The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [155]
TEIRESIAS: I do not countenance or imagine the powers of heaven to be subtle. The faith we inherited from our fathers, as old as time itself, shall not be cast down by reason, no! Even though it were the very subtlest invention of wit and sophistication. Maybe some one will say, I have no respect for my grey hair in going to dance with ivy round my head; not so, for the god did not define whether old or young should dance, but from each and every one of us he claims a universal homage, and scorns calculating niceties in the way he is worshipped.9
Of course there will be many radical thinkers we have never heard of; many ideas that were burned or knocked back before they could even make it into the historical record. This period has been billed as the dawn of enlightenment: but it was also an age that, for the first time, labelled men atheists; that democratically sponsored censorship. Intellectual progress was made here which remained unmatched for the next 1,500 years. But shamed by their defeats in war, confused by the freedom their own political system gave them, the Athenians from around 415 BC onwards chose oppression over liberal thinking. After c.415 BC there was no further need for ostracism – because now the state could harry and censor at will. Socrates’ death came at the end of more than a decade of intellectual and political persecutions. We must never forget that although Socrates is the most famous victim of Athenian oppression, there would have been scores – perhaps hundreds – more like him whose names have escaped the historical record. Athens’ story, and therefore the story of the intellectual development of mankind, could have been very different. The Athenian experiment was starting to calcify.
But as is the way with these things, the persecutions within the city and the slaughter on Melos, that colourful little volcanic island, seem to have given the Athenians an appetite for more aggressive expansion. The aristocrats in the Assembly, used to outdoing one another with feats of military might, stood together once more and looked out to sea. Amongst them stood Alcibiades. Always the showman, in 415 – a year after the Melian affair, after Plato’s Symposium is located in fifth-century chronology, and after the aristocrat had wiped the floor with his rivals in the Olympic Games – Alcibiades ordered himself up a theatrical backdrop of truly epic proportions. Now his sights were set on an even bigger prize: Sicily.
For more than fifteen years now Alcibiades had been wading knee-deep in the blood of Greeks and barbarians alike. He had been charming the people of Athens with his heroic feats, and earning the jealousy and hatred of men the length and breadth of the city-state. The Furies had their eye on him, but he was not finished yet. The Athenian force as instructed by the Athenian Assembly preparing to invade, of all places, Sicily was building up to be ‘the most expensive and splendid fitted out by a single polis up to that time’.10
Yet this was a splendid sight destined to suffer terrible hardship. There are many mournful artefacts in Athens’ National Archaeological Museum, but one of its saddest has to be a grave stele tucked away next to a doorway on the ground floor.11 The 4-foot-high piece of stone was found in the Piraeus port area. The design is original, and beautiful. A young man – a tiny figure – sits in a windswept, empty landscape. We have his name, inscribed, ‘Demokleides son of Demetrios’. Demokleides cradles his head in his hands, his helmet lies behind him. Beyond stretches a beautiful boat, a deep, wide sea. The death that this young soldier mourns is his own – one of the many Athenians killed for the city-state