The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [170]
When the democracy was developing and expanding, it was bullish, confident it could cope with Socrates’ eternal questions. It could even handle (albeit reluctantly) the precocious self-belief of his young protégés – immature men who started to interrogate those around them before they had learned how to answer questions themselves. It turned a blind eye to the fact that Socrates meandered through the city and talked, and talked; he never pulled his weight in an overtly democratic way; he did not put himself forward for jury service, or for high office. But now, after two decades of battle, after plague, after five years of civil strife, this high-handed, apparently self-indulgent questioning must have seemed intolerable. Socrates’ association with a particular ‘young man’ would also have been to the fore of Athenian minds. Alcibiades, that glaringly ebullient latter-day Theseus, was now dead, and a disgrace to the city. He was as despised as he had once been loved. How could the Athenians possibly not remember that Socrates had shared Alcibiades’ tent, his couch, his well-turned drinking cup? Who was to say the philosopher did not also share half-Spartan Alcibi-ades’ superiority, his dangerous, knife-wielding aristocratic friends, his oligarchic leanings, his part-Spartan heart?
And then, three years after his debate with the young men at the wrestling grounds, an unusual thing happened: Socrates himself, who all his life had shunned ‘conventional’ politics (the Assembly, the law-courts, the Boule) suddenly seemed to change tack. In the late summer of 406 BC we find him back in the Agora – not wandering around and provoking his fellow-citizens, not sharing ideas with those forty or fifty years his junior, but acting more conventionally, as a member of a prytany, the inner circle of the democratic Boule council itself. At last, with just seven years to live, Socrates was acting like a good-to-honest, conventional Athenian democrat.
47
ARGINUSAE – STANDING OUT IN THE CROWD
The Assembly, Athens, 406 BC
SOCRATES: Because I’m not just now but in fact I’ve always been the sort of person who’s persuaded by nothing but the reason that appears to me to be best when I’ve considered it … Consider then: doesn’t it seem to you to be correct that one shouldn’t respect all the opinions people have but some and not others, nor the opinions of all people, but some and not others? What do you say? Is this right or not?
CRITO: It’s right.
SOCRATES: Then should we respect the good ones but not the bad ones?
CRITO: Yes.
SOCRATES: Aren’t the good ones the opinions of the wise, and the bad ones the opinions of the foolish?
CRITO: Of course.
Plato, Crito, 46b–7a1
ASCANT SEVEN YEARS BEFORE HIS own capital trial Socrates stood in the company of another group of men, 6,000 or so this time. He had put himself forward for selection by lot (a system of which he took a rather dim view) to judge on the Boule council in the melodramatic case of the Battle of Arginusae.2
In 406 BC the Spartans looked set to take over the western seaboard of Turkey and had their eyes set on the strategic city of Methymna on the island of Lesbos – the Athenians’ only chance to thwart them was a battle around a small group of islets close by, the Arginusae. Athens was much attenuated come 406 BC, but the city drafted in all men, citizens, freed slaves, whoever was strong enough to hold a weapon to fight. Eight of the ten generals elected by the Assembly were prepared to