12
The Cyclades,
the Mediterranean basin, 478/7–454 BC
CALLICLES: What do you mean?
SOCRATES: I mean that every man is his own ruler; or is there no need of one’s ruling oneself, but only of ruling others?
Plato, Gorgias, 491d1
THE ATHENIANS HAD SHOWN THEIR IMPERIAL hand early. Up until 477 BC, it had been the Spartans who bared their teeth at the Persians, controlling the loose alliance between like-minded Hellenic city-states that was formed to prevent another Thermopylae.
But then the Athenians became Hellenic protectors-in-chief. It was they who determined who should provide ships, who should offer up human muscle to serve the Hellenic vs Barbarian cause. It was the Athenians who collected tribute from those who couldn’t run to oars and ramming prows. To all intents and purposes, ‘tribute’ was a protection tax, a way of paying for armaments and personnel that could be pooled for use against the Persians. That forced windfall was then stored 100 miles south-east of Athens, on the sacred island of Delos.
Delos will sound loud in Socrates’ story. Even though it appears as just a speck on the map, this tiny ‘floating’ island at the centre of the Cyclades was always believed to have sacred powers. Since prehistory, men from across the eastern Mediterranean had gathered here. They left their calling cards: simple, angular, limestone human shapes, their surfaces tattooed with staring eyes, penises, abstract, organic patterns. And now that the Greeks felt strong enough to stand up to the bully-boys of the East, they made this charmed place the centre of their league of understanding. Delos was centrally placed between the great powers of the eastern Mediterranean, and yet the island was, in the eyes of the ancients, inhabited by an unusual number of divinities and demons. No one in their right mind would attack such a possessed territory.
And so, for a brief time at the beginning of Socrates’ long life, while the Athenians were pre-eminent, the Persians quiet and other Greeks acquiescent, there was some degree of peace in the world.
Then in 465 a spat broke out in the northern territories. The honey-filled island of Thasos – just south of modern-day Kavala – owned mining rights on the mainland across a narrow stretch of water. Here the earth is porous: tombs are regularly sunk, and gold is frequently pulled out. Herodotus is ebullient in his excitement: ‘The gold mines at Scapte Hyle yielded in all eighty talents a year … the islanders, without raising any tax on their own produce, enjoyed, from the mines and the mainland, a revenue of two hundred talents – and, in a particularly good year, of as much as three hundred. I have seen these mines myself; … A whole mountain has been turned upside down in the search for gold.’2
Some of the most exquisite artefacts from antiquity are now emerging from the soil in this region: chandelier earrings, golden belt-buckles, tiny perfume bottles so heavy with gold and enamel they weigh in like a brick. A diadem made of gold and coloured with blue enamel – a wreath of wild metal flowers – shows what beauty could be created in these northern lands.3 While being restored in 2008, this wreath was treated in the laboratory-workshops of the new Acropolis Museum. Testimony of its daintiness, as the door of the workshop was opened, a momentary, gentle breeze was sufficient to set the golden flower-heads dancing.
But jewels such as these attract thieves.
Athens, it seems, wanted a piece of the gold-and-honey action, and when Thasos defected from the League in protest in 465, the island community found itself blockaded. Athenian ships sailed one after another from the port of Piraeus. For two full years hoplite citizens whetted their swords and spears and stared across at the Thasian islanders – who were perturbed to discover that their enemies now spoke not Persian, but Greek. Athens was blatantly using League money to promote her own interests. By 463/2 BCThasos had been decimated – it was forced to hand over its fleet, relinquish its mainland possessions, deliver up thirty talents (a crippling sum, the equivalent of circa £6 million in today’s money) and raze its fortifications to the ground.4 All this in spite of the fact that Thasos had secretly been promised help from the other supercity on the Greek mainland, Sparta.5 Athens triumphantly took control of the mainland mines.6 Climbing to the top of the ruined Byzantine castle that still crowns the island itself, looking out over a deep-blue sea, the air saturated with the scent of pine, it is disturbingly easy to imagine the picture-perfect setting, mired by human suffering and polluted by human greed.
But Athens was not sentimental. The hostilities with Persia rumbled on. Despite the Athenians’ heavy-handedness, the Greeks knew they still needed to stand strong against Persian ambition. Athens registered the consensus of need – and harnessed it for her own purposes. For the League’s ‘further protection’, she took matters into her own hands.
On the island of Delos there is a grand temple to Apollo, constructed to store the League’s treasure-trove capital: money waiting to build new ships, to arm more men and to build back communities and lives when the Persians next attacked.7 The temple was designed, in effect, as a League treasury, an independent building crammed with shared wealth.
Yet when one braves the curious weather-fronts and tides that swirl around this little isle that has always punched above its weight, where architecture clings to the mineral-rich rocks along with blasted vegetation, there is a surprise. Standing next to the Temple of Apollo’s footprint, the sacred building feels oddly amputated. Here, there is something not ruined, but uncompleted. With good reason. In 454 BC slaves manhandling mortar blocks into position were ordered to down tools; the building work on Apollo’s earthly home at Delos was peremptorily truncated. Athens wanted the Greek allies’ material security closer to home. The treasury was moved, lock, stock and barrel, from neutral Delos to vested-interest Athens – and then quickly into Athena’s lap, into the storage rooms of the Parthenon. We have a list of the capital harvest as accounted in 434/3 BC: 113 silver bowls, one gold bowl, three silver drinking horns, three silver cups, one silver lamp, one goblet, three large golden bowls, one golden statue of a woman, one silver basin, six Persian daggers, one gilt lyre, three ivory lyres, four wooden lyres, one inlaid ivory table, one silver-gilt mask, ten Milesian couches, six thrones, two silver-gilt nails, seventy shields.8
Now the Parthenon resembled less a sanctuary, and more a bank. Cities such as Neapolis (modern-day Kavala) on the mainland opposite Thasos contributed 1,000 drachmas a year to Athena in thanks for her protection. Money was baggage-trained from across the eastern Mediterranean straight to Athens. Athenian intention was clear.
Pericles and Socrates were maturing in a city that was rich in ideas, and was quickly becoming filthy rich.
Yet Socrates, remember, was a man who would ask whether we need warships and walls and glittering prizes in order to be happy. It was not clear whether a burgeoning empire and Socrates’ philosophies were going to make for easy bedfellows.
