The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [78]
Athenians were pulled in to this brutal conflict thanks to the sweet-nothings of a whore from Miletus.41
But Aspasia’s accident of Milesian birth was not the real reason the Athenians were so jittery about involvement in Milesian affairs. An early fifth century oracle from Delphi shows that for mainland Greeks, intervention on behalf of the envied city-state was expected to bring nothing but evil. The underlying jealousies and tensions across the Greek world were rancorous and dengerously close to the surface. By involving his democratic citizens in this foreign expedition Pericles was re-opening a wound that was deep and fresh.
Then shall you, Miletus, the contriver of many evil deeds,
Yourself become a banquet and a splendid prize for many,
Your wives shall bathe the feet of many long-haired men;
And my temple at Didyma will be ripped from your hands and cared for by others.42
The Athenians might have been wrong to say it was Aspasia who pulled the trigger, to see in her clever little hands a smoking gun, but they were right to call the conflict that would follow ‘brutal’.
ACT THREE
SOCRATES THE
SOLDIER
18
SAMOS
The island of Samos, 440–439 BC
With a sudden rush he turns to flight the rugged battalions
Of the enemy, and sustains the beating waves of assault.
And he who so falls among the champions and loses his sweet life,
So blessing with honour his city, his father, and all his people,
With wounds in his chest, where the spear that he was facing has transfixed
That massive guard of his shield, and gone through his breastplate as well,
Why, such a man is lamented alike by the young and the elders,
And all the city goes into mourning and grieves for his loss.
His tomb is pointed to with pride, and so are his children,
And his children’s children, and afterward all the race that is his.
Tyrtaios, Spartan war poet, c.640 BC1
THE YEAR OF 440 BC WAS a dark one. Whether he was goaded by Aspasia’s pillow-talk or by realpolitik, Pericles, on behalf of the Athenian people, as punishment for interfering with one of her ‘allies’, eradicated the Samian government and put an Athenian-style democracy in its place. An Athenian garrison was installed in the central city of Samos to make sure the islanders accepted this regime change ‘quietly’. Hostages were roughly boated over to the nearby island of Lemnos. Athens was suddenly looking, not like an ally, but an overlord. The Samians had been taken unawares by the speed of Pericles’ action, and they did not like it. They turned to the Persians for help – Asia Minor was, after all, just a short boat-ride away. The local Persian satrap Pissuthnes allowed the Samians to raise a mercenary army – and suddenly Athens had not a squabble, but a full-scale regional incident on her hands. The Samians reinvaded their own home by night; local knowledge giving them the upper hand, they stormed the garrison and captured its soldiers. Retribution followed.2 Athenian prisoners-of-war on the island had their faces branded with the shape of Athena’s owl. A covert message went out to the Spartans and their allies in the ‘Peloponnesian League’ that this was Sparta’s chance to provide support for those who wanted to challenge Athens’ cocksure supremacy.
But, fearing those Athenian triremes, that supremely confident democratic Athenian army, no help came. The Samian walls, solid stone polygonal blocks faced with mud-bricks, in places reaching a whole house deep, with their extra fortifications, towers and a ditch, were considered impregnable.3 So, Pericles besieged Samos for nine months. He sent one of his aristocratic generals, the tragic poet Sophocles, to ensure the loyalty of all Greeks in the region. Now the Samians were isolated; starving, in 439 BC they finally surrendered. In Sophocles