Except that none of the work was actually done in the name of the Athenians. Far from signaling an outbreak of civic harmony, the dust-clouds on the Acropolis conveyed precisely the opposite message. Every building project was the gift of a different clan. What better way, after all, for a Eupatrid to show off than to adorn the city’s skyline? To excel was, for a nobleman, not merely to cut a political dash but to emulate the age of heroes, to mimic the deathless gods. “Always be the bravest,” warriors in the Trojan War had been admonished. “Always be the best.”17 Centuries later, this was a message that an aristocrat still drank in with his milk. For the upper classes across the whole Greek world, it served as a virtual manifesto. This was why, if a partiality for dinner parties was one mark of the cosmopolitan elite, then another distinguishing feature had become, during the seventh century BC, a relish for sport: spectacular contests of stamina and skill, in which the jeunesse dorée, glistening and gym-perfected, would compete with their fellow noblemen for public glory. True, the first victor at the Olympic Games was said to have been a cook, and an occasional goatherd might still sneak a fairy-tale victory, but in general only those with time and money could afford to put in the ten months’ training officially required by the rules. By the first half of the sixth century, the games at Olympia had been supplemented by a whole circuit of other festivals, so competitors might, and often did, spend year after year on the road, sculpting and toning their bodies, schmoozing with other members of the Greek world’s crème de la crème. In 566 BC, even the Athenians, who in the previous century had been defiantly sniffy about the Olympics, got in on the act. A magnificent festival in honor of Athena, the Great Panathenaea, was inaugurated in their city, at which the prizes included, as well as glory, a huge amphora of olive oil. Grands projets on the Acropolis, an athlete’s trophies: both spoke of “the sweetness” that was “triumph and wondrous fame.”18
Yet the applause was not universal. Glamour and self-glorification might be all very well at Olympia, but not, say, for hoplites advancing into battle. It was notable that the Spartans, raised as they were to subordinate their individuality to a collective, were the only people in Greece to play team games; notable also that they displayed a marked ambivalence toward their Olympic athletes. A competitor from elsewhere in Greece who won first prize at the Games might expect to have statues raised in his honor, or receive a bounty, or even breach a section of his native city’s walls, “to convey,” so it was said, “that a state with such a citizen hardly had need of fortifications.”19 No such nonsense for the Spartans—not least because they had no city walls to pull down in the first place. Naturally, since their prestige was at stake, their athletes were expected to compete and win at Olympia, but memorials to their victories, back at Sparta, were conspicuous by their absence. The returning champions themselves were granted no reward save the distinctly hazardous one of a posting to the front line of battle, directly before the king.
For always, with the exceptional, with the godlike, there was menace. There rose, in the universe of things, a scale of perfection, towering like Mount Olympus, with the immortals on the summit, and mortals down in the foothills, eternally looking to climb higher. But it was perilous for a man to reach too far. The dangers that resulted might plunge not only the hero but all who knew him—indeed, all his city—into ruin. That the Athenians, for instance, back in the days of their insularity, were not being merely provincial in their suspicion of international athletics had been amply demonstrated by the fate of Cylon, a Eupatrid, and one of their few Olympic stars. The champion, returning home with his victor’s olive crown, had eventually grown so puffed up with conceit that he had dared, in 632 BC, to occupy the Acropolis and proclaim himself master of Athens. The scandalized city had been plunged into street fighting. Cylon and his followers had found themselves barricaded on the hill; they had sought sanctuary in a temple; granted a promise of free passage by the archon, they had duly emerged, only to be stoned and put to death.20 A salutary lesson on the bitter fruits of setting one’s sights too high.
Except that in states more in tune with the modern than Athens, men such as Cylon had already proved themselves vanguards of the future. There were few leading cities anywhere in the Greek world that did not at some point during the seventh and sixth centuries BC fall into the hands of a high-aiming strongman—with Sparta, as ever, the exception that proved the rule. “Tyrannides,” the Greeks called such regimes—“tyrannies.” For them, the term did not have remotely the bloodstained connotations that the English word “tyrant” has for us. Indeed, a Greek tyrant, almost by definition, had to have the popular touch, since otherwise he could not hope to cling to power for long. Trumpets, slogans and public works: such were the enthusiasms he would invariably parade. He would also be expected to provide, to a people that might have been racked by faction-fighting for decades, the stamp of firm government—at the very least. Most provided a good deal more: Periander, a celebrated tyrant of Corinth, for instance, proved so consummate a statesman that he was remembered, along with Solon, as one of the seven sages of Greece.*11 Naturally, in exchange for granting his fellow citizens the blessings of order and prosperity, a tyrant could be expected to make a few demands of his own. He might require that certain illegal measures, certain regrettable precautions, be overlooked: bodyguards, for instance; controls on free speech; the occasional midnight knocking on doors.
It was the tyrant’s own peers, of course, who would wince most painfully at these humiliations. Few greater torments could be imagined for an aristocrat than to endure a tyranny: the equivalent of watching a single champion win every race, year after year. No wonder that Megacles, the archon who had tricked Cylon’s followers from their temple sanctuary to their deaths, had been willing to risk the taint of sacrilege—for he had been head of the Alcmaeonids, one of the grandest of all Athenian clans, descended from a king, proud and high-aspiring, and certainly no man’s slave. And, to be sure, the penalty he and all his family paid had been a terrible one. Even in defense of freedom, a crime such as Megacles had committed against the gods could not be readily forgiven. It had taken a full thirty years of furious foot-dragging by the Alcmaeonids before they were finally brought to court; but Megacles’ clan, in the end, around 600 BC, had all been sentenced to exile in perpetuity.21 The moldering bones of their ancestors had been dug up and dumped beyond the borders of the city. The Alcmaeonids had become a family accursed.
But even absent from Athens, they continued to cast a long and glamorous shadow. Indeed, if anything, the curse only contributed to their menacing allure. It was typical of the Alcmaeonids’ cool effrontery that the moment they were exiled they entered into a hugely profitable relationship of mutual back-scratching with—of all people—the priests at Delphi. Megacles’ son Alcmaeon, displaying a particularly shameless aptitude for hypocrisy, led the campaign against the sacrilegious city of Crisa. He then successfully wangled himself into serving as the middleman between the grateful oracle and King Croesus, and reaped fabulous rewards—for Croesus was so pleased with his agent’s diplomacy that he invited him to visit the royal treasury in Sardis and take away all the gold that he could carry.22 Alcmaeon capitalized on this offer, it was said, by wearing a baggy woman’s tunic and the loosest boots that he could find, and then filling them with gold dust; so that “when he came staggering out, he could scarcely drag one foot after the other, his tunic bulged obscenely, and even his cheeks were stuffed full to bursting.”23