The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [166]
But the Athenians were not fooled. Kolonos came to be remembered as the locus of the beginning of ‘the troubles’. The council of the Four Hundred had sufficient money to pay assassins to work swiftly and effectively. Demokratia had suddenly become treason, the ‘demos’ was once again a dirty word. There were summary executions, Athena’s city was staggering into civil war. All pretence of freedom of expression was dropped. By 411 BC the Four Hundred had the bit between their teeth and believed they were on a winning streak. They decided they could manage without Alcibiades, who twisted and turned once again. The democrats in the fleet in Samos were horrified by what had happened back in the mother-city. Alcibiades smelled an opportunity, sympathised, and they voted him their general. Now to all intents and purposes, the exile had his very own private Athenian navy.
And meanwhile the new, prematurely confident oligarchic Athens was not doing well. The 400 had secured neither Persian money nor Spartan appeasement. Spartan troops took over the breadbasket that is Euboea and then slowly started to pick off cities potentially friendly to Athens: Byzantium in 410, and from 407 many more as the satrap of Asia Minor, Prince Cyrus, decided to put his money behind Sparta’s cause. When it was clear that the Council of 400 – still meeting regularly in the bouleuterion in the Agora – wouldn’t work, the Athenians tried a new way to restrict the full democracy, instituting a property qualification for full citizenship.7
These were all lame gestures. The club of the great and the good had become just too small to allow Athens to revolutionise its political system effectively overnight.
Throughout the fifth century, fighting on many sides – against Persians, and then Persians and Spartans, and then Spartans, and then Spartans and Persians once more – the Athenians had managed to lose sight of, or perhaps more accurately gloss over, internal disputes, and were able to pretend that they presented a united front. They exiled or ostracised those who caused trouble, they shouted loudly together in the Assembly – they persuaded themselves that they were as one. But now cracks within the city-state were widening.
It is in 411 that Thucydides’ narrative ends. He was of course (following his disgrace at Amphipolis) in exile in Thrace. His health broken, within a few years he would be dead. From 411 BC onwards it is also almost as though the true father of history cannot bear to write about Athens anymore.
The Four Hundred were in power, the democracy had been lost, but some men of Athens remembered that Alcibiades was in fact only two days’ sailing away in the region of Samos with the pro-democrats Thrasybulus and Thrasyllus. Alcibiades, despite his treachery, despite his hubris and quicksilver politics, had a totemic reputation for many Athenians. He might not have demonstrated the pure ‘nobility of spirit’ that was thought to come with the beauty of an aristocrat, but he still had the vigour, the driving ambition that incarnated democratic Athenian verve. And – this is of key importance – he had the loyalty of a water-borne army.8 Athenian hoi polloi were quickened once again to the idea that this quasi-legendary figure might be able to save them.
And indeed it was Alcibiades, Socrates’ couch-mate, who pulled off a temporary reversal of fortunes, earning great victories for Athens and at last