The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [40]
Like Aphrodite, Eros and Nemesis, Peitho had a prehistoric pedigree. She was clumped with those deities who were believed to have emerged from the primordial night, a darkness that smothered the universe before humanity, before earth itself came into existence. Sappho describes her as Aphrodite’s ‘handmaiden bright as gold’,3 and sometimes she is credited with a closer relationship to the goddess of love and passion – she is thought to be Aphrodite’s daughter, or the daughter of Ate, fate.4 Love and persuasion, a dangerous combination. Peitho is seductive, potent, undinting; sometimes she meddles where she shouldn’t. But still the Athenians put their trust in her.
Democratic Athens in fact adored Peitho. With so many vested interests, such possibilities for freedom, how could the body-politic of Socrates’ Athens possibly stick together? Peitho was thought to have an important job to do, not just to promote the ambitious, but to persuade Athenian men to think collectively, to encourage consensus for the common good. Athenians watched Peitho’s glory played out in the theatres. Her priestesses were given special seats of honour in the Theatre of Dionysos.5 (The persuasive nature of drink was as evident to the Greeks as it is to us.) Her chameleon qualities were turned into wooden cult-images or set in stone, by the most voguish sculptors of the day.6 During one ritual a priestess would wash down a carving of Peitho’s body and scatter doves’ blood on her altar. Her name climaxed Aeschylus’ Oresteian trilogy of tragedies.
ATHENA: Holy Persuasion too I bless,
Who softly strove with harsh denial, Till Zeus the Pleader came to trial
And crowned Persuasion with success.
Now good shall strive with good; and we
And they shall share the victory.
CHORUS: Let civil war, insatiate of ill,
Never in Athens rage;
Let burning wrath, that murder must assuage,
Never take arms to spill,
In this my heritage,
The blood of man till dust has drunk its fill.
Let all together find
Joy in each other;
And each both love and hate with the same mind
As his blood-brother;
For this heals many hurts of mankind.
ATHENA: These gracious words and promised deeds
Adorn the path where wisdom leads …
… Let your state
Hold justice as her chifest prize;
And land and city shall be great
And glorious in every part.7
The Oresteia trilogy was first performed in 458 BC when the democracy was a brave new idea. A decade when Persuasion, in a direct-democracy, seemed to be yielding splendid, life-enhancing results for the people of Athens. It is hard to read Aeschylus’ lines without sadness, with the hindsight we have, knowing of the civil wars that did indeed rage, and of the ugly place where persuasion and circumstance would in fact take Athena’s city. We should also note that Peitho, in ancient folklore, had a monstrous, bastard child – pheme is the name in Greek, which comes down to Latin as fama and to us as ‘fame’. The derivation of the word is worth remembering. Fame in its original sense meant not notoriety but notoriety’s life-spark – rumour. Through the fifth century, when talk was encouraged by democratic politics, talk’s dark side, pheme, was welcomed as a new cult – worshipped with ever-increasing enthusiasm. In a tight-knit, free-to-go-as-it-pleased community like Athens, rumour and gossip salted many a conversation. Fame in Athens was, by the time of Socrates’ trial, bringing as much pain as it was pleasure.
Socrates had always been presciently ambiguous about peitho and pheme.
He seems to have recognised, and abhorred, the curious paradox that empty, persuasive words can often carry the greatest weight. Although many sophists invoked peitho, and came to sell their persuasive wares in the Agora, Socrates had strong reservations. Unlike many rhetoricians of