himself, was that of three years ending with his return to Athens in 407 B.C. The results of these three years of success were frustrated by the unexpected coming down of Cyrus as satrap: but just at the moment when it behoved Alcibiades to put forth a higher measure of excellence, in order to realise his own promises in the face of this new obstacle--at that critical moment we find him spoiled by the unexpected welcome which had recently greeted him at Athens, and falling miserably short even of the former merit whereby that welcome had been earned. If from his achievements we turn to his dispositions, his ends, and his means--there are few characters in Grecian history who present so little to esteem, whether we look at him as a public or as a private man. His ends are those of exorbitant ambition and vanity; his means rapacious as well as reckless, from his first dealing with Sparta and the Spartan envoys, down to the end of his career. The manœuvres whereby his political enemies first procured his exile were indeed base and guilty in a high degree. But we must recollect that if his enemies were more numerous and violent than those of any other politician in Athens, the generating seed was sown by his own overweening insolence and contempt of restraints, legal as well as social. On the other hand, he was never once defeated either by land or sea. In courage, in ability, in enterprise, in power of dealing with new men and new situations, he was never wanting; qualities which, combined with his high birth, wealth, and personal accomplishments, sufficed to render him for the time the first man in every successive party which he espoused--Athenian, Spartan, or Persian--oligarchical or democratical. But in none of them did he ever inspire any lasting confidence; all successively threw him off. On the whole, we shall find few men in whom eminent capacities for action and command are so thoroughly marred by an assemblage of bad moral qualities as Alcibiades.[b] LIFE AT ATHENS [Sidenote: [404-403 B.C.]] The state of Athens after the expulsion of the Thirty was in some respects apparently less desolate than that in which she had been left after the battle of Platæa. It is possible indeed that the invasions of Xerxes and Mardonius may have inflicted less injury on her territory than the methodical and lingering ravages of the Peloponnesians during the Decelean war. But in 479 the city, as well as the country, had been, for a part of two consecutive years, in the power of an irritated enemy. All that it required both for ornament and defence was to be raised afresh from the ground. Yet the treasury was empty: commerce had probably never yet yielded any considerable supplies, and it had been deeply disturbed by the war; the state possessed no dependent colonies or tributary allies, and was watched with a jealous eye by the most powerful of its confederates. [Sidenote: [403-402 B.C.]]