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

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СКАЧАТЬ the desecration was the first manifestation of a conspiracy to overthrow the democracy. An investigation was launched. Rewards were offered to anyone coming forward with useful information and informers’ immunity was guaranteed. One Andocides accused himself and other members of his club, which may well have been an association of would-be oligarchs; but Thucydides (along with most other ancient sources) seems to have considered his confession a false one. ‘Neither then nor later could anyone say with certainty who had committed the deed.’

      In the atmosphere of panic and universal suspicion, other dark doings came to light. It was a fine time for the undoing of reputations. Alcibiades had many opponents. Nicias’ supporters resented his popularity. So did the radical demagogues, especially one Androcles, who was instrumental in finding, and perhaps bribing, slaves and foreigners ready to testify to the investigators. Three separate informers, apparently seeing one form of sacrilege as being much the same as another, told stories of the Eleusinian Mysteries being enacted, or rather parodied, at the houses of various aristocratic young men. On all three occasions Alcibiades was said to have been present, and at one he was alleged to have played the part of the High Priest. The punishment for such impious action could only be death.

      The allegation was, and remains, credible. Fourteen years later Socrates was to die on a charge of failing to honour the city’s gods, a charge against which he scarcely deigned to defend himself, and Socrates had been Alcibiades’ mentor. It is unlikely the young general was devout in any conventional sense. Besides, Alcibiades’ ‘insolence’ and his readiness to breach taboos were well known. Gossip had it that he had even staged a mock murder, shown the corpse to his friends, and asked them to help conceal the crime. If he was ready to make a game of the solemnity of death, why should he be expected to stop short of blaspheming against the gods?

      Whatever the truth, Alcibiades vociferously asserted his innocence, and declared his readiness to stand trial and clear his name. His opponents demurred. He was the charismatic leader of the expedition from which all Athenians were hoping for so much. His popularity was at its height. Thucydides writes that his enemies feared that the people would be over-lenient with him were he to come to trial. They probably feared more than that. ‘All the soldiers and sailors who were about to embark for Sicily were on his side, and the force of 1,000 Argive and Mantinean infantry had openly declared that it was only on Alcibiades’ account they were going to cross the sea and fight in a distant land.’ The expeditionary force was, in effect, his army. To impeach him while it lay in the harbour would trigger a mutiny. To put him to death might well start a civil war. His accusers temporized. They did not wish to delay the fleet’s departure, they said. Alcibiades should sail, but the charges against him remained outstanding. On his return, whatever happened in Sicily, he must face his accusers.

      Perhaps a quick victory might have made it possible for him to win his case and salvage his position, but that victory was not forthcoming. The money promised by the Athenian colonies in Sicily, essential for the maintenance of the expeditionary force, had never existed. Cities they had thought their allies refused to let them land. Alcibiades managed to take Catania, but it was a small gain and came too late. At home in Athens more informers had been coming forward. With so many of the fighting men who admired him absent on campaign Alcibiades had fewer supporters left in the city. Without his presence to dazzle or intimidate them, the Assembly turned against him. In August, only weeks after he had sailed out of Piraeus with such pomp, the Salaminia, the state ship, arrived at Catania bringing orders recalling him at once to Athens to answer the charges against him.

      This, Alcibiades’ first fall, was brought about in part by himself – whether or not he was guilty as charged, he had undoubtedly been reckless in his defiance of conventional propriety and arrogant in his disdain for the public’s opinion of his wild ways – and in part by the intrigues of his political rivals. But beyond those immediate causes of his downfall lies something more nebulous and more fundamental. Alcibiades was a hero. He had the charisma and the prodigious talents of his legendary predecessors. And the Athenians feared their heroes as fervently as they worshipped them, and they feared even more the tendency to hero-worship in themselves.

      Months before his fall, Alcibiades had told the Assembly he knew full well that ‘people whose brilliance has made them prominent’ aroused suspicion and dislike. The Athenians were notoriously wary of their great men. Aristotle expressed a popular sentiment when he described a polity that contained an outstanding individual as being as ill proportioned as a portrait in which one foot was gigantic. Alcibiades had already been subjected to one of the methods by which the Athenians rid themselves of those grown too great. In 417 BC an ostracism had been proposed. ‘They employ this measure from time to time,’ wrote Plutarch, ‘in order to cripple and drive out any man whose power and reputation in the city may have risen to exceptional heights.’ Each citizen wrote a name on a piece of potsherd. The unfortunate winner of most votes was banished for ten years. The target in this case was either Alcibiades or Nicias, but the two joined forces and by vigorous campaigning contrived that the majority of votes went to a comparative nonentity (who was probably the instigator of the ostracism). It was, for Alcibiades, a warning of how little his compatriots liked brilliance. There were plenty of other instances to underline the point. In Alcibiades’ lifetime Phidias, the sculptor and designer of the Parthenon, died in jail, possibly poisoned, after being accused by a jealous rival of embezzlement. Pericles himself was stripped of his command and fined the enormous sum of fifteen talents when the Assembly agreed to blame him for the plague (a decision which, in ascribing to him a power to rival that of Providence, was in itself a kind of tribute to his superhuman capacity). The astronomer Anaxagoras was imprisoned; Euripedes was so slighted that he left Athens for Macedonia; and five years after Alcibiades died, his mentor and the love of his youth, Socrates, was put to death. ‘The people were ready to make use of men who excelled in eloquence or intellectual power,’ wrote Plutarch, ‘but they still looked on them with suspicion and constantly strove to humble their pride.’

      Alcibiades was not only exceptional: he was also bellicose. The Athenians were a fighting people, but they were also justly proud of their great creation, a civilization based on the resolution of differences by non-violent dispute. The heroes of old were still worshipped in classical Athens. Hero cults were numerous, and attracted distinguished devotees (Alcibiades’ contemporary Sophocles was a priest in the cult of the hero Halon). But the heroes were fierce spirits who had to be propitiated. They were thirsty for blood, which was poured, after dark, into trenches at the supposed site of their burials; and if they were not appeased, their anger was terrible.

      ‘Let me seize great glory,’ Homer’s Achilles begs his mother, ‘and drive some woman of Troy … /To claw with both hands at her tender cheeks and wipe away/Her burning tears as the sobs come choking from her throat.’ Homer’s warriors know full well that their splendid exploits are the cause of others’ grief: they may regret the fact, but they do not jib at it. To later generations, though, their ruthlessness came to seem savage and abhorrent. In the Iliad Achilles sacrifices twelve Trojan prisoners on Patroclus’ pyre, slaughtering them in cold blood and hacking their bodies to pieces. Homer reports his action briefly and without condemnation; but to Euripides, who had celebrated Alcibiades’ Olympic victory with a song, Achilles’ human sacrifices were monstrous. In his Hekabe Achilles’ ghost demands the slaughter of the Trojan Princess Polyxena on his grave. In Iphigenia at Aulis Achilles is associated with Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter. If she were not killed there would be no wind to carry the black ships to Troy, no war in which Achilles can demonstrate his valour. The death of the innocent girl is the necessary prerequisite for the fulfilment of the warrior’s glorious destiny: both the hero and his glory are tainted with her blood. In both plays, Achilles is the arrogant, pathologically СКАЧАТЬ