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

by Bettany Hughes

  If my sound advice you heed, if you follow where I lead,

  You’ll be healthy, you’ll be strong and you’ll be sleek;

  You’ll have muscles that are thick and a pretty little prick –

  You’ll be proud of your appearance and physique.3

  The fact that Socrates is happy to relax at Kynosarges, as well as the more upmarket Academy and Lyceum, tells us something significant about him. Kynosarges – ‘White Bitch’ gym – was designated for the half-castes of the city. As ever, Socrates does not just inhabit the ‘showcase’ venues of ‘violet-crowned’, ‘show-city’ Athens, but can also be found in its more mongrel spots.

  The Kynosarges gym-goers were all bastard-citizens, metics with only one parent – either a mother or a father – who was a full Athenian citizen.4 In 451 BC Pericles had passed a reform that limited access to Athenian citizenship. Athens was growing more popular and Pericles needed to keep the demos’ power-base manageable; so only those born with both father and mother full Athenian citizens could be fully blown children of Athena. The democratic club was getting smaller. Coming to the gym and endeavouring to make yourself physically perfect, a honed fighting machine, was one important way that these second-class Athenians might prove themselves worthy of the mother city.

  The highest hope of Socrates’ peers, of young Athenian men, was to serve Athens by dying for her. Perceived as a military unit, Athenian eighteen-year-olds, called ephebes, from at least the fourth century BC onwards, swore an oath:

  I shall not disgrace the sacred weapons [that I bear] nor shall I desert the comrade at my side, wherever I stand in the line. And I shall fight in dfence of things sacred and non-sacred and I shall not hand down [to my descendants] a lessened fatherland, but one that is increased in size and strength both as far as [it] lies within me [to do this].5

  This is an oath that Socrates too would have taken. The young men of Athens knew that their job was to defend Athenian interests and expand Athenian territories – and that they had to make their bodies both beautiful and in mint condition in order to do so. Although scant biographical evidence exists for Socrates’ youth, we do know that he fought for Athens between 431 and 422 BC. He possibly started his soldiering career as early as 440 BC. There is no doubt that the young philosopher would have joined his compatriots in the gymnasia to train to fight; and no doubt that this was a sinew-stretching, macho business.

  The young men who worked out in the gymnasia, unlike their Spartan cousins, did this not just to satisfy some kind of pugnacious militaristic ideal.6 Thucydides is explicit. Young men in the Athenian gyms practise with arms because this is state-controlled, regulated activity – a million miles from the dagger-waving, brigand barbarity found elsewhere in Greece. Athens was militarised, but it was not indiscriminately bellicose.7

  The Athenians were the first to give up the habit of carrying weapons and to adopt a way of living that was more relaxed and luxurious.8

  However, there could be exceptions – in one tongue-in-cheek, hypothetical case a contemporary of Socrates, Antiphon, cites a sad instance in one of the city’s exercise grounds, when there had been a fatality as a result of military javelin practice:

  My young lad … was practising the javelin with his classmates and though he did indeed make the throw, he didn’t exactly ‘kill someone’, not strictly speaking … The boy ran into the path of the javelin and put his body in its way … my son is not the perpetrator of an accident but the victim of one, in as much as he was prevented from hitting the target.9

  Beautiful bodies – and Theseus, the most beautiful of all

  Bastards they might be at the Kynosarges, but the trainee soldiers, the gym-goers (gymnasium comes from gumnos, the place where you exercise naked), were still eager to make themselves physically perfect. Socrates exercised regularly in the gym and we do him a disservice if we remember just the grey-haired condemned man by the water-clock and not the hirsute youngster, sweating, working out with his fellow Athenians.

  SOCRATES: I am a fiend for exercise.10

  At the gym and the wrestling grounds, oil, perfumes, fresh fruits, hair unctions were all used. Beauty was considered a quantifiable asset in the Greek city. As time went on, an increasing number of male beauty contests were hosted in the gymnasia. Courage, morality and physique were all judged as one psycho-physical parcel. Developing a beautiful body made you not just fit for posing, but fit to fight. Listen to Plutarch describing the merits of one particular young (Spartan) man:

  … in that lovely season of life when men pass out of the ranks of Boys and into the ranks of Men, blossoming most pleasantly …11

  The downy-chinned athletes at Kynosarges would have remembered the stories of how Theseus – Athens’ special hero – himself arrived in Athens on this very spot; how, in a full-length chiton and with thick plaited hair, he was mistaken for a girl and had to ward off the amorous advances of the builders, heaving masonry blocks and cement to construct Apollo’s temple here. (If the story was true, then Socrates himself as a young man would have bumped into Athens’ founding father – since the classical Temple of Apollo was constructed in around 450 BC!)

  At this time in Athens images of muscle-rippling Theseus would have been hard to avoid. The replication of this master-hero became deeply fashionable. As the democracy gets more of a sense of itself, a place where individual men have the capacity and the right to act like kings, like gods, the irony (of course) is that the adoration of individuals, of ‘the beautiful people’, becomes ever more intense. And so the great deeds of that über-hero Theseus are replicated on the red-figure vases – both cheap tat and the highest quality, by the artisans of the Kerameikos; every year a festival, the Synoikia, celebrates in the month Hekatombaion (May/June) Attic unity and the new system of demes, trittyes and tribes (there were thirty trittyes, divisions of the population, in Attica. Each tribe was composed of one trittys from the coast, one from the city and one from inland) – and Theseus is invoked on the streets as part of the ritual; his domineering presence in Athens is enthusiastically celebrated. Even Theseus’ ‘bones’ are rediscovered at Skyros and reburied in Athena’s own soil.

  All this because, in the minds of the Athenians, Theseus is perfect … He is muscular, ambitious, powerful, brave. With the new democracy that has, in theory, banished the personally ambitious and those squashing, wonder-boy aristocrats, Theseus is now Athens’ ‘virtual’ role-model. This unambiguously macho warrior-hero – credited as the founder of the city – has a cocky aggression and drive to match Athens’ own. A perfect young man of Athens, he loved his body, his city and his gargantuan ambition for both.

  So it is not just ‘wise’ Athena, but Theseus (‘steadfast in battle’, ‘brazen-breastplated’ and ‘protector of Athens’ youth’)12 who succours the city in which Socrates matures. The Athenians’ passionate belief in the value of their own mortal Theseuses – the belligerent, loyal, gorgeous young men of the city – will play out badly for Socrates. He comes to attract young, beautiful men around him as if he is their cult-leader; but Athens is jealous. As we shall see in the next chapter, Athena’s city, boy-mad, sponsors her own cult of the young – and Socrates’ Pied Piper-luring of the young men perturbs many in the juvenile, democratic city-state.

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  ‘GOLDEN AGE’ ATHENS

  The zones of Athens where young men are permitted, c.465–415 BC

  CHREMES: Then we all saw a handsome young man rush into the tribune, he was all pink and white like young Nicias.

  Aristophanes, Ecclesiazusae, 427–91

  WHETHER OR NOT YOU BELIEVE IN ‘golden ages’ per se, Golden Age Athens was so in actual terms. The hair of statues on the streets and public buildings of the city-state was, in Socrates’ lifetime, often highlighted in gilt and yellow paint. Bronze figurative statuary was so profuse that at one stage bronze humans must have appeared to clone themselves around the city streets. (Some argue that these bronzes were cast from life, explaining their hauntingly
realistic appearance.2) Detailed aspects of the human form (nipples, lips, teeth) were picked out in copper and silver. Ivory carvings were gilded. Luminous, gleaming rays of the sun reflected from their rock-crystal eyes: with their chryselephantine skin, their linen wraps, treated in oil until they gleamed, the statues of Socrates’ day would have been lucent across the city.3 The stage-set of Athens was littered with these perfect, permanently beautiful extras, a reminder of what humans could and should be.

  And Athenian society also demanded a gold standard of physical perfection. The weak, the disabled were not welcome. We learn this from the bone evidence (very few humans with congenital disabilities are found in formal graves, suggesting that a number were exiled or abandoned),4 but also from a few throwaway words in the Platonic Dialogues, at the moment when, in 399 BC, Socrates refuses to escape from his prison. His turn of phrase, his choice of analogy, suggests that the imperfect were frequently marked out in the city:

  SOCRATES: [Imagining the Laws of Athens speaking to him] ‘But you preferred neither Lacedaemon nor Crete, which you are always saying are well-governed, nor any other of the Greek states or foreign ones, but you went away from this city less than the lame and the blind and the other cripples.’5

  Athens: a city where the eyes have it. Visual references are stitched through the language – old women were called ‘gauna’, literally ‘hot milk-skin’; you spoke not of being good, but of appearing good; the most precious possession in the city were the well-born, pulchritudinous young men, the kalos k’agathos – the ‘noble in mind and appearance’. Not only was Socrates starting to develop a perturbingly robust internal life that belied his odd external appearance, but in that religious court, on that May morning of 399 BC, it will be the minds of this vital, peachy group that Socrates is accused of corrupting. The verb used is diaphtheirein, which can mean to destroy, corrupt, seduce or lead astray – politically as well as physically. An archaeological survey of Socrates’ Athens drives home how precious these beautiful young men were to the psyche of the citystate. Images of them were tenderly, proudly replicated in civic, religious and military spaces; think of the Parthenon Marbles; boys on the cusp of becoming men lead sacrificial victims, they bear arms, they turn their faces to the sea and imagine the riches that lie beyond. The charge that Socrates had corrupted these paragons would have caused genuine distress.

  One can still find these ‘perfect Athenians’, these ‘beautiful young men’, in the museums of modern-day Athens. Fit, less scarred than their fathers, less exhausted than their mothers. Good teeth. Muscles rock-hard. It is impossible not to be moved by their beauty. In the Kerameikos we just have their bones and their billets-doux, lovesick notes scratched onto terracotta by the potters of the Kerameikos: ‘the boy is beautiful’. In Socrates’ day their names would also be daubed on notices in the centre of town and then cast in bronze. We are used to memorialising those who fall in battle; the Athenians commemorated their young men before they fought. Armies were levied from those over the age of eighteen. And these young hopefuls were then listed in public by their deme in massive age-group catalogues.6 Laws were passed to try to ensure that the young were protected from malign influence – physical or psychological.

  The orator Aeschines makes reference to the city’s legislation on these matters:

  First I will go over with you the laws laid down concerning the propriety of our Boys, then secondly those concerning Young Men, and thirdly, those concerning the other age-grades in turn.7

  Being a young man in Athens brought with it an ecstatic belief that, if raised in an appropriately virile, legal, state-sanctioned way, you could bring security, wealth and great good to your polis.

  Athens was alert to the possibilities of paedophilia, worried that beautiful boys might be preyed upon by older men. Middle-aged citizens (and, for the Athenians, ‘middle-aged’ meant in your twenties and thirties) had (by law) to train in the gymnasia with supervision. Trainers all had to be aged forty or above.8

  CHORUS: I have not been seen frequenting the wrestling school intoxicated with success and trying to seduce young boys, but I took all my theatrical gear and returned straight home.9

  And so Socrates would have matured in a culture that fetishised young men and their role in society, and then, as he grew older, chose actively to seek this group out as the favoured and favourite recipients of his philosophising. There is no doubt that, whether or not the emotion had a physical expression, Socrates loved young men. Eye-witnesses were happy to report his delectation of male youth. In one of the most charged sections of Plato’s work, the philosopher describes the intense emotion that strikes Socrates on seeing the ‘beautiful boy’ Charmides enter the gym.

  SOCRATES: … Charmides gave me such a look that I was helpless; and then all the men in the palaestra gathered round in a circle … I caught a glimpse inside [Charmides’] garment and burned with passion, there was nothing I could do …10

  Our source – Plato – is, however, eager to point out that nothing inappropriate took place with Charmides (Plato’s own uncle), and Socrates’ pupil emphasises that the pair were chaperoned at all times.

  But there is far more than just sexual innuendo in play here. Whatever Socrates’ actual interest, the idea that he was somehow captivating the strong young men in the gym with his endless, radical chat, diverting them from the path of good Athenian citizenship, was, to fifth- and fourth-century minds, very troubling. Young men across Greece were considered the flower of the city-state; its hope and its strength. And in Athens, metics and full citizens alike were the children of the empire. Young men were trained to speak persuasively (one of those who brought the charge against Socrates was a younger man, Meletus) in order to conform rather than rebel. They were not raised to challenge, but to buttress the status quo – that finely woven net of family, tribal, democratic and religious loyalties that held the city-state together – and so the anxiety about Socrates’ influence over young men ran deep:

  I certainly know there are young men you’ve seduced into believing you rather than their parents.11

  Thus, in 399 BC, Socrates stood accused, despite the fact that, as he pointed out, it was probably the misuse of his own ideas by ‘the young’ that had got him into trouble (demonstrating perfectly that they were exactly the group that needed nurturing and guidance from worldly-wise men like himself) …

  [SOCRATES] But in addition to this, the young who follow me around, doing so of their free will, who have complete leisure – the sons of the richest people – enjoy hearing people examined, and they often imitate me, and then try to examine others. And then, I imagine, they find an abundance of people who think they know something but know virtually nothing. That’s why those who are examined by them get angry with me and not with them, and say that a certain Socrates completely pollutes the land and corrupts the youth.12

  Polluting Athenian youth was a highly charged crime.13 Little surprise that in Socrates’ courtroom on that May morning we find fireworks.

  And there was in 399 BC another contributing factor to Socrates’ fading popularity. Not only did he mess with the minds of young men, but he dared to associate with Athens’ second-class citizens, with her women. Worse even than that, with one woman in particular, an individual who was thought dreadful in three ways: she was female, she was foreign and she was clever.

  When he was still a relatively young man, in his early twenties, a teenage girl stepped off a boat at Piraeus harbour, someone whose life and reputation would become entwined with this ingenu philosopher. At this time, as word travelled around the eastern Mediterranean that Athens was creating a society and an economy quite remarkable, goods, essential and frivolous, poured into the rocky port of Piraeus in small independent boats or the sturdy trading vessels of rich men.14 A cargo of great value was human booty. One day (calculations of the year vary, but 450 BC seems to be the most likely), it is almost certain that the feet that stumbled onto the new shore included those of a rather strikin
g young lady. She was an adolescent from the city-state of Miletus in Asia Minor, a refugee who would make her mark on the city and would become intimately embroiled in Socrates’ life and with the high-flyers of democratic Athens. A woman who would (according to Plato) end up as both the tutor and the confidante of the philosopher, as well as the victim of pheme – rumour, the source of many poisonous, sensational accounts, in fifth-century Athens and across the two and a half millennia that separate us from her.

  She was a woman called Aspasia.

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  ASPASIA – SOPHE KAI POLITIKE, WISE AND POLITICALLY ASTUTE

  Piraeus harbour, c. 470–411 BC

  The resident aliens of Athens include not only Greeks from other states, but many Phrygians, Lydians, Syrians, and other assorted barbarians.1

  WHEN ASPASIA STEPPED OFF THAT BOAT in Piraeus, she brought with her the whiff of Eastern spices and the whiff of trouble. She was a girl from Miletus, the natural harbour that lies low, just inland on the Turkish coast. It was a rich, busy little place, perfectly situated to trade both with ocean-edged civilisations and deep into the interior of Anatolia via the Maeander valley.

  Miletus is a settlement with a profound history.2 It is where the Mycenaean Greeks and the Hittites fell out a long time ago – its name is scratched into those clay tablets that bear Linear B, the Greek writing that pulled Europe forward from prehistory in around 1450 BC. AS early as 1260 BC, this settlement in the Asian land-mass belonged to the Greeks. At its height its territories were larger than most other contemporary Greek poleis. But come the early fifth century BC, Miletus was back in Eastern hands – and in 494 BC the archaic city was razed to the ground and many thousands of Milesians were slaughtered. A year longer under the Persian yoke than the Athenians, Milesians must have watched, dismayed, powerless, as Athens, the new ‘protector’ of the eastern Mediterranean, in 479 BC stepped in to take control over some of the Milesians’ long-fought-for trade-routes and allies. Injury added to injury.