The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [143]
MENEXENUS: Could you repeat from memory that speech of Aspasia?
SOCRATES: Yes, if I am not mistaken; for I learnt it, to be sure, from her as she went along …17
This is more than just a parlour game. Those with bardic memory at this stage of human development were the repository of all civilisation’s information. Wise men were wise because they had impressive recall. Homer’s epics, a touchstone for Ancient Greek life, were put onto the brain’s hard-drive and reproduced in public squares, on street corners, in private homes. A retentive mind was considered a great gift of the gods. It is fascinating that Aspasia is credited with such a gift.
Of course men had always been jealous of Aspasia; that interloper who benefited from Athenian nous, who wormed her way into the arms of their great Pericles and then ‘weakened his limbs’, as many Athenians saw it. That perfumed, jewel-spattered whore. A recent archaeological discovery suggests they might just have had some small justification. One of the heavy baubles dedicated up at the Parthenon to the goddess Athena – a gold tiara – is inscribed as the gift of Aspasia. Only an extremely wealthy person would have been able to afford such a fine offering.18 Even in a democracy men, and women, had ways of showing that they were, or had been, special.
In 438–436 BC the xenophobia directed at Aspasia came to a head. She was in court on charges of impiety – it could possibly have been her reported conversations with Socrates, and the other more radical philosophers of the day, that got her into such trouble.19 At the same time Pheidias was accused of embezzling public funds and Anaxagoras of denying the gods. Aspasia was – we are told by hostile sources – saved through the intervention of Pericles, who wept and moped around with more care for her fate than his own. She might have been saved from condemnation by the courts, but the parodying of this episode by Athenian playwrights suggests that Socrates’ association with Aspasia would not play out well for the philosopher.
What the characters of Diotima (and Aspasia) and Socrates do seem to have shared was a passionate belief in the potential of relationships. The Platonic Dialogues make it clear that relationships make our world better. Mutual commitment is wrapped in and gives birth to love. This love can bind marriages, cities, states, religions. Aphrodite does not just sponsor the poison-tipped arrows of Eros, but the lint-gauze of Harmonia. Heterosexual love can forge a path to virtue. And there is no doubt that when it came to real, human relationships Socrates could speak from experience. Because some time in the philosopher’s early to mid-thirties (Plato suggests thirty to thirty-five, and Aristotle recommends thirty-seven as the prime age to get hitched), he married.
Once a suitable partner had been selected for Sokrates Alopekethen, a series of customs, social and religious – unchanged for generations – would have been set in train. An Athenian wedding’s primary purpose was to legitimise the sexual union, the ‘gamos’, between a man and a woman. Groom and father of the bride-to-be sealed the pact with a firm handshake. Socrates and his ‘intended’ would have performed a series of pre-nuptial sacrifices, often with the accompaniment of marriage hymns and incense for Aphrodite. They would have purified themselves in the waters of the city – the sacred spring of Kallirrhoe or at the banks of Eridanos. Clean, rendered ‘extra’ fertile by the sacred waters, both man and girl-woman (most brides were fourteen or so) would have then doused themselves with perfume – myrrh was a favourite – both were garlanded and the bride was veiled.
After entering the bride’s family home, sweet with herbs and ribbons, a curious symposium would begin. Men down one side, women the other, wedding cakes made of sesame seeds were eaten, the sacrificed animals