The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [203]
Eleusis is writ large in Socrates’ drama.3 We have no hard evidence that the philosopher himself was an initiate – although the ecstatic language of Plato’s works suggests that perhaps this pupil, possibly even Socrates himself, had experienced the Mysteries. The heady, primitive atmosphere of the worship at Eleusis, its development of the importance of the individual and the fact that Eleusinian influence could be seen all around the city meant that Socrates’ story was played out as an Eleusinian backdrop waited in the scene-dock. The Sacred Way ran from the Kerameikos through the Agora and on up to the Eleusis sanctuary (as it still does today). It was along this sacred, arterial track that as an initiate, Socrates would have stepped every single year of his life. The Archon who conducted his trial was the high-priest of the Eleusinian cult. In years to come, when Alcibiades mucks about with and mocks the Eleusinian Mysteries, he brings a death penalty onto his own head and infects Socrates with the disgrace. Eleusis was, in a sense, the spiritual touchstone of Athens. Not of the whole city-state, but of those who had really made it in the world.
The Mysteries were one of the most anticipated and drawn out of Athenian festivals.4 In spring – the month of Anthesterion (March) – the Lesser Mysteries, a dress-rehearsal for the main event, were celebrated near the banks of the River Ilissos, in the region that Socrates himself frequented. Candidates were coached, in secret, by the Eleusinian priests. In the year of Socrates’ death (399 BC) these Lesser Mysteries would have been in full swing in that no-man’s-land time for the philosopher, probably April, between his abrupt meeting with Meletus in the Agora and his trial itself in the Archon Basileus’ law-courts.
Five moons later, in the calendar month of Boedromion (around September), sacrifices and processions through the heart of Athens – the start of the Greater Mysteries – prepared the faithful for the pilgrimage to the Sanctuary itself. The build-up to the excursion was long and demanding; initiates had to purify themselves, were obliged to carry ritual objects from the Eleusinian shrine in Athens back to Demeter’s sanctuary, and libations and sacrifices were demanded. Secret chants were learned – if the students mocked these they could be executed.
The site of Eleusis is currently being re-excavated and is slowly yielding its secrets. Today we are asked to contemplate the grimy, once primary-coloured monuments to heavy industry that lie between Eleusis and the Aegean Sea beyond. But in Socrates’ day this would have been an idyllic spot. The land was rich and fertile – hence its connection to the goddess of grain, Demeter. The limestone bedrock erodes to form a natural auditorium. A building called the telesterion, developed within this space in the fifth century BC, has now been identified. Windowless, punctuated by columns, this vast area was where many thousands of the faithful gathered together. Initiates could not reveal what went on in here, on pain of death. On these earth-made benches, men and women would sit to watch scenes played out in front of them. These religious stories constitute the earliest form of Western drama. What the initiates saw was said to leave them ‘shivering, and trembling with sweat and amazement’. Apparitions (early theatrical tricks) produced ‘every kind of terror’.5
The burning torches were both an enactment of Demeter’s desperate search for her daughter and a