Why Socrates Died

by Robin Waterfield

  Some of these habits and characteristics could perhaps be imitated by those who were not true aristocrats, but one of them, all by itself, marked a man as truly wealthy. Ownership of a horse or two was an ostentatious way of displaying one’s membership of this exclusive group. From early times in Europe, horses have been a symbol of prestige and a marker of high social rank – the rank enjoyed by the hippeis in ancient Athens, the equites of Rome, the chevaliers of the European Middle Ages. The knights of Athens formed a distinct and easily recognizable group; they could ride about town, but more importantly they could frequently be seen training together in the Agora, cuirasses flashing in the sunlight, and they featured prominently in several of the major annual religious festivals and processions.

  Athenian aristocrats called themselves the eupatridai, the ‘well-fathered’, or the kaloi kagathoi, the ‘beautiful and good’, and nowhere was a beautiful body prized more than in Athens, where once a year, among the athletic and artistic contests of the Panathenaic festival, there was a contest in euandria – ‘cutting a fine figure of a man’ – which was a kind of beauty contest, in which contestants were judged for their strength as well as their defined musculature and handsome features.

  A CHANGING WORLD

  This was the world into which Alcibiades was born, and on which Socrates was a sort of parasite. But Athenian society was changing, especially as a result of the stresses and complexities of democracy and empire. The closed universe of hereditary aristocratic rulership was increasingly giving way to democracy and meritocracy, so that there were brash nouveaux riches politicians, and social climbers who inevitably de-emphasized the family; the state was demanding that xenia be subordinate to patriotism, that the Council, not private individuals, should host foreign dignitaries, and that the people should decide with whom to go to war, regardless of aristocratic ties and interests abroad; under state control, some felt liturgies to be more of a burden and less of a privilege; commoners were beginning to make a mark in the panhellenic games; the common people were gaining the right to choose priests and to put on many of the most important religious ceremonies (while demanding financial assistance from rich individuals); display of wealth was now more the province of the state than of individuals, and it was the state that built public buildings and parks; the state was organizing magnificent public funerals and frowned on the elite habit of overspending on their own family funerals. Plato has Socrates complain that everyone is a hero now: ‘Even a poor man nowadays gets a beautiful, magnificent funeral; even a man of no consequence receives a eulogy.’

  Aristocrats could still dominate Athenian politics because they had more time than anyone else for it, and because, before the five hundred Councillors for that year were chosen by lot, potential members were first elected at deme level, where the elite could still influence things, but there were an increasing number of disincentives to political power. Above all, the people now assessed a man’s fitness for office before he took it up, and at the end of his year judged whether or not he had done a good job. And though the rich might hold more of the political offices, the people held most of the cards and kept the elite on the democratic straight and narrow.

  Pericles lay on the cusp of these changes and was responsible for some of them. A couple of his actions illustrate the changing world. At the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, the Spartan army invaded, led by one of the Spartan kings, Archidamus; but Archidamus and Pericles were xenoi, so Pericles formally made his estates over to the Athenian people, in case out of xenia Archidamus was tempted to bypass his land and leave it unravaged. This gesture neatly symbolized the new separation of the private aristocratic world from the public world of politics. Then, not long after getting his new citizenship law passed in 451, by which both parents had to be Athenians in order for a child to qualify as an Athenian citizen, he put aside his Athenian wife and brought into his home the famous and beguiling Aspasia of Miletus, as if to say that his personal interests would not intrude on his public policies, in the way that they had for old-style aristocrats.

  Aristocrats were also having to diversify to make enough money to preserve their lifestyle. The traditional and most stable source of wealth was owning land. The rich tended not to own large estates, but a number of smaller ones both in and around Athens, and further abroad. One of the reasons for the decline of wealthy families after the Peloponnesian War was that the loss of the empire simultaneously meant the loss of almost all these foreign estates. A second form of income, owning non-agricultural slaves, became increasingly important towards the end of the fifth century and on into the fourth; such slaves might be put to work in small workshops (lack of sophisticated technology prevented the development of large factories) or rented out to the state, perhaps to work in the state-owned silver mines of Laurium.

  A rich man might also own farms or urban dwellings, which he rented out. In Piraeus, above all, houses and apartments were rented out to metics (foreign residents of Athens), who were forbidden by law to own Athenian property themselves. During the imperial years, as Athens’s prosperity attracted large numbers of metics, there was a considerable housing boom, which the rich exploited by developing new properties for rent. Another possible source of income was money-lending or investing, especially in overseas trade, where the risks and the returns were commensurably large. Dealing in grain became another good source of income towards the end of the fifth century. And it was always possible for a man to make a great deal of money from war booty (where a general, the highest in the social as well as the military order, got the lion’s share) or, as a politician, from ‘gifts’ from others, at home or abroad. Most Athenians most of the time felt that it would be invidious to describe this as ‘bribery’ rather than a perk.

  When aristocrats claimed that their noble birth gave them the right to rule, they were not talking about genetics and they were hardly talking about education either, though they expected their sons to be imbued with a sense of their abilities as future rulers. They were talking about the natural order of things: the gods, in their providence for the world, had made certain people gifted at leadership, and had also given them the resources that made leadership possible and effective. This is a common view among elites of any time and place. So when certain thinkers began to ask whether statesmanship was in fact given by birth, or whether it might not be teachable, this seemed like an attack on the gods; and when fully fledged democracy made aristocrats the servants of the state, not its leaders, this seemed like a subversion of the natural order. We will not understand the ferment and the torment of late-fifth-century Athens unless we understand that utterly fundamental issues were at stake.

  ARISTOCRATIC RESPONSES

  Some aristocrats more or less dropped out, becoming what the Greeks called idiōtai. This word, the origin of our ‘idiot’, referred in a political context to someone who chose not to take part in the public life of the city when he could have done so; perhaps the notions of pointlessness and disengagement offer a bridge between the ancient and modern meanings of the word. Only despair, or a particular temperament, could have driven an Athenian aristocrat to follow such a course, since at least some of his peers would have taken it to be equivalent to choosing to be unmanned or servile. But quite a few well-born Athenians, and particularly the disaffected young, took this route from the 420s onward, in response to having lost their automatic right to leadership.

  Others retreated to exclusive clubs (hetaireiai). There had always been, in aristocratic circles, loose social groups who met for symposia or religious purposes, but these groups became less based on kinship and thicker on the Athenian ground from the late 430s onwards. Within the clubs disaffected aristocrats could preserve something of their fading world, and even exaggerate certain of its traits. Not only were the clubs venues for letting off steam, for partying and gambling, but they became the seed-beds of anti-democratic thinking, the main lines of which now became tempered in the smouldering fire of discontent.

 
An average club consisted of about thirty members, even if not all attended every meeting. The core of their activities remained the symposium, though not all symposia took place within the context of a club. The symposium was one of the more arcane aristocratic rituals, a hangover from the glory days of the Athenian aristocracy, when these evening meetings had formed the pulse of the city’s social and political life. The word symposion literally means ‘drinking together’, but it is best left transliterated rather than translated, because ‘drinks party’ has misleading connotations: those present did not stand around sipping sherry and nibbling nuts. Like many aspects of Athenian life, the symposium incorporated elements of ritual and religion.

  The guests, typically about a dozen, reclined on couches. Their left arms rested on cushions and supported the upper half of their bodies, so that their right hands were free for eating and drinking from the small table which was set in front of them. After a light meal, the tables were removed, and the room was cleared and swept. The diners wiped their hands on pieces of bread and tossed them to the dogs, then ritually washed their hands and dabbed a bit of perfume, perhaps of rose or orris-root, on their bodies.

  A ‘king’ was appointed, to regulate the evening and decide on the proportions of wine and water to be mixed in the great mixing-bowl. The Greeks usually drank their wine diluted with water, in the ratio of about five parts of water to two of wine, and they thought, or affected to think, that over-indulgence in neat wine induced madness. Symposiast drinking-cups were shallow, better for sipping than gulping, to curb drunkenness and encourage conversation between sips. Nevertheless, drunken symposia were not unknown and could be extended: drunken guests might spill out on the street in a kōmos, a ritual revel, in which the boisterous party paraded noisily through the city, still dressed as symposiasts and still singing, in search of another house where they could prolong the evening. This was typically aristocratic behaviour; they could still get away with making a nuisance of themselves.

  The symposium began with purificatory rituals, the donning of garlands, and libations and hymns to the gods. The guests settled down to make conversation, sing songs (popular songs from the past or present, or, in competition, verse of their own spontaneous composition), play games (such as kottabos, the flicking of drops of liquid from the bottom of a cup at a bowl or some other target) and be entertained. The night might include not only the guests’ own singing, to the accompaniment of a girl playing the pipes, but also a show put on by hired dancing-girls, acrobats or mimes. Apart from these slave-girls, who were often obliged to have sex with the guests as well, it was a strictly male affair. Symposia were orchestrated to include nothing from the humdrum world: guests ate and drank from crockery decorated with symbolic or realistic versions of symposia – with ever-receding versions of themselves, as it were; they recited special poems, played special games, and focused exclusively on pleasure and past times. The clubs, and symposia more generally, allowed aristocrats temporarily to suspend time.

  But some clubs chose exposure. Just as in eighteenth-century Britain young aristocrats formed clubs such as the Hellfire Club, to mock religion and have sex with prostitutes, so Athenian clubs sometimes took provocative names, based on the names of hostile peoples (compare the ‘Mohocks’, a street gang in London of the early eighteenth century) or on cocking a more or less serious snook at society in some other way. In Athens there were, among others, ‘The Hard-On Club’ and ‘The Wankers’, though these date from the fourth century. In our period there were the ‘Acolytes of the Evil God’, a mock inversion of a deity known only as the Good God, who was invoked by libations at the end of meals. Hence this dining club met on unpropitious days of the calendar, to tease the superstitious. Usually, however, the clubs were named after the day on which they met, or their most prominent member or members: we hear, for instance, of ‘Charicles and Critias and their club’.

  There were rumours that a few of the clubs had outrageous initiation ceremonies (reminiscent of some American college fraternities, or army regiments), and more than a few required an oath of allegiance from their members; hence, as well as hetaireiai (‘groups of comrades’), they were also known as synōmosiai (‘groups bound by a common oath’). The most famous oath of secrecy in the ancient Athenian world was that required of initiates at the Eleusinian Mysteries, and it was not uncommon for the clubs to make their oaths parodies of the Eleusinian ceremony, a practice that could be overlooked in normal circumstances. No doubt such oaths were often hardly meant to be seriously binding, but occasionally they were, if the subversive goals of a club outweighed its social activities. Even more rarely, but infinitely more sinisterly, members might be required to confirm their oaths by a ‘proof of loyalty’ (pistis). The most extreme of these occurred in 411 when an anti-democratic club arranged the assassination of the Athenian democrat Hyperbolus, as just such a pledge. Members were thus bound together by shared complicity.

  Clubs also undertook less sinister political tasks, such as influencing elections, trials and judicial hearings, or distributing pamphlets. They could provide a vociferous block of men at assemblies, to give speeches, heckle, cheer, intimidate, filibuster, or otherwise move things in their preferred direction; or they could canvas support by bribery or in other more legitimate ways. Rival clubs could form temporary alliances, perhaps to try to get a common enemy ostracized; and then when the day came for people to vote, club members could write names down on ostraka for those in a hurry or the illiterate, as a heap of 190 ostraka archaeologists have recovered with Themistocles’ name were written by only fourteen hands. None of these activities was exclusive to the clubs, but they were typical of them.

  ALCIBIADES THE ARISTOCRAT

  The historian Thucydides, our chief source for the events of the Peloponnesian War, gave Alcibiades two set-piece speeches. In the context of the aristocratic milieu, and as an introduction to Alcibiades’ stance in public life, the general tenor of these speeches is highly revealing. The first, delivered during the debate in the Assembly about whether to invade Sicily in 415, starts as a defence of his suitability for high command and political power in Athens. He speaks of himself as a ruler rather than as a general and identifies himself and the city to the extent of claiming that his personal display of wealth abroad (as at the recent Olympics) impresses foreigners with the power of the city as a whole. And then he says that ordinary people should submit to the disdain of the successful man, such as himself, who is favoured by the gods. All this is sheer aristocratic ideology, and the attempt to make political capital out of his fame at home and abroad would have been recognized and admired by aristocrats of an earlier generation.

  Alcibiades’ second speech, addressed to the Spartans after his defection later that same year, again begins with self-defence, as part of an attempt to persuade his hosts, the enemies of Athens, to give such a prominent Athenian a home. He claims to have supported democracy only as a vehicle for self-aggrandizement and is scathing in his comments about the Athenian constitution, famously calling it at one point ‘unequivocal folly’. He hints that he and some others had considered launching a coup in Athens, and held back only because the time was not right. Once again, the kind of political arrangement that he favours is based entirely on the existence of the exceptional aristocrat – himself, in other words. These are bitter words, directed at his native city, but the bitterness too is thoroughly aristocratic: no self-respecting member of the Greek elite would fail to retaliate for perceived insults and wrongs, and Alcibiades saw his banishment from Athens as a personal slight, and as proof that Athens was corrupt.

  Alcibiades was different from those of his Athenian peers who were prepared to adapt. He was never going to respond to the changes that were overtaking Athenian society by dropping out. Although he was certainly the leader of a club, and possibly a member of others, they were venues where he could develop political networks, not places of retreat. He was something of a throwback: an old-style, pure aristocrat who exploited
his many xenoi abroad and relentlessly, publicly and competitively pursued his own and his family’s glory. While insisting that his personal fame and successes were good for the city, he also expected to convert them into political capital and clientele.

  He seemed to others to be able to adapt himself to circumstances like a chameleon, but in one respect he never changed. And the single-mindedness of his pursuit of glory made politics a game for him, because he felt himself to be outside all constitutions and regimes. This is why the Athenians were conflicted about him: they admired and needed his aristocratic leadership qualities, and loved him for his charm and his successes, but he was also a throwback to a time when aristocrats had been beyond their control, and they feared his ambition. And so they also came to fear those who were held to have fuelled his ambition.

  FIVE

  Pestilence and War

  Alcibiades came of age just as, after a long and uneasy gestation, the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta came to life. Even if his temperament had not predetermined the matter, he had no choice but to make warfare and wartime politics the fields in which he would seek glory. The war lasted intermittently – too intermittently for his taste – for twenty-seven years and ended in defeat for Athens, and the end of the empire it had diplomatically nurtured and ruthlessly maintained for decades. Over the course of these twenty-seven years, many Athenians sought their brief moments of fame in the harsh light of warfare, but by the skin of his teeth Alcibiades lasted longer than most, until in the end there were those, including the historian Thucydides, who were inclined to attribute their defeat above all to him.