The Thirty Tyrants

Further Reading:

Texts mentioned in the episode -

• Lysias 12 'Against Eratosthenes'
• Cornelius Nepos 'Life of Thrasybulus'
• Diodorus Siculus Bibliotheca Book 14 1-18
• Diodorus Siculus Bibliotheca Book 14 32-39
• Xenophon Hellenica Book 2

Books:

• Athens on Trial by Jennifer Roberts

If you want to purchase any of these books, please consider buying them through our online bookshops: click here for the UK, or click here for the United States. Our online shops exclusively use independent bookstores, and we also earn a small commission on every sale, so you are supporting the podcast with every book bought.

Episode Transcript:

Okay, I'm very excited about this episode. I'm excited about all of them, but I'm excited about this one. We're going to be talking about something that's painfully relevant to today's society. And for that we have a very crucial expert guest. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Yes, thanks very much for having me on. My name is Roel Konijnendijk. I'm an ancient historian. I work at Lincoln College, Oxford. My special is my field of of expertise is Greek warfare, really. And I've been working on that for a long time. But lately, I've also been looking at the revolutions at the end of the fifth century in Athens is something that we're starting to teach now in Oxford. They've introduced some new material on this. And so I've been looking at that. And that's what I'm here to talk about today.

Fabulous, wonderful. When I was at uni, think my module that I did on the Athenian Empire stopped just before what we're going to talk about today. So I'm thrilled to carry on learning. And as I say, it is pretty relevant to what's going on in the world today because we're talking about people trying to destroy democracy and what you can possibly do to restore it. Big, big topic.

That's right, yeah. And it sits at this weird moment in Athenian history, right? So this is basically at the end of the Peloponnesian War. So they've just lost this huge war. And of course, for all sorts of reasons, may have been some criticisms of democracy and its role in the downfall of the Athenian Empire. And so it's at the end of this, partly out of this internal movement to say like, maybe this wasn't the right way to run the state. And partly because the Spartans are essentially saying, we don't trust the democracy, right? Like, we don't want to deal with this kind of regime anymore. And they impose a different government on the Athenians. And so that's where this phase comes from, right after the end of the Peloponnesian War, in which Athens briefly is run by a very narrow oligarchy called the Thirty. And that's the period that we'll be talking about. It doesn't last long. Thankfully, I'll sort of spoiler that now because that's the good news.

So let's set the scene a little bit because in the fifth century everyone knows Athens grew really, really strong, had a huge empire of friends and allies, which was essentially them bullying people for their lunch money. And then this huge war happens. They lose the what's Athens like after they've lost the war? I'm guessing they're a lot weaker than they were at beginning of the war.

Yeah, I mean, Athens is devastated in ways that are so difficult to wrap your head around, partly demographically. mean, know that, or modern estimates have it that Athenian adult male citizens at the beginning of the war were about 60,000, which is the high mark, but it's it's huge numbers. It makes them by far the largest Greek city state in the world at that stage. But by the end of the war, that number has been cut in half. A large part of that is due to the plague, not actual war losses, but especially towards the end of the conflict when naval battles that are immensely costly if they go wrong because people just drown in their hundreds if a ship sinks or if it can't be salvaged. Prisoners get taken in their thousands from the ships that get captured. So this kind of naval warfare that they're losing towards the end of the Peloponnesian War. It cuts into their demographics in a dramatic way. And then as well, in the last year of the war, essentially Athens under siege and people are starving. And so you have to imagine that, you know, the population of this city state has been cut in half. it's half of the people are gone. Their fleet is gone. It's been scrapped. Anything that was left has been sort of confiscated with the exception of 12 ships they're allowed to keep. So this is nothing compared to the 300 they had at the start of the war.

And they've been forced to demolish their walls. So the long walls and the walls of Piraeus, the harbour, which is to say that they are no longer able to protect themselves in war by saying, OK, well, we can just sort of ignore our countryside, hole up in the city and rely on supplies by sea because the fortifications that connect them to the harbour have been destroyed. And so Athens is demographically weak. Its resources are exhausted. It no longer has tribute income. its state finances are a mess. And it's no longer protected. It's vulnerable. Both by sea and by land, it is no longer able to protect itself in the way that it could before. So Athens isn't very much in a humble state, militarily, geopolitically, and the population obviously is looking at a very different Athens than the one they knew from a generation before.

So are Athenians talking to each other and saying democracy seems to have failed? We've really screwed up it.

Well, this is kind of a question. Obviously, the source material that we have very heavily focuses on the type of person who would say such a thing. mean, obviously, we always have to bear in mind that all of the written evidence comes from the wealthy, like wealthy citizen men, right? And that means that in almost all cases, there are a few wealthy medics as well, which are resident foreigners, which means that in a lot of those cases, that's where you would find those kinds of attitudes that democracy is to blame. Because of course, the alternative to democracy is for those men to be in charge without having to worry about what the ordinary people think. And so you have to be a little bit aware that we don't necessarily have a full picture of what people's attitudes are. We never do in the ancient world.

Even when it comes to male citizens, right, let alone all the other groups in society. And so we don't really know what people were saying, but we do know, for instance, that in 411, which is a little bit earlier, during the world war that was still going on, there was already a brief moment of oligarchy, a rule in Athens when people were indeed saying like, okay, this isn't going well, we need to think of a different way to approach this, our own governance as well as the war. And so they briefly had the government that's known as the 400, which is the first of the oligarchic regimes. And what you find is a lot of people that were involved in that project, which was very short lived and unsuccessful. And the democracy was soon restored. But a lot of the people that were involved in that are also involved in this new regime. So there is clearly an underbelly of oligarchic thought in Athens that just persists throughout this period. There are people who are talking about alternatives to democracy, who have clear reasons to argue that democracy isn't working for Athens. And so they are starting to agitate for this. And obviously, at this point, the end of the war in Athens has been forced to surrender to the Spartans.

They have the trump card of saying, okay, well, the Spartans, you know, obviously don't want democracy to return because they don't want, they don't trust that regime. ⁓ They would support a different kind of way of running the city.

What are Sparta doing after the war? Are they feeling really confident?

Obviously, this is a war about hegemony, right? This is a war about which which side gets to be the leader of the Greeks in a sort of, you know, in a fuzzy symbolic sense, but also in a practical sense, like who gets to count which parts of the Greek world as their sphere of influence. And so when it comes to Athens versus Sparta at the end of the war, of course, there's only one serious force, serious hegemon left. And Sparta at that point controls effectively the entire Greek world. And so what they're doing is instead of saying, OK, right, that was a job well done, let's all go home. Instead, they seem to take over all of this imperial sort of reach, all of these holdings, all these responsibilities. They just sort of seize it for themselves and they become the new great empire of the Greek world. And according to Diodorus, although it's only this late source, not the contemporary sources don't say this, but according to the late source, they actually levy tribute as well. So they become essentially the sort of the new Athenian empire. We're Spartan this time. And so yeah, you get this weird situation where ⁓ the Spartans who went to war allegedly to abolish and to demolish the Athenian Empire ⁓ essentially just replace it with their own.

Well, now, hypocrisy, who would have thought? ⁓ So what are Greeks thinking about what's happening outside of Athens and Sparta?

You can't let power go, right? who knows what will happen to it?

I know that Persia kind of helped Sparta win the Peloponnesian War. What are people thinking about Persians helping Greeks to fight other Greeks and then again this hypocrisy of Sparta taking over an empire that they were supposed to be dismantling?

Yeah, it's a very interesting thought because of course, we're kind of inclined by sort of simplified narratives that you get in pop culture that to think that there is a sort of opposition between Greeks and Persians, right, and they always hate each other and they suspect each other. But actually, what you see after the end of the Persian Wars is that the Greeks just kind of live in a world where the Persians obviously have, you know, they're the world power of this of their entire geopolitical environment. have all of the money and all of the resources. And so they're a very useful ally, right? You can use them to your advantage if you can convince them that it is in their interest to support you. And this is what the Greeks start doing. So throughout the Peloponnesian War, I mean, the Spartans end up getting Persian help. But both sides are asking for it! Both sides are lobbying the Persians for money, essentially. Can you back us up? Because then we will essentially stabilize your Western frontiers, right? Because that's what the Persians are interested in. They want to regain control over the coast of Asia Minor, so it's Western Turkey now. They want to continue levying tribute on those cities. The Athenian Empire is in the way. They are now doing the tribute levying. And so they want to shake things up, but also they don't want to create this sort of situation of endemic violence and disruption because they want to just get the money, right? They want to, they want a stable Western front too. And so the Persians, the other Greeks are also just looking at the Persians as like, okay, can we, can we find some way to get that support for ourselves? You know, I mean, after the war, we don't know that much about what the other Greek states are thinking or what they're, what they're up to. I mean, obviously we don't hear about that as much. Our sources are heavily focused on Athens and Sparta.

But for instance, the states, those Greek states on the Western Coast of Asia Minor, I mean, they are sort of wondering what's going on now. Obviously, they have to now suddenly find themselves having to obey Sparta. And they're wondering which way, you know, what would be better for them to be, to continue on the Spartan rule, to resort to the Persians or the Athenians? Like, how can they get a protector who's actually going to look after them and classify their regions because no one wants to be involved in, no one wants to be war zone, essentially. The Athenians, meanwhile, they're already working with the Persians to try and reverse their fortunes. mean, there is an Athenian called Conan who got away from the final decisive battle in which the Athenian Navy is destroyed. A few ships get away. They sail to Cyprus, and they immediately become a Persian asset. The Persians are using that as the backbone of a new fleet, which inevitably in a few years is going to challenge Spartan naval supremacy. So they are going to undo the outcome of the Peloponnesian War.

So I think you've kind of touched on it. We've been given this narrative that it's very much an East versus West hostility, and the two sides will never ever manage to cooperate and work together and they'll never ever be able to be even slightly friendly. But that's a real simplification between Persia and the Greeks that we should chuck out. We should rethink that.

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's never the case. I mean, even during the Persian Wars. I mean, one of the big reasons why the Persians even bothered to invade the Greek world is because several Greek factions, exiles, people who have who have, you know, old scores to settle are asking them to come over and help them out. Right. This has always been the case. mean, the Greeks are very opportunistic about the rise of the Persian Empire. Right. They see it as an opportunity to have unrivaled resources at their beck and call. And so they all try to play that game as much as possible. Resistance is the old

choice. Like that's the weird one. There's only a handful of states ever bothered to do that. Much more commonly they try to find a way to benefit from the arrival of this enormous power in the East.

That's great, we've busted one myth already and we're only 10 minutes in. Fantastic! So we're talking about regime change in Athens. Who is working to make this regime change happen? Is it just one party or is it more than one?

So it's an interesting thing that gets depicted differently. The chronology of this period is kind of confusing. And obviously, there is a lot of memory that the Athenians would rather not have. This is a period that's very difficult for them ⁓ to deal with and one that they seem to have had sort of quite a limited understanding of what happened when and in what order and because of whom. But fundamentally, the Spartans are, or there are different factions in Athens that want to have different ways of ruling this. According to some of our sources, there's basically three. There's the people who want the democracy back, there's people who want an oligarchy regime outright. And then there's the really odd one that's kind of mysterious, which wants what they call the patrios politeia, the ancestral constitution. And the ancestral constitution is a fuzzy concept that emerges in politics around this time, which can mean all sorts of things. It's it's one of the what does it mean to have the answers? It's like basically saying somebody wants tradition backward. What is tradition? know, tradition is things that change all the time. You can't actually say, OK, this is the thing that we've always been doing because there is no such thing in any society anywhere, that we've always been doing the same way forever. They always sort of adapt with the times and change. So appealing to tradition is always about saying like, but what do you actually mean? You always have to ask, you know, what tradition and what point in time do you actually mean to restore here? And what for the Athenians, it also seems to be the case. This isn't about saying, okay, right. We just going to grab the laws of Solon that we put in place two centuries ago and we're just going to reintroduce them and change nothing. Because of course everybody realized there are reasons why those laws were changed over time. They didn't necessarily work perfectly. So this is always understood. And so what they're probably asking for with the so-called ancestral constitution is really just a whole new set of laws which have some tenuous claim to being more like the laws of Solon or the laws of Cleisthenes.

But in any case, what it means is rolling back some of the things that the democracy has done, some of the things that have been introduced over the decades to make Athenian politics more accessible, more inclusive. They obviously always want to roll that back by appealing to an older tradition. And so we're talking about ⁓ removing things like pay for office, which allows anyone, regardless of their economic background, to be a magistrate in the Athenian system. They don't want that because they want to monopolize power among the wealthy. These sort of things are probably part of this question. But that means that the ancestral constitution people, ancestral, ⁓ the Patrios Politea party, if you will, they kind of sit in the middle. So you have democracy, then you have ancestral constitution, which is like a moderated oligarchy, essentially. And you have the outright oligarchy. And the Spartans are sort of looming in the background of these debates that are going on in Athens. And we don't really have a good sense of how this happens, whether they are the ones who are telling the Athenians, you've got to think about this and we better like what you come up with. Or whether they are sort of standing there breathing down their necks and saying, right, what do you got? What are you going to do? Either way, they seem to be backing the more oligarchic option and especially Lysander, the Spartan admiral, who was the key figure in achieving the defeat of the Athenians.

He is kind of the one who favors the narrow as possible oligarchy because that is how he has managed the affairs of the other Greek cities, which he has liberated from the Athenians, liberated as in imposed his own narrow oligarchies on them, which he more or less controls as puppet regimes. So he wants a narrow oligarchy and the Athenians find it very difficult at this stage, obviously, to tell him, we want something else.

So just briefly, what do we know about how Sparta was run at this time? And are they trying to just copy paste their constitution onto Athens or are they not? Do we even know what their constitution was doing at the time?

⁓ You can tell by now I'm very bad at 'briefly'. ⁓ It's one of the theories is that what they're doing is actually just copying this Spartan constitution, right? So that is one of the things, ways that people have been interpreting the regime that follows where you have this very small group of people in particular ⁓ in Athens, this becomes a regime of the 30 because built around this council of 30 men who are meant to redraft the constitution.

And people said, well, of course, in Sparta, you have the Council of Elders, the Gerousia, which is also 30 men. And so there are a few other parallels like that where you can say, okay, well, it seems like the Spartans are trying to apply that. But I think that doesn't really get taken so seriously nowadays because the way that this state is run still is very much almost haphazard. It develops as it goes. It's not meant to be a ruling board of 30. It's not meant to have these kinds of aspects. There is talk in one source that there was also like five executive magistrates which paralleled the Spartan ephors quite a bit, but other sources don't report them at all. So we don't even know if that's really existed or if later sources are trying to strengthen this sense that this is like a Spartan system. It's not really clear. To come at it from the other side, how is the Spartan state run? It's this weird sort of system that we know from other sources where essentially there are two kings, there is a council of elders and there is an assembly.

And then there's an executive board of five ephors, which are elected annually that kind of do the day-to-day stuff. And that is fundamentally how they work, except that with the difference that the assembly is not just all the citizens, but only those who can meet a certain property requirements. So that's how they run their state. It's, know, if you're in the gang, if you're in the club, it's a democracy, but if you're not in the club, it's clearly an oligarchy, right? You need to be this tall to ride. And so that is how it fundamentally operates as an oligarchy, which does have within that circle quite a lot of sort of, you know, input and inclusivity, as long as you're a member of that, that leisure class. But, you know, there are some of those things that you could say, okay, well, that is something that they're trying to do at Athens, partly because they're mimicking Sparta, partly because that is just the idea of how an oligarchy works.

But for instance, there's absolutely no sign that they're adopting something like Spartan kings or this idea of this dual leadership. A lot of their institutions seem to be very Athenian still. They still adopt and use a lot of the kinds of state institutions that they just inherit from the democracy, like the court of the Areopagus and the magistrates that they have, the generalship, the board of generals that are elected every year, these kinds of things.

So just because a foreign, well 'foreign'... so just because a different city is imposing power upon Athens doesn't mean that we should assume that Sparta is imposing everything on Athens. They're not turning it into Sparta 2.0.

No, and certainly in fact, they wouldn't want that, right, because Athens is a larger community than theirs. So that would actually be a real problem if they they ended up sort of becoming a new Sparta, then you Sparta itself would lose legitimacy and potentially power. mean, they do allow these states to more or less determine the finer details of how they are run. But what you see Lysander do in other states is just impose a board of 10. So these are called dekaki. So rule of the 10. And those have complete charge. Now, there's no parallel to that anywhere in Sparta. This is just a Lysander's little idea of how to run states as a very, very narrow oligarchy, right? 10 guys run the whole show. And the other argument with the 30 in Athens is that it's basically just another board of 10, except it's bigger because Athens is bigger. So they have 30 instead of 10. But fundamentally, it's the same idea. They're just imposing a system that is not spartan in any way, but it is extremely restrictive and extremely, you know, 'Tyrannical' is a word that's kind of weird to use when there's like 30 guys, but this regime is actually in later tradition sometimes known as the 30 Tyrants. Like they have complete control there, they behave like despots. And so it's a system of government that is sort of an oligarchy so narrow that it becomes effectively a tyranny except that they have to, there is a group of them.

So 30 tyrants, who are they, how are they chosen, who is choosing them?

We don't know. We know a bunch of names actually and Xenophon actually lists them. So there are ways in which we can tell who they are. Not all of the names are known elsewhere. ⁓ But a couple of the key ones are really, really interesting. Critias is one who some of some fragments of his writing survive. He was known as a heavy laconophile, like he loved Sparta. ⁓ He was definitely a big fan of oligarchy. He was a student of Socrates. So these are the kind of people who have spent a lifetime thinking differently about things. at this point, they come to power and turns out Critias is a psycho who just

rules Athens as he sees fit. Critias is one of the leading figures. And then you have a bunch of others. Caraclys is another leading figure who comes up a few times. We know very little about him. He's one of the poster children of this regime. A number of other names that we mostly know from this period.

So we don't really know them, but you do get figures like there are many and that is where it gets really interesting. So there are many. Is one of the richest men in Athens is a hugely prominent guy, but he was one of the key figures who initially created this regime of the 400, which I mentioned before. So a few years earlier when you have another oligarchy regime, there are many is one of their great champions. Like he's the one who puts them together. And then when he realizes that this isn't working out, he is also one of the ones who makes it collapse. So he has this double role, which is very strange because afterwards he you know, the democracy is restored. And there are many is all over it. Like he's one of the most prominent leaders of the restored democracy as well. So he's managed to to like walk this fine line where people can see him both as a champion of oligarchy and as a proponent of democracy.

Handy for a politician!

Right? this literally he gets called Buskin like he has a nickname which basically means a shoe that fits both feet. It's beautiful ⁓ but yeah so he is he's also member of the 30 which is it's wild like he ends up being sort of proponent of every possible regime right like he's always there. He's super influential. He's a prominent general. He was fighting with Alcibiades and fighting with Thrasybulus during the Ionian Wars, the final years of the Peloponnesian Wars, one of the great generals of that period. So he's hugely prominent and hugely wealthy. And he's very happy to consider oligarchy as one of the options for Athens. But this, he will become more important later. But Theramenes is one of the most interesting figures of this regime.

So we've used the word oligarch. I'm taking it from this that all 30 are from a certain demographic.

Yeah, so presumably that's true. I there's one source that says the 30 were composed of like some from the some from all the different parties, right, like that they were representatives of the different ⁓ groups that were advocating different policies. But I think people generally don't really believe that. They think that's a that's a sort of idealized version of how this group came about. Fundamentally, they are just people who are who are wealthy. They're from wealthy backgrounds. They are ideally probably, you know, palatable to the Spartans, which means they can, Spartans can relate to them. So they're gonna be a leisure class men. And of course, I mean, they are advocates of a kind of system in which they are the ones who are in charge, not the common people. shouldn't have equal say and equal access to political rights that they do.

For a society that's been a democracy for so long, a radical democracy that has given common men power, that's got to be quite the U-turn for the majority of people living in Athens. I'm guessing they weren't wonderfully pleased about it, but it sounds like they were so exhausted that they didn't have much choice. But were the Thirty tolerating the common men, or were they, you know, using this as an opportunity to wreak some havoc?

So it seems to me that there's, mean, it's a really good question actually, because again, we don't actually know very much about how the common people reacted to. And this is always the kind of thing that, you in modern politics, it's very easy to find out, you know, you can go on social media or you can go anywhere to see what people are saying about stuff. And some of them may even be real people and not bots. But if you're looking at the ancient world, a lot of the time, you end up having only the attitudes of or the report of what the wealthy elite are doing.

Alexandra Sills (26:18)

Okay.

Roel Konijnendijk (26:29)

It seems though, and we are told this explicitly, that initially when the 30 was put together as a board to consider what constitution Athens should have, that this had quite a lot of support from ordinary people precisely because they thought democracy clearly had something, had had its flaws, it led to disaster. We have to imagine also this population probably was recovering from outright starvation, they weren't necessarily gonna be too keen to start a fight. But also you have to imagine that they were willing to consider that reform was necessary. And so one of the things the 30 initially did specifically, and this was considered to be quite a popular move, was they went after these people called sycophants, the informers. So there was this system in Athens in the democracy where the courts are very influential. Almost any political career can be made or broken in the law courts. And one of the ways in which you could defeat a rival in the law courts was you could get these hired people, these informers, to essentially start a case against them so that you could destroy them in the courtroom. And it didn't really matter what frivolous thing they could come up with in order to accuse people as long as it gave you the opportunity to destroy their reputation and to have a court of your peers essentially inflict horrible punishments on them, exile, fines, or even execution in the worst case.

And so the courts were hugely influential and people have always, the Athenian people always kind of had this sense that these sycophants were a form of corruption, They're a form of abuse of the system that where people were just allowing themselves to be hired to create frivolous lawsuits in order to suit the interests and needs of corrupt politicians. That's fundamentally what we're talking about. And that was considered to be a way in which the system was, was corrupt, was broken, was being abused. And as a result of that, when the 30 said, OK, we're going to put a stop to that. We're going to restore the powers of the Areopagus Council, which is the highest court of Athens. And we're going to strip away some of the powers of these popular courts. And we're going to go after these sycophants. We don't want these informers anymore. A lot of people said, you know what? That's probably good. That will clean up our system. This is the classic sort of anti-corruption measures where initially these regimes can have quite a bit of support for that.

And as a result of that, people were initially like, OK, well, the 30 can't be all bad. And it just kind of escalates from there, right? Like initially, they were going after the right people. And so everybody was like, you know what, that's fine. And then they started going after whoever they wanted. And at that point, obviously, for a lot of people, it was too late to respond.

Well, we can't see any parallels in modern politics now, can we?

I wouldn't possibly want to comment on this! What's very interesting actually is that the 30, and this is at a point that is chronologically unclear, so I can't exactly say what triggered the action. ⁓ But eventually the 30, they recognize that they are as their own sort of body, they're too small, they don't command enough sort of loyalty and compliance to be able to run the city, so they need to co-opt some of the population, right? So what they do is they instigate this body called the 3000, which is essentially an assembly, except it's just a bunch of yes men that they handpick from the population, most likely based on property levels, right? So they seek their own, they get the 3,000 of the richest citizens, they say, okay, you guys are gonna have some rights, no one else is gonna have any rights. And they hope that that three body of 3,000 is going to be enough support for them to essentially control the whole city. But they then also, and this is the kind of crucial step that makes you realize like they are not that confident that they can control the city of Athens, which as you say, has been used to democracy and all of these people have been used to having some say in power for a very long time. So they actually disarm the population and throw them out of the city.

Right, so we're seeing consolidation of power, we're seeing rights being stripped away from people who are deemed as inferior due to, in this case, wealth bracket??

Yeah. Well, it's kind of like, it's not explicit, right? This is the problem. We assume it's wealth. We actually just hear that these people are handpicked by the 30. But we have to imagine that when you handpick people in a population this small, you're doing it on the basis of like, these are people I know, these are people that I can rely on, right? Everybody that we hear about who's in the 3000, they're all wealthy citizens. Socrates is one of them, actually. So that's a bit of an odd one. you know, obviously because they want to protect the status of the mentor of various members of this regime. These are people who are very well connected. Socrates obviously had incredible connections if we read through the dialogues that Plato writes. We know that he was at the very top of society. He's hobnobbing with the rich and powerful. And so these are the kind of people that get saved. ⁓ But it's not all of the rich. It's not like you can start at the top of society and then just go down and then there's a line that you draw and then everybody below that is out.

It is selective. They are clearly looking for people who might be inclined to support their regime, which we know because they also go after other people exactly because they're very wealthy and because they are not trusted to support the regime. So they go and sort of execute them or send them into exile and confiscate their property essentially just to enrich themselves. And so there's absolutely a sense that if you're rich, you're not safe for that reason. You also have to be considered to be a potential friend of oligarchy, or their weapons taken away and they're thrown out of their houses.

So think it's really worth emphasizing that for a lot of families in Athens, they've been starved, they've survived a plague, they've lost countless of their menfolk in war. They're weakened, right? And they're more impoverished than they've ever been. And now they're having their voting rights stripped back. And their weapons taken away. So their right to bear arms is also taken away.

Well, yes. So it's very easy to grab modern parallels of that when we're talking about right to bear arms. We're immediately thinking of one particular country. This is something that in the Greek world is obviously discussed, the idea that it is a typical tyrannical move to take away the people's weapons and to rely on mercenaries instead. Because tyrants obviously can't trust the people if they're armed. They might start an uprising.

That is a very particular context that exists in the Greek world, which is taken by the founding fathers and written into the constitution, because that is what they also believe. They need to be armed so that they can get organized so that they can overthrow tyrannical regimes. ⁓ But you have to think of this in terms of a situation where it's one city where the public spaces are very accessible, right? They're right in the middle of the city. You have the Agora where the government buildings are, and that's where the council is, where the 30 are gathered. They are literally staying in the Tholos, right? This little round building where the Pritonees of the council used to stay. they're right in middle of the city. If you gather together even a few hundred men with spears and shields, this regime will be over in a flash, right? It's in order to control the relative volatility and vulnerability of a society that is that small.

That is why bearing arms is such an important aspect of it. And of course, ⁓ a society in which the people in arms are their primary military resource. I'm always having to stress this, but all of these Greek cities rely on militia systems, Sparta included, which means the adult male citizens are their army. If they are armed, they are an army. That is exactly how it works in all of their wars as well. It doesn't necessarily even restrict to civil war. That's true in all of their wars. The people in arms are the military force of these states. There's very few of them that have anything other than that in order to defend themselves. That is their military resource. And so obviously, if you want to take that away, it's very simple. You just take away their weapons. And then the state is completely helpless. They no longer have any means of defending themselves. Similar to why the Athenians, when they are suppressing rebellions in the empire, they will say, OK, well, you have to tear down your walls. It's also to create a vulnerable, a helpless environment to make sure that people can't defend themselves. And so there's a very low threshold for that, right? Like both for creating military force and therefore also for taking it away. You just need to take their weapons and then they have nothing left. Whereas the modern situation is very different. mean, there are professional armies out there. There's trillions poured into military R&D. People in arms are not the same, is not as close to what a state has as a military asset as it was back in those days.

Right. Okay, so the 30 hold power, a lot of the population of Athens are, as you say, very, very vulnerable. Are the 30 kind? Are they civically minded? Are they looking after their citizens? I can guess...

What do you think!? So I can guess, yeah, no, it's oligarchs. So the thing is that initially, as I said, they

seem to have been decently popular with some of the measures that they took, but it becomes very rapidly clear that they are essentially in it for their own benefit, right? They are desperate to establish themselves to a greater degree of stability and also to enrich themselves. And that seems to be very rapidly comes out as one of their primary aims is just to confiscate as much wealth as they can and just take it for themselves, give it to their friends. So they start this regime of terror in which they go after any citizen they don't like, anybody who might be organizing resistance, anybody who looks at them funny essentially for various reasons actually, partly because they want their money, that absolutely is a factor. But also partly because, this is very explicit in Plato for instance, actually says they deliberately sent random people to go and arrest people on their behalf so that they'd be complicit, right? So that they had also committed crimes for this regime and therefore the regime had to last, right? Because if the regime ever fell, they would also be persecuted, they would also be, you know, in trouble because of what they'd done for them.

So they send, for instance, Socrates at one point is sent to arrest someone and he refuses and they have to send someone else because of course Socrates is like, you know, morally pure. But the idea is that the 30 are just using everyone in the 3000, this larger body of citizens, they're using all of them as their agents in order to make them complicit in this regime of essentially sort of murder and theft so that they will back the regime to the hilt, essentially. So they will have no choice but to fight to the last to keep this regime going because otherwise they will face consequences. And they will never be able to wash their hands of it, so to speak.

So they're putting they're putting vulnerable people against vulnerable people because they're acting out of self-preservation?

Yep. Yep. Yep. So it's fundamentally, it's all of this is, know, the first they disarm the population, they drive them out of the city. They send supposedly 5,000 people to Piraeus. So basically they drive out the entire population of Athens out of the city so that they can have that to themselves. And they go after anybody they can, you know, both in Piraeus and elsewhere who they think can either sort of give them some useful resources they can spread around or just take for themselves or people whose removal is going to increase the stability of the regime.

So we've got a regime who are hell-bent on just gathering as much wealth as possible. I'm going to guess they're not planning on spending it on charitable foundations or anything like that.

Indeed not. Sorry.

Shocker! Is this really not a short-sighted kind of approach to be taken considering that Athens is so weak after the Peloponnesian War?

Yeah, the thing is, the chronology of the period, as I said, is really difficult to pin down. And so we are not always sure what is the cause and what is the effect of different things that are happening around the same time which is one of the reasons why they're doing all this and why they're creating such disruption and messing around with this population that ought to be healing and recovering, ⁓ seems to be that there's already a rebellion going on and there's already resistance brewing and so what they're doing, they need money, right? They need to get resources in order to fight this rebellion, or so they say, you know, that is how it's connected. So one of the things they do with all the money they confiscate is pay for the Spartan garrison that has been provided to them to back up their regime. So there's a Spartan occupation force on the Acropolis, right? There's 700 Spartans who are there to keep this regime in power. And they have to be paid, you know, they have to be fed. And so the 13 eat money. And it's this kind of thing that causes them to behave in this rapacious way. But there's also this urge that they seem to have to kind of change the character of Athens, right? So one of the things they're later accused of doing is selling the dockyards. they literally just, Athens obviously relied on its naval power for a very long time, had very extensive dockyards around Piraeus and different military harbors. They sell it for scrap, like for building materials. So supposedly, according to one source, it costs 1000 talents to build all that and they sell it for three. It's the idea of like, they're not doing it for the money, they're doing it because they don't want Athens to be the way it was, right? They want Athens to change its character and change its nature.

Right. Do we know what kind of things they were doing to these dissenters that they didn't like?

Yes, they were executed or sent into exile. I mean, if you're lucky, you're sent into exile without your possessions. So you'd end up being destitute and relying on your connections. So this happens to a lot of very influential Athenians. And this ends up being the kernel of the resistance, people who get sent into exile and who want to try to make their way back. ⁓ But the alternative is to be executed. there's all sorts of horrible ways that they can do that. The main figure that we know about is actually Theramenes. So I mentioned him before, he was this kind of the buskin guy, right? The one who fits into every regime. He is again, a member of the 30s. So you have to think he's quite happy to consider oligarchy, right? Like he's quite happy to be part of it and to support it. But he doesn't like radical oligarchy. He doesn't like the kind of despotism they engage in. So he is the one who we're told

starts pushing back. He's the one who says from within, he's the one who says, I don't think we should be doing this. I think we are causing problems for ourselves. We're making ourselves vulnerable by causing all this chaos and inciting all this resistance. We are setting people up against us. And he has all sorts of moments where he pushes back and the 30 tell him to do stuff and he refused to do it. So he's a problem and Critias just does away with him. And that is in the classic way of making him drink hemlock.

Okay, which we will see later on with Socrates as well. Spoiler alert!

Exactly. So yeah, Socrates doesn't end upwell. And for this reason, actually, because he has this close connection. We'll get to that. But fundamentally, you're talking about a regime that even in the event of getting rid of one of their own, they're very explicitly behaving in this way, which will feel extremely relatable to modern audiences, where Theramenes will just argue like you can't do anything to me because it's not lawful for you to execute someone if they're a member of your regime. I'm on the list, I'm on the 3,000, I'm in the 30, there are laws that apply to me. We have to have a proper trial and then you can see what you want to do. so Kritias just in front of everyone essentially just strikes his name off the list and says, now I can do whatever I want. And he has them executed. And that is very much the way this regime works, right?

Yeah, it's very much like the 'at first they came for' the poem, right? So I'm kind of trying to imagine life as an Athenian who's not in the 30 or the 3000 at the time, poorer than ever, sicker than ever.

My family has been decimated and now it sounds like I can't trust my neighbors. I can't trust the government. This is a really horrible way to live...

Yeah, effectively as well, if we believe that, and this some pushback from some scholars, I mean, there's a question of how many people really sent into exile, right? And there's the reason why we should suspect the number that we get that everyone was sent out of the city, except for the 3000, is because that is later when the democracy is restored. That's the story the Athenians want to tell, right? Like there was oligarchs in the city, but all of us, all of us. We're kicked out and we're helpless and we were all united outside the city just looking for a way to get back in, right? You know, all the good people were not part of this. In reality, it's probably a lot more mixed in that they didn't throw everyone out. They just kind of had a large number of people driven out of the city, but others were still having to sort try and find a way in their day-to-day lives to cope with it.

So I think it's important to stress, isn't it, that when we talk about Athens, it's not just the urban centre. There's a whole area around it. OK, so let's talk about Attica a little bit. What is Attica and where is Athens in it? What else is in it?

Yeah, so Attica is a sort of peninsula, right? It's like a triangle sticking out into the Aegean, which is about the size of modern state of Luxembourg. Like it's quite a large territory as Greek states go, right? It's one of the largest ones. Attica is sort of in the southeast of that. It's further away from the land borders than it is from the various coastlines. So it's considered to be hugely advantageous for naval trade and naval power. But on the landward side, it's got borders with Megara, it's got borders with Boeotia, which are quite mountainous, they're quite difficult to pass, but they create this enormous territory that is being governed from the central city of Athens. And all around that territory, you have separate communities living in their own towns and living in their own administrative districts, which are part of Athens, the polis. But of course they're quite far from the city. I can be as much as two, three days travel to get to Athens from outlying parts of Attica. Some of those towns are quite famous names, obviously Marathon, Eleusis, Sunion. These are places that are days away on foot from the Attic core.

So when we talk about exiles from Athens, are they being exiled from the urban centre or are they being exiled from Attica?

So it varies, which is the annoying thing. Some people are being just driven out of the city. The large bulk of the population is being exiled from the city, the urban center. But they live in Piraeus, which clearly means they haven't been exiled from Attica because Piraeus, the harbor, is also part of Attica. But then there are people who absolutely have been exiled from Attica and who have sought refuge in surrounding cities. So we hear about exiles being welcomed in Megara, in Thebes in particular seems to be very receptive. In Chalkis on Euboea, basically all the surrounding areas. So Troezen and Hermione on the Peloponnese... These kinds of places are hosting, and Argos as well on Peloponnese, hosting these exiles. The Spartans are extremely unhappy about this. They actually say, ⁓ you must send them back. We will punish you and fine you if you don't, if we catch you hosting and harbouring Athenian exiles because you must deliver them up to the 30. ⁓ But some of these states, and obviously a lot of people are cowed by this, but some of these states explicitly refuse to obey the Spartans, which kind of tells you the tensions that already exist now in this new world order where the Spartans have become the new hegemons. And a lot of their former allies are like, wait a minute, that's not what we were doing all this for. They weren't hoping to be bossed around by another imperial overlord,right? So they instead say, well, okay, well, we will actually back the Athenians, you can't make us do anything. The Thebans in particular, who are currently at this point, they're still being led by a pro, they're an oligarchy, but they have a faction that is more pro Athenian led by as many as and he is the one who essentially persuades the Thebans to issue a counter decree, saying that if you see a Spartan arresting an Athenian exile, you must help them, like you must help the Athenian or we will find you. So they have this decree that actually says, cannot allow the Spartans to boss us around and to do the bidding of the third, you must help. ⁓ And that is their law, right? So they actually make a counter law that goes explicitly against what the Spartans are telling them to do.

So Attica itself is a big place, lots of different types of communities, and I'm guessing from the Peloponnesian War it was heavily fortified. But it sounds like from what you're saying that the Thirty are really only interested in the city itself. You've talked about the garrison in Athens on the Aquopolis. Have they fortified the whole of Attica because they've now got thousands, by the sounds of it, people with military training, if not with weapons, roaming around the countryside, potentially able to talk to each other and communicate. Right?

Yeah, so as long as they're disarmed, they're not too worried about it. And this really does come up. Like the fact that they are disarmed makes them militarily not very useful, essentially. Like they have to do something else, right? They have to get funding to buy weapons or they have to make new weapons. And this becomes a problem even when the rebellion eventually gets strong enough, getting ahead of myself here, but when they get strong enough to control the countryside and essentially besiege the, besiege the oligarchs, they still have to organize how to get arms to these people, right? How to sign them up and then actually make sure that they are effective. So this is something of a problem. But fundamentally, initially the Thirty, of course they base themselves in the city, that is their fort, that's their citadel. But of course they are wealthy citizens as well, which in a lot of cases means they are the landowners. They are the people who own the Attic countryside, right? A lot of them are, you some of the wealthiest, like there are many, some of the wealthiest citizens in Athens, which means that their own estates are out there, you know, so they have to worry about that as well. So they're not just going to say like, okay, whatever. In fact, one of their key props of their regime, other than this Spartan garrison, which keeps coming up time and again, is essentially the strong arm of the regime is the Athenian cavalry.

Now, the cavalry obviously mostly consists of young rich men. So these are the younger members of the families that compose the 30 and the 3000. But the Athenian cavalry is firstly, of course, it comes out of the countryside. You're not going to raise a cavalry force in the city. But also, it is a key element of the defense of the countryside. And that's true throughout the Pelvanese War and other conflicts as well. mean, if the countryside is being raided by enemies, you send out the cavalry to contain the raiders to drive them off to push them together and to get rid of them and to get them out of the land by harassing them and by writing them down. And so the cavalry is an instrumental force. It's sort of mobile, quick to act, flexible and able to engage enemies when they're trying to do damage to the countryside. So in that sense, the Athenians hold the 30 in Athens hold the trump card when it comes to defending the countryside as well, especially against lightly armed or unarmed mobs, because the cavalry is just going to absolutely shatter them if they try anything. So in that sense, they have the tools to protect the countryside as well and to maintain control over it as long as their enemies are not organized and not armed.

So can we see these exiles being able to congregate anywhere so that they can maybe organise?

Yeah, so this is where the rebellion comes in. So there is actually resistance brewing. this is mainly based around a very, very small band of men who are in Thebes. So they've been thrown out into exile. And some of them, led by a figure named Thrasybulos, who is himself one of the great generals of the late Peloponnesian War, one of the great admirals of that period, who was also one of the leaders of the resistance against the 400, which is, again, he's got form, he was in that conflict very explicitly pro-democratic. Now in this conflict, I'm not exactly sure, but that's a separate discussion. But fundamentally, because he's also very good friends with there are many, which and a number of his fellow travelers are very good friends there are many. So you always have to wonder like, what what what side is he on? You never know. You just don't know it there are many. But setting that aside, he is the one who organizes a small band of exiles. And instead of just sitting in Thebes seething,

they actually cross over the mountains over the Parnitha range into Attica and they take, they seize this rocky outcrop which is sort of sticking out in sight of Athens. You can see it from the city, which is called Phyle. He's got about 70 guys initially, but that group grows over time.

So yeah, I don't know if we can talk about how that works, but fundamentally we don't really know. The problem is the number of citizens in that group doesn't seem to grow very much. ⁓ A few foreigners join as well, but it seems like most of the ⁓ waxing of that rebellion is because people are sending them money and mercenaries and they're using the money to get more mercenaries. And so basically ⁓ it's a weird feature of this rebellion. They sit at Phyle for about four months, three or four months. So they're in sight of Athens and the 30 go up against them and get defeated twice, which means that they really are able to hold their own and to form a credible threat, even though they're very small band of troops. And yet people don't seem to join them, right? There's no movement to everybody, let's go to Philae and join Thrasybulos and his rebels. There's no real attempt to try and do that in any kind of numbers. Really very, very small numbers of people actually join the rebellion until they realize, okay, this isn't working out, even though they're militarily quite successful, they're not really snowballing into a sort of countrywide movement. They realize, you what, we need to go to the people where they are. And so they go to Piraeus, infiltrate Piraeus in the night. And that's suddenly when the people sort of, when they see them around, when they realize there is an alternative to this oligarchy, there is somebody who's trying to fight, who's trying to resist. That is when the people start to join in huge numbers.

Okay, so we have Piraeus, it's the port town of Athens, it's quite a bit smaller, already quite busy, and now we see all of these rebels flooding in. What are conditions like in Piraeus?

If we believe that large numbers of people were driven into Piraeus, then you have to imagine this is essentially, again, a kind of siege-like situation where loads and loads of people are crammed into a small, heavily built-up space, having to kind of find shelter wherever they could, having to sort of, way too many in a way too sort of small, urbanized area, having to find a way to scrape a living ⁓ when everything around them had been laid waste by the war and now also had been confiscated by the Thirty. So it's a really, really desperate situation. We don't know much about what it was like in that environment. We really don't hear much about it, but we do hear that as soon as the rebels get to Piraeus, huge masses of those people immediately join the rebellion, right? Like as soon as they get to Piraeus, as soon as the the the exiles, there's quite a small band of exiles that reaches Piraeus, suddenly they have a massive army, right? Because everybody who's in the city, everybody who's stuck in Piraeus, they don't even have weapons, right? Because they've been disarmed. So we hear of them like having to sort of make shifts, build, make their own shields and things like that. They have to kind of slap together something like an armed force, but they are so keen, you know, to get out of this situation.

Because they've been torn from their homes, right? And I'm guessing not with a trial or anything, they're just literally ripped from their houses.

Just told, yeah, disarmed, which at that point, obviously, they are helpless. And so the 30 can just sort of drive them out by force of arms, you know, at the point of a spear. That is fundamentally what happens, or at least with some unclear number of them. What's very interesting though, is because in Piraeus, obviously you have different populations that are living there. Piraeus is known to be a place where poorer people live because, you know, they work in shipping. They work as rowers, they work in the merchant fleets, they work as fishermen, whatever. So it's known to be a place where the demos live, so to speak, rather than the well-to-do, right? It's also known as a place where a lot of migrant communities live. And so this is why in Piraeus, you have a shrine to Bendis, the Thracian goddess. These kinds of figures are so prominent in Piraeus. And so a lot of the people who support the rebellion actually are not the people who are driven out from Athens, but they are the actual demos, the people who make up the bulk of Athenian society. These are the people who actually rise from Piraeus where they live to contribute to this. And we have good evidence of this in the fact that we have an inscription which honors those who joined the rebellion who were not Athenian citizens. So these are medics, resident foreigners, mercenaries, whatever else, who supported the rebellion. There's a huge list of names. There's like 1200 of them on the stone, or at least estimated because the stone is very fragmented. But they are listed because they're not Athenian citizens who you would normally list by the name and the demotic, right? So the deem that they're part of their administrative

district. But they are not citizens, so they don't have a deem. So they are listed by name and profession. And that is interesting, because you can see who these people are. And it turns out they are just the most common. Like they're farm workers, they're craftsmen, they're like sailors and people who have the most sort of common everyday jobs. And that's all of them, right? There is no one there who's just like, well, I don't have a profession, I'm a landowner. They're all like just ordinary people

who are putting their lives on the line to try and get democracy back, even though they're not even citizens, right? Even though they don't even have any stake in Athenian democracy as such. Likely because they're hoping that, partly because they're in a terrible situation in Piraeus, but partly because they're hoping that maybe if they win, they will get some kind of ⁓ improvement to their status.

So we have the Thirty in Athens, which it sounds like they've turned it into just their own private citadel with Spartan soldiers on the Acropolis. We've got exiled rebels in Piraeus. What happens next?

So, I mean, the exiled rebels themselves, they've had to infiltrate from Thebes, right? So they had a long sort of journey ahead. They actually spent some months up on a fort in Phyle, which is sort of on the edge of Attica. So they've had some time to get to Piraeus, but they have, in that period, actually defeated the Thirty several times. So the Thirty haven't been able to deal with this very effectively, which is kind of an interesting question from a military perspective. They get into Piraeus, they sneak in in the night. There's even a story that they had to sort of hide behind a sort of propitiously appearing thunderstorm, which lit their way through the darkness. This kind of story, it's obviously mythologized. They sneak into Piraeus and the 30 again react to them, march out in force, get defeated again, which is what is the major catalyst for this local support that the rebels get. So the rebellion initially is very small. It's a group of like 70 guys that infiltrate Attica.

And it doesn't grow very much except by attracting mercenaries. mean, they just have some foreign backers. just get people to join them for pay, essentially, which is a pretty good move. But when they get to Piraeus and when they defeat the 30 for the third time there, ⁓ they suddenly get all this local support. So that's when their army starts to balloon. Like the rebellion starts to be a serious problem. But the thing is, in that battle that they fight in Piraeus, Critias dies, actually. He dies in the fighting because as like so many Greek commanders, if you want the army to fight for you, you have to lead by example. So he's somewhere in the front ranks and he gets killed, along with several other prominent figures, which means that the 30 is shaken. It's sort of lost some of its most prominent figures. It's lost some of the most radical figures in that movement. And so the 30 actually get overthrown and replaced by a new group of a new sort of central council called the 10.

And this is the point where, obviously even more narrow, right? The point where, according to the narrative, everybody was hoping that the 10, it's just a temporary board. They're just there to negotiate the peace because we're all sick of civil war. The 30 didn't work. We got rid of the 30. We sent them out to Eleusis, right? The remaining 30 just get sort of told to go away. ⁓ And the 10 are now there to kind of manage the transition back to a peaceful compromise, whatever. We don't know what they're going to do.

Of course, what do they do? Double down on oligarchy. Exactly the same thing as before. It's very hard to kind of see a real distinction between the 30 and the 10 because essentially they just say like, well, we're in this war. We're just going to go straight back to Sparta and say, you send us more help? We need to deal with this situation. They absolutely have no intention whatsoever of giving up their power. They are just going to double down on what the 30 were already doing.

Of course. Okay. Yes.

Right? So the 10 have called on the Spartans to intervene, ⁓ which is essentially the final phase, because the Spartans do. And that is a bit more than a small rebellion of haphazardly armed citizens can handle, citizens and their foreign backers.

Okay, so we've got our rebels who are trying their best, God love them. We've got an increasingly narrow amount of people in charge of Athens and it sounds like they're talking to Sparta about, let's sort this out because this rebellion is something that we don't want. So what happens when Sparta finally does get more involved?

Yes. Hmm. I should mention that at this point, we can say the rebels are 'trying their best', but actually they are immensely successful after they have taken Piraeus and they have secured all the support. It gets kind of missed in the narratives of this because very rapidly after this, when the Spartans intervene, the whole story comes to an end. ⁓ But in this period, they are actually besieging Athens. I don't mean besieging, instead of they're sitting around watching the walls. There is talk of engines going up to the walls. There's assaults at the city center.

Wow!

It doesn't come to anything because it's very hard to assault a city that has, still at this point, something in the area of 3,000 4,000 fairly well-equipped defenders. But it is something that is, at that point, perceived as a siege. And very interestingly, we were trying earlier to reconstruct what it must have been like for the common people in Piraeus, being driven out of their homes and living in this sort squalor. We don't have good sources for that. But of course, again, because our sources are

inclined to the wealthy. We do have an account of people living in Athens, in the city, being bottled up with the 30 or with the 10 at that point and having to make do and then, know, having complaining that they are no longer have access to their resources in the countryside, that they're shut off from their states, that all of their, you know, all of the people that depend on them have been driven into their households and they're just kind of sitting around not knowing what to do, but eating food every day, you know, causing this sort of economic hardship.

There's a really interesting scene in Xenophon's Memorabilia where a couple of these people are complaining to each other, like, I have all these women in my house now. I can't marry them off to anyone because no one wants to marry them. And I don't have access to anything that I could offer as dowry. So like we're stuck. What do we do? We were just, they're just eating me out of house and home. ⁓ at which point, you know, Xenophon's friend is, basically telling me, you know, why don't you just make them, put them to work, right? Use them as as a labor force. And that is the brilliant solution that he comes up with is, you know, if they just weave and then we can sell the clothes they make and then, you know, we've got our little cottage industry. And so that is something that is concerning to the wealthy even in Athens at this point, because they are under siege, right? They are once again trapped in the city without the normal resources they can rely on. it's a moment of considerable hardship for the rich, know, the world's smallest violin.

It is something that we can then see, okay, this isn't just something that happens, you know, a line in the text that says, ⁓ the city's under siege. ⁓ It happened in a couple of different texts. It's explicitly said like that, you know, the rebels control the countryside and besiege the city. ⁓ And the effect of that is, you know, people have to radically rethink how they live because, you know, the world is not, the world is not theirs to roam around in as they normally would.

So it sounds like even though these people who've been weakened by plague and poverty and they've had their weapons taken away and they're disenfranchised, it sounds like the oligarchs have really actually underestimated the potential of getting together and really, really fighting for something that you believe in.

Yeah, you could say that definitely. It's not for lack of trying. A later source tells us that they killed, in their sort of ratios and executions, they killed something like 1,500 citizens, which is a truly wild number when you hear about it. And it actually says in that source, they killed more people than the Peloponnesians in the entire Peloponnesian war, which is not quite true. ⁓ But in the final years, maybe. they destroyed more Athenian citizen lives than many years of war. So it's an absolutely devastating period for Athens over the course of the rule of the 30 and 10.

Wow! Well, and just so that we're specific, they killed 1,500 people over how long a period?

It's eight months or so.

That's insane.

It is, yeah, absolutely. if that number is true, which again, know, historians can debate over whether that's a wild exaggeration to emphasize just how evil this regime was, which is absolutely what the later sources want to believe, or whether this is accurate and it is just an absolute reign of terror. I mean, you really are talking about a perceived like a perceptible number of percentage of the remaining citizen body, something in the area of 5 % of the remaining Athenian male citizens are being killed by this regime, essentially. So it's an absolutely devastating period for Athens in an attempt to secure and to put this regime on a firmer footing.

So they really don't care about popularity or mass consent or anything, do they? They're so arrogant. .

Well, aren't all oligarchs ever, right? mean, this is, you have to imagine that if their patrons are the Spartans, right? The Spartans are right there sitting like, if you need help figuring out how to take a population of, at this point in Sparta, 2000 citizens, maybe, and govern a territory that holds maybe 400,000 people, Messenia and Laconia together, we can tell you how to do it. It's not going to be fun. I mean, the Spartans obviously live that way and loads of other Greek communities live that way. Chios is famous for how many slaves it Thessaly has a system similar to Helots in Sparta. All of these communities, mean, the Syracusans, the Cretans, they all have these kinds of societies where a very small number of wealthy men essentially absolutely dominate a much larger population through violence, division, but also these instruments of co-optation, which get people to buy into their own oppression in very intricate ways. mean, this is something that gets extensively studied comparatively as well across different sort of slave systems that have existed throughout history. But it is quite possible to, you know, to subject a very large population to a very small minority if you're willing to be cruel enough and if you're willing to work out ways to essentially psychologically set that group up against itself, which is very much what the 30 are trying to do.

Good grief. Okay. Yeah.

Yes, it's not a fun thing about that. We all obviously grow up with all these stories about it. Obviously, if you oppress people and if you make their lives miserable, eventually something's going to give and people are going to try and push back and organize a rebellion. And of course, that does happen. And it is something that can happen. ⁓ But all too often throughout history, it doesn't. And that's precisely because there are well-established ways in which these minorities and they inform each other on how to do it in well established ways in which they can try to make sure that doesn't happen because the populations remain divided. Populations are without the tools to resist. Populations without the narrative to resist, like they don't have anything that they can use to unite them. Or in this case, just because the regime is backed by very, powerful foreign allies, which they can just call in and say, if we can't hack it ourselves, can you ⁓ throw your weight around? And obviously, the Spartans are the absolute hegemons of the Greek world. No one can stand against them.

It's a phrase that we hear a lot now, isn't it? That democracy is fragile and worth defending. And the 30 have been telling the Athenians that democracy is flawed, so you should just let us...

be in charge. They've obviously not shown much effort into proving why oligarchy is beneficial to everyone instead of democracy and we've seen the rebels have, you know, they've fought to get it back. When Athens calls in Spartan reinforcements, are these rebels able to defeat the Spartans as well?

No. So what happens is initially, yeah, it's a simple story. ⁓ It is actually a bit more complicated in the sense that this is where we get a glimpse of what's going on in Sparta at the time, which is also having some of its internal problems. The main thing is Lysander, who is not one of the kings and in fact, necessarily of the most prominent families, but he's become this enormously influential figure because he was the commander who won the Peloponnesian War. So he is this war hero figure, which is the classic sort of disruptive figure in any society is the man who has built his reputation with his own hands through means that royalty and established power can't necessarily easily take away from him. So he is the one who is, of course, the main patron of this regime. And so the ten actually don't go to Sparta, they go to Lysander and they say, can you help us because you put us in this place, you are the one who is supposed to back us.

And Lysander kind of seems to do this almost as a private venture. Like he gathers mercenaries to come and intervene. The Spartans find out about this and they send King Pausanias after him and basically say, no, no, no, no, this is not your mission. This is my mission. But there is a moment where the Spartan state basically has to intervene and say, Lysander doesn't get to do this on his own, like under his own name, right? Like he is not in charge. We are officially taking over this attempt to prop up the regime in Athens. And so while Isander was gathering mercenaries and actually being paid by the ten to get mercenaries, which is like, okay, you're just a warlord at this stage, right? Like he's just there as an asset to support any oligarchy. The Spartans kind of gazumpled. They just take over the operation, bring a Peloponnesian League levy.

So a massive army from the entire Peloponnesian, of the style that they had done during the Peloponnesian war. bring all of the militias from all these different states together. They march into Attica. So this is a full on Spartan invasion of Attica, of the old style, essentially, where they basically say, OK, we're going to put this place to rights.

Wow. Sounds significant. Do we have any idea of numbers?

We're not given any. So this is kind of a guess. mean, initially, obviously, during the early stages of the Peloponnesian War, their numbers were absolutely insane. the late sources talk about armies of 60,000 or something. This is absolutely wild. By this stage, they probably wouldn't have been able to muster quite that many. But we do get, you know, the Battle of the Nemea, for instance, which happens about 10 years later. The Spartans seem to have mustered an army of 25,000, so this is very, very significant numbers. And that's just their good troops, so to speak. We're not talking about the light arms and the camp followers that would have been attached to that. So a city moves into Attica, essentially, in order to settle the business.

And these are all battle-hardened, properly equipped?

I mean, we need to think about this as these are the people who fought the Peloponnesian War, right? So very many of them would have been the actual veterans of the final stages of the Decalean War who had, you know, served continuously in raiding the Attic countryside in going up to the walls. You know, these are people who have extensive military experience and also, yeah, they're absolutely all going to be hoplites and cavalry and professional light arm troops who know exactly what they're doing. And the Spartans lead the way. They go up to Piraeus basically just to scope it out initially.

They just kind of go and have a look at how they can essentially besiege the rebels, right? Throw them back out of the countryside into Piraeus and then sort of try to starve them out, which is Lysander's plan. Remember, the Athenians have no navy at this point, right? So it's very easy to blockade them, which was always the problem in the Peloponnesian Wars. You couldn't do that because the Athenians controlled the sea, so they can always supply themselves. But by this point, the Athenians can't prevent you blocking Piraeus and then they're just going to starve, right? So they have no way of getting food.

There is a skirmish initially with the forces of Thrasybulos who are guarding the walls. They do drive off the Spartans initially, but then they sort of bring up the whole army and just sort of absolutely sort of tidal wave them, which is really not something that they have the numbers or the equipment or the training to do anything about. But they do manage, and this is a very interesting thing. They drive off the initial Spartan vanguard and they kill two of the Spartan polemarchs. So these are very high ranking Spartan officers who are commanding this army, because again, they'd be fighting in the front ranks. So they are the first to die if something bad happens. And a couple of other Spartans who fall in that fighting, Xenophon names them. He says, these are the names of the polemarchs. And no other source mentions this, right? Many sources actually skip this battle. They don't mention it at all. say, Pausanias showed up and that's it. The resolution happened. So they don't mention this battle.

But we have in the Keramaikos the tomb of the Spartans who were buried there, because Spartans are always buried where they fall. That's the Spartan principles. They go and bury them where their allies can see. Look, Spartans came this far on your behalf. So they bury them in the Keramaikos. And we have the tomb, the tomb with the skeletons which were excavated in early 20th century and the inscription, which matches the names that Xenophon gives for the polemarchs.

So we know it's them, we know it's them!! So it's this wonderful moment where you actually can match up your archaeology and your literary sources and you can say, you know, the Athenians absolutely did their, you know, did their due diligence of figuring out how to properly bury these Spartans that died in their land, even though they died fighting for democracy, essentially.

I really, really love it when we can bring archaeological evidence and literature. I love it, I love it. Yeah.

And, you know, there's so much that we learn. Obviously, we don't have many, many dead Spartans, right? We don't have so many that we can identify securely as these are Lacedaemonians. And so we can see the skeletons, you know, we see that they were indeed, as Xenophon says, you know, quite tall for Greeks, and they were indeed sort of, they had battle wounds, one of them has like an arrow lodged in his leg, and another has a spearhead lodged between his ribs, you know, these, these skeletons are, are

know, dead from fighting. And I think there is even one that has like healed, healed battle scars and a skull and things like that. So you know that they are, they are exactly these guys and you can learn so much from the, from the fact that these remains are securely connected to a historical event.

So that tangible evidence, if one historian hadn't have mentioned it when all of the others skipped it, we wouldn't have had a clue what that tomb was for.

We wouldn't even have known there was a battle. I think a lot of people, I I talked to them about this and they think, wait, no, didn't the Spartans die in the earlier fight? You know, the one where Critias also died because the Spartan garrison was involved. It's like, no, no, no. We're explicitly told they died in this fight, which so many of the sources just skip over because it's kind of like a weird skirmish that doesn't really affect anything either way. But this is this is the one that's commemorated with this monument, which you can go see. I mean, it's right there in the Kerameikos. I visited it two summers ago. It's right there.

Thank you, Xenophon!

Yeah, again, as usual! Now, Xenaphon is interesting in the sense that he knows a lot about this. He has a really, really good detailed account of this whole period. ⁓ And he never really says why, and we all suspect why, but no one wants to say it out loud, which is that he was very likely one of the cavalry fighting for the Thirty. Because he was of that age, he was of that social bracket. We know he's a cavalryman. We know he's very fond of his horses. We know he's a student of Socrates. He's in those circles.

So everything points to the suspicion. No one wants to say this because it just no, no hard evidence anywhere. Um, but he was probably one of the cavalrymen fighting for the 30, which is why he knows so much about, he, he names individual cavalrymen who died in the fighting and things like that. We're just like, come on, son of a gun!

Okay. Okay, yeah, I mean, it's slightly sus. I mean, just because he's in the cavalry, should we assume necessarily that it was him perhaps fighting his own citizens or should we?

Oh, yeah, no, I mean, that would have happened, right? If he was in the fighting, he would have been fighting the rebels with Rassiboulos. And obviously, that would have ordinarily been, you know, cause for for exile, except that the way that this this conflict ends results in amnesty for everybody who was involved in propping up the regime, basically. So that's that's skipping ahead again. But that is why why Xenophon doesn't he doesn't get exiled for this. He later gets exiled for other reasons.

And I should say, mean, know, Xenophon was there fighting among the cavalry, very likely Plato was as well. mean, because it's the exact same circles, the exact same people. They were possibly even fighting side by side. don't know. Because they're all very rich Athenians who are in the circle of Socrates. And this is the circle that overlaps to a startling extent with the 30 and the people who are in this regime. So there's absolute reason to believe that they would have been some of the muscle of this regime, absolutely.

So Xenophon's account, is there anything in the way that he talks about the rebels or indeed the Thirty that gives us that bit of a clue that says yeah okay this is the side that he was on or is he writing really neutrally?

He is smart enough to know which way the bread is buttered, right? Like he's not going to be like, the oligarchs actually were OK. He is one of the authors who really tries to make there are many look good. Right. So he is saying there were good guys among the 30. There were people who were fighting for justice within this regime. But you have to imagine that in the time when he's writing, you know, in the fourth century, I mean, it is completely politically impossible to argue that the 30 were any good, right? Like this is absolutely a regime that has been clearly rightly portrayed as completely, completely irredeemable, right? And this is, you know,⁓ I have ⁓ one author, Christopher Joyce, who refers to them as unreformed political criminals. It's really unreconstructed political criminals, which I think is a beautiful phrase. It's just like no one has attempted in the way that it expresses this idea, no one has attempted to say, actually, you know, they were doing it for the right reasons or they were not so bad or whatever. Completely vile, right? And so it would be impossible for him to try and do anything about this. I've tried to portray him in a noble light for hiding on their behalf. So he just doesn't talk about it. And he does, of course, portray the rebels as being very noble, very brave, very capable, because that is what the Athenian democracy has chosen to do. It has valorized and glorified its champions.

And so in that sense, mean, Xenophon follows that tendency very strongly. He just has these moments where he introduces a bit of pathos on the side of the Thirty, that is, or not really the Thirty, ⁓ but the cavalry certainly. And that is something that does come up. So for instance, at one point where one of the commanders of the cavalry actually commits an atrocity against some local farmers and the rebels avenge themselves on a captured cavalryman. And so Xenophon has this very sort of little, this little vignette where you can see like, okay, well, this meant something to you, didn't it? You know, this is personal. And similarly in the fighting ⁓ around Phyle, where the rebels mounted surprise attacking on the camp of the ⁓ of the of the 30s troops that were meant to bottle them up over there, meant to keep them contained. And they kill a whole bunch of the Spartan garrison and they kill, they capture a couple of cavalrymen who are still sleeping, right? They capture them in their beds and he names one of them as being like the kallos, right? The beautiful. So there was there's this moment where you're just like, you knew that guy didn't you? There was something to this and it's like that he's not saying that these guys are nobly fighting for an ideal or anything. He doesn't defend their actions, but he does make them, he does try I think to make them human.

Yeah, I think it's really important and I emphasise this wherever I can, that we cannot read any of these accounts just as face value and I think this is the perfect case study of what's hidden in between the actual words.

Yeah. And again, I mean, we don't know. Maybe Xenophon was just sitting idly by, but he is, you know, in every sense, the kind of guy who would have been in the cavalry. That is essentially all we have to go on. It's plausible. And, you know, the amount of detail that he gives, and that's basically it. That's circumstantial evidence. Like, how did you know? How did you know the names of these cavalrymen? How did you know exactly where they were, what they did? Yeah, that's it.

So it's plausible. So the rebels and the Spartans at Piraeus. It sounds like a bit of a David and Goliath battle. Is it a really decisive victory for the Spartans? Because that's what we hear about Spartans isn't it? That all of their battles were decisive victories. Is that the case here?

Well, no, because that encounter is really kind of a weird skirmish that goes sort of different ways. there are significant casualties on the side of the rebels, but ultimately they're still in Pireus, so they have their own fortress. They can retreat to that. And fundamentally, the Spartans haven't resolved that. It's just at that point, it's a matter of time, right? They can besiege them there. The rebels have absolutely no chance of getting out, driving off the Spartan army. On the other hand, the Spartan army has the problem that they are obviously this huge number of militias have been drummed up to support this operation, they can't stick around, perhaps not even long enough to force the issue, right, to bring the rebels to surrender. So at that point, Pausanias essentially just steps in and enforces a reconciliation. Now, this is a really fuzzy moment. We really don't understand this moment very well, but he essentially says, okay, right, ⁓ he steps in as a sort of arbitrator. says, okay, you must now reconcile. The rebels must re-enter Athens and return to their homes. And while on the one hand, what that, you you could read that as, know, the police officer saying, everybody go back to your homes and, stay quiet. And that is sort of resolving the riot, right? Like, you know, you must all sort of, you must disperse. But of course, what that means when the rebels re-enter Athens and return to their homes is the oligarchs are, you know, locally outnumbered and they have to accept that the democracy is just back, right? Like they're being forced to accept democracy back into their city. So what happens is, and we have to imagine that Pozanias knew that that's what he was doing. He's saying, okay, the conflict is over, civil war is over, everybody go home. But the outcome of that is that the oligarchy is overthrown, right? They no longer have a leg to stand on once thousands of Democrats are returning into the city under arms.

And so they have this great parade where they essentially sort of march up under arms up to the Acropolis to sacrifice to Athena, which symbolizes the restoration of the Athenian demos to its rightful place.

So would the oligarchy have survived longer if the Spartans carried on propping them up? Is that what they relied on for their very existence?

They absolutely did. And this seems to be true from the start. They had the Spartan garrison, which was already a big part of the military forces that they had at their disposal. And at this point, they absolutely needed the Spartans to intervene just to survive. ⁓ But it does mean that the reconciliation, even though it means the restoration of democracy in effect, it isn't neutral. It isn't something where the Democrats can just do whatever they want. Because the Spartans are there. The Spartans are overseeing this event. They are encouraging them to reconcile properly. And so even though they ⁓ get to return to their homes and they get to reclaim control over their community, they do have to kind of do it in a way that the Spartans are not going to say, hold on, that's not why we're here. ⁓

So we're not going to see oligarchs being dragged from their homes and executed...

Exactly. So that is the one of the reasons why that that reconciliation ends up with with the general amnesty, which was considered at the time to be a great example to the rest of Greek world for how to resolve a civil war. Basically, the Athenians are told to not mnēsikakein, which is an interesting word they have. It's a verb that literally means remember bad things. They're not supposed to remember bad things. So it's literally forget, forget everything that happened and allow these people to remain where they are, no matter what they have done with a few exceptions. I mean, some of the people who are the main magistrates, the ten themselves, for instance, they do face exile. There's a couple of other magistrates that are involved in sort of doing the actual executing of the regime. Those people are not going to get away with it. But the rest of the population, which was, as I said, made complicit in the crimes of 30, they are allowed to continue. the demos is told, don't actually avenge yourself on it. You're not allowed to do that. And this is enshrined in the in the truth that is made in the agreement that is made and later there are laws issued specifically to make sure that you couldn't take someone to court for things that happened under the 30. You were not allowed to do that.

Wow, okay. I mean, again, trying to put myself in the shoes of those who lived through it. And, you know, it's very easy, I think, for historians who are living in peaceful times to assume that, everything ended well, everyone lived happily ever after, but we're living in horrible times. And I don't think I can forget a lot of the things that I'm seeing on my social media feeds. And we assume therefore that at the time this happily ever after, there were tensions and it wasn't as easy as everyone is making out.

Absolutely, yes. mean, we have plenty of evidence of even in the immediate aftermath ⁓ when the rebels themselves are being rewarded for what they've done. are already sort of there's already resistance. There's already the sense of like, we have to make sure that they don't get too much, that they don't destabilize the society. For instance, by Thrasybulos, who was the commander of the rebels, he tries to give all of the non-citizens who helped him Athenian citizenship, which I think we would all agree they richly deserved. ⁓ But his own fellow general basically said, no, you can't do that. That's not constitutional. We don't want you to introduce, you know, up to 1200 new citizens who are all going to be loyal to you because that would destabilize the democracy. Right. So there is this understanding that you can't just say at this point, now we can be as radical as we like, we can do the democracy the way we want. There is all these breaks that are being put on to make sure the demos doesn't go out of control essentially and tries to, you know, essentially reassert itself with violence against the people who have wronged it. ⁓ So you get these kinds of moments and later on as well, there are a number of court cases that we know of, because we have the speeches that survive where on the one hand, people are not being taken to court for what they did under the 30. But what they did under 30 is basically everything the speech is about. It's like, you know, something else is going on. But also this guy I think you'll find is a dick. And so this is kind of something that gets brought up. People have been told to forget, but of course they don't, right?

Right. They can't.

You can't. And so there is a real tension that exists in this society between, on the one hand, those who are trying to secure the survival of the democracy by essentially trying to tell the demos to cool its jets.

But also at the same time, this sense that you can't just get away with it, right? If it comes up, it absolutely will come up. If there is a reason to say that somebody was ⁓ not on the right side of this conflict, then it's absolutely going to be used against them. And you see these moments as well where, for instance, the cavalry, which is obviously ⁓ hugely suspicious afterwards. I no one likes the cavalry because they were propping up this regime.

And you get all these kinds of twists. There's a really great article by Polly Low, actually, which describes how there's this animosity towards the cavalry, not because of any kind of moral perception of how Greeks are supposed to fight, but because these guys are oligarchs, right? You don't trust them. And so there's this great quote where the Spartans start, you know, they started war with Persia not long after this. They asked their allies, you know, their subject allies to provide them with troops. The Athenians have to provide troops because the terms of the Peloponnesian War.

And so they send the cavalry and Xenophon actually says, you know, people were very happy to send the cavalry off to ⁓Asia. Literally hoping they would go off and die. Like that is literally what it says, right? You know, please go and fight for the Spartans and by all means, don't come back, you know, because they don't, they don't trust these guys and similar to things happening, you know, you get this sense that, know, the demos on the one hand is willing to abide by the truth, but they are also

absolutely aware that there is bad blood, there's unsettled scores, and it comes out every now and then, it just kind of crops up because obviously people aren't that good by nature. We're not all sitting here going like, you know what, I forgive you, it's all good, you may have killed my entire family, but it's not going to happen. So the Athenians are praised by later tradition for having this amnesty and for keeping it. It does get maintained, you know, that there is no renewal of that civil war at any point. But you can see the simmering under the surface for decades after.

I think it's interesting isn't it because there doesn't seem to be any kind of moment of catharsis for them they don't have their version of the Nuremberg trials they just are told to get on with it that sounds... [unsatisfying]

Yeah, there is. So the remains of the absolute sort of ringleaders of the oligarchy, the 30 and the 10, whoever else wants, they get to move to Eleusis. So they're being given a sort of window of grace, a grace window to kind of move to Eleusis, get out of here, and then to live there under their own laws, which is a weird kind of arrangement that allows them to kind of save their own skin and get out of the city while they can. And that community kind of persists for a few years at the end of which, according to one version, they kind of reconcile and merge back into the city. According to another version, they start hiring mercenaries, at which point the Athenians just go like, like hell you are and just send their army to destroy them. So there's two different traditions about what happens to the remains of the oligarchs. But we can perceive this if there was indeed a sort of flash of violence trying to get rid of the last few oligarchs because they were thought to be, you know, continue to be a problem.

This is maybe their moment, right? Their moment of saying, okay, well, at least we dealt with the worst of them. And the rest, we can kind of sort of accept the argument that they were behaving under coercion, they didn't have a choice, thought they were doing the right thing, whatever, but we can kind of live with that, but at least we got rid of the people who made them do it.

So democracy is restored. Does it last for long?

It does. mean, this is the thing about restored democracy. It's a great success. It's a huge, successful project. There is no further lapse into oligarchy until the Macedonians force it, basically. So this is for the next 80 years, the Athenian democracy is one of the most stable regimes in the Greek world. It's very well established. And this is largely because already at this time, obviously, you can see how much backlash it generates to have this oligarchic regime, not just because of its crimes, but because the Athenians perceive themselves to be a democracy. They have this democratic culture in which every adult male citizen, at least, has a say and gets to do their bit for the democracy. so that democratic culture is so well established by the time the 30 come around that it just sits in the population. It's very unnatural for them. And that's how they perceive and how they tell the story. It's very unnatural for them to become a different kind of ⁓ state, different kind of government. They don't like it. It doesn't sit well with them. And it never lasts long.

And so after that, the democracy comes back and is strengthened in various ways, revised in various ways. But it becomes one of the most stable regimes of the Greek world until, of course, it makes some terrible decisions against the rise of the Macedonians, which leads to them being forcibly taken away. But even then, mean, the overthrown democracy, the oligarchy that gets put in place in 322 by the Macedonians only lasts for four years because democracy wants to return in a way. Like you can't really credit it with a spirit. I mean, yes, the Athenians worshiped Democratia as a goddess, right? Okay, so there is personified, anthropomorphized goddess democracy. But it's almost as if it has a spirit of its own. It's almost as if it's in Athenian society in a way that you can't get rid of. It takes centuries for that democratic spirit to wear down to the point where under Roman rule, It kind of changes its nature slowly over time, every time it's overthrown, every time it's actively replaced by another system, it doesn't last long.

So in between, remind me the year that we're talking about with the the amnesty, what year is this?

403.

I'm going right up to Macedon 80 years later. In those 80 years democracy has been restored. Do we see Athens get back on its feet? Are they thriving in those 80 years?

They are in lot of ways. mean, they're definitely thriving as a democratic society. And this is very robust and very healthy. I you see all the of epigraphic evidence of the way they run their states and the way that they manage their political decision making. We know from very good evidence from that period that it's very consensus based. So you have these communities who are really trying to make sure that everybody's on board when the assembly decides something. It's not a tyranny of the majority or anything like that. At least that's the impression that we get from the evidence, very much attempting to try and run this place as a democracy. ⁓ has its flaws, obviously, and it is still a very restrictive community in a lot of ways, as we would perceive it. It is still just only the adult male citizens that have the rights that it provides. ⁓ But it is a healthy system, with the exception of a couple of moments where you kind of feel like, OK, I'm not sure this is the move you want to be making at this point. And in fact, the Athenian democracy itself is also aware that some of the things they do, they repent.

And this has always been true, right? So the Mytilenean massacre where they say we're going to kill the entire population of this rebellious city, and then they change their minds. They have to send a message out quickly afterwards saying, no, please don't kill everybody. We don't think that's a good idea. The Arginusae trial, afterwards, they repent. And similarly, the one that they do after the restoration of democracy is they execute Socrates. They have a trial in which Socrates is accused of corrupting the youth and of bringing new gods, denying the existence of the gods and bringing new gods into Athens, which is obviously disruptive to the fabric of the community. These are fairly spurious accusations and it's been widely assumed that what's really going on is he's just too close to the 30, right? He is too directly involved with teaching figures like Critias, but also figures like Alcibiades, who is himself

a threat to democracy in various ways, who is himself a disruptive factor ⁓ and other figures like that. And people just kind of look at Socrates like, your students have a disturbing tendency to turn out to be oligarchic psychopaths. ⁓ wonder if there's something going on there. And obviously, you know, he gets defences written for him by Plato and Xenophon, who are themselves not necessarily politically pure and kind hearted.

Yeah, I wonder if there's a cause for all of this. Yeah.

But who nevertheless make a fairly sort of plausible ⁓ reason for Socrates to wash his hands of this and say, was not my fault. I'm just making people think if you think that's a bad thing, you need to think about that. But he is sort of considered to be this presence that people just don't hold accountable in some ways. And they are clearly trying to purge themselves of it. And it's very interesting to know one of the people who accuses him, Anytus ⁓ who is himself, although he's very, very wealthy, he was one of the men who led the army at Phyle. So he is one of the rebels and he is the one who then takes Socrates to court along with a couple of others. So you can see that there is, you know, this is not an incident like an incidental coming together. This is, you know, something that has something to do with the settling of scores after the fall of of 30. ⁓ But and this is why I'm mentioning this. I they do execute Socrates. I mean, they do punish him. They declare him to be guilty and force him to drink hemlock, but then they immediately repent ⁓ and they exile his accusers. Actually, they throw them out of the city because they think they've done something wrong. set up a statue of Socrates and supposedly this guy, Anytus, he goes to Heracleia Pontica and gets stoned to death by the people there. you know, they all come to bad ends because what they did, you know, this is the idea.

I mean, having sat through a whole module about Plato, I'm not going to say whether I think Socrates deserved to drink hemlock or not... So it sounds like then we've got this mass trauma event of the Peloponnesian War. Oligarchy was not the right response after that traumatic event. Sounds like democracy really was worth fighting for. And it sounds like, you know, even people who've been disenfranchised and traumatised, if you just stand up and do what's right. It is possible to get it back.

That's very much the story. And that's obviously the story that the Athenians would have told. There's all sorts of things we can add to that. But fundamentally, that is a story that we want to get out of this. I've often said to people, if you're looking for a hero in Greek history, in Thrasybulos, he's got some dodgy friends. But he himself is absolutely the kind of figure who will stand up for the regime that he thinks is best for his state. And in both cases where he needs to do that, that regime is democracy. And he stands up and he leads the people to the outcome that they want, is the outcome in which they actually have a say in their own government. They actually get to be respected as people rather than being forced to live under a regime that treats them as an expendable resource at best.

Let's dig into some historiography. Has this always been the consensus about this event that it was a net positive that democracy was restored? Because I'm thinking a lot of early classicists were not living in a democratic system and they may not have had the same takeaways from this event that you and I have.

So while Athenian democracy has often been, so Jennifer Roberts has a great book about this, right? Athens on Trial, which is fantastic. It really blew my mind when I read it the first time, when she basically points out that Athenian democracy has, until the mid-19th century, consistently been regarded by everyone as a bad thing, right? Everybody thinks democracy is a terrible idea, and the reasons they cite for this include things like the Arginusae Trial and the execution of Socrates.

So this is specifically why they will say democracy is bad because it kills its best people. makes these decisions on a whim. It does terrible things to itself. It isn't able to act rationally or consistently. And as a result, it leads its own community to disaster. That is the traditional version of the traditional review, let's say, of Athenian democracy. Even then, I don't think anybody has been brazen enough to say the 30 were a better alternative.

I mean, that's telling, isn't it? That's really a good indication of how awful they must have been.

Exactly, because even the ancient sources overwhelmingly are critical of democracy. And as I said, all of the authors that we have, know, they are perfectly able to point out what's wrong with democracy. But no one says anything good about the 30, right? This is just a outright bad, rapacious, murderous regime that everybody agrees is terrible. If you want to create a better state for Athens, there are ways to do that. They will obviously gladly look at Sparta and other places for examples, for guidance. But no one says the 30 is good because the 30 are essentially tyrants, right? And lawless and violent and they have caused nothing but hardship to the Athenians. So in that sense I think it's always been accepted that the restoration of democracy was a good thing for Athens even if it meant that know Socrates would eventually be executed and similar things because that democracy you know it was what the Athenian what caused the Athenian state to become sort more stable and and to revive its fortunes after the disasters of the Peloponnesian War. even if you're opposed to the system on principle or even on the account of its deeds, it's hard to argue that the 30 would be better than anything.

What about ancient sources then? mean whenever we hear about ⁓ Greek history we usually default don't we to Herodotus and Thucydides. Are they alive at this point? Are they writing about it?

Herodotus probably not, mean he seems to stop writing sometime in the 420s or even by the latest accounts he's 410 so he's dead by this point. Thucydides is still alive. Thucydides is probably writing his histories around this time. Unfortunately, of course, his account ends in 411, 410. So we don't actually have his view on this regime. We don't actually know what role he may have played in it or what he was doing at the time. And we don't exactly know when he died. It's somewhere between the end of the Peloponnesian War and maybe 395 or something. It's pretty obscure. So we don't actually know what Thucydides would have thought about any of this. But we can imagine that Thucydides being himself, you know, a member of one of the wealthiest of Athenian families, beneficiary

of the end of the Peloponnesian War in the sense that as an exile he finally got to go home. Lysander restored the exiles initially. So he is back in Athens, which means that to some extent he must be quite happy that the war has come to an end and that this situation has developed as it did.

At the same time, you know, this regime, would he have been safe in it? We don't know. Would he have been, you know, in any sense complicit in it? We really have absolutely no clue about this. We know so little about the city's own life or his presence. For this kind of story, I mean, we really rely on Xenophon because implicitly he was directly involved in it and he was the one who actually lived through an active way.

So which of Xenophon's works does he talk about this?

So he covers the regime of the 30 in Hellenica, book two, book two, chapters three and four. And it's a really detailed, it's one of the most detailed bits of Xenophon. He really goes into the nitty gritty of it. He gives speeches and things like that, which he never does elsewhere, very rarely. He's not usually this Thessidian about his account. And this is really quite a regretting thought. He's maybe still trying to be like Thycydides, which later on he revised what he was trying to do, like what the shape of his project should be. But it's also possible that he was just able to do this because he had all these connections that were able to give him eyewitness reports and he had his own memories to rely on.

When we talk about speeches in these historical works, Are they reporting what was said for verbatim?

No, of course not. There's no one there sitting and recording it like we're doing now. mean, this is the thing. They themselves acknowledge this and every author, ancient author who discusses speeches will actually say themselves, you know, like, of course I wasn't able to repeat this word for word. I am just sort of giving you what I think happened or what I was told was said, or, you know, this is a very telling kind of phrase that Thucydides and Polybius both offered, you know, what they should have said, you know, what's in the situation, the circumstances, and given the personalities and the arguments that were being made, this is roughly what such a speech would look like. ⁓

Right. Which is important to bear in mind when we're reading Hellenica?

I mean, these are rhetorical exercises, right? This is absolutely just people who are thinking about like, okay, well, what would I say, you know, or what should someone say in this situation? They're showing off their learning, their oratory, and they are also applying that to historical knowledge, you know, that they are also trying to say something with it. So it's very interesting, for instance, Xenophon's account of the battle in Munychia. So this is the first battle in Piraeus where Critias is killed.

He really doesn't describe the battle. People have this sense that he describes the battle. He describes the way that the Thirty are approaching this position of the rebels. And then he gives Thrasybulos a pre-battle speech. There are only two pre-battle speeches in all of Xenophon's Hellenica. The other one is like two sentences in a much later episode. But this is a full on pre-battle speech of a Thucydidian sort of style in which Thrasybulos explains why they're going to win. He says, you know, we are in this position, we have these advantages, this is what's going to happen. If you all do your work and you do your job, then it will be great. And then the actual account of the battle is over in a flash, but it's because of the speech that we understand how they won, right? So it's because he predicts exactly what will happen that we understand what happens. And so this is a kind of weird construction that he makes, but it shows that he's very interested in having his generals prove themselves to act knowingly rather than to become sort of the leaders of accidental outcomes. They know exactly what they're doing, that's how he's portraying Thrasybulus in this occasion.

Right. So there's a purpose in the manner in which he's writing.

Yes, and I mean, this is something that I wouldn't necessarily have have clocked myself as you're struggling through the Greek, but it is actually a feature of Xenophon as well that he has his characters speak differently. So he has different kinds of ways of portraying their speech patterns, whereas some of these guys are much more staccato and like, know, tight, hard phrases and others are sort of florid, educated, like beautiful rhetoric, all that kind of stuff. He gives them character in the way he makes them talk. And that is a very interesting feature of Xenophon in particular.

Is Xenophon our only source or is he just the main one?

Just the main one. For this, actually, we have loads of sources, because of course, there's a pivotal moment for Athenian democracy. So this is something that gets reported extensively in the AthPol. So the Constitution of the Athenians is Aristotelian text that survives only in papyrus. We have other versions of it in Diodorus, which diverge. We have Cornelius Nepos, who writes the lives of all these generals ⁓ of Greek and Roman history. He says that Thrasybulus is basically the greatest man he writes about. He says the most patriotic, the bravest, the most wonderful, morally upright, upstanding man. No one else comes close, according to Cornelius Nepos. He writes a little biography, which also gives further details. And then you have ⁓ Justin's epitome of Pompeius Trogus has a whole version of this. We get elements of it from Plutarch's life of Lysander, of course, because he's involved. ⁓ There's bits of it absolutely everywhere. And then the other thing is, of course, we have a bunch of courtroom speeches, which I mentioned already, dating from later periods in which a lot of these events are kind of brought back up in order to kind of review and judge. so you have extensive accounts of the ⁓ very heavily coloured accounts of the period and the events from Lysias, who was also involved. was a Metic living in Athens at the time, so was a resident foreigner. was forced to flee his own home while the Thirty was breaking the door down. They killed his brother, but he fled to Megara. And this is one of the most prominent orators of the time, right? Like, you know that he's one of the richest guys in Athens, know, he's super wealthy, he has to flee his house, like he literally has to run out through the back door while the Thirty are coming, the muscle guys are coming in from the front in order to escape to Megara, from which he then supports the rebellion. So he sends them money, he sends them shields, he sends the mercenaries.

⁓ He's a hugely important person in the rebellion and he's later writing speeches about it. And he has his speakers rehearse some of the events that occurred and the way in which different figures played a in it, etc. So it's from his speeches as well that we get a huge amount of this stuff.

So they're definitely worth trying to read if we can if we're interested in this particular event.

Absolutely. So, Lysias 12 in particular, which, which rehearses a lot of this stuff. And this is entirely because it's one of those cases where, we're not really talking about the 30, but let's talk about the 30. You know, like, it's, on the edge of a permissible court case in that situation. And a real personal, yeah, it becomes very vivid. Yeah, absolutely.

And it's a great example, isn't it? Because it's demonstrating so clearly that these events affected people on a real level. So do you have any particular translations of these sources that people should be listening to? or maybe some books that they can get their hands on if they want to know more about this.

⁓ So I don't know if there's, mean, usually the Penguin volumes are really easy, right? Like they're cheap and you can pick them up and they have good translation. So usually I would recommend those. I don't know if they exist for all of these things. They certainly do for Xenophon's Hellenica. So you can definitely pick that up. But the others, I mean, there free translations online that are usually just the lobe editions that have been scanned and put onto various websites. So if you don't want to shell out for these little greenback volumes with the Greek and translation facing.

You can find their translations online, which I definitely always recommend because it means that it's very easy to just pick them up. can just read them. Cornelius Nepos is online, it's through Lacus Curtius. All the Lysias's speeches are online on Perseus. Diodorus Siculus, the Library of History is online on Perseus. All of these sources you can just read.

And will be linking everything to make it as easy as possible for everybody and as free as possible, which is important as well. Okay, well, that was a roller coaster. Thank you so much for explaining this really knotty subject in such an accessible and understandable way because it sounds like it's a really important event in the ancient world that we can actually take lessons from.

Thanks very much for having me. It's been a real pleasure to talk about this in so much detail.