The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [119]
Tempted, perhaps, by this show of weakness, the Athenians renewed their aggression against Sparta, and Socrates found himself back on the road again – fighting for a city-state he loved, and for an ideal he might or might not wholeheartedly believe in.
ACT FIVE
THE FIGHT GOES ON
30
THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR, PHASE TWO – A MESSY SIEGE
Delion, 424 BC
SOCRATES: Wars and revolutions and battles are due simply and solely to the body and its desires. All wars are undertaken for the acquisition of wealth; and the reason why we have to acquire wealth is the body, because we are slaves in its service.
Plato, Phaedo, 66C–d1
SOCRATES: Courage is inseparable from wisdom.
Plato, Laches, 19962
SOCRATES COULD NOT JUST BE WISE. His city needed him to kill.
Democracy forces a confidence. It forces a belief in collective power. When the elite stood next to the masses, hoplites next to thetes, clamouring and heckling under the open sky, up would shoot an amalgam of hands to register their vote, some palms soft from indolence, some hard from labour. This tightly knit citizen-body could encourage itself to go to fight again and again and again. And now democratic Athens had cash to add to credo. As more satellite societies came under its wing, as more insular people became part of a mental mainland, money meant that Athena was honoured with a permanent army. Her people could keep on building ships that could keep on travelling out on ram-raid expeditions.
Potidaea might have spawned the horror of cannibalism, Pericles might have entrapped his people in their own city with a pandemic pathogen, tens of thousands might already have died, but Athens was far from ready to give up the fight with Sparta. Two days’ slow march north of Athens, in 424 BC, Socrates was about to walk onto his bloodiest battlefield.
When the Athens underground was being renovated in 1995, one rather beautiful stone stele was dug up.3 On it we see rows of finely carved horses, a Boeotian footsoldier being trampled, and we read about the aristocratic cavalry who made their way into battle in Tanagra, possibly Delion too. Here is the paradox of the Athenians: the foot soldiers of a democracy, who vote for a war and then have to go out to fight in it – they now lie unmemorialised, while the aristocrats, who stick to many of their old oligarchic ways, still have the resources to commemorate themselves as heroes. Even despite the democratic revolution, the ‘cream’ that Solon anxiously spoke of (worrying that it might be skimmed from Athenian society during political reforms) was certainly still there; not only that, but it had a way of rising to the top.
On the way to Delion, Alcibiades rode, Socrates walked.
The philosopher was no longer a young man; now he was grizzled, forty-five or so. The hoplites, the men whom Socrates marched alongside, ranged between eighteen and sixty. These were the democratic politicians who would lead from the front; those who would be barged and stifled and skewered, who would attempt, by holding together, not to degenerate into a mindful frenzy. You can still see their salvation in a number of Greece’s museums.4 Here are bronze greaves, perfectly moulded to shins and knees, and the rough helmets that have been beaten out of ploughshares; here are shields’ metal skins, pockmarked and warped from punitive impact and the storms of arrowheads that once rained down – on the battle sites that now seem so tranquil.
Today, Dhilesi, the site of the Battle of Delion, feels not just calm, but more than a little backwaterish. Refuse collectors haven’t bothered to come, roads remain untarmacked. Not many tourists travel here – and, for that