41
Athens, 415 BC
TALTHYBIUS: Come, child; I pity your mother, but time is up.
No more embracing now.
You must climb to the topmost fringe of your father’s towers,
Where the sentence says you must leave your life behind.
Take him. – A job like this
Is fit for a man without feeling or decency;
I’m not brutal enough.
HECUBA: O little child, son of my dear lost son,
Your life is ravished from us by murderers.
What will become of us? What can I do for you?
Only to beat the head and bruise the breast –
This we can give; no more.
Lost city, lost child: what climax of suffering
Lacks now? Have we not reached
In headlong plunge the abyss of pain?
Euripides, Women of Troy, lines 782–98, written in 416/415 BC around the time of the Melos massacre1
THE ATHENIANS HAD A NEW ISLAND; and they had blood dripping from their hands. Alcibiades held the Melians’ faces and rubbed them in the dirt. He took one of the bereaved Melian women, enjoyed her and left her pregnant with a son.2
Alcibiades, who carries his villainy to such unheard-of lengths that, after recommending that the people of Melos be sold into slavery, he purchased a woman from among the prisoners and has since had a son by her … a child … sprung from parents who are each other’s deadliest enemies, and of his nearest kin the one has committed and the other has suffered the most terrible of wrongs.3
And it is at this point that we see Socrates’ city beginning to fracture irreparably. There is no doubt that the massacre at Melos worried the Athenians. That same year Euripides wrote his throat-tighteningly powerful tragedy Women of Troy. He would have applied to the Chief Archon for permission to write in the July or August before the massacre, but then clearly adapted his script during the winter of 416/15 as the Melians were suffering their abominable trauma. The scene is set back in the Age of Heroes, when Troy has fallen and the Greeks are wreaking their vengeance on the Trojan population – Women of Troy picks up where Homer’s Iliad Book 24 leaves off. But the resonance is a contemporary one, and Euripides’ point is clear. In many ways, the men who have been speared and sliced and clubbed and hacked to death in atrocities such as Melos are the lucky ones. It is the women – who have in front of them a long life of exile, enslavement, rape, forced separation from their children – who are the most dehumanised victims of war. It is these women who will be shipped to an alien city, Athens, or sold in the Athenian Agora to travel yet further afield. Socrates would certainly have passed these casualties of his friend Alcibiades’ high-handed policy as he made his habitual journey through the marketplace. Mothers and children side by side, orphans, childless mothers all staring out at Athena’s city with wary eyes. The actors who wore masks and became the ‘abused women’ of Euripides’ and Sophocles’ tragedies in the Theatre of Dionysos might well have passed them too – the spoiled life that their dramatic art imitated.
One Melian man escaped the carnage – because at the time of the massacre he was hiding as a resident alien in Athens itself. A philosopher, known as Diagoras of Melos, he had been attracted to Athena’s city in happier days when the eastern Mediterranean was at relative peace, when thought and moral exploration were currencies valued as highly as talents of tribute silver and prisoners-of-war.
Diagoras was not exterminated by an Athenian trireme, yet it was Athenian paranoia that would cut him down. Because within two years of the Melian massacre the Assembly had called for his assassination without trial, and Diagoras had fled the city-state with a price on his head. For centuries we have not known precisely the nature of his crime, other than that, like Socrates’, it was not for his deeds, but ‘his words’.4 But a recent thrilling discovery may now make that clear.