Mind you, don’t forget that Athenians were brought up on the epics. From the cradle they were entranced with tales of a time when, in the Age of Heroes, Achilles, Ajax, Odysseus et al. were giants of men and coloured the earth with their heroic deeds. For some, a character such as Alcibiades appeared to have brought heroism back to earth. His extreme gorgeousness could be interpreted as a sign of his quasi-divinity – his beauty a gift given directly by the gods.
This much is clear. Suppose that there were men whose bodily physique showed the same superiority as is shown by the statues of the gods, then all would agree that the rest of mankind would deserve to be their slaves.5
The passions this larger-than-life character aroused were violent. Alcibiades was handsome, brash, materialistic, ambitious, feckless, power-hungry, decadent – and yet Socrates did not condemn the boy, he was fascinated by him. Alcibiades was the Athens that Socrates was struggling to live with. Socrates was drawn to all that was heady and worldly and meritocratic about the ‘Queen of Cities’ (and he was himself famously ‘hedonistic’), but he smelled its weakness, he feared for the future of a thing that was driven by individual ambition and was called, all too conveniently, a democracy.
Alcibiades, boasting (thinly disguised) that even he, even he with his luxuriant charms, could not seduce Socrates, framed his time with Socrates as a love-story. This should be a great fable. The meeting of the perfect mind with the perfect body. In the Symposium, Alcibiades protests that he wants to be a better man and that only Socratic magic can work to achieve this end. Again he is like Athena’s city herself – full of potential, successful, but still seeking a position on a moral compass:
Nothing is more important to me than becoming the best man I can be, and no one can help me more than you to reach that aim …6
And tonight Alcibiades sits with Socrates while the party rocks, and lies with him when it is over. Alcibiades recalls another night the two lay close together, around the time of the Potidaean campaign. Socrates has only a thin cloak, but he is wrapped in Alcibiades’ rich mantle. Excited by his words – as Alcibiades says – still energised even by the memory of what was said (‘I can feel it at this moment even as I’m speaking’7), the lusty, lusting young warrior is determined to have his curious bedfellow.
We have all been there: the dark, the whispers, the unseen skin pricks connecting flesh to flesh. Yet Socrates chose to love Alcibiades with his heart, not his body. He wanted to live in an Athens that could deny itself, as well as indulge. And so in Plato’s Symposium, Socrates turns the advances of Alcibiades down. The power of love, Aphrodite’s tricky gift to man, was of great fascination for Socrates. He recognised the trouble love caused, when sexual desire drove you mad (mania is a Greek word that can mean a kind of erotic frenzy) …
‘By Herakles!’ said Xenophon, ‘What awesome power you attribute to a kiss!’
‘And this amazes you?’ said Socrates. ‘Don’t you know,’ he said, ‘that scorpions, even though they are no bigger than a half-obol’s size, when they merely touch one’s mouth wear humans down with gut-wrenching pains and deprive them of their good sense?’
‘Yes, by god,’ said Xenophon. ‘The reason is that scorpions have some poison in their bite.’
‘You foolish one!’ said Socrates. ‘Don’t you think that beautiful boys also have some poison in their love, which you don’t see? Don’t you know that this beast, which they call “the beautiful boy in the prime of his youth”, is so much more dangerous than scorpions because scorpions at least have to touch whereas this beast can poison from a distance? … But I advise you, Xenophon, whenever you see some beautiful boy, to flee with all speed.’8
And of course Socrates’ philosophy cannot but bear relevance to eroticism and sex. In this Greek world the physical and the spiritual were two breaths in the same whisper. An older man made love to a younger to instil virtue in him. This was the ‘good’ love that could be complemented by ‘bad’ physical love. Plato allows Socrates’ philosophy to be heavy with his sexual overlay. And even ‘bad’ love has a greater purpose. For Socrates sex is a means to an end – a way of producing beautiful men and (since the advice is given by Diotima in the Symposium) beautiful women too. To populate and promote a beautiful city. Socrates might not choose to have sex with Alcibiades, but he never denied the power, or purpose or pleasure of sex itself.9
Enchanting, illuminating and thought-provoking as the scenes in Plato’s theatrical Symposium are, the real life of its characters was grubbier.
Despite all this talk of love and affection, outside the warm walls of the historical symposia things had not been going well for the Athenians. Following the debacle of Delion and Amphipolis there had been a three-year peace between Athens and Sparta. But then in the summer of 418 the Spartans beat the Argives (Athenian allies) and Athenian forces at Mantinea. Mantinea sits in a wide floodplain 100 miles south of Athens. Alcibiades, by this time voted Athenian General, had persuaded Argos, Mantinea and Elis (all democratic cities at this stage) to join together as comrades in the Peloponnese. Sparta read this, correctly, as a threat and decided to take action. Troops began to mass, glaring at each other from their respective camps. Initially the Spartans had tried to burn Mantinea’s crops, and then threatened to divert their river so that the city-state’s fields would be drowned under flood-water. Both then proceeded to play at push-me-pull-you, each side trying to use the vagaries of the dramatic landscape in the area to their own military advantage.
On the final day of fighting, under the glowering shadow of the Lyrkian mountains, it was superior Spartan strategy that resulted in the deaths of more than 1,000 allied troops, many Athenians amongst them. Messengers ran gloomily back to the mother-city, retracing the route that the Athenian Pheidippides had taken all those years ago to try to ensure Spartan aid at the Battle of Marathon, when Sparta and Athens were still friendly. With their back to the Tegean valley, not a thing of beauty, glacially eradicated, farmers still building here in mud-brick as they have done for 4,000 years, while leaves raced themselves through the sky, back to a city-state where men were beginning to lose their sense of purpose. The rousing words of Pericles, when Athens was broadcast as ‘the leader and envy of all Greece’, were wearing decidedly thin. From the time when Plato’s Symposium is set, 416 BC, onwards, Athens was fragile and fractious. Men voted to ostracise one another from the city. The tension between aristocrats and democrats was rising. In years to come the demos would remember, darkly, the rumours of these highfalutin evenings when men such as Socrates and Alcibiades drank and ate well and talked of love while an enemy breathed down Athena’s neck.
And it was the affront of words spoken behind closed doors, or in intimate conversations – the exchanges that give us Plato’s Dialogues, that would come to make Socrates both one of the world’s most tenacious and most widely read philosophers – and that would turn the tide of contemporary opinion against him.
At the end of the Symposium, Alcibiades lurches off, wine-swollen, to carry on with his Bacchic revels. He is a satire of himself – or, as Socrates puts it, to satyrikon, a satyr-play. His drive is to love the fug of the crowd, to be loved by it; no doubt to reach a heady climax on this hot spring night. In history, Alcibiades is, around the time of the setting of the Symposium, sailing dangerously close to the wind. He enjoys increasing influence in the Assembly with his grand talk and even grander gestures, but already men are anxious about his degree of influence and jealous of his degrees of success. In 416 BC he comes close to being ostracised. And in the Symposium he shatters the dining party’s spell; while bright talk and a searching exploration of the nature of love have kept the andron alight, he pollutes the high-octane atmosphere by bringing in something (to Greek minds) grubby, and obvious. A prostitute: a flute-girl. There is a dark double entendre here. When Athens’ walls are eventually pulled down, the democracy destroyed, Spartans trampling through Athenian homes, it will be the city’s flute-girls – sick perhaps of having been the mus
ically talented sex-slaves to Athenian democrats all their adult lives – who raise a victory cry, who herald the end of ‘Golden Age’ Athens. It is men like Alcibiades, implies Plato, who are killing Athens with the wrong kind of love.
Demon drink
Tomb-raiders know how to take all the best goods. In the basement of one Greek museum sits a beautiful, huge drinking bowl rescued from the illegal antiquities trade. Delicate vines lace around the edge, men lie close to one another, intimate and trusting, but in the centre of the cup is a petrol-blue monster, a Gorgon who grimaces and through her gaping teeth lolls her engorged tongue out at the viewer, at the drinker, the symposiast. Painted close to the year that Socrates died from hemlock poison, the cup is reminding us what horrors excessive love of our fellow men – lulled by wine, by a false sense of security and joint purpose, loose-tongued, seen to be having too good a time – can lead to. Around the symposia foul-breathed rumour pheme would do her withering work, and out of the intense, charged gatherings could come ideas of pure evil.
If Plato was giving us Alcibiades as Athens, then his metaphor was horribly accurate. Alcibiades, beautiful young Alcibiades, had become greedy, bellicose and corrupt. He was driven not by virtue or by nous, but by his primal appetites. The young aristocrat thought he wanted to learn from Socrates, but instead he chose to sway off drunkenly into the night. Like Athens he was drinking, partying, living and dying too hard.
Socrates had seen how easily citizens slid into barbarity; how in hard times men preferred hard talk. His exhortation to his fellow Athenians to moderation, to thinking before leaping, seemed to be falling on deaf ears.
SOCRATES: Then it is impossible to be happy if one is not temperate and good.
ALCIBIADES: Impossible.
SOCRATES: So it is the bad men who are wretched.
ALCIBIADES: Yes, very.
SOCRATES: And hence it is not he who has made himself rich that is relieved of wretchedness, but he who has made himself temperate.
ALCIBIADES: Apparently.10
ACT SEVEN
CUTTING DOWN THE TALLEST CORN
40
MELOS
416 BC
SOCRATES: If you think that by killing people you’ll put a stop to anyone criticising you because you don’t live as you should, you’re not thinking clearly.
Plato, Apology, 39d1
Geography has a lot to answer for. Some territories are blessed, others are burdened with supplying the raw materials of human civilisation. The island of Melos is one such. It is a tiny island whose geological composition has proved both a bonus and a curse.
Ringing the Cyclades, a swirling volcanic archipelago in the heart of the Aegean Sea, Melos has, since the age of prehistory, been civilisation’s paintbox. Geophysical activity means that the rocks weep sulphur, kaolin and gypsum. In the north of the island the beaches are still littered with treacle-black volcanic glass – obsidian – which has been in demand across the known world since the Stone Age. Melos was long on Athens’ radar. Finds at Laurion show that Bronze Age Attic Greeks traded their metals for the razor-sharp knives, the arrowheads, the surgeon’s scalpels that obsidian so usefully becomes. In ancient times Melos’ exports were essential. Now the island thrives on selling barite to force-ripen cherry tomatoes for the global salad market.
Melos is an odd, beautiful, slightly perturbing place. Children digging on the beach find the sand gets hotter and then dangerously hot as they approach the earth’s crust. Steam jets suddenly bubble the skin as one swims in its coves. The world-famous Venus de Milo was found, gawky, half-submerged in a cave covered with unremarkable scrub by a (surprised) farmer hoeing his patch at the beginning of the season in 1820. And today on a deserted hillside site, smothered with wildflowers and droning with diligent bees, massive Doric blocks of stone, dark gore-red, shield human settlements that are no longer there.
This ancient place feels like a ghost town, for good reason.
In 416 BC the Melians made the political mistake of asserting that they were happy to continue their ‘700-year’ independence and not join the Delian League. For more than a decade Athenians had been pressing the islanders to secede. Back in 425 BC Athens had assessed Melos for tribute; the Melians had refused to pay up. Clearly, Melian independence was a thorn in Athens’ flesh. And now that the Peloponnesian War had dragged on for years, the Athenians needed all the cash they could lay their hands on. With Alcibiades and his coterie to all intents and purposes in charge of the Assembly, the small island and the mainland superpower entered a heated debate. Melos, don’t forget, was at a disadvantage by this stage. Athenians had become highly skilled at argument. The Assembly was no stranger to grand oratory – and already the historian Thucydides was commenting on the dangers of these rabble-rousing situations. Witness his report of one of Cleon’s speeches in the Assembly.
In speechifying competitions of this sort the prizes go to the spin-doctors and the state is the loser. The blame is yours, for stupidly encouraging these competitive displays … If something is to be done in the future, you weigh it up by hearing a good speech on the subject, and as for the past, you judge it not from your own first-hand, eye-witness experience but from what you hear in some clever bit of rhetoric … You all want to be the first to make a speech, and if you can’t do that, you try to sit there looking as though you are one step ahead of the speaker … you demand changes to the conditions under which you live, and yet have a very dim understanding of the reality of those conditions: you are very slaves to the pleasure of the ear, and more like the audience of a paid public speaker than the council of a city.2
Athens’ most persuasive and hard-line negotiators were sent across the water to make the Melians see sense. Theatricalised it may be, but the following exchange between the men of Melos and the Athenian envoys is one of the most sobering in world literature. The author, Thucydides, may have invented it for dramatic effect, but the point of drama is that it can communicate that awful moment when attitudes harden, when love is lost, when men decide to hate one another. Stinging from defeat at the Battle of Mantinea in 418 BC, and irked by the fact that Melos had been friendly to the Spartans, on hearing that the Melians still insisted on their independence, and – one suspects – remembering Melos’ staggering natural resources, angry voices in the Athenian Assembly up on the Pnyx (Alcibiades almost certainly amongst them) proposed a violent motion: this was going to be gunboat diplomacy.3
A massive force was mobilised: 2,500 hoplites all told, 320 archers, twenty crack-squad cavalrymen – all boarding boats whose prows would be pointing south.4
Any Melian – a shepherd, a miner, a baker looking out on the pearly northern horizon one day in May – would have seen a worrying, and then a horrifying, stain: thirty-eight triremes (Athens’ own as well as boats offered up or sequestered from Athenian allies), 3,000 soldiers bearing down. Frothing through the deep water and then nudging their way into Melos’ natural harbour.
Because the Athenians did not want a plucky anomaly in the heart of the Mediterranean, they were determined the Melians would admit that they were a subject state in Athens’ empire. Melian oligarchs and magistrates refused to allow the Athenians to present their case to the full community – and there were not that many of them: 1,600 or so in total in an island only 15 miles long and 10 miles wide. Why such censorship? To prevent mass panic spreading, perhaps? Believing they could avert atrocity and come to some mutually beneficial deal? In case the banner of democracy would be too easily planted?
Thucydides gives us his version of the conversation that followed. The Melians admit it will be difficult to contend with Athenian power, but say that they will ‘put their trust in the gods’, they will ‘try to save themselves’. The Athenian reply is chilling.
Of the gods we believe and of mankind we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever and whatever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it in existence
before us, and shall leave it to exist for ever among those who come after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you or anybody else, with the same power as ours, would do precisely the same as us.5
The Athenians declare ‘Might Rules’. They need no other excuse for unprovoked aggression than the size of their army.
Whether or not Thucydides was writing up this exchange to express his own sensitivity to moral debates has been and always will be debated. But what is certain is the disgusting brutality of the outcome. For a number of months the Melians were besieged. Melos would be a hard nut to crack because the island has and had great advantages. As the rim of an extinct volcano, it is a natural fortress; fresh water runs into the citadel (a number of the cafés and houses in the modern village still have their own wells) and a giant’s march of jagged volcanic rocks protects the island’s highest point, Mount Halakas. But the rocks’ colour, that of dried blood, would appear to have been prophetic.
Through a hard winter the Melians held out. Then disease, starvation, fear swirled in the air around those who were left. In 415 BC, forced back right to the crow’s nest of the island on top of a plug of unexploded magma, the islanders capitulated. Their soot-blackened oil lamps, mirrors, hair-pins and scythes – still being turned up by archaeologists – were left in their households for one last time.6 The remains, sitting quietly now in Melos’ municipal museum, are pathetic shards of ordinary human lives abandoned.
The Athenians were ruthless. This would be a blood-bath. Their orders were to slay every man standing, and to enslave every woman and child.
We can only imagine the carnage, because it seems not one single man survived to leave us their account.7
The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life Page 33