The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [26]
And now Socrates is charged with crimes that so offend Athens, that strike at its deepest sense of itself, that the penalty proposed is death.
So at that time of day when the early sun still rings haloes on human heads, Socrates is walking through the Agora to his judgement day.
4
THE STOA OF THE KING
Court of the religious Archon, Athens, March/April 399 BC
EUTHYPHRO: Who has accused you?
SOCRATES: I don’t really know the man very well myself. His name is Meletus, I believe – if you can recall a Meletus of Pitthus, lanky-haired, hooked-nose, with a sparse beard.
EUTHYPHRO: I can’t, Socrates. But what’s the charge he has brought against you?
SOCRATES: Charge? Rather a grand one, I think. It’s no mean achievement for a young man to have learned about these things. He says he knows how the young are led astray and who the people are who corrupt them.
Plato, Euthyphro, 1b-c1
SOCRATES WAS TO BE TRIED IN a religious court some time close to May 399 BC – but he had been accused of crimes against the state a good four to six weeks beforehand. To hear the charges against him formally read, he had already had to make his way – through the Agora once again – to one of the most attractive new buildings in Athena’s city.
The Stoa Basileios was discovered in the north-east corner of the Agora only in 1970. Work continued on the excavation site between 1982 and 1983 and has yet to be completed. It is a structure worth seeking out. Decorated with striking statues, supported by marble columns, this covered colonnade was, in Socrates’ day, not only an elegant walkway where friends chatted in the cool of the shade; it was a building with a grave purpose. The Stoa Basileios was the home of the city’s religious court. The title of the man who administered its cases was the Archon Basileus, ‘King Archon’. He was, in effect, a high-ranking magistrate – one of nine who were selected by lot each year.2 Kingship was a distant memory, but the use of the epithet basileus drove home to Athenians how fundamentally important were the piety trials that took place in this sheltered spot.
In Ancient Greece there was no separate word for religion. Spirits, gods and demigods were believed to be everywhere and in everything. Religion was not an optional extra, it was the known and the unknown world. Gods were around every corner – the people of Athens never knew when they would appear, in human form or perhaps in the guise of a swan, a ram, a rainbow, a swallow, a waterfall, a gust of wind. All life marched to the beat of the great gods’ drums. The notion might seem oppressive to twenty-first-century tastes, but this was a rhythm that men prayed, fervently, would never be interrupted. Athenians were exhorted not to tamper with any ritual, or do away with ‘any of the practices their ancestors had handed down to them, and not add anything to the customary ways’.3 Religion was at Athens’ heart, it kept the citizen body alive.
Gods in the marketplace
The Agora of Socrates’ day was thick with religious fervour. Stalls sold portable household shrines, and diminutive, messy sanctuaries would have been cluttered with offerings – the remains of burnt goat hair, dove’s blood, the clay maquettes of diseased limbs, eyes, knees, genitalia, sacred flames that were never allowed to die. Greasy smoke hung in the air; Athens was, after all, a city occupied by many gods, all jealous for attention – forces that you neglected at your peril.