Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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СКАЧАТЬ Olympia, something no one, commoner or king, had ever done before him, and carried off three prizes. Euripides wrote a celebratory ode: ‘Victory shines like a star, but yours eclipses all victories’. The games were far more than a sporting event: they were festivals of great religious and political significance attended by crowds from all over the Greek world. Alcibiades celebrated his triumph with superb ostentation, drawing on the resources of his far-flung clients and dependants, pointedly making a display of a network of personal influence spreading all the way across the eastern Mediterranean. ‘The people of Ephesus erected a magnificently decorated tent for him. Chios supplied fodder for his horses and large numbers of animals for sacrifice, while Lesbos presented him with wine and other provisions which allowed him to entertain lavishly.’ Alcibiades was only a private citizen, but with his wealth and his pan-Hellenic connections he formed, on his own, a political entity that looked like rivalling Athens itself.

      It was too much. On the plain before Troy, Achilles measured his status as an outstandingly gifted individual against Agamemnon’s regal authority. At Olympia, Alcibiades, in parading his wealth, his influence and his talent, seemed to be issuing a parallel challenge to the state of which he was part but which he threatened to eclipse. So, at least, his contemporaries understood the spectacle. He was accused of having the city’s gold and silver ceremonial vessels carried in his triumphal procession and of having used them at his own table ‘as if they were his own’. Non-Athenians, maintained one of his critics, ‘laughed at us when they saw one man showing himself superior to the entire community’. Answering the grumblers, Alcibiades asserted that in making himself splendid he was doing a service to his country, that a city needs its illustrious men to personify its power. ‘There was a time when the Hellenes imagined that our city had been ruined by the war, but they came to consider it even greater than it really is because of the splendid show I made as its representative at the Olympic games … Indeed this is a very useful kind of folly, when a man spends his own money not only to benefit himself but his city as well.’ Not everyone was convinced. After Alcibiades won another victory at the Nemean games, the great painter Aristophon exhibited a portrait of him. Any visual representation of him, it should be remembered, would have paid tribute to his striking beauty, and beauty, in fifth-century Athens, was commonly understood to make a man eligible for far more than mere sexual conquest. ‘This much is clear,’ wrote Aristotle in the next generation. ‘Suppose that there were men whose bodily physique showed the same superiority as is shown by the statues of the gods, then all would agree that the rest of mankind would deserve to be their slaves.’ The people crowded to see Aristophon’s painting, but there were those who ‘thought it a sight fit only for a tyrant’s court and an insult to the laws of Athens’. There was no place within a democracy for an Alcibiades. ‘Men of sense’, warned a contemporary orator in an address entitled ‘Against Alcibiades’, ‘should beware of those of their fellows who grow too great, remembering it is such as they that set up tyrannies.’

      In the winter of 416–415 BC Alcibiades was at last presented with an adventure commensurate with his ambition. A delegation arrived in Athens from Sicily, asking the Athenians to intervene in a war between their own colonists there and the people of Syracuse, a colony and powerful ally of the Spartans. The careful Nicias put forward sound arguments against undertaking such a risky and unnecessary venture, but Alcibiades was all for action. According to Plutarch, he ‘dazzled the imagination of the people and corrupted their judgement with the glittering prospects he held out’. All Athens caught his war fever. The young men in the wrestling schools and the old men in the meeting places sat sketching maps of Sicily in the sand, intoxicating themselves with visions of conquest and of glory. The projected invasion of Sicily was not expedient, it was not prudent, it was not required by any treaty or acknowledged code of obligation; but its prospect offered excitement, booty, and the intangible rewards of honour. In the Assembly, Alcibiades, the man of whom it was said that without some great enterprise to engage his energies he became decadent, self-destructive, and a danger to others, ascribed to the state a character to match his own: ‘My view is that a city which is active by nature will soon ruin itself if it changes its nature and becomes idle.’ He argued that, like himself, Athens was the object of envy and resentment, impelled for its own safety to make itself ever greater and greater. ‘It is not possible for us to calculate, like housekeepers, exactly how much empire we want to have.’ At Olympia, he claimed, Alcibiades was identified with Athens. Now, in urging the war in Sicily, he was offering Athens the chance to identify with Alcibiades, to be, like him, bold and reckless and superbly overweening.

      He won fervent support. Nicias, in a last attempt to halt the folly, pointed out that the subduing of all the hostile cities in Sicily would require a vast armada, far larger and more expensive than the modest expeditionary force initially proposed. But the Assembly had by this time cast parsimony as well as prudence to the winds. They voted to raise and equip an army and navy commensurate with their tremendous purpose. The generals appointed to command the expedition were one Lamachus, the appalled and reluctant Nicias, and Alcibiades.

      The resulting host’s might was matched by its splendour. The captains (gentlemanly amateurs whose civic duty it was to outfit their own ships) had ‘gone to great expense on figure-heads and general fittings, every one of them being as anxious as possible that his own ship should stand out from the rest for its fine looks and for its speed’. Those who would fight on land had taken an equally competitive pride in their handsome armour. When the fleet lay ready off Piraeus it was, according to Thucydides, ‘by a long way the most costly and finest-looking force of Hellenic troops that up to that time had ever come from a single city’.

      On the appointed day, shortly after midsummer, almost the entire population of Athens went down to the waterfront to watch the fleet sail. A trumpet sounded for silence. A herald led all of the vast crowds on ship and shore in prayer. The men poured libations of wine from gold and silver bowls into the sea. A solemn hymn was sung. Slowly the ships filed out of the harbour, then, assembling in open sea, they raced each other southwards. All the onlookers marvelled at the expedition’s setting out, at ‘its astonishing daring and the brilliant show it made’, and were awed by the ‘demonstration of the power and greatness of Athens’, and incidentally the power and greatness of Alcibiades, the expedition’s instigator and co-commander. This appeared to be a triumph to make his victory at Olympia seem trivial. But by the time he sailed out at the head of that great fleet, Alcibiades’ downfall was already accomplished. The brilliant commander was also a suspected criminal on parole. The Athenians, who had entrusted the leadership of this grand and perilous enterprise to Alcibiades, had given him notice that on his return he must stand trial for his life. In his story, the pride and the fall are simultaneous.

      One morning, shortly before the armada was due to sail, the Athenians awoke to find that overnight all the Hermae, the familiar idols that stood everywhere, on street corners, in the porches of private houses, in temples, had been mutilated. A wave of shock and terror ran through the city. The Hermae represented the god Hermes. Often little more than crude blocks of stone topped with a face and displaying an erect penis in front, they were objects both of affection and of reverence. Thucydides called them ‘a national institution’. Now their faces had been smashed and, according to Aristophanes, their penises hacked off. The outrage threatened the Athenians at every level. The gods must be angry, or if not angry before they would certainly have been enraged by the sacrilege. It was the worst possible omen for the projected expedition. Besides, the presence in the city of a hostile group numerous enough to perpetrate such a laborious outrage in a single night was terrifying. There were panic-stricken rumours. Some believed that the city had been infiltrated by outside enemies – СКАЧАТЬ