The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  The Athenians had no idea of their precarious situation. They promptly raised, and sent, enough men to double Nicias’s force.33

  Nicias, aghast to see the reinforcements appear on the horizon, planned to take the whole army and retreat. But the Syracusans got wind of this scheme, and, in Thucydides’s words, “became more eager than ever to press the Athenians, who had now themselves acknowledged that they were no longer their superiors either on sea or by land, as otherwise they would never have planned to sail away.”34 Syracusan ships blocked the Athenian retreat, whereupon forty thousand Athenian soldiers tried to escape across the island on foot to the other side. Their horrific march, in the summer sun with the enemy behind, ended in disaster: they hoped to reach the Assinarus river and launch a defense on the other side, but when they reached the shore,

  driven by their exhaustion and craving for water…they rushed in, and all order was at an end, each man wanting to cross first…. Mean while the opposite bank, which was steep, was lined by the Syracusans, who showered missiles down upon the Athenians, most of them drinking greedily and heaped together…in the hollow bed of the river. The Peloponnesians also came down and butchered them, especially those in the water, which was thus immediately spoiled, but which they went on drinking just the same, mud and all, bloody as it was, most even fighting to have it. At last, when many dead now lay piled one upon another in the stream, and part of the army had been destroyed at the river, and the few that escaped from there had been cut off by the cavalry, Nicias surrendered.35

  Despite assurances from the Syracusan commander, Nicias was murdered as soon as he had laid down his arms. The captive Athenians were sent to the quarries, where they died in heat and filth, or lived among the piled bodies of those who had died before. The few survivors returned home to find that the Spartans, helped by Alcibiades, had already invaded Attica and were spreading across its edge.

  But the Spartans still couldn’t force an Athenian surrender, and after eight years the war was still dragging on. Most Greeks were, by now, very tired of fighting the Spartans. In these years, the playwright Aristophanes wrote the comedy Lysistrata, in which the women of Athens announce that they will all refrain from sex until their husbands bring the war to an end. “We need only sit indoors with painted cheeks,” their leader Lysistrata exclaims, “and meet our mates lightly clad in transparent gowns…they will get their tools up and be wild to lie with us. That will be the time to refuse, and they will hasten to make peace, I am convinced of that!”36

  No such solution presented itself. Instead, the Persians got reinvolved, and the troubles between the two cities became even more insoluble.

  The Persians were brought into the picture by none other than Alcibiades, who had managed to get himself kicked out of Sparta. While Agis, the king of the junior line, was out of the city fighting, Alcibiades had carried on a raging affair with his wife so blatant that the whole city knew about it: “She got pregnant with his child,” Plutarch observes, “and did not even deny it.”37 Agis himself, who could count, realized when he returned home that the baby wasn’t his. Alcibiades, not wanting to meet with a fatal accident, fled to Sardis. There he introduced himself to the satrap now in charge of Asia Minor, one Tissaphernes, and offered to help the Persians work the ongoing war between Athens and Sparta in a way that might bring both cities down.

  The scheme, as planned by Alcibiades and Tissaphernes (who didn’t consult the king at Susa), was partially successful. Tissaphernes sent word to the Spartans, offering to fund their ongoing war on condition that, once Athens fell, the Spartans would abandon the Ionian cities to Persia. The Spartans agreed, which played directly into Tissaphernes’s hands; he encouraged them to rely on the Persian bankroll and then did a lousy job of paying up. “Tissaphernes,” says Thucydides, “was ruining their navy by payments made irregularly, and even then not made in full.”38

  Meanwhile Alcibiades wrote to Athens, offering to come and join them (again) with plenty of Persian gold in hand, as long as they would agree to reinstate him in his previous position. That the Athenians agreed was a measure of their desperation.

  This was probably supposed to end in a huge sea battle in which the Athenians and Spartans would, theoretically, destroy each other’s fleets. Alcibiades certainly did go back to Athens, in 407, with enough gold to help them refurbish the navy; and in the fall of that same year, he led a fleet of a hundred Athenian ships towards the Spartan navy.

  Meanwhile, two changes of command had taken place. Darius II had gotten wind of the unauthorized negotiations, yanked Tissaphernes back to Susa, and sent his younger son Cyrus to Sardis with instructions to put Persian reinforcements firmly on the Spartan side. And the Spartan navy had been put under the command of a new admiral, a man named Lysander. Plutarch tells us that Lysander, bolstered by Persian reinforcements and Persian money, was paying his forces a third more than the Athenians got from Alcibiades, and that Alcibiades “was pinched to pay even the daily allowance.”39

  Outfunded and outmanned, the Athenian navy was doomed. In a series of battles between the fall of 407 and 405, Athenian ships were sunk and captured, sailors killed and drowned. In August, in a final devastating battle, the Athenian navy lost 171 ships in a single engagement.

  Alcibiades himself disappeared, prudently; he turned up at the court of the satrap of Phrygia a little later and was treated “as an honoured member of the court.”40 His luck ran out shortly later, when Lysander (who remained on good terms with the Persians) asked the satrap to kill him off. The satrap agreed and sent men to burn down Alcibiades’s house; Alcibiades woke up and crashed out through the flames, only to be spitted by a javelin.

  Lysander followed up on his destruction of the Athenian fleet by burning every ship he could and then sailing for Athens. He reached the city in October and besieged it. The Athenians, seeing that resistance was only going to result in starvation, surrendered: “Besieged by land and sea,” wrote the Greek soldier and historian Xenophon, “they had neither ships nor allies nor food.”41 The war was over.

  Lysander ordered the Athenians to knock down the Long Walls, a condition which was carried out to the sound of celebratory flute music. Athens was also forced to give up all influence over the cities which had once belonged to the “Athenian empire.”42 This was not nearly as severe a punishment as it could have been; Athens still had its main city walls, it had not been sacked, and it had the freedom to reestablish its own government. Unfortunately the Athenians at once began a huge internal quarrel about how to do this. Eventually Lysander was forced to return and set up a junta of thirty aristocrats, known later simply as the Thirty.43 They became infamous for the bloodbath which they instituted, putting to death on any pretext Athenians whom they suspected of wanting democracy restored. Lysander, whose initial reaction to Athens had been mild, turned a blind eye and even sent Spartan foot soldiers to help the new regime get rid of all opposition.

  The executions soon moved beyond the political: “They aimed at removing all whom they had reason to fear,” Aristotle later wrote, “and also those whose possessions they wished to lay hands on. And in a short time they put to death not less than fifteen hundred persons.”44

  In desperation, the remaining Athenians massed together, sent to nearby Thebes for help, and attacked the Thirty and the Spartan garrison that protected them. This could have started war with Sparta all over again, but the king of Sparta, seeing the mess, overruled Lysander and pulled the garrison out. Darius II had just died, and his son and heir, Artaxerxes II, was an unknown quantity; Sparta was not going to rely on Persian gold again.

  The Thirty who had not died in the fighting fled. The following year, 403, was hailed by the Athenians as the start of a new era, in which democracy could finally make its return to Athens. But the Athens which welcomed it was broken and bankrupt.

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  The First Sack of Rome

  In Rome, between 495 and 390 BC,

  patricians and plebians q
uarrel,

  and Gauls burn the city

  THE FIRST DICTATOR OF ROME, appointed to beat invaders away from the city walls, had succeeded in his task. His efforts had not brought a real peace, though. In the Roman countryside, Livy writes, there “was neither assured peace nor open war” rather, an ongoing standoff between a rising and aggressive power, and the surrounding towns, not quite sure whether to challenge Rome or leave it alone.1

  But while the Etruscans were no longer a serious worry—they had rallied their fading force behind the Athenians during the attack on Sicily, and had suffered for it—Rome had troubles of its own. “So deeply was the country divided by its political differences,” says Livy, “that the people, unlike their oppressors in the governing class, hailed the prospect of invasion with delight.”2

  ROME HAD THROWN its net across peoples on the outside, and as it began to mutate towards an empire it faced the same difficulty as the Persians or Spartans: how to combine people with great power (the original conquerors) and those with no power (the conquered, now absorbed) into a harmonious whole.

  In Sparta, the conquerors were called citizens, while the conquered were helots. In Rome, the two groups had slightly different origins. The patricians (from the Latin word pater, “father”) were by tradition descendents of the Roman council of advisors that served the old kings. The plebians were everyone else: a term which is notoriously hard to define because it is a negation, the “not patricians.” This included conquered peoples now living in Rome, but also men who traced their ancestry back to lowly inhabitants of the original city.

  The plebians outnumbered the patricians, but the patricians held a disproportionate amount of land and wealth. Even in the early days of the Republic, the plebians managed to elect one of their own to be consul on a fairly regular basis, but Rome’s magistrates and priests, landowners and generals, were all patricians.

  As in Athens, the problem of debt had become acute. A plebian who had to borrow money in time of famine, or while away at war, to feed his family, had to pledge himself as security; if the money was not paid back, he and his dependents became slaves.3 The patricians in this way were gaining not only land and money, but also ownership over the citizens of Rome themselves, in increasing numbers. The plebians found it particularly galling that they often fell into debt and slavery as a result of having gone off to fight for Rome.

  In 495, their unhappiness was brought to public riot when an old soldier, once famous for his exploits, hobbled into the Forum. “With his soiled and threadbare clothes,” Livy writes, “his dreadful pallor and emaciated body…his unkempt hair and beard…he was a pitiable sight.” He was recognized, and a murmur went through the crowd; more and more people gathered to hear him. He ripped his shirt apart and showed his chest scarred with sword-cuts suffered during his service to Rome, his back marked with weals from beatings given him by his wealthy master. “While I was on service,” the old man said, “during the Sabine war, my crops were ruined by enemy raids, and my cottage was burnt. Everything I had was taken, including my cattle. Then, when I was least able to do so, I was expected to pay taxes, and fell, consequently, into debt.”4

  At this, debt slaves (some still in chains) from all over the city thronged into the streets, shouting for the Senate to decide at once how to give them relief from their slavery. The senators were mostly missing, because they were hiding from the mobs. However, the consuls were determined to avoid unnecessary violence, so they went around and hauled senators out of hiding, into the Senate, so that they could begin deliberations on the problem of debt slavery. As the debates began between senators, angry debt slaves thronged around the Senate, pushing into doors and hanging through windows to hear just how the Senate would resolve the situation.

  This was not the best setting for a reasonable debate over the problem of debt, and in fact the Senate was getting nowhere when help of a sort arrived on the horizon: news came that the nearby tribe of the Volscii, who lived south of Rome, were marching on the city. The Senate passed a hasty resolution that no man could in the future be reduced to debt slavery as long as he was on active military duty. At this, practically everyone in the streets joined the army and went out to fight the Volscians. The attackers were thoroughly thrashed, since the army of debtors that came charging out to meet them was, as Livy puts it, “spoiling for a fight.”

  But the larger problem of the imbalance of power hadn’t yet been addressed. Rome, Livy writes, needed to find “a solution for the conflicting interests of the two classes in the state: by fair means or foul the country must recover its internal harmony.”5 The “or foul” is not particularly encouraging; it suggests that, even in Livy’s day, a whiff of let’s-just-get-rid-of-the-problem survived from those ancient senatorial deliberations. And in fact, with the Volscian threat beaten off, the plebian soldiers who had returned to the city (they couldn’t stay on active military duty forever) soon saw that no permanent solution was on offer.

  Their only strength in Rome was that of numbers, and they used it. In 494, they went on the world’s first recorded strike: “They took themselves off in a body to the Sacred Mount, three miles from the city…,” Livy says, “and there…they made themselves a camp.”6 This became known as the Plebian Secession, and within Rome it threw both the patricians (who had lost their slaves and most of their army) and the remaining plebians (who had lost most of their strength) into a panic. The city froze up, vulnerable to attack, its daily work undone.

  Finally the Senate and consuls proposed a solution. From now on, they would be joined in government by special magistrates called tribunes, who would always be appointed from the ranks of the plebians, and who would be “above the law” (which is to say, immune from pressures applied by Senate and consuls, since Rome had as yet no written law). Their job would be to protect the plebs from injustice. It was the first Roman office blocked off to patricians, as so many offices had been to the plebs.

  The first two tribunes were appointed in 494, the same year as the Plebian Secession. The crisis had been, temporarily, averted.

  Over the next half century, the jockeying for power between consuls, senators, priests, and tribunes threw into sharp relief Rome’s need for a written law which would act as even further protection for the plebians. Roman ambassadors who had visited Athens came back talking of the laws of Solon, which had been written out in an attempt to reduce tensions between Athenian aristocrats and democrats. They even brought back a copy of the laws with them. Rome was now too big, and too diverse, to rely on unwritten tradition. The city needed laws “which every individual citizen could feel that he had…consented to accept.”7

  So in 451, a board of ten lawmakers—the decemvirs—was appointed in place of the regular Roman officers to serve during the year 450. Their task was not only to run the government but to draw up laws to govern Rome. Their appointment was not without controversy: “There was a certain amount of argument about whether men not of patrician birth should be allowed to serve,” Livy says,8 as some Romans were still unwilling to see plebians take any part in government. But with this issue resolved, the decemvirs spent their year working on the laws and then presented them to the people for public discussion. When the laws had been amended by the discussion, an assembly of all the people was held to approve them. There was a general feeling that a little more regulation was still in order, so decemvirs were appointed for the following year also to draw up two more tables.

  The Twelve Tables that resulted were written out on wood and set in the Forum, where all could see them. Livy says that in his day they were still the foundation of Roman law. Unfortunately the Tables were lost; what we know of them is assembled from quotes in various Roman documents.

  Reassembled, the incomplete Tables contain the expected provisions to keep peace between the two Roman classes. “Eris confessi rebusque iure iudicatis XXX dies iusti sunto,” reads Table III: “You who admit to or have been judged to owe money have thirty days to pay it.” After that, the
debtor can be taken to court, and if he has no surety or income, he can be put in chains; but his accuser must pay for his food (which might end up being more costly than forgiving the debt). Anyone who makes a false claim, according to Table XII, can be brought in front of three judges; if they decide that he has lied, he has to pay a substantial penalty. And then there is Table IX, the bedrock of the whole arrangement: “Privilegia ne irroganato,” “No private laws can be proposed.” No longer could patricians simply impose their will on plebians without their agreement.

  Along with these are regulations of injury and harm that recall the laws of Hammurabi: a man who breaks another’s bone must pay a fine, but the fine is halved if the bone broken belongs to a slave; if roads are not kept up by those who own the property through which they pass, the users are permitted to trespass and drive their cattle alongside the road instead; a son who is sold into slavery three different times can declare himself emancipated from his father.

  And along with these are hints that although the Laws of the Twelve Tables were a step in the right direction, there was still plenty of injustice in Rome. Some of the injustices are standard ancient practice: “A deformed child shall be killed,” reads Table IV, baldly, and Table V explains, “Women, because of their light dispositions, shall always have guardians even when they are grown.” And others are particular to Rome itself. “No one may hold meetings in the city during the night,” reads Table VIII, a regulation meant to protect the patricians from another plebian plot; and, most infamously, Table XI decrees, “Marriage between a patrician and a plebian is forbidden.” This particular law was finally repealed in 445 after savage debate in the Senate; not everyone was convinced that Rome would prosper if the blood of noble and common Romans mingled.9