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

by Bettany Hughes

  Socrates had always been presciently ambiguous about peitho and pheme.

  He seems to have recognised, and abhorred, the curious paradox that empty, persuasive words can often carry the greatest weight. Although many sophists invoked peitho, and came to sell their persuasive wares in the Agora, Socrates had strong reservations. Unlike many rhetoricians of Athens, the philosopher – as sold to us by Plato, Xenophon and later interpreters – was genuinely perturbed by degradation of the truth.

  SOCRATES: If you continue to delight in clever, idle arguments you’ll be qualified to combat with the sophists but never know how to live with men.8

  His uncompromising quest was to distinguish the ‘good’ from the ‘bad’, the ‘true’ from the ‘false’. At a time when compromise and spin were coming to have great value in Athens, Socrates, doggedly, infuriatingly, doesn’t pursue popularity, he doesn’t delight in managing with clever words to make black appear white – he is after something more solid, something with content as well as style.

  SOCRATES: And it’s this [hatred] that’ll convict me, if indeed I’m going to be convicted – not Meletus nor even Anytus but the prejudice and ill will of most people. This is what’s convicted many other good men and, I think, it’ll do so in the future. And we needn’t fear that it’ll end with my case.9

  Socrates was, transparently, a victim of rumour – of both pheme and peitho. Persuasive words in the court on that early summer’s day will decide whether or not Socrates is to live or die.

  But before we imagine how he met his end, we should investigate in what way and where the philosopher’s life began.

  ACT TWO

  SOCRATES AS A YOUNG MAN

  9

  ALOPEKE: A PHILOSOPHER IS BORN

  A Deme south-east of Athens, 469 BC

  CRITO: Either you shouldn’t have children or you should share in their lives by nurturing and educating them completely.

  Plato, Crito, 45d1

  SOCRATES: Fellow citizens, why do you turn and scrape every stone to gather wealth, and, yet, take so little care of your own children, to whom one day you must relinquish it all?

  Socrates (attributed)2

  AS IS OFTEN THE WAY WITH great men from history, we know precise and intimate details of their death, and very little about their birth. What we do know is that Socrates was born in the long shadow of the Acropolis – or to be more accurate, with the proud, 230-foot-high rock at eye level.3 He was the son of Sophroniscus and Phaenarete, a man-child of the tribe of Antiochis and of the deme-district of Alopeke.4 South-east of the city centre, Alopeke sits snug and high on the slopes of the foothills of Mount Hymettos.

  The Acropolis, with its crusting of world-class buildings, is unavoidable today. Its profile, dominated by the Parthenon, has become an old friend; the Parthenon itself has come to represent, across the globe, a certain kind of civilisation. Of course Socrates’ view would not have been ours; the classical Parthenon was not yet dreamed of; Socrates’Athens was innocent of the bold beauty to come. Instead he would have woken each morning to the silhouette of war-ruins – the Archaic Parthenon temple a jagged gash, toppled and burned by Persian battering-rams, Persian torches, Persian swords. But already there were whisperings that a phoenix would somehow rise from the ashes.

  Even without the glory to be of the Parthenon, Socrates lived surrounded by the natural, cradling grandeur of the mountains that protected Athena’s city. Lykabettos Hill, Mount Aigaleos to the west of Athens, Mount Parnes to the north and Mount Penteli to the north-east – all cloud-high. He would have seen traders nudging into Piraeus harbour, and the generous sweep of coastline, arcing down to southern Greece, becoming, just beyond Corinth, the Peloponnese. He would have as an old friend the mysterious white rock-formations of what is now called Philopappou Hill, where today lovers meet, but which was then a vital lookout point against invasion. Up here in Alopeke, the world – with all its possibilities, all its challenges – spreads out at your feet.

  Here too, from Socrates’ birthplace, you can see how geography gave Athenian history a kick-start. The story went that the goddess Athena and the sea-god Poseidon fought over the inland settlement – a special place. Surrounded by defensive mountains and lands rich in the raw materials of culture (marble, limestone, clay and silver), Athens is a kingfisher’s whisper from the sea. Athenians have always benefited from maritime trade, but have little to fear from pirates. Their greatest exports were olives and expertise. So, the storytellers concluded – to give their daily way of life a sense of primordial, divine significance – Poseidon was rejected and wise Athena won out: the goddess was welcomed as a long-term resident of that great lump of red-veined Late Cretaceous limestone that we still call the ‘High City’: the Acropolis.

  When Socrates lived, Athens was still a tribal city, and, as discussed in previous chapters, society was ordered, emotionally and with a kind of loose apartheid system, into tribes. Each district, or deme, was assigned to a tribal group. Socrates was born as a man of the deme of Alopeke.5 Demes were once villages, typically under the thumb of a local tribal warlord. But the reformer Kleisthenes recognised that tribal culture and democracy are inimical. If you owe loyalty to your tribe, you cannot owe it to your wider community. And so, in 508/7 BC, Kleisthenes introduced one of his most radical and sweeping initiatives. He smashed the old tribal system. No fool, he recognised that change is accepted most happily when it seems familiar. And so, in clusters or singly, villages were rebranded ‘denies’. ‘Tribes’ stayed; they were just renamed and utterly reconfigured.

  As cogent men have done through history, Kleisthenes ignored organic divisions in the demographic landscape and started to draw straight lines. On the face of it, to strengthen the army, he invented new teams of Athenians. Now the ‘Ten Tribes of Athens’ were drawn from across the Attic landscape.6 At a stroke, nepotism, dynastic cliquery, the age-old superiority of age-old families were massively diminished. Of course, some tribal leaders must have been extremely disgruntled, but they would have been shouted down – these were exciting times, and suddenly so many more were empowered.

  Fifty men from each tribe could come to represent their tribesmen’s interests at a central council. And within those tribes each deme (in effect, a village government) could decide, by vote, who qualified as an Athenian citizen. Aristocratic and dynastic ties were immediately fractured. Now the demes – the name of course gives way to ‘demos’, the people – are compact units of grass-roots potency. All Athenian citizens feel empowered, and yet all citizens are umbilically linked to the mother-city, to Athena’s city, Athens. Local festivals such as (to take just one example) the Rural Dionysia compound a sense of belonging. During the Rural Dionysia, which was held in the second half of the midwinter month of Poseideon, a large, stylised wooden phallus, garlanded with lilies and ivy, was paraded through the streets, a billy-goat was sacrificed, and locals competed in a dramatic contest (the level of contention at these drama contests is indicated by the fact that they could be represented pictorially as two fighting cocks). Aristophanes captures the sense of belonging that such deme-centred festivals fostered:

  O Lord Dionysos, may my performance of this procession and this sacrifice be pleasing to you, and may I and my household with good fortune celebrate the Rural Dionysia, now that I’m released from campaigning;

  Revel mate, nocturnal rambler,

  Fornicator, pederast:

  After six years I greet you,

  As gladly I return to my deme,

  With a peace I made for myself,

  Released from bothers and battles …7

  The city-wide festivals – such as the City Dionysia (where again a billy-goat, a tragos, was sacrificed, his name probably giving rise to the ‘tragedies’ that were performed during the drama competitions in honour of Dionysos) – ensured that one knew, ultimately, to whom one belonged: to the deme and to the democracy. In the Republic, Plato paints a busy picture of Athenians dashing about from one festival to another
, drawn by the craic, by the crowd, by the knowledge that this behaviour would please the gods and their comrade-citizens.8 The ten Eponymous Heroes – the ten ‘team-leaders’ who incarnated the brave new world – stood day and night as bronze statues in the heart of the Agora. This was the humming, consciously rebuilding, reconfiguring political landscape into which Socrates was born.

  Today Socrates’ deme, Alopeke, still keeps an old-world village feel. Only a twenty-five-minute walk from the city centre, it has wild snapdragons growing on the verges. A few traditional mud-brick houses cling onto the hillside. They will be replaced soon, by developers keen to buy the ‘air space’ above such prime plots of real estate. Alopeke is not a rich district. After heavy rains, bearded men – a little shamefacedly – still scour the grassy banks in search of snails to flesh out the family meal. Many of the elderly Athenians and refugees here have reached the end of a line.

  But at Socrates’ birth this was a territory with much to look forward to.

  In 469 BC Athens was a small place in a vast land-mass. Rich and strategically placed, the city had already attracted the unwelcome attention of the unforgiving Persian Empire. In late August 480 BC, 301 Spartans, at the front of a combined Greek force (6,000 or so), had held up King Xerxes and his army at the ‘Hot Gates’, the pass of Thermopylae, until all had fallen or fled – in the last instance the men fighting with bare hands and biting teeth. But then the Persian army advanced through Attica. They scorched the earth as they travelled, entrapping floundering civilians in their path in a net of soldiers, enslaving or slaughtering those they had caught. Towards the end of September9 they reached the Acropolis itself and climbed up the archaic steps and red-limestone rock there, and then torched the place. Wooden structures roared and hissed to the ground, the archaic Temple of Athena toppled, split and ripped. Today you can still see the traumatised kouroi – beautiful, enigmatic statues of young boys – whose stone skin has been blistered, buckled and singed in the Persian inferno.

  But there was the chance of a reprieve. In 483 BC slaves working under ground up to 4 miles deep through the rock in low hills to the south of Athens at Laurion had discovered a gift from the gods that demonstrated that the Athenians were ‘favoured’: the treasure, silver-bearing seams of lead. Overnight the city became cash-rich. This could have been a get-rich-quick opportunity – a chance for poor Athenian citizens to nudge their way out of poverty, for the well-to-do to become wealthier still. But one man, the general Themistocles, stood in front of the Athenian Assembly and proposed a far-sighted plan. Rather than enjoy the windfall then and there, he suggested something radical – that Athens should turn her face south, to the sea: she should become a sea-power, a ‘thalassocrat’, a ruler of the waves like those heroes of old that trim across the lines of Homer. And just as he was cogitating this grand plan, the Oracle at Delphi proved itself very obliging. A cryptic message told Athenians to put their trust in wooden walls. What walls? Where? the demos cried. The wooden fence around the sacred Acropolis, perhaps? No, says Themistocles; the Oracle refers to those walls which decorate the seas – the sap-curved timber of a fleet.

  Despite initial scepticism, Themistocles’ passion won the day. He commissioned 200 new triremes, first for flight, then to fight, and at a stroke turned landlubbers into ‘seafaring men’ (thalassioi).10 The quavering Athenians certainly needed help. Xerxes’ Persian force, glowering in the east, intent on invasion, was credited as being the most massive in human history: 1.7 million according to contemporary sources; 250,000 in a more sober modern estimate. Whichever number, this was an overwhelming body of soldiers – a seemingly unstoppable juggernaut. This was the army that had joined Europe and Asia by building a bridge across the Hellespont made of boats bound with clod-earth and brushwood. These were the men that had gouged a canal through the thick peninsula that points south into the Mediterranean and today bears the independent ecclesiastical state of Mount Athos. Some eye-witnesses stammered that the Persian leader, Xerxes, who commanded such monstrous, shape-shifting acts of the landscape, must be Zeus himself in disguise.11

  The Persians could never be beaten with Greek brawn; Greek nous, however, might have a chance. And so early in autumn – the month of September for us, Pyanepsion in the Athenian calendar – the Persian forces, by now camped dangerously close on the fringes of Attica, were tempted into what would turn out to be the beginning of their military endgame.

  The entire population of Athens – all, that is, except the priestesses, treasurers and trembling lingerers who had holed themselves up on the Acropolis (and were then slaughtered or burned alive as the Temple of Athena was torched) – had been evacuated to the Peloponnese or to the nearby island of Salamis. Well over 100,000 had been moved. Children were whimpering, women sweated with effort and fear. In this refugee crowd were many of the men who might have the chance to make Athens great: a teenage Pericles (almost certainly) was here, so too the dramatist Sophocles.

  They were lines of snails in an electric storm. Families had with them some treasures, some grain. Their homes had been incinerated, everything was broken or looted. This was a sad, a debased moment. With the city of Athens still smouldering, all Athenians could do was watch and wait. The odds were heavily weighted against them. Enslavement, slaughter, rape seemed almost certain. Only if by some miracle – or, many must have thought, by the intervention of Athena herself – if the Greek plan worked, would they be able to take themselves and their families back to their cindered city.12

  But that day Olympian deities, and particularly, it seemed, the gods of the wind, were listing towards the Athenian side. The straits of Salamis are a scant mile wide. If one climbs up the rocky white cliffs – where Xerxes himself sat to watch the battle – and stares down, the waters look little more than an inlet, a lake better suited to pleasure-boats. Salamis sits obstructively in between. However vast your head-count, at any one time, only a limited number of soldiers can fight here. The few Persian ships that entered were blown sideways. Fat, broadside bellies of the boats were presented to the Greeks. The warships started to cluster like leaves in a puddle. A frenzy of ramming followed. With the bottle-nosed metal bolt attached to the front of every ship, the Greeks splintered the guts of their enemies. Those men that didn’t drown were skewered in the shallows. Screams echoed across the seas, the rocks slipped and shone with still-pulsing half-humans. Waters flushed with Greek and with Persian blood.

  And then a sharp, sweet call cut through the air. The Greeks were celebrating their victory with a flute paean. A monumental statue would be set up in Delphi, 17½ feet high, holding the stern-post of a captured Persian warship. Blocks of stone would be inscribed and erected throughout the city, declaring that Western liberty could, and should, triumph over Eastern tyranny.

  The defeat of such a gargantuan enemy ignited Athens. For seven long decades the Persians had been flexing their muscles, stealing Greek allies, marching through Greek lands, tempting Greeks to their side with the promise of riches beyond their wildest dreams.13 And now overnight this attitudinal, radical little territory of Athens had become (by recalling exiles, empowering hoplite soldiers, training in new skills and – hands butchered with blisters and splinters – knocking out two triremes a week) the city of the invincible. The Athenians set about rebuilding their homes, and building up their reputation and their wondrous city-state.

  Now Athens’ name was spoken of in village squares across the diaspora. Spirits were flying high. In simple rooms throughout the city officials wrapped themselves in their best cloaks to travel to Asia Minor, Thrace and Egypt to bear the good news that Athens had taken on the job of uniting the eastern Mediterranean against its enemies. Because Athens was now a maritime power, she seemed like a natural leader against an enemy that invaded by sea and land. Two years on, Athenian pre-eminence was officially recognised on the sacred, Cycladic island of Delos. In the winter of 478 BC Athenians were declared leaders of (what we call) the ‘Delian League’. Allied states paid tribu
te in thanks. Money started to pour into Athenian territory. Greek unity brightened the economic glow of the eastern Mediterranean. The defeat of the ‘dog-barbarians from the East’ had energised the city.

  And just over ten years after the Salamis triumph, Socrates is born. If you subscribed to the common Greek belief that your name gave you your character, then you would know that this baby boy was sos – ‘safe’, ‘very sound’ (sos gives us our word so; this book is so long) and kratos, ‘powerful’, ‘gripping’. So-krates’ secure nomination was perhaps the heartfelt wish of a mother and father, Phaenarete and Sophroniscus, who had lived through brutal, troubled, bloody times. A mother and father who yearned for a more secure future for their boy-child.14

  So as Socrates mewled in his crib, this was chisel-time in Athens. Building projects were in train the length and breadth of the city. In the year of his birth, the north citadel wall of the Acropolis was constructed; the Peisianaktios (later the Stoa Poikile – the Painted Stoa) had its foundations laid on the edge of the Agora. The impressive harbour-complex of Piraeus was only twenty years old. Sculptors and stone-workers splintered and then smoothed limestone and marble to incarnate vital totems of the Greek world: plump, life-size toddlers prayed to a goddess of fertility, the goat-legged Pan-god was given his clambering cloven-hooves, ranks of hoplite stone soldiers marched to war and mourning young wives were draped on funeral pyres.

  We are told that Socrates’ father, limed, dusty, was one of the stonemasons in the hammering city.15 A man kept busy and in pocket by the ‘can-do’ spirit of the day. Alopeke and its neighbouring districts – from that day to this – have a reputation as a zone where marble-masons live.16 At the bottom of the hill the masons are still there, cottage-industry-compact, displaying their wares around the gates of the modern city’s First Cemetery. Today their work is decorative – comforting the bereaved who want to do honour to the twenty-first-century dead with hand-carved sparkling stone. But in the fifth century BC, the stone-worker was the creature who would build brand-Athens.