The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [197]
Socrates knew the shiny democracy as an infant, an adolescent and in middle age. He watched it flourish, diversify, dull, die and, briefly, revive. He never let the democratic ideal become complacent. He died obeying its laws. He was both the product and the casualty of direct democracy. His death reminds us to care about the world we live in, to respect it, to challenge it, but above all to remember ta erotika – the ‘things of love’, the things that drive us to pursue the good.11
CODA
THE TOMB OF SOCRATES – THE TOWER OF THE WINDS
SOCRATES: For no one knows whether death happens to be the greatest of all goods for humanity, but people fear it because they’re completely convinced it is the greatest of evils.
Plato, Apology, 29a–b1
SOME WILL TELL YOU THERE IS still a mausoleum for Socrates right in the heart of Athens. Many visitors continue to pay their respects to the philosopher here; eighteenth-century watercolours show Grand Tour eagers bowing their heads at the place as if in prayer. It is folly. The ‘Tomb of Socrates’ is in fact a huge time-machine, the Horologion of Kyrrhestos, probably built by the astronomer Andronikos from Macedonia in the first century BC.
This chunky, confident, octagonal tower (much approved of by the Roman architect Vitruvius and listed in his catalogue of classical excellence De Architectura) decorated with flying, bearded figures was designed to house one of those relatively newfangled measures of human life – a water-clock.
When I last visited the Horologion it was being renovated. The bronze weathervane that showed the direction of the winds was under reconstruction, the sun-clock was absent, the vigorous carved figures under the parapet needed more than a little expert attention. Inside, scaffolding poles and bags of mortar lay abandoned – there was, it seemed, no urgency to shore up this tower, which has already stood for 2,000 years. But somewhere in the Horologion there was a leak – and nature’s own water-clock was drumming drip by drip, marking out the span of all our mortal lives.
In a sense this is Socrates’ true tomb – the trap of calibrated time, the false friend, some would say, of which Socrates was acutely, atypically, aware. The tyrant time that civilisation brings, that allows us to do so much and stops us from doing more.
Socrates despised the artificial constraints that time-counting puts on human affairs, he raged against the ludicrous notion that the volume of a terracotta water-clock should determine how long a man is given to argue for his life. But he had a powerful sense of one measure of time – a lifespan. For him it was vital for each and every living individual to think how well man spent his time on earth.
So in some ways the ‘House of the Winds’ is not an inappropriate memorial for Socrates. It is muscular, odd, ferocious – an eccentric, anachronistic folly, plonked as it is at the top of Athens’ Roman forum. And yet it has endured. Socrates’ name lives on in the great civilisations of both East and West. Although traditionally we focus on his trial and death, he was actually a survivor. By 399 BC, many men in Athens were destroyed or were shadows of their former selves. As Socrates chooses not to escape, chooses to take the hemlock and obey the laws of his city, as he jokes with his friends, no one could describe him as a destroyed man. All democratic Athenians were architects of Athenian democracy, and Socrates was one of the few who lived to see its demolition, and its rebirth. He lived through much.
As has that Horologion. Just two generations after Socrates