The Book of Ancient Bastards (5 page)

Just Because You’re a Paranoid Tyrant Doesn’t Mean Someone Isn’t Out to Get You

(REIGNED 527–510 B.C.)

Hippias fled to Lemnos, where he died, the blood gushing from his eyes. Thus was his country, against which he led the Barbarians, avenged.
—Suidas, tenth-century Byzantine lexicographer and historian

The last tyrant to rule ancient Athens, Hippias was a paranoid whose fear of plots on his life helped usher in the world’s first democratic government (to replace his).

The son and successor of the most successful tyrant in the ancient world, Hippias became tyrant of Athens upon the death of his father Pisistratus in 527 B.C. Because he initially continued his father’s policies (light taxes, no curbs on personal freedoms for the most part), the people were willing to let Hippias rule unopposed.

But Hippias had a brother: a patron of the arts and bon vivant named Hyparchus. And when Hyparchus got into a quarrel in 514 B.C. with a gay couple he was trying to break up (he had a crush on the younger and cuter of the two men), he wound up murdered.

At that point Hippias freaked out and began giving “tyranny” its more modern meaning. He arbitrarily killed those he suspected of plotting against him. He sentenced people to death for having the wrong friends. (And he seized their property for good measure.) The crackdown was swift and devastating.

In so doing, he played into the hands of the exiled Alcmeonid family.

These Athenians, run out of town by Hippias’s father, promptly bribed the priestess oracle at Delphi to claim that the Spartans—backwards, superstitious, and with good reason the most-feared warriors in Greece—should invade Athens, take the city, and drive Hippias out in order to please the gods.

By 510 B.C. they had done it, trapping Hippias and his troops on the Acropolis, the city’s fortified central hill. Settling in for a siege, Hippias at first seemed prepared to wait the invaders out. Then his family, including his children, fell into their hands (they had been trying to escape to Persia and were caught outside the city’s gates). Hippias agreed to leave Athens and go into exile in exchange for the safety of his kids.

When he left Athens, Hippias, who had been a rare pro-Persian ruler in mainland Greece, hotfooted it to Persia and asked the Great King Darius I to intercede on his behalf. Darius allowed him to set up a government-in-exile in Persian-held western Anatolia (modern Turkey), but made him wait for a decade before sending emissaries to the Athenians demanding that they take back their tyrant and restore him as their ruler.

The Athenians laughed at him, then turned around and sent troops and ships to support the Ionian Revolt against Persia. See the entry on Darius I for the rest of the story.

Bastard’s End

Hippias served the Persians as an administrator and advisor for decades while awaiting the opportunity to be revenged on the city that had tossed him out on his ear. In 490 B.C., he felt he’d gotten it. By now close to eighty years of age, Hippias received permission to accompany Darius’s invasion fleet to its appointment with destiny at the seaside plain of Marathon. Wounded in the ensuing battle, he died soon afterward, as noted in the quote from Suidas that opens this chapter.

Better a Live Rebel Than a Dead Royal Governor

(?–497 B.C.)

While the cities were thus being taken, Aristagoras the Milesian, being, as he proved in this instance, not of very distinguished courage, since after having disturbed Ionia and made preparation of great matters he counseled running away when he saw these things. . . .
—Herodotus, The Histories

How’s this for cynical: yesterday’s tyrants becoming today’s liberty-loving embracers of democracy? We’ve seen this during the modern era: Boris Yeltsin in Russia, for example, rejecting communism out of convenience rather than out of conviction, and being catapulted to power as a result.

But it’s hardly a new story.

Take Aristagoras, the Persian-appointed tyrant of the semi-independent Greek city-state of Miletus (in the region of Ionia in Asia Minor, now Turkey), the guy whose push for homegrown democracy touched off the so-called “Ionian Revolt” in 499 B.C., a conflict that led to the loss of thousands of lives and served as the precipitating event in a wider conflict between the Greeks and the Persians over the two centuries that followed.

Hardly a born-and-bred defender of personal liberty, Aristagoras’s opportunism was born of the most instinctive of human impulses: self-preservation. Here’s how it happened.

Shortly after he became tyrant of Miletus, Aristagoras was tapped to help the empire pick up some new real estate in the form of Naxos, a strategically placed Greek island in the middle of the Aegean Sea. In exchange for helping with this, Aristagoras was to receive a large portion of the loot to be taken when the island fell.

In anticipation of said loot, Aristagoras took out a large cash loan from the local Persian satrap (governor). With this money, he hired mercenary soldiers and ships to help with the conquest.

The only problem was that Aristagoras got into a major personal feud with the Persian admiral set to lead the expedition. The feud got so ugly that the admiral secretly warned the Naxians of an invasion on the way. Not surprisingly, the whole venture failed.

Bastard-in-Law

Aristagoras owed his position as tyrant to his father-in-law, Histiaeus. Histiaeus had been tyrant before him, and had done his job so well that the Persian king, Darius I, appointed him to his own governing council. When Histiaeus went east to the royal court at Persepolis, he recommended Aristagoras succeed him. Later, when Aristagoras was attempting to foment revolt among the Greek cities of Asia, Histiaeus secretly helped him, hoping that a rebellion led by his son-in-law would lead to his own being appointed to retake the city and re-establish himself as Miletus’s tyrant.

But, in a setup that twentieth-century mafia bosses would admire, Aristagoras was still on the hook to the Persians for the money he’d borrowed. Desperate to save his own skin, Aristagoras set about quietly stirring a rebellion in Miletus and the neighboring cities, inviting such mainland Greek cities as Sparta and Athens to help their cousins across the Aegean Sea.

The Spartans, not surprisingly, refused (it was too far from home for these xenophobes). But the Persian king had just succeeded in really pissing off the Athenians by baldly interfering in their internal politics and insisting that they take back the tyrant (Hippias) to whom they had given the boot. So the Athenians agreed to send a fleet of ships to help.

And with that the Ionian Revolt was born. The result? Sardis, the westernmost provincial capital in the Persian Empire (and home base of the governor who had strong-armed Aristagoras in the first place) was sacked and burned by the Greek rebels. After a five-year-long campaign and the investment of much time, effort, blood, and money, the Persians put down the revolt.

And Aristagoras? Still fearing for his own skin, he relocated to Thrace (in the European part of Turkey), where he tried to establish a colony from which to continue the war against Persia. He was killed trying to strong-arm the locals (see how this sort of thing just keeps running downhill?).

Opportunism, Anyone?

(CA. 450–404 B.C.)

Meanwhile I hope that none of you will think any the worse of me if after having hitherto passed as a lover of my country, I now actively join with its worst enemies in attacking it, or will suspect what I say as the fruit of an outlaw’s enthusiasm.
—Alcibiades, quoted in The Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides

A brilliant favorite student of the great philosopher Socrates and a gifted politician and military leader, Alcibiades was also an opportunist of monstrous proportions, concerned more with his personal fortunes than with the welfare of those he aspired to lead. This combination of ego and selfishness led him to betray his people to an extent that might have made a Benedict Arnold blush.

By 410 B.C., Alcibiades had developed a reputation as a wild man who loved a good party, in addition to his acknowledged talents as a speaker and political leader. Elected to Athens’s city government that year, Alcibiades gave a dazzling speech in the Athenian assembly, laying out a bold plan for ending the ongoing decades-long war with her longtime rival, the city-state of Sparta.

He succeeded in convincing the Athenians that the key to victory lay in invading the island of Sicily and seizing the rich city of Syracuse. Swayed by his compelling oratory, the Athenians voted in favor of his plan, and Alcibiades left Athens later that same year as commander of a massive Athenian invasion fleet.

But enemies at home had him removed from his command and arrested on trumped-up charges of desecrating several religious idols. In a snit, he went over to the Spartans and told them in detail about his plan for attacking
Syracuse and suggested how they might thwart the Athenian battle plan and win the war. The quote above is from the speech he is supposed to have given exhorting the Spartans to accept his advice.

The intelligence Alcibiades provided the Spartans proved devastating to his country. In fairness, he probably didn’t intend to completely cripple Athens, merely to bloody her nose enough that his political enemies would be swept from power and Alcibiades himself would be welcomed back into the city and into power at the head of the government.

He got it half right.

Alcibiades was welcomed back to Athens several times over the next five years, first after his enemies were pushed out (as he’d hoped) when the Sicilian Expedition failed. But it wasn’t long before he was forced to flee the city. Once again he changed sides, this time going to the Persians, to whom he gave advice on how to keep the Greeks from uniting.

In the end, Alcibiades died while attempting to get Persian backing for a proposed attack on Sparta. Surprised in an isolated farmhouse in what is now Turkey, he rushed out into the night with just a dagger in his hand when his enemies set the place on fire and was killed by a hail of arrows.

Traitorous bastard.

Bastard with a Pedigree

Alcibiades was a member of the famous Alcmeonid family, which included such distinguished citizens as Cleisthenes, who had helped rid Athens of the tyrant Hippias and founded its democratic government, and Pericles, who had run that same government wisely and well for the thirty or so years that comprise the city’s golden age. After Alcibiades, no Alcmeonid ever held a position of leadership within the city again. That was no accident.