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

by Bettany Hughes

  In a sense this is Socrates’ true tomb – the trap of calibrated time, the false friend, some would say, of which Socrates was acutely, atypically, aware. The tyrant time that civilisation brings, that allows us to do so much and stops us from doing more.

  Socrates despised the artificial constraints that time-counting puts on human affairs, he raged against the ludicrous notion that the volume of a terracotta water-clock should determine how long a man is given to argue for his life. But he had a powerful sense of one measure of time – a lifespan. For him it was vital for each and every living individual to think how well man spent his time on earth.

  So in some ways the ‘House of the Winds’ is not an inappropriate memorial for Socrates. It is muscular, odd, ferocious – an eccentric, anachronistic folly, plonked as it is at the top of Athens’ Roman forum. And yet it has endured. Socrates’ name lives on in the great civilisations of both East and West. Although traditionally we focus on his trial and death, he was actually a survivor. By 399 BC, many men in Athens were destroyed or were shadows of their former selves. As Socrates chooses not to escape, chooses to take the hemlock and obey the laws of his city, as he jokes with his friends, no one could describe him as a destroyed man. All democratic Athenians were architects of Athenian democracy, and Socrates was one of the few who lived to see its demolition, and its rebirth. He lived through much.

  As has that Horologion. Just two generations after Socrates’ death, Aristotle declares democracy dead. For him the hierarchical warrior-greatness of the Iliad is still the way to run things; an opinion enthusiastically taken up by Aristotle’s protégé Alexander the Great. Democracy has a very light hold on history. In antiquity it lasted just over 180 years. The Horologion in the centre of Athens saw many political systems, many civilisations come and go: republics, empires, tyrannies, monarchies – but not until the twentienth century did it live through a democracy once again. All faiths passed by here too: pagans, Byzantine Christians, Frankish Christians, Muslims. In the Ottoman period the ‘Tomb of Socrates’ was used as a tekke, where whirling dervishes would free their own souls, to the delight of European visitors.

  And for 400 years the ‘Tomb of Socrates’ stood opposite one of Athens’ great madrasas, the Islamic school where the faithful learned to praise Allah, and also to praise Socrates. Because, remember, Socrates does not just belong to a Western tradition. The mystic and philosopher Ibn ’Arabi approved of the Socratic maxim ‘I know that I do not know’. Al-Razi, the prolific writer, produced more than 200 books and modelled himself closely on Socrates. The madrasa in Athens, continuously – for 200 years – employed the Socratic method of question and counter-question.

  When Islamic culture made Greece its home throughout the Ottoman period, locals elevated Socratic influence. They believed that the Parthenon was ‘Plato’s Academy’ – the place from which the ‘divine’ pupil of Socrates would share his pearls of knowledge. They imagined Plato sitting in the marble throne in the apse, considering the decoration of the east wall.2

  Sometimes in history it is helpful to put the cart before the horse. When we see how enthusiastically Islam embraced Socrates as ‘The Source of Wisdom’, we are reminded both that the philosopher’s own, fifth-century life was orientated east before the chart was reset west, and that Plutarch was prophetic when he described Socrates: ‘Not as a citizen of Athens, or a citizen of Greece, but a citizen of the world.’3

  Socrates escapes the compass. His ideas were peddled by caliphs as avidly as they were in the courtyards of Renaissance princes. The humanist philosopher Marsilio Ficino self-consciously replicated Socratic-style seminars in Florence, but so too did the scholars of Coptic Alexandria. One of the oldest surviving copies of Plato – from the tenth century AD – sits in the library of the Carouine Mosque behind the souk in Fez; its edges are crumbling, like fine biscuit, but the internal pages are yesterday-bright. Plato (in Arabic ‘Aflatones’) is still a very popular Islamic name; as popular as the name Socrates still is in the US and Europe. Whether we approve of Socrates or not, whether we believe Athens was or was not justified in contriving his death, we must remember him. Because he is part of our heritage and because our lives can only be better if we keep pursuing knowledge, and ‘the good’. We are indeed ignorant if we pretend that we already have all the answers to life on earth.

  SOCRATES: For no one knows whether death happens to be the greatest of all goods for humanity, but people fear it because they’re completely convinced that it’s the greatest of evils. And isn’t this ignorance, after all, the most shameful kind: thinking you know what people don’t?4

  I know that I do not know.

  Ibn ’Arabi – following ninth century AD Islamic Hadith

  Socrates is a strange hero. His life interrupts the predictable beat of world civilisation, a rhythm that pumps out wars and tyrants, experiments, certainties, old solutions to new problems. We strive for answers, for closure; but all Socrates does is ask questions. His notorious slogan is stimulating and troubling in equal measure: ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’

  Socrates’ debates between duty and desire, between politics and personality, between sex and sophistication, between the power of men and the capabilities of women, between principle and pragmatism, still inform our lives today. He embraced paradox; he delighted in the essence of what it is to be human, in the extremes of the human life as lived. The heady, paradoxical, essential, extreme world of fifth-century Greece provided the flashpoint for his ideas.

  Within five years of Socrates’ death, Athens had allied herself with her one-time enemy, Persia – with the topsy-turvy outcome that in 394 BC it was an Athenian general, Konon, who led the Persians to victory over the Spartan fleet. A sea-power for just ten years, Sparta was land-locked once more, and now a shadow of her former self. Never again in her history could she claim to rival Athenian nous with Spartan brawn. Limestone block by limestone block, it was the Persians who helped the Athenians rebuild their totemic fortifications, the walls that the Spartans had eagerly destroyed in 404 BC. Socrates’ lifespan marked the beginning and an end of an idea – the idealistic vision of an autonomous, tolerant, democratic Athenian city-state.

  AFTERWORD

  The gods have put sweat between us and virtue.

  Plato, Republic, 364

  WHEREAS THE PORTRAITS THAT WENT UP of Socrates ten or twenty years after he died cast him in Silenus mode – as the plain, portly, peculiar anti-hero – as the years go by the philosopher becomes a bit over-refined, more of a gentleman-scholar. In Naples he leans on his staff, hand on hip, the very incarnation of the leisured conversationalist. In the British Museum there is a glistening marble statuette, based on that commissioned by one of the finest sculptors of the time, Lysippus of Sicyon. There again is the fashionable, classical contrapposto pose: his hair is fluffier, his paunch is sucked in, he modestly holds his himation drapes in place: this is the acceptable face of radical philosophy.1

  Socrates has been tidied up. The smell of sweat and blood, the fried fish of Piraeus quayside have been scrubbed off him.

  But perhaps the most telling Socratic image of all was dug up in the philosopher’s prison. We’ll never be sure exactly who this foot-high figure is. The location and proportion, though, suggest this is Socrates himself – an offering left by someone who mourned his forced death. Half his face has been chipped or rubbed off. Only his torso survives – but what a body, robust, firm-set, hairy. Unlike the fantasy heroes that lined most Athenian streets, this man is very human.

  And whether it is Socrates or an idol Socrates, Socrates’ ghost, his eidolon that we follow, the idea of Socrates is an ethical one. He argues that the soul – the psyche – is all-important. That eudaimonia (a kind of good karma, realising all your potential as a human being) is more important than jewels, baths, designer clothes, warships, dogma. He focuses our minds on how we should live, how we should flourish. He throws down a gauntlet; it is not ‘them’, but ‘us’ who are respons
ible for the world’s happiness. You, and you alone, can hurt yourself by being unvirtuous. Vice is self-inflicted ignorance.

  SOCRATES: Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing. And every word, when it is written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to whom to speak or not to speak; when ill-treated or unjustly reviled it always needs its father to help it; for it has no power to protect or help itself.2

  Because Socrates generated not a single written word from his philosophising, we can never claim truly to have found him. His life and work will never be a tablet of stone. Socrates is recondite. And he is essential. He reminds us to keep debating the meaning of life, to keep questioning, to keep speaking to one another, to keep looking for answers. However you value him, you cannot argue with the central tenet of his philosophy. Because he beseeches mankind not to be thought-less.

  APPENDIX ONE

  HONOURING APHRODITE

  Acropolis rock and Agora, 469–399 BC

  Do you not see what a great goddess Aphrodite is? She, whom you can neither name nor measure, how great she is by nature, from how great a thing she comes through. She nourishes you and me and all the mortals. And as proof, so that you might not only comprehend this in words, I will show you by deed, the strength of the goddess.

  On the one hand, earth desires rain when the dry barren ground is in need of moisture on account of drought; and on the other hand, the revered sky, when it is filled with rain by Aphrodite, desires that it fall on the earth; and when the two mingle into the same thing, they beget everything for us, and at the same time, they nurture everything through which the mortal race lives and grows.

  Fragment from a lost play by Euripides1

  BECAUSE THE PARTHENON DOMINATES ATHENS’ SKYLINE, it is easy to imagine that Athena allowed few other goddesses elbow-room in her golden city. But swathes of the Acropolis rock – the very foundation of Athena’s peacock-blue and green and gold shrine – were sacred to Aphrodite.2

  Gouged out of the red limestone of the Acropolis itself are tiny pocks – little stone larders prepared for the offerings of the faithful in Athens. These niches were sacred to the goddess of love. Here, throughout the year, men and women would come to placate and honour Aphrodite and her son Eros: they left small cakes, marble replicas of genitalia (now kept modestly under lock and key in the storerooms of the Agora Museum) and terracotta figurines for the goddess. When I last visited, despite the fact that the area was cordoned off to the public, someone was coming week in, week out to leave a fresh-cut pomegranate for the erotic spirits of the place.

  Two fifth-century BC inscriptions have survived next to the crumbling niches. They are so eroded now as to be almost invisible to the human eye – best to feel them out with your fingers:

  FOR APHRODITE … FOR EROS

  At night, pairs of two or four virgins (aged seven to eleven years old) would pick their way down to these niches. These were the Arrhephoroi, distinguished children selected by the Archon Basileus of Athens for religious service. Imagine a high-class ‘Myrtis’, the little eleven-year-old plague victim whose face has recently been re-created by a team of international scientists. Housed east of the Erechtheion, the Acropolis would be their home for almost a year.3 Both sacred and juvenile, these were children allowed to play with childish things; up on the complex was a courtyard for ball games. One can easily imagine the jointed dolls – which now sit unloved in the glass cases of museums – being dangled on knees and clutched tight up here, with the jangle of Athens and the wide reach of the Attic countryside stretched out beneath. The girls probably spent the bulk of their days tending to the needs of Athena Polias (it might be them peeping out from the skirts of the priestess on the Parthenon friezes), and then one night of the year the priestess summoned them, presented them with a basket of arrheta – secret things – which they were instructed to transport to the niches.4

  But not for them the monumental sloping stairway through the Propylaia. They travelled down through the very bedrock of the Acropolis itself. Their staircase was a vulva-like cleft in the north citadel, which, following earthquake damage in the thirteenth century BC, had been scooped out by the pious Late Bronze Age inhabitants of the Acropolis and still emerges discreetly at niche-level. Slowly, slowly, with their precious load (what could these unspeakable offerings be? genitalia? – but these were common at the time, nothing to be covered up – a sacred dew for Athena’s sacred olive tree perhaps?), they climbed down deep inside the cold rock.

  Now the passageway is dank and smells appropriately (given that the dove was Aphrodite’s familiar) of the guano of a colony of collared doves. Here the girls emerged. The rituals they engaged in at the niches themselves are unrecorded, although it seems that at the end of the nocturnal rites the maidens returned to the Acropolis – to be replaced by next year’s fresh-faced votaries.

  And Aphrodite did not just walk the Athenian streets at night. She was there too at the grand entrance to the Acropolis complex. Today tourists shuffle past the polished stones oblivious to their significance – happy only that they will soon be reaching the summit. For this was where Aphrodite Pandemos (Aphrodite of all the people) was worshipped together with the goddess Peitho – Persuasion.5 The fifth-century Athenians knew only too well that they inhabited a fragile city-state. Where there were so many political players, each with a vested interest, how could they possibly stop the body politic from fracturing? Aphrodite’s stock-in-trade – love, desire, communality – were all vital in a political system that had suddenly given each citizen equal rights.

  And so Aphrodite’s unions were not all thought to be sexual. When we think of the goddess of love, we should banish the voluptuous Venus figure that inhabits many imaginations. As well as bodies, the goddess of love also joined hearts and minds. And for this reason the flow of the faithful to her shrine was steady. At the very least the love goddess has eight altars in and around Attica, including one – as recent excavations have shown – in the heart of the Agora itself.6 Damaged by the Persians, this love-zone in the Athenians’ marketplace kept functioning through the Peloponnesian and civil wars. The epistyle of her temple at the edge of the Acropolis was discovered in 1968, and on it an inscription. ‘This to you, O great August Aphrodite Pandemos we honour you with our twenty gifts.’7 In the summer, at the festival of Aphrodisia, thimblefuls of the blood from the breasts of sacred doves were spilled onto her altar here.

  And in the Agora itself more sacrifices were regularly made to the goddess of unions.8 Between 1980 and 1982 the American School of Classical Studies at Athens unearthed a wide altar, just at the northern limit of the Pan-Athenaic Way, a stone’s throw from the court of the Archon Basileus and within spitting distance of the Altar of the Twelve Gods (the Centre-point of Athens), and here were burned offerings of sheep and goats, because horned creatures were the animals most sacred to the goddess of desire. As Socrates walked through the Agora – particularly on the fourth days of the month9 – he would have seen, month in, month out, these habitual, desperate measures to keep these goddesses on-side.10

  Did the banality of such practices trouble Socrates? Did he look at priestesses catching thimblefuls of blood or at priests faffing around with the slippery tongue of a goat and think, quietly: why are we going through such futile gestures? Love and harmony are vital, but can we really ensure them only by sending burnt offerings to the sky, or by sending out children to scramble around on rock staircases at night?

  If you read between the lines of Plato’s Dialogues, it seems that Socrates offers an alternative when it comes to the matter of love.

  DIOTIMA: [The] right way of approac
hing or being initiated into the mysteries of love [is] to begin with examples of beauty in this world, and using them as steps to ascend continually with that absolute beauty as one’s aim, from one instance of physicial beauty to two and from two to all, then from physical beauty to moral beauty, and from moral beauty to the beauty of knowledge, until from knowledge of various kinds one arrives at the supreme knowledge whose sole object is that absolute beauty, and knows at last what absolute beauty is.11

  Socrates sees in the power of human wisdom, of will, the potential to hold together societies, however disparate. For him, love = virtue = knowledge = social cohesion and happiness. Socrates sought some kind of universal union in human affairs. He invokes the wise men who ‘claim that community and friendship, orderliness, self-control, and justice hold together heaven and earth, and gods and men, and that is why they call this universe a world order’.12 He goes on to argue that nous – mind – encourages the heavens to move in an orderly way, just as nous brings order and health to the human body.13 Socrates’ life-work was to encourage men to find a way to live together and be good. But he does not simply see Harmonia dripping out of the neck of a dove as a gift of Aphrodite.

  Unfortunately for those on the wrong side of her clever little tongue, Peitho’s (Persuasion’s) force could be malevolent. But she did have her good days. The great goddess Aphrodite was, remember, family. Aphrodite added passion to Peitho’s persuading power. The goddess of love could herself persuade Peitho to persuade men to act harmoniously, to seek concord. Peitho’s goddess-mistress-mother Aphrodite was thought capable of promoting an important sensation in the democracy – harmonia/homonoia, harmony/union: qualities vital to the variegated political entity that was fifth-century Athens.