The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [116]
The Athenians were fervently proud of their horse stock and horsemen. Those who sponsored winning teams at the Panhellenic games – Olympia, Corinth, Delphi, Nemea – were given free meals for life. It is a press of mounted cavalry that leads the procession around the Parthenon frieze. By the time of Socrates’ trial, the central spine of the Agora was a racetrack, with water-troughs at various intervals where sweat-flecked, steam-snorting horses could quench their thirst.4 In the 450s a census of the wealthiest ‘democrats’ in Athens had led to the formation of a ‘democratic’ cavalry. In reality these were old-style aristocrats legitimising a traditionally aristocratic pursuit. Alcibiades, who used his horses for self-aggrandisement when they won no fewer than seven Olympic chariot-races in a row, was one such. The Athenian cavalry trained in the Agora; their favourite spot was just outside the Royal Stoa, at the crossroads where busts of the god Hermes, his erect penis a symbol of fortune, spectated with blind eyes. Xenophon gives us a great sense of the dynamic spectacle of the horses and their men here at exercise:5
As for the processions, I think they would be most pleasing to both the gods and the spectators if they included a gala ride in the Agora. The starting point would be the Herms; and the cavalry would ride around saluting the gods at their shrines and statues … When the circuit is completed and the cavalcade is again near the Herms, the next thing to do, I think, is to gallop at top speed, tribe by tribe, to the Eleusinion.6
It is a utopian picture of blue-bloods; a demonstration of high-born refinements and the superiority and swagger of a cavalry that still marched all democratic Athenians into battle.
Put together, the finds speak of the class divisions that remained, just below the surface, in Socrates’ city. Democratic Athens never ceased to be an entity that was populated by aristocrats and oligarchs, as well as democrats. The papyrus also communicates both the aspirations and the daily grind of the demos (being able to vote for war, and then having to fight in it), of people who have for centuries been an underclass. Socrates, whose life spanned both social sets, would find, towards the end of his three-score years and ten, that his ‘double-agenting’ disturbed, and then envenomed, his fellow citizens. He was slowly proving himself to be out of kilter in many ways in Athens. He held unorthodox views on the power of persuasive speech, he shunned the material wealth that empire brought, his lines of communication to the gods were suspiciously direct. Yes, he fought, but unlike his comrades, he seemed to question whether military might was the greatest goal for a man, whether battle brought good.
Then without determining as yet whether war does good or harm, thus much we may affirm, that now we have discovered war to be derived from causes which are also the causes of almost all the evils in States, private as well as public.7
Both discoveries – the warhorse and the papyrus fragment describing the fierce preparation for military campaigns – also remind us that throughout the second half of Socrates’ life the Peloponnesian War was a cancer shadow in the back of all Athenians’ minds: an awful reference point for every day.
After the plague had bludgeoned Athens there was a brief respite, a couple of years when the invasions of Attica slowed down. But aggression, inevitably perhaps, resumed. Soon those Athenians travelling from the Agora to worship on the Acropolis, or returning from council duty, or having just cast their vote in a law-court or the Assembly, turning their eyes north and west, would see new flames – not the pine torches of Eleusinian initiates or priestesses of the cult of Bendis, but something wider,