The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [11]
33. Socrates and a stag. Socrates’ work and life came to represent, in the culture and philosophies of both East and West, what it was to be human.
ACT ONE
ATHENA’S CITY
1
THE WATER-CLOCK:
TIME TO BE JUDGED
Athens, the Agora, 399 BC
How fitting is it to destroy an old man, a grey-headed man, beside the water-clock?
Aristophanes, Acharnians, 6941
IN MAY THE SUN RISES BRISKLY over Mount Penteli.
Five hundred men2 are walking with purpose through the tight, packed-gravel lanes of Athens, past the modest mud-brick houses, around the gaudy public monuments: the communal baths, the Temple of Athena Nike, the new mint. Some of these public buildings are still wet with paint, few are more than fifty years old. At times the walking men have to pick their way across distasteful evidence of trauma – over derelict homes and past gaunt-hungry citizens. Unpleasant reminders of the catastrophes Athena’s city has suffered during the last three decades: plague; foreign invasion; full-blown civil war; strife.
There are goats here, dogs, geese, cats, ducks; but hardly any women. Or at any rate there are few creatures classified as female; there are some shaven-headed slaves. These sub-human folk of Athens, male and female alike – ‘man-footed things’, ‘living tools’3 – have been about their business since well before dawn, preparing the food, mending the clothes, wiping the shit off the shoes of their masters.4 At this time of day, the majority of Athens’ other females, women-citizens, are moving back indoors. The night is their time. After dark, usually chaperoned, they are allowed out to gossip, to barter, to practise religious rites, and just before sunrise they collect around the fountains to gather water. Now, with the sun climbing into the sky, it is appropriate to leave the streets. To be shut up at home during daylight hours is the only way for a respectable Athenian woman to behave.
But times have been hard. Once Athens could boast a stakeholder population of more than 200,000. Now, at the beginning of the fourth century BC, the number of adult men living in the city-state is one-tenth that number, closer to just 20,000. Since the outbreak of war with another Greek city-state, Sparta, in 431 BC, many tens of thousands of male citizens have died: in 404–3 BC alone up to 1,500 were killed, not by foreign but by Athenian hands – the death squads sponsored by rival factions during Athens’ bitter civil war. Now women are forced to do that which their grandmothers would never have dreamed possible: bake their own bread, live in a bigamous marriage, sell ribbons on street corners. Rather than enter and exit the city through 30-foot-high monumental gates, decorated with bronze, the surviving females must stepping-stone across the stumpy remains of Athens’ broken city walls; walls that were once the envy of all Greece.
A number of the men striding the street this late spring morning will be checking the precise time by the climb of the sun and the length of their shadow.5 But these urgent Athenians are pulled not just to the brightening of the sky, but by the drip, drip of progress. The new mechanical water-clock that marks out time in this most adventurous of cities is soon to have its plug pulled. The judicial day is about to begin.6
All are making their way towards a court – the religious court of the archon – the magistrate of sacred affairs, a site that today is dissected by the jaunty-orange, rattling Athens metro and flanked by trinket and umbrella sellers.7 This was, in the fifth century BC, a well-beaten path. Athens at that time was an exceedingly litigious place. In any one year up to 40,000 court cases might be heard. The Athenians loved a good legal brawl; their wrangles were a popular spectator sport. Agon – which translates as competition, struggle, set-to – is the Greek word often used. Gloves were off; agon is the root of our ‘agony’. And today there