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By Root 1749 0

in 440 BC and encouraged the production of new melodies for the city’s parades: the sound of musicians practising would have been transported by Athens’ soft winds through the central districts and even to its surrounding demes. The Odeion was splendid, with a vast conical roof, the largest covered building in the Greek world.11 Later tradition alleged that it was an imitation of the tent of Xerxes, an architectural two fingers up to Persian might.12 Pericles was taught by a certain Damon, who studied the effects of music on behaviour and character,13 and the general promoted a soundtrack ‘through which he harmonized the city’.14 According to Plutarch, Pericles reorchestrated the music in the Pan-Athenaea festival.15 In the fifth century music was credited with medicinal qualities – Pericles was playing physick to his compatriots.

Here comes the squill-headed Zeus,

Perikles, wearing the Odeion on his head,

now that the ostrakon is past.

Fragment of Kratinos16

No one could deny Pericles’ piety, but he also entertained the abstracts of oddballs. This was an age when all kinds of astonishing ideas were abroad, outlandish notions from foreign thinkers; one, Thales, had guessed that all things come from water, another, Anaximander, stated: ‘from the warmed-up water and earth emerged either fish or animals pretty fish-like: from these humans were created’.17 Then Anaxagoras of Clazomenae proposed that the sun was a red-hot rock, the moon a lump of earth. The thoughtful traveller from Asia Minor went further, having the audacity to suggest that consciousness rests not in the heart, but in the brain, and he introduced a concept of nous – ‘mind’ – a kind of super-presence that sets the world in motion:

It is the finest of all things and the purest, and it has knowledge concerning all things and the greatest power; and over everything that has souls, large or small, mind rules.18

Anaxagoras was allowed into Pericles’ home – a man who, according to Socrates, ‘filled him [that is, Socrates himself] with high thoughts and taught him the nature of the mind.’19 Pericles’ sons associated with the philosopher Protagoras. Socrates, already eagerly acquiring philosophic experience, may also have been welcomed.20 All met at sponsored soirées: phrontistai – thinkers (and this is the Greek word used more frequently than ‘philosophers’) gathered to give practical advice on the well-being of this new, experimental society. Athenians recognised that democracy would be difficult to maintain, but they went out of their way to cherish and buttress the new ideology. These men inhabited the phrontisteria, the ‘thinking shops’ that Aristophanes would, thirty years later, mock so mercilessly. He ripped into the ‘immoral logic’ that they taught, and scorned the utterly ludicrous lines of enquiry that men such as Socrates followed.

STUDENT: Chaerephon of Sphettus once asked Socrates whether he was of the opinion that gnats produced their hum by way of the mouth or – the other end.

STREPSIADES: Well, well, what did he say?

STUDENT: ‘The intestinal passage of the gnat,’ he replied, ‘is very narrow, and consequently the wind is forced to go straight through the back end. And the arse, being a hole forming the exit from this narrow passage, groans under the force of the wind.’

STREPSIADES: Like a trumpet, you mean. I must say that’s a marvellous feat of intestinology. I can see getting acquitted in the Lawcourts is going to be child’s play for a chap who knows all there is to know about gnat’s guts.21

But Pericles has set a precedent; in years to come we hear of ‘open house’ meetings elsewhere in the city: men gathering in the inner courtyards that were a feature of most mid-range Athenian homes. Here the premier educators of the day competed to see who would get to mould the city’s future and its hope – its young men.22

Picture Socrates at these elevated gatherings, perhaps inside Pericles’ home, perhaps in a neighbouring courtyard. Listening to what Anaxagoras has to say about a new meaning of life, nous; computing these notions, turning them