The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [64]
He would have known that the supreme aim of this über-race was to achieve a ‘beautiful death’, one moment where you died well, in battle, cleanly, courageously. This, the kalos thanatos, was considered the epitome of Spartan achievement.
There is something horribly, magnetically enthralling about the single-minded purpose of Spartan life. Socrates matured at a time when Sparta was Athens’ mortal enemy. Socrates himself – as a hoplite soldier – spent decades fighting against Sparta and her allies, yet he never seems to have despised his Peloponnesian cousins. Rather the opposite: he – and those associated with his circle – aped these extreme men.23 Socrates admired the tight structure of their society. He approved of the Spartan drive to live life exceptionally well, to focus on the fundamentals rather than the fripperies of existence. Even though he preferred the laws of Athens, Plato has him concede that Sparta is ‘well-governed’.24
Socrates’ penchant for straggly hair and irregular baths was very Spartan. Like the men of Sparta, he preferred to walk through his city-state shoeless. He is referred to as a ‘Spartan hound’25 (like Spartan dogs, famed for their keen scenting abilities, Socrates could ‘sniff out’ the truth), and being lakonomanea, ‘Sparta-mad’. One of the philosopher’s closest friends, Cimon, calls his son Lacedaimonius. Socrates’ fascination with Spartan mores will come to be mistaken for a love of their politics. Within two decades the philosopher and his circle will be denounced as lovers of Sparta – as ‘laconophiles’.
Athena’s city was troubled by Sparta for another reason too. There were many in Athens itself who secretly thought Sparta’s adherence to the old, oligarchic way of doing things was laudable. For centuries – possibly for millennia – Greek society had promoted the idea that the powerful were powerful because they were the gods’ chosen ones; they had not only a divine right to rule, but ruled because they boasted god-given gifts: status, courage, physical beauty, manly virtue. From the day of Socrates’ birth to the minute of his death, many Athenians, either overtly or in private, hankered after the Spartans’ sure sense of social order.
This tension between oligarchs and democrats, between aristocrats and the people, charged Athenian politics and culture, and infected its very atmosphere. And Socrates would be both an exemplar and a victim of Athens’ great dilemma: in a true democracy, where power and responsibility are shared equally amongst all citizens, what is the place not just of the good, but of the very great?
And what about the city’s tolerance – the ‘forgiving nature of democracy’? Its ‘don’t care’ about trifles? It utterly despises the things we took so seriously when we were founding our city, namely, that unless someone had a transcendently natural talent, he’d never become good unless he played the right games and followed a fine – a beautiful and a joyful – way of life from early childhood? Isn’t it magnificent the way it tramples all this underfoot, by giving no thought to what someone was doing before he entered public life and by honouring him if only he professes to be the ‘people’s friend’?26
As time goes on, the ideology of Athens’ brand of collectivism – demokratia – comes to be set against Sparta’s own brand of high-achieving communalism, and so a fascination with Sparta is estimated anti-Athenian activity. And yet – despite the political temperature of the times – it is a half-Spartan boy, with a Spartan name and nursed at a Spartan breast, who will from here on in be Socrates’ earthly love. A boy who will bring him much trouble. A boy called Alcibiades.
Born in 450 BC, Alcibiades was, following the death of his father Cleinias, an orphan by the age of four. But this child was not destined to be destitute – he would not end up abandoned (bone evidence from the period suggests this was not uncommon practice), for he had blue-blood, he was in fact a relative of the great General Pericles, and he was made a ward of