The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [128]
In 424 BC the historian Thucydides had already tried to do his patriotic duty in this region. The Spartan commander Brasidas, backed by a motley crew of Peloponnesian hoplites and helots in hoplite armour, had made a surprise sortie here. A message was sent to Thucydides, who was manning and maintaining seven triremes back on that honey-rich island of Thasos (the place that had witnessed the stirrings of Athens’ imperial ambition), to say that the Athenian general had to come, and fast. It took Thucydides half a day to arrive. He had a vested interest here, the ownership of a number of gold-mining concessions in the fertile landscape. Thucydides should have been the perfect man for the job. But his tardiness, and Spartan brio, worked against him. Brasidas, under the cover of a raging storm, had forced his way into the city. Not long inside, he had already persuaded the men of Amphipolis to give up their settlement without so much as raising a sword. He promised safe passage to those who wanted to leave, and no sequestering or looting of the property of those Amphipolitans who decided to stay. Suddenly, with their fair play and diplomatic niceties, it was the Spartan-side who appeared to hold the moral high ground in this unpleasant war. When news filtered back to Athens that Thucydides had failed to secure Amphipolis and had also allowed Brasidas to appear the benign liberator, the general was swiftly recalled to the mother-city and put on trial. Thucydides was found guilty. Amphipolis would be the last live military action that the key historian of the Peloponnesian War would ever see. Thucydides’ humiliating failure earned him lifelong exile. The general and his family lived out the rest of their lives in Thrace. It was in this northern, rugged territory that Thucydides produced his History of the Peloponnesian War, one of the greatest factual works of all antiquity.
Spartan forces were now installed in the Amphipolis garrison. On and off over the next two years the two enemies taunted one another, nibbling away at territories, treating the natives of the region like pawns in their own realm-wide game of chess. But the Athenians had no intention of letting a rich settlement such as Amphipolis slip from their grasp. The army’s instruction was to recapture Amphipolis at all costs. Socrates was one of the soldiers asked to effect this victory. After a year of mutually agreed armistice, in 422 BC the Athenians were back. The site of Socrates’ fiercest fighting is now a scrubby, low mound, where today cars engage on the crossroads between Thessaloniki and Drama.
This time as Socrates fought, he did so alongside Thracians. Thracians were a fickle bunch, barbaric fighters in both the true and the received sense of the word. Greek was not their native tongue; instead these men had their own bar-bar-baring language. They also committed atrocities on and off the battlefield. The rumours flew that they ate babies, that they never allowed their enemies to bury their dead. Frequently they hired themselves out to the highest bidder.1 Socrates’ immediate experience of war here was almost certainly an ugly one. Rather than the picture-perfect elegance of hoplites on the black-figure vases that litter the graves and archaeological layers of fifth-century Greece, we should turn to the bone evidence of the period, where eye-sockets are pierced with arrows, shin-bones sliced with axes, teeth smashed back into skulls. The fine vases may perhaps be the image that democratic Athens would prefer us to remember, but the bones too are the reality of fifth-century democratic politics.
When last at the Amphipolis site in 2006, I arrived at 2.30 p.m. to see the museum’s key-holder disappearing in a puff of blue diesel smoke. I mooched around, sulky. My children followed suit, and then started to spot pottery