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Corcyra (Corfu) and Megara, 440–432 BC
Remember, too, that the reason why Athens has the greatest name in all the world is because she has never given in to adversity, but has spent more life and labour in warfare than any other state, thus winning the greatest power that has ever existed in history, such a power that will be remembered for ever by posterity, even if now (since all things are born to decay) there should come a time when we were forced to yield: yet still it will be remembered that of all the Hellenic powers, we held the widest sway over the Hellenes, that we stood firm in the greatest wars against their combined forces and against individual states, that we lived in a city which had been perfectly equipped in every direction and which was the greatest in Hellas.
Thucydides, 2.64.31
CLAMBERING DOWN TO THE REMAINS OF Athens’ Long Walls is tricky. This archaeological site is the wrong side of the tracks. The massive limestone blocks, laid between 459 and 457 BC, are now sandwiched between the railway, a dirty canal and an industrial plant bristling with CCTV cameras. An arterial road moans overhead. Old fag packets stick to the mortar.
The Long Walls, you will remember, were built two decades after the city walls to connect Athens to its ocean-mouth, at Piraeus harbour. Although five million tourists come to Athens every year, there are none at this spot. The site is off-putting. These defensive stones don’t reflect the afterglow of the Athenian ‘Golden Age’, a time remembered as egalitarian, free and high-minded. The walls tell us that Athens was indeed a fortress city; that those who came in and out were strictly monitored and controlled. Socrates lived during some of the most volatile decades in Greek history. The city and its citizens needed protecting. The stone ring also guarded Athens’ precious Piraeus harbour, Athens’ bustling second city, the ministate from which Athenian oarsmen rowed out to claim new territories in the name of demokratia.
Back in the dark days of Persian invasions there were only two city-states from the 700 or so in Hellas that, when commanded to by the Medes, refused to submit tributes of earth and water: they were Athens and Sparta. Both were united, both were torn apart by their extraordinary sense of themselves. Although separated by rivers, mountains and plains, the connection between the two was intimate. When the Persians were amassing for the Battle of Marathon, it was an Athenian, Pheidippides, who had run the 153 miles, in under two days, to beg the Spartans to come to Athenian aid. But ever since, each culture had vied to prove that they had been dealt the stronger hand. And now that Athens had an ideology – a new thing called democracy – it was with democratic superiority that she took on Spartan supremacy.
The two city-states were spoiling for a fight. The port of Piraeus became extra-busy. A new section was hived off for the exclusive use of the Athenian navy – you can still peer down on its solidly built walls that today run under the throbbing peripheral road. Those surviving soldiers of the conflicts against Persia (Marathon, Salamis, Plataea), now in their seventies and eighties – the ‘old courage’ so lauded by Aristophanes – were asked by the young, gym-hard generation of citizens who had trained to fight day in, day out for their opinion on the best battle strategies. And Athens and Sparta quickly found reasons to become affronted by one another.
The result of this antipathy was a Total War that would engulf the rest of Socrates’ life and, indeed, the whole of the region.
First the gentle harbours of Corcyra (modern-day Corfu) were bludgeoned.
One summer’s morning in 433 BC the inhabitants of that island woke in the blue hour before dawn to a fearful sound: the rhythmic wash of warships at full speed. The Corinthians and the Corcyrans were thrashing it out for control of trade routes and territories – but Athens, a good 200-plus miles further to the east, looked to the future and saw what Corcyra would always be: a gateway for Magna Graecia to Northern Italy and the rest of Europe. Unlike any other city-state of the age, Corcyra had its own fleet of 120 warships. Envoys from the island had already reminded the Athenian Assembly of this: ‘We possess a navy that is the greatest in all Hellas except for your own’.2 Persuasive words. In 433 BC Athens’ politicians had made a defensive alliance with the Corcyrans. Up in the breezy debating chamber of the Pnyx, Athenian citizens had voted to ratchet up their presence in the far west. Distant but calculating, Athens then intervened on the side of the little, wealthy, well-placed island community.
When the Corinthians and Corcyrans came to clash, there would be thirty-three Athenian triremes in the fray. In a curious, edgy boxing match, around the rocks to the south of the island (called Sybota), which appear to bleed and bubble from the mainland into the sea, each city-state unfurled its sails and attempted to demonstrate that it was the most powerful in the ring. Of course the ripples from those grappling boats would spread wide. Worried that the Corinthians might use the fracas to galvanise their own allies against Athenian interests, the Athenian democrats took pre-emptive action. And, as ever with such conflicts, those with their fingers over the red button found that they needed to persuade themselves there were many reasons for aggression, many justifications for feeling threatened. On the seas outside Corcyra vindication was provided in the form of wooden boats from a small town just 30 miles west of Athens called Megara. Megara was an ally of Athens. Corinth was a powerful city-state, but even the strong need more firepower, and bobbing within its fleet were a number of Megarian ships.
Mediocre, modest Megara was to be a flashpoint; a signal flare that could not be ignored, a small place that determined a massive historical event.
Modern Megara has a rather listless landscape. On my last visit the liveliest event was a coach-outing of Greek widows led by a stern Orthodox priest. Megara lies in the no-man’s-land in between the clamour of Athens and the embracing curves of the Corinthian gulf. It seems to have little going for it. Today Megara is where, they scoff in nearby cafés, ‘men work for chicken-feed’. The land looks unpromisingly stony – in the fourth century BC Isocrates jibed that Megara ‘farmed rocks’. But appearances can be deceiving, and somehow, through careful use of salt reserves, by keeping enough sheep alive, making cloth tunics popular with workers, by being en route (and having access to a gentle bay that provides easy docking for boats), by sending out ships of colonists to the Black Sea to found useful little colonies such as Byzantium, the Megarians came to mean something.
And within months of the Battle of Sybota in the blue seas around Corcyra, Athens started to bully them. The relationship between the two city-states was already not what could be described as warm. In 445 Megarians had massacred the Athenian garrison. The outrage had always rankled. Around 432 Pericles proposed a strange law.3 He suggested that Megarian traders and shoppers should be banned from Athenian markets, and he wanted to prevent Megarian ships from docking in any harbour of any member of the Delian League. His proposal was accepted. This was a trade embargo, sanctions of a most debilitating kind, a political insult. None in the region could ignore the fact that Athens was really throwing its weight about now. The ‘Megarian Decree’ became an excuse for outright war.
Gangrenous gossip in Athens, as the Peloponnesian War proved itself to be a bad one, blamed Aspasia – once again. It was said that Aspasia ran a whorehouse, a sex-academy. When two of her prostitute-hostesses were abducted by Megarians, the dominatrix from Miletus got her gimpy general, Pericles, to retaliate – they said.
From this began the Great War in all Hellas – from three cock-sucking sluts.4
The blood of the eastern Mediterranean was up; that popular mythology should want to give the episode a sexual context and a female casus belli is sadly familiar.5
Those bloody, localised beginnings – nothing to do with a courtesan and her prostitutes – were symptomatic of the Peloponnesian War: a sense of aggrieved aggression; a sense that someone else wants what you want. An uneasy notion that the world was a greedy place and that even under that loose umbrella of ‘Hellenism’, your Greek neighbour was eyeing up your Greek land. Progress, overt success, is rarely a stranger to jealousy; as most wars do, the Peloponnesian War started as a pique, covetousness, fear, a frustration that turned into slaughter.6
Things started to escalate. The Athenians had already been flexing their muscles where the sun set in the far west (Corcyra) and towards the Peloponnese at Megara, and now it was the turn of the north. From one of the newly trim quays at Piraeus, Socrates would sail out for battle, his mission to subdue the northern territories of Greece. The course that the ship had set was for a pretty, birdsong-filled town named Potidaea; a town that would soon hear the percussion of an Athenian citizen army.7
This was an age when war was endemic. And Athens in the late fifth century BC appeared to have a heightened taste for conflict. One year in two in the democratic Assembly, Athenian citizens voted in favour of military aggression. Young men had been training for years for this moment. Athenian soldiers had an active, and respected, part to play in the possibility of their democracy. These were not the shank-quivering quislings who had to be whipped into battle by Persian lackeys. Not the shock-haired Thracians who drank deep to their king as if it were still prehistory. Hoplites were firmly rooted in the Greek landscape and psyche. For centuries now, standing shoulder to shoulder, each man on the right had protected each man on the left with his hoplon, his distinctive round shield.8Already there was a sense of collective purpose in Hellas, but democratic politics bred extra confidence. Side by side in the Athenian Assembly, their stunning new Parthenon above them, their spanking-new fleet in the harbour below, Athenian citizens persuaded one another that they were capable of anything.
And now the rank and file of sinew and muscle that powered and turned the trireme ships also played its part. Not just slaves, but low-ranking citizens, bosuns and rowers forced these boats, which could reach up to nine knots and could change course 180 degrees in just one minute, to take a new word-idea, ‘demos-kratia’, to new lands.9 Athenian citizens – ordinary men – made Athenian expansion their business. Socrates witnessed this development at first hand. Because there was a consolidated body of stakeholding citizens at home, the Athenians were roused to embark on constant military action abroad. Twenty-four months would not pass when the Athenian Assembly did not, during Socrates’ lifetime, vote for war. In the minds of the Greeks, this was a dawning age – an age when blood and the sword would be used not just for defence, but to build a brave, new, ideological world. These were high hopes (or rabble-rousing sentiments, if one takes a cynical view) that would be dashed. Socrates might aim to inspire men to live a ‘good life’ – ‘never do injustice!’ – and other fellow Athenians might advocate social justice, but there would be inevitable casualties of creating a civilisation with virtue and democratic ambition at its core.10
What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.11
Athens had taunted austere, extreme Sparta. She had flaunted her high walls and her glittering monuments and her liberal ways, and now she would play a game of cat’s-paw with the militarised polis. The Peloponnesian War, as its fifth-century chronicler Thucydides noted, and as Socrates continually iterates, speaks of the awkward, emotional business of living with others in the world. But the huge benefit to any biographer of Socrates is that when he becomes a fighter in the Peloponnesian War itself, we begin to get sharper textual clues to the nature of his life, his relationships, and to the man behind the philosophy.
SOCRATES: Thus, I would have done a terrible thing, Athenians, if, when the commanders whom you elected to command me, stationed me, both at Potidaea and at Amphipolis and at Delium (or indeed, if I had stationed myself) and they remained and ran the risk of death; but when the god ordered – as I believed and understood to have been so ordered – to spend my life in philosophy and examining myself and others, then I were to desert my post through fear of death or indeed, any other concern. That would be terrible, and then someone might really bring me to court justly on the ground that I don’t believe the gods exist, since I disobey the oracle, fear death, and think I’m wise when I’m not. In truth, the fear of death is nothing but thinking you’re wise when you are not, for you think you know what you don’t. For no one knows whether death happens to be the greatest of all goods for humanity, but people fear it because they’re completely convinced it is the greatest of evils. And isn’t this ignorance, after all, the most shameful kind: thinking you know what you don’t.12
It is also during Socrates’ time as a soldier that we properly meet that other principal character in Socrates’ life-story, the precocious, privileged child who is now a grown man, that flesh-and-blood counterpoint to frugal, Socratic existence. The charismatic individual who is partially responsible for bringing Socrates to trial, and arguably to his premature death; the force of nature that we last saw as a shock-headed boy in the courtyard of Pericles, the beautiful, dangerous aristocrat who bore a troublingly Laconic dynastic name: Alcibiades.
