The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [237]
16 Aristophanes, Clouds, 445–51.
17 Aristophanes, Birds, 1280–3. Socrates joins the ranks of Machiavelli, Thatcher, Rasputin, etc. – those whose personal names have become a political catchword. It was not just Aristophanes who lampooned him, but only Aristophanes whose work survived; cf the lost play Konnos by the comic poet Ameipsias, plus four others in fragmentary form.
18 Cratinus’ Wine-flask (Pytinê in Greek) is a comedy. This play was supposed to have defeated Aristophanes’ Clouds (it also accuses A. of plagiarism) (cf. Thomas K. Hubbard, The Mask of Comedy: Aristophanes and the intertextual Parabasis (Ithaca and London, 1991), 75. Aristophanes’ Clouds was given third place behind Cratinus’ Wine-flask, (Pytinê) (first prize) and Ameipsias’ Konnos (second prize); see Pauly-Wissowa Real-Encyclopädie, vol. I. 2. 1819 (s.v.) Ameipsias. See also Kassel & Austin (1991), 200;this was also the year that Sophocles perhaps premiered his Maidens of Trachis.
19 Aristophanes, Clouds, 358–66. Trans. A. H. Sommerstein (1973).
20 Aristophanes, Clouds, 1504–10. Trans. A. H. Sommerstein (1973)
21 Plato, Apology, 18a–d, 19c. Trans. Brickhouse and Smith (2002).
22 See Plato, Gorgias, 468b–70b; Phaedrus, 248d; Xenophon, Memorabilia, 2.1.19, 4.5.10.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Amphipolis
1 In 405 BC we find Alcibiades negotiating to buy Thracian muscle for the Battle of Aegospotami (but he also defends Greek cities on the Hellespont against Thracian attack).
2 Thucydides, 4.102–8.
3 Thucydides, 4.108.1–3. Trans. R. Warner (1972).
4 Thucydides, 5.3.2–4.
5 A friend of aristocrats and cobblers, an also-ran hoplite – what did Socrates make of these campaigns? In some ways he seems, through the battles, skirmishes, and long marches, to be a funny little fellow, mongrel-class in a land that only understood rigid social divisions. Pursuing his own, private, mental world at a time when all that mattered was communal, the explicit, the shared, the public.
6 Years later Socrates would be invited back to those territories beyond the northern frontier. Archelaus, who was the King of Macedonia from 413 to 399 BC, asked Socrates to speak at his court – see Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1398a. Socrates turned him down.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Socrates in the symposium
1 Trans. R. Waterfield (1993).
2 Pherekrates, Persians, 130e.
3 Although there were gynaikeion – specific rooms where women worked (weaving cloth in particular) and spent time together. Nb. ‘flute-girl’ has come to be an accepted term for performing slave-girls. The aulos (previously identified as a flute) was in fact almost certainly more oboe-like.
4 Aristophanes, Acharnians, 530.
5 Plutarch also pointed up the theatrical nature of the symposia. In his Moralia, 10c–d, Socrates says, ‘I am teased in the theatre as if I were at a large symposium.’
6 Athenaeus, Deipnosophistai, 5.217a.
7 Aristophanes ridicules Agathon in his comedies, e.g., Thesmophoriazusae.
8 Laughter is, of course, one of those experiences that often escapes the historical record. But it was here, Plato talks of it, and Aristophanes’ jokes still make us smile. Aristotle describes there being a ‘certain sweetness in life itself’. And despite his sometime reputation as a needling curmudgeon, Socrates too seems to taste that sweetness. Recently laughter has been a focus of interest, see, e.g., Halliwell (2008); Sommerstein (2009); Beard, Roman Laughter, forthcoming.
9 Plato, Symposium, 221e–2a. Trans. W. R. M. Lamb [LCL].
10 See, for example, [Xen] Ath. Pol, 10; Plato, Laws, 655; Socrates (Xenophon, Memorabilia, 3.10.5); Iliad, 2, 211.
11 Plato, Phaedo, 100e. Trans. B. Jowett [adapt.].
12 Plato, Symposium, 210a–12a.
13 Xenophon, Symposium, 5.5.
14 Plato, Gorgias, 481d.