The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [156]
43
SICILY
416/15 BC
CHORUS: … Over the streets of the central city
A shriek of death rose like a grip at the throat;
And trembling children clutched at their mothers’ skirts;
And War went forth from his secret lair;
And the work of the virgin Pallas was accomplished.
Men sank in blood while their dead hands clasped the altar;
The head half-raised from the pillow
Defenceless rolled from severed neck;
And beside the dead the victor’s lust
Planted the seed of a son for Hellas
Watered with tears of Troy’s despair …
Euripides, Women of Troy, lines 555–67, produced two months before the invasion of Sicily1
IN SEPTEMBER, IN ATHENS, THE MOON appears to be the colour of a blood-orange. Winds start to whip dust off the ground.
And back in 416, in early autumn, at a time of year that already feels unsettled, the Athenian Assembly began to debate a crazy, megalomaniac plan. Athens was forever short of grain. Aerial spy photos from the Second World War have revealed the ghosts of agricultural terraces from antiquity – thin shelves on hillsides all around the city where men have tried to coax food out of the stony, unhelpful earth.2 Unlike Sparta, Athens could not boast swathes of flat, fertile land. But the Athenian people needed to be fed.
A policy of land-grab, thinly disguised under the banner of democratic enlightenment, had long been in play in the city-state. The result was a peculiarly Athenian phenomenon called clerouchia, or cleruchy. These settlements – a refined, aggressive form of the Greek colony – had been established across the Mediterranean basin. An Athenian force would turn up in a new territory (the island of Euboea, literally ‘well-oxed’, is an excellent example) and claim the fertile farmland in the name of the democratic experiment. Each time troops from the mother-city appeared, natives would be forced off their land. Athenian administration generated 50,000 refugees from Euboea alone, at least 500,000 in total; homeless men, women and children, trudging through the eastern Mediterranean, fearfully searching for a new yard of earth they could call their own. On Euboea, Athenian forts manned by democratic-soldiers and guarding the Euboean farmland of Athenian absentee landlords await excavation. Today the few remaining masonry blocks cling to the rock faces and the promontories are easy to miss. But once one begins to trace the footprint of these buildings, their scale is apparent. These garrisons were well staffed – the ground is thick with pottery, the discarded cooking pots of generations of Athenian-paid soldiers who lived here to stand guard over Athens’ newly acquired land. The sites on Euboea, when fully excavated, will tell us a good deal about the demanding nature of the democratic experiment.
And of course Athenian imperialism-by-any-other-name had as much to do with aristocratic ambition as it did with demotic provision. Athens’ old oligarchs, its cavalry class, would stand on hills and look out to sea – here was an opportunity for aristocratic competition; land-grabs and head-counts that proved you were capable of strategic marvels, worthy descendants of your ancestor Theseus.
And so in 416 BC we can perhaps imagine the stellar aristocrat Alcibiades standing one night on a high point in Athens and looking out across the crowded cityscape beyond the Acropolis to Piraeus bay and the dimpled lapping of the sea. This is still, and was then, a spiriting view. What other lands lay beyond that horizon? Persia seemed unconquerable, the Egyptian expedition of 459/4 had failed spectacularly – so what about the place where the sun sets, corn-yellow at this time of year, what about the west?3
In the choppy waters between the toe of Italy and the north coast of Africa there is a lush, large island: Sicily. And that autumn, as its wheat and barley