SICILY
416/15 BC
CHORUS: … Over the streets of the central city
A shriek of death rose like a grip at the throat;
And trembling children clutched at their mothers’ skirts;
And War went forth from his secret lair;
And the work of the virgin Pallas was accomplished.
Men sank in blood while their dead hands clasped the altar;
The head half-raised from the pillow
Defenceless rolled from severed neck;
And beside the dead the victor’s lust
Planted the seed of a son for Hellas
Watered with tears of Troy’s despair …
Euripides, Women of Troy, lines 555–67, produced two months before the invasion of Sicily1
IN SEPTEMBER, IN ATHENS, THE MOON appears to be the colour of a blood-orange. Winds start to whip dust off the ground.
And back in 416, in early autumn, at a time of year that already feels unsettled, the Athenian Assembly began to debate a crazy, megalomaniac plan. Athens was forever short of grain. Aerial spy photos from the Second World War have revealed the ghosts of agricultural terraces from antiquity – thin shelves on hillsides all around the city where men have tried to coax food out of the stony, unhelpful earth.2 Unlike Sparta, Athens could not boast swathes of flat, fertile land. But the Athenian people needed to be fed.
A policy of land-grab, thinly disguised under the banner of democratic enlightenment, had long been in play in the city-state. The result was a peculiarly Athenian phenomenon called clerouchia, or cleruchy. These settlements – a refined, aggressive form of the Greek colony – had been established across the Mediterranean basin. An Athenian force would turn up in a new territory (the island of Euboea, literally ‘well-oxed’, is an excellent example) and claim the fertile farmland in the name of the democratic experiment. Each time troops from the mother-city appeared, natives would be forced off their land. Athenian administration generated 50,000 refugees from Euboea alone, at least 500,000 in total; homeless men, women and children, trudging through the eastern Mediterranean, fearfully searching for a new yard of earth they could call their own. On Euboea, Athenian forts manned by democratic-soldiers and guarding the Euboean farmland of Athenian absentee landlords await excavation. Today the few remaining masonry blocks cling to the rock faces and the promontories are easy to miss. But once one begins to trace the footprint of these buildings, their scale is apparent. These garrisons were well staffed – the ground is thick with pottery, the discarded cooking pots of generations of Athenian-paid soldiers who lived here to stand guard over Athens’ newly acquired land. The sites on Euboea, when fully excavated, will tell us a good deal about the demanding nature of the democratic experiment.
And of course Athenian imperialism-by-any-other-name had as much to do with aristocratic ambition as it did with demotic provision. Athens’ old oligarchs, its cavalry class, would stand on hills and look out to sea – here was an opportunity for aristocratic competition; land-grabs and head-counts that proved you were capable of strategic marvels, worthy descendants of your ancestor Theseus.
And so in 416 BC we can perhaps imagine the stellar aristocrat Alcibiades standing one night on a high point in Athens and looking out across the crowded cityscape beyond the Acropolis to Piraeus bay and the dimpled lapping of the sea. This is still, and was then, a spiriting view. What other lands lay beyond that horizon? Persia seemed unconquerable, the Egyptian expedition of 459/4 had failed spectacularly – so what about the place where the sun sets, corn-yellow at this time of year, what about the west?3
In the choppy waters between the toe of Italy and the north coast of Africa there is a lush, large island: Sicily. And that autumn, as its wheat and barley and oats started to ripen in the fields, the Athenians put Sicily at the head of their list.
The Sicilian campaign was launched.
Today Piraeus harbour is still busy – up until the year 2000 it thronged with people – but now it has been dragged into the modern age and mechanised. Containers have done away with the need for porters, the Olympics clean-up has removed the illegal immigrants who used to sell pirate sunglasses and CDs as you waited to embark. Cars take travellers into the bowels of 200-foot-long ships – and then on to the Greek islands. Apart from those scurrying onto boats, there are scarcely any people.
The scene in spring of 415 BC – the eve of the send-off of the boats – would have been very different. Sanctuaries around the port were full of the trinkets of worshippers. The harbour walls were, we are told by Thucydides, edged with eager onlookers. Citizens, metics, foreigners, allies – Thucydides gives us the impression that anyone who could walk or ride made the pilgrimage down to the port. It would have been odd if Socrates were not here. Particularly given that the plan had been masterminded by his one-time soulmate, the dashing Alcibiades. This was Athenian democracy in action. A force of citizen-soldiers voted to war by their own fathers, brothers, and by their own show of hands in a democratic assembly; an exhibition of democratic might. Gold and silver vessels were at the ready to pour libations of wine into the sea, and each and every soldier had made a particular effort with his armour so that ‘it looked more like a demonstration of the power and greatness of Athens, than an expeditionary force against the enemy’.4
Symptomatic of the aristocratic one-upmanship that was so rife in Athens, ship-owners had carved particularly flamboyant figureheads on their ships, and the boats were carnival-bright. Cavalrymen and their horses – spooked doubtless by the noise and water all around – were clattering into the storage areas of some of the boats. The Sicilian expedition (to all intents and purposes Alcibiades’ vanity project, an expression of aristocratic power) was set to leave Piraeus on a swell of manufactured brio. Trumpets were being sounded and throats cleared to sing a communal hymn of high praise.
But there was a problem. Athens and its stolidly conventional religious cycle could not be interrupted. This was the month when the women of the city worshipped Adonis. In a (to us slightly bizarre) manufactured replay of Adonis’ life, women planted small rows of vegetables and left them unwatered. They watched these wither and die, and then mourned their terrible loss. This was the death of promise, of a beautiful boy, it was what city-state and mother alike feared; it was the world all wrong, but the world as it really was. As a climax to the ritual, an effigy of the divine Adonis – a creature thought bigger, shinier, the epitome of what humanity wanted to be – would be wrapped and thrown into the sea.5
And on that autumn night the rites could not be interrupted, for such an irregularity might offend the gods, and so women’s voices had been rising in the air all night, shouting, screaming, wailing. Athens is a vast auditorium, and the horseshoe of mountains keeps clamour in, the limestone of the Acropolis acts as a giant sounding board. Hollering and shouts of fear still, in the noisy modern city, hang in the air like low cloud.
As females tore their faces and shrieked at the loss of male youths, it could not be a good omen. However, 134 ships, 5,100 hoplites, 700 slingers, thirty horsemen, thirty horses and thirty cargo ships were ready for the off. Huge crowds came down to the shore to wave them goodbye, torches were lit and carried along Piraeus quayside, libations were poured; the acrid, sweet smell of a civilisation on the move was in the air.
But those in the know in the crowd were subdued. The night before, a sickening thing had happened in the city. As Athens slept someone (or, it was whispered, something) had stalked through the streets. Over life-size marble carvings of bearded, half-smiling men at every junction in the city – in the Agora outside the Royal Stoa, at the edge of the public burial ground, beneath the shrine of Aphrodite and Peitho – herms, their erect phalluses proof that they brought good luck and strength to the city, had been horribly mutilated.
Muffled by cloth, metal had eaten into these smooth, cool, strong, stone men. With such a disturbance the dogs of the city must have set one another barking. But perhaps the human shadow
s that glided from place to place seemed just too intimidating to interrupt, because the peculiar mutilations were not stopped, no one was arrested. The strange, hideous sacrilege was allowed to continue unabated. On the ground now were shards of marble, chips of paint, splinters of desecration. Many of the herms of the city had had their noses – and, in some cases, their penises – smashed off.
Not even the most wily soothsayer or a Pythia priestess could interpret this as a good omen. Sculptures whose spirits ensured a fair journey were now weak, broken shadows of themselves. The jaws of the departing soldiers who knew of the scandal took a rather grim set.
But then things picked up. The sailing was smooth. Allied fleets that had already assembled in Corcyra made the crossing without mishap. Nicias, the senior officer in charge of the Athenian fleet, although in ill health before he left, seemed to be coping well. There was no massed force waiting to bludgeon the allied Athenian troops (all 25,000 of them) to death. The Spartan allies of the Sicilians were conspicuous by their absence. The landings went smoothly, the pastures and foliage, particularly lush on this side of the island, were meadow-sweet. And maybe sick of slaughter, maybe sensing the need not to repeat another Melos, the Athenians did two very odd things. They treated the campaign a little like a scouting mission, property developers making their way up the coast.
And they did not attack: this, it seemed, was going to be a well-mannered invasion. They had the best men with them and a fair wind behind. Instead of punishing the local populations, they started to fan out along Sicily’s eastern seaboard. There was no complacency, this was of course a tricky operation, but still … The Athenian hoplites and their aristocratic leaders seemed to have at last recaptured some of that heroic vigour that immortalises them still in the Parthenon Marbles and around the sides of masterfully painted pots.
Then pheme, gossip, fouled the air with her bad breath. As the ships had been ploughing their way west, tongues had started to wag back in the mother-city. Someone had heard something at one of those infamous symposia that made for juicy gossip. Golden-haired Alcibiades, that provoking, beautiful, privileged boy, that adorant of the eccentric old Socrates, that lisping lover of oligarchs and Spartans, had mocked the gods. And not just a roadside-shrine god, but the goddess Demeter herself, the female whose sacred, mysterious rites at Eleusis promised you both an afterlife and acceptance into the ‘haves’ of Athenian society. They gossiped that he had held his own version of the Eleusinian Mysteries within the privacy of his own home, and even worse, it was muttered, it was none other than Alcibiades and his motley over-privileged crew which had rampaged through the city the night before the fleet set sail and destroyed the herms – the very totems of Athenian security abroad.
What a cocksure fool, they started to say, what an oily, blasphemous, dangerous streak of lightning. We’ll recall him, we’ll charge him, we – the emasculates who are left in the city along with women, children, the sick, the other grey-hairs – we’ll show that we still have fire in our bellies.
And so the message was sent that Alcibiades must return to face trial.
Alcibiades heard the news and replied with the most spectacular two-finger salute. Why on earth should he slink back to the city, charged with a capital crime: sacrilege and treason? Thucydides tells us that after Sicily the General had been planning to take Carthage too – and from that victory the whole of the African continent, not to mention Spain and beyond, would be spread out before him. Fearless Alcibiades was on track to conquer the world, so he would hardly want to trot back, meekly, to have his wrists slapped – or worse. And maybe, just maybe, this slight flicked him on the raw. The golden boy could do wrong after all. Wounded pride has a way of festering. And so Alcibiades did a wonderfully audacious thing: he slipped away at night. Where he ended up shocked everyone.
He appeared to be setting sail for home. His ship was docked in Thurii (a new-town colony of Athens, founded 446–443 BC and settled by a number of Greek luminaries, the historian Herodotus amongst them). And then Alcibiades vanished. Thurii, like many settlements at this time, nurtured anti- as well as pro-Athenian elements and clearly someone there had been persuaded, or had been paid sufficiently handsomely, to cover his tracks. Alcibiades was next heard of in the bosom of Athens’ arch-enemy, first in Elis and then in the wall-less city-state of none other than Sparta.
The Athenians were wild with rage – and we have found hard evidence of their anger. Reused in the Agora as rough building material there is a stone block about 3 feet high,6 and on it is etched Alcibiades’ shame. This block denounces the aristocrat as an enemy of the democracy; it was displayed, haughtily, up on the Acropolis. Alcibiades’ property and that of his immediate clique was confiscated. His estates, even twenty-two of his gowns, were auctioned off. His name was cursed by priests in sanctuaries and in public arenas such as the Agora. Any Athenian who thought of making contact with him would become eternally polluted.7 He was condemned to death. It would appear that Alcibiades had burned every one of his bridges.
Socrates’ influence had, apparently, rubbed off on his protégé, although hardly with results that the philosopher would condone. Why do the obvious? Why blindly follow an orthodox path? If the action you are taking feels good, then why not turn convention on its head and pursue your course? Socrates had taught the young in the Agora, and soldiers, and dinner-mates, that men need to think for themselves. Well, no one could accuse Alcibiades of conformity. He was individual to his core.
Now the Athenians needed to be very worried. They had a bitter, well-informed, charismatic traitor in the heart of their enemy’s camp. By doubting Alcibiades they had lost the one man who was guaranteed to fire up democratic soldiers to fight a pitiless battle in a foreign land. Careless!
Alcibiades wasted no time. He swaggered with his new-found rebel-power – he managed to intimidate both his countrymen and the Spartans at the same time. The smart aristocrat warned Sparta that Athens’ ambitions to take over the Peloponnese were unlimited. Their women would be impregnated by Athenian cock, their boy warriors forced to march to war under an Athenian yoke. Go to Sicily, he said, my hoplites are all over the place, they haven’t packed half enough forces; send out your diplomats, your proxenoi – tell the rest of the Aegean that ballsy, busybody Athens is stumbling; and get yourself into a crow’s-nest position above the city-state itself: go just north of Athens, to the Attic town of Decelea.
Back in Athens, panic joined gossip in the lanes and courtyards, in the Agora and Assembly. Religious paranoia escalated. The herms had been defiled, the sacred mysteries mocked. The flower of the city, the Athenian youth, was abroad – tempted out by a man who (or so the tongues wagged) despised Athena and her democrats. A man who had endeavoured to pollute the city from within, but had fled to Laconian lands (so he was not mired by the dirt that he had scattered through Athenian streets and sanctuaries). Informers set to work. The early toleration of the democratic state was forgotten. Citizens were tortured and executed. Fundamentalists clamoured that religious radicals should be put to death without trial. The priests of the mysteries of Eleusis helped coordinate the witch-hunt. Almost a hundred years later Aristotle would also be on the run from the Eleusinian elite. In 322 BC the priesthood brought charges of impiety against the fourth-century philosopher; fearing for his life, he left Athens, remarking pointedly that he would not let the Athenians ‘sin against philosophy a second time’.8 Those thinkers who had been playing around with religious ideas were the first to come under suspicion. This was when Diagoras of Melos fled the city with a price on his head.
And while the Athenians, spring-trapped within their own walls, let anxiety and paranoia foment and take the place of religious and intellectual exploration, Alcibiades walked wide in the city of Sparta that had no boundaries. This was the man, remember, with a Spartan name, a Spartan wet-nurse – in many ways it must have felt as though he had come home. The Athenians raged. Athena’s city was now fighting on three fronts: against Sparta, agai
nst a rejuvenating Persia and against the enemy within.
An inspired system, which had harnessed the competitive instincts of the aristocrats for the benefit of the people, had turned into a regime that drove some of its greatest talent into the arms of the enemy. Maybe it does not always work, to rule and be ruled in turn. Jealousy was a new god in Athens. Jealousy now ruled the Golden City.
44
RIVERS OF BLOOD
Sicily, 414–413 BC
[The Sicilians] took particular measures to lead the Athenians into dread, noxious conditions.
This was the greatest Hellenic action that took place during this war,
and, in my opinion, the greatest action that we know of in Hellenic history –
to the victors the most brilliant of successes, to the vanquished the most calamitous of
defeats; for they were utterly and entirely defeated; their sufferings were on an
enormous scale; their losses were, as they say, total; army, navy, everything was
destroyed, and, out of many, only few returned. So ended the events in Sicily.
Thucydides, finale of Book 7, History of the Peloponnesian War, 7.871
MEANWHILE SICILY, ONCE AN ISLAND THAT most Greeks thought of as a distant, western outpost of civilisation, had become a killing field. The Athenians had overreached themselves.
The general Nicias, tense with the pain of kidney disease, asked to be recalled. He sent a message for reinforcements. He was told to stay put, and the reinforcements that arrived were sizeable but pitifully insufficient. Three years into the campaign, and city-states up and down Greece had begun to sense which way the military wind was blowing; now more and more were joining Sparta rather than Athens as allies. Nicias made the decision to return home. But then an unexpected omen: on the night of 27 August 413 BC the bright full moon was suddenly, fully eclipsed. Nicias was a deeply religious man. He sought the advice of a soothsayer, who hedged his bets. Don’t depart yet, the augur said. Lie low in the harbour for a few weeks – now is clearly not the time to sail. Nicias concurred. His enemies heard they had a sitting duck in Syracuse and launched a blistering attack. In a set-piece naval battle in the harbour of Syracuse the Athenians were resoundingly defeated, their triremes captured or burned.
The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life Page 35