The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [2]
Socrates, in Plato’s Lysis, 218b, fourth century BC
PUT TWO AUTHORS TOGETHER IN A room and someone is bound to leave mildly depressed. The only exception seems to be when one of the pair is Peter Cook. Meeting a fellow writer in a bar, so the anecdote goes, he was asked whether he was penning a book. ‘Yes, I’m not either …’ came the soothing reply.
No such comfort for me. Sharing breakfast in an Edinburgh hotel with an award-winning novelist, just as I embarked on this book, the friendly chat came round to our next projects.
‘Socrates! What a doughnut subject!’ he exclaimed. ‘Gloriously rich, with a whacking hole in the middle where the central character should be …’ My smile fixed. Of course he is right: because as far as we know, Socrates wrote down not one word of philosophy. The idea of Socrates is immensely influential, and yet everything we know of him is hearsay. He is, historically, conspicuous by his absence. And thus for the past five years, as I’ve typed, I have had a spectral doughnut hovering over my shoulder.
But painters will tell you that the truest way to represent a shape is to deal with the space around it. The primary-source, autobiographical, historical Socrates is a lacuna; my hope is that by looking at the shape around the Socrates-sized hole, at the city in which he lived – Athens in the fifth century BC – I can begin to write not quite a life of Socrates, but a vivid sketch of Socrates in his landscape; a topography of the man in his times.
I have a warehouse full of unusual allies in this task – the earth-shifters, bulldozers, spades and trowels that have been picking over the Greek landscape in the last few years. The millennial year of 2000, the promise of a Greek Olympics in 2004, the new Acropolis Museum, a change in planning law – all these things have yielded huge amounts of material evidence from the fifth century BC. Socrates is an eidolon – the Greek word gives us idol, a ghost – who haunts a very real landscape. By exploring this physical landscape my hope is to flesh out this idol, and to imagine the life of one of the most provocative and provoking thinkers of all time.1
INTRODUCTION
The unexamined life is not a life worth living for a human being.
Socrates, in Plato’s Apology, 38a1
WE THINK THE WAY WE DO because Socrates thought the way he did. Socrates’ belief that, as individuals, we need to question the world around us stands at the heart of what it means to live in ‘modern times’. In the Socratic Dialogues, generated twenty-four centuries ago, we find the birth of ethos – ethics2 – and the identification of the psyche.3 ‘The First Martyr’ – the Greek martys means ‘witness’ – a witness to ‘truth, virtue, justice’ and ‘freedom of speech’, is commemorated as a bedrock of our civilisation.
Socrates stands at the beginning of our world – when democracy and liberty are first conceived as fundamental values of society. We need to understand him because he did not just pursue the meaning of life, but the meaning of our own lives.4
Socrates sees us coming. He worries that the pursuit of plenty will bring mindless materialism, that ‘democracy’ will become just a banner under which to fight. What is the point, he says, of warships and city walls and glittering statues if we are not happy? If we have lost sight of what is good? His is a question that is more pertinent now than ever. He asks: ‘What is the right way to live?’
I am a stinging fly, sent to goad the city as though it were a huge, thoroughbred horse, which because of its size is rather sluggish and needs to be stirred.5
When Socrates comes into focus, in Greece in the fifth century BC, he is no didact: he wanders through the streets of Athens, debating the essence of what it means to be human. For the young men (and women) of the city he is irresistible: his relentless questioning appears to tap man’s potential for self-knowledge. His ‘ethics’ programme centres on the search for the ‘good life’. His, it was