The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [96]
Even so, Athens just about held itself together. As the enigmatic Hellenic sage from Ephesus, Heraclitus, had said right at the beginning of the fifth century, warfare and strife can be curiously stimulating. The following years were in fact some of the most productive for Socrates and the other creative and intellectual sparks of the day. Although the sheer number of those funerary vases tells of mass deaths, their very manufacture reminds us that men in Athens were still working, still creating world-class ornaments, still talking, still loving the beauty of the world. The Agora was still a thrilling home-from-home for Socrates. And at dawn, the birds familiar to Athenian ears – swifts, swallows, crag martins – still piped and sang.12
ACT FOUR
NEW GODS, NEW
POSSIBILITIES:
SOCRATES IN
MIDDLE AGE
23
SILVER OWLS AND A WISE OWL
The Agora, central Athens,
483–411 BC
Little Laureotic [silver] Owls
Shall always be flocking in
You shall find them all about you,
As the dainty brood increases,
Building nests within your purses
Hatching tiny silver pieces.
Aristophanes, Birds, 1106–81
THE AGORA: A BUZZING HUB. THE heart, spine, liver, spleen and lungs of Athens; the engine – some would argue – of democracy, liberty, freedom of speech and the ‘Greek Miracle’. The Agora derives from the Greek for ‘to gather together for trade or politics’ and gives its name to the word agoreuein, ‘speak in public’. It is nominated as a place to converse, to debate, to exchange ideas – the market gave traction to the democracy, and words fuelled it. Possibilities unimaginable a generation before were made flesh here.
Travelling along the Agora’s central axis, the ‘Sacred Way’, from northeast to south-west, Socrates, returning from his campaigns in the north, would have passed through a melange of scents. Fish, carrion and sesame stalls. Wool, friction-hot off the loom. The corpses of birds laid out on musky, wet clay tables. Sleeveless tunics sold alongside hopeless slaves.2 Five hundred years before Socrates’ day, in ‘Dark Age’ Greece, the Agora had been a graveyard: excavators still turn up the skulls and bones of 3,000-year-dead early Athenians, 20 feet or so below the surface.3 But come the fifth century, the Agora had been rejuvenated. Political innovation and a degree of military success had given the Athenians enormous self-confidence. Fountains had been tapped, plane trees were planted. Offerings were made to the immortals on fragrant altars. Pyramids of figs, opiates, spices, aromatic oils from the East and saffron from the Cyclades were for sale. The zest of newly excavated minerals, newly minted silver coins, was in the air, the taste of unusually seasoned stews, cooked on outdoor stoves, on the tongue.
Socrates knew the Agora as the home not of the dead, but of life. Musical recitals were held here, soldiers drilled, books sold, dramas performed, sculptures shaped and smoothed. Speech-writers sat at tables to scratch out words on papyrus and tree-bark so that less articulate men could defend themselves, or prosecute others in the law-courts. And administrators, chosen by lot, met to standardise the business of democratic living. Roses were boiled down for perfume, bones for glue. Around Hephaestus’ Temple4 were more carbon-stinking foundries, mass-producing arrowheads, spear tips and even lead slingshots blazoning the slogan ‘Take that’. In one zone, where the choral and dance displays were practised vigorously, un-ignorably, we hear from Socrates that, at a (high) price, you could purchase pamphlets peddling the very latest doctrines and ideas.5 In the Agora, everything was for sale. Athenian silver kept the market chiming with commerce and with ideas.
Silver Owls
The spoil of the latest Agora excavations is still being treated backstage at the Agora Museum in Athens. Here a young archaeologist lovingly eases apart a fused hoard of 400 tetradrachms – the silver coinage produced by the Athenian state and known as its ‘Silver