Why Socrates Died

by Robin Waterfield

  All this might seem pusillanimous on the part of the Assembly, the heart of Athenian democracy, but they were a less strident, more weary and more bewildered majority than they had been a few years earlier, disinclined to privilege ideology over either ending the war or getting paid for their military service. They knew they were voting for an oligarchy, but even the loss of some rights was preferable to the hazards of a lingering war. Besides, Peisander and the others were talking about a broad oligarchy of five thousand full citizens, selected on the criterion of their wealth, and also hinted that this was just an emergency measure – that once the war was won democracy would be restored. The Athenian people, or those who remained in the city and were not stationed on Samos, chose to believe them.

  At the same time, however, Peisander was working more surreptitiously: he made the rounds of the clubs, encouraging them to unite and to support the oligarchic cause. He also linked up with the hardcore oligarchs who emerged as the chief architects of the coming coup – the orator Antiphon of Rhamnous, Theramenes of Steiria and the otherwise unknown Aristarchus of Deceleia. Shortly afterwards, the clubs began a campaign of terror, intimidation and the occasional assassination of prominent democrats and opponents of Alcibiades, including Androcles, the man who had worked hardest for his downfall after the mocking of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Fear pervaded meetings of the Assembly and Council, since no one knew who the murderers were and everyone knew what might happen to those who spoke out against Alcibiades or against Peisander’s proposals.

  Leaving Athens in safe hands, then, Peisander headed the delegation to Sardis, to report on progress on Samos and in Athens, and to bring back details of Tissaphernes’ promised support. However straightforward this mission might have seemed, things did not go at all well. Having decided to let both Sparta and Athens exhaust each other, without favouring either side, Tissaphernes was not pleased at being asked to change his mind and support just one side. With Alcibiades as his mouthpiece, Tissaphernes made outrageous demands that the Athenians could never agree to – the return of not just the Asiatic Greek cities, but also some of the islands, and a free hand to patrol the coastline with Persian warships, which had been banned this far west for fifty years. The conference achieved nothing, except to cause a momentous breach between Alcibiades and Peisander, especially dangerous since Tissaphernes was still flirting with the Spartans. On his way back to Athens, Peisander stopped at Samos, where his failure in Sardis alienated Thrasybulus, who still favoured Alcibiades’ return (and the promise of Persian cash and an end to the war), but no longer as part of an oligarchic package.

  Most of the oligarchic conspirators had a dream: oligarchy in Athens was just the first step towards establishing sympathetic oligarchies elsewhere, as a way of patching up the tattered empire. And so, while Peisander went to Athens to foment oligarchy there, others travelled around the Aegean on equivalent missions. In this way the revolution of 411 contributed directly towards the loss of the Athenian empire and of the war. After the failure of the oligarchy in Athens, most of the new oligarchic governments elsewhere in the empire remained in place, and inevitably turned to Sparta for support.

  OLIGARCHY IN ATHENS

  Peisander was back in Athens by the end of May. In delivering their report to the Assembly, he and his colleagues suppressed the failure of the Sardis conference and continued to insist that they and they alone could bring the war to a swift and successful conclusion. The Assembly was amenable to a proposal that a board of thirty – the ten probouloi and twenty others – should be created to think over the options. But when this new committee came to make its recommendations to the Assembly a few weeks later, the oligarchs arranged for the Assembly to meet not on the Pnyx as usual, but outside the city walls. With King Agis and his army based near by at Deceleia, this arrangement was designed to intimidate those who could not protect themselves in open countryside and who did not have the backing of the Spartans. Moreover, the site chosen for the Assembly, the precinct at Colonus of Poseidon of the Horses, had distinctly upper-class associations: the message of the Assembly was that government was changing in favour of the rich. The only recommendation the new committee put to this pseudo-Assembly was that any Athenian citizen could make any proposal he wanted, with impunity, even if – what had been expressly forbidden by Athenian law for a number of years – such a proposal were unconstitutional.

  The proposal immediately made by Peisander, and passed, was oligarchic in nature: a new Council of Four Hundred was to be set up with full powers of government. The method of selection of the Four Hundred was also undemocratic: a committee of five, chosen by lot (but from among those present at Colonus), would select one hundred men, who would each co-opt three more. Official positions were to be limited to five thousand citizens of hoplite rank and above, so that pay for public service could be suspended, since the Five Thousand could afford to do without; and the Council of Four Hundred could convene the general Assembly of all citizens as and when it saw fit. In other words, the Four Hundred were to be the effective rulers of Athens, with the Five Thousand a sop to more moderate oligarchs and fence-sitters among the rich, while the Assembly, being entirely a tool of the Four Hundred, was a parody of the democratic Assembly. Moreover, it would be up to a special committee to conduct the census which would lead to the list of the Five Thousand – a process which could be prolonged indefinitely to keep the Four Hundred in power. For, to the Four Hundred, five thousand seemed little better than ‘downright democracy’.

  A few days later the oligarchs completed their coup. Supported by armed mercenaries, they took over the offices of the democratic Council, paid off the Councillors for the remainder of the year, and instituted the new Council of Four Hundred in their place. The oligarchs appeared to be well in control. They must have wanted to recall the post-415 exiles, but they had to find a way to do so without recalling Alcibiades, because they were no longer sure where Alcibiades stood.

  Matters had not stood still on Samos. An attempted oligarchic coup on the island – part of the Athenian oligarchs’ programme of establishing oligarchies all over the empire – had been defeated, and both the Samians and the Athenian troops set their faces firmly against oligarchy. When news reached Samos of the takeover in Athens of the Four Hundred, along with an exaggerated account of their terror tactics (which had been brought starkly home to those on Samos by the assassination there of Hyperbolus, who had retreated to the island after his ostracism), the leading Athenian democrats on the island made the troops swear to maintain democracy, to continue the war against Sparta, to be unremittingly hostile towards the oligarchy in Athens, and not to enter into any negotiations with them. The Athenian poor serving on Samos thus took the initiative which their comrades at home had been too cowed to take, and thereby made themselves into a kind of Athenian democratic government-in-exile.

  Alcibiades had been the instigator of the oligarchic coup in Athens, and had expected to be one of them, but after his breach with Peisander the oligarchs went ahead without him. But personal safety was still uppermost in his mind; he still needed to get back to Athens. He now performed a volte-face as perfect as his earlier abandonment of Athens for Sparta – precisely the sort of behaviour that led to his enduring reputation as a chameleon. Knowing that Thrasybulus was sympathetic, he used him to deflect any further opposition. Thrasybulus won the main body of the army over to his side by convincing them that in Alcibiades lay their best hope of a speedy and profitable end to the war, and travelled to Sardis personally to bring Alcibiades back into the Athenian fold. Having taken upon themselves the right, as the only Athenian democratic government, to elect their own generals, they appointed Alcibiades to join the others they had chosen. Alcibiades the would-be oligarch thus re-emerged as a general of the democracy.

  Shortly after his return, in the summer of 411, envoys arrived from the oligarchs in Athens. Despite their conciliatory message, the troops wanted to lynch them and sail straight for Athens to topple the oliga
rchs. Alcibiades must have been tempted, since victory over the oligarchs would have elevated him to undisputed leadership of Athens, but he recognized that it would mean abandoning the Aegean to the Spartans, and the last thing Alcibiades wanted right then was for Sparta to gain such a decisive advantage in the war; after all, one of the Spartan kings had tried to have him assassinated already. Thucydides calls Alcibiades’ restraining of the troops an act of patriotism, and the noblest thing Alcibiades ever did, but it is not hard to discern his usual self-interest.

  Instead, still acting as the official democratic government, the Athenians on Samos sent a message to Athens, demanding that the Four Hundred stand down immediately in favour of the Five Thousand. The combination of the threat from Samos and Spartan successes in the Hellespont and Propontis (they had gained the strategic towns of Abydus and Byzantium) threw the Athenian oligarchs into disarray. Theramenes saw the writing on the wall and put his not inconsiderable weight behind the moderates and realists among the Four Hundred, who were urging that the list of the Five Thousand should be published sooner rather than later.

  The extremists’ reaction, however, was extreme: Peisander, Antiphon, Phrynichus and others chose to call in the enemy rather than lose control. They sent a secret delegation to arrange this, but it was too late: always a fragile alliance of different factions, the Four Hundred rapidly lost their grip on the city. Phrynichus was publicly stabbed to death in the Agora. A Spartan fleet sailed close to Athens, expecting to find Piraeus opened by their friends, or the city torn apart by civil strife and easy prey. But the moderates and democrats rose up in the defence of Piraeus, and then marched on Athens, not to fight, but to force the Four Hundred to keep their promise of drawing up the list of the favoured Five Thousand.

  The Spartan fleet turned its attention to its secondary target, the island of Euboea, which had been poised to rebel since the Sicilian catastrophe; they defeated a scratch Athenian fleet, and made it possible for the entire island to secede. The Athenians were dismayed not just by the loss of this island, right on their doorstep, but by their danger. The main Athenian fleet was on Samos: the Spartans could have blockaded Piraeus and either forced the city to submit, or tempted the Samian fleet to defend Athens at the cost of leaving the Aegean undefended. But the Spartans failed to seize the opportunity; Thucydides sarcastically described them as the most helpful enemies Athens could have had. But in the longer term, the worst thing was that Euboea had been one of the main sources of grain for the city, and now the Athenians were increasingly dependent on grain from the Black Sea – and the shipping route through the Hellespont was a fragile basket in which to have all one’s eggs.

  The last remaining support in Athens for the Four Hundred was eroded by the knowledge that the extremists had intended to betray the city to save their skins, and by the fact that they had failed to protect the city’s supply of grain. People wanted a rapid victory, not an end to the war at any cost. The Assembly met to transfer power to the Five Thousand, defined now not by means of the still unpublished list, but as all those who could afford their own hoplite equipment (in reality, closer to nine thousand). By taking this decision, the Assembly re-established itself as the proper government of Athens. The old Council was brought back, and the rule of the Four Hundred was over after only four months. Peisander and other oligarchs fled to the Spartans at Deceleia or to the Boeotians; those who remained, such as Antiphon, were taken to court at the instigation of their erstwhile friend Theramenes and executed for treason. Phrynichus was posthumously cursed, his corpse was thrown out of the city, and those of his assassins who had been caught were released. ‘The elite’, comments Josiah Ober, ‘had proven unable to establish a stable, nondemocratic form of government in the face of their own tendency to intra-class competition, strong Athenian patriotism, and the developed political consciousness of the lower classes of Athenian political society.’

  The rule of the hoplites lasted about eight months longer before succumbing to pressure from the oarsmen on Samos. Athens had endured its worst constitutional turmoil since the foundation of democracy almost a century earlier. On the restoration of democracy in 410, every male citizen was required to take a solemn oath that legitimized the killing of anyone who was opposed to democracy. The chief differences from the pre-coup democracy were that state pay for anything but armed service remained suspended, and a new Law Review Board was created, tasked with overhauling the Athenian laws and constitution, an initiative (one of only a handful that we know of) that had been started by the Five Thousand.

  ALCIBIADES’ RETURN

  Even after he had been pardoned, Alcibiades chose not to return to Athens straight away. Along with some of the other exiles, he probably considered the situation in Athens still too volatile. After all, court cases were continuing against the remnants of the Four Hundred and their sympathizers, and it was Alcibiades who had originally pushed for the regime change. Even as late as 405 Aristophanes included in Frogs, in serious mode, a plea to forgive and forget, or at least to get on with the backlog of court cases: ‘And suppose someone mistakenly fell for Phrynichus’s tricks: in my opinion, those who slipped up then should be allowed to free themselves of the charges against them and be pardoned for their past errors.’

  By not returning, however, Alcibiades remained on the margins of Athenian political life. Although he continued to fight for the Athenian cause, he did so as a maverick – as a kind of privateer who accepted orders from Athens, as Sir Walter Ralegh did from Elizabethan England. Nevertheless, the three or four years from 411 to 408 were the culmination of his military career, and his successes in battle were supported by his skill at raising money, which endeared him both to his troops and to the power-possessors back in Athens. The consequent increase in morale spiralled his successes in both spheres ever onward and upward.

  Spartan gains in the Propontis shifted the theatre of war northwards, to Pharnabazus’s domain. Athens’s grain route through the Hellespont became the target of the attentions of the Spartans’ Hellespontine fleet, based at Abydus. The Athenians responded by moving their own fleet to Sestus, and Alcibiades’ help was critical in enabling the Athenian generals to inflict a defeat on the Spartans. This gave Theramenes the opportunity to get the Assembly to pardon Alcibiades and those who fled with him in 415; desperate for a saviour, the Athenian people forgave him his crimes. A little later, the Spartans broke out of Abydus in full force; they had decided to move the fleet to a more favourable location at Cyzicus, closer to Pharnabazus and supplies. Cyzicus was a critical Athenian possession in the Propontis, with strategic harbours facing both east and west, and the Athenian response was swift and effective. Within a couple of weeks, and again with Alcibiades’ help, Cyzicus was safely in Athenian hands, and other former or current Athenian allies hastened to affirm their loyalty. Athens had survived another crisis, and it seemed that Alcibiades could not set a foot wrong.

  With Byzantium still in Spartan hands, the Athenians fortified Chrysopolis and imposed a whopping ten per cent tax on all shipping through the Bosporus, while Alcibiades freely raided and plundered Pharnabazus’s territory. The Spartans approached Athens for peace, but urged on by the popular leader Cleophon, the Athenians rejected the olive branch, thinking they could win the war outright. The celebration of the four-yearly Great Panathenaea that summer was especially joyous and magnificent, and the Athenians used the opportunity to announce that allied tribute was to be reimposed (while the trade tax and the Bosporus tax remained in place). For the remainder of the year, Alcibiades continued to keep things under tight control in the Hellespont, so that the Aegean could once again become a field of operations for official Athenian commanders, in their continuing efforts to undo the losses of the mass rebellions of 412. But the Spartans achieved a notable success close to home in finally recovering Pylos.

  Alcibiades was also trying to cap his military successes with a bold diplomatic coup – a Persian alliance with Athens, with Athens keeping her maritime emp
ire, and turning a blind eye to Persian repossession of the Asiatic Greek cities (whereas Sparta would want them for itself). Athens and Persia were to carve up the world between them with the callousness of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin at the Yalta conference. This vision of Alcibiades’ won over not just Tissaphernes, but eventually (under the pressure of Athenian military successes in the Hellespont) Pharnabazus, who in 408 sponsored a Greek delegation to the Persian king, Darius II, to talk over the possibility of making the vision real. Since the delegation included not just Persians and Athenians, but also Argives and renegade Spartans and Syracusans, the intention was plainly to follow the ‘Peace of Alcibiades’ with treaties with Athens’s main enemies, once these renegades had seized power in their states. As part of the process, the Athenians tactfully welcomed into Athens the eastern deity, the Mother of the Gods, and the old Council House was rededicated as her shrine (the Metroön) and used as the office of the Law Review Board, and as the storehouse of the state archives, which now for the first time had a permanent home.

  In 408 Alcibiades and Theramenes succeeded in regaining Byzantium. Throughout the Hellespont and Propontis, the Spartans now held only Abydus, and the Athenians were able to keep them bottled up there. Back in Athens Critias Callaeschrou formally proposed the recall of Alcibiades. Pausing only to sell prisoners of war in Caria, to raise funds to bring back home, Alcibiades returned early in 407 with the aura of a conquering hero who had turned around years of defeat. He gave conciliatory speeches to both Council and Assembly, but popular enthusiasm for his return could hardly have been higher. All the charges against him were dropped, the curses revoked, and he was given property to replace what had been confiscated in 415 and auctioned off. He was even awarded a golden crown by the grateful citizenry – a remarkable and very rare honour. He was elected general with full powers to make field decisions on his own without referring back to the Assembly.