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

by Bettany Hughes

  Potidaea might have spawned the horror of cannibalism, Pericles might have entrapped his people in their own city with a pandemic pathogen, tens of thousands might already have died, but Athens was far from ready to give up the fight with Sparta. Two days’ slow march north of Athens, in 424 BC, Socrates was about to walk onto his bloodiest battlefield.

  When the Athens underground was being renovated in 1995, one rather beautiful stone stele was dug up.3 On it we see rows of finely carved horses, a Boeotian footsoldier being trampled, and we read about the aristocratic cavalry who made their way into battle in Tanagra, possibly Delion too. Here is the paradox of the Athenians: the foot soldiers of a democracy, who vote for a war and then have to go out to fight in it – they now lie unmemorialised, while the aristocrats, who stick to many of their old oligarchic ways, still have the resources to commemorate themselves as heroes. Even despite the democratic revolution, the ‘cream’ that Solon anxiously spoke of (worrying that it might be skimmed from Athenian society during political reforms) was certainly still there; not only that, but it had a way of rising to the top.

  On the way to Delion, Alcibiades rode, Socrates walked.

  The philosopher was no longer a young man; now he was grizzled, forty-five or so. The hoplites, the men whom Socrates marched alongside, ranged between eighteen and sixty. These were the democratic politicians who would lead from the front; those who would be barged and stifled and skewered, who would attempt, by holding together, not to degenerate into a mindful frenzy. You can still see their salvation in a number of Greece’s museums.4 Here are bronze greaves, perfectly moulded to shins and knees, and the rough helmets that have been beaten out of ploughshares; here are shields’ metal skins, pockmarked and warped from punitive impact and the storms of arrowheads that once rained down – on the battle sites that now seem so tranquil.

  Today, Dhilesi, the site of the Battle of Delion, feels not just calm, but more than a little backwaterish. Refuse collectors haven’t bothered to come, roads remain untarmacked. Not many tourists travel here – and, for that very reason, the Hellenism of the place is uninterrupted. The stretch of blue water between the mainland and the island of Euboea throws its snow-headed mountains into relief. This is a Greece worth fighting for. And in 424 BC this was a Greece, as yet, inconclusively claimed.

  The columns of soldiers who marched out of Athens, heading here on paths dust-hard at the end of a long summer, were, literally, ideological. They carried with them a word idea, demos-kratia, democracy, that had been in existence for a scant forty years. Their instructions were to take Boeotian territories, and to take the Boeotian people from under the oligarchs’ noses; to make Delion a pro-democratic base from which Athens could hoover up other territories, other cultures, other ‘less democratic’ political systems. On the face of it, the motivation was high-minded. But in reality this was a war-game. By breaking the Boeotian alliance to Sparta, the Athenians would eradicate the Peloponnesian War’s northern front, which was, really, too close for comfort.

  By the time Socrates arrived here in Delion six years had passed since he last saw active service. And now he was stepping out with 7,000 men – a full hoplite force of Athens. Alongside the soldiers were as many as 20,000 civilians: camp-followers, construction workers, corpse-gatherers, all there to secure a tactical victory. Each hoplite’s batman had packed his provisions: a bag of flour, jars of wine and water, snacks (salted fish was a favourite) wrapped in fig leaves, sleeping mats, spare leather straps, shovels, hoes, axes, scythes to destroy enemy crops, money to buy spare food or your way out of a ransom demand.5 This was a satellite-city on the move, nomadic, marching to protect the mother ship.

  But Athens’ plan6 – to bring democracy to the north – would fail, and 1,000 hoplites, along with 1,000 unarmed men, would die. Socrates was one of the few foot soldiers to survive.

  Delion was supposed to be a surprise attack, but Boeotia was well supplied with spies and, learning of the Athenian advance, managed to make herself ready for the onslaught. The Athenians arrived in two deployments, yet failed to coordinate and were separated by a vital twenty-four hours and 15 miles. Then they added insult to incompetence. The Athenian idealists, it seems, made a dreadful religious gaffe. News of their faux-pas had filtered through the clouds around Mount Olympus to affront winged Nike, the goddess of victory – and suddenly it was not at all clear that Athens was going to win this battle that it had picked. Athenian troops had elected to fortify themselves in Delion’s Temple of Apollo and to use a sacred spring as the camp sluice. As locals heard of their total lack of respect for the gods and disregard for centuries of combat-convention, their gorge rose. Outrage sharpened the claws of pragmatism.

  Socrates and his peers would have prayed to their gods, made a libation and then, with a sudden clanking, the battle began. But immediately there was another unforeseen challenge. When it came to the fighting, the Boeotian enemy was configured in an unusual way; on the battlefield the Theban hoplites were twenty-five rather than the normal eight men deep. There was confusion, and at one point fighters were so close they could not see who it was that they were puncturing, throttling, grinding down. The casualties from this friendly-fire were significant. This was a matted mass of men stabbing out wildly at any flesh they could reach. The sun might have been bright in the sky, but sweat, dust, blood, snot, the deafening hum of their helmets and metal skull-shields blinded and disorientated the warrior-democrats.

  Athena’s brave soldiers start to turn and flee.

  And then the enemy cavalry pursued them. Charging down the hill, stumbling, chests heaving, the Athenians ran for their lives, discarding their heavy, chafing armour as they went – into the woods, to the foothills of Mount Parnes and eventually, thankfully, under a cloak of darkness as the sun set. This is difficult territory to escape into. The ravines here are scrubby and crumpled. Now shadowed by pylons and plasterworks, this wrong-footing landscape once sheltered and exposed soldiers in equal measure. The area has never been fully excavated; as you walk you still crunch over millennia-old pottery shards, and somewhere down here are the broken bones of a battlefield.

  But Socrates, through this carnage and chaos, was one of the few who survived. He remained calm. Men were drawn to him in the pandemonium. He led (so Plato tells us) a small group to safety – amongst them a character called Laches, a successful general who would go on to have a Platonic dialogue named for him.7 All through this – we are told – Socrates’ beautiful companion Alcibiades watched from the vantage of horseback, glimpsing busy soldier Socrates through the heat and dust. Socrates’ beautiful boy ‘happened to be there’8 when he spotted the philosopher and his band – a good indication of how confused, how random, how utterly unplanned battle in antiquity could be. An indication too of how ill-suited horseback fighting was in this hilly terrain – the cavalry’s distant impotence at Potidaea would be remembered, sorely, for years to come. Yet through this jangling, ugly maelstrom something stands out: Socrates’ determination. He was a man strong enough to fight when challenged, he was unflustered by the difficulties of the day, he is portrayed to us as having about him a peculiar serenity.

  ALCIBIADES: Here indeed I had an even finer view of Socrates than at Potidaea – or personally I had less reason for alarm, as I was mounted; and I noticed first how far he outdid Laches in collectedness, and next I felt – to use a phrase of yours, Aristophanes – how there he stepped along, as his wont is in our streets, ‘strutting like a proud marsh-goose, with ever a sidelong glance’, turning a calm sidelong look on friend and foe alike, and convincing anyone even from afar that whoever cares to touch this person will find he can put up a stout enough defence.9

  In the Platonic dialogue Protagoras,10 Socrates offers good advice: we need to know what it is that we are scared of; courage is knowledge of what is and what is not truly to be feared. Our inability to distinguish between the two, between real and perceived threat, is of course what every terrorist, then and now, plays upon.r />
  Still, the prospect was not looking good. The Athenian troops were scattered, so many soldiers were wounded that a victory was impossible; one group grimly held on in their base in the Temple of Apollo. The Athenians had lost and yet, by still occupying Apollo’s sacred home, they were blasphemous even in defeat. And so the Thebans and the other Boeotians, in collusion with the Spartans, refused to let the Athenians collect their dead. The corpses lay there for seventeen days, starting to rot.

  It must have been a hellish scene. Bodies beginning to swell, stink and burst. The great and the nameless lying twisted together – Pericles’ nephew was one of the young men who slowly putrefied on these coastal killing fields. The Boeotians had already stripped the bodies of their armour, so the Athenians’ flesh must have been fed on by dogs and flies. But still the surviving soldiers, Socrates’ peers, cowered, braving it out in the temple.11

  These cocky invaders had to be shifted; and so the Boeotians resorted to diabolic ingenuity – chemical warfare – sending pitch and sulphur shooting into the garrison-temple itself. The Athenians were now about to be assaulted from the skies by something that resembled a thunderbolt-rage of Zeus. A crude wooden siege-breaker, 20 feet tall, was raised next to the walls. Delion was recaptured with this noxious flame-thrower, and it is easy to imagine the stench of burning sulphur in the air, burnt hair in the nostrils, the taste of roasting human flesh on the tongue, the sinking pit of defeat in the democrats’ stomachs.

  These were hardly the glory days.

  After seven days it is difficult to move decomposing bodies from one place to another, but at Delion the bodies had now lain, unburied, for two and a half weeks.

  As Socrates looked at the mould blooming on the skin of these once-humans, did he wonder whether this was all there was? Whether all that glittering chat, those beautifully crafted words and manufactured things back in Athens, whether it all came down to that gamey, dropping flesh? And although Socrates stood against the lex talionis – the typical way of proceeding, when all male soldiers were put to the sword, all women and children were seized, all booty, human and otherwise, that could be packed on carts or dragged behind the army train – it was this slaughter in cold blood that he now witnessed.12

  Socrates lived, and his bravery and clear-headed tenacity at Delion were noted.13 His peers, and as a result history, remembered Socrates as a courageous man.

  For, as a rule, people will not lay a finger on those who show such a calm fortitude in war.14

  But even if Socrates had acquitted himself well, the return to Athens must have been subdued; this was a dishonourable defeat.

  Socrates limped back to Athens with the ragtag remains of the Athenian army. Here in the mother city, life jogged along. Athena might have taken some body-blows, but she was still standing. More than standing, in fact, she was still earning her various epithets: ‘busybody’, ‘violet-crowned’, ‘sleek and oily’. She was still self-consciously promoting herself as the brightest and best in the region. The story of the ‘Greatest City on Earth’ still looked set to run for quite some time; and, increasingly, Socrates was finding himself central to the Athenian drama.

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  BRICKBATS AND BOUQUETS

  Theatre of Dionysos, Athens, 423 BC

  A bold rascal, a fine speaker, impudent, shameless, a braggart, and adept at stringing lies, and an old stager at quibbles, a complete table of laws, a thorough rattle, a fox to slip through any hole, supple as a leather strap, slippery as an eel, an artful fellow, a blusterer, a villain, a knave with one hundred faces, cunning, intolerable, a gluttonous dog.

  Aristophanes, Clouds, 445–51

  SOCRATES: But what do we care about what most people think, Crito?…

  CRITO: But surely you see, Socrates, that it’s necessary to care about what most people think. The circumstances we’re in now make it clear that most people are able to do not just the smallest evils but virtually the greatest if someone’s been slandered when they’re around.

  Plato, Crito, 44c and 44d1

  CLUTCHING A METAL THEATRE TOKEN, EVEN in March, is a sweaty business. The discs of bronze – the size of a fat ten-pence piece and worth a day’s wages for the Athenian poor – mark the palms: on a really hot day they leave fingers sticky-wet. Just one more odour to waft on the pungent Athenian breeze.

  Little matter since the crowds entering the Theatre of Dionysos on the slopes of the Acropolis rock were hardly at their freshest. As one of Athens’ key religious expressions, the preparation for theatrical contests in the citystate was intense, at times frenzied. Drama had (probably) started as a religious ritual in the sanctuary of Eleusis centuries before, and had made its way into the villages of Attica and then on into the Athenian Agora. The re-defining of the City or Great Dionysia festival in around 500 BC has been seen as an expression of democratic fervour, a means for Athenian citizens to explore the potential of this new kind of socio-political way of being. Drama’s movement to a purpose-built theatre was a departure during Socrates’ lifetime; Athenian playwrights – Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides – gave plays their trademark form, with a chorus and leading actors, but the theatre never lost its intensely religious undertones. The build-up to Greek drama, for example, was bestial. Men dressed in ritual costume led sacrificial animals through the streets. Military leaders, the great and good of the city, sprinkled piglet’s gore across the theatre-space. Given that the whole event was sacred to the god Dionysos, once the blood had flowed, so did the wine: all night. Most theatrical productions must have been watched with distinctly sore heads.

  And pre-show manners were hardly something to write home about. Finding one’s seat in the open-air auditorium could resemble a stampede.

  … People would rush for seats and even occupy places during the night before the performance, there were shoving matches, battles and beatings.2

  Democrats clumped together in tribal formation. Priests and highranking officials had their own seats towards the front, but such favouritism was not popular. In the middle of the fourth century BC when Demosthenes invited ambassadors from Philip of Macedon’s court to the theatre in Athens, giving them ringside positions with plump cushions and a purple throw on top, the anger was audible: ‘people hissed at the disgrace’.3 So to beat the rush, men often arrived at the theatre half a day or so before the performance.

  [SOCRATES TO CRITOBOULOS:] As it is, I’ve known you to get up very early in the morning and walk a very long way to see a comedy and eagerly urge me to go along and see it with you.4

  Socrates grew up with theatre beating its juvenating rhythm out to his city. In 472 BC, three years before the philosopher was born, Aeschylus had been inspired to exalt Athenian victory at Salamis with The Persians. When Socrates was fourteen, Euripides first competed in the Great Dionysia festival, and it was said that in later life the two became as thick as thieves, Socrates furnishing the playwright with inspiration and ideas:

  The Phrygians, that’s a new play by Euripides;

  Actually, Socrates puts on the firewood.

  Again he says:

  … Euripidean [tragedies?], nailed up by Socrates …

  And Aristophanes says in the Clouds;

  He’s the chap who writes tragedies for Euripides,

  Those wordy, clever ones.5

  When Socrates was around twenty, at the foot of the Acropolis, drama was given a permanent home: a wooden theatre auditorium was consecrated to Dionysos, the greedy god who demanded festivals across one whole third of the Athenian year.6 Dionysos was a god for the ‘whole’ of democratic Athens – for everyone in this shiny, new-look city. As one scholar puts it: ‘A master of illusions, he produces drunkenness and madness; he destroys the barriers between man and animal, male and female, young and old, free and slave, city and country, man and god.’7 Dionysos was known as ‘mainomenos Dionysos’8 – raving Dionysos – but also as Psilax – he who gave men’s minds wings.

  Theatre was a consecrated act in fifth-century BC Athens, an
entertainment that brought Athenians closer to the gods; it was also the right and the responsibility of those in the democratic state. That theatre token, fingered by so many democratic Athenians queuing for the day-long entertainments (comic and tragic), marked you out as a stakeholder in one of the most adventurous cities ever known. Sitting together in the sunlight, Athena’s democrats explored complicated, awkward, inspiring ideas together. The rich were obliged to pay for choruses (chorus members, like the actors, were themselves Athenian citizens) and specific aspects of the production. In Socrates’ day tragedy was fresh, raw, an idea with the celerity of novelty. As with so much in Athenian society, the drama festival was also an agon, a competition. Plays were performed just once. Every dramatist, every producer was fiercely competitive – winning here, in front of your peers, really mattered.

  To call Greek drama an ‘art-form’ is somewhat anachronistic. The Greeks (unlike many modern-day bureaucrats) didn’t distinguish drama as ‘art’ – something separate from ‘society’, ‘politics’, ‘life’. Theatre was fundamental to democratic Athenian business. Aristophanes via one of the characters in his comedies declares, ‘Poetry makes people better in their societies.’9 Members of the chorus were exempt from military service. A fund was set up to support those too poor to buy their own tickets.