Private and Public Lies: The Discourse of Despotism and Deceit in the Graeco-Roman World 9004187758, 9789004187757

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Private and Public Lies

Impact of Empire Editorial Board of the series Impact of Empire (= Management Team of the Impact of Empire)

Lukas de Blois, Angelos Chaniotis Ségolène Demougin, Olivier Hekster, Gerda de Kleijn Luuk de Ligt, Elio Lo Cascio, Michael Peachin John Rich, and Christian Witschel Executive Secretariat of the Series and the Network

Lukas de Blois, Olivier Hekster Gerda de Kleijn and John Rich Radboud University of Nijmegen, Erasmusplein 1, P.O. Box 9103, 6500 HD Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Academic Board of the International Network Impact of Empire

géza alföldy – stéphane benoist – anthony birley christer bruun – john drinkwater – werner eck – peter funke andrea giardina – johannes hahn – fik meijer – onno van nijf marie-thérèse raepsaet-charlier – john richardson bert van der spek – richard talbert – willem zwalve

VOLUME 11

Private and Public Lies The Discourse of Despotism and Deceit in the Graeco-Roman World

Edited by

Andrew J. Turner, James H. Kim On Chong-Gossard and Frederik Juliaan Vervaet

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2010

Cover illustration: The Roman emperor Augustus, ceremoniously dressed as pontifex maximus, a position he held from 12 bce onwards. The statue is now in the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, Rome. Photo by J.H.K.O. Chong-Gossard. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Private and public lies : the discourse of despotism and deceit in the Graeco-Roman world / edited by Andrew J. Turner, James H. Kim On Chong-Gossard, and Frederik Juliaan Vervaet. p. cm. – (Impact of empire) Includes bibliographical references and indices. ISBN 978-90-04-18775-7 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Despotism–Greece–History–To 1500. 2. Despotism–Rome–History. 3. Deception–Political aspects–Greece–History to 1500. 4. Deception–Political aspects–Rome–History. I. Turner, Andrew J. II. Chong-Gossard, K. O. III. Vervaet, Frederik. IV. Title. V. Series. JC75.D4P75 2010 320.93701'4–dc22 2010018053

ISSN 1572-0500 ISBN 978 90 04 18775 7 Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change.

This collection is dedicated to CHARLES ANTHONY TESORIERO (1973–2005) o saeuae nimium grauesque Parcae! o numquam data longa fata summis! cur plus, ardua, casibus patetis? cur saeua uice magna non senescent? (Statius Siluae ..–)

and to RONALD THOMAS RIDLEY “In my opinion, then, let the historian be this sort of man: fearless, unbribeable, free, a friend of free speech and the truth; intent (as the comic poet says) on calling a fig a fig and a trough a trough; neither through hatred nor friendship dealing out anything or sparing anything or showing pity or shame or timidity; an impartial judge, well-disposed to all persons up to the point of not giving one side more than its due; in his books a stranger and a man without a city, independent, subject to no sovereign; not reckoning what this or that man will think, but stating what has been done.” (Lucian How To Write History )

CONTENTS

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1

the graeco-hellenistic world Autochthonous Autocrats: The tyranny of the Athenian democracy Jonathan Hall Phokian Desperation: Private and public in the outbreak of the rd Sacred War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Peter Londey

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29

Truth and falsehood in early Hellenistic propaganda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Brian Bosworth

39

Tyrannizing Sicily: The despots who cried ‘Carthage!’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jonathan Prag

51

republican rome Frigidus rumor: The creation of a (negative) public image in Rome Francisco Pina Polo

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Deceit and the struggle for Roman franchise in Italy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christopher Dart

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Pouvoirs extraordinaires et tromperie. La tentation de la monarchie à la fin de la République romaine (– av. J.-C.) . . . 107 Frédéric Hurlet

augustan dissimulation Arrogating despotic power through deceit: the Pompeian model for Augustan dissimulatio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 Frederik Juliaan Vervaet

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Deception, lies, and economy with the truth: Augustus and the establishment of the principate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 John Rich

early imperial literature Lucan’s Cleopatra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 Andrew J. Turner Damn with great praise? The imperial encomia of Lucan and Silius 211 John Penwill What ‘lies’ behind Phaedrus’ fables? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 Enrica Sciarrino Mendacia maiorum: tales of deceit in pre-Republican Rome . . . . . . . 249 Parshia Lee-Stecum Is there an antidote to Caesar? The despot as venenum and veneficus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271 Cristina Calhoon Who slept with whom in the Roman empire? Women, sex, and scandal in Suetonius’ Caesares . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295 James H. Kim On Chong-Gossard

the later empire From priest to emperor to priest-emperor: The failed legitimation of Elagabalus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331 Martijn Icks Constantinus tyrannus: Das negative Konstantinsbild in der paganen Historiographie und seine Nuancen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343 Bruno Bleckmann Justinian, Procopius, and deception: Literary lies, imperial politics, and the archaeology of sixth-century Greece . . . . . . . . . . . . 355 Amelia Brown

the broader context Despotism and Deceit: Yes, but what happened before and after? . . 373 Ron Ridley

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Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 387 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425 Index Locorum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 431

PREFACE

We are grateful to the editorial board of the international network Impact of Empire for allowing us to publish as part of their series this collection, which represents the proceedings of the conference ‘Private and Public Lies: The Discourse of Despotism and Deceit in the Ancient World’, held at The University of Melbourne from – July . As we explain below, the conference was originally conceived of as one dealing with mainly literary issues, but due to a series of events eventually came to include a substantial contribution from a group of ancient historians whose work intersects on many levels with the fundamental interests of the Impact of Empire network. We hope that the resultant mixture of papers published here, some purely literary in focus, and others historical, will complement each other, and provide an accurate reflection of the dynamics of the conference, which participants later described as a great success. The initial research for this collection was supported under the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme, for a project entitled ‘Public and Private Lies: Retelling the clash of duty, power and sexual indulgence in the Roman imperial court’ (project number DP), awarded to James H. Kim On Chong-Gossard and Andrew Turner at The University of Melbourne (Turner was the recipient of an Australian Post Doctoral Fellowship under this grant), and Charles Tesoriero at The University of New England. The original plan was to look at the works of Tacitus, Juvenal, and Suetonius, whose accounts of the first-century Roman imperial court depicted the deleterious effect of private acts on public conduct, and to explore how these authors’ interests were characteristic of their own generation rather than those described by their texts. The project would examine the interrelationship of private acts and public conduct during the height of the Roman Empire, and how personal morality was perceived to affect capability to govern. As part of their application, the researchers planned to host an international conference in June or July  on the campus of The University of New England in rural New South Wales. But Fate, ever revolving, had different plans. Tragically, Charles Tesoriero died in August  at the age of . The conference proposal was then stalled until June , when Frederik Vervaet, of Ghent University

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in Belgium, travelled to Australia to interview for a position as Lecturer in the School of Historical Studies at The University of Melbourne. Vervaet was subsequently recruited by Chong-Gossard and Turner to assist in organizing the conference, and proved an invaluable replacement for Charles. He was a major figure in convincing so many prominent international scholars to attend, and contributed substantially to the final form of this volume by suggesting that political deceit should become a principal theme in the conference. With regard to the conference, we have many donors to thank, without whose support it could not have been such a success. The Classical Association of Victoria, the Ian Potter Foundation, and the Australasian Society for Classical Studies all provided funding which enabled our overseas visitors to attend, including subsidising airfares for our keynote speakers. Particular thanks go to Mr Peter Mountford and members of the Savage Club in Melbourne, for their generous subventions. Mr Ian Renard, then Chancellor of The University of Melbourne, who has always been a keen supporter of the Classics, officially opened the conference on behalf of the University. The provision of venues was facilitated by Professor Warren Bebbington, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of The University of Melbourne; our thanks are also due to the School of Botany, especially their building supervisor, for their hospitality whilst we utilized their space for our many lectures. We are greatly indebted to the School of Historical Studies at The University of Melbourne for providing material and secretarial support throughout, with thanks to Gabrielle Murphy, then the School’s Executive Officer. Particular gratitude goes to Kevin March, then the School’s Marketing Officer, who designed the conference programme. We also had substantial support from postgraduate volunteers throughout, including Sarah Davidson, Sarah Midford, James O’Maley, Miriam Riverlea, and Sonya Wurster. All chapters presented in this volume were developed from papers given at the conference, with the exception of that by Professor Bleckmann, who had planned to attend and was only forced to cancel his journey at a late juncture; we are most grateful that he nevertheless agreed to submit. Charles’ student from The University of New England, Thomas Atkinson, was able to assist us at many stages as a research assistant, and his contribution is gratefully acknowledged here. Michael Crennan of The University of Melbourne has also helped us greatly with reading over the papers and preparing material for the introduction, while Christopher Dart assisted us by providing biographical material. The editors for Brill, Caroline van Erp and Birgitta Poelmans, have also been of enor-

preface

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mous help, and we would like to thank them here for guiding us through the various procedures and facilitating publication. The editorial board of the Impact of Empire network arranged for all chapters to be anonymously peer-reviewed by two assessors. This collection of proceedings has two dedicatees. The first is Charles Tesoriero, our original colleague in this project, who had already established a considerable reputation as a researcher into Lucan at the time of his death. Even before we joined forces with him, one of his more memorable achievements at The University of New England had been to organise an international conference on Ancient Magic entitled ‘Hecate at the Crossroads’ in . His will left bequests of almost one million dollars to The University of New England and The University of Sydney, and a Latin literature conference (‘Roman Byways’) was held in his honour in Sydney in December .  saw the publication of a major contribution to Lucan scholarship which Charles had envisaged and largely set in train, the edited collection of influential essays in Oxford Readings in Classical Scholarship: Lucan, published by Oxford University Press. Charles’ vivacious personality and passion for the passionate literature of antiquity will be sorely missed. The other dedicatee of this collection of proceedings is Professor Emeritus Ronald T. Ridley, who has been a teacher and supervisor at The University of Melbourne for over forty years. He is well known within Australia and abroad for the commitment and genuine care he has shown for the needs of his students over many years. Professor Ridley is one of the last true universalist scholars; his numerous articles and chapters span early Dynastic Egypt, classical Greece, the late Roman Republic, late antiquity, the history of archaeology, and historiography. This incredible breadth of knowledge is in evidence in his contribution to this volume. Major books to date include a translation and commentary of Zosimus’ New History (), Gibbon’s complement: Louis de Beaufort (), History of Rome: A documented analysis (), a study of archaeology in the Napoleonic era, The Eagle and the Spade (), and his work on the Res Gestae of the emperor Augustus, The Emperor’s Retrospect (). Forthcoming books include major works on travellers to Rome from the Renaissance to  and a new assessment of Akhenaten. Professor Ridley is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquities (London), Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (London), Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, and Fellow of the Pontifical Academy of Roman Archaeology (Roma). A.J.T J.H.K.O.C-G F.J.V

ABBREVIATIONS Names of classical authors and their works cited in this volume have been abbreviated in accordance with abbreviations found in the Oxford Latin Dictionary, the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, and H.G. Liddell and R. Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon. Other abbreviations used are as follows: BNP CAH CCSL CID FGrH IG ILS LCL OCD OLD PIR PO RAC RE RIC RRC

Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World: New Pauly. Leiden –. Cambridge Ancient History, nd edition (Vols. –). Cambridge –. Corpus christianorum. Series latina. Turnholt –. Corpus des inscriptions de Delphes, vol.  Les comptes du quatrième et du troisième siècle (ed. Jean Bousquet). École française d’Athènes: Paris: de Boccard. . F. Jacoby, Fragmente der griechischen Historiker. Leiden . Inscriptiones Graecae. Berlin –. H. Dessau, Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae. Berlin: Weidmann. – . Loeb Classical Library The Oxford Classical Dictionary, rd edition revised. Eds. Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth. Oxford . Oxford Latin Dictionary. Ed. P.G.W. Glare. Oxford . Prosopographia imperii Romani. Saec. I. II. III. nd edition. BerlinLeipzig –. Patrologia orientalis. –. Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum. Stuttgart. –. A.F. Pauly, G. Wissowa, and W. Kroll. Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft. Munich –. C.H.V. Sutherland, The Roman Imperial Coinage. Vol. : From  bc to ad . nd edn. London: Spink and Son. . M.H. Crawford, Roman Republican Coinage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. .

CONTRIBUTORS

Bruno Bleckmann is Professor and Chair of Ancient History at Heinrich-Heine-Universität in Düsseldorf, Germany. His recent works include Fiktion als Geschichte. Neue Studien zum Autor der Hellenika Oxyrhynchia und zur Historiographie des vierten vorchristlichen Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, ), and (with Horst Schneider) Eusebius von Caesarea. De vita Constantini. Über das Leben Konstantins (Brepols, ). Brian Bosworth is Professor of Ancient Cultures in the Department of Ancient History at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He is the author of A Historical Commentary on Arrian’s History of Alexander (Oxford, Vol.  in , Vol.  in ), Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great (Cambridge, , now in its third reprint as a Canto edition, ), and The Legacy of Alexander: Politics, Warfare, and Propaganda under the Successors (Oxford, ). Amelia R. Brown is a Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. She is the author of ‘Hellenic Heritage & Christian Challenge: Conflict over Panhellenic Sanctuaries in Late Antiquity,’ in Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions & Practices, Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity  (Ashgate, ). Her Ph.D. thesis was entitled The City of Corinth and Urbanism in Late Antique Greece. Cristina G. Calhoon is an Instructor in the Department of Classics at the University of Oregon in the USA. She is the author of ‘Lucretia, savior, and scapegoat: the dynamics of sacrifice in Livy .–,’ in Helios  (), and a Ph.D. thesis entitled Livia the Poisoner: Genesis of an Historical Myth (University of California, Irvine, ). James H. Kim On Chong-Gossard is a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Classics and Archaeology at The University of Melbourne in Australia. He is the author of Gender and Communication in Euripides’ Plays: Between Song and Silence (Brill, ), ‘Consolation in Euripides’ Hypsipyle,’ in The Play of Texts and Fragments: Essays in Honour of Martin Cropp (Brill, ), and ‘Mourning and Consolation in Greek Tragedy: the rejection of comfort,’ in Acts Of Consolation: Approaches to loss and sorrow from Sophocles to Shakespeare (Cambridge, forthcoming).

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Christopher J. Dart is a Fellow in Ancient History at The University of Melbourne in Australia, where in  he completed a Ph.D. thesis entitled Nationalism, Patriotism and National Identity in Italia under the Roman Republic. He is the author of ‘The “Italian Constitution” in the Social War: A Re-assessment ( to  bce),’ in Historia  (). Jonathan M. Hall is Phyllis Fay Horton Professor in the Humanities, Professor and Chair of Classics, and Professor of History at the University of Chicago. He is the author of the award-winning Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge, ), Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (Chicago, ), The Blackwell History of the Archaic Greek World (Blackwell ), and Archaeology and the Ancient Historian: Investigating Graeco-Roman Antiquity Through Texts and Material Culture (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming) Frédéric Hurlet is Professeur des Universités (Histoire romaine) at the Université de Nantes in France, Dean of the Subfaculty of History, Art History and Archaeology, and Director of the Nantes-based ‘Equipe de Recherche sur les Échanges dans la Méditerranée antique et médiévale’. He is the author of La dictature de Sylla: monarchie ou magistrature républicaine? Essai d’histoire constitutionnelle (Bruxelles-Rome ), Les collègues du prince sous Auguste et Tibère. De la légalité républicaine à la légitimité dynastique (Rome ), and Le proconsul et le prince d’Auguste à Dioclétien  (Bordeaux ). Martijn Icks is Wissenschaftlicher Angestellter on the research project “Making and Unmaking the Emperor” at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. His publications include The Crimes of Elagabalus: the Life and Legacy of Rome’s Decadent Boy Emperor (I.B. Tauris, ), ‘Empire of the Sun? Civic responses to the rise and fall of Sol Elagabal in the Roman empire,’ in Ritual Dynamics and Religious Change in the Roman Empire (Vol.  of Impact of Empire; Brill, ), and ‘Heliogabalus, a Monster on the Roman Throne: the literary construction of a “bad” emperor,’ in Kakos: Badness and Anti-value in Classical Antiquity (Brill, ). Parshia Lee-Stecum is a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Classics and Archaeology at The University of Melbourne in Australia. He is the author of Powerplay in Tibullus: Reading Elegies Book  (Cambridge, ), ‘Persona and Power in Horace’s First Book of Epistles,’ in Antichthon  (), and ‘Roman refugium: refugee narratives in Augustan versions of Roman pre-history,’ in Hermathena  ().

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Peter Londey is Associate Lecturer and Convenor of the Classics Program of the School of Language Studies at the Australian National University. He is the author of Other People’s Wars: a history of Australian peacekeeping (Allen & Urwin, ), and ‘A possession for ever: Charles Bean, the ancient Greeks, and military commemoration in Australia’, in The Australian Journal of Politics and History  (). He is also coeditor (with D. Horner and J. Bou) of Australian Peacekeeping: Sixty Years in the Field (Cambridge, ). John Penwill is an Honorary Associate in Humanities within the Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences at La Trobe University, Bendigo, in Australia. He is the author of Two Essays on Virgil: Intertextual Issues in Aeneid  and Georgics  (Studies in Western Traditions , ), and several articles on Roman poetry, including ‘On Choosing a Life: variations on an epic theme in Apuleius Met.  & ,’ in Ramus  (), ‘Lucretius and the First Triumvirate,’ in Writing Politics in Imperial Rome (Brill, ), and ‘The Double Visions of Pompey and Caesar,’ in Antichthon  (). Francisco Pina Polo is Profesor titular de Historia Antigua at the Universidad de Zaragoza in Spain. He is the author of a pioneering study on Rome’s informal popular assembly, the contio (Las contiones civiles y militares en Rome, Universidad de Zaragoza, ). His other publications include ‘Eminent corpses: Roman aristocracy’s passing from life to history,’ in Formae Mortis: el tránsito de la vida a la muerte en las sociedades antiguas (University of Barcelona, ), ‘Hispania of Caesar and Pompey. A conflict of clientelae?’ in Del Imperivm De Pompeyo A La Avctoritas De Augusto: Homenaje a Michael Grant (Instituto de Historia, Madrid, ), ‘Public speaking at Rome: a question of auctoritas,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Social Relations in the Roman World (Oxford, forthcoming), and Consulares, consuls and the ‘constitution’ of the Roman Republic (Cambridge, forthcoming). Jonathan Prag is Fellow and Lecturer in Ancient History at Oxford’s Merton College. His publications include ‘Republican Sicily at the start of the st Century: the rise of the optimists,’ in Pallas  (), ‘Auxilia and Gymnasia: A Sicilian Model of Roman Imperialism,’ in The Journal of Roman Studies  (), and ‘Cave Navem: Petronius, Satyricon .,’ in Classical Quarterly  (). He is also co-editor, with I.D. Repath, of A Handbook to Petronius (Blackwell, ).

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John W. Rich is Emeritus Professor of Roman History in the Department of Classics at the University of Nottingham, U.K. He is the author of Declaring War in the Roman Republic in the Period of Transmarine Expansion (Latomus, ), Cassius Dio: The Augustan Settlement (Aris & Phillips, ), A History of the Roman Republic (Blackwell, ), and War, Expansion and Society in Early Rome (forthcoming). Ron Ridley is Emeritus Professor in the School of Historical Studies at The University of Melbourne in Australia. He is the author of History of Rome: a documented analysis (Rome, ), The Infancy of Historiography (), and The Emperor’s Retrospect: Augustus’ Res Gestae in epigraphy, historiography and commentary (Peeters, ). Enrica Sciarrino is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Classics and Linguistics at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Her publications include ‘The Elder Cato and Gaius Gracchus: Roman Oratory Before Cicero,’ in A Companion to Roman Rhetoric (Blackwell, ), ‘The Introduction of Epic in Rome: cultural theft and social contests,’ in Arethusa  (), and a new book, The Invention of Latin Prose: From Poetic Translations to Elite Transcripts. Andrew J. Turner was an Australian Research Council Post Doctoral Fellow at The University of Melbourne from –. He is co-author of Eadmer of Canterbury: Lives and Miracles of Saints Oda, Dunstan, and Oswald (Oxford, ), and co-editor of a digital edition of a manuscript of Terence, published by the Bodleian Library (Oxford, ). His other publications include ‘The Poet and the Praetor: Travel Narratives from Early Second-Century Italy,’ in Antichthon  (), and ‘Frontinus and Domitian: Laus principis in the Strategemata,’ in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology  (). Frederik J. Vervaet is a Lecturer in Ancient History in the School of Historical Studies at The University of Melbourne in Australia. He is the author of several substantial articles on Roman republican history, the most recent ones being ‘The Monopolisation of the summum imperium auspiciumque: From Cornelius Sulla Felix to Imperator Caesar Augustus’, in MEFRA  (), ‘The Secret History: The Official Position of Imperator Caesar Divi filius from  to  bce’, in Ancient Society  (), and ‘Pompeius’ Career from  to  bce: Constitutional, Political and Historical Considerations,’ in Klio  (). He is currently preparing a monograph on ‘The Principle of the summum imperium auspiciumque under the Roman Republic’.

INTRODUCTION

Andrew J. Turner, Michael Crennan, and K.O. Chong-Gossard The ancient Graeco-Roman world offers many parallels with highly developed modern societies with regard to the problems of boundaries between state powers and individual rights. Literary works, historiography, and even the reporting of rumours in both eras are couched as if they come in response to an insatiable desire by ordinary citizens to know everything about the lives of their leaders, and to hold them to account, at some level, for their abuse of constitutional powers for personal ends. The little man who bristles with indignation at the misdeeds of his political and social superiors is as much a part of the world of Juvenal as he is of social critics today. Greek and Roman writers had a deep fascination with how powerful individuals stepped over boundaries and affected their public responsibilities. The quasi-historical foundation stories of Athenian democracy and the Roman republic depict democracy being introduced in direct response to sexual misdeeds by despots or their families. A long series of ancient authors—historians like Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Livy, Tacitus, Appian, Dio Cassius, and Procopius; biographers like Plutarch, Suetonius, and the authors of the Historia Augusta; orators like Demosthenes and Cicero; and poets like Vergil, Lucan, Juvenal, Phaedrus, and Silius Italicus, to name only a few—drew enormous significance from the interplay of public duties and private aspirations. The portraits of legendary figures like Theseus and Romulus, or historical giants like Alexander the Great, Pompey, Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Augustus, Constantine and Justinian, or notorious Roman emperors like Tiberius, Caligula, Nero and Elagabalus, all reveal their authors’ understanding of what a ruler’s duty ideally should be, and how personal excesses came to wreak havoc on those around them. Ancient authors were equally fascinated with how these same individuals used deceit as a powerful tool to disguise private and public reality. Occasionally these very individuals have bequeathed their own self-representations to posterity in the form of official portraiture, coinage and inscriptions (most famously, Augustus’ monumental Res Gestae). Such carefully crafted public propaganda continues to puzzle modern audiences with regard to what private agenda lies concealed.

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As explained in the Preface, the following collection of chapters emerged from our conference, ‘Private and Public Lies: The Discourse of Despotism and Deceit in the Ancient World,’ held at The University of Melbourne from – July . This conference was the culmination of an Australian Research Council funded project that was originally limited to an examination of Tacitus, Juvenal and Suetonius. When organizing the event, we recognized the relevance of the classical Greek and Hellenistic worlds and their discourse of despotism and deceit, both as telling precursors to Roman practice and as interesting phenomena in themselves; and beyond our initial plans, we encouraged papers on republican, Julio-Claudian, Flavian, late imperial and Byzantine discourses of Roman power and deceit. Because we wanted a cross-disciplinary conversation, we invited scholars from a wide range of academic approaches—politicohistorical, philological, literary, gender-theory based—to join forces and shed new light on the dynamics of power in the Graeco-Roman world. Indeed, a major aim of the conference had always been to show the relevance of ancient world studies to modern social concerns, and to explore within an ancient world context the linkages between the private and public spheres of persons in power, the deception involved in presenting those spheres to an audience, and the potential for that audience to be represented (or represent themselves) as victims of autocrats. This collection of nineteen chapters is divided into six thematic sections, and the subject matter in the first five ranges from fifth-century bce Athens to the emperor Justinian in the sixth century ce. The first section, “The Graeco-Hellenistic World” focuses on how the excesses of tyrants and the processes of deceit are represented in the literature (poetry, oratory, political theory, and historiography) and epigraphic evidence from the Greek and Hellenistic periods, spanning classical Athens, the Hellenistic monarchies, and the poleis of Phokis and Sicily. Jonathan Hall’s chapter (originally delivered as the first keynote address at the conference) examines contemporary fifth-century evidence, and seeks to expose one of the essential dynamics of Athenian democracy—the tyrannical rule of the dêmos over the elites (and the Empire), as evidenced in taxation policy, building programmes, and the persistent practice of deception in public life. A number of the foundation myths of democracy are in fact borrowed from autocracy; the official nomenclature of democracy is closely examined. The deception embodied “an ambiguous tension similar to that which existed between the official Athenian repudiation of tyranny and the tyrannical mode in which the dêmos enacted its business.”

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Peter Londey examines how, in the case of the Third Sacred War, the citizens of Phokis were persuaded to go to war by the spurious foregrounding of a non-existent public interest, grounded in an appeal to national pride and reliance on overstated dangers. These (perennial) arguments served to conceal the true motives of private interest inspiring the promoters of war. As a result, the citizens suffered great losses, and the historical record itself was corrupted. Brian Bosworth explores the way in which the unqualified claims to total honesty made by Alexander the Great’s Successors, derived from the Iranian cult of kingship, laid the basis for complex layers of deceit. Alexander the Great, says Bosworth, “made a speciality of deceit”, yet asserted that “The king . . . should not do anything other than speak truth in his relations with his subjects, and none of his subjects should think that the king does anything other than speak the truth”. After Alexander’s claims came “Ptolemy’s assertion that the king must speak the truth or suffer ignominy . . . [thus] if a king were detected in deceit then it undermined the legitimacy of his regime”. Alexander’s successors engaged in elaborate deceit and counter-deceit to the extent that it could be advantageous to affect a belief in false representations so as to make the ignominy of the deceitful monarch, when disclosed, all the deeper. The claims for total trust made in succession by Darius, Alexander and his successors, far from establishing a praxis of truthfulness, candour and trustworthiness, constituted the enabling basis of “a web of deceit”. Jonathan Prag considers the development of hostile images of the Carthaginians in Sicily. These arose from conflict between them and the Greek cities of Sicily in the age of the tyrants, although the Romans were later able to use them in their own propaganda war. Prag assembles a very wide range of evidence to trace the development of a negative stereotype of the western Phoenicians (“on one view, a work of deceit, for the furtherance of personal power on the part of the Sicilian Despots”), later exploited by the Romans. This had developed partly in the context of the synchrony of the wars against the Persians in the East and the Western Phoenicians, as a putative expression of a pan-Hellenic common struggle against the barbarian. Francisco Pina Polo launches the second section, “Republican Rome,” with a study of rumour and deception, bringing the subject matter to the brink of the first principate. Frigidus Rumor examines the means by which false rumours and the like could be spread to a wide audience in Rome. Graffiti had its place in this, but was of limited circulation.

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The audiences in the comitia and the law courts were relatively small. Rumour was needed. Client relationships allowed the elites to spread rumours at the morning salutationes. Invective, rhetoric and rumour established and destroyed reputations, with consequences for the unravelling of the republic. Octavian, in particular, was adept at addressing the people directly in the contiones. “Pamphlets, libels, poems and letters” were significant. Pina Polo concludes that: “The plebs were not the decisive element in his final victory, but the combination of the oratory displayed in contiones and the rumours spread about the city contributed to Octavian’s goals being progressively attained, leading to the final and most important aim: him becoming princeps”. Christopher Dart examines the role of deception in manipulating a populace for the purpose of spreading Roman power. He argues that the extension of citizenship to non-Romans in the republican period was marked by deceit and contradictions on both sides. The Romans were more likely to award citizenship to quell the rebellious than to reward loyalty. Many non-citizens exploited loopholes in Roman law in order to become citizens, using a range of devices from crude fraud to more sophisticated schemes. For their part, the Roman ‘proponents’ of a wider franchise persistently reneged on their promises upon encountering opposition in the elites. Sulla’s conduct was particularly reprehensible. Dart notes that “despite the deceitful behaviour of many within the Roman elite, when such legislation was put to the assemblies, ordinary Romans endorsed the extension of the franchise”. Frédéric Hurlet’s study follows the first two chapters in the section appropriately by examining the connection between deception, constitutional power, and despotism in the period that culminates in the principate. Historians may long have come to suspect what the powerful say of their actions, but Hurlet points out the difficulties facing powerful men of the late republic in attempting to persuade the people at large of their policies or worth, in the absence of regulated or efficient communication. He takes a number of examples: Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar. Sulla did not aim at dominatio, still less regnum, and his purpose was to roll back the populist reforms. It was only the revival of large-scale proscriptions in  bce which augmented the depiction of Sulla as a cruel tyrant. But Pompey was a more ambivalent figure than Sulla and manoeuvred himself into positions of very considerable power while maintaining a façade of legality, while Caesar manipulated existing legal provisions regarding the dictatorship to establish his rule. Deception had by the time of Octavian become an integral part of

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the political process; thus even the optimates for their part “adoptèrent une stratégie politique qui n’était pas exempte elle aussi de dissimulation”. The third section is devoted to “Augustan dissimulation,” beginning with Frederik Vervaet, who argues that Pompey provides a precedent for the dissimulation practised by Augustus. Significant episodes in which dissimulation played its part in Augustus’ career are set out. Vervaet infers that many of the crises which eventually benefited Augustus were either fabricated or exploited by him or his confederates. Part of Augustus’ statecraft was to accept offices for a limited period, in the full expectation of having them extended in due course. Pompey had used similar forms of dissimulation, and, in some cases, he or his agents had fomented the very crises which provoked the grants of power. Like Augustus, but unlike Julius Caesar, Pompey attempted to avoid affronting the powerful institutions of Roman political life. Accordingly, Pompey “provided Augustus with a code of conduct, a behavioural method in power politics”. Vervaet’s chapter is followed by John Rich, whose chapter is based on the second keynote address from the conference. Rich notes, first, that the actions of Augustus in augmenting and confirming his power were not part of a master plan, but a series of brilliant opportunistic tactical moves, and, secondly, that Augustus was not so much a liar as economical with the truth. He concludes that Augustus “achiev[ed] a solution which kept the essentials of power in his hands but within a republican framework”. He emphasizes the importance of the dispositions of the provinces in understanding the true extent of Augustus’ power. The outcome of  bce was that no one doubted that Augustus was the ruler, with the caveat that “this rule should be expressed in a way which respected their traditions and sensibilities and gave the senate an honoured voice”. The section on “Early imperial literature” is the longest and consists of six chapters that approach the question of “public and private lies” from a predominantly literary perspective. Andrew Turner notes that the ancient sources before Lucan, Appian, and Plutarch say little about Caesar’s affair with Cleopatra. Lucan’s accounts provide a moral perspective which “is capable of distorting events and providing extraneous details to strengthen his arguments”. He can sometimes corroborate later writers. Two schools of thought about his writings are first, that his intention is to challenge the imperial dynasty in favour of traditional stoic republican virtues, and second, that he is nihilistic and merely plays “highly sophisticated but ultimately meaningless games with his

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audience.” Christine Walde’s middle ground is that Flavian audiences would recognize “a highly specific criticism of Nero’s regime, rather than . . . a doctrinaire statement of republican values”. Historical or literary parallels for Lucan’s Cleopatra are considered. Egyptian luxury may have had contemporary resonance for the Roman audience. Where there is corroboration from other sources, Lucan is reasonably accurate and may be relying on an earlier source. Calculated echoes of Vergil and contemporary corruption in Rome become relevant. John Penwill considers and rejects a number of readings of Lucan’s praise of Nero, amongst them that it is purely ironic, or that it denotes the impossibility of any other course for someone writing under Nero. Penwill’s conclusion is that there is a kind of collusion between Nero and Lucan: “Lucan fabricating the image, Nero living it, both complicit”. Lucan with “dazzling rhetoric” juxtaposes this lie to the other: “that civil war prefigures cosmic dissolution”. In considering Silius Italicus, Penwill notes the close but significantly altered Homeric templates in the later poem, which on close reading can only mean that the extravagant praise found in that poem is thoroughly subverted. Another example of the use of earlier templates is found in the fables of Phaedrus. Enrica Sciarrino accepts the identification of the author as “a Roman gentleman or aristocrat”, and notes that amongst the changes from the Aesopic model, we find that, whereas other writers working within this generic tradition draw didactic lessons from the fate of those who ignore prudence, Phaedrus locates the significance of the misfortunes chronicled in the social relations to which the victim is subject. Phaedrus aims to provide a way for this audience to reflect on “their collective and individual positioning in the face of the collapse of social relations brought about by autocracy”, while, at the same time quarantining himself from any imputation of seditious intent. Parshia Lee-Stecum considers the accounts of pre-Republican Rome by Roman historians writing in late republican or early imperial times, in order to determine whether acts of deceit or deception were imputed to the credit or discredit of the person concerned. Criteria included the relative status of deceiver and deceived, the extent to which the deceit served the interests of Rome rather than personal or factional interest, and the moral standing of the person involved. Subject to these questions, Lee-Stecum finds no absolute prohibition on deceit. The ancient writers that are considered (Cicero, Livy, Ovid, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Valerius Maximus and Plutarch) are taken as sources for attitudes to the permissibility of deceit in public life in their own period.

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Cristina Calhoon moves from a brutal aside of Caligula: (“Is there an antidote for Caesar?”) to a highly developed set of reflections on the clusters of meanings radiating out from the word venenum and cognate terms. This pattern of meanings and associations is very broad, and appear in a variety of authors (including Pliny the Elder, Juvenal, Tacitus, Suetonius and Dio Cassius). The many possible associations traced and located include magic, healing, dyeing, aphrodisiac powers, poisoning, the colour purple, mimesis, and transformation. One of the conclusions drawn is that “The deceptive quality of venena, which partook of the characteristics of art and overlapped to a certain extent with artistic ambiguity also made them appropriate metaphors for the ‘arts’ of deception and intrigue practiced by Caligula and Nero”. These qualities were not only pursued by certain of the emperors, but also served to define imperial rule generally. James H. Kim On Chong-Gossard considers Suetonius’ egregious tales of sexual scandal set in Julio-Claudian and Flavian times. He includes, as a kind of concordance, an unprecedented tabular listing of all the sexual liaisons found in the imperial biographies. He suggests a number of explanations, including that Suetonius emphasized the superior outcomes achieved by the second-century system of choosing emperors on merit rather than ancestry; and that he wrote in order to satisfy his readership’s desire for sexual gossip about imperial women, which was frustrated by the associations of philanthropy, self-effacement, subservience, partnership and chastity enveloping its own female grandees. Suetonius’ collection of sexual rumours was significantly produced for the same generation that was the target of Hadrian’s own propaganda, including coinage that advertised his own pudicitia and the concordia of his childless marriage on the one hand, and the public deification of his beloved Antinous on the other. Whatever the explanation, it is beyond doubt that “Suetonius’ Caesares spoke to a society that was still deeply concerned” with such matters, including the emperor’s “need to spin public lies about his own private life”. The penultimate section focuses on “The later empire” and ranges from the third to sixth centuries ce. Martijn Icks deals with the reign of Vaius Avitus Bassianus who, having been proclaimed emperor by the Legio Gallica III, took on the name and perquisites of the Syriac Sun God Elagabalus. Despite attempts by his followers to normalize and accommodate the new cult, his attempt to subvert the Roman pantheon was fatal. He outraged Roman piety, not least by marrying a Vestal. His reign was full of deceit: coins praised its stability, yet his Severan pretensions were false.

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Bruno Bleckmann deals with the vagaries of reputation accorded to a more successful revolutionary. Constantine’s achievement attracted panegyrics and a concomitant accretion of pious legend from Christian historians or chroniclers, and, conversely, bitter polemical attacks by Pagan writers sympathetic to the Julian reaction. The latter charged him with cruelty and the murder of family members, more generally making war as an aggressor, and breaking treaties, and ‘Luxusliebe und Effeminierung’, long a touchstone of un-Roman excess. He was identified by his hostile critics with the Hellenizing Nero and the solar pretender Elagabalus. Bleckmann analyses the degree of truth and falsity in these criticisms in the hagiography and damnatio surrounding Constantine. Amelia Brown’s subject is the notorious volte-face of the Secret History of Procopius. After offering an account of the reception of the work, Brown then turns to the problems of reconciling Procopius with other sources. She notes how comprehensively Procopius employs the various Greek expressions for deception. Procopius specifically charges that the public disagreements between Justinian and Theodora were feigned, and that the latter maintained her influence by sorcery. Brown turns to other sources to test Procopius’ veracity, including records of expenditure, inscriptions, and evidence of plagues. The final section, “The broader context,” is a single article by one of the dedicatees of our collection, Professor Ron Ridley. Its temporal limits extend well beyond those otherwise observed in the collection, but its value comes as a reflection on the applicability and relevance of one of the main themes discussed here, the use of deceit, to other ancient and modern European societies. Ridley considers a number of examples of the deceptive nature of autocratic regimes, ranging from the posthumous reputation of Akhenaton to the deception surrounding the massacre of the Polish officer class in the Katyn forest during the Second World War. Six regimes are impugned: Egyptian, Assyrian, Persian, Napoleonic, Italian Fascism, and Soviet Russia. His central thesis is that deception is most particularly an incident of the conduct and representation of public affairs by autocratic regimes, but, even more significantly, that the programme of deception is often aimed at the future: “If all the other parts of society are in the hands of one person or a party, why not history as well?” The consequent duty on historians is obvious.

THE GRAECO-HELLENISTIC WORLD

AUTOCHTHONOUS AUTOCRATS: THE TYRANNY OF THE ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY

Jonathan Hall It is now commonplace for politicians and public figures to hold up the example of democratic Athens as some sort of paradigmatic model for modern liberal democracy. During a visit to Athens, dogged by anti-American protests, in November , former President Clinton modified Percy Shelley’s famous aphorism by proclaiming “We are all Greeks—not because of monuments and memories, but because what began here two-and-a-half thousand years ago, has at last, after all the bloody struggles of the th century, been embraced all around the world.”1 It had not always been the case. Although Athens had been a guiding beacon for French revolutionaries of the late eighteenth century, ochlocratic Athens with its rule by the rabble was an example to be avoided by sober republics, let alone constitutional monarchies. It was not by accident that the American founding-fathers chose Roman rather than Greek names for their institutions and public buildings and, in the words of James Madison, “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”2 In Anglophone scholarship at any rate, the origins of the association between modern politics and the Athenian democracy were enshrined in the monumental History of Greece, written by the liberal banker George Grote in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, and this was hardly a disinterested political project.3 At first sight, Aristotle seems to offer some justification for regarding participation as a key element of the ancient polity: the Politics (.. [b]) begins with the assertion that “every polis is a sort of partnership (koinônia)” and we are later told (.. [a]) that the partnership in question is one of free men (cf. .. [b]). But this is Aristotle’s definition of any polis, regardless of its political constitution, and, in fact, although he recognizes that ‘freedom’ often serves as a banner for 1 2 3

See H. Smith, “Clinton charms Greek critics,” The Guardian, November , . In Kramnick (ed.)  no. ; cf. Samons  . Momigliano  –.

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champions of democracy, he expresses strong doubts that freedom is a monopoly of democracies alone. When we try to determine what it is that—for Aristotle at any rate—distinguishes a democracy from a tyranny or an oligarchy, we discover that the chief criterion concerns the party to whose advantage a political system is structured. “None of these systems,” says Aristotle, “governs to the profit of everybody in common.” Rather, “tyranny is monarchy, ruling to the advantage of the autocrat, oligarchy governs to the advantage of the rich, and democracy to the advantage of the poor” (Pol. .. [b]). This rather blunt statement is later qualified when Aristotle comes to distinguish between four different types of democracies (Pol. ..– [b–a]). Where property qualifications exist for the right to hold office, then one has a democracy based on true equality, where the poor have no more prominence than the rich. A similar situation arises where the rule of law is in force, whether or not property qualifications exist. But the fourth type of democracy is where the masses (plêthos) and not the laws govern “and this comes about when decrees of the assembly override the law” (Aristotle clearly has in mind the fifth-century democracy of Athens, prior to the end of the Peloponnesian War). “For when the laws are not sovereign, then demagogues arise, and the people (dêmos) becomes a single composite monarch, because the many are sovereigns not individually but collectively” (Pol. .. [a]). The purpose of this chapter is to explore why, in Aristotle’s eyes, the fifth-century democracy of Athens could have resembled a tyranny.

The Power of the People In a paper submitted to the “Princeton / Stanford Working Papers in Classics,” Josiah Ober has argued that the definition of democracy as ‘majority rule’ was a coinage of democracy’s critics in the late-fifth and fourth centuries and that it was therefore this pejorative meaning that was adopted by Aristotle.4 Drawing attention to the fact that the Greek term dêmokratia employs the -kratos suffix, whereas monarchia and oligarchia—the two regime-types with which democracy is usually contrasted—contain the -archê suffix, Ober claims that the archê suffix is used for terms that are concerned with number (monos [‘one’]; oligoi [‘few’]), whereas the

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Ober .

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term dêmos refers to a collective body that does not therefore answer the question “how many are empowered?” On this basis, Ober supposes that kratos originally meant something rather different from archê. More specifically, he argues that archê is concerned with a “monopoly of office” and that terms such as monarchia, oligarchia or even anarchia answer the question “how many rulers?” By contrast, kratos should mean ‘power to’ rather than ‘power over’ and originally referred to a political capacity, newly activated in the wake of what Ober terms the ‘Athenian Revolution’ of  bce.5 The problem is that Ober’s findings are flatly contradicted by our earliest theoretical reflection on political systems—the so-called ‘Constitutional Debate’ in the third book of Herodotus’ Histories (.–). Following the suppression of the conspiracy of the Magi c. bce, three Persian noblemen—Otanes, Megabyzus and the future king Darius—are supposed to have discussed the form of constitution that would best be suited to the Persians, with Otanes favouring democracy, Megabyzus oligarchy, and Darius monarchy. It has often been pointed out that the term dêmokratia is never actually used in the debate, but later in the narrative Herodotus tells how the Persian admiral Mardonius abolished tyrannies among the Greek cities of Asia Minor, replacing them with democratic regimes, and he offers this as a reply to those Greeks who found it difficult to believe that “Otanes had advised that the Persians should be governed democratically” (..). We are, then, entitled to read Otanes’ speech in the Constitutional Debate as a defence of democracy, even if synonyms are employed. In fact, the two terms that are used in the debate to signify government by the people are dêmos and plêthos (“multitude,” “majority”) and they appear to be employed interchangeably. Darius, for example, explicitly juxtaposes dêmos, oligarchiê and mounarchiê to indicate democracy, oligarchy and monarchy respectively and claims that it is impossible for wickedness not to arise when the dêmos is archôn, thus explicitly juxtaposing dêmos with the -archê suffix. Where, I believe, Ober has gone astray is in assuming that dêmos necessarily denotes the entire body politic, as one might expect from its regular citation in decrees of the Athenian assembly (e.g. “it seemed right to the council [boulê] and the dêmos . . . ”), but here we need to engage in some historical etymology. In the Linear B tablets of the Mycenaean palaces, dêmos appears to signify territory, but in poetry of the Archaic

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Ober ; reprinted in Ober  –.

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period its sense is that of the common people, excluding the elites. To avoid clouding the issue, let us stick to Athens and to the poetry of Athens’ early sixth-century lawgiver, Solon. When Solon warns (fr.  W) that the polis risks destruction because “the mind of the leaders of the dêmos is unjust,” it is initially tempting to interpret dêmos in its fully inclusive sense but other passages indicate that Solon actually distinguishes between the ‘leaders of the dêmos’ and the dêmos itself.6 So, in talking about his social and economic reforms (fr.  W), he complains that he has “given the dêmos such privileges as are sufficient, neither subtracting nor increasing their honour” in a context where it is clear that Solon sees himself as a mediator between two groups that he elsewhere (fr.  W) describes as ‘the nobles’ (esthloi) and ‘the worthless’ (kakoi). Similarly, in another fragment (fr.  W), he claims that the dêmos would best follow its leaders “if they are not given too much licence or overly oppressed.” Now, it could be argued that Solon’s decidedly aristocratic outlook does not allow us to infer that dêmos was anything more than an elite term for those excluded from full political office but there is evidence to suggest otherwise. Although the word dêmokratia is not attested until the later fifth century, a paraphrase is found in the form δμου κρατο σα χερ (“the ruling hand of the dêmos”) in Aeschylus’ Suppliant Maidens (), first performed in the later s just as Ephialtes was forcing the aristocratic council of the Areopagus to yield many of its powers and privileges to the people (Arist. [Ath. Pol.] ). It is, then, a reasonable assumption that dêmokratia was a catchword of contemporary salience.7 Contrary to Ober, then, I would like to suggest that when Herodotus has his Persian speakers talk about kratos and archê in the same breath, he is, in fact, thinking of a monopoly of office in the hands of non-elites.

The Ways of Tyrants In official discourse, the Athenian democracy of the fifth century construed itself as a rejection of tyranny—and, more specifically, as a reaction to the autocratic rule of the Pisistratid family which lasted from around the middle of the sixth century down to  bce. That official discourse required traditions that told of the tyranny to conform to a decided genre of ‘tyrannology’ in which autocrats are invested with modes of 6 7

Irwin  –. Raaflaub  . For Aeschylus’ democratic leanings, see Podlecki .

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behaviour that repeatedly transgress sociocultural norms.8 Yet, in comparison with the fabled greed of Polycrates of Samos or the sexual depravity of Periander of Corinth, the Athenian tyrants receive relatively light treatment from our literary sources: in fact, the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians (.–) tells us that Pisistratus enjoyed the reputation of administering everything “according to the laws” and that the regime was later looked back upon as a sort of ‘golden age’. That said, there are four standard tyrannical traits that our sources attribute to Pisistratus and his sons: firstly, the neutralization of potential rivals by means of exile and the taking of hostages (Hdt. .; Arist. [Ath. Pol.] .); secondly, the levying of an income tax (Thuc. ..; Arist. [Ath. Pol.] .); thirdly, an ambitious plan of urban monumentalization (Thuc. ..; Arist. Pol. .. [b]); and lastly—and most significantly for the theme of this volume—the practice of deception. So, for example, on his first attempt at the tyranny—probably in the s bce—Pisistratus sported a selfinflicted wound that he said had been the work of his enemies in order to secure a bodyguard for himself, with which he proceeded to capture the acropolis (Hdt. .; Arist. [Ath. Pol.] .).9 On his second attempt, he dressed up a local Attic woman as Athena in order to make it look as if the goddess herself were accompanying him back to the city—a ruse that Herodotus claims to find difficult to believe, given the noted (or self-professed?) intelligence of the Athenians (Hdt. .; Arist. [Ath. Pol.] .). And on his third, successful attempt, the author of the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians (.) reports that Pisistratus summoned an armed muster at the Sanctuary of Theseus, at which he deliberately made his address so inaudible that he persuaded the Athenians to accompany him to the acropolis after leaving their arms behind at the Theseion (where they were swiftly confiscated). Herodotus (.) recounts a different ruse whereby, after routing the Athenians on the battlefield, Pisistratus sent his sons on horseback after those who were fleeing, telling them not to be afraid but to each return to his own home—thus, avoiding the possibility of their regrouping in the city. To reinforce its antityrannical credentials, the radical Athenian democracy coined its own charter myth, which told how the tyranny had been ended by an act of violence when two aristocrats, Harmodius and Aristogiton, struck down and killed Pisistratus’ son Hipparchus in 8

See, for example, McGlew . For the problem of the chronology of Pisistratus’ tyrannies, see Lavelle  – ; Parker  –. 9

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 bce. By the early fifth century, a popular drinking-song ran: “I shall bear my sword in a branch of myrtle, like Harmodius and Aristogiton, when they killed the tyrant and made Athens a place of equality under law (isonomos)” (Ath. . [a]). At about the same time, the sculptor Antenor was commissioned to make bronze statues of the two tyrannicides, which were set up in the Athenian agora—the first time the likeness of any historical individual had been placed in so august a location. The statue group was carried off by Xerxes during his invasions of Athens in  and  bce, though a replacement—now known through Roman marble copies—was swiftly created by Kritios and Nesiotes. Furthermore, by the fourth century, if not much earlier, cultic honours were offered annually at Harmodius’ and Aristogiton’s grave and their descendants were granted the right in perpetuity to be entertained in the prutaneion (the public dining hall) and to be exempt from taxes (Arist. [Ath. Pol.] .; IG I3 ; Andoc. .; Isae. .). Two points are of interest here. Firstly, the material forms with which the tyrannicide myth was invested were anything but democratic. The tradition of cultic offerings and ritual meals besides the grave had a long history in Greece, stretching back to the eighth century, but had typically been reserved for elite chieftains who had been granted quasi-heroic status in death. Similarly, the aesthetic form of the male nude traces its direct descent back to the kouros—the type of statue that had formerly served as wealthy sanctuary dedications or funerary monuments over aristocratic graves.10 Secondly, the myth itself was, as both Herodotus (..) and Thucydides (..; .–) recognized, an exercise in self-delusion and deception. As the second son of Pisistratus, Hipparchus had not been tyrant of Athens and his assassination did not put an end to the tyranny since his older brother Hippias continued to reign for another four years. In the end, it was the Spartans who suppressed the tyranny at Athens by besieging Hippias and his family on the acropolis, though the Athenian family of the Alcmaeonidae turned what could easily have been a serious religious crime—bribery of the Pythian priestess at Delphi— to their advantage by claiming that it was they who had persuaded the Delphic Oracle to urge the Spartan king Cleomenes to liberate Athens (Hdt. .–). In fact, to the extent that we can establish any motives to Harmodius’ and Aristogiton’s act, the establishment of democracy is unlikely to have been one of them. Thucydides (., ) attributes the

10

Hall c –.

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assassination to homosexual jealousy and wounded family pride, but he elsewhere (..) implies that the couple had originally intended to murder Hippias, not Hipparchus, and since both belonged to the distinguished aristocratic clan of the Gephyraei, their true intention was probably to remove an obstacle to the political prominence of their own family—much as the Alcmaeonidae were to do a couple of years later during their unsuccessful attempt to capture Athens from their base at Leipsydrion on Mount Parnes (Thuc. .–; ..; Hdt. ..). This would certainly explain why the tyrannicide myth does not seem to have entered Athenian popular consciousness immediately after Hippias’ departure from the city: members of the Pisistratid family were, for example, still holding high office as late as the s bce.11 It was only in the s that the Pisistratids became the targets of ostracism and that monuments commemorating the family were destroyed (e.g. Lycurg. Leoc. ), and this was almost certainly a reaction to the fact that, when the Persians landed at Marathon in  bce, they were accompanied by Hippias, who hoped to be reinstalled as despot of Athens. Greg Anderson has recently argued that the distinction we tend to draw between tyrants and legitimate rulers is an invention of classical and postclassical sources. Resurveying the literary and material evidence, he argues instead that tyrants merely engaged in the same tactics of force, violence and persuasion as their aristocratic rivals and that their aim was to dominate, rather than subvert, the oligarchies that governed Archaic Greek city-states.12 Part of his point is that would-be and actual tyrants operated by necessity within the conventions and behavioural norms— and thought within the symbolic universe—of the aristocratic societies to which they all, with only a few possible exceptions, belonged.13 But should not the same hold true for the early democracy at Athens? Were the popular activists, whose support of Cleisthenes in  bce led to wide-ranging reforms, actually creating a new political paradigm or were they forced to draw on the same conceptual vocabulary that had been developed within non-democratic regimes? As we have seen, the drinking song in honour of Harmodius and Aristogiton attributed to the tyrannicides the establishment of isonomia, or equality under the law. Isonomia is also the term that is employed in the Constitutional Debate at Susa: “When the majority rules,” says Otanes, 11 12 13

See Lavelle  –. Anderson . For the aristocratic backgrounds of early Greek tyrants: de Libero .

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“first of all, the system has the fairest of names—isonomia” (Hdt. .). It is often assumed that isonomia is an early equivalent, or synonym, of dêmokratia and certainly it was, along with isêgoria (‘freedom of speech’), an essential ingredient of democratic ideology in the later fifth century. But the term itself does not define the precise extent of the circle within which members are to enjoy equality under the law and Kurt Raaflaub is almost certainly right to believe that it was originally coined among the elite class.14 This equality among elite peers was guaranteed by the principle of rotation of office among powerholders, which is why the earliest laws for which we possess epigraphical evidence are so obsessively concerned with defining the tenure limits of office. So, for example, a seventh-century law from Dreros on Crete (ML ) prohibits an individual from holding the chief magistracy of kosmos more than once in any ten-year period, while a sixth-century law from Cretan Gortyn (IC .) sets a series of terms that had to intervene between tenure of the same magistracy.15 Even within a restrictive oligarchical government, it seems that the Greeks were uncomfortably conscious of the fact that not every individual could rule absolutely all the time and therefore set about ensuring that the highest offices should be shared among the ruling class. That this principle was inherited by democratic regimes is suggested strongly by Aristotle’s affirmation (Pol. .. [a]) that ruling and being ruled in turn was one of the fundamental aspects of democratic freedom.

Theseus: The Democratic Tyrant? The autocratic pedigree of the Athenian democracy and the ambiguous tension that this generated are encapsulated in the mythical figure of Theseus. In the final decade of the sixth century bce, scenes depicting Theseus’ exploits on the road from Troezen to Athens become popular on red-figured vases. The normal interpretation for this is that Theseus was being promoted as an emblematic hero for the new democracy established by the reforms of Cleisthenes,16 as if the fledgling regime had nothing better to do than instruct Attic vase painters as to what they 14

Raaflaub  . For early laws and their relationship with the aristocracy: Eder ; Hölkeskamp ; Hall a –. 16 E.g. Brommer ; Neils ; Calame ; Anderson  –. 15

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should put on their pots. In fact, this is part of a broader and concerted effort in which (predominantly American) scholars have sought to dissociate major Athenian monuments and artistic programmes from the Pisistratid tyranny. The Archaic temple to Athena and the sanctuary of Artemis Brauronia on the acropolis, the temple of Artemis at Brauron, the sixth-century Telesterion at Eleusis and the City Eleusinion, all once confidently attributed to Pisistratus or his sons, have now been downdated so that their construction falls within the final eight years of the sixth century, after the expulsion of Hippias, leaving to the Pisistratids only the credit for initiating—though not completing—the Temple of Olympian Zeus at Athens.17 Quite apart from the fact that this is an implausibly narrow chronological ‘window’ for the planning, design and execution of major building projects, one is left wondering exactly what it was that the Pisistratids did during their thirty-seven years of uninterrupted rule—especially since Thucydides (..) explicitly says that they “beautified the city . . . and made the sacrifices in the temples.” Theseus is not absent from Athenian art before  bce. On the François Vase, dated to ca.  bce, he is portrayed instituting, on the island of Delos, the Geranos (or ‘crane dance’) to commemorate his victory over the Minotaur. A black-figure amphora, from around  bce, probably shows him fighting the Marathonian bull, while his abduction of the Amazon queen Antiope features on a red-figure cup ascribed to Euphronius.18 There are actually good reasons for supposing that it was Pisistratus and his sons, not the Cleisthenic regime, who first championed Theseus as a specifically Athenian hero. Firstly, Theseus’ ordeals on the road to Athens to assume his rightful throne could be thought to prefigure Pisistratus’ own difficult efforts to seize power. Secondly, Theseus’ famed friendship with Pirithous, king of the Thessalian Lapiths, could serve as a charter for Pisistratus’ alliance with the powerful Thessalian families that supported both him and Hippias (Arist. [Ath. Pol.] ., .). Thirdly, as the son of Poseidon, Theseus was genealogically linked to Neleus, the mythical king of Pylos from whom the Pisistratids claimed descent (Hdt. ..). Fourthly, Pisistratus is supposed to have purified the island of Delos—associated, as we have seen, with Theseus’ institution of the Geranos—and reorganized the festival of the Delia there (Hdt. ..; Thuc. ..). Fifthly, the area of Marathon, where Theseus had 17 For the revised datings, see Shapiro  ; Stewart  i –; Hayashi  –; Childs ; Miles . For a criticism: Hall a –; b –. 18 Neils  –.

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battled a ferocious bull, was a Pisistratid stronghold, which is presumably why Hippias led the Persians there in  bce (Plut. Thes. .).19 It is surely not coincidental that, across the Euripus straits from Marathon, on the island of Euboea, lay the city of Eretria, which served as a base of operations for Pisistratus immediately before his successful attempt at the tyranny and from where he is said to have taken a wife (Hdt. ..; Schol. Ar. Nub. ). Here, on the west pediment of the Late Archaic temple of Apollo, was portrayed Theseus’ abduction of Antiope.20 Sixthly, it was at the sanctuary of Theseus that Pisistratus is said to have tricked the Athenians into surrendering their arms (see above). Finally, Theseus was remembered chiefly for having unified Attica by persuading the inhabitants of rural towns and villages to abandon their local council chambers and town halls in favour of the centralized institutions of Athens (Thuc. ..). Similarly, the Pisisistratids are widely believed to have connected rural communities to the city of Athens by instituting travelling ‘circuit judges’, developing a network of thoroughfares radiating out from the city of Athens, and reorganizing peripheral sanctuaries such as Brauron and Eleusis.21 Although the Great Panathenaea, the festival that celebrated the unity of the Athenians, was probably instituted prior to the tyranny, Aristotle (fr.  Rose) seems to have associated its reorganization with Pisistratus while Plato ([Hipparch.] b) tells us that Hipparchus was responsible for instituting rhapsodic contests at the festival. On balance, then, the evidence suggests that the figure of Theseus was not a new creation of the more democratic regime established under Cleisthenes but, rather, an originally tyrannical emblem that was usurped by the Athenian democracy. This democratic usurpation of a mythical autocrat was monumentalized in the early fifth century on the Treasury of the Athenians at Delphi, where Theseus’ deeds are juxtaposed with those of Heracles but appear on the more visible southern metopes of the building.22 It reaches its fruition, however, in the carved friezes that stood above the pronaos and opisthodomos of the Temple of Hephaestus and Athena, overlooking the Athenian agora and dating to the mid fifth century. Both friezes narrate episodes from early Athenian history that involved Theseus (which is one of the reasons why this temple was originally identified, erroneously, as the Theseion), but what is most remark19 20 21 22

Hdt. .. implies that the Pisistratids had supporters in the Marathon region. For the pediment: Touloupa . See generally Hall b: –. For the problems in dating the treasury, see Bommelaer and Laroche  –.

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able about them is that Theseus is depicted in two different stances, each of which echoes precisely the two figures of the tyrannicide group commissioned by Kritios and Nesiotes.23

Dêmos turannos I take it as relatively uncontroversial that the Athenian democracy of the fifth century could be viewed—and, indeed, viewed itself—as a tyranny in terms of the hegemony it wielded over its erstwhile allies within the Delian League. In his final speech to the Athenian assembly, Pericles tells his fellows citizens “you rule your empire as if it were a tyranny; it may seem wrong to have taken it, but it is now dangerous to let it go” (Thuc. ..). A little later, Cleon is even more blunt: You are not considering that the empire you rule is a tyranny, and that you are dominant over unwilling subjects who continuously plot against you and who do not obey you because of any favours that you grant them at considerable risk to yourself but rather on account of your strength rather than their good will. (Thuc. ..)

Prior to the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides (..) has the Athenians tell the Spartans that it was fear, honour and self-interest that impelled them to acquire their empire, but by the time of the Melian Dialogue in  bce any pretence to honour has evaporated. In their justification of why the Melians should suffer the severest punishment for not having joined the Athenian empire, the Athenians confess: We, for our part, will not provide a long and scarcely credible speech, adorned with noble terms, such as how it was just for us to rule, since we defeated the Persians, or that it was because of your injustice that we attacked you . . . You know perfectly well that, according to human logic, what is right is only an issue between two forces that are equally matched, whereas the strong do what they can and the weak must yield. (Thuc. .)

The Athenians go on to say that their only guiding concern in the decisions that they must make is one of self-preservation and it is difficult not to be reminded of Thucydides’ authorial observation, in the opening chapters of his History (.), that the early Greek tyrants looked only to their own personal self-interest and the glorification of their families, making security their principal aim. 23

Taylor .

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What is, perhaps, more surprising is that the motif of the tyrannical dêmos—dêmos turannos as it is sometimes termed in our sources— also seems to have been part of the rhetoric that circulated for internal, domestic consumption, where the dêmos, understood in the more restrictive, Archaic sense of the term, exercises hegemony over a now dispossessed elite. As Lisa Kallet puts it, Given the intimate connection that the Greek concept of freedom has to the right to rule, tyranny and democracy, like democracy and archê, fit neatly together, for the dêmos occupies a similar position to the tyrant: the people want absolute power and are unaccountable . . . the dêmos, in this definition, would hold absolute sway over its fellow, elite citizens.24

Interesting here is Thucydides’ digression on the Pisistratid tyranny on the occasion of violence that erupted in Athens shortly before the despatch of the doomed Sicilian Expedition in  bce. In one night, many of the statues of Hermes that adorned the city were vandalized—an act of sacrilege that was thought to be ominous for the expedition’s success. Among those implicated was Alcibiades, who was also charged with having staged mock celebrations of the Eleusinian Mysteries—an act of impiety that was punishable by death—though much of the supposed ‘proof ’ for his involvement was his “undemocratic lawlessness with regard to his practices” (Thuc. ..). Thucydides later explains that the Athenians pursued their investigations into the affair relentlessly and were particularly concerned because “the dêmos had heard how the tyranny of Pisistratus and his sons had ended up being harsh (chalepên) and, moreover, that it had been ended not by themselves and Harmodius but by the Spartans, and for this reason it was always fearful and took everything suspiciously” (..). It is at this point that Thucydides pauses to digress on the circumstances surrounding the end of the Pisistratid tyranny, reiterating that, after the assassination of Hipparchus, Hippias’ tyranny had become more harsh (chalepôtera). Yet chalepos is precisely the adjective that he also uses to describe the Athenian dêmos after it became aware of the charges of the profanation of the mysteries (Thuc. .., .). Put another way, in its almost compulsive fear of tyranny, the Athenian democracy reacted with the paranoia that typified tyrants.25 It is not so difficult to understand why, in the eyes of elite authors who thought that they merited more political clout, the Athenian dêmos could 24 25

Kallet  . Henderson : .

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be perceived as acting tyrannically.26 A case in point is the Old Oligarch— the name conventionally given to the author of a political treatise that was preserved among the works of Xenophon. The Old Oligarch begins by conceding that it is right that the poor masses should have more power than the noble elites because it is they who crew the ships on which the Athenian Empire’s strength is based (Xen. [Ath. pol.] .). “For,” he says later (.), “the dêmos does not want to be enslaved in a city governed by good laws but to be free and to rule” (i.e. over the elites)—again, the tenor is very clearly one of somebody who does not include himself in the dêmos. But there is, I believe, some evidence to suggest that the concept of the dêmos turannos was not restricted to the elites—namely the plays of Aristophanes. Admittedly, political comedy is a difficult genre to decode and many scholars have sought to see in Aristophanes’ plays criticism— both oblique and explicit—of radical democracy.27 On the other hand, Aristophanes’ principal aim was to secure the appreciative approbation of his audience, which must have been dominated by the less well-off.28 So, when in Knights (–), the chorus praises the personified Demos as exercising “a fine rule, because all men fear you like a tyrannical man,” or when, in Wasps, the aging democrat Philocleon claims that he “rules over all” () and asks if the authority of the juror “is not the greatest power (archê) of all, which mocks even the rich man” (), we should not, I think, assume that this is merely the frustrated sentiment of an opponent to democracy.29 There are three respects in which the Athenian democracy acted in ways that could be described as tyrannical. The first was the massive public building project which we associate today with the name of Pericles but which was designed, monitored and funded by the Athenian assembly.30 Plutarch gives us some taste of the elite opposition to the adornment of the city: Surely Greece is being dreadfully insulted and evidently subject to tyranny when it sees that, from the forced contributions it makes to the war, we are gilding and beautifying our city like a brazen whore, equipping it with precious stones and statues and temples worth thousands of talents. (Plut. Per. .) 26 Raaflaub  argues that the concept of the dêmos turannos is limited to the elite sphere. 27 E.g. de Ste Croix  –; contra Gomme . 28 MacDowell  –. 29 This is the opinion of Connor  and Kallet . 30 Kallet  .

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Kallet has argued that Plutarch is drawing on very real criticism that was voiced against the building project in the fifth century and even suggests that Pericles’ references, in the Funeral Oration (Thuc. .., ., .), to the aggrandizement of the city and its imperishable monuments, together with his exhortation to his fellow citizens to “gaze daily upon the strength of Athens and fall in love with it,” are a response to such criticism.31 The second was the levying of taxes. As we have seen, Pisistratus was said to have imposed income taxes on the Athenians and, although there was no universal tax on citizens under the radical democracy, an assessment named the eisphora was levied on wealthier Athenians— especially as civic funds became depleted due to the Peloponnesian War.32 In Xenophon’s Symposium (.), Charmides explains why he prefers his current poverty to his former life of opulence: “Now I am like a tyrant whereas before I was evidently a slave; for in those former days, I used to pay taxes to the dêmos whereas now the polis levies tribute to support me.”33 Similarly, the Old Oligarch comments on how the rich fund choruses, gymnasia and triremes while the dêmos has all these provided for it (Xen. [Ath. pol.] .). The third respect—and, again, the most significant for the theme of this volume—is the practice of deception. Here too we see an ambiguous tension similar to that which existed between the official Athenian repudiation of tyranny and the tyrannical mode in which the dêmos enacted its business. Deception was recognized as a fundamentally undemocratic trait in a free and open society and, in the Funeral Oration, Pericles contrasts the naturally spontaneous courage of the Athenians with the preparations and deceptions (apatai) of the Spartans (Thuc. ..).34 At the same time, however, one can detect a deep-seated anxiety among the Athenians that deception is simply one of the instruments of domination in any society—especially a society in which rhetorical skills, the ability but also necessity to persuade, counted for so much. So, for example, in the debate that takes place in the Athenian assembly to decide the fate of the rebellious citizens of Mytilene, Cleon accuses his fellow citizens of being easily led astray by the “decorous speech” of an orator and tells them that they are “very good at being deceived (apatasthai) by the 31 32 33 34

Kallet  –. Kallet  –. Kallet  . Hesk  .

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novelty of an argument” (Thuc. .., ), while his opponent, Diodotus, notes that “the speaker who wants to persuade the most terrible things must use deceit to bring the multitude (plêthos) over to him, just as he who says better things must lie in order to be believed,” and adds that “in this polis alone, on account of such sensitivity, it is impossible to do good service openly without practising deceit (..–).”35 Democratic deceit also features prominently in Xenophon’s account (Hell. ..) of the Arginousae affair in  bce, when six generals were charged with not having recovered the bodies of their comrades after a victorious naval battle against the Spartans and were summarily executed. In the wake of the affair, Xenophon tells us that the Athenians had a change of heart and “decreed that accusations should be made against those who had deceived the people.”36 In all these cases, the accusations of deception are laid at the feet of demagogues but in the radical Athenian democracy, the most prominent speakers were—de iure if not always de facto—equal in political status to each of their compatriots. Aristophanes is also a valuable source for the theme of democratic deception. In its address to Demos in the Knights (–), the chorus says: “Demos, you have a fine rule, because all men fear you like a tyrannical man. But you are easily led astray, you rejoice in being fawned upon and thoroughly deceived.” “Wrong,” replies Demos. “You have no mind under your long hair if you think that I’m stupid, for in these matters I play the fool willingly. I enjoy my daily suckle and I want to nourish a thief as my protector; then, when he’s full and I’ve raised him up, I trample upon him.”37 A similar theme can be found in the Acharnians (–), when the play’s protagonist, Dicaeopolis, claims to “know the way of rustics, who rejoice greatly if some crafty man eulogizes them and the polis, whether justly or unjustly.” It is, however, the start of the play that presents one of the most blatant acts of deceit on the Athenian stage. Dicaeopolis is attending a session of the assembly, at which Athenian ambassadors to the Great King of Persia request an increase in their daily allowance. To legitimate their request, they produce a decadently dressed man that they claim is the Persian king’s chief advisor. He addresses the assembly in pidgin Greek and the ambassadors provide their own translation, to the effect that the Athenians will receive in return great wealth from the King. But the 35 36 37

Hesk  –. Hesk  . Hesk  –.

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‘Persian advisor’ is, in reality, an Athenian in costume and the request for an increased stipend is nothing other than an act of deception on the part of the Athenian ambassadors against their peer citizens, even if Dicaeopolis is the only one who can see through the sham.

Autochthonous autocrats I wish, finally, to consider the Athenian myth of autochthony and how this might be implicated in the discourse of the polis turannos and the dêmos turannos. In one of his poems, Solon (fr.  W) refers to Attica as “the oldest land of Ionia,” indicating that, in the early sixth century at any rate, the Athenians wished to be viewed as a branch of the Ionians. Indeed, it may be this claimed affiliation to the Ionian ethnos that guaranteed the Athenians a seat on the Amphictyony that governed Apollo’s oracular sanctuary at Delphi.38 Various origins were attributed to the Ionians, but the tradition that Herodotus accepted (.; cf. Paus. ..–) told how they had fled from the coastal region of the northern Peloponnese to Athens, from where they had subsequently set out to colonize the central Aegean islands and the cities of Asia Minor. By the fifth century, however, the Athenians seemed anxious to dissociate themselves from the Ionians: according to Herodotus, again, they “avoid the name, not wishing to be called Ionian; in fact, I believe that many of them are ashamed of the name” (..). Instead, the Athenians came to think of themselves as autochthonous—that is, as having always inhabited the same territory. They are first explicitly described as such in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (), performed in  bce, though Pindar’s reference (I. .) to their descent from the earth-born Erechtheus may allow us to push the origins of this belief back to the s.39 It was not uncommon for tyrants to profess ethnic origins different from those of their subjects: the Pisistratids claimed descent from the mythical king Neleus of Messenian Pylos (Hdt. ..); Miltiades the Elder, who established a tyranny in the Thracian Chersonese, belonged to a family that traced its origins back to the Aeacids of Aegina (..); Cypselus, tyrant of Corinth, is said to have had a Lapith father (..); 38

Hall : –. Cf. Hdt. ..; Thuc. ..; ... See Montanari ; Rosivach ; Hall  –. Shapiro   notes that this is the period when scenes of the Athenian king Erichthonius being born from the soil become popular on Athenian vases. 39

autochthonous autocrats

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while Battus, the first ruler of Cyrene, was supposedly a Minyan by descent (..). One gets the impression that the claim to extraneous origins somehow circumvented the problem of justifying why one individual should exercise rule over fellow kinsmen. Athens seems to have adopted a similar strategy once it found itself at the head of a hegemonic league which consisted primarily of city-states that professed an Ionian heritage. By downplaying their own Ionian origins and promoting the belief in their autochthony, the Athenians could appear ethnically different from their subject allies and, by the time that Euripides’ Ion was performed, probably in the last decade of the fifth century, the Ionians came to be regarded as colonists, rather than kinsmen, of the Athenians.40 This, of course, is related to the image of the Athenians as tyrants over their tribute-paying allies but there is possibly another sense in which autochthony could bolster the Athenian dêmos’ hegemony over wealthy aristocrats. The legal correlate to the myth of autochthony was the Citizenship Law that was proposed by Pericles in  bce and that henceforth decreed that citizenship could only be inherited by the sons of two Athenian parents. Several scholars have followed the author of the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians () in attributing the motives behind the law to a desire to curb overpopulation at Athens,41 but at least part of the point must have been a proscription of the hitherto common elite practice of marrying into the families of aristocrats and even autocrats from other city-states.42 In most parts of the ancient Greek world, autochthony was not especially valued: in a society where the power of force was admired, the rights of the latest population to conquer a city or a region were normally championed over those of the indigenous inhabitants. But in democratic Athens, the ideology of autochthony bestowed an authenticity and a primordial nobility on the members of the dêmos in contradistinction to the extraneous status of elite families that might now be regarded as parvenus and, therefore, less authentically Athenian. The Archaic poet Archilochus (fr. ) wrote that he had no desire for tyranny and Solon (fr.  W) comments that he deliberately abstained from seizing the tyranny at Athens.43 A moment’s thought should suffice to show that tyranny was, in and of itself, a desirable thing to possess in 40 41 42 43

Dougherty ; Hall  –. See Hansen : . Gernet  ; Humphreys . Cf. Arist. [Ath. Pol.] ., ..



jonathan hall

the eyes of most people. The brute reality was that, for the ancient Greeks, tyranny was only to be hated if one had the misfortune to be the subject of a tyrant and, in the fifth century at any rate, when political theory had barely developed beyond a crude distinction that had long been drawn between rulers and ruled, it was obviously preferable to belong to the former category. Plus ça change?

PHOKIAN DESPERATION: PRIVATE AND PUBLIC IN THE OUTBREAK OF THE 3RD SACRED WAR

Peter Londey In  bc the Athenian orator Demosthenes described travelling though Phokis in central Greece, on his way to Delphoi. It was a harrowing scene: houses razed to the ground, walls stripped away [from cities]; a country emptied of young men; the pitiable inhabitants just a few women and young children, and old men. (D. .)

Demosthenes, of course, had reason to exaggerate the Phokian plight, for which he held his enemy Aischines responsible. Yet the scene is plausible enough. The rd Sacred War had ended three years before, in . The war had begun in , when the Phokians seized the sanctuary at Delphoi and proceeded, with the help of mercenaries paid for with looted Delphic treasures, to hold off their enemies—primarily Thebans, Thessalians, and Lokrians—for ten years. With the ridge of Mt Helikon providing a high road into Boiotia,1 the Phokians proved more or less unassailable until the eventual entry of Philip of Makedon tipped the scales decisively against them. Philip settled the war in , and thus successfully and permanently inserted himself into the affairs of southern Greece. The fate of Phokis was left to the members of the Delphic Amphiktyony, the religious league of Greek states which controlled the sanctuary at Delphoi. Aischines claimed that only his intervention as Athenian envoy had saved the Phokians from an Oitaian proposal that all the adult male population should be thrown off the cliffs at Delphoi (Aeschin. .). Whether or not such brutal punishment was seriously entertained, the Amphiktyonic judgement was still harsh. Diodoros tells us that the Amphiktyony decreed that the -odd cities of Phokis should be broken up into villages of not more than  houses, at least a stadion apart; that the Phokians should not be allowed to possess either horses or arms; and that as reparations to Apollo they should pay an indemnity of  talents a year (D.S. ..). From inscriptions we know that payment 1

Burn  –.

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of the reparations began in autumn , a little after Demosthenes’ visit, with half-yearly payments of  talents. The amount was in a few years reduced, but payments continued into Alexander’s reign (CID , –). Sixty talents will have been an enormous burden on the ruined Phokians: double the th century tribute to Athens paid by Aigina, four times that paid by Byzantion—but they were great trading states, with busy ports to tax. For the Phokians, years of poverty beckoned. The outline of the story is clear enough, but the question remains: Why did the Phokians seize the sanctuary in ? The orthodox view is summed up thus in a recent (and fine) general textbook: Behind the outbreak of the war was Thebes’ attempt to consolidate its hegemony in central Greece. Exploiting a favourable majority on the Amphiktyonic council of Delphi, Thebes arranged to have Phocis severely fined in  for cultivating land sacred to Apollo. Phocis’ response was unexpected. . . . the Phocians made a desperate effort to regain their independence. Instead of submitting to Theban blackmail, they seized control of Delphi and used the treasures of Apollo to recruit a powerful mercenary army.2

This outwardly reasonable set of statements is, I would argue, wrong in almost every respect. It falls into a common error in our thinking about international politics: the assumption that, where there are great powers involved, they are necessarily pulling the strings. In recent history, there is an excessive tendency to explain every event from the late s to the late s in terms of the Cold War. The same error is common in discussing antiquity, as much in ancient sources as in modern criticism. I have argued previously that although Philip was the ultimate beneficiary of the outbreak of the th Sacred War of  / , he actually had nothing whatsoever to do with the original conflict from which it sprang. That was a purely local conflict, mainly between groups of people in Delphoi and the Western Lokrian town of Amphissa.3 In this chapter I shall argue that the rd Sacred War, similarly, may have sprung from local rather than great power conflicts. John Buckler, in Philip II and the Sacred War, and most recently (with Hans Beck) in Central Greece and the politics of power, begins his account of the outbreak of the Sacred War with events of  bc at Delphoi.4 In that year, as we know from an Athenian inscription, the Amphiktyony 2 3 4

Pomeroy  . Londey . Buckler  –; Buckler and Beck  –; see also Buckler  –.

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exiled a group of eleven Delphians, led by a man called Astykrates (IG 2 ). It is a remarkable instance of the Amphiktyony intervening in the internal affairs of a member state, though of course Delphoi was not a normal member state. Since this event occurred more or less at the high point of Theban hegemony, it is natural to see some Theban involvement.5 That does not mean, necessarily, that the Thebans had a policy aim of a compliant Delphian polis. It is just as likely that they simply used their influence on the Amphiktyonic council to do a favour for their own friends among the Delphians—quite possibly the clan of the Thrakidai, who were later slaughtered by Philomelos (D.S. ..). One must assume that Astykrates’ faction had been powerful, perhaps dominant, within Delphoi, forcing its opponents to call in the outside help of the Amphiktyony to deal with them. It is impossible to say whether pro- or anti-Thebanism was an issue in Delphian politics, but it is probably safe to say that Astykrates’ faction did not have strong ties with Thebes. Certainly Buckler’s attempt to argue that Astykrates was not anti-Boiotian on the grounds that anti-Theban sentiment was not as widespread as our Athenian sources would suggest holds no water. And, given the nature of Greek politics, Buckler’s evident belief that Astykrates must have been punished for some genuine offence against both Delphoi and Amphiktyony, with a verdict which the Athenians “could not refute”, smacks of deliberate naivety.6 The connection between the expulsion of Astykrates in  and the Sacred War a few years later is that Astykrates’ group were, it would appear, able to return to Delphoi when it was under Phokian control. At any rate one of them, Hagesarchos, turns up at Delphoi as a wartime naopoios from  to .7 (The college of naopoioi, “temple builders”, were magistrates, drawn from various member states of the Amphiktyony, in charge of managing the building of the new temple of Apollo.) Delphian politics were, I would imagine, more complex than simply a matter of pro- and anti-Theban (or Phokian) positions. The Delphian naopoios in spring , Aristagoras, is pointedly absent from a meeting held in summer , between the regular spring and autumn meetings of the Amphiktyony; at that meeting he is replaced by a Nikomachos son of 5 Buckler (see references in n. ) does not see it that way, but the question is not critical here, since I am not arguing that the Thebans used their influence in this way as a way of attacking the Phokians. I hope to return to the whole question elsewhere. 6 Buckler and Beck  . 7 Equating He[ges]archos at IG 2 b. with the Delphian Hagesarchos at CID , ., , , , .

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Menekrates, who also appears in autumn . Neither Nikomachos nor his father were among the associates of Astykrates honoured at Athens in . This might suggest a different factional alignment for him and his family—perhaps as a “moderate” meant to give a gloss of respectability to Philomelos’ control of the sanctuary; or it might suggest that Nikomachos was a connection of Philomelos himself, while Hagesarchos who appears in  after a break in meetings of the naopoioi, was in some way associated with Philomelos’ successor, Onomarchos. When we turn to the seizure of the sanctuary in , we find a tendency for later sources—falling, I would suggest, into the “great power” error described above—to see the whole affair as primarily a conflict between the Phokians and the Thebans. Justin blames the Thebans for high-handed use of their hegemony to charge the Phokians in the Amphiktyony with laying waste Boiotia: the Phokians, forced in desperation to seize the temple, won more sympathy than the Thebans who had driven them to do it (Iust. ..–). Pausanias links the event in a general way either with Thessalian hostility or with war against Thebes (Paus. .., ..). But by far the fullest account is that in Diodoros, which merits close attention. According to Diodoros, the Phokians had been charged in the Amphiktyony with cultivating a large part of the sacred land called “Kirrhaian”.8 The tag “Kirrhaian” may simply be a later guess, influenced by events leading up to the th Sacred War. When the Phokians failed to pay the fine imposed, the hieromnemons (voting members of the Amphiktyonic Council) demanded that the council “dedicate the land of those cheating the god.”9 The council agreed, and the matter was referred to the member cities of the Amphiktyony for ratification.10 In desperation, according to Diodoros, Philomelos, a man of high reputation, addressed the Phokians and argued that they should not lie down and let this happen. He then put forward arguments to support the view that Delphoi was historically part of Phokis; and finally promised to lead a successful resistance to all this if the Phokians would elect him stratêgos autokratôr (sole commander) with full powers. Duly elected, he went off to Sparta, currently also upset with the Amphiktyony due to the renewal of demands of payment of the fine for seizing the Kadmeia. The

ας.

8

D.S. ..: περγασμενοι πολλν τς ερς χρας τς νομαζομνης Κιρρα-

9

D.S. ..: κα!ιερ"σαι τν χραν τ"ν #ποστερο$ντων τ&ν !ε'ν. On the process, see Londey  –.

10

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Spartan king Archidamos did not want to support Philomelos openly, but quietly provided money and mercenaries. Philomelos hired more mercenaries, recruited , Phokians, and seized the sanctuary. His first act was to slaughter a group called the Thrakidai and seize their possessions. Then, after a successful battle against the local Lokrians, he erased the decisions of the Amphiktyons, before announcing that he was looking after the sanctuary and would not plunder any of the treasures. It was a coup, in effect, in which the Phokians intervened to cancel some illegal acts of the Amphiktyony, and to reorder power in Delphoi itself (D.S. ..–.). To the Boiotians and Lokrians, of course, it was much more than a coup, and they managed to rouse up other members of the Amphiktyony—Thessalians and the dependent groups around Thessaly, the Dolopians and Ainianians of central Greece, and so on—and the Sacred War began in earnest. After Philomelos’ death in , Phokian command passed to Onomarchos, followed eventually by Onomarchos’ brother Phayllos and Phalaikos, son of either Phayllos or Onomarchos.11 A common feature across many of our sources is that they assign responsibility for the seizure of the sanctuary and later for its plundering not to the Phokians at large, but specifically to their leaders.12 Very often, indeed, the various Phokian leaders during the war are referred to as tyrannoi,13 a word which may carry a sense that that the Phokians under the sway of these leaders could not be blamed for what happened. This was an idea with currency at the time, it would appear. Aischines claimed that in  he told Philip that he should punish “those individuals who were originally responsible for the seizure of the shrine (το(ς α)τους τς ξ #ρχς καταλψεως το ερο ), . . . not their cities” (Aeschin. .). Now obviously this could be an exculpatory view put about by those favourable to the Phokians, and it may reflect the general tendency 11

D.S. .–. Phayllos as Onomarchos’ brother: Paus. .. (with the spelling Phaylos); Harpokration s. Φϋλλος. Phalaikos is son of Onomarchos at D.S. .., of Phayllos at Paus. ... 12 Examples: Paus. .. (a shield is stolen “by Philomelos”); Ephor. (= Ath. .e) (“Onomarchos, Phayllos and Phalaikos”); Plb. .. (“Onomarchos and Philomelos”); Ath. .d (shrine looted /π& τ0ν Φωκικ"ν τυρννων, though admittedly the shrine is seized /π& Φωκων at .c); Ath. . f.–d (Theopompos wrote a work on treasures plundered from Delphoi, with lists of items given by Philomelos, Onomarchos and Phayllos to various flute girls, dancing girls, and beautiful boys). 13 For Phalaikos alone, see e.g. Aeschin. ., .; for the Phokian leaders in general, Aeschin. ., .; Ath. .d; Harpokration s. Φϋλλος; Plu. Mor. e–f,  f.; Plb. ...

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to attach the names of individuals to more complex stories. Yet the consistency is striking, and it fits well with the detail of what our fullest source, Diodoros, tells us about the start of the war. Trusting Diodoros may be counterintuitive, but let us see where it gets us. When Diodoros has Philomelos exhort the Phokians to action, what he urges them to do is #μφισβητε3ν περ4 τς το μαντεου προστασας 5ς ο6σης πατρου το3ς Φωκε σιν (D.S. ..), which I would take to mean “to mount a claim to the presidency of the oracle, on the grounds that this had belonged to the Phokians of old”. There is nothing here about seizing the sanctuary by force. That part of the plan, I would suggest, Philomelos kept secret. He went off to Sparta and told king Archidamos. Then he recruited mercenaries, and a thousand chosen Phokians, no doubt his own close supporters. With these he seized the sanctuary (D.S. ..–). A somewhat similar account appears in Polyainos, who tells us that Philomelos recruited mercenaries on the pretext (prophasis) of a war against the Thebans and Thessalians, but then used them to seize the sanctuary and loot the treasures, thus turning his hegemonia into tyrannis (Polyaen. .). Once Thebes entered the war, Philomelos (according to Diodoros) chose the best (aristous) of the Phokians to fight, but kept hiring more mercenaries (D.S. ..). From these accounts it would appear that the seizure of the temple was a coup carried out by Philomelos behind the backs of his fellow Phokians. Let me say a little about motive, and method. Obviously the lure of becoming the tyrant of Delphoi may have been attractive enough. For a Phokian aristocrat from the town of Ledon—in Pausanias’ day an impoverished village,14 but perhaps something greater in the th century—to play Smaug sitting on the vast heap of treasures at Delphoi would be tempting, however dangerous the sacrilege involved. But perhaps Philomelos’ aims were less grandiose. There is a passage in Aristotle’s Politics, where Aristotle is giving examples of cases where great conflicts grew out of small factional conflicts (very much in keeping with the theme of this chapter). One example he gives is the Sacred War which, he claims, arose out of stasis between Onomarchos’ father Euthykrates and Mnaseas, father of Mnason, in a dispute over an ‘heiress’ (epiklêros) (Arist. Pol. a). Clearly the families were closely related (if they could both have claims over the same heiress), and possibly as time went on the dispute was forgotten, as in the late s Onomarchos’

14

Paus. ..–; naturally Philomelos’ asebeia is blamed.

phokian desperation



brother left Mnaseas as guardian over his young son or nephew, Phalaikos (D.S. ..–). I am not sure that anybody has satisfactorily accounted for Aristotle’s explanation; Georgios Zachos has recently suggested that Philomelos, seemingly a relative outsider in the Phokian aristocracy, took advantage of the fact that the leading families were distracted to seize power for himself.15 That is possible, but would leave Aristotle with a rather weak example for his theme. What makes Aristotle’s mysterious information all the more tantalising is that he got it, evidently, from the horse’s mouth: Mnaseas’ son Mnason was, it seems, a companion of Aristotle’s,16 and no doubt tried to explain to him some of the family history. I think we can take two things from Aristotle’s account, however mysterious the deeper interpretation. First (and taking the opposite tack to Zachos), although it was Philomelos who convinced the Phokians to elect him stratêgos autokratôr, Onomarchos was probably involved from the start: indeed, Diodoros refers to Onomarchos as Philomelos’ colleague as general (synarchôn stratêgos), who became commander once Philomelos was killed (D.S. ..). Onomarchos’ family seems absolutely central, given that they continued to command the Phokians until Phalaikos was deposed in  (D.S. ..). Perhaps Philomelos was an acceptable front-man, but my inference from Aristotle would be that Onomarchos was very possibly the power behind the scenes. But we should not go too far. If the Mnaseas is the Phokian general who was a friend of Phayllos and guardian of Phalaikos (and who was himself killed by the Boiotians; see D.S. ..–), then the stasis cannot have lasted long.17 Secondly, what Aristotle preserves for us is the fact that, in the view of some of the participants, factional struggle among and within aristocratic families was what it was all about. Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that the very first thing that Philomelos did after seizing Delphoi, even before erasing the decrees of the Amphiktyons, was to slaughter the Thrakidai (D.S. ..), presumably a faction based around a family opposed to the families of Philomelos and Onomarchos. It is reasonable to suppose that the Thrakidai had been among the beneficiaries of the expulsion of Astykrates and his faction; and they may well have been, above others, instrumental in raising the claims against the

15

Zachos  . Ath. .d. Aeschin. . provides contemporary evidence for Mnason’s prescence in Athens. 17 McInerney   assumes that the war “ended the contention” between the families. 16

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Phokians of cultivating sacred land. Though direct evidence is lacking, it seems plausible to conjecture that there were probably close ties, very likely formalised through intermarriage, between Phokian and Delphian aristocratic families; and potentially equally strong enmities. Indeed, the story that Phokians were cultivating sacred land implies that they could own land within Delphian territory. In the section from the Politics cited above, Aristotle also tells how the beginning of the later staseis at Delphoi was an incident at a wedding, where a bridegroom changed his mind and did not take away the bride; her relatives concocted charges of sacrilege against him and had him put to death.18 If he had this, too, from Mnaseas, then this may also be an event from the over-heated s or s. We can do no more than speculate, however, on what the connections may be. We may be on somewhat firmer ground if we ask, which Phokians were accused of cultivating sacred land. The answer, among others, is Onomarchos himself. Diodoros tells us that he had had many large fines imposed on him by the Amphiktyons, “like the others” (7μοως το3ς 8λλοις), and had failed to pay them (D.S. ..). Diodoros carefully explains that this meant that to Onomarchos himself it was more desirable to continue the war after Philomelos’ death than to seek the peace which the more moderate Phokians wanted. At this point, Diodoros suggests, there was a strong moderate group seeking peace. But the disreputable Onomarchos talked the Phokians into continuing the war, not out of interest in the common good but by putting private advantage first.19 If we are willing to follow the implications of this passage, it changes things a lot. First, it suggests that the fines imposed by the Amphiktyons were not against the Phokians as a group but against the individuals accused of cultivating sacred land. That land had, by definition, to be near Delphoi, and presumably was owned or leased by Phokians who lived nearby or otherwise had connections with Delphoi. Philomelos might have been one of them, though his city of Ledon was somewhere in the Kephisos valley, not exactly close to Delphoi.20 Where Onomarchos came from, we simply do not know. But it is not hard to imagine that wealthy men from any part of Phokis might have connections with Delphoi. If the Amphiktyonic fines were levied against some Phokians, not the whole koinon, what of the threatened punishment? The usual assumption 18 Arist. Pol. b–a. Plutarch gives a more detailed version of the story, at Mor. b. 19 D.S. ..: τ& 9διον λυσιτελ:ς προκρνας. 20 Discussion at McInerney  .

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

is that the Amphiktyony was going to dedicate the whole of Phokis to the god, a drastic punishment indeed, leaving the Phokians to starve, emigrate, or perhaps lease their own land back. In Justin’s words, “the Phokians stood to be deprived of their land, children and wives” (Iust. ..). The decision was made at Delphoi, but then referred back to the member states for ratification. It is very hard to imagine that a majority of member states would have been willing to agree to such a brutal decision affecting an entire ethnos. In fact, however, that is not what Diodoros tells us. He does refer to the land of the Phokians being about to be dedicated (D.S. ..), but that seems to be elliptical. A few lines earlier, as noted above, he has referred to the hieromnemons’ demand that the Amphiktyony “dedicate the land of those defrauding the god” (D.S. ..)—which surely means a threat simply to dedicate the estates of those individuals who had been accused by their enemies at Delphoi of cultivating sacred land. So, I would suggest, this was more or less a private quarrel between some Phokian aristocrats and the groups left in a position of dominance in Delphoi after the expulsion of Astykrates. In their pursuit of this quarrel, these aristocrats played very fast and loose with the interests of their fellow Phokians. And that is where the deception, which is the theme of this volume, came in. Philomelos’ task was to convince the Phokians to give him powers to take actions which were in his own interests, but could not possibly be in theirs. He did this partly, as I have said, by not telling them what his actual intentions were. He also did it by the classic advertiser’s trick of exaggerating the danger of the situation. There is a hint of this in Diodoros, when Philomelos argues that to give in to the Amphiktyons would bring with it with it the danger of upsetting the life or livelihood of them all, τ"ν ;πντων (D.S. ..). It is all too easy to imagine Philomelos’ slick oratory gliding from a threat to the estates of a small group of nobles to a threat to the Phokian people en masse.21 Given that he was speaking to farmers whose lands in the Kephisos valley were wide open to the threat of retaliatory invasions from Boiotia, this was quite a trick. So he resorted to what still works best today in these situations: the appeal to national pride. He told them how Delphoi had originally been Phokian, quoting Homer. Phokian ‘presidency’ (prostasia) at Delphoi 21 We do not need to follow Buckler and Beck’s literal reading of Philomelos’ oratory: “If the sacred property was clearly that important, it must have been quite extensive” (Buckler and Beck  ).



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was traditional, he claimed. We get a glimpse of the line of argument later when he claims that by erasing the decrees of the Amphiktyons he was merely upholding the patrioi nomoi of the Phokians (D.S. ..–; ..). When people start talking about patrioi nomoi, it is generally, I would think, a sign that they are not to be trusted. That is as true in antiquity as it is today. We probably do not have enough evidence to refute Philomelos’ claims; but nor should we take them at face value. The Phokians do appear to have had a period in the th century when Delphoi was part of the Phokian koinon.22 Further than that we cannot go, except through archaeology. In the early Iron Age, Delphoi seems to have been quite archaeologically distinct from Phokis north and east of Parnassos, as one might expect.23 As time went on, greater integration occurred; but cultural integration may have little to do with political unity. Whether there was ever a time before the mid-th century when Delphoi formed part of a politically unified Phokis, we have no way of saying. But, in any case, in  questions of historical or archaeological truth simply did not matter. All that mattered was what Philomelos could make his listeners believe, and what sort of emotions it roused in them. Of course, Phokian aristocrats were not the only ones appealing to imagined histories: at Delphoi, even more than elsewhere, the appeal to history was always a likely strategy. We may perhaps discern something of a campaign by belligerent Delphians to assert their rights over the “sacred land”. Noel Robertson’s view that the st Sacred War was a th century invention still has a lot going for it.24 Unattested before , it sounds like a convenient story on which to hang claims of Delphian independence. The outbreak of the rd Sacred War, like the th Sacred War after it, took place within a foggy world of mythology and unprovable assertion. Not everybody suffered. Mnaseas’ son Mnason turns up years later as tyrant of Elateia and owner of , slaves.25 The losers were the ordinary citizens of Phokis, who allowed themselves to have the wool pulled over their eyes in , and suffered ruin as a result.

22 23 24 25

The most obvious evidence is Th. ... See, in general, Morgan  –. Robertson . Timaios (= FGrH  Fa, Fb).

TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD IN EARLY HELLENISTIC PROPAGANDA

Brian Bosworth “The king, he said, should not do anything other than speak truth in his relations with his subjects, and none of his subjects should think that the king does anything other than speak the truth.”

The speaker is, of course, Alexander the Great, harshly reproving his men for their distrust of his motives when he discharged their accumulated debts.1 He insists on reciprocity between his troops and himself. As a king he must speak the truth, and his subjects must take his words at face value. At first sight this is a paradox. Alexander made a speciality of deceit, as Arrian states in his final eulogy (“No one was more reliable in keeping pacts or agreements, or more secure from being trapped by the fraudulent”).2 He uses language which deliberately evokes Thucydides’ commendation of Themistocles. The Athenian statesman was the subtlest judge of the political situation both present and future, and could improvise with amazing skill at short notice. Themistocles was a master of intrigue, and was seen as the chief agent of the Persian defeat.3 In Arrian’s eyes Alexander had the same qualities. He had a supreme ability to forestall the enemy, and took the offensive before they even realised that there was a threat. Arrian is clearly thinking of episodes like the attack on the Malli in the Punjab.4 On that occasion Alexander crossed the desert east of the river Chenab and launched an assault at daybreak. The Malli had no inkling that he was in the vicinity, and the agricultural population 1 Arr. An. ..–; cf. D.S. ..; Curt. ..–; (with Yardley and Atkinson . –); Just. ..–; Plu. Alex. .; Mor. b–c. 2 Arr. An. ... Here Alexander does not deliberately act in bad faith. Arrian stresses the opposite: Alexander cannot be deceived, and consequently he has a talent for deception. Justin (..) has a more conventional view. It is Philip who is the master of deceit, who considered that no means of gaining victory were dishonourable. Arrian by contrast depicts Alexander as the ideal battlefield tactician, cool-headed and foresighted. 3 See particularly Th. .., with Hdt. .., in which Themistocles is extolled as the wisest of man in all Greece. So too the encomium at Th. ..– with Bosworth b . 4 Arr. An. ..–. See further Bosworth  –.

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was beginning work in the fields. As a result Alexander was able to kill most of them without their attempting resistance. It was an impressive example of anticipation, but the attack did not involve open deception. That had been the story of an earlier engagement, when Alexander dealt with the Uxians of the Zagros mountains.5 On this occasion, according to Arrian, he made them think that he would give them the traditional gifts paid as passage money by Persian monarchs. He prescribed a rendezvous point “so that they could take the agreed payments from himself as well” (Arr. An. ..). The Uxians naively supposed that the agreement would be observed, and Alexander safely sacked their territory and massacred many of them in their beds. This was certainly-double dealing, but it was also the sort of imaginative generalship that minimised losses on one’s own side at the greatest cost to the enemy. The tactics were most vividly on display in the extermination of the Indian mercenaries at Massaga. The details vary with the sources, but there is general agreement that Alexander violated the terms of surrender. The Indians were cut down to a man. For Arrian the Indians themselves had disregarded the letter of the truce, and were attempting to desert rather than join Alexander’s army.6 That was taken as treaty breaking, giving the Macedonians the pretext they needed to wipe out a group of men that had been particularly tenacious in their defence of the city.7 In the military context few people past or present would have objected to Alexander’s use of the strategic lie. He would not have thrown away his men’s lives for the sake of his moral reputation. Admittedly Plutarch (Alex. .) terms the episode a blemish (κηλς) on his otherwise kingly record in warfare, but the Macedonians would hardly have objected to this flagrant example of bad faith. It removed Massaga’s most effective defenders and left the city practically defenceless. According to Arrian no more than  of his men died in the whole length of the siege.8 This 5

On this controversial episode see Bosworth  –; Briant  –;  –; cf. Speck  There is considerable doubt about the actions in the Zagros passes, but scholars are now in general agreement that Alexander staged an ambush and executed it meticulously. 6 Arr. An. ..–; cf. Bosworth  , . For other traditions see D.S. ..– ; Epit. Alex. – (a direct order to exterminate the mercenaries); so Plu. Alex. .–; Curt. .. (surrender of the city, but no reference to the mercenaries). 7 See Arr. An. .., where Alexander prides himself on saving the lives of brave men. The wording echoes a much earlier episode, at the capture of Miletus where Alexander saw that its mercenary garrison was prepared to fight to the last (An. ..), and concluded an armistice on condition that they joined his army. 8 Arr. An. ... There is an interesting parallel in the actions of Coenus over the

truth and falsehood in early hellenistic propaganda



may be an exaggeration, but it is clear that the losses were kept to a minimum, thanks in part to Alexander’s breach of faith. We can now move back to Alexander’s reproof to his troops. Here the emphasis on truth occurs in a civil context. It amounts to a social contract, the king speaking truth and his subjects accepting the veracity of his claims. It is, moreover, a guarantee to all his subjects, not merely his Macedonians. The recipients of his promise of truthful speech are termed /πκοοι and #ρχ'μενοι, in other words, everybody who falls under his sway.9 Nothing could be more explicit or more absolute. The location of the episode also needs emphasis. It took place at Susa during the spring of .10 Here Alexander was in one of the four great Achaemenid palaces, where the Great King had held court and imposed his will on the cities of Greece. There in Susa Alexander was to promulgate the Exiles’ Decree, perhaps the most dramatic example of his absolutism.11 It was a new King’s Peace, imposed by a new Great King. At Susa, then, Alexander was exposed to Iranian culture—more so than anywhere else, even in Persepolis. In  Persian aristocrats were dominant at Alexander’s court, as was dramatically displayed in the mass marriage of Susa. Over  Persian princesses were wedded to Macedonian generals in a spectacle of unconstrained magnificence.12 Their male relatives will have attended as guests at the feast and offered the requisite homage to the new master of the world. In similar vein young Iranian nobles were enlisted in the elite Macedonian cavalry guard (the agêma), and some , troops were recruited winter of  / , when the Macedonian losses were again  against  Saca cavalry (Arr. An. ..). At Massaga the victor was Alexander, and the number of the enemy casualties was exaggerated to his greater glory. Compare the figures for the siege of Sangala, one of the largest cities in the Punjab (Arr. An. ..): the Indians lost , dead against a little under a hundred under Alexander, and Arrian underlines the fact that the circumstances were unusual, resulting in a disproportionately large number of wounded. 9 Arr. An. ... Curt. ..–, D.S. .. and Plu. Alex. . confine the debt relief to the Macedonian troops. See also Yardley and Atkinson  . 10 Nearchus joined forces with Alexander around February , seven months after leaving Patala in the in the mouth of the Indus (Plin. Nat. . = FGrH  F ). The fleet began its voyage after the etesian winds eased (so Arr. Ind. .). Arrian, following Nearchus, placed the departure midway through the Attic month of Boedromion, around September . The bitter enemies, Nearchus and Onesicritus, did at least agree on chronology. 11 On the historiographical importance of the Exiles’ Decree (which J.G. Droysen regarded as a pillar of Alexander’s new world empire, based on benevolent imperialism) see Bosworth  – and Yardley and Atkinson  –. 12 Arr. An. ..; according to Chares (FGrH  F  = Ath. .b–c) Alexander arranged  bridal chambers for the newlyweds.

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brian bosworth

from the upper satrapies, all trained in Macedonian weaponry and tactics. They were intended to be replacements for the troops demobilised later in the year, and if necessary they could be used as a counterphalanx,13 as very nearly happened during the troubles at Opis. Alexander was in a virtual sea of things Iranian, and it would be hardly surprising if he delved into the records of the past and absorbed some of the regal ideology. For our purposes the most illuminating material is found in the great rock inscriptions of Darius the Great. It is well known that he represented himself as the servant of Ahura Mazda, who granted him the kingdom with its  satrapies.14 He depicted his enemies, the usurpers who contested the throne, as servants of the Lie, and the corollary was the pre-eminence of Truth. The King’s regime depended on its observance. In Darius’ case that was literally true; he came to power by eliminating a usurper who claimed to be Bardiya the younger son of Cyrus.15 Darius’ position was extremely precarious. Almost certainly he had come to power through a coup, and his rivals will have dismissed his claims as fictitious. Hence the obsessive mantra that he was the enemy of the lie. Darius secured the throne by assassination and repression. He also claimed moral justification. It is preserved on an important inscription from Naqs-i-Rustam, in which the King equates right and truth: “What is right, that is my desire. I am not a friend to the Lie-follower”.16 Somewhat later, after listing the physical skills that he owes to Ahura Mazda, he addresses his subjects at large: “O menial, vigorously make you known of what sort I am and of what sort my skilfulnesses, and of what sort my superiority. Let not that seem false to you, which has been heard by thy ears. That do you hear, which is communicated to you”.17 In the Bisitun inscription Darius makes a similar protestation. He claims repeatedly that he repressed all the rebellious provinces in a single year and calls upon his subjects to support him: “this is what I did; by the favour of Ahura Mazda, in one and the same year I did (it). You who shall hereafter read this inscription let that which has been done by me 13

D.S. .. explicitly speaks of an antitagma, on which see Briant  –; Bosworth a –. 14 See particularly the Naqsi Rustam inscription of Darius (DN, printed by Kent  –; Briant  –), with Briant  –. 15 CAH .–; Burn  –; Briant  –. 16 DNb § b. Briant   aptly states: “the Great King could claim that he himself was first of all a master of truth.” 17 DNb § a–b. This occurs in a long exposition of royal virtues; the nub of it is the King’s claim to dexterity as a horseman and archer. Physical excellence is listed side by side with moral probity.

truth and falsehood in early hellenistic propaganda

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convince you; do not think it a lie.” This comes close to Arrian’s version of Alexander’s address to his troops. In both cases the monarch insists that it is the subject’s duty to believe in his veracity. Darius demands that his people accept his version of the troubled events of his accession, whereas Alexander makes an absolute claim: all his subjects must accept whatever he states as the truth. There is to be no questioning, no Macedonian parrhêsia. We now revert to the cancellation of debt. As for the source there can be no serious doubt. It must surely be Ptolemy’s History of Alexander. In the first place the passage is presented without qualification. On Arrian’s own methodology this restricts the field to his major sources, Aristobulus and Ptolemy, whose account he accepts as completely true, when they are in agreement.18 Next Arrian’s famous justification of his choice of sources echoes Alexander’s reproof to his troops at Susa, which Ptolemy must have heard. Arrian insists that that he has the weight of authority behind him. He was a king like Alexander, and so a lie was more disgraceful for him than for any one else.19 This statement has been treated with derision: it was totally naïve to accept that kingship was a guarantee of truth; a king had more reasons than most for mendacity. In that case Arrian is the author of the sentiment, honouring another king, his friend and master, the emperor Hadrian (who had every reason to cover up the circumstances of his own accession). But perhaps we should pause a minute. Arrian and Ptolemy were two of the most brilliant figures of their day, and they are unlikely to have made claims that they knew would make them a laughing stock. In any case we can exclude Arrian as the author of the observation on the veracity of kingship; it was in vogue long before he was born. The evidence is quite unequivocal. It comes from the so-called Letter of Aristeas, concerning a detailed but fictitious delegation of Jewish Sages, who were received by Ptolemy Philadelphus and worked in collaboration 18 “In my view Ptolemy and Aristobulus are more trustworthy in their narrative, since Aristobulus took part in Alexander’s expedition, and Ptolemy did the same; but as he himself was was also king it would have been more disgraceful for him to lie than for anyone else” (Arr. An. praef. ). The passage is echoed by Synesius, writing at the end of the fourth century ad in a very jocular mood. In his Calvitii enconium – he explains how the Macedonians took to fighting clean shaved and cites Ptolemy as his authority “who, since he was present at the scene, knew the facts and as he was a king when he wrote this work, he would not lie”. Synesius was clearly making fun of Arrian and adducing what had become a literary topos. 19 For the relationship between Arrian and Hadrian see particularly Bosworth  –; Birley  passim.

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to produce the canonical translation of the Septuagint.20 One of the highlights of the story was a royal banquet at which Philadelphus posed questions on kingship to the Jewish luminaries. One of the  questions concerned truth. The king asked how he was to maintain it, and received the answer: “by realising that falsehood brings great disgrace upon all men, far more so upon kings, for since they have the power to do what they wish, what reason should they have for lying? You should also bear in mind that God is a lover of truth.” Here we have a direct reflection of Arrian’s justification of his choice of sources. Kings have no reason for deceit because they can encompass their ends openly. Falsehood is unnecessary and for that reason all the more reprehensible. This little homily did not take place in actuality. Among many other incongruities it presupposes that Demetrius of Phaleron took a leading role as court librarian in the reign of Philadelphus, after Demetrius had done everything in his power to prevent his accession.21 However, there is little doubt that the Letter was concocted in the Hellenistic period, some time in the second century bc. It was clearly influenced by Ptolemy Soter, and it looks as though the sentiment had become common currency, to be used by the author of the Letter. Ptolemy had insisted on the veracity of monarchs. That insistence underpinned the truth of his account of Alexander’s achievements. He was a king and it was not in his interest to lie. That would undermine his credentials. We are faced with a progression of thought. Persian monarchs, Darius above all claimed to be the servant of truth, in perpetual opposition to the followers of the lie, and his subjects were instructed to take his protestations at face value. Alexander echoed the ideology, telling his men that they should not imagine that he ever lied (“Don’t even think about it!”). Next came Ptolemy’s assertion that the king must speak the truth or suffer ignominy. Almost certainly he was referring back to Alexander’s great declaration at Susa. Alexander had insisted on the primacy of truth, and maintained that veracity was an indispensable attribute of monarchy. An important consequence followed. If a king were detected in deceit then it undermined the legitimacy of his regime. Hence Ptolemy’s declaration in his History of Alexander. He was a king, and what he said was true—otherwise he was no king. That had been Alexander’s implicit message at Susa, issued in the full confidence that the principle would not be invoked against him. 20 21

There is now a huge bibliography, best consulted in Schürer : III –. D.L. . (= Hermippus F Wehrli). Cf. Fraser  i. .

truth and falsehood in early hellenistic propaganda

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The dynasts who succeeded him were more vulnerable, more open to hostile propaganda. Consequently there was a constant interplay, all actors in the game taking moves to put their enemies in the wrong. There is a good example in the prelude to the campaign of Ipsus (– ), when the leaders of the two great coalitions intrigued against each other.22 They mounted what one can only describe as a scare campaign. Faced with the possibility of an attack by Antigonus, Cassander and Lysimachus tried to enlist the support of the other two monarchs— Seleucus and Ptolemy. They sent envoys attacking Antigonus’ supposed territorial ambitions against Macedonia. “claiming that, if Antigonus should gain control of Macedonia, he would take their kingdoms from the others also”. As a result Ptolemy and Seleucus believed that the statements were true (δ'ξαντες #λη! λγειν) and joined forces with the other two dynasts (D.S. ..). They clearly endorsed the principle that kings speak the truth and should be thought to do so. Ptolemy himself was involved in a particularly intricate piece of diplomacy—or chicanery. That took place in , shortly before Ipsus. At that time Ptolemy was engaged in a protracted siege of Sidon and he was approached by messengers who brought the false report (#παγγλλοντες ψευδ"ς) that his allies, Seleucus and Lysimachus, had been defeated and had withdrawn to their base at Heracleia Pontica. As a result Syria lay open to the vast Antigonid forces. Ptolemy, it is said, was deluded by the reports, which he was convinced were true.23 Accordingly he made a four month truce with the Sidonians and retreated into Egypt. The source used here by Diodorus was almost certainly the Antigonid statesman Hieronymus of Cardia who was a contemporary and will have participated in the battle at Ipsus.24 Though an Antigonid courtier he seems to have given Ptolemy a surprisingly good press, and one may trace an element of apology. It looks as though Ptolemy had resorted to trickery to gain control of Syria, which had been a primary object of expansion since Alexander’s death. Hieronymus, who was a diplomat as well as a soldier and a historian, must have had personal relations with 22

See Billows  –; Bosworth  –. See D.S. .. (παραλογισ!ε4ς ο