ACT ONE
1
Athens, the Agora, 399 BC
How fitting is it to destroy an old man, a grey-headed man, beside the water-clock?
Aristophanes, Acharnians, 6941
IN MAY THE SUN RISES BRISKLY over Mount Penteli.
Five hundred men2 are walking with purpose through the tight, packed-gravel lanes of Athens, past the modest mud-brick houses, around the gaudy public monuments: the communal baths, the Temple of Athena Nike, the new mint. Some of these public buildings are still wet with paint, few are more than fifty years old. At times the walking men have to pick their way across distasteful evidence of trauma – over derelict homes and past gaunt-hungry citizens. Unpleasant reminders of the catastrophes Athena’s city has suffered during the last three decades: plague; foreign invasion; full-blown civil war; strife.
There are goats here, dogs, geese, cats, ducks; but hardly any women. Or at any rate there are few creatures classified as female; there are some shaven-headed slaves. These sub-human folk of Athens, male and female alike – ‘man-footed things’, ‘living tools’3 – have been about their business since well before dawn, preparing the food, mending the clothes, wiping the shit off the shoes of their masters.4 At this time of day, the majority of Athens’ other females, women-citizens, are moving back indoors. The night is their time. After dark, usually chaperoned, they are allowed out to gossip, to barter, to practise religious rites, and just before sunrise they collect around the fountains to gather water. Now, with the sun climbing into the sky, it is appropriate to leave the streets. To be shut up at home during daylight hours is the only way for a respectable Athenian woman to behave.
But times have been hard. Once Athens could boast a stakeholder population of more than 200,000. Now, at the beginning of the fourth century BC, the number of adult men living in the city-state is one-tenth that number, closer to just 20,000. Since the outbreak of war with another Greek city-state, Sparta, in 431 BC, many tens of thousands of male citizens have died: in 404–3 BC alone up to 1,500 were killed, not by foreign but by Athenian hands – the death squads sponsored by rival factions during Athens’ bitter civil war. Now women are forced to do that which their grandmothers would never have dreamed possible: bake their own bread, live in a bigamous marriage, sell ribbons on street corners. Rather than enter and exit the city through 30-foot-high monumental gates, decorated with bronze, the surviving females must stepping-stone across the stumpy remains of Athens’ broken city walls; walls that were once the envy of all Greece.
A number of the men striding the street this late spring morning will be checking the precise time by the climb of the sun and the length of their shadow.5 But these urgent Athenians are pulled not just to the brightening of the sky, but by the drip, drip of progress. The new mechanical water-clock that marks out time in this most adventurous of cities is soon to have its plug pulled. The judicial day is about to begin.6
All are making their way towards a court – the religious court of the archon – the magistrate of sacred affairs, a site that today is dissected by the jaunty-orange, rattling Athens metro and flanked by trinket and umbrella sellers.7 This was, in the fifth century BC, a well-beaten path. Athens at that time was an exceedingly litigious place. In any one year up to 40,000 court cases might be heard. The Athenians loved a good legal brawl; their wrangles were a popular spectator sport. Agon – which translates as competition, struggle, set-to – is the Greek word often used. Gloves were off; agon is the root of our ‘agony’. And today there would have been a particular frisson. The man Athenians have come to judge is considered a threat to society. His offence could be capital. It seems almost certain that this encounter will be agonising.
The Athenian jurors are here to try a stocky seventy-year-old, their fellow citizen – Sokrates Alopekethen, Socrates from the district of Alopeke. Socrates: not high-born, neither a decorated general, a prize-winning dramatist, nor a political hero, but still famous in his own lifetime. For the past thirty years men – particularly young men – have flocked to Athens from right across the eastern Mediterranean with the prime purpose of listening to him philosophise in the public spaces of the city. In decorated dining rooms, crowded back alleys and by the leafy banks of the city’s rivers he could have been heard. He is a maverick; he did not found a school of philosophy, there was no individual aristocrat who funded his mission, it appears that he chose to write not a single word of philosophy down. And instead of polemic, instead of the great sweeps of rhetoric that have become so fashionable in Athenian society by the end of the fifth-century Golden Age, Socrates simply asks questions. His methods are, to put it mildly, unusual.
Yet the enquiring philosopher, now an old man, has become not just celebrated, but notorious. His eccentric methods, his unconventional lifestyle, his dogged interrogations, his troubling attraction to the young of the region have earned him as many enemies as friends. He walks to the court on this May morning accused of anti-Athenian activity, with undermining what it was that held the polis – the city-state – together. Today, those 500 Athenians will decide whether or not Socrates has corrupted the city’s source of hope – their young men – and, even more worrying, denied its sublime security: the power of their traditional gods.
It’s right for me to make my defence, Athenians, against the first of the false accusations made against me … ‘Socrates does wrong and is too concerned with enquiring about what’s in the heavens and below the earth and to make the weaker argument appear the stronger and to teach these same things to others.’8
How do you say that I corrupt the youth …? Isn’t it in fact clear according to the indictment you wrote that I do so by teaching the young not to believe in the gods that the city believes in but instead to believe in other new divinities? Aren’t you claiming that it’s by teaching that I corrupt them?9
The Athenian city has spent four generations dealing with clear and present danger in the form of invading forces and the military coups of enemies within. Socrates’ crime is less tangible, but because of that, more pernicious – he is considered a bad, a dangerous influence. The citizens who make up the judge and jury (there was no hierarchy of judgement in the Athenian judicial system in Socrates’ lifetime), hot-footing it through those narrow Athenian streets, have travelled from far and wide. Some started their journey in districts such as Cape Sounion, nearly 30 miles south-east of Athena’s city, where the splendid temple of Poseidon still basilisk-eyes the boats that come in and out of Athens’ harbours; others will have rolled off bed-pallets just five minutes away in what were little more than shacks on the bare rock,10 beneath the Areopagus, where councils of Athenians have been meeting for close on 300 years. Rich and very poor alike, they are gathering here in this milky-dawn light because the Ancient Greeks believed something remarkable about men. They believed that each had been given, by the gods, an equal portion of dike, justice, and aidos, shame or concern for their fellow man.11 If they put their minds to it, each true, mandated Greek could judge another fairly and wisely. This Hellenic hallmark was proudly celebrated, in Athens’ public spaces, by the commentators of the day:
When I have chosen the best of my citizens I shall return; it is for them to judge this matter according to truth, since they have bound themselves by oath to say nothing contrary to justice.12
On this hill the reverence and inborn fear of the citizens will hold them back from committing injustice by day and night alike, so long as they themselves do not pollute the Laws with evil streams: if you stain clear water with filth, you will never find a drink.13
So on that spring morning twenty-four centuries ago, the ordinary citizens of Athens, dirt-poor oxherds, smooth-palmed accountants, dark-tanned traders, were here to enact a unique, fifth-century form of direct democracy. Citizen to citizen, they were here to pass judgement on one of their own.
But today’s court case did not, by any means, promise a cut-and-dried resolution. Because the one accused amongst them, who had also started to make his way to the court at dawn; who had also walked through the hub of Athens’ democratic city as the city started to wake, a fellow citizen amongst the press of jurors; the man making his way to the dock today was, by any standards, an awkward customer to estimate: an extreme and disconcerting individual. Unsettling to look at, Socrates stood out in a crowd. He boasted, his contemporaries tell us, a pot-belly, thick lips, swivelling eyes, a pug nose and broad nostrils. Descriptions of his lifestyle suggest he possessed irrepressible energy and a wit that, even after one of his many nights of heavy drinking, struck home ‘like the touch of a sting-ray.’14 In a city that made a cult of physical beauty15 – which believed, in fact, that outward beauty was a sign of an inner nobility of spirit – Socrates was famously ugly. He had a rocking gait and he made it his business to power from one spot in the city to another, enlightening some, badgering others to engage in meaningful conversation. As one contemporary (according to Plato) – the man who had spent years as Socrates’ love-interest – put it:
ALCIBIADES: When we hear any other person – quite an excellent orator, perhaps – pronouncing one of the usual discourses, no one, I venture to say, cares a jot; but as soon as we hear you, or your discourses in the mouth of another – though such person be ever so poor a speaker, and whether the hearer be a woman or a man or a youngster – we are all astounded and entranced. As for myself, gentlemen, were it not that I might appear to be absolutely tipsy, I would have affirmed on oath all the strange effects I personally have felt from his words, and still feel now. For when I hear him I am worse than any wild fanatic; I find my heart leaping and my tears gushing forth at the sound of his speech, and I see great numbers of people having the same experience. When I listened to Pericles and other skilled orators I thought them eloquent, but I never felt anything like this …16
Often Socrates out-foxed and floored his peers with his beguiling and relentless banter. But then, at other times, he would stand for hours, silent, stock-still, frozen. These ‘trances’ Socrates himself put down to his daimonion semeion, his ‘divine sign’. Scholars still debate the cause of these odd seizures. Was this some kind of deep philosophic engagement? Were they signs of a medical condition such as catalepsy? Many at the time were more suspicious; they whispered, behind his back, that Socrates was possessed.
Whatever his disability – social, physical or psychological – the philosopher was clearly both unhampered and uninhibited, and for the previous fifty years had taken the concept of being an Athenian citizen to its upper limits.
Far from being an unworldly greybeard, we are told that Socrates spun through Athena’s city like a tornado, drinking, carousing (though never out of control), talking, debating. Women, slaves, generals, purveyors of sweet and bitter perfumes – he involved all in his dialogues. Eccentric, grubby, his hair left uncombed, he famously stunned guests at a dinner party by turning up freshly bathed and oiled following an afternoon’s session at the gymnasium – a display of personal hygiene that was way out of character.17
Socrates paddled in Athens’ streams, he spent nights in her brothels, he worshipped the city’s demanding inbred dynasties of gods as assiduously as, if not harder than, the next man. This is a dedication not to be underestimated, for there were as many as 2,000 separate religious cults, all clamouring for attention in Attica in the fifth century BC. Socrates fought for his city too. Strapping on linen and leather armour, sharpening his short, stabbing sword, he travelled hundreds of miles to defend Athens’ interests. Although not one to join committees, or volunteer for jury service and neighbourhood watch, Socrates devoted limitless energy to making the polis work; in his own idiosyncratic way he was absolutely devoted to the political process. Those who did not participate usefully in Athenian life were labelled, in Greek, idiotai – laymen:18 these idiots, Socrates had no time for. On that May morning, however dangerous he had come to seem, there was no doubt that democratic Athenians were judging one of their own.
The varied accounts of Socrates’ life and philosophy make it clear: he was inspiring, exciting, maddening. He was brilliant and curiously naïve. He was impossible to ignore. Given that the philosopher was responsible for his own defence, this trial looked set to spark with verbal and intellectual fireworks.
MENO: Socrates! Even before I met you they told me that in plain truth you are a perplexed man yourself and reduce others to perplexity. At this moment, I feel that you are exercising magic and witchcraft on me and positively laying me under your spell until I am just a mass of helplessness … My mind and my lips are literally numb, and I have nothing to reply to you. Yet, I have spoken about virtue hundreds of times and held forth on the subject in front of large audiences, and very well indeed, or so I thought. Now I can’t even say what virtue is.19
Socrates might seem to us the North Star in Athens, the light by which others orientated themselves, but he was one in a galaxy. Walking through those jangling streets were many others who shone very bright. Here were familiar sun-worn faces, now familiar only as great names: the playwright Euripides, the historian Xenophon, the general-statesman Pericles (as well as his intriguing courtesan and soulmate, Aspasia – his ‘partner’ to her friends, his ‘whore’ to their enemies), the mane-haired, rippling aristocratic chancer Alcibiades, the witty Aristophanes, the ‘father-of-history’ Herodotus, the sculptor/designer Pheidias, whose genius had created the Parthenon, a young Plato. Fifth-century Athens supported a rare concentration of talent. It is for this reason that Socrates’ lifetime is nominated a ‘Golden Age’. Socrates witnessed the ‘Greek Miracle’ at first hand.
Yet on that spring morning in 399 BC, as the trickle of men into the law-court became a steady flow, Socrates’ alma mater, his beloved Athens, and the men who had made this city world-class, who had witnessed the rise of their home-town to the status of superpower and had generated a civilisation to match, now wanted their troublesome philosopher shamed, and some wanted him dead.
This is how Socrates’ story ends. But we are still at the beginning of a day that shook the world.
To understand the tenor of Socrates’ trial, its flavour, its taste, its smell, its surface tensions and its undercurrents, we must stand in the classical Agora, look around us, and see what Socrates would have seen as he made his journey through the streets and on into the hallowed space of the law-courts. Above him, behind him if he travelled with his back to the rising sun, perched on the Acropolis rock, stood the great temple, the Parthenon, sacred to Athena Parthenos – Athena the Maiden. There, too, the Temple of Athena Nike, this time dedicated to Athena the goddess of victory. In the Agora itself were the training grounds where Athens’ citizen-soldiers sweated day in, day out to ensure that they were fit to fight and to die for their city-state. All around were fine bronze and marble statues – so lifelike their rock-crystal eyes seemed to follow each and every passer-by. Their stone skin would have been thick with carnival-coloured paint. Analysis of the statues today reveals how gaudy they were – akin to theatrical scenery and props, designed to make an impression from afar. The air in the Agora would have been heavy with the scents of the market: spices from the East, saffron from the South, the tang of gold from the northern hills, the sweat of captured humans, shuffling slaves waiting to be sold on.
And the earth beneath Socrates was thick with the remains of Athenians past, men and women whose own triumphs and struggles had laid the ground for Socrates’ progress.
Piecing together our story, on our own journey into Socrates’ courtroom, we too should walk through the military, cultural and social landscape of Athens, as deep as it is broad, that the philosopher inhabited. We need to investigate the physical and psychological stage that had been set for Athenian greatness. To understand Socrates’ thoughts, his life, and his death by hemlock poison, fifth-century Athens – Athena’s City, the city that birthed Sokrates Alopekethen in 469 BC – must first come more sharply into focus.