The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [105]
The wood was not sawn, but split and adzed. The peg-holes were slightly misaligned so that driving in the connectors neatly pulled the planks together; much of the wood used had a natural curve, a genetic twist that gave the belly of the boat great strength. The floating skin was built up element by element, oak ribs inserted as the planking progressed, all nailed down with bronze or copper nails.4 Each boat was given a pair of bright-painted marble eyes and a ramming bronze snout. Contemporaries talk about these vessels intimately, as if they lived and breathed. When divers today find these marble eyes on the sea-bed, they describe the uncanny feeling that they are being watched.
Constructed on the open ground between the shipyards of Kantharos and Zea, the building blocks of Athens’ navy were then stored in the stone ship-sheds at Zea – themselves inspiring architectural enterprises. These triremes were not mere boats, they were the very vessels of democracy itself. Warships like these had defeated Eastern tyranny, they had carried Athenian soldiers right across the Aegean to claim new lands in the name of demoskratia. The choice of names for each craft was given much careful consideration. The fact that in Socrates’ lifetime one new boat was named Parrhesia should not be underestimated.
Freedom of expression was the great innovation of the new democracy. The fact was, all citizens could now not just speak in the Assembly, but vote in it too – and more than that, ordinary men could dictate and nuance which issues were voted upon. Assemblies of men had been important in Homer’s Iliad.
… Agamemnon sent the criers round to call the people in assembly; so they called them and the people gathered thereon.5
… but here men stood or sat and nodded or murmured at the outpourings of the great and the good. Witness the Homeric fantasy art almost certainly imitating pre-classical life in a scene on Achilles’ god-forged shield:
Meanwhile the people were gathered in assembly, for there was a quarrel, and two men were wrangling about the blood-money for a man who had been killed, the one saying before the people that he had paid damages in full, and the other that he had not been paid. Each was trying to make his own case good, and the people took sides, each man backing the side that he had taken; but the heralds kept them back, and the elders sat on their seats of stone in a solemn circle, holding the staves which the heralds had put into their hands. Then they rose and each in his turn gave judgement, and there were two talents laid down, to be given to him whose judgement should be deemed the fairest.6
The nuance of parrhesia, freedom of speech, is that Athenians did not simply have equality of speaking abilities (isegoria), but could speak their minds, they could openly criticise the regime. The Greek is perhaps better translated as ‘the ability to speak frankly’ – it is a peculiarly Athenian attribute, and is lionised by Athenian authors. Its counterbalance was diabolē – slander. Diogenes the Cynic, a successor of Socrates’, declared that parrhesia was the most beautiful of all things in humanity.7
Socrates too chewed over the subject. For him, freedom of speech was the mark of a citizen, a privilege not available to foreigners.8 It was a privilege he enthusiastically employed. Socrates seems to have been most active in Athens from his forties onwards, and during this time, both publicly in the streets and privately in the homes of the well-to-do, he explored the relationship between man and his soul. He did this, it seems from the evidence that has survived, without any interference from civic or religious authorities. The city might be entrenched in a