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

by Bettany Hughes

  So, Socrates’ father, Sophroniscus, would have been in demand. The exquisite ‘mourning Athena’ relief was carved, the Klepsydra Fountain was sunk on the north-west slopes of the Acropolis, a bronze Athena Promachos was cast by master-artist Pheidias. The round dining-chamber, the Tholos, reminiscent of warrior-kings’ tombs from the Age of Heroes, the Late Bronze Age, was erected in the Agora so that fifty councillors at a time could be given a square meal for their pains.17 The population of Athens started to grow, and by the time of Socrates’ death it would have increased fivefold. People flocked to the district. Modest, basic homes started to crowd the streets of Athens.

  Illuminating the buildings came genius; a current of creativity that sped through the lanes and streets. Visual artists had the financial sponsors and the psychological support of a hopeful city. Two bronze ‘tyrant slayers’, Harmodios and Aristogeiton, became permanent inhabitants of the Agora; these statues which replaced originals stolen by Xerxes are the earliest examples of monumental political art from antiquity. Pheidias carved the exquisitely detailed Athena Lemnia, a forerunner to his massive gilded Athena in the Parthenon.

  In modelling and sculpture, by what is the spectator most overcome? Is it not by the fairest and most magnificent statues, the ones which have achieved the limits of perfection in these matters? The Olympian Zeus, the Athena at Athens …18

  The home-grown talent was matched by adventurers from the north and by craftsmen from the south and east. The master-painter Polygnotos arrived from Thasos and conjured up pounding horses and Amazons in the Stoa Poikile, the Painted Stoa, as did a rival painter, Agatharchos of Samos.19 The philosopher Protagoras of Abdera was here; the sculptor Kresilas from Cydonia in north-west Crete worked in Athens; Democritus came from Thrace too – he whose mind gave the atom its name, a particle so tiny it is a-tomos, in-divisible. An extraordinary thing – to imagine and name something 2,500 years before it can be seen.20 A bit of a local celebrity up north, ‘in the streets of Athens,’ Democritus would say, ‘no one knows who I am!’21 Aristotle from Stageira will travel this way too. Athens is an expanding pond crammed with big fish.

  From infancy, Socrates would have glimpsed the capabilities of man and of the men around him.

  And then when the boy Socrates was just two, an extraordinary thing. A celestial event that would be the talk of the town for years to come: a massive meteorite blazed through the sky and crashed to earth close to the Hellespont at a place called Aegospotami.22 Some fields were burned – but, unusually, the Greeks did not all wail that this was the wrath of the gods. One of the rogue philosophers in Athena’s city, Anaxagoras, would soon amuse others with his crazy theories – that the stars and planets were not heavenly creatures, but rock-hot masses. His belief seemed to have willed evidence out of the sky itself. The reformer-general-politician, Pericles, one of the rising stars of the new democratic city, started to take serious note of the theories – suddenly all sorts of wild, provocative ideas were a possibility.

  So we should picture Socrates as a youngster. Riding on his mother’s shoulders; being beaten for bad behaviour by his father (years later Plato has him referring to a truant running away from his pa);23 at the age of three being listed on the ‘he’s-one-of-us’ phratries24 list – celebrating along with other three-year-olds at the festival of the Anthesteria. We see these Athenian minors on diminutive vases and cups in children’s graves: pulling one another along in carts, pinging pebbles into pots, catching birds, playing with a stick and ball. Being children – for those who survived – and also becoming an essential part of the community.

  At this time in history, death was something associated not with the old, but with the young. Socrates is one of the minority who weathers the illnesses that, in the fifth century BC, laid low three out of five children in Athens. The Persians stayed in the East, and young Socrates was not slaughtered, as so many from the generation before him had been, in a pitiless raid. His childhood was unusually calm. He and his deme-mates had time to play; jointed dolls were popular, as were astragaloi, knucklebones (discovered in a number of digs, jumbled on the earth as they would be on the mud floor of an Ancient Greek’s hut), or, if you could afford them, dice, identical to those we use today – all favourite time-wasters for Athens’ upcoming generation.

  The boy Socrates would almost certainly have had an education. Typically the slave-tutor, the paidagogos, was a constant companion of young Athenians25 – and, like the other sun-browned kids around him, Socrates would have watched as, down the lanes and footpaths, artisans and scientists, astrologers, painters, sculptors, quacks, slave-dealers and spice merchants all started to pace along arterial routes into the city, into the magnet that ‘violet-crowned’26 Athens had become.

  So, for a Greek boy, an ordinary start to life in a place of quite extraordinary energy.

  Yet if we believe our sources, there always seems to have been something that set Socrates slightly apart. It may just be hagiography, wishful thinking with hindsight, but the story goes that Socrates was somehow ‘different’ – savant-ish. His father went so far as to ask the Oracle at Delphi how he should deal with his eccentric son. The Oracle was laissez-faire: let the boy do ‘whatever came into his mind and not to constrain or divert his motivations but let them be’27 Heads down and keep out of trouble, the best way for a run-of-the-mill Athenian family to behave. All Sophroniscus had to do was to pray to Zeus of the Agora and the Muses: make sure he was keeping on the right side of the Olympians and their sidekicks. This was still an age – despite its democratic verve – when it paid not to attract too much attention to yourself. Those who became great and good frequently found themselves the victims of whispering campaigns; or, worse, were exiled from the city.

  But ‘safe’ Socrates may have had less taste for anonymity and the status quo. Already, or so our existing sources tell us, an immature philosopher had started to interrogate the world he found himself in. Throughout his life he would make the question the thing. ‘The only virtue is knowledge, the only evil ignorance’.28 ‘An unexamined life is not worth living’29 This lime-dusted, gently paced suburb of Alopeke was not, it seems, big enough for an enquiring mind. Socrates had to find his sparring partners.

  The next we hear of him is pursuing knowledge – on the wrong side of the tracks, in Athens’ downtown district, its suburbs of sin.

  10

  KERAMEIKOS – POTTERS AND BEAUTIFUL BOYS

  Outside Athens’ city walls, 450 BC

  Moreover Socrates was the first to call philosophy down from the sky.

  Socrates autem primus philosophiam devocavit e caelo.

  Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 5.10

  GOLDEN AGE ATHENS WAS SURROUNDED by antiquity’s equivalent of a ring of steel: an encircling building programme of walls 3¾ miles long that buttressed the city, and then remarkably by 452 BC reached out for 15 miles to link Athens with its sister city – the downtown port district of Piraeus – the city-harbour that gave Athens an ocean-mouth.1

  The building material used for construction was ‘Persian rubble’ – the remains of the city that the Persians had tried to destroy. The builders were ordinary men, women, children and slaves, all survivors who had staggered back home after the Persian nightmare had ended with the wake-up call of Salamis.2 Athenians were fervent; they never wanted to suffer such carnage again. And so an ambitious construction programme began. Athens started to resemble the great cities of the Near East – Babylon, Nineveh – superstates protected by a defensive statement visible for miles around. Yet whereas Babylon’s walls were blue-brick glazed, and Nineveh’s carved with fantastical visions of paradisiacal gardens, it is clear that Athens’ walls were put up in a hurry.3 All kinds of debris ended up squashed in amongst the masonry blocks: chips of tombs, law decrees, broken pots.4 Scrabbling to put something concrete between themselves and atrocity, the Athenians used what they could lay their hands on to keep Athens fortress-safe.

  The protection offered by strong wall
s was written into the literature and psyche of the period. The philosopher Heraclitus from Ephesus in Asia Minor declared, ‘The people should fight for the law as for their city wall.’ A study of the texts of the Old Testament drives home the horror of city walls tumbling down: ‘I have wiped out many nations, devastating their fortress walls and towers. Their cities are now deserted; their streets are in silent ruin. There are no survivors to even tell what happened.’5 And Yahweh thunders, ‘I will reduce the wicked to heaps of rubble.’6 The Athenians had no intention of enduring such a reduction and so they hand-lifted one block up onto another. The project was completed with all the subtlety of a juggernaut; houses, roadways, olive groves were swept aside. Athens saw that without a bullish defence system and permanent, controlled access to the port at Piraeus, she remained just another land-locked city-state, a beached sitting duck.

  Because although Athens had become head of the Delian League, even though her boatyards were filled with the sleek ‘wooden walls’ of the Delphic Oracle, and despite the fact that she had brought a new word – ‘democracy’ – to the world and had sent the Persians packing, she was not universally loved.

  CORINTH: Keep it in mind that a tyrant city has been set up in Greece, and it has been set up against all of us alike; some of us it rules already, the rest it plans to add to its empire.7

  As well as the flattering epithet ‘violet-crowned’, at this time Athens garnered herself another: ‘busybody Athens’. Without the common enemy of Persia as a clear and present danger, the city-states started to notice who amongst them had best picked themselves up and dusted themselves down. There was no doubt that Athens deserved that particular laurel. As well as mutterings from the Corinthians, the Spartans too (down in Lakonia in the Peloponnese) were none too happy with the reports that protective walls were rising from the Attic plain.8 Sparta despised walls. Plutarch tells us that the Spartans boasted proudly that ‘our young men are our city walls, their battlements the tips of our spears’.9 About 75 per cent of all Greek city-states had some form of enclosing wall by the time of Socrates’ death. An extravagantly walled city takes on a mythic quality – it declares it can never be assailed. Athenians must have suspected that their building programme would antagonise the other superstate of the region, Sparta, but they had no intention of relenting. By 478 BC the city-wall fortifications were complete. Socrates was born outside the cordon of a truculently, hermetically sealed state.

  By the time Socrates was nineteen, Athens had been fully democratic for just twelve years.10 So as the philosopher grew up, democracy too was beginning to ripen. Democracy was a strange, bold, radical experiment.11 And, like all good experiments, it could yield the best results under stringent conditions. Athens hardly constituted an open society. The radical developments in the city were very recent, very raw. Its enemies were still only a morning’s march away. The city built a cucumber-frame around its tender shoots. It became fiercely protective. Outside were foreigners, journeymen, the demi-monde. Inside were citizens, stakeholders. Golden Age Athens was truly a fortress city. Crenellated towers and battlements, at least 40 feet high, kept the haves apart from the have-nots.

  Walk due north-west from the Acropolis today and one finds one of the most exciting ongoing Athenian archaeological digs – in that dangerous space beyond the mortar shield. The road to this, the Kerameikos district, still has a marginal feel. Moustachioed, toothless men play backgammon; there is an apologetic flea-market, where old magazines nestle up to older knives, but even the vendors recognise that most of what they sell is tat and abandon it to the dustmen when it rains.

  It is this literally edgy district that can give us many clues to Socrates’ life. Imagine approaching Athens not from the usual direction – via the writings of proud Athenians or self-confessed Atheno-philes – but instead from outside in. From afar the Acropolis, crowned with monumental temples and sanctuaries, dominated the skyline, as it does now. Closer in, the city’s stench (no sewage system, no rubbish collection here) and its lime-polished patrolled defences (wide enough for troops to march along) would have announced that civilisation was close at hand. Here entry to the city was via a scrappy shantytown and through monumental double-gates.

  The walls and the north-west Dipylon gate with its interior courtyard, 130 feet deep, covering in total 2,160 square yards – the largest gateway in the Ancient World, cut right across an ancient district. A fountain here was used to refresh and cleanse travellers before they entered the city. Named for the divinity Kerameus (his name means potter), this liminal area was colonised by eponymous craftsmen. The potmakers of the Kerameikos gave us the thing that, for many, defines the classical world: the Greek vase. We inadvertently honour their efforts, and Kerameus, each time we talk of ‘ceramics’.

  The Kerameikos must have been a gaudy, stinking, pulsating place: a place you came to celebrate both life and death. The River Eridanos flowed freely here; now reduced to a boggy, subterranean trickle. Tortoises amble purposefully above the ghost of the river.12 Leaving the city, through its own door in the city walls, the river-water in Socrates’ day was soiled and rank. But still the brown liquid stream was used to feed bathhouses, popular ones. The playwright Aristophanes declares, with a nudge and wink, a ‘sausage-seller’ (double entendre intended) here ‘sells sausages of mashed up dog and ass meat, knocks back the booze, and trades insults with the whores, slaking his thirst with the used, dirty water from the baths’.13

  When the young Socrates ambled through this district he would have found plenty of whores available to josh with: the Kerameikos supported scores of prostitutes, operating in what were often described in the Greek as ‘factories’ or ‘fuck-factories’. Walking through the excavations today, you can still see their stalls. Tussock-grass and wild lupins grow here and all is open to the sky. But the squashed footprint of the buildings forces the imagination: rows of women, weaving clothes their day-job, busier still at night. A chunky silver medallion found in the corner of one of the rooms bears a plump ‘laughter-loving’ Aphrodite riding on a goat through a star-studded night sky, and is an honest indicator of the bawdy nature of the place 2,500 years ago.14

  One fourth-century source describing Athens’ red-light district tells us that ‘women sunbathe with bare breasts, stripped for action in semi-circular ranks; and from among these women you can select whichever one you like: thin, fat, round, tall, short, young, old, middle-aged or past it’.15 Females of all hues too: many prostitutes were enslaved during military campaigns in Thrace, Syria and Asia Minor. These captives (not allowed into Athens itself) became an exotic fringe to the city. Women plucked and singed off their pubic hair to be ready to suit any sexual tastes. Men rocked up for a quick session ‘in the sack’; or, as the Athenians would have put it, ‘middle-of-the-day marriages’. Male flesh was, of course, available. Aeschines describes boys lined up, ‘sitting in stalls’.16 In years to come, it would be one of these stall-boys – a fallen aristocrat from Elis called Phaedo – who allowed Socrates to stroke his soft hair while the philosopher waited for death. Some prostitutes in the Kerameikos were brought so low even slaves could afford them: one obol a shag.

  Love, sex, death, it was all here. From the twelfth century BC onward this had been a burial ground, and in Socrates’ day the main thoroughfare was still lined as far as the eye could see with dressed stone graves – simple affairs, not the showy painted tombs that smelt of aristocratic power, but something more democratic. The dead were listed in tribal groups. A discrete ‘political’ cemetery housed public burials. But still the fallen of all degrees were honoured; orators celebrated the virtues of brave soldiers. Specially organised athletic games sent the dead off to Hades.

  It is this noisy, pleasure-death-ground that Socrates, we are told, frequented as a young man. The Kerameikos is a key clue to his story and to the story of Athens’ Golden Age. These visceral, vacillating lanes, nooks and crannies were his ethical nursery. This is a zone where man’s basic needs, as well as his mor
e elevated tastes, were catered for. Socrates makes it clear that his philosophy comes from observing, and living in, the good, bad and ugly place we humans call home. Despite what the world throws at us, his simple, infuriating, inspiring message is that however mongrel and challenging our surroundings, we should identify and embrace the good, the pleasant in life.

  Tell me: do you agree that there is a kind of good which we would choose to possess, not from desire for its after-effects, but welcoming it for its own sake? As, for example, joy and such pleasures are harmless and nothing results from them afterwards save to have and to hold enjoyment.17

  He used to praise leisure as the most valuable of possessions, as Xenophon tells us in his Symposium.18

  Interestingly, as a young man, Socrates’ enquiries seem to have been not just about the nature of goodness and happiness, but of a more scientific bent. In the Kerameikos the juvenile sage came to learn new things; he spent time, we are told, with the sophists, the professional thinkers who were drawn to Athens like iron filings to a magnet. Their studies were explosive: Was the world round or flat? (Socrates came to the conclusion it was round.) What was air made of? What was the point of the stars? These thinkers’ investigations oriented around phusis – the function of nature.

  SOCRATES: When I was young, Cebes, I was tremendously eager for the kind of wisdom which they call investigation of nature. I thought it was a glorious thing to know the causes of everything, why each thing comes into being and why it perishes and why it exists; … I prized my hopes very highly, and I seized the books very eagerly and read them as fast as I could, so that I might know as fast as I could about the best and the worst.19