In these wars of attrition men must have lain down at night wondering what carnage the next day would bring. Potidaea was just one in a line of diminishing, besmirching campaigns – orchestrated by Athena’s city to protect her democratic interests. The ideology in play was discomforting. But at some point in this phase of his life, as he fought, as he lay in his tent with Alcibiades, the moonlight coming ghost-bright through the linen of the military awning, as he stood, frozen, a blank stare on his face but his mind whirring within, Socrates developed a new ideology, where the interests of ‘the good’ came before all other concerns.
We don’t know precisely how long Socrates and Alcibiades stayed in the north. The siege was finally lifted in 429 BC. Potidaean leaders – or what was left of them – gave up as it became clear that their Corinthian allies were insufficient, and that every last Potidaean, every mother, child and freshly bearded boy, would die unless they opened their city gates. The two soldiers may well have watched as the emaciated Potidaean men and women were, surprisingly, given permission to leave. They would have stumbled out, clutching the pathetic bundles that were to form the foundations for their future lives. All adult males with one garment, the women with two, and each with enough money to clear the war-zone. Were those tent-mates Socrates and Alcibiades blamed, as their field generals were, for the leniency that enabled the Potidaeans to depart? Back in the Athenian centre of operations, men wanted blood, they wanted to hear that the vanquished city-state had been further humiliated. Perhaps those in the north were battle-weary – they did not want to hurt any more.
Our evidence for the Potidaea campaign is necessarily based on conjecture and literature. The battlefields around Potidaea have yet to be excavated, and many of the few extant remains in Potidaea itself were stolen from the village schoolhouse by the Nazis in 1941. But the campaign here became legendary almost as soon as it became historical. Because this unlikely pair, Alcibiades and Socrates, were now characters in the soap opera of popular history. A hot-headed boy, the selfless, wiser, grizzled older man. Lovers whose passionate on-off affair would be played out against one of the most charismatic of city backdrops and against one of the most elongated and insidious wars in antiquity.
Stereotype or not, both friends would find it hard to shake off their given roles. Because it seems that from Potidaea onwards, Socrates’ purpose was to identify the point of human lives, Alcibiades’ to make or break them.
SOCRATES: I questioned one man after another, always conscious of the anger and hatred that I provoked, which distressed and alarmed me. But necessity drove me on; the word of Apollo, I thought, must certainly be considered first.11
At the very moment when a network of city-states were establishing themselves to form not just pockets of civilisation, but a new ideology for civilisation itself, and when civilisation was winning over subsistence, Socrates was asking whether Alcibiades – the embodiment of the Athenian ideal in so many ways, beautiful, strong, daring, pleasure-loving, charismatic, urbane – was also an embodiment of a flaw of civilised development, of our urge always to want more, to want that which we do not have.
For I go about doing nothing else than urging you, young and old, not to care for your persons or your property more than for the perfection of your souls, or even so much; and I tell you that virtue does not come from money, but from virtue comes money and all other good things to man, both to the individual and to the state.12
Socrates had cause for concern. Be careful what you wish for, they say. Athens had had a vision – that she could lead, perhaps even rule, the known world – but her hubris had been spotted by the gods on Mount Olympus. The Spartans had intensified their campaigns closer to the Athenian home. Their strategy was to tempt the Athenians out to pitched battle on the Attic plains, while their foot soldiers harried and destroyed the people and the crops of Attica. Led by King Archidamus, the debilitating invasions lasted between fifteen and forty days, and were repeated almost without exception year in, year out. Their effects were burned into the minds of Athenians, and onto the pages of their playwrights:
But now it seems the brutal god of war
Stands at the gates
With firebrand flaming blood
To set this town ablaze.
– O please don’t let him!
We share the sufferings of our kin …
Your pain is our pain!
All round the city, lying like a
Low mist, are enemy shields
Like smoke that only needs one bloody spark
To blaze into the flame of battle.
A message for the War God to unleash
The Furies’ Violence,
On sons of Oedipus.13
On the field, Socrates would have seen wounds both clean and unclean – he must have heard as men died quick and slow deaths. But nothing could prepare him for the charnel-house that Athens had become.
The home-town that Socrates and Alcibiades returned to in May 429 BC was changed into a sick city, a diseased thing in no mood to give anyone a hero’s welcome.
22
THE PLAGUE
Within Athens’ city walls, 430–428 BC
If anyone feels secure, satisfied with what he thinks of as his established position in life, he is a fool. The forces that control our lives are as unpredictable as the behaviour of idiots. There is no such thing as certain happiness.
Euripides, Trojan Women, 1203–6
DAWN BREAKS IN ATHENS. THE STREETS are jolted out of the forgetfulness of night. Around the fountains and wells of the city there is a flock of human swallows. Capped women who have come to gather water, and to exchange news. Most of these will be low-born females and slave-girls. But there is a war on, all sorts of conventions slip at a time like this. Now is the one window for the women of the city to gossip – later in the day it will be the men who go to market to pick over the meagre supplies of food.1
Bad news spreads quickly in Athens. And today the word of mouth is particularly sour. Athenians – indiscriminately it seems, metics, women, men, priests – are being struck down by a curious curse. Their bodies are purple-stained, twisted in the agony of their death throes, their mouths gaping, their dying wish always water, water. The eyes burn, the tongue becomes bloodied, the skin breaks out in ulcers and the lungs constrict; it can take seven to nine days to die. Those few that survive are often blinded, incontinent. Contemporary Athenian sources describe men as possessed – they were, we can now deduce, simply brain-damaged. It is hard to say categorically what this affliction was – typhoid fever, Ebola, a new, mutant virus have been suggested – but the very latest analysis of tooth pulp from graves of the period makes typhus the most likely; and what is certain is that the plague had a characteristic trait. Birds of prey and scavengers avoided the corpses. And even more monstrous, the dogs that did eat the diseased human body-parts perished too. This seemed to be an epidemic that had the power to jump from one species to another.2
The most terrible thing of all was the despair into which people fell when they realised that they had caught the plague; for they would immediately adopt an attitude of utter hopelessness, and, by giving in in this way, would lose their powers of resistance. Terrible, too, was the sight of people dying like sheep through having caught the disease as a result of nursing others. This indeed caused more deaths than anything else.3
Contained in the city by military command, within a year the disease danced its way through the caged population of Athens and across the hot streets; 80,000 died. At a cautious estimate, at least one-third of the city was wiped out.
It had started in 431 BC. Pericles was implementing an ill-starred strategy. Spartans were harrying the Attic countryside, employing a scorched-earth policy. They sabotaged Athenian estates, indiscriminately. As a teenage boy, Pericles had watched Athens’ city walls being raised to keep out the Persians, and he trusted in their strength. The General decided that the entire population of Athena’s city-state should be pulled inside its ring
of stone. And so from the 139 demes families dutifully travelled. Athens had already become crowded, and now it was crushed. Forced into the city, stumbling caravans of humans were trapped in ‘suffocating shacks’ in refugee camps that would swiftly resemble cemeteries. Livestock was sent to the nearby island of Euboea, and human stock was barricaded within the city walls. Socrates’ grassy banks – home of his dawdling with young boys – were now deserted, the shrines and sanctuaries there unattended, the Dipylon Gate, like the other gates of the city, barred. Crops outside the city ripened unharvested, and were then torched.
The plague was subtle at first. But it left its mark. Sadly, those democratic little houses of Athens, cheek-by-jowl (no villas protected by high-walled gardens as you find in the Roman period), were the perfect host for a visiting virus or bacterium. And now they were doubly, triply occupied – by city dwellers, by refugees and by a killer. As the disease spread the courtyards began to fill with bodies, and men, women and children desperately tried to find some relief from the searing heat of their internal cellular battle.
At first week by week, and then day by day, more and more Athenians needed to be buried. The eye-witness accounts make for unbearable reading.
Words indeed fail one when one tries to give a general picture of this disease; and as for the sufferings of individuals, they seemed almost beyond the capacity of human nature to endure.4
The bodies of the dying were heaped one on top of the other, and half-dead creatures could be seen staggering about the streets or flocking around the fountains in their desire for water. The sanctuaries in which they took up their quarters were full of the dead bodies of people who had died right there inside.5
Thucydides tells us that with the plague came degeneracy.
People had fewer inhibitions about self-indulgent behaviour they had previously repressed … The upshot was that they sought a life of swift and pleasurable gain, because they regarded their lives and their property as equally impermanent.6
Those citizens who, despite the outbreak of an ugly war, had behaved properly, had kept society running as it should, now remembered the animal in them. Running through the streets, feral, they looted and rutted. The carnage was surveyed by the fixed gaze of ideal Homeric heroes, the kinds of men Athenians were supposed to be, staring reproachfully from epic, decorated walls across the city.7 The colours of Athens’ painted-backdrop scenery – its statues and themed walkways and gaudy shrines – were still garishly bright. But the acts they witnessed were grubby. By the time Socrates and Alcibiades returned, the plague had been on the Athenian streets for two long years.
This horror-show was the home-town that Socrates and Alcibiades have re-entered.
The plague pits of Athens
The region of Demosion Sema, the public cemetery, in the north-west corner of Athens, is still, as it were, on the wrong side of the tracks. Traders as grubby as their suitcases sell twentieth-century debris. Here there are men who mend bikes and wicker chairs; many of the walls around about are covered with graffiti – some of it commissioned as an exercise in social inclusion, most not. There is much new development here: it is a district that sits somewhere between life and death. And just at the edge of this mongrel zone, construction workers preparing ground for the 1994 extension of the Athens metro made a gruesome discovery. Behind a metal fence is a half-dug building site. The concrete foundations are there to support something new, but they cover something very old. Because in Socrates’ day this was a mass grave. Thucydides stated that during the plague years Athens had been infected by something supernatural, ghoulish, heaven-sent; he uses the same word that Socrates did to describe his own inner-demon, ‘daimonion’.
And now one eleven-year-old girl, called Myrtis, has risen from this morass of the dead to throw light on Thucydides’ ghoulish daimonion, on Athens’ uninvited guest. She has been named by the scientists who resurrected her. In amongst the jumble of hastily buried bodies, thrown together into the ground in around 430/429 BC, Myrtis’ skull was discovered. It is in a remarkably good state of preservation; the bone is smooth, the skull virtually intact, the teeth all present. In fact the remains are so robust, it is clear this young girl had a pronounced overbite, messy eye-teeth, a mouth that turned up slightly at the corner. Her face has been painstakingly reconstructed in a laboratory in Sweden, and she now gazes out surprised at a world that was two and a half millennia into her future. We can stare into Myrtis’ face, but we cannot see the fear that must surely have been in her eyes as the world around her collapsed.8
Fetid, petrol-green water stagnates in the holes where steel girders and other twentieth-century detritus have been removed in the area where Myrtis was discovered. The digging was done quickly as the developers needed to move in. But now that weeds grow on the slag-piles of earth, archaeologists have made a good case to the authorities; there is so much more to discover, the site is safe for another half-decade. As well as the remains from the mass grave, those bodies and burial pots that have already been excavated nearby await further analysis, many stored in soft tissue paper in laboratories in America and Athens.9
The Demosion Sema was Athens’ public burial ground. Extending for an entire mile from the Kerameikos towards Eleusis, this was the resting place for great Athenian men and for those who died in battle. The sixth-century law-giver Solon was (allegedly) buried here, so too tyrant slayers and philosophers. All lie in unmarked graves and, although large bone fragments do remain, it is hard to identify individuals from the burial sites because many of the skeletons have been cremated, burned at temperatures of up to 800 degrees Celsius. Under normal circumstances the Athenians would take more care, but at the time of the plague these too became more akin to mass graves.
In the presence of these grim, ashen human remains it is easy to envisage a gruesome calamity. Athenians were suddenly falling, not just in war, or from old age, but thanks to Spartan-enforced hunger and now too this groping pestilence. Yet still in the fifth century the Athenians tried to generate some beauty as men and women died. In the National Archaeological Museum there is a midden of funerary jars, beautiful, mournful things, expensively decorated, white-based domestic scenes picked out in soft-wash tints. Women say farewell to soldiers, they cradle babies, stroke pets. Children play in courtyards and young men shake hands. It is impossible to look at these vases and not be moved by the fine, fluid brush-strokes – those squirrel hairs and carefully mixed pigments capturing the fear and exquisite sweetness of still being alive.
What a paradoxical time this was for Athena’s city.
Back in Athens, Socrates would have seen the aggression around him. He would have noticed the telltale clouds of smoke where Spartan forces – just half a mile away – were burning yet another grove of olive trees, yet another line of figs: 500, 700, some even 2,000 years old, these trees had witnessed the whole of Greek history. Planted before men had started to write and to understand the stars, they were now being turned to charcoal by Spartan spite.
This destruction burned deep into the psyche of the Athenians; listen to the street-talk, threats ‘to turn cropland into sheepwalk’.10 On the stage, one of Aristophanes’ characters cites those burning fields as the reason he despises the Spartans with such punitive fervour:
DICAEOPOLIS: I am ready to address the Athenians about the city while making comedy. For even comedy knows about what’s right … I myself hate the Spartans vehemently; and may Poseidon, the god at Tainarum, send an earthquake and shake all their houses down on them; for I too have had vines cut down.11
We can imagine other degenerations that never made it into the record. The over-sweet smell of crops rotting outside the city walls. The stink of human excreta everywhere. Statues of deities and divinities in this period were washed and clothed, pampered as though they were much-loved flesh and blood. Not now; the garments of the city statues were sun-faded, dirty, bird-shat. The plagued Athenians were neglecting their gods, and their gods were forgetting them.
‘
Sleek’ Athens – the city that, like Socrates, hated to be still – was now not just contained, it was mutilated.
Even so, Athens just about held itself together. As the enigmatic Hellenic sage from Ephesus, Heraclitus, had said right at the beginning of the fifth century, warfare and strife can be curiously stimulating. The following years were in fact some of the most productive for Socrates and the other creative and intellectual sparks of the day. Although the sheer number of those funerary vases tells of mass deaths, their very manufacture reminds us that men in Athens were still working, still creating world-class ornaments, still talking, still loving the beauty of the world. The Agora was still a thrilling home-from-home for Socrates. And at dawn, the birds familiar to Athenian ears – swifts, swallows, crag martins – still piped and sang.12
ACT FOUR
NEW GODS, NEW
POSSIBILITIES:
SOCRATES IN
MIDDLE AGE
23
SILVER OWLS AND A WISE OWL
The Agora, central Athens,
483–411 BC
Little Laureotic [silver] Owls
Shall always be flocking in
You shall find them all about you,
As the dainty brood increases,
Building nests within your purses
Hatching tiny silver pieces.
Aristophanes, Birds, 1106–81
THE AGORA: A BUZZING HUB. THE heart, spine, liver, spleen and lungs of Athens; the engine – some would argue – of democracy, liberty, freedom of speech and the ‘Greek Miracle’. The Agora derives from the Greek for ‘to gather together for trade or politics’ and gives its name to the word agoreuein, ‘speak in public’. It is nominated as a place to converse, to debate, to exchange ideas – the market gave traction to the democracy, and words fuelled it. Possibilities unimaginable a generation before were made flesh here.
The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life Page 21