and put to death all who had previously offended them or who now aroused their enmity. They encouraged collaborating citizens to inform on their neighbors, thereby sending them to death. They disarmed their enemies and seized their lands and property; they killed resident aliens, then sold their goods to pay a mercenary militia; they occupied the village of Eleusis and, to make it a refuge for themselves alone, executed all male inhabitants. When one of their own questioned the excesses of this reign of terror, they passed him the bowl of hemlock. By the end, thousands had been driven into exile and fifteen hundred killed, more than during any decade of the war just passed.
As might be expected, resistance to the Thirty Tyrants soon arose, and in May of 403, in a final battle at the Piraeus, Thrasybulus and his fellow democrats defeated the oligarchy.
As that battle drew to a close, Cleocritus of the democratic resistance called for reconciliation with his fellow Athenians. “Citizens . . . , why do you want to kill us . . . ? We have joined with you in the holiest rituals, in the most beautiful sacrifices and festivals. We have been fellow dancers with you, fellow students, and fellow soldiers. . . . For the sake of our kinship, our marriage ties, and our fellowship . . . , put a stop to this crime against our city.”
THE DEATH OF POLEMARCHUS. Lysias, one of the great Attic orators and a resident alien in Athens at the time of the tyranny, tells the story of how Eratosthenes, one of the Thirty, came upon Lysias’s brother Polemarchus in the street, arrested him without charge, and carried him off to prison. The Thirty sent down their customary order, that Polemarchus was to drink the hemlock. They allowed him no hearing, gave him no chance at self-defense, would not tell him why he was to die. After his family carried his body from prison, the Thirty forbade them to hold his funeral rites in their own homes, and so they laid Polemarchus out in a hired shed. Though they were rich in cloaks, the Thirty made them wrap Polemarchus in a borrowed shroud and rest his head on a borrowed pillow. The Thirty confiscated his property—slaves, gold and silver, ornaments and bronze, furniture and clothing. When Melobius, another of the Thirty, came into the house, he immediately tore from the ears of Polemarchus’s wife her earrings made of gold.
Multiply such thieving and such murder by fifteen hundred dead and again by thousands exiled, and you will have an estimate of the grief and rage endemic to Athens on the day the tyrants fell, of how hard it might have been to heed Cleocritus’s call for reconciliation.
THE UNFORGETTABLE. Some emotions grip us, then fall away. A great happiness can bring sleepless nights when first it blooms, but the possession eventually fades. Two years out, no one says, “I cannot shake my joy!”
Grief and rage, however—these can go on and on. Decades go by and still a loss or wound from childhood colors our days. Two decades have passed since Odysseus left for war, and still the old swineherd Eumaeus grieves “unforgettingly” for his absent master.
Rage may be the more troubling of the unforgettables, and especially rage knit together with grief because these don’t just persist; they call for action, and in action taken, they reseed themselves generation after generation. All the years of the Trojan War have passed, and still Clytemnestra cannot forget how Agamemnon sacrificed their daughter to put a wind in his sails, and so she takes her revenge, a revenge that plants the seed in turn for their children, Orestes and Electra, to seek vengeance against her.
In Sophocles’s play that bears her name, Electra speaks of her father’s murder as a sorrow (or evil) that cannot be forgotten and describes her own passion (or anger) in similar terms, though in this case the Greek for “not forgetting” (our láthei) might better be translated from its root meaning—“it does not escape notice,” “it is not hidden.” The image is of anger as a thing that the mind cannot bury, cannot help being aware of. Electra’s passion won’t let her alone. It’s intrusive. It bugs her. We do not control the unforgettable; it controls us.
The spirits of such unforgetting are called the Furies, the Erinyes. They cling to the memory of hurt and harm, injury and insult. Their names are Grievance, Ceaseless, and Bloodlust. Their names are Grudge, Relentless, and Payback. They bloat the present with the undigested past. “Most dreaded of the forces of insomnia,” they harry the mind, demanding for its release a ransom paid in blood.
THE TERMS OF PEACE. At the end of the Athenian civil war, after the democrats had defeated the oligarchs, negotiations led to what Aristotle in The Athenian Constitution calls “peace and reconciliation.” By the terms of the agreement, the Thirty and several small groups of their supporters were exiled to nearby Eleusis (and could be subject to criminal prosecution if they returned). All others, no matter their involvement in the tyranny, were granted amnesty. They were allowed to stay in Athens provided that each took an oath, swearing “not to remember the recent misfortunes.”
The oath is the crux of the Athenian amnesty and, before we unpack its complexity, it should be said that, by all accounts, it worked; it put an end to the fighting and to any ongoing cycle of revenge killings. “On this occasion,” writes Aristotle, “the Athenians reacted to their previous misfortunes . . . better and more public-spiritedly than anyone else at any other time.”
FORGET ABOUT IT. A family has saved for a trip to Carthage, only to find that all the money must go to pay a tax bill. Says the wife to the husband, “We can forget about Carthage.”
A teenager has misbehaved and his parents say, “You can forget about using the car tonight.”
When we say, “Don’t forget the milk,” we indicate an act that should follow from the thought. It wouldn’t do to say, “I was thinking about milk the whole time; I just didn’t buy it.”
In one of his endless meditations on language, Ludwig Wittgenstein writes, “Suppose someone points to a vase and says ‘Look at that marvelous blue—forget about the shape.’ Or: ‘Look at the marvelous shape—forget about the color.’ No doubt you’ll do something different in each case.”
One category of forgetfulness has to do with putting a thought aside, as it were, and with the nonaction that follows. “To forget about the shape” of the vase means to refrain from putting it in play, mentally, and thus not to make it part of whatever “you’ll do.” “Forget about Carthage” doesn’t mean you can’t think about it, just that thinking about it can’t lead to a trip.
In all such cases, forgetting is a lack of action, not a lack of thought. You can think about driving the car all you want, but you won’t be driving it tonight. Forgetting in these cases severs the otherwise reflexive link between thought and action. Many things may come to mind, but when they do, nothing happens. The seeds of karma are not sown.
THE OATH. The key phrase in the Athenian amnesty oath is variously translated as “it is forbidden to recall the recent misfortunes” or to “recall the past misdeeds” or to “harbor grievances against any citizen.” The Greek phrase itself is mê mnêsikakein (μὴ μνησικακεῖν), mê being “not,” and mnêsikakein being a compound built from mnes-, indicating memory, and kakein from kaka, indicating any bad or evil thing. As Nicole Loraux argues, the “bringing back to memory” that the oath forbids is not simple recollection but rather a summoning of memory against an opponent: “Mnêsikakein implies that one wields a memory like a weapon, that one attacks or punishes someone, in short, that one seeks revenge.”
The language echoes the old tradition of blood vengeance. In the Oresteia, for example, the Furies describe themselves as those who “hold the memory of evil (mnemonics kakôn),” the point being that the amnesty oath is an inversion of that epithet and, as such, should be seen as a speech act directed against everything the Furies represent, the primordial forces of unforgettable grief and rage.
That
