The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [93]
Like smoke that only needs one bloody spark
To blaze into the flame of battle.
A message for the War God to unleash
The Furies’ Violence,
On sons of Oedipus.13
On the field, Socrates would have seen wounds both clean and unclean – he must have heard as men died quick and slow deaths. But nothing could prepare him for the charnel-house that Athens had become.
The home-town that Socrates and Alcibiades returned to in May 429 BC was changed into a sick city, a diseased thing in no mood to give anyone a hero’s welcome.
22
THE PLAGUE
Within Athens’ city walls, 430–428 BC
If anyone feels secure, satisfied with what he thinks of as his established position in life, he is a fool. The forces that control our lives are as unpredictable as the behaviour of idiots. There is no such thing as certain happiness.
Euripides, Trojan Women, 1203–6
DAWN BREAKS IN ATHENS. THE STREETS are jolted out of the forgetfulness of night. Around the fountains and wells of the city there is a flock of human swallows. Capped women who have come to gather water, and to exchange news. Most of these will be low-born females and slave-girls. But there is a war on, all sorts of conventions slip at a time like this. Now is the one window for the women of the city to gossip – later in the day it will be the men who go to market to pick over the meagre supplies of food.1
Bad news spreads quickly in Athens. And today the word of mouth is particularly sour. Athenians – indiscriminately it seems, metics, women, men, priests – are being struck down by a curious curse. Their bodies are purple-stained, twisted in the agony of their death throes, their mouths gaping, their dying wish always water, water. The eyes burn, the tongue becomes bloodied, the skin breaks out in ulcers and the lungs constrict; it can take seven to nine days to die. Those few that survive are often blinded, incontinent. Contemporary Athenian sources describe men as possessed – they were, we can now deduce, simply brain-damaged. It is hard to say categorically what this affliction was – typhoid fever, Ebola, a new, mutant virus have been suggested – but the very latest analysis of tooth pulp from graves of the period makes typhus the most likely; and what is certain is that the plague had a characteristic trait. Birds of prey and scavengers avoided the corpses. And even more monstrous, the dogs that did eat the diseased human body-parts perished too. This seemed to be an epidemic that had the power to jump from one species to another.2
The most terrible thing of all was the despair into which people fell when they realised that they had caught the plague; for they would immediately adopt an attitude of utter hopelessness, and, by giving in in this way, would lose their powers of resistance. Terrible, too, was the sight of people dying like sheep through having caught the disease as a result of nursing others. This indeed caused more deaths than anything else.3
Contained in the city by military command, within a year the disease danced its way through the caged population of Athens and across the hot streets; 80,000 died. At a cautious estimate, at least one-third of the city was wiped out.
It had started in 431 BC. Pericles was implementing an ill-starred strategy. Spartans were harrying the Attic countryside, employing a scorched-earth policy. They sabotaged Athenian estates, indiscriminately. As a teenage boy, Pericles had watched Athens’ city walls being raised to keep out the Persians, and he trusted in their strength. The General decided that the entire population of Athena’s city-state should be pulled inside its ring of stone. And so from the 139 demes families dutifully travelled. Athens had already become crowded, and now it was crushed. Forced into the city, stumbling caravans of humans were trapped in ‘suffocating shacks’ in refugee camps that would swiftly resemble cemeteries. Livestock was sent to the nearby island of Euboea, and human stock was barricaded within the city walls. Socrates’ grassy banks – home of his dawdling with