Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Lucy Hughes-Hallett

them, ‘I care little. I have come for the lyre of Achilles, with which, as Homer says, he would sing of the prowess and glories of brave men.’ As Achilles had sung to himself in his tent, evoking the reputation of the heroes dead and gone among whom he wished to be numbered, so Alexander, at this momentous starting-point, solemnly honoured his great forerunner. Stripped naked, and anointed with oil, he ran with his companions to lay a garland on Achilles’ tomb.

      That a young Hellenic king ambitious of military conquest in Asia and intent on creating for himself the reputation of a warrior to compare with those of the legendary past should choose Achilles as model and patron is perhaps predictable. But a generation earlier a great man of a very different stamp had also invoked his name. In 399 BC the 70-year-old philosopher Socrates was put on trial in Athens, accused of refusing to recognize the city’s gods, of introducing new deities, and of corrupting the young. He was summoned before a court consisting of five hundred of his peers and invited to make his defence. He proceeded, not to answer the charges against him, but to make a mock both of them and of his chief accusers. Then, midway through his defence (as it was written down by Plato some years after the event), his tone altered. For a while, his famous irony and his provocative sangfroid alike were laid aside. He was unpopular, he said, he realized that, and he had known for some time that he risked incurring a capital charge. But to one who might ask him why, in that case, he persisted in a course that was so evidently irritating to the authorities he said that he would answer: ‘You are mistaken, my friend, if you think that a man who is worth anything ought to spend his time weighing up the prospects of life and death. He has only one thing to consider in performing any action; that is whether he is acting justly or unjustly.’ If he were offered acquittal – and with it his life – on the condition that he would refrain in future from the kind of philosophical enquiry he was accustomed to practise, he would refuse the offer. ‘I am not going to alter my conduct, not even if I have to die a hundred deaths.’

      There was an uproar in the court. Unabashed, Socrates reiterated his defiance, alluding to the passage in the Iliad when Thetis tells Achilles that if he re-enters the fighting he will die soon, for he is doomed to fall shortly after Hector. ‘“Let me die forthwith,” said [Achilles], “… rather than remain here by the beaked ships to be mocked, a burden on the ground.” Do you suppose that he gave a thought to death and danger?’ The quotation was inaccurate but the sentiment was authentically Homeric. Achilles, like Socrates after him, refused to be a burden on the earth, a mere lump of animated matter, obedient to the stupid or immoral decrees of others. Wherever he went, Socrates told his judges, established authority would persecute him if he continued to question it, which he would never cease to do. A life in which he was not free to think and speak as he pleased was ‘not worth living’. To die was preferable.

      A vote was called. Socrates was found guilty by 280 votes to 220. He spoke again. His accusers demanded the death penalty. According to Athenian law it was for the defendant to propose another, lesser punishment. Socrates believed, and most historians agree with him, that if he had asked for banishment it would have been granted. He disdained to do so. The sentence of death was voted on, and approved by a substantially larger majority than the verdict (indicating that there were more people in court who wanted Socrates dead than there were people who believed him to be guilty as charged). He spoke again, asserting that he was content because the satisfaction of acting rightly, according to one’s own lights of reason and moral discrimination, was so great as to eclipse any suffering: ‘Nothing can harm a good man either in life or after death.’ Defiant, courageous, intransigent, he had proved himself equal to the example he had invoked in court, Achilles.

      A man of violence who admitted himself to be easily bested in debate, whose passions were hectic, and whose thought processes were frequently incoherent, who spoke his mind at all times and despised subterfuge, Homer’s Achilles was in many ways a bizarre model for the philosopher who strove unceasingly to subject emotion to reason, who was a master of irony and a brilliant manipulator of men’s minds. But the classical philosopher and the legendary warrior were, for all their differences, soul-mates. Alexander, world-conqueror in the making, sought to associate himself with Achilles’ youthful valour and invincibility, with the glittering, deadly warrior whose brilliance rivalled the splendour of the midday sun. But when Socrates, the impecunious, pug-nosed, incorrigible old worrier of complacent authority and scourge of dishonest thinking, claimed Achilles as a predecessor he did so in appreciation of the fact that Achilles was more than a killer of unparalleled charisma, that he could be taken as a model in peace as well as in war, as one who insisted that his life should be worthy of his own tremendous estimation of his own value as an individual, and who would pay the price required to invest that life with significance and dignity, even if the price were life itself. Socrates defied convention and eventually fell foul of the law because he would submit to no other dictates than those of his intellect and of his private daimon. Achilles rebelled against Agamemnon’s overlordship, and looked on relentless while his countrymen were slaughtered rather than compromise his honour. Both were stubborn, self-destructive, exasperating to their enemies and the dismay of their friends. Both insisted on valuing their own personal integrity higher than any service or disservice they might do the community. Both have been condemned for their culpable pride, and venerated for their courage and their superb defiance.

      In his tent at the furthest end of the Greek encampment, sworn to inaction, isolated by his own rage and by others’ fear of it, Achilles set himself at odds with the fractured, fudged-together thing that society necessarily is. Any human group, be it a family, a city, an army or a nation, depends for its continued existence on its members’ willingness to bend and yield, to compromise, to accept what is possible rather than demand what is perfect; but a society that loses sight of the standard of perfection is a dangerously unstable one. From the accommodating to the corrupt is an easy slide. Achilles and others who, like him, have stood firm, however wilfully and self-destructively, on a point of principle, have generally been revered by onlookers and by posterity as wholeheartedly as they have been detested by the authorities they challenge. ‘Become who you are!’ wrote Pindar, Socrates’ contemporary. It is not an easy injunction. For a man to become who he is takes a ruthless lack of concern for others’ interests, monstrous egoism, and absolute integrity. Achilles, who hated a dissembler worse than the gates of death, had the courage to make the attempt, and so died.

       II ALCIBIADES

      IN 405 BC the Peloponnesian War, which had lasted for a quarter of a century and set the entire Hellenic world at odds, ended with the comprehensive defeat of the Athenians at Aegosopotami on the Hellespont. The fleet on which Athens depended for its security and its food supply was destroyed. Lysander, commanding the victorious Spartans, had all the defeated Athenians troops slaughtered. The ship bearing the news reached the Athenian port of Piraeus at nightfall. The wailing began down in the harbour. As the news was passed from mouth to mouth, it spread gradually all along the defensive walls linking city to sea until it reached the darkened streets around the Acropolis and the whole city was heard to cry out like an enormous beast in its agony. ‘That night,’ wrote Xenophon, ‘no one slept. They mourned for the lost, but more still for their own fates.’

      The Athenians had good cause to mourn. Within a matter of months they had been blockaded and starved into submission. Their democracy had been replaced by a murderous puppet government, an oligarchy known as the Thirty Tyrants. They lived in fear – of the Spartans who were now their overlords, and of each other, for every formerly prominent person was under suspicion, informers were so active that none dared trust his neighbour, and Critias, leader of the Thirty, ‘began to show a lust for putting people to death’. And yet, according to Plutarch, ‘In the midst of all their troubles a faint glimmer of hope yet remained, that the