The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [95]
Fetid, petrol-green water stagnates in the holes where steel girders and other twentieth-century detritus have been removed in the area where Myrtis was discovered. The digging was done quickly as the developers needed to move in. But now that weeds grow on the slag-piles of earth, archaeologists have made a good case to the authorities; there is so much more to discover, the site is safe for another half-decade. As well as the remains from the mass grave, those bodies and burial pots that have already been excavated nearby await further analysis, many stored in soft tissue paper in laboratories in America and Athens.9
The Demosion Sema was Athens’ public burial ground. Extending for an entire mile from the Kerameikos towards Eleusis, this was the resting place for great Athenian men and for those who died in battle. The sixth-century law-giver Solon was (allegedly) buried here, so too tyrant slayers and philosophers. All lie in unmarked graves and, although large bone fragments do remain, it is hard to identify individuals from the burial sites because many of the skeletons have been cremated, burned at temperatures of up to 800 degrees Celsius. Under normal circumstances the Athenians would take more care, but at the time of the plague these too became more akin to mass graves.
In the presence of these grim, ashen human remains it is easy to envisage a gruesome calamity. Athenians were suddenly falling, not just in war, or from old age, but thanks to Spartan-enforced hunger and now too this groping pestilence. Yet still in the fifth century the Athenians tried to generate some beauty as men and women died. In the National Archaeological Museum there is a midden of funerary jars, beautiful, mournful things, expensively decorated, white-based domestic scenes picked out in soft-wash tints. Women say farewell to soldiers, they cradle babies, stroke pets. Children play in courtyards and young men shake hands. It is impossible to look at these vases and not be moved by the fine, fluid brush-strokes – those squirrel hairs and carefully mixed pigments capturing the fear and exquisite sweetness of still being alive.
What a paradoxical time this was for Athena’s city.
Back in Athens, Socrates would have seen the aggression around him. He would have noticed the telltale clouds of smoke where Spartan forces – just half a mile away – were burning yet another grove of olive trees, yet another line of figs: 500, 700, some even 2,000 years old, these trees had witnessed the whole of Greek history. Planted before men had started to write and to understand the stars, they were now being turned to charcoal by Spartan spite.
This destruction burned deep into the psyche of the Athenians; listen to the street-talk, threats ‘to turn cropland into sheepwalk’.10 On the stage, one of Aristophanes’ characters cites those burning fields as the reason he despises the Spartans with such punitive fervour:
DICAEOPOLIS: I am ready to address the Athenians about the city while making comedy. For even comedy knows about what’s right … I myself hate the Spartans vehemently; and may Poseidon, the god at Tainarum, send an earthquake and shake all their houses down on them; for I too have had vines cut down.11
We can imagine other degenerations that never made it into the record. The over-sweet smell of crops rotting outside the city walls. The stink of human excreta everywhere. Statues of deities and divinities in this period were washed and clothed, pampered as though they were much-loved flesh and blood. Not now; the garments of the city statues were sun-faded, dirty, bird-shat. The plagued Athenians were neglecting their gods, and their gods were forgetting them.
‘Sleek’ Athens – the city that, like Socrates,