The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [217]
5 Aristophanes, Ecclesiazousae, 652; Menander, Frag. 364 K.
6 Water-clocks were installed elsewhere in external locations, but significantly, the first large stone klepsydra was situated on the outside wall of the north-west face of the Heliaia (a court of judgement in the centre of the Agora).
7 Recent analysis suggests this is possibly where Socrates was tried. Alternatively his courtroom could have been in the open air at the Areopagus (unlikely given the kind of scene-setting presented to us by Plato), which had originally been established to deal with issues that ‘polluted’ the city; or in the Heliaia, ‘Sun-Court’ or ‘Sun-Area’ – yet to be excavated, but possibly in the south-west end of the Agora. (The Heliaia was in the form of a rectangular peribolos, with four walls open to the sky.) Law-courts dating from the late fifth century BC have almost certainly been identified in the north-east corner of the Agora under the reconstructed Stoa of Attalos. See, e.g., R. Townsend, Athenian Agora XXVII. The East Side of the Agora: The Remains beneath the Stoa of Attalos (1995).
8 Plato, Apology, 18b; 19b. Trans. Brickhouse and Smith (2002).
9 Plato, Apology, 26b. Trans. Brickhouse and Smith (2002).
10 Athenian housing was notoriously small and cramped, even for wealthy citizens. Most would be flat-roofed (some two-storey) with a wooden framework, mud-brick walls and earth floors; the larger would probably have had a small courtyard. Aristophanes (Wasps, 125–32) describes the old man Philokleon trying to escape from one such house, desperate to make his trip to the law-courts whilst his slaves tried to keep him indoors. Cf. Tucker (1907), 29; Jones, Sackett and Graham (1973), 75–114; Deighton (1995), 15, 18; and MacDowell (1971), 148 on Aristophanes.
11 Plato, Protagoras esp. 322–4. Interesting that this Protagoras is a non-Athenian.
12 Athena in Aeschylus, Eumenides, 487–9.
13 Athena in Aeschylus, Eumenides, 690–5.
14 Plato, Meno, 80a.
15 Possessing ‘the beauty of Helen’ and ‘the soul of Socrates’ was a flattering epithet on a woman’s tombstone of the fourth century BC.
16 Plato, Symposium, 215d–e. Trans. W. R. M. Lamb (1925) [LCL].
17 Plato, Symposium, 174a.
18 Pericles’ Funeral Speech, Thucydides, 2.64.
19 Plato, Meno, 80a–b. Trans. W. K. C. Guthrie (1956).
CHAPTER TWO
Athena’s city
1 Trans. E. D. A. Morshead.
2 ‘Age of Heroes’ is loosely 1500–1100 BC.
3 During the eighth century BC warfare in Greece changed. Rows of soldiers, all armed in a similar way, replaced individual warrior fighters. Usually standing eight deep in a phalanx, these men were named for the armour and equipment which they carried – the hopla: a metal breastplate, metal greaves for the legs, a long spear, a large round shield. These men also stood tall thanks to their crested helmets.
4 (Kolakes) flatterers, (parasitoi) parasites. This belief in self-reliance may even have fostered an entrenched slave system – very difficult for a ‘free’ Greek to enter the ‘free labour’ market.
5 Hesiod, Works and Days, 2.349–350. Trans. H. G. Evelyn-White (1914) [LCL].
6 ‘Balkan’ means ‘a chain of wooded mountains’ in Ottoman Turkish.
7 Still, it is inaccurate to label this period the Greek ‘Dark Ages’. The latest excavations (summer 2008) at Lefkandi on the Greek island of Euboea show that culture within the city-states could be vibrant, sophisticated. Here women are buried with fabulous necklaces, their breasts shielded with solid gold breast cups, in communal graves; the eye sockets of their men stare, blind, at heavily decorated pots. But there is still not the gauze-fine craftsmanship, the exquisite palatial culture that fluoresced between 1600 and 1200 BC – the civilisation of the Greek Late Bronze Age. Cf. Irene Lemnos’ excellent excavations; work on Lefkandi resumed in 2003. www.lefkandi.classics.ox.ac.uk/ Nb. Through this period