Alcibiades had previously met Tissaphernes, the Persian satrap (local governor) in Asia Minor, where he had been organising financial subsidies to the Peloponnesian forces. Now Alcibiades advised him to curtail his support, allegedly so as to weaken both sides for Persian advantage. His act was viewed by many, however, as an attempt to restore himself to Athenian favour. After establishing himself as Tissaphernes’ trusted adviser, Alcibiades did indeed involve himself in complicated machinations aimed at bringing about his eventual restoration to Athens. In the meantime, however, Sparta made a series of treaties with Persia, making the eventual outcome of the conflict look even less likely to be in Athens’ favour.
The regime of the Four Hundred set up in 411 BC was soon succeeded by a more moderate and broadly-based regime, the Five Thousand, under which Alcibiades was finally recalled to Athens. He did not return immediately, but first acted to help the Athenians obtain a number of victories by sea and land. When he eventually returned to Athens in 407 BC, he received a hero’s welcome, and the charges against him were officially dropped.
However, his political enemies had not disappeared. After the Athenians suffered a defeat in a sea battle in 406 BC, for which Alcibiades was blamed, he withdrew into voluntary exile in Thrace. From there he headed east after Athens’ defeat in 404 BC, crossing the Hellespont into Phrygia in the hope of reviving an association with Persia on behalf of Athens. Shortly afterwards, his house in Phrygia was surrounded and set on fire by Persian troops sent at the behest of the Spartans. Rushing out of the house, sword in hand, he met his end in a hail of arrows.11
The shadow of Alcibiades
By the time Plato was composing his dialogues in the 380s and 370s BC, Alcibiades was long dead. His character and intentions remained controversial after Athens finally surrendered to Sparta in 404 BC. We have no record of what Socrates himself thought of the vicissitudes of his young friend’s political and military career. During the period of Alcibiades’ ascendancy, most of Socrates’ activities, other than his service in battle, involved little more than participating in philosophical debates in the houses of rich friends, or walking around Athens’ Agora subjecting artisans and tradesmen to examination about their unconsidered assumptions.
Given his love of Alcibiades and his own consistent loyalty to Athens, Socrates cannot have failed to feel dismay at the thought of Alcibiades supporting the city’s enemies during the Sicilian campaign. But, then, he was surely long used to feeling similar alarm at the younger Alcibiades’ reckless behaviour and wild escapades. He may not have been greatly surprised when he heard of Alcibiades’ profanation of the Mysteries or his defection from Athens; nor to see him, in more happy times, being forgiven by the Athenians and welcomed back as a returning hero, before being forced to escape once again.
After their final victory in 404 BC, the Spartans installed oligarchic rule in Athens, the so-called Thirty Tyrants, with Critias (who was Plato’s uncle, his mother’s cousin) at their head. They set about murdering and dispossessing democratic opponents to their regime, but their reign of terror was brief. In 403 BC the oligarchs were defeated in battle by exiled forces who had gathered under the banner of democracy, whereupon the traditional institutions were restored to Athens. One of the democratic exiles was Socrates’ old friend Chaerephon, as Socrates was to remind the jurors at his trial in 399 BC, no doubt in a bid to show that his own views, like those of at least some of his followers, should not be thought anti-democratic.
Although an official amnesty was declared to allow for the recall of all except those most directly responsible for the oligarchic actions of previous years, supporters of the restored democracy of Athens could not forgive Alcibiades. In their eyes, his behaviour was a determining factor in Athens’ defeat and in the deaths of so many fellow-Athenians. They linked his treacherously anti-democratic conduct to the guidance of his friend and associate Socrates, who was still alive and very much in evidence, both as a teacher of upper-class youngsters and as an annoyingly disruptive questioner of the views of the common man.
Plato makes the clear suggestion in his Symposium that Alcibiades himself did not lay the responsibility for any of his decisions or actions at Socrates’ door. The young man there says that he strayed into excess only when he was out of reach of Socrates’ good influence. It may have been enough for Socrates’ accusers, however, that the philosopher never explicitly condemned Alcibiades’ actions. The years of Alcibiades’ instruction by Socrates and their close acquaintance were bound to be recalled by Athenians after the events of 404–403 BC, the year in which the Thirty Tyrants launched their brutal reign of terror with its summary executions, property confiscations, and the exile of thousands of Athenian citizens and metics.
Socrates and the Terror
Alcibiades’ contemporary and friend Critias was a leading figure in the Thirty. A cousin of Plato’s mother, he had been a follower of Socrates, though not an uncritical one, for many years. He was also one of the high-born Athenians who had been accused of taking part in the mutilation of the Herms in 415 BC. Immediately after that event he had been arrested, but was exonerated after the man who denounced him was discredited. He remained in close contact with Alcibiades during his absence from Athens, and successfully proposed his return from exile in 407 BC.
When public opinion turned against Alcibiades again in 406 BC, Critias left the city. He returned after the fall of Athens to Sparta in 404 BC to become a principal actor in the Spartan-installed oligarchy. When the reassembled democratic forces fought the oligarchic junta in 403 BC, Critias was killed in battle. However, his part in the politically motivated executions of hundreds of innocent fellow-citizens was not forgotten, and popular bitterness against him and his associates lingered.
Xenophon characterises Critias as a ruthless and amoral individual, whose partisan cruelty contributed to the negative perception of Socrates. While his account gives witness to the association of Socrates with Critias long before the latter acquired political power, he takes pains to show that the two men did not see eye to eye. He records Critias’s open contempt about Socrates’ keenness to converse with low-class artisans such as tanners, craftsmen, and bronzeworkers. Socrates in his turn was said to have been disgusted by Critias when he observed him harassing a young man with whom he was infatuated; he openly compared those attentions to ‘a pig scratching itself against a rock’. Critias could not forgive the insult, and when he rose to power he took revenge. In the Apology, Socrates tells how he was summoned by the Thirty and instructed to arrest an innocent man, Leon of Salamis, and bring him in for execution. He refused to comply with the instruction at the risk of being executed himself, and claimed that he survived only because the Thirty fell from power shortly afterwards.
Socrates tells the story in his defence speech to support his claim that he feared committing an unjust act more than he feared dying. The fact that he had remained in Athens under the new regime was, however, something that his democratic foes will have viewed with suspicion, even though he was vocally critical of the actions of Critias and the Thirty. He was said to have observed: ‘If a cowherd reduced the numbers and health of his cattle, he would rightly be reckoned a poor cowherd; so it’s amazing that a leader who reduces and impoverishes his citizens should not recognise with shame that he’s a poor leader.’12 Socrates was suspected of teaching sentiments of this kind to young men who sought to whip up opposition to the regime; a law passed by Critias banning ‘instruction in the art of words’ was apparently intended to ensure Socrates’ silence.
Socrates may indeed have been lucky to have survived the reign of the Thirty. However, the fact that Critias, despite his personal resentment towards Socrates, may not have countenanced the execution of his old teacher, will have led to the suspicion that they remained on good terms. In any case, the link between Socrates and his upper-class pupils lingered in people’s minds. Half a century after Socrates’ death, the fourth-century orator Aeschines declared to his Athenian audien
ce: ‘You executed Socrates because he was responsible for educating Critias, one of the leaders of the anti-democratic Thirty.’
In 399 BC Socrates was put on trial in front of an Athenian court, charged with ‘failing to acknowledge the city’s gods’, ‘introducing new gods’ and ‘corrupting young men’. A majority of jurors found him guilty as charged. Under Athenian law, Socrates and his accusers were each allowed to suggest what his punishment should be. In the speech that Plato’s Apology purports to record, Socrates proposed that he be rewarded for his philosophical activities with a public pension for life. The jurors were not amused, and voted by a considerably larger margin than before that he be put to death.
It would have been possible for Socrates to escape death while awaiting his sentence in gaol. Friends urged him to allow them to bribe the guards to release him. However, he had decided that, even if the judgement of his fellow-citizens was flawed, he had a duty to abide by their decision. He was also aware, as classicist Mary Lefkowitz has acutely observed, that ‘a heroic death would bring him immortality: no Greek could forget the names or deeds of Patroclus, Hector and Achilles … It was only by allowing himself to be executed that Socrates was able to remain in control of his own biography.’13 The method of his execution was to have him drink a cup of hemlock ground in water. The poison induced a numbness that rose from his feet until it reached his heart.
For many historians, the real reason for the indictment and execution of Socrates in 399 BC was the Athenians’ anger at the political crimes perpetrated by Critias and Alcibiades. It could not be denied that both had been close to Socrates. Alcibiades in particular had followed Socrates, boy and man, from the time when his father’s death in battle had delivered him into the guardianship of Pericles. Who else, then, in Pericles’ circle did Socrates know or come into contact with during those decades? The association of Socrates with Alcibiades, and possibly with Pericles himself, raises questions about Socrates’ background and status which have vital and hitherto unexplored implications for the trajectory of his life and thought.
4
The Circle of Pericles
The earliest biographical evidence for the young Socrates derives from an ancient author called Ion of Chios. An older contemporary of Socrates, Ion was a polymath, active in the early half of the fifth century BC as a successful poet, dramatist, and philosopher. His writings are lost apart from a few citations, but passages quoted by later authors show him to have been a knowledgeable commentator on social and political affairs. In his Travel Journal, the earliest known example of the genre of autobiographical travel writing, Ion wrote: ‘As a young man Socrates accompanied Archelaus on a trip to Samos.’1
This apparently straightforward report, cited many centuries later by the historian Diogenes Laertius (second–third centuries ad), is the earliest direct testimony to Socrates’ teenage years, and a crucial witness to his youthful background and experience. It is supplemented by the words of an authoritative ancient author, the fourth-century BC musical theorist Aristoxenus of Tarentum, whose father Spintharus was also a contemporary of Socrates. In his lost Life of Socrates, the earliest formal biography of the philosopher, Aristoxenus straightforwardly notes that ‘Socrates was Archelaus’s boy-lover [paidika]’.
This proposition has been generally dismissed or ignored by subsequent biographers of Socrates. The neglect would be inexplicable were it not for the statement’s explosive attestation to an early homosexual liaison for Socrates. The notion has been rejected, often from simple prejudice, by generations of historians who have sought to emphasise Socrates’ sexual (and specifically heterosexual) rectitude, or have been inclined to view his life solely from the perspective of his trial and death.2 The statement’s implications for Socrates’ social status and the milieu in which he moved as a youth are no less significant – indeed, considerably more important from the point of view of his biography – than the confirmation it gives of Socrates’ early experience of a homosexual liaison involving an older man.
The circle of Archelaus
Archelaus, Socrates’ companion on the trip to Samos, was an Athenian philosopher and a friend of the leading aristocratic politician and pro-Spartan general, Kimon. Ion of Chios, who noted that Archelaus was Socrates’ companion on the journey to Samos but did not specify a closer relationship, was also friendly with Kimon and a keen student of philosophy. Ion is likely to have encountered Archelaus and to have been conversant with his activities and his philosophical doctrines. Ion’s acquaintance with Pericles, then an up-and-coming populist politician, was probably less warm, since he is recorded as remarking on the latter’s ‘impudent and disdainful’ manner. He must have experienced at first hand the young Pericles’ dismissive attitude, which was perhaps directed in particular at his political rival Kimon and the latter’s conservative associates.
Ion travelled widely around the Greek world, making more than one trip to the island of Samos, which is just a few hours by boat down the coast from Chios. One of his later visits there coincided with the presence of the dramatist Sophocles, who was serving as a general on Pericles’ infamous expedition to subdue the island in 440 BC. While there’s no evidence that Socrates served on this campaign, some have read the testimony about Socrates’ visit to Samos as referring to his involvement on Samos as a hoplite soldier. It is hard for such an interpretation to be sustained. First, by 440 BC Socrates was nearly thirty, so the description by Ion of Socrates being a ‘young man’ seems to rule out a reference to that event. Secondly, Ion’s remark is cited by Diogenes Laertius explicitly to deny the proposition that ‘Socrates never left Athens other than for military service.’ So the visit to Samos mentioned by Ion cannot refer to Socrates’ participation in a military expedition to Samos in 440 BC. It must refer to a visit to that island for non-military purposes at an earlier stage of Socrates’ life.
The idea that Socrates ‘never left Athens’ was so commonplace that when Socrates is described, in Plato’s Phaedrus, as wandering beyond the city boundaries, it is a matter for surprised comment.3 The image of Socrates as a stay-at-home philosopher stems from a perspective on him as a middle-aged and older man, who spent his days frequenting the Agora and other localities where young men (who may have been forbidden by law to enter the Agora) were permitted to gather, such as the house of Simon the Shoemaker.4 The notion that Socrates was only ever based in Athens is what we might expect to be assumed by biographers who were too young to have known Socrates in his youth. It was evidently not true of the younger Socrates.
Socrates’ visit to Samos with Archelaus is dated by Porphyry, a widely-read pagan scholar of the third century ad, to 452 BC. In that year Socrates would have been seventeen. In the writings of Aristoxenus, Porphyry read the assertion that Socrates and Archelaus ‘were for many years not just acquaintances, but lovers’. Scholars have sought to dismiss Aristoxenus as ‘spiteful’ and for being ‘an unreliable gossip-monger’.5 But in the context of ancient Greek elite culture, the assertion that Archelaus and Socrates were lovers need not have entailed indignity or scandal. The statement may simply have been intended to be straightforwardly factual.
‘As boys we sought the affection of older men,’ remarks a speaker in Plato’s late dialogue Laws, ‘from whom we could learn and whose company would benefit us.’ Upper-class Athenian youths of Socrates’ day were expected to seek to broaden their social and intellectual horizons through a close association with an older man. In the dialogue Parmenides, Plato introduces the philosopher Parmenides when he visited Athens with his pupil Zeno, fifteen years his junior, who is described as ‘tall and good-looking, and said to have been Parmenides’ boy-lover’. The comment is not pejorative, but a simple statement. It was accepted, at least in elite circles in Athens, that an association between a younger and older man might involve a physical relationship, even if such a sexual liaison was not approved of by Greek society as a whole, and was not necessarily part of the arrangement. In the case of Socrates and Archelaus
, however, Aristoxenus’s testimony is unequivocal.
Archelaus and Socrates
What do we know of young Socrates’ mentor and older lover? In his intellectual and philosophical leanings Archelaus was a disciple of Anaxagoras, a close friend of Pericles and the most famous philosopher in Periclean Athens. Anaxagoras came from Clazomenae in Ionia, a region that was home to many of the leading intellectuals of the day. The philosophers of the Ionian school were natural scientists who were centrally concerned with questions about the nature of being and the physical composition of the universe. Archelaus was said to have followed Anaxagoras’s cosmological theories in arguing that the material world had come into being ‘through a mingling of Matter and Mind’.
Archelaus will have encountered Socrates, the son of a successful stonemason, as a well-educated youngster keen to develop his understanding of the philosophy of the day. Socrates would have been an intellectually precocious as well as a physically impressive teenager. Although his father may have wanted him to devote more attention to sculpting stone, Socrates was endowed with brains as well as brawn. He may well have exhibited something of the charm, charisma, and competitive zeal that he and others were later to admire in his pupil Alcibiades.
In his dialogue Theaetetus, Plato sketches a picture of a budding mathematician called Theaetetus whose qualities seem to reflect those that Plato might have imagined Socrates too displayed as a youth. He has Theaetetus’s tutor speak admiringly of the boy as follows:
Among all the people I’ve ever met, and I’ve got to know many in my time, I’ve never yet seen anyone so amazingly gifted. Along with a quickness of apprehension which is almost unrivalled, he has an unusually gentle character, and to crown it all is as manly as any of his peers.
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