The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life

by Bettany Hughes

  It is important to remember that both Plato and Xenophon composed their works convinced that Athenians were wrong to vote for the death of Socrates.

  PLATO’S DIALOGUES

  The works are divided into three fluid and still-controversial periods: (a) early, (b) middle, (c) late. Perhaps Lysis was written while Socrates was still alive.

  (a) Hippias Minor; Ion; Crito; Euthyphro; Laches; Charmides; Lysis; Menexenus; Protagoras; Meno; Gorgias; Euthydemus

  (b) Cratylus; Hippias Maior (both perhaps early); Phaedo; Symposium; Republic (perhaps Book 1 is early); Phaedrus (perhaps late)

  (c) Parmenides; Theaetetus; Sophist; Politicus; Philebus; Timaeus; Critias; Laws; (falsely attributed), Plato Alcibiades 1.

  THE LIST OF DIALOGUES BELOW IS IN POSSIBLE ORDER OF DRAMATIC DATE

  450 – Parmenides; 433/2 – Protagoras; 431–404 – Republic, Gorgias; 429 – Charmides; 424 – Laches; 422 – Cratylus; 418–416 – Phaedrus; 416 – Symposium; 413 – Ion; 409 – Lysis; 407 – Euthydemus; 402 – Meno; winter 402/1 – Menexenus; spring 399 – Theaetetus; 399 – Euthyphro, Symposium (frame), Statesman; May–June 399 – Apology; June–July 399 – Crito, Phaedo

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  MAPS

  The Greek Mainland, c.400 BC

  Asia Minor

  Plan of the Athenian Agora

  Sicily and Southern Italy

  Athens

  INTEGRATED IMAGES

  1. Portrait Herm of Socrates. Busts or herms of Socrates were popularly produced throughout antiquity. The majority that survive are Roman-period copies of Greek originals. We are told that almost immediately after Socrates’ state-assisted suicide the Athenians regretted their decision and set up a bronze statue of the philosopher just outside the Dipylon Gate. Many later sculptures were thought to be based on one original.

  2. Excavations of the north-west side Athens’ Agora, 19 June 1931. On the far right is the hill of Kolonos Agoraios and the Hephaisteion. The first shovel struck the site in May 1931.

  3. A reconstruction of the kleroterion – the random selection machine which allotted office in the democracy. Each of the jurors during Socrates’ trial would have been an adult, male citizen and would have had to have put himself up for selection for this state-sponsored duty.

  4. Vase depicting women gathered at the fountains of Athens just before dawn. This was considered one of the few times of the day that respectable females in the city could exchange gossip and information.

  5. Boiotian terracotta figurine, late Archaic (c.500–475 BC) showing a Greek mother carrying her child. Socrates was born in 469 BC, and in one account of his life we hear that he too rode ‘shoulder-high’ on his father.

  6. A rare vase scene; the domestic interior of an Athenian home.

  7. Eugene Vanderpool, Professor of Archaeology of the American School, 1947–1971. ‘EV’ examines a carved stone stele publishing the ‘Law Against Tyranny’. The inscription is surmounted by an image of Demokratia crowning the people of Athens.

  8. The martial might of the men of Athens was celebrated by many of the great sculptors of the day. It was these paragons – in particular the young men of Athens – whom Socrates was accused of corrupting. In these portraits, which had originally stood in Athens’ Agora, the ‘tyrant-slayers’ Harmodios and Aristogeiton are lauded.

  9. The beauty of young Athenian men is apparent from this sculpture – dating to c.480 BC. It was recently excavated during the rescue digs in Athens at the time of the construction of the new metro system. The head was discovered at the north-eastern edge of the National Gardens near Herodou Attikou Street. Note the full mouth and finely cast eyelashes.

  10. A portrait herm, possibly depicting Aspasia, currently held by the Vatican.

  11. Socrates is imagined dancing to Aspasia’s tune in this French cartoon of 1842. By Honoré Daumier.

  12. Two hoplite soldiers, named Chairedemos and Lykeas, on a funerary relief from the Piraeus Museum. Socrates on his military campaigns would have been turned out as the Athenian hoplite is on the right.

  13. Later cultures played on the possibilities of a sexual relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades. This touched-up print was one of a set made for a 1906 edition of the De Figuris Veneris (the Manual of Classical Mythology); the images were first produced on the Continent in the 1890s but titled ‘Manchester 1884’. Of course we hear from Plato that Socrates refused Alcibiades’ advances.

  14. The so-called Mourning Athena relief, commissioned around 460 BC. The artist is clearly endeavouring to portray the weight of responsibility that comes with success. The relief is now beautifully displayed in the new Acropolis Museum, Athens.

  15. Athena’s Silver Owl: the coin that became emblematic of both Athens’ wealth and of her control of the economy in the Eastern Mediterranean for a substantial part of the fifth-century BC. The silver to create this coinage came from silver-bearing seams of lead in the mines of Laurion, south-east of Athens.

  16. The north-east corner of the Athenian Agora in 1931. By the end of the first excavating season many of the key landmarks of the marketplace of Socrates’ day had been revealed. The foreground column rests on foundation stones of Athens’ great ‘records office’, the Metroon. Behind this are the foundations of the monument of Eponymous Heroes and beyond that the steps and altar stone of the Altar of Zeus Agoraios, where, it was said, Socrates’ father had prayed for his idiosyncratic son’s future.

  17. A rare representation of a slave from the bottom of a drinking cup. The man is shackled and is collecting rocks. c.490–480 BC. Metal shackles from the early fourth century BC have been found in the Athenian-run silver-mining district of Laurion.

  18. A stern Socrates rescues Alcibiades from the pitfalls and snares of the world (in this case the arms of two beautiful young women). Possibly the work of Lorenzo Bartolini (1777–1850) but also attributed to Antonio Canova.

  19. Although Plato tells us that Socrates was not interested in the physical aspects of erotic love, as this kylix indicates, this was not an activity to which fifth-century Greeks were averse.

  20. Marble stele (marble from Mount Hymettus) showing a priestess holding a giant temple-key. The stele was discovered at the site of Rhamnous and could therefore be a representation of a priestess in charge of the cult there of the deity Nemesis. The ribbon-band in the woman’s hair is also a sign of her sacral position.

  21. A representations of Socrates suffering at the hands of his ‘shrewish’ wife Xanthippe. As imagined in Stuttgart in 1467 and Antwerp in 1579.

  22. Another representations of Socrates suffering at the hands of his ‘shrewish’ wife Xanthippe. As imagined in Stuttgart in 1467 and Antwerp in 1579.

  23. The physiognomy of Socrates under scrutiny, 1789.

  24. Ostrakon (a broken piece of pot with the name of an Athenian citizen scratched upon it) voting for the ostracism of Alcibiades in 416 BC.

  25. After the Athenian defeat at Aegospotami all Athens’ subject allies deserted. Samos, though, remained staunchly democratic. As an act of thanks all Samian citizens were given Athenian citizenship, a pact which is sealed here on a stele of 405–403 BC where Hera (patron goddess of Samos) and Athena (patron goddess of Athens) shake hands.

  26. The burnt head of Apollo, discovered buried beneath a pavement at Delphi. Apollo was the god honoured during the sacred month of the Delian expedition. Athens, and her people, could not be polluted by spilt blood at this time, and so once Socrates had been condemned to death he had to wait for at least twenty-eight days until the sacred embassy returned from the island of Delos to the city-state. Only then could he drink his fatal hemlock draught.

  27. The bronze name tickets used by Athenian citizens when they put themselves forward for selection as jurors. This particular strip belonged to a man called Demophanes, who came from the Kephesia deme of Athens (the region that has recently suffered so badly in summer fires).

  28. The excavation of the Dipylon Gate at the Kerameikos in Athens
at the beginning of the twentieth century. After Socrates’ death it was said that the mourning population of Athens, realising their mistake, set up a staue of the philosopher just in front of this gateway to the city.

  29. Plato teaching Socrates, or leaning over his shoulder to learn from him. Illustration taken from Matthew Paris’ fortune-telling book c.1250 AD. Through the centuries, Socrates and Plato’s relationship has been interpreted and re-interpreted. In the Islamic tradition, Plato is allowed an ever increasing role. From the sixteenth century it was thought by the Ottoman rulers of Athens that the Parthenon was in fact Plato’s Academy.

  30. ‘Socrates’ Tomb’, at Athens, also traditionally known as the Tower of the Winds, actually the Horologion of Kyrrhestos, as painted in 1839. The building was used by Muslim mystics for centuries.

  31. Aphrodite on the so-called Ludovisi Throne rises from the sea-foam from which she was thought to be born. c.470–460 BC.

  32. The Ludovisi Throne. On the reverse of its exquisite representation of Aphrodite’s ocean-birth two ‘types’ of female inhabitants of Athens are shown. On the left a blatant ‘flute-girl’, a prostitute; on the right a respectable, veiled and covered Athenian woman-citizen burns incense for Aphrodite.

  33. Socrates and a stag. Socrates’ work and life came to represent, in the culture and philosophies of both East and West, what it was to be human.

  ACT ONE

  ATHENA’S CITY

  1

  THE WATER-CLOCK:

  TIME TO BE JUDGED

  Athens, the Agora, 399 BC

  How fitting is it to destroy an old man, a grey-headed man, beside the water-clock?

  Aristophanes, Acharnians, 6941

  IN MAY THE SUN RISES BRISKLY over Mount Penteli.

  Five hundred men2 are walking with purpose through the tight, packed-gravel lanes of Athens, past the modest mud-brick houses, around the gaudy public monuments: the communal baths, the Temple of Athena Nike, the new mint. Some of these public buildings are still wet with paint, few are more than fifty years old. At times the walking men have to pick their way across distasteful evidence of trauma – over derelict homes and past gaunt-hungry citizens. Unpleasant reminders of the catastrophes Athena’s city has suffered during the last three decades: plague; foreign invasion; full-blown civil war; strife.

  There are goats here, dogs, geese, cats, ducks; but hardly any women. Or at any rate there are few creatures classified as female; there are some shaven-headed slaves. These sub-human folk of Athens, male and female alike – ‘man-footed things’, ‘living tools’3 – have been about their business since well before dawn, preparing the food, mending the clothes, wiping the shit off the shoes of their masters.4 At this time of day, the majority of Athens’ other females, women-citizens, are moving back indoors. The night is their time. After dark, usually chaperoned, they are allowed out to gossip, to barter, to practise religious rites, and just before sunrise they collect around the fountains to gather water. Now, with the sun climbing into the sky, it is appropriate to leave the streets. To be shut up at home during daylight hours is the only way for a respectable Athenian woman to behave.

  But times have been hard. Once Athens could boast a stakeholder population of more than 200,000. Now, at the beginning of the fourth century BC, the number of adult men living in the city-state is one-tenth that number, closer to just 20,000. Since the outbreak of war with another Greek city-state, Sparta, in 431 BC, many tens of thousands of male citizens have died: in 404–3 BC alone up to 1,500 were killed, not by foreign but by Athenian hands – the death squads sponsored by rival factions during Athens’ bitter civil war. Now women are forced to do that which their grandmothers would never have dreamed possible: bake their own bread, live in a bigamous marriage, sell ribbons on street corners. Rather than enter and exit the city through 30-foot-high monumental gates, decorated with bronze, the surviving females must stepping-stone across the stumpy remains of Athens’ broken city walls; walls that were once the envy of all Greece.

  A number of the men striding the street this late spring morning will be checking the precise time by the climb of the sun and the length of their shadow.5 But these urgent Athenians are pulled not just to the brightening of the sky, but by the drip, drip of progress. The new mechanical water-clock that marks out time in this most adventurous of cities is soon to have its plug pulled. The judicial day is about to begin.6

  All are making their way towards a court – the religious court of the archon – the magistrate of sacred affairs, a site that today is dissected by the jaunty-orange, rattling Athens metro and flanked by trinket and umbrella sellers.7 This was, in the fifth century BC, a well-beaten path. Athens at that time was an exceedingly litigious place. In any one year up to 40,000 court cases might be heard. The Athenians loved a good legal brawl; their wrangles were a popular spectator sport. Agon – which translates as competition, struggle, set-to – is the Greek word often used. Gloves were off; agon is the root of our ‘agony’. And today there would have been a particular frisson. The man Athenians have come to judge is considered a threat to society. His offence could be capital. It seems almost certain that this encounter will be agonising.

  The Athenian jurors are here to try a stocky seventy-year-old, their fellow citizen – Sokrates Alopekethen, Socrates from the district of Alopeke. Socrates: not high-born, neither a decorated general, a prize-winning dramatist, nor a political hero, but still famous in his own lifetime. For the past thirty years men – particularly young men – have flocked to Athens from right across the eastern Mediterranean with the prime purpose of listening to him philosophise in the public spaces of the city. In decorated dining rooms, crowded back alleys and by the leafy banks of the city’s rivers he could have been heard. He is a maverick; he did not found a school of philosophy, there was no individual aristocrat who funded his mission, it appears that he chose to write not a single word of philosophy down. And instead of polemic, instead of the great sweeps of rhetoric that have become so fashionable in Athenian society by the end of the fifth-century Golden Age, Socrates simply asks questions. His methods are, to put it mildly, unusual.

  Yet the enquiring philosopher, now an old man, has become not just celebrated, but notorious. His eccentric methods, his unconventional lifestyle, his dogged interrogations, his troubling attraction to the young of the region have earned him as many enemies as friends. He walks to the court on this May morning accused of anti-Athenian activity, with undermining what it was that held the polis – the city-state – together. Today, those 500 Athenians will decide whether or not Socrates has corrupted the city’s source of hope – their young men – and, even more worrying, denied its sublime security: the power of their traditional gods.

  It’s right for me to make my defence, Athenians, against the first of the false accusations made against me … ‘Socrates does wrong and is too concerned with enquiring about what’s in the heavens and below the earth and to make the weaker argument appear the stronger and to teach these same things to others.’8

  How do you say that I corrupt the youth …? Isn’t it in fact clear according to the indictment you wrote that I do so by teaching the young not to believe in the gods that the city believes in but instead to believe in other new divinities? Aren’t you claiming that it’s by teaching that I corrupt them?9

  The Athenian city has spent four generations dealing with clear and present danger in the form of invading forces and the military coups of enemies within. Socrates’ crime is less tangible, but because of that, more pernicious – he is considered a bad, a dangerous influence. The citizens who make up the judge and jury (there was no hierarchy of judgement in the Athenian judicial system in Socrates’ lifetime), hot-footing it through those narrow Athenian streets, have travelled from far and wide. Some started their journey in districts such as Cape Sounion, nearly 30 miles south-east of Athena’s city, where the splendid temple of Poseidon still basilisk-eyes the boats that come in and out of Athens’ harbours; others wi
ll have rolled off bed-pallets just five minutes away in what were little more than shacks on the bare rock,10 beneath the Areopagus, where councils of Athenians have been meeting for close on 300 years. Rich and very poor alike, they are gathering here in this milky-dawn light because the Ancient Greeks believed something remarkable about men. They believed that each had been given, by the gods, an equal portion of dike, justice, and aidos, shame or concern for their fellow man.11 If they put their minds to it, each true, mandated Greek could judge another fairly and wisely. This Hellenic hallmark was proudly celebrated, in Athens’ public spaces, by the commentators of the day:

  When I have chosen the best of my citizens I shall return; it is for them to judge this matter according to truth, since they have bound themselves by oath to say nothing contrary to justice.12

  On this hill the reverence and inborn fear of the citizens will hold them back from committing injustice by day and night alike, so long as they themselves do not pollute the Laws with evil streams: if you stain clear water with filth, you will never find a drink.13

  So on that spring morning twenty-four centuries ago, the ordinary citizens of Athens, dirt-poor oxherds, smooth-palmed accountants, dark-tanned traders, were here to enact a unique, fifth-century form of direct democracy. Citizen to citizen, they were here to pass judgement on one of their own.

  But today’s court case did not, by any means, promise a cut-and-dried resolution. Because the one accused amongst them, who had also started to make his way to the court at dawn; who had also walked through the hub of Athens’ democratic city as the city started to wake, a fellow citizen amongst the press of jurors; the man making his way to the dock today was, by any standards, an awkward customer to estimate: an extreme and disconcerting individual. Unsettling to look at, Socrates stood out in a crowd. He boasted, his contemporaries tell us, a pot-belly, thick lips, swivelling eyes, a pug nose and broad nostrils. Descriptions of his lifestyle suggest he possessed irrepressible energy and a wit that, even after one of his many nights of heavy drinking, struck home ‘like the touch of a sting-ray.’14 In a city that made a cult of physical beauty15 – which believed, in fact, that outward beauty was a sign of an inner nobility of spirit – Socrates was famously ugly. He had a rocking gait and he made it his business to power from one spot in the city to another, enlightening some, badgering others to engage in meaningful conversation. As one contemporary (according to Plato) – the man who had spent years as Socrates’ love-interest – put it: