The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [30]
The position of the red letters could not have been more significant. When the democracy was first established, the reformer Kleisthenes realised that he would have to break old loyalties in order to strengthen fidelity to the new mono-democratic Athenian city-state. Ancient Greece was a tribal society, but now millennia-old tribes had been effectively disbanded and ten new, manufactured tribes put in their place. It was one of those moments in history when men draw straight lines on the map – to try to obliterate the past.
The sociopolitical engineering was carefully thought through. Each tribe was given a hero. And each hero was given a fine, larger-than-life-sized statue in the heart of the Agora. This display of Eponymous Heroes was raised 15 feet above street level. At either end of the line-up giant flames burned. These bronze heroes had, at the time of Socrates’ trial, reminded Athenians morning, noon and night of the radical power of the democracy for the last twenty-five years.18 Here was street furniture with a message. Because beneath the statues, on wooden and plaster plaques, the charges of highend criminals were etched. Ideal men, idols and condemned democratic sinners side by side. It was in the vicinity of the Eponymous Heroes – either directly beneath the figures or on the wall opposite – that Socrates’ crimes were blazoned.
When Socrates came to the law-court of the Archon Basileus, a century’s worth of political crisis and political experimentation had come to a head. Athens had suffered the awful, abominable realities of stasis and civil war. Athenians were a brutalised polity. Twelve years before this trial, in 411 BC, a dreadful thing had happened, a nightmare that shook up courtroom dynamics.19 The democracy itself had been overturned by an Athenian cell of aristocratic men. This was Athens’ night of the long knives. Slaughter, torture, intimidation were companions of the political coup. Athenians spattered the streets with Athenian blood.
Reliving the horror of its memory-bright civil wars, once again Athens had attempted to institutionalise fairness.
When democrats repopulated the city squares from 410/9 BC, they were determined to do what they could to prevent cliques splitting the city apart a second time around. So now, to cauterise overt cronyism, the legally active in Athens on any one day – dikastes (the Athenian judge and jury) – have each been allotted to a different court that very dawn. The chance for tribal or political bloc-voting has been negated. Socrates’ own situation in March/April 399 BC is another example of state-sponsored fairness. What now awaits Socrates is a pre-trial examination – more fluid than the trial proper will be. Chaired by the Archon, genuine questions and answers try to flush out vested interests, coercion, downright illegality. The pre-trial examination is a carefully orchestrated safeguard of fair play.
It is in democratic Athens that the sycophant is born: a man on the make who brings a trumped-up court case; someone who thinks he’ll be able to score off the very presence of a justice system. Sycophantai were the fifth-century legal equivalent of ambulance-chasers; citizens who brought cases on flimsy charges so that they could be paid for attending court, and might possibly even net damages. And so steep fines have been introduced – if you don’t succeed in getting any more than one-fifth of the votes, you have to pay the state back.20
But in the trial of Socrates, a fine for sycophancy seems unlikely. For whatever reason, Meletus has been moved to make an example of Socrates. The young poet does not even have to pay court fees, because by bringing Socrates to justice, he is thought to be furthering important state business, delivering a public