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

by Bettany Hughes

  Past racks of frescoes from Pompeii, dulled with dust, past one-armed goddesses, downwards in stainless-steel lifts with mobster-manqué security guards and over to a padlocked metal locker. We peered into an old plastic crate, the bottom of which was scattered with metal objects, many wrapped in brown paper and string and simply labelled. But Diotima wasn’t there. Loaned to an exhibition, she was playing hide-and-seek somewhere with her philosopher-companion.

  A stern bust of Socrates was on show in the public galleries, as was a finely tessellated mosaic – the pieces so numerous that no one has yet counted them. But the intricacy of the philosopher’s relationships, particularly with the women around him, was not obvious. Nor was this furniture-decoration, priestess-loving Socrates, a Socrates the public wanted to see. But in fact the character of Diotima is a close ally when it comes to trying to understand both what Socrates thought and who he was.

  Diotima was a priestess. A priestess from Mantinea.3 It is difficult to tell how accurately she is represented in Plato. It could quite possibly be that she is fictional. But then again, no one in Plato’s Dialogues is entirely made up, apart from the mysterious ‘Eleaic Stranger’, so it would be slightly odd for Plato to fabricate her entirely. And then, too, there is the fact that Diotima’s demeanour, her life skills, are very believable. She talks in public – as priestesses were allowed to;4 she represents herself as a kind of messenger (priestesses from the Oracle at Delphi and those in charge of the sacred mysteries at Eleusis were also the message-carriers of the gods). And (in some aspects) Diotima is believable as a woman. When ruminating on love, she looks for a productive middle way – she thinks that it is love that inspires humankind; desire forces us to want to be better: better philosophers, better lovers, better humans.

  This, when once beheld, will outshine your gold and your clothing, your beautiful boys and young men, whose aspect now so astounds you and makes you and many another, at the sight and constant society of your darlings, ready to do without either food or drink if that were in any way possible, and only gaze upon them and have their company. But tell me, what would happen if one of you had the fortune to look upon essential beauty entire, pure and unalloyed; not infected with the flesh and colour of humanity, and ever so much more of mortal trash? What if he could behold the divine beauty itself in its unique form?5

  Sometimes described as an anomaly, in fact Diotima reminds us that priestesses were a highly visible part of the Athens where Socrates lived, worked and loved.6 These women were not just arranging antiquity’s equivalent of flowers on the altar – they were responsible for the smooth running of ritual and religion, and therefore of life itself. The Athenians thought their good fortune came only from their good relationship with assorted spirits and Olympian deities and it was all down to the women of the city to keep this relationship sweet. One fragment from a lost play by Euripides – performed, in Athens, during the Peloponnesian War – makes that poetically clear:

  And in divine affairs – I think this of the first importance –

  we have the greatest part. For at the oracles of Phoibos

  women expound Apollo’s will. At the holy seat of Dodona

  by the sacred oak the female race conveys

  the thoughts of Zeus to all Greeks who desire it.

  As for the holy rituals performed for the Fates

  and the nameless goddesses, these are not holy

  in men’s hands; but among women they flourish,

  every one of them. Thus in holy service woman

  plays the righteous role.7

  So the women in Socrates’ day didn’t just drift around at home: many of the best-born were busy priestesses. Virgin, wife, old maid alike – these women had practical duties. If they were well heeled, they would be expected to fund the building of cisterns, porticos, temples. They supplied oil for gyms and animals for sacrifice.8 Priestesses could be temple key-holders – a big job given that these sanctuaries doubled up as banks, a safe depository for the community’s wealth.9 The temple keys themselves were enormous things, more like the starter-handles of early-twentieth-century cars, and on a number of carved stelai we see women confidently wielding them.

  And then, often at night, the female religious leaders were joined by their devoted followers: mature women or girls bearing the finest of baskets – willow-woven, bronze, gilded, silver – which contained the most precious, the most mysterious of things. Banish the image of women just balancing water on their heads after another back-breaking trip to the well; these creatures had the honour of bearing the holiest of liquids.

  This is not to deny that some of the all-female activities ring a little discordantly in twenty-first-century ears: the Thesmophoria, for example. This festival’s origins stretch back to the Stone Age. Married women (no men were allowed) congregated to indulge in rites that were largely obscene and extreme. The worshippers would insult one another and expose themselves, they would carry phallic objects. Slaughtering a large number of piglets or puppies, they threw the corpses into a chasm, and then days later dug up the gamey, half-decayed remains as an offering for the goddess Demeter.

  Little surprise, perhaps, that some Athenian men should seem a bit nervous of their womenfolk.

  So think back. The sound of young women’s voices, praising in the temples and sanctuaries, carried on the air, their figures stone-silhouetted against the sky, their names carved on stelai and statue plinths and grave monuments across the city – these were clearly a force to be reckoned with. In the British Museum there is a 3-foot-high gold sceptre, and a golden necklace heavy with flowers, with fruits waiting to burst, nestling next to the heads of horned women. The provenance is shrouded in the treasure-seeking, tomb-raiding ambiguity of the 1870s, when the artefacts were acquired – but one sensible reading is that these belonged to the priestesses of a cult of the goddess Hera.10 Some of the religiously significant women in Athens wore necklaces of dried figs, a sign of their fertility, while others were chosen for their ‘god-given’ beauty. We know this from their names: Kallisto, Most Beautiful; Megiste, Most Great; Chrysis, Golden; Theodote, God-Given;11 Aristonoe, Best.12

  At night women’s ritual activity increased exponentially. It was thought appropriate that women should operate most vigorously not in the brightness of day, but in the gloom. In the all-female Haloa, a festival associated with wine, fertility and libido, it seems that women ‘tended’ fake phalli (not surprising to learn perhaps that the festival was particularly popular with prostitutes). Young girls sang from door to door in honour of the ‘great Mother’ (the oldest fertility goddess), accompanied by the dark and, so they thought, the priapic god Pan.13 Young and old processed at night to praise another newcomer to the city, the god Sabazios, a ‘dodgy’ easterner from Phrygia.14 Young devotees of Aphrodite carried ‘unspeakable offerings in baskets’ through the Acropolis at night. Dread forces, the ‘nameless goddesses’ – awful creatures like the Eumenides, the ‘Kindly Ones,’ more honestly known as the Erinyes, the ‘Furies’ – were escorted back into the earth at night by women thankful, one imagines, for the comfort of the flaming torches they carried. In women-only rites, young dogs were sacrificed after sunset and flung into flame-lit crevasses to appease the goddess of the Underworld, Hekate. The Adonia, where females mourned with Aphrodite the loss of the beautiful boy Adonis, involved a night-time ritual, a mock-funeral procession, much wailing and no little drinking. Deeper into the war, the grief of these Adonis-worshippers was thought to be a terrible omen for Athens.15

  Although our literary sources tell us that respectable women in classical Athens should stay indoors, women who walked hand-in-hand with the gods in fact glinted and scintillated as, carrying the golden sceptres and staffs of their priesthood, they officiated at civic rituals, filling the air with unearthly ululating sounds. They spoke out, and their hands flashed as they killed and carved the sacrificial meat.

  As soon as I turned seven I was a child hand-maiden, up on the Acropolis,

&nb
sp; then, I ground sacred grain; when I was ten I shed

  my saffron robe for the Foundress, being a bear at the Brauronia;

  And once, when I was a beautiful maiden, I carried sacred baskets,

  wearing a necklace of dried figs.16

  This list appears in a cool, serious passage in the middle of Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata. It is presented as an explanation as to why women’s voices, in Athens, needed to be heard. In the Socratic Dialogues of Plato we have the only other extant example of Athenian women, through conversations with the philosopher, being given a high-level platform. Socrates is rare in the philosophical canon. This unusual, thoughtful man, and his disciple Plato, who were in reality surrounded by women active in the maintenance of Golden Age, democratic Athens, however briefly, give women a voice.

  37

  LITTLE BEARS

  Brauron, north of Athens

  Women so beautiful it hurt your eyes to see them.

  Herodotus, The Histories [adapted], 5.18

  AND WHAT OF THE OTHER FEMALE citizens: the girls, the maidens, the widows of Athens?

  Every four years, Socrates would have seen, walking through the Agora and along the Sacred Way, diminutive lines of temporary exiles. Their destination was Brauron, a two-day hike east of Athens; for many this must have seemed a long road, because the majority of these pilgrims were young children. Eight-, nine-, ten-year-old girls from good families were regularly sent out to this religious sanctuary from Athena’s city, to live for three, four, five years, as ‘wild animals’.

  Little Bears, arktoi, they were called. Dedicated to the virgin huntress goddess Artemis, they wore animal skins and headdresses, and on occasion saffron-yellow dresses. Vase fragments from the site show naked maidens running away from pursuing bears – a rite the girls themselves possibly endured with real wild beasts. Sometimes the girls raced in short chitons, sometimes naked. Plato approved: in his ideal city-state, as in Sparta, young women were encouraged to compete nude in foot-racing and athletics.1 The purpose of the exercise at Brauron was to run the animal out of the child. Their time in this religious boarding school appeased the coiled, virgin goddess Artemis – the chaste huntress whose arrows could strike women down in childbirth. The Little Bears’ days were filled with dances. They learned the jobs a good Athenian wife would be expected to accomplish – in their sanctuary-home you can still see the dormitories where (one imagines, worn out) they slept.

  What remains of the temple complex is peaceful now. Today the only sound of water is the leak of pipes, and the ghost of a stream, irrigating nearby fields. In its heyday, in the mid–fifth century BC, as recent excavations have shown, a monumental fountain, 60 feet long, was installed here to channel the sacred water. Lichen-covered rocks are a protection and a backdrop, a reminder of the primeval wash of this sanctuary’s devotion. But we should also remember that in some ways this sacred zone would have resembled an outpost of the rag-trade; when women died in childbirth their clothes were dedicated here; draped, hung and stored around the sanctuary; a limp gift to pitiless Artemis, to whom, probably just a few years from now, the girls would be calling out during the dreadful pangs of labour.2 Votaries still come here to pray for help in childbirth from a distant relative of those goddesses, the Virgin Mary, in the pretty little Byzantine church on the edge of the site.

  During the Peloponnesian War Brauron’s satellite sanctuary up on the Acropolis was extended. Athens had a gimlet-eye focused on Brauron in political terms – useful strategic territory, but as the Athenian population was effectively being thinned out by the dragging conflict, it was also essential that the girls – the reproductive future of the community – were kept secure. In Brauron itself, the youngsters, it was hoped, would chasten the beast within them and learn to appreciate the grinding reality of being an Athenian wife. Subdued, de-spirited, around the age of twelve the youngsters would then be dressed in modest clothes and marched back to Athens to find a husband.

  Socrates – in a straightforwardly pragmatic way – seemed to think the female of the species could be used in society a little more imaginatively.3

  SOCRATES: Is there anyone to whom you commit more affairs of importance than to your wife?

  CRITOBULUS: No.

  SOCRATES: Is there anyone to whom you talk less?

  CRITOBULUS: Few or none, I confess.

  SOCRATES: And you married her when she was a mere child and had seen and heard almost nothing?4

  During the city’s difficult war-days the philosopher suggested that a group of women, relatives of one of his friends, become gainfully employed in the wool-working business.5 And in the Republic, the character of Socrates discusses the value of giving women the same education as men, and access to all functions and professions.6 While Plato opines in his Laws that women are ‘accustomed to an underground and shadowy existence,’ and again Xenophon writes that they are ‘brought up under the most cramping restrictions, raised from childhood to see and hear as little as possible, and to ask only the fewest possible questions’,7 perhaps Socrates, who was happy to stare right through convention, realised that raising 50-plus per cent of the population as etiolated creatures was a waste.

  And when, during the Symposium (Xenophon’s this time, not Plato’s) Socrates is watching a slave-girl performing complicated circus tricks for the amusement of the assembled company (juggling, contorting, diving through crossed swords), he chips in:

  SOCRATES: A woman’s nature is not at all inferior to a man’s – except in that it lacks understanding [reasoning, effectiveness] and strength. So if any of you has a wife, let him confidently set about teaching her whatever he would like to have her know.8

  Although of course, with a distance of 2,400 years and given the provocative, sexually charged circumstances, it is difficult to tell whether or not Xenophon gives the philosopher this line with an ironic smile.

  Socrates first and then Plato (even to some extent Aristotle) may well have watched all the precise, well-handled busyness of women in society – doing those important jobs listed by Aristophanes – and thought ‘What a waste!’ These are creatures that could be even more productive … there are other ways they can add to society.

  Listen to further conversations in Plato’s Republic:

  Many women, it is true, are better than many men in many things.9

  If, then, we are to use the women for the same things as the men, we must also teach them the same things.10

  Socrates was, above all, fascinated by the business of being human. And in the human genus, he happily includes both women and men. He was, as a result, humane; Xenophon has Socrates comment as he visits the prostitute Theodote:

  … There are many attractive servant girls, and they show absolutely no sign of neglect …11

  Take off those rose-tinted glasses: the philosopher is no campaigner for a classical-age, sexual revolution, he also refers to women as horses, as slaves. No proto-feminist here; but Socrates does have the courage to look beyond the orthodox. And the significant women who crop up in the literary accounts of his life far outnumber those who appear alongside other ‘great men’ of this period. His name is also linked to that of real, historical women – and not just in a sexual or moral scandal (which is how women typically make their way into the historical record), but as an inspiration; witness this antique inscription on the tombstone of a young woman:

  She was the splendour of Greece, and possessed the beauty of Helen, the virtue of Thirma, the pen of Aristippus, the soul of Socrates and the tongue of Homer.12

  Socrates and wives, midwives and war-widows

  Socrates’ mother, we are told, became a midwife.13 Socrates may have been conceived in a city showered with talents, but he was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Phaenarete was a ‘well-built woman’,14 with a stocky set suited to her physically demanding job. Between the ages of eighteen and thirty, while the philosopher lived at home (the standard arrangement in Athens at this time), Socrates would have watched hi
s mother preparing for and practising her difficult, essential business. Not a precious upbringing; he might have seen Phaenarete preparing herbs – pharmaka – drugs, useful little things. Pennyroyal to catalyse contractions; cardamom concoctions to fumigate the womb through a long reed; pomegranate pessaries. He would have heard what happened when births went wrong and child, or mother, or both, died. He would have known that some Athenian parents chose to expose their newborn to the elements if she was a girl-child.

  In the National Archaeological Museum in Athens there is a useful cabinet that gathers together images of women who gave birth, or helped. These are often crude objects, social records rather than aspirational objets d’art. Many are still unpublished by scholars: this is an aspect of Greek history that early collectors had little interest in celebrating. In one particularly rough group of figures two headscarved women, one woman cradled in the other’s lap, sit while a baby appears from beneath the full skirts. They are not gorgeous things, but as terracotta mementoes they work. They remind us what a lusty, messy business giving birth really is.

  But nonetheless, the midwife (maia in Greek) ensured that a community survived. At the point of birth the midwife and her companions howled with joy to the heavens. If the child was a boy an olive-wreath would be pinned to the doorway; if a girl, a tuft of wool – a prophecy of the woven goods that, as an Athenian female, she would spend much of her life producing. Many babies died in classical antiquity, between 10 and 30 per cent, and others were exposed to die: also the midwife’s job.

  If you take what he says at face value, Socrates’ family background (stonemason father, midwife mother) – at the coal-face of civilisation, knocking out citizens, knocking up monuments to house them – had an enormous impact.15