Socrates in Love

by Armand D'Angour

  That final scene has caught the imagination of writers, painters, film directors, and satirists. Might the story of Socrates be told on stage or film, I wonder, by stringing together some of the more colourful episodes of his life and ending with the scene of his death? Film-makers such as Roberto Rossellini in his 1971 film Socrates have tried, with limited success. Not only is it hard to capture the atmosphere of life in ancient Athens, but the story of Socrates as we know it does not transfer well to the screen.

  Why might that be? While the philosopher was undoubtedly a figure of drama in many ways, in the pages of Plato and Xenophon he emerges mainly as a thinker, a questioner, and a debater. For three decades or more from the age of around forty Socrates frequented the Agora, the market-place and central urban hub of ancient Athens, engaging its citizens in discussion and cross-examination of their unquestioned beliefs and moral assumptions. The nature of this activity, which continued for the greater part of Socrates’ life as a middle-aged and older man, makes unpromising material for dramatisation. A film-maker will struggle to make a compelling biopic of the character that we learn about from Plato and Xenophon. While there are undoubtedly moments of high spectacle, culminating with the drama of his trial and the moving scene of his death, the problem is that the character of Socrates does not change.

  The play’s the thing

  Like many alleged facts about Socrates’ life, the story of the philosopher’s standing up and remaining on his feet during the performance of Clouds is found only in a much later source. Since Aelian was writing six centuries after Socrates’ death, the anecdote he recounts is regarded by some historians as no more than a colourful fiction.7 Perhaps it was based on the occasions noted above when Socrates was attested to have stood still for hours on end. Such an assessment, however, of possible biographical evidence for Socrates raises acute questions about historical method, and specifically about the evaluation of source material for his life. When can a source be trusted to be telling us the historical truth, and when can it not be?

  Scholars are usually content to assume that Socrates was actually present at the performance of Clouds. This is because, as mentioned above, in the account given by Plato of Socrates’ famous defence speech, Apology, delivered during his trial in 399 BC, he is made to allude to the comedy and the fact that it had a malign influence on the jurors’ view of him. In this case as in others, Plato is assumed to be a reliable source. However, the trial took place two decades after the play’s first performance, and there’s no record of it having had any subsequent performances. Would Socrates really have mentioned the way he had been depicted in a comedy staged so long ago? Would it make sense that a play performed some twenty-four years earlier, which most jurors may well not have seen, could still influence people’s perceptions?8

  Perhaps, then, we should not credit Plato’s account of the trial speech as an accurate record of the event. Given that the Apology was composed so many years after Socrates delivered his speech, it’s not clear how faithful it could be, or was intended to be, to what was actually said at the time. It may be that Plato simply invented the section of the speech in which Socrates alludes to Aristophanes’ depiction of him in Clouds. Plato may have supposed that his readers would be familiar with the play – presumably the revised version preserved in writing, if not the original play itself; and he was obviously keen to put on record that Socrates had been misrepresented by Aristophanes’ portrayal. We might be inclined to assume that other elements of the speech Plato puts in Socrates’ mouth subtly incorporate ideas that Plato would have wanted readers to form about the life and activities of his beloved teacher.

  Weighing the evidence

  With so much room for doubt, the prospects for a truly historical reconstruction of Socrates, young or old, seem to become ever more remote. How can we penetrate beyond the likely distortions of Socrates’ portrayal, whether created for comic purposes by Aristophanes or with more serious and fundamentally apologetic aims by his sympathetic biographers Plato and Xenophon? What can we know about the actual life and thoughts of Socrates, in particular those of his early years?

  The investigation of the story of the young Socrates seems at first glance to present an almost complete void. His main ancient biographers give scant and random reports about Socrates’ youth and adolescence, and other sources seem to add only a few contested details to supplement their silence. It might appear that, given the dearth of evidence for the young Socrates, we are doomed to ignorance or speculative fantasy about his early career. Why should this matter? Simply because it seems likely that Socrates’ early experiences and close relationships hold a vital clue to why, some time in his early middle age, he inaugurated a style of philosophising that was to shape the direction of Western philosophical thought. ‘Socrates,’ said the Roman orator and statesman Cicero, ‘brought philosophy down from heaven to earth.’

  Philosophers before Socrates – the Presocratics – were less interested in asking how human beings should live, or how we can seek to know what is true or good. The main aim of their inquiries was to offer plausible speculations about such things as the physical composition of the universe and the genesis of the material world. Socrates, by contrast, thought that nothing was more important than understanding how best to cultivate and train the psūchē – the soul or spirit of a human being. He took seriously the pithy saying inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi, ‘Know Yourself.’ He sought to forge a path to that self-knowledge through unflagging questioning and examination of people and ideas, declaring that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living by man’.

  What, then, inspired Socrates to turn his unusual analytical mind to this original inquiry of profound moral significance, one that was to generate the vast legacy of moral, ethical, and epistemological thinking to which the world is heir? What made him end up pursuing with single-minded urgency and persistence, at the cost of social acceptance and ultimately of life itself, a whole new way of thinking about the meaning of human existence? What intellectual and emotional obstacles did he encounter and overcome in order to do so? What personal experiences as a younger man, including perhaps falling and failing in love, might have shaped his outlook and altered the course of his life?

  Allegedly the son of a lowly stonemason and a midwife, Socrates’ early life seems to hold little of interest. Although he may be admitted to have led a more active life beyond his native city as a soldier, Socrates seems to appear in history as a fully-fledged thinker, and few see the need to inquire about what he was before he became one. As one studies the chronology of Socrates’ life and career, however, it becomes increasingly evident that events that took place in his youthful or early experience, long before he became known to Plato, Xenophon, or even Aristophanes, must have played a crucial part in creating the thinker he was to become.

  The apparent dearth of evidence about Socrates’ early life has led scholars and historians to assume that there is no way of adequately answering questions about the intellectual or emotional trajectory that led to his embrace of philosophical life and thought. But there is a road to greater illumination about the youth of Socrates, based on evidence that has been either overlooked or misinterpreted. It leads us to revisit the social and historical background of Socrates’ early years, and to flesh out from circumstantial details the story of his youth and intellectual development. It guides us to subject the primary sources to closer examination of their apparent contradictions and silences, and to reassess the contributions of less well-known source material. And it directs us to consider what the biographers of Socrates might have neglected, withheld, or glossed over, and why they might have done so.

  To approach the topic of ‘Socrates in love’ involves expanding from historical sources the evidence for events in which he is likely to have played an active part. It requires us to take a fresh look at the qualities attributed to him by Plato and Xenophon, who were after all born only when Socrates was already in his advanced middle age, so
never knew him other than as an older man.9 And it invites us to look at less systematic evidence that is preserved for his life than the picture provided by his principal biographers.

  In the writings of later authors such as the first- to second-century ad Plutarch and the third-century ad Diogenes Laertius, we find stories and anecdotes about Socrates compiled from earlier sources including Plato and Xenophon, but also drawing on scraps of citations from less partisan witnesses such as Ion of Chios, Aristotle, and Aristoxenus. Ion was an older contemporary of Socrates, and Aristotle and Aristoxenus, though of a younger generation (Aristotle was Plato’s pupil and the teacher of Aristoxenus), would have known older people who were acquainted with him.

  The testimonies of these sources present some unidealising biographical perspectives which have been largely overlooked by modern historians or, particularly where they diverge from Plato or Xenophon, dismissed as uninformed, groundless, or hostile fabrications. From them we learn, for instance, that Socrates as a youth travelled to Samos with his older male lover, that he married more than once, and that he was able to support his lifestyle by renting out property. If true, these details give a very different picture of Socrates from the one that is commonly drawn.

  How should we evaluate the reliability of this kind of information? All historical investigation requires us to weigh up the evidence of sources and to try to create a convincing narrative from them. The Socrates of the ancient biographers can only be, if not a fiction, at least a selective and imaginative construction. Aristophanes’ ‘Socrates’ differs from Plato’s Socrates and Plato’s Socrates differs from Xenophon’s; and Plutarch and Diogenes Laertius preserve elements of all of these sources while departing from them in tone and detail. Our image of Socrates will inevitably differ in turn from all of these.

  Using what evidence can be found and argued to be of historical value, and taking special care to note the chronology of events that frame the philosopher’s activities, we may be no less inclined, however, and no less entitled, to create our own imaginative construction of Socrates. The main reason for wanting to present my Socrates is that the existing evidence relating to the largely obscure earlier decades of Socrates’ life calls out for renewed attention, re-evaluation, and reinterpretation. By considering this evidence in a new light, we have the opportunity of understanding as never before the possible course of the philosopher’s early life and its significance for the development of his thought.

  Life and thought

  Why should Socrates’ life story be of interest at all? Many will think that what really matters is the legacy of his philosophical ideas and procedures. Socrates is admired above all as one of the great founding figures of the Western intellectual tradition. His ideas, as transmitted by Plato, changed the way we think about life, truth, and knowledge, and have bequeathed to humanity a vast and invaluable heritage of moral and philosophical thinking. ‘The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition,’ wrote the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, ‘is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.’ Plato’s dialogues draw our attention to questions raised by Socrates that remain of undimmed relevance to the modern world. What is justice? What is goodness? What do we actually know? What is the goal of education? What is the meaning of courage? How should human beings aim to live? What does love really mean?

  However, Socrates’ biography matters too. Despite the fact that he left nothing in writing, his ideas survived largely thanks to the fact that he lived and died for his philosophical principles, motivating his faithful followers Plato and Xenophon to tell the story to posterity.10 This makes not just the content of his ideas important, but the manner of his life and death. The comparison with the founder of Christianity is unavoidable: the story of Jesus’s life and death as told in the New Testament is integral to understanding and appreciating his message.11 In particular, the justice or otherwise of Socrates’ execution by the Athenian state is still a matter of debate. Plato, his most brilliant and devoted pupil, was certain that a terrible wrong had been perpetrated, and spent the rest of his life promoting his version of Socrates’ ideas in order to show that Socrates was a martyr to the truth he had tried to purvey.

  How, then, might we reconstruct a plausible account of what turned Socrates the man into Socrates the philosopher? At the time of the Clouds in 423 BC Socrates was, as we have seen, in his mid forties. On the evidence of the play, he was already well known, and identified above all as a penniless teacher and a high-flown intellectual. This was the reputation that clung to him, despite the fact that, as we know from Plato, he had fought with conspicuous bravery in the Battle of Delium just a year earlier, and despite his being long involved with influential individuals in Athenian public life such as the popular playboy-politician Alcibiades. At what stage did the career of Socrates as a man of action yield to that of Socrates as above all a thinker, and why did that change happen? The evidence leads us insistently, in my view, to a much earlier period of his life, and ultimately to the title of this book: the story of Socrates in love.

  1

  For the Love of Socrates

  ‘What is love?’ The question is asked in a well-furnished dining room in Athens, lit with flickering oil-lamps, in the house of the playwright Agathon. The date is 416 BC. Listening with rapt attention, a group of men reclining on couches watch Socrates as he speaks. Some of them have already given speeches on the subject, and now it’s Socrates’ turn. A squat, solidly built man in his fifties, with wide-set eyes and a snub nose, he has an almost mesmeric presence and speaks with quiet assurance.

  ‘The one thing I actually know about,’ says Socrates, ‘is love.’1

  Socrates seems to mean what he says. His listeners know, however, that he’s a master of irony, so it’s not clear whether they should take his statement at face value. They don’t doubt that he’s telling the truth, any more than they would doubt the veracity of the god Apollo who pronounces his riddling oracles at Delphi through the mouth of the inspired priestess, the Pythia. But what does Socrates mean by ‘know’, given that he’s already famous for claiming ‘all I know is that I do not know’?

  Just as the Delphic Oracle’s pronouncements are notoriously ambiguous, Socrates’ words often seem to disguise a hidden meaning. The word for ‘love’ used by Socrates, erōtika, literally ‘matters concerning Eros’ or ‘the domain of the erotic’, sounds like the Greek word erōtan, which means ‘to ask questions’. Since Socrates has made a name for himself as a thinker who has only questions, not answers, perhaps the comment conceals an ironic pun. Is he suggesting to his audience that his knowledge of love really lies in the art of questioning?

  The Mystery of Love

  What Socrates goes on to say provides a very full answer to the question ‘What is love?’ Yet it is not his own answer. He explains to his listeners that it is the report of a conversation he had long ago – when he was a young man, we suppose – with a wise woman called Diotima, in which he asked questions about love and received answers from her. Even in presenting his speech on love, then, Socrates remains a questioner, rather than someone who has his own doctrine on the matter. He describes Diotima as a priestess from Mantinea, which was a city in the central region of the Peloponnese about a hundred miles to the south-west of Athens. The city was famous for its music and styles of dance.2 Socrates claimed, however, that the supreme music is philosophy – the pursuit of wisdom; and it is wisdom that he seeks from Diotima. ‘This woman was my instructress,’ says Socrates, ‘in matters of love.’

  Many have heard a double entendre in this statement, but Socrates does not dwell on it, and no one present is said to laugh or raise an eyebrow. What is unusual is to find Plato reporting that Socrates, speaking to an audience consisting entirely of men, attributes his instruction to a woman. In all of Plato’s roughly thirty dialogues, this is an almost unique situation. Almost, because in one (and only one) other dialogue, Menexenus, Socrates is plainly portrayed as receiving in
struction from a woman – Pericles’ widow Aspasia.

  Diotima is generally taken to be a fictitious personage. Her name means ‘honoured by Zeus’ (or ‘Zeus-honouring’), and the name of her town Mantinea seems designed to recall, indeed to pun on, the Greek word for seer, mantis.3 So Socrates, it has been argued, is here attributing a profound and mysterious doctrine about love to a woman of visionary intelligence who is in a privileged position to know its meaning. Although we cannot know whether such a woman as Diotima existed, Socrates in the Symposium does link her to a specific historical action. Once, he says, she used her wisdom on behalf of the Athenians when they were making sacrifices to ward off the plague, and so ‘managed to postpone the disease, so that it fell ten years later than was originally intended’.

  This strangely specific claim has attracted little attempt at explanation. However, since plague struck Athens in 430 BC, this curious reference draws attention to the year 440 BC. What happened in that year for Socrates to be able to suggest in passing that the plague was originally meant to have taken place then?

  The most salient historical event of 440 BC was Pericles’ expedition to conquer the powerful island of Samos, allegedly at the request of its long-standing rival city on the Ionian mainland, Miletus. It was an episode that became notorious in several ways. First, Pericles was said to have conducted the campaign, which involved battles on sea and land and a long siege, with shocking brutality. The dismal tale was told by Douris, ruler of Samos in the late fourth century, who compiled a history of his island: Douris recorded that after defeating his enemies in a sea battle, Pericles had the Samian commanders and marines strung up on crosses in the market-place of Miletus. The philosopher Melissus, who is recorded as being one of the commanders of the Samian fleet against the Athenians, and who may have been personally known to Socrates from a visit to Samos in happier times some two decades earlier, may have been one of Pericles’ victims.