The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life Read online

  Yet Socrates is not concerned just with our surroundings, but what is within us. ‘He who orders us to know ourselves is bidding us to become acquainted with our soul.’15 Socrates is soulful. The philosopher believes open conversation an essential balm for the psyche. His method gets inner thoughts out into the public sphere, not as a monologue, but as a dialogue. For him this was cathartic – Plato uses the Greek word katharsis16 – releasing ‘bad things’ from the spirit. Socrates is the first man for whom we have an extant record who explores how we should all live in the world, as the world was working out how to live with itself.

  Truth is in fact a purification [katharsis] … and self-restraint and justice and courage and wisdom itself are a kind of purification.17

  Socrates’ philosophy is relevant to all of us, not least because it has been so tenacious. From Elizabeth I to Martin Luther King, from the Third Reich to twenty-first-century America, Socrates’ example has been used to try to understand what society is, and what it should be. Socratic words filled the halls of Italian Renaissance humanists. The Jewish philosopher Yehuda ha-Levi in the eleventh century AD cites Socrates in a dialogue with King Khazar concerning the nature of Judaism. John Locke and Thomas Hobbes scatter their treatises of political theory with Socratic quotations.

  Socrates was also a central influence in early Islam. Al-Kindi, the ‘first’ self-professed Arab philosopher, certainly the first Muslim philosopher, wrote extensive (long-lost) treatises on Socrates in the ninth century AD.18 Socratic wisdoms were quoted in coloured stone, mortared into the very fabric of public buildings in Samarkand. The philosopher was nominated one of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his nickname ‘The Source’. Socrates’ inner voice was thought by medieval Muslims a sign that he was an angel in poor man’s clothing. Throughout the Arab world from the eleventh century AD up until the present day he was said to refresh and nourish, ‘like … the purest water in the midday heat’.19

  And yet why should we still care for him? Why commemorate this long-ago life? One good reason is because Socrates does that shocking thing – that thing we still crave – he implies there might be a way to be fulfilled on this earth. Socrates was magnetic because he counselled care of the soul. He believed that men can achieve true happiness only when they are at peace with themselves.20 He suggested it is ‘us’, not ‘them’, who can make things better.

  Socrates, as I have said, is tantalisingly elusive. But what we do have in our favour is the physical setting of his ‘not thereness’. If the play of fifth-century BC Athenian life was lovingly crafted by Plato, and Socrates was his inspiration, then the stage-set, Athens, is still available to all of us. All agree, when it comes to Socrates, that he was down-to-earth. His was a great mind supported by feet of clay. And it is those muddy footsteps that I will follow. So this is not a philosophical, but a topographical map of the man.

  There are many reasons why Socrates’ story demands to be told. It is, at its most basic, an electric courtroom drama. The men of Athens vote to exterminate Socrates. They think he is a threat. He thinks he can save the soul of the city. Is this mob-rule, a political conspiracy, or the perfect example of the rule of the majority? Is Socrates’ story a tragedy or a useful staging post in the development of civilisation? Who is in the right?21 The story of Socrates also incarnates the tension between the freedom of the individual and the regulation of the community. His refusal to compromise ends in his death. It is for this reason that he is hailed as humanity’s first-recorded ideological martyr.

  Socrates’ life was spent in search of treasure, of an intimate understanding of humanity. And the combusting energy of that search drove him around the city of Athens. This book pursues the path he burned. His quest was to identify what place ‘the good’ might have in human society. We might not find that ultimate prize; Socrates himself was never sure that he had done so, and the only thing he seems to have been certain of was the futility of trying to find ‘real’ scientific explanations for everything in life. He thought it fruitless to stare at the skies and travel to the ends of the earth in order to catalogue the world, without learning to love it. Yet by inhabiting the Athens that raised him, we might just get a glimpse of the treasure-seeker: hot and cross sometimes, bad-tempered, self-absorbed, brilliant, dangerous, droll. Socrates never lost sight of his own temporality. The day he is condemned to death he declares: ‘I am, as Homer puts it, “not born of an oak or a rock”, but of human parents.’22 And so this books aims, physically, to inhabit Socrates’ Athens – not just as recorded and as promoted, but as lived and experienced.

  The city of Athens is Socrates. Nothing means more to Socrates than Athens, and, more importantly, than the Athenians within it. He tells one of his colleagues, Phaedrus, that his home, his world, is the city – a city full of people. For Socrates, people are his magnetic North: he loved them. Xenophon reports that his conversations ‘were always about human concerns. He dealt with questions such as how people please and displease the gods, what is the essence/purpose of beauty and ugliness, justice and injustice, prudence and moderation, courage and cowardice.’23 All his philosophy is drawn to understanding the being of men and women around him. This understanding, this consciousness of one’s own consciousness, is what Socrates calls the psyche – the life-breath or soul. And it is in the city of Athens, between the years 469 and 399 BC, that Socrates’ soul flits.

  My ambition is very simple: to re-enter the streets of Athens in real time. Not to revisit a Golden Age city, but to look at a real city-state that was forging a great political experiment and riveting a culture; a city that suffered war and plague as well as enjoying great triumphs. To inhabit a place that is at once absolutely recognisable and utterly strange. To breathe the air Socrates breathed. To meet democrats who pre-date democracy and philosophers who operate before the science of philosophy is born.

  This history is pathos. Socrates’ life and trial and death by hemlock are stories that Athens did not want fully told, but which we need to hear.

  THE DRAMATIC STORY OF SOCRATES – SOURCES AND APPROACH

  The words of Socrates survive and always will, although he wrote nothing and left no work or testament.

  Dio Chrysostom, On Socrates, 54, first century AD

  TRADITIONALLY WE MEET Socrates when a few of the key authors from antiquity, in particular Plato and Xenophon (both pro-Socrates) and Aristophanes (mixed), decide to open the door to him: but in that doorway there is always the screen of the authors’ opinions, their take on what they choose us to see. So, when we read the ‘words’ of Socrates, it is hard to tell whether these are his or another’s attitude, another’s philosophical enterprise.1

  There is a second challenge. Plato, Aristophanes and Xenophon – Socrates’ immediate or close contemporaries, men who are the fathers of Western philosophy, drama and chronicle – each deal with Socrates in a notably theatrical way.

  Plato writes as a dramatist, a frustrated playwright. In his work the ‘character’ of Socrates is – as all great theatrical characters are – essentially charismatic, articulate and, to some extent, fabricated. The dramatic persona is both amplified and collapsed, it is extra-articulate and two-dimensional. Plato’s Socratic Dialogues – crafted between twenty and forty years after Socrates died – are brilliantly constructed, designed to engage. Plato teases us and plays with us (he throws all the tricks of the entertainer into his work), which of course leaves us with the possibility that it is all just a fantasy. Xenophon is not much more help. Although more down-to-earth and literal, his hard-fact histories are communicated via animated, reported dialogue. Aristophanes, who satirises Socrates mercilessly, is not a biographer – he is a dramatist with a biting wit, he plays to the gallery; he strives to make his audience howl with laughter. Spend long enough with the Socratic texts from the fifth and fourth centuries BC and you feel as though you have sat through a series of ‘Socrates Shows’ – the TV docudrama, the West End, Hollywood and Broadway versions of a man’s life.2

&n
bsp; Yet these individuals, Socrates’ contemporary biographers,3 were not just showmen. They understood that drama can be an arterial route to truth. Socrates never wrote anything down, because, as he went about his philosophical business on the streets of fifth-century Athens, he believed in the honesty of joint-witnessing. For Plato to give Socrates a living voice in dialogue was as close as he could get to the original ‘Socratic’ experience.4 The detail in Plato’s work is conspicuous. We hear of the species of trees that shade Socrates, the birds he hears sing, the discomfort of the wooden benches he lies upon, the shoemakers he talks to, the hiccups he cures.

  If this detail were utterly inappropriate, or fanciful, Plato would have been laughed out of the Academy he set up in around 387 BC, and out of history. Plato, along with Xenophon and Aristophanes, wrote for their fifth- and fourth-century BC peers – for men who were contemporaries of Socrates, many of whom were intimately involved in the philosopher’s life and eyewitnesses to the events of the age. Downright lies just wouldn’t have washed.5

  Plato’s memory matters. As a species, we remember and often we think in pictures, not words. Our visual memories are more acute than our aural.6 In neuroscience these experiences are known as ‘episodic memories’ – vivid, patchy, but with a sensory quality that can be remarkably accurate. It is very likely that the physical setting that Plato provides for Socrates can be relied upon; the punchy, sensuous real-life scenarios he supplies are exactly the kinds of details that stick in the cortex. Add to that the fact that the Ancient Greeks invested in landscape in a way we can only begin to imagine: not only was visual stimulus, visual expression fundamental to society, but the world they saw was a place where spirits resided, a place full of signs and symbols. One begins to realise that the Platonic setting of ancient Athens was no mere convenient backdrop, but a four-dimensional landscape that Socrates, in real life as well as in Plato’s imagination, almost certainly, vigorously occupied.7

  Plato was perhaps over-compensating; doubtless some of those ‘Socratic’ sentiments were in fact his own – and so he gave us a virtual world, stocked with the real things that he and Socrates saw around them, copper-plating his own credibility as the historical Socrates’ mouthpiece. But Plato’s reputation now has archaeology on its side.8 His philosophies work on many levels, but the hard facts they contain were certainly not all a lie. Archaeological digs – each year – are substantiating and backing up in precise detail the picture of fifth-century Athens that Plato so skilfully and energetically painted just after Socrates’ death, 2,400 years ago. For the first time, for example, we can walk beside the narrow streets that lie under the new Acropolis Museum and across the Painted Stoa (a covered area or walkway) where Plato, as a young, impressionable man, sat and listened to Socrates speak. The ancient stones match Plato’s ancient words.9

  And so my attempt has been to re-create Socrates’ world.10 To follow the clues in Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes to the physical reality of fifth-century Athens and therefore the physical reality of the story of Socrates’ life. Through his dialogues Plato has given us the ‘play’ of Socrates’ life, and described the most appropriate scenery before which the character of Socrates should enter. It is that scenery, that setting, that is now turning up in digs across the city.

  The life of fifth-century Athens was itself, in essence, dramatic. Not only does Socrates’ life span seventy of the busiest, most wonderful and tragic years in Athenian history, but the Athenians did, physically, construct a backdrop of democratic ‘theatre’ in which to play out their lives – democratic buildings, scenery, speeches, statues, props, music to help make their new democracy feel real.

  Socrates will be best served not by Aristophanes’ pantomime Clouds, but by a solid stage to stand on, from which he can speak audibly and directly to us, his audience. To this end I have used the latest sources – archaeological, topographical, textual – to construct a life for a man we can all benefit from getting to know a little better.11

  DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

  Aristophanes

  ARISTOPHANES IS THE OLDEST OF OUR sources for Socrates. A comic playwright, over his forty-year career he attacked everything from beetle-dung to apparently serious politics. These onslaughts earned him enemies: among them was Cleon, a hard-line demagogue who argued for the destruction of the entire male population of Mytilene in 427 BC and again at Scione in 423 BC. Cleon pursued Aristophanes in the courts, and in return was ridiculed repeatedly until his death at the Battle of Amphipolis in 422 BC. Aristophanes would continue making scabrous jibes at politicians at all levels, and mild satire of the Athenian people in general. Another target was Socrates himself, who was turned into a figure of fun in Clouds. Comic licence makes it hard to determine how serious this character assassination was: Plato suggests that Aristophanes helped fuel the public distrust of Socrates,1 yet Aristophanes also features as an amiable dinner-companion of Socrates in Plato’s Symposium, which is set after Clouds was first performed. Despite the violence of his satire, Aristophanes survived the deadly series of revolutions and politically motivated assassinations that characterised the final years of the Peloponnesian War in Athens.2

  Aristophanes’ career started with The Banqueters in 427 BC. He composed at least forty plays of which only eleven survive – we know the names of seventeen. Clouds, in which Socrates figures prominently, was produced in 423 BC. Clouds was not successful, finishing in last place at the City Dionysia festival. The poet-playwright’s career continued until shortly before he died in 386 BC.

  WORKS

  Banqueters (427 BC); Babylonians (426); Acharnians (425); Knights (424); Clouds (423); Wasps (422); Peace (421); Amphiaraus (414); Birds (414); Lysistrata (411); Women at the Thesmophoria (411); a first Plutus (408); Frogs (405); Ecclesiazusae (391); a second Plutus (388); Cocalus and Aiolosikon (possible dates 387 BC and 386 BC3).

  Xenophon

  Xenophon’s life was spent in warfare. Born near the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, probably in Erchia, a rural deme of Athens,4 he would later write treatises on horsemanship from his estate near Olympia on the plains of the Peloponnese. Xenophon had probably served in the Athenian cavalry during the Peloponnesian War, and fought against the democratic insurgents in the Athenian civil war of 404/3 BC. After the democratic victory, Xenophon left Greece. He went to Anatolia to join the ‘Ten Thousand’, the Greek mercenary force supporting Cyrus the Younger’s attempt to usurp the Persian throne. Cyrus was killed at Cunaxa (near Babylon) in 401 BC, and the five Greek generals in command of the Ten Thousand were themselves murdered soon after; Xenophon’s star rose in their place, as he led the surviving Greeks on a dangerous and violent journey back to safety near Trapezus. It was during this period that Socrates was executed, and scholars are divided on how well the two men could have been acquainted.5 Xenophon continued as a mercenary, first in Thrace and then for the Spartans in Anatolia and mainland Greece. Exiled by Athens, but protected by the Spartans, he was set up on an estate at Skillus, where he wrote most of his works. After the Spartan defeat at Leuctra, Xenophon was expelled from his estate and, though now reconciled with Athens, lived out the rest of his years near Corinth. His son Gryllus was killed fighting in the Athenian cavalry close to Mantinea in 362 BC.

  XENOPHON’S WORKS MENTIONING SOCRATES, IN POSSIBLE ORDER OF COMPOSITION

  Apology (composed after 384 BC?); Memorabilia (commenced); Symposium (before 371?); Memorabilia (completed); Oeconomicus (completed after 362).

  Socrates also features in Xenophon’s Hellenica (not completed before 359–355 BC), a history of Greek affairs from 411 to 362 BC.6

  Plato

  Plato was in his late twenties when Socrates was executed in 399 BC. He had probably known Socrates for all of his adult life.7 Born some time around 428–423 BC, perhaps in Athens, into an aristocratic Athenian family, Plato was descended from Solon, who tradition claimed had brought democracy to the city.8 Plato’s uncle Critias headed the Thirty Tyrants, the murderous pro-Spartan faction th
at briefly controlled Athens after the end of the Peloponnesian War. Plato himself had been born in 428, not long after this war started. Growing up in the Athenian district of Cotyllus, he probably followed the normal educational path of a young aristocratic boy in poetry, music and gymnastics. He was a champion wrestler, almost certainly later serving in the Athenian military, presumably in the cavalry.9 After Socrates’ death, Plato’s life was nomadic and eventful. He spent time in Megara, Egypt and southern Italy, associating with tyrants in Sicily and even being sold into (and immediately ransomed from) slavery on the island of Aegina in 388/7 BC. Shortly afterwards he seems to have established the Academy in Athens, one of the most significant intellectual institutions in the history of the world. There men such as Aristotle met; they were not taught as such, but engaged in the long conversations that characterise Plato’s written output, and which Plato considered the necessary foundation-stone of all philosophical progress. Plato died in 348/7 BC.