Why Socrates Died

by Robin Waterfield

  The Spartans followed up this success with an attack on Athenian possessions in the north, under their brilliant general Brasidas, who had made his name over the previous few years. The plan was to threaten the Athenian supply of precious metals and timber from Thrace and Macedon, and the grain route from the Black Sea; lacking an effective fleet, it was the closest the Spartans could get to an assault on the empire. With a combination of diplomacy and the threat of force, Brasidas succeeded in persuading several towns in and around Chalcidice to leave the Athenian alliance, and then laid siege to Amphipolis, the most important Athenian possession in the region. Before an Athenian fleet, commanded by the historian Thucydides, could bring help, Brasidas had offered such favourable terms to the inhabitants of Amphipolis that they surrendered the city to him without a fight. Despite repeated efforts, Athens never recovered this crucial outpost. Thucydides’ failure to save Amphipolis led to his prosecution by Cleon (the historian’s animosity towards the politician shows in his writing) and lifelong exile. He retired to his family’s estate in Thrace, from where he could survey the war and work on his remarkable history.

  Having restored the balance somewhat, the Spartans sued once more for peace. Early in 423 the two sides entered into a one-year truce: each side was to keep the possessions they currently had, and fighting was to stop, to buy time with which to negotiate a lasting peace. Unfortunately, on the Spartan side, the Thebans refused to recognize the truce and Brasidas ignored instructions from home and continued his northern campaign, and on the Athenian side, Cleon and other hawks kept stirring things up. Scione, a small but strategically placed town, was judged to have seceded from the Athenian alliance and surrendered to Brasidas after the truce had been signed, and therefore not to be covered by it. The Athenian Assembly was furious, and this time there was no Diodotus to oppose Cleon’s proposal that all the male citizens of Scione should be put to death.

  In 422, once the truce had expired, Cleon took command of northern operations himself. Scione was by now surrounded by a siege wall, so he could ignore it. He retook several other towns, before turning his attention to Amphipolis. The two armies (with Socrates again among the Athenians) met outside the town, and the Athenians were again badly mauled. They lost hundreds of men, while the Spartans lost only seven. One of the seven, however, was Brasidas – and among the Athenian dead was Cleon. The Athenians may not have regained Amphipolis, but the two most belligerent obstacles to peace had fallen.

  The peace treaty that was eventually drawn up in 421 recognized, with minor exceptions, the status quo that had existed before the start of the war. In other words, the Spartans were to abandon Amphipolis and the rest of Chalcidice, leaving Scione to suffer Cleon’s posthumous legacy of the execution of all its male citizens. Socrates may have witnessed or even been involved in this horrendous act. Athens, for her part, was to abandon important gains such as Cythera and Pylos. The peace was to be binding not just on the protagonists, but on all the allies too, and was to last for fifty years – unless Alcibiades got his way.

  ALCIBIADES IN THE WINGS

  Alcibiades played very little part in the early years of the war. He served as a soldier at Poteidaea and at Delium, he was on the board that reassessed the tribute in 424, and in 422 he proposed a decree honouring the people of the island of Siphnos for some benefaction to Athens. The reason for his inactivity during the Archidamian phase of the war is perfectly mundane: in Athens, one had to be thirty to hold significant public office, and he did not reach this critical birthday till 423 or 422, ten years after he first became eligible to serve abroad, at Poteidaea. It was also around this time that he had a bill passed which granted land and money to the children of Aristeides the Just – a diplomatic move, since Aristeides had earned his nickname as the original assessor of the allies’ tribute which, with Alcibiades’ help, had just been revised sharply upwards.

  Alcibiades was still primarily engaged, however, in perfecting his reputation as a man-about-town; like Oscar Wilde, he was putting his genius into his life and only talent into his work. There are plenty of stories about his wild youth. Many may be fantasies, and some derive from the imaginations of the comic poets, but he was certainly a headstrong young man, with a large appetite for life. His first public appearance would have occurred in March of the year when he gained his majority, aged eighteen; as the orphaned son of a father killed fighting for Athens, he would have been presented to the assembled people at the Festival of Dionysus. The young men were required to dress in armour for the occasion, as a sign that they were now entering on manhood and would themselves fight for the city, and we must surely imagine Alcibiades seizing the opportunity to make a fine display. For this was also the occasion when he would have inherited his share of his father’s plentiful estate.

  He was also busy extending his honour by more dubious means – sexual conquest. This was always a recognized route among the competitive aristocrats of Athens, despite the fact that it required that what we would consider private behaviour (say, seduction of a famous beauty, or of Socrates) become public knowledge. But he also relied on more conventional methods, such as the prosecution of court cases and the delivery of polished speeches designed to win over the general populace. Although his wealth and family prestige meant that he could have gradually ascended to power in the time-honoured way, he preferred the fast route of the new politicians, by endearing himself to the Athenian people. Some time in the 420s, since he securely belonged to the liturgical class, he was obliged to act as sponsor for a dramatic production at one of the choral festivals, which he did in a typically magnificent fashion; also typically, he became involved in a punch-up with a rival impresario.

  ALCIBIADES TAKES THE STAGE

  The Archidamian War had ended in disappointment and frustration for both sides – hardly the right conditions for a lasting peace – and Alcibiades and his fellow hawks, such as Hyperbolus of Perithoedae, watched for an opportunity to undermine the fragile treaty. Alcibiades was motivated not only by his warlike ambition, but also by his political enmity with Nicias of Cydantidae. Nicias was a ‘new man’, not a member of one of the aristocratic families; his father had made an enormous fortune renting slaves to the state, and Nicias came to the fore in the 420s as a competent, if somewhat cautious, military commander. By 421 he was already in his early fifties, and became the chief negotiator of the accord with Sparta.

  As both an aristocrat and a narcissist, Alcibiades was particularly piqued that the Spartans chose to negotiate with Nicias. Alcibiades’ family had traditionally held the proxenia of Sparta, allowing them to represent Spartan interests in Athens, but his grandfather had allowed it to lapse; this had not stopped him being ostracized in 460, but at the time he had needed to demonstrate his loyalty towards Athens rather than its rival. Alcibiades was trying to revive the proxenia, especially by making sure that the Spartan prisoners from Sphacteria were reasonably well looked after. After all, even his name was Spartan in origin. A foreign state might have more than one proxenos in another state, but at any given time one was more ‘official’ than the others, in the sense that the foreign state turned first to him. With the rivalry between the two states, and especially with Athens holding eminent Spartan prisoners, the official Spartan proxenos would have been highly visible, and Alcibiades always wanted to be visible.

  He did not have to wait long for a chance to act on his pique. Sparta and Argos were old rivals, with a long history of fighting for supremacy in the eastern and central Peloponnese. The issue had been resolved early in the fifth century, when Sparta wiped out Argos’s fighting force in a single battle. Over the next seventy-five years, Argos recovered enough to feel the sting of the old rivalry, but could never challenge Sparta for supremacy. In 450 the Argives entered into a treaty with the Spartans, which had so far kept them out of the current conflict. In 420, however, the treaty was about to expire.

  According to Thucydides, this is what happened. Alcibiades invited a delegation from Argos,
Mantineia and Elis to Athens to talk about an alliance with the Athenians, instead of renewing their various treaties with Sparta. This provoked the Spartans to send their own delegation, to try to prevent such a Quadruple Alliance, and to demonstrate their commitment to the Peace of Nicias. As foreign delegations did, the Spartans first addressed the Athenian Council, and told them that they had come with full powers of negotiation on these matters. Alcibiades did not want the reminder of peace to sway the Assembly, when the proposal was put to the people there. At a private meeting with the Spartan delegates, he persuaded them not to mention to the Assembly that they had full powers of negotiation and to leave it to him to shore up the Peace of Nicias. So when the Spartans were presented to the Assembly, and were asked whether they had full powers of negotiation, they denied that they had. The blatant contradiction between what they had told the Council and what they were telling the Assembly made the Athenians mistrust them, and Alcibiades made a stirring appeal that they should bring the Argive delegation forward straight away and enter into an alliance with them. Just at that moment, a slight earth tremor interrupted the proceedings as a bad omen, and the next day Nicias persuaded the Assembly to send him and others to Sparta to try to sort the mess out.

  This is incomprehensible. Why would the Spartan delegates trust Alcibiades, a fledgling Athenian politician who was not even their proxenos? Why would they believe that a hawk would work for peace? Why would they so stupidly discredit themselves and their mission before the Athenians? Why did they not simply discredit Alcibiades instead, by saying that it was he who had persuaded them to say what they said? Could any or all of the puzzles be solved by remembering that one of the Spartan delegates, a man called Endius, was a xenos of Alcibiades? It is simplest to think that Thucydides has written a condensed and misleading account. Since, as we shall see, Alcibiades’ efforts really achieved very little, Thucydides’ reason for highlighting this episode must have been to portray Alcibiades, on his first appearance in his history, as an ambitious and unscrupulous man, driven by personal motivations; and in his desire not to spend more time over this than he had to, the historian obscured the facts.

  The key to untangling the story lies, I believe, with the Boeotians. The Boeotians, led by Thebes, were among Sparta’s most important allies, and they were opposed to the peace with Athens. Sparta had undertaken to try to win the Boeotians over to the idea of peace with Athens, but instead had just entered into a fresh military alliance with them. The Athenian position was straightforward: either you cancel this alliance with Boeotia, or we enter into an alliance with Argos. This was exactly the deal Nicias offered the Spartans when he went there following the extraordinary Assembly meeting. Now we can perhaps unpack what happened.

  When the Spartans said in the first instance that they came with full powers of negotiation, they meant that they had a free hand to try to persuade the Athenians not to enter into an alliance with Argos, by promising to arrange the exchange of Pylos, still in Athenian hands, for territory the Athenians claimed that was still in the hands of Spartan allies. But when asked in the Assembly – perhaps by Alcibiades or one of his stooges – whether this meant that they would cancel their new alliance with the Boeotians, they said that they could not guarantee that. How could they? Such an important issue would be a matter for the authorities in Sparta itself. This is what Alcibiades had discovered in his private talks with the Spartan delegates, or at least from his friend Endius, and this was what he used to discredit the Spartan envoys. He would have argued, without much difficulty, that the Spartan alliance with the Boeotian federation was the key, and that if the Spartan delegates were powerless in this respect, they were in effect powerless altogether.

  Alcibiades spent an anxious few days while Nicias was negotiating in Sparta, but the mission came to nothing: it foundered on the Spartans’ refusal to give up their alliance with the Boeotians. Nicias came home with egg on his face and with the Athenian doves in disgrace, since they had already returned the Spartan prisoners from Sphacteria (as they were obliged to by the terms of the treaty) and gained nothing in return. The Athenians immediately entered into a hundred-year treaty with Argos, Mantineia and Elis. Sparta was bound to use military means against such a threat on its doorstep. While the Spartans first hastened to reassure and retain their existing friends, Alcibiades, who had parlayed his success into his first generalship, spent much of 419 touring the Peloponnese, strengthening the Quadruple Alliance and persuading others to join it. There was more than a little showmanship even in this military venture, as Arnold Gomme pointed out: ‘It was a grandiose scheme for an Athenian general, at the head of a mainly Peloponnesian army, to march through the Peloponnese cocking a snook at Sparta when her reputation was at its lowest.’

  When Patrae proved reluctant to join the alliance, on the grounds that the Athenians would swallow them up, Alcibiades quipped, ‘That may be so, but they will do so little by little, and feet first, whereas the Spartans will swallow you down head first in a single gulp.’ Alcibiades’ intention was to secure the western entrance to the Corinthian Gulf for Athens, but a strong Corinthian force prevented him from doing more than strengthening Patrae’s defences and enhancing the Athenian presence there. He also persuaded Argos to attack strategically important Epidaurus, perhaps as an attempt to make the Corinthians feel cornered and to frighten them out of the Peloponnesian League. But Spartan sabre-rattling undermined Argive resolve, even when Alcibiades arrived with a thousand Athenian hoplites; in any case, the Athenians too were wary of meeting the formidable Spartan hoplites in a pitched battle.

  Having achieved relatively little, Alcibiades was not elected general for 418. The Spartans cowed the Argives into concluding a four-month truce with them, but Alcibiades was despatched to Argos to stiffen the resolve of the allies and to argue that the truce was not valid, since the Athenians had not been involved in the negotiations. The Quadruple Alliance attacked Orchomenus, and set their sights on Tegea next, on the border of the Spartan heartland, but the Spartans met them at Mantineia and defeated them. This was a critical battle for Sparta: if they had lost, the Peloponnesian League would have collapsed and the Athenians would have won the war. But instead Argos, Elis and Mantineia abandoned the Athenian alliance and joined or rejoined the Peloponnesian League. Although Alcibiades’ Peloponnesian policy had failed, he was able to boast that he had brought the Spartans to the brink of defeat, and had forced them to risk all on a single battle, without seriously endangering Athens, since the battle had taken place far from the city. It was not a bad start for someone who had set his sights on being the first man of the city. But Nicias was still in the way.

  OSTRACISM

  The Peace of Nicias should also have been one of the victims of Mantineia, since Spartans and Athenians clashed there in battle, but they tacitly agreed to regard this as an anomaly and carried on as though the peace were intact. Both Nicias’s peace policy and Alcibiades’ Peloponnesian programme were more or less in tatters, but Alcibiades maintained contact with the pro-Athenian democrats in troubled Argos, who in 417 bloodily deposed the ruling oligarchy and seized power. At Alcibiades’ suggestion, they began to build walls connecting their town to the sea (on the model of the Athenian Long Walls), so that they would be less vulnerable to a Spartan attack. The scheme was spectacularly unsuccessful, since the Spartans attacked and demolished the walls just a few weeks after their completion, but the following year Alcibiades, in his second generalship, sailed to Argos to forestall the possibility of an oligarchic counter-coup. He arrived with twenty ships, arrested the remaining Spartan sympathizers, and deported them to islands under Athenian control. By now, Argos was virtually Alcibiades’ client state.

  With the two rivals, Nicias and Alcibiades, both forced to retrench, Hyperbolus chose this time to attack them both for ineffective leadership and, by default, to put himself forward as a candidate for the position of first man of Athens. Hyperbolus was a popular politician best known for his advocacy of expansi
on into the western Mediterranean. He now, in 416, initiated an ostracism, on the grounds that the rivalry between Nicias and Alcibiades was destabilizing the state. As far as he could see, he could only win: either Nicias would be exiled, and that would remove the chief opponent of western expansion, or Alcibiades would go, and that would leave the glory and profit of western conquest to Hyperbolus. Of course, an ostracism was not so straightforward: ostraka recovered by archaeologists and plausibly dated to this particular ostracism process bear the names of eleven men, including the four picked out by our literary sources as the chief candidates: Alcibiades, Nicias, Hyperbolus and Phaeax of Acharnae. Phaeax too was an expansionist, remembered for a successful diplomatic mission to Sicily and southern Italy in 422, during which he arranged alliances with or at least neutrality in a number of towns, as a prelude to a future Athenian attack on Sicily.

  Alcibiades’ response is explicable only on the assumption that he was more or less certain that he would be the one to be banished. First, he allied his networks of political friends with those of Phaeax. This left matters about even: it was no longer certain whether he or Nicias would be sent into exile. Nicias accordingly became worried, and was open to Alcibiades’ approach. With typical flamboyance, by forming a temporary alliance also with his main rival, Alcibiades not only secured his own safety, but ensured a topsy-turvy ostracism, because when the votes were counted, it was Hyperbolus himself who had the most. Since Hyperbolus had not originally been seen as a threat to the stability of the democracy, which was the alleged purpose of any ostracism, the whole institution came into disrepute. Alcibiades had demonstrated how easy it was for powerful men to manipulate the system to their own advantage. The Athenians never again resorted to ostracism.