‘Critias was indeed the most rapacious, the most violent and the most murderous of all those who were part of the oligarchy.’Footnote ¹ In the ancient tradition, Critias is a man systematically described in superlatives. The ancient sources readily depict him as an extremist oligarch, a misguided disciple of Socrates, oblivious to the lessons of his former master. This detestable image is admittedly softened in Plato’s dialogues, which give a mellower point of view.Footnote ² But the overall picture remains very dark: As a radical counterpart of the ‘moderate’ Theramenes, Critias embodies the figure of the wolf-man, ready even to spill the blood of his friends to retain his power.

Incomparable Critias? This superlative representation deserves to be deconstructed. Not in order to rehabilitate his tarnished memory but because the man is a convenient bogeyman who acts as the singular representative of what was in reality a collective adventure. Not only does his role as leader of the Thirty remain to be proven, but this exclusive focus also tends to obscure the vast chorus that surrounded him: Far from being a lone wolf, Critias was the spokesman or, rather, the coryphaeus of Athenian oligarchs united by common habits and experiences.

The challenge is therefore to understand the dynamics that led to the emergence of such a group at the end of the Peloponnesian War. Here we are faced with the same burning questions as today: How did men, having fought together, having attended the same chorus in their youth, having danced and sung together as adults – to quote Cleocritus’ poignant recitation in the Hellenica – come to exclude and even murder their former comrades? In this process of radicalization, what relative weight should be given to the general context (the violence of war), to existential ruptures and, finally, to the force of oligarchic ideology itself?

It is in this broader perspective that the figure of Critias imposes himself, no longer as an evil and all-powerful coryphaeus but as the spokesman of an oligarchic chorus, bonded together by an exclusive definition of the community. Is this a simple choral metaphor? Absolutely not. Speaking of an ‘oligarchic chorus’ distances us from the idea of an aristocratic ‘party’ – endowed with a structured ideology and faithful adherents, possibly divided into different schools of thought – in order to conceive of forms of affiliation that are both ephemeral and dynamic, enlisting bodies and mobilizing emotions. A poet and a virtuoso musician, Critias even promoted a true choral policy, striving to convince all the Athenians remaining in the city to align to his radical positions. Breaking with the democratic experiment and its multiple and competing choruses, the oligarch sought to create a single, distinctive and hermetic chorus, of which all the members had to dance in unison and where the slightest deviation was mercilessly punished. Better still, in the tumult of the civil war, Critias had a dream: to establish a permanent state of exception in order to forge a new brand of men entirely devoted to the cause of the oligarchy.

Incomparable Critias?

In the third century AD – more than 600 years after the Athenian civil war – the rhetorician Philostratus reiterated earlier views of Critias: ‘for all this I hold him to be the greatest criminal of all who is notorious for crime.’Footnote ³ The worst of all: How to better express the evil aura that surrounded Critias?

Let’s take a closer look. Even before the civil war broke out, Critias had allegedly already betrayed his country. In the fourth century BC, a litigant compared the patriotism of one of his ancestors to the detestable behavior of the ‘kin of Critias’ who, in 411 BC, tried to deliver a stronghold in Piraeus to the Lacedaemonians.Footnote ⁴ Even more seriously, he is said to have failed in his faith not only in men but also in the gods: At the end of the second century AD, Sextus Empiricus considered him to be a prominent member of the ‘atheist group,’ who had blasphemed against divinity in both word and deed.Footnote ⁵ As for his morals, they were supposedly just as corrupt. According to Xenophon, Socrates enjoined him not to harass the handsome Euthydemus: ‘As Critias paid no heed whatever to this protest, Socrates, it is said, exclaimed in the presence of Euthydemus and many others, “Critias seems to have the feelings of a pig he can no more keep away from Euthydemus than pigs can help rubbing themselves against stones.”’Footnote ⁶ Unable to govern himself, he would therefore have been unable to govern others. Lecherous pigs do not make good shepherds!Footnote ⁷ In his Life of Critias, Philostratus takes up this pastoral comparison and adds even more sinister overtones: ‘he shared in the monstrous design of Sparta to make Attica look like a mere pasture for sheep by emptying it of its human herd.’Footnote ⁸ In contrast to the Homeric shepherd-king who cares about the well-being of his subjects – once studied by Michel Foucault – Critias is depicted as a shepherd determined to decimate his own flock.Footnote ⁹

Thus an evil figure emerges, oscillating between the impious pig and the wolf-man, devouring even his own flesh and blood. Still, we have to understand the reasons behind such a terrible picture: Like Xenophon, himself involved in the oligarchic revolution of 404, many authors had every interest in blackening Critias’ reputation to expunge their own turpitude from people’s minds. Above all, this charge aimed, for Socrates’ disciples, to dissociate the figure of their master from his cumbersome devotee by stressing their radically incompatible temperaments.Footnote ¹⁰ Consumed by their desire to right this wrong, the Socratics even tended to credit Critias with an exaggerated influence within the oligarchy, all the better to exalt their master’s stubborn resistance to the tyrant’s arbitrariness.

The Untraceable Leader

This is particularly true of Xenophon, who, in the Memorabilia, makes Critias the leader of the Thirty, presenting him as the legislator of the oligarchy, alongside Charicles.Footnote ¹¹ Should we believe him? Probably not. First of all, the selfsame Xenophon does not grant him any particular institutional preeminence in the Hellenica, where he appears only as one of the Thirty.Footnote ¹² Moreover, no other contemporary source ascribes to him a decision-making role. It is true that Critias was a member of the committee of five ephors (named after the famous Spartan magistrates) set up in 404, ‘while the democracy was still in existence.’Footnote ¹³ He then represented ‘the notables who belonged to the hetaireiai and those exiles who had returned after the peace and were eager for oligarchy.’Footnote ¹⁴ However, this was a position of power that was neither stable (since it was transitory), nor legal (since it took informal groups as its origin), nor hegemonic (since it was collegial). What’s more, with the exception of Xenophon and, secondarily, of Lysias, the authors of the fourth century loftily ignore Critias when they evoke the stasis of 404: Andocides and Aristotle mention only Charicles at the head of the Thirty, and, in the Athenian Constitution of Pseudo-Aristotle, the name of Critias is conspicuous by its absence in the long account devoted to the Athenian civil war.Footnote ¹⁵

On balance, it would be just as fair to present Charicles, or even Theramenes, as the real leaders of the oligarchy.Footnote ¹⁶ Going into more depth, it is probably a mistake to try to isolate a single leader within the oligarchy that took power in Athens: The Thirty were precisely not a tyranny – whatever the ancient authors say – and they should be considered as a dynamic and unstable chorus, in which Charicles, Critias, Theramenes or even Satyrus and Aristoteles played successively or concurrently the leading roles.Footnote ¹⁷ How then can we explain the process of reductio ad unum that finds its final formulation in the later ancient sources? Since the times of Diodorus of Sicily, in the first century BC, the matter seems to have been settled: ‘the Thirty called a meeting of the Council. Critias, at their head (Kritiou de proestōtos autōn), brought numerous charges against Theramenes.’Footnote ¹⁸ We must no doubt see there the influence of the Socratic tradition, initially a minor factor but victorious in the long term.Footnote ¹⁹ Critias, or the misguided disciple, persecuting his former master: This portrayal left little room for what was in reality a collective venture.

The Banality of Evil

Far from being beyond compare, Critias resembles all the laconizing oligarchs – zealous admirers of Sparta – that Aristophanes depicts so often in his plays that they have become a genuine sociological type. Let’s try to characterize them briefly, taking Critias as our guide. While there was no real nobility in Athens, some Athenians could boast of a prestigious ancestry – including Critias, the son of Callaischros and a distant descendant of the archon Dropides, a relative and friend of the legislator Solon.Footnote ²⁰ These Athenians with their prestigious genealogies were usually rich, even if it is difficult to identify precisely the bases of their wealth. Certain historians have claimed to see, within the Thirty, the broad outlines of a ‘mining lobby,’ which was exploiting the mines of Laurion and eager to cease all hostilities with the Spartans in order to pick up with their flourishing business.Footnote ²¹ But there is scant evidence of this, and such a theory jars with the contempt in which Critias held craftsmen and, more generally, his disdain for profitFootnote ²²: Was he not the one to stigmatize mortals who ‘seek shameful profits rather than virtue’?Footnote ²³ Did he not show his hatred of newly affluent men such as Cleon who, after spending years in debt, supposedly accumulated more than fifty talents during his career?Footnote ²⁴

This criticism of ill-gotten gains does not provide sufficient grounds to see Critias as the figurehead of a hypothetical middle class impoverished by the war, as Németh would have it.Footnote ²⁵ There is no doubt that closer inspection of the assets confiscated from the most virulent supporters of the oligarchy after democracy was restored in 403 reveals them to be quite modest. However, the hypothesis is still fragile: While the amounts recorded are relatively low, this could just as well reflect a general deflation in Athens, affecting the entire population and not just the oligarchs; above all, these stelai, engraved in 402/1, are highly disfigured and do not allow for an overall view of the fortunes of the condemned.Footnote ²⁶

Whatever their exact level of wealth was, one thing is certain: Critias and his kin did not consider themselves ordinary citizens. On the contrary, Critias expressed the wish, in his elegies, to accede to ‘the wealth of the Scopadai, the magnanimity of Cimon, and the victories of the Spartan Arcesilaus.’Footnote ²⁷ Such a desire may seem astonishing: Is it not contradictory to celebrate in the same voice the luxury of an opulent Thessalian family – the Scopadai, encountered in exile – and the very Spartan austerity of an Olympic victor? In reality, Critias’ remark reflects the choices of a certain number of Athenians who, in order to oppose the democratic ethos, did not hesitate to combine laconism (and its demonstrative austerity) and ‘medism’ (i.e. the attraction of Persian luxury).Footnote ²⁸ In Wasps, produced in 422 BC, Aristophanes had already begun to mock these cheap laconizers wearing stark woolen fringes – in imitation of the Spartan Brasidas (v. 473–6) – while appreciating clothes ‘woven at great expense by barbarians.’Footnote ²⁹

The Athenian oligarchs readily drew on various external models to differentiate themselves, but they reserved a special place in their imagination for Sparta: At the end of the fifth century BC, laconism had become the common language of the Athenian elites in disarray. This fascination even found, at the end of the Peloponnesian War, an institutional translation under the Thirty.Footnote ³⁰ Indeed, Critias seems to have whipped up laconophilia to fever pitch. Considering Sparta ‘the most beautiful of regimes,’ he praised it in one of his Constitutions in verse.Footnote ³¹ In it, he celebrated in particular the Spartans’ drinking habits and, furthermore, their sobriety in all things: ‘Apart from these matters, the smallest details of their way of life. The best shoes, as well as the robes that are most comfortable, are the Spartan variety.’Footnote ³² Laconizing in Athens was as much about promoting a specific institutional model as it was about adopting a certain way of life – a way of drinking wine (soberly), of dressing (simply), of wearing one’s hair (long),Footnote ³³ even of dancing (doing entrechatsFootnote ³⁴) or playing music (with the aulos, a kind of double oboe).Footnote ³⁵

However, laconism alone was apparently not enough to define the distinctive identity of the Athenian oligarchs: Even Critias willingly drew on other references to feed his political imagination.Footnote ³⁶ Beyond a certain number of shared ideas, the Thirty were especially united by experiences that counted at least as much as their ideological motivations.

Generation War

If the case of Critias deserves an in-depth examination, it is above all because his path overlaps with that of many Athenians who, after having initially supported the democratic regime, went on to oppose it with extreme violence. His trajectory therefore makes it possible to analyze the powerful effects of democratic pressure on the civic elites before the experience of exile served to bring out oligarchic tendencies that were all the more disruptive for having been repressed for a long time.

Most of the oligarchs in power in 404 experienced their youth and the beginning of their adult life within a city at war. Indeed, Critias belonged to the generation born in the middle of the fifth century – around 455 in his case – that reached manhood shortly before the Peloponnesian War broke out. This interminable conflict had destabilizing effects in the long term because it accustomed the citizens to an unprecedented degree of violence. Certainly, Greek cities in general and Athens in particular had always marched to the rhythm of war. But in terms of the frequency of battles, their intensity and, especially, the repeated massacres of prisoners of war and even of civilians, the Peloponnesian War broke with the past.Footnote ³⁷ In this respect, it is no exaggeration to speak of a real ‘brutalization’ of Athenian society – all the more so as the violence built to a crescendo during the conflict, which lasted over twenty-five years. The proof: In 416 BC, the Athenians massacred all the male inhabitants of the island of Melos – who refused to rally to them – and sold the women and the children as slaves. The following year, they enthusiastically launched a great expedition to Sicily, which led, two years later, to a resounding catastrophe and to the annihilation of a quarter of the civic body: 12,000 Athenians died there, including a large number of prisoners living in impossibly cramped conditions deep in the stone quarries of Syracuse. Finally, in 405, after the battle that sealed the fate of the conflict in Aigos Potamos, the 3,000 Athenians who had been taken prisoner were massacred in cold blood on the order of the Spartan Lysander.Footnote ³⁸ Knowing they were accustomed to mass extinctions and even torture is crucial to understanding the violence that the Thirty showed in 404.Footnote ³⁹

This brutality was unleashed with such force that, for several decades, the future oligarchs had been forced to show, at least superficially, their attachment to the people’s cause. Let us take the case of Charicles, an exact contemporary of Critias, sometimes presented as the true leader of the Thirty: He showed ostensible support for the democratic regime for some time. In 415, he was even chosen to investigate the Herms affair, thereby showing ‘a very great devotion to the people.’ According to Androcles – himself embroiled in this disreputable affair – Charicles declared that the event was not the work of a few individuals, ‘but was aimed at the overthrow of democracy.’Footnote ⁴⁰ Charicles as a defender of the people: This was, for Androcles, a way to highlight his duplicity since, at the time of this speech in 399, the sinister role Charicles had played in the oligarchic revolution in 404 was common knowledge. But, in 415, there was no indication of what was to come. The adhesion of Charicles to democratic values was even sufficiently credible for the Athenian people to elect him stratēgos the following year, in 414/3.Footnote ⁴¹ He was then one of the politicians influential enough to be mocked by comic poets, such as Telecleides (c. 440–420 BC), who targeted him over his supposedly dubious origins.Footnote ⁴² However, hardly three years later, the split was confirmed: In 411, Charicles sided with the oligarchs – and, in particular, with Peisandros, previously also devoted to the people – who seized power in Athens while the Athenian fleet was stationed in Samos. After democracy was restored in 410, Charicles went into forced exile.Footnote ⁴³

Critias followed a similar but slightly offset trajectory. In 415, he was one of the 300 or so Athenians who had a hand – guilty or not – in the desecration of the Herms and the profanation of the Eleusinian Mysteries.Footnote ⁴⁴ But after this traumatic episode, Critias showed his attachment to the democratic regime: Not only does he not seem to have taken part in the oligarchic revolt of 411,Footnote ⁴⁵ but he also took the initiative, as soon as democratic order was restored in 410, to bring a posthumous lawsuit against Phrynichus, one of the leaders of the oligarchy.Footnote ⁴⁶

Is this enough to see Critias as a confirmed democrat? One might question it. His behavior is more of an overblown attempt to prove his attachment to the regime, even though his father, Callaischros, had undoubtedly been one of the influential members of the Four Hundred in 411.Footnote ⁴⁷ Perhaps his initiative was also guided by the desire to gain the upper hand over certain rivals involved in the ongoing struggles between oligarchic factions: Phrynichus was a declared enemy of Alcibiades, of whom Critias was then a staunch supporter, even proposing in 407 a decree granting Alcibiades the right to return to Athens.Footnote ⁴⁸ More positively, it was a question of gaining influence with the people, as Theramenes reminded him during his trial: ‘For, said he, you and I also have said and done many things for the sake of winning the favor of the city.’Footnote ⁴⁹ Should one then conclude that oligarchs in general were duplicitous, ready to switch allegiances at the slightest opportunity? This is what the orator Lysias claims a few years later when he recalls ‘how often the supporters of each of the two types of constitution [oligarchs and democrats] changed their allegiances,’Footnote ⁵⁰ following the example of Phrynichus’ and Peisander’s changes in allegiance.

Could Athens have been the very first place in history where political actors changed their minds on a dime? Was it the first ‘Republic of political weathervanes’? This depoliticized vision calls for some nuance.Footnote ⁵¹ Far from being purely opportunistic, Critias’ path is rather the result of his lucid adherence to a regime that was perhaps despised but also considered too powerful to be publicly challenged. Having always lived in a democracy, the Athenian elite had indeed assimilated the hegemony of the people as an intangible fact of political life. Faced with such a mighty opponent, there were only two possibilities: to serve him (faithfully) or to fight him (to the death).

To prove this point, one need only to read the prose of the Athenian oligarch – known as Pseudo-Xenophon (or the Old Oligarch) – whose work has come down to us in the corpus of Xenophon: the Constitution of the Athenians, which specialists agree on dating between 430 and 415 – before the Sicilian expedition weakened the democratic consensus. Relying on a philological argument that is as seductive as it is fragile, the Italian historian Luciano Canfora suggested it might be the work of Critias, composed before his exile.Footnote ⁵² Si non è vero, è bene trovato: Whoever wrote it, the treatise expresses quite bluntly the divided habitus of oligarchs living under popular pressure. The beginning is famous:

Within this unjust but terribly efficient regime, the ‘good men’ have no choice but to bend to the will of the people, to the point of almost becoming their slaves. For compromise is impossible and the ‘middle way’ is no more than a pious fiction: Either the elite must accept the undivided domination of the people or it must introduce judicious measures, although ‘as a result of these excellent decisions, the common people would soon plunge into slavery.’Footnote ⁵⁴ Radical democracy or extremist oligarchy: The alternative is all the more clear-cut since democracy is, according to the author of the Constitution of the Athenians, incorrigible.Footnote ⁵⁵ This rigid conception makes it possible to understand both why the future oligarchs adhered for so long to the democratic regime (and even defended it vigorously) and, symmetrically, how, once the demos had been weakened, they were able to suddenly become its worst enemies: Inherently violent, democracy could not be changed but only overthrown by a superior form of counterviolence. Long in a weak position, the oligarchs thus bowed to pressure – and often served the demos with zeal – until they were able to crush their depleted opponent. It was no wonder, then, to discover that most of the Thirty occupied positions of importance within the Athenian democracy, before or after 411 – having been elected as generals or drawn by lot as Council members and treasurers.Footnote ⁵⁶

If there is anything permanent in the behavior of Critias and his peers, it is ultimately their radical actions, both in serving the people and in opposing them. Several spectacular episodes attest to this: In 415, Peisander and Charicles led a judicial inquiry to uncover the suspects in the profanation of the Eleusinian Mysteries, who were accused of wanting to overthrow democracy; and in 411, Critias proposed to expel the corpse of the oligarch Phrynichus, thus refusing the sacred right to burial to a ‘public enemy (koinos echthros)’Footnote ⁵⁷ – like the tyrant Creon when he deprived Polynices of a proper funeral in the tragedy of Sophocles. As for the ‘moderate’ Theramenes, in 406, he persuaded the people to condemn to death the victorious Athenian generals at the Battle of Arginusai, guilty as they were of not having been able to repatriate the remains of the soldiers who died during the campaign. Extremists to a man …

The Fracture of Exile

Along this sinuous but coherent path, there are several pivotal moments that had an effect, sometimes immediately, sometimes at a later time. In the case of Critias, the date of 415 breaks with the past. The city was then in turmoil, following the mutilation of the Herms, and the culprits were actively sought. Arrested and imprisoned on the denunciation of a certain Dioclides, dozens of citizens spent an interminable night in prison, expecting the same death sentence that had already befallen many of their kinsmen. Andocides delivered a poignant description of the scene:

During the night, Dioclides was convicted of lying and, at dawn, the danger was over. But the terror felt on this occasion undoubtedly left a lasting impression on all those who had looked death in the eye: This episode is perhaps one of the unnoticed root causes of the regime of fear that the Thirty put in place a little over ten years later. Fear had simply changed sides.

There is another traumatic experience shared by many oligarchs: exile. The Thirty indeed count among their ranks a number of outcasts, who have returned home with their hearts set on revenge. There are abundant sources to back this up: Onomacles and Charicles had been forced into exile after the failed revolution of 411Footnote ⁵⁹; likewise for Mnesilochus, Melobius and Aristoteles.Footnote ⁶⁰ As for Critias, he left for Thessaly a few years later, in 407 or 406, perhaps because of his legal disputes with Cleophon, the leader of the democrats.Footnote ⁶¹ Lysias goes so far as to maintain, in one of his speeches, that ‘the Thirty and the Council that held office under them […] had themselves all been members of the exiled Four Hundred.’Footnote ⁶² This assertion is certainly exaggerated, not only because all of the Thirty were not involved in the revolution of 411, but also because not all of them had experienced exile: The vacillating Theramenes is an example of the latter.Footnote ⁶³ It is, however, true of the majority of them, and it was indeed a chorus of former exiles that took power in Athens in 404.

Certainly, the experience of exile was intensely individual, insofar as not all the banished left at the same time, nor did they all take refuge in the same place. Far from settling randomly, the outcasts relocated to places chosen according to the support and assistance from which they already benefited abroad. Critias thus went to Thessaly because he enjoyed bonds of hospitality (xenia) with several powerful families in the area; as for Andocides, he settled in Cyprus because of the commercial contacts that he had made there previously. These networks of mutual aid and solidarity therefore guided the course of the exiles who ended up dispersed throughout the Mediterranean basin.

However, exile was also a collective experience in that it involved a common trauma. If, as Aristotle says, man is by nature a political animal – that is, destined to live in a polis – exile is a social death. For these men did not simply leave behind a homeland, but a vibrant community to which they were attached by multiple bonds: The entire existence of every citizen took place within nested circles of sociability, from the family to the city, but also including the deme, the tribe (in which voting took place), the army and the phratries (where citizens had their children recognized during the festival of the Apatouria). Also on the list, in the case of the Athenian elite, was membership of hetaireiai – groups of companions who quaffed wine together – and of more informal groups lingering in the Agora to converse, as Plato’s dialogues show. It is this rich social fabric, woven by bonds of reciprocal obligations, from which exiles were brutally torn.

On an individual scale, this existential rupture has a truly revolutionary potential. Such an upheaval is sometimes expressed only in thought, as among the first Greek historians. It is because they had all experienced exile that they were able to propose a decentered vision of the past, attentive to each other’s views.Footnote ⁶⁴ But exile can also result in a radical change of political attitude. Xenophon shows exactly this in his study of Critias, when he underlines the deleterious effect caused by his distance from AthensFootnote ⁶⁵: As long as he lived in Athens and regularly visited Socrates, he behaved as a good citizen; as soon as he had to go into exile in Thessaly, he fell under the control of violent men and turned into a real villain.Footnote ⁶⁶ If, for the sake of his argument, Xenophon exaggerates the regulating influence of Socrates, he is still on the mark: Exile accustomed the banished men to other political regimes and, above all, led to a sense of disaffection – in the literal sense of the word – for their community of origin. For want of participation in the daily weaving together of the community, the banished sometimes came to take an outsider’s view of their city, as a den of enemies to be eliminated.

It is precisely this process of emotional detachment that explains the violence of the oligarchs during the revolution of 404. Not only did they not want to repeat the failure of 411 – caused, according to them, by too timorous a repression – but they wished to inflict on their adversaries the experience that they themselves had been through. This is why they decided to proceed with the mass expulsion of the people: ‘more than half of the Athenians’ were driven out of the territory.Footnote ⁶⁷ More broadly, they used an unprecedented level of violence that Xenophon attributes, in the case of Critias, to the experience of exile: ‘Critias showed himself eager to put many to death, because, for one thing, he had been banished by the people.’Footnote ⁶⁸

Even before the civil war broke out, the most lucid Athenians were already conscious of the revolutionary potential of exile – whether they dreaded or hoped for it. At the end of the Constitution of the Athenians, Pseudo-Xenophon was thus interested in the Athenians deprived of their citizenship (atimoi) and often left in exile, due to their inability to obtain any legal defense:

If it is somewhat tortuous, the Old Oligarch’s argument is prophetic: As long as there are only a few disenfranchised men (atimoi), democracy is in no danger. But the situation could evolve if their number increases: Forced into exile, such demoted citizens could join forces and bring down the regime responsible for their misfortunes.Footnote ⁷⁰

When all is said and done, Critias’ path through life seems quite banal: It overlaps with the itinerary of many members of the Athenian elite, initially faithful to the democratic regime, before detaching themselves and then turning violently against it, often following a stay in exile. If he can be considered unique, it is not, ultimately, because he was the leader of the Thirty or ‘the most wicked of men,’ but rather because he lent his voice to the claims of the Athenian oligarchs and ventriloquized them.

Critias, Champion of Oligarchic Radicality

In his fragmentary work, Critias portrays himself as an oligarch who displays his convictions loud and clear – in words as well as in images, in prose as well as in verse, in form as well as in content. Such is undoubtedly the true originality of his character: his lack of inhibition. During his lively exchange with Theramenes, Critias thus refuses all half-measures and makes no bones about breaking with the democratic regime. Speaking in the name of the Thirty, he addresses the members of the Council in these revealing terms: ‘[…] you and we have manifestly (phanerōs) become hateful to the democrats.’Footnote ⁷¹ Critias is precisely that: a declared oligarch.

According to Hermogenes, his eloquence was emphatic and ‘often categorical’; according to Aelius, Aristides and he frequently used sentences giving definitive, even peremptory opinions: ‘My opinion is that …’ or, ‘It seems to me to be right to do …’ As for Philostratus, he qualifies his opinion thus: While Critias had a way with words, he was willingly dogmatic, even sententious.Footnote ⁷² In fact, in the rare fragments that have come down to us, Critias readily uses superlatives, seeking excellence in all things.Footnote ⁷³ His opponents took pleasure in turning this distinctive obsession against him: Xenophon described him as someone who ‘of everyone in the oligarchy was the most greedy and the most violent!’Footnote ⁷⁴

This radicalism was even displayed at his tomb. Critias’ funeral stele is said to represent the oligarchy in human form setting fire, by means of a torch, to an allegory of democracy. An epitaph in verse was also engraved there:

Only a particularly attentive reader can detect a veiled allusion to the deceased, by spotting, in this epitaph, the repetition of a verse by Solon, a distant relative of Critias: In his time, the legislator had himself boasted of having ‘constrained the people.’Footnote ⁷⁶ The image, however, gives the epitaph very sinister overtones, far from the Solonian spirit of compromise: The ‘compulsion’ here is nothing other than the pure and simple destruction of the people, as if democratic hubris could only be contained by an even greater violence. Death to democracy, long may it burn!Footnote ⁷⁷

This demonstrative radicality was also expressed in music. A renowned poet, Critias indeed resorted to various musical forms – be they elegies sung at symposia or tragedies staged at the theater – to reach the widest possible audience for his ideas: a musical stance intertwined with a certain emotional, even ardent conception of politics.

A Musical Politics

Since the beginning of the sixth century BC, the Greeks attributed powerful political effects to music, for better or for worse.Footnote ⁷⁸ In the Republic, Plato worried about the contagious power of music, which ‘flows over little by little into characters and ways of life. Then, greatly increased, it steps out into private contracts, and from private contracts, Socrates, it makes its insolent way into the laws and government, until in the end it overthrows everything, public and private.’Footnote ⁷⁹ But in the eyes of the Greeks, music could also have beneficial effects, by purifying a city infected by stasis: ‘Now that those cities which were governed by the best laws (eunomōtatais) took care always of a generous education in music, many testimonies may be produced. But for us it shall suffice to have instanced Terpander, who appeased a sedition among the Lacedaemonians, and Thaletas the Cretan, of whom Pratinas writes that, being sent for by the Lacedaemonians by advice of the oracle, he freed the city from a raging pestilence.’Footnote ⁸⁰ Beyond such shock therapies, music had the power to generate harmony within the community, as demonstrated by Pythocles (or Pythocleides), one of the teachers of Pericles, who ‘harmonized (harmozontos) the citizens [of Athens] using suitable melodies.’Footnote ⁸¹

It was still necessary to choose the right musical forms for each political project. To establish his ideal city, for example, Plato favored Dorian and Phrygian harmonies to the detriment of loose Lydian harmonies, which were associated with corrupt democracies.Footnote ⁸² A few years earlier, his uncle Critias himself had come to a similar conclusion: According to Philostratus, he cultivated a majestic style, diametrically opposed to the artificial solemnity of the dithyramb – a democratic genre par excellence; in the same way, he played the aulos in the Lacedaemonian manner, in order to better distinguish himself from the new democratic style then in vogue on the theatrical stage.Footnote ⁸³

Critias seems to have particularly appreciated the elegiac genre, undoubtedly because, sung at symposia for a select audience, this type of poetry was the best vehicle for his oligarchic ideas: Form and content coincided perfectly.Footnote ⁸⁴ Thus it is in elegiac couplets that he celebrated the moderation of the Spartans:

How better to say that these ‘constitutions in verse’ (emmetroi) were at the same time ‘moderate constitutions’ (summetroi)?Footnote ⁸⁶ For the oligarch, music and politics were mirror images of each other and had to be well balanced in order not to fall into the excesses typical of ‘pure democracy’ – that is to say, ‘without mixture’ (akratos), as Plutarch characterizes the Athenian regime of the mid-fifth century.Footnote ⁸⁷

Critias extended his thoughts on the relationship between poetic action and political commitment into an elegy, where he recalled his decisive role in the return of Alcibiades to Athens in 407 BC:

Addressing with familiarity his companion Alcibiades, Critias simultaneously claims the paternity of his verses – performed impromptu at the symposion – and of the decree formerly put to the Assembly. To this end, he plays on the ambiguity of the term sphragis, which can designate both the seal authenticating official documents and the poetic style of an author. Legislative and poetic works are thus closely associated, probably because Critias sees in them two modes of nomos – rules, whether legal or musical.

However, the poem distinguishes and hierarchizes these two registers: Recited with an anonymous crowd as its audience, the speech in prose clearly does not have the same reach as the elegy sung for a group of distinguished companions.Footnote ⁸⁹ More exactly, each is only a means to the other: It is to be able to sing with Alcibiades again that Critias speaks at the Assembly in favor of his friend. From this perspective, the poem is resonant of an ode to friendship – an unbreakable bond between two companions, underpinned by the people.

This minor oligarchic melody can be heard in other works composed by Critias and, in particular, in several choral tragedies that are attributed to him. Such a statement may seem surprising, as tragedy seems intimately associated with the democratic universe, reflecting it like a ‘broken mirror,’ according to Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s formulation.Footnote ⁹⁰ Should we be surprised that a resolute oligarch like Critias could have indulged in such a genre? No, for it would mean forgetting the future oligarch’s lasting ostensible support for the Athenian regime and, above all, overlooking the role of tragedy in offering a framework flexible enough to allow dissonant voices to be heard.Footnote ⁹¹ Far from reflecting democratic consensus, Critias’ plays seem to have promoted an ardent conception of the community based not on the rule of law, but on the manipulation of emotions.

Deadly Friendships

In his Constitutions in Verse as in his tragic plays, Critias indeed shows a certain contempt for the law. This disdain is expressed most clearly in a fragment from his tragedy Pirithoos:

Although it stands alone, this fragment is consistent with the distrust Critias often expressed – in words and in deeds – toward institutions: In 404, he did not hesitate to bend the law to his convenience in order to eliminate his political opponents and, in particular, Theramenes. Rather than relying on a system of legal rules, Critias preferred to rely on trusted men, bound to him by mutual friendship and fear – two powerful emotions, the only ones able to hold the political community together.

It is in the Pirithoos that Critias most clearly developed this demanding, even terrifying conception of friendship (philia). From this lost drama – whose attribution to Critias is probable, even if certainty is impossibleFootnote ⁹³ – several fragments have come down to us and allow us to specify the course of the action. After having tried to kidnap the goddess Persephone, the hero Pirithoos is punished by the god Hades and condemned to stay in the Underworld.Footnote ⁹⁴ His companion Theseus decides to stay by his side, although he has the option to return to the world of the living. After a series of adventures, Heracles manages, as a good friend, to rescue them both and deliver them together (88 B16 DK). The whole play is thus pervaded with ‘the obsessive presence of the code of friendship.’Footnote ⁹⁵

Found on a papyrus of Oxyrhinchus in Egypt, a long tirade describes the unfailing friendship that binds the two prisoners.Footnote ⁹⁶ Theseus opposes Heracles’ offer to free him alone because he cannot abandon Pirithoos to his tragic fate, whatever wrongs his friend may have committed: ‘it is shameful to betray a true and faithful friend when he has been seized malevolently’ (v. 1–3). Far from blaming him, Heracles then praises his exemplary behavior: ‘Theseus, your words become (both yourself) and the city of the Athenians; for you have ever been an ally of those in misfortune’ (v. 4–7). The dialogue thus praises a model of uncompromising philia, which requires one to support one’s friends even in death and beyond, since it is a question of suffering an eternal punishment together. This radical commitment also rings out in an isolated verse, also taken from the Pirithoos: ‘So isn’t not living superior to living in dishonor (kakōs)?’Footnote ⁹⁷ How better to sum up the fatal conception of friendship defended in the play as a whole? In a way, it is in death – and only in death – that true friendships are proven and tested. So it is probably no coincidence that the whole play is bathed in a dark, even crepuscular atmosphere, representing a ‘circle of the ether, around which the dark night and the innumerable crowd of stars never cease to circle.’Footnote ⁹⁸

It is an equally demanding form of friendship that links Theseus to Heracles. There again, it implies unequivocal support, whatever the obstacles encountered. When Heracles announces, at first, that he will not be able to come to his aid – because he is preoccupied with his own mission, to capture Cerberus – Theseus nobly answers him: ‘But what you desire […] you have my goodwill, not from impulse (but) freely, in enmity to enemies and good intention (towards friends).’Footnote ⁹⁹ Once granted, friendship cannot be taken back. Better still, it defines a network of cascading solidarities, which affects the entire life of a given companion: Transposing to the individual level the principles of a military alliance between cities, Theseus promises Heracles to have the same friends and the same enemies, no questions asked. Conversely, this absolute solidarity forbids any deviation, however minor.

All of these fragments help sketch out the profile of a hero who is certainly exemplary, but also disturbing. Theseus indeed puts friendship above all other considerations – and, in particular, above common good, or even good itself. It does not matter to him that Pirithoos insulted a god and tried to rape a goddess: He will follow him to the Underworld, without the merest hint of reproach. This excessive image broke radically with the soothing representations of the hero then in vogue in Athens. A few years earlier, in 423, Euripides had portrayed Theseus as a good-natured king, voluntarily submitting his decisions to the community and boasting of having established in the city ‘an equal right to vote.’Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Breaking with the democratic imagery associated with the founding hero of Athens, Critias thus made a dissonant voice heard on the theatrical stage: His Theseus promoted an oligarchic conception of friendship, based on exclusive and distinctive choices, in contradiction to the horizontal and democratic vision of friendship – the very same that Aristotle celebrates in the Eudemian Ethics.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In short, Critias was already outlining the path he would later take: As we shall see, the tyranny of the Thirty was also a tragedy of aristocratic friendship.

Quoted by Plutarch three times, the last line of the Pirithoos clarifies the profound importance of philia in the eyes of the poet:

For Critias, Theseus and Pirithoos are thus linked by immaterial chains – not forged of metal (achalkeutoisin), says the Greek text – and yet unbreakable. This extremely powerful link relies on a form of fear: Often translated as ‘honor,’ aidos in fact indicates the fear of dishonor. If Theseus decides to stay with his friend in the Underworld, it is ultimately because he fears not doing ‘the right thing.’ This fatal friendship is therefore based on fear, this other emotion that Critias wishes to instill in the hearts of all men, putting them all on the same sinister wavelength.

A Political Praise of Fear

It was probably in the theater that the Athenian oligarch theorized the political role of terror. At the end of the second century AD, Sextus Empiricus quoted a long passage, explicitly attributed to Critias, in which fear plays an important role.Footnote ¹⁰³ While there is no indication of the exact provenance of the extract, most commentators have recognized it as a fragment of a tragedy or satyr drama, perhaps entitled Sisyphus.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

In this long tirade in verse, one character delivers a strange account of the origins of the social world. To civilize a still bestial humanity, it is said that wise men invented the first laws, ‘so that justice might be sovereign (tyrannos).’ The actor then gives himself up to a praise of the nomos, celebrated for its capacity to ‘keep outrage (hubris) in slavery (doulēn).’ However, laws alone are not enough: They can only punish faults that are discovered and committed in broad daylight. Religion may therefore have been invented precisely to make up for the failures of human institutions:

Through his actor, Critias shows an incredible audacity here: claiming first of all that the gods were only an invention created by a particularly wise man; then, far from seeking to alleviate the evils of humanity, that this fiction aims to spread terror among men. For these imaginary gods have the power to probe hearts and minds. Invisible from men, they see all and hear all: ‘Further, if you silently plan some evil, this will not escape the gods’ notice: for there is intelligent awareness in (them).’Footnote ¹⁰⁶ As Emmanuelle Caire reminds us, ‘force can constrain bodies and the law can constrain public behavior, but only religion – and therefore fear – can achieve absolute control, that of the spirits.’Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Tamed by fear, citizens can be governed more easily.

How original is the scene imagined by Critias? It is certainly not the first time that Fear is placed at the foundation of the social order on stage. In the Eumenides, Aeschylus had already evoked its founding role: ‘Upon [the Areopagus], the respect (sebas) and inborn fear (phobos) of the citizens will prevent any wrong being done, alike by day and by night.’Footnote ¹⁰⁸ However, fear occupied only a marginal place in the Athenian religious landscape, and it is rather from Sparta that Critias, as a good laconizer, seems to have drawn his real inspiration. The Spartans were indeed famous for their ‘fear of the gods’ (deisidaimonia), and they even worshipped fear.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Fear, moreover, kept the Spartan community together, by holding a perpetual threat over the citizens’ heads. Some magistrates seem to have been primarily responsible for relaying this policy of fear: The sanctuary of Fear was next to the place where the ephors met, and they, according to Xenophon, were precisely in charge of ‘frightening the citizens into obedience.’Footnote ¹¹⁰

While it resounds with Spartan tradition, the tirade of Sisyphus is, however, an innovation. For the Lacedaemonians never considered fear a complete invention! Relayed by Sextus Empiricus, this extract is, moreover, at the root of the accusations of atheism that have been brought against Critias since antiquity. Might we then compare Critias’ verses with the ideas of his nephew, Plato, who praises the ‘noble lie’? Perhaps, but with one major difference: Plato never ventured to present the gods as a purely human invention. To lie, for the sake of the greater good, about the origins of the political community is one thing; to claim that the gods themselves are pure fiction is another; moreover, the Platonic lie aimed to develop friendship between citizens, not to unleash fear in the community.Footnote ¹¹¹

In Sisyphus, Critias develops a deeply original theology, even if it means hurting common beliefs.Footnote ¹¹² Stranger still, the hero lifts the lid on deception and, so to speak, spills the beans. He reveals religion for what it is: an instrument of domination over men, a means of government in the hands of a sophist-legislator – a revelation all the more shocking as it was undoubtedly placed in the mouth of Sisyphus, a king who, according to the common tradition, had been punished by the gods! This is perhaps the strongest originality of the play: Through the intermediary of his actor, Critias suggests that an intelligent ruler should not hesitate to use law, religion or rhetoric – all human inventions – to establish his power absolutely. In this uncomplicated perspective, religion is only one of the means of government.

At the end of this foray into Sisyphus, one last question deserves to be clarified. Is it possible to infer from this simple excerpt Critias’ ideas on religion? Is this not falling into the classic interpretative trap of confusing the author and his work, the poet and the characters he gives voice to? The risk is all the greater here since the fragment is totally isolated and we know nothing about how it fit into the play, unlike the Pirithoos, whose plot we can reconstruct. If it is indeed an extract from a tragedy, the character was perhaps abused, even punished by the gods, after having pronounced such transgressive words. Isn’t it the case of Sisyphus who, according to the almost unanimous tradition, ends up tortured in the Underworld?Footnote ¹¹³ Tragedies tend to end badly … Moreover, it is far from certain that Sextus Empiricus acted neutrally when he selected the passage: He was probably influenced in his choice by what was known about Critias after 404, which could have introduced a ‘confirmation bias’ reinforcing through a type of feedback loop the already detestable image of Critias.

Should we therefore give up the idea of accessing Critias’ true thoughts? At least we can see that his ‘atheist’ tradition was formed quite early in time.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Let us also note that the Sisyphus passage strangely echoes the affair of the Thirty, which made fear a principle of government: Poetically stated in the theater, Critias’ ideals were brutally put into practice under the oligarchy. It would be a mistake, however, to believe that Critias tried to impose on the Thirty a political line that he had defined beforehand on the tragic stage. The poet simply had the talent to express and to put to music ideas already largely shared by opponents of democracy. A culture of friendship and fear had indeed already bloomed within the hetaireiai, and it is these powerful collective emotions that guided the initial development of the oligarchic chorus in 404, before contributing to its ruin.

The Unified Chorus: A Joyful Purification

April 22, 404: The siege of Athens has finally ended. Critias and the other outcasts return to the city, set on revenge. In an initial symbolic gesture, the victors begin to destroy the Walls to the sound of the aulos – the instrument so intimately associated with the Spartan universe. Let us not be mistaken: It is the death of the imperialist democracy of the fifth century that is thus signified. Sheltered behind the Long Walls linking the city to its port, the Athenians dominated the Aegean Sea for over half a century, their fleet punishing recalcitrant allies and importing the food they needed, even when their territory was under invasion.

The enthusiasm generated by victory silenced the divisions and erased the divergent interests between the Athenian exiles and the triumphant Spartans, and, within the oligarchy itself, between radicals and moderates. Created in such joyful circumstances, the chorus of the oligarchs managed, for a while, to agree on the punishment of a certain number of scapegoats, before unchained political passions compromised its internal balance.

As always, the good times couldn’t last. After a moment of indecision, the Athenians set up a new political regime. Conducted by five ephors designated within the oligarchic hetaireiai, the transition ended during the summer of 404 with the election of a commission of thirty members, charged with collecting and restoring the ‘ancestral laws’ – the patrioi nomoi – and, in the meantime, with governing the city.Footnote ¹¹⁵ While Xenophon provides the nominative list of the Thirty in a passage using very official language, it is Lysias who makes its principles of composition clear: ‘Instructions were given to vote for ten men identified by Theramenes, ten whom the previously established “ephors” should appoint, and ten more from those at the meeting [i.e. the Assembly].’Footnote ¹¹⁶ The establishment of the Thirty therefore relied on a skillful balance between various schools of thought with divergent political options. According to the Athenian Constitution, the political field was then divided into three distinct groups: ‘the people’s supporters endeavored to preserve the democracy, but the notables who belonged to the hetaireiai and those exiles who had returned after the peace were eager for oligarchy, while those notables who were not members of any hetaireiai but who otherwise were inferior in reputation to none of the citizens were aiming at the ancestral constitution.’Footnote ¹¹⁷ One should not, however, be misled by this beautiful tripartition: The Thirty did not count any authentic democrats in their midst, but only men whose positions were compatible with the new political relations of force, inside and outside the city. As Xenophon recalls it, the new regime was established ‘with the approval of the Lacedaemonians.’Footnote ¹¹⁸

This rather homogeneous recruitment policy explains why the Thirty displayed a united front at first, determined to put an end to several decades of popular hegemony. Brought together through attending the same symposia, they even sought to create an ideal community, transposing the principles of Spartan organization to Athens. The Thirty indeed seem to have wanted to break with the Cleisthenic decimal system, with its decentralized structures of power, to privilege a much more hierarchical model, ordered into three concentric circles based on multiples of thirty: It seems that the community counted 3,330 citizens, divided into 3,000 hoplites (100 × 30), 300 horsemen (10 × 30) and 30 leaders (1 × 30). If this hypothesis is correct, one might claim that the Thirty were inspired by a laconizing utopian model, undoubtedly actively promoted by Critias, the ‘organic intellectual’ of the oligarchy.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Beyond this numerical reorganization, the Thirty wanted to put an end to the Athenian maritime dominance and to anchor the city to the earth. For them, it was a question of going back to a primitive Athens, before the city turned toward the sea and fell into imperial excess – according to the historical reconstruction proposed by Critias himself in Plato’s Timaeus.Footnote ¹²⁰ This inflexion was reflected, in particular, in the decision to reorient the Pnyx – the place where the citizens’ Assembly met – so that the bema faced the territory of the city, instead of Piraeus, the port of Athens and symbol of imperialist democracy.Footnote ¹²¹ When they addressed the people, orators henceforth gazed out upon the territory of a city closed on itself and purged of its foreign elements.

This redefinition of the community was accompanied by a certain violence, initially rather well accepted. Attacking the most radical democrats, the first capital sentences even favored, at first, the unity of the Athenians who had remained in the city. Diodorus of Sicily underlines this momentary state of grace: ‘To begin with, [the Thirty] brought to trial the city’s most notorious malefactors and condemned them to death; and so far what was going on met with even the most reasonable citizens’ approval.’Footnote ¹²² Even the orator Lysias, however little suspected of oligarchic sympathies, agrees: ‘you would have regarded the Thirty as honorable men if they had punished only those people.’Footnote ¹²³ Better still, these initial measures aroused enthusiasm, according to the Athenian Constitution: ‘At the outset, therefore, [the Thirty] were engaged […] in removing the sycophants and the persons who consorted undesirably with the people to curry favor and were evil-doers and scoundrels; and the city was delighted at these measures, thinking that they were acting with the best intentions.’Footnote ¹²⁴

Who were these ‘sycophants’ and ‘evil-doers’ whose deaths contributed to temporarily uniting the oligarchic chorus? Lysias evokes by name Cleophon, one of the former leaders of the people, recognized as a ‘bad citizen’ and quickly executed.Footnote ¹²⁵ Those who refused the new geopolitical order were also attacked, and in particular the stratēgoi and the taxiarchs who had opposed the terms of the peace treaty with the Spartans: Arrested even before the Thirty came into being and accused of high treason, they were eventually brought before the Council and condemned to death after a public vote.Footnote ¹²⁶

These first condemnations aimed, in the literal sense, to purify the community, by ridding it of the worst leaders of the ‘accursed people of the Athenians’ – to paraphrase the funeral epigram of Critias. The Thirty claimed ‘that they needed to cleanse (katharan) the city of wrongdoers and redirect the remaining citizens towards goodness and justice.’Footnote ¹²⁷ These expeditious punishments were in this respect a cathartic ritual similar to the purifying ceremonies that opened the festival of the Thargelia in honor of the birth of Apollo and Artemis: Charged with all the evils of the city, one or two individuals were chosen as expiatory victims before being, according to ancient sources, either expelled from the city or beaten and stoned so that the regenerated city could get back to normal.Footnote ¹²⁸ The following day, competitions between several cyclical choruses of men and children took place to mark, in the joy of dance and song, the new beginning of the community.

Beyond its ritual resonances, this joyful purification had long been prepared for or, more precisely, prefigured in the theater. For the comedies of the last third of the fifth century had continually staged expulsions, or even the elimination of sycophants,Footnote ¹²⁹ according to a recurrent narrative pattern: A sycophant enters the stage and proudly announces that he is pursuing, on spurious grounds, certain vulnerable individuals; he is then mocked and insulted by the comic hero, before finally being chased away, or even brutally and mercilessly beaten.Footnote ¹³⁰ In the Demes of Eupolis, in 412, a sycophant ended up tied up and beaten like a drum, after having opposed Aristides the Just. In Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, performed in 411, the heroine proposes to unite the citizens after cleaning the dirt – the dung and the burrs – from the shorn fleece that is the city in this metaphor; that is, cleansing the city of the demagogues who would do anything to gain power – even if it meant ‘pluck[ing] off their heads one by one.’Footnote ¹³¹

It would be a mistake, however, to read these plays in retrospect as genuine calls for the murder of sycophants. First of all, the comic poets were targeting all influential political actors, without distinction, and laconizing oligarchs bore the brunt of it as well. Secondly, the violence of comic language was more akin to a ritualized verbal venting than to an articulated political program.Footnote ¹³² In order to switch from verbal insults to real violence, a completely different political situation and the arrival in power of vengeful oligarchs were necessary.

When theatrical fiction found its way into reality, comedy quickly turned to tragedy or, rather, to terror: Instead of purifying passions by representing them on stage – in accordance with Aristotle’s famous katharsis – the very real executions of ‘sycophants and demagogues’ aroused terrible fears that quickly became impossible to appease within the community.

For a while, ‘those in the town were unanimous.’Footnote ¹³³ But the spell was soon broken, for the Thirty quickly attacked not only overt democrats, but also citizens whose only fault was to have adhered to the previous regime. The executions came in quick succession, striking Leon of Salamis, a famous former general, the rich and patriotic Antiphon, and Niceratus the son of Nicias: ‘although he was invited to share in the oligarchy by those who were plotting against the democracy, he rejected their request.’Footnote ¹³⁴ Shortly afterwards, it was the turn of ‘Strombichides and Calliades and many other excellent citizens (kaloi kagathoi)’ to be condemned to death by the new oligarchic Council.Footnote ¹³⁵

Far from targeting only the ‘contemptible’ (ponēroi), the Thirty also focused particularly on rich Athenians: Of the sixteen victims of the oligarchy known by name, eleven were part of the liturgical class.Footnote ¹³⁶ Perhaps this relentlessness derived from the fact that these wealthy citizens were regarded as traitors to their class. A few years before, the Old Oligarch had already railed against ‘anyone who is not one of the common people, and yet chooses to settle in a city governed by a democracy rather than one governed by an oligarchy.’Footnote ¹³⁷ Still, this extension of violence brought about the first fracture within the oligarchy between the most radical fringe and all those who, like Theramenes, refused this justification. A man should not be executed, he argued, ‘because he was honored by the people, provided he was doing no harm to the excellent people (kaloi kagathoi).’Footnote ¹³⁸

Such violence also affected noncitizens and, in particular, wealthy metics who remained in Athens after the defeat.Footnote ¹³⁹ These targeted seizures, of which the family of the orator Lysias was a victim, corresponded to a particularly closed conception of the community. Far from being arbitrary, such persecutions resonated with the new civic organization, which was based on political and spatial segregation. Reduced to three thousand, the citizens were thus registered, then reviewed by the Thirty and, finally, gathered on the Agora; conversely, all ‘those who were not on the roll’ were distributed ‘in various places here and there,’ before being disarmed.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Dispersed across the entire territory, several thousand Athenians were thus dispossessed of their citizenship and deprived of means of defense both military and judicial.

This drastic redefinition also had strong repercussions within the civic body itself: By setting a strict limit on the number of citizens – 3,000 and not one more – the Thirty also put a strain on the fortunate ones, whose names they could strike off the list with the stroke of a pen: ‘for a long time went on postponing the roll of the Three Thousand and keeping to themselves those on whom they had decided, and even on occasions when they thought fit to publish it they made a practice of erasing some of the names enrolled and writing in others instead from among those outside the roll.’Footnote ¹⁴¹ To include a citizen was therefore to perfunctorily exclude another. The Thirty probably saw this as a way of maintaining pressure on the closed group of citizens, who had to fight to retain their place and their privileges. This agonistic conception of citizenship was in fact quite coherent with the thought of Critias, according to whom true superiority was established through competition: As Emmanuelle Caire has successfully shown, for the oligarch, ‘excellence is never a steady state: it is only conceived in the agōn.’Footnote ¹⁴²

This numerical limit also aimed to prevent the emergence of competing choruses within the oligarchic community. It is, in any case, the justification given for the reform according to Xenophon: ‘Accordingly Critias and the rest of the Thirty, who were by this time alarmed and feared above all that the citizens would flock to the support of Theramenes, enrolled a body of three thousand, who were to take part, as they said, in public affairs.’Footnote ¹⁴³ In this matter, the oligarchs seem to have been guided by the fear of seeing ‘too large a group gravitating’ (surreō) around Theramenes – himself a member of the Thirty – since this could have thwarted their radical projects.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Not surprisingly, Theramenes opposed the idea of fixing a precise number of citizens, ‘as though this number must somehow be good men and true’: He refused to believe that ‘they should limit themselves to three thousand, and there could neither be excellent men (kaloi kagathoi) outside this body nor rascals within it.’Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Above all, he thought that such a restriction endangered the maintenance of the new regime: ‘Theramenes said that if one did not associate enough people in the public affairs, it would be impossible that the oligarchy maintains itself.’Footnote ¹⁴⁶ He then became the spokesman of all those who, among the Three Thousand, and even among the Thirty, challenged the exclusive approach defended by Critias and his peers: They soon split into separate factions. Stasis insinuated itself within the oligarchy: Even before the first massacres, ‘the Three Thousand were in a state of civil strife (stasiazontas), […] the other citizens had been formally expelled from the town, [and] the Thirty were no longer united.’Footnote ¹⁴⁷ The oligarchic revolution would soon begin to devour its own children – as was the case at the height of the Terror during the French Revolution.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

The Fractured Chorus: Extending the Domain of Fear

Faced with the growing popularity of Theramenes, the Thirty finally decided to bring him to trial for treason. Pretending to respect the law, they assembled the Council, which acted as a judicial court. Critias held the role of principal accuser, and, at the end of a parody of judgment, Theramenes was condemned and executed. Reported in detail by Xenophon, this sequence is marked by a form of intense theatricalization, both in form and in content. Pitting the accuser against the accused, the story has contributed greatly to the legend of an all-powerful Critias, the true leader of the oligarchy. In reality, if he did all the talking during the trial, it was not by virtue of his supposedly exorbitant power, but because he was the most accomplished orator of the Thirty and the only one able to stand up to a rhetorician of Theramenes’ caliber.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ And the fact that the confrontation was so poignant is because the two men had been close – so close.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

‘Now in the beginning Critias shared the ideas of Theramenes and was his friend (philos).’Footnote ¹⁵¹ The two men had indeed frequented the same places and, in particular, the same symposia, tasting together the pleasures of the wine that Critias sang about so beautifully in his elegiac verses.Footnote ¹⁵² However, these happy memories were not enough to disarm the growing hostility between the two men. Better still, it is in the name of this earlier friendship that Critias tried to have Theramenes condemned. For, in his eyes, ‘treason is a far more dreadful thing than war.’Footnote ¹⁵³ While with an avowed enemy one knows what to expect, a traitor ruins any form of trust and calls into question the very principles of philia. He claimed Theramenes had acted precisely in this way: After having been a friend of the Lacedaemonians, he turned against them, becoming their adversary, even their enemy.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Without the loyalty of Theseus, who supported Pirithoos in all circumstances, the inconstant Theramenes thus deserved severe punishment. At the end of the trial, Critias had him removed from the list of citizens, depriving him of any legal protection because the Thirty ‘have power of life or death over those outside the roll (katalogos).’Footnote ¹⁵⁵ What better way to show that the traitor is no longer a subject of law, but a man who can be killed with impunity, like the homo sacer dear to Giorgio Agamben?

Theramenes obviously did not take the same view. Condemned to death, he delivered a final speech, in which he looked back on the friendship that had tied him to Critias. Mixing pathos with irony, the scene is famous: ‘And when, being compelled to die, he had drunk the hemlock, they said that he threw out the last drops, like a man playing kottabos, and exclaimed: “This to the fair Critias.”’Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Far from being anecdotal, as Xenophon pretends to believe, this tirade mobilizes a whole universe of references shared between oligarchs. At one level, this joke is indeed part of the tradition of scathing retorts, specific to the culture of the banquet (symposion). More specifically, it refers to the game of kottabos, very popular at symposia, whose rules are well known: The participants threw the last drops of their cup toward the cup of the friend to whom they wished to show their preference, or even their attraction.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

In this context, this last line takes on a very ironic character. Wasn’t it a way of mocking Critias, whose taste for drunken banquets and admiration for the sober morals of the Lacedaemonians were well known to everyone?Footnote ¹⁵⁸ ‘This to the fair Critias’: The remark was also, at another level, a way to make fun of the codes of the erotic culture specific to symposia. For Critias, then about fifty years old, was no longer the handsome young man he had once been, when the two adversaries were still frequenting the symposion together. Above all, by addressing the last drop of poison to his former companion, Theramenes was ironically inviting him to join him in death, as Theseus had followed Pirithoos to the Underworld. While the kottabos anticipates in principle love, it announces in this case death – the death that Critias met, a few days later, during the Battle of Mounychia.

Beyond its biting irony, the toast also functioned, on one final level, as a melancholic meditation on how time ravages bodies and dissolves the bonds of even the strongest friendships. The time of philia was now over – and fear had taken its place!

Let’s go back, to the moment of the trial itself, to focus this time not on the two main protagonists, but on the audience attending the scene. Everything happens in front of the members of the Council, arranged in a circle and charged with judging the case. As in a real play, the accuser and the accused question the audience in turn: After an initial tirade from Critias, Theramenes replies with conviction and almost wins over the audience. The denouement of the trial is then staged by Xenophon as a theatrical event:

Through his consummate storytelling, Xenophon brings the scene alive for the reader. However, as Emmanuelle Caire has shown, ‘it is above all the staging of a show for the use of the members of the Council, a show in which Critias is both the chorus and the coryphaeus. The appearance of the dagger-bearers is as spectacular as the entrance of the chorus in a dramatic play, even if it remains absolutely silent and even if, paradoxically, the narration ellipses it.’Footnote ¹⁶⁰ With its two distinguished protagonists, a highly visible chorus and a large audience, all the ingredients of a tragic play, with its adventures and its dramatic denouement, are gathered together.

But it should be noted that it is a very singular play that is acted out here, in complete contradiction with the traditional tragic codes. First of all, Critias combines roles that are normally distinct in the theater: In this strange show, he acts at the same time as a protagonist (since he plays the main role), as a coryphaeus (since he speaks in the name of the dagger-bearers), as a chorēgos (since he has prepared the entrance of the different performers) and, finally, as a poet (since he has also written the denouement of the plot). Then, throughout the whole sequence, the chorus does not speak, does not dance and does not call out to the spectators, as is the custom in Athens: The armed men remain silent, stationed all around the stage, like threateningly immobile blocks. The spectators themselves remain mute: While they are supposed to decide between the actors by means of a vote – at the end of the trial as in tragic contests – they remain frozen and reactionless, silently acquiescing to the dispossession of their own power. Finally, this disconcerting show does not aim to purge the passions of the audience through a cathartic fictional tale, but on the contrary to unleash fear in citizens’ souls, by bringing together reality and its representation.

Indeed, the Council members were seized with terror and abandoned Theramenes to his sad fate. Panic-stricken, the accused took refuge on the altar of Hestia, placing himself under the protection of the gods and the laws. Critias did not care, however, and had him apprehended by his men, in a heavy silence, broken only by Theramenes’ protests and calls for help. ‘But the councilors kept quiet, seeing that the men at the rail were of the same sort as Satyrus and that the space in front of the Council-house was filled with the guardsmen, and being well aware that the former had come armed with daggers.’Footnote ¹⁶¹ The Councilors were thus reduced to the rank of passive citizens, forced to accept the death of one of their own without saying a word.

After this coup de force, the oligarchy of the Thirty was transformed into a true phobocracy – a form of government by terror. The Three Thousand were henceforth only a cluster of fearful solo individuals, with no unifying principle other than fear. Critias and the Thirty were not spared either: Like the tyrant who brings in a reign of terror but feels it cruelly in return – according to a cliché in vogue on the tragic scene – the leaders of the oligarchy were tormented by fear. Wasn’t it in fact because they ‘feared (phoboumenoi)’ the charisma of Theramenes that they decided to eliminate him at all costs?Footnote ¹⁶²

The Frightened Chorus: The Terrorist Climax

At the end of the trial, the Thirty nevertheless felt they had been delivered from their anguish. ‘So, then, Theramenes died; but the Thirty, thinking that now they could play the tyrant without fear, issued a proclamation forbidding those who were outside the roll to enter the city […].’Footnote ¹⁶³ But this feeling of safety was illusory, Xenophon immediately specifies: A few weeks later, terror invaded the entire political arena, at the end of a new spectacular trial.

Eleusinians of fighting age – in all, three hundred men, formerly Athenian citizens – were arrested in a single day, at the instigation of Critias and his peers.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ The very next day, the Thirty summoned to the Odeon the hoplites and the horsemen – that is to say, the whole Three Thousand – to collectively judge the prisoners.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Here again, the scene appears to be marked by a powerful theatricality, first of all because of the place chosen for the trial: Next to the theater of Dionysus, wasn’t the Odeon in fact a major venue for performances, where the musical competitions of the Panathenaia were held? The unfolding of the trial itself can be seen as reproducing, on a much larger scale, that of Theramenes: Critias again plays every role, at once protagonist, chorus, coryphaeus and poet. But the play quickly turns into a parody, so condensed is the plot and so accelerated the rhythm. If Critias gives voice to the accusation, he no longer has an opponent to counter him. He delivers only a short speech, concentrated into a few sentences, to the Three Thousand:

Critias confesses here: The trial does not aim to punish criminals – the Eleusinians’ only fault being that they are not registered citizens – but to transform the judges themselves into assassins! Alternating ‘you’ and ‘we,’ Critias seeks precisely to make the Three Thousand accomplices of a terrible crime, to stop them defecting for fear of reprisal.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Beyond this sordid objective, Critias reveals what, according to him, form the real founding principles of a political community: Citizenship is less about participation in the Assembly or the Council than about shared hopes and fears. To put it differently, according to the enraged oligarch, a politeia worthy of the name is defined emotionally, not institutionally.

For the oligarch, these collective passions must be imposed, not negotiated. In this case, the vote is not only public in order to identify the half-hearted and any possible traitors, but it is carried out under guard. The threat is even clearer than at the time of Theramenes’ trial: It is no longer simple dagger-bearers, placed at strategic locations, who impose a reign of terror, but ‘the armed Lacedaemonian garrison,’ occupying ‘half of the Odeon’Footnote ¹⁶⁸: the threatening troop transforms the vote into a masquerade and the tragedy into a sinister farce.

In this trial orchestrated by Critias, terror is pervasive and touches every single participant – victims, executioners and accomplices: While the Eleusinians fated to die were seized with terror, the Three Thousand hardly fared any better, fearing as much the ferocity of the Thirty as future reprisals by the democrats who were enraged by this mass crime; and the Thirty themselves also lived in fear since they deemed that ‘their government was no longer secure’ (Hellenica, 2.4.8). Following the initial successes of Thrasybulus and his troop, they had decided to empty Eleusis of its population to contrive a refuge in case they needed one.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

We must go further. Pervading the whole civic body, these fears are not the accidental fruit of a political situation out of control, but the product of a deliberate strategy implemented by the laconic oligarchs leading the Thirty. Critias had indeed been interested in the way the Spartans had based their own political freedom on fear and, in particular, on fear of the helots – the enslaved population of Laconia and Messenia who farmed for the Homoioi. This is, at least, what is suggested, at several centuries of distance, by the rhetor Libanios in one of his Discourses:

The Spartans had apparently even invented the means to prevent helot revolts by removing the strap on their shields (to make them unusable) and by always carrying a spear (to have a constant advantage in the event of hand-to-hand combat). Libanios makes light of such freedoms, the cost of which seems to him inordinate:

With all due respect to Libanius, Critias saw in this constant vigilance the very condition of complete political freedom. His reasoning can be expressed in the form of an argumentative chain: To be truly free, a citizen must always remain on the alert; to remain on the alert, he must himself feel fear; to feel fear, he must frighten others; to frighten others, he must enslave them. According to this perverse logic, true freedom is thus inseparable from the enslavement of others, and this is why ‘in Lacedaemonia are the most enslaved men (douloi) and the most free (eleutheroi).’ This is also why the whole of society had to live in fear: Terrorized as they were themselves, the helots also terrorized, in turn, the citizens, thus maintaining them in a state of salutary tension.

Transposed to Athens, this vicious reasoning allows us to better understand certain radical decisions taken by the Thirty. In 404, the oligarchs could indeed have reserved access to the magistracies and the Council to a selected elite, without excluding the majority of the people from the civic body and, consequently, from any form of legal protection. If the Thirty decided to enslave the demos and to deprive it of the safety offered by the statute of citizen, it was perhaps not only out of a spirit of revenge, but also to create enemies inside the group, determined to restore their old privileges. In the face of such a threat, the oligarchs were forced to form a united front and silence their internal divisions. In this strategy of tension, fear became its own goal – an existential experience designed to prevent any dissension in the oligarchic ranks.Footnote ¹⁷² This policy was therefore linked to a new form of anthropology: Skillfully maintained, terror was to give birth to a ‘new man,’ frightened but free – or, rather, free because he was frightened.

Establishing a permanent state of exception to guarantee the freedom of the ‘best’: Such was perhaps the great dream of Critias and his accomplices. But in wanting to keep the political community perpetually at boiling point, there was a great risk of arousing fatal fury. Rather than creating a virtuous form of vigilance, terror quickly degenerates into paralyzing fear, isolating citizens from each other and plunging them into a dazed stupor.

After the Thirty

Hardly a few days after the Eleusinians’ massacre, the Thirty left to reconquer Piraeus, which Thrasybulus and his men had just seized. In spite of their numerical superiority and their heavy armament, the oligarchs suffered a resounding defeat on the slopes of Mounychia, where Critias and Charmides died: Fear had obviously not helped the oligarchs’ troops stick together. However, fear was still necessary several months before any true peace negotiations were launched between ‘those of the town’ and the democratic exiles. Plagued by the fear of reprisal, the Three Thousand entrenched themselves behind the city walls and refused to lay down their arms for a long time. While they did eventually decide to dismiss the Thirty, they replaced them with a ten-man commission that proved to be just as belligerent and intransigent:

The execution of Demaretus functions here as a duplicate of the condemnation of Theramenes. It has the same objective – to bring the Three Thousand to heel – and resorts to the same means: terror. There again, fear pervades the whole community: The fear felt by the Ten corresponds to the terror that strikes the Three Thousand. However, the narrative has another, less immediately apparent, function: It seeks to impute responsibility for the continuation of the war to the Ten alone, who are accused of having betrayed the mission of appeasement that was entrusted to them.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ In this version of the story, the Three Thousand are portrayed as frightened citizens, acting against their will and manipulated by the Ten after having been manipulated by the Thirty.

Once democracy was restored a few months later, the former oligarchs adopted this line of defense before the popular courts of justice, at least for those who did not benefit from the amnesty. The anonymous defendant in a Lysianic speech justified staying in the city because he was filled, like so many other citizens, with fear.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ This argument of the ‘terrorized terrorizer’ was taken up even within the Thirty. In his speech against Eratosthenes – one of the Thirty, whom Lysias accused of having had his brother, Polemarchus, murdered and of having plundered his family’s wealth – the orator anticipated the answers of his adversary in this imaginary dialogue:

Indeed, Eratosthenes had everything to gain by playing the role of the frightened citizen in order to better exonerate himself from any responsibility for the crimes committed by his fellow oligarchs.Footnote ¹⁷⁷

Focusing hatred on a few convenient bogeymen – first and foremost, the dazzling Critias – this emotional strategy was accepted by the democrats who had returned from Piraeus, or at least by the most moderate fraction of them. Every effort seems to have been made to help people forget to what extent, until the very last moment, the chorus of the Three Thousand danced in unison: The collective memory targeted, a posteriori, a few irredeemable citizens, struck with infamy, in order to better rebuild the unity of the divided city. But it is far from certain that all the democrats of Piraeus accepted this irenic version of the history – and, in particular, those close to Thrasybulus who had shouldered the risk involved in chasing the oligarchs out of Athens and knew what to expect.