The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [245]
2 Shear (1995), ‘Bouleuterion, Metroon and the Archives at Athens’, in Hansen and Raaflaub (1995), 157–190; S. G. Miller (1995), ‘Old Metroon and Old Bouleuterion in the classical Agora of Athens’, in M. H. Hansen and K. Raaflaub (1995), 133–56.
3 Alcibiades even managed to force his way into this locus of Socrates’ life. Guards stood outside the state archive the day Socrates was killed, as they did every day of the week – apparently because Alcibiades had once broken in at dead of night to eradicate investigations into his financial affairs, which had been stored inside. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistai, 9.407b–c, on which see Miller (1995), 137. Cf. Plato, Alcibiades I 134b.
4 The following details are as laid out by Diogenes Laertius, 1.5.43. Since this is a later source/tradition it is quite possible that this aspect of Socrates’ afterlife was fabricated. Still, given the quick turnaround of Athenian attitude exemplified by Mytilene, it is also a possibility.
5 Was it simply because we are deeply uncomfortable with those who break the mould? As Alcibiades asserts in the Symposium (Plato, Symposium, 221c), what Socrates did again and again and again was to take men out of their comfort zones.
6 Some say that there is a certain blackness in Socrates’ philosophy. In Plato’s, yes, in Socrates’– who can say? As we live our lives with intelligence agencies investing massively in venture capital in order to keep the toys in their box cutting-edge, one wonders whether Socrates would have heaved a world-weary sigh. Don’t put all your energies into spy machines, why not try to stop the need for spying? Don’t build walls and ships; try to discover ‘the good’ in those around us. Instead of creating a pretend world on earth – with pretty, impressive objects such as the Parthenon, the White House, the Kremlin – striving to create, and invent, and battle-building yourself out of trouble, make your heart strong. Nowadays we look anxiously for our enemies; for anarchists, terrorists, capitalists, communists, nihilists. But Socrates reminds us of the uncomfortable truth, that the enemy is always within. It is down to us. That it is not ‘their’ fault, but ‘ours’ has to be his single most important, and hard-to-swallow, philosophy.
7 Plato, Phaedo, 69b. Trans. H. N. Fowler (1914) [LCL].
8 Plato continued on to Sicily, southern Italy, Cyrene and Egypt.
9 Syllogism based on Aristotle’s system of logic as recounted in the Organon.
10 Gold keeps its colour at the highest heat, after many thousands of years in the earth. But bronze – the heroic element of Athens – tarnishes. So many bronze statues from the ‘Golden Age’ have vanished that we can be fooled into thinking this was a land of stone. But bronze would have been everywhere, some of it painted, some of it left au naturel; coins were made of bronze, as were furniture decorations, ceremonial swords, religious tokens. As it oxidises, raw bronze dulls, greens, its surface complexes over time. As the Athenian democracy was oxygenated, as it breathed in and out over the years, its patina too became more complex.
11 Even a god had to be morally good in Socrates’ way of thinking; this was very unconventional, see, e.g., Euthyphro 6a–c.
Coda: The tomb of Socrates – the Tower of the Winds
1 Trans. Brickhouse and Smith (2002).
2 Beard (2002), p.71ff.
3 Plutarch, Moralia, On Banishment, 600f.
4 Plato, Apology, 29a–b. Trans. Brickhouse and Smith (2002).
Afterword
1 Zanker (1995), 58.
2 Plato, Phaedrus, 275d‘e. Trans. H. N. Fowler [LCL]. Nb. Socrates’ mistrust of the written word was particularly out of kilter with Athens towards the end of his life when democracy had been declared restored on stone stelai around the city and on papyrus sheets in the Metroon.
APPENDIX ONE
Honouring Aphrodite
1 Euripides, Frag. 898; see Nauck (1926), p.648; Segal (1965), p.119 – see Rosenzweig (2007), p.80.
2 One day in the future, doubtless, Aphrodite’s sanctuary on the banks of the Ilissos, Aphrodite Ourania ‘in the gardens