The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [50]
SOCRATES: When I was young, Cebes, I was tremendously eager for the kind of wisdom which they call investigation of nature. I thought it was a glorious thing to know the causes of everything, why each thing comes into being and why it perishes and why it exists; … I prized my hopes very highly, and I seized the books very eagerly and read them as fast as I could, so that I might know as fast as I could about the best and the worst.19
Socrates would have been in good company during these al fresco seminars; for the well heeled in Athena’s city, this was what the leisured boys of sixteen, seventeen, eighteen did. With two, possibly three slaves to every adult citizen, the young well-to-do Athenian did not have to trouble himself with too much work. Instead he spent his waking hours honing his body and mind.20 All young citizen men (and particularly wealthy young men), outnumbered as they were by the population of slaves, had vast amounts of schole – leisure-time. It has been estimated that the young and middle-aged may well have spent three-quarters of their day at the gym. Here they prepared for competitions, for war, for being ‘beautiful’ and for their role in the city’s many festivals.
At certain ages in Athens you could do certain things: Socrates, like all other healthy sons of citizens, had already been welcomed into Athenian society as a toddler at the Anthesteria festival. At seven he would have been allowed to read. At twelve to participate in religious rites, and then at eighteen – the real coming of age when beardless boys became bearded men – the number of festivals that he could attend increased exponentially.
The almost-daily religious festivals – the majority of which Socrates would have had the chance to participate in – gave Athens both a sense of security and a sense of purpose.21 Its most splendid was the show-stopping Great Pan-Athenaea, a four-yearly fixture when outsiders were allowed into the city to marvel at Athenian greatness. Between the rival ten tribes of Attica, competition was fierce. It is the Great Pan-Athenaea that is represented on the Parthenon frieze. Foreigners carry honey-cakes, aristocrats parade along the street on horseback, their charges rearing and prancing; there are flute and lyre players; gods mix with men, young girls carry furniture in preparation for religious ritual to a high-priestess; and standing back to back with this priestess is none other than the Archon Basileus himself, the man who oversaw Socrates’ trial. On the Parthenon’s delicately carved marble the Archon, a stocky, well-honed figure, masterfully, tenderly folds a thick, heavy peplos, a new cloak for the premier goddess of the city – wise Athena.
There is no doubt that Socrates himself would have participated in the Pan-Athenaea. The celebrations lasted a week and spread right through the city. The festival route – the Pan-Athenaic Way – ran from the Dipylon Gate up to the Acropolis. Passing along it, one would have smelled the hot sweat of the athletes in the Agora running in full body armour and the hot breath of horses as they clattered past to cavalry and chariot events. In the harbour there were boat races, on the slopes of the Acropolis orchestral competitions, and up at the Pnyx recitations of Homer. Winning at the Pan-Athenaea was not just for honour, but for gain. First place in the chariot race for adult horses, for instance, earned you a whacking 140 amphoras of prize olive oil – approximately 7,850 pints. Winners flaunted their prizes during the florid parade in honour of