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The hour is getting late, and Phormio wonders whether he should drop a hint to the bride’s father that the wedding party should be moving on. Since the average Athenian wedding is a more than somewhat chaotic affair, it does not surprise the old soldier that the party is running late. Nevertheless, to some degree the lack of proper organization offends his tidy military mind.
In fact, reflects Phormio, the entire wedding is running late, as the occasion was originally scheduled for the month of Gamelion (late January/early February). Gamelion is an auspicious month to wed, because this is the month when Zeus, king of the gods, married his sister-wife Hera.
A marriage, however, is more than the union of a man and a woman. It is also the union of two families. The families in question are both reasonably wealthy landowners, and both fathers are friends of Phormio. Over the previous month Phormio has felt considerable sympathy for the frustration of the betrothed couple as he helped their fathers slowly navigate their way to an agreement on matters of tillage, inheritance, property and pasture rights. The actual betrothal was sorted out in an afternoon.
Eventually, the marriage was postponed to the end of the next month, Anthesterion. This is also a good month for weddings because it is the beginning of spring. More importantly from Phormio’s personal perspective as a wedding guest, this is the month when the wine from the previous year’s grape harvest has matured enough to be drinkable. The wine god Dionysus married an Anatolian queen in this month, so it too is auspicious from a religious viewpoint. Indeed, the city is in a party mood because of the three-day spring celebration, the Anthesteria, after which the month is named.
The wedding had been scheduled for the end of the month so as not to clash with that mid-month party. Then, deciding that they needed more time to prepare for the Dionysia, the city Archons had calmly clipped five days off Anthesterion and added them to Elaphebolion, the month in which the Dionysia takes place.
(The Archons could do this because the Athenian city calendar is a flexible affair to which days or even months can be added or deducted as the need arises. It’s not unusual for the Archons to, for example, stretch out a month to give the army time to return to celebrate the harvest festivals. Spring came late this year, so Gamelion was extended to allow the Anthesteria celebrations to happen in the right climatic conditions. So even without the Dionysia, the month of Anthesterion needed trimming anyway if Elaphebolion was to start on time.)
As a result, it is now Elaphebolion, the month that honours Artemis, so the cakes at the wedding are stag-shaped. (The stag symbolizes Artemis, just as the owl symbolizes Athena, and the horse Poseidon.) The wine, however, is still young, plentiful and cheap. The abundance of drink has certainly added to the general air of festivity.
Sitting quietly in a corner that allows him to see the entire hall, Phormio notes young male guests have amused and irritated their elders with impromptu games, dances and wild, off-key singing. A youth called Hippoclides has imitated his namesake by dancing on the table in a handstand. This has generated a certain interest among the matrons present since, like all Athenian males, Hippoclides wears no underwear.
The Dance of Hippoclides
The dance of Hippoclides is related in Herodotus’ Histories 6.129. The disapproving father-in-law was Psistratos, the ruler of Athens around 600 BC. When the original Hippoclides did a revealing tabletop dance, his father-in-law-to-be cancelled the planned wedding, saying, ‘Hippoclides has danced away his bride.’ To which the demoted bridegroom cheerfully replied, ‘Hippoclides doesn’t care.’ There’s now an Athenian catchphrase about whether a planned event goes forward or not – ‘It’s all the same to Hippoclides.’
Men and women are supposed to celebrate on different sides of the hall, but after the wedding meal (men eat first, then the women) a lot of informal mingling takes place. The men of marriageable age, however, have congregated around the wine krater. Phormio has a theory that this is for the same reason that cattle form a tight defensive cluster when hunted by wolves. The hunters in this case are the mothers of nubile daughters.
Phormio grins as he sees a young male stray too near the female side of the party. Within moments the youth will find himself pinned against a column, where hopeful mothers will politely but persistently grill him on his family connections, expectations and prospects. If deemed suitable, the man will then be treated to brief but heartfelt eulogies about the charms and domestic skills of the matrons’ daughters.
The daughters themselves are considered too young to attend the festivities, the exception of course being the bride herself. She’s the rosy-cheeked fifteen-year-old in a saffron dress sporting the short haircut that symbolizes her accession to married status. The bride’s veil has already been ceremonially removed by the groom (the most significant part of the day’s events as it demonstrates that the girl has been transferred to her new family), so there’s nothing to shelter the over-lively young men at the wine krater from the bride’s basilisk-like glare.
It is clear that someone has to intervene, so Phormio reluctantly volunteers himself for the task. On the pretext of refreshing his wine, he joins the group and says, ‘A happy occasion this is, and by all means one we should celebrate. I commend your enthusiasm, but may I suggest you tone it down just a touch. The bride’s family are getting a bit restless.’
He knows his advice will be taken. Athenian youngsters will respect any greybeard, and especially a veteran like himself with a scar across his face from a spear-thrust – a wound that also took away one eye. Also, he is Phormio, one of the better Athenian generals in the recent war. He is retired now, but his reputation as a warrior and sailor remains. (It is a point of quiet pride with him that when he was chosen for state office he was ineligible to take the position because he owed money. The Assembly promptly gave him a minor task to perform, and then paid him exactly the sum of his debt – a mark of respect that he deeply values.)
Accordingly, when Phormio drops his hint, the young men disperse uncomplainingly. One man remains, somewhat truculently dipping his wine cup into the krater to refresh it and then making a sour grimace with his first swig.
Phormio
While a competent general and tactician, Phormio is best remembered today as a great Athenian admiral. Phormio won two naval battles against the Peloponnesians despite being outnumbered each time. His victories cemented Athenian naval supremacy on the Greek west coast. Nothing is heard of Phormio after 428 BC. It is thought that he died soon after fighting a land campaign in Acarnania, though, as suggested here, he may have been badly wounded and later retired.
Phormio guesses that the grimace is because the wine has been well diluted with water. As the saying goes, water the first krater for a formal gathering; half-mix the second, for a convivial affair; serve the third almost unwatered, for a proper party. By now the party should be getting on to the stronger wine. Instead the third krater has been well-watered, too – and the young man eyeing the huge urn disapprovingly is among the reasons why.
Over-indulgence is frowned upon at this stage, for this is still meant to be a formal gathering: the real party will kick off when the wedding procession arrives at the groom’s house. Then the elderly guests will go off to bed and leave the night to the young men – not that they’re having any trouble celebrating already.
BRIDESMAIDS PREPARE A BRIDE FOR HER BIG DAY
It does occur to Phormio that by now they should have lit the torches and staggered into formation for the wedding procession. Still, the whole wedding has suffered continual delays since the engagement was first announced, so why should the final act be any different? Admittedly, the delay grates somewhat on his tidy military mind, but Phormio reminds himself that, firstly, he is not in charge and, secondly, wedding feasts are not military campaigns.
‘You will remember this night fondly when you are camped outside the walls of Syracuse,’ he informs the young man. The guest takes another swig of wine. ‘Oh, yes. Alcibiades will show everyone how it’s done.’
There’s a feeling among the new crop of Athenian youths that the generals of the last war had been pedestrian at best. Today, however, they claim Athens has a general with flair. Battle and diplomacy – Alcibiades can do both. The young men subscribe to the idea that the last war was only won because Demosthenes got lucky. But now, even if Athens has to fight the Spartans again, it will be an easy victory.
But Phormio disagrees. The Spartans are never easy. They weren’t last time and they won’t be next time. Yet Alcibiades has convinced the hotheads of Athens to follow him.
Last time, when the Spartans opened hostilities, no city anywhere was better prepared for war than Athens. The conflict was not an unexpected development and everything possible had been done to weather the storm. The trouble is that in military affairs no plan survives contact with reality unscathed.
Phormio remarks as much to the young man, who hoots derisively. ‘Yes, Pericles. What a plan!’ He says the name ‘Pericles’ as though it leaves a bad taste in his mouth.
Pericles’ plan was that Athens should not fight the Spartans in Attica. Instead he persuaded the rural population to retreat into Athens and wait behind the safety of the city walls while the Spartans prowled the fields outside. They might devastate the crops, but Athens could easily survive on grain imported from the Euxine.
The young man slams his wine cup down on the table so hard that a fountain splashes up from its centre. ‘Pericles got it wrong!’
It is true that Pericles might have foreseen the plague. After all, when you pack tens of thousands of extra people into a city, into every courtyard and gutter, as Pericles did with refugees from the countryside, disease is a likely consequence.
And when Athenian strategy is based on inviting ships from all over the world to import foods and, with that food, whatever diseases they’re carrying, then illness becomes almost certain. As masterplans go, the one dreamed up by Pericles certainly had some major flaws.
The young man leans forward suddenly, causing Phormio to flinch from his wine-laden breath.
‘Pericles is the father of Athens’ misfortune!’
‘Please keep your voice down,’ says Phormio sharply, ‘or we might need to step out for a bit of fresh air. The wine seems to be getting to you.’
This is a wedding feast, he thinks, and a joyous occasion is hardly time to discuss topics like plague – especially that plague. Pericles didn’t see it coming, and the plague killed him, along with thousands of Athenians. The planned attack on Thrace was cancelled because afterwards Athens hardly had an army left. It was all they could do to keep the navy going, and they needed that navy to survive.
Until the plague, it was one of the healthiest of years for Athens. Then the disease hit the Piraeus. Brought from Egypt, it took the strong and the weak alike, young and old. It didn’t matter whether you went to a doctor, or prayed at a temple, or did nothing. You died, or you survived – and survivors believed that no disease could kill them after that.
Aside from the threat to life, the plague threw the city into total anarchy. Athenians committed crimes – robberies, rape and murder – believing they wouldn’t live long enough to be punished for them. And nobody bothered to maintain order, as there seemed little point. There was a greater judgement on the way; they might as well enjoy what time they had left.
Phormio estimates the youth would have been about fourteen then. A pretty boy, making him a likely victim for any sexual predators he met on the street. Although he wouldn’t have wanted to leave the house anyway – there would have been corpses lying unburied in the gutters, and dogs tearing at them until the plague killed the dogs as well. Funeral pyres were started right there in the street using smashed-up furniture and household timber. And while funeral rites were going on, others would add more bodies to the fire.
Phormio was not alone in noting that the plague never hurt Sparta. The Spartans live spread out in villages and that warlike nation never had the need to pack everyone from all those villages into one city in the middle of summer. Perhaps it would have been better to do with the villagers as the Athenians had done with their livestock and evacuate everyone to the nearby island of Euboea.
Phormio turns his thoughts from past troubles to the present problem. ‘Pericles …’ he starts to say, but the youth shouts him down.
‘Pericles! He was an awful strategist, an awful general, and a rotten person! He … Let go of me!’
The Plague
The plague that hit Athens in the summer of 430 BC was a terrible event which killed an estimated third of the population sheltering behind the city walls. A mass grave from the period suggests that the plague was two concurrent epidemics, one of which was a mutant form of typhoid fever. We have an eyewitness account of the plague in Athens, for Thucydides was there, became ill, but recovered. The description of the plague here is lifted mostly verbatim from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War 2.47.1
Phormio has taken the young man by one arm. He exchanges looks with another burly guest who has taken the other arm. The man was shouting, and they had made an earlier agreement that if he upset the other guests, it would be time to pitch him on to the cobblestones outside.
The young man struggles violently as he is lifted, and kicks at Phormio’s shins. Since he is barefoot, this achieves nothing apart from hurting his toes. The other party-goers carefully pay no attention as the writhing body makes its way to the entrance. The disturbance has achieved one thing, though. Everyone has been sufficiently distracted from socializing, drinking or enjoying the banqueting dishes for a rough consensus to form that it’s time to get the wedding procession started. A laughing, jostling throng starts flowing out of the hall into the courtyard.
Leaving the drunken young man to pull himself together, Phormio joins the group around the bride – who, he notes, seems more than a bit apprehensive about the rest of her wedding night. Nevertheless, she must be relieved that it’s finally going to happen. Seeing Phormio return, the bride asks, ‘Was the plague as bad as that man was saying? He seemed really upset.’
‘We shouldn’t discuss such things at your wedding. But, yes, I understand it was horrible. Pericles’ son feels somehow responsible. That’s why he acts the way he does. No one else blames him, but for some reason he blames himself. This isn’t the first social event where he’s drunk too much and been thrown out.’
The illegitimate son of Pericles and Aspasia was originally banned from Athenian citizenship as a result of a law his own father had carried. In an ambiguous sentence, Plutarch also suggests that the elder Pericles might have molested his son’s wife. In any case, his ‘harlot-birth’ (as Eupolis the poet put it, according to Plutarch’s Life of Pericles 24) seems to have embittered the son. He was later legitimized by the Athenian Assembly. When war with Sparta resumed, he was among the commanders who won an epic naval victory against the Peloponnesians. The Athenians executed him anyway, because after the battle a storm was brewing and Pericles the younger ordered the triremes to safety without stopping to pick up survivors in the water.
