For in all cities the story of the citizens of Erechtheus makes the rounds,
Apollo,
How they made your dwelling in divine Pytho
A marvel to see.9
The ‘citizens of Erechtheus’ were Athenians. Pytho was an early name for Delphi. Athena’s city felt she had a privileged connection to the sacred site of the Delphic Oracle. It was Athenian nous and Athenian cash that had helped to construct Apollo’s great temple there. The suggestion that Socrates should enjoy some kind of favoured position with the great glittering super-god Apollo, that he be the wisest of all Athenian democrats, of all Greeks – as wise as a god even – would have seemed, to many, to be sheer blasphemy.
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ARISTOCRATS, DEMOCRATS AND THE REALITIES OF WAR
The Agora, c.426 BC
For a sharp … saw … gobbling … of the whole … sharpening the flashing iron. And … the helmets … are shaking their purple-dyed crests, and for the wearers of the breastplates the weavers are striking up the wise shuttle’s songs, that wake up those who are asleep.
And he is gluing together the chariot’s rail …
Newly discovered fragment of Sophocles, first published 20071
TWO RECENT ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES HELP TO flesh out the picture of life – physical and emotional – in and around Athens’ city walls during the Peloponnesian War: a picture where Socrates is always there, just to the fore of the crowd throughout the mid-420s BC. They also hint at the social and political environment of the day. One is a tiny scrap of papyrus. To see it we must leave the eastern Mediterranean and travel back to a wet England, where the fragment is kept in a storeroom behind the Sackler Library, Oxford.
Beaumont Street in Oxford might not be the obvious place to get a sense of the scent-rich Athenian Agora of 2,440 years ago. But at the back of the splendid Ashmolean Museum are some particularly redolent biscuit boxes. Ginger Nuts, Huntley & Palmer; rows of tarnished silver-grey tins. Some boxes have not been opened since they were deposited in the vaults in 1906. Ninety-nine per cent of the material here is still waiting to be studied. Lying inside are the contents of an Egyptian rubbish dump – and remnants of Socrates’ life. Here are Athenian words that were recopied over the centuries by Greek scribes based in Oxyrhynchus (the Greek translates as ‘The Town of the Sharp-Nosed Fish’). With the multi-spectral technology that usually peers through gas and particles in space, we can now find traces of words describing Socrates’ city. The scanner highlights the original characters – frequently invisible to the human eye – that were inked onto each page. We hear from the speech-writers who sat in the Agora selling their words; we hear from letter-composers, angry wives, angrier husbands, issuers of summonses, evidence of indictments.2 A lost gospel excluded from our New Testament is possibly here, a version of Euripides’ Medea where she does not kill her children, but I am interested in Fragment 4807.
Fragment 4807 is a new find, unread for 1,900 years, the lost section of a play by Sophocles. The shred of papyrus itself is 4 inches long and 2¾ inches tall. Now preserved in between two plates of glass, the fragment is badly damaged. The fibres of the papyrus plant itself are clearly visible, the two columns of lines split by a great gash in the text.
The lines belong to a play called the Epigonoi (The Progeny). They describe an ancient city preparing for war. Although the scene is set in Thebes, Sophocles was an Athenian (and a general), and there can be no doubt, since the play was composed in the late fifth century BC, that the author was drawing on his own experience of the atmosphere and activities in Athens during the ghastly attrition of the Peloponnesian War. Listen again:
For a sharp … saw … gobbling … of the whole … sharpening the flashing iron. And … the helmets … are shaking their purple-dyed crests, and for the wearers of the breast-plates the weavers are striking up the wise shuttle’s songs, that wake up those who are asleep.
And he is gluing together the chariot’s rail …3
The gaps in the text are where the papyrus is torn or has rotted away. With those missing millimetres of the fragment have, almost certainly for ever, gone the words that Sophocles set down, that men such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle would have heard under a bright Mediterranean sun.
The Agora, which once produced books, gold jewellery, marble statues that were the envy of all Greece, was now focusing its energies on glue for chariots and whetstones for swords. The inhabitants of the city were kept awake not just by the possibilities of their world as they lay under the stars, but by the whine of the weaver’s loom as it wove protection for men who would soon be dead.
The second find from Athens’ city-centre is the exquisitely carved head of a horse. The broken piece of statuary, two-thirds life-size, has recently been restored in the new Acropolis Museum. The marble horse’s nostrils flare, his eyes roll and his mane is wind-ruffled. The curator in charge of his recent restorative grooming speaks animatedly of the personal character of this animal: and he is right. The carving is clearly a portrait – the immortalisation of a much-loved, much-prized individual aristocrat’s warhorse.
The Athenians were fervently proud of their horse stock and horsemen. Those who sponsored winning teams at the Panhellenic games – Olympia, Corinth, Delphi, Nemea – were given free meals for life. It is a press of mounted cavalry that leads the procession around the Parthenon frieze. By the time of Socrates’ trial, the central spine of the Agora was a racetrack, with water-troughs at various intervals where sweat-flecked, steam-snorting horses could quench their thirst.4 In the 450s a census of the wealthiest ‘democrats’ in Athens had led to the formation of a ‘democratic’ cavalry. In reality these were old-style aristocrats legitimising a traditionally aristocratic pursuit. Alcibiades, who used his horses for self-aggrandisement when they won no fewer than seven Olympic chariot-races in a row, was one such. The Athenian cavalry trained in the Agora; their favourite spot was just outside the Royal Stoa, at the crossroads where busts of the god Hermes, his erect penis a symbol of fortune, spectated with blind eyes. Xenophon gives us a great sense of the dynamic spectacle of the horses and their men here at exercise:5
As for the processions, I think they would be most pleasing to both the gods and the spectators if they included a gala ride in the Agora. The starting point would be the Herms; and the cavalry would ride around saluting the gods at their shrines and statues … When the circuit is completed and the cavalcade is again near the Herms, the next thing to do, I think, is to gallop at top speed, tribe by tribe, to the Eleusinion.6
It is a utopian picture of blue-bloods; a demonstration of high-born refinements and the superiority and swagger of a cavalry that still marched all democratic Athenians into battle.
Put together, the finds speak of the class divisions that remained, just below the surface, in Socrates’ city. Democratic Athens never ceased to be an entity that was populated by aristocrats and oligarchs, as well as democrats. The papyrus also communicates both the aspirations and the daily grind of the demos (being able to vote for war, and then having to fight in it), of people who have for centuries been an underclass. Socrates, whose life spanned both social sets, would find, towards the end of his three-score years and ten, that his ‘double-agenting’ disturbed, and then envenomed, his fellow citizens. He was slowly proving himself to be out of kilter in many ways in Athens. He held unorthodox views on the power of persuasive speech, he shunned the material wealth that empire brought, his lines of communication to the gods were suspiciously direct. Yes, he fought, but unlike his comrades, he seemed to question whether military might was the greatest goal for a man, whether battle brought good.
Then without determining as yet whether war does good or harm, thus much we may affirm, that now we have discovered war to be derived from causes which are also the causes of almost all the evils in States, private as well as public.7
Both discoveries – the warhorse and the papyrus fragment describing the fierce preparation for military campaigns – also remind u
s that throughout the second half of Socrates’ life the Peloponnesian War was a cancer shadow in the back of all Athenians’ minds: an awful reference point for every day.
After the plague had bludgeoned Athens there was a brief respite, a couple of years when the invasions of Attica slowed down. But aggression, inevitably perhaps, resumed. Soon those Athenians travelling from the Agora to worship on the Acropolis, or returning from council duty, or having just cast their vote in a law-court or the Assembly, turning their eyes north and west, would see new flames – not the pine torches of Eleusinian initiates or priestesses of the cult of Bendis, but something wider, darker, at a distance. These were beards of fire on the horizon: the Spartans starting to scorch the earth around them once more. The clouds above the land darkened from cream to a smoky yellow, as if their enemies were pissing into the milky sky. And then the mountains around turned a charcoal-black.
In the city Athens’ citizens might have been trying to forget the war as they continued to commission plays and sculptures, as they debated with sophists and paid respects to their many gods, but the war had not forgotten them.
Foul breath – Mytilene, Corcyra and the Agora, 427 BC
The casualties of Athens’ war with Sparta were not just the foot soldiers. Pericles, the official elected as one of the ten generals every year for fifteen years, had died in c.429 BC. Blamed for masterminding a policy that welcomed plague into Athens, he was heavily fined and then stripped of his office. His own family – like so many in the city – had been thinned out by the disease; his sons from his first marriage were amongst the first to die. Whether it was physical or psychological damage that killed the General, we shall probably never know.
What is certain is that he represented a corporate malaise in the citystate.
Communities around the eastern Mediterranean had started to notice that Athens was faltering. The cities of Asia Minor and its offshore islands in particular, many still oligarchic, started to get restless. One such, Mytilene – the first city of the island of Lesbos – decided to chance her luck and sent envoys to Sparta and to Olympia asking for military aid, reminding her would-be Laconic saviours that ‘Athens had been ruined by the plague and the costs of the war.’
Athens was appalled by Mytilene’s gall. Hands shot up in the Assembly once more, and the Athenian democrats who had survived battle and pathogens voted for unstinting aggression. Mytilene was besieged, and then starved into submission. But still the Assembly, urged on by hardline orators, raged. In 427 BC democratic Athenians voted to wipe the hubristic rebels – man, woman and child – off the face of the earth. A trireme was to be sent eastwards, its instructions to cut the breath out of all who stood there. The boat was dispatched, bristling with arms, but then overnight the democrats slept uneasily. They dreamed of the brutality of the decision they had made. The next day as they walked to the Pnyx at dawn, with the clarity of the early-morning air around them, they realised what a horror they had unleashed. One man, Diodotus, stood up and persuaded another course, with words that have great purchase: why slaughter, he said, when this will send such a malign signal out to the rest of the world, and why maim when Mytilenean resources – manpower, boats, cash – could be so useful to us? A second trireme was sent out from Piraeus, its rowers fed superfoods (barley-cakes soaked in honey and fortified wine) so that they had the strength of heroes; they had to overtake the first trireme, packed with assassins, even though it had almost a day’s advantage.
Thrashing through the Aegean surf, the second trireme arrived just in time. The orders were reversed. Women wept with relief, men lived to see another day. Both the mob-passion and the flexibility of this fledgling democracy had been proved at a stroke. But Athens’ act of mercy would become far from typical. In the Assembly a motion was passed that Athens’ allies should be forced to ‘love’ the demos: a love-affair that saw Athena developing into an oppressive and domineering partner. Little surprise that when recording the ‘free cities’ in league with Athens, there was sometimes a slip of the stonemason’s chisel; instead of ‘our allies’ on inscriptions, the Athenians started to refer to ‘those cities that we rule’.
Mercy had been shown at Mytilene. Corcyra (modern-day Corfu) would not be so lucky. Oligarchs on the island had gained the upper hand. Athens decided that, after all, they did need to make an example of those who stirred up trouble. Corcyra had tempted Athens into conflict with Corinth and Sparta back in 433 BC, and now it was causing trouble again. The oligoi, the ‘few’, rather than the Athenian-sponsored democrats, had taken back the reins of power. But, hearing Athenian reinforcements were on their way, these insurgents headed for the hills. Men and women both retreated to Mount Istone, the sky-scraping rock that towers dark above the island’s subtropical green. The Athenians claimed they would be relatively lenient to all those from the captured garrison, as long as not one man attempted flight. The insurgents were shipped over to the islet of Ptychia – a stop-off before being put on trial in Athens. But agents (some say democratic Corcyrans, some say Athenians) infiltrated the concentration camp, tempting the prisoners with promises of boats waiting in bays and an open, night-black sea ahead; an escape plan was formulated. Some oligarchs made a dash for it and were immediately executed. A number of survivors still cowered in their island prison, sticking to their side of the bargain. But the Athenians were tested, and did not honour the promise they had made. Two-by-two these prisoners were roped together and brought out in blocks of twenty. The Corcyrans thought they were being transferred, but in fact waiting for them were rows of enemy hoplites – mainly democratic Corcyrans with a grudge – who speared them as they ran. Whips kept the prisoners moving on and into the blades. Sixty or so were torn to pieces. The remaining Corcyrans refused to come out of their barracks – so the democrats used them for target practice, shooting arrows into the garrison, hurling down roof tiles. Many of the rebels decided to take their own lives, slitting their own throats or hanging themselves with shreds of clothes and bed-linen. At least 1,000 died.8
An ideological struggle was turning into a very dirty war.
War, promoted by the democracy, was depriving many of their liberty and their lives. Between 425 and 421 BC Athens’ Agora corralled not just slave-labour, but another kind of captive. Socrates would have seen, as he came to talk around the market-stalls, a dejected reminder of Athens’ imperialism: a great huddle of almost 300 Spartans, prisoners-of-war.9
These drooping captives were treated by the Athenians like the attractions in a freak show. Many citizens came to gawp and point. Because these Spartans – and remember, Spartan boys were trained from the age of seven never to surrender, never to give up, to fight their way through to a beautiful death – had caved in.
Just months before, the men had been trapped in a Spartan garrison, on the small island of Sphacteria opposite the bay of Pylos. The rock here was scrubby, exposed. No chance of agriculture or animal husbandry; birds and a few small rodents were the men’s only companions. Sparta’s allied fleet had been withdrawn and, realising these men would die (they did represent, after all, 10 per cent of the Spartan army), the Spartan authorities sued for peace. Athens refused. The fighting continued, with the marooned Spartans somehow clinging on, eating berries, bugs, rats. And then, disaster. Incompetents in the group managed to start a fire in the dry scrub, and in effect the Spartans smoked themselves out. Dashing to escape the flames, they were picked off by Athenian arrows – usually sneered at by the Spartans as ‘spindles’ because they believed a technological trick like this, that killed at a distance, was feeble, womanish. But now, rather than remain target practice, the survivors surrendered. Hangdog, they were route-marched back to Athens.
And suddenly the Spartiates had a very masculate sword hanging over their heads. The Athenian Assembly had sent a curt message to the Spartan council. If so much as a single Spartan step was taken into Attic territory, the miserable soldiers now hunched in the Agora would be summarily executed. The news chilled the
council of Spartan ephors; instead of a ‘beautiful death’, the greatest warriors in the world risked being dispatched, in shackles, like beasts in an abattoir.
One of the Spartan prisoner-of-war’s shields is still in the Agora Museum. It is massive, more than 3 feet in diameter, the bronze now a gentle green, but – warped and battered – this is clearly a piece of kit that has been put through the mill. And punched onto the surface of the hoplon shield is a simple triumphant message: ‘FROM THE SPARTANS, FROM PYLOS’. It is a war trophy that the Spartans believed the world would never see.
Tempted, perhaps, by this show of weakness, the Athenians renewed their aggression against Sparta, and Socrates found himself back on the road again – fighting for a city-state he loved, and for an ideal he might or might not wholeheartedly believe in.
ACT FIVE
THE FIGHT GOES ON
30
THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR, PHASE TWO – A MESSY SIEGE
Delion, 424 BC
SOCRATES: Wars and revolutions and battles are due simply and solely to the body and its desires. All wars are undertaken for the acquisition of wealth; and the reason why we have to acquire wealth is the body, because we are slaves in its service.
Plato, Phaedo, 66C–d1
SOCRATES: Courage is inseparable from wisdom.
Plato, Laches, 19962
SOCRATES COULD NOT JUST BE WISE. His city needed him to kill.
Democracy forces a confidence. It forces a belief in collective power. When the elite stood next to the masses, hoplites next to thetes, clamouring and heckling under the open sky, up would shoot an amalgam of hands to register their vote, some palms soft from indolence, some hard from labour. This tightly knit citizen-body could encourage itself to go to fight again and again and again. And now democratic Athens had cash to add to credo. As more satellite societies came under its wing, as more insular people became part of a mental mainland, money meant that Athena was honoured with a permanent army. Her people could keep on building ships that could keep on travelling out on ram-raid expeditions.
The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life Page 26