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By Root 1750 0

Troy picks up where Homer’s Iliad Book 24 leaves off. But the resonance is a contemporary one, and Euripides’ point is clear. In many ways, the men who have been speared and sliced and clubbed and hacked to death in atrocities such as Melos are the lucky ones. It is the women – who have in front of them a long life of exile, enslavement, rape, forced separation from their children – who are the most dehumanised victims of war. It is these women who will be shipped to an alien city, Athens, or sold in the Athenian Agora to travel yet further afield. Socrates would certainly have passed these casualties of his friend Alcibiades’ high-handed policy as he made his habitual journey through the marketplace. Mothers and children side by side, orphans, childless mothers all staring out at Athena’s city with wary eyes. The actors who wore masks and became the ‘abused women’ of Euripides’ and Sophocles’ tragedies in the Theatre of Dionysos might well have passed them too – the spoiled life that their dramatic art imitated.

One Melian man escaped the carnage – because at the time of the massacre he was hiding as a resident alien in Athens itself. A philosopher, known as Diagoras of Melos, he had been attracted to Athena’s city in happier days when the eastern Mediterranean was at relative peace, when thought and moral exploration were currencies valued as highly as talents of tribute silver and prisoners-of-war.

Diagoras was not exterminated by an Athenian trireme, yet it was Athenian paranoia that would cut him down. Because within two years of the Melian massacre the Assembly had called for his assassination without trial, and Diagoras had fled the city-state with a price on his head. For centuries we have not known precisely the nature of his crime, other than that, like Socrates’, it was not for his deeds, but ‘his words’.4 But a recent thrilling discovery may now make that clear.

42

PRIEST OF NONSENSE: PLAYING WITH FIRE

Derveni, northern Greece, and Athens, 414 BC

Anaxagoras was justly imprisoned for his impiety regarding the sun and moon; you banished Protagoras fairly and appropriately for asking whether the gods exist or not; you were wise to promise a reward for the person who would kill Diagoras, since he mocked Eleusis and the ineffable mysteries; but who can say that there is a book or an argument about the gods by Socrates that is contrary to law? As you cannot show us one, Anytus, even if you cite a myriad of sophists who have been ruined you still do not convict Socrates.1

Libanius, Apology, 154–5

ON THE E75 FROM ATHENS TO Thessaloniki the long vehicles juggernaut past. Searching out excavations on the motorway verge at Derveni has to be at once one of the most unrestful and one of the most rewarding of journeys. Widening the road here between 1961 and 1963, workers’ pickaxes struck a completely unexpected find: a series of fabulously rich aristocrats’ tombs. Burial chamber A11 is now protected by concrete walls and canopied with scrubby earth. There is a lot of litter. The husband-and-wife curators (key-holders who seem a little surprised that visitors might have an interest in their charge) struggle to lift the metal-grille gate because this grave has so few visitors.

When you clamber down to find the sarcophagus, still in situ, it takes a good minute or so for your eyes to adjust to the blackness inside.

The riches within, when first discovered in May 1962, physically took the breath away. Archaeologists’ reports tell us that as the coffin lid was removed, the excavators gasped and cried out. Inside the tomb were two finely cast golden urns each 2 feet high; here too rock-crystal vases; golden diadems and necklaces with gold tendrils cotton-fine; perfume still sweet. Although his name was nowhere to be found, it was clear that this was the grave of a wealthy and cultured aristocrat. A man who collected not just material riches, but also intellectual delights. Because here there were gems relevant to Socrates’ story, but jewels so fine they almost blew away in the dust: here there were the