The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [85]
Those bloody, localised beginnings – nothing to do with a courtesan and her prostitutes – were symptomatic of the Peloponnesian War: a sense of aggrieved aggression; a sense that someone else wants what you want. An uneasy notion that the world was a greedy place and that even under that loose umbrella of ‘Hellenism’, your Greek neighbour was eyeing up your Greek land. Progress, overt success, is rarely a stranger to jealousy; as most wars do, the Peloponnesian War started as a pique, covetousness, fear, a frustration that turned into slaughter.6
Things started to escalate. The Athenians had already been flexing their muscles where the sun set in the far west (Corcyra) and towards the Peloponnese at Megara, and now it was the turn of the north. From one of the newly trim quays at Piraeus, Socrates would sail out for battle, his mission to subdue the northern territories of Greece. The course that the ship had set was for a pretty, birdsong-filled town named Potidaea; a town that would soon hear the percussion of an Athenian citizen army.7
This was an age when war was endemic. And Athens in the late fifth century BC appeared to have a heightened taste for conflict. One year in two in the democratic Assembly, Athenian citizens voted in favour of military aggression. Young men had been training for years for this moment. Athenian soldiers had an active, and respected, part to play in the possibility of their democracy. These were not the shank-quivering quislings who had to be whipped into battle by Persian lackeys. Not the shock-haired Thracians who drank deep to their king as if it were still prehistory. Hoplites were firmly rooted in the Greek landscape and psyche. For centuries now, standing shoulder to shoulder, each man on the right had protected each man on the left with his hoplon, his distinctive round shield.8 Already there was a sense of collective purpose in Hellas, but democratic politics bred extra confidence. Side by side in the Athenian Assembly, their stunning new Parthenon above them, their spanking-new fleet in the harbour below, Athenian citizens persuaded one another that they were capable of anything.
And now the rank and file of sinew and muscle that powered and turned the trireme ships also played its part. Not just slaves, but low-ranking citizens, bosuns and rowers forced these boats, which could reach up to nine knots and could change course 180 degrees in just one minute, to take a new word-idea, ‘demos-kratia’, to new lands.9 Athenian citizens – ordinary men – made Athenian expansion their business. Socrates witnessed this development at first hand. Because there was a consolidated body of stakeholding citizens at home, the Athenians were roused to embark on constant military action abroad. Twenty-four months would not pass when the Athenian Assembly did not, during Socrates’ lifetime, vote for war. In the minds of the Greeks, this was a dawning age – an age when blood and the sword would be used not just for defence, but to build a brave, new, ideological world. These were high hopes (or rabble-rousing sentiments, if one takes a cynical view) that would be dashed. Socrates might aim to inspire men to live a ‘good life’ – ‘never do injustice!’ – and other fellow Athenians might advocate social justice, but there would be inevitable casualties of creating a civilisation with virtue and democratic ambition at its core.10
What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.11
Athens had taunted austere, extreme Sparta. She had flaunted her high walls and her glittering monuments and her liberal ways, and now she would play a game of cat’s-paw with the militarised polis. The Peloponnesian War, as its fifth-century chronicler Thucydides noted, and as Socrates continually iterates, speaks of the awkward, emotional business of living with others in the world. But the huge benefit to any biographer of Socrates