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

by Bettany Hughes

  Athenians were pulled in to this brutal conflict thanks to the sweet-nothings of a whore from Miletus.41

  But Aspasia’s accident of Milesian birth was not the real reason the Athenians were so jittery about involvement in Milesian affairs. An early fifth century oracle from Delphi shows that for mainland Greeks, intervention on behalf of the envied city-state was expected to bring nothing but evil. The underlying jealousies and tensions across the Greek world were rancorous and dengerously close to the surface. By involving his democratic citizens in this foreign expedition Pericles was re-opening a wound that was deep and fresh.

  Then shall you, Miletus, the contriver of many evil deeds,

  Yourself become a banquet and a splendid prize for many,

  Your wives shall bathe the feet of many long-haired men;

  And my temple at Didyma will be ripped from your hands and cared for by others.42

  The Athenians might have been wrong to say it was Aspasia who pulled the trigger, to see in her clever little hands a smoking gun, but they were right to call the conflict that would follow ‘brutal’.

  ACT THREE

  SOCRATES THE

  SOLDIER

  18

  SAMOS

  The island of Samos, 440–439 BC

  With a sudden rush he turns to flight the rugged battalions

  Of the enemy, and sustains the beating waves of assault.

  And he who so falls among the champions and loses his sweet life,

  So blessing with honour his city, his father, and all his people,

  With wounds in his chest, where the spear that he was facing has transfixed

  That massive guard of his shield, and gone through his breastplate as well,

  Why, such a man is lamented alike by the young and the elders,

  And all the city goes into mourning and grieves for his loss.

  His tomb is pointed to with pride, and so are his children,

  And his children’s children, and afterward all the race that is his.

  Tyrtaios, Spartan war poet, c.640 BC1

  THE YEAR OF 440 BC WAS a dark one. Whether he was goaded by Aspasia’s pillow-talk or by realpolitik, Pericles, on behalf of the Athenian people, as punishment for interfering with one of her ‘allies’, eradicated the Samian government and put an Athenian-style democracy in its place. An Athenian garrison was installed in the central city of Samos to make sure the islanders accepted this regime change ‘quietly’. Hostages were roughly boated over to the nearby island of Lemnos. Athens was suddenly looking, not like an ally, but an overlord. The Samians had been taken unawares by the speed of Pericles’ action, and they did not like it. They turned to the Persians for help – Asia Minor was, after all, just a short boat-ride away. The local Persian satrap Pissuthnes allowed the Samians to raise a mercenary army – and suddenly Athens had not a squabble, but a full-scale regional incident on her hands. The Samians reinvaded their own home by night; local knowledge giving them the upper hand, they stormed the garrison and captured its soldiers. Retribution followed.2 Athenian prisoners-of-war on the island had their faces branded with the shape of Athena’s owl. A covert message went out to the Spartans and their allies in the ‘Peloponnesian League’ that this was Sparta’s chance to provide support for those who wanted to challenge Athens’ cocksure supremacy.

  But, fearing those Athenian triremes, that supremely confident democratic Athenian army, no help came. The Samian walls, solid stone polygonal blocks faced with mud-bricks, in places reaching a whole house deep, with their extra fortifications, towers and a ditch, were considered impregnable.3 So, Pericles besieged Samos for nine months. He sent one of his aristocratic generals, the tragic poet Sophocles, to ensure the loyalty of all Greeks in the region. Now the Samians were isolated; starving, in 439 BC they finally surrendered. In Sophocles’ masterpiece Oedipus the King, written a decade later, we may hear a haunting memory of the atrocities there:

  Oh Gods, Gods!

  Destroy all those who will not listen, will not obey

  Freeze the ground until they starve.

  Make their wives as barren as stone.

  Let this disease that shakes Thebes to its roots –

  Or any worse disease, if there is any worse than this –

  Waste them,

  Crush everything they have, everything they are.4

  Although Athens now had a new, intimidated ally, conveniently close to the coast of Asia Minor (and, usefully, a little further north, on the edge of the Bosporus, Byzantium followed suit, also declaring itself subject to Athenian ‘protection’), the whole affair had made the eastern Mediterranean jumpy. Athens was earning her epithet ‘busybody’. The military action on Samos had become one of the dominoes in the line of events that led to the Peloponnesian War. Foreseeing further trouble and needing to ensure that the morale of Athena’s people was high, Pericles was reported to have given a great speech in Athens to honour the war dead.

  ‘For we cannot see the gods,’ he said, ‘but we believe them to be immortal from the honours we pay them and the blessings we receive from them, and so it is with those who have given their lives for their country. They too gain immortality.’5

  But despite Pericles’ best efforts at jingoism, the whisperers continued: they knew that Aspasia was a Milesian – obviously her pillow-talk, they hissed, had sharpened Pericles’ sword: her alien patriotism had ensured the Samians would have an example made of them. Aspasia is described by her (and Pericles’) enemies as a ‘Helen’; it was Pericles’ lust for his clever courtesan that had created first the Samian atrocities and then the Peloponnesian War itself. Just as Helen drew men across the Aegean in her wake and sparked the war for Troy, so Aspasia would destroy Greek unity. Scared of the idea of her, democratic Athens never failed to remind contemporaries and history alike that Aspasia was an immigrant, an interloper of the wrong sex. It is in the bile that is poured out about this clever girl that we start to appreciate that this new democracy was not entirely comfortable with its cosmopolitan attitude, or in its own skin: canker spots were appearing.6

  Socrates and Samos

  Socrates has an interesting footnote in the Samian affair.7 He would have been twenty-nine when the campaign started, and there is every possibility that he sailed from Piraeus with one of Athens’ contingents of forty, and then a further sixty, then forty again and then twenty more ships to fight there. This was a greedy punitive exercise. The sea battles were fierce, and Athens needed men such as Socrates, in his prime, to go to fight. All Athenian citizens between the ages of eighteen and thirty had to perform compulsory military service. In times of war any man up to the age of sixty could be called up. Although we have no direct textual evidence that Socrates sailed east in 441/0 BC, it would be decidedly odd if he had not. And so it is now that we can meet a Socrates familiar to the Athenians – Socrates the soldier.

  We should imagine the philosopher dressed as young men are dressed on grave stelai in the Piraeus Museum today – the ideal hoplite of Athens. His breast would be cocooned within a bronze breastplate, and he would be wearing greaves on his legs, a helmet surmounted with a horsehair crest for protection and intimidation. Some specialist soldiers stabbed with the spear (up to 2.5 metres long) or were slingshot maestros; others, the peltasts, lined up tight in defence, threw javelins. But Socrates’ weapon was his broadsword and massive hoplon – the round shield so weighty it is frequently shown in carvings resting on the thighs or shoulders for relief, the shield that gave the hoplites their name.8

  Hoplites had to provide their own equipment, yet the philosopher’s finances are a bit of a mystery. Clearly his beginnings were lowly. Socrates boasted that he never charged even half an obol, the equivalent of a penny – unlike other sophists in the city – for his thoughts. And yet somehow he had become wealthy enough to be a hoplite; to be a vertebra in the backbone of the Athenian city-state, a soldier who could afford to provide his own spear, helmet and hoplon. At this time in Athens there were about 14,000
of these, not uncomfortably well-off, lower-middle-ranking men.9 Perhaps his stonemason father had benefited quite significantly from the Periclean building boom. One source connects Sophroniscus to the family of Aristeides the Just – a dynasty influential in Athens since before the Persian Wars. So the budding philosopher could have had ‘good connections’. Maybe the father had a wit that prefigured that of his son; maybe he was paid well for his skill and his original ideas. Whatever the fiscal context, Socrates could afford to fight.

  Alternatively, perhaps, Socrates was sponsored by one of those wealthy friends he had met in the aristocratic milieu of Athens’ new ‘think-tanks’, and it is not impossible that his patron was Pericles himself – possibly the greaves he strapped on, the leather wristbands he shaped to fit around his thick arms, signified just how well in with the in-crowd Socrates had already become. He drank, ate and talked with those who would once have been called oligarchs – and now, of course, he had to stand shoulder to shoulder and fight with them too. Socrates was no mere oarsman, not just muscle to power-row triremes, a human-machine whose bones the fish would soon be scouring clean; he had also earned the right to be spear and hatchet fodder.10

  And so if he had sailed to Samos as a hoplite passenger, a deck-boy, his lips and eyelashes stiff with wind, stinging, briny, he would have beached at the point of his – some would argue – first battlefield. The possibility of an involvement in Athens’ Samian campaign reminds us that although Socrates loved Athens, and lived in the city-state most of his life, when we look at his life-story, and indeed the life of the Athenian democracy, we also have to set the compass north, south, east and west. Socrates’ skill with a stabbing sword and an outsize hoplon shield would have been as important to his fellow citizens as any cleverness with philosophical words.

  A contemporary of the philosopher’s, Ion of Chios, is quoted as saying that without a doubt Socrates was at Samos in the company of another great thinker of the day, Archelaus, the pupil of Anaxagoras, a favourite of Pericles. Socrates could indeed have visited the island as a young man with the philosopher Archelaus in order to debate heavenly matters like the nature of cosmology11 (comedians would mock Socrates for such airy-fairy interests later in life,12 remembering that in his early days a wide-eyed Socrates ‘had an extraordinary passion for that branch of learning that is called natural science’13). Socrates might have come to Samos to learn, or he might simply have come here to kill. Because if he did travel to Samos as a soldier, he would have been required to shed blood. Pericles’ orders to his Athenian troops were unyielding. The Athenians fighting in Samos exemplified perfectly Aristotle’s summary, one hundred years later, of the purpose of all that intense military training back in the bosom of the city-state.

  Military training … has three purposes:

  1. To save ourselves from becoming subject to others.

  2. To win for our own city a position of leadership, exercised for the benefit of others …

  3. To exercise the rule of a master over those who deserve to be treated as slaves.14

  The ‘pax Atheniensis’ had been short-lived. For the next thirty years Socrates, Aspasia, Euripides, Alcibiades, the young men in the gym, the traders in the Agora, the priestesses on the Acropolis will live through, or be destroyed by, one of the most pitiless wars that human history has known.

  Isthmus, near Corinth, c.441–411 BC

  You never left the city to go to a festival, except once to go to the Isthmus, nor to go to any other place except when you were serving in the army somewhere, nor did you ever make a trip abroad, as other people do, nor were you seized by a desire to know another city or other laws, but we and our city were enough for you.

  Plato, Crito, 52b15

  Yet it wasn’t solely the promise of death that drew Socrates out of Athens. The one other time (as far as we know from existing evidence) that he may have left the city, as a young-to-middle-aged man, was to engage in a sweaty, agonising exertion of a different kind – participating (as an audience member more likely than as an athlete) in the Isthmian Games down south next to the Gulf of Corinth.16

  Socrates would have left Athens on the Sacred Way. The road is still there, still called the Hiera Hodos. Although a drive along the Sacred Way today past out-of-town furniture emporia and oil refineries is not markedly spiritual, a sympathetic traveller can imagine Socrates and his fellow citizens making this pilgrimage. Socrates was a great walker. He talks about travelling 25-mile distances without a second thought. Walking and thinking seem to have been a true pleasure to him. And once the Sacred Way turns off to the old coast road, the bucolic nature of Ancient Greece feels closer. Here there are olive, fig and pomegranate groves. The air can be thick with birdsong, the wind, off the Aegean Sea, is always warm. And the mood of those taking this route would have been buoyant. Participation in the Isthmian Games, although taken deadly seriously, seems from ancient descriptions to have had a tinge of a holiday mood.17

  How appropriate that religion and fighting, the two-speed engines driving the Athenian city-state, should be the only dynamos that could move the philosopher from his beloved home-town.18

  Today when one visits the site of the Isthmian Games the place is quiet. A few after-hours students press their noses up to the metal perimeter fence, a child’s swing creaks and a defunct alarm drones, but the most hectic activity inside is provided by bees and butterflies, which gorge themselves on the poppies that pretend to stretch down to the Saronic Gulf. Although the site is perched on the plateau of a low hill, the sea feels impossibly close here. Appropriate then that the sanctuary was sacred to the great sea-god Poseidon. In modern tourist terms, this lovely site is Olympia’s poor cousin. And yet the ancient sporting competitions held here were as fierce, as symbolic and as significant as anything at Zeus’ Olympian sanctuary site further west. Scheduled every other spring, these Isthmian Games were the warm-up competitions to the Olympic Games at Olympia and the Pythian Games at Delphi.

  The fifth-century BC stone-flagged roads here – wagon-rutted still – are witness to just how busy the Isthmia became. The sanctuary itself was right at the edge of an arterial track that ran from Corinth to Athens. The Saronic Gulf today sits calm and grey, broken by lumbering cargo ships, but of course in the fifth century it would have been thrashing with commercial craft, bringing goods to and from the humming harbours that served the great mercantile city of Corinth.

  And imagine the other sounds here 2,500 years ago when a man like Socrates competed. Musicians tuning up for the added-attraction music festival would slowly drown out the sound of the bees and the passing birds; the tang of fat cooking and spitting on the hearth would swamp the smell of fresh sweat. The sound of running water,19 splashing into basins there to purify athletes and spectators alike, would soothe the nerves.

  A participant had the choice of wrestling, boxing, discus, foot-races, chariot-racing, equestrian events and the pentathlon. The games were three days of physical devotion to the gods. Those who came celebrated with blessed feasts. They gorged on freshly sacrificed bulls. A circular pit that once contained gallons of water is now blocked with the old bones and the discarded votive offerings of the faithful. Terracotta body-parts, statuettes, jewellery, coins and pretty little vases have been left here by the Greeks, who would try all forms of bribery to keep their gods on side.

  Socrates’ trip to this busy sanctuary would, in all probability, have been a little marred. The vast archaic Temple of Poseidon that once dominated the site had burned down in 450 BC. Virtually everything inside was destroyed; just enough material survives to date the conflagration. The offerings of jars filled with olive oil would have acted like incendiary bombs – feeding the flames. Eventually the temple was rebuilt, but if Socrates had visited the Isthmus in his youth it was rubble, gaping, a blackened reminder of the unpredictable nature of human affairs.

  In fact, although this sanctuary was not a conventional battlefield, the reason to be at the Isthmus did have something to do wit
h welcoming decay and death. The Greeks were less concerned with dying than with dying well – were, in the case of the Spartans, desperate to achieve ‘a beautiful death’. These games commemorated a mortal end: the death of a child-hero called Melikertes, who drowned at sea but whose body was brought back to shore by a kindly dolphin.20 Priests wore black robes and crowned victors with wreaths of wild celery – the plant that was thought to grow so freely in the Underworld.

  It is at the Isthmus that you get a good sense of how superstitious many fifth-century Greeks would have been. Dug out into the mud, 25 feet down into the earth, and under an overhang of the rock, are underground dining chambers. Up to twenty-two people could be accommodated here, reclining on baked-earth couches, eating food specially prepared by especially sacred kitchens. The haves and have-nots knew their place in religious ritual. Aristocrats from many city-states would have met at the site, and only some of the ‘top brass’ were allowed to dine in this special chamber. These games were Panhellenic, a useful chance to see how the other Greeks lived. All participants, whatever their origins, were watched over by the god Poseidon, in whose honour the games were held.21

  Of course Poseidon knew that his mortal devotees – who stopped all aggression during the Isthmian Games, as they did during the Olympic Games while they met to compete – would soon use his watery highways to invade and colonise, to ship arms and to steal women, wealth and lives, as well as to trade. Man’s theatrical dishonesty with himself in the name of tradition, of civilisation, is an aspect of humanity that Plato’s works seem to reveal Socrates wished he could, somehow, change.