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Published by Jonathan Cape 2010
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Copyright © Bettany Hughes 2010
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First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Jonathan Cape
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ISBN 9780224071789
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Also by Bettany Hughes
Praise for Helen of Troy
1 Acknowledgements
2 Preface
3 Introduction
4 The dramatic story of Socrates – sources and approach
5 Dramatis personæ
6 List of Illustrations
7 Maps
ACT ONE – ATHENA’S CITY
1 The water-clock: time to be judged
2 Athena’s city
3 Socrates in the Agora
4 The Stoa of the King
5 The first blood sacrifice
6 Checks, balances and magic-men
7 Persuade or obey
8 Peitho – the power of persuasion
ACT TWO – SOCRATES AS A YOUNG MAN
9 Alopeke: a philosopher is born
10 Kerameikos – potters and beautiful boys
11 Pericles: high society, and democracy as high theatre
12 Delos – and the birth of an empire
13 Purple ambition
14 Paddling in the river, sweating in the gym: Socratic youth
15 Gym-hardened fighting men
16 ‘Golden Age’ Athens
17 Aspasia – Sophe Kai Politike, Wise and Politically Astute
ACT THREE – SOCRATES THE SOLDIER
18 Samos
19 Flexing muscles
20 Socrates the soldier
21 Demons and virtues
22 The plague
ACT FOUR – NEW GODS, NEW POSSIBILITIES: SOCRATES IN MIDDLE AGE
23 Silver Owls and a wise owl
24 Hot air in the Agora
25 Democracy, liberty and freedom of speech
26 The good life – after dark
27 Delphi, the Oracle
28 Gnothi Seauton – Know Yourself
29 Aristocrats, democrats and the realities of war
ACT FIVE – THE FIGHT GOES ON
30 The Peloponnesian War phase two – a messy siege
31 Brickbats and bouquets
32 Amphipolis
ACT SIX – SOCRATES AND LOVE
33 Socrates in the symposium
34 The trouble with love
35 Oh, tell me the truth about love
36 Diotima – a very social priestess
37 Little Bears
38 Xanthippe
39 Alcibiades: violet-crowned, punch-drunk
ACT SEVEN – CUTTING DOWN THE TALLEST CORN
40 Melos
41 Venus de Milo abused
42 Priest of nonsense: playing with fire
43 Sicily
44 Rivers of blood
45 Decelea – closing down the mines
46 Time of terror
47 Arginusae – standing out in the crowd
48 Tall poppies, cut corn
49 Thirty Tyrants
ACT EIGHT – THE TRIAL AND DEATH OF SOCRATES
50 The scapegoat
51 An apology
52 Twilight and Delos at dawn
53 Socrates bound
54 Flight from the world
Coda: The tomb of Socrates – the Tower of the Winds
Afterword
Appendix One: Honouring Aphrodite
Appendix Two: Mysteria – the Eleusinian Mysteries
Timeline
Text Acknowledgements
Image Acknowlegements
Notes
Bibliography
Plates
For
KE-SE-NE-WI-JA
xenwia and xenia
and therefore for my
friends, at home and abroad.
ALSO BY BETTANY HUGHES
Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore
Many wonders, many terrors, but none more wonderful or more terrible than a human being.
Sophocles, Antigone, 332
And what kind of person is more loved by the gods than the one who is most happy?
Xenophon describing Socrates in his Memorabilia, 4.8.3
I have referenced the works, both ancient and modern, upon which I have relied heavily or which might be of further interest to the reader. Although I would have loved Socrates to be Sokrates – and hence more Hellenic, I have in general chosen the more familiar, Latinised versions of the names of literary and historical figures and places.
The translations are my own or a collaborative effort between myself and my colleagues unless otherwise stated.
For help, humour, hospitality and the gift of nous my heartfelt thanks go to;
Julian Alexander, Anna Antoniou, Professor Mary Beard, Professor Lisa Bendall, Richard Bradley, Professor Sue Blundell, Professor John Camp, Professor Paul Cartledge, Sophia and Alex Constantidis, Professor Michael Cosmopoulos, Professor James Davidson, Dr Angelos Delivorrias, Professor Matthew Dickie, Dr Matt Edge, Kathy Elgin, Lucy Felmingham, Wing Commander John Foden (who, age 83 led me through the mountains of the Peloponnese), Spiro and Millie Flamburiari (thank you for introducing me to the delights of Corcyra), Dr Annelise Freisenbruch, Professor Betsy Gebhard, Dr Dimitris Grigoropoulos, Dr Angie Hobbs, Dr Dan Hogg, Ben Jackson, John, Jenny, Jane and Julia (for the houses), Professor Robin Lane-Fox, Bill Locke, Jack Maclnnes, John Morcom, Dr Alfonso Moreno, Peter Millett, Professor Dirk Obbink, Justin Pollard, Jennifer Redfearn, Professor P. J. Rhodes, Laura Rizzotto, Sophia Roberts, Professor Charlotte Roueché, Dr Deborah Ruscillo, John Savage, Dr Michael Scott, Philip Sellars, Dr Victoria Solomonidis, Julietta Steinhauer, Dr Claire Stocks, Professor Barry Strauss, Professor Oliver Taplin, Lieutenant-Commander Alec Tilley, Dr Nicola Wardle, Olivia Williams. The staff of the Ashmolean and British Museums, the German Archaeological Institute, the Naples Museum and the Samos Epigraphical Museum, thank you for your patience. St. Hilda’s College – my alma mater – always there for me. Professor Dirk Obbink – the treasures from the sands of Egypt have been patiently and generously revealed. Robin – you fired me to do all of this, when we meet or talk or I read a word of your work I remember why every single one of your tutorials was wildly inspirational. Never a dull moment. Matti and Nicholas Egon have been, as ever, wonderful. The world owes you much. Professor John Camp, your guided tours were exceptionally helpful, and illuminating for both me and my girls. Peter and Anna, you’ve let me impose on your hospitality so many times now, and Athens will not be the same without you. Pete, our road trips have been amongst the happiest days of my life. Sorrel and May Evans – thank you very much for reading out those Plato quotes at times of need. Adrian, thank you for living with a backview at a computer for the last five years. Ma and pa you made it possible.
Without the undinting support of all of the above this book simply would not have made it into print.
Ellah Allfrey and Dan Franklin sympathetically honed the text and saved me from both extreme colloquialism and self-indulgence, Tom Avery – the man with the most beautiful writing in the world, was charm personified despite my increasingly wild demands, Neil – thank you for the extension, Will for your good judgement, and Clara for your vivacity and vision. Julian Alexander my Literary Agent has been my rock and has become one of my dear friends, you have made my life better – and whenever I think of you I smile. Dr Alfonso Moreno, Dr Angie Hobbs, Professor Oliver Taplin, Professor Michael Cosmopoulos, Professor James Davidson, Professor Elizabeth Gebhard, Professor Matthew Dickie, Peter Millett, Dr Matt Edge have all been kind enough to read all or part of this text and save me from error and mania. Paul Cartledge has proved himself, once again, to be both the superior friend and scholar. He has met last minute requests to look over this text – I blush to think how many times – with grace and generosity. He is one of the reasons I love antiquity with such a passion.
Those who are already wise no longer love wisdom – whether they are gods or men. Similarly, those whose own ignorance has made them bad, rotten, evil, do not strive for wisdom either. For no evil or ignorant person ever strives for wisdom. What remains are those who suffer from ignorance, but still retain some sense and understanding. They are conscious of knowing what they don’t know.
Socrates in Plato’s Lysis, 218b, fourth century BC
PUT TWO AUTHORS TOGETHER IN A room and someone is bound to leave mildly depressed. The only exception seems to be when one of the pair is Peter Cook. Meeting a fellow writer in a bar, so the anecdote goes, he was asked whether he was penning a book. ‘Yes, I’m not either …’ came the soothing reply.
No such comfort for me. Sharing breakfast in an Edinburgh hotel with an award-winning novelist, just as I embarked on this book, the friendly chat came round to our next projects.
‘Socrates! What a doughnut subject!’ he exclaimed. ‘Gloriously rich, with a whacking hole in the middle where the central character should be …’ My smile fixed. Of course he is right: because as far as we know, Socrates wrote down not one word of philosophy. The idea of Socrates is immensely influential, and yet everything we know of him is hearsay. He is, historically, conspicuous by his absence. And thus for the past five years, as I’ve typed, I have had a spectral doughnut hovering over my shoulder.
But painters will tell you that the truest way to represent a shape is to deal with the space around it. The primary-source, autobiographical, historical Socrates is a lacuna; my hope is that by looking at the shape around the Socrates-sized hole, at the city in which he lived – Athens in the fifth century BC – I can begin to write not quite a life of Socrates, but a vivid sketch of Socrates in his landscape; a topography of the man in his times.
I have a warehouse full of unusual allies in this task – the earth-shifters, bulldozers, spades and trowels that have been picking over the Greek landscape in the last few years. The millennial year of 2000, the promise of a Greek Olympics in 2004, the new Acropolis Museum, a change in planning law – all these things have yielded huge amounts of material evidence from the fifth century BC. Socrates is an eidolon – the Greek word gives us idol, a ghost – who haunts a very real landscape. By exploring this physical landscape my hope is to flesh out this idol, and to imagine the life of one of the most provocative and provoking thinkers of all time.1
The unexamined life is not a life worth living for a human being.
Socrates, in Plato’s Apology, 38a1
WE THINK THE WAY WE DO because Socrates thought the way he did. Socrates’ belief that, as individuals, we need to question the world around us stands at the heart of what it means to live in ‘modern times’. In the Socratic Dialogues, generated twenty-four centuries ago, we find the birth of ethos – ethics2 – and the identification of the psyche.3 ‘The First Martyr’ – the Greek martys means ‘witness’ – a witness to ‘truth, virtue, justice’ and ‘freedom of speech’, is commemorated as a bedrock of our civilisation.
Socrates stands at the beginning of our world – when democracy and liberty are first conceived as fundamental values of society. We need to understand him because he did not just pursue the meaning of life, but the meaning of our own lives.4
Socrates sees us coming. He worries that the pursuit of plenty will bring mindless materialism, that ‘democracy’ will become just a banner under which to fight. What is the point, he says, of warships and city walls and glittering statues if we are not happy? If we have lost sight of what is good? His is a question that is more pertinent now than ever. He asks: ‘What is the right way to live?’
I am a stinging fly, sent to goad the city as though it were a huge, thoroughbred horse, which because of its size is rather sluggish and needs to be stirred.5
When Socrates comes into focus, in Greece in the fifth century BC, he is no didact: he wanders through the streets of Athens, debating the essence of what it means to be human. For the young men (and women) of the city he is irresistible: his relentless questioning appears to tap man’s potential for self-knowledge. His ‘ethics’ programme centres on the search for the ‘good life’. His, it was whispered – then and through the next 2,400 years – is a voice of incomparable sophia: of knowledge, skill, wisdom and truth. The greater part of Socrates’ life was spent out in public, in Athens, philosophising unrestricted. But when the philosopher was seventy, Athens turned against him. In March 399 BC the ageing citizen was tried in a religious court and found guilty of both primary and secondary charges: ‘not duly acknowledging the city’s gods and inventing new ones’ and ‘corrupting the youth’. The death sentence was passed: four weeks or so later Socrates killed himself by drinking the hemlock poison left for him by his jailer in his Athenian cell.
Socrates’ arguments were perhaps just too incendiary, too dangerously charismatic. He believed that man had the potential to enjoy perfect happiness. A clue to the contemporary impact of his ideas is given by his pupil Plato. In the Allegory of the Cave,6 with cool detail, Plato has Socrates describe a race of men who have been born in chains, and who, staring for ever at a cave wall, see only the shadows of creatures above them and believe these shadows to be reality. He then reveals the dismay and joy these captives feel when they are brought, blinking, into the light of the real world. The chained men represent those of humanity who have yet to hear or understand what Socrates has to say.
However, when it comes to wholeheartedly embracing the new, mankind displays a poor record. In a superstitious city, Socrates’ spiritual and moral make-up was unconventional, troubling. He seems to have suffered from some form of epilepsy or ‘petit mal’ (hence his curious cataleptic seizures, when he stared into the distance for hours on end), which in a pious age was interpreted as a malign ‘inner voice’.7 His contemporary, the playwright Aristophanes, talks of the passionate men who go to hear him preach and turn their minds to fundamental issues rather than frivolities as having been ‘Socratified’. And in his comedy, Clouds,8 Aristophanes jeers at Socrates’ high-minded eccentricities, has him clamber into a raised bath and scramble around in the clouds to ‘peer at the arse of the moon’. Democracies need pragmatists, yet Socrates refuses to contain himself, to temper the power of principle. So pheme – rumour, gossip – starts to fly through Athena’s city. As the robust philosopher is only too aware, a whispering campaign is the most pernicious and insidious of enemies.9
These people who have thrown scandal at me are genuinely dangerous. They’ve used envy and slander and they’re difficult to deal with. I cannot possibly bring them into court to cross-question them or refute their charges. I have to defend myself as if I were boxing with shadows.10
In all cities, it is easier to hurt a man than to help him.
Plato, Meno, 94e
In the Metropolitan Museum in New York hangs a painting of Socrates, dying, by the great neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David. Socrates – speaking slowly but determinedly as the hemlock runs through his veins, a martyr to virtue and high principle – is surrounded by agitated disciples.11 Crouched around his bed are those men such as Plato who will carry his words into literature and thus on into the very DNA of world civilisation.12
Now it is time for us to go away, for me to die and for you to live; but which of us is going to a better condition is not known to anyone except god.13
This is not, in principle, a book of philosophic theory. I am a historian, not a philosopher, and cannot possibly better the work of those who have gone before me, who have squeezed ever-evolving interpretations out of Socrates’ philosophical ideas; Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes the Cynic, Al-Kindi, Yehuda ha-Levi, Thomas Hobbes et al., all these men have tussled with what Socrates’ philosophy means. That is a bulging canon and one I would not presume to augment. But I can turn my eyes to the stones under my feet. I can see how Socrates’ philosophy evolved in his time and his place.
For the purposes of this book, the joy of Socratic thought is that Socrates did not believe in or deal with abstracts. For him, morality stemmed from and emerged to deal with real problems in a real world. The characters he employs as porters for his ideas are often cobblers, bakers, priestesses, whores. Socrates continually emphasises that he is flesh and blood, and that it is as a flesh-and-blood man that he lived and understood life. It is one of the reasons his philosophy is so accessible to all of us. So bringing the humble, the archaeological and the physical back into the Socratic experience is appropriate. The totemic ideas that Socrates delivered were, put simply, as much to do with the religious ritual he had just witnessed down at his local harbour, with the pleasure of walking barefoot through Athens, with the death of a loved one, or the horror of living through a wasting-war, as they were with any kind of purely intellectual concept. Socrates’ prime concern was with the world as lived. As this book weaves together the mongrel evidence for his life, where material remains are as valued as literary and documentary sources, a picture emerges of a world that is, for the first time, self-consciously trying to build a ‘civilisation’ that is based on a ‘democracy’.14
Yet Socrates is not concerned just with our surroundings, but what is within us. ‘He who orders us to know ourselves is bidding us to become acquainted with our soul.’15 Socrates is soulful. The philosopher believes open conversation an essential balm for the psyche. His method gets inner thoughts out into the public sphere, not as a monologue, but as a dialogue. For him this was cathartic – Plato uses the Greek word, katharsis16– releasing ‘bad things’ from the spirit. Socrates is the first man for whom we have an extant record who explores how we should all live in the world, as the world was working out how to live with itself.
Truth is in fact a purification [katharsis] … and self-restraint and justice and courage and wisdom itself are a kind of purification.17
Socrates’ philosophy is relevant to all of us, not least because it has been so tenacious. From Elizabeth I to Martin Luther King, from the Third Reich to twenty-first-century America, Socrates’ example has been used to try to understand what society is, and what it should be. Socratic words filled the halls of Italian Renaissance humanists. The Jewish philosopher Yehuda ha-Levi in the eleventh century AD cites Socrates in a dialogue with King Khazar concerning the nature of Judaism. John Locke and Thomas Hobbes scatter their treatises of political theory with Socratic quotations.
Socrates was also a central influence in early Islam. Al-Kindi, the ‘first’ self-professed Arab philosopher, certainly the first Muslim philosopher, wrote extensive (long-lost) treatises on Socrates in the ninth century AD.18 Socratic wisdoms were quoted in coloured stone, mortared into the very fabric of public buildings in Samarkand. The philosopher was nominated one of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his nickname ‘The Source’. Socrates’ inner voice was thought by medieval Muslims a sign that he was an angel in poor man’s clothing. Throughout the Arab world from the eleventh century AD up until the present day he was said to refresh and nourish, ‘like … the purest water in the midday heat’.19
And yet why should we still care for him? Why commemorate this long-ago life? One good reason is because Socrates does that shocking thing – that thing we still crave – he implies there might be a way to be fulfilled on this earth. Socrates was magnetic because he counselled care of the soul. He believed that men can achieve true happiness only when they are at peace with themselves.20 He suggested it is ‘us,’ not ‘them’, who can make things better.
Socrates, as I have said, is tantalisingly elusive. But what we do have in our favour is the physical setting of his ‘not thereness’. If the play of fifth-century BC Athenian life was lovingly crafted by Plato, and Socrates was his inspiration, then the stage-set, Athens, is still available to all of us. All agree, when it comes to Socrates, that he was down-to-earth. His was a great mind supported by feet of clay. And it is those muddy footsteps that I will follow. So this is not a philosophical, but a topographical map of the man.
There are many reasons why Socrates’ story demands to be told. It is, at its most basic, an electric courtroom drama. The men of Athens vote to exterminate Socrates. They think he is a threat. He thinks he can save the soul of the city. Is this mob-rule, a political conspiracy, or the perfect example of the rule of the majority? Is Socrates’ story a tragedy or a useful staging post in the development of civilisation? Who is in the right?21 The story of Socrates also incarnates the tension between the freedom of the individual and the regulation of the community. His refusal to compromise ends in his death. It is for this reason that he is hailed as humanity’s first-recorded ideological martyr.
Socrates’ life was spent in search of treasure, of an intimate understanding of humanity. And the combusting energy of that search drove him around the city of Athens. This book pursues the path he burned. His quest was to identify what place ‘the good’ might have in human society. We might not find that ultimate prize; Socrates himself was never sure that he had done so, and the only thing he seems to have been certain of was the futility of trying to find ‘real’ scientific explanations for everything in life. He thought it fruitless to stare at the skies and travel to the ends of the earth in order to catalogue the world, without learning to love it. Yet by inhabiting the Athens that raised him, we might just get a glimpse of the treasure-seeker: hot and cross sometimes, bad-tempered, self-absorbed, brilliant, dangerous, droll. Socrates never lost sight of his own temporality. The day he is condemned to death he declares: ‘I am, as Homer puts it, “not born of an oak or a rock”, but of human parents.’22 And so this books aims, physically, to inhabit Socrates’ Athens – not just as recorded and as promoted, but as lived and experienced.
The city of Athens is Socrates. Nothing means more to Socrates than Athens, and, more importantly, than the Athenians within it. He tells one of his colleagues Phaedrus that his home, his world, is the city – a city full of people. For Socrates, people are his magnetic North: he loved them. Xenophon reports that his conversations ‘were always about human concerns. He dealt with questions such as how people please and displease the gods, what is the essence/purpose of beauty and ugliness, justice and injustice, prudence and moderation, courage and cowardice.’23 All his philosophy is drawn to understanding the being of men and women around him. This understanding, this consciousness of one’s own consciousness, is what Socrates calls the ‘psyche’– the life-breath or soul. And it is in the city of Athens, between the years 469 and 399 BC, that Socrates’ soul flits.
My ambition is very simple: to re-enter the streets of Athens in real time. Not to revisit a Golden Age city, but to look at a real city-state that was forging a great political experiment and riveting a culture; a city that suffered war and plague as well as enjoying great triumphs. To inhabit a place that is at once absolutely recognisable and utterly strange. To breathe the air Socrates breathed. To meet democrats who pre-date democracy and philosophers who operate before the science of philosophy is born.
This history is pathos. Socrates’ life and trial and death by hemlock are stories that Athens did not want fully told, but which we need to hear.
The words of Socrates survive and always will, although he wrote
nothing and left no work or testament.
Dio Chrysostom, On Socrates, 54, first century AD
TRADITIONALLY WE MEET Socrates when a few of the key authors from antiquity, in particular Plato and Xenophon (both pro-Socrates) and Aristophanes (mixed), decide to open the door to him: but in that doorway there is always the screen of the author’s opinions, their take on what they choose us to see. So, when we read the ‘words’ of Socrates, it is hard to tell whether these are his or another’s attitude, another’s philosophical enterprise.1
There is a second challenge. Plato, Aristophanes and Xenophon – Socrates’ immediate or close contemporaries, men who are the fathers of Western philosophy, drama and chronicle – each deal with Socrates in a notably theatrical way.
Plato writes as a dramatist, a frustrated playwright. In his work the ‘character’ of Socrates is – as all great theatrical characters are – essentially charismatic, articulate and, to some extent, fabricated. The dramatic persona is both amplified and collapsed, it is extra-articulate and two-dimensional. Plato’s Socratic Dialogues – crafted between twenty and forty years after Socrates died – are brilliantly constructed, designed to engage. Plato teases us and plays with us (he throws all the tricks of the entertainer into his work), which of course leaves us with the possibility that it is all just a fantasy. Xenophon is not much more help. Although more down-to-earth and literal, his hard-fact histories are communicated via animated, reported dialogue. Aristophanes, who satirises Socrates mercilessly, is not a biographer – he is a dramatist with a biting wit, he plays to the gallery; he strives to make his audience howl with laughter. Spend long enough with the Socratic texts from the fifth and fourth centuries BC and you feel as though you have sat through a series of ‘Socrates Shows’ – the TV docudrama, the West End, Hollywood and Broadway versions of a man’s life.2
Yet these individuals, Socrates’ contemporary biographers,3 were not just showmen. They understood that drama can be an arterial route to truth. Socrates never wrote anything down, because, as he went about his philosophical business on the streets of fifth-century Athens, he believed in the honesty of joint-witnessing. For Plato to give Socrates a living voice in dialogue was as close as he could get to the original ‘Socratic’ experience.4 The detail in Plato’s work is conspicuous. We hear of the species of trees that shade Socrates, the birds he hears sing, the discomfort of the wooden benches he lies upon, the shoemakers he talks to, the hiccups he cures.
If this detail were utterly inappropriate, or fanciful, Plato would have been laughed out of the Academy he set up in around 387 BC, and out of history. Plato, along with Xenophon and Aristophanes, wrote for their fifth- and fourth-century BC peers – for men who were contemporaries of Socrates, many of whom were intimately involved in the philosopher’s life and eyewitnesses to the events of the age. Downright lies just wouldn’t have washed.5
Plato’s memory matters. As a species, we remember and often we think in pictures, not words. Our visual memories are more acute than our aural.6 In neuroscience these experiences are known as ‘episodic memories’ – vivid, patchy, but with a sensory quality that can be remarkably accurate. It is very likely that the physical setting that Plato provides for Socrates can be relied upon; the punchy, sensuous real-life scenarios he supplies are exactly the kinds of details that stick in the cortex. Add to that the fact that the Ancient Greeks invested in landscape in a way we can only begin to imagine: not only was visual stimulus, visual expression fundamental to society, but the world they saw was a place where spirits resided, a place full of signs and symbols. One begins to realise that the Platonic setting of ancient Athens was no mere convenient backdrop, but a four-dimensional landscape that Socrates, in real life as well as in Plato’s imagination, almost certainly, vigorously occupied.7
Plato was perhaps over-compensating; doubtless some of those ‘Socratic’ sentiments were in fact his own – and so he gave us a virtual world, stocked with the real things that he and Socrates saw around them, copper-plating his own credibility as the historical-Socrates’ mouthpiece. But Plato’s reputation now has archaeology on its side.8 His philosophies work on many levels, but the hard facts they contain were certainly not all a lie. Archaeological digs – each year – are substantiating and backing up in precise detail the picture of fifth-century Athens that Plato so skilfully and energetically painted just after Socrates’ death, 2,400 years ago. For the first time, for example, we can walk beside the narrow streets that lie under the new Acropolis Museum and across the Painted Stoa (a covered area or walkway) where Plato, as a young, impressionable man, sat and listened to Socrates speak. The ancient stones match Plato’s ancient words.9
And so my attempt has been to re-create Socrates’ world.10 To follow the clues in Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes to the physical reality of fifth-century Athens and therefore the physical reality of the story of Socrates’ life. Through his dialogues Plato has given us the ‘play’ of Socrates’ life, and described the most appropriate scenery before which the character of Socrates should enter. It is that scenery, that setting, that is now turning up in digs across the city.
The life of fifth-century Athens was itself, in essence, dramatic. Not only does Socrates’ life span seventy of the busiest, most wonderful and tragic years in Athenian history, but the Athenians did, physically, construct a backdrop of democratic ‘theatre’ in which to play out their lives – democratic buildings, scenery, speeches, statues, props, music to help make their new democracy feel real.
Socrates will be best served not by Aristophanes’ pantomime Clouds, but by a solid stage to stand on, from which he can speak audibly and directly to us, his audience. To this end I have used the latest sources – archaeological, topographical, textual – to construct a life for a man we can all benefit from getting to know a little better.11
ARISTOPHANES IS THE OLDEST OF OUR sources for Socrates. A comic playwright, over his forty-year career he attacked everything from beetle-dung to apparently serious politics. These onslaughts earned him enemies: among them was Cleon, a hard-line demagogue who argued for the destruction of the entire male population of Mytilene in 427 BC and again at Scione in 423 BC. Cleon pursued Aristophanes in the courts, and in return was ridiculed repeatedly until his death at the Battle of Amphipolis in 422 BC. Aristophanes would continue making scabrous jibes at politicians at all levels, and mild satire of the Athenian people in general. Another target was Socrates himself, who was turned into a figure of fun in Clouds. Comic licence makes it hard to determine how serious this character assassination was: Plato suggests that Aristophanes helped fuel the public distrust of Socrates,1 yet Aristophanes also features as an amiable dinner-companion of Socrates in Plato’s Symposium, which is set after Clouds was first performed. Despite the violence of his satire, Aristophanes survived the deadly series of revolutions and politically motivated assassinations that characterised the final years of the Peloponnesian War in Athens.2
Aristophanes’ career started with The Banqueters in 427 BC. He composed at least forty plays of which only eleven survive. Clouds, in which Socrates figures prominently, was produced in 423 BC. Clouds was not successful, finishing in last place at the City Dionysia festival. The poet-playwright’s career continued until shortly before he died in 386 BC.
Banqueters (427 BC); Babylonians (426); Acharnians (425); Knights (424); Clouds (423); Wasps (422); Peace (421); Amphiaraus (414); Birds (414); Lysistrata (411); Women at the Thesmophoria (411); a first Plutus (408); Frogs (405); Ecclesiazusae (391); a second Plutus (388); Cocalus and Aiolosikon (possible dates 387 BC and 386 BC3).
Xenophon’s life was spent in warfare. Born near the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, probably in Erchia, a rural deme of Athens,4 he would later write treatises on horsemanship from his estate near Olympia on the plains of the Peloponnese. Xenophon had probably served in the Athenian cavalry during the Peloponnesian War, and fought against the democratic insurgents in the Athenian civil war of 404/3 BC. After the democratic victory, Xenophon left Greece. He went to Anatolia to join the ‘Ten Thousand’, the Greek mercenary force supporting Cyrus the Younger’s attempt to usurp the Persian throne. Cyrus was killed at Cunaxa (near Babylon) in 401 BC, and the five Greek generals in command of the Ten Thousand were themselves murdered soon after; Xenophon’s star rose in their place, as he led the surviving Greeks on a dangerous and violent journey back to safety near Trapezus. It was during this period that Socrates was executed, and scholars are divided on how well the two men could have been acquainted.5 Xenophon continued as a mercenary, first in Thrace and then for the Spartans in Anatolia and mainland Greece. Exiled by Athens, but protected by the Spartans, he was set up on an estate at Skillus, where he wrote most of his works. After the Spartan defeat at Leuctra, Xenophon was expelled from his estate and, though now reconciled with Athens, lived out the rest of his years near Corinth. His son Gryllus was killed fighting in the Athenian cavalry close to Mantinea in 362 BC.
Apology (composed after 384 BC?); Memorabilia (commenced); Symposium (before 371?); Memorabilia (completed); Oeconomicus (completed after 362) Socrates also features in Xenophon’s Hellenica (not completed before 359– 355 BC), a history of Greek affairs from 411 to 362 BC.6
Plato was in his late twenties when Socrates was executed in 399 BC. He had probably known Socrates for all of his adult life.7 Born sometime around 428–423 BC perhaps in Athens, into an aristocratic Athenian family, Plato was descended from Solon, who tradition claimed had brought democracy to the city.8 Plato’s uncle, Critias, headed the Thirty Tyrants, the murderous pro-Spartan faction that briefly controlled Athens after the end of the Peloponnesian War. Plato himself had been born in 428/7, not long after this war started. Growing up in the Athenian district of Cotyllus, he probably followed the normal educational path of a young aristocratic boy in poetry, music and gymnastics. He was a champion wrestler, almost certainly later serving in the Athenian military, presumably in the cavalry.9 After Socrates’ death, Plato’s life was nomadic and eventful. He spent time in Megara, Egypt and southern Italy, associating with tyrants in Sicily and even being sold into (and immediately ransomed from) slavery on the island of Aegina in 388/7 BC. Shortly afterwards he seems to have established the Academy in Athens, one of the most significant intellectual institutions in the history of the world. There men such as Aristotle met; they were not taught as such, but engaged in the long conversations that characterise Plato’s written output, and which Plato considered the necessary foundation-stone of all philosophical progress. Plato died in 348/7 BC.
It is important to remember that both Plato and Xenophon composed their works convinced that Athenians were wrong to vote for the death of Socrates.
The works are divided into three fluid and still-controversial periods: (a) early, (b) middle, (c) late. Perhaps Lysis was written while Socrates was still alive.
(a) Hippias Minor; Ion; Crito; Euthyphro; Laches; Charmides; Lysis; Menexenus; Protagoras; Meno; Gorgias; Euthydemus
(b) Cratylus; Hippias Maior (both perhaps early); Phaedo; Symposium; Republic (perhaps Book 1 is early); Phaedrus (perhaps late)
(c) Parmenides; Theaetetus; Sophist; Politicus; Philebus; Timaeus; Critias; Laws; (falsely attributed), Plato Alcibiades 1
450 – Parmenides; 433/2 – Protagoras; 431–404 – Republic, Gorgias; 429 – Charmides; 424 – Laches; 422 – Cratylus; 418–416 – Phaedrus; 416 – Symposium; 413 – Ion; 409 – Lysis; 407 – Euthydemus; 402 – Meno; winter 402/1 – Menexenus; spring 399 – Theaetetus; 399 – Euthyphro, Symposium (frame), Statesman; May–June 399 – Apology; June–July 399 – Crito, Phaedo
The Greek Mainland, c.400 BC
Asia Minor
Plan of the Athenian Agora
Sicily and Southern Italy
Athens
1. Portrait Herm of Socrates. Busts or herms of Socrates were popularly produced throughout antiquity. The majority that survive are Roman-period copies of Greek originals. We are told that almost immediately after Socrates’ state-assisted suicide the Athenians regretted their decision and set up a bronze statue of the philosopher just outside the Dipylon Gate. Many later sculptures were thought to be based on one original.
2. Excavations of the north-west side Athens’ Agora, 19 June 1931. On the far right is the hill of Kolonos Agoraios and the Hephaisteion. The first shovel struck the site in May 1931.
3. A reconstruction of the kleroterion – the random selection machine which allotted office in the democracy. Each of the jurors during Socrates’ trial would have been adult, male citizens and would have had to have put themselves up for selection for this state-sponsored duty.
4. Vase depicting women gathered at the fountains of Athens just before dawn. This was considered one of the few times of the day that respectable females in the city could exchange gossip and information.
5. Boiotian terracotta figurine, late Archaic (c.500–475 BC) showing a Greek mother carrying her child. Socrates was born in 469 BC, and in one account of his life we hear that he too rode ‘shoulder-high’ on his father.
6. A rare vase scene; the domestic interior of an Athenian home.
7. Eugene Vanderpool, Professor of Archaeology of the American School 1947–1971. ‘EV’ examines a carved stone stele publishing the ‘Law Against Tyranny’. The inscription is surmounted by an image of Demokratia crowning the people of Athens.
8. The martial might of the men of Athens was celebrated by many of the great sculptors of the day. It was these paragons – in particular the young men of Athens – whom Socrates was accused of corrupting. In these portraits, which had originally stood in Athens’ Agora, the ‘tyrant-slayers’ Harmodios and Aristogeiton are lauded.
9. The beauty of young Athenian men is apparent from this sculpture – dating to c.480 BC. It was recently excavated during the rescue digs in Athens at the time of the construction of the new metro system. The head was discovered at the north-eastern edge of the National Gardens near Herodou Attikou Street. Note the full mouth and finely cast eyelashes.
10. A portrait herm, possibly depicting Aspasia, currently held by the Vatican.
11. Socrates is imagined dancing to Aspasia’s tune in this French cartoon of 1842.
12. Two hoplite soldiers, named Chairedemos and Lykeas, on a funerary relief from the Piraeus Museum. Socrates on his military campaigns would have been turned out as the Athenian hoplite is on the right.
13. Later cultures played on the possibilities of a sexual relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades. This touched up tint came from Manchester in 1884 and was reprinted in 1906 in the De Figura Veneris (the manual of Classical Erotology). Of course we hear from Plato that Socrates refused Alcibiades’ advances.
14. The so-called Mourning Athena relief, commissioned around 460 BC. The artist is clearly endeavouring to portray the weight of responsibility that comes with success. The relief is now beautifully displayed in the new Acropolis Museum, Athens.
15. Athena’s Silver Owl: the coin that came to be emblematic of both Athens’ wealth, and her control of the economy in the Eastern Mediterranean for a substantial part of the fifth-century BC. The silver to create this coinage came from silver-bearing seams of lead in the mines of Laurion, to the south-east of Athens.
16. The north-east corner of the Athenian Agora in 1931. By the end of the first excavating season many of the key landmarks of the marketplace of Socrates’ day had been revealed. The foreground column rests on foundation stones of Athens’ great ‘records office’, the Metroon. Behind this are the foundations of the monument of Eponymous Heroes and beyond that the steps and altar stone of the Altar of Zeus Agoraios, where, it was said, Socrates’ father had prayed for his idiosyncratic son’s future.
17. A rare representation of a slave from the bottom of a drinking cup. The man is shackled and is collecting rocks. c.490–480 BC. Viciously sturdy metal shackles from the early fourth-century BC have been found in the Athenian-run silver-mining district of Laurion.
18. A stern Socrates rescues Alcibiades from the pitfalls and snares of the world (in this case the arms of two beautiful young women). Possibly the work of Lorenzo Bartolini (1777–1850) but also attributed to Antonio Canova.
19. Although Plato tells us that Socrates was not interested in the physical aspects of erotic love, as this kylix indicates, this was not an activity to which fifth-century Greeks were inured.
20. Marble stele (marble from Mount Hymettus), showing a priestess holding a giant temple-key. The stele was discovered at the site of Rhamnous and could therefore be a representation of a priestess in charge of the cult there of the deity Nemesis. The ribbon-band in the woman’s hair is also a sign of her sacral position.
21 & 22. Two representations of Socrates suffering at the hands of his ‘shrewish’ wife Xanthippe. As imagined in Stuttgart in 1467, and Antwerp 1579.
23. The physiognomy of Socrates under scrutiny, 1789.
24. Ostrakon (a broken piece of pot with the name of an Athenian citizen scratched upon it) voting for the ostracism of Alcibiades in 416 BC.
25. After the Athenian defeat at Aegospotamoi all Athens’ subject allies deserted. Samos though remained staunchly democratic. As an act of thanks all Samian citizens were given Athenian citizenship, a pact which is sealed here on a stele of 405–403 BC where Hera (patron goddess of Samos) and Athena (patron goddess of Athens) shake hands.
26. The burnt head of Apollo, discovered buried beneath a pavement at Delphi. Apollo was the god honoured during the sacred month of the Delian expedition. Athens, and her people, could not be polluted by spilt blood at this time, and so once Socrates had been condemned to death he had to wait for at least twenty-eight days until the sacred embassy returned from the island of Delos to the city-state. Only then could he drink his fatal hemlock draught.
27. The bronze name tickets used by Athenian citizens when they put themselves forward for selection as jurors. This particular strip belonged to a man called Demophanes, who came from the Kephesia deme of Athens (the region that has recently suffered so badly in summer fires).
28. The excavation of the Dipylon Gate at the Kerameikos in Athens at the beginning of the twentieth century. After Socrates’ death it was said that the mourning population of Athens, realising their mistake, set up a staue of the philosopher just in front of this gateway to the city.
29. Plato teaching Socrates, or leaning over his shoulder to learn from him. Illustration taken from Matthew Paris’ fortune-telling book c.1250 AD. Through the centuries, Socrates’ and Plato’s relationship has been interpreted and re-interpreted. In the Islamic tradition, Plato is allowed an ever increasing role. From the 16th century it was thought by the Ottoman rulers of Athens that the Parthenon was in fact Plato’s Academy.
30. ‘Socrates’ Tomb’, more correctly nominated the House of the Winds, as painted in 1839. The building was used by Muslim mystics for centuries.
31. Aphrodite on the so-called Ludovisi Throne rises from the sea-foam from which she was thought to be born c.470–460 BC.
32. The Ludovisi Throne. On the reverse of its exquisite representation of Aphrodite’s ocean-birth two ‘types’ of female inhabitants of Athens are shown. On the left a blatant ‘flute-girl’, a prostitute, on the right a respectable, veiled and covered Athenian woman-citizen burns incense for Aphrodite.
33. Socrates and the Stag. Socrates’ work and life came to represent, in the culture and philosophies of both East and West, what it was to be human.
How fitting is it to destroy an old man, a grey-headed man, beside the water-clock?
Aristophanes, Acharnians, 6941
IN MAY THE SUN RISES BRISKLY over Mount Penteli.
Five hundred men2 are walking with purpose through the tight, packed-gravel lanes of Athens, past the modest mud-brick houses, around the gaudy public monuments: the communal baths, the Temple of Athena Nike, the new mint. Some of these public buildings are still wet with paint, few are more than fifty years old. At times the walking men have to pick their way across distasteful evidence of trauma – over derelict homes and past gaunt-hungry citizens. Unpleasant reminders of the catastrophes Athena’s city has suffered during the last three decades: plague; foreign invasion; full-blown civil war; strife.
There are goats here, dogs, geese, cats, ducks; but hardly any women. Or at any rate there are few creatures classified as female; there are some shaven-headed slaves. These sub-human folk of Athens, male and female alike – ‘man-footed things’, ‘living tools’3 – have been about their business since well before dawn, preparing the food, mending the clothes, wiping the shit off the shoes of their masters.4 At this time of day, the majority of Athens’ other females, women-citizens, are moving back indoors. The night is their time. After dark, usually chaperoned, they are allowed out to gossip, to barter, to practise religious rites, and just before sunrise they collect around the fountains to gather water. Now, with the sun climbing into the sky, it is appropriate to leave the streets. To be shut up at home during daylight hours is the only way for a respectable Athenian woman to behave.
But times have been hard. Once Athens could boast a stakeholder population of more than 200,000. Now, at the beginning of the fourth century BC, the number of adult men living in the city-state is one-tenth that number, closer to just 20,000. Since the outbreak of war with another Greek city-state, Sparta, in 431 BC, many tens of thousands of male citizens have died: in 404–3 BC alone up to 1,500 were killed, not by foreign but Athenian hands – the death squads sponsored by rival factions during Athens’ bitter civil war. Now women are forced to do that which their grandmothers would never have dreamed possible: bake their own bread, live in a bigamous marriage, sell ribbons on street corners. Rather than enter and exit the city through 30-foot-high monumental gates, decorated with bronze, the surviving females must stepping-stone across the stumpy remains of Athens’ broken city walls; walls that were once the envy of all Greece.
A number of the men striding the street this late spring morning will be checking the precise time by the climb of the sun and the length of their shadow.5 But these urgent Athenians are pulled not just to the brightening of the sky, but by the drip, drip of progress. The new mechanical water-clock that marks out time in this most adventurous of cities is soon to have its plug pulled. The judicial day is about to begin.6
All are making their way towards a court – the religious court of the archon – the magistrate of sacred affairs, a site that today is dissected by the jaunty-orange, rattling Athens metro and flanked by trinket and umbrella sellers.7 This was, in the fifth century BC, a well-beaten path. Athens at that time was an exceedingly litigious place. In any one year up to 40,000 court cases might be heard. The Athenians loved a good legal brawl; their wrangles were a popular spectator sport. Agon – which translates as competition, struggle, set-to – is the Greek word often used. Gloves were off; agon