The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [13]
On this hill the reverence and inborn fear of the citizens will hold them back from committing injustice by day and night alike, so long as they themselves do not pollute the Laws with evil streams: if you stain clear water with filth, you will never find a drink.13
So on that spring morning twenty-four centuries ago, the ordinary citizens of Athens, dirt-poor oxherds, smooth-palmed accountants, dark-tanned traders, were here to enact a unique, fifth-century form of direct democracy. Citizen to citizen, they were here to pass judgement on one of their own.
But today’s court case did not, by any means, promise a cut-and-dried resolution. Because the one accused amongst them, who had also started to make his way to the court at dawn; who had also walked through the hub of Athens’ democratic city as the city started to wake, a fellow citizen amongst the press of jurors; the man making his way to the dock today was, by any standards, an awkward customer to estimate: an extreme and disconcerting individual. Unsettling to look at, Socrates stood out in a crowd. He boasted, his contemporaries tell us, a pot-belly, thick lips, swivelling eyes, a pug nose and broad nostrils. Descriptions of his lifestyle suggest he possessed irrepressible energy and a wit that, even after one of his many nights of heavy drinking, struck home ‘like the touch of a sting-ray.’14 In a city that made a cult of physical beauty15 – which believed, in fact, that outward beauty was a sign of an inner nobility of spirit – Socrates was famously ugly. He had a rocking gait and he made it his business to power from one spot in the city to another, enlightening some, badgering others to engage in meaningful conversation. As one contemporary (according to Plato) – the man who had spent years as Socrates’ love-interest – put it:
ALCIBIADES: When we hear any other person – quite an excellent orator, perhaps – pronouncing one of the usual discourses, no one, I venture to say, cares a jot; but as soon as we hear you, or your discourses in the mouth of another – though such person be ever so poor a speaker, and whether the hearer be a woman or a man or a youngster – we are all astounded and entranced. As for myself, gentlemen, were it not that I might appear to be absolutely tipsy, I would have affirmed on oath all the strange effects I personally have felt from his words, and still feel now. For when I hear him I am worse than any wild fanatic; I find my heart leaping and my tears gushing forth at the sound of his speech, and I see great numbers of people having the same experience. When I listened to Pericles and other skilled orators I thought them eloquent, but I never felt anything like this …16
Often Socrates out-foxed and floored his peers with his beguiling and relentless banter. But then, at other times, he would stand for hours, silent, stock-still, frozen. These ‘trances’ Socrates himself put down to his daimonion semeion, his ‘divine sign’. Scholars still debate the cause of these odd seizures. Was this some kind of deep philosophic engagement? Were they signs of a medical condition such as catalepsy? Many at the time were more suspicious; they whispered, behind his back, that Socrates was possessed.
Whatever his disability – social, physical or psychological – the philosopher was clearly both unhampered and uninhibited, and for the previous fifty years had taken the concept of being an Athenian citizen to its upper limits.
Far from being an unworldly greybeard, we are told that Socrates spun through Athena’s city like a tornado, drinking, carousing (though never out of control), talking, debating. Women, slaves, generals, purveyors of sweet and bitter perfumes – he involved all in his dialogues. Eccentric, grubby, his hair left uncombed, he famously stunned guests at a dinner party by turning up freshly bathed and oiled following an afternoon’s session at the gymnasium – a display of personal hygiene that was way out of character.17
Socrates paddled in Athens’ streams, he spent nights in her brothels, he worshipped the city