The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life
Page 13
Pericles also filled his city with billowing music. He commissioned the Odeion concert-hall in 440 BC and encouraged the production of new melodies for the city’s parades: the sound of musicians practising would have been transported by Athens’ soft winds through the central districts and even to its surrounding demes. The Odeion was splendid, with a vast conical roof, the largest covered building in the Greek world.11 Later tradition alleged that it was an imitation of the tent of Xerxes, an architectural two fingers up to Persian might.12 Pericles was taught by a certain Damon, who studied the effects of music on behaviour and character,13 and the general promoted a soundtrack ‘through which he harmonized the city’.14 According to Plutarch, Pericles reorchestrated the music in the Pan-Athenaea festival.15 In the fifth century music was credited with medicinal qualities – Pericles was playing physick to his compatriots.
Here comes the squill-headed Zeus,
Perikles, wearing the Odeion on his head,
now that the ostrakon is past.
Fragment of Kratinos16
No one could deny Pericles’ piety, but he also entertained the abstracts of oddballs. This was an age when all kinds of astonishing ideas were abroad, outlandish notions from foreign thinkers; one, Thales, had guessed that all things come from water, another, Anaximander, stated: ‘from the warmed-up water and earth emerged either fish or animals pretty fish-like: from these humans were created’.17 Then Anaxagoras of Clazomenae proposed that the sun was a red-hot rock, the moon a lump of earth. The thoughtful traveller from Asia Minor went further, having the audacity to suggest that consciousness rests not in the heart, but in the brain, and he introduced a concept of nous – ‘mind’ – a kind of super-presence that sets the world in motion:
It is the finest of all things and the purest, and it has knowledge concerning all things and the greatest power; and over everything that has souls, large or small, mind rules.18
Anaxagoras was allowed into Pericles’ home – a man who, according to Socrates, ‘filled him [that is, Socrates himself] with high thoughts and taught him the nature of the mind.’19 Pericles’ sons associated with the philosopher Protagoras. Socrates, already eagerly acquiring philosophic experience, may also have been welcomed.20 All met at sponsored soirées: phrontistai – thinkers (and this is the Greek word used more frequently than ‘philosophers’) gathered to give practical advice on the well-being of this new, experimental society. Athenians recognised that democracy would be difficult to maintain, but they went out of their way to cherish and buttress the new ideology. These men inhabited the phrontisteria, the ‘thinking shops’ that Aristophanes would, thirty years later, mock so mercilessly. He ripped into the ‘immoral logic’ that they taught, and scorned the utterly ludicrous lines of enquiry that men such as Socrates followed.
STUDENT: Chaerephon of Sphettus once asked Socrates whether he was of the opinion that gnats produced their hum by way of the mouth or – the other end.
STREPSIADES: Well, well, what did he say?
STUDENT: ‘The intestinal passage of the gnat,’ he replied, ‘is very narrow, and consequently the wind is forced to go straight through the back end. And the arse, being a hole forming the exit from this narrow passage, groans under the force of the wind.’
STREPSIADES: Like a trumpet, you mean. I must say that’s a marvellous feat of intestinology. I can see getting acquitted in the Lawcourts is going to be child’s play for a chap who knows all there is to know about gnat’s guts.21
But Pericles has set a precedent; in years to come we hear of ‘open house’ meetings elsewhere in the city: men gathering in the inner courtyards that were a feature of most mid-range Athenian homes. Here the premier educators of the day competed to see who would get to mould the city’s future and its hope – its young men.22
Picture Socrates at these elevated gatherings, perhaps inside Pericles’ home, perhaps in a neighbouring courtyard. Listening to what Anaxagoras has to say about a new meaning of life, nous; computing these notions, turning them over in his own, maturing mind.
I was delighted with this … It seemed somehow right that mind [nous] should be the cause of all things, and I thought that if this were the case then mind, in arranging all these things, would arrange each in the way that was best for it.23
Staring too up at the night sky, at that point in the earth’s turn where thinking conditions in this region become more bearable. Although this would be a line of enquiry Socrates would later reject, in his early years mulling over with the great thinkers around him the secrets and purpose of the stars.
And he strongly advised them also to become familiar with astronomical measurement, however only to the point of being able to know the time-divisions of night, of the month, and of the year, for the sake of journeying and sailing and keeping watch.24
Yet Socrates at this stage was nothing more than a village boy, the son of artisans. It was intimidating surely to make his way into the circle of, possibly even the household of, the acolytes of, the most powerful man in all of Athens.
The domestics of democracy
But there is one thing it is important to remember about democratic Athens – just how cosy this city was. Here you would not find the 100-foot-wide avenues running to the palatial complex that will so impress in the city of Alexandria, or the equivalent of Nero’s Domus Aurea in Rome. So far the archaeological record has not turned up an aristocratic ‘district’. Men of all degrees walked through the winding streets, brushing shoulders with one another. Prostitutes could confidently ply their trade by slipping on customised little hobnail boots and casually strolling up and down the alleyways. In the dust their shoe-nails would spell out akolouthei – ‘this way’, or ‘follow me’. Ordinary women, bread-sellers and washer-women joined aristocrats on their way to make dedications at sanctuaries or up on the Acropolis itself.25 All life was here. Socrates, himself a great walker (we hear in one of the Platonic dialogues, the Phaedrus, that contemporaries thought walking a ‘good way to think’), would have travelled through an Athenian landscape of surprising parity.
Because it seems, at least when Socrates was a young man, that the blue-blood dynasties, the ‘old’ Athenian families, had chosen not to cream off the benefits of democratic living; rich and poor democrats alike lived in homes that, from the outside at any rate, looked very similar. The excavations to build the new Acropolis Museum in Athens have revealed warrens of streets, modest, fifth-century BC terraced houses hugging right up close to the rock of the Acropolis. Twenty feet below the current city-level, visitors can now walk above the city of Pericles and Socrates, over a glass and Perspex sky: as though the hive of the modern city has been lifted to reveal a honeycomb of antiquity beneath. In one section of the dusty remains there is a neat drain from Socrates’ day – touching somehow to imagine this bit of engineering quietly functioning, while the men and women around it got on with the business of being the world’s first official democrats.
Their homes were simple, made of mud-brick, red-roof-tiled.26 Socrates would have lived with his parents until he was thirty or so, in just such a house. Courtyards were where much of the bustle of being alive took place. Very little fancy decoration here. Those expressive, brush-fine, pastel-shade fresco paintings from the fifth and fourth centuries BC that are still being excavated were kept mainly for the walls of graves (hence their survival) and of public spaces. Democrats – great and small – lived remarkably modestly.27
Personal satisfaction appears to have counted for little in the newly democratic city. In fact being ‘private’ was something that made the Athenians suspicious. Years later Socrates would fall foul of this anxiety; when he chose to expound his ideas behind closed doors within a tight aristocratic circle, democrats cried, Oligarch! Anti-democrat! It is telling that the only anecdote we have of individual aggrandisement when it came to interior decoration (scant archaeological evidence survives) gossips that Socrates’ brash, larger-than-life, supremely aristocratic friend Alcibiades kidnapped a scen
e-painter (possibly Agatharcos of Samos) and forced him to make over his own house. Alcibiades also sponsored his personal sweatshop of goldsmiths. These were stereotypically audacious bits of posturing from a blue-blood who did not want to give up his aristocratic ways.
This was not Pericles’ style at all. Despite his reputation in Old Comedy for an engulfing sexual licence, the Olympian’s kicks, it seems, were satisfied not by personal wealth and domestic comfort, or by the obligingly varied knocking shops in the city, or even by the attentions of his courtesan-consort Aspasia (more of her later), but by the philosophical conversation of his protégés, by strategic military planning, by drama (as a young man he produced the playwright Aeschylus), and by the idea of what Athens could become.28
So we should imagine the modest home of Pericles – the man who is still a role-model for so many of our political leaders, the unofficial leader of Athens. Visitors striding in and out of his mud-brick and stone chambers. Slaves keeping the material world turning. Women everywhere in the house, apart from in the andron – the man’s room. Unpretentious dinner services on the table, but new ideas all around. The invisible web of interconnecting possibilities, woven by the men who came and sat at Pericles’ table, had sparkling ideas dropped into them like dew.
That Athenians employed ideas as a workhorse for civilisation was big news. This was an age when there were many gleaming examples of the wonders that man could achieve – Babylon’s Prussian-blue and ochre-glazed Processional Way protected by glazed dragons and lions (standing until 1902 in the sands of modern-day Iraq); the pyramids at Giza, already 2,000 years old; the Apadana – the ‘audience hall’ at Persepolis, where Darius and Xerxes intimidated their subjects while guarded by massive carved dogs and winged bulls.29 And although many other towns, particularly along the western coast of Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey), sponsored thinkers and scientists, Athens had something different: thoughts, ideas that were beginning to harmonise and to sound the timbre of an ideology, demos-kratia – the power of the people.
Listen to contemporary accounts of the excited reports of Athens’ egalitarian attitudes from a Persian nobleman, Otanes:
The rule of the majority has a most beautiful name: equality under the law [isonomia] … The holders of offices are selected by lot and are held accountable for their actions. All deliberations are in public. I predict – and suggest that we will give up monarchy and replace it with democracy. For in democracy all things are possible.30
Although Otanes’ predictions of democracy in Persia are still to be fully realised, his final comment proved prescient. ‘In a democracy all things are possible.’ Athens was focusing not just on making herself beautiful and fit for practice, her eyes were flicking elsewhere too. Pericles could not afford simply to indulge his time with humble-born, thinking men such as Socrates and Anaxagoras – scintillating as they might be – to play around with ground-breaking political experiments. Because he now had not only a citystate, but a burgeoning empire to run.
12
DELOS – AND THE BIRTH OF AN EMPIRE
The Cyclades,
the Mediterranean basin, 478/7–454 BC
CALLICLES: What do you mean?
SOCRATES: I mean that every man is his own ruler; or is there no need of one’s ruling oneself, but only of ruling others?
Plato, Gorgias, 491d1
THE ATHENIANS HAD SHOWN THEIR IMPERIAL hand early. Up until 477 BC, it had been the Spartans who bared their teeth at the Persians, controlling the loose alliance between like-minded Hellenic city-states that was formed to prevent another Thermopylae.
But then the Athenians became Hellenic protectors-in-chief. It was they who determined who should provide ships, who should offer up human muscle to serve the Hellenic vs Barbarian cause. It was the Athenians who collected tribute from those who couldn’t run to oars and ramming prows. To all intents and purposes, ‘tribute’ was a protection tax, a way of paying for armaments and personnel that could be pooled for use against the Persians. That forced windfall was then stored 100 miles south-east of Athens, on the sacred island of Delos.
Delos will sound loud in Socrates’ story. Even though it appears as just a speck on the map, this tiny ‘floating’ island at the centre of the Cyclades was always believed to have sacred powers. Since prehistory, men from across the eastern Mediterranean had gathered here. They left their calling cards: simple, angular, limestone human shapes, their surfaces tattooed with staring eyes, penises, abstract, organic patterns. And now that the Greeks felt strong enough to stand up to the bully-boys of the East, they made this charmed place the centre of their league of understanding. Delos was centrally placed between the great powers of the eastern Mediterranean, and yet the island was, in the eyes of the ancients, inhabited by an unusual number of divinities and demons. No one in their right mind would attack such a possessed territory.
And so, for a brief time at the beginning of Socrates’ long life, while the Athenians were pre-eminent, the Persians quiet and other Greeks acquiescent, there was some degree of peace in the world.
Then in 465 a spat broke out in the northern territories. The honey-filled island of Thasos – just south of modern-day Kavala – owned mining rights on the mainland across a narrow stretch of water. Here the earth is porous: tombs are regularly sunk, and gold is frequently pulled out. Herodotus is ebullient in his excitement: ‘The gold mines at Scapte Hyle yielded in all eighty talents a year … the islanders, without raising any tax on their own produce, enjoyed, from the mines and the mainland, a revenue of two hundred talents – and, in a particularly good year, of as much as three hundred. I have seen these mines myself; … A whole mountain has been turned upside down in the search for gold.’2
Some of the most exquisite artefacts from antiquity are now emerging from the soil in this region: chandelier earrings, golden belt-buckles, tiny perfume bottles so heavy with gold and enamel they weigh in like a brick. A diadem made of gold and coloured with blue enamel – a wreath of wild metal flowers – shows what beauty could be created in these northern lands.3 While being restored in 2008, this wreath was treated in the laboratory-workshops of the new Acropolis Museum. Testimony of its daintiness, as the door of the workshop was opened, a momentary, gentle breeze was sufficient to set the golden flower-heads dancing.
But jewels such as these attract thieves.
Athens, it seems, wanted a piece of the gold-and-honey action, and when Thasos defected from the League in protest in 465, the island community found itself blockaded. Athenian ships sailed one after another from the port of Piraeus. For two full years hoplite citizens whetted their swords and spears and stared across at the Thasian islanders – who were perturbed to discover that their enemies now spoke not Persian, but Greek. Athens was blatantly using League money to promote her own interests. By 463/2 BC Thasos had been decimated – it was forced to hand over its fleet, relinquish its mainland possessions, deliver up thirty talents (a crippling sum, the equivalent of circa £6 million in today’s money) and raze its fortifications to the ground.4 All this in spite of the fact that Thasos had secretly been promised help from the other supercity on the Greek mainland, Sparta.5 Athens triumphantly took control of the mainland mines.6 Climbing to the top of the ruined Byzantine castle that still crowns the island itself, looking out over a deep-blue sea, the air saturated with the scent of pine, it is disturbingly easy to imagine the picture-perfect setting, mired by human suffering and polluted by human greed.
But Athens was not sentimental. The hostilities with Persia rumbled on. Despite the Athenians’ heavy-handedness, the Greeks knew they still needed to stand strong against Persian ambition. Athens registered the consensus of need – and harnessed it for her own purposes. For the League’s ‘further protection’, she took matters into her own hands.
On the island of Delos there is a grand temple to Apollo, constructed to store the League’s treasure-trove capital: money waiting to build new ships, to arm more men and to build back communities and liv
es when the Persians next attacked.7 The temple was designed, in effect, as a League treasury, an independent building crammed with shared wealth.
Yet when one braves the curious weather-fronts and tides that swirl around this little isle that has always punched above its weight, where architecture clings to the mineral-rich rocks along with blasted vegetation, there is a surprise. Standing next to the Temple of Apollo’s footprint, the sacred building feels oddly amputated. Here, there is something not ruined, but uncompleted. With good reason. In 454 BC slaves manhandling mortar blocks into position were ordered to down tools; the building work on Apollo’s earthly home at Delos was peremptorily truncated. Athens wanted the Greek allies’ material security closer to home. The treasury was moved, lock, stock and barrel, from neutral Delos to vested-interest Athens – and then quickly into Athena’s lap, into the storage rooms of the Parthenon. We have a list of the capital harvest as accounted in 434/3 BC: 113 silver bowls, one gold bowl, three silver drinking horns, three silver cups, one silver lamp, one goblet, three large golden bowls, one golden statue of a woman, one silver basin, six Persian daggers, one gilt lyre, three ivory lyres, four wooden lyres, one inlaid ivory table, one silver-gilt mask, ten Milesian couches, six thrones, two silver-gilt nails, seventy shields.8
Now the Parthenon resembled less a sanctuary, and more a bank. Cities such as Neapolis (modern-day Kavala) on the mainland opposite Thasos contributed 1,000 drachmas a year to Athena in thanks for her protection. Money was baggage-trained from across the eastern Mediterranean straight to Athens. Athenian intention was clear.