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

by Bettany Hughes

  5

  THE FIRST BLOOD SACRIFICE

  Religious law-court, Athens, May 399 BC

  If you think that by killing people you’ll put a stop to anyone criticising you because you don’t live as you should, you’re not thinking clearly … The best and easiest course is not to restrain others, but instead to do what you need to do to be as good as possible.

  Plato, Apology, 39d1

  A BLOOD SACRIFICE STARTED THE LEGALITIES in earnest.

  Today the oath stone is the only thing that feels secure in the boggy rectangle of the old religious court, the Stoa Basileios; archaeologists have to lay planks to cross safely. Marshy grass clumps around the few, marooned, listing, classical remains; a rude train from the leafy suburb of Kifissia to Piraeus rattles by at four-minute intervals. This block, a limestone table for sealing sacred oaths, was uncovered by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, which undertakes excavations in this zone of central Athens.2 It rests 20 feet below today’s street level: overhead, tourists munch Greek salads above the masonry blocks and fallen columns here in the fashionable Plaka district – seemingly unaware of the drama that was once played out beneath them.

  As Socrates watched in 399 BC, this cracked, worn, 6-foot-long altarblock may well have gleamed wet with blood and gore.

  The theatre of justice had begun.

  The Archon Basileus, the chief magistrate, his hair long and wreathed in myrtle,3 his tunic unbelted, did the killing.4 The oath sworn here was believed to be binding, its potency accentuated by the visceral nature of the sacrifice. Goats, rams or oxen, their coats washed and scented, horns twinkling with gilt, were coaxed to the priests’ blade. As they died, the animals’ open veins coursed into a sacred bowl – here the magistrate plunged his hands. Wrist-deep in blood, now he was ready to oversee justice. But the oath-maker hadn’t finished his gory business; the severed testicles of a sacrificed animal were then ground and squashed underfoot (a precursor of things to come: if he broke the oath, his own family would be emasculated). It was an ancient, unyielding custom: ‘Whatever men first do wrong against the oath, let the brains of them and of their children flow to the ground like this wine,’ warns the Iliad.5

  All jurors swore to do their duty: a synthetic strap of common purpose. One Greek said, ‘The oath is what holds democracy together.’6 And what a mongrel democracy it was: farmers, old generals, cheesemakers, road-builders – all manner of men would have been here to judge Socrates; all Athenian citizens over the age of thirty, all chosen by lot. These were oaths taken in the presence of the gods themselves, their ritual aspect was central. And Meletus’ own indictment of Socrates was itself an antomosia, a ‘counter-oath-swearing’ – a statement with the gods as his witness that what he said was true. We must never lose sight of how deeply pious, superstitious (one might say) Athens was. In the city that is often considered the catalyst of a rational, enlightened way of being, there was no doubt in the minds of the first democrats that spirits and magic were in the air. The sublime, inexplicable, potent world and its unpredictable, primeval, divine inhabitants were believed to be far more powerful than anything in the mortal coil. Spirits, dead heroes, gods, goddesses and demons were around every street corner in Athena’s city.

  And so the fact that Socrates stands accused of a religious crime, in a religious court, should remind us of the fundamental seriousness of this particular legal day.

  Since the early hours men have been preparing to judge Socrates. The eligible of the city have rolled themselves out of bed and trooped in to the Agora, busy even before dawn. In that blue-grey light, tribe by tribe, they have stood in line before a futuristic invention – the kleroterion – a random-selection machine. There were probably a number of these contraptions in the city; certainly one in the marketplace and at the entrance to the law-courts. Each tribe had its own machine, and the tribe members are here to find out if the day ahead of them is going to be one of justice; 6,000 have already made their names available for the annual selection by lot, and now a second selection from that list takes place.7

  The kleroterion (really a proto-computer) is a neat bit of technology. Still available to marvel at in Athens – one in the Agora Museum, the other in the Epigraphic Museum – it randomised participation in democratic business. On the face of the hollow stone box there are carved slots, just big enough to take a metal disc on which is inscribed the name of an individual citizen. Down the left-hand side is a chute. Black and white marble counters would be sent down the chute (wood originally, now long gone), and when a black or white marble (we still don’t know which) lined up with a bronze disc bearing your name and deme (the village district where you lived or where your family’s name was registered), then you had been chosen for office on that day.

  Selection for jury service was considered a thrill, a privilege, the mark of a democrat. A number of Athenians chose to be buried with their personal metal name-disc; so while we’ll never know their faces, we know what these first democrats were called: Alexander, Draco, Georgios. Having been selected, there was still some administration to do: each juror would reach into an urn and pull out a ball marked with different letters. Depending on whether you got a ‘lamda’ (an L) or an ‘omicron’ (an O), you would end up serving that day in one particular courtroom. There was no chance of cheating – the moment your ball was inspected by a magistrate you were handed a coloured baton that corresponded with the paint daubed over the entrance to ‘your’ court, and this you had to show as you arrived.

  And the engineering of democratic equity didn’t stop at the kleroterion and tinted sticks.

  Each tribe had its own entrance, its own machine, its own zone. Society might still be fiercely tribal, but families, friends, allies, conspirators were not allowed to sit together. Everyone suspected of a close connection, a vested interest that might cloud judgements, was given a place in separate stone blocks, lettered like our theatres and cinemas. It is no coincidence that Plato even refers to those listening to trials as ‘the audience’.8

  Picture that audience. All middle-aged or old men, many settling down for the day with a cushion or reed-mat to stop their buttocks getting cold-stone sore. Each one has sworn to be impartial. No well-dressed, punctilious clerks organising things here. This is a direct democracy – individuals are actively, immediately involved in the administration and decision-making of their polis. You might have been a sheep-stinking farmer or a merchant of perfumed oils; in this land everyone was a politician. Each is to be paid three obols for his pains.9 In the glory days of the Athenian democracy, money had not been a key motive. Sure, in the Assembly ideas could be formed, laws created; but it is in the law-courts that Athenian self-government could be put into play.10 It was both a duty and a privilege to be here.11

  But by the time of Socrates’ trial so many citizen-judges of Athens have been killed, in defence of the city or by rival Athenian cliques. Today it is the disabled, the aged, the lucky few who have survived. The majority of the jurors are poor, they need the essential money that a day of justice will bring.

  The minimum number of jurors allowed at a graphe – a public law-suit – is 500/501; Socrates’ trial fell into this category. His crimes were believed to be of public concern; serious matters. By bringing Socrates to trial, Meletus was preventing religious outrage, he was doing Athens a favour. But, oddly, this was not a popular trial to attend. Juries could easily reach up to 1,000 or 2,000 men. Perhaps Athenians were already uneasy about what they might have to do – they came measured by the hekaton (hundred), not the khilioi (thousand).

  The 500 jurors on that May morning, as always, are held in by a nominal security fence – a lattice of wood punctuated by gates – a symbolic ringing in of civilised practice. Because although events here were impassioned and powerful, law-courts were not particularly pretty places. Victorious prosecutors could exact punishment then and there, beating their victims to a pulp.12 The accounts of Socrates’ trial describe jurors in an uproar, g
urning and groaning when they hear something that displeases them.13 Socrates himself complains that thorubos – tumult, baying, shouting, the acclamation of the rabble – disrupts the course of justice. But now, one presumes, there is just murmuring, as the chosen men – the ragbag judges – file in to take their place to enact the business of democracy. Once the entire panel is assembled and settled, the Archon motions for the wicker gate to be opened to admit prosecutor and defendant. Both stand on a bema, a raised platform. As the plaintiff and the to-be-judged appeared, all eyes must have swivelled immediately to stare, to check out their quarry.14

  And here we have the worrying certainty of the world’s first true democracy. If all citizen-men can judge their fellow citizens, then naturally men of all degrees can sit in judgement. Their decision will be representative. Every means possible has been thought of to prevent corruption. Alphabetical blocks of seats, secret ballots, random-selection machines. But still, the value of the judgement depends on those 500 odd men chosen to cram into the Stoa on that one day. As they shout and complain and applaud they will whip up and goad one another. They will bring their own neuroses, frustrations and back-biting, pre-judgements to bear.

  Socrates has spent his life so far promoting the notion that every man should strive to be as good as he possibly can be. But he is to be judged before his advice has been institutionalised. As his darting eyes scan the courtroom – populated by men scrawny from hunger and disappointment, veterans scarred by war, tremblers scarred with shame, citizens who view him as an enemy of the state – one wonders with what degree of confidence he drew breath.

  6

  CHECKS, BALANCES AND MAGIC-MEN

  Athens, 462–399 BC

  Do not be angry with me for speaking the truth; no man will survive who genuinely opposes you or any other crowd and prevents the occurrence of many unjust and illegal happenings in the city. A man who really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public life if he is to survive even for a short time.

  Plato, Apology, 31e–32a1

  DOWN IN THE BASEMENT OF THE Agora Museum, where 250,000 ancient artefacts line up on shelves beautifully built in the 1950s, a number still kept in old olive-oil tins, there is an original fifth-century BC ballot box still in situ. This simple clay structure, looking for all the world like a marooned, subterranean chimney, is where Athenian men would toss their voting discs – psēphos (pebble – from the original tool of voting, a river pebble or stone). The ballots thrown in here around 399 BC were no longer river pebbles, but carefully designed. These were cutting-edge, newfangled things at the time of Socrates’ trial. The size of finger cymbals, each has either a hollow or a filled stem. A hollow stem equals a condemnation, a solid stem an acquittal. If you hold the middle between your thumb and forefinger it is impossible to tell which way your vote has fallen (one side of the ballot box gathered together all the ‘innocent’, the other all the ‘guilty’ votes); this was an ancient secret ballot.

  That surviving bit of archaeology in the Agora basement tells us something important about the psychology of democratic Athens. Despite the value of words in Athens, and their power of persuasion, Athenians knew they needed to try to keep rhetoric (not to mention vote-rigging and corruption) in check. Canny to the fact that their ‘open’ system was vulnerable to abuse, to intimidation, that gift of the gab or personal connections could carry enormous weight in a people-led system, Athena’s children had spent a great deal of brain-time working out how to keep all procedures as fair, as fail-safe as humanly possible.2

  Magic in the law-courts

  But even so, in a show-trial such as this one, the odds were stacked against a mortal like Socrates. Demons were also thought to be at work here in the courts.

  In the Kerameikos Museum, a five-minute walk due north-west of the Stoa Basileios, there is a small figure of a man. He is made of lead, his hands have been tied behind his back, he has been buried in a lead coffin. On his right leg is scratched his name, and it is there again on the lid of the coffin: Mnesimachos.

  Mnesimachos was the object of black magic – an aspect of the Athenian legal system that has typically been played down, since it does not fit very easily with a popular notion of Athens as a high-minded and enlightened quasi-utopia. On this miniature lead coffin lid other Athenians are remembered. These men may be the victims’ friends – or his enemies who had brought him to trial. The coffin-lid curses cover all bases; at the end of the list is written, ‘and anyone else who is either a legal advocate (syndikos) or a witness (martys) with him’.3

  Elsewhere we find Athenian curse-tablets, folded up, pierced with a nail and left underwater – in wells and cisterns. Their messages seem to aim to disable those who attend the court:

  Just as this lead is worthless and cold, so let that man and his deeds be worthless and cold, and for those men with him [also let] whatever they say and plot against me be worthless and cold.4

  Figurines like these, along with the curse-tablets that turn up at all digs in the region of the law-courts (in central Athens and also in Piraeus and at the Kerameikos), show just how suspicious and superstitious a society Athens could be. Laying curses was once thought to be a habit of lower-grade Athenians, but the recent surge of archaeological activity in Athens paints a different picture. The frequency of the figurine and curse-tablet finds, and the names they bear, show that such sorcery was fairly standard procedure. A recent survey by the American School at Athens of all extant graffiti from excavations in the city shows that the bulk divides into two categories: the ABCs, where Athenians are learning to read and write, and the curses, where Athenians are perfecting ways of damning one another. Plato, in his Republic, refers to this kind of legal magic, the use of binding spells, produced through incantations:

  They believe these things deliver us from evils in the other world, while terrible things await those who have neglected to incant and sacrifice.5

  In the minds of many, magic was at work in other ways too in the legal system. Kleromancy, the quasi-supernatural power of randomness, was credited with guiding those balls in the kleroterion machines to their specific slots. The Athenians could not let the outcome of legal trials just rest on the power of a defendant’s speech or the whim of the jury – darker forces had to be called into play.6 And given how litigious a society Athens was – close on 40,000 legal cases, remember, in any one year – that is a lot of black magic to be in circulation.

  With the help of the spirit world, Athens was a city that was used to condemning, to dispatching both the innocent and the guilty.

  The plug has been pulled on the water-clock in the Archon’s court – all eyes are now on Meletus along with Anytus and Lycon (plus those Meletus has possibly brought with him, to chip in to substantiate his argument against Socrates). The team for the prosecution have precisely three hours to do their job.7

  Before sunset on this one day, Athenians will decide whether or not a seventy-year-old philosopher is to live or die. It is not at all clear who will win this day in court.

  There are no barristers or attorneys in the ancient Athenian legal system – Meletus, Anytus and Lycon have to mount the case for the prosecution, Socrates has to defend himself. What no one knows is whether Socrates’ famous wit, his smart one-liners, his thinking mind, his self-belief, are going to provide sufficient ammunition to save his skin.

  7

  PERSUADE OR OBEY

  Religious court of the Archon Basileus, 399 BC

  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.

  Socrates’ defence at his trial, 399 BC, in Plato, Apology, 21d1

  SOCRATES WAS IN COURT, IN ATHENS, in 399 BC on charges of corrupting the young and denying the city’s gods. Passions clearly ra
n high and it was, by all accounts, a noisy trial. Time and again we are told that during the court proceedings the philosopher was shouted down. His cool, calm logic, even in the face of death, was clearly infuriating. But this kind of vociferous attitude was a familiar refrain in Athena’s democratic city.

  Athenians were used to bellowing. Every month the frowsty roar of the democratic Assembly up on the Pnyx rang through the city-state: 6,000 men together in one place. Shoemakers next to aristocrats, fullers alongside perfumiers, harbourmasters by slave merchants; all debating issues that directly affected their lives. The Assembly was the living incarnation of the democratic ideology. All here were equal under the law, each had the right to rule and be ruled in turn. Heralds tried to keep order, but we’re told that at times the babble of these new democrats would reach to the skies.

  The Pnyx was the name given to the natural rock auditorium just to the west of the Acropolis and perched above the Agora. Men would congregate here in the fresh dawn light to debate Athens’ business: themes, topics were selected by a rotating council of 500 men. The Council Chamber – the bouleuterion – back down in the Agora was where the issues of the day were selected; dinner was provided for fifty of the administrators in a strict rota system. Once the subject had been argued and counter-argued back up on the Pnyx, vote was by show of hands. Forensic research by one scholar has shown the exact square meterage (0.65m2) on which each ancient Athenian could plant his feet or backside on that acoustically exciting hillside (and with 6,000 men there, the fit would have been snug) – contemporary Athens a panorama beneath him – to make his voice heard.2