Later that afternoon as the day started to cool, Professor D’Angour and Dr Charis took Mr Posh and us three kids around the Agora, which is now just a bunch of ruins with trees and tortoises and butterflies.
Crina whispered to me and Dinu, ‘Does Dr Charis remind you of anybody?’
‘The shoemaker’s daughter,’ said Dinu and I nodded.
‘Doctor Charis,’ I began.
‘Please call me Fotini.’
‘Are you from Athens?’
‘Yes, as far back as records go,’ she replied, ‘on my mother’s side. Why?’
‘You remind us of Simona, the daughter of Simon the Shoemaker,’ said Crina boldly.
Dr Charis stopped in her tracks, removed her sunglasses and turned to look at us. ‘When I was young I had to wear an eyepatch to correct a lazy eye. And my great-great-grandfather claimed to have come from a long line of shoemakers.’
We all stared at her and Mr Posh murmured, ‘Extraordinary.’
After a moment we continued on through the knee-high grasses and wildflowers of the ruined Agora.
Presently Professor D’Angour stopped at the remains of a building near the Tholos. ‘Any idea what this is?’ he said. He held up his hand to stop me speaking. ‘Not you, Alex. You’ve been to Athens several times. I want to know if Dinu or Crina can tell me.’
Crina got it first. ‘It’s the house of Simon the Shoemaker!’
‘Brava!’ He stepped to one side and we all saw a stone block on the waist-high foundations behind him. It bore the inscription ‘OIKIA SIMONOS-HOUSE OF SIMON’ picked out in red paint.
‘And look!’ Dr Charis used the toe of her sandal to tap another stone half-hidden in the golden grass. It read ‘I AM THE BOUNDARY OF THE AGORA’ in both Greek and English.
I shivered.
And as we started up a path towards the Acropolis, I shivered again. I knew where we were heading.
About a hundred paces on, we stopped by some ruins lying beside the trench of the Great Drain. It was very quiet here, with the late sun shining through the trees. A few birds twittered and a bee buzzed past my right ear.
‘See the foundations of this building?’ said Professor D’Angour. ‘It’s the State Prison where Alex and Dinu almost ended up. It’s probably also the place where Socrates spent the last month of his life before he bravely faced execution.’
Mr Posh frowned. ‘I thought the Prison of Socrates was some caves near the Acropolis.’
‘Almost certainly not,’ said Dr Charis. ‘Archaeologists found little cups for measuring hemlock here and even a votive figurine of Socrates himself, as if it became a kind of shrine to his memory.’
‘He died with extreme calm and dignity, didn’t he?’ asked Mr Posh.
‘Yes,’ replied Professor D’Angour. ‘While his friends wept, he calmly drank the deadly potion. It makes you numb and cold from the feet up,’ he added.
Dr Charis said, ‘We know this because Plato wrote a blow-by-blow account of Socrates’ last hours in a dialogue called Phaedo.’
‘Even though he tells us that he wasn’t actually present when Socrates died,’ added the professor.
‘But Plato was present at the trial of Socrates, and wrote about it in an account called The Apology.’
‘Which really means a defence, rather than an apology,’ added Crina.
‘Exactly.’ Dr Charis took off her sunglasses and looked at us. ‘It’s one of the few dialogues that’s not a dialogue, that is to say a question-and-answer session. Plato only reports what Socrates says, and for once Socrates plainly states his beliefs.’
‘What was the charge?’ I asked.
‘They accused him of corrupting the youth and introducing new gods,’ said Dr Charis. ‘And I do believe he was guilty.’
We all stared at her.
She put on her sunglasses again. ‘Not of corrupting the youth,’ she said. ‘But Socrates believed an extraordinary thing: he believed that ho theos – that is, God or “the god” – must be purely good and must want people to try to be good too. To be virtuous. To seek aretay.’
‘Aretay means “virtue” or “excellence”,’ I whispered to Crina.
Mr Posh raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you claiming Socrates didn’t believe in the Greek gods?’
‘I am. I believe he sacrificed to them and paid them lip service,’ said Dr Charis, ‘but he thought they were cruel and capricious, which they are. So in a way he was introducing new gods. Or rather a new god. That is why Socrates is still revered by many Jews and Christians.’
Crina frowned. ‘But he lived five hundred years before Christ.’
‘Yes, he did.’
‘Some historians think the charges were merely an excuse to arrest him,’ said the professor. ‘The Athenians really wanted to punish the maverick general Alcibiades, but by that time he was already dead. So they executed his teacher instead: Socrates.’
Dinu looked at him. ‘Why did the Athenians want to kill Alcibiades?’
‘Many reasons,’ said Professor D’Angour. ‘Mainly because the Sicilian Expedition was a terrible disaster. As you know, it resulted in the deaths of more than twenty thousand Athenian soldiers. As a consequence Athens lost the war with Sparta and ultimately her empire.’
‘But I thought Alcibiades never went on the expedition,’ I said.
‘He didn’t. But it was originally his idea. And even before the expedition set out, the Athenians voted for him to be put to death on account of the incident of the herms and the profaning of the Mysteries. So he defected to Sparta–’
‘What?’ Dinu’s face went a shade paler.
‘In fairness, the council had voted for him to be put to death.’
‘But he fought for the Spartans against Athens?’
‘Yes,’ agreed the professor. ‘Even so, when he changed sides again and returned a few years later the Athenians gave him a hero’s welcome.’
Dr Charis added, ‘We Athenians have a strange love-hate relationship with Alcibiades.’
‘Like in that famous poem by Catullus,’ suggested Mr Posh.
‘Odi et amo,’ I quoted the Latin. ‘I hate and I love …’
‘Yes.’ Professor D’Angour smiled.
‘How did Alcibiades die?’ Dinu asked in a barely audible voice.
‘Accounts vary,’ said the professor. ‘But historians agree that he’d fled to Phrygia, that is modern Turkey. He was hiding out in a house with his latest girlfriend, and Persian commandos tracked him down. They had been sent at the request of the Spartan king, who was in league with the local Persian governor. The soldiers set the house on fire to drive Alcibiades out.’
‘Oh!’ Crina covered her mouth with her hand.
‘Then what?’ Dinu’s face was pale.
‘He charged outside, naked except for a blanket wrapped around his left arm as a shield, and they shot him full of arrows. It was only five years later that they put his teacher Socrates to death.’
After hearing that, we were all silent for a while.
It was hot and peaceful there, with golden grasses around the foundations of the cell where Socrates had spent the last month of his life. Twig birds were twittering and a wood pigeon was cooing. We could hear faint music coming from one of the cafes. A couple of girls came by, in shorts and sunglasses, with their bare arms already turning pink. They looked around then turned and headed back, because the path ended there.
I wanted to shout after them, ‘This is the spot where one of the most amazing men in the history of the world died!’
Professor D’Angour, Dr Charis, Mr Posh and Dinu started back along the path, but Crina and I lingered at the ruins of the prison.
‘Do you think Socrates guessed we were from the future?’ she asked me.
‘No idea,’ I said. ‘In a way, I don’t think that would have mattered. He only wanted each of us to live our best life.’
‘And I intend to,’ she said.
I glanced at her and smiled. ‘Me too.’
At that moment a little white butterfly fluttered by.
‘Goodbye, Socrates,’ I whispered.
And Crina added, ‘We’ll never forget you.’