The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [72]
SOCRATES: … Charmides gave me such a look that I was helpless; and then all the men in the palaestra gathered round in a circle … I caught a glimpse inside [Charmides’] garment and burned with passion, there was nothing I could do …10
Our source – Plato – is, however, eager to point out that nothing inappropriate took place with Charmides (Plato’s own uncle), and Socrates’ pupil emphasises that the pair were chaperoned at all times.
But there is far more than just sexual innuendo in play here. Whatever Socrates’ actual interest, the idea that he was somehow captivating the strong young men in the gym with his endless, radical chat, diverting them from the path of good Athenian citizenship, was, to fifth- and fourth-century minds, very troubling. Young men across Greece were considered the flower of the city-state; its hope and its strength. And in Athens, metics and full citizens alike were the children of the empire. Young men were trained to speak persuasively (one of those who brought the charge against Socrates was a younger man, Meletus) in order to conform rather than rebel. They were not raised to challenge, but to buttress the status quo – that finely woven net of family, tribal, democratic and religious loyalties that held the city-state together – and so the anxiety about Socrates’ influence over young men ran deep:
I certainly know there are young men you’ve seduced into believing you rather than their parents.11
Thus, in 399 BC, Socrates stood accused, despite the fact that, as he pointed out, it was probably the misuse of his own ideas by ‘the young’ that had got him into trouble (demonstrating perfectly that they were exactly the group that needed nurturing and guidance from worldly-wise men like himself) …
[SOCRATES] But in addition to this, the young who follow me around, doing so of their free will, who have complete leisure – the sons of the richest people – enjoy hearing people examined, and they often imitate me, and then try to examine others. And then, I imagine, they find an abundance of people who think they know something but know virtually nothing. That’s why those who are examined by them get angry with me and not with them, and say that a certain Socrates completely pollutes the land and corrupts the youth.12
Polluting Athenian youth was a highly charged crime.13 Little surprise that in Socrates’ courtroom on that May morning we find fireworks.
And there was in 399 BC another contributing factor to Socrates’ fading popularity. Not only did he mess with the minds of young men, but he dared to associate with Athens’ second-class citizens, with her women. Worse even than that, with one woman in particular, an individual who was thought dreadful in three ways: she was female, she was foreign and she was clever.
When he was still a relatively young man, in his early twenties, a teenage girl stepped off a boat at Piraeus harbour, someone whose life and reputation would become entwined with this ingenu philosopher. At this time, as word travelled around the eastern Mediterranean that Athens was creating a society and an economy quite remarkable, goods, essential and frivolous, poured into the rocky port of Piraeus in small independent boats or the sturdy trading vessels of rich men.14 A cargo of great value was human booty. One day (calculations of the year vary, but 450 BC seems to be the most likely), it is almost certain that the feet that stumbled onto the new shore included those of a rather striking young lady. She was an adolescent from the city-state of Miletus in Asia Minor, a refugee who would make her mark on the city and would become intimately embroiled in Socrates’ life and with the high-flyers of democratic Athens.