The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [18]
Demos had for much of its history been a dirty word. Hoi polloi, the people, the great unwashed, were something to be feared, to be mistrusted. But Socrates witnessed an extraordinary human development. Instead of kings and tyrants, instead of councils of elders and aristocrats, the demos – the people – were now in charge. Over a period of a hundred years a massive rupture had taken place in life on earth. Men in one city-state, Athens, had agreed, collectively, to rule themselves, and to be ruled in turn.12
The conditions for change were there in the place we now call Greece. Throughout the Archaic period, in the eighth and seventh centuries BC, Greece lay on the edge of things. Those unfortunate enough to live through ‘interesting times’13 were to be found on the other side of the Bosporus: Assyrians, Medes, Babylonians – all contained, as our story begins, within the vast Persian Empire. Many Greeks on Asia Minor’s western seaboard lived under Persian rule. But mainland Greece had always been truculent geographically. Too many islands, too many shores; mountains too high to conquer easily. Greek colonists might be establishing settlements right across the eastern Mediterranean, but there is an admission that, in spirit, the Greek world has shrunk.14 Men are no longer achieving that which the heroes of the Age of Heroes once did; they are not walking through palaces decorated with lapis lazuli from the Caucasus, not sitting on rock-crystal thrones, not boasting that they possess the most beautiful women in the world, that they are thalassocrats, ‘rulers of the sea’. For centuries there has been a sense of waiting; of suspended animation. But Socrates has been born into a time and place where all that has changed.
In 594 BC the Athenian poet and law-giver Solon had already made bold attempts to make society work well. Sick of the filibustering influence of a network of aristocratic families, he instituted a series of reforms. He reduced the reach of those who had ‘pushed through to glut yourselves with many good things.’15 He broadened Athens’ power-base. Up on the cluster of polished limestone rocks – the areios pagus (hence Areopagus) – just in the shadow of the Acropolis, a broader-based council now sat whose role it was to protect the interests of the people. The men on the areios pagus were elevated, as close to the sacred inhabitants of the Acropolis as they were to mere mortals. Yet Athens’ political reforms – founded on a Hellenic philosophical bedrock of justice and wisdom – paved the way for Athena’s city to be stand-out progressive.
Some of the resulting laws from Solon’s new political vision would play happily in any modern new-town development. Houses, walls, ditches, beehives and certain kinds of trees had to be an acceptable distance from your neighbour’s property. You could not speak ill of the dead (or indeed the living). These reforms – which convey a sense both of solidarity and of self-determination – are a charming mix of the ultimately ideological and the extremely pedestrian. Solon was estimated a wise man, a sophos. He respected the common man’s timē – his honour. But this revolution was circumscribed, this revolutionary was no democrat, he was an oligarch – a man who believed that the oligoi, the few, should maintain control, he had no desire ‘to stir up the milk and lose the cream’:
This is how the demos can best follow its leaders
if it is neither unleashed nor restrained too much
For excess breeds hubris, when great prosperity comes
to men of unsound mind.16
Solon had no taste for tyrants, but he helped those who could help themselves. Even though the foundations of a new political order had been laid, political life was still dominated by the ambition of rival aristocrats. We can meet them today on the lavish grave stelai (stone blocks) they commissioned to outdo one another, monuments that would be ostentatiously raised along the roadsides of Athens. Between one and six feet high, these soft yellow stones are monolithic snapshots of the past. On the stelai in the Piraeus Museum