The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [127]
But the earlier ones worry me more, men, who, having got hold of many of you when you were children, convinced you with accusations against me that weren’t any truer than the ones I now face. They said that there’s a certain Socrates, a wise man, who thinks about what’s in the heavens and who has investigated all the things below the earth and who makes the weaker argument appear to be the stronger. Those who spread this rumour, Athenians, are the accusers that worry me. For the people who hear such things believe that those who enquire about such topics also don’t believe in the gods. There are lots of these accusers and they’ve been at it for a long time already, telling you these things when you were still at an age when you were most apt to believe them, when some of you were children and others were adolescents and they made their case when absolutely no one presented a defence. But the most unreasonable part of all is that it is impossible to know and say their names, except one, who happens to be a certain writer of comedies …
For you yourselves saw these things in the comedy by Aristophanes; Socrates being carried around there, saying that he is walking on air and all kinds of other nonsense that I don’t understand at all.21
Trial by media has been, and always will be, of peculiar potency.
Yet one aspect that Aristophanes never mocks is Socrates’ courage. This is a war veteran after all – a decorated one. A man who does not deny the value of war in a warring age.22 And a man who – despite being mocked by his city – will, within months of Aristophanes’ premiere of Clouds, have to risk his life for her once more.
32
AMPHIPOLIS
North-eastern Greece, 424–422 BC
SOCRATES: The envious person grows lean with the fatness of their neighbour.
Plato, Phaedo, 66c
BEHIND ATHENS’ CITY WALLS TRAGEDIANS AND comedians may have continued to write, musicians to compose, and philosophers to debate – but beyond that ring of stone, hostilities dragged on.
Delion’s humiliation of the city-state had given Athens’ enemies renewed vim. In 424 BC word reached Athens that the Spartans and their allies were fingering Athenian possessions in the north-east of Hellas. So Socrates was back on the road northwards once more, marching (possibly sailing) as part of the Athenian army – to a landscape so different from that around Athens that even today it seems outlandish that a city 200 miles to the south should consider it right to claim it as its own.
This is the road today to Turkey, and the further east one travels, the more apparent is the fallout of the disastrous exchange of population in 1923. Still remembered as the ‘Katastrofi’, ‘The Catastrophe’, formalised as the Treaty of Lausanne in July 1923, 390,000 Muslims were forcibly taken from Greece to Turkey and 1,300,000 Christians from Turkey to Greece. The small towns stretched along the coast from here to the Bosporus still have a temporary, refugee feel about them. But they shelter within an abundant, confident landscape.
Here the hills never seem to stop; all are shaggy with trees, the earth beneath rich in minerals. Amphipolis was a new town, founded only in 437 BC, but it sat on top of a prehistoric settlement. The Athenians had attempted to establish a colony here in 465; it was disastrous, and 10,000 colonists were killed. So strategically placed, the settlement’s Thracian name was ‘Nine Ways’; it would be from here in just under 100 years’ time that Alexander the Great would set out to conquer the whole of Asia.
To get to the most likely site of Socrates’ next battle at Amphipolis you still cross the Strymon (in his day ‘well-bridged’) River. Now the river banks are married and marred by a rusty and rattling metal crossing. But the river itself keeps its ancient scale – it is broad, banked by reeds – a life-support system that must be defended. The Strymon, in fact, was the mother of Amphipolis