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

by Bettany Hughes

  Your pain is our pain!6

  Outside the Theatre of Dionysos where these plays are performed are the visible, physical casualties of war. The hunger-drawn middle-aged men. Women who cannot spawn new little humans to support them, and who have lost the sons they once gave birth to. These are fixtures of all war-zones: outlaws with no families, no role. We hear of one such after Socrates has died, in the fourth century BC. An older woman who is suspected of not being a citizen because she is reduced to working as a wet-nurse and a ribbon-seller: jobs normally fit only for slaves and metics. Her son Euxitheus declares with aching understatement that many crones like her are forced to work as nurses, wool-workers, grape-pickers. ‘We do not live in the way that we’d like,’ he sighs.7

  By the end of the fifth century BC the mood in Athens had become uniformly ugly. Grain supplies were getting low. Brother could not trust brother. A recently discovered letter written by a contemporary of Socrates, etched onto a foil-fine piece of lead and long lost in the Black Sea, sees a banker called Pasion, himself an ex-slave, instructing a lawyer to effect retribution in Athens:

  I, Pasion, write with instructions to Dikaiarchos to punish and pursue Satyrion and Nikostratos … since they are wronging and plotting against me, and [against] Glauketes and Aiantodoros, and are plotting also that …8

  One can imagine the atmosphere: Athenians all looking over their shoulders to see who would be the next to stab them in the back. A weary whisper must have stolen through the cramped streets – someone must be responsible for all this suffering, for the degeneration of a city that was once in the ascendant. And the people of Athens lashed out at what they could hear and see: at the sophists, the clever men who, at one time, had, with flowery words and tricks of rhetoric, with the goddess Persuasion at their sides, glorified Athens to the wider world and within its walls. Much like the financiers in the first decade of the twenty-first century, these specialists traded in clever, invisible assets that seemed powerful, but that none outside their circle fully understood. There was a time when the delight of good argument, the cosy glow of inspiring words, had seemed to protect Athens: to give Athenians a great sense of themselves, to publicise their undeniable cleverness and self-confidence throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, to make anything seem possible. In the new inclusive political system, ordinary men needed their fancy words to survive the bear-pit of the law-courts, the fracas of the Assembly. The influx of foreigners, of foreign ideas, was, briefly, intensely exciting for Athens. Some sophists managed to grow fat on the democrats’ willingness and need to pay for words. At the outset of the democracy great orators had been adulated and the city-state had fallen in love with the art of rhetoric. But now men realised that the slickest speakers were running rings around them: if you could argue black was white, then it was only the most persuasive argument – not the most sound, the most logical, the best – that would win the day. Democrats realised that men could be tricked into doing dreadful, as well as noble, things. Smooth talk was recognised as spin, and it lost its charm.

  Throughout Socrates’ life, men had flocked to hear word-merchants talk in the Agora. Now mobs banged on their doors late at night demanding the expulsion of these self-same sophists from the city. Athens was no longer a state you wanted to arrive at, it was a place from which you tried to escape.

  Aristophanes’ comedies, always surgically sharp, speak even more bitterly now of men like Socrates. The philosopher is not just a figure of fun, he is unpatriotic, devaluing the work of the great tragedians with his ‘hair-splitting twaddle.’9 There were not many intellectuals left in Athens by the turn of the century and there was the sense that those who were there had their backs against the wall.

  Alcibiades was exiled, Nicias dead, Pericles just bones in the earth. The democratic mob, and for once this is what it was, had terminated the lives of the successful generals of Arginusae – eight men who had originally been picked as the brightest sparks that remained in a dulled city-state. Athens simply had no great men to lead it, and the bellies of the people were growing big with hunger. But the appetite for war was undiminished and Athens, it seems, still had the stomach to fight.

  The next theatre of engagement between the old enemies Sparta and Athens would be on the stretch of water that now sits between Europe and Asia, the Hellespont, and in particular a spot that still demarcates the division between East and West – a place called Aegospotami on the European side of the mouth of the Bosporus. The landscape here is listless and unfriendly. Nearby are the modern-day battlegrounds of Gallipoli, where other young soldiers were slaughtered in their thousands during the First World War. It is inhospitable territory – land you have to know well if you are to survive.

  This is the region that had become Alcibiades’ home patch; the Chersonese peninsula, where he had been given estates and fortified tagging posts. To all intents and purposes he had morphed into a Thracian warlord. The harshness of his life was written in the landscape around him. Learning of the planned battle at Aegospotami, Alcibiades, thundering up to the generals like a former-day knight in shining armour, just got near enough to offer advice – it is crazy, he said, to beach Athenian ships on those exposed hills that seem to grow only rock and low scrub, where the Spartans could spike them. But a ‘privateer’10 now rather than a true Athenian, his golden touch seemed cheap, fake. Alcibiades’ words were summarily dismissed. In some ways, if Athenians were going to go down, perhaps it was to their credit that they did not throw out a desperate lifeline to the rackety, trashy, charismatic athlete-aristocrat, who had played fast and loose with their affections so many times.

  And now not only did the Athenians anchor their ships where they were vulnerable, but they left them unattended while going out into alien territory to forage for supplies. They had not a chance of victory, particularly given that Sparta had two phosphorescently luminous young male characters on her side. The Spartan general Lysander was on the attack, and as he ploughed through the sea, it was said that the twin brothers of Helen, the divine Dioscuri, came rushing to the aid of Spartans abroad once more. Athens was once a thalassocracy – a power that ruled the seas. But now the Spartans, landlocked for so long, had learned to adapt. And it was their warrior-citizens, along with those fit underclasses called helots (slaves) and mothakes (bastards) who were forcing the oars of triremes to power-surf through the Aegean at spine-tingling speeds. Now it was the Spartans who had control of coasts and waterways and beaching points, of naval strategy.

  At Aegospotami, Athenian ships scattered, and all but two were taken captive. All Athenian citizens on board, at least 1,000 of them, were lined up and executed. Spartan Lysander had won. Athens surrendered. The region that had witnessed a heavenly shower of meteorites when Socrates was just two years old, a line from the heavens that encouraged Athenians and visitors to Athens to debate the scientific nature of the universe, had now trailblazed the death of the Athenian Empire.

  Spartan administrators lost no time in broadcasting their city-state’s triumph. In Delos a decree was issued, written in the distinctively bucolic Spartan dialect, stating, laconically, that the Delians had their freedom, their sanctuaries and their funds once more – never again would this be an Athenian offshore bank.

  And in the navel of the world itself, in Delphi, the Spartan commander Lysander was commemorated with a gaudy monument. As you walked up the rousing Sacred Way, with the plain of Kirrha on your left, Mount Parnassus to your right and behind you, this hubristic memorial would have been impossible to miss. Right next to the Athenian show-off zone, with its eponymous heroes, by a statue of Miltiades (the victor at the Battle of Marathon) now stood a new, Spartan plinth boasting thirty-eight bronze statues precisely commissioned by Laconic overlords. Here there were Zeus, Apollo and Artemis, here too those helpful twin brothers Castor and Pollux, and there was Lysander, being crowned by the god who had lost the battle for the Acropolis and for Athens, Poseidon. But Poseidon had won the ultimate victory. He now adored these Spa
rtans, who had, at last, seen sense and floated their boats and their chances on his briny battle-plain: together gods and god-fearing Spartans had brought that busybody superpower Athens down. Athena, on this occasion, was nowhere to be seen.

  After the disastrous naval defeat at Aegospotami all of Athens’ allies deserted her, with the exception of idealistic Samos, once so troublesome but now staunchly democratic. The Athenians, desperate to remember their few friends, commissioned a beautiful relief of the two goddesses Athena and Hera (protectress of Samos) warmly shaking hands; the Samians – whose restlessness all those years back in 440 BC helped to spark the zero-sum Peloponnesian War – were now given Athenian citizenship.

  Athens had been great, but one wondered, this year, who would want its citizenship? Outside the city walls were camped those two Spartan kings. The Spartan fleet, warming to its new sea-legs, ringed the harbour of Piraeus. The 150 ships prevented grain supplies getting through to the Athenian people – and there were many Athenians inside the city as Lysander had swept through all the nearby territories, ordering the children of Athena to go and hide in the skirts of their wise, war-loving goddess. In 404 BC the Athenians, with the Spartans at their gates and confidently billeting themselves in those once-beloved, once-thriving places, the gymnasia and wrestling grounds,11 were hopelessly besieged, hungry and weak with a certain fear of what they had coming to them:

  They could see no future for themselves except to suffer what they had made others suffer, people of small states whom they had injured not in retaliation for anything they had done but out of arrogance of power and for no reason except that they were in the Spartan alliance … and so though numbers of people in the city were dying of starvation, there was no talk of peace.12

  We hear that while all in the city were wailing and pulling their hair, gnawing at wood to beat the pangs of starvation, Socrates was typically phlegmatic in the face of disaster, typically out of step with those around him:

  SOCRATES: During the siege, while others pitied themselves, I lived no worse than when the city was happiest.13

  But we have reached the endgame. Sparta had Athens surrounded. Athens no longer commanded the treasured asset she had fought for seventy-odd years before – eleutheria, freedom. Socrates and his fellow Athenians found that if they wanted to live, they had no choice but to vote out their own democracy, and vote in a Laconophile oligarchy instead.

  Hearing that democratic Athens was at last defeated, a tsunami of resentment and hate raced towards Attica. The Thebans and Corinthians (Sparta’s allies) wanted to slaughter and maim, to turn rich, cultured Athenian territory into land for sheep. But the Spartans were less emotional. Calmly they demanded four things: the reduction of Athens’ fleet to twelve ships; the disbanding of the democracy – and the smashing down of those city walls that they so resented, and in whose shadow they had fought for so long. And then those words that have come to have such a familiar ring, in modern as well as ancient societies: the edicts of the powerful instructing subject nations how they will now think, who will now be their friends and their common foes; the Spartans made one final demand and the statement was blunt, unambiguous: either you are with us or against us.

  Athens to have the same enemies and the same friends as Sparta has and to follow Spartan leadership in any expedition Sparta might make either by land or sea.14

  It was done. Athena’s city no longer belonged to Socrates and his fellow Athenians. Now she belonged to Sparta. Those who had been subject-states controlled by Athens stretched their arms wide and welcomed this change of regime.

  Brick by brick, block by block, Athens’ proud city walls were tumbled to the ground.

  And so, Xenophon tells us, the flute-girls, the prostitutes around the city walls, quickly changed sides, dancing in the embers of the Athenian Empire.

  They believed this day to be the beginning of freedom for the Greeks.15

  49

  THIRTY TYRANTS

  Athens, 404 BC

  They tore people from their children, parents and wives, … and did not allow them to receive the lawful and customary burial rights, considering their own might-is-right authority to be more powerful than the punishments of gods.

  Lysias, Speech 12, Against Eratosthenes, 12.96

  FOR MORE THAN TWO YEARS SPARTAN-controlled populations across the Aegean had had to live under the rule of pro-Spartan juntas, ‘the rule of ten’ – and now the Athenians too were about to taste that experience.

  Lysander supported a group of just thirty men who were to have command of Athena’s city. These were all Athenian citizens, but had to have had oligarchic or pro-Spartan leanings. The interim body of ‘overseers’ was given a Spartan name, the ephors. We have to imagine that this ‘Thirty’ were not selected because of their holistic, democratic views or their support of fair-handed moderation. Critias, an uncle of Plato and an arch-conservative, the man whom Socrates had condemned as a rutting pig thanks to his sexual appetites, masterminded the operation. Socrates’ other favourite, Charmides (he whom Socrates described, on spotting him in the gym, as being ‘perfectly beautiful’), was one of the Ten that the Spartans backed to keep the Piraeus district subdued, and under a form of Spartan system of control. Other members of Socrates’ circle were part of the narrative of the restriction of people-power in this chapter of Athens’ history.

  But there was nothing symposiastic, dreamy, genial-boozy, butter-warmed about these men. Three per tribe, the Thirty had been legally elected, but they were in charge of an abused, traumatised city; and a Spartan ‘big brother’ watched over all. Much Athenian property was seized, and wealthy men, in particular foreign men, were targeted.

  The Thirty instituted a reign of terror, purging the city of their personal and political enemies. The business started by oligarchs back in 411 BC, when death squads had roamed the streets, was being seen through to its awful conclusion.

  These new rulers of Athens held power for just twelve months, but they steadily thinned the Athenian population; over one hundred men a month were ‘disappeared’. Apart from the back-street massacres, the stiflings in beds, the snatching of children from the ‘wrong’ families, all the incidental displacements in the city must have been so distasteful, so heart-rending. The Tholos – that attractive roundhouse created to feed democrats while they worked all hours to make the democracy robust – was taken over by the Thirty in 403 BC as their headquarters. From their base there in the Agora’s circular, visibly egalitarian building (architecture of deep symbolic importance), the Thirty sent out their orders of intimidation and murder. The awful irony cannot have been lost on those Athenians who had seen the Tholos raised as a triumphant hurrah for liberty and equality.

  From 404 through to 403 BC, Athens was stifled in an endless nightmare. Fists and wooden clubs pounded on doors. Citizens turned slaughterers to avoid their own messy deaths. To appreciate the horror of this long night, it is important to recall just how small Athens had become. A city of 100,000 Athenians plus 200,000 slaves had been reduced, through disease, the Peloponnesian War and civil strife, to a core of 60,000 or so. Only 30,000 of those were men, and just 10,000 lived within the walls of Athens itself. This was Balkan-village atrocity. Neighbours turned on neighbours, sometimes brother against brother.

  In the year of the Thirty, between 1,000 and 1,500 Athenians died. We know about the citizen deaths; there may have been many thousands more – anonymous corpses. Metics, slaves, the inhabitants of Piraeus were also purged. Vigilantes were around every corner. We have one unusually vivid eye-witness account of the attacks.1 One Lysias (a ‘leading citizen’, originally from Thurii, Sicily, who was himself a prominent speech writer and whose father had been a friend of Pericles) tells us the details of his narrow escape. Arrested, he made a dash for the back door. His brother, Polemarchos, was not so lucky. As with all coups, loot seems to arouse as much passion as politics. The golden earrings were ripped from Polemarchos’ wife’s ears; his relations were raped and their goo
ds stolen. Also confiscated by the state were the contents of his brother’s factory in Piraeus: 700 shields, plus gold, silver and 120 slave workers. The democracy had always disapproved of shows of wealth. Men who did well in the unusually buoyant economy of the mid-to-late fifth century, in the spirit of communal achievement, stashed capital away in their homes. Well, now this opulence was being ripped from private hands, not by egalitarian idealists but by jealous aristocrats and oligarchs; by men who had perhaps secretly always thought it a disgrace that ordinary, non-aristocratic, Athenians should be allowed to succeed.

  The actions across the city were carefully orchestrated. To kill their rivals, to cut down the tall poppies, the Thirty adapted the various means of death already available in Athens. Men could be thrown into pits alive, they could be strapped with metal restrainers by their necks, legs and arms onto wooden boards; but what the Thirty brought to a fine art was death by hemlock.2

  The recipe for a fatal hemlock dose had only just been perfected. Herbalists had worked out that less than a quarter of an ounce was needed to kill. There were ways of making the murder weapon extra-effective, or ‘quick and easy’ as the contemporary sources have it: if the plant was skinned, ground in a pestle and mortar and then sieved, its poison became particularly efficacious.

  Aristophanes jokes about the situation.3 Death by domestic implement: the ludicrousness of us carefully, steadily working out mundane ways in which we can more easily force others to die. In 405 BC this was a newfangled bit of terminal chemistry. And by 404/3 BC drinking hemlock became a ‘habitual’ order. Men were forced to die in their own homes, and many were denied a burial. Athena’s city had become a ghoulish morgue, the stuff of nightmares.