The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [90]
Socrates, Alcibiades and the citizen-army were in the north for two, possibly three years, and they did not waste their time. They burned the crops of those towns that seemed uneasy, and engaged in open warfare with the truculent settlement of Spartolus – here they lost all their generals and 430 men. The Athenian soldiers had walked through desiccated groves, sun-blasted, and they had hopped gingerly through a landscape so iced that the ground was iron-hard. They had watched, with amazement and no little suspicion, as Socrates strode through these same frosty landscapes with his trademark bare feet. Why, when you could afford shoes, might you choose to go without? Why put men like Simon the Cobbler, back in Athens, out of business? And what on earth was going on in the man from Alopeke’s curious, spooky staring sessions – those hours when Socrates seemed to be talking to himself, wrestling with some kind of inner dialogue, not to mention inner demons?3
SOCRATES: Be well assured, my dear friend Crito, that this is what I seem to hear, as the frenzied dervishes of Cybele seem to hear the flutes, and this sound of these words re-echoes within me and prevents my hearing any other words.4
It is easy to imagine the questions slipping quickly through the camp. What is the superhumanity that this ugly soldier Socrates seems to enjoy? Who or what is his daimonion? How come he claims some kind of privileged, private access to the spirit world? Have you heard that he is one of that freaky circle who hang around with Pericles – the man who has brought us to this godforsaken, freezing place – one of the ones who says crazy things, like we all started as fish, and the sun is a red-hot rock. What an oddball, how peculiar.
But thus far, there was no persecution. Times were relatively good, Athens was still in that frame of mind where she believed she could do anything. The citizens had voted themselves into this war – in living memory they had beaten the Persians, and now they can beat the Spartans and their scumbag allies too. And look how badly it is going for those allies – the Potidaeans are really suffering, obviously the gods are not with them …
Because the fate of the Potidaeans had started to be shared in the tents of the army camp. Two annual cycles of self-imposed incarceration had degraded and debauched an entire community. The new recruits coming up from Athens appeared to have infected the weak locals with a strange, pustular disease – a miasma that induced high fevers, sweats, racking coughs and a suppurating rash. More then 1,000 Athenian troops themselves succumbed to the infection while they waited to fight. Those trapped inside the besieged city were worst affected. They had no means of escape or of reaching new food supplies. The inhabitants who were not struck down by this alien illness could survive now only by eating human flesh – the Potidaeans had become cannibals.5
This is vindictive and shabby. Victorious Athena’s crystal stare up on the Acropolis has a decidedly unpleasant glint.
So Socrates fought, and he stood and he waited and he thought. Already a recognised philosopher in the city, clearly this three-year-long campaign gave him new material. The Potidaeans were protecting themselves against rapacious Athenian interests. Did Socrates ever wonder what he was doing in someone else’s back yard? As he fought and watched skulls smashing, guts spilled, the mortally wounded turning green and then black before their last breath escaped them – Greeks slaughtering Greeks, for honour and to grab land – did he wonder: Why? What is this for? The Athenians and the Spartans, one-time allies, men who spoke the same language, lived as neighbours, worshipped the same gods, now chose to emphasise their differences, to try to destroy one another.
He must over the years have observed the Spartans and their tight, efficient military machine: every single soldier a citizen, and a citizen who had been trained for one profession alone – to fight; to fight well, cleanly, swiftly, efficiently, to kill adroitly and to die