The Classical World (25 page)

In 415
BC
, six years after an initial peace, the Athenians accepted a request from some of the Sicilian Greeks and other allies on the island and dispatched a huge armada, hoping to dominate the West. The venture came close to success, but was foiled above all by the skill and horsepower of their main Sicilian enemy, Syracuse. The Athenians had failed to send horses in boats or sufficient cavalry to oppose such a horse-rich enemy. A year later the expedition ended in a total disaster for the Athenians and their navy. Even so, the Spartans were very slow to profit from this unexpected gift. In September 411 they had their best chance of victory when an Athenian fleet was defeated off nearby Euboea and the Athenians in the city were deeply split by an anti-democratic coup. Yet the Spartans went away without pressing their advantage. The next year they were offering peace, an offer which they are said to have repeated five years later.

Among the Spartans, the war’s final years, from 411 to 404, were distinguished by continuing naval incompetence and the careers of some of the harshest thugs in Greek history, the dour Clearchus and the ruthless Lysander. Among the Athenians, despite the Sicilian fiasco
and the brutal coup of 411, they were years, amazingly, of extreme cultural vigour. The tense early months of 411 saw two of Aristophanes’ comic masterpieces, the
Lysistrata
and the
Women at the Thesmophoria
, both playing hilariously with gender-roles (and the latter with Euripides the tragedian). Responding to the ‘new music’ in Athenian taste, Euripides took the tragic chorus to new extremes and put on one of his masterpieces, too, a brutal reworking of the Orestes myth. He then withdrew to Macedon and composed his finest play, the
Bacchae
with its tale of resistance, then submission to the god Dionysus’ power. Sculptors back in the city carved a classical masterpiece too, the victory-figures and the procession of cattle for sacrifice on the parapet of the recently completed temple to Athena, goddess of victory.
¹
Above all, the elderly Sophocles, battered by an unwilling role in the coup of 411, staged his two finest plays, though in his eighties: the
Philoctetes
, with its theme of deception, and the heroic
Oedipus at Colonus
, the tragedy which best conveys the awesomeness of the ‘heroic temper’. The citizens remained polarized, between oligarchic sympathizers and determined democrats but the tensions did not disintegrate their master-artists’ skills.

The Spartans’ eventual victory in 404
BC
owed much to the Persians’ funding for their fleet and to the harsh and aggressive tactics of their newly emergent leader, Lysander. It was also assisted by the extreme behaviour of the Athenians, who had exiled and executed most of their best generals in politically motivated proceedings. In 404 the Athenians’ ‘second squad’ of commanders lost a naval battle up at the Hellespont and exposed the sea-route on which the city’s grain imports relied. The Athenians had to surrender their fleet, breach their Long Walls and accept a narrow oligarchy, backed by Spartan support. Their neighbours in Thebes and Corinth are said to have pressed for the complete destruction of the city.

More than twenty years of intermittent war had seen at most five major engagements. However, there had been more than a hundred lesser encounters all over the Greek world. Almost every region had memories of dire days and nights when their freedom had stood in the balance and parties of local men had braved all for safety and survival. All around Greece, sweaty rowers, horsemen (still without stirrups) or even divers had stretched their human endurance to its
limits. A rash of local victory-monuments, or trophies, commemorated minor successes of the war’s early years, but on a long view, this scrappy stalemate would never have loomed so large in our awareness of Greek antiquity. Without one great asset, we might have struggled to reconstruct it from inscriptions (whose dating sometimes depends on fragile assumptions about the particular style in which they are cut on stone) and oblique references in Athenian comedy. It is of lasting human significance because of its surviving historian, the aristocratic Athenian Thucydides, whose work, unfinished at his death, extends down to 411
BC
.

Thucydides had been nobly born in
c.
460–455
BC
and was linked by family to Cimon, the political antithesis of Pericles. Nonetheless, Pericles became his hero and ideal leader, the dominant voice in Athens when the young Thucydides could begin to attend assemblies for himself. In the late 440s Pericles’ pre-eminence appeared to have cowed the potential excesses of the democracy which he addressed. It was a ‘golden age’, therefore, in the young man’s eyes: by birth, sympathy and intellect Thucydides was no democrat. He wrote with contempt of Pericles’ most populist successors (men who were ‘most aggressive’, hiding their misdeeds by prolonging the war, or simply ‘wicked’). His own political preference was for a restrictive oligarchy which eliminated more than half of the Athenian male voters (‘the best constitution the Athenians had, at least in my time’).
²
The ignorance, quarrelling and incompetence of the ‘people’, he argued, were root causes of the failure of the campaign in Sicily. Others, more fairly, might have blamed the feeble dithering of its main general, Nicias. But Nicias, for Thucydides, was ‘one of us’, a rich man, though not a noble, and was remembered later as someone ‘who never did anything populist in his life’.
³
From Thucydides, Nicias receives a glowing last tribute, which refutes the usual pattern whereby the historian praises men of achievement, rather than those who failed but had good intentions.

Thucydides prized accuracy, ‘exactness’ in the newly fashionable Greek word for it. When compiling information he was admirably aware of the problems of false memory and the need for ‘laborious investigation’.
⁴
He had thought carefully, too, about the problems of establishing a chronology. Above all, he removed the gods as
explanations of the course of events. In his mid-twenties he could well have heard a lecture by the older ‘enquirer’, Herodotus, or even met him on his visit to Athens. His predecessor would have struck him as naive, uncritical and (no doubt) superstitious. There is no sign that he wrote with Herodotus’ ‘enquiry’ prominently in his mind. It was not so much a model as (in his view) a muddle. Admirably self-confident, Thucydides saw his own very different approach as his means of writing a ‘possession for all time’.

Dreams and omens, the simple wisdom of ‘wise advisers’, the belief that those who go too far get a just revenge and a divine retribution: Thucydides excluded all these Herodotean staples, just as he excluded explanations in terms of curses and divine causes. He had nothing to do with the ‘archaic’ belief that people may suffer for their ancestors’ misdeeds: on an occasion when Herodotus saw divine justice working itself out, Thucydides never even mentioned it and gave a political explanation only.
⁵
He favoured a new and penetrating realism. The gap between expectation and outcome, intention and event fascinated him. So did the bitter relations between justice and self-interest, the facts of power and the values of decency. He was well aware of the difference between truth and rhetorical pleading. What men professed publicly, he knew, was not what they practised. The Spartans began by promising ‘liberation’ to the Greek world, and then betrayed the value of freedom. Thucydides was no cynic, not a person who always imputes a selfish and unworthy motive to participants. Rather, he was a realist, having learned the hard lesson that in inter-state relations, powers simply rule where they can, a fact of life which others, professing justice, obscure or ignore at their peril. ‘Ethical foreign policy’, he realized, is a vain irrelevance.

His
Histories
, therefore, are the most penetrating account of freedom and justice and the practical limits on both in the cut and thrust of life. Luxury concerned him less: he could accept that an individual might combine public astuteness and success with private dissolution and an excessive lifestyle. He saw this possibility exemplified by his colourful friend Alcibiades at Athens during the one truly valuable phase (411–407) of Alcibiades’ long public career. It was Thucydides’ explicit aim to teach his readers, but his lesson was not just how to cope with a military problem or a challenge in a battle. Thucydides
admired practical wisdom, the clever improvisations of a political genius like Themistocles or the long sight and (arguable) steadiness of a Pericles. Such qualities, and their exemplars, were to be emulated. But he also wished to lay bare, through speech and action, the amoral reality of inter-state politics, the verbal distortions of diplomatic speakers and factional leaders, and the terrifying violence which political revolution unleashes ‘as long as human nature stays the same’. His diagnosis is still only too recognizable.

He died, probably in the early 390s
BC
, before finishing his history: it breaks off in 411
BC
, not with the defeat of 404 to which it looks forward. The stages of composition of even the eight books we have remind us that it was not written in one single sweep: we must allow for eventual adjustments in his point of view. Nonetheless, we can see from what survives, unfinished, that his presentation of the bleak facts of life in factional politics and inter-state relations was not itself bleak or inhumane. He gives a brilliant description of the lethal plague which beset Athens from 430 onwards, and it is a masterpiece of observation. Above all, it is unmarked by reference to divine causation, although even his keenest Greek admirers later adduced such explanations for similar epidemics in their own histories. At the same time, he gives an account of the participants’ own psychology and human suffering which is written with a victim’s understanding: Thucydides merely tells us, with noble restraint, that he, too, had suffered this plague. His human analysis is so much more penetrating than the day-by-day case notes of the external symptoms of sicknesses which were compiled by the most ‘scientific’ of the Greek writers on medicine. So, too, his analysis of factional strife is written with a heartfelt pity for the plight of those caught between the extremists. He expresses real regret for the values of simple decency. Through speeches, as much as through his narrative’s angle of vision, Thucydides brings out the strength of participants’ feelings and sufferings, and encourages us to understand what it was like to be one of them at the time. We need to grasp the way the world is, he is telling us; but implicitly, that way is distressing, even regrettable. The master of realism is also well aware of its emotionally upsetting context.

The ancients themselves acknowledged Thucydides as the pinnacle of history-writing, harsh and difficult though his style seemed. Some
thirty years younger than Herodotus, he belonged to a generation which had seen no technological revolution, no sudden change in its geography or material life. Yet his way of presenting his contemporaries belonged, intellectually, to a completely different mental universe. Like Herodotus and so many Greek historians, he wrote in exile from his home city, but not before he had listened, argued and learned from debates in Greece’s most powerful city-state and had himself served briefly as one of its generals. He was formed and steeled at the centre of power in Athens, in a climate where political theory was being taught for the first time, where generalizations about human psychology were the talk of his class and where power, and its exercise, were questions of passionate concern. Athens was his New York, whereas Thurii was Herodotus’ Buenos Aires. In his
Histories
, Thucydides claimed to have kept ‘as close as possible to the general gist of what was actually said’ when he gave the speeches of selected contemporaries. Frequently mistranslated here, Thucydides is disavowing word-for-word accuracy, but he is claiming, nonetheless, to have kept as close to the reality as he possibly could. The implication is that, often, he has kept very close indeed. The style of these speeches at times may be Thucydides’ own, but his gallery of speakers allows us to hear the voices of a new articulate realism, the style of the generation which was his own singular context. Through them, and his underlying insight, the Peloponnesian War remains the most instructive war in human history.

Socrates

We went in and found Socrates just released from his chains and his wife Xanthippe – you know her – holding his little son and sitting beside him. When Xanthippe saw us, she cried out and said the sort of things which women usually do say, ‘Socrates, this is the last time that your friends will ever speak to you, or you to them.’ Socrates looked up at Crito and said, ‘Crito, let somebody take her off home.’
    Plato,
Phaedo
60A

But now is the time to depart, for me to die, for you to live, but which of us is going to the better business is unclear to all, except God.
           Plato’s ‘Socrates’ to his jury:
Apology
42A

In a tribute to classical Athens, Hadrian’s villa included a ‘Lyceum’, an imitation of the shrine in which the most famous of all Athenians had taught and conversed. He was neither rich nor handsome. He never wrote a book and he never received a prize. He was described by the Delphic oracle as the wisest man in Greece, but wise, it was said, because he knew his own ignorance. His style of teaching appears to have been by question and answer, through which he exposed his participants’ contradictory beliefs. He inspired at least two Athenian comedies at his expense, a cluster of texts on his supposed ‘Conversations’, posthumous allegations that he had been a bigamist and a series of recollections by the sober, though artful, Athenian Xenophon to show that he had wholeheartedly worshipped the gods and had been opposed to sex with boys. Above all, he inspired the writings of his pupil Plato. Through them he shaped the entire future of Western philosophy.

In spring 399, however, a large jury of Athenians condemned him to death. Socrates, the prosecution claimed, ‘does not acknowledge the gods which the city acknowledges’; he introduces new ‘divinities’; he ‘corrupts the young’.
¹
After a month in prison, he died from a cup of hemlock. The condemnation of a chubby, quizzical seventy-year-old who had been teaching in Athens for some forty years is a reminder that the world’s most thorough democracy was not liberal, tolerant or committed to personal freedom on every issue.