The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [132]
One house at Olynthos has been particularly well preserved; and fortunately for archaeologists and historians one room here is in particularly good nick – it is the men’s room, the andron. In a sense there are no women’s quarters in Ancient Greek homes – the whole domestic space was a woman’s turf:3 apart, that is, from the andron. The andron was an area for men only. Most were built with doors to the outer street so that women didn’t have to sully the atmosphere by passing through to reach the rest of the house. Serving slave-girls, flute-girls and hetairai were, of course, an exception.
Although Athenian houses of this period were notably simple, the one room where you were likely to find internal decoration was the andron: this was, after all, a place of pleasure. At Olynthos the mosaics from two of the andrones still exist. Charming, if slightly crude, things, made up of river pebbles, they show Bellerophon mounted on Pegasus, killing the Chimaera, and Nereids frolicking with sea-horses. Stone-slab seats, wide enough for two lean Greeks to recline side by side, edge the room. Wooden couches were often brought in to sit on top of these platforms. Here songs were sung, toasts were made, poetry was composed and the talk was of politics – the things of import to the polis. At the time when the Symposium is set, there is a war on: battle-weary men, deep in their cups, were also here to lick the wounds and extend the bonds made during the fighting.
Socrates’ nights on a low couch tell us about far more than his preference for good wine and tasty, slave-prepared food. Not everyone went to symposia. Some of those ‘born to rule’ kept themselves above such things. Pericles, we are told, strode straight from the Agora to the Boule (the council) without stopping to waste his time with chat and networks.4 The ‘Olympian’ had better things to do than shoot the breeze and stir up aristocrats. But Socrates was a philosopher who enjoyed hanging out with the top drawer of society as well as with its artisans and dogsbodies.
Plato’s Symposium may be pure fantasy, but it is at once a brilliant psychological drama and an acute picture of precisely the kind of event that could, and did, happen on many a fifth-century Athenian night.5
The Symposium party is being thrown in January or February 416 BC by a group of well-heeled businessmen. One of the symposiasts, Agathon, Socrates’ host for the evening, has won a prize for tragedy at a prestigious dramatic festival.6 Drama is so hard to write and produce well that winning really meant (and means) something. We should imagine that spirits are high. There are songs, discussions, party games.
There appear to be many great minds round this table: Aristophanes, whose waspish pen would help to bring Socrates closer to hemlock, lay on one bench, and together with Agathon burned the tallow low with Socrates and his companions.7 Plato paints strong, black-outlined characters here. Alcibiades bursts in, more debauched than normal; Socrates is more self-deprecatory and enigmatic; the host, Agathon, is preternaturally beautiful (his soft white skin is tenderly described); and a kind of mystery guest – a woman no less – is part of the dialogue too: Diotima, the thoughtful, articulate priestess whose ideas are, in Plato’s Symposium, reported by Socrates.
Many symposia were, doubtless, dreary. Others must have sparkled. Aristotle, Xenophon, Euripides – all these men spent time wreathed with laurels and lying on the symposiasts’ couch. These high-octane experiences must surely have given Socrates food for thought. And at this particular symposium, the guests appear on fine form.8 Alcibiades teases Socrates about his delight in self-denial; there is discussion of Socrates’ oddness, of the fact that much that he says has an ambiguous