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

by Bettany Hughes

  Sophists filled Athenian streets with their saleable advice on how to write or to speak the best lines. These travelling educators – who typically charged pretty steep fees for their services – claimed, no less, that being able to talk your way out of any situation would ensure your survival. During festivals, fine speakers would deliver grand, extended lectures for the enjoyment of the Athenian public: words as mass entertainment.17

  Socrates loved the spoken word – but in honest, bite-sized chunks. By all accounts the philosopher was very wary of the great sophistic exercises where high-flying rhetoric and grand oratory could persuade men to do almost anything.18 As he says, mischievously, with lengthy rhetoric it is so easy at the end to forget what the point of the whole thing was at the beginning, quipping that in a long speech you lose your initial notion; or, more saliently, the audience does, and so can be duped by the power of language alone.19 For Socrates, the Athenian democracy was best served by dialogue, not by bombast.

  When persons who are unworthy of education approach philosophy and make an alliance with her who is a rank above them, what sort of ideas and opinions are likely to be generated? Will they not truly deserve to be called sophisms, having nothing in them genuine, or worthy of or akin to true wisdom?20

  But the philosopher’s tastes were unfashionable. Schooled in the epic, the Athenians of this period seemed to delight in a show-stopping rhetorical tour de force. And where you have an audience, you have a commercial opportunity. Sophists travelled long miles to exploit Athens’ market.21 Gorgias of Sicily stunned Athenian audiences with his Encomium of Helen – a defence of the indefensible femme fatale. It was said that thousands came, and paid, to hear him lecture in the Agora.22 His work was a self-fulfilling prophecy – one line in the Encomium declares that speech has an addictive, chemical power:

  The effect of speech upon the condition of the soul is comparable to the power of drugs over the nature of bodies.23

  Athens in the late fifth century became a land of bluff: worshipping (literally) at the shrine of the goddess of persuasion. Suddenly arguments mattered less than the amplified skill of the arguer. Every male citizen over the age of eighteen had the vote – and that citizen needed to be persuaded to vote in the right way. The Athenians wanted to hear the benefits of their city and their culture talked up. A law was passed that encouraged citizens me mnesikakein, ‘not to remember the bad things’.24

  But Socrates’ approach was rather different. Socrates was a blot on the puff-filled, near-perfect city-state that Attic ambition was contriving to build. He encouraged men to humility rather than arrogance, to honesty rather than self-delusion. Even though the Athenians were living through one of the most debilitating wars in the history of the world, his fellow citizens endeavoured to keep their city band-box bright. There is a sense throughout these decades that the Athenian show must go on. But with all the sensitivity of a blunderbuss, Socrates discouraged his peers from fooling themselves.

  Wisdom is wealth. Do we need anything more, Phaedrus? For me that prayer is enough.25

  Wealth is the parent of luxury and indolence.26

  Socrates’ candour has been described as ‘relentless’. Perhaps he suffered from the curse of the clear-sighted: to imagine that those around him would judge the world with corresponding clarity. His ideas were designed to stimulate, to provoke – and we all know how irritating, how needling that gadfly, that conscience-pricking gnat can be. Socrates appeared to challenge the great cobweb of spirituality and spirits of Olympian gods and demons that wrapped themselves around Athens and through its streets, by suggesting that it was not divine influence but men who can make mankind good. His words were doubtless threatening; the difficulty with proposing immense moral individualism is that each individual is under pressure to be immensely moral.

  Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.27

  In the first place, are they not free; and is not the city full of freedom and frankness – a man may say and do what he likes?

  ’Tis said so, he replied.

  And where freedom is, the individual is clearly able to order for himself his own life as he pleases?

  Clearly.

  Then in this kind of State there will be the greatest variety of human natures?

  There will.

  This, then, seems likely to be the fairest of States, being an embroidered robe which is spangled with every sort of flower. And just as women and children think a variety of colours to be of all things most charming, so there are many men to whom this State, which is spangled with the manners and characters of mankind, will appear to be the fairest of States.28

  And there was an added issue. In a world that believed in magic, Socrates was thought to have the power of a goes – a sorcerer. As he walked through the lanes, gymnasia and green spaces of Athens, crowds of the young followed him as though he were pulling them by an invisible thread. Plato tries, throughout his Dialogues, to dissociate Socrates from the kind of cheapskate street-magic that many sophist-sorcerers used to entrance their listeners. But nonetheless he allows Socrates’ friends and acquaintances, through the Dialogues, to assert that Socrates’ words are, somehow, spell-binding.

  ALCIBIADES: … If you chose to listen to Socrates’ discourses you would feel them at first to be quite ridiculous; on the outside they are clothed with such absurd words and phrases – all, of course, the hide of a mocking satyr. His talk is of pack-asses, smiths, cobblers and tanners, and he seems always to be using the same terms for the same things; so that anyone inexpert and thoughtless might laugh his speeches to scorn. But when these are opened and you obtain a fresh view of them, by getting inside, first of all you will discover that they are the only speeches that have any sense in them; and secondly, that none are so divine, so rich in images of virtue, so largely – nay, so completely – intent on all things proper for the study as such as would attain both grace and worth.29

  For whatever reason, Socrates, throughout the 420s BC, became a big draw. Perhaps it was simply that here was an ordinary man who did not just satiate with honeyed lies, but who plumped up the soul. Socrates was not happy just to consolidate the Athenians’ sense of themselves: he did not only want to talk about the world, he wanted to change it. All around him were forging the trappings of civilisation – but this philosopher seems to have been interested in forging the civilisation of inner lives.

  SOCRATES: If anyone, whether young or old, wishes to hear me speaking and pursuing my mission, I have never objected, nor do I converse only when I am paid and not otherwise, but I offer myself alike to rich and poor; I ask questions, and whoever wishes may answer and hear what I say.30

  In a sibling dialogue (to Xenophon’s Symposium), the Hippias Minor, another Socratic characteristic is revealed that would have troubled the Athenians:

  I go astray, up and down, and never hold the same opinion.31

  And again in Plato’s Euthyphro: ‘In any case, I was thinking while you were talking and I put this question to myself …’32 Socrates has moved on to the next strain of thought in his head while we are all still struggling with the first – infuriating and fascinating in equal measure. The philosopher chews away at ideologies. He does not spit them out, verbally, like half-sucked acid drops. And he also proposes an unusually feminine idea for this macho society – true consensus: ‘Isn’t it when we disagree and aren’t able to come to a sufficient answer that we become enemies to each other, whenever we do, I and you and everyone else?’33

  This was a land at war, decimated by plague. Athens wanted action, not theories; heroes, not nay-sayers; answers, not questions.

  Stellar in intellect, Socrates was also, we are told, infuriating. Unlike the sophists, who gave the audience what they wanted, Socrates wrong-footed hoi polloi. There is something of the Lord of Misrule about him. The apparent open-season of conversation in the Agora seems to goad the philosopher into pushing the bound
aries of good taste.

  The iconic superheroes of Athens – Themistocles, Pericles, Miltiades and his son Cimon – are described by Socrates as ‘pastry-cooks, flatterers of the ignorant multitude.’34 ‘Ironic’ and ‘irony’ (derived from eironeia in Ancient Greek) are words first applied to Socrates. To be the first ironic man on earth was not necessarily an enviable position.35

  … And he on hearing this gave a great guffaw and laughed sardonically and said, ‘Ye gods! Here we have the well-known irony of Socrates, and I knew it and predicted that when it came to replying you would refuse and dissemble and do anything rather than answer any question that anyone asked you.’36

  There are many ways to translate eironeia; it is a nuanced expression to describe a tricky concept. In Aristophanes’ comedies it meant a downright lie, in Plato more of an intended simulation. For Aristotle, irony was a concealed superiority – the opposite of boasting. Ancient authors tussled with this new, spikily playful notion.37 But all were clear that, while fascinating to witness, irony could wrong-foot the ordinary man. Ironic Socrates had the ability to make honest democrats look like fools. To have been closeted in a debate with Socrates must, in many ways, have been an uncomfortable experience; sitting in the Agora, or gym, or at a drinking session with friends and discovering you’ve been seated next to a laser-sharp barrister, an odd-looking man who elegantly slices through your woolliness and lights up your inadequacies. Socrates was a philosopher who, over dinner, made others pink and shiny with embarrassment:38

  Thrasymachus produced an amount of sweat that was a wonder to behold, since it was summer – and then I saw what I had never seen before, Thrasymachus blushing.39

  His enemies said that by employing irony Socrates dissembled, that he covered up his true feelings, that he mocked Athenians as he appeared to indulge them, laughing at the demos from behind his sturdy, hairy hands. But his friends and admirers were roused, aroused by his ironic smile, his cleverness, his just-out-of-reachness. Of all the attractions on offer in the Agora, Socrates was coming to be (particularly for the impressionable population of the young) one of the most eagerly sought out. A fact that, later, would be used against him:

  So what gives one a deal of happiness is not to park next to Socrates and waffle all day long, neglecting all great culture, music and the best of the tragedian’s works. It’s sheer madness to waste your time with lofty, pompous, idle words, with words for idle speculation! That’s the sign of a man who’s lost his mind!40

  On the fringes of the Agora men today still cluster when it looks like there could be the chance to make a fast buck, or a rumpus is brewing. It might be a gambler or an illusionist, throwing dice, hiding ping-pong balls in tumblers, a makeshift cardboard-box gaming table quickly kicked aside when the local police cruise by. Or it might be a row, a debate that’s attracted attention; a small crowd (even in the twenty-first century still mainly of men), worry-beads clacking, can cluster together so fast, setting the world to rights. Nearby students gather, buying up past-their-expiry-date spray cans from the flea-market so that they can protest on the streets. They are, in one sense, all Socrates’ children. The fact that they talk about politics, and challenge one another’s opinions – not to mention the status quo – is what Socrates would have wanted them to do.

  SOCRATES: I am one of the few Athenians – not to say the only one – who undertakes the real political craft and practice of politics.41

  Socrates took the democratic experience to its logical conclusion. Not just gassing in the Assembly or orchestrating himself onto committees, but walking through the streets and lanes, talking to other Ancient Greeks about their political experience. Absolutely of his time, he is also of ours. He realised that the more we learn to do in and with the world, the more we need to learn about ourselves. The more sophistication and complication there is around us, the more important it is to be sure of what is going on within us.

  SOCRATES: So the command that we should know ourselves means that we should know our souls.42

  And so for Socrates the Agora was the home of our conscious selves, of our souls.43 Socrates believed humanity was society. He said he would travel to the ends of the earth just for human company. His credo was that we cannot be wise and utterly alone. The further we quest for knowledge, the more human companionship we need. Ignorance is evil, knowledge is good. If we know (or admit) what is good, we will enact it. And we do that not by shutting ourselves away from the world, but by engaging with it, by taking it on, warts and all.

  So Socrates speaks in the Agora, but he sticks out like a sore thumb.

  He did not believe himself to be a sophist. He was not there to teach, not there in the market to sell wisdom; and anyway, he declared that he knew nothing – how can a man who has no knowledge cite knowledge as his stock-in-trade? Socrates argued that only God can be a sophist, only God can be truly wise. He would perhaps be happier with the title we give him – a philo-sophos, someone who loves, who yearns for wisdom. Unfortunately for Socrates, Homo sapiens has always been very good at rewriting history. The one man who counselled against empty, clever words was remembered as, and punished as, one of the most prominent ancient sophists of all.

  This confounded Socrates, they say; this villainous misleader of youth! And then if somebody asks them, ‘Why, what evil does he practise or teach?’ they do not know, and cannot tell; but in order that they may not appear to be at a loss, they repeat the ready-made charges which are used against all philosophers about teaching things up in the clouds and under the earth, and having no gods, and making the worse appear the better cause; for they do not like to confess that their pretence of knowledge has been detected – which is the truth: and as they are numerous and ambitious and energetic, and are all in battle array and have persuasive tongues, they have filled your ears with their loud and inveterate calumnies.44

  Socrates’ stock-in-trade was words. Yet words would prove both his weapon and his executioner.

  SOCRATES: You might think written words spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing. And every word, when it is written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to whom to speak or not to speak; when ill-treated or unjustly reviled it always needs its father to help it; for it has no power to protect or help itself.45

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  DEMOCRACY, LIBERTY AND FREEDOM OF SPEECH

  Piraeus harbour and across Attica, 420 BC

  Free men have free tongues.

  Sophocles, Frag. 297aR

  No longer will men keep a curb on their tongues; for the people are set free to utter their thoughts at will, now that the yoke of power has been broken.

  Aeschylus, Persians, 592–41

  PHAEDRA: My friends, it is this very purpose that is bringing about my death, that I may not be detected bringing shame to my husband or to the children I gave birth to but rather that they may live in glorious Athens as free men, free of speech and flourishing.

  Euripides, Hippolytus, 419–232

  AROUND 420 BC THE SMELL OF freshly cut Aleppo pine, oak and, perhaps, silver fir would have filled the boatyards of Piraeus harbour. A new vessel was being made. This was an expensive enterprise: 200 slaves were here, fifty or so skilled boat-builders. The raw materials had been sourced from Magna Graecia, Macedonia, Phoenicia, Syria. It would take at least three months to complete, the labour was intensive, but the craft’s launching was eagerly anticipated. Because this boat was named Parrhesia.3 The Greek parrhesia translates as ‘freedom of speech’.

  The wood was not sawn, but split and adzed. The peg-holes were slightly misaligned so that driving in the connectors neatly pulled the planks together; much of the wood used had a natural curve, a genetic twist that gave the belly of the boat great strength. The floating skin was built up element by element, oak ribs inserted as the planking progressed, all nailed down with bronze or copper nails
.4 Each boat was given a pair of bright-painted marble eyes and a ramming bronze snout. Contemporaries talk about these vessels intimately, as if they lived and breathed. When divers today find these marble eyes on the sea-bed, they describe the uncanny feeling that they are being watched.

  Constructed on the open ground between the shipyards of Kantharos and Zea, the building blocks of Athens’ navy were then stored in the stone ship-sheds at Zea – themselves inspiring architectural enterprises. These triremes were not mere boats, they were the very vessels of democracy itself. Warships like these had defeated Eastern tyranny, they had carried Athenian soldiers right across the Aegean to claim new lands in the name of demoskratia. The choice of names for each craft was given much careful consideration. The fact that in Socrates’ lifetime one new boat was named Parrhesia should not be underestimated.

  Freedom of expression was the great innovation of the new democracy. The fact was, all citizens could now not just speak in the Assembly, but vote in it too – and more than that, ordinary men could dictate and nuance which issues were voted upon. Assemblies of men had been important in Homer’s Iliad.

  … Agamemnon sent the criers round to call the people in assembly; so they called them and the people gathered thereon.5

  … but here men stood or sat and nodded or murmured at the outpourings of the great and the good. Witness the Homeric fantasy art almost certainly imitating pre-classical life in a scene on Achilles’ god-forged shield: