The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [221]
13 Xenophon, Apology, 14.
14 No barristers, attorneys or QCs here; the defendant had to defend himself. The very fact that Socrates seemed – by all extant accounts – unfazed by the task in hand is a great advert for his idiosyncratic approach to life. What Socrates does not appear to have lacked is self-confidence and his own particular brand of self-belief.
‘Well I am certainly wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of; but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know.’ Plato, Apology, 21d. Trans. H. Tredennick (1954).
The philosopher’s reasoning is charismatic. Once the mind has tussled with, and worked through, the right way of doing things, the soul can act. A life becomes an accretion of right, helpful decisions. Socrates tells us that knowledge brings arete, virtue/personal happiness. Virtue is knowledge. If we do everything we can to avoid ignorance, and to do what is good, then peace of mind presents itself. He admits to being odd, but seems genuinely to believe that he has done nothing through his life other than try to find ‘the good’ in the world. His serenity is axiomatic. By all accounts, this was not a distressed man in the dock.
CHAPTER SIX
Checks, balances and magic-men
1 Trans. G. M. A. Grube (1997).
2 The system of secret ballots had been introduced to prevent cronyism, to banish the nightmare-memories of the years of civil war. There were other ways the Athenians tried to keep things fair – see pp. 51–53.
3 For a full discussion of this aspect of the Athenian legal system, see work by Christopher A. Faraone, University of Chicago, e.g., Curses and Social Control in the Law Courts of Classical Athens, first delivered as a lecture at the conference ‘Democracy, Law and Social Control’ at the Historisches Kolleg, Munich, June 1998.
4 DTA, 107, Attic, late fifth or early fourth century BC (DTA = R. Wunsch [1897], Defixionum Tabellae Atticae, Appendix to Inscriptiones Graecae III, Berlin).
5 Plato, Republic, 364e-5a. Trans. P. Shorey (1930) [adapt.] [LCL].
6 That is, the gods were showing their divine will by random selection.
7 Athenians were an extremely litigious society, but this was not a society of lawyers. The Athenians had to represent themselves – occasionally with a kind of ‘phone a friend’ policy, when synegoroi (friends and relatives) could speak during some of the time allotted to the disputant.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Persuade or obey
1 Trans. H. Tredennick (1954).
2 Hansen (2006).
3 As Cynthia Farrar points out in ‘Power to the People’, in Ober, Raaflaub and Wallace (2007).
4 Socrates was in fact anti the brand of demokratia found in Athens for sixty out of his seventy years (462–411, 410–404, 403–399). Philosophically he did not accept the infallibility of equality: one of the reasons he had reservations about the selection for high office by lot.
5 Euripides, The Suppliant Women, 404–18. Trans. P. Vellacott (1972).
6 In Plato’s estimation, Socrates did not believe in allotting absolute power to the many, but in appointing experts to oversee political affairs. His friendship with Simon the Shoemaker was a small example of this attitude; Simon knew what he was good at (making shoes) and so he stuck at it. Socrates approved. Socrates also appeared to be fascinated by the Spartan focus on being a ‘perfect’ soldier. Again, the philosopher saw the sense in this. Better in his mind to do what you are particularly good at than to be a dilettante, a Jack-of-all-trades. His vision of political power was prophetic – it is the style of democracy that we all live with today. The restricted ‘Western-style’ democracy – benign dictatorships – where experts are elected to run things for the masses is that which he would best recognise. The democracy that killed Socrates remained unconscionable