History of the Peloponnesian War

Now among those who held control at Samos,[*](Those elected leaders in ch. lxxvi.) Thrasybulus, after he had effected the revolution, always held very strongly to the same opinion, that they should recall Alcibiades, and finally in a meeting of the assembly he won the majority of the soldiers to his view. And when these had passed a resolution recalling Alcibiades and granting him immunity, he sailed across to Tissaphernes and brought Alcibiades back to Samos, thinking that their only salvation was to convert Tissaphernes from the Peloponnesian side to their own.

Accordingly, an assembly was held, in which Alcibiades complained with much lamentation of his personal misfortune in being exiled; he also spoke at length on matters of state, inspiring in them no slight hopes regarding the future, and went on to magnify to excess his own influence with Tissaphernes. His object was that those who were in control of the oligarchy at home should fear him and that the political clubs which conspired against him should more surely be broken up; also that the army at Samos should hold him in greater honour and feel a greater degree of confidence themselves; and finally that the enemy should be filled with all possible suspicions of Tissaphernes and so deprived of their present hopes. Accordingly, Alcibiades in a spirit of boasting went on and made these great promises:

that Tissaphernes had solemnly pledged to him that, if he could but trust the Athenians, so long as he had anything left of his own they should not lack subsistence, no, not even if in the end he had to sell his own bed; and that he would bring the Phoenician ships, which were already at Aspendus, and deliver them to the Athenians and not to the Peloponnesians; but, he had added, he could place confidence in the Athenians only on condition that he, Alcibiades, should be restored in safety and become surety to him.