The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [108]
In democratic Athens, at least one in three, possibly one in two, of the population were of slave status. These creatures were hardly classified as human – some described them as ‘living tools’, for others they were simply the ‘man-footed thing’. Athena’s city was particularly reliant on foreign slaves because the law-giver Solon had passed a decree that no Athenian would be forced to work for another. Owning slaves, rather than being owned, was a hallmark of the free Athenian. So slaves gave Athenians an unusually robust sense of their own peculiarly elevated standing. Fetching your water, cooking your food, polishing your jewellery, writing your letters, mopping your brow, stitching your wounds, praising your poetry – in a thousand ways every day the slave system reinforced the fact that the ‘free Athenian’ was someone a bit special. Work by archaeologists to the south-east of Athens at Laurion between 1998 and 2008 tells us that this situation was not accepted with total equanimity.
The Laurion district (particularly around what is now called Thorikos) is an odd, listless place. Today the striped towers of a nationalised electricity company, DEH, loom over the bay. Gleaming white boulders and iron-red earth combine to give the landscape a planetary feel. The caves are colourful with minerals. Up until 1923 silver was extracted from the seams here; lead, manganese and cadmium are still harvested.
Up in the hills today there survive forgotten spoil heaps from Athens’ classical mines – those that were grim with industry when Socrates was alive. Venture too far down clefts in the rock and you’ll find yourself in an abandoned mine-shaft. The landscape today is deserted; scrabbling through the pines here you can be alone for days on end, but in the fifth century this region would have teemed with slaves and their masters. At night these ‘human machines’ went back to guarded village-camps. The slave population was, in effect, sterilised, for men and women were not allowed to breed and were billeted separately. A rising, broken, square stone structure overlooking one of the slave camps is identified by some archaeologists as a watch tower – little surprise. This was a manufactured human settlement with the potential to be more than a touch restless.
But it was vital that the humans here be kept liberty-less, because it was the muscle and sweat of these men and women that kept commerce chiming back in Athena’s city. Socrates’ suggestion that all men, whatever their background, might possess an equal capacity for personal liberty was extremely inconvenient. It was Athens’ slave population that produced for Athenians the coin to spend in the Agora, and their broken lives that gave free citizens, and men such as Socrates, the time to talk, and to freely express themselves there.
As well as the new ideals of democratic life, which were being made flesh down in the boatyards at Piraeus, in the form of the boats Parrhesia and Eleutheria, new democratic religious rituals were also being initiated here. Athens was demonstrably proving that she was big enough to tolerate new forms of religious expression. And Socrates, we are told, was an eye-witness to their spectacular, sacred inauguration.
26
THE GOOD LIFE – AFTER DARK
Piraeus harbour,
432–428 BC
‘Do you mean to say’ interposed Adeimantus, ‘that you haven’t heard that there is to be a torchlight race this evening on horseback in honour of the goddess?’
‘On horseback?’ said I [Socrates]. ‘That is a new idea. Will they carry torches and pass them along to one another as they race with the horses, or how do you mean?’
‘That’s about it’ said Polemarchus, ‘and, besides, there is to be a night festival which will be worth seeing. For after dinner we will get up and go out and see the sights and meet a lot of the lads there and have a good talk …’
Plato, Republic, 327c–328a1
TORCHLIGHT ON THE SEA’S SURFACE IS magical. Pockets of flame dance from one ripple-crest to another, linked by a spider-line of fire. And around 2,440-odd years ago just such a spectacle