The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [188]
Approaching the island of Delos today, it still feels as if the gods of wind and rain protect the place. The gneiss rock, coarse-grained, meta-morphic – layered with quartz and ferromagnesium – is unwelcoming. But many city-states have left their mark here, claiming a stake in the pooling, prehistoric sanctity of the island. Rain drips off the bared gums of rows of snarling lions, installed by pious Naxians just before 600 BC. Massive statuary, a Hellenistic row of engorged 6-foot-high penises, still brave it out against the elements. City-states had their own boarding houses next to the ritual sites. By reviving the Delian festival some time around 427 BC the Athenians made the triangular connection between Athens, Delos and Theseus even stronger. They wanted to remember the good old days, when the treasure houses were full, when heroes stole women, when a small, favoured city ran the known world’s most productive and energetic territories.
The theatre of purity at Delos was considered essential. Come the Roman period, all visitors were required to be spotless of hand and soul and, at the sanctuaries of Zeus Kynthios and Athena Kynthia, to wear white.7 Delos’ sanctity stretches back until before recorded time. For the prehistoric populations of the eastern Mediterranean, this speck on a map was no less than a magical island. The dances that Theseus was credited with perpetuating here, as he sailed fecklessly back to Athens, the abandoned princess Ariadne behind him, a hopelessly anticipant father in front, stemmed from the rich and deep Minoan culture.8 These were dances of youths and maidens of intense importance. Human sacrifice almost certainly took place on the island of Crete.9 It could be that teenage boys and girls beat out their path to adulthood with the stamp and sway of the communal dance, and that some dances ended with a victim being killed.10
In Socrates’ day the dances on Delos still had this charged, edgy feel and took place at night. Lamps and torches were lit, the undulating movement of the dancers catching and escaping the tallow-light as they wove between one another. There were sacred games too, established, as the pious Athenians loyally repeated, by Theseus himself.
Delos might be a sacred island, but it too had suffered during the pitiless Peloponnesian War. In 422 BC, the Athenians had expelled the entire population – restoring them again on the advice of Apollo at Delphi in 421 BC, furious, presumably, that his birthplace should be treated with such high-handed disdain. Dumped marble found in an old cistern shows that after the Spartan victory of 404 BC the lands were rented out, interest was taken on sanctuary money, fishing rights were claimed – and all by a new Spartan overlord. And the massive roofless temple to Apollo, abandoned in 454 BC, half-built, when the Athenians withdrew Delian League money back to the Parthenon, still stood, an aborted enterprise that spoke loudly of Athens’ glorious hubris.11 But now, briefly, Athenians had the upper hand once more. Their commemoration of that brave, lusty, straightforward founder-hero Theseus must have had even more resonance in 399 BC. There must have been even less patience for complicated flies in the ointment such as Socrates.
The purified pilgrims are cutting their way back to Athens through the surf. They are leaving behind an island where no pollution is allowed – the elderly, the sick, the