The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [62]
… The brilliance of the present is the glory of the future stored up for ever in the memory of man. It is for you to safeguard that future glory and to do nothing that now is dishonourable. Now, therefore, is the time to show your energy and to achieve both these objectives.14
Fine words. But Socrates was fully aware that Athenian democratic greatness had been built on war-blood and the sweat of another’s brow, as well as on honest endeavour. Although we hear nothing of Socrates’ philosophical opinions before c.420 BC, when he is forty or so, his ideas, passed on to us as Socrates’ own by Plato, do seem to have been forged in a fiery, rough furnace. Socrates matured in a city-state that taught the lesson – for those who wanted to learn it – that the search for money, glory and power could bring compromise, heartache and trouble.
Through the 450s the Athenians were fighting aggressive wars on all fronts. Against the Persians on the one hand and the Spartans on the other, and against players in the theatre of power that was the eastern Mediterranean, who simply did not want to be bullied into being democrats. Between 459 and 454 BC they attempted to conquer no less a territory than Egypt itself; in 457/6 they besieged the nearby island of Aegina, which capitulated; in 456 Athenian soldiers destroyed the Spartan dockyards at Gytheion and captured the Corinthian territory of Chalcis in Aetolia. Uncompromising lessons for Socrates’ youthful years.
Socrates was fully exposed to the casualties of ambition. In 449 BC his compatriot Cimon was killed on campaign – dying in Cyprus, probably from infected wounds – attempting to deal a crippling blow to Persian forces and holdings, in particular their worryingly effective navy, co-owned by the Phoenicians. Cyprus must have been a strange land to die in – with its many kings and its barren rocks, its adoration of the goddess Ishtar, a promoter of love and war since the Bronze Age. Accounts from the fifth century tell us that Cyprus had an edgy, threatening feel. But it was an island that the Greeks passionately wanted to ‘liberate’.15 The saturated heat of the Middle East blew a hot wind to Europe even then.
We do not know precisely when Socrates started to question the point of empire, the point of super-wealth. We do not know what he thought of Athens’ early career as the region’s premier usurer. But he was, it seems, underwhelmed. His attitude to empire was more than a little curmudgeonly. The questioning philosopher flicks his thumb at wars and walls and ships.16 Others in the city had started to smell that bit sweeter, rubbed with rose oil imported from Syria, their bodies draped in linen from Corinth, their homes boasting the increasingly fine, black-figure dinnerware – so precious it was buried with its owners. Socrates, it seems, was stubbornly anti-material, anti both public and private grandstanding. He appears to have realised that great works might come of great strength – but they neither represent nor guarantee it.
O beloved Pan and all the gods of this place, grant to me that I be made beautiful within, in my soul, and that all external possessions match my inner state. Let me take wisdom for wealth; and may I have just the right amount of wealth that a self-restrained man can bear or endure.17
There was one city-state that seemed to share some of Socrates’ reservations.
Laconic Sparta
Thucydides, the great historian and contemporary of Socrates, was prescient when he mused:
Suppose, for example, that the city of Sparta were to become deserted and that only the temples and foundations of buildings remained. I think that future generations would, as time passed, find it very difficult to believe that the place had really been as powerful as it was represented to be … If on the other hand the same thing were to happen to Athens, one would conjecture