The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [153]
On the stone-block lid of this coffin at Derveni, 2,400 years ago, tightly rolled papyri had been burned. These clearly contained sentiments that, for some reason, meant a great deal to their owner – and they were also incriminating, which is why they were burned with him when he died. Chanting (raised by the professional mourners and the female relatives allowed out of their homes as a special concession to this funerary ritual) would have been punctuated by the crackling from the flames that were believed to take the spirit of the cremated aristocrat aloft. The flesh of the owner has long gone – but this enforced, fiery desiccation saved something extraordinary from that anonymous aristocrat’s funeral pyre. The rolled papyri – we now realise – represent the oldest book to have survived in all of European history.
At first glance, the remains of this book look like the end of a bonfire – the newspaper leftovers that remain after they have fed the blaze – and initially excavators were dismissive of the scraps. But then a bit of a phrase in Attic Greek was spotted and, as archaeologists from the region of Thessaloniki gently separated the 200 fragments and prised apart the charred rolls that resembled nothing less than charcoal briquettes, the ghostly remains of beautiful, finely scribed Greek letters started to appear.
The stories dealt with here are highly coloured. They describe how Zeus rapes his mother and then eats the severed penis of the god of the sea. None questions that these stories are true – but the author also sees in them an allegory: a suggestion that phusis, nature, and bios, life (as we know it), emerged from some kind of primal vortex. There is magic in the words: the goddess ‘HERA’ is equated with ‘AIR’ (AER in Greek), and so forth. In essence what we have at Derveni is an entirely new way of looking at the world; touch-paper at the moment it is lit. The burnt poems are a tortured, complicated attempt to square cutting-edge and revolutionary scientific thought with the presence of the old gods; as has been said, it is like devout nineteenth-century Christians trying to justify evolution by reading the Bible as an allegory for genetic development.2
This is hermetic evidence that opens up Socrates’ world.
Given those who were active in Athens at this time, and their recorded fates, it could well be Diagoras of Melos (or one of his close circle) who wrote those beautiful, complicated words discovered burnt beside a motorway at Derveni. The authorities were clearly troubled by the ideas contained within the mystical verses – but in a land without orthodoxy, there was no mechanism for prosecuting ‘heretics’ or ‘free-thinkers’. ‘Heresy’ comes from the Greek verb ‘to take, to make a choice’ and ‘blasphemy’ in Greek meant ‘speaking ill’. In Socrates’ day, heresy was meaningless. And so instead, in 414 BC, the author of the works, Diagoras (if it was indeed he), was charged with a crime that would be a precursor of Socrates’ own. He was charged with not recognising the city’s deities and branded a-theos, an atheist, a man away from the gods.3 The Assembly put a price on his head. The culprit was wanted back in Athena’s city, dead or alive. Now Diagoras, like those fellow islanders who fled from the massacring swords of the Athenians,4 was a fugitive from the democratic decisions of the world’s first democracy.
Aristophanes jokes about Diagoras’ persecution a year or so after the event in his play the Birds, but the language chills. Undesirables will be strung up like songbirds (the playwright fantasises); those who are trapped no longer have wings to fly. He beats out the message in his harsh, funny poetry:
CHORUS LEADER: On this particular day, you know, we hear it again proclaimed that whoever of you kills Diagoras the Melian shall get a talent.5
INFORMER: It’s wings I want, wings!6
The birth of atheism and heresy
In democratic Athens there was no religious dogma, no equivalent of the Bible. There was no credo, no ‘I believe’, no creed. Socrates lived at a time when