The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [186]
If it were the law with us, as it is elsewhere, that a trial for life should not last one, but many days, you would be convinced, but now it is not easy to dispel great slanders in a short time.13
Throughout that one, heated, epoch-forming twelve-hour stretch, each juror has had charge of two discs of metal. One with the axle solid, the other hollow. They have been fingering them perhaps throughout the speeches, cooling them in the folds of their clothes, warming them in their hands, and now they have to choose which one to drop. A pierced axle is a vote for Socrates’ death, a solid axle for his innocence. The first few discs of metal thud on the terracotta-and-earth base in the ballot box, then as the box fills, the bronze clamours for attention, chiming out the decision of the troubled democracy.14
The first majority that decides Socrates to be guilty has been slender; but now the margin is far more substantial. These Athenian democrats want closure on the situation. Whereas 220 had voted for him and 280 against in the first mandate, now only 160 choose to acquit the philosopher and 340 vote for his death. Originally, it seems, the Athenians remembered that, in 403 BC, they had sworn an oath of amnestia, amnesty. A promise officially to forget the ‘bad’, the anti-democratic offences of the past. But Socrates’ hubris, his worrying religious unorthodoxy was too much to bear. If, in that initial round casting, just thirty men had chosen to vote with a different-coloured pebble or a different bronze disc (because a tied vote always fell in favour of the defendant), if Socrates had not become a martyr, a cause-célèbre, then the history of philosophy, the value-system of the West, and of the East, might have been immeasurably different.
The Athenians were as fearful of what they could not see as they were in awe of that which they could. Imagine a miasma seeping through the court. Criminals, ‘honourless’ and infected men were not allowed to speak in the Assembly. It was thought that their very presence, and in particular their dirty words, would pollute the common good.15 And yet now, in full view, breath-on-cheek close, is this man who, it seems, is on the hit-list of the gods, spitting out a series of home truths. The Athenians may have accused Socrates of being beloved of the sophists, but a bit of sweet sophistry would have softened those verbal blows. Yet Socrates’ case is proved in the manner of his defence. He does not attempt to sway the crowd with his cleverness. He just tells the truth. He is, he says, naked before them.
In his apology the philosopher continuously stresses that he speaks the truth – that his accusers run from it. He compares his adherence to the gods, his sacrifice for what he loves and his preference for death over a bad life to the choices that Achilles once made. Achilles and Socrates? How in heaven’s name could the philosopher compare himself to this Hero of Heroes? How could he (or perhaps his biographer Plato, given that all these words are Plato’s) introduce a Homeric hero into the rhetoric at this make-or-break juncture? The hard-toned, sinew-sweet, love-locked war-machine that was Achilles set up against a dirty, smelly (probably), rolling, pug-faced, daydreaming stonemason’s son? Yet there is some logic in Socrates’ self-pairing with Achilles’ self-serving might. Both men, despite appearances, share one vital thing. They are true to themselves. They know themselves. They are who they are, not who society wants them to be.16
You get the sense that the Athenians really did not know what to do with this obdurate, annoying, wonderful man, impossible to pigeonhole, neither true democrat nor dyed-in-the-wool oligarch, neither golden hero nor twisted villain. Socrates has dined in Periclean circles, but has criticised imperial ambitions. He cautions virtue, but never once spoke out against the outrages in Mytilene, Corcyra, Melos. He loves young men, he gives voice to young