The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [69]
The highest hope of Socrates’ peers, of young Athenian men, was to serve Athens by dying for her. Perceived as a military unit, Athenian eighteen-year-olds, called ephebes, from at least the fourth century BC onwards, swore an oath:
I shall not disgrace the sacred weapons [that I bear] nor shall I desert the comrade at my side, wherever I stand in the line. And I shall fight in dfence of things sacred and non-sacred and I shall not hand down [to my descendants] a lessened fatherland, but one that is increased in size and strength both as far as [it] lies within me [to do this].5
This is an oath that Socrates too would have taken. The young men of Athens knew that their job was to defend Athenian interests and expand Athenian territories – and that they had to make their bodies both beautiful and in mint condition in order to do so. Although scant biographical evidence exists for Socrates’ youth, we do know that he fought for Athens between 431 and 422 BC. He possibly started his soldiering career as early as 440 BC. There is no doubt that the young philosopher would have joined his compatriots in the gymnasia to train to fight; and no doubt that this was a sinew-stretching, macho business.
The young men who worked out in the gymnasia, unlike their Spartan cousins, did this not just to satisfy some kind of pugnacious militaristic ideal.6 Thucydides is explicit. Young men in the Athenian gyms practise with arms because this is state-controlled, regulated activity – a million miles from the dagger-waving, brigand barbarity found elsewhere in Greece. Athens was militarised, but it was not indiscriminately bellicose.7
The Athenians were the first to give up the habit of carrying weapons and to adopt a way of living that was more relaxed and luxurious.8
However, there could be exceptions – in one tongue-in-cheek, hypothetical case a contemporary of Socrates, Antiphon, cites a sad instance in one of the city’s exercise grounds, when there had been a fatality as a result of military javelin practice:
My young lad … was practising the javelin with his classmates and though he did indeed make the throw, he didn’t exactly ‘kill someone’, not strictly speaking … The boy ran into the path of the javelin and put his body in its way … my son is not the perpetrator of an accident but the victim of one, in as much as he was prevented from hitting the target.9
Beautiful bodies – and Theseus, the most beautiful of all
Bastards they might be at the Kynosarges, but the trainee soldiers, the gym-goers (gymnasium comes from gumnos, the place where you exercise naked), were still eager to make themselves physically perfect. Socrates exercised regularly in the gym and we do him a disservice if we remember just the grey-haired condemned man by the water-clock and not the hirsute youngster, sweating, working out with his fellow Athenians.
SOCRATES: I am a fiend for exercise.10
At the gym and the wrestling grounds, oil, perfumes, fresh fruits, hair unctions were all used. Beauty was considered a quantifiable asset in the Greek city. As time went on, an increasing number of male beauty contests were hosted in the gymnasia. Courage, morality and physique were all judged as one psycho-physical parcel. Developing a beautiful body made you not just fit for posing, but fit to fight. Listen to Plutarch describing the merits of one particular young (Spartan) man:
… in that lovely season of life when men pass out of the ranks of Boys and into the ranks of Men, blossoming most pleasantly …11
The downy-chinned