Critias, the leader of the Thirty, was no ordinary reactionary. This onetime student of Socrates wrote poems and tragedies. In exile from Athens towards the end of the war, he helped establish a democracy, of all things, in Thessaly. Suspected of involvement in the mutilation of the Herms, he was an advanced thinker: a fragment of one of his tragedies survives in which a speaker explains that the gods were a necessary invention to control human beings.
Some shrewd man first, a man wise in judgment,
invented for mortals the fear of gods,
in that way, frightening the wicked should they
even act or speak or scheme in secret.
He believed that virtue should be imposed by force, and that was indeed his policy when he took power. However, force soon came to be applied without the slightest attempt at virtue, as Lysias’s story shows.
Once firmly in the saddle the Thirty abandoned any idea of preparing a new constitution, as they had been instructed to do. They confiscated all weapons and armor in the city and instituted a reign of terror. They began by executing known informers, but went on to arrange the deaths of 1,500 men simply for their money or their reputation as law-abiding and politically moderate citizens.
An attempt was made to implicate ordinary Athenians in these judicial murders. Socrates was ordered, along with four fellow-citizens, to arrest a respectable former military officer, Leon of Salamis. At great personal risk, he refused and simply went home. According to Plato, he admitted later that he might have been put to death for this, but, he added: “If it’s not crude of me to say so, death is something I couldn’t care less about, but my whole concern is not to do anything unjust or impious.” The others were not so brave; they brought Leon in and he was put to death. The Thirty were sensible enough to leave Socrates unpunished.
Theramenes had hoped that the Thirty would implement his idea for a limited oligarchy, as in the days of the Five Thousand. He joined them, but soon had a change of heart. To broaden the base of his government, Critias issued a register of Three Thousand supporters, and announced that all other citizens were liable to capital punishment without trial and to have their property confiscated. Theramenes criticized the regime for its cruelty and a split threatened. It was wrong, he said, to kill people simply because they had been popular under the democracy. At last this man for all seasons, the so-called Cothurnus, had made his choice.
Critias acted. He summoned the boulē and arrived at the meeting with an escort of young supporters, equipped with daggers concealed in their armpits. After an angry debate, he struck the name of Theramenes off the list of the Three Thousand, for his membership guaranteed him a trial, and ordered his instant arrest and execution. Theramenes ran to an altar and claimed sanctuary. However, he was dragged from it and, protesting loudly and clearly, was dragged through the agora.
In the little prison on the edge of the agora, he was given a lethal cup of hemlock to drink. As if he were an erastes playing a game of kottabos (see this page) at a drinking party, he threw out the dregs as a toast to his murderous eromenos: “Here’s to the lovely Critias!”
Removing a senior politician in such an arbitrary and violent way was a sign of weakness rather than of strength and the government faltered. Two leading democrats in exile in Thebes decided to intervene. One of them was Thrasybulus, the capable admiral based at Samos in the last phase of the war, and the other Anytus, an influential politician and owner of a successful tanning business. He had had a checkered career: many years previously he had fallen head over heels in love with the teenaged Alcibiades. He was a moderate democrat and in 409 he was elected as one of the year’s ten generals. He had the misfortune to be in command when Pylos was lost to the Spartans. He was put on trial for this failure, but apparently paid the jury for an acquittal.
In December 404 the two men crossed over from Thebes into Attica with seventy followers and occupied a hill called Phyle ten miles from Athens. The Thirty sent a force to mount a blockade, but a snowstorm broke it up. Men left the city and joined Thrasybulus and soon he had seven hundred followers. Just before dawn one morning they attacked and scattered some cavalry and members of a Spartan garrison stationed on the Acropolis that had been dispatched to watch Phyle.
Morale among the Thirty fell sharply and they left the city. They took over the border town of Eleusis as an emergency retreat if that became necessary, and massacred the local population. Thrasybulus then marched by night to Piraeus, and Critias followed him to the port with his troops and men from the Spartan garrison. The fighters from Phyle retired in good order to high ground and, although outnumbered, drove off an enemy attack. Critias and seventy others lost their lives.
A confused pause ensued. The Thirty were abolished, but the oligarchs clung to power. Would the Spartans step in and save their cause? Lysander wanted to, but his high-handed behavior after Aegospotami had dismayed his own government. He had allowed Greek cities to offer sacrifices in his honor as if he were a god. He had had a statue of himself erected at Delphi; on its base a boastful inscription read that “he had destroyed the power of the sons of Cecrops [a legendary king of Athens], Lysander who crowned never-sacked Sparta.” Perhaps, his enemies whispered, he was meditating a revolution and wanted to set himself up as king or tyrant.
This was un-Spartan behavior and the Agiad monarch, Pausanias, who was in the field with an army, was suspicious. He wanted to do nothing that might enhance Lysander’s status. Supported by the ephors, he negotiated a peace between the warring parties at Athens. An amnesty was agreed for all past acts, excepting only those of the Thirty themselves and their officials. A constitutional commission restored the democracy. The foreign garrison withdrew. Men of all political persuasions did their best to make reconciliation work.
Only two years had passed since the catastrophe of Aegospotami and Athens was no longer a creature of the Spartans and had taken a long step towards retrieving its old liberties. But could it ever retrieve its old power? Even to fantasize such a dizzying hope, more time was required.
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Signs of a changing political climate are illustrated by the careers of two distinguished but disillusioned Athenians—Conon and Xenophon. With the end of the war, many men who had flourished as soldiers or sailors found themselves out of work. For them, going home to a defeated and desolate city was an unappealing prospect, even if their fellow-citizens were to allow them back. They looked for work as mercenaries.
Mercenary troops had been used in the past (for instance, as trireme crews), but they were increasingly employed as hoplites in the fourth century. This was not just that the arrival of peace left large numbers of fit young men at loose ends. Athens was not the only polis that had registered heavy casualties and in the coming years states in need of an army had to look for supplementary fighters from abroad.
Also, the misery of the Peloponnesian War seems to have had a moral impact. The deployment of native force to drive foreign policy, an untroubled patriotism, and a willingness to sacrifice citizens’ lives freely were no longer part of the Athenian mentality. The fierce, self-sacrificial energy that the invention of democracy seems to have released had run its course. The demos would no longer obey a new Cimon or a new Pericles if he wanted to scatter thousands of citizen hoplites around the Eastern Mediterranean. People still loved their country, but they lacked the old passion. Loyalty to the state gave way to a new individualism.