• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1863 0

foreigners and their families.11 Centuries after her death one man reports seeing Aspasia’s tomb in the harbour district.12 And there is the chance that a piece of figurative statuary now copied in the Vatican guarded her grave. Rather matronly, stodgy and sensible-looking, if this stone bust is indeed Aspasia, it is hard to credit that she caused the Peloponnesian War thanks to her looks and the lust of her nymphomaniac dancing girls. But that was what the mob persuaded themselves they wanted to believe. Once this slander was on the streets, it was nurtured until it became popular history – and was then quoted as fact. Like most goddesses, the goddess of persuasion, Peitho, and Pheme, the goddess of rumour, could be irrevocably unkind.

We commemorate Aspasia as a bright, self-made woman, but the Athenians never accepted this foreign courtesan. The democracy recognised the benefits of a cosmopolitan city, but shied away from endorsing and buttressing it. The Athenians, who had for a few decades proved themselves to be the most radical and liberal thinkers, who had embraced revolutionary, ground-breaking intellects from across the known world, gradually allowed the flaws of human nature – jealousy, self-delusion, greed, hubris, gossip, fear – to keep their democracy a flicker rather than a forest-fire in history. As a demos, a crowd, they made their judgement of Aspasia just as they did in the case of Arginusae.

Xenophon records his distaste for the Athenian gannets up on the Pnyx.

‘The crowd’, he simply says, ‘forced its will by thorubos.’13

This is sometimes dismissed as the snobbish slight of an aristocrat, but anyone who has lived in the real world should be able to taste Xenophon’s fear in their own mouths. Homo sapiens, time and again, craves the anonymity of the herd. All of civilisation’s darkest hours have been bayed on by men who want scapegoats, who want the finger of blame to turn in any direction, as long as it is away from their own face. Loose, jealous tongues are the bane of history. Thorubos can mean a buzz, a jangle of minds stimulated by one another, or it can mean the clatter of prejudice, where individuals choose to follow herd opinion. We call these shames abominable, but the complicity of the crowd is a distinctly human affair.

So how could it not be that one peculiar, uncompromising man, who refused to go with the flow, who refused to vote to kill to make a community feel better about itself, would not soon have a taste of society’s own medicine?

SOCRATES: You pay attention to and concentrate on this one thing; if what I say is just or not. This is the virtue of a judge; the virtue of a speaker is to tell the truth.14

Just over six years later that same crowd would prove that men like Socrates could not thwart them with his high-minded talk. If a crowd, a court, an all-powerful democracy wanted to dispose of someone, with truth on their side or no, they had the power to do so.

48

TALL POPPIES, CUT CORN

Athens, 405–404 BC

By cutting the tops of the tallest ears of corn he [Periander, advising Thrasybulus] meant he must always put out of the way the citizens that overtop the rest.

Aristotle, Politics, 5.101

IT WAS NOW EASIER TO DESTROY those that the democracy had built up, that the people had once loved. Those who flowered too tall and too bright were regularly being cut down. The demos had always been ambivalent about their leading lights. Was a visionary, high-achieving man an asset, or did his very specialness, his head-above-the-crowdness make him anti-democratic?2

Athenian drama is riddled with scenarios that explore this theme:

OEDIPUS: O power –

wealth and empire, skill outrunning skill

in the rivalry and battlefields of life,

what spite and envy follows after you!

CHORUS: Who could behold his fame without envious eyes?

Now in what a sea of overwhelming troubles he lies!3

Greek theatre is frequently cited as a civilising influence, an altogether good thing. A space where people could meet their fears together: joint-witnessing. But we mustn’t forget