8 Plato, Phaedrus, 228d.
9 Dionisius of Halicarnussus, Treatise on Isocrates, Chapter 18. Dionisius quotes a lost work of Aristotle. Aristotle Frag. 140. Aristotle comments on the sale and storage of Isocrates’ private speeches in ‘bundles’ on the book stalls of the Agora.
10 See www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk.
11 P. Saqqara inv. 1972 GP 3, c.331–323 BC.
12 Another example of words used to malign effect can be found on the thin lead sheets, covered in crude curses, that are upturned each excavating season throughout the city centre and deme-districts of fifth-century Athens.
13 Plato, Phaedrus, 275d. Trans. B. Jowett [adapt.].
14 When Pindar used the word he was probably referring to poets/educators.
15 Pindar, Isthmian, 5.28. Protagoras was one early visitor to Athens.
16 The Agora had, since Solon’s day, been a place where populist points were made. For years – until they were stolen away by Xerxes’ Persian soldiers – there stood here two bronze statues of Athens’ ‘tyrant-slayers’. These fine figures of men, copied many times over by Hellenistic and Roman artists (and then spending the whole of antiquity being looted and reclaimed, finally to be dredged up from the sea-bed off the coast of southern Italy in the 1960s and transferred to Naples’ Archaeological Museum), commemorated the termination of tyrannical rule in Athens a generation or so before Socrates was born.
17 Natural science, social science, political theory, the art of rhetoric, mathematics, ethics, logic – all these were rolled out into the public spaces of Athena’s city. Although more concerned with the nature of virtue than the nature of the universe, Socrates himself stated that the world was round. Plato, Phaedo, 108–9.
18 Plato, Apology, 17d; Republic, 1.350d.
19 See also Plato, Protagoras, 334c–d; Gorgias, 449b, 461e-2a.
20 Plato, Republic, 6.496a. Trans. B. Jowett (1953).
21 We associate fine-speaking with Athens, but in fact we are informed the art of rhetoric was a foreign import. Aristotle tells us that Corax and Tisias developed the form when the tyrants were banished from Sicily (cf. Rhodes [2005], 75–6: ‘by the end of the 470s the tyrants were on their way out’). For sophists travelling to earn money, see Plato, Greater Hippias, 282d.
22 It was said Gorgias had won plaudits at the Olympic Games, where his audience was closer to 20,000. He also spoke to the Athenian Council, or Assembly, in 427 BC.
23 Gorgias, Helen, 14. Trans. Sprague (2001).
24 This was also devised to prevent Greek-upon-Greek recriminations as a result of the Peloponnesian Wars.
25 Plato, Phaedrus, 279b–c.
26 Plato, Republic, 4.422a. Trans. B. Jowett (1953).
27 Plato, Republic, 7.536e. Trans. B. Jowett.
28 Plato, Republic, 8.557b–d. Trans. B. Jowett.
29 Plato, Symposium, 221e–2a. Trans. H. N. Fowler (1914) [LCL].
30 Plato, Apology, 33a–b. Trans. H. N. Fowler (1914) [LCL].
31 Plato, Hippias Minor, 376c. Trans. W. R. M. Lamb (1926) [LCL].
32 Plato, Euthyphro, 9c. Trans. Brickhouse and Smith (2002).
33 Plato, Euthyphro, 7d. Trans. Brickhouse and Smith.
34 Plato, Gorgias, 465a and following.
35 E.g., Plato, Republic, 337a. The basic meaning of eironeia (straightforward lying) is first found in the plays of Aristophanes (e.g., Wasps, 169–74, Birds, 1208–11, and Clouds, 444–51), but it is Socrates who imbues the word with all its subtleties and controversies. Cicero, writing in the first century BC, says that in his opinion Socrates surpassed all in his use of irony (Cicero, De Oratore, 2.67.270). Cf. Colebrook (2004), 22–64; Lear (2006), 442–62; Emlyn-Jones (2007), 151. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 4.7.3. See also Plato, Symposium, 216e: ‘ALCIBIADES: He spends his whole life in chaffing and making game of his fellow men. Whether anyone else has caught him in a serious moment and opened him, and seen the images inside, I know not; but I saw them one day, and thought them so divine and golden, so perfectly fair and wondrous, that I simply had to do as Socrates bade me.’ Trans. W. R. M. Lamb (1925) [LCL].
36 Plato, Republic, 337a. Trans. P. Shorey (1930) [LCL].
37 Scholars still fervently debate in what way Socrates was ironic, but all agree that irony was a Socratic hallmark. For some, then and now, Socratic irony is also the hallmark of the sophisticated mindset of a true civilisation.
38 Saxonhouse (2006), passim, expounds the view that Socrates was in fact executed because he was ‘shameless’, i.e. he felt completely unrestrained by a general ‘tenor’ of accepted behaviour.
39 Plato, Republic, 350d.
40 Aristophanes, Frogs, 1491–9 (performed in 405 BC). Trans. G. Theodoridis [adapt.].
41 Plato, Gorgias, 521d.
42 Plato, Alcibiades I, 130e. Trans. D. S. Hutchinson (1997).
43 That is, the Agora is not the means to an end; it is not the means, and not the end; it is simply, and vitally, our human home.
44 Plato, Apology, 23c–e. Trans. B. Jowett (1953).
45 Plato, Phaedrus, 275d–e. Trans. H. N. Fowler (1914).
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Democracy, liberty and freedom of speech
1 Trans. H. W. Smyth (1973) [LCL].
2 Trans. D. Kovacs (1995) [LCL].
3 IG II2 1624.81.
4 Many thanks to Alec Tilley for his help with this passage. His own, fascinating views on boat design in the fifth and fourth centuries BC can be found in Tilley (2004) and Tilley (1992).
5 Iliad, 2.50–2. Trans. S. Butler.
6 Iliad, 18.497–508. Trans. S. Butler.
7 Diogenes Laertius, On the Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, 6.69.
8 Plato, Gorgias, 487b (and again in Protagoras, 319cd, although this is used more to describe the possibility that each man has in the Assembly for isegoria, right of equal speech).
9 Parody of the question posed in the male Assembly. Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusae, 379: See also Ecclesiazusae, 392.
10 Aeschines, Against Timarchus, 1.23. Trans. N. Fisher (2001) [adapt.].
11 Although Socrates does worry about the unbridled impact of a true democracy, recent readings of the works of Plato concur that he was not as critical as previously judged. See, e.g., Saxonhouse (2006), 98, for the opinion that Socrates does not describe parrhesia perjoratively in Book 8 of the Republic.
12 For a fascinating discussion of the role of parrhesia in Socrates’ Athens see Saxon-house (2006), passim.
13 Gorgias, 486d–8b and Laches, passim. Socrates was a practitioner of parrhesia.
14 Aristotle, Politics, 1317b12.
15 Aeschylus, Persians, lines 584–94. Trans. P. Vellacott (1961).
16 Several triremes named Eleutheria were built: IG II2 1604 line 49 (377/6 BC); 1607, line 85 (373/2 BC); 1627, line 202 (330/329 BC); 163, line 488 (323/2 BC). All references from Robinson (2004), 80 (cf. also Hansen [1989], 42).
17 The forgers of the ‘Socratic’ Dialogues Eryxias and Theages (these were almost certainly invented) have the philosopher filling the Stoa of Zeus Eleutherios with thoughts and words.
18 Plato, Republic, 8.562a. Trans. P. Shorey (1930) [LCL].
19 Herodotus, 9.5.
20 Plato, Republic, 5.449a. Trans. B. Jowett (1953).
21 Plato, Republic, 5.462d–e (see also 462b). Trans. B. Jowett.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The good life – after dark
1 Trans. P. Shorey (1930) [LCL].
2 Although there is some scholarly argument that Plato includes this information to prove that the Athenians frequently worshipped ‘new gods’ and therefore Socrates should not be targeted for his own unorthodox spiritual experiences, archaeological evidence shows us that the cult of Bendis was indeed inaugurated in Athens at this time.
3 IG I3 136 (SEG 10.64).
4 Contrast the acceptance of this ‘new god’ when it suits the city, with the anxiety about Socrates’ new, ‘private’ god and the manner of its introduction.
&
nbsp; 5 Plato, Symposium, 197d1–e3. cf. Diogenes Laertius, Socrates XIV.
6 Socrates and his contemporaries lived in a landscape where there was much space to think. With their back-up of wives, slaves and the fruits of an empire, the leisured could enjoy afternoons saturated with thought. Socrates might have lived through times when men did abominable things to one another, when women passed by, their faces worn out by tears. But he lived a long life, and there would have been days of watching and waiting – times when the landscape of Athens and its surrounds could be drunk in. Socrates must have considered keen thoughts here, trying to ascertain whether or not goodness had a place in human society, and how to locate and nurture it.
7 On occasion Socrates did speak of one god, in contrast with the gods (Plato, Laws, 10.904a, and Timaeus, 41a). He challenged the literal veracity of the mythic stories, the tales in Homer and Hesiod that were the Greek’s equivalent of a bible.
8 Plato, Euthyphro, 6a–b. Trans. H. N. Fowler (1914) [adapt.] [LCL].
9 This and other fundamental aspects of Greek religion are discussed with great élan by Walter Burkert (1985).
10 Demosthenes, 4.35.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Delphi, the Oracle
1 Trans. Brickhouse and Smith (2002).
2 Today just along the esplanade from modern-day Itea.
3 See Plato’s Apology, 2ia. Trans. H. N. Fowler (1914) [adapt.] [LCL]; also Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Aristophanes’ Clouds, Wasps and Birds.
4 The equivalent of walking to church, temple or mosque through the killing fields of Cambodia or the napalm-blasted pathways of Vietnam. Places that we knew had witnessed hideous suffering; images brought to a mass audience by art (tragedies then, now movies).
5 Of course Apollo is a Johnny-come-lately at Delphi. Originally this was the Python’s place. A holy zone for a serpentine female spirit: Homer’s ‘rocky Pytho’. Myth-stories told of this being the home of Ge, or Gaia, mother-earth. The archaeological remains of Bronze Age female figurines, winkled out of the earth by archaeologists and, haply, by farmers, back up the literature. There is no doubt that for 700 years some kind of female spirit was worshipped here. But then, the stories go, Apollo wrestled the snake-goddess-serpent-dragon, the Python, to the ground. Her spirit slithered away into a cave and the holy hot-spot was his. Visiting in the mid-fifth century BC, it would have been Apollo’s brash, colonnaded temple built partly with Athenian money and shared with Dionysos, a sturdy canopy to contain spirits that dominated the crowded Delphic skyline. The Athenians were particularly keen to stamp their mark. One family (the Alcmaeonids) funded the completion (in marble) of Apollo’s monumental temple started in the sixth century BC.
6 And almost certainly Leto – although there are no extant remains.
7 Pindar, Pythian, 7.12.
8 Porphyry, On Abstinence, 2.9; HN 4 n.13.
9 See De Boer and Hale (2000), 399–412; De Boer, Hale and Chanton (2001), 707–10. Broad (2006).
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Gnothi Seauton – Know Yourself
1 Trans. O. J. Todd (1992). See also Plato, Apology, 21a; Gorgias, 447a; Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.2.48.
2 Nb Both Chaerephon’s visit to Delphi and the date of this putative visit are uncertain.
3 Pausanias, 10.24.1.
4 Scholiast to Plato, Phaedrus, 229e.
5 Macrobius, Dream of Scipio, 1.9.2.
6 The Hellenic Ministry for Culture claims the pronaos (inner portico) was most likely.
7 Aristotle is reported as having said that Socrates, not Chaerephon, went to Delphi, but this is a relatively unstable source. Diogenes, Laertius, 2.23.
8 Cf. Herodotus, 7.141.
9 Pindar, Pythian, 7.9–13. Trans. B. L. Gildersleeve (1890).
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Aristocrats, democrats and the realities of war
1 See Hatzilambrou, Parsons and Chapa (2007), 15.
2 Deighton (1995), 34.
3 See pg. 15, The Oxyrhyncus Papyri, Volume LXXI, ed. R. Hatzilambrou, P. J. Parsons and J. Chapa, Egypt Exploration Society, London, 2007.
4 There were also pretend equids all around: painted and Amazon-mounted on the walls of the Stoa Poikile, the Painted Stoa; free-standing in bronze outside the Stoa of Zeus Eleutherios, – the Stoa of Zeus of Freedom, in gaudily coloured terracotta on the roof of the Royal Stoa – the place where Socrates had been charged with his crimes, moulded into tiny models to be offered as votives for the gods in sanctuaries and shrines across the heaving market-place. See also, e.g., The Four-Horse Chariot of Helios, ACR. 19052, and the Four-Horse Chariot of Selene, ACR. 19053, 19054.
5 The writer-general was a huge admirer of Socrates’ thought, and a former pupil of the philosopher.
6 Xenophon, The Cavalry Commander, 3.2. Trans. E. Marchant and G. W. Bowestock (1925) [LCL].
7 Plato, Republic, 2.373e. Trans. B. Jowett (1953).
8 Thucydides, 3.48.
9 Spartans captured from the battle on Sphacteria, an island adjacent to Pylos, in 425 BC. Cf. Powell (1988), 165–70; 237–8.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The Peloponnesian War, phase two – a messy siege
1 Trans. H. Tredennick (1954).
2 Trans. B. Jowett (1953).
3 See illustration in The City Beneath the City. Antiquities from the Metropolitan Railway Excavations, by Liana Parlama and Nicholas Stampolidis, Harry N. Abrams (2001). Stele currently stored in the Benaki Museum in Athens. The stele mentions men from Socrates’ tribe who were killed (also at the battles of Megara and Spartolus).
4 The National Archaeological Museum in Athens, the National Museum in Thessaloniki, and the museum at Olympia all have excellent collections of discarded Greek armour and equipment.
5 Lists taken from Van Wees (2004), 104–8.
6 This strategy depended on two separate forces linking up in Boeotia.
7 Plato, Symposium, 219e–220e.
8 Plato, Symposium, 219e–221a. Trans. W. R. M. Lamb (1925) [LCL].
9 Plato, Symposium, 221a–b. Trans. W. R. M. Lamb (1925) [LCL].
10 See also Laches.
11 Although some of the campaign had maintained the hallmarks of limited, ritual warfare, much convention was insulted. The Athenian forces barricaded the temple at Delion and soldiers drank from the sacred spring there. The Boeotians used cavalry, driving down the hoplite foot soldiers (who were then only saved by the arrival of night) and the Spartans (initially) refused to allow the Athenians to collect their dead.
12 If Socrates had fought at Scione, the summer after Delion, this is what he would also have seen there.
13 Plato, Laches, 181b; Symposium, 221a. And even when Aristophanes astringently mocked Socrates the very next year, he never said he was a coward.
14 ‘Men hesitate to lay hands on those who show such a countenance as Socrates did even in defeat.’ Plato, Symposium, 221b–c. Trans. W. R. M. Lamb [LCL].
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Brickbats and bouquets
1 Trans. Brickhouse and Smith (2002).
2 Scholion on Pseudo-Lucian, possibly based on Philochorus’ Atthis.
3 Aeschines, Against Ktesiphon, 76; Plato, Ion, 535d-e.
4 Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 3.7. Trans. S. Pomeroy (1994) [adapt.].
5 See Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 2.18.
6 For a useful visual guide to the development of theatre in Athens, see Connolly and Dodge (2001), 90–101.
7 R. Parker (2005. Reprinted in paperback 2007), 314.
8 Homer, Iliad, 6.132.
9 Aristophanes, Frogs, 1009–10.
10 Sophocles, Ajax, 964–5. Trans. J. Moore (1954); Sophocles, Acrisius, F 58; Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, 226–7; Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, 380.
11 Perhaps one of the reasons that Plato was so vehemently opposed to tragedy. He complained that the political statements of the theatre were, by definition, all crowd-pleasers, demagoguery. Plato, Gorgias, 502b–c; Republic, X, 602b; Laws, VII, 817b–d.
12 Plato, Ion, 535d–e. Trans. W. R. M. Lamb (1925) [adapt.].
13 See Rehm (2007).
14 Comedy and tragedy mattered. Comedy was believed to have been born when society learned how to be democratic. After all, democracy should be a place where all people have the opportunity to laugh: oligarchs and tyrants have never been very keen on being mocked. This was a time when theatre was not just the canary in the chamber. It was the poisonous gas. Following the Samian revolt of 440 BC restrictions were brought in on comedy: now comedians had to get a licence – the men in power had to keep a tab on who was choosing to amuse, to diffuse, to incite, to offend. This restriction was lifted by 430 BC so Aristophanes was un-constrained. Aristotle, Poetics, 1448a, insists that comedy was ‘invented’ in Megara ‘at the time of their democracy’. See also the Parian Marble (FGrHist 239 A39).
15 Sommerstein (1982), 2 – Clouds was performed originally at the City Dionysia of 423 BC, where it was placed third (and last) after Cratinus’ The Wine-flask (a satire and the winner) and Ameipsias’ Konnos. Aristophanes himself viewed Clouds as his best play (Wasps, 1047) and he certainly revised it – it is the revised edition we have. Dover (1968), xvii, also has the Dionysia plus 423 for the first performance. He suggests (xxxii) that in 424 BC Socrates fought as a hoplite at Delion. He also suggests (lxxx) the dates of the revision would have been somewhere between 420 and 417 BC and surmises (lxxxi) that we must reject Hypothesis II, which says that the play was performed again in 423/2, because of the dates of the revision. Dover concludes by saying that the revised edition was unlikely to have been performed in Athens, if at all.
16 Aristophanes, Clouds, 445–51.
17 Aristophanes, Birds, 1280–3. Socrates joins the ranks of Machiavelli, Thatcher, Rasputin, etc. – those whose personal names have become a political catchword. It was not just Aristophanes who lampooned him, but only Aristophanes whose work survived; cf the lost play Konnos by the comic poet Ameipsias, plus four others in fragmentary form.
The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life Page 52