The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [171]
The land here, deserted today apart from the odd visit by extreme swimmers who enjoy the challenge of the currents in this spot, is curiously unprepossessing. And in 406 BC, around the tricky rocks of Arginusae, 120 Spartan triremes and 155 Athenian swung into their ugly seaborne dance: ramming and burning, throat-slitting and heart-piercing until one side could stand it no more.
The battle was a close call, but, just, a victory for Athens. And then a summer storm came. Storms in this region split open the sky. At a distance of 10 miles the rains scurf up the sea’s surface, and close at hand the raindrops travel so fast they are immediately blinding. The foul conditions back in 406 BC (or this was the official story at any rate) prevented the generals from picking up the bodies of the dead and wounded. Today a storm of this magnitude washes up fag-ends and cuttlefish right along the shoreline. In 406 BC it left shreds of battle, of humans. But the hours and days that followed the battle were so intemperate these scraps could not be retrieved. Uncollected, this meant that mutilated corpses could not be given a proper burial; their souls were lost, condemned. Two of the Athenian generals realised the implication of their failings and melted away into the Eastern Mediterranean. Six returned home, expecting perhaps a heroes’ welcome – there had been mitigating circumstances after all. Jittery and bad-tempered with worry, the Athenian demos did not receive the homecomers as they might have expected.
Instead of garlands and laurels, the six generals still standing found themselves on trial. Athens, fleet of foot as ever, had arranged a hearing in the Assembly the men charged, collectively, with anti-democratic activity. As it so happened, Socrates was presiding officer for the day – serving with the prytany, the committee of the council.3 He had volunteered himself for service, back in the assembly of his local deme, Alopeke.4 His selection as overseer was a chance one; just the way the lottery machine chose to allocate democratic jobs that day. We do not know why Socrates volunteered himself, the man who famously left that kind of politicking to others. Payment for prytany duty was around 5 obols for the day – perhaps he simply needed the money.5 But his motivation could also have been more high-minded. He realised perhaps that Athens needed practical help to keep the body-politic together; that for once the philosopher’s role was to be not the wound, but the bandage. So, that late-summer morning in 406 BC, just as they would do in the near future at the philosopher’s trial, citizens were hurrying, at dawn with Socrates himself among them, to pass judgement on their fellow democrats.
As presiding officer in the Assembly, Socrates had gone through that theatre of democracy that enabled ordinary men to prosecute one another or to declare them innocent. He had sworn an oath in Theseus’ Sanctuary that his counsel would be ‘for the best advantage of the state’. He would have made a sacrifice to Demokratia. He had stood up in front of the council members to declare himself fit for practice – giving the names of his mother and father, his grandparents, declaring that he honoured their names and the family cult, that he was not a pauper and that he had seen military service. He had eaten dinners (simple fare – the dinner services still being dug up here are not at all fancy6) in the round dining hall, the Tholos, by now more than fifty years old; he might have stayed the night there, he would have debated Assembly business with a press of the demos listening to him from behind railings, and he would have plunged his hands into the baskets of cold pebbles, some black, some white, so that he could vote ‘for’ or ‘against’.7
We should not underestimate the significance of Socrates