Socrates in Love

by Armand D'Angour

  Nearly half a century earlier, in 479 BC, the city, protected on all sides by thick walls, had been besieged by withdrawing Persian forces under the command of Xerxes, the king of Persia, who, having marched across from Asia to subdue Greece, had been repulsed at the Battle of Plataea. During the siege, the townspeople and their adversaries had experienced an unprecedented event: Potidaea, the city dedicated to the great sea god, was engulfed by a gigantic wave – the earliest tsunami to be recorded in a historical source.

  Unlike the Greeks, most of the Persian forces were unable to swim.5 So what in other circumstances might have seemed like a terrible punishment was in this case hailed by the people of Potidaea as a divine liberation. After hundreds of the Persian besiegers had drowned, the enemy commanders called off the siege, and the city was providentially saved from occupation and destruction by foreign forces. By a tragic irony, such a fate would have been hardly worse than what Potidaea’s citizens were to suffer nearly half a century later at the hands of Athenians, their fellow-Greeks, in 430 BC.

  After the end of the Greco-Persian wars, it had not taken long for hostilities to surface between Athens and its supposed allies. When the islanders of Naxos sought to secede from the League around 471 BC, they were subjugated by Athens and forced to tear down their city walls. The island of Thasos, off the coast of Thrace, defected in 465 BC, but after a two-year siege surrendered to the Athenian general Kimon. The cities of the Peloponnese led by Sparta provided support to Athens’ enemies in a number of bloody battles by land and sea over the following two decades, including the Battle of Coronea in 447 BC in which Alcibiades’ father Cleinias was killed. These came to a head in the summer of 433 BC, when Corinth fought and won a damaging sea battle against the Athenians over a dispute regarding the status of another Corinthian satellite, Corcyra, the powerful city on what is now the island of Corfu.

  To preempt the possibility that Potidaea, with its close links to the mother-city Corinth, might be emboldened to revolt from the Athenian alliance, Pericles ordered north a contingent of troops by land and sea. Thirty ships and a thousand men were dispatched, with the demands that the Potidaeans dismiss their annual Corinthian overseers, pull down part of their defensive wall, and supply hostages to Athens for good behaviour. The people of Potidaea refused to do as ordered. After trying unsuccessfully to negotiate terms, they persuaded Corinth to send a force of soldiers to protect them, and formally withdrew from alliance with Athens. Forty days later, two thousand men under the command of a Corinthian general arrived in the Thraceward region. The scene was set for an intensification of the proxy war between Corinth and Athens.

  A philosopher at war

  In response to the arrival at Potidaea of Corinthian troops, in 432 BC the Athenians sent a second contingent of forty ships with two thousand troops under the command of Callias son of Calliades. This group probably included Socrates, then in his late thirties, and his protégé Alcibiades, aged nineteen. On their arrival, they found that the original Athenian force had just taken the town of Therme in Macedonia, the site of modern Thessaloniki. The opposing forces had retreated to the Macedonian town of Pydna, whereupon the Athenian forces then put that city to siege.

  The people of Potidaea were supported by the ruler of neighbouring Macedon, King Perdiccas, whose men obstructed the Athenian troops that had arrived under Callias’s command, holding them down in Macedonia on the way to Potidaea. The siege of Pydna was ultimately abandoned – sieges were hardly ever successful in ancient warfare – and the combined forces, with whom both Socrates and Alcibiades will have fought, then participated in successful assaults on the Macedonian towns of Beroea and Strepsa, before finally marching on Potidaea.

  In the summer of 432, the opposing forces fought a pitched battle, and it was during this engagement that Socrates made his dramatic rescue of Alcibiades from the thick of the enemy lines. The hoplite code required that in battle the soldier standing to the right of a fellow-fighter and holding his large round shield on his left side was responsible for partly protecting the body of his comrade to the left. The series of shields formed a line of defence against spears and arrows, and required unconditional discipline to maintain. The dynamics of battle, however, put immense pressure on individual hoplites to break the line, either by turning to flee from oncoming forces or by breaking ranks to pursue the enemy when they saw that the opposing line was beginning to crumble.

  It would suit what we know of Alcibiades’ character if the hot-headed youth had been tempted during the mêlée to prove his valour by rushing forward in pursuit of fleeing enemy troops. If so, his breaking of ranks will have posed a risk to his fellow-hoplites, and one that might have proved fatal to them as well as him. We might imagine that, instead of the opposing line falling apart, it regrouped so that Alcibiades was left facing, wounded and on his own, a ring of hostile men in arms. Socrates, holding his position in the Athenian line, would have been horrified to observe the danger in which Alcibiades had placed himself.

  It would have been a difficult choice for a disciplined soldier to act to save his friend’s life at the cost of breaking the line himself. What is clear, however, from Alcibiades’ account is that the only thing that prevented him being finished off by enemy forces was Socrates’ irruption into the enemy line. In Plato’s account, Alcibiades reports Socrates’ bold action solely as meriting praise and commendation rather than disapproval. In the bloody turmoil of battle, Alcibiades was fortunate not to have been mortally wounded; perhaps what saved him from death was a blow to the head that made him fall to the ground. In the space created by his own spirited foray, Socrates would have been able to lift his friend bodily out of danger and bring him and his precious armour back to the safety of Athenian lines.

  Socrates’ subsequent willingness for his young friend to enjoy the limelight on his own may have had something to do with his recognition that individual glory, though held in high regard, came at a price that he was no longer prepared to pay. Many a young Athenian of the hoplite class will have cherished the ambition to become a hero on the battlefield; and Socrates’ life story, both in soldiery and in philosophy, shows that heroism in various forms was for him an object of admiration and desire. At this stage of his life, however, martial heroism was already less attractive to Socrates than moral heroism, even if he was bound to acknowledge that Alcibiades, then still in his late teens, might never be persuaded to come to the same view.

  The end of the siege

  The battle at Potidaea was short and indecisive. Despite suffering twice as many casualties as the Athenians, the majority of Potidaeans were able to withdraw behind their still intact city walls. The Athenians proceeded to lay siege to Potidaea for two long years.

  In 430 BC a contingent of reinforcements was dispatched from Athens to help with the siege. The Athenian generals, who were named as Cleopompus and Hagnon, brought with them massive battering rams, an artillery invention for assaulting walled cities of which we are told here for the first time in the history of Greek warfare.6 The new contingent of Athenian troops brought with them from Athens something even more deadly: the plague.

  After war had been declared the year before in 431 BC, Athens had become a temporary home to thousands of countryfolk fleeing the Spartan invasions of Attica. In the squalid and overcrowded conditions created within the city walls, the people of Athens had fallen prey to a terrible epidemic whose grisly symptoms were described in detail by Thucydides. It has been identified by some modern researchers as a form of typhus.7 Some of the soldiers who arrived at Potidaea in 430 BC carried the disease with them, and it spread inexorably through the camp. The general Cleopompus son of Cleinias (not Alcibiades’ father, but possibly another member of the family with the same name) succumbed to it, along with many of his troops. Within weeks, more than a thousand Athenian soldiers stationed at Potidaea had died of the plague, whereupon Hagnon returned to Athens by sea with the remnants of his ill-fated army.

  Despite this demoralising
setback, the Athenians who remained at the site, among whom Socrates and Alcibiades may have numbered, were instructed to persist in the siege. Conditions in the besieged town of Potidaea were becoming dire. Eventually, stocks of food began to run out, and, having eaten through all their stores, crops, and livestock, the residents of Potidaea resorted to eating the corpses of their fellow-citizens.8

  In the winter of 430 BC the starving survivors finally surrendered to the Athenians. The emaciated Potidaeans were sent into exile in neighbouring cities of the region. Thucydides reports that men were permitted to take with them one cloak and a small amount of money, while women were allowed two pieces of clothing. The aim of the Athenians’ expedition had formally been achieved, but it must have felt like a miserable and unsatisfying end to the long campaign.

  Socrates on campaign

  The Athenians and their allies, among whom were troops from cities of Ionia, remained in their encampment at Potidaea until the following summer of 429 BC. It was perhaps during these summer months that Alcibiades witnessed a characteristic piece of Socratic behaviour, which Plato has him recount as follows in the Symposium:

  One day, at dawn, Socrates was immersed in some problem and stood on the spot trying to work it out. He couldn’t resolve it, but he wouldn’t give up. He simply stood there, trying. By midday, many soldiers had seen him, and in amazement said to one another ‘Socrates has been standing there meditating since dawn!’

  He was still there when evening came. After dinner some Ionians brought out their mattresses and rugs to sleep in the cool – this took place in the summer – and they waited to see if Socrates was going to stay out there all night.

  He stood on the spot until dawn came and the sun rose, then made his prayers to the Sun and left.

  The detail of Socrates’ salutation to the Sun (personified as the god Helios) pointedly shows him acting in a traditional Greek religious manner. As a thinker Socrates was popularly associated with philosophers of nature such as Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, who notoriously argued that the sun was a physical object rather than a divinity. To many Greeks such views seemed dangerously sacrilegious; and it was never far from Plato’s mind that his teacher had been unjustly condemned to death for ‘not honouring the city’s gods’. Here he could subtly remind his readers that Socrates was a conventionally pious man.

  To Socrates’ fellow-soldiers, and to contemporary readers of Plato, the act of praying to the Sun would have been perfectly normal behaviour. They would have been less comfortable to witness his standing still through the night. This was, as we have seen, something for which Socrates was well known, and it seemed to fit other aspects of his personality that made him stand out as unusual: one of the adjectives regularly used to describe Socrates is atopos, ‘eccentric’ or ‘unconventional’ (literally ‘out of place’). The act of standing still for hours on end, however, seems too extreme to be considered wholly a matter of rational choice, and it is reasonable to suppose that it was the symptom of an underlying physiological or psychological condition.

  Surprisingly, however, no ancient author speaks of Socrates as being afflicted by any kind of medical condition apart from an author in the school of Aristotle, who suggested that his physical symptoms stemmed from ‘melancholy’.9 His main biographers, devoted as they were to Socrates’ memory, are inclined to view his behaviour with great respect, and they treat his episodes of apparent silent contemplation as an indication of his extreme (and probably, to their minds, divinely inspired) devotion to the life of the mind. In recent times, however, these episodes have attracted medical analyses, including the diagnosis of catalepsy.10 If so, Socrates is likely to have suffered from this condition from early youth, and he would have been aware that it caused observers to treat him with circumspection if not active antipathy. It would surely have made him, among other things, a less than attractive marriage prospect for eligible Athenian girls of his class.

  The final battle

  Socrates was to experience a final action on the Potidaea campaign which he describes in Plato’s Charmides (the setting of which is just after Socrates’ return to Athens from service in Potidaea) as a ‘severe battle’; it has been identified as the Battle of Spartolus.11 In 429 BC the Athenians in Potidaea had been joined by yet another relief contingent of soldiers from Athens, two thousand strong, and military activity was resumed. After deceptive intelligence reports had led them to believe that the town of Spartolus would be betrayed to them by insiders, the Athenians advanced towards the city, setting fire to the outlying fields and orchards. However, troops from neighbouring cities rapidly swarmed to the defence of Spartolus. These included contingents of horsemen and slingers, who operated with deadly effectiveness in picking off the Athenian soldiers. The Athenians suffered the disastrous loss of over four hundred men in this engagement, and all their commanders on the field were killed.

  Spartolus was the last action of the campaign, after which the war-weary Athenians struck a truce with the Potidaeans, collected their dead, and sailed back to Athens. Socrates and Alcibiades will have returned to their homes some time in the late summer of 429 BC, after an absence of up to three years. They will have found the city and its surroundings in a miserable state. The central area of the city was crowded with refugees who had poured in from the countryside. Men and women, slave and free, young and old, were still suffering and dying from the plague, with corpses piled in the streets and being buried in hastily dug pits. The adjacent fields and orchards were scarred by the aftermath of successive Spartan invasions.12

  Such calamitous conditions might have made it hard for someone less tough-minded than Socrates to preserve a philosophical perspective. He is presented in Charmides as cheerful and unscarred by his experiences either in battle or afterwards. What is clear from the above accounts of his military service is that the image of Socrates as a thinker is not the only one we should form of him. At Potidaea and elsewhere he showed himself to be an impressive, even heroic, man of action. His unconventional outlook was also apparent in that, despite having single-handedly rescued Alcibiades from the thick of battle, he chose to divert attention from his own actions.

  Perhaps, as I have suggested, he did so partly because he harboured a sense of guilt about his own part in prioritising the rescue of Alcibiades over the safety of his other comrades, some of whom may have lost their lives as a result of his individualistic action. Perhaps it was partly because he wanted to allow the Athenians, and above all Pericles and Aspasia, to draw pride and comfort from the reports of young Alcibiades’ dashing heroism on the battlefield. They might, after all, have taken a sterner view of Alcibiades’ breaking the line in pursuit of personal glory; whereas Socrates, unlike Alcibiades, was apparently not interested – or no longer interested – in receiving rewards for the kind of martial valour for which most Athenian men of his time would have keenly wished to be recognised, admired, and remembered.

  A man of action

  The testimony of Alcibiades shows that Socrates’ indifference to physical discomfort, even in the depth of winter, made a strong impression on his fellow-soldiers, to the point that he was resented for it. Socrates will have been trained to endure such harsh conditions early on in his life, and one might associate his physical strength with the activities in which he engaged as a boy and young man. His father Sophroniscus is described as a ‘worker of stone’ (lithourgos): given that the evidence of Socrates’ early education and hoplite service points to his family’s being relatively wealthy, however, this may mean that Sophroniscus owned a business that employed stonecutters and carvers rather than simply being a poor artisan.

  Socrates was trained in the family profession, which is likely to have involved laborious hours of cutting stone in quarries and transporting the blocks to workshops for sculpting. In addition to such work, Socrates’ training as a hoplite, involving practising manoeuvres in heavy armour, would have honed his strength and agility. Ancient armies travelled with support units, some of which we
re responsible for carrying fire in the form of burning coals and embers stowed in braziers, along with stocks of kindling and dry logs.13 Fire was used for military purposes such as the burning of enemy land and crops. When camping out in bitterly cold conditions such as those they would have experienced in winter in Potidaea, Athenian troops also depended on fire to sustain their bodies and spirits. They would light fires for warmth and cooking as soon as they set up camp. Socrates, however, had apparently trained himself to a remarkable degree to ignore cold and discomfort. In his speech in the Symposium, Alcibiades describes Socrates’ capacity to endure discomfort:

  He took the hardships of campaign much better than I did, much better in fact than any of the troops. When we were cut off from our supplies, as often happens on campaign, no one else endured hunger as well as he did.

  In addition, he had an extraordinary ability to withstand the cold, though winter in that region is awful. Once, I remember, it was absolutely freezing, and no one stuck his nose outside. If we had to leave our tents, we wrapped ourselves in anything we could lay our hands on and tied extra pieces of felt or sheepskin over our boots.

  Well, Socrates went out in that weather wearing nothing but his old light cloak, and even in bare feet he walked more steadily through the ice than other soldiers did in their boots. You can imagine how they looked at him – they thought he was doing it just to show them up.