The Road to Sardis

by Stephanie Plowman

  And suddenly I had left the theatre, I was standing on the Acropolis, staring down at the City, at house after house from which emerged, slowly and painfully, groping old men, bereaved old men.

  ‘There are no young men left in those houses,’ said Euripides, at my side. ‘The fathers say Socrates is to blame.’

  I woke then, was glad to wake, hoped I’d forget this dream as speedily as one usually forgets such things. But, as you see, I have not been able to forget it. More, it recurs from time to time in varying forms.

  I also keep remembering how Socrates told me that he was a soldier of God, and no soldier can desert his post.

  I have been recalling that with increasing frequency—also with increasing wistfulness. Even the conviction that I am truly serving the City by coming here to Sardis doesn’t banish stupid dreads. I am not frightened so much by the fact that I may never return to the City again—no, what scares me is the thought of returning to the City and finding myself unable for a second time to forgive myself for staying away so long.

  But I am a soldier of the City, and must stay at my post.

  In any case, I may be acting like a man scared by the mere shadow of smoke.

  And may it not be that I have become fanciful simply because we have been in camp at Sardis for a long time now—too long, because in this enforced idleness you tend to remember what brought you here?

  Author’s Notes

  The Eupatrids were the noble class in Athens, like the Patricians in Rome. Until the reforms of Solon (about 640 BC to 560 BC), they controlled all the administration, and nearly all the land of Attica.

  The Alcmaeonids were the most famous of Eupatrid families, with members taking a leading part in the government of the City in the seventh, sixth and fifth centuries. Because they, the greatest of aristocrats, championed the rights of the people, they were detested by many Athenian nobles as traitors to their class. Cleisthenes the Reformer, who gave Athens her democratic constitution, was an Alcmaeonid, while Pericles, Alcibiades and Lycius were all sons of Alcmaeonid mothers.

  Strategoi (singular, Strategos) was the term used by all Greeks for commanders of fleets or armies. In Athens there were ten, elected yearly by the Assembly, and after 487 BC these were the most important magistrates. Most of the leading politicians at one time or another were strategoi (though, of course, there were strategoi like Demosthenes who were not politicians). The Athenians did not believe in specialisation—a politician elected Strategos might be expected to lead an army on land or a fleet on the sea.

  Not only politicians and practical men were elected; Sophocles’ tragedy, Antigone, was such a success in 441 BC that he was elected Strategos for 440 BC.

  A Strategos held office for one year, but there was no limit to the number of times he could be re-elected. Pericles was elected every year from 443 to 429 BC and, by sheer genius, could transform the Board of Generals into a kind of one-man concern. Hence, to a small boy like Lycius, Pericles would be the Strategos.

  Athenian Democracy. It is hard for us to understand what exactly democracy—‘rule of the people’—meant in Athens, possibly because there is some truth in what Rousseau wrote in the eighteenth century, that the English are free only at the time of a General Election. By this he meant that it is only at the time of an election that the English vote directly as far as politics are concerned; for the rest of the time we delegate our rights to representatives, MPs. Democracy in its real sense, where every man can vote direct on all questions, that is, is his own MP, is possible only in a small place like Athens or, nowadays, in the cantons of Switzerland.

  Not that being a citizen meant only privileges for an Athenian, it brought responsibilities too. Citizens paid taxes, were liable for military service for many years, while rich men were expected to be responsible for all the repairs and equipment of warships or provide financial backing for the plays offered at the yearly Festival. One can imagine a modern government expecting a payer of surtax to provide it with long-range missiles—but hardly to pay for an Edinburgh Festival.

  Sparta. It is only too easy for us to visualise certain aspects of life in Sparta. In some ways it was a mixture of Communism and Hitler’s Germany. There was no private property. There was no family life—boys and men spent their lives in barracks. Physical toughness was all that counted. The Spartans believed themselves to be a master-race, and their treatment of their slaves (Helots) is a nightmare page in history.

  The Spartans, comparative newcomers to Greece, had, however, scarcely moved with the times since settling in Laconia. They went on using iron bars as currency, and, long after all other Greek states had got rid of their monarchies, Sparta still had kings—what is more, two kings at a time, though, unless the kings possessed great personality, the chief power in Sparta rested with five magistrates, the Ephors, or Guardians.

  Plataea. The story of this little town is one of the most pathetic in all history.

  Only seven miles of open plain and a small river, the Asopus, separated Plataea from the much bigger city, Thebes, which made more than one attempt to conquer her small neighbour, and could not forgive Plataea for resisting so sturdily. Just at the time that Athens was emerging from obscurity, Plataea tried to get help from Sparta, then unquestionably the greatest state in Greece, but the Spartans said they were too far away to be effective allies, and suggested that the Plataeans should turn instead to Athens. The Athenians helped the Plataeans, and the Plataeans never forgot it. In 490 BC, while Sparta delayed, and no other state stirred, Plataea sent every fighting man she possessed to fight beside the Athenians at Marathon.

  For this reason alone, the name of Plataea should have sounded like a trumpet-call to every true Greek, but more was to follow. Ten years later, when Xerxes’ gigantic army invaded from the north, Plataea fought again for liberty, and Thebes, joining the Persians, got her revenge, for all Greece north of Corinth was occupied, and the Thebans persuaded the Persians to destroy Plataea.

  But Plataea was not finished yet. The great land battle completing the triumph begun at Salamis was fought outside her ruined walls, and the day after the defeat of the Persians and the Theban renegades, Pausanias, King of Sparta, stood in what had been the market-square of Plataea and in the name of every state that had fought for freedom, he declared Plataea for ever free, independent and inviolate against attack.

  Not fifty years later the Thebans made their surprise attack on Plataea; by this act of aggression they plunged all Hellas into war.

  And after another few years their Spartan allies destroyed Plataea, butchering all the men, and enslaving the women and children.

  Part of the garrison had broken out, exactly as I have described; the speech of Astymachus is as described in Thucydides.

  Most of the characters in this book appear in all the standard histories; some, indeed, such as Pericles, Euripides, Sophocles, Socrates, Thucydides and Alcibiades, rank among the most famous names in the world. Others, like Conon, and Demosthenes son of Alcisthenes (not to be confused with the great orator, who lived later) deserve to be better known. So does every one of the heroic garrison of Plataea.

  A Callistratus is mentioned once in Thucydides’ account of the Sicilian Expedition; he rode back to Nicias’ deserted camp after the surrender of what was left of the army. A Lycius of Athens commanded the cavalry when the ten thousand Greeks assembled by Cyrus at Sardis, after marching into the heart of the Persian Empire, found themselves leaderless, and began the long retreat to the sea. It was this retreat, described by Xenophon in his Anabasis, that I originally intended to write about. There had to be some preliminary explanation of how Athenians and men from all other parts of Hellas were fighting as mercenary soldiers so far from home, and then, suddenly, I realised that these ‘introductory’ chapters involved matters so tremendous and heartbreaking that Cyrus’ expedition dwindled into insignificance in comparison with the events that had brought his Greek soldiers to Asia. Thus the book which I had planned to be The Road from
Sardis became, instead, The Road to Sardis.

  Perhaps after reading this, you will want to read Xenophon’s account of what happened to the Ten Thousand; very much more I hope you will want to read Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, the greatest history ever written, and the plays of Euripides, many of them translated by Gilbert Murray, who was to write in his Five Stages of Greek Religion, ‘And there were always also those who had neither learned nor forgotten, the unrepentant idealists; too passionate or too heroic, or, as some will say, too blind, to abandon their life-long devotion to “Athens” or to “Freedom” because the world considered such ideas out of date. They could look the ruined Athenians in the face, after the lost battle, and say, “It cannot be that you did wrong, it cannot be!” ’