Ancient & modern | 22 March 2008

According to Mohamed Al Fayed, the Princess of Wales was murdered on the orders of Prince Philip working in cahoots with some 30 named individuals, the Home Office, the CIA, the Inland Revenue and the French intelligence and emergency services, judiciary and police. Ancient Athenians would have loved it. They saw conspiracies everywhere. Let there be the slightest suggestion, for example, that someone might be at work to (say) destroy the democracy, and panic ensued, ranks closed and politicians would rush to say that Athens was safe in their hands.

Take the famous affair of the mutilation of the Hermai (good-luck statues of Hermes) and the profanation of the Mysteries. In 415 bc a highly controversial expedition was about to sail to Sicily when drunken youths rampaged around the city defacing Hermai. That was a bad enough omen, but then the Assembly was informed that Alcibiades, the main advocate and leader of the expedition, had been parodying rituals involving the Eleusinian Mysteries. From that it was a short step to implicate Alcibiades in the Hermai incident too, and all hell broke loose. The contemporary historian Thucydides says that Alcibiades’ enemies saw their chance and ‘exaggerated the whole thing and created a tremendous uproar, alleging that it was all a plot to overthrow the democracy’. Alcibiades was allowed to sail, but accusations continued to flow thick and fast, and a panicking Assembly demanded his return. Alcibiades, sensing the hysteria, went into exile.

This is all very typical. Conspirators always have secret, quite implausible agendas. Their plot is frequently associated with a political crisis of some sort. There is a mastermind behind it all, in perfect control of events. Those who uncover the plot are always the only people in the whole world actually privy to the details.