The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [154]
Although, inevitably, there were powerful religious dynasties within the sanctuaries, there was no priestly class to preserve and promote an orthodoxy for the pantheon of Hellenic gods. Men could interpret religious texts as they liked. The boundaries of blasphemy were blurred. The freedom of expression encouraged by the democracy facilitated both philosophical and spiritual enlightenment, and then witch-hunts.
For much of his early life it must have seemed to the philosopher and his coterie that Socrates had been born at the right time. Pericles might have created and ruled an empire with a fist of iron – but he was also a man who believed in the expansion of the mind. He wasn’t afraid of the shocking, original ideas that deep thinkers brought behind Athens’ walls. Pericles had experienced at first hand where bigotry leads: his own mother lived with a religious curse on the family. Her tribe, the Alcmaeonids, were accused of pro-Persian sympathies after the Battle of Marathon – and leading members were ostracised. Pericles had spent his adolescent years in exile. Perhaps these circumstances combined to give the General an unusual sense of the power of the future. For most Greeks, the future was a Frankenstein of the gods; it was in the past that security lay. Pericles seems to have appreciated that living in the past, rather than living with it, can hinder human development. And so he cultivated a forward-thinking culture. Yet Socrates, and the other great thinkers of the day – Diagoras, Anaxagoras, Protagoras et al. – as has been discussed earlier, operated at a time when freedom meant a very particular thing: not freedom of the individual, but freedom of the community, freedom of the state. And as with present-day societies and governments, that state could not decide whether or not freedom of speech, freedom of thought gave one freedom to offend.
While Athens started out its democratic life remarkably tolerant (after all, Socrates was allowed to operate without inhibition for more than half a century), eventually new thought became nefarious. There had always been an undercurrent to Athens’ apparent open-mindedness. When Socrates was growing up, Anaxagoras proposed that the sun was not Helios in fiery form, but a red-hot stone. The Assembly, intrigued and horrified by his suggestion, passed a decree that declared astronomy sacrilegious, and forbade its study. The ubiquity of religious belief skewed much of the free-thinking of the day. And then men started to gossip: had political tyranny in fact been replaced by tyranny of the mind? Athens was trying to shore itself up, to build and build, to support military blockades and masonry blocks with sweat and mortar, to set in stone the laws of an empire; and yet the sophists and Socrates appeared happy, at an atomic level, to deconstruct things.7
The Derveni papyrus went to the grave with its owner. Other texts were ripped from the hands of the living. A Roman tradition tells us that Protagoras’ life-work, On the Gods, was burned in public. Heralds called for every last copy to be jettisoned from homes, the conflagration filling the Agora with smuts and smoke. Only the first sentence of that work now survives, passed down in whispered oral memory: ‘About the gods I cannot say either that they are or that they are not, nor how they are constituted in shape; for there is much which prevents knowledge, the unclarity of the subject and the shortness of life.’8 Incendiary stuff; thinking they had obliterated his ideas from history, Athenians then voted to exile Protagoras from their city. If the stories are true, then book-burning begins in Athens as soon as ‘the book’, as a popular art-form, arrives in the city-state.
Those