The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [92]
We don’t know precisely how long Socrates and Alcibiades stayed in the north. The siege was finally lifted in 429 BC. Potidaean leaders – or what was left of them – gave up as it became clear that their Corinthian allies were insufficient, and that every last Potidaean, every mother, child and freshly bearded boy, would die unless they opened their city gates. The two soldiers may well have watched as the emaciated Potidaean men and women were, surprisingly, given permission to leave. They would have stumbled out, clutching the pathetic bundles that were to form the foundations for their future lives. All adult males with one garment, the women with two, and each with enough money to clear the war-zone. Were those tent-mates Socrates and Alcibiades blamed, as their field generals were, for the leniency that enabled the Potidaeans to depart? Back in the Athenian centre of operations, men wanted blood, they wanted to hear that the vanquished city-state had been further humiliated. Perhaps those in the north were battle-weary – they did not want to hurt any more.
Our evidence for the Potidaea campaign is necessarily based on conjecture and literature. The battlefields around Potidaea have yet to be excavated, and many of the few extant remains in Potidaea itself were stolen from the village schoolhouse by the Nazis in 1941. But the campaign here became legendary almost as soon as it became historical. Because this unlikely pair, Alcibiades and Socrates, were now characters in the soap opera of popular history. A hot-headed boy, the selfless, wiser, grizzled older man. Lovers whose passionate on-off affair would be played out against one of the most charismatic of city backdrops and against one of the most elongated and insidious wars in antiquity.
Stereotype or not, both friends would find it hard to shake off their given roles. Because it seems that from Potidaea onwards, Socrates’ purpose was to identify the point of human lives, Alcibiades’ to make or break them.
SOCRATES: I questioned one man after another, always conscious of the anger and hatred that I provoked, which distressed and alarmed me. But necessity drove me on; the word of Apollo, I thought, must certainly be considered first.11
At the very moment when a network of city-states were establishing themselves to form not just pockets of civilisation, but a new ideology for civilisation itself, and when civilisation was winning over subsistence, Socrates was asking whether Alcibiades – the embodiment of the Athenian ideal in so many ways, beautiful, strong, daring, pleasure-loving, charismatic, urbane – was also an embodiment of a flaw of civilised development, of our urge always to want more, to want that which we do not have.
For I go about doing nothing else than urging you, young and old, not to care for your persons or your property more than for the perfection of your souls, or even so much; and I tell you that virtue does not come from money, but from virtue comes money and all other good things to man, both to the individual and to the state.12
Socrates had cause for concern. Be careful what you wish for, they say. Athens had had a vision – that she could lead, perhaps even rule, the known world – but her hubris had been spotted by the gods on Mount Olympus. The Spartans had intensified their campaigns closer to the Athenian home. Their strategy was to tempt the Athenians out to pitched battle on the Attic plains, while their foot soldiers harried and destroyed the people and the crops of Attica. Led by King Archidamus, the debilitating invasions lasted between fifteen and forty days, and were repeated almost without exception year in, year out. Their effects were burned into the minds of Athenians, and onto the pages of their playwrights:
But now it seems the brutal god of war
Stands at the gates
With firebrand flaming blood
To set this town ablaze.
– O please don’t let him!
We share the sufferings of our kin …
Your pain is our pain!
All round the city, lying like a
Low mist,