ACT SEVEN
40
416 BC
SOCRATES: If you think that by killing people you’ll put a stop to anyone criticising you because you don’t live as you should, you’re not thinking clearly.
Plato, Apology, 39d1
Geography has a lot to answer for. Some territories are blessed, others are burdened with supplying the raw materials of human civilisation. The island of Melos is one such. It is a tiny island whose geological composition has proved both a bonus and a curse.
Ringing the Cyclades, a swirling volcanic archipelago in the heart of the Aegean Sea, Melos has, since the age of prehistory, been civilisation’s paintbox. Geophysical activity means that the rocks weep sulphur, kaolin and gypsum. In the north of the island the beaches are still littered with treacle-black volcanic glass – obsidian – which has been in demand across the known world since the Stone Age. Melos was long on Athens’ radar. Finds at Laurion show that Bronze Age Attic Greeks traded their metals for the razor-sharp knives, the arrowheads, the surgeon’s scalpels that obsidian so usefully becomes. In ancient times Melos’ exports were essential. Now the island thrives on selling barite to force-ripen cherry tomatoes for the global salad market.
Melos is an odd, beautiful, slightly perturbing place. Children digging on the beach find the sand gets hotter and then dangerously hot as they approach the earth’s crust. Steam jets suddenly bubble the skin as one swims in its coves. The world-famous Venus de Milo was found, gawky, half-submerged in a cave covered with unremarkable scrub by a (surprised) farmer hoeing his patch at the beginning of the season in 1820. And today on a deserted hillside site, smothered with wildflowers and droning with diligent bees, massive Doric blocks of stone, dark gore-red, shield human settlements that are no longer there.
This ancient place feels like a ghost town, for good reason.
In 416 BC the Melians made the political mistake of asserting that they were happy to continue their ‘700-year’ independence and not join the Delian League. For more than a decade Athenians had been pressing the islanders to secede. Back in 425 BC Athens had assessed Melos for tribute; the Melians had refused to pay up. Clearly, Melian independence was a thorn in Athens’ flesh. And now that the Peloponnesian War had dragged on for years, the Athenians needed all the cash they could lay their hands on. With Alcibiades and his coterie to all intents and purposes in charge of the Assembly, the small island and the mainland superpower entered a heated debate. Melos, don’t forget, was at a disadvantage by this stage. Athenians had become highly skilled at argument. The Assembly was no stranger to grand oratory – and already the historian Thucydides was commenting on the dangers of these rabble-rousing situations. Witness his report of one of Cleon’s speeches in the Assembly.
In speechifying competitions of this sort the prizes go to the spin-doctors and the state is the loser. The blame is yours, for stupidly encouraging these competitive displays … If something is to be done in the future, you weigh it up by hearing a good speech on the subject, and as for the past, you judge it not from your own first-hand, eye-witness experience but from what you hear in some clever bit of rhetoric … You all want to be the first to make a speech, and if you can’t do that, you try to sit there looking as though you are one step ahead of the speaker … you demand changes to the conditions under which you live, and yet have a very dim understanding of the reality of those conditions: you are very slaves to the pleasure of the ear, and more like the audience of a paid public speaker than the council of a city.2
Athens’ most persuasive and hard-line negotiators were sent across the water to make the Melians see sense. Theatricalised it may be, but the following exchange between the men of Melos and the Athenian envoys is one of the most sobering in world literature. The author, Thucydides, may have invented it for dramatic effect, but the point of drama is that it can communicate that awful moment when attitudes harden, when love is lost, when men decide to hate one another. Stinging from defeat at the Battle of Mantinea in 418 BC, and irked by the fact that Melos had been friendly to the Spartans, on hearing that the Melians still insisted on their independence, and – one suspects – remembering Melos’ staggering natural resources, angry voices in the Athenian Assembly up on the Pnyx (Alcibiades almost certainly amongst them) proposed a violent motion: this was going to be gunboat diplomacy.3
A massive force was mobilised: 2,500 hoplites all told, 320 archers, twenty crack-squad cavalrymen – all boarding boats whose prows would be pointing south.4
Any Melian – a shepherd, a miner, a baker looking out on the pearly northern horizon one day in May – would have seen a worrying, and then a horrifying, stain: thirty-eight triremes (Athens’ own as well as boats offered up or sequestered from Athenian allies), 3,000 soldiers bearing down. Frothing through the deep water and then nudging their way into Melos’ natural harbour.
Because the Athenians did not want a plucky anomaly in the heart of the Mediterranean, they were determined the Melians would admit that they were a subject state in Athens’ empire. Melian oligarchs and magistrates refused to allow the Athenians to present their case to the full community – and there were not that many of them: 1,600 or so in total in an island only 15 miles long and 10 miles wide. Why such censorship? To prevent mass panic spreading, perhaps? Believing they could avert atrocity and come to some mutually beneficial deal? In case the banner of democracy would be too easily planted?
Thucydides gives us his version of the conversation that followed. The Melians admit it will be difficult to contend with Athenian power, but say that they will ‘put their trust in the gods’, they will ‘try to save themselves’. The Athenian reply is chilling.
Of the gods we believe and of mankind we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever and whatever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it in existence before us, and shall leave it to exist for ever among those who come after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you or anybody else, with the same power as ours, would do precisely the same as us.5
The Athenians declare ‘Might Rules’. They need no other excuse for unprovoked aggression than the size of their army.
Whether or not Thucydides was writing up this exchange to express his own sensitivity to moral debates has been and always will be debated. But what is certain is the disgusting brutality of the outcome. For a number of months the Melians were besieged. Melos would be a hard nut to crack because the island has and had great advantages. As the rim of an extinct volcano, it is a natural fortress; fresh water runs into the citadel (a number of the cafés and houses in the modern village still have their own wells) and a giant’s march of jagged volcanic rocks protects the island’s highest point, Mount Halakas. But the rocks’ colour, that of dried blood, would appear to have been prophetic.
Through a hard winter the Melians held out. Then disease, starvation, fear swirled in the air around those who were left. In 415 BC, forced back right to the crow’s nest of the island on top of a plug of unexploded magma, the islanders capitulated. Their soot-blackened oil lamps, mirrors, hair-pins and scythes – still being turned up by archaeologists – were left in their households for one last time.6 The remains, sitting quietly now in Melos’ municipal museum, are pathetic shards of ordinary human lives abandoned.
The Athenians were ruthless. This would be a blood-bath. Their orders were to slay every man standing, and to enslave every woman and child.
We can only imagine the carnage, because it seems not one single man survived to leave us their account.7