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73 CHAPTER 3 Aristophanes’ Ready Victim The Satan expelled is that one who foments and exasperates mimetic rivalries to the point of transforming the community into a furnace of scandals. The Satan who expels is this same furnace when it reaches a point of incandescence sufficient to set off the single victim mechanism. In order to prevent the destruction of his kingdom, Satan makes out of his disorder itself, at its highest heat, a means of expelling himself. —René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning W hen the Athenians returned to their city after the retreat of the Persiansin479bcetofinditswalls,temples,andbuildingsrazed, they wanted what any Greek would want: walls. Not all desire is mimetic.1 A hungry or thirsty person is not imitating the desire of another for food or drink. Thus protected by city walls, Greeks could negotiate or endure or sally forth; otherwise, they were exposed. Tension with Sparta, whose military might and village life negated the need for walls, dominated the first months of the return (Thuc. 1.90–93). The Athenian Themistocles went to Sparta as an ambassador. There he prevaricated and postponed discussions with the authorities while, at his prompting, Athenians back home frantically threw up walls from whatever stone and rubble were at hand. 74 Chapter 3 There is no mimesis in these early actions with the Spartans but the human need for security. Although born of a distinguished family, Themistocles did not enjoy the traditional support for his career but relied on his own intelligence and, as Thucydides observes, a remarkable ability to foresee the course of events (1.138.3). During his archonship (493–492 bce), he persuaded Athenians to develop the Piraeus by enclosing its three natural harbors with walls (Thuc. 1.93.3). Even before the return of the Persians, he seems to have realized that the future for Athenians lay in ships. According to Thucydides (1.93.3), he was the first to envision Athens as a sea power, and for this insight the available model was the Persians.2 In essence, Persians showed him what was to be desired: naval superiority. Relying upon Athenian triremes, Themistocles manipulated the Greeks to resist the Persians at Salamis and defeat their navy. After the war, the fleet brought Athenians the hegemony of an alliance of eastern Mediterranean cities and islands formed to drive out the Persians and seek reparations. Imitative desire appears to have continued to motivate the league’s early policies under its foremost general, Cimon, whose exploits drove out Persians and replaced their dominance with Athenian.3 In time, differences of ethnicity and morality between the Athenians and their Persian models wore away. Athenians reduced allies to subjects, and the league to a tyranny. The Athenian empire and the glories of classical Athens realized the acquisitive desire in mimesis of the largest tyranny of the then-known world. In effect, Athenian society underwent crisis that lasted throughout their history, from the assumption of leadership against the Persians in 478 bce through their defeat at the hands of the Peloponnesians in 404 and into the fourth century. The empire taxed the institutions of what began as a traditional polis with an influx of innovations and challenges. The world of Athenians simply changed and kept on changing, not always for the better, but always breaking down fixed and received ways of thought and living. New products spilled into the city, while foreigners brought exotic outlooks on the gods, the world, and, in particular, education to the hearth of Athenians. The attraction and repulsion aroused by their views comes out in Aristophanes ’ Clouds. Strepsiades eagerly seeks the powers of the new-wave rhetoric taught by Sophists to elude his debts and then shrinks in horror when that same rhetoric corrupts his son. This comedy first (423 bce) associated Aristophanes’ Ready Victim 75 Socrates with the crisis in belief in the gods and the stability of language and contributed to that τύχη (“chance”) that identifies Socrates as victim (Pl. Ep. 325b). The Sophists’ teachings met with such acceptance, however, because the atmosphere created by the seizing of an empire and the launching of a war in its defense had instilled desire and readiness and greed. ◆ ◆ ◆ Socrates first appears as a hoplite soldier during the siege (432–430 bce) of the rebel Corinthian colony, Potidaea. The references come years after the events in Plato’s account of Alcibiades’ encomium of Socrates in the Symposium. Alcibiades praises Socrates for his endurance...

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