The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [22]
Ideologically, militarily, culturally, Sparta and Athens would, in hindsight, be certain to cross swords.
In Socrates’ lifetime the climax of Spartan/Athenian rivalry would judder throughout the Greek world; it was a conflict responsible for decimating the Athenian population by the time of Socrates’ trial. This trauma the Ancient Greeks simply called stasis – strife, discord – but we now label it ‘the Peloponnesian War’. The war lasted a full generation, from 431 to 404 BC. Come the year of Socrates’ death, it was Spartan brawn that had broken down Athens’ city walls; Spartan fires that had torched the precious stretches of farmland outside the city walls. The war devastated the earth’s very fertility, it caused the deaths of many hundreds of thousands. The territories that Socrates travelled through as a soldier were blackened with the back-fires of aggression. The young men that Socrates exercised with in the gym and with whom he debated – these were the children of strife, they grew up knowing nothing other than conflict.
And so when Socrates walked through the Agora to his trial in 399 BC he was surrounded by war damage and by a community that had been psychologically traumatised. When he was tried, Athens, which had once achieved so much, was a defeated society. The milk-and-honey promise of the democracy had curdled. Athenians were no longer champions of the world, they were the defeated. We can trace the disintegration of the polis in the woeful lines of Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes, Athens’ playwrights, the men who documented Athens’ trauma:
War will be men’s business.27
So those men, who waxed so proud with bitter speech, are themselves in the mansions of the dead, all of them, and their city is enslaved.28
For here begins trouble’s cycle, and, worse than that, relentless fate; … with trouble from an alien shore … as its result war and bloodshed and the ruin of my home; and many a Spartan maiden too is weeping bitter tears in her halls on the banks of the fair Eurotas, and many a mother whose sons are slain is smiting her grey head and tearing her cheeks, making her nails bloody in the furrowed gash.29
Although Socrates’ professed concern was with the moral fundamentals of life, it was this tangled web of realpolitik and rival beliefs, of conflict and anxiety, that drew him to a religious court to defend himself against capital charges.
Yet war can stimulate as well as destroy. Before it drew to a close, the fifth century BC witnessed the most remarkable resilience and a breathtaking cultural efflorescence. Democracy in Socrates’ day provoked rational thought, artistic experiment and wildly ambitious social and political schemes. During the fight with Sparta some of the most exquisite buildings – buildings that we consider to be the epitome of classical achievement – were constructed. Although maimed and denuded on that May morning in 399 BC, for much of Socrates’ life Athens was a beautiful city. And the Athenian Agora in particular, Socrates’ favoured stamping-ground, was one of the most exciting, if not the most vivacious and eye-opening of places to visit the length and breadth of the ancient world. The Agora, 37 acres of human endeavour, rimmed with boundary stones, was Socrates’ second home. To appreciate why the philosopher enjoyed such influence and earned such hatred, we need to join him there once again as he travels, in 399 BC, to his show-trial.
3
SOCRATES IN THE AGORA
The Agora, Athens’ marketplace, 451–399 BC
But Socrates, moreover, was always out in public. In the morning he went to the colonnades and the gymnasia, during the market he was seen there at the Agora, and for the rest of the day he was constantly in whatever place