The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [29]
What is good? How do we know that we know anything? Who is qualified to rule? What is love? Socrates was not a mollifying man. For more than fifty years he had dogged Athens with questions. He purported not to instruct, but to ‘un-teach’ men.
And here we can understand why Socrates’ trial has such central importance – both for Athens and within world history. Come the year 399 BC, Socrates has, for the last forty (perhaps even the last fifty) years, encouraged those around him to think deeply, critically, about the meaning of life. He exhorts young men to do this, young women too, priests and priestesses, soldiers, seasoned citizens. He advocates thinking while men make shoes, row ships, break bread. He suggests that acquiescence to the status quo, to ‘the way things are’, is not just lazy, it is inhuman.
And while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy, exhorting anyone whom I meet after my manner, and convincing him, saying: O my friend, why do you, who are a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of Athens, care so much about laying up the greatest amount of money and honour and reputation, and so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul, which you never regard or heed at all? Are you not ashamed of this? And if the person with whom I am arguing says: Yes, but I do care; I do not depart or let him go at once; I interrogate and examine and cross-examine him, and if I think that he has no virtue, but only says that he has, I reproach him with undervaluing the greater, and overvaluing the less. And this I should say to everyone whom I meet, young and old, citizen and alien, but especially to the citizens, inasmuch as they are my brethren.12
Despite the fact that the crimes now laid out in front of the philosopher are so serious they could incur the death penalty, Socrates does not appear over-bothered. For the next few days, if Plato has it right (and he was, at this stage in Socrates’ life, an eye-witness in Athens), Socrates does not choose to exile himself from the city – which would have been a legal option.13 Instead he has a chat in the gymnasium with some of these young men (those boys who, since birth, had known nothing other than war-years) and, only once sated with conversation, does he walk to the Archon Basileus, the ‘King Magistrate’, in the Stoa to make his plea.
The charges – that he has denied Athens’ gods, introduced new ones and corrupted the city’s young men – are read out once again. Socrates, we know, accepts that Meletus’ accusation stands up, given the existing laws of the city.14 This is a skirmish, an uncomfortable situation, which – like so many in his life – the philosopher is not going to duck.15
So some time in late March or early April the philosopher leaves the Archon’s court. Now the well-oiled bureaucracy of complaint, of justice, is in train. One of the distinctive traits of democratic Athens was its obsession with posting public notices. Papyrus chits, graffiti, stone-carved stelai communicating new laws, fines, religious summons, would have been found everywhere in the city. Democratic decisions have to be shared with fellow democrats. And therefore a man handy with a paintbrush is given a job; the Agora – a witness to Socrates’ ideas as he sat or strode up and down, asking one question after another – will now witness his defamation. Strapped to the railings outside the row of statues of ‘Eponymous Heroes’, possibly also painted on the white-plastered wall opposite, Socrates’ crimes are set out in outsize red letters. Here is a rude accusation; his disruptive influence noted down, marked into the minds of his fellow Athenians, and ours.
In 1954 excavations uncovered white flakes deep in the ground in this south-east corner of the Agora: fragile fragments of marble-dust stucco. This find was not included in the excavation report, but just noted down on an inventory card. Recent investigation has, though, thrown