The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [122]
As Socrates looked at the mould blooming on the skin of these once-humans, did he wonder whether this was all there was? Whether all that glittering chat, those beautifully crafted words and manufactured things back in Athens, whether it all came down to that gamey, dropping flesh? And although Socrates stood against the lex talionis – the typical way of proceeding, when all male soldiers were put to the sword, all women and children were seized, all booty, human and otherwise, that could be packed on carts or dragged behind the army train – it was this slaughter in cold blood that he now witnessed.12
Socrates lived, and his bravery and clear-headed tenacity at Delion were noted.13 His peers, and as a result history, remembered Socrates as a courageous man.
For, as a rule, people will not lay a finger on those who show such a calm fortitude in war.14
But even if Socrates had acquitted himself well, the return to Athens must have been subdued; this was a dishonourable defeat.
Socrates limped back to Athens with the ragtag remains of the Athenian army. Here in the mother city, life jogged along. Athena might have taken some body-blows, but she was still standing. More than standing, in fact, she was still earning her various epithets: ‘busybody’, ‘violet-crowned’, ‘sleek and oily’. She was still self-consciously promoting herself as the brightest and best in the region. The story of the ‘Greatest City on Earth’ still looked set to run for quite some time; and, increasingly, Socrates was finding himself central to the Athenian drama.
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BRICKBATS AND BOUQUETS
Theatre of Dionysos, Athens, 423 BC
A bold rascal, a fine speaker, impudent, shameless, a braggart, and adept at stringing lies, and an old stager at quibbles, a complete table of laws, a thorough rattle, a fox to slip through any hole, supple as a leather strap, slippery as an eel, an artful fellow, a blusterer, a villain, a knave with one hundred faces, cunning, intolerable, a gluttonous dog.
Aristophanes, Clouds, 445–51
SOCRATES: But what do we care about what most people think, Crito?…
CRITO: But surely you see, Socrates, that it’s necessary to care about what most people think. The circumstances we’re in now make it clear that most people are able to do not just the smallest evils but virtually the greatest if someone’s been slandered when they’re around.
Plato, Crito, 44c and 44d1
CLUTCHING A METAL THEATRE TOKEN, EVEN in March, is a sweaty business. The discs of bronze – the size of a fat ten-pence piece and worth a day’s wages for the Athenian poor – mark the palms: on a really hot day they leave fingers sticky-wet. Just one more odour to waft on the pungent Athenian breeze.
Little matter since the crowds entering the Theatre of Dionysos on the slopes of the Acropolis rock were hardly at their freshest. As one of Athens’ key religious expressions, the preparation for theatrical contests in the citystate was intense, at times frenzied. Drama had (probably) started as a religious ritual in the sanctuary of Eleusis centuries before, and had made its way into the villages of Attica and then on into the Athenian Agora. The re-defining of the City or Great Dionysia festival in around 500 BC has been seen as an expression of democratic fervour, a means for Athenian citizens to explore the potential of this new kind of socio-political way of being. Drama’s movement to a purpose-built theatre was a departure during Socrates’ lifetime; Athenian playwrights – Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides – gave plays their trademark form, with a chorus and leading actors, but the theatre never lost its intensely religious undertones. The build-up to Greek drama, for example, was bestial. Men dressed in ritual costume led sacrificial animals through the streets. Military leaders, the great and good of the city, sprinkled piglet’s gore across the theatre-space. Given that the whole event was sacred to the god Dionysos, once the blood had flowed, so did the wine: all night. Most theatrical productions must have been watched with distinctly sore heads.