The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [218]
8 Operated by a German gunner.
9 Date c.510 BC. Akkadian was a common written language of this period, Elamite a spoken lingua franca.
10 Herodotus, 8.100.
11 Socrates served here one year and was elected leader of the council for one day. Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.1.18.
12 The earliest surviving recorded example of the demos as a political unit has, just very recently, been made whole. It is carved on a block of stone, the letters each about an inch high. For decades one half of the name languished in the storerooms of the National Epigraphical Museum in Athens – there are so many fragments here and simply not enough scholars to publish them. If you hold up the loose half – not for too long, this is heavy marble and arms will ache after a while – ‘mos’ has been reunited with ‘de’. Fragments currently being re-catalogued.
13 Origin of this phrase disputed, but the most likely relation does now seem to be with a Chinese proverb that originates around the fifth century BC.
14 In Homer’s magnificent poetry (and in the absence in 1000–700 BC of a renaissance, a new ‘Golden Age’, a brilliance visible in the archaeological record), there is in the Hellenic diaspora a keen nostalgia, a sense of underlying disappointment.
15 Aristotle, Athenian Constitution, 5.3. Trans. P. J. Rhodes (1984).
16 Solon Frag. 6W = Aristotle, Ath. Pol., 12.2. Trans. P. J. Rhodes (2002) [adapt.].
17 Cat. ref. 3477.
18 The Spartans did not like change. Throughout the sixth century, when a city-state was controlled by a tyrant, rather than the traditional dynasties of aristocratic families, the Spartans would intervene. Tyrannos (the word originated in Lydia) at this time did not have the monstrous connotations we tar it with today. Tyrants were frequently supporters of the people. In 510 BC the Delphic Oracle had been bribed to persuade Sparta to intervene in Athenian aristocratic affairs. Isagoras’ use of Spartan muscle did not necessarily mean he was a confirmed supporter of the Spartans, but that he was simply forming pragmatic alliances to further his own causes during the stasis of the age.
19 Herodotus, 5.66.
20 Quotation taken from Ober, Raaflaub, and Wallace (co-authors) (2007), 54. For an up-to-date overview of the origins of Athenian democracy this volume is hard to beat.
21 See Hanson (1986); (1991), 69–71.
22 Aeschylus, Suppliants, or Suppliant Women, 604; 699.
23 An inscription records offerings made to Demokratia, Tyche and Eirene in 331–330 BC (IG II 2, 1496. 131, 140–1). Cf. Smith (2003), 7.
24 One hundred years after Solon’s reforms those old families with old, entrenched interests, who had climbed to the stony heights of the Areopagus (the hill is a baby brother to the brooding Acropolis, where schoolkids scramble and slip now), who had been invited in as protectors of the people, appeared self-serving; many were banished, ostracised; the council purged. A neo-conservative counter-revolution seemed certain, a true, full-blown, direct democracy too enormous, too scary an idea to take on. These were uncertain times.
25 Because the Spartans did not write about themselves, we rely almost exclusively on perceptions of their society from outsiders. Paul Cartledge deals with the difficulties of this ‘Spartan mirage’ for the historian in his masterful Spartan Reflections (2001).
26 Thucydides, 2.39. Trans. C. F. Smith (1919).
27 Aristophanes, Lysistrata, 18, originally from Homer, Iliad, 6.492.
28 Sophocles, Women of Trachis, 281–3. Trans. R. C. Jebb (1892).
29 Euripides, Hecuba, 639–56. Trans. E. P. Coleridge (1938).
CHAPTER THREE
Socrates in the Agora
1 Trans. J. Fogel (2002).
2 See Theophrastus (372–287 BC), Enquiry into Plants.
3 Excavations ongoing. See American School at Athens website www.asca.edu.gr. Well dated to c.395–375 BC.
4 Xenophon, Memorabilia, 4.2.1.
5 Diogenes Laertius, 2.122.
6 Although the historical existence of Simon is debated, recent work does tend towards his identification as a real man. A useful investigation of the problem and of the influence