ACT FOUR
23
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 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 intention is to trade the material of the human mind.13
But Socrates himself was clearly the opposite of this type of person – he was a man of the people, and a lover of mankind. For he took in many enthusiastic followers, both citizens and foreigners, and never charged anyone any fee for his companionship, but rather gave of his goods unstintingly to everybody. Some of them received small portions from him as a gift, sold them to others for much money, and were not men of the people as he was; for they refused to speak with those who could not give them money.14
Socrates’ ambition is to find the psyche, humanity’s soul, its spirit. If the Agora is a blast-furnace for civilisation, then Socrates believes there must be bellows at work, pumping a life-breath into all these flames. As he strides through the marketplace, through conversation with those around him, he tries to wrestle the answer to the ground:
Then the wise or temperate man, and he only, will know himself, and be able to examine what he knows or does not know, and to see what others know and think that they know and do really know; and what they do not know, and fancy that they know, when they do not. No other person will be able to do this. And this is wisdom and temperance and self-knowledge – for a man to know what he knows, and what he does not know. That is your meaning?
Yes, he said.15
It is an invigorating, a terrifying search.
While Socrates’ contemporary Protagoras declares at this time, ‘Man is the measure of all things’, the exciting, the difficult, the inconvenient truth of Socrates’ philosophy is its plangent suggestion that ‘man’s relationship with man’ and ‘man’s relationship with the world around him’ is the measure of all things. In addition his opinion seems to be that this relationship can never work unless each of us is as ‘individually good’ as we can be. The philosopher, in amongst the traders and tanners and soldiers and sailors who thronged the Agora, explores the unique capacity of man to be conscious of things, and to be conscious of being conscious of things. He does it as a real man, in a real historical place, in real terms. The Roman statesman Cicero makes a perceptive comment about Socrates’ ideas:
He applied it [philosophy] to ordinary life, directing his enquiries to virtues and vices, and in general to the study of good and evil.16
But there were others in the Agora at this time who saw in the trading of words a less high-minded opportunity. These were the sophists. Rather than simply view philosophical exploration as a route to enlightenment, some also exploited words as a means of personal enrichment. Socrates was (Plato vehemently declared) not a sophist, but because his business was words and the ideas behind them, he came to be tarred by his contemporaries and by history with the brush of sophistry.