The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [34]
And here we have the worrying certainty of the world’s first true democracy. If all citizen-men can judge their fellow citizens, then naturally men of all degrees can sit in judgement. Their decision will be representative. Every means possible has been thought of to prevent corruption. Alphabetical blocks of seats, secret ballots, random-selection machines. But still, the value of the judgement depends on those 500 odd men chosen to cram into the Stoa on that one day. As they shout and complain and applaud they will whip up and goad one another. They will bring their own neuroses, frustrations and back-biting, pre-judgements to bear.
Socrates has spent his life so far promoting the notion that every man should strive to be as good as he possibly can be. But he is to be judged before his advice has been institutionalised. As his darting eyes scan the courtroom – populated by men scrawny from hunger and disappointment, veterans scarred by war, tremblers scarred with shame, citizens who view him as an enemy of the state – one wonders with what degree of confidence he drew breath.
6
CHECKS, BALANCES AND MAGIC-MEN
Athens, 462–399 BC
Do not be angry with me for speaking the truth; no man will survive who genuinely opposes you or any other crowd and prevents the occurrence of many unjust and illegal happenings in the city. A man who really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public life if he is to survive even for a short time.
Plato, Apology, 31e–32a1
DOWN IN THE BASEMENT OF THE Agora Museum, where 250,000 ancient artefacts line up on shelves beautifully built in the 1950s, a number still kept in old olive-oil tins, there is an original fifth-century BC ballot box still in situ. This simple clay structure, looking for all the world like a marooned, subterranean chimney, is where Athenian men would toss their voting discs – psēphos (pebble – from the original tool of voting, a river pebble or stone). The ballots thrown in here around 399 BC were no longer river pebbles, but carefully designed. These were cutting-edge, newfangled things at the time of Socrates’ trial. The size of finger cymbals, each has either a hollow or a filled stem. A hollow stem equals a condemnation, a solid stem an acquittal. If you hold the middle between your thumb and forefinger it is impossible to tell which way your vote has fallen (one side of the ballot box gathered together all the ‘innocent’, the other all the ‘guilty’ votes); this was an ancient secret ballot.
That surviving bit of archaeology in the Agora basement tells us something important about the psychology of democratic Athens. Despite the value of words in Athens, and their power of persuasion, Athenians knew they needed to try to keep rhetoric (not to mention vote-rigging and corruption) in check. Canny to the fact that their ‘open’ system was vulnerable to abuse, to intimidation, that gift of the gab or personal connections could carry enormous weight in a people-led system, Athena’s children had spent a great deal of brain-time working out how to keep all procedures as fair, as fail-safe as humanly possible.2
Magic in the law-courts
But even so, in a show-trial such as this one, the odds were stacked against a mortal like Socrates. Demons were also thought to be at work here in the courts.
In the Kerameikos Museum, a five-minute walk due north-west of the Stoa Basileios, there is a small figure of a man. He is made of lead, his hands have been tied behind his back, he has been buried in a lead coffin. On his right leg is scratched his name, and it is there again on the lid of the coffin: Mnesimachos.
Mnesimachos was the object of black magic – an aspect of the Athenian legal system that has typically been played down, since it does not fit very easily with a popular notion of Athens