Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen
Lucy Hughes-Hallett
From the author of ‘The Pike’ – winner of the 2013 Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction – a compelling story of heroism told through eight famous lives that span from Achilles to Sir Francis Drake.Beginning beneath the walls of Troy, ending in 1930s Europe, ‘Heroes’ is a compelling evocation of heroism through eight famous lives – Achilles, Odysseus, Alcibiades, Cato, El Cid, Francis Drake, Wallenstein and Garibaldi.Not necessarily all good – sometimes quite the reverse – but all great, they possessed a charisma, a strength of will powerful enough to persuade those around them that they alone could do the incredible and unprecedented.It is a story of morality and dictatorship; money and sorcery; seduction and mass hysteria.
HEROES
Saviours, Traitors and Supermen
LUCY HUGHES-HALLETT
DEDICATION (#ulink_e9e4df59-2783-5af6-b365-2f332dcf2cf1)
For Dan
CONTENTS
COVER (#u6a627130-559f-560d-bed7-8d778d832ced)
TITLE PAGE (#u5b32b299-c9b7-5265-bcfa-df08146c9357)
DEDICATION (#u4ada073d-5723-5e2f-b86d-8009b86030d6)
PROLOGUE (#u0b69959e-f75e-50c2-8dd3-b9fa6b2472aa)
I ACHILLES (#uf0a13dad-8539-5236-b8c1-224519a7b18f)
II ALCIBIADES (#uad64aa14-a4ab-5056-a448-66c7bcae4821)
III CATO (#ucf4f6c19-6381-527f-9aba-9afcba0aa665)
IV EL CID (#litres_trial_promo)
V FRANCIS DRAKE (#litres_trial_promo)
VI WALLENSTEIN (#litres_trial_promo)
VII GARIBALDI (#litres_trial_promo)
VIII ODYSSEUS (#litres_trial_promo)
AUTHOR’S NOTE (#litres_trial_promo)
REFERENCES (#litres_trial_promo)
BIBLIOGRAPHY (#litres_trial_promo)
INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)
P.S. IDEAS, INTERVIEWS & FEATURES … (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
THE DELIGHT OF WRITING (#litres_trial_promo)
LIFE AT A GLANCE (#litres_trial_promo)
TEN FAVOURITE BOOKS (#litres_trial_promo)
A WRITING LIFE (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE BOOK (#litres_trial_promo)
THE FANTASY OF SUPERMAN (#litres_trial_promo)
READ ON (#litres_trial_promo)
IF YOU LOVED THIS, YOU MIGHT LIKE … (#litres_trial_promo)
HAVE YOU READ? (#litres_trial_promo)
FIND OUT MORE (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
PRAISE (#litres_trial_promo)
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
COPYRIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_db7f11cb-0fbb-5b06-a328-0be60193e37a)
‘RAGE!’ THE FIRST WORD of the Iliad, the word that inaugurates Europe’s literary culture and introduces one of its dominant themes. The rage not of Agamemnon, king and commander, but of Achilles, the semi-divine delinquent, the paradigmatic hero whose terrible choice of glory at the price of an early death has haunted the collective imagination of the West for two and a half millennia.
Heroes are dynamic, seductive people – they wouldn’t be heroes otherwise – and heroic rage is thrilling to contemplate. It is the expression of a superb spirit. It is associated with courage and integrity and a disdain for the cramping compromises by means of which the unheroic majority manage their lives – attributes that are widely considered noble. It is also, and therefore, profoundly disruptive of any civil state. Homer’s Achilles was the ‘the best of the Achaeans’, the pre-eminent Greek warrior, but his rage was directed, not against his people’s enemies, but against Agamemnon, his people’s leader. The Iliad is a celebration of Achilles’ lethal glamour: it is also the story of how he came close to occasioning the defeat of the community of which he was the most brilliant representative.
This book is about Achilles and some of his real-life successors (whether Homer’s hero really lived we are unlikely ever to know for certain). It takes the form of a series of brief lives of people who have been considered by their contemporaries (and in most cases by posterity as well) to be exceptionally, even perhaps supernaturally, gifted and so to be capable of something momentous – the defeat of an enemy, the salvation of a race, the preservation of a political system, the completion of a voyage – which no one else could have accomplished. In 411 BC the people of Athens resolved to recall Alcibiades, whom they had once condemned to death and who had subsequently fought with devastating success for their opponents, because, as one of their commanders told the Assembly, he was ‘the only person living (#litres_trial_promo)’ who could save their state. So the eleventh-century King Alfonso VI of Castile turned to Rodrigo Díaz, known as the Cid – a man he had twice banished – when African invaders poured into Spain, because whatever threat the Cid posed to the stability of the kingdom he was known to have been ‘born in a happy hour (#litres_trial_promo)’ and could therefore never be defeated. And so in 1630 the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand, having first nerved himself to dismiss his overweening and intransigent General, Albrecht von Wallenstein, had then to humble himself by imploring Wallenstein to resume his command and save the empire from the onslaught of the invading Swedes, something that, by common consent of all his enemies (he had few friends), Wallenstein alone could hope to do.
Cometh the hour, cometh the man. It is in times of emergency that heroes are looked for, and found. Bertolt Brecht wrote, famously, that it is an unhappy land (#litres_trial_promo) that looks for heroes. The dictum is ambiguous, and works both ways. A land without heroes may be fortunate in their absence, for a hero is a menace to any state’s equilibrium. ‘The Argonauts left (#litres_trial_promo) Heracles behind’, noted Aristotle, for the same reason that the Athenians took to ostracizing and sending into exile outstanding citizens, ‘so the Argos would not have on board one so vastly bigger than the rest of the crew.’ But only a fortunate land is confident enough to dispense with heroes. At the time of writing it is fashionable to lament the littleness of those accorded celebrity within our culture – so many footballers and rock stars and models, so few great spirits – but such collective frivolity should be cherished as one of the privileges of peace. It is desperation that prompts people to crave a champion, a protector, or a redeemer and, having identified one, to offer him their worship.
Virtue is not a necessary qualification for heroic status: a hero is not a role model. On the contrary, it is of the essence of a hero to be unique, and therefore inimitable. Some of the people whose stories are told in this book were irreproachable, others were scoundrels. Cato had the highest moral standards and adhered to them as nearly as could possibly be expected. Garibaldi was a man of signal sincerity, although he was not quite so transparently simple as his admirers imagined. (Alfred Lord Tennyson, meeting him in 1864, was delighted to recognize in him the ‘divine stupidity (#litres_trial_promo) of a hero’. In fact Garibaldi was far from dumb: he just didn’t speak English.) Others among my subjects were more morally questionable. Alcibiades was an arrogant libertine and a turncoat several times over. The Cid was a predatory warlord, Drake was a pirate and a terrorist, and Wallenstein was a profiteer prone to apparently psychotic rages whose contemporaries believed him to be in league with the devil. But heroes are not required to be altruistic, or honest, or even competent. They are required only to inspire confidence and to appear, not good necessarily, but great.
This book is rooted in ambivalence. Thomas Carlyle, who wrote one on the same subject a century and a half ago, declared that there was ‘no nobler feeling’ than hero-worship. ‘Heartfelt prostrate admiration (#litres_trial_promo), submission, burning, boundless, for a noblest godlike Form of Man … it is to this hour and at all hours the vivifying influence in a man’s life.’ I disagree. An exaggerated veneration for an exceptional individual poses an insidious temptation. It allows worshippers to abnegate responsibility, looking to the great man for salvation or for fulfilment that they should more properly be working to accomplish for themselves. Carlyle approvingly called it ‘the germ … of all religion hitherto known’, but to make a fellow human the object of religious devotion is unwise. Hero-worshippers, as the stories in this book repeatedly demonstrate, are frequently disappointed in, and lay themselves open to abuse by, the heroes of their choice.
The notion of the hero – that some men are born special – is radically inegalitarian. It can open the way for tyranny. ‘Beware the pursuit of the Superhuman,’ wrote George Bernard Shaw. ‘It leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human.’ True. Carlyle’s friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote ‘Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in great men’, saw the prime function of the great man as that of rendering ‘indemnification for populations (#litres_trial_promo) of pigmies’, while humanity en masse seemed to him ‘disgusting, like moving cheese, like hills of ants or fleas.’ Such a revulsion from the majority of one’s fellow beings, combined with an exaggerated admiration for the exceptional few, makes a politically poisonous mix.
But a wariness of the potentially pernicious effects of hero-worship hasn’t made me immune to the intoxicating allure of the hero. The people I have written about here are all compelling personalities whose life stories – tragic, inspirational, or shocking – have been told and retold over centuries, in some cases millennia, because they are so dramatic, so full of complex resonance, and so profoundly moving. The idea of the hero would not be so emotionally disturbing or so politically dangerous were it not so potent.
I am not a debunker, more a collector and analyst of bunk. I shall repeatedly be pointing to discrepancies between the ascertainable facts about heroes and the legends that grew up around them. I do so not as an iconoclast but because the process whereby heroes’ characters and curricula vitae are adjusted to suit the moral values and emotional needs of those who adore them is a fascinating one. That most idols have feet of clay is a banality: what is interesting is the question why, knowing it, we are still enthralled by them. Cato was an inept politician who repeatedly handed advantages to his opponents, but his contemporaries thought him a man in ten thousand, and his admirers in the next generation revered him as a god. Francis Drake turned aside from the pursuit of the Spanish Armada to grab a disabled ship as his own prize, imperilling the entire English fleet by doing so, but his popularity was undiminished by the action: on the contrary, when the news reached London bonfires were lit in celebration. Byron and Keats had both read their Plutarch: they knew all about Alcibiades’ treachery. Yet Byron wrote ‘no name comes down (#litres_trial_promo) from antiquity with a more general charm than that of Alcibiades’, while to Keats ‘Alcibiades, leaning (#litres_trial_promo) on his crimson couch in his galley, his broad shoulders imperceptibly heaving with the sea’ was the embodiment of the abstract idea of the heroic, ‘large, prominent, round and coloured with magnificence’.
Heroes are insubordinate: that is part of their glamour. Several of the people I have written about followed Achilles in defying their political masters: in doing so they were acting within a well-established heroic tradition. There are men, wrote Aristotle, so godlike, so exceptional, that they naturally, by right of their extraordinary gifts, transcend all moral judgement or constitutional control: ‘There is no law (#litres_trial_promo) which embraces men of that calibre: they are themselves law.’ Such men inevitably clash with the established powers that their inordinate personal prestige subverts. The legendary Persian hero Rustum quarrelled with his king and refused his services. Horatio Nelson is at his most heroic with his telescope clamped to his blind eye. George Custer was court-martialled barely a week after he graduated from West Point and afterwards he so frequently annoyed his superiors that he would have been excluded from the Little Big Horn campaign had not a storm of public protest obliged President Grant to restore him to his command.
One who has become the object of hero-worship is hard to accommodate in a well-ordered state. Established authority has often been highly (and justifiably) suspicious of the heroes that served it. The Cid and Wallenstein were both dismissed by the royal masters who feared and envied them. Garibaldi was and is revered as the valiant creator of a united Italy, but he was repeatedly imprisoned or blockaded on his tiny island home by the state he had brought into being.
Most heroes are rebels. A startling number are actually traitors. Achilles, having quarrelled with Agamemnon, prayed that his fellow Greeks might be defeated. Lancelot was the most complete knight at Arthur’s Round Table, but he brought about the collapse of the civilization of which he was paragon. Of my six historical heroes, five fought at some point against their compatriots (a fact that did not prevent their passing into legend as national heroes). Drake is the exception: but though he never had political power enough to precipitate a confrontation with his queen, he frequently disobeyed her.
Hero-worship is the cult of the individual, and the hero is always imagined standing alone. The heroes of classical mythology were homeless wanderers, and so are those of modern legend, be they cowboys or police officers, vigilantes or secret agents. They are brilliant mavericks, outsiders coming in from elsewhere to handle an emergency before riding off into the sunset. The wanderer seems to the settled majority to be free and invulnerable. As Herodotus wrote of the nomadic Scythians: ‘This people has no cities (#litres_trial_promo) or settled forts: they carry their houses with them and shoot with bows from horseback: they live off herds of cattle, not from tillage, and their dwellings are on their wagons. How then can they fail to be invincible?’ Much more can be expected of a stranger, whose unfamiliarity makes him a blank screen for the projection of fantasies, than could ever be asked of someone familiar. Historical heroes, whose status depends at least in part on the public’s identification of them with legendary counterparts, have frequently been people with no fixed position in the society that expected such great things of them. Wallenstein, the protector of the Austro-Hungarian-German empire, was a Czech. Garibaldi, the maker of Italy, was born in France, wore the costume of a South American gaucho, and until the end of his life still needed a dictionary by him when writing in Italian.
The responsibilities of government do not combine well with the individualism expected of the hero. Achilles, wrote Aristotle, was that rare, not quite human creature, a non-political man, ‘a non-cooperator (#litres_trial_promo) like an isolated piece in a game of draughts’. None of my subjects was a head of state (although the Cid, at the end of his life, created a new state for himself). They are the successors, not of Agamemnon but of Achilles, not of Arthur but of Lancelot, not of Jehovah but of Jesus Christ. In the 1880s, Friedrich Nietzsche defined the state – any state – as ‘a fearful tyranny (#litres_trial_promo), a remorseless machine of oppression’ against which he opposed the heroic figure of the ‘superman’. Nietzsche’s superman is ‘like a star (#litres_trial_promo) thrown forth into empty space and into the icy breath of solitude’. He has no community within which to hide, no religion, legal system, or moral code as guide, no group or institution to share the responsibility for his choices. He is terrifyingly exposed. ‘Can you furnish yourself with your own good and evil and hang up your own will above yourself as a law?’ asks Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. ‘Can you be judge of yourself and avenger of your law?’ Achilles took it upon himself to do so, repudiating his allegiance to Agamemnon, denying any obligation to his fellow Greeks, choosing to answer to no human authority save his own, and insisting on his right to determine when and on whose behalf he would exercise his devastating skills. And although some of my subjects – Cato, with his embarrassing clothes and pernickety accountancy; tubby, venal Drake – are scarcely the kind of resplendent figures Nietzsche had in mind, the same proud rejection of a communal identity has been the mark of the hero throughout the millennia covered by this book.
My subjects are all Europeans. There are many correspondences between the Western heroic tradition and those of some Asian and African cultures, but I have not attempted to trace them, partly for practical reasons – this book is plenty long enough as it is – and partly because the tradition I describe is a continuous and self-referential one. Achilles in his tent sang of the exploits of heroes dead and gone, tales that shaped his concept of himself and his role just as his own story was to condition posterity’s idea of what a hero might be. Cato prepared himself for his own suicide by reading Plato’s account of the death of Socrates. Even when heroes were not themselves aware of the parallels between their careers and those of their celebrated antecedents, the people who told and modified their stories frequently were, so that those stories, as they have come down to us, are full of echoes and presentiments: Drake is a latter-day Jason, Wallenstein a Mars; Cato (despite having died half a century before the Christian era began) is an avatar of Christ, and to Alexander Herzen Garibaldi seemed ‘a hero of antiquity (#litres_trial_promo), a figure out of the Aeneid’. As heroes are shaped by the past, so in turn they shape the future. In the 1930s, when Europe was once more in crisis, my heroes (except for Alcibiades, whose offences against his birthplace were anathema to the age of nationalism) were resurrected and put to political use.
They are all white Westerners and, for different reasons, they are all male. Heroes’ stories resemble women’s stories in that the hero is simultaneously adored and marginalized, being more often an object of veneration than a holder of power; but the vast majority of the people accorded hero status in Western history have been men. Of course there are women I might have included, but to have done so would have been to obscure the lamentable fact that people of my sex have, throughout most of recorded time, been considered incapable of running a country, let alone saving one. To have chosen a female subject would be to imply that one sixth of historical heroes were women. That kind of emollient falsification, in my opinion, does women no service. When Agamemnon sent out a call for all the men of Greece to join him in attacking Troy, Achilles’ father, anxious to save his wonderful boy from conscription, dressed him as a girl and hid him in the women’s quarters. Odysseus heard of it and came visiting, bringing with him magnificent gifts. The women of the court crowded round, exclaiming over the embroidered cloths and golden cups, the robes and the jewels; but Achilles, unable to suppress his true nature, seized upon a sword. At once Odysseus knew him. Achilles abandoned his pretence, acknowledged his manhood, and accepted his heroic destiny. So Odysseus himself, in Homer’s account of his journey home, has to extricate himself from Calypso’s island, the tempting domain of the feminine where he enjoys every comfort and every pleasure, before the tale of his adventures can begin. Alcibiades dreamed shortly before he was murdered that he was wearing his mistress’s clothes and that she was making up his face with pigments and white lead like a woman’s. Plutarch recounts the dream as though it should be read as a premonition of the hero’s death: to lose one’s masculinity is tantamount, for a traditional hero, to losing life itself.
The definition of that masculinity has fluctuated. Homer’s heroes fume and weep, indulging their emotions in ways commentators from Plato onwards have found disgracefully unmanly, and they are immensely proud and careful of their magnificent bodies, shamelessly displaying a physical vanity later ages would consider contemptibly effeminate. Charles Baudelaire identified Alcibiades as being among the first of the dandies: the tradition of heroic self-adornment is ancient. Achilles’ shield was the most marvellous piece of armoury the world had yet seen. The warriors of ancient Sparta decorated their clothes and weapons with ornaments: they wore their hair long and plaited it intricately before going into battle wreathed with flowers. Beauty breeds valour. The troops who travelled on the Armada’s ships in 1588 were not required to wear uniform, explained a Spanish military expert in 1610, because their morale was much enhanced by the gorgeousness of their own clothes: ‘It is the finery (#litres_trial_promo), the plumes and bright colours which give spirit and strength to a soldier so that he can with furious resolution overcome any difficulty or accomplish any valorous exploit.’ Napoleon’s Marshal Murat was as noted for his red boots and extravagant epaulettes as he was for his fearlessness. But although the heroic tradition encompasses areas of human experience identified for most of the recent past as feminine, it is nonetheless sexually exclusive. Even Joan of Arc, the most obvious female candidate for inclusion in this book, renounced her sex and its perceived limitations by cross-dressing, tacitly acknowledging that the pantheon of heroes admits men only.
So what makes a hero? And what are heroes for? In narrating the lives of a handful of heroes, in attempting to recreate their contemporaries’ expectations of them and tracing the way posterity responded to and reshaped their stories, I hope to give a kaleidoscopic answer to each question. Simple, single ones would be impossible. The hero’s nature and function have repeatedly shifted along with the mentality of the culture that produced them, and so have the attributes ascribed to the hero, the exploits expected of him, and his place within political structures and society at large.
Each era has a different theory as to how some men come to be, or seem to be, extraordinary. Often ideas about the hero are religious: the hero is the son of a god, or a saint, or a hubristic challenger of divine authority, or a god himself. Or his superhuman talents may be less legitimately supernatural: he may be a witch. Class is important, though not always in predictable ways. Many heroes’ social status is indeterminate and wavering, like that of the English folk hero Robin Hood, who is now the dispossessed lord of Locksley Hall, now the comrade of common criminals. The majority of heroes throughout history have been, or pretended to be, or aspired to become, aristocrats. But heroes, especially dead ones, are usefully malleable: their images have been pressed into service as often by revolutionaries as by defenders of authoritarianism. There is a vigorous counter-tradition celebrating the popular hero, the man of the people who challenges elitist power and privilege, the plucky little fellow who slays the giant with nothing but a pebble in a sling, the common sailor or the carpenter’s son who lays low principalities and powers.
There is an erotic dimension to hero-worship. Beauty, charm, and sex appeal are useful assets for a hero: in their absence, a dashing style or a commanding presence will do. People were dazzled by Alcibiades, besotted with Garibaldi, terrified by Wallenstein. A hero must be able either to seduce or intimidate: either way he needs an outsize personality and a talent for projecting it. Heroism is theatrical. Heroes must look, and act, the part. They must swagger and preen, or, if their public’s taste inclines the other way, they must make a show of their humility, as Cato did, going indecently under-dressed to the Forum. Heroic gestures are frequently histrionic, which is not to say they are frivolous: a symbolic gesture can have substantial consequences. When it was suggested to General Gordon that his brightly illuminated headquarters in Khartoum provided too easy a target for the Mahdi’s guns he called for an immense candelabrum, lit its twenty-four candles with his own hands, and stationed himself beside it at a great arched window saying, ‘Go tell the people (#litres_trial_promo) of Khartoum that Gordon fears nothing.’ He died anyway, but he had made a stirring spectacle of his own defeat. The capacity to stage a splendid tableau is a more important qualification for admission to the gallery of heroes than either survival or success.
Appearances matter, and not only because ‘defeat in battle (#litres_trial_promo)’, as Tacitus wrote, ‘always begins with the eye’. ‘What is he (#litres_trial_promo) [Achilles] more than another?’ asks Ajax in Shakespeare’s bitterly anti-heroic version of the Troy story, Troilus and Cressida. ‘No more than what he thinks he is,’ replies Agamemnon. Heroic status depends on the hero’s self-confidence and often also on the confidence trick he (or his sponsors and advocates) pulls on others in persuading them of his superhuman potency. Some heroes’ reputations are manufactured or enlarged by others: Drake’s power and ferocity were magnified by Spaniards motivated by anger at the humiliations to which he had subjected them. Garibaldi was surprised, on returning to Europe in 1848, to find that Mazzini had made him an international celebrity. Others are self-created: Alcibiades’ most audacious and ingenious publicist was himself. But whether by his own or others’ will, a hero inevitably acquires an artificial public persona. Shakespeare’s Achilles is addressed as ‘thou picture of what (#litres_trial_promo) thou seemest’, a doubled image of inauthenticity. But an image is what a hero inevitably becomes. In 1961, Anthony Mann, with General Franco’s enthusiastic support (the Spanish army was placed at his disposal for the battle scenes), made a stirring film of El Cid. At the end of it the Cid is killed fighting but his grieving wife and followers, knowing that without the inspiration his presence provides their armies will never succeed in beating off the hordes of the enemy, keep his death secret. His corpse is dressed and armed and strapped upright in the saddle of his great white charger. The trusty horse gallops out at the head of the Cid’s army. Believing that their great leader is still with them, his men win a marvellous victory before the horse, with its lifeless but still invincible burden, disappears over the horizon.
The story was made up on purpose for the film – there is no medieval legend, let alone chronicle, in which it appears in that form – but the thinking behind it is sound. A hero’s appearance is sometimes all that is required of him. He can win a battle, or quell a riot, or raise a revolution simply by being seen. He doesn’t have to be active, he doesn’t even have to be alive. Indeed it isn’t necessary that he be actually present: it is enough that he should be so apparently. Achilles sent Patroclus out to fight disguised in his armour, knowing that the mere simulacrum of himself would be terrifying enough to send the Trojans hurtling back towards their walls. Julius Caesar used to wear a cloak of a striking and unusual colour into battle to advertise his presence; and at Thapsus, when he himself was overtaken by an attack of ‘his usual sickness (#litres_trial_promo)’ (probably epilepsy), he sent a surrogate onto the field in that cloak. Nobody noticed: victory came quickly. A hero, once his fame reaches a certain pitch, becomes a totem, an object of magical potency that need take no action in order to achieve results. Garibaldi, serving France when he was old and crippled by arthritis, was carried around the battlefield on a stretcher: his presence was all the same reckoned to have been invaluable.
It follows that a hero is not always, even in his lifetime, and certainly not thereafter, responsible for the uses to which his image is put. Frequently, as the stories I have to tell demonstrate, a hero is – consciously or unconsciously – the chief actor in a spectacle scripted and directed by others. As Elizabeth and Walsingham used Drake, so Victor Emmanuel and Cavour used Garibaldi. And once dead a hero becomes an infinitely adaptable symbol. Cato’s repeated metamorphoses – from conservative oligarch to Christian saint to martyr in the cause of liberty to Whig parliamentarian – have parallels in most heroes’ afterlives. Every retelling of a heroic story is coloured by the politics and predilections of the teller, whether that teller’s intentions are deliberately propagandist or ostensibly innocent. Looking at heroes, we find what we seek.
What that is exactly depends on the time and place from which we are looking. In telling my heroes’ stories I demonstrate how various are the ways in which heroes appeal to us. Heroes may challenge or comfort, they may offer the elation of victory or the infantilizing luxury of being taken care of by a superhuman protector. They may constitute models of courage or integrity, or they may set enticing examples of transgression and licence. But one thing is constant: they all provide ways of thinking about mortality.
‘Madam,’ so Francis Drake purportedly told Queen Elizabeth, ‘the wings (#litres_trial_promo) of opportunity are fledged with the feathers of death.’ Heroes expose themselves to mortal danger in pursuit of immortality. Sophocles, writing while Alcibiades was a boy, has the heroically intransigent Antigone tell her sister, Ismene: ‘You chose life (#litres_trial_promo), but I chose death.’ Ismene is preparing to compromise her principles, bowing to the powers that be in order to secure herself a safe place in the world; but Antigone would rather die than do so, and so her name will long outlive them both. ‘Many men (#litres_trial_promo),’ wrote Sallust, ‘being slaves to appetite and sleep, have passed through life like mere way-farers … The lives and deaths of such men is about alike, since no record is made of either.’ But a few rise above the sordid limitations of physical existence, the repetitive and futile cycle of consumption and excretion and slow decay. Sallust considered Cato, who was his contemporary, to be one of those exceptional beings whose greatness lifts them above the common ruck, who transcend their pitifully ephemeral physical nature, thus holding out the profoundly consoling vision of an existence in which oblivion can be averted and a mortal may escape time’s scythe.
A hero may sacrifice himself so that others might live, or so that he himself may live for ever in others’ memories. But even when his exploits are undertaken for purely selfish and temporal motives of ambition or greed, the very fact of his enduring fame is a token of immortality. Since the prospect of death is something with which we all have to come to terms, the stories of heroes will never lose their fascination. Dead heroes escape the degeneration that awaits the rest of us. ‘They shall not (#litres_trial_promo) grow old as we that are left grow old’, and it seems to those who survive them that they have evaded death. ‘Being dead (#litres_trial_promo) they have not died,’ wrote Simonides of the Spartans who died at Thermopylae. ‘Their excellence raised them gloriously out of the house of Hades.’
Hero-worship still plays a vital part in our political lives. It inspires both terrorists and those who combat them. It shapes the rhetoric of our election campaigns. It helps determine the choices made by democratic voters and it eases dictators’ ascent to power. I have chosen not to play the game of spot-the-hero among the people whose names now fill our screens and newspapers but I hope that, while reading this book, others will. The stories I have to tell are legendary or historical, but each one of them is to be read as a parable about the way we live now.
There is an odd kind of inverted vanity that persuades people to imagine that some of our collective follies are brand new, peculiar to the age of mass media. Wrong. As the stories I have told here demonstrate, there is nothing new about the cult of personality, about the calculated manipulation of news for political ends, about the ways in which celebrity and sexual charisma can be translated into power, about the suggestibility of a populace who, in a time of fear or over-excited enthusiasm, can be tempted to hand over their political rights to a glorious Superman. On 12 September 2001 a group of people were photographed near the ruins of the World Trade Center holding up a banner reading ‘WE NEED HEROES NOW’. This book is, first and foremost, a collection of extraordinary stories; but it is also an attempt to examine that need, to acknowledge its urgency, and to warn against it.
I ACHILLES (#ulink_5a92c6b4-92a5-55fb-9242-8af551c0ddfc)
HOMER’S TROY. Achilles, paragon of warriors, consents to enter the fight. Ready for battle in the armour made for him by the smith-god Hephaestus, he glitters like the sun. His teeth grind, his eyes flash fire. With a voice as plangent as a trumpet’s he calls out to his immortal horses, which no other man can master, and one of them replies. Yes, says the beast (#litres_trial_promo), this time the team will bring their master safely back to the Greek camp, but the day of his death already hovers near and when it comes, even were they to have the speed and power of the west wind, they would not be able to save him. ‘You are doomed to die violently, Achilles.’ Achilles’ reply is impatient: ‘Don’t waste your breath, I know, well I know.’ With a terrifying yell he sends his chariot hurtling into the front line.
Of all the warriors who fight at Troy Achilles is the only one who is bound to die there. He is not courting risk: he is confronting certainty, and he himself must take responsibility for his own end. His mother, the goddess Thetis, has told him of the two destinies between which he must choose. He can stay peaceably in his father’s house, and if he does so his life will be long and fruitful. He can marry and have children. He can use his wealth and amass more. He can exploit his strength and exercise his intellect. He can inherit and rule his father’s kingdom, enjoying the satisfactions of power and, in due time, the respect accorded to an elder. Or he can fight. If he chooses the latter he will be killed before the war’s end, but first he will win such glory that his name will live in song for ever more.
He chooses death, buying immortality at the cost of his life. And so he becomes the paradigmatic hero, one whose traits and actions are echoed, with infinite variations, in the life stories of subsequent heroes both legendary and actual. His beauty, his swiftness and ferocity, his unrivalled talent for killing his fellow men, his uncompromising commitment both to honesty and to honour, and, above all, the pathos of his freely accepted death, all combine to invest him with an ineffable glamour.
His choice is not easy. There is an alternative. There is another Homeric epic and another hero, Odysseus, who chooses life, and who is so determined to hang on to all that Achilles has renounced that he will lie, cheat, and steal for it. Odysseus is an intriguer, a shape-shifter, a warrior like Achilles but one noted primarily not for his actions but for his words. Achilles’ foil, he repeatedly calls into question the values Achilles represents both tacitly, by his very existence as one who has taken the opposite path, and explicitly on the several occasions when the two confront each other. In the stories of the heroes who come after them the characteristics of Odysseus and Achilles combine and alternate, but for Achilles himself there can be no half-measures, no partial sacrifice. His choice is absolute and tragic. The brilliance with which his prowess and his physical splendour invest him is simultaneously shadowed and intensified by his inconsolable grief at the prospect of his own end, by his pity for his father and mother in the anguish his death must bring them, and by his mourning for all that he might have been. Throughout the Iliad Homer imagines him questioning the bargain he has made (and which he can at any moment revoke – three days’ sailing would take him home), asking at each setback ‘Was it for this?’ that he decided to forgo so much. He neither despises life nor belittles death. The former he knows to be worth more than all the wealth in the world. The prospect of the latter is dreadful to him. He describes the underworld habitations of the dead as ‘dank mouldering horrors (#litres_trial_promo)/That fill the deathless gods themselves with loathing’, and he dwells obsessively on the ignominies to which dead flesh is subject.
If Achilles ever lived (something unlikely ever to be proven) he inhabited a culture separated from us by over three millennia, by tremendous changes in belief, in accepted morality, in technology, in human knowledge. Yet his story, as told by Homer, addresses questions as troubling now as they were when Agamemnon’s host laid siege to Troy. ‘Like the generations (#litres_trial_promo) of leaves, the lives of mortal men’, so a Trojan warrior tells a Greek, as they prepare to fight to the death. The Greek has asked to know his antagonist’s identity. The Trojan’s point is that the question is otiose. If each individual is as expendable and replaceable as this year’s leaves, it scarcely matters who anyone might be. Before the fact of mortality any achievement seems futile, any quarrel petty. Death would make nihilists of us all, were it not for the passion with which humans struggle against its reductive, equalizing influence. Achilles will give anything, including life itself, to assert his own uniqueness, to endow his particular life with significance, and to escape oblivion.
A non-Homeric legend tells how Achilles’ divine mother sought to make her baby invulnerable by dipping him in the waters of the Styx, the river over which the souls of the dead were ferried to the Underworld. The attempt was unsuccessful. The heel by which Thetis held Achilles remained dry, and it was in that heel that he eventually received his fatal wound. Thetis could not keep her son alive, but he was to find his own way to life eternal, a way closely analogous to the one she tried. Just as she had sought to save him from dying by immersing him in the waters of death’s river, so he cheated death by embracing it, voluntarily dying in his quest for everlasting life.
The Iliad begins with a quarrel over a girl. By the consent of the full Greek army, two female prisoners have been awarded, one to Agamemnon, king and commander-in-chief, and one to the supreme warrior Achilles, as part of the prize due to each for their exploits in the war. The girl given to Agamemnon is the daughter of a priest of Apollo. The angry god retaliates by sending down a plague. An assembly is called. Reluctantly, Agamemnon agrees to return the girl to her father, but demands compensation. If he cannot keep his own prize he will take someone else’s. Achilles, who is not only the paragon of warriors but also the scrupulous guardian of the warriors’ code of honour, protests that to do so would be disgraceful. Agamemnon is defiant. He is the overlord and will have his way regardless of another’s opinion: ‘Let that man (#litres_trial_promo) I go visit choke with rage.’ Achilles, beside himself, declares that he will sail for home if Agamemnon perpetrates such an outrage against the code of conduct they all observe. Agamemnon rounds on him and declares his intention of taking Achilles’ own prize, the girl Briseis. For a moment Achilles is ready to kill him, but he is restrained by the voice of wisdom, Pallas Athena. Instead, he swears a great oath that he will not fight again in the quarrels of the house of Atreus. Leaving the assembly he withdraws to his tent at the end of the Greek lines, and there he stays. The rage of Achilles, the passion that is at once so disastrous and so magnificent, and which has earned his immortality, is not the savage blood-thirst that drives him on the battlefield, but the principled fury that keeps him off it.
This argument is far more than a squabble over possession of a slave. It is a dispute over the nature of superiority. Agamemnon tells Achilles he will take his girl ‘so you can learn (#litres_trial_promo) just how much greater I am than you’. But is a man’s worth dependent on his rank, or on his talent? Is it a function of his social and political relationships, or can an individual possess a value independent of his place in the community? Is Agamemnon, as old Nestor says, the more to be honoured ‘because he rules (#litres_trial_promo) more men’? Or might Achilles, whose claim to supremacy lies entirely in himself, in his own particular, unsurpassed brilliance, be the greater man? These questions are fundamental. Their answers must affect the conduct both of individuals and of states, determining the relationship between political institutions and the people of whom they are constituted.
Achilles is an exceptional being. The son of a goddess and repeatedly described by Homer as being himself ‘godlike’, he is innately superior to his fellows. His beauty, his size, and his speed are all prodigious. He is a divinely created aristocrat, a living demonstration that men are not born equal. Pindar, the fifth-century poet who was classical Athens’ most eloquent upholder of the class system, celebrated his prowess, his ‘hands like Ares’ (#litres_trial_promo), his feet like lightning’. In the Iliad he is physically magnificent. When he loses his armour he cannot borrow more from any of his fellow Greeks, for none of them, with the possible exception of Ajax, is as tall as he. The perfection of his body is sublime, the loveliness of his features flawless. His beauty, potently erotic, marks him, like Helen, as a superhuman being. He is ‘brilliant’, literally: in armour he shines like the sun. He is faster than any of his peers and therefore more deadly in battle. When he chases Hector three times round the walls of Troy, hunting him as a hawk hunts a terrified dove, it is his speed as much as his courage and his strength that makes him invincible. Destined never to grow old, he has a young man’s splendour and a young man’s energy. His emotions are extreme, his responses passionate, his actions devastating. For all these reasons he is unique among the Homeric warriors. Nestor may be wiser, Odysseus more astute and articulate, Ajax stronger in a hand-to-hand fight; but Achilles is, by common consent, the ‘best of the Achaeans’. Only Agamemnon disputes his right to that title, and he does so on political grounds. He doesn’t claim that he is a greater individual than Achilles. He bases his challenge on the assumption that no individual can count for as much as a community, and that therefore the ruler of that community is, by definition and regardless of his or anybody’s else’s personal qualities, the greatest person in it. Extraordinary as Achilles’ gifts may be, they do not procure him especial status. Agamemnon tells him, ‘You are nothing (#litres_trial_promo) to me!’
That would be enough to enrage Achilles, but there is more. Beyond the competition between Agamemnon the king and Achilles the hero lies the question of the legitimacy or otherwise of the war in which they are engaged. The disputed women are prizes, not booty. (They are also of course human beings whose rights, judged by modern standards, are being grossly violated – but let that be.) They have been awarded to the two men as marks of honour. They are not mere chattels to be passed from tent to tent, any more than a medal awarded for valour is only a coin on a ribbon, or an athlete’s gold cup just an expensive drinking vessel. A prize awarded to one person cannot be appropriated by another without its meaning being erased and the symbolic code within which it existed being called into question. In demanding Briseis, Agamemnon is acting, not like a warrior eager for glory, but like a bandit greedy for loot. In doing so, he shames not only himself, but the whole Greek army. In the gruesome setting of the battlefield, a situation where men are all too easily reduced to the level of beasts of prey, or to carrion, it is essential to hold fast to the elusive concept of honour as a talisman against horror and despair. Achilles came to Troy to avenge the insult done to Agamemnon and his brother Menelaus when the Trojan prince Paris abducted Helen, Menelaus’ wife – to protect their honour. But if Agamemnon seizes Briseis, then he is a rapist and an abductor, just as Paris is. The Greeks’ invasion of Priam’s kingdom is revealed to be no more than a predatory attack on a wealthy victim, and Achilles no longer a warrior in a noble cause but the underling of an unprincipled looter. If he dies he will do so ignominiously, in the prosecution of a stupid, brutal war, and the eternal fame for which he hoped will be denied him. As he later tells those who come to implore him to return to the field, there is no point in doing so once Agamemnon has robbed fighting of its meaning. The King’s rapacity has levelled all value, trivialized all achievement. In a world in which the distinction between the noble warrior and the thug has been erased, ‘The same honour (#litres_trial_promo) waits for the coward and the brave. They both go down to death.’
When it becomes clear that the Greeks will continue to obey Agamemnon, Achilles turns his back on them, becoming, like so many subsequent heroes, a voluntary outcast from a society he despises. Self-exiled, he is isolated. His only companion is Patroclus, the beloved friend who has followed him to Troy. Always exceptional, he is now unassimilable. He respects no human jurisdiction. He defers to no one; he fears no one. In Homer’s telling of his story he is the champion of individualism against the compromising demands of the community, the defender of the loner’s purity against the complex imperfections of the group. In that role he is superb, but potentially lethal to any ordered state. When an embassy comes to him from Agamemnon, imploring him to rejoin the fighting, promising him splendid gifts and the restoration of his honour, he rejects the offer: ‘I say my honour (#litres_trial_promo) lies in the great decree of Zeus.’ He asks nothing of his fellows now, nor does he acknowledge any claim they might make on him. In a ferociously apocalyptic vision he prays that Greeks and Trojans alike may cut each other to pieces, leaving no one alive but Patroclus and himself, so that the two of them might, alone, bring Troy’s towers toppling down. In his tent, he plays the lyre and sings to himself of ‘the famous deeds (#litres_trial_promo) of fighting heroes’. He acknowledges allegiance now not to any living society, but only to his dead peers, each one exceptional, brilliant mavericks like himself.
While Achilles broods his fellow Greeks fight on. Slowly, inexorably, over several days, the Trojans, led by Hector, force them back across the coastal plain. Their leaders – Agamemnon, Diomedes, Odysseus – are all wounded. They throw up a rampart of rocks and clay to protect their ships. The Trojans breach it. The two armies are fighting hand to hand on and around the ships, the beach is black with blood and the air full of the scorching heat and ferocious crackle of the firebrands when Patroclus comes weeping to Achilles, begging his friend to relent, to save the Greeks from defeat and from the horror of being marooned in a hostile land, their ships burned, to be massacred or enslaved. Achilles is moved, but he has sworn he will not join the battle unless the Trojans menace his own ships, still secure at the furthest end of the Greek lines. He will hold to his vow. He will not fight in person. But he agrees to a compromise. He will lend Patroclus his armour and send him out to battle in his stead.
A hero of the stature of Achilles has only to show himself in order to alter the course of events. Encased in the magnificent star-emblazoned, silver-studded bronze armour, which is immediately identifiable to Greek and Trojan alike as that of the terrible Achilles, with a great crest of horsehair tossing on his helmet’s crest, Patroclus leads out the Myrmidons, ‘hungry as wolves (#litres_trial_promo) that rend and bolt raw flesh,/Hearts filled with battle-frenzy that never dies’. Seeing him, the Trojans quake, their columns waver. Achilles appears to have returned, bearing with him ‘sudden, plunging death (#litres_trial_promo)’. Shrieking, wild as storm clouds driven by a cyclone, the Trojan army stampedes back and away from the Greek ships, back towards the safety of their own walls.
In the fighting that follows Hector kills Patroclus and strips from his corpse the armour of Achilles. When the news is brought to Achilles he lays aside his quarrel with Agamemnon. In the frenzy of his mourning all scruples about propriety, about honour, about the sanctity of vows, are forgotten. He resolves to fight the next day, but first he displays himself to his enemy. As twilight descends he climbs alone and unarmed onto the rampart before the Greek ships. Pallas Athena, whose favourite he is, crowns him with a diadem of fire that blazes from his head to the sky, and slings around him a shield of flaring storm. Furious with grief for his slaughtered friend, he lets loose three times a war cry so piercing and terrible that the Trojans whirl round in panic. ‘Twelve of their finest (#litres_trial_promo) fighters died then and there, crushed by chariots, impaled on their own spears’, killed by the mere sight and sound of the awful Achilles.
‘The man who is incapable (#litres_trial_promo) of working in common, or who in his self-sufficiency has no need of others, is no part of the community,’ wrote Aristotle. Such a man is ‘like an animal or a god’. Achilles, who has divorced himself from the fellowship of the army, who looks to Zeus alone for the validation of his claim to honour, has made himself independent of his fellow men. He re-enters the battle not to save his compatriots, but in pursuit of a private revenge. In the cataclysmic battle that follows he is both subhuman and superhuman, both bestial and divine. He is likened to a forest fire, to a massive ox threshing barley, to a lion (repeatedly), to the Dog Star that rains down pestilence, to the frenzied god of war. He kills and kills and kills until the earth is drenched with blood and the river that flows before the walls of Troy is choked with corpses. His rampage is outrageous, so transgressive in the extremity of its violence that earth and heaven alike are angered by it. The river rises up against the desecration of its waters: a tremendous tidal wave threatens to engulf Achilles and sweep him away. The god Hephaestus, to protect him, hurls a great fireball down from heaven. The blaze races across the plain, blasting trees and corpses and scorching the river banks until the river is all but dried. The conflict is elemental, apocalyptic, and at its centre Homer places Achilles, a figure from a nightmare (#litres_trial_promo), trumpet-tongued, gigantic, shrieking out his rage, his sharp-hoofed stallions trampling on corpses, sending up sprays of blood, blood on his wheels, blood on his chariot’s handrail, ‘bloody filth splattering both his invincible arms’.
In this war the Trojans are at home. At night they retire from the battlefield to well-built halls, to wives and children. They belong to a polity. Even the bravest warrior among them must defer to the civil authority, King Priam. They have temples and priests. The landscape in which they do battle with the Greeks is one they have tamed and made productive. Their horses have grazed the earth that is now slippery with blood. The spring past which Achilles chases Hector has been their washing place. Their babies wave to them as they advance through the Scaean Gates. Their parents and elders line the city walls, watching the fighting from a position of security. Hector is husband, father, son, and brother, as well as being the protector of his home and his fellow citizens. In the frenzy of battle he may become, like Achilles, as fierce as a wild beast, but he is essentially domestic. On the day of his death his wife Andromache sits weaving as she waits for him, within earshot of the fight, and her women have the water heated ready for his bath.
The Greeks, by contrast, are far from home, from family, from women, from the sources of their culture. They may have come from a civilization, but they are no longer part of it. For nine years and more they have been encamped on the windy plain with the grey sea behind them. They are cut off from parents and children, isolated from the continuum of generation. All male, all adult, only a few of them old, they form, as any army does, a pathologically unbalanced community. They are raiders, cattle rustlers: they neither grow nor produce anything. Homeless and predatory, they circle the walls of Troy like hungry wolves.
This existence, the life of a vagrant marauder, of a dangerous and perpetually endangered outsider, is what Achilles chose when he picked the path that would lead to his early and glorious death. The Trojans fight because it is their civic duty to do so, to ‘form a wall (#litres_trial_promo) before our loving parents, wives and sons/To defend Troy’. Achilles fights because he has a lust for ‘the bloody grind (#litres_trial_promo) of war’. Freud would recognize Hector as a devotee of Eros, the creative deity ‘whose purpose is (#litres_trial_promo) to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, in one great unity, the unity of mankind’. In battle he is courageous and terrible, but his fighting is a service performed for the sake of the community. It is a function of the relationships by which he defines himself. Achilles the loner, by contrast, is an agent of Thanatos, the force that divides man from man and which drives its acolytes to seek their own and others’ deaths. He is one of the wild ones, one who has rejected the restrictions as well as the rewards of civilian life, whose readiness to risk his own death has accorded him unlimited licence. At large on the plains outside the Trojan walls he is a terrifying apparition, the personification of cruelty and brute force. But he is also, always, even when crazy-eyed and cloaked in others’ blood, dazzlingly beautiful.
Everything about him is exciting, even when (especially when) he is at his most psychotic. He is the first of the lordly delinquents, the charismatic outcasts by whom law-abiding citizens have always been fascinated as well as scared witless. Off the battlefield, arguing in the assembly or in his tent, he exhilarates by his uncompromising integrity and his emotional extremism. In the thick of the fighting he generates a related but darker response. His titanic energy, his lethal skill, his pitilessness, ring out like another, harsher, kind of truth-telling. ‘Come friend (#litres_trial_promo),’ he says to a Trojan prince who clasps his knees, unarmed, abjectly begging for mercy. ‘You too must die. Why moan about it so?/ … Look, you see how handsome and powerful I am? … Even for me I tell you/Death and the strong force of fate are waiting./There will come a dawn or sunset or high noon/When a man will take my life in battle too.’ This is the truth. The coolness with which Achilles faces it is connected with the deplorable but intoxicating fury with which he slaughters his fellow men.
Such courage and such rage are not human. ‘The salt grey sunless ocean (#litres_trial_promo) gave you birth/And the towering blank rocks’, Patroclus tells him, reproaching him for his indifference to his fellows’ fate. Before their final duel Hector proposes a pact binding the winner to return the loser’s corpse to his own people for decent burial. Hector is dressed in the armour he stripped from Patroclus’ dead body, the armour of Achilles. He looks just like Achilles; he is nearly his equal in arms; he is what Achilles might be if he chose to respect the conventions governing human intercourse and rendering its useful continuance possible. Achilles answers by disowning any connection between his wild self and his civilized double. ‘Don’t talk to me (#litres_trial_promo) of pacts. There are no binding oaths between men and lions.’ He acknowledges no obligation now to anyone or to any power other than his own rage. He is ready to shuffle off his humanity altogether, to become completely bestial. He would like to eat Hector’s flesh. He is unconstrained by any inhibition, any law. He has already consented to his own death, a decision of inhuman bravado which has emancipated him even from what Tacitus called ‘that hindrance (#litres_trial_promo) to all mighty enterprises, the desire for survival’. Death may be immortality’s opposite, but it confers a similar invulnerability. Death-dealing and bent on dying, Achilles has achieved absolute freedom.
Panic-stricken, the Trojans flee before him, racing for the security of the city. At last only Hector is left outside the walls. The two champions confront each other. Achilles is deadly as the Dog Star, brilliant as the blazing sun. Hector, the noble, all but invincible Hector, loses his nerve and runs. Three times the great runner Achilles chases him round the walls of Troy. Hector is humiliated, pathetic, as feeble as a cringing dove. At last he turns to fight and be killed. With his last breath he foretells Achilles’ own death, but Achilles, as impervious to fear as he is to compassion, taunts him: ‘Die, die! (#litres_trial_promo) For my own death, I’ll meet it freely.’ As soon as the Trojan is still the rest of the Greeks run up. In a scene of horrible frenzy each one of them stabs Hector’s corpse, until Achilles calls them off. He, the killer, will also be the prime desecrator of Hector’s body. He pierces the tendons in the Trojan prince’s ankles (the tendons later to be known by his own name) and lashes them to the back of his chariot. As he whips his horses to a gallop and races over the plain back to the Greek camp Hector’s head, so handsome once, is dragged bouncing in the dust behind him. From the walls of Troy the watchers, Hector’s parents among them, scream out their horror and their despair.
This agent of mass slaughter and perpetrator of atrocity, this ‘monstrous man’ as Priam justly calls him, Achilles, is still ‘the best of the Achaeans’, the supreme exemplar of heroic virtue. Back in camp, he presides at a splendid funeral games for Patroclus. As instigator of the games and giver of the prizes, he does not compete: were he to do so, he would, of course, be unbeatable. He consoles the losers, arbitrates wherever there is a dispute and sends all home happy with the generosity of his awards. His rage has left him. When Agamemnon wishes to compete as spear-thrower, risking an embarrassing situation if he loses, Achilles intervenes to prevent him by tactful flattery, acknowledging, as he once so passionately refused to do, his commander’s superiority: ‘You are the best (#litres_trial_promo) by far.’ Even his deference is princely. He is courteous, judicious, munificent, a lord among men.
Disputes about the composition of the Iliad are legion, probably insoluble, and certainly outside the scope of this book. There is a case for considering the funeral games episode to be a later interpolation; but whether or not it always formed part of the Iliad, it certainly did so by the time Homer had come to be ‘the educator of the Greeks’. To the Athenians of the classical era Homer was not only ‘the Poet’, the supreme practitioner of the noblest art; he was also a sage whose works were imagined to contain all wisdom. The Iliad and the Odyssey were recited in their entirety to huge crowds at the great Panathenaic festivals. The citizens of Periclean Athens heard the story of Achilles the frenzied killer who, once the fighting was over, was also a gracious, fine-mannered aristocrat, and saw no inconsistency worth their puzzling over. Patroclus, the man over whom Achilles mourns so frantically, was a fighter almost as savage as his friend, and yet Homer repeatedly describes him as being ‘gentle’. In a warrior culture nobility, even gentleness, coexist comfortably with a capacity for mass-murder.
For twelve days Hector’s body lies unburied. For twelve days Achilles mourns for Patroclus, wandering distraught along the beach, or time and again lashing his enemy’s corpse to his chariot and dragging it three times around his beloved’s tomb. At last the gods intervene. Thetis comes to tell her son that it is Zeus’ will he return the body. That night, helped by Hermes, who has led him unseen past the Greek sentries, old King Priam appears in Achilles’ tent and begs to be allowed to ransom Hector’s body. He offers in exchange magnificent gifts: twelve of the brocaded robes for which the weavers of Troy are celebrated all over the known world, tripods and cauldrons, ten bars of gold, a priceless Thracian cup. Achilles, who has repeatedly spurned Agamemnon’s attempts to conciliate him with rich gifts, accepts.
On the wonderful shield Hephaestus forged for Achilles two cities are depicted, two visions juxtaposed. One is that of a world of war, where even allies quarrel over tactics, where animals and men alike are promiscuously and wastefully killed, where the only way of resolving differences is by the slaughter of opponents. The other is a microcosm of civilized life, typified first by weddings and dancing, emblems of union and cooperative creation, and, most pointedly, by the detailed representation of a dispute resolved, not by violence, but by argument culminating in financial payment. A man has been murdered. The killer and the victim’s kinsman have come into the marketplace so that the case may be publicly debated. The killer offers to pay the blood price. The other refuses to accept it. Both ask for a judge to ‘cut the knot (#litres_trial_promo)’ of their antagonism, to save them from the horrors of vendetta. The elders of the city, in turn, propose solutions. Money, not blood, will end this quarrel.
Mercenary exchange has frequently been held to be antithetical to the heroic ideal. One who allows himself to be bought off forfeits his claim to glory. Plato censured Homer for showing the great Achilles trading a corpse for gifts. A hero should not be represented as suffering from the ‘disease of mean-spirited (#litres_trial_promo) avarice’. Sallust, the Roman historian, praised the great men of Rome’s early days for their disdain for gold, their preference for fame: ‘To be seen of all (#litres_trial_promo) while doing a splendid deed, this they considered riches.’ Virgil, whose hero was the Trojan prince Aeneas, cast Achilles as the archenemy, not only of Troy but of civilization in general, and took every opportunity of discrediting him: in the Aeneid the events of the Iliad are conflated so as to suggest that Achilles was driven by financial greed, that he killed Hector with the ignoble intention of selling him. The distaste for deal-making has proved persistent. At the beginning of the twentieth century members of the European nobility still thought twice before marrying their children to nouveaux riches who had made their fortunes in trade.
The heroes of the Iliad have no such scruples. In the terrifyingly belligerent world Homer describes, the making of a financial deal seems like a blessed release from the otherwise inevitable cycle of killing and counter-killing. As Ajax argues: ‘Any man will accept (#litres_trial_promo) the blood-price paid/For a brother murdered, a child done to death.’ Once the price has been paid the murderer can be reincorporated into society and the injured man must ‘curb his pride, his smouldering, vengeful spirit’. Such transactions may run counter to the individual’s craving for vengeance but they are necessary to the preservation of the community. Far from being dishonourable, they are manifestations of praiseworthy forbearance. Achilles’ refusal to accept Agamemnon’s gifts along with his apology is a sign that he is still death-bent, an enemy of his own kind, a ‘hard, ruthless man’.
He accepts the exchange Priam proposes because the old King asks it not only for his own sake but also for that of Achilles’ father, who will some day grieve as he does now for the loss of a glorious son. Touched at last, Achilles weeps with him. The rage that had made him emotionally inviolable has passed. He feels pity, for Priam, for his own father, for Patroclus, for himself. He is no longer isolated, no longer either superhuman or subhuman, but part of a family, part of a race. He urges Priam to eat, as Odysseus and Thetis have each on earlier occasions urged him to do: the need for food being something that humbles people, reminds them of their vulnerability and of the imperative need for cooperation. He seems almost ready to countenance the compromises and sacrifices a social existence requires, to accept the limitations physicality sets to a human’s behaviour. Ever since Briseis was taken from him, he has been set on a suicidal course. ‘Only death submits to no man,’ says Agamemnon, infuriated by his obduracy; but Achilles has been as implacable as death, and implacably set on dying. Perhaps, if it were open to him to choose again, he might this time choose survival. But he is given no second chance. Priam returns to Troy with Hector’s body. For twelve days both sides observe a truce while the Trojans celebrate the funeral rites. Shortly after the fighting resumes, Achilles falls.
The Romans had a legend that in earliest times a chasm opened up in the centre of the Forum, threatening to yawn wide enough to swallow the city. The terrified citizens consulted the oracles, which told them that the horrid mouth would close only if Rome’s greatest treasure were cast into it. A splendid young man named Curtius (#litres_trial_promo), handsome, brave and nobly born, at once sprang upon his horse and, fully armed as though for battle, put his spurs to its sides and leapt into the abyss. The earth closed over him. The city was saved. Similarly, the death of Achilles, ‘the best of the Achaeans’, opens the way for a Hellenic victory. Once their supreme warrior, their greatest treasure, has been sacrificed, the Greeks take Troy.
When the war is over, when the fabled towers of Troy are shattered, its riches plundered and its people slaughtered or enslaved, when the Greeks at last have sailed away, Poseidon and Apollo throw down the massive rampart that protected the Greek ships. The proper sacrifices were not made before building began. The prodigious wall is an impious defacement of the landscape. The gods call upon the waters of the earth to wash it away. Rivers in flood, torrential rain, the sea’s breakers, all batter against it until there is nothing left of that desperate labour. Poseidon ‘made all smooth (#litres_trial_promo) along the rip of the Hellespont/And piled the endless beaches deep in sand again’. This war, the most celebrated in human history, is to leave no trace upon the face of the earth.
‘You’d think me (#litres_trial_promo) hardly sane,’ says Apollo to a fellow god, ‘if I fought with you for the sake of wretched mortals./Like leaves, no sooner flourishing, full of the sun’s fire,/Feeding on earth’s gifts, then they waste away and die.’ Human affairs, viewed sub specie aeternitatis, are of gnat-like insignificance. Human aspirations are absurd, and human lifespan as short as summer’s lease.
For Homer’s heroes there is no sublime afterlife to compensate for this one’s brevity. The souls of the dead survive, but once parted from their bodies their existence is shadowy and mournful. When a warrior dies his soul goes ‘winging down (#litres_trial_promo) to the House of Death,/ Wailing its fate, leaving his manhood far behind,/His young and supple strength’. Physical beauty, the marvellous vigour and grace of the human body, these are life’s splendours. The pleasures of the intellect, of stratagem and story telling and debate, are prized as well, but they too are a part of corporeal life, dependent for their very existence on ear and tongue and brain. ‘In Death’s strong house (#litres_trial_promo),’ says Achilles, ‘there is something left/A ghost, a phantom – true, but not real breath of life.’
Achilles and his fellows treat bodies, alive or dead, with reverence and tenderness – or with a violence that deliberately outrages the body’s acknowledged sanctity. More than half of the fighting described in the Iliad consists of battles over corpses, as a warrior’s enemies try to strip his fallen body of armour (which, poignantly, is far more durable than its wearers) while his comrades struggle to defend him from such posthumous indignity, giving their lives sometimes to save one already dead. It is the flesh that is precious: without it, the spirit is of little consequence. Funerals are awesome, long-drawn-out, and prodigally expensive. Funeral games honour the dead by celebrating the survivors’ bodily strength and swiftness and skill, insisting, even in commemoration of one who has lost it, that the breath of life is of ineffable value. And once gone it is irretrievable. Achilles refuses all Agamemnon’s proffered presents, and he would refuse them even if they were as numberless as the sand; for all the world’s wealth is worth less than his little time in the sun. ‘A man’s life’s breath (#litres_trial_promo) cannot come back again once it slips through a man’s clenched teeth.’
But just as the discarnate spirit is a sad and paltry thing, so the inanimate flesh is gross and open to the most squalid abuse. The dignity of embodied man is exquisitely precarious. ‘Oh my captains (#litres_trial_promo),’ cries Patroclus, grieving over the beleaguered Greeks. ‘How doomed you are … to glut with your shining fat/The wild dogs of battle here in Troy.’ The Homeric warriors, who have lived for over nine years by a battlefield, the horrors of war perpetually before their eyes, are haunted by the knowledge that the strong arms, the tireless shoulders, the springy knees in which they take such pride, are also so much grease to be melted and swallowed up by the impartial earth, so many joints of meat. In one of this harsh poem’s most desolating passages King Priam foresees his own death. ‘The dogs before my doors (#litres_trial_promo)/Will eat me raw … The very dogs/I bred in my own halls to share my table … mad, rabid at heart they’ll lap their master’s blood.’ Death cancels all relationship, annuls all status. ‘The dogs go at the grey head and the grey beard/And mutilate the genitals.’ Even a king like Priam, his life’s breath gone, is reduced to unlovely matter, defenceless, disgusting. When Zeus sees Achilles’ immortal horses weeping for Patroclus he apologizes to them for having sent them to live with mortals, whose inevitable destiny is so pitiful, so degrading. ‘There is nothing (#litres_trial_promo) alive more agonized than man.’
There is one way to salvage something from the brutal fact of death. To the Homeric warriors it seemed that the fearless confrontation of violence with more violence might be a way to transform themselves from destructible things into indestructible memories. A man without courage is mere evanescent matter. ‘You can all turn (#litres_trial_promo) to earth and water – rot away,’ Menelaus tells the Greeks when none among them is brave enough to take up Hector’s challenge to single combat. But a man ready to go out and meet death cheats it. It is on the battlefield, as Homer tells us over and over again, ‘that men win glory’, and for the ancients the winning of glory had a precise and urgent purpose. ‘Ah my friend (#litres_trial_promo),’ says Sarpedon to his comrade, ‘if you and I could escape this fray and live forever, never a trace of age, immortal,/I would never fight on the front lines again/Or command you to the field where men win fame./But now as it is, the fates of death await us/ … and not a man alive/Can flee them or escape – so in we go for the attack!/Give our enemy glory or win it for ourselves.’ Only glory could palliate the grim inexorability of death. The man who attained it distinguished himself in life from the mass of his fellows, and when he died he escaped oblivion.
Achilles’ surpassing beauty is precious not because of any erotic advantage it may give him but because, along with his strength and prowess, it renders him outstanding. His celebrity is profoundly important to him, as it would be to any of his peers. It is not frivolous vanity that makes him prize it so. A man who is praised and honoured while he is alive may be remembered even after his body is reduced to ashes and his spirit has gone down into the dark. To be forgotten is to die utterly. To Agamemnon, facing defeat as the Trojans close on the Greek ships, the most terrible aspect of the fate awaiting him and his army is that, once they have been massacred so far from home, their memory will be ‘blotted out’. The only moment in the Iliad when Achilles shows fear is when the River Xanthus comes close to overpowering him, to sweeping him away ignominiously ‘like some boy (#litres_trial_promo), some pig-boy’ and threatens to bury him in slime and silt so deep that his bones will never be found, and no fine burial mound will ensure his lasting fame.
‘Remember (#litres_trial_promo),’ says the mysterious wise woman Diotima to Socrates in Plato’s Symposium, ‘that the love of fame and the desire to win a glory that shall never die have the strangest effects on people. For this even more than for their children they are ready to run risks, spend their substance, endure every kind of hardship and sacrifice their lives.’ Achilles, she goes on, would surely not have given his life had he not believed that his ‘courage would live for ever in men’s memory’. Pindar, writing a generation before Plato, rejoiced that in the hero’s lifetime ‘the voice of poets (#litres_trial_promo) made known … the new excellence of Achilles’, that in his death ‘song did not abandon him’, that the Muses themselves chanted dirges around his pyre, and that the gods ordained that he, or rather his memory, should be tended and sustained by them for ever more.
St Augustine understood the ancients’ craving for fame, and what seemed to him their over-valuation of the ‘windy praise (#litres_trial_promo) of men’. Looking back from the standpoint of one to whom Christ’s death had offered the hope of heaven, he wrote forgivingly of the folly with which they tried to extend and to give significance to their pathetically finite lives. ‘Since there was no eternal life for them what else were they to love apart from glory, whereby they chose to find even after death a sort of life on the lips of those who sang their praise?’
That windy afterlife could be attained by killing. Hector, challenging Ajax to single combat, promises to return his victim’s body, should he kill him, so that the Greeks can build a burial mound: ‘And some day (#litres_trial_promo) one will say, one of the men to come,/Steering his oar-swept ship across the wine-dark sea,/“There’s the mound of a man who died in the old days,/One of the brave whom glorious Hector killed”. So they will say, some day, and my fame will never die.’ Better still, it could be achieved by being killed in battle. In the Odyssey Achilles’ shade and that of Agamemnon meet in the Underworld. Agamemnon who, alive, insisted so vehemently on his supremacy, now defers to the other, paying tribute to Achilles’ glorious end. Rank confers honour, but only a soldier’s death brings glory. Murdered on his return to Mycenae by his wife Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, as the victim of a squalid and abhorrent crime, is degraded in perpetuity. He wishes, and Achilles agrees that he is right to do so, that he had been killed at Troy. Enviously, he describes Achilles’ funeral, the eighteen days of unbroken mourning and sombre ceremony, the tears, the dirges, the burnt offerings, the games, the long cortège of men in battle armour, the resounding roar that went up when the pyre was lit, the great tomb built over the hero’s bones. ‘Even in death (#litres_trial_promo) your name will never die … /Great glory is yours, Achilles,/For all time, in the eyes of all mankind.’
The gods held to their side of the bargain Achilles made. His fame has yet to die. For the Greeks of the classical era, for the Romans after them, and – after a lapse of nearly a thousand years during which the Greek language was all but forgotten in the West – for every educated European gentleman (and a few ladies) from the Renaissance until the beginning of the twentieth century, the two Homeric epics were the acknowledged foundations of Western culture, and ‘the best of the Achaeans’ the prototypical hero. Even now, as this book goes to press, a new film version of the Troy story is being advertised, one in which Brad Pitt, described as Hollywood’s handsomest actor, plays Achilles. It is a role many illustrious men have coveted.
In 334 BC Alexander, the 22-year-old King of Macedonia, already remarkable for his daring and his vast ambition, chose to make his first landfall in Asia on the beach traditionally held to be the one where, some nine centuries earlier, the Greeks’ black ships were drawn up throughout the ten harrowing years that they laid siege to Troy. Alexander slept every night with a copy of the Iliad, which he called his ‘journey-book (#litres_trial_promo) of excellence in war’, beneath his pillow along with a dagger. He claimed that his mother was descended from Achilles. He encouraged his courtiers to address him by Achilles’ name. As his fleet neared the shore he dressed himself in full armour and took the helm of the royal trireme. Before embarking on his world-subduing campaign, Alexander had come to pay tribute to his model.
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 (#litres_trial_promo),’ 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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! (#litres_trial_promo)’ 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 (#ulink_08480a80-7462-5075-8db2-0542f097c8af)
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 (#litres_trial_promo),’ 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 (#litres_trial_promo) a lust for putting people to death’. And yet, according to Plutarch, ‘In the midst (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) there was nothing he could not accomplish.’
Plato, who knew Alcibiades, elaborates in the Republic what he calls a ‘noble lie (#litres_trial_promo)’, 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo), my boy! Go on like this and you will soon be big enough to ruin the lot of them.’
As befitted Pericles’ ward, he soon began to make his mark in the Assembly, displaying, according to the great Demosthenes himself, an ‘extraordinary power’ of oratory. Pericles had died in 429 BC. By 421 Alcibiades, though not yet thirty, was one of the two most influential men in the city. The other, Nicias, was in nearly every way his opposite. Older than his rival by twenty years, Nicias was cautious, timid, and notoriously superstitious. Alcibiades’ indiscretions were brazen; Nicias used to shut himself up in his house at night rather than waste time or risk being duped by a spy. Alcibiades liked to dazzle the public; Nicias was careful to ascribe his success to the favour of the gods in order to avoid provoking envy. Most importantly, Alcibiades saw the by now protracted war against the Spartans as a splendid opportunity for the aggrandisement of himself and of his city; Nicias longed only to end it.
In 421 BC he succeeded temporarily in doing so. He negotiated a treaty whereby the Peloponnesians and the Athenians agreed to exchange prisoners and to restore all of each other’s captured territory. But, as Plutarch records, ‘No sooner (#litres_trial_promo) had [Nicias] set his country’s affairs on the path of safety than the force of Alcibiades’ ambition bore down upon him like a torrent, and all was swept back into the tumult of war.’ There were disputes about the procedure for restoring the conquered cities and fortresses, disputes that Alcibiades aggravated and exploited. A Spartan delegation arrived in Athens. Alcibiades tricked them and undermined their standing, ensuring that the Assembly would refuse to deal with them and sending them home humiliated and enraged. Nicias followed after them but was unable to repair the damage: the Spartans rejected his overtures, the Athenians had lost their enthusiasm for the peace. Alcibiades was elected general (for one year, as was the custom). He forged an alliance with Mantinea, Elis, and Argos, and took Athens back to war.
There were those who accused him of making war for personal gain. Certainly there were prizes to be won which he would have welcomed. He had a reputation for financial rapacity. His father-in-law (or brother-in-law, accounts differ) was so afraid of him that he entrusted his enormous fortune to the state, lest Alcibiades might be tempted to kill him for it. He had already, after demanding a dowry of unprecedented size, extorted a second equally enormous sum from his wife’s family on the birth of their first child. His wealth was immense, but so was his expenditure. ‘His enthusiasm (#litres_trial_promo) for horse breeding and other extravagances went beyond what his fortune could supply,’ wrote Thucydides. Besides, in the Athenian democracy (as in several of the modern democracies for which Athens is a model), only the very rich could aspire to the highest power. Alcibiades needed money to pay for choruses, for largesse, for personal display designed, not solely to gratify his personal vanity, but to advertise his status as a great man.
But the war offered him far more than money. It provided him with a task hard and exhilarating enough to channel even his fantastic vitality, and it afforded an opportunity for him to satisfy the driving ambition Socrates had seen in him. Nicias, his rival, understood him well, and paid back-handed tribute to his eagerness for glory when he told the Athenian Assembly to ‘Beware of [Alcibiades] (#litres_trial_promo) and do not give him the chance of endangering the state in order to live a brilliant life of his own.’
As advocate for the war, Alcibiades was spokesman for the young and restless, and also for the lower classes. He probably belonged to one of the clubs of wealthy young Athenians, clubs that were generally (and correctly) suspected to be breeding-places of oligarchic conspiracy, but there is no evidence he had any such sympathies. Haughty and spectacularly over-privileged as he was, his political affiliations were democratic. In his personal life he defied class divisions. Homer’s lordly Achilles detests the insolent commoner Thersites, and in an extra-Homeric version of the tale of Troy he kills him, thus upholding the dignity of the warrior caste and silencing the mockery of the people. Alcibiades would not have done so. He earned the disapproval of his peers by consorting with actors and courtesans and other riffraff, and he was to remain friends for most of his life with Antiochus, the common seaman who caught his quail. Politically, he followed the example of his guardian Pericles in establishing his power base among the poorer people, who tended to favour war (which was expensive for the upper classes, who were obliged to pay for men and ships, but which offered employment, decent pay, and a chance of booty to the masses). According to Diodorus Siculus, it was the youthful Alcibiades who urged Pericles (#litres_trial_promo) to embroil Athens in the Peloponnesian War as a way of enhancing his own standing and diverting popular attention from his misdemeanours. Certainly Alcibiades would have learnt from observing his guardian’s career that, as Diodorus puts it, ‘in time of war (#litres_trial_promo) the populace has respect for noble men because of their urgent need of them … whereas in time of peace they keep bringing false accusations against the very same men, because they have nothing to do and are envious’.
The Athenian alliance was defeated in 418 BC at the battle of Mantinea, but its failure cannot be blamed on Alcibiades, whose term as general had elapsed. During the following years he loomed ever larger in the small world of Athens, menacing those who mistrusted him, dazzling his many admirers. Everything about him was excessive – his wildness, his glamour, his ambition, his self-regard, the love he inspired. In a society whose watchword was ‘Moderation in all things’ he was a fascinatingly transgressive figure, an embodiment of riskiness, of exuberance, of latent power. ‘The fact was (#litres_trial_promo)’, writes Plutarch, ‘that his voluntary donations, the public shows he supported, his unrivalled munificence to the state, the fame of his ancestry, the power of his oratory and his physical strength and beauty, together with his experience and prowess in war, all combined to make the Athenians forgive him everything else.’
The dinner party described in Plato’s Symposium, which contains the fullest contemporary description of Alcibiades, dates from this period. The host is the poet Agathon, who is celebrating having won the tragedian’s prize. As the wine goes round the guests take turns to talk about love. They are serious, competitive, rapt. At last it is Socrates’ turn. In what has proved one of the most influential speeches ever written he enunciates his deadly vision of a love divested in turn of physicality, of human affection, of any reference whatsoever to our material existence. He finishes. There is some applause and then – right on cue – comes a loud knocking at the door. There is an uproar in the courtyard, the sounds of a flute and of a well-known voice shouting, and suddenly there in the doorway is the living refutation of Socrates’ austere transcendentalism. The philosopher has been preaching against the excitements of the flesh and the elation attendant on temporal power. To mock him comes Alcibiades, wild with drink, his wreath of ivy and violets slanted over his eyes, flirtatious, arrogant, alarming, a figure of physical splendour and worldly pride forcing himself into that solemn company like a second Dionysus. No wonder, as Nepos wrote, Alcibiades filled his fellow Athenians ‘with the highest hopes (#litres_trial_promo), but also with profound apprehension’.
In 416 BC, when he was thirty-four, he entered no fewer than seven chariots in the games at Olympia, something no one, commoner or king, had ever done before him, and carried off three prizes. Euripides wrote a celebratory ode: ‘Victory shines (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo),’ 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)’, 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 – possibly Corinthians. Others asserted that the culprits were treacherous Athenians, that 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 violent representative of a code of conduct that is essentially destructive and inimical to the institutions of the family and of the civil state. There is a story, of which the earliest surviving version was written down by Flavius Philostratus in the second century ad but whose origin is probably much earlier, that Achilles’ ghost appeared to a merchant and demanded a slave girl who boasted of being descended from King Priam. The merchant, terrified, handed her over. The spectral hero fell upon her and tore her to pieces. In the light cast backwards across time by these horrific stories Homer’s account of Achilles’ rage over the loss of Briseis takes on a different shading. So do his feats on the Iliad’s field of battle. The brilliant warrior is also the slaughterer of fathers, husbands, farmers, councillors; the enemy of all women; the destroyer of civilized society.
The shattered Hermae were not the only ominous sight in the streets of Athens at the time the Sicilian expedition sailed out with Alcibiades as one of its commanders. It was the feast of Adonis, and groups of women dressed as though in deep mourning were carrying effigies of the dead youth, the beautiful young man whom Venus had loved, through the streets, wailing as they went. The sombre processions were not much remarked upon at the time; but later, when the terrible outcome of the expedition was known, they were remembered with a kind of horrified awe as presages of what was to come and, more particularly, as reminders of the price to others of one man’s glory. If the campaign was to fulfil what Socrates had identified as being Alcibiades’ ambition, ‘to fill the mouths (#litres_trial_promo) of all men with your name and power’, it would do so only at the cost of many other young men’s lives. It was a price the Athenians did not pay gladly. In one of the reversals frequent in the history of Athenian democracy the people first allowed themselves to be seduced by Alcibiades’ high talk of glorious conquest, and then, in a fit of self-disgust and revulsion, punished him for their own lapse into irrationality.
Alcibiades was not placed under arrest when the Salaminia arrived in Sicily. His opponents still feared provoking a mutiny and, as Plutarch remarked, Alcibiades ‘might very easily (#litres_trial_promo) have brought this about if he had wished’. But he preferred the role of exile to that of rebel. Apparently docile, he agreed to follow the Salaminia home in his own ship. In southern Italy he put ashore, and vanished. The Athenian Assembly tried him in his absence and condemned him to death. His estate was confiscated. His name was inscribed on a stele set up on the Acropolis as a monument to his disgrace. All the priests and priestesses of Athens were ordered to call down curses on him. A reward of a talent (a considerable fortune) was offered to anyone who could bring him in, dead or alive. Three months after he had sailed from Athens with such pomp and splendour he was an outcast, a hunted man with a price on his head.
What Alcibiades did next has identified him, in the opinion of many latter-day historians, as an unprincipled scoundrel. When he heard of the death sentence pronounced against him he is reported to have said grimly: ‘I will show them (#litres_trial_promo) I am still alive.’ Achilles turned traitor after his quarrel with Agamemnon, praying that his fellow Greeks should be beaten back to their ships. So, now, did Alcibiades. Before he even left Sicily, he had begun on his treachery. The Athenians had contacted an opposition group in the Sicilian city of Messina and arranged that they should open the gates to an Athenian attack. Alcibiades informed the pro-Spartan authorities in Messina of the plot. The attack was thwarted and the conspirators were put to death. From Italy Alcibiades crossed to the Peloponnese, and after first sending to ask for a guarantee of his safety, he made his way to Sparta. There he offered his services to his hosts, his native city’s archenemies. He urged them to intervene in Sicily (which they did, with devastating consequences for the Athenians). He also suggested that they do what the Athenians had for years been dreading that they might do – fortify the stronghold of Dekelea in the mountains north of Athens which commanded the route whereby the revenue from the silver mines, the tribute money from the offshore colonies, and, most importantly, food supplies, reached Athens. The Spartans acted on his advice. ‘It was this (#litres_trial_promo), more than any other single action,’ remarks Plutarch, ‘which wore down the resources of Athens, and finally ruined her.’
Such a betrayal, surely, could never be forgiven. Yet this was the same Alcibiades whom the Athenians were to welcome back seven years later with garlands and embraces and cries of joy, whom they crowned with a golden crown and elected general with supreme powers on both land and sea, the same Alcibiades of whom it was said that while he lived Athens could not die.
We live in a post-nationalist age, one in which Alcibiades’ disloyalty to his native city seems an absolute disqualification from the pantheon of heroism. But treason has not always been judged the action of the mean-spirited. Achilles despised the kind of status attainable by allegiance to a community of petty mortals and looked to Zeus for confirmation of his honour. Isolated in his tent, he stood by, implacably inactive, while the Trojans slew his compatriots. So, after the Athenians condemned him to death, Alcibiades, as far as his motives can be guessed at, acted for the rest of his life for himself alone, serving now Athens’ enemies, now Athens herself again, true only to himself and his limitless ambition. His Athenian contemporaries intermittently feared and distrusted him. Some hated him. But, traitor though he was, they did not despise him.
The relationship between the individual and the community in fifth-century Athens was an unstable one. The democratic assembly was terrifyingly fickle, inclined to turn savagely on its own servants. The generals who later replaced Alcibiades (after he was stripped of his command for the second time in 406 BC) were all put to death for alleged misconduct during a battle they had won for Athens. And just as the state could and did abandon its citizens, so citizens could quit the state. Both of the two great Athenian historians who wrote as contemporaries of Alcibiades, Thucydides and Xenophon, were to spend the majority of their adult lives away from the city, the former exiled for a military failure, the latter leaving of his own free will to serve first the Persian pretender Cyrus and subsequently the Spartans. Alcibiades’ defection would not have outraged his contemporaries to anything like the extent that it has shocked posterity.
Nor, given the influences to which he had been exposed, was it entirely unpredictable. The nurse who cared for him in his earliest childhood was a Spartan woman. His family had long had Spartan connections. One of his first political acts was to claim for himself the position of the Spartans’ representative in Athens, a job that had traditionally been performed by his forebears. When the Spartan delegates came to Athens to negotiate peace terms in 421 BC Alcibiades enjoyed privileged access to the most powerful of them, the ephor Endius, with whom he had family connections. The two states might be deadly enemies, but they were also near neighbours, and the links between upper-class families, in classical Greece as in medieval and early modern Europe, transcended national boundaries.
Besides, as an adolescent Alcibiades had been Socrates’ best-beloved disciple. Socrates was said to be the only person who could manage him, the only one whose opinion Alcibiades valued and whose advice he took. It is unclear how much influence the philosopher maintained over him once he was an adult, but unless Plato’s Symposium is entirely fictional (which is unlikely), they were still close friends in the year before the Sicilian expedition embarked. ‘What you have said (#litres_trial_promo)’, Alcibiades tells Socrates in Plato’s account, ‘stirs us to the depths and casts a spell over us.’ Much later, when the philosopher was on trial for his life, his friends were at pains to point out that he could not be held responsible for the actions of his followers, but that he influenced their thinking seems indisputable. In The Birds Aristophanes describes a group of unpatriotically pro-Spartan youths as having been ‘socratified’. The jibe was amply justified. The philosopher’s most prominent disciples included not only the traitor Alcibiades but also several others who were passionate admirers of all things Spartan. Xenophon the historian, who was one of Socrates’ devoted followers, fought for the Spartans against Persia, accepted an estate in recognition of his services from the Spartan King Agesilaus, and lived happily on it for twenty years. When Sparta was defeated by the Thebans in 371 BC, he was obliged to leave, but he did not return to Athens. Critias, the collaborator who was set up by the Spartans as leader of the oligarchic regime of the Thirty Tyrants in Athens in 404 BC, was another of Socrates’ circle. And so of course was Plato, a nobleman who had relatives among the Thirty and whose ideal state, as described in the Republic, has a constitution that resembles that of Sparta far more closely than the Athenian one. It has been argued (#litres_trial_promo) that when the restored Athenian democracy accused Socrates of ‘corrupting the youth’, and put him to death for it, the charge had a precise political meaning. He was being accused of being a Spartan sympathizer. The heroic stand he made at his trial, which has earned him the admiration of generations of libertarians and defenders of free speech and free enquiry, was made, if this theory is correct, in assertion of his right to commend one of the most repressive and secretive regimes in recorded history.
Sparta is the classical model for all subsequent totalitarian states, just as Athens is for democracies. It was a warrior society, dedicated with grim exclusivity to its own preservation and aggrandisement. The Spartans were a Dorian people who had invaded the Peloponnese from the north and had reduced the indigenous population, known as Helots, to a state of serfdom. The Helots had not submitted tamely. Their repeated uprisings were brutally suppressed. New ephors, on taking office, routinely declared war on them ‘in order that there might be no impiety in slaying them’. The state maintained a corps of Helot killers whose operations Plutarch describes: ‘They would be armed (#litres_trial_promo) with daggers and supplied with basic rations, but nothing else … At night they came down onto the roads and, if they found a Helot, would cut his throat.’ Sparta’s much admired stability was guaranteed only by the omnipresence within it of violence and sudden death.
The Helots were obliged to provide food for the master race. The Spartans, thus freed from the labour of providing for themselves, were able to devote themselves single-mindedly to the business of warfare. ‘The Spartans are, (#litres_trial_promo) of all men, those who admire poetry and poetic glory least,’ noted Pausanias. ‘They did not understand (#litres_trial_promo) how to be at leisure’, wrote Aristotle, ‘and never engaged in any kind of training higher than training for war.’
It was forbidden for any Spartan to travel abroad except for purposes of conquest and foreigners were not made welcome, for Lycurgus, the Spartans’ mythical lawgiver, had wished the society he created should remain permanently intact and unchanged and ‘along with strange people strange doctrines must come in’. Trade was virtually non-existent, each citizen living off the produce of his own allotted plot of land. Lycurgus had forbidden luxury of all sorts. The staple Spartan food was a black broth famous throughout Greece for its nastiness. Spartan houses were all identical, and so crudely built that, according to a patronizing Athenian joke, a Spartan visiting Corinth was astonished to see wooden planks and asked whether the trees in that region had square trunks. Spartan dress was austerely simple. Even Spartan speech was limited and deliberately brusque. The people maintained a ‘general habit of silence’, a ‘laconicism’ (the word means simply ‘Spartan’), which combined the caution of those whose rigidly conservative, authoritarian state permitted them no political voice and the dumbness of those whose every personal response was suppressed or put to public use.
The state was all-encompassing. Spartans, according to Plutarch, had ‘neither the time (#litres_trial_promo) nor the ability to live for themselves; but like bees they were to make themselves integral parts of the whole community’. The city was like a military encampment, where each person had allotted duties. All personal relationships were subordinated to that between the individual and the state. Male babies were inspected by the elders at birth. If they were not perfectly healthy they were thrown into a ravine. Those who passed muster were cared for by their parents until the age of seven, when they entered the school, a vast boot camp whose curriculum consisted almost entirely of gymnastics, where they learnt obedience to discipline, indifference to pain and the rigid suppression of private emotion.
The boys were systematically underfed and encouraged to steal to satisfy their perpetual hunger, but if they were caught in the act they were ruthlessly flogged. The young men lived in all-male dormitories but they were permitted to marry. A bride was abducted by force from her family home. Her hair was cropped back to her scalp by a ‘bridesmaid’, who then stripped her and left her lying alone on the floor of a darkened room to await her husband, who came late at night and stayed only long enough to perform his reproductive duty before returning to the men’s house. The couple’s subsequent encounters would be equally swift and furtive, and always nocturnal, so that a woman might give birth to several children before seeing her husband’s face. All men, of whatever age, took their meals in the communal mess (women ate separately, and were rationed to about one-sixth the quantity of food allowed to their menfolk). Men who refused to marry were punished and publicly shamed. Husbands who failed to impregnate their wives were pressured into inviting other men to do so. Jealousy was despised, along with all other manifestations of strong personal feeling. A mother who expressed contempt for a cowardly son was especially esteemed. Sparta was a place of throttled emotion, of willed dumbness and of furtive violence. ‘When the Spartans kill,’ wrote Herodotus, ‘they do so at night.’
This place of darkness and suppression, however, was widely admired even by its enemies. Socrates joked about the fashionable Athenian Spartophiles who wore short tunics and leather bands around their legs and mutilated their ears in the Spartan style. Spartans were praised for their frugality and their physical fitness, for the fortitude with which they bore pain, for their indifference to all forms of pleasure and their readiness to sacrifice themselves for the common good. To many Athenians they seemed, not enviable of course, but admirable: models of ascetic virtue, time travellers from a simpler but more dignified age. The austerity of their lifestyle made an aesthetic appeal even to those who would not themselves have wished to drink black broth. The authoritarianism of their rulers was insidiously seductive to those weary of the endless argument and counter-argument of the democratic process. Pindar wrote in praise of Sparta, its venerable council of elders, its young men’s conquering spears. And Plato, while overtly rejecting the Spartan system of government as being debased, incorporated many Spartan institutions and Spartan values into his ideal Republic, thus ensuring that Lycurgus’ programme for converting an individual into a useful component of the state has become intrinsic to Western ideals of manliness, of good citizenship, and of heroic virtue.
In Sparta Alcibiades was to describe Athenian democracy as ‘a system which is (#litres_trial_promo) generally recognized as absurd’; and although he was undoubtedly attempting to curry favour with his anti-Athenian audience, it is also possible that he spoke from the heart. He had proved a brilliant manipulator of the democratic Athenian Assembly, with powers of persuasion equal to those of the demagogues he despised; but once the Assembly had turned against him he would have had strong personal reasons to reject, not only that particular gathering, but the political system of which it was the foremost example. As an aristocrat he may have found the oligarchic Spartan system congenial. As a young and famously beautiful military commander he must have responded to the Spartan cult of the warrior: ‘In time of war (#litres_trial_promo) they relaxed the severity of the young men’s discipline and permitted them to beautify their hair and ornament their arms and clothing, rejoicing to see them, like horses, prance and neigh for the contest.’ He had felt in Athens what it was like to be at the mercy of people he considered his inferiors. He had been condemned by his own city for reasons that probably seemed to him pettifogging and stupid. Sparta may have seemed to him a home more fit for heroes.
Certainly it suited him to give his hosts that impression. He arrived in Sparta a penniless fugitive whose life depended on his winning the protection of his former enemies. Never again would he dazzle and intimidate in his youthful role of spoilt, swaggering dandy. In Athens, he had made a mock of public opinion. In Sparta, he was tactful, accommodating, charming. In Athens, he glittered like Achilles: in Sparta he showed that he could bend and change like Odysseus, Homer’s ‘man of twists and turns’. Achilles is absolutely self-consistent, totally transparent. He says he hates the man ‘who says one thing (#litres_trial_promo) but hides another in his heart’ as he hates the Gates of Death. Odysseus says the same thing in almost identical words, but he says it in the course of a speech we know to be a concatenation of lies. He is a diplomat and intriguer, a master of disguise and dissimulation. Alcibiades was like him. He was a chameleon, a brilliant role-player. He possessed, says Plutarch, ‘one special gift (#litres_trial_promo) which surpassed all the rest and served to attach men to him, namely that he could assimilate and adapt himself to the pursuits and the manner of living of others’.
He was an outcast now, and those deprived of their rooted identity are freed to reinvent themselves. The second-century theologian Justin Martyr described the lineage of Cain, those outsiders of Hebrew legend, as shape-shifters who could become at will birds, serpents, or quadrupeds. Alcibiades, an accursed exile like Cain, had the same protean gift, mark both of his untrustworthiness and his uncanny brilliance. In Athens his lifestyle had been luxurious to the point of decadence. Sailing to Sicily, he astonished his peers by having part of the deck of his trireme cut away so that he could sling up a hammock instead of sleeping, as all his compatriots, however exalted, did, wrapped in his cloak on the wooden deck. Now he became an ascetic. ‘By adopting Spartan customs in his everyday life he captivated the people and brought them under his spell.’ He grew his hair long in the Spartan fashion, took cold baths and ate coarse bread with the notorious black broth. (Ironically, this play-acting won him the accolade of being compared with the hero who was never anything but himself: ‘In Sparta, so far as all the externals went, one could say of him “This is no son of Achilles, but Achilles himself”.’) A marked man, he could no longer afford the self-indulgence of spontaneity. For the rest of his life, for all the glory and acclaim that still lay before him, he would have to please his audience, to mind his manners and watch his back.
He had to present himself to his new masters as something more than a renegade with an exhaustible fund of useful information. He could probably, had he been content to live a modest and private life, have bought himself sanctuary at the price of a few minor betrayals, but the restless, self-castigating ambition that Socrates had identified in him made such a solution to his problems inconceivable. When he arrived in Sparta in the winter of 415–414 BC he had yet to score any notable military successes. Deprived as he was of his social position, without his wealth, without an army, the only way he could win a role consonant with the ‘love of distinction and desire for fame’ that drove him all his life was to project an image of himself as a superman capable of accomplishing mighty deeds unaided. In Sparta he began the creation of that image.
He had a quick eye for the main chance. Odysseus is ‘never at a loss’ and Thomas Carlyle was to define a hero as ‘a man with an almost mythical awareness of what needed to be done’. Alcibiades was one such. The philosopher Theophrastus, who lived a century after him, thought that he ‘possessed in a higher degree (#litres_trial_promo) than any of his contemporaries the faculty of discerning and grasping what was required in a given situation’. Delegations arrived in Sparta from Sicily asking for help against the Athenians. Alcibiades seized his opportunity. He spoke in the Sicilians’ support, using the occasion to make his formal entry into Spartan public life. His speech, as reported by Thucydides, is a brilliant exercise in self-justification and self-aggrandisement. In it he publicly declares, for the first time, a tremendous programme of conquest and colonization of which the Sicilian expedition was to have been only the beginning. From Sicily, he told the Spartans, he would have led the Athenians on to Italy and, that territory once conquered, would have launched an attack on Carthage and its empire. Then, with all the might of their new western conquests to draw on, the Athenians would have returned to crush the Peloponnesians, to emerge finally as masters of the entire Mediterranean world.
Probably Alcibiades had entertained such intentions: they are entirely consonant with his well-attested ambition. But it is unlikely that such a grand design ever existed outside of his imagination, and inconceivable that Nicias would have consented to it. When Alcibiades told the Spartan Assembly that ‘The generals who (#litres_trial_promo) are left will, if they can, continue just the same to carry out these plans’ he was certainly lying. But the lie went undetected. The Spartans were persuaded. They decided to intervene in Sicily. And from then onwards, in their eyes and in posterity’s, the audacity and grandeur of those tremendous projected conquests attached themselves to Alcibiades, lending him the aura of a great man; one who, had he not been thwarted by his ungrateful compatriots, might have become, five years before Alexander of Macedon was born, a world-conquering Greek. The modern historian Donald Kagan pays tribute to his performance on this occasion: ‘One can only (#litres_trial_promo) marvel at his boldness, his imagination, his shrewd psychological understanding, and the size of his bluff.’
For the next two and a half years, Alcibiades lived in Sparta. Plutarch speaks pityingly of him wandering aimlessly about the city; but there is no evidence that he was humiliated by his hosts. The only story we have about his sojourn in Sparta is that of his liaison with Queen Timea, wife of Agis, one of Sparta’s two kings. Agis was abstaining from sex after an earthquake, which he took to be a divine warning, had interrupted his love-making with Timea. He was absent on campaign when a second earthquake shook the palace and a man was seen escaping from the Queen’s bedroom. That man, according to ancient gossip, was Alcibiades. Nine months later Timea gave birth to a son. The story may be scurrilous (Agis’ other heirs would have had a motive for alleging the baby was illegitimate), but it is perfectly credible. Alcibiades was as attractive as ever and unused to sexual continence. The child was later barred from succession. When challenged about his alleged paternity Alcibiades is reported as saying, with his characteristic arrogance, ‘that he had not done (#litres_trial_promo) this as a mere insult, nor simply to gratify his appetite, but to ensure that his descendants would one day rule over the Spartans’.
While Alcibiades dallied in Sparta the Athenians’ campaign in Sicily ended in horror. The fleet was annihilated. The entire army was either slaughtered or enslaved. The venture for which Alcibiades was largely responsible, and which he had envisioned as the first phase of a glorious series of conquests, left Athens crippled, without money, without ships, without fighting men. At once her colonies began to contemplate secession.
During the winter of 413–412 BC, two years after Alcibiades had arrived in Sparta, the Spartans were twice approached by rebellious oligarchic factions within Athenian colonies asking for support. In both cases the rebels already had Persian backing. The Great King’s satraps in the region were eager to exploit any weakness within the Athenian empire. Alcibiades was among those who advocated sending a fleet to support the rebels on the island of Chios. He must, after two years’ stagnation, have been craving action and the chance to cut a brilliant dash. King Agis, who had presumably heard the stories in circulation about Queen Timea’s surprising pregnancy, was by now openly hostile towards him. Unless he could do the Spartans some signal service Sparta would not be a safe refuge for much longer. He embarked on the second phase of his self-mythologizing. He personally, and he alone, he told the ephors, would be able to break Athens’ hold on the cities of the eastern Mediterranean. ‘He said he would easily (#litres_trial_promo) persuade the cities to revolt by informing them of the weakness of Athens and of the active policy of Sparta; and they would regard his evidence as being particularly reliable.’
The ephors were persuaded. A small fleet was assembled. The first group of ships to set out blundered into the Athenian fleet and were defeated. The commander was killed and the surviving ships blockaded off Epidaurus. The Spartans hesitated. Many were so discouraged by this first setback that they were ready to abandon the venture entirely, but Alcibiades succeeded in holding them to their purpose. A second group of five ships, commanded by the Spartan Chalcides but with Alcibiades on board as mastermind, dashed to Chios, arriving before the news of the first group’s defeat. Any seaman they encountered on the voyage was arrested and taken with them to ensure secrecy. They sailed up to the city while its Council was sitting. Alcibiades and Chalcides disembarked and marched into the assembly. To the consternation of the pro-Athenian party they announced that they were the vanguard of a Peloponnesian fleet (but omitted to mention that the rest of the aforesaid fleet was trapped several hundred miles away). The ruse was successful: their opponents capitulated. First Chios, then the neighbouring cities of Erythraea and Clazomenae, switched allegiance and prepared to resist the Athenians.
The suborning of Chios was a brilliant coup. It bears all Alcibiades’ trademarks: swiftness, audacity, a dependence on his own charisma and histrionic powers, flamboyant deception. Like the great runner Achilles he knew the value of speed, the way an army, or even a man, appearing where the rules of probability decree they cannot possibly be, can be as shocking and awesome as a supernatural apparition, demoralizing opposition and lending fresh courage to allies. Later that same year, after fighting all day in a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to repel the Athenians at Miletus, Alcibiades took horse and galloped southward through the night to meet the Peloponnesian fleet as it came into harbour and urge its captains to turn and sail on till morning. At dawn the next day, thanks to his despatch, the fleet appeared off Miletus and the Athenians slunk away ‘without realizing the fruit of their victory’. A masterly manipulator of the facts with which circumstances presented him, Alcibiades was one who could conjure up an illusion of victory, and use it to make that victory real.
His cunning and theatricality as a commander have their parallels in the political games he was obliged to play throughout the last ten years of his life to keep himself alive and in command. He was instrumental in the making of a treaty between the Persians and the Spartans that heavily favoured the former. There were suspicions in Sparta (quite possibly justified) that he was not a faithful servant to his adopted masters, masters who had a reputation for summarily and secretly killing those inconvenient to them. ‘The most powerful (#litres_trial_promo) and ambitious of the Spartans were by now both jealous and tired of him,’ says Plutarch. After the battle of Miletus the Spartan admiral received orders (probably originating with King Agis) to have Alcibiades put to death. Somehow, possibly warned by Queen Timea, who was so recklessly in love with him that in private she called her baby son by his name, Alcibiades heard of the order even before the admiral received it. A condemned man now in both halves of the Greek world, he slipped away from the Peloponnesian fleet and, turning his back not only on his native city but on his native culture, took refuge with the Persian Satrap Tissaphernes at Sardis.
The Satrap received him well. Plutarch describes Tissaphernes as one ‘who was naturally (#litres_trial_promo) inclined to malice and enjoyed the company of rogues, being anything but straightforward himself’, adding that he ‘admired intensely Alcibiades’ versatility and exceptional cleverness’. The Persian and the Athenian, two schemers and conjurors with the truth, became – apparently – fast friends. Once again Alcibiades played the chameleon, adopting (possibly with more enthusiasm than he had adopted Spartan asceticism) Persian luxury and Persian pomp. Once again his extraordinary charm worked its spell. ‘Even those who feared and envied him could not help taking pleasure in his company,’ writes Plutarch. Tissaphernes was so delighted with his guest that he named a pleasure garden ‘decorated in regal and extravagant style’ after him, one ‘famous for its refreshing streams and meadows and pavilions and pleasances’. Alcibiades ‘became his adviser (#litres_trial_promo) in all things’, says Thucydides. But his position was terrifyingly insecure, dependent as it was on a web of deceptions. Tissaphernes welcomed him initially on the understanding that he offered advice on behalf of the Spartans, the people who in fact now sought his death. Over the next year he was to play a perilous game of bluff and double-bluff with Persians and Greeks alike, borrowing others’ authority to cloak his real situation, which was that of an impotent and resourceless fugitive, and seeking to impress each party by laying claim to vast influence over another who at best distrusted him, at worst wanted him dead.
Achilles, rejected by his own people but still the inveterate enemy of their enemies, prayed that Achaeans and Trojans might cut each other to pieces, leaving no one alive but himself and his beloved Patroclus to stride together across the corpses into the shattered ruins of Troy. Alcibiades, doubly rejected and doubly a renegade, gave Tissaphernes advice that echoed Achilles’ ferocious wish: ‘Let the Hellenes (#litres_trial_promo) wear each other out among themselves.’ The Persian had been subsidizing the Peloponnesian fleet. Alcibiades suggested that he reduce the level of his support, lest the Spartans become a colonial power potentially as troublesome to Persia as Athens had been. The advice was shrewd. It was typical of Alcibiades, who preferred guile to bloodshed. It forcefully expresses his disengagement from all things Greek. It also, paradoxically, marks the beginning of his return to Greece. In Thucydides’ opinion, he ‘gave this advice (#litres_trial_promo) not only because he thought it was the best he could offer, but also because he was looking out for a way to be recalled to his own country’. He must have been acutely aware of the precariousness of his position in Sardis. Sparta was now closed to him. Tissaphernes’ favour offered him a chance of returning to Athens, where he had once been so popular and influential, where in times gone by the young men had imitated his sandals and their elders had looked to him to win for them an empire in the West. That chance depended on his ability to persuade the Athenians that he might be able to come back to them, not as the impotent exile he really was, but as one who could call on all the vast resources of Persia’s Great King and who might, on his own terms, use those resources to Athens’ advantage.
The Athenians, in his long absence, had had cause to question their wisdom in rejecting him. After his recall from Sicily, Nicias was left in the unenviable position of commanding a massive and aggressive campaign he himself had advised against from its inception. Irresolute, in pain from a diseased kidney, repeatedly terrified by ominous portents, he dithered and procrastinated through a war that ended in horror. The survivors straggled back to Athens, months or years after the final defeat, to recount their terrible experiences. They told of the repeated slaughters, of the infernal scene at the River Assinarus, where parched Athenians trampled over corpses to get a palmful of water fouled by their own compatriots’ blood, of the months after the surrender during which the survivors were held in the quarries outside Syracuse, with no room to move or lie down so that those many who died remained wedged upright among the living, of their subsequent enslavement. Initially, they were met with incredulity. The Athenians at home ‘thought that this (#litres_trial_promo) total destruction was something that could not possibly be true’. Next, the citizens turned murderously on those who had advocated the expedition and on the prophets and soothsayers who had promised success. Happy for Alcibiades, perhaps, that he was absent then. But over the next months and years, as Alcibiades was seen to serve their enemies so effectively at Chios and Miletus, suborning colonies just as he had intended to do, on Athens’ behalf, in Sicily, there must have been some of his fellow citizens who asked themselves what might have happened if only they had trusted him, if only he had been allowed to stand trial and clear his name, if only he had not been recalled. It is easier to admit to one’s own errors than to believe oneself helpless in the hands of a malign providence. There were many in Athens who blamed themselves, collectively if not personally, who believed that in turning against Alcibiades they had brought about their own downfall.
In the winter of 412–411 BC, when Alcibiades was with the Persians, the Athenian fleet was based at Samos, less than a mile off the coast of Asia Minor. Somehow, without Tissaphernes’ knowledge, Alcibiades communicated with the Athenian commanders there, first by letter and subsequently in secret meetings on the mainland. He intimated to them that if the democratic government in Athens were replaced by an oligarchy he would be able to persuade Tissaphernes to alter his policy. He would talk the Persian into supporting Athens, into paying their men and calling on the Phoenician navy, then supposedly lying inactive to the south, to fight alongside them. All this, Alcibiades suggested, he would do, if they could secure his pardon and restore him to his lost command. Most of the commanders, at least, believed him. One of them, Pisander, was to tell the people of Athens that for the sake of a Persian alliance they ‘must bring (#litres_trial_promo) Alcibiades back, because he is the only person now living who can arrange this for us’. Once more Alcibiades had succeeded in presenting himself as one uniquely gifted, able, as no one else was, to alter destiny.
The Athenian commanders on Samos sent a delegation, led by Pisander, to Athens to advocate his recall and the change of constitution Alcibiades had demanded. With some difficulty, they made their case. Devastated by the calamity in Sicily, Athens was no match for Sparta. Without Persian support, it was in danger of extinction, not only as a colonial power but even as an independent city-state. The citizens were persuaded that the sacrifice of their cherished democratic rights, at least temporarily, was necessary for their very survival. The Assembly authorized Pisander and ten companions to negotiate with Alcibiades and Tissaphernes. They travelled back east to Sardis, where the Satrap, with Alcibiades at his side, received them. Alcibiades spoke for his protector-cum-employer. To the Athenians’ angry astonishment he made demands to which they could not possibly accede. Bitterly disappointed, Pisander – an ambitious man with no love for the democracy – resolved to forget Alcibiades and seize power on his own account. He returned to Athens where he and his co-conspirators staged a coup d’état. They established a savagely repressive oligarchic regime known as the Four Hundred. For three months they held power, imprisoning and murdering any who opposed them. In Samos meanwhile, the Athenian navy, under Thrasybulus and Thrasyllus, both of whom were long-time associates of Alcibiades, swore to uphold the democracy, thus effectively splitting the Athenian polis into two opposed parts – an unprotected city and a homeless armada. Thrasybulus, who had been from the first an enthusiastic advocate of Alcibiades’ recall, with some difficulty persuaded the mass of soldiers and seamen to agree to it. At last, with their consent, he crossed to the mainland and brought Alcibiades back with him to Samos. Four years after his life had been declared forfeit and his name had been cursed by every priest in the city Alcibiades was back among Athenians, albeit not actually in Athens. The troops elected him a general ‘and put everything (#litres_trial_promo) into his hands’.
There is much that is baffling about these events, not least Alcibiades’ insistence on the overthrow of the Athenian democracy, which is inconsistent, not only with his subsequent acceptance of Thrasybulus’ invitation to become commander of the democratic forces, but also with his entire political history. But though the intricacies of his machinations during this tumultuous year will probably never be satisfactorily unravelled, his main strategy is clear. It was that of the confidence trickster so audacious that he gets away with his sting precisely because of its enormity. By the time Pisander’s delegation came to negotiate with him and Tissaphernes he had lost what influence he had had over the Satrap. The Spartan commander had contrived to let the Persian know that Alcibiades was communicating secretly with the Athenians. Tissaphernes may still have enjoyed Alcibiades’ company, but he no longer trusted him or acted on his advice. It is probable that Alcibiades deliberately aborted the negotiations with Pisander in order to avoid letting the Athenians perceive quite how impotent he really was. Thrasybulus saved him just in time from a potentially lethal situation. (Tissaphernes might well soon have found it expedient, as another Satrap was to do six years later, to trade Alcibiades’ life for the Spartans’ goodwill.) And yet, totally powerless as he was, dependent for his very survival on a foreign magnate who owed him nothing, he presented himself to the Athenians, oligarchs and democrats alike, as one who could dispose of the power of the greatest empire on earth. It is a measure of his astonishing nerve, of his indomitable charm, and of the potency of the glamour that had come to surround his name, that they appear to have believed him.
On Samos he spoke to the assembled Athenian forces, proclaiming that he, Alcibiades, had saved them, giving them, as Thucydides remarks drily, ‘a very exaggerated idea (#litres_trial_promo) of the strength of his influence with Tissaphernes’ and assuring them that, thanks to him, the Satrap would never let them go short of supplies, ‘not even if he [Tissaphernes] had to sell his own bed’. His speech was a pyrotechnical display of rabble-rousing optimism. He flattered and excited his hearers. He assured them of imminent victory. By the time he had finished speaking ‘there was not a man (#litres_trial_promo) who for anything in the world would have parted with his present hopes of coming through safely and of taking vengeance on the Four Hundred’. Intoxicated by the presence of their charismatic lost-and-found leader, the men were all for sailing on Athens directly. Alcibiades dissuaded them. Delegates arrived from Athens bearing placatory messages from the oligarchs. The troops would barely give them an audience and again, infuriated, cried out that they would sail on their own city and drive out the Four Hundred. Only Alcibiades’ presence averted what would have been a catastrophe for Athens. Once again he refused, as he had done at the time of his recall from Sicily, to play the mutineer. Such was his ascendancy over the troops that his oratory prevailed. ‘There was not another (#litres_trial_promo) man in existence’, wrote Thucydides, ‘who could have controlled the mob at that time.’
Just as he had used his supposed influence over Tissaphernes to win him authority over the Athenians, now he used his new authority over the Athenians to revive his influence over the Persian. His first action as an Athenian general was to revisit Sardis, making a display to Tissaphernes of his new status and to the Athenians of his supposedly close relationship with the Satrap. It was a game he continued to play until, in 410 BC, the emptiness of his hand was brutally exposed. The Satrap happened to be in the neighbourhood of the Athenian fleet. Alcibiades, still feeling the need to make a parade of his supposed friendship with Tissaphernes, visited him at the head of a princely retinue and bearing splendid gifts; but Tissaphernes had received new orders from the Great King: he was to give the Spartans his unequivocal support. Alcibiades’ pompous visit gave him a welcome opportunity to demonstrate his zeal. He had his visitor arrested and imprisoned in Sardis. Alcibiades got away after only a month, claiming that Tissaphernes was still sufficiently devoted to him to have connived at his escape, but he could no longer plausibly lay claim to any influence over Persian policy.
Fortunately for him, he no longer needed to. During the four years after his recall to Samos, he won, or helped to win, a series of brilliant victories for Athens in their struggle with the Peloponnesians for control of the Aegean and the Hellespont. By degrees, as one success followed another, his mystique became so potent that his followers felt themselves glorified by it. By 410 BC, according to Plutarch, ‘the soldiers who (#litres_trial_promo) had served under Alcibiades were so elated and confident that they disdained to mix any longer with the rest of the army: they boasted that the others had been defeated time and again, but that they were invincible’. Though he was only one of several Athenian commanders, and though Thrasybulus, for one, was his equal in military talent, Alcibiades was the most dazzling. It was he, not his peers, who addressed the troops before a battle; and it was he to whom glory accrued. As Cornelius Nepos remarked, ‘Thrasybulus accomplished (#litres_trial_promo) many victories without Alcibiades. The latter accomplished nothing without the former, and yet he [Alcibiades], by some gift of his nature, gained the credit for everything.’
For Athens, as for Sparta, his swiftness in action was astonishing. At the battle of Abydos in 411 BC his arrival with eighteen ships after racing north from Samos proved decisive. As he came into view, ‘the Spartans turned (#litres_trial_promo) and ran for shelter’, records Xenophon. A year later, before the battle of Cyzicus, he gained a crucial lead by galloping overland across the Gallipoli peninsula. During the battle itself he played the decoy, luring the Spartans out into open sea where his colleagues, Theramenes and Thrasybulus, could close in on their flank. When the Spartans saw the trap and attempted to retreat Alcibiades nimbly turned his ships and pursued them back to the shore. Cyzicus, a great victory for Athens, was a cooperative action, but it was Alcibiades, the fleet, the daring, who won most of the acclaim.
His Puck-like propensity for appearing where he was least expected was theatrical. So were his other gifts, for dazzling the eye and mind with his presence, for conspicuous courage, and for subterfuge. At Selymbria in 408 BC his arrangement with the friendly factions within the city, who were to show a lighted torch at midnight to signal that they were ready to open the gates and rise in support of him, was botched. The signal was given early, before Alcibiades’ army was prepared. Determined not to miss his opportunity, Alcibiades dashed into the city, followed by only fifty men, to find himself surrounded by the entire Selymbrian army. He was trapped. At any moment he could have been killed or captured. Coolly he ordered one of his men to a sound a trumpet and another to make a formal proclamation forbidding the Selymbrians to take up arms. The Selymbrians, bewildered by a performance so inappropriate to the reality of the situation, believed the performance and discounted the reality. Nervous and disoriented, afraid perhaps that the rest of the Athenians had already entered the city (impossible to be sure in the darkness), they failed to use their advantage. Stupefied by Alcibiades’ effrontery, they parleyed with him until his army at last came up and their surrender was assured.
In the same year he won the greater prize of Byzantium by similar sleight of hand. Again, he made contact with people within the city who were ready to betray their Spartan masters. The Athenians had been blockading the harbour; but on the appointed day, their fleet sailed away, or seemed to do so. At the same time, Alcibiades’ army, which had been besieging the city on the landward side, withdrew far enough to be out of sight. When night fell, the army silently returned, while the Athenian fleet sailed back into harbour and attacked the Spartan ships there ‘with a great deal (#litres_trial_promo) of shouting, commotion and uproar’. The Spartans and their supporters raced down to the waterfront. Meanwhile Alcibiades’ Byzantine allies placed ladders against the walls allowing his men to flood into the city and to overwhelm its defenders. The decisive moment of the battle came when Alcibiades, who understood the strategic value of magnanimity, had it proclaimed throughout the city that the Byzantines would not be harmed, and a decisive proportion of the population abruptly changed sides.
The Athenian troops adored him: he had yet to test the temper of the Athenians at home. Pisander’s oligarchy was short lived. The politically moderate government of the Five Thousand that replaced it endorsed Alcibiades’ command and invited him to return. But he waited another four years before he risked re-entering the city from which he had been outcast, in which his name had been anathematized and he himself condemned to die. When he finally returned he did so as the victor in a war that had made the Hellespont, at least temporarily, an Athenian lake. As Plutarch explains, ‘he had thought (#litres_trial_promo) it best not to meet [the Athenians] empty handed, without any positive achievement to his credit and owing his recall to the pity and good nature of the people, but rather to arrive in a blaze of glory’.
Two hundred years later Duris of Samos, who claimed to be Alcibiades’ descendant, wrote an excited description of his return to Athens, at the head of a great fleet of ships decorated from stem to stern with captured shields and trophies, with flute players and actors timing the oarsmen’s strokes, and with Alcibiades’ own ship rigged with purple sails ‘as though he were (#litres_trial_promo) leading a crowd of revellers after some drinking party’. More reliable sources give a less festive but more dramatic account. Thrasyllus went ahead with the main body of the fleet while Alcibiades, with only twenty ships, delayed. Perhaps he calculated that it would be to his advantage to let the bulk of the fighting men, who adored him, arrive in the city before he did, and to give them time to spread tales of his prowess among the citizens. He stopped to raise money (conscious as ever of its usefulness in procuring popularity) and sailed for Athens only after he had received word that the Assembly had expressed its approval by electing him general once again. Even then he was apprehensive. It is unclear from the ancient sources whether the death sentence against him had ever been formally revoked: he still had many enemies in the city. Arriving at Piraeus, he anchored close to the shore and scanned the waiting crowd. Only when he had picked out a group of friends, including one of his cousins, did he feel safe enough to land. He came ashore surrounded by a bodyguard ready to fight off any attempt at arresting him.
His caution must quickly have given way to triumph. His return was greeted with wild scenes of celebration. This homecoming was his apotheosis, the moment when the Athenians received him as though he were one of Plato’s men of gold, a quasi-divine hero who could lead them forward to a glittering future. A vast crowd, near-hysterical with joy, had gathered on the waterfront. According to Diodorus Siculus, ‘all men thronged (#litres_trial_promo) to the harbour to catch sight of Alcibiades, the slaves vying with the free so that the city was entirely deserted’. The entire crowd, alight with enthusiasm, escorted him back into the city, yelling out their exultation as they went. People struggled to get close enough to embrace him and to crown him with garlands. Many wept ‘for they reflected (#litres_trial_promo) that they would never have suffered the Sicilian disaster or any of their terrible disappointments if only they had left Alcibiades in command’; but their regrets were mingled with rejoicing, for according to Diodorus, ‘practically all men (#litres_trial_promo) believed’ that with his return from exile ‘great fortune had come again to the city’.
Carried on the wave of the jubilant throng, Alcibiades made his way to the Pnyx, where he spoke to the full Assembly. He was a magnificent figure, his beauty, according to Plutarch, being as great in the prime of his manhood as it had been when he was a boy, ‘lending him extraordinary grace and charm’. He was also a brilliant player on others’ emotions. Shrewdly, he chose to be magnanimous, to blame no one for his exile. Instead, with tears in his eyes, he spoke of ‘ill-fortune’ and the ‘evil genius that had dogged his career’. Many listeners wept. Others cried out angrily, just as if, remarks Cornelius Nepos drily, ‘it had been another (#litres_trial_promo) people, and not those who were then shedding tears, that had condemned him for impiety’. He ended his speech with rousing optimism, promising Athens a splendid future. His audience applauded ecstatically. His confiscated property was restored to him. The stele recording his disgrace was taken down from the Acropolis and thrown into the sea. The priests were commanded to solemnly revoke the curses they had once cast on him. He was crowned with a golden crown and appointed general with absolute authority by land and sea (a title which only his guardian Pericles had held before him). For years – in Sparta, in Sardis, in Samos – he had been claiming superhuman powers for himself. Now, at last, unreal as it still was, that claim was believed by his compatriots. Alcibiades was acclaimed throughout the city as the man who could make Athens great once more.
The extravagant joy that attended his homecoming was followed by an even more impressive demonstration of his rehabilitation. The grandest spectacle of the Athenian religious calendar was the procession that escorted the sacred objects and the image of the god Iacchus from Athens to Eleusis, some fourteen miles away, for the annual celebration of the Mysteries. The marchers included young men about to be initiated, initiates wreathed with myrtle and long-robed priests. Bands of flute players, dancers, and hymn-singing choirs accompanied the procession, which halted frequently along the route to make sacrifices and to perform sacred rites. Holiday and awe-inspiring spectacle at once, the ceremony held profound significance for all Athenians, but for several years it had not taken place. The presence of the Spartan garrison at Dekelea in the mountains overlooking the route had rendered it too dangerous. Instead, Iacchus had been carried by boat to Eleusis with a small escort and none of the usual attendant ceremony, a compromise sadly emblematic of Athens’ reduced and endangered condition.
Alcibiades – the traitor who had advised the Spartans to fortify Dekelea, the blasphemer who had repeatedly made a mock of the Eleusinian Mysteries and who had been condemned to death for doing so – seized the chance to demonstrate his reformation with an operation exactly designed to erase his past sins. Scrupulously devout now, he first consulted the priests before announcing, with their approval, that the procession would take place. He posted look-outs on the hilltops all along the route, sent out an advance guard at daybreak to clear the way and then, surrounding the procession with his troops, escorted it to Eleusis and back. Had King Agis led out an attacking force from Dekelea Alcibiades would have been able to make a parade of his military skills and his loyalty, fighting, in sight of all Athens, to defend the sacred mysteries. As it was, the procession went and returned unmolested. The participants had walked, according to Plutarch, ‘in solemn order (#litres_trial_promo) and complete silence’. Throughout the thirty-mile journey they must have been in a state of mingled terror and exaltation. When they returned safely to the city their relief, and that of the watching citizens, was expressed in further outbursts of rapturous acclaim for Alcibiades. The poorer classes especially were convulsed by an ‘extraordinary passion’ for him. The troops were exultant, boasting once again that under his command they were invincible. The one-time blasphemer was hailed as ‘a high priest and an initiator into the Mysteries’. It seemed there was nothing he could not do.
To live in a democracy is not easy. The freeborn adult male citizens of fifth-century Athens were obliged to accept responsibility for their own destinies. There was no tyrant whom they could reproach for their misfortunes, no fatherly autocrat on whom they could rely for protection. They were expected to participate in the making of crucial policy decisions. If those decisions proved to have been bad ones, there was no person or institution outside of themselves that the citizens could blame for their ill consequences. Nor was there any all-powerful authority who could erase their mistakes and comfort them in their troubles. Many people, in Athens in Alcibiades’ lifetime as well as in the numerous later democracies where demagogues have become dictators, longed to be reduced once more to the condition of infancy, to be made free of the wearisome responsibilities of independent adulthood.
In Athens political debate was urgent, incessant, bafflingly inconclusive. The political process was obstructed and complicated at every turn by envy, corruption, and blackmail. The tenure of any office was brief. There was no certainty, no continuity, no easy-going reliance on precedent. Every principle, and every practical detail, was to be debated and voted upon. This edgy insistence on examining every question afresh each time it arose is one of the things that made Athens so exhilarating a society and gave it its extraordinary intellectual and political vitality. But it imposed a burden on the citizens that exasperated or frightened many, and which others found simply too great to bear. In the summer of 408 BC, when Alcibiades descended on Athens surrounded by the golden aura of the conquering hero, as splendid as one of those godlike men whom Aristotle judged fully entitled to enslave their fellows, there were many who entertained the fantasy of surrendering their exhausting freedom to him. People came to him and begged him to ‘rid them of those (#litres_trial_promo) loud-mouthed wind-bags who were the bane of the city’, to silence the ceaseless, bewildering play of argument and counter-argument for which the entire city was the stage by seizing absolute power. In an extraordinary frenzy of self-abasement, people begged him to make himself dictator, to ‘sweep away decrees and laws as he thought fit’, to overturn the constitution and wipe out all opposition, thus relieving the demoralized and insecure citizens of the awful burden of their liberty.
Alcibiades did not respond to the invitation. He had work to do elsewhere. The Spartan fleet under its formidable new commander Lysander was lying at Ephesus, a menace to the Athenian colonies. The Assembly granted Alcibiades all the men and ships he required, even allowing him the unprecedented honour of choosing his own fellow generals. Their generosity was expressive of the people’s adulation of their new commander-in-chief. Besides, the Assembly’s more thoughtful members were probably anxious to speed him on his way. ‘We do not know (#litres_trial_promo) what Alcibiades himself thought of a dictatorship,’ writes Plutarch, ‘but certainly the leading citizens at this time were frightened of it.’ They mistook their man. The insatiable ambition Socrates had seen in his disciple was not for stay-at-home executive power, but for world-bestriding glory. Soon after the Eleusinian festival, just four months after he had entered the city, Alcibiades left Athens for ever.
He had seduced the people and alarmed the leading democrats, but he had not won over the gods. The day on which he landed in Athens to be so rapturously received was the unluckiest of the year, the day when the image of Athena on the Acropolis was veiled for secret purification rites. Perhaps those citizens hostile to Alcibiades pointed out the inauspicious circumstance at the time, to be ignored by the ecstatic majority. Perhaps it was only with hindsight that people were to remember it as a sign of what was to come. At the zenith of his popularity, the city’s patron goddess turned her face away from him. Only months later the city’s people were, as though in imitation, to withdraw their favour.
‘If ever a man (#litres_trial_promo) was destroyed by his own high reputation,’ wrote Plutarch, ‘it was Alcibiades.’ He was now expected to work miracles; and when he failed to do so the lethally volatile democratic Assembly began to grumble and to doubt his loyalty, ‘for they were convinced that nothing which he seriously wanted to achieve was beyond him’. He sailed to Andros, where he established a fort but failed to take the city. When he arrived at Notium in Asia Minor, across the bay from the Peloponnesian fleet at Ephesus, he was unable to lure Lysander out of the safety of the harbour. The oarsmen began to defect: the Spartans, now subsidized by the Persian Prince Cyrus, were able to offer them 25 per cent more pay than the Athenians. Alcibiades, foreseeing a long and expensive wait before he could force a decisive engagement, sailed off to raise funds elsewhere, leaving the main fleet under the temporary command of Antiochus, the pilot of his ship. It was a controversial appointment. Antiochus was a professional sailor, not one of the aristocratic trierarchs or amateur captains who, though probably less competent, were his social superiors and who would have seen themselves as outranking him. He had known and served Alcibiades for nearly twenty years, ever since he had caught his future commander’s errant quail for him in the Assembly. Alcibiades’ decision to place him in command was audacious, unconventional and, as it turned out, calamitous. In Alcibiades’ absence, and in defiance of his explicit order, Antiochus provoked a battle for which he was totally unprepared. Lysander put the Athenians to flight, sinking twenty ships. Antiochus was killed. Alcibiades raced back to Notium and attempted, unsuccessfully, to induce Lysander to fight again. Only a brilliant victory could have saved him, but it was not forthcoming.
When the news reached Athens, all the old accusations against him were revived. He was arrogant. He was depraved. He was untrustworthy. The people who, only months before, had been ready to give up their political rights for the privilege of being his subjects now turned on him with a fury as irrational as their adulation had been. It was alleged that he intended to make himself a tyrant. It was pointed out that he had built a castle in Thrace – why, asked his accusers, would a loyal Athenian need such a bolt-hole? The appointment of Antiochus, unquestionably a mistake, was presented as evidence of his wicked frivolity. ‘He had entrusted (#litres_trial_promo) the command’, said one of his accusers, ‘to men who had won his confidence simply through their capacity for drinking and spinning sailors’ yarns, because he wanted to leave himself free to cruise about raising money and indulging in debauchery and drunken orgies with the courtesans of Abydos and Ionia.’ He was accused of accepting a bribe from the King of Cyme, a city he had failed to take. None of the charges against him were substantiated. They did not need to be. After all, in 417 BC, the Athenians had come close to banishing him by ostracism for no reason at all except that he had grown too great. Now new generals were elected, one of whom was ordered to sail east and relieve Alcibiades of his command. On hearing that his city, whom he had so grossly betrayed but to whom he had since done such great service, had once again rejected him Alcibiades left the fleet, left the Greek world entirely, and, Coriolanus-like, sought a world elsewhere.
Taking only one ship, he sailed away northward to Thrace, where he had indeed had the foresight to acquire not one, but three castles. There, among the lawless barbarians, he recruited a private army and embarked upon the life of a brigand chief, a robber baron, preying upon his neighbours and taking prisoners for ransom. Adaptable as ever, he assumed the habits of his new countrymen, winning the friendship of the tribal chieftains by matching them, according to Cornelius Nepos, ‘in drunkenness and lust (#litres_trial_promo)’. Perhaps, as the historian and novelist Peter Green has suggested, this was the debauchery attendant on despair; or perhaps it was the zestful beginning of yet another new life. We shall see how Rodrigo Díaz, the Cid, another outcast hero who grew too great for the state he served, was to begin again as a bandit in the badlands of eleventh-century Spain and ultimately to make himself prince of a great city. After two years in Thrace, Alcibiades was to boast that he was treated there ‘like a king’.
In Athens meanwhile, as disaster followed upon disaster, he gradually acquired the mystique of a king over the water, a once and perhaps future redeemer of his native city. A year after the beginning of his second exile Aristophanes had a character in The Frogs say of Alcibiades that the Athenians ‘yearn for him, they hate him, but they want to have him back’. His history was to touch theirs just once more, in an encounter that yet again identified him as the man who could have saved Athens if only Athens had allowed him to do so.
In 405 BC, on the eve of the disastrous battle of Aegosopotami, he appeared, a troubling deus ex machina, in the Athenian camp. The Athenian and Spartan fleets were drawn up facing each other in the narrowest part of the Hellespont, the Athenians being on the Thracian shore, only a few miles from his stronghold. Alcibiades, uninvited and unexpected, came riding in and demanded a meeting with the generals. He pointed out to them that their position was dangerously exposed, and too far from their source of supplies. He advised them to move and offered them the armies of two Thracian kings on whom he could rely. The Athenian generals would not listen. Perhaps they remembered how he had once offered to deliver Persian money and Phoenician ships and failed to do so. Perhaps they thought of how Thrasybulus had been eclipsed and, as Diodorus suggests, were jealously protecting their own reputations, fearing ‘that if they were defeated (#litres_trial_promo) they themselves would get the blame, but that the credit for any success would go to Alcibiades’. Whatever their motives, they turned him away rudely saying, ‘We are in command (#litres_trial_promo) now, not you.’ As he rode out of the camp, Alcibiades told his companions that had he not been so outrageously insulted the Spartans would have lost all their ships. Some thought this boast mere bravado, but many, including some modern historians, have believed him. Rejected for the third time, he galloped away. At Aegosopotami the Athenian fleet was utterly destroyed. The survivors, including all but one of the generals, were slaughtered. A few months later Athens fell.
For the last year of his life Alcibiades was a fugitive. The Spartans still wanted him dead. Their victory rendered coastal Thrace unsafe for him. He withdrew into the interior, leaving behind the bulk of his possessions, which the neighbouring chieftains promptly looted. As he travelled inland he was set upon and robbed of his remaining belongings but he managed to escape capture and made his way, armed now only with his reputation and his miracle-working charm, to the headquarters of the Persian Satrap Pharnabazus. Once more, as when he arrived at Tissaphernes’ court, ‘he so captivated (#litres_trial_promo) Pharnabazus that he became the Persian’s closest friend’. Graciously, the Satrap granted him the Phrygian city of Grynium and all its revenues. He had found a refuge, a protector and an income. But, characteristically, he wanted more. He was in his forties, his prime, and his ambitions were still inordinate, his conception of his own potential still as extravagant as the awe he inspired. He resolved to make the formidable journey eastward to visit the Great King Artaxerxes at Susa. He would have had in mind the example of Themistocles, the victor of Salamis, another great Athenian who, half a century earlier, had been banished and condemned to death by the city for whom he had won great victories but who had been received with honour by a Persian king. Besides, he had information that Artaxerxes’ brother Cyrus, who was closely associated with the Spartan Lysander, was plotting to usurp the Persian throne. Perhaps he hoped to foment war between Persia and Sparta, a war in which he might play a glorious part as the liberator of Athens.
He asked Pharnabazus to arrange an audience for him with the Great King. Pharnabazus demurred. Alcibiades set out anyway. He halted one night in a small town in Phrygia. There, while he lay in bed with the courtesan Timandra (whose daughter Lais was later said to be the most beautiful woman of her generation), hired killers heaped fuel around the wooden house in which he was lodged and set fire to it. Waking, Alcibiades seized his sword, wrapped a cloak around his left arm for a shield and charged out through the flames. His assassins backed off, but from a distance they hurled javelins and spears at him until he fell. Then they closed in and hacked off his head before departing. Timandra wrapped his decapitated body in her own robe and buried it, or, according to Nepos, burned the dead Alcibiades in the fire that had been set to burn him alive.
Even his death, wretched as it was, is evidence of Alcibiades’ extraordinary charisma. One story goes that the killers were the brothers of a girl he had seduced, but most of the sources agree they had been hired by Pharnabazus. The Satrap had been persuaded to violate the duties of the host, and his affection for the man who had so captivated him, by the urgings of the Spartan Lysander, who had threatened that Sparta would break off its alliance with Persia if Pharnabazus did not hand over Alcibiades, alive or dead. Lysander, in turn, was responding to pressure from Critias – the man who long ago had sat with Alcibiades at Socrates’ feet, and who was now the leader of the puppet government the Spartans had installed in Athens. Such was the potency of Alcibiades’ reputation, so widespread the hope that he might yet come to save his city, that while he lived, complained Critias, ‘none of the arrangements (#litres_trial_promo) he made at Athens would be permanent’. In those dark days for Athens, it was not only the oppressed democrats who ascribed to Alcibiades the power to turn the course of history single-handed. His enemies feared him, or feared the legend he had become. He was a man without a state, without an army, without a fortune, without allies; but he was also a human phoenix who had repeatedly risen from the ashes of disaster in a flaming glory all of his own making.
Alcibiades’ talents were never fully put to the test. His career was a sequence of lost opportunities. Perhaps, given the chance, he might have won the war for Athens. Certainly Thucydides, who was as judicious as he was well informed, believed that the Athenians’ failure to trust Alcibiades (for which Alcibiades, who had failed to win their trust, was partially to blame) brought about the city’s undoing. ‘Although in a public (#litres_trial_promo) capacity his conduct of the war was excellent, his way of life made him objectionable to everyone as a person; thus they entrusted their affairs to other hands, and before long ruined the city.’ But great reputations do not flourish, as Alcibiades’ did in his lifetime and afterwards, on the foundation only of what might have been. It is possible that his career – thwarted, dangerous, and isolated as it was – was precisely suited to his particular genius. He was an actor, a seducer, a legend in his own lifetime and of his own making, a true con-artist, one whose self-invented myth was a creation of awesome grandeur and brilliance, a man who owed the large place he occupied in his contemporaries’ imagination not to any tangible achievement, but simply to the magnitude of his presence.
Poets of the classical and medieval era imagined Achilles to be a giant. He was born different from others. Statius describes him as a baby lapping not milk but ‘the entrails of lions (#litres_trial_promo) and the marrow of half-dead wolves’. Pindar, who lived in Athens a generation before Alcibiades, imagined the six-year-old Achilles outrunning deer, fighting with lions, and dragging the vast corpses of slaughtered boars back to Chiron’s cave. In fiction and myth, exorbitant size and prodigious strength were the tokens of the hero. In the real world, Alcibiades, marked out from others by his aristocratic origins, his striking beauty, his intimidating capacity for violence and his inordinate self-confidence, was received by his contemporaries as though he were another such prodigy, a being intrinsically greater than his fellows.
Such a person is not easily assimilable within any community: in a democracy his very existence is a form of sedition. The dizzying reversals of Alcibiades’ career reflect the constant interplay between his fellow citizens’ adulation of him and their ineradicable distrust of the magic whereby he was able temporarily, but never for long enough, to dominate them. They ascribed to him the potential to be alternately their saviour or their oppressor. They ‘were convinced (#litres_trial_promo)’, wrote Nepos, ‘that it was to him that all their disasters and their successes were due’. They imagined superhuman power for him: they adored him for it, and they found it unforgivable. Like Achilles, he was as terrifying as a god, or a beast. ‘Better not bring up a lion inside your city/But if you must, then humour all his moods’, wrote Aristophanes, with reference to Alcibiades. ‘Most people became frightened (#litres_trial_promo) at a quality in him that was beyond the normal,’ wrote Thucydides. That supranormal quality posed a temptation as alluring as it was insidious. Perhaps what the Athenians feared most in Alcibiades was not any ambition of his to seize absolute power but their own longing to hand it to him, to abase themselves before him as a superman capable not only of rescuing them from their enemies but also of freeing them of the burden of being free.
III CATO (#ulink_42ea4df9-3ef2-59ce-8103-612b62f539d4)
LONDON, 1714. The first night of Joseph Addison’s tragedy, Cato, which was to enjoy such a triumph that Alexander Pope, who wrote the prologue, declared that ‘Cato was not so much (#litres_trial_promo) the wonder of Rome in his days as he is of Britain in ours.’ The curtain rises on the last act. The hero is discovered ‘Solus, sitting in a (#litres_trial_promo) thoughtful posture: in his hand Plato’s book on the Immortality of the Soul. A drawn sword on the table by him.’ The tableau – the sword, the book, the pensive hero – was repeated exactly in numerous neo-classical paintings. Its drama lies not in what is represented, but in what is still to come, the horror to which (as most male members of Addison’s classically educated eighteenth-century audience would have known) this tranquil scene is prelude. Before the night is out Cato will read the book through three times, and then, still serene, still ‘thoughtful’, drive the sword into his belly. When that first attempt to free himself from tyranny fails he will submit calmly while his friends bind up the dreadful wound and remove the weapon. Once more alone, he will tear open his body with his bare hands and resolutely disembowel himself.
Cato, true until death. Cato, so inflexible in his righteousness that he was ready to kill himself not once, but twice. Cato, who had no self-pity, but grieved only for Rome and its venerable institutions. Cato, who, on the night of his death, read of the death of Socrates and who, like the Athenian philosopher, chose not to save himself from a death made inevitable by the mismatch between his own integrity and the imperfection of the world he inhabited. This Cato was venerated alike by pagan Rome and Christian Europe. Addison describes him as ‘godlike’, an epithet first applied to him by Lucan nearly seventeen hundred years earlier. Of his contemporaries, only Julius Caesar, whose most inveterate opponent he was, denied his virtue. Cicero and Brutus both eulogized him. Horace praised his ‘fierce heart (#litres_trial_promo)’. Virgil imagined for him an illustrious afterlife as lawgiver to the virtuous dead. To later generations of Romans, especially to the Stoics who formed the opposition to Nero’s tyranny, he was an exemplar, a philosopher (though he left no philosophical writings), and the embodiment of their ideal. The Christian Fathers saw him as the paragon of pagan virtue. To Lactantius he was ‘the prince of (#litres_trial_promo) Roman wisdom’. To Jerome he had a glory ‘which could neither (#litres_trial_promo) be increased by praise nor diminished by censure’. Dante placed Brutus, who was Cato’s son-in-law and political heir, in the lowest circle of hell with Judas Iscariot, in the very mouth of Satan, to be eaten alive ceaselessly through all eternity, and he condemned others who had, like Cato, committed the sin of self-murder to an afterlife of unremitting mute agony in the form of trees whose twigs ooze blood. But Cato is exempt. Despite being a suicide and a pagan he is the custodian of Dante’s Purgatory and is destined eventually for a place in Paradise. In the Convivio Dante goes even further. Cato divorced his wife Marcia so that she could be married to his political ally Hortensius. After Hortensius’ death he remarried her. The story has proved troubling to most Christian moralists, but Dante treats the couple’s reunion as an allegory of the noble soul’s return to God: ‘And what man (#litres_trial_promo) on earth is more worthy to signify God than Cato? Surely no one.’
It was his intransigence that rendered Cato all but divine. Sophocles, Alcibiades’ contemporary and fellow Athenian, had described the tragic hero as one who refuses to compromise or conform but remains, however beset by trouble, as immovable as a rock (#litres_trial_promo) pounded by stormy seas, or as the one tree which, when all the others preserve themselves by bending before a river in flood, stays rigidly upright and is therefore destroyed root and branch. Cato was as steadfast as that rock, as self-destructively stubborn as that tree. An Achilles, not an Odysseus, he was the antithesis of Alcibiades, the infinitely adaptable, infinitely persuasive charmer. Cato never charmed, never changed.
He has been revered as a hero, but he put all his energies into thwarting the aspirations of the heroic great men among his contemporaries, and into attempting to save his fellow Romans from the folly of the hero-worship he so passionately denounced. The defining drama of his life was his resolute opposition to Julius Caesar. Friedrich Nietzsche considered Caesar to be one of the few people in human history to have rivalled Alcibiades’ particular claims to superman status, the two of them being Nietzsche’s prime examples of ‘those marvellously incomprehensible (#litres_trial_promo) and unfathomable men, those enigmatic men predestined for victory and the seduction of others’. Cato was their opposite. Obstinately tenacious of a lost cause, he was predestined for defeat and temperamentally incapable of seduction.
Caesar – adroit and charismatic politician, ruthless, brilliant conqueror – was a hero of an instantly recognizable type. Cato’s claim to heroic status is of quite a different nature. He is the willing sacrifice, the patiently enduring victim. His glory is not that of the brilliant winner but of the loser doggedly pursuing a course that leads inevitably to his own downfall. Small wonder that Christian theologians found his character so admirable, his story so inspiring. He embodied the values of asceticism and self-denial that Jesus Christ and his followers borrowed from pagan philosophers and, like Christ’s, his life can be seen with hindsight as a steady progress towards a martyr’s death.
That death retrospectively invested his career and character with a melancholy grandeur that compensated for the glamour which, alive, he notably lacked. Curmudgeonly in manner, awkward and disobliging in his political dealings and his private relationships alike, he sought neither his contemporaries’ affection nor posterity’s admiration. Yet he received both. Cicero, who knew him well, wrote that he ‘alone outweighs (#litres_trial_promo) a hundred thousand in my eyes’. ‘I crawl (#litres_trial_promo) in earthly slime,’ wrote Michel de Montaigne, some sixteen hundred years after Cato’s death, ‘but I do not fail to note way up in the clouds the matchless heights of certain heroic souls’, the loftiest of them all being Cato, ‘that great man who was truly a model which Nature chose to show how far human virtue and fortitude can reach’.
He had a personality of tremendous force. His contemporaries were awed and intimidated by him – not as the Athenians had feared the capricious bully Alcibiades, more nearly as the moneylenders in the Temple feared the righteous and indignant Christ. His mind was precise and vigorous and he was an orator of furious talent. He was deferred to, by the soldiers he commanded, by the crowds he stirred or subdued, by those of his peers who recognized and admired his selflessness and integrity; but he was also a troublemaker and an oddity. He was a well-known figure in Rome, but one who inspired irritation and ridicule as well as respect.
He was a nuisance. He embarrassed and annoyed his peers by loudly denouncing corrupt practices that everyone else had come to accept as normal. He had no discretion, no urbanity. He looked peculiar. He habitually appeared in the Forum with bare feet and wearing no tunic beneath his toga, an outfit that seemed to his contemporaries at best indecorous, at worst indecent. When challenged about it he pointed to the statue of Romulus (represented similarly underdressed) and said that what was good enough for the founder of Rome was good enough for him. When he became praetor (a senior magistrate) his judgements were acknowledged to be scrupulously correct; but there were those who muttered that he disgraced the office by hearing cases – even those solemn ones in which important men stood to incur the death penalty – looking so raffish, so uncouth.
He never laughed, seldom smiled and had no small talk. He stayed up late, all night sometimes, drinking heavily; but his nightlife was not of the gracious and hospitable kind that his fellow aristocrats found congenial. Rather, he would engage in vehement debate with philosophers who tended to encourage him in his eccentricities. Rigorously ascetic, he disdained to think of his own comfort, and had a way of undermining other people’s. He never rode if he could walk. When he travelled with friends he would stalk along beside their horses on his bare and callused feet, his head uncovered, talking indefatigably in the harsh, powerful voice that was his most effective political weapon. Few people felt easy in his company; he was too judgemental and too much inclined to speak his mind. To his posthumous admirers his disturbing ability to search out others’ imperfections was among his godlike attributes. Montaigne called him one ‘in whose sight (#litres_trial_promo) the very madmen would hide their faults’. But his contemporaries shunned him for it. He was his community’s self-appointed conscience, and the voice of conscience is one to which most people prefer not to listen. His incorruptibility dismayed his rivals: ‘the more clearly (#litres_trial_promo) they saw the rectitude of his practice’, writes Plutarch, ‘the more distressed were they at the difficulty of imitating it’. All the great men of Rome ‘were hostile to Cato (#litres_trial_promo), feeling that they were put to shame by him’. Even great Pompey was said to have been unnerved by him. ‘Pompey admired him (#litres_trial_promo) when he was present but … as if he must render account of his command while Cato was there, he was glad to send him away.’
His life (95–46 BC) coincided with the last half century of the Roman Republic, a time of chronic political instability and convulsive change. It was a time when the institutions of the state had ceased to reflect the real distribution of power within it. Rome and all its provinces were nominally ruled by the Senate and the people of Rome; but by the end of Cato’s life, Rome’s dominions extended from the Euphrates to the Atlantic, from the Sahara to the North Sea. The constitution, evolved within a city-state, provided none of the machinery required to subdue, police, and administer an international empire. The prosecution of foreign wars and the exploitation of the conquered provinces required great armies and teams of officials – none of which Rome’s institutions could provide. The provinces were effectively autonomous states, far larger and frequently richer than the metropolis, with their own separate administrations. The pro-consuls who conquered and governed them at their own expense and to their own profit, who were often absent from Rome for years on end acting as effectively independent rulers in their allotted territories, and who returned at last enormously wealthy and to the adulation of the people, had, in reality, infinitely more clout than the institutions they were supposed to serve. When Pompey celebrated his triumph on returning from Asia in 61 BC his chariot was preceded by the captive families of three conquered kings. He boasted of having killed or subjected over twelve million people and of increasing Rome’s public revenues by 70 per cent. There was no room in the Republic for such a man, no legitimate channel for his influence or proper way in which he could exert his power. The Athenians had been afraid when Alcibiades demonstrated his prowess, his wealth, and his international connections at Olympia. Just so were the Roman republicans apprehensive as first Pompey, and subsequently Crassus and Caesar, grew so great they loomed over the state like unstable colossi.
Cato was the little man who dared oppose these giants, the Prometheus nobly defying the ruthless gods (one of whom Caesar would soon become) for the sake of oppressed humanity. Armed only with his voice, his knowledge of the law and his unshakeable certainty of his own rectitude, he resolutely obstructed their every attempt to have their actual power acknowledged. Whether he was wise to do so is open to question. Theodor Mommsen, the great nineteenth-century German historian, called Cato an ‘unbending dogmatical fool’ (#litres_trial_promo). Even Cicero, who thought so highly of him and whose political ally he was throughout most of their contemporaneous careers, found him exasperating at times. Cicero was a pragmatist, a sophisticated political operator and a practitioner of the art of the possible. Cato, by contrast, loudly and dogmatically insisting on the letter of ancient and anachronistic laws, repeatedly damaged his own cause by exposing his allies’ misdemeanours and defending his opponents’ rights. To many commentators, ancient and modern alike, it has appeared that, had it not been for Cato’s dogged refusal to compromise his political principles, or to allow anyone else to do so without being publicly shamed, the Senate might have been able to come to terms with Julius Caesar in 49 BC, that Caesar need never have led his troops across the Rubicon, that thousands of lives might have been saved.
But Cato’s failings are identical with his claims to heroic status. What in the man was awkward was transmuted by time and changing political circumstance to become, in the context of the legend that grew up around him, evidence of his superhuman fortitude. His obstinate refusal to take note of historical change or political expediency are manifestations of his magnificent staunchness. His tactlessness and naivety are the tokens of his integrity. His unpopularity proves his resolution. Even his downfall is a measure of his selfless nobility. He opposes Julius Caesar – by common consent one of Western history’s great men – and is inevitably defeated by him; but his defeat makes him even greater than that great opponent. He dies as a flawed and vulnerable person, and rises again as a marmoreal ideal. Seneca, writing in the next century, imagined the king of the gods coming down among men in search of instances of human grandeur. ‘I do not know (#litres_trial_promo) what nobler sight Jupiter could find on earth,’ he wrote, ‘than the spectacle of Cato … standing erect amid the ruins of the commonwealth.’
His life began and ended in times of civil war. When he was seven years old the Roman general Sulla marched on Rome at the head of his legions, demanding the leadership of the campaign against King Mithridates of Pontus. The Senate capitulated. Sulla then departed for the East, leaving his followers to be killed by his political enemies. Five years later, after having subdued all Asia Minor, he returned to Italy and fought his way to Rome, confronting and defeating the armies of the consuls. Once he had taken the city, the people granted him absolute power. He set about putting to death anyone who had opposed him. His proscriptions, the terrible lists of those outlawed with a price on their heads that served as an incitement to mass murder, were posted in the Forum. Forty senators and at least sixteen hundred others (nine thousand (#litres_trial_promo) according to one source) were named. Some were formally executed, some murdered by Sulla’s paid killers, some torn apart by the mob. Cato was thirteen at the time. His father, by then dead, had been favoured by Sulla. Plutarch, who wrote his Life of Cato a century and a half after the latter’s death but whose sources included accounts (subsequently lost) written by Cato’s contemporaries, relates that the boy’s tutor took him to pay court to the dictator. Sulla’s house was an ‘Inferno’, where his opponents were tortured, and on whose walls their severed heads were displayed. Early in his life Cato witnessed at first hand what befalls a state whose constitution has been overturned by a military dictator.
He bore an illustrious name. He was the great-grandson of Cato the Censor, a man who was remembered as an embodiment of the stern virtues that those who came later liked to imagine had been characteristic of the Roman Republic in its prime. The Censor was a byword for his asceticism and his moral rigour. He travelled everywhere on foot, even when he came to hold high office. At home he worked alongside his farm labourers, bare-chested in summer and in winter wearing only a sleeveless smock, and was content with a cold breakfast, a frugal dinner and a humble cottage to live in. Wastage was abhorrent to him. To his rigorous avoidance of it he sacrificed both beauty and kindness. He disliked gardens: land was for tilling and grazing. When his slaves became too old to work, he sold them rather than feed useless mouths. In office he was as harsh on others as he was on himself. When he discovered that one of his subordinates had been buying prisoners of war as slaves (a form of insider dealing that was improper but not illegal) the man hanged himself rather than suffer the Censor’s rebuke. Grim, graceless and incorruptible, the elder Cato was unpopular but generally revered. The younger Cato, or so several of his contemporaries believed, took him as a model.
His early career followed the conventional path for a young man of Rome’s ruling class. When Crassus put down the revolt of the slaves under Spartacus Cato served as a volunteer in his army, his zeal and self-discipline, according to Plutarch, providing a striking contrast with the ‘effeminacy and luxury (#litres_trial_promo)’ of his fellow officers. Like his virtuous ancestor, who ‘never embraced (#litres_trial_promo) his wife except when a loud peal of thunder occurred’, he was sexually abstemious, remaining a virgin until his first marriage (something unusual enough to arouse comment). Surly and forbidding in company, in private he drilled himself rigorously for the political career before him. He frequented philosophers, especially the Stoic Antipater, ‘and devoted himself (#litres_trial_promo) especially to ethical and political doctrines’. He trained his voice and disciplined his body not only by exercising hard but also by a programme of self-mortification involving exposure to all weathers.
When he was twenty-eight he stood for election as one of the twenty-four military tribunes chosen each year. In canvassing for support he shamed and irritated his fellow candidates by being the only one of them to obey the law forbidding the employment of nomenclatores, useful people (usually slaves) whose job it was to murmur in the candidate’s ear the name of the man whose vote he was soliciting. Despite this self-imposed handicap he won his place and was posted to Macedonia to command a legion. He proved himself an efficient and popular officer. When his year’s term of office was up he made a grand tour of Asia Minor before returning home, stopping at Ephesus to pay his respects to Pompey. To the surprise of all observers, Rome’s greatest commander (Caesar’s career was only just beginning) rose to greet the young man, advanced towards him and gave him his hand ‘as though to honour (#litres_trial_promo) a superior’.
Cato was still young, his political career had yet to begin, but he was already somebody to whom the mighty deferred. Quite how he achieved that status is mysterious. He was not physically remarkable: none of the ancient authors considered his looks worth describing. A portrait bust shows him with a lean and bony face, a serviceable container for a mind but not a thing of beauty. He came of a distinguished family, but so did plenty of other hopeful young Romans. He had inherited some money: so did most men of his class. He had done decent service in the army, but he was never to prove a particularly gifted warrior. His distinguishing characteristics were those of inflexibility and outspokenness, scarcely the best qualifications for worldly success. He was more studious than most, but what was impressive about him seems to have had little to do with his intellectual attainments. Something marked him out, something very different from the dangerous brilliance of Achilles or Alcibiades’ winning glamour, something his contemporaries called ‘authority’.
According to Plutarch, he had already been a known and respected figure in his early teens. When Sulla was appointing leaders for the two teams of boys who performed the ritual mock battle, the Troy Game, one team rejected the youth appointed and clamoured for Cato. In adulthood his nature, wrote Plutarch, was ‘inflexible, imperturbable (#litres_trial_promo), and altogether steadfast’. His peers were awed by it. His acknowledged incorruptibility gave him a kind of power that was independent of any formal rank. From his first entry into public life the amount of influence he was able to exert and the deference he inspired were unprecedented for one so comparatively young. His ascendancy over the Roman political scene has been described by the German historian Christian Meier as ‘one of the strangest (#litres_trial_promo) phenomena in the whole of history’. Inexplicable in terms of his official or social status, it can only have derived from the extraordinary force of his personality.
By the time he returned to Rome from Asia he was thirty, and therefore eligible to stand for election as one of the twenty quaestors chosen annually. The constitution of Republican Rome was a complicated hybrid, evolved over centuries. The Greek historian Polybius, who had been held hostage in Rome in the previous century, had described it as being at once monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy. His analysis is not exact – no one within the Republic had the absolute lifelong power of a monarch – but near enough. The consuls, of whom two at a time were elected for a year’s term, seemed to Polybius like kings. Originally the consuls had been military commanders and generally absent from the metropolis, but by Cato’s day it had become normal for them to remain in Rome for their year of office, departing at the end of it each to his own province (traditionally chosen by lot), which he would govern for a further year.
The consuls were the senior members of the Senate, but they were not prime ministers. The state was administered by annually elected officials – in ascending order of seniority, quaestors, aediles, praetors and consuls – each of whom held power independently of all the rest. There might be alliances between officeholders, but there was no unified government, no cabinet of ministers working in concert. Anyone who had ever held office became a lifelong member of the Senate. Theoretically, any free adult male could present himself for election to office once he attained the prescribed age. In practice, only the rich could afford to do so. Election campaigns were expensive; bribery was commonplace; and if it cost a lot of money to gain office, it cost far more to hold it. Officials were expected to provide their own staff, to lay on public games and maintain public buildings, all at their own expense. And not only were officeholders obliged to spend money copiously: they were debarred, for the rest of their lives, from earning it. It was forbidden for a senator to engage in business. Besides, to win elections it was necessary to have the right connections. Inevitably, the majority of officeholders and senators were drawn from a small pool of families, of which Cato’s was one, of substantial wealth and long-established influence.
Rome was nonetheless a democracy. The Senate was not a legislative body, its members could propose laws, but those laws were passed or rejected by the people of Rome (that is, the male, adult, unenslaved people) voting in person. And the people’s interests were protected by the tribunes of the people, elected officials (ten a year) who shared with the consuls and praetors the right to propose laws to the voters, who had the devastating power of the veto – a single tribune could block any measure – and whose persons were sacrosanct.
In Cato’s lifetime this ramshackle and mutually inconvenient assemblage of institutions began to fall apart. The upholders of the ancient constitution – of whom Cato was to become the most passionately committed – struggled to enforce the elaborate rules that were designed, above all, to ensure that no one man should ever achieve too much power. They failed. Defying the Senate, making use of the tribunes and appealing direct to the people, first Pompey, then Crassus, and finally Julius Caesar demanded and obtained powers that vastly exceeded any that the constitution allowed. It was Cato’s life’s work to oppose them.
From his first entry into public life Cato signalled his punctilious regard for the workings of the constitution. To most candidates the post of quaestor, the most junior magistracy, was primarily the portal through which a man entered the Senate – not so much a job as a rite of passage. In 65 BC Cato astonished all observers by qualifying himself for the position before applying for it. The quaestors were responsible for the administration of public funds. According to Plutarch, Cato ‘read the law (#litres_trial_promo) relating to the quaestorships, learned all the details of the office from those who had had experience in it, and formed a general idea of its power and scope’. Once elected he assumed control of the treasury, instituting a purge of the clerks who had been accepting bribes and embezzling money with impunity. Next he set about paying those, however insignificant, to whom the state was indebted, and ‘rigorously and inexorably’ demanding payment from those, however influential, who were its debtors – a policy whose simple rectitude appeared to his contemporaries breathtakingly novel.
The society in which Cato lived was described by his contemporary Sallust (who was himself convicted of extortion) as one in which ‘instead of modesty (#litres_trial_promo), incorruptibility and honesty, shamelessness, bribery and rapacity held sway’. Sulla’s coup, the ensuing civil wars and his reign of terror had left the state punch-drunk and reeling. More recently and insidiously, a series of constitutional reforms and counter-reforms had undermined the perceived legitimacy of established institutions. Meanwhile wealth flooded into Rome from the conquered provinces, but there was no mechanism whereby the state could put it to good use and few channels for its redistribution among the populace. Rome had no revenue service. Romans paid no tax, but the inhabitants of the overseas provinces did. The money was collected by tax farmers, who paid dearly for the right to do the job and who set the level of tribute exacted high enough to ensure themselves handsome profits. The Roman provincial governors who oversaw their operations took their cut as well. Corruption was endemic throughout the system. The records of Rome’s law courts are full of cases of returning governors facing charges of extortion. It was a time when the best lacked all conviction: Sallust denounced those magnates who squandered their wealth shamefully on fantastically grandiose projects for beautifying their private grounds – ‘they levelled mountains (#litres_trial_promo) and built upon the seas’ – instead of spending it honourably for the public’s good, and Cicero inveighed against aristocrats who chose to retire to their country estates and breed rare goldfish rather than wrestle with the intractable problems besetting the state.
In such a society Cato, scrupulously balancing his books, shone out. Heroes of a flashier sort disdain accountancy. In Alcibiades’ youth, when his guardian Pericles was accused of using public money for his own private ends, Alcibiades told him ‘You should be seeking (#litres_trial_promo) not how to render, but how not to render an accounting’ and advised him to divert attention from his alleged embezzlements by provoking a major war. But Cato was a man who believed that right and wrong were absolute and non-negotiable, that ethics was a discipline as clear and exact as arithmetic. In paintings of his death it is conventional for the artist to include, along with the sword and the book, an abacus, the tool of the accountant and token of his absolute integrity.
Under Cato’s administration the treasury became an instrument of justice. There were still at large several men known to have been used as assassins by Sulla at the time of his murderous proscriptions. ‘All men hated them (#litres_trial_promo) as accursed and polluted wretches,’ says Plutarch, ‘but no one had the courage to punish them.’ No one, that is, except Cato. He demanded that they repay the large sums with which they had been rewarded for their killings, and publicly denounced them. Shortly thereafter they finally came to trial.
Cato possessed, writes Plutarch, ‘that form of goodness (#litres_trial_promo) which consists in rigid justice that will not bend to clemency or favour’. Eccentric as his straight dealing was perceived to be, it won him a degree of respect quite disproportionate to his actual achievements. His truth-telling became a by-word. ‘When speaking of matters that were strange and incredible, people would say, as though using a proverb “This is not (#litres_trial_promo) to be believed even though Cato says it”.’ Any defendant who attempted to have him removed from a jury was immediately assumed to be guilty. His evident probity gave him a degree of power out of all proportion to his official rank. It was said that he had given the relatively lowly office of quaestor the dignity normally attached to that of consul.
He had become a notable player in the political game. That game, as played in the last years of the Roman Republic, was a rough one. Rome had no police force. Prominent people never went out alone. In good times they were accompanied wherever they went by an entourage of clients and servants. In bad times they had their own trains of guards-cum-enforcers, troops of armed slaves and gladiators, in some cases so numerous as to amount to private armies. Political dispute developed, rapidly and often, into physical conflict. To read the ancient historians’ account of the period is to be repeatedly astonished by the contrast between the grandeur and efficacy of Rome’s rule over its expanding empire and the rowdiness and violence at its very heart. The Forum was not only parliament, law court, sports arena, theatre and place of worship. It was also, frequently, a battlefield. The temples that surrounded it, which were used on occasion as debating chambers or polling stations, could and frequently did serve as fortresses occupied and defended by fighting men. During his career Cato was to be spat upon, stripped of his toga, pelted with dung, dragged from the rostrum (the platform in the Forum from which orators addressed the people), beaten up and hauled off to prison. He escaped with his life, but he was present on occasions when others did not. The making of a political speech, in his lifetime, was an act that called for considerable courage.
His quaestorship over, he was an assiduous senator, always the first to arrive in the morning at the Senate House and the last to leave, attending every session to ensure no corrupt measure could be debated without his being there to oppose it. But in 65 BC he resolved to take a reading holiday. He set off for his country estate, accompanied by a group of his favourite philosophers and several asses loaded down with books. The projected idyll – quiet reading and high-minded discussion in a bucolic setting – was aborted. On the road Cato met Metellus Nepos, brother-in-law and loyal supporter of Pompey. Learning that Nepos was on his way to Rome to stand for election as a tribune of the people, Cato decided that it was his duty to return forthwith and oppose him.
It was an edgy time in Rome. Two years previously, during Cato’s quaestorship, a group of influential men had plotted a coup d’état. The plot was aborted, but those suspected of instigating it were all still at liberty, all highly visible on the political scene. The ancient historians differ as to who they were. Sallust identifies the ringleader as Catiline, a charismatic, dangerous man whom Cicero credited with a phenomenal gift for corrupting others and a corresponding one for ‘stimulating his associates (#litres_trial_promo) into vigorous activity’. Catiline was a glamorous figure: nineteen hundred years later Charles Baudelaire was to identify him, along with Alcibiades and Julius Caesar, as being one of the first and most brilliant of the dandies. Scandals clung to his name. He was said to have seduced a vestal virgin, even to have murdered his own stepson to please a mistress. His sulphurous reputation had not prevented him achieving the rank of praetor, but his first attempt to win the consulship was thwarted when he was accused of extortion. Sallust maintains that, prevented from attaining power by legitimate means, Catiline plotted to assassinate the successful candidates and make himself consul by force. Suetonius, on the other hand, asserts that the chief conspirators were Crassus and Caesar.
Crassus was a man some seventeen years older than Cato who had grown fabulously rich by profiting from others’ misfortunes. He had laid the foundations of his wealth at the time of Sulla’s proscriptions, buying up the confiscated property of murdered men at rock-bottom prices. He had multiplied it by acquiring burnt-out houses for next to nothing (in Rome, a cramped and largely wooden city, fires were frequent and widespread) and rebuilding them with his workforce of hundreds of specially trained slaves until he was said to own most of Rome. A genial host, a generous dispenser of loans and a shrewd patron of the potentially useful, he ensured that his money bought him immense influence. No one, he is reported to have said, could call himself rich until he was able to support an army on his income. He was one who could.
Julius Caesar was one of Crassus’ many debtors. Five years older than Cato and politically and temperamentally his opposite, he was already noted for his military successes, his sexual promiscuity and his fabulous munificence – all of which endeared him to the populace. As aedile in 65 BC, the year of the alleged conspiracy, he staged at his own expense a series of wild-beast hunts and games of unprecedented magnificence, filling the Forum with temporary colonnades and covering the Capitoline Hill with sideshows. In Alcibiades’ lifetime, Plato had warned ‘any politician who seeks (#litres_trial_promo) to please the people excessively … is doing so only in order to establish himself as a tyrant’. Whether or not he was actually plotting sedition, Caesar was already one of the handful of men who threatened to destabilize the Roman state – as Alcibiades had once undermined the stability of Athens – simply by being too glittering, too popular, too great.
But though Catiline, Crassus and Caesar were all present in Rome when Cato returned in 63 BC to stand for election, it was Pompey whom the guardians of republican principles were watching most apprehensively. It was because Metellus Nepos was Pompey’s man that Cato had felt it so imperative to oppose him. Pompey had treated Cato graciously in Ephesus, but Cato was not the man to be won over by a display of good manners, however flattering. Cato was a legalist. His political philosophy was based on the premise that only by a strict and absolute adherence to the letter of the law could the Republic be preserved. Pompey’s entire career had been conducted in the law’s defiance.
When only twenty-three he had raised an army of his own and appointed himself its commander. When he returned triumphant from Spain in 71 BC he had insisted on being allowed to stand for consul – the highest office in the state – despite the fact that he was ten years too young and had held no previous elected office, and he had backed up his demand by bringing his legions menacingly close to the city. Sulla had drastically reduced the powers of the tribunes and enhanced those of the Senate. As consul in 70 BC, Pompey had reversed the balance. In subsequent years he had seen to it that a fair number of the tribunes were his supporters and he worked through them, as Caesar was to do later, to bypass the increasingly unhappy Senate and appeal directly to the electorate for consent to the expansion of his privileges and power.
In 66 BC a tribune had proposed and seen through a law granting Pompey extraordinary and unprecedented powers to rid the eastern Mediterranean of pirates. In the following year another tribune had proposed that he should be granted command of the campaign against Mithridates of Pontus (Sulla’s old adversary who had risen against Rome again). Military commands brought glory, which in turn brought popularity. They brought tribute money and ransoms and loot that could be used to buy power. Military commanders also had armies (which the Senate did not). Pompey had been spectacularly successful, both against the pirates and against Mithridates. There were plenty who remembered that he had begun his career as one of Sulla’s commanders, that it was Sulla who had named him ‘Pompey the Great’. And Sulla, who had returned from defeating Mithridates to make war on Rome itself, had set a terrible precedent. In 63 BC the senators awaited the return of their victorious general with mounting fear.
Cato and Metellus Nepos were both among those elected to hold office as tribunes in the following year. At once Cato resumed his role as self-appointed guardian of public morality, while simultaneously demonstrating how unable, and indeed unwilling, he was to act the wily politician. He accused one of his own political allies, the consul Murena, of bribery. He was almost certainly correct in doing so. The bribing of voters was so commonplace that Cato’s own refusal to practise it made him highly unpopular. But those who had assumed that Cato was their ally were exasperated. Cicero, the celebrated advocate and the other great luminary of the constitutionalist party, defended Murena (and got him off), remarking acidly in court that Cato had acted ‘as if he were living (#litres_trial_promo) in Plato’s Republic, rather than among the dregs of Romulus’ descendants’ – a remark designed less to lament the imperfection of modern life than to reproach the incorruptible Cato for his political ineptitude.
Later that year, though, Cato got the chance to demonstrate that what he lacked in adroitness he made up for in passion and persuasiveness. For years he had been developing his powers of oratory, rigorously preparing himself for his calling, and he had, besides, two gifts worth more than any acquired rhetorical skill. One was an exceptionally powerful voice. It was loud and penetrating enough for him to be able to address enormous crowds, and he had trained and exercised it until he had the stamina and the lung power to speak all day at full volume. The other was ferocity. He is reported to have believed that political oratory was a discipline as ‘warlike’ as the defence of a city, and he put his theory into practice. His speeches were performances of thunderous belligerence, full of devastating energy, of aggression and of righteous rage. He was soon to have occasion to employ his talent.
Catiline had once more stood for election as consul and lost. Whether or not he had conspired against the state two years earlier, this time he certainly did. According to Sallust he bound his followers to him with a solemn ritual during which they were all required to drink from a cup full of human blood, and he prepared to lead an armed revolt.
Cicero was consul. He heard – from his wife, who had heard it from a female friend, who had heard it from her lover, who was one of Catiline’s fellow conspirators – that Catiline’s coup was imminent. Unable to act on such hearsay evidence, Cicero provided himself with a bodyguard of hired thugs and ostentatiously wore a breastplate in public, as though to announce that he knew he and his fellow officeholders were under threat and that he was ready to defend himself. Catiline, too, had his personal guard, made up, according to a contemporary, of ‘troops of criminals (#litres_trial_promo) and reprobates of every kind’. The situation was doubly dangerous. The prospect of an uprising was alarming in itself. Even worse, to Cato and like-minded senators, was the probability that Pompey would use it as a pretext for bringing his legions back to Italy and marching on Rome – ostensibly to suppress the revolt, in fact to seize power for himself. It was among the most essential provisions of the Roman constitution that no army should ever be brought into Rome, and that a military leader must lay aside his command (and the legal immunity it gave him) before entering the city. When in Rome, all Romans were civilians and subject to the law. Sulla had breached that rule, with terrible consequences for the Republic. There was a real prospect that Pompey, Sulla’s protégé, might follow his lead.
In October there was an uprising in Etruria. In November an armed gang attempted to force their way into Cicero’s house before dawn, apparently to assassinate him, but were driven off by his guards. In an atmosphere of mounting panic rumours circulated that the conspirators intended to burn the city to the ground. The Senate declared a state of emergency, but still there was no concrete evidence against anyone. Catiline defiantly took his seat in the Senate. No one would sit next to him. Shortly afterwards he left to join the rebels in the countryside. At last a letter was intercepted naming the leading conspirators. On 3 December the five of them who were still in Rome were arrested.
What was to be done with them? Two days later the Senate met in a temple on the edge of the Forum. Outside were crowds whose shouts and murmurs could be heard from within the chamber, crowds that included many of Catiline’s supporters. Around the building, and in all the other temples in the Forum, were stationed Cicero’s armed guard. It was a dangerous and solemn occasion. The first speakers all demanded ‘the extreme penalty’, clearly meaning death. Then came the turn of Julius Caesar.
Caesar’s speech on that momentous December day was elegant, tightly argued, and – given that he himself was widely suspected of having instigated the earlier plot and of complicity in the current one – coolly audacious. Summary execution was illegal, he argued. The conspirators deserved punishment, but to kill them without legal sanction would be to set a dangerous precedent. He advocated life imprisonment ‘under the severest terms’ instead. So persuasive was he (and so intimidating) that all the following speakers endorsed his opinion, and of those who had spoken earlier several abjectly claimed that by the ‘extreme penalty’ they had meant not execution, but precisely the kind of sentence Caesar was now recommending. The outcome of the debate seemed certain. At this point, very late in the proceedings because senators spoke in order of seniority and he was one of the youngest and lowest ranking, Cato intervened.
His speech was electrifying. Caesar had been suave: Cato was enraged. With the furious probity of a Saint-Just he denounced the pusillanimous senators. Sarcastic and passionate by turn, he sneered at them – ‘You, who have always (#litres_trial_promo) valued your houses, villas, statues and paintings more highly than our country’ – and fiercely drove them on: ‘Now in the name of the immortal gods I call upon you … Wake up at last and lay hold of the reins of the state!’ He mocked, he ranted, he painted a luridly dramatic picture of the dangers besetting the commonwealth. Finally, with awful solemnity, he demanded that the conspirators be put to death. The potency of his performance was demonstrated by its effect. When he had finished the senators, one after another, rose and went to stand beside him to signal their agreement.
Caesar, who only minutes before had held the assembly in his hand, was left isolated. For once losing his famous imperturbability, Caesar protested furiously. There was a fracas, during which (according to some sources) Cato accused Caesar of complicity with the conspirators. Cicero’s guard intervened, drawing their swords. Caesar was nearly killed in the ensuing mêlée. Eventually some kind of order was restored. Caesar left. The Senate stood firm behind Cato. The conspirators were led, one by one, across the Forum, through the agitated crowd (which included some of their confederates) to the place of punishment. There, in an underground chamber ‘hideous and fearsome (#litres_trial_promo) to behold’, they were strangled. A few weeks later Catiline himself was killed in battle.
So began the essential drama of Cato’s life. ‘For a long time (#litres_trial_promo),’ wrote Sallust, ‘no one at all appeared in Rome who was great. But within my own memory there have been two men of towering merit, Cato and Caesar.’ Two thousand years on Caesar is by far the more celebrated of the two – thanks in part to his skilful fostering of his own fame, in part to our culture’s infatuation with military conquest. But to those who knew them, the two looked evenly matched – a comparable pair of brilliantly gifted men. They clashed for the first time in the debate over the conspirators’ sentence. From that day until his death seventeen years later Cato was to remain Caesar’s most inveterate political opponent.
Each of them was the prime representative of one of two tendencies in Roman political life (to call them parties would be to suggest a degree of cohesiveness notably absent from the political scene). Cato was to become the most eloquent spokesman of the Optimates, Caesar the most successful of the Populares. Optimates and Populares alike were oligarchs drawn from the same exclusive group of rich and well-descended Romans; but they differed in the ways in which they played the complicated political system of the Republic. The Populares were soldiers and empire-builders, or their clients and admirers, who tended to bypass the Senate by enlisting the support of the tribunes and through them of the electorate at large. Like Alcibiades, they were aristocratic populists, distrusted by their peers but adored by an electorate to whom they offered the violent excitement and huge potential profits of warfare. The Optimates – civilians at heart – were the defenders of the power of the Senate, and sticklers for the rules designed to uphold the senators’ dignity and, most importantly, to ensure that military commanders were prevented from using their armies to seize personal power.
Within a week of the executions of the Catilinarian conspirators the new tribunes, Cato and Metellus Nepos among them, took office, and so did Caesar as praetor. At once Nepos fulfilled Cato’s worst fears by proposing that Pompey, his patron, be recalled to Rome with his legions ‘to restore order’. When Nepos’ proposal was discussed in the Senate Caesar supported it, but Cato raged against it with such vehemence that some observers thought he was out of his mind. As a tribune he had the right to veto the measure and he announced that he would do so, swearing passionately ‘that while he lived (#litres_trial_promo) Pompey should not enter the city with an armed force’.
It was no empty piece of rhetoric. It was widely believed that the Populares would have Cato prevented by whatever means were necessary, up to and including murder, from blocking their way. He would have to declare his veto formally the following day, when the people would be asked to vote on the measure in the Forum. That night he slept deeply, but he was alone of his household in doing so. According to Plutarch, ‘great dejection (#litres_trial_promo) and fear reigned, his friends took no food and watched all night with one another in futile discussion on his behalf, while his wife and sisters wailed and wept’.
It was customary for friends and political allies to call for an officeholder at his house in the morning and escort him down to the Forum as a public demonstration of support. But on the day of the vote, so effectively had Nepos and Caesar cowed their opponents, Cato had only one companion of note, another tribune by the name of Thermus. As the two of them, attended only by a handful of servants, made their way towards the place of assembly they met well-wishers who exhorted them to be on their guard but who fearfully declined to accompany them. On arriving they found the Forum packed with people whom Nepos had succeeded in rousing to his cause and surrounded by his and Caesar’s armed slaves. (Caesar owned several gladiatorial training schools and had brought an unprecedented number of gladiators to Rome for the games he staged in 65 BC: the games over, he kept the surviving slaves around him as an armed guard.)
Nepos and Caesar were already seated in a commanding position on the exceptionally high and steep podium of the Temple of Castor. On the temple steps a troop of gladiators was massed. Seeing them, Cato exclaimed, ‘What a bold man (#litres_trial_promo), and what a coward, to levy such an army against a single unarmed and defenceless person!’ Accompanied only by Thermus, he pushed through the hostile crowd. The gladiators, disconcerted by his courage, made way for him. Climbing onto the podium, he brusquely positioned himself between Nepos and Caesar.
A law upon which the people were to vote had first to be read out loud to them. A herald prepared to declaim Nepos’ proposed measure. Cato, announcing his veto, stopped him. Nepos, in defiance of law and custom, attempted to override the veto. Snatching the document from the herald, he began to read it himself. Cato ripped it from him. Nepos continued to recite it from memory. Thermus, Cato’s sole supporter, clapped a hand over his mouth.
The tussle was taking place in full view of an excited and increasingly volatile crowd. People were yelling out encouragement for one side or another as though watching a gladiatorial show, and increasing numbers were shouting for Cato. ‘They urged one another (#litres_trial_promo) to stay and band themselves together and not betray their liberty and the man who was striving to defend it.’ Furious at being so thwarted, Nepos signalled to his armed guards, who charged into the mob with fearsome yells, precipitating a riot that lasted for several hours. It was a day of brutal mayhem. At one point Nepos, having temporarily regained control of the Forum, attempted to force what would have been an illegal vote. At another Cato, standing dangerously exposed on the tribunal, was stoned by the crowd and was only saved from perhaps fatal injury by the intervention of the consul Murena (the man he had accused of bribery), who wrapped him in his own toga and dragged him into the shelter of a temple.
Nepos’ followers were eventually driven out. Cato addressed the people and, battered and exhausted as he must have been, he spoke with such fervour that he won them over entirely. The Senate assembled again and rallied behind him, condemning Nepos’ law. Nepos, according to Plutarch, saw ‘that his followers (#litres_trial_promo) were completely terrified before Cato and thought him utterly invincible’. In defiance of the rule that no tribune might leave the city during his term of office he fled, ‘crying out that he was fleeing from Cato’s tyranny’, and made his way to Pompey’s camp in Asia. Caesar’s praetorship was temporarily suspended. The episode was a great political victory for Cato. Characteristically, he contrived to make it a moral one as well when he opposed a motion to deprive Nepos of his office: the tribunate must remain inviolable, however flawed the tribune might be.
In 61 BC Pompey returned from the East and celebrated his triumph. He had conquered fifteen countries and taken nine hundred cities, eight hundred ships and a thousand fortresses. For two whole days the celebrations engulfed Rome as the entire populace turned out to see the show. Captured monarchs and their children were led in procession along with manacled pirate chiefs. Huge placards proclaimed Pompey’s victories. There were bands playing; there were military trophies; there were wagonloads of weaponry and precious metal. Finally, there came Pompey himself wreathed with bay, his face painted to resemble Jupiter, his purple toga spangled with gold stars. He wore a cloak that had purportedly belonged to Alexander the Great. Beside him in his gem-encrusted chariot rode a slave whose task it was to whisper ceaselessly ‘Remember you are human’ while all about the noisy, gaudy, amazing spectacle proclaimed the opposite. Behind the godlike victor marched lines of soldiers, all hymning his glory.
It was a spectacle that boded ill for republican liberty, but for the time being Cato’s dark forebodings of civil war and dictatorship were not realized. Pompey, for all his magnificence, was still a republican. In Asia he had repudiated Nepos. Now he dismissed his army and re-entered Rome as a private citizen apparently intent on seeking a legitimate channel for his power. It was not his ambition but Cato’s absolute refusal to allow any concession to be made to him that rendered that impossible.
Doggedly disobliging, implacably opposed to the slightest modification of a political system which, like Sophocles’ tree, looked doomed to break if it would not bend, Cato obstructed Pompey’s every manoeuvre. It was Cato who persuaded the Senate not to postpone the consular elections so that Pompey might stand for office. It was Cato who vociferously opposed the ratification of Pompey’s settlements in the East. And it was Cato who spoke loudest against the bill whereby Pompey sought to reward his veterans for their victories with plots of publicly owned land. Pompey attempted to dissolve this thorn in his flesh by proposing a double marriage, with himself and his son as bridegrooms to Cato’s nieces (or perhaps his daughters), further evidence of the astonishingly high regard in which this still comparatively junior politician was held. Cato refused, saying ‘Tell Pompey that Cato (#litres_trial_promo) is not to be captured by way of the women’s apartments.’ Once again, in rejecting an opportunity to bind Pompey to the constitutionalist faction, he had done his own cause a grave disservice.
He did it another one when he antagonized Crassus. A consortium of tax farmers had paid too high for the right to raise money in Asia Minor. Unable to make a profit, they attempted to renegotiate their contract with the Senate. Crassus backed them. Cato opposed them with manic obduracy. Talking indefatigably for day after day, he succeeded in blocking the measure for months on end, effectively paralysing the Senate by the sheer power of his obstinate will.
In 60 BC Julius Caesar, who had been campaigning in Spain, also returned to Rome. He had been granted a triumph for his Iberian conquests, but in order to celebrate it he was obliged to remain outside the sacrosanct bounds of the city. However, he wished (as Pompey had done) to be elected consul for the following year, and in order to declare his candidacy he had to be in Rome. He asked the Senate’s permission to stand for office in absentia. Cato opposed him. A decision had to be reached before nightfall on a certain day. Once more Cato filibustered, haranguing his colleagues in his powerful, rasping voice until the sun went down. The next morning Caesar laid aside his command, thus giving up his triumph, and entered the city to seek election.
Rome’s three most powerful men had each found that, thanks to Cato’s intransigence, they were unable to impose their will on the Senate. They resolved instead to ignore it. In 60 BC Pompey, Caesar and Crassus arrived at a secret agreement (known as the First Triumvirate) that made them the effective, though unacknowledged, rulers of Rome, their combined wealth, manpower and political influence allowing them to bypass or overrule all the institutions of government.
Cato was outraged. Over the next four years, in the face of political intimidation that frequently escalated into violence, he unswervingly opposed the incremental growth of the power of Rome’s inordinately great men. Every time a rule was bent, a precedent ignored, an extraordinary privilege granted, he was there to oppose the innovation. Tireless and tiresome in equal measure, ‘always ready (#litres_trial_promo)’, as Theodor Mommsen wrote, ‘to throw himself into the breach whether it was necessary to do so or not’, he let nothing pass. When Caesar became consul in 59 BC Cato obstructed and opposed his every move.
One of Caesar’s proposals was another bill granting land to Pompey’s soldiers. Pompey brought his veterans – the very men who would benefit from the measure – into the city, a tacit threat to anyone inclined to oppose its passage. A time limit was set for the Senate’s discussion. Few – nervously aware of the armed men thronging the streets around them – dared speak at all; but when it came to Cato’s turn he rose and, employing his favourite tactic, attempted to block the measure by speaking for hours on end. This time, though, he had an opponent with scant respect for senatorial procedure. Caesar’s gang of gladiators dragged him from the rostrum and hauled him off to the very prison cells where Catiline’s co-conspirators had been done to death. As Cato was hustled away, he continued to harangue the senators. Several followed him ‘with downcast looks (#litres_trial_promo)’. Caesar called them back, demanding they finish the business in hand. One bravely replied: ‘I prefer to be (#litres_trial_promo) with Cato in prison rather than here with you.’ Cato was marched across the Forum, still talking at the top of his powerful voice to the shocked and fearful crowd. He was released almost immediately, but his imprisonment was a crucial turning point in the history of the Republic, the moment when Caesar demonstrated that he would have his way, with or without the law.
There were more ugly scenes. When his ineffectual fellow-consul Bibulus (Cato’s son-in-law and ally) attempted to speak against him, Caesar had him and Cato thrown down the steps of the Temple of Castor. They were pelted with dung and Bibulus’ fasces, the emblems of his authority, were broken and thrown after him. There was little Cato could do in the face of such intimidation. Pompey, who had wished to be Cato’s son-in-law, became Caesar’s instead, marrying the consul’s daughter Julia, who was thirty years his junior. Caesar proposed a second land law. It was passed, for all Cato’s protests, the people seeming as entranced by Caesar’s glamour as the Athenians had been by Alcibiades’ (or perhaps they were just afraid of his enforcers). So was the one granting Caesar Gaul and Illyria for his provinces once his consulate lapsed, not for the usual one-year term, but for five years. A few years later Horace was to advise a poet wishing to represent Achilles, ‘Let him deny (#litres_trial_promo) that the law was made for him.’ Caesar, bending every rule, ignoring every precedent, was acting with an Achillean disdain for legality. As the people gathered in the Forum to vote Cato addressed them with desperate vehemence, warning ‘that they themselves (#litres_trial_promo) were establishing a tyrant in their citadel’. They voted the measure through regardless.
Caesar boasted at the end of his consulate that he had got everything he wanted to the accompaniment of his opponents’ groans: now he was free to dance on their heads. He departed for Gaul, having first contrived the election as tribune for the following year of his protégé Clodius, the man who was to plunge Rome into a state of such anarchy that, in Cicero’s words, ‘the blood that streamed (#litres_trial_promo) from the Forum had to be mopped up with sponges’. Clodius, whose personal name was Pulcher, ‘Beautiful’, dominated the circle of young aristocrats against whom Sallust railed for their ‘lewdness’ and ‘luxury’, their total lack of reverence for gods or man-made institutions. A blasphemer and sexual transgressor like Alcibiades, Clodius had – famously – disguised himself and gained entry to the secret festival of the Bona Dea, a women’s rite from which men were rigorously excluded. He was a womanizer whose lovers were said to include his own sister, Clodia, and Caesar’s wife. He was also, as the events of the next six years were to show, a brilliant political organizer, a charismatic demagogue and a man of dangerously unpredictable allegiance capable of turning savagely on magnates who had complacently imagined themselves to be manipulating him.
Immediately he took office he legalized the previously outlawed collegia, institutions that were part trade unions, part neighbourhood self-defence groups and part political clubs, and set about transforming them into units of street-fighting men. Owing their new legitimacy to him, the collegia became Clodius’ own instruments, making him, whether in or out of office, the warlord of the streets. First, though, he had to rid himself of those few public figures with the nerve and integrity to oppose him. He had Cicero sent into exile on the pretext that the executions of the Catilinarian conspirators had been illegal. Cato (without whom those executions would not have taken place) was treated less rudely. He was given the task of annexing Cyprus.
It was a prestigious and potentially lucrative assignment, but Cato saw it only as a means of getting rid of him. It was one of the fundamental differences between the constitutionalists like Cato and the Populares that the former clung to the anachronistic sense that nowhere outside Rome mattered. When Cicero was appointed governor of Cilicia (southern Turkey) he was to tell his friend Atticus that the task was ‘a colossal bore (#litres_trial_promo)’. To others it might seem he was seeing the world. But he was pining for ‘the world, the Forum’, which to him seemed to be one and the same. Likewise, to Cato, that cramped and teeming rectangular space at the centre of Rome was the hub of the universe, the only place where words and actions had consequences. He accepted overseas postings grudgingly, and despatched them without enthusiasm. When his term of office as praetor ended he actually turned down the provincial governorship to which he was entitled. Pompey and Caesar, by contrast, made the provinces – the armies they were entitled to levy in order to subdue them and the fortunes they amassed there – the foundations of their power.
Cato’s role in Cyprus turned out to be one to which he was exactly suited, that of inventory clerk. The island’s ruler was a Ptolemy, brother of the King of Egypt, who was to be ousted ostensibly because he had supported the pirates against Pompey, but also so that his personal wealth and the revenue from his prosperous island could be added to the magnificence of Rome. Cato was not required to act the conqueror. On receiving his letter calling upon him to abdicate, Ptolemy poisoned himself. All Cato had to do was to take possession of his realm and convert his treasure into currency. This he did virtually single-handed, to the annoyance of his followers. Refusing to delegate any responsibility, he personally negotiated with merchants and private buyers, ensuring he got the highest possible price for all the jewels and golden cups and purple robes and other ‘furnishing of the princely sort’ poor Ptolemy had left. ‘For this reason (#litres_trial_promo)’, reports Plutarch, ‘he gave offence to most of his friends, who thought that he distrusted them.’ The task was immense: the sum he brought back from Cyprus was so great that, when it was carried through Rome to the treasury, the crowds stood amazed at the quantity of it; but Cato insisted on making himself personally responsible for every detail of its collection and transport. He decided how the money was to be shipped and designed special coffers for the purpose, each one trailing a long rope with a cork float attached so they could be retrieved in the case of shipwreck. He had the accounts written out in duplicate. He had called the assignment an insult, but the people of Rome had voted that he must do it, so – punctilious and dutiful as ever – do it he did, with the driven thoroughness he brought to all his appointed tasks.
While he did so, the Roman Republic staggered under Clodius’ assault. ‘District by district (#litres_trial_promo),’ records Cicero, ‘men were being conscripted and enrolled into units and were being incited to violence, to blows, to murder, to looting.’ The collegia’s fighting bands were swelled by slaves. Gangs of swordsmen controlled the city’s public spaces. The Temple of Castor, the building whose high podium dominated the Forum and where Cato had twice suffered violence at Caesar’s hands, was converted from a place of worship and public assembly into a fortress. Clodius had its steps demolished, rendering access to it hard and its defence easy, and made it his arsenal and military headquarters. The political meetings, trials and plebiscites for which the Forum was the venue – all the public business of the state – now took place under the intimidating gaze of Clodius’ enforcers. Meetings of the Senate were interrupted by yelling crowds. A debate on Cicero’s possible recall from exile was broken up by rioters throwing stones and wielding clubs and swords. Some of the tribunes were injured (shockingly, since they were supposed to be inviolate) and several other people killed. When one of Clodius’ associates was put on trial a mob of his supporters invaded the court, overturning benches, dragging the judge from his place, knocking over the urns that served as ballot boxes and driving the prosecutors and jury in terror from the place. No one was exempt. Clodius had appeared originally to be the Triumvirs’ tool but now he turned viciously on one of them. When Pompey attempted to speak in the Forum, Clodius led a mob in heckling him cruelly. A fight broke out between Pompey’s and Clodius’ men: several people were killed and a man was caught apparently in the act of attempting to assassinate Pompey himself. Baffled and afraid, Pompey withdrew to his villa, where he lived virtually besieged.
By the time Cato returned from Cyprus in 56 BC with his haul of scrupulously catalogued treasure some kind of balance of power had been established, but at great cost to the cause of the constitutionalists and to the stability of the state. One of the new year’s tribunes, Milo, with Pompey’s encouragement and sponsorship, had assembled his own private army of slaves and hired thugs and emerged as a rival to Clodius. For weeks, the two gangs fought for control of the city. ‘The Tiber was full (#litres_trial_promo) of citizens’ corpses,’ wrote Cicero, ‘the public sewers were choked with them.’ Clodius was at least temporarily contained. Pompey, recovering his nerve, reasserted himself and saw to it that Cicero was recalled amid scenes of public rejoicing all over Italy. Bread was scarce: the people were rioting for food. Cicero, returning a favour, advocated a measure granting Pompey control of the corn supply for the next five years, a commission that gave him ill-defined but enormous power both domestically and (since most of Rome’s corn was imported) throughout the Mediterranean.
Endemic violence, a near total collapse of the rule of law, disastrous food shortages, the acceptance even by a moderate like Cicero that only an armed potentate could save the disordered state – the situation to which Cato returned was the fulfilment of his direst predictions. At once he resumed his old task – that of preventing the great men becoming greater.
Caesar, Pompey and Crassus renewed their pact. Pompey and Crassus were standing together for election as the next year’s consuls. The constitutionalists in the Senate went into mourning, as though for the death of the Republic, but no one dared stand in opposition to the two magnates until Cato (who was not yet old enough to be eligible himself) persuaded his brother-in-law, Domitius Ahenobarbus, to do so and to declare that, if elected, he would terminate Caesar’s unprecedentedly long command in Gaul. Before dawn on the morning of the election Cato and Domitius went together to the Field of Mars, where voting was to take place. They were set upon in the darkness. Their torchbearer was killed. Cato was wounded in the arm. With furious resolution he tried to persuade Domitius to stand his ground ‘and not to abandon (#litres_trial_promo), while they had breath, the struggle in the behalf of liberty which they were waging against the tyrants, who showed plainly how they would use the consular power by making their way to it through such crimes’. His eloquence was futile. Ahenobarbus, less principled, or perhaps just more realistic, abandoned his candidature and took to his heels.
Cato, determined that the Triumvirs should not be unopposed, stood for election as praetor. Pompey and Crassus put up a candidate of their own and set about bribing the electorate in a vote-buying exercise of unprecedented scale and blatancy. On the day of the election Pompey had the Field of Mars surrounded by Milo’s thugs. Those who voted the wrong way could expect to suffer for it. Even so, so great was Cato’s prestige, the first votes declared were for him. Bribery and intimidation having both failed, Pompey invoked the gods. He declared he had heard thunder (though no one else had) and, thunder being a sign of divine displeasure, he cancelled the ballot. His supporters went to work on the voters again (whether with their money or their swords is not recorded). By the time a second vote could be held those who had initially voted for Cato had changed their minds.
Measure by measure the Triumvirs consolidated their power. Pompey and Crassus saw to it that they were assigned, as their proconsular commands, Spain and Syria respectively; they introduced bills allowing them to wage war as and when they saw fit and to levy as many troops as they wished. Pompey, further, had it agreed that he could delegate the government of Spain to his officials while remaining himself near Rome. Each time the people voted in their favour while all but one of the senators, listless in their impotence, allowed the legislation to pass without questioning or comment. The exception, of course, was Cato.
A man whose greatest skill was that of making a nuisance of himself, he let none of these measures pass without a hurly-burly. Time and again Cato forced his way onto the rostrum to harangue the people. Time and again he was manhandled down. He was briefly imprisoned again. Nothing could silence him. Denied the rostrum, he would mount his supporters’ shoulders instead. There was rioting. People were killed. But Pompey and Crassus, unperturbed, proceeded to their most controversial move. They proposed that Caesar’s command in Gaul should be extended for a further five years. This called from Cato a speech of the utmost passion and solemnity. He told Pompey that he had taken Caesar upon his own shoulders ‘and that when he began (#litres_trial_promo) to feel the burden and to be overcome by it he would neither have the power to put it away nor the strength to bear it longer, and would therefore precipitate himself, burden and all, upon the city’. The prophecy, with its strange and awful image of the two giants, one weighing down upon the other, crushing the state beneath them as they toppled, was remembered by the historians, but in the short term it was as futile as all of Cato’s efforts. Caesar got his extended command.
Cato kept up his attack. He argued in the Senate that Caesar’s aggression against the German and Gallic tribes was not only wicked but illegal: the Senate, which supposedly determined Rome’s foreign policy, had not authorized it. The Gallic war, on which Caesar’s enormous (and still extant) fame was based, constituted a monstrous atrocity, a genocidal war crime carried out in full view of all the world over a period of nearly a decade. Caesar had taken the leaders of two German tribes prisoner when they came to him under terms of truce and then massacred some four hundred thousand of their people. This, fulminated Cato, was an outrage for which the gods would exact retribution. Caesar should be put in chains and handed over to the enemy for just punishment. Until his guilt was expiated, all Rome would be accursed. Legally speaking, Cato was correct; but the people of Rome preferred conquests, however achieved, to a clear conscience. Caesar fought on.
Over the next two years, Cato struggled ever more desperately for the cause of legitimacy. It was like building card houses in a hurricane. In Gaul Caesar, conquering tribe after tribe and carting their treasure away with him, grew ever richer and more powerful. At the end of each campaigning season he returned to the Italian peninsula, bringing some of his legions with him, and established himself in winter quarters near Ravenna, within his province of Cisalpine Gaul. There he received visitors from Rome, clients and suitors to whom he dispensed largesse, agents who watched over his interest in the metropolis, candidates begging him to use his power to help them to office. Officially absent, he was nonetheless a drastically destabilizing off-stage presence in the drama of Rome’s politics.
While Caesar’s power grew insidiously, Pompey’s was paraded with superb ostentation. For five years he had been building a theatre of unprecedented size and grandeur on the Field of Mars. In 55 BC he inaugurated it with a series of spectacular shows. There were plays, extravagantly staged. (‘What pleasure is there (#litres_trial_promo) in having a Clytemnestra with six hundred mules?’ wrote Cicero, who found the display vulgar.) There was a bloody series of games in which five hundred lions and untold numbers of gladiators were killed. There was an elephant fight (‘a most horrifying (#litres_trial_promo) spectacle’, says Plutarch), which astonished the crowd. At the end of his consulate Pompey, invested now with the authority and the legal immunity of a pro-consul but declining to leave Rome, withdrew to his villa near the city. There he bided his time while the Republic tore itself to pieces.
Milo’s and Clodius’ gangs (the former apparently sponsored by Pompey, the latter by Caesar, but both in fact running way out of any sponsors’ control) bullied the citizens and battled each other for control of the streets. Meetings of the Senate were cut short for fear of violent interruptions by the mobs that gathered outside the chamber. Gangs of armed slaves burst into the Arena and put a stop to the sacred games. Elections took place, if at all, in an atmosphere of terror. It was apparent that the situation was untenable. ‘The city’, wrote Suetonius, ‘began to roll and heave like the sea before a storm.’
Yet Cato persisted. Mommsen called him a ‘pedantically stiff (#litres_trial_promo) and half witless cloud-walker’, and certainly, viewed with hindsight, his dogged efforts to reform a political system on the eve of its extinction look absurd. But Cato, and most of his contemporaries, still assumed that the Republic would last for generations to come. To like-minded Romans his resolute campaign to restore it to rectitude looked not stupid, but saintly. Cato ‘stood alone (#litres_trial_promo) against the vices of a degenerate state’, wrote Seneca. ‘He stayed the fall of the Republic to the utmost that one man’s hand could do.’
His stand did not make him popular. Repeatedly, when he spoke in the Forum, he was jeered by hostile agitators. ‘He fared’ (#litres_trial_promo), says Plutarch, ‘as fruits do which make their appearance out of season. For as we look upon these with delight and admiration, but do not use them, so the old-fashioned character of Cato … among lives that were corrupted and customs that were debased, enjoyed great repute and fame, but was not suited to the needs of men.’ He was elected praetor on the second attempt and brought in a law banning bribery and requiring all candidates for office to submit full accounts of their election expenses. That year’s candidates acquiesced on condition that Cato himself (the only man who could be trusted with the job) would act as their umpire; but the electors, accustomed to being paid for their votes, were outraged by the notion that they should give them free. A riot broke out. Cato was set upon by an angry mob. He was knocked down and would have been lynched had he not succeeded in hauling himself upright for long enough to harangue the crowd into docility. As soon as he was eligible he stood for consul but, for all his prestige, was roundly defeated. When Alcibiades returned to his native city (as Pompey had done and Caesar was shortly to do) in the golden nimbus of victory, the citizens had begged him to make himself their absolute ruler, while only a handful of dissenters wished him on his way. So Cato was one of very few of his contemporaries unsusceptible to the glamour of the conquering generals who rode triumphant into Rome, apparently as superhuman in their swaggering magnificence as Plato’s men of gold. Compared with their splendour, Cato’s virtue seemed a dull and unappealing thing. While he clung to republicanism, Lucan was to write, ‘all Rome clamoured (#litres_trial_promo) to be enslaved’.
In January 52 BC the first of the storms that had been so long gathering broke. The two urban warlords, Clodius and Milo, met – apparently by chance – some miles from Rome on the Appian Way. Clodius was attended by thirty slaves carrying swords, Milo by three hundred armed men, including several gladiators. A brawl began. Clodius was injured. He was carried into a tavern. Milo’s men broke in and killed him. As soon as the news reached Rome the city exploded into violence. Clodius the beautiful, Clodius the insolent, was gone, and the common people of Rome, to whom he had granted an intoxicating taste of their own power, ran wild. His associates, including two tribunes, displayed his corpse, naked and battered as it was, in the Forum. There were hysterical scenes of rage and grief. Prompted by the tribunes, the mob took over the Senate House, built a pyre of all the furniture and the senatorial records, hoisted Clodius’ corpse on top and set fire to the building. The seat of government, the repository of centuries of tradition, the brain controlling all the vast body of the Roman world, was reduced to charred ruins. The rioting spread as fast as the flames.
For a month the chaos continued. A hostile mob attacked Milo’s house, to be driven back by the archers of his personal guard. ‘Every day’ (#litres_trial_promo), according to Plutarch, ‘the Forum was occupied by three armies, and the evil had well-nigh become past checking.’ The Senate declared a state of emergency, but the previous year’s consular elections had not yet taken place. There was no one to take control. ‘The city was left with (#litres_trial_promo) no government at all like a ship adrift with no one to steer her.’ A mob invaded the sacred grove where the fasces were kept and seized them. Then, as though craving someone who could save them from their own licence, they swept on to Pompey’s villa outside the city and clamoured for him to make himself dictator. Pompey demurred. He was waiting for the more official invitation that he sensed could not be much longer withheld.
It came soon enough. Twelve years previously Cato had declared that ‘while he lived’ he would never consent to Pompey’s entering the city at the head of an army. Now, hopeless, he concluded that ‘any government (#litres_trial_promo) was better than no government at all’. To the astonishment of his peers, he spoke in favour of a motion offering Pompey the post of sole consul.
Diplomatic and subtle as ever, Pompey invited Cato to work alongside him. Cato, his living opposite, stubbornly refused. He would be of no man’s party. He would give his advice when asked for it, he said, but he would also give his candid opinion whether asked for it or not.
Pompey ordered his legions into the city. Gradually order was restored; but Rome – while the emergency lasted – was effectually a military dictatorship. When Milo was put on trial for the murder of Clodius, Pompey’s troops, ringing the place of judgment, were so numerous and so menacing that even Cicero, who had undertaken Milo’s defence, lost his nerve, failed to deliver the speech he had planned and saw his client convicted.
The crisis over, Pompey stepped down, once more amazing the constitutionalists by the propriety of his behaviour. But a second storm was imminent. Caesar’s command in Gaul would lapse in the winter of 50 BC. Cato publicly swore that as soon as it did, and Caesar therefore became once more subject to the law, he would bring charges against Caesar for the illegal acts he had perpetrated as consul in 59 BC and for his unjustified and unsanctioned assaults on the people of Gaul.
Caesar had many clients and supporters in the city. Tribunes of his party repeatedly vetoed attempts to rescind his command and appoint a successor to him in Gaul. It began to look increasingly probable that he would refuse to surrender his legions. In December the Senate voted by an overwhelming majority that both he and Pompey should give up their commands. Again one of the tribunes vetoed the measure, at which the Senate once more went into mourning. By this time the danger posed by Caesar, which Cato had been railing against, largely unheard, for years, had served greatly to enhance the latter’s authority. In the general hysteria Cato was acclaimed as a prophet whose vision was being proved true. Terrified that Caesar might launch a coup d’état at any moment from his winter quarters in Ravenna, three senior senators visited Pompey, handed him a sword, and asked him to assume command of all the troops in Italy. Pompey accepted.
There was still a chance of peace. Caesar wanted power, but he was prepared at least to observe the outward forms of republican legitimacy. It was not he but Cato, by his strenuous insistence on refusing any compromise, who made war inevitable. A second Odysseus might have come to some kind of face-saving arrangement; might have bent rules and reinterpreted precedents, remodelling the anachronistic constitution to accommodate modern reality; but Cato was no Odysseus, and it was because he was incapable of Odyssean diplomacy that he has been remembered and revered for millennia. ‘I would rather have noise (#litres_trial_promo) and thunder and storm-curses than a cautious, uncertain feline repose,’ wrote Nietzsche, meditating on the Superman nearly two thousand years after Cato’s death. There was nothing uncertain about Cato. He was neither beautiful, nor especially valorous, nor – so far as we know – fleet of foot; but he was all the same a true successor to Achilles in his abhorrence of anything less than absolute truthfulness, in his immovable insistence on every article of his creed, in his willingness to see his own cause defeated if the only alternative was a dilution of its purity, and in his preference for death over dishonour. Caesar offered to hand over Gaul to a governor of the Senate’s choosing and to disband all but one of his legions if he could only be granted the right to stand for election as consul in his absence (and so return to Rome protected by the privileges of office). It was not an unprecedented proposal, but Cato fulminated furiously against its acceptance. He would rather die, he said, than allow a citizen to dictate conditions to the Republic.
The Senators were persuaded. Caesar’s offer was refused. A measure was proposed declaring Caesar a public enemy. One of the tribunes (Caesar’s creature) vetoed it, whereupon the Senate declared a state of emergency. None of the ancient sources suggests that the two tribunes friendly to Caesar were physically threatened, but they acted as though they had been. Disguised as slaves, they slipped out of Rome and fled to Caesar’s camp. Their flight provided a pretext for war. Caesar had once dreamed of raping his mother. On 10 January 49 BC, after another troubled night, he led his legions across the Rubicon and marched on his mother city.
His advance was inexorable and swift. Pompey had boasted that he had only to stamp his foot and all Italy would rise in his support. He was wrong: the people, apparently indifferent to the threat to senatorial rights and their own liberties, let Caesar pass. Despairing of holding the city against him, Pompey and most of the officeholders, as well as many senators, abandoned Rome. After that day Cato never again cut his hair, trimmed his beard, wore a garland, or lay on a couch to eat. In deep mourning for the republic he had tried so hard to maintain, he followed Pompey, who was at least the Senate’s appointed representative, into war.
His was not a warlike nature. As a young military tribune he had been popular with his soldiers for his refusal to make a show of his dignity and for his readiness to share their work and their hardships. When the time had come for him to leave his legionaries wept and crowded round to embrace him, kissing his hands and laying down their cloaks in his path. Now, when he joined Pompey at his base in Dyrrachium, in northern Greece, he again proved his talents as a leader. Before a battle the generals were addressing their troops, who listened to them ‘sluggishly and in silence’. Then Cato spoke with his usual fervour and a great shout went up. But though he could generate enthusiasm for the fight in others, he himself felt none. A civilian by nature, he once wrote to Cicero: ‘It is a much more splendid (#litres_trial_promo) thing … that a province should be held and preserved by the mercy and incorruptibility of its commander than by the strength of a military force.’ He loved neither fighting nor the cause for which he fought. He had rejected Pompey’s repeated attempts to annex him to his party. Now he privately told his friends that if Caesar triumphed he would kill himself: if Pompey prevailed, he would at least continue living but would go into exile rather than submit to the dictatorship that he assumed was inevitable.
The first task Pompey assigned him was the defence of Sicily, source of most of Rome’s corn supply. When he realized that his troops were outnumbered by the invading Caesarean force, he avoided a confrontation by abandoning the island, advising the Syracusans to make their peace with whichever party was ultimately victorious. His priority was the prevention of Rome’s self-destruction. He persuaded Pompey to swear that he wouldn’t plunder any city under Rome’s protection, or kill any Roman except on the battlefield. When the Pompeians won a battle everyone rejoiced except Cato, who ‘was weeping (#litres_trial_promo) for his country … as he saw that many brave citizens had fallen by one another’s hands’. He was not to be trusted with any command that would empower him to turn on his own commander. Pompey considered making him admiral of his fleet but changed his mind, reflecting that ‘the very day of Caesar’s defeat would find Cato demanding that he [Pompey] also lay down his arms and obey the laws’. When Pompey marched on Pharsalus, where he suffered his devastating defeat at Caesar’s hands, he left Cato at Dyrrachium to mind the camp and guard the stores.
At Pharsalus Pompey’s army, though twice as large as Caesar’s, was routed. Pompey escaped by sea, but in the aftermath of the battle few of his supporters knew whether he was dead or alive. Cato found himself the commander of those troops that had straggled back into camp after the battle. He led them out to join up with the still intact Pompeian fleet. A stickler for propriety even in this moment of calamity, he offered to surrender his command to Cicero who was with the ships and who, as a former consul, outranked him. Cicero was appalled – an altogether more flexible and pragmatic character, he was in a hurry to return to Italy and find himself a place on the winning side. Cato helped him get away (Pompey’s son wanted to kill him for his disloyalty) and set sail for Africa with the remnant of the Pompeian army. He had guessed, correctly, that Pompey would seek refuge in Egypt. In Libya he learnt that he was right, and that in Egypt the great man had been murdered. He also heard that another Pompeian army, commanded by Scipio (a sadly inferior descendant of the Scipio who defeated Hannibal), was in Numidia and had the backing of the Numidian King, Juba. Cato, who was proving himself a resourceful and efficient commander, led his troops on an arduous march across the Sahara to join them. When they met Cato, as scrupulous as ever in his observance of proper form, ceded overall command to Scipio – technically his superior – despite the fact that everyone, including Scipio himself, recognized that Cato would have been the better leader.
It took Caesar nearly two years to follow him into Numidia. The new ruler of Rome had business to attend to and battles to fight in Asia Minor, Egypt and back in Italy. Meanwhile, Cato and his fellow Pompeians marched into the Phoenician port-city of Utica and made it their base.
Enclosed on one side by the desert and on the other by the sea, Utica was an isolated place. Under occupation by Cato and his colleagues, its political nature was complicated and volatile. There were some three hundred Roman citizens of no particular allegiance living there, most of them moneylenders or merchants. These people would no doubt be ready to adapt to whatever political situation they found themselves in. But there were also a number of Roman senators who had left Italy with Pompey and come with Cato from Dyrrachium. There was good reason to suppose that should they fall into Caesar’s hands they would all be killed for their obstinate opposition. The African people of Utica were thought to favour Caesar. Scipio and Juba both wished to protect themselves and their followers against possible treachery by slaughtering the entire native population. Cato dissuaded them from this atrocity and took upon himself the responsibility of keeping the city secure, and its diverse inhabitants safe from each other. To do so he employed harsh measures. He forced all the indigenous young men of Utica to give up their arms and interned them in concentration camps outside the city walls. The rest of the population – women, children, and old men – were allowed to remain inside, living uneasily alongside the Roman occupiers while the latter fortified the city and stocked it with grain.
It was a tense and unhappy situation. The commanders bickered. Scipio accused Cato of cowardice. Cato, so observers believed, came profoundly to regret having handed over the command to a man he trusted neither to act competently in battle nor to be wise after it. Yet fractious and deeply divided as the Pompeian force at Utica was, it seemed to contemporary observers and later Roman historians to have a tragic grandeur. To those who rejected Caesar’s rule – whether still fighting for the scattered Pompeian resistance abroad or living resentfully under the new regime – the Senate Cato established in Utica was the one true Senate, and Utica itself, because Cato was there, the one true Rome. Cut off with his fugitive army in what to a Roman was the back of beyond, he loomed up in the Romans’ collective imagination, doomed but resolute, superbly alone, calmly awaiting Caesar’s arrival and his own surely inevitable defeat and death with what Seneca called ‘the unflinching steadiness (#litres_trial_promo) of a hero who did not totter when the whole state was in ruins’.
At last Caesar, who in the previous year had visited the supposed site of Achilles’ tomb, making a show, as Alexander had done, of his claim to be a successor to that paragon of warriors, finally turned his attention to the man whose claim to Achilles-like integrity was generally and annoyingly perceived to be so much stronger than his own. He landed in Africa. Cato stayed in Utica to safeguard the supplies and keep the road to the sea open while Scipio led out the army. On 6 April 46 BC, at Thapsus, the Pompeians were crushingly defeated, many of them trampled to death by their own stampeding elephants, and the majority of them were slaughtered.
The news reached Utica late at night, brought by a messenger who had been three days on the road. At once the Romans in the city panicked. There were tumultuous scenes in the unlit streets as people dashed from their houses, shouting in terror, only to run back again, unsure where to seek safety. They had no troops to defend them. They were horribly aware of the men of Utica, penned into the prison camp outside the city and no doubt exulting in the news of their oppressors’ defeat, and of those men’s relatives all around them. They were crazy with fear, and they had good cause to be. Only one man remained calm. Once more, as he had so often done in the Roman Forum, Cato made use of his stentorian voice and his powers of self-assertion to still and quieten a frenzied crowd.
Striding through the darkened streets, shouting out in his harsh voice, he arrested the stampede. As soon as it was light, he summoned all the Romans present in Utica to assemble before the Temple of Jupiter. He made his appearance among them with characteristic sangfroid, apparently immersed in a book (it was in fact an inventory of the food supplies and weaponry stockpiled in the city). He spoke serenely, asking them to make up their minds whether they wished to fight or surrender to Caesar. He would not despise them, he said, if they chose the latter course; but if they decided to fight – and here his tone became more fervent – their reward would be a happy life, or a most glorious death. The immediate effect of his oratory was impressive. ‘The majority (#litres_trial_promo), in view of his fearlessness, nobility and generosity, almost forgot their present troubles in the conviction that he alone was an invincible leader and superior to every fortune.’
All too soon, though, the mood of exaltation passed. Someone suggested that all those present should be required to free their slaves, thereby providing the city with a defence force. Cato, correct as ever even in this desperate moment, refused to infringe private property rights by making such an action compulsory, but asked those who would give up their slaves of their own free will to do so. The Roman merchants – slave-owners all and probably slave-traders too, for whom business counted for more than politics – began to see the advantages of surrender. The situation was terrifyingly precarious. The merchants began talking about overpowering and interning their fellow Romans, the senators, before handing them over as a peace offering to the victorious Caesar.
A troop of horsemen, survivors from Scipio’s defeated army, appeared out of the desert like the answer to a prayer. At last Cato had the manpower of which he was in such urgent need. Leaving the Roman merchants in the city, he hurried out, accompanied by the senators, to welcome the newcomers and enlist their help in defending the city. But the soldiers had already endured a traumatic battle: they were demoralized and exhausted. Nothing could persuade them to make a stand against Caesar, who was now, pehaps, only hours away. There were angry scenes, both in the city, where the merchants were working themselves into a state of self-justifying indignation against anyone who might suggest they should risk opposing Caesar, and outside, where the senators and their families, now doubly threatened, wept and wailed. Eventually, the horsemen issued their ultimatum. They would stay and help defend Utica against Caesar, but only on condition that they might first slaughter all the Uticans. Cato refused. They began to ride away, taking with them any remaining hope of survival, let alone of saving the Republic. Cato went after them. For once showing emotion, he wept as he grasped at their horses’ bridles in a futile attempt to drag them back. For all his passion, the most he could get them to agree to was that they would guard the landward gates for one day while the senators made their escape by sea. Cato accepted.
They took up their positions. The Roman merchants meanwhile announced their intention of surrendering forthwith. They were not Cato, they said, ‘and could not carry (#litres_trial_promo) the large thoughts of Cato’. Petty as most mortals, they had resolved to take the safest and probably most profitable course. They offered to intercede with Caesar for Cato. He told them to do no such thing. ‘Prayer belonged to the conquered and the craving of grace to those who had done wrong.’ It was Caesar who was defeated: since he had made war on his own country his guilt was exposed for all to see. He, Cato, was the true victor. It was as though he was already leaving this world – mundane definitions of success and failure no longer held any validity for him. Simply to be right was to prevail.
Throughout the last hours of his life he was fiercely active. His one outburst of emotion done with, he accepted his doom, and proceeded to do all that remained to be done with the scrupulous thoroughness with which, all his life, he had discharged his public duties. He was everywhere. He was in the city, urging the merchants not to betray the remaining senators. He was interviewing the emissary chosen by the merchants to go on their behalf to Caesar. He was disdainfully ignoring a message from another Pompeian commander who had escaped from Thapsus and wished to claim the leadership. He was patiently attempting to persuade those most at risk from Caesar’s anger to get away. He was at the city’s seaward gates controlling the rush to escape. He was down at the docks overseeing the embarkations and ensuring that each boat was properly provisioned. Most characteristically, he was handing over to the Uticans the detailed accounts of his administration, and returning the surplus funds to the public treasurer. While all around him others were prostrated by anxiety or brutalized by greed and fear, he alone was imperturbably competent. The horsemen became uncontrollable and attacked the Uticans in the concentration camps, looting and killing. Having so passionately begged them to stay, Cato had eventually to bribe them to leave in order to stop the massacre.
At last, on the evening of the second day since the terrible news from Thapsus had arrived, he judged that the evacuation of those at risk was all but completed: his work was almost done. He retired to his quarters to take a bath. Afterwards he dined. He ate sitting upright (the acme of discomfort for a Roman), as he had ever since he left Rome; but afterwards, over the wine, he joined in the high-minded conversation. His household, as usual, included at least two philosophers. The talk turned to the Stoic definition of freedom. Cato ‘broke in with vehemence (#litres_trial_promo), and in loud and harsh tones maintained his argument at greatest length and with astonishing earnestness’. His companions, understanding, fell silent. It was a tenet of Stoicism that, as Lucan was to put it, ‘The happiest men (#litres_trial_promo) are those who chose freely to die at the right time.’
After supper he walked for a while, gave orders to the officers of the watch, embraced his son and close friends with especial affection and withdrew to his bedchamber. There he began to read Plato’s Phaedo, in which Socrates comforts his companions by offering them proofs of the immortality of the soul before serenely, even joyfully, drinking the hemlock that will heal his soul of the flaws inherent in bodily life. While still in the midst of his reading, Cato noticed that his sword was not hanging in its usual place by his bed (his son had removed it). He called a servant and asked where it was. The servant had no answer. Cato returned to his book but a little later, without any evident anxiety or urgency, asked again for the sword. Still it was not brought. He finished his reading and called the servants again. This time he became angry and struck one over the mouth, hurting his own hand. (This incident, in which the great man gives evidence of distinctly un-godlike irascibility, even nervousness, is omitted from some accounts.)
He cried out that his friends had betrayed him, by so arranging that he would fall unarmed into his enemy’s hands. At that his son and several companions rushed into the room sobbing and imploring him to save himself. Cato addressed them sternly, asking if they considered him an imbecile, reminding them that, even if deprived of the sword, he had only to hold his breath or dash his head against the wall when he chose to die, and asking why, in this crisis, they wished him to ‘cast away (#litres_trial_promo) those good old opinions and arguments which have been part of our lives’. All who heard him wept. Ashamed, they left him once more alone. A child was sent with his sword. He received it impassively, saying, ‘Now I am my own master.’ Laying it aside, he returned to his reading before lying down and sleeping so deeply that those in the next room could hear his snores.
Around midnight he woke, asked the doctor to bandage his hand, and sent a servant down to the harbour to report on the evacuation. When the servant returned with the news that there was a heavy storm and high winds, Cato (mindless of his own trouble) groaned with pity for those at sea, then briefly slept again, having sent the servant back down to the waterfront to ensure nothing further could be done to help the fugitives. When the servant returned for the second time, reporting that all was quiet, Cato, satisfied that his earthly responsibilities were fully discharged, dismissed him.
Alone, he drove his sword into his midriff and fell heavily, knocking over the abacus that stood in his chamber. His servants and his son ran in and found him alive but all besmeared with blood, his bowels protruding from the ghastly wound. His doctor sewed up the gash but Cato pushed him away (or perhaps waited until he and the other attendants had left) and tore his belly open once more. This time he accomplished his purpose. ‘He drew forth (#litres_trial_promo) by his hand that holiest spirit,’ wrote Seneca, ‘too noble to be defiled by steel.’
At once his reputation, released from the confines of his human reality, began to swell like a genie freed from a bottle. Alive, he was a pugnacious politician, an obstructionist and filibusterer, a man of unquestionable probity and great courage but also a bit of an oddball who courted trouble to the detriment of his own cause. He was a prig, an embarrassment, a pedant, perhaps even a bore. His hostility to Caesar has been compared to the kind of bitter envy a dull schoolboy (#litres_trial_promo), a dutiful plodder and keeper of the rules, might feel for a charismatic, carelessly successful fellow-student who defies authority and gets away with it by virtue of his cheek and charm – a cruelly reductive characterization that, all the same, has the ring of partial truth to it.
Even judged by his own standards, Cato was not perfect. He was to be remembered as the one and only incorruptible Roman. ‘No man of that day (#litres_trial_promo)’, wrote the Greek historian Dio Cassius two centuries later, ‘took part in public life from pure motives and free from any desire of personal gain except Cato.’ But there were various episodes in his political career that suggest that his righteousness was not absolute. When he opposed the ratification of Pompey’s arrangements in Asia Minor he was not only checking the growth of Pompey’s inordinate power, he was also doing a favour to his own brother-in-law, Lucullus, whom Pompey had supplanted. As a tribune, just after the suppression of Catiline’s rebellion, he had authorized the free distribution of grain to the populace, a crowd-pleasing measure that he furiously condemned as tending to demoralize and corrupt the people when Caesar did the same. When Caesar was elected consul in 55 BC Cato condoned the use of bribery (which he otherwise so rigorously condemned) to get the constitutionalist Bibulus elected as his colleague. He allowed Cicero to persuade him that he should swear to uphold a land law of Caesar’s, on the grounds that otherwise he was likely to be exiled and because ‘even if Cato (#litres_trial_promo) did not need Rome, still Rome needed Cato’. He would not declare Clodius’ legislation as tribune invalid (though there was good reason for doing so) because then his own work in Cyprus would be annulled. But once he was dead, all such lapses were forgotten. The noisy, obstreperous troublemaker was magnified into a figure of marmoreal grandeur and serenity. The inveterate opponent of great men was himself accorded greatness.
The process of his exaltation began within minutes of his death. The news of his suicide spread through the town. The people of Utica, whom he had twice saved from massacre, assembled outside his house along with the remaining Romans. Caesar was fast approaching but, uncowed, they gave his adversary an honourable funeral. Cato’s body, splendidly dressed (as it had never been in life), was carried at the head of a solemn procession to the seashore, where it was buried. When Caesar arrived to accept the Uticans’ surrender, he exclaimed: ‘O Cato, I begrudge (#litres_trial_promo) you your death; for you begrudged me the sparing of your life.’ Perhaps he meant that he would have been proud to act rightly towards such a paragon of righteousness: more likely he felt, as Cato did, that Cato’s submission would have been an abject defeat, and his mercy the cruellest and most satisfying of victories. But Cato had eluded him. As Seneca triumphantly declared: ‘All the world (#litres_trial_promo) has fallen under one man’s sway, yet Cato has a way of escape: with one single hand he opens a wide path to freedom.’
Dead, he was every bit as troublesome to Caesar as he had been when living. A painted placard depicting Cato tearing himself apart ‘like a wild animal’ was carried in the triumph Caesar celebrated on returning to Rome. The gruesome image’s effect was the opposite of that intended: instead of exulting in the death of Caesar’s most inflexible opponent, the crowd groaned and muttered as it passed. Brutus wrote and published a eulogy to Cato. So, showing a degree of political courage unusual for him, did Cicero. Caesar commissioned his loyal historian Hirtius to reply to them in a text, now lost, that belittled Cato’s virtues and catalogued his failings. This literary controversy over a dead man’s reputation masked a more dangerous debate over his living enemy’s claim to power: Caesar clearly considered it absolutely necessary to his own security that Cato be discredited. Unsatisfied with Hirtius’ effort, he wrote his own Anti-Cato, a pamphlet so extravagantly vitriolic as to have defeated its own object. The allegations he made in it were luridly, self-defeatingly exaggerated. He accused Cato of financial greed and dishonesty, of sexual depravity and of laziness. He wrote that Cato had sieved the ashes from the funeral pyre of his much-loved brother in search of gold, that he came drunk to the courts, and that he had an incestuous relationship with his sister Servilia (a particularly self-damaging accusation this – Servilia was actually Caesar’s mistress). He was not believed. Cicero thought the pamphlet had greatly enhanced Cato’s posthumous reputation – presumably by making manifest the hatred and fear he had inspired in his great opponent.
Cato’s influence persisted, and grew deadly. Plutarch relates that when Cato was taken as a boy to the house of the dictator Sulla he asked his tutor, ‘Why didst thou not (#litres_trial_promo) give me a sword, that I might slay this man and set my country free from slavery?’ Whether or not Cato the child ever said such a thing, Cato the man never advocated or condoned the use of violence as a political tool. Yet though in life he had staunchly defended the forms of law against the summary use of force, in his afterlife he became the presiding genius of a political movement aimed at an act of lethal violence. Cato had initiated the opposition to Caesar, and that opposition achieved its end on the Ides of March, brought to a murderous conclusion by Brutus, Cato’s nephew and son-in-law who, according to Plutarch, admired Cato ‘more than any (#litres_trial_promo) other Roman’.
Caesar was killed, but the Caesarean dynasty survived and flourished and Cato, who had made his name in opposition, flourished with it, growing ever greater in Rome’s collective memory. Cicero, who in his lifetime had found Cato an awkward colleague, paid tribute to him after his death in reverential terms as a ‘god-like and unique (#litres_trial_promo) man’ who had ‘remained ever true (#litres_trial_promo) to his purpose and fixed resolve’. To Horace (who was nineteen when Cato died), he was the model of the just man (#litres_trial_promo), even of manhood itself.
Cato’s posthumous exaltation had a philosophical basis. He became the exemplar of the increasingly influential ideal of Stoic virtue. In the fifth century BC Socrates had taught that nothing can harm the good man. To one whose mind is on eternal verities, no material loss, not even the loss of life itself, is of any consequence. In Plato’s Phaedo, the book Cato chose to read three times over on the last night of his life, Socrates explains that, since a wise man’s ultimate goal must be to free himself from the body, which ‘fills us with loves (#litres_trial_promo), desires and all sorts of fancies and great deal of nonsense, with the result that we literally never get an opportunity to think at all about anything’, he need dread no bodily harm. Death, which will free him to apprehend more clearly the ideas of which the things of this world are merely dim reflections, is actually desirable. When Cato rebuked his friends for hiding his sword, thus seeking to make him abandon ‘those good old opinions’ to which they all subscribed, these are the sort of opinions to which he referred.
The wise man had no fear. Indeed, the wisest had few emotions of any kind. Plato, synthesizing in the Republic the teachings of Socrates with the example of Sparta, promulgated an ideal of the impassive hero. Homer’s heroes raged and wept, mourning each other’s deaths and openly declaring the terror they felt at the prospect of their own. To Plato, the admirer of Spartan discipline and self-repression, they seemed contemptible. His decision to ban poets from his ideal republic was motivated partly by his revulsion at Homer’s extended description of Achilles’ lamentation for Patroclus. No hero (even Plato could not deny Achilles that status) should be seen to express himself with so little restraint, such a lack of the self-mastery which, to Plato, was essential not only to dignity but also to virtue.
Drawing on Socrates and Plato, and on the mystic traditions of the Orphics and Pythagoreans, the Stoics, whose philosophy first evolved under that name in Athens in the second century BC, elaborated their vision of the wise man. Such a man hopes for nothing and is therefore delivered from all fear of disappointment. Desire, ambition, even human love, are to be shunned. To ask for nothing is to render oneself invulnerable. That was the condition that Cato was judged to have achieved. When Seneca, writing some fifty years after Cato’s death, wished to answer the objection that the Stoic ‘wise man’ was a chimera, he had only to point to Cato: ‘I almost think (#litres_trial_promo) he surpasses our ideal.’
In life, Cato had been a student of philosophy – Cicero reports that he had ‘a voracious appetite (#litres_trial_promo) for reading’. An early riser, he would always bring a book with him to the Senate and sit studying it until his fellow senators were assembled. In late Roman and medieval texts he is referred to as ‘Cato the philosopher’, meaning not that he left behind him a body of written work (he didn’t), but that he liked to ponder the profound and difficult questions with which philosophy is concerned. When he was granted leave of absence during his term as military tribune, he took ship to Pergamum expressly in order to meet the celebrated philosopher Athenodorus and invite the old man to live with him thereafter. Back in Rome, he sought out teachers and readers of philosophy, several of whom received his patronage. In Sicily, during the opening months of the civil war, he found opportunities, despite his responsibility as commander of the Pompeian forces on the island, to walk about discoursing with the philosopher Philostratus. Even in Utica, in the last two terrible days of his life, he found time to confer with the two sages, one a Stoic, the other a Peripatetic, who were attached to his household there.
What he learned, he practised. He went barefoot and inadequately dressed in all weathers, not only to harden his body but also in order to train his spirit, ‘accustoming himself (#litres_trial_promo) to be ashamed only of what was really shameful’. What seemed to most of his contemporaries to be a lack of dignity and decorum in his appearance was a self-imposed penance, a spiritual exercise. He was, wrote Cicero, ‘endowed by nature (#litres_trial_promo) with an austerity beyond belief’.
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