Lucy Hughes-Hallett - Heroes - Saviours, Traitors and Supermen

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

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

The Athenians had good cause to mourn. Within a matter of months they had been blockaded and starved into submission. Their democracy had been replaced by a murderous puppet government, an oligarchy known as the Thirty Tyrants. They lived in fear – of the Spartans who were now their overlords, and of each other, for every formerly prominent person was under suspicion, informers were so active that none dared trust his neighbour, and Critias, leader of the Thirty, ‘ began to showa lust for putting people to death’. And yet, according to Plutarch, ‘ In the midstof 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 thoughtthere was nothing he could not accomplish.’

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

That Alcibiades was indeed an extraordinary person is well attested. All his life he had a quality, which his contemporaries were at a loss to define or explain, that inspired admiration, fear, and vast irrational hopes. ‘ No one everexceeded 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 soilof 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.