The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [157]
The Sicilian campaign was launched.
Today Piraeus harbour is still busy – up until the year 2000 it thronged with people – but now it has been dragged into the modern age and mechanised. Containers have done away with the need for porters, the Olympics clean-up has removed the illegal immigrants who used to sell pirate sunglasses and CDs as you waited to embark. Cars take travellers into the bowels of 200-foot-long ships – and then on to the Greek islands. Apart from those scurrying onto boats, there are scarcely any people.
The scene in spring of 415 BC – the eve of the send-off of the boats – would have been very different. Sanctuaries around the port were full of the trinkets of worshippers. The harbour walls were, we are told by Thucydides, edged with eager onlookers. Citizens, metics, foreigners, allies – Thucydides gives us the impression that anyone who could walk or ride made the pilgrimage down to the port. It would have been odd if Socrates were not here. Particularly given that the plan had been masterminded by his one-time soulmate, the dashing Alcibiades. This was Athenian democracy in action. A force of citizen-soldiers voted to war by their own fathers, brothers, and by their own show of hands in a democratic assembly; an exhibition of democratic might. Gold and silver vessels were at the ready to pour libations of wine into the sea, and each and every soldier had made a particular effort with his armour so that ‘it looked more like a demonstration of the power and greatness of Athens, than an expeditionary force against the enemy’.4
Symptomatic of the aristocratic one-upmanship that was so rife in Athens, ship-owners had carved particularly flamboyant figureheads on their ships, and the boats were carnival-bright. Cavalrymen and their horses – spooked doubtless by the noise and water all around – were clattering into the storage areas of some of the boats. The Sicilian expedition (to all intents and purposes Alcibiades’ vanity project, an expression of aristocratic power) was set to leave Piraeus on a swell of manufactured brio. Trumpets were being sounded and throats cleared to sing a communal hymn of high praise.
But there was a problem. Athens and its stolidly conventional religious cycle could not be interrupted. This was the month when the women of the city worshipped Adonis. In a (to us slightly bizarre) manufactured replay of Adonis’ life, women planted small rows of vegetables and left them unwatered. They watched these wither and die, and then mourned their terrible loss. This was the death of promise, of a beautiful boy, it was what city-state and mother alike feared; it was the world all wrong, but the world as it really was. As a climax to the ritual, an effigy of the divine Adonis – a creature thought bigger, shinier, the epitome of what humanity wanted to be – would be wrapped and thrown into the sea.5
And on that autumn night the rites could not be interrupted, for such an irregularity might offend the gods, and so women’s voices had been rising in the air all night, shouting, screaming, wailing. Athens is a vast auditorium, and the horseshoe of mountains keeps clamour in, the limestone of the Acropolis acts as a giant sounding board. Hollering and shouts of fear still, in the noisy modern city, hang in the air like low cloud.
As females tore their faces and shrieked at the loss of male youths, it could not be a good omen. However, 134 ships, 5,100 hoplites, 700 slingers, thirty horsemen, thirty horses and thirty cargo ships were ready for the off. Huge crowds came down to the shore to wave them goodbye, torches were lit and carried along Piraeus quayside, libations were poured; the acrid, sweet smell of a civilisation on the move was in the air.
But those in the know in the crowd were subdued. The night before, a sickening thing had happened in the city. As Athens slept someone (or, it was whispered, something) had stalked through the streets. Over life-size marble carvings of bearded, half-smiling