Socrates — the life Athens ended for asking
Transcript
Bram: The first thing is the noise, and the noise is a hundred hammers. Not together. That is the thing about it — a hundred men cutting stone do not keep time, so it is not a beat, it is a kind of weather, a hard bright ringing rain that comes off the rock above the yard and never once stops from the moment the light is good enough to see the line you are cutting. I have a chisel in my left hand and a wooden mallet in my right and there is a block of white marble in front of me the size of a sheep, and my whole body knows — before I do — exactly how hard to hit. And above us, up the rock, there is a temple going up, and it is not white. Everybody thinks they were white. They were not white. The finished stone up there is painted — the beams that run along the top are barefaced blue, and the carved panels between them are red behind the figures, and there is gold, actual gold leaf, catching on the edges where a man on a swinging plank is working wax and colour into marble that was cut in this valley and dragged up there on sledges. It is the biggest, loudest, most expensive thing being made anywhere in the world, and it is being made out of the exact stone that is turning to dust in my teeth right now, and the dust is in everyone's teeth, all day, all summer. So my hands are busy and my mouth is full of the mountain, and that is why it takes me a moment to notice that the man has stopped working. Again. There is a man in this yard who will not cut the stone. He is the master's son, so nobody can send him off, and he is built like a man who would be very good at it — short, thick through the chest and the neck, a stonemason's whole body — and he has a chisel in his hand as often as any of us and then he simply stops, mid-stroke, and stands there, and starts asking somebody a question. Bare feet. One cloak, and not a good one. A face like a bad joke — the nose spread flat, the eyes too far apart and bulging a little, so that when he looks at you he looks like he is about to laugh, and half the time he is. This morning it is the master he has stopped. His own father. Who is trying to get an order of drum-sections finished for the foreman from the works, who is standing right there, waiting, with the light going.
Socrates: No, but you said good work, father. That's the word you used. You said this drum is good work and that one over there is not. So I'm asking what you saw. Because if I don't know what you saw, I can only copy the drum, I can't cut a good one myself.
Sophroniskos: I saw a true edge and a clean flute and no chip on the astragal. Now pick up your mallet.
Socrates: But a man could have all of that and still have cut a bad drum. Couldn't he? If the stone had a fault in it he didn't read. So it isn't the edge and the flute you're really looking at — those are only where you look. What you actually know is something underneath the edge and the flute. And I want that. Because that's the thing worth having, and the edge you can teach a boy in a month.
Bram: And the foreman from the works — a big man, a man with a hundred and fifty stonecutters under him and a temple to raise before the money runs out — the foreman laughs. Short. Not kindly.
The_foreman: Sophroniskos, your boy's going to talk himself out of a trade.
Bram: And I have stopped cutting. Everyone near me has stopped cutting, because the master's face has gone the colour of the inside of a fig, and when the master's face does that somebody's afternoon is about to become very bad, and the somebody is usually the nearest apprentice, and this morning the nearest apprentice is me. And here is the strange part. The son sees it. He sees his father's face and he sees me — sixteen years old, marble to the elbows, trying to disappear into a block of stone — and he does the thing I will learn, much later and in another life, that he does to everyone: he takes it off me. He turns the whole weight of the yard back onto himself.
Socrates: You're right. I'm sorry. It's a fault in me, not in the drum. — Here, give me the order, I'll cut the lot before dark and you can dock it off me if a single one's short.
Bram: And he does. He picks up the mallet and he cuts, and he is fast and he is good, better than good, and the question just — goes into him, the way water goes into dry stone, and you can see it is still in there, going round, while his hands do perfect work he does not care about. I get my afternoon back. I am not beaten. The temple goes up another few inches over our heads, blue and red and gold, paid for by an empire I have never seen and never will, and the dust comes down on all of us equally, the men who will be forgotten and the one who won't. And it lands on me the way it always does, four minutes late — the who and the where and the when. I am sixteen. I have a chisel in my hand and a mountain in my mouth, and it is somewhere near the start of the most brilliant forty years any city has ever had, in a place that is about to invent almost everything you think you thought of yourself. And the man who would not cut the stone, the master's son with the terrible face and the question he can't put down — in exactly seventy years, that man is going to be the most famous person this city ever produced, and this city is going to kill him for it. His name is Socrates. Stay with me. You have never met him. You only think you have. This is Chronicles — history, lived from the inside. Not the dates and the names cut into the monument, but the morning it actually happened, close enough to touch. We drop you into the room where the world turned, and we make you feel why it still matters now. And there's only one honest way in: to actually be there, in a body, on the day. So one traveller goes where the rest of us can't — the same soul, life after life, moving through all of history, waking inside someone who was really there. I'm the Traveller. Episode fourteen. The Life Athens Ended For Asking — seventy years, one city, and a cup you already know about and a life you don't. Here is the thing everybody knows about Socrates, and it is the last hour of his life. An old man, a cup of poison, a room of weeping friends, the cold climbing his legs while he says something calm and clever. That is the picture. It is on the walls of museums. And it is the very end of a story that is seventy years long, and almost nobody has ever been told the other sixty-nine. So let me put you down at the start of it, and give you the ground to stand on. He was born in Athens around the year 470 before the common era — call it two and a half thousand years ago — the son of a stonemason called Sophroniskos and a woman called Phainarete. And the accident of his birth is that he was exactly the right age to grow up inside the best forty years any Greek city ever had. Because just before he was born, the Greeks had done the impossible: they had beaten the Persian empire, the largest power on earth, twice — once at Marathon and once, ten years later, at sea off an island called Salamis, a name you should hold on to, because it comes back at the worst possible moment near the end. And Athens had led the winning side at sea. So when the war was over, the Greek cities formed an alliance against Persia and put Athens in charge of the treasury, and over the next fifty years Athens quietly turned that alliance into an empire — a hundred and fifty, two hundred, three hundred cities, all paying tribute, and the tribute all flowing to one place. And in the year 454, Athens moved the treasury of the whole alliance from the island where it had sat, to Athens. To keep it safe, they said. And then they spent a great deal of it on the rock in the middle of their city — the Acropolis — and put up the building you have a picture of in your head right now, the one with the columns. The Parthenon. Painted, when it was new, in colour you would find gaudy. It went up between about 447 and 432, which means a stonemason's son of exactly the right age spent his whole young manhood underneath the single most ambitious building project in the Greek world. And here is what they were building underneath, besides a temple. They were building the most radical idea about power anyone had tried. They called it demokratia — rule by the demos, the people, meaning the adult male citizens, which is a much smaller club than "people" and we will come back to that. But inside that club it was real, and it was direct in a way nothing you have lived under is direct. There was no president. There was barely a government. Any citizen who turned up at the hill called the Pnyx could stand and speak and vote on war and peace and money. The council that ran the day-to-day was chosen by lottery — you could be pulled out of a crowd to help govern the city. And the juries were the same: hundreds of ordinary men, drawn by lot, paid a few coins for the day, deciding cases with no judge and no lawyers and no appeal. Hold that thought, too. That jury is going to kill him. And they invented the theatre — our theatre, comedy and tragedy both — and packed most of the citizen body onto a hillside once a year to watch plays that mocked living politicians by name, to their faces, while they sat there. A city that could laugh at itself in public, on purpose, as a festival. Below the shining rock, mind you, the city itself was a slum. Mud-brick houses, no plan, unpaved lanes, open drains, the smell of a place where a quarter of a million people and their animals live close in the heat. The glory was on the hilltop and the tribute paid for it; the living was down in the dust, and that is where he did all his work, because he never went up onto the rock to pray and he never sat down to write. He had no school. He had no fee. He had no book. He just stood in that dusty square and stopped people and asked them what they meant, for fifty years, until they killed him for it. So that is the ground. A young empire at its dazzling height, a democracy prouder and freer and more direct than any before it, a building programme you could see from the sea — and, walking around in the dust underneath it with the wrong face and no shoes, a man who is going to spend his life asking whether any of these magnificent people can actually explain what they are so sure of. It goes wrong. All of it. And it starts, as these things do, with a friend of his doing something helpful. I have walked here. That is the first thing this body wants me to know — that the legs are tired in a proud way, that we have come a very long way on foot to ask one question, and that we would walk it again tomorrow. I am thin, and pale, and my heart is going far too fast for a man standing still, and I have the specific joy of somebody who is about to do something slightly impertinent and get away with it. Delphi. Halfway up a mountain, with the whole world falling away below in blue haze, and a smell of burning bay-leaves and old smoke coming out of the ground. This is the centre of the earth — they will tell you a stone here marks the exact middle — and it is where the god Apollo answers questions, through a woman, in verse, and everyone from kings down has come up this road to ask, and been careful about it, because the god is famous for answering the question you asked instead of the question you meant. I have paid. There is a procedure — a cake, a fee, a goat that has to shiver the right way when the water hits it or the god is not receiving today. The goat shivered. And now I am inside, in the dark part, and there is the woman on her seat over the crack in the rock, and the smoke, and I ask the thing I have carried up a mountain to ask, and it is not about me, which is the part I am proud of.
Chaerephon: Is any man wiser than Socrates?
Bram: And she answers. And the answer is short, and it is not a riddle, which frightens me more than a riddle would.
The_pythia: No one is wiser.
Bram: No one. No one is wiser than Socrates. My friend. The stonemason's son with the flat nose who makes his living — makes no living — standing in the agora being a nuisance. The god of the middle of the earth has just said that no man alive is wiser than him. I could carry this news for a hundred years. I run down the mountain. I genuinely run. And I find him where he always is, in the square, in the dust, mid-argument with some poor man about the difference between being brave and being reckless, and I can't even wait for him to finish, I just say it.
Chaerephon: Socrates. Socrates. I asked the god. At Delphi. I asked whether any man was wiser than you, and the priestess said — no one. No one is wiser. Do you hear me? The god said it.
Bram: And he goes still. Not pleased. Not the way any human being I have ever met goes when they are handed the best possible thing said about them by the highest possible authority. He goes still the way he goes still when somebody has said something that is wrong and he can't yet see how.
Socrates: That can't be right.
Chaerephon: It's the god, Socrates. It's not me. You can't argue with the god.
Socrates: I'm not arguing with the god. I wouldn't dare. But I know one thing for certain, Chaerephon, and it is that I am not wise. I know almost nothing. So the god has said a thing that I know to be untrue, and the god does not lie. Which means the god has said something I don't understand yet. Which means — oh. Oh, that's not a compliment at all, is it. That's a job.
Bram: And I have just watched it happen, and I will spend the rest of my life wishing I had asked about the weather. Because he does not take it as praise, and he does not let it go. He decides the god has set him a puzzle: to go and find one man — a politician, a poet, a craftsman, anyone — who is actually wise, who can actually defend the thing he claims to know. And if he finds one, the puzzle is solved and the god was speaking plainly. And so he starts going round. And he never finds one. Not one. He goes to the men everyone calls wise and he asks them to explain what they are certain of, gently, one question at a time, and every single time the thing comes apart in their hands, in public, in front of the young men who follow him around because watching this happen is the best entertainment in Athens. And what he decides, at the end of it, is the most annoying possible conclusion: that the god meant he was the wisest man only in this — that he alone knew that he knew nothing, and everyone else was carrying around a confidence they hadn't earned. I brought him that. I climbed a mountain and I brought my best friend the one sentence that would turn every important man in Athens into his enemy, one dismantled certainty at a time, over fifty years, and I handed it to him like a gift. He's dead now. So am I, by the time it matters. But if you want to know where it started — the whole thing, the trial, the cup, all of it — it started with me, running down a mountain, delighted. I love him already, and I want you to, because it is going to matter enormously later that you do. But I also want to be fair to the people who came to hate him, because they were not fools and they were not monsters, and the easiest, laziest, worst version of this story is the one where a beautiful genius is murdered by a stupid mob. That is not what happened. So let me show you the thing he did, from the outside, the way his neighbours saw it. He would stop you in the street. A real person, going about your day — a general, a poet, a rich young man, a priest — and he would ask you, with enormous courtesy, to explain something you used all the time and had never once examined. What is courage. What is piety. What makes a law just. And you would answer, because of course you knew, everyone knew — and he would say, yes, but, and ask one more question, and then one more, each of them polite, each of them reasonable, and somewhere around the fourth or fifth the thing you were certain of would fall over, in the street, in front of a grinning crowd of teenagers, and you would be standing there having discovered in public that you could not defend your own life. Now. Some people found that the most exhilarating thing that had ever happened to them and followed him for the rest of his life. And some people — powerful people, people with reputations, people whose sons were in that grinning crowd — found it something else entirely. He thought he was performing a service. He genuinely did. He thought a life you couldn't explain wasn't worth living, and that helping a man see he was confused was a kindness, the way pointing out a fever is a kindness. And he could not, or would not, see that when you do that to a proud man in front of his own city, you are not being kind. You are making an enemy who will wait. And Athens was about to give those enemies something they had never had before: a reason. Because the golden age I just showed you — the temple, the empire, the theatre — was about to spend itself, in a single catastrophic war, over twenty-seven years, and drag every certainty in the city down into the dust with it. And the first thing the war does, before a single battle Socrates is in, is send a sickness through a city that has locked itself behind its own walls. Come and see. Bring nothing. There's nothing you can do. The city is the wrong quiet. That is the first thing, and this body flinches at it — because this body knows exactly how loud this street should be at this hour, and it isn't, and a street that has lost its noise is a street that has lost its people. I am a woman, which I notice at once, because the world arrives differently — lower, and to the side, and with a bag in my hand that is heavier than it looks. I am young, and I am apprenticed to a midwife, and my hands know things my head is only catching up to: how to press a belly and read what's inside, how to turn a child, how to stop a bleed with a fist and a prayer and the exact right cloth. It is the summer of 430, and the war is two years old, and Athens has done a clever, terrible thing. The general Pericles decided the city could not beat Sparta on land, so he pulled everyone inside — the whole countryside, the farmers, the families, the animals, all of it, in behind the long walls that run down to the sea, and he let the enemy burn the fields, and he fed the city by ship. And it worked. And then a sickness came up through the port, into a city with three times the people it was built for, packed into every yard and lane and gap, in the heat, with the drains already failing. And it is in this house. I can smell it from the door — a smell every person who lives through this summer will carry to their own death and none of them will ever be able to describe it to you, and I won't try. There is a man in the front room and he is dead, and he has been dead a day, and nobody has moved him because the people who would move him are the problem: the ones who go near the dead catch it, and the ones who catch it mostly die, and everyone has learned this, so the dead lie where they fall. And in the back room there is his wife, and she is not dead, she is in labour.
The_midwife: In. Don't touch the walls, don't touch him, come straight through. She's early and she's frightened and the fright's the worst of it. — You. Girl. Hands.
Bram: And I go in, and I put my hands where they are needed, and I do the work, and I am not going to describe that either, except to say that it goes on a long time and that the woman is very brave in the way people are brave when bravery has stopped being a choice.
The_labouring_woman: Is he — through there. Is my husband —
The_midwife: You do the one thing. You hear me? You do this one thing and let me do the rest. Push.
Bram: And there is a neighbour in the doorway, an older woman, who will not come in, who is holding the frame with both hands as if the house might tip, and she is saying the thing everybody is saying that summer, over and over, under her breath, like counting.
A_neighbour: What did we do. What did we do to be given this. What did any of us do.
Bram: And I want to answer her, and I can't, because I have worked it out, somewhere around the third street this morning, and there is nowhere to put it. We didn't do anything. That's the thing. That's the whole unbearable thing about this summer. I have been in the houses of good people and wicked people, people who kept every festival and people who kept none, the pious and the impious, the ones who gave to the gods and the ones who laughed at them — and it takes them exactly the same. In the same street. In the same week. A priest and a thief, the same fever, the same spots, the same three days. There is no pattern. Nobody is being punished, because if this were punishment it would at least have found the guilty, and it hasn't, it has just come in off the sea and taken a third of the city the way weather takes a field. And I get the child out alive. I do. A girl, furious and breathing, and I put her on her mother's chest, and for about the length of one breath the room is only the ordinary miracle and not the other thing. And then I have to tell the mother about the front room, and I do, and she already knew. The midwife told me, walking out, that Pericles himself died of it the next year — the great man, the man who built the temple and moved the treasury and pulled us all in behind the walls — died of the same fever as the man in the front room, in the same city, and it did not care that he was Pericles any more than it cared that the other man was nobody. Between a quarter and a third of everyone was dead by the end of it. And here is what a city learns, in a summer like that, and never fully unlearns. It learns that the gods are not watching. Or that if they are, they are not sorting the good from the bad, which for a practical people comes to the same thing. And once a city has learned that the sky is empty and nobody is keeping the ledger, it becomes capable of things it could not have done before. Not that summer. But later. When the war has gone on too long, and there is a junta, and a jury, and an old man who says a private god still talks to him — this is the city that will be listening. A city that already found out, in one terrible summer, that shame doesn't stop anything. Here is the fact that gets left out of every single telling of this man, and it is my favourite, because it is so completely at odds with the picture in your head. The barefoot old talker in the marketplace, the man of pure mind — he was a soldier. A front-rank heavy-infantry soldier, three times, in a war, and by the account of the men who served with him he was frightening. Not a general. A man in the line. In Athens you served if you could afford the kit, and the kit was about seventy pounds of bronze you bought yourself — a helmet, a shield, a spear — so the army was the middling men, the farmers and the craftsmen, and a stonemason's son with a strong back was exactly it. He fought at a siege called Potidaea when he was about thirty-eight, and there is a story from it that tells you everything: in the fighting he stood over a wounded young man and kept him alive, and afterwards, when the commanders wanted to give Socrates the prize for valour, he told them to give it to the boy instead. The boy was beautiful, and rich, and about eighteen, and his name was Alcibiades, and hold on to him, because he is going to grow up to be the most gifted and most destructive man in Greece, and the reason, thirty years on, that this old soldier ends up on trial. But the campaign that matters for what I want you to feel is the next one. Eight years later, at a place called Delium, where for once the disciplined thing did not hold, and the line broke, and the Athenians ran. And running, in this kind of war, is not the safe thing. Running is where you die. Come and stand in the file and I'll show you why. You cannot hear. That is the first thing nobody tells you about being inside the bronze — you put the helmet down over your face and the world goes to a hum and a slot. I can see a strip of the world the width of two fingers and I can hear my own breath like a man drowning, and everything else — the orders, the other army, my own side — comes to me late and wrong, through metal. I am in the fourth rank of a block of men eight deep, and my shield is on my left arm and it does not cover me. That is the thing you learn first and never forget: the shield is wide, and half of it hangs out past your left side and covers the man on your left. So the man on my right is covering me, with the half of his shield I can't see, and I am covering the man on my left, and that is what the line is — not a row of soldiers, a row of promises. If I run, the man on my left dies. If he runs, I die. It only works if nobody breaks. And today, at Delium, somebody breaks. I don't even see how it starts, because I can't see anything, but I feel it — the shove that has been holding us up all suddenly stops shoving back, and there is a gap where a man should be, and light where there should be a shield, and then the whole thing that was a wall is a crowd, and a crowd running, and I am running with it because your legs go before your mind does.
The_file_leader: Hold — HOLD — you're throwing your shields away, you're —
Bram: Nobody holds. We are throwing our shields away — that is the thing you do, you drop the heavy thing so you can run faster, and every dropped shield is a man who has decided to save himself and let the line die — and I have not dropped mine only because the strap is caught, and I am grateful for the strap, because it is the one thing keeping me a man and not a rabbit.
A_young_hoplite: They're on us — the horse — they've sent the horse —
Bram: And that is the death. Not the battle. The horse. When a line breaks, the enemy sends the cavalry after the runners, and a running man with his back turned and his shield gone is nothing, he is a rabbit in a field, and they ride him down and put a spear through him from behind and never slow the horse. I can hear it now, the hooves coming into the hum, and I am running and I am going to die running, and that is the worst of it, that it will be in the back. And then I see him. And he is not running. There is a man off to my right, in the wreck of the line, and he is walking. Thick through the body, older, on foot, and he has kept his shield, and he is going backward and sideways across the field at a walk, facing the enemy, in no hurry at all, and every few steps he stops and turns the shield and looks at the horsemen the way you look at a dog you have decided not to be afraid of. And — this is the thing I will tell my sons — the horsemen leave him alone. They go past him. They take the running men, the easy men, and they look at this one squarely walking figure who is plainly ready to put a spear through the first horse that comes in, and they decide he is too much trouble, and they go and kill somebody cheaper. There is a moment the sword comes out — the spear's gone or broken, I never see which, and he draws the short sword, the blade too short for anything but a man right on top of him, and he holds it low and steady and waits — and a rider swerves off him at the last stride, the steel never touches anyone, and the man just — resets. Squares up. Keeps walking. And there is a young man on a horse of our side — one of the few Athenians still mounted, wheeling back into the rout instead of out of it, which no sane man does — and he comes past the walking man and shouts down at him, and I know the voice before I know the face, everybody in Athens knows that voice.
Alcibiades: Socrates! On me — take the horse's tail, I'll walk you out —
Socrates: Go on, Alcibiades. Take that boy up behind you, he's bleeding. I'm perfectly comfortable.
Bram: Perfectly comfortable. On a broken field, with the cavalry working through the runners fifty feet away, a man declines a ride because there is somebody who needs it more, and calls it comfort. I lived. I want to say that plainly, because I have made this sound like a story about him and it was, for me, the day I found out what I was — which was a man who runs. I am not ashamed of it, quite. Almost everybody ran. The line broke and running was sensible and I have three children because I ran. But I saw, that afternoon, the difference between the courage you talk about at a fire and the courage that is just a thing a man is, all the way down, when the metal is over his face and nobody would ever know if he ran — and I only saw it because one man in a broken army didn't have the other kind, the kind you can spend. He only had the kind you are. It cost him nothing to keep his shield, because keeping it was not a decision. That is what I could never work out afterward, and never got the chance to ask him. Whether it cost him nothing. Or whether he'd simply been paying it so long he'd stopped noticing the bill. So he is brave, and he is honest, and he is kind to a fault on a battlefield, and you are wondering how a man like that ends up with enough enemies to kill him. Here is the first big reason, and it's a case of mistaken identity that lasted his whole life. There was a new profession in Athens, and people hated it and needed it in equal measure. They were called sophists — travelling teachers who, for very large sums of money, would teach you to argue. Not to be right — to win. To take any side of any question and make it sound convincing to a crowd, which in a city where every law and every war was decided by a show of hands to a mass meeting was the single most valuable skill there was, and also, obviously, a kind of poison, because it quietly separated winning an argument from being correct. One of them, Protagoras, is said to have charged, for a full course, something on the order of a skilled man's lifetime earnings. And from the street — from a distance, if you weren't listening closely — Socrates looked exactly like one of them. He argued in public. He attracted rich young men who hung on it. He made respected people look foolish. If you walked past the edge of the crowd you could not tell the difference between the man selling the trick of winning and the man giving away, for nothing, the harder skill of finding out you were wrong. He was the opposite of a sophist in the one way that mattered — no fee, no doctrine, no school, and he died poor — and most of Athens could not tell. And then, one spring, the confusion got the biggest possible stage. Because the funniest man in Athens wrote a comedy about him, and put it on in front of the entire city, and I want you to be sitting in exactly the wrong seat when it happens. His seat. I know at once that I am him, because of the feet. I have woken into a lot of bodies and they all take a moment, but this one announces itself: the feet are bare on packed earth that has been baking since dawn and they do not mind, the skin gone to horn, and there is one cloak and it is the wrong side of clean, and the body underneath it is thick and easy and about fifty and entirely unbothered by being looked at — which, I am about to learn, is a thing it only believes about itself. It is the theatre festival, the Dionysia, and there are — I stop counting — thousands of people on the hillside, the whole city, packed on the banked earth from the bottom to the sky, and it is a holiday, and there is wine going round, and down on the round floor at the bottom a play is happening, and the play is about me. Not a man like me. Me. By name. There is an actor down there in a mask, and the mask has my nose, my ridiculous flat nose, made bigger, and he is playing a character called Socrates who runs a school — a school, with a fee, everything I am not — a school where he teaches young men how to win a lawsuit by making the weaker argument beat the stronger, which is the exact thing the sophists sell and the exact thing I have spent my life arguing is a disease. And here is the genius of it, and I can feel myself appreciating it even as it skins me: it is funny. It is really, properly funny. They have got me hung up in a basket —
The_actor: I am walking on air, and contemplating the sun! For the earth, do you see, drags down the moist thought into itself — exactly as it does with watercress!
Bram: — and the whole hill goes up. Ten thousand people. It comes in a wave from the top, a wall of laughter, and it is the specific sound of a crowd laughing at a person, which I have made other people stand inside and have never once stood inside myself, and I understand in this instant, in my stomach, that it is a completely different thing from the inside. Because the man next to me is laughing. He doesn't know it's me. Why would he — he's looking at the stage.
A_neighbour: Oh, that's him to the life, isn't it — that's the one that stands about in the agora, the barefoot one, measures how far a flea can jump. My boy heard him talking last month. Came home with his head full of it and no use to anyone since.
Bram: Measures how far a flea can jump. I have never measured a flea in my life. But I can hear it becoming true as he says it — I can feel the version of me being poured into ten thousand heads at once, all around me, in one afternoon, and it is a version I cannot get at. This is the thing I do to other people, and I have always thought of it as a gift: I take the thing they believe and I hold it up and I turn it until they see it isn't solid. And I have never noticed, until right now, wedged on a hillside between two laughing strangers, that when it is done to you there is no answer to it — because it isn't an argument. It's a picture. You can't cross-examine a picture. You can only sit there and have the wrong face.
Chaerephon: Socrates. Socrates, sit down — don't. Everyone can see you. Sitting up like that just gives them somewhere to point.
Socrates: I'm not going to hide from a joke, Chaerephon. If a man's told a truth about me I should thank him for it. And if he's told a lie, I should be able to sit here and let everyone see that it's a lie.
Chaerephon: And can they? See that it's a lie?
Bram: And I don't answer him, because the honest answer is no. They can't. That is the whole terror of it. Not one person on this hill is going to walk down and cross-examine the playwright. They are going to walk home having had a wonderful afternoon, and the wonderful afternoon is now the thing they know about me, and it will sit in them — I have no way of knowing this and I know it anyway, cold, all the way through — for twenty-four years, until a jury of these exact people, older, sits in a court and finds that they already know who I am, because a comedian told them, on a holiday, when they were young and happy and I was sitting three rows away making sure my face was doing the right thing. So I do the only thing there is to do. When the people near me work out that the man from the play is sitting right there, and the heads start turning, I stand up. All the way up, so they can all see me, and I hold my arms out a little, beside the mask on the stage that is pretending to be me, as if to say — well? Which of us is the better likeness? And they laugh. And it is a kinder laugh, a laugh that is with me and not only at me, and it is the best I can do, and it is a good joke, and I am pleased with it. And it is not enough. And I know it is not enough. And I keep my face doing the right thing the whole long walk home. I want to take you to a party now, and to do that I have to tell you a little about how men in Athens loved each other, because it is not our shape and I don't want you to trip on it. The centre of a certain kind of Athenian life was the symposium — a drinking party, men only, reclining on couches in a lamplit room, the wine watered and mixed in a great bowl, a hired girl to play the pipes, and talk that went until the lamps burned down. And woven all through it was something we don't have a clean word for: an accepted, public, rule-bound intensity between older men and beautiful younger ones — desire, and mentorship, and status, all tangled together, and argued about, and worried over, by the Athenians themselves as much as by anyone since. And the most beautiful young man in the city, the one every older man watched, was the boy from the battlefield — Alcibiades, grown up now, rich, brilliant, impossible, wearing the whole city's attention like a cloak he'd been born in. And there was exactly one man in Athens who had that attention to give and withheld it. You can guess who. Come to Agathon's house, in the year 416. There is a party, and there is a latecomer at the door, and he is very drunk, and he is about to say, in front of everyone, the truest thing anyone ever said about Socrates — and the most damaging, though nobody in the room hears the damage yet. The room is close and gold. That is the body's first report — the couches in a horseshoe, the low fire, the lamps, seven or eight men reclining two to a couch with the wine going round, and I am young, and near the door, and a little drunk, and happy the way you are happy when you are twenty and in the best room in the city and nobody has asked you to say anything clever yet. The pipe-girl has been sent out. That happens at a certain point — the host sends the flute-girl away so the men can talk properly, and I notice her go, because somebody should, and nobody else does. And Socrates is here, on the best couch, and he has been talking, and the talk has been about love, of all things — what it is, what it's for — and he has just finished saying something that turned the whole subject inside out, and the room is in that particular silence a room gets when a man has said a true thing, when there is a crash at the door. And Alcibiades comes in. Drunk, garlanded, leaning on a girl and a couple of friends, ribbons in his hair, and the whole room lights up because of course it does, he is the most beautiful man in Greece and he has arrived, and he wants to crown the host with his ribbons —
Alcibiades: Agathon! Where's Agathon — I've come to crown the cleverest and handsomest — no, don't get up —
Bram: — and he's got the ribbons half off his own head and onto Agathon's, laughing, and then he sees who Agathon is sharing the couch with. And he stops. And the whole performance goes out of him at once, like a lamp in a draught, and what is under it is not funny at all.
Alcibiades: Oh. You. Of course. Of course he's here. You lie in wait for me, do you know that? You always turn up exactly where a man is trying to enjoy himself.
Socrates: Agathon, protect me. This man's affection has become a serious danger to me. Ever since I admired him he won't let me look at another soul — he's jealous, he makes scenes, he very nearly comes to blows. Please keep the peace between us.
Bram: And Alcibiades laughs, but it doesn't reach anywhere, and then he does a reckless thing, the thing drunk men do when a wound is close to the surface: he decides to open it himself, in public, before anyone else can.
Alcibiades: No. No, let me — I want to tell you all about him. I want to tell you what this man did to me, because you all think you know him, and you don't. You think he's this — harmless. Ugly old fellow, funny in the market. Let me tell you what's inside.
Bram: And he tells them. And the room goes very still, because he tells them everything. He tells them that when he was young — the most sought-after boy in Athens, a boy who had only ever had to allow things to happen — he decided he wanted Socrates. Wanted to be wanted by the one man who seemed not to want him, because that refusal was the only interesting thing left in a world that gave him everything. So he engineered it. Got them alone. Sent the attendants away. And when nothing happened, he arranged to wrestle with him at the gymnasium, and still nothing. And at last, one night, he says — and he says it flatly, looking at the fire, not at us — he had Socrates to dinner, and kept him late, and made up a bed, and in the dark he got up and lay down under the old man's worn cloak, and put his arms around him, and made, in as many words, the offer that no one in the history of Athens had ever refused him. And Socrates talked to him. Kindly. All night. And in the morning Alcibiades got up having been, he says — and here the whole beautiful ruined face does something I can't watch — having been treated, by the ugliest man in Athens, exactly as a decent man treats the son of a friend. And nothing more. And he has never in his life recovered from it.
Alcibiades: I got up as if I'd slept next to my father. Do you understand? I, who — everyone — and he made me feel ashamed. He is the only person alive who has ever made me feel ashamed of the way I live. And I hate him for it and I would die for him and I cannot be in a room with him and I cannot stay away, and you should all be warned, because he does it to everyone. He makes you see the thing about yourself you were getting along fine without seeing.
Bram: And there is a silence. And then Socrates does the cruellest kind thing, which is to turn it back into talk — to say something dry about Alcibiades wanting to come between him and Agathon, so the room can laugh and breathe and stop looking at the open wound in the middle of it. And I lie there, twenty years old and sobering fast, and I understand two things at once that I will not be able to put together for years. One is that I have just watched the most enviable man in the world tell a room that the best thing that ever happened to him was being turned down, and mean it. And the other — the one that goes cold in me later — is that everyone here will remember this. That Alcibiades stood up and told Athens that Socrates got inside him and changed him and he could never get free. And that one day, when Alcibiades has done the thing he is going to do to this city, somebody is going to remember that the old man got inside him first. And then Alcibiades does the thing. The very next year, 415, he stands up in the assembly and talks Athens into the biggest gamble any Greek city ever made: an invasion of Sicily, a rich island a very long way away, that had done them no particular harm. The largest fleet ever sent out by a Greek state. And then, with the fleet barely gone, his enemies have him recalled to stand trial over a religious scandal — somebody had gone round the city in the night smashing the sacred statues, and his name got attached to it — and rather than come home to that, he jumps ship, and defects. To Sparta. The enemy. And tells them, precisely, how to beat Athens: fortify a permanent fort inside Athenian territory, and send a good commander to Sicily. Both things are done. Both work. By 413 the Sicilian expedition is a catastrophe beyond anything in Greek memory. The whole fleet, the whole army, gone — the survivors packed into stone quarries to die of sun and thirst and each other. The most beautiful young man in Athens has, in the space of two years, argued his city into its worst disaster and then shown its enemy how to finish the job. That is the pupil. That is what Socrates' most famous companion grows up to be. And it is not even the end of the fall. Come down to the harbour — the same harbour the fleet sailed from, cheering — and I'll show you the two ends of an empire in one place. First, the glory, because you have to feel the height to feel the fall. It is 415, the morning the fleet sails for Sicily, and I am on the quay, and I belong to a man who owns one of the warships, which is to say I am not a man at all in the eyes of the law, I am a pair of hands that can load a trireme without tipping it, and I am very good at it, and no one has ever asked me anything else. And it is the most beautiful and most terrible thing I have ever seen. A hundred and thirty ships and more, low and lean, three banks of oars each, a bronze ram at every waterline and an eye painted at every bow, and the whole city has come down to the water to see them go. And when the trumpet sounds, every ship at once pours a libation to the gods — but not with clay cups, not today. Today the officers pour it from cups of silver and gold, wine going into the sea off a hundred and thirty decks at once, the whole harbour bright with it, and the crowd singing, and the ships going out past the moles into the open water.
The_trierarch: Pour it all. Every drop. Let the god see we're not stingy with him today of all days.
Bram: And I stand on the emptying quay holding a coil of rope that is suddenly not needed by anyone, and I think the one thought a man in my position is free to think, because I am not going, because slaves don't sail to glory: that is everything this city has. All of it. Its money and its young men and its ships and its luck, and it is rowing out of the harbour, all at once, on a bet. Now come forward. Eleven years. The gold went into the sea and never came back — the fleet died at Sicily, and what Athens built to replace it died at a place called Aigospotamoi, caught on a beach with the men ashore getting water, the last fleet of the empire taken almost without a fight. And then the city starved behind its walls until it surrendered, and the terms of the surrender are why I am standing here, in 404, with a crowbar in my hands that I have been paid — well paid, better than I've been paid in a year — to use on my own city's walls. Because that is the term. Sparta did not burn Athens. Sparta made Athens pull down its own Long Walls — the walls that made it an island, that made it an empire — with its own hands. And they have made it a party. There are flute-girls playing, up on the broken course, because somebody among the victors decided the day the great walls came down should have music, and the pipes go on and on while we lever the blocks off and they go over with that deep wrong boom you feel through your feet before you hear it.
A_fellow_labourer: My grandfather set these. You know that? Set this very course, he told me, when I was a boy. And here's me taking his wage to pull it down again. Same family, same wall, both ways.
A_spartan_officer: Keep the rhythm to the pipes. It goes quicker to the pipes.
Bram: And I keep the rhythm to the pipes, because I want the wage, and I hate myself for wanting it, and both of those are true and neither of them stops my hands. A whole labouring line of us, pulling down the greatest thing our fathers made, in time to a tune, for a day's pay. This is the bottom. I want you to sit in it a moment before we climb out, because everything left in this story happens down here, in the wreck. The empire is gone. The fleet is gone. A third of the people died in the plague and more in the war, and the walls are coming down to music. And a city that has been brought this low, that has been hollowed out and humiliated and taught twice over that nothing is watching — that city is about to be handed to thirty men who have decided that what went wrong was too much freedom. And one of the thirty is a man who used to sit and listen to Socrates. The Spartans installed a junta. Thirty men, to write a new constitution, they said — and instead they ran a terror. In eight months they killed something like fifteen hundred Athenian citizens, without trial, and drove thousands more into exile, and took their property. Fifteen hundred. In a city you could walk across in an hour, in less time than a baby takes to learn to walk. And the leader of them, the cleverest and the coldest, was a man called Critias — a poet, an aristocrat, a genuinely gifted writer — who had, years before, been one of the young men around Socrates. Not a pupil exactly; Socrates had no pupils, he had no school. But he had been there, in the crowd, listening. And so had Alcibiades, who wrecked the fleet. Two of the men who did the most damage to Athens in a generation had both come out of the same company — the barefoot old man's company — and everyone knew it, and it sat there, unspoken, waiting. And I need you to understand one word before we go on, because it is half of what he is going to be killed for, and it is not what you think. The word is asebeia — impiety. Now, Athenian religion had no book, no creed, nothing you had to believe. It was something you did — the festivals, the sacrifices, the shared oaths — and doing it was how the city stayed on good terms with powers that could send a plague or lose you a war. So impiety wasn't having the wrong opinion about the gods. It was closer to sabotage — refusing to do your part of the thing that kept everyone safe. In a city that had just watched everything fall apart, a man who said he took his orders from a private divine voice of his own, that only he could hear — that man was not an eccentric. He was a risk. And while the Thirty are still in power, before any trial, they give that man an order. And what he does with it is the finest thing he ever did, and I am going to let you watch it from the point of view of a man who did the opposite — because that is the only way you will feel what it cost. There are five of us, and we have been sent for, and being sent for by the Thirty is the thing everyone in Athens now goes to sleep afraid of. I am a solid man, a reliable man, the kind you can give a job to, and I have kept my head down for eight months while they killed people I knew, and it has worked, I am alive, and now they have sent for me, and I understand as I walk in that keeping my head down has just run out. The room is the Tholos — the round house where the city's standing committee eats, a cold stone drum of a room with a fire that isn't warming it, and there are armed men at the door, and there is a member of the Thirty at a table with the list, and the five of us stand in a little clump not looking at …