The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [236]
1 Trans. H. Tredennick (1954).
2 Trans. B. Jowett (1953).
3 See illustration in The City Beneath the City. Antiquities from the Metropolitan Railway Excavations, by Liana Parlama and Nicholas Stampolidis, Harry N. Abrams (2001). Stele currently stored in the Benaki Museum in Athens. The stele mentions men from Socrates’ tribe who were killed (also at the battles of Megara and Spartolus).
4 The National Archaeological Museum in Athens, the National Museum in Thessaloniki, and the museum at Olympia all have excellent collections of discarded Greek armour and equipment.
5 Lists taken from Van Wees (2004), 104–8.
6 This strategy depended on two separate forces linking up in Boeotia.
7 Plato, Symposium, 219e–220e.
8 Plato, Symposium, 219e–221a. Trans. W. R. M. Lamb (1925) [LCL].
9 Plato, Symposium, 221a–b. Trans. W. R. M. Lamb (1925) [LCL].
10 See also Laches.
11 Although some of the campaign had maintained the hallmarks of limited, ritual warfare, much convention was insulted. The Athenian forces barricaded the temple at Delion and soldiers drank from the sacred spring there. The Boeotians used cavalry, driving down the hoplite foot soldiers (who were then only saved by the arrival of night) and the Spartans (initially) refused to allow the Athenians to collect their dead.
12 If Socrates had fought at Scione, the summer after Delion, this is what he would also have seen there.
13 Plato, Laches, 181b; Symposium, 221a. And even when Aristophanes astringently mocked Socrates the very next year, he never said he was a coward.
14 ‘Men hesitate to lay hands on those who show such a countenance as Socrates did even in defeat.’ Plato, Symposium, 221b–c. Trans. W. R. M. Lamb [LCL].
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Brickbats and bouquets
1 Trans. Brickhouse and Smith (2002).
2 Scholion on Pseudo-Lucian, possibly based on Philochorus’ Atthis.
3 Aeschines, Against Ktesiphon, 76; Plato, Ion, 535d-e.
4 Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 3.7. Trans. S. Pomeroy (1994) [adapt.].
5 See Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 2.18.
6 For a useful visual guide to the development of theatre in Athens, see Connolly and Dodge (2001), 90–101.
7 R. Parker (2005. Reprinted in paperback 2007), 314.
8 Homer, Iliad, 6.132.
9 Aristophanes, Frogs, 1009–10.
10 Sophocles, Ajax, 964–5. Trans. J. Moore (1954); Sophocles, Acrisius, F 58; Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, 226–7; Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, 380.
11 Perhaps one of the reasons that Plato was so vehemently opposed to tragedy. He complained that the political statements of the theatre were, by definition, all crowd-pleasers, demagoguery. Plato, Gorgias, 502b–c; Republic, X, 602b; Laws, VII, 817b–d.
12 Plato, Ion, 535d–e. Trans. W. R. M. Lamb (1925) [adapt.].
13 See Rehm (2007).
14 Comedy and tragedy mattered. Comedy was believed to have been born when society learned how to be democratic. After all, democracy should be a place where all people have the opportunity to laugh: oligarchs and tyrants have never been very keen on being mocked. This was a time when theatre was not just the canary in the chamber. It was the poisonous gas. Following the Samian revolt of 440 BC restrictions were brought in on comedy: now comedians had to get a licence – the men in power had to keep a tab on who was choosing to amuse, to diffuse, to incite, to offend. This restriction was lifted by 430 BC so Aristophanes was un-constrained. Aristotle, Poetics, 1448a, insists that comedy was ‘invented’ in Megara ‘at the time of their democracy’. See also the Parian Marble (FGrHist 239 A39).
15 Sommerstein (1982), 2 – Clouds was performed originally at the City Dionysia of 423 BC, where it was placed third (and last) after Cratinus’ The Wine-flask (a satire and the winner) and Ameipsias’ Konnos. Aristophanes himself viewed Clouds as his best play (Wasps, 1047) and he certainly revised it – it is the revised edition we have. Dover (1968), xvii, also has the Dionysia plus 423 for the first performance. He suggests (xxxii) that in 424 BC Socrates fought as a hoplite at Delion. He also suggests