The Walled Orchard (20 page)

Actually, I did go to Assembly when they debated Mytilene; the first day, that is, not the second, when they changed their minds. I hadn’t meant to go; in fact I was standing in the Market Square haggling with a man for a bundle of sheepskins, which I wanted to use as blankets in Pallene. I was so busy trying to save myself a few obols that I didn’t see that the constables were coming through the Market Square with the rope dipped in red paint, which is how they used to drive people with nothing to do up to Assembly in my day. The fleece-seller suddenly ducked behind his bales, and when I looked round there was the red rope, heading straight for me. I just managed to get up to the Pnyx before they caught up with me, and so avoided the chant of ‘Redleg!’ which always greets the last arrivals.

It was there that I heard Cleon speak in public for the first time, and you can imagine the impression it made on me. He was a truly awe-inspiring figure when he had worked himself up into a fury, and although I felt it my duty as a Comic poet to hate him, I found it very difficult.

You probably know more about the Mitylenean crisis than I do, but the basic situation was this. Our subjects in Mitylene, the largest city in Lesbos, had rebelled, and after a lot of trouble we broke the rebellion and regained control of the city. The motion before Assembly, therefore, was what we should do with the Mityleneans, and most of us, at least before Cleon started to speak, would have given the same answer; kill or exile the ringleaders, double the taxes, and leave a garrison. But Cleon, typically, had a much better, idea. He wanted to turn an episode which did not, broadly speaking, do us much credit into an opportunity for ‘clear thinking and radical action’, to use a favourite phrase of his. He wanted us to put to death every adult male in Mitylene, regardless of any plea or excuse. That way, he argued, he would demonstrate not only how dangerous it was to play games with the Athenians, but also how totally unlike other cities we were.

‘Who else in the whole of Greece,’ he said, in that wonderful, horrible voice of his, ‘would dare to contemplate such a dreadful act, the destruction of an entire people? Never mind who else could do it — although there are very few who could; who else
would
do such a thing? Who would dare?’

Here he paused, and looked around slowly, as if daring someone to interrupt him. ‘But you would, Men of Athens, if you have courage to match your position. And why? Because you are a democracy, the only true democracy in the history of the world. For a democracy which is a true democracy can do anything it pleases, and no constraint of expediency or morality can restrain it. Because the People have no permanent identity, because they are immortal and are influenced by no factor other than their own benefit, the only limit to what they can do is the physical limit of what they can get away with, what they can actually start and complete without interruption or being bodily prevented by others. It is this that gives us Athenians the ability, and the right, to be the servants of none and the masters of others.

‘But, I hear some of you muttering, just because we, alone of all men, can put the Mityleneans to death, surely that doesn’t mean that we must? On the contrary, Men of Athens. Because we have this unique power, we must exercise it; we must be ruthless in exercising it, or else it will float away from us, like a dream on waking. Otherwise we will create for ourselves mental restraints more deadly than physical ones; we will begin to say, “We
dare
not do this”, not, “We
cannot
do this”, which would be like binding ourselves in chains because no other man is able to bind us.

‘No; if it seems true to us that the best way to preserve our empire in the future is to set it such a terrifying example that no man would ever dare to rebel again, we have no real option other than to set that example, and show the world that Athens will stop at nothing to get what it wants. For you all know the rest. If we lose our subject-states, then we lose our whole way of life, which is that of the landlords of Greece. At present, no man in any of our cities can plough his land or promise his daughter in marriage or buy flour in the market, except by the consent of Athens. I do not mean that we authorise all these things, or that each man must receive a licence written in wax before he does anything; but he knows that he is the property of Athens, just as your chattels are the property of each one of you.

‘Supposing Nicias or Callias the son of Hipponicus, who each has hundreds of slaves, had one slave in particular who not only ran away but incited his fellows to do the same, and cut their master’s throat into the bargain. Nicias and Callias are honest, pious men; but would they hesitate to have that slave whipped and tortured to death? Of course not. They are rich enough to bear the loss, and if they did not do so, they would be positively encouraging their other slaves to run away too, and asking to be murdered themselves. And you, fellow Athenians, you have more slaves than anyone else. You can afford the loss, but you cannot afford to give treason a precedent. So if you value your empire and your democracy and your very lives, vote for my proposal. But if you do not, and if you are prepared to hand over your true and only wealth to the Spartans and the Corinthians, then vote against it.

Of course, we all voted for him, and cheered him until our throats were dry, and went home to tell anyone unlucky enough not to have been present what a feast of oratory and good sense they had missed. But we are Athenians, and so the next day when someone demanded that we reconsider the resolution, we did, and overruled it, too. The general view seemed to be that since we had voted both for and against the motion, we must have got it right either the first or the second time, which was very clever of us.

So Cleon didn’t get his way over Mitylene. But this defeat did him no harm at all, no more than all the attacks in the Comedies. The real test of his abilities came much later, at about the time I married Phaedra and went to Samos.

It all started when Demosthenes, a brilliant, dashing and quite remarkably lucky general of ours, made rather a mess of an important and fairly straightforward campaign in Aetolia. He was far too frightened to come home, since he would have been exiled or put to death, and so he hung around in Naupactus waiting for his luck to change. And change it did. Before he knew quite what was happening, he had won a notable victory in Messenia and was able to come home safely.

But Demosthenes never knew when to leave well alone, and so he persuaded the Athenians to give him forty first-class warships, to use at his absolute discretion in and around the Peloponnese. For he had seen a place on the Messenian coast called Pylos; once the home of the fabulous King Nestor, but now a god-forsaken place with nothing much to it except a certain shape, which Demosthenes but no one else could see. His fellow generals told him not to be so damned stupid and come and join them in a little recreational crop-burning; but Demosthenes would not be diverted from his arcane purpose. Since he could not openly dissent from the opinion of his fellow generals, he sat down in Pylos and read Homer, and his colleagues washed their hands of him and got on with the war. But Demosthenes’ soldiers, either from boredom or because they had had the idea planted in their heads, set about fortifying Pylos with whatever materials came to hand.

King Agis of Sparta, on his way home from burning the best crop of early beans I have ever managed to produce, heard about what was going on at Pylos, and nearly had a stroke. Apparently, he too had seen that natural shape at Pylos, and had been meaning to do something about it for some time. Perhaps my early beans got in his way; certainly he recognised that once a force of determined men got dug in at Pylos, there was nothing on earth that could get them out. He marched as fast as he could, hoping to take Demosthenes by surprise.

Lying next to Pylos is a wooded and uninhabited island called Sphacteria, on to which Agis transferred the flower of the Spartan army, with some idea of using it as a base for attacking Demosthenes without having to risk a sea-battle. The main point about Sphacteria is that there is no water on the island; but this seemed irrelevant, since the Spartans did not intend to stay there for more than a day or so.

Just then, a large Athenian fleet, which Demosthenes had sent for, arrived unexpectedly, and there was a messy battle between the Athenians and Agis’s forces on the mainland, both by land and sea. Despite the efforts of a certain Spartan captain called Brasidas, the Athenians won, and the Spartans drew out feeling hard done by. Except, of course, for their best troops, who were cooped up on Sphacteria with no ships and no water.

Demosthenes realised that his position, although it looked good for the moment, was untenable. Unless he thought of something quickly, the Spartans would overcome their profound respect for him and come back, and even his luck was unlikely to hold out much longer. There was no way of knowing how long the reserves of water on Sphacteria would last, and even though he had swept the sea clear of Peloponnesian warships, it would be impossible to stop small fishing-boats slipping out by night and supplying the Spartans on the island.

So he made a deal, which under the circumstances was the best he could do. In return for being allowed to send food and water in to Sphacteria, the Spartans were to hand over all the ships they had in the area as securities (to be returned if the truce was observed) and keep well away while they sent an embassy to Athens to discuss peace terms. The Spartans sent their embassy, which Cleon, who was then under considerable pressure from the moderate faction, sent away again. Accordingly, Demosthenes stopped the food shipments, but claimed some minor infringement of the truce and refused to return the ships. The Spartans attacked at once by land, and Demosthenes, despite reinforcements from Athens, didn’t know what to do next. He could see no hope of taking Sphacteria by storm, and if he let the men on the island die of hunger and thirst, he would lose his hostages and with them the best opportunity Athens had yet had of ending the war. In addition, he was running short of food and water himself, in spite of now having seventy first-class warships to fetch and carry for him, and since the Spartans were managing to get some supplies through to Sphacteria, it looked as if the whole thing could still end in disaster. So he sent a full account of his position to Athens and asked for any sensible suggestions.

Cleon, who had turned away the Spartan ambassadors, was now in deep trouble, and all he could think of was to accuse Demosthenes’ messengers of lying. It was therefore proposed — I think as a joke — that he be sent out to have a look for himself, and the proposal was overwhelmingly accepted. But Cleon kept his nerve and counter-proposed that Nicias son of Niceratus, who was one of the generals that year, should be sent out with reinforcements to help Demosthenes.

Nicias, being Nicias, stood there like a thoughtful sheep and said that although it was a great honour to be chosen for such an important mission, his infirmity was such that he could not accept it. At this, Cleon tried to be rather too clever. He said that Nicias was nothing special, and neither was Demosthenes, whom everyone was calling the best thing since fried whitebait. Any fool, he said, could have those Spartans off that island and back in Athens in a couple of days. Why, even he could do it.

Nicias, who had been sitting there fretting about failing to do his duty in his city’s hour of need, suddenly brightened up and said that that was a wonderful idea, and everyone started agreeing with him and cheering at the tops of their voices. Cleon, who knew about as much about the arts of war as I do about sponge-diving, went a ghastly shade of white and started to talk very fast. But nobody would listen to him; the more he gabbled, the more they cheered, until he realised that there was no way out.

So he stood up and held up his hand for silence, and everyone stopped laughing and shouting, to hear what. this clever man would say next. Cleon started by saying that he was moved and honoured by his fellow citizens’ confidence in him, which was a generous reward for the few small services he had done the Athenians, but which he could not help feeling was misplaced. He had never held a military command before, and although nothing would please him more than to go, he felt he could not risk the lives of his fellow Athenians in this venture. Instead, he said, raising his voice so as to be heard above the groundswell of rude noises coming from his beloved fellow citizens, he would take with him only the few allied heavy infantry who were stationed in Athens, and a force of light infantry and archers, also allies. Then he took a deep breath and shut his eyes, and promised that if he wasn’t back, mission accomplished, within twenty days, they could duck him in one of his own tanning-vats and cut him up for sandals. The Athenians roared with laughter and cheered so loudly that they could be heard all over the City; for even if Cleon couldn’t hope to deliver, it had been great fun listening to him, and there would be more fun still, first when he made his excuses, and later at his trial.

Twenty days later, he was back; and with him were the Spartans from the island, including one hundred and twenty Spartiate noblemen, in chains. There was a different sort of cheering after that, and although Aristophanes’ next play, which was entirely devoted to the most vicious attacks on Cleon, won first prize, that was little more than an Athenian way of telling him how much they loved him, just as they had loved Pericles and Themistocles before him.

In fact, it wasn’t fool’s luck, as everyone said afterwards. Because Cleon wasn’t a soldier, he didn’t think like a soldier. He saw that heavy infantry, the heart and soul of any Greek army, are never much more than a liability, and since the object of the exercise was to take as many Spartan heavy infantrymen alive as possible, he couldn’t use Athenian heavy troops against them. So he used his brains instead. First he set fire to the woods which cover Sphacteria — Demosthenes had been too clever to think of anything so simple — and when the Spartans came dashing out, like hares out of barley when it’s being cut, he harried them with his light infantry and archers until, out of a mixture of exhaustion and frustration at not being able to come to grips with their tormentors, they threw down their shields and surrendered quietly. It was all totally new and barbaric, but it worked, with minimal losses to them and virtually none to us.