The Ambassadors: From Ancient Greece to the Nation State

A second embassy – the embassy that had provoked the trial of Timarchus – had been despatched to Philip with the aim of ratifying that peace treaty but it had failed to secure all of the conditions and provisos that the Athenian assembly had insisted upon. A deeply unsatisfactory treaty had been agreed and Aeschines was solely to blame. This is what Demosthenes had told the assembly upon his return to Athens, but he added that it had been hoodwinked by Aeschines’s eloquence. The ambassador had offered no report, given no reply to the charges levelled by Demosthenes, ‘but he made such a fine speech, so full of big promises, that he carried you all away with him’. Through his efforts, Aeschines boasted, Philip had been entirely won over to the Athenian cause and would now be a valued ally.

This was hardly how Demosthenes remembered the embassy, so ‘I rose, and said that the whole story was news to me. I attempted to repeat the statement I had made to the council, but Aeschines and Philocrates posted themselves one on either side of me, shouting, interrupting, and finally jeering. You were all laughing; you would not listen to me, and you did not want to believe anything except what Aeschines had reported.’

A dishonourable peace had been secured and Philip of Macedon’s ascendancy had continued unchecked. ‘Men of Athens,’ Demosthenes suggested, ‘nothing more awful or more momentous has befallen Greece within living memory, nor, as I believe, in all the history of the past.’ Athens had been duped by Philip of Macedon, a man who ‘has many claims to congratulation on his good fortune…Such achievements as the capture of great cities and the subjugation of a vast territory are, I suppose, enviable, as they are undoubtedly imposing; yet we could mention many other men who have done the like.’ But his ‘greatest stroke of good fortune…is that, when he needed scoundrels for his purposes, he found bigger scoundrels than he wanted’. He had found Aeschines, who had not been cajoled into treachery but ‘had sold himself, and pocketed the money, before he made his speech and betrayed us to Philip. To Philip he has been a trusty and well-beloved hireling; to you a treacherous ambassador and a treacherous citizen, worthy of threefold destruction.’

It was not too late to make amends, however. ‘Today you are not merely adjudging this case. You are legislating for all future time, whether every ambassador is basely to serve your enemies for hire, or without fee or bribe to give his best service to you.’ Philip could be warned that ‘he will have to remodel his methods’ when dealing with Athens. ‘At present his chosen policy is to cheat the many and court the few; but, when he learns that his favourites have been brought to ruin, he will wish for the future to deal with the many, who are the real masters of our state…For the sake of your honour, of your religion, of your security, of everything you value,’ Demosthenes implored the jury, ‘you must not acquit this man. Visit him with exemplary punishment, and let his fate be a warning not to our own citizens alone but to every man who lives in the Hellenic world.’7

It was rousing stuff, but Aeschines had prepared a compelling story of his own. From the outset he threw himself on the jury’s mercy. ‘I beg you, fellow citizens, to hear me with willing and friendly mind, remembering how great is my peril, and how many the charges against which I have to defend myself; remembering also the arts and devices of my accuser.’ This Demosthenes was hardly the most attractive of personalities, after all, Aeschines reminded the jury.

During the embassy to Philip he had been little more than a nuisance: ‘All the way we were forced to put up with Demosthenes’ odious and insufferable ways.’ That was as nothing when compared with his boastfulness, ‘the over-weening self-confidence of this fellow’. When the ambassadors were discussing their tactics, one of them had ‘remarked that he was afraid Philip would get the better of us in arguing his claims’. Demosthenes immediately ‘promised fountains of oratory, and said that he was going to make such a speech…that he would sew up Philip’s mouth as with an un-soaked rush’. Sadly, as Aeschines remembered it, events turned out rather differently.

When Demosthenes’ turn came to address Philip,

all were intent, expecting to hear a masterpiece of eloquence. For, as we learned afterwards, his extravagant boasting had been reported to Philip and his court. So when all were thus prepared to listen, this creature mouthed forth a proem [an introduction] – an obscure sort of thing and as dead as fright could make it – and getting on a little way into the subject he suddenly stopped speaking and stood helpless. Finally he collapsed completely.

Philip saw Demosthenes’s plight and generously assured him that his faltering speech was not an ‘irreparable calamity’. He was an ambassador, not an actor on the stage. He should calm himself and ‘try gradually to recall his speech, and speak it off as he had prepared it’. Unfortunately, ‘having been once upset, and having forgotten what he had written, he was unable to recover himself…and broke down again.’ Philip was deeply embarrassed and a herald ordered the ambassadors to withdraw. Demosthenes was mortified, at which point his sour feelings towards the entire embassy began to fester. To deflect attention away from his own risible performance, he suddenly began accusing the other ambassadors of negotiating against the best interests of Athens.

Through the rest of the ambassadors’ stay in Macedon, Demosthenes oscillated between showering Philip in fawning speeches and behaving ‘with shameless rudeness’ whenever he was invited to dinner. On the journey home his mood did seem to brighten. ‘Suddenly he began talking to each of us in a surprisingly friendly manner,’ promising to lend his support to their political careers and even praising Aeschines’s oratorical skills. One evening, ‘when we were all dining together at Larisa, he made fun of himself and the embarrassment which had come upon him in his speech, and he declared that Philip was the most wonderful man under the sun’. It was a ruse, however, an attempt to make the other ambassadors say complimentary things about Philip that he could later use as proof of their treachery.

Demosthenes had never been the warmest supporter of a peace treaty with Philip, and his experiences in Macedonia had only brought him humiliation. He was levelling charges of corruption, Aeschines suggested, as a political strategy, to rouse Athens against Philip of Macedon, and as a petulant gesture of revenge. Aeschines allowed that ‘the peace failed to please some of our public men’, but ‘ought they not to have opposed it at the time, instead of putting me on trial now?…They say that Philip bought the peace, that he overreached us at every point in the articles of agreement, and that the peace which he contrived for his own interests, he himself has violated.’ Aeschines disputed this analysis but, regardless, it seemed unfair to him that ‘although I was but one of ten ambassadors, I alone am made to give account.’

Finally, Aeschines invited the jurors to look around the courtroom. ‘Yonder is my father, Atrometus. There are few older men among all the citizens, for he is now ninety-four years old. When he was a young man, before the war destroyed his property, he was so fortunate as to be an athlete. Banished by the Thirty [Athens’ oligarchic governing body after the Peloponnesian War], he served as a soldier in Asia, and in danger he showed himself a man.’ Then there was his mother, a woman of extraordinary courage, who had followed her husband into exile and shared in his disasters.

Aeschines was portraying himself as the child of proud Athenian parents: ‘I myself, gentlemen, have three children, one daughter and two sons, by the daughter of Philodemus, the sister of Philon and Epicrates.’ He had brought them into court with the other family members ‘for the sake of asking one question and presenting one piece of evidence to the jury’.

For I ask, fellow citizens, whether you believe that I would have betrayed to Philip, not only my country, my personal friendships, and my rights in the shrines and tombs of my fathers, but also these children, the dearest of mankind to me. Do you believe that I would have held his friendship more precious than the safety of these children? By what lust have you seen me conquered? What unworthy act have I ever done for money? It is not Macedon that makes men good or bad, but their own inborn nature; and we have not come back from the embassy changed men, but the same men that you yourselves sent out.

‘With all loyalty I have served the city as her ambassador,’ Aeschines declared. ‘My speech is finished. This, my body, I and the law now commit to your hands.’8

Aeschines was acquitted, but only barely, and the damage done to his reputation would be catastrophic. He would always retain the whiff of scandal, ending his career not as an elder statesman in Athens, but as a teacher of rhetoric on the island of Rhodes. Demosthenes would even succeed in mobilizing public opinion against Philip of Macedon, but support came far too late (assuming it would ever have made any real difference). Just as Demosthenes had desired, Athens and Macedonia joined battle and, at Chaeronea in 338 BC, Athens was crushed. In its aftermath, Philip established the League of Corinth, a pan-Hellenic league of mutual defence almost entirely dominated by Macedonian interests.

The trials of Timarchus and Aeschines were rather parochial affairs, but they intersected with momentous political events. Philip of Macedon, whose ascendancy was the catalyst for the whole affair, died two years after the battle of Chaeronea. His achievement was secure and Macedonia was now the greatest power in Greece. His son, Alexander, would extend that influence across much of the known world and, as skilled a warrior as he was, Alexander also knew the value of a diplomatic flourish. The insular relations of the Greek city states were shortly to give way to ambassadorial encounters with the rest of the world that were as epochal as any that had yet been produced – epochal if, on occasion, boozy.

CHAPTER II Greeks and Indika

i. Alexander

A prodigious tolerance for drink was always among the most useful of ambassadorial qualities. Writing in the middle of the eighteenth century, the Prussian monarch Frederick the Great offered unvarnished advice to anyone hoping to serve as an ambassador in London. He ought to be a ‘good debauchee who should preferably be able to drink wine better than the English and who, having drunk, would say nothing that should be kept quiet’.

Drinking wine better than the English was no easy feat. During a trip to Hanover in the winter of 1716, James Stanhope, Secretary of State to George I, served no less than seventy bottles of wine to thirteen diplomatic dinner guests. At the end of the evening everyone but Stanhope – and he had certainly consumed his share – was hopelessly drunk. Stanhope left his guests to sleep off their excesses and went to compare notes with Cardinal Dubois, representative of the French child-king Louis XV, who had been listening to the revelatory table talk from across the hall.1

Those with less robust livers risked moments of indiscretion and humiliation. In 1673, the French jeweller Jean Chardin attended a banquet at the Persian court in Isfahan. If he was impressed by the food – ‘a collation of fruits, both green and dried, and all sorts of sweet meats, wet and dry’ – he was dazzled by the alcohol on display. Lavish flat-bottomed cups, each able to carry three litres of wine, were filled from fifty golden flagons, some enamelled, others encrusted with jewels and pearls. It all left Chardin with the feeling that ‘no other part of the world can afford anything more magnificent and rich or more splendid and bright’. Impressed as he was, Chardin was also confused. None of the ambassadors present at the dinner seemed to be partaking of the wine, and while the Muscovite ambassador could be seen drinking, it was only from his private cache of Russian brandy. A nobleman at the dinner supplied Chardin with an explanation.

At a banquet ten years earlier, he revealed, two Russian ambassadors had drunk ‘so excessively that they quite lost their senses’. Unfortunately, the shah had then proposed a toast to the tsar, an honour that the ambassadors could hardly refuse. The two men took long draughts from their massive cups but one of them, ‘not being able to digest so much wine, had a pressing inclination to vomit, and not knowing where to disembogue, he took his great sable cap, which he half filled’.

His colleague was mortified by ‘so foul an action done in the presence of the king of Persia’ and urged him to leave the banqueting hall at once. Instead, ‘not knowing either what was said to him nor what he himself did’, he ‘clapped his cap upon his head, which presently covered him all over with nastiness’. Mercifully, the shah and his retinue were not offended, but ‘broke into a loud laughter, which lasted about half an hour, during which time the companions of the filthy Muscovite were forcing him by dint of blows with their fists to rise and go out’.2

Not that the debauched diplomatic banquet was an invention of the modern era. In 327 BC Alexander the Great, heir to the man Demosthenes had so despised, crossed into India. Some cowered at his advance; some resisted it; still others accepted it as inevitable. After suffering a humiliating defeat, two Indian kings decided to send a hundred envoys to offer their submission to the Greek invasion. ‘They all rode in chariots and were men of uncommon stature and of a very dignified bearing,’ the historian Curtius Rufus reports. In their gold and purple embroidered robes, they humbly offered Alexander ‘themselves, their cities, and their territories’.

Alexander eagerly accepted and, in celebration, ‘gave orders for the preparation of a splendid banquet, to which he invited the ambassadors and the petty kings of the neighbouring tribes’. Tapestry curtains, ‘which glittered with gold and purple’, surrounded a hundred gilded couches. It was a majestic spectacle, one more demonstration of Macedonian paramountcy. Until, that is, the alcohol intervened.

An Athenian boxer named Dioxippus was a guest at the festivities. Unfortunately, a Macedonian called Horratus was there too. ‘Flown with wine’, he began to taunt Dioxippus ‘and challenged him, if he were a man, to fight him next day with a sword’. The challenge was gleefully accepted and Alexander, ‘finding next day that the two men were more than ever bent on fighting…allowed them do as they pleased’.

Horratus arrived in full gladiatorial regalia, ‘carrying in his left hand a brazen shield…and in his right a javelin’, with a sword by his side for good measure. Dioxippus carried nothing but a scarlet cloak and a ‘stout knotty club’. To the large crowds that had gathered, ‘it seemed not temerity but downright madness for a naked man to engage with one armed to the teeth.’ They were mistaken.

Horratus launched his javelin, but Dioxippus evaded it ‘by a slight bending of his body’ and proceeded to break Horratus’s long pike with a single blow of his club. Next, he tripped Horratus, snatched his sword and ‘planted his foot on his neck as he lay prostrate’. Only Alexander’s intervention prevented Dioxippus from smashing his challenger’s skull. It was a huge disappointment for the assembled Macedonians, and they set about plotting their revenge. At another feast a few days later, they falsely accused Dioxippus of stealing a precious golden cup. He blushed at the suggestion, since ‘it often enough happens that one who blushes at a false insinuation has less control of his countenance than one who is really guilty.’ A proud man, Dioxippus ‘could not bear the glances which were turned upon him as if he were a thief’, so he quit the banquet, wrote a letter of farewell to Alexander, and fell on his sword.3

Such unseemly events could hardly have impressed the envoys of the Indian kings, and Macedonian pride was doubtless bruised, but a brief moment of humiliation could not mar Alexander’s spectacular achievements. He had quashed residual Greek resentment (even daring to raze the city of Thebes to the ground), conquered Persia, and by the time of his death at the age of thirty-two he had carved out an empire that stretched from the Danube, through Egypt, to the mouth of the Indus River. The pilgrimage he had reputedly made to Troy, to place wreaths on the tombs of the Homeric heroes Achilles and Patroclus, now seemed less like hubris and more like a fitting prelude to a glorious military career.

Redoubtable soldier that he was, Alexander had always honoured diplomacy and had treated its officers with great respect. As a young man he had received a party of Persian ambassadors and had been so affable, and had asked them such pertinent questions, that they thought the much-vaunted abilities of his father Philip were as nothing in comparison with the precocious talents of his son. Years later, the envoys of some other defeated Indian towns visited Alexander to offer their submission. They were surprised to find him still in his armour and without anyone waiting in attendance upon him. At length, a cushion was brought in so that Alexander might rest his battle-wearied body. Instead, he made the eldest of the ambassadors take it and sit down upon it. Delighted by such courtesy, the envoys readily agreed to the terms of surrender that were proposed. Alexander could, as the occasion required, feast, charm or flatter all and any ambassadors.

He had won his empire through a combination of military prowess and diplomatic politesse. The empire was as fragile as it was vast, however. When he died, Alexander’s relatives, counsellors and generals squabbled over his inheritance and a series of smaller Macedonian states sprang up. The easternmost of these was centred on Syria and Persia, where one of Alexander’s most successful generals, Seleucus Nicator (358–281 BC), established a dynasty that would survive until the Roman invasion in 64 BC. Seleucus dreamed of emulating Alexander’s military forays into northern India. Unfortunately, in the period since Alexander’s death a formidable new power had arisen in that region.

ii. Megasthenes

The Mauryan Empire does not enjoy the place it deserves in the popular historical imagination. Between 321 and 180 BC, the Mauryans ruled over 500 million people, easily matching the grandeur of either the Moghul Empire or the British Raj. By the fifth century BC the numerous tribal groups of India had been reduced to four dominant monarchies, or mahajanpadas, who set about battling for primacy. By the beginning of the fourth century BC. the kingdom of Magadha, with its capital at Pataliputra, had emerged victorious. In the wake of Alexander’s military adventures in India, Chandragupta Maurya ascended to the Magadhan throne and, along with his successors, established the first genuine Indian empire, ranging from the borders of Persia to those of Afghanistan and Bengal.

Pataliputra (on the site of present-day Patna) was likely the largest city in the world at the time. Surrounded by 570 towers and a 900-foot moat, it boasted elegant houses, ponds and orchards, plentiful food and hardly any crime. With an army of 3,000 cavalry, 9,000 war elephants and 600,000 foot soldiers, the Mauryans were fully equipped to repulse any Greek invasion. Seleucus realized that his plans to conquer India were stillborn. After suffering military defeat in 305 BC, he instead made a treaty with the Mauryans, abandoning claims to the Punjab in exchange for several hundred battle elephants. With the prospect of hostilities averted, diplomacy was able to flourish.

In 302 BC a Macedonian ambassador named Megasthenes was sent to formalize relations between two civilizations recently at war. He travelled down the Kabul Valley, over the Khyber Pass, and headed across the Ganges Valley towards the Mauryan capital. He would stay there for ten years. While the workaday detail of his diplomatic encounters has vanished, the reports he took home would define the West’s understanding of India for centuries to come, and would be endlessly cited, if not always uncritically, in the works of historians and scholars like Arrian and Pliny. India was suddenly more tangible: a land ‘of such vast extent, it seems well-nigh to embrace the whole of the northern tropic zone of the earth’. It had ‘many huge mountains which abound in fruit trees of every kind, and vast plains of great fertility’.

The Indian people were not hapless savages but, ‘distinguished by their proud bearing’, were ‘well skilled in the arts, as might be expected of men who inhale a pure air and drink the very finest water’. They were generally frugal, but entirely capable of appreciating finery, favouring robes ‘ornamented with precious stones’ and ‘flowered garments made of the finest muslin’. They had ‘a high regard for beauty, and avail themselves of every device to improve their looks’.

There was much to admire in Mauryan culture. Even during military campaigns, those who worked the land were left unmolested, ensuring a steady supply of food. There were no slaves anywhere in the empire and visitors like Megasthenes were guaranteed courteous treatment: ‘officers are appointed even for foreigners whose duty is to see that no foreigner is wronged. Should any of them lose his health, they send physicians to attend him…and if he dies they bury him, and deliver over such property as he leaves to his relatives. The judges also decide cases in which foreigners are concerned, with the greatest care, and come down sharply on those who take unfair advantage of them.’

The sophistication of Indian thought was perhaps the greatest revelation. ‘Truth and virtue they hold alike in esteem. Hence they accord no special privileges to the old unless they possess superior wisdom.’ Death was ‘a very frequent subject of discourse. They regard this life as, so to speak, the time when the child within the womb becomes mature, and death as a birth into a real and happy life for the votaries of philosophy.’ And when the old finally passed on, the Indians did not raise monuments in their honour but considered ‘the virtues which men have displayed in life, and the songs in which their praises are celebrated, sufficient to preserve their memory after death’.

Like so many later visitors, Megasthenes was especially fascinated by Brahmin priests, men who ‘abstain from animal food and sexual pleasures, and spend their time in listening to serious discourse, and in imparting their knowledge to such as will listen to them’. They were much revered, and any man who came to listen to their discussions was ‘not allowed to speak, or even to cough, and much less to spit, and if he offends in any of these ways he is cast out from their society that very day, as being a man who is wanting in self-restraint’.4

Megasthenes’ epic survey of Indian life, his Indika, did not survive antiquity intact. All that remain are fragments and the countless references to his work by later authors. His influence was profound, though not uncontroversial. Megasthenes would be criticized for his inaccuracies and wilder speculations. Unversed in Indian languages, he only ever heard stories and reports in presumably imperfect translation. He certainly made gross generalizations about a society made up of hundreds of millions of people, and gave too much credence to the more fabulous stories he heard. He told the Greek world about races of Indians who lacked noses, others whose feet pointed backwards, and still others who had heads like dogs and communicated by barking. He spoke of ants that were the size of foxes, which dug for gold, and of bizarre flying serpents.

All such legends died hard. But Megasthenes also provided accurate accounts of Indian political and social life, Indian philosophy, the Indian judiciary, the Indian diet of rice and richly spiced meat, and he depicted a mighty city about which almost nothing had previously been known. His description of the Indian caste system was flawed – he mistakenly divided society into seven rather than four groups – but the truly momentous thing was that he introduced the West to this hierarchy for the very first time. Ultimately, it did not matter how good or bad his narrative was – although, on balance, it was remarkably good. The justified carping of some critics aside, it was believed, and one civilization’s understanding of another was forever transformed. India was suddenly far more than the mysterious place from which an occasional parrot arrived.