The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [146]
IT IS IN THE SYMPOSIUM THAT we meet again the other leading player in Socrates’ story – Alcibiades.
Alcibiades has burst into that immortalised dinner gathering on a hot night. He is more than a little drunk, his head is wreathed in violets (how could Socrates resist his violet-cream-perfumed golden locks – a heart-turning double-sweetness?). But he is beauty with a forked tongue.
SOCRATES: I beg you, Agathon … protect me from this man!2
So why did those pretty flowers ring Alcibiades’ head? In Athens, young men who worshipped Demeter and Dionysos wore just such a gentle, pungent crown. Was the aristrocrat preparing himself for a hard night of drinking? Centuries later Pliny would advise men to wreath themselves in violets to dispel the fug of wine-fumes or of a wine-fuelled headache. The plant – actually a purple gillyflower – still grows profusely in Athens today and is a favourite decoration at parties that involve serious boozing.
Or is Plato reminding us that Athens herself has an epithet, ‘violet-crowned’? He is perhaps giving us Alcibiades as Athens: beautiful, louche, supremely confident, sensuous, redolent, flawed, war-hungry – and visibly wilting.
Alcibiades is one of those enchanting, magnetic historical characters who always seem to take things just that bit too far. He clearly drove men and women to distraction. The only extant evidence we have for a woman initiating her own divorce in this period concerns Alcibiades’ wife Hipparete. She leaves Alcibiades in protest at the number of prostitutes he brings back to the house, and moves in with her brother Callias. The long-suffering woman goes to register the divorce with the Archon (on her own) and is seized shortly afterwards by Alcibiades and dragged – one presumes ignominiously – back to their old home.
Within a few months the pair are separated.
That brilliant, glowing, selfish party-animal Alcibiades illuminates the cracks in the ‘liberty and equality’ of the radical new state. His behaviour began to prove that Athenian democracy, deep down, was a sham and always had been. Whereas others in the city had, as the fifth century progressed, suggested something a little more egalitarian in their dress, Alcibiades seemed to delight in his deep-purple cloak, the colour of ‘congealed blood’. He might put up with democracy, but he refused to bury his aristocratic privileges and pretensions. This purple was so highly prized, a signifier of kings since prehistory, that it was banned by most cults in Attica. The cult par excellence, however, the Eleusinian Mysteries, prescribed that their sacred officials should wear the phoinikis – a purple wrap. When Andocides was cursed for his part in Alcibiades’ alleged profanation of the Eleusinian Mysteries, we’re told that the priests thunderclapped their purple cloaks at him.3
Like Athens, Alcibiades was an attention-seeker of monstrous proportions, loudly confident. In 416 he entered seven chariots at the Olympic games, and three came in poll positions, first, second and fourth. His victory ode was written by none other than Euripides himself:
Victory shines like a star, but yours eclipses all victories.4
Paintings of the conquering hero (commissioned by Alcibiades himself) and his horses were executed by the master-painter Aristophon for the Propylaia, at the entrance to the Acropolis: work so impressive that men started to whisper that Alcibiades styled himself ‘tyrant’. Again like Athena’s city itself, Alcibiades’ achievements were immense, his use of funds generated by the rosy economy of a material democracy inspiring. But such showy confidence sparked jealousy. Men disapproved of Alcibiades and other city-states were clearly starting to disapprove of flash, look-at-me Athens.
Mind you, don’t forget that Athenians were brought up on the epics. From the cradle they were entranced with tales of a time when, in the Age of Heroes, Achilles, Ajax, Odysseus et al. were giants of men and coloured the earth with their heroic deeds. For some, a character such as Alcibiades appeared to have brought heroism