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

by Bettany Hughes

  The Thirty were established, and many of the Athenians died drinking hemlock, and many went into exile.4

  Socrates too was intimidated. Critias had clearly not forgotten that Socrates had criticised his pig-like libido all those years ago around Agathon’s dinner table, and decided to cut him off from his raison d’ětre – the company of the young. The philosopher was told that he could no longer associate with men under the age of thirty.5 Socrates’ old drinking companions had become war criminals. This fact was frequently used to debase the philosopher’s reputation, guilt by association. But Xenophon, that pragmatic writer, came up with the most obvious and natural explanation, one that is typically overlooked. Xenophon says: we cannot blame Socrates for the evil of others, this is not the philosopher’s fault – people let themselves down, they change.

  ‘But,’ the accuser added, ‘Critias and Alcibiades became intimates of Socrates, and the two of them did the city the most grievous wrongs. Critias became the biggest thief and the most violent and murderous of all those in the Oligarchy, while Alcibiades became, for his part, the most irresponsible and high-handed and violent of all those in the democracy.’6

  And I know that Alcibiades and Critias, too, were temperate while they were with Socrates, not because they were afraid of being charged a fee or struck by Socrates, but because they believed at that time that this was the best action to be taking.

  Then, perhaps many of those who claim to be philosophers might say that the just man could never become unjust, nor the temperate man rash and high-handed, nor was it possible that a person who learned anything that could be learned might ever un-learn it. But this is not what I understand to be the case about these matters.7

  Friends, companions can surprise with their actions – and can suddenly seem strangers. Scholars often chide Socrates for the reactionary outcome of some of his pupils. But there is a tendency to over-promote the absolute tenacity of morality teaching. Socrates, who mingled with all manner of men, cannot be blamed for associating with individuals who went on to disappoint in later life.8

  Now a list was drawn up, 3,000 citizens of whom the Thirty approved, and all others in Athens were disarmed. Socrates (and it is unclear why, given Critias’ antipathy towards him) was on the ‘approved’ list.9 One of the Thirty, Theramenes, protested against the new, restrictive policy; he was executed, poisoned with hemlock after being dragged from the railings of an altar by Athens’ heavies, ‘the Eleven’.10 Theramenes’ body should have been wrapped in a shroud with the word ‘persecution’ woven into the fabric. His death signified the empty ethical shell that Athens had become; democracy, liberty and freedom of speech, always qualified, now had no place. Theramenes was no democrat – and yet even he could not speak out. It was becoming crystal-clear what would happen to anyone who exercised their right to isegoria, ‘equal right of expression’. Now, by day and night, a number of Athens’ aghast citizens crept out of the city, exiling themselves from within the walls, broken now, that had protected them since birth.

  Seven, fourteen, at least twenty-one harvests had been gathered since the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. But the dark days for Athenian democracy were about to become darker still. Although the Thirty had initially free rein to murder and rob and intimidate, a democratic Resistance started to form. Democrats who had melted away from the city began to regroup outside the city walls, in quite some number. The Thirty heard tell of the scale of partisan involvement and started to flee, most ending up 15 miles to the north-west of Athens in Eleusis. The oligarchs had prepared this bolt-hole, theoretically, but in practice the town did not welcome them. So they and their henchmen took Eleusis by force. The Thirty then went on to trick the male Eleusinian citizens into nailing their colours to the mast, declaring whether or not they were democrats. The Eleusinians were forced to walk out through a gateway – a kind of census, ostensibly to plan an effective garrison for the town. Waiting outside the gates were cavalry and the Thirty’s lackeys. The oligarch Eleusinians walked free, the democrat Eleusinians were seized, bound and transported to Athens. Xenophon finished the gruesome story in his Hellenica; the retelling is stagey in its cold-heartedness.

  Critias, he says, had already ‘begun to show this lust for putting people to death’.11

  On the rocky, sun-drenched slopes beneath the Acropolis it was not Persian whips nor a heroic code of honour that drove the captured men to their deaths – it was an open, democratic vote. In a crammed Odeion, Critias raised his voice loud:

  My friends, we are organising this government in your interests as well as in our own. It is right that, just as you share in the privileges, so you should share in the dangers. And so, in order that you may have the same hopes and same fears as we have, you must now pass the death sentence on these men of Eleusis who have been captured.12

  Given that the space – which once hosted the aspirational music of Damon et al., whose concerts were thought to provide a medical balm for the democratic mind – was now blatantly a place weighted in the oligarchs’ favour, papered with Spartan racketeers and with Spartan-sponsored soldiers standing at the entrance gates, it was clear which way the vote was going to fall.

  Elsewhere, from previously oligarchic strongholds in Thebes and Megara, which, surprisingly, gave a number of democrats shelter, steady streams of men climbed up to where the pine starts to sweeten the air, to the security of a place called Phyle. Phyle lies 3 miles north-east of Athens and offers excellent natural protection. A high promontory, it affords stunning views in the summer across the plains of Attica. In winter the clouds and mists wrap Phyle in its own veil of security. Amongst the renegade group camped up here was the man who had already made one journey north looking for a better place: Socrates’ Delphic envoy and treasured friend Chaerephon. On one of those bright, clear days of winter, the Thirty tried to flush the democrats out from their democratic den, but then the sky whitened and snow started to fall. We hear of the impact:

  The fighters could no longer see one another, let alone their enemy.13

  So the pro-Spartans returned home, frustrated, empty-handed.

  Still in Athens, the Thirty wanted Socrates’ hands bloodied along with their own. The philosopher was instructed to go to Salamis, that long, low island which kick-started the story of Athenian liberty from Persia, and was ordered to arrest a once-democratic general called Leon so he could be murdered in cold blood. Socrates refused.

  SOCRATES: The Thirty summoned me and four others to the Tholos and ordered us to bring Leon from Salamis to be put to death. They often ordered many others to do such things, since they wanted to implicate as many as possible in their causes. At that time I made it clear once again, not by talk but by action, that I didn’t care at all about death – if I’m not being too blunt to say it – but it mattered everything that I do nothing unjust or impious, which matters very much to me. For though it had plenty of power, that government didn’t frighten me into doing anything that’s wrong.14

  Enraged by his intransigence, the philosopher was now marked out by the Thirty as an enemy of the State. The death squads were, we are told, coming for Socrates next. It is one of history’s great what-ifs. If a backdoor murderer had been dispatched by Critias and his mob to deal with this troublesome, recalcitrant philosopher then and there, we would have no martyr to liberty, and we might well have lost Socrates from history. On this occasion, Socrates escaped by the skin of his teeth. Because the wind-blown democrats up on Phyle decided to try to claim their city back. Coming home through Piraeus, they met the Thirty in battle. Critias and Charmides were killed. It was said that on Critias’ tombstone was carved the figure of a fierce woman ‘Oligarchy’ physically torching the anthropo-morphised lady Demokratia. While the denuded oligarchy withdrew to the city centre to lick their wounds and plan their next move, the 3,000 citizens who remained deposed them. Now a new board of ten, one per tribe, was elected. The Spartans were brought in to attempt to get the city back into some kind of order. Spartan
diplomacy between those Athenians who had all stood together in the Assembly as one, as a single mass of 6,000, but who were now bitterly opposed to each other, meant that the oligarchs were allowed to live with their mysteries in Eleusis and all democratic exiles were recalled.

  One of those who came back into Athena’s city, a chip the size of Crete on his shoulder, was a one-time tanner, now owner of a tanning factory, called Anytus. Anytus would be one of the men who would bring Socrates to trial.

  And in 401 BC, when Spartans and Spartan swords were occupied elsewhere in the region, at a safe distance, the returned democrats stormed Eleusis and slaughtered the remaining oligarchs. Were they defending themselves, their families, an ideology? One wonders. But this was a time when there were many different reasons for hands to ball into fists. What is certain is that Athenians, whether reluctantly or with gusto, had developed a taste for spilling Athenian blood.

  Socrates, throughout these dark days, remained intransigent. Was this one of his most irritating acts – the moment when it became clear to his compatriots that he really meant it when he said he did not want to be involved in politics? That all that otherworldliness was not just a pose? Socrates had not raised his voice to condemn the slaughter on Melos in 416 BC and now he did not – on record – condemn the slaughterers who had been busy on the streets of his home-town. Because although Socrates stood up to the oligarchs, he did not formally denounce them, he did not flee the city along with democratic friends such as Chaerephon, holing up, planning a revolution from the north. He did what he had done through plague and siege and war and peace: he stayed and walked around the streets of Athens, and he talked.

  The delightful thrill of being with a man who was resolutely happy to plough his own furrow, even if what he did shocked those around him, was starting to wear decidedly thin.

  Three years passed. These had been terrible times. Socrates had grown old in a city which since his birth had memorialised the extraordinary fact that Athena’s children had beaten back Persian might. But now there was shame; the Athenians could not match the muscle of their fellow Greeks, the Spartans, and they could not beat the enemy within. They could not maintain their empire, they could not employ the ideology of democracy as a convenient panacea, they could not control their own internecine strife. Socrates took the sting of this disgrace.

  And so it was that, a scant five years after the Spartans had broken down Athenian walls, just four years after the democracy had been suppressed out of existence, and with the memories of slaughter and political executions still keen in the minds of the Athenian crowd, their wounds still suppurating, Socrates felt the hand of the poet Meletus on his shoulder, and he was called to court by the Athenian people.

  ACT EIGHT

  THE TRIAL AND DEATH OF SOCRATES

  50

  THE SCAPEGOAT

  Religious court of the Archon Basileus, 399 BC

  He was the first person who really talked about human life; and he was also the first philosopher who was condemned to death and executed.

  Diogenes Laertius,

  The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, Socrates, V1

  SO WE ARRIVE AT THAT MAY morning in 399 BC. Socrates stands in front of 500 of the few remaining Athenian citizens and is charged with disrespect for the city’s gods, with introducing new divinities and with the corruption of the young. We cannot imagine the philosopher in a religious court on that day in 399 BC without recalling the heady, dreadful history that has been played out in the streets, the theatres and the homes all around the law-court. And knowing that bloody, disrupted history, we should be shocked by the apparent coolness with which Socrates treats his own trial.2

  The philosopher is insouciant, apathetic. Standing there in the packed courtroom in his shabby clothes (no flaxen linen for him, although this would have been available), woven, almost certainly, in one of the gynaikeia of the city,3 the master of words appears diffident, as if he has no taste for this particular drama, as if he perceives it all to be a sham.

  His naïvety is distasteful – it seems to mask some kind of misplaced superiority. Athens has prided itself on its legal system, on its ability to bring men to justice in front of their peers. But Socrates confesses that he has had no time for such legalities. Not only that, but the Athenians also know that he has cast aspersions on the lot-selection system itself – the very apparatus that has been the envy of the known world and has kept the democracy a democracy for so long.

  ‘But, by god,’ the accuser said, ‘he made his companions despise the established law, saying that it was foolish to establish the rulers of the city by lot, and that no one would want to make use of a captain chosen by lot, or a builder, or a flute-player, or any other arts, any of which do far less damage when their practitioners make a mistake than do those who make a mistake about affairs of the city.’ And such arguments, the accuser said, raised up young men to look down on the established constitution, and made them violent.4

  In the heads of the Greeks, this disdain was doubly offensive. They believed it was the power of the gods that had guided those white and black balls in the kleroterion to their slot. Nothing happened during this age and in this land without the gods’ say-so. The kleroterion machine was not just an agent of random selection, but of potent kleromancy – a divine, magical process that should not be mocked.

  And then, despite the fact that Socrates has spent more than sixty years in Athenian society, the philosopher, in Plato’s version of events, informs the court of a peculiar anomaly:

  The fact is that this is the first time I have come before the court, even though I am seventy years old. I am therefore an utter foreigner as far as courtroom speaking goes. So now I make what I think is a fair request of you: disregard my manner of speaking. Pardon me as I speak in that manner in which I have been raised, just as you would if I really were a foreigner.5

  Gallingly, this cocky philosopher doesn’t seem to take the privilege of a fair trial seriously.6 The man who is accused of poisoning democracy with words has the chance to use words in self-defence, yet he acts the dolt, the innocent. He refuses to play word-games. Socrates’ professed ignorance of typical democratic activity might have been endearing to start off with, but by this stage in his life, and with the troubled back-story of Athens, it has become intensely infuriating.7 Here were clod-footed deme-men, who for the first time in human history had been given the chance to be proactive politicians, and someone like Socrates cracks a gag about not knowing how to vote when he serves a term on the Boule, the council.8 Here were men who had lost fathers, brothers, sons in the recent civil wars when oligarch death-squads had roamed Athena’s city. Athena’s citizen-children – who since the age of three have been earning their stripes to become mechanics in the engine-room of democracy – have traipsed to court this morning to keep their democracy clean.

  And Socrates seems to be laughing at them.

  For certain, there was much this philosopher did that sparked real pain in the hearts of democrats. Athens liked things cut and dried, as black and white as the balls in the kleroterion machine. Actions were either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, gods were either officially introduced to the city or they were the demons of Athens’ enemies. This nebulous, knowing, exploratory, open-ended questioning that Socrates insisted on pursuing was just too troubling. It is perhaps because of this sense of discomfort, this aggravating, literally eccentric attitude, and not because of any ‘crimes’ he committed, that Athens’ antipathy towards Socrates mushroomed. Every juror here, don’t forget, has seen an empire won and lost, has crouched trembling in his mud-brick home as brother kills brother, has put all trust in this brilliant and burning new idea of ‘democracy’, and has watched as the hope of a commonly run city-state has wasted into personal ambition, blood-lust, arrogance, cynicism, tyranny. The gods are clearly enraged. Athena despises her own children. The milk-and-honey moment of the democracy has curdled. Athens has been brutalised.

  Yet Socrates keeps a
bout him an air of optimism, a sense of proportion, a moral certainty, an infuriating otherworldliness.

  Meletus, Anytus and Lycon accuse Socrates of two abstract but fundamentally serious crimes:

  Under oath Meletos the son of Meletos of Pitthos has brought a public action against Socrates the son of Sophroniskos of Alopeke and charged him with the following offences: Socrates is guilty of not acknowledging the gods acknowledged by the state and of introducing other new divinities. Furthermore he is guilty of corrupting the young. Penalty proposed: capital punishment.9

  Perhaps we should not be surprised that a city-state that we laud for its commitment to democracy, liberty and freedom of speech chooses to punish a maverick in their midst.

  The verdict of the court is not directly recorded, but Plato has given us his version of Socrates’ response:

  Many things contribute to my not being angry at what’s happened – that you voted against me – and the result was not unexpected by me, but I was much more surprised by the total number of votes on each side. For I didn’t think it would be such a small majority. I thought it would be much larger. Now it seems, if only thirty votes had gone the other way, I’d have been acquitted … So the gentleman [Meletus] asks that the penalty be death. Well, what shall I propose for you as a counter-penalty? Isn’t it clear that it should be what I deserve? So, what would that be, what do I deserve to suffer or to pay for not having led an inactive life and for not caring about what most people care for – making money, managing my affairs, being a general or a political leader and any of the different offices and factions in the city? I believe that I was really too good to go down that path and survive. I didn’t go where I would have been no help at all to you or to me, but went, instead, to each one of you in private to do the greatest good. As I say, I went there, undertaking to persuade each of you not to care about your possessions before you care about how you will be the best and wisest you can be, nor to care about what the city has, before you care about the city itself, and to care about other things in just the same way. Being this sort of person, what do I deserve to suffer? Something good, Athenians!10