The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [181]
Enraged by his intransigence, the philosopher was now marked out by the Thirty as an enemy of the State. The death squads were, we are told, coming for Socrates next. It is one of history’s great what-ifs. If a backdoor murderer had been dispatched by Critias and his mob to deal with this troublesome, recalcitrant philosopher then and there, we would have no martyr to liberty, and we might well have lost Socrates from history. On this occasion, Socrates escaped by the skin of his teeth. Because the wind-blown democrats up on Phyle decided to try to claim their city back. Coming home through Piraeus, they met the Thirty in battle. Critias and Charmides were killed. It was said that on Critias’ tombstone was carved the figure of a fierce woman ‘Oligarchy’ physically torching the anthropo-morphised lady Demokratia. While the denuded oligarchy withdrew to the city centre to lick their wounds and plan their next move, the 3,000 citizens who remained deposed them. Now a new board of ten, one per tribe, was elected. The Spartans were brought in to attempt to get the city back into some kind of order. Spartan diplomacy between those Athenians who had all stood together in the Assembly as one, as a single mass of 6,000, but who were now bitterly opposed to each other, meant that the oligarchs were allowed to live with their mysteries in Eleusis and all democratic exiles were recalled.
One of those who came back into Athena’s city, a chip the size of Crete on his shoulder, was a one-time tanner, now owner of a tanning factory, called Anytus. Anytus would be one of the men who would bring Socrates to trial.
And in 401 BC, when Spartans and Spartan swords were occupied elsewhere in the region, at a safe distance, the returned democrats stormed Eleusis and slaughtered the remaining oligarchs. Were they defending themselves, their families, an ideology? One wonders. But this was a time when there were many different reasons for hands to ball into fists. What is certain is that Athenians, whether reluctantly or with gusto, had developed a taste for spilling Athenian blood.
Socrates, throughout these dark days, remained intransigent. Was this one of his most irritating acts – the moment when it became clear to his compatriots that he really meant it when he said he did not want to be involved in politics? That all that otherworldliness was not just a pose? Socrates had not raised his voice to condemn the slaughter on Melos in 416 BC and now he did not – on record – condemn the slaughterers who had been busy on the streets of his home-town. Because although Socrates stood up to the oligarchs, he did not formally denounce them, he did not flee the city along with democratic friends such as Chaerephon, holing up, planning a revolution from the north. He did what he had done through plague and siege and war and peace: he stayed and walked around the streets of Athens, and he talked.
The delightful thrill of being with a man who was resolutely happy to plough his own furrow, even if what he did shocked those around him, was starting to wear decidedly thin.
Three years passed. These had been terrible times. Socrates had grown old in a city which since his birth had memorialised the extraordinary fact that Athena’s children had beaten back Persian might. But now there was shame; the Athenians could not match the muscle of their fellow Greeks, the Spartans, and they could not beat the enemy within. They could not maintain their empire, they could not employ the ideology of democracy as a convenient panacea, they could not control their own internecine strife. Socrates took the sting of this disgrace.
And so it was that, a scant five years after the Spartans had broken down Athenian walls, just four years after the democracy had been suppressed out of existence, and with the memories of slaughter and political executions still keen in the minds of the Athenian crowd, their wounds still suppurating, Socrates felt the hand of the poet Meletus on his shoulder, and he was called to court by the Athenian people.
ACT EIGHT
THE TRIAL AND