The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [195]
But after a little while he moved; the attendant uncovered him; his eyes were fixed. And Crito, when he saw it, closed his mouth and eyes.29
The now-dead hand of democracy has done its work. Socrates’ fearful, unseen daimonion is sealed up inside the shell of his lifeless flesh, gristle, bone and skin.30 The philosopher is destroyed.
SOCRATES: I hope that there is something in store for the dead, and, as has been said of old, something better for the good than for the wicked.31
I think it was no coincidence that Socrates was killed in May/June – the ancient month of Thargelion. Every year at this time, in an obscure ritual known as the Thargelia, two people – either male and female, or representing the male and the female by wearing a necklace of black and green figs respectively – were exiled from the city as scapegoats. Flogged outside the city walls, their expulsion was a symbolic gesture. The Athenians believed their sacrifice would prevent pollution and stasis from seeping through the city-state. The death of Socrates, in this propitious month, could be justified as a further gift to the gods.32 When Socrates was a boy and playing around with incendiary ideas outside the city walls in the Kerameikos he was encouraged and patronised, and when he was trading his ideas in the Agora and Athenian life was sweet he could be tolerated, but now that things had gone bad, his enemies believed that he had brought pollution within the city. His was a miasma that had to be tidied up, obliterated. Socrates suffocated to death when the poppies in the city would have been blood-red. The dying democracy had ensured that one of the tallest of all Athenian poppies was cut down.
SOCRATES: I go to die and you to live, who knows which is the better journey.33
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FLIGHT FROM THE WORLD
Beyond the city walls, 399 BC and beyond
ALCIBIADES: There is no one like him and I do not think there ever was or will be … you will never find anyone else like Socrates or any ideas like his ideas. Not today, not in days gone by.
Plato, Symposium, 221c–d
NO EXTANT EVIDENCE TELLS US WHERE Socrates’ body was taken. In such circumstances after one day lying in state the corpse would typically be released to his family for burial. Women would have helped to lower his corpse into a coffin, and with their shorn hair, their scratched cheeks and chests red with thumping would have wailed his way to Hades.1 But in contemporary sources we hear neither of Socrates’ body nor of his wife and children again. The most tangible remnant of Socrates was a small piece of papyrus, the affidavit that detailed the charge against him, kept available for inspection in the public registry. And so rather than Plato, or Xenophon, the first human hand to record the outcome of the philosopher’s trial would have been a literate slave.2 A Persian perhaps, a man who sat within the shade of the Metroon in the heart of the Agora, recording day in, day out the business of this once-great democracy.3 Socrates would have known that this is how he would be inked into history. The power of the written word – a potency that Socrates mistrusted until the last – had, in one sense, and in the physical landscape at least, the final say.
We are told by later traditions that the Athenian citizens, very quickly, realised that they had done wrong.4 Athena’s children instituted a period of mourning for the murdered philosopher, closing the gymnasia and training grounds. Socrates’ prosecutors were banished, Meletus was put to death. And down at the Kerameikos district, where Socrates had started his journey into philosophy, a bronze statue of the man from Alopeke was erected. Unashamedly