The job is done. When his body is rigid, once it is dead, it will no longer need dousing. Unlike those other Greeks – witness Electra and Antigone, whose hearts were broken because their brother’s body lay outside the city walls, and unwashed – Socrates continues his atypical interest not in the corporeal superstructure, but in the soul within. It is the moment of transition that Socrates anticipates, not death itself. The fate of his physical body seems irrelevant. He has watched those pounding plays of absolute tragedy so popular throughout the fifth century BC. Works of art that drove home the horror of lying unburied. And yet, if his questions at the point of death reflect those he has asked during life, it is what lies beyond the decaying, the turning to worms and bone, that occupies this man’s mind.
So Socrates is now ready to meet death. Family and friends are allowed back in, they are distraught. But Socrates is apparently serene.
And from now until the dying of the light the philosopher will talk, talk, talk.
He is as moderately sensual with his male companions as he has been throughout his life:
He stroked my head and gathered up the hair on the nape of my neck in his hand – he was in the habit of playing with my hair sometimes – and said, ‘Tomorrow, Phaedo, maybe you will cut off this lovely hair’21
Socrates recalls the Homeric heroes, reminding history, and those around him, how all Athenians were basted in an epic past. He quotes Homer, choosing lines that bring home to his friends that he is a mere mortal man, neither a hero nor a creature of ‘oak and rock’. The earth – that troublesome, beautiful orb which, as an ingenu philosopher, he argued was round – is turning. The sun is starting to sink, and at sunset Socrates must die.
And now it is time. The philosopher takes the cup, and looks, as is his manner, ‘directly’ at the jailor who has brought it to him. He asks if he should tip out a little libation. A dusty pool of hemlock. He prays.
Some in this period made the hemlock poison more palatable with herbs – dill was one recorded. Whatever the taste, this was a lethal brew. As planned, the philosopher serves himself the drug – the state likes it this way. Self-administration of the fatal dose will clear the body-politic of any miasma. This is not murder, it is state-sponsored suicide. The Athenians abhorred a messy death. The oozing, viscous, cloying and clinging liquids of the body deeply troubled the Greeks. This is why they strangled men to death, and although some varieties of hemlock can cause you to spew bile, to froth at the mouth, to piss and shit uncontrollably, poison hemlock is not one of them. Water hemlock attacks the central nervous system, but poison hemlock attacks the peripheral nervous system.22 If it was indeed poison hemlock that Socrates took, we can understand why he thanks Athens for giving him an ‘easy’ death.23
Socrates, throughout his life, has watched the dreadful dying of men and boys, women and children. He was there when humans slipped easily into barbarity and murdered countrymen, neighbours, family and friends. Dying in old age, surrounded by his best-loved, lying on a bed is, approximately, his fate.24 It is not a bad end to a good life. His lack of interest in whether his body is buried or burned is palpable. It is the moment of passing that has always fascinated him. Perhaps this is why he covers his face as he dies, to experience this greatest of all journeys alone.
It is the effects of poison hemlock that the prison official of Plato’s Phaedo seems to demonstrate to Socrates’ companions.
And passing upwards in this way, he showed us that he was growing cold and rigid. And then again he touched him and said that when it reached his heart, he would be gone. The chill had now reached the region about the groin …25
Poison hemlock does indeed attack the extremities first, often damaging the peripheral nerve, a massive single cell, up to 4 feet long, that runs from the spine to the toes. There is a terminal seizure as the brain is starved of oxygen. This would normally be a violent spasm, but by this stage all muscles are paralysed, so they cannot convulse.
So at that time of day when everyone else is scurrying home, when the market stalls in the Agora are being cleaned of their wares, unsold slaves taken back to their shackles for the night, slugged lettuce leaves and soiled spice abandoned, when little boys scour the dust frantically searching for the thing they have lost, without which a welcome home means a beating, Socrates is being terminated.
But before he dies he says an odd thing.
And uncovering his face, which had been covered, he said – and these were his last words – ‘Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Pay it and do not neglect it.’26
Socrates invokes an unusual god. Asclepius, the god of healing, was a newish divine arrival in the city of Athens.27 In 420/19 BC, as men across the Eastern Mediterranean licked the wounds delivered by the Peloponnesian Wars, a sanctuary had been built in Socrates’ city to the great healer – a divinity already popular in the Peloponnese, the homeland of Athens’ enemies. The sanctuary site on the slopes of the Acropolis is now being restored. The air here is sharp with marble-dust, the columns have an unfamiliar (to us), temporary fresh-cut-white perfection, the earth is mud-wet where new foundations for Asclepius’ temple are being relaid. Socrates, twenty-four centuries ago, would have watched all this fuss happening the first time round as Asclepius’ sanctuary was being established; today we can watch the diverting arrival of a new home for the healing god, precisely as he did.
Socrates (and in this way he was like the citizens of Athens, rather than unlike them) seems to have put his faith in Asclepius. He was clearly becoming a popular deity; stone stelai, now in the National Archaeological Museum, show the faithful driving their pigs up to his altar for sacrifice. His daughter Hygieia is at the ready, helping out her clever, medical father with poultices and wraps. In the new sanctuary at Athens, sitting under a pleasant portico with the sound of sacred water running from a fountain, patients, calmed, lulled would wait to be healed by the appearance of the divinity in their dreams. Over-familiar with so many deaths on the battlefield, so much collateral damage, all those stinking plague bodies where choruses once danced and men drank wine, the Athenians were flinging out a lifeline – trying to persuade a premier healing spirit to be their friend.
[SOCRATES:] ‘Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius; make this offering to him and do not forget.’ ‘It shall be done,’ said Crito, ‘tell us if there is anything else.’ But there was no answer.28
Socrates’ invocation to Asclepius has promoted a great deal of scholarly ink. Is Plato trying to show how pious Socrates really is? That in fact Athens too has accepted new gods? Is he reminding the people of Athens that they themselves, in the sanctuary of Asclepius, are visited by divinities in their dreams – that Socrates’ daimonion is not really so weird? Is it a last moment of Socratic irony; the philosopher gives thanks to the health god for relieving him of the sickness of being alive? Or could the answer be more simple, more basic? Socrates, thanks to the effects of the poison, is slowly suffocating to death as he speaks; who better to cry out for at this time than the god of healing? Socrates was used to meeting spirits in his dreams; perhaps Asclepius would come to his aid at this time of need. Asclepius’ sanctuary sits cheek-by-jowl with the Theatre of Dionysos and has a bird’s-eye view of all that goes on there; maybe this was the chance for the new divine neighbour of Dionysos to physick the wounds inflicted twenty years ago in Athenian drama, when Socrates was mocked on-stage in 423 BC in front of 20,000 Athenians as a dangerous nutter, a threat to society.
And there is another thing. In many myths, Asclepius was said to be able to raise men from the dead. Maybe Socrates was not quite so phlegmatic about leaving this mortal coil after all. Perhaps he wanted another chance to bustle around like a beautiful nurse in a recovery clinic, tempting the world to a better idea of itself; to ensure the extension of his soulful life. Whatever his last conscious thought, Socrates lies there, twitching, lungs constricting, mind absolutely alert, his face wrapped in a cloth. All eyes must have been upon him, but no one saw the very moment when his psych
e – his soul, his spirit – slipped from that ugly, satirical, unforgettable face.
But after a little while he moved; the attendant uncovered him; his eyes were fixed. And Crito, when he saw it, closed his mouth and eyes.29
The now-dead hand of democracy has done its work. Socrates’ fearful, unseen daimonion is sealed up inside the shell of his lifeless flesh, gristle, bone and skin.30 The philosopher is destroyed.
SOCRATES: I hope that there is something in store for the dead, and, as has been said of old, something better for the good than for the wicked.31
I think it was no coincidence that Socrates was killed in May/June – the ancient month of Thargelion. Every year at this time, in an obscure ritual known as the Thargelia, two people – either male and female, or representing the male and the female by wearing a necklace of black and green figs respectively – were exiled from the city as scapegoats. Flogged outside the city walls, their expulsion was a symbolic gesture. The Athenians believed their sacrifice would prevent pollution and stasis from seeping through the city-state. The death of Socrates, in this propitious month, could be justified as a further gift to the gods.32 When Socrates was a boy and playing around with incendiary ideas outside the city walls in the Kerameikos he was encouraged and patronised, and when he was trading his ideas in the Agora and Athenian life was sweet he could be tolerated, but now that things had gone bad, his enemies believed that he had brought pollution within the city. His was a miasma that had to be tidied up, obliterated. Socrates suffocated to death when the poppies in the city would have been blood-red. The dying democracy had ensured that one of the tallest of all Athenian poppies was cut down.
SOCRATES: I go to die and you to live, who knows which is the better journey.33
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FLIGHT FROM THE WORLD
Beyond the city walls, 399 BC and beyond
ALCIBIADES: There is no one like him and I do not think there ever was or will be … you will never find anyone else like Socrates or any ideas like his ideas. Not today, not in days gone by.
Plato, Symposium, 221c–d
NO EXTANT EVIDENCE TELLS US WHERE Socrates’ body was taken. In such circumstances after one day lying in state the corpse would typically be released to his family for burial. Women would have helped to lower his corpse into a coffin, and with their shorn hair, their scratched cheeks and chests red with thumping would have wailed his way to Hades.1 But in contemporary sources we hear neither of Socrates’ body nor of his wife and children again. The most tangible remnant of Socrates was a small piece of papyrus, the affidavit that detailed the charge against him, kept available for inspection in the public registry. And so rather than Plato, or Xenophon, the first human hand to record the outcome of the philosopher’s trial would have been a literate slave.2 A Persian perhaps, a man who sat within the shade of the Metroon in the heart of the Agora, recording day in, day out the business of this once-great democracy.3 Socrates would have known that this is how he would be inked into history. The power of the written word – a potency that Socrates mistrusted until the last – had, in one sense, and in the physical landscape at least, the final say.
We are told by later traditions that the Athenian citizens, very quickly, realised that they had done wrong.4 Athena’s children instituted a period of mourning for the murdered philosopher, closing the gymnasia and training grounds. Socrates’ prosecutors were banished, Meletus was put to death. And down at the Kerameikos district, where Socrates had started his journey into philosophy, a bronze statue of the man from Alopeke was erected. Unashamedly prominent, it was set outside the Pompeion, where young men gathered and sacred artefacts were kept for use in pompe – religious processions. This was where Socrates himself had gone over half a century before, to join in the Great Pan-Athenaic procession, and to listen to the foreign philosophers Zeno and Parmenides bringing their ideas into the city-state. And so Athens memorialised Socrates as he wanted to live: at the edge of the city walls, a place that drank and swore and fucked; where soldiers were commemorated and women wove – but also a place that invited in new ideas, that welcomed men whose job it was to open minds. And most of all, a place where young people gathered, where heads could be turned to look to a better future.
Socrates thrived in a democracy – because this was a state that gave ordinary men voice, that tolerated new ideas. He was silenced, on the face of it, because democratic Athens could stand much criticism, but not criticism of the value of demos-kratia itself, and not by men who suggested it was neither walls nor fine buildings nor warships that made a democrat great, but the soul within him.5
Unpack that state of affairs a little. The democracy – the power of the demos, the people – was small, face to face, made up of men who knew one another, whose inspiration, animation, fear, genius, jealousy, frustration and prejudice rubbed off between citizens as they jostled together in the streets, at the Assembly, on battleships, by brothels, outside the law-courts. Socrates’ single most plangent message, that there can be no good, even in a democracy, if each individual is not as good as he can possibly be, is also beautifully exemplified in his death sentence. Athens might have been right to insist on Socrates’ conviction (to the letter of the law, this was state-sponsored suicide and his ideas could indeed, on the face of it, pose a threat to the robust orthodoxy of democratic Athens), but, in a Socratic system, he too was right to die as he did.6 Socrates would never have escaped, because this would not have been a ‘good’, or a sophon, a wise, thing to do.
In short true virtue exists only with wisdom, whether pleasures and fears and other things of that sort are added or taken away.7
When Socrates died, Athens was bleeding. Its city walls were broken down; confidence, talent, self-esteem seeped through the gap. Plato, sick to the stomach at the prospect of Socrates’ death, melted away to Megara, exiled or, sensibly, keeping a low profile while the political heat in Athens was high.8 Xenophon, one of Socrates’ closest supporters, had been away (since 401 BC) in Persian territory (modern-day Iraq and across Asia Minor and the Middle East), fighting as a mercenary. Socrates had advised him not to take up the commission. At the moment that Socrates was executed, Xenophon – now in Spartan service and leading Spartan troops – had just reached Greek territory on the Black Sea. Meno, the man once so impressed by the philosopher that he was struck dumb, betrayed the Greeks into the hands of the Persians. This was a time of despair and shame. The world had been turned upside down. Socrates was both an agent and a casualty of this turmoil. He exemplified the paradoxical brilliance and the brutality of his ‘Golden Age’.
Man is mortal
Socrates is a man
Therefore Socrates is mortal9
Socrates was indeed a mortal man, in a mortal world, but his spirit – because we still write about it, read about it, debate it today – was undimmed.
The fifth century BC had rough charisma. Poets, story-makers and politicians have always recognised this fact. There is something alluringly immediate about Golden Age Greece. Ordinary people were, for the first time, long-running players in the theatre of power. Philosophers could love wisdom as a viable profession; strategists – the strategoi, the generals – had to live out their fantasies face to helmeted face with their enemies. Men fought on the plains of war that they had engineered. You got what you saw, and you lived what you got.
Golden Ages are comforting; we love the thought that in the dim and distant past we achieved absolute perfection, and that if as a species we did it once, we can do so again.10 We want ancient Athens to satisfy our yearning for a fair, ordered, beautiful society. We want to believe that ideologies such as ‘democracy’, ‘liberty’, ‘freedom of speech’ have, at some time, achieved a perfect form. But – even though Athens was unique, wonderful – that is laying too great a burden on both Athena’s city and on history.
Socrates knew the shiny democracy as an infant, an adolescent and in middle age. He watched it flourish, diversify, dull, die and, briefly, revive. He neve
r let the democratic ideal become complacent. He died obeying its laws. He was both the product and the casualty of direct democracy. His death reminds us to care about the world we live in, to respect it, to challenge it, but above all to remember ta erotika – the ‘things of love’, the things that drive us to pursue the good.11
CODA
THE TOMB OF SOCRATES – THE TOWER OF THE WINDS
SOCRATES: For no one knows whether death happens to be the greatest of all goods for humanity, but people fear it because they’re completely convinced it is the greatest of evils.
Plato, Apology, 29a–b1
SOME WILL TELL YOU THERE IS still a mausoleum for Socrates right in the heart of Athens. Many visitors continue to pay their respects to the philosopher here; eighteenth-century watercolours show Grand Tour eagers bowing their heads at the place as if in prayer. It is folly. The ‘Tomb of Socrates’ is in fact a huge time-machine, the Horologion of Kyrrhestos, probably built by the astronomer Andronikos from Macedonia in the first century BC.
This chunky, confident, octagonal tower (much approved of by the Roman architect Vitruvius and listed in his catalogue of classical excellence De Architectura) decorated with flying, bearded figures was designed to house one of those relatively newfangled measures of human life – a water-clock.
When I last visited the Horologion it was being renovated. The bronze weathervane that showed the direction of the winds was under reconstruction, the sun-clock was absent, the vigorous carved figures under the parapet needed more than a little expert attention. Inside, scaffolding poles and bags of mortar lay abandoned – there was, it seemed, no urgency to shore up this tower, which has already stood for 2,000 years. But somewhere in the Horologion there was a leak – and nature’s own water-clock was drumming drip by drip, marking out the span of all our mortal lives.
The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life Page 43
