The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [104]
Socrates took the democratic experience to its logical conclusion. Not just gassing in the Assembly or orchestrating himself onto committees, but walking through the streets and lanes, talking to other Ancient Greeks about their political experience. Absolutely of his time, he is also of ours. He realised that the more we learn to do in and with the world, the more we need to learn about ourselves. The more sophistication and complication there is around us, the more important it is to be sure of what is going on within us.
SOCRATES: So the command that we should know ourselves means that we should know our souls.42
And so for Socrates the Agora was the home of our conscious selves, of our souls.43 Socrates believed humanity was society. He said he would travel to the ends of the earth just for human company. His credo was that we cannot be wise and utterly alone. The further we quest for knowledge, the more human companionship we need. Ignorance is evil, knowledge is good. If we know (or admit) what is good, we will enact it. And we do that not by shutting ourselves away from the world, but by engaging with it, by taking it on, warts and all.
So Socrates speaks in the Agora, but he sticks out like a sore thumb.
He did not believe himself to be a sophist. He was not there to teach, not there in the market to sell wisdom; and anyway, he declared that he knew nothing – how can a man who has no knowledge cite knowledge as his stock-in-trade? Socrates argued that only God can be a sophist, only God can be truly wise. He would perhaps be happier with the title we give him – a philo-sophos, someone who loves, who yearns for wisdom. Unfortunately for Socrates, Homo sapiens has always been very good at rewriting history. The one man who counselled against empty, clever words was remembered as, and punished as, one of the most prominent ancient sophists of all.
This confounded Socrates, they say; this villainous misleader of youth! And then if somebody asks them, ‘Why, what evil does he practise or teach?’ they do not know, and cannot tell; but in order that they may not appear to be at a loss, they repeat the ready-made charges which are used against all philosophers about teaching things up in the clouds and under the earth, and having no gods, and making the worse appear the better cause; for they do not like to confess that their pretence of knowledge has been detected – which is the truth: and as they are numerous and ambitious and energetic, and are all in battle array and have persuasive tongues, they have filled your ears with their loud and inveterate calumnies.44
Socrates’ stock-in-trade was words. Yet words would prove both his weapon and his executioner.
SOCRATES: You might think written words spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing. And every word, when it is written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to whom to speak or not to speak; when ill-treated or unjustly reviled it always needs its father to help it; for it has no power to protect or help itself.45
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DEMOCRACY, LIBERTY AND FREEDOM OF SPEECH
Piraeus harbour and across Attica, 420 BC
Free men have free tongues.
Sophocles, Frag. 297aR
No longer will men keep a curb on their tongues; for the people are set free to utter their thoughts at will, now that the yoke of power has been broken.
Aeschylus, Persians, 592–41
PHAEDRA: My friends, it is this very purpose that is bringing about my death, that I may not be detected bringing shame to my husband or to the children I gave birth to but rather that they may live in glorious Athens as free men, free of speech and flourishing.
Euripides, Hippolytus, 419–232
AROUND 420 BC THE SMELL OF freshly cut Aleppo pine, oak and, perhaps, silver fir would have filled the boatyards of Piraeus harbour. A new vessel was being made. This was an expensive