The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [174]
Socrates had been lambasted on-stage when there was still hope in the city. When in 423 BC Aristophanes had described him as a ‘rascal, a braggart, a liar’, when other playwrights had mocked his ‘one ragged cloak’, his ‘shoeless disciples’, there was still a chance that Athens could triumph in her foreign and internal struggles. The Dionysia itself may have been reduced from five days to three for the duration of the Peloponnesian War, but at least it was there. Approaching the year of Socrates’ death, Athens was ground down, jaded, wrecked, exhausted, febrile. Euripides’ Women of Troy and Hecuba talk not just about the sickening, fetid brutality of war, but of the dull, wasteful messiness of it.
Woe, woe is me! What words, or cries, or lamentations can I utter? Ah me! For the sorrows of my closing years! For slavery too cruel to endure, to bear! Woe, woe is me! What champion do I have? Family and city – where are they?4
And it was in these dark days, when the searing joviality of Aristophanes’ Clouds, the genial colours of an April day in 423, with pigs’ blood and wine and dancing, would still have been viable if distorted memories, that Socrates was judged. He was judged when hope had waned. When at least one-half, possibly three-quarters of the Athenian population had died. When the city’s greatest enemies had broken down Athenian walls, pissed on their thresholds, outlawed democracy – when the roar of the crowd suddenly showed a sharper edge.
It is not [my accusers] but the envy and detraction of the world, which has been the death of many good men, and will probably be the death of many more; there is no danger of my being the last of them.5
In the latest tragedies written – Euripides’ Phoenician Women, composed just ten years before Socrates’ trial, is a prime example – the picture is clouded. Now the city is a place compromised by war. Families are ruined, both tribal ties and individual ambition tear apart the city-state. We watch the last great works of Euripides and hear fifth-century Athenians weep.
Your pain is our pain!6
Outside the Theatre of Dionysos where these plays are performed are the visible, physical casualties of war. The hunger-drawn middle-aged men. Women who cannot spawn new little humans to support them, and who have lost the sons they once gave birth to. These are fixtures of all war-zones: outlaws with no families, no role. We hear of one such after Socrates has died, in the fourth century BC. An older woman who is suspected of not being a citizen because she is reduced to working as a wet-nurse and a ribbon-seller: jobs normally fit only for slaves and metics. Her son Euxitheus declares with aching understatement that many crones like her are forced to work as nurses, wool-workers, grape-pickers. ‘We do not live in the way that we’d like,’ he sighs.7
By the end of the fifth century BC the mood in Athens had become uniformly ugly. Grain supplies were getting low. Brother could not trust brother. A recently discovered letter written by a contemporary of Socrates, etched onto a foil-fine piece of lead and long lost in the Black Sea, sees a banker called Pasion, himself an ex-slave, instructing a lawyer to effect retribution in Athens:
I, Pasion, write with instructions to Dikaiarchos to punish and pursue Satyrion and Nikostratos … since they are wronging and plotting against me, and [against] Glauketes and Aiantodoros, and are plotting also that …8
One can imagine the atmosphere: Athenians all looking over their shoulders to see who would be the next to stab them in the back. A weary whisper must have stolen through the cramped streets – someone must be responsible for all this suffering, for the degeneration of a city that was once in the ascendant. And the people of Athens lashed out at what they could hear and see: at the sophists, the clever men who, at one time, had, with flowery words and tricks of rhetoric, with the goddess Persuasion at their sides, glorified