The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [58]
Delos will sound loud in Socrates’ story. Even though it appears as just a speck on the map, this tiny ‘floating’ island at the centre of the Cyclades was always believed to have sacred powers. Since prehistory, men from across the eastern Mediterranean had gathered here. They left their calling cards: simple, angular, limestone human shapes, their surfaces tattooed with staring eyes, penises, abstract, organic patterns. And now that the Greeks felt strong enough to stand up to the bully-boys of the East, they made this charmed place the centre of their league of understanding. Delos was centrally placed between the great powers of the eastern Mediterranean, and yet the island was, in the eyes of the ancients, inhabited by an unusual number of divinities and demons. No one in their right mind would attack such a possessed territory.
And so, for a brief time at the beginning of Socrates’ long life, while the Athenians were pre-eminent, the Persians quiet and other Greeks acquiescent, there was some degree of peace in the world.
Then in 465 a spat broke out in the northern territories. The honey-filled island of Thasos – just south of modern-day Kavala – owned mining rights on the mainland across a narrow stretch of water. Here the earth is porous: tombs are regularly sunk, and gold is frequently pulled out. Herodotus is ebullient in his excitement: ‘The gold mines at Scapte Hyle yielded in all eighty talents a year … the islanders, without raising any tax on their own produce, enjoyed, from the mines and the mainland, a revenue of two hundred talents – and, in a particularly good year, of as much as three hundred. I have seen these mines myself; … A whole mountain has been turned upside down in the search for gold.’2
Some of the most exquisite artefacts from antiquity are now emerging from the soil in this region: chandelier earrings, golden belt-buckles, tiny perfume bottles so heavy with gold and enamel they weigh in like a brick. A diadem made of gold and coloured with blue enamel – a wreath of wild metal flowers – shows what beauty could be created in these northern lands.3 While being restored in 2008, this wreath was treated in the laboratory-workshops of the new Acropolis Museum. Testimony of its daintiness, as the door of the workshop was opened, a momentary, gentle breeze was sufficient to set the golden flower-heads dancing.
But jewels such as these attract thieves.
Athens, it seems, wanted a piece of the gold-and-honey action, and when Thasos defected from the League in protest in 465, the island community found itself blockaded. Athenian ships sailed one after another from the port of Piraeus. For two full years hoplite citizens whetted their swords and spears and stared across at the Thasian islanders – who were perturbed to discover that their enemies now spoke not Persian, but Greek. Athens was blatantly using League money to promote her own interests. By 463/2 BC Thasos had been decimated – it was forced to hand over its fleet, relinquish its mainland possessions, deliver up thirty talents (a crippling sum, the equivalent of circa £6 million in today’s money) and raze its fortifications to the ground.4 All this in spite of the fact that Thasos had secretly been promised help from the other supercity on the Greek mainland, Sparta.5 Athens triumphantly took control of the mainland mines.6 Climbing to the top of the ruined Byzantine castle that still crowns the island itself, looking out over a deep-blue sea, the air saturated with the scent of pine, it is disturbingly easy to imagine the picture-perfect setting, mired by human suffering and polluted by human greed.
But Athens was not sentimental. The hostilities with Persia