The Walled Orchard (54 page)

It was no surprise to see Socrates the son of Sophroniscus hanging about the Law Courts; although he fervently denies it, he can generally be found somewhere in the neighbourhood of a good, juicy trial. He is not, strictly speaking, one of the speech-writers, like Python; but he makes a lot of money from what he calls his thinking lessons, which are little more than preparatory courses for litigants, and is always on the lookout for new clients. Since the disgrace and exile of his most prestigious pupil, the celebrated Alcibiades, business had been rather slack, and I hadn’t heard his name quite so often in the Market Square or the Baths.

Phaedra and Leagoras obviously wanted to avoid him, for they tried to snuggle down inside their clothes and disappear; but I regarded Socrates’ arrival as an omen from the Gods, like an eagle or an owl flying over my head. So I called out and waved to him; and sure enough he came bounding over, like a hungry dog who hears the sound of a plate on the kitchen floor.

‘Good morning, Eupolis,’ he said through one of those enormous grins of his. ‘You’re rather out of your way here, aren’t you? Shouldn’t you be down in the Market Square, nosing out some bits of gossip for a play?’

I smiled in such a way as to communicate lack of amusement. ‘And shouldn’t you be at the Lyceum?’ I replied. ‘You don’t want to lose your pitch if there are gullible young men about, with money in their pockets.’

Socrates laughed, displaying his fine collection of yellow teeth. He never cleans them, even when he eats onions and garlic, since he purports to regard such practices as effete and not worthy of an ascetic. For an ascetic though, he’s merciless on stuffed quails. ‘You know better than that, son of Euchorus,’ he said. ‘You’ll get me into trouble, saying things like that. You’ve been watching too many of your own plays.’

‘Are you busy?’ I asked, making room for him on the bench. ‘I have an hour or so to kill, waiting for my case to come on, and I know you’re always ready for a chat.’

‘I certainly am,’ he replied. ‘Free of charge, seeing it’s you. Only you must promise not to pirate any of my material in your lawsuit. Are you prosecuting or defending?’

‘Defending,’ I replied.

He nodded. ‘A serious charge?’

‘Fairly serious,’ I replied. ‘They say I was one of the men who damaged the statues.’

Socrates raised his eyebrows. ‘Is that so?’ he said, and sat down next to me. ‘And did you?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I was in bed at the time with my wife here. But of course she can’t give evidence, being a woman, and I can produce no one else who saw me. And that’s a point that intrigues me, Socrates. Perhaps you and I could clarify it between us, if you have nothing better to do. Why is it that a woman should be forbidden to give evidence in a court of law, when men and even slaves, if tortured, are acceptable as witnesses?’ I scratched my nose, then continued. ‘After all, they have the same five senses as we do, and minds just like men. We listen to the evidence of men with doubtful characters, don’t we, and trust ourselves to be able to assess its weight. Why can’t we accept the evidence of women?’

Socrates leaned back in his seat, with his hands clasped around his left knee. ‘So you are saying that there is no difference between men and women?’

‘Certainly there is a difference,’ I replied, ‘just as there’s a difference between Greeks and foreigners, and Athenians and other Greeks. But this difference doesn’t make such a great difference that we should refuse to accept anything they say as the truth. I mean, when you ask your wife what’s for dinner and she says dried fish, you believe her, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said Socrates, settling himself more comfortably in his seat. ‘Invariably.’

‘And when you ask her what she did while you were out and she says she mended the hole in your tunic, you take her word, don’t you? In the absence of contrary evidence, such as the smell of wine on her breath, or the bedclothes being ruffled up?’

‘Indeed I do, Eupolis.’

‘And yet,’ I said, ‘Xanthippe isn’t an unnaturally truthful woman, is she? She’s not under some curse, like that woman in the old story who cheated Apollo and was cursed with the inability to lie?’

‘She’s the same as other women in that respect,’ said Socrates, plainly wondering where all this was leading. ‘I couldn’t say for sure.’

‘But if there was a prosecution and she was a witness, she couldn’t give evidence,’ I said. ‘Tell me why that is, I’d like to know. Then I might be able to persuade the Court to let Phaedra testify, and perhaps I wouldn’t have to die after all.’

Socrates furrowed his brow for a moment. ‘What is the difference, would you say,’ he said, ‘between women and men? The main difference, I mean, not just the obvious anatomical differences. We can take those for granted.’

It was my turn to frown. ‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘it’s that women stay in the house all day while men go out to work in the fields.’

‘Exactly,’ said Socrates, and he let go of his knee and sat upright. ‘Now, have you ever seen a rabbit?’

‘Often, Socrates, often.’

‘And aren’t rabbits hard to see, because of their grey fur?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s not easy to see them, unless you know what to look for.’

‘And the first time you saw a rabbit,’ Socrates continued, ‘did you identify it for yourself, or did someone point it out to you?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I replied, thinking hard for a moment. ‘I believe someone said, “Look, there’s a rabbit” and I said, “Where?” and he pointed, and I saw it.’

‘So he saw the rabbit first, and showed you what to look for?’

‘As far as I can remember, yes.’

‘And you had been looking in that direction,’ said Socrates, ‘and saw the same things as he did, but because you didn’t know how to pick out a rabbit against a background of grey rocks, you hadn’t identified it as a rabbit?’

‘That’s pretty much what happened,’ I said, folding my arms in front of me, ‘so far as I can recall. It was a long time ago, you understand.’

‘Oh, of course,’ said Socrates. ‘Now, supposing you had never had a friend who knew what a rabbit looked like, do you suppose it’s possible that you could have gone through life looking at stone outcrops and never known that there were rabbits all around you?’

‘Perfectly possible,’ I said, and scratched my ear.

‘Or take speedwell,’ Socrates went on. ‘You know what speedwell looks like, of course.’

‘I should say I do, Socrates,’ I replied. ‘I was brought up in the mountains, you know. It has a long, thin stalk and blue flowers.’

‘But if no one had ever told you what it was,’ said Socrates, looking me straight in the eye, ‘if you had been abandoned on the hillside at birth and brought up by wolves, like the child in the story, you wouldn’t know that the blue flower was speedwell, would you?’

‘Come to think of it,’ I replied, ‘I don’t suppose I would.’

‘Now let us suppose you are walking in the hills and you look up at the sky and see black clouds. What would you expect?’

I knew the answer to that. ‘Rain,’ I replied.

‘And why precisely would you expect rain? Because someone had told you that it rains from black clouds?’

‘Yes indeed.’

‘Or perhaps you found it out for yourself, by experience,’ said Socrates, leaning his chin thoughtfully on the back of his hand. ‘You worked out that every storm of rain you could remember was preceded by black clouds, and your mind, being rational, rejected the explanation that this was a mere coincidence.’

I nodded profoundly. ‘That’s what a rational mind would do,’ I agreed.

‘Well then,’ said Socrates brightly, ‘now that we’ve established these preliminary points, we can return to your original enquiry, about women and the Courts. Suppose there was a lawsuit, and it was vital to the evidence whether there had been a rabbit, or a sprig of speedwell, in a particular place. Would a person who couldn’t identify a rabbit at sight or tell speedwell from soldanella be able to give good evidence?’

‘I suppose not.’

‘Exactly,’ said Socrates, grinning. ‘There might well have been a rabbit or a speedwell plant there, but this person would have looked straight at it and not recognised it, and would in all honesty tell the jury that he hadn’t seen a rabbit or a speedwell plant. And then the jury would think that the defendant, who had just claimed there was a rabbit or a speedwell in the place in question, was a liar and not to be believed on any matter, and vote to have him put to death. Whereas if the ignorant witness had not been allowed to testify, admittedly the defendant’s evidence would not be corroborated, but at least his own credit as a witness would be unimpaired. Am I right?’

‘Yes indeed.’

‘Now let us suppose you were in court and your defence turned on there having been a storm of rain. And imagine that, although you could find no one who had been out in the rain and thus was able to give evidence that he had got wet through, you knew that your neighbour had walked home an hour before and must have seen the dark clouds. Couldn’t you expect him to testify that it had been about to rain an hour before you said it would rain, which would give at least some weight to your account of events?’

‘Most certainly.’

‘But supposing that your neighbour had spent all his life in one of those hot countries south of the Ethiopians where it never rains, and so had not made the mental connection between dark clouds and rain. Would his evidence be any use to you? Or would it be potentially dangerous, like the evidence of the man who couldn’t recognise rabbits or speedwell?’

‘Potentially dangerous, of course.’

‘So we are agreed that a misleading witness is worse than no witness at all?’

‘Indeed we are.’

‘And that a witness who has no knowledge or experience of a thing is likely to be a misleading witness, even if he is inclined to tell the truth?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘And didn’t we say,’ said Socrates, leaning back again, ‘at the very outset of our discussion, that the main difference between men and women was that men go out in the world and women stay at home; and that therefore men have knowledge and experience of the world that women inevitably lack? And isn’t it true that the sort of thing that generally crops up in lawsuits as needing to be proved by evidence is exactly the sort of thing that happens out in the world, where men meet and do business and have contact with one another? The sort of thing, necessarily, that women have no knowledge or experience of, and therefore should not testify about?’

‘Naturally,’ I replied.

‘So you agree that only men are qualified to give evidence in lawsuits, and women should be debarred?’

‘I do.’

‘You do realise,’ said Socrates, ‘that everything I’ve been saying up till now has been a load of old rubbish?’

‘Yes, Socrates.’

‘And yet you found yourself forced to agree with it?’

‘Yes, Socrates.’

‘Because I was talking so fast, and so fluently, and with such an air of intelligence and authority and being about to make some intelligent point, that you didn’t care to interrupt me? And by the time you had worked out that I was talking nonsense it was too late to contradict me without seeming petty or just plain stupid?’

‘Exactly so.’

‘Well, Eupolis my friend,’ said the son of Sophroniscus, rising to his feet and brushing the dust pointedly off his backside, ‘that’s the one and only way to win lawsuits in this City. If you can charm them with words and bewilder them with plausible ideas, you’ll be all right. If not, you’ll have to accept that in the absence of divine intervention you’re probably going to die, and it serves you right for not consulting a competent expert, like myself. Only I wouldn’t have helped you if you’d offered me all the wealth of King Gyges, after what you said about me in those so-called Comedies of yours; and neither, I expect, would any of my fellow philosophers. Good luck, Eupolis, you need it.’

‘And the same to you,’ I said. ‘See you around.’

‘I doubt it,’ said Socrates over his shoulder, and he walked happily away down the street.

‘What an unpleasant man,’ said Phaedra. ‘He’ll come to a bad end one of these days.’

‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘But at least he kept me from falling asleep, which is more than you could do.’

‘I don’t see what you’re complaining about,’ interrupted Leagoras, who had listened to our discussion with rapt attention. ‘It all seemed to make perfect sense to me.’

Phaedra and I both looked at him, and he seemed rather offended. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I reassured him, ‘it’s not your fault.’

‘It certainly is not,’ Phaedra agreed. ‘Isn’t that Aristophanes over there?’

We all looked round, and saw the son of Philip, dressed in an unusually sombre gown and carrying a plain olive-wood walking-stick, following Demeas and his crowd of witnesses, slaves and other attendant Furies. A friend of my uncle’s once told me of the mighty carvings his grandfather had seen in Sardis, when he went there as a young man; vast reliefs, stretching as far as the eye could see, showing the Great King of the Persians marching to war with all the nations of the earth in the van, and his hawks and his hounds and his gigantic royal umbrella. I suppose the Great King of Persia looked every bit as menacing to his subjects as Demeas did to me then, on his carvings at least. But Demeas achieved his effect without hawks and hounds and umbrellas. He had presence.

He seemed to look straight through me as he passed, as if I was already a hungry ghost twittering hopelessly on the wrong side of the river. But Aristophanes accidentally caught my eye, and gave me such a look of repressed hatred that I was quite startled. For a moment I wondered what was upsetting him so much; then it occurred to me that he blamed me for putting him in a position where he would have to make a public exhibition of himself, giving evidence against a Comic poet at a political trial. I could see his point; there is, even in Athens, a certain stigma attached to participating in one of these affairs, and there are still a few right-minded people in the City who disapprove. But even so, I took it rather hard that I should be blamed; it was Demeas’ fault, after all. Perhaps I’m too sensitive. Anyway, I looked away until the procession had taken itself off to another part of the porch.