The Rise of Athens

Few slaves would agree to the accuracy of this observation. The majority, who worked in the fields or (worse) the mines, led hard and bitter lives. Boys and girls with good looks could end up in a brothel or at best be compelled to have sex with their owners.

Even poor citizens could afford a slave. Hesiod in the eighth century advised a peasant farmer to “get a house, a bought woman and an ox for ploughing.” The averagely affluent Athenian probably owned two or three slaves and the rich could afford between ten and twenty. By encouraging procreation, owners could add to their stock without making an additional purchase.

A minority, with a good education and good luck, were able to get on in the world. Slave sculptors worked alongside free colleagues on the new temples on the Acropolis. Owners allowed trusted slaves to manage businesses and live in their own houses. Sometimes close ties of affection grew between them (and indeed between slave woman and mistress). Slaves were sometimes set free, but we do not know how often this was done.

The state owned a number of slaves, among whom were the Scythian archers responsible for keeping public order; others were notaries, jury clerks, coin testers, and an executioner. These were the fortunate ones, treated with respect and given a degree of independence.

There are no records, but by the fifth century Athenians collectively owned thousands of slaves (some estimate as many as 150,000, not far off the number of the free population). They came from all around the Eastern Mediterranean; some were unfortunate Greeks who were sold into slavery by their enemies in war (Scione, for example) or kidnapped by pirates. Many were not Hellenes; these were mainly “barbarians” from Thrace and such places as Illyria and even faraway Scythia, and may well have been sold by their parents. Others originated in Caria and Lydia.

An auction sale list from 415 has survived. If its numbers are typical, it suggests that slaves were not cheap. A Syrian male was sold for 301 drachmas and a “little Carian boy” fetched 240 drachmas. A slave’s average market value stood at anything between 50 and, exceptionally, 1,000 drachmas, with about 200 drachmas an average price.

Most Greeks believed that slavery was ethically acceptable, but Aristotle reports that some argued that “it is contrary to nature to rule as master over slave, because the distinction between slave and free is one of convention only, and in nature there is no difference. This form of rule is based on force and therefore not just.”

Few paid attention to such awkward critics. A Hellene’s heart may have lain with the wolf, but his mind told him that dogs were very useful acquisitions.

—

The island of Sphacteria was a remote and lonely spot on the southwest coast of Messenia in the Peloponnese, the enslaved land of Sparta’s helots.

One great thin chunk of mountainous rock, it was nearly three miles long and about 150 yards wide. The ruins of an ancient prehistoric fortification could be found on a high hill at the northern end, but, with only one spring, the place was uninhabitable and was the exclusive haunt of birds of prey. The soil was red. The stony terrain was wooded and there were no tracks or paths. On the landward side a wall of cliffs tumbled precipitately into the waters of a magnificent natural harbor, which Sphacteria protected from the open sea.

Two channels led into this harbor. The one to the north of the island was very narrow, no more than 150 yards across, and on the far side loured a tall, more or less impregnable headland called Pylos. In the south the passage was about 1,400 yards wide.

One spring day in 425 an Athenian fleet of forty triremes sailed past on its way north with orders to sail to Corcyra and Sicily (for more about the expedition see this page). Most unusually, it was carrying a private citizen who had a secret plan in mind.

He was Demosthenes, an associate or protégé of Cleon and one of a new breed of military commander. Like the admiral Phormio, he was a dashing and creative improviser. While campaigning in western Greece in the previous year, he had devised a plan to launch a surprise attack on Boeotia from the north, mainly using locally recruited troops. It was a brilliant idea, but poorly executed. It led to an embarrassing defeat and 120 Athenian hoplites were killed. Demosthenes dared not return to Athens to face the fury of the demos, but stayed in the region, where he scored victories against a Peloponnesian force and a colony of Corinth. This retrieved his reputation at home.

He was reelected strategos, but his term of office would only begin in the summer and in the meantime he conceived another bright scheme. If only Athens could gain a foothold on the coast of the Peloponnese it would go some way to counterbalance the regular invasions of Attica.

The two fleet commanders were given the mysterious instruction to allow Demosthenes to “make what use he liked of this fleet of theirs on its way around the Peloponnese.” As they passed by Pylos he pointed it out to them and recommended that it be fortified; it would be a useful base from which local Messenians and those who had been settled in Naupactus in the Corinthian gulf could harry the Spartans.

The commanders were not impressed, but a fortunate storm forced them to take shelter in the harbor. Pylos was a natural stronghold and to pass the time the crews were authorized to fortify its weak spots. When the weather improved after a week, Demosthenes stayed behind with five triremes.

When the news of Pylos’s capture reached Lacedaemon the authorities were seriously alarmed. Ships and troops were sent to eject the Athenians. Attacks were launched on Pylos and 420 Spartan hoplites with helot servants landed on Sphacteria to prevent the Athenians taking it as a permanent base. Demosthenes had little trouble repelling the Spartans, but he dispatched two triremes to bring back the fleet. When it arrived, it defeated the Spartan ships in short order.

This meant that, in effect, the Spartans on the island were under siege. They numbered less than one thousand in total, if we assume that each of the hoplites was accompanied by a helot servant. Of the hoplites themselves, at least 180 were elite citizens or Equals. Two Athenian warships sailing round Sphacteria in opposite directions stayed on permanent patrol to prevent any rescue attempt from the mainland.

To lose so many Equals was inconceivable and some ephors arrived in person to assess the situation. It was embarrassingly clear that the hoplites and helots on the island could not be freed. Sparta offered a truce during which it would suspend hostilities and temporarily hand over its fleet to the Athenians. A trireme conveyed a Spartan delegation to Athens where they proposed a permanent peace that would bring the war to an end.

Cleon persuaded the ecclesia to insist on impossible terms. These were, in effect, the reinstatement of the “land empire” abandoned under the terms of the Thirty Years Peace. The envoys suggested private talks, but Cleon vetoed the idea. The delegation gave up and left town. The truce was ended, but Demosthenes refused to give back the Spartan fleet as promised, alleging some minor infraction. The blockade of Sphacteria continued.

Grain, wine, and cheese were smuggled across the water to the Spartan soldiers by underwater swimmers and small boats. It began to look as if they could survive the siege indefinitely. By contrast, the supply of food was beginning to be a logistical problem for the Athenians. The arrival of winter might put an end to the blockade.

Then at last there was an important, if accidental, development. There were so many soldiers and so little space on Pylos that marines on the Athenian patrol ships used to disembark on the southern tip of Sphacteria and cook their midday meals there. One day they accidentally set fire to part of the wood. The wind got up and the flames quickly spread. Soon the entire island was ablaze.

In the absence of tree cover it was now possible to see exactly how many Spartans there were and where they were encamped in the center of the island near the only well. Demosthenes had been considering an attack, but now he was in a position to prepare a detailed plan.

—

Time passed and nothing seemed to be happening. In Athens, the demos became impatient. Ordinary citizens wished that they had accepted the peace terms, which they had been persuaded to reject. Cleon felt under pressure and blamed a political rival, a multimillionaire businessman, Nicias, who was one of the year’s generals.

Born in about 470, Nicias came from the entrepreneurial middle class. He inherited a large fortune from his father. His property was valued at the huge sum of 100 talents and included a labor force of slaves who worked his substantial concessions at the silver mines of Laurium and provided him with a handsome income. He lacked charm and found it hard to make up his mind. He was deeply religious and avoided decisions until he had taken omens. A poor orator, he was thought of as an earnest bore. However, he was extremely public-spirited and became popular because of his generous support of public causes. He made a point of being a hard worker. His lack of charisma stood him in good stead when compared with the opportunism and unreliability of a demagogue like Cleon.

The comic poets enjoyed making fun of Nicias. In his The Cavalrymen, Aristophanes has his “Cleon” say:

I’ll shout down every speaker and put the wind up Nicias.

Phrynichus, another well-liked writer of farces, writes of one of his characters:

He’s the best of citizens, as well I know.

He doesn’t cringe and creep about like Nicias.

Nicias inherited the defensive, cautious policy of Pericles. In the debate Cleon put the blame for inaction on him.

“If only our generals were real men,” he shouted, “it would be easy to take out a force and capture the Spartans on the island.”

Nicias retorted: “As far as the generals are concerned, Cleon can take whoever he likes and see what he can do himself.”

Cleon thought this was merely a ploy and said he was perfectly willing to accept the command. But he soon realized that Nicias was in earnest and did his best to wriggle out of the commitment. But finding that the ecclesia was insistent he changed tack and accepted the command. Brazenly doubling the odds, he claimed that he would bring back the prisoners within twenty days or kill them.

—

Everyone laughed to see Cleon hoist on his own petard; but he took the commission seriously and soon set off for Pylos with a substantial force. His critics were delighted. Either Cleon would fail—which was what they rather expected—and they would be rid of him, or if they were proved wrong, they would have the Spartans in their power. Heads I win, tails you lose.

On his arrival at Pylos, Cleon immediately agreed to the plan of Demosthenes (the two men were close and he may already have been briefed about it before the debate in Athens). They waited for a day and then just before dawn landed eight hundred hoplites on Sphacteria. They quickly overran an outpost. Once a bridgehead had been established the rest of the army arrived—up to thirteen thousand hoplites, lightly armed skirmishers (called peltasts), and archers.

The Athenians marched against the Spartans in their camp in the center of the island. The skirmishers and archers wore down the heavily armed and relatively immobile hoplites. Clouds of red earth and black cinders created an artificial fog and blinded the defenders, who eventually withdrew to the ruined hilltop fort.

A small group of Messenian exiles from Naupactus knew the terrain and completely surrounded the Spartans. Their position was hopeless. After consulting the authorities on the mainland they capitulated. Of the original 420 soldiers, 128 were dead. The 292 survivors, of whom 120 were Equals, were shipped to Athens as prisoners.

The Athenians set up a trophy. This was routine for a victorious army left in charge of the battlefield. Trophies were usually a selection of enemy arms—helmets, cuirasses, and the like—fastened to a wooden post, which was fixed in the ground on a hill or a rise. Some captured shields were sent back to Athens for permanent exhibition. To prevent rust, they were coated in pitch. They were still on show in the second century A.D. and one of them has been unearthed in the agora. The Messenians of Naupactus commissioned a statue of a winged Victory at Olympia, which can still be seen there today.

Cleon had delivered on his mad promise. The impact of the news was colossal. The whole point about Equals was that they never surrendered. Thucydides commented: “Nothing that had happened in the war surprised the Greeks as much as this event.”

—

There was a widespread desire for peace, but two years passed before a treaty was signed.

An infuriated Aristophanes wrote two fierce satires in 425 and 424, The Acharnians, in which the protagonist negotiates a private peace with Sparta and enjoys its fruits, and The Cavalrymen, a bitter, no-holds-barred caricature of the Athenian political system. Cleon appears in the latter as a comic monster who can be blamed for all that was wrong with the polis. The chorus of cavalrymen sing to the assembled demos:

For everyone that’s here,

One thing they’ll all agree on:

They’ll greet with cheer on cheer

The overthrow of Cleon!

In the Peloponnese, Athens improved her position still further, winning control of the substantial island of Cythera, the love goddess Aphrodite’s birthplace, or so it was said, and Methone, a port on the coast of Messenia. Sparta was under real threat in its home base and the possibility of another Messenian revolt was edging into probability. It was now that the two thousand able and troublesome helots were notoriously tricked with the promise of freedom and liquidated in secret. Cautious, pessimistic, and irritated with its allies, Sparta had lost its zest for the war.

Athens did not have it all its own way. Attacks on Corinth and Megara met with only partial success and a botched attempt to invade Boeotia culminated in a bad defeat at the town of Delium. One thousand Athenians lost their lives. The event was notable for the participation of Socrates, the famous Athenian philosopher, at forty-five years nearly too old to fight, and his pupil, the handsome young aristocrat Alcibiades, now in his mid-twenties. Alcibiades, who had been Socrates’ messmate in an earlier campaign, recalled the philosopher’s valor under fire. “He quietly observed the movements of friend and foe and made it perfectly plain even at a distance that he was prepared to put up a strong resistance to any attack. That is how both he and his companion got off safe.” Alcibiades was on horseback on this occasion and rode alongside Socrates until he was out of danger.

Cleon did not last. He was obliged to capitalize on his newfound military reputation by leading an expeditionary force to a strategically important corner of the Athenian empire, Chalcidice. There he confronted a most un-Spartan Spartan. This was Brasidas, enterprising, imaginative, and charming. The only quality he shared with his compatriots was courage.

With some enfranchised helots and Peloponnesian mercenaries, he had marched so quickly up the length of Greece that nobody had had time to stop him. Once in Chalcidice he had raised the standard of revolt and, to great alarm in Athens, won the important city of Amphipolis to his cause.

Cleon was no fool, but he was inexperienced and, after Pylos, overconfident. To reconnoiter the terrain, he went too close to the city walls for safety. He guessed what was going to happen next, for he saw the feet of men and horses under one of the gates, but Brasidas was too quick for him. He sortied out quickly and caught the Athenians before they could get away.

Cleon was killed. There were plenty of other so-called demagogues to take his place during this period—among them Hyperbolus, who apparently had been a lamp maker before entering politics, Androcles, and Cleophon, a lyre maker. They have all received a bad press from ancient historians, who were snobbishly contemptuous of middle-class politicians. However, Cleon was a towering figure. Although he never attained the heights of power that Pericles had scaled, his more forceful and energetic approach to the war was an intelligent response to the Olympian’s failed war plan.

The Athenian defeat in front of Amphipolis was a disaster for Athens, but with terrible luck for Sparta Brasidas too fell. The symbolism of the opposing generals’ simultaneous deaths was not lost on peacemakers. Now that the two liveliest proponents of war had gone, the trouble of agreeing on an accord was greatly eased.

—

The setbacks at Delium and Amphipolis disarmed the war party in Athens, and the general mood favored a settlement. As for the Spartans, they were desperate to see an end to the war and would agree to almost anything to get their men back from the island.

Discussions went on during the winter of 422. Nicias, now the chief man in the state following the death of Cleon, headed the negotiations and sought a durable peace. A final agreement valid for five decades was announced after the Great Dionysia the following year.

The basis of the treaty was the status quo ante. Each side was to return its gains made during the war. There were some awkward exceptions to the rule that were quietly glossed over. But Sparta would give back Amphipolis, the biggest prize, and a number of rebellious poleis in the north. The Boeotians would hand over a frontier fortress. Megara would have to put up with Athens its old enemy retaining the port of Nisaea. Corinth lost some northwestern possessions, now in the hands of Athens. For its part Nicias agreed to give up Pylos, Sphacteria, and its other footholds along the Peloponnesian coastline. All prisoners of war would be exchanged.

The treaty satisfied Sparta’s needs very well, but it enraged its allies. They cried foul and refused to accept it. The Spartans knew better; they trusted Athens not to meddle and were convinced that in time the likes of Corinth and Megara would understand that they had nowhere else to go for support but to Sparta. Sooner or later they would stop complaining and form up behind them.

If Pericles in the Elysian Fields learned of the entente, he will have been justifiably pleased. He would have opposed the aggressive policies of Cleon and his like, but they had produced the result he had wanted. The enemy had lost the will to carry on.

Athens was the winner, on points.

18

The Man Who Knew Nothing

Life and leisure in the city carried on despite the effects of war and the plague. The great annual festivals came and went, affluent citizens entertained one another at home, and shoppers haggled in the agora. Peace brought a welcome dividend, trade flourished, and tourists flocked to the city of light from all corners of the Eastern Mediterranean. Time passed agreeably.

One afternoon in January of the year 416, the young Athenian playwright Agathon held a dinner party followed by drinks. He had won the prize at the Lenaea or Country Dionysia drama festival with his first tragedy and wanted to celebrate the achievement. The previous day he had thrown a boozy function for the cast, but now, although he was hungover, he invited a few intimates to join him at his house.

Agathon was sensationally good-looking and “the lovely Agathon” became something of a catchphrase. Always well dressed, he cut a distinctive figure. He lived with his partner, Pausanias, and they seem to have constituted that rare thing in ancient Athens, an adult gay couple (later in life he is said to have been the partner of the aged tragedian Euripides). Nothing of his has survived, except for the stray quotation.

His guests included the comic playwright Aristophanes and one of the butts of the comic stage, Socrates. The events of the evening and the conversation that unfolded were described in a slim volume entitled The Symposium (taken from the Greek for “a drinking-together”), by Plato, a disciple of Socrates and an even greater philosopher than he.

Plato was said (perhaps mistakenly, but it is hard to be sure) to have written an erotic epigram about Agathon.

Kissing Agathon, my soul was on my lips.

It tried, stupid thing, to cross over into him.

The Symposium was written no earlier than 385 and is a masterpiece of world literature. It is a work of fiction, but Plato tricks out his account with all kinds of plausible detail, and perhaps faction is the better word. The playwright’s victory is historical and it is more likely than not that he marked it with a party. The guest list may have been different, but Plato’s description of upper-class hospitality in the fifth century is true to life. Those attending were, for the most part, well-known personalities and we may suppose that the opinions their literary avatars express echo those of the real-life personages.

There were no pubs or bars in ancient Athens, so far as we can tell. Apart from at public festivals, alcoholic refreshment was provided in private. In the houses of the well born and well-to-do, there was a men’s room (or andrōn). Here, at a symposium, writers, politicians, thinkers, and attractive young men could eat, drink wine, and talk; it was an opportunity for the sharing of traditional values and for homosexual bonding.

Those taking part wore garlands and reclined on couches, one or two apiece and leaning on their left elbow. Made of wood or stone, there were at least four couches—or room for the host and seven or more guests (women seldom attended and if they did sat on upright chairs). In front of each of them stood a three-legged table where drinking cups were placed and food served.

Food in ancient Athens was plain and simple. Olives, onions, and garlic were popular. Greeks ate a lot of bread with honey, cheese, and olive oil; it was usually made from barley, which was more plentiful than wheat; white wheat bread was the preserve of the wealthy. Milk was used in cooking, but seldom drunk. Fruits and nuts were readily available.

Produce familiar to us had not yet been discovered and exploited—potatoes, rice, oranges and lemons (although Jews are recorded as pelting a high priest with lemons in the first century B.C.), bananas, and tomatoes.

Plato does not give us Agathon’s dinner menu, but it might have included eels from Lake Copais in Boeotia. There were other possibilities. Dried or salted tuna, mackerel, and sturgeon were imported from the Black Sea and baked in olive oil with herbs. Anchovies and sardines were fished close to the Attic shore. Simple casseroles of poultry and game were often served, but for roast meat the Athenian had to await a religious sacrifice and so it was rarely on the menu at home. Everyone who attended a sacrifice received a portion of meat (the less edible parts of an animal were reserved for the gods, who seemed not to mind).

A gastronomic writer from Sicily, Archestratus, in the fourth century, approved of pork and roast birds. He observed:

As you sip your wine, let these delicacies be brought to you, pig’s belly and sow’s uterus, spiced with cumin and vinegar and silphium [probably a variety of fennel and used as a contraceptive as well as a seasoning], together with the tender species of roast birds, as each is in season.

Drinking wine was a serious, even a religious, business for the responsible Athenian. It was almost always mixed with water and could be artificially sweetened (sugar being unknown, its place was taken by honey or dried figs). A symposium was not an informal gathering at which everyone set out to get drunk; rather, it was governed by strict ritual.

Each stage of the proceedings was marked by an acknowledgment of the power of the gods. After everyone had eaten and the food had been cleared away, and before the wine was mixed with water, those present drank a few drops in honor of the agathos daimon, a kindly supernatural power or Good Spirit. They prayed to the daimon that they might do nothing indecent and not drink too much. They then poured three libations of wine—to Zeus of Olympus and the other Olympian gods, to the heroes (exceptional human beings who were regarded as divine), and to Zeus Soter, or Savior and Deliverer from Harm. This was followed by a hymn to Hygieia, the goddess or personification of health, cleanliness, and hygiene. “I pray that you be a gracious inmate of my house.”

One of those taking part in a symposium could be appointed Master of Drinking, or symposiarch. He was chosen by the throw of a die and would usually not be the host. He was a lord of rule, rather than of misrule, for he set the regulations for the evening. He determined the amount of water to be mixed with the wine and the number of cups to be drunk. His decision obviously influenced the tone of the party. It could be a serious discussion group that debated the issues of the day and indeed aristocratic symposia gained a reputation for antidemocratic activism. Alternatively, songs were sung, with well-known poems supplying the lyrics. The occasion could be something of a knees-up; entertainment was often laid on in the shape of a flute girl or two, or there could be dancing. Slaves, sometimes chosen for their good looks, went around serving wine from a large mixing bowl. On racier occasions clothes might be loosened or discarded.

Games could be played. One of these, kottabos, called for considerable skill. The rules differed, but in a popular version, a wooden pole was set in place, with a small figurine on its apex. Halfway down was a plate or pan; toasting an attractive young man, a player would flick some wine from his cup and try to knock down the figurine so that it fell on the pan and made a musical sound.

Another game demanded a good knowledge of Greek literature and casts light on the high level of cultural awareness among upper-class Athenians. The first player recited a famous line from a poem, and the second had to cap it by quoting the following line. The third had to quote from a passage on a similar theme by another poet.

—

Socrates was, unconsciously if we are generous, the most unreliable of guests. On this occasion, he had taken the trouble to have a bath and put on shoes, both quite rare events with him. But then he became lost in his thoughts and asked a friend whom he had met on the way to walk ahead, gate-crash the party, and tell his host that Socrates would be along later.

Agathon took all this in good part and welcomed the unbidden guest. After waiting for a time, he sent out a servant to find Socrates. The philosopher was standing under a neighbor’s front porch, but was deaf to the man’s entreaties to come in. Eventually everyone lay down to dinner and, about halfway through, Socrates arrived, without a word of apology. Then the usual libations were poured and hymns sung.

There was general agreement that after the previous day’s excesses nobody was at all eager for serious drinking, so a symposiarch was not appointed. It was agreed that each man should drink as little or as much as he chose. Socrates was excluded from consideration, for he had an iron constitution and was impervious to alcohol.

A specially hired flute girl was sent away. “Let us entertain ourselves today with conversation,” a doctor called Eryximachus said. “My proposal is that each of us, going from left to right, should make the best speech he can in praise of love.”

Socrates concurred. “Love,” he said, “is the only subject I understand.”

—

One by one the guests delivered their opinions. Eros was the Greek word for the passionate, primarily sexual, engagement between two human beings. As a god he was the oldest divinity and inspired lovers to great sacrifices. Love at its finest was that between man and boy, semi-educational, semi-erotic. Nobody spoke up for love between a man and a woman. According to the good doctor, love was a spirit or force that permeated and guided everything in the universe.

The contribution of Aristophanes was a tour de force. Plato allowed him to invent a comical myth to explain the power of love. It exactly suited the playful, fantastical mind of the historical playwright.

In the beginning of things, he said, there were three sexes—male, female, and a hermaphroditic combination of the two. Human beings in that early time were shaped like a circle with two backs, four hands and four legs, and two faces on one head looking in different directions. They could walk backwards or forward but when they wanted to run, Aristophanes said that they “used all their eight limbs, and turned rapidly over in a circle like gymnasts performing a cartwheel.”

These eccentric hominids attacked the gods and Zeus was at a loss what to do with them. After much thought, he decided neither to exterminate them nor to let them carry on regardless, but to weaken them by slicing them in two. He proclaimed: “They will walk upright on two legs. And if there is any further trouble from them and they don’t keep quiet, I will bisect them again and they will have to hop about on one leg.”

Men and women yearn for a return to their primal condition when they were complete, for, according to Aristophanes, “love is simply the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole.” They fall in love with their other halves when they can find them or their equivalents. Those who are halves of a male whole pursue other men, while women who are halves of a female whole are lesbians and fall in love with other women. Those men who seek women and vice versa come from a hermaphroditic whole.

Beneath the fantasy and the joking Aristophanes was making a serious point. Everybody loves what is akin to them and most nearly restores their original oneness. Love is a need that transcends sexual attraction. It is a longing for fulfillment, for a return to vanished happiness. These are themes that Socrates picks up later in the evening.

—

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Aristophanes’ speech was that he was given the opportunity to deliver it at all. One would have thought that he and Socrates were on the worst possible terms and unlikely to have attended the same social event. As a writer of satire he had savaged the philosopher in one of his political comedies, The Clouds. He not only destroyed his character, but got his character wrong. A saint would have been offended.

Some years previously, in 423, Aristophanes’ The Clouds received its premiere at the Great Dionysia. It flopped, but the author was proud of the play and revised it. The final version was finished about the time of Agathon’s dinner party.

The protagonist is Strepsiades, a fraudulent farmer who is getting on in years. He has been bankrupted by his expensive wife and a wastrel of a son, Pheidippides, who spends all his money on horses. He believes that Socrates, who is well known for “making the worse cause seem the better,” would show his son how to bamboozle his creditors.

Socrates runs a school, the Phrontisterion, or Thought Shop, and is happy to oblige. But Pheidippides refuses to enroll, so his father takes his place. Strepsiades learns of Socrates’ scientific achievements. These include a new unit of measurement for working out how far a flea jumps, the cause of a gnat’s whine, and a new use for a large pair of compasses (to remove cloaks from pegs on gymnasium walls).

Strepsiades begs to be introduced to the great man, who appears like a god in a tragedy suspended in a basket from a rope—the better to scrutinize meteorological phenomena. “I am walking on air,” he says, “and attacking the mystery of the sun.”

The comedy contains some dangerous allegations. Socrates is made to claim that rain clouds are divine. He tells Strepsiades: “The Clouds are the only goddesses, all the others are pure nonsense.” The old duffer replies: “But Zeus! Come on now, doesn’t the Olympian god exist?” “Who’s Zeus?” asks Socrates. “You’re talking rubbish, there is no Zeus.”

A joke is a joke, but the Athenians like other Greeks were pious and resented religious innovations. If this was what Socrates really believed, he was a malefactor and breaker of taboos.

After various comings and goings that involve father and son, the play ends with Strepsiades losing faith in Socrates and blaming the Thought Shop for his troubles. He arms his slaves with torches and spades and leads a frenzied attack on the school. Socrates and his students run away.

—

What was Aristophanes getting at? Scientists and philosophers remained unpopular with ordinary citizens, as men like Anaxagoras had been in Pericles’ day.

Throughout the Greek world intellectual life was in a ferment. Itinerant teachers called sophists wandered around the region and tested traditional values. The word sophistes in Greek originally meant a master craftsman and therefore someone with a claim to specialist knowledge. The new sophists claimed that they could impart wisdom, in a general sense, to their students. Gorgias, a famous sophist, claimed to know the answer to any question he was asked.

These public intellectuals embodied three different disciplines. First of all, they taught their late-teen pupils the art of oratory. In direct democracies like that of Athens, persuading the ecclesia to adopt a particular course of action or not was an essential talent. Also, there were no professional lawyers, no police force, and no professional prosecution service. Individual citizens brought charges or defended themselves in court. It was self-evident self-interest to learn the principles of advocacy. The impression spread that sophists were cynics who trained young men in rhetorical techniques that would win assent to the most disreputable of propositions.

The better class of sophist rejected this criticism, saying that a good speaker was a good man. Most of them offered to teach virtue or aretē. Virtue had been the prerogative of birth, but now it could be inculcated through training. It is true that, in general, sophists equipped young men with the skills needed to climb the greasy pole of power. However, they were interested in morality, if they failed always to promote it.

The traditional view was that the gods were just and that virtue consisted in establishing their will and obeying it. But Greeks were now asking how divine justice could be reconciled with the evil in the world. Also, could the Olympians make a convincing claim to be morally good? Xenophanes, a fifth-century critic of conventional theology, remarked: “Both Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods all sorts of thing that are shameful and a reproach among men: theft, adultery and mutual deception.” Readers of Homer could hardly resist this claim, for his gods and goddesses behave like spoiled children.

Many Greek thinkers were early scientists in that they wanted to understand natural phenomena. They asked questions about the nature of the universe and looked for governing principles. Thales of Miletus, whom we met when planning resistance to Cyrus the Great (see this page), was a geometer, astronomer, political adviser, and businessman; he flourished in the first half of the sixth century and was among the first to reject supernatural explanations featuring gods and goddesses. He proposed general principles and developed hypotheses. He used geometry to calculate the height of pyramids and the distance of ships from the shore. He asked what was the substance or substances from which all things were made. According to Aristotle, he guessed that the “permanent entity was water.” The fact that he was wrong should not obscure his claim to be the father of the rational sciences.

There were multifarious theories. Other thinkers argued for air, fire, and earth or all four elements. Pythagoras, who also flourished in the sixth century, and his followers “applied themselves to mathematics, and were the first to develop this science; and through studying it they came to believe that its principles are the principles of everything.”

Heraclitus, a younger contemporary and a member of the royal family of Ephesus, posited a constantly changing order of things. “You cannot step into the same river twice,” he said, gnomically. As a metaphor of the need for change, he added: “The barley drink separates if it is not stirred.” His writings were famously obscure; when Euripides was asked his opinion of them, he replied: “The bit I understand is excellent, and so too, I dare say, is the bit I do not understand; but it needs a diver from Delos to get to the bottom of it.” (The island seems to have been famous for its expert swimmers in search of fish.)

Heraclitus also appears to have anticipated an up-to-date version of the Big Bang theory. He believed that the universe “is generated from fire and it is consumed in fire again, alternating in fixed periods throughout the whole of eternity.”

By contrast, the Eleatic School (so-called after the town of Elea, today’s Velia, in southern Italy) was headed by Parmenides in the fifth century and held that change was only an illusion and that a divine and unvarying unity permeates the universe.

On the other hand, the atomists headed by the fifth-century thinker Democritus of Abdera in Thrace offered a hypothesis that also (remarkably) anticipated twentieth-century physics. They argued that the only things that were unchanging were small, indivisible units called atoms. These came together randomly to form the variousness of the world’s phenomena.

There was as little agreement among Greek philosophers as among politicians.

—

The Socrates of The Clouds is obviously a parody of the typical all-purpose sophist—an amoral know-all and phony. Socrates, as he really was, was no sophist except in the sense that he taught young men through argument. Aristophanes was being dangerously unfair.

Sophists were restless travelers, but Socrates was a stay-at-home and never went abroad except when on military campaign. He was born in Attica not far from Athens in 469, and so was fifty-three at the putative date of The Symposium. His father, Sophroniscus, was a sculptor or stonemason and his mother, Phaenarete, a midwife. He himself seems to have worked at some stage of his life as a stonemason. He married Xanthippe and was reportedly henpecked. The couple had three undistinguished sons.

His economic circumstances are unclear. As we have seen, he served as a hoplite and so must have been a man of means, but he lived very simply and spent his time talking philosophy. Perhaps we should assume that he lived off the family savings from the masonry business.

Socrates was famously ugly. He had a broad, flat, turned-up nose, bulging eyes, thick lips, and a potbelly. He seldom changed his clothes or washed himself and had a habit of walking barefoot.

His lifestyle and ideas were unlike those of sophists. A teacher such as Gorgias charged his students high fees and was treated as a VIP. By contrast, Socrates spent most of his time out of doors talking to whomever he met. He made a point of not charging fees, although his followers, or perhaps more truly his disciples, tended to be wealthy young aristocrats who could easily afford to pay them. He fancied attractive boys (or at least allowed people to believe he did) and in today’s terminology may well have been bisexual; however, he appears not to have had sex with them.

Socrates was not much interested in scientific inquiry and restricted himself to the discussion of ethical questions. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” Plato has him say. Unlike the Aristophanes version, he was conventionally religious and respected the gods (especially Apollo) without question. However, unusually, he asserted that right and wrong are established independently of the pantheon. Also, he seems to have held the somewhat eccentric belief that the gods could never injure each other or human beings—in a word, they could do no evil. One can imagine the unquenchable laughter when that news reached Olympus.

Socrates was not altogether a rationalist; he spoke of a “divine sign” or spirit, a daimonion sent by the gods. This was an inner voice that turned him back from a given course of action, but never gave its approval to one. It was thanks to his daimonion, he used to say, that he steered clear of active politics.

—

Xenophon’s first encounter with Socrates illustrates the philosopher’s pickup technique. Born about 430, he was a well born youth, modest and (this always helped with Socrates) extremely good-looking. One day Socrates came across him in a narrow passage walking in the opposite direction. He stretched out his stick to block his path and asked Xenophon where every kind of food was sold. On receiving a reply, he put another question: “And where do men become good and honourable?”

Xenophon was stumped. He admitted he had no idea. “Then follow me,” said Socrates, “and learn.”

The boy was smitten. From that moment he became a pupil of Socrates and remained so for the rest of his life. In later years Xenophon wrote a memoir of his mentor, in which he drew a sketch of him at work:

Socrates was always in the public eye. Early in the morning he used to make his way to the covered walkways and open-air gymnasia, and when the marketplace became busy he was there in full view; and he always spent the rest of the day where he expected to find the most company. He talked most of the time and anyone who liked was able to listen.

A familiar figure walking among the plane trees in the agora, the philosopher used to visit a shoemaker called Simon who had a shop just beyond its edge or boundary. Boys were not allowed into the square, so they often met in shops of this kind. Simon wrote down Socrates’ sayings and was one of the first to publish them as dialogues (sadly, they are lost).

The remains of a building have been found near the Tholos, the circular building where the Prytaneum, the executive committee of the boulē, conducted its business; its floor was covered with hobnails and a cup base was found with the word “Simon’s” scratched on it. Pericles heard of his writings and offered to pay for Simon’s upkeep if he would come and live in his house. Simon refused, on the grounds that he was unwilling to sell his freedom of speech.

Socrates’ method of philosophical inquiry was highly original. Unlike Gorgias, who claimed to know everything, he insisted that he knew nothing. He wrote nothing down although many of his followers did, but proceeded by spoken question and answer, the so-called dialectic. Where the sophist would study virtue by means of the art of oratory, Socrates insisted on justifying propositions through reason. He seldom offered an opinion himself, but concentrated on pursuing definitions and demonstrating the wrongness of his interlocutor’s views. “What is courage?” he would inquire. “What is justice?” He drew a sharp distinction between opinion (bad) and knowledge (good, but hard to attain).

He seems to have believed that virtue, or aretē, was necessary for the fulfilled and happy life. But he always denied that he knew what it was, simply what it wasn’t. Understanding the nature of aretē was a function of the divine, he sometimes said, and the most that humans can attain is to acknowledge their own ignorance.

Socrates equated virtue with knowledge. The good leads to happiness, or is itself a part of happiness. More than anything else we all want to be happy, so it follows that anyone who has an inkling of what the good is will inevitably choose to embrace it. It is impossible to know the better and follow the worst.

—

Socrates had little difficulty dismissing the other speakers at Agathon’s celebration dinner, but when his turn came to discourse on love he modestly avoided offering his own opinion. Instead, he reported a conversation on the same topic he had once had with a mysterious personage called Diotima.

She was a woman from Mantinea, a town in the Peloponnese. It is not at all certain whether she was fact or figment. All other speakers in Plato’s many philosophical dialogues existed in real life, so maybe Diotima did too. Some modern scholars used to speculate that she was a pseudonym for Aspasia, Pericles’ companion. Not a very plausible thought, for Diotima appears to have been something of a seer, whose intercession succeeded in postponing the Athenian plague by ten years.

As recalled by Socrates, she claimed that love “is the perpetual possession of the good.” It is a ladder between the sensible world and the eternal world. Through procreation a man can have children and win a kind of immortality. But if he can rise above sex, the next rung is to reckon beauty of soul more valuable than beauty of body. He will procreate with his lover (a male eromenos, of course) in a spiritual sense by “bringing forth such notions as may serve to make young people better.”

In a continuing progression, he will recognize that passion for one human being is beneath him and fall in love with all beauty. He will discern it in activities and institutions and realize that love of a beautiful person is an overrated pastime.

By gazing upon the vast ocean of beauty to which his attention is now turned, [he] may bring forth, or procreate, in the abundance of his love of wisdom many beautiful sentiments and ideas.

Finally, the seeker after wisdom encounters

a beauty whose nature is marvelous, indeed the final goal, Socrates, of all his previous efforts. This beauty is first of all eternal; it neither comes into being nor passes away, neither waxes nor wanes; next, it is not beautiful in part and ugly in part, nor beautiful at one time and ugly at another, nor beautiful in this relation and ugly in that, nor beautiful here and ugly there, as varying according to its beholders; nor again will this beauty appear to him like the beauty of a face or hands or anything corporeal, or like the beauty of a thought or a science, or like beauty which has its seat in something other than itself, be it a living thing or the earth or the sky or anything else whatever; he will see it as absolute, existing alone with itself, unique, eternal and all other things partaking of it, yet in such a manner that, while they come into being and pass away, it neither undergoes any increase or diminution nor suffers any change.

How much of all this is Socrates and how much the thinking of his great disciple? We will not go far wrong if we agree that Plato offered a speaking likeness, copied accurately his question-and-answer method, and echoed his interest in the correct definition of ethical terms. The historical Socrates probably also advocated the sublimation of sexual desire into some kind of spiritual or (as we respectfully name it) “platonic” love.

But the notion, adumbrated in The Symposium, that the everyday world, which seems so real to us, consists only of shadows, is merely appearance, can almost certainly be attributed to Plato. In his On the State he makes his thinking clear with a celebrated allegory. Men have been kept as captives in a cave since childhood. Their heads are fixed so that they can only look at the cave wall. Some way behind them a fire is burning and between the fire and the prisoners an array of objects of all kinds casts shadows on the wall. For the prisoners these shadows are reality, but if one of them is released and he turns around, he will be blinded by the fire and the sunlight outside the cave mouth. He will seek to return to the world of shadows. But in fact the objects, what Plato calls “forms,” are the real reality and the sun represents perfect knowledge. The flickering shadows are only inadequate copies. We human beings are the prisoners and our task is at least to glimpse the truth that lies behind our backs.

—

A clatter was heard at the front door and loud knocking. A moment later Agathon and his guests heard the voice of Alcibiades, the onetime ward of Pericles, shouting tipsily from the courtyard. At thirty-four years of age or thereabouts he was now one of the city’s foremost politicians. But he was still a spoiled boy and insisted on seeing Agathon.

He was helped into the dining room by a flute girl and some companions. He stood in the doorway with a thick wreath of ivy and violets on his head, from which some ribbons were hanging. He usually wore his hair long and, like most adult males, will have been bearded—a curious combination of masculine and feminine.

“Good evening gentlemen,” he said. “Will you welcome into your company a man who is already drunk, completely plastered, or shall we just give Agathon a garland, which is why we came, and go away?”

Everyone shouted for him to stay. He lay down next to Agathon, whom he kissed and crowned with his wreath. Only then did he notice that Socrates was also sharing the couch. Pretending that the philosopher was stalking him, he said: “Good god, what have we here? Socrates? Ambushing me again?”

Alcibiades was asked to improvise a speech in praise of love, but excused himself because he was drunk. Instead, if allowed, he wanted to deliver a eulogy of Socrates, his mentor and erastes. “If I compliment anyone but him, he won’t be able to keep his hands off me!” “Be quiet,” said Socrates.

Having obtained permission to proceed, Alcibiades claimed that Socrates was a more moving orator than Pericles and compelled him to realize that he himself was still a “mass of imperfections.” He told a long anecdote about an attempt he made on Socrates’ virtue. He gave him dinner and persuaded him to stay the night. When the lights were out and they were alone, Alcibiades threw his arms around Socrates, but failed to get any response. In other words, the philosopher lived up to the fine aspirations in his speech about rising above sexual desire.

Alcibiades went on to speak of Socrates’ bravery in battle, not only at the battle of Delium, but at another engagement when he was wounded and Socrates rescued both him and his weapons.

When Alcibiades finished, everyone laughed. The joke was that he had turned upside down the usual order of things in single-sex love affairs. He was the youthful eromenos, but instead of being demure and desire-free, as was proper, he had been forward and randy. On the other hand, Socrates was a most passive and unaroused erastes.

—

A crowd of revelers found the front door of Agathon’s house open and joined the party in the dining room. All order broke down and the rest of the evening was given over to heavy drinking. By dawn everyone had dozed off except for the host, Aristophanes, and, of course, Socrates, who was still holding forth. Agathon and Aristophanes gave way to his arguments and then fell asleep themselves.

Dawn broke and the philosopher got up and left. He walked to a gymnasium called the Lyceum where he had a wash, spent the day as normal, and towards evening went home to bed.

19

Downfall

At dawn on a fine June day in 415 almost the entire population of Athens poured out of the city and walked down between the Long Walls to the great port of Piraeus and the sea. They came to see the fleet before it set sail. One hundred warships were anchored in the harbor, a splendid sight. Although the state had paid for their construction, ship captains had spent their own money on carved and painted figureheads and on general fittings. If they were rich enough they may have paid for the making of the ship itself, as a gift to their city. They topped up the sailors’ state salary of one drachma a day in order to recruit the finest crews. Each was anxious that his own vessel stand out from the rest for smartness and speed. Everywhere polished armor gleamed and glinted in the morning light.

Sixty triremes were manned for fighting at sea and forty transports for carrying at least five thousand hoplites or heavy infantry, of whom about one third were Athenians and the rest allies, as well as archers and slingers. Up to 17,000 men pulled the oars. There was also a large number of vessels to convey wheat and barley and other items. Surprisingly only one ship was reserved for cavalry and carried a mere thirty mounts; the lack of cavalry was to be made good by allies in Sicily. (Other smaller craft and allied warships had previously been instructed to rendezvous at the island of Corcyra.)

Thucydides observed: “This expedition…was by far and away the costliest and most splendid force of Hellenic troops that up to that time had ever been sent out by a single city.” It was a hugely expensive military venture, but a few years of relative peace had replenished the city’s exchequer. The human capital lost from the plague more than ten years in the past had been restocked, at least in part, with a new generation of young men.

Once the crews and men had gone aboard, a trumpet called for silence. Everyone recited the customary prayers for those in peril on the sea, following the words of a crier, and hymns were sung. Then wine was poured into bowls and officers and men offered libations from gold or silver cups.

Once all this had been done, the fleet set sail in column and triremes raced each other as far as the island of Aegina. The expedition sailed around the Peloponnese en route to its destination—Sicily.

What can Athens have been thinking of, to abandon the main theater of war, the isles of Greece and the Aegean Sea, in favor of an adventure in the faraway west?

—

Before that question is answered another, more pressing one presents itself. What had happened to the general peace that Athens and Sparta had negotiated with so much trouble in 421?

Aristophanes’ exuberant comedy Peace captured a mood of enthusiasm that citizens could now safely return to the countryside and tend their farms again and that profiteering city tradesmen were going bankrupt. He makes his hero, a farmer, say:

Now we can wank and sing altogether at high noon, as the old Persian general did, when he crooned “What joy! What bliss! What delight!”

But, as reported, a problem had arisen from the outset. Sparta had promised more than it could deliver. Its allies—Corinth, Megara, and Boeotia—refused to cooperate and hand back to Athens places presently under their control, as stipulated.

In particular, the city of Amphipolis, where Brasidas and Cleon had died, refused to be transferred and the Spartan army there was disinclined to force it to do so and left for home. So, not unreasonably, the ecclesia declined to return the prisoners of war captured on Sphacteria.

To the stone inscription of the treaty this sentence was added: “The Spartans have not kept their oaths.” They were also becoming desperate. This was not just because they wanted their men back, but because a thirty-year treaty with their old enemy in the Peloponnese, the powerful polis of Argos just south of Corinth in the northeastern corner of the peninsula, was about to expire. There was an alarming risk that Argos, freed at last from its entente, might combine with Athens against Sparta. To avert this prospect a Lacedaemonian proposal emerged of going beyond an accord between two belligerents and entering into a full-on fifty-year defensive alliance between Sparta and Athens. Nicias, who headed the peace faction and wanted an enduring friendship with the old enemy, readily agreed. At last the prisoners were sent back, but Pylos and Cythera were retained against the handover of Amphipolis.

This was an unsatisfactory state of affairs and the various parties schemed against one another unrelentingly. For a time a plan was put forward for Sparta’s onetime Peloponnesian allies to create a new league headed by Argos and including anyone who wanted to be included (provided, of course, that they were neither Sparta nor Athens). Then Argos, whose record of treacherous neutrality during the Persian Wars had never been forgotten, lost its nerve and sent an embassy to Lacedaemon to negotiate a new long-term treaty.

Meanwhile Athens was furious with Sparta for making up to the Boeotians despite the fact that not only had they not handed back the frontier fort they were meant to do, but had demolished it.

At this awkward juncture a familiar personality intervened, who was determined to make as much trouble as he could—Alcibiades. In 420 he was elected strategos for the first time when he was thirty (the earliest legal age) or a little older and, after Cleon’s death in 422, became a leading man in the state.

He was prominent among radical politicians who were opposed to the peace with Sparta, and he worked hard to discredit it. Having spent his childhood in a political household, he was well connected and familiar with all the issues. He was also charming, highly intelligent, and a brilliant public speaker; he even turned a lisp to pleasing effect.

Alcibiades put forward to the people of Argos (or Argives) the idea of an alliance with Athens. They promptly jilted the Spartans and chose the better offer. A plenipotentiary deputation from Sparta hurried to Athens to try to ward off this new combination of foes. Alcibiades laid a trap; he told the envoys in private that if they made no mention of their full powers he would arrange for Pylos to be handed back to them. They were taken in and at a meeting of the ecclesia said in reply to a question they had come without full powers. The demos lost patience and was on the point of choosing the alliance with Argos when the session was interrupted by an earthquake. When it resumed the following day, wiser counsels prevailed. Nicias won the debate and was instructed to negotiate an agreement with Sparta.

Unluckily the discussions failed and, after all, Athens agreed to a pact with Argos and a number of smaller Peloponnesian states. It was not long before Sparta, feeling itself threatened on its home ground, marched with a strong force under its King Agis and met an allied army outside Mantinea, a polis in Arcadia. In 418, they won a great battle. The Athenian contingent extricated itself relatively unscathed, but its two generals were killed.

The encounter had two consequences. Argos’s uncertain bid to become the leading power in the Peloponnese was over and it had no option but to submit to the Spartans. It was a welcome victory, for it restored some of their battered prestige after the Pylos debacle.

As for Athens little harm had come of its Argive adventure, but little good either. Alcibiades had shown himself to be an opportunist rather than a statesman.

—

The amusing and affable drunk at Agathon’s dinner party may have become a senior politician, but he was no more respectable than he ever had been. He spent the family fortune with abandon. He dressed extravagantly, scandalously trailing long purple robes in the dust of the marketplace. He was well known for financing theatrical productions. In 416, the same year that Plato had him gate-crash Agathon’s dinner party, he entered a record-breaking seven teams of horses in the Olympic Games, which took first, second, and fourth places in the chariot race. This extraordinary—and ridiculously expensive—achievement became a talking point throughout the Greek world. “Victory is a beautiful thing,” wrote Euripides obligingly in a celebratory ode and the winner thoroughly agreed.

Alcibiades claimed that he was more than a playboy with a talent to amuse, and that promoting his image was good for Athens as well as for him. According to Thucydides, he told the ecclesia:

The Hellenes expected to see our city ruined by the war, but they concluded that it is greater than it really is because of the splendid show I made as its representative at the Games….It is a very useful type of folly when a man spends his money not just for himself but for his city too.

Alcibiades was reported to act greedily and arrogantly, and to get his way by threats. He was popular, but also feared as a bully. He married well—that is, wealthily. His wife, Hipparete, was the sister of Callias, one of the city’s richest men, and she brought with her a handsome dowry of ten talents.

Alcibiades treated her badly and apparently brought his pickups back to the house—whether free women or slaves. This was indeed unacceptable behavior, for a wife’s home was her protected domain. Alcibiades seems to have been addicted to sex. A third-century poet wittily remarked that as a boy he drew husbands away from their wives, and as a young man wives from their husbands.

Hipparete lost patience and left home to lodge with a relative. Almost certainly accompanied by a supportive male relative, she went in person to see the Chief Archon at his workplace, the City Hall or Prytaneum in the agora, and asked him for a divorce. Divorce seems to have been uncommon in ancient Athens, although little information has come down to us; when initiated by a woman, it was a public procedure presumably designed to safeguard her reputation.

Alcibiades was having none of this; the last thing he wanted to do was to repay the dowry, as a divorce would have required. Calling on some friends to help him, he carried off his wife from the agora by force and brought her back home. It was evidence of the fear he aroused that nobody in the square tried to stop him. We do not know whether he was acting within his rights or not, but his behavior was at the very least high-handed and brutal. Apparently Hipparete died soon afterwards. Relations with Hipparete’s brother went into a deep freeze and Callias accused Alcibiades of plotting his death.

—

From time to time public affairs and his private life overlapped. Melos is a small volcanic island among the Cyclades, famous for the mining of obsidian (and some centuries later for the statue of the goddess of love, Aphrodite, whom we know as the Venus de Milo). The inhabitants claimed to be descended from Spartans, but remained carefully neutral in the war.

The Athenians had tried, without success, to force the island to join their maritime league. Now, also in the same year as Agathon’s symposium, they invaded Melos and laid siege to its main town. They promised a general pardon if Melos agreed to join the Athenian Empire. Once again, the islanders declined. Thucydides wrote (perhaps invented) a debate between spokesmen of the two sides. An Athenian justified imperialism with cold candor.

“It is a necessary law of nature to rule where one can,” he said. “We did not make this law, nor were we the first to act on it….All we do is make use of it.”

When winter came, the Melians surrendered. There was no forgiveness for the trouble they had caused. All adult males were put to death and the women and children sold into slavery. It was an atrocity that shocked the Greek world.

Alcibiades not only actively approved of the expedition and its cruel conclusion, he personally profited from it. He bought an attractive Melian woman as a slave and had a son by her.

A few months later at the Great Dionysia in the spring of 415 the playwright Euripides staged his tragedy The Trojan Women. He was a disenchanted rationalist and was noted for his strong women’s parts. Like Aeschylus and Sophocles he addressed the issues of the day, usually in mythical disguise. The play hardly has any plot, but it is a masterpiece of grief. Troy has just fallen and Euripides directs his attention to the sufferings of a group of women among the ruins of the plundered city. Headed by King Priam’s wife, Hecabe, they are waiting to be distributed among the victors and can look forward only to a life of slavery. One of the queen’s daughters is sacrificed on the tomb of Achilles and her darling little grandson, Astyanax, is also slaughtered by the Greeks. Hecabe wails over his dead body:

Dear, lifeless lips, do you remember your promises? You leant over my bed and vowed, When you die, Grandmother, I will cut a long curl of my hair for you, and I will bring all my friends to honor your grave with gifts and holy words. But you have broken your promise, young man.

Euripides was inflaming a sore spot. It is perhaps because his audience recognized echoes of Melos, but refused to admit its guilt for what had been done in its name, that that year the first prize for tragedy went to an execrable poet (in the opinion of Aristophanes, a good judge) called Xenocles.

Payment for the crime would wait.

—

The politics of Sicily were complicated. The Carthaginians, an aggressive mercantile city-state based in North Africa, were well established in the west of the island, Greek settlements populated the eastern end (as well as the Italian boot), and indigenous peoples, the Sicels, occupied the interior. The Athenians had long had an on-off interest in Sicily and agreed on bilateral treaties with individual city-states from time to time. Between 427 and 424 in the early stages of the Peloponnesian War they had sent out expeditions to Sicily with a view to gaining allies; they were a little afraid that pro-Spartan poleis, such as the great city of Syracuse, founded by Corinth, might aid and abet their enemies in mainland Greece.

But these interventions led nowhere and the fears of Athens were allayed. More pressing matters called for their attention in mainland Greece. Then in 416 the polis of Segesta in western Sicily asked the Athenians, with whom it had agreed to an alliance not long before, for assistance in a war they were losing against their neighbor Selinus, which was supported by Syracuse. The ecclesia was not especially interested in the details, but was minded to respond favorably to the appeal. According to Thucydides, their unstated idea was “to conquer the whole of the island while at the same time making it look as if their purpose was simply to help…their newly acquired allies there.”

Pericles’ advice not to expand the empire while fighting a war was forgotten. However, there was peace (of a sort) and no immediate threats faced the Athenians from Sparta or its allies. The situation at home was more complicated, but eventually a political consensus was reached.

A war faction led by Alcibiades wanted to continue meddling in the Peloponnese despite the setback at Mantinea; and the less aggressive Nicias made his priority the recapture of Amphipolis. The ecclesia could not agree on a consistent policy.

About 416, a radical fixer called Hyperbolus (so like an exaggerated version of Cleon that someone nicknamed him “Cleon in hyperbole”) thought he saw a way forward. He would resolve the standoff by proposing an ostracism, which (he calculated) would remove either the chief advocate of the peace faction, Nicias, or (preferably) Alcibiades. Although sworn opponents, the two candidates for ostracism joined forces to ward off the threat. Their combined supporters scratched the name of Hyperbolus on their potsherds and much to his dismay the author of the ostracism found himself in exile. (In retrospect, although this was an amusing outcome, everyone thought he had been the victim of a dirty trick and it seems that the constitutional mechanism of ostracism was never used again.)

So the problem of two opposing policies—one for peace and the other for war—that were more or less equally supported remained unresolved. However, the plan to invade Sicily was so glamorously ambitious that unity was achieved. The demos had no hesitation in voting for it and ordering a fleet of sixty triremes. Nicias did his best to dissuade them. He tried to frighten people by exaggerating the expense and said that sixty ships would be too few. Pressed to name his own figure, he hazarded at least one hundred triremes. The ecclesia immediately agreed to the increase and voted full powers to the three generals whom it chose to lead the expedition.

In an obvious attempt to encompass the complete range of opinion, it appointed Alcibiades, Nicias, and Lamachus. The first two were brave on the battlefield and had extensive military experience, but they were first and foremost leaders of political factions that disagreed with one another; the third was a nonpolitical “career” commander. In principle this was a good team, although running a military campaign by committee would risk delay and compromise when immediate decisions were needed. Still, the auguries for a successful campaign were good.

One man stood out in opposition, Socrates, who said he had “no great expectation that any good would come to the city from the expedition.”

—

Scattered throughout Athens stood Herms. These curious sculptures offered protection from harm (see this page). They were venerated and at festival times were rubbed down with olive oil and garlanded. Every neighborhood of the city had them; they stood at boundaries and street corners, in front of temples, gymnasia, porticoes, and in the porches of private houses. There was a row of them beside the Royal Stoa (or Colonnade) in the agora.

One May morning not long before the planned departure of the fleet for Sicily, Athenians woke up to news of sacrilege. The faces of many of these statues had been disfigured and knocked about during the night. The identity of the vandals was unknown.

There was worse to come. An instant investigation drew out testimony from personal servants and metics of even worse offenses. Although they had nothing to say specifically about the Herms, they reported that young men worse for wear from drink had defaced statues and had conducted a mock celebration of the Mysteries at Eleusis; these were highly secret initiation ceremonies that involved “visions” and the promise of an afterlife. Witnesses claimed that the blasphemous parody had been staged in the house of Alcibiades.

According to Thucydides, those who disliked Alcibiades “exaggerated the whole thing and made as much noise as they could about it. They claimed that the business with the Mysteries and the profanation of the Herms were all part and parcel of a plot to overthrow the democracy and that Alcibiades was behind it all.”

As a disciple of the supposedly irreligious Socrates, Alcibiades was convicted in the court of public opinion, despite his furious denials. So far as the Herms were concerned his involvement is, in truth, most unlikely. To commit such a public outrage on the eve of his departure for Sicily would have been the height of stupidity—and whatever else he was, Alcibiades was not stupid. The timing strongly suggests that the perpetrators’ aim was to hold up or disrupt the Sicilian Expedition. The vandals could have been paid agents of Syracuse or possibly some of the wilder activists in Nicias’s peace camp.

It is not clear when the mock-Mysteries were supposed to have taken place, but if they occurred a good while in the past, one could imagine the teenaged Alcibiades happily joining in a bit of blasphemous fun. In the case of an adult seriously building a political reputation the verdict must be at worst not proven.

Alcibiades protested his innocence and demanded an immediate trial to establish the truth. His enemies declined to take the bait. They wanted to pursue their investigations in the absence of the army, which thought highly of its young general. He was ordered to sail out with the fleet alongside his two colleagues, Nicias and Lamachus. He had no choice but to obey.

Even if we clear Alcibiades of involvement, what the scandal did do was raise fundamental questions about his political beliefs. Was he a true democrat? Was he aiming at establishing a tyranny, as some feared? A contemporary who later admitted to having played a part in the mutilation of the Herms said of Alcibiades that he talked “as though he were a friend of the people” and “a guardian of the constitution,” while really favoring an oligarchy. Socrates was no friend of the Athenian democracy, so Alcibiades’ association with him did neither of them any good in the popular mind.

Perhaps Alcibiades was happy to play the political game according to the rules laid down by Cleisthenes, but privately reserved judgment and waited on events. Suspicions about his real motives may have been well founded. But for the time being he was a man of the people. It is highly unlikely that he had any active plans for fomenting revolution.

—

The grand armada sailed via Corcyra to Sicily. The generals were not entirely sure what to do when they arrived. Nicias, whose heart was not in the campaign, wanted merely to press the two opposing poleis to come to an agreement, sail about for a while in a show of strength, and then go home. Alcibiades argued that the expedition should first of all recruit allies among the city-states of Sicily. Lamachus, an elderly man but a soldier’s soldier and willing to take risks, was all for marching on Syracuse at once, their real object, while they were not yet ready to defend themselves. Even if they could not storm the city they would be able to cut it off by land and sea, and so compel a capitulation. He reluctantly agreed to back Alcibiades’ plan in order to outvote Nicias, whose opinion he liked least. But, as it turned out, the recruitment drive failed, for it transpired that the Sicilians were cautious and preferred neutrality. A wasted summer passed with nothing achieved.

Back in Athens the atmosphere was becoming toxic. False evidence inflamed a witch hunt. Young aristocrats were mainly blamed for the sacrilegious scandals. Feeling against Alcibiades grew. It was alleged that he played the part of the high priest of Eleusis during tipsy revels. The ecclesia recalled him to face his accusers. This turned out to be a mistake.

The impeachment against the general was still on record in Plutarch’s day. It read in part:

Thessalus, the son of Cimon, of the deme of Laciadae lays information against Alcibiades, son of Cleinias, of the deme of the Scambonidae, that he committed sacrilege against the goddesses of Eleusis, Demeter and Kore [another name for Persephone]. He made a mockery of the Mysteries and put them on show in his own house.

It is noteworthy that the accuser’s father was the great Cimon, who lost power for being too pro-Spartan. If he kept up the family tradition, the son will have wanted permanent peace with Sparta as fervently as Nicias. Getting rid of Pericles’ ward would go a long way to achieving that.

The state galley, the Salaminia, was dispatched to bring home Alcibiades and other co-accused. However, he was not placed under arrest, for he was well liked and it was felt the men might mutiny. At Thurii, on the Italian coast, he disembarked, gave his guards the slip, and went into hiding. When the Salaminia returned to Athens without its prize, the demos was enraged. Alcibiades was condemned to death in absentia and his estate was confiscated. The sale list of his bedroom furniture has survived; twelve Milesian (that is, high-quality) couches were auctioned along with coverlets, bedclothes, and “six perfume bottles.”

It was further decreed that his name should be cursed by all the city’s priests and priestesses. When he learned of the death sentence, Alcibiades remarked: “I’ll show them that I am still alive.”

He was as good as his word. After extricating himself from Thurii he made his way across the Ionian Sea to mainland Greece and settled in Argos where he had friends. Then, fearing for his safety, he decided to renounce his country altogether. He wrote to Sparta asking for asylum. He promised: “I will render you services greater than all the harm I have done you when I was your enemy.”

His request was granted, although, not trusting turncoats, the Lacedaemonian establishment was cautious. Alcibiades made his way there and, like a chameleon, quickly turned himself into a proper Spartan. The locals were captivated: according to Plutarch,

When they saw him with his hair untrimmed, taking cold baths, enjoying their coarse bread, and dining on black broth, they could hardly believe their eyes, and doubted the man they now saw had ever had a cook in his own house, or so much as looked at a perfumier, or endured the touch of Milesian wool.

The treachery of Alcibiades gave his hosts a gift beyond price, as the half peace tipped slowly over into war. As a leading politician, he knew all the secrets of Athens, the unstated policies, the future covert ambitions. He appears to have told the Spartans everything. He showed them all the cards in the other player’s hand.

In particular, he gave them two invaluable pieces of advice. First, he persuaded them to send out a competent Spartan general to lead the defense of Syracuse. No time was lost in commissioning a certain Gylippus; his mother may have been a helot and so he was probably not an Equal. However, in his childhood he had been trained in the traditional Spartan fashion. When he grew up, he was allowed to join a military mess and, as he did not have the money, a wealthy patron covered his fees.

Second, Alcibiades proposed that the Spartans resume their invasions of Attica and, above all, build a permanent fort at Decelea, a strongpoint near the northern border with Boeotia. Not wanting to be the first to break the peace, they waited for a year before doing as he said, but the effect when it came was dramatic. From now on, instead of making brief annual visits, a Spartan force was always present on Athenian soil. The economic consequences were severe. Food imports from Euboea were interrupted. Farming had to be abandoned altogether and for food supplies the population now relied exclusively on grain from the Black Sea. The production of silver from Laurium was halted. Over the coming years more than twenty thousand slaves, mainly skilled workers, ran away to Decelea (it did them little good: they hoped for liberty, but, cruelly, were resold into servitude at rock-bottom prices).

Thucydides summed up the situation:

Every single thing the city needed had to be imported, that instead of a city it became a fortress. Summer and winter the Athenians were worn out by having to keep guard on the fortifications….But what oppressed them most was that they now had two wars at once.

Alcibiades had shown his true colors and those who suspected him of being unstable and immature had had their fears confirmed. It was an expensive lesson, for he was doing everything he could to make Athens lose the war. Like an angry child, he was imagining the worst possible revenge for his treatment—saying to himself: “Then they’ll be sorry.” He did not yet understand that he might also be spiting himself.

—

In Sicily the Athenians were doing as well as could be expected when doing very little. Victory in a land battle was not followed up, perhaps for want of cavalry. Winter passed uneventfully. Nicias “kept on sitting around, sailing about, and thinking things over” and so the advantage of surprise was lost.

At last, with the arrival of spring 414, Nicias bestirred himself. His plan was to blockade the city and to achieve this it would be necessary to take control of Epipolae, rising ground that sloped up northwest from the city to a commanding plateau. The Syracusans intended to station six hundred picked troops on these heights, but the Athenians pipped them to the post by landing their entire force north of Syracuse and storming Epipolae. They then began building a wall northwards at speed.

At this rate the Syracusans would soon be sealed off by land as well as by sea. So they constructed a counterwall designed to cut across the Athenian circumvallation. However, the Athenians attacked and destroyed it, and then built fortifications southwards towards the Great Harbor. Once again a counterwall was constructed and once again, in a fierce battle, it was destroyed. The victory came at a high price, for the general Lamachus was killed in the fighting. Now Nicias, the reluctant warrior, was commander-in-chief and alone.

However, victory was in sight. All that remained to be done was to extend the north wall until it met the sea. Thucydides writes: “The Syracusans no longer thought they could win the war, no kind of help having arrived from the Peloponnese, and were beginning to discuss terms of surrender among themselves.”

Once again Nicias dithered. He fortified Plemmyrion, a promontory on the southern end of the Great Harbor of Syracuse, a convenient base for the fleet. Unaccountably he did not trouble to complete the wall on Epipolae. This was another grave error, for it allowed the Spartan general Gylippus to slip into the city and take command. He energized the Syracusans and restored their morale.

He realized that his first priority was to regain control of Epipolae and started work on a new counterwall. After a couple of sharp engagements, the Syracusans succeeded in cutting across the Athenian rampart with one of their own. At last, even if the Athenians won battles, the city was safe from complete encirclement. Meanwhile reinforcements arrived to strengthen the defenders. The Athenians found that they were outnumbered and the prospect of victory suddenly receded.

Nicias saw that every day which passed brought new strength to the enemy and increased his own difficulties. He was especially worried about the state of the fleet; the ships were waterlogged and the rowers were no longer in peak condition. He himself had contracted a kidney disease and was in poor physical shape. The strain of sole command after the death of Lamachus was telling on him. He wrote a letter to the ecclesia in which he explained the situation. “We thought we were the besiegers, but in fact have become the besieged.”

He reported that the time had come either to recall the expedition or to send out another fleet and army as big as the first. Also because of his illness he asked to be allowed to resign his command and for a replacement commander to be appointed. Nicias hoped that his dispatch would persuade the ecclesia to recall the entire expedition, but, once again, he was to be disappointed by its bellicosity.

The failure in Sicily was a shock to the democracy, but when offered double or quits it instinctively doubled. Another vast expeditionary force was assembled and Nicias was not relieved of his command. He had always been known for being lucky, and sooner or later, it was felt, fate would relent and turn in his direction. His incompetence and lack of enthusiasm were overlooked. However, two new generals, Eurymedon and the hero of Pylos, Demosthenes, were appointed to join him.

The balance of power was changing. In the summer of 414 Athens brought the peace to a clear and explicit end by raiding Laconia, Sparta’s homeland, but surprisingly lost a sea battle in the Corinthian Gulf. The Spartans at last felt free to resume hostilities and it was in the following spring that, as we have seen, they fortified Decelea.

—

Meanwhile in the Great Harbor, Nicias’s fleet lost a sea fight with the inexperienced Syracusans, whose army captured the fort and supply depot at Plemmyrion.

No longer was the Athenian trireme invulnerable. The situation was becoming decidedly uncomfortable, for Nicias and his men were in some danger of being trapped.

In July 413 there was a massive case of déjà vu. A second superbly equipped fleet, almost as large as the first one, set sail from Piraeus, bound for Sicily. Under the command of Demosthenes, seventy-three warships carried five thousand hoplites as well as three thousand javelin throwers, archers, and slingers. On this occasion the historians did not record crowds of enthusiastic onlookers, and those who were present must have had mixed feelings about the future.

However, the impression the armada made on the Syracusans when it was sighted off the Great Harbor was one of unmixed horror. Plutarch describes the scene.

The flash of armor, the vivid colors of the ships’ ensigns and the cacophony of boatswains and flute-players marking time for the rowers made for a spectacular display, which dismayed the enemy. As was only to be expected, the Syracusans were plunged into despair. They saw ahead of them no end to their troubles except futile suffering and a purposeless loss of life.

Demosthenes knew that in fact the visual glamour of the new fleet was misleading. It was a good example of psyops, a mind game designed to influence the enemy by the use of selective information. It did not reveal the grim reality. Demosthenes studied the Athenian campaign so far and concluded that, unless the Athenians regained control of Epipolae and fully invested the city, Syracuse would never be defeated.

This was more easily said than done. Gylippus had ensured strong defenses on the heights and Demosthenes’ first attempt to capture the counterwall came to nothing. Seeing that any assault by daylight was bound to fail, he planned a daring night raid.

One midnight in early August Demosthenes led about ten thousand hoplites and the same number of light-armed skirmishers up the steep ascent to Epipolae. The moon had not yet risen and the Athenians surprised the Syracusan garrison and captured their fort. Some of the garrison were killed, but the rest escaped and spread word of the Athenian attack. The elite Epipolae guard rushed out to meet the enemy, but they too were quickly routed.

The Athenians pressed on, eager not to lose momentum before they reached their objectives. Some began immediately to tear down the counterwall. Gylippus, taken entirely by surprise, arrived with his troops from outworks, but the Athenians pushed them back.

Then something went wrong. The Athenians assumed that victory was theirs and began to lose cohesion. They encountered a band of tough Boeotians, who had crossed seas to come to Syracuse’s aid, and for the first time that night the Athenians were thrown back.

There was now a bright moon, but while figures could be discerned in outline they were not recognizable. Also, the defeated hoplites had no clear idea where they were. Large numbers of soldiers of both sides were crowded together on the plateau and it was hard to tell who was friend and who was foe. Soldiers still climbing up onto Epipolae received no orders when they arrived and collided with their retreating compatriots. The noise was confusing, with different groups singing their paeans, or hymns of thanksgiving, at the tops of their voices and shouting out their watchwords.

Thucydides writes:

After once being thrown into confusion, the Athenians ended by colliding with each other in many parts of the field, friend against friend and citizen against citizen. They not only created panic among themselves, but actually came to blows and could only be parted with difficulty.

Many men lost their lives trying to escape from Epipolae; the descent was narrow and a good number threw themselves down from the cliffs. By the time day dawned, some two and a half thousand Athenian infantry were dead.

Night fighting was always a dangerous tactic in ancient warfare. Even in daylight a battlefield was a mystifying place and most soldiers knew only what was going on in their immediate vicinity. Preliminary surprise could often be achieved, but if a nocturnal engagement lasted for any length of time soldiers could easily lose their bearings. Communication between the high command and the rank and file was usually out of the question.

Demosthenes was a talented general, but as we saw earlier in his career over-optimism could make him careless. He was unfamiliar with the terrain (although Nicias could have explained it to him in detail) and failed to make his orders absolutely clear. He ought to have established way stations to manage the flow of traffic or some other reliable system of information exchange.

—

There was no point deploring the past. A council of war was held the following day to discuss what to do now—not only in the light of the defeat, but also the army’s catastrophically low morale. The camp was situated in marshy ground and many men were ill.

Demosthenes saw, correctly, that the campaign was lost and advised an immediate withdrawal while Athens still had mastery of the seas. He told the meeting: “It is better for Athens for us to fight against those who are building fortifications at Decelea in Attica than against the Syracusans, who can no longer be conquered easily.”

Nicias disagreed. He accepted that the expedition was in grave danger, but he had private sources of information in Syracuse which suggested that the enemy was in an even worse way. He was sure that the ecclesia in Athens would disapprove of a withdrawal and refused to lead the army away from Sicily. Privately, he was in two minds, but he feared an angry demos and knew that it would punish failure. He said he would prefer death at the hands of an enemy to an unjust condemnation by his fellow-citizens. Demosthenes and Eurymedon could have outvoted Nicias, but they let their senior colleague have his way.

Indecision meant delay. Sickness in the camp worsened. Meanwhile Gylippus recruited a large army of native Sicels, and hoplite reinforcements arrived from the Peloponnese. Nicias’s resolution to stay put weakened. He now endorsed Demosthenes’ proposal that the expedition should sail away from Syracuse to open country where the army would be free to maneuver and attract supplies, which were running dangerously short. Orders to leave were to be given as secretly as possible.

On the night of August 27 between 9:41 and 10:30 the moon was totally eclipsed. As early as the seventh century Greek thinkers and scientists had put aside myths and looked for rational explanations of natural phenomena: Herodotus reports that Thales of Miletus predicted a solar eclipse on May 28, 585. However, many Athenians were superstitious and had laughed at the pretensions of science in The Clouds of Aristophanes. Panic-stricken, they saw the eclipse as a warning from the gods against their plan to withdraw from Syracuse rather than as an astronomical event.

According to Thucydides, Nicias was “rather over-addicted to divination and such things.” He consulted a soothsayer who recommended that the Athenians should wait “three times nine days” before departing. Not only was this a catastrophic piece of advice militarily, but it was unnecessary. A third-century seer called Philochorus judged that an eclipse “was not unfavourable to men who were fleeing but, on the contrary, very favourable; for concealment is just what acts of fear need, whereas light is their enemy.”

If Nicias had been mentally more nimble he would have promoted an interpretation à la Philochorus that would allow the army to leave. But the fact is that in his heart of hearts the commander-in-chief preferred inactivity and feared responsibility, as he had done ever since the invasion of Sicily was first mooted.

The Syracusans soon learned from deserters that Nicias intended to sail away, but was delayed by the eclipse. Sensing a collapse of enemy morale, they decided to force a sea fight in the Great Harbor. After some days training their crews, they sent out seventy-six triremes and at the same time launched a land attack on the camp walls. The Athenians fielded a fleet of eighty-six warships. The gamble paid off handsomely. Although the enemy hoplites were repelled, the Athenians lacked space for maneuver in the Great Harbor and were defeated. Some of their triremes were driven back onto the marshy northwestern shore of the harbor and the Syracusans dragged away eighteen of them. Eurymedon, who was in charge, fell.

—

The eclipse was forgotten and everyone now wanted to get away as soon as possible. If the Athenians did not make their escape immediately they would be cornered.

But the jubilant Syracusans were not ready simply to let the invaders go. They were determined to capture and destroy the entire expeditionary force. “To conquer the Athenians by land and by sea,” they felt, “would win us great glory in Hellas.”

They started to block the harbor entrance with a line of triremes broadside on as well as other craft and boats at anchor. They chained them together and laid boards over them. As soon as the Athenians realized what was happening, they decided to leave a garrison onshore defending the smallest space possible and manned their entire fleet of 110 ships with every fit oarsman they had and a large number of archers and javelin throwers.

This was Nicias’s finest hour. Although half distraught by the crisis in Athenian fortunes, he behaved as a leader should. He took a boat through the fleet and spoke to each trireme captain individually, doing his best to cheer everyone up. He also arranged for the infantry to line the shore and give whatever vocal support they could to the fleet. Meanwhile elsewhere on the harbor’s edge Syracusan soldiers also gathered to watch the oncoming battle. Women and old men looked on from the city walls. Both sides shouted and cheered as if they were spectators at some great sporting occasion at the Olympic Games.

The paean sounded and the Athenians rowed across the bay to attack the barrier. Through sheer force of numbers their ships crowded around and began to cut the chains and break through. The Syracusans came out against them and pushed them off into the center of the harbor and the battle became a series of one-to-one duels. There was little room for ramming or the tactics of movement that had won Athens the mastery of the seas. Fighting was hand-to-hand as marines tried to grapple with and board enemy triremes.

Thucydides has left a famous description of the struggle, so vivid that it must have been based on the evidence of an eyewitness:

The two armies on the shore, while victory hung in the balance, were a prey to the most agonizing and conflicting emotions. The Syracusans thirsted for more glory than they had already won, while the invaders feared to find themselves worse off than they already were….While the result of the battle was in doubt all kinds of sound could be heard coming simultaneously from this one Athenian army, shrieks, cheers, “We’re winning,” “We’re losing” and all the other different cries one would expect to hear from a great army in great danger.

Eventually the Syracusan fleet had the better of it and chased the enemy across the harbor and back to land, to great shouts and cheers. It was a decisive setback. The panic-stricken Athenians ran as fast as they could from their beached ships. They could see that they had no hope of escaping by land, unless some miracle happened, but they refused point-blank to board the sixty viable triremes that remained and resume the struggle. Such a move would have taken the Syracusans by surprise and might well have succeeded.

—

Escaping by land was now, in fact, their only if forlorn hope. The Athenians were still dangerous and the Syracusans feared, correctly, that the enemy might leave by night and steal a march on them. So they sent some horsemen who pretended to be renegades; they shouted into the enemy camp a warning not to march that night because the roads were already guarded. Believing the information to be genuine the generals put off their departure for a couple of days.

This was yet another blunder, which they compounded by lingering for a third day to allow time for the men to pack their most essential luggage. They burned some of their ships but left the rest for the enemy to drag away at will. Meanwhile the Syracusans had used the interval to build roadblocks on the likely escape routes. At last on September 11 the bedraggled expeditionary force set off inland on the third day after the sea fight. In all, they amounted to no fewer than forty thousand souls, allies as well as Athenians and oarsmen as well as hoplites.

The generals intended to march inland into native Sicel country before turning northwards for the port of Catana where they could expect a friendly welcome and supplies.

Nicias, ill and in pain, did his best to raise the men’s spirits. But they were so fearful and depressed that they left their dead unburied, a grave sin of omission, and abandoned seriously wounded comrades, despite their pleas to be taken with them. The two generals each commanded a hollow rectangle of troops surrounding civilians, camp followers, and the like.

The army fought its way successfully through enemy opposition, but was constantly harried by cavalry and javelin throwers. Food and water were in short supply. Eight miles northwest of Syracuse an obstacle stood in the way—the Acraean cliff, a large plateau accessible through a ravine. The enemy had already built a wall across the ravine, and it was impervious to attack. A torrential downpour soaked the Athenians. The Syracusans began building another wall behind them, threatening to trap them, so the Athenians turned around, prevented its completion, and pushed past to level ground where they encamped.

They gave up their original plan to make for Catana and decided to march south. They lit many fires and crept away under cover of darkness. Unfortunately, during the night Demosthenes’ contingent became confused and fell behind. The Syracusans caught up with it by midday and encircled it, as it stood huddled in an olive grove surrounded by a wall. They rained missiles on the Athenians from every direction. There was nothing they could do in response and on September 16 Demosthenes capitulated on condition that none of his men was to be put to death. Once the detailed arrangements for surrender had been agreed, he tried to take his life, but only wounded himself with his sword before it was removed from him. Of the twenty thousand men who had set out from Syracuse under his command only six thousand were left.

Meanwhile Nicias, six or eight miles ahead, was plowing on. A Syracusan herald broke the news to him about the fate of Demosthenes, which at first he refused to believe. He proposed terms of surrender, but they were not accepted. On the following day, the eighth of their march, the Athenians pressed forward under constant Syracusan attacks until they arrived at the river Asinarus (today’s Falconara). The men were exhausted and were longing for water.

Many of them broke ranks and ran to the river to slake their thirst. They crowded in so closely that some men were trampled underfoot or killed with their own spears. The water became muddy and full of blood, but they went on gulping it. Syracusan and allied troops were stationed on the far bank and rained missiles onto the confused mass of Athenians and their allies. Some then came down and slaughtered anyone they could find.

Nicias saw that this was the end. He surrendered personally to Gylippus, whom he trusted more than the Syracusans. Of his troops only one thousand survived the Asinarus. Athenian citizens were imprisoned throughout the winter in the city’s stone quarries. In this early concentration camp, they were “forced to do everything in the same place.” Most of them perished from sickness and a wretched diet (half a slave’s rations of meal and water). Some were sold and branded with the sign of a horse on their foreheads.

Against the wishes of Gylippus, who wanted to show them off in Lacedaemon, the ailing Nicias and the half-dead Demosthenes were put out of their misery and executed. Their bodies were thrown beyond the city gates and lay there in plain sight for all to see.

The Sicilians were great poetry lovers. They were especially fond of Euripides and used to treasure any scraps of verse visitors from mainland Greece could repeat to them from memory. Apparently some of the very few Athenians who returned home safely made a point of calling on the author of The Trojan Women to thank him. They told him that they had received their freedom after teaching their masters whatever they could recall of his poetry. Others, after the final battle, had been given food and drink in return for reciting some of his lyrics.

—

One day in mid- to late September 413, a stranger landed at Piraeus and took a seat in a barber’s shop. He began to talk about the defeat in Sicily as if it were common knowledge. In fact, not a word had reached Attica and the shocked barber ran at top speed to the city. He rushed up to the Archons and blurted out the news in the agora. Uproar followed and an emergency meeting of the ecclesia was called.

The barber was cross-examined, but he could not explain clearly who his informant had been (no doubt the stranger had very sensibly made himself scarce). He was condemned as an agitator and tortured on the wheel until messengers arrived and gave chapter and verse of the disaster. Even then for some time people did not believe what they were told. It had to be an exaggeration. It could not be true.

—

It is tempting to regard the Sicilian Expedition as an example of pride before a fall, of overreaching ambition justly punished. But terrible as the narrative is even for the casual reader, there was nothing inevitable or even likely about the catastrophe. In fact, it was a catalogue of if-onlys. If only Alcibiades had been allowed to retain his command; if only Nicias had put his shoulder to the wheel, had not sought to shuffle off responsibility, had not delayed, had not been foolishly superstitious; above all, if only old Lamachus had been allowed to launch an attack on Syracuse immediately on arrival, as he wished—with a reasonable degree of diligence all would have been well.

That said, there was something deeply irresponsible about the project. It diverted energy and treasure to a policy that was, strictly speaking, unnecessary. The defeat of Syracuse would not help Athens, one way or another, to resolve its broken relationship with Sparta and its allies. What is more, even if the demos could reasonably assume victory, how did it propose to govern Sicily once it had conquered it? It is unlikely that it would be able to keep a humbled Syracuse permanently down. Athens would almost certainly collide with the fabulously rich maritime power Carthage, which had a foothold in the west of the island and would certainly have given it a run for its money.

Underlying the Sicilian Expedition lurked an ambition to unite all Hellas under an Athenian banner. The fact was that Athens did not have a large enough population, nor dispose of sufficient and sustainable wealth, to capture and control the Greek world, the lands that stretched from Segesta in the west to Miletus in the east, from Cyrene in northern Africa to Thrace or the frontiers of Macedon. The failure of the Egyptian campaign in the long-ago days of Pericles had convincingly demonstrated that the reach of Athens exceeded its grasp. His successors in power had forgotten the lesson. They learned it again in Sicily.

Counterfactuals are risky, but, if it had vanquished Syracuse, Athens might well have achieved overall dominion of the Greek world, but surely not for long. There would have been endemic instability and revolts. So maybe the incapacity of Nicias saved everyone a deal of trouble in the longer run.

As it was, Athens now had its back to the wall. Thucydides had no doubt of the importance of the disaster. He wrote:

This was the greatest achievement during this war, or in my opinion the greatest we know of in Greek history. For the victors it was the most brilliant of successes. It was the most ruinous debacle for the losers, for they were defeated comprehensively and in every way. Their sufferings were on a vast scale. Their destruction was, as they say, total. Their fleet, their army, everything was destroyed, and few out of many returned home.

20

The End of Democracy?

After so many false starts, the Athenians at last had victory in their sights.

In March or April 410 news arrived at Athens of a glorious engagement at sea off Cyzicus, a polis on the southern coast of the Sea of Marmara. A complete Spartan fleet had been eliminated. The Athenian admirals had captured all the enemy’s warships, and taken many prisoners (shades of Sphacteria) and a vast quantity of booty.

Although the Spartan commander, Mindarus, was brave and experienced, this had been his third major maritime defeat in a row and he himself had been killed. Within the space of a few months the Peloponnesians had lost between 135 and 155 triremes. Athens had complete control of the seas and had secured the sea routes for food imports from the Ukraine and the Crimea, the wheat that, post-Decelea, was vital for the city’s survival.

The Spartan vice admiral had written with laconic brevity to Lacedaemon, pleading for help, for orders, for anything: “Ships gone, Mindarus dead, men starving, don’t know what to do.” As a final stroke of bad luck, the letter was captured by the Athenians and greatly entertained the demos.

Sacrifices were made to the gods in celebration and various festivities were held. Then a high-level delegation arrived in the city from Lacedaemon. It was headed by a former ephor, Endius, who addressed the ecclesia in direct and simple terms. He wanted the long war, which had lasted on and off for more than two decades, to come to an end. He argued that both sides were suffering, Athens even more than Sparta, and that it was time to halt the mutually self-destructive struggle. He proposed a treaty with Athens.

Men of Athens, we want to make peace with you, on these terms; that each of us keep what cities we now possess; that the strongholds we maintain in one another’s territories [Pylos, for example, and Decelea] be abandoned, and that our prisoners of war be ransomed by exchange, one Laconian for one Athenian.

How could all this be, only two years after the Sicilian Expedition? So huge and so complete had been the destruction of manpower in 413 that most people expected Athens to concede defeat.

In fact, this huge historical calamity did not end the war, but it did transform it. Once the news from Sicily had settled in, the first reaction of the Athenians was to give up hope. The thousands of hoplites, cavalry, and men of military age who had lost their lives could not be replaced until a new generation had grown up. The best and most experienced generals were gone. There were hardly any ships in the Piraeus dockyards and most of the crews were dead. The treasury was nearly empty. There was a widespread fear that a vengeful Sicilian fleet was already at sea and heading for Piraeus. The allies would all surely revolt and the Athenian Empire would collapse.

After thoroughly frightening itself, the demos regained its nerve with a titanic effort of will. Despite its limited resources, it decided not to give up the struggle. Somehow or another it scraped together the funds and the timber to put together a new fleet. It raised money and did its best to keep its “allies” loyal.

The old system of an annual subscription fee for members of the Delian League was replaced by a 5 percent tax on imports and exports to or from all harbors in the empire; it was believed that this would raise more money and would be a more equitable system of payment. It underlined the fact that the Athenian “peace” throughout the Mediterranean encouraged trade and economic growth even in time of war. In the city itself the people took measures of economy and reform, appointing a committee of “wise men” to advise the ecclesia on the situation. Thucydides summed up the mood drily: “As is the way with democracies, now that they were panic-stricken, they were ready to put everything in order.”

And here was the surprising thing. Although there were major revolts, much of the empire stood firm alongside its master. There was good reason for this. Persia had by no means gone away. The Athenians may have been high-handed and arrogant, but they did provide protection from the eastern threat. Also they now took more care to treat their subjects well; when they expelled a Spartan garrison from the rebel polis of Byzantium, they did not replace it with one of their own—an example of what a contemporary historian called a “new policy of justness and conciliation adopted as a means of recovering the empire.”

That said, Chios off the Anatolian coast revolted and other league members on the Asiatic seaboard followed suit. The Athenian fleet laid waste the fertile countryside on the island and besieged the main town. By the spring of 411 the situation was that in the northern Aegean and the Hellespont the empire was intact, but a good number of the Ionian poleis had seceded.

—

The Spartans reacted to the misfortunes of Athens by coming back to life. They had always had a bad conscience about the outbreak of war in 431 because they had not accepted an Athenian offer of arbitration beforehand; but with the renewal of hostilities after the Peace of Nicias they felt it was Athens that had broken the peace treaty.

They had always claimed that their original strategic aim was to free the Greeks, but now an easy victory seemed to await them after which, in the words of Thucydides, “the overthrow of the Athenians would leave them in quiet enjoyment of the supremacy over all Hellas.”

This was not just a matter of high politics. Individual Spartans foresaw a chance to make their fortunes. According to tradition, nine thousand Equals or full male citizens received country estates, the income from which paid for training and education and for maintaining their communal messes. Only about five thousand Equals fought at the battle of Plataea against the Persian invader in 479, and no more than 3,500 had fought at Mantinea in 418 against the Argive coalition.

The reasons for this decline are both obscure and various, but it is clear that fewer and fewer Spartans were able to afford the high costs of citizenship and that poverty excluded many males who were otherwise eligible to join the Equals.

Spartans came to hope, writes Diodorus Siculus, that if they won the war they would “enjoy great wealth, Sparta as a whole would be made greater and more powerful, and the estates of private citizens would enjoy a great rise in prosperity.”

Poverty was not only an issue for individuals; the Spartan state had insufficient resources to carry on the war, however eager they now were to do so. They could not afford to mount a serious challenge to the Athenians at sea. However, there existed an almost boundless treasure-house of money—the Persian Empire. But if Sparta were to accept the Great King’s shilling, how could it maintain its proud role as liberator of the Greeks?

As in all such pacts with the devil they could only access these riches if they were willing to sell their souls.

—

Until the Sicilian disaster, Athens had ruled the Aegean Sea unchallenged and for many years the Great Kings saw little point in contesting its supremacy. But they had not forgotten the humiliations of Salamis and Plataea that their predecessor Xerxes had suffered, and they still had their eyes on the now independent cities of the Ionian seaboard.

The monarch at this time was Darius II, who had ascended the throne over the dead bodies of various other contenders of the blood royal, one of whom was drenched in alcohol and thrown into a pit filled with glowing embers. He wanted Ionia to return to his rule and Athenian weakness after Sicily offered him the opportunity.

Although a Great King was an absolute ruler, his dominions were too extensive for him to rule personally, and we have seen that, at the center of a feudal web of mutual allegiances, he devolved executive authority to the governors of provinces, or satraps. At this time, the two governors in charge of the western end of the Persian Empire were Pharnabazus and Tissaphernes. The province of Hellespontine Phrygia was to all intents a family possession; Pharnabazus had inherited the satrapy from his father and would pass it on to his son. He may have been descended from one of the co-conspirators of Darius the Great. He was an energetic and honorable ruler.

He was on poor terms with the slippery Tissaphernes, who was the grandson of a general in command of the elite Immortals during the invasion of Greece by Xerxes. Tissaphernes was the satrap of Lydia and Caria. He was loyal to his master, but was an inscrutable and unscrupulous political operator.

Darius II made it known to his satraps that he wished them to collect tribute and arrears from the coastal poleis of Asia Minor that Persia had lost after 479. This would mean bringing them back under his rule. The simplest and most cost-effective way of achieving this would be to back Sparta in its war with a seriously weakened Athens.

Rival delegations both from Pharnabazus and Tissaphernes arrived in Sparta at about the same time. They said that the Great King was ready to join the war against the Athenians. Each satrap wanted Spartan support for a rebellion of members of the Delian League in their region.

Throughout the Peloponnesian War, as we have seen, Sparta had always been short of money; it had no silver mines, did not engage in trade, and had nothing useful to export except soldiers. The ephors had long believed that they would never defeat Athens unless they built a powerful fleet and destroyed it as a sea power. But they had found out to their cost that warships were expensive and ruinous to maintain as a fighting force. However, if Persia were now to foot the bill, Sparta would renew the war on the waves.

The Spartans decided to do business with Tissaphernes. In 412 careful negotiations were opened. An early draft has survived that showed only too clearly the Great King’s intentions. It read:

All the territories and cities now in the King’s possession or formerly in the possession of his ancestors shall belong to the King….The war shall be carried on jointly by the King and the Spartans and their allies….Any people who revolt from the King shall be treated as enemies by the Spartans and their allies.

The final text was more discreet, but the message was clear. Sparta, the liberator of Greece against the invading barbarians, had signed up to help those very barbarians regain the lands they had lost. In return Darius would subsidize a Spartan fleet. Everyone could see that once the protection of Athens was withdrawn the Ionian poleis would fall back into his hands like low-hanging fruit. The treaty was evidence of the bitterness and the corruption of values that the long war had engendered.

The Spartans agreed to help the men of Chios, which was in the satrap’s theater of operations, with their insurrection. They sent their new fleet to this southern theater of war, and with them sailed Alcibiades, still making trouble for Athens.

—

His astonishing career now lurched in a new direction. While in Sparta he had apparently had an affair with Timaea, the wife of King Agis, while he was away on campaign at Decelea. This was discovered probably in February 412, much to her husband’s annoyance. It is alleged they had a son, Leotychidas, whom Agis disavowed, although years later on his deathbed he changed his mind and acknowledged him as his. According to Plutarch, Alcibiades

said, in his mocking way, that he had not done this merely as an insult, nor simply to satisfy his lust, but to ensure that his descendants would one day rule over the Spartans.

His hopes were in vain, for the boy never acceded to the throne. In any event, Agis was seriously displeased and took against the Athenian renegade. As a matter of fact, the Spartans had never entirely trusted him and were now tiring of him. The term of office as ephor of Endius, a family friend, came to an end in the following autumn and removed a key supporter. Alcibiades had pressed for Sparta’s new maritime policy, financed by the Persians, and had engineered or assisted revolts against Athenian rule. This was beginning to look like bad advice, for Athens was taking energetic and largely successful measures to protect its foreign possessions. Chios was not the center of a general uprising as had been expected, but was under siege and consuming Peloponnesian resources. Athenian sailors were tactically more experienced and imaginative; Spartans were in awe of them and tended to avoid battle when they could. The notion that the empire was ready to fall over at one push was proving to be wishful thinking.

A letter was sent to the Spartan admiral ordering him to put the unruly Athenian to death. Alcibiades got wind of this and without making any fuss removed himself to the court of Tissaphernes. Ostensibly he continued to work for Sparta, but in fact became the satrap’s confidential adviser.

Typically, he immediately fit into his new environment. He turned his irresistible charm onto Tissaphernes, who despite his long-standing hatred of the Greeks was bowled over. Plutarch writes that he

surrendered so completely to Alcibiades’s blandishments as to surpass him in reciprocal flatteries. He decreed that the most beautiful park [or

paradeisos

] he owned, which was famous for its refreshing streams and lawns and contained pavilions and retreats decorated in a regal and extravagant style, should be renamed after Alcibiades. Everyone always called it by that name.

In fact, Alcibiades was in a very tricky position. He was running out of options. He could follow the example of Themistocles, who had ended his career as a Persian official, but what if he fell out of the satrap’s favor? Moreover, he was homesick. Now that he was no longer persona grata in Lacedaemon, it was not in his interest to support a Spartan victory. He began to consider how he might negotiate his recall, despite the terrible damage he had done to his homeland’s interests.

Some Athenians were thinking the same thing.

—

The women of Athens are tired of the long war and thirst for peace. The inspirational and strong-minded Lysistrata persuades them to take over the government of the city. This they do by refusing sexual favors to their husbands and by taking over the treasury on the Acropolis. We learn that they will forswear a popular erotic position called The Lioness on a Cheese-Grater. The men are soon desperate for sex and sport enormous erections. A Spartan herald appears, similarly incommoded, proposing peace talks. An accord is soon agreed. Husbands receive back their wives. Spartans and Athenians join in a celebratory dance and banquet.

None of this happened, of course, for this was the plot of Aristophanes’ latest farce, Lysistrata (her name means “army disbander”), which premiered in 411. But many Athenians in the audience will have wished that it had.

In fact, there was sharp dissension in the city, but not between the sexes. The quarrel was between the classes. The city’s aristocrats had endured, but not enjoyed, the democracy, this despite the fact that many of them got themselves elected as generals and government officials. They still believed in their hereditary primacy—what Pindar called “the splendour running in the blood.” Now their opportunity had come to abolish the democracy and return to the old order. The demos deserved to take the blame for Sicily and respectable people of moderate views felt that popular rule should be reined back. They were willing to support the establishment of some kind of oligarchy.

In Athens the atmosphere was gloomy. A posse of blue-blooded young thugs assassinated leading democratic politicians and terrorized the population. In May, one century after its creation, the ecclesia let itself be bullied into abrogating the constitution. It dissolved itself and was replaced by a council of four hundred oligarchs, which took office in June 411. Its leaders promised in due course to establish an assembly of five thousand voting citizens. In the meantime executive authority lay in its hands. Payment for service in almost all public offices was abolished.

The new regime was more unstable than it looked at first glance. Many suspected that it intended to concede an ignominious peace treaty with Sparta. In spite of their exhaustion, most Athenians would see this as treachery, for they had not lost hope in victory or at least a draw. Above all, the ringleaders of the revolution were few and depended on the support of moderates.

One of these was Theramenes, an able and agile politician and the son of a Periclean general. One of nature’s compromisers, he was nicknamed Cothurnus, a boot worn by actors that fit either foot. He quickly grew disenchanted with his more radical and unyielding colleagues. He noticed that they were putting off publishing a list of the Five Thousand, as they had promised, and suspected they were dragging their feet, because they knew their power would fade once the new assembly began to meet. The Four Hundred split into two groups, extremists and moderates like Theramenes, who favored a qualified, not an out-and-out, democracy.

The main reason that the oligarchs were able to effect a change of constitution in Athens was that so many citizens were with the fleet in Samos. Trireme captains may have preferred an oligarchy, but rank-and-file oarsmen, when citizens, were drawn mostly from the poorest social class, the thetes, and remained staunch democrats. An alternative ecclesia was established on the island.

The oligarchs in Athens put out peace feelers to Sparta, which rejected them. When they started work on building a fortress at the entrance to Piraeus’s main harbor, people immediately feared that they were planning to let in a Peloponnesian fleet to end the war. Opposition grew and a leading oligarch was struck down by foreign assassins in the agora. Crowds demolished the fort and an ad hoc assembly was held on a steep hill at Piraeus. Ironically, a commander named Aristocrates was the first to arrest a senior oligarch.

In the outside world, matters went from bad to worse. An enemy fleet was sighted off Salamis, the important island of Euboea on Athens’s doorstep rebelled, and a small home squadron of thirty-six triremes was trounced by the Spartans, a rare victory for landlubbers. Most of the Four Hundred lost sympathy with their radical leaders and hated the situation in which they found themselves. The fleet at Samos insisted that they be abolished.

In September a general assembly met on the Pnyx and dissolved the Four Hundred only four months after they took power. Just as Theramenes wished, they were replaced by a sovereign body, not of every citizen, but of all adult males who could afford to buy their own armor. In effect, this new governing ecclesia was equivalent to the phantom assembly of Five Thousand, which was now at last brought into being.

The new system was a great success, enabling Athens to restore not only effective government but also her fortunes in the war. A year later and without one drop of blood being shed, the full democracy was reinstated and its first known document begins with the customary formula—“enacted by the boulē and the demos.” Everything returned to the status quo ante (including the reinstatement of payment for public service). Thucydides wrote that

during the first period of this new dispensation, the Athenians appear to have enjoyed the best government that they ever did, at least in my time. There was a reasonable and moderate blending of the few and the many, and this was what enabled the city to recover from her manifold disasters.

—

The traitor was back. One of the most controversial decisions that the alternative ecclesia on Samos took was to depose all the generals elected in Athens and replace them with their own choices.

These included Alcibiades, who they believed would help Athens win the war. The new assembly of the Five Thousand confirmed the vote. This was not to say that all was forgotten and forgiven. Alcibiades had many enemies who feared he aimed at installing a tyranny, but for the time being they had no choice but to keep quiet.

Age and the vicissitudes of his career had improved Alcibiades, who was now in his late thirties. He had grown into a tougher and more mature leader and had put behind him his weakness for easy triumphs and clever tricks. He knew too that this was his last throw of the dice; if it failed, his political career and probably his life would be over.

As adviser to Tissaphernes he had recommended an evenhanded approach to the two belligerents. This had the advantage from the Persian point of view of wearing them both down. While not altogether trusting Alcibiades (who would?), the satrap agreed. He reduced the subsidy on which the Peloponnesian fleet depended and made sure that a promised reinforcement, the Phoenician fleet, never arrived. But he did not agree to a rapprochement with Athens.

Meanwhile Alcibiades had opened negotiations with the fleet at Samos, promising to bring Tissaphernes over to their side. He had first been in touch with the oligarchs, but soon switched his attention to the democrats. An influential, intelligent, and independent-minded sailors’ leader, Thrasybulus, argued for his recall.

The satrap learned of this confidential initiative and began to distance himself from his adviser. It was about this time that a revised entente between Sparta and Persia was agreed.

Thrasybulus persuaded the assembled troops and crews on Samos to recall Alcibiades and grant him immunity from prosecution. He collected the former renegade from the mainland and brought him to Samos. It soon became clear that Alcibiades had lost his credit with Tissaphernes, but his energetic leadership and skill at raising funds to pay the men canceled that disappointment.

—

The Athenians now hit a winning streak.

Tired of Tissaphernes and his half-fulfilled promises, the Peloponnesians sailed northwards to the Hellespont and opened a new theater of war. Here lay the satrapy of the more straightforward Pharnabazus, with whom they were soon on good terms and who took over as Sparta’s Persian best friend. Fearful for their grain supply, the Athenians had no choice but to follow suit, led by Thrasybulus and another admiral.

The tumultuous year of 411 concluded in the autumn with two striking Athenian victories in the Hellespont. Then, as we have seen, came the crowning mercy of Cyzicus in the following spring. The three Athenian commanders were Thrasybulus, Theramenes, and Alcibiades, the last of whom deserved much of the credit for the victory. The only disappointments were the loss of Nisaea, the port of Megara, and Sparta’s capture that winter of Pylos, the rock fortress on the Messenian coast that Athens had taken as long ago as the year 425.

To everyone’s surprise the Athenians now found themselves in a very strong position.

They saw to their relief that they were still a great power and a new self-belief spread through the fleet. They exaggerated. The recovery was hugely to their credit, but Athens was no longer the city of Pericles. Its reserves both of precious metals and of human capital were nearly exhausted, and so was its resilience. It could not go on indefinitely producing new fleet after new fleet. It would have been wise to accept offers of peace from a disheartened Sparta and taken a few years to recuperate. But the old Attic arrogance was as fierce as it had ever been. The demos wanted total victory, and it wanted it now.

—

When the distinguished Spartan Endius headed his delegation to Athens and offered peace to the ecclesia, he must have anticipated a warmer welcome from a war-weary people than he received in the event. The restored democracy had lost little of its traditional aggression. The most prominent popular leader of his day, Cleophon, stressed the magnitude of the city’s recent successes. “I will use a dagger to cut the throat of anyone who proposes making peace,” he is reported to have threatened.

His critics lampooned him as a depraved drunk of low birth, but his father had been an elected strategos, so he must surely have come from an affluent and respectable family. The demos agreed with Cleophon, and Endius was sent on his way. With Alcibiades at the helm all would yet be well.

It is evidence of Cleophon’s confidence in the future that he resumed construction of the Erechtheum, the elaborate little temple complex with female caryatids on the Acropolis, which had been abandoned during the Sicilian Expedition in order to save money. Although this was a comparatively small project he was following in the footsteps of the great Pericles. A new temple on the sacred hill was bound to boost public morale. Also, in honor of Cyzicus, a parapet was built for the tiny temple of Athena Nike.

And for a time all did go well. The Athenians never retrieved Chios and Euboea, but the island of Thasos off the Thracian coast was lost and regained. Variably neutral during the war although a league member, Rhodes finally went its own independent way. With these exceptions, the empire held together, more or less.

In 407 after four years in the field Alcibiades at last decided it was safe to go home. He had proved himself, and his friends in the city guaranteed him a warm and, more important, a safe welcome. When he sailed into Piraeus, a great crowd of well-wishers was waiting—just as they had been the last time they had seen him, leading the fleet as it set off to Sicily on that day of splendor in 415.

He anchored offshore but, fearing an ambush by his enemies, did not immediately disembark. Instead he stood on the deck and kept looking to see if his relatives were there. Only when he recognized a cousin did he go ashore and walk up to the city, surrounded by an informal bodyguard.

With tears in his eyes, Alcibiades said what he could at the boulē and the ecclesia to explain his actions, but most people were more interested in a glittering future than in the past. A crown of gold was placed on his head and he was appointed commander-in-chief, as Xenophon put it, “on the grounds that he was the man to restore the former power of Athens.” The records of his trial and sentence were sunk in the sea, his property was returned, and the priests were ordered to recant their curse.

Since the Spartan occupation of Decelea, the annual procession from Athens to Eleusis to celebrate the Mysteries had had to travel by sea. This year Alcibiades led it along its traditional land route, escorted by troops. The Spartans did not react. It was a doubly symbolic gesture; it showed contempt for King Agis and his men and it gave Alcibiades an opportunity to show his reverence for the Mysteries, which he had been accused (falsely, he still claimed) of mocking. If ever there was a moment when he could establish himself as tyrant it was now, but perhaps he told himself that he would do better to win the war first.

—

Two developments cast a shadow over Athenian prospects. An intelligent and energetic new Spartan admiral was appointed to the Peloponnesian fleet. This was Lysander. His family was poor and he was a mothax (literally Doric Greek for “stepbrother”), a term used for a Spartan who was too poor to pay for membership of a syssitia, or soldier’s mess, and was obliged to find a wealthy sponsor. Although not one of the Equals, a mothax was allowed to fight alongside them.

Lysander was an imperialist and wanted Sparta to replace Athens as leader of the Greek world. He made the acquaintance of Cyrus, brother of the Persian king Artaxerxes. He complained to the young prince that Tissaphernes was only halfhearted in his support for the Peloponnesian fleet and persuaded him to raise the subsidy for sailor’s pay from three obols a head to four. Artaxerxes appointed Cyrus to take over command of the war from Tissaphernes. He was in his late teens, hyperactive and resolutely pro-Spartan. Lysander could be arrogant and overbearing, but on this occasion he obeyed the rules of flattery and deference at court. The Spartan and the Persian became good friends.

At this inauspicious moment Alcibiades lost concentration. His enemies at home, who had been patiently waiting for an error they could exploit, pounced.

An Athenian fleet was standing off Ephesus near the port of Notium. Alcibiades wanted to bring Lysander and his fleet to battle as soon as possible, but they stayed where they were inside the harbor of Ephesus. The Spartan admiral, handsomely financed by Cyrus and able to afford higher wages than the Athenians, had time on his side and saw no reason to risk a fight. By contrast, Alcibiades was the victim of great expectations, for the Athenian public imagined he could achieve whatever he wanted. Also, tempted by Persian gold, his oarsmen were deserting to the enemy in some numbers.

Alcibiades sailed away in his troopships on a brief expedition to look for money and rations, leaving his triremes on guard against any move by Lysander. He placed his helmsman in charge of the fleet, a man called Antiochus, a good pilot but (according to Plutarch) an unthinking lowlife. He was well qualified as a drinking companion, but not as an admiral.

Alcibiades gave him strict instructions to avoid battle at all costs, but Antiochus ignored what he had been told. He sailed across Ephesus’s harbor mouth with a couple of triremes, shouting abuse and making obscene gestures. Lysander sent a few boats to chase him away, and gradually both fleets came out to fight. Antiochus was killed and the Athenians lost twenty-two ships. It was a minor but completely pointless setback. Alcibiades rushed back as soon as he heard the news and offered battle to Lysander, but the Spartan declined. He had done well enough as it was, and saw no need to take any more risks.

The skirmish at Notium was the first real reverse since Cyzicus, and the ecclesia was dismayed. A speaker blamed Alcibiades for appointing men “who had won his confidence simply through their capacity for drinking and telling sailors’ yarns.” He was treating the war at sea as if it were a luxury cruise. All his old misdeeds were rehearsed, the assistance he gave Sparta and his collusion with the Persians. He was dismissed from office.

It seems a foolish decision, the demos at its flightiest, but the debacle at Notium did no more than throw a harsh light onto a preexisting state of affairs—the divisiveness of Alcibiades. Feelings against him were too strong not to keep reemerging and he could not assemble a broad enough consensus of support in the long run. He knew that his return to Athens had been a huge and dangerous gamble. He saw at once that he had made his last throw of the dice and lost. He was no longer safe. He left the fleet for a castle in the Thracian Chersonese, a bolt-hole that he had prepared in advance exactly against this eventuality.

Irrepressible as ever, Alcibiades paid for some mercenaries and led a raiding party into Thrace, ransoming his captives for large sums of money. But this was child’s play to what he had lost.

Two years after the disgrace of Alcibiades, Aristophanes wrote in The Frogs of his fellow-citizens’ mixed feelings about their lost leader. Athens “longs for him, but hates him, and yet she wants to have him back.” But it was too late for that now.

—

The demos continued on its angry, cruel, and unpredictable way.

Lysander’s commission expired after its statutory year in 406 and he was obliged to hand over to a new young commander, Callicratidas, who was that rare thing—a traditional Spartan with charm, who had something of the much-missed Brasidas about him. His predecessor was so annoyed at being superseded that he blackened Callicratidas’s reputation with Cyrus and gave back to the prince the unspent remainder of the subsidies he had provided.

The admiral disagreed with the expansionist policy of Lysander. He regarded the Persian alliance as a disgrace and was furious when Cyrus refused to meet him. On a visit to Miletus, an anti-Persian polis that he made the headquarters of his campaign, he told its general assembly: “It is a sad day for the Greeks when they have to flatter foreigners for cash. If I get home safely I will, to the best of my ability, make peace between Athens and Sparta.”

He raised the money he needed to pay for his huge fleet of 140 vessels from Ionian cities, who appreciated his distaste for the Persians. He hunted down the Athenian fleet, now led by an admiral called Conon, and caught it at the harbor mouth of Mytilene, the capital of the island of Lesbos. He captured thirty Athenian triremes, leaving Conon with not more than forty blockaded inside the port. If he had destroyed the entire fleet the war would have been over. Cyrus did not want to see Sparta victorious without Persian help and immediately sent Callicratidas money to pay the crews.

Conon managed to sneak one ship out to report to Athens and ask for more ships. A tremendous effort was made to respond to the crisis. Slaves were freed to row in the fleet and even the aristocrats in the cavalry knuckled down as oarsmen. One hundred and ten warships were built and manned. The allies contributed forty more, including ten from still loyal Samos. As a token of gratitude a marble relief was commissioned of Hera, the tutelary goddess of Samos, shaking hands with an armed Athena.

The relief force arrived off Lesbos and Callicratidas lost his numerical superiority. An engagement took place near the Arginusae Islands in front of Mytilene. It was a blustery day. The Athenians, who formed up in two rows against the enemy, began to outflank the Spartans on the left. In response, Callicratidas divided his fleet into two separate squadrons. This opened a gap in his center into which the Athenians rowed. Callicratidas fell overboard while his trireme was ramming an enemy ship, disappeared, and was never seen again, and the Athenian right drove the Peloponnesians back. Some triremes got away but the Spartans and their allies lost seventy-seven warships, or well over half their fleet. The Athenians lost only twenty-five. It was an extraordinary result, and Diodorus writes that Arginusae was “the greatest naval engagement in history of Greeks against Greeks.”

As the long battle ended a storm blew up. It was the explicit duty of victorious admirals to pick up surviving crew members, as they clung to their wrecked vessels or swam around, as well as corpses lying in the water. At Arginusae this amounted to five thousand men.

The eight admirals (to avoid battle by committee, a different one was in overall charge every day) decided that up to fifty triremes, to be commanded by Theramenes and Thrasybulus, both of whom were ship’s captains on this occasion, should pick up survivors. But the weather was very bad and the two men decided it would not be possible to obey these orders. Meanwhile the rest of the fleet went off to deal with the Spartan flotilla that was still blockading Mytilene harbor. So the five thousand were lost.

This was a large number and although the ecclesia was thrilled by the victory it was furious about the casualties. Theramenes and Thrasybulus swiftly laid the blame on the admirals, who were deposed and put on trial. Their cases were heard together and they were all sentenced to death on a single vote.

To prosecute accused men en bloc violated a decree guaranteeing separate trials. By a remarkable chance, Socrates happened to be sitting on the boulē for this year (the only time he ever held a public office). For this month he was also on the subcommittee, or prytany, which prepared business for the boulē to lay before the ecclesia. Even more coincidentally, he was chairman of the ecclesia for the very day in question. He refused to put the motion to the assembly on the grounds that it was illegal.

His authority lasted only twenty-four hours, the hearing went ahead, and the admirals were executed. They included Pericles, son of Pericles and Aspasia. One of the condemned men paused before he was led away. With cutting sarcasm, he asked the assembly to remember to discharge the vows to the gods that he and his colleagues had made before their victory, for they themselves no longer had the time to do so.

Only the unpopular philosopher comes out well in this unconstitutional episode.

The loss of life at Arginusae had certainly been substantial, but did Athens have enough talent at its disposal that it could afford to eliminate so many commanders in one fit of rage? As it recognized later but too late, the ecclesia had acted cruelly and foolishly. Its conduct makes one miss the rational governance of the Five Thousand. Would they have lost their self-control as completely as did the recently reempowered demos?

The Spartans once more sued for peace, with each side keeping what they held. They even offered to give up Decelea. Apparently Cleophon intervened again, disastrously. According to the fourth-century author of a study of the Athenian Constitution, he prevented “the masses…from making peace by going into the assembly drunk and wearing his breast-plate, and saying that he would not allow it unless the Spartans surrendered all the cities they had taken.”

The Athenian refusal was yet another unwise decision. The ships that won Arginusae were the last that the Athenians would be able, almost miraculously, to create out of nothing. They had scraped the bottom of the barrel for personnel, matériel, and money. If anything were to happen to the present fleet, that would be the end. No more prodigies would be possible.

How was it that the demos did not see this? Perhaps the only answer is exhaustion. Like a punch-drunk boxer, it did not have the energy needed to call a halt.

—

A horseman trotted along the shore to where the Athenian ships lay beached and asked to see the six admirals in command. We may guess that he was not kept waiting for long, for the visitor was none other than Alcibiades and he had come specially to give them some advice.

The place was called Aegospotami (or Goat Streams), a small river debouching into the Hellespont from its northern coast. The castle to which Alcibiades had withdrawn was not far away on what is today’s Gallipoli peninsula and he had been able to watch the developing situation.

On the face of it Aegospotami had little to recommend it. There was no harbor and the nearest substantial town where provisions could be found, Sestos, was more than ten miles away. Its only advantage was that it lay opposite the port of Lampsacus, where Lysander, back in command again, and a fleet of two hundred warships were installed.

The Athenians with 180 triremes wanted to fight a battle as soon as possible while they still had money to pay their crews, about 35,000 men in all. If they were to do so, they had to be in a position to challenge the Spartans. For four days they rowed the two miles across the channel from Aegospotami and offered battle. On each occasion Lysander kept his fleet under oar inside the harbor, but did not sally out. It was far too dangerous to attack him there and in the afternoon the Athenians returned to their beach and foraged onshore for an evening meal.

Alcibiades’ visit fell on the fourth day. He urged the admirals to move their fleet south to Sestos where there was a harbor and a city. He added that if they gave him a share of the command he would produce an army of Thracians to attack the Spartans by land. Alcibiades was right to warn the admirals that their present position was risky, and a force of Thracians, if one was really available, would have indeed been useful.

However, they could not conceivably have shared any part of their command with a man twice condemned by the ecclesia. Moreover, as Diodorus points out, they figured that “they would incur the blame for any defeat, whereas everyone would give the credit for any success to Alcibiades.” They told him to make himself scarce. “We are the admirals now,” they reminded him.

On the following morning thirty Athenian triremes set out ahead of the main fleet. The admiral in charge was Philocles. His aim was probably to tempt Lysander out to destroy a temptingly easy target and then to be overwhelmed by the main fleet when it came up later. The plan failed for two reasons: deserters betrayed it and discipline among the Athenians had grown lax.

Forewarned, Lysander put out immediately with his full fleet, scattered the Athenian advance guard, and swooped onto the beached triremes before the crews had had a chance to launch them. He also landed some infantry to attack the enemy camp while the Athenians were fully occupied trying to rescue their ships. Most ran off in all directions and made for Sestos.

Of the Athenian navy only ten boats had not been sunk or taken. Between three and four thousand prisoners were captured. It was decided to put to death all who were Athenian citizens. Those previously responsible for atrocities received special attention, among whom was Philocles: he had had a motion passed by the ecclesia that after a victory all captives should either have their right thumbs or hands cut off. Also on one occasion he had ordered the crews of two captured triremes to be thrown overboard to drown. Xenophon writes: “Lysander first asked him what he thought he deserved for having begun such uncustomary and criminal actions against the Greeks. He then had his throat cut.”

—

One of the state triremes, the Paralos, arrived at Athens during the night and brought news of the catastrophe at Aegospotami. Xenophon memorably describes the scene.

A sound of wailing came from Piraeus and ran up through the Long Walls and into the city itself as one man passed the news to another. As a result, no one slept that night as they wept not only for the dead, but for themselves, thinking that they would suffer the same treatment they had inflicted on others—the people of Melos…and many other Greeks.

The great war between Athens and Sparta was nearly but not quite over.

Athens prepared for a siege. The city was impregnable, so it would have to be starved into submission. Lysander threatened death to any Athenian citizen caught outside the city and a stream of refugees multiplied the number of mouths that had to be fed. A blockade of Piraeus halted food imports. Lysander waited. A winter passed and by the spring people were dying in the streets.

What terms would Sparta impose? The fate of Melos had not been forgotten nor other war atrocities. What the Athenians had meted to others should now be meted to them. The Corinthians and Boeotians wanted to see Athens destroyed, “root and branch,” the city razed to the ground and the people sold into slavery. The proposition was supported by King Agis and Lysander. But a moment’s thought showed this to be against Sparta’s interests. If Athens vanished from the map a power vacuum would be created that either the Corinthians or the Boeotians, both of whom had been troublesome during the war, would be the first to fill. There was little advantage in losing one rival superpower only to create another.

What would be best for the Spartans was a tamed Athens. And this was what was ultimately agreed. Athens remained an independent state, but stripped of its Long Walls and the fortifications of Piraeus and of its empire. It was locked into a treaty of friendship with its former enemy that prevented it from having a foreign policy. All exiles (these were mostly oligarchs) were to be recalled.

Athens’s chief negotiator was the moderate Theramenes. Radical democrat Cleophon, irrepressible as ever, tried to resist the settlement, but cruel necessity was against him. He was arraigned on a charge of evading military service, found guilty, and executed. Lysander sailed in triumph into Piraeus, and both Athenians and their conquerors worked alongside one another to tear down the Long Walls. Daunted by the Spartan commander’s presence in the city, the ecclesia did as it was told. It voted out the democracy and appointed a commission of Thirty, headed by a returning exile, an author and oligarch called Critias, to prepare a new constitution. These reactionaries became the de facto government.

—

And what of the man who had done most to destroy, and then most to try to save, his native land—the man whose volatile and charismatic personality incarnated the spirit of Athenian imperialism?

After Aegospotami Alcibiades knew that he was without a future. The authorities in Sparta wanted to see an end of him. As the fourth-century orator and commentator Isocrates said: “They could not be sure of the loyalty of Athens if they demolished her walls, unless they should also destroy the man who could rebuild them.” In other words, he was too dangerous to live.

Alcibiades lay low in his castle in the Hellespont, but, when Thracian raiders mounted an attack and robbed him of his money, he escaped across the water into Phrygia. Here the ever-decent Pharnabazus let him use a house in a village in the countryside. As a last throw of the dice Alcibiades persuaded the satrap to arrange a meeting with the Great King Artaxerxes in Susa. He would try to persuade him to act against Sparta and help Athens to recover from its defeat: his argument would be that as ever it was in the Persian interest to maintain a balance of power in Hellas. In any case he would offer Artaxerxes his services, to whom he could be as useful as Themistocles had been in his day.

Critias had once boasted in a poem that he had put the motion to the ecclesia for the recall of Alcibiades, but, as the new ruler of Athens, he changed his tune. He sent a message to Lysander in Asia: “Unless you cut off Alcibiades, none of the arrangements you have made at Athens will stand. So if you want your decisions to remain unaltered, you must have him put to death.” In their teens, Critias and Alcibiades had studied under Socrates, and it must have occurred to their teacher that neither of them was a fine example of the study and practice of virtue.

At first Lysander refused to act, but, under pressure from the authorities at home, he told the satrap that relations with Sparta would be broken unless he produced Alcibiades dead or alive. Pharnabazus complied, reluctantly, and asked two relatives of his to deal with the matter.

Plutarch reports that a hetaira, or courtesan, called Timandra was living with Alcibiades at the time. One night he dreamed that he was wearing her dress. She had his head in her arms and was making up his face with cosmetics as if he were a woman.

Not long afterwards the men who had been sent to kill Alcibiades came to his home during the night. Not daring to enter, they laid wood against the walls of the building and set it alight. Woken up by the crackling of the flames, Alcibiades tried to smother the fire with clothes and bedding. Then he wrapped a cloak around his left arm and with a sword in his right ran through the blaze without being burned. His attackers backed away out of his reach and shot at him from a distance with javelins and arrows, until he fell and died.

Later when the assassins had left, Timandra took up the body and wrapped it in her own clothes. Then she cremated it in the fire that had been laid to consume Alcibiades when he had been alive.

And so one of the last Alcmaeonids left the stage. The clan fades from the record and whether it died out or survived in comfortable anonymity we may hope that with this blood-stained climax the Cylonian curse was expiated.

21

Sparta’s Turn

An Athenian who came back to his home city in 403 after a long absence must have noticed how quiet and empty the streets were. Where were all the people?

The short answer is that they were dead. There were fewer than half as many Athenian men at the end of the war than there had been when it started, even allowing for the arrival over the years, courtesy of the birthrate, of new cohorts of male citizens and the enforced return of citizen settlers, or cleruchs (in all probability, there were no more than ten thousand of these). The causes were not only battle casualties, notably during the Sicilian Expedition, but also the mass mortality of the plague in the 420s. Hoplite numbers are estimated to have declined from 22,000 in 431 to about 9,250 in 394. The sea battles in the last years of the war brought even greater losses among the thetes, or the lowest economic class. There were about 15,000 of them in 415, but only between 5,000 and 7,000 in 394. Because of the large numbers of oarsmen needed to power a trireme, casualties could far exceed those of a battle on land.

In sum, the number of adult male citizens of Athens after the Peloponnesian War is estimated as being between 14,000 and 16,250. It had been over 40,000 in 434. Its citizen population had fallen by some 60 percent.

—

After so complete a defeat, could Athens ever recover her position as a great power in the Greek world? It hardly seemed likely.

The city’s economy had collapsed. In its heyday, agriculture lay at its heart, and some two thirds of the adult male population owned some land, although not necessarily enough to provide a living. In many cases, smallholders could supplement their earnings by serving as a juror or receiving state payments for holding public offices. They might row in the fleet or work in the shipyards of Piraeus. Alternatively, they could emigrate and join a cleruchy, here and there across the empire. The landless poor were even more reliant on income deriving from the war and from opportunities for paid public service at home. Public policy overlapped with welfare funding.

But now the empire was gone and so was the fleet. The gap between haves and have-nots on the land widened. Accustomed inflows of money abruptly dried up. As we have seen, more than twenty thousand slaves had run away. Many of these came from the mines at Laurium, and it was not until the middle of the next century that the extraction of silver came anywhere near the old levels. Also many slaves were given their freedom in return for fighting at Arginusae. When money was short, they could not be easily or quickly replaced. So long as there was the slightest risk of fresh military invasions, large-scale investors may have found loans to merchants and sea traders a safer bet than mining or agricultural renewal.

The league membership payments (or, more honestly, imperial tribute) ended. The subscription charge and other monies collected from the allies had provided the Athenian state with 600 talents in 431; 1,300 talents, after revised assessments upwards, in 425; about 900 talents in 413—and in 403 nothing at all. On the credit side, now that the empire had gone, as it undoubtedly had, Athens was no longer obliged to keep the seaways safe for merchants (one unpredicted consequence of which was a rise in piracy). Income fell, but so to some extent did expenditure.

Athens had never been primarily a manufacturing center and most of its light industry served the domestic market. During the war many firms in such fields as metalwork, carpentry, tanneries, and dockyards, which produced weapons, ships and ship’s gear, armor, and the like, had done well and the arrival of peace will have brought with it unemployment and a period of painful readjustment. There was no longer a fleet to build or an army to equip.

There were some slivers of a silver lining. Athenians were able to resume living safely in the countryside and full-time farming started up again. The Spartan army had left the fortress at Decelea and three decades of enemy invasions were at last over. The fields of Attica had been burned and dug up; farm buildings had been dismantled and wood and tiles, tools and furniture removed. Land fell in value, and in 389 or 388 the speechwriter Lysias refers to a landowner, the value of whose estate had fallen from seventy to twenty talents.

The destruction was not quite as bad as it looked. Grain is replanted annually, vines cannot be easily destroyed, and olive trees resist the ax and the flame (although new ones take years to grow). The renewal of agriculture reduced costly dependence on imported foodstuffs from the Black Sea. The wealthier landowners recovered more quickly than the rest, and we hear of several affluent farmers who did well in the postwar era, including somewhat surprisingly Plato, the philosopher and student of Socrates.

Once things had settled down, Athens, or rather Piraeus, reasserted its position as an entrepôt for traders in the Eastern Mediterranean, where goods were imported and reexported. Ports from Carthage to the Crimea sent ships to Athens to buy as well as to sell. However, there was no denying a sharp decline in business. The total annual value of seaborne imperial trade had probably been more than 18,000 talents, of which Piraeus’s share was at least 25 percent, or 4,500 talents. In 402/1, though, the port’s earnings may have fallen to 1,800 talents, although this was still a substantial sum.

Commerce was supported by bankers and tax farmers, who were often resident aliens, or metics, and well-trained slaves (the state did not have an exchequer or a revenue service). Foreigners also came to Athens for cultural reasons, in particular to attend the Great Dionysia. With the end of hostilities, tourists returned. In the long run the provision of services to foreigners was to become the city’s most lucrative industry.

A young man from the Bosphorus visited Athens in the mid-390s. His evidence was not untypical.

When I heard reports about Athens and of the other parts of the Greek world, I wanted to travel abroad. And so my father loaded two ships with grain [to sell here in the city], gave me money, and sent me off on a trading expedition and at the same time to see the world.

So daily life in Athens returned to something resembling normality. Small shoots of economic growth could be detected. But recovery was inevitably constrained by the population collapse and a gloom fell across the future. Partly the disasters of the war knocked back self-confidence, partly there were simply too few people and too little money left to afford a war, an economic revival, an empire, or a cultural renaissance.

—

One afternoon in 404 Lysias, a wealthy metic or resident alien, was holding a dinner party at his home in Piraeus, when the authorities called.

Two members of the Thirty, the oligarchic regime established by Lysander, walked in. They were accompanied by a body of armed men. They turned out the guests and then went off to the arms factory next door, which Lysias and his elder sibling Polemarchus owned. They made an inventory of the 120 slaves who were manufacturing shields. Meanwhile one of the oligarchs, Peison, stayed with Lysias in the house.

The Thirty were short of funds and suspected treachery among the community of resident aliens. They decided to solve both problems with a single blow. Ten prosperous metics were identified whose property would be confiscated and whose lives forfeited on spurious criminal charges (for appearances’ sake two of them would be poor). Lysias and Polemarchus were among those selected. They came from a rich, respectable, and carefully nonpolitical family of immigrants, whose Syracusan father had been invited by Pericles to settle in Athens. Polemarchus was interested in philosophy and Plato set the scene for his great philosophical dialogue On the State at his house.

Lysias asked Peison to let him go free in return for a talent of silver, and Peison agreed. He went into his bedroom and opened a strongbox that contained three talents and other gold coins. Unfortunately, Peison followed him, saw the box, and had his men take it away. So Lysias lost everything. He was handed over to the second oligarch and taken to a neighbor’s house. His prospects looked poor; so while his unwelcome visitors were in conversation, Lysias took his chance and slipped off unnoticed to freedom through three doors, which all happened, unusually, to be unlocked. He made his way to the house of a sea captain he knew, who went up to Athens to find out what had happened to Polemarchus. He brought back the news that he had been arrested and taken to prison. So Lysias boarded a boat the following night and crossed over to Megara.

Recalling these events a year later, he spoke bitterly of his brother’s fate. “To Polemarchus, the Thirty gave their familiar order, to drink hemlock [a poison used in capital punishment], without so much as telling him the reason for his execution. Still less was he allowed a trial at which he could defend himself.” Polemarchus’s property was looted (even his wife’s earrings) and his relatives had to beg and borrow the necessaries for his funeral.

Critias, the leader of the Thirty, was no ordinary reactionary. This onetime student of Socrates wrote poems and tragedies. In exile from Athens towards the end of the war, he helped establish a democracy, of all things, in Thessaly. Suspected of involvement in the mutilation of the Herms, he was an advanced thinker: a fragment of one of his tragedies survives in which a speaker explains that the gods were a necessary invention to control human beings.

Some shrewd man first, a man wise in judgment,

invented for mortals the fear of gods,

in that way, frightening the wicked should they

even act or speak or scheme in secret.

He believed that virtue should be imposed by force, and that was indeed his policy when he took power. However, force soon came to be applied without the slightest attempt at virtue, as Lysias’s story shows.

Once firmly in the saddle the Thirty abandoned any idea of preparing a new constitution, as they had been instructed to do. They confiscated all weapons and armor in the city and instituted a reign of terror. They began by executing known informers, but went on to arrange the deaths of 1,500 men simply for their money or their reputation as law-abiding and politically moderate citizens.

An attempt was made to implicate ordinary Athenians in these judicial murders. Socrates was ordered, along with four fellow-citizens, to arrest a respectable former military officer, Leon of Salamis. At great personal risk, he refused and simply went home. According to Plato, he admitted later that he might have been put to death for this, but, he added: “If it’s not crude of me to say so, death is something I couldn’t care less about, but my whole concern is not to do anything unjust or impious.” The others were not so brave; they brought Leon in and he was put to death. The Thirty were sensible enough to leave Socrates unpunished.

Theramenes had hoped that the Thirty would implement his idea for a limited oligarchy, as in the days of the Five Thousand. He joined them, but soon had a change of heart. To broaden the base of his government, Critias issued a register of Three Thousand supporters, and announced that all other citizens were liable to capital punishment without trial and to have their property confiscated. Theramenes criticized the regime for its cruelty and a split threatened. It was wrong, he said, to kill people simply because they had been popular under the democracy. At last this man for all seasons, the so-called Cothurnus, had made his choice.

Critias acted. He summoned the boulē and arrived at the meeting with an escort of young supporters, equipped with daggers concealed in their armpits. After an angry debate, he struck the name of Theramenes off the list of the Three Thousand, for his membership guaranteed him a trial, and ordered his instant arrest and execution. Theramenes ran to an altar and claimed sanctuary. However, he was dragged from it and, protesting loudly and clearly, was dragged through the agora.

In the little prison on the edge of the agora, he was given a lethal cup of hemlock to drink. As if he were an erastes playing a game of kottabos (see this page) at a drinking party, he threw out the dregs as a toast to his murderous eromenos: “Here’s to the lovely Critias!”

Removing a senior politician in such an arbitrary and violent way was a sign of weakness rather than of strength and the government faltered. Two leading democrats in exile in Thebes decided to intervene. One of them was Thrasybulus, the capable admiral based at Samos in the last phase of the war, and the other Anytus, an influential politician and owner of a successful tanning business. He had had a checkered career: many years previously he had fallen head over heels in love with the teenaged Alcibiades. He was a moderate democrat and in 409 he was elected as one of the year’s ten generals. He had the misfortune to be in command when Pylos was lost to the Spartans. He was put on trial for this failure, but apparently paid the jury for an acquittal.

In December 404 the two men crossed over from Thebes into Attica with seventy followers and occupied a hill called Phyle ten miles from Athens. The Thirty sent a force to mount a blockade, but a snowstorm broke it up. Men left the city and joined Thrasybulus and soon he had seven hundred followers. Just before dawn one morning they attacked and scattered some cavalry and members of a Spartan garrison stationed on the Acropolis that had been dispatched to watch Phyle.

Morale among the Thirty fell sharply and they left the city. They took over the border town of Eleusis as an emergency retreat if that became necessary, and massacred the local population. Thrasybulus then marched by night to Piraeus, and Critias followed him to the port with his troops and men from the Spartan garrison. The fighters from Phyle retired in good order to high ground and, although outnumbered, drove off an enemy attack. Critias and seventy others lost their lives.

A confused pause ensued. The Thirty were abolished, but the oligarchs clung to power. Would the Spartans step in and save their cause? Lysander wanted to, but his high-handed behavior after Aegospotami had dismayed his own government. He had allowed Greek cities to offer sacrifices in his honor as if he were a god. He had had a statue of himself erected at Delphi; on its base a boastful inscription read that “he had destroyed the power of the sons of Cecrops [a legendary king of Athens], Lysander who crowned never-sacked Sparta.” Perhaps, his enemies whispered, he was meditating a revolution and wanted to set himself up as king or tyrant.

This was un-Spartan behavior and the Agiad monarch, Pausanias, who was in the field with an army, was suspicious. He wanted to do nothing that might enhance Lysander’s status. Supported by the ephors, he negotiated a peace between the warring parties at Athens. An amnesty was agreed for all past acts, excepting only those of the Thirty themselves and their officials. A constitutional commission restored the democracy. The foreign garrison withdrew. Men of all political persuasions did their best to make reconciliation work.

Only two years had passed since the catastrophe of Aegospotami and Athens was no longer a creature of the Spartans and had taken a long step towards retrieving its old liberties. But could it ever retrieve its old power? Even to fantasize such a dizzying hope, more time was required.

—

Signs of a changing political climate are illustrated by the careers of two distinguished but disillusioned Athenians—Conon and Xenophon. With the end of the war, many men who had flourished as soldiers or sailors found themselves out of work. For them, going home to a defeated and desolate city was an unappealing prospect, even if their fellow-citizens were to allow them back. They looked for work as mercenaries.

Mercenary troops had been used in the past (for instance, as trireme crews), but they were increasingly employed as hoplites in the fourth century. This was not just that the arrival of peace left large numbers of fit young men at loose ends. Athens was not the only polis that had registered heavy casualties and in the coming years states in need of an army had to look for supplementary fighters from abroad.

Also, the misery of the Peloponnesian War seems to have had a moral impact. The deployment of native force to drive foreign policy, an untroubled patriotism, and a willingness to sacrifice citizens’ lives freely were no longer part of the Athenian mentality. The fierce, self-sacrificial energy that the invention of democracy seems to have released had run its course. The demos would no longer obey a new Cimon or a new Pericles if he wanted to scatter thousands of citizen hoplites around the Eastern Mediterranean. People still loved their country, but they lacked the old passion. Loyalty to the state gave way to a new individualism.

Both Conon and Xenophon, in their different ways, turned their gaze to Persia, which was eager to make use of Greek military skills and men. The former had been an admiral at Aegospotami, and was the only man to have kept his nerve on that dark day. His trireme, seven others, and the state warship, the Paralus, quickly boarded all their rowers and sailed across the narrow sea to Lampsacus, the Spartan base. Here, with great presence of mind, they captured the main sails of Lysander’s fleet (sails were usually left in camp before a battle to save space). This meant that his flotilla could not be pursued.

Fearing the rage of the demos, not without cause, Conon fled to Cyprus where he placed himself under the protection of King Evagoras of Salamis, a city-state on the island. Evagoras, who belonged to a long-ruling dynasty, was a competent leader. He took over all of Cyprus and broke away from Persian rule. The local Greek culture flourished. There Conon, who was in his forties, lived quietly, letting time pass, but awaiting opportunity.

Power fills a vacuum. Sparta inherited the hegemony of Athens in the Aegean. It cynically presented itself as the liberator of Greece, but quickly became even more repressive than its predecessor. Lysander threw out democracies and appointed military governors, called harmosts, wherever he went. Like most Spartans when they were let off the leash and allowed to travel abroad, he behaved with a nauseous mixture of self-righteousness, corruption, and high-handedness.

Worse, in order to defeat Athens, Sparta had felt compelled to seek Persian assistance, and above all Persian money. The unprincipled price for that was the sacrifice of Hellenic independence on the Ionian coastline. Both powers recognized the presentational difficulty this created for the “liberator” and the Great King was content to allow the Ionians a show of autonomy in return for paying tribute to the Great King. But the fact remains that Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea had been for nothing.

—

However, relations with Sparta were soon to be transformed. In 405 the Great King Darius II died and the Persian court plunged into one of its regular phases of murderous palace intrigue. He had had four sons by his half sister, Parysatis. One of them succeeded to the throne as Artaxerxes II, but the queen mother had other ideas. Her favorite child was Lysander’s friend and ally Cyrus the Younger. It was through her influence that in 408 he had been appointed commander of Persian forces in the west although he was only in his late teens. She tried and failed to persuade her ailing husband to make Cyrus his heir.

Tissaphernes detected the prince in a plot to murder the new Great King. Artaxerxes, who was as emollient as his brother was headstrong, forgave him on his mother’s plea. This clemency was unwise.

The unrepentant Cyrus began to raise an army secretly, or at least discreetly, which he intended to lead against Artaxerxes and replace him on the throne. He called in his debts with the Spartans and demanded their support. His message to them was simple—I helped you win your war; now you help me win mine. They agreed, placed their fleet at his disposal, and appointed a Spartan general to lead a regiment of more than ten thousand Greek mercenaries, whom Cyrus had recruited to his army.

Xenophon, in his late twenties, had been a cavalryman for the Thirty, but was disgusted by their cruelty and especially by the bloodbath at Eleusis, which he had witnessed. However, he was a natural pro-Spartan oligarch and, to escape the restored democracy at Athens, joined up under Cyrus, of whom he became a great admirer.

He has left a vivid eyewitness account of his great adventure. One spring morning in 401 the armies of Cyrus and the Great King met near a village on the Euphrates called Cunaxa.

And now it was midday, and the enemy were not yet in sight; but when afternoon was coming on, there was seen a rising dust, which appeared at first like a white cloud, but sometime later like a kind of blackness in the plain, extending over a great distance. As the enemy came nearer and nearer, there were presently flashes of bronze here and there, and spears and the hostile ranks began to come into sight. There were horsemen in white cuirasses on the left wing of the enemy, under the command, it was reported, of Tissaphernes; next to them were troops with wicker shields and, farther on, hoplites with wooden shields which reached to their feet, these latter being Egyptians, people said; and then more horsemen and more bowmen.

The exact number of participants in the battle eludes us, but Artaxerxes’ host was so large that the center of his battle line, where the Great King was placed by tradition, extended beyond the edge of Cyrus’s left wing. The Greek mercenaries were on the pretender’s right wing and their flank abutted against a river. They were by far the best troops in the field and Artaxerxes’ left wing knew the treatment they could expect. They turned and fled before the Greeks even came within arrowshot. Encouraged by this rout and shouting again and again “Get out of the way,” Cyrus charged obliquely from the central position in his army at the Great King. In the melee Artaxerxes was wounded and unhorsed. He withdrew on foot to a nearby hill, but Cyrus was killed, and with him gone there was no point in anyone fighting on. The battle ended.

The Greeks had done well and were still a coherent fighting force. Their commanders unwisely accepted an invitation to dinner with the wily Tissaphernes. They were promptly arrested and executed. The mercenaries elected new generals, one of whom was Xenophon, and made their escape as best they could. They marched hundreds of miles through deserts and snow-filled mountain passes and came under frequent attack from Persian troops and angry locals. Finally, they reached the Black Sea, where they took ship to the Aegean and safety.

Sparta’s support for Cyrus brought unpleasant consequences. Artaxerxes pulled back from the autonomy-for-tribute understanding and Tissaphernes began to act aggressively towards the Ionian cities. The Spartans had a new, ambitious king, Agesilaus, lame from birth, who as a boy had been Lysander’s eromenos. He had a typically laconic wit. He was once invited to listen to a man who could imitate the nightingale’s song. “No thank you,” he replied. “I have heard the bird itself.”

Now about forty years old, the king decided to recover Sparta’s good name and from 399 to 395 led a successful campaign against the Persians in Asia Minor. Bearing Xenophon’s experience in mind, he aimed at winning

the person of the Great King and the wealth of Ecbatana and Susa, and above all things to rob the king of the power to sit at leisure on his throne, playing umpire for the Greeks in their wars, and corrupting their popular leaders.

Agesilaus was so successful that his opponent Tissaphernes lost favor in Susa. The queen mother, who seems to have led a charmed life, had not forgiven him for his hostility to her favorite son and persuaded Artaxerxes to have him beheaded for his failure to repel the invader. His fate was a reminder that it is possible to be too clever.

Back in mainland Greece Sparta’s allies were losing patience. They had received none of the spoils of war after the fall of Athens and were irritated by Spartan meddling in the north of Greece. Pharnabazus stirred the pot by laying out fifty talents in bribes. In 395 Argos, Thebes, Corinth, and a rather nervous Athens launched a war against Sparta (the so-called Corinthian War). Their fortunes ebbed and flowed. The two most important outcomes were, first, the death of Lysander in battle in Boeotia and, second, the recall of Agesilaus, much to his fury and just as the Great King had calculated.

Meanwhile the Persians had spent some years building a large fleet in the Aegean. Conon was appointed as its commander and, with the Great King’s gold, he contributed a squadron of his own crewed by Hellenic émigrés and mercenaries. In August 394 Conon destroyed the Spartan fleet off the island of Cnidus.

It was a triumphant moment for the Athenians, and one to be savored. Conon toured the islands of the Aegean expelling the Spartan harmosts and garrisons. He then sailed back to Piraeus where he received a hero’s welcome. At great expense (Pharnabazus picked up the bill), he employed the crew of his eighty triremes, about sixteen thousand men, to refortify the port and rebuild the Long Walls.

A little more than one decade had passed since Aegospotami and the loss of empire, and the violet-crowned city was once again a great power. It began to invest in warships. As the patriotic Isocrates remarked: “The Spartans…lost their supremacy, Greeks were liberated and our city recovered part of its old glory.”

The careers of Conon and Xenophon allowed thinking men to draw two momentous conclusions. First, the pretensions of Sparta, perilously short of citizens as it was, were shown to be hollow. The battle of Cnidus broke once for all its ambition to replace Athens as the ruler of a great maritime empire. Second, the experience of Xenophon and his mercenary comrades exploded another reputation—that of the Great King. Persian soldiery could not rival the professional competence of the Hellenic hoplite (although Persian cavalry had to be reckoned with).

A talented general with enough trained hoplites and a deep pocket would have a good chance of overthrowing the vast and ostensibly invulnerable realm that had once had the Greek world at its feet. Agesilaus might have been that man, had the gods not decided otherwise.

—

During the years following the fall of Athens, the restored demos had recovered much of its self-confidence and bellicosity. Critias and his oligarchs had come and gone, but it had not forgiven, even if it had officially forgotten, the crimes of its domestic enemies. Abroad it tried to exploit Sparta’s misfortunes and at home, despite the amnesty after the deposition of the Thirty, it looked about for vengeance. In 399 it found a high-profile target in Socrates, who was taken to court on capital charges.

“I don’t know what effect my accusers have had on you, men of Athens,” he told the five hundred and one jurors at his trial. “But so far as I was concerned I almost forgot who I was, their arguments were so convincing. On the other hand, there is hardly a word of truth in what they have said.”

Socrates might have been forgiven for his puzzlement. The accusations against him were serious enough to warrant the death penalty, but at first reading they seem to contradict everything we know about him. What was going on?

A politician called Meletus, supported by two others, Anytus and Lycon, brought the charges against the philosopher. They read:

This indictment and affidavit is sworn by Meletus, the son of Meletus of Pitthos, against Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus of Alopece: Socrates is guilty of refusing to recognize the gods recognized by the state, and of introducing other new divinities [in Greek,

daimonia

]. He is also guilty of corrupting the youth. The penalty demanded is death.

Little is known about Meletus. He was young and, according to Plato, had “a hooked nose, and long straight hair, and a poorly growing beard.” He was a tragic poet whom Aristophanes attacked, or perhaps the son of one.

We have met Anytus before, hero of the democratic restoration. He was acquainted with Socrates and appears as a character in one of Plato’s dialogues, Meno, in which he is presented as being hostile to sophists. Lycon was a democrat and an orator. Socrates was friendly with Anytus’s and (perhaps) Lycon’s sons, and the two fathers may have resented his influence over them.

What is curious about the charges is that Socrates was a religious man and noted for his piety. He was punctilious in observing all the relevant rituals; he took part in the many city festivals and followed the common forms of private and public worship. Although he criticized some sacred legends, he did not reject the existence of the Olympians as some scientific rationalists did, such as Anaxagoras, the friend of Pericles.

It would seem that Meletus and his friends were attacking the “Socrates” of The Clouds, whom Aristophanes tars with the same brush as those nomadic intellectuals, the sophists. In fact, the real Socrates was known to be as critical of them as was the average Athenian. It is hard to see how this accusation could have been made to stick.

Did he then introduce new gods, as alleged? Questions of precise belief did not much interest the Greeks and many new cults were imported to Athens without raised eyebrows or cries of heresy. However, Socrates did frequently refer to his daimonion, his own supernatural spirit, which gave him personal access to the will of the gods. Once again there was nothing so very unusual for a Greek to consult oracles or other signs.

On the other hand, Greek religion was essentially about the community not the individual. Indeed, it was a means by which the individual signaled his membership of the community. But Socrates’ daimonion spoke to no one else and was, in effect, his private property. This must have been the offense; no right-thinking citizen should boast a hotline to the supernatural, for it lent too much weight to the individual conscience.

The third and last charge was the easiest to understand. Everyone was aware that, although uninterested in money himself, Socrates was an intellectual honeypot for wealthy young aristocrats. They numbered among them men such as Xenophon and his exact contemporary Plato, who spent his long lifetime preserving, glorifying, and developing his memory and his ideas. But, much worse than that, they included Critias, leader of the Thirty, and his nephew and ward Charmides, an active supporter of the oligarchy who fell with him during the fighting at Piraeus in 403. They both appear in Socratic dialogues by Plato.

Socrates was believed to be misodemos, a hater of the democracy, and a good case could be made that his circle was a breeding ground of political reaction. This was unfair, as the philosopher’s brave stand against the tyrannical behavior of the Thirty showed, at risk to his own life; and, once second thoughts had set in, even democrats respected his refusal to put the motion to the enraged ecclesia to try the Arginusae generals together. Nevertheless, many people blamed him, indirectly at least, for the overthrow of the established constitution. This was the heart of the matter.

There being no public prosecutor nor a police force to detect crime, any citizen was allowed to bring criminal charges against any other (the Scythian archers were only tasked with keeping public order). He would make an arrest (if incapable, a magistrate or Archon would step in). The process was not free of risk, for in the case of wrongful arrest a fine of 1,000 drachmas was levied. The accuser led the prosecution and he could pay for the services of professional speechwriters.

At a preliminary hearing, the plaintiff swore that the charge was genuine and the defendant that he was innocent (he was entitled to enter a counterplea if he so wished). All trials took place in the open air and at different locations in the city (for example, at the Painted Stoa in the agora or the Odeum), dependent on the category of alleged crime. They lasted for one day only. The presiding Archon had no powers to give legal directions and simply oversaw due process. Juries, as already noted, were very large in order to discourage bribery. Once each side had delivered its speeches, they cast their ballots in secret and without discussion. The prosecution required 50 percent plus one of the votes to secure a conviction.

—

We do not have a copy of Socrates’ defense, and apparently he spoke off-the-cuff and in a rather offhand manner. He was unyielding and seems almost to have dared the jury to convict him. Both Plato and Xenophon wrote versions of his speech and, although these overlap here and there, they differ markedly from one another. Neither man was present and must have relied on a combination of eyewitness reports and imagination. Whatever his actual words Plato surely captured his spirit when he has him say:

Men of Athens, I respect you and love you, but I shall obey god rather than you. As long as I live and am able to carry on, I shall never give up philosophy nor stop trying to win you over and pointing out the truth to any one of you I may meet.

Socrates was found guilty by a majority of sixty votes. For some crimes there were fixed punishments, but when, as in this case, there was no penalty fixed by law, the prosecutor recommended one and the defense another. The jury was asked to choose between them. Meletus sought death, as in the indictment. Socrates teased his audience by saying that he had wanted to propose maintenance for life at the state’s expense as a public benefactor; but in deference to his friends, including Plato, whom he had consulted, he suggested a fine of 3,000 drachmas. The jury, irritated by his attitude, voted for death by a larger majority than they had for his guilt.

The accusers of Socrates had not in fact wanted his execution. Banishment would have been sufficient. But the philosopher refused to escape abroad, as had been expected. He had always obeyed the law and refused to evade its sanctions now. And in any case he had lived long enough. When his wife complained that he was condemned unjustly, he replied: “Well, would you prefer me to have been condemned justly?”

Socrates spent a delay of some weeks in Athens’s small twelve-cell prison (archaeologists have found it) so that a religious festival would not be polluted by his death. He was then told to drink a concoction of poison hemlock. He drained the cup calmly and with no sign of distaste and the small company of close friends in the room broke down in tears.

Plato was absent ill, but his account of Socrates’ final minutes as narrated to a friend by an eyewitness, a disciple called Phaedo, is justly famous. Socrates complained:

“Really, my friends, what kind of behavior is this? Why, that was my main reason for sending away the women, to prevent this sort of commotion; because I am told that one should make one’s end in a peaceful frame of mind. Calm down and try to be brave.”

This made us feel ashamed, and we controlled our tears. Socrates walked about, and soon, saying that his legs were heavy, lay down on his back—that was what the prison warden recommended. The man (he was the same one who had administered the poison) kept his hand on Socrates, and after a little while inspected his feet and legs; then pinched his foot hard and asked if he felt it. Socrates said no. Then he did the same to his legs; and moving gradually upwards in this way let us see that he was becoming inert and numb. Presently he touched him again and said that when it reached the heart, Socrates would be gone.

The numbness was spreading about as far as his groin when Socrates uncovered his face—for he had covered it up—and said (these were his last words): “Crito, we ought to sacrifice a cock to Asclepius. Make sure it’s done. Don’t forget.”

“No, it shall be done,” said Crito. “Are you sure that there is nothing else?”

Socrates made no reply to this question, but after a little while he stirred; and when the man uncovered him, his eyes were fixed. When Crito saw this, he closed the mouth and eyes.

Such, Echecrates, was the end of our comrade, who was, we may fairly say, of all those whom we knew in our time, the bravest and also the wisest and most upright man.

Asclepius was the god of healing and Socrates presumably meant by his last words that he was thankful for being cured of the disease of life.

Some years later, a repentant demos executed the leading prosecutor, Meletus, and exiled Anytus and the other accusers for their part in the hounding of Socrates. We are told that Anytus was stoned to death when he visited the Black Sea polis of Heraclea and travelers could still visit his grave in Roman times. In Athens later in the fourth century a statue of the philosopher was commissioned from the great sculptor Lysippus. In effect, Socrates had been canonized.

—

The Corinthian War, which had started in 395, continued to go badly for the Spartans. They had some successes, but in 390 the Athenians annihilated a Spartan regiment. The engagement had no strategic consequences, but 250 hoplites lay dead on the field. Sparta could not stand losses on that scale.

All the international powers were coming under strain. Persia was absorbed by revolts in Egypt and Cyprus, the Spartans had acquired a new fleet that Athens feared would interrupt food imports from the Black Sea. Argos and Corinth were also in difficulties.

Prompted by Sparta, the Great King proposed a general peace. Its theme was independence for city-states, but important concessions were made to special interests. According to the treaty, which was agreed in 386, “King Artaxerxes believes it to be just that cities in Asia should be his, as also…Cyprus.” All the other cities in the Aegean and mainland Greece were to be independent—except for the islands of Lemnos, Imbros, and Skyros: this reservation ensured the compliance of Athens, which was reluctant to lose these new island acquisitions.

Here we witness Sparta (and Artaxerxes) gaining an interval for drawing breath; Athens was obliged to discontinue its hopes of imperial expansion and a reluctant Thebes had to allow the autonomy of the cities of Boeotia. All Sparta had to do for these gains was to stop fighting the Persians and once more to abandon its Ionian cousins, as Plutarch put it, “in the most shameful and lawless way.”

Sparta now had the upper hand to settle various outstanding issues in the Peloponnese, and also in 382 sent a major expedition by land to northern Greece against Olynthus, which headed a growing league of more than thirty poleis in Chalcidice. The city was beginning to threaten Spartan supremacy in that part of the Aegean and needed to be cut down to size. After three years of indecisive fighting, Olynthus, hard-pressed by famine, conceded defeat.

On that journey north the Spartans sought permission to pass through Theban territory, which was willingly granted. However, a regimental commander called Phoebidas, who, writes Xenophon, “was not considered to be a man who thought things through or was very bright,” was let into the city of Thebes by a dissident oligarch. He and his men occupied the citadel, called the Cadmea, and the democratic government was thrown out.

The coup was a blatant breach of the peace treaty and across Hellas there was a hugely negative reaction. Agesilaus gave it his support while at the same time trickily distancing himself from it. Phoebidas was heavily fined, but Sparta kept the Cadmea.

Athens and Thebes were bitterly hostile neighbors, but both were angry with Sparta. They quickly entered into an alliance and went to war with their common enemy.

—

Isocrates was the most celebrated intellectual and educationist of the fourth century. When he spoke, many felt he spoke for Greece. And that was how he liked it.

Born in Athens in 436, a few years before the start of the Peloponnesian War, he became one of its victims. His family was rich and his father, Theodorus, gave him a first-class education. He studied under some of the best-known sophists, among them Gorgias, a one-man traveling university whom Plato ridiculed in one of his dialogues for arguing that it was unnecessary to know the truth of things if one had learned the art of persuasion.

Isocrates also fell under the influence of Socrates and in the Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates foretell, with a typical touch of Socratic sarcasm, the young man’s future fame as an orator or a philosopher.

In the later stages of the Peloponnesian War the family lost its fortune and Isocrates had to cast about for a way of earning a living. He began his career by writing courtroom speeches. He left Athens during the time of the Thirty and taught rhetoric on the island of Chios. He returned to Athens after the restoration of the democracy and shortly before 390 opened a school of rhetoric. The curriculum was unusually wide and he placed a greater emphasis on the importance of morality than most of the teachers with whom he competed.

The school became famous throughout the Hellenic world, where able young men could be “finished.” His fees were high and he only accepted a maximum of nine students at a time. Isocrates was a good businessman and made a great deal of money. His only weakness was a poor voice and he lacked confidence as a public speaker. So he tended to write essays in the form of speeches that he published rather than delivered in person.