Although Socrates’ professed concern was with the moral fundamentals of life, it was this tangled web of realpolitik and rival beliefs, of conflict and anxiety, that drew him to a religious court to defend himself against capital charges.
Yet war can stimulate as well as destroy. Before it drew to a close, the fifth century BC witnessed the most remarkable resilience and a breathtaking cultural efflorescence. Democracy in Socrates’ day provoked rational thought, artistic experiment and wildly ambitious social and political schemes. During the fight with Sparta some of the most exquisite buildings – buildings that we consider to be the epitome of classical achievement – were constructed. Although maimed and denuded on that May morning in 399 BC, for much of Socrates’ life Athens was a beautiful city. And the Athenian Agora in particular, Socrates’ favoured stamping-ground, was one of the most exciting, if not the most vivacious and eye-opening of places to visit the length and breadth of the ancient world. The Agora, 37 acres of human endeavour, rimmed with boundary stones, was Socrates’ second home. To appreciate why the philosopher enjoyed such influence and earned such hatred, we need to join him there once again as he travels, in 399 BC, to his show-trial.
3
SOCRATES IN THE AGORA
The Agora, Athens’ marketplace, 451–399 BC
But Socrates, moreover, was always out in public. In the morning he went to the colonnades and the gymnasia, during the market he was seen there at the Agora, and for the rest of the day he was constantly in whatever place he thought he would meet up with the most people. And he talked quite a lot, and those who wished, could hear him.
Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.1.101
THIS LATE SPRING DAY IN 399 BC, a time of year when marguerites, the golden ‘eyebrow of Zeus’, grew around the sanctuaries of the Agora (as they still do around their ruins),2 Socrates wended his way through the labyrinthine lanes and small passageways of Athens’ marketplace.
The cheek-by-jowl dynamics of the district have just been brilliantly revealed by a new excavation in the south-west corner of the ancient Agora. ‘Fussing around’, as the director of excavations put it, diggers uncovered the rim of what at first seemed to be a giant pithos – a storage jar. But as the earth was eased away, it became clear that this was in fact the edge of a steep-sided well. Wells are good news for archaeologists, and for historians, because people throw objects into them, they drop things accidentally. At the bottom of a well lies an unselfconscious snapshot of what life was once like above ground.3
And this well has surprised the excavators. Until recently it was thought that the Agora was a very ‘public’ place. The free-market, political hub and adminstrative centre of the new democracy. But at the bottom of this smooth terracotta shaft are all kinds of intimate objects: shopping lists, loom-weights, broken make-up boxes. This kind of mongrel debris implies that the little stone buildings that nustle up next to the grand public architecture of Athens’ central marketplace were not just shops or storage rooms, as has long been suggested, but houses, living quarters. Homes for the ordinary men and the women of Socrates’ Athens.
And so if we picture Socrates’ journey to the law-court in 399 BC we should hear the hubbub of human habitation, and see a hundred pairs of eyes following his progress.
Padding barefoot, as he had done for most of his life, Socrates would have been drummed to court by a hectic beat; 500 jurymen on the move, many of them in their ‘Sunday best’ for a day in court, sporting leather sandals or sturdy footwear – on packed-gravel tracks; quite some sound. One doesn’t imagine that Athenians were partial to hobnailed boots. But the rejected debris from the floor of one workshop on the fringes of the Agora – piles of iron tacks and ivory eyelets for laces – shows that many thousands of nails must have been hammered into leather by the cobblers of the city. And if the literary and archaeological sources really do intersect, then this particular, recently reinvestigated workshop was one in which Socrates, in happier days, spent a good deal of time, and made public a good deal of his philosophy.
Xenophon tells us that Socrates frequently stopped by here in the artisans’ district at the Agora’s limit because this was where youths and young men were allowed to meet to hear the philosopher’s words – only over-eighteens had access actually within the boundary of the 37-acre Agora itself.4 Athenian society was divided into strict age groups – strength was known to reside in youth, wisdom in age. Young men were Socrates’ particular passion. Although later slander imagines him as some kind of philosopher-paedophile, the truth seems to have been simpler. Socrates sought out the company of the young men of Athens because he thought they had much to learn.
A writer called Diogenes Laertius, who carefully collated the Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (seriously researched, but written 600 years or so after Socrates’ death), gives us the name of one particular fifth-century Athenian workshop owner who occupied that liminal zone where young men were allowed to hang out: Simon the Shoemaker. In the corner of the excavated, nail-strewn Agora workshop, the fragment of a drinking cup from the mid-fifth century BC has been discovered – one name is scratched in capitals on the base: ‘SIMON’. So it seems there was a Simon here at the time of Socrates, and he did make shoes.
Simon the Shoemaker was, according to Diogenes, an avid, early follower of Socrates; and excavators appear to have unearthed his very home. The philosopher would (we are told) spend hours on end at Simon’s premises, riffing and chatting with the young men of the city, and after each debate the artisan would record the exchange. Eventually the cobbler collected enough material for thirty-three books, The Dialogues of Simon.5 The anecdote, intimately connecting the philosopher and a shoemaker, is curious, but believable. Socrates went about his thinking-business in a completely unorthodox way – not philosophising in a formal school, or in the courts of kings and noblemen, but right in amongst hoi polloi. A cobbler’s workshop-home would have seemed the most appropriate of places for unconventional Socrates to analyse the meaning and point of our everyday lives. And archaeology confirms that there was indeed a ‘Shoemaker’ who lived and worked in the Agora when Socrates was at his productive peak as a philosopher, c.435–415 BC.6 The ‘Dialogues of Simon’ have been lost to history, but later commentators throughout antiquity recorded that these debates, first heard within the warm-stoned, cottageindustries of Athens’ jangling, cosmopolitan marketplace, dealt with many of Socrates’ prime subjects: love, jealousy, the role of good in society.7 Essential topics, zestily explored by Socrates day in, day out.
But when we are travelling through the Agora, in the late spring of 399 BC, Simon the Shoemaker is long dead.8 Today Socrates has just one destination, the law-court. No roaming the Agora’s nooks and crannies, asking unsuspecting passers-by their views on the best way to live, as was once the philosopher’s wont. Soon this seventy-year-old man will be obliged to defend his case and his fundamental attitude to life in front of 500 judgemental Athenian democrats.
Ironic since for much of his life, the Agora has been where the philosopher has spoken freely – and for free. Stopping artisans and aristocrats alike, Socrates debated both the fripperies and the fundamentals of life. In a number of Plato’s and Xenophon’s chronicles he comes across as alarmingly unpredictable, leaping out at unsuspecting passers-by and startling them with a moral challenge. It was said that Xenophon first encountered Socrates in just such a manner. Walking as a young boy through the streets, Xenophon was approached by Socrates, who asked the lad where he could acquire a series of normal household goods. ‘And what about a brave and virtuous man?’ Socrates continued. When Xenophon was puzzled, Socrates suggested that the ingenu tag along for enlightenment.
Plutarch also recounts a tale of a visit that Socrates and his friends made to the Agora district where moneylenders set up their trapezai – banking tables – each morning. As the philosopher (surrounded as usual by a huddle of companions) walked southwards past the chipping-zone of the marble-workers he was struck by ‘sublime
inspiration’ and suddenly dived off past a woodworking district while his colleagues took their normal route. The friends laughed at his abstraction, until they found themselves surrounded by a squealing, stinking herd of pigs, soon to be carved up into flesh and hide, their skins sent off down to be rinsed by the tanners at the Ilissos River just outside the city walls.9
Socrates had apparently, on this occasion, been enraptured by his own inner ‘voice’ – a kind of divine calling, a personal, private god; an idiosyncrasy that would attract suspicion and spark trouble as the years went by.10 He called it his daimonion – his demon. This personal spirituality was very unorthodox in Socrates’ day. The philosopher lived in a world where all religion was a matter for public consumption. In their demandingly polytheistic spiritual landscape, Socrates and his colleagues were expected to pay their dues to a range of the gods most of the time. This worship took place mostly out in the open; it was a collective experience. A visit to the Agora would never not have involved some kind of act of worship.11 Doubting the city’s gods went beyond affront. Socrates’ peers had dreamed up the atom,12 but even they had a concept of something invisible beyond those indivisible particles – think perhaps of the sublime-spiritual world as being the quarks of Athenian existence, the building blocks of everything. Life itself was thought to be a religious experience.
What do the gods want from us? What is beauty? What is love? Who is good? Who deserves power? What is virtue? What is knowledge? Where do we go when we die? Questions, questions. Plato depicts the maturing philosopher as so fascinated by human conversation that, far from charging for his ideas, Socrates declares he would subsidise passers-by so that they could listen to what he has to say:13
SOCRATES: I fear that because of my love of people they think that I not only pour myself out copiously to anyone and everyone without payment, but that I would even pay something myself if anyone would listen to me.14
As early as 430 BC, and quite possibly before, we know that this eager questioning was ruffling a few feathers in the city-state. A fragment of papyrus, copied out carefully by a Roman scholar and then by a Frankish scribe, and now held in a cardboard box in the warehouse of the Naples Museum, preserves a few lines of the Greek comic poet Callias.15 Callias was a direct contemporary of Socrates. He noticed that which had begun to so bother the Athenians, that Socrates was not just a one-trick pony, but a consistent presence, and more than that: guru-like. A democratic citizen who was beginning to attract his own band of followers. Because Socrates’ radical take on the issues of life was so refreshing, he gathered around him a coterie of disciples. One of Callias’ characters moans that Socrates’ methods made men dissatisfied and arrogant.
CHARACTER A: Oh why this pride, why this disdainful eye?
EURIPIDES (disguised as a woman): I’ve every right to it; Socrates is why!
We can picture the scene: followers of the philosopher prowling the busy marketplace, trying out the Socratic method on random passers-by; young men challenging their elders, the subservient challenging their betters – all following Socrates’ principle that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living …’
But Callias was writing when Athens was in crisis – when the Peloponnesian War was brewing. By 432 BC hostilities between Sparta and Athens would be open. Whilst times were good, when the city-state was not at war, not crouching with its back against the wall, Socrates was a charismatic cause célèbre in Athens’ marketplace, one of the many fine and stimulating attractions that the Agora had to offer.
The prison complex was here in the Agora too, in the grubbiest quarter – the industrial zone; sweating bronze- and marble-workers hammered alongside those that a sprawling, polyglot, imperial city such as Athens had to keep temporarily under lock and key.16 Manned by ‘The Eleven’, a not-to-be-messed-with law-enforcement body, with 300 public slaves to draw from as their heavies, the prisons contained men who awaited trial or execution.
If the trial of Socrates does not go well today, this prison is where he’ll be heading.
It is a building the philosopher must have passed countless times. Socrates has lived, from birth, in and around Athena’s busy city; apart from battle-missions and participation in a religious festival down South, he has barely left the place.17 His presence in the Agora is nothing new; this is where for half a century he has plied his trade as an ideologist – a trader of word-ideas, unobstructed in the marketplace. He has watched and listened as Athenians created the first files on the subject of democracy. This is where, very recently, he has done his duty as an active, democratic Athenian citizen.
But today Socrates finds himself at the sharp end of democratic politics.
On this late spring morning the Agora of 399 BC is a changed place. Now, most of Athens’ luminaries are gone. The great general Pericles is dead of the plague – or, some said, of a broken spirit; the playwrights Sophocles and Euripides have been taken too: dying just a few months apart, but only after Euripides, judged by many to be second only to Shakespeare in genius, has been hounded out of the city, and Sophocles has been charged with insanity. The free-thinkers whom Aristophanes and Callias mocked in their plays have been exiled or executed, their work burned.18 The historian and general Xenophon, a fierce supporter of Socrates, is fighting as a mercenary in Persian lands. Socrates’ one-time lover Alcibiades, already disgraced, now lies murdered, messily, by a contract killer. The master-architect Pheidias, responsible for the Parthenon and many of the city’s beauties, has been (or so they said) poisoned.19
And now Socrates is charged with crimes that so offend Athens, that strike at its deepest sense of itself, that the penalty proposed is death.
So at that time of day when the early sun still rings haloes on human heads, Socrates is walking through the Agora to his judgement day.
4
THE STOA OF THE KING
Court of the religious Archon, Athens, March/April 399 BC
EUTHYPHRO: Who has accused you?
SOCRATES: I don’t really know the man very well myself. His name is Meletus, I believe – if you can recall a Meletus of Pitthus, lanky-haired, hooked-nose, with a sparse beard.
EUTHYPHRO: I can’t, Socrates. But what’s the charge he has brought against you?
SOCRATES: Charge? Rather a grand one, I think. It’s no mean achievement for a young man to have learned about these things. He says he knows how the young are led astray and who the people are who corrupt them.
Plato, Euthyphro, 1b-c1
SOCRATES WAS TO BE TRIED IN a religious court some time close to May 399 BC – but he had been accused of crimes against the state a good four to six weeks beforehand. To hear the charges against him formally read, he had already had to make his way – through the Agora once again – to one of the most attractive new buildings in Athena’s city.
The Stoa Basileios was discovered in the north-east corner of the Agora only in 1970. Work continued on the excavation site between 1982 and 1983 and has yet to be completed. It is a structure worth seeking out. Decorated with striking statues, supported by marble columns, this covered colonnade was, in Socrates’ day, not only an elegant walkway where friends chatted in the cool of the shade; it was a building with a grave purpose. The Stoa Basileios was the home of the city’s religious court. The title of the man who administered its cases was the Archon Basileus, ‘King Archon’. He was, in effect, a high-ranking magistrate – one of nine who were selected by lot each year.2 Kingship was a distant memory, but the use of the epithet basileus drove home to Athenians how fundamentally important were the piety trials that took place in this sheltered spot.
In Ancient Greece there was no separate word for religion. Spirits, gods and demigods were believed to be everywhere and in everything. Religion was not an optional extra, it was the known and the unknown world. Gods were around every corner – the people of Athens never knew when they would appear, in human form or perhaps in the guise of a swan, a ram, a rainbow, a swallow, a waterfall, a gust of wind. All life m
arched to the beat of the great gods’ drums. The notion might seem oppressive to twenty-first-century tastes, but this was a rhythm that men prayed, fervently, would never be interrupted. Athenians were exhorted not to tamper with any ritual, or do away with ‘any of the practices their ancestors had handed down to them, and not add anything to the customary ways’.3 Religion was at Athens’ heart, it kept the citizen body alive.
Gods in the marketplace
The Agora of Socrates’ day was thick with religious fervour. Stalls sold portable household shrines, and diminutive, messy sanctuaries would have been cluttered with offerings – the remains of burnt goat hair, dove’s blood, the clay maquettes of diseased limbs, eyes, knees, genitalia, sacred flames that were never allowed to die. Greasy smoke hung in the air; Athens was, after all, a city occupied by many gods, all jealous for attention – forces that you neglected at your peril. Even the poorest would try to offer many deities some kind of sacrifice. Indeed, the longest extant inscription from the whole of Athens’ classical history is a calendar of sacrifices set up in the marketplace. Every day but one was a festival in Socrates’ city.4
Here there were shrines to Aphrodite, a Temple of Hephaestus, a colonnade named for Zeus the Liberator – Zeus Eleutherios. Statues commemorated the demigods and heroes who held a special place in Athens’ heart. And in the north-eastern corner, close to the Archon’s courtroom, stood the great Altar of the Twelve Gods: a massive stone block (the corner of which still survives) from which all distances in the known, Hellenic world were measured.
The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life Page 6