The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [39]
Despite their antipathy (and given what was at stake), the accusations raised by Meletus, Anytus and Lycon cannot have been world-class speeches, the kind of Ciceronian epics that have survived the millennia. Although we know that they stood up and addressed the assembled crowd in the allotted time, not one quote from the attacks appears to have survived. Yet it is not just the men’s philippic skill that is in play here. Socrates knows, only too well, that he has something else to compete with. On this spring day, prejudice – pre-judgement – is clearly present in the courtroom; and so too is a force so powerful it was incarnated by the Greeks as a goddess:
SOCRATES: Those who persuaded you by using malice and slander, and some who persuaded others after they themselves had been persuaded – all are very hard to deal with. It isn’t even possible to bring any of them up here and to question them, and in making my defence, it’s absolutely necessary to shadow-box, as it were, and to ask questions when no one answers.18
Socrates is pointing up the dangers of ‘slander’, ‘rumour’, of ‘word-of-mouth’ judgements – all the stocks-in-trade of one acutely, intimidatingly powerful deity. A goddess beloved of democratic Athens called Peitho – Persuasion. Before Socrates has even opened his mouth, some in the court have already been persuaded. Slander, it appears, had swiftly flown on the breath of this, one of the most popular goddesses in democratic Athens. History has neglected her, but for the Athenians Peitho was a larger-than-life presence across the city, and a permanent fixture in the law-courts.
Well anyway, Athenians, that I’m not guilty according to Meletus’ indictment doesn’t seem to me to need much of a defence, and what I’ve said about it is enough. But what I was saying earlier – that there’s a great deal of hatred directed at me and by many people, you may be sure that’s true. And it’s this that’ll convict me, if indeed I’m going to be convicted – not Meletus nor even Anytus but the prejudice and ill will of most people. This is what’s convicted many other good men and, I think, it’ll do so in the future. And we needn’t fear that it’ll end with my case.19
The power of persuasion, in any democratic society, should not be underestimated.
8
PEITHO, THE
POWER OF PERSUASION
Agora, Assembly, law-courts, 469–399 BC
SOCRATES: … I don’t know whether you have been convinced by my accusers, gentlemen; but I myself was almost carried away by them, their arguments were so persuasive. And yet hardly a word of what they said was true …
Socrates’ defence, 399 BC, in Plato, Apology, 17a
IF YOU WALK ON THE SOUTH-WESTERN side of the Acropolis today, on your right-hand side, before you start to mount the monumental marble steps, there are the four walls of a home – a god-home.
When every Athenian made his way up to the cult centre here, he knew that he was visiting not a symbolic, but the actual, temporal seat of gods and goddesses. Temples and sanctuaries were built as earthly lodgings for the god-tribe. The experience on arrival must surely have been highly charged. Here you were, walking into the presence of what were believed to be the most powerful forces in heaven and on earth; entering a spiritually radioactive force-field.
This first house belonged to that of a powerful, wily goddess; the magnetic, effective creature called Peitho.1 When you start to look, you find Persuasion/Peitho throughout the city-state. She hurries, ornamental chiton flapping, across funerary urns and drinking cups. She is commemorated in Pindar’s ode Olympian 13, where prostitutes are nominated her servants. The art of persuasion has become so important in this new democracy – a place where ideas on the conduct of society, of justice, of war, of civilisation