The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [23]
Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.1.101
THIS LATE SPRING DAY IN 399 BC, a time of year when marguerites, the golden ‘eyebrow of Zeus’, grew around the sanctuaries of the Agora (as they still do around their ruins),2 Socrates wended his way through the labyrinthine lanes and small passageways of Athens’ marketplace.
The cheek-by-jowl dynamics of the district have just been brilliantly revealed by a new excavation in the south-west corner of the ancient Agora. ‘Fussing around’, as the director of excavations put it, diggers uncovered the rim of what at first seemed to be a giant pithos – a storage jar. But as the earth was eased away, it became clear that this was in fact the edge of a steep-sided well. Wells are good news for archaeologists, and for historians, because people throw objects into them, they drop things accidentally. At the bottom of a well lies an unselfconscious snapshot of what life was once like above ground.3
And this well has surprised the excavators. Until recently it was thought that the Agora was a very ‘public’ place. The free-market, political hub and adminstrative centre of the new democracy. But at the bottom of this smooth terracotta shaft are all kinds of intimate objects: shopping lists, loom-weights, broken make-up boxes. This kind of mongrel debris implies that the little stone buildings that nustle up next to the grand public architecture of Athens’ central marketplace were not just shops or storage rooms, as has long been suggested, but houses, living quarters. Homes for the ordinary men and the women of Socrates’ Athens.
And so if we picture Socrates’ journey to the law-court in 399 BC we should hear the hubbub of human habitation, and see a hundred pairs of eyes following his progress.
Padding barefoot, as he had done for most of his life, Socrates would have been drummed to court by a hectic beat; 500 jurymen on the move, many of them in their ‘Sunday best’ for a day in court, sporting leather sandals or sturdy footwear – on packed-gravel tracks; quite some sound. One doesn’t imagine that Athenians were partial to hobnailed boots. But the rejected debris from the floor of one workshop on the fringes of the Agora – piles of iron tacks and ivory eyelets for laces – shows that many thousands of nails must have been hammered into leather by the cobblers of the city. And if the literary and archaeological sources really do intersect, then this particular, recently reinvestigated workshop was one in which Socrates, in happier days, spent a good deal of time, and made public a good deal of his philosophy.
Xenophon tells us that Socrates frequently stopped by here in the artisans’ district at the Agora’s limit because this was where youths and young men were allowed to meet to hear the philosopher’s words – only over-eighteens had access actually within the boundary of the 37-acre Agora itself.4 Athenian society was divided into strict age groups – strength was known to reside in youth, wisdom in age. Young men were Socrates’ particular passion. Although later slander imagines him as some kind of philosopher-paedophile, the truth seems to have been simpler. Socrates sought out the company of the young men of Athens because he thought they had much to learn.
A writer called Diogenes Laertius, who carefully collated the Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (seriously researched, but written 600 years or so after Socrates’ death), gives us the name of one particular fifth-century Athenian workshop owner who occupied that liminal zone where young men were allowed to hang out: Simon the Shoemaker. In the corner of the excavated, nail-strewn Agora workshop, the fragment of a drinking cup from the mid-fifth century BC has been discovered – one name is scratched in capitals on the base: ‘SIMON’. So it seems there was a Simon here at the time of Socrates, and he did make shoes.
Simon the Shoemaker was, according to Diogenes, an avid, early follower of Socrates; and excavators appear