Still, can’t we ask whether his simply remaining in the city under such circumstances in itself constituted tacit collaboration? Was it possible to avoid the moral contagion spreading like pestilence, infecting anyone who didn’t actively, politically, resist? Can’t he, at the very least, be charged with moral cowardice, this man who made himself so conspicuous with his incessant moral interrogating, the smug suggestion that he alone knew something of which everybody else was ignorant?
But then he did regard himself as actively resisting. His refusal to take any political stand was itself a stand against the politicizing of virtue. His refusal to partake in any political actions was the only action compatible with the inquiries he conducted daily, trying to pry the notion of aretē away from its encasement in the politics of Athenian exceptionalism. This prying away was the very point of his inquiries.
Politics was a dirty business, as far as he was concerned, which was so radical a position to take in his polis as to be almost unintelligible. The polis was the source of normativity. Certainly this was true in Athens, where the political reforms of the evolving democracy had destroyed the old tribal ties, so that they didn’t interfere with loyalty to the city. This particular polis’s radical experiments with self-government, its faith in the capacity of the average Athenian to participate directly in every decision, was a testament to its extraordinary nature, which had seemed to be abundantly confirmed in the days of its ascendance. Given the presuppositions that grounded his society, his asking for a definition of aretē independent of civic duties was like asking someone to translate a sentence into a language for which no vocabulary or grammar has been provided. It was like asking someone to declare the winner of a game when nobody has specified its rules.
And yet these were precisely the questions he was asking: Tell me what is essential about a worthwhile life, no matter whether the life is lived in Athens or elsewhere, whether one is born into high circumstances or into low, whether one is a free citizen or a slave. Virtue must be something over which people can take responsibility for themselves, not something that makes them hostage to the gods, which is to say hostage to what lies beyond their control. We are hostage in all other things, but surely not in whether we live virtuously. That is an aim people must achieve for themselves, the only aim worth the achieving. But if it is an aim we must achieve for ourselves, then the collective achievement of a polis can do it for us no better than the gods can.
With his distinctive use of the word, aretē begins its slide into what we now would translate as “virtue.” The word is loosened from its conceptual entanglement with kleos, the social aspect of it shed. For him, there is no contradiction in saying that a person has achieved aretē even when the majority of his peers condemn him. But the achievement still specifies the life worth living. The subtle changes he renders to the word aretē tell of the revolution he is after with his questions. We read Plato’s dialogues in English, with aretē straightforwardly translated as virtue, and in that straightforward translation the normative shift that he was after is contained.
But to the majority of those whom he questioned, his questions were barely intelligible. What made his ceaseless importuning all the more incoherent is that he himself protested that he didn’t know the answers to his questions, that in truth he knew nothing except that he knew nothing. But if he knew nothing, then on the basis of what, pray tell, did he reject the answers of his community? Why did he persist, day in and day out, in setting himself up as a one-man display of normative confoundment?
How could one make sense of his interrogations when the constituent norms and values of one’s society rendered them incoherent? To appreciate the difficulties of the Athenians in the face of his questions, think of those in our own day who are at a loss to say how there can be virtue independent of the word of God. Even if you don’t share that reaction, as long as you are able to imagine yourself into it, you should likewise be able to imagine yourself into the reaction of the citizens of Athens when they were confronted with this man’s inquisitions. And to try to imagine one’s way back to their perplexity helps one gain a clear vision of the progress that’s been made.
The ideology of Athenian hegemony intensified the politicizing of aretē. To live a life worth living was to do one’s civic duty, which included duty to the city’s gods. The religious questions, too, were bound up with the political, melded together in the tacit normative assumptions constituting the lives deemed best. But even were religious and civic duties not bound up with one another, would it be any wonder that he would be charged with impiety? Impiety signals the deepest of normative disturbances, and that is precisely what he aimed to provoke with his normative impudence.
And when he pushed his city too far—or rather, when his city had been pushed too far by historical circumstances to tolerate his irreverance any longer—he was brought up on charges of impiety, as well as on the charges of corrupting the young, since it seemed his shenanigans had only served to undermine the constraints of politicized aretē, which reined in the more dangerous antinomian strains of the Ethos of the Extraordinary. And, his investigations ending in the inconclusivity of aporia, he had offered nothing to replace the norms he’d undermined. Wasn’t Alcibiades proof of the normative vacuum he had created? And what about Critias? Both of these characters had presented a spectacle of vicious lawlessness not seen for a long time in the internal affairs of Athens.
It is much like those who argue today that our own recently experienced atrocities—perpetrated by such villains as Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot—were the results of questions that had removed the restraints of religion, which alone can keep violence and savagery at bay. So, too, might an Athenian have believed that nothing could replace the moral constraints imposed by the institutions of the polis.
Soon the tyrants who had disputed with him about the art of disputation were themselves dead or exiled. Those among the Thirty and their immediate henchmen who weren’t killed in the fighting to recapture the city—unlike Critias and Charmides, who died in battle in May 403—fled to nearby Eleusis, a deme of Athens that the Tyrants had secured as a retreat should things not go their way, taking the precaution of first slaughtering all its inhabitants on the false charge that they were democratic subversives. And when the polis suspected that these oligarchs were planning, once again, to march on Athens, they themselves marched on Eleusis, and preemptively killed the last of the Thirty. Still, Athens was filled with those who had been complicit, either actively or passively.
With the restoration of the democracy, something quite extraordinary occurred. The customary bloodbath never happened. In all the other poleis that had undergone revolutions and civil wars, a vicious round of retribution and counterretribution had been the pattern, but it was not so in Athens. The cycle was forestalled by a declaration of a general amnesty, granted to all but a notorious few at the top. “Those of Piraeus” and “those who remained in the city” shed their labels and came together to restore the city, though it would never again be the empire it had been.
The amnesty was an act of political brilliance, fostering a renewed sense of solidarity, easing the way toward an ameliorating fiction that all the Athenians, with the exception of the Thirty, had been victims, that none had been collaborators. It was a collective act of willful forgetting. In fact, the citizens swore an oath, me mnesikakein, which means “not to remember past wrongs.”
Of course, no oath or legislation can blot out memories, especially not those of atrocities committed by neighbors who had born false witness out of cowardice or worse. But the amnesty proved to be surprisingly successful in stabilizing the city, knitting its social fabric together again—so successful, in fact, that a Harvard law professor recently published a paper offering it as a case study for “the design of modern transitional justice institutions.”9 Her verdict: “The Athenian experience suggests that the current preoccupation with uncovering the truth may be misguided.” The Athenians managed the delicate balancing ac
t of both forgetting and remembering. No crimes committed at the behest of the Thirty could be prosecuted. Nobody could bring charges against someone for having been a sympathizer. In this sense, there was willful forgetting. But they allowed for remembering by allowing lawsuits to cite past behavior under the Thirty as evidence for good character or bad. (The Athenian courts, lacking both professional lawyers as well as professional judges, were more freewheeling than the judicial systems to which we are accustomed.) In this way, the city both refused to get bogged down in endless prosecution, but ensured that there wasn’t total impunity either. “The Athenian case suggests that at least in some situations pursuing a true account of who bears responsibility for atrocities may not be necessary, or even desirable, if the primary aim is to ensure an enduring, peaceful reconciliation.”
And an enduring, peaceful reconciliation is exactly what they accomplished. The Spartan garrison withdrew, and the stability of the reconstituted democracy persisted right up until Athens, together with the other poleis, fell before the imperial conquest of Philip II of Macedon. Despite the horrors, despite the widespread complicity during the reign of terror, the polis managed to put itself to rights again, its citizens participating together in their reestablished institutions, exercising moderation and a judicious tolerance that again put them on the other side of the ordinary.
Nothing like this had ever been seen in the ancient world, a bloody civil war settled with such wisdom and prudence. Once again, in their righting of what had gone so wrong, the Athenians revealed themselves as beyond their fellow Greeks, which meant beyond all mortals, as they lost no time in telling themselves. “This, too, is worthy of our remembrance that, although our forefathers performed many glorious deeds in war, not the least of its glory our city has won through these treaties of reconciliation. For whereas many cities might be found which have waged war gloriously, in dealing with civil discord there is none which could be shown to have taken wiser measures than ours. Furthermore, the great majority of all those achievements that have been accomplished by fighting may be attributed to Fortune; but for the moderation we showed towards one another no one could find any other cause than our good judgement. Consequently it is not fitting that we should prove false to this glorious reputation.”10 Yes, others, such as Sparta, might have fought nobly and heroically, but Athens had topped such nobility and heroism, or so the Athenians took to telling themselves. Athens had done something, once again, that had never before been known. Athens’ response to their defeat and the horrors that had followed was a demonstration of rationality, generosity, and overall largeness of mind. The speechifiers of the restored democracy—whether speaking in the Assemby or before juries—all participated in elaborating a story in which the amnesty was not so much a compromise in the face of terrible realities as an opportunity for demonstrating a new kind of extraordinariness. It was a cause for celebration, and the Athenians were once again kleos-worthy. “All the world thought our city exceptionally wise,” the rhetorician Aeschines writes. Nobody could do defeat the way the Athenians could.
Athenian exceptionalism had taken a hit since the glory days of Pericles. Not only had they been vanquished and occupied by the Spartans, their protective walls torn down, the bulk of their navy relinquished; but they themselves had sunk, under the pressures of war, to a level of irrationalism and cruel depravity whose forgetting they might very well have wished to legislate at the ekklêsia, along with the amnesty’s me mnesikakein.
They had converted a league that had valiantly repulsed the Persian invasion of Europe into a ruthless imperialism over their former Greek allies, and they had enslaved and exterminated thousands of their fellow Greeks. There had been atrocities committed in the prosecution of the war, atrocities that went beyond the realpolitik toward other poleis. There had been coldly calculated cruelty, as in the destruction of Melos, a polis that had resisted joining the Delian League and devastatingly lost its argument with Athens.11 There had been even worse, as at the massacre at Mycalessus, committed by Thracians whom the Athenians had contracted as mercenaries for the Sicilian expedition and then dismissed because they hadn’t arrived in time. The atrocity at Mycalessus, which Thucydides relates, had happened when the Thracians were being escorted back to Thrace by the Athenian general Diitrephes, so the Athenians could well feel it had happened on their watch. Thucydides had dwelled on the horror of what had occurred at Mycalessus, a small polis that had not taken either side in the war and so had taken no pains to protect itself, never expecting anyone to take notice of them. Thucydides—whose own covert attitude either for or against his former polis of Athens is still debated—tells of the pity and terror of Mycalessus, of the slaughter of young boys beginning their schoolday, and breaks out of his strictly enforced impartiality to state: “This is what happened to Mycalessus, a thing which is as much worth our tears as anything that occurred in this war, considering the small size of the town.”12
If a hazard of the Ethos of the Extraordinary is individual hubris, Athenian exceptionalism had bred collective political hubris. And political hubris, no less than individual hubris, had spawned tragedy. The Athenians had rejected a peace treaty Sparta had offered in 410, which in hindsight would have been to their advantage. Now in their defeat they were beholden—passively, cravenly beholden—to victorious Sparta for not doing to them what they had done to other poleis—sacking the city, slaughtering its males, ravishing and enslaving its females. They had ingloriously survived on the sufferance of Sparta. And then there had been the period of the Thirty, best forgotten.
Pericles had been able to compare his contemporaries to Homeric heroes, in fact telling them that they had surpassed the heroes of Homeric epic: “We don’t need a Homer to sing our praises,” he had said, using a trope of the genre of the funeral oration (epitaphios logos), that the deeds of the Athenians of the present surpass the deeds of mytho-historical heroes. Now, after what they had seen and what they had done, comparison to their former selves, much less to their legendary ancestors, was humbling to the point of shame. But with their amnesty, so different from anything accomplished before, together with the fiction of victimization it helped to create, they recovered the redemptive sense of themselves as daring innovators, brilliant pragmatists exquisitely adaptable to new circumstances. Their protective walls may have been razed by their conquerors, but there was still the protection of a fiction formalized in the phrase me mnesikakein.
Only he—tenacious, teasing, taunting—did not participate in the sustained delusion of continuing supremacy. That was the point of his maddening inquisitions that never seemed to go anywhere but were always driving home the same point: you Athenians live off the myth that you are living lives worth the telling and so worth the living. What a whopper, more incredible even than the bizarre stories that the manic poets tell of the gods. Being an Athenian doesn’t make you extraordinary in any of the ways that matter. It never did, not even in the days of your self-proclaimed glory, your collective hubris fed by your most famous statesmen—much less now. Don’t be so hasty in donning yourselves with laurels.
And who was he to talk, to taunt? Just how much good had he done his young men anyway—or more to the point, how much good had his young men done the city? The two worst exemplars of the opposing political sides had emerged from his sphere of influence, Alcibiades the lawless democrat and Critias the lawless oligarch. On the surface they might seem different, but what the two had in common was a raging individuality that burst out into fearsome hubris—in other words, precisely the dangers that the politicizing of aretē was meant to prevent. His questioning had only served to remove the restraints on the sort of ambition that was always a danger in a society that valorized kleos-measured aretē.
The fragile fiction of their non-complicity, on which they were trying to resurrect their sense of exceptionalism, had a great deal of pragmatic wisdom to it. They were pulling together to reassemble a ruptured social unity. This was not the time for rethinking first princi
ples.
And that was precisely what he was asking of them, this insufferable man, constantly pelting them with questions whose point it was almost impossible to discern, rejecting everything they tried to say in response, they who were being spoken about throughout the world (at least so they liked to tell themselves) for the godlike wisdom of their reconciliation, their reputation still glorious.
“Forgive me, you most excellent fellow,” he had answered the boy who had laughed at him for being so enthusiastic about a sycamore perched by a babbling stream. “I’m a friend of learning. The countryside and the trees don’t want to teach me anything, but the people in town do.”
Did he then hope that people could teach him what he wanted to know? He made a great show of expecting the people he constantly questioned to provide him enlightenment, but the show was a sham. He was insincere in the enthusiasm with which he greeted their initial complacent responses, and he was insincere in the disappointment he expressed when their answers were invalidated in a sad little pop of self-contradiction. He was convinced, even before he heard the specifics of their answers, that the people he questioned didn’t know what they were talking about, and his questioning was designed to convince them of the same.
Why was he so sure that the answers he would hear would be inadequate? Had he arrived at answers that conflicted with everyone else’s? But he was adamant in denying he had the answers. He denied it up until the very end, when his very life was at stake.
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