The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [32]
As Socrates watched in 399 BC, this cracked, worn, 6-foot-long altarblock may well have gleamed wet with blood and gore.
The theatre of justice had begun.
The Archon Basileus, the chief magistrate, his hair long and wreathed in myrtle,3 his tunic unbelted, did the killing.4 The oath sworn here was believed to be binding, its potency accentuated by the visceral nature of the sacrifice. Goats, rams or oxen, their coats washed and scented, horns twinkling with gilt, were coaxed to the priests’ blade. As they died, the animals’ open veins coursed into a sacred bowl – here the magistrate plunged his hands. Wrist-deep in blood, now he was ready to oversee justice. But the oath-maker hadn’t finished his gory business; the severed testicles of a sacrificed animal were then ground and squashed underfoot (a precursor of things to come: if he broke the oath, his own family would be emasculated). It was an ancient, unyielding custom: ‘Whatever men first do wrong against the oath, let the brains of them and of their children flow to the ground like this wine,’ warns the Iliad.5
All jurors swore to do their duty: a synthetic strap of common purpose. One Greek said, ‘The oath is what holds democracy together.’6 And what a mongrel democracy it was: farmers, old generals, cheesemakers, road-builders – all manner of men would have been here to judge Socrates; all Athenian citizens over the age of thirty, all chosen by lot. These were oaths taken in the presence of the gods themselves, their ritual aspect was central. And Meletus’ own indictment of Socrates was itself an antomosia, a ‘counter-oath-swearing’ – a statement with the gods as his witness that what he said was true. We must never lose sight of how deeply pious, superstitious (one might say) Athens was. In the city that is often considered the catalyst of a rational, enlightened way of being, there was no doubt in the minds of the first democrats that spirits and magic were in the air. The sublime, inexplicable, potent world and its unpredictable, primeval, divine inhabitants were believed to be far more powerful than anything in the mortal coil. Spirits, dead heroes, gods, goddesses and demons were around every street corner in Athena’s city.
And so the fact that Socrates stands accused of a religious crime, in a religious court, should remind us of the fundamental seriousness of this particular legal day.
Since the early hours men have been preparing to judge Socrates. The eligible of the city have rolled themselves out of bed and trooped in to the Agora, busy even before dawn. In that blue-grey light, tribe by tribe, they have stood in line before a futuristic invention – the kleroterion – a random-selection machine. There were probably a number of these contraptions in the city; certainly one in the marketplace and at the entrance to the law-courts. Each tribe had its own machine, and the tribe members are here to find out if the day ahead of them is going to be one of justice; 6,000 have already made their names available for the annual selection by lot, and now a second selection from that list takes place.7
The kleroterion (really a proto-computer) is a neat bit of technology. Still available to marvel at in Athens – one in the Agora Museum, the other in the Epigraphic Museum – it randomised participation in democratic business. On the face of the hollow stone box there are carved slots, just big enough to take a metal disc on which is inscribed the name of an individual citizen. Down the left-hand side is a chute. Black and white marble counters would be sent down the chute (wood originally, now long gone),