Students in the (Ancient) Streets, or Agent(s) Provocateur? The Liberal Arts Schools of Athens and the Hostage Crisis of 88

• Published in: Athens journal of history (online) Vol. 6; no. 4; pp. 299 - 312
• Main Author: Wick, David P.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Athens Institute for Education and Research 01.10.2020
• ISSN: 2407-9677; 2407-9677
• DOI: 10.30958/ajhis.6-4-1

One of the odd angles in the story of Athens’ second greatest ‘hostage crisis’ moment is the student protest or ‘Athenian student independence’ movement, often part of how the “siege of Athens” in 88 of the old era gets its narrative. This qualifies as ‘second’ greatest if one interprets the greatest as the city’s takeover and destruction by Xerxes in 480 of that same era. In this second crisis the city’s ‘liberal arts’ schools – they were by the late Roman Republic’s era one of the drivers of the city’s economy – are often seen spurring it to resist Roman imperialism, even to the extent of taking children of town business families hostage on the Acropolis and inviting a foreign power (Mithridates) to invade and save the city from Rome. All this happens under the twin shadows of Rome’s civil war against Sulla, and the Anatolian war of conquest launched by Mithridates -- and in an Athens that had become a sort of flame-keeping educational and artistic symbol for the new European/Mediterranean culture clustering itself around Italy in the west, Athens itself leaning toward Europe but forced into a disastrous bit of political theater, in which Athenian townsfolk (those unable to flee) were used, and starved, as symbols for the agents of either an Anatolian coup, or a coup by students who alone valued the ancient independence and brilliance of the city’s ‘Greekness.’ This study looks at the Athenian part in the Crisis of 88, from the political troubles in the decades preceding which made the city vulnerable, through the various internal coups in the crisis year that left Athens a city divided between refugees and captives, to the ultimate dilemma: an armed external insurrection holding the Acropolis and attempting to bar the gates, and a Roman renegade outside the walls desperate for any sort of improvisational victory, without regard for the fragile treasures of culture trapped within its walls. Among the threads untangled to pursue the story are brief looks at the Athenian-educated ‘student rebel’ or Anatolian agent Athenion, and of the military adventurer Aristion of Rhodes, and the local public support they raised against Rome (some of it certainly seemed to come from ‘students in the streets). Also worth notice are careers of the Athenian financial-political families of Medeius (the Piraean) and Sarapion of Melite, who play either as pro-Roman or independent ‘power-gamers’ who may have helped make the hostage crisis possible. Much of the evidence for these episodes is dependent (via Plutarch) on fragments of Poseidonius, with help from surviving inscriptions, but the study attempts to find a reasonable, respectful way of dealing with writers who, whatever their stylistic eccentricities, were quite a bit closer to the events and to the historical heritage of these events than we are.