Heroes: A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  He was a high-handed swaggerer, someone by whom others were readily intimidated and who took pleasure in trying his power. He was jealous. Even Socrates said of him, albeit teasingly, “I am really quite scared by his mad behaviour and the intensity of his affections.” He was violent. As a boy he had beaten up a teacher who confessed to owning no copy of Homer’s works (an assault which was generally agreed—such was the mystique accorded the two epics—to redound to the perpetrator’s credit). He once struck his father-in-law simply for a wager. He thrashed a political rival. He was rumored to have killed a servant. When he wanted his house decorated with murals he abducted the distinguished painter Agatharchus, locked him up in the house until he had done the work, then sent him home with a cartload of gold. Annoyed by one of the many older men who doted on him, he refused an invitation to dinner but then arrived at the party, late and visibly drunk, with a gang of slaves whom he ordered to seize half of the gold and silver vessels laid out to impress the guests. When Hipparete, rendered desperate by his shameless infidelities, appeared before the magistrates to petition for a divorce, Alcibiades interrupted the proceedings, seized her, and carried her home through the marketplace “and not a soul dared oppose him or take her from him.” Such delinquency in one so high placed and privileged was unnerving. It threatened to disrupt not only the lives of his immediate circle, but that of the whole community which observed him, fascinated and fearful. Timon, the notorious misanthrope, once accosted Alcibiades in the street, shook him by the hand, and said, “You are doing well, my boy! Go on like this and you will soon be big enough to ruin the lot of them.”

  As befitted Pericles’ ward, he soon began to make his mark in the Assembly, displaying, according to the great Demosthenes himself, an “extraordinary power” of oratory. Pericles had died in 429 BC. By 421 Alcibiades, though not yet thirty, was one of the two most influential men in the city. The other, Nicias, was in nearly every way his opposite. Older than his rival by twenty years, Nicias was cautious, timid, and notoriously superstitious. Alcibiades’ indiscretions were brazen; Nicias used to shut himself up in his house at night rather than waste time or risk being duped by a spy. Alcibiades liked to dazzle the public; Nicias was careful to ascribe his success to the favor of the gods in order to avoid provoking envy. Most importantly, Alcibiades saw the by now protracted war against the Spartans as a splendid opportunity for the aggrandizement of himself and of his city; Nicias longed only to end it.

  In 421 BC he succeeded temporarily in doing so. He negotiated a treaty whereby the Peloponnesians and the Athenians agreed to exchange prisoners and to restore all of each other’s captured territory. But, as Plutarch records, “No sooner had [Nicias] set his country’s affairs on the path of safety than the force of Alcibiades’ ambition bore down upon him like a torrent, and all was swept back into the tumult of war.” There were disputes about the procedure for restoring the conquered cities and fortresses, disputes which Alcibiades aggravated and exploited. A Spartan delegation arrived in Athens. Alcibiades tricked them and undermined their standing, ensuring that the Assembly would refuse to deal with them and sending them home humiliated and enraged. Nicias followed after them but was unable to repair the damage: the Spartans rejected his overtures, and the Athenians had lost their enthusiasm for the peace. Alcibiades was elected general—for one year, as was the custom. He forged an alliance with Mantinea, Elis, and Argos, and took Athens back to war.

  There were those who accused him of making war for personal gain. Certainly there were prizes to be won which he would have welcomed. He had a reputation for financial rapacity. His father-in-law (or brother-in-law: accounts differ) was so afraid of him that he entrusted his enormous fortune to the state, lest Alcibiades might be tempted to kill him for it. He had already, after demanding a dowry of unprecedented size, extorted a second equally enormous sum from his wife’s family on the birth of their first child. His wealth was immense, but so was his expenditure. “His enthusiasm for horse-breeding and other extravagances went beyond what his fortune could supply,” wrote Thucydides. Besides, in the Athenian democracy (as in several of the modern democracies for which Athens is a model), only the very rich could aspire to the highest power. Alcibiades needed money to pay for choruses, for largesse, for personal display designed not solely to gratify his personal vanity but to advertise his status as a great man.

  But the war offered him far more than money. It provided him with a task hard and exhilarating enough to channel even his fantastic vitality, and it afforded an opportunity for him to satisfy the driving ambition Socrates had seen in him. Nicias, his rival, understood him well, and paid backhanded tribute to his eagerness for glory when he told the Athenian Assembly to “beware of [Alcibiades] and do not give him the chance of endangering the state in order to live a brilliant life of his own.”

  As advocate for the war, Alcibiades was spokesman for the young and restless, and also for the lower classes. He probably belonged to one of the clubs of wealthy young Athenians, clubs which were generally (and correctly) suspected to be breeding places of oligarchic conspiracy, but there is no evidence he had any such sympathies. Haughty and spectacularly overprivileged as he was, his political affiliations were democratic. In his personal life he defied class divisions. Homer’s lordly Achilles detests the insolent commoner Thersites, and in an extra-Homeric version of the tale of Troy he kills him, thus upholding the dignity of the warrior caste and silencing the mockery of the people. Alcibiades would not have done so. He earned the disapproval of his peers by consorting with actors and courtesans and other riffraff, and he was to remain friends for most of his life with Antiochus, the common seaman who caught his quail. Politically he followed the example of his guardian Pericles in establishing his power base among the poorer people, who tended to favor war. Military conflict was expensive for the upper classes, who were obliged to pay for men and ships, but it offered employment, decent pay, and a chance of booty to the masses. According to Diodorus Siculus it was the youthful Alcibiades who urged Pericles to embroil Athens in the Peloponnesian War as a way of enhancing his own standing and diverting popular attention from his misdemeanors. Certainly Alcibiades would have learned from observing his guardian’s career that, as Diodorus puts it, “in time of war the populace has respect for noble men because of their urgent need of them … whereas in time of peace they keep bringing false accusations against the very same men, because they have nothing to do and are envious.”

  The Athenian alliance was defeated in 418 BC at the battle of Mantinea, but its failure cannot be blamed on Alcibiades, whose term as general had elapsed. During the following years he loomed ever larger in the small world of Athens, menacing those who mistrusted him, dazzling his many admirers. Everything about him was excessive—his wildness, his glamour, his ambition, his self-regard, the love he inspired. In a society whose watchword was “Moderation in all things” he was a fascinatingly transgressive figure, an embodiment of riskiness, of exuberance, of latent power. “The fact was,” writes Plutarch, “that his voluntary donations, the public shows he supported, his unrivalled munificence to the state, the fame of his ancestry, the power of his oratory and his physical strength and beauty, together with his experience and prowess in war, all combined to make the Athenians forgive him everything else.”

  The dinner party described in Plato’s Symposium, which contains the fullest contemporary description of Alcibiades, dates from this period. The host is the poet Agathon, who is celebrating having won the tragedian’s prize. As the wine goes round, the guests, each in turn, talk about love. They are serious, competitive, rapt. At last it is Socrates’ turn. In what has proved one of the most influential speeches ever written, he enunciates his deadly vision of a love divested in turn of physicality, of human affection, of any reference whatsoever to our material existence. He finishes. There is some applause and then—right on cue—comes a loud knocking at the door. There is an uproar in the courtyard, the sounds of a flute and of a well-kn
own voice shouting, and suddenly there in the doorway is the living refutation of Socrates’ austere transcendentalism. The philosopher has been preaching against the excitements of the flesh and the elation attendant on temporal power. To mock him comes Alcibiades, wild with drink, his wreath of ivy and violets slanted over his eyes, flirtatious, arrogant, alarming, a figure of physical splendor and worldly pride forcing himself into that solemn company like a second Dionysus. No wonder, as Nepos wrote, Alcibiades filled his fellow Athenians “with the highest hopes, but also with profound apprehension.”

  In 416 BC, when he was thirty-four, he entered no fewer than seven chariots in the games at Olympia—something no one, commoner or king, had ever done before him—and carried off three prizes. Euripides wrote a celebratory ode: “Victory shines like a star, but yours eclipses all victories.” The games were far more than a sporting event: they were festivals of great religious and political significance attended by crowds from all over the Greek world. Alcibiades celebrated his triumph with superb ostentation, drawing on the resources of his far-flung clients and dependents, pointedly making a display of a network of personal influence spreading all the way across the eastern Mediterranean. “The people of Ephesus erected a magnificently decorated tent for him. Chios supplied fodder for his horses and large number of animals for sacrifice, while Lesbos presented him with wine and other provisions which allowed him to entertain lavishly.” Alcibiades was only a private citizen, but with his wealth and his pan-Hellenic connections he formed, on his own, a political entity which looked like rivalling Athens itself.

  It was too much. On the plain before Troy Achilles had measured his status as an outstandingly gifted individual against Agamemnon’s regal authority. At Olympia Alcibiades, in parading his wealth, his influence, and his talent, seemed to be issuing a parallel challenge to the state of which he was part but which he threatened to eclipse. So, anyway, his contemporaries understood the spectacle. He was accused of having the city’s gold and silver ceremonial vessels carried in his triumphal procession and of having used them at his own table “as if they were his own.” Non-Athenians, maintained one of his critics, “laughed at us when they saw one man showing himself superior to the entire community.” Answering the grumblers Alcibiades asserted that in making himself splendid he was doing a service to his country, that a city needs its illustrious men to personify its power. “There was a time when the Hellenes imagined that our city had been ruined by the war, but they came to consider it even greater than it really is because of the splendid show I made as its representative at the Olympic games…. Indeed this is a very useful kind of folly, when a man spends his own money not only to benefit himself but his city as well.” Not everyone was convinced. After Alcibiades won another victory at the Nemean Games, the great painter Aristophon exhibited a portrait of him. Any visual representation of him, it should be remembered, would have paid tribute to his striking beauty, and beauty, in fifth-century Athens, was commonly understood to make a man eligible for far more than mere sexual conquest. “This much is clear,” wrote Aristotle in the next generation, “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.” The people crowded to see Aristophon’s painting, but there were those who “thought it a sight fit only for a tyrant’s court and an insult to the laws of Athens.” There was no place within a democracy for an Alcibiades. “Men of sense,” warned a contemporary orator in an address entitled “Against Alcibiades,” “should beware of those of their fellows who grow too great, remembering it is such as they that set up tyrannies.”

  In the winter of 416/415 BC Alcibiades was at last presented with an adventure commensurate with his ambition. A delegation arrived in Athens from Sicily, asking the Athenians to intervene in a war between their own colonists there and the people of Syracuse, which was a colony and powerful ally of the Spartans. The careful Nicias put forward sound arguments against undertaking such a risky and unnecessary venture, but Alcibiades was all for action, and, according to Plutarch, he “dazzled the imagination of the people and corrupted their judgement with the glittering prospects he held out.” All Athens caught his war fever. The young men in the wrestling schools and the old men in the meeting places sat sketching maps of Sicily in the sand, intoxicating themselves with visions of conquest and of glory. The projected invasion of Sicily was not expedient, it was not prudent, it was not required by any treaty or acknowledged code of obligation, but its prospect offered excitement, booty, and the intangible rewards of honor. In the Assembly Alcibiades, the man of whom it was said that without some great enterprise to engage his energies he became decadent, self-destructive, and a danger to others, ascribed to the state a character to match his own: “My view is that a city which is active by nature will soon ruin itself if it changes its nature and becomes idle.” He argued that, like himself, Athens was the object of envy and resentment, impelled for its own safety to make itself ever greater and greater. “It is not possible for us to calculate, like housekeepers, exactly how much empire we want to have.” At Olympia, he claimed, Alcibiades was identified with Athens. Now, in urging the war in Sicily, he was offering Athens the chance to identify with Alcibiades, to be, like him, bold and reckless and superbly overweening.

  He won fervent support. Nicias, in a last attempt to halt the folly, pointed out that the subduing of all the hostile cities in Sicily would require a vast armada, far larger and more expensive than the modest expeditionary force initially proposed. But the Assembly had by this time cast parsimony as well as prudence to the winds. They voted to raise and equip an army and navy commensurate with their tremendous purpose.

  The generals appointed to command the expedition were one Lamachus, the appalled and reluctant Nicias, and Alcibiades.

  The resulting host’s might was matched by its splendor. The captains (gentlemanly amateurs whose civic duty it was to outfit their own ships) had “gone to great expense on figureheads and general fittings, every one of them being as anxious as possible that his own ships should stand out from the rest for its fine looks and for its speed.” Those who would fight on land had taken an equally competitive pride in their handsome armor. When the fleet lay ready off Piraeus it was, according to Thucydides, “by a long way the most costly and finest-looking force of Hellenic troops that up to that time had ever come from a single city.”

  On the appointed day, shortly after midsummer, almost the entire population of Athens went down to the waterfront to watch the fleet sail. A trumpet sounded for silence. A herald led all of the vast crowds on ship and shore in prayer. The men poured libations of wine from gold and silver bowls into the sea. A solemn hymn was sung. Slowly the ships filed out of the harbor, then, assembling in open sea, they raced each other southwards. All the onlookers marveled at the expedition’s setting out, at “its astonishing daring and the brilliant show it made,” and were awed at the “demonstration of the power and greatness of Athens,” and incidentally the power and greatness of Alcibiades, the expedition’s instigator and co-commander. This was a triumph to make his victory at Olympia seem trivial, or it would have been, but that by the time he sailed out at the head of the great fleet Alcibiades’ downfall was already accomplished. The brilliant commander was also a suspected criminal on parole. The Athenians, who had entrusted the leadership of this grand and perilous enterprise to Alcibiades, had given him notice that on his return he must stand trial for his life. In his story the pride and the fall are simultaneous.

  One morning, shortly before the armada was due to sail, the Athenians awoke to find that overnight all the hermae, the familiar idols which stood everywhere, on street corners, in the porches of private houses, in temples, had been mutilated. A wave of shock and terror ran through the city. The hermae represented the god Hermes. Often little more than crude blocks of stone topped with a face and displaying an erect penis in front, they were objects bo
th of affection and of reverence. Thucydides called them “a national institution.” Now their faces had been smashed, and, according to Aristophanes, their penises hacked off. The outrage threatened the Athenians at every level. The gods must be angry, or if not angry before they would certainly have been enraged by the sacrilege. This was the worst possible omen for the projected expedition. Besides it was terrifying to imagine the presence in the city of a hostile group numerous enough to perpetrate such a laborious outrage in a single night. There were panic-stricken rumors. Some held the city had been infiltrated by enemies from elsewhere—possibly Corinthians. Others asserted that the culprits were treacherous Athenians, that the desecration was the first manifestation of a conspiracy to overthrow the democracy. An investigation was launched. Rewards were offered to anyone coming forward with useful information and informers’ immunity was guaranteed. One Andocides accused himself and other members of his club, which may well have been an association of would-be oligarchs, but Thucydides (along with most other ancient sources) seems to have considered his confession a false one: “Neither then nor later could anyone say with certainty who had committed the deed.”

  In the atmosphere of panic and universal suspicion, other dark doings came to light. It was a fine time for the undoing of reputations. Alcibiades had many opponents. Nicias’s supporters resented his popularity. So did the radical demagogues, especially one Androcles, who was instrumental in finding, and perhaps bribing, slaves and foreigners ready to testify to the investigators. Three separate informers, apparently seeing one form of sacrilege as being much the same as another, told stories of the Eleusinian Mysteries—the sacred rites of Demeter which none but the initiated might witness—being enacted, or rather parodied, at the houses of various aristocratic young men. On all three occasions Alcibiades was said to have been present, and at one he was alleged to have played the part of the high priest. The punishment for such a impious action could only be death.