Why Socrates Died

by Robin Waterfield

  MELOS

  The year 416 also demonstrated how far down the path of ruthlessness the Athenians were prepared to go. As one of the generals for the year, Alcibiades would certainly have kept in touch with events, but he was not personally involved. He had other fish to fry, as we shall shortly see. The island of Melos had ancestral ties with Sparta, but was neutral (in so far as that was a recognized status in ancient Greece), despite being surrounded by Athenian allies. The Athenians had from time to time attempted to force the island into full membership of the empire, and now their patience had run out. Since the island had briefly and intermittently paid tribute (up until 425 BCE), the Athenians probably consoled themselves, as they prepared to invade, with the argument that it was a rebel state. Before invading, however, they sent envoys to negotiate with the Melians, to see if they could cow them into submission without committing any troops. Thucydides cast the negotiations in the form of a memorably savage dialogue between the Athenian delegates and members of the oligarchic Melian council – savage, but also futile, since if the Melians won the argument they would be invaded, and if they lost the argument they would be ‘enslaved’, or forced to join the empire.

  Right from the start, according to Thucydides, the Athenians dismissed any reference to justice or international law; there is no place for justice between unequal sides, they insisted, only for the domination of the weaker party by the stronger. Expediency is the issue, not justice; the security of the empire demands the island’s capitulation. Besides, it is both a natural law, valid among gods as well as men, that the strong should dominate the weak, and a human convention too, throughout human history. If the Melians had the power that the Athenians currently have, the Melians would act no differently. So the Athenians have nothing to fear from the gods. As for the Melian hope of help from Sparta, this is just plain stupid, the Athenian envoys sneered. The Spartans lead the way in acting only in their own interest, and they will not see it here; there is too much risk involved. They might have added (though it does not play a part in Thucydides’ dramatic debate) that the Spartans could not seize the moral high ground, since they had just carried out a massacre themselves, at the Argive town of Hysiae.

  Negotiation failed to resolve anything, and Athenians turned to military muscle instead. They attacked the island in the late summer of 416 and by the early winter they had conquered it and more or less depopulated it: the men were all killed, the women and children sold into slavery. Thucydides’ style rarely permits him to comment explicitly on an event, but he placed the Melian dialogue right before the debate that led to the Athenians sending out the expedition to Sicily, an act of terminal self-destruction, as if to say that one was sin and the other retribution. If so, Alcibiades, the chief instigator of the Sicilian expedition, was the instrument of retribution.

  SIX

  The Rise and Fall of Alcibiades

  Alcibiades avoided involvement in the massacre at Melos only because he was occupied with a different route to personal glory. Originally, the ancient games at Olympia, in the far west of the Peloponnese, consisted of no more than a few footraces for locals. It was only once the festival became a panhellenic meeting of aristocrats that the chariot race became one of the focal events, with its legendary origin depicted on the pedimental sculptures of the great temple of Zeus at Olympia, erected around 456 BCE. But entering a team was possible only for a very exclusive class, even among the rich. The Athenian statistics bear this out: ‘The 44 certain known entries by Athenians of four-and two-horse chariots for international contests during the 300 years from 600 to 300 were made by members of only fourteen families, and … three of these families (Alkmeonidai, Philaidai/Kimonids, and the Kleinias-Alkibiades family) account for 25 of them.’

  The name of Alcibiades is constantly linked with breeding horses for chariot-racing contests. It was his passion, and one of the main ways in which he chose to make a mark on both Athenian and international society. Even before the almost legendary Olympic games of 416 he had achieved notable successes. He had won at the Panathenaea of 418, which was the most splendid international festival in Athens, and in 416 he commissioned two paintings, to be displayed in a wing of the monumental entrance to the Acropolis: one showed him being crowned by figures representing both the Olympic and the Pythian games (held at Delphi); the second had him seated in the lap of the Nemean games. The international Nemean and Pythian games almost rivalled the Olympic games for prestige, and the paintings can only mean that he had also won there. At the same time he also commissioned a bronze statue of himself driving a chariot – not that he or any of his aristocratic peers drove their racing chariots themselves: it was an extremely dangerous event, best left to expert slaves.

  But true glory was to be won at the games at Olympia, and for those of 416 he entered no fewer than seven teams, more than most states could manage, let alone individuals. As if that were not enough, he erected an enormous pavilion, in the Persian style, in which he lavishly entertained large numbers of guests with golden tableware, and he performed ostentatiously large sacrifices in the sacred precinct. The cost was enormous (eight talents – perhaps £4,000,000 – a later historian records, but how did he arrive at this figure?), and even Alcibiades had to cut some corners. He had bought a team of horses in Argos on behalf of his friend Teisias Teisimachou, but since Teisias was otherwise engaged at the time, leading the invasion of Melos, Alcibiades entered the team as his own. He appears also to have persuaded the Olympic Committee that another Athenian team, which properly belonged to a certain Diomedes, was his; it is typical of Alcibiades not to have been content with the staggering feat of entering five teams. He also ‘borrowed’ the golden tableware from the official Athenian delegation to the festival. In short, Alcibiades made sure that he was highly visible at this, the most important meeting of aristocrats from all over the Greek world.

  His teams came first, second and fourth (or possibly third). When he got home he commissioned no less a poet than Euripides to write a celebratory ode, and the painters and sculptor he used for his victory portraits were also of the first rank. Victory in one or more of the great international athletic festivals was held to be an almost superhuman achievement, and was regularly taken to bestow the victor with talismanic power, of the sort that could strike terror into the hearts of one’s enemies on the battlefield; a victorious athlete might well be fêted in popular songs and celebrated on monuments, and after his death his spirit might be worshipped as a beneficent power. Given Alcibiades’ rivalry with Nicias, it is certainly worth mentioning that the previous year the older statesman had paid for a particularly extravagant performance of the choral programme of the Delia, the festival in honour of Apollo on the sacred island of Delos. Alcibiades did not enjoy being in the shade; his display at the Olympics was meant to catapult him way beyond his rival.

  In the eyes of many Athenians, however, he had gone too far – and they had a very specific way of describing just how much too far he had gone. The rumour began to spread that Alcibiades would not be satisfied even with the Periclean position of first statesman of Athens, but was aiming for tyranny, unconstitutional sole rule. Although in a speech the following year he argued that his Olympic success and spectacle brought glory to the city as a whole, his behaviour smacked of replacing the city, not of representing it. The very actions that, according to Alcibiades, glorified the city, led others to claim that people would mock Athens for their subservience to just one man. From then on, rumours of tyranny blighted Alcibiades’ career. If anyone had not heard the rumours earlier, in 414, on stage before an audience of thousands, Aristophanes had a thinly disguised Alcibiades found a new model community in the sky (the play was called Birds) and set himself up as an eastern-style tyrant there.

  There was a specifically Athenian precedent for the attempt to translate Olympic victory into control of the state; it had happened long before, but the story was still fresh in people’s minds, because it led to one of the great scandals of Athe
nian history, the Alcmaeonid Curse. Even as recently as 431, the Spartans had invoked this curse in an attempt to turn the Athenians against Pericles. Around 630 BCE a would-be tyrant called Cylon, a recent Olympic victor, had seized the Acropolis with his supporters – and with the help of troops supplied by his father-in-law, the tyrant of Megara. The coup failed to garner the local support Cylon had hoped for, and he abandoned the Acropolis once he and his supporters had been promised fair treatment. But an Alcmaeonid archon had some of the Cylonians summarily executed. This was the sacrilege that led to the cursing of the Alcmaeonid family – and to the Spartan recollection of the stigma in their negotiations with Alcmaeonid Pericles.

  As if Alcibiades’ vainglorious use of Olympic victory were not enough, there were other aspects of his life that his enemies could easily use to support the suggestion that limited, constitutional power was not going to satisfy him. There was his habit of using his charm to make the citizens of foreign states more or less his clients: the Ephesians and the islanders of Chios had supported the cost of his Olympic extravaganza, and the loyalty of the Argive army reminded Athenians of how Peisistratus, on his third and most successful attempt to become tyrant in 547 BCE, had seized power with the help of Argive troops. Then there were his strong links with Asia Minor, when the east was the traditional home of tyranny: the Greek word turannos was an adaptation of an Anatolian original, and the Persian king was always regarded as the archetypal tyrant. There were also his many xenoi among foreign magnates, which suggested simultaneously a network of alliances that could be used to seize power at home, and a tenuous attachment to Athenian democracy.

  Even his appetites told against him: it was a firm aspect of the Greek conception of a tyrant that his unbridled lusts manifested not just as violence, and not just as a desire for absolute power, but also as a desire for excessive sex, even with members of his own family (as Persian kings from time to time married sisters). Alcibiades’ sexual escapades were so notorious that no one knew where they would end: he was certainly suspected of kinky sex (threesomes with his uncle in Abydus, the ancient Bangkok, and affairs with both a mother and her daughter there), and within a generation, at the latest, there was gossip that he too was not averse to sleeping with his mother and sister ‘in the Persian manner’.

  Despite the persistence of the rumours that Alcibiades had tyrannical aspirations, it would have been virtually impossible for a single individual, even one as celebrated as Alcibiades, to have seized autocratic, unconstitutional power in late-fifth-century Athens. Even while these rumours were being spread by Alcibiades’ enemies, Aristophanes was mocking fear of tyrants as old-fashioned. But it was a real emotion: curses against tyranny were uttered at the start of every Assembly meeting and there were legal weapons (including ostracism) to combat it. The charge reflected Alcibiades’ huge appetites, disregard for convention and patently undemocratic nature; tyranny seemed to be the logical end of the way in which he sought distinction and flaunted his power. And his very popularity threatened a society whose integrity depended on a high degree of notional equality among its citizens. Hero worship had the potential to undo Athenian democracy; this was what Alcibiades’ enemies sensed and it gave credibility to their accusations.

  SICILY

  After the Olympics of 416, Alcibiades and his war policy rode high on a wave of popular adoration; he seemed to be the embodiment of Athenian adventurousness, which had already profited the city immensely and promised to restore its fortunes once again. Many Athenians profited from the war, especially the poorer members of society, who received a stipend for serving in the navy, which had been largely dry-docked for five years. Meanwhile, the war chest had been swelled by a few years of relative inactivity, and a new generation of young soldiers had come of age and restored Athens’s military capability. Nationalism was as vigorous as it had ever been.

  Athenian imperialists had long looked westward to Sicily. Pericles himself had glanced in that direction in the 430s, but in the face of the reality of war had favoured conservation over aggression. But a few years later, with Pericles dead, Cleon, Hyperbolus and others came out in favour of attacking Sicily: it was always popular for a politician to promise western conquests, to remind the people of western opulence and especially of Sicily’s grain and ship-quality timber, two vital commodities of which Athens was always short and sometimes starved. The main and immediate obstacle was Syracuse, a Greek city – an ally of Sparta – as populous and as committed to a course of self-interested ruthlessness as Athens. The next hurdle was Carthage, the wealthy Phoenician trading city on the north African coast, which already had outposts in the western triangle of Sicily. According to Thucydides, Athenian imperialists with an expansionist turn of mind made no secret of the fact that once Sicily had been secured, they had their sights on Carthage – and then Spain, rich in minerals and grain. With the western Mediterranean under their control, the resistance of the Peloponnese would start to seem futile.

  Cleon got his way to the extent that the Athenians maintained a largely ineffective military presence in southern Italy from 426 to 424, until with the Treaty of Gela the Sicilian communities, including Athens’s allies, united and persuaded Syracuse to shelve its ambition to rule the entire island. Athens no longer had a plausible reason for military intervention in Sicily, but dreams of western conquest lingered; some saw Athens’s destiny in a pan-Mediterranean empire, three centuries before the Romans achieved it.

  Despite the Treaty of Gela, tension remained just below the surface of Sicilian affairs, occasionally bubbling up into the open. And when Selinus and Segesta were involved, not for the first or last time, in a bitter border war, the Segestans, after exhausting local possibilities, turned for help to Athens. The embassy arrived in Athens late in 416, and was joined by a delegation of exiles from Leontini, who had been expelled in a Syracuse-backed oligarchic coup a few years earlier; even the Segestans complained as much about Syracuse as about Selinus. After some weeks, while Athenian agents in Sicily assessed the situation, the Assembly voted to send a limited force to Sicily; this was not, or not yet, to be a full invasion, and in any case they expected support from their allies in Sicily and southern Italy (more support than they actually received). The mission was ‘to help the Segestans against the people of Selinus; to re-establish Leontini, if things were going well in the war; and in general to make the kind of provisions for Sicily that might seem to them most to further Athenian interests’. To judge by the generals’ actions in Sicily, this last clause was meant to give them a carte blanche where Syracuse was concerned. Three generals were appointed, with Nicias and Alcibiades joined by the elderly firebrand Lamachus of Oa.

  But this, the legacy of the failed ostracism, was an inauspicious leadership: Nicias was by now chronically ill with kidney disease, and the bitter enmity between himself and Alcibiades was hardly appropriate for the high command of such a critical expedition; united only by their contempt for Lamachus, the two rivals devoted their energies to a futile attempt to outdo each other in the magnificence of their flagships. All they had going for them, apart from belligerence and the size of the expedition, were Nicias’s contacts with the democrats in oligarchic Syracuse (for which he was proxenos) and Alcibiades’ skill at negotiating; neither Lamachus nor Alcibiades had good track records as successful field commanders. Even when they arrived in southern Italy, they were incapable of agreeing: Lamachus wanted to attack Syracuse straight away; Alcibiades wanted to gather a coalition of Sicilian and southern Italian towns whose troops could be used against Syracuse and whose crops and livestock could supply the army; Nicias wanted to settle Segestan affairs and then either leave, having made a display of force that the Syracusans would remember, or stay if the Segestans could supply the fleet. But this unfortunate beginning merely reflected the palpable aura of doom that had hung over the expedition in the weeks immediately prior to its departure.

  HERMS AND MYSTERIES

  This is not the place to tell the story
of the Sicilian expedition, which has in any case already been done brilliantly and with the thoroughness it deserves, first by Thucydides. Suffice it to say here that the Athenians lost, largely as a result of incompetence. The whole sordid, tragic business took two years, and in the course of these two years the Athenians had voted twice to send reinforcements; the upshot was that the losses may have amounted to almost fifty thousand Athenian soldiers and oarsmen (including allies and mercenaries), among whom were Nicias and Lamachus, and both the generals (one of whom was Demosthenes) who had been sent out with the second wave of reinforcements. By the end of the catastrophic expedition, the Athenians probably had fewer than a hundred serviceable ships, had more or less exhausted their capital reserves, and were just as badly off as before for grain and timber. Even more importantly, the catastrophe altered the balance of the war in the Aegean, since the Persians, scenting the possibility of recovering their long-lost Aegean possessions, decided to come in on the side of the Spartans.

  The pre-expedition omens indicated either success or disaster, but all paled into insignificance beside the mutilation of the herms. Three or four weeks before the expedition was due to set sail in all its glory, on a single night most of the herms in the city were vandalized. Herms were, as the name implies, figures of the god Hermes, each consisting of a square-cut, slightly tapering block of stone, with only two sculpted features: a bearded bust of the god set on top, and an erect phallus in the appropriate anatomical position. They warded evil from, and so guaranteed prosperity for, the building or street or square at the entrances of which they were placed, and hence also acted as boundary markers. Originally, herms were perhaps just logs of olive wood with projecting branch-stubs (which are still today called ‘pricks’ in the coarse world of Greek olive-farming), and in classical Athens some private homes still had wooden rather than stone herms.