The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [222]
7 Pettifogging was an issue, and many – the sycophantai, the sycophants – brought cases purely to make money. Yet Socrates’ crimes were far more worrying than the daily grind of rapes, boundary disputes, murders, petty thefts. Mockery of the gods and corruption of youth, those flowers of the great Athenian city, are not accusations you bring lightly.
8 This refers to the episode when large numbers of Athenians had offered Ionian Greeks help (against the Persians) after the Spartan King Cleomenes had rejected their call. Herodotus, 5.97.
9 Only one of Socrates’ prosecutors, Anytus, with the evidence we have available to us, can be tracked in documents or contemporary literature. It is possible that Meletus and Lycon were the hired hands of political machinators.
10 Plato, Apology, 23e.
11 Plato, Meno, 94e. Trans. W. R. M. Lamb (1914) [LCL].
12 A public trial (graphê) such as this would have been allotted a full day in court. Cf. Lanni (2006), 37 n.102. Little weight was placed upon the evidence of the witnesses – what mattered were the speeches. The plaintiff would speak first, his speech timed by the water-clock (klepsydra), which was allowed to flow during the speech and stopped for the reading of the evidence. The time allocated to a speech was measured in terms of the volume of water that the clocks contained (1 khous = approx. 5½ imperial pints). From the only surviving Athenian klepsydra that we have, it seems 2 khoes would take approximately six minutes to drain. Based upon these figures, it has been (tentatively) argued that the speeches at public trials could have been roughly two hours long. Cf. Todd (1993), 130–33.
13 Plato, Apology, 37a–b. Trans. G. M. A. Grube (1997).
14 In 433 BC, a sundial was set up on the Pnyx by Meton (Munn [2006], 201). On Meton and Socrates, see Plutarch, Alcibiades, 17.4–5 Munn (2006).
15 Socrates in Aristophanes, Clouds, 743–5. See, as an alternative translation, McLeish (1979): ‘Stop wriggling. If you come to a dead end, / Turn your analysis round, and take it back / To the nearest crossroads of thought. Look round, / Get the new direction right, and start again.’
16 In a landscape that had embraced the measurement of time in a prescriptive and predictable way (parapegmata and klepsydra), Socrates’ apparent random questioning appeared counterintuitive, anti-progressive. Questions such as his were unsettling; they could stick in the memory like burrs. It was easy answers that were more readily forgotten.
SOCRATES: Following this I questioned one man after another, always conscious of the anger and hatred that I provoked, which distressed and alarmed me. But necessity drove me on, the word of Apollo, I thought, must be considered first.
The juror-judges were old hands at this game. Men delighted to take up the 3 obols day pay – not to be sniffed at when the courts sat every third, sometimes every second day. They knew how the system worked, how it was played. And judging from the outcome of this trial, they did not take to unorthodoxy. See Hansen (1999), p.186. Courts sat 175–225 days per year.
17 Diverting to think that modern-day lawyers are the children of the Age of Heroes – of Achilles, Ajax and Hector.
18 Plato, Apology, 18d. Trans. Brickhouse and Smith (2002) [adapt.].
19 Plato, Apology, 28a–b. Trans. Brickhouse and Smith.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Peitho, the power of persuasion
1 Existing temple founded mid-fourth century BC.
2 Isocrates, 5.249a. Trans. G. Norlin (1980); Demosthenes, Pro., 54.
3 Sappho, F 57a. Trans.