The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [187]
The minuscule cash-surplus generated within the city-state (any trickle of income from Athens’ attenuated empire had by now dried up) was used to pay the jurors for this day in court. The functionaries of the democracy have had to sit in judgement on the man who is both the summation of democracy and its nemesis.
And so, their decision made, the judges file out of the courtroom. Not, as they have done for centuries, only at boulutonde, the time when the cows come home, but because the clock has run dry. And the tally of metal discs in the ballot box shows no ambiguity. Socrates is condemned. The only journey that remains for him is terminal – to Athens’ jail and then to his death.
SOCRATES: … But surely it is possible – and indeed one ought to say a prayer to the gods that the journey from here to there will be a happy one. That’s what I pray and may it turn out to be so.18
Athens, though, is going to make the philosopher attend his death. Because the Delian festival of Apollo has begun, this is a month of ritual purity. The beautiful sun god with his enigmatic smile now commands all attention in the city. Socrates can wait. Athens, still religious to the core, is preoccupied.
52
TWILIGHT AND DELOS AT DAWN
Delos, the Cyclades, 399 BC
You sing as if you were sailing to Delos.
Zenobius, 2.731
As happy as sailing to Delos.
Popular Attic Greek proverb
THE DAY BEFORE SOCRATES’ TRIAL, ATHENS would have breathed in the smell of crushed stalks and bruised petals.2 The philosopher is now condemned. But he is going to be forced to wait to die. Because it so happens that his trial fell on the day in the year when Athenians started to celebrate an ancient festival on the small Cycladic island of Delos.3
The story behind the festival is still told today: the Athenian hero Theseus – as a young man, before he has raped Helen and chased Persephone, before he has, as a ghostly apparition, led the triumphant troops of Athens at Marathon – was sent by his father, the King of Athens, to slay the Minotaur on the island of Crete. Theseus brings with him to that ‘wide and lovely’ island the usual tribute: seven young boys and seven maidens. But his plan is to end the humdrum human sacrifice with which the Athenians have had to put up, year in, year out. His aim is to kill an abhorrence, a man-monster. What better way to earn your stripes as a trainee hero?
Theseus does manage to slaughter the beast, but only with the help of King Minos’ daughter, dancing Ariadne. They love, but Theseus is not polite. He leaves the princess, heart-broken, on Naxos. When he sails back home, preoccupied with his own marvellousness, he also forgets to change his sails from black to white, and so his father Aegeus, thinking his son dead, hurls himself into the sea (the ‘Aegean’ Sea still bears his name). But what Theseus does find time for is a little stop-off at Delos, Apollo’s birthplace. The sun god was born of a difficult labour – nine days; Hera, jealous of this creature (Zeus’ love-child by Leto), accidentally-on-purpose forgot to let Eileithyia, the goddess of parturition, and an aide to women in labour, know that Leto was about to give birth.4 But when at last the god-child arrived wailing into the world (in some versions with his twin sister Artemis), the island – which had until then been unfixed, a wandering womb on the sea – became rooted.
The Athenians commemorate Theseus’ selfish heroics in grand style. They send to Delos a modern chorus in (so they told themselves) the very boat that Theseus himself had used.5 Lovingly cared for in dry-dock throughout the year, possibly near the sanctuary at Brauron where those young Athenian girls grew up