Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  The state was all-encompassing. Spartans, according to Plutarch, had “neither the time nor the ability to live for themselves; but like bees they were to make themselves integral parts of the whole community.” The city was like a military encampment, where each person had allotted duties. All personal relationships were subordinated to that between the individual and the state. Male babies were inspected by the elders at birth. If they were not perfectly healthy they were thrown into a ravine. Those who passed muster were cared for by their parents until at the age of seven they entered the school, a vast boot camp whose curriculum consisted almost entirely of gymnastics, where they learned obedience to discipline, indifference to pain, and the rigid suppression of private emotion.

  The boys were systematically underfed, and encouraged to steal to satisfy their perpetual hunger, but if they were caught in the act they were ruthlessly flogged. The young men lived in all-male dormitories but were permitted to marry. A bride was abducted by force from her family home. Her hair was cropped back to her scalp by a “bridesmaid,” who then stripped her and left her lying alone on the floor of a darkened room to await her husband, who came late at night and stayed only long enough to perform his reproductive duty before returning to the men’s house. The couple’s subsequent encounters would be equally swift and furtive, and always nocturnal, so that a woman might give birth to several children before seeing her husband’s face. All men, whatever their age, took their meals in the communal mess (women ate separately, and were rationed to about one-sixth the quantity of food allowed to their men-folk). Men who refused to marry were punished and publicly shamed. Husbands who failed to impregnate their wives were pressured into inviting other men to do so. Jealousy was despised, along with all other manifestations of strong personal feeling. A mother who expressed contempt for a cowardly son was especially esteemed. Sparta was a place of throttled emotion, suppressed individuality, of willed dumbness. Spartans coupled sightlessly. The men never carried lights when they returned from the mess to their sleeping quarters. “When the Spartans kill,” writes Herodotus, “they do so at night.”

  This place of darkness was widely admired even by its enemies. Socrates joked about the fashionable Athenian Spartophiles who wore short tunics and leather bands around their legs and mutilated their ears in the Spartan style. Spartans were praised for their frugality and their physical fitness, for the fortitude with which they bore pain, for their indifference to all forms of pleasure and their readiness to sacrifice themselves for the common good. To many Athenians they seemed, not enviable of course, but admirable, models of ascetic virtue, time travelers from a simpler but more dignified age. The austerity of their lifestyle made an aesthetic appeal even to those who would not themselves have wished to drink black broth. The authoritarianism of their rulers was insidiously seductive to those weary of the endless argument and counterargument of the democratic process, a process which frequently deteriorated into time-wasting, irresponsible chatter. Pindar wrote in praise of Sparta, its venerable council of elders, its young men’s conquering spears. And Plato, while overtly rejecting the Spartan system of government as being debased, incorporated many Spartan institutions and Spartan values into his ideal Republic, thus ensuring that Lycurgus’s program for converting an individual into a useful component part of a state which existed not for its people’s benefit but for the perpetuation of its own power has become intrinsic to the Western ideals of manliness, of good citizenship, and of heroic virtue.

  A totalitarian state whose ordinary citizens are denied almost all self-expression provides, paradoxical as it may seem, a hospitable habitat for exceptional great men. Plutarch likened Sparta to a colony of bees, and every bee swarm has its queen. The subjugation of many empowers and liberates the few. In Sparta Alcibiades, Socrates’ student, was to describe Athenian democracy as “a system which is generally recognized as absurd,” and although he was undoubtedly attempting to curry favor with his anti-Athenian audience it is also possible that he spoke from the heart. He had proved a brilliant manipulator of the democratic Athenian Assembly, with powers of persuasion equal to those of the demagogues he despised, but once the Assembly turned against him he had strong personal reasons to reject not only that particular gathering but the political system of which it was the foremost example. As an aristocrat he may have found the oligarchic Spartan system congenial. As a young and famously beautiful military commander he must have responded to the Spartan cult of the warrior: “In time of war they relaxed the severity of the young men’s discipline and permitted them to beautify their hair and ornament their arms and clothing, rejoicing to see them, like horses, prance and neigh for the contest.” He had felt in Athens what it was like to be at the mercy of people he considered his inferiors. He had been condemned by his own city for reasons which probably seemed to him pettifogging and stupid. Sparta may have seemed to him a home more fit for heroes.

  Certainly it suited him to give his hosts that impression. He arrived in Sparta a penniless fugitive whose life depended on his winning the protection of his former enemies. Never again would he dazzle and intimidate in his youthful role of spoiled, swaggering dandy. In Athens he had made a mock of public opinion. In Sparta he was tactful, accommodating, charming. In Athens he glittered like Achilles; in Sparta he showed that he could bend and change like Odysseus, Homer’s “man of twists and turns.” Achilles is absolutely self-consistent, totally transparent. He says he hates the man “who says one thing but hides another in his heart” as he hates the Gates of Death. Odysseus says the same thing in almost identical words but he says it in the course of a speech we know to be a concatenation of lies. He is a diplomat and intriguer, a master of disguise and dissimulation, the godson of Autolychus, the divine master of “thievery and subtle shifty oaths,” a compulsive fabulist who speaks as often, in the

  Odyssey, in an assumed character as he does in his own. Alcibiades was like him. He was a chameleon, a brilliant role player. He possessed, says Plutarch, “one special gift which surpassed all the rest and served to attach men to him, namely that he could assimilate and adapt himself to the pursuits and the manner of living of others.”

  He was an outcast now, and those deprived of their rooted identity are free to reinvent themselves. The second-century theologian Justin Martyr described the lineage of Cain, those outsiders of Hebrew legend, as shapeshifters who could become at will birds, serpents, or quadrupeds. Alcibiades, an accursed exile like Cain, had the same protean gift, mark both of his untrustworthiness and his uncanny brilliance. In Athens his lifestyle had been luxurious to the point of decadence. Sailing to Sicily, he astonished his peers by having part of the deck of his trireme cut away so that he could sling up a hammock, instead of sleeping, as all his compatriots did, wrapped in his cloak on the wooden deck. Now he became an ascetic. “By adopting Spartan customs in his everyday life he captivated the people and brought them under his spell.” He grew his hair long in the Spartan fashion, took cold baths, and ate coarse bread with the notorious black broth. (Ironically, this playacting won him the accolade of comparison with the hero who was never anything but himself: “In Sparta, so far as all the externals went, one could say of him ‘this is no son of Achilles, but Achilles himself.’ ”) A marked man, he could no longer afford the self-indulgence of spontaneity. For the rest of his life, for all the glory and acclaim that still lay before him, he would have to please his audience, to mind his manners and watch his back.

  He had to present himself to his new masters as something more than a renegade with an exhaustible fund of useful information. He could probably, had he been content to live a modest and private life, have bought himself sanctuary at the price of a few minor betrayals, but the restless, self-castigating ambition that Socrates had identified in him made such a solution to his problems inconceivable. When he arrived in Sparta in the winter of 415/414 BC he had yet to score any notable military successes. But, deprived as he was of his social position, without his wealth, withou
t an army, the only way he could win a role consonant with the “love of distinction and desire for fame” which drove him all his life was to project an image of himself as a superman, one capable in his own person of accomplishing mighty deeds. In Sparta he began the creation of that image.

  He had a quick eye for the main chance. Odysseus is “never at a loss” and Thomas Carlyle was to define a hero as “a man with an almost mythical awareness of what needed to be done.” Alcibiades was one such. The philosopher Theophrastus, who lived a century after him, thought that he “possessed in a higher degree than any of his contemporaries the faculty of discerning and grasping what was required in a given situation.” Delegations arrived in Sparta from Sicily asking for help against the Athenians. Alcibiades seized his opportunity. He spoke in the Sicilians’ support, using the occasion to make his formal entry into Spartan public life. His speech, as reported by Thucydides, is a brilliant exercise in self-justification and self-aggrandizement. In it he publicly declares, for the first time, a tremendous program of conquest and colonization of which the Sicilian expedition was to have been only the beginning. From Sicily, he told the Spartans, he would have led the Athenians on to Italy and, that territory once conquered, would have launched an attack on Carthage and its empire. Then, with all the might of their new western conquests to draw on, the Athenians would have returned to crush the Peloponnesians, and emerged as masters of the entire Mediterranean world.

  Probably Alcibiades had entertained such intentions: they are entirely consonant with his well-attested ambition, his vast self-confidence, and his pleasure in the superlative gesture (his seven chariot teams, his three prizes). But it is unlikely that such a grand design ever existed outside of his imagination. It is inconceivable that Nicias would have consented to it. When Alcibiades told the Spartan assembly, “The generals who are left will, if they can, continue just the same to carry out these plans,” he was certainly lying. But the lie went undetected. The Spartans were persuaded. They decided to intervene in Sicily. And from then onwards, in their eyes and in posterity’s, the audacity and grandeur of those tremendous projected conquests attached themselves to Alcibiades, lending him the aura of a great man—one who, had he not been thwarted by his ungrateful compatriots, might have become, five years before Alexander of Macedon was born, a world-conquering Greek. The modern historian Donald Kagan pays tribute to his performance on this occasion: “One can only marvel at his boldness, his imagination, his shrewd psychological understanding, and the size of his bluff.”

  For the next two and a half years Alcibiades lived in Sparta. Plutarch speaks pityingly of him wandering aimlessly about the city, but there is no evidence that he was humiliated by his hosts. The only story we have about his sojourn in Sparta is that of his liaison with Queen Timea, wife of Agis II, one of Sparta’s two kings. Agis was abstaining from sex after an earthquake—which he took to be a divine warning—had interrupted his lovemaking with Timea, and he was anyway absent on campaign when a second earthquake shook the palace and a man was seen escaping from the queen’s bedroom. That man, according to ancient gossip, was Alcibiades. Nine months later Timea gave birth to a son. The story may be scurrilous (Agis’s other heirs would have had a motive for alleging the baby was illegitimate), but it is perfectly credible. Alcibiades was as attractive as ever and unused to sexual continence. The child was later barred from succession. When challenged about his alleged paternity Alcibiades is reported to have said with his characteristic arrogance “that he had not done this as a mere insult, nor simply to gratify his appetite, but to ensure that his descendants would one day rule over the Spartans.”

  While Alcibiades dallied in Sparta the Athenians’ campaign in Sicily ended in horror. The fleet was annihilated. The entire army was either slaughtered or enslaved. The venture for which Alcibiades was largely responsible and which he had envisioned as the first phase of a glorious series of conquests left Athens crippled, without money, without ships, without fighting men. At once her colonies began to contemplate secession.

  During the winter of 413/412 BC, two years after Alcibiades had arrived in Sparta, the Spartans were twice approached by rebellious oligarchic factions within Athenian colonies asking for support. In both cases the rebels already had Persian backing. The Great King was, or rather his satraps in the region were, eager to exploit any weakness within the Athenian empire. Alcibiades was among those who advocated sending a fleet to support the rebels on the island of Chios. He must, after two years’ stagnation, have been craving action and the chance to make a brilliant show. King Agis, who had presumably heard the stories in circulation about Queen Timea’s surprising pregnancy, was by now openly hostile towards him. Unless he could do the Spartans some signal service Sparta would not much longer be a safe refuge for him. He embarked on the second phase of his self-mythologizing. He personally, he told the ephors, and he alone, would be able to break Athens’ hold on the cities of the eastern Mediterranean. “He said he would easily persuade the cities to revolt by informing them of the weakness of Athens and of the active policy of Sparta; and they would regard his evidence as being particularly reliable.”

  The ephors were persuaded. A small fleet was assembled. The first group of ships to set out blundered into the Athenian fleet and were defeated. The commander was killed and the surviving ships blockaded off Epidaurus. The Spartans hesitated. Many were so discouraged by this first setback they were ready to abandon the venture entirely, but Alcibiades succeed in holding them to their purpose. A second group of five ships, commanded by the Spartan Chalcides but with Alcibiades on board as mastermind, dashed to Chios, arriving before the news of the first party’s defeat. Any seaman they encountered on the voyage they arrested and took with them to ensure secrecy. They sailed up to the city while its council was sitting. Alcibiades and Chalcides disembarked and marched into the Assembly. To the consternation of the pro-Athenian party they announced that they were the vanguard of a Peloponnesian fleet (but omitted to mention that the rest of the aforesaid fleet was trapped several hundred miles away). The ruse was successful: their opponents capitulated. First Chios, then the neighboring cities of Erythrae and Clazomenae, switched allegiance, and prepared to resist the Athenians.

  The suborning of Chios was a brilliant coup, and one typical of Alcibiades. It bears all his trademarks: swiftness, audacity, a dependence on his own charisma and histrionic powers, flamboyant deception. Like the great runner Achilles he knew the value of speed, the way an army, or even a man, appearing where they are not looked for, where the rules of probability decree they cannot possibly be, can be as shocking and awesome as a supernatural apparition, demoralizing opposition and lending fresh courage to allies. Later that same year, after fighting all day in a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to repel the Athenians at Miletus, Alcibiades took horse and galloped southward through the night to meet the Peloponnesian fleet as it came into harbor and urge its captains to turn and sail on till morning. At dawn the next day, thanks to his despatch, the fleet appeared off Miletus and the Athenians slunk away “without realizing the fruit of their victory.” A masterly manipulator of the facts with which circumstances presented him, Alcibiades was one who could conjure up an illusion of victory, and use it to make that victory real.

  His cunning and theatricality as a commander have their parallels in the political games he was obliged to play throughout the last ten years of his life to keep himself alive and in command. He was instrumental in the making of a treaty between the Persians and the Spartans which heavily favored the former. There were suspicions in Sparta (quite possibly justified) that he was not a faithful servant to his adopted masters, masters who had a reputation for summarily and secretly killing those inconvenient to them. “The most powerful and ambitious of the Spartans were by now both jealous and tired of him,” says Plutarch. After the battle of Miletus the Spartan admiral received orders, which probably originated with King Agis, to have Alcibiades put to death. Somehow, possibly warned by Queen
Timea, who was so recklessly in love with him that in private she called her baby son by his name, Alcibiades heard of the order even before the admiral received it. A condemned man now in both halves of the Greek world, he slipped away from the Peloponnesian fleet and, turning his back not only on his native city but on his native culture, took refuge with the Persian satrap Tissaphernes at Sardis.

  The satrap received him well. Plutarch describes Tissaphernes as one “who was naturally inclined to malice and enjoyed the company of rogues, being anything but straightforward himself,” and adds that he “admired intensely Alcibiades’ versatility and exceptional cleverness.” The Persian and the Athenian, two schemers and conjurors with the truth, became—at least apparently—fast friends. Once again Alcibiades played the chameleon, adopting (possibly with more enthusiasm than he had adopted Spartan asceticism) Persian luxury and Persian pomp. Once again his extraordinary charm worked its spell. “Even those who feared and envied him could not help taking pleasure in his company,” writes Plutarch. Tissaphernes was so delighted with his guest that he named a pleasure garden, “decorated in regal and extravagant style,” after him, one “famous for its refreshing streams and meadows and pavilions and pleasances.” Alcibiades “became his adviser in all things,” says Thucydides. But his position was terrifyingly insecure, dependent as it was on a web of deceptions. Tissaphernes welcomed him initially on the understanding that he offered advice on behalf of the Spartans, the people who in fact now sought his death. Over the next year he was to play a perilous game of bluff and double bluff with Persians and Greeks alike, borrowing others’ authority to cloak his real situation, which was that of an impotent and resourceless fugitive, and seeking to impress each party by laying claim to vast influence over another who at best distrusted him, at worst wanted him dead.