The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [25]
What do the gods want from us? What is beauty? What is love? Who is good? Who deserves power? What is virtue? What is knowledge? Where do we go when we die? Questions, questions. Plato depicts the maturing philosopher as so fascinated by human conversation that, far from charging for his ideas, Socrates declares he would subsidise passers-by so that they could listen to what he has to say:13
SOCRATES: I fear that because of my love of people they think that I not only pour myself out copiously to anyone and everyone without payment, but that I would even pay something myself if anyone would listen to me.14
As early as 430 BC, and quite possibly before, we know that this eager questioning was ruffling a few feathers in the city-state. A fragment of papyrus, copied out carefully by a Roman scholar and then by a Frankish scribe, and now held in a cardboard box in the warehouse of the Naples Museum, preserves a few lines of the Greek comic poet Callias.15 Callias was a direct contemporary of Socrates. He noticed that which had begun to so bother the Athenians, that Socrates was not just a one-trick pony, but a consistent presence, and more than that: guru-like. A democratic citizen who was beginning to attract his own band of followers. Because Socrates’ radical take on the issues of life was so refreshing, he gathered around him a coterie of disciples. One of Callias’ characters moans that Socrates’ methods made men dissatisfied and arrogant.
CHARACTER A: Oh why this pride, why this disdainful eye?
EURIPIDES (disguised as a woman): I’ve every right to it; Socrates is why!
We can picture the scene: followers of the philosopher prowling the busy marketplace, trying out the Socratic method on random passers-by; young men challenging their elders, the subservient challenging their betters – all following Socrates’ principle that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living …’
But Callias was writing when Athens was in crisis – when the Peloponnesian War was brewing. By 432 BC hostilities between Sparta and Athens would be open. Whilst times were good, when the city-state was not at war, not crouching with its back against the wall, Socrates was a charismatic cause célèbre in Athens’ marketplace, one of the many fine and stimulating attractions that the Agora had to offer.
The prison complex was here in the Agora too, in the grubbiest quarter – the industrial zone; sweating bronze- and marble-workers hammered alongside those that a sprawling, polyglot, imperial city such as Athens had to keep temporarily under lock and key.16 Manned by ‘The Eleven’, a not-to-be-messed-with law-enforcement body, with 300 public slaves to draw from as their heavies, the prisons contained men who awaited trial or execution.
If the trial of Socrates does not go well today, this prison is where he’ll be heading.
It is a building the philosopher must have passed countless times. Socrates has lived, from birth, in and around Athena’s busy city; apart from battle-missions and participation in a religious festival down South, he has barely left the place.17 His presence in the Agora is nothing new; this is where for half a century he has plied his trade as an ideologist – a trader of word-ideas, unobstructed in the marketplace. He has watched and listened as Athenians created the first files on the subject of democracy. This is where, very recently, he has done his duty as an active, democratic Athenian citizen.
But today Socrates finds himself at the sharp end of democratic politics.
On this late spring morning the Agora of 399 BC is a changed place. Now, most of Athens’ luminaries are gone. The great general Pericles is dead of the plague – or, some said, of a broken spirit; the playwrights Sophocles and Euripides have been taken too: dying just a few months apart, but only after Euripides,