Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen

At Troy, at this period a mere village, he refused the citizens’ offer of the instrument on which Paris (also known as Alexander) used to serenade Helen. ‘For that lyre,’ he told them, ‘I care little. I have come for the lyre of Achilles, with which, as Homer says, he would sing of the prowess and glories of brave men.’ As Achilles had sung to himself in his tent, evoking the reputation of the heroes dead and gone among whom he wished to be numbered, so Alexander, at this momentous starting-point, solemnly honoured his great forerunner. Stripped naked, and anointed with oil, he ran with his companions to lay a garland on Achilles’ tomb.

That a young Hellenic king ambitious of military conquest in Asia and intent on creating for himself the reputation of a warrior to compare with those of the legendary past should choose Achilles as model and patron is perhaps predictable. But a generation earlier a great man of a very different stamp had also invoked his name. In 399 BC the 70-year-old philosopher Socrates was put on trial in Athens, accused of refusing to recognize the city’s gods, of introducing new deities, and of corrupting the young. He was summoned before a court consisting of five hundred of his peers and invited to make his defence. He proceeded, not to answer the charges against him, but to make a mock both of them and of his chief accusers. Then, midway through his defence (as it was written down by Plato some years after the event), his tone altered. For a while, his famous irony and his provocative sangfroid alike were laid aside. He was unpopular, he said, he realized that, and he had known for some time that he risked incurring a capital charge. But to one who might ask him why, in that case, he persisted in a course that was so evidently irritating to the authorities he said that he would answer: ‘You are mistaken, my friend, if you think that a man who is worth anything ought to spend his time weighing up the prospects of life and death. He has only one thing to consider in performing any action; that is whether he is acting justly or unjustly.’ If he were offered acquittal – and with it his life – on the condition that he would refrain in future from the kind of philosophical enquiry he was accustomed to practise, he would refuse the offer. ‘I am not going to alter my conduct, not even if I have to die a hundred deaths.’

There was an uproar in the court. Unabashed, Socrates reiterated his defiance, alluding to the passage in the Iliad when Thetis tells Achilles that if he re-enters the fighting he will die soon, for he is doomed to fall shortly after Hector. ‘“Let me die forthwith,” said [Achilles], “… rather than remain here by the beaked ships to be mocked, a burden on the ground.” Do you suppose that he gave a thought to death and danger?’ The quotation was inaccurate but the sentiment was authentically Homeric. Achilles, like Socrates after him, refused to be a burden on the earth, a mere lump of animated matter, obedient to the stupid or immoral decrees of others. Wherever he went, Socrates told his judges, established authority would persecute him if he continued to question it, which he would never cease to do. A life in which he was not free to think and speak as he pleased was ‘not worth living’. To die was preferable.

A vote was called. Socrates was found guilty by 280 votes to 220. He spoke again. His accusers demanded the death penalty. According to Athenian law it was for the defendant to propose another, lesser punishment. Socrates believed, and most historians agree with him, that if he had asked for banishment it would have been granted. He disdained to do so. The sentence of death was voted on, and approved by a substantially larger majority than the verdict (indicating that there were more people in court who wanted Socrates dead than there were people who believed him to be guilty as charged). He spoke again, asserting that he was content because the satisfaction of acting rightly, according to one’s own lights of reason and moral discrimination, was so great as to eclipse any suffering: ‘Nothing can harm a good man either in life or after death.’ Defiant, courageous, intransigent, he had proved himself equal to the example he had invoked in court, Achilles.

A man of violence who admitted himself to be easily bested in debate, whose passions were hectic, and whose thought processes were frequently incoherent, who spoke his mind at all times and despised subterfuge, Homer’s Achilles was in many ways a bizarre model for the philosopher who strove unceasingly to subject emotion to reason, who was a master of irony and a brilliant manipulator of men’s minds. But the classical philosopher and the legendary warrior were, for all their differences, soul-mates. Alexander, world-conqueror in the making, sought to associate himself with Achilles’ youthful valour and invincibility, with the glittering, deadly warrior whose brilliance rivalled the splendour of the midday sun. But when Socrates, the impecunious, pug-nosed, incorrigible old worrier of complacent authority and scourge of dishonest thinking, claimed Achilles as a predecessor he did so in appreciation of the fact that Achilles was more than a killer of unparalleled charisma, that he could be taken as a model in peace as well as in war, as one who insisted that his life should be worthy of his own tremendous estimation of his own value as an individual, and who would pay the price required to invest that life with significance and dignity, even if the price were life itself. Socrates defied convention and eventually fell foul of the law because he would submit to no other dictates than those of his intellect and of his private daimon. Achilles rebelled against Agamemnon’s overlordship, and looked on relentless while his countrymen were slaughtered rather than compromise his honour. Both were stubborn, self-destructive, exasperating to their enemies and the dismay of their friends. Both insisted on valuing their own personal integrity higher than any service or disservice they might do the community. Both have been condemned for their culpable pride, and venerated for their courage and their superb defiance.

In his tent at the furthest end of the Greek encampment, sworn to inaction, isolated by his own rage and by others’ fear of it, Achilles set himself at odds with the fractured, fudged-together thing that society necessarily is. Any human group, be it a family, a city, an army or a nation, depends for its continued existence on its members’ willingness to bend and yield, to compromise, to accept what is possible rather than demand what is perfect; but a society that loses sight of the standard of perfection is a dangerously unstable one. From the accommodating to the corrupt is an easy slide. Achilles and others who, like him, have stood firm, however wilfully and self-destructively, on a point of principle, have generally been revered by onlookers and by posterity as wholeheartedly as they have been detested by the authorities they challenge. ‘Become who you are!’ wrote Pindar, Socrates’ contemporary. It is not an easy injunction. For a man to become who he is takes a ruthless lack of concern for others’ interests, monstrous egoism, and absolute integrity. Achilles, who hated a dissembler worse than the gates of death, had the courage to make the attempt, and so died.

II ALCIBIADES

IN 405 BC the Peloponnesian War, which had lasted for a quarter of a century and set the entire Hellenic world at odds, ended with the comprehensive defeat of the Athenians at Aegosopotami on the Hellespont. The fleet on which Athens depended for its security and its food supply was destroyed. Lysander, commanding the victorious Spartans, had all the defeated Athenians troops slaughtered. The ship bearing the news reached the Athenian port of Piraeus at nightfall. The wailing began down in the harbour. As the news was passed from mouth to mouth, it spread gradually all along the defensive walls linking city to sea until it reached the darkened streets around the Acropolis and the whole city was heard to cry out like an enormous beast in its agony. ‘That night,’ wrote Xenophon, ‘no one slept. They mourned for the lost, but more still for their own fates.’

The Athenians had good cause to mourn. Within a matter of months they had been blockaded and starved into submission. Their democracy had been replaced by a murderous puppet government, an oligarchy known as the Thirty Tyrants. They lived in fear – of the Spartans who were now their overlords, and of each other, for every formerly prominent person was under suspicion, informers were so active that none dared trust his neighbour, and Critias, leader of the Thirty, ‘began to show a lust for putting people to death’. And yet, according to Plutarch, ‘In the midst of all their troubles a faint glimmer of hope yet remained, that the cause of Athens could never be utterly lost so long as Alcibiades was alive.’

Alcibiades! The name was a charm, and its workings, like all magical processes, were beyond reason. The man on whom the Athenians, in their extremity, pinned their hopes was one whom they had three times rejected, a traitor who had worked so effectively for their enemies that there were those who held him personally responsible for Athens’ downfall. Exiled from Athens for the second time, he was now living among the barbarians in Thrace. There, in a heavily fortified stronghold, with a private army at his command, he led the life of an independent warlord or bandit chief. There was no substantial reason to suppose that he could do anything for the Athenian democracy, and no certainty that he would wish to help even were it in his power to do so. And yet, as the first-century historian Cornelius Nepos noted, Alcibiades was a man from whom miracles, whether malign or beneficent, had always been expected: ‘The people thought there was nothing he could not accomplish.’

Plato, who knew Alcibiades, elaborates in the Republic what he calls a ‘noble lie’, a fable in which he suggests that all men are made from earth, but that in a few the earth has been mixed with gold, rendering them inherently superior to their fellow men, and fit to wield power. This lie, Plato suggests, is a politically useful one. In his ideal republic, he would like to ‘indoctrinate’ the mass of the people with a belief in it, in order that they might be the more easily governed. It would probably not be hard to do so. The belief that some people are innately different from and better than others pervades all pagan mythology and classical legend and surfaces as well in folk tales and fairy stories. The foundling whose white skin proclaims her noble birth, the favoured younger son who survives his ordeals assisted by the birds and beasts who recognize his privileged status, the emperor-to-be whose birth is attended by tremendous omens – all spring, as Plato’s men of gold do, from a profoundly anti-egalitarian collective belief in, and yearning for, the existence of a naturally occurring elite – exceptional beings capable of leading their subordinates to victory, averting evil and playing saviour, or simply providing by their prodigious feats a spectacle capable of exhilarating and inspiring the humdrum multitude. In Alcibiades the Athenians found their golden man.

That Alcibiades was indeed an extraordinary person is well attested. All his life he had a quality, which his contemporaries were at a loss to define or explain, that inspired admiration, fear, and vast irrational hopes. ‘No one ever exceeded Alcibiades’, wrote Nepos, ‘in his faults or in his virtues.’ His contemporaries recognized in him something demonic and excessive that both alarmed and excited them. Plutarch likened him to the fertile soil of Egypt, so rich that it brings forth wholesome drugs and poisons in equally phenomenal abundance. He was a beauty and a bully, an arrogant libertine and a shrewd diplomat, an orator as eloquent when urging on his troops as when he was lying to save his life, a traitor three or four times over with a rare and precious gift (essential to a military commander) for winning his men’s love. There was a time when his prodigious energy and talents terrified many Athenians, who feared that a man so exceptional must surely aim to make himself a tyrant; but in their despair they looked to him as a redeemer.

His adult life coincided almost exactly with the duration of the Peloponnesian War, which began in 431 BC, when he was nineteen, and ended with the fall of Athens in 405, the year before his death. Throughout that period, with brief interludes, the Spartans and their allies (known collectively as the Peloponnesians) struggled against the Athenians, with their allies and colonies, for ascendancy while lesser powers repeatedly shifted allegiance, tilting the balance of power first one way, then another. Sparta was a rigidly conservative state with a curious and ancient constitution in which two hereditary kings ruled alongside, and were outranked by, a council of grandees, the ephors, selected from a handful of noble families. Spartan colonies had oligarchic governments imposed upon them. Athens was a democracy, and founded democracies in its colonies. The war had an ideological theme, but it was also a competition between two aggressively expansionist rival powers for political and economic dominance of the eastern Mediterranean world. From 412 onwards it was complicated by the intervention of the Persians, whose empire dwarfed both the Hellenic alliances. Athens’ successful colonization of the Aegean islands and the coastal regions of Asia Minor deprived the Persian Great King of revenue. His regional governors, the satraps, sided first with the Spartans, later with Athens, in an attempt to re-establish control of the area. Alcibiades, who had Odysseus’ cunning as well as Achilles’ brilliance, was a skilful actor in the complex, deadly theatre of the war. As a general he was swift, subtle and daring. As a diplomat he proved himself to be a confidence trickster of genius.

In his youth he was the golden boy of Athens’ golden age. His family were rich, aristocratic (they claimed descent from Homer’s Nestor), and well connected not only in Athens but all over the Greek world. In constitutional terms every free male citizen of Athens was equal to every other, but in practice the nobility still dominated the government as they did the city’s economic and social life. Homer’s characters take it for granted that a person’s best qualities are inherited. ‘No mean men could sire sons like you’, Menelaus tells two handsome young strangers (he’s right – their fathers are both kings). Most of Alcibiades’ contemporaries would have made the same assumption. ‘The splendour running in the blood has much weight,’ wrote Pindar. When Alcibiades was still a child his father was killed in battle and he was taken to live in the household of his guardian Pericles, who was for thirty years effective ruler of Athens. He could scarcely have been given a better start in life.

Nature was as kind to him as fortune had been. Like Achilles, he was dazzlingly beautiful. To Plutarch, writing five hundred years after his death, his loveliness was still so much of a byword that ‘we need say no more about it, than that it flowered at each season of his growth in turn’. In the homoerotic society of Athens such good looks made him an instant celebrity. As a boy, he was ‘surrounded and pursued by many admirers of high rank … captivated by the brilliance of his youthful beauty’. Whether he actually had sexual relations with any of them is unclear, but gossip maintained that he did. If so, few of his contemporaries would therefore have considered him either immoral or effete. Aeschylus, in the generation before Alcibiades, and Plato, his contemporary, both believed Achilles to be Patroclus’ lover (something Homer does not suggest), but neither of them thought any the less of him for it. On the contrary, Plato’s Phaedrus cites Achilles’ ‘heroic choice to go and rescue Patroclus’ as an example of the way in which love can ennoble a man, earning him ‘the extreme admiration of the gods’.

Among those smitten by Pericles’ ward was Socrates, who told a disciple that the two great loves of his life were philosophy and Alcibiades. The philosopher had gathered around himself a group of aristocratic young men, non-paying students of whom Alcibiades was certainly not the most serious but of whom he was the most highly favoured. Plato (another of them) testifies that the relationship between the ugly middle-aged philosopher and the radiantly beautiful teenager remained chaste, but it surely was, at least on Socrates’ part, physically motivated. When in Plato’s Protagoras, which is set at a time when Alcibiades was about fifteen, Socrates claims to have become so engrossed in a philosophical discussion as to have briefly forgotten Alcibiades altogether, his friend teases him by saying ‘Surely you did not find anyone else of greater beauty there. No! not in all our city.’ Alcibiades’ beauty marked him out, just as Achilles’ had done, as a superior being. In the second century ad the Roman Emperor Hadrian, a connoisseur and devotee of male beauty as ardent as any Athenian, set up an image of Alcibiades in Parian marble and commanded that an ox should be sacrificed to him every year. In his lifetime as well, his looks made him an object, not only of lust, but also of worship. And lovely as he was, his charm was as potent as his physical attractions. His personal magnetism, according to Plutarch, ‘was such that no disposition could wholly resist it, and no character remain unaffected’. The events of his extraordinary career confirm the claim.

As a young man Alcibiades was showy, extravagant, outrageous. He wore his hair as long as a woman’s, spoke with a provocative lisp and strutted through the marketplace trailing his long purple robe. He was a ringleader, a setter of trends. Eupolis reports that he started a fashion for drinking in the morning. When he appeared in a new style of sandal all his contemporaries had copies made, and called them ‘Alcibiades’. He was proud and unbiddable, touchily conscious of his dignity as a nobleman. Plutarch relates an anecdote about him as a child playing in the street, first refusing to interrupt a game of dice in order to allow a cart to go by, and then lying down in the vehicle’s path to show his defiance of the driver’s threats, risking his life rather than take orders from a common carter. He refused to learn to play the flute, on the grounds that flautists made themselves look ridiculous by pursing their lips: flute-playing at once went out of fashion among the smart Athenian youth. As an adolescent, according to his son, he disliked the favourite Athenian sport of wrestling because ‘some of the athletes were of low birth’. As an adult, he was a keen breeder and trainer of horses, an amusement open only to the rich. He carried himself as one who knows himself to be a superior being, by virtue of his class but also because his gifts fitted him for a splendid destiny and because his gargantuan vitality would settle for no less. Plato records Socrates saying to him: ‘You appear to me such that if any god were to say to you “Are you willing, Alcibiades, to live having what you now do, or would you choose to die instantly unless you were permitted greater things?” you would prefer to die.’ Socrates was not talking about material possessions. ‘Further, if the same god said “You can be master here in Europe, but will not be allowed to pass over into Asia”, it appears to me that you would not even on those terms be willing to live, unless you could fill the mouths of all men with your name and power.’ Like Achilles, Alcibiades, according to those intimate with him, had no use for an unremarkable life.

The device on his extravagantly splendid ivory and gold shield showed Eros with a thunderbolt, an image, combining aggressive sexuality with elemental violence, that nicely encapsulates the impression he made. He was prodigally, flashily generous. It was customary for wealthy Athenians with political ambitions to woo the populace by subsidizing choral performances and other public shows: Alcibiades’ were always the most lavish. His first public action was, characteristically, the donation of a quantity of money to the state, and it was performed with typically insouciant theatricality. He happened to be passing the place of assembly at a time when citizens had been asked to make voluntary contributions to the treasury to meet the costs of the war. He was carrying a live quail under his cloak, but hearing the applause with which donors were being received he went in, pledged a large sum, and at the same time inadvertently released the bird. There was laughter and a scramble that ended in a seaman named Antiochus catching the quail and handing it back to Alcibiades. The meeting was to prove a fateful one. Antiochus’ next appearance in recorded history is in the role of catalyst for Alcibiades’ downfall. For the time being, though, he was assisting at an auspicious occasion, the public debut of the rich young dilettante whose mind was on sport but who had demonstrated that he could, if it happened to please him, be of substantial service to the state.

While still in his teens Alcibiades served his stint in the army, as all Athenians were required to do, sharing a tent with Socrates. Philosopher and disciple each acquitted themselves well, but when Socrates saved the younger man’s life, fighting off the enemy when he lay wounded, it was Alcibiades who was awarded a crown and suit of armour as a prize for valour – an injustice that owes something to Socrates’ selflessness, something to the generals’ snobbery, and something as well to Alcibiades’ frequently noted gift for gaining the credit for more than he had actually performed. His actions were as ostentatious as his appearance. ‘Love of distinction and desire for fame’ were, according to Plutarch, the engines that drove him. But courageous he certainly was, and popular with both the common soldiers and those who commanded him.

Warfare provided an outlet for his prodigious energies. In civilian life, they festered. Cornelius Nepos praises his accomplishments and abilities but goes on: ‘but yet, so soon as he relaxed his efforts and there was nothing that called for mental exertion, he gave himself again to extravagance, indifference, licentiousness, depravity’. He had voracious appetites, for sex, for drink, for luxury of all kinds, and he had the money to indulge them all. Already very rich himself, he married Hipparete, one of the wealthiest heiresses in Athens. The wedding seems to have scarcely interrupted his scandalous series of liaisons with courtesans. Scurrilous gossip later accused him of incest with his sister, mother, and illegitimate daughter. The charges are lurid and unconvincing (there is no other evidence that he even had a sister), but his reputation for promiscuity was undoubtedly well founded.

He was a high-handed swaggerer, someone by whom others were readily intimidated and who took pleasure in trying his power. He was jealous. Even Socrates said of him, albeit teasingly, ‘I am really quite scared by his mad behaviour and the intensity of his affections.’ He was violent. As a boy he had beaten up a teacher who confessed to owning no copy of Homer’s works (an assault that was generally agreed – such was the mystique accorded the two epics – to redound to the perpetrator’s credit). He once struck his father-in-law simply for a wager. He thrashed a man who had dared to subsidize a chorus in competition with the one he himself had sponsored. He was rumoured to have killed a servant. When he wanted his house decorated with murals he abducted the distinguished painter Agatharchus, locked him up in the house until he had done the work, then sent him home with a cartload of gold. Annoyed by Anytus, one of the many older men who doted on him, he refused an invitation to dinner but then arrived at the party, late and visibly drunk, with a gang of slaves whom he ordered to seize half of the gold and silver vessels Anytus had laid out to impress his guests (only Athenaeus, of the several ancient writers to tell this story, softens it by mentioning that Alcibiades subsequently gave the valuable dishes to a needy hanger-on). When Hipparete, rendered desperate by her husband’s shameless infidelities, appeared before the magistrates to petition for a divorce, Alcibiades interrupted the proceedings, seized her, and carried her home through the marketplace, ‘and not a soul dared oppose him or take her from him’. Such delinquency in one so high placed and privileged was unnerving. It threatened to disrupt not only the lives of his immediate circle, but of the whole community that observed him, fascinated and fearful. Timon, the notorious misanthrope, once accosted Alcibiades in the street, shook him by the hand, and said: ‘You are doing well, my boy! Go on like this and you will soon be big enough to ruin the lot of them.’