The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [35]
Elsewhere we find Athenian curse-tablets, folded up, pierced with a nail and left underwater – in wells and cisterns. Their messages seem to aim to disable those who attend the court:
Just as this lead is worthless and cold, so let that man and his deeds be worthless and cold, and for those men with him [also let] whatever they say and plot against me be worthless and cold.4
Figurines like these, along with the curse-tablets that turn up at all digs in the region of the law-courts (in central Athens and also in Piraeus and at the Kerameikos), show just how suspicious and superstitious a society Athens could be. Laying curses was once thought to be a habit of lower-grade Athenians, but the recent surge of archaeological activity in Athens paints a different picture. The frequency of the figurine and curse-tablet finds, and the names they bear, show that such sorcery was fairly standard procedure. A recent survey by the American School at Athens of all extant graffiti from excavations in the city shows that the bulk divides into two categories: the ABCs, where Athenians are learning to read and write, and the curses, where Athenians are perfecting ways of damning one another. Plato, in his Republic, refers to this kind of legal magic, the use of binding spells, produced through incantations:
They believe these things deliver us from evils in the other world, while terrible things await those who have neglected to incant and sacrifice.5
In the minds of many, magic was at work in other ways too in the legal system. Kleromancy, the quasi-supernatural power of randomness, was credited with guiding those balls in the kleroterion machines to their specific slots. The Athenians could not let the outcome of legal trials just rest on the power of a defendant’s speech or the whim of the jury – darker forces had to be called into play.6 And given how litigious a society Athens was – close on 40,000 legal cases, remember, in any one year – that is a lot of black magic to be in circulation.
With the help of the spirit world, Athens was a city that was used to condemning, to dispatching both the innocent and the guilty.
The plug has been pulled on the water-clock in the Archon’s court – all eyes are now on Meletus along with Anytus and Lycon (plus those Meletus has possibly brought with him, to chip in to substantiate his argument against Socrates). The team for the prosecution have precisely three hours to do their job.7
Before sunset on this one day, Athenians will decide whether or not a seventy-year-old philosopher is to live or die. It is not at all clear who will win this day in court.
There are no barristers or attorneys in the ancient Athenian legal system – Meletus, Anytus and Lycon have to mount the case for the prosecution, Socrates has to defend himself. What no one knows is whether Socrates’ famous wit, his smart one-liners, his thinking mind, his self-belief, are going to provide sufficient ammunition to save his skin.
7
PERSUADE OR OBEY
Religious court of the Archon Basileus, 399 BC
Well I am certainly wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of; but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know.
Socrates’ defence at his trial, 399 BC, in Plato, Apology, 21d1
SOCRATES WAS IN COURT, IN ATHENS, in 399 BC on charges of corrupting the young and denying the city’s gods. Passions clearly ran high and it was, by all accounts, a noisy trial. Time and again we are told that during the court proceedings the philosopher