Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  The allegation was, and remains, credible. Fourteen years later Socrates was to die on a charge of failing to honor the city’s gods, a charge against which he scarcely deigned to defend himself, and Socrates had been Alcibiades’ mentor. It is unlikely the young general was in any conventional sense devout, and his “insolence” and readiness to breach taboos were well known. Gossip had it that he had even staged a mock murder, shown the corpse to his friends and asked them to help conceal the crime. If he was ready to make a game of the solemnity of death, why should he be expected to stop short of blaspheming against the gods?

  Whatever the truth, Alcibiades vociferously asserted his innocence, and declared his readiness to stand trial and clear his name. His opponents demurred. He was the charismatic leader of the expedition from which all Athenians were hoping for so much. His popularity was at its height. Thucydides writes that his enemies feared that the people would be overlenient with him were he to come to trial. They probably feared more than that. “All the soldiers and sailors who were about to embark for Sicily were on his side, and the force of 1,000 Argive and Mantinean infantry had openly declared that it was only on Alcibiades’ account they were going to cross the sea and fight in a distant land.” The expeditionary force was, in effect, his army. To impeach him while it lay in the harbor would trigger a mutiny. To put him to death might well start a civil war. His accusers temporized. They did not wish to delay the fleet’s departure, they said. Alcibiades would sail, but the charges against him remained outstanding. On his return, whatever happened in Sicily, he would face his accusers.

  Perhaps a quick victory might have made it possible for him to win his case and salvage his position, but that victory was not forthcoming. The money, essential for the maintenance of the expeditionary force, that had been promised by the Athenian colonies in Sicily had never existed. Cities they had thought their allies refused to let them land. Alcibiades managed to take Catania, but it was a small gain and it came too late. At home in Athens more informers had been coming forward. With so many of the fighting men who admired him absent on campaign he had fewer supporters left in the city. Without his presence to dazzle or intimidate them the Assembly turned against him. In August, only weeks after he had sailed out of Piraeus with such pomp, the Salaminia, the state ship, arrived at Catania bringing orders recalling him at once to Athens to answer the charges against him.

  This, Alcibiades’ first fall, was brought about in part by himself—whether or not he was guilty as charged, he had undoubtedly been reckless in his defiance of conventional propriety and arrogant in his disdain for the public’s opinion of his wild ways—and in part by the intrigues of his political rivals. But beyond those immediate causes of his downfall lies something more nebulous and more fundamental. Alcibiades was a hero. He had the charisma and the prodigious talents of his legendary predecessors. And the Athenians feared their heroes as fervently as they worshiped them, and they feared even more the tendency to hero worship in themselves.

  Months before his fall Alcibiades had told the Assembly he knew full well that “people whose brilliance has made them prominent” aroused suspicion and dislike. Aristotle expressed a popular sentiment when he described a polity which contained an outstanding individual as being as ill proportioned as a portrait in which one foot was gigantic. Alcibiades had already been subjected to one of the methods by which the Athenians rid themselves of those grown too great. In 417 BC an ostracism had been proposed. “They employ this measure from time to time,” wrote Plutarch, “in order to cripple and drive out any man whose power and reputation in the city may have risen to exceptional heights.” Each citizen wrote a name on a potsherd. The unfortunate winner of most votes was banished for ten years. The target in this case was either Alcibiades or Nicias, but the two joined forces and by vigorous campaigning contrived that the majority of votes went to a comparative nonentity (who was probably the instigator of the ostracism). It was, for Alcibiades, a warning of how wary his compatriots were of their great men. There were plenty of other instances to underline the point. In Alcibiades’ lifetime Phidias, the sculptor and designer of the Parthenon, was jailed on a charge of sacrilege. Pericles himself was stripped of his command and fined the enormous sum of fifteen talents when the Assembly agreed to blame him for the plague (a decision which, in ascribing to him a power to rival that of Providence, was in itself a kind of tribute to his superhuman capacity). The astronomer Anaxagoras was imprisoned, Euripides was so slighted that he left Athens for Macedonia, and five years after Alcibiades died his mentor and the love of his youth, Socrates, was put to death. “The people were ready to make use of men who excelled,” wrote Plutarch, “but they still looked on them with suspicion and constantly strove to humble their pride.”

  Alcibiades was not only exceptional; he was also bellicose. The Athenians were a fighting people, but they were also justly proud of their great creation, a civilization based on the resolution of differences by nonviolent dispute. The heroes of old were still worshiped in classical Athens. Hero cults were numerous, and attracted distinguished devotees: Alcibiades’ contemporary Sophocles was a priest in the cult of the hero Halon. But the heroes were fierce spirits who had to be propitiated. They were thirsty for blood, which was poured, after dark, into trenches at the supposed site of their burials, and if they were not appeased their anger was terrible.

  “Let me seize great glory,” Homer’s Achilles begs his mother, “and drive some woman of Troy … / to claw with both hands at her tender cheeks and wipe away / her burning tears as the sobs come choking from her throat.” Homer’s warriors know full well that their splendid exploits are the cause of others’ grief; they may regret the fact, but they do not balk at it. To later generations, though, their ruthlessness came to seem savage and abhorrent. In the Iliad Achilles sacrifices twelve Trojan prisoners on Patroclus’s pyre, slaughtering them in cold blood and hacking their bodies to pieces. Homer reports his action briefly and without condemnation, but to Euripides, who had celebrated Alcibiades’ Olympic victory with a song, Achilles’ human sacrifices were monstrous. In his Hecuba Achilles’ ghost demands the slaughter of the Trojan princess Polyxena on his grave. In Iphigenia at Aulis Achilles is associated with Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter. If she were not killed there would be no wind to carry the black ships to Troy, no war in which Achilles could demonstrate his valor. The death of the innocent girl is the necessary prerequisite for the fulfillment of the warrior’s glorious destiny: both the hero and his glory are tainted with her blood. In the second century AD Flavius Philostratus told a story about Achilles’ ghost appearing to a merchant and demanding a slave girl who boasted of being descended from King Priam. The merchant, terrified, handed her over. The spectral hero fell upon her and tore her to pieces. In the light cast backwards across time by these horrific stories Homer’s account of Achilles’ rage takes on a different shading. The brilliant warrior is also the serial killer, the slaughterer of fathers, husbands, farmers, councillors, the enemy of all women, the destroyer of civilized society.

  The shattered hermae were not the only ominous sight in the streets of Athens at the time the Sicilian expedition sailed out with Alcibiades as one of its commanders. It was the festival of Adonis, and groups of women dressed as though in deep mourning were carrying effigies of the dead youth, the beautiful young man whom Venus had loved, through the streets, wailing as they went. Later, when the terrible outcome of the expedition was known, the somber processions were remembered as presages of what was to come and, more particularly, as reminders of the price to others of one man’s glory. If the campaign was to fulfill what Socrates had identified as being Alcibiades’ ambition, “to fill the mouths of all men with your name and power,” it would do so only at the cost of many other young men’s lives. It was a price the Athenians did not pay gladly. In one of the reversals frequent in the history of Athenian democracy the people first allowed themselves to be seduced by Alcibiades’ high talk of glorious conquest,
and then, in a fit of self-disgust and revulsion, punished him for their own lapse into irrationality.

  Alcibiades was not placed under arrest when the Salaminia arrived in Sicily. His opponents still feared provoking a mutiny, and as Plutarch remarked, Alcibiades “might very easily have brought this about if he had wished.” But he preferred the role of exile to that of rebel. Apparently docile, he agreed to follow the Salaminia home in his own ship. In southern Italy he put ashore, and vanished. The Athenian Assembly tried him in his absence and condemned him to death. His estate was confiscated. His name was inscribed on a stele set up on the Acropolis as a monument to his disgrace. All the priests and priestesses of Athens were ordered to call down curses on him. A reward of a talent (a considerable fortune) was offered to anyone who could bring him in, dead or alive. Three months after he had sailed from Athens with such pomp and splendor he was an outcast, a hunted man with a price on his head.

  What Alcibiades did next has identified him, in the opinion of many latter-day historians, as an unprincipled scoundrel. When he heard of the death sentence pronounced against him he is reported to have said grimly, “I will show them I am still alive.” Achilles turned traitor after his quarrel with Agamemnon, praying that his fellow Greeks should be beaten back to their ships. So, now, did Alcibiades. Before he even left Sicily he had begun his treachery. The Athenians had contacted an opposition group in the Sicilian city of Messina and arranged that they should open the gates to an Athenian attack. Alcibiades informed the pro-Spartan authorities in Messina of the plot. The attack was thwarted and the conspirators were put to death. From Italy Alcibiades crossed to the Peloponnese, and after first sending to ask for a guarantee of his safety, he made his way to Sparta. There he offered his services to his hosts, his native city’s archenemies. He urged them to intervene in Sicily (which they did, with devastating consequences for the Athenians). He also suggested that they do what the Athenians had for years been dreading that they might do, fortify the stronghold of Decelea in the mountains north of Athens which commanded the route whereby the revenue from the silver mines, the tribute money from the offshore colonies, and, most importantly, food supplies reached Athens. The Spartans acted on his advice. “It was this, more than any other single action,” remarks Plutarch, “which wore down the resources of Athens, and finally ruined her.”

  Such a betrayal, surely, could never be forgiven. Yet this was the same Alcibiades whom the Athenians were to welcome back seven years later with garlands and embraces and cries of joy, whom they crowned with a golden crown and elected general with supreme powers on both land and sea, the same Alcibiades of whom it was said that while he lived Athens could not die.

  We live in a postnationalist age, one in which Alcibiades’ disloyalty to his native city seems an absolute disqualification from the pantheon of heroes. But treason has not always been judged the action of the mean-spirited. A hero may demonstrate his grandeur as an individual by the disdain with which he ignores or transgresses the obligations which bind ordinary people to each other or to the state. Achilles despised the kind of status attainable by allegiance to a community of petty mortals, looking to Zeus alone for confirmation of his honor. So, after the Athenians condemned him to death, Alcibiades, as far as his motives can be guessed at, acted for the rest of his life for himself alone, serving now Athens’ enemies, now Athens herself again, true only to himself and his limitless ambition. His Athenian contemporaries intermittently feared and distrusted him. Some hated him. But, traitor though he was, they did not despise him.

  The relationship between the individual and the community in fifth-century Athens was an unstable one. The democratic Assembly was terrifyingly fickle, inclined to turn savagely on its own servants. The generals who later replaced Alcibiades (after he was stripped of his command for the second time in 406 BC) were all put to death for alleged misconduct during a battle which they had won for Athens. And just as the state could and did abandon its citizens, so citizens could quit the state. Both of the two great Athenian historians who wrote as contemporaries of Alcibiades, Thucydides and Xenophon, were to spend the majority of their adult lives away from the city, the former exiled for a military failure, the latter leaving of his own free will to serve first the Persian pretender Cyrus and subsequently the Spartans. Alcibiades’ defection would not have outraged his contemporaries to anything like the extent that it has shocked posterity.

  Nor, given the influences to which he had been exposed, was it entirely unpredictable. The nurse who cared for him in his earliest childhood was a Spartan woman. His family had long had Spartan connections. One of his first political acts was to claim for himself the position of the Spartans’ representative in Athens, a job which had traditionally been performed by his forebears. When the Spartan delegates came to Athens to negotiate peace terms in 421 BC Alcibiades enjoyed privileged access to the most powerful of them, the ephor Endius, with whom he had family connections. The two states might be deadly enemies, but they were also near neighbors, and the links between upper-class families, in classical Greece as in medieval and early modern Europe, transcended national boundaries.

  Besides, as an adolescent Alcibiades had been Socrates’ best-beloved disciple. Socrates was said to be the only person who could manage him, the only one whose opinion Alcibiades valued and whose advice he took. It is unclear how much influence the philosopher maintained over him once he was an adult, but unless Plato’s Symposium is entirely fictional (which is unlikely) they were still close friends in the year before the Sicilian expedition embarked. Much later, when the philosopher was on trial for his life, his friends were at pains to point out that he could not be held responsible for the actions of his followers, but that he influenced their thinking seems indisputable. In The Birds Aristophanes describes a group of unpatriotically pro-Spartan youths as having been “socratified.” The jibe was amply justified. The philosopher’s most prominent disciples included not only the traitor Alcibiades but also several others who were passionate admirers of all things Spartan. Xenophon the historian, who was one of Socrates’ devoted followers, fought for the Spartans against Persia, accepted an estate in recognition of his services from the Spartan King Agesilaus II, and lived happily on it for twenty years. When Sparta was defeated by the Thebans in 371 BC he was obliged to leave, but he did not return to Athens. Critias, the collaborator who was set up by the Spartans as leader of the oligarchic regime of the Thirty Tyrants in Athens in 404 BC, was another of Socrates’ circle. And so of course was Plato, a nobleman who had relatives among the Thirty and whose ideal state, as described in The Republic, has a constitution which resembles that of Sparta far more closely than it resembles the Athenian democracy. It has been argued that when the restored Athenian democracy accused Socrates of “corrupting the youth,” and put him to death for it, the charge had a precise political meaning. He was being accused of being a Spartan sympathizer. The heroic stand he made at his trial, which has earned him the admiration of generations of libertarians and defenders of free speech and free inquiry, was made, if this theory is correct, in assertion of his right to commend one of the most repressive and secretive regimes in recorded history.

  Sparta is the classical model for all subsequent totalitarian states, just as Athens is for democracies. It was a warrior society, dedicated with grim exclusivity to its own preservation and aggrandizement. The Spartans were a Dorian people who had invaded the Peloponnese from the north and had reduced the indigenous population, known as helots, to a state of serfdom. The helots had not submitted tamely. Their repeated uprisings were brutally suppressed. New ephors, on taking office, routinely declared war on them “in order that there might be no impiety in slaying them.” The state maintained a corps of helot killers, whose operations Plutarch describes: “They would be armed with daggers and supplied with basic rations, but nothing else. … At night they came down onto the roads and, if they found a helot, would cut his throat.” The state’s much-admired stability was guarante
ed only by the omnipresence within it of violence and sudden death.

  The helots were obliged to provide food for the master race. The Spartans, thus freed from the labor of providing for themselves, were able to devote themselves single-mindedly to the business of warfare. “The Spartans are, of all men, those who admire poetry and poetic glory least,” noted Pausanias. “They did not understand how to be at leisure,” wrote Aristotle, “and never engaged in any kind of training higher than training for war.”

  It was forbidden for any Spartan to travel abroad except for purposes of conquest, and foreigners were not made welcome, for Lycurgus, the Spartans’ mythical lawgiver, had wished the society he created should remain permanently intact and unchanged and “along with strange people strange doctrines must come in.” Trade was virtually nonexistent, each Spartan living off the produce of his own allotted plot of land. Lycurgus had forbidden luxury of all sorts. The staple Spartan food was a black broth famous throughout Greece for its nastiness. Spartan houses were all identical, and so crudely built that (according to a patronizing Athenian joke) a Spartan visiting Corinth was astonished to see wooden planks, and asked whether the trees in that region had square trunks. Spartan dress was austerely simple. Even Spartan speech was limited and deliberately brusque. The people maintained a “general habit of silence,” a “laconicism” (the word means simply “Spartan”) which combined the caution of those whose rigidly conservative, authoritarian state permitted them no political voice and the dumbness of those whose every personal response was suppressed or put to public use.