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

by Bettany Hughes

  Spartan forces were now installed in the Amphipolis garrison. On and off over the next two years the two enemies taunted one another, nibbling away at territories, treating the natives of the region like pawns in their own realm-wide game of chess. But the Athenians had no intention of letting a rich settlement such as Amphipolis slip from their grasp. The army’s instruction was to recapture Amphipolis at all costs. Socrates was one of the soldiers asked to effect this victory. After a year of mutually agreed armistice, in 422 BC the Athenians were back. The site of Socrates’ fiercest fighting is now a scrubby, low mound, where today cars engage on the crossroads between Thessaloniki and Drama.

  This time as Socrates fought, he did so alongside Thracians. Thracians were a fickle bunch, barbaric fighters in both the true and the received sense of the word. Greek was not their native tongue; instead these men had their own bar-bar-baring language. They also committed atrocities on and off the battlefield. The rumours flew that they ate babies, that they never allowed their enemies to bury their dead. Frequently they hired themselves out to the highest bidder.1 Socrates’ immediate experience of war here was almost certainly an ugly one. Rather than the picture-perfect elegance of hoplites on the black-figure vases that litter the graves and archaeological layers of fifth-century Greece, we should turn to the bone evidence of the period, where eye-sockets are pierced with arrows, shin-bones sliced with axes, teeth smashed back into skulls. The fine vases may perhaps be the image that democratic Athens would prefer us to remember, but the bones too are the reality of fifth-century democratic politics.

  When last at the Amphipolis site in 2006, I arrived at 2.30 p.m. to see the museum’s key-holder disappearing in a puff of blue diesel smoke. I mooched around, sulky. My children followed suit, and then started to spot pottery churned over by a farmer’s plough – the remnants of a war and a settlement and of the settlement the war destroyed. Arrowheads, javelin heads and meat-hooks on occasion emerge from the earth here – a reminder of the up-close-and-personal, literally gut-wrenching mode of warfare that Socrates executed on behalf of the polis. At Amphipolis the philosopher was one of the fortunate few who emerged unscathed and unmaimed.

  Two years after the town had first been taken by their laconic enemies, the Athenians, led by Cleon, tried to attack the Spartan garrison. The Athenian general manoeuvred his troops into position, but when the Spartans failed to emerge from within Amphipolis’ barricades, he presumed they could not be tempted out to fight. Given that the Spartans were well drilled for this kind of head-on collision, the situation seemed unusual. Cleon turned tail, retreating so that he could formulate another plan. But the Spartan forces were following behind him. Hoplites, trained in the foothills of the Taygetan mountains and on the Eurotan plain, were proving themselves adept at this kind of guerrilla warfare. What followed was a one-sided massacre: 300 horses, brought in by the aristocratic Athenian cavalry, screamed and slipped in the gore. The Spartans routed their Attic cousins; 600 Athenian hoplites died that day, but as few as seven Spartans.2 Brasidas, leading from the front, was mortally wounded, although he lived long enough to be told that he had successfully seen off the Athenian threat.

  Developed, specifically, as an outpost of Athenian power, as a taxing point for rich raw materials, Amphipolis was now occupied by Spartan heavies and fireside stories of Spartan ‘do-gooding’. Brasidas was clearly a charismatic man; after his death locals celebrated him, every year, with games and sacrifices. A monument was erected, posthumously he was honoured as the ‘founder’ of Amphipolis itself and lauded as the ‘liberator of Hellas’. Even more galling for Athenians than the strategic loss of the city was the fact that the local population appeared to welcome the Spartans with open arms. Athens was plangently failing in its mission to ‘force’ other Greeks to love the demos. The democratic superpower was not wanted here; Amphipolis represents a moral as well as a military setback.

  The capture of Amphipolis caused great alarm at Athens … The cities subject to Athens … eagerly embraced the idea of a change, made overtures to Brasidas, begging him to march on their territory, and vied with each other in being the first to revolt.3

  The chirpy birdsong in the trees that now grow over the site of the battle is a useful corrective. This was a defeat for Athens, yes, but a victory for the Spartans. Since the Athenians wrote our history of Greece, their account is naturally biased. We are used to reading about the fifth century BC from the Athenian point of view. Make this the Athenian War rather than the Peloponnesian War and Amphipolis becomes a great, a significant victory: a victory of the oppressed against their oppressors. Sparta had won affection once more, Athens had lost another cash-cow.

  The year 422 was a busy one. After the defeats at Amphipolis, the remaining Athenians moved, with the other hoplite troops, against the rebellious settlements of Scione, Mende and Torone. Mende caved in after only two days of resistance – and the Athenian troops pillaged the town. At Scione the male inhabitants were executed. And now it was the turn of Torone. Coastal Torone is strategically situated; during the Second World War the Germans used its bay as a naval base. Today it is sleepy. A Byzantine fortress is all that visibly stands from earlier fortifications. But the orders were harsh here too and in 423/2 BC the lilting landscape would have been bruised and broken. Here all women and children were captured and enslaved, all men were marched back to Athens as prisoners-of-war.4 One by one, cities in the region were bullied and beaten into submission.

  In Potidaea, where the bid for democracy forced besieged men to eat one another; in Delion, where the gods were ignored, and yet the world did not fall apart; in Scione and Torone, where young children, grabbing at their mother’s skirts, stumbling, were driven down south to be slaves, Socrates developed his ideas.5 And his respect for the Spartans possibly developed too – those extreme southerners who devised their entire society so that life on earth could be as Spartanly perfect as possible, so that eunomia (good order) could hold sway. The Spartans were men who lived vigorously in the mortal world, but who had no fear of death: an attitude that Socrates would take with him to his own grave.6

  Come 422 and Cleon lies dead, the Spartan Brasidas lies dead, and the maimed and dying and fleeing warriors bear very little relation to the fallen heroes of the hoplite code. After this campaigning season the towns of Scione, Mende, Torone have been bled dry. The landscape is scored by an army’s tracks. Athens’ army lumbered through the 420s with strength, but little grace. The Spartans matched Athenian audacity with tenacity and dynamism. Cities were beginning to empty because the countryside was full of fighting men. The Hellenic hoplites were the armadillo skin of Greece – its distinctive character, its greatest organ – but no longer a thing of beauty.

  Salient then that Socrates has no interest in skin-deep strength. He endeavours to poke through to the soft flesh beneath the superficial layer. The man who asserted that ‘one must never do injustice’ has blood on his hands. He could just remain an ugly soldier in an ugly war. And yet the philosopher brings back into Athena’s city not only bad memories, but beautiful ideas. He exemplifies his own belief that the best way to deal with life’s horrors and its troubles is to live it to the full: to find the good in the world.

  The demeaning military actions in the territories north of Athens were the kinds of campaigns that men drank to forget. But one particular night back in Athens in 416 BC (or so Plato would have us believe), Socrates drank to remember. This long, warm, companionable feast is the basis of one of Plato’s most brilliant examples of philosophical theatre – his dialogue the Symposium. Hoplite shields, swords and breastplates have been put aside. Fine dinnerware has been spread out on rugs. With some deep in their cups, amidst carousing, Socrates goaded his compatriots to remember, to debate and to identify the meaning not just of hate and revenge and might and despair, but of virtue, of moderation and, above all, of erotic love.

  ACT SIX

  SOCRATES AND LOVE

  33

  SOCRATES IN T
HE SYMPOSIUM

  Domestic dwelling, Athens, 416 BC

  SOCRATES: … savouries, perfumes, incense, prostitutes, pastries …

  Plato, Republic, 2.373a1

  WINE WAS A SERIOUS BUSINESS IN Athens. During excavations of Athens’ city-centre a well was found bunged up with terracotta debris, the mess clearly derived from great drinking binges. Deep inside were pitchers and black-glazed drinking cups, along with amphoras that told of the origins of some of the booze on offer. Here there was honeyed wine from the windy island of Lesbos – alma mater of the poetess Sappho – and here too a vintage from Corinth, on the coast road that ran down to the Peloponnese, and, sweet as nectar, wine from remote Thasos – the island so irresistible to Athenians – and Dionysos himself was said to have blessed it.

  So, around 416 BC, according to Plato, we find Socrates entertaining democratic daytime Athens with perceptive, withering philosophical insights, and then in select company consuming the crushed fruits of empire as the sun sets.

  Dinner defined the Golden Age citizen. He was the true inheritor of Athens’ greatness, who could lie on a couch, listen to flute-girls, flirt with young boys and eat delicacies grown by another’s hand. It is often said that Socrates was anti-material because he refused payment for his work – but he did accept dinner: and the symposium was up there with the finest gifts that any could give a man. This was, traditionally, how the aristocrats of the day strengthened their blue-blood bonds. How they kept themselves sleek in a landscape that could feel stony and barren. It was a gift, however, that lacked some finesse. Symposia were bawdy, and however high-minded the conversation, the evening often ended crudely. Drinking games such as the popular kottabos (where a cup is balanced on a stick in the middle of the room and the assembled company attempts to knock it off with their wine-dregs) could only operate with slaves on hand to clear up the citizens’ mess. Socrates debauched with the best of them, and his presence at the symposia shows that his tastes were discreetly, plangently Athenian.

  The argot of Golden Age Athens was money and food. In Attic comedy men often joked about the honesty of an empty belly, and poets fantasised about the wealth – and feasts – in store, should the Persian Empire ever be conquered,

  While trees on the hill will shed at our will, not leaves but giblets of kid

  And deciduous bushes drop fricasseed thrushes and succulent gobbets of squid.2

  In preparation for the symposium (literally, the ‘drinking together’), slaves would cook relatively wholesome food throughout the day (none of the excesses of Roman banquets here, although the Athenians did have a soft spot for pastries – in fact, fried fish, lentil soup, sausages and raisins were more likely to be on the menu than flambéed peacock). Male guests, eleven or so, were typically wreathed for the occasion: myrtle, rose, wild celery could all be worn. A hymn was sung, usually to Zeus Soter, Zeus the Saviour, and the symposiarch – the colleague elected by his fellow diners to be in charge – would decide how many units of watered-down wine (often three parts water to one part wine) should be drunk that night.

  At Socrates’ symposium – reports Plato – the agreement was that the guests themselves should decide how much to drink, a hint that even within closed aristocratic circles democracy was in action. But although this detail does copper-plate Socrates’ democratic credentials, Plato’s point was not heavy-handed. The symposia were far more than just a chance to imbibe and consume; they were the unofficial gatherings that kept the world turning. These were evenings (sometimes longer: a symposium could run for thirty-six hours) that enabled small groups of men to get together behind closed doors. Since the Late Bronze Age these drinking events had been the way in which the elite of society shared experience and advice, where the young bloods were properly educated. At a symposium in democratic Athens, things might now be done a little differently, but just by being there aristocrats could relive those days when they called the shots; and they could talk about Demokratia behind her back. Years later, in the Archon’s courtroom, there is no doubt that Socrates’ ready association with these exclusive groups would be held against him.

  Symposia were claustrophobic affairs. To appreciate their scale it is best to leave Athens and drive five hours north to the magical little hill of Olynthos, back in fact to the district where Socrates had been fighting around 424 BC. Olynthos, 20 miles north of Potidaea, 120 miles south-west of Amphipolis, was laid out on a Hippodamian-style grid (Hippodamus being the Milesian architect who had also designed Athens’ Piraeus district so neatly) – part of the region’s redevelopment programme after the fierce fighting of 432 BC. Olynthos’ appearance resembled Athenian mores, if not its constitution; this was a town led by an oligarchy, one that resisted Athens’ offer of democracy, but it still looked to the future: to a time when urban planning would make life better.

  Because vast sections of fifth-century Athens lie smothered and inaccessible under the modern city, Olynthos – recently re-excavated – offers us a more complete glimpse of the built environment that Socrates would have enjoyed. There is a down-the-rabbit-hole feel to the architectural remains at Olynthos today, as if you are marching through some giant golden board game. The footprint of the town’s layout has been raised, four blocks of stone high, and what is striking (apart from the odd tree that has established itself as a rare umbrella of shade) is the regularity of the place: little boxes on the hillside where fifth-century Greeks settled down to the business of promoting Greek civilisation.

  One house at Olynthos has been particularly well preserved; and fortunately for archaeologists and historians one room here is in particularly good nick – it is the men’s room, the andron. In a sense there are no women’s quarters in Ancient Greek homes – the whole domestic space was a woman’s turf:3 apart, that is, from the andron. The andron was an area for men only. Most were built with doors to the outer street so that women didn’t have to sully the atmosphere by passing through to reach the rest of the house. Serving slave-girls, flute-girls and hetairai were, of course, an exception.

  Although Athenian houses of this period were notably simple, the one room where you were likely to find internal decoration was the andron: this was, after all, a place of pleasure. At Olynthos the mosaics from two of the andrones still exist. Charming, if slightly crude, things, made up of river pebbles, they show Bellerophon mounted on Pegasus, killing the Chimaera, and Nereids frolicking with sea-horses. Stone-slab seats, wide enough for two lean Greeks to recline side by side, edge the room. Wooden couches were often brought in to sit on top of these platforms. Here songs were sung, toasts were made, poetry was composed and the talk was of politics – the things of import to the polis. At the time when the Symposium is set, there is a war on: battle-weary men, deep in their cups, were also here to lick the wounds and extend the bonds made during the fighting.

  Socrates’ nights on a low couch tell us about far more than his preference for good wine and tasty, slave-prepared food. Not everyone went to symposia. Some of those ‘born to rule’ kept themselves above such things. Pericles, we are told, strode straight from the Agora to the Boule (the council) without stopping to waste his time with chat and networks.4 The ‘Olympian’ had better things to do than shoot the breeze and stir up aristocrats. But Socrates was a philosopher who enjoyed hanging out with the top drawer of society as well as with its artisans and dogsbodies.

  Plato’s Symposium may be pure fantasy, but it is at once a brilliant psychological drama and an acute picture of precisely the kind of event that could, and did, happen on many a fifth-century Athenian night.5

  The Symposium party is being thrown in January or February 416 BC by a group of well-heeled businessmen. One of the symposiasts, Agathon, Socrates’ host for the evening, has won a prize for tragedy at a prestigious dramatic festival.6 Drama is so hard to write and produce well that winning really meant (and means) something. We should imagine that spirits are high. There are songs, discussions, party games.

  There appear to be many gre
at minds round this table: Aristophanes, whose waspish pen would help to bring Socrates closer to hemlock, lay on one bench, and together with Agathon burned the tallow low with Socrates and his companions.7 Plato paints strong, black-outlined characters here. Alcibiades bursts in, more debauched than normal; Socrates is more self-deprecatory and enigmatic; the host, Agathon, is preternaturally beautiful (his soft white skin is tenderly described); and a kind of mystery guest – a woman no less – is part of the dialogue too: Diotima, the thoughtful, articulate priestess whose ideas are, in Plato’s Symposium, reported by Socrates.

  Many symposia were, doubtless, dreary. Others must have sparkled. Aristotle, Xenophon, Euripides – all these men spent time wreathed with laurels and lying on the symposiasts’ couch. These high-octane experiences must surely have given Socrates food for thought. And at this particular symposium, the guests appear on fine form.8 Alcibiades teases Socrates about his delight in self-denial; there is discussion of Socrates’ oddness, of the fact that much that he says has an ambiguous ‘dream-like quality’. His ugliness is mocked. But then something rather interesting happens. Socrates is compared to one of the cult statues of the city – wooden and coarse on the outside, but a structure that opens up to reveal a thing of great beauty within:

  ALCIBIADES: … If you chose to listen to Socrates’ discourses you would feel them at first to be quite ridiculous; on the outside they are clothed with such absurd words and phrases – all, of course, the hide of a mocking satyr. His talk is of pack-asses, smiths, cobblers and tanners, and he seems always to be using the same terms for the same things; so that anyone inexpert and thoughtless might laugh his speeches to scorn. But when these are opened and you obtain a fresh view of them, by getting inside, first of all you will discover that they are the only speeches that have any sense in them; and secondly, that none are so divine, so rich in images of virtue, so largely – no, so completely – intent, they are relevant to most or rather to all things worth considering for someone who strives to be beautiful and good.9