The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [121]
But Socrates, through this carnage and chaos, was one of the few who survived. He remained calm. Men were drawn to him in the pandemonium. He led (so Plato tells us) a small group to safety – amongst them a character called Laches, a successful general who would go on to have a Platonic dialogue named for him.7 All through this – we are told – Socrates’ beautiful companion Alcibiades watched from the vantage of horseback, glimpsing busy soldier Socrates through the heat and dust. Socrates’ beautiful boy ‘happened to be there’8 when he spotted the philosopher and his band – a good indication of how confused, how random, how utterly unplanned battle in antiquity could be. An indication too of how ill-suited horseback fighting was in this hilly terrain – the cavalry’s distant impotence at Potidaea would be remembered, sorely, for years to come. Yet through this jangling, ugly maelstrom something stands out: Socrates’ determination. He was a man strong enough to fight when challenged, he was unflustered by the difficulties of the day, he is portrayed to us as having about him a peculiar serenity.
ALCIBIADES: Here indeed I had an even finer view of Socrates than at Potidaea – or personally I had less reason for alarm, as I was mounted; and I noticed first how far he outdid Laches in collectedness, and next I felt – to use a phrase of yours, Aristophanes – how there he stepped along, as his wont is in our streets, ‘strutting like a proud marsh-goose, with ever a sidelong glance’, turning a calm sidelong look on friend and foe alike, and convincing anyone even from afar that whoever cares to touch this person will find he can put up a stout enough defence.9
In the Platonic dialogue Protagoras,10 Socrates offers good advice: we need to know what it is that we are scared of; courage is knowledge of what is and what is not truly to be feared. Our inability to distinguish between the two, between real and perceived threat, is of course what every terrorist, then and now, plays upon.
Still, the prospect was not looking good. The Athenian troops were scattered, so many soldiers were wounded that a victory was impossible; one group grimly held on in their base in the Temple of Apollo. The Athenians had lost and yet, by still occupying Apollo’s sacred home, they were blasphemous even in defeat. And so the Thebans and the other Boeotians, in collusion with the Spartans, refused to let the Athenians collect their dead. The corpses lay there for seventeen days, starting to rot.
It must have been a hellish scene. Bodies beginning to swell, stink and burst. The great and the nameless lying twisted together – Pericles’ nephew was one of the young men who slowly putrefied on these coastal killing fields. The Boeotians had already stripped the bodies of their armour, so the Athenians’ flesh must have been fed on by dogs and flies. But still the surviving soldiers, Socrates’ peers, cowered, braving it out in the temple.11
These cocky invaders had to be shifted; and so the Boeotians resorted to diabolic ingenuity – chemical warfare – sending pitch and sulphur shooting into the garrison-temple itself. The Athenians were now about to be assaulted from the skies by something that resembled a thunderbolt-rage of Zeus. A crude wooden siege-breaker, 20 feet tall, was raised next to the walls. Delion was recaptured with this noxious flame-thrower, and it is easy to imagine the stench of burning sulphur in the air, burnt hair in the nostrils, the taste of roasting human flesh on the tongue, the sinking pit of defeat in the democrats’ stomachs.
These were hardly the glory days.
After seven days it is difficult to move decomposing bodies from one place to another, but at Delion the bodies had now lain, unburied, for two and a half