The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [142]
But nonetheless, the midwife (maia in Greek) ensured that a community survived. At the point of birth the midwife and her companions howled with joy to the heavens. If the child was a boy an olive-wreath would be pinned to the doorway; if a girl, a tuft of wool – a prophecy of the woven goods that, as an Athenian female, she would spend much of her life producing. Many babies died in classical antiquity, between 10 and 30 per cent, and others were exposed to die: also the midwife’s job.
If you take what he says at face value, Socrates’ family background (stonemason father, midwife mother) – at the coal-face of civilisation, knocking out citizens, knocking up monuments to house them – had an enormous impact.15
SOCRATES: My art of midwifery is in general like that of midwives. The only difference is that my patients are men, not women. My concern is not with the body but with the soul that is in labour. The highest point of my art is the power to prove by every test whether the offspring of a young man’s thought is a false phantom or is something alive and real. I am so much like the midwife that I cannot myself give birth to wisdom. The common reproach is true, that, although I question others, I can bring nothing to light because there is no wisdom in me. This is because God constrains me to serve as a midwife, but has debarred me from giving birth.16
Socrates would have been under no illusions. He would have known what a bloody, churning, searing, dangerous, wonderful business it is, coming into this world. His mother must have come home tainted with the sweet-acrid smell of childbirth and stillbirths. She would also have come home polluted for at least five days, by her presence during the parturition. Childbirth was one of the many ways that women were thought to generate miasma, pollution, in the Ancient World.
And yet, despite knowing all of this, despite a childhood listening to rhapsodes (epic-poetry reciters) charm year in, year out around village camp fires with stories of demonic, intemperate, sex-crazed women – Helen, Klytemnestra, Medea, schemers who brought down the Age of Heroes – despite being nudged, sweaty-seated, faces red from the glowing embers, by his fellow boy-Athenians, the next-generation citizens; despite spending the majority of his waking hours at men-only gymnasia, or fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with only males, walking through the streets in which, during daylight hours, respectable women were conspicuous by their absence – despite all this, Socrates’ attitude to the female of the species appears unconventional and relatively welcoming.
For Diotima was not the only female character with whom Socrates had a rather unorthodox literary relationship – his conversations with Aspasia had (apparently) been more than a little unusual. Plato, who reports this in his dialogue Menexenus, is, one suspects, mildly uncomfortable with Socrates’ deference to Pericles’ fancy-woman. In the Dialogue, the two have had a memory contest to see who could recall more of a speech – Socrates his own words, and Aspasia Pericles’ famous funerary speech, which she was rumoured to have written.
SOCRATES: But I was listening only yesterday to Aspasia going through a funeral speech for these very people. For she had heard the report you mention, that the Athenians are going to select the speaker; and thereupon she rehearsed to me the speech in the form it should take, extemporising in part,