A vote was called for. Socrates was found guilty by 280 votes to 220. He spoke again. His accusers demanded the death penalty. According to Athenian law it was for the defendant to propose another, lesser punishment. Socrates believed, and most historians agree with him, that if he had asked for banishment it would have been granted. He disdained to do so. The sentence of death was voted on, and approved by a substantially larger majority than the verdict (indicating that there were more people in court who wanted Socrates dead than there were people who believed him to be guilty as charged). He spoke again, asserting that he was content because the satisfaction of acting rightly, according to one’s own lights of reason and moral discrimination, was so great as to eclipse any suffering: “Nothing can harm a good man either in life or after death.” Defiant, courageous, intransigent, he had proved himself equal to the example he invoked in court, Achilles.
A man of violence who admitted that he was easily bested in debate, whose passions were hectic and whose thought processes were frequently incoherent, who spoke his mind at all times and despised subterfuge, Achilles was in many ways a bizarre model for the philosopher who strove unceasingly to subject emotion to reason, who was a master of irony and a brilliant manipulator of men’s minds. But the classical philosopher and the legendary warrior were, for all their differences, soulmates.
Alexander, world conqueror in the making, sought to associate himself with Achilles’ youthful valor and invincibility, with the glittering, deadly warrior whose brilliance rivaled the splendor of the midday sun. But when Socrates, the impecunious, pug-nosed, incorrigible old worrier of complacent authority and scourge of dishonest thinking, claimed Achilles as a predecessor, he did so in appreciation of the fact that Achilles was more than a killer of unparalleled charisma, that he could be taken as a model in peace as well as in war, as one who insisted that his life should be worthy of his own estimation of his own tremendous value as an individual, and who would pay the price required to invest that life with significance and dignity, even if the price were life itself. Socrates defied convention and eventually fell foul of the law because he would submit to no other dictates than those of his intellect and of his private daemon. Achilles rebelled against Agamemnon’s overlordship, and looked on relentless while his countrymen were slaughtered rather than compromise his honor. Both were stubborn and self-destructive, to the exasperation of their enemies and the dismay of their friends. Both insisted on valuing their own personal integrity higher than any service or disservice they might do the community. Both have been condemned for their culpable pride, and venerated for their courage and their superb defiance.
In his tent at the extreme end of the Greek encampment, sworn to inaction, isolated by his own rage and by others’ fear of it, Achilles set himself at odds with the fractured, fudged-together thing that society necessarily is. Any human group, be it a family, a city, an army, or a nation, depends for its continued existence on its members’ willingness to bend and yield, to compromise, to accept what is possible rather than demand what is perfect. But a society which loses sight of the standard of perfection is a dangerously unstable one: from the accommodating to the corrupt is an easy slide. Achilles and others who, like him, have stood firm, however willfully and self-destructively, on a point of principle have generally been revered by onlookers and by posterity as wholeheartedly as they have been detested by the authorities they challenge. “Become who you are!” wrote Pindar, Socrates’ contemporary. It is not an easy injunction. For a man to become who he is takes a ruthless lack of concern for others’ interests, monstrous solipsism, and absolute integrity. Achilles, who hated a dissembler worse than the gates of death, had the courage to make the attempt, and so died.
II
ALCIBIADES
In 405 BC the Peloponnesian War, which had lasted for a quarter of a century and set the entire Hellenic world at odds, ended with the comprehensive defeat of the Athenians at Aegospotami on the Hellespont. The fleet on which Athens depended for its security and its food supply was destroyed. Lysander, commanding the victorious Spartans, had all the defeated Athenian troops slaughtered. The ship bearing the news reached the Athenian port of Piraeus at nightfall. The wailing began down in the harbor. As the news was passed from mouth to mouth it spread gradually all along the defensive walls linking city to sea until it reached the darkened streets around the Acropolis and the whole city was heard to cry out like an enormous beast in its agony. “That night,” wrote Xenophon, “no one slept. They mourned for the lost, but more still for their own fates.”
The Athenians had good cause to mourn. Within a matter of months they had been blockaded and starved into submission. Their democracy had been replaced by a murderous puppet government, an oligarchy known as the Thirty Tyrants. They lived in fear, of the Spartans who were now their overlords, and of each other, for every formerly prominent person was under suspicion, informers were so active that none dared trust his neighbor, and Critias, leader of the Thirty, “began to show a lust for putting people to death.” And yet, according to Plutarch, “in the midst of all their troubles a faint glimmer of hope yet remained, that the cause of Athens could never be utterly lost so long as Alcibiades was alive.”
Alcibiades! The name was a charm, and its workings, like all magical processes, were beyond reason. The man on whom the Athenians, in their extremity, pinned their hopes was one whom they had three times rejected, a traitor who had worked so effectively for their enemies that there were those who held him personally responsible for Athens’ downfall. Exiled from Athens for the second time, he was now living among the barbarians in Thrace. There, in a heavily fortified stronghold, with a private army at his command, he led the life of an independent warlord or bandit chief. There was no substantial reason to suppose that he could do anything for the Athenian democracy, and no certainty that he would wish to help even were it in his power to do so. And yet, as the first-century BC historian Cornelius Nepos noted, Alcibiades was a man from whom miracles, whether malign or beneficent, had always been expected: “The people thought there was nothing he could not accomplish.”
Plato, who knew Alcibiades, elaborates in The Republic what he calls a “noble lie,” a fable in which he suggests that all men are made from earth, but that in a few the earth has been mixed with gold, rendering them inherently superior to their fellow men, and fit to wield power. This lie, Plato suggests, is a politically useful one. In his ideal republic, he would like to “indoctrinate” the mass of the people with a belief in it, in order that they might be the more easily governed. It would probably not be hard to do so. The belief that some people are innately different from and better than others pervades all pagan mythology and classical legend and surfaces as well in folk tales and fairy stories. The foundling whose white skin proclaims her noble birth, the favored younger son who survives his ordeals assisted by the birds and beasts who recognize his privileged status, the emperor-to-be whose birth is attended by tremendous omens—all spring, as Plato’s men of gold do, from a profoundly anti-egalitarian collective belief in, and yearning for, the existence of a naturally occurring elite, of exceptional beings capable of leading their subordinates to victory, of averting evil and playing savior, or simply of providing by their prodigious feats a spectacle capable of exhilarating and inspiring the humdrum multitude. In Alcibiades the Athenians found their golden man.
That Alcibiades was indeed an extraordinary person is well attested. All his life he had a quality, which his contemporaries were at a loss to define or explain, which inspired admiration, fear, and vast irrational hopes. “No one ever exceeded Alcibiades,” wrote Nepos, “in his faults or in his virtues.” His contemporaries recognized in him something demonic and excessive which both alarmed and excited them. Plutarch likened him to the fertile soil of Egypt, so rich that it brings forth wholesome drugs and poisons in equally phenomenal abundance. He was a beauty and a bully, an arrogant libertine and a shrewd diplomat, an orator as eloquent when urging on his tr
oops as when lying to save his life, a traitor three or four times over with a rare and precious gift (essential to a military commander) for winning his men’s love. There was a time when his prodigious energy and talents terrified many Athenians, who feared that a man so exceptional must surely aim to make himself a tyrant, but in their despair they looked to him as a redeemer.
His adult life coincided almost exactly with the duration of the Peloponnesian War, which began in 431 BC, when he was nineteen, and ended with the fall of Athens in 405, the year before his death. Throughout that period, with brief interludes, the Spartans and their allies (known collectively as the Peloponnesians) struggled against the Athenians, with their allies and colonies, for ascendancy, while lesser powers repeatedly shifted allegiance, tilting the balance of power first that way, then this. Sparta was a rigidly conservative state with a curious and ancient constitution in which two hereditary kings ruled alongside, and were outranked by, a council of grandees, the ephors, selected from a handful of noble families. Spartan colonies had oligarchic governments imposed upon them. Athens was a democracy, and founded democracies in its colonies. The war had an ideological theme, but it was also a competition between two aggressively expansionist rival powers for political and economic dominance of the eastern Mediterranean. From 412 onwards it was complicated by the intervention of the Persians, whose empire dwarfed both the Hellenic alliances. Athens’ successful colonization of the Aegean islands and the coastal regions of Asia Minor deprived the Persian Great King of revenue. His regional governors, the satraps, sided first with Spartans, later with Athens, in an attempt to reestablish control of the area. Alcibiades, who had Odysseus’ cunning as well as Achilles’ brilliance, was a skillful actor in the complex, deadly theater of the war. As a general he was swift, subtle, and daring. As a diplomat he proved himself to be a confidence trickster of genius.
In his youth he was the golden boy of Athens’ golden age. His family was rich, aristocratic (they claimed descent from Homer’s Nestor), and well connected not only in Athens but all over the Greek world. In constitutional terms every free male citizen of Athens was equal to every other, but in practice the nobility still dominated the government as they did the city’s economic and social life. “The splendour running in the blood has much weight,” wrote Pindar. When Alcibiades was still a child his father was killed in battle, and he was taken to live in the household of his guardian Pericles, who was for thirty years effective ruler of Athens. He could scarcely have been given a better start in life.
Nature was as kind to him as fortune had been. Like Achilles, he was dazzlingly beautiful. To Plutarch, writing five hundred years after his death, his loveliness was still so much of a byword that “we need say no more about it, than that it flowered at each season of his growth in turn.” In the homoerotic society of Athens such good looks made him an instant celebrity. As a boy he was “surrounded and pursued by many admirers of high rank… captivated by the brilliance of his youthful beauty.” Whether he actually had sexual relations with any of them is unclear, but gossip maintained that he did. If so, few of his contemporaries would therefore have considered him either immoral or effete. Aeschylus, in the generation before Alcibiades, and Plato, his contemporary, both believed Achilles to be Patroclus’s lover (something Homer does not suggest), but neither of them thought any the less of him for it. On the contrary Plato’s Phaedus cites Achilles’ “heroic choice to go and rescue Patroclus” as an example of the way in which love can ennoble a man, earning him “the extreme admiration of the Gods.”
Among those smitten by Pericles’ ward was Socrates, who told a disciple that the two great loves of his life were philosophy and Alcibiades. The philosopher had gathered around himself a group of aristocratic young men, nonpaying students of whom Alcibiades was certainly not the most serious but of whom he was the most highly favored. Plato (another of them) testifies that the relationship between the ugly middle-aged philosopher and the radiantly beautiful teenager remained chaste, but it surely was, at least on Socrates’ part, physically motivated. Alcibiades’ appearance marked him out, just as Achilles’ had done, as a superior being. In the second century AD the Roman emperor Hadrian, a connoisseur and devotee of male beauty as ardent as any Athenian, set up an image of Alcibiades in Parian marble and commanded that an ox should be sacrificed to him every year. In his lifetime as well his looks made him an object not only of lust but also of worship. And lovely as he was, his charm was as potent as his physical attractions. His personal magnetism, according to Plutarch, “was such that no disposition could wholly resist it, and no character remain unaffected.” The events of his extraordinary career confirm the claim.
As a young man he was showy, extravagant, outrageous. He wore his hair as long as a woman’s, spoke with a provocative lisp, and strutted through the marketplace trailing his long purple robe. He was a ringleader, a setter of trends. Eupolis reports that he started a fashion for drinking in the morning. When he appeared in a new style of sandal all his contemporaries had copies made, and called them “Alcibiades.” He was proud and unbiddable, touchily conscious of his dignity as a nobleman. Plutarch relates an anecdote about him as a child playing in the street, first refusing to interrupt a game of dice in order to allow a cart to go by, and then lying down in the vehicle’s path to show his defiance of the driver’s threats, risking his life rather than take orders from a common carter. He refused to learn to play the flute, on the grounds that flutists made themselves look ridiculous by pursing their lips: flute playing at once went out of fashion among the smart Athenian youth. As an adolescent, according to his son, he disliked the favorite Athenian sport of wrestling because “some of the athletes were of low birth.” As an adult he was a keen breeder and trainer of horses, an amusement open only to the rich. He carried himself as one who knows himself to be a superior being, by virtue of his class but also because his gifts fitted him for a splendid destiny and because his gargantuan vitality would settle for no less. Plato records Socrates saying to him, “You appear to me such that if any god were to say to you, ‘Are you willing, Alcibiades, to live having what you now do, or would you choose to die instantly unless you were permitted greater things?’ you would prefer to die.” Socrates was not talking about material possessions. “Further, if the same god said, ‘You can be master here in Europe, but will not be allowed to pass over into Asia,’ it appears to me that you would not even on those terms be willing to live, unless you could fill the mouths of all men with your name and power.” Like Achilles, Alcibiades, according to those intimate with him, had no use for an unremarkable life.
The device on his extravagantly splendid ivory and gold shield showed Eros with a thunderbolt, an image combining aggressive sexuality with elemental violence, which nicely encapsulates the impression he made. He was prodigally, flashily generous. It was customary for wealthy Athenians with political ambitions to woo the populace by subsidizing choral performances and other public shows; Alcibiades’ were always the most lavish. His first public action was, characteristically, an act of munificence. He happened to be passing the place of assembly and overheard the applause with which citizens who had made voluntary contributions to the treasury were being received. He was carrying a live quail under his cloak but, undeterred, he went in, pledged a large sum, and at the same time inadvertently released the bird. There was laughter and a scramble which ended in a seaman named Antiochus catching the quail and handing it back to Alcibiades. (The meeting was to prove a fateful one. Antiochus’s next appearance in recorded history is in the role of catalyst for Alcibiades’ downfall.) The rich young dilettante whose mind was on sport had demonstrated that he could, if he chose, be of substantial service to the state.
While still in his teens Alcibiades served his stint in the army, as all Athenians were obliged to, sharing a tent with Socrates. Philosopher and disciple each acquitted himself well but when Socrates saved the younger man’s life, fighting off the enemy when he lay wounded, it was Alcib
iades who was awarded a crown and suit of armor as a prize for valor—an injustice which owes something to Socrates’ selflessness, something to the generals’ snobbery, and something as well to Alcibiades’ frequently noted gift for gaining the credit for more than he had actually performed. His actions were as ostentatious as his appearance. “Love of distinction and desire for fame” were, according to Plutarch, the engines that drove him. But courageous he certainly was, and popular with both the common soldiers and those who commanded him.
Warfare provided an outlet for his prodigious energies. In civilian life, they festered. Cornelius Nepos praises his accomplishments and abilities but goes on: “but yet, so soon as he relaxed his efforts and there was nothing that called for mental exertion, he gave himself again to extravagance, indifference, licentiousness, depravity.” He had voracious appetites, for sex, for drink, for luxury of all kinds, and he had the money to indulge them all. Already very rich himself, he married Hipparete, one of the wealthiest heiresses in Athens. The wedding seems to have scarcely interrupted his scandalous series of liaisons with courtesans. Scurrilous gossip later accused him of incest with his sister, mother, and illegitimate daughter. The charges are lurid and unconvincing (there is no other evidence that he even had a sister), but his reputation for promiscuity was undoubtedly well founded.
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