49

THIRTY TYRANTS

Athens, 404 BC

They tore people from their children, parents and wives, … and did not allow them to receive the lawful and customary burial rights, considering their own might-is-right authority to be more powerful than the punishments of gods.

Lysias, Speech 12, Against Eratosthenes, 12.96

FOR MORE THAN TWO YEARS SPARTAN-controlled populations across the Aegean had had to live under the rule of pro-Spartan juntas, ‘the rule of ten’ – and now the Athenians too were about to taste that experience.

Lysander supported a group of just thirty men who were to have command of Athena’s city. These were all Athenian citizens, but had to have had oligarchic or pro-Spartan leanings. The interim body of ‘overseers’ was given a Spartan name, the ephors. We have to imagine that this ‘Thirty’ were not selected because of their holistic, democratic views or their support of fair-handed moderation. Critias, an uncle of Plato and an arch-conservative, the man whom Socrates had condemned as a rutting pig thanks to his sexual appetites, masterminded the operation. Socrates’ other favourite, Charmides (he whom Socrates described, on spotting him in the gym, as being ‘perfectly beautiful’), was one of the Ten that the Spartans backed to keep the Piraeus district subdued, and under a form of Spartan system of control. Other members of Socrates’ circle were part of the narrative of the restriction of people-power in this chapter of Athens’ history.

But there was nothing symposiastic, dreamy, genial-boozy, butter-warmed about these men. Three per tribe, the Thirty had been legally elected, but they were in charge of an abused, traumatised city; and a Spartan ‘big brother’ watched over all. Much Athenian property was seized, and wealthy men, in particular foreign men, were targeted.

The Thirty instituted a reign of terror, purging the city of their personal and political enemies. The business started by oligarchs back in 411 BC, when death squads had roamed the streets, was being seen through to its awful conclusion.

These new rulers of Athens held power for just twelve months, but they steadily thinned the Athenian population; over one hundred men a month were ‘disappeared’. Apart from the back-street massacres, the stiflings in beds, the snatching of children from the ‘wrong’ families, all the incidental displacements in the city must have been so distasteful, so heart-rending. The Tholos – that attractive roundhouse created to feed democrats while they worked all hours to make the democracy robust – was taken over by the Thirty in 403 BC as their headquarters. From their base there in the Agora’s circular, visibly egalitarian building (architecture of deep symbolic importance), the Thirty sent out their orders of intimidation and murder. The awful irony cannot have been lost on those Athenians who had seen the Tholos raised as a triumphant hurrah for liberty and equality.

From 404 through to 403 BC, Athens was stifled in an endless nightmare. Fists and wooden clubs pounded on doors. Citizens turned slaughterers to avoid their own messy deaths. To appreciate the horror of this long night, it is important to recall just how small Athens had become. A city of 100,000 Athenians plus 200,000 slaves had been reduced, through disease, the Peloponnesian War and civil strife, to a core of 60,000 or so. Only 30,000 of those were men, and just 10,000 lived within the walls of Athens itself. This was Balkan-village atrocity. Neighbours turned on neighbours, sometimes brother against brother.

In the year of the Thirty, between 1,000 and 1,500 Athenians died. We know about the citizen deaths; there may have been many thousands more – anonymous corpses. Metics, slaves, the inhabitants of Piraeus were also purged. Vigilantes were around every corner. We have one unusually vivid eye-witness account of the attacks.¹ One Lysias (a ‘leading citizen’, originally from Thurii, Sicily, who was himself a prominent speech writer and whose father had been a friend of Pericles) tells us the details of his narrow escape. Arrested, he made a dash for the back door. His brother, Polemarchos, was not so lucky. As with all coups, loot seems to arouse as much passion as politics. The golden earrings were ripped from Polemarchos’ wife’s ears; his relations were raped and their goods stolen. Also confiscated by the state were the contents of his brother’s factory in Piraeus: 700 shields, plus gold, silver and 120 slave workers. The democracy had always disapproved of shows of wealth. Men who did well in the unusually buoyant economy of the mid-to-late fifth century, in the spirit of communal achievement, stashed capital away in their homes. Well, now this opulence was being ripped from private hands, not by egalitarian idealists but by jealous aristocrats and oligarchs; by men who had perhaps secretly always thought it a disgrace that ordinary, non-aristocratic, Athenians should be allowed to succeed.

The actions across the city were carefully orchestrated. To kill their rivals, to cut down the tall poppies, the Thirty adapted the various means of death already available in Athens. Men could be thrown into pits alive, they could be strapped with metal restrainers by their necks, legs and arms onto wooden boards; but what the Thirty brought to a fine art was death by hemlock.²

The recipe for a fatal hemlock dose had only just been perfected. Herbalists had worked out that less than a quarter of an ounce was needed to kill. There were ways of making the murder weapon extra-effective, or ‘quick and easy’ as the contemporary sources have it: if the plant was skinned, ground in a pestle and mortar and then sieved, its poison became particularly efficacious.

Aristophanes jokes about the situation.³ Death by domestic implement: the ludicrousness of us carefully, steadily working out mundane ways in which we can more easily force others to die. In 405 BC this was a newfangled bit of terminal chemistry. And by 404/3BC drinking hemlock became a ‘habitual’ order. Men were forced to die in their own homes, and many were denied a burial. Athena’s city had become a ghoulish morgue, the stuff of nightmares.

The Thirty were established, and many of the Athenians died drinking hemlock, and many went into exile.⁴

Socrates too was intimidated. Critias had clearly not forgotten that Socrates had criticised his pig-like libido all those years ago around Agathon’s dinner table, and decided to cut him off from his raison d’ětre – the company of the young. The philosopher was told that he could no longer associate with men under the age of thirty.⁵ Socrates’ old drinking companions had become war criminals. This fact was frequently used to debase the philosopher’s reputation, guilt by association. But Xenophon, that pragmatic writer, came up with the most obvious and natural explanation, one that is typically overlooked. Xenophon says: we cannot blame Socrates for the evil of others, this is not the philosopher’s fault – people let themselves down, they change.

‘But,’ the accuser added, ‘Critias and Alcibiades became intimates of Socrates, and the two of them did the city the most grievous wrongs. Critias became the biggest thief and the most violent and murderous of all those in the Oligarchy, while Alcibiades became, for his part, the most irresponsible and high-handed and violent of all those in the democracy.’⁶

And I know that Alcibiades and Critias, too, were temperate while they were with Socrates, not because they were afraid of being charged a fee or struck by Socrates, but because they believed at that time that this was the best action to be taking.

Then, perhaps many of those who claim to be philosophers might say that the just man could never become unjust, nor the temperate man rash and high-handed, nor was it possible that a person who learned anything that could be learned might ever un-learn it. But this is not what I understand to be the case about these matters.⁷

Friends, companions can surprise with their actions – and can suddenly seem strangers. Scholars often chide Socrates for the reactionary outcome of some of his pupils. But there is a tendency to over-promote the absolute tenacity of morality teaching. Socrates, who mingled with all manner of men, cannot be blamed for associating with individuals who went on to disappoint in later life.⁸

Now a list was drawn up, 3,000 citizens of whom the Thirty approved, and all others in Athens were disarmed. Socrates (and it is unclear why, given Critias’ antipathy towards him) was on the ‘approved’ list.⁹ One of the Thirty, Theramenes, protested against the new, restrictive policy; he was executed, poisoned with hemlock after being dragged from the railings of an altar by Athens’ heavies, ‘the Eleven’.¹⁰ Theramenes’ body should have been wrapped in a shroud with the word ‘persecution’ woven into the fabric. His death signified the empty ethical shell that Athens had become; democracy, liberty and freedom of speech, always qualified, now had no place. Theramenes was no democrat – and yet even he could not speak out. It was becoming crystal-clear what would happen to anyone who exercised their right to isegoria, ‘equal right of expression’. Now, by day and night, a number of Athens’ aghast citizens crept out of the city, exiling themselves from within the walls, broken now, that had protected them since birth.

Seven, fourteen, at least twenty-one harvests had been gathered since the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. But the dark days for Athenian democracy were about to become darker still. Although the Thirty had initially free rein to murder and rob and intimidate, a democratic Resistance started to form. Democrats who had melted away from the city began to regroup outside the city walls, in quite some number. The Thirty heard tell of the scale of partisan involvement and started to flee, most ending up 15 miles to the north-west of Athens in Eleusis. The oligarchs had prepared this bolt-hole, theoretically, but in practice the town did not welcome them. So they and their henchmen took Eleusis by force. The Thirty then went on to trick the male Eleusinian citizens into nailing their colours to the mast, declaring whether or not they were democrats. The Eleusinians were forced to walk out through a gateway – a kind of census, ostensibly to plan an effective garrison for the town. Waiting outside the gates were cavalry and the Thirty’s lackeys. The oligarch Eleusinians walked free, the democrat Eleusinians were seized, bound and transported to Athens. Xenophon finished the gruesome story in his Hellenica; the retelling is stagey in its cold-heartedness.

Critias, he says, had already ‘begun to show this lust for putting people to death’.¹¹

On the rocky, sun-drenched slopes beneath the Acropolis it was not Persian whips nor a heroic code of honour that drove the captured men to their deaths – it was an open, democratic vote. In a crammed Odeion, Critias raised his voice loud:

My friends, we are organising this government in your interests as well as in our own. It is right that, just as you share in the privileges, so you should share in the dangers. And so, in order that you may have the same hopes and same fears as we have, you must now pass the death sentence on these men of Eleusis who have been captured.¹²

Given that the space – which once hosted the aspirational music of Damon et al., whose concerts were thought to provide a medical balm for the democratic mind – was now blatantly a place weighted in the oligarchs’ favour, papered with Spartan racketeers and with Spartan-sponsored soldiers standing at the entrance gates, it was clear which way the vote was going to fall.

Elsewhere, from previously oligarchic strongholds in Thebes and Megara, which, surprisingly, gave a number of democrats shelter, steady streams of men climbed up to where the pine starts to sweeten the air, to the security of a place called Phyle. Phyle lies 3 miles north-east of Athens and offers excellent natural protection. A high promontory, it affords stunning views in the summer across the plains of Attica. In winter the clouds and mists wrap Phyle in its own veil of security. Amongst the renegade group camped up here was the man who had already made one journey north looking for a better place: Socrates’ Delphic envoy and treasured friend Chaerephon. On one of those bright, clear days of winter, the Thirty tried to flush the democrats out from their democratic den, but then the sky whitened and snow started to fall. We hear of the impact:

The fighters could no longer see one another, let alone their enemy.¹³

So the pro-Spartans returned home, frustrated, empty-handed.

Still in Athens, the Thirty wanted Socrates’ hands bloodied along with their own. The philosopher was instructed to go to Salamis, that long, low island which kick-started the story of Athenian liberty from Persia, and was ordered to arrest a once-democratic general called Leon so he could be murdered in cold blood. Socrates refused.

SOCRATES: The Thirty summoned me and four others to the Tholos and ordered us to bring Leon from Salamis to be put to death. They often ordered many others to do such things, since they wanted to implicate as many as possible in their causes. At that time I made it clear once again, not by talk but by action, that I didn’t care at all about death – if I’m not being too blunt to say it – but it mattered everything that I do nothing unjust or impious, which matters very much to me. For though it had plenty of power, that government didn’t frighten me into doing anything that’s wrong.¹⁴

Enraged by his intransigence, the philosopher was now marked out by the Thirty as an enemy of the State. The death squads were, we are told, coming for Socrates next. It is one of history’s great what-ifs. If a backdoor murderer had been dispatched by Critias and his mob to deal with this troublesome, recalcitrant philosopher then and there, we would have no martyr to liberty, and we might well have lost Socrates from history. On this occasion, Socrates escaped by the skin of his teeth. Because the wind-blown democrats up on Phyle decided to try to claim their city back. Coming home through Piraeus, they met the Thirty in battle. Critias and Charmides were killed. It was said that on Critias’ tombstone was carved the figure of a fierce woman ‘Oligarchy’ physically torching the anthropo-morphised lady Demokratia. While the denuded oligarchy withdrew to the city centre to lick their wounds and plan their next move, the 3,000 citizens who remained deposed them. Now a new board of ten, one per tribe, was elected. The Spartans were brought in to attempt to get the city back into some kind of order. Spartan diplomacy between those Athenians who had all stood together in the Assembly as one, as a single mass of 6,000, but who were now bitterly opposed to each other, meant that the oligarchs were allowed to live with their mysteries in Eleusis and all democratic exiles were recalled.

One of those who came back into Athena’s city, a chip the size of Crete on his shoulder, was a one-time tanner, now owner of a tanning factory, called Anytus. Anytus would be one of the men who would bring Socrates to trial.

And in 401 BC, when Spartans and Spartan swords were occupied elsewhere in the region, at a safe distance, the returned democrats stormed Eleusis and slaughtered the remaining oligarchs. Were they defending themselves, their families, an ideology? One wonders. But this was a time when there were many different reasons for hands to ball into fists. What is certain is that Athenians, whether reluctantly or with gusto, had developed a taste for spilling Athenian blood.

Socrates, throughout these dark days, remained intransigent. Was this one of his most irritating acts – the moment when it became clear to his compatriots that he really meant it when he said he did not want to be involved in politics? That all that otherworldliness was not just a pose? Socrates had not raised his voice to condemn the slaughter on Melos in 416 BC and now he did not – on record – condemn the slaughterers who had been busy on the streets of his home-town. Because although Socrates stood up to the oligarchs, he did not formally denounce them, he did not flee the city along with democratic friends such as Chaerephon, holing up, planning a revolution from the north. He did what he had done through plague and siege and war and peace: he stayed and walked around the streets of Athens, and he talked.

The delightful thrill of being with a man who was resolutely happy to plough his own furrow, even if what he did shocked those around him, was starting to wear decidedly thin.

Three years passed. These had been terrible times. Socrates had grown old in a city which since his birth had memorialised the extraordinary fact that Athena’s children had beaten back Persian might. But now there was shame; the Athenians could not match the muscle of their fellow Greeks, the Spartans, and they could not beat the enemy within. They could not maintain their empire, they could not employ the ideology of democracy as a convenient panacea, they could not control their own internecine strife. Socrates took the sting of this disgrace.

And so it was that, a scant five years after the Spartans had broken down Athenian walls, just four years after the democracy had been suppressed out of existence, and with the memories of slaughter and political executions still keen in the minds of the Athenian crowd, their wounds still suppurating, Socrates felt the hand of the poet Meletus on his shoulder, and he was called to court by the Athenian people.