Travelling along the Agora’s central axis, the ‘Sacred Way’, from northeast to south-west, Socrates, returning from his campaigns in the north, would have passed through a melange of scents. Fish, carrion and sesame stalls. Wool, friction-hot off the loom. The corpses of birds laid out on musky, wet clay tables. Sleeveless tunics sold alongside hopeless slaves.2 Five hundred years before Socrates’ day, in ‘Dark Age’ Greece, the Agora had been a graveyard: excavators still turn up the skulls and bones of 3,000-year-dead early Athenians, 20 feet or so below the surface.3 But come the fifth century, the Agora had been rejuvenated. Political innovation and a degree of military success had given the Athenians enormous self-confidence. Fountains had been tapped, plane trees were planted. Offerings were made to the immortals on fragrant altars. Pyramids of figs, opiates, spices, aromatic oils from the East and saffron from the Cyclades were for sale. The zest of newly excavated minerals, newly minted silver coins, was in the air, the taste of unusually seasoned stews, cooked on outdoor stoves, on the tongue.
Socrates knew the Agora as the home not of the dead, but of life. Musical recitals were held here, soldiers drilled, books sold, dramas performed, sculptures shaped and smoothed. Speech-writers sat at tables to scratch out words on papyrus and tree-bark so that less articulate men could defend themselves, or prosecute others in the law-courts. And administrators, chosen by lot, met to standardise the business of democratic living. Roses were boiled down for perfume, bones for glue. Around Hephaestus’ Temple4 were more carbon-stinking foundries, mass-producing arrowheads, spear tips and even lead slingshots blazoning the slogan ‘Take that’. In one zone, where the choral and dance displays were practised vigorously, un-ignorably, we hear from Socrates that, at a (high) price, you could purchase pamphlets peddling the very latest doctrines and ideas.5 In the Agora, everything was for sale. Athenian silver kept the market chiming with commerce and with ideas.
Silver Owls
The spoil of the latest Agora excavations is still being treated backstage at the Agora Museum in Athens. Here a young archaeologist lovingly eases apart a fused hoard of 400 tetradrachms – the silver coinage produced by the Athenian state and known as its ‘Silver Owls’.6 The coins had been buried together in a time of crisis, either during the Persian invasion or the Peloponnesian Wars. But their safekeeping devalued them – these silver pieces, squirrelled away out of the sight of enemies, have been warped and buckled in vicious fires. The stash is worth at least £250,000 in today’s money: their loss would have been felt keenly by their owners. Stamped with the distinctive wide-staring, wise owl of Athena or with the goddess’ own head – helmeted, ready, as ever, for conflict – the coins have suffered so much heat that their surfaces have been almost wiped clean. But the single foreign coins dropped by chance throughout the Agora have fared better. Here there is well-preserved evidence that Socrates’ fellow Athenians did not just barter; there was a thriving cash economy driven by Athens that stretched right across the eastern Mediterranean. Unlike secretive Sparta, Athens positively encouraged external influence – and external cash – within her walls. Each city in the classical period minted its own distinctive coinage. Metal discs (gold, silver, bronze, some decorated with turtles and dolphins, others with griffins and ducks, or beautiful Helen and her twin brothers, the Dioscuri – from Corinth, Persia, Aigina, Macedonia), all were weighed and exchanged in Socrates’ regular stamping ground, the Agora.7
And the people of Athens, in fits and spurts throughout Socrates’ lifetime, were getting visibly richer. Although the democracy did not encourage conspicuous consumption, the archaeology tells us that life was looking up. The paint on pots is laid on more thickly, the gold of earrings dangles heavier, wine comes from ever further-flung locations. Yet Socrates goes against the grain; as the years go by, he becomes even more theatrically shabby.
I loathe that poverty-stricken windbag Socrates who contemplates everything in the world but does not know where his next meal is coming from.8
Socrates bothered Athens because, in this money-loving state, he was demonstrably unmaterialistic. From the Bronze Age onwards the silver mines of Laurion in the southern corner of Attic territory had given the polis something special. Come the fifth century and activity in the mine had increased tenfold. Every day 20,000 slaves were sent 4 miles into the dark earth to gouge out silver-bearing lead ore. The glittering harvest was driven along dirt-tracks back to the Mother City. By the middle of the fifth century Athens could boast a cash reserve of 6,000 talents.9 This is the equivalent of more than £45,200,000 or $64,200,000 in today’s money. Yet in this markedly material world Socrates preached a form of fundamentalism – a return to absolute values rather than the pursuit of self-advancement at any price. He typically wore no shoes and thin clothes. All year round he sported the same, worn woollen cloak. Contemporaries roared with laugher at his parlous sartorial state:
That dog Socrates. How dare he preach when he only has one coat to boast of, come rain or shine!10
Unlike the other sophists of the age who were coining it in with their public philosophising, Socrates refused to amass wealth. And, worst of all, when he debated and conversed in the public spaces of the city, he suggested to young Athenian men, the flowers of Athens, that their future might lie not in imperialist ambitions and rows of fine colonnades, but in a more satisfying life – a life that revolved around the good, rather than the great.
Socrates didn’t come to buy and sell in the crowded marketplace. When he walked past the merchants’ tables, set up and down each day,11 he just talked, he came to trade ideas. The philosopher must have been every seller’s nightmare. In his ragged cloak – we’re told – he mocked those who sought out gewgaws for themselves. ‘How many things I don’t need!’12 he says as he marches along, striding on bare feet through the irrelevant market stalls. Socrates is not blind to beauty, to craftsmanship, to epicurean pleasures, he is certainly no killjoy, but he wants to start back at the beginning; his intention is to trade the material of the human mind.13
But Socrates himself was clearly the opposite of this type of person – he was a man of the people, and a lover of mankind. For he took in many enthusiastic followers, both citizens and foreigners, and never charged anyone any fee for his companionship, but rather gave of his goods unstintingly to everybody. Some of them received small portions from him as a gift, sold them to others for much money, and were not men of the people as he was; for they refused to speak with those who could not give them money.14
Socrates’ ambition is to find the psyche, humanity’s soul, its spirit. If the Agora is a blast-furnace for civilisation, then Socrates believes there must be bellows at work, pumping a life-breath into all these flames. As he strides through the marketplace, through conversation with those around him, he tries to wrestle the answer to the ground:
Then the wise or temperate man, and he only, will know himself, and be able to examine what he knows or does not know, and to see what others know and think that they know and do really know; and what they do not know, and fancy that they know, when they do not. No other person will be able to do this. And this is wisdom and temperance and self-knowledge – for a man to know what he knows, and what he does not know. That is your meaning?
Yes, he said.15
It is an invigorating, a terrifying search.
While Socrates’ contemporary Protagoras declares at this time, ‘Man is the measure of all things’, the exciting, the difficult, the inconvenient truth of Socrates’ philosophy is its plangent suggestion that ‘man’s relationship with man’ and ‘man’s relationship with the world around him’ is the measure of all things. In addition his opinion seems to be that this relationship can never work unless each of us is as ‘individually good’ as we can be. The philosopher, in amongst the traders and tanners and soldiers and sailors who thronged the Agora, explores the unique capacity of man to be conscious of things, and to be conscious of being conscious of things. He does it as a real man, in a real historical p
lace, in real terms. The Roman statesman Cicero makes a perceptive comment about Socrates’ ideas:
He applied it [philosophy] to ordinary life, directing his enquiries to virtues and vices, and in general to the study of good and evil.16
But there were others in the Agora at this time who saw in the trading of words a less high-minded opportunity. These were the sophists. Rather than simply view philosophical exploration as a route to enlightenment, some also exploited words as a means of personal enrichment. Socrates was (Plato vehemently declared) not a sophist, but because his business was words and the ideas behind them, he came to be tarred by his contemporaries and by history with the brush of sophistry.
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HOT AIR IN THE AGORA
Sophistry, 426–416 BC
SOCRATES: Stop trembling. You should look away from some of your thoughts; and, having dismissed them, depart for a while. Then, go back to your brain; set it in motion again and weigh the issue.
Socrates in Aristophanes, Clouds, 807–101
IN THESE SCABROUS, TAINTED DAYS, WHEN life continued, but the Spartans breathed down the Athenians’ necks, Athens remembered an old, new friend. Words had been the fairy godmother of the democracy; word-ideas; demos-kratia (people-power), eleutheria (liberty), parrhesia (freedom of speech) had been chiselled into architecture and broadcast on ocean currents around the Mediterranean; words had promoted the aspirations of democrats in assemblies and law-courts, and then made public the decisions that a democratic assembly chose to take. By the mid-fourth century, Athens was described as a ‘City of Words’.2 Rhetors ruled, and words on the streets of Socrates’ city seemed to give comfort, to suggest that the Athenian democracy was still a logical, a solid thing.
Walking through the bleached bones of ancient sites, it is easy to forget how hectic they once were. Not just with smells and colours, but in the case of Athens, with a massive barrage of information. Stone stele blocks, the length of roadways, at crossroads, outside sanctuaries, like stained teeth jutting from the ground, were laced with ideas. As stonemasons gouged out the hopes and fears and codes of society, granite, marble and limestone sparks would have flown. The public spaces bristled with urgent, talkative stelai like newly filled graveyards.3
Here the workings of the world’s first democracy were inscribed. Two jigsaw-puzzle pieces of marble, each half a foot square, discovered near the Agora and dating from c.500 BC, have just been reunited in the National Epigraphical Museum in Athens. Although the remains are very battered, the precise wording is just about visible. The fragment ‘DE’ has been joined with ‘MOS’ to give us the earliest extant hard evidence of DEMOS, ‘the people’, as an active political body.4
Democratric Athens strove for transparency. Decisions from the sublime to the ridiculous were published on stele noticeboards. Chipped out of stone and then emphasised with red paint, these could deal with issues as lofty as the state of public finances (newly restored inscriptions have just been installed in the new Acropolis Museum, covered in carefully calculated lines, these aimed to prevent backhanders, political sweeteners, and to name and shame those suspected of sequestering public funds).5 Elsewhere the correct pricing for offal for sale to citizens and foreigners has been immortalised. In the Piraeus Museum a 3-foot-high block declares that the market inspectors have passed the quality of tripe on a particular stall down by the harbour; the feet, head, brains, womb, breast, liver and lungs of pork and goat-meat have all been diligently listed: the stone inventory then was matter-of-factly, democratically put on public display.6
Athens’ word-fetish was unusual. In a democracy ideas have to be shared, outcomes agreed, and that consensus then made public. A dictatorship has little need for written confirmation, no taste for the brouhaha of village squares. And whereas earlier cultures – the Hittites, for example, the superpower of the Bronze Age who controlled much of modern-day Turkey, Palestine, the southern Black Sea shore and northern Iraq – wrote everything down on tablets so numerous they were stored in a central temple-archive the size of four football pitches, and in Lower Egypt Ramesses II built his power into the very cliff-face at Abu Simbel, in Athens the decisions of the democracy were declared, but in order to communicate the will of the demos, not simply as a means of control.
The walls of Athenian houses and public buildings would also be daubed with painted letters, white and red.7 Scraps of papyri notices rolled off hawkers’ stalls. Books were coming to be objects of desire. A biblion (a papyrus sheet, typically the length of an armspan and coiled around a central dowl, the omphalos) was designed to be portable and user-friendly. Some of these books were small enough for the ancients to fold them up in their fists, or tuck them into their clothes. When Socrates bumps into one colleague, Phaedrus, the Athenian has a suspicious bulge in his tunic – as it turns out, a book.8 Twenty years later, we hear of bundles of papyrus rolls stacked up on book stalls and in the Agora’s warehouses.9 In the Metroon, a stocky public library, scores of scribes bent over papyrus sheets and wax tablets, day in, day out, recording the ‘office’ copies of democratic business. Here too the ‘personal effects’ of Athenians – letters, contracts, writs – were stored. Because of systematic military activity in the Agora area, not to mention a climate that rots papyrus within a matter of weeks, this fund of knowledge is no longer available to us. The majority of the rich papyri of Athens represent portable history that, sadly, will never make the journey down time, although one recent discovery in an Oxford University collection of Egyptian papyri from the Greek-run town of Oxyrhynchus can go some way to help us to visualise Athens as a city of words: a place where notices were pinned to public buildings, to walkways and outside private homes.10
The water-table in Egypt is lower than it is elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, and as a result much organic material has survived in the sands there – evidence lost everywhere else in the world. So if we want to get an impression of the written landscape of Athens, oddly it is to evidence from Egypt that we must turn. This particular piece of papyrus in the Oxford collection, just under a foot long, half a foot wide, has emerged from a dig in the necropolis city of Saqqara, which once served ancient Memphis. The papyrus rectangle is a notice – one that was pinned up on the tent of Alexander the Great’s chief commanding officer and then discarded once its message no longer applied. The neatly, swiftly made, confident ink characters in perfect Ancient Greek read:
ROYAL ORDER OF THE MAIN GENERAL OF THE MACEDONIAN ARMY BY ORDER OF PUCHESTOS
DO NOT COME IN. OUT OF BOUNDS TO SOLDIERS.
RITUAL IN PRACTICE11
In that royal tent in Memphis priests were clearly at work and did not want to be disturbed. Although they have not survived, Athens’ streets would have been full of such messages. The Athenians set a precedent for keeping hoi polloi up to speed with what was going on behind closed doors. ‘Keep out’, ‘Occupied’, ‘Out to lunch, back in a short time’, ‘Ritual in progress’. All these day-to-day messages would have formed part of Socrates’ Athenian landscape.
But words in Athens could also have a sinister ring. Those whom the democracy disliked found their names scratched onto broken pottery shards – ostraka – gathered together by officials in giant pots and then systematically counted. The unfortunate man whose name appeared most frequently on these ostraka was ostracised, exiled from the city for ten years. Kleisthenes had instituted the system – originally to rid the city of would-be tyrants. But quickly ostracism came to be a handy way of eliminating the unsuccessful, or unpopularly successful, individuals. The piles of scratched ostraka in the Agora Museum in Athens are hard evidence of lives ruined; ‘Kallias’ is ostracised in c.450 BC, ‘Hyperbolus’ in 417–15 BC and another ‘Sokrates’, ‘Sokrates Anargyrasios’, in 443 BC. Tens of thousands of these ostraka have been discovered – many in the same hand, suggesting that votes were sometimes rigged. Resourceful law-breakers in Athens clearly offered a service whereby they could effect block-vote ostracism.12
Socrates wa
s wary of the written word. His anxiety was that it could neither account for itself nor answer back. Words were everywhere in Athena’s city, but Socrates, unusually, did not set his own down on papyrus with an inky flourish. In a city filled with authors of every kind, he was anxious about the impact of writing without the accountability of face-to-face contact. ‘I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the appearance of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence.’13
For the first time in recorded history, words, and in particular written words, started to count as much as deeds. Socrates lived through an information revolution. By the time of his trial, a huge swathe of Athenians right down to the artisan class had become literate. Every excavating season wheelbarrow-loads of written material are rescued from the levels of Classical Athens. It was in Athens in the fifth century BC that the written word – which gives all of us so much – took flight. Athens declared its authority not just with fine monuments, but with strings of letters.
Now, from 429 BC onwards, that democratic life was not looking so rosy, perhaps words could warm things up a little again. So the Athenians employed wily words as protection against their pain. Words, both oral and inscribed, became a commodity. Wordsmiths, sophists, peddled a new kind of product in Athens’ Agora. Pindar refers to ‘sophistes’14 as early as 478 BC.15 But these pay-by-the-hour philosophers would wait another fifty years before they really flooded the Athenian market. It was during the Peloponnesian War, when the purpose of life must suddenly have seemed a little less clear, that the services of sophists, in effect travelling wisdom-merchants, apparently became indispensable.16
The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life Page 22