The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [172]
This case of the disgraced generals was going to be tried under the operatic canopy of a Greek sky. The Pnyx was the location – that creamy, rocky slope where up to 6,000 men could sit or stand comfortably side by side. And so piglets were sacrificed, invocations and curses were sent up to the gods, the Assembly men were now ritually pure. The fact that the disgraced generals from Arginusae were to be tried together – and by so many accusers – did not look good. No precedent in Athenian law allowed for group trials. This smacked of a kangaroo court. It seemed the generals’ guilt was a foregone conclusion. Socrates (a lone voice, or so Xenophon and Plato would have us believe) refused to go along with the ugly mood of the crowd. They shouted that he would be indicted for treason, but Socrates did not budge. The laws of Athens stated that men should be tried individually, and Socrates was sticking to the letter of the law. There was a stalemate; in the darkening sky that shadowed so quickly at this time of the year, the show of Athenian hands could not be counted clearly. The trial of the hangdog generals was postponed, and in the revolving-door arrangement of the democracy, tomorrow would bring another day, and another amateur politician to supervise proceedings. There was a promise of separate trials.8 Socrates was off the case.
Athens had voted and agreed, but somehow, thanks to a bit of parliamentary ducking and diving, the Assembly was now told that this mandate was invalid; the progressive democracy had become a mob that preferred illegality to frustration. Their blood was up. Agitators infiltrated the court, their heads shaved as if they were in mourning. They produced a witness, a man who said he survived by clinging on to debris from the Arginusae wreckage – a bran tub of all things – and wailed that these generals did not even collect the men, dead, half-dead, dying, bobbing and gasping in the water, who had proved themselves ‘most brave in the service of the country’.9
We do not have the name of the man who took over from Socrates; but what we know is that he did not have the philosopher’s qualms. The next day all six surviving generals in Athens were jointly tried, condemned to death and executed.10 Their means of death, hemlock poison.
The generals had been voted into their posts, and into their graves, in a matter of weeks by the democratic Assembly. Socrates, who always questioned whether ‘democracy’ was indeed an automatic route to ‘the good’, seemed in the case of Arginusae to have grounds for concern.
Loose ends
One of the unfortunate dead – one of the six generals summarily executed – was Aspasia and Pericles’ son, Pericles II. Pericles’ two legitimate sons by his first marriage had died in the plague; Pericles II had been made a citizen by special decree. For a short time in his life he was accepted as a valid member of the Athenian democratic body. But now Athenian policy had managed to eradicate the genetic remnant of that union that had irritated them so all those years ago – a remnant of a great, an exemplary man and a seductive, beautiful woman from the East.
By the time her son died, Aspasia had long been lost to history.
But recent evidence has brought her back. Excavations in Piraeus during the laying of a new road turned up a number of artefacts in the rescue archaeology, amongst them one of the curse-tablets so favoured of fifth-century Athens. Someone had gouged Aspasia’s name out of lead and buried their curses in the Piraeus district. A grave stele mentioning her family was recently discovered here too – in the home of prostitutes, of liminal