Vulgar envy and spite: Cleon, Socrates, and Aristophanes.

In 425 BC, seven years into the Peloponnesian War – far nearer the beginning than the end of that sprawling contest – Cleon, “a popular leader of the time and very powerful with the multitude”, stood up in the Athenian assembly and damned his city’s generals as a bunch of slackers and cowards.

A small force of Spartan and allied infantry was being blockaded by the Athenians on a tiny island near Pylos, on the far side of the Peloponnese. In an effort to retrieve their men, the Spartans some months before had come to Athens to offer a peace treaty; but the assembly, thanks in part to Cleon’s influence, had sent the envoys packing, hoping by the outright capture of the Spartans to extract more favourable terms.

However, despite being short of food and fresh water, the men on the island had shown no inclination to surrender, and the blockade was proving to be ruinously expensive to maintain. Now, with winter coming on, it appeared that the operation would soon have to be abandoned, the Spartans permitted to escape, the Athenian advantage squandered.

Just as the assembly seemed ready to bow to this necessity, Cleon hopped up, and

pointing at Nicias, son of Niceratus, then general, whom he hated, he tauntingly said that it would be easy, if they had men for generals, to sail with a force and take those in the island, and that if he had himself been in command, he would have done it.

Nicias, despising his accuser in turn, primly replied that Cleon was welcome to step up and lead the expedition himself. Cleon dismissed this as mere rhetoric, until Nicias upped the stakes by publicly resigning his generalship. The assembly, out of faith in Cleon’s competence or delight at the prospect of his humiliation, roared him into accepting the command.

Making the best of it, he blustered that within twenty days he would take the island and bring the Spartans home as prisoners. “The Athenians,” we are told, “could not help laughing at his fatuity.”

Yet after a brief and triumphant campaign – whose success Thucydides attributes to a combination of dumb luck and the talent of Cleon’s co-general Demosthenes – Cleon fulfilled his promise, returning from Pylos with 292 prisoners, among them 120 members of the Spartan elite who could be used as hostages to deter future hostile actions.

It ought to be remembered that Thucydides, the source of the above account, had himself been a general in the war, and was banished from Athens, during the period of Cleon’s greatest influence, for his botched defense of Amphipolis. So perhaps he can be forgiven for the apparent tone of satisfaction with which he recounts Cleon’s death a few years later in the attempt to recapture the very town he’d lost. As he describes it,

Cleon, who from the first had no thought of fighting, at once fled and was overtaken and slain by a Myrcinian targeteer[.]

Yet it’s unclear why, if Cleon “had no thought of fighting”, he kept on volunteering for these extremely high-risk missions, when he could easily have stayed home, talking tough in the assembly.

***

Any attempt to rehabilitate Cleon’s reputation will of necessity focus on his actions at Pylos and Amphipolis – his second and third appearances in Thucydides’ narrative. His first appearance the modern reader will find harder to defend.

This concerns his participation in the debate over the fate of Mytilene, a city which had revolted from Athenian rule, finally surrendering after a long siege. Cleon’s faction, insisting that the Mytileneans must be punished brutally to deter revolts by other subject cities, called for all the adult males to be put to death, and the women and children sold into slavery.

The Athenian assembly at first agreed, and then, having second thoughts, reconvened the following day to reopen the debate. Cleon condemned their soft-heartedness and argued strongly against the reversal of the death sentence.

In light of his reputation, you might expect Cleon’s speech to have been a mere thuggish cry for revenge. Thucydides introduces him into his narrative as “the most violent man at Athens”; Plutarch, writing four centuries later, would dismiss him as “a fellow remarkable for nothing but his loud voice and brazen face”, and deplore his lack of refinement:

Among other things, he destroyed all the decorum of public speaking; he was the first who ever broke out into exclamations, flung open his dress, smote his thigh, and ran up and down whilst he was speaking[.]

It must therefore be admitted, in support of Thucydides’ objectivity, that he put in the hated Cleon’s mouth a clear-headed, even compelling justification of rule by terror. The Mytileneans, he pointed out, had revolted willingly:

Consider therefore! if you subject to the same punishment the ally who is forced to rebel by the enemy, and him who does so by his own free choice, which of them, think you, is there that will not rebel upon the slightest pretext; when the reward of success is freedom, and the penalty of failure nothing so very terrible?

Perhaps with a bit more thigh-smiting and running up and down, Cleon might have won his point; but despite his efforts, Athens voted to execute only a thousand or so of the “prime movers in the rebellion”.

As the war dragged on, hearts grew harder. Six years after Cleon’s death, when the Athenians captured Melos – a town heretofore neutral – they did to its defenders what they had recoiled from doing at Mytilene.

***

The Peloponnesian War is perhaps the greatest refutation of the cliché that history is written by the victors. With characteristically Laconic disdain for fine words and braggartry, the Spartans left no account of their triumph. Our knowledge of the war comes almost exclusively from Thucydides and Xenophon, both men of Athens, although not overly partisan ones: Thucydides is archetypally even-handed, while Xenophon, if anything, had pro-Spartan sympathies.

In his introduction to the 1951 edition of The Complete Writings of Thucydides, John H. Finley mentions that,

It is on first glance astonishing that the Athenians, who invented democracy, on the whole speak so badly of it.

Xenophon and Plato openly preferred Sparta’s militarized aristocracy. Aristotle’s view was more nuanced, but hardly an endorsement of letting the yokels have their way. The three great tragedians, fixated on the legendary deeds of kings and heroes, addressed the dramas of modern Athenian statecraft allegorically, if at all; while Aristophanes, in The Knights, portrayed the demos as an easily duped old gentleman:

Proud, O Demus, thy sway.
Thee, as Tyrant and King,
All men fear and obey,
Yet, O yet, ’tis a thing
Easy, to lead thee astray.
Empty fawning and praise
Pleased thou art to receive ;
All each orator says
Sure at once to believe ;
Wit thou hast, but ’tis roaming ;
Ne’er we find it its home in.

Among the major Athenian writers, says Finley, the one who wrote most sympathetically of democracy was Thucydides. But his idea of democracy was the forty-year supremacy of the “Olympian” Pericles, who by his personal charisma restrained and guided the Athenian mob. After his death, vain adventurers like Alcibiades and social climbers like Cleon arose and led the city to catastrophe.

In his 2009 book Thucydides: The Reinvention of History, Donald Kagan makes the case that Pericles’ hypercautious strategy could only have led to bankruptcy and defeat in a war lasting more than a couple years, and that populist leaders like Cleon were probably correct to push for a more aggressive posture after his death. Right or wrong, Kagan says,

we must understand that in each case Cleon won the support of the Athenians, and that he spoke to them honestly and directly, without deception or deviousness. Though he is often referred to as the first of the Athenian demagogues, he did not flatter the masses but addressed them in the severe, challenging, realistic language sometimes used by Pericles himself. Moreover, he put his own life on the line, serving on the expeditions he recommended and dying on the last one. [1]

Cleon’s sleazy reputation was cemented thanks to Thucydides and, especially, Aristophanes, who in The Knights portrayed him as a slave, “the greatest rogue and liar in the world”, who rules his master Demus through promises and flattery. Cleon’s fellow slaves Nicias and Demosthenes, tired of his antics, enlist a passing sausage-seller, even more coarse, stupid, and unscrupulous, to win over Demus and put an end to their rival’s tyranny.

It wasn’t for his ruthlessness that Cleon was despised: Mytilene is mentioned just once in The Knights, in reference to a bribe he supposedly elicited from the citizens of that city. Why they were bribing the man who’d been advocating their mass slaughter a couple of years before is unknown.

Pylos, however, is alluded to more than a half-dozen times. Aristophanes’ main complaint against Cleon, apart from his being an uncouth arriviste who came up through the leather trade, is that he dishonourably claimed credit for another man’s victory: Demosthenes complains that when he “baked a rich Laconian cake at Pylos”, Cleon snuck in and stole it, presenting it to their master as his own.

To his contemporaries, Cleon’s offenses were ill breeding, rapacity, and self-aggrandizement. His “kill all the Mytileneans” policy, though a tad audacious, was well within the Overton window.

At any rate, Aristophanes’ dung-flinging did nothing to diminish the popularity of Cleon and other so-called demagogues. As John Williams White concedes in his introduction to the Loeb edition of Aristophanes’ plays,

he drove no one of them from power; there is little evidence, indeed, that he damaged their influence or even disturbed their brazen self-confidence.

Perhaps that’s because Athenian playgoers knew not to take his attacks quite seriously.

Quoting some slanderous wisecracks made against Pericles by the comic writers of his time, Plutarch observes,

And how can one wonder at any number of strange assertions from men whose whole lives were devoted to mockery, and who were ready at any time to sacrifice the reputation of their superiors to vulgar envy and spite […] ? So very difficult a matter is it to trace and find out the truth of anything by history, when, on the one hand, those who afterwards write it find long periods of time intercepting their view, and, on the other hand, the contemporary records of any actions and lives, partly through envy and ill-will, partly through favour and flattery, pervert and distort truth.

In fact, there is reason to believe that Plutarch, in his Life of Pericles, mistook the plot of a lost farce by Hermippus for an account of a real-life court case involving Pericles and his lover Aspasia – a mistake which has ever since distorted our understanding of the beginnings of the Peloponnesian War. [2]

If Plutarch could make such a boner after the passage of a mere four centuries, are we likely to have more luck digging out the truth after the passage of an additional twenty, when many of the writers to whom the ancient historians refer are now lost to us, except through the snippets said ancients chose to preserve? At best, we can reassess the limited and contradictory facts available to us in light of our own assumptions about what constitutes vulgarity and respectability, cravenness and courage, virtue and wickedness.

***

It’s curious that so many readers have been prepared to accept as basically truthful Aristophanes’ caricature of Cleon in The Knights, while balking at accepting his caricature of Socrates in The Clouds.

The difference is that in the latter case we have, to place alongside Aristophanes’ satire, Plato and Xenophon’s worshipful depictions, whereas our opinion of Cleon has been shaped exclusively by the writings of those who detested him. A volume of Cleon’s Table Talk, if any of his partisans had taken the trouble to produce one, would no doubt prove edifying – maybe even entertaining: Plutarch, no sympathizer, alludes to the demagogue’s “nimble wit” and “bold jests”, contrasting them with Nicias’ more plodding style. [3]

Says I.F. Stone in his 1988 book The Trial of Socrates,

[T]he bits and pieces that survive from the Old Comedy, as it is called, of fifth-century Athens indicate that to his fellow citizens [Socrates] was long regarded as an odd — even lovable — eccentric, a town “character”. This is how his contemporaries saw him, and not as we see him in the golden haze of the Platonic dialogues.

In The Clouds, a father harassed by creditors determines to take his son to Socrates to be taught “the unjust Logic / That can shirk debts”.

Arriving at the school, we discover the students with their faces pressed to the earth to “seek things underground” while their assholes, turned to the heavens, simultaneously study astronomy. Socrates descends in a basket from above, where he has been walking on air, he says, and contemplating the sun. He informs the father that there is no Zeus, and that in his school only three gods are acknowledged: Chaos, the Clouds, and the Tongue. [4]

After a great many fart jokes and yet more abuse of Cleon, the son completes a course in Socratic “humbug and circumlocution”. The father, confident now in his son’s ability to win any lawsuit that might arise, insults and chases away his creditors.

Alas, he soon discovers that the verbal tricks of Socrates can be turned just as easily against him – the son assaults the father, and then blandly justifies his violence, declaring:

How sweet it is these novel arts, these clever words to know,
And have the power established rules and laws to overthrow.

Plutarch tells us that Socrates took this raillery in good humour, comparing it to being roasted at a dinner party. [5] Plato, too, depicted Socrates and Aristophanes as pals sharing a boozy all-night bull session in The Symposium.

And yet in the Apology, which depicts Socrates’ defense at his trial on charges of impiety and corrupting the young, Plato has his hero complain that his most formidable opponents are not the accusers who have brought the charges against him, but his “first accusers” – those who years earlier taught the public to sneer at him:

You have seen this yourself in the comedy of Aristophanes, a Socrates swinging about there, saying he was walking on air and talking a lot of other nonsense about things of which I know nothing at all.

I.F. Stone doubts that the Athenians were so simple as to take Aristophanes’ absurdities literally:

But only a humorless pedant can believe that the joshing of the comic poets led to the trial of Socrates. … To blame Socrates’ fate on the comic poets is like blaming a politicians’ defeat today on the way he has been “misrepresented” by newspaper cartoonists.

Stone’s argument is not that Socrates’ prosecution was deserved – Stone was a leftist of the old school who believed in protection even for subversive or dangerous speech – but that in their fictionalized accounts of his trial, Plato and Xenophon deliberately obscured the real and justified reasons the Athenians had for fearing his influence on the youth. The Trial of Socrates was written, Stone says,

to give the Athenian side of the story, to mitigate the city’s crime and thereby remove some of the stigma the trial left on democracy and on Athens.

***

Anytus, the most prominent among the three accusers who brought Socrates to trial, had like Cleon derived his modest fortune from the leather business. No doubt like Cleon he had rankled at snobbish comments about his being tainted with the stench of the tannery.

In her 1956 historical novel The Last of the Wine, Mary Renault imagines her protagonist, a young man of Socrates’ circle, being buttonholed by Anytus and scolded for his association with the philosopher:

“That man,” said Anytos, “ever since I remember, has been seen about with rich young idlers, flaunting their privilege of leisure, and frittering away their best years when they might have been mastering an honest trade. Can you deny that Kritias was his pupil? Or perhaps you would rather say his friend? What is more, ever since the democracy was restored, he has mocked at it, and undermined it.”

Critias was the former follower of Socrates who, after the fall of Athens at the the close of the war, headed the short-lived oligarchical dictatorship known as the Thirty. In I.F. Stone’s view, it was Socrates’ association with Critias and his followers – who, even after Critias’ death and the restoration of democracy, were still regarded as a threat – that led to his prosecution.

This was what was meant by the indictment in which Socrates was accused of “corrupting the young”: not that he had turned idle upper-class Athenians against their fathers or the gods, but that he had turned them into dangerous anti-government radicals. Stone has no trouble digging out quotes from Plato and Xenophon to illustrate that Socrates’ acolytes, or at least some of them, were contemptuous of Athenian democracy. [6]

Whether Socrates shared his acolytes’ views is less clear. In Xenophon’s (and Mary Renault’s) telling, it wasn’t political differences that had caused Critias and Socrates to fall out, but Critias’ habit of groping attractive boys: Socrates had publicly scolded him once for rubbing himself up against a certain youth like a pig against a stone.

In revenge, Critias when in power passed a law making it illegal “to teach the art of words”; which in practice meant, he oilily informed his former mentor, that it was forbidden for Socrates to “hold any converse whatever with the young”.

The prosecution of Socrates may likewise have had its roots in a personal grudge. Here Renault’s fictional Anytus, while barking down an attempt to explain how he has misunderstood the philosopher’s teachings, lets slip the real cause of his animus:

“Quibbles!” he said. “Everlasting quibbling, eating away the decent principles every man’s instinct should tell him are true. How does he get this hold over young men? By flattering them, of course; making them think they have a mission in life to be something out of the way, like that head-in-the-air young fellow [Plato] who was sneering at the Demos just now: teaching them that to work at a good trade, where they could learn the meaning of true democracy in give-and-take with their mates, is a waste of their precious souls; that unless they can dawdle about with him all day in the colonnades, talking away everything sacred, they will turn to clods—just like their poor fathers, who have only sweated blood that they might live as citizens and not as slaves.”

It seems that Socrates had at one time been acquainted with Anytus’ son – a boy “not lacking in firmness of spirit”, and therefore worthy in the philosopher’s eyes of elevation above the “servile occupation” that was the source of his father’s wealth.

Ever after, Anytus resented Socrates for commenting that he “ought not to confine his son’s education to hides.”

***

In Plato’s Apology, Socrates tells the jury that he believes it to be his duty to fulfill his “philosopher’s mission” and go on making a public nuisance of himself, even at the risk of his own life – just as it was his duty to remain where his generals placed him during the battles of Potidaea, Amphipolis, and Delium.

There are well-known anecdotes concerning Socrates’ heroics at Potidaea and Delium, but nothing is known about his involvement at Amphipolis – where, if you’ll recall, he would have served under the doomed generalship of Cleon.

Judging by the percentage of the comedians’ barbs that were directed at them, Socrates and Cleon must have been two of the most famous men in Athens. The Clouds had been produced the year before Amphipolis, The Knights the year before that. In their off hours, did these two soldiers ever get together to compare Aristophanic arrow wounds?

We don’t know anything about Cleon’s leadership style – Thucydides doesn’t give him a pre-battle speech, as he does the opposing Spartan general – but we can speculate that, as a radical democrat, he would have striven for an easy camaraderie with his troops. If so, it’s far from clear that the hoplites – many of them aristocrats who would have looked down on their “new money” commander – would have responded with warmth to his egalitarian outreach.

As for Socrates, I’m sure he would have made a show of friendliness. How could he have resisted the opportunity to poke a few finger-holes in Cleon’s sense of self-satisfaction? He might easily have driven his thin-skinned general into a rage, if not by philosophizing rings around him then by dropping some jerky comment about his background in the trades. But it’s just possible that Cleon with his “nimble wit” would have held his own.

***

If it’s not quite true that history is written by the victors, it’s obviously true that history is written by those who write the histories. They tend not to be pragmatic middle-class men like Cleon and Anytus, who are busy tending to their affairs, but the kind of dreamers condemned by Anytus as “rich young idlers, flaunting their privilege of leisure”.

We see ancient Athens through the eyes of the men who had the time and inclination to fritter away their days yakking about the nature of justice and virtue. They weren’t all rich, by any means, and they weren’t all idle, at least as far as their intellects were concerned. Nevertheless, their writings tended to reflect the preoccupations and prejudices of their social class: they had a high regard for their own intelligence, they scoffed at the commonplace, and they resented the system that subordinated their preferences to those of the working stiffs who kept their city running.

The commonplace men who elevated Cleon and Anytus to positions of influence would be startled, no doubt, at the topsy-turvy picture of their society communicated to the future by men they dismissed as zanies. No doubt our own zanies are busily compiling a history of our own times which would startle us, too, if we lived long enough to see it accepted as truth.

M.

1. Kagan mentions that Cleon’s great rival Nicias, after his death in the misbegotten Sicilian expedition of 415-413, was omitted from the stone commemorating the war dead because, Pausanias tells us, he had surrendered in what the Athenians deemed an ignominious manner. Cleon’s name, however, his countrymen continued to honour, placing it “at the head of those who fought at Amphipolis”. (So says Kagan. As far as I can tell, Pausanias only specifies that that “those who marched with Cleon” were thus honoured. The Greek version can be consulted here.)

2. The likelihood that Plutarch mistook the plot of a lost satire on Pericles for actual history is mentioned by I.F. Stone in The Trial of Socrates. He refers us to this note in the 1927 edition of the Cambridge Ancient History.

3. Unfortunately, Plutarch provides just one example of Cleon’s humour: showing up late to a sitting of the Athenian assembly, a garland perched ostentatiously on his head, Cleon mock-piously informed the crowd that he’d been kept busy with his sacrifices and was now late for a dinner date, so would they mind adjourning till tomorrow? – “Whereupon the Athenians, laughing, rose up, and dissolved the assembly.” That the gag isn’t all that funny bespeaks the fondness the people must have held for him.

4. I find it helpful, reading Aristophanes, to have multiple translations of the play open: one in verse, for euphony; one in modern prose, for comprehension; and one with detailed notes. Which is why I’ve quoted from three different versions of The Clouds.

5. Regarding Socrates’ broad-minded reaction to Aristophanes’ abuse, Todd M. Compton writes in Victim of the Muses:

[Plutarch’s anecdote] does portray a Socrates unruffled by Aristophanes’ play. But it also portrays a friend of Socrates who is clearly shocked at the extent of the abuse (“all manner of abuse … in every possible way”) directed at his friend. In addition, this fits into the familiar genre of Socratic stories in which he is seen as an extraordinarily wise man (it is prefaced by an explanation that wise men can control their anger). The point of the story is that one would expect Socrates to be upset, but he reacts with wisdom, self-control, and urbanity.

6. I.F. Stone knows enough not to take Aristophanes’ lampoons too seriously, yet he elects to interpret Plato’s thought experiments as literal blueprints for the design of a functioning state. He dismisses in an incredulous aside the view held by, among others, Allan Bloom, that the regimented, thought-controlled, eugenic state described in The Republic is, as Stone puts it, “a satire by Plato on his own utopianism!”

Here’s Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind expressing the viewpoint that Stone finds so risible:

What is so intolerable about The Republic, as Plato shows, is the demand that men give up their land, their money, their wives, their children, for the sake of the public good, their concern for which had previously been buttressed by these lower attachments. The hope is to have a happy city made up entirely of unhappy men. Similar demands are made today in an age of slack morality and self-indulgence. Plato taught that, however laudable justice may be, one cannot expect prodigies of virtue from ordinary people. Better a real city tainted by selfish motives than one that cannot exist, except in speech, and that promotes real tyranny.

—

As I mentioned in my essay on literary eunuchs, Mary Renault in The Last of the Wine makes Socrates’ real-life disciple Phaedo a survivor of the Athenian massacre at Melos. I’ve never written about Aristophanes before, but I did drop a reference to Lysistrata into this exploration of accents, clothing, and class in the movies. And, oh yeah – Cleon, meet William Jennings Bryan: “He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming half-wits.”

Two literary eunuchs.

In this retrospective on the 20th anniversary of Gladiator, that film’s co-star Djimon Hounsou says something odd:

The initial script had me being the head of slaves during that time and I said, “I shouldn’t be the definition of slavery.” Slavery didn’t exist back then, so, what are we talking about, really? We’re talking about using humans to do that sort of fighting entertainment and all those people were considered slaves.

Now, English isn’t Hounsou’s first language, so he might have misspoken, or been misheard. Or perhaps he subscribes to some esoteric definition of “slavery” that somehow excludes the Roman variety. But on the surface it appears that one of the stars of Gladiator­­ – a movie about slavery in ancient times – came away from it believing that there was no slavery in ancient times.

Speaking of fictional depictions of slavery…

***

“Two literary eunuchs” would be a good title for a bitchy essay about a pair of insufficiently virile male authors. Tolkien and Lewis, maybe? Auden and Isherwood? These nerds? But I’m not sufficiently virile to write such an essay.

Instead I’ll be talking about two actual eunuchs from literature – and from history – the narrators of Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy and Robert Graves’ Count Belisarius.

Between 1969 and 1981 Mary Renault wrote a biography and a loose trilogy of historical novels about Alexander the Great. I can recommend them all, but especially the middle chapter of the trilogy, The Persian Boy, from 1972, which describes the most eventful period of Alexander’s career from the perspective of a eunuch slave boy who is taken into his personal service.

In Renault’s telling, Bagoas is the child of a Persian aristocrat who, during the dynastic manoeuvrings that brought King Darius to the throne, was killed on the orders of the previous king’s vizier (also named Bagoas, to the confusion of later students of history). Marked for death, the handsome ten year old is instead carried off by one of his father’s murderers:

He did not keep me long, being in need of money. In the dealer’s courtyard at Susa, city of lilies, I stood stripped naked, while they drank date wine out of little cups, and haggled over my price. […]

The dealer’s house was strong as a prison, with courtyard walls fifteen feet high. On one side was a shed, where they did the gelding. They had purged and starved me first, which is thought to make it safer; I was led in cold and empty, to see the table with the knives, and the frame with splayed-out legs to which they bind you, with old black blood on it and dirty straps. Then at last I threw myself at the dealer’s feet and clasped them crying. But they made no more of it than farmhands of the bawling bull-calf.

The newly-made eunuch spends two quiet years as a page-boy to the wife of a local merchant, but as he grows older and his good looks attract the eyes of the men in the bazaar, his owner decides to make a little extra cash pimping him out to his customers. The boy proves so popular that he comes to the attention of the agents of the royal household, and at age thirteen Bagoas is sold again, to begin his training in “the rites of the bedchamber”.

I wonder whether Renault’s book could be published in the current climate of hypersensitivity about depictions of underage sexuality. While Bagoas begins his royal service traumatized by his experiences as a child prostitute, he reluctantly finds himself enjoying his “training” at the hands of an older eunuch. He soon graduates to service in the royal bedchamber, where the ageing Darius handles him gently, kissing and dandling him “like a doll”, but:

In all the time I was with him, he gave no sign of knowing a eunuch can feel anything. One does not tell such things to the King of Kings, if he does not ask.

***

In an Author’s Note, Renault adds that while the real Bagoas’ backstory is unknown,

the conjecture that he was of good birth is not fanciful. Such boys, whose looks had been taken care of and not spoiled by malnutrition or hardship, once enslaved were always at the highest risk of prostitution. Sokrates’ disciple Phaidon (Phaedo) is the best-known case.

Phaedo – the namesake of one of Plato’s best-known dialogues – appears in Renault’s earlier novel The Last of the Wine, set among the young followers of Socrates during the Peloponnesian War. She makes Phaedo a native of Melos, an island besieged in 416 BC after defying Athenian demands for tribute. Wounded in the defense of his city, the boy is recuperating in bed when starvation obliges the defenders to submit:

[T]he gates were opened and the Athenians marched in. Presently he heard a great shrieking of women, and the death-cries of men. Soldiers ran in, dragged him from his bed to the Agora, and threw him down among a crowd of young lads and children, who had been herded into the sheep-pound. Just across the square was a pile of corpses newly killed, and still being added to; sticking out of the midst of it was his father’s head. [1]

Purchased in the slave-market by the manager of an Athens bathhouse, Phaedo soon “learned the arts of his calling, and commanded a high price”.

The narrator attempts to befriend the shy, skittish boy who is accustomed to sit in silence at Socrates’ feet. (In the dialogue named for him, Phaedo describes himself sitting on a low stool while Socrates “stroked my head and pressed the hair on the back of my neck, for he was in the habit of playing with my hair at times”.) Phaedo’s new friends are unaware that he is a slave, a fact he conceals not only out of shame, but to protect others from the ignominy of being associated with a bathhouse boy. When he reveals his secret, he is careful to explain that he met Socrates not as a client, but while on an unauthorized break from his trade – he has learned the trick of locking the door so that his manager will think he has a customer, and going out through a window to roam the city.

Later some members of Socrates’ circle send one of their number to the bathhouse to invite Phaedo to a dinner party. This leads to an awkward moment:

“In due course I knocked, and Phaedo opened. All he had on was the paint on his face. I knew then I shouldn’t have come. The next moment he slammed-to the door. He was almost too quick for me, but being rather stronger I managed to hold it. ‘Next room,’ he said through the crack, ‘I’m engaged’ – ‘Wait, Phaedo,’ I began. Suddenly he flung open the door so that I nearly fell inside. He stood there laughing. He looked like something you might come upon in a dark wood. ‘Come in, Lysis,’ he said. ‘Honour the threshold. Who am I to turn away trade?'”

Phaedo is eventually bought by one of Socrates’ friends and set free. He never discusses his past clients, but occasionally the narrator will notice him “watching with irony in his dark eye” as some citizen pontificates about morality.

Luckily for Phaedo, at this time it wasn’t the Greek custom to make eunuchs of their slaves, a practice they regarded with disgust – though as Bagoas states in The Persian Boy, set almost a century later,

[S]o long as they sold boys young into the brothels, I did not think the Greeks had so much to boast of.

***

To resume the narrative of The Persian Boy: After King Darius ignominiously flees Alexander’s army at Gaugamela, Bagoas joins his slow retreat northward through the mountains, faithfully serving his master while his generals and courtiers scheme to depose him. When the coup comes, and the remnants of Persian resistance scatter, the boy finds himself masterless and alone, with no choice but to offer his services in the camp of the pursuing Macedonians:

I waited by the fidgeting horses, while the Macedonians looked at me. Among Persians, the eunuch knows himself marked out at sight by his lack of beard; it was most strange to be in a crowd where no young man had one. Alexander had shaved from his youth, and liked his fashion followed. Persian soldiers would have had any man’s blood, who told them to make themselves like eunuchs; but I don’t think this had even occurred to the Macedonians. They had no eunuchs. I was the only one.

Accustomed to the formal rigours of the Persian court, Bagoas is at first repelled by the easy manners of the Macedonians – “uncouth westerners” who drink heavily, banter playfully with their king, and exercise shamelessly in the nude. They in turn detest him as a “spayed catamite” and resent his “fawning barbarians ways”.

The young king, whom Bagoas find surprisingly courteous “for someone reared in the wilds”, is more receptive to eastern customs. Appreciating his new servant’s elegant manners and remarkable beauty, he employs him as a personal attendant, and later as a Persian language instructor, but declines to invite him to his bedchambers. It is Bagoas who first falls in love with Alexander, and eventually succeeds in seducing him.

Bagoas appears again in Renault’s Funeral Games, set amid the struggles for succession at the time of Alexander’s death. The general Ptolemy watches as Bagoas tenderly nurses the dying king:

At first Ptolemy had disliked this exotic presence haunting Alexander’s living-quarters, encouraging him to assume the trappings of Persian royalty and the manners of a Persian court, having his ear day and night. But he was a fixture one had grown used to.

In Renault’s telling Bagoas became not only Alexander’s lover but one of his nearest confidantes, inspiring his vision of his new empire as a synthesis of the best of eastern and western civilizations. In practice this meant that the relatively democratic norms of Macedonia were supplanted by the pomp and rigidity of Persia.

As word got back to Greece about Alexander’s eastern pretensions – like expecting visitors to prostrate themselves before him – his political enemies began to incorporate Bagoas, in the character of a conniving oriental courtier, into their “anti-Macedonian agitprop”. In her 1975 biography The Nature of Alexander, Renault compellingly refutes the story that Bagoas fabricated a charge of tomb-robbing against a satrap who had insulted him. As relayed by the Roman historian Quintus Curtius:

On one side Bagoas, on the other those whom he had suborned, filled the king’s ears with false charges. Before Orsines suspected that he was being accused he was delivered into bondage. Not content with the punishment of an innocent man, the eunuch laid his hand on him as he was about to be executed. Orsines with a glance at him said: “I had heard that women once reigned in Asia; this however is something new, for a eunuch to reign!”

In The Persian Boy Renault makes Orsines genuinely guilty of various crimes, including complicity in the murder of Bagoas’ family.

***

Unluckily for generations of boy slaves, Alexander’s policy of fusionism led to the adoption of many Persian practices in the west. In a 1937 poem Robert Graves imagined some soldiers of the Byzantine Empire, posted on the eastern frontier, sneering as Alexander’s uncouth Macedonians might have at the decadence of big city customs:

We can know little (as we care little)
Of the Metropolis: her candled churches,
Her white-gowned pederastic senators,
The cut-throat factions of her Hippodrome,
The eunuchs of her draped saloons.

By the time of the Emperor Justinian – we’re now in the 6th century AD – eunuchs were an integral part of Byzantine court life. Eugenius, the narrator of Graves’ 1938 novel Count Belisarius, though a slave himself, takes a certain pride in the influence of his fellow eunuchs:

It is a principle first learned by our Emperors from the Persian Court that eunuchs, since they are ineligible for sovereignty and incapable of founding dangerously powerful families, can safely be honoured with the royal confidence and used as a bulwark against the possible usurpation of the Throne by a conspiracy of powerful nobles. Eunuchs on the whole make milder and more loyal and more industrious officials than their unstoned colleagues, and their pettiness in routine matters – I do not deny the pettiness – is a strong conservative force. It has therefore long been the practice of rich middle-class families who have enough male children to carry on the line, deliberately to castrate one of the younger ones and dedicate him to a profitable career in the Civil Service. The bastard sons of Emperors too, or of their sons and daughters, are regularly castrated, in order to make useful citizens of them and prevent them from aspiring to the Throne. […]

Thus, to be a eunuch is, in the worldly sense at least, more of an advantage than a disadvantage, as may also be seen by a comparison of slave-market prices. A eunuch house-slave fetches three times the price of an unstoned one; he is worth only a little less than a trained house-physician or a skilled artisan. But a eunuch is seldom a happy man, because the operation has almost always been performed on him before the age of puberty, and he secretly imagines that to be a whole man is something very fine; if only because whole men are apt to jeer at eunuchs and to swear that they would rather be blind or dumb or deaf, or even all three of these things together, than debarred from the sweet and wholesome act of love. Naturally, the eunuch has a ready answer to such boasting: that sex is a madness and never brought anyone much luck. But secretly, as I confess, he is apt to envy the man who can take a woman to bed with him and do more than embrace her as a sister and chastely kiss her eyes.

Unlike Mary Renault, Graves evinces not the slightest interest in the sex life of his eunuch narrator. The passage above occurs during the introduction of the eunuch court chamberlain Narses – another real historical figure – who despite appearing in only a handful of scenes emerges as a more complete character than Eugenius.

When we meet him, Narses is already well advanced in years, a survivor of innumerable palace intrigues, a “dwarfish and repulsively ugly figure” acutely sensitive to slights, who harbours an unlikely aspiration to be taken seriously as a warrior. Antonina, wife to the celebrated general Belisarius, is one of the few to humour the ugly little man when he prattles about military tactics.

To widespread amusement, Narses later convinces the flighty Emperor Justinian to send him as general to Italy, to reinforce Belisarius in his war there against the Goths:

That he was dwarfish and big-buttocked and had a squint and a twisted lip had not seemed very ridiculous when he was gliding along the Palace corridors. … But to see Narses, who had already long passed the grand climacteric of his years, strutting about in the latest fashion of plate-armour … trailing a full-sized sword which was continually catching between his legs and tripping him up – that I assure you was a sight to raise a smile on the face of a man dying of the cholera.

The level-headed Antonina foresees that Narses might prove “a capable officer in spite of his age”, but warns her husband that his touchy personality will demand delicate handling. Her warning proves justified: the eunuch promptly quarrels with Belisarius and sows contention among the other generals, until Justinian is forced to recall him.

A dozen years later, after Belisarius has retired to Constantinople, Narses is again sent out by Justinian against the Goths, and by a series of brilliant victories reconquers Italy. Still later, annoyed once again over private slights, Narses intrigues with the Lombards, who go on to invade northern Italy, putting an end to Byzantine rule there.

***

Whereas Narses has plans and ambitions of his own, the narrator Eugenius is defined primarily by his utter devotion to Antonina, whose servant he has been since she was a child.

In creating his narrator, Graves had even less material to work with (or to constrain his imagination) than Renault did with Bagoas. In fact Eugenius appears only once in the historical record, in the lurid Secret History written by Procopius, who served as private secretary to Belisarius.

In that episode, Eugenius is enlisted in avenging an insult by some unfaithful slaves:

And they say that [Antonina] first cut out all their tongues, and then cut them up bit by bit, threw the pieces into sacks, and then without ado cast them into the sea, being assisted throughout in this impious business by one of the servants named Eugenius…

Note that Procopius never identifies Eugenius as a eunuch – that was Graves’ extrapolation. In fact, in the early stages of the writing of Count Belisarius, Antonina was intended as the narrator. Graves was convinced by his mistress and sometime collaborator Laura Riding to rewrite the early chapters in the slave’s voice, inspiring some prurient eyebrow-waggling over the parallels to the author’s own sex life:

It is often observed that Graves was in effect the devoted slave of Riding, which raises the possibility that he was Eugenius to her Antonina. … [I]t is known that Graves had embraced a life of celibacy for Riding. [2]

At any rate, Eugenius in Graves’ telling, like Bagoas in Mary Renault’s, is innocent of the atrocity attributed to him. Just as Alexander was libelled by jealous Greeks, so was Belisarius by his jealous secretary, Procopius:

Sometimes he told the truth, sometimes he distorted the facts, sometimes he lied – according to his vindictive purposes. (Even I, Eugenius, was introduced into this farrago: for example, I was supposed to have assisted my mistress in the murder of the maid Macedonia: whose tongue, he said, was cut in little pieces and cast into the sea.) [3]

However, Eugenius makes no bones about his involvement in another murder – that of a bishop, whose assassination he succesfully pins on an old rival of Antonina’s. In gratitude, Antonina offers to give him his freedom and a hefty reward besides. He humbly demurs:

“What is money but bodily comforts, which I already possess? What is ‘freedom’ but to be well considered, as I already am?”

Eugenius should have taken his freedom and retired somewhere far from the capital’s “cut-throat factions”; for not long afterward, the scandalous manuscript of Procopius comes to light, full of vile gossip not only about Belisarius and Antonina but about the Emperor Justinian. (In Graves’ interpretation, all the tales about his hero and heroine are malicious distortions, but all those about Justinian are true.)

To save his own skin, Procopius is induced to give false evidence against Belisarius, whom the emperor detests for his own petty reasons. Belisarius is charged with treason, and his household servants are seized and put to torture.

For a slave in such a situation, Eugenius knows, defiant silence is not a winning strategy:

Andreas died under the torture, but in order to vex [the public prosecutor] he did not utter a single cry. I yelled and screamed without ceasing. I knew that to do so would either satisfy the officer of the torture chamber or else disconcert him, so that he would say to the slave: “Enough for the moment, fellow: relax the cords, unscrew!” All my cries were: “Long life to his Gracious Majesty!” and “I know nothing, nothing.” So I escaped. Of the bodily injuries I received that day I shall not trouble you. I am a person of no importance.

M.

1. The real Phaedo, known as Phaedo of Elis, was – as you might suppose – from Elis, which fell to an alliance of Sparta and Athens a few years before Socrates’ death in 399 BC. In The Last of the Wine Renault moves Phaedo’s enslavement over a decade backward in time, to the middle of the Peloponnesian War, and makes him a victim of the most famous instance of Athenian ruthlessness in that conflict.

2. For more about Graves’ decision to make Eugenius and not Antonina his narrator, see “Count Belisarius – Genesis, Gender, and Truth” by Shaun Tougher. For Graves’ turbulent relationship with Laura Riding – “a woman of gargantuan and zany self-esteem who rivals the best of Dickens’ comic monsters in the splendor and variety of her awfulness” – this snappy book review by Thomas M. Disch covers the essentials.

3. Elsewhere in Count Belisarius, Eugenius denies his involvement in the murder of Antonina’s servant in slightly different words:

That my mistress with my help pulled out Macedonia’s tongue, cut her in pieces, and threw the pieces into the sea is a lie told many years later by the secretary Procopius to discredit her.

Whereas in the passage quoted above, it’s only Macedonia’s tongue that is chopped up. I can’t read the original Greek – which you can consult here – but I gather there’s some ambiguity in Procopius’ phrasing on this point. I can find three translations online:

It is said that she first cut out their tongues, and then ordered them to be hewn in pieces, put into sacks and thrown into the sea.
—Athenian Society, 1896

She first cruelly cut out their tongues, it is said, and then cut their bodies into little bits which were put into sacks and thrown into the sea.
—Richard Atwater, 1927

And they say that she first cut out all their tongues, and then cut them up bit by bit, threw the pieces into sacks, and then without ado cast them into the sea…
—H.B. Dewing, 1935

—

In January I referred to Robert Graves’ I, Claudius in a discussion of Max Beerbohm and posterity. Years ago while reading The Last of the Wine I noticed that Mary Renault seemed to be the only person puzzled (like me) by the story of the Spartan boy and the fox. And speaking of “depictions of underage sexuality”, in 2018 I had some surprisingly deep thoughts about the Netflix cartoon series Big Mouth.

A fox at his breast.

Mary Renault in her 1956 novel of the Peloponnesian War, The Last of the Wine, has her Athenian hero comment:

Spartans are the best thieves in the world. They keep their boys always half-fed, so that they can never have a belly-full without stealing; this is so that they will learn to live off the country. They get a thrashing if anyone sees them at it. There is a well known story about this, not the least remarkable part of which, to my mind, is that the boy was hungry enough to have intended eating a fox.

Thank you, Mary Renault, for drawing our attention to this absurdity, which other authors pass over as if it needed no elaboration. The first time I came across the tale to which her hero alludes, I wondered, Why on earth would anyone steal a fox?

Here’s how Plutarch tells it, in his life of Lycurgus, the lawgiver of the Spartans:

So seriously did the Lacedaemonian children go about their stealing, that a youth, having stolen a young fox and hid it under his coat, suffered it to tear out his very bowels with its teeth and claws and died upon the place, rather than let it be seen.

That’s the 1683 translation of John Dryden, from my big Modern Library edition of The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. The Loeb Classical Library translation of 1914 is also available online, and the (modern) editor has added the skeptical footnote:

Umm, not to rain on anyone’s parade, but who steals foxes, and why? (Come to think of it, who would have one that one might steal it from them? Although there will always be someone to believe that foxes were kept as pets, CJ 44:305.)

…With the link going to a 1947 article in the Classical Journal called “Greek and Roman Household Pets” in which the author, on the authority of Plutarch’s tale, includes foxes among those pets “which appealed to the more eclectic tastes” of the ancients.

So did the boy steal the fox to eat it, or to play with it – or merely from an engrained Lacedaemonian habit of larceny? Plutarch gives a quite different, inferior, and no more enlightening version of the story in his Remarkable Sayings of the Spartans (in the 1878 translation of William Goodwin):

Another boy, at the time when freemen’s sons are allowed to steal what they can and it is a disgrace to be discovered, when some of his companions had stolen a young fox and delivered it to him, and the owners came to search, hid it under his gown; and though the angry little beast bit through his side to his very guts, he endured it quietly, that he might not be discovered. When the searchers were gone and the boys saw what had happened, they chid him roundly, saying, It had been better to produce the fox, than thus to conceal him by losing your own life; No, no! he replied, it is much better to die in torments, than to let my softness betray me and suffer a life that had been scandalous.

Since neither version explains what the boy intended to do with the fox, we must deduce that whatever it was, Plutarch didn’t think it interesting enough to comment on. So perhaps Renault is being anachronistic in having her hero remark on what must have been unremarkable to a Greek of his time.

***

The story of the Spartan and the fox comes up from time to time as a metaphor for suffering in silence, but the expression is uncommon enough that I can find only a smattering of examples online. I could have sworn I saw it used in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, which I read recently; but now, using Amazon’s “Search Inside” feature, I’m unable to locate it.

As it happens, one of the few hits on Google Books is in the fourth issue of The Living Age, from June, 1844:

All this Lord Brougham bore as the Spartan boy bore the gnawing of the stolen fox at his breast.

That periodical lasted into the 1940s and is commonly known as Littell’s Living Age, from its founding editor Eliakim Littell. An ancestor of Jonathan, or just a Littell coincidence?

M.

Update, Sept. 2018. Since this old post still gets the occasional visitor, some of them no doubt Googling as I once did for instances of the hungry fox story being used as a metaphor, here’s one I came across recently. In Book V, Chap. 6 of Fielding’s Tom Jones the hero

endeavoured to smother a flame in his own bosom, which, like the famous Spartan theft, was preying upon and consuming his very vitals.

…the painful flame in question being his unrequited love for Sophia Western. I referred to this passage last year in a gloomy essay called Why read?

Update, July 27, 2020: Added cover image and linked to Bibliography page