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Piraeus harbour,
432–428 BC
‘Do you mean to say’ interposed Adeimantus, ‘that you haven’t heard that there is to be a torchlight race this evening on horseback in honour of the goddess?’
‘On horseback?’ said I [Socrates]. ‘That is a new idea. Will they carry torches and pass them along to one another as they race with the horses, or how do you mean?’
‘That’s about it’ said Polemarchus, ‘and, besides, there is to be a night festival which will be worth seeing. For after dinner we will get up and go out and see the sights and meet a lot of the lads there and have a good talk …’
Plato, Republic, 327c–328a1
TORCHLIGHT ON THE SEA’S SURFACE IS magical. Pockets of flame dance from one ripple-crest to another, linked by a spider-line of fire. And around 2,440-odd years ago just such a spectacle was laid on in the Piraeus district in honour of a newcomer to the city. Worshipping a new goddess – the barbarian Bendis – sometime around 429/428 BC, many Athenians, Socrates apparently amongst them, came down to watch the premiere of this black-and-gold light show. A new festival for Bendis was being inaugurated by Athenian citizens down in the harbour-town of Piraeus.2 This was a significant introduction to the neighbourhood – the demos must have authorised payment for a swell welcoming party. There were horseback torch relay-races to honour the interloper divinity, a visitor from the wilds of Thrace. As Plato’s colloquial account shows, this was an attraction worth leaving the dinner-table for.
Greece has a long history of worshipping gods from the East. Zeus himself first appeared as a small bronze from Sumeria (made in the third millennium BC) before there was any mention of him in records west of the Bosporus. Dionysos too danced, swung and lurched his way over from Central Asia at just about the moment that written records in what we now call Greece began. But in the fifth century BC, a full thousand years later, in Socrates’ day, the community of gods on Mount Olympus was a little more settled. There was, indeed, an Olympian establishment. The arrival of a new divinity, relatively infrequent, never failed to cause a stir. Bendis was a newcomer whom the Athenians wanted to make particularly welcome. Her worship had been accepted by democratic vote in the Assembly. Not only would she protect and nourish the sizeable population of Thracian immigrants who worked in Piraeus, but she might bring onside the warring tribes of Thrace themselves – fierce soldiers whom Athens did not want to find buttressing a Spartan army.
The night festival must have been thrilling. Greek torches were halfhuman size: made of pine or cedar, their scent was pungent, the flames burned bright and long. Bendis was a huntress like Artemis; she prized speed, and a keen sense of competition. So down in this humming harbour-town, with its mongrel population and a ‘where-there’s-muck-there’s-brass’ mentality, an edgy carnival was promised. No one knew what to expect. Women priestesses had been chosen to administer the cult, and citizens and aliens alike played an official ritual role.3
Much was made by Socrates’ biographers of the fact that Socrates did not travel around the Mediterranean as his sophist contemporaries did, sightseeing, lecturing. But he had little need to travel out of Athens; the world came to him. Bendis’ acceptance was as much to do with political survival as it was with spiritual enlightenment. The Athenians knew, with war-cries all around, that the goodwill of the wild men of Thrace was more than useful.4 There were many immigrants in the Piraeus district, a sizeable community of Thracians amongst them; and now they had a charismatic, ritual crowd-puller to call their own; a sense of belonging. Simple marks in stone, a decree, tell us that the goddess’ heady celebrations ran all night.
Night and day, before, during and after the Peloponnesian War, there is no doubt that Socrates revelled in the many and various Athenian festivals – and valued them. These events were vital: a way that stakeholders got together, on the streets, and enjoyed what it meant to be a community. Socrates, quite rightly, opines that that these aren’t just blind traditions, entrenched ways of being that stumble along in the train of orthodoxy, but feel-good experiences. Reasons to live. Their predictable presence is part of what constitutes the good life.
Festivals, singing, shared celebrations of all kinds – these are initiated by Eros, and they give life itself a sweetness and a sense.5
Perhaps because Socrates was accused of impiety, Plato, writing with hindsight, emphasises the number of times the philosopher throws himself into the worship of Athens’ various gods. The fact that Plato cites Bendis might well be a pointed reminder (given the accusations against Socrates during his trial) that Athens, and not just Socrates, was open-minded enough to embrace new divinities. The philosopher’s dying words, according to Plato, remember another divine hero new to the city, the healer Asclepius. Even if the mention of Bendis is all a ploy on the part of Plato, there is no reason whatsoever to believe that Socrates disrespected the city’s traditional gods – whether they were newcomers or established cohabitants of Athena’s city.6
Socrates, war-blasted, would have seen during the Peloponnesian War what happened when the religious idols of a city were burned. When the patchwork of materials that made up the earthly incarnation of a god or a goddess – the wood, the marble, the paint, the chryselephantine ivory, the rock-crystal eyes, the gold hair filaments – melted, twisted, buckled, warped and blackened in the flames. Greek religion was patched and glued together like the images of its living gods. There were many thousands of ways to worship the lustful, greedy, fickle god-tribe. Although conventionally pious, Socrates, it appears, searched for something more essential, something stiller and more stable. A creed is precisely what he was feeling his way towards.7
Is not this the reason, Euthyphro, why I am being indicted, that when people tell such stories about the gods I find it hard to accept them? Do you really believe that these things happened and that there was a war among the gods, and fearful enmities and battles and other things of the sort, such as we are told by the poets?8
These were incendiary thoughts. While we might think of religion as a convenient means for corralling morality, for the Greeks it was where morality – a social code – began. Odysseus’ Cyclops is godless, which is why he eats men.9 In the Laws, religion guarantees that the judiciousness of the citizens is the foundation and the mortar of political life. And at a time when there was only one day in the year that was not designated a festival,10 to be perceived by your fellow Athenians to be doubting the gods was dangerous indeed. And yet Socrates goes one step further – according to Plato, he does not deny the gods, but he does claim something even more shocking: to be as wise as they are, to know their very minds.