Why Socrates Died

by Robin Waterfield

  This was a clever ploy, serving a number of purposes simultaneously. Above all, it was an attempt to divert attention from Alcibiades (though, as it happened, it was too late for that). Alcibiades was not accused of mutilating the herms, but only of mocking the Mysteries, so the more the investigation focused on the herms, the more they hoped to defuse hostility against Alcibiades. It was after the Assembly had received a sequence of denunciations about the Mysteries that Alcibiades’ cousin and close friend, Alcibiades of Phegous, got Diocleides to tell the Assembly that three hundred men were involved in the desecration of the herms: with such numbers involved, they would have to focus on it.

  Second, the ploy successfully disguised the fact that Peisander and Charicles (and their associates) were not loyal democrats, since they seemed to be acting for the democracy. Third, it created a cache of men who were either oligarchs or, by now, angry with the democracy; they would scatter to sympathetic states or friends abroad and forge networks; they could be recalled when the appropriate time came for revolution. This might seem far-fetched, but one of the strangest aspects of the whole business was that most of the forty-two men named by Diocleides fled, even though Diocleides’ deposition was false and he was soon executed for it; witch-hunts promote fear of unfair trials, of course, but if Diocleides was lying and these men were innocent, many of them must have had an alibi for the night in question. Why did none of them produce it? So, on my conspiracy theory, no oligarchic coup followed the mutilation of the herms because the surviving hot-heads were in exile, and the hardcore oligarchs were biding their time.

  ALCIBIADES’ DEFECTION

  The profanation of the Mysteries was presumably not supposed to become known outside the closed circle of the clubs, but the mutilation of the herms was a public, shocking act, with sinister political nuances. Alcibiades’ enemies, led by a certain Androcles, did a good job of persuading the Athenians that illegally performing the Mysteries – the only crime for which Alcibiades had been denounced – was as politically subversive as mutilating the herms. The two acts became so confused in people’s minds that not much more than fifty years later, in the course of summarizing Alcibiades’ chequered career, Demosthenes mistakenly said that he had mutilated the herms.

  No doubt as a result of Androcles’ efforts, the two scandals together were taken, according to Thucydides, to be part of ‘an oligarchic and tyrannical conspiracy’, wording that can refer only to Alcibiades. Androcles must have reminded the Athenians of the rumours that Alcibiades aspired to tyranny, and spiced the tale with the suggestion that all these pseudo-Eleusinian rites served a common purpose, to unite powerful men behind the banner of Alcibiades. In August an official ship was sent to find him in southern Italy and bring him home to stand trial. Alcibiades knew straight away that he would never return to Athens and, in a gesture that combined bitterness towards Athens with an olive branch towards Sparta, he immediately began to undermine Athenian interests in Sicily. On the way home, while the ship was docked in Thurii, Alcibiades and his closest friends disappeared.

  Alcibiades was tried in absentia and condemned to death; on hearing of the sentence, he is reported to have said: ‘I’ll show them I’m alive.’ His property was confiscated and auctioned off (as was that of all the other condemned exiles), and the details inscribed as a permanent warning on marble stelae and set up in the shrine of the Eleusinian goddesses in Athens. The sale of the confiscated property of the dead or exiled men took about eighteen months, but it was worth it: the state raised the equivalent of a year’s imperial tribute; Oeonias’s property alone fetched over eighty-one talents. In the world’s first celebrity clothing auction, twenty-two of Alcibiades’ gowns were sold.

  He and the others implicated in mocking the Mysteries were subjected to an awesome, public curse, pronounced by priests and priestesses as they ‘stood facing west [the direction of the infernal gods] and shook out their purple garments’. There was no place for Alcibiades now in Athens, not even a house for him to shelter in, and the curse specifically barred him from the Agora and Athenian cult shrines, as well as threatening any Athenian who came in contact with him with lethal pollution. And so he resurfaced in Elis, in the north-western Peloponnese, but soon made his way to Sparta, once he had extracted a guarantee of safe conduct from the Spartan authorities: he had, after all, done his best in the recent past to bring them to their knees.

  His choice of Sparta was, surprisingly, not unambiguous treachery, above all because the two states were supposed to be at peace at the time. Alcibiades’ family had traditionally held the proxenia of Sparta in Athens, the perks of which were not just prestige at home, but also a place of protection in the foreign state. In any case, he had xenoi there, and it was relatively normal for aristocrats to prefer the demands of guest-friendship to those of patriotism. But in the course of the speech in which he persuaded the Spartan authorities to make him welcome, Alcibiades said – and there is no reason to think that his sadness was not sincere – that democracy had corrupted Athens until it was no longer a place to which he owed allegiance. The argument may seem sophistic, but it was one which would have struck a chord with many Athenian aristocrats at the time; and aristocrats all over the Greek world were prepared to betray their city into the hands of a foreign, occupying power, if that was the price of their holding political power. Nor was Alcibiades the only one to defect to Sparta. He was accompanied there by some of his closest political allies (including Alcibiades of Phegous), and other Athenian oligarchs spent their years of exile either there or in Spartan-held Deceleia.

  Alcibiades sweetened his not entirely welcome arrival in Sparta with some advice. First, he helped them decide to send help to Syracuse; second, though the matter had long been discussed in the councils of the Peloponnesian League, he added his weight as a high-profile defector to the idea that the Spartans should occupy somewhere in Athenian territory, to match the Athenians’ continuing occupation of Pylos; rather than invade for only a few weeks at a time, as they had done in the first phase of the war, they could have a permanent base. At Alcibiades’ suggestion, Deceleia was the site chosen for this fortress, though it was not fortified till 413 because by then war between Athens and Sparta had resumed. Deceleia was only about twenty-two kilo metres from Athens and, once the Spartans had fortified and garrisoned it, they could threaten Athenian farmland on a permanent basis, and could interrupt the straightforward route from fertile Euboea, so that supplies instead had to be transported by boat around Sunium. The Spartan presence there also made it possible for thousands of Athenian slaves to run away from farms, but especially from the silver mines of Laurium, where appalling conditions gave the slaves working in the galleries and tunnels little to hope for. The restriction of income from the mines was a bad blow for Athens.

  There is evidence, though not of an especially convincing kind, that Alcibiades spent some time in Thebes (a Spartan ally) and Thessaly. These visits could only be fitted into this period of his life, so perhaps he went there on some kind of mission on behalf of the Spartans: his skills at negotiation were recognized. Otherwise, he was relatively idle between 415 and 413, the two years he spent in Sparta, and for a man of his restless energy it must have been a frustrating period. But he had plenty of time to make enemies, specifically of one of the two Spartan kings, Agis II. The only reason given in our sources for the rift sounds suspiciously like gossip:

  While King Agis was out of the country on campaign, Alcibiades set about seducing his wife Timaea, and he was so successful that not only did she get pregnant with his child, but she did not even deny it. The boy she gave birth to was called Leotychidas in public, but in private the child’s name, as whispered by the mother to her friends and serving-women, was Alcibiades. That is how infatuated the woman was. As for Alcibiades, he used to say, in his wilful fashion, that it was not defiance or lust that had led him to do it, but rather because he wanted his descendants to rule over the Spartans.

  There may be some truth to the s
tory: the combination of sexual conquest, high ambition and arrogance sounds like Alcibiades. And it is true that Leotychidas was later refused the kingship on the grounds that he was not his father’s child (though that does not necessarily make him Alcibiades’ bastard); and that Spartan culture permitted what Paul Cartledge has described as ‘the (to an Athenian) surprising availability of Spartan wives for extra-marital sex’; and that Alcibiades was just the man to take advantage of this. So who knows?

  SEVEN

  The End of the War

  The uncomfortable truth was that, after the Sicilian catastrophe, the Athenians were on the ropes. They were in no position to prevent the Spartans, with Persian help, from turning the Aegean and the Hellespont, which up until then had been safe waters for Athenian patrols, into the main theatres for the final phase of the war (413–404). The Persians saw an opportunity to recover their Greek subjects on the Asia Minor coast, which had been lost to the Athenian alliance since 479. Dissatisfied Athenian allies began to secede with increasing regularity and Spartan encouragement. Most Athenian manoeuvres in the Aegean had the defensive purposes of recovering dissident allies and keeping open the trade route through the Hellespont.

  The Spartans finally made use of Alcibiades in 412, following the arrival in Sparta of delegations from several of Athens’s most important subject states, with a view to secession. Foremost among the would-be rebels was the island of Chios, with its own fleet of sixty warships, and the oligarchic Chians’ plea was supported by representatives of Tissaphernes, the satrap of what the Persians called Sparda (roughly, Lydia, Lycia and Caria), with its capital at Sardis. At the same time, agents of the other Persian satrap in Asia Minor, Pharnabazus II of Phrygia, arrived to suggest an alternative strategy: that the Spartans develop a Hellespontine fleet, to threaten the trade route from the Black Sea. Both satraps were prepared to offer the Spartans cash to develop and maintain a fleet, with which they could contest the Aegean or the Hellespont; both wanted to please their king by being responsible for bringing down the Athenian empire.

  The Spartans chose to focus first on central Asia Minor. Alcibiades was sent out to Chios to encourage the oligarchs there, and to stir up rebellion against Athens in the Asiatic Greek towns. Endius and his other friends in Sparta were happy to see him removed from the immediate reach of King Agis’s growing hostility. Within a few weeks, several Athenian allies had rebelled, including the important port cities of Miletus and Ephesus and the island of Lesbos. Tissaphernes was impressed by Alcibiades’ diplomatic skills, and renewed his promise of money.

  A measure of the Athenians’ anxiety and bankruptcy was that they chose this moment to break into a special fund of one thousand talents which had been set aside at the beginning of the war for use only in the direst emergency. In 413 they had also replaced the annual payment of tribute by their allies with a five per cent tax on all maritime trade within the empire. The strategically placed island of Samos, with its excellent harbours and bays, had long been the Athenians’ main base in the Aegean, but now they had greater plans for it. Once they had got the local democrats to overthrow the long-standing oligarchy, they sent a fleet of about seventy-five ships there, with the fifteen thousand oarsmen, marines and other crewmen required to keep such a fleet operational. Samos became a second Athens.

  The Athenians soon succeeded in recovering Lesbos and some of the Asiatic Greek towns (though not Miletus), and even blockaded Chios. This was hardly the widespread rebellion in the Aegean that the Spartans had hoped to see, and that Alcibiades had promised. Late in 412 Agis ordered Astyochus, the Spartan commander at Miletus, to have the Athenian put to death, making him the only person to be condemned to death by both sides in the war. Alcibiades got wind of the threat and took refuge in Sardis with his new friend Tissaphernes, who had also recently fallen out with the Spartans over the precise wording of the prospective treaty between them. They got on so well together that the satrap named his favourite paradeisos (an estate combining parkland, orchards, woodland and hunting-grounds) after the Athenian.

  ALCIBIADES’ INTRIGUES

  Alcibiades now embarked upon perhaps the most risky and devious scheme of his entire life. First, he had to persuade Tissaphernes to moderate his support for the Spartans. Under the circumstances, Tissaphernes was inclined to listen as Alcibiades revealed that the Spartans were already considering the possibility of simply replacing the Athenian empire with one of their own. Athens had shown all Greeks the enormous rewards that empire could bring, and even ascetic, militaristic Sparta was prepared to be corrupted. Alcibiades’ suggestion, then, which met with a willing response from the satrap, was that Tissaphernes should do his best to play the two Greek powers off against each other, so that even the eventual winner of the war would be so exhausted that it would be in no position to retain the Asiatic Greek cities coveted by the Persians.

  So much for phase one. Phase two involved negotiating with the Athenian generals on Samos. Presenting his advice to Tissaphernes as proof of his loyalty to Athens (since the Spartans would not be receiving so much help from the Persian), Alcibiades gave them the impression that Tissaphernes was his to command and told them that he could bring him over to the Athenian side – but only if the democracy was replaced by an oligarchy. Persian policy here coincided with Alcibiades’ personal concerns: he was rapidly running out of places to stay, but he could be more certain of a safe haven in Athens without the democracy that had cursed and banished him. He found enough receptive ears among the leading Athenians on Samos for an oligarchic conspiracy to be formed on the island. So far, so good for Alcibiades: the prospect of defeat had made the Athenians desperate, and even the democrats on Samos, fronted by Thrasybulus of Steiria (a friend of Alcibiades), were prepared to sacrifice at least some of the institutions of democracy if the result was the survival of Athens.

  The leader of the Athenian oligarchs on Samos was Alcibiades’ friend Peisander. He had come to the island not as a general, but as a trierarch, responsible for financing and taking charge of a warship for a year. But Phrynichus of Deiradiotae resisted the plan; despite being a committed oligarch, he was an enemy of Alcibiades and did not want to see him restored to Athens. Alcibiades accordingly fabricated a tale (which found its way into Thucydides’ narrative as fact) that Phrynichus was planning to betray the Athenians on Samos to Astyochus, the Spartan commander, and Phrynichus was sent back to Athens.

  So the conspiracy on Samos prospered within the Athenian high command, and even Athens was going to be an easier nut to crack than it might have been before the Sicilian expedition. In 413, in the immediate wake of the Sicilian disaster, crypto-oligarchs in Athens had successfully pushed for the appointment of a permanent board of ten elders (including the eighty-four-year-old playwright Sophocles), independent of either the lottery or annual election. The board had uncertain emergency powers (they were called probouloi, ‘preliminary advisers’, so perhaps they took over some of the work of the Council), and the oligarchs hoped that this would pave the way for further limitations of democracy. At the same time, the slogan became current that what was needed was a return to the patrios politeia, the ‘ancestral constitution’, or ‘constitution of our fathers’. Although this vague phrase was flexible enough to suit a wide spectrum of political persuasions, it sounded like a return to the good old days – at least to the Cleisthenic model of a blend of aristocracy and democracy.

  Under these circumstances, the oligarchs might have thought that things were moving of their own accord in their preferred direction, so that they had no need of violence, but at the same time they could not overlook the fact that they had a good opportunity. The war in the Aegean was finely balanced, especially since early in 411 the Spartans persuaded the main states of the wealthy island of Rhodes to defect from the Athenians, and the prospect of gaining the upper hand with the help of Tissaphernes’ cash would be a persuasive argument in the Assembly. At the same time, resentment was fast building up among the Athenian rich, who wer
e of course potential recruits for the oligarchic cause, since they were the ones who would emerge with full political rights and access to resources. The renewed war effort was milking them of their cash and capital, just when they were incapable of profiting from their land thanks to the Spartan fortification of Deceleia; the desertion of slaves also hit both landowners and businessmen, and they still had liturgies to fulfil and war tax to pay. The knights (roughly, the second wealthiest class in Athens) were also likely supporters of an oligarchic coup: many knights had been politicized in the 420s as a result of a prolonged and bitter rivalry with Cleon.

  So it was with cautious hope that Peisander led a delegation of Athenian oligarchs from Samos to Athens at the end of February 411. No doubt they found the city awash with rumours and in a state of high tension: news of events on Samos would have reached the city from Phrynichus, if from no other source. There was no point in dissembling, so they addressed the Assembly relatively frankly: recall Alcibiades, and Persian funds will support our war effort and we can quickly win the war; in order to achieve this, ‘a different form of democracy’, as they delicately put it, will be required. Also, public pay should be restricted to troops on active service, and not made available for service on committees and juries at home – a fiscal measure Peisander presented as wartime belt-tightening, but pay for public service was an essential plank of the democracy, since it enabled the poorer members of society to take part. At first, the Assembly hesitated, with Alcibiades’ enemies and the officials of the Eleusinian cult particularly vociferous, but Peisander won them over: the possibility of Persian cash trumped every protest in bankrupt Athens. The Assembly voted to send Peisander with nine others to negotiate with Alcibiades and Tissaphernes in Sardis.