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

by Bettany Hughes

  Attendance at Assembly operated on a first-come, first-served basis. It was those men who decided to submit their names, locally or in the Agora itself, to put themselves forward for democratic duty, who made judgements on Athens’ democratic life. Officials for particular jobs – and we are talking high office, not just clerical duties – were predominantly chosen by lot: the equivalent of having your head of state randomly selected for the duration of one year, and then the secretary of state picked afresh each twenty-four hours. All were working together, to ensure the eudaimonia – the blessedness, the health – of the city-state. All officials were (in theory at any rate) there to facilitate the popular will. The name for a citizen at this time was simply polites: city-person. Athens had delivered a social and political system that was exciting, empowering and head-spinningly radical. Policy was not in the gift of one king, it was dreamed up and enacted by ‘the plebs’.

  Gaining purchase here required a new kind of politician. In the past, the premier men of Greece spoke out to their community, but they were remembered, and lionised, for their heroic deeds. Now it was a way with words that counted. Arguments had to play to a mongrel audience. Although agricultural work would have kept many of the lower classes at home, there would have been lean, toothless men here, many battle-scarred or deformed by disease and malnutrition; but their vote still counted. In democratic Athens every citizen was a politician.

  Yet many Athenians were, in fact, troubled by articulate people-power.3 In a full democracy, citizen status and influence are not dependent upon social or economic standing or education or talent or virtue; the bigoted, the mildly crazed, the vindictive also have their say. A direct democracy is ideologically perfect and, in practice, flawed. Why believe that the outcome of a political process will be communal order and justice? Socrates had the kind of questing intelligence that challenged the value of absolute democracy. He was the child of a child-like political system. No one knew yet where this democratic experiment would lead. He was not complacent about the potential power of the emerging concept, not tired of it, not petrified of it. But he did what intelligent children do – he interrogated the situation he found himself in. Although some have, as a result, labelled Socrates an anti-democrat, he was in truth articulating the fears about the democracy of his day, fears that in their moments of doubt, secretly, subconsciously, and at times explicitly, made many Athenians quake.4

  THESEUS: … This state is not

  Subject to one man’s will, but is a free city.

  The king here is the people, who by yearly office

  Govern in turn. We give no special power to wealth;

  The poor man’s voice commands equal authority.

  HERALD: … The city that I come from [Thebes] lives under command

  Of one man, not a rabble. None there has the power

  By loud-mouthed talk to twist the city this way and that

  For private profit – today popular, loved by all,

  Tomorrow, blaming the innocent for the harm he’s done,

  Getting away with every crime, till finally

  The law-courts let him off scot-free! The common man!

  Incapable of plain reasoning, how can he guide

  A city in sound policy?5

  And Socrates – the man we credit as the champion of free speech and liberty – asked another, disconcerting question of democracy. Persuasive speech is all very well, but how much room does persuasion allow for goodness, for truth?6

  Speaking freely in the law-courts

  But this is slavery, not to speak one’s thoughts.

  Euripides, Phoenician Women, 392

  Freedom of speech was cardinal in Athens – and yet all clever democrats picked their words carefully. The silver-tongued did well in both the Assembly and the law-courts. The speeches of ordinary, nameless Athenians, many of which are only now being translated from scraps of papyrus, indicate just how canny these early democrats were. A few spoke their minds; most said that which they thought the crowd wanted to hear. Personal gain could be masked as moral purpose.7 Herodotus’ observation, that it is easier to persuade 30,000 to act than it is one, easier to deceive a multitude than one man, was a human truth of Athens’ direct democracy.8 It was a truth that Socrates was soon to suffer.

  Pamphlets outlining the ‘Art of Rhetoric’ sold like hotcakes in the city. The number of copies of Aristotle’s fourth-century Art of Rhetoric that are still turning up in the sands of Egypt are an indication of how popular such tracts had become for the layman. In the law-courts precise skills were required. Speeches had to be memorised, not read. The defendant or plaintiff needed a clear voice, a dramatic delivery, a developed command of the Greek language (polysyllabic and complicated to speak) and he needed to be able to argue his case within precise time-limits.

  The first to speak at Socrates’ trial were his accusers, Meletus, Anytus and Lycon.9 Meletus, remember, spoke on behalf of other poets,10 whom Socrates had rubbed up the wrong way. The glitterati and their lackeys were turning against the irritating gadfly. Lycon was a representative of the orators, the men whom Socrates criticised for valuing style over content. Anytus was one of the city’s entrepreneurs; Socrates, we hear, had had some kind of brief liaison with his son and had persuaded this young man to ‘think’ rather than to go into the family tanning business. Anytus was also a man who had lost much property during the civil wars – wars that saw oligarchs such as Critias, a pupil of Socrates’, flourish. Who knows how long Anytus’ rancour had been allowed to grow – perhaps even stretching back to those days when Socrates walked and talked with young men in the Ilissos district, while the tanners were restricted from using the clear water there to sluice down their bloodied skins. While the beautiful juveniles, the men with leisure and youth on their side, paddled in rivers and listened to Socrates and other sophists, Anytus’ livelihood was degraded and threatened. As the philosopher and his friends enjoyed the cooling Ilissian waters, appreciated young boys in the gym, and thought, deeply, about the point of human life, a powerful subset of the business community was being snubbed.

  In one of Plato’s dialogues, Anytus and Socrates bump into one another in the back streets of Athens. The scene bristles with scarcely contained antagonism:

  ANYTUS: Socrates, I consider you are too apt to speak ill of people. I, for one, if you will take my advice, would warn you to be careful: in most cities it is probably easier to do people harm than good, and particularly in this one.11

  We don’t know who wrote the speeches that promoted the arguments of the tanner, the poet and the orator on that spring morning; the prosecutors themselves, or one of the hired hands who sat at tables in the Agora and bashed out perfectly persuasive tracts, thanks to which men could save their own lives, prevent an abortion, claim their neighbour’s garden was in fact theirs, et cetera, et cetera. Nor do we know what Meletus, Anytus and Lycon said (unless – always a possibility – their words are sitting on a scrap of papyrus in the storerooms of a museum in London, Paris, New York, Egypt or Athens, waiting to be translated and published; given that new fragments of new plays by Sophocles have recently been coming to light amongst the Oxyrhynchus Papyri collection, this is feasible). What is certain is that their orations against Socrates would have had to be to time.12

  Because now that the trial-space in the Agora had filled, now that the charges against Socrates had been boomed out by a herald, a functionary of the court – after patiently waiting for the Archon’s signal – had allowed the water-clock’s regulating stream to start to flow: the sign that speakers could commence sharing their arguments with the 500-strong judge-and-jury.

  We have a pretty good idea of what the Athenian water-clock or klepsydra in Socrates’ trial looked like because the fractured remains of one klepsydra were found, in the 1930s, discarded down a well in central Athens. Two earthenware pots sit one above the other, and the water spouts from the larger into the smaller. This particular example releases water relatively quickly – it t
akes only around six minutes to drain. But the water-clocks in the bigger courts were commensurately larger, and we know that these earthenware pots were refilled time and again during the proceedings. It is a bottling of time that sits uneasily with Socrates’ more fundamentally expansive approach to life. During his trial, Socrates points up the ludicrousness of making dead clock-time an arbiter in court:

  SOCRATES: If it were the law with us, as it is elsewhere, that trial for life should not last one, but many days, you would be convinced, but now it is not easy to dispel great slanders in a short time.13

  There is no real sense of hours passing by in this courtroom. only comes to mean ‘hour’ in the second half of the fourth century. Up until then the word implied both a season and a ‘fitting or appointed time’. Socrates’ lifespan has been rightly called the ‘axial age’. Because this is a moment in human history when the old world starts to morph into the new. Athens still follows a primitive, bucolic calendar. Rituals and seasons mark out time. But new technology is starting to change things. The water-clock’s slow leakage is inexorable.14

  SOCRATES: Stop trembling. You should look away from some of your thoughts; and, having dismissed them, depart for a while. Then, go back to your brain; set it in motion again and weigh the issue.15

  Socrates has agreed to abide by the rules of the court that has gathered to try him by the laws of Athens. And so he has to stand there, aged seventy, in his worn, woollen cloak and, like those around him in the court, within a prescribed length of time, strain to hear what it is his accusers have to say – because he, like all those in ancient Athenian courts, has to respond in his own defence.16

  Agony in the law-courts

  The adversarial nature of today’s law-courts came directly from the Greek warrior tradition, where agones – competitions – were the prime means to prove you were a real man.17

  The Athenian court was not about consensus – it was about winning. Defendants and accusers performed in a theatre. Emotional manipulation was an important part of the action: men would weep and beg, aristocrats would prostrate themselves at the feet of ‘the people’. Of course the climax was not the roar of applause, but a judgement. And the courtroom-full of ordinary Athenians – think perhaps of a basketball court rammed to the gills – swayed by the tears, the wringing of hands, the fine words, these men could come to definitive, explicit, irreversible verdicts.

  Despite their antipathy (and given what was at stake), the accusations raised by Meletus, Anytus and Lycon cannot have been world-class speeches, the kind of Ciceronian epics that have survived the millennia. Although we know that they stood up and addressed the assembled crowd in the allotted time, not one quote from the attacks appears to have survived. Yet it is not just the men’s philippic skill that is in play here. Socrates knows, only too well, that he has something else to compete with. On this spring day, prejudice – pre-judgement – is clearly present in the courtroom; and so too is a force so powerful it was incarnated by the Greeks as a goddess:

  SOCRATES: Those who persuaded you by using malice and slander, and some who persuaded others after they themselves had been persuaded – all are very hard to deal with. It isn’t even possible to bring any of them up here and to question them, and in making my defence, it’s absolutely necessary to shadow-box, as it were, and to ask questions when no one answers.18

  Socrates is pointing up the dangers of ‘slander’, ‘rumour’, of ‘word-of-mouth’ judgements – all the stocks-in-trade of one acutely, intimidatingly powerful deity. A goddess beloved of democratic Athens called Peitho – Persuasion. Before Socrates has even opened his mouth, some in the court have already been persuaded. Slander, it appears, had swiftly flown on the breath of this, one of the most popular goddesses in democratic Athens. History has neglected her, but for the Athenians Peitho was a larger-than-life presence across the city, and a permanent fixture in the law-courts.

  Well anyway, Athenians, that I’m not guilty according to Meletus’ indictment doesn’t seem to me to need much of a defence, and what I’ve said about it is enough. But what I was saying earlier – that there’s a great deal of hatred directed at me and by many people, you may be sure that’s true. And it’s this that’ll convict me, if indeed I’m going to be convicted – not Meletus nor even Anytus but the prejudice and ill will of most people. This is what’s convicted many other good men and, I think, it’ll do so in the future. And we needn’t fear that it’ll end with my case.19

  The power of persuasion, in any democratic society, should not be underestimated.

  8

  PEITHO, THE

  POWER OF PERSUASION

  Agora, Assembly, law-courts, 469–399 BC

  SOCRATES: … I don’t know whether you have been convinced by my accusers, gentlemen; but I myself was almost carried away by them, their arguments were so persuasive. And yet hardly a word of what they said was true …

  Socrates’ defence, 399 BC, in Plato, Apology, 17a

  IF YOU WALK ON THE SOUTH-WESTERN side of the Acropolis today, on your right-hand side, before you start to mount the monumental marble steps, there are the four walls of a home – a god-home.

  When every Athenian made his way up to the cult centre here, he knew that he was visiting not a symbolic, but the actual, temporal seat of gods and goddesses. Temples and sanctuaries were built as earthly lodgings for the god-tribe. The experience on arrival must surely have been highly charged. Here you were, walking into the presence of what were believed to be the most powerful forces in heaven and on earth; entering a spiritually radioactive force-field.

  This first house belonged to that of a powerful, wily goddess; the magnetic, effective creature called Peitho.1 When you start to look, you find Persuasion/Peitho throughout the city-state. She hurries, ornamental chiton flapping, across funerary urns and drinking cups. She is commemorated in Pindar’s ode Olympian 13, where prostitutes are nominated her servants. The art of persuasion has become so important in this new democracy – a place where ideas on the conduct of society, of justice, of war, of civilisation itself, must be sold to the Assembly – that Persuasion’s divine incarnation was paid high honours. The pamphleteer Isocrates, writing in the late fourth century BC, claims that, by giving yearly sacrifices to Peitho, ‘men aspire to share the power which the goddess possesses’.2

  Like Aphrodite, Eros and Nemesis, Peitho had a prehistoric pedigree. She was clumped with those deities who were believed to have emerged from the primordial night, a darkness that smothered the universe before humanity, before earth itself came into existence. Sappho describes her as Aphrodite’s ‘handmaiden bright as gold’,3 and sometimes she is credited with a closer relationship to the goddess of love and passion – she is thought to be Aphrodite’s daughter, or the daughter of Ate, fate.4 Love and persuasion, a dangerous combination. Peitho is seductive, potent, undinting; sometimes she meddles where she shouldn’t. But still the Athenians put their trust in her.

  Democratic Athens in fact adored Peitho. With so many vested interests, such possibilities for freedom, how could the body-politic of Socrates’ Athens possibly stick together? Peitho was thought to have an important job to do, not just to promote the ambitious, but to persuade Athenian men to think collectively, to encourage consensus for the common good. Athenians watched Peitho’s glory played out in the theatres. Her priestesses were given special seats of honour in the Theatre of Dionysos.5 (The persuasive nature of drink was as evident to the Greeks as it is to us.) Her chameleon qualities were turned into wooden cult-images or set in stone, by the most voguish sculptors of the day.6 During one ritual a priestess would wash down a carving of Peitho’s body and scatter doves’ blood on her altar. Her name climaxed Aeschylus’ Oresteian trilogy of tragedies.

  ATHENA: Holy Persuasion too I bless,

  Who softly strove with harsh denial, Till Zeus the Pleader came to trial

  And crowned Persuasion with success.

  Now good shall strive with good; and we

  An
d they shall share the victory.

  CHORUS: Let civil war, insatiate of ill,

  Never in Athens rage;

  Let burning wrath, that murder must assuage,

  Never take arms to spill,

  In this my heritage,

  The blood of man till dust has drunk its fill.

  Let all together find

  Joy in each other;

  And each both love and hate with the same mind

  As his blood-brother;

  For this heals many hurts of mankind.

  ATHENA: These gracious words and promised deeds

  Adorn the path where wisdom leads …

  … Let your state

  Hold justice as her chifest prize;

  And land and city shall be great

  And glorious in every part.7

  The Oresteia trilogy was first performed in 458 BC when the democracy was a brave new idea. A decade when Persuasion, in a direct-democracy, seemed to be yielding splendid, life-enhancing results for the people of Athens. It is hard to read Aeschylus’ lines without sadness, with the hindsight we have, knowing of the civil wars that did indeed rage, and of the ugly place where persuasion and circumstance would in fact take Athena’s city. We should also note that Peitho, in ancient folklore, had a monstrous, bastard child – pheme is the name in Greek, which comes down to Latin as fama and to us as ‘fame’. The derivation of the word is worth remembering. Fame in its original sense meant not notoriety but notoriety’s life-spark – rumour. Through the fifth century, when talk was encouraged by democratic politics, talk’s dark side, pheme, was welcomed as a new cult – worshipped with ever-increasing enthusiasm. In a tight-knit, free-to-go-as-it-pleased community like Athens, rumour and gossip salted many a conversation. Fame in Athens was, by the time of Socrates’ trial, bringing as much pain as it was pleasure.