Thucydides says that the faces of the herms were disfigured, and one defaced herm that has been recovered by archaeologists in the Agora may date from this episode. Many have succumbed to the temptation to think that, in some cases at least, the phalluses were broken off. The temptation is increased by a couple of lines from Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata, produced in 411, in which some Athenians, who are displaying prominent erections, are warned to keep their clothes on, ‘in case a herm-basher catches sight of you’. But the joke may be no more than: get dressed, or the herm-bashers will mistake you for herms and smash your faces in.
This was an act of profound and outrageous sacrilege, and it met with a swift response. The Council convened the Assembly several times within a few days; a special commission of inquiry was set up; substantial rewards were offered for information; immunity was guaranteed for anyone who might incriminate himself in informing; and the promise of freedom tempted slaves to inform on their masters. But the first information that was received (from a slave of Alcibiades called Andromachus) only confused matters further. The board heard not about this act of desecration, but two others, both of which had taken place in the recent past: first, sacred images had been damaged during a kōmos (a lawless, drunken, noisy parade through the streets in the wee hours of the morning, after a symposium); second, the Eleusinian Mysteries had been mocked by being celebrated in private houses. Alcibiades was denounced for both of these crimes.
The most likely reason for putting on a display of the rites of the Mysteries is that it was a form of initiation into a club. The Eleusinian rite lent itself to such parody because initiation was at its heart, as it was of all the Greek mystery cults. Only the Mysteries offered ancient Greeks features that, even in the waning Christian era, we moderns might expect from a religion: personal salvation, and a glimpse of transcendence. Since the Mysteries were the best chance for ancient Greeks to experience these powerful emotions, the whole cult was held in awe. Initiates were charged with secrecy, and over the thousand-year history of the cult, hundreds of thousands of them kept the secret. We know too little about the Mysteries, then, to be sure what the profaners might have done, but the very fact of performing the rites out of their sacred context and before non-initiates was probably enough. The cult was sacred to the goddesses Demeter and her daughter Korē or Persephone, and was open to all Greek-speakers, but was jealously protected by Athens, in whose territory the town of Eleusis fell. Very many Athenian citizens and their wives were initiates.
The mocking of the Mysteries became critically important, but we hear no more about the earlier act of damaging sacred images. Perhaps it had already served its purpose, as a red herring. The idea that sacred images could be damaged during a kōmos may have been floated in order to downplay the importance of the mutilation of the herms by making it out to be a drunken prank perpetrated by young aristocrats; indeed, the conspirators may well have disguised their noise by pretending to be drunken revellers. There is a very striking, if somewhat crudely painted, Athenian vase that shows a toppled herm being struck in the face by an axe-wielding satyr. Given the exact coincidence between the picture on the vase (substituting a satyr, symbolizing unruliness, for a drunken human being) and the actions of the herm-mutilators, it is astonishing to learn that this vase pre-dates 415 by some decades. Another vase from the same period shows satyrs, who commonly represent extreme human behaviour on vases, vandalizing a tomb. It looks as though the desecration of sacred objects was familiar, even if rare, drunken behaviour (satyrs were commonly associated with Dionysus, god of wine), and certainly there were those at the time who persuaded themselves that this was no more than youthful high spirits, taken too far – an exaggeration of the kind of dissolute prank aristocratic youths of earlier generations had commonly indulged in, in the days when society had been structured in such a way that they could get away with it.
If this view had prevailed, the fuss over the mutilation of the herms might have died down, but the sheer scale and timing of the affair made that impossible. Athens was famous for its hundreds of herms, and apparently most of them were damaged. To do this amount of noisy damage in a single night, without being detected (even granted that Athenian houses rarely had windows on to the street), took considerable planning and manpower. One of the informants said that he saw about three hundred men, one of the defendants that only twenty-two were involved. Both figures were presumably considered plausible, but since the informant had reasons to exaggerate and the defendant to downplay the affair, the truth probably lies in between. But even if a hundred people were involved, why would so many – a good proportion of the Athenian rich – have taken such a pledge if not for politically subversive reasons?
It seemed like a conspiracy – but to what end? There was much fear at the time of the oligarchic machinations of Sparta; it was thought that the Spartans, in this time of nominal peace between the two states, would try to defeat Athens by encouraging internal dissent, even civil war. And so the dominant theory about the mutilation of the herms was that it was precisely ‘part of a conspiracy to bring about a revolution and to subvert the democracy’.
This is why it became a true witch-hunt, marked by the kind of hysterical over-reaction that inevitably mars attempts to get to the truth: ‘They did not assess the informants, but in their paranoia accepted everything anyone said, so that perfectly decent people were arrested and imprisoned on the evidence of bad men.’ Andocides of Cydathenaeum, a member of one of the city’s wealthiest families and a notorious oligarch, was prosecuted for a different act of impiety in 399 BCE, and one of the reasons we know so much about this whole business is because, in his defence speech, he gave the court his version of the events of sixteen years earlier as background information, and his speech has survived. In the course of this speech, no doubt impelled to a little exaggeration by self-righteous indignation over his own summary arrest, he asked his dikasts to imagine the Agora, the thriving, bustling heart of the city, being avoided by terrified people, the innocent and the guilty alike.
Perhaps the conspirators intended to spoil the Sicilian expedition; after all, mysterious Hermes was the god of travel, because the end of a journey is always unknown. But no one stood to gain from the cancellation of the expedition. There were those who wanted peace, but the Sicilian expedition was, strictly, not a breach of the current peace with Sparta, so stopping it would have made no difference. The sacrilege would cast a pall over the expedition, and for that reason alone it was incumbent upon the authorities to do their best to redress the situation, but it is at least as likely that the prevalent view at the time was correct – that the conspirators’ misguided intention was just to create enough instability to improve their chances of fomenting revolution while large numbers of poor Athenians were away in Sicily, serving as oarsmen.
If we are inclined to look for symbolism in the act, then, it may be more productive to remember that another of Hermes’ provinces was the lottery (always a journey with an uncertain end), the essential tool of Athenian democracy; but in all probability the conspirators chose the herms not for symbolic reasons, but just because their desecration was the easiest way for them to commit an outrage. One of those accused later claimed that the whole affair was a pistis, a pledge or proof of loyalty to some over-large club.
The committee appointed to investigate the disfigurement of the herms allayed public fear somewhat just because it seemed to be doing something, but all the evidence they received seemed to confirm the fear of oligarchic conspiracies, just because the accused were the kinds of men who met in clubs after dark, and the clubs were the seedbeds of oligarchic disaffection and bluster. Suddenly, the issue was loyalty to the democracy, and when the imitation of the Mysteries also came to light, this affair too became tarred with the same oligarchic, or at least un-Athenian, brush. These sorts of initiation ceremonies had probably been going on in the clubs for a while, and may even have been relatively common knowledge; but now they seemed threatening, to b
e the work of those who demanded from fellow club-members greater loyalty to the club than to Athens. When the younger Alcibiades, our Alcibiades’ son, came to defend his father’s memory, he linked in a single sentence the charges that his father’s club had met for revolutionary purposes, and that they had put on a performance of the Mysteries.
So once the authorities had heard of the further acts of impiety, in both of which Alcibiades was allegedly implicated, fears spiralled out of control. Further informants came forward to give evidence about the profanation of the Mysteries. A metic called Teucrus denounced twelve people, including himself, for a separate incident in which the Mysteries had been illegally celebrated, and said he also knew of eighteen herm-mutilators; the next, a woman called Agariste, named a few people for illegally celebrating the Mysteries; the next, a slave called Lydus, told the board about yet another occasion on which the Mysteries had been illegally celebrated. In all, we know of five or six occasions on which the Mysteries were illegally performed, a heady brew of impiety and oligarchy. And the Athenians may well have felt that this was the tip of an iceberg. Many of those denounced fled, while a few were hastily put to death; those who were taken to court were tried before juries composed only of fellow initiates from the pool of six thousand enrolled dikasts, to preserve the secrets of the Mysteries.
So far the informers had been two slaves, a metic and a woman – none of them full citizens. As if that were not curious enough, the woman, Agariste, was an Alcmaeonid, a member of one of the oldest and noblest families of Athens, and one of those she named was her kinsman Alcibiades, perhaps in an attempt to keep her family’s reputation untainted by the scandals: it must have been ‘one of the most sensational events in an uncommonly sensational year’, as historian Robert Wallace has said. The next informant was a certain Diocleides, an Athenian citizen. He declared that he had been out late on the night of the mutilation of the herms, and in the light of the full moon (probably 25 May, then) had seen approximately three hundred men up to no good: they must be the mutilators, and he could name over forty of them. One was Andocides.
The two affairs seemed to dovetail; there was even some overlap in the people allegedly involved in one or the other of the crimes. Both smacked of a widespread oligarchic conspiracy in the highest stratum of Athenian society. The Assembly declared a state of emergency, all forty-two people on Diocleides’ list were thrown into prison, if they did not flee into exile, and armed citizens patrolled the streets and defensive walls of both Athens and Piraeus. Andocides decided to turn state’s evidence, in order to save himself and the nine other members of his family who had been imprisoned – and in order to demonstrate that Diocleides had fabricated his whole story as a way to settle some scores. Andocides did his best to make it sound as though it was all a prank, evolving out of the culture of drunken symposia attended by aristocratic young men, and he played safe by denouncing largely men who had already been denounced by earlier informants. Diocleides confessed to his lies, claiming that he had been put up to it by a couple of Alcibiades’ friends, and was duly put to death. Andocides’ enemies found a way around the promise of immunity and saw to his exile. Andromachus and Teucrus were the only two who were given the promised rewards; Agariste may have felt it beneath her dignity to accept one.
Alcibiades was deeply implicated: two of the five informers had named him for profaning the Mysteries, and many of the other conspirators had familial or other close links to him; quite a few of them were also associates of Socrates. But by then Alcibiades was no longer in the city. After being denounced by the very first informer, his slave Andromachus, he had tried to insist on an immediate trial, to clear his name before the expedition set sail, but the people did not want to be bulldozed. The expedition sailed on schedule a couple of weeks later, in the middle of June. Then, after the sailing, Teucrus and the other informants came forward, and the atmosphere in the city worsened.
Widespread paranoia was not helped by the appearance early in July of Peloponnesian and Boeotian forces on the borders of Attica. But this was a time of supposed peace, with an alliance in place between Athens and Sparta; it was clearly not going to last much longer, but it had not yet been broken. So what were the troops doing there? Taking part in a threatening military exercise on Athens’s borders? Hardly: such training exercises were not an aspect of this Cold War. They were there for a hostile purpose, and most likely because they were hoping to get called in by dissident Athenians; in fact, they had probably expected to be summoned earlier. Their appearance in peacetime confirms that there was an oligarchic conspiracy afoot. Where we can be certain of the status of those accused, they were well born and well off (including Oeonias Oeonocharous, the wealthiest man in Athens, a billionaire by today’s standards). Where we can be certain of their politics, they were oligarchs; a significant number of the names recur again among the oligarchs involved in the coups of either 411 or 404 or both. When the militia patrolled the walls of Athens, it was not to ward off external enemies, but to prevent some of their fellow citizens opening the gates to the enemy.
A CONSPIRACY THEORY
Everything points, then, to an oligarchic conspiracy – but what went wrong? Why was no coup attempted after all? The simplest answer is to say that the conspirators were unmasked, and were exiled or killed, but this can be no more than part of the picture. The most peculiar aspect of the whole mess is that, although a number of oligarchically inclined Athenians died or fled, some very important oligarchs remained. They may even have been pulling the strings.
The most ardent members of the board that investigated the two scandals and saw that democratic justice was done were Peisander of Acharnae and Charicles Apollodorou. Peisander is one of the many shadowy figures in Athenian political life about whom it would be instructive to know more; he was important enough to feature in a number of literary works (usually portrayed as a coward) and even to have a whole play devoted to him. He was in his early forties, intelligent, wealthy, slightly overweight and a bon vivant; he was also a friend of Alcibiades, and so had nothing to do with the accusations against him, but otherwise did an admirable job in purging the city of opponents of democracy. And this is exactly what is odd, because within a very few years he would emerge as the chief architect of an oligarchic coup in Athens. In fact, he pursued his mission to replace the democracy with a narrow oligarchy with considerable ruthlessness: he organized or triggered the first political assassinations in Athens for about forty years. We are asked to believe, then, that some time between 415 and 411, he changed from fervent democrat to fervent oligarch.
This is not impossible. Athenian politicians were openly self-interested and changed allegiances even over major issues. But the distance Peisander is supposed to have travelled, from one extreme to the other, is what makes this interpretation implausible in his case, and the plot further thickens when we consider that we are also asked to believe the same about Charicles. He too came to the fore in 411 as an oligarch, and was even more famous as one of the members of the brutal oligarchic regime that briefly ruled Athens after the end of the war. Would either of these men have been acceptable as leaders of the oligarchs in 411 if just a few years earlier they had been instrumental in persecuting oligarchs, if not destroying a potential oligarchic coup? When Andocides first mentions them in his defence speech he describes them as ‘supposedly loyal democrats at the time’, as if he thought their loyalty to the democracy had been a sham.
Instead of assuming that both these men coincidentally underwent a conversion, we can reconstruct another possible scenario. Suppose that Peisander and Charicles were hardcore oligarchs, and that they and their networks were genuinely committed to revolution. Suppose they were sober men, who knew that such a coup stood a chance of success only if the majority of the populace could be persuaded that it was in their interests. Certainly, then, the eve of the Sicilian expedition was not the appropriate time: the general populace was almost irrationally in favour of the expedition, and by imp
lication of the renewal of war. Political coups require either popular leaders, or discontent and disunity – or both – but in 415 the Athenian people were fired up and united by a common purpose. The hot-heads who smashed the herms were acting prematurely.
The first result of the mutilation of the herms was the denunciation of Alcibiades for mocking the Mysteries. Alcibiades’ enemies leapt at the chance to suggest that Alcibiades was the ringleader of an attempted coup, and I believe that this may be a half truth: he was an ally not of the hot-heads, but of Peisander and the sober men, who were planning a coup in the future – a coup of which Alcibiades intended to be the leader. Obviously, it could not take place while he was away in Sicily; probably the intention was to cruise to power on the strength of his likely successes there. At any rate, in a speech to the Spartans delivered later in 415 (as reported by Thucydides), he admitted that he and his friends had been held back from launching a coup only by the consideration that war is not a good time to do so.
So Alcibiades set sail, leaving matters in the hands of his friends Peisander and Charicles. They acted with extreme boldness: it was they, specifically, who turned the investigation into a witch-hunt, by insisting, where the affair of the herms was concerned, that the eighteen men denounced by Teucrus could not have been the only ones involved – ‘that what had happened was not the work of an insignificant number of men, but part of an attempt to overthrow the democracy, and that therefore the investigation should continue’.
Why Socrates Died Page 13
