ΑΡΙΣΤΕΙΔΕΣ PEPIKLES KANDID DEMIS OKLES 185 Athenian ostraka (fifth century BC), inscribed with names including those of Aris teides, Lysimachus (possibly Aristeides' father: his son, of the same name, never achieved prominence in public life), Themistocles and Pericles. 186 Detail of a black bowl (red-figure, fifth century) show ing a sculptor carving a herm. of ostracism had been degraded by it. So a political instrument which had numbered Cimon and Themistocles among its victims was now formally abolished. Intellectuals like Euripides might have qualms about genocide on Melos, as The Trojan Women (415) makes clear; but the prospect of raping Sicily aroused nothing but enthusiasm among expansionists, and purely practical objections from conservatives or moderates. Moral scruples they had none; all that concerned them was whether this legitimate imperialist venture could succeed - a fear which, in the event, proved all too justifiable. A commission of inquiry returned from Segesta with tales of conspicuous affluence (afterwards supposedly revealed as fraudulent, but this may have been Athenian propaganda to justify the expedition's patent lack of interest in Segestan affairs). On the basis of their report a sixty-ship squadron was voted 'to help the Segestans against the Selinuntines... and in general to make the kind of provisions for Sicily which might seem to them most in accordance with Athenian interests' (Thucydides, Bk. VI) - a convenient holdall clause. Four days later that cautious figure Nicias, one of the three commanders-designate, made a blistering attack on the expedition as such, claiming (what of course was true) that 'the city was in fact aiming at conquering the whole of Sicily'. The Assembly, ignoring his objections, voted him a larger fleet. Foiled in debate, Nicias whipped up various seers and diviners to prophesy doom for the venture, while Alcibiades, nothing daunted, hired rival oracles predicting glorious Athenian triumphs. During the night of 6/7 June 415, an anonymous but well-organized group of iconoclasts went round Athens systematically defacing those square-pillar busts of Hermes which stood at street corners. In some irrational way people convinced themselves that here was 'evidence of a revolutionary conspiracy to overthrow the democracy'. The mutilation of the Herms could in fact have had only one motive: to secure an omen bad enough to stop the fleet from sailing. In this it failed; but the populists used it (reinforced with a blasphemy charge) to smear Alcibiades, who found himself in the anomalous position of sailing for Sicily with a capital indictment outstanding against him. Athens' great armada finally reached Sicily in the late summer of 415, and its commanders at once began to show signs of that indecisiveness, lack of initiative and plain incompetence which marked the entire campaign. Alcibiades, on being recalled to stand trial, jumped ship at Thurii and deserted to Sparta, where he fed the Spartans lethally good advice on how to defeat his own fellow countrymen - including the dispatch of a Spartan general to conduct anti-Athenian operations in Sicily, and the permanent occupation of Decelea in Attica. With the death of the third commander, Lamachus, the sick and dilatory Nicias was left in sole charge of the expeditionary force. In spring 414 Aristophanes' play The Birds could satirize the Sicilian venture as a fantastic airborne imperial development scheme, a racket run for crooks, profiteers and fiddling bureaucrats. Little more than a year later (September 413), after an appalling series of disasters, the entire Athenian expeditionary force in Sicily was wiped out during an overland retreat. Over twenty-nine thousand men, up to two hundred of the city's best triremes, and perhaps four thousand talents in cash had been squandered for nothing. To cap everything else, King Agis of Sparta now occupied Decelea, as Alcibiades had suggested: a move which led eventually to the closure of the Laurium mines and the desertion of up to twenty thousand slaves. Athens rallied as best she could. The political climate (as so often after a major defeat: compare the Germany of the Weimar Republic) began to change in favour of right-wing extremism. Ten commis sioners of Public Safety (probouloi) were appointed to 'advise' the Council. Work on the Erechtheum, begun after the Peace of Nicias (421), was temporarily suspended. An emergency shipbuilding programme was launched, and only just in time: the spring of 412 brought a rash of revolts by the Ionian subject-allies, largely at Alcibiades' instigation. While Euripides in the Helen noted man's inability to decide 'what is god or not god or something in between', the elderly comedian Eupolis produced his last play, The Demes, in which great statesmen of the past, from Solon to Pericles, were raised from the dead to guide the polis in its hour of crisis. This psychological tendency to turn back the clock became increasingly marked as the war dragged on, reaching its climax with the contest between Aeschylus and Euripides in The Frogs. 187 Notice of the sale of Alci biades' property after his con demnation (414 BC) in con nection with the profanation of the Mysteries and mutilation of the Herms. The list includes, inter alia, ten Milesian beds and six perfume-jars. In 411 a group of right-wing revolutionaries launched a coup in Athens based on that nostalgic if vague reactionary ideal, the ‘ancestral constitution'. After a moderate start, this junta, the so-called 'Four Hundred', set about running Athens on vigorously totalitarian lines, with something very like a reign of terror. The Athenian fleet was away at Samos (one reason why the coup had succeeded), and its commanders, learning what was afoot back home, promptly formed democratic government-in-exile. They also recalled Alcibiades, who by this time had a Spartan price on his head (King Agis, whose wife he had seduced, wore horns less peaceably than most men), and was involved in tortuous diplomacy with the Persian satraps of Ionia to secure the Great King's backing. Alcibiades earned his country's grateful thanks by stopping the fleet from sailing back to Piraeus against the junta, and thus precipitating a full-scale civil war. Instead he more usefully led them from one victory to another against the Peloponnesian fleet (now much expanded with Persian support), culminating in an engagement off Cyzicus (May 410) which for the moment ended all organized naval opposition in the eastern Aegean. Meanwhile the Four Hundred had fallen for lack of support, to be replaced by a more moderate regime, based on the original scheme for an elite franchise of five thousand (both Thucydides and Aristotle praise this constitution highly, a significant pointer). One immediate consequence of Cyzicus, however, was the restoration of full democracy, under a new urban demagogue, a lyre-maker named Cleophon. Sparta made Athens a peace-offer on the basis of the status quo; the Assembly, at Cleophon's urging, turned it down flat. The question of Alcibiades' return occupied all minds. There was still deep resentment against him, but, equally, a feeling that nobody else could win the war. Over forty now, the eternal playboy still retained some of his old quasi-Periclean charisma. But he did not dare risk a return (even though it had been voted in the Assembly) for another two years: years during which he notched up further dazzling victories by way of amends for past conduct, including the recapture of Chalcedon and Byzantium on the Bosporus. It was not until the summer of 407 - by which time Athens was so short of silver that she had been reduced to melting down her gold images and utensils into currency - that Alcibiades staged a triumphal return to his native city. He had timed things well. His property was restored, the Athenian priesthood revoked the curses they had laid on him and he was appointed Supreme Commander-in-Chief. To symbolize his reconciliation with the gods, he personally provided a cavalry escort for the sacred procession from Eleusis, discontinued since the Spartan capture of Decelea. Yet he knew, better than anyone, that his rehabilitation, as far as the demos was concerned, stood or fell by continued military successes. One failure, and he was lost. The moment came all too soon. In the winter of 407/6, while he was drumming up pay for his troops, his deputy disobeying orders - suffered a defeat off Notium. Alcibiades, deposed from his command, wisely chose exile rather than justification before the Assembly, and retreated to a castle he had bought for himself in the Thracian Chersonese. About the same time, in Athens, the nonagenarian Sophocles dressed his chorus in mourning for Euripides' death. The old landmarks were fast vanishing. With indestructible optimism, Athens built yet another fleet from good Macedonian timber (paid for this time by melting down Acropolis dedications) and scored a great victory off the Arginusae Islands, near Mytilene (406). Unfortunately a storm blew up, and the captains failed to save numerous sailors from the water. For this they were prosecuted, in an atmosphere of hysterical fury, and put to death. Sparta once more made peace proposals, but Cleophon - storming into the Assembly drunk, in full armour - got these overtures, too, rejected. After a vain warning from Alcibiades, who left his castle to remonstrate with them for the position they had taken up, the com manders of Athens' last fleet were totally defeated by the Spartan admiral Lysander at Aegospotami, the 'Goat River', opposite Lampsacus on what is now the Gallipoli peninsula. After a winter (405/4) of starvation under siege, Athens at last surrendered. 'It was thought,' Xenophon wrote, 'that this day was the beginning of freedom for Greece.' It certainly marked the end of an era. 189 Silver tetradrachm from Egypt minted c. 305 BC by Ptolemy I: obverse showing Alexander the Great wearing elephant scalp and the ram's horns of Zeus Ammon. The decline of the polis: Aegospotami to Mantinea It took very little time for those who had heralded the dawn of Greek freedom in 404 to realize that they had simply exchanged one despotism for another, which did not even possess its predecessor's merits of intelligence, brilliance and style. This was true, not only of Sparta, the paramount Greek state between 404 and 371, but also of her successor Thebes (371-362). The Theban general Epaminondas once said it was his ambition to bring the Athenian Propylaea to the Cadmeia, Thebes' acropolis: that went to the heart of the matter, but as a programme was doomed to failure. There was no longer an Alcman at Sparta; there was no longer a Pindar in Thebes. Both regimes made themselves notorious through their rigidity, authoritarianism, wanton aggression and atrocities. The general pattern of each is only emphasized by their striking exceptions, such as Pelopidas or Epaminondas himself (Agesilaus and Lysander are hardly advertisements for culture). One ends by suspecting that Aristophanes' vaudeville jokes about the thick Doric mentality may have a grain of truth as well as Attic salt in them. Sparta hardly got off to a good start after the war. It is true that the effects of Athenian imperialism were reversed wherever possible: Aegina and Melos regained their independence, the cleruchs were expelled, the exiles reinstated. But this counted for little against the brutal behaviour of Spartan-backed decarchies (ten-man juntas) all over the Aegean. Nor did anyone forget that, during the final phase of the Peloponnesian War, the Spartans had bargained away the Greek cities of Asia Minor to the Great King in return for much-needed gold and other subventions - an act which made their claim to have been fighting for Greek freedom look a trifle shop-soiled. Worst of all was |