The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [48]
As well as the flattering epithet ‘violet-crowned’, at this time Athens garnered herself another: ‘busybody Athens’. Without the common enemy of Persia as a clear and present danger, the city-states started to notice who amongst them had best picked themselves up and dusted themselves down. There was no doubt that Athens deserved that particular laurel. As well as mutterings from the Corinthians, the Spartans too (down in Lakonia in the Peloponnese) were none too happy with the reports that protective walls were rising from the Attic plain.8 Sparta despised walls. Plutarch tells us that the Spartans boasted proudly that ‘our young men are our city walls, their battlements the tips of our spears’.9 About 75 per cent of all Greek city-states had some form of enclosing wall by the time of Socrates’ death. An extravagantly walled city takes on a mythic quality – it declares it can never be assailed. Athenians must have suspected that their building programme would antagonise the other superstate of the region, Sparta, but they had no intention of relenting. By 478 BC the city-wall fortifications were complete. Socrates was born outside the cordon of a truculently, hermetically sealed state.
By the time Socrates was nineteen, Athens had been fully democratic for just twelve years.10 So as the philosopher grew up, democracy too was beginning to ripen. Democracy was a strange, bold, radical experiment.11 And, like all good experiments, it could yield the best results under stringent conditions. Athens hardly constituted an open society. The radical developments in the city were very recent, very raw. Its enemies were still only a morning’s march away. The city built a cucumber-frame around its tender shoots. It became fiercely protective. Outside were foreigners, journeymen, the demi-monde. Inside were citizens, stakeholders. Golden Age Athens was truly a fortress city. Crenellated towers and battlements, at least 40 feet high, kept the haves apart from the have-nots.
Walk due north-west from the Acropolis today and one finds one of the most exciting ongoing Athenian archaeological digs – in that dangerous space beyond the mortar shield. The road to this, the Kerameikos district, still has a marginal feel. Moustachioed, toothless men play backgammon; there is an apologetic flea-market, where old magazines nestle up to older knives, but even the vendors recognise that most of what they sell is tat and abandon it to the dustmen when it rains.
It is this literally edgy district that can give us many clues to Socrates’ life. Imagine approaching Athens not from the usual direction – via the writings of proud Athenians or self-confessed Atheno-philes – but instead from outside in. From afar the Acropolis, crowned with monumental temples and sanctuaries, dominated the skyline, as it does now. Closer in, the city’s stench (no sewage system, no rubbish collection here) and its lime-polished patrolled defences (wide enough for troops to march along) would have announced that civilisation was close at hand. Here entry to the city was via a scrappy shantytown and through monumental double-gates.
The walls and the north-west Dipylon gate with its interior courtyard, 130 feet deep, covering in total 2,160 square yards – the largest gateway in the Ancient World, cut right across an ancient district. A fountain here was used to refresh and cleanse travellers before they entered the city. Named for the divinity Kerameus (his name means potter), this liminal area was colonised by eponymous craftsmen. The potmakers of the Kerameikos gave us the thing that, for many, defines the classical world: the Greek vase. We inadvertently honour their efforts, and Kerameus, each time we talk of ‘ceramics’.
The Kerameikos must have been a gaudy, stinking, pulsating place: a place you came to celebrate both life and death. The River Eridanos flowed freely here; now reduced to a boggy, subterranean trickle. Tortoises