Athenian Rowdies
What do Judge Judy and ancient Athens have in common? Drunkards and lawyers.
The Athens of 350 BC was in many ways like our own society: bursting at the seams with idiots, drunkards and rabble ready to sue over anything. Like nearly every nation in the modern world, Athens had courts to try criminals and sue individuals for damages, both usually filled to capacity. In her magnificent work, The Murder of Herodes, Kathleen Freeman digs up old court transcripts and translates them for our enjoyment. Before we delve into our favorite testimonial, we will indulge ourselves with a little etymology. It turns out the word testimonial is derived from the same Greek root as testicle. Why? Only men were allowed to sue and testify in court, and so to prove their manhood and by extension their honor, they swore their testimony by grabbing their, well, manhood. More convenient than casting about for a Bible! It is interesting that this gesture is now interpreted as agressive or dismissive, when it was once the sacred symbol of one of our most ancient and important legal rights. But we digress.
Wedgies All Around
Our favorite court case from Ms. Freeman's book, reading very much like an episode of Jerry Springer accidently dropped into the courtroom of Judge Wapner, details the shenanigans between one drunk and lout named Conon and a young, earnest soldier named Ariston. It seems the latter had been ordered to perform garrison duty by Athens in a small town outside of Attica. He happily headed off to his duty, but soon found himself in a tent neighboring Conon's sons. These brutes conducted themselves in a most unseemly manner, and, after a mild altercation, beat him to a pulp in the marketplace some months later. At the damages suit that subsequently ensued, Ariston detailed their behaviors:
They used to begin drinking immediately after lunch, and continue all day long, he claimed, even when on garrison duty. They played obnoxious tricks on the servants and their masters, and were generally a thorn in the side of the garrison community.
They used to pretend that the servants annoyed them with the smoke of their cooking, or that they were impertinent -- any kind of excuse; and for this they used to thrash them and empty the chamber-pots over them and urinate at them. There was no sort of disgusting outrage they left undone.
No One Likes a Tattletale
The gentle readers who were members of fraternities in their ill-spent youth will perhaps finally understand where their 'Greek' organizations acquired the proud tradition of excretory hi-jinks. Anyway, trying to break up the disturbance, Ariston and his goody-two-shoes buddies reported these offenses to the commanding officer of the garrison, who in turn had a few choice words with the rowdies. Conon's sons didn't take kindly to Ariston ratting on them, and decided to thump him. Ariston noted in court:
Yet far from leaving off or being ashamed [at being rebuked by the commanding officer], on that very same evening as soon as it was dark they burst in upon us, beginning with abuse and ending by aiming blows at me. They made such a din and uproar around our tent that the Colonel, the lieutenants and some of the men came along; and they prevented any more serious consequences to us at the hands of the defendants in their drunken state.
After time had cooled tempers, Ariston said to himself 'no real harm done'. He had not "the slightest intention of bringing a suit against them, or even mentioning what had happened. [His] sole idea was to take care in the future, and to beware of having any dealings with men of this kind."
However, not long afterwards Ariston was walking at the marketplace in downtown Athens, when
...who should come past us opposite the Monument but the defendant's [Conon's] son Ctesias, in a state of intoxication! Seeing us, he gave a yell, and then muttered something to himself indistinctly, as a drunken man does... it seems that a drinking-party was being held [at Honeywood, a suburb of Athens, from which Ctesias had recently come] at the house of Pampilus the dyer and cleaner.
Thumping Their Chess
How many an intrepid high school chess club president has walked the corridors of the local mall in fear of just this sort of incident! Ctesias fetched his father Conon, a friend Theogenes, and a motley band of others, to do Ariston mischief:
We happened to have turned back, and were again walking in about the same place, near the Monument, when we encountered them. As we came close, one of them, I don't know which, fell upon my friend Phanostratus and held him, while Conon and his son and Theogenes attacked me. First they tore off my clothes, then they tripped me up, threw me into the mud, jumped on me and kicked me with such violence that my lip was cut through and my eyes were closed up. In this state they left me, unable to get up or utter a word. As I lay on the ground, I heard them use dreadful language, some of it so shocking that I could not bring myself to repeat it before you... After this, the bystanders carried me off, naked as I was... and showed me to the doctors. Later, the doctor said that the swellings on my face and the cuts and bruises gave no great cause for alarm... [but] I was unable to take any food; and as the doctor said, if a sudden discharge of blood had not relieved me at the most painful and critical moment, I should have died of suppuration.
Ariston, feeling like the whole world has it in for him concludes that
If bystanders, instead of preventing men who are trying to commit injuries through drunkenness or bad temper or any other cause, themselves egg on the offenders, there is no hope or salvation for the man who encounters ruffians, but they can carry on with their violence until they grow tired. This is what happened to me.
Certainly true. Posterity loses, however, because Conon's defense is unrecorded. Also unrecorded is the verdict of the case: while we suspect Conon lost, it would be a tidy little indictment of Athenian society if he did not. Conon had been in a well-known group of thugs growing up, one of whom the state had already executed. He was also known to have stolen offerings made to the dead and the gods. We bet he got a good flogging.
Greece's Greatest Accomplishment
The Greeks loved to analyze things -- they invented geometry for goodness' sake. It should therefore come as no surprise that court records contain a whole speech dedicated to defining offensiveness. We feel it is one of the proudest moments of Greek civilization. We leave you with this masterful oration, quoted from the fantastic book, Greek People:
Offensiveness can be defined with no difficulty; it is amusing yourself in an obtrusive, objectionable way. The offensive man is the kind who exposes himself when he passes respectable married women on the street. At the theater he goes on clapping after everyone else has stopped and hisses the actors who are public favorites; should there be general silence for a moment, he cocks his head and lets out a belch to make the audience turn round in their seats... he lounges around outside the barber shop explaining in full detail his intention to get drunk... [and] at a formal dinner he goes to spit across the table and hits the waiter.
Tee hee hee. We're off to the barber.
Further Reading
Greece was cool. Check out Alexander the Great's wacky habits, and some of the bizarre intrigue that surrounded his father. Public beatings are more common throughout history records than you might think... Read our four part series on Voltaire's run-ins with bullies:
Voltaire's Beatings: Part I
Voltaire gets the snot beat out of him. Again.
Voltaire, the greatest man of letters France produced in the eighteenth century, always found himself at odds with the local aristocracy. Voltaire was obviously a man of great talent, yet was surrounded by dolts who commanded much more power and respect than he. He spent his life toadying to the rich and powerful, and they wholeheartedly rejected him. Fortunately, he was able to derive some satisfaction by verbally thrashing his opponents. Yes, thrashing. Lord Macauley opined that "of all the intellectual weapons that have ever been wielded by man, the most terrible was the mockery of Voltaire. Bigots and tyrants who had never been moved by the wailings and cursings of millions, turned pale at his name." Unable to respond, his targets instead initiated a seemingly never-ending series of public beatings. Luckily,Voltaire's got some company. Here's what our friend A. Owen Aldridge has to say about it in his Voltaire and the Century of Light:
A whole book has been written on the subject of the role of beatings in literary history. The authors of these crimes were rarely condemned by public opinion, and it was the innocent victims who suffered ridicule -- their discomfiture being considered comical, like the plight of cuckolded husbands. The bishop of Blois... who had many times received Voltaire, coldly remarked, 'We would indeed be in a bad way if poets did not have shoulders.'
By February 1726, at the age of 32, Voltaire had already been to the Bastille for 11 months, exiled from Paris three times, and made himself rather famous by writing plays and whatnot. He wrote Candide, his most famous work, around 1759. Everyone knows someone like this -- they spent all their time in lunch detention in high school. He'd also changed his name from Arouet to Voltaire, prompting the French noble chevalier de Rohan to ask him, "Monsieur de Voltaire, Monsieur Arouet, exactly what is your name?" Aldridge describes the scene as outlined by Voltaire's friend Nicolas-Claude Thieriot: "I myself do not bear a great name," he said, "but I know how to honor the one I carry." Sort of a 'I know you are, but what am I?' response, eh? The remark was to have some more dire consequences, for a few days later, whilst dining at his good friend the Duc de Sully's, Voltaire was called to the front door:
As Voltaire stepped out into the street and made his way to a carriage that was stationed there, he was seized by two hoodlums and beaten by a cudgel while Rohan, who had hired the thugs for the purpose, sat in his coach and watched. According to one account, he commanded, 'Don't hit him on the head, something good may come out of it.'
Voltaire managed to escape and ran back into his host's dining room. He begged Sully to follow him back to the authorities to lend some credence to the accusations he was planning to make. After all, he would be accusing a noble of assault, and trying to arrest nobility in those days was like trying to convict O.J. Simpson: you'd need all the evidence you could get, and even then you needed a whole lot of luck. As Aldridge puts it,
Sully, who had to choose between embroiling himself with one of the most influential families in the realm and affording satisfaction to the tenuous honor of a mere poet, placed discretion above the laws of hospitality and refused to take any steps on Voltaire's behalf. At this point Voltaire was faced with the bitter truth that he as a poet had merely been tolerated rather than accepted by most of his titled acquaintances. Like his friends at the theater, he was regarded as a paid entertainer.
A harsh life these poets lead! William Butler Yeats chased the same woman (Maud Gonne) for thirty years, and when he couldn't get her, proposed to her daughter instead. She turned him down, too, and he remained a virgin until he was thirty! (After which he commented that he regretted every single day he'd saved himself.) Yipes! Next time: Voltaire ends up in the Bastille... again.
Voltaire's Beatings: Part II
Voltaire gets the snot beat out of him. Again.
In 1715, early in Voltaire's life, King Louis XIV of France died. Louis XV, his son, was just a young pup, so the duc d'Orleans took over as regent. The transformation here, for those paying attention, went from imposed morality (Louis XIV presided over this conflict between the Jansenists and Gallicists. Obnoxious goodie-two-shoes, both of 'em) to a boozin' and sexual free-for-all. As our buddy Theodore Besterman himself laments, "Happy days, when love was sometimes taken lightly, and a poet could mention one mistress to another!" We won't take this point to examine Besterman's marital relations in detail, but instead use it to mention that the duc d'Orleans was almost certainly sleeping with Marie Louise, the duchesse de Berry, his own daughter. Voltaire knew about this and just couldn't help himself, so he wrote a couple of poems about it. Here's one he addressed to the regent's daughter and denied he did after publication:
At last your mind is cured
of the fears of the vulgar
lovely duchesse de Berry,
complete the mystery.
Mother of the Moabites,
a new Lot serves as your husband;
may you soon give birth
to a race of Ammonites.
Um, okay. Voltaire claimed he couldn't have written this one because "A rhymer educated by the Jesuits... knows only the Sodomites," which is probably an argument that would hold water today (snicker). Anyways, Voltaire got the boot from Paris for this one. He returned a few months later, and wrote another poem that said things like "A boy reigning, / a man notorious for poisoning and incest ruling, etc. ... France is about to perish," again denying authorship. Unfortunately, since the regent had everybody spying on everybody else, Voltaire got caught bragging about writing it in some bar. He'd drunkenly told the spy that the duchesse du Berry had just been spirited away from Paris pregnant (yes, that's correct, carrying a child conceived by her own father), and was irritated because the regent had him exiled: "Do you know what that bugger has done to me? He exiled me because I revealed to the public that his Messalina of a daughter was a whore!" Voltaire got ratted on by the spy, one gent named Beauregard. [Don't worry, we'll see more of the rat next week.]
Some months later, strolling about the Palais Royal, Voltaire bumped into the regent and got thrown in the Bastille. To be helpful during his arrest, he told the police that he had hidden more incriminating poems in his latrine. After two full days of searching and finding nothing but, "water and floating objects," they gave up. The officers in question decided he'd done this "out of a an acrid disposition and in order to furnish them useless activity." (from Prod'homme's Voltaire raconte par ceux qui 'lont vu) We can imagine a very self-satisfied Voltaire giggling away in the Bastille. His father, a respected lawyer, cried out, "I had indeed foreseen that his idleness would bring on some disgrace. Why did he not take up a profession?" Sounds familiar, at least to us. Voltaire spent 13 months in prison, but as a postscript, seemed pretty jolly there. At one point he asked the governor for "two volumes of Homer, Latin-Greek; two linen handkerchiefs; a little bonnet; two cravats; a night-cap; a little bottle of essence of cloves." Makes the Bastille sound like a spa weekend. Don't worry, he gets to go back a few more times. What? Upset because Voltaire didn't actually get beaten this week? Don't worry -- he gets publicly pummeled by the very spy who turned him in next time.
Voltaire's Beatings: Part III
Voltaire gets the snot beat out of him. Again.
To recap from last time: In 1717 our hero wrote some particularly scandalous poetry and distributed it anonymously. Perhaps confused by the concept of anonymity, he proceeded to brag about it in public. Unfortunately for him, a spy by the name of Beauregard happened to be present and was instrumental in sending him packing off to an eleven-month stay in the Bastille. In prison Voltaire wrote a fairly decent play that subsequently brought him fame and fortune at the tender age of 24, and upon his release he flitted about Parisian society, fancying himself an aristocrat. Alas, he was sadly deluded.
Five years later, in 1722, Voltaire found himself dining at Claude LeBlanc's, the French Minister of War. (In those days they didn't have the gall to call the position 'Minister of Defense' -- if nothing else, you have to respect their honesty.) At the table he found the very same Beauregard who had sent him to the Bastille a half decade earlier. Needless to say, he was distressed to have him as a table-mate. Ever the busybody, he felt obliged to comment during a lull in the conversation. "I knew that spies were being paid," said Voltaire, "but I did not know until now that their reward was to dine at the Minister's table." Pretty cheeky. Beauregard, tattle-tale that he was, went to LeBlanc and told him what happened, suggesting that it was probably time to rough Voltaire up a little. "Go ahead," said LeBlanc, "but do it discreetly."
Unfortunately, the French are known rather more for their indiscretion. Several days after the infamous dinner party, Beauregard intercepted Voltaire's coach on the bridge of the Sevres, pulled him out, and proceeded to beat him to a pulp in broad daylight. Voltaire walked off with a couple of shiners and some pretty serious lumps and bruises. One imagines the difficulties involved in explaining away these marks in days when public beatings of literary figures were sanctioned and encouraged. Our indefatigable protagonist refused to simply cower in private or mumble something about falling down the stairs, but rather strutted his injuries in front of the regent, the duc d'Orleans, complaining bitterly about the treatment he had received. The more alert reader may recall that the regent was the same man whom Voltaire had exposed for sleeping with his own daughter some seven years before. That's not the sort of publicity you live down very easily, and it seems the regent had certainly not forgotten. Upon hearing Voltaire's bitter whining, the regent retorted, "Monsieur Arouet [Voltaire], you are a poet and you have been beaten -- this is the order of things, and I have nothing more to say." We here at the History House heartily agree. Voltaire eventually got a little revenge -- Beauregard was subsequently jailed and paid a him a hefty indemnity.
1722 was a bumper crop year: Voltaire had the good fortune of contracting smallpox as well. As A. Owen Aldridge outlines in his Voltaire and the Century of Light, "Voltaire was seized with the smallpox on the fourth of November, was out of danger on the fifteenth, and began writing verses again on the sixteenth." Before the recovery, however, things looked grim and Voltaire even received last rites. What saved the little guy? Aldridge credits an "unorthodox treatment", but remains coy as to its exact nature. Fortunately, our good friend Besterman (in Voltaire) informs us that Voltaire's doctor had him drink two hundred pints of lemonade (!!). Seemed to fix him right up. Aldridge notes that no sooner had Voltaire recovered from smallpox than he fell fate to a horrible mishap. On December first, he finally felt strong enough to leave his house for the first time in weeks, but in an interesting twist on "out of the frying pan into the fire", Aldridge tells us "he had scarcely gone a hundred yards from the chateau when a part of the flooring of his room burst into flames, and almost the entire wing, including priceless furniture, was destroyed."
Voltaire eventually learned his lesson. He decided to stop picking fights, and fifteen years later was trying to get ahead like the rest of us: through sheer unembarrassed sycophantic brown nosing. He fell in cahoots with the crown prince of Prussia, Frederick II, in 1736. They wrote each other letters that elevated ass kissing to an art form. In his biography, Frederick the Great, Robert B. Asprey tells us that Voltaire variously called Fred "a Caesar, an Augustus, a Marcus Aurelius, a Trajan, an Anthony, a Titus, a Julian, a Virgil, a Pliny, a Horace, a Mecene, a Solomon, a Prometheus, an Apollo, a Patroclus, a Socrates, an Alcibiades, an Alexander, a Henry IV, and a Francis I." This is not a list to sneeze at.... Voltaire also wrote embarrassing things like, "I prostrate myself before your scepter, your pen, your sword, your imagination, your justness of understanding, and your universality." Fairly embarrassing stuff from the pillar of the French Enlightenment. We said Voltaire did learn his lesson: you may be pleased to discover next time it's actually his turn to open up a can of whup-ass!