The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [106]
But not everyone welcomed this phenomenon unreservedly; as the years went by people started to speak freely not just in the Assembly, but in the Agora, the gymnasia, the temples, their own homes. The ideological flame of parrhesia was fanned by Athens’ jumbled street layout: in the narrow walkways, from unshuttered windows and through the open courtyards and squares of Athena’s city free-talk sparked. This was fine in theory, but in a tight-knit community freedom of speech can quickly degenerate into gossip and then to slander. And slander was against the law.
Athens was one of the first polities to allow freedom of speech – and immediately it had to deal with the conundrum of who had freedom to offend.
‘Who wishes to speak?’9 calls the steward in the Assembly during one of Aristophanes’ most popular comedies. Yet his is not a celebration of parrhesia, but a parody. In another of Aristophanes’ dramas, women are being encouraged to speak out when they have taken over the city. The playwright is making a cutting point: in this upside-down world of the democracy, any awful creature can have a voice.
The phrase ‘freedom of speech’ is so caught up in our own twenty-first-century heads with a notion of rights that we can lose the meaning of the word in Socrates’ day. Here it was something more like ‘saying everything’, sharing. In the Athenian Assembly the order of the day was: make sacrifice; enact religious ritual; offer the chance to speak frankly – in that order.
When the sacrificial victim has been carried round, and the herald has uttered the ancestral prayers, once the purification is complete, he commands the presiding officers to take the initial votes on matters to do with religious affairs, he deals with heralds and embassies, and then with secular matters; after that the herald asks, ‘Who wishes to speak of those above fifty years of age?’ When they have all spoken, he then invites anyone who is entitled to and who wishes to speak for the rest of the Athenians to speak up.10
Socrates in the Protagoras describes the scene in detail: ‘carpenter, bronze worker, shoemaker, merchant, shop-owner, rich, poor, noble, lowly born’ can all stand up and deliberate on the governance of the city.11 But only within limits, only if they speak respectfully, with aidos – the Greek word means a sense of shame, a ‘knowing-your-placeness’. In one Greek text, Zeus thunders, ‘He without aidos is a disease to the city.’12
But Socrates dares to take Zeus on. He brings to the city a new kind of discomfiting free-talk. In the Protagoras, Socrates seems to be generating a system of free speech – ‘dialogue’ – which is not controlled by ‘shame’ and convention, but by a pattern; by strict Q and A. The Greeks were anxious that ‘free’ (as in ‘footloose and fancy-free’) words would break down society. Socrates, employing his Socratic method (elenchus in Greek – ‘question and answer’, ‘logical debate’, ‘investigation’), develops a system to contain free words: he is ahead of his time.13 Yet the proof of the value of free speech is in the eating, and Socrates’ Athens was still a giant krater, a mixing bowl into which all kinds of ingredients were being thrown. The Athenians were not sure that they enjoyed this novel taste, they were not entirely convinced that the confection they had created was good.
In Athens parrhesia was truly, and worryingly, a new way of doing things. Aristotle’s estimation of what a democracy was – ‘whatever seems best to the many, what the majority decides is what is final and this constitutes justice’ … ‘to live as one wishes’14 – could be interpreted in two ways: either this was extreme civil liberty, or it was a political madness that heralded anarchy. Socrates sits firmly in the eye of