No other would have dared to speak at that time in such a way of the leader and favourite of the people, or thus to oppose the general desire. The people not only let him speak, but allowed the whole question of the expedition to be reopened. Several spoke in favour of the war, a few against it. At length Alkibiades ascended the tribune. He felt the speech of Nikias had made an impression upon many. Not only was the war he had so much at heart, together with his generalship, at stake; a personal attack, as everybody knew, had been made upon him. It had been suggested that he was ruining his patrimony. This was, indeed, a serious charge, for, were it proved, it would, by the law of Athens, disable him from holding any public office. He began by answering, in perfect taste, the attack of Nikias. He apologized for speaking of himself at all. He regretted, he said, that he had been forced to do so by the ungenerous treatment he had met with at the hands of his brother-general, his elder colleague. ‘As to my prodigality and the prancing steeds you have just now heard so much about, for whose honour and at whose expense were those horses bred and taken to the pan-Hellenic meeting? If I did spend something of my patrimonial estate in rearing them, was it not for Athens that I did it? And if with them I won the greatest prize in Greece, it was that you, not I alone, might reap the glory. I only bore the charges. And if I have many times equipped great triremes for the state at larger cost than some other citizens are wont to undertake, was it not for Athens that I did it? If I have put finer choruses upon the stage, and furnished forth my public functions with greater splendour, it was that you and strangers from all over Greece might see and hear them, and that they might bring the greater praise, not to myself, but to my country. ‘If you have shown me honour now in choosing me strategos, and the colleague of such a well-known general as Nikias, it is not for any merit of my own, but for the glory reflected on me by my ancestors. You have not forgotten all my great-grandfather Kleisthenes did for the democracy of Athens when he expelled the tyrants and oligarchs, and’ (turning to Nikias) ‘all who favoured them; nor have you forgotten my grandfather Alkibiades; nor my dear father Kleinias, who taught me by his life and actions to spare nothing of my own in your defence, who lived for the people, who died for Athens. Why need I speak of Perikles, my cousin and my tutor, whose memory is fresh in the minds of every one of you? It is as the scion of such a steadfast race that ye have honoured me, not for myself; and may the gods grant that in this expedition I prove worthy of that race and of your choice.’