The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [41]
SOCRATES: If you continue to delight in clever, idle arguments you’ll be qualified to combat with the sophists but never know how to live with men.8
His uncompromising quest was to distinguish the ‘good’ from the ‘bad’, the ‘true’ from the ‘false’. At a time when compromise and spin were coming to have great value in Athens, Socrates, doggedly, infuriatingly, doesn’t pursue popularity, he doesn’t delight in managing with clever words to make black appear white – he is after something more solid, something with content as well as style.
SOCRATES: And it’s this [hatred] 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.9
Socrates was, transparently, a victim of rumour – of both pheme and peitho. Persuasive words in the court on that early summer’s day will decide whether or not Socrates is to live or die.
But before we imagine how he met his end, we should investigate in what way and where the philosopher’s life began.
ACT TWO
SOCRATES AS A YOUNG MAN
9
ALOPEKE: A PHILOSOPHER IS BORN
A Deme south-east of Athens, 469 BC
CRITO: Either you shouldn’t have children or you should share in their lives by nurturing and educating them completely.
Plato, Crito, 45d1
SOCRATES: Fellow citizens, why do you turn and scrape every stone to gather wealth, and, yet, take so little care of your own children, to whom one day you must relinquish it all?
Socrates (attributed)2
AS IS OFTEN THE WAY WITH great men from history, we know precise and intimate details of their death, and very little about their birth. What we do know is that Socrates was born in the long shadow of the Acropolis – or to be more accurate, with the proud, 230-foot-high rock at eye level.3 He was the son of Sophroniscus and Phaenarete, a man-child of the tribe of Antiochis and of the deme-district of Alopeke.4 South-east of the city centre, Alopeke sits snug and high on the slopes of the foothills of Mount Hymettos.
The Acropolis, with its crusting of world-class buildings, is unavoidable today. Its profile, dominated by the Parthenon, has become an old friend; the Parthenon itself has come to represent, across the globe, a certain kind of civilisation. Of course Socrates’ view would not have been ours; the classical Parthenon was not yet dreamed of; Socrates’Athens was innocent of the bold beauty to come. Instead he would have woken each morning to the silhouette of war-ruins – the Archaic Parthenon temple a jagged gash, toppled and burned by Persian battering-rams, Persian torches, Persian swords. But already there were whisperings that a phoenix would somehow rise from the ashes.
Even without the glory to be of the Parthenon, Socrates lived surrounded by the natural, cradling grandeur of the mountains that protected Athena’s city. Lykabettos Hill, Mount Aigaleos to the west of Athens, Mount Parnes to the north and Mount Penteli to the north-east – all cloud-high. He would have seen traders nudging into Piraeus harbour, and the generous sweep of coastline, arcing down to southern Greece, becoming, just beyond Corinth, the Peloponnese. He would have as an old friend the mysterious white rock-formations of what is now called Philopappou Hill, where today lovers meet, but which was then a vital lookout point against invasion. Up here in Alopeke, the world – with all its possibilities, all its challenges – spreads out at your feet.
Here too, from Socrates’ birthplace, you can see how geography gave Athenian history a kick-start. The story went that the goddess Athena and the sea-god Poseidon fought over the inland settlement – a special place. Surrounded by defensive mountains and lands rich in the raw materials of culture (marble, limestone, clay and silver), Athens is a kingfisher’s whisper