The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [177]
They could see no future for themselves except to suffer what they had made others suffer, people of small states whom they had injured not in retaliation for anything they had done but out of arrogance of power and for no reason except that they were in the Spartan alliance … and so though numbers of people in the city were dying of starvation, there was no talk of peace.12
We hear that while all in the city were wailing and pulling their hair, gnawing at wood to beat the pangs of starvation, Socrates was typically phlegmatic in the face of disaster, typically out of step with those around him:
SOCRATES: During the siege, while others pitied themselves, I lived no worse than when the city was happiest.13
But we have reached the endgame. Sparta had Athens surrounded. Athens no longer commanded the treasured asset she had fought for seventy-odd years before – eleutheria, freedom. Socrates and his fellow Athenians found that if they wanted to live, they had no choice but to vote out their own democracy, and vote in a Laconophile oligarchy instead.
Hearing that democratic Athens was at last defeated, a tsunami of resentment and hate raced towards Attica. The Thebans and Corinthians (Sparta’s allies) wanted to slaughter and maim, to turn rich, cultured Athenian territory into land for sheep. But the Spartans were less emotional. Calmly they demanded four things: the reduction of Athens’ fleet to twelve ships; the disbanding of the democracy – and the smashing down of those city walls that they so resented, and in whose shadow they had fought for so long. And then those words that have come to have such a familiar ring, in modern as well as ancient societies: the edicts of the powerful instructing subject nations how they will now think, who will now be their friends and their common foes; the Spartans made one final demand and the statement was blunt, unambiguous: either you are with us or against us.
Athens to have the same enemies and the same friends as Sparta has and to follow Spartan leadership in any expedition Sparta might make either by land or sea.14
It was done. Athena’s city no longer belonged to Socrates and his fellow Athenians. Now she belonged to Sparta. Those who had been subject-states controlled by Athens stretched their arms wide and welcomed this change of regime.
Brick by brick, block by block, Athens’ proud city walls were tumbled to the ground.
And so, Xenophon tells us, the flute-girls, the prostitutes around the city walls, quickly changed sides, dancing in the embers of the Athenian Empire.
They believed this day to be the beginning of freedom for the Greeks.15
49
THIRTY TYRANTS
Athens, 404 BC
They tore people from their children, parents and wives, … and did not allow them to receive the lawful and customary burial rights, considering their own might-is-right authority to be more powerful than the punishments of gods.
Lysias, Speech 12, Against Eratosthenes, 12.96
FOR MORE THAN TWO YEARS SPARTAN-controlled populations across the Aegean had had to live under the rule of pro-Spartan juntas, ‘the rule of ten’ – and now the Athenians too were about to taste that experience.
Lysander supported a group of just thirty men who were to have command of Athena’s city. These were all Athenian citizens, but had to have had oligarchic or pro-Spartan leanings. The interim body of ‘overseers’ was given a Spartan name, the ephors. We have to imagine that this ‘Thirty’ were not selected because of their holistic, democratic views or their support of fair-handed moderation. Critias, an uncle of Plato and an arch-conservative, the man whom Socrates had condemned as a rutting pig thanks to his sexual appetites, masterminded the operation. Socrates’ other favourite, Charmides (he whom Socrates described, on spotting him in the gym, as being ‘perfectly beautiful’), was one of the Ten that the Spartans backed to keep the Piraeus district subdued, and under a form of Spartan system of control. Other members