The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [168]
But it was the briefest of honeymoon periods. Four months in total. Within a number of weeks Alcibiades’ deputy Antiochus lost the sea-battle at Notion and, with particularly bitter-sweet contrast, other Athenian generals won the significant sea-battle of Arginusae. Alcibiades had rolled his last dice; he flounced back to Persia and then north to Thrace and the Hellespont. The Athenian Empire had become so sprawling, so big, so weak that it was localising again, and many Greeks gave up all pretence of fighting under an ideological banner. Alcibiades was resurrected amongst the malcontents of the north as a warlord. The Dark Ages were back, a time when powerful men carved up territories on the map for purely personal gain.
Like a bad penny, Alcibiades would turn up once more in Athenian affairs; but his offer of help would be rejected. Now he was in his mid-forties, bald, perhaps looking seedy, a good deal of his glamour had finally worn off. His end was certainly ignominious; not epic, not heroic, not golden. He had lived his life for glory – and had earned many enemies in the process. Deciding to give up on Hellenic interests altogether, he travelled east again, anticipating a new alliance with the grand King of Susa, Artaxerxes. En route – with his beautiful courtesan-consort Timandra – he slept one night in a small town in Phrygia. In the early hours a scraping sound woke him. Assassins (to this day we don’t know whose) were setting his lodgings alight. Alcibiades stumbled out, sword in hand, choking, but was lynched at a distance with javelins and spears. His whore was spared – but only to wash and bury, or burn, Alcibiades’ body, which had by now been decapitated.
And what of Socrates through all this turmoil and political heartache? How did he react to the messy, exiled death of the man he had once loved as dearly as philosophy itself? Well, Plato has us believe that, as ever, he wasted not a moment worrying about the casualties or minutiae of the power politics of the day. His concern, purely and simply, was now what it had always been – to encourage the young men of the city to learn how to be good.15 And the philosopher achieves this as he has always done, by wandering through the hot, still inspiring streets and sanctuaries of his city-state.
SOCRATES: The locusts seem to be looking down upon us as they sing and talk with each other in the heat. Now if they should see us not conversing at midday, but, like most people, dozing, lulled to sleep by their song because of our mental indolence, they would quite justly laugh at us, thinking that some slaves had come to their resort and were slumbering about the fountain at noon like sheep. But if they see us conversing and sailing past them unmoved by the charm of their Siren voices, perhaps they will be pleased and give us the gift which the gods bestowed on them to give men.16
Despite all this retrogressive pain, Socrates was still looking to the future; he was still coaching the young men of Athens in their job of being thinking men. And he did so in one of the most trim of all Athens’ locations, a wrestling ground, a palaestra.
SOCRATES: What is this place? And what do you do here?
[The young men reply:] It is a newly-built wrestling ground; but in fact we spend much of our time talking and debating – would you like to come to join us?17
An entire Platonic Dialogue, the Lysis (subtitled ‘On Friendship’), is set here. The date is 409 BC. Socrates, putatively aged about sixty, describes to us two conversations he has with a handsome young man, Lysis, and his friend Menexenus. Their discussions focus on the motivations for personal affection, and on the nature of friendship.