The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [59]
On the island of Delos there is a grand temple to Apollo, constructed to store the League’s treasure-trove capital: money waiting to build new ships, to arm more men and to build back communities and lives when the Persians next attacked.7 The temple was designed, in effect, as a League treasury, an independent building crammed with shared wealth.
Yet when one braves the curious weather-fronts and tides that swirl around this little isle that has always punched above its weight, where architecture clings to the mineral-rich rocks along with blasted vegetation, there is a surprise. Standing next to the Temple of Apollo’s footprint, the sacred building feels oddly amputated. Here, there is something not ruined, but uncompleted. With good reason. In 454 BC slaves manhandling mortar blocks into position were ordered to down tools; the building work on Apollo’s earthly home at Delos was peremptorily truncated. Athens wanted the Greek allies’ material security closer to home. The treasury was moved, lock, stock and barrel, from neutral Delos to vested-interest Athens – and then quickly into Athena’s lap, into the storage rooms of the Parthenon. We have a list of the capital harvest as accounted in 434/3 BC: 113 silver bowls, one gold bowl, three silver drinking horns, three silver cups, one silver lamp, one goblet, three large golden bowls, one golden statue of a woman, one silver basin, six Persian daggers, one gilt lyre, three ivory lyres, four wooden lyres, one inlaid ivory table, one silver-gilt mask, ten Milesian couches, six thrones, two silver-gilt nails, seventy shields.8
Now the Parthenon resembled less a sanctuary, and more a bank. Cities such as Neapolis (modern-day Kavala) on the mainland opposite Thasos contributed 1,000 drachmas a year to Athena in thanks for her protection. Money was baggage-trained from across the eastern Mediterranean straight to Athens. Athenian intention was clear.
Pericles and Socrates were maturing in a city that was rich in ideas, and was quickly becoming filthy rich.
Yet Socrates, remember, was a man who would ask whether we need warships and walls and glittering prizes in order to be happy. It was not clear whether a burgeoning empire and Socrates’ philosophies were going to make for easy bedfellows.
13
PURPLE AMBITION
The eastern Mediterranean,
465–415 BC
[PERICLES:] It is right and proper for you to support the imperial dignity of Athens. This is something in which you all take pride, and you cannot continue to enjoy the privileges unless you also shoulder the burdens of the empire.
Thucydides, 2.63.I1
SOCRATES: One mustn’t be much concerned with living, but with living well …
Socrates to Crito, in Plato, Crito, 48b2
TODAY A JOURNEY TO THE NATIONAL Epigraphical Museum in Athens is a surprisingly risky one. Its entrance is up a side street – right next to the National Archaeological Museum. Although the authorities have managed to keep the neoclassical façade of the big museum clean, this side passage, with its grassy central spine, has become a favourite haunt for the city’s drug addicts. The few visitors who venture in have to run a gauntlet of thin, angry self-exiles.
It is worth the effort. Just inside the building and to the left is a stop-still-in-your-tracks vast tribute stone. The inscribed rock stretches over 18 feet high. Carved across the surface of this megalith are the names of the cities who paid tribute to Athens between 454/3 BC and 440/39 BC.3 Byzantium is there, as are Miletus, Mount Athos and settlements right along the Troad (the modern-day Biga Peninsula in northern Turkey). The inscriptions are tight, close. Not one inch of the stone surface has been left bare. That tribute stone represents bags, barrels and chests of cash coming into Athens’ coffers from her