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

by Bettany Hughes

  Then there was the problem of money. To rub salt into the wound, the annual levy demanded by Athens from city-states in the region was raised from six to fifteen talents.4 The Athenians knew how a handover of cash can focus a troubled mind. To pre-empt a revolt Athens dispatched an ultimatum: pull down your walls, give over hostages, sever connections with the mother-city Corinth.

  The Potidaeans desperately sent envoys to Athens and Sparta respectively. They asked the former to temper their actions and the latter to retaliate, should the Athenians become too heavy-handed. Athens’ interventions in Samos and in the rich waters off Corcyra were fresh in everyone’s minds. When it came to overseas interests, the Athenians were clearly forming a plan.

  Unfortunately for Potidaea, although only a modest town it was useful to larger international interests. The nearby king of Macedon wanted to draw the Corinthians into this northern conflict to strengthen his own position against Athens. He fluffed up anxiety, joining the envoys that Potidaea had already sent to Corinth/Sparta with his own and demanding help from forces down south.

  Now the military elite of the region were involved; the machinery of war was starting to turn. Thirty Athenian triremes left Piraeus, 1,000 hoplites – Socrates amongst them – started the journey north.5 Word reached the jumpy inhabitants of Potidaea, and they knew that this wasn’t simply cage-rattling. Here the earth is red-rich. Athenians were determined to protect (some would say to annex) these lands where iron keeps the hills green throughout the summers, where rival cities (Sparta, Corinth) and barbarian tribes were also battling to create empires. Anticipating casualties, a number of locals were evacuated to the nearby flagship new-town of Olynthos. And from roads way beyond Athens on the Peloponnese dust started to rise. Corinth dispatched 1,600 hoplites and 400 lightly armed troops to protect its threatened city-child.

  The Greeks were at war – with one another.

  Socrates at war

  Greek encampments were untidy and relatively haphazard. Trees were cleared for firewood and rough shelters, soldiers would huddle under animal skins – one-man bivouacs. Those who could not afford tents companioned around camp fires.6 The nights were chill at that time of year; the campaign fell some time between September and November in 432 BC. It was only the really wealthy who could afford a grand battleground-home. And one of the most beautiful men on campaign, Alcibiades, had a tent big enough for Socrates to share.

  The two soldiers came from different tribes, but on this campaign they were mess-mates.7 The democracy had thrown them together. They would have sat in the same theatre, drunk at the same symposia, perhaps trained together in the gymnasia or the Agora, and certainly sought one another out in the city; ‘Hello there, Socrates. Where have you been? Not that I need ask, you’ve been chasing after that gorgeous Alcibiades.’8 We do not know how their relationship started, but we do know how far it went. They lay together, Alcibiades carping that nothing physical ever took place: ‘I might as well have been sleeping with my father or an elder brother.’9 On campaign Pericles must have approved of this bit of mongrel billeting – social engineering if you like – the clever, classless philosopher shacked up with a muscular, aristocratic firebrand. They made an odd pair: Socrates just shy of forty and, we are told, still sporting his trademark thin cloak and bare feet.10 Alcibiades twenty or so, a boy whose beauty ‘flowered at each season of his growth in turn.’11

  Alcibiades was a long way from his family’s homeland. This ‘man beyond compare’ was – so they said – a direct descendant of that sage old hero of the Trojan War, King Nestor. Nestor, the poets sang, lived on a beautiful bay at Pylos in the southern Peloponnese. ‘Nestor’s Palace’ has now been excavated. Ranks of perfect kylikes – long-stemmed wine cups – have been found, 2,856 of them in one storeroom alone; a Linear B tablet from the Late Bronze Age shows that the court here ordered 375 gallons of wine to be drunk. It seems that the Bronze Age ruler of Pylos (Nestor or no) was a king who enjoyed his revels. And Nestor’s many-times-great-grandson inherited his taste for the fermented grape.

  If people told stories about Socrates, they could have filled books with the gossip that circulated about Alcibiades. This preening, irresistible-sounding specimen became a leader of the age. He encouraged Athenians to think it modish to start to drink in the morning; he turned his nose up at wrestling because it would mean rubbing up against plebs; he rejected flute-playing because it made your face pucker in an unattractive way. His beauty was breathtaking. ‘He was hunted by many women of noble families,’ Xenophon tells us.12 For many centuries after his death stories were still being told of his hot-headed exploits. It was rumoured, tongues clucking, that he had staged a murder and presented his friends with the corpse to test their loyalty and nerve.13

  Oddly, despite Alcibiades’ god-given gifts (his beauty, his strength, his dangerous charm), this was a man with everything – and nothing – to prove. Orphaned young (Athenians were thought of as ‘orphans’ when their fathers died, even if their mothers were still alive), he had been brought up by Pericles. He had the adoptee’s liberty. He had no blood-father to resent. No excuse for curtailing his talents. Without the genetic anxiety of a natural parent to live up to, or to disappoint, anything was possible.

  Plato has Socrates ask him, ‘Are you willing, Alcibiades, to live having what you now do, or would you choose to die instantly unless you were permitted greater things? You would prefer to die … It appears to me that you would not … be willing to live, unless you could fill the mouths of all men with your name and power.’14

  The young man’s know-no-bounds, excessive approach to life was written into history and into the urban myths of fifth-century Greece. But still, despite the debauchery, Alcibiades had blue blood. And for Socrates’ peers, with the epic tales of Homer their roadmap to life, such a quality really counted for something: ‘splendour running in the blood has much weight’, sang the poet Pindar.15 And Alcibiades was certainly not shy of advertising this fact by surrounding himself with things splendid.

  His shield was emblazoned with a picture of Eros hurling a thunderbolt. At this stage in history Eros had yet to weaken into a soppy Cupid. The Greeks knew just how dangerous Eros really was. Naturally, Love and Lust destroyed men. Eros brought the great and the weak alike to their knees. Socrates himself compared the kisses sponsored by Eros to the venom injected by a lethal scorpion.

  ‘You are a fool,’ said Socrates. ‘Do you think that good-looking people inject nothing in the act of kissing, just because you can’t see it? Don’t you realise that this creature which they call the bloom of youth is even more dangerous than scorpions? Scorpions produce their effect by contact, but this needs no contact; if one looks at it, even from quite a distance, it can inject a kind of poison that drives one crazy. No; I advise you, Xenophon, when you see an attractive person, to take to your heels as fast as you can.’16

  The gold and ivory of Alcibiades’ fine armour must have flashed as the young man raged through that soft, pretty territory. One cannot imagine him having any trouble engaging, bloodily, with his enemies. By every account Alcibiades lived up to his name; he was a man of alke, strength, and bia, force. He was the kind of modern-day, all-Athenian hero to stir pride in Theseus’ own, heroic heart.

  But at Potidaea it was Socrates who saved Alcibiades, not vice versa.17 The beautiful but inexperienced boy-man was – according to Plato – on the verge of extinction, the Athenian army having been attacked in a sudden, unexpected skirmish. Socrates, quick-witted, pulled the young lad out of the fray. And as befits the prince of self-promotion on the one hand and the master of understatement on the other, it was Alcibiades, not Socrates, who was awarded a suit of armour and crown by Athens – recognition of his conduct on the battlefield. Of course Alcibiades was honoured, for he was an aristocrat, and Socrates, a stonemason’s son, was not.18

  Through the autumn, the massing of forces continued in the Pallene peninsula. By late September there were 3,000 Athenian hoplites in the region
– close on 6 per cent of the entire male, adult citizen population, plus 600 Macedonian cavalry. Some of the smaller towns caved in, but not Potidaea. It resisted, and was caught in a firestorm. The first battle was over so quickly that only a fraction of the soldiers had the chance to fight; 300 from Potidaea or the south lost their lives, and 150 Athenian hoplites, including their general Callias, were killed.

  Alcibiades was wounded either here or at one of the later skirmishes at Spartolus. But, luckily for him, according to Plato, Socrates was close by – and having scooped him plus his armour up (those showy, jauntily crafted bits of well-wrought metal that declared to the army of democrats that Alcibiades was just a bit special), Socrates incarnated the ethos of hoplite warfare: that you stand shield-to-shield, you are as strong as the mass you represent. Under a pale northern sun Socrates had kept the life in this golden teenage boy. Both lived to fight another day.

  After the initial bouts of fighting with Athens and her allies, to save those who could still stand, the Potidaean community backed into its walled city and waited. The Athenians, Socrates included, bedded themselves down, ranging the benighted walls. The rituals of war continued. Potidaeans were allowed to bury their dead. The Athenians rigged up on the ‘turning place’ (the spot where a battle was lost or won) a trophy (derived from the Greek trepein, to turn). Trophies of this day and age were ghoulish scarecrows – often the stump of a tree dressed in the defeated’s armour. A dead, pointless thing. As dead and as pointless, in this case, as the hopes of the Potidaean victims. Because the suffering wasn’t over yet. Now new allied reinforcements came. Potidaea found herself besieged both by land and by sea – those trapped inside the city would have to wait for winter to come and go twice more before liberation; death by starvation or disease looked likely to be their first chance of relief.

  21

  DEMONS AND VIRTUES

  The Kassandra peninsula, northern Greece, 432–429 BC

  FRIEND: Where have you been now, Socrates? Ah, but of course you have been in chase of Alcibiades and his youthful beauty! Well, only the other day, as I looked at him, I thought him still handsome as a man – for a man he is, Socrates, between you and me, and with quite a growth of beard.

  Plato, Protagoras, 309a1

  IT WAS IN POTIDAEA THAT THE first, troubling, stories about Socrates really began to fly.

  Here, in the depth of winter, the middle-aged man (we hear from Alcibiades back in Athens) stands shoeless, for five, ten, fifteen, twenty-four hours at a stretch. Rapt. Lost in his own mind. Staring blankly like the living dead; communicating with his daimonion, his inner demon. And then dawn appears and stills the sea: Socrates quietly says his prayers to the sun and carries on with the business of being a good democratic soldier in a foreign land.2

  Socrates, Alcibiades and the citizen-army were in the north for two, possibly three years, and they did not waste their time. They burned the crops of those towns that seemed uneasy, and engaged in open warfare with the truculent settlement of Spartolus – here they lost all their generals and 430 men. The Athenian soldiers had walked through desiccated groves, sun-blasted, and they had hopped gingerly through a landscape so iced that the ground was iron-hard. They had watched, with amazement and no little suspicion, as Socrates strode through these same frosty landscapes with his trademark bare feet. Why, when you could afford shoes, might you choose to go without? Why put men like Simon the Cobbler, back in Athens, out of business? And what on earth was going on in the man from Alopeke’s curious, spooky staring sessions – those hours when Socrates seemed to be talking to himself, wrestling with some kind of inner dialogue, not to mention inner demons?3

  SOCRATES: Be well assured, my dear friend Crito, that this is what I seem to hear, as the frenzied dervishes of Cybele seem to hear the flutes, and this sound of these words re-echoes within me and prevents my hearing any other words.4

  It is easy to imagine the questions slipping quickly through the camp. What is the superhumanity that this ugly soldier Socrates seems to enjoy? Who or what is his daimonion? How come he claims some kind of privileged, private access to the spirit world? Have you heard that he is one of that freaky circle who hang around with Pericles – the man who has brought us to this godforsaken, freezing place – one of the ones who says crazy things, like we all started as fish, and the sun is a red-hot rock. What an oddball, how peculiar.

  But thus far, there was no persecution. Times were relatively good, Athens was still in that frame of mind where she believed she could do anything. The citizens had voted themselves into this war – in living memory they had beaten the Persians, and now they can beat the Spartans and their scumbag allies too. And look how badly it is going for those allies – the Potidaeans are really suffering, obviously the gods are not with them …

  Because the fate of the Potidaeans had started to be shared in the tents of the army camp. Two annual cycles of self-imposed incarceration had degraded and debauched an entire community. The new recruits coming up from Athens appeared to have infected the weak locals with a strange, pustular disease – a miasma that induced high fevers, sweats, racking coughs and a suppurating rash. More then 1,000 Athenian troops themselves succumbed to the infection while they waited to fight. Those trapped inside the besieged city were worst affected. They had no means of escape or of reaching new food supplies. The inhabitants who were not struck down by this alien illness could survive now only by eating human flesh – the Potidaeans had become cannibals.5

  This is vindictive and shabby. Victorious Athena’s crystal stare up on the Acropolis has a decidedly unpleasant glint.

  So Socrates fought, and he stood and he waited and he thought. Already a recognised philosopher in the city, clearly this three-year-long campaign gave him new material. The Potidaeans were protecting themselves against rapacious Athenian interests. Did Socrates ever wonder what he was doing in someone else’s back yard? As he fought and watched skulls smashing, guts spilled, the mortally wounded turning green and then black before their last breath escaped them – Greeks slaughtering Greeks, for honour and to grab land – did he wonder: Why? What is this for? The Athenians and the Spartans, one-time allies, men who spoke the same language, lived as neighbours, worshipped the same gods, now chose to emphasise their differences, to try to destroy one another.

  He must over the years have observed the Spartans and their tight, efficient military machine: every single soldier a citizen, and a citizen who had been trained for one profession alone – to fight; to fight well, cleanly, swiftly, efficiently, to kill adroitly and to die a ‘beautiful death’.6 Did he contemplate this facility and ask whether this was preferable to the demotic chaos of most inefficiently fought wars? Is this where the seeds of the respect that he undoubtedly felt for the über-specialist Spartan ethos were first sown?7

  Socratic virtue

  On each morning of battle Socrates would have heard the Corinthians clank and shuffle their camp into readiness for war. When Spartan troops were on the battlefield their advent was more sonorous, because this was a citystate that sacrificed to Eros before conflict, that encouraged its men to ‘embrace death like a lover’ and then played them into battle, singing and dancing as they had been taught to do from the age of seven. The Spartans rarely broke with tradition. They enjoyed doing what they were told. Spartiates believed that obedience was more important than freedom. ‘At Sparta the most powerful men show utmost deference to the officials; they pride themselves on their humility, believing that, if they lead, the rest will follow along the path of eager obedience.’8 For the Spartans, virtue resided in unflinching compliance and the well-developed biceps of their citizen fighting machine. The passion for conflict was visceral, sensuous. Their very war music was erotic. But Socrates tells us that the body is the tomb of the soul, not its manifestation. Physical submission, for him, was of no interest as a moral goal. Although the philosopher admired the Spartans in some respects – he approved of their selfless communality, their pursuit of excellence in
this life – he appeared to have a much more nuanced notion of what ‘goodness’ really is.

  Socrates, so Plato and Xenophon tell us, spent years of his philosophical life propounding the need for virtue, arete. The orthodox notion of virtue at this time was a courageous, virile, manly concept. Young men were taught arete in the gymnasia, during military exercises. The virtue they possessed had to equip them, in literal and precise terms, for the cut-and-thrust of life in the fifth century. Although Socrates was, quite rightly, later lauded by Christians, his philosophy came before the ‘turn-the-other-cheek’ ethos was developed. In Greece at this time the lex talionis still operated: all is fair in love and war, and civilian men can all be slaughtered, women and children enslaved.

  So arete, manly virtue, could, and did, lead to abominable acts. But Socrates played around with a rather different concept of ‘goodness’. He thought of virtue in more subtle, multifaceted terms; for him, virtue was sophrosune, temperance, dikaiosune, justice, hosiotes, piety, and andreia, courage, all rolled together into one bigger ambition – Sophia, wisdom or knowledge.9 His belief was that this was not pie-in-the-sky idealism, but a real option; a virtue that could withstand the vicissitudes of pleasure and pain, of anger, of frustration and jealousy, and be enjoyed by all. And this particular brand of Sophia – not pat answers, not wisdom-as-product, but a deeper and more connected mode of thinking – he eventually concurred, could, and should, be taught.10

  Perhaps it is not too fanciful to suggest that, surrounded as he was both by great, human possibilities and by awful, disgusting, debasing human acts, he was trying to will a better, a newly virtuous kind of man out of the world. He was living in extremis and so he understood the value of moderation. Socrates was exposed to so much that was ‘bad’ that his search for ‘the good’ was ever more urgent.