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By Root 1658 0

tanning yards. Some carcasses came from as far afield as the Black Sea and Cyrene in North Africa – the smell here of decomposing flesh must have been horrific. Socrates and his peers used leather extensively: for clothing, military equipment, agricultural implements and as hides to cover seats and benches – the demand for leather goods was high; the scale of production in this particular spot by the river banks intense. Hides were pegged out on the ground and then treated with mulberry leaves or urine to ‘sweat’ out or ‘un-hair’ the skin. Sometimes dog faeces were used to ‘purify’ the leather. Surviving complaints from elsewhere in antiquity indicate just what a rank and stinking business this was (Roman citizens frequently brought legal cases against those tanners who polluted the air with their foul fumes). In Aristophanes’ comedy The Knights a famous tanner (and politician) of the day, Cleon, is mocked as ‘the dung-stirrer’.8 A decree from 420 BC – recently discovered near the Lysikrates Monument – forbade tanners from rinsing their bloodied hides here above the spring, sacred to Kallirrhoe.9 The fact that Byzantine and Ottoman tanners still productively, and profitably, manned the site 2,000 years after Socrates had been poisoned at the behest of the democratic Athenian state is an indication of how high tempers must have run when the fifth-century skin-merchants were put under the squeeze.

What is a great shame is that one of the key fifth-century BC attractions here, the ‘bastards’ gym – Kynosarges on the Ilissos’ south bank – was cannibalised by the Emperor Valerian’s rebuilding of the city walls from AD 254 (his defence against Teutonic tribes). Just beyond the perimeter walls, through the Diomeian Gate, Kynosarges was one of Socrates’ haunts:

While he was on his way to the Kynosarges and getting near the Ilissos, he heard the voice of someone shouting, ‘Socrates, Socrates!’ When he turned around to find out where it was coming from, he saw Clinias, the son of Axiochus.10

Although the gym itself has been lost to time, the roadway that led to the area has recently been excavated. It is along this very track that Socrates would have walked to the Kynosarges district.11 To get to the gym you would have had to cross the rills and rivulets of the Ilissos. Wooden planks bridged the fissured rocks and the man-made trenches that edged the running tracks. So we can imagine Socrates here, a young man, and then an older one, making his way towards one of the hubs of Athenian athletic activity, participating, spectating, indulging in the Greeks’ particular fascination with the formation of the beautiful human body.

While the river here has hardly changed its course since the Bronze Age, and naturalised parakeets above and chamomile carpets beneath remind you that this would have been a corner of the city where you could exhale a little, now the running track is pounded by four-lane traffic and the exercise grounds are squashed beneath ugly commercial enterprises, the showrooms of a motorbike dealer and Eurobank. So if we are to walk with Socrates here, we must employ both the archaeological and literary sources available, and our imaginations.

The Kynosarges gym complex boasted a 200-yard course for sprinting, and there would have been the usual exercise grounds, plus perhaps a zone for military practice – although in fact the Kynosarges seems to have been less of a focus for military training than the other gymnasia of the city. Herakles was worshipped here – and as a result, years later, Spartan invaders were drawn to the place12 (Herakles was Sparta’s hero-in-chief). Before each exercise session libations would be poured to the semi-divine hero. In Socrates’ day, even exercise was considered a religious experience. And keeping himself physically as well as mentally fit, emphasising that we are creatures of flesh and blood as well as of the spirit, would become one of Socrates’ grounding principles. As a young man, he would have honed his body as well as his mind, and like the other young men around him, he would have