The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [38]
We don’t know who wrote the speeches that promoted the arguments of the tanner, the poet and the orator on that spring morning; the prosecutors themselves, or one of the hired hands who sat at tables in the Agora and bashed out perfectly persuasive tracts, thanks to which men could save their own lives, prevent an abortion, claim their neighbour’s garden was in fact theirs, et cetera, et cetera. Nor do we know what Meletus, Anytus and Lycon said (unless – always a possibility – their words are sitting on a scrap of papyrus in the storerooms of a museum in London, Paris, New York, Egypt or Athens, waiting to be translated and published; given that new fragments of new plays by Sophocles have recently been coming to light amongst the Oxyrhynchus Papyri collection, this is feasible). What is certain is that their orations against Socrates would have had to be to time.12
Because now that the trial-space in the Agora had filled, now that the charges against Socrates had been boomed out by a herald, a functionary of the court – after patiently waiting for the Archon’s signal – had allowed the water-clock’s regulating stream to start to flow: the sign that speakers could commence sharing their arguments with the 500-strong judge-and-jury.
We have a pretty good idea of what the Athenian water-clock or klepsydra in Socrates’ trial looked like because the fractured remains of one klepsydra were found, in the 1930s, discarded down a well in central Athens. Two earthenware pots sit one above the other, and the water spouts from the larger into the smaller. This particular example releases water relatively quickly – it takes only around six minutes to drain. But the water-clocks in the bigger courts were commensurately larger, and we know that these earthenware pots were refilled time and again during the proceedings. It is a bottling of time that sits uneasily with Socrates’ more fundamentally expansive approach to life. During his trial, Socrates points up the ludicrousness of making dead clock-time an arbiter in court:
SOCRATES: If it were the law with us, as it is elsewhere, that trial for life should not last one, but many days, you would be convinced, but now it is not easy to dispel great slanders in a short time.13
There is no real sense of hours passing by in this courtroom. only comes to mean ‘hour’ in the second half of the fourth century. Up until then the word implied both a season and a ‘fitting or appointed time’. Socrates’ lifespan has been rightly called the ‘axial age’. Because this is a moment in human history when the old world starts to morph into the new. Athens still follows a primitive, bucolic calendar. Rituals and seasons mark out time. But new technology is starting to change things. The water-clock’s slow leakage is inexorable.14
SOCRATES: Stop trembling. You should look away from some of your thoughts; and, having dismissed them, depart for a while. Then, go back to your brain; set it in motion again and weigh the issue.15
Socrates has agreed to abide by the rules of the court that has gathered to try him by the laws of Athens. And so he has to stand there, aged seventy, in his worn, woollen cloak and, like those around him in the court, within a prescribed length of time, strain to hear what it is his accusers have to say – because he, like all those in ancient Athenian courts, has to respond in his own defence.16
Agony in the law-courts
The adversarial nature of today’s law-courts came directly from the Greek warrior tradition, where agones – competitions – were the prime means to prove you were a real man.17
The Athenian court was not about consensus – it was about winning. Defendants and accusers performed in a theatre. Emotional manipulation was an important part of the action: men would weep and beg, aristocrats would prostrate themselves at the feet of ‘the people’. Of course the