The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [244]
4 Hesiod, Homeric Hymn to Apollo (HAp 14–126).
5 Plutarch, Theseus, 23.1.
6 Plutarch, Theseus, 23.1, Walker (1995), 43; and Marshall (2000), 352–3.
7 F. Sokolowski (ed.), Les Lois Sacrées de Cités Grecques: Supplément (Paris, 1962).
8 Callimachus, Hymn to Delos, 307–15, and Plutarch, Theseus, 21.1–2.
9 See Hughes (2005), 231–2.
10 Lonsdale (1995), passim, for an excellent discussion of the dance in Minoan religion.
11 Work would not start again on the temple until 314 BC.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Socrates bound
1 Trans. H. N. Fowler (1914).
2 Excellent work dealing with crime and punishment in Athens: Todd (2000), 31–51, and Allen (2000).
3 See, for example, Antiphon 5, On the Murder of Herodes, 17.
4 Herodotus, 9.37.2.
5 Plato, Republic, 439e.
6 You can still wander around the perimeter of the prison remains, but at the time of writing (2010) access inside had been indefinitely restricted.
7 Plato, Crito, 43a. Trans. J. Savage (2010).
8 For a fuller discussion of the role of the Eleven, see Allen (2000); Hunter (1994); Todd (1993); and Herman (2006).
9 But even here perhaps we are being presented with a truth within a story within a half-truth. Orphic mythology, often dealing with such lyric pursuits, makes much play of the connection between the pursuits of the body (soma) and a tomb (sema).
10 Xenophon, Memorabilia, 4.8.2–3.
11 Plato, Crito, 43b. Trans. H. N. Fowler (1914) [LCL].
12 Plato, Crito, 45a–c. Trans. H. N. Fowler [LCL].
13 Plato, Crito, 50a–b. Trans. H. N. Fowler [LCL] [adapt.].
14 Xenophon, Apology, 7. Trans. O. J. Todd (1992) [LCL].
15 Plato, Crito, 49a–b. Trans. H. N. Fowler (1914) [LCL].
16 This potent little plant could have been imported from Asia Minor or Crete. To pharmakon, as Plato calls it – the ‘useful little thing’, which crops up in the earliest form of Greek on Linear B tablets – grew well on Crete, an island that yielded a constitution, the ‘Gortyn Code’ which Socrates was said to have admired.
17 Plato refers to children who eat hemlock by accident – so, with its purple-spotted stalk and distinctive leaves, it must have grown in the region. Plato, Lysis, 219e.
18 Aristophanes, Frogs, 117–27. Trans. J. Henderson (2008) [adapt.].
19 See Allen (2000), 234.
20 Plato, Symposium, 174a.
21 Plato, Phaedo, 89b. Trans. H. N. Fowler (1914) [adapt.].
22 Edith Bloch’s article ‘Hemlock Poisoning and the Death of Socrates’ is essential reading. Her statements on the matter – following her research – are assertive: ‘Socrates suffered a peripheral neuropathy, a toxin-induced condition resembling the Guillain-Barré syndrome, brought about by the alkaloids in Conium maculatum, the poison hemlock plant.’
23 Transgressive behaviour worthy of the death penalty was in fact fairly limited. ‘Now of all the acts for which the laws have prescribed the death penalty – temple robbery, burglary, enslavement, treason to the state – not even my adversaries themselves charge me with having committed any of these.’ Xenophon, Apology, 25. Trans. O. J. Todd (1992) [LCL].
24 Plato, aged twenty-eight, sick to the stomach, we are told could not be there.
25 Plato, Phaedo, 118a. Trans. H. N. Fowler (1914) [LCL].
26 Plato, Phaedo, 118a. Trans. H. N. Fowler [LCL].
27 See, e.g., votive relief NMA 1388 from 400/399 BC, where Asclepius sits proud on an omphalos rock.
28 Plato, Phaedo, 118a. Trans. G. M. A. Grube (1997).
29 Plato, Phaedo 118a. Trans. H. N. Fowler (1914) [LCL].
30 Cf. the similarity of the soma (body) and the sema (tomb).
31 Plato, Phaedo. 63c. Trans. H. N. Fowler [adapt.] [LCL].
32 Robin Waterfield has recently come to a similar conclusion in Why Socrates Died – Dispelling the Myths (2009). Waterfield also suggests that because Socrates had failed in his mission, he readily accepted his own sacrifice, and called to Asclepius with his last breath because he believed his own extinction to be a healing act for the city.
33 Plato, Apology, 42a.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Flight from the world
1 See a vase by the Sappho painter (Bowdoin College Museum of Art