The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [192]
The Thirty, remember, had recently favoured hemlock poisoning. The sound of the stone against stone, releasing the alkaloids of the plant, must surely have been a sinister grinding, a familiar, throat-tightening sound.17 Aristophanes jokes, darkly, about the death-bringing, hemlock-grinding pestle and mortar in his Frogs:
DIONYSOS: … Just give me the directions, my quickest route down to Hades, and don’t give me one that’s too hot or too cold.
HERAKLES: Let me see, which one shall I give you first? Hmm. Well, there’s one via rope and bench: you hang yourself.
DIONYSOS: Stop it, that way’s too stifling.
HERAKLES: Well, there’s a shortcut that’s well-beaten – in a mortar.
DIONYSOS: You mean hemlock?
HERAKLES: Exactly.
DIONYSOS: That’s a chill and wintry way! It quickly freezes your shins as hard as ice.18
I have ground up hemlock and it releases a nose-wrinkling sour smell. It also sparks a pain above your eyes and across the brain. I have never known, though, whether this is psychosomatic. Because I know, from Plato, what hemlock can do.
Hemlock was a pricey plant back then, twelve drachmas per dose. Under Athenian law, criminals were responsible for the costs of their own punishment, so hemlock poisoning was a death only available to the rich, or those with rich friends.19 All most men needed was a small measure – a solution that would fit into an eye-bath; a number of modest phials of just such dimensions survive (there are two rows of them in the Agora Museum). Black-glazed, rough-cast, they are straightforward, functional objects. Although Romantic painters like to imagine the damned Socrates drinking deep in his cups, this is a dose you would have had to have necked to toss down.
The Eleven have come to Socrates before dawn – they must now prepare the philosopher for his last day on earth. There are fixed procedures that have to be adhered to, traditions that should be upheld. Socrates’ wife, Xanthippe, and the couple’s young child, Menexenos, come into the cold, stone room. For days Xanthippe has been doing what the females of a prisoner’s family had to do: keeping the prisoner fed and watered (some prisoners died during incarceration because their families neglected them), arranging for slaves to clean out the cool, stone cell. But now, as it is clear that in just a few hours Socrates will be dead, Xanthippe does what is expected of good Greek wives, she wails – she raises her hands to the heavens, beats her forehead and with rigid nails scours her cheeks.
Yet Plato tells us that Socrates sends away this howling second-class citizen. Seized upon as an example of his coldness, of his misogyny, this is surely a last display of unorthodoxy: not for him the moaning press of women, brought in for centuries by the well-to-do, primarily to display aristocratic might, the size of the dynasty’s entourage, the number of grateful dependants – Socrates wants an untraditional death. Perhaps – given that the philosopher seemed sensitive to what went on in the minds of others, and that everything written about him suggests that he had an odd but affectionate disposition – maybe, just maybe, this was a display of tenderness.
And then, to save women from the job – unconventional, self-reliant to the last – Socrates washes himself in the prison’s cistern. In one room in Athens’ Agora, excavated in 1931, in the prison-complex (possibly the room in which Socrates bathed himself), a giant pithos stands, half-buried, cool for holding water, and a small basin. The water flow that rinsed the early-summer prison grime off the philosopher would surely have been more like a squaddies’ shower. Socrates, of course, had a reputation for never bathing himself properly.20
The job is done. When his body is