The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [15]
And the earth beneath Socrates was thick with the remains of Athenians past, men and women whose own triumphs and struggles had laid the ground for Socrates’ progress.
Piecing together our story, on our own journey into Socrates’ courtroom, we too should walk through the military, cultural and social landscape of Athens, as deep as it is broad, that the philosopher inhabited. We need to investigate the physical and psychological stage that had been set for Athenian greatness. To understand Socrates’ thoughts, his life, and his death by hemlock poison, fifth-century Athens – Athena’s City, the city that birthed Sokrates Alopekethen in 469 BC – must first come more sharply into focus.
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ATHENA’S CITY
Athens, 800–500 BC, the Archaic period
For Athens I say forth a gracious prophecy –
The glory of the sunlight and the skies
Shall bid from earth arise
Warm burgeoning waves of new life and glad prosperity.
Aeschylus, Eumenides, 922–61
THERE HAD BEEN A SETTLEMENT AT Athens since pre-history. Between around 2100 and 1000 BC, the time described by archaeologists as the Bronze Age, but thought of by the classical Greeks as ‘The Age of Heroes’,2 men and women encamped on the Acropolis – the great lump of red-cretaceous limestone that improbably juts out of the Attic plain. Early Athenians lived and worshipped here. Eventually the prehistoric community started to sleep and eat in the shadow of the Acropolis as well as atop it. As time went on these lower settlements expanded, there was a degree of town-planning, a community with an identity was established. Athens could now call herself a polis, a city-state. The Acropolis itself, rising 230 feet above sea-level, believed to hold sacred powers, was predominantly a home for the god-tribe – when humans sheltered high on this geological fortress it usually meant that the city was under attack or in crisis.
Socrates’ Athens was axiomatic: history began with geography. Greece in his time, Hellas (as it was and still is known), was a loose connection of close on 1,000 seperate poleis or city-states. These city-states – originally a coalition of neighbouring families and tribes who gathered together around a central locale for self-protection – were isolated from much of Europe by mountains and from Asia Minor by the sea. Each Hellenic polis (with populations of anything from 1,000 to 30,000) was, typically, run as a republic. Kings had been all but lost with the downfall of the Bronze Age – the epoch immortalised by literary hero-leaders such as Menelaus, Agamemnon, Priam, Ajax. Philosophy and literature from across the period (found in the works of the poet Hesiod, the law-giver Solon, the historian Herodotus, the dramatist Sophocles, inter alios) indicate that all sense of society revolved around this polis, this collective whole. Morality meant the goodness of the community; loyalty to the city-state was paramount. Farmercitizens, rather than following one military leader, together defended their poleis (their cities) – frequently against the hoplites (armed foot soldiers),3 of another.
‘Man is a political animal.’ Pride bursts from Aristotle’s voice. The Hellenic unit of society (polis is the root of our word ‘political’) fostered, without a shadow of a doubt, a sense of community and commonality. And within that polis there were men – embodied in the sturdy Farmer of Hesiod’s Works and Days – who valued personal independence above (almost) everything, who fought hard against the smothering rule of aristocratic factions and despots, who made democracy a possibility. The poems of Hesiod show us that these Greeks had a fierce sense of self-reliance – if you