The theatre of purity at Delos was considered essential. Come the Roman period, all visitors were required to be spotless of hand and soul and, at the sanctuaries of Zeus Kynthios and Athena Kynthia, to wear white.7 Delos’ sanctity stretches back until before recorded time. For the prehistoric populations of the eastern Mediterranean, this speck on a map was no less than a magical island. The dances that Theseus was credited with perpetuating here, as he sailed fecklessly back to Athens, the abandoned princess Ariadne behind him, a hopelessly anticipant father in front, stemmed from the rich and deep Minoan culture.8 These were dances of youths and maidens of intense importance. Human sacrifice almost certainly took place on the island of Crete.9 It could be that teenage boys and girls beat out their path to adulthood with the stamp and sway of the communal dance, and that some dances ended with a victim being killed.10
In Socrates’ day the dances on Delos still had this charged, edgy feel and took place at night. Lamps and torches were lit, the undulating movement of the dancers catching and escaping the tallow-light as they wove between one another. There were sacred games too, established, as the pious Athenians loyally repeated, by Theseus himself.
Delos might be a sacred island, but it too had suffered during the pitiless Peloponnesian War. In 422 BC, the Athenians had expelled the entire population – restoring them again on the advice of Apollo at Delphi in 421 BC, furious, presumably, that his birthplace should be treated with such high-handed disdain. Dumped marble found in an old cistern shows that after the Spartan victory of 404 BC the lands were rented out, interest was taken on sanctuary money, fishing rights were claimed – and all by a new Spartan overlord. And the massive roofless temple to Apollo, abandoned in 454 BC, half-built, when the Athenians withdrew Delian League money back to the Parthenon, still stood, an aborted enterprise that spoke loudly of Athens’ glorious hubris.11 But now, briefly, Athenians had the upper hand once more. Their commemoration of that brave, lusty, straightforward founder-hero Theseus must have had even more resonance in 399 BC. There must have been even less patience for complicated flies in the ointment such as Socrates.
The purified pilgrims are cutting their way back to Athens through the surf. They are leaving behind an island where no pollution is allowed – the elderly, the sick, the disturbed are evacuated by Athenian decree. Eugenics has given this place a brittle, make-believe perfection. The Athenians have spent close on a month celebrating a young hero who rescued the flowers of the city-state from pernicious foreign influence. The boat’s load – the elderly spectators, the theoroi, the young bloods – are pure again. When they land on Attic soil, men like Socrates can start to die once more.
The pastoral Ilissos of Socrates’ day – the site of his ramblings with young men – had had a prophetic relevance to the philosopher’s fate. In one corner next to the river bank was an enclosure where Theseus’ father (so the storytellers had it) dashed to the ground a poisoned cup of wolfbane, prepared by the wicked Medea for her handsome stepson. But Socrates had no king-father to protect him. While the Athenian hero Theseus was paid the highest of honours, Athens’ anti-hero, Socrates, would be forced to drink hemlock in a small Athenian cell.
53
SOCRATES BOUND
Athens’ prison, the Agora, June 399 BC
SOCRATES: Then we agree that the question is whether it is right for me to try to escape from here without the permission of the Athenians, or not right. And if it appears to be right, let us try it, and if not, let us give it up.
Plato, Crito, 48b–c1
SOCRATES TRAVELLED ONLY 300 yards or so from his courtroom to the prison; it was the last time he walked freely.
Imprisonment per se was not devised as a punishment in classical Athens, but it cannot have been remotely pleasant.2 Socrates was, almost certainly, shackled with iron fetters. Other prisoners talk about the ‘physical abuse’ and ‘physical suffering’ that came with fifth-century BC prison life. Desmoterion, the word for ‘prison’ at this time in Greece, means ‘a binding down place’.3 Inmates were often strapped to the ground in wooden stocks; Herodotus tells us of a foreign prisoner in Sparta who was so desperate to break free that he hacked off a section of his own foot and slipped out of his restraint – an agonising contraption known simply as ‘the wood’.4
Athena was used to punishing. Exile from your city, outlawing, debilitating fines, death – these were all penalties. A scrubby area outside the walls appears to have been used as a death zone. Plato tells a story that brings the unpleasant realities of the fifth century BC more sharply into focus.5 Circling the North Long Wall, a young man called Leontius walks past bodies on the ground next to an executioner. The Greek terms used suggest that these almost-corpses are in their final death throes – men strapped to boards and left to die. An executioner watches over them. They have already been exiled from the city, they know they have already lost all chance of a good burial and therefore a good afterlife, and now theirs will not be a death that can in any way be described as ‘beautiful’.
Greek law has little time for prison sentences; it is too inefficient, too expensive, too odd to make someone suffer by locking them up. The prison was really a holding bay for the dysfunctional, the innocent, the framed, the unlucky. Socrates’ jail would have been patrolled and serviced by ‘the Eleven’, a law-enforcement body – our police, judiciary and prison medics rolled into one. But there is no concept here of jail sentences. Little surprise then that the jail-block that contained Socrates resembles a simple storage room. The footprint of the prison can still be traced in the Agora and, although it is roped off from the public, some children still play on the low walls that mark the perimeter.6 I was last there on a wet Tuesday and most tourists seemed unimpressed by the diminutive ruins; even the stray dogs that lounge in the modern city’s public places pass listlessly by, no useful shelter here.
Yet the view from the Stoa Basileios up towards the prison zone, which would have been Socrates’ panorama as he left the court, is magnificent today, as it would have been in his day. There is the Parthenon, there the rock of the Areopagus, and under a sky butter-yellow at the time of year of Socrates’ incarceration, and at the magic hour, the hour before sunset, precisely when the philosopher was condemned and then released from his day in court to prison, just over 2,400 years ago – there is the Acropolis, that gory stone that looks like some kind of petrified, god-sized brain. A giant divine system for thinking; a nous that Athenians for 1,000 years have already been boring into, pock-marking with niches and tunnels and caves and staircases and offering-pits – to try to understand what was going on inside, to try to placate, and approach, the meaning of life.
It is almost certainly this that was the last view Socrates had of the city in which he had lived and loved and talked for seventy years. It might have been his last glimpse of the outside world, but this would not be his last day on earth.
Because of the ritual delay, the Delian festivities, Socrates has a full month of life ahead of him. When he walks in through the guarded doors of the prison his purpose is to wait. And according to Plato, Socrates chooses to sit, chained, and carry on within his prison walls that which he has always done outside – talk with friends and strangers. It is in the prison that Plato situates entire Socratic Dialogues such as the Crito.
The atmosphere of the philosopher’s cell is, according to Plato, positively convivial. Although Socrates is closely guarded, his companions seem to have formed a good relationship with the prison authorities:
SOCRATES: I am surprised that the prison warden was willing to let you in.
CRITO: He is used to me by now, Socrates, because I come here so often, and besides I have done him a favour.7
The prison officials and their senior command, the Eleven, were not a body of men to be messed with. These Athenians could take the law into their own hands. If they caught a common criminal in the act and he confessed his guilt, they had the right to execute without trial. Accompanied by public slaves (possibly S
cythians) armed with whips, cudgels, bows and daggers, they made arrests, confiscated property, supervised the torture of slaves (slaves’ evidence was thought admissible in fifth-century Athens only if obtained under torture). Employed extensively as vigilantes and assassins by the Thirty, the Eleven were little loved. By turn they slept in another two-storey building next to their charges in the prison complex.8
Oppressive as this sounds, Socrates seems to have found the company of his jailors – perhaps members of the Eleven, perhaps just prison-running slaves – counter-intuitively congenial.
Socrates has, Plato tells us, bided his time doing little things in jail: turning Aesop’s Fables into lyric verse, a sweet task. Making jottings. It is the only evidence we have that Socrates ever wrote anything down.9 His musings during this period do not betray an agitated man. The philosopher might have been calm, but his friends were not. Because now, four weeks on from Socrates’ trial, probably in early June, Theseus’ ship has been spotted off Cape Sounion – twenty-nine days after it left Athens.10 When the visitors to Delos land, Socrates must die. But in Socrates’ drama, as written, imagined, related by Plato, at this point there is suddenly a chink of hope.
CRITO: … I only wish I myself were not so sleepless and sorrowful. But I have been wondering at you for some time, seeing how sweetly you sleep.11
Crito, one of his oldest friends, learning of the return of the ship from Delos, is (Plato tells us) in the prison trying to persuade Socrates to escape. Contacts across the eastern Mediterranean have been alerted and are ready to protect this renowned philosopher; foreigners have helped raise money to realise an escape plan. Here there is a hint of the old-boy network, aristocrats, gearing up for action to save a beautiful thing from the bile of the mob (networks are rarely formed of peasants). Across the entire region they appear to have agreed to collude in Socrates’ escape. At a modest price, Socrates’ ‘vanishing’ is presented by Crito as a very real possibility.
CRITO: It is not even a large sum of money which we should pay to some men who are willing to save you and get you away from here … Do not be troubled by what you said in court, that if you went away you would not know what to do with yourself. For in many other places, wherever you go, they will welcome you.12
The reply that comes back is elegant but immutable. All his life Socrates has lived by Athenian laws. How could he possibly now turn his back on them?
SOCRATES [quoting the Laws and Commonwealth of Athens as if they are talking to him]: Are you not intending by this thing you are trying to do, to destroy us, the Laws, and the entire state, so far as you can? Or do you think that state can exist and not be overturned, in which the decisions reached by the courts have no force but are made invalid and annulled by private persons?13
As befits Socrates’ idiosyncratic character, escape is simply not an option.
If I am condemned now, it will clearly be my privilege to suffer a death that is adjudged by those who have superintended this matter to be not only the easiest but also the least irksome to one’s friends.14
How, in any case, do you escape from a city that sleeps lightly? Bribery, violence, subterfuge, all of these things might have been essential. This is not Socrates’ style. But then again, maybe the jailers had given Crito a nod and a wink. Perhaps the hushed conversation as Socrates slept implied some complicity with the escape plan. Possibly Athens is already regretting her decision. Maybe Socrates could have slipped away with very little fuss, while the Eleven turned a blind eye. Remember the democracy called back the ship that was beating through the water to massacre the Mytilenaeans: Athena might have heaved a sigh of relief if Socrates had escaped – no one could then accuse the democracy of a blood-lust that matched that of the oligarchs, and the Spartans, and the juntas of the Thirty.
But in any case, Socrates is having none of it. He does not want to suffer what Homer describes as the ‘creeping humiliations’ of old age. Arguing that it seems ludicrous for an old man to be scared of dying, and that naturally, as always, he has to do what is right, and obey the Laws of Athens, Socrates stays.
SOCRATES: Ought we in no way to do wrong intentionally, or should we do wrong in some ways but not others? Or, as we often agreed in former times, is it never right or honourable to do wrong? Or have all those former conclusions of ours been overturned in these few days, and have we old men, seriously conversing with each other, failed all along to see that we were no better than children? Or is not what we used to say most certainly true, whether the world agree or not? And whether we must endure still more grievous sufferings than these, or lighter ones, is not wrongdoing inevitably an evil and a disgrace to the wrongdoer? Do we believe this or not?
CRITO: We do.
SOCRATES: Then we ought not to do wrong at all.15
And so when a messenger brings news that the Delian ship has indeed landed, Socrates is to be found, not scrambling across some rocky Attic landscape on his way to a waiting boat, but sitting quietly, in his cell, in the Agora. The Eleven give Socrates’ jailor the instruction to start making preparations for his death.
Execution in Athens would normally (for slaves and common criminals) entail a ‘bloodless crucifixion’. Bloodless to prevent pollution. But it was still a hideous way to die. With the victim strapped to a board by his arms, legs and neck, the iron noose was slowly pulled tighter and tighter until he was garrotted. But for Socrates hemlock was in store.16
Killing the philosopher
The hemlock (the ‘poison hemlock’ variety almost certainly, although ‘water hemlock’, also poisonous, would have been available at this time) was ground up with a pestle and mortar. Opium might have been added to lessen the severity of the venom’s symptoms – convulsions and muscle cramp. The opium poppy had been used extensively in Greece as a medicine and a duller of pain since the Bronze Age; carbonised seeds have been found in archaeological digs, residues of laudanum in massive cooking pots in Mycenaean graves. The poppy juice was put onto linen and held against wounds; it was given to sick and teething babies; it was used, in overdose, to assassinate kings. And now, in post-democratic Athens, it is used in the preparation of killing draughts.
The Thirty, remember, had recently favoured hemlock poisoning. The sound of the stone against stone, releasing the alkaloids of the plant, must surely have been a sinister grinding, a familiar, throat-tightening sound.17 Aristophanes jokes, darkly, about the death-bringing, hemlock-grinding pestle and mortar in his Frogs:
DIONYSOS: … Just give me the directions, my quickest route down to Hades, and don’t give me one that’s too hot or too cold.
HERAKLES: Let me see, which one shall I give you first? Hmm. Well, there’s one via rope and bench: you hang yourself.
DIONYSOS: Stop it, that way’s too stifling.
HERAKLES: Well, there’s a shortcut that’s well-beaten – in a mortar.
DIONYSOS: You mean hemlock?
HERAKLES: Exactly.
DIONYSOS: That’s a chill and wintry way! It quickly freezes your shins as hard as ice.18
I have ground up hemlock and it releases a nose-wrinkling sour smell. It also sparks a pain above your eyes and across the brain. I have never known, though, whether this is psychosomatic. Because I know, from Plato, what hemlock can do.
Hemlock was a pricey plant back then, twelve drachmas per dose. Under Athenian law, criminals were responsible for the costs of their own punishment, so hemlock poisoning was a death only available to the rich, or those with rich friends.19 All most men needed was a small measure – a solution that would fit into an eye-bath; a number of modest phials of just such dimensions survive (there are two rows of them in the Agora Museum). Black-glazed, rough-cast, they are straightforward, functional objects. Although Romantic painters like to imagine the damned Socrates drinking deep in his cups, this is a dose you would have had to have necked to toss down.
The Eleven have come to Socrates before dawn – they must now prepare the philosopher for his last day on earth. There are fix
ed procedures that have to be adhered to, traditions that should be upheld. Socrates’ wife, Xanthippe, and the couple’s young child, Menexenos, come into the cold, stone room. For days Xanthippe has been doing what the females of a prisoner’s family had to do: keeping the prisoner fed and watered (some prisoners died during incarceration because their families neglected them), arranging for slaves to clean out the cool, stone cell. But now, as it is clear that in just a few hours Socrates will be dead, Xanthippe does what is expected of good Greek wives, she wails – she raises her hands to the heavens, beats her forehead and with rigid nails scours her cheeks.
Yet Plato tells us that Socrates sends away this howling second-class citizen. Seized upon as an example of his coldness, of his misogyny, this is surely a last display of unorthodoxy: not for him the moaning press of women, brought in for centuries by the well-to-do, primarily to display aristocratic might, the size of the dynasty’s entourage, the number of grateful dependants – Socrates wants an untraditional death. Perhaps – given that the philosopher seemed sensitive to what went on in the minds of others, and that everything written about him suggests that he had an odd but affectionate disposition – maybe, just maybe, this was a display of tenderness.
And then, to save women from the job – unconventional, self-reliant to the last – Socrates washes himself in the prison’s cistern. In one room in Athens’ Agora, excavated in 1931, in the prison-complex (possibly the room in which Socrates bathed himself), a giant pithos stands, half-buried, cool for holding water, and a small basin. The water flow that rinsed the early-summer prison grime off the philosopher would surely have been more like a squaddies’ shower. Socrates, of course, had a reputation for never bathing himself properly.20
The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life Page 42