The End of Herodotus

 

What are we to make of the end of the Histories? Is it an accident? Did he intend to conclude with the Sestos siege and the story about Protesilaos? Did he simply die before he could finish his narrative? Why does it appear as it is? We have certain expectations of a historian – that he will begin and end his work in a certain way, that themes will underlie it, that the themes will be emphasized, and that the ending will restate those themes in some dramatic or at least memorable, emotive way. Herodotus meets some of these expectations, but not the last. The end of the story seems to precede the end of the text; it is though Herodotus stuck in a few unrelated appendices and forgot to label them as such.

Perhaps the largest concluding portion comes in Herodotus’s account of the Plataea campaign, which includes several of what Hayden White refers to as “terminating motifs.”[1] Three episodes stand out in particular, all of which summarize some main theme of Herodotus: in 9.76, Pausanias returns a Persian courtesan to her Greek family; in 9.79, he explains why, unlike the Persians, the Greeks do not humiliate their dead enemies; and in 9.82, he remarks at the vast difference between a sparse Greek dinner and a gluttonous Persian one. These motifs all serve to bring the Histories to a thematic resolution, but there are still several episodes left for Herodotus to relate.

The last major battle, and the last episode to which Herodotus appends one of his characteristic closing statements[2] (“Thus indeed for the second time Ionia revolted from the Persians,” 9.104), is the battle of Mycale. But again, the Histories do not end there – there are for more brief episodes to be accounted for, none of them containing the same sort of thematic or formal closure that a reader would expect from a great writer. Herodotus does not give us one. He drops off his narrative with an ambiguous, and hardly satisfying, epigram about Persian slavery.

The question remains – why did Herodotus choose to end his work in this way? It couldn’t be due to incompetence or lack of imagination; we see in other places that Herodotus was perfectly capable of stirring up a rousing rhetorical conclusion to his discussion of a certain topic. Many eminent scholars – Wilamowitz, Jacoby, and Pohlenz, to name a few – have decided that the end which has come down to us is simply wrong – a sort of corruption of the text, or a failure on Herodotus’s part to carry through the ends he intended to achieve. Wilamowitz and Jacoby thought that Herodotus had meant to end his history with the capture of Sestos; however he had really intended to end his Histories, what was surely known was that “he could not have done so with the story of the pickled hero Protesilaos and with an anecdote from the time of Cyrus.”[3]

More recently, however, scholars have begun to take the ending for what it is, and to study it more carefully as though Herodotus did indeed intend to end with it. For John Moles, the thrust of the enigmatic ending is that the Athenians must be warned against the perils of empire. The major themes are rehearsed and brought to mind for the reader: we are reminded that strong people come from harsh lands and weak people from lush ones, that liberty is a treasure, that self-restraint is preferable to opulence, and that empires expand at the risk of losing their hard national character. The final anecdote, as well, serves to hammer the imperial point home – the Persians chose empire and ended with slavery.

Dewald goes further: the expectations we have about historiography, she says, are largely 18^th– and 19^th-century conventions. We write within the tradition that produces those conventions, so we have inherited them. Herodotus, however, did not write within a tradition with much sense of prose historiography at all; the Greek tradition, and particularly the Homeric tradition Herodotus sought to imitate, was one rooted in oral, rather than written, transmission. Oral narratives are not as formally cohesive – or not in the same way – as written ones.

Rather, oral narratives rely on other forms, such as repetition, clear signposting, and others. Herodotus exhibits all of these qualities and more. Furthermore, he continuously asserts his reliance on oral narratives in the construction of his work; he is not reading other writers so much as he is listening to what others tell him. With this background in mind, it becomes much easier to envision Herodotus’s ending as intentional; his idea of a good historical barnstormer was simply different from ours. He was capable of winding up as good a conclusion as anyone, but he wrote in a context that saw no formal need for it.

In Boedeker’s view, the episode with Protesilaos, the “pickled hero,” is the most important feature of Herodotus’s closing. The vengeance which he exacts upon Artayktes is symbolic; from it we can see the theme of intrusion upon territory not one’s own, and the price which is paid by those who dare to enter. Herodotus makes the parallel even more obvious, Boedeker thinks: Artayktes is killed at the very place that the Persians used to enter Europe. The two stories are thus linked by metonymy: each invader is repelled from the lands he has tried to enter.

Protesilaos, furthermore, is far from the only example of this theme, and the actors in his episode are not merely mortal – it is Artaykes who declares that the punishment that is visited upon him is “from the god” (9.120). The theme, then, is one of divine retribution. It occurs many times throughout the Histories; the gods favor those whose lands have been invaded. Before Marathon, the Greeks camp in a temple of Heracles and are then victorious. They do the same before they fight the Persians at Sounion with similar results.

All this is most clearly present, Boedeker argues, in the insignificant parts of the Histories such as the end precisely because those parts are insignificant in themselves and are filled with minor characters. Herodotus dares not force his major characters into the procrustean bed of fate – his great characters and great movements must be presented as they are, while the minor men and events which surround them explicitly act out the great themes of the work.

The special significance of Protesilaos, for Boedeker, is that he is the last example of this method at work. In the execution of Artaykes we find the final Persian to be killed in the Persian War, because he had trespassed on the property of an ancient Greek hero: the first Greek killed in the Trojan War. All of this, again, occurs at the very spot where the Persians first invaded the Greek homeland in the Persian Wars.

For my part, I am inclined to take both sides. The case for Protesilaos as a metonym for Greece, and Artaykes for Persia, seems to me very strong, and the themes in the episode are clearly important in the self-understanding of the Greek audience Herodotus wrote for. The following episode, with Cyrus and the Persian slavery, seems also to fit a nice motif mold – Herodotus warning the Athenians that their imperial delusions will bring their city to naught.

I am resistant to the idea that Herodotus explicitly put all these literary devices in, however, specifically in the case of Croesus, whose role depends heavily on parallels with the first book. I do not think that the first book and the last books were written at the same time or with much reference to each other, and it seems difficult to me to prove that Herodotus was a strong-minded thematic writer here when the scope spans across the entire breadth of the Histories. Further, it just doesn’t seem like Herodotus to end in such a queer enigmatic way; the texts do read as though they were note-sheets or manuscripts appended to the text by some hasty literary executor, or simply happened to be at the bottom of the pile of papers Herodotus was writing when he died. The oral narrative suggestion is fascinating and seems very probably correct, but I am still hesitant to think that some more formal ending never occurred to Herodotus. He may have written within a predominantly oral culture, but still he wrote. It is easy to make sense of it all if one squints hard enough, but I find it hard not to doubt that this was really the way Herodotus designed it to be.

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[1] Dewald, p. 65.

[2] These sorts of summary statements are found at the end of many of Herodotus’s digressions – “This is the way it was concerning the rule of Croesus and the first conquest of Ionia” (1.92), “The Lydians, then, were enslaved by the Persians” (1.94), “Thus was Babylon captured for the first time” (1.191), etc. Each of these statements gives the reader, if not full closure, at least a sense that Herodotus has finished saying what he meant to say on the topic. In the case of Mycale, we would be content to end the Histories on that note, if it did indeed end there.

[3] Dewald, p.62.

Punishing the Compatibilists?

Prepunishment is a strange thing. It is, strictly speaking, the punishment of innocent people – punishing people for crimes they have not yet committed. Saul Smilansky contends that a person who accepts compatibilism is forced also to accept prepunishment; if they are at all open to the idea that our actions may be causally determined and yet they maintain that we are still morally responsible for our actions, Smilansky argues, then it does not make any difference whether the punishments occur before or after the determined actions. It seems to be a formality, on his account, that we punish afterwards, but that in some cases we ought to punish beforehand; specifically, he says, we ought to prepunish when we know that someone is going to commit a crime (they have told us and we have no reason to disbelieve them) and we have good reason to think that we will not be able to punish them afterwards (if, say, their crimes is breaking the speed limit while they speed away from us and escape).

Smilansky himself provides a sort of way out for those who wish to accept all the same evidence and yet to avoid prepunishment: for Smilansky, there can be no such thing as knowing “beyond a reasonable doubt” that a crime will be committed until the crime has been committed. But, as Smilansky points out, this presupposes certain things: most important, by pointing out that the act has not yet occurred, it presupposes the possibility that the act may not occur – that the person might change his mind and remain innocent of the crime he had intended to commit.

To Smilansky, what is at play here is a certain notion of human free will. He thinks that the distinction between human acts that have been committed and those that have not is simple: that the two are easily separable on a libertarian view, but that they dissolve on a determinist view. What differentiates them, then, must have something to do with the disjunction between a person’s intention and a person’s action. On the libertarian view, whatever a person’s intention, the action itself is what matters – the intention, because it is freely moved by the will, may change, and the action resulting therefrom may be a crime, or it may not. On the determinist view, however, the intention itself is determined, and thus the resultant action is also determined (or so Smilansky’s argument goes). If we know the (determined) intention with certainty, then we know also the (determined according to the intention) action – with a sort of certainty.

There is a difficulty here which needs some brief attention before we can proceed. What, exactly, do we know about a thing when we know that it is “determined”? First we ought to reject the obvious misapprehensions: we do not mean to say that a determined act will happen necessarily in the future. This formulation must be rejected because it implies a sort of prophetic quality that the theory cannot claim. It might very well be the case that Mr. Brown intends to fly to Jamaica, and on the determinist worldview, we might say that he will – in a sense. Mr. Brown might also board a plane whose engines fail in mid-flight, causing the plane to drop out of the sky and crash, killing all of its passengers. If determined actions must have happened necessarily, then Mr. Brown’s determined vacation is in obvious trouble. Was his vacation not actually determined?  Is determinism done for? Did he actually intend to die on his flight?

The sensible view here, in my opinion, is merely to view “determined” actions through Newton’s law of inertia. If Mr. Brown says he is going to vacation in Jamaica, then it is determined that he will vacation in Jamaica – unless something else prevents him. Say, for instance, his plane crashes, or the credit card with which he was going to buy the tickets hits its limit, or another plane stalls on the runway, delaying his flight, or any number of things.

Take another perhaps more illustrative analogy: a round ball is rolling down a smooth even incline at its terminal velocity. It will not speed up, it will not slow down, it will not change directions – until its terrain changes. A hill appears; the ball slows, turns, perhaps bounces. No intention has been invoked here; the ball didn’t intend anything. Everything in the scenario is determined by the laws of physics. There is no free will to confound us. Yet, even in a perfectly deterministic scenario, we can see how the predictions we make about determined actions and events are liable to change in a changing environment.

With all this in mind, Smilansky’s purported problem looks very strange. Why, if we can imagine a would-be criminal not going through with the action for one reason on a libertarian view, can’t we imagine that the same could occur on a determinist view? All sorts of preventative circumstances could arise; any number of accidental (or non-accidental!) events could intervene, taking one determined action and confuting it, in the same way the path of our rolling ball can be changed by variations in its terrain. What is to stop the same sort of vicissitudes from affecting human action? Smilansky doesn’t seem to consider this – he seems to attribute to determinism a prophetic quality that claims more for the predictive qualities of science than the actual exponents of the position would claim.

Furthermore, the determinist begins to wonder what difference Smilansky is really drawing in his “human respect” objection. If, as Smilansky argues, human beings do have a thing called free will, the argument can be made to treat this “will” or “intention” category of motivators separately from other types of motivators. Notice what this means, however, for Smilansky’s argument (provided he does desire to treat “will” separately) – whenever the criminal is asked why, having said he would commit the crime, he nonetheless did not, he must answer: “Because I changed my mind.” This is the only description I can think of that gives an account of the will’s movement in influencing action alone. Notice that he cannot say, though, that he did not commit the crime “because I was hit by a car,” or “because I read about the consequences that would follow the crime,” or “because my brother gave me a lecture,” or anything of that sort. All of those explanations, it is clear, do not describe the movement of the will, but instead describe some secondary influence which the will takes into account when making decisions.

Again, this distinction might make sense on the libertarian view, but for the determinist, there is no special category of free will to account for. One motivator for a change in action is as good as any other, and whenever the criminal is asked why he did or did not take such and such an action, the epistemological root of his answer is not in the will but in the external influences (which, when free will is absent, are no longer secondary – they influence his actions directly). Why, then, must the determinist accept prepunishment? He rejects the premise that the will is the prime motivator in human action. When the will is absent (or rather, when it is as determined as any external non-voluntary occurrence), he does not say that there is no prime motivator, but that there are other motivators.

It is unclear to the determinist, then, why he should lament the would-be criminal’s inability to change his mind simpliciter – that is simply a matter of will, and has no implications for his actions. It is still possible, on this view, for the would-be criminal to change his mind in a determined way – namely, if the external circumstances under which he had originally expressed his (determined) intent were to change – and if this is possible, the criminal can still (in a sense) “change his mind” before the crime occurs. Where’s the problem? It is in Smilansky’s head – he has invented it by projecting libertarian presuppositions about choice onto a determined framework, where they have no business in being and play no significant role.

The most troubling aspect of the problem, however, is Smilansky’s neglect to inquire after the meanings of crime and punishment. What do they do, what makes a crime a crime, why is a crime punished, what is a punishment? These questions seem very obvious to us, and this is Smilansky’s advantage; by taking our assumptions about them as definitions and providing no formal definition of his own, he is able to equivocate on what prepunishment is and when it is required. Prepunishment is “punishment” that is meted out before the crime is committed – but what is punishment, and again, why do we punish?

Again, Smilansky appears to equivocate. The argument runs something like this: say we have action X which implies ambiguous reaction Y. Nobody really knows why Y follows from X, or what Y means, but we know that it does follow from X. Then we create action X’, which looks just like action X, but isn’t one and the same. Shouldn’t reaction Y still follow from action X’ as much as it does from X? They’re practically the same! What’s the difference? What stops you from endorsing one and not the other?

This is a clever rhetorical trick, but it’s clearly just an appeal to intuition and not an argument. Smilansky can demand that punishment follows just as much from his pre-crime-crime as it does from an actual crime that has been committed, but we shouldn’t take him seriously unless he tells us why. Instead he just asks us: why not? “The crime hasn’t been committed!” But it’s determined! “You don’t appear to understand what it means for something to be ‘determined’ in this way!” But we know it’s going to happen! “But it hasn’t.” The argument goes nowhere; the opponents refuse to interrogate the question that’s at hand.

If that weren’t enough reason to reject Smilansky’s argument, it is perhaps well to note that he doesn’t actually provide any reason to accept it. His claim is that prepunishment follows from a consistent compatibilist-determinist position, but he refuses to answer the question: “consistent with what?” He attempts to shift the burden of proof for his argument onto the determinist, but again, this is done by way of insinuation rather than argument.

It seems clear from the preceding considerations, then, that Smilansky’s compatibilist opponents have a right to demand a bit more from their critics before they revise their positions on prepunishment.

The trireme debate: how many oars to a cross-section?

The Greeks sailed in triremes. We know their names; what else we know about these warships, so prevalent in ancient naval warfare? From the literary sources, we know that 170 rowers were required to propel a ship; that the oarsmen had cushions; the rest must be determined by argument.

The first complete assessment we have of the problem comes from Morrison, whose Athenian Trireme was first published in 1941. In beginning this study, some source problems ought to be addressed: one of the many perplexing aspects of trireme study is the almost complete lack of archaeological evidence. Why is it that we have the sunken wreckage of other ships – merchants, for instance – from the time period, but none of triremes? Morrison suggests that this problem owes itself mostly to the practice of Greek naval warfare, which has been slightly misrepresented by translators. The word most of the Greek historians use to describe how ships are damaged – the transitive verb ‘kataduein’ – does not mean, in context, ‘to sink,’ as it is usually translated; rather, it means ‘to swamp.’ This is because most frequently the aim in naval battles was not to sink ships, but to immobilize them or capture them.

For my part, I find this explanation only partially convincing; granted that all of that were true, shouldn’t we still expect to see evidence of ships that sank unintentionally in battle, or that were sunk by storms (which, as we know, happened not infrequently)? Perhaps we might answer that merchant ships simply sank more often, so there was a better chance that one should be preserved for us. But this seems counter-intuitive; wouldn’t we expect more casualties among the ranks of the ships that were explicitly designed to disable other ships? It seems rather to suggest, if anything, a difference in the materials used for the ships; that triremes were made of a less enduring material. In any case, the archaeological evidence is scarce.

Morrison, though not denying the existence of two-level ships, nonetheless argues that the triremes we are considering were three-level ships. Part of this he deduces from the name; trieres, that is, three-rowing, gives us a clue, but more illuminating is a variant that Aeschylus uses to refer to them: triskalmos, that is, a ship with three thole-pins (the pins which hold the oars in place). Obviously the ship has more than three thole-pins in it, but it would seem similarly obvious that there must be some unit within the ship which corresponds to a three-thole-pin estimate. For Morrison this unit is the “room” (interscalmium or dipheciaca), which refers to the distance between thole-pins along the length of the hull. Thus we have three oarsmen per room. And how are they arranged? According to their eponymous positions: the zygioi are at the very bottom, seated on the zyga (the cross-beams in the ship’s hull), the thranitai sit at the very top, and between the two sit the thalamioi (“below”). The latter two categories are named and attested in the sources; in the Frogs, Aristophanes makes a joke about an oarsman “making wind in the face of the thalamax.”[1]

Responding to Morrison and others fifty years on, Tilley seeks to challenge the “trireme orthodoxy.” He agrees on the linguistic evidence: “trireme” means “three-something,” likely “three-rowing”; thus we know that the number three had something to do with the oars. The so-called orthodox theory that Tilley purports to rebut is described as “the assumption that the ancient trireme had six fore-and-aft files of oarsmen.”[2] Tilley rejects this assumption in favor of an apparently simpler approach: rather than three files of men on either side, he suggests that there were only three in total. On this view, the men on the left rowed to the left, the men on the right rowed to the right, and the men in the middle alternated. Some of the evidence used to argue for a six-man cross-section, he shows, is anachronistic; we look at an 18^th century Venetian trireme, itself an anachronistic revival of what the ancient trireme might have been like, and assert a continuity between the two that does not exist. Against the three-level view typically held, Tilley argues that there were only two levels of oarsmen; on this view, a cross section has three men, because it has three files – one on either side, equal in height, and a third, lower down, between the two. Much is made of the ancient artistic depictions; Tilley rejects all the depictions in which Morrison sees a three-level trireme, and instead believes it first to occur on Trajan’s column. He is utterly unconvinced by the Lenormant relief and the 17^th century drawing he presents, though, for my part, I cannot see how. The pictures clearly show three oars; Tilley denies it, and in the stead of argument offers scorn.

Tilley also argues that the Olympias cannot be trusted as a model until it is able to satisfy every description that we have from the literary sources, not just the relevant ones – for instance, the Olympias is far too heavy to be lifted by her crew, and she is far too large to resemble an ancient trireme (for example, she is too large for her oars, which are built according to the measurements given in the sources). A three-level trireme in general, Tilley thinks, would be too tall for the oars to reach the ocean; moreoever, only two different sizes of oars are provided in the texts.

A complicating aspect of Tilley’s argument is his tendency to argue for a diversity among types of ships and the ways they were manned; double-, triple-, and quadruple-banked ships are discussed, alongside double- and triple-leveled ones. This is, I think, the most easily accepted part of his argument; as the numbers of men available to row at certain times might differ, and as differences are suggested in the literary evidence, it seems not implausible to think that other sorts of trireme structures may have co-existed with the dominant form (whatever that may be).

Coates brings a different perspective to bear on the arguments presented by Tilley and Morrison. Although Tilley has revised the trireme model according to a simpler, more diverse method, Coates argues, he has neglected to account for material along with model. In particular, Tilley’s oar models demand a sort of material strength for the hull that far exceeds normal capabilities. Moreover, Coates points out, Tilley’s model deprives the ships of so much manpower that it would be impossible (on a two-level 120-oar ship) to attain the high speeds regularly attested in the literary sources. A model trireme, the Olympias, constructed according to the three-level Morrison standard, has attained the speeds described; from this Coates argues that the three-level model should still be preferred. Indeed, Coates regards a model’s performance when reconstructed to be the definitive measure of its veracity; until Tilley has built himself a ship, according to his model, which can outperform the Olympias and the old model, we should not give it too much credence.

In an interesting popular article, Hale argues that the Greek oarsmen made use of a sliding technique in order to maximize their speed, efficiency, and maneuverability. Rather than simply leaning forward and backward and making use only of their upper bodies in rowing, Hale demonstrates that the Athenians adopted a method of rowing where most of the power came from movement in their legs – by wearing cushions strapped to their posteriors, they could slide forward and backward along a hardwood bench, extending their arms to push and pull for added distance.

It is precisely this technique, he argues, that led the Greeks to victory at Salamis, when their customary tactics of diekplous and periplous were unavailable to them; instead, they had to carry out sharp turns (almost right angles) at the last minute to ram the Persia/Phoenician fleet (who, lacking the outriggers on the ships that fixed the oars in place for the Greeks, likely did not use a sliding stroke). The evidence adduced for the cushions seems to the present author incontrovertible, and the explanation for sliding is similarly strong. Furthermore, because it is commonly accepted among scholars that the trireme oarsmen rowed one man to the oar, and because the sliding technique is most effective when an oarsman’s feet are level with his rear, the Greeks were able to add additional oarsmen both above and below the original oarsman, settling with an arrangement three men high.

I am inclined to hold to the orthodox view: there were six men per cross-section, with two rows and three levels. Tilley’s failure to produce a working reconstruction that meets speed standards is a point against him, but what really strikes me as most troubling is his interpretation of the ancient artistic depictions, which I can describe only as confirmation bias. His appraisals of Morrison’s positions strike me as tendentious and not entirely accurate; Morrison, for instance, does not simply throw up his hands and admit that there is no evidence for the three-level trireme in ancient art, as Tilley would have his reader believe. On the affirmative side, the evidence presented by Morrison is neither shocking nor implausible, he has produced a reconstruction which appears to perform up to the standard that is described in the sources, and the evidence for slide-rowing seems overwhelming; if that is true, it is only a small jump from one to three oarsmen per stack. A two-man stack might be plausible, but there is no one to argue for it; Tilley’s two-level ship is also a three-row ship, meaning no oarsman is directly over another. His argument is interesting, and his treatment of ship arrangements both ancient and modern is valuable, but I am unconvinced.

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Bibliography

1. S. Morrison et al., The Athenian Trireme²(2000)
2. R. Hale, “The Lost Technology of Ancient Greek Rowing,” Scientific American274 (1996) 81-86
3. Tilley, Seafaring on the Ancient Mediterranean.  New Thoughts on Triremes and Other Ancient Ships(2004)
4. Coates, “Tilley’s and Morrison’s Triremes–Evidence and Practicality,” Antiquity69 (1995) 159-162

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[1] Morrison, p. 136.

[2] Tilley, p. 12.

Apuleius’s Apology

 

[1]  Apuleius is accused of sorcery and magic. It seems, as he tells us, that he was originally accused of using magic to kill Pontianus, but that this charge was dropped; now he is standing trial accused of using magic to convince his wife, Pudentilla, to marry him. There are minor accusations, too, that he replies to, the gist of which being that he is a magician. The case is brought against him by the son of his wife, a boy named Pudens, and is argued by a man named Aemilianus.

The response Apuleius gives is comprehensive and devastating; in argument he resembles a hailstorm, mustering every technique – logic, rhetoric, satire, learned allusion, wisdom, scorn, flattery, honor – and throwing them all, one after another, into the fray with expert aim. To every charge he has a careful and lethal response. First, to slander his character, a number of accusations are brought forth: it is claimed that he owns a mirror for the purpose of staring at himself and admiring his image. What of it, he replies? Mirrors have other uses; perhaps, he suggests, his accusers might know of them if they had read some obscure Greek philosopher’s discussion of the subject.[2]

But still, his accusers reply, he is stricken by poverty! Again, Apuleius answers, let us assume this is so: why should this be a defect? Plenty of great Romans have been poor; furthermore, is it not suitable for a philosopher, a man devoted to the study of the higher things, who seeks knowledge beyond the mere material pleasures of the world, to have few possessions? What’s more, Apuleius is no mere impoverished fool; he is the scion of a prominent family: “my father left my brother and myself a little under 2,000,000 sesterces.”[3] And can the same be said of his accusers, who are so quick to slander his poverty? It would seem not: “you yourself used, after waiting for some seasonable shower to soften the ground, to expend three days in ploughing single-handed, with the aid of one wretched ass, that miserable farm at Zarath, which was all your father left you.”[4] Romans who live in glass villas shouldn’t throw stones. The replies he makes are not laden down with sententious intoning or careful dissection, but with levity and humor; he aims more to humiliate than to refute.

The magical evidence is mostly of a pathetic sort: Apuleius likes fish, ergo he is a magician. But in what magical formulae are fish used? His accusers have not read the books that he has read, and they do not know; as it happens, his interest is scientific. Homer and Vergil are thrown in (Homer in Greek, of course) for good measure.[5] Few of the other charges fare better: the trump cards presented by the prosecution – the letters of Prudentilla, in which she refers to Apuleius as a magician, and purportedly of Apuleius, wherein he is supposed to have “beguiled Prudentilla with flattery.”[6] Both letters are in Greek; in the first, an authentic document, the prosecutors have mishandled the Greek and have quoted it out of context (they “could not read the letter which Pudentilla wrote in Greek altogether too refined for his comprehension,”[7]); Apuleius has it read aloud in full, to definitive effect. The second letter, Apuleius shows, is a clear forgery, written in pathetically infelicitous Greek. And why would he seduce Prudentilla for her money? He has received none from the marriage.[8] His arguments being stated, Apuleius sums up, declares his own victory, and sits to wait for the verdict that will exonerate him.

One of the main themes of the speech is the erudition of the defendant; Apuleius is constantly showing off his own erudition. Rather than make a reply in his own words, he prefers to answer “in the words with which Homer makes Paris reply to Hector.”[9] His knowledge of Greek is flaunted endlessly; he rattles off the names of philosophers and poets (“among our own poets were Aedituus, Porcius, and Catulus”[10]) with careless ease; he does everything he can to demonstrate to his audience that he is a learned man. Indeed, the text is so packed with direct quotations from prominent Latin and Greek authors, and with minute philosophical discussions on the fine points of Platonic dialogues, that the reader begins to wonder how much of this was in the original speech, and how much was later added by the stenographer for increased effect.

In contrast to Apuleius’s immense learning, the rustic and backwards character of his accusers is emphasized again and again. They cannot pronounce verse properly, instead reading it in and “absurd and illiterate manner;”[11] “so vilely and coarsely did they read”[12] Apuleius’s light verse that the poems themselves were obscured and the impression of the reader was all that was left – the impression, that is, of disgust. Why is it that they do not understand the references? Because they have never studied them: “instead of devoting yourself to the study of your fields and their dull clods,” Apuleius suggests, perhaps they ought to have taken the time to become erudite and witty, as he is – and then, to prove the point, he tacks on another allusion-laden insult: “although your face is hideous enough for a tragic mask of Thyestes.”[13]

He presses further; not only are his accusers “so ignorant … of all literature,” but what’s worse, they appear to be so backward and bucolic that they have not even learned the normal stories any Roman could be expected to know; they are ignorant “even of popular tales.”[14] The message is clear: these men are so stupid that they cannot even be considered proper Romans; their ignorance is so vast, and their knowledge so constricted, that they are to be considered little better than Latin-speaking barbarians. Again, the message is clear; no argument can be taken from“this dull blockhead,”[15] “clumsy and inartistic in his very effeminacy,”[16] “stupid and uncivilized”[17] to the core.

It is no surprise, then, to find that the intended audience of the speech – the judge, Maximus – receives heaps upon heaps of praise and flattery. He is complimented for his “great acuteness,”[18] as well as for his his acquaintance with Plato,[19] for he is a scholar (Apuleius generously assumes) who has “read Aristotle’s numerous volumes”[20] (This point is made several times – “you have doubtless frequently read the like in the works of ancient philosophers,”[21] etc. – in order for Apuleius to create a bond between himself and Maximus; “the admiration with which Maximus and myself regard Aristotle.”[22]) In addition to his intellectual and academic pursuits, Apuleius attempts to put his thumb on the scale by flattering the station of the judge: he praises “the astuteness of [his] questions,”[23] posed by “so grave and perspicacious a judge.”[24] No appendage is left uncomplimented: even his hands – “hands as pure and pious as yours”[25] – present to Apuleius an opportunity to win his audience over to his side (it is interesting to recall that, at one point, Apuleius mentions that he has thus far refrained from complimenting Maximus. One wonders exactly how he would characterize all the effusive flattery that is uttered prior to that statement). Indeed, there are so many instances of flattery that I can scarcely list them all.[26] Suffice it to say that there is a lot, and that the point of it all is not difficult to guess.

Interestingly, Apuleius does not repudiate magic wholesale and even lists off the names of some magicians casually, as though he were not standing trial under the accusation that he is among their number. He carefully reminds his audience that it was one thing to know a great deal about magic, and it is quite another to actually practice the art;[27] still, the reader is left with the feeling that Apuleius – and, it is important to note, his aristocratic audience – are a fairly tolerant of their magically-inclined brethren. The impression might almost be one of enlightened elites forced to go through a superstitious charade at the insistence of their more credulous underlings, except for two things: Apuleius’s strict refusal to deny magic as a real thing – in fact, his treatment of it is just the opposite – and, what is perhaps more telling, the participation of Roman elites in what are patently superstitious practices (for instance, Tiberius was a fairly successful astrologer). The scorn for the country bumpkin is clear enough, but the divide is not over magic; both seem to believe in it readily.

Apuleius’s techniques throughout his apology, if they bear any resemblance to the text which comes down to us, are as effective as they are entertaining. The text reveals something about the social life of the second century in the Roman empire, too; we discover the immense importance of and interest in magic; we have a front-row seat in an exhibition of the prejudices of the upper class; we are shown exactly what sorts of education have become fashionable, and exactly how such education is put to use; and, more than anything else, we are given a good long look at the court proceedings of the high imperial period.

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[1] Footnote numbers correspond to chapter numbers. [2] 16 [3] 23 [4] 23 [5] 30 [6] 87 [7] 87 [8] 102 [9] 4 [10] 9 [11] 5 [12] 9 [13] 16 [14] 30 [15] 66 [16] 74 [17] 91 [18] 2 [19] 11 [20] 36 [21] 38 [22] 41 [23] 48 [24] 53 [25] 63 [26] [26]“his careful study of the Phaedrus,” “a man of such lofty character,” “your learning … your perfect erudition,” “in enjoyment of great wealth and enormous opulence,” [27] 91

Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, 2016

Jeb Bush = Nicias
Ben Carson = Thucydides, Marius ??
Chris Christie = Vitellius
Ted Cruz = Pompey
Carly Fiorina = Boudicca
Lindsey Graham= Brasidas
Mike Huckabee = Alexander of Abonoteichus
John Kasich = Bibulus
Rand Paul = Marcus Cato
Marco Rubio = Lepidus, Philagrus of Cilicia
Donald Trump = Kleon
Hillary Clinton = Xerxes
Martin J. O’Malley = Marc Antony? no
Bernie Sanders = Solon
Jim Webb = Calgacus
George W Bush = Pericles
Barack Obama = Pontius Pilate

Self-Revelation (1)

I have more prejudices than opinions; I like to state them, but to discuss them bores me. I am confident, sometimes overly so, in my abilities, but not in my output. I have few intellectual insecurities, and I do not think much about the details of my advantage. I am cleverer than most, and I like to be near the top, but I like to have superiors. I would rather excel in art than in intellect.

I am easily influenced by those I like and admire, and I am very good at striking poses. I sometimes worry that poses are all I have; I feel like a wooden mannequin, able to take up any posture, but without any distinctive features of my own.

I am very erudite, but I think more in themes and motifs than in facts. My memory is vast but its rooms are mostly dark, and I underestimate the amounts that I am able to remember until a word or phrase is mentioned, a memory is triggered, the light is flicked on, and the facts flow easily. I think most intellectuals are frauds, and I dismiss most of them wholesale.

It is important to me that my success be measured relative to my station. It is not enough that I be recognized as great; I want also to be precocious. I expect praise and often get it, but I never believe it. I like to be flattered, but only by people I like; the content means less to me than the source. I hate groveling.

Desert matters enormously to me, and I hate that some receive more than their due. That others receive less troubles me even to the point of despair. I like to give a good kicking when it is deserved, and I often feel it is. I find it easy to excuse viciousness and malice when deployed in defense of the right side. I love to read cruel men if they are also clever. The idea of a pious life for myself used to bore me, and I would worry that I could never learn to love it.

I do not understand the source of my faith, and I wonder about this without allowing myself to be troubles by it. I prefer angels and saints to doctrines and dogmas. I like the idea of dogma. I find most theological argument distasteful, and long to have the faith of a bigoted Italian peasant. My doubts are very large and few; I feel most sure about things I know don’t matter. My fears are relatively few and intense; my anxieties are many, and I repress them easily.

I am very devoted, but rarely affectionate; my affection is reserved for my wife and daughter. I sometimes like to praise, and especially when I think it hasn’t been appreciated. Empty praise does not occur to me. I like music; I listen to it more than I talk about it, though I wish I could share it more. Talking about music is, for me, an intimate thing.

I do not feel compelled to keep large numbers of friends, and I do not mind hating most people. I am more comfortable around nameless strangers than named. Some people like me, many more respect me, and I find the former difficult to understand. I am more reflective than I let on.

I like to start things, but I hate finishing them, and I am never satisfied with them when I do. I think I am much smarter and more refined than my work reflects, and I know that this is largely true. I do not like thinking about the future; I assume some things, but am indecisive. I prefer to keep my goals far-off, and myself young.

The Krypteia

 

The peoples and events of history are all, in some measure, concealed from us; their images blur as we recede from them. The simple passage of time, the loss of memory, continual changes in worldview and culture, technological innovations, and the constant deterioration of source material all add to the fog that settles in the vale that separates the historian from his object of study. All the objects on the other end are obscured; some of them, in addition, are hiding.

Such objects are the Spartan Krypteia. About them we have a famously scant amount of source material: four (brief) principle sources, two allusions, and two fragments (of dubious value).[1] What we do know about them is strange, fearsome, brutal, and repugnant; they feel so far removed from us that we wonder if we can ever relate to them, let alone understand them. This adds a further barrier to their proper study. H. Jeanmaire, writing in 1913, gave voice to this concern : « Si les historiens ont souvent été déroutés par la cryptie, c’est …  parce que, déconcertés par la barbarie d’une coutume dont le motif ne leur apparaissait point clairement, ils ont été amenés à suspecter l’authenticité de renseignements qui paraissent pourtant sérieux. »[2]

Vidal-Naquet provides us a serviceable list[3] of those Krypteian characteristics that can be learned from our sources: the Krypteian is lightly armed (likely unarmed; at most, a dagger); he lives alone; he “runs wild in the mountains”; he does his training during the winter; he stealthily kills helots; he kills at night; he eats whatever he finds; he lives in what is technically a warzone – as Vidal-Naquet says, “the frontiers of enemy territories.” By first listing these traits, I hope, we will be able to form a preliminary picture of the Krypteia against which to weigh the claims made by each source.

Following J. Ducat, we will take the texts in chronological order. Plato’s treatment of the Krypteia, one of our two major sources for the matter, sprawls out over an entire sentence from Book 1 of his Laws (633b-c). It is short enough to quote in full:

There is also something called the Crypteia, which is an extraordinarily harsh form of training: in winter, neither footgear nor bedding; no slaves, so that each one looks after himself; and wandering all over the territory, night and day.[4]

In Plato’s account, the mention is put into the mouth of Megillos, who is listing off impressive feats of endurance.  It is unsurprising, then, that we do not get the full history of the Krypteia here; only those facts which are relevant are given.[5] Thus we learn four things: that (1) the Krypteia skimp on their equipment; that (2) they use no slaves; that (3) they forsake the normal schedule of night and day; and that (4) they “wander all over the territory.” There should be nothing to perplex us here; Ducat raises two possible dilemmas, both of which can be dealt with shortly. The first Ducat solves himself: why does Plato say nothing about the rule, mentioned by others, that the Krypteia must avoid being seen? We are not told, Ducat says, “because [Plato] did not judge it useful to mention it.”[6] Of course this makes sense. Whether or not stealth is a necessary characteristic of the Krypteian lifestyle, it is not one worth mentioning in a laundry list about asceticism and hardship.

Ducat finds another omission more troubling – where, in Plato’s account, is the task of the Krypteia to kill helots? Though not completely germane, Ducat thinks that this is “still difficult and dangerous” and that, had Plato known about it, it would have been mentioned. I do not think, however, that we should allow this to give us pause, or to doubt Plato’s knowledge of the institution. Killing is a sort of preparation for war, and it may be extremely difficult, but it is hardly the same type of ascetic activity as the other things Plato mentions – sleep deprivation, homelessness, starvation, and… lots of murder? He could have included it, but we should infer nothing from its absence.

Aristotle and Plutarch can be treated together; Aristotle gives us two brief fragments, one from pseudo-Herakleides, the other from Plutarch’s life of Lycurgus. Here we are told that the Krypteia were set up by Lycurgus to go out and kill helots at night “as they think necessary”.[7] Again Ducat finds the passage troubling: how can Aristotle be quoted as saying the Krypteia around sent out “with no specific objective” when Plutarch adds that they would “range through the fields, killing the strongest and most influential of [the helots]”? The dilemma can be resolved, I think, by differentiating the purpose of the Krypteia from their objectives and their operations. Whatever other purposes they had,[8] at least one is clear enough: they existed to repress helots. When Aristotle is quoted, he merely says that they were given no objectives; this does not mean that they were thus deprived of this purpose. Plutarch, on the other hand, describes the activities and operations of the Krypteia – he tells us not what they were commanded to do, but what they did. When these distinctions are made, the apparent contradictions between Aristotle’s and Plutarch’s statements fade.

Plato’s scholiast gives us a few new impressions: he specifically calls the Krypteian regimen “a form of training for war,” and he tells us that those who are seen are punished. No mention is made of the helots. The emphases on asceticism and war-preparation, both present in Plato, are accentuated in his scholiast. As a source, it has few textual problems, but it poses a few broader questions about the nature of the Krypteia – were they chiefly treated as a military preparation organization? From whom were they meant to hide? Was the main focus of the organization internal, meant to change those who underwent it, or external, meant primarily to effect some other end (the repression of the helots)?

Jeanmaire has produced a strong anthropological argument[9] in favor of the former. In defense of his claim that the Krypteian phenonemon is nothing more than « une variété d’une espèce de phénomènes universellement répandus, »[10] he cites a number of African tribal rituals wherein the men of the tribe withdraw from the rest of the community, develop secret traditions, and create initiation rituals for their secret societies (he describes some of the rituals belonging to the Arunta and the Massai). Having placed the Krypteia in this context, Jeanmaire attempts to explain it in these same (to him, primitive) coming-of-age terms; given the rigid structure of the Spartan society, « il faut s’attendre à voir les pratiques de l’initiation du jeune homme prendre un certain développement. »[11] Often these practices seem, to us, strange, even barbaric; in a military society like Sparta, it would make sense for them to be militaristic. Up to this point, his argument is brilliant; he makes a false step, however, as Vidal-Naquet notes, and his argument loses steam thereafter.[12]

Let us take his argument from there, then, and use it as it is to address the concerns of E. Lévy in his article “La kryptie et ses contradictions.” Lévy divides the sources on the Krypteia into three categories: (1) those which see it as a sort of endurance test or initiation rite, (2) those which see it as a mechanism to repress the helots, and (3) those which see it as a sort of scouting police force, used to patrol the Spartan territories. The Platonic texts, with their harsh asceticism, he places in the first category; Jeanmaire’s argument is most germane here. The Aristotelian texts are placed in the second category, and in the third, Plato finds himself in the company of a papyrus fragment bearing the name of Agesilaus. All of the texts say that the Krypteians travel; most say they live in the mountains; in all of them, life – with no servants and few (if any) possessions – seems pretty hard. But are its members alone, as one text attests, or in groups, according to another? Do they carry no weapons at all, or a dagger? Do they hide for a year, or do they only go out on certain expeditions?

Lévy suggests that the institution could vary over as each source records it – but this seems unlikely, as Plato and Aristotle were so near to each other, and the scholiast, supposedly commenting on Plato, differs greatly from Aristotle and Plutarch. « Aussi voit-il mieux chercher la solution dans la carrière individuelle du krypte. »[13] Moreover, judging from the Platonic texts, the conditions that its members are asked to withstand are extreme beyond belief – so extreme, Lévy thinks, that no one age group could commit to them in its entirety; of all the sources, only Aristotle speaks of the Krypteia in the plural.

It seems likely to me, then, that its numbers were few, and that they were taken from the very best and hardiest of the Spartan youths. As for Jeanmaire, there is nothing preventing (and a good deal suggesting otherwise) the Krypteia from functioning both internally and externally – as both a liminal stage for the best of the Spartan youths, and as its own organization with functions independent of that initiation rite. That the organization should have its own initiation process is unremarkable, as is the idea that it should have multiple purposes. Adopting the individual-career point of view that Lévy suggests, we can finally try to bring all the strings together – its members could be sent off to train in the wilderness, merely enduring hardships, or to kill; in both cases they were fulfilling some previously discussed function. They would kill, both to develop their own skills, and to pacify the helots. They could be told to kill, in the case of important or unruly helots, or they could do so at their own discretion. They were not to be seen: by their victims, to heighten the fear of the helots and to intensify their own mystique, but also by the elder Spartan men, who enforced the rule as a part of their transition to manhood. They would suffer, both for its own nobility, but also because a tolerance for it would be useful down the road.

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Works Cited

1. Jeanmaire, “La cryptie lacédémonienne,” Revue des Études Grecques 26 (1913) 121-150
2. Vidal-Naquet, The Black Hunter (1986) 106-128
3. Lévy, “La Kryptie et ses contradictions,” Ktéma 13 (1988) 245-253
4. Ducat, “The Crypteia,” in id., Spartan Education (2006) 281-331

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[1] E. Lévy, 245.

[2] “If historians were often confused by the krypteia, it is … because, baffled by the barbarity of a custom whose pattern they could never discern, they were led, though the information appeared serious, to nevertheless doubt its authenticity.” Jeanmaire, 122.

[3] Vidal-Gasquet, 113.

[4] Ducat, 282.

[5] Lévy, however, in his classification, seems to think that Plato is reducing the Krypteia to nothing more than « un exercice d’endurance prodigieusement difficile » (245).

[6] Ducat, 284.

[7] Ducat, 284. Lévy (247) has it « qu’il faut » – “as one must”.

[8] Ducat mentions four (319-329) – in the ancient view, they were to repress helots and to prepare for war; in the modern view, they were to kill helots and, through wandering and living apart from the society, to pass through a liminal stage of Spartan manhood.

[9] Jeanmaire, 126-128.

[10] “A variety of instances of universally widespread phenomena,” 122.

[11] “It must be expected that the practices for initiating young men would take some development,” 137.

[12] Vidal-Naquet 112-113; Jeanmaire, 147-150. Through a clever parallel to the Zulu tribe in South Africa, Jeanmaire destroys his argument – he opposes the hoplite to the Krypteia in a man-boy dichotomy, and infers that the killing of helots done by the Krypteia is done primarily as a way for young men to earn their manhood, that they may become proper hoplites.

[13] Lévy, 251. “So it is better to seek the solution in an individual’s career in the Krypteia.”

Fehling To Convince

The heyday of the apologia pro opus suis ended over a century ago, but Detlev Fehling is not a man with much regard for fads. It is in the defensive stance that we find him at the beginning of his book, Herodotus and his ‘Sources’, in which he undertakes to show that Herodotus was a liar. In the 1971 preface to the work, he is very anxious to make his reader understand that he is no modish iconoclast; the impartation of this awful truth brings him no joy. Like his illustrious victim, he feels “forced to declare an opinion that most people will find offensive; yet, because [he] think[s] it true, [he] will not hold back” (7.139).

Fehling’s argument is simple: Herodotus falsified his sources. The argument is structured around several central claims: (1) that Herodotus provides many source citations which are “demonstrably false” or “fictitious”; (2) that these “make no sense unless they are treated as literary forms” which require interpretation in order “to discover why each source citation takes the form it does”; (3) that large parts of the Histories, apart from the sources, are products of imagination; (4) that the numbers Herodotus uses are indicative of a disconnect from reality, and, through their repetition (Fehling claims to see certain patterns), it can be concluded that they, too, were invented by the author.

Fehling’s missteps are numerous as they are embarrassing, and Pritchett catalogues them mercilessly; a brief sample will suffice. In the span of seven pages (134-140), Pritchett catches Fehling in no fewer than four egregious errors.  On p. 134, he has misread the Greek, mistaking a bowl made from a dekate of six talents for a bowl that merely weighs six talents; on pp. 136-137, he calls the story about the arrow-head vessel “a fabrication that springs from the imagination” (the archaeological evidence does not agree); on p. 139 he has forgotten that the world “island” in Greek uses the feminine substantive, and has thus leapt to the conclusion that Herodotus, who called Elephantine a city rather than an island, never went to Elephantine at all; on p. 140 Fehling sees himself quoted saying that Herodotus “says not a word about the monuments of Thebes – this man has never been in Upper Egypt,” only to be reminded that Herodotus refers to Thebes twenty-four times.

In argument, Pritchett seems to take as his ideal The Great Flood – the reader flounders in an ocean of citations, pages deep, the crushing weight of which Fehling’s arguments rarely survive. Take, for instance, Fehling’s assessment of the story Herodotus tells about Arion’s dolphin rescue.[2]  Fehling’s judgment is peculiar on its own terms,[3] but the attack Pritchett launches against him is almost unbelievable in its absurdity. He spends one preliminary page informing the reader that the dolphin “is said to be among the most intelligent animals on the planet”; he quotes Plutarch, saying that the dolphin “is the only creature who loves man for his own sake”; he musters research that demonstrates “the playfulness, the love of applause and showing off of this creature of the sea”; he tells us that, in the Bahamas, “fifty to one hundred Atlantic dolphins come daily to flirt and play with swimmers”; he even finds room to mention various hagiographies, wherein certain saints “are said to have been bound and thrown into the sea, but saved by dolphins.”[4] There then follows an exhausting 7-page list of what appears to be every parallel dolphin-messiah story ever conceived.

Indeed, at times Pritchett is so busy providing citations that the reader wonders if he has forgotten to leave room to argue; most of his argument is done by way of implication and juxtaposition, albeit by necessity – when evidence is passed over, the first thing that must be done is to dig it up and present it. An enormous mass of source material is presented to support the sources Fehling purports to discredit, to the neglect of the (admittedly weaker) latter two components of his argument: that concerning “literary form,” and that concerning Herodotean numbers.

The chapter on numbers, “Typical numbers and their use in Herodotus,” might as well be an excursus in numerology. Perhaps it does not need extensive treatment; again Fehling, from a close reading of the numbers that Herodotus gives, claims to prove that the numbers display secret patterns which could only have arisen due to their invention. If a man has to make up a number, he is liable to pick the same ones – his mind can never approximate the truly random number distribution of nature. Unfortunately, this argument, already quite tedious, also neglects those numbers which do not support it – for instance, in 7.187,[5] where Herodotus is quite happy to give no number at all. Did he run out of ideas?

Furthermore, why, if Herodotus were lying, would he so frequently admit his ignorance (as he does in 2.33,[6] 4.99,[7] 2.99[8], 4.87[9], and 2.29[10])? Why, if he was so intent on passing off falsehoods as truth, would he proclaim that certain stories were unbelievable (as he does in 2.23,[11] 2.45[12])? Perhaps this is yet another, more sophisticated literary technique, by which the author seeks to draw us more into his narrative – but this argument is subject to the same “dovetailing” criticism Fehling so adores (it is a shaky criticism, but he is committed to it). It would match up perfectly – the perfect fraudster at every level, his perfidy noticeable to our dear Fehling – but too perfectly. If Fehling is willing to deploy this argument against Herodotus, as he clearly is, he cannot hope to avoid it in his own theories.

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[1] All translations are taken from David Grene’s 1987 translation, UChicago Press.

[2] Fehling, pp. 21-24; Herodotus, 1.23-24.

[3] He claims (p. 21) that “the notion that stories can survive through generations in a local tradition, which was developed at a time when scholarship was under the spell of the Romantic movement, is generally unrealistic. Stories exist primarily in the heads of individuals not in the collective consciousness of social groups.” In other words, he thinks oral traditions as such are a fantastical and unreliable invention of the late 19^th century.

[4] Pritchett, p. 17.

[5] “But no one could give the exact number of the women who baked the bread, or of the concubines, or the eunuchs, or the transport animals and baggage-carrying cattle and Indian dogs that came with the army – of all of these creatures no one could count the numbers, they were so large. So I do not wonder that the streams of some rivers gave out; no, rather I wonder that there was food enough for so many tens of thousands of people.”

[6] “As I conjecture, arguing from what is seen to what is not known.”

[7] “Of course, I am comparing small things with big.”

[8] “So far it is my eyes, my judgment, and my searching that speak these words to you; from this on, it is the accounts of the Egyptians that I will tell to you as I heard them, though there will be, as a supplement to them, what I have seen myself.” Of Herodotus’ purported source here, Fehling concedes that “there is no doubt that this is the straightforward interpretation,” but feels that “the picture he paints is obviously unrealistic.” He does not say why.

[9] “The place on the Bosporus at which King Darius bridged it – at least as far as I can conjecture – is midway between Byzantium and the temple at the entrance of the sea.”

[10]  “From no one else could I learn anything whatever. But this much I found out by the furthest inquiry I could make, having myself gone as far as the city of Elephantine and seen with my own eyes there and, after that, investigating through hearsay.”), which Fehling treats as “a literary parallel [to 4.16], that is, as one of the many examples of Herodotus’ dependence on Epic” (p. 100).

[11] “Indeed only a tale, back to where it vanishes and so cannot be disproved.”

[12] “In my opinion, the Greeks who tell this story know absolutely nothing about the nature of the Egyptians and their customs.”

The Four Hundred

For a brief period, scarcely longer than the summer of 411, the Four Hundred ruled. Who were they? Whither did they come, what did they do? Why did they fall? In making sense of the story, the reader must begin with the failure of Athens in its Sicilian expedition of 413 BC. The Athenian democracy could hold itself together when the war was going well, but at any sign of imbalance, the constitution strained; the campaign at Sicily proved to be a greater imbalance than any event theretofore, and Athens responded accordingly.

When news of the Sicilian disaster came, the immediate reaction of the Athenians was incredulity, followed by a near-frenzied resolve to, though crippled, continue the war. This resolve was not looked upon kindly by the other Greeks, who saw it rather as insanity than bravery. Though Athens was determined to remain in the arena unto the end, the Spartans by then had the undisputed favor of the audience. Among the various effects of this was a seemingly unending series of revolts: notably Euboea, Lesbos, and, of particular relevance here, Chios.

The Chians sought the aid of a nearby Persian satrap called Tissaphernes in organizing their revolt. No less eager to see Athens lose its subjects were the Spartans, who could not resist throwing their weight behind the revolts as well; Alcibiades, now a Spartan advisor, was sent to negotiate with Chios and Tissaphernes and to aid them in their revolt against Athens. The Athenians, with their newly revived determination, refused to cede their empire without a good fight and quickly arrived to contest their subjects’ hopeful aspirations to sedition; other cities in the area revolted and the two sides skirmished back and forth, each side winning and losing in turns.

Then Alcibiades defected once again (probably in hopes of eventually returning to Athens). This time allying himself with the Persians, he found his way to the ear of Tissaphernes and filled it with new ideas: perhaps it would be better, from the Persian perspective, for Athens to win; and anyway, was Persia really getting as much out of its Spartan alliance as could be gotten? Why not squeeze them for a little more – cut back their funding, stretch them out a bit more? Alcibiades then turned to the Athenians at Samos with a similar proposal: this satrap could be got as an ally, if only the Athenians would toss their petulant and unpredictable democracy and install a more reliable oligarchy. There was some opposition – would not an oligarchical revolution only further alienate their allies? – but the Athenians had already seen in their minds’ eyes the victories that would accompany their soon-to-be supportive satrap and decided to go ahead with the plan.

The “plan,” of course, was a canard. Tissaphernes would not support Athens, but the events had already been set in motion and Pisander began to agitate for oligarchy. At Athens he was met with little sympathy, but his anti-democratic invective, replete with warnings against the growing powers of Sparta and Persia, would inflame the Athenians’ fear in his absence. After going next to supplicate Tissaphernes, whose demands in the case of an alliance were calculated as to exceed the limits Athens would accept, Pisander finally arrived back at Samos, empty-handed but full of oligarchical conviction.

From there the seeds finally began to sprout. Thrasos accepted oligarchy; when Pisander arrived again at Athens, he found that the Athenian anxiety made for fertile soil and his revolution had taken root and begun to bloom. The people’s champions were quickly weeded out and the masses themselves quickly abandoned all convictions to their overwhelming fear (which was carefully tended and watered by roving gangs of pro-oligarchical agitators). An interim committee of ten was installed to see to the details of the new constitution, and finally the budding oligarchs came to power; the Four Hundred were ushered in and the oligarchy was in full flower. Some prevarications were necessary – vague and insincere gestures about the Five Thousand who would, in name, govern the city, were made, but of course the real power remained in the hands of the Four Hundred. Finally they could use it.

Use it they did. It was decided that all tax revenue would go to the war effort and to nothing else; all bureaucratic salaries were suspended. Hopes of victory were apparently forgotten and a letter was sent to Sparta seeking peace, to which the Spartan king Agis replied by inviting the Athenians to send, perhaps inauspiciously, a delegation. Ten men were sent to Samos to win favor for the new government back in Athens, where they found a party of Samian oligarchs plotting their own ascendancy. The would-be oligarchs were then discovered and their conspiracy crushed. Soon after, Chaereas, a crewmember of the Paralus, arrived at Samos with terrible, if exaggerated, tales of the events at Athens – his ship, unware of the regime change, had arrived at the city only to have its entire crew locked up by the new despots.

In a somewhat less-than-vexing decision, the Athenian armies at Samos, though originally so eager to bring the oligarchy about, took a hard look at the evidence and changed their minds. They solemnly professed their democratic faith and vowed to support democracy both at Samos and back at Athens, afterwards electing new generals whose mission, it was agreed, would be to seek the restoration of democracy. Alcibiades again reappeared at Samos; the generals, having not forgotten the traitor’s influence at the court of Tissaphernes, brought him back in hopes of using his Persian influence to their gain; he quickly joined their ranks and wandered back to Tissaphernes’ court while the other generals began to plan for their voyage to Athens. Alcibiades returned, followed quickly by emissaries from the Four Hundred who had been waiting at Delos for some of the fervor to dissipate.

It hadn’t; for some time they found it impossible to speak over the jeers. Eventually the democrats ran out of breath and the despots’ emissaries gave their speech, presenting the same fibs that had been given at Athens about the preservation of the city and the real power of the Five Thousand. Fortunately for the beleaguered envoy, Alcibiades turned coats again and came to their aid, convincing the generals in the audience not to sail against Athens. Less propitious was the arrival thereafter of a pro-democratic Argive embassy accompanied, as living evidence, by the rest of the crew of the Paralus whom the Four Hundred had treated so poorly.

Nevertheless, the relieved ambassadors returned to Athens with the news. The Four Hundred were not as receptive to Alcibiades’ optimism about the war as they could have been. Some discontent had begun to rise in certain members of the oligarchy, and a rift developed between those who then had begun to want the Five Thousand around as more than a convenient fiction and those who still did not. Another peace embassy was sent to Sparta; the Four Hundred had begun to fear their own internal opposition more than their external enemies, and believed that peace with Sparta would allow them to concentrate on placating their own malcontented countrymen. They simultaneously began to build a wall at the Pireaus under the pretense of keeping “enemies” out; in fact, the enemies they sought to exclude came not from Persia nor Sparta but from Samos. This project was met with resistance by Theramenes, who recognized the pretenses for what they were and accused the Four Hundred, quite reasonably, of preferring to maintain their own power over victory against the Spartans.

Finally the Four Hundred’s anxiety-ridden reign began to topple. First came the unsettling assassination of one of the ambassadors to Sparta, Phrynichus, as he walked through the market; his killer could not be discovered, no matter how much the Four Hundred tortured his Argive accomplice. Suspecting Theramenes of conspiracy, they arrested him. He agreed to accompany them on their rescue mission to Piraeus where, having had enough and, emboldened by the failure of the Four Hundred to prove their power in something as simple as a murder case, he instead had the hoplites tear down their beloved wall. The Four Hundred began to sense that their defeat was imminent. The Athenian people had tired of fighting a war on two fronts: against their enemies and against their own rulers. The legend of the Five Thousand was increasingly talking its way into reality. An assembly was convened between the two and negotiations began.

Just then the Four Hundred were granted a temporary reprieve: news arrived that a massive Spartan fleet was approaching the Piraeus and the Athenians scrambled aboard their ships and sailed out to meet them. The Spartans, surprised to find that their oligarchic allies had been deposed and their wall razed, simply sailed right past, choosing instead to target the island of Euboea (which housed a critical base for Athens). The Athenians couldn’t allow that, either, and frantically followed in pursuit. A battle was fought at Eretria and the Spartans triumphed; cities all over Euboea, seeing this, took the opportunity to revolt. Clearly, the Athenians saw, the installation of the oligarchs had not been all they were promised it would be.

At long last the hammer fell. The ultimate assembly was called to order at Pnyx and the Four Hundred were deposed. The Five Thousand, who promised to supply their own armor, were handed the reigns of the state and Theramenes had his revenge. The frightened ex-tyrants escaped to Sparta and (could it end in any other way?) Alcibiades was summoned to Athens once again.

Nicias vs. Alcibiades

Nicias and Alcibiades – the tale is a tragi-comedy. Nicias, the cautious commander, wrought peace with Sparta, which Alcibiades, the Spartan proxenos, undid. Nicias opposed the campaign to Sicily, yet led it; Alcibiades propounded it and was recalled. Alcibiades, the rash, eager young man, proposed the more modest course for the expedition; Nicias, the judicious fogey, demanded a fleet so immense that its defeat became Athens’ destruction.

Alcibiades has what would seem to be a well-deserved reputation for brazenness, sometimes bordering on impudence. He was similarly reputed, perhaps unfairly, to be, very often and at separate points in his life, young.  Thucydides introduces him, amidst the negotiations in the summer of 420, as “a man who would have been thought young in any other city, but was influential by reason of his high descent”[2] – indeed, it is for this very reason that the Spartans overlook him as an ambassador in these talks: “For they had not consulted him, but had negotiated the peace through Nicias and Laches, despising his youth”[3]; Nicias opposes his bellicose Sicilian machinations, later on, saying that “there may be some young man here who is delighted at holding a command, and the more so because he is too young for his post”[4]; further, “an expedition to Sicily is a serious business, and not one which a mere youth can plan and carry into execution off-hand.”[5] With such weight placed so frequently upon his age, it is surprising that Alcibiades (it is alleged) negotiated with those same Spartans who had then refused him on account of his youth just one year later.[6] Together with his youth, to be sure, came inextricably his reputation for violence and impetuosity.

Nicias is almost his perfect foil – as if sprung from the pages of a novel, he contrasts with Alcibiades in almost every particular. Old, well-esteemed, cautious, experienced, reticent, conniving, “by nature timid and inclined to defeatism” with a “lack of resolution,”[7] perhaps even unlucky[8] – here we find the elder statesman par excellence. It is no surprise that Aristotle describes him and Thucydides, the son of Melesias, as “not only true gentlemen and good politicians, but also [men who] looked after the city like fathers.”[9] A man who “wore an air of gravity which was by no means harsh or vexatious,”[10] he was well-liked by the people (by whom, we are told, he was often made visibly anxious). In March of 421, sensing that Athens had tired of war and that Sparta ached for an end to the conflict, he orchestrated his eponymous Peace.

Of this Peace, Alcibiades strenuously disapproved. In the summer of the following year, when a Spartan delegation arrived in Athens to defend their alliance with the Boeotians and to dissuade the Athenians from making an alliance with the Argives, he turned his opposition into action.[11] The story is well-known: believing sincerely that the Argive alliance would be of far greater benefit to Athens, Alcibiades met with the Spartan delegates in secret, imploring them to renounce the full negotiating power they had been given in exchange for the safe return of Pylos. The Spartans agreed and appeared before the assembly the next day to deny the full negotiating powers they had previously claimed. Alcibiades seized upon this manufactured lie, denounced the apparently dumbfounded Spartan envoy for a trick he himself had concocted, and ran them out of town. Nicias responded weakly to this bold encroachment upon his negotiating powers, and an alliance was forged with the Argives the next day.

As McGregor points out, the story almost beggars belief: the behavior of the Spartans is “so naïve as to be incredible,”[12] and Alcibiades’ behavior, seeing as it “deliberately ruined the opportunity of reconciliation with Sparta,”[13] is at least a little perplexing. His belief in the superiority of an Argive alliance appears to be sincere; Thucydides gives us no reason to think otherwise. Further, having opposed the Peace of Nicias from its very inception, Alcibiades seems to have “regarded [it] as no  peace at all … a mere prelude to a resumption of hostilities.”[14] In this Alcibiades’ suspicions appear well-founded – the Spartan envoy had come with considerable demands,[15] but did not have much to offer in return.[16]

What, then, of Alcibiades’ scheme to isolate Sparta through an alliance with Argos? Even if prudent at its inception, surely it failed in its culmination: the defeat at Mantinea. Yet if this loss reflected at all upon his strategy, the Athenians did not seem to notice – they elected him a strategia immediately after.[17] Thucydides does, in the view of some scholars, appear to change his portrayal of Alcibiades for worse after the loss, but this is a question of historiography for which there are a convincing explanations (Bloedow tells us that “[a]nother explanation should, however, be considered.” He is wrong.[18]), not of history.

Even more interesting – and, many think, for Alcibiades more troubling – is the Athenian policy which led to the Sicilian disaster. It hardly needs mentioning that it, too, was a failure. Alcibiades was its eager advocate, Thucydides says, for two reasons: (1) to undermine Nicias, “on both political and personal grounds,”[19] and (2) to increase his own power and standing by gaining command of the expedition. Nicias’ opposition to the expedition is at first staunch, but later, grappling with inevitability, it appears to radicalize. Seeing in Alcibiades only youthful arrogance and greed, Nicias counsels his audience at Athens that “by prevision many successes are gained, but few or none by mere greed.”[20] His practical argument is essentially one of non-interference; if Sicily is left alone, if their boundaries are not molested, they will leave the Athenians in peace. That region, no matter who might claim Athens as an ally, can tend to itself: “Let us have no more allies such as ours have too often been, whom we are expected to assist when they are in misfortune, but to whom we ourselves when in need may look in vain.”[21]

Alcibiades, of course, sees Sicily as an apple ripe for the picking.[22] If his initial assessment is judged against its outcome, it is egregiously, offensively wrong. This judgment Plutarch makes. But to judge it as such is to fail to take account for several important developments which either Alcibiades himself did not advocate, or else could not be foreseen at the outset of the expedition; (1) at Nicias’ foolish behest, the massive growth in the size of the expedition, (2) Alcibiades’ own recall from the expedition, and (3) the defense of Syracuse being placed under the command of the Spartan Gylippos, whose importance can hardly be overestimated (upon the recommendation of the recently-defected Alcibiades).[23]

Nicias was not an interesting man. His words and actions are plain, his motives are largely obvious. Alcibiades, however, is different. Whether he was, as McGregor argues, a man with the “uncanny, as well as lucky, ability to forecast what would happen under given circumstances,”[24] who “at all stages of his career … knew exactly what he was doing,”[25] it is difficult to say. Perhaps he was not really so remarkably prognostic; maybe he was not really gifted with any special insight; maybe he only acted like it.

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Bibliography

E.F. Bloedow, “Not the Son of Achilles, but…,” Historia 39 (1990) 1-19

E.F. Bloedow, “On ‘Nurturing Lions in the State’…,” Klio 73 (1991) 49-65

Moore, J. M., Aristotle, and Xenophon. 1975. Aristotle and Xenophon on democracy and oligarchy. London: Chatto & Windus.

M.F. McGregor, “The Genius of Alkibiades,” Phoenix 19 (1965) 27-46

Plutarch, and Ian Scott-Kilvert. 1960. The rise and fall of Athens; nine Greek lives [Harmondsworth, Middlesex]: Penguin Books.

Thucydides, and Benjamin Jowett. 1900. Thucydides. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Thucydides, Robert B. Strassler, and Richard Crawley. 1998. The landmark Thucydides: a comprehensive guide to the Peloponnesian War. New York: Simon & Schuster.

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All Thucydides references are given according to the Jowett translation, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2^nd ed. (1900); Plutarch, from the Scott-Kilvert translation, Penguin (1960).

[2] 5.43. [3] Ibid. [4] 6.12. [5] Ibid. [6] Bloedow (1991), p. 53. [7] Plutarch, Nicias 2 [8] 6.17; Jowett has Alcibiades say that Nicias “enjoys the reputation of success,” while Crawley renders the same passage as “appears to be fortunate.” Whether this is meant to be read sarcastically is unclear; it stands out against Alcibiades’ strong self-appraisal, though, wherein he says he is “in the flower of my days” (Crawley: “still in [youth’s] flower”); here the virtue is stated rather than reputed. [9] Trans. Moore, 1975. [10] Plutarch, Nicias 2 [11] 5.43-46. [12] McGregor, p. 29. [13] Ibid. [14] McGregor, p. 30. [15] Namely, the return of Pylos, the permission to preserve their new alliance with Boeotia, and the prevention of an Athenian alliance with Argos. [16] Bloedow (1991), pp. 54-56. I cite Bloedow here for his engagement with Kagan, whom he quotes as saying that “[The Spartans] had almost nothing to offer the Athenians, and much to ask.” Bloedow demurs, though, and I contest this; as the Spartans were the ones in clear violation of the treaty, one would like them to bring something more than Panactum and Amphipolis to the bargaining table. Bloedow concedes that “the prospects for achieving these [Spartan] demands were not great.” [17] McGregor, p. 31. [18] Bloedow (1991), p 61. The explanation he asks his reader to consider is this: that “Thucydides wished to contrast Alcibiades’ initial flamboyancy with his actions over the long haul of the next few years.” Of course, Alcibiades retained his “flamboyancy” unto the end; this explanation, which Bloedow asks us not only to consider, but to accept, is hard to countenance against Westlake’s less obtrusive view, which Bloedow also gives us: that Thucydides appears to take a “dim” view of Alcibiades because his style as a whole is transitioning into its “most severely annalistic manner” throughout the account. [19] Bloedow (1990), p. 2 [20] 6.13. [21] Ibid. [22] Following McGregor’s summary, p. 33, he argues that Sicily is weak and unprepared, that regional allies will come to their aid, that Athens owes it to its Sicilian allies to conquer, that it will reduce enemy morale, that the maritime nature of the fight will play to their advantage, and that a successful expedition will “strike at the Peloponnese.” This might be called a bit optimistic. [23] These latter two reasons I take from McGregor, p. 33. For the importance of Gylippos, see p. 37: “fortified Dekeleia had a stifling effect on Athens (7.27), and … Gylippos put strength and confidence into Syracusan resistance.” [24] McGregor, p. 27 [25] Ibid.