The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [37]
THESEUS: … This state is not
Subject to one man’s will, but is a free city.
The king here is the people, who by yearly office
Govern in turn. We give no special power to wealth;
The poor man’s voice commands equal authority.
HERALD: … The city that I come from [Thebes] lives under command
Of one man, not a rabble. None there has the power
By loud-mouthed talk to twist the city this way and that
For private profit – today popular, loved by all,
Tomorrow, blaming the innocent for the harm he’s done,
Getting away with every crime, till finally
The law-courts let him off scot-free! The common man!
Incapable of plain reasoning, how can he guide
A city in sound policy?5
And Socrates – the man we credit as the champion of free speech and liberty – asked another, disconcerting question of democracy. Persuasive speech is all very well, but how much room does persuasion allow for goodness, for truth?6
Speaking freely in the law-courts
But this is slavery, not to speak one’s thoughts.
Euripides, Phoenician Women, 392
Freedom of speech was cardinal in Athens – and yet all clever democrats picked their words carefully. The silver-tongued did well in both the Assembly and the law-courts. The speeches of ordinary, nameless Athenians, many of which are only now being translated from scraps of papyrus, indicate just how canny these early democrats were. A few spoke their minds; most said that which they thought the crowd wanted to hear. Personal gain could be masked as moral purpose.7 Herodotus’ observation, that it is easier to persuade 30,000 to act than it is one, easier to deceive a multitude than one man, was a human truth of Athens’ direct democracy.8 It was a truth that Socrates was soon to suffer.
Pamphlets outlining the ‘Art of Rhetoric’ sold like hotcakes in the city. The number of copies of Aristotle’s fourth-century Art of Rhetoric that are still turning up in the sands of Egypt are an indication of how popular such tracts had become for the layman. In the law-courts precise skills were required. Speeches had to be memorised, not read. The defendant or plaintiff needed a clear voice, a dramatic delivery, a developed command of the Greek language (polysyllabic and complicated to speak) and he needed to be able to argue his case within precise time-limits.
The first to speak at Socrates’ trial were his accusers, Meletus, Anytus and Lycon.9 Meletus, remember, spoke on behalf of other poets,10 whom Socrates had rubbed up the wrong way. The glitterati and their lackeys were turning against the irritating gadfly. Lycon was a representative of the orators, the men whom Socrates criticised for valuing style over content. Anytus was one of the city’s entrepreneurs; Socrates, we hear, had had some kind of brief liaison with his son and had persuaded this young man to ‘think’ rather than to go into the family tanning business. Anytus was also a man who had lost much property during the civil wars – wars that saw oligarchs such as Critias, a pupil of Socrates’, flourish. Who knows how long Anytus’ rancour had been allowed to grow – perhaps even stretching back to those days when Socrates walked and talked with young men in the Ilissos district, while the tanners were restricted from using the clear water there to sluice down their bloodied skins. While the beautiful juveniles, the men with leisure and youth on their side, paddled in rivers and listened to Socrates and other sophists, Anytus’ livelihood was degraded and threatened. As the philosopher and his friends enjoyed the cooling Ilissian waters, appreciated young boys in the gym, and thought, deeply, about the point of human life, a powerful subset of the business community was being snubbed.
In one of Plato’s dialogues, Anytus and Socrates bump into one another in the back streets of Athens. The scene bristles with scarcely contained antagonism:
ANYTUS: Socrates, I consider