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

by Bettany Hughes

  11 Aristophanes, Frogs, 695–702. Trans. G. Murray (1908).

  12 See Finley (1971), 11–12 for inscription reference.

  13 Aristophanes, Frogs, 1425. Trans. J. Savage (2010).

  14 Plutarch, Alcibiades, 34.6.

  15 And, curiously, the embattled Athens that Socrates refused to leave was defiantly productive. Aristophanes wrote his Lysistrata and the Women at the Thesmophoria. Sophocles – the playwright, one of those caught up, reluctantly, in the coup of 411 – was eighty by now, but still he produced the finest of works. His almost unbearably angry play Philoctetes deals with the issue of deception – one feels this has to be a comment on the world around him. Cf. Heraclitus’ comments on the value of strife.

  16 Plato, Phaedrus, 259a-b. Trans. H. Fowler (1914) [LCL].

  17 Plato, Lysis, 204a.

  18 Plato, Lysis, 205e–6a. Trans. W. R. M. Lamb (1925) [LCL].

  19 Plato, Lysis, 203a–b.

  20 See City Beneath the City, p. 249.

  21 Plato, Lysis, 221d. Trans. B. Jowett (1953) [adapt.].

  22 Exhibit 3280–1, found at Moschato.

  23 Plato, Apology, 23c–e. Trans. Brickhouse and Smith (2002).

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Arginusae – standing out in the crowd

  1 Trans. Brickhouse and Smith (2002).

  2 Plato, Apology, 32b; Gorgias, 473e; Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.7.16; Memorabilia, 1.1.18, 4.4.2.

  3 Plato, Apology, 32b; Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.7.15. Nb The case first went through the Council, Socrates presided over the second day of the Assembly meeting.

  4 See Hansen (1999), 248.

  5 Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 2.2–4, details Socrates’ meagre financial situation.

  6 Thompson and Wycherley (1972), 44.

  7 Voting was originally calibrated by the deposit of an olive leaf by each councillor, but in Socrates’ day voting could also be by show of hands. For details of how the Boule functioned, see Rhodes (1972).

  8 Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.7.16–33.

  9 Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.7.11 (also 12–13). Trans. C. L. Brownson (1918).

  10 Could this perhaps be the coalesced passion of a group, trying to find someone to blame for the tragedy of mortality that Arginusae represents?

  11 For further illumination see Brunt (1993); Figuiera (1991).

  12 Diodorus of Athens, see Jacoby, FGrH 372 (Diod. Periegetes Frags. 34, 35, 40).

  13 Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.7.16–33.

  14 Plato, Apology, 18a. Trans. Brickhouse and Smith (2002).

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Tall poppies, cut corn

  1 Trans. J. Barnes (1996). Herodotus tells the same story at 5.92.

  2 A democracy still craves heroes. Homeric paragons were still the touchstone of all Athenians, and ‘the people’ still wanted visionaries – leaders who seemed somehow ‘better’, to gleam. But whereas it is tempting to fantasise about the great achievements of literary heroes being, really, our own, with mortal success comes envy. The introduction of ostracism is a tangible reminder of this.

  3 Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, 380–2; 1524–30.

  4 Euripides, Hecuba, 154–60. Trans. E. P. Coleridge (1938).

  5 Plato, Apology, 28a–b. Trans. B. Jowett (1953).

  6 Euripides, Phoenician Women, 243.

  7 Demosthenes, 57.45 and 57.31. Although this statement was made in the 340s BC, reference was made back to the period when wet-nurses were usually slave-women, ribbon-sellers usually metic women.

  8 Trans. J. D. Sosin. See also Sosin (2008), 105–8.

  9 Aristophanes, Frogs, 1497.

  10 Robin Waterfield’s phrase, in Waterfield (2009), 112. As already mentioned, this publication is an incisive examination of the build-up to the trial of Socrates.

  11 Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.2.8, and Plutarch, Lysander, 14–15.

  12 Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.2.10–11. Trans. R. Warner (1966).

  13 Xenophon, Apology, 8. He continues, ‘And that while other men furnish themselves with expensive delicacies from the market-place I produce, at no cost, more pleasurable ones from my own soul’ Trans. J. A. Martinez (2002).

  14 Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.2.20. Trans. R. Warner (1966).

  15 Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.2.23.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  Thirty Tyrants

  1 Lysias, Against Eratosthenes, esp. 5–21.

  2 References to alternative forms of execution can be found, for instance, in Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusae, 929–1209, and Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.7.20.

  3 Aristophanes, Frogs, 120–7.

  4 Andocides, 3.10.

  5 Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.2.35.

  6 Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.2.12. Trans. J. Fogel (2002).

  7 Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.2.18–19. Trans. J. Fogel.

  8 The Ancient sources were quick to promote the argument that Socrates abused his position as a teacher. This view has down the years been vigorously maintained by modern-day teachers and tutors.

  9 This fact is frequently employed to show that Socrates had sympathies with the Thirty. The question is still open as to why Socrates chose not to leave Athens at this time, as other committed democrats did.

  10 A later source, Diodorus Siculus, has it that Socrates and two young companions tried to stop the two Scythian guards who had come to exterminate Theramenes – but he begged the philosopher to hold back. Universal Library, 14.5.1–3.

  11 Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.3.15. Trans. R. Warner (1966).

  12 Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.4.9. Trans. R. Warner (1966).

  13 Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.4.3, see also Diodorus Siculus, XIV, 32.

  14 Plato, Apology, 32c-d. Trans. Brickhouse and Smith (2002).

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  The scapegoat

  1 Words reproduced in a variety of scholia and sources from the second century BC to late Antiquity.

  2 Socrates was that difficult thing in society: a maverick at the centre of things. Think of a hermit; an anchorite; a prophet on the hill. These remote radicals are less troubling than the inscrutable, revolutionary boy next door.

  3 We know that Socrates gave a thought to how the clothes got onto his back, thanks to a little anecdote in Xenophon’s Memorabilia, 2.7.1–12. Because of the political turmoil following an oligarchic coup, no fewer than fourteen homeless female relatives had to move in to Aristarchus’ household. Socrates’ advice was brisk – get them to set up a wool-working business so they could derive both job satisfaction and turn a pretty profit. The exchange gives us a little hint of his view on women – that they should be allowed to be a more productive, perhaps even a more valued, part of the body politic. Another troubling half-suggestion that may have earned him distrust.

  4 Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.2.9. Trans. J. Fogel (2002).

  5 Plato, Apology, 17d–18a.

  6 Unlike those citizens who have lived and died to be jurors – just listen to Aristophanes in his play Wasps: ‘It’s this that grieves us most of all, to see men who have never served or held either lance or oar in defence of their country, enriching themselves at our expense without ever raising a blister on their hands. In short, I give it as my deliberate opinion that in future every citizen not possessed of a sting shall not receive the three obols.’ Aristophanes, Wasps 1117–21. Trans. E. O’Neill (1938).

  7 We should, instead, think of him as an unconventional political activist – understanding polis in the Greek sense: as a body of men. See Plato, Gorgias, 521d, and Meno, 100a.

  8 Plato, Gorgias, 474a.

  9 Indictment quoted in Diogenes Laertius, On the Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, 2.40. See also trans. M. Munn (2000): ‘Meletus, son of Meletus of Pitthus, has written a sworn indictment against Socrates, son of Sophroniskos of Alopeke, as follows: Socrates has committed the offence of not acknowledging the gods acknowledged by the state and of introducing other new divinities. He has committed the further offence of corrupting the young. Penalty proposed: capital punishment.’ Also paraphrased in Plato, Apology, 24b; Euthy
phro, 3b; Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.1.1, 1.2.64; Apology, 10. When his charges were first read out they were heard by Meletus, the Archon and one or two witnesses whom history has forgotten (possibly by Anytus and Lycon).

  10 Plato, Apology, 35d–36d.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  An apology

  1 Alternative translation: ‘I shall be like a doctor tried by a bench of children on a charge brought by a cook.’ Trans. W. R. M. Lamb (1925) [LCL].

  2 Plato, Phaedo, 109b: ‘We live around the sea like frogs live around a pond.’ But Socrates turned his back on the sea. We hear that apart from his military campaigns and that one trip to the Isthmus of Corinth, Socrates shunned his companions’ taste for ocean-travel – for yearning to view, and acquire, what lay beyond each horizon. What drew Socrates were not the international highways of the sea, but the twists and turns of rivers. He fought by the broad banks of the reeded River Strymon in Macedonia, he paddled with his favourite it-boys in the Ilissos and composed his thoughts along the lost river of the Eridanos in Athens. It was the rivers that wind through human existence, rather than the oceans that sit at its edge, that constituted his natural home.

  3 Plato, Symposium, 213e. Trans. M. Joyce (1935).

  4 Plato, Apology, 35e–8c.

  5 Plato, Apology, 17b–c.

  6 Socrates in Plato, Apology, 36b–7a. Trans. H. N. Fowler (1914) [LCL].

  7 Plato, Apology, 21a.

  8 Plato, Apology, 20e. Trans. H. N. Fowler (1914) [LCL].

  9 Plato, Apology, 21a. Trans. H. N. Fowler [LCL].

  10 We also hear from Xenophon that Socrates’ friends defended him in court.

  11 The amount of time Socrates would have been given for his speech is unclear. The length of Plato’s account suggests little more than two khoes. (A khoe is a pitcher-full. In a recent archaeological experiment this seems to give Socrates only six minutes for his final speech.) Since the jury was given no opportunity to confer when making a decision, the voting process is unlikely to have lasted longer than was practically necessary. Cf. Todd (1993), 132–5.

  12 Trans M. J. Levett, rev. M. Burnyeat (1990).

  13 Plato, Apology, 37a–b. Trans. Brickhouse and Smith (2002).

  14 There is still some debate as to whether bronze ballots had been brought in by the time of Socrates’ trial or whether pebbles were still being used. As yet the archaeological evidence is inconclusive.

  15 Aeschines, Against Timarchus, 1.30; Demosthenes, Against Aristogeiton, 26.2.

  16 Aristocrats engaged in vicious blood-feuds (the year of Socrates’ trial prostitutes across the city owned by noble families were tortured and murdered by rival aristocratic houses). Socrates’ exhortation to ‘turn the other cheek’ (not as a philanthropic gesture, but because doing so would ensure your own happiness rather then engendering a sense of hate) was considered dangerous nonsense.

  17 Professor Paul Cartledge has quite rightly pointed out in his recent work Ancient Greek Political Thought in Practice (CUP, 2009) Chapter 7, that the population of Athens was justified in condemning Socrates according to the laws of the day. This raises the interesting question of the ethics of this decision.

  18 Plato, Phaedo, 117c.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Twilight and Delos at dawn

  1 ‘Athoi Proverbia’. See W. Bühler (ed.), Zenotü Athoi proverbia, vulgari ceteraque memoria acuta edidit et enarravit. Winfried W. Bühler, vol. 4: Libri secundi proverbia 1–40 complexum (Göttingen, 1982).

  2 Plato, Phaedo, 58a–c.

  3 There is some debate as to the dating of the trip to Delos – and therefore of Socrates’ trial. From extant sources it could be inferred that the Delia took place in the (Delian) month of Hieros, in turn associated with Anthesterion (January/February). See Deubner (1932), 203–4. Others date it to the month of Thargelion (April/May), e.g., Nails (2006), 15. White (2000), 155, suggests 7th Mounichion (March/April) for the date of Socrates’ trial. For further discussion see Calame (1997:), 107–8.

  4 Hesiod, Homeric Hymn to Apollo (HAp 14–126).

  5 Plutarch, Theseus, 23.1.

  6 Plutarch, Theseus, 23.1, Walker (1995), 43; and Marshall (2000), 352–3.

  7 F. Sokolowski (ed.), Les Lois Sacrées de Cités Grecques: Supplément (Paris, 1962).

  8 Callimachus, Hymn to Delos, 307–15, and Plutarch, Theseus, 21.1–2.

  9 See Hughes (2005), 231–2.

  10 Lonsdale (1995), passim, for an excellent discussion of the dance in Minoan religion.

  11 Work would not start again on the temple until 314 BC.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Socrates bound

  1 Trans. H. N. Fowler (1914).

  2 Excellent work dealing with crime and punishment in Athens: Todd (2000), 31–51, and Allen (2000).

  3 See, for example, Antiphon 5, On the Murder of Herodes, 17.

  4 Herodotus, 9.37.2.

  5 Plato, Republic, 439e.

  6 You can still wander around the perimeter of the prison remains, but at the time of writing (2010) access inside had been indefinitely restricted.

  7 Plato, Crito, 43a. Trans. J. Savage (2010).

  8 For a fuller discussion of the role of the Eleven, see Allen (2000); Hunter (1994); Todd (1993); and Herman (2006).

  9 But even here perhaps we are being presented with a truth within a story within a half-truth. Orphic mythology, often dealing with such lyric pursuits, makes much play of the connection between the pursuits of the body (soma) and a tomb (sema).

  10 Xenophon, Memorabilia, 4.8.2–3.

  11 Plato, Crito, 43b. Trans. H. N. Fowler (1914) [LCL].

  12 Plato, Crito, 45a–c. Trans. H. N. Fowler [LCL].

  13 Plato, Crito, 50a–b. Trans. H. N. Fowler [LCL] [adapt.].

  14 Xenophon, Apology, 7. Trans. O. J. Todd (1992) [LCL].

  15 Plato, Crito, 49a–b. Trans. H. N. Fowler (1914) [LCL].

  16 This potent little plant could have been imported from Asia Minor or Crete. To pharmakon, as Plato calls it – the ‘useful little thing’, which crops up in the earliest form of Greek on Linear B tablets – grew well on Crete, an island that yielded a constitution, the ‘Gortyn Code’ which Socrates was said to have admired.

  17 Plato refers to children who eat hemlock by accident – so, with its purple-spotted stalk and distinctive leaves, it must have grown in the region. Plato, Lysis, 219e.

  18 Aristophanes, Frogs, 117–27. Trans. J. Henderson (2008) [adapt.].

  19 See Allen (2000), 234.

  20 Plato, Symposium, 174a.

  21 Plato, Phaedo, 89b. Trans. H. N. Fowler (1914) [adapt.].

  22 Edith Bloch’s article ‘Hemlock Poisoning and the Death of Socrates’ is essential reading. Her statements on the matter – following her research – are assertive: ‘Socrates suffered a peripheral neuropathy, a toxin-induced condition resembling the Guillain-Barré syndrome, brought about by the alkaloids in Conium maculatum, the poison hemlock plant.’

  23 Transgressive behaviour worthy of the death penalty was in fact fairly limited. ‘Now of all the acts for which the laws have prescribed the death penalty – temple robbery, burglary, enslavement, treason to the state – not even my adversaries themselves charge me with having committed any of these.’ Xenophon, Apology, 25. Trans. O. J. Todd (1992) [LCL].

  24 Plato, aged twenty-eight, sick to the stomach, we are told could not be there.

  25 Plato, Phaedo, 118a. Trans. H. N. Fowler (1914) [LCL].

  26 Plato, Phaedo, 118a. Trans. H. N. Fowler [LCL].

  27 See, e.g., votive relief NMA 1388 from 400/399 BC, where Asclepius sits proud on an omphalos rock.

  28 Plato, Phaedo, 118a. Trans. G. M. A. Grube (1997).

  29 Plato, Phaedo 118a. Trans. H. N. Fowler (1914) [LCL].

  30 Cf. the similarity of the soma (body) and the sema (tomb).

  31 Plato, Phaedo. 63c. Trans. H. N. Fowler [adapt.] [LCL].

  32 Robin Waterfield has recently come to a similar conclusion in Why Socrates Died – Dispelling the Myths
(2009). Waterfield also suggests that because Socrates had failed in his mission, he readily accepted his own sacrifice, and called to Asclepius with his last breath because he believed his own extinction to be a healing act for the city.

  33 Plato, Apology, 42a.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  Flight from the world

  1 See a vase by the Sappho painter (Bowdoin College Museum of Art 1984, 023). Lysias, Against Eratosthenes, 18; Plato, Phaedo, 115c.

  2 Shear (1995), ‘Bouleuterion, Metroon and the Archives at Athens’, in Hansen and Raaflaub (1995), 157–190; S. G. Miller (1995), ‘Old Metroon and Old Bouleuterion in the classical Agora of Athens’, in M. H. Hansen and K. Raaflaub (1995), 133–56.

  3 Alcibiades even managed to force his way into this locus of Socrates’ life. Guards stood outside the state archive the day Socrates was killed, as they did every day of the week – apparently because Alcibiades had once broken in at dead of night to eradicate investigations into his financial affairs, which had been stored inside. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistai, 9.407b–c, on which see Miller (1995), 137. Cf. Plato, Alcibiades I 134b.

  4 The following details are as laid out by Diogenes Laertius, 1.5.43. Since this is a later source/tradition it is quite possible that this aspect of Socrates’ afterlife was fabricated. Still, given the quick turnaround of Athenian attitude exemplified by Mytilene, it is also a possibility.

  5 Was it simply because we are deeply uncomfortable with those who break the mould? As Alcibiades asserts in the Symposium (Plato, Symposium, 221c), what Socrates did again and again and again was to take men out of their comfort zones.

  6 Some say that there is a certain blackness in Socrates’ philosophy. In Plato’s, yes, in Socrates’– who can say? As we live our lives with intelligence agencies investing massively in venture capital in order to keep the toys in their box cutting-edge, one wonders whether Socrates would have heaved a world-weary sigh. Don’t put all your energies into spy machines, why not try to stop the need for spying? Don’t build walls and ships; try to discover ‘the good’ in those around us. Instead of creating a pretend world on earth – with pretty, impressive objects such as the Parthenon, the White House, the Kremlin – striving to create, and invent, and battle-building yourself out of trouble, make your heart strong. Nowadays we look anxiously for our enemies; for anarchists, terrorists, capitalists, communists, nihilists. But Socrates reminds us of the uncomfortable truth, that the enemy is always within. It is down to us. That it is not ‘their’ fault, but ‘ours’ has to be his single most important, and hard-to-swallow, philosophy.