Socrates in Love

by Armand D'Angour

  SOCRATES

  IN LOVE

  CONTENTS

  Map

  Acknowledgements

  Timeline

  Preface

  Foreword: Bringing Socrates in from the Clouds

  1 For the Love of Socrates

  2 Socrates the Warrior

  3 Enter Alcibiades

  4 The Circle of Pericles

  5 A Philosopher Is Born

  6 The Mystery of Aspasia

  Afterword: The Unknown Socrates

  Notes

  References

  Index

  For better or worse, our Socrates is Plato’s Socrates.

  Diskin Clay

  None of us really knows Socrates.

  Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium

  Know Yourself.

  Motto written on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi

  The unexamined life is not worth living by a human being.

  Socrates in Plato’s Apology

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Any account of Socrates’ life involves selection and conjecture. Socrates in Love is not written for specialists, but it brings into focus elements of Socrates’ biography to which insufficient attention has been paid. The amount of published writing on Socrates is enormous, but I have restricted the bibliography to items that I have found particularly useful: paramount among these are Debra Nails’ comprehensive scholarly work The People of Plato and Carl Huffman’s discussion of Aristoxenus’s Life of Socrates, a neglected source for the philosopher’s life.

  This book is not fiction, but my narratives of the Battle of Potidaea at the start of Chapter 2 and of Socrates’ ‘life story’ at the end of the book, though based on the evidence presented, are put in italics to indicate that they are imaginative recreations. Peter Rhodes and Chris Pelling gave generous and invaluable feedback on earlier drafts. I am also grateful to Michael Anderson, John Birchall, Paul Cartledge, Jeannie Cohen, Coline Covington, Madeleine Dimitroff, Tom Dimitroff, Michael Fishwick, James Morwood, Toby Mundy, Peter Thonemann, and in particular my wife, Karen Ciclitira, for their thoughts and comments.

  TIMELINE OF EVENTS RELATING TO SOCRATES IN THE FIFTH CENTURY BC (500–399 BC)

  NOTE ON CHRONOLOGY:

  1.The Athenian year began in our month of July; so the Battle of Marathon in September 490 BC fell in the year 490–89 BC. For simplicity, dates in this book are given as single years; so Socrates was born in the year 469–8, but the date given is 469.

  2.The symbol ~ below indicates that a date or event is conjectural.

  500 Democracy in Athens following Cleisthenes’ reforms of 508.

  490 Greco-Persian Wars: Darius’s army defeated at the Battle of Marathon.

  480 Greco-Persian Wars: Xerxes’ fleet defeated at Battle of Salamis.

  470 ~Birth of Aspasia.

  469 Birth of Socrates.

  460 Pericles leads Athens after the ostracism of Kimon in 461.

  Hostilities between Athens and Sparta: ‘First Peloponnesian War’.

  ~455 Pericles divorces his wife Deinomache.

  ~451 Birth of Alcibiades. Socrates visits Samos with Archelaus.

  450 ~Aspasia arrives in Athens with her father-in-law Axiochus.

  447 Battle of Coronea: ~Socrates’ earliest military service.

  Death of Cleinias, father of Alcibiades.

  ~445 Pericles and Aspasia living together.

  440 Pericles’ campaign to subjugate Samos (440–439).

  432 Socrates saves Alcibiades’ life at Battle of Potidaea.

  430 The Peloponnesian War (431–404) enters its second year.

  Socrates and Alcibiades on military service in northern Greece.

  429 Death of Pericles from plague. Aspasia marries Lysicles.

  424 Socrates retreats at the Battle of Delium.

  423 Aristophanes’ Clouds performed, with Socrates present.

  421 Aristophanes’ comedy Peace. Peace of Nicias struck with Sparta.

  420 Alcibiades in politics. Socrates in Xenophon’s Symposium.

  416 Agathon wins prize for tragedy.

  Socrates depicted in Plato’s Symposium.

  415–413 Sicilian Expedition; Alcibiades in exile from Athens.

  410 Democracy restored after oligarchic coup (‘the Four Hundred’) of 411.

  406 Socrates on Council argues against mass execution of generals.

  404 Spartan victory in Peloponnesian War.

  Thirty Tyrants in Athens.

  Socrates refuses to arrest Leon of Salamis.

  403 Democracy restored in Athens.

  400

  399 Trial and execution of Socrates.

  NOTE ON THE SPELLING OF NAMES

  I have used Latinate transliterations for many names, especially familiar ones (e.g. Socrates, Plato, Pericles, Miletus, Potidaea), and kept the Greek forms of others (e.g. Trygaios, Kimon, Lampros, Konnos). All who work in this area of history know that such inconsistency is unavoidable.

  PREFACE

  Who was Socrates?

  Most people who know something about Socrates imagine him as a thinker, wise man, or philosopher of ancient Greece. Their image might be that of Rodin’s Thinker, or that of an old man with a white beard dressed in a toga. To some, his name brings to mind a method of eliciting answers to questions popularised as Socratic questioning, and his declaration that the unexamined life is not worth living. Others imagine the drama of his execution: how, put on trial and sentenced to death, he was imprisoned and made to drink poison – a deadly draught of hemlock. Some will recall that Socrates had a devoted but demanding wife or mistress called Xanthippe.

  The reader may imagine Socrates’ life and death taking place against the backdrop of ancient Athens during its Golden Age, five centuries before the birth of Christ. During that period, ancient Greek civilisation attained great heights in many areas of thought, art, and literature – among other things, the Greeks invented philosophy, lifelike sculpture, magnificent architecture, and theatrical drama. The leading politician in Athens for many decades of the fifth century BC was Pericles, under whose direction Periclean Athens developed democratic institutions, became a maritime empire, and built the Parthenon.

  Socrates is also associated with other great philosophers from ancient Greece, notably his successors Plato and Aristotle. But to many it comes as a surprise that Socrates himself left virtually nothing in writing. What we know of his thought relies largely on the writings of Plato, who was a young man in his twenties when Socrates died. Another admirer of Socrates of similar age to Plato was the soldier and author Xenophon, whose writings depict Socrates from a more everyday perspective. Neither author will have known Socrates well in person for much more than a decade, and both will have encountered him only as an older man.

  Plato and Xenophon are the two principal sources for Socrates’ biography. Of the two, Plato is generally considered more historically reliable. In his writings, a strong image emerges of Socrates in late middle age, as a sharp-minded, highly educated, original thinker, and a persistent, ironic, and often irritating questioner. Plato also gives us glimpses of Socrates as an earthily sexual man, and portrays him as an exceptionally brave and capable fighter on the battlefield. In Xenophon’s writings, by contrast, Socrates comes across more as an Athenian gentleman, witty, jovial, and a keen conversationalist.

  Both writers make clear that Socrates was unconcerned about the material side of life and about his appearance. Indeed, he was someone who in his later years was widely recognised as being materially poor and physically unprepossessing, despite displaying undoubted in- tellectual brilliance and associating on equal terms with leading thinkers and politicians in Athens. Writing from a largely philosophical perspective, Plato depicts him as a man de
voted to ideas, whose external image mysteriously belied an internal beauty that captivated many of those around him; while in Xenophon’s writings Socrates is humorously self-deprecating about his appearance, and self-confidently unconcerned with the trappings of wealth. The enduring image is of an extraordinary and original thinker who was always poor, always old, and always ugly.

  This leaves a mystery at the heart of Socrates’ story. What transformed a young Athenian man, allegedly from a humble background and of modest means, into the originator of a way of thinking and a philosophical method that were wholly original for his time and hugely influential thereafter? Later biographers of Socrates rarely look further than the pictures Plato and Xenophon create, and proceed on the assumption that Socrates’ youth is irrelevant. They overlook crucial, if scattered, strands of evidence for his adolescence and early manhood, the very period in which the ideas and attitudes of the future philosopher were evolving. As a result, most accounts of Socrates’ life fail to consider indications which, given the thinker’s cultural context and historical circumstances, might credibly explain his personal and intellectual trajectory.

  What can have inspired a young man of Socrates’ place and time to inaugurate a whole new style of thinking, and to dedicate himself to a philosophical quest quite distinct from those thinkers who preceded him? At what stage did he embark on the career of a questioning philosopher, and why? What happened in Socrates’ early manhood to bring about such a change? What was he doing, and what sort of person was he, in his teenage and adolescent years? What, in short, made Socrates Socrates?

  These questions remain to be answered. To do so, one must unearth and ponder the clues in the manner of a detective investigator, piecing together Socrates’ historical background and social milieu, and recreating a narrative of his early life that has been obscured and fragmented almost to the point of oblivion. Many of the answers are, it turns out, hiding in plain sight. Their cumulative effect is surprising, fascinating, and even shocking to those who suppose that all there is to know about Socrates is already known.

  The aim of this book is to offer a new, historically grounded, perspective on Socrates’ personality, early life, and the origins of his style of thinking. Since direct evidence for Socrates’ youth is thin, oblique, and scattered, circumstantial evidence and historical imagination must be used to flesh out the few precious indications in the sources about his background and early days. The answer to how his ideas changed and developed requires us to reconstruct, with keen attention to chronology and to less well-known but authoritative sources for Socrates’ life, the story of his early middle age, adolescence, and childhood.

  Commonly held views about Socrates are that he came from a lowly background, with few educational opportunities; that as a youth he must have been no less ugly than when he was an adult; that the dearth of evidence for his early love life must indicate its absence; and that he was always a thinker rather than a doer. Examination of the evidence will show that all these assumptions can be turned on their head. What is revealed is a picture of a strong and attractive young man from a relatively well-off family, growing up in an elite Athenian milieu where a boy’s aspiration was to win a name for heroic prowess on the battlefield and in political life; who from early youth learned to sing the great poetry of Greece, to play the lyre, and to subject himself to rigorous physical and mental discipline; who learned from some of the best teachers of the day and strove to cultivate the latest intellectual pursuits; and whose spiritedly erotic approach to life found expression not in marriage – he met Xanthippe in his fifties or later, and his relationship with his first wife, Myrto, is obscure – but in the companionship of clever men and, above all, in the love of one of the most exciting and brilliant women of his time, Aspasia of Miletus.

  The figure of the younger Socrates that emerges has never been fully fleshed out by biographers ancient or modern. What it makes clear is that his early manhood was the period in which he made the deliberate choice, thanks to various transformational experiences of which his relationship with Aspasia may have been the most significant, to focus on the life of the mind. Up to that point and beyond, he presented himself as an impressive warrior, an athletic wrestler and dancer, a deeply cultured speaker, and a passionate lover.

  To view Socrates in this unprecedented light requires us to follow clues about how his life and personality were shaped, and to rediscover the experiences of his youth that were to turn him into a new kind of hero – a philosopher whose original insights, unconventional behaviour, and heroic courage in the face of death have cast a spell on thinkers and inquirers for nearly 2,500 years.

  FOREWORD

  BRINGING SOCRATES IN FROM THE CLOUDS

  The giant arm of a wooden crane swings slowly from the left of the stage to the centre. Suspended from its tip by hemp ropes is a large wicker basket, in which a masked actor is sitting, his legs dangling in a comically undignified manner from the seat of the basket. The crane comes to a creaking stop, with the basket still swinging gently from its ropes. From his lofty, swaying perch, Socrates utters his first imperious words:

  ‘Mortal fellow, what is it you seek from me?’

  I sit in my College study in Oxford, imagining the moment when the figure of ‘Socrates’ first appears in Aristophanes’ comic drama, Clouds. With me are two keen undergraduates taking a tutorial. It is the modern academic equivalent of Socratic questioning, in which the tutor elicits answers from pupils by subjecting their ideas and assumptions to critical analysis. The sun is slanting through the mullioned windows as the students take turns to read out their essays on what ‘Socrates’ represents in the comedy. The thrust of both their arguments is that the way he appears in the play, first staged at a dramatic festival in ancient Athens in 423 BC, represents the philosopher’s activities unfairly and should be regarded as mere comic burlesque – the stock-in-trade of Aristophanes, who was to become the greatest comic dramatist of his age, but was at that date in his twenties and at an early stage of his career.

  The ‘mortal fellow’ addressed by the character of Socrates in the play is an old farmer called Strepsiades, the anti-hero of the comedy. Strepsiades appears on stage at the start of the comedy, tossing and turning in his bed in a state of high anxiety. The cause of his wakefulness, he tells the audience, is his profligate son Pheidippides, who has incurred large debts by buying and maintaining pedigree horses. This was equivalent, for a well-born Athenian youth of the fifth century BC, to a young man squandering the family’s funds on costly fast cars.

  Worrying about paying off his son’s debts, Strepsiades, whose name in Greek connotes ‘Twister’ (it might be translated in Dickensian style ‘Artful Twister’), tells us that he has devised a cunning plan. He has heard that Socrates runs a school called the ‘Thinkery’ where students are taught to argue any case and win. Instead of trying to pay off his son’s loans, Strepsiades concludes, he will send Pheidippides to the school so that the boy can learn how to argue his way out of debt.

  It seems like the perfect fantasy-solution to the old man’s worries. But Pheidippides will have none of it. A member of the young Athenian smart set, he is appalled at the thought of consorting with Socrates and the shabby, emaciated, intellectuals who attend the Thinkery – men such as Chaerephon, the skinny long-haired devotee of Socrates nicknamed ‘the Bat’, who was said to have once ventured to ask the Delphic Oracle ‘Is anyone wiser than Socrates?’ and to have received the answer ‘No’.

  Failing to persuade his son to enrol, Strepsiades decides to attend the school himself. Presenting himself at the doors of the Thinkery, he receives a brief induction into the school’s activities from a supercilious student. In the school premises he observes inmates bent double examining terrestrial phenomena, with their bottoms pointed up towards the sky to investigate (according to Strepsiades’ guide) celestial occurrences. After commenting with blithe ignorance on curious-looking objects – a large globe and a map of Greece – that represent the stu
dy of astronomy and geography, Strepsiades spots Socrates himself, the instructor-in-chief, riding aloft in his basket on the far side of the theatre. ‘Hey, Socrates!’ he calls out in a wheedling tone, ‘Hey there, little fellow.’

  This is the cue for the crane-operator – one might imagine a brawny, sweating slave seated astride the base of the mechanism – to lumber into action. Grasping the crane’s handles, his muscled arms strain to manoeuvre the large wooden arm, from which is suspended a basket containing its ludicrously masked passenger, across to the centre of the stage.

  Comic elevation

  The crane, mēkhanē in Greek, was a relatively recent stage device in the late fifth century BC, beloved for a time by audiences and playwrights. The Latin form of the word, māchina, gives us ‘machine’, while from the Greek word we derive ‘mechanism’. In a few surviving ancient tragedies, it comes into its own at the denouement of the drama. Usually a divine character is brought on, lifted by the crane high above the stage, to explain to the characters and the audience how Fate will unravel a knotty situation – the impasse of choice, strife, or passion that the plot has created. The god pronounces his or her providential solution ‘from the machine’: he is the deus ex māchinā.1

  In contrast to tragedies, ancient comedies were a combination of slapstick, political satire, and lampooning of personalities and institutions. Aristophanes enjoyed parodying the institutions of tragic drama itself, including the solemn use of the stage machine. The crane’s potential for humorous deployment is explicit in his comedy Peace, which was produced in 421 BC, two years later than Clouds. The historical context of Peace was the Athenians’ fervent hope that the warring states of Greece – the Spartans and their allies who had fought against the Athenians and their allies for over a decade – would shortly come to a peace agreement.