The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [115]
And he is gluing together the chariot’s rail …
Newly discovered fragment of Sophocles, first published 20071
TWO RECENT ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES HELP TO flesh out the picture of life – physical and emotional – in and around Athens’ city walls during the Peloponnesian War: a picture where Socrates is always there, just to the fore of the crowd throughout the mid-420s BC. They also hint at the social and political environment of the day. One is a tiny scrap of papyrus. To see it we must leave the eastern Mediterranean and travel back to a wet England, where the fragment is kept in a storeroom behind the Sackler Library, Oxford.
Beaumont Street in Oxford might not be the obvious place to get a sense of the scent-rich Athenian Agora of 2,440 years ago. But at the back of the splendid Ashmolean Museum are some particularly redolent biscuit boxes. Ginger Nuts, Huntley & Palmer; rows of tarnished silver-grey tins. Some boxes have not been opened since they were deposited in the vaults in 1906. Ninety-nine per cent of the material here is still waiting to be studied. Lying inside are the contents of an Egyptian rubbish dump – and remnants of Socrates’ life. Here are Athenian words that were recopied over the centuries by Greek scribes based in Oxyrhynchus (the Greek translates as ‘The Town of the Sharp-Nosed Fish’). With the multi-spectral technology that usually peers through gas and particles in space, we can now find traces of words describing Socrates’ city. The scanner highlights the original characters – frequently invisible to the human eye – that were inked onto each page. We hear from the speech-writers who sat in the Agora selling their words; we hear from letter-composers, angry wives, angrier husbands, issuers of summonses, evidence of indictments.2 A lost gospel excluded from our New Testament is possibly here, a version of Euripides’ Medea where she does not kill her children, but I am interested in Fragment 4807.
Fragment 4807 is a new find, unread for 1,900 years, the lost section of a play by Sophocles. The shred of papyrus itself is 4 inches long and 2¾ inches tall. Now preserved in between two plates of glass, the fragment is badly damaged. The fibres of the papyrus plant itself are clearly visible, the two columns of lines split by a great gash in the text.
The lines belong to a play called the Epigonoi (The Progeny). They describe an ancient city preparing for war. Although the scene is set in Thebes, Sophocles was an Athenian (and a general), and there can be no doubt, since the play was composed in the late fifth century BC, that the author was drawing on his own experience of the atmosphere and activities in Athens during the ghastly attrition of the Peloponnesian War. Listen again:
For a sharp … saw … gobbling … of the whole … sharpening the flashing iron. And … the helmets … are shaking their purple-dyed crests, and for the wearers of the breast-plates the weavers are striking up the wise shuttle’s songs, that wake up those who are asleep.
And he is gluing together the chariot’s rail …3
The gaps in the text are where the papyrus is torn or has rotted away. With those missing millimetres of the fragment have, almost certainly for ever, gone the words that Sophocles set down, that men such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle would have heard under a bright Mediterranean sun.
The Agora, which once produced books, gold jewellery, marble statues that were the envy of all Greece, was now focusing its energies on glue for chariots and whetstones for swords. The inhabitants of the city were kept awake not just by the possibilities of their world as they lay under the stars, but by the whine of the weaver’s loom as it wove protection for men who would soon be dead.
The second find from Athens’ city-centre is the exquisitely carved head of a horse. The broken piece of statuary, two-thirds life-size, has recently been restored in the new Acropolis Museum. The marble horse’s nostrils flare, his