The Book of Ancient Bastards: 101 of the Worst Miscreants and Misdeeds From Ancient Sumer to the Enlightenment

by Brian Thornton

  And Aristagoras? Still fearing for his own skin, he relocated to Thrace (in the European part of Turkey), where he tried to establish a colony from which to continue the war against Persia. He was killed trying to strong-arm the locals (see how this sort of thing just keeps running downhill?).

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  ALCIBIADES OF ATHENS

  Opportunism, Anyone?

  (CA. 450–404 B.C.)

  Meanwhile I hope that none of you will think any the worse of me if after having hitherto passed as a lover of my country, I now actively join with its worst enemies in attacking it, or will suspect what I say as the fruit of an outlaw’s enthusiasm.

  —Alcibiades, quoted in The Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides

  A brilliant favorite student of the great philosopher Socrates and a gifted politician and military leader, Alcibiades was also an opportunist of monstrous proportions, concerned more with his personal fortunes than with the welfare of those he aspired to lead. This combination of ego and selfishness led him to betray his people to an extent that might have made a Benedict Arnold blush.

  By 410 B.C., Alcibiades had developed a reputation as a wild man who loved a good party, in addition to his acknowledged talents as a speaker and political leader. Elected to Athens’s city government that year, Alcibiades gave a dazzling speech in the Athenian assembly, laying out a bold plan for ending the ongoing decades-long war with her longtime rival, the city-state of Sparta.

  He succeeded in convincing the Athenians that the key to victory lay in invading the island of Sicily and seizing the rich city of Syracuse. Swayed by his compelling oratory, the Athenians voted in favor of his plan, and Alcibiades left Athens later that same year as commander of a massive Athenian invasion fleet.

  But enemies at home had him removed from his command and arrested on trumped-up charges of desecrating several religious idols. In a snit, he went over to the Spartans and told them in detail about his plan for attacking

  Syracuse and suggested how they might thwart the Athenian battle plan and win the war. The quote above is from the speech he is supposed to have given exhorting the Spartans to accept his advice.

  The intelligence Alcibiades provided the Spartans proved devastating to his country. In fairness, he probably didn’t intend to completely cripple Athens, merely to bloody her nose enough that his political enemies would be swept from power and Alcibiades himself would be welcomed back into the city and into power at the head of the government.

  He got it half right.

  Alcibiades was welcomed back to Athens several times over the next five years, first after his enemies were pushed out (as he’d hoped) when the Sicilian Expedition failed. But it wasn’t long before he was forced to flee the city. Once again he changed sides, this time going to the Persians, to whom he gave advice on how to keep the Greeks from uniting.

  In the end, Alcibiades died while attempting to get Persian backing for a proposed attack on Sparta. Surprised in an isolated farmhouse in what is now Turkey, he rushed out into the night with just a dagger in his hand when his enemies set the place on fire and was killed by a hail of arrows.

  Traitorous bastard.

  Bastard with a Pedigree

  Alcibiades was a member of the famous Alcmeonid family, which included such distinguished citizens as Cleisthenes, who had helped rid Athens of the tyrant Hippias and founded its democratic government, and Pericles, who had run that same government wisely and well for the thirty or so years that comprise the city’s golden age. After Alcibiades, no Alcmeonid ever held a position of leadership within the city again. That was no accident.

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  CRITIAS, LEADER OF THE THIRTY ATHENIAN TYRANTS

  Putting the Terror into Tyranny

  (460–403 B.C.)

  Let it not be in the power of Critias to strike off either me, or any one of you whom he will. But in my case, in what may be your case, if we are tried, let our trial be in accordance with the law they have made concerning those on the list . . . . [Y]ou must see that the name of every one of you is as easily erased as mine.

  —Athenian politician Theramenes, quoted in Xenophon’s Hellenica

  Playwright, poet, scholar, great-uncle of the famous Athenian philosopher Plato (and contemporary of Plato’s even more famous teacher Socrates), Critias was renowned for much of his life as a writer whose work was in demand. He was even featured as the titular character in one of Plato’s dialogues, The Critias.

  Too bad he ended his life as a blood-soaked traitor to everything his city had once stood for, a classic example of conservative overreaction resulting in the loss of much life and property.

  By 404 B.C., Athens had lost its decades-long war with Sparta. As a result of the humiliating peace treaty, the Athenian city walls were leveled, its navy dismantled, and a collection of thirty oligarchs who favored Sparta were placed in charge of the government. Critias, a follower of fellow Athenian bastard Alcibiades during the war, was named one of these oligarchs (known afterward as “The Thirty Tyrants”).

  Critias, a strong personality with lots of scores to settle and bitterness eating away at his very soul, soon embarked on a vendetta against anyone who had ever wronged him. What followed was a bloodbath, one of the first recorded political purges in history.

  Bastard Playwright

  “Religion was a deliberate imposture devised by some cunning man for political ends.”

  This quote is attributed to Critias and is cited over and over again as his position on the cynical use of religion by politicians for their own purposes. A popular author in his own time, he wrote on a wide variety of topics and in a broad range of stylistic formats: everything from tragic drama to history to political tracts to poetry to collections of popular sayings. Quite a well-rounded tyrant!

  “Day after day,” writes Xenophon, “the list of persons put to death for no just reason grew longer.” For every person he denounced and had put to death, Critias received his confiscated property as a reward. When the Athenian statesman Theramenes protested that The Thirty ought to be careful about killing people so indiscriminately, noting that today’s butcher is tomorrow’s butchered, Critias famously responded with a statement that would be echoed for years afterward by politicians conducting similar purges: “If any member of this council, here seated, imagines that an undue amount of blood has been shed, let me remind him that with changes of constitution such things cannot be avoided.” One of the first times a politician used some variation of the notion, “You can’t make any omelet without breaking a few eggs!”

  Critias went on to denounce his former friend Theramenes, calling him a traitor and enemy of both The Thirty and the Spartan troops who had placed them in power. After heated debate, Theramenes was dragged from the meeting and executed on the spot.

  Emboldened by this silencing of their most vocal critic, The Thirty went on to denounce and execute thousands of Athenian citizens, seizing their property as they went. Within a year, the oligarchs had become such an object of fear and hatred that the people rose against them. Critias was killed in the fighting that followed, and his memory was justly damned in the minds of his countrymen for decades afterwards.

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  DIONYSIUS I, TYRANT OF SYRACUSE

  When Philosophers and

  Tyrants Don’t Mix

  (CA. 432–367 B.C.)

  [Dionysius], taking offence at something [Plato] said to him . . . ordered him to be brought into the common market-place, and there sold as a slave for five minas: but the philosophers (who consulted together on the matter) afterwards redeemed him, and sent him back to Greece, with this friendly advice. . . . That a philosopher should very rarely converse with tyrants.

  —Diodorus Siculus, ancient Sicilian Greek

  geographer and historian

  If ever there was a piece of work to prove that one man holding all the levers of power is usually a lousy idea, it was Dionysius I, tyrant of the Greek city-state of Syracuse in Sicily. Originally a government clerk, Diony
sius rose through the ranks to ultimate power based on his ability as a political, diplomatic, and military strategist. To balance this out, he was also arbitrary, capricious, cruel, and (perhaps worst of all) harbored literary pretensions.

  Dionysius fancied himself both a poet and a philosopher, boasting “far more of his poems than of his successes in war,” according to Diodorus. Poetry being a big deal in the ancient world, and Dionysius being the big man on campus in Syracuse, he surrounded himself with other literary and intellectual types, including Plato, who, as described in the quote opening this chapter, got sold as a slave in the public market for speaking his mind in the presence of the philosopher-tyrant.

  In another example of why it’s a bad idea for a creative type to be bluntly open and honest with a benefactor possessing no discernable sense of humor, Dionysius asked the poet Philoxenus what he thought of Dionysius’s poetry. When Philoxenus answered candidly, Dionysius had him dragged off to work in the quarries.

  Dionysius regretted the action once he’d sobered up, freed Philoxenus the next day, then invited him to dinner again. The wine flowed (again) and Dionysius asked (again) what Philoxenus thought of his poetry. In response, Philoxenus told Dionysius’s servants to drag him off to the quarries. This time the tyrant laughed.

  One-Eyed Bastard

  Dionysius was particularly fearsome in battle. He’d lost an eye early in life, and as a result presented a ferocious image that struck terror in the hearts of his enemies. That terror was justified, as even in victory he could be a particularly ruthless bastard: In 386 B.C., Dionysius led his mercenary army in an attack on the Greek city of Rhegium (now Reggio, in southern Italy). After a protracted and bloody siege, the tyrant, who fancied himself a cultured and enlightened man, sold the entire population of the city into slavery.

  From then on, and for the remainder of his time at Dionysius’s court, Philoxenus promised that he would give truthful criticism of the tyrant’s work while also never again offending him. He accomplished this by basically inventing the double entendre. Dionysius’s poetry, according to Diodorus, was “wretched,” and he had a taste for tragedy, so when Dionysius would declaim a poem with a sad subject, then ask Philoxenus what he thought about it, the poet would reply, “Pitiful!”

  Dionysius is reputed to have either been murdered by his doctors to make way for his son to succeed him or to have died of alcohol poisoning from having drunk too much celebrating a win by some of his poetry at a festival in Greece.

  And Philoxenus? He eventually left Syracuse and went on to write his most famous and successful poem, a comic piece called Cyclops, about the ridiculous passion of the mythical one-eyed monster for a beautiful goddess.

  Most people assumed that he was making fun of his one-eyed former benefactor. If Dionysius wrote a poem about his feelings on the matter, it hasn’t survived.

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  PHILIP II OF MACEDONIA

  Sometimes the Bastard Doesn’t

  Fall Far from the Tree

  (382–336 B.C.)

  O how small a portion of earth will hold us when we are dead, who ambitiously seek after the whole world while we are living.

  —Philip II of Macedonia

  The hard-bitten, ambitious, and ruthless youngest son of an undistinguished royal house, Philip II of Macedonia was a usurper and military genius who reorganized the army of his backward mountain kingdom and in so doing changed the course of history. He also fathered and trained the most successful conqueror the ancient world ever knew.

  Born in 382 B.C., Philip had two older brothers and was deemed so expendable that he was used as a hostage (a political practice during ancient times in which two sides in any given conflict exchanged Very or Semi Important Persons after the signing of a peace treaty, as guarantee of their future good behavior towards each other). Thus, he spent years in the Greek city-state of Thebes while still a boy, and carefully studied the organization of the Theban army.

  After his return to Macedonia, a Greek-speaking kingdom situated in the mountains and plains north of Greece itself, Philip soon found himself regent for his nephew Amyntas IV, infant son of his older brother Perdiccas II. In 359 B.C., Philip took the throne for himself, setting aside the young king and declaring himself the rightful king. It was a naked exercise of power and nothing else.

  Moving quickly to modernize his army, Philip arranged to pay his soldiers, drilling them incessantly and converting what had previously been feudal levies into the first truly professional nonmercenary fighting force in the ancient world. For the next two decades, he campaigned every year, gradually expanding Macedonia’s territory in all four directions, but especially to the south, toward mainland Greece.

  In 349 B.C., Philip captured the city of Olynthus (in northwestern Greece), whose leaders had made the twin mistake of opposing him and housing two rival claimants to the Macedonian throne. In a preview of what his famous son would later do to those who defied him, Philip destroyed the city utterly and sold its surviving inhabitants into slavery.

  By 338 B.C., Philip had conquered all of Greece and the rest of the Balkan peninsula besides. Then he got himself “elected” leader of the so-called “Hellenic League”(a loose collection of Greek city-states that banded together against the Persians). He announced his intention to invade the Persian Empire as revenge for the Persian burning of Athens 150 years previous.

  But problems at home distracted him. He quarreled with his son and heir Alexander, who fled along with his mother, Philip’s first wife, Olympias. Recently married to a much younger woman who quickly bore him another son, Philip disinherited Alexander, making his newborn son his heir. Philip was assassinated in 336 B.C. (allegedly with the complicity of both Alexander and his wild, scheming mother), leaving his infant son as “king” for all of about ten seconds before Alexander took the throne.

  One-Eyed Bastard, Redux

  Philip was famous for having lost an eye in battle. It supposedly happened while he was besieging the Greek city of Byzantium (modern-day Istanbul) in Thrace. It also supposedly occurred on the same day in 356 B.C. that his son and successor Alexander (later nicknamed “The Great”) was born.

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  ALEXANDER THE GREAT

  Bastard as Exemplar for an Age

  (356–323 B.C.)

  Alexander ordered all but those who had fled to the temples to be put to death and the buildings to be set on fire. . . . 6,000 fighting-men were slaughtered within the city’s fortifications. It was a sad spectacle that the furious king then provided for the victors: 2,000 Tyrians, who had survived the rage of the tiring Macedonians, now hung nailed to crosses all along the huge expanse of the beach.

  —Quintus Curtius Rufus, Roman historian

  Held up throughout the ages as a shining example of both the great conqueror and the philosopher-king, Alexander III of Macedonia was considered by many to be the greatest monarch of the ancient world.

  He was also a homicidal megalomaniac who developed a god complex to go with a drinking problem, likely had a hand in killing his own father, murdered one of his own generals in a drunken rage, conquered the Persian Empire, and unleashed the Macedonian war machine on an unprepared world, resulting in the deaths of untold numbers of people.

  Born to parents who could barely stand the sight of each other by the time he came along, Alexander was in his teens and already trained as a cavalry officer and a leader of men when his father, Macedonian king and bastard Philip II, took a new, young wife, whom he immediately got pregnant. When the girl delivered a boy whom Philip promptly designated his heir, Alexander and his crazy snake-cult-priestess mother Olympias fled Macedonia for her native country of Epirus (modern Albania), where they cooled their heels until Philip was assassinated later that same year. Alexander and his mother probably had a little something to do with that. Within weeks, Philip’s new wife, her opportunistic nobleman father, and her infant son had all been quietly put to death. And then Alexander was on to Asia, leading an army that Philip had
built, conquering territories left and right.

  When he entered Egypt, the priests of Amun there hailed him as a god himself and the son of their god, a connection that played to both his vanity and his political need to lend legitimacy to his conquests (after all, who can argue with the reasons of a god-on-earth for anything he does?).

  The further he got from Macedonia, the more binge drinking he and his senior officers did, and the worse Alexander’s god complex became. One evening, he got into a drunken brawl with one of his generals, a veteran named Cleitus, who had saved Alexander’s life in battle. In the heat of the moment, Alexander killed him on the spot.

  Overcome with remorse once he sobered up, Alexander contemplated suicide but was talked out of it by his entourage, who convinced him that Cleitus was disloyal and since Alexander was a god, he was therefore infallible.

  When he finally died of a combination of malaria and exhaustion at the age of thirty-three, Alexander left a changed world behind him. Whether or not it was for the better is up for debate.

  Tyrian Bastard

  Alexander and his army found the Phoenician port city of Tyre an island and left it a peninsula. Unwilling to bypass the city and allow its Persian-allied navy to harass his supply lines while he pushed into Mesopotamia and onward to Persia, Alexander had his engineers spend nearly a year building a causeway, then a road, in order to take the city. The Tyrians fought back ingeniously and heroically. Alexander responded with the actions quoted at the start of this chapter: thousands killed outright, over 13,000 taken as slaves—the mailed fist in the not-so-velvet glove of a conqueror.

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  OLYMPIAS, QUEEN