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VENUS DE MILO ABUSED
Athens, 415 BC
TALTHYBIUS: Come, child; I pity your mother, but time is up.
No more embracing now.
You must climb to the topmost fringe of your father’s towers,
Where the sentence says you must leave your life behind.
Take him. – A job like this
Is fit for a man without feeling or decency;
I’m not brutal enough.
HECUBA: O little child, son of my dear lost son,
Your life is ravished from us by murderers.
What will become of us? What can I do for you?
Only to beat the head and bruise the breast –
This we can give; no more.
Lost city, lost child: what climax of suffering
Lacks now? Have we not reached
In headlong plunge the abyss of pain?
Euripides, Women of Troy, lines 782–98, written in 416/415 BC around the time of the Melos massacre1
THE ATHENIANS HAD A NEW ISLAND; and they had blood dripping from their hands. Alcibiades held the Melians’ faces and rubbed them in the dirt. He took one of the bereaved Melian women, enjoyed her and left her pregnant with a son.2
Alcibiades, who carries his villainy to such unheard-of lengths that, after recommending that the people of Melos be sold into slavery, he purchased a woman from among the prisoners and has since had a son by her … a child … sprung from parents who are each other’s deadliest enemies, and of his nearest kin the one has committed and the other has suffered the most terrible of wrongs.3
And it is at this point that we see Socrates’ city beginning to fracture irreparably. There is no doubt that the massacre at Melos worried the Athenians. That same year Euripides wrote his throat-tighteningly powerful tragedy Women of Troy. He would have applied to the Chief Archon for permission to write in the July or August before the massacre, but then clearly adapted his script during the winter of 416/15 as the Melians were suffering their abominable trauma. The scene is set back in the Age of Heroes, when Troy has fallen and the Greeks are wreaking their vengeance on the Trojan population – Women of Troy picks up where Homer’s Iliad Book 24 leaves off. But the resonance is a contemporary one, and Euripides’ point is clear. In many ways, the men who have been speared and sliced and clubbed and hacked to death in atrocities such as Melos are the lucky ones. It is the women – who have in front of them a long life of exile, enslavement, rape, forced separation from their children – who are the most dehumanised victims of war. It is these women who will be shipped to an alien city, Athens, or sold in the Athenian Agora to travel yet further afield. Socrates would certainly have passed these casualties of his friend Alcibiades’ high-handed policy as he made his habitual journey through the marketplace. Mothers and children side by side, orphans, childless mothers all staring out at Athena’s city with wary eyes. The actors who wore masks and became the ‘abused women’ of Euripides’ and Sophocles’ tragedies in the Theatre of Dionysos might well have passed them too – the spoiled life that their dramatic art imitated.
One Melian man escaped the carnage – because at the time of the massacre he was hiding as a resident alien in Athens itself. A philosopher, known as Diagoras of Melos, he had been attracted to Athena’s city in happier days when the eastern Mediterranean was at relative peace, when thought and moral exploration were currencies valued as highly as talents of tribute silver and prisoners-of-war.
Diagoras was not exterminated by an Athenian trireme, yet it was Athenian paranoia that would cut him down. Because within two years of the Melian massacre the Assembly had called for his assassination without trial, and Diagoras had fled the city-state with a price on his head. For centuries we have not known precisely the nature of his crime, other than that, like Socrates’, it was not for his deeds, but ‘his words’.4 But a recent thrilling discovery may now make that clear.
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PRIEST OF NONSENSE: PLAYING WITH FIRE
Derveni, northern Greece, and Athens, 414 BC
Anaxagoras was justly imprisoned for his impiety regarding the sun and moon; you banished Protagoras fairly and appropriately for asking whether the gods exist or not; you were wise to promise a reward for the person who would kill Diagoras, since he mocked Eleusis and the ineffable mysteries; but who can say that there is a book or an argument about the gods by Socrates that is contrary to law? As you cannot show us one, Anytus, even if you cite a myriad of sophists who have been ruined you still do not convict Socrates.1
Libanius, Apology, 154–5
ON THE E75 FROM ATHENS TO Thessaloniki the long vehicles juggernaut past. Searching out excavations on the motorway verge at Derveni has to be at once one of the most unrestful and one of the most rewarding of journeys. Widening the road here between 1961 and 1963, workers’ pickaxes struck a completely unexpected find: a series of fabulously rich aristocrats’ tombs. Burial chamber A11 is now protected by concrete walls and canopied with scrubby earth. There is a lot of litter. The husband-and-wife curators (key-holders who seem a little surprised that visitors might have an interest in their charge) struggle to lift the metal-grille gate because this grave has so few visitors.
When you clamber down to find the sarcophagus, still in situ, it takes a good minute or so for your eyes to adjust to the blackness inside.
The riches within, when first discovered in May 1962, physically took the breath away. Archaeologists’ reports tell us that as the coffin lid was removed, the excavators gasped and cried out. Inside the tomb were two finely cast golden urns each 2 feet high; here too rock-crystal vases; golden diadems and necklaces with gold tendrils cotton-fine; perfume still sweet. Although his name was nowhere to be found, it was clear that this was the grave of a wealthy and cultured aristocrat. A man who collected not just material riches, but also intellectual delights. Because here there were gems relevant to Socrates’ story, but jewels so fine they almost blew away in the dust: here there were the charred ghosts of words.
On the stone-block lid of this coffin at Derveni, 2,400 years ago, tightly rolled papyri had been burned. These clearly contained sentiments that, for some reason, meant a great deal to their owner – and they were also incriminating, which is why they were burned with him when he died. Chanting (raised by the professional mourners and the female relatives allowed out of their homes as a special concession to this funerary ritual) would have been punctuated by the crackling from the flames that were believed to take the spirit of the cremated aristocrat aloft. The flesh of the owner has long gone – but this enforced, fiery desiccation saved something extraordinary from that anonymous aristocrat’s funeral pyre. The rolled papyri – we now realise – represent the oldest book to have survived in all of European history.
At first glance, the remains of this book look like the end of a bonfire – the newspaper leftovers that remain after they have fed the blaze – and initially excavators were dismissive of the scraps. But then a bit of a phrase in Attic Greek was spotted and, as archaeologists from the region of Thessaloniki gently separated the 200 fragments and prised apart the charred rolls that resembled nothing less than charcoal briquettes, the ghostly remains of beautiful, finely scribed Greek letters started to appear.
The stories dealt with here are highly coloured. They describe how Zeus rapes his mother and then eats the severed penis of the god of the sea. None questions that these stories are true – but the author also sees in them an allegory: a suggestion that phusis, nature, and bios, life (as we know it), emerged from some kind of primal vortex. There is magic in the words: the goddess ‘HERA’ is equated with ‘AIR’ (AER in Greek), and so forth. In essence what we have at Derveni is an entirely new way of looking at the world; touch-paper at the moment it is lit. The burnt poems are a tortured, complicated attempt to square cutting-edge and revolutionary scientific thought with the presence of the old gods; as has been said, it is like devout nineteenth-century Christians trying to justify evolution by re
ading the Bible as an allegory for genetic development.2
This is hermetic evidence that opens up Socrates’ world.
Given those who were active in Athens at this time, and their recorded fates, it could well be Diagoras of Melos (or one of his close circle) who wrote those beautiful, complicated words discovered burnt beside a motorway at Derveni. The authorities were clearly troubled by the ideas contained within the mystical verses – but in a land without orthodoxy, there was no mechanism for prosecuting ‘heretics’ or ‘free-thinkers’. ‘Heresy’ comes from the Greek verb ‘to take, to make a choice’ and ‘blasphemy’ in Greek meant ‘speaking ill’. In Socrates’ day, heresy was meaningless. And so instead, in 414 BC, the author of the works, Diagoras (if it was indeed he), was charged with a crime that would be a precursor of Socrates’ own. He was charged with not recognising the city’s deities and branded a-theos, an atheist, a man away from the gods.3 The Assembly put a price on his head. The culprit was wanted back in Athena’s city, dead or alive. Now Diagoras, like those fellow islanders who fled from the massacring swords of the Athenians,4 was a fugitive from the democratic decisions of the world’s first democracy.
Aristophanes jokes about Diagoras’ persecution a year or so after the event in his play the Birds, but the language chills. Undesirables will be strung up like songbirds (the playwright fantasises); those who are trapped no longer have wings to fly. He beats out the message in his harsh, funny poetry:
CHORUS LEADER: On this particular day, you know, we hear it again proclaimed that whoever of you kills Diagoras the Melian shall get a talent.5
INFORMER: It’s wings I want, wings!6
The birth of atheism and heresy
In democratic Athens there was no religious dogma, no equivalent of the Bible. There was no credo, no ‘I believe’, no creed. Socrates lived at a time when many gods and goddesses were jealous for attention. Each constantly vied for more gifts, more sacrifices, more devotees than the next. The city-states were just small enough to allow their citizens to scurry around from one shrine and sanctuary to another and get home before sunset. The acts of belief, rather than faith itself, were what was important.
Although, inevitably, there were powerful religious dynasties within the sanctuaries, there was no priestly class to preserve and promote an orthodoxy for the pantheon of Hellenic gods. Men could interpret religious texts as they liked. The boundaries of blasphemy were blurred. The freedom of expression encouraged by the democracy facilitated both philosophical and spiritual enlightenment, and then witch-hunts.
For much of his early life it must have seemed to the philosopher and his coterie that Socrates had been born at the right time. Pericles might have created and ruled an empire with a fist of iron – but he was also a man who believed in the expansion of the mind. He wasn’t afraid of the shocking, original ideas that deep thinkers brought behind Athens’ walls. Pericles had experienced at first hand where bigotry leads: his own mother lived with a religious curse on the family. Her tribe, the Alcmaeonids, were accused of pro-Persian sympathies after the Battle of Marathon – and leading members were ostracised. Pericles had spent his adolescent years in exile. Perhaps these circumstances combined to give the General an unusual sense of the power of the future. For most Greeks, the future was a Frankenstein of the gods; it was in the past that security lay. Pericles seems to have appreciated that living in the past, rather than living with it, can hinder human development. And so he cultivated a forward-thinking culture. Yet Socrates, and the other great thinkers of the day – Diagoras, Anaxagoras, Protagoras et al. – as has been discussed earlier, operated at a time when freedom meant a very particular thing: not freedom of the individual, but freedom of the community, freedom of the state. And as with present-day societies and governments, that state could not decide whether or not freedom of speech, freedom of thought gave one freedom to offend.
While Athens started out its democratic life remarkably tolerant (after all, Socrates was allowed to operate without inhibition for more than half a century), eventually new thought became nefarious. There had always been an undercurrent to Athens’ apparent open-mindedness. When Socrates was growing up, Anaxagoras proposed that the sun was not Helios in fiery form, but a red-hot stone. The Assembly, intrigued and horrified by his suggestion, passed a decree that declared astronomy sacrilegious, and forbade its study. The ubiquity of religious belief skewed much of the free-thinking of the day. And then men started to gossip: had political tyranny in fact been replaced by tyranny of the mind? Athens was trying to shore itself up, to build and build, to support military blockades and masonry blocks with sweat and mortar, to set in stone the laws of an empire; and yet the sophists and Socrates appeared happy, at an atomic level, to deconstruct things.7
The Derveni papyrus went to the grave with its owner. Other texts were ripped from the hands of the living. A Roman tradition tells us that Protagoras’ life-work, On the Gods, was burned in public. Heralds called for every last copy to be jettisoned from homes, the conflagration filling the Agora with smuts and smoke. Only the first sentence of that work now survives, passed down in whispered oral memory: ‘About the gods I cannot say either that they are or that they are not, nor how they are constituted in shape; for there is much which prevents knowledge, the unclarity of the subject and the shortness of life.’8 Incendiary stuff; thinking they had obliterated his ideas from history, Athenians then voted to exile Protagoras from their city. If the stories are true, then book-burning begins in Athens as soon as ‘the book’, as a popular art-form, arrives in the city-state.
Those boys, Socrates included, who hung out around the walls of the Kerameikos and bartered for new information from the travelling sophists were aware that they were handling dangerous goods. Just as Euripides charts in the Bacchae his gruesome (both figuratively and actually), heart-splitting tragedy, rationalism goes so far, and then the instinct to destroy starts to shadow the light.
TEIRESIAS: I do not countenance or imagine the powers of heaven to be subtle. The faith we inherited from our fathers, as old as time itself, shall not be cast down by reason, no! Even though it were the very subtlest invention of wit and sophistication. Maybe some one will say, I have no respect for my grey hair in going to dance with ivy round my head; not so, for the god did not define whether old or young should dance, but from each and every one of us he claims a universal homage, and scorns calculating niceties in the way he is worshipped.9
Of course there will be many radical thinkers we have never heard of; many ideas that were burned or knocked back before they could even make it into the historical record. This period has been billed as the dawn of enlightenment: but it was also an age that, for the first time, labelled men atheists; that democratically sponsored censorship. Intellectual progress was made here which remained unmatched for the next 1,500 years. But shamed by their defeats in war, confused by the freedom their own political system gave them, the Athenians from around 415 BC onwards chose oppression over liberal thinking. After c.415 BC there was no further need for ostracism – because now the state could harry and censor at will. Socrates’ death came at the end of more than a decade of intellectual and political persecutions. We must never forget that although Socrates is the most famous victim of Athenian oppression, there would have been scores – perhaps hundreds – more like him whose names have escaped the historical record. Athens’ story, and therefore the story of the intellectual development of mankind, could have been very different. The Athenian experiment was starting to calcify.
But as is the way with these things, the persecutions within the city and the slaughter on Melos, that colourful little volcanic island, seem to have given the Athenians an appetite for more aggressive expansion. The aristocrats in the Assembly, used to outdoing one another with feats of military might, stood together once more and looked out to sea. Amongst them stood Alcibiades. Always the showman, in 415 – a year after the Melian affair, after Plato’s Symposium is located in fifth-century chronolo
gy, and after the aristocrat had wiped the floor with his rivals in the Olympic Games – Alcibiades ordered himself up a theatrical backdrop of truly epic proportions. Now his sights were set on an even bigger prize: Sicily.
For more than fifteen years now Alcibiades had been wading knee-deep in the blood of Greeks and barbarians alike. He had been charming the people of Athens with his heroic feats, and earning the jealousy and hatred of men the length and breadth of the city-state. The Furies had their eye on him, but he was not finished yet. The Athenian force as instructed by the Athenian Assembly preparing to invade, of all places, Sicily was building up to be ‘the most expensive and splendid fitted out by a single polis up to that time’.10
Yet this was a splendid sight destined to suffer terrible hardship. There are many mournful artefacts in Athens’ National Archaeological Museum, but one of its saddest has to be a grave stele tucked away next to a doorway on the ground floor.11 The 4-foot-high piece of stone was found in the Piraeus port area. The design is original, and beautiful. A young man – a tiny figure – sits in a windswept, empty landscape. We have his name, inscribed, ‘Demokleides son of Demetrios’. Demokleides cradles his head in his hands, his helmet lies behind him. Beyond stretches a beautiful boat, a deep, wide sea. The death that this young soldier mourns is his own – one of the many Athenians killed for the city-state in a naval battle. Athens’ triremes, those ‘wooden walls’ that the Oracle at Delphi had predicted would keep Athens safe, were slowly morphing into water-borne coffins. And the seas around Sicily would soon be their graveyard.
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The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life Page 34