• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1788 0

BC the Melians made the political mistake of asserting that they were happy to continue their ‘700-year’ independence and not join the Delian League. For more than a decade Athenians had been pressing the islanders to secede. Back in 425 BC Athens had assessed Melos for tribute; the Melians had refused to pay up. Clearly, Melian independence was a thorn in Athens’ flesh. And now that the Peloponnesian War had dragged on for years, the Athenians needed all the cash they could lay their hands on. With Alcibiades and his coterie to all intents and purposes in charge of the Assembly, the small island and the mainland superpower entered a heated debate. Melos, don’t forget, was at a disadvantage by this stage. Athenians had become highly skilled at argument. The Assembly was no stranger to grand oratory – and already the historian Thucydides was commenting on the dangers of these rabble-rousing situations. Witness his report of one of Cleon’s speeches in the Assembly.

In speechifying competitions of this sort the prizes go to the spin-doctors and the state is the loser. The blame is yours, for stupidly encouraging these competitive displays … If something is to be done in the future, you weigh it up by hearing a good speech on the subject, and as for the past, you judge it not from your own first-hand, eye-witness experience but from what you hear in some clever bit of rhetoric … You all want to be the first to make a speech, and if you can’t do that, you try to sit there looking as though you are one step ahead of the speaker … you demand changes to the conditions under which you live, and yet have a very dim understanding of the reality of those conditions: you are very slaves to the pleasure of the ear, and more like the audience of a paid public speaker than the council of a city.2

Athens’ most persuasive and hard-line negotiators were sent across the water to make the Melians see sense. Theatricalised it may be, but the following exchange between the men of Melos and the Athenian envoys is one of the most sobering in world literature. The author, Thucydides, may have invented it for dramatic effect, but the point of drama is that it can communicate that awful moment when attitudes harden, when love is lost, when men decide to hate one another. Stinging from defeat at the Battle of Mantinea in 418 BC, and irked by the fact that Melos had been friendly to the Spartans, on hearing that the Melians still insisted on their independence, and – one suspects – remembering Melos’ staggering natural resources, angry voices in the Athenian Assembly up on the Pnyx (Alcibiades almost certainly amongst them) proposed a violent motion: this was going to be gunboat diplomacy.3

A massive force was mobilised: 2,500 hoplites all told, 320 archers, twenty crack-squad cavalrymen – all boarding boats whose prows would be pointing south.4

Any Melian – a shepherd, a miner, a baker looking out on the pearly northern horizon one day in May – would have seen a worrying, and then a horrifying, stain: thirty-eight triremes (Athens’ own as well as boats offered up or sequestered from Athenian allies), 3,000 soldiers bearing down. Frothing through the deep water and then nudging their way into Melos’ natural harbour.

Because the Athenians did not want a plucky anomaly in the heart of the Mediterranean, they were determined the Melians would admit that they were a subject state in Athens’ empire. Melian oligarchs and magistrates refused to allow the Athenians to present their case to the full community – and there were not that many of them: 1,600 or so in total in an island only 15 miles long and 10 miles wide. Why such censorship? To prevent mass panic spreading, perhaps? Believing they could avert atrocity and come to some mutually beneficial deal? In case the banner of democracy would be too easily planted?

Thucydides gives us his version of the conversation that followed. The Melians admit it will be difficult to contend with Athenian power, but say that they will ‘put their trust in the gods’, they will ‘try to save themselves’. The Athenian