The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [56]
I was delighted with this … It seemed somehow right that mind [nous] should be the cause of all things, and I thought that if this were the case then mind, in arranging all these things, would arrange each in the way that was best for it.23
Staring too up at the night sky, at that point in the earth’s turn where thinking conditions in this region become more bearable. Although this would be a line of enquiry Socrates would later reject, in his early years mulling over with the great thinkers around him the secrets and purpose of the stars.
And he strongly advised them also to become familiar with astronomical measurement, however only to the point of being able to know the time-divisions of night, of the month, and of the year, for the sake of journeying and sailing and keeping watch.24
Yet Socrates at this stage was nothing more than a village boy, the son of artisans. It was intimidating surely to make his way into the circle of, possibly even the household of, the acolytes of, the most powerful man in all of Athens.
The domestics of democracy
But there is one thing it is important to remember about democratic Athens – just how cosy this city was. Here you would not find the 100-foot-wide avenues running to the palatial complex that will so impress in the city of Alexandria, or the equivalent of Nero’s Domus Aurea in Rome. So far the archaeological record has not turned up an aristocratic ‘district’. Men of all degrees walked through the winding streets, brushing shoulders with one another. Prostitutes could confidently ply their trade by slipping on customised little hobnail boots and casually strolling up and down the alleyways. In the dust their shoe-nails would spell out akolouthei – ‘this way’, or ‘follow me’. Ordinary women, bread-sellers and washer-women joined aristocrats on their way to make dedications at sanctuaries or up on the Acropolis itself.25 All life was here. Socrates, himself a great walker (we hear in one of the Platonic dialogues, the Phaedrus, that contemporaries thought walking a ‘good way to think’), would have travelled through an Athenian landscape of surprising parity.
Because it seems, at least when Socrates was a young man, that the blue-blood dynasties, the ‘old’ Athenian families, had chosen not to cream off the benefits of democratic living; rich and poor democrats alike lived in homes that, from the outside at any rate, looked very similar. The excavations to build the new Acropolis Museum in Athens have revealed warrens of streets, modest, fifth-century BC terraced houses hugging right up close to the rock of the Acropolis. Twenty feet below the current city-level, visitors can now walk above the city of Pericles and Socrates, over a glass and Perspex sky: as though the hive of the modern city has been lifted to reveal a honeycomb of antiquity beneath. In one section of the dusty remains there is a neat drain from Socrates’ day – touching somehow to imagine this bit of engineering quietly functioning, while the men and women around it got on with the business of being the world’s first official democrats.
Their homes were simple, made of mud-brick, red-roof-tiled.26 Socrates would have lived with his parents until he was thirty or so, in just such a house. Courtyards were where much of the bustle of being alive took place. Very little fancy decoration here. Those expressive, brush-fine, pastel-shade fresco paintings from the fifth and fourth centuries BC that are still being excavated were kept mainly for the walls of graves (hence their survival) and of public spaces. Democrats – great and small – lived remarkably modestly.27
Personal satisfaction appears to have counted for little in the newly democratic city. In fact being ‘private’ was something that made the Athenians suspicious. Years later Socrates would fall foul of this anxiety; when he chose to expound his ideas behind closed doors within a tight aristocratic circle, democrats cried, Oligarch! Anti-democrat! It is telling that the only anecdote we have of individual aggrandisement