The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [117]
In the city Athens’ citizens might have been trying to forget the war as they continued to commission plays and sculptures, as they debated with sophists and paid respects to their many gods, but the war had not forgotten them.
Foul breath – Mytilene, Corcyra and the Agora, 427 BC
The casualties of Athens’ war with Sparta were not just the foot soldiers. Pericles, the official elected as one of the ten generals every year for fifteen years, had died in c.429 BC. Blamed for masterminding a policy that welcomed plague into Athens, he was heavily fined and then stripped of his office. His own family – like so many in the city – had been thinned out by the disease; his sons from his first marriage were amongst the first to die. Whether it was physical or psychological damage that killed the General, we shall probably never know.
What is certain is that he represented a corporate malaise in the citystate.
Communities around the eastern Mediterranean had started to notice that Athens was faltering. The cities of Asia Minor and its offshore islands in particular, many still oligarchic, started to get restless. One such, Mytilene – the first city of the island of Lesbos – decided to chance her luck and sent envoys to Sparta and to Olympia asking for military aid, reminding her would-be Laconic saviours that ‘Athens had been ruined by the plague and the costs of the war.’
Athens was appalled by Mytilene’s gall. Hands shot up in the Assembly once more, and the Athenian democrats who had survived battle and pathogens voted for unstinting aggression. Mytilene was besieged, and then starved into submission. But still the Assembly, urged on by hardline orators, raged. In 427 BC democratic Athenians voted to wipe the hubristic rebels – man, woman and child – off the face of the earth. A trireme was to be sent eastwards, its instructions to cut the breath out of all who stood there. The boat was dispatched, bristling with arms, but then overnight the democrats slept uneasily. They dreamed of the brutality of the decision they had made. The next day as they walked to the Pnyx at dawn, with the clarity of the early-morning air around them, they realised what a horror they had unleashed. One man, Diodotus, stood up and persuaded another course, with words that have great purchase: why slaughter, he said, when this will send such a malign signal out to the rest of the world, and why maim when Mytilenean resources – manpower, boats, cash – could be so useful to us? A second trireme was sent out from Piraeus, its rowers fed superfoods (barley-cakes soaked in honey and fortified wine) so that they had the strength of heroes; they had to overtake the first trireme, packed with assassins, even though it had almost a day’s advantage.
Thrashing through the Aegean surf, the second trireme arrived just in time. The orders were reversed. Women wept with relief, men lived to see another day. Both the mob-passion and the flexibility of this fledgling democracy had been proved at a stroke. But Athens’ act of mercy would become far from typical. In the Assembly a motion was passed that Athens’ allies should be forced to ‘love’ the demos: a love-affair that saw Athena developing into an oppressive and domineering partner. Little surprise that when recording the ‘free cities’ in league with Athens, there was sometimes a slip of the stonemason’s chisel; instead of ‘our allies’ on inscriptions, the Athenians started to refer to ‘those cities that we rule’.
Mercy had been shown at Mytilene. Corcyra (modern-day Corfu) would not be so lucky. Oligarchs on the island had gained the upper hand. Athens decided that, after all, they did need to make an example of those who stirred up trouble. Corcyra had tempted Athens into conflict with Corinth and Sparta