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

by Bettany Hughes

  Is not this the reason, Euthyphro, why I am being indicted, that when people tell such stories about the gods I find it hard to accept them? Do you really believe that these things happened and that there was a war among the gods, and fearful enmities and battles and other things of the sort, such as we are told by the poets?8

  These were incendiary thoughts. While we might think of religion as a convenient means for corralling morality, for the Greeks it was where morality – a social code – began. Odysseus’ Cyclops is godless, which is why he eats men.9 In the Laws, religion guarantees that the judiciousness of the citizens is the foundation and the mortar of political life. And at a time when there was only one day in the year that was not designated a festival,10 to be perceived by your fellow Athenians to be doubting the gods was dangerous indeed. And yet Socrates goes one step further – according to Plato, he does not deny the gods, but he does claim something even more shocking: to be as wise as they are, to know their very minds.

  27

  DELPHI, THE ORACLE

  Delphi, north of the Gulf of Corinth,

  c.440–420 BC

  SOCRATES: And don’t interrupt me with your jeering, Athenians, not even if I seem to you to be bragging. The story I’m about to tell you [about myself] isn’t mine, but I refer you to a speaker you trust. About my wisdom, if it really is wisdom, and what sort of wisdom it is, I’ll produce as a witness Apollo the Delphic god.

  Plato, Apology, 20e1

  TO KNOW YOUR FUTURE IN THE FIFTH century BC you had two choices: travel by road or boat. Boat was quicker. Your destination: the sacred harbour of Kirrha.2

  Kirrha was the tollgate, the mouth of the single most important sacred site in the whole of Greece. It was the coastal station for Delphi – and in the Greek mind, Delphi sheltered the omphalos, the very navel of the earth. At the beginning of time Zeus had sent two eagles flying, one to the East, one to the West, and, so the story went, where they met marked the earth’s geographical and spiritual centre-point. The stories originated back to before Greek civilisation – to the very beginning of the Bronze Age, as do the archaeological remains that tell us that, come Socrates’ day, Delphi had been a significant religious site for more than 2,000 years. Still visited through the Late Bronze Age, the Greek ‘Dark Ages’, it flourished from the Archaic period and by the fifth century BC had gained a phenomenal international reputation. It drew men from across the known world. To get to the sacred mountain and the nerve-centre of Delphi itself, you had to dock at Kirrha, and climb.

  Today the beaches on this side of the Corinthian Gulf are lively with runaway towels and beach-grilled fish. In Socrates’ day this shoreline was ten times busier.

  Worshippers had to buy meat, new clothes, food, dedications, souvenirs while they waited for Delphi’s divine pronouncements. We know the region was economically strong because it minted its own silver coins. Kirrha was in fact so profitable – all those pilgrims wanting to know their future – that it attracted unwelcome attention.

  In the so-called ‘Sacred Wars’, back in the Archaic age (close on 120 years before Socrates’ birth), c.595–585 BC, the population of Kirrha was intimidated by a local league of cities; this ‘Amphictyonic League’ was purely and simply jealous of the Kirrhans’ religio-tourism economy. The League (supported by Athens, Solon reportedly deciding on the strategy himself) stationed soldiers at Kirrha’s gates. Kirrha was said to have held out against its rivals for ten years, until the city’s own water supply turned enemy – poisoned with hellebore by the troops outside the walls. The toxic effects – delirium, diarrhoea, muscle-cramps, asphyxia, convulsions and heart-attacks – were infamous. The plant, they said, grew at the Gates of Hades itself, but was, and still is, abundant in the region – a boat-ride away above Antikyra. The men at the local kafenion still recall how, as children, their mothers rubbed their gums with hellebore roots (these must have been tiny doses; hellebore is medicinal in small quantities) to alleviate toothache. These locals do not, however, tell the story of the hellebore of antiquity that was mashed into the water-pipes and wells, whose invisible alkaloids struck down first children and the old, then pregnant women, the sick and finally Kirrha’s young men: biological warfare that offended the Greeks’ ‘rule of honour’. The poisoning of Kirrha was a blot on Hellenic memory, and elders codified that such calculating evil should never happen again. This was one of the events that gave Athenian soldiers such as Socrates the code of honour to which they were expected to adhere.

  Traces of former glories in Kirrha are few and far between. There is the odd fifth-century masonry block on the beach that fishermen use to stand on, children to jump off. All that is left of the harbour is a playground’s worth of knee-high stone stumps; the remains of docking bays – surrounded now by rabbit-chewed earth, not sea.

  But in Socrates’ time this spot would have been jangling. The Kirrhans might have lost their independence in the ‘Sacred Wars’ – Delphic priests controlled the place now – but no one could take away their strategic location. Special rules applied to those who made their pilgrimage here on the way to Delphi. Boats bringing ambassadors and the faithful were allowed to dock for the duration of their visit to the sanctuary. The theoroi and diplomats had semi-permanent lodgings. Offerings were made. Rituals of all ethnic hues from Asia Minor, North Africa and right across the eastern Mediterranean quickened the shore.

  It must have been a convenient place to size up your rivals and allies. To gossip. To be enlightened (‘Who’d have thought the Thebans made their libations in that order …?’) or to buttress bigotry, because the Corinthian Gulf is a salmon-flick of water that connected the prickly city-states of Greece with the wider world. This was a polyglot landing. Business deals were struck, at Kirrha and in the Delphic hills above, treaties discussed – yet the heart of the experience was, without a shadow of doubt, spiritual. At Delphi the gods opened their mouths to men.

  And (so we are told) a certain Chaerephon, a friend of Socrates, came to Delphi to enquire who was the wisest of all mankind. In some versions of the story, it was Socrates himself who made the journey.

  Chaerephon has come down to us in history as a rather quixotic individual; agitated, emaciated, ‘impetuous in everything he did’.3 You can perhaps imagine him, beaded with sweat, flushed, a man on a mission; taking a ride in a cart, or making the long march up through the foothills where Delphi itself was hidden, tucked into the cleft of the mountains known as ‘The Shining Ones’.

  He would have journeyed through a landscape of incident. Dramas such as those of Oedipus and Jocasta were thought to have been played out here.4 Travellers to Delphi carried with them the epic stories they had first heard told around campfires and then in the newfangled tragedies written to instruct Athenian citizens of the terrible ways of the world. Delphi is not a soothing, but an imposing, an exciting place. At sunrise and sunset the ring of rock that is Mount Parnassus beckons with flesh-pink veins. But during the heat of the day the mountain stands granite-stern: a giant reflector, beating Apollo’s sun rays back down onto his own sanctuary.

  Delphi, its columns and treasuries, its walkways polished shiny-wet by human traffic, feels as though it is a stone site simply borrowed from the mountains; that the earth will soon reclaim its own.5

  Before you could even consider a visit to Apollo’s oracle here you had to purify yourself with holy water from the Kastalian spring. You can still scoop out the sweet silver-ice trickle, but will find yourself with few companions other than stragglers from an unusually eager tourist group, filling up a bottle for the coach journey home (perhaps in the hope that it still – as it was believed to in the fifth century – brings the muse).

  And then Chaerephon would have had to push through the hordes on the Sacred Way, gawping at the material might of civilisations crammed into and onto the state treasuries that lined this thoroughfare. Finds from twentieth-century excavations – for instance, a life-size silver bull, 7½ feet long, three layers of silver sheet pasted over
a wooden core – still take our breath away. During one battle amidst the ‘Sacred Wars’, exquisite ivory statues of Apollo and Artemis were burned.6 Both lay buried under the Sacred Way until 1939, when they were stumbled upon by the unsuspecting excavation team and brought, blinking and black, back into the light, their gold headdresses, earrings and necklaces untarnished. Through the carnage these charcoal-dark immortals still wear their enigmatic smiles.

  But in comparison with the other treasures on show at Delphi these were nothing. Who could miss the monumental highlights that became legend sooner than they became history: the colossal sphinx, atop a 40-foot-high column, dedicated by the islanders of Naxos as proof of their might in the sixth century; a giant statue of Apollo; friezes of Amazons and Trojan war heroes in red, blue and bronze against a royal-blue background; the Cnidian Clubhouse (a kind of sacred embassy building), gaudy with paintings by the master artist from Thasos, Polygnotos – he who also decorated the Painted Stoa back in Athens. Croesus of Lydia, consulting the oracle before he attacked the Persians, dedicated at Delphi a solid gold lion, rampant on 117 blocks of fine, white gold.

  A journey through the site today is so denuded in comparison. The limestone paving stones are polished smooth by human footsteps, and the views – clouds that scud through the plain below, eagles that perch on the highest peaks, twisting valleys that tempt you to imagine what life is like just out of sight – are still heart-stoppingly magnificent. But there is none of the brouhaha that would once have been here. Instead of broken walls, imagine a kaleidoscope of colours on the painted marble surfaces, the greasy smoke of sacrifice – and everywhere the butter-yellow reflection of gilt, silver, gold.

  A Lydian tyrant built the first-ever treasury at Delphi. Whatever the political persuasion of the city-state as time went on, these flamboyant treasure-stores, bank-deposits in effect, maintained the same trouble-making, virile, ‘look-at-me-and-tremble’ feel. The Athenians dedicated their own treasury after victory over the Persians at the Battle of Marathon of 490 BC. Here many oiled and gilded muscles were being flexed.

  And so Chaerephon would have made his way to the oracle dazzled by the sparkle and gleam of loot. One-tenth of military booty was expected to be dedicated at a sanctuary, and much of it came to Delphi. Hoplite shields, necklaces, thrones, sections of whole throne-rooms, crystals, spears, teams of golden horses, bangles grabbed from the suppliant arms of the vanquished, were all displayed here.

  It must have been an emotional journey for every single pilgrim. Here you were surrounded by both your polis’ great victories and its great humiliations. And although it was Athenians, the Alcmaeonid family, who had completed Apollo’s brash temple (‘a marvel to see,’ says Pindar7) in the sixth century, Athena’s people were by no means immune from public disgrace in the sanctuary. On the hill above the commemorative Stoa of the Athenians, the limestone equivalent of a two-finger salute, stood the Treasury of Brasidas and the Acanthians, built after the allied Spartan victory against the Athenians at Amphipolis (422 BC). A battle that Socrates himself would soon suffer. Each island, each city-state, each alliance that visited this sacred place wanted others to remember that power was fleeting, that the powerful would have their day.

  But still, in happier times the atmosphere in Apollo’s sanctuary must have been charged, expectant. All ages came and men of all degrees. The prettiest girls would trek out here to dedicate locks of hair. Heads of state bowed to ask for advice in foreign affairs – although after the oracle had given a number of wrong answers during the Persian Wars the footfall of official delegations dwindled a little. Overwhelmingly popular were personal questions. From the trembling ‘Whom should I marry?’ to complex character profiles; hence Chaerephon’s question, ‘Is Socrates the wisest man of all?’

  But Socrates’ friend would get his answer only if he penetrated the inner sanctum of Apollo’s temple where the Pythia – the voice of the oracle – resided. So on he walked, up past the monstrous altar dedicated by the people of Chios, which, during the Pythian Games held here every five years, would have run with the blood of a hundred sacrificed bulls. Past the dripping sound of Apollo’s own sacred spring, the Kassiotis, that ran into the sanctuary itself and gurgled on towards the slope that led inside.

  The smell of roasting flesh must have penetrated the interior, just as it sharpened the air outside. Not only pilgrims but all priests had to make sacrifice to the god before approaching the sanctuary. Scrubbed and beautified animals, coy with garlands of flowers or ribbons, their horns gilded, would be led to the knife, concealed in a ‘blameless’ maiden’s basket under barley-cakes. A sprinkling of water or oats ensured the animal nodded its head at the right moment – meeting the Delphic oracle’s own injunction, ‘That animal which willingly nods over the holy water, that one, I say you may justly sacrifice.’8 For tight-stomached country men the atmosphere must have smelled Elysian.

  And from the holy of holies, the adyton, where the Pythia herself sat, other olfactory tendrils would reach out to the nostrils: the ever-burning hearth, the laurel leaves and barley scattered on the flames. And – as has only just been scientifically identified by an international team of geologists – the hallucinogenic vapours seeping out of the ground.9 After years of scepticism, the most recent geological surveys have shown that two faults meet right under the current Temple of Apollo. Through a fracture in the limestone, hydrocarbon gases, including ethylene, may well have escaped in antiquity.

  It was over these that the Pythia, an old woman dressed in a young virgin’s clothes, would sit and would babble out the Oracle – ramblings turned into hexameter verse by a priest so that the Oracle could be delivered. And here at Delphi, a place that bannered itself with aphorisms – Meden Agan, ‘Nothing in Excess’; Gnothi Seauton, ‘Know Yourself’ – and that set a moral tone for the eastern Mediterranean (advising, for example, that murder requires atonement), there came a stark retort that would quickly be spoken of across Attica and throughout the Athenian Empire. When Chaerephon asked, ‘Is there any man wiser than Socrates?’

  The answer came back:

  ‘No.’

  28

  GNOTHI SEAUTON – KNOW YOURSELF

  Delphi and Athens

  Is there anybody wiser than Socrates?

  No.

  Whatever does the god mean? Whatever is his riddle? For I know that I am not wise, not extremely wise, not even moderately wise. So whatever does he mean by saying that I am the wisest?

  Plato, Apology, 21a–b

  When one of his pupils, Chaerephon, enquired of him in front of a large crowd at Delphi the reply came back: Apollo answered that no man was more free than I, or more just, or more prudent. Socrates adds, Apollo did not compare me to a god. He did, however, judge that I far excelled the rest of mankind.

  Xenophon, Apology, 14–161

  CHAEREPHON HAD TO TAKE HIS MESSAGE back to his mentor. Unlikely that he’d have chosen an overland route – after all, there was a war on, and the journey from Delphi in Central Greece back 250 miles south to Athens would have taken him through tracts of enemy territory.2 So it would be on to the shore at Kirrha, boarding a small boat that would take the weighty news back to Athens. A time-bomb nudging its way in through Piraeus harbour.

  KNOW YOURSELF and NOTHING IN EXCESS were the maxims ‘useful for the life of men’ built into the fabric of the Delphi complex. Exactly where, and when, depends on whom you believe. Pausanias describes them appearing in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo.3 Others tell us they were carved into the Propylaia,4 on the temple front or on doorposts,5 on a column or (most likely) across the temple wall.6

  But for many Greeks, the incised homilies were as inflexible as the stone into which they were carved. For the Greeks (and remember, of course, Delphi served Greeks of all shades, and men of all ilks), this meant ‘KNOW YOUR PLACE’, do not get above yourself. Do not push your luck. It is, in its fifth-century context, a limiting phrase. Socrates’ peers were a population that ‘knew’ its
place, which, day in, day out, participated in rituals and invocations and athletic competitions that confirmed the status quo.

  But this was not, it seems, how Socrates interpreted the maxim.

  To move the world, first move yourself.

  The philosopher’s understanding of the command is paradoxical. It is perturbing at both its polar ends. Know that you have great limits – but do not be content to be told who you are. Know who you are inside. Know yourself through your relations with others. Understand yourself by loving those around you. Know that you know nothing.

  When the democracy was feeling strong, such unsettling notions could be confidently batted about in the Agora. But times change. Athens from the 430s onwards was much more thin-skinned.

  Whether it had been Chaerephon’s ‘impetuous’ charisma, his money (Delphi was not beyond the odd bribe) or Socrates’ notoriety that inspired the oracle (or history’s myth-makers) to such an answer, the stark response would, almost certainly, be the beginning of the end for Socrates.7 Delphi was believed to hold all the answers to all the questions in the world. When enemies wanted to invade Greece, they checked their battle plans with Delphi’s God; when Themistocles had asked how Athens should be saved, it was to Delphi that he put the question.’8 And cheeky Socrates wasted the great god Apollo’s breath; by confirming that he was Athens’ premier smart-arse he had committed hubris of the highest order.