The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [17]
I am Darius the great King, the king of kings, the King of Persia, the king of all lands … so says Darius the King … these lands obeyed my rule. Whatever I told them to do, was done …9
A cousin of the next Persian leader, Xerxes – who invaded Athens just a decade before Socrates was born – was reported to have roared that he would ‘complete the enslavement of all the Greeks’.10 It is impossible to understand Socrates’ life without appreciating the bogeyman horror that the Persians represented to all Athenian citizens. Persian diabolics would come to be contrasted with Greek heroics. Socrates was a child when, at last, the Eastern threat appeared to have receded: after Persian forces had been conclusively defeated by a collection of Greek allies, Athenians, Corinthians, Spartans et al., at the Battles of Salamis and Plataea. ‘Liberty’ had become the watchword of all Athenians; a freedom not to be enslaved or oppressed by the ‘dog-barbarians’ of the East. As Socrates grows up there is a sense, clearly, that a new age is dawning. The greatest despot in remembered history – Persia – has been thwarted, and the dream of people-power has become conscious. Socrates is born when the world is different. Because Athens is entertaining an extraordinary new ideology: democracy.
Demos-kratia
and a new town for a new democracy,
508–404 BC
May the people who hold the power in the polis maintain their office confidently: a system of rule that looks ahead and concerns itself with the welfare of the community.
Aeschylus, Suppliant Women, 698–700
When Socrates was growing up, we should try to imagine the flurry of papyrus sheets on workbenches and the fingers sketching in the dirt as draughtsmen and architects laid out plans for their new, newly democratic city. Stylus pens have been found deep in the earth all around the Agora. Project leaders would have been appointed, and slave-labourers briefed. Masonry blocks were laid one on the other to give a physical incarnation to the democratic ideology. A new, voguish, solid, round limestone building, the Tholos chamber, gave nightly dinners to fifty of those who served on the Boule – Athens’ council. Five hundred ordinary men were picked by lot to meet here to administer the business of the Athenian Assembly for the space of one year.11 In the sturdy, rectangular council chamber itself, the bouleuterion, and also in the Agora, business was prepared for the Assembly’s citizen-politicians. The Assembly hovered like a stone cloud above the Agora – its home, known affectionately as the Pnyx, the ‘packed-place’, a natural, limestone-smooth auditorium where all Athenian citizens could decide how their polis should be run.
Greece already has a close-on-1,000-year-old written history at the moment we pick up Socrates’ story – and in that history the powerful persecute the weak, might is right and tyrants lead men. Warlords and high priests dominate society. Ordinary men may have access to councils of peace and battle, but the final decision is never theirs.
Democracy is the most thrilling of developments. Now, for around 50,000 or 60,000 (the number varies, depending on population size through the fifth century BC) adult, male, Athenian citizens, not only could their voice be heard, but they could actively mould their society. You, your brother, your father, your son, could choose which issues were important to debate, which vital to legislate. The city built around Socrates was designed to keep democracy alive. Democratic Athenians did not serve the state, they were the state: its army, its executive, its judiciary.