Jonathan Wright - The Ambassadors - From Ancient Greece to the Nation State

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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