The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [52]
Their fathers had been slaughtered over the stretch of a half-century by the Persians, their mothers raped. And still they had not caved in. This new generation had much to live up to. Now the boy-children, Socrates’ peers, healthy skin-oiled, flame-lit, pound along the Pan-Athenaic Way into Athena’s city to show they are on their way to becoming men; and the Athenian horizon looks rosier.
At the end of the Pan-Athenaea festival, there was a mass slaughter. Each and every city that owed tribute to Athens had to provide victims for sacrifice, and many hundreds of animals (mostly heifers) were killed. The bloodied cuts of meat were then processed down from the Acropolis to the Kerameikos, and the flesh cooked up in a massive feast for the people of Athens’ demes. Socrates would certainly have participated in such communal activity. As the smell of roasting flesh met the night air, as travellers shared tales, as new perspectives on human life were explored, Athena’s city was sated. The world and its wealth were coming to Athens because it was strong and confident and powerful.
It is a vivid scene. The stonemason’s son, his suburban friends, the well-bred of Athens gathering to celebrate their city and to hear new ideas to add to their own fast-developing, novel world. In a cosmos dominated by irascible, anthropomorphic gods; gods who drank and argued and slept with each other’s wives, together nature, phusis and democratic man suddenly appeared capable of producing her and his own mysteries and pleasures. A combination as powerful as that was unlikely to escape the notice of the authorities. The possibilities of the world – revealed by the brightest of sparks in this democratic city – might be fathomless. And in Athens one man, who was beginning to enjoy enormous influence, chose to open his doors to these new opinions, these new options and the radicals who propounded them.
Socrates was about to earn himself a taste of the high, as well as the good, life.
11
PERICLES: HIGH SOCIETY, AND DEMOCRACY AS HIGH THEATRE
Athens, 465–440 BC
[SOCRATES:] Best of men, since you’re Athenians, from the greatest city with the strongest reputation for wisdom and strength, aren’t you ashamed that you care about having as much money, fame and honour as you can, whereas you don’t care about, or even consider, wisdom, truth, and making your soul as good as possible?
Plato, Apology, 29d–e1
BUSTS OF PERICLES CHORLARGEUS – PERICLES OF CHORLARGOS – look odd. His helmet appears misshapen, strangely elongated and globular. Yet this is not some artist’s aberration. In fact, the form corresponds to the unflattering jibes hurled at this statesman-general during his life-time: ‘onion-head’, ‘squill-head’ are hardly glamorous epithets.2 But even through the taunts, it was whispered that under the great domed helmet of this most influential of Athenians hummed a notable life-force. Because within that bulbous, outsize helmet lay the very sharpest of minds.
Pericles was a strategist in both the ancient and the modern sense; he was a Greek strategos – a Greek general – and he was a man with muscular visions of what could be. When Socrates was nineteen or so and hanging out in the Kerameikos, Pericles was at the peak of his power, a reformer who shaped democratic Athens strategically, architecturally and intellectually.
Pericles came from good stock, inheriting from his mother the blue blood of the Alcmaeonid dynasty. His great-uncle was that key democratic reformer Kleisthenes. His family owned large rural estates. But this was a dynasty with skeletons in its cupboard. Pericles’ own father had been banished under suspicion of ‘medising’ (fraternising with the Persians), and Pericles’ childhood was part spent in exile. Expulsion was something of which the family seemed to make a habit. Further back, Pericles’ archaic Athenian ancestors had been expelled