The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [162]
FIRST HERALD: Founder of the most renowned City of the Sky, do you not know what great honour you have won among men, and how many of them you have who are passionate lovers of this country? Before you founded this city, in those days all men were Spartan-mad, all hairy, hungry and dirty, Socrates-y and carrying clubbed sticks.9 …
CHORUS: And near the Shadfeet there lies a lake where unwashed
Socrates charms up men’s souls.10
And while the Athenians slept uneasy in their beds, flailing around in nights of long nightmares, arms reaching out to try to find someone to blame, Alcibiades was busy.
Aristophanes said of Socrates’ one-time-lover:
Better not bring up a lion inside your city,
But if you must, then humour all his moods.11
A tricky, half-wild, half-domesticated rogue lion, with plenty of bite left, was precisely what Athens did not need roaming at the edge of its territories right now.
Alcibiades’ hubris boded well neither for Athena’s city nor for his brother-in-arms, Socrates.
45
DECELEA – CLOSING DOWN THE MINES
Decelea, 414–404 BC
Freedom is delicious to eat and hard to digest.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Considerations on the Government of Poland and on its Proposed Reformation (1772)
DECELEA, 13 MILES NORTH-WEST OF Athens, was, in the Greek mind, a troublesome place. In particular it was a place where, through remembered time, friction between Athens and Sparta had sparked.
The Greeks spoke of it often. This was the site of one of the most unpleasant episodes in mythical history. The legendary Helen, princess of Sparta, was said to have been dancing naked with other maidens down by the banks of Sparta’s River Eurotas. She was a child, twelve, ten, even as young as eight, some said.1 The old man Theseus, a hero-king of Athens, and now about seventy, spied her and was so enraptured by her that he had to have her. She became the summation of all earthly desire. Theseus, wheezing, sprang a trap, kidnapped the beautiful girl and carried her away to the hilltop fort of Aphidna near Decelea. But his lust had blinded him. He forgot, perhaps, that Helen had divine twin brothers, Castor and Pollux: toned, fist-flailing warriors who would have none of this affront. Riding out to retrieve their too-desirable sister – a scene that gallops across some of the earliest Greek vases – they found the people of Decelea as outraged as themselves by Helen’s abduction. The old men of the city helped the twins get Helen back, leading them to Theseus’ hideout at Aphidna while he was off pursuing more skirt in the form of Persephone. Spartans never forgot the Deceleans’ kindness. In all the years they sent out those blistering raids to the Attic countryside, Decelea was left alone. Now, in 413 BC, thanks to honey-tongued Alcibiades, it was Spartan warriors who occupied the hill once more.
Twenty-four centuries later the place still smacks of regime change. This is where the Greek monarchy last made its summer residence. In the coup of 1967 the mini-Versailles here was abandoned. Now it moulders in a limbo. The swimming pool is empty of water and full of graffiti, a 2-foot-high roaring marble lion has a mouth that has long since gaped dry, the stables are derelict, there are sheep-turds on the lawns.
But in its heyday the aristocrats of Europe stretched out here because the cool and pine of the mountain air brings welcome relief from the city fug. As you drive across the arterial road today, leaving behind jerry-built blocks selling fridges and cheap furniture, the freshening of the air and the smell of the humus suddenly strike. Back in the fifth century, Decelea’s elevation meant this was a perfect lookout from which to guard Athens to the south-east, to keep an eye out for invading Thebans (or other Boeotians) to the north.
In 414 the Athenians had riled the Spartans. They commissioned a