The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [100]
The water-table in Egypt is lower than it is elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, and as a result much organic material has survived in the sands there – evidence lost everywhere else in the world. So if we want to get an impression of the written landscape of Athens, oddly it is to evidence from Egypt that we must turn. This particular piece of papyrus in the Oxford collection, just under a foot long, half a foot wide, has emerged from a dig in the necropolis city of Saqqara, which once served ancient Memphis. The papyrus rectangle is a notice – one that was pinned up on the tent of Alexander the Great’s chief commanding officer and then discarded once its message no longer applied. The neatly, swiftly made, confident ink characters in perfect Ancient Greek read:
ROYAL ORDER OF THE MAIN GENERAL OF THE MACEDONIAN ARMY BY ORDER OF PUCHESTOS
DO NOT COME IN. OUT OF BOUNDS TO SOLDIERS.
RITUAL IN PRACTICE11
In that royal tent in Memphis priests were clearly at work and did not want to be disturbed. Although they have not survived, Athens’ streets would have been full of such messages. The Athenians set a precedent for keeping hoi polloi up to speed with what was going on behind closed doors. ‘Keep out’, ‘Occupied’, ‘Out to lunch, back in a short time’, ‘Ritual in progress’. All these day-to-day messages would have formed part of Socrates’ Athenian landscape.
But words in Athens could also have a sinister ring. Those whom the democracy disliked found their names scratched onto broken pottery shards – ostraka – gathered together by officials in giant pots and then systematically counted. The unfortunate man whose name appeared most frequently on these ostraka was ostracised, exiled from the city for ten years. Kleisthenes had instituted the system – originally to rid the city of would-be tyrants. But quickly ostracism came to be a handy way of eliminating the unsuccessful, or unpopularly successful, individuals. The piles of scratched ostraka in the Agora Museum in Athens are hard evidence of lives ruined; ‘Kallias’ is ostracised in c.450 BC, ‘Hyperbolus’ in 417–15 BC and another ‘Sokrates’, ‘Sokrates Anargyrasios’, in 443 BC. Tens of thousands of these ostraka have been discovered – many in the same hand, suggesting that votes were sometimes rigged. Resourceful law-breakers in Athens clearly offered a service whereby they could effect block-vote ostracism.12
Socrates was wary of the written word. His anxiety was that it could neither account for itself nor answer back. Words were everywhere in Athena’s city, but Socrates, unusually, did not set his own down on papyrus with an inky flourish. In a city filled with authors of every kind, he was anxious about the impact of writing without the accountability of face-to-face contact. ‘I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the appearance of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence.’13
For the first time in recorded history, words, and in particular written words, started to count as much as deeds. Socrates lived through an information revolution. By the time of his trial, a huge swathe of Athenians right down to the artisan class had become literate. Every excavating season wheelbarrow-loads of written material are rescued from the levels of Classical Athens. It was in Athens in the fifth century BC that the written word – which gives all of us so much – took flight. Athens declared its authority not just with fine monuments, but with strings of letters.
Now, from 429 BC onwards, that democratic life was not looking so rosy, perhaps words could warm things up a little again. So the Athenians employed wily words as protection against their pain. Words, both oral and inscribed, became a commodity. Wordsmiths, sophists, peddled a new kind of product in Athens’ Agora. Pindar refers to ‘sophistes’14 as early as 478 BC.15 But these pay-by-the-hour philosophers would wait another fifty years before