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

by Bettany Hughes

  Meanwhile the people were gathered in assembly, for there was a quarrel, and two men were wrangling about the blood-money for a man who had been killed, the one saying before the people that he had paid damages in full, and the other that he had not been paid. Each was trying to make his own case good, and the people took sides, each man backing the side that he had taken; but the heralds kept them back, and the elders sat on their seats of stone in a solemn circle, holding the staves which the heralds had put into their hands. Then they rose and each in his turn gave judgement, and there were two talents laid down, to be given to him whose judgement should be deemed the fairest.6

  The nuance of parrhesia, freedom of speech, is that Athenians did not simply have equality of speaking abilities (isegoria), but could speak their minds, they could openly criticise the regime. The Greek is perhaps better translated as ‘the ability to speak frankly’ – it is a peculiarly Athenian attribute, and is lionised by Athenian authors. Its counterbalance was diabolē – slander. Diogenes the Cynic, a successor of Socrates’, declared that parrhesia was the most beautiful of all things in humanity.7

  Socrates too chewed over the subject. For him, freedom of speech was the mark of a citizen, a privilege not available to foreigners.8 It was a privilege he enthusiastically employed. Socrates seems to have been most active in Athens from his forties onwards, and during this time, both publicly in the streets and privately in the homes of the well-to-do, he explored the relationship between man and his soul. He did this, it seems from the evidence that has survived, without any interference from civic or religious authorities. The city might be entrenched in a bloody war, but it still honoured its assumed role as an intellectual playground for natives and exotic guests. Athens still had principles. She still vaunted liberty. Between 460 and 416 BC she was still remarkably tolerant. One of her dearest-held tenets was that free democrats should, where possible, enjoy freedom of expression.

  But not everyone welcomed this phenomenon unreservedly; as the years went by people started to speak freely not just in the Assembly, but in the Agora, the gymnasia, the temples, their own homes. The ideological flame of parrhesia was fanned by Athens’ jumbled street layout: in the narrow walkways, from unshuttered windows and through the open courtyards and squares of Athena’s city free-talk sparked. This was fine in theory, but in a tight-knit community freedom of speech can quickly degenerate into gossip and then to slander. And slander was against the law.

  Athens was one of the first polities to allow freedom of speech – and immediately it had to deal with the conundrum of who had freedom to offend.

  ‘Who wishes to speak?’9 calls the steward in the Assembly during one of Aristophanes’ most popular comedies. Yet his is not a celebration of parrhesia, but a parody. In another of Aristophanes’ dramas, women are being encouraged to speak out when they have taken over the city. The playwright is making a cutting point: in this upside-down world of the democracy, any awful creature can have a voice.

  The phrase ‘freedom of speech’ is so caught up in our own twenty-first-century heads with a notion of rights that we can lose the meaning of the word in Socrates’ day. Here it was something more like ‘saying everything’, sharing. In the Athenian Assembly the order of the day was: make sacrifice; enact religious ritual; offer the chance to speak frankly – in that order.

  When the sacrificial victim has been carried round, and the herald has uttered the ancestral prayers, once the purification is complete, he commands the presiding officers to take the initial votes on matters to do with religious affairs, he deals with heralds and embassies, and then with secular matters; after that the herald asks, ‘Who wishes to speak of those above fifty years of age?’ When they have all spoken, he then invites anyone who is entitled to and who wishes to speak for the rest of the Athenians to speak up.10

  Socrates in the Protagoras describes the scene in detail: ‘carpenter, bronze worker, shoemaker, merchant, shop-owner, rich, poor, noble, lowly born’ can all stand up and deliberate on the governance of the city.11 But only within limits, only if they speak respectfully, with aidos – the Greek word means a sense of shame, a ‘knowing-your-placeness’. In one Greek text, Zeus thunders, ‘He without aidos is a disease to the city.’12

  But Socrates dares to take Zeus on. He brings to the city a new kind of discomfiting free-talk. In the Protagoras, Socrates seems to be generating a system of free speech – ‘dialogue’ – which is not controlled by ‘shame’ and convention, but by a pattern; by strict Q and A. The Greeks were anxious that ‘free’ (as in ‘footloose and fancy-free’) words would break down society. Socrates, employing his Socratic method (elenchus in Greek – ‘question and answer’, ‘logical debate’, ‘investigation’), develops a system to contain free words: he is ahead of his time.13 Yet the proof of the value of free speech is in the eating, and Socrates’ Athens was still a giant krater, a mixing bowl into which all kinds of ingredients were being thrown. The Athenians were not sure that they enjoyed this novel taste, they were not entirely convinced that the confection they had created was good.

  In Athens parrhesia was truly, and worryingly, a new way of doing things. Aristotle’s estimation of what a democracy was – ‘whatever seems best to the many, what the majority decides is what is final and this constitutes justice’ … ‘to live as one wishes’14 – could be interpreted in two ways: either this was extreme civil liberty, or it was a political madness that heralded anarchy. Socrates sits firmly in the eye of that particular storm.

  The most intense flurry of discussions about parrhesia, this peculiar attribute of Athens, began, as so much did, with reference to the defeat of the Persians in 480/79 BC. The Athens that Socrates grew up in was decorated with the fifth-century equivalent of billboards, bronze and stone declarations. These proud street signs declared that the West was now free from Persian tyranny. That Greek men were, at last, free to express themselves as true Greeks, not as quavering subjects of a Persian tyrant. Similar sentiments were projected in the most powerful of Greek dramas:

  From East to West the Asian race

  No more will own our Persian sway,

  Nor on the king’s compulsion pay

  Tribute, nor bow to earth their face …

  Now fear no more shall bridle speech;

  Uncurbed, the common tongue shall prate

  Of freedom; for the yoke of state

  Lies broken on the bloody beach.15

  Also during Socrates’ lifetime, in the salty landscape of Athens harbour, in 425 BC,16 another boat had been built. It too needed to be strong because it carried yet another heavy burden; the name of this vessel was Eleutheria – Liberty.

  To get to Socrates’ courtroom, many jurors would have passed through an attractive walkway called the Stoa Zeus Eleutherios. Here an emotional concept was writ large. We are used to statues of Liberty; but the Athenians got there first, they built Liberty colonnades. The Stoa of Zeus Eleutherios – Zeus of Freedom, Zeus the Liberator – was created in thanks for the victory at Salamis against the Persians.17 Sauntering through, shaded from the sun, good Athenian citizens were at liberty not to be slaves; not to be ruled by a despot. There are other dedicated sites at Marathon and Rhamnous, where Athenians gave thanks for their delivery from Persian might. This was a society that honoured freedom in a palpable way.

  But – crowd-pleaser as it is – Socrates does not concern himself with liberty. Instead he focuses his energies on identifying virtue. He argues that only the pursuit of a virtuous life brings exquisite happiness. Total liberty is a chimera; happiness accepts, even delights in the certainty of compromise. Plato’s Socrates goes further, he suggests that tyranny is spawned by the liberty of all in the demos. Here he is the first to suggest that liberty is an illusion fostered by the great to keep the many happy.

  Come then, tell me, dear friend, how tyranny arises. That it is an outgrowth of democracy is fairly plain.18

  This was a man born into the most fervently patriotic of ‘liberty’ mo
ments. In defeating the Persians, the Athenians had committed to freedom to a quite lunatic degree. They had shaken off the yoke of the greatest superpower of the day. They had declared that Greeks shall never be slaves to the East. They had chanced their wit and belief in self-determination against despotism and brawn. Wondrously the gamble had paid off. To do so they had to work themselves into a fever-pitch of self-belief. When one man suggested accepting Persian terms of peace soon after the Battle of Salamis, he and then his wife and children were mobbed and stoned to death.19 But there is one thing that Socrates does that is very troubling to the Athenians. Nowhere does he challenge the need for liberty itself – yet, rather than vaunt the liberty of the city, he champions an inner, spiritual liberty.

  Such is the good and true City or State, and ‘the good’ and man is of the same pattern; and if this is right every other is wrong; and the evil is one which affects not only the ordering of the State, but also the regulation of the individual soul.20

  Then when any one of the citizens experiences any good or evil, the whole State will make his case their own, and will either rejoice or sorrow with him?

  Yes, he said, that is what will happen in a well-ordered State.21

  In these collective times individual liberty, rather than the liberty of the city-state, was both a novel and an awkward concept for fifth-century Athenians. And they were uncomfortable with Socrates’ unconventional views for a very precise reason.

  In democratic Athens, at least one in three, possibly one in two, of the population were of slave status. These creatures were hardly classified as human – some described them as ‘living tools’, for others they were simply the ‘man-footed thing’. Athena’s city was particularly reliant on foreign slaves because the law-giver Solon had passed a decree that no Athenian would be forced to work for another. Owning slaves, rather than being owned, was a hallmark of the free Athenian. So slaves gave Athenians an unusually robust sense of their own peculiarly elevated standing. Fetching your water, cooking your food, polishing your jewellery, writing your letters, mopping your brow, stitching your wounds, praising your poetry – in a thousand ways every day the slave system reinforced the fact that the ‘free Athenian’ was someone a bit special. Work by archaeologists to the south-east of Athens at Laurion between 1998 and 2008 tells us that this situation was not accepted with total equanimity.

  The Laurion district (particularly around what is now called Thorikos) is an odd, listless place. Today the striped towers of a nationalised electricity company, DEH, loom over the bay. Gleaming white boulders and iron-red earth combine to give the landscape a planetary feel. The caves are colourful with minerals. Up until 1923 silver was extracted from the seams here; lead, manganese and cadmium are still harvested.

  Up in the hills today there survive forgotten spoil heaps from Athens’ classical mines – those that were grim with industry when Socrates was alive. Venture too far down clefts in the rock and you’ll find yourself in an abandoned mine-shaft. The landscape today is deserted; scrabbling through the pines here you can be alone for days on end, but in the fifth century this region would have teemed with slaves and their masters. At night these ‘human machines’ went back to guarded village-camps. The slave population was, in effect, sterilised, for men and women were not allowed to breed and were billeted separately. A rising, broken, square stone structure overlooking one of the slave camps is identified by some archaeologists as a watch tower – little surprise. This was a manufactured human settlement with the potential to be more than a touch restless.

  But it was vital that the humans here be kept liberty-less, because it was the muscle and sweat of these men and women that kept commerce chiming back in Athena’s city. Socrates’ suggestion that all men, whatever their background, might possess an equal capacity for personal liberty was extremely inconvenient. It was Athens’ slave population that produced for Athenians the coin to spend in the Agora, and their broken lives that gave free citizens, and men such as Socrates, the time to talk, and to freely express themselves there.

  As well as the new ideals of democratic life, which were being made flesh down in the boatyards at Piraeus, in the form of the boats Parrhesia and Eleutheria, new democratic religious rituals were also being initiated here. Athens was demonstrably proving that she was big enough to tolerate new forms of religious expression. And Socrates, we are told, was an eye-witness to their spectacular, sacred inauguration.

  26

  THE GOOD LIFE – AFTER DARK

  Piraeus harbour,

  432–428 BC

  ‘Do you mean to say’ interposed Adeimantus, ‘that you haven’t heard that there is to be a torchlight race this evening on horseback in honour of the goddess?’

  ‘On horseback?’ said I [Socrates]. ‘That is a new idea. Will they carry torches and pass them along to one another as they race with the horses, or how do you mean?’

  ‘That’s about it’ said Polemarchus, ‘and, besides, there is to be a night festival which will be worth seeing. For after dinner we will get up and go out and see the sights and meet a lot of the lads there and have a good talk …’

  Plato, Republic, 327c–328a1

  TORCHLIGHT ON THE SEA’S SURFACE IS magical. Pockets of flame dance from one ripple-crest to another, linked by a spider-line of fire. And around 2,440-odd years ago just such a spectacle was laid on in the Piraeus district in honour of a newcomer to the city. Worshipping a new goddess – the barbarian Bendis – sometime around 429/428 BC, many Athenians, Socrates apparently amongst them, came down to watch the premiere of this black-and-gold light show. A new festival for Bendis was being inaugurated by Athenian citizens down in the harbour-town of Piraeus.2 This was a significant introduction to the neighbourhood – the demos must have authorised payment for a swell welcoming party. There were horseback torch relay-races to honour the interloper divinity, a visitor from the wilds of Thrace. As Plato’s colloquial account shows, this was an attraction worth leaving the dinner-table for.

  Greece has a long history of worshipping gods from the East. Zeus himself first appeared as a small bronze from Sumeria (made in the third millennium BC) before there was any mention of him in records west of the Bosporus. Dionysos too danced, swung and lurched his way over from Central Asia at just about the moment that written records in what we now call Greece began. But in the fifth century BC, a full thousand years later, in Socrates’ day, the community of gods on Mount Olympus was a little more settled. There was, indeed, an Olympian establishment. The arrival of a new divinity, relatively infrequent, never failed to cause a stir. Bendis was a newcomer whom the Athenians wanted to make particularly welcome. Her worship had been accepted by democratic vote in the Assembly. Not only would she protect and nourish the sizeable population of Thracian immigrants who worked in Piraeus, but she might bring onside the warring tribes of Thrace themselves – fierce soldiers whom Athens did not want to find buttressing a Spartan army.

  The night festival must have been thrilling. Greek torches were halfhuman size: made of pine or cedar, their scent was pungent, the flames burned bright and long. Bendis was a huntress like Artemis; she prized speed, and a keen sense of competition. So down in this humming harbour-town, with its mongrel population and a ‘where-there’s-muck-there’s-brass’ mentality, an edgy carnival was promised. No one knew what to expect. Women priestesses had been chosen to administer the cult, and citizens and aliens alike played an official ritual role.3

  Much was made by Socrates’ biographers of the fact that Socrates did not travel around the Mediterranean as his sophist contemporaries did, sightseeing, lecturing. But he had little need to travel out of Athens; the world came to him. Bendis’ acceptance was as much to do with political survival as it was with spiritual enlightenment. The Athenians knew, with war-cries all around, that the goodwill of the wild men of Thrace was more than useful.4 There were many immigrants in the Piraeus district, a sizeable community of Thracians amongst them; and now they had a charismatic, ritual cr
owd-puller to call their own; a sense of belonging. Simple marks in stone, a decree, tell us that the goddess’ heady celebrations ran all night.

  Night and day, before, during and after the Peloponnesian War, there is no doubt that Socrates revelled in the many and various Athenian festivals – and valued them. These events were vital: a way that stakeholders got together, on the streets, and enjoyed what it meant to be a community. Socrates, quite rightly, opines that that these aren’t just blind traditions, entrenched ways of being that stumble along in the train of orthodoxy, but feel-good experiences. Reasons to live. Their predictable presence is part of what constitutes the good life.

  Festivals, singing, shared celebrations of all kinds – these are initiated by Eros, and they give life itself a sweetness and a sense.5

  Perhaps because Socrates was accused of impiety, Plato, writing with hindsight, emphasises the number of times the philosopher throws himself into the worship of Athens’ various gods. The fact that Plato cites Bendis might well be a pointed reminder (given the accusations against Socrates during his trial) that Athens, and not just Socrates, was open-minded enough to embrace new divinities. The philosopher’s dying words, according to Plato, remember another divine hero new to the city, the healer Asclepius. Even if the mention of Bendis is all a ploy on the part of Plato, there is no reason whatsoever to believe that Socrates disrespected the city’s traditional gods – whether they were newcomers or established cohabitants of Athena’s city.6

  Socrates, war-blasted, would have seen during the Peloponnesian War what happened when the religious idols of a city were burned. When the patchwork of materials that made up the earthly incarnation of a god or a goddess – the wood, the marble, the paint, the chryselephantine ivory, the rock-crystal eyes, the gold hair filaments – melted, twisted, buckled, warped and blackened in the flames. Greek religion was patched and glued together like the images of its living gods. There were many thousands of ways to worship the lustful, greedy, fickle god-tribe. Although conventionally pious, Socrates, it appears, searched for something more essential, something stiller and more stable. A creed is precisely what he was feeling his way towards.7