The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [148]
Enchanting, illuminating and thought-provoking as the scenes in Plato’s theatrical Symposium are, the real life of its characters was grubbier.
Despite all this talk of love and affection, outside the warm walls of the historical symposia things had not been going well for the Athenians. Following the debacle of Delion and Amphipolis there had been a three-year peace between Athens and Sparta. But then in the summer of 418 the Spartans beat the Argives (Athenian allies) and Athenian forces at Mantinea. Mantinea sits in a wide floodplain 100 miles south of Athens. Alcibiades, by this time voted Athenian General, had persuaded Argos, Mantinea and Elis (all democratic cities at this stage) to join together as comrades in the Peloponnese. Sparta read this, correctly, as a threat and decided to take action. Troops began to mass, glaring at each other from their respective camps. Initially the Spartans had tried to burn Mantinea’s crops, and then threatened to divert their river so that the city-state’s fields would be drowned under flood-water. Both then proceeded to play at push-me-pull-you, each side trying to use the vagaries of the dramatic landscape in the area to their own military advantage.
On the final day of fighting, under the glowering shadow of the Lyrkian mountains, it was superior Spartan strategy that resulted in the deaths of more than 1,000 allied troops, many Athenians amongst them. Messengers ran gloomily back to the mother-city, retracing the route that the Athenian Pheidippides had taken all those years ago to try to ensure Spartan aid at the Battle of Marathon, when Sparta and Athens were still friendly. With their back to the Tegean valley, not a thing of beauty, glacially eradicated, farmers still building here in mud-brick as they have done for 4,000 years, while leaves raced themselves through the sky, back to a city-state where men were beginning to lose their sense of purpose. The rousing words of Pericles, when Athens was broadcast as ‘the leader and envy of all Greece’, were wearing decidedly thin. From the time when Plato’s Symposium is set, 416 BC, onwards, Athens was fragile and fractious. Men voted to ostracise one another from the city. The tension between aristocrats and democrats was rising. In years to come the demos would remember, darkly, the rumours of these highfalutin evenings when men such as Socrates and Alcibiades drank and ate well and talked of love while an enemy breathed down Athena’s neck.
And it was the affront of words spoken behind closed doors, or in intimate conversations – the exchanges that give us Plato’s Dialogues, that would come to make Socrates both one of the world’s most tenacious and most widely read philosophers – and that would turn the tide of contemporary opinion against him.
At the end of the Symposium, Alcibiades lurches off, wine-swollen, to carry on with his Bacchic revels. He is a satire of himself – or, as Socrates puts it, to satyrikon, a satyr-play. His drive is to love the fug of the crowd, to be loved by it; no doubt to reach a heady climax on this hot spring night. In history, Alcibiades is, around the time of the setting of the Symposium, sailing dangerously close to the wind. He enjoys increasing influence in the Assembly with his grand talk and even grander gestures, but already men are anxious about his degree of influence and jealous of his degrees of success. In 416 BC he comes close to being ostracised. And in the Symposium he shatters the dining party’s spell; while bright talk and a searching exploration of the nature of love have kept the andron alight, he pollutes the high-octane atmosphere by bringing in something (to Greek minds) grubby, and obvious. A prostitute: a flute-girl. There is a dark double entendre here. When Athens’ walls are eventually pulled down, the democracy destroyed, Spartans trampling through Athenian homes, it will be the city’s flute-girls – sick