Socrates’ penchant for straggly hair and irregular baths was very Spartan. Like the men of Sparta, he preferred to walk through his city-state shoeless. He is referred to as a ‘Spartan hound’25 (like Spartan dogs, famed for their keen scenting abilities, Socrates could ‘sniff out’ the truth), and being lakonomanea, ‘Sparta-mad’. One of the philosopher’s closest friends, Cimon, calls his son Lacedaimonius. Socrates’ fascination with Spartan mores will come to be mistaken for a love of their politics. Within two decades the philosopher and his circle will be denounced as lovers of Sparta – as ‘laconophiles’.
Athena’s city was troubled by Sparta for another reason too. There were many in Athens itself who secretly thought Sparta’s adherence to the old, oligarchic way of doing things was laudable. For centuries – possibly for millennia – Greek society had promoted the idea that the powerful were powerful because they were the gods’ chosen ones; they had not only a divine right to rule, but ruled because they boasted god-given gifts: status, courage, physical beauty, manly virtue. From the day of Socrates’ birth to the minute of his death, many Athenians, either overtly or in private, hankered after the Spartans’ sure sense of social order.
This tension between oligarchs and democrats, between aristocrats and the people, charged Athenian politics and culture, and infected its very atmosphere. And Socrates would be both an exemplar and a victim of Athens’ great dilemma: in a true democracy, where power and responsibility are shared equally amongst all citizens, what is the place not just of the good, but of the very great?
And what about the city’s tolerance – the ‘forgiving nature of democracy’? Its ‘don’t care’ about trifles? It utterly despises the things we took so seriously when we were founding our city, namely, that unless someone had a transcendently natural talent, he’d never become good unless he played the right games and followed a fine – a beautiful and a joyful – way of life from early childhood? Isn’t it magnificent the way it tramples all this underfoot, by giving no thought to what someone was doing before he entered public life and by honouring him if only he professes to be the ‘people’s friend’?26
As time goes on, the ideology of Athens’ brand of collectivism – demokratia – comes to be set against Sparta’s own brand of high-achieving communalism, and so a fascination with Sparta is estimated anti-Athenian activity. And yet – despite the political temperature of the times – it is a half-Spartan boy, with a Spartan name and nursed at a Spartan breast, who will from here on in be Socrates’ earthly love. A boy who will bring him much trouble. A boy called Alcibiades.
Born in 450 BC, Alcibiades was, following the death of his father Cleinias, an orphan by the age of four. But this child was not destined to be destitute – he would not end up abandoned (bone evidence from the period suggests this was not uncommon practice), for he had blue-blood, he was in fact a relative of the great General Pericles, and he was made a ward of this, the most powerful man in all Athena’s city. He was wet-nursed by a Spartan woman – fashionable in those days, as Spartans were thought to be, physically, the lustiest of breeds – and, with Spartan relatives, Alcibiades was a character in the fifth-century BC play of democracy, with a foot in both the Montague and the Capulet camps. Raised in Pericles’ halls from the age of seven, allowed to join the meetings of high minds that Pericles sponsored (thus enjoying an upbringing starkly unlike those of his seven-year-old Spartan cousins in the agoge down south), Alcibiades may well have first been met by Socrates as an indulged, mop-headed youngster, a beautiful boy.
Alcibiades appears one of those charmed individuals. He was, by all accounts, striking. Five hundred years after his death, authors such as Plutarch were still entranced by the idea of him – he was written of extensively throughout antiquity.27 A Roman-period mosaic still on display in the Sparta Museum captures what men thought so lovely about him. Alcibiades is a latter-day Adonis – all flowing golden locks, a fine profile and with androgynously smooth skin.28 He lisped sensuously, he loved women, girls, men, boys, dogs. He paraded through the Agora trailing a long purple cloak. A contrapunto character, he matured to be everything that Socrates was not: brash, feckless, loud-mouthed, debauched. Indeed, the relationship between the two men incarnates symptoms of both Golden Age Athens and Socratic thought; the struggle between personal liberty and social ambition; the relationship between the physical and the spiritual, between inner and outer beauty; the difficulty in identifying the true form of the good life.
Theirs was a testing, paradoxical match. But of all the long-lashed, bright-eyed, honed and eager young men of the Athenian city, it was Alcibiades – with his oligarchic, Spartan blush – who would endure as Socrates’ favourite.
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PADDLING IN THE RIVER, SWEATING IN THE GYM: SOCRATIC YOUTH
The River Ilissos, 450–399 BC
He [Socrates] did not neglect his body, and he did not praise those who neglected theirs.
Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1. 2. 41
HOW CRUSTED WITH DIRT MOST ATHENIANS must have been; snotty-nosed kids, hormone-stinking teenagers, veterans with ulcerating wounds, men matt with the patina of pollution, droplets of sweat briefly cleaning grimy skin – all physical joys of living in the urban centres of the eastern Mediterranean. What pleasure then to be made clean.2
Socrates, from youth through to old age, was often to be found at the south-east face of the city walls, at the edge of the River Ilissos. Here he would talk with young men – paddle with them (as Plato has Phaedrus point out, the philosopher has the advantage as he always has bare feet) and, after a long walk, stretch out on a bank cushioned with grass, shaded by a spreading plane tree and a fragrant, flowering willow. Here there are chasteberry bushes and cult statues, the breeze is cool and cicadas fill the air with their almost unbearably heady percussion.
PHAEDRUS: I am fortunate, it seems, in being barefoot; you are always so. It is easiest then for us to go along the brook with our feet in the water, and it is not unpleasant, especially at this time of the year and the day.3
This pretty, pastoral stretch – running half a mile downstream – was a deeply ancient district, an area sacred since the Bronze Age. There were many sanctuaries here, many shrines. Religious processions regularly wound around the rocks and rivulets. One of Athens’ most powerful and recondite festivals, the Great Eleusinian Mysteries, had its dress rehearsal by the banks of the river; priests of Eleusis (always from the same dynastic families), called in Greek the mystagogos, coached ‘mystery’ candidates in the mysteria on the banks of the Ilissos in March. These ‘Lesser Mysteries’ promised to open one of life’s greatest secrets to their participants. All the best (and richest) families of Athens tried to ensure they could take part. Thanks to the Eleusinian Mysteries, an Athenian looked both forwards and back: back to a time when the best men, a select and privileged group, had power and also forward to an epoch when life after death seemed a possibility. This is a particularly fascinating aspect of Athens’ new democracy – as men started to realise their mortal potential on earth, they were ever keener to believe that life continued beyond the grave. Socrates too (via Plato) hints that men who are good in this life can go on to enjoy a ‘goodness’ in a life beyond.
Death is one of two things. Either it is an annihilation and the dead have no consciousness, or, as we are told, it is a change, a migration of the soul from one place to another.4
Coming to the Ilissos must therefore have been a rich experience: typical of life in Athens, where a sensuous spirituality and a brisk belief in the sacred importance of the new democratic polis collided. Typical of Socrates’ life as it is unfolding, where deep thought and a vigorous engagement in day-to-day life sit happily side by side. Water eddied and gurgled here, collecting in rockpools, gushing down through pint-sized chasms. Of course Socrates knew this spot like the back of his hand; familiar territory, he would have passed it regularly on the 25–30-minute route in – from his old deme of Alopeke to Athens’ rammed city centre.
SO
CRATES: By Hera, it is a charming resting place …
PHAEDRUS: You are an amazing and most remarkable person. For you really do seem exactly like a stranger who is being guided about, and not like a native.5
Often quoted as proof that Socrates had eyes only for urban matters and the city centre itself, this particular line in one of Plato’s Dialogues is surely a character insight; Socrates drinks in the delights of the banks of the Ilissos, this habitual place, as if it is new to him. The clear-sighted are noted for looking on the world every day as if with new eyes.
In Socrates’ day many gathered here at the side of Athens’ other river. Even though the water’s flow is now underground – the river was converted to a sewer in the 1950s – and the scrub is flanked by screaming arterial roads, young men still do so today. One wonders if these obliging individuals realise they are perpetuating a millennia-old tradition.
Lucky the lover who gets a workout when he arrives home
Sleeping all day with a beautiful boy.6
Socrates’ Ilissos
The banks of the Ilissos were indeed an area where some of the famous ‘pick-up’ points of classical Athens were situated – somewhere Socrates (always full-blooded in his enjoyment of the physical pleasures of being human) would have ‘exercised himself’. At present, the area shows scarcely any signs of Socrates’ city. The most obvious ‘classical’ stones are in the fifth century BC’s future: the dizzyingly high temple columns erected by Hadrian to honour a Roman Olympian Zeus and, of course, his imperial self. But if you know where to look, there are hints of a more organic and Hellenic classical past.
A careful exploration of the district short-circuits the investigator back to a landscape that Socrates himself inhabited. Muffle out the noise of the modern city, keep your eyes to the ground and it can seem possible to be in two times at once. To the east of the Ilissos plunges a chasm where honey-soaked cakes were once thrown. This was believed by Socrates’ peers to follow the route of the last waters of the Great Flood – sent by Zeus and braved by the Greek Noah, Deucalion. Underneath a rocky outcrop, still visible, are the foundation walls and the pebble floor of a court where innocent and guilty manslaughterers and adulterers were tried.7
Light industry was here too. In a busy city there are many vested interests. Free-flowing water and deep pools might equal rural idyll for some, but industrialists also saw their opportunity, and just above the Sanctuary of Herakles, as Socrates strolled here, tanners were moving in. Tanning is a disgusting business involving human urine and much scraping of dead flesh. Along with roughly cleaned skins, entire animal carcasses were imported to the Athenian tanning yards. Some carcasses came from as far afield as the Black Sea and Cyrene in North Africa – the smell here of decomposing flesh must have been horrific. Socrates and his peers used leather extensively: for clothing, military equipment, agricultural implements and as hides to cover seats and benches – the demand for leather goods was high; the scale of production in this particular spot by the river banks intense. Hides were pegged out on the ground and then treated with mulberry leaves or urine to ‘sweat’ out or ‘un-hair’ the skin. Sometimes dog faeces were used to ‘purify’ the leather. Surviving complaints from elsewhere in antiquity indicate just what a rank and stinking business this was (Roman citizens frequently brought legal cases against those tanners who polluted the air with their foul fumes). In Aristophanes’ comedy The Knights a famous tanner (and politician) of the day, Cleon, is mocked as ‘the dung-stirrer’.8 A decree from 420 BC – recently discovered near the Lysikrates Monument – forbade tanners from rinsing their bloodied hides here above the spring, sacred to Kallirrhoe.9 The fact that Byzantine and Ottoman tanners still productively, and profitably, manned the site 2,000 years after Socrates had been poisoned at the behest of the democratic Athenian state is an indication of how high tempers must have run when the fifth-century skin-merchants were put under the squeeze.
What is a great shame is that one of the key fifth-century BC attractions here, the ‘bastards’ gym – Kynosarges on the Ilissos’ south bank – was cannibalised by the Emperor Valerian’s rebuilding of the city walls from AD 254 (his defence against Teutonic tribes). Just beyond the perimeter walls, through the Diomeian Gate, Kynosarges was one of Socrates’ haunts:
While he was on his way to the Kynosarges and getting near the Ilissos, he heard the voice of someone shouting, ‘Socrates, Socrates!’ When he turned around to find out where it was coming from, he saw Clinias, the son of Axiochus.10
Although the gym itself has been lost to time, the roadway that led to the area has recently been excavated. It is along this very track that Socrates would have walked to the Kynosarges district.11 To get to the gym you would have had to cross the rills and rivulets of the Ilissos. Wooden planks bridged the fissured rocks and the man-made trenches that edged the running tracks. So we can imagine Socrates here, a young man, and then an older one, making his way towards one of the hubs of Athenian athletic activity, participating, spectating, indulging in the Greeks’ particular fascination with the formation of the beautiful human body.
While the river here has hardly changed its course since the Bronze Age, and naturalised parakeets above and chamomile carpets beneath remind you that this would have been a corner of the city where you could exhale a little, now the running track is pounded by four-lane traffic and the exercise grounds are squashed beneath ugly commercial enterprises, the showrooms of a motorbike dealer and Eurobank. So if we are to walk with Socrates here, we must employ both the archaeological and literary sources available, and our imaginations.
The Kynosarges gym complex boasted a 200-yard course for sprinting, and there would have been the usual exercise grounds, plus perhaps a zone for military practice – although in fact the Kynosarges seems to have been less of a focus for military training than the other gymnasia of the city. Herakles was worshipped here – and as a result, years later, Spartan invaders were drawn to the place12 (Herakles was Sparta’s hero-in-chief). Before each exercise session libations would be poured to the semi-divine hero. In Socrates’ day, even exercise was considered a religious experience. And keeping himself physically as well as mentally fit, emphasising that we are creatures of flesh and blood as well as of the spirit, would become one of Socrates’ grounding principles. As a young man, he would have honed his body as well as his mind, and like the other young men around him, he would have spent many of his waking hours training to fight, in order to defend his city-state from invaders and to acquire new lands for his fellow citizens.
15
GYM-HARDENED FIGHTING MEN
The Academy, the Lyceum, 450–399 BC
He was exceptionally handsome and exceptionally big, in that lovely season of life when men pass out of the ranks of Boys and into the ranks of Men, blossoming most pleasantly. Naked, wearing neither armour nor clothing, covered in nothing but oil, he took a spear in one hand and in the other a sword …
Plutarch, Agesilaus, 34.71
PLATO TELLS US THAT SOCRATES VISITED Kynosarges later in his life, so we don’t know whether this was the space he used as a young man (after all, it was his local), or whether his regular gym was the (now more famous) Academy or Lyceum exercise grounds.
Plato certainly talks about the philosopher being doorstepped on the road between the Academy and the Lyceum, and that at the Lyceum itself in later life Socrates spoke, surrounded by an eager crowd.2 Here Socrates sat in a dressing room (literally an ‘un-dressing room’), there were a covered track, showers for athletes and a series of allegorical paintings around the walls. There was also a sense of rus in urbe; the fact that the Lyceum was dedicated to Apollo Lykeios – ‘Wolfish’ Apollo – indicates how bosky this part of Athens had once been.
This bucolic zone, where the men of Athens practised both physical and mental gymnastics, beautifully described in Aristophanes’ play Clouds, had much in store; in the Academy, Plato would set up his school of philosophy, and in the Lyceum, Aristotle, his pupil, a r
ival. The modern world is populated by academics, academies and lycées thanks to these two institutions.
Now the Lyceum lies under the National Gardens. Originally designed in 1836 as a personal arboretum for Queen Amalia after the Greek War of Independence, its exotic plants have grown jungle-tall – a welcome relief in the city’s midsummer heat. Toddlers in buggies are pushed along sandy paths to look at a city zoo that has seen better days; children – the sons and daughters of both shipping money and Albanian street-kids alike – play on swings: the overweight of the city jog, painfully, around the perimeter. It is a bit shabby and very pleasant here. But like the Academy, currently battling to be remembered beneath a pox of badly planned light-industrial units dealing in scrap metal, scrap plastic, wrought-iron gates, guarded by dogs and gypsy boys and hemmed in by the River Kephisos – today little more than a channel for (illegally dumped) industrial waste that flows in a toxic stream out to the Saronic Gulf – these once-idyllic spots could today scarcely inspire the purple (comic) poetry of Aristophanes:
RIGHT ARGUMENT: … Spend your time in the gymnasium – get sleek and healthy. You don’t want to be the sort of chap who’s always in the Agora telling stories about other people’s sex lives, or in the courts arguing about some piffling, quibbling, filthy little dispute. No, you’ll run off to the Academy and relax under the sacred olive trees, a wreath of pure white flowers on your head, with a decent well-mannered companion or two; and you’ll share the fragrance of leafy poplar and carefree convolvulus, and the joys of spring, when the plane tree whispers her love to the elm!
The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life Page 15