The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [165]
Alcibiades knew that Athens’ bullion was running dry. The closure of the Laurion mines meant that Silver Owls were no longer being produced from Attic soil, and many of Athens’ ‘allies’ were failing to deliver their tribute to the mother-city. Money was still dribbling in, but now there were moths rather than rubies in the Parthenon bank. A couple of years later, around 407/6 BC, the Athenians would be forced to melt down some of their golden statues for ready cash. Even glittering Athena Parthenos, that proud wonder of the ancient world who once surveyed an Athenian Empire broad and long, was turned into gold coin.4
So Alcibiades encouraged a brief oligarchic revolt in Samos, and, explicitly or unwittingly, set in train a series of events that would spell the beginning of the end of Athens. The details of this moment in history are still mysterious – almost certainly because they were planned covertly.
The general Assembly was persuaded that Athens’ situation was desperate. A committee of thirty (all, as it turned out, renowned oligarchs) were chosen to consider Athens’ options. Due to present their findings to the Assembly up on the Pnyx, there was a last-minute change of venue. An unfamiliar meeting space was arranged for what would turn out to be a momentous decision – the extinction of the democracy for the first time in almost a hundred years. The citizens of Athens were instead invited to a sanctuary of Poseidon Hippios in the deme of Kolonos, a mile or so outside the city walls. The location was designed to befuddle; a local sanctuary with distinct aristocratic connotations (it is aristocrats who have hippoi, ‘horses’, after all), it had neither the timbre of those great democratic debating grounds – the Agora, the Odeion, the Pnyx, the Theatre of Dionysos – nor, importantly, space enough to fit everyone in. The Spartans were only a few miles away at Decelea. Where the Pnyx had natural fortifications. It seemed the sanctuary-meeting place was going to be protected by oligarchic heavies. Any democrat here at Kolonos must have felt distinctly exposed.
The uneasy crowd gathered. It was clear that not everyone was welcome here, and that there was a danger of being trapped in the sanctuary, should you want to get out fast. In the ‘narrow space’, as Thucydides describes it, a series of reforms were pushed through. The democracy voted itself out of existence and voted in a new kind of constitution. A self-selected council of 400 was to replace the 500 citizens who once queued up to be chosen for office by lot in demes across Attica. The Athenian citizen-body would be restricted to 5,000, and only men who could carry hoplite arms. Athens had become a democratically elected oligarchy. The blue-blood horsemen who travelled home past their traditional exercise grounds at the herms’ crossroads opposite the Stoa Basileios now wore sardonic smiles.
Within a few days the council was dissolved. Someone – it is still not clear who precisely was the driving force behind this sociopolitical unrest – had achieved a very clever bloodless coup. The democracy had not been bypassed, but instead coerced into renouncing itself. Heavily armed highborn men ostentatiously hung out in the streets, escorted by the 120 so-called ‘Hellenic Youths’ (early pre-echoes of the ‘Hitler Youth’) to check there was no trouble.5 Democrats were intimidated into staying indoors, lying low and keeping quiet.
Thucydides tells us that ‘no one dared to speak out against them, fear was everywhere, and it was clear that the conspiracy was widespread; and if anyone did … straightaway, in some convenient way he was a dead man.’6
Immediately the new system was open to abuse. The 5,000 ‘citizen-body’ never materialised. Instead, for four months, the Four Hundred ruled, and tried to tidy up the city by exterminating their enemies. The sanctuary of Poseidon Hippios was set down in popular memory as a place where ate, fate, was played out to its dreadful conclusion. Kolonos Hill