The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [190]
It is almost certainly this that was the last view Socrates had of the city in which he had lived and loved and talked for seventy years. It might have been his last glimpse of the outside world, but this would not be his last day on earth.
Because of the ritual delay, the Delian festivities, Socrates has a full month of life ahead of him. When he walks in through the guarded doors of the prison his purpose is to wait. And according to Plato, Socrates chooses to sit, chained, and carry on within his prison walls that which he has always done outside – talk with friends and strangers. It is in the prison that Plato situates entire Socratic Dialogues such as the Crito.
The atmosphere of the philosopher’s cell is, according to Plato, positively convivial. Although Socrates is closely guarded, his companions seem to have formed a good relationship with the prison authorities:
SOCRATES: I am surprised that the prison warden was willing to let you in.
CRITO: He is used to me by now, Socrates, because I come here so often, and besides I have done him a favour.7
The prison officials and their senior command, the Eleven, were not a body of men to be messed with. These Athenians could take the law into their own hands. If they caught a common criminal in the act and he confessed his guilt, they had the right to execute without trial. Accompanied by public slaves (possibly Scythians) armed with whips, cudgels, bows and daggers, they made arrests, confiscated property, supervised the torture of slaves (slaves’ evidence was thought admissible in fifth-century Athens only if obtained under torture). Employed extensively as vigilantes and assassins by the Thirty, the Eleven were little loved. By turn they slept in another two-storey building next to their charges in the prison complex.8
Oppressive as this sounds, Socrates seems to have found the company of his jailors – perhaps members of the Eleven, perhaps just prison-running slaves – counter-intuitively congenial.
Socrates has, Plato tells us, bided his time doing little things in jail: turning Aesop’s Fables into lyric verse, a sweet task. Making jottings. It is the only evidence we have that Socrates ever wrote anything down.9 His musings during this period do not betray an agitated man. The philosopher might have been calm, but his friends were not. Because now, four weeks on from Socrates’ trial, probably in early June, Theseus’ ship has been spotted off Cape Sounion – twenty-nine days after it left Athens.10 When the visitors to Delos land, Socrates must die. But in Socrates’ drama, as written, imagined, related by Plato, at this point there is suddenly a chink of hope.
CRITO: … I only wish I myself were not so sleepless and sorrowful. But I have been wondering at you for some time, seeing how sweetly you sleep.11
Crito, one of his oldest friends, learning of the return of the ship from Delos, is (Plato tells us) in the prison trying to persuade Socrates to escape. Contacts across the eastern Mediterranean have been alerted and are ready to protect this renowned philosopher; foreigners have helped raise money to realise an escape plan. Here there is a hint of the old-boy network, aristocrats, gearing up for action to save a beautiful thing from the bile of the mob (networks are rarely formed of peasants). Across the entire region they appear to have agreed to collude in Socrates’ escape. At a modest price, Socrates’ ‘vanishing’ is presented by Crito as a very real possibility.
CRITO: It is not even