The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [194]
So at that time of day when everyone else is scurrying home, when the market stalls in the Agora are being cleaned of their wares, unsold slaves taken back to their shackles for the night, slugged lettuce leaves and soiled spice abandoned, when little boys scour the dust frantically searching for the thing they have lost, without which a welcome home means a beating, Socrates is being terminated.
But before he dies he says an odd thing.
And uncovering his face, which had been covered, he said – and these were his last words – ‘Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Pay it and do not neglect it.’26
Socrates invokes an unusual god. Asclepius, the god of healing, was a newish divine arrival in the city of Athens.27 In 420/19 BC, as men across the Eastern Mediterranean licked the wounds delivered by the Peloponnesian Wars, a sanctuary had been built in Socrates’ city to the great healer – a divinity already popular in the Peloponnese, the homeland of Athens’ enemies. The sanctuary site on the slopes of the Acropolis is now being restored. The air here is sharp with marble-dust, the columns have an unfamiliar (to us), temporary fresh-cut-white perfection, the earth is mud-wet where new foundations for Asclepius’ temple are being relaid. Socrates, twenty-four centuries ago, would have watched all this fuss happening the first time round as Asclepius’ sanctuary was being established; today we can watch the diverting arrival of a new home for the healing god, precisely as he did.
Socrates (and in this way he was like the citizens of Athens, rather than unlike them) seems to have put his faith in Asclepius. He was clearly becoming a popular deity; stone stelai, now in the National Archaeological Museum, show the faithful driving their pigs up to his altar for sacrifice. His daughter Hygieia is at the ready, helping out her clever, medical father with poultices and wraps. In the new sanctuary at Athens, sitting under a pleasant portico with the sound of sacred water running from a fountain, patients, calmed, lulled would wait to be healed by the appearance of the divinity in their dreams. Over-familiar with so many deaths on the battlefield, so much collateral damage, all those stinking plague bodies where choruses once danced and men drank wine, the Athenians were flinging out a lifeline – trying to persuade a premier healing spirit to be their friend.
[SOCRATES:] ‘Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius; make this offering to him and do not forget.’ ‘It shall be done,’ said Crito, ‘tell us if there is anything else.’ But there was no answer.28
Socrates’ invocation to Asclepius has promoted a great deal of scholarly ink. Is Plato trying to show how pious Socrates really is? That in fact Athens too has accepted new gods? Is he reminding the people of Athens that they themselves, in the sanctuary of Asclepius, are visited by divinities in their dreams – that Socrates’ daimonion is not really so weird? Is it a last moment of Socratic irony; the philosopher gives thanks to the health god for relieving him of the sickness of being alive? Or could the answer be more simple, more basic? Socrates, thanks to the effects of the poison, is slowly suffocating to death as he speaks; who better to cry out for at this time than the god of healing? Socrates was used to meeting spirits in his dreams; perhaps Asclepius would come to his aid at this time of need. Asclepius’ sanctuary sits cheek-by-jowl with the Theatre of Dionysos and has a bird’s-eye view of all that goes on there; maybe this was the chance for the new divine neighbour of Dionysos to physick the wounds inflicted twenty years ago in Athenian drama, when Socrates was mocked on-stage in 423 BC in front of 20,000 Athenians as a dangerous nutter, a threat to society.
And there is another thing. In many myths, Asclepius was said to be able to raise men from the dead. Maybe Socrates was not quite so phlegmatic about leaving this mortal coil after all. Perhaps he wanted another chance to bustle around like a beautiful nurse in a recovery