The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [47]
But ‘safe’ Socrates may have had less taste for anonymity and the status quo. Already, or so our existing sources tell us, an immature philosopher had started to interrogate the world he found himself in. Throughout his life he would make the question the thing. ‘The only virtue is knowledge, the only evil ignorance’.28 ‘An unexamined life is not worth living’29 This lime-dusted, gently paced suburb of Alopeke was not, it seems, big enough for an enquiring mind. Socrates had to find his sparring partners.
The next we hear of him is pursuing knowledge – on the wrong side of the tracks, in Athens’ downtown district, its suburbs of sin.
10
KERAMEIKOS – POTTERS AND BEAUTIFUL BOYS
Outside Athens’ city walls, 450 BC
Moreover Socrates was the first to call philosophy down from the sky.
Socrates autem primus philosophiam devocavit e caelo.
Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 5.10
GOLDEN AGE ATHENS WAS SURROUNDED by antiquity’s equivalent of a ring of steel: an encircling building programme of walls 3¾ miles long that buttressed the city, and then remarkably by 452 BC reached out for 15 miles to link Athens with its sister city – the downtown port district of Piraeus – the city-harbour that gave Athens an ocean-mouth.1
The building material used for construction was ‘Persian rubble’ – the remains of the city that the Persians had tried to destroy. The builders were ordinary men, women, children and slaves, all survivors who had staggered back home after the Persian nightmare had ended with the wake-up call of Salamis.2 Athenians were fervent; they never wanted to suffer such carnage again. And so an ambitious construction programme began. Athens started to resemble the great cities of the Near East – Babylon, Nineveh – superstates protected by a defensive statement visible for miles around. Yet whereas Babylon’s walls were blue-brick glazed, and Nineveh’s carved with fantastical visions of paradisiacal gardens, it is clear that Athens’ walls were put up in a hurry.3 All kinds of debris ended up squashed in amongst the masonry blocks: chips of tombs, law decrees, broken pots.4 Scrabbling to put something concrete between themselves and atrocity, the Athenians used what they could lay their hands on to keep Athens fortress-safe.
The protection offered by strong walls was written into the literature and psyche of the period. The philosopher Heraclitus from Ephesus in Asia Minor declared, ‘The people should fight for the law as for their city wall.’ A study of the texts of the Old Testament drives home the horror of city walls tumbling down: ‘I have wiped out many nations, devastating their fortress walls and towers. Their cities are now deserted; their streets are in silent ruin. There are no survivors to even tell what happened.’5 And Yahweh thunders, ‘I will reduce the wicked to heaps of rubble.’6 The Athenians had no intention of enduring such a reduction and so they hand-lifted one block up onto another. The project was completed with all the subtlety of a juggernaut; houses, roadways, olive groves were swept aside. Athens saw that without a bullish defence system and permanent, controlled access to the port at Piraeus, she remained just another land-locked city-state, a beached sitting duck.
Because although Athens had become head of the Delian League, even though her boatyards were filled with the sleek ‘wooden walls’ of the Delphic Oracle, and despite the fact that she had brought a new word – ‘democracy’ – to the world and had sent the Persians packing, she was not universally loved.
CORINTH: Keep it in mind that a tyrant city has