The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [88]
Alcibiades was a long way from his family’s homeland. This ‘man beyond compare’ was – so they said – a direct descendant of that sage old hero of the Trojan War, King Nestor. Nestor, the poets sang, lived on a beautiful bay at Pylos in the southern Peloponnese. ‘Nestor’s Palace’ has now been excavated. Ranks of perfect kylikes – long-stemmed wine cups – have been found, 2,856 of them in one storeroom alone; a Linear B tablet from the Late Bronze Age shows that the court here ordered 375 gallons of wine to be drunk. It seems that the Bronze Age ruler of Pylos (Nestor or no) was a king who enjoyed his revels. And Nestor’s many-times-great-grandson inherited his taste for the fermented grape.
If people told stories about Socrates, they could have filled books with the gossip that circulated about Alcibiades. This preening, irresistible-sounding specimen became a leader of the age. He encouraged Athenians to think it modish to start to drink in the morning; he turned his nose up at wrestling because it would mean rubbing up against plebs; he rejected flute-playing because it made your face pucker in an unattractive way. His beauty was breathtaking. ‘He was hunted by many women of noble families,’ Xenophon tells us.12 For many centuries after his death stories were still being told of his hot-headed exploits. It was rumoured, tongues clucking, that he had staged a murder and presented his friends with the corpse to test their loyalty and nerve.13
Oddly, despite Alcibiades’ god-given gifts (his beauty, his strength, his dangerous charm), this was a man with everything – and nothing – to prove. Orphaned young (Athenians were thought of as ‘orphans’ when their fathers died, even if their mothers were still alive), he had been brought up by Pericles. He had the adoptee’s liberty. He had no blood-father to resent. No excuse for curtailing his talents. Without the genetic anxiety of a natural parent to live up to, or to disappoint, anything was possible.
Plato has Socrates ask him, ‘Are you willing, Alcibiades, to live having what you now do, or would you choose to die instantly unless you were permitted greater things? You would prefer to die … It appears to me that you would not … be willing to live, unless you could fill the mouths of all men with your name and power.’14
The young man’s know-no-bounds, excessive approach to life was written into history and into the urban myths of fifth-century Greece. But still, despite the debauchery, Alcibiades had blue blood. And for Socrates’ peers, with the epic tales of Homer their roadmap to life, such a quality really counted for something: ‘splendour running in the blood has much weight’, sang the poet Pindar.15 And Alcibiades was certainly not shy of advertising this fact by surrounding himself with things splendid.
His shield was emblazoned with a picture of Eros hurling a thunderbolt. At this stage in history Eros had yet to weaken into a soppy Cupid. The Greeks knew just how dangerous Eros really was. Naturally, Love and Lust destroyed men. Eros brought the great and the weak alike to their knees. Socrates himself compared the kisses sponsored by Eros to the venom injected by a lethal scorpion.
‘You are a fool,’ said Socrates. ‘Do you think that good-looking people inject nothing in the act of kissing, just because you can’t see it? Don’t you realise that this creature which they call the bloom of youth is even more dangerous than scorpions? Scorpions produce their effect by contact, but this needs no contact; if one looks at it, even from quite a distance, it can inject a kind of poison that drives one crazy. No; I advise you, Xenophon, when you see an attractive person, to take to your heels as fast as you can.’16
The gold and ivory of Alcibiades’ fine armour must