A History of the World (18 page)

All this was bad enough. But the story of the Syracuse disaster and what came after is intertwined with that of one of the most attractive and yet wicked figures of classical Greek history, Alcibiades. An aristocrat related to Pericles, and good-looking enough to win many lovers of both sexes, Alcibiades was one of Socrates’ favourite pupils. Plato says that Socrates had saved his life in battle and the two were
inextricably linked in the minds of the Athenians – even though Socrates seems to have resisted Alcibiades’ sexual charms, famously spending a chaste night under a blanket with him.

As we have seen, Alcibiades had been a prime mover in the catastrophic mission against Syracuse. He had persuaded Athens to increase her fleet, upping the stakes disastrously. But before the ships left he was accused of being involved, perhaps as a drunken aristocratic joke, in the mutilation of some sacred statues – the
Hermai
, which featured phalluses and stood at intervals around the city. Though he left with the fleet, under joint command, Alcibiades was then summoned back to stand trial for blasphemy. He defected to Sparta, and fought successfully against Athens before falling out with the Spartans too and selling his services to the Persians.

Later on, allies of his in Athens (where he had been condemned to death in his absence) rather remarkably managed to have him recalled: the charges against him were lifted and he was again put in command of the Athenian forces. This time, luck seemed to have deserted him, and after some defeats at the hands of the Spartans he was dismissed from Athens yet again. He died in exile, apparently surprised by Spartan assassins while at his mistress’s house, running at them naked with a dagger in each hand, then felled by a shower of arrows. Plutarch claims that the assassination had been fixed by another of Socrates’ old pupils and a one-time friend of Alcibiades, Critias. The American journalist I.F. Stone has rightly said that the story was made to order for that Plutarch-reading lover of a great plot, William Shakespeare.
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It is the play Shakespeare ought to have got round to but somehow never did; and it reminds us how small the ancient Greek world really was.

Alcibiades and Critias were certainly dangerous men. After the defeat at Syracuse, Athenian democracy had been briefly knocked to one side by the so-called Four Hundred, a group of aristocrats who in 411
BC
overthrew the government and briefly took power, a move that led to killings and a climate of fear. Alcibiades was thought to have been involved, and the coup foundered when the plotters fell out. Middle-class and poorer Athenians made common cause, and restored democracy. Then in 404 when Athens was finally defeated by Sparta, democracy fell again, this time under the rule of the Thirty Tyrants, a rich oligarchy led by Critias which suspended the right to vote or have a jury trial for all but a tiny aristocratic minority. This was an
altogether bloodier business. They ruled with a Spartan army, Vichy-like collaborators, using gangs of whip-wielding thugs to keep order,
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exiling and executing popular leaders.

Socrates stayed in Athens under the tyrants’ rule, even though many other eminent citizens left for a relatively comfortable exile. He excused himself later by saying he had been ordered by the Thirty to arrest a man for execution, but in fact he slipped away and left the job to others – hardly the action of a heroic resister. Once more, middle-class hostility triumphed, the Thirty were ousted, and democracy returned. But by the time of Socrates’ trial, a mere four years later, the Athenian regime must still have seemed to be teetering, and Socrates was not its friend.

His death was a tragedy, not because he had the answers to the key philosophic conundrums of the ancient world, but because it showed that even in this relatively open society the greatest minds could not always express themselves freely or follow their thoughts wherever they led. The most pressing problems for would-be democracies and open societies – and Athens was really more the latter than the former – have never been about the minutiae of voting systems, or even about the right balance of powers, hard though these are to achieve. They have been about how to deal with critics who seem genuinely threatening, as Socrates, old though he was, seemed in 399
BC
. This would be the case for French revolutionaries of the Enlightenment, for the US during the McCarthy era, and is so for today’s Western democracies struggling with Islamist preachers of hate.

For how long can you hang on to your principles of free speech and free thought, before giving way to fear?

As a philosopher, Socrates was a dissolver of certainties, a sceptic and a mocker. He did the minimum possible service in the Athens
polis
, was about as inactive a citizen as he could manage to be. He had fought as a soldier, but he chose not to use his great skills in open political argument at the great assemblies; he preferred private teaching. His critics dismissed him as a ‘sophist’, by which they meant a cynical teacher of the arts of argument – a purveyor of logic to suit every occasion. This was unfair. His radical doubt and self-questioning could never have produced a handbook for good living, still less a constitution, but he remains an essential contributor to the maturing of the human mind.

Learning to question is more important, even, than learning to believe. Socrates’ fluidity is shown by the very different paths taken by his followers, and their followers – Plato’s darkly authoritarian republic is a world away from Aristotle’s sophisticated defence of the city-state. As in China, where the supporters and foes of Kongzi would lock horns for centuries, Socrates’ death began an argument that has never ended.

Alexander the . . . Quite Good

We have spent much time with the Greeks, Chinese, Indians, Hebrews and Persians, observing how, over hundreds of years, social change and ideas that have lasted to our own time were provoked and given focus by war. Technical change was happening too, with the spread of sophisticated metalworking, chariots, and writing, and with ships able to make long sea voyages, though the pace of change was gentler here.

There were many other peoples for whom these centuries were important ones. Humanity’s advance guard was still pushing down through the Americas, clearing land and starting to farm; the first coastal American civilizations date from this time. In the Pacific, seafarers were finding and colonizing the last major unpeopled islands, an epic of courage and navigation that nobody recorded. In Europe, the Celts – who will make an appearance in the next section – were thrusting earlier settlers aside. In Japan, Burma, Thailand and Korea the first dynasties were establishing themselves. Elsewhere, including Russia and Africa, we know very little beyond the probable movements and settlements of nomad tribes.

All of these are interesting and much studied stories, but are less important than the development of the four essential hubs of advancing humanity, those to be found on the plains of China, across northern India, in Persia and the Near East, and around the Mediterranean. The conundrum there is that war, at this stage even more than trade, had clearly driven change; yet these local wars had been destructive (as wars always are), resulting as they did in the collapse of cultures and cities that might well have flowered.

We must go back one last time to the Greek world, for if there is
one man who embodies the tragic ambiguity of these messages it is Alexander III of Macedon, better known as Alexander the Great.

This is the man under whom the Greeks broke the boundaries of their archipelago, and flung out east and south across central Asia in a fury of war-making. Alexander, though he came from the rougher northern state of Macedon, was a product of Greece’s golden age. Schooled in hoplite fighting, he carried a copy of Homer’s poems with him, allegedly using it as his pillow. He was taught by the great Aristotle, a follower of the Socratic tradition, and himself a Macedonian by birth. Alexander’s father Philip had hired the philosopher to teach the prince and his companions from the ages of thirteen to sixteen. Their school, a leafy hideaway in the hills, has been rediscovered. There, Alexander was taught about the Persians, including Cyrus – the information culled from Herodotus – as well as a sweep of subjects including natural history, botany, geography and mathematics. Aristotle’s later writings on education imply that Alexander may not have been the very best of pupils; or perhaps he was merely saying that teenagers are headstrong and don’t listen. From early on, Alexander dreamed of uniting West and East, bringing together the thinking warriors of Greece and the ease, wealth and customs of Asia. Yet for true admirers of the Greek golden age, Alexander would be a fatal messenger.

The Greek message for the world had been that the town was where humankind expresses itself best. There, a rough political equality between citizens, speaking freely and listening attentively, living under clear, agreed laws, could produce a better way of life – more artistic, philosophical, even proto-scientific. Law, a settled and codified system of fairness, allows people to live successfully in larger groups than families or tribes. So Greek city-states were proud of their laws and revered their ancient law-makers. Greek philosophy spent much thought on the question of law. Greek cities had been places where, slaves apart, the gaps between rich and poor were not so wide as to destroy any sense of communality.

These city-states also demonstrated the power of competition. Laws, constitutions, political systems, artisan skills, fighting styles – all improved when constantly tested against one another. Greek competition flung out questions and answers that still reverberate around the world. Is it possible to be a true republic and an empire at the same
time? No. Can democracy survive vast disparities of wealth? No. Does success produce decadence? Yes.

But then, after the horrors of the Peloponnesian war, this vigorously competitive world collapsed. Democracies did become empires. Athens, then Sparta, then Thebes, became dominant over lesser city-states and over one another.

The hoplite citizen armies, undermined by mistrust and defeat, began to give way to hired forces, mercenaries. As one historian puts it, ‘Poor, disenfranchised citizens, landless men, refugees, foreigners, and slaves became more numerous . . . Single and separate cities, where the citizens’ voices could perhaps still be heard, had lost control of their own fates.’
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And when eventually the largest city-states were conquered by the Macedonians in 338
BC
, the true age of the city-state ended. For the Macedonians brought the leader cult, the rule of kings over subject peoples, across most of the Greek world – and Alexander, for all his love of Homer, was just a very glamorous tyrant.

History offers many examples of marginal-seeming peoples suddenly erupting over their borders to overwhelm or dominate the richer civilizations near by. The Persians had seemed to come from almost nowhere to overturn the great war culture of Assyria. In China, the frontier state of Ch’in would soon leap on, and bring down, her richer, softer rivals. Macedon too was a frontier territory in the Greek world, beyond which there were only barbarians. The Macedonians spoke Greek, though it sounded a little strange. With forests and marshes to deal with, and a tough climate – it snows heavily and can be bitterly cold even in the springtime – they were anything but decadent.

They were tribal people, not town-dwellers. Hard to govern and loyal to their nobility, they had only relatively recently come under the full control of their kings, based near the coast. These kings, great hunters of bears and lions, had imported some of the culture of the Greek golden age, including flamboyant palaces. Their new capital, Pella, had a huge central open area, or Agora, where pottery, metalwork, glasswork and statuary were manufactured, excellent wine was sold, and goods from around the Mediterranean were displayed. The palaces were richly decorated with bright frescos and elaborate mosaics; their gold jewellery was delicate and lovely. There are hints of a slight inferiority complex: they imported a lot from the more fully evolved states to the south. More practically, they had developed and
advanced Greek phalanx fighting to supplement their royal cavalry. The more southerly Greeks, though, had not taken them terribly seriously. Macedon was the place to which it had been suggested Socrates might flee to escape his death penalty. Tellingly, he had laughed off the idea as absurd.

The first great King of Macedon was Philip II, Alexander’s father, who had exploited the wars of the Greek city-states to build a powerful military position. He had conquered his nearby rivals Illyria and Thrace in a sequence of campaigns, leading his army in person and losing both an eye and much blood in the process. His cavalry fought in V-formation, without stirrups, and his infantry used extraordinarily long spears, some nineteen feet long, so they presented the appearance and effect of an infuriated giant hedgehog running at speed. Bribing, menacing, fighting and outsmarting, Philip brought the city-states (including Athens), already in disarray, under his control. It was a huge achievement. Only Sparta had held out against him. Philip had warned the Spartans that if he brought his armies successfully into their territory he would destroy their cities and kill all their people. They replied, rather magnificently, with the single word ‘If ’. Next, he planned to invade Asia. But as he was preparing for the invasion, Philip’s domestic circumstances took a turn for the worse.

He had taken several wives, and in 336
BC
he did something to provoke his senior divorced wife. We do not know precisely what the feud was about, though Philip had also taken a younger wife, but this senior wife was not a woman to be trifled with. She was Olympias, a Lydian princess and the mother of Alexander. She was also a worshipper of the god Dionysus, and was reputed to sleep with snakes in her bed, though this was probably a reference to the snake-handling rites of the Dionysiacs. It was later suggested she had actually conceived Alexander while bedding the Persian king – who had then sent her back home because her breath was smelly.