The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [161]
One source tells us that 18,000 men were killed in a single afternoon.2
And we must not forget what it means to be slain by a classical Greek sword. Pornographically graphic descriptions of ways for men to die in battle are riven through the corpus of Ancient Greek literature, and none of this is horror-fantasy. Witness Euripides:
He drew back his left foot but kept his eyes closely on the pit of the other’s stomach from a distance; then advancing his right foot, he plunged the weapon through his navel and fixed it in his spine. Down fell Polyneikes, dripping with blood, ribs and belly contracting in his agony.3
Xenophon reports simply that a maimed Arkadian ‘reached the camp in flight, wounded deep in his belly and holding his intestines in his hands, he told all that had happened.’4
A stone inscription tells us the Athenians had voted in the Assembly to force their allies to ‘love the demos of the Athenians’.5 In Sicily it became clear that this love was, blatantly, unreciprocated.
There were a few survivors, 7,000 or so Athenians, and their fate was, if anything, even more gruesome. The Syracusans had always had a love of the playwright Euripides. And so Athenian soldiers were marched to a natural quarry just outside Syracuse, where they were forced to barter verses of Euripides for the chance of freedom. Today you can still enter, as the site has become a national park, gently planted; the quarry itself has cathedral-esque proportions, flocks of white doves roost at its height and fill the space with a low, rumbling coo. Given no food or water, crushed so tight they could not lie down, the Athenian interlopers were forced to recite lines of their own premier dramatist until they dropped from exhaustion or were felled. The torture was calculating. Sicilian demagogues remembered Melos and called for no clemency.
All in all, after the Sicilian debacle, close on 50,000 Athenian troops and their allies were missing, all presumed dead; 216 triremes were lost.
The wailing women, mourning Adonis, whose cries had cankered the air that night back in Athens twenty-four moons ago, were suddenly believed prescient. Effigies of the dead boy-god, corpse-stiff like the corpses in the quarry at Syracuse, had been carried to the coast. The Athenian women had buried beautiful figurine boys in the Aegean Sea in order to safeguard real men. But now those flesh-and-blood heroes were coming home across the waves in body-bags.
The Athenian dream had been that the Sicilian campaigners would return from their western adventure wealthy and bathed in glory; a whole new land-mass would be waiting, arms open to welcome Athenian democrats and their families. As it was, a handful of traumatised hoplites limped back, amputated, violated, covered in shame.6 Socrates himself – as represented by Plato in the dialogue Ion, set just at the end of the Sicilian disaster in 413 BC – comments that the Athenians were now desperate for personnel. Their citizen population was mortally reduced: they would even recruit generals from the ranks of foreigners. It is a passing remark that has recently been backed up by inscriptional evidence.7
SOCRATES: My splendid Ion, you know Apollodorus of Cyzicus, don’t you?
ION: And what sort of person might he be?
SOCRATES: He’s someone whom the Athenians have often elected as their general, foreigner though he is; and Athens also appoints to generalships and the other posts Phanosthenes of Andros and Heraclides of Clazomenae, even though they are foreigners, because they have demonstrated their merit.8
As those tattered remains of an army began to pull into the port of Piraeus, the frightened men of Athens