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By Root 1858 0

Owls’.6 The coins had been buried together in a time of crisis, either during the Persian invasion or the Peloponnesian Wars. But their safekeeping devalued them – these silver pieces, squirrelled away out of the sight of enemies, have been warped and buckled in vicious fires. The stash is worth at least £250,000 in today’s money: their loss would have been felt keenly by their owners. Stamped with the distinctive wide-staring, wise owl of Athena or with the goddess’ own head – helmeted, ready, as ever, for conflict – the coins have suffered so much heat that their surfaces have been almost wiped clean. But the single foreign coins dropped by chance throughout the Agora have fared better. Here there is well-preserved evidence that Socrates’ fellow Athenians did not just barter; there was a thriving cash economy driven by Athens that stretched right across the eastern Mediterranean. Unlike secretive Sparta, Athens positively encouraged external influence – and external cash – within her walls. Each city in the classical period minted its own distinctive coinage. Metal discs (gold, silver, bronze, some decorated with turtles and dolphins, others with griffins and ducks, or beautiful Helen and her twin brothers, the Dioscuri – from Corinth, Persia, Aigina, Macedonia), all were weighed and exchanged in Socrates’ regular stamping ground, the Agora.7

And the people of Athens, in fits and spurts throughout Socrates’ lifetime, were getting visibly richer. Although the democracy did not encourage conspicuous consumption, the archaeology tells us that life was looking up. The paint on pots is laid on more thickly, the gold of earrings dangles heavier, wine comes from ever further-flung locations. Yet Socrates goes against the grain; as the years go by, he becomes even more theatrically shabby.

I loathe that poverty-stricken windbag Socrates who contemplates everything in the world but does not know where his next meal is coming from.8

Socrates bothered Athens because, in this money-loving state, he was demonstrably unmaterialistic. From the Bronze Age onwards the silver mines of Laurion in the southern corner of Attic territory had given the polis something special. Come the fifth century and activity in the mine had increased tenfold. Every day 20,000 slaves were sent 4 miles into the dark earth to gouge out silver-bearing lead ore. The glittering harvest was driven along dirt-tracks back to the Mother City. By the middle of the fifth century Athens could boast a cash reserve of 6,000 talents.9 This is the equivalent of more than £45,200,000 or $64,200,000 in today’s money. Yet in this markedly material world Socrates preached a form of fundamentalism – a return to absolute values rather than the pursuit of self-advancement at any price. He typically wore no shoes and thin clothes. All year round he sported the same, worn woollen cloak. Contemporaries roared with laugher at his parlous sartorial state:

That dog Socrates. How dare he preach when he only has one coat to boast of, come rain or shine!10

Unlike the other sophists of the age who were coining it in with their public philosophising, Socrates refused to amass wealth. And, worst of all, when he debated and conversed in the public spaces of the city, he suggested to young Athenian men, the flowers of Athens, that their future might lie not in imperialist ambitions and rows of fine colonnades, but in a more satisfying life – a life that revolved around the good, rather than the great.

Socrates didn’t come to buy and sell in the crowded marketplace. When he walked past the merchants’ tables, set up and down each day,11 he just talked, he came to trade ideas. The philosopher must have been every seller’s nightmare. In his ragged cloak – we’re told – he mocked those who sought out gewgaws for themselves. ‘How many things I don’t need!’12 he says as he marches along, striding on bare feet through the irrelevant market stalls. Socrates is not blind to beauty, to craftsmanship, to epicurean pleasures, he is certainly no killjoy, but he wants to start back at the beginning; his