Why Socrates Died

by Robin Waterfield

  Alcibiades is the only person in Thucydides’ austere history who is awarded a coherently written character sketch. Other comments Thucydides makes about Alcibiades elsewhere are also strangely revealing of his personality. Some scholars have speculated that Thucydides knew him personally and even that Alcibiades was his main informant for some of the events of the history. Be that as it may, this is what Thucydides says:

  Alcibiades Cleiniou was the one who pushed most forcefully for the expedition [to Sicily]. He wanted to oppose Nicias, not only because of the ongoing political enmity between them, but also because of the disparaging remarks that Nicias had just made in his speech. Above all, however, he wanted command of the expedition, in the hope that he would be the one to whom Sicily and Carthage would fall, and that his success would bring him personal glory and wealth. For in order to maintain his public image, he spent more than he could afford on indulging his desire for extravagances such as horse-breeding. This, in fact, was one of the chief causes of the subsequent defeat of Athens, in the sense that his readiness to overstep the bounds of convention in his private life, and his presumption in every walk of life, alarmed the Athenian people so much that they assumed he was aiming at tyranny and turned against him. Even though he was a brilliant military commander, his fellow citizens found his private conduct so objectionable that they entrusted their affairs to others, and this led before long to the downfall of the city.

  Thucydides’ syllogism is transparent, but was he blaming Alcibiades for the defeat any more than he was blaming the Athenians for turning against him? We need to know enough of the history of the Peloponnesian War to see what Athens went through, in terms of military and moral suffering, and what part Alcibiades played in it all.

  THE OUTBREAK OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR

  Athens and Sparta had been rivals almost since the end of the Persian Wars in 479. Though they committed themselves then to the joint defence of Greece against the continuing Persian threat, this was largely a maritime enterprise, and since Athens was the chief naval power in the Aegean, it was Athens that grew in authority and power, while Sparta focused on maintaining its supremacy at land warfare by means of its militaristic regime. Athens became the head of the league that committed itself to the defence of the Aegean, and received tribute from the other members of the league, which was used to keep its substantial navy operational. The Persians were driven from Asia Minor, and the defence of the Aegean culminated in the battle of Eurymedon (the modern river Köprü Irmagi in southern Turkey) in 469 or thereabouts, in which Cimon Miltiadou crushed the Persians on sea and land, and put an end to their last serious military effort against the Greeks. It was as significant a battle as Marathon or Salamis, but it lacked a Herodotus to write it up in detail, and even its date is uncertain.

  Before long, the Athenians had a virtual monopoly on naval experience in the Aegean. Realizing the opportunity this gave them, and encouraged by their allies’ continuing need for protection, they began to behave from time to time with more arrogance: they used their military muscle to compel some Aegean states, especially those with strategic importance to Athens itself, to join the alliance, and to punish others for wanting to withdraw from it; they dispossessed recalcitrant islanders from their land and installed their own citizens to exploit agricultural resources; they moved the League Bank, with its vast funds, from the sacred island of Delos, the symbolic centre of the league, to Athens; they continued to exact tribute and to treat their allies as their subjects even after they had signed a peace treaty with Persia in 449. Over the years a league of allies became, in all but name, an Athenian empire.

  The Spartans and their allies looked on these developments with increasing and increasingly justified suspicion. It was a true Cold War, with many moments of heightened tension, punctuated by occasional and sometimes serious clashes, and by treaties and truces that did little to disguise the fact that each side was actually positioning itself for war. Despite a thirty-year peace treaty between Athens and Sparta, drawn up in 446, the Cold War rapidly heated up in the 430s, with Corinth, Sparta’s greatest ally, usually the target of Athenian manoeuvring.

  On top of an alliance with the Acarnanians, on the west coast of the mainland, which the Corinthians regarded as their own colonial territory, came Athenian interference in the war between Corinth and Corcyra (modern Corfu); on top of that came the terrible business of Poteidaea, which was a tributary of Athens while retaining strong links with Corinth, its mother city. Athens had recently increased Poteidaea’s tribute, and then in 432, worried about Corinthian intrigues in the area, it insisted that Poteidaea break off relations with Corinth and demolish some of its defences. The Athenians trumped the Poteidaeans’ attempt to stall and negotiate by sending a sizeable army into the area (which included Socrates and Alcibiades).

  Corinth was now consumed by unremitting hostility towards Athens, and threatened to leave the Peloponnesian League if Sparta failed to help. The Spartans promised Poteidaea that they would send armed help, which arrived in the form of a largely Corinthian army. The two armies clashed, the Athenians won, and the Corinthians were trapped inside the city, along with the city’s inhabitants. The siege lasted until spring 429 and cost the Athenians an enormous two thousand talents (as well as at least a thousand men); they could give no clearer sign of their commitment to war.

  By August 432 the Peloponnesian League had voted for war, claiming speciously that the unenforceable economic embargo Athens had placed upon one of its members, the town of Megara, constituted an act of violence against the treaty of 446. Fighting finally broke out when the Thebans, anticipating an Athenian invasion of Boeotia, attacked Plataea, a Boeotian town that had long been Athens’s ally and was a holdout against Theban domination of Boeotia. Thucydides opens his history of the war with a statement of his belief that it would be the greatest war in Greek history, and he was right, at least in the sense that much of the Greek world was convulsed. From Thrace and Macedon to the coast of Asia Minor and the shores of Sicily and southern Italy, Greek cities took the opportunity to settle old scores with their neighbours, protected by an alliance with one or the other of the two superpowers. Moreover, the political rift between Sparta with her support for oligarchy and Athens with her support for democracy was echoed in strife that tore apart many communities. All over the Mediterranean world, Greeks were killing Greeks.

  THE ARCHIDAMIAN WAR

  At the start of the war, the Spartans could count on allies from all over the Peloponnese (except for Argos and the Achaean towns on the north coast, which were neutral), Megara, most of Boeotia, the Phocians and Locrians on the mainland, and various other mainland states. In the west they had military alliances with Syracuse, the most powerful Greek city in Sicily, and some towns in southern Italy. The Athenians had as allies the two hundred or more states of their empire, and could also call on Thessalian cavalry units, Plataea, Corcyra, Zacynthos and mainland Acarnania. The Spartans were regarded as invincible on land, and the Athenian navy had the same reputation at sea.

  The first, ten-year phase of the war is named after King Archidamus of Sparta, though he was opposed to war in 431 and died in 427. Sparta’s avowed intention was ‘to free Greece’ – to put an end to the Athenian empire, which was portrayed as a form of enslavement of fellow Greeks. The best way for Sparta to achieve this goal was to approach the allies directly, and to separate them from Athens by force or diplomacy. But this required a fleet, and Sparta lacked the money and expertise to conduct naval warfare. Even Corinth, with a longstanding navy, was rightly reluctant to challenge Athenian supremacy at sea. At the beginning of the war, Sparta requested some ships from her Sicilian and Italian allies, but the western Greeks preferred to avoid for as long as possible involvement in the problems of the mainland and the Aegean. Sparta was compelled to adopt a second-best course, dictated by its acknowledged superiority on land.

  Canonical land warfare invariably involved the devastation of farmland, in order to provoke th
e enemy to give battle; often, a single, swift battle would decide a whole war. The Spartans invaded Attica in many of the first years of the war; they arrived between the middle and the end of May, when grain crops were ripe enough either to burn or to steal for food, and stayed between sixteen and forty days, depending on provisions and the need of the army to be elsewhere: farmers needed to return to their lands, and the Spartans could not afford to keep their army away from Laconia for too long in force, in case their vast servile population seized the opportunity to revolt.

  The destruction of crops and farmhouses was depressing, but inflicted no long-lasting damage, and was not an economic catastrophe. As long as Athens had the Long Walls (completed by 445) connecting the city to the port of Piraeus, food and other necessities could get through. Siege engines capable of destroying the walls would not be invented for several decades. And Athens had the vast financial resources (in terms of both capital and regular income) of the empire. Pericles’ strategy was to sit behind the walls and wait, hoping that the Peloponnesians would give up before Athenian money gave out. So the Peloponnesians invaded Athenian territory and the Athenians invaded Megarian territory; no more than skirmishing was involved in either case. Squadrons of the Athenian navy devastated selected areas of the Peloponnesian coastline, and bottled up the Corinthian fleet in the Corinthian Gulf; and the war continued in Chalcidice even after the fall of Poteidaea in 429. But none of these actions resulted in important gains or delivered a decisive advantage.

  The strategies of both sides were flawed. The regular Spartan invasions of Attica did not tempt the Athenians to risk a pitched battle on land. On the other hand, Pericles had underestimated the costs of maintaining a navy on a war footing and the stubbornness of the Peloponnesian League. The Spartan tactic did, however, have an unforeseen side effect. Each time they invaded Attica, everyone who had no other place of refuge moved (with as much of his property as was feasible) within the walls of Athens – not just inside the city itself, but along the narrow corridor of walls leading down to the sea. For some part of every year, there was severe overcrowding. In 430 typhoid fever ravaged the city, and over the next four years it wiped out at least a quarter of the Athenian population. There were no hospitals: people died at home or in the streets, and so the plague succeeded where the Spartans were failing. It broke many Athenians’ spirits and thinned the ranks of fighting men. From then on, paying mercenaries was something else for which the Athenians had to budget.

  Thoroughly dispirited, the Athenian people listened as Pericles’ political opponents accused him of cowardice and inactivity, when the real reason was that he had taken them into a war they could present as a failure. They suspended his generalship and charged him with embezzlement; he was found guilty, and fined the enormous sum of fifteen talents. Pericles was reinstated at the beginning of 429, but the elderly statesman died only a few weeks later from the effects of the plague. He had been at the helm of Athenian affairs for many years, and the Athenians would soon learn to miss his experience and statesmanship. None of Pericles’ successors had his stature, or at any rate the circumstances impeded their attaining it. Since they were more nearly equals, U-turns became more a feature of Athenian politics, as the Assembly’s decisions depended on which politician’s views were found persuasive at any given moment.

  Nothing illustrates this better than the most important event of 428, which almost provoked one of the worst atrocities of the war. The oligarchic authorities in Mytilene, the largest town on the island of Lesbos, seceded from the empire, taking with them their not insubstantial fleet. The attempt was badly timed: Athenian morale, already lowered by the plague, had plummeted when the Spartans sent a naval patrol for the first time to the Aegean, which the Athenians had come to consider their own waters. The Athenians first blockaded the island, and then besieged the city of Mytilene itself. The Spartans promised help, but delayed and arrived too late. If they had energetically supported the rebellion of one of the Athenian allies, others might have taken heart and followed.

  The next year, Mytilenean resistance collapsed. The Athenians took possession of the town, sent the ringleaders to Athens, and waited for the Assembly’s decision about the town’s future – and the Assembly decided to kill all the male citizens of Mytilene, and to enslave the women and children. They felt they had to stop the rot: if they made an example of Mytilene, perhaps that would prevent further rebellions. After all, their security now depended entirely on their empire.

  The Athenian Assembly had voted to execute several thousand people and destroy an entire city. A ship was sent to Mytilene, but the very next day a less harsh mood prevailed in the Assembly. All they could do, however, was send another ship and hope that it would arrive on time. The oarsmen of the second ship put in a special effort, even eating at their oars, and in an archetypal nick-of-time climax arrived just as the original orders were about to be executed. But the revised orders were still brutal: a thousand men were executed, while the city had to tear down its defences, and accept a heavy fine and a garrison of Athenian soldiers.

  As he did with other critical points of the war, Thucydides dramatized the issues by having two speakers debate and duel, in this case Cleon of Cydathenaeum and the otherwise unknown Diodotus. Although the people regretted their harsh decision of the previous day, Cleon argued that they should not change their mind. His speech appealed to expediency and attacked any form of moderate imperialism: he wanted to see terror tactics applied to keep the empire’s subjects truly in subjection. But Diodotus argued that it was more in Athens’s interest to be seen to be lenient. This is what is truly disturbing about the debate: Diodotus did not argue on moral grounds that Cleon’s proposals were too harsh and cruel; both parties appealed in different ways only to the criterion of self-interest.

  THE END OF THE ARCHIDAMIAN WAR

  The following years saw the usual swings and roundabouts of Athenian and Spartan successes and setbacks. Athens signally failed to help Plataea, which finally fell to the Spartans and Thebans in 427; the following year the Athenians defeated a small Boeotian force; on Corcyra democrats and oligarchs massacred one another, with the democrats proving the more successful and the more bloodthirsty; the Athenians achieved some successes in Sicily, in hindering the spread of Syracusan influence and the passage of goods to the Peloponnese from the farms of Sicily; the plague died out; the Spartans carried out their usual invasions of Athenian territory. But there was one critical exception to the generally indecisive state of affairs.

  In 425 the enterprising Athenian general Demosthenes of Aphidna successfully fortified the Messenian peninsula of Pylos on the southwest of the Peloponnese. This was a clever idea: it could act as a base for disaffected Messenian helots (Spartan serfs) to stir up rebellion, and it was through the helots that the Spartans were most vulnerable. It had the potential to be a war-winning scheme. The Spartans clearly thought so, because they lost no time in attacking the peninsula, with its hastily built fortifications, by land and sea. But their assault was unsuccessful.

  The Spartans had landed 420 men on the islet of Sphacteria, just off Pylos. With the defeat and withdrawal of the Peloponnesian fleet, these men became cut off. The numbers may seem small, but they represented some ten per cent of the Spartan army, and many of them were proud Spartiates, full-blooded Spartan aristocrats. The Spartan authorities could not endure this loss, and they arranged a truce at Pylos, while they sent delegates to Athens to negotiate an end to the war. They offered to enter into a full alliance with Athens, with each side keeping the territory it currently had. Partly out of fear of the Spartans’ inability to rein in their allies, but mainly because their blood was up and they seemed to have the upper hand, the Athenians, led by Cleon, turned down the offer.

  Fighting resumed, but the men on Sphacteria held out longer than expected. There was water on the island, and shade, and when the Spartans offered freedom to any helot willing to run the blockade with provisions for their trapped troops, man
y jumped at the chance. Back in Athens Cleon, whose refusal of the Spartan peace offer was responsible for the continued fighting, offered to take over command, despite the fact that he had not been elected one of the generals for that year. He boasted that he would bring things rapidly to an end – and indeed he and Demosthenes overran the island. The surviving Spartans surrendered – to everyone’s surprise, since Spartans were not supposed to surrender but to die in battle. Almost three hundred prisoners, among them 120 Spartiates, were taken to Athens. Captured Spartan shields made a glorious display in the Agora.

  The Athenians were now in a very strong position. They were facing a dispirited and weakened enemy, they held hostages, and they undertook a radical upward revision of the allies’ tribute in order to secure their precarious finances. Alcibiades’ first known appearance in Athenian public life was as a member of the board that revised the tribute. The Athenians renewed their peace treaty with Persia, and simultaneously interrupted Spartan delegations to the Great King’s satrap in Sardis. They could probably have negotiated peace on very favourable terms, and there was certainly heated discussion of this possibility in both Athens and Sparta, but nothing was done about it. In the meantime, the Athenians waged a more aggressive war – not the kind of war Pericles had envisaged: they took the island of Cythera, which they could use as a base for interrupting Spartan supplies from Egypt and for raids on the Peloponnese, and nearly risked a hoplite battle with the Spartans near Megara in 424.

  Impelled ever onwards by their run of successes, the Athenians devised a bold plan to remove Boeotia from the war, by fomenting democratic rebellion in the towns there, supported by a large invasion. Demosthenes was to occupy the town of Siphae in western Boeotia, while Hippocrates of Cholarges seized Delium in the east. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong: word leaked out and what was supposed to be a surprise attack met stiff resistance from the Boeotians; and the two generals failed to co-ordinate their attacks, but arrived at their destinations a day apart, so that the Boeotians could deal with them separately. Over a thousand Athenian or hired soldiers lost their lives. The Athenian cavalry, with Alcibiades among them, played little part due to the unsuitable terrain, but they were useful in protecting the troops as they straggled back across Mount Parnes to Athenian territory. Socrates was notable during the retreat for his self-control and for keeping his companions calm.