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

by Bettany Hughes

  ALCIBIADES: When we hear any other person – quite an excellent orator, perhaps – pronouncing one of the usual discourses, no one, I venture to say, cares a jot; but as soon as we hear you, or your discourses in the mouth of another – though such person be ever so poor a speaker, and whether the hearer be a woman or a man or a youngster – we are all astounded and entranced. As for myself, gentlemen, were it not that I might appear to be absolutely tipsy, I would have affirmed on oath all the strange effects I personally have felt from his words, and still feel now. For when I hear him I am worse than any wild fanatic; I find my heart leaping and my tears gushing forth at the sound of his speech, and I see great numbers of people having the same experience. When I listened to Pericles and other skilled orators I thought them eloquent, but I never felt anything like this …16

  Often Socrates out-foxed and floored his peers with his beguiling and relentless banter. But then, at other times, he would stand for hours, silent, stock-still, frozen. These ‘trances’ Socrates himself put down to his daimonion semeion, his ‘divine sign’. Scholars still debate the cause of these odd seizures. Was this some kind of deep philosophic engagement? Were they signs of a medical condition such as catalepsy? Many at the time were more suspicious; they whispered, behind his back, that Socrates was possessed.

  Whatever his disability – social, physical or psychological – the philosopher was clearly both unhampered and uninhibited, and for the previous fifty years had taken the concept of being an Athenian citizen to its upper limits.

  Far from being an unworldly greybeard, we are told that Socrates spun through Athena’s city like a tornado, drinking, carousing (though never out of control), talking, debating. Women, slaves, generals, purveyors of sweet and bitter perfumes – he involved all in his dialogues. Eccentric, grubby, his hair left uncombed, he famously stunned guests at a dinner party by turning up freshly bathed and oiled following an afternoon’s session at the gymnasium – a display of personal hygiene that was way out of character.17

  Socrates paddled in Athens’ streams, he spent nights in her brothels, he worshipped the city’s demanding inbred dynasties of gods as assiduously as, if not harder than, the next man. This is a dedication not to be underestimated, for there were as many as 2,000 separate religious cults, all clamouring for attention in Attica in the fifth century BC. Socrates fought for his city too. Strapping on linen and leather armour, sharpening his short, stabbing sword, he travelled hundreds of miles to defend Athens’ interests. Although not one to join committees, or volunteer for jury service and neighbourhood watch, Socrates devoted limitless energy to making the polis work; in his own idiosyncratic way he was absolutely devoted to the political process. Those who did not participate usefully in Athenian life were labelled, in Greek, idiotai – laymen:18 these idiots, Socrates had no time for. On that May morning, however dangerous he had come to seem, there was no doubt that democratic Athenians were judging one of their own.

  The varied accounts of Socrates’ life and philosophy make it clear: he was inspiring, exciting, maddening. He was brilliant and curiously naïve. He was impossible to ignore. Given that the philosopher was responsible for his own defence, this trial looked set to spark with verbal and intellectual fireworks.

  MENO: Socrates! Even before I met you they told me that in plain truth you are a perplexed man yourself and reduce others to perplexity. At this moment, I feel that you are exercising magic and witchcraft on me and positively laying me under your spell until I am just a mass of helplessness … My mind and my lips are literally numb, and I have nothing to reply to you. Yet, I have spoken about virtue hundreds of times and held forth on the subject in front of large audiences, and very well indeed, or so I thought. Now I can’t even say what virtue is.19

  Socrates might seem to us the North Star in Athens, the light by which others orientated themselves, but he was one in a galaxy. Walking through those jangling streets were many others who shone very bright. Here were familiar sun-worn faces, now familiar only as great names: the playwright Euripides, the historian Xenophon, the general-statesman Pericles (as well as his intriguing courtesan and soulmate, Aspasia – his ‘partner’ to her friends, his ‘whore’ to their enemies), the mane-haired, rippling aristocratic chancer Alcibiades, the witty Aristophanes, the ‘father-of-history’ Herodotus, the sculptor/designer Pheidias, whose genius had created the Parthenon, a young Plato. Fifth-century Athens supported a rare concentration of talent. It is for this reason that Socrates’ lifetime is nominated a ‘Golden Age’. Socrates witnessed the ‘Greek Miracle’ at first hand.

  Yet on that spring morning in 399 BC, as the trickle of men into the law-court became a steady flow, Socrates’ alma mater, his beloved Athens, and the men who had made this city world-class, who had witnessed the rise of their home-town to the status of superpower and had generated a civilisation to match, now wanted their troublesome philosopher shamed, and some wanted him dead.

  This is how Socrates’ story ends. But we are still at the beginning of a day that shook the world.

  To understand the tenor of Socrates’ trial, its flavour, its taste, its smell, its surface tensions and its undercurrents, we must stand in the classical Agora, look around us, and see what Socrates would have seen as he made his journey through the streets and on into the hallowed space of the law-courts. Above him, behind him if he travelled with his back to the rising sun, perched on the Acropolis rock, stood the great temple, the Parthenon, sacred to Athena Parthenos – Athena the Maiden. There, too, the Temple of Athena Nike, this time dedicated to Athena the goddess of victory. In the Agora itself were the training grounds where Athens’ citizen-soldiers sweated day in, day out to ensure that they were fit to fight and to die for their city-state. All around were fine bronze and marble statues – so lifelike their rock-crystal eyes seemed to follow each and every passer-by. Their stone skin would have been thick with carnival-coloured paint. Analysis of the statues today reveals how gaudy they were – akin to theatrical scenery and props, designed to make an impression from afar. The air in the Agora would have been heavy with the scents of the market: spices from the East, saffron from the South, the tang of gold from the northern hills, the sweat of captured humans, shuffling slaves waiting to be sold on.

  And the earth beneath Socrates was thick with the remains of Athenians past, men and women whose own triumphs and struggles had laid the ground for Socrates’ progress.

  Piecing together our story, on our own journey into Socrates’ courtroom, we too should walk through the military, cultural and social landscape of Athens, as deep as it is broad, that the philosopher inhabited. We need to investigate the physical and psychological stage that had been set for Athenian greatness. To understand Socrates’ thoughts, his life, and his death by hemlock poison, fifth-century Athens – Athena’s City, the city that birthed Sokrates Alopekethen in 469 BC – must first come more sharply into focus.

  2

  ATHENA’S CITY

  Athens, 800–500 BC, the Archaic period

  For Athens I say forth a gracious prophecy –

  The glory of the sunlight and the skies

  Shall bid from earth arise

  Warm burgeoning waves of new life and glad prosperity.

  Aeschylus, Eumenides, 922–61

  THERE HAD BEEN A SETTLEMENT AT Athens since pre-history. Between around 2100 and 1000 BC, the time described by archaeologists as the Bronze Age, but thought of by the classical Greeks as ‘The Age of Heroes’,2 men and women encamped on the Acropolis – the great lump of red-cretaceous limestone that improbably juts out of the Attic plain. Early Athenians lived and worshipped here. Eventually the prehistoric community started to sleep and eat in the shadow of the Acropolis as well as atop it. As time went on these lower settlements expanded, there was a degree of town-planning, a community with an identity was established. Athens could now call herself a polis, a city-state. The Acropolis itself, rising 230 feet above sea-level, believed to hold sacred powers, was predominantl
y a home for the god-tribe – when humans sheltered high on this geological fortress it usually meant that the city was under attack or in crisis.

  Socrates’ Athens was axiomatic: history began with geography. Greece in his time, Hellas (as it was and still is known), was a loose connection of close on 1,000 seperate poleis or city-states. These city-states – originally a coalition of neighbouring families and tribes who gathered together around a central locale for self-protection – were isolated from much of Europe by mountains and from Asia Minor by the sea. Each Hellenic polis (with populations of anything from 1,000 to 30,000) was, typically, run as a republic. Kings had been all but lost with the downfall of the Bronze Age – the epoch immortalised by literary hero-leaders such as Menelaus, Agamemnon, Priam, Ajax. Philosophy and literature from across the period (found in the works of the poet Hesiod, the law-giver Solon, the historian Herodotus, the dramatist Sophocles, inter alios) indicate that all sense of society revolved around this polis, this collective whole. Morality meant the goodness of the community; loyalty to the city-state was paramount. Farmercitizens, rather than following one military leader, together defended their poleis (their cities) – frequently against the hoplites (armed foot soldiers),3 of another.

  ‘Man is a political animal.’ Pride bursts from Aristotle’s voice. The Hellenic unit of society (polis is the root of our word ‘political’) fostered, without a shadow of a doubt, a sense of community and commonality. And within that polis there were men – embodied in the sturdy Farmer of Hesiod’s Works and Days – who valued personal independence above (almost) everything, who fought hard against the smothering rule of aristocratic factions and despots, who made democracy a possibility. The poems of Hesiod show us that these Greeks had a fierce sense of self-reliance – if you were dependent on someone, or on the work of others, you were a kolax (a flatterer) or a parasitos (a parasite).4 Hesiod’s ideal Greek man works, works and works. He is industrious to a fault – he strives to better himself and the lives of his immediate neighbours.

  Take fair measure from your neighbour and pay him back fairly, with the same measure, or better, if you can.5

  The Greek – the Hellene – was loyal first and foremost to his city, and then to a loose notion of ‘Greece’, or rather ‘Greekness’. A Hellene was Hellenic because he was Hellenic rather than barbaric; Greek rather than barbarian. Barbarians, in the eyes of the Greeks, were those who talked gibberish, who literally bar-bar-bared in their own language: Lydian, Persian, Thracian, Nubian, Goth, they came from all points of the compass.

  The Greeks cheerfully demonised the way these ‘others’ ran their own affairs. They despised the monomaniacal autocracy of eastern super-kings, the slavish devotion to political orthodoxy, the dynasties of ruling classes of priests. They had to hate them, because these barbarians had become their enemies. Whereas once the whole eastern Mediterranean had been held together by the notion of xenia – an unspoken allegiance between the aristocrats of Greece, but also of Anatolia, Egypt, Macedonia – now dividing lines had been firmly traced: one, vertical, ran north and south, following the Bosporus, the other stretched horizontally across the Balkans.6 Mountain ranges – the Carpathians, the Julian Alps, the Dinaric Alps, the Pindus – divided Greece from the rest of Europe; the Aegean and Libyan Seas segregated Greek communities from those in Egypt and North Africa.

  This Hellenic land-mass (with satellites on the western shore of what is now Turkey), whose population appears largely to have lost the power of literacy between about 1100 and 800 BC, no longer part of a tight network of trading routes, was, on the whole, left to its own devices. Jealousies between rival city-states festered. Citizen-soldiers, men who farmed in the spring and autumn and fought throughout the summer, now stood side by side and defended their home-town against that of their neighbour. The default position of the Greek polis through the Archaic period was to watch its own back.7 The archaeological evidence tells us that city-states such as Athens were, in the hundred years running up to Socrates’ birth, no strangers to warfare and conflict.

  In the mud, scree and debris that rises 15–20 feet above Socrates’ Athens, up from the street level of 2,400 years ago, archaeologists discover, every year, new shards of the philosopher’s city. In 2008 a sliver of a beautiful woman’s stone face was excavated from the gravelly subsoil; within days her outstretched hand was also identified. In 2009 a marble horse’s hind-leg was found just 30 inches below the surface; even more recently, limestone flowers have been unearthed. These amputated bits and pieces are remnants of the fine decoration that once rimmed the great Parthenon temple up on the Acropolis: classical stoneworks that were carved and hoisted into place when Socrates was still alive. Work on the Parthenon of Socrates’ day was begun in 447 BC and completed in 432 BC. The woman, the horse, the flowers survived in place throughout antiquity, but were hacked at by offended Orthodox Christians, ground down for lime, and then blown apart in 1687 by a Venetian cannon.8 The firepower was there to attack Ottoman Turks – the occupying power in Athens since 1458 – who by the seventeenth century were using the Parthenon as a mosque and an arms store.

  The fragments that archaeologists are now carefully piecing back together have been doubly traumatised. Some of the earlier sculptures that have come to light were bruised by ancient Athens’ bullying nemesis – the superpower that harried Greek lands through the sixth and fifth centuries BC: Persia. In 480 BC and again in 479 Persian forces breathed down the very necks of the Athenians; a Persian garrison occupied the Acropolis itself, and Persian forces smashed and burned all they could find there. Persians – powerful, ambitious, greedy for land and human booty – had been the enemies of Athens for a hundred years. By 522 BC the Persian Empire stretched from the Balkans to the River Indus. The size of the Persians’ geopolitical appetite can be measured by the words carved high into the rockface at Behistun beside the royal road to Babylon. In three languages, Akkadian, Old High Persian and Elamite, their ruler at this time, King Darius, thunders:

  I am Darius the great King, the king of kings, the King of Persia, the king of all lands … so says Darius the King … these lands obeyed my rule. Whatever I told them to do, was done …9

  A cousin of the next Persian leader, Xerxes – who invaded Athens just a decade before Socrates was born – was reported to have roared that he would ‘complete the enslavement of all the Greeks’.10 It is impossible to understand Socrates’ life without appreciating the bogeyman horror that the Persians represented to all Athenian citizens. Persian diabolics would come to be contrasted with Greek heroics. Socrates was a child when, at last, the Eastern threat appeared to have receded: after Persian forces had been conclusively defeated by a collection of Greek allies, Athenians, Corinthians, Spartans et al., at the Battles of Salamis and Plataea. ‘Liberty’ had become the watchword of all Athenians; a freedom not to be enslaved or oppressed by the ‘dog-barbarians’ of the East. As Socrates grows up there is a sense, clearly, that a new age is dawning. The greatest despot in remembered history – Persia – has been thwarted, and the dream of people-power has become conscious. Socrates is born when the world is different. Because Athens is entertaining an extraordinary new ideology: democracy.

  Demos-kratia

  and a new town for a new democracy,

  508–404 BC

  May the people who hold the power in the polis maintain their office confidently: a system of rule that looks ahead and concerns itself with the welfare of the community.

  Aeschylus, Suppliant Women, 698–700

  When Socrates was growing up, we should try to imagine the flurry of papyrus sheets on workbenches and the fingers sketching in the dirt as draughtsmen and architects laid out plans for their new, newly democratic city. Stylus pens have been found deep in the earth all around the Agora. Project leaders would have been appointed, and slave-labourers briefed. Masonry blocks were laid one on the other to give a physical incarnation to the democratic ideology. A new, voguish, solid, round limestone building, the Tho
los chamber, gave nightly dinners to fifty of those who served on the Boule – Athens’ council. Five hundred ordinary men were picked by lot to meet here to administer the business of the Athenian Assembly for the space of one year.11 In the sturdy, rectangular council chamber itself, the bouleuterion, and also in the Agora, business was prepared for the Assembly’s citizen-politicians. The Assembly hovered like a stone cloud above the Agora – its home, known affectionately as the Pnyx, the ‘packed-place’, a natural, limestone-smooth auditorium where all Athenian citizens could decide how their polis should be run.

  Greece already has a close-on-1,000-year-old written history at the moment we pick up Socrates’ story – and in that history the powerful persecute the weak, might is right and tyrants lead men. Warlords and high priests dominate society. Ordinary men may have access to councils of peace and battle, but the final decision is never theirs.

  Democracy is the most thrilling of developments. Now, for around 50,000 or 60,000 (the number varies, depending on population size through the fifth century BC) adult, male, Athenian citizens, not only could their voice be heard, but they could actively mould their society. You, your brother, your father, your son, could choose which issues were important to debate, which vital to legislate. The city built around Socrates was designed to keep democracy alive. Democratic Athenians did not serve the state, they were the state: its army, its executive, its judiciary.