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striped, curved throne, are carefully wrapped in tissue paper; in the Acropolis’ still-standing blocks of defensive cyclopean walls; in words such as ‘pharmakon’, first scratched on to Greek Linear B tablets 3,500 years ago as PA-MA-KO and now animated neon-green on pharmacy signs throughout the modern city. Athenian priests and priestesses active during Socrates’ lifespan mimicked in their dress gods, goddesses, demigods, nymphs and epic rulers from the ‘Age of Heroes’. Choruses of maidens sang praises to the deities of old, from a time before time. Bards – professional and amateur – rhapsodised the words of Homer in open spaces across the city; tales from a thousand years ago that felt as though they happened yesterday.

4 The Temple is still a raised landmark in the Agora, although now mainly used for high-society weddings and state occasions.

5 Plato, Apology, 26d–e.

6 Site visit to Agora excavations’ research laboratory, 2007.

7 Thanks to Dr Morcom. Currently on display in the Agora can be seen, e.g., gold Daric from Persia, electrum stater discs from Kyzikos, silver staters from Aigina, gold staters from Macedonia.

8 Eupolis, Frag. 352E.

9 Thucydides, 2.13.

10 Fragment of lost fifth-century BC comedy. See also Xenophon’s story of Socrates’ encounter with Antiphon the Sophist. And see Olsen (2007), pp.445–6.

11 Similar to the banco, the first banks set up in Renaissance Florence on the Via Rosso. The modern Greek for ‘bank’ is still trapeza, ‘table’.

12 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 2.25. Trans. R. D. Hicks (1925) [adapt.].

13 Whether or not the story told about Socrates’ exasperated father praying to Zeus Agoraios (Zeus of the Marketplace) was contemporary, or invented with hindsight, either way it shows that the Agora, its chat, its debates, its fervid humanness, was considered a vital part of Socrates’ DNA; and when Socrates spoke at his trial, the language of his defence was woven from the very fabric of these conversations at the money-tables (Plato, Apology, 17c).

14 Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.2.60. Trans. J. Fogel (2002).

15 Plato, Charmides, 167a. Trans. B. Jowett (1953).

16 Cicero, Academica, 1.15.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Hot air in the Agora

1 See also trans. 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.’

2 Demosthenes, 19.184.

3 When you travel round Greece today words are earthquake-cracked at Delphi, in Segesta, reused as a doorstep, in the Acropolis Museum, scratched into the scoop of a Corinthian column. And in the National Epigraphical Museum in Athens – a lithrary rather than a library – they line the walls and litter the floors. More than 7,000 other inscribed fragments are waiting here to be deciphered.

4 Cat. EM 6798. The inscription relates to Salamis.

5 See, e.g., EM 6765, 440/39 BC, account of the supervisors for construction of the statue of Athena Parthenos by Pheidias; also EM 6769, 438 BC, EM 5223 + 5378β + 6710α 447/6–433/2 BC, account of the supervisors for the construction of the Parthenon; and EM 7862 401/400 BC – 399 18 BC, accounts of the treasures of the goddess Athena and the other gods.

6 Piraeus Museum, 4628; see also 5352, standard measurements.

7 Over a 2,500-year period it appears that Athenians have not lost their taste for using outsize red letters to register public protest. At the time of writing, students are rioting and covering Athens’ Parliament building and National Library (protected by statues of Socrates and Plato) with red graffiti: ‘Pigs, Police, Murderers’.

8 Plato, Phaedrus, 228d.

9 Dionisius of Halicarnussus, Treatise on Isocrates, Chapter 18. Dionisius quotes a lost work of Aristotle. Aristotle Frag. 140. Aristotle comments on the sale and storage of Isocrates’ private speeches in ‘bundles’ on the book stalls of the Agora.

10 See www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk.

11 P. Saqqara inv. 1972 GP 3, c.331–323 BC.

12 Another example of words used to malign effect can be found on