The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [178]
But there was nothing symposiastic, dreamy, genial-boozy, butter-warmed about these men. Three per tribe, the Thirty had been legally elected, but they were in charge of an abused, traumatised city; and a Spartan ‘big brother’ watched over all. Much Athenian property was seized, and wealthy men, in particular foreign men, were targeted.
The Thirty instituted a reign of terror, purging the city of their personal and political enemies. The business started by oligarchs back in 411 BC, when death squads had roamed the streets, was being seen through to its awful conclusion.
These new rulers of Athens held power for just twelve months, but they steadily thinned the Athenian population; over one hundred men a month were ‘disappeared’. Apart from the back-street massacres, the stiflings in beds, the snatching of children from the ‘wrong’ families, all the incidental displacements in the city must have been so distasteful, so heart-rending. The Tholos – that attractive roundhouse created to feed democrats while they worked all hours to make the democracy robust – was taken over by the Thirty in 403 BC as their headquarters. From their base there in the Agora’s circular, visibly egalitarian building (architecture of deep symbolic importance), the Thirty sent out their orders of intimidation and murder. The awful irony cannot have been lost on those Athenians who had seen the Tholos raised as a triumphant hurrah for liberty and equality.
From 404 through to 403 BC, Athens was stifled in an endless nightmare. Fists and wooden clubs pounded on doors. Citizens turned slaughterers to avoid their own messy deaths. To appreciate the horror of this long night, it is important to recall just how small Athens had become. A city of 100,000 Athenians plus 200,000 slaves had been reduced, through disease, the Peloponnesian War and civil strife, to a core of 60,000 or so. Only 30,000 of those were men, and just 10,000 lived within the walls of Athens itself. This was Balkan-village atrocity. Neighbours turned on neighbours, sometimes brother against brother.
In the year of the Thirty, between 1,000 and 1,500 Athenians died. We know about the citizen deaths; there may have been many thousands more – anonymous corpses. Metics, slaves, the inhabitants of Piraeus were also purged. Vigilantes were around every corner. We have one unusually vivid eye-witness account of the attacks.1 One Lysias (a ‘leading citizen’, originally from Thurii, Sicily, who was himself a prominent speech writer and whose father had been a friend of Pericles) tells us the details of his narrow escape. Arrested, he made a dash for the back door. His brother, Polemarchos, was not so lucky. As with all coups, loot seems to arouse as much passion as politics. The golden earrings were ripped from Polemarchos’ wife’s ears; his relations were raped and their goods stolen. Also confiscated by the state were the contents of his brother’s factory in Piraeus: 700 shields, plus gold, silver and 120 slave workers. The democracy had always disapproved of shows of wealth. Men who did well in the unusually buoyant economy of the mid-to-late fifth century, in the spirit of communal achievement, stashed capital away in their homes. Well, now this opulence was being ripped from private hands, not by egalitarian idealists but by jealous aristocrats and oligarchs; by men who had perhaps secretly always thought it a disgrace that ordinary, non-aristocratic, Athenians should be allowed to succeed.
The actions across the city were carefully orchestrated. To kill their rivals, to cut down the tall poppies, the Thirty adapted the various means of death already available in Athens. Men could be thrown into pits alive, they could be strapped with metal restrainers by their necks, legs and arms onto wooden boards; but what the Thirty brought to a fine art was death by hemlock.2
The recipe for a fatal hemlock dose had only just been perfected. Herbalists had worked out that less