The Classical World

by Robin Lane Fox

  Pericles's strategy involved letting the Spartans do what little they could, while Athenians continued to put pressure on the crucial Mega-rians and Corinthians. If one or both would defect to the Athenian side, perhaps as a democracy, the Spartans would be blocked from Attica. Meanwhile, the Spartans' successes in subverting Athenian allies remained limited, not least because the Spartans' own system and the harshness of most of the Spartan commanders were such a grim alternative. The Spartans' main impact lay in their yearly invasion of Attica when they cut down the local trees and burned the land. Nobody could beat them in a pitched battle, but the Athenians denied them one, merely harassing their raiders and foragers with their recently enlarged cavalry. Sparta's allies could not stay long in Attica: they lacked a workforce of helots at home, and so they needed to return to gather in their own harvest with their own hands.

  Pericles had not provoked war, but because he had a rational strat­egy for seeing off the Spartans, he had urged the Athenians not to give in to the pre-war diplomatic pressure. His reasoning was faultless, but it was ruined by pure chance. The Athenians became infected by an unforeseen plague (probably, typhus) and Pericles was one of the many victims. Straining for pre-eminence, his followers proposed an increasingly active strategy, including an un-Periclean first venture to Sicily, a source of grain for Corinth and Spartan allies. Even so,

  Athenian failures did not undermine the basic model of Periclean planning: the Spartans could not win, and so they agreed a truce in 42.1 bc which left them with no real gain and no popularity among their allies. The events of the war give a fascinating glimpse of the weaknesses in Spartan culture and society. The numbers of Spartiate soldiers were already declining and the outlying 'Dwellers Around' were being used to fill up infantry units which had previously been for Spartans only. The Spartan state was financially feeble (she still refused to strike coins) and at sea, her commanders were incompetent. In 425 a genuine Spartan cavalry was introduced, but it was not a success. Once outside Sparta, most of the Spartan governors were detestable men, trained to be harsh, not tactful, with a tendency to homoerotic affairs with their subjects and excessive use of the military baton. No Greek army marched without a strong sense of the gods as onlookers and guides, but the Spartans were exceptionally conscious of them. Like every Greek army, they respected the possible wrath of 'gods and local heroes', but they respected them in a more prominent way. They had a heightened sense of these gods' anger and their 'punishment' of any Spartans who transgressed them. It was not just that 'behind a Spartan army there trotted a mixed herd of sacrificial animals, ready for use to test the will of the gods at any time'. Before crossing Sparta's borders, Spartans were distinctive in their practice of offering 'crossing-sacrifices' and would even withdraw if the omens proved unfavourable. Like other field commanders, Spartan kings and generals could sometimes treat the gods, the omens and the yearly calendar of religious festivals as flexible factors, whose rules could be bent or evaded. But they became very conscious of such manipulations if events proved their decisions wrong. More than those of their Athenian opponents, Spartans' activities were limited by fear of the gods.

  In 415 bc, six years after an initial peace, the Athenians accepted a request from some of the Sicilian Greeks and other allies on the island and dispatched a huge armada, hoping to dominate the West. The venture came close to success, but was foiled above all by the skill and horsepower of their main Sicilian enemy, Syracuse. The Athenians had failed to send horses in boats or sufficient cavalry to oppose such a horse-rich enemy. A year later the expedition ended in a total disaster for the Athenians and their navy. Even so, the Spartans were very slow to profit from this unexpected gift. In September 411 they had their best chance of victory when an Athenian fleet was defeated off nearby Euboea and the Athenians in the city were deeply split by an anti-democratic coup. Yet the Spartans went away without pressing their advantage. The next year they were offering peace, an offer which they are said to have repeated five years later.

  Among the Spartans, the war's final years, from 411 to 404, were distinguished by continuing naval incompetence and the careers of some of the harshest thugs in Greek history, the dour Clearchus and the ruthless Lysander. Among the Athenians, despite the Sicilian fiasco and the brutal coup of 411, they were years, amazingly, of extreme cultural vigour. The tense early months of 411 saw two of Aristo­phanes' comic masterpieces, the Lysistrata and the "Women at the Thesmophoria, both playing hilariously with gender-roles (and the latter with Euripides the tragedian). Responding to the 'new music' in Athenian taste, Euripides took the tragic chorus to new extremes and put on one of his masterpieces, too, a brutal reworking of the Orestes myth. He then withdrew to Macedon and composed his finest play, the Bacchae with its tale of resistance, then submission to the god Dionysus' power. Sculptors back in the city carved a classical masterpiece too, the victory-figures and the procession of cattle for sacrifice on the parapet of the recently completed temple to Athena, goddess of victory.1 Above all, the elderly Sophocles, battered by an unwilling role in the coup of 411, staged his two finest plays, though in his eighties: the Philoctetes, with its theme of deception, and the heroic Oedipus at Colonus, the tragedy which best conveys the awe-someness of the 'heroic temper'. The citizens remained polarized, between oligarchic sympathizers and determined democrats but the tensions did not disintegrate their master-artists' skills.

  The Spartans' eventual victory in 404 bc owed much to the Persians' funding for their fleet and to the harsh and aggressive tactics of their newly emergent leader, Lysander. It was also assisted by the extreme behaviour of the Athenians, who had exiled and executed most of their best generals in politically motivated proceedings. In 404 the Athenians' 'second squad' of commanders lost a naval battle up at the Hellespont and exposed the sea-route on which the city's grain imports relied. The Athenians had to surrender their fleet, breach their Long Walls and accept a narrow oligarchy, backed by Spartan support. Their neighbours in Thebes and Corinth are said to have pressed for the complete destruction of the city.

  More than twenty years of intermittent war had seen at most five major engagements. However, there had been more than a hundred lesser encounters all over the Greek world. Almost every region had memories of dire days and nights when their freedom had stood in the balance and parties of local men had braved all for safety and survival. All around Greece, sweaty rowers, horsemen (still without stirrups) or even divers had stretched their human endurance to its limits. A rash of local victory-monuments, or trophies, commemor­ated minor successes of the war's early years, but on a long view, this scrappy stalemate would never have loomed so large in our awareness of Greek antiquity. Without one great asset, we might have struggled to reconstruct it from inscriptions (whose dating sometimes depends on fragile assumptions about the particular style in which they are cut on stone) and oblique references in Athenian comedy. It is of lasting human significance because of its surviving historian, the aristocratic Athenian Thucydides, whose work, unfinished at his death, extends down to 411 bc.

  Thucydides had been nobly born in c. 460-455 bc and was linked by family to Cimon, the political antithesis of Pericles. Nonetheless, Pericles became his hero and ideal leader, the dominant voice in Athens when the young Thucydides could begin to attend assemblies for himself. In the late 440s Pericles' pre-eminence appeared to have cowed the potential excesses of the democracy which he addressed. It was a 'golden age', therefore, in the young man's eyes: by birth, sympathy and intellect Thucydides was no democrat. He wrote with contempt of Pericles' most populist successors (men who were 'most aggressive', hiding their misdeeds by prolonging the war, or simply 'wicked'). His own political preference was for a restrictive oligarchy which eliminated more than half of the Athenian male voters ('the best constitution the Athenians had, at least in my time').2 The ignorance, quarrelling and incompetence of the 'people', he argued, were root causes of the failure of the campaign in Sicily. Others, more fairly, might have blamed
the feeble dithering of its main general, Nicias.

  But Nicias, for Thucydides, was 'one of us', a rich man, though not a noble, and was remembered later as someone 'who never did anything populist in his life'.3 From Thucydides, Nicias receives a glowing last tribute, which refutes the usual pattern whereby the historian praises men of achievement, rather than those who failed but had good intentions.

  Thucydides prized accuracy, 'exactness' in the newly fashionable Greek word for it. When compiling information he was admirably aware of the problems of false memory and the need for 'laborious investigation'.4 He had thought carefully, too, about the problems of establishing a chronology. Above all, he removed the gods as explanations of the course of events. In his mid-twenties he could well have heard a lecture by the older 'enquirer', Herodotus, or even met him on his visit to Athens. His predecessor would have struck him as naive, uncritical and (no doubt) superstitious. There is no sign that he wrote with Herodotus' 'enquiry' prominently in his mind. It was not so much a model as (in his view) a muddle. Admirably self-confident, Thucydides saw his own very different approach as his means of writing a 'possession for all time'.

  Dreams and omens, the simple wisdom of 'wise advisers', the belief that those who go too far get a just revenge and a divine retribution: Thucydides excluded all these Herodotean staples, just as he excluded explanations in terms of curses and divine causes. He had nothing to do with the 'archaic' belief that people may suffer for their ancestors' misdeeds: on an occasion when Herodotus saw divine justice working itself out, Thucydides never even mentioned it and gave a political explanation only.5 He favoured a new and penetrating realism. The gap between expectation and outcome, intention and event fascinated him. So did the bitter relations between justice and self-interest, the facts of power and the values of decency. He was well aware of the difference between truth and rhetorical pleading. What men professed publicly, he knew, was not what they practised. The Spartans began by promising 'liberation' to the Greek world, and then betrayed the value of freedom. Thucydides was no cynic, not a person who always imputes a selfish and unworthy motive to participants. Rather, he was a realist, having learned the hard lesson that in inter-state relations, powers simply rule where they can, a fact of life which others, pro­fessing justice, obscure or ignore at their peril. 'Ethical foreign policy', he realized, is a vain irrelevance.

  His Histories, therefore, are the most penetrating account of free­dom and justice and the practical limits on both in the cut and thrust of life. Luxury concerned him less: he could accept that an individual might combine public astuteness and success with private dissolution and an excessive lifestyle. He saw this possibility exemplified by his colourful friend Alcibiades at Athens during the one truly valuable phase (411-407) of Alcibiades' long public career. It was Thucydides' explicit aim to teach his readers, but his lesson was not just how to cope with a military problem or a challenge in a battle. Thucydides admired practical wisdom, the clever improvisations of a political genius like Themistocles or the long sight and (arguable) steadiness of a Pericles. Such qualities, and their exemplars, were to be emulated. But he also wished to lay bare, through speech and action, the amoral reality of inter-state politics, the verbal distortions of diplomatic speakers and factional leaders, and the terrifying violence which politi­cal revolution unleashes 'as long as human nature stays the same'. His diagnosis is still only too recognizable.

  He died, probably in the early 390s bc, before finishing his history: it breaks off in 411 bc, not with the defeat of 404 to which it looks forward. The stages of composition of even the eight books we have remind us that it was not written in one single sweep: we must allow for eventual adjustments in his point of view. Nonetheless, we can see from what survives, unfinished, that his presentation of the bleak facts of life in factional politics and inter-state relations was not itself bleak or inhumane. He gives a brilliant description of the lethal plague which beset Athens from 430 onwards, and it is a masterpiece of observation. Above all, it is unmarked by reference to divine caus­ation, although even his keenest Greek admirers later adduced such explanations for similar epidemics in their own histories. At the same time, he gives an account of the participants' own psychology and human suffering which is written with a victim's understanding: Thu­cydides merely tells us, with noble restraint, that he, too, had suffered this plague. His human analysis is so much more penetrating than the day-by-day case notes of the external symptoms of sicknesses which were compiled by the most 'scientific' of the Greek writers on medi­cine. So, too, his analysis of factional strife is written with a heartfelt pity for the plight of those caught between the extremists. He expresses real regret for the values of simple decency. Through speeches, as much as through his narrative's angle of vision, Thucydides brings out the strength of participants' feelings and sufferings, and encourages us to understand what it was like to be one of them at the time. We need to grasp the way the world is, he is telling us; but implicitly, that way is distressing, even regrettable. The master of realism is also well aware of its emotionally upsetting context.

  The ancients themselves acknowledged Thucydides as the pinnacle of history-writing, harsh and difficult though his style seemed. Some thirty years younger than Herodotus, he belonged to a generation which had seen no technological revolution, no sudden change in its geography or material life. Yet his way of presenting his contempor­aries belonged, intellectually, to a completely different mental uni­verse. Like Herodotus and so many Greek historians, he wrote in exile from his home city, but not before he had listened, argued and learned from debates in Greece's most powerful city-state and had himself served briefly as one of its generals. He was formed and steeled at the centre of power in Athens, in a climate where political theory was being taught for the first time, where generalizations about human psychology were the talk of his class and where power, and its exercise, were questions of passionate concern. Athens was his New York, whereas Thurii was Herodotus' Buenos Aires. In his Histories, Thucy­dides claimed to have kept 'as close as possible to the general gist of what was actually said' when he gave the speeches of selected contemporaries. Frequently mistranslated here, Thucydides is dis­avowing word-for-word accuracy, but he is claiming, nonetheless, to have kept as close to the reality as he possibly could. The implication is that, often, he has kept very close indeed. The style of these speeches at times may be Thucydides' own, but his gallery of speakers allows us to hear the voices of a new articulate realism, the style of the generation which was his own singular context. Through them, and his underlying insight, the Peloponnesian War remains the most instructive war in human history.

  15

  Socrates

  We went in and found Socrates just released from his chains and his wife Xanthippe - you know her - holding his little son and sitting beside him. When Xanthippe saw us, she cried out and said the sort of things which women usually do say, 'Socrates, this is the last time that your friends will ever speak to you, or you to them.' Socrates looked up at Crito and said, 'Crito, let somebody take her off home.'

  Plato, Phaedo 6oA

  But now is the time to depart, for me to die, for you to live, but

  which of us is going to the better business is unclear to all, except

  God.

  Plato's 'Socrates' to his jury: Apology 42A

  In a tribute to classical Athens, Hadrian's villa included a 'Lyceum', an imitation of the shrine in which the most famous of all Athenians had taught and conversed. He was neither rich nor handsome. He never wrote a book and he never received a prize. He was described by the Delphic oracle as the wisest man in Greece, but wise, it was said, because he knew his own ignorance. His style of teaching appears to have been by question and answer, through which he exposed his par­ticipants' contradictory beliefs. He inspired at least two Athenian comedies at his expense, a cluster of texts on his supposed 'Conver­sations', posthumous allegations that he had been a bigamist and a series of recollections by the sober,
though artful, Athenian Xenophon to show that he had wholeheartedly worshipped the gods and had been opposed to sex with boys. Above all, he inspired the writings of his pupil Plato. Through them he shaped the entire future of Western philosophy.

  In spring 399, however, a large jury of Athenians condemned him to death. Socrates, the prosecution claimed, 'does not acknowledge the gods which the city acknowledges'; he introduces new 'divinities'; he 'corrupts the young'.1 After a month in prison, he died from a cup of hemlock. The condemnation of a chubby, quizzical seventy-year-old who had been teaching in Athens for some forty years is a reminder that the world's most thorough democracy was not liberal, tolerant or committed to personal freedom on every issue.

  Socrates was born at Athens in c. 470 bc into a humble family, the son of a stonemason and a mother, it was said, who was a sturdy midwife. He was strikingly ugly, with a snub nose, a paunch, big lips and protruding eyes which swivelled as he spoke. He was wonderfully scruffy, wearing a worn-out cloak and sometimes not troubling to wear shoes. His priorities lay elsewhere, and he was said to become rapt in intellectual concentration, oblivious of his surroundings. He was married, nonetheless, to Xanthippe and, according to Xenophon, she was awfully difficult. 'I want to keep company with the human race and so I have acquired her,' he makes Socrates say, 'for if I can put up with her, I will easily get on with all the rest of mankind.'2 He had three sons, none of whom came to anything special. He also proved his resilience and courage by serving on at least three Athenian campaigns abroad as an infantryman, in one of which he saved the life of the city's controversial 'golden boy', the young and noble Alcibiades. In his later years he served on the council at a critical moment and opposed a ferocious proposal to condemn the Athenians' generals in a single block vote. To be serving on the council he had had to be appointed by lot: he was willing, then, to take his turn in a democracy, although, in discussions, he regarded the random lot as a stupid device with which to run a state. Two years later, after a brutal political coup in the city, he bravely opposed another outrageous order, to arrest a resident foreigner and cause his death. Ever the loyal citizen, Socrates made no attempt to escape when he himself was awaiting death in prison under the restored democracy.