The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [220]
19 In 411 BC fear gripped the city as a conspiracy led by Theramenes, Antiphon and Pisandros (among others) carried out a spate of political killings and succeeded in passing a motion that effectively overthrew one hundred years of democracy – replacing the elected governing bodies with a Council of Four Hundred. In 404 BC, democracy, which had been fleetingly restored in 410 BC, was overthrown once more, Theramenes again playing a leading role in its downfall. Pisandros was among those who had benefited from the mutilation of the Herms in 415 BC. Cf. Meier (1999), 558.
20 Sycophantai in Greek were originally, oddly, ‘tale-tellers about figs’. The phrase arose (possibly) because Athenians were not allowed to export anything other than olives from their largely infertile territory. Figs were sometimes smuggled out. Those who shopped the smugglers were ‘tale-tellers of figs’. The journey into the English ‘sycophant’ is therefore rather a convoluted one.
21 Xenophon, Apology, 1.2–4. Trans. J. A. Martinez (2002) [adapt.].
22 Many thanks to James Davidson for his help with this point of fact.
23 Indictment quoted in Diogenes Laertius, On the Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, 2.40, and paraphrased in Plato, Apology, 24b; Euthyphro, 3b; Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.1.1, 1.2.64; Apology, 10. When his charges were first read out it was just Socrates, the Archon and one or two witnesses whom history has forgotten. Nb. Brought a ‘public action’ can also be translated as ‘written a sworn indictment against’.
CHAPTER FIVE
The first blood sacrifice
1 Trans. Brickhouse and Smith (2002).
2 The Athenian Agora Site Guide, http://www.agathe.gr and http://www.attalos.com/cgi-bin/image?lookup=1997.01.0512, in Hesperia, 40 (1971), plate 50. The block was certainly used by the archons when they stood upon it each year to swear their oath to preserve the laws of the city. The exact location of the animal sacrifice is uncertain, although the worn surface of the stone shows this was much used over the centuries. The sacrifice would certainly have taken place very close at hand.
3 Aristotle, Ath. Pol., 57.2, states that the Archon took his myrtle wreath off when presiding over murder trials outside – indicating that for a trial such as that of Socrates, he possibly kept it on.
4 See Miller (1989), esp. 321.
5 Homer, Iliad, 3.299–301.
6 IG13 40 (ML 52), 3–4; Andocides, On the Mysteries, 1.97; Lycurgus, Against Leocrates, 79.
7 Cf. Ober (1991), 142.
8 Plato, Apology, 25a. Trans. B. Jowett (1953).
9 A three-obol stipend was paid to jurors for a day’s service from the late fifth century to the later part of the fourth. This figure started at 2 obols under Pericles and was raised to 3 obols in the 430s or 420s. Cf. Ober (1989), 142.
10 For majority vote to decide a man’s fate (when those voters sat in the court not by virtue of birth, or wealth, or military prowess, or sporting trophies faded in the home, still burning bright in the memory) was a defining shift in human history. And although the Athenians did not know that, two and a half millennia on, nations, leaders and continents would look back to these pungent, frequent gatherings as the birth of ‘the West’, they did know that they had responsibility and power. This had been the system in Athens for close on one hundred years.
11 The Athenians also relied on amateurs for the smooth operation of the court. On the day you arrived, your name might or might not be pulled out of a box full of the names (ten boxes, one for each tribe) of those in the courtroom; one might be given the job of keeping his eye on the water-clock, five to sort out payment of jurors (3 obols per day), four to count the voting, etc.
12 See Demosthenes, Against Neaira 66, Apollodoros’ case against the Corinthian prostitute Neaira; ‘If it is determined that the prosecutor is a moichos [which loosely translates as a sexual philanderer], his sureties are to hand him over to the man who caught him, and that man is to do to the prosecutor, as he would to a moichos, whatever