The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [89]
But at Potidaea it was Socrates who saved Alcibiades, not vice versa.17 The beautiful but inexperienced boy-man was – according to Plato – on the verge of extinction, the Athenian army having been attacked in a sudden, unexpected skirmish. Socrates, quick-witted, pulled the young lad out of the fray. And as befits the prince of self-promotion on the one hand and the master of understatement on the other, it was Alcibiades, not Socrates, who was awarded a suit of armour and crown by Athens – recognition of his conduct on the battlefield. Of course Alcibiades was honoured, for he was an aristocrat, and Socrates, a stonemason’s son, was not.18
Through the autumn, the massing of forces continued in the Pallene peninsula. By late September there were 3,000 Athenian hoplites in the region – close on 6 per cent of the entire male, adult citizen population, plus 600 Macedonian cavalry. Some of the smaller towns caved in, but not Potidaea. It resisted, and was caught in a firestorm. The first battle was over so quickly that only a fraction of the soldiers had the chance to fight; 300 from Potidaea or the south lost their lives, and 150 Athenian hoplites, including their general Callias, were killed.
Alcibiades was wounded either here or at one of the later skirmishes at Spartolus. But, luckily for him, according to Plato, Socrates was close by – and having scooped him plus his armour up (those showy, jauntily crafted bits of well-wrought metal that declared to the army of democrats that Alcibiades was just a bit special), Socrates incarnated the ethos of hoplite warfare: that you stand shield-to-shield, you are as strong as the mass you represent. Under a pale northern sun Socrates had kept the life in this golden teenage boy. Both lived to fight another day.
After the initial bouts of fighting with Athens and her allies, to save those who could still stand, the Potidaean community backed into its walled city and waited. The Athenians, Socrates included, bedded themselves down, ranging the benighted walls. The rituals of war continued. Potidaeans were allowed to bury their dead. The Athenians rigged up on the ‘turning place’ (the spot where a battle was lost or won) a trophy (derived from the Greek trepein, to turn). Trophies of this day and age were ghoulish scarecrows – often the stump of a tree dressed in the defeated’s armour. A dead, pointless thing. As dead and as pointless, in this case, as the hopes of the Potidaean victims. Because the suffering wasn’t over yet. Now new allied reinforcements came. Potidaea found herself besieged both by land and by sea – those trapped inside the city would have to wait for winter to come and go twice more before liberation; death by starvation or disease looked likely to be their first chance of relief.
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DEMONS AND VIRTUES
The Kassandra peninsula, northern Greece, 432–429 BC
FRIEND: Where have you been now, Socrates? Ah, but of course you have been in chase of Alcibiades and his youthful beauty! Well, only the other day, as I looked at him, I thought him still handsome as a man – for a man he is, Socrates, between you and me, and with quite a growth of beard.
Plato, Protagoras, 309a1
IT WAS IN POTIDAEA THAT THE first, troubling, stories about Socrates really began to fly.
Here, in the depth of winter, the middle-aged man (we hear from Alcibiades back in Athens) stands shoeless, for five, ten, fifteen, twenty-four hours at a stretch. Rapt. Lost in his own mind. Staring blankly like the living dead; communicating with his daimonion, his inner demon. And then dawn appears and stills the sea: Socrates quietly says his prayers to the sun and carries on with the business of being a good democratic soldier in a foreign land.2