The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [51]
Socrates grew up in a city that had become a master at doing things: yet this young man from Alopeke, at some point around 450 BC, appears to have decided to pursue not just the what, but the why.
One year when Pan-Athenaic carnival spirit was abroad in the air, there were two particularly respected visitors to the Kerameikos district: two great elder-statesman thinkers of the day, Parmenides and Zeno.22 Pupil and master, lovers – all kinds of rumours circulated about these two travellers, footsore all the way from Magna Graecia, southern Italy. Theirs was a progressive idea: that our internal lives are as valuable as our corporeal existence. In all the pulsating, sweaty business of living, it seems that here Socrates, soaking up the eclectic experiences available to him, was quickened to the concept of being.
Parmenides was clearly a firebrand thinker, a man who burned his own path through society’s undergrowth. Many credit him as the founder of all Western philosophy. The sophist wrote poetically, and in lush, descriptive terms. He conjures up luminous images to express his ideas: a divine chariot, driven by maidens – daughters of the sun, no less – and pulled by docile mares, which draws him down the path of truth. At the end of this path he will discover what it is ‘to be’. His pupil Zeno developed philosophy further by establishing ‘dialectics’ – a method of testing the tenacity of an idea by taking it to its most ludicrous, paradoxical potential.
In this fledgling democracy, repeatedly throwing the rulebook out of the window – where new political structures, new built environments, new world orders are a possibility – maybe whole new ways of thinking, of living life itself, are a possibility too. Ideas such as these would have been eagerly discussed by the young men who gathered in the Kerameikos district. Over the outdoor braziers, and juggling too-hot fish from charred earthenware frying pans (one such was discovered during city-centre excavations in 2007 and is currently on display in the new Acropolis Museum), fundamentally illuminating ideas were played with. Socrates was born into very exciting times.
And one hot summer (the Great Pan-Athenaea took place in July/August), searing news.
Although the two alien philosophers Zeno and Parmenides were staying in this low-rent motel-strip of the ancient city, they had brought with them something priceless. A new book. Imagine the impact. The leather pannier opening, the papyrus unwrapped, the words, inked black with oak-gall and charcoal, marking out a fresh landscape of ideas.
Zeno and Parmenides once came to Athens for the Great Pan-Athenaea. Parmenides was a man of distinguished appearance. At that time he was well advanced in years, with his hair almost white. He may have been sixty-five years old and Zeno perhaps forty. They were staying with Pythodorus outside the walls of the Kerameikos. Socrates and a few others went there, anxious to hear a reading of the book Zeno had brought to Athens for the first time. Socrates was then quite young.23
Quite young – probably nineteen or so. His age was significant. Athens was not just a city divided by gender, tribe, wealth, but – and this is vitally important – by age-groups.
If the dating fits, then, during that same summer, as day slipped into night, Socrates’ exact contemporaries (possibly even Socrates himself) would have been introduced to the citizen-body of Athens in all their naked glory down at the Kerameikos. The Athenian year ran from summer solstice to summer solstice. And round about the beginning of the New Year – in this case, the night before the Great Pan-Athenaea kicked off – boys became men by racing against one another from the altar of love in the Academy to an altar in the city.24 These boys – all just eighteen or older, of an age one scholar describes, evocatively, as ‘striplings’25 – were stark naked, and