Hiero the Tyrant and Other Treatises (Penguin Classics) (25 page)
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Authors: Xenophon
Moreover, how could the enemy launch a strike against the mines? [46] Megara is the enemy city nearest to the silver mines, of course, and it is rather more than 500 stades away; Thebes is the next closest, and it is rather more than 600 stades away. Now, an expeditionary force [47] coming from somewhere around there to attack the mines will have to pass Athens. A small force will probably be wiped out by our cavalry and patrols, and if they come in strength they will have left their own property unprotected, which will be problematic for them, because by the time they reach the mines Athens will be considerably closer to their home towns than they will be. Besides, even if they [48] do come, how will they be able to stay, given their lack of supplies? Sending a detachment off in search of food would endanger the object of the whole enterprise, let alone the foragers themselves, while if they all went off foraging they would have to end the siege and become the besieged instead.
21
Now, Athens’ allowance system will not find its finances improved [49] solely by the money raised by hiring out slaves; given the concentration of men in the vicinity of the mines a great deal of revenue will also be generated from the market there, from the state-owned houses in
[50] the region, from the kilns
22
and so on and so forth. it would even become a densely populated community in its own right, if the measures I have suggested are implemented, and plots there would become as valuable to its owners as plots in and about Athens.
23
[51] So if my proposals are put into effect, I agree
*
that the state will become not only financially better off, but also more obedient, more [52] disciplined and militarily more effective.
24
After all, the people assigned to take exercise will train far more assiduously in the gymnasia once they receive a better
*
allowance for food than they do when they are being trained up for the torch races; and the units assigned to garrison duty, to the light infantry and to patrolling the countryside, will do all these jobs with more enthusiasm if in return they receive the maintenance due to each of these tasks.
25
[1] There can hardly be any doubt that peace is a prerequisite for all the sources of revenue to realize their full potential. Surely, then, it is worth setting up a committee of Custodians of the Peace.
1
With these officers duly elected, Athens would become more attractive and more [2] frequently
*
visited by people from all over the world. Some people might think that Athens would pay for constant peace with loss of influence, prestige and fame in Greece, but in my opinion this is another distorted way of looking at things.
*
After all, it goes without saying that the longer the period of unbroken peace a state enjoys, the better off it is held to be.
2
And Athens is better placed to grow [3] during peacetime than any other state in the world. With the city at peace, it will be in demand by everyone – shipowners and traders to start with. And what about those with a surplus of grain, wine, oil or sheep? What about people with a good head for business and money [4] as well? Artisans, sophists and philosophers, poets and the producers of their plays, spectators and audiences who appreciate works of quality, whether sacred or secular?
3
Suppose you wanted to sell or buy a lot of goods in a short space of time: what better place could you find to do so than Athens?
Even if no one takes exception to this, it still remains the case that [5] there are people who think it will take war rather than peace for Athens to regain its position of dominance, which is what they want to see happen. These people should first consider the Persian Wars and ask themselves whether we gained the leadership of the fleet and our position as treasurers of the Greek confederacy by force or by helping Greece.
4
Secondly, after Athens had been deprived of its [6] rulership for having supposedly wielded power with excessive brutality, was it not only when we stopped perverting the course of justice that we had the leadership of the fleet restored to us by the Aegean islanders, of their own free will?
5
Thirdly, is it not the case that the [7] Thebans chose Athenian leadership because they had been well served by Athens?
6
Fourthly, did we force the Spartans to allow us to dispose of the leadership as we wanted? No, they let us do so because they had been well treated by us.
7
It seems to me that the current situation of chaos in Greece presents [8] us with an ideal opportunity for recovering our control
8
over the Greeks easily, safely and cheaply. We could try to reconcile the warring states with one another and to make peace between the factions tearing various states apart. Also, if you make it clear that your concern is to [9] regain for the temple at Delphi its lost autonomy and that you intend to do so by sending delegations everywhere in Greece rather than by military means, I for one would not be surprised if you found enough solidarity among the Greeks for them to enter into solemn treaties with one another and to band together against any nation that might try to gain control of the temple once it has been abandoned by the Phocians.
9
And if you make it clear that what you want to see is a [10] complete end to war, on land and sea, I for one think that the safety of Athens would feature strongly in everyone’s prayers,
10
second only to that of their own homelands.
It may be thought, however, that Athens profits more by war than [11] by peace. Personally, I cannot think of a better way to assess whether or not this is true than by reviewing Athens’ past history once again and seeing how things turned out. Anyone who does this will find [12] that in times past the state’s funds were enormously increased in times of peace and completely drained in times of war. This review will
also make him realize that things are no different today – that, thanks to the war, a number of sources of revenue dried up, while any money that did come in was used up on miscellaneous projects, and that only the end of the war at sea has stimulated growth of revenue and made it possible for the people of Athens to spend money on projects of [13] their own choice.
11
‘What about an unprovoked assault on our state?’ I might be asked. ‘Are you saying we should remain at peace even in the face of aggression?’ ‘No,’ I would reply, ‘but I am saying that a policy of not initiating unjust wars against others would enable us to punish our enemies far more quickly, because they would not find anyone to come and support their cause.’
12
[1] Now, since none of my proposals is impossible or even hard to put into practice, since by doing so we will improve our relations with the rest of Greece, live in greater security and gain a more glorious reputation, since the general populace of Athens will never go short of subsistence and the wealthy members of society will no longer have to spend money to support the war effort, since a generous surplus will enable us to celebrate our festivals on an even more magnificent scale than we do now, to repair our temples, rebuild the walls and dockyards, and return our priests, Council, functionaries and cavalry to the traditional ways of doing things,
1
what could be wrong with setting this programme in motion straight away, in order [2] to see prosperity and security come to the state in our time? If you citizens of Athens were to decide to carry out my proposals, I for my part would advise you to send emissaries to Dodona and Delphi to ask the gods
2
whether the state would, both now and in the future, [3] profit and benefit by being organized along these lines. If the measures meet with their approval, we should in my opinion next ask which of the gods should be propitiated to ensure that we carry out these measures in the most expedient and advantageous manner. Only when they have told us the names of the appropriate gods and we have obtained good omens from our sacrifices to them should we set the
programme in motion. For if we act with the help of the god it is likely that all our actions will promote the profit and advantage of the state.
3
1
.
festivals… at once
: This applies especially to the four major ‘panhellenic’ festivals: the Olympics, the Pythian Games (held at Delphi), the Isthmian Games (at the Isthmus of Corinth) and the Nemean Games (at Nemea in the north-east Peloponnese). Despite what follows, Dionysius I (see Introduction) did make an enormous personal splash at the Olympics of either 388 or 384.
2
.
praise
…
criticism:
A tyrant might go to great lengths to secure a favourable ‘press’, as the real Hiero did by patronizing Pindar and Bacchylides as well as Simonides. See Pindar’s
Pythian
I and II, in C. M. Bowra’s Penguin
The Odes of Pindar
(1969); and Bacchylides
Ode
V. Simonides’ surviving work is most conveniently read in D. A. Campbell’s
Greek Lyric
III (Loeb Classical Library, 1991).
3
.
flattery:
An entire homiletic literature grew up around the topic of
kolakeia,
‘flattery’: see, e.g., Theophrastus’
Characters
II and Plutarch’s ‘How to distinguish a flatterer from a friend’, in I. Kidd and R. Waterfield’s Penguin
Plutarch Essays
(1992), pp. 61–112.
4
.
find particularly attractive:
A married Greek man, unlike a married Greek woman, could indulge his sexual appetites outside marriage without necessarily incurring even social disapproval. Two of the outlets available at least to wealthier men were slave girls (1.28) and – far more prestigious – free, adolescent boys (1.29–38); note that our term ‘pederasty’ comes from the Greek
paiderastia,
desire for boys: see Dover,
Greek Homosexuality.
A large part of the humour in the plot of Aristophanes’
Lysistrata
depends on the fantasy that Greek husbands would and could look only to their wives for sexual satisfaction.
1
.
savouries:
The Greek diet was as a whole frugal – the Persians, according to Herodotus (
The Histories,
trans. A. de Sélincourt, rev. edn., 1996, 1.133), ‘say that the Greeks leave the table hungry’. But Greek Sicily was famous for its gourmandizing, and for its cooks – the oldest European cookbook was composed by one Archestratus, a younger contemporary of Xenophon. Special side-dishes on top of the basic cereals (so basic indeed that
sitos
meant both grain and ‘food’ in general), pulses and fruits were called collectively
opsa,
translated here as ‘savouries’; meat was rarely eaten, and even fish could count as a luxury. See A. Dalby,
Siren Feasts: A Study of Food and Gastronomy in Greece
(Routledge, 1996).
2
.
reward your friends
: This was a standard tenet of Greek, pre-Christian ethics, though difficulties of application arose when it was not clear who one’s (true) friends were, or when one’s friends were themselves in conflict with each other. The sociological and theological dimensions of such difficulties were thoroughly aired in Greek tragedy, the philosophical in Platonic dialectic. See D. Konstan,
Friendship in the Classical World
(Cambridge University Press, 1997). Xenophon, characteristically, assumes the validity of the tenet but does not dig deep.
3
.
armed escort… at all times
: It was taken as a mark of Greek civilization that – apart from some ‘backward’ exceptions – citizens of Greek communities no longer carried arms: see Thucydides 1.6
(History of the Peloponnesian War)
.
4
.
protect himself there more than anywhere else
: The precautions allegedly taken by Dionysius I were elaborate in the extreme (only his daughters were allowed to shave him, or rather singe him with hot coals, etc.), but the evidence is largely anecdotal.
5
.
war… have explained
: The paradigmatic instance is the advice of Thrasybulus, tyrant of Miletus, to Periander, tyrant of Corinth, supposedly
c
. 600, to cut off the tallest ears of wheat, that is, murder ‘all the people in the city who were outstanding in influence or ability’ (Herodotus,
The Histories
5.92f–g). Xenophon’s use of ‘war’ (also 4.11) is deliberately extreme.
1
.
any setbacks
: For the thought see Xenophon’s
Cyropaedia
1.6.24.
2
.
remains inviolate
: The fact that the rape of a wife was considered a less heinous offence than her seduction (and in Athenian law might receive a
lesser penalty) is baffling and repugnant to us, but was a direct reflection of the Greek regime of patriarchy according to which the wife’s interests and needs were safeguarded only in so far as they directly affected those of her ‘lord and master’. The husband stood to lose more face by being consensually cuckolded than by failing to protect his wife from sexual violation by a man unknown to her (or him). Notice that at 3.7 the affection of wives for husbands is not necessarily reciprocated.
1
.
violent death
: This remarkably graphic image brings to the surface the underlying tension in Greek society between slave owners and slaves. Not that Greek slave owners typically lived in constant dread of insurrection and murder, as those in the United States Old South appear regularly to have done; but the murder of a master (or mistress) by a slave was by no means unknown (see 10.4) – whereas collective insurrection was almost unheard of, except in Sparta, where the Helots were not barbarian chattel slaves but a locally enslaved Greek people all too conscious of the birthright of freedom and self-rule the Spartans systematically denied them (see
Agesilaus
,
chapter 1 note 6
).
2
.
are polluted
: Ritual pollution (
miasma
) could be incurred in several ways, but murder ranked high up the scale. The Spartans, with brutal legalism, formally declared the Helots to be enemies, outside the protection of laws against murder, so that Spartans who killed Helots would be cleansed in advance of the taint of blood guilt.
3
.
statues… their sanctuaries
: The point is a somewhat rhetorical one, but Xenophon’s Athens did set up statues of the so-called Tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogeiton. They were displayed in the Agora or civic centre, which though not itself a religious sanctuary did contain religious shrines and was barred to certain types of convicted criminals.
4
.
hates losing to his rivals
: For this motif, compare Alexander the Great’s unwillingness to compete against anyone but kings: Plutarch,
Alexander
4.5;
Moralia
179d, 331b.
5
.
a person’s perceived needs
: This is a Socratic insight that Xenophon repeats elsewhere (especially
The Estate-manager
1–2). According to ordinary Greek perceptions, wealth meant above all not having to work for one’s living.
6
.
steals from temples
: The crime of
hierosulia
, theft from sanctuaries or temples, was always a capital offence, since it was regarded as theft of a god’s or hero’s property; other types of theft might attract the death penalty depending on circumstances.
