The Pericles Commission (31 page)

We kissed.

This story really happened, though not, perhaps, precisely as it appears in the book. There really was an Ephialtes. He really did create the world’s first democracy. He really was murdered days later.

Democracy began in the middle of a blind spot in written history. The Persian Wars had been fought twenty years before. Herodotus recorded them. The next great war was the long and destructive fight between Athens and Sparta, which Thucydides recorded. Democracy began in the gap between, when no one was recording much of anything. The longest record is a few paragraphs in a book called
The Athenian Constitution,
which is usually attributed to Aristotle, but quite possibly was cobbled together by a couple of his students. Here’s what it says (from the Penguin Classics edition):

Later in the same book it says: “They took down from the Areopagus hill the laws of Ephialtes and Archestratus about the Council of the Areopagus…” From which we know a legal technician by the name of Archestratus had been assisting Ephialtes.

You can see how the characters in the story come together: Ephialtes, the reformer; Archestratus, the lawyer; Conon, the archon; and Aristodicus, the hit man, are all there to be found in the ancient sources. If you made this stuff up, people wouldn’t believe it.

When Ephialtes was finished, the Ecclesia had the sole right to decide all policy, domestic and foreign. Every citizen, irrespective of who they were, had exactly the same vote, and exactly the same inalienable right to speak before the people. It was the world’s first democracy.

At that moment, Western civilization began.

There are other dates you could argue for, but it’s hard to go past this one: a sovereign state with one man one vote, free speech for every citizen, written laws and equality before the law, with open courts and trial by jury. Modern drama was being invented at the same time as democracy. Aeschylus was writing his plays; two young men called Sophocles and Euripides were beginning to write their own. Anaxagoras was developing a theory of matter in which everything was made of infinitesimal particles; it was the beginning of atomic theory. Herodotus was traveling the world, writing his book, and in the process founding both history and anthropology. A young kid called Socrates was outside somewhere, playing in the street, and on the island of Kos, a baby called Hippocrates was born to a doctor and his wife.

Within days of pushing through his reforms, Ephialtes was murdered. The world’s first political assassination in a democracy had happened within days of the world’s first democracy, and the victim was the man who created it. The assassin was caught, but Aristodicus was a hired killer. The men behind the plot were never discovered.

It’s difficult to comprehend from our distance what Athens must have gone through. The United States was traumatized when JFK was assassinated, imagine the same thing happening when your newly minted democracy is less than a month old. Anything might have happened. The old men of the Areopagus might have gathered troops and resumed control of Athens. The new government might have collapsed. Civil war might have broken out.

But if Ephialtes was killed to stifle the democracy, then the plot failed, because when they killed Ephialtes they replaced a great statesman with a political genius. Ephialtes had a lieutenant, a rising young politician by the name of Pericles.

Pericles held it together. Somehow. It must have been a challenge even for him, but Athens didn’t collapse, didn’t fall into civil war, and didn’t lose its democracy.

Pericles was the son of two great political families. His father Xanthippus was a hero of the Persian Wars, and a member of the Council of the Areopagus. His mother was the niece of Cleisthenes, the man who had begun the drive for democracy fifty years before, and descended of an ancient lineage that had held power in Athens in ages past. Pericles was as close as you could get to aristocracy in a city that, technically, didn’t have any. But he was also a political radical, and when Ephialtes went down, Pericles stepped into the breach.

Perhaps the greatest joy of writing a book like this is interweaving fiction into the fabric of truth. Nicolaos didn’t exist. Socrates had no known full siblings, and yet, Nicolaos would not be impossible. The fact that Nicolaos doesn’t show up in the historical record is no objection. The period is poorly documented and even some quite prominent men have only a few lines in the histories. When you throw in the fact that Nicolaos is doing discreet investigation…of course no one has heard of him until now.

We do know the parents of Socrates (and Nicolaos) were Sophroniscus and Phaenarete. By popular tradition Sophroniscus was a “polisher of stone,” which is code for a sculptor in marble. I’ve accepted the tradition as true in the absence of anything better, though there’s a fair chance it’s apocryphal; the family trade isn’t mentioned anywhere until the following century. Phaenarete was a midwife, which we know for sure because Plato says so in
Theaetetus,
one of the many books he wrote featuring Socrates.

A surprising piece of trivia is the family of Socrates and the family of Pericles had friends in common. In
Laches,
Plato names Lysimachus, the son of a famous statesman, as a close friend of Sophroniscus, in which regard he dines with the family in
The Pericles Commission
. The connection is surprising because Pericles and Xanthippus were wealthy landholders and Sophroniscus was, at best, a middle-class artisan.

The trial of Nicolaos descends into farce, but there is very little that happens at his trial that did not happen at one time or another. Athenian juries were huge: the minimum size was 101 jurors, and numbers as high as 501 were perfectly normal. The 1,001 jurors who hear Nico’s trial is high, but not surprising considering the importance of the case. For comparison, the number of jurors who heard the infamous trial of Socrates sixty years later is usually given as 501, but that’s because 501 was the
average
jury size for a case of heresy.

When Euterpe rips off her dress before the jurors, she is anticipating by more than a hundred years the trial of Phryne the hetaera. Phryne was the most sought-after courtesan of her day and a stunning beauty. Praxiteles, the greatest sculptor of ancient times, used Phryne as the model for his most famous work, the
Aphrodite of Knidus
. This got Phryne into trouble. By posing as Aphrodite she was claiming to be as beautiful as the Goddess of Love. Phryne was charged with impiety, the same charge that had got Socrates killed.

Needless to say, the best lawyer of the day was among her lovers. Hyperides struggled to save her, but he was failing because the complainants had her dead to rights; for a mortal to pretend to divine attributes was a crime. It looked like Phryne would be sent to her death. With nothing to lose, Hyperides walked over to Phryne, standing in the court, and in one movement ripped down her dress.

The entire (all male) court took a close look at Exhibit A.

The charges were dismissed.

Phryne thus became the only woman in history to be declared divinely beautiful, by order of court.

I stole this famous incident wholesale for Euterpe. Or an alternative explanation is Hyperides, who as a lawyer had a fine appreciation for precedent, recalled Euterpe’s dramatic gesture of a hundred years before and was inspired to try the same for his own client.

Pythax is my invention, but the Scythian Guard was very real. The Scythians were a barbarian people far to the north. The Scythian Guard of Athens was created after the Persian Wars when three hundred slaves, supposedly Scythians, were bought for the purposes of crowd control within the city. We know this from the works of two orators called Andocides and Aeschines. The trick of using a painted rope to quell the rioting mob outside the house of Xanthippus was standard operating procedure and apparently worked very well. The Scythians frequently used the same method to herd reluctant citizens to vote at the Ecclesia and is described in the comic play
The Acharnians
by Aristophanes.

The bow was the favored weapon of the Scythians and they carried it unstrung when on patrol, as a baton with which to beat, which they would happily do if faced with a disorderly drunk. By the time of Nicolaos it’s unlikely the Scythian Guard were in fact all Scythian. Their numbers would have been replenished with whatever suitable slaves came to hand. It may seem odd that the Athenians allowed slaves to push them around, but the reason Nicolaos gives in the book is correct: it was illegal for one citizen to lay hands on another, but it was legal for a slave under approved circumstances.

There was no police force as we know it. If a crime was committed, it was up to a private citizen to charge the criminal and prosecute him in court. It’s not even certain there was a jail at the time, because there was no such thing as a prison sentence. Criminals were killed, fined, or exiled. There were no other options. I created the holding cell because it makes sense there was one to hold the condemned.

Diotima was a real person, but what little we know of her comes from only one source: a famous book by Plato called
Symposium
. In it, Socrates credits “Diotima, a priestess of Mantinea,” as one of his early teachers of philosophy. The only other woman listed among Socrates’ teachers is Aspasia, the future wife of Pericles and a genius of rhetoric (which we know from Plato’s
Menexenus
). This was a world where women received no education. It took enormous natural talent for any woman to rise above such repression.

Diotima must have had a towering intellect for Socrates to speak proudly of being her pupil, and for Plato to have passed it on as simple fact. One wonders how a priestess from another city could have been teaching the young Socrates anything, but obviously it happened, and my answer to the question is as likely as any other.

The inheritance law that forces Diotima to marry Rizon was quite real. It was an absolute imperative of Athenian inheritance that property remain within the family. This, and the rule forbidding women to own property, combined on rare occasions to cause chaos. If there was a son to inherit then there was no problem, but if the only possible heirs were all female, then a search was made for the closest male relation of any sort. The heiress was then
required
to marry the distant relative, even if she had to divorce to do so, and the man was required to marry the heiress, even if he had to divorce.

Pericles himself was trapped by this rule. He was forced to marry a woman he disliked when an obscure relative, presumably the woman’s father, died, leaving her an heiress. She had to divorce her existing husband to marry Pericles. They suffered an unhappy marriage until Pericles met Aspasia and fell madly in love with her. At this point things got a bit complex, but he was able to divorce his wife with her agreement because she’d borne him an heir, and Pericles took up with Aspasia. They became one of the world’s first power couples, and the ex-wife married the son of Callias.

Callias, the richest man in Athens, made his money from a rent-a-slave business, supplying slaves (short-lived ones) to the state-run silver mines. He was a fervent democrat who fought in the line at Marathon, and also a diplomat par excellence. The most surprising thing about Callias, to me, is that despite his qualities and unlike most of his peers, he did
not
try to become leader of Athens. Callias was a friend and supporter of Pericles, and yet also the brother-in-law of the arch-conservative Cimon, Pericles’ greatest enemy. He probably exerted a stabilizing influence.

Conspicuously offstage in
The Pericles Commission
are two men of vast importance: Cimon and Themistocles. Both had been ostracized—which means exiled for a period of ten years—before the book opens. Themistocles was the deep strategist whose battle plan saved the Greeks during the Persian invasion, but who later was accused of treason. He departed about nine years before the book opens. Cimon was ostracized mere months before the rise of the democracy. It was his departure that made it possible for Ephialtes to make his move.

So Nicolaos has survived his first taste of investigation, and he’s foiled one plot, but Athens’ position in the world is very far from safe. The city is caught in a cold war with the vast super-state of the Persian Empire. The Persians may have been beaten twenty years ago, but they haven’t given up.

Athens has perhaps thirty thousand men to serve in the army. Their enemy is the largest empire the world has yet seen, covering all of what today we would call the Middle East, plus Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Turkey, plus the Arabic Peninsula and Egypt. It’s not exactly even odds.

At the same time the league of Greek city-states that united against the Persians is collapsing. The cities bordering the Persian Empire desperately need Athens to remain strong; they know they’ll be swallowed up if Athens weakens. But on the other side of Greece the powerful city-states fear the astonishing and ever-growing influence of the democracy. Corinth is in a vicious trade war with Athens, which will lead to open fighting at any moment. Sparta, an insular, ruthlessly militaristic state in which every citizen is required to be a professional soldier, distrusts the clever Athenians and fears the democracy will spread across Hellas and incite rebellion.

In the coming years Athens will be on the knife edge of disaster, and if they fail now, our future goes with them. They need a breathing space. Fifty years will do. In that time they can invent almost everything that’s important to our civilization. But it can only happen if Athens doesn’t fall, and with the Persians to the east, and Sparta and Corinth to the west, the world’s first democracy is like a deer caught between two wolves.