The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [107]
The most intense flurry of discussions about parrhesia, this peculiar attribute of Athens, began, as so much did, with reference to the defeat of the Persians in 480/79 BC. The Athens that Socrates grew up in was decorated with the fifth-century equivalent of billboards, bronze and stone declarations. These proud street signs declared that the West was now free from Persian tyranny. That Greek men were, at last, free to express themselves as true Greeks, not as quavering subjects of a Persian tyrant. Similar sentiments were projected in the most powerful of Greek dramas:
From East to West the Asian race
No more will own our Persian sway,
Nor on the king’s compulsion pay
Tribute, nor bow to earth their face …
Now fear no more shall bridle speech;
Uncurbed, the common tongue shall prate
Of freedom; for the yoke of state
Lies broken on the bloody beach.15
Also during Socrates’ lifetime, in the salty landscape of Athens harbour, in 425 BC,16 another boat had been built. It too needed to be strong because it carried yet another heavy burden; the name of this vessel was Eleutheria – Liberty.
To get to Socrates’ courtroom, many jurors would have passed through an attractive walkway called the Stoa Zeus Eleutherios. Here an emotional concept was writ large. We are used to statues of Liberty; but the Athenians got there first, they built Liberty colonnades. The Stoa of Zeus Eleutherios – Zeus of Freedom, Zeus the Liberator – was created in thanks for the victory at Salamis against the Persians.17 Sauntering through, shaded from the sun, good Athenian citizens were at liberty not to be slaves; not to be ruled by a despot. There are other dedicated sites at Marathon and Rhamnous, where Athenians gave thanks for their delivery from Persian might. This was a society that honoured freedom in a palpable way.
But – crowd-pleaser as it is – Socrates does not concern himself with liberty. Instead he focuses his energies on identifying virtue. He argues that only the pursuit of a virtuous life brings exquisite happiness. Total liberty is a chimera; happiness accepts, even delights in the certainty of compromise. Plato’s Socrates goes further, he suggests that tyranny is spawned by the liberty of all in the demos. Here he is the first to suggest that liberty is an illusion fostered by the great to keep the many happy.
Come then, tell me, dear friend, how tyranny arises. That it is an outgrowth of democracy is fairly plain.18
This was a man born into the most fervently patriotic of ‘liberty’ moments. In defeating the Persians, the Athenians had committed to freedom to a quite lunatic degree. They had shaken off the yoke of the greatest superpower of the day. They had declared that Greeks shall never be slaves to the East. They had chanced their wit and belief in self-determination against despotism and brawn. Wondrously the gamble had paid off. To do so they had to work themselves into a fever-pitch of self-belief. When one man suggested accepting Persian terms of peace soon after the Battle of Salamis, he and then his wife and children were mobbed and stoned to death.19 But there is one thing that Socrates does that is very troubling to the Athenians. Nowhere does he challenge the need for liberty itself – yet, rather than vaunt the liberty of the city, he champions an inner, spiritual liberty.
Such is the good and true City or State, and ‘the good’ and man is of the same pattern; and if this is right every other is wrong; and the evil is one which affects not only the ordering of the State, but also the regulation of the individual soul.20
Then when any one of the citizens experiences any good or evil, the whole State will make his case their own, and will either rejoice or sorrow with him?
Yes, he said, that is what will happen in a well-ordered State.21
In these collective times individual liberty, rather than the liberty of the city-state, was both a novel and an awkward concept for fifth-century Athenians. And they were uncomfortable with Socrates’ unconventional views for a very precise