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

by Bettany Hughes

  18 The monument is mentioned in Aristophanes, Peace, 1183–4, which was produced in 421 BC.

  19 In 411 BC fear gripped the city as a conspiracy led by Theramenes, Antiphon and Pisandros (among others) carried out a spate of political killings and succeeded in passing a motion that effectively overthrew one hundred years of democracy – replacing the elected governing bodies with a Council of Four Hundred. In 404 BC, democracy, which had been fleetingly restored in 410 BC, was overthrown once more, Theramenes again playing a leading role in its downfall. Pisandros was among those who had benefited from the mutilation of the Herms in 415 BC. Cf. Meier (1999), 558.

  20 Sycophantai in Greek were originally, oddly, ‘tale-tellers about figs’. The phrase arose (possibly) because Athenians were not allowed to export anything other than olives from their largely infertile territory. Figs were sometimes smuggled out. Those who shopped the smugglers were ‘tale-tellers of figs’. The journey into the English ‘sycophant’ is therefore rather a convoluted one.

  21 Xenophon, Apology, 1.2–4. Trans. J. A. Martinez (2002) [adapt.].

  22 Many thanks to James Davidson for his help with this point of fact.

  23 Indictment quoted in Diogenes Laertius, On the Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, 2.40, and paraphrased in Plato, Apology, 24b; Euthyphro, 3b; Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.1.1, 1.2.64; Apology, 10. When his charges were first read out it was just Socrates, the Archon and one or two witnesses whom history has forgotten. Nb. Brought a ‘public action’ can also be translated as ‘written a sworn indictment against’.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The first blood sacrifice

  1 Trans. Brickhouse and Smith (2002).

  2 The Athenian Agora Site Guide, http://www.agathe.gr and http://www.attalos.com/cgi-bin/image?lookup=1997.01.0512, in Hesperia, 40 (1971), plate 50. The block was certainly used by the archons when they stood upon it each year to swear their oath to preserve the laws of the city. The exact location of the animal sacrifice is uncertain, although the worn surface of the stone shows this was much used over the centuries. The sacrifice would certainly have taken place very close at hand.

  3 Aristotle, Ath. Pol., 57.2, states that the Archon took his myrtle wreath off when presiding over murder trials outside – indicating that for a trial such as that of Socrates, he possibly kept it on.

  4 See Miller (1989), esp. 321.

  5 Homer, Iliad, 3.299–301.

  6 IG13 40 (ML 52), 3–4; Andocides, On the Mysteries, 1.97; Lycurgus, Against Leocrates, 79.

  7 Cf. Ober (1991), 142.

  8 Plato, Apology, 25a. Trans. B. Jowett (1953).

  9 A three-obol stipend was paid to jurors for a day’s service from the late fifth century to the later part of the fourth. This figure started at 2 obols under Pericles and was raised to 3 obols in the 430s or 420s. Cf. Ober (1989), 142.

  10 For majority vote to decide a man’s fate (when those voters sat in the court not by virtue of birth, or wealth, or military prowess, or sporting trophies faded in the home, still burning bright in the memory) was a defining shift in human history. And although the Athenians did not know that, two and a half millennia on, nations, leaders and continents would look back to these pungent, frequent gatherings as the birth of ‘the West’, they did know that they had responsibility and power. This had been the system in Athens for close on one hundred years.

  11 The Athenians also relied on amateurs for the smooth operation of the court. On the day you arrived, your name might or might not be pulled out of a box full of the names (ten boxes, one for each tribe) of those in the courtroom; one might be given the job of keeping his eye on the water-clock, five to sort out payment of jurors (3 obols per day), four to count the voting, etc.

  12 See Demosthenes, Against Neaira 66, Apollodoros’ case against the Corinthian prostitute Neaira; ‘If it is determined that the prosecutor is a moichos [which loosely translates as a sexual philanderer], his sureties are to hand him over to the man who caught him, and that man is to do to the prosecutor, as he would to a moichos, whatever he wishes in the courtroom, only not using a knife.’ Also Ps-Dem 59.

  13 Xenophon, Apology, 14.

  14 No barristers, attorneys or QCs here; the defendant had to defend himself. The very fact that Socrates seemed – by all extant accounts – unfazed by the task in hand is a great advert for his idiosyncratic approach to life. What Socrates does not appear to have lacked is self-confidence and his own particular brand of self-belief.

  ‘Well I am certainly wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of; but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know.’ Plato, Apology, 21d. Trans. H. Tredennick (1954).

  The philosopher’s reasoning is charismatic. Once the mind has tussled with, and worked through, the right way of doing things, the soul can act. A life becomes an accretion of right, helpful decisions. Socrates tells us that knowledge brings arete, virtue/personal happiness. Virtue is knowledge. If we do everything we can to avoid ignorance, and to do what is good, then peace of mind presents itself. He admits to being odd, but seems genuinely to believe that he has done nothing through his life other than try to find ‘the good’ in the world. His serenity is axiomatic. By all accounts, this was not a distressed man in the dock.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Checks, balances and magic-men

  1 Trans. G. M. A. Grube (1997).

  2 The system of secret ballots had been introduced to prevent cronyism, to banish the nightmare-memories of the years of civil war. There were other ways the Athenians tried to keep things fair – see pp. 51–53.

  3 For a full discussion of this aspect of the Athenian legal system, see work by Christopher A. Faraone, University of Chicago, e.g., Curses and Social Control in the Law Courts of Classical Athens, first delivered as a lecture at the conference ‘Democracy, Law and Social Control’ at the Historisches Kolleg, Munich, June 1998.

  4 DTA, 107, Attic, late fifth or early fourth century BC (DTA = R. Wunsch [1897], Defixionum Tabellae Atticae, Appendix to Inscriptiones Graecae III, Berlin).

  5 Plato, Republic, 364e-5a. Trans. P. Shorey (1930) [adapt.] [LCL].

  6 That is, the gods were showing their divine will by random selection.

  7 Athenians were an extremely litigious society, but this was not a society of lawyers. The Athenians had to represent themselves – occasionally with a kind of ‘phone a friend’ policy, when synegoroi (friends and relatives) could speak during some of the time allotted to the disputant.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Persuade or obey

  1 Trans. H. Tredennick (1954).

  2 Hansen (2006).

  3 As Cynthia Farrar points out in ‘Power to the People’, in Ober, Raaflaub and Wallace (2007).

  4 Socrates was in fact anti the brand of demokratia found in Athens for sixty out of his seventy years (462–411, 410–404, 403–399). Philosophically he did not accept the infallibility of equality: one of the reasons he had reservations about the selection for high office by lot.

  5 Euripides, The Suppliant Women, 404–18. Trans. P. Vellacott (1972).

  6 In Plato’s estimation, Socrates did not believe in allotting absolute power to the many, but in appointing experts to oversee political affairs. His friendship with Simon the Shoemaker was a small example of this attitude; Simon knew what he was good at (making shoes) and so he stuck at it. Socrates approved. Socrates also appeared to be fascinated by the Spartan focus on being a ‘perfect’ soldier. Again, the philosopher saw the sense in this. Better in his mind to do what you are particularly good at than to be a dilettante, a Jack-of-all-trades. His vision of political power was prophetic – it is the style of democracy that we all live with today. The restricted ‘Western-style’ democracy – benign dictatorships – where experts are elected to run things for the masses is that which he
would best recognise. The democracy that killed Socrates remained unconscionable for well over 1,500 years. Here is Wordsworth in 1794: ‘I am of that odious class of men called democrats’; and here the education minister Robert Lowe, opposing the Reform Bill of 1867: ‘Surely the heroic work of so many centuries, the matchless achievements of so many wise heads and strong hands, deserves a nobler consummation than to be sacrificed at the shrine of revolutionary passion or the maudlin enthusiasm of humanity … History may tell of other acts as signally disastrous, but of none more wanton, none more disgraceful.’ Cf. Roberts (1994).

  7 Pettifogging was an issue, and many – the sycophantai, the sycophants – brought cases purely to make money. Yet Socrates’ crimes were far more worrying than the daily grind of rapes, boundary disputes, murders, petty thefts. Mockery of the gods and corruption of youth, those flowers of the great Athenian city, are not accusations you bring lightly.

  8 This refers to the episode when large numbers of Athenians had offered Ionian Greeks help (against the Persians) after the Spartan King Cleomenes had rejected their call. Herodotus, 5.97.

  9 Only one of Socrates’ prosecutors, Anytus, with the evidence we have available to us, can be tracked in documents or contemporary literature. It is possible that Meletus and Lycon were the hired hands of political machinators.

  10 Plato, Apology, 23e.

  11 Plato, Meno, 94e. Trans. W. R. M. Lamb (1914) [LCL].

  12 A public trial (graphê) such as this would have been allotted a full day in court. Cf. Lanni (2006), 37 n.102. Little weight was placed upon the evidence of the witnesses – what mattered were the speeches. The plaintiff would speak first, his speech timed by the water-clock (klepsydra), which was allowed to flow during the speech and stopped for the reading of the evidence. The time allocated to a speech was measured in terms of the volume of water that the clocks contained (1 khous = approx. 5½ imperial pints). From the only surviving Athenian klepsydra that we have, it seems 2 khoes would take approximately six minutes to drain. Based upon these figures, it has been (tentatively) argued that the speeches at public trials could have been roughly two hours long. Cf. Todd (1993), 130–33.

  13 Plato, Apology, 37a–b. Trans. G. M. A. Grube (1997).

  14 In 433 BC, a sundial was set up on the Pnyx by Meton (Munn [2006], 201). On Meton and Socrates, see Plutarch, Alcibiades, 17.4–5 Munn (2006).

  15 Socrates in Aristophanes, Clouds, 743–5. See, as an alternative translation, McLeish (1979): ‘Stop wriggling. If you come to a dead end, / Turn your analysis round, and take it back / To the nearest crossroads of thought. Look round, / Get the new direction right, and start again.’

  16 In a landscape that had embraced the measurement of time in a prescriptive and predictable way (parapegmata and klepsydra), Socrates’ apparent random questioning appeared counterintuitive, anti-progressive. Questions such as his were unsettling; they could stick in the memory like burrs. It was easy answers that were more readily forgotten.

  SOCRATES: Following this I questioned one man after another, always conscious of the anger and hatred that I provoked, which distressed and alarmed me. But necessity drove me on, the word of Apollo, I thought, must be considered first.

  The juror-judges were old hands at this game. Men delighted to take up the 3 obols day pay – not to be sniffed at when the courts sat every third, sometimes every second day. They knew how the system worked, how it was played. And judging from the outcome of this trial, they did not take to unorthodoxy. See Hansen (1999), p.186. Courts sat 175–225 days per year.

  17 Diverting to think that modern-day lawyers are the children of the Age of Heroes – of Achilles, Ajax and Hector.

  18 Plato, Apology, 18d. Trans. Brickhouse and Smith (2002) [adapt.].

  19 Plato, Apology, 28a–b. Trans. Brickhouse and Smith.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Peitho, the power of persuasion

  1 Existing temple founded mid-fourth century BC.

  2 Isocrates, 5.249a. Trans. G. Norlin (1980); Demosthenes, Pro., 54.

  3 Sappho, F 57a. Trans. H. T. Wharton (1885).

  4 Sappho, F 96.

  5 Inscriptiones Graecae III.351.

  6 Pausanias, 1.43.5 and 5.11.8.

  7 Aeschylus, The Eumenides, 970–96. Trans. P. Vellacott (1956).

  8 Paraphrased from Sir Edward Bysshe, The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates (1747), 49.

  9 Plato, Apology, 28a–b. Trans. Brickhouse and Smith (2002).

  CHAPTER NINE

  Alopeke: a philosopher is born

  1 Trans. Brickhouse and Smith (2002).

  2 An unsourced quotation attributed to Socrates, still cited by scholars today, e.g., Rotberg (2004), viii.

  3 The Acropolis is 490 feet above sea level.

  4 At this time there were ten tribes and 139 deme-districts in Athens.

  5 Plato, Gorgias, 495d.

  6 See Aristotle, Ath. Pol., 21.

  7 Aristophanes, Acharnians, 247–70.

  8 Plato, Republic, 475d. For the Rural Dionysia, see Whitehead (1986).

  9 C. Meier (1999), 3, cites the Persian advance and flight by Athenians as taking place in ‘the late summer of 480 BC, most likely towards the end of September’.

  10 Herodotus, 7.144.

  11 Herodotus, 7.56.

  12 Herodotus, 9.1–15.

  13 Athens was occupied a second time in 479 BC, and the Persians were defeated at the Battles of Plataea and Mycale as they had been in c.490 BC at Marathon.

  14 We hear from Socrates in the Dialogue Cratylus that the philosopher himself did believe that names had this inherent power. Amusingly, the nickname of Socrates’ disciple Plato came from his prowess on the wrestling field. He was Plato (platus), ‘broad’ or ‘brick-built’.

  15 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 2.5.1.

  16 The ancient tradition that Socrates carved the statues of the three graces on the Acropolis is attested in Pausanias, 1.22.3, but disputed by modern scholarship (cf. Kleine Pauly, ‘Sokrates’); the tradition is most likely a confusion with the sculptor Socrates of Thebes, a contemporary of Pindar and mentioned by Pausanias, 9.25.3. Marble masons today are found serving the First Cemetery in modern Dafnis, close to Alopeke.

  17 These fifty men were referred to as being ‘in the prytany’.

  18 Aristides, Or., 34.38. This quotation appears in Aelius Aristides’ speech, Against those who burlesque the mysteries. Trans. Elsner (2007), 30. Contemporary source material focuses mainly on the amount of gold used to cover the statue (because Pheidias stood accused of embezzlement).

  19 Lapatin (2007), 132–3.

  20 At the time of writing, the Oxford University Experimental Quantum Computation with Ion Traps project has just managed to photograph atoms. See www.physics.ox.ac.uk/al/people/lucas.htm. Many thanks to Dr David Lucas for his demonstration of this phenomenon.

  21 See Diogenes Laertius, 9.54.

  22 The Parian Marble records that this took place in 467 BC: Diels-Kranz, 59 A 11; cf. Pliny, Natural History, 2.149. Aegospotami will witness Athens’ final sea-defeat in the Peloponnesian War in 405 BC.

  23 Plato, Crito, 50a.

  24 Loose brotherhoods of loyalty, joined together by blood-relationships and cult practice.

  25 Harris (1989).

  26 ‘Violet-crowned’: especially of Athens: Pindar, Frag. 76; (cf. B.5.3); Aristophanes, Acharnians, 637; Knights, 1323. But also used of others earlier, e.g., Hom. Hym., 6.8; Solon, 19.4; Theognis, 250.

  27 Plutarch, On Socrates’ Divine Sign, 20 (589e).

  28 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 2.31. Trans. R. D. Hicks (1925) [adapt.].

  29 Plato, Apology, 38a. Trans. G. M. A. Grube (1997).

  CHAPTER TEN

  Kerameikos – potters and beautiful boys

  1 These new walls enclosed an area of nearly 1 square mile (1 1/3 square miles inc. Piraeus).

  2 Cf. Thucydides, 1.89.3. The Persian commander Mardonius had destroyed virtually all of the original walls by the tim
e of his final withdrawal. Cf. Herodotus, 9.13.2.

  3 City walls were built quickly from 479 BC and the Long Walls project ran from the 460s through the 450s, completed c.445 BC.

  4 Cf. Thucydides, 1.93.1–2. Themistocles also persuaded the Athenians to complete the building of the walls of the Piraeus (Thucydides, 1.93.3).

  5 Zephaniah, 3.6. See also 1.7–18. Trans. New Living Translation.

  6 Zephaniah, 1.2–6. Trans. New Living Translation.

  7 Thucydides, 1.124. Trans. P. Woodruff (1993).

  8 Cf. Thucydides, 1.90–2.

  9 See also Plutarch, Moralia Vol. III

  10 In 462 a democratic judicial reform of the Areopagus squared the democratic circle (other landmarks included the institution of pay for juries in the 450s, raised by Cleon in the 420s). See Thucydides, 1.100; Plutarch, Cimon, 12–13.

  11 Other city-states were conducting political experiments at this time. Sparta’s fabled social reforms were thought to have started back in the seventh century BC. India too had been experimenting with democratic forms of government.

  12 Vase-paintings from the period tell us that tortoises were a very popular pet in ancient Athens.

  13 Aristophanes, Knights, 1398–1401. Adapted from LCL 1998.

  14 The Kerameikos was the kind of place that attracted scandal. Themistocles – the architect of the naval fleet – was said to have driven through here at dawn in a chariot pulled by four courtesans.

  15 Xenarchus, 4 K-A; Eubulus, 67 and 82 K-A.

  16 See Aeschines, Against Timarchos, passim.

  17 Plato, Republic, 2.357b. Trans. P. Shorey (1930).

  18 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 2.31. Trans. C. D. Yonge (1853).

  19 Plato, Phaedo, 96a, 98b. Trans. H. N. Fowler (1914).

  20 Traditionally, an Athenian boy’s education was less to do with learning facts than with developing a moral character. The kitharistes taught a musical instrument and lyrical thought; the paidotribes worked on the body and sports; and the three basic Rs were down to the grammatistes. In our overloaded information age this development of spirit, of character, can seem appealing. But the eager minds of the fledgling democracy wanted more. They wanted new data to juggle with imagination. And perhaps too they wanted, in this city of splendid possibilities, to spread their wings a little. Fragments of Greek thought circulating at this time, when Socrates was a young man, suggest that Athenian education was geared to inciting both aidos and sophrosune – a sense of shame and a sense of moderation. See Democritus (D-K 68 B179). In other words, education was devised to keep young men in their place.