The Classical World (32 page)

Nonetheless, the will to apply and reform was certainly there in Plato, and we must do justice to his interest in laws and his detestation of tyranny. Later sources credit him with many pupils who were asked, as he was, to help in drawing up laws for city-states: there is no evidence that any of them really did so. Several of them are also credited with actions against reigning tyrants, even with killing them. This involvement may be true. Two of Plato’s former hearers did assassinate Cotys, the despotic king of Thrace, in 359
BC
and six years later another is said to have killed Clearchus, a remarkable Greek tyrant at Heraclea on the south shore of the Black Sea.
⁸
Aristotle’s pupil Callisthenes was also believed to have encouraged a plot against the ‘tyrannical’ Alexander. There are several stories of such involvement, but the Academy did not urge political murders and we do not know how far any philosophic principles inflamed these various people. They may have done, but not at Plato’s direction.

The more difficult legacy comes after Plato’s death. We have a repulsive letter ascribed to Speusippus, his successor at the Academy, which is addressed to King Philip of Macedon and which smoothly assures Philip that his forceful conquest of so much of Greek city-territory in the north is simply the reclaiming of ‘his own’, his heritage, as is proven by some highly dubious references to the ancient Greek myths. This letter picks up contemporary diplomatic issues and is very well informed: it reads like a genuine flattery of the greatest enemy to Greek freedom in the years 343–342
BC
. It is a major warning against allowing a philosopher near foreign affairs.

A Platonist pupil, we are told, had also helped Philip to establish his rule in Macedon before his accession. We know nothing more of it, but we do know that in 322
BC
, when the Athenians’ democracy was at the mercy of Alexander’s victorious Macedonian Successors,
the Athenians chose the head of the Platonist Academy, Xenocrates, to go as one of their ambassadors to plead for a lenient treatment of their city-state: Xenocrates was a resident foreigner, not even a citizen. He was a landmark, the first of many future philosophers to be used on embassies (previously, Athenians had preferred to send theatre actors). The choice was surely made because the Academy stood so high in the respect of the Macedonian ‘tyrants’; Alexander himself had favoured Xenocrates, who had addressed four books
On Kingship
to him, although, sadly, they do not survive.

Similar involvement was even more obviously true of Aristotle. He lived at court in Macedon from 342 to 335
BC
and he taught Alexander. Before he arrived King Philip had flattened his home town of Stageira, but the tradition that Aristotle did get the king to agree to its rebuilding now seems more likely, as archaeologists have proved there was some rebuilding on the site in Philip’s reign, albeit on a smaller area. Perhaps Aristotle did also later receive funds and materials for his researches from the far-ranging Alexander. His visit, then, was not an entirely fruitless stay with the kings.

Aristotle also developed close links with Philip’s senior general, Antipater, and probably with his family. We have a text of his will, of which Antipater is to be an executor. He even wrote a work called
Justified Claims
, probably to help with the claims of the Greek states in the Peloponnese after the Spartan-led rebellion which Antipater crushed there in 331/0
BC
. When Alexander died and the Athenians rebelled against the Macedonians, we can see why Aristotle, the friend of top Macedonians, was forced to leave the city: he was accused, tendentiously, of impiety, and so he left, saying that he wished to save the Athenians from ‘sinning twice against philosophy’ (the first sin was condemning Socrates). He is also reported as saying he became ‘fonder of the myths as he became alone’.
⁹

He had some role, surely, in the continuing curiosity of Alexander about the Asia which he was conquering, but his main role appears to be in passing on his awful sense of geography. Aristotle believed that the edge of the world was visible from what we call the Hindu Kush mountains in Afghanistan: like many, Aristotle confused them with the distant Caucasus. He also reasoned that the river Indus ran neatly round to Egypt and that modern Morocco is quite close to
India, on the grounds that both lands have elephants. This view of the world can only have strengthened the young Alexander’s resolve to conquer to the edge of it. For Aristotle, our world lies at the centre of the universe, and the assertions of astronomers are consistent with that view.
¹⁰

His real political influence followed after his death. Plato’s admiration for the stars in the heavens, the universe and a supreme God were to be taken up in subsequent philosophy: they make him the father of a distinctive strand in Hellenistic religion. Aristotle’s followers, rather, were to carry forward the systematic study of laws and constitutions. Their advice may well have been very important for the first ruling Ptolemies in Egypt’s Alexandria, especially what they could say about a Library, a Museum and royal laws. Certainly, Aristotle’s 158 local Constitutions influenced one of the major Alexandrian poets, Callimachus. But the most immediate impact came from a pupil of one of Aristotle’s own former pupils, the Athenian Demetrius from Phaleron. In 317
BC
the Macedonians put down the Athenians’ attempt at a revived democracy and instead supported this Demetrius as the head of a restrictive oligarchy. The poor were disenfranchised and the rich were spared the expense, in future, of liturgies; Demetrius passed laws to limit luxury in funerary monuments and approved the appointment of ‘inspectors of women’, surely so as to curb female extravagance, including the city’s notorious prostitution. Quite probably, his motives were ethical, formed by Aristotelian values of moderation and restraint. He was then attacked, inevitably, for his own luxury, including the supposed use of make-up and blond hair-dye and the acceptance of statues in his own honour (‘360’, it was alleged). His friends included other pupils of Aristotle, and he was most urbane in defending his own elegant and gentlemanly habits.
¹¹
His rule lasted ten years, until 307
BC
, but when it fell and democracy returned, the Athenians ecstatically celebrated their liberation. Freedom was back, and one Sophocles promptly proposed that philosophers should be banned in future from teaching in the city unless they were licensed by the democracy.
¹²
The Athenians did relent, but the proposal was eloquent. Democrats detested these philosopher-friends of kings and tyrants and their unbearable notions of an ideal state.

Fourth-century Athenians

He is just the man to buy a little ladder for the pet jackdaw which he keeps indoors and to make a bronze shield which the jackdaw can carry as it hops on the ladder. When he has sacrificed an ox, he nails up the skull straight opposite the entrance to his house and ties it round with long ribbons so that people who go in can see that he has sacrificed an ox. And when he has processed with the cavalrymen, he gives everything else to his slave to take home, but throws back his cloak over his shoulder and walks round the agora in spurs. And when his little Maltese dog dies, he makes a monument for it and having put up a little grave-marker he inscribes on it, ‘[Barker (Kelados)], a Maltan…’

Theophrastus, caricaturing the Man of Petty Ambition with
Athenian detail,
Characters
21 (
c.
330–310
BC
)

The nearest to an ideal state in the classical world was not the state of Plato or Aristotle: it was the Athenians’, their contemporaries. To us, it is far from ideal as it was still a slave-society, using perhaps some 80,000 fellow humans as objects. But the philosophers’ ideal states also took slavery for granted, although Plato in his
Laws
was the first to consider that the existence of slavery might corrupt slave-owning masters.

Nonetheless, fourth-century Athens has been severely misjudged. It has been seen as decadent, after the Periclean years of glory, apathetic, in the face of Macedon, and immoral, even, in its continuing attachment to power over other Greek city-states. For Jacob Burckhardt, it
was the symptom of a wider political decline. ‘Everywhere,’ he wrote, ‘democracy nourished a tremendous degree of ill-will’; in his view, the results were visible in ‘private contempt’ for the public authorities, general mockery (Burckhardt disliked personalized comedy), lawbreaking, excessive praising of the glories of the past and the frequency with which the sons of prominent men turned out to be so much worse than their fathers.
¹

Certainly, there were fewer Athenians. The losses in the long war had reduced the citizenry by up to a half, perhaps to only 25,000 adult males by 403
BC
. Numbers recovered to around 30,000 adult males in the fourth century, but were still far short of the 50,000 which we estimate for the 440s. Finances were greatly down, too. The biggest change in fourth-century Attica was that the revenues from the former Empire were gone: they had amounted to more than 1,000 talents a year in its later phases. The ‘contributions’ of the member-states of the Athenians’ revived Confederacy (from 377
BC
onwards) were smaller and much less in total. So, too, the official valuation of the visible property of rich taxpayers in Attica had fallen. The working estimate had probably been around 10,000 talents by 430
BC
. In 378 it was just below 6,000.

Nonetheless, the slimmed-down citizenry maintained an admirable stability in this age of surrounding civic violence and revolution. Fourth-century Athenians did not forget the two dreadful oligarchic coups in their state, briefly in 411 and again in 404/3
BC
: grandfathers still passed stories of them on to the young in the 350s. Oligarchy became, in my view, nothing more than a theoretical possibility for a few, ignored theorists: twice bitten, Athenians were for ever shy, even those from upper-class families who would have favoured oligarchy in the fifth century. One reason why their proclaimed Confederacy was such a success, with over seventy members for its first twelve years or so, was that the Athenians were the true democrats, proven by nearly a hundred and fifty years. They were other democrats’ increasingly self-proclaimed friends.

The social and religious infrastructure of the city-state was still intact. The calendar of festivals continued undiminished, the setting for an Athenian’s social year: there was no ‘religious crisis’, least of all one provoked by Socrates’ scepticism. Citizenship still depended
on a mother and father of pure citizen descent and exceptions for foreigners were still extremely rare. Even on their tombstones, the inscriptions for Attic citizens maintained a simple restraint. The phratries still received (and verified) the young male citizens; the demes maintained their local assemblies and festivals and linked citizens, as Cleisthenes intended, to one of the ten tribes. As the population changed irregularly, the numbers of yearly councillors each deme was to choose were adjusted to keep pace. What did not change was a family’s deme-membership (reflected in their name, their ‘demotic’): in the 330s
BC
it still reflected their ancestors’ place of enrolment back in 508
BC
. The laws of family inheritance remained unaltered, just as Solon had first had them written down. The restraints on an Athenian ‘heiress’s’ free marriage were never relaxed, although comic dramatists made such fun in the later fourth century
BC
of the preposterous circumstances which extreme cases could bring about.

The best-known fourth-century Athenian gives us a sense, indirectly, of this cohesive society and its values. Apollodorus (born
c.
394
BC
) was the son of the immigrant metic Pasion, an ex-slave who had won the very rare gift of Athenian citizenship for his role as a banker to many of the big names in fourth-century Athens, and above all for his great benefactions to the state. To his contemporaries, Apollodorus remained preposterous, as a whole cluster of Athenian speeches for and against him testify. They show the Athenians’ sensitivity to Greek when spoken with an accent, to boastfulness, to
arrivistes
who were publicly too prominent. A whole industry of ‘winding up’ the litigious Apollodorus developed, as he took on lawsuit after lawsuit in the manner of a newcomer who is touchy about his newly gained status. In reply, there were fellow Athenians who never left him alone. ‘The mouse has tasted pitch,’ they even joked about him, alluding to the story of a mouse who fell into a wine jar but found the contents (like Apollodorus’ citizenship) less palatable than expected.
²

The Athenians of his era were not a ‘face-to-face’ society where almost everyone knew each other: 30,000 adult males were far too many for that. But what they all liked to hear were praises of themselves as special, a ‘cut above’. In the orators’ speeches to juries and assemblies, the male citizens as a whole attract the language once used of the noble aristocrats. They are now the ‘fine and fair’.
³
The one
self-made politician whom we know in his own words, the orator Aeschines, is notably careful to associate his family with noble pursuits, the cavalry and so forth, before an Athenian jury. In such company, Apollodorus, the son of an ex-slave, was a hilarious figure of fun.

For there was no popular culture, breaking through with the loss of empire and destroying the cultural forms of the fifth century’s golden years. Rather, most of that culture had begun with the nobles and filtered downwards, gaining comedy (the one non-noble extra) and tragedy (it so happened) on the way. The great athletic contests were still prized in Attica and were watched during the nobles’ invention, the festival of the Panathenaia (founded by them in the 560s
BC
). All classes enjoyed cock-fighting and it is probably only by chance that we now hear less about the noble sport of hunting hares and boar. Fine drinking-parties persisted, the stylish
symposia
, in houses with a smart ‘men’s room’ in which to hold them. It was only for want of space and money that poorer Athenians drank in bars and drinking-shops around the town.