The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [82]
In fact, although this sanctuary was not a conventional battlefield, the reason to be at the Isthmus did have something to do with welcoming decay and death. The Greeks were less concerned with dying than with dying well – were, in the case of the Spartans, desperate to achieve ‘a beautiful death’. These games commemorated a mortal end: the death of a child-hero called Melikertes, who drowned at sea but whose body was brought back to shore by a kindly dolphin.20 Priests wore black robes and crowned victors with wreaths of wild celery – the plant that was thought to grow so freely in the Underworld.
It is at the Isthmus that you get a good sense of how superstitious many fifth-century Greeks would have been. Dug out into the mud, 25 feet down into the earth, and under an overhang of the rock, are underground dining chambers. Up to twenty-two people could be accommodated here, reclining on baked-earth couches, eating food specially prepared by especially sacred kitchens. The haves and have-nots knew their place in religious ritual. Aristocrats from many city-states would have met at the site, and only some of the ‘top brass’ were allowed to dine in this special chamber. These games were Panhellenic, a useful chance to see how the other Greeks lived. All participants, whatever their origins, were watched over by the god Poseidon, in whose honour the games were held.21
Of course Poseidon knew that his mortal devotees – who stopped all aggression during the Isthmian Games, as they did during the Olympic Games while they met to compete – would soon use his watery highways to invade and colonise, to ship arms and to steal women, wealth and lives, as well as to trade. Man’s theatrical dishonesty with himself in the name of tradition, of civilisation, is an aspect of humanity that Plato’s works seem to reveal Socrates wished he could, somehow, change.
Since the god is good … He and he alone must be held responsible for good things, but responsibility for bad things must be looked for elsewhere and not attributed to the god.22
The bad things of life, whether initiated by gods or men, were about to become inescapable. What is certain is that around this time of his life, whether or not Socrates played an active part in the Samian campaign – whether or not he personally ran as an athlete at the Isthmus – the philosopher would swiftly be at the sharp end of aggressive Athenian imperial policy, because the hostilities sponsored by Pericles and his supporters would not end at Samos. In Athens men in the Assembly, the Agora, the symposia had started to talk, to say that the intervention on behalf of Miletus was a dangerous diplomatic precedent. Difficult to dip your toe in foreign waters and not get wet.
Samos, as it turned out, did not immediately spark Greece’s equivalent of the First, Second and Cold Wars (decades of sclerotic fighting) – a Total War that was finally declared in 432 BC – but all over the Aegean ploughshares were being beaten into swords, shields polished, daggers sharpened. And the Greeks, once again, remembered their taste for laying the blame for epic conflicts at a woman’s door.
And then the Megarians, garlic-stung … stole a couple of Aspasia’s whores, and from that the onset of war broke forth …23
Not content to let the Samos affair rest, punitive comedy dragged Aspasia and her sexual power into an invented narrative concerning another real sequence of events, this time a domino-line of destruction that did indeed kick-start the great Peloponnesian conflict. The struggle that would make