The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [86]
SOCRATES: Thus, I would have done a terrible thing, Athenians, if, when the commanders whom you elected to command me, stationed me, both at Potidaea and at Amphipolis and at Delium (or indeed, if I had stationed myself) and they remained and ran the risk of death; but when the god ordered – as I believed and understood to have been so ordered – to spend my life in philosophy and examining myself and others, then I were to desert my post through fear of death or indeed, any other concern. That would be terrible, and then someone might really bring me to court justly on the ground that I don’t believe the gods exist, since I disobey the oracle, fear death, and think I’m wise when I’m not. In truth, the fear of death is nothing but thinking you’re wise when you are not, for you think you know what you don’t. For no one knows whether death happens to be the greatest of all goods for humanity, but people fear it because they’re completely convinced it is the greatest of evils. And isn’t this ignorance, after all, the most shameful kind: thinking you know what you don’t.12
It is also during Socrates’ time as a soldier that we properly meet that other principal character in Socrates’ life-story, the precocious, privileged child who is now a grown man, that flesh-and-blood counterpoint to frugal, Socratic existence. The charismatic individual who is partially responsible for bringing Socrates to trial, and arguably to his premature death; the force of nature that we last saw as a shock-headed boy in the courtyard of Pericles, the beautiful, dangerous aristocrat who bore a troublingly Laconic dynastic name: Alcibiades.
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SOCRATES THE SOLDIER
Potidaea, northern Greece, 432–429 BC
ALCIBIADES: Then if you care to hear of him in battle – for there also he must have his due – on the day of the fight in which I gained my prize for valour from our commanders, it was he, out of the whole army, who saved my life: I was wounded and he would not forsake me, but helped me to save both my armour and myself.
Plato, Symposium, 220d–e1
POTIDAEA, IN THE NORTH OF GREECE, just beneath Macedonia, is one of those ancient sites that it is only too easy to miss. Travelling south-east from Thessaloniki, you have to screech off the flyover and then track back on a sheer sliproad down to sea-level – to the canal hacked through the isthmus there in 1935. Now the site is umbrellaed by a six-lane motorway; a fast-food joint called Portes hems in the abandoned harbour.
Here there is a cannibalised architectural history. Medieval sea walls have swallowed up classical remains. A Roman temple to Poseidon lurches into the sea.2 Pebbles mix with pottery shards on the beach. In the summer, butterflies follow their reflections in the crystal-clear water; but in the winter ice creeps its way from the shoreline.
This was a settlement that defined itself by its relation to the sea. When Corinthians arrived in the seventh century BC they took over the town at the neck of the peninsula and blessed it with the Doric version of their name for the sea-god Poseidon: Potidaea.
So the classical city of Potidaea was exposed on the edge of the Kassandra peninsula – then called Pallene, now named for the Macedonian king Kassandros. In the spring this 31-mile-long finger pointing into the Gulf of Thessalonica turns apple-green, a shade that signifies this is fertile territory well worth protecting.3 Even unploughable coastal land here – a rock-filled, lunar landscape – is a refuge for the bees that produce some of the sweetest honey in Greece. From the highest point of the settlement it is possible to see the peaks of Mount Athos, the mountains of Olympus and Pelion.
Today the place seems untroubled. A fountain plays in the small town square; fishermen sit in a toadstool ring, mending their nets, smoking, joshing. Swallows dive over the sea, stinging the surface after an