The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [45]
And just over ten years after the Salamis triumph, Socrates is born. If you subscribed to the common Greek belief that your name gave you your character, then you would know that this baby boy was sos – ‘safe’, ‘very sound’ (sos gives us our word so; this book is so long) and kratos, ‘powerful’, ‘gripping’. So-krates’ secure nomination was perhaps the heartfelt wish of a mother and father, Phaenarete and Sophroniscus, who had lived through brutal, troubled, bloody times. A mother and father who yearned for a more secure future for their boy-child.14
So as Socrates mewled in his crib, this was chisel-time in Athens. Building projects were in train the length and breadth of the city. In the year of his birth, the north citadel wall of the Acropolis was constructed; the Peisianaktios (later the Stoa Poikile – the Painted Stoa) had its foundations laid on the edge of the Agora. The impressive harbour-complex of Piraeus was only twenty years old. Sculptors and stone-workers splintered and then smoothed limestone and marble to incarnate vital totems of the Greek world: plump, life-size toddlers prayed to a goddess of fertility, the goat-legged Pan-god was given his clambering cloven-hooves, ranks of hoplite stone soldiers marched to war and mourning young wives were draped on funeral pyres.
We are told that Socrates’ father, limed, dusty, was one of the stonemasons in the hammering city.15 A man kept busy and in pocket by the ‘can-do’ spirit of the day. Alopeke and its neighbouring districts – from that day to this – have a reputation as a zone where marble-masons live.16 At the bottom of the hill the masons are still there, cottage-industry-compact, displaying their wares around the gates of the modern city’s First Cemetery. Today their work is decorative – comforting the bereaved who want to do honour to the twenty-first-century dead with hand-carved sparkling stone. But in the fifth century BC, the stone-worker was the creature who would build brand-Athens.
So, Socrates’ father, Sophroniscus, would have been in demand. The exquisite ‘mourning Athena’ relief was carved, the Klepsydra Fountain was sunk on the north-west slopes of the Acropolis, a bronze Athena Promachos was cast by master-artist Pheidias. The round dining-chamber, the Tholos, reminiscent of warrior-kings’ tombs from the Age of Heroes, the Late Bronze Age, was erected in the Agora so that fifty councillors at a time could be given a square meal for their pains.17 The population of Athens started to grow, and by the time of Socrates’ death it would have increased fivefold. People flocked to the district. Modest, basic homes started to crowd the streets of Athens.
Illuminating the buildings came genius; a current of creativity that sped through the lanes and streets. Visual artists had the financial sponsors and the psychological support of a hopeful city. Two bronze ‘tyrant slayers’, Harmodios and Aristogeiton, became permanent inhabitants of the Agora; these statues which replaced originals stolen by Xerxes are the earliest examples of monumental political art from antiquity. Pheidias carved the exquisitely detailed Athena Lemnia, a forerunner to his massive gilded Athena in the Parthenon.
In modelling and sculpture, by what is the spectator most overcome? Is it not by the fairest and most magnificent statues, the ones which have achieved the limits of perfection in these matters? The Olympian Zeus, the Athena at Athens …18
The home-grown talent was matched by adventurers from the north and by craftsmen from the south and east. The master-painter Polygnotos arrived