Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Lucy Hughes-Hallett
His assassins backed off, but from a distance they hurled javelins and spears at him until he fell. Then they closed in and hacked off his head before departing. Timandra wrapped his decapitated body in her own robe and buried it, or, according to Nepos, burned the dead Alcibiades in the fire that had been set to burn him alive.
Even his death, wretched as it was, is evidence of Alcibiades’ extraordinary charisma. One story goes that the killers were the brothers of a girl he had seduced, but most of the sources agree they had been hired by Pharnabazus. The Satrap had been persuaded to violate the duties of the host, and his affection for the man who had so captivated him, by the urgings of the Spartan Lysander, who had threatened that Sparta would break off its alliance with Persia if Pharnabazus did not hand over Alcibiades, alive or dead. Lysander, in turn, was responding to pressure from Critias – the man who long ago had sat with Alcibiades at Socrates’ feet, and who was now the leader of the puppet government the Spartans had installed in Athens. Such was the potency of Alcibiades’ reputation, so widespread the hope that he might yet come to save his city, that while he lived, complained Critias, ‘none of the arrangements he made at Athens would be permanent’. In those dark days for Athens, it was not only the oppressed democrats who ascribed to Alcibiades the power to turn the course of history single-handed. His enemies feared him, or feared the legend he had become. He was a man without a state, without an army, without a fortune, without allies; but he was also a human phoenix who had repeatedly risen from the ashes of disaster in a flaming glory all of his own making.
Alcibiades’ talents were never fully put to the test. His career was a sequence of lost opportunities. Perhaps, given the chance, he might have won the war for Athens. Certainly Thucydides, who was as judicious as he was well informed, believed that the Athenians’ failure to trust Alcibiades (for which Alcibiades, who had failed to win their trust, was partially to blame) brought about the city’s undoing. ‘Although in a public capacity his conduct of the war was excellent, his way of life made him objectionable to everyone as a person; thus they entrusted their affairs to other hands, and before long ruined the city.’ But great reputations do not flourish, as Alcibiades’ did in his lifetime and afterwards, on the foundation only of what might have been. It is possible that his career – thwarted, dangerous, and isolated as it was – was precisely suited to his particular genius. He was an actor, a seducer, a legend in his own lifetime and of his own making, a true con-artist, one whose self-invented myth was a creation of awesome grandeur and brilliance, a man who owed the large place he occupied in his contemporaries’ imagination not to any tangible achievement, but simply to the magnitude of his presence.
Poets of the classical and medieval era imagined Achilles to be a giant. He was born different from others. Statius describes him as a baby lapping not milk but ‘the entrails of lions and the marrow of half-dead wolves’. Pindar, who lived in Athens a generation before Alcibiades, imagined the six-year-old Achilles outrunning deer, fighting with lions, and dragging the vast corpses of slaughtered boars back to Chiron’s cave. In fiction and myth, exorbitant size and prodigious strength were the tokens of the hero. In the real world, Alcibiades, marked out from others by his aristocratic origins, his striking beauty, his intimidating capacity for violence and his inordinate self-confidence, was received by his contemporaries as though he were another such prodigy, a being intrinsically greater than his fellows.
Such a person is not easily assimilable within any community: in a democracy his very existence is a form of sedition. The dizzying reversals of Alcibiades’ career reflect the constant interplay between his fellow citizens’ adulation of him and their ineradicable distrust of the magic whereby he was able temporarily, but never for long enough, to dominate them. They ascribed to him the potential to be alternately their saviour or their oppressor. They ‘were convinced’, wrote Nepos, ‘that it was to him that all their disasters and their successes were due’. They imagined superhuman power for him: they adored him for it, and they found it unforgivable. Like Achilles, he was as terrifying as a god, or a beast. ‘Better not bring up a lion inside your city/But if you must, then humour all his moods’, wrote Aristophanes, with reference to Alcibiades. ‘Most people became frightened at a quality in him that was beyond the normal,’ wrote Thucydides. That supranormal quality posed a temptation as alluring as it was insidious. Perhaps what the Athenians feared most in Alcibiades was not any ambition of his to seize absolute power but their own longing to hand it to him, to abase themselves before him as a superman capable not only of rescuing them from their enemies but also of freeing them of the burden of being free.
LONDON, 1714. The first night of Joseph Addison’s tragedy, Cato, which was to enjoy such a triumph that Alexander Pope, who wrote the prologue, declared that ‘Cato was not so much the wonder of Rome in his days as he is of Britain in ours.’ The curtain rises on the last act. The hero is discovered ‘Solus, sitting in a thoughtful posture: in his hand Plato’s book on the Immortality of the Soul. A drawn sword on the table by him.’ The tableau – the sword, the book, the pensive hero – was repeated exactly in numerous neo-classical paintings. Its drama lies not in what is represented, but in what is still to come, the horror to which (as most male members of Addison’s classically educated eighteenth-century audience would have known) this tranquil scene is prelude. Before the night is out Cato will read the book through three times, and then, still serene, still ‘thoughtful’, drive the sword into his belly. When that first attempt to free himself from tyranny fails he will submit calmly while his friends bind up the dreadful wound and remove the weapon. Once more alone, he will tear open his body with his bare hands and resolutely disembowel himself.
Cato, true until death. Cato, so inflexible in his righteousness that he was ready to kill himself not once, but twice. Cato, who had no self-pity, but grieved only for Rome and its venerable institutions. Cato, who, on the night of his death, read of the death of Socrates and who, like the Athenian philosopher, chose not to save himself from a death made inevitable by the mismatch between his own integrity and the imperfection of the world he inhabited. This Cato was venerated alike by pagan Rome and Christian Europe. Addison describes him as ‘godlike’, an epithet first applied to him by Lucan nearly seventeen hundred years earlier. Of his contemporaries, only Julius Caesar, whose most inveterate opponent he was, denied his virtue. Cicero and Brutus both eulogized him. Horace praised his ‘fierce heart’. Virgil imagined for him an illustrious afterlife as lawgiver to the virtuous dead. To later generations of Romans, especially to the Stoics who formed the opposition to Nero’s tyranny, he was an exemplar, a philosopher (though he left no philosophical writings), and the embodiment of their ideal. The Christian Fathers saw him as the paragon of pagan virtue. To Lactantius he was ‘the prince of Roman wisdom’. To Jerome he had a glory ‘which could neither be increased by praise nor diminished by censure’. Dante placed Brutus, who was Cato’s son-in-law and political heir, in the lowest circle of hell with Judas Iscariot, in the very mouth of Satan, to be eaten alive ceaselessly through all eternity, and he condemned others who had, like Cato, committed the sin of self-murder to an afterlife of unremitting mute agony in the form of trees whose twigs ooze blood. But Cato is exempt. Despite being a suicide and a pagan he is the custodian of Dante’s Purgatory and is destined eventually for a place in Paradise. In the Convivio Dante goes even further. Cato divorced his wife Marcia so that she could be married to his political ally Hortensius. After Hortensius’ death he remarried her. The story has proved troubling to most Christian moralists, but Dante treats the couple’s reunion as an allegory of the noble soul’s return to God: ‘And what man on earth is more worthy to signify God than Cato? Surely no one.’
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