The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [68]
15
GYM-HARDENED FIGHTING MEN
The Academy, the Lyceum, 450–399 BC
He was exceptionally handsome and exceptionally big, in that lovely season of life when men pass out of the ranks of Boys and into the ranks of Men, blossoming most pleasantly. Naked, wearing neither armour nor clothing, covered in nothing but oil, he took a spear in one hand and in the other a sword …
Plutarch, Agesilaus, 34.71
PLATO TELLS US THAT SOCRATES VISITED Kynosarges later in his life, so we don’t know whether this was the space he used as a young man (after all, it was his local), or whether his regular gym was the (now more famous) Academy or Lyceum exercise grounds.
Plato certainly talks about the philosopher being doorstepped on the road between the Academy and the Lyceum, and that at the Lyceum itself in later life Socrates spoke, surrounded by an eager crowd.2 Here Socrates sat in a dressing room (literally an ‘un-dressing room’), there were a covered track, showers for athletes and a series of allegorical paintings around the walls. There was also a sense of rus in urbe; the fact that the Lyceum was dedicated to Apollo Lykeios – ‘Wolfish’ Apollo – indicates how bosky this part of Athens had once been.
This bucolic zone, where the men of Athens practised both physical and mental gymnastics, beautifully described in Aristophanes’ play Clouds, had much in store; in the Academy, Plato would set up his school of philosophy, and in the Lyceum, Aristotle, his pupil, a rival. The modern world is populated by academics, academies and lycées thanks to these two institutions.
Now the Lyceum lies under the National Gardens. Originally designed in 1836 as a personal arboretum for Queen Amalia after the Greek War of Independence, its exotic plants have grown jungle-tall – a welcome relief in the city’s midsummer heat. Toddlers in buggies are pushed along sandy paths to look at a city zoo that has seen better days; children – the sons and daughters of both shipping money and Albanian street-kids alike – play on swings: the overweight of the city jog, painfully, around the perimeter. It is a bit shabby and very pleasant here. But like the Academy, currently battling to be remembered beneath a pox of badly planned light-industrial units dealing in scrap metal, scrap plastic, wrought-iron gates, guarded by dogs and gypsy boys and hemmed in by the River Kephisos – today little more than a channel for (illegally dumped) industrial waste that flows in a toxic stream out to the Saronic Gulf – these once-idyllic spots could today scarcely inspire the purple (comic) poetry of Aristophanes:
RIGHT ARGUMENT: … Spend your time in the gymnasium – get sleek and healthy. You don’t want to be the sort of chap who’s always in the Agora telling stories about other people’s sex lives, or in the courts arguing about some piffling, quibbling, filthy little dispute. No, you’ll run off to the Academy and relax under the sacred olive trees, a wreath of pure white flowers on your head, with a decent well-mannered companion or two; and you’ll share the fragrance of leafy poplar and carefree convolvulus, and the joys of spring, when the plane tree whispers her love to the elm!
If my sound advice you heed, if you follow where I lead,
You’ll be healthy, you’ll be strong and you’ll be sleek;
You’ll have muscles that are thick and a pretty little prick –
You’ll be proud of your appearance and physique.3
The fact that Socrates is happy to relax at Kynosarges, as well as the more upmarket Academy and Lyceum, tells us something significant about him. Kynosarges – ‘White Bitch’ gym – was designated for the half-castes of the city. As ever, Socrates does not just inhabit the ‘showcase’ venues of ‘violet-crowned’, ‘show-city’ Athens, but can also be found in its more mongrel spots.
The Kynosarges gym-goers were all bastard-citizens, metics with only one parent – either a mother or a father – who was a full Athenian