In distant Pamphylia, one night of the year 389 BC. Exasperated by the looting and the abuses of the Athenian soldiers, some men from the city of Aspendos break into the tent of their general to assassinate him. By a strange twist of fate, it is on the site of one of Athens’ most famous victories of the fifth century against the Persian king, near the Eurymedon river, that resurgent Athenian imperialism suffers a cruel humiliation. Did the conspirators of Aspendos know as they awoke that the old general they had just assassinated was none other than the great Thrasybulus, the liberator of 403? One might question this. ‘This, then, was the end of Thrasybulus, who was esteemed a most excellent man,’Footnote ¹ writes Xenophon, seeming to regret the inglorious death of one of the greatest heroes of Athenian history.

There were, however, few Athenians who mourned the death of the general in 389. Diodorus of Sicily indicates only that ‘when the Athenians learned of the death of their general Thrasybulus, they sent out Agyrrhius as general.’Footnote ² Fifteen years after the democratic regime was restored, the glorious memory of the liberator had given place to defiance, even rejection, on behalf of the people. The man who had restored democratic institutions in 403 was henceforth suspected of conspiring to their overthrow, whereas many of his friends, described as obscure figures in the pay of a general who left to seek glory and fortune off Ionia, were dragged in front of the courts. Some did not hesitate to compare Thrasybulus to Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, as if he too had only ever aspired to exercise personal power.Footnote ³ On the occasion of a lawsuit brought against one of his relatives, Ergocles, an orator even went so far as to affirm that his brutal death in Aspendos was providential, because it saved his memory from the dishonor to which it was promised: ‘Thrasybulus did well in ending his life as he did. It was not right for him to live after plotting such deeds, nor to be executed by you (since he was thought to have done you some good in the past), but to be removed from the city in this manner.’Footnote ⁴ Thrasybulus had then become an adversary of the democratic city.

An Illustrious Unknown

When Hellenistic and Roman authors came to write the history of classical Athens, it is, however, the sole memory of the victory of 403 with which they associate the name of Thrasybulus, claiming he personally overthrew the Thirty’s tyranny, thereby putting him on an equal footing with the greatest characters of classical Athens, such Miltiades, victor of the Battle of Marathon, or Pericles, the icon of the triumphant democracy of the fifth century.Footnote ⁵ From the beginning of the third century, the ‘victory of Thrasybulus (hē Thrasyboulou nikē)’ is the expression used to name and date the restoration of democratic institutions following the tyranny of the Thirty.Footnote ⁶ Since he ‘was not only the first to make war upon them, but in the beginning he was the only one,’Footnote ⁷ as Cornelius Nepos wrote much later, Thrasybulus had become the symbol of all the combatants who had taken part in the restoration of the democracy. This late entry into the glorious crypt shared by the heroes of Athenian history nevertheless conceals the character’s lack of biographical depth in the works of ancient authors, as if the man Thrasybulus, son of Lykos and of the deme of Steiria, frozen in the marble of his own statue, was destined to remain no more than a name, confined forever to the memory of the events of 403.Footnote ⁸

What do we know about Thrasybulus? Very little, for the simple reason that no biographical tradition, whether favorable or hostile to him, has amassed and been transmitted through the centuries. It is with great difficulty that the historian gathers, with the help of some remarks scattered among Athenian writers, the elements that might lend him either allure or personality.Footnote ⁹ Born in the middle of the fifth century, undoubtedly toward 450, the man belongs to the Athenian social elite, and while it appears that his wealth was considerable, since he was designated trierarch twice in less than five years (in 411 and 406), it is quite difficult to ascertain its origin. It should be noted, however, that in the middle of the fourth century his son, also Thrasybulus, was condemned to a fine of ten talents, a considerable sum that implies an exceptional fortune. In addition, his daughter went on to marry the grandson of the great Nicias, confirming with this brilliant matrimonial alliance that the family belonged to the social elite of the civic community.Footnote ¹⁰ Through scattered allusions present in the works of Xenophon, Aristophanes and Lysias, a few character traits – a psychology in short – take shape. Pride, first of all, the natural preserve of a man who was aware he enjoyed a certain superiorityFootnote ¹¹; in the speech In Defense of Mantitheus, Lysias thus mocks ‘the pretentious man from Steiria who had been reproaching everybody with cowardice’Footnote ¹² as if, from the heights of his own legendary status, Thrasybulus despised his fellow citizens. Next, recognized oratorical talents, since Thrasybulus regularly spoke at the Assembly with the help of ‘the most powerful voice of Athens (megalophōnotatos Athenaiōn).’Footnote ¹³ And finally, an undeniable physical courage,Footnote ¹⁴ which went hand in hand with a certain intellectual coarseness. His adversaries never missed the opportunity to make puns about his name. Thrasos, that is to say courage, boldness or temerity, on the one hand, and Boulē, meaning council or will, on the other: It didn’t take much to turn the combined terms, which might have designated a man of courageous council, into a mockery of his rash and unrefined decisions.Footnote ¹⁵

Beyond these few impressionistic touches, the man remains mysterious. This fact is undeniably surprising when you consider his intense participation in political life during one of the most crucial twenty-year period in Athenian history (411–390). When he entered the city in 403 victorious, he already had a reputation among the Athenians for valorous behavior during a particularly dramatic moment of the Peloponnesian War, in the summer 411, on the island of Samos.

Samos, 411: A Political Experiment

The Samos episode opens a decisive sequence of Athenian history that will only close in 403. Let us recall what we know about it. The adversaries of the democratic regime had made the most of the fact that a lot of poor citizens were away with the Athenian fleet stationed in Ionia to overthrow the democratic institutions. The oligarchs indeed intended to replace the Council of 500 citizens (drawn by lot without distinction of fortune) with a restricted Council of 400 members and to reserve citizenship to the 5,000 richest Athenians. A trierarch – and not a stratēgos – Thrasybulus was then part of the Athenian navy present in Samos, the operational base for all Athenian incursions throughout the eastern Aegean. According to the account proposed by Thucydides, it was he and Thrasyllus who, with the announcement that the Four Hundred had seized power in Athens, convinced the Athenian rowers of Samos to take up arms and overthrow the oligarchic regime.Footnote ¹⁶ The two trierarchs were apparently even the originators of the oath that each of the soldiers present that day had to swear: to ‘maintain a democracy (dēmokratēsesthai) and live in harmony (homonoēsein), to carry out energetically and prevail against the Peloponnesians and, vis-a-vis the Four Hundred, to treat them as enemies without sending them heralds.’Footnote ¹⁷ By an act of dissidence against the established powers that Thucydides presents as a genuine revolution (metabolē),Footnote ¹⁸ the rowers of Samos then came to proclaim themselves the sole representatives of Athens and, forming an assembly (ekklēsia), deposed the stratēgoiFootnote ¹⁹ and elected in their stead Thrasybulus and Thrasyllus.

The scene, as penned by Thucydides, is presented as a heroic Athenian democratic gesture, by which a group of exiles came to refound the political community, and it is not without reason that some have implicitly compared it to the Gaullian experience of Free France.Footnote ²⁰ A careful reading of Thucydides’ account reveals a singularly complex situation. Two political scenes, Athenian and Samian, collide in the initial episode: The assembly of the Athenian demos also aims to prevent the establishment of an oligarchic regime in Samos. Moreover, the oath is sworn not only by the soldiers of Athens, among whom are citizens as well as metics and slaves,Footnote ²¹ but also by some of the Samians. In sum, the Athenian people who refounded the democratic regime in Samos in 411 were made up of free and unfree men, Athenians and Samians. Far from Athens, on the triremes that Plutarch compared to choruses,Footnote ²² a political community with new boundaries had been invented. Transcending the restricted framework of citizenry, this even claimed to be the guarantor of the democratic regime.

Fig. 2.1 Map of the Aegean world.

However, this political experiment was not simply a bright and fleeting moment of Athenian history. It largely accounts for the specificity of Thrasybulan politics over the course of 404–403. It is indeed striking to observe the sustainability of this community that, from 411 to 407, accompanied Thrasybulus while continuing to maintain an ongoing relationship with the Athenian institutions once democracy was restored in 410. It is within this diverse group that Thrasybulus, deprived of his status as stratēgos since 410 but enjoying unquestionable authority over his men,Footnote ²³ carried out the siege of Eresos and took part in the appropriation of Cyzicus, and these same men were still at his side when the fleet reached Thrace in 409 and took part in the captures of Thasos and Abdera in 407.Footnote ²⁴ Everything suggests that this political experience, lived through exile, greatly contributed to widening the distance that separated Thrasybulus from the other members of the Athenian elite – and when the litigant of Lysias’ Against Ergocles denounces Thrasybulus in 390 as a man whose interests are now ‘separate from those of the town,’Footnote ²⁵ he obviously points out a constant in his life since the Samian episode. The experience of exile unites Critias and Thrasybulus, beyond their political antagonism, and this probably also explains their dissonant behavior compared to the ordinary practices of the elite and the singularity of their positioning in the Athenian political field.

It is tempting to interpret the action of the trierarch of 411 in the light of that of the liberator of 403. Thrasybulus initially appears to be a man of his oath, refounding on two occasions the democratic regime by means of a successful speech: In 411, he was the originator of the oath by which everyone committed themselves to overthrowing the regime of the oligarchs, whereas in 403 he exhorted the Athenians, once the city was reconquered, not ‘to violate any one of the pledges to which [democrats and oligarchs] have sworn’ in order to live together again.Footnote ²⁶ The echoes between the two episodes attest, in any case, to the constancy of Thrasybulus in his political commitment to the service of Athenian democracy and imperialism. The rupture with the oligarchic city in 411 was a solitary act that Thrasybulus went on to reproduce in the final months of the confrontation against the Thirty. While he and his men had a firm grip over the fort of Phyle, the Thirty indeed urged him ‘to break up the group of exiles, and instead to join them, the Thirty, in the running of the city, as the elected replacement for Theramenes. He would, they added, have the authority to bring back into the country any ten exiles he chose.’Footnote ²⁷ Thrasybulus remained unmoved, answering ‘that he preferred his current exile to power with the Thirty and, further, that he would not stop fighting until every citizen was repatriated, and the people got back their ancestral constitution.’Footnote ²⁸ Attachment to the democratic regime risked exile, as if loyalty to Athens was above all to its democratic institutions. The constancy of Thrasybulus contrasts singularly with the underwhelming path taken by the majority of Athenian politicians of the last decade of the fifth century, especially Theramenes and Alcibiades – that is, one of successive volte-faces.

Fortunes and Misfortunes of a Condottiere

But if the memory of Thrasybulus since Hellenistic times was restricted to his role in liberating Athens in 403, this was due to his repeated failures on the Athenian political scene. Whether it concerned the first oligarchic revolution of 411, that following the restoration of the democracy in 403 or that during the Corinthian War, which started in 395, Thrasybulus had no idea how to convert his military glory into political victory, meaning that his destiny followed the trajectory of all great men quick to save the fatherland in dark times but unsuited to the prosaicness of peace. The same misadventure repeats itself throughout the life of our hero, one in which he gets eclipsed by politicians he himself helped bring to the forefront of political life: Alcibiades, first of all, in whose service he placed himself until the defeat of Notion (407). Indeed, Cornelius Nepos comments that ‘in the Peloponnesian war he often won victories without the aid of Alcibiades, the latter never without his help; but Alcibiades by some innate gift gained the credit for everything.’Footnote ²⁹ Next, Theramenes, who was a trierarch like Thrasybulus at the time of the Battle of Arginusai (406) but who upheld the charge against the stratēgoi alone and therefore amassed all the profit from this dark political maneuver.Footnote ³⁰ Finally, Archinus, who, in the aftermath of the restoration of democracy in 403, managed to marginalize the victorious general by reconnecting with the Three Thousand.

It would be naive, however, to compare Thrasybulus to a man like Cato, who offers a model for republican virtue fallen victim to the machinations that make up the ordinary course of political life. Because, if the commitment of Thrasybulus to the democratic regime is incontestable, another, less flattering representation is no less appropriate: that of a condottiere, more at ease on the battlefield than in the Assembly and resistant to the necessarily egalitarian order of democratic life. This is also the reason for the city’s disenchantment at the end of the Corinthian War. Sent out by the Athenians at the head of forty triremes, Thrasybulus indeed put into place a highly personal form of diplomacy and military policy: Not only did he free himself from the control of the Assembly and the Council by forging ties of philia with certain cities – and even with the Thracian king Seuthes, whose daughter he perhaps thought of marryingFootnote ³¹ – but he also imposed heavy taxes on some allies. Many Athenians disapproved of the violence of the general who, during the expedition, did not hesitate to overthrow the political regime of cities such as Byzantium, where he established institutions of a democratic type,Footnote ³² or, still worse, to allow his men to plunder his allies’ communities.Footnote ³³ Undoubtedly some of these measures were inevitable given that the city was reluctant to finance its own military expeditions, tacitly leaving it up to its stratēgoi to fund them by all and any means that they judged appropriate.Footnote ³⁴ Nevertheless, some of the Athenians saw in the general’s behavior the specter of tyranny, as if Thrasybulus had privatized imperial policy and the benefits that the Athenian demos could draw from it: This is why he was recalled to Athens to justify his conduct as stratēgos, his death saving him in extremis from facing this test.Footnote ³⁵ One can also imagine how those close to Thrasybulus must have benefited from this policy of plunder and brutal exploitation. Ergocles, who was denounced as the courtier of the ‘tyrant’ Thrasybulus by an orator of the beginning of the century, is a good example of this.Footnote ³⁶

In sum, Thrasybulus’ political career is located at the crossroads of two conceptions of politics in Athens, and it is perhaps an anachronistic standpoint which gives the best perspective of this. Thrasybulus seems indeed to believe that he is the worthy successor of Pericles, adopting his austere ethics, competing with his oratorical talents and, especially, putting the alliance of democracy and the imperial project at the heart of his policies. But his political position after 403 also prefigures that of Timotheus or Chabrias, the great generals of the fourth century, admired and feared in equal measure by the Athenian people who preferred to see them defending their interests far from the city than to support them on a day-to-day basis in Athens. It is, moreover, what Pausanias seems to suggest, in his way, when he indicates that the tomb of Thrasybulus was next to those of Pericles and Chabrias, as if the political destiny of Thrasybulus symbolically bridged the gap between these two figures of Athenian political and military life.Footnote ³⁷ True, the political failure of Thrasybulus in the aftermath of 403 announces, in a fashion, the separation between the military and oratorical sources of power that characterizes political life in the fourth century. Whereas a Cimon, a Pericles or a Nicias, in the fifth century, founded their political legitimacy in part on the basis of their military victories, a Demosthenes or a Lycurgus in the fourth century would hardly venture out into the battlefield; likewise, great generals like Timotheus or Chabrias would deliberately avoid the political arena.

But if the name of Thrasybulus has come to designate the entire group of victorious combatants from 403, to which chorus does it refer? Let us return to the crucial moment when our hero is preparing for the reconquest of Athens. The ancient sources agree that the victory of Thrasybulus’ army revolves around three key moments: the capture of the fort of Phyle during the winter of 404, the military victory against the Thirty in Piraeus at the end of spring 403 and the entrance of the democratic army into Athens and their ascent of the Acropolis a few months later.Footnote ³⁸ Focusing on the changing composition of the men with Thrasybulus through the way the army absorbed various fractions of the political community reveals how the democratic city gradually found its new center of gravity. But to capture each progressive coalescence of Thrasybulus’ chorus before it eventually evolved into a reunified civic community in 403 also implies questioning the very existence of a Thrasybulan policy and, consequently, how it may have evolved as events unfolded. This is because the same applies to Thrasybulus’ army as to those of Garibaldi or Mao Zedong: The group of men who took the fortress of Phyle during the winter of 404 was quite different from those who wound their way to the top of the Acropolis a few months later. While the group mutated, just as the chorus continued to grow, contradictions could not fail to appear, and the Thrasybulan project likewise evolved.

The Hundred Heroes of Phyle

It is undoubtedly when his exile and the confiscation of his property were announced at the end of the year 404 that Thrasybulus left Athens to take refuge with Thebes.Footnote ³⁹ ‘And further, when I saw that many in the city were becoming hostile to this domination and that many were becoming exiles, it did not seem to me best to banish either Thrasybulus or Anytus or Alcibiades; for I knew that by such measures the opposition would be made strong, if once the crowd should acquire capable leaders and if those who wished to be leaders should find a multitude of supporters,’Footnote ⁴⁰ declared Theramenes at the time of his own trial. With seventy men by his side,Footnote ⁴¹ some of whom had perhaps been with him since the Samos episode, Thrasybulus was welcomed to Thebes while the city was under the influence of Ismenias, who had undertaken to disengage it from its traditional alliance with Sparta. Thrasybulus would never forget the protection that Thebes granted to him, erecting in the Herakleion of the Boeotian city two gigantic statues of Athena and Heracles, works of the Athenian sculptor Alcamenes.Footnote ⁴² Placed side by side, the two divinities recalled the precarious alliance between the two cities and the crucial support that Thebes, defying its own history, had given to the restoration of the Athenian democracy. The dedication that may have accompanied this monumental offering remains unknown, but one might suppose that, with this gesture, the victorious general also wished to celebrate the memory of the first soldiers, ‘those of Thebes,’ whose combat, initially led while they were few and far between, was not to be confused with that of the larger army that later went on to strike the blow that proved fatal to the Thirty. The monument was therefore the depositary of the Thrasybulan memory of the event, irreducible to civic memory. This Boeotian connection persisted over time, since, in 395, Thrasybulus would be sent as ambassador to the Athenians to forge an alliance with Thebes against the Spartans.Footnote ⁴³

From Thebes, Thrasybulus and his men entered into the north of Attica and managed to seize the fortress of Phyle, which constituted one of the outposts ensuring the military defense of the Athenian territory. The capture of Phyle and the resistance that followed constitute the founding acts of the Thrasybulan legend, of which Xenophon and, after him, Diodorus wrote a detailed account. Once it was announced that the fortress had been captured, the Thirty immediately sent out a group of young combatants, but a miraculous event spared the besieged: Snow – yes, snow! – began to fall as winter came around in Attica,Footnote ⁴⁴ an unexpected phenomenon in which Thrasybulus saw a sign from the gods,Footnote ⁴⁵ which obliged the Thirty’s army to retreat and to set up camp several kilometers to the southwest of Phyle. A few weeks later, Thrasybulus and his men attacked the oligarchs’ camp by night on the plain of Acharnai. In the weeks that separated the capture of Phyle from the ‘Acharnian surprise,’Footnote ⁴⁶ the chorus of Thrasybulus had swollen by several hundred men, since, according to Xenophon and Diodorus, there were between 700 and 1,200 men on the democratic side who took part in the night raid.Footnote ⁴⁷ The mission was a resounding success, since 120 hoplites and three of the Thirty’s horsemen were slaughtered during the assault. Thrasybulus did not fail, moreover, to erect a memorial on the site of the confrontation, raising this simple raid to the status of a founding battle, which ushered in the military reconquest of Athens.

In the account they forged of these events, once democracy was restored the Athenians clearly distinguished between the initial group of men who had heroically resisted the siege of Phyle and those who took part in the raid against the Thirty’s camp in Acharnai. Aeschines is indeed quick to point out that the day after democracy was restored, the Council, at the instigation of Archinus, carried out an investigation to establish the identity of those who had been besieged in Phyle.Footnote ⁴⁸ On the stele that recorded their names, set up in the Metrôon in the center of the Agora, they even had the following epigram engraved: ‘These men for their virtue were honored with crowns by the ancient people of Athens, because once when men with unjust ordinances (adikois thesmois) ruled the city, they were first to check them and lead the way, accepting mortal danger.’Footnote ⁴⁹ By decree, the Athenians decided, moreover, to finance a sacrifice and a number of offerings in their honor – rites, the timing and regularity of which we know nothing – as well as to crown each one of them. This admittedly minor honor brought them considerable prestige. The very existence of an investigation carried out by the Boule indicates the importance that the city attached to defining this community of early fighters precisely.Footnote ⁵⁰

The decree mentioned by Aeschines is also recorded on a long fragmentary inscription found in the Agora and published for the first time in 1933 by Benjamin Meritt.Footnote ⁵¹ It consists of a dedication made by about sixty individuals, whose names are engraved and divided into two columns according to the Athenian tribes to which they belonged, and it was probably placed under the epigram quoted by Aeschines. Only the names of citizens seem to have been engraved, as if metics and slaves had been excluded from the commemorative group.Footnote ⁵² Their presence at the battle is, however, confirmed by Aeschines: When he mentions the ‘first men’ who contributed to saving democracy, he makes no distinction between the citizens and noncitizens among them. An honorific community had therefore sprung up around the memory of Phyle, including both free men and noncitizens, even if only the former commemorated the privilege that had been granted to them in 401. It must therefore be admitted that the men honored by Archinus’ decree are not exactly those who erected the monument from which the fragments of our inscription derive, since noncitizens, whether they were free or not, have been excluded. In short, statutory hierarchies do not unfold in a homogeneous and continuous fashion in the social arena.

How can we identify the one hundred heroes of Phyle? It seems like a difficult task since the stele delivers the complete name of only two individuals. The first can be identified as a certain Theocles, son of Leucios, of the deme of Sounion (l. 33). While he is unknown, his son, who was an important mineowner in Laurion,Footnote ⁵³ went on to be known in the mid-fourth century for offering no less than an agora to his own deme,Footnote ⁵⁴ attesting to the wealth of the family. To him, we can probably add two men in Athens destined to greatness: Firstly, Archinus of Koile, whose name can be made out on the stele, and of whom Demosthenes affirms that he ‘captured Phyle,’ by adding that, ‘next to the gods, he was the person most responsible for the return of the democracy.’Footnote ⁵⁵ The presence of Archinus in Phyle is moreover confirmed by an author of the third century BC, Cratippus, who classifies him among the seventy ‘of Phyle’ who rose against the oligarchy.Footnote ⁵⁶ Second, Anytus, known for having taken part in the accusation against Socrates in 399, was also present in Phyle.Footnote ⁵⁷ A well-to-do man, he was the son of Anthemion, who commemorated a statue on the Acropolis on the occasion of his passage from the class of the thetes to that of the horsemen (hippeis), indicating a recently acquired fortune. Owner of a tannery in the city – just like Cleophon and Hyperbolus – he belonged to the category disparagingly designated by ancient authors as that of the demagogues.Footnote ⁵⁸ Elected stratēgos in 409, he allegedly abused his position. Plutarch and Aristotle even attribute to him an unflattering invention: that of having been the first to corrupt an entire Athenian jury during the trial following the rending of accounts (euthynai) of his generalship (stratēgeia).Footnote ⁵⁹ However, it would be wrong to reduce him to the stereotype of the vengeful demagogue. In 403, Anytus opted for a policy of appeasement: He refused to bring to trial those who had seized his property during the civil war.Footnote ⁶⁰ The Athenian Constitution is not mistaken when it presents him as a man attached to the patrios politeia, close to the moderate oligarch Theramenes in 404.Footnote ⁶¹

To these three names, it is undoubtedly necessary to add that of Aisimus. If nothing explicitly indicates that he was present at Phyle, it is he who led the procession to the Acropolis when it entered Athens in September or October 403, and such an eminent role would not have been entrusted to a man who was not an early freedom fighter.Footnote ⁶² Whatever the case may be, he went on to play a political role during the first few decades of the fourth century as the ambassador of the city at the time of the King’s Peace in 386,Footnote ⁶³ and he took an active part in the reconstitution of Athenian power when he was designated ambassador to Chios in 384Footnote ⁶⁴ and to Methymna in 378/7.Footnote ⁶⁵

Apart from these four characters, it is difficult to define precisely the community of the men of Phyle. Among the orators of the fourth century, many individuals are praised for having ‘brought back’ the people ‘from Phyle’ (apo Phulēs). Among them, it is very difficult to distinguish those who were besieged in the fortress from those who fought only in Acharnai. This is the case for Thrasybulus of Collytos,Footnote ⁶⁶ for Atrometus (Aeschines’ father)Footnote ⁶⁷ and for Ergocles.Footnote ⁶⁸ An episode related by Lysias testifies, moreover, to the conflicts that arose between the men of Phyle and those whose arrival, after the siege of the fortress began, came across as opportunistic rallying. It involved a certain Agoratus, accused in 402 by the litigant of a speech by Lysias of having caused the death of his cousin, Dionysodorus, during the Thirty’s reign. The orator denounces his adversary’s successive acts of treason after having perhaps taken part in the plot that led to the murder of Phrynichus, one of the principal figures of the Four Hundred, in 411.Footnote ⁶⁹ It seems that he served the Thirty during the initial months of the oligarchy, denouncing the members of a plot formed by former generals and trierarchs, who aimed to restore democracy. Then, changing camp once again, it is said that he went to Phyle, whence some of the citizens he had just denounced had fled. Apparently, as soon as they saw him, these combatants arrested him and, just as they were about to execute him,Footnote ⁷⁰ Anytus, designated stratēgos by the army, stayed their hand. In spite of this providential protection, Agoratus had to live carefully separate from the remainder of the troops: ‘no human being spoke to him – it was as if he were polluted,’Footnote ⁷¹ affirms the litigant. Even if this biased account cannot be proven, it testifies at least to the tensions that had been unravelling the army of Thrasybulus since the first weeks of its existence.

In the course of his diatribe, the speaker returns several times to the allegedly servile origins of Agoratus, whom he describes as ‘a slave son of slaves.’Footnote ⁷² The status of Agoratus is more uncertain than the speaker suggests: Perhaps he was in fact not a slave but a freedman or a foreigner who had recently become a citizen. But no matter; the presence of Agoratus in Acharnai reminds us of a crucial fact: While the most easily identifiable men on the expedition belonged to the citizen elite, they obviously did not make up the largest part of it. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe Thrasybulus’ army had been a heterogeneous group from the start. Admittedly, the first fighters of Phyle were not predominantly noncitizens; but the troop was composed of many poor citizens, non-property-owning peasants or minor craftsmen from the town of Athens who wanted to defend the democratic regime.

The Enlarged Chorus of Piraeus

After the victory at Acharnai, Thrasybulus and his men moved toward the Piraeus, which they reached in fewer than five days.Footnote ⁷³ Their military confrontations occurred in two distinct phases. The exiles managed first of all to seize the hill of Mounychia, which overhangs the port of Piraeus. This was a highly strategic spot because it forced the Thirty’s army, even though clearly in the majority, to attack from the plain of Piraeus, rendering all missiles ineffective. At the end of a ‘long and violent’ fight,Footnote ⁷⁴ during which Critias was killed, the Thirty failed to recapture the hill. This decisive victory apparently convinced a great mass of Athenians, who had been biding their time, to join the camp of the democrats in Piraeus.Footnote ⁷⁵

After the fight, Thrasybulus’ army changed in nature for the second time by incorporating at its heart not only those who were former members of the Three Thousand but also the heterogeneous population of Piraeus itself. Many citizens had been forced by the Thirty to leave the city because they did not participate in the regime of the Three Thousand.Footnote ⁷⁶ These forced exiles were then joined by the many opportunists at whom Lysias took aim when he decried those who ‘changed sides … when they saw that those from Phyle were succeeding in their efforts,’Footnote ⁷⁷ or more precisely still, those ‘men like this, who shared in the activities of those at Piraeus but shared in the attitudes of those from the town.’Footnote ⁷⁸ With this, Lysias was targeting the mysterious Phormisius, Theramenes’ former ally, who tried to bring in a new constitution once the city had been reconquered.Footnote ⁷⁹ According to Lysias, adding these last-minute recruits to Thrasybulus’ army constituted a true turning point. It might be said that some oligarchs, by returning at little personal cost to the city, subverted the democratic dimension of Thrasybulus’ gesture, cutting short his time as a hero. A parallel, once again, comes to mind if one thinks of the installation of General de Gaulle’s ‘government’ in Algiers in June 1943. When a whole section of the administrative and economic elite, who had previously supported the Vichy regime, rallied to the new power, for many combatants this meant the end of the ‘Resistance as Revolution.’Footnote ⁸⁰ Similarly, some of Thrasybulus’ soldiers may have had the impression that the new recruits from Piraeus distorted the very heart and soul of the expedition.

To define the contours of Piraeus’ chorus, it is necessary to question the place that noncitizens – metics or slaves – occupy within it. Thrasybulus’ task was indeed pulled in two contradictory directions. The need to gather together the whole of the civic community clashed with the growing number of noncitizens among the fighters. For just as the former members of the Three Thousand rallied to their cause, the army received an enormous influx of partisans, among whom poor citizens rubbed shoulders with slaves and metics. According to Xenophon, Piraeus’ democratic soldiers were ‘numerous and of all conditions.’Footnote ⁸¹ Their contribution made all the difference: Behind the scant rows of hoplites, vastly outnumbered by the Thirty’s men, they formed the contingents armed with slingshots and javelins who routed the oligarchic army and drove them out of Mounychia.Footnote ⁸²

The participation of these noncitizens in Thrasybulus’ army is proven by a decree of the year 401/0 with which the Athenians, at the instigation of Thrasybulus himself, granted honors to the foreigners and the slaves who had taken part in battle on the democratic side. The text is fragmentary, and all attempts at restoration have been the subject of debate. Since Michael Osborne’s systematic survey of Athenian citizenship decrees, however, a consensus has gradually emerged among epigraphists of classical Athens to render the first nine lines of the inscription as followsFootnote ⁸³:

Following the decree, three lists of names were engraved according to Athenian tribe: It is estimated that the first, which listed the men returned from Phyle, included between 70 and 90 namesFootnote ⁸⁵; the second, which brought together those who had fought at the Battle of Mounychia,Footnote ⁸⁶ included around 290 individuals; while the third, approximately 580 names strong, tallied those who had been present at PiraeusFootnote ⁸⁷ and had joined the army of Thrasybulus the day after the decisive battle. These lists show just how much Thrasybulus’ army had grown since the capture of Phyle, but that is not the crux of the matter. First and foremost, they demonstrate the important role played by noncitizens, of all trades, in the combat. Study of the names suggests, moreover, that there were not only many foreigners resident in Athens but also large numbers of slaves.Footnote ⁸⁸

The decree does not resemble any other decrees granting citizenship. And for good reason: The Athenians did not decide to grant citizenship to a clearly delimited community, like the Samians or the Plataeans, who had shown their loyalty to Athens, or to a benefactor of the city, as would become common in the fourth century. They intended to reward two categories of clearly distinguished individuals, to whom specific rights and honors were granted, but who were obliged to join the system of Cleisthenic tribes in return. Thus, the foreigners who had rallied to Thrasybulus’ army in Phyle during the winter of 404/3, whether they joined it before the siege or on the way from Phyle to Piraeus, were granted citizenship and had to integrate into one of the ten Cleisthenic tribes rather than a deme or a phratry. To these men the ‘same laws as [those] concerning the other Athenians’ applied. To those who had rallied to the cause ‘later’ (husteron), whether they had fought only at Mounychia or they had been on the democrats’ side during the reconciliation in Piraeus, only the tax privilege of isoteleia and the right to enguēsis were granted.Footnote ⁸⁹ Under this last term, it is necessary to understand ‘the right to ally with a member of this community (that of the Athenians) and to have legitimate children of it.’ Thus, these noncitizen isoteleis, henceforth an integral part of the Cleisthenic tribes, could marry their daughters to Athenians in order to beget legitimate grandchildren with full citizenship, just as they could take Athenian women for their wives and ‘produce within wedlock legitimate Athenian children of their own.’Footnote ⁹⁰ This should be recognized as an exceptional privilege that set this honorific community apart from all the other metics present in Athens. While the law of Pericles, guaranteeing citizenship only to the sons and daughters of citizens, had just been officially reinstated in 403, and just as the Athenians were about to prohibit marriages between Athenians and noncitizens,Footnote ⁹¹ the combatants were given an opportunity to incorporate their descendants into the civic community.

It is probable that Thrasybulus’ decree was supplemented by another measure. In his funeral oration, Lysias refers to a decision undoubtedly dating back to the year 401/0 that concerned the foreigners who had died during the campaign at Piraeus:

The speaker explicitly evokes the situation of the foreigners who had fought in the army of Piraeus. They benefit from the same honors as citizens since their deeds have been commemorated at the public cemetery (dēmosion sēma). The speaker insists on the significance of this privilege: It is indeed a considerable honor, unprecedented in the fifth century, which we should consider to be the indirect consequence of the isoteleis’ integration into the Athenian tribal system.

To the Slaves: The Promise of Thrasybulus

The decision of 401/0 concluded a sequence during which the status of Thrasybulus’ combatants had been the subject of bitter debate among the Athenians once democracy was restored. The experience of battle had deeply subverted the theoretical isomorphism between the community of fighters and the civic community since the Samian episode of 411. Which attitude would be adopted with regard to all the noncitizens who had shown their attachment to democratic mores? By contrast, many citizens had remained passive or, worse still, had supported the Thirty. In 403, Thrasybulus had proposed granting citizenship to all the combatants of Piraeus regardless of their legal status. The Athenian Constitution specifies that Thrasybulus wanted to grant citizenship to ‘all those who had come back together from Piraeus, some of whom were clearly slaves,’Footnote ⁹³ but he had failed following an ‘indictment for illegality’ (graphē paranomōn) initiated by Archinus. According to Plutarch’s Lives of the Ten Orators, the assembly even voted to grant citizenship to Lysias (who was not part of the fighting group but helped the resistance financially), before Archinus also attacked the proposal made by Thrasybulus.Footnote ⁹⁴

Let us take stock of the revolutionary character of the proposal. Like a new Cleisthenes, Thrasybulus envisaged no less than to redefine the contours of the civic body by massively incorporating slaves and foreigners. The decree of 401 suggests that this concerned approximately 1,000 men. Such a figure is far from being negligible when correlated to the Athenian demographic situation of the end of the fifth century. Decimated by the plague of 429 and the accumulation of military defeats since the dramatic expedition to Sicily in 415, the civic community counted few more than 20,000 men in 403, so Thrasybulus’ project consisted in renewing (at least) 5% of all citizens.

An echo of this astonishing initiative can be found in the remarks Xenophon places in the mouth of Theramenes, a figure of political moderation par excellence, during his own trial. They were certainly aimed, as if by anticipation, at Thrasybulus’ proposal.

No doubt Xenophon places in the mouth of Theramenes the arguments that were those of Archinus against the proposal of Thrasybulus.Footnote ⁹⁶ Theramenes’ remarks are in any case disturbing: They suggest that a radical democratic design existed, implying ‘the lifting of all exclusions’ and that democracy contained the potential to radically extend the privilege of citizenship. Dēmokratia would thus cease to designate the complete rights of a community all the more egalitarian for having its power rest on the domination of the others (women, metics or slaves) and would instead be the name of a promise: that of the abolition of all these relationships of domination. Granting citizenship to slaves, as Thrasybulus defended it, would therefore be no more than a simple consequence of the founding gesture of the democratic regime (i.e. the extension of political rights beyond the narrow circles of the social elite). In other words, the dissociation of political rights and wealth capability, at the very foundation of the Cleisthenic reform, revealed the true nature of the democratic regime, monstrous according to its detractors in that it could imply the eventual political participation of slaves.Footnote ⁹⁷

Perhaps it is adventurous to want to see in this a specifically Thrasybulan conception of democracy. The proposal of the victorious general aimed, after all, only to reward the partisans of the democratic regime, and not to open citizenship to slaves for good; and one might rightly object that this measure is presented from the standpoint of its adversaries, who accuse it of destroying the very foundations of civic order. True … But at least it is clear that already in Thrasybulus’ speech to these men before the Battle of Mounychia he defended a broadened conception of the civic community. Let us listen to the chorodidaskalos as he faces his own chorus:

Thrasybulus exhorts each of the combatants individually to defend the fatherland (patris), the family (oikos), freedom (eleutheria) and honor (timē) – or, to put it differently, to safeguard the democratic city as if it were his own oikos. Through this complex invocation, Thrasybulus boldly exalts ‘the claim of a collective identity linked, because it is rooted in it, to a territory, as the Athenian freedom had been to Attica since Solon,’Footnote ⁹⁹ and in this, it comes across as a premature funeral oration that, as penned by Xenophon, recalls that of Pericles. But the situation is paradoxical, to say the least: While qualifying them as citizens, Thrasybulus addresses de facto Athenians, foreigners and slaves, and his speech also aims to mask the heterogeneous character of his troops by, in word if not in deed, integrating all combatants regardless of their statutory differences into the civic community.

The City and Its Borders: Back to Order

But Thrasybulus’ project was doomed to failure. The decree of 401/0, while delivering an exceptional testimony to the composition of the democratic army, demonstrates this, since it did not grant citizenship to all the noncitizens present at Piraeus but only to the combatants of Phyle. The idea of an inclusive civic community conflicted with that of Archinus, which, remaining faithful to Theramenes’ views, refused to grant citizenship to those who had not been born Athenian. Archinus prevailed, and Thrasybulus’ proposal was rejected by the Athenians. By refusing to incorporate into the civic body the 1,000 noncitizen combatants of Thrasybulus’ army and, at the same time, reinstating Pericles’ law on citizenship, Athens affirmed how inflexible its borders were.

Debate only took place among the Athenians after the democratic institutions were restored in the summer of 403. However, Thrasybulus’ chorus, once it returned to the city, no longer resembled the Piraeus troupe, since it had absorbed every member of the Three Thousand who had remained in the city and supported the Thirty. Back within city limits, the civic community recovered its traditional form, and the legal distinctions within the civic body, temporarily neutralized within the heterogeneous army of Thrasybulus, came back to full strength. The refoundation of the democratic regime thus ushered in two new forms of exclusion: that, numerically derisory, of some of the Thirty and the Ten, who were banished from the ranks of the community with their crimes deemed unforgivable; and that of all the metics and the slaves whose the integration into the civic body was refused, even though they had fought for the restoration.

During their speeches, the orators of the fourth century did not fail to address the judges of the courts by referring to the moment when the aforementioned men had ‘returned from Piraeus,’Footnote ¹⁰⁰ as if the city as a whole, and in its abstract form, had been constantly by the side of Thrasybulus’ men. This rhetorical platitude should not mislead us. While the men of Piraeus came to qualify by metonymy the whole Athenian demos, this identification took the form of a double denial: On the one hand, it made it possible to leave untold the integration of those who had supported the Thirty until the end while remaining in the city; on the other, it erased from memory the city’s crucial debate on the place of metics and slaves in the new civic order.

* * *

From the siege of Phyle, during the winter of 404, until the ascent of the Acropolis in the fall of the following year, several fighting communities had succeeded one another under Thrasybulus’ direction, reconstituting little by little, as if in ripples, the whole of the Athenian community. The city’s mantle – to refer to the Platonic image again – was, however, far from being unified and homogeneous at the end of the civil war. Torn and patched back together, its seams were visible, and the political life of the initial years of the fourth century made them periodically reappear.

The memory of these events reflected these struggles: In the aftermath of the civil war, various accounts coexisted and contradicted each other, before being replaced, during the fourth century, by a univocal civic account. There is every reason to believe that Thrasybulus tried, in the aftermath of the democratic restoration in 404–403, to put the memory of his epic journey on public display. Lysias evoked shortly after his death the arrogance of the general who had continued to reproach the Athenians for their behavior during the stasis. And we have seen that the stratēgos tried at all costs to have his acts commemorated directly where they happened by setting up a trophy on the battlefield or, in the case of the two statues, in Thebes. However, just as he did not succeed in imposing himself durably in public life after 403, Thrasybulus lost the battle of history and memory by failing to impose his own account of the events in Athens – and this is most certainly what ultimately explains why he got left out of ancient sources. In fact, there is every reason to believe that another chorus – associated with the name of Archinus – won, and entirely rewrote the account of the events of 403 to its own benefit.