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

by Bettany Hughes

  Now tourists, on their way from the Plaka shopping district up to the Acropolis, wander a little listlessly through the Theatre of Dionysos. Tour guides give a good impression of the ‘what’ and the ‘how’, but not the ‘why’. Yet in the fifth century this was a place where Athenian democrats came to understand the very world they lived in. The contrast with the press of men here 2,500 years ago, eager to hear what, in this land of free speech, an Athenian would dare to say next – the rock of the Acropolis and the gods who lived there his witnesses – could not be starker.

  Ignorant men do not know what they hold in their hands

  until they have flung it away.

  To him who is in fear everything rustles.

  For somehow this is tyranny’s disease, to trust no friends.

  Words are the physicians of the diseased mind.10

  Athenian theatre dealt with the very stuff of life.

  The original theatre audiences here were tenderised – the theatre was a space where emotions were intentionally heightened. All manner of tricks and tropes were used to ensure that the democratic Athenians, – 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 of them – were deeply moved by what they saw before them. Primal, shared musical nights were the stem-cells of Greek theatre. Drama had evolved from ritual song and dance. Playwrights were also poets; actors learned to sing haunting refrains and to fill the theatres with abstract, choral sounds. Euripides et al. composed their own music: melodic, monophonic rhythms that beat out the heart of the matter. Refrains from oboes (auloi) and cymbals represented ethos – sensibility itself. A theatre performance guaranteed all kinds of assaults on your senses, on your sentiments. And so the fact that Socrates turned up as a character in the plays of Aristophanes, one of the most ingenious and waspish playwrights of the day, was significant. Scrutiny of this new art-form was intense. Socrates’ appearance on the comic stage in Aristophanes’ play Clouds, where he was parodied mercilessly, mattered.11 We learn of the impact that the theatre had on Socrates’ contemporaries from one of Plato’s Dialogues, when Socrates bumps into a rhapsode, a professional ‘reciter’ called Ion:

  SOCRATES: And are you aware that your rhapsodies produce these same effects on most of the spectators too?

  ION: Yes, absolutely aware: for I look down on them from the platform and see them at such moments, crying and turning awestruck eyes upon me and yielding to the amazement of my tale. For I have to pay the closest attention to them; since, if I set them crying, I shall laugh because of all the money I take, but if they laugh, I myself shall cry because of the money I lose.12

  Athens’ plays might be matchless in their honesty, with their forensic analysis of the extremes of the human condition, their investigation of human flaws, but they wrapped the experience in a lusty, feel-good mantle. Plays were where you came to process information, to learn to form an opinion of the world around you, and to love your polis. Although there is frequently criticism in the dialogue of overweening ambition, of cliques, of tall poppies, an imaginary, theatrical Athens is often a place that is high-minded and fair, in direct contrast to the bad-boys of Greece: Corinth, Sparta, Thebes. The experience of theatre was meant to be one that re-affirmed Athens’ robust sense of demos-solidarity. The very front row was reserved for the sons of men killed in war. As a showy prelude to the drama, these fatherless young men paraded through the theatre dressed in state-sponsored armour. Each war orphan then took a binding oath to protect and preserve the city. And when the tributes had been collected from amongst Athens’ ‘allies’, these goods (to all intents and purposes, taxes) were processed in public, before an admiring Athenian crowd, at the opening of the Great Dionysia competition. The March end-of-year returns in Athens’ treasury were an explicitly theatrical affair. Theatre in Socrates’ day was a heady and patriotic experience.

  Although women and foreigners were almost certainly not allowed in to see the comedies and tragedies, children may well have been, possibly even as judges of the competition13 – an impressionable age to sit and watch a charismatic version of real life played out in front of you.14

  It is into this highly charged atmosphere, in 423 BC, in front of citizen-democrats and the next generation of Athenians that an unlovable, buffoon-make-believe version of Socrates is flung.15

  Picture Socrates in 423 BC, in late March or early April, bustling up to Dionysos’ theatre at the base of the vast Acropolis rock. Taking his seat in his tribal block, buying the snacks – figs and nuts and chickpeas – to munch during the show, settling down for an experience that was devised to change, to some degree, how he, and the men around him, thought about the world. But today would be a little different. Because it was Socrates himself who would provide the entertainment. A young buck (aged twenty-two or so) called Aristophanes has written all about the gobby philosopher and his peculiar ways. The title of this thinly veiled slander is Clouds. In his summation of Socrates, the author certainly did not pull his punches.

  A bold rascal, a fine speaker, impudent, shameless, a braggart, and adept at stringing lies, and an old stager at quibbles, a complete table of laws, a thorough rattle, a fox to slip through any hole, supple as a leather strap, slippery as an eel, an artful fellow, a blusterer, a villain, a knave with one hundred faces, cunning, intolerable, a gluttonous dog.16

  Clearly, to spark such intemperate smears, Socrates was already known in Athens: a big character in the city. And a big name too. The kind of name worth inventing words for. Nine years later, in another of his plays, Birds, Aristophanes describes Socrates’ followers as like the Lakono-manes – those who are Spartan-mad. These are people who have aped Socrates, they are esokratun, they are Socratised.17 The year 423 is the year of Clouds, but also, more importantly, the year that the winning drama is Cratinus’ Wine-flask, a play lost to us now, but in which Socrates was also mocked; clearly in 423 it pleased the Athenian crowds to lambast the philosopher.18

  CHORUS [in the form of Clouds]:

  Hail, grey-headed hunter of phrases artistic!

  Hail, Socrates, master of twaddle!

  Out of all the specialists cosmologistic

  We love for the brains in his noddle

  Only Prodicus; you we admire none the less

  For the way that you swagger and cuss,

  And never wear shoes, and don’t care how you dress,

  And solemnly discourse of us.

  STREPSIADES [in raptures]: How fantastic! How divine!

  SOCRATES: Yes, these are the only truly divine beings – all the rest is just a lot of fairy tales.

  STREPSIADES: What on earth! You mean you don’t believe in Zeus?19

  So what, one wonders, had turned the tide? Socrates had spent a period of eight years fighting for his country. In many ways he had followed the conventional path for a good Athenian citizen – but clearly he had started to irritate people. It could just be simply that he had been a fixture in the Agora for too long, asking his annoying, soul-searching questions. But the plot-line of Clouds offers other clues.

  Clouds

  In a nutshell, Clouds is a little like a restoration comedy: a story of town and country. Our lead, the middle-aged, bumbling bumpkin Strepsiades, is lured into the city by his urbane missus. His son runs up debts; Strepsiades decides that Socrates’ popular philosophy establishment, the ‘Thinking Foundation’, will sort the boy out, will show him how to wangle himself out of tricky situations. But it is the father who ends up in the crammer. Strepsiades watches (for our amusement) as Socrates is shat on by lizards while gawping at the heavens, measuring with great solemnity the distance a flea can jump and then ‘peering at the arse of the moon’.

  Clouds is not stellar – and it wasn’t judged so. Aristophanes won third (last) prize when the show was first presented. But with the phlegm of youth – remember, he would have been twenty-two or so at the time – the playwright set out to make his comedy that bit edgier. Clouds had an unperformed, more savage, iteration, and now recent, gruesome historical events were recalled as part of the d
rama.

  In about 454 BC a group of Pythagoreans had gathered together as per usual in their meeting house in Croton, one of the Greek cities in Magna Graecia, southern Italy. Their conversation would perhaps have been about the stars, mathematics, the nature of the universe, the nature of society, the nature of love. This think-tank engaged with the world around them in the most vigorous of ways. But others were there too, in the shadows. As the radical group of thinkers settled down to business, the door was barred – from the outside – and a torch put to the tinder. All the Pythagoreans within were burned alive.

  In his new version of Clouds, Aristophanes imagines a similar, awful fate for Socrates and the others in his ‘Thinkery’.

  SOCRATES [coughing in the smoke]: Help, I’m going to suffocate!

  CHAEREPHON [still inside]: Help, I’m being prematurely cremated!

  STREPSIADES [descending the ladder, followed by his slave XANTHIAS]: No more than you deserved; people who cock snooks at the gods and argue about the arse of the moon must pay for it. [Kicks SOCRATES on the bum.] Get them! Stone them! Revenge! Revenge for the injured gods! Remember what they did! Revenge.20

  This time, Socrates and his companions escape. But the scene, even if it had a happy ending, was ugly.

  And how did Socrates react to such public blackballing? Well, with equanimity, we’re led to believe. Aristophanes, after all, appears (from Plato’s Symposium) to have been an acquaintance of his; friend, not foe. The two would drink together, sharpen their wits on one another. Was this perhaps a feisty, testy tale written with a kind of wry affection? According to a later anecdote, after Socrates had watched himself on the stage ‘peering at the arse of the moon,’ he stood up and bowed to the crowd. He smiled. What a society, where men can be parodied, in public, in front of anyone who is anyone, as well as those who appear to be nothing, and laugh at their own trouble.

  Of course comedy is where Socrates belongs. Where else could he be? The ugly, pot-bellied eccentric. The wrong-footing genius; the stonemason’s son who understands how fragile and foolish mortal life is, and yet at the same time how sublime. The soldier commended for his bravery who stands, like a snowman in the middle of a winter campaign, caught in one of his embarrassing staring fits. All the other characters in Socrates’ story – Alcibiades, Pericles, Aspasia – could appear in tragedy, in epic drama. Socrates, unique, world-class as he is, is at the same time a queer middle-aged man with feet of clay. A curiously comforting, curiously unsettling pilot-passenger in the leaky lifeboat. A man easy to mock.

  At the time of this production of Aristophanes’ Clouds, many experimental thinkers were being lambasted and lampooned in Athenian theatre – yet tolerated too. But theatre was, after all, a religious experience. The ideas floated here had surprising weight. And times would change, once – in the future, at the beginning of a new century – Socrates was isolated, his fellow radicals persecuted and exiled, and his city-state the loser in one too many battles, the roar of Athens’ crowd would be sharper, the laughter hollow.

  In good democratic style, at this juncture maybe Aristophanes was simply trying to ensure that a man who walked strong and tall in this democratic city did not get a swollen head. But he still made it clear that Socrates could act very un-democratically when he meddled with young men’s minds. The children sitting in the Theatre of Dionysos had been given something distinctly unpleasant to lodge in their cortical memory. At the time of Socrates’ trial these youngsters will be grown men, just thirty, old enough to vote, old enough to be judges in a law-court. As Socrates strode off at the end of the day’s entertainment, home to his mother’s house in Alopeke, with his waddling gait, his darting eyes, his hairy hands, perhaps they giggled and sneered at him behind his back. Come 399 BC, and Socrates’ trial in a religious court, the philosopher was certain that this appearance in the theatre had been immensely damaging.

  First, then, it’s right for me to make my defence, Athenians, against the first of the false accusations made against me and against my first accusers, and then against the later ones and the later accusers …

  But the earlier ones worry me more, men, who, having got hold of many of you when you were children, convinced you with accusations against me that weren’t any truer than the ones I now face. They said that there’s a certain Socrates, a wise man, who thinks about what’s in the heavens and who has investigated all the things below the earth and who makes the weaker argument appear to be the stronger. Those who spread this rumour, Athenians, are the accusers that worry me. For the people who hear such things believe that those who enquire about such topics also don’t believe in the gods. There are lots of these accusers and they’ve been at it for a long time already, telling you these things when you were still at an age when you were most apt to believe them, when some of you were children and others were adolescents and they made their case when absolutely no one presented a defence. But the most unreasonable part of all is that it is impossible to know and say their names, except one, who happens to be a certain writer of comedies …

  For you yourselves saw these things in the comedy by Aristophanes; Socrates being carried around there, saying that he is walking on air and all kinds of other nonsense that I don’t understand at all.21

  Trial by media has been, and always will be, of peculiar potency.

  Yet one aspect that Aristophanes never mocks is Socrates’ courage. This is a war veteran after all – a decorated one. A man who does not deny the value of war in a warring age.22 And a man who – despite being mocked by his city – will, within months of Aristophanes’ premiere of Clouds, have to risk his life for her once more.

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  AMPHIPOLIS

  North-eastern Greece, 424–422 BC

  SOCRATES: The envious person grows lean with the fatness of their neighbour.

  Plato, Phaedo, 66c

  BEHIND ATHENS’ CITY WALLS TRAGEDIANS AND comedians may have continued to write, musicians to compose, and philosophers to debate – but beyond that ring of stone, hostilities dragged on.

  Delion’s humiliation of the city-state had given Athens’ enemies renewed vim. In 424 BC word reached Athens that the Spartans and their allies were fingering Athenian possessions in the north-east of Hellas. So Socrates was back on the road northwards once more, marching (possibly sailing) as part of the Athenian army – to a landscape so different from that around Athens that even today it seems outlandish that a city 200 miles to the south should consider it right to claim it as its own.

  This is the road today to Turkey, and the further east one travels, the more apparent is the fallout of the disastrous exchange of population in 1923. Still remembered as the ‘Katastrofi’, ‘The Catastrophe’, formalised as the Treaty of Lausanne in July 1923, 390,000 Muslims were forcibly taken from Greece to Turkey and 1,300,000 Christians from Turkey to Greece. The small towns stretched along the coast from here to the Bosporus still have a temporary, refugee feel about them. But they shelter within an abundant, confident landscape.

  Here the hills never seem to stop; all are shaggy with trees, the earth beneath rich in minerals. Amphipolis was a new town, founded only in 437 BC, but it sat on top of a prehistoric settlement. The Athenians had attempted to establish a colony here in 465; it was disastrous, and 10,000 colonists were killed. So strategically placed, the settlement’s Thracian name was ‘Nine Ways’; it would be from here in just under 100 years’ time that Alexander the Great would set out to conquer the whole of Asia.

  To get to the most likely site of Socrates’ next battle at Amphipolis you still cross the Strymon (in his day ‘well-bridged’) River. Now the river banks are married and marred by a rusty and rattling metal crossing. But the river itself keeps its ancient scale – it is broad, banked by reeds – a life-support system that must be defended. The Strymon, in fact, was the mother of Amphipolis – the settlement had been built by Athens only thirteen years before in order to provide an effective crossing point, and to control trade: planks from those trees,
gold from those hills. This is what Socrates had been sent out to defend.

  In 424 BC the historian Thucydides had already tried to do his patriotic duty in this region. The Spartan commander Brasidas, backed by a motley crew of Peloponnesian hoplites and helots in hoplite armour, had made a surprise sortie here. A message was sent to Thucydides, who was manning and maintaining seven triremes back on that honey-rich island of Thasos (the place that had witnessed the stirrings of Athens’ imperial ambition), to say that the Athenian general had to come, and fast. It took Thucydides half a day to arrive. He had a vested interest here, the ownership of a number of gold-mining concessions in the fertile landscape. Thucydides should have been the perfect man for the job. But his tardiness, and Spartan brio, worked against him. Brasidas, under the cover of a raging storm, had forced his way into the city. Not long inside, he had already persuaded the men of Amphipolis to give up their settlement without so much as raising a sword. He promised safe passage to those who wanted to leave, and no sequestering or looting of the property of those Amphipolitans who decided to stay. Suddenly, with their fair play and diplomatic niceties, it was the Spartan-side who appeared to hold the moral high ground in this unpleasant war. When news filtered back to Athens that Thucydides had failed to secure Amphipolis and had also allowed Brasidas to appear the benign liberator, the general was swiftly recalled to the mother-city and put on trial. Thucydides was found guilty. Amphipolis would be the last live military action that the key historian of the Peloponnesian War would ever see. Thucydides’ humiliating failure earned him lifelong exile. The general and his family lived out the rest of their lives in Thrace. It was in this northern, rugged territory that Thucydides produced his History of the Peloponnesian War, one of the greatest factual works of all antiquity.