The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [111]
In the so-called ‘Sacred Wars’, back in the Archaic age (close on 120 years before Socrates’ birth), c.595–585 BC, the population of Kirrha was intimidated by a local league of cities; this ‘Amphictyonic League’ was purely and simply jealous of the Kirrhans’ religio-tourism economy. The League (supported by Athens, Solon reportedly deciding on the strategy himself) stationed soldiers at Kirrha’s gates. Kirrha was said to have held out against its rivals for ten years, until the city’s own water supply turned enemy – poisoned with hellebore by the troops outside the walls. The toxic effects – delirium, diarrhoea, muscle-cramps, asphyxia, convulsions and heart-attacks – were infamous. The plant, they said, grew at the Gates of Hades itself, but was, and still is, abundant in the region – a boat-ride away above Antikyra. The men at the local kafenion still recall how, as children, their mothers rubbed their gums with hellebore roots (these must have been tiny doses; hellebore is medicinal in small quantities) to alleviate toothache. These locals do not, however, tell the story of the hellebore of antiquity that was mashed into the water-pipes and wells, whose invisible alkaloids struck down first children and the old, then pregnant women, the sick and finally Kirrha’s young men: biological warfare that offended the Greeks’ ‘rule of honour’. The poisoning of Kirrha was a blot on Hellenic memory, and elders codified that such calculating evil should never happen again. This was one of the events that gave Athenian soldiers such as Socrates the code of honour to which they were expected to adhere.
Traces of former glories in Kirrha are few and far between. There is the odd fifth-century masonry block on the beach that fishermen use to stand on, children to jump off. All that is left of the harbour is a playground’s worth of knee-high stone stumps; the remains of docking bays – surrounded now by rabbit-chewed earth, not sea.
But in Socrates’ time this spot would have been jangling. The Kirrhans might have lost their independence in the ‘Sacred Wars’ – Delphic priests controlled the place now – but no one could take away their strategic location. Special rules applied to those who made their pilgrimage here on the way to Delphi. Boats bringing ambassadors and the faithful were allowed to dock for the duration of their visit to the sanctuary. The theoroi and diplomats had semi-permanent lodgings. Offerings were made. Rituals of all ethnic hues from Asia Minor, North Africa and right across the eastern Mediterranean quickened the shore.
It must have been a convenient place to size up your rivals and allies. To gossip. To be enlightened (‘Who’d have thought the Thebans made their libations in that order …?’) or to buttress bigotry, because the Corinthian Gulf is a salmon-flick of water that connected the prickly city-states of Greece with the wider world. This was a polyglot landing. Business deals were struck, at Kirrha and in the Delphic hills above, treaties discussed – yet the heart of the experience was, without a shadow of doubt, spiritual. At Delphi the gods opened their mouths to men.
And (so we are told) a certain Chaerephon, a friend of Socrates, came to Delphi to enquire who was the wisest of all mankind. In some versions of the story, it was Socrates himself who made the journey.
Chaerephon has come down to us in history as a rather quixotic individual; agitated, emaciated, ‘impetuous in everything he did’.3 You can perhaps imagine him, beaded with sweat, flushed, a man on a mission; taking a ride in a cart, or making the long march up through the foothills where Delphi itself was hidden, tucked into the cleft of the mountains known as ‘The Shining Ones’.
He would have journeyed through a landscape of incident. Dramas such as those of Oedipus and Jocasta were thought to have been played out here.4 Travellers to Delphi carried with them the epic