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

by Bettany Hughes

  Socrates would have been in good company during these al fresco seminars; for the well heeled in Athena’s city, this was what the leisured boys of sixteen, seventeen, eighteen did. With two, possibly three slaves to every adult citizen, the young well-to-do Athenian did not have to trouble himself with too much work. Instead he spent his waking hours honing his body and mind.20 All young citizen men (and particularly wealthy young men), outnumbered as they were by the population of slaves, had vast amounts of schole – leisure-time. It has been estimated that the young and middle-aged may well have spent three-quarters of their day at the gym. Here they prepared for competitions, for war, for being ‘beautiful’ and for their role in the city’s many festivals.

  At certain ages in Athens you could do certain things: Socrates, like all other healthy sons of citizens, had already been welcomed into Athenian society as a toddler at the Anthesteria festival. At seven he would have been allowed to read. At twelve to participate in religious rites, and then at eighteen – the real coming of age when beardless boys became bearded men – the number of festivals that he could attend increased exponentially.

  The almost-daily religious festivals – the majority of which Socrates would have had the chance to participate in – gave Athens both a sense of security and a sense of purpose.21 Its most splendid was the show-stopping Great Pan-Athenaea, a four-yearly fixture when outsiders were allowed into the city to marvel at Athenian greatness. Between the rival ten tribes of Attica, competition was fierce. It is the Great Pan-Athenaea that is represented on the Parthenon frieze. Foreigners carry honey-cakes, aristocrats parade along the street on horseback, their charges rearing and prancing; there are flute and lyre players; gods mix with men, young girls carry furniture in preparation for religious ritual to a high-priestess; and standing back to back with this priestess is none other than the Archon Basileus himself, the man who oversaw Socrates’ trial. On the Parthenon’s delicately carved marble the Archon, a stocky, well-honed figure, masterfully, tenderly folds a thick, heavy peplos, a new cloak for the premier goddess of the city – wise Athena.

  There is no doubt that Socrates himself would have participated in the Pan-Athenaea. The celebrations lasted a week and spread right through the city. The festival route – the Pan-Athenaic Way – ran from the Dipylon Gate up to the Acropolis. Passing along it, one would have smelled the hot sweat of the athletes in the Agora running in full body armour and the hot breath of horses as they clattered past to cavalry and chariot events. In the harbour there were boat races, on the slopes of the Acropolis orchestral competitions, and up at the Pnyx recitations of Homer. Winning at the Pan-Athenaea was not just for honour, but for gain. First place in the chariot race for adult horses, for instance, earned you a whacking 140 amphoras of prize olive oil – approximately 7,850 pints. Winners flaunted their prizes during the florid parade in honour of Athena: the name of this procession – the pompe, initiated in the Kerameikos at the Pompeion – still suggests to us the ultimate in ceremonial greatness, a moment of pomp and circumstance.

  Socrates grew up in a city that had become a master at doing things: yet this young man from Alopeke, at some point around 450 BC, appears to have decided to pursue not just the what, but the why.

  One year when Pan-Athenaic carnival spirit was abroad in the air, there were two particularly respected visitors to the Kerameikos district: two great elder-statesman thinkers of the day, Parmenides and Zeno.22 Pupil and master, lovers – all kinds of rumours circulated about these two travellers, footsore all the way from Magna Graecia, southern Italy. Theirs was a progressive idea: that our internal lives are as valuable as our corporeal existence. In all the pulsating, sweaty business of living, it seems that here Socrates, soaking up the eclectic experiences available to him, was quickened to the concept of being.

  Parmenides was clearly a firebrand thinker, a man who burned his own path through society’s undergrowth. Many credit him as the founder of all Western philosophy. The sophist wrote poetically, and in lush, descriptive terms. He conjures up luminous images to express his ideas: a divine chariot, driven by maidens – daughters of the sun, no less – and pulled by docile mares, which draws him down the path of truth. At the end of this path he will discover what it is ‘to be’. His pupil Zeno developed philosophy further by establishing ‘dialectics’ – a method of testing the tenacity of an idea by taking it to its most ludicrous, paradoxical potential.

  In this fledgling democracy, repeatedly throwing the rulebook out of the window – where new political structures, new built environments, new world orders are a possibility – maybe whole new ways of thinking, of living life itself, are a possibility too. Ideas such as these would have been eagerly discussed by the young men who gathered in the Kerameikos district. Over the outdoor braziers, and juggling too-hot fish from charred earthenware frying pans (one such was discovered during city-centre excavations in 2007 and is currently on display in the new Acropolis Museum), fundamentally illuminating ideas were played with. Socrates was born into very exciting times.

  And one hot summer (the Great Pan-Athenaea took place in July/August), searing news.

  Although the two alien philosophers Zeno and Parmenides were staying in this low-rent motel-strip of the ancient city, they had brought with them something priceless. A new book. Imagine the impact. The leather pannier opening, the papyrus unwrapped, the words, inked black with oak-gall and charcoal, marking out a fresh landscape of ideas.

  Zeno and Parmenides once came to Athens for the Great Pan-Athenaea. Parmenides was a man of distinguished appearance. At that time he was well advanced in years, with his hair almost white. He may have been sixty-five years old and Zeno perhaps forty. They were staying with Pythodorus outside the walls of the Kerameikos. Socrates and a few others went there, anxious to hear a reading of the book Zeno had brought to Athens for the first time. Socrates was then quite young.23

  Quite young – probably nineteen or so. His age was significant. Athens was not just a city divided by gender, tribe, wealth, but – and this is vitally important – by age-groups.

  If the dating fits, then, during that same summer, as day slipped into night, Socrates’ exact contemporaries (possibly even Socrates himself) would have been introduced to the citizen-body of Athens in all their naked glory down at the Kerameikos. The Athenian year ran from summer solstice to summer solstice. And round about the beginning of the New Year – in this case, the night before the Great Pan-Athenaea kicked off – boys became men by racing against one another from the altar of love in the Academy to an altar in the city.24 These boys – all just eighteen or older, of an age one scholar describes, evocatively, as ‘striplings’25 – were stark naked, and each carried a torch.26 It must have been a genuinely rousing sight – and we hear that many spectators gathered to give those young bottoms ‘slaps of Kerameikos’ as they went past.27

  Their fathers had been slaughtered over the stretch of a half-century by the Persians, their mothers raped. And still they had not caved in. This new generation had much to live up to. Now the boy-children, Socrates’ peers, healthy skin-oiled, flame-lit, pound along the Pan-Athenaic Way into Athena’s city to show they are on their way to becoming men; and the Athenian horizon looks rosier.

  At the end of the Pan-Athenaea festival, there was a mass slaughter. Each and every city that owed tribute to Athens had to provide victims for sacrifice, and many hundreds of animals (mostly heifers) were killed. The bloodied cuts of meat were then processed down from the Acropolis to the Kerameikos, and the flesh cooked up in a massive feast for the people of Athens’ demes. Socrates would certainly have participated in such communal activity. As the smell of roasting flesh met the night air, as travellers shared tales, as new perspectives on human life were explored, Athena’s city was sated. The world and its wealth were coming to Athens because it was strong and confident and powerful.

  It is a vivid scene. The stonemason’s son, his suburban friends, the well-bred of Athens gathering to celebrate thei
r city and to hear new ideas to add to their own fast-developing, novel world. In a cosmos dominated by irascible, anthropomorphic gods; gods who drank and argued and slept with each other’s wives, together nature, phusis and democratic man suddenly appeared capable of producing her and his own mysteries and pleasures. A combination as powerful as that was unlikely to escape the notice of the authorities. The possibilities of the world – revealed by the brightest of sparks in this democratic city – might be fathomless. And in Athens one man, who was beginning to enjoy enormous influence, chose to open his doors to these new opinions, these new options and the radicals who propounded them.

  Socrates was about to earn himself a taste of the high, as well as the good, life.

  11

  PERICLES: HIGH SOCIETY, AND DEMOCRACY AS HIGH THEATRE

  Athens, 465–440 BC

  [SOCRATES:] Best of men, since you’re Athenians, from the greatest city with the strongest reputation for wisdom and strength, aren’t you ashamed that you care about having as much money, fame and honour as you can, whereas you don’t care about, or even consider, wisdom, truth, and making your soul as good as possible?

  Plato, Apology, 29d–e1

  BUSTS OF PERICLES CHORLARGEUS – PERICLES OF CHORLARGOS – look odd. His helmet appears misshapen, strangely elongated and globular. Yet this is not some artist’s aberration. In fact, the form corresponds to the unflattering jibes hurled at this statesman-general during his life-time: ‘onion-head’, ‘squill-head’ are hardly glamorous epithets.2 But even through the taunts, it was whispered that under the great domed helmet of this most influential of Athenians hummed a notable life-force. Because within that bulbous, outsize helmet lay the very sharpest of minds.

  Pericles was a strategist in both the ancient and the modern sense; he was a Greek strategos – a Greek general – and he was a man with muscular visions of what could be. When Socrates was nineteen or so and hanging out in the Kerameikos, Pericles was at the peak of his power, a reformer who shaped democratic Athens strategically, architecturally and intellectually.

  Pericles came from good stock, inheriting from his mother the blue blood of the Alcmaeonid dynasty. His great-uncle was that key democratic reformer Kleisthenes. His family owned large rural estates. But this was a dynasty with skeletons in its cupboard. Pericles’ own father had been banished under suspicion of ‘medising’ (fraternising with the Persians), and Pericles’ childhood was part spent in exile. Expulsion was something of which the family seemed to make a habit. Further back, Pericles’ archaic Athenian ancestors had been expelled from the city with a religious curse on their heads; it was said they had executed revolutionaries sheltering on sacred ground. To shed human blood on an altar was pollution so great that a Cretan soothsayer was called in to cleanse Athena’s city – and to clear out the Alcmaeonids.3 This was damaging superstition that allowed no quarter for pragmatism, and perhaps for that very reason, once he had real influence in the city, Pericles turned not to hardened, entrenched, superstitious tradition, but to new waves of thought.

  Pericles comes into focus when Socrates is just six years old, in 463 BC. He lobbies on behalf of the Athenian people. He is instrumental in the reforms and purging of the Areopagus Council. By the time Socrates has come of age in the Athenian sense – after 451 – Pericles is campaigning in the Gulf of Corinth and has won enormous political respect. Chosen as Athens’ General one season after another, he makes military achievements the basis of his power. This is the kind of man the democracy needs to give it backbone. And Pericles is not shy of reminding hoi polloi of the fact. His tongue was as sharp as his sword: he was an accomplished rhetor – a speaker.4 For fifteen consecutive years from 443 BC (and twenty-two in all) he was re-elected as Athens’ premier democrat.5 Although he was not officially Athens’ leader, think of him as the city’s ‘first citizen’. He had effective power because his lead was, almost always, followed in the Assembly. As Strategos, he could propose which motions were debated by the demos. He set the agenda for Athens’ ‘Golden Age’. His name, once again, seems prophetic. He is peri-kles – ‘surrounded or rimmed with glory’.

  Pericles, because of his position, his intelligence, and his known integrity, could respect the liberty of the people and at the same time hold them in check. It was he who led them, rather than they who led him, and, since he never sought power from any wrong motive, he was under no necessity of flattering them: in fact he was so highly respected that he was able to speak angrily to them and to contradict them. Certainly when he saw that they were going too far in a mood of over-confidence, he would bring back to them a sense of their dangers; and when they were discouraged for no good reason he would restore their confidence. So, in what was nominally a democracy, power was really in the hands of the first citizen.6

  It could be easy to imagine Pericles doing what so many of his peers did, drinking a great deal, gossiping in the symposia. But he was not typical; head down, we are told, he made a beeline from his home to the Assembly, not allowing for any distractions, making democracy his business. He was both an intellectual, a theorist, and a man who did. His mind buzzed with political reform; he attacked the privileges of the Areopagus Council; in the late 450s he introduced payment for juries – now every man, even the very poorest, could afford to be a judge; in 451 he limited entry to the democracy by allowing only the children of parents who were both fully fledged citizens to become citizens themselves; throughout the 440s he encouraged and supported radical thinkers and made their ideas flesh in the stones of the city.7

  Pericles was evidently a man who watched and listened to the world around him. He recognised that you cannot exercise your right as a democrat without being reimbursed for your trouble. And so by the end of his life soldiers, sailors, jurymen, councillors were padding their way, the majority by foot, a few of the rich on horseback, into the city-centre or down to Piraeus to ensure that their democratic power mattered. Thucydides credits Pericles with an acute understanding of what it takes to be a politician: ‘to know what must be done and to be able to explain it; to love one’s country and to be incorruptible.’8

  Athens, stage-set for democracy

  When Socrates was in his early twenties, Pericles was the man who persuaded the demos to pour public money into the reconstruction of Athens’ cult centre, the Acropolis; he oversaw the building of the Propylaia – a vast structure, a kind of glorified entrance hall to the Acropolis summit, the approach ramp rising, lined with Ionic columns and a ceiling of midnight-blue studded with golden stars – the first sight to meet those seeking access to Athena’s earthly home;9 he commissioned the new temple to Hephaestus overlooking the Agora, the worrying lair of Nemesis (the goddess of fate) on the wind-sweet site of Rhamnous, plus a temple to Athena above the Kolonos Hill. Pericles planned other buildings to herald a new Athens: each stone canopy served a spiritual function, replacing the god-homes destroyed by the Persians in 480/79 BC.10 The Persians might have burned down the architecture of the Acropolis, but Pericles, on behalf of the Athenian democracy, would build it back higher.

  And the splendification of Athens was not measured just in masonry. The modern-day pollution of central Athens is nothing compared to that in the Golden Age. On the south-east slopes of the Acropolis itself a foundry has recently been excavated. Massive clay channels here drained off the molten wax and other by-products of foundry-cast art. Temperatures of up to 950 degrees centigrade had to be stoked in the furnaces on these slopes – the Agora, the Parthenon itself, must have been regularly shrouded in clouds of charcoal-smuts. This was where those bronze sculptures, heroically naked, most funded by individual dynasties, were knocked out to satisfy both the city’s renewed democratic sense of itself and aristocratic competitive instinct – visible proof that your family was capable of more great works than the next.

  We should pause for a moment to imagine just how many created versions of the human form there were in Athena’s city. Athens was a territory where the breathing population
was watched by beautifully worked stone and metal men – idealised versions of humankind, an embodiment of the democratic Athenian’s ambition. Sculptures – bronze, marble, wood – all dressed in real clothes as if they suffered hot and cold like any other human, lined the sanctuaries, the roads, the colonnades, the law-courts. Only a tiny fraction of the bronze statuary cast in Athens in the fifth century remains, so it can be easy to underestimate just what a packed, ever-expanding site-specific art gallery this city was, the public spaces populated by crowds of silent humans. Silent, but not muted. With a showman’s urge to make their new attraction (in this case, the show city of democracy) as gaudy as any Persian king’s court or Babylonian tyrant’s processional way, the Athenians stage-set demos-kratia. Statues, monuments, temples, democratic courts were all painted and stained in Technicolor. The stark application and gloopy pigments used would shock most of us today, but these were designed to be seen under the bright Attic sun, and their gaudy glory to be remembered.

  In 2007 archaeologists turned up in the earth of the Agora seashells pretty with cinnabar-red, lapis-blue and calchite-green mineral pigment. Winkled out of the ground, these craftsmen’s paint pots were half-empty – their job, for some reason, interrupted. The majority of Athens’ public buildings were painted or stained: recent analysis has shown that the Parthenon was gaudy with greens, blues, reds and gold. The Agora was where the backdrop of Athenian democracy was liveried. It was also where the fruits of the Athenian empire – exotic and home-grown – were enjoyed.

  Scientists from the west coast of Asia Minor, rhetoricians from Sicily, philosophers from Thessaly and Macedonia made their way to Athena’s city, all chatting, arguing, thinking: imagine the hubbub – the Athenians had a name for it, the thorubos – the buzz of opinion and dissent in the streets, the council chambers, the Assembly, and at those famous debauched-yet-refined symposia that Plato, Aristophanes, Xenophon et al. have immortalised, where wit and wine flowed, where poetry was sung and schemes of self-advancement were hatched.