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

by Bettany Hughes

  The uneasy crowd gathered. It was clear that not everyone was welcome here, and that there was a danger of being trapped in the sanctuary, should you want to get out fast. In the ‘narrow space’, as Thucydides describes it, a series of reforms were pushed through. The democracy voted itself out of existence and voted in a new kind of constitution. A self-selected council of 400 was to replace the 500 citizens who once queued up to be chosen for office by lot in demes across Attica. The Athenian citizen-body would be restricted to 5,000, and only men who could carry hoplite arms. Athens had become a democratically elected oligarchy. The blue-blood horsemen who travelled home past their traditional exercise grounds at the herms’ crossroads opposite the Stoa Basileios now wore sardonic smiles.

  Within a few days the council was dissolved. Someone – it is still not clear who precisely was the driving force behind this sociopolitical unrest – had achieved a very clever bloodless coup. The democracy had not been bypassed, but instead coerced into renouncing itself. Heavily armed highborn men ostentatiously hung out in the streets, escorted by the 120 so-called ‘Hellenic Youths’ (early pre-echoes of the ‘Hitler Youth’) to check there was no trouble.5 Democrats were intimidated into staying indoors, lying low and keeping quiet.

  Thucydides tells us that ‘no one dared to speak out against them, fear was everywhere, and it was clear that the conspiracy was widespread; and if anyone did … straightaway, in some convenient way he was a dead man.’6

  Immediately the new system was open to abuse. The 5,000 ‘citizen-body’ never materialised. Instead, for four months, the Four Hundred ruled, and tried to tidy up the city by exterminating their enemies. The sanctuary of Poseidon Hippios was set down in popular memory as a place where ate, fate, was played out to its dreadful conclusion. Kolonos Hill today still has a slightly uncertain feel – it struggles to be an urban park – and it is not a place to visit after dark. Red graffiti on the wall yells ‘COPS! MURDERERS!’ as a protest against the shooting of a student by police in Athens in December 2008. Mature pines and olives cushion the jag of cheaply built apartment blocks, but there are syringes under park benches and rubbish in the bushes. The place is listless. Pointedly, when Sophocles wrote his final Oedipus tragedy in 401 BC (which he would not live to see performed), he tried to turn back the clock and hymned Kolonos as an idyllic grove – whose sanctity a blind, imperfect Oedipus violates.

  But the Athenians were not fooled. Kolonos came to be remembered as the locus of the beginning of ‘the troubles’. The council of the Four Hundred had sufficient money to pay assassins to work swiftly and effectively. Demokratia had suddenly become treason, the ‘demos’ was once again a dirty word. There were summary executions, Athena’s city was staggering into civil war. All pretence of freedom of expression was dropped. By 411 BC the Four Hundred had the bit between their teeth and believed they were on a winning streak. They decided they could manage without Alcibiades, who twisted and turned once again. The democrats in the fleet in Samos were horrified by what had happened back in the mother-city. Alcibiades smelled an opportunity, sympathised, and they voted him their general. Now to all intents and purposes, the exile had his very own private Athenian navy.

  And meanwhile the new, prematurely confident oligarchic Athens was not doing well. The 400 had secured neither Persian money nor Spartan appeasement. Spartan troops took over the breadbasket that is Euboea and then slowly started to pick off cities potentially friendly to Athens: Byzantium in 410, and from 407 many more as the satrap of Asia Minor, Prince Cyrus, decided to put his money behind Sparta’s cause. When it was clear that the Council of 400 – still meeting regularly in the bouleuterion in the Agora – wouldn’t work, the Athenians tried a new way to restrict the full democracy, instituting a property qualification for full citizenship.7

  These were all lame gestures. The club of the great and the good had become just too small to allow Athens to revolutionise its political system effectively overnight.

  Throughout the fifth century, fighting on many sides – against Persians, and then Persians and Spartans, and then Spartans, and then Spartans and Persians once more – the Athenians had managed to lose sight of, or perhaps more accurately gloss over, internal disputes, and were able to pretend that they presented a united front. They exiled or ostracised those who caused trouble, they shouted loudly together in the Assembly – they persuaded themselves that they were as one. But now cracks within the city-state were widening.

  It is in 411 that Thucydides’ narrative ends. He was of course (following his disgrace at Amphipolis) in exile in Thrace. His health broken, within a few years he would be dead. From 411 BC onwards it is also almost as though the true father of history cannot bear to write about Athens anymore.

  The Four Hundred were in power, the democracy had been lost, but some men of Athens remembered that Alcibiades was in fact only two days’ sailing away in the region of Samos with the pro-democrats Thrasybulus and Thrasyllus. Alcibiades, despite his treachery, despite his hubris and quicksilver politics, had a totemic reputation for many Athenians. He might not have demonstrated the pure ‘nobility of spirit’ that was thought to come with the beauty of an aristocrat, but he still had the vigour, the driving ambition that incarnated democratic Athenian verve. And – this is of key importance – he had the loyalty of a water-borne army.8 Athenian hoi polloi were quickened once again to the idea that this quasi-legendary figure might be able to save them.

  And indeed it was Alcibiades, Socrates’ couch-mate, who pulled off a temporary reversal of fortunes, earning great victories for Athens and at last bringing good news back into the Agora. In one sense this was all a great confidence trick. Alcibiades appeared to have the ear of the Persians, and so the Athenian people rolled over to his side. Flurries of triremes on the white-flecked Aegean – Spartan, Athenian, Persian – had been thrashing it out for control of sea and land. Alcibiades had lived in and around Asia Minor and his local knowledge helped to effect a string of victories. With his triumph at the Battle of Kyzikos in 410, Alcibiades grappled back some self-respect for Athena’s city. By setting up a kind of customs house at Byzantium, charging 10 per cent to all trading traffic that sailed through the Hellespont, he also brought some hard cash back to the city-state.9 The demos, loyal to Alcibiades, who flattered and charmed them with deeds and coin, began to drift back to the Assembly. By 410/9 the old-style democracy had been restored, proving how remarkably resilient this word-idea in fact was – and how vindictive. The horsemen of the Four Hundred were not smiling now. There were reprisals the length and breadth of the city.

  CHORUS: And if things don’t go well, if these good men

  All fail, and Athens comes to grief, why then

  Discerning folk will murmur (let us hope):

  ‘She’s hanged herself – but what a splendid rope’.10

  When Socrates was young, the smell of destroyed carcasses in Athens came from the meat markets in the Agora, the tripe stalls on Piraeus harbour front or the dead animals prepared for tanning; now it was human flesh, first of democrats and then of oligarchs, that was making the air above Athena’s city rank.

  Aristophanes’ Frogs, written when the city was a daily host to such barbarity, again captures the mood of the moment – where salvation no longer seems to lie in the future, but somewhere in a romanticised past:

  But remember these men also, your own kinsmen, sire and son,

  Who have of times fought beside you, spilt their blood on many seas;

  Grant for that one fault the pardon which they crave you on their knees.

  You whom nature made for wisdom, let your vengeance fall to sleep;

  Greet as kinsmen and Athenians, burghers true to win and keep,

  Whosoe’er will brave the storms and fight for Athens at your side!11

  Athenian society’s underlying belief in the power of the ‘old’ way of doing things bubbled to the surface at a time of crisis. The reformed democracy of 410 set to inscribing the resumed democratic laws in
stone. But what was being set down there was not a brave new world. The hard evidence, a surviving a carved stone stele, demonstrates that the public statements in Athens now have, literally, a more draconian feel. ‘The Athenians shall be governed in the ancestral ways, using the laws, weights and measures of Solon and also the regulations of Draco which had previously been in force.’12 It was to a conventional past that a traumatised people turned to find strength.

  Alcibiades, the prodigal son

  With the democracy restored and a number of oligarchic troublemakers executed, for a short time, in domestic affairs at least, Athens seemed to be temporarily robust. In 407, as a conquering hero once again, opportunist Alcibiades was recalled to Athens. Greeted at Piraeus with all the pomp and affection befitting one who had that vital Greek virtue kleos – fame, the worth to be sung of as the heroes of old – he went straight to the Pnyx to flex his well-exercised rhetorical muscles. At this moment Alcibiades was truly the prodigal son returned. The stele incarnating his disgrace was up-ended, dragged down from the Acropolis and thrown into the sea. In his play the Frogs, Aristophanes says the Athenians ‘pine for him, they hate him, but they wish to have him back’.13

  Alcibiades led the procession heading towards the Eleusinian Mysteries – by necessity rerouted for a number of years to skirt those areas of Attic land under Spartan occupation – cocking a snook at the Spartan garrison at Decelea. The returning hero was followed by a gaggle of eager, sycophantic (‘sycophant’ in the modern, not Attic Greek, sense) citizens, welcoming their lost-boy home. The Athenians, delirious with relief that something at last seemed to be going their way, forgetting his treachery and the disgrace he had brought to their doors, lauded Alcibiades loudly. Plutarch later said of him, with a sniff, that he ‘so demagogued the humbler and the poorer classes that they yearned – lusted even – for him to rule over them like a dictator.’14

  But it was the briefest of honeymoon periods. Four months in total. Within a number of weeks Alcibiades’ deputy Antiochus lost the sea-battle at Notion and, with particularly bitter-sweet contrast, other Athenian generals won the significant sea-battle of Arginusae. Alcibiades had rolled his last dice; he flounced back to Persia and then north to Thrace and the Hellespont. The Athenian Empire had become so sprawling, so big, so weak that it was localising again, and many Greeks gave up all pretence of fighting under an ideological banner. Alcibiades was resurrected amongst the malcontents of the north as a warlord. The Dark Ages were back, a time when powerful men carved up territories on the map for purely personal gain.

  Like a bad penny, Alcibiades would turn up once more in Athenian affairs; but his offer of help would be rejected. Now he was in his mid-forties, bald, perhaps looking seedy, a good deal of his glamour had finally worn off. His end was certainly ignominious; not epic, not heroic, not golden. He had lived his life for glory – and had earned many enemies in the process. Deciding to give up on Hellenic interests altogether, he travelled east again, anticipating a new alliance with the grand King of Susa, Artaxerxes. En route – with his beautiful courtesan-consort Timandra – he slept one night in a small town in Phrygia. In the early hours a scraping sound woke him. Assassins (to this day we don’t know whose) were setting his lodgings alight. Alcibiades stumbled out, sword in hand, choking, but was lynched at a distance with javelins and spears. His whore was spared – but only to wash and bury, or burn, Alcibiades’ body, which had by now been decapitated.

  And what of Socrates through all this turmoil and political heartache? How did he react to the messy, exiled death of the man he had once loved as dearly as philosophy itself? Well, Plato has us believe that, as ever, he wasted not a moment worrying about the casualties or minutiae of the power politics of the day. His concern, purely and simply, was now what it had always been – to encourage the young men of the city to learn how to be good.15 And the philosopher achieves this as he has always done, by wandering through the hot, still inspiring streets and sanctuaries of his city-state.

  SOCRATES: The locusts seem to be looking down upon us as they sing and talk with each other in the heat. Now if they should see us not conversing at midday, but, like most people, dozing, lulled to sleep by their song because of our mental indolence, they would quite justly laugh at us, thinking that some slaves had come to their resort and were slumbering about the fountain at noon like sheep. But if they see us conversing and sailing past them unmoved by the charm of their Siren voices, perhaps they will be pleased and give us the gift which the gods bestowed on them to give men.16

  Despite all this retrogressive pain, Socrates was still looking to the future; he was still coaching the young men of Athens in their job of being thinking men. And he did so in one of the most trim of all Athens’ locations, a wrestling ground, a palaestra.

  SOCRATES: What is this place? And what do you do here?

  [The young men reply:] It is a newly-built wrestling ground; but in fact we spend much of our time talking and debating – would you like to come to join us?17

  An entire Platonic Dialogue, the Lysis (subtitled ‘On Friendship’), is set here. The date is 409 BC. Socrates, putatively aged about sixty, describes to us two conversations he has with a handsome young man, Lysis, and his friend Menexenus. Their discussions focus on the motivations for personal affection, and on the nature of friendship. It is a charming and practical work.

  Hence anyone who deals wisely in love-matters, my friend, does not praise his beloved until he prevails, for fear of what the future may have in store for him. And besides, these handsome boys, when so praised and extolled, become full of pride and haughtiness: do you not think so?

  I do, he said.

  And then, the haughtier they are, the harder grows the task of capturing them?18

  Excitingly for scholars of Plato’s work, recent excavations that preceded the 2004 Olympics and that extended earlier archaeological work between 1924 and 1925, and between 1960 to 1981, have confirmed the exact geography of Socrates’ opening lines.

  SOCRATES: I was walking straight from the Academy to the Lyceum, by the road which skirts the outside of the walls – just under the wall, and had reached the little gate where you’ll find the spring of Panops [of Hermes the ‘all-seeing’], when I chanced upon Hippothales, the son of Hieronymos, Ktesippos the Paeaniain, and some more young men, standing together in a group …

  Come and join us, he said.

  Where do you mean? I asked; and who do you mean by ‘us’?

  Here, he said, pointing out to me an enclosure with a door open. We pass our time here, he went on; not only us, but others besides, – a great many, and handsome.19

  It is still possible to peer down at these excavations in the north-eastern corner of the city today. Hefty stone blocks mark the parameters of the gateway and the boundary of the old wrestling ground. The traces of the spring of Panops are now visible. The work has also uncovered a new cemetery in the area, created during the Peloponnesian War to deal with the increasing number of corpses that Athens produced in those dull decades of its Golden Age history. Touching little artefacts have emerged from the graves: a child’s golden bracelet and finger ring, a young man’s voting disc.20 Moving to think that this spot may well have been precisely where Socrates delivered lines so thoughtful and universal that they still chime today:

  May not the truth be that, as we were saying, desire is the cause of friendship; for that which desires is dear to that which is desired at the time of desire?21

  And the real Lysis himself has left us an unexpected archaeological treat. In the newly refurbished Archaeological Museum down in Piraeus district, in between the shafts of light that come sea-bright through the blinds, stands a fine funerary urn.22 It is made of solid stone, creamy, finely carved. Chiselled into its front face is a tender scene. An elderly man sits while a woman stands behind him. The man is old, but poised – he extends his hand in farewell. His name is Lysis, son of Demokrates. He is bidding farewell to his own son, Timokleides, who has, prematurely, be
en taken from the world. The mourning Lysis is the same bright lad that Socrates chatted with one warm day at the wrestling ground. He is in more ways than one ‘the son of Demokrates’. Young, confident, like the democracy itself, he has lived to suffer disappointment and great loss. His fifth-century story can still be read in the stones underneath modern Athens’ feet.

  We can map with increasing certainty Socrates’ peregrinations (and those of his peers) around Athens during those final spasms of the Peloponnesian War. Yet the philosopher is still a challenge for history writers, for he does not fit into an easy political narrative. He is not a campaigner. He does not die for the sake of democracy. He does not seize power with the oligarchs, exterminate his enemies and debauch on victory. Instead, while all around him are losing their heads, their principles and their lives, he apparently relaxes in the gymnasia and at the wrestling grounds and, with the next generation of young Athenian men, debates the nature of friendship and looks to the future.