The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [230]
15 Trans. Brickhouse and Smith (2002)
16 My thanks for help with this chapter and for access to the Isthmus site go to Prof. Elizabeth Gebhard and the team working on the University of Chicago excavations at the inspiring excavation of the Sanctuary of Poseidon at Isthmia. See http://humanities.uchicago.edu/isthmia and http://isthmia.ohio-state.edu
17 Herodotus tells us that an official Athenian delegation sailed in a ‘special’ ship to the Isthmus. The fact that Plato omits this detail suggests that Socrates was not perhaps a part of this ‘official embassy’.
18 The Isthmian Games are a useful reminder never to think of Socrates as a cartoon philosopher – a quiet white-beard. His purpose was all about understanding and participating in, the grimy, joyful-sorrowful business of being, of living, of sweating out our lifespan in the real world. They also remind us to head-shift; to see fifth-century Greece with fifth-century eyes. They remind us that Socrates had a youth, as well as a middle and old age. That he was not a remote aesthete, but a full-blooded fifth-century Greek.
19 The basins to collect this water have been identified. The site is now open to the public and a visit is highly recommended.
20 The heroic sponsor of the games would have chimed with Socrates’ own ambiguous attitude to dying and the afterlife. See Plato, Phaedo, passim.
21 Sport, sustenance, politics, culture, competition, international relations – for the Ancient Greeks religion lay at the heart of everything.
22 Plato, Republic, 379c. Trans. R. Waterfield (1993).
23 Aristophanes, Acharnians, 524. Trans. M. M. Henry (1995).
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Flexing muscles
1 Trans. R. Warner (1972).
2 Thucydides, 1.33.
3 The date of the Megarian decree is the subject of much debate; ‘around 432’ is as secure as possible. See, e.g., J. McDonald (1994), with extensive bibliography.
4 Aristophanes, Acharnians, 528–9. Trans. M. M. Henry (1995).
5 This was a turn in the popular tide that would eventually leave charming, witty, sexy Aspasia stranded. The parallels with the story of Helen of Troy are numerous.
6 Cf. Socrates’ fate, see Ch. 50 onwards
7 Potidaea, 432–429 BC (Plato, Symposium, 219e–21a); Delium, 424 (Plato, Apology, 28e, Laches, 181a–b and Symposium, 221a–b); Amphipolis, 422 (Apology, 28e).
8 The keenest moral template for Socrates’ society are Homer’s epics and the epics of other epic-cycle poets. The Iliad and the Odyssey speak of many things, but they recall a long, bloody, seemingly pointless conflict – the Trojan War. Warmongering in antiquity was pragmatic before it was ethical. The poor in the democratic body knew that conflict could be an income generator; a poor soldier could earn from war (booty and payment). Socrates himself, middle-aged, hard-up, might even have volunteered for service – a drachma a day, potentially what a soldier can earn, is not to be sniffed at. As stated before, following Anderson, Socrates almost certainly fought at Therme, Pydna, Beroea, Strepsa, Mende, Scione, Torone, Gale, Singus, Mecygerna, Thyssus, Cleonae, Acanthos, Olophyxus, Stageira, Bormiscus, Galepsos and Trailus.
9 See Morrison (1987) and (1988) and Coates, Platis and Shaw (1990).
10 Plato, Crito, 49b: Trans. Brickhouse and Smith (2002).
11 Thucydides, 1.23.6. Trans. R. Warner (1972).
12 Plato, Apology, 28d–29b. Trans. H. N. Fowler (1914) [LCL] and Brickhouse and Smith (2002) [adapt.].
CHAPTER TWENTY
Socrates the soldier
1 Trans. W. R. M. Lamb (1925) [LCL].
2 Herodotus, 8.129, mentions a Greek temple to Poseidon in front of the city.
3 One of the scant remains from the site is a spearhead from the Geometric Period, now held by the British Museum. See Forsdyke in the British Museum Quarterly, VI (1932), 82f., and viii (1934), 108.
4 IG I 279 (cf. Thucydides, 2.70).
5 Diogenes Laertius, 2.23: ‘Again he served at Potidaea, whither he had gone by sea, as land communications were interrupted by the war’ Trans. R. D. Hicks (1925) [LCL].
6 Van Wees (2004) has a vivid description