Chapter 25
In This Chapter
● Reconsidering heroes
● Questioning generals
● Weighing in on politicians
The history of ancient Greece is full of interesting characters - individuals who got into some sticky situations or rose to great heights but whose motivations were sometimes dubious.
This chapter is a short list of people about whom you may be interested in finding out more sordid details!
Alcibiades (451-403 BC)
The ultimate dodgy character, Alcibiades was an Athenian general and politician who changed sides so often that keeping up with his allegiances is difficult.
Alcibiades was a young playboy about town who everyone thought was destined for great things. He was the main mover behind the idea of the disastrous Sicilian Expedition during the Peloponnesian War (refer to Chapter 8). He never made it to Sicily because a message reached him that he was being charged in his absence with blasphemy, including drunkenly mocking the secrets of the Eleusinian Mysteries (decribed in Chapter 22). These charges were probably true; throughout his life, he lived to excess.
Hearing of these charges, Alcibiades literally jumped ship, escaping in a fishing boat, and went to Sparta and worked as an advisor to his former enemy. But the Spartans soon distrusted him too, and Alcibiades ended up at the court of a Persian satrap. Eventually he was welcomed back to Athens and fought successfully for the Athenians for a number of years. After a defeat in 406 BC, he retired to live in Thrace. His was not a peaceful old age - the new regime in Athens assassinated him two years later.
Alcibiades was a great man who arguably dominated his era, but you wouldn’t lend him a fiver!
Odysseus
Yes, that’s right - I’m including Odysseus, the great Greek hero of Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, on my list of dodgy characters!
Homer calls Odysseus the ‘master of cunning stratagems’ and throughout the myths about him, Odysseus continually lies, cheats, and cons. It was Odysseus who came up with the plan of the Trojan horse, as well as many other cunning schemes. On several occasions in The Odyssey, he adopts disguises given to him by the goddess Athena to work some kind of con.
The ancient Greeks recognised these traits in Odysseus’s character, and later portrayals of him emphasise his untrustworthiness. In Sophocles’s play Philoctetes, for example, Odysseus is shown to be cunning and amoral in his treatment of a wounded archer when he tries to steal the archer’s bow.
Odysseus was also famed as a teller of tales. Undoubtedly they weren’t all true!
Pausanias (died circa 450 BC)
Pausanias was a Spartan general who earned a possibly undeserved reputation for treachery. He was the commander of all the Greek forces at the battle of Plataea in 479 BC and claimed sole credit for the victory - an act that didn’t exactly make him popular. The following year he commanded a Greek fleet that captured the Persian city of Byzantium but was afterwards accused of treachery. Back in Sparta he was acquitted and unwisely headed back to Byzantium where he was again accused of treachery! Put on trial several further times, Pausanias was eventually convicted of trying to organise a helot (slave worker) uprising in Sparta. He fled to avoid execution, eventually starving to death in the Spartan acropolis.
Strangely, several years later the Spartans voted that Pausanias be made a hero and a cult was established in his honour. Two statues to him were eventually constructed. So was he a traitor - or just the victim of powerful enemies? It’s unlikely that we’ll ever know.
Demetrius (336-283 BC)
Demetrius was the son of Alexander the Great’s successor Antigonus I, king in Phrygia in Asia Minor. Demetrius grew up a playboy in the Alcibiades style with a taste for military adventure.
Demetrius spent many years campaigning like a pirate around the Aegean and earned the entirely undeserved nickname Poliorcetes, or ‘Besieger of Cities’. He was responsible for the design and construction of the Helepolis' siege engine (refer to Chapter 12) during his illegal and unsuccessful attack on Rhodes.
Eventually Demetrius was defeated in 285 and surrendered his army to Seleucus (the king of the Seleucid kingdom in Mesopotamia). He spent the last two years of his life under house arrest at Seleucus’s court where he indulged his other two great passions - and effectively ate and drank himself to death.
Theseus
Like Odysseus, Theseus is another great example of a classic ancient Greek hero with two sides.
● On the plus side Theseus travelled to Crete and killed the Minotaur and was one of the greatest kings of Athens.
● On the debit side he dumped Ariadne (daughter of King Minos) on the island of Naxos when she was pregnant with his child and according to another myth kidnapped the young Helen (of Troy fame) and tried to force her to be his wife.
Theseus is a perfect example of the way that the Greeks regarded a ‘hero’ as somebody who did amazing things, rather than helped other people selflessly. (For more on heroes refer to Chapter 20.)
Olympias (circa 370-316 BC)
As the wife of Philip II of Macedon and the mother of Alexander the Great, Olympias was always going to have an important place in history, but she’s famed as being one of the great villains of ancient Greece.
Many historians believe that Olympias was behind the murder of Philip while she was in exile. Whether that’s true or not, Olympias certainly ordered the deaths of Philip’s second wife and her infant daughter on her return. After Alexander’s death, she tried desperately to cling on to power and was responsible for several more deaths until she was executed by relatives of her previous victims in 316 BC.
To be fair to Olympias, she lived in a court where the choice was to kill or be killed. And she was just very good at killing!
Alexander the Great (356-323 BC)
Alexander the Great - a bit dodgy? A controversial choice, but a good one, I believe:
Alexander was responsible for some of the greatest military achievements in the ancient world and created population movements that ushered in the Hellenistic Age (see Chapter 11). He founded great cities and travelled farther and wider than anybody else before.
But, during his campaigns, thousands of people were either killed in battle or executed and thousands more had their homes and lives destroyed. Alexander had several of his friends killed who he suspected of treachery - at least one by his own hands. His savagery to those who resisted him was legendary. Also, his name was used as a kind of bogeyman to scare children in eastern countries for centuries after his death. ‘Go to bed when I tell you, or Alexander will get you!’
So, visionary or mass-murdering maniac? You have to judge all of these people by the standards of their age. History is all about opinions. The choice is yours!
Diogenes the Cynic (circa 412-321 BC)
Diogenes was a philosopher whose controversial methods made him famous throughout the ancient world. At various times in his life he lived in a barrel, was captured by pirates, and was expelled from the town of Sinope for ‘defacing the currency’ - spoiling coins in an attempt at rejecting the material world. Diogenes ended up in Corinth and lived the life of a beggar, rejecting all social conventions including marriage and cleanliness. He was known as the ‘cynic’ because he was credited with being the founder of the ‘cynic’ branch of philosophy, which disdained conventional life. The word ‘cynic’ comes from the Greek word kynikos which means ‘dog like’. Diogenes believed people could learn a lot from living like dogs - he did!
Although Diogenes was a proper philosopher who wrote many books, treatises, and several tragic plays, undoubtedly the best story about him concerns his meeting with the young Alexander the Great. When the young king asked Diogenes if there was anything that Alexander could do for him,
Diogenes replied, ‘Yes, you can move slightly to the left, you’re standing in my sunlight.’ A brave man indeed!
Jason
Another ancient Greek hero with a dark side, Jason is the celebrated warrior who journeyed to the Black Sea and stole the Golden Fleece from King Aietes, along with his daughter, the sorceress Medea (refer to Chapter 20 for the full story).
However, the stories about Jason’s return aren’t as flattering as his early exploits. Eventually he ended up living with Medea in the city of Corinth where they had two children. In Euripides’s play Medea, Jason dumps Medea (who, because she was a non-Greek, had no legal status as his bride) to marry Glauce, the daughter of the king of Corinth, so that he would gain social status. In an act of revenge, Medea kills both Glauce and her own two children before fleeing.
For his part, Jason eked out the rest of his life alone in Corinth, eventually dying when timber from the rotting hulk of his ship, the Argo, fell on him. An unheroic end!
Kleon of Athens (died 422 BC)
Kleon gets a bit of an unfair press because the only descriptions that survive of him are from Aristophanes and Thucydides - neither of whom liked him at all and (in the case of Aristophanes) continually publicly lampooned him.
Kleon was one of the first demagogue politicians (see Chapter 7), whose rabble-rousing political style clashed with old-school Athenian aristocrats like Pericles. In 426 BC he tried to prosecute Aristophanes over his play The Babylonians, which he claimed defamed the city of Athens, but the case was thrown out.
At the same time Kleon was a brave general who won several victories and died fighting near Amphipolis. However, most people regard him as being one of the first to exploit Athens’s new democracy for his own personal glory.