11
Athens, 465–440 BC
[SOCRATES:] Best of men, since you’re Athenians, from the greatest city with the strongest reputation for wisdom and strength, aren’t you ashamed that you care about having as much money, fame and honour as you can, whereas you don’t care about, or even consider, wisdom, truth, and making your soul as good as possible?
Plato, Apology, 29d–e1
BUSTS OF PERICLES CHORLARGEUS – PERICLES OF CHORLARGOS – look odd. His helmet appears misshapen, strangely elongated and globular. Yet this is not some artist’s aberration. In fact, the form corresponds to the unflattering jibes hurled at this statesman-general during his life-time: ‘onion-head’, ‘squill-head’ are hardly glamorous epithets.2 But even through the taunts, it was whispered that under the great domed helmet of this most influential of Athenians hummed a notable life-force. Because within that bulbous, outsize helmet lay the very sharpest of minds.
Pericles was a strategist in both the ancient and the modern sense; he was a Greek strategos – a Greek general – and he was a man with muscular visions of what could be. When Socrates was nineteen or so and hanging out in the Kerameikos, Pericles was at the peak of his power, a reformer who shaped democratic Athens strategically, architecturally and intellectually.
Pericles came from good stock, inheriting from his mother the blue blood of the Alcmaeonid dynasty. His great-uncle was that key democratic reformer Kleisthenes. His family owned large rural estates. But this was a dynasty with skeletons in its cupboard. Pericles’ own father had been banished under suspicion of ‘medising’ (fraternising with the Persians), and Pericles’ childhood was part spent in exile. Expulsion was something of which the family seemed to make a habit. Further back, Pericles’ archaic Athenian ancestors had been expelled from the city with a religious curse on their heads; it was said they had executed revolutionaries sheltering on sacred ground. To shed human blood on an altar was pollution so great that a Cretan soothsayer was called in to cleanse Athena’s city – and to clear out the Alcmaeonids.3 This was damaging superstition that allowed no quarter for pragmatism, and perhaps for that very reason, once he had real influence in the city, Pericles turned not to hardened, entrenched, superstitious tradition, but to new waves of thought.
Pericles comes into focus when Socrates is just six years old, in 463 BC. He lobbies on behalf of the Athenian people. He is instrumental in the reforms and purging of the Areopagus Council. By the time Socrates has come of age in the Athenian sense – after 451 – Pericles is campaigning in the Gulf of Corinth and has won enormous political respect. Chosen as Athens’ General one season after another, he makes military achievements the basis of his power. This is the kind of man the democracy needs to give it backbone. And Pericles is not shy of reminding hoi polloi of the fact. His tongue was as sharp as his sword: he was an accomplished rhetor – a speaker.4 For fifteen consecutive years from 443 BC (and twenty-two in all) he was re-elected as Athens’ premier democrat.5Although he was not officially Athens’ leader, think of him as the city’s ‘first citizen’. He had effective power because his lead was, almost always, followed in the Assembly. As Strategos, he could propose which motions were debated by the demos. He set the agenda for Athens’ ‘Golden Age’. His name, once again, seems prophetic. He is peri-kles – ‘surrounded or rimmed with glory’.
Pericles, because of his position, his intelligence, and his known integrity, could respect the liberty of the people and at the same time hold them in check. It was he who led them, rather than they who led him, and, since he never sought power from any wrong motive, he was under no necessity of flattering them: in fact he was so highly respected that he was able to speak angrily to them and to contradict them. Certainly when he saw that they were going too far in a mood of over-confidence, he would bring back to them a sense of their dangers; and when they were discouraged for no good reason he would restore their confidence. So, in what was nominally a democracy, power was really in the hands of the first citizen.6
It could be easy to imagine Pericles doing what so many of his peers did, drinking a great deal, gossiping in the symposia. But he was not typical; head down, we are told, he made a beeline from his home to the Assembly, not allowing for any distractions, making democracy his business. He was both an intellectual, a theorist, and a man who did. His mind buzzed with political reform; he attacked the privileges of the Areopagus Council; in the late 450s he introduced payment for juries – now every man, even the very poorest, could afford to be a judge; in 451 he limited entry to the democracy by allowing only the children of parents who were both fully fledged citizens to become citizens themselves; throughout the 440s he encouraged and supported radical thinkers and made their ideas flesh in the stones of the city.7
Pericles was evidently a man who watched and listened to the world around him. He recognised that you cannot exercise your right as a democrat without being reimbursed for your trouble. And so by the end of his life soldiers, sailors, jurymen, councillors were padding their way, the majority by foot, a few of the rich on horseback, into the city-centre or down to Piraeus to ensure that their democratic power mattered. Thucydides credits Pericles with an acute understanding of what it takes to be a politician: ‘to know what must be done and to be able to explain it; to love one’s country and to be incorruptible.’8
Athens, stage-set for democracy
When Socrates was in his early twenties, Pericles was the man who persuaded the demos to pour public money into the reconstruction of Athens’ cult centre, the Acropolis; he oversaw the building of the Propylaia – a vast structure, a kind of glorified entrance hall to the Acropolis summit, the approach ramp rising, lined with Ionic columns and a ceiling of midnight-blue studded with golden stars – the first sight to meet those seeking access to Athena’s earthly home;9 he commissioned the new temple to Hephaestus overlooking the Agora, the worrying lair of Nemesis (the goddess of fate) on the wind-sweet site of Rhamnous, plus a temple to Athena above the Kolonos Hill. Pericles planned other buildings to herald a new Athens: each stone canopy served a spiritual function, replacing the god-homes destroyed by the Persians in 480/79 BC.10 The Persians might have burned down the architecture of the Acropolis, but Pericles, on behalf of the Athenian democracy, would build it back higher.
And the splendification of Athens was not measured just in masonry. The modern-day pollution of central Athens is nothing compared to that in the Golden Age. On the south-east slopes of the Acropolis itself a foundry has recently been excavated. Massive clay channels here drained off the molten wax and other by-products of foundry-cast art. Temperatures of up to 950 degrees centigrade had to be stoked in the furnaces on these slopes – the Agora, the Parthenon itself, must have been regularly shrouded in clouds of charcoal-smuts. This was where those bronze sculptures, heroically naked, most funded by individual dynasties, were knocked out to satisfy both the city’s renewed democratic sense of itself and aristocratic competitive instinct – visible proof that your family was capable of more great works than the next.
We should pause for a moment to imagine just how many created versions of the human form there were in Athena’s city. Athens was a territory where the breathing population was watched by beautifully worked stone and metal men – idealised versions of humankind, an embodiment of the democratic Athenian’s ambition. Sculptures – bronze, marble, wood – all dressed in real clothes as if they suffered hot and cold like any other human, lined the sanctuaries, the roads, the colonnades, the law-courts. Only a tiny fraction of the bronze statuary cast in Athens in the fifth century remains, so it can be easy to underestimate just what a packed, ever-expanding site-specific art gallery this city was, the public spaces populated by crowds of silent humans. Silent, but not muted. With a showman’s urge to make their new attraction (in this case, the show city of democracy) as gaudy as any Persian king’s court or Babylonian tyrant’s processional way, the Athenians stage-set demos-kratia. Statues, monuments, temples, democratic courts were all painted and stained in Technicolor. The stark application and gloopy pigments used would shock most of us today, but these were designed to be seen under the bright Attic sun, and their gaudy glory to be remembered.
In 2007 archaeologists turned up in the earth of the Agora seashells pretty with cinnabar-red, lapis-blue and calchite-green mineral pigment. Winkled out of the ground, these craftsmen’s paint pots were half-empty – their job, for some reason, interrupted. The majority of Athens’ public buildings were painted or stained: recent analysis has shown that the Parthenon was gaudy with greens, blues, reds and gold. The Agora was where the backdrop of Athenian democracy was liveried. It was also where the fruits of the Athenian empire – exotic and home-grown – were enjoyed.
Scientists from the west coast of Asia Minor, rhetoricians from Sicily, philosophers from Thessaly and Macedonia made their way to Athena’s city, all chatting, arguing, thinking: imagine the hubbub – the Athenians had a name for it, the thorubos – the buzz of opinion and dissent in the streets, the council chambers, the Assembly, and at those famous debauched-yet-refined symposia that Plato, Aristophanes, Xenophon et al. have immortalised, where wit and wine flowed, where poetry was sung and schemes of self-advancement were hatched.
Pericles also filled his city with billowing music. He commissioned the Odeion concert-hall in 440 BC and encouraged the production of new melodies for the city’s parades: the sound of musicians practising would have been transported by Athens’ soft winds through the central districts and even to its surrounding demes. The Odeion was splendid, with a vast conical roof, the largest covered building in the Greek world.11 Later tradition alleged that it was an imitation of the tent of Xerxes, an architectural two fingers up to Persian might.12 Pericles was taught by a certain Damon, who studied the effects of music on behaviour and character,13 and the general promoted a soundtrack ‘through which he harmonized the city’.14 According to Plutarch, Pericles reorchestrated the music in the Pan-Athenaea festival.15 In the fifth century music was credited with medicinal qualities – Pericles was playing physick to his compatriots.
Here comes the squill-headed Zeus,
Perikles, wearing the Odeion on his head,
now that the ostrakon is past.
Fragment of Kratinos16
No one could deny Pericles’ piety, but he also entertained the abstracts of oddballs. This was an age when all kinds of astonishing ideas were abroad, outlandish notions from foreign thinkers; one, Thales, had guessed that all things come from water, another,Anaximander, stated: ‘from the warmed-up water and earth emerged either fish or animals pretty fish-like: from these humans were created’.17 Then Anaxagoras of Clazomenae proposed that the sun was a red-hot rock, the moon a lump of earth. The thoughtful traveller from Asia Minor went further, having the audacity to suggest that consciousness rests not in the heart, but in the brain, and he introduced a concept of nous – ‘mind’ – a kind of super-presence that sets the world in motion:
It is the finest of all things and the purest, and it has knowledge concerning all things and the greatest power; and over everything that has souls, large or small, mind rules.18
Anaxagoras was allowed into Pericles’ home – a man who, according to Socrates, ‘filled him [that is, Socrates himself] with high thoughts and taught him the nature of the mind.’19 Pericles’ sons associated with the philosopher Protagoras. Socrates, already eagerly acquiring philosophic experience, may also have been welcomed.20 All met at sponsored soirées: phrontistai – thinkers (and this is the Greek word used more frequently than ‘philosophers’) gathered to give practical advice on the well-being of this new, experimental society. Athenians recognised that democracy would be difficult to maintain, but they went out of their way to cherish and buttress the new ideology. These men inhabited the phrontisteria, the ‘thinking shops’ that Aristophanes would, thirty years later, mock so mercilessly. He ripped into the ‘immoral logic’ that they taught, and scorned the utterly ludicrous lines of enquiry that men such as Socrates followed.
STUDENT: Chaerephon of Sphettus once asked Socrates whether he was of the opinion that gnats produced their hum by way of the mouth or – the other end.
STREPSIADES: Well, well, what did he say?
STUDENT: ‘The intestinal passage of the gnat,’ he replied, ‘is very narrow, and consequently the wind is forced to go straight through the back end. And the arse, being a hole forming the exit from this narrow passage, groans under the force of the wind.’
STREPSIADES: Like a trumpet, you mean. I must say that’s a marvellous feat of intestinology. I can see getting acquitted in the Lawcourts is going to be child’s play for a chap who knows all there is to know about gnat’s guts.21
But Pericles has set a precedent; in years to come we hear of ‘open house’ meetings elsewhere in the city: men gathering in the inner courtyards that were a feature of most mid-range Athenian homes. Here the premier educators of the day competed to see who would get to mould the city’s future and its hope – its young men.22
Picture Socrates at these elevated gatherings, perhaps inside Pericles’ home, perhaps in a neighbouring courtyard. Listening to what Anaxagoras has to say about a new meaning of life, nous; computing these notions, turning them over in his own, maturing mind.
I was delighted with this … It seemed somehow right that mind [nous] should be the cause of all things, and I thought that if this were the case then mind, in arranging all these things, would arrange each in the way that was best for it.23
Staring too up at the night sky, at that point in the earth’s turn where thinking conditions in this region become more bearable. Although this would be a line of enquiry Socrates would later reject, in his early years mulling over with the great thinkers around him the secrets and purpose of the stars.
And he strongly advised them also to become familiar with astronomical measurement, however only to the point of being able to know the time-divisions of night, of the month, and of the year, for the sake of journeying and sailing and keeping watch.24
Yet Socrates at this stage was nothing more than a village boy, the son of artisans. It was intimidating surely to make his way into the circle of, possibly even the household of, the acolytes of, the most powerful man in all of Athens.
The domestics of democracy
But there is one thing it is important to remember about democratic Athens – just how cosy this city was. Here you would not find the 100-foot-wide avenues running to the palatial complex that will so impress in the city of Alexandria, or the equivalent of Nero’sDomus Aurea in Rome. So far the archaeological record has not turned up an aristocratic ‘district’. Men of all degrees walked through the winding streets, brushing shoulders with one another. Prostitutes could confidently ply their trade by slipping on customised little hobnail boots and casually strolling up and down the alleyways. In the dust their shoe-nails would spell out akolouthei – ‘this way’, or ‘follow me’. Ordinary women, bread-sellers and washer-women joined aristocrats on their way to make dedications at sanctuaries or up on the Acropolis itself.25 All life was here. Socrates, himself a great walker (we hear in one of the Platonic dialogues, the Phaedrus, that contemporaries thought walking a ‘good way to think’), would have travelled through an Athenian landscape of surprising parity.
Because it seems, at least when Socrates was a young man, that the blue-blood dynasties, the ‘old’ Athenian families, had chosen not to cream off the benefits of democratic living; rich and poor democrats alike lived in homes that, from the outside at any rate, looked very similar. The excavations to build the new Acropolis Museum in Athens have revealed warrens of streets, modest, fifth-century BC terraced houses hugging right up close to the rock of the Acropolis. Twenty feet below the current city-level, visitors can now walk above the city of Pericles and Socrates, over a glass and Perspex sky: as though the hive of the modern city has been lifted to reveal a honeycomb of antiquity beneath. In one section of the dusty remains there is a neat drain from Socrates’ day – touching somehow to imagine this bit of engineering quietly functioning, while the men and women around it got on with the business of being the world’s first official democrats.
Their homes were simple, made of mud-brick, red-roof-tiled.26 Socrates would have lived with his parents until he was thirty or so, in just such a house. Courtyards were where much of the bustle of being alive took place. Very little fancy decoration here. Those expressive, brush-fine, pastel-shade fresco paintings from the fifth and fourth centuries BC that are still being excavated were kept mainly for the walls of graves (hence their survival) and of public spaces. Democrats – great and small – lived remarkably modestly.27
Personal satisfaction appears to have counted for little in the newly democratic city. In fact being ‘private’ was something that made the Athenians suspicious. Years later Socrates would fall foul of this anxiety; when he chose to expound his ideas behind closed doors within a tight aristocratic circle, democrats cried, Oligarch! Anti-democrat! It is telling that the only anecdote we have of individual aggrandisement when it came to interior decoration (scant archaeological evidence survives) gossips that Socrates’ brash, larger-than-life, supremely aristocratic friend Alcibiades kidnapped a scene-painter (possibly Agatharcos of Samos) and forced him to make over his own house. Alcibiades also sponsored his personal sweatshop of goldsmiths. These were stereotypically audacious bits of posturing from a blue-blood who did not want to give up his aristocratic ways.
This was not Pericles’ style at all. Despite his reputation in Old Comedy for an engulfing sexual licence, the Olympian’s kicks, it seems, were satisfied not by personal wealth and domestic comfort, or by the obligingly varied knocking shops in the city, or even by the attentions of his courtesan-consort Aspasia (more of her later), but by the philosophical conversation of his protégés, by strategic military planning, by drama (as a young man he produced the playwright Aeschylus), and by the idea of what Athens could become.28
So we should imagine the modest home of Pericles – the man who is still a role-model for so many of our political leaders, the unofficial leader of Athens. Visitors striding in and out of his mud-brick and stone chambers. Slaves keeping the material world turning. Women everywhere in the house, apart from in the andron – the man’s room. Unpretentious dinner services on the table, but new ideas all around. The invisible web of interconnecting possibilities, woven by the men who came and sat at Pericles’ table, had sparkling ideas dropped into them like dew.
That Athenians employed ideas as a workhorse for civilisation was big news. This was an age when there were many gleaming examples of the wonders that man could achieve – Babylon’s Prussian-blue and ochre-glazed Processional Way protected by glazed dragons and lions (standing until 1902 in the sands of modern-day Iraq); the pyramids at Giza, already 2,000 years old; the Apadana – the ‘audience hall’ at Persepolis, where Darius and Xerxes intimidated their subjects while guarded by massive carved dogs and winged bulls.29 And although many other towns, particularly along the western coast of Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey), sponsored thinkers and scientists, Athens had something different: thoughts, ideas that were beginning to harmonise and to sound the timbre of an ideology, demos-kratia – the power of the people.
Listen to contemporary accounts of the excited reports of Athens’ egalitarian attitudes from a Persian nobleman, Otanes:
The rule of the majority has a most beautiful name: equality under the law [isonomia] … The holders of offices are selected by lot and are held accountable for their actions. All deliberations are in public. I predict – and suggest that we will give up monarchy and replace it with democracy. For in democracy all things are possible.30
Although Otanes’ predictions of democracy in Persia are still to be fully realised, his final comment proved prescient. ‘In a democracy all things are possible.’ Athens was focusing not just on making herself beautiful and fit for practice, her eyes were flicking elsewhere too. Pericles could not afford simply to indulge his time with humble-born, thinking men such as Socrates and Anaxagoras – scintillating as they might be – to play around with ground-breaking political experiments. Because he now had not only a citystate, but a burgeoning empire to run.