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

by Bettany Hughes

  But there is a strong hint in one of the lines given to Socrates by Plato that this devoted entanglement with the young, the not fully mature, spells disaster.

  SOCRATES: The young who follow me around, doing so of their free will, who have complete leisure – the sons of the richest people – enjoy hearing people examined, and they often imitate me, and then try to examine others. And then, I imagine, they find an abundance of people who think they know something but know virtually nothing. That’s why those who are examined by them get angry with me and not with them, and say that a certain Socrates completely pollutes the land and corrupts the youth. And when anyone asks them what I do and what I teach … I think they wouldn’t want to say what’s true, that they’re plainly pretending to know, and in fact, they know nothing.23

  When the democracy was developing and expanding, it was bullish, confident it could cope with Socrates’ eternal questions. It could even handle (albeit reluctantly) the precocious self-belief of his young protégés – immature men who started to interrogate those around them before they had learned how to answer questions themselves. It turned a blind eye to the fact that Socrates meandered through the city and talked, and talked; he never pulled his weight in an overtly democratic way; he did not put himself forward for jury service, or for high office. But now, after two decades of battle, after plague, after five years of civil strife, this high-handed, apparently self-indulgent questioning must have seemed intolerable. Socrates’ association with a particular ‘young man’ would also have been to the fore of Athenian minds. Alcibiades, that glaringly ebullient latter-day Theseus, was now dead, and a disgrace to the city. He was as despised as he had once been loved. How could the Athenians possibly not remember that Socrates had shared Alcibiades’ tent, his couch, his well-turned drinking cup? Who was to say the philosopher did not also share half-Spartan Alcibi-ades’ superiority, his dangerous, knife-wielding aristocratic friends, his oligarchic leanings, his part-Spartan heart?

  And then, three years after his debate with the young men at the wrestling grounds, an unusual thing happened: Socrates himself, who all his life had shunned ‘conventional’ politics (the Assembly, the law-courts, the Boule) suddenly seemed to change tack. In the late summer of 406 BC we find him back in the Agora – not wandering around and provoking his fellow-citizens, not sharing ideas with those forty or fifty years his junior, but acting more conventionally, as a member of a prytany, the inner circle of the democratic Boule council itself. At last, with just seven years to live, Socrates was acting like a good-to-honest, conventional Athenian democrat.

  47

  ARGINUSAE – STANDING OUT IN THE CROWD

  The Assembly, Athens, 406 BC

  SOCRATES: Because I’m not just now but in fact I’ve always been the sort of person who’s persuaded by nothing but the reason that appears to me to be best when I’ve considered it … Consider then: doesn’t it seem to you to be correct that one shouldn’t respect all the opinions people have but some and not others, nor the opinions of all people, but some and not others? What do you say? Is this right or not?

  CRITO: It’s right.

  SOCRATES: Then should we respect the good ones but not the bad ones?

  CRITO: Yes.

  SOCRATES: Aren’t the good ones the opinions of the wise, and the bad ones the opinions of the foolish?

  CRITO: Of course.

  Plato, Crito, 46b–7a1

  ASCANT SEVEN YEARS BEFORE HIS own capital trial Socrates stood in the company of another group of men, 6,000 or so this time. He had put himself forward for selection by lot (a system of which he took a rather dim view) to judge on the Boule council in the melodramatic case of the Battle of Arginusae.2

  In 406 BC the Spartans looked set to take over the western seaboard of Turkey and had their eyes set on the strategic city of Methymna on the island of Lesbos – the Athenians’ only chance to thwart them was a battle around a small group of islets close by, the Arginusae. Athens was much attenuated come 406 BC, but the city drafted in all men, citizens, freed slaves, whoever was strong enough to hold a weapon to fight. Eight of the ten generals elected by the Assembly were prepared to command the campaign. A battle force was set. It made the two-day journey east under a scorching August sun. Two generals from the board of ten were besieged in the region at Mytilene, and so those eight remaining men had a sizeable, strategic burden to carry.

  The land here, deserted today apart from the odd visit by extreme swimmers who enjoy the challenge of the currents in this spot, is curiously unprepossessing. And in 406 BC, around the tricky rocks of Arginusae, 120 Spartan triremes and 155 Athenian swung into their ugly seaborne dance: ramming and burning, throat-slitting and heart-piercing until one side could stand it no more.

  The battle was a close call, but, just, a victory for Athens. And then a summer storm came. Storms in this region split open the sky. At a distance of 10 miles the rains scurf up the sea’s surface, and close at hand the raindrops travel so fast they are immediately blinding. The foul conditions back in 406 BC (or this was the official story at any rate) prevented the generals from picking up the bodies of the dead and wounded. Today a storm of this magnitude washes up fag-ends and cuttlefish right along the shoreline. In 406 BC it left shreds of battle, of humans. But the hours and days that followed the battle were so intemperate these scraps could not be retrieved. Uncollected, this meant that mutilated corpses could not be given a proper burial; their souls were lost, condemned. Two of the Athenian generals realised the implication of their failings and melted away into the Eastern Mediterranean. Six returned home, expecting perhaps a heroes’ welcome – there had been mitigating circumstances after all. Jittery and bad-tempered with worry, the Athenian demos did not receive the homecomers as they might have expected.

  Instead of garlands and laurels, the six generals still standing found themselves on trial. Athens, fleet of foot as ever, had arranged a hearing in the Assembly the men charged, collectively, with anti-democratic activity. As it so happened, Socrates was presiding officer for the day – serving with the prytany, the committee of the council.3 He had volunteered himself for service, back in the assembly of his local deme, Alopeke.4 His selection as overseer was a chance one; just the way the lottery machine chose to allocate democratic jobs that day. We do not know why Socrates volunteered himself, the man who famously left that kind of politicking to others. Payment for prytany duty was around 5 obols for the day – perhaps he simply needed the money.5 But his motivation could also have been more high-minded. He realised perhaps that Athens needed practical help to keep the body-politic together; that for once the philosopher’s role was to be not the wound, but the bandage. So, that late-summer morning in 406 BC, just as they would do in the near future at the philosopher’s trial, citizens were hurrying, at dawn with Socrates himself among them, to pass judgement on their fellow democrats.

  As presiding officer in the Assembly, Socrates had gone through that theatre of democracy that enabled ordinary men to prosecute one another or to declare them innocent. He had sworn an oath in Theseus’ Sanctuary that his counsel would be ‘for the best advantage of the state’. He would have made a sacrifice to Demokratia. He had stood up in front of the council members to declare himself fit for practice – giving the names of his mother and father, his grandparents, declaring that he honoured their names and the family cult, that he was not a pauper and that he had seen military service. He had eaten dinners (simple fare – the dinner services still being dug up here are not at all fancy6) in the round dining hall, the Tholos, by now more than fifty years old; he might have stayed the night there, he would have debated Assembly business with a press of the demos listening to him from behind railings, and he would have plunged his hands into the baskets of cold pebbles, some black, some white, so that he could vote ‘for’ or ‘against’.7

  We should not underestimate the significance of Socrates’ decision to be a politician for a day, either in his own narrative or in the story of the d
og days of Athens. The man who spent no time in his life busying himself with the practical, explicit business of being a democrat had now put himself forward for selection. He admitted that Athens needed him, and he needed to make his voice heard in the city. After years of brutalisation something had changed, – Athena must have been visibly stumbling.

  This case of the disgraced generals was going to be tried under the operatic canopy of a Greek sky. The Pnyx was the location – that creamy, rocky slope where up to 6,000 men could sit or stand comfortably side by side. And so piglets were sacrificed, invocations and curses were sent up to the gods, the Assembly men were now ritually pure. The fact that the disgraced generals from Arginusae were to be tried together – and by so many accusers – did not look good. No precedent in Athenian law allowed for group trials. This smacked of a kangaroo court. It seemed the generals’ guilt was a foregone conclusion. Socrates (a lone voice, or so Xenophon and Plato would have us believe) refused to go along with the ugly mood of the crowd. They shouted that he would be indicted for treason, but Socrates did not budge. The laws of Athens stated that men should be tried individually, and Socrates was sticking to the letter of the law. There was a stalemate; in the darkening sky that shadowed so quickly at this time of the year, the show of Athenian hands could not be counted clearly. The trial of the hangdog generals was postponed, and in the revolving-door arrangement of the democracy, tomorrow would bring another day, and another amateur politician to supervise proceedings. There was a promise of separate trials.8 Socrates was off the case.

  Athens had voted and agreed, but somehow, thanks to a bit of parliamentary ducking and diving, the Assembly was now told that this mandate was invalid; the progressive democracy had become a mob that preferred illegality to frustration. Their blood was up. Agitators infiltrated the court, their heads shaved as if they were in mourning. They produced a witness, a man who said he survived by clinging on to debris from the Arginusae wreckage – a bran tub of all things – and wailed that these generals did not even collect the men, dead, half-dead, dying, bobbing and gasping in the water, who had proved themselves ‘most brave in the service of the country’.9

  We do not have the name of the man who took over from Socrates; but what we know is that he did not have the philosopher’s qualms. The next day all six surviving generals in Athens were jointly tried, condemned to death and executed.10 Their means of death, hemlock poison.

  The generals had been voted into their posts, and into their graves, in a matter of weeks by the democratic Assembly. Socrates, who always questioned whether ‘democracy’ was indeed an automatic route to ‘the good’, seemed in the case of Arginusae to have grounds for concern.

  Loose ends

  One of the unfortunate dead – one of the six generals summarily executed – was Aspasia and Pericles’ son, Pericles II. Pericles’ two legitimate sons by his first marriage had died in the plague; Pericles II had been made a citizen by special decree. For a short time in his life he was accepted as a valid member of the Athenian democratic body. But now Athenian policy had managed to eradicate the genetic remnant of that union that had irritated them so all those years ago – a remnant of a great, an exemplary man and a seductive, beautiful woman from the East.

  By the time her son died, Aspasia had long been lost to history.

  But recent evidence has brought her back. Excavations in Piraeus during the laying of a new road turned up a number of artefacts in the rescue archaeology, amongst them one of the curse-tablets so favoured of fifth-century Athens. Someone had gouged Aspasia’s name out of lead and buried their curses in the Piraeus district. A grave stele mentioning her family was recently discovered here too – in the home of prostitutes, of liminal foreigners and their families.11 Centuries after her death one man reports seeing Aspasia’s tomb in the harbour district.12 And there is the chance that a piece of figurative statuary now copied in the Vatican guarded her grave. Rather matronly, stodgy and sensible-looking, if this stone bust is indeed Aspasia, it is hard to credit that she caused the Peloponnesian War thanks to her looks and the lust of her nymphomaniac dancing girls. But that was what the mob persuaded themselves they wanted to believe. Once this slander was on the streets, it was nurtured until it became popular history – and was then quoted as fact. Like most goddesses, the goddess of persuasion, Peitho, and Pheme, the goddess of rumour, could be irrevocably unkind.

  We commemorate Aspasia as a bright, self-made woman, but the Athenians never accepted this foreign courtesan. The democracy recognised the benefits of a cosmopolitan city, but shied away from endorsing and buttressing it. The Athenians, who had for a few decades proved themselves to be the most radical and liberal thinkers, who had embraced revolutionary, ground-breaking intellects from across the known world, gradually allowed the flaws of human nature – jealousy, self-delusion, greed, hubris, gossip, fear – to keep their democracy a flicker rather than a forest-fire in history. As a demos, a crowd, they made their judgement of Aspasia just as they did in the case of Arginusae.

  Xenophon records his distaste for the Athenian gannets up on the Pnyx.

  ‘The crowd’, he simply says, ‘forced its will by thorubos.’13

  This is sometimes dismissed as the snobbish slight of an aristocrat, but anyone who has lived in the real world should be able to taste Xenophon’s fear in their own mouths. Homo sapiens, time and again, craves the anonymity of the herd. All of civilisation’s darkest hours have been bayed on by men who want scapegoats, who want the finger of blame to turn in any direction, as long as it is away from their own face. Loose, jealous tongues are the bane of history. Thorubos can mean a buzz, a jangle of minds stimulated by one another, or it can mean the clatter of prejudice, where individuals choose to follow herd opinion. We call these shames abominable, but the complicity of the crowd is a distinctly human affair.

  So how could it not be that one peculiar, uncompromising man, who refused to go with the flow, who refused to vote to kill to make a community feel better about itself, would not soon have a taste of society’s own medicine?

  SOCRATES: You pay attention to and concentrate on this one thing; if what I say is just or not. This is the virtue of a judge; the virtue of a speaker is to tell the truth.14

  Just over six years later that same crowd would prove that men like Socrates could not thwart them with his high-minded talk. If a crowd, a court, an all-powerful democracy wanted to dispose of someone, with truth on their side or no, they had the power to do so.

  48

  TALL POPPIES, CUT CORN

  Athens, 405–404 BC

  By cutting the tops of the tallest ears of corn he [Periander, advising Thrasybulus] meant he must always put out of the way the citizens that overtop the rest.

  Aristotle, Politics, 5.101

  IT WAS NOW EASIER TO DESTROY those that the democracy had built up, that the people had once loved. Those who flowered too tall and too bright were regularly being cut down. The demos had always been ambivalent about their leading lights. Was a visionary, high-achieving man an asset, or did his very specialness, his head-above-the-crowdness make him anti-democratic?2

  Athenian drama is riddled with scenarios that explore this theme:

  OEDIPUS: O power –

  wealth and empire, skill outrunning skill

  in the rivalry and battlefields of life,

  what spite and envy follows after you!

  CHORUS: Who could behold his fame without envious eyes?

  Now in what a sea of overwhelming troubles he lies!3

  Greek theatre is frequently cited as a civilising influence, an altogether good thing. A space where people could meet their fears together: joint-witnessing. But we mustn’t forget these were gatherings that could fan the flames of prejudice and resentment and jealousy, as well as of good judgement.

  Socrates had been lambasted on-stage when there was still hope in the city. When in 423 BC Aristophanes had described him as a ‘rascal, a braggart, a liar’, when other playwrights had moc
ked his ‘one ragged cloak’, his ‘shoeless disciples’, there was still a chance that Athens could triumph in her foreign and internal struggles. The Dionysia itself may have been reduced from five days to three for the duration of the Peloponnesian War, but at least it was there. Approaching the year of Socrates’ death, Athens was ground down, jaded, wrecked, exhausted, febrile. Euripides’ Women of Troy and Hecuba talk not just about the sickening, fetid brutality of war, but of the dull, wasteful messiness of it.

  Woe, woe is me! What words, or cries, or lamentations can I utter? Ah me! For the sorrows of my closing years! For slavery too cruel to endure, to bear! Woe, woe is me! What champion do I have? Family and city – where are they?4

  And it was in these dark days, when the searing joviality of Aristophanes’ Clouds, the genial colours of an April day in 423, with pigs’ blood and wine and dancing, would still have been viable if distorted memories, that Socrates was judged. He was judged when hope had waned. When at least one-half, possibly three-quarters of the Athenian population had died. When the city’s greatest enemies had broken down Athenian walls, pissed on their thresholds, outlawed democracy – when the roar of the crowd suddenly showed a sharper edge.

  It is not [my accusers] but the envy and detraction of the world, which has been the death of many good men, and will probably be the death of many more; there is no danger of my being the last of them.5

  In the latest tragedies written – Euripides’ Phoenician Women, composed just ten years before Socrates’ trial, is a prime example – the picture is clouded. Now the city is a place compromised by war. Families are ruined, both tribal ties and individual ambition tear apart the city-state. We watch the last great works of Euripides and hear fifth-century Athenians weep.