The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [81]
Plato, Crito, 52b15
Yet it wasn’t solely the promise of death that drew Socrates out of Athens. The one other time (as far as we know from existing evidence) that he may have left the city, as a young-to-middle-aged man, was to engage in a sweaty, agonising exertion of a different kind – participating (as an audience member more likely than as an athlete) in the Isthmian Games down south next to the Gulf of Corinth.16
Socrates would have left Athens on the Sacred Way. The road is still there, still called the Hiera Hodos. Although a drive along the Sacred Way today past out-of-town furniture emporia and oil refineries is not markedly spiritual, a sympathetic traveller can imagine Socrates and his fellow citizens making this pilgrimage. Socrates was a great walker. He talks about travelling 25-mile distances without a second thought. Walking and thinking seem to have been a true pleasure to him. And once the Sacred Way turns off to the old coast road, the bucolic nature of Ancient Greece feels closer. Here there are olive, fig and pomegranate groves. The air can be thick with birdsong, the wind, off the Aegean Sea, is always warm. And the mood of those taking this route would have been buoyant. Participation in the Isthmian Games, although taken deadly seriously, seems from ancient descriptions to have had a tinge of a holiday mood.17
How appropriate that religion and fighting, the two-speed engines driving the Athenian city-state, should be the only dynamos that could move the philosopher from his beloved home-town.18
Today when one visits the site of the Isthmian Games the place is quiet. A few after-hours students press their noses up to the metal perimeter fence, a child’s swing creaks and a defunct alarm drones, but the most hectic activity inside is provided by bees and butterflies, which gorge themselves on the poppies that pretend to stretch down to the Saronic Gulf. Although the site is perched on the plateau of a low hill, the sea feels impossibly close here. Appropriate then that the sanctuary was sacred to the great sea-god Poseidon. In modern tourist terms, this lovely site is Olympia’s poor cousin. And yet the ancient sporting competitions held here were as fierce, as symbolic and as significant as anything at Zeus’ Olympian sanctuary site further west. Scheduled every other spring, these Isthmian Games were the warm-up competitions to the Olympic Games at Olympia and the Pythian Games at Delphi.
The fifth-century BC stone-flagged roads here – wagon-rutted still – are witness to just how busy the Isthmia became. The sanctuary itself was right at the edge of an arterial track that ran from Corinth to Athens. The Saronic Gulf today sits calm and grey, broken by lumbering cargo ships, but of course in the fifth century it would have been thrashing with commercial craft, bringing goods to and from the humming harbours that served the great mercantile city of Corinth.
And imagine the other sounds here 2,500 years ago when a man like Socrates competed. Musicians tuning up for the added-attraction music festival would slowly drown out the sound of the bees and the passing birds; the tang of fat cooking and spitting on the hearth would swamp the smell of fresh sweat. The sound of running water,19 splashing into basins there to purify athletes and spectators alike, would soothe the nerves.
A participant had the choice of wrestling, boxing, discus, foot-races, chariot-racing, equestrian events and the pentathlon. The games were three days of physical devotion to the gods. Those who came celebrated with blessed feasts. They gorged on freshly sacrificed bulls. A circular pit that once contained gallons of water is now blocked with the old bones and the discarded votive offerings of the faithful. Terracotta body-parts, statuettes, jewellery, coins and pretty little vases have been left here by the Greeks, who would try all forms of bribery to keep their gods on side.
Socrates’ trip to this busy sanctuary