The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [110]
Socrates, war-blasted, would have seen during the Peloponnesian War what happened when the religious idols of a city were burned. When the patchwork of materials that made up the earthly incarnation of a god or a goddess – the wood, the marble, the paint, the chryselephantine ivory, the rock-crystal eyes, the gold hair filaments – melted, twisted, buckled, warped and blackened in the flames. Greek religion was patched and glued together like the images of its living gods. There were many thousands of ways to worship the lustful, greedy, fickle god-tribe. Although conventionally pious, Socrates, it appears, searched for something more essential, something stiller and more stable. A creed is precisely what he was feeling his way towards.7
Is not this the reason, Euthyphro, why I am being indicted, that when people tell such stories about the gods I find it hard to accept them? Do you really believe that these things happened and that there was a war among the gods, and fearful enmities and battles and other things of the sort, such as we are told by the poets?8
These were incendiary thoughts. While we might think of religion as a convenient means for corralling morality, for the Greeks it was where morality – a social code – began. Odysseus’ Cyclops is godless, which is why he eats men.9 In the Laws, religion guarantees that the judiciousness of the citizens is the foundation and the mortar of political life. And at a time when there was only one day in the year that was not designated a festival,10 to be perceived by your fellow Athenians to be doubting the gods was dangerous indeed. And yet Socrates goes one step further – according to Plato, he does not deny the gods, but he does claim something even more shocking: to be as wise as they are, to know their very minds.
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DELPHI, THE ORACLE
Delphi, north of the Gulf of Corinth,
c.440–420 BC
SOCRATES: And don’t interrupt me with your jeering, Athenians, not even if I seem to you to be bragging. The story I’m about to tell you [about myself] isn’t mine, but I refer you to a speaker you trust. About my wisdom, if it really is wisdom, and what sort of wisdom it is, I’ll produce as a witness Apollo the Delphic god.
Plato, Apology, 20e1
TO KNOW YOUR FUTURE IN THE FIFTH century BC you had two choices: travel by road or boat. Boat was quicker. Your destination: the sacred harbour of Kirrha.2
Kirrha was the tollgate, the mouth of the single most important sacred site in the whole of Greece. It was the coastal station for Delphi – and in the Greek mind, Delphi sheltered the omphalos, the very navel of the earth. At the beginning of time Zeus had sent two eagles flying, one to the East, one to the West, and, so the story went, where they met marked the earth’s geographical and spiritual centre-point. The stories originated back to before Greek civilisation – to the very beginning of the Bronze Age, as do the archaeological remains that tell us that, come Socrates’ day, Delphi had been a significant religious site for more than 2,000 years. Still visited through the Late Bronze Age, the Greek ‘Dark Ages’, it flourished from the Archaic period and by the fifth century BC had gained a phenomenal international reputation. It drew men from across the known world. To get to the sacred mountain and the nerve-centre of Delphi itself, you had to dock at Kirrha, and climb.
Today the beaches on this side of the Corinthian Gulf are lively with runaway towels and beach-grilled fish. In Socrates’ day this shoreline was ten times busier.
Worshippers had to buy meat, new clothes, food, dedications, souvenirs while they waited for Delphi’s divine pronouncements. We know the region was economically