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

by Bettany Hughes

  But 40,000 survivors were still on dry land and Nicias tried to march them to safety. These men had watched their transport home vaporised – their sense of entrapment must have been suffocating. And the Sicilians not only had local knowledge, but paddocks full of fresh horses. In a terrible drawn-out game of cat-and-mouse the Syracusans and their Spartan allies stalked Athenians down, charging, then slaughtering, and then withdrawing. After eight days of marching the men were delirious with thirst and hunger.

  Then they arrived in a steep valley. The Sicilian horsemen drove them to the riverbed of the wide Assinarus River. Desperate for water, the broken Athenians fell on the muddy pools. Allied Syracusan forces above and around them were closing in, but the Athenians needed to drink before they died. Many were butchered as they knelt to cup the water, others drowned in the crush. Their fellow soldiers lay slaughtered all around them, their blood spilling into the stream, but still the Athenians gulped to satisfy their thirst. One by one they were cut down, or staggered into their own spears. That armour which had been polished so extra-shiny bright for the showy departure from Piraeus two long years before was now dull and mired.

  One source tells us that 18,000 men were killed in a single afternoon.2

  And we must not forget what it means to be slain by a classical Greek sword. Pornographically graphic descriptions of ways for men to die in battle are riven through the corpus of Ancient Greek literature, and none of this is horror-fantasy. Witness Euripides:

  He drew back his left foot but kept his eyes closely on the pit of the other’s stomach from a distance; then advancing his right foot, he plunged the weapon through his navel and fixed it in his spine. Down fell Polyneikes, dripping with blood, ribs and belly contracting in his agony.3

  Xenophon reports simply that a maimed Arkadian ‘reached the camp in flight, wounded deep in his belly and holding his intestines in his hands, he told all that had happened.’4

  A stone inscription tells us the Athenians had voted in the Assembly to force their allies to ‘love the demos of the Athenians’.5 In Sicily it became clear that this love was, blatantly, unreciprocated.

  There were a few survivors, 7,000 or so Athenians, and their fate was, if anything, even more gruesome. The Syracusans had always had a love of the playwright Euripides. And so Athenian soldiers were marched to a natural quarry just outside Syracuse, where they were forced to barter verses of Euripides for the chance of freedom. Today you can still enter, as the site has become a national park, gently planted; the quarry itself has cathedral-esque proportions, flocks of white doves roost at its height and fill the space with a low, rumbling coo. Given no food or water, crushed so tight they could not lie down, the Athenian interlopers were forced to recite lines of their own premier dramatist until they dropped from exhaustion or were felled. The torture was calculating. Sicilian demagogues remembered Melos and called for no clemency.

  All in all, after the Sicilian debacle, close on 50,000 Athenian troops and their allies were missing, all presumed dead; 216 triremes were lost.

  The wailing women, mourning Adonis, whose cries had cankered the air that night back in Athens twenty-four moons ago, were suddenly believed prescient. Effigies of the dead boy-god, corpse-stiff like the corpses in the quarry at Syracuse, had been carried to the coast. The Athenian women had buried beautiful figurine boys in the Aegean Sea in order to safeguard real men. But now those flesh-and-blood heroes were coming home across the waves in body-bags.

  The Athenian dream had been that the Sicilian campaigners would return from their western adventure wealthy and bathed in glory; a whole new land-mass would be waiting, arms open to welcome Athenian democrats and their families. As it was, a handful of traumatised hoplites limped back, amputated, violated, covered in shame.6 Socrates himself – as represented by Plato in the dialogue Ion, set just at the end of the Sicilian disaster in 413 BC – comments that the Athenians were now desperate for personnel. Their citizen population was mortally reduced: they would even recruit generals from the ranks of foreigners. It is a passing remark that has recently been backed up by inscriptional evidence.7

  SOCRATES: My splendid Ion, you know Apollodorus of Cyzicus, don’t you?

  ION: And what sort of person might he be?

  SOCRATES: He’s someone whom the Athenians have often elected as their general, foreigner though he is; and Athens also appoints to generalships and the other posts Phanosthenes of Andros and Heraclides of Clazomenae, even though they are foreigners, because they have demonstrated their merit.8

  As those tattered remains of an army began to pull into the port of Piraeus, the frightened men of Athens needed to impugn, they needed scapegoats. The Athenians would remember Socrates’ curious fascination with the Spartans. Well, now the Spartans had become their devils, and anyone associated with them the devil’s incubus.

  FIRST HERALD: Founder of the most renowned City of the Sky, do you not know what great honour you have won among men, and how many of them you have who are passionate lovers of this country? Before you founded this city, in those days all men were Spartan-mad, all hairy, hungry and dirty, Socrates-y and carrying clubbed sticks.9 …

  CHORUS: And near the Shadfeet there lies a lake where unwashed

  Socrates charms up men’s souls.10

  And while the Athenians slept uneasy in their beds, flailing around in nights of long nightmares, arms reaching out to try to find someone to blame, Alcibiades was busy.

  Aristophanes said of Socrates’ one-time-lover:

  Better not bring up a lion inside your city,

  But if you must, then humour all his moods.11

  A tricky, half-wild, half-domesticated rogue lion, with plenty of bite left, was precisely what Athens did not need roaming at the edge of its territories right now.

  Alcibiades’ hubris boded well neither for Athena’s city nor for his brother-in-arms, Socrates.

  45

  DECELEA – CLOSING DOWN THE MINES

  Decelea, 414–404 BC

  Freedom is delicious to eat and hard to digest.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Considerations on the Government of Poland and on its Proposed Reformation (1772)

  DECELEA, 13 MILES NORTH-WEST OF Athens, was, in the Greek mind, a troublesome place. In particular it was a place where, through remembered time, friction between Athens and Sparta had sparked.

  The Greeks spoke of it often. This was the site of one of the most unpleasant episodes in mythical history. The legendary Helen, princess of Sparta, was said to have been dancing naked with other maidens down by the banks of Sparta’s River Eurotas. She was a child, twelve, ten, even as young as eight, some said.1 The old man Theseus, a hero-king of Athens, and now about seventy, spied her and was so enraptured by her that he had to have her. She became the summation of all earthly desire. Theseus, wheezing, sprang a trap, kidnapped the beautiful girl and carried her away to the hilltop fort of Aphidna near Decelea. But his lust had blinded him. He forgot, perhaps, that Helen had divine twin brothers, Castor and Pollux: toned, fist-flailing warriors who would have none of this affront. Riding out to retrieve their too-desirable sister – a scene that gallops across some of the earliest Greek vases – they found the people of Decelea as outraged as themselves by Helen’s abduction. The old men of the city helped the twins get Helen back, leading them to Theseus’ hideout at Aphidna while he was off pursuing more skirt in the form of Persephone. Spartans never forgot the Deceleans’ kindness. In all the years they sent out those blistering raids to the Attic countryside, Decelea was left alone. Now, in 413 BC, thanks to honey-tongued Alcibiades, it was Spartan warriors who occupied the hill once more.

  Twenty-four centuries later the place still smacks of regime change. This is where the Greek monarchy last made its summer residence. In the coup of 1967 the mini-Versailles here was abandoned. Now it moulders in a limbo. The swimming pool is empty of water and full of graffiti, a 2-foot-high roaring marble lion has a mouth that has long since gaped dry, the stables are derelict,
there are sheep-turds on the lawns.

  But in its heyday the aristocrats of Europe stretched out here because the cool and pine of the mountain air brings welcome relief from the city fug. As you drive across the arterial road today, leaving behind jerry-built blocks selling fridges and cheap furniture, the freshening of the air and the smell of the humus suddenly strike. Back in the fifth century, Decelea’s elevation meant this was a perfect lookout from which to guard Athens to the south-east, to keep an eye out for invading Thebans (or other Boeotians) to the north.

  In 414 the Athenians had riled the Spartans. They commissioned a series of seaborne summer raids on grain supplies that had already been gathered in from across Lakonia and from the lands of Spartan allies. The smell of wasted, roasting fodder sparked Spartan ire. Alcibiades – back in the suckling home of his memory – gave good advice.2 He knew that the Athenians had so come to depend on the fruits of their empire that they needed to be cut off from them. He reminded his hosts of that first assault on Decelea, when Spartan heroes had once rescued the honour of a child-Helen from the ravages of the old Athenian King Theseus. Spartan warriors oriented themselves there once again. The known world’s crack fighters determined to take Decelea from under the Athenians’ noses.

  Cleverly they waited until winter. These were men, remember, who from their earliest memory had been trained to endure dreadful extremes: weeks out in the cold, survival all year round in nothing but a summer cloak. While the Athenian garrison guards shivered, Spartans tensed their muscles for the attack.

  The Spartans first ringed the settlement and then stormed it. Their success was absolute. A slightly later source, that arch-conservative Isocrates, writing in the fourth century BC, exaggerated when he said that 10,000 men died here, but clearly there was mass slaughter at Decelea.

  And now the Spartans had a permanent base in Attica just 13 miles from Athens’ walls. They could do more than just intimidate, than just burn vines and olives. From this vantage point they could disrupt the flow of trade, they could intercept communications. Here they started systematically to catalogue the loot they had taken from Attic territories and commandeered local farmers, forcing them to feed Spartan rather than Athenian mouths.

  King Agis commanded. In 412/11, Miletus, Aspasia’s home-town, revolted and went Spartan.3 As the months yawned into years, Agis persuaded allies to provide 100 new triremes and now in 408 or 407 BC his Navarch, his admiral-in-chief, Lysander, could begin to harry the Athenians from the sea too. Sparta had always been timid around the sea, but now she had taken a leaf out of Athens’ book and was embracing naval technology with all the verve of a fresh convert. Without ruling the waves, democratic Athenians could guarantee the safety of neither their own city-state nor their empire.

  This was not something the ruling democrats could cover up or sweet-talk away. The people of Athens smelled disintegration, and then, shockingly, devastatingly, more than 20,000 of their slaves in clusters or singly revolted and deserted.4 A number of these one-time ‘human-tools’, these ‘man-footed things’, ended up throwing their lot in with the Spartans at Decelea. The majority of the women and men should have been down in those coastal mines at Laurion, harvesting Athens’ cash-crop. But instead they chose to serve masters whose mission was to humiliate and to destroy Athena’s city.

  It is a two-day walk from Laurion (south-east of Athens) to Decelea (in the north). But the alacrity with which the slaves joined Spartan ranks suggests this was a distance the ex-slaves covered in half that time. These rebels had lived their lives as subhumans. Men and women had been kept separately. The cramped boxes close to the Laurion minefields were all that they had ever called home. When the Spartan slave population revolted, it was said that they wanted to ‘eat the Spartans even raw’,5 We have no first-hand accounts of those who cut themselves loose from Athenian shackles, but every reason to believe the hatred of their masters was as prodigious, as dangerous.

  In terms of sheer muscle and man-power, the foundations of democratic Athenian society had been removed. Without their slaves, the Athenians would no longer be able to scrape silver out of the earth, no longer stimulate the market, no longer sustain their position as ‘the envy of all Greece’. Now the Spartans really had Athens in their sights. Always scorning coined money (coinage was banned in the Spartan state), the Spartans must have rubbed their hands with glee at the thought that they had cauterised the production of Athena’s Silver Owls: coins that were a symbol of both high-minded achievement and imperial might.

  With the Thebans at their backs and an impoverished Athens ahead of them, it looked as though Sparta’s favourite hero, Herakles, had broken the back of his thirteenth labour – that soon Athena’s city would be his.

  46

  TIME OF TERROR

  Athens, 412–406 BC

  Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide.

  John Adams, letter, 15 April 1814

  AND WHAT OF ALCIBIADES? WOULD THIS not be the time for him to wield his killer-blow against the city that had so publicly disowned him?

  Yet, like all jilted lovers, the ‘adored tyrant of Athens’1 would not cut loose, not be rejected so easily.

  Always a little ‘weak about the trousers’, Alcibiades was said to have been busy during his time in Sparta, particularly in the balmy district where the two Spartan kings lived. Magoula, as it was known then and still is today, feels privileged. In amongst the banana and orange groves are the homes of rich men. The tributaries of the Eurotas River, high-reeded, gurgle through the fields, and jasmine spills over well-built walls. The remains of Roman baths, abandoned in olive groves, remind one that this was once a place of relaxation and sensual pleasure. And it was here that Alcibiades seduced the Spartan wife of King Agis while the cuckold was away on campaign.2 The love-match had spawned a child – and court gossips recalled that years later this wife, Timaea, still whispered into the ear of her golden-haired babe, ‘Alcibiades, Alcibiades.’ Agis, furious, had ordered Alcibiades’ execution – but of course the lustful Athenian had no intention of accepting termination, all because of a few moments of heterosexual pleasure. And so, bribing and dodging his way out of a Spartan death-penalty, he was on the road again – travelling back, not to Athens, but to where he smelled the money: to the east, to Persia.

  His timing was good. Two generations after their defeats at Salamis and Plataea, the grandchildren of those shamed Persian kings were growing in confidence once more. The Persian emperor and his familiars supervised a long game of inter-state chess – manipulating the pieces so that now it was Athens, now the Spartans, who had the upper hand. Soon, they reasoned, these two, already weakened after twenty years of conflict, would pick away at one another’s defences so successfully that the Persians would be able to stride across their lands, and the lands of their allies, without so much as a sword being raised. Sparta and Athens had become two old cats in a bag, whose only option was to scratch one another to death.

  And so it should come as little surprise to hear that by 412 BC we find Alcibiades in Asia Minor, acting as a double-agent-cum-advisor for the Persian Viceroy Tissaphernes.

  For three years Alcibiades hedonised in Sardis – ‘medising’, soaking up the opulence of the Persian court and the ways of the ‘Medes’. His massive charisma was appreciated. ‘Even those who feared and envied him could not help delighting in his company.’3 He became Tissaphernes’ closest friend; Persian pleasure gardens were named after him. But Alcibiades was restless in the East. He had abandoned the black-broth – the pigs’-blood-based national dish – in Sparta, and you sense he was itching to return to his home-town Athens, although strictly on his terms. He had friends and relatives and men who owed him one in the city, and the runaway made it clear to them that he was still a player in the Athenian game. Making use of the network of spies and messengers that stitched together the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, Alcibiades g
ot word out to Athens. Promising the allegiance and support of the Persians, he started his own whispering campaign. Tough times call for tough measures, he said. The Spartan wolf is at our gates. We need finance and leadership and control, if we are to win. He offered to broker a deal – Persian gold would come into Athens if broader democratic ambitions were pushed out.

  Alcibiades knew that Athens’ bullion was running dry. The closure of the Laurion mines meant that Silver Owls were no longer being produced from Attic soil, and many of Athens’ ‘allies’ were failing to deliver their tribute to the mother-city. Money was still dribbling in, but now there were moths rather than rubies in the Parthenon bank. A couple of years later, around 407/6 BC, the Athenians would be forced to melt down some of their golden statues for ready cash. Even glittering Athena Parthenos, that proud wonder of the ancient world who once surveyed an Athenian Empire broad and long, was turned into gold coin.4

  So Alcibiades encouraged a brief oligarchic revolt in Samos, and, explicitly or unwittingly, set in train a series of events that would spell the beginning of the end of Athens. The details of this moment in history are still mysterious – almost certainly because they were planned covertly.

  The general Assembly was persuaded that Athens’ situation was desperate. A committee of thirty (all, as it turned out, renowned oligarchs) were chosen to consider Athens’ options. Due to present their findings to the Assembly up on the Pnyx, there was a last-minute change of venue. An unfamiliar meeting space was arranged for what would turn out to be a momentous decision – the extinction of the democracy for the first time in almost a hundred years. The citizens of Athens were instead invited to a sanctuary of Poseidon Hippios in the deme of Kolonos, a mile or so outside the city walls. The location was designed to befuddle; a local sanctuary with distinct aristocratic connotations (it is aristocrats who have hippoi, ‘horses’, after all), it had neither the timbre of those great democratic debating grounds – the Agora, the Odeion, the Pnyx, the Theatre of Dionysos – nor, importantly, space enough to fit everyone in. The Spartans were only a few miles away at Decelea. Where the Pnyx had natural fortifications. It seemed the sanctuary-meeting place was going to be protected by oligarchic heavies. Any democrat here at Kolonos must have felt distinctly exposed.