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By Root 1628 0

work on many levels, but the hard facts they contain were certainly not all a lie. Archaeological digs – each year – are substantiating and backing up in precise detail the picture of fifth-century Athens that Plato so skilfully and energetically painted just after Socrates’ death, 2,400 years ago. For the first time, for example, we can walk beside the narrow streets that lie under the new Acropolis Museum and across the Painted Stoa (a covered area or walkway) where Plato, as a young, impressionable man, sat and listened to Socrates speak. The ancient stones match Plato’s ancient words.9

And so my attempt has been to re-create Socrates’ world.10 To follow the clues in Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes to the physical reality of fifth-century Athens and therefore the physical reality of the story of Socrates’ life. Through his dialogues Plato has given us the ‘play’ of Socrates’ life, and described the most appropriate scenery before which the character of Socrates should enter. It is that scenery, that setting, that is now turning up in digs across the city.

The life of fifth-century Athens was itself, in essence, dramatic. Not only does Socrates’ life span seventy of the busiest, most wonderful and tragic years in Athenian history, but the Athenians did, physically, construct a backdrop of democratic ‘theatre’ in which to play out their lives – democratic buildings, scenery, speeches, statues, props, music to help make their new democracy feel real.

Socrates will be best served not by Aristophanes’ pantomime Clouds, but by a solid stage to stand on, from which he can speak audibly and directly to us, his audience. To this end I have used the latest sources – archaeological, topographical, textual – to construct a life for a man we can all benefit from getting to know a little better.11

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

Aristophanes

ARISTOPHANES IS THE OLDEST OF OUR sources for Socrates. A comic playwright, over his forty-year career he attacked everything from beetle-dung to apparently serious politics. These onslaughts earned him enemies: among them was Cleon, a hard-line demagogue who argued for the destruction of the entire male population of Mytilene in 427 BC and again at Scione in 423 BC. Cleon pursued Aristophanes in the courts, and in return was ridiculed repeatedly until his death at the Battle of Amphipolis in 422 BC. Aristophanes would continue making scabrous jibes at politicians at all levels, and mild satire of the Athenian people in general. Another target was Socrates himself, who was turned into a figure of fun in Clouds. Comic licence makes it hard to determine how serious this character assassination was: Plato suggests that Aristophanes helped fuel the public distrust of Socrates,1 yet Aristophanes also features as an amiable dinner-companion of Socrates in Plato’s Symposium, which is set after Clouds was first performed. Despite the violence of his satire, Aristophanes survived the deadly series of revolutions and politically motivated assassinations that characterised the final years of the Peloponnesian War in Athens.2

Aristophanes’ career started with The Banqueters in 427 BC. He composed at least forty plays of which only eleven survive – we know the names of seventeen. Clouds, in which Socrates figures prominently, was produced in 423 BC. Clouds was not successful, finishing in last place at the City Dionysia festival. The poet-playwright’s career continued until shortly before he died in 386 BC.

WORKS

Banqueters (427 BC); Babylonians (426); Acharnians (425); Knights (424); Clouds (423); Wasps (422); Peace (421); Amphiaraus (414); Birds (414); Lysistrata (411); Women at the Thesmophoria (411); a first Plutus (408); Frogs (405); Ecclesiazusae (391); a second Plutus (388); Cocalus and Aiolosikon (possible dates 387 BC and 386 BC3).

Xenophon

Xenophon’s life was spent in warfare. Born near the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, probably in Erchia, a rural deme of Athens,4 he would later write treatises on horsemanship from his estate near Olympia on the plains of the Peloponnese. Xenophon had probably