The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [12]
The Athenian jurors are here to try a stocky seventy-year-old, their fellow citizen – Sokrates Alopekethen, Socrates from the district of Alopeke. Socrates: not high-born, neither a decorated general, a prize-winning dramatist, nor a political hero, but still famous in his own lifetime. For the past thirty years men – particularly young men – have flocked to Athens from right across the eastern Mediterranean with the prime purpose of listening to him philosophise in the public spaces of the city. In decorated dining rooms, crowded back alleys and by the leafy banks of the city’s rivers he could have been heard. He is a maverick; he did not found a school of philosophy, there was no individual aristocrat who funded his mission, it appears that he chose to write not a single word of philosophy down. And instead of polemic, instead of the great sweeps of rhetoric that have become so fashionable in Athenian society by the end of the fifth-century Golden Age, Socrates simply asks questions. His methods are, to put it mildly, unusual.
Yet the enquiring philosopher, now an old man, has become not just celebrated, but notorious. His eccentric methods, his unconventional lifestyle, his dogged interrogations, his troubling attraction to the young of the region have earned him as many enemies as friends. He walks to the court on this May morning accused of anti-Athenian activity, with undermining what it was that held the polis – the city-state – together. Today, those 500 Athenians will decide whether or not Socrates has corrupted the city’s source of hope – their young men – and, even more worrying, denied its sublime security: the power of their traditional gods.
It’s right for me to make my defence, Athenians, against the first of the false accusations made against me … ‘Socrates does wrong and is too concerned with enquiring about what’s in the heavens and below the earth and to make the weaker argument appear the stronger and to teach these same things to others.’8
How do you say that I corrupt the youth …? Isn’t it in fact clear according to the indictment you wrote that I do so by teaching the young not to believe in the gods that the city believes in but instead to believe in other new divinities? Aren’t you claiming that it’s by teaching that I corrupt them?9
The Athenian city has spent four generations dealing with clear and present danger in the form of invading forces and the military coups of enemies within. Socrates’ crime is less tangible, but because of that, more pernicious – he is considered a bad, a dangerous influence. The citizens who make up the judge and jury (there was no hierarchy of judgement in the Athenian judicial system in Socrates’ lifetime), hot-footing it through those narrow Athenian streets, have travelled from far and wide. Some started their journey in districts such as Cape Sounion, nearly 30 miles south-east of Athena’s city, where the splendid temple of Poseidon still basilisk-eyes the boats that come in and out of Athens’ harbours; others will have rolled off bed-pallets just five minutes away in what were little more than shacks on the bare rock,10 beneath the Areopagus, where councils of Athenians have been meeting for close on 300 years. Rich and very poor alike, they are gathering here in this milky-dawn light because the Ancient Greeks believed something remarkable about men. They believed that each had been given, by the gods, an equal portion of dike, justice, and aidos, shame or concern for their fellow man.11 If they put their minds to it, each true, mandated Greek could judge another fairly and wisely. This Hellenic hallmark was proudly celebrated, in Athens’ public spaces, by the commentators of the day:
When I have chosen the best of my citizens I shall return; it is for them to judge this matter according to truth, since they have bound themselves by oath to say nothing contrary