The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [79]
Oh Gods, Gods!
Destroy all those who will not listen, will not obey
Freeze the ground until they starve.
Make their wives as barren as stone.
Let this disease that shakes Thebes to its roots –
Or any worse disease, if there is any worse than this –
Waste them,
Crush everything they have, everything they are.4
Although Athens now had a new, intimidated ally, conveniently close to the coast of Asia Minor (and, usefully, a little further north, on the edge of the Bosporus, Byzantium followed suit, also declaring itself subject to Athenian ‘protection’), the whole affair had made the eastern Mediterranean jumpy. Athens was earning her epithet ‘busybody’. The military action on Samos had become one of the dominoes in the line of events that led to the Peloponnesian War. Foreseeing further trouble and needing to ensure that the morale of Athena’s people was high, Pericles was reported to have given a great speech in Athens to honour the war dead.
‘For we cannot see the gods,’ he said, ‘but we believe them to be immortal from the honours we pay them and the blessings we receive from them, and so it is with those who have given their lives for their country. They too gain immortality.’5
But despite Pericles’ best efforts at jingoism, the whisperers continued: they knew that Aspasia was a Milesian – obviously her pillow-talk, they hissed, had sharpened Pericles’ sword: her alien patriotism had ensured the Samians would have an example made of them. Aspasia is described by her (and Pericles’) enemies as a ‘Helen’; it was Pericles’ lust for his clever courtesan that had created first the Samian atrocities and then the Peloponnesian War itself. Just as Helen drew men across the Aegean in her wake and sparked the war for Troy, so Aspasia would destroy Greek unity. Scared of the idea of her, democratic Athens never failed to remind contemporaries and history alike that Aspasia was an immigrant, an interloper of the wrong sex. It is in the bile that is poured out about this clever girl that we start to appreciate that this new democracy was not entirely comfortable with its cosmopolitan attitude, or in its own skin: canker spots were appearing.6
Socrates and Samos
Socrates has an interesting footnote in the Samian affair.7 He would have been twenty-nine when the campaign started, and there is every possibility that he sailed from Piraeus with one of Athens’ contingents of forty, and then a further sixty, then forty again and then twenty more ships to fight there. This was a greedy punitive exercise. The sea battles were fierce, and Athens needed men such as Socrates, in his prime, to go to fight. All Athenian citizens between the ages of eighteen and thirty had to perform compulsory military service. In times of war any man up to the age of sixty could be called up. Although we have no direct textual evidence that Socrates sailed east in 441/0 BC, it would be decidedly odd if he had not. And so it is now that we can meet a Socrates familiar to the Athenians – Socrates the soldier.
We should imagine the philosopher dressed as young men are dressed on grave stelai in the Piraeus Museum today – the ideal hoplite of Athens. His breast would be cocooned within a bronze breastplate, and he would be wearing greaves on his legs, a helmet surmounted with a horsehair crest for protection and intimidation. Some specialist soldiers stabbed with the spear (up to 2.5 metres long) or were slingshot maestros; others, the peltasts, lined up tight in defence, threw javelins. But Socrates’ weapon was his broadsword and massive hoplon – the round shield so weighty it is frequently shown in carvings resting on the thighs or shoulders for relief, the shield that gave the hoplites their name.8
Hoplites had to provide their own equipment, yet the philosopher’s finances are a bit of a mystery. Clearly his beginnings were lowly. Socrates boasted that he never charged even half an obol, the equivalent of a penny – unlike other sophists