Texts in Context:
Thirty Tyrants
and One Nuisance
By Gabriel Blanchard
A thousand years before this, in the Gilgamesh, we met the genesis of literature as we know it. Now we meet the genesis—more than that; the generator—of philosophy as we know it.
The Wisest in the World
Before we resume our narrative of the Thirty Tyrants, we must zero in on a man who was in every sense a character in classical Athens. In our posts about the age of Pericles and the Peloponnesian War, we have had two or three occasions to mention Socrates in passing, alluding to his military service, his interest in philosophy, and his eccentric sense of humor (judging from which, he would probably be quite disappointed if we failed to mention here that he was famously ugly). At some unknown date, a friend of his, Chærephon of Sphettus—by all accounts a rather boisterous personality—visited the Pythia, or oracle of Delphi. Supposedly inspired by Apollo,* she was famed for always telling the truth, but also for doing so in cryptic lines of hexameter that had to be puzzled out as best one could. Chærephon’s question for the priestess was: “Is there any man wiser than Socrates?” The Pythia meditated, and delivered her oblique, mystical reply:
“No.”
If Plato’s account of Socrates is to be believed, this compliment baffled him. As far as he was aware, he didn’t know anything. Whether he thought this out of natural humility, or merely took up the position for the sake of argument, or had been driven to uncertainty by thinkers like Anaxagoras, Heraclitus, and Protagoras**—that is impossible to say. Regardless, Socrates took to cross-examining others, to see what they knew. According to him, he did this out of curiosity, to see if he could prove Apollo wrong; but he rapidly found that almost no one he spoke to knew much of anything, and even those who did have a little real knowledge were so pretentious and vain as to make their knowledge insignificant.
His method was later known as “Socratic irony”: a pose of near-total ignorance, with a tactic of naïve questioning that tended rapidly to expose gaps and contradictions in other people’s views without exposing him to anything like the same intellectual vulnerability, for he made no claims. Even if this Socratic irony was sincere—or perhaps especially if it was sincere—it is easy to see how he made enemies of those who liked to style themselves Sophists, i.e. “intellectuals.” Still more so, if they were in the habit of charging people money to learn from them, which the Sophists did and Socrates did not.
Either way, like the Sophists, before long Socrates had accumulated a group of friends and hangers-on. Many were young men of the aristocratic class, several of whom gained fame of their own: Alcibiades, Critias, Xenophon (one of the only two to write a firsthand account of his teacher), Glaucon and his younger brother Plato, Antisthenes, Phædo. Some were attracted by the fact that he publicly embarrassed people, including political partisans of both sides. Others, more wholesomely, became interested in questions he was eager to discuss, about the virtues, knowledge, beauty, and the gods. It may have been no coincidence that he was a son-in-law of Aristides the Just.†
A Parting of Ways
How long Socrates had been wandering the streets of Athens and bothering people before the end of the war, no one knows. Aristophanes’ comedy The Clouds features him as a character, so his antics were familiar enough to publicly make fun of by 423 BC; ergo, he must at least have had a career of at least twenty years when Athens surrendered in 404, and perhaps longer.
One of his students, mentioned above, was Critias, one of Alcibiades’ friends. He came from an old noble family—in fact, he was a cousin once-removed of Plato. A playwright, historian, and orator of considerable talent and lofty expression, when it came to politics, he had apparently only dabbled; even so, his dabbling, or maybe his friendship with Alcibiades, had gotten him exiled to Thessaly. When the war ended, Critias came back. However, at some point, he had become estranged from his teacher. Xenophon relates that Socrates had embarrassed Critias in front of a lover, and says Critias hated Socrates from that moment forward; whatever the reason, there could be no doubt about the fact.
The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
About, about, in reel and rout,
The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch's oils,
Burned green, and blue, and white.
Shortly after his return, Critias became, in substance, the head of the new post-war government—a collection of aristocrats who, in their own eyes, had had it with the disasters imposed on their city by majority rule. Ten were chosen by a panel of magistrates; ten were elected by the Athenian assembly; ten were hand-picked by a politically moderate general, a man called Theramenes, who had negotiated the Athenian surrender. Thus rose the Thirty Tyrants.
The Reign of Terror
Backed by a Spartan-supplied private police, the Thirty decided not to draw up a reformed constitution (their original raison d’être), but simply to rule the city directly. A list of three thousand full citizens was drawn up; there is some question whether it was ever completed, and by all accounts it was changed frequently. Only men on the list had a right to bear weapons, be tried by a jury, or even live within city limits. Aristotle records that the Thirty executed fifteen hundred people without trial—sometimes, it seems without even feigning a charge. Estimates place the total deaths under them at five percent of the populace.
In his Memorabilia, Xenophon tells us Socrates made a smart remark on the subject, to the effect that a cattle farmer who incessantly thinned out his herd would have to admit he was a bad cattle farmer, so it was strange that rulers who were thinning out a city couldn’t admit they were bad rulers. He was called promptly before a subcommittee of the Thirty—including Critias—and forbidden to keep up his old habit of asking people questions. A bit of banter followed, in which Socrates inquired whether he were still allowed to ask for food when purchasing it in the market; the interview was ended when one of them snapped that he was to stay off topics like truth and virtue, “and especially cattle farming, or you’ll be ‘thinning out the herd’ yourself.”
Before the end, Critias’s fanatic bloodlust even turned him against Theramenes. The latter protested repeatedly against the arbitrariness and violence of Critias and the rest, calling them worse than the democracy’s worst excesses. Finally, Critias publicly denounced him as a traitor and slashed his name off the citizenship list with a dagger. Theramenes tried to take refuge in a temple, but he was dragged from it and forced to swallow poison hemlock.
Like many tyrants, the Thirty tried to spread the blame around, involving whomever they could in their vile decisions. In this vein, they summoned Socrates and four other citizens and ordered them to arrest a man called Leon of Salamis (thought to be the same Leon as a renowned general of the late war). To argue with the Thirty was perilous, but to defy them was death. Nevertheless, rather than obey this command, Socrates simply went home.‡ Yet it was not for his act of civil disobedience that, in 399 BC, Socrates would be tried for his life—for the arrest and execution of Leon was one of the last acts of the Thirty.
Escape—And a Scapegoat
In 403, under a pro-democracy general named Thrasybulus, Athens revolted against her Thirty Tyrants. They were overthrown after a rule of only eight months. Perhaps Critias sincerely believed in the cause of inequality before the law; perhaps he was too addicted to power to grasp that he had lost; or perhaps he foresaw that he would assuredly be executed for his depraved conduct, and would not give his fellow citizens that satisfaction. Whatever the reason, he died fighting, shedding Athenian blood to the last.
Except the remaining twenty-eight tyrants, and a number of their lackeys, the Athenians declared another amnesty. No one could be prosecuted for crimes committed, perhaps under the threat of death, in those eight months of horror. The three thousand citizens acknowledged by the Thirty were left unharmed; exiles were readmitted; the rule of law was restored. It would be nice to say that, from this point forward, this was “a sadder and a wiser” city. It would be nice, and not entirely false.
But there was still one man more who had to die: the rescuer of Alcibiades, the tutor of Critias, the man who—since long before the period covered by the amnesty—had made it his business to be the embarrassment of all Athens.
*Apollo’s “portfolio” is a strange mishmash to us: light, music, poetry, shepherds, healing, prophecy, the safety of children, and archery. Other Olympians were similar, e.g. Poseidon, god of the sea, horses, and earthquakes. One can discern some through-lines that were more intuitive in Greek culture: e.g., viewing Apollo as a god of education brings his concerns together, and the link between earthquakes and tidal waves makes Poseidon’s clearer. (Still don’t get the horse thing, though.)
**Anaxagoras and Heraclitus were pre-Socratic Ionian philosophers. Protagoras was a Sophist from Thrace; supposedly he first said “Man is the measure of all things,” which Plato took as a statement of moral relativism.
†The outcome of this marriage does not appear to be known. Socrates may have been widowed. In any event, he married again; his second wife, Xanthippe, bore him three sons, and appears once or twice in Plato’s dialogues.
‡He has occasionally drawn criticism for not attempting to warn Leon, but the present author finds such critiques short-sighted. It seems the direction was to arrest Leon immediately; if so, the only way to warn him would have been for Socrates to outrun all four of the others—challenging if not impossible for a man approaching seventy! We know from other incidents that he was brave enough to risk his neck for others. It seems more plausible that, this time, there was simply nothing he could do.
Gabriel Blanchard, although he has a bachelor’s in Classics from College Park, has thus far avoided swallowing hemlock. He is a proud uncle of seven nephews, and lives in Baltimore, MD.
If you enjoyed this piece, you might also like our “Sorting Through Sophistries” series, teaching you how to recognize fallacies: you can find the introduction to that series here, and we’ve already profiled many common fallacies, including the tu quoque, the misinterpretation of idioms, the abuse of statistics, and the slippery slope argument. You might also enjoy our series on “the Great Conversation,” indexed in this post, and the official CLT podcast, Anchored. Thank you for reading the Journal.
Published on 15th July, 2024. Page image of the ruins of Apollo’s temple at Delphi, photographed by Helen Simonsson in 2012 and used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license (source).
