Why Socrates Died by Robin Waterfield

Author:Robin Waterfield
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2009-04-29T04:30:00+00:00

EIGHT

Critias and Civil War

The negotiations that led to the terms of Athens’s surrender were oddly prolonged. Theramenes arranged to be sent to negotiate with Lysander, and let it be known that he was holding a major trump card, which he could not reveal in advance for fear of devaluing it. Whatever it was, it had to be powerful enough to keep Lysander from destroying the city and enslaving the population, which is what the most important Spartan allies were pushing for. It is a measure of Theramenes’ authority in the city in these troubled times that, perhaps somewhat gullibly, the Athenians appointed him their ambassador with full powers to make peace, and he set out for Samos, where Lysander was supervising the blockade of the town and port. Theramenes went alone, but Lysander already had notable Athenian exiles in his camp, including Charicles, Aristotle of Thorae and Critias, all previous allies of Theramenes as oligarchs and friends of Alcibiades.

Theramenes did not return for three months, and then came empty-handed, saying that Athens’s fate had to be decided by the proper authorities in Sparta, not by their brilliant but maverick commander. In order to explain his long absence and his failure, he claimed that Lysander had detained him. But it does not seem likely that the ‘detention’ was anything but amicable, and it is distinctly possible that senior Athenian oligarchs had spent the time assembling on the island from their various places of exile, to discuss the immediate future. Since this conference took place under Lysander’s aegis, they must have looked to Lysander to help them to power. And no doubt their discussions were leisurely, because it was in all of their interests to wait until starvation put pressure on the Athenians to come to terms. Theramenes’ trump card was the offer of oligarchic rule in Athens by men who would be loyal to Lysander if he managed to use his influence in the Peloponnesian League to get better terms for them.

So Theramenes and others went to Sparta, and returned with the terms outlined towards the end of the previous chapter. Meanwhile, on Lysander’s orders, Cleophon, still resisting peace, was arrested on a trumped-up charge and put to death, and the clubs kept the population cowed by the fear of a resumption of their terror tactics of 411. This cleared the way for the Spartan insistence, as relayed to the Council and the Assembly by the oligarchs, that Athens should be governed from now on in accordance with the ‘ancestral constitution’–the multivalent phrase that had become a slogan a few years previously. It seemed as though Athens was to be allowed the right of self-government, but as it turned out, the ‘ancestral constitution’ that was in store for the Athenians was hardly less oligarchic than, and certainly as brutal as, any of the puppet regimes Lysander was imposing on the Asiatic Greeks.

THE THIRTY

Athens was close to anarchy for a while. There was feuding in the courts, and no government to speak

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