The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [16]
Take fair measure from your neighbour and pay him back fairly, with the same measure, or better, if you can.5
The Greek – the Hellene – was loyal first and foremost to his city, and then to a loose notion of ‘Greece’, or rather ‘Greekness’. A Hellene was Hellenic because he was Hellenic rather than barbaric; Greek rather than barbarian. Barbarians, in the eyes of the Greeks, were those who talked gibberish, who literally bar-bar-bared in their own language: Lydian, Persian, Thracian, Nubian, Goth, they came from all points of the compass.
The Greeks cheerfully demonised the way these ‘others’ ran their own affairs. They despised the monomaniacal autocracy of eastern super-kings, the slavish devotion to political orthodoxy, the dynasties of ruling classes of priests. They had to hate them, because these barbarians had become their enemies. Whereas once the whole eastern Mediterranean had been held together by the notion of xenia – an unspoken allegiance between the aristocrats of Greece, but also of Anatolia, Egypt, Macedonia – now dividing lines had been firmly traced: one, vertical, ran north and south, following the Bosporus, the other stretched horizontally across the Balkans.6 Mountain ranges – the Carpathians, the Julian Alps, the Dinaric Alps, the Pindus – divided Greece from the rest of Europe; the Aegean and Libyan Seas segregated Greek communities from those in Egypt and North Africa.
This Hellenic land-mass (with satellites on the western shore of what is now Turkey), whose population appears largely to have lost the power of literacy between about 1100 and 800 BC, no longer part of a tight network of trading routes, was, on the whole, left to its own devices. Jealousies between rival city-states festered. Citizen-soldiers, men who farmed in the spring and autumn and fought throughout the summer, now stood side by side and defended their home-town against that of their neighbour. The default position of the Greek polis through the Archaic period was to watch its own back.7 The archaeological evidence tells us that city-states such as Athens were, in the hundred years running up to Socrates’ birth, no strangers to warfare and conflict.
In the mud, scree and debris that rises 15–20 feet above Socrates’ Athens, up from the street level of 2,400 years ago, archaeologists discover, every year, new shards of the philosopher’s city. In 2008 a sliver of a beautiful woman’s stone face was excavated from the gravelly subsoil; within days her outstretched hand was also identified. In 2009 a marble horse’s hind-leg was found just 30 inches below the surface; even more recently, limestone flowers have been unearthed. These amputated bits and pieces are remnants of the fine decoration that once rimmed the great Parthenon temple up on the Acropolis: classical stoneworks that were carved and hoisted into place when Socrates was still alive. Work on the Parthenon of Socrates’ day was begun in 447 BC and completed in 432 BC. The woman, the horse, the flowers survived in place throughout antiquity, but were hacked at by offended Orthodox Christians, ground down for lime, and then blown apart in 1687 by a Venetian cannon.8 The firepower was there to attack Ottoman Turks – the occupying power in Athens since 1458 – who by the seventeenth century were using the Parthenon as a mosque and an arms store.
The fragments that archaeologists are now carefully piecing back together have been doubly traumatised. Some of the earlier sculptures that have come to light were bruised by ancient Athens’ bullying nemesis – the superpower that harried Greek lands through the sixth and fifth centuries BC: Persia. In 480 BC and again in 479 Persian forces breathed down the very necks of the Athenians; a Persian garrison occupied the Acropolis itself, and Persian forces smashed and burned