The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [43]
Today Socrates’ deme, Alopeke, still keeps an old-world village feel. Only a twenty-five-minute walk from the city centre, it has wild snapdragons growing on the verges. A few traditional mud-brick houses cling onto the hillside. They will be replaced soon, by developers keen to buy the ‘air space’ above such prime plots of real estate. Alopeke is not a rich district. After heavy rains, bearded men – a little shamefacedly – still scour the grassy banks in search of snails to flesh out the family meal. Many of the elderly Athenians and refugees here have reached the end of a line.
But at Socrates’ birth this was a territory with much to look forward to.
In 469 BC Athens was a small place in a vast land-mass. Rich and strategically placed, the city had already attracted the unwelcome attention of the unforgiving Persian Empire. In late August 480 BC, 301 Spartans, at the front of a combined Greek force (6,000 or so), had held up King Xerxes and his army at the ‘Hot Gates’, the pass of Thermopylae, until all had fallen or fled – in the last instance the men fighting with bare hands and biting teeth. But then the Persian army advanced through Attica. They scorched the earth as they travelled, entrapping floundering civilians in their path in a net of soldiers, enslaving or slaughtering those they had caught. Towards the end of September9 they reached the Acropolis itself and climbed up the archaic steps and red-limestone rock there, and then torched the place. Wooden structures roared and hissed to the ground, the archaic Temple of Athena toppled, split and ripped. Today you can still see the traumatised kouroi – beautiful, enigmatic statues of young boys – whose stone skin has been blistered, buckled and singed in the Persian inferno.
But there was the chance of a reprieve. In 483 BC slaves working under ground up to 4 miles deep through the rock in low hills to the south of Athens at Laurion had discovered a gift from the gods that demonstrated that the Athenians were ‘favoured’: the treasure, silver-bearing seams of lead. Overnight the city became cash-rich. This could have been a get-rich-quick opportunity – a chance for poor Athenian citizens to nudge their way out of poverty, for the well-to-do to become wealthier still. But one man, the general Themistocles, stood in front of the Athenian Assembly and proposed a far-sighted plan. Rather than enjoy the windfall then and there, he suggested something radical – that Athens should turn her face south, to the sea: she should become a sea-power, a ‘thalassocrat’, a ruler of the waves like those heroes of old that trim across the lines of Homer. And just as he was cogitating this grand plan, the Oracle at Delphi proved itself very obliging. A cryptic message told Athenians to put their trust in wooden walls. What walls? Where? the demos cried. The wooden fence around the sacred Acropolis, perhaps? No, says Themistocles; the Oracle refers to those walls which decorate the seas – the sap-curved timber of a fleet.
Despite initial scepticism, Themistocles’ passion won the day. He commissioned 200 new triremes, first for flight, then to fight, and at a stroke turned landlubbers into ‘seafaring men’ (thalassioi).10 The quavering Athenians certainly needed help. Xerxes’ Persian force, glowering in the east, intent on invasion, was credited as being the most massive in human history: 1.7 million according to contemporary sources; 250,000 in a more sober modern estimate. Whichever number, this was an overwhelming body of soldiers – a seemingly unstoppable juggernaut. This was the army that had joined Europe and Asia by building a bridge across the Hellespont made of boats bound with clod-earth and brushwood. These were the men that had gouged a canal through the thick peninsula that points south into the Mediterranean and today bears the independent ecclesiastical state of Mount Athos. Some eye-witnesses