The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [125]
Picture Socrates in 423 BC, in late March or early April, bustling up to Dionysos’ theatre at the base of the vast Acropolis rock. Taking his seat in his tribal block, buying the snacks – figs and nuts and chickpeas – to munch during the show, settling down for an experience that was devised to change, to some degree, how he, and the men around him, thought about the world. But today would be a little different. Because it was Socrates himself who would provide the entertainment. A young buck (aged twenty-two or so) called Aristophanes has written all about the gobby philosopher and his peculiar ways. The title of this thinly veiled slander is Clouds. In his summation of Socrates, the author certainly did not pull his punches.
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.16
Clearly, to spark such intemperate smears, Socrates was already known in Athens: a big character in the city. And a big name too. The kind of name worth inventing words for. Nine years later, in another of his plays, Birds, Aristophanes describes Socrates’ followers as like the Lakono-manes – those who are Spartan-mad. These are people who have aped Socrates, they are esokratun, they are Socratised.17 The year 423 is the year of Clouds, but also, more importantly, the year that the winning drama is Cratinus’ Wine-flask, a play lost to us now, but in which Socrates was also mocked; clearly in 423 it pleased the Athenian crowds to lambast the philosopher.18
CHORUS [in the form of Clouds]:
Hail, grey-headed hunter of phrases artistic!
Hail, Socrates, master of twaddle!
Out of all the specialists cosmologistic
We love for the brains in his noddle
Only Prodicus; you we admire none the less
For the way that you swagger and cuss,
And never wear shoes, and don’t care how you dress,
And solemnly discourse of us.
STREPSIADES [in raptures]: How fantastic! How divine!
SOCRATES: Yes, these are the only truly divine beings – all the rest is just a lot of fairy tales.
STREPSIADES: What on earth! You mean you don’t believe in Zeus?19
So what, one wonders, had turned the tide? Socrates had spent a period of eight years fighting for his country. In many ways he had followed the conventional path for a good Athenian citizen – but clearly he had started to irritate people. It could just be simply that he had been a fixture in the Agora for too long, asking his annoying, soul-searching questions. But the plot-line of Clouds offers other clues.
Clouds
In a nutshell, Clouds is a little like a restoration comedy: a story of town and country. Our lead, the middle-aged, bumbling bumpkin Strepsiades, is lured into the city by his urbane missus. His son runs up debts; Strepsiades decides that Socrates’ popular philosophy establishment, the ‘Thinking Foundation’, will sort the boy out, will show him how to wangle himself out of tricky situations. But it is the father who ends up in the crammer. Strepsiades watches (for our amusement) as Socrates is shat on by lizards while gawping at the heavens, measuring with great solemnity the distance a flea can jump and then ‘peering at the arse of the moon’.
Clouds is not stellar – and it wasn’t judged so. Aristophanes won third (last) prize when the show was first presented. But with the phlegm of youth – remember, he would have been twenty-two or so at the time – the playwright set out to make his comedy that bit edgier. Clouds had an unperformed, more savage, iteration, and now recent, gruesome historical events were recalled as part of the drama.
In about 454 BC a group of Pythagoreans had gathered together as per usual in their