From Democrats to Kings E-Book

Michael Scott

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 502

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Athens, 404 BC. The Democratic city-state has been ravaged by a long and bloody war with neighbouring Sparta. The search for scapegoats begins and Athens, liberty's beacon in the ancient world, turns its sword on its own way of life. Civil war and much bloodshed ensue. Defining moments of Greek history, culture, politics, religion and identity are debated ferociously in Athenian board rooms, back streets and battlefields. By 323 BC, less than 100 years later, Athens and the rest of Greece, not to mention a large part of the known world, has come under the control of an absolute monarch, a master of self-publicity and a model for despots for millennia to come: 'megas alexandros', Alexander the Great. Michael Scott, Finley Fellow in Ancient History at Darwin College, Cambridge, explores the dramatic and little-known story of how the ancient world was turned on its head from Democratic Athens to King Alexander the Great in this superb example of popular history writing. "From Democrats to Kings" also gives us a fresh take on the similar challenges we face today in the 21st century - a world in which many democracies - old and new - fight for survival, in which war-time and peace-time have become indistinguishable and in which the severity of the economic crisis is only matched by a crisis in our own sense of self.

Leseprobe

FROM DEMOCRATS TO KINGS

FROM DEMOCRATS TO KINGS

The Brutal Dawn of a New World from the Downfall of Athens to the Rise of Alexander the Great

MICHAEL SCOTT

Published in the UK in 2009 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.co.uk

Sold in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asiaby Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House, 74–77 Great Russell Street,London WC1B 3DA or their agents

Distributed in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asiaby TBS Ltd, TBS Distribution Centre, Colchester RoadFrating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW

Published in Australia in 2009

by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd, PO Box 8500,

83 Alexander Street, Crows Nest, NSW 2065

ISBN: 978-184831-073-5

Text copyright © 2009 Michael ScottThe author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by anymeans, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset in 12 on 16pt Minion by Marie Doherty

Printed and bound in the UK by

CPI Mackays, Chatham, Kent ME5 8TD

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Maps

Introduction: One Man’s Dream

1   Flute Players and Pick Axes

2   The City of (Crass) Long-Haired Warriors

3   Dancing with the Persian King

4   ‘Serious Business for Tomorrow’

5   The Vegetarian Philosopher and the Body-Building Philanthropist

6   The Slippery Fish

7   The Clash of Philosopher and Tyrant

8   The Implosion of Greece

9   The Cow’s Bladder, the Love Curse and the Caricature

10   Ten Years That Changed the Ancient World: 362–352 BC

11   Survival Strategies

12   Saviour or Tyrant?

13   The Final Showdown

14   From Father to Son

15   Ruling the Ancient World

16   You’ve Never Had it So Good

17   A New World

Epilogue: From Democrats to Kings

Select Bibliography

Timeline

Index

About the author

Michael Scott is currently Moses and Mary Finley Fellow in Ancient History at Darwin College, Cambridge, where he studies the ancient Greek and Roman worlds as well as teaching undergraduates and working with schools around the country.

Since 2007, he has been a regular guest lecturer aboard cruise tours of ancient Greece, has run the route of the ancient Marathon in Athens, and has been an on-screen historical consultant for several documentaries about the ancient world for the History Channel.

From Democrats to Kings is his first book. His next, on the ancient sanctuaries of Delphi and Olympia, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2010.

www.michaelcscott.com

For Peter Wicker,who taught me my first lettersof the ancient Greek alphabet

Acknowledgements

The genesis of this book was in a series of lectures given to undergraduates at Cambridge University. My thanks go to the class of students who attended those lectures with good humour and grace, who gave me an opportunity to road test my ideas and who gave much helpful feedback. To the many friends and colleagues with whom I have enjoyed countless discussions about the subject of this book and about the ancient world in general, I offer my sincerest gratitude. I would especially like to thank Prof. Robin Osborne, Prof. Paul Cartledge, Prof. Pat Easterling, Dr Alastair Blanshard, James Watson, Ben Keim, Peter Agocs, Clare Killikelly and Kelly Agathos for their thoughts, wit and guidance. To the small team of ‘veteran travellers’ who willingly came with me to explore the ‘dancing floor of Ares’, its mysteries and delights (not least of which was the underrated modern town of Thebes), I say ‘Suga!’ To Davina Barron, who carefully and helpfully read earlier drafts, I offer my indebted thanks. To Darwin College, Cambridge and to the British School at Athens, two admirable research institutions, which have made me feel very much at home in Cambridge and Athens not just during the research and writing of this book but over the past several years, I offer my heartfelt gratitude and praise. To the people who make these two institutions what they are, and who are themselves so much more besides, I give my admiration and affection. To Moses and Mary Finley, towering greats in the scholarship of the ancient world, whose legacy funds my current position as Finley Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, I offer my continued awe and thanks. For good advice on entering the world of history writing, my deepest appreciation goes to my agents Diane Banks and Sue Rider, my editor at Icon Simon Flynn, Duncan Heath and the rest of the team at Icon, and at Cambridge Prof. Mary Beard, Prof. Simon Goldhill and Dr Chris Kelly. Finally, to my family, who encouraged my desire to pursue this crazy classics thing many years ago: thank you. It has been a pleasure and an honour to write this book and to help bring the ancient world once more to life.

List of Illustrations

Maps

Map 1: Athens and Piraeus

Map 2: Greece, the Aegean and the Asia Minor coast

Map 3: Megale Hellas

Map 4: Alexander the Great’s empire

Plate section

1.  An ancient portrait bust of Alexander the Great.

2.  The Pnyx hill in the centre of Athens (with the Acropolis and Parthenon in the background).

3.  The public graveyard of Athens, the Cerameicus.

4.  The landscape of the ancient city of Sparta.

5.  A reconstruction of the ancient sanctuary of Delphi.

6.  A reconstruction of the ancient sanctuary of Olympia.

7.  The Theban victory monument at Leuctra.

8.  The remains of the wall built by the Athenians to protect Attica.

9.  A Roman copy of the statue of Eirene and Ploutus, 4th century BC.

10.  A Roman copy of the Aphrodite of Cnidus.

11.  A recreation of Mausolus’ funeral Mausoleum.

12.  The law for the protection of democracy in Athens, 338 BC.

13.  The stone lion set up by King Philip of Macedon at the battlefield of Chaeronea.

14.  The temple and oracle of the god Ammon at Siwah.

15.  The remains of the great Persian capital of Persepolis.

16.  The Tyrannicides statue group.

Map 1

Map 2

Map 3

Map 4

When you set out on the journey to Ithaca,pray that the road be long,full of adventures, full of knowledge.

C.P. Cavafy (1863–1933),‘Ithaca’ (trans. E. Sachperoglou)

INTRODUCTION

One Man’s Dream

In the year 339 BC, an old man forced himself up from his deathbed to undertake one final task. Struggling against the illness which had blighted him for the past three years of his life, encouraged by his friends and colleagues who were only too aware of the importance of what he was about to do, this 97-year-old man painstakingly put the finishing touches to the work he had been writing in the years before his illness had taken over. His name was Isocrates, from the city of Athens in ancient Greece, and his writing sought to save his city from itself.

Isocrates was an idealist. Throughout his extraordinarily long life, he had fought tirelessly to put Athens and the ancient Greek world on a better course, to remind its constituents of the dangers they all faced and to call on those with the necessary capabilities to lead Greece out of crisis. Now, as his own life started finally to fade, as he forced himself despite his illness to complete his final words of advice, he knew that Greece stood at a fundamental fork in the road. As he reflected on the gravity of the crisis, he was perhaps the only man left in Greece who had been alive long enough to see for himself how such a moment had come to pass.

Born back in the previous century, in 436 BC, when Athens was at the height of its power, Isocrates had been one of five children. His parents had been wealthy thanks to his father’s flute-making business, which meant that as a child he had received an excellent education. Yet his idyllic childhood had been rudely interrupted by the savage wars that tore apart the Greek world in the last 30 years of the century and brought about Athens’ fall from grace. His father’s property and wealth were lost and Isocrates, for all his education, could look forward, like many others at the time, to little more than a hand-to-mouth existence. His only hope was to make a living by passing on his knowledge. Opening a school in the city of Athens, Isocrates began to teach. He was, by all accounts, a demanding but popular schoolmaster who, over his lifetime, amassed a fortune and shaped the minds of many who would play key roles in Athens’ and Greece’s future. He taught about the value of self-control, the fundamental importance of freedom and autonomy, the seductive nature of power, and the destructiveness of unfocused aggression.

But educating future leaders wasn’t enough for Isocrates. Though he never wanted public office for himself, he did want to help shape the political world around him as it changed dramatically throughout the course of his life. His answer was to write. Isocrates became one of the first in a long line of political commentators and observers, dispensing his advice to cities and individuals across the ancient Greek world in the form of written political pamphlets. Though he never held any kind of official position, and probably never even delivered a public political speech in his life, his carefully thought-out exhortations endeavoured to influence the cities and individuals who attempted to dominate Greece. Starting to publish only in his fifties, Isocrates proceeded to cover nearly every one of the turbulent moments in Athens’ and Greece’s history during the second half of his life. Throughout those writings, two themes are always dominant. The first is his love for his home city, Athens. The second is his deep desire to see Hellas, the ill-defined community of often disparate and warring individual cities which made up ancient Greece, unified and dominant over the entire ancient world.

For the majority of his life, Isocrates envisaged with unremitting zeal a particular kind of future for Greece. As one scholar has put it, if mighty Hellas was a religion, then Athens was its central altar and Isocrates was its most outspoken prophet. All Isocrates’ early writings spoke to Athens, encouraging his beloved city to better itself as it fought to keep its place in the shifting sands of international politics, to be worthy of its glorious reputation, to think past its normal political infighting and to step forward to lead Greece. But as time passed, Isocrates became more and more disillusioned with Athens’ failure to live up to that reality. More and more, Isocrates sought out others, powerful individuals rather than cities, who might be more willing and able to bring his dream of a dominant Hellas to reality.

It was not until the final year of his life that he gave up on Athens. Rising from his deathbed, he forced himself to finish his parting words to his beloved city, encouraging it, one last time, to rise once again to glory. But those words were empty of hope. In the following year, 338 BC, months before his own death, Isocrates forsook Athens and found a new shrine for his religion of a greater Greece. Writing one last public letter to the new king of Macedon in northern Greece, whose armies were on the verge of taking control of much of the country and had just beaten those of Athens and its allies on the field of battle, Isocrates thanked the king for making ‘some of the things I dreamed of in my youth come to pass’. He ended simply: ‘I am hopeful the rest will follow.’

Isocrates died soon after. He was buried with his father and mother near the banks of the Ilissos river in Athens. He never knew what happened next. He never knew that Greece was on the verge of being ruled by its most powerful and successful father and son: Philip of Macedon and Alexander the Great, who would create the greatest empire the ancient world had ever seen. But Isocrates did die aware that Athens, and Greece, had come to a fundamental fork in their destinies. He knew better than anyone the turbulent tides of events, personalities, debates and decisions that had brought both Athens and Greece to this moment. In the final year of his life, his last two public pamphlets symbolised the change coming over Greece: a change in the balance of power from cities like democratic Athens to the king of Macedon. Isocrates had witnessed and played his part in the brutal dawn of a new world – from democrats to kings.

It’s a safe bet that you will have heard of Alexander the Great (not least because of the Hollywood film with Colin Farrell and Angelina Jolie). It’s a safe bet that you will have heard about Athenian democracy (not least because America recently celebrated the origins of its own democracy in Athenian democracy 2,500 years previously). But it’s also a safe bet that you will not have heard of Isocrates or realised that these two extremes of the political spectrum, democracy and absolute monarchy, and the diametrically opposed societies and worlds they defined, were separated in the ancient world by just a single ancient lifetime: Isocrates’ lifetime. Though there are many good history books available today to describe and explain the ‘accident’ of Athenian democracy and the heroic story of the ultimate over-achiever, Alexander the Great, there are few that focus on the single generation in between them. This book is about that time and the story of the dawn of a new world order that it contains.

But why should anyone care about such events in Isocrates’ lifetime, which happened so many hundreds, indeed thousands of years ago?

First of all because this is a period still imperfectly understood even by specialists. Scholars of the ancient world have been quick to focus on Athenian democracy and subsequently to skip to Alexander the Great, without understanding how one gave way to the other. Even if they have studied the period between the two, they have often discarded it as a story of decline and decay after the glory days of the century preceding it (the glorious 5th century BC during which time the Parthenon was built and democratic Athens had its own empire). But every indication is that a story of decline and decay simply will not do. In fact, it is becoming clearer and clearer that an understanding of this period of dramatic transition may well be pivotal in developing a better understanding of the ancient world as a whole. This book makes the case for the importance of the period ‘from democrats to kings’ for everyone who is interested in ancient history. It tells this story of tumultuous change not as a succession of inevitable events like a timeline in a history textbook, but from the perspectives of the actual people involved, who were making decisions about how to react to the changing world around them with limited time, information and room for manoeuvre. It follows the decisions, debates and personalities that turned the Greek world on its head.

Such a story, however, is not only important for a better understanding of ancient history. I think that now is a more appropriate time than ever for this period of turbulent transition to be brought to the attention of the modern world. This book is a story of world change, of political and economic turmoil (even the banks in ancient Greece stopped lending at one point), of democracies being crushed and rebuilding themselves, of older and newer democracies teetering on the edge of imperialist ambitions, of faltering empires and hitherto backward states rising to prominence and suddenly becoming the powerhouses of the ancient world. It tells of a desperate, and ultimately delusional, struggle to maintain the status quo, and the triumph of new strategic thinking over stuck-in-the-mud tactical paralysis. It investigates the development of identity and a sense of self, at an individual, civic, national and even international level in the face of the integration of very different worlds, cultures, politics and religions. It follows population movement and the potential, as well as the traumas, of immigration. It puts the spotlight on a loosening of the class system and the creation of new wealth and celebrity. It shows how societies searched for new ways to conceptualise, regulate and police themselves and how individuals clamoured for reason, balance and the perfect life. It brings to light agreements behind closed doors and great debates among thousands. It is the story of a fight for natural resources and the persistent search for self-sufficiency, of treacherous transformation from face-to-face world into globalised society, in which individuals, as well as governments, could have a major impact. It is a celebration of people breaking the boundaries of the possible, of investigating uncertainty and discovering the intricacies of the world around them. Few people could find something in this list that does not speak to them and the world in which we all live right now. If history generally can provide a map of where we have been, a mirror to where we are right now, and perhaps even act as a guide to what we should do next, the story of the change from democrats to kings is perfectly suited to do just that in our times. It is a period of history that we would do well to think a little more about right now.

But perhaps the most important reason why we should care about this moment in the history of ancient Greece is the following: whether we like it or not, large parts of today’s world are tied in tightly to the stories, values and paradigms of ancient Greece (America’s cherished link to ancient Athenian democracy being only one example). The morals, practices, culture, philosophy, language, politics and identity of the ancient Greeks have, for a multitude of reasons, become embedded in our own, and ancient Greek examples have often been cited as justification for modern actions. The results have been both positive and negative. Ancient Greek tragedy has inspired generations of literary creativity. Yet Hitler justified his eugenics programme in part based on the heroic mentality of ancient Spartan warriors (those ones in the film 300). As a result, our world has a great deal at stake in how we choose to understand the history of ancient Greece and how we choose to let others use it.

For me, the only solution to this dilemma is to improve our understanding of what happened in the ancient world so that everyone is better equipped to evaluate the appropriateness of its example and influence for our own world today. We cannot be blind to how unimaginably different the ancient world really was from ours. But at the same time, we should not be deaf to how little has changed, how much the ancients faced the same struggles and challenges as we do, and how much we can still learn from them. If the modern world is to evolve and feel more comfortable in its relationship to ancient Greece, and if ancient history, instead of being misappropriated, is to be as useful as it could be for our present and future, we need to understand better the game of proximity and distance that separates us from them. We all need to engage in the debate about the relationship between the ancient and modern worlds.

In our increasingly busy world, we have little time to take stock of where we are in our own lives, let alone where we are as families, communities, cities, nations and as humanity in comparison to our past. The story told in From Democrats to Kings can help in that task because it is a true story of change, of failure, of triumph, of distress and hope in the ancient world, but most of all because it is, ultimately, a story of being human.

CHAPTER 1

Flute Players and Pick Axes

In the year 404 BC, when Isocrates was 32 years of age, the democratic city of Athens and its great empire lay in the final throes of a slow and painful death. Athens had been at war for almost the entirety of Isocrates’ life. The reason for this epic struggle was simple enough. After the cities of Greece had resisted the Persian invasion (and the 300 – in reality 301 – Spartans had fought so gloriously at Thermopylae) at the beginning of the century, the city of Athens had slowly moved to dominate much of ancient Greece. In the 440s BC, roughly 30 years after the heroic actions of the 301, as construction work on the great Parthenon temple in Athens was beginning and almost a decade before Isocrates was born, Athens’ empire had grown to span much of the Greek world. Its unbeatable navy patrolled the Aegean and the Black Sea and often visited violent retribution on cities unwilling to accept its leadership, its taxes and its garrison outposts. Eventually the strain had become too much and the one city which had the strength to oppose Athens’ stranglehold grip on Greece, Sparta, with its famous warrior citizens, had declared war in order to deliver what it called freedom once more to the Greeks. Athens, the celebrated democracy, was denounced as the tyrant of Greece by Sparta – a city, ironically enough, itself ruled by two kings. Gathering allies as it went, Sparta faced up against Athens in a war, which eventually enveloped much of mainland Greece, the islands of the Aegean and the coast of modern-day Turkey. This war, known as the Peloponnesian war, raged across Greece for much of the next 30 years. It consumed Isocrates’ early life and wiped out his family’s fortune, not to mention the lives of thousands.

Throughout those 30 long years, neither side could deliver the fatal blow. Yet by 404 BC, Athens was on its knees. Why? Partly, it was to do with factors beyond Athens’ control. In an effort to protect its citizens, it had encouraged many who lived out in the vulnerable countryside to move into the city where they would be protected by Athens’ stout city walls. But the effect of so many people crowded into a city, not best known for its public hygiene, was plague. Severe bouts of the plague struck the city three times, killing perhaps a third of its population. The plague bled the morale of the city, causing social and religious order to break down and taking the life of its most illustrious general, Athens’ version of Winston Churchill, a man called Pericles. Without a clear leader, surrounded by funeral pyres whose scattered ashes seemed to symbolise the crumbling state of the once-proud city, Athens was ill prepared to continue fighting this debilitating conflict.

Yet Athens’ fall from power was also due to its own mistakes. Too often, Athens’ over-eager democratic assembly voted in haste for a particular mission which, not going to plan, they sought to blame on somebody else. The worst case was that of a sea battle at Arginusae in 406 BC, just two years before Athens’ final defeat. Following the battle, in which they had actually been victorious, the Athenian admirals had been unable to pick up their dead from the water for fear of a storm, which threatened to take more Athenian lives in pursuit of those already dead. They returned home without the bodies of their compatriots, a serious breach of Athenian custom and religious obligation, but perhaps understandable given the circumstances. The Athenian assembly, standing together in session on the assembly hill, called the Pnyx, in the centre of the city (see Map 1), did not see it that way and voted to put on trial and eventually execute the offending admirals. In the midst of war, Athens killed its own successful military leaders. Athens left itself without a head, and with such a vengeful mob seemingly calling the shots, it’s not surprising that it had difficulty finding talented men willing to take the place of the dead admirals.

But perhaps the final nail in the coffin for Athens during this great war was the Spartans’ (perhaps surprising) willingness to think the unthinkable. For much of the current century, the cities of Greece had been at war with the great empire across the Aegean sea, Persia. Persia was the antithesis of everything Greek, and the successful repudiation of Persia’s attempt to take over the cities of ancient Greece back in 490 and 480–479 BC secured not only the legendary status of Spartan warriors in the ancient world, but also Greece’s freedom and the growing glory of the city of Athens. A Spartan could not even consider alliance with Persia. Yet the long years of the Peloponnesian war, and the fact that it was now the Greek city of Athens, not Persia, that was threatening Greece’s freedom, seem to have prompted the Spartans to make a deal with the Persians. In return for military and financial aid, the Spartans promised the Persians control over the Greek cities dotted along the coast of modern-day Turkey (the borderlands of the Persian and Greek worlds), which had been a constant thorn in the Persian king’s side. The Spartans, the descendants of the 301 who had held to their death the pass at Thermopylae against the invading Persian army, were now in bed with their one-time enemy. Against the combined army of Sparta and the financial and naval muscle of Persia, Athens didn’t stand a chance.

In 404 BC, following a siege of the city of Athens and the blockade of its port, Piraeus (Map 1), which had provided the arterial life-blood of edible grain into the city, Athens accepted its defeat. The Athenian empire was dead. The Spartan general responsible for masterminding this final humiliation, Lysander, accepted Athens’ peace envoy with great generosity, but also kept him waiting for an excruciating three months to agree terms. Three months in which exhausted Athenians waited to hear what lay in store for their battered city, like a victim of the guillotine waiting interminably for the sound of the blade sliding towards their neck. The terms that finally emerged were bludgeoning. Athens had to surrender its crown jewel – its navy – except for a paltry twelve triremes (the ancient version of the battle-cruiser). It had to allow all supporters of oligarchy – rule by the few, the antithesis of democracy – back into the city. It had to become a friend and ally of Sparta and follow wherever it led. And if this wasn’t enough, Athens had to pull down its own city walls, leaving itself naked to the world around it. Like a prisoner of war stripped naked in front of his captors, this was the final humiliation for the city that had been the glory of Greece.

In some ways, however, the peace agreement could have been much worse. It didn’t, for instance, demand that Athens get rid of its system of democracy. In fact, Athens did that all by itself. In the assembly meeting on the Pnyx to hear the peace terms, some Athenians stepped forward to say that democracy had had its day and that what was needed now was strong, stable government by a small number of experienced men. This wasn’t a new idea, since Athens had briefly tried a somewhat similar system of government seven years earlier but had thrown it out just as quickly as it had been brought in. This time, however, the movement was more serious. The man who had been sent by Athens to negotiate the peace terms (and, it was rumoured, enjoyed far too much the generosity of Sparta during those long three months of waiting) spoke in favour of appointing a board of 30 men to lead Athens in its dark hour. The victorious Spartan general himself, Lysander, sat on the platform in front of the Athenian assembly and suggested that, for Athens’ good, the proposal be accepted. The opponents of the scheme, the die-hard democrats, walked out of the assembly in disgust at what they saw as the subversion of normal democratic procedures (fair enough, since Lysander’s presence, and that of his army not far away, wasn’t particularly conducive to democratic debate). In their absence, however, the motion’s supporters continued the debate and won the day. On the same day as, 76 years earlier, democratic Athens with its allies had won its own famous victory against the Persians at the sea battle of Salamis, democratic Athens (somewhat) democratically voted itself out of existence.

In the nights following the adoption of Sparta’s demands, its terms were brutally enforced. The most heart-rending of these was the destruction of the stout city walls that had defined and protected Athens. Every Spartan, every hater of Athens, was called on to hack down the walls with anything they could lay their hands on. In contrast to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which heralded the birth of unity in a splintered city, this tearing down signified a city’s destruction. By day in the blistering sun and by night in the flicker of torch-fire, the rhythmic beat of metal against stone could be heard ringing out around the city. The Spartans, who marched to the tune of the flute, even installed flute players around the city to co-ordinate the work. The sad, rhythmical tune of the flute and the accompanying beat of the pickaxes heralded the final humiliation of a once proud city and, supposedly, the freeing of Greece from its tyrant.

The rule of the 30 (who would themselves later be branded the ‘30 Tyrants’) was initially fairly mild and temperate. But one of their most controversial actions was to rebuild the Athenian assembly on the Pnyx. Since its inception, this open-air assembly area on top of one of the central hills of Athens had been structured so as to have the assembly members facing towards Athens’ port, Piraeus, and the sea. The 30 Tyrants had it reversed so that the members now faced towards the land. Why? It is said that the 30 believed that Piraeus and the sea reminded the Athenians of democracy and empire (because rowing aboard Athens’ fleet of triremes had been one of the great supports for democratic thinking in Athens: if you can defend the city by powering its warships, you should have a say in how the city is run). Pointing people towards the land, the thinking went, instead reminded people of landowners, aristocracy, and the ‘traditional’ order of things in which only the elites had a say. Putting the sea to their backs, the 30 Tyrants hoped that the Athenians would forget their love affair with democracy. You still can still visit the Pnyx today in Athens, set out in the same orientation as the 30 Tyrants left it in 403 BC (see Figure 2).

The 30’s reign was fairly short, not simply because of their cosmetic attempts to eradicate many Athenians’ deep-seated regard for democracy. By the winter of the same year in which they had come into power, competition between the 30 men chosen to lead Athens had led to a hardening of their positions. Theramenes, the man who had brokered the peace with Sparta and supported the 30’s rule in the assembly, now questioned their motives and actions; he was exiled and a list of 3,000 people who were ‘in’ the club of Athenian citizenship was drawn up. Though always restrictive in who it gave citizenship to, democratic Athens, in the course of a couple of months, had now become an extremely exclusive members-only club. Supporters of the democracy and those not on this exclusive list fled the city to plot their revenge in neighbouring Greek cities like Thebes, Argos and Megara. By the end of the year, a revolutionary band of 70 men – both Athenian exiles and non-Athenians – was gathering in Thebes under the leadership of a man called Thrasyboulus. They struck out to occupy the town of Phyle on the border between the territories of Athens and Thebes. From there they moved to take Athens’ port, Piraeus. This hotbed of democratic support had smouldered since the overthrow of democracy, despite the assembly men literally turning their backs to it, and was ignited by the arrival of Thrasyboulus and his heroic band. On the Munychia hill in Piraeus, Thrasyboulus and his by now vastly swollen numbers of resistance fighters met the advancing (and still larger) supporters of the 30 and the ‘list of 3,000’ in open battle for the future of Athens.

The result was inconclusive, but the insurrection did succeed in killing Critias, the most hard-line of the 30 Tyrants, and forced constitutional change. The exclusive list of 3,000 dispatched the 30 Tyrants, and, in an off-hand move to placate the democrats, installed ten people to govern the city of Athens and ten to govern Piraeus instead. Such moves only further angered the leaders of the rebellion, who threatened further military action. The ten and the 3,000 appealed in desperation and a good degree of panic to Sparta for more military help. But what would Sparta do?

We are more aware than ever today of the dangers and difficulties of interfering with another city or country’s internal political affairs. Sparta too, despite its prominent position as de facto controller of Greece, was split in how to respond. The two sides of the debate were summed up by two of the city’s leading figures. On the one hand, Lysander, the original architect of victory over Athens, wished to move in and crush the democratic rebellion once and for all. But one of Sparta’s kings (Sparta had two of them at any one time) argued for restraint. The king pulled rank on the general Lysander. It was but another irony of Athens’ history that its democracy, voted out of existence by its own democratic assembly, was reinstated by a settlement negotiated by the king of the city which had brought Athens to its knees just a year before.

Athens had been through turbulent times. In a single year, it had lost its empire, its pride, its city walls, its democracy, been reorganised into an oligarchic state, suffered internal civil war and had its democracy restored. In the summer of 403 BC, it was left with the gigantean task of rebuilding and healing itself – physically, politically and morally. The problem was this: how should Athens restore the democracy and punish those opposed to it, without making clear just how weak democracy had been? How should the city celebrate its victory without making clear how close it had come to defeat? Like Germany after the fall of Nazism, Athens had to work out how to move on from such a dark part of its history without forgetting the lessons that needed to be learnt from it.

The settlement the city struck on was one that brilliantly combined a selective remembering of the heroic moments and an equally important selective forgetting of the embarrassing ones. Athens allowed an amnesty to everyone except the 30 Tyrants, who were hunted down and punished. Athens, pushed by Sparta, offered a very attractive deal to anyone who didn’t want to be part of a democratic Athens to go and live at Eleusis, a hugely important religious cult site about a day’s walk from the city (Map 1). But most important of all, it agreed that no one would remember past wrongs: not just an amnesty from prosecution, but a deliberate wiping clean of the slate in the collective memory. The past never happened. The last year was nothing more than a hiccup in the graceful dance of democracy at work.

But before such a blanket could be drawn over the affair, democracy’s heroes had to be honoured. With tacit acknowledgement of degrees of heroism, Athens reserved the ultimate honours for those brave few who had been willing to stand up to the 30 at the very beginning – the 70 men who had set out from Thebes under Thrasyboulus and occupied Phyle – with lesser honours for the larger numbers who had responded to Thrasyboulus’ call at his arrival in Piraeus, and lesser honours still for the hordes who had flocked to Piraeus once it looked like he was a sure bet to win. The rewards for each were inscribed on a stone set up on the sacred hill at the centre of ancient Athens that dominated the city then as it does today, its Acropolis. Placed near the world-famous Parthenon temple, which sits astride this towering rock, the stone inscribed with the list of Athens’ saviours, like the Parthenon itself, survives in part for us to read today.

The foreigners among the original heroes, the ‘men of Phyle’ as they became known, were granted the ultimate prize: citizenship of Athens for them and their descendants. In contrast, the non-Athenians who had only helped out in Piraeus were granted exemption from the tax imposed on foreigners by the city – to be considered a great honour but not quite such an honour as citizenship itself. The name of every man in each group was recorded with his employment for all to see. It reads like an inspiring report of a true, bottom-up, democratic revolution by the little man. ‘Leptines the cook’ and ‘Hegesias the gardener’, among others, fought for their democratic rights that day. Immortalised in stone, these humble cooks and gardeners became the heroes of Athens. Yet the inscription also reveals that, before anyone got onto that list, whether from Phyle or Piraeus, they all first had to provide witnesses to prove that they really had been where they claimed to have been. Athenian democracy, quite rightly, wanted proof of who its heroes really were.

After honouring the heroes, both in the inscription on the Acropolis and with graves in Athens’ public cemetery, the Cerameicus (which was located in a highly visible position around the main entrance gate to the city so that you had to travel through the cemetery to reach Athens), the crucial task now was to paper over the gaps in war-torn Athenian society and to rebuild the democracy stronger than before. The men of Phyle and Piraeus were allowed one victory march to the Acropolis before they had to take their place anonymously with everyone else in the assembly and begin the slow process of rebuilding the offices of democracy. That process crucially involved a review of the laws of the city, many of which had been discarded by the 30 Tyrants. Soon enough, Athens would feel the result of this new underpinning of the rule of law. Its citizens were able to read the city’s laws for themselves, set up on stone in the public space of the city’s political market-place, the Agora, and to implement the law in new courtrooms also built in the same area. Athens moved quickly after 403 BC to make the democracy stronger, and more visible, than it had ever been before. The ultimate proof of this was the oath that all Athenians were forced to swear in the weeks after the settlement. Standing in the Agora, as one voice, they swore: ‘I shall kill by word and by deed and by vote and by my own hand, if I can, anyone who overthrows the democracy at Athens.’

Every Athenian democratic citizen no longer just supported democracy with their voice and vote. They were now obliged by an oath, made before their gods, to go as far as killing anyone who attempted to overthrow it. An Athenian’s allegiance was now ultimately not to friends or family but to the city. Democratic Athens, after the upheaval and revolution of 404–403 BC, was now a militant force of would-be killers.

It all seems a little too perfect: democracy faltered, was restored by the cooks and gardeners of Athens and returned stronger than ever before, with all past wrongs forgotten, and everyone lived happily ever after. In reality, of course, it didn’t work like that. Whatever the official line, people could not forget so easily who had been supporters of the democracy and who had not. Partly this was to be expected. The settlement had laid out the bare bones of how post-revolution Athenian society was going to work, but it was up to the Athenians themselves to put nerves, ligaments and muscle on this skeleton framework. Here the law courts became paramount. They acted as the sites of discussion and debate for what was and what was not permissible to remember and to pursue. Slowly Athenian society groped its way towards a working political settlement. But there were casualties along the way. Even Thrasyboulus, the great hero who had led the revolution from Thebes and captained the men of Phyle and Piraeus, was not above the judicio-political intrigue of those difficult days after 403 BC. He was accused of illegally requesting too many honours for the revolutionary heroes (particularly the foreigners among them). ‘Steady on’, was the veiled call from the old guard, even for this hero of the democracy.

But the worst injustice of those turbulent years was reserved for a man who has kept on provoking history, thought and debate ever since. Athenian citizens could not accuse other citizens directly of supporting the 30 Tyrants in the newly built law courts (it was all forgive and forget, remember), but they could find some trumped-up charge to accuse them of and then load their speeches for the prosecution with thinly-veiled references to their past misdemeanours. Even as the mortar was drying in the law-court walls, Athens in 399 BC bore witness to an out-pouring of vengeful double entendre and dubious accusation directed against one man: Socrates.

You probably already know what Socrates looked like, so iconic has his philosopher image become – short, tubby, with a receding hairline, an ugly face like that of a goat, pudgy eyes and a wagging finger. He had roved around Athens for many years, engaging high-flying politicians and citizens of all trades in discussion of what they thought they were doing. Among the close companions of Socrates was our future political commentator Isocrates, who, now in his late thirties, was earning himself a living as a teacher. Socrates had even prophesied Isocrates’ glorious future. Yet the problem with Socrates was that, inevitably, his philosophical discussions ended up demonstrating only too clearly how the ‘experts’ he interrogated were not really experts at all. He was just the kind of fellow you didn’t want at a party – the kind who doesn’t let any statement go unchallenged, who punctures egos in public, who questions exactly what you meant by your flippant remark about ‘freedom’. In short, a man who frustrated, annoyed and embarrassed a large number of the people he talked to.

But he was also a man whose arguments, teaching and search for real truth, knowledge, justice and the good life has challenged the course of our thinking across the ages. We are still struggling with the complexities of Socrates’ arguments, and our world, just like the world of Athens, was, and is, better for it. But in 399 BC in ancient Athens, some people had had enough. Socrates, in the course of his baiting of powerful individuals, had come into contact with members of the 30 Tyrants. He had been their supporter and a member of the ‘in-club’ of 3,000. This, coupled with his difficult demeanour, was enough for his enemies to smell blood in the water. Officially the charges against the great thinker were those of introducing new gods, not honouring the gods that the city recognised, and corrupting the young (whatever that meant). But in reality, these charges were a front for an opportunity for revenge on the 30 and on Socrates as one of their supporters. Socrates’ defence speech to the jury against these charges survives for us today in the writings of another of his philosophical disciples (and later a great philosopher in his own right), Plato. To the jury in front of him, Socrates defended his existence in Athens and his way of life by explaining an idea which has become the catch-phrase of thinkers throughout the ages: ‘An unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.’ But the jury, blind to the truth or rather blinded by a desire for vengeance, voted to convict.

The practice in Athenian law courts for this type of crime was for the jury to act also as judges and pass sentence. They did not, however, have free rein. The prosecution and defence, having heard the guilty verdict, could each suggest a punishment. The jury had to pick one of them – it had no third way. The prosecution, of course, claimed the ultimate punishment: execution by the drinking of poison. Socrates stood and claimed that instead of punishing him, the city should pick up all his bills – so much of a good thing was he for Athens. He later modified his stance by offering to pay a fine. The jury, left to choose between killing him and letting him off with a fine, chose to kill him.

A democratic Athenian jury sentenced Socrates to death in 399 BC. His final moments in prison, including his drinking of the poison (the dreaded hemlock which paralysed drinkers from their feet upwards so that they were aware of their approaching death, even as the poison stopped the lung muscles from moving so that the victim suffocated), are recorded for us once again by his disciple Plato. The most surprising part of this record of his last hours for me is that Socrates was given several chances to escape, but chose not to, such was his respect for the rule of law in Athens – however wrong that law may be. Socrates, the ugly warrior of truth, was killed by the bloodthirsty alter ego of Athens’ new hard-line democracy in its blind groping for political reconciliation. It was an inglorious day in the history of democratic government.

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Almost 2,500 kilometres east of Athens, another event was taking place that would change the face of the ancient world as it stood on the brink of a new century. In the same year that Athens was in the throes of losing and regaining its democracy, the Persian king, Darius II, lord over the immense Persian empire that spanned from modern-day Turkey to Afghanistan, died in his capital at Susa (Map 4). His death was immediately followed by the succession of one of his sons, Artaxerxes. But another son, Cyrus, watching events at Susa and later back at his base on the coast of Asia Minor (the ancient name for the western half of what is now Turkey), had other plans.

In previous times, such internal politicking for the throne may not have interested the cities of Greece that much. A Persian was a Persian – whatever name he had and under whichever king he served. But now Sparta had taken Persian money (indeed Cyrus’ money) to help win its war with Athens, and promised Persia in return the Greek cities on the Asia Minor coast. Sparta, and with it Greece, now had a stake in Persian affairs, especially since the pretender to the throne, Cyrus, was sitting on that very coast. The gamble was this: if Sparta helped Cyrus in his plot to steal the throne of Persia and Cyrus succeeded, the new Persian king would forever be in Sparta’s debt. But if Cyrus failed, Sparta, and Greece, would have to deal with a Persian king whom they had actively tried to assassinate. The temptation of power and influence over the greatest empire in the ancient world was too much. Sparta sent one of its own generals to aid Cyrus, and together they put out a call for Greek warriors who would fight as mercenaries.

But fight for what? They couldn’t possibly announce their intention to march on the newly crowned Persian king, giving him ample time to raise an army and squash the insurrection before it had started. Instead, Cyrus and his Spartan adjutant called for Greek mercenaries to fight in a local war against a rebellious tribe. Cyrus, it was claimed, was doing his brother, the king, a favour in dealing with local insurrection. While Cyrus gathered a native force on the coast of Asia Minor, Greeks from many cities flocked to the mercenary call: they were battle-hardened warriors of a 30-year war and, more importantly, were in need of the high pay that Cyrus would offer for their fighting services.

One of the men who didn’t need the money, but who instead needed a reason to leave Athens, was Xenophon, a rich young Athenian not best pleased with the democratic reversal of fortunes in 403 BC. He consulted the wise Socrates (who was soon to suffer his own terrible fate) on whether he should go and serve with Cyrus. Socrates advised him to consult the great oracle at the sanctuary of Delphi, hidden high up in the Parnassian mountains of central Greece. Xenophon, eager young man that he was, asked the oracle not first of all whether he should go, but, going, to which gods he should sacrifice to do well on his adventure. His mind made up, he left to join Cyrus on that fateful expedition to the innards of the Persian empire.

It was not until they had gone so far inland that it was difficult even to remember what home looked like that Cyrus announced to his assembled troops his real intention: to fight his brother for the throne of Persia. What could the Greek mercenaries do? Turn around and wander homewards alone in the midst of a foreign, enemy country? Cyrus knew he had them cornered: they had to stay and fight with him for the throne of Persia. At Cunaxa near Babylon in modern-day southern Iraq in 401 BC (Map 4), a dust cloud appeared on the horizon, soon to be filled with the flashing glints of weaponry, announcing the arrival of the real Persian king and his forces. The battle for the future of Persia was soon under way.

It was short-lived. Cyrus, himself too eager for a man-to-man face-off between himself and his brother, dived into the Persian throng and was killed. Greek mercenaries didn’t fight for a cause but for money, and the man who paid them was dead. They had no interest in continuing the battle. But they were left with one small problem. How should they get home? Indeed, surrounded by the land mass of Asia and out of sight of the sea, which way was home? Suddenly these 10,000 or so Greek mercenaries must have felt very alone. They were unwelcome strangers in a foreign land, facing the most powerful ruler in the ancient world whom they had just tried to kill.

With impressive honesty, they explained their situation to the now undisputed Persian king (an argument along the lines of ‘business is business, no hard feelings’) and made an agreement with his henchman, a man called Tissaphernes, to head home. Initially the gambit seemed to have worked. The deal was reached, provisions were bought and the 10,000 started off, watched by the hawk-eyed Tissaphernes every step of the way. But as they progressed homewards, Tissaphernes’ intentions to harass them became clearer and clearer. Why wouldn’t he? Ten thousand highly-trained Greek mercenaries had come once to Persia – why wouldn’t they do so again if the money was right? Better to kill them off than let them live to fight another day. In a daring and outrageous subversion of normal custom, Tissaphernes killed the Greek generals who had come to see him under a truce to negotiate their continued march. The Greek mercenary army, now leaderless, still stuck deep in enemy territory, was a sitting duck.

It was at this time of crisis that Xenophon, that young, rich, eager Athenian who had responded to Cyrus’ call – and who would later be hailed as the first ‘horse whisperer’ for his skill with horses – came into his own. In a march that he was later to recount in his own published writing (and which, rumours tell, is soon to be made into a Hollywood movie), Xenophon led those brave 10,000 warriors through the midst of the enemy, through the barbarous mountains of the Persian empire, all the way to the Black Sea (Map 4). His account says that when they first sighted the sea after months and months of nothing but unending dry land, the Greeks, a people born with sea water in their veins, cried out as one voice with heart-rending simplicity: ‘Thalatta! Thalatta!’ (‘The sea! The sea!’) Their great journey had come to an end. Xenophon returned to Athens as the other Greeks did to their home cities. But the die had been cast. The cities of Greece, after an uneasy truce with the Persians during the Peloponnesian war, had been caught red-handed betting the wrong way against the new Persian king. What’s more, it appeared that Sparta was now not so keen to give Persia the Greek cities in Asia Minor it had promised them. And from the Greek perspective, the Persians had proved once again that they could not be trusted: Cyrus had deceived them and Tissaphernes had broken all rules of common god-fearing behaviour. The new century had begun, after a brief entente, with a ten-fold increase in mutual distrust and dislike between the two major powers in the ancient world, a distrust that would echo down the decades to come.

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While Athens was in the throes of revolution and Persia in a succession crisis, another part of the ancient world was also in the grip of significant upheaval. The island of Sicily had been home to Greek colonies for the past 300 years (Map 3). It was a difficult and treacherous place. The Greek cities there, with their own eclectic populations formed as a result of being major emporia on the international trade network, shared the island with a large selection of native tribes, as well as with Carthaginians, leaders of a powerful naval empire centred around the city of Carthage in north Africa. Sicily, just as it is today, was a melting pot of ethnicities, identities and political affiliations. In 406 BC, just two years before Athens lost the Peloponnesian war, Carthage had made a concerted push to capitalise on that unstable dynamic. Carthage’s target was the wealthy Sicilian Greek city of Acragas. The fall of Acragas into Carthaginian hands set off city-wide panic in another major Greek city on the Sicilian coast, Syracuse. At the assembly in the city, no one knew what to do next. In the midst of confusion, a lone man stepped forward: Dionysius. He was just 35 years old and he knew how to play the crowd. He first attacked the politicians and generals of the city for their poor handling of the crisis so far. Everyone loves to know whom to blame. The people loved it. He taunted the city into electing new generals. A fresh start – everyone loves that. He claimed that he needed sole power to be able to deal with the threat – that he alone could lead Syracuse and Sicily to safety in its dark hour. Everyone loves a hero. Dionysius, by working the crowd, and with his flair for theatre (he staged a fake attack on his life to push the people into supporting him further), became sole general – strategos autokrator – of Syracuse. Dionysius I was born.

His first year was tumultuous. He conscripted all men under 40 in the city to fight. He led this army against the Carthaginians, only to be pushed back. The fickle crowd, turning against him, let the city’s cavalry wreck his home and force his wife to commit suicide. But somehow Dionysius maintained control (of himself and the city). The Carthaginians were pushed back and the island of Sicily was divided: half to Syracuse and half to Carthage. But such a settlement was never supposed to last. Mustering his strength and dismissing his own thoughts of suicide, desperate to prove himself worthy of the title strategos autokrator and to hang on to power, Dionysius set off to take back Sicily. By 401 BC, just as Cyrus was killed at Cunaxa in Persia, Dionysius, himself acting now not so differently from a Persian monarch, had every Greek city in Sicily but one under his own personal rule. For the next 30 years, he would continue unceasingly his battle to enlarge his personal dominion, more than once almost losing it all, but in the end taking the fight both to Carthage in north Africa and to the cities in the heel of mainland Italy. Not for nothing did Dionysius I of Syracuse become known as the ‘warlord’ of Sicily.

What was this man like? Modern-day scholars, just like the ancient sources, are polarised between describing him as the strong man who did what was necessary in the circumstances and the brutal dictator who butchered a nation. He certainly wanted king-like rule over Syracuse for himself and his descendants (he even mentioned it in a treaty with Athens in later decades). He uncompromisingly married his children off in politically advantageous alliances; forced Syracusans to work solely on military projects, and taxed them heavily to pay for his war machine. Syracuse under his rule became the first example of the military-industrial complex – a city whose economic strength depended largely on it continuing to bristle with arms. He forced people from neighbouring cities to move to Syracuse to swell the numbers of workers and fighters. He was condemned openly at the Olympic games of 388 BC by the Athenian orator Lysias for being too much like the Persian king. Yet he wrote poetry from the writing desk of the great tragedian Aeschylus and used the pen of Euripides for inspiration. Athens would put up a statue of him in its own Agora in recognition of his achievements in defending Greek cities from the invading Carthaginians. Syracuse entered a period of unrivalled safety and prosperity under his control. Even Isocrates, our watchful political commentator who, by the end of Dionysius I’s reign, had begun to write his pamphlets encouraging Athens to step up its game, was tempted by what this man had to offer. Although Isocrates taught his students to loathe the pursuit of power and aggression, he admired this man’s ability to use that power to unite and lead. In 368 BC, as Dionysius neared the end of his life, Isocrates sent him a public letter, begging him to save the rest of Greece with his strong-arm tactics. Dionysius I – hero or villain? People of the time, just as we do today, had to decide for themselves.

As the 4th century BC dawned, a very different ancient world had emerged from the one everyone had known and understood just a decade before in the final years of the previous century. Key theatres of operation were in severe flux. Athens was defeated and in the grip of revolution, counter-revolution and self-flagellation. Sparta was now top dog in mainland Greece. The Persian empire was in a succession crisis. Sicily was being torn apart. From the depths of these conflicts, new politics were being born. From Athens rose a democracy more hard-line and uncompromising than ever before. From Persia, a king increasingly distrustful of Greece and a Greece even more distrustful of the king. From Sicily, a powerful king-like individual who, to some, offered the only hope of salvation not just for Sicily, but for some of Greece.

What made this world all the more terrifying was the difficulty in telling friend from foe. A Persian army could have a Spartan general or an Athenian admiral at its head, and Greek mercenary soldiers in its ranks, and still be Greece’s enemy. Dionysius I might have been attacking and capturing Greek colonies but he did so with Greek mercenaries and was honoured for it in Athens and courted by Sparta. The rules of the game had changed, but no one was quite sure what the new rules were. Who was your friend and who was your enemy? As the peoples of the ancient world faced up to the new century, no one could be sure who to count on or what would happen next.