The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [151]
Of the gods we believe and of mankind we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever and whatever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it in existence before us, and shall leave it to exist for ever among those who come after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you or anybody else, with the same power as ours, would do precisely the same as us.5
The Athenians declare ‘Might Rules’. They need no other excuse for unprovoked aggression than the size of their army.
Whether or not Thucydides was writing up this exchange to express his own sensitivity to moral debates has been and always will be debated. But what is certain is the disgusting brutality of the outcome. For a number of months the Melians were besieged. Melos would be a hard nut to crack because the island has and had great advantages. As the rim of an extinct volcano, it is a natural fortress; fresh water runs into the citadel (a number of the cafés and houses in the modern village still have their own wells) and a giant’s march of jagged volcanic rocks protects the island’s highest point, Mount Halakas. But the rocks’ colour, that of dried blood, would appear to have been prophetic.
Through a hard winter the Melians held out. Then disease, starvation, fear swirled in the air around those who were left. In 415 BC, forced back right to the crow’s nest of the island on top of a plug of unexploded magma, the islanders capitulated. Their soot-blackened oil lamps, mirrors, hair-pins and scythes – still being turned up by archaeologists – were left in their households for one last time.6 The remains, sitting quietly now in Melos’ municipal museum, are pathetic shards of ordinary human lives abandoned.
The Athenians were ruthless. This would be a blood-bath. Their orders were to slay every man standing, and to enslave every woman and child.
We can only imagine the carnage, because it seems not one single man survived to leave us their account.7
41
VENUS DE MILO ABUSED
Athens, 415 BC
TALTHYBIUS: Come, child; I pity your mother, but time is up.
No more embracing now.
You must climb to the topmost fringe of your father’s towers,
Where the sentence says you must leave your life behind.
Take him. – A job like this
Is fit for a man without feeling or decency;
I’m not brutal enough.
HECUBA: O little child, son of my dear lost son,
Your life is ravished from us by murderers.
What will become of us? What can I do for you?
Only to beat the head and bruise the breast –
This we can give; no more.
Lost city, lost child: what climax of suffering
Lacks now? Have we not reached
In headlong plunge the abyss of pain?
Euripides, Women of Troy, lines 782–98, written in 416/415 BC around the time of the Melos massacre1
THE ATHENIANS HAD A NEW ISLAND; and they had blood dripping from their hands. Alcibiades held the Melians’ faces and rubbed them in the dirt. He took one of the bereaved Melian women, enjoyed her and left her pregnant with a son.2
Alcibiades, who carries his villainy to such unheard-of lengths that, after recommending that the people of Melos be sold into slavery, he purchased a woman from among the prisoners and has since had a son by her … a child … sprung from parents who are each other’s deadliest enemies, and of his nearest kin the one has committed and the other has suffered the most terrible of wrongs.3
And it is at this point that we see Socrates’ city beginning to fracture irreparably. There is no doubt that the massacre at Melos worried the Athenians. That same year Euripides wrote his throat-tighteningly powerful tragedy Women of Troy. He would have applied to the Chief Archon for permission to write in the July or August before the massacre, but then clearly adapted his script during the winter of 416/15 as the Melians were suffering their abominable trauma. The scene is set back in the Age of Heroes, when Troy has fallen and the Greeks are wreaking their vengeance on the Trojan population – Women of