The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [189]
The pastoral Ilissos of Socrates’ day – the site of his ramblings with young men – had had a prophetic relevance to the philosopher’s fate. In one corner next to the river bank was an enclosure where Theseus’ father (so the storytellers had it) dashed to the ground a poisoned cup of wolfbane, prepared by the wicked Medea for her handsome stepson. But Socrates had no king-father to protect him. While the Athenian hero Theseus was paid the highest of honours, Athens’ anti-hero, Socrates, would be forced to drink hemlock in a small Athenian cell.
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SOCRATES BOUND
Athens’ prison, the Agora, June 399 BC
SOCRATES: Then we agree that the question is whether it is right for me to try to escape from here without the permission of the Athenians, or not right. And if it appears to be right, let us try it, and if not, let us give it up.
Plato, Crito, 48b–c1
SOCRATES TRAVELLED ONLY 300 yards or so from his courtroom to the prison; it was the last time he walked freely.
Imprisonment per se was not devised as a punishment in classical Athens, but it cannot have been remotely pleasant.2 Socrates was, almost certainly, shackled with iron fetters. Other prisoners talk about the ‘physical abuse’ and ‘physical suffering’ that came with fifth-century BC prison life. Desmoterion, the word for ‘prison’ at this time in Greece, means ‘a binding down place’.3 Inmates were often strapped to the ground in wooden stocks; Herodotus tells us of a foreign prisoner in Sparta who was so desperate to break free that he hacked off a section of his own foot and slipped out of his restraint – an agonising contraption known simply as ‘the wood’.4
Athena was used to punishing. Exile from your city, outlawing, debilitating fines, death – these were all penalties. A scrubby area outside the walls appears to have been used as a death zone. Plato tells a story that brings the unpleasant realities of the fifth century BC more sharply into focus.5 Circling the North Long Wall, a young man called Leontius walks past bodies on the ground next to an executioner. The Greek terms used suggest that these almost-corpses are in their final death throes – men strapped to boards and left to die. An executioner watches over them. They have already been exiled from the city, they know they have already lost all chance of a good burial and therefore a good afterlife, and now theirs will not be a death that can in any way be described as ‘beautiful’.
Greek law has little time for prison sentences; it is too inefficient, too expensive, too odd to make someone suffer by locking them up. The prison was really a holding bay for the dysfunctional, the innocent, the framed, the unlucky. Socrates’ jail would have been patrolled and serviced by ‘the Eleven’, a law-enforcement body – our police, judiciary and prison medics rolled into one. But there is no concept here of jail sentences. Little surprise then that the jail-block that contained Socrates resembles a simple storage room. The footprint of the prison can still be traced in the Agora and, although it is roped off from the public, some children still play on the low walls that mark the perimeter.6 I was last there on a wet Tuesday and most tourists seemed unimpressed by the diminutive ruins; even the stray dogs that lounge in the modern city’s public places pass listlessly by, no useful shelter here.
Yet the view from the Stoa Basileios up towards the prison zone, which would have been Socrates’ panorama as he left the court, is magnificent today, as it would have been in his day. There is the Parthenon, there the rock of the Areopagus, and under a sky butter-yellow at the time of year of