I never thought such a combination could exist – I don’t see it anywhere else. People who, like him, are quick and keen and retentive, are generally off balance. They rush about like ships without ballast, and are crazy rather than courageous. Meanwhile, steadier types tend to approach their studies with minds that are sluggish, as if freighted down by a poor memory.
But this boy moves surely and smoothly and effectively in the path of knowledge and enquiry, and he’s good-tempered with it. He’s like a stream of oil flowing silently along. It’s wonderful to observe such facility in a young man.6
Plato’s ascription to Theaetetus of a ‘unique’ combination of brains and brawn seems ironic in view of the fact that he effectively attributes, across a number of dialogues, precisely such a set of qualities to Socrates. The sketch of Theaetetus’s qualities may thus offer a hint about Plato’s view of the kind of teenager Socrates himself would have been. This passage, along with others in Plato, seems to present us with a partial image of the younger Socrates, refracted through the lives and characters of others.
We cannot know for sure the nature of Socrates’ relationship with Archelaus. It seems likely, however, that the purpose of their visit to Samos in 452 BC was to fulfil a specific educational goal: they will have travelled there to learn more about the ideas of one of the most celebrated thinkers of the day, the philosopher Melissus of Samos.
A visit to Samos
The island of Samos rises from the Aegean Sea off the coastline of Asia Minor, (Ionia to the ancient Greeks). It features two volcanic prominences, covered with vineyards as in ancient times. In Socrates’ day, Samos was famed for its wine, its pottery, and in particular its three masterpieces of civil engineering from the sixth century BC: the huge artificial breakwater in its harbour, the thousand-metre long water-tunnel cut through the side of a mountain, and the enormous temple dedicated to the goddess Hera.
The island’s proximity to some of the Mediterranean’s key trade routes had made it for centuries a centre for textiles and elaborate metalware imported from the interior of Asia Minor, as well as a place that could draw and disseminate intellectual influences from the Near East and further afield. For half a century Samos’s most famous son had been the philosopher-sage Pythagoras, who was said to have travelled through eastern lands as far as India. At the time of Socrates’ visit to the island with Archelaus, a new intellectual star had arisen in the person of Melissus, son of Ithaegenes.
Melissus was a man of action as well as a thinker. Over a decade later, in 440 BC, he was to command the Samian fleet in battle against the Athenian fleet under the command of Pericles; and he may have been one of the victims of the brutal reprisals taken by Pericles when the Samians were eventually defeated. In the 450s BC, however, he was primarily known as a philosopher, who had developed and published a detailed metaphysical theory about the nature of the universe.
Melissus’s theory was based on the ideas of the philosopher Parmenides, who had left his home town, the Greek city of Elea (modern Velia in southern Italy), to teach in Athens. Parmenides’ philosophical poem On Nature had circulated widely among educated Greeks, and had caused lively discussion and debate among those who were able to understand the kind of ideas he was proposing. His central premise was that ‘nothing comes from nothing’. It followed, according to Parmenides, that the universe had always existed, since it could not have been generated from nothing. These premises led the philosopher to the startlingly counter-intuitive conclusion that all change and motion are illusory, and that in spite of our common perception the universe is actually both changeless and motionless.
Following this line of high abstract reasoning, Melissus also taught that whatever exists must have existed eternally, and that it must also exist for ever in future. He concurred with Parmenides’ doctrine that, despite the appearance of multiplicity and change, the universe must in fact be a unified, unchanging entity. He went even further than Parmenides by asserting that the cosmos is spatially unlimited, that Being is eternal, and that the universe is indestructible, indivisible, changeless, and motionless.
It would have been an exhilarating adventure for Socrates to meet Melissus in the flesh and to hear him elaborate his arguments about Matter and Being.7 Samos was the furthest that the teenage Socrates may have travelled from home; the journey with Archelaus by sea from Athens would have taken around two weeks. Hospitality to strangers was and still is a feature of Greek culture: we may imagine that Melissus welcomed the Athenian visitors to his home, treated them to local food and wine, and discussed with them his doctrines about the nature of the universe.
The visit may also have been the occasion for Socrates’ earliest dissatisfaction with what was widely accepted to be the loftiest wisdom of the day. The down-to-earth young man will have been perplexed by Melissus’s theories, and unconvinced by the lofty abstraction of his conclusions. How confident could one be in asserting such metaphysical theories, and how could one be satisfied with conclusions that, however logically derived, flew in the face of everyday experience? Was it not better to admit ignorance? More importantly, how could such theories offer any kind of guide about how people should live their lives? What was the use of this kind of philosophy if it had nothing to say about the pressing questions of human beings’ daily experience?
We don’t know if Socrates ever left Athens again to visit other thinkers. He may not have felt the need to do so. His adolescence and later years spanned a period in which the expansion of Athenian power encouraged an influx of thinkers and artists from all over the Greek world into the city. It was a time of intellectual ferment, and Socrates immersed himself in the torrent of exhilarating new ideas generated by the philosophers, physicians, sculptors, painters, musicians, dramatists, politicians, and military theorists all around him. Together they contributed to what we know now as Athens’ Golden Age, an era associated above all with the name of Pericles.
The false dawn of science
There was a flurry of excitement when a ram was discovered on Pericles’ estate with a single horn sprouting from the middle of its brow. Was it an omen, and if so what did it mean? The ram was killed and its head was brought to Pericles, who summoned the priest Lampon and his philosophical mentor Anaxagoras. Lampon studied the head and declared it to be a prophetic sign. He interpreted it as foretelling that Pericles, who was then facing opposition from an aristocratic political faction, was going to overcome his adversaries: the single horn indicated that Pericles would become Athens’ sole political leader. The rationalistic Anaxagoras, however, instructed that the skull be cut in two. The ram’s brain, it turned out, had not developed properly, but was misshapen: it was drawn in to the point where the root of the horn began. There was a straightforward physiological explanation for the deformity.
As this story shows, Anaxagoras’s genius stemmed from a determination to find naturalistic rather than religious explanations of natural phenomena. He did the same for events such as eclipses, meteors, rainbows, and earthquakes. His reputation was greatly enhanced among those with a zeal for scientific thought when a meteorite landed in northern Greece in 467 BC. It proved to be, as he had predicted, no more than a chunk of blazing hot rock.
Born around 500 BC, Anaxagoras travelled from Clazomenae to Athens in his twenties, where he became Pericles’ close friend and mentor. During the 450s BC he became the pre-eminent philosopher in Athens.8 His ideas were audacious and visionary for their time. The sun itself, traditionally an object of veneration for Greeks, was, he declared, no more than a mass of fiery stone. Working with novel ideas of perspective and astronomical measurement – he was famed as, among other things, the inventor of the sundial – Anaxagoras estimated that the sun was somewhat larger than the whole peninsula of the Peloponnese.9 He also proposed, correctly as we now know, that the moon’s light was reflected via the earth from that of the sun.
To ordinary Greeks who worshipped the Sun and Moon as deities, however, Anaxagoras’s doctrines were da
ngerous. Greeks such as Socrates regularly offered up prayers at daybreak to the sun-god Helios. To deny the divinity of the sun or other deities risked drawing the anger of the gods and bringing retribution on the whole community. Anaxagoras was allegedly charged with the offence of impiety, and although Pericles spoke on his behalf at his trial, he was forced to return to Ionia for his own safety. This probably took place in the early 430s BC, when Pericles was coming under political pressure from all sides, and his ability to protect his friend and mentor may not have been as assured as it had once been.
Archelaus was one of Anaxagoras’s disciples, so he is likely to have introduced Anaxagoras’s explanations, and no doubt the great man himself, to his young friend. Plato tells us that Socrates was initially enthralled by Anaxagoras’s boldly rational explanations for material phenomena, which would have seemed very different from the speculative cosmic abstractions of Melissus and other thinkers. Something else about Anaxagoras’s approach may have rubbed off on the young Socrates. The older philosopher was known for saying that being wealthy or powerful did not make a man happy – though, he added, he would not be surprised if to most people he ‘came across as eccentric’.10 It’s a lesson Socrates seems to have taken to heart. He was to set his face firmly against acquiring wealth and power, and the Greek word for ‘eccentric’, atopos, was frequently applied to him in later life.
It’s also apparent from a comment in Aristophanes’ Clouds that Socrates was identified with thinkers who denied the literal reality of the gods. Foremost among these was the notorious atheist Diagoras of Melos, who argued that the gods were fictions created by human beings to explain frightening natural phenomena such as lightning and thunder. Socrates was particularly excited, however, when he heard that Anaxagoras had proposed the doctrine that the universe was shaped by a ‘guiding Mind’. He hoped this was a new departure for philosophical thought, one that would lead to revelations of the true purpose of human existence. Keen to learn the argument, he went to the booksellers’ quarter in the Agora and bought Anaxagoras’s book. The valuable scroll of papyrus cost him one drachma, equivalent to a day’s pay for a labourer; it was a sum that only a well-off Athenian youth would or could have afforded.
Scrolling through the book with, we might imagine, eager anticipation, the young Socrates found himself sorely disappointed by its contents. What they revealed was that, for Anaxagoras, Mind was no more than a name attributed to the cause of mechanistic principles by which the cosmos was generated and structured. The theory said nothing about why the world should be organised the way it was, or why it was best that things should be so and not otherwise. As with his earlier experience of Melissus, Socrates encountered a philosophical doctrine that appeared to hold great promise, but in the end had nothing to say about the questions which for him held the most burning relevance and interest: how human beings should best direct their lives.
The scientific turn
Socrates’ youthful interest in Anaxagoras’s theories strongly suggests that he was intrigued at that time by the possibility of achieving a more accurate understanding of the world through empirical investigation. Plato and Xenophon underplay this aspect of their teacher’s inclinations, no doubt to avoid creating unwelcome associations with the disparate assortment of mainly non-Athenian intellectuals and teachers – the ‘sophists’ who would have included Anaxagoras, Melissus and Archelaus. Their theories required, in a pre-scientific era, to be argued for as much as demonstrated; and many sophists taught the art of argumentation as one of the skills needed to succeed in public life. This led to a suspicion that all the sophists were keener to make their case by using persuasive, high-sounding, arguments than they were to tell the truth. Socrates’ pupils and followers had no wish to see their beloved master, whose sole interest was to get closer to the truth, associated with such thinkers.
Some light is thrown on Socrates’ early enthusiasm for natural philosophy and empirical experiment by Aristophanes’ comedy Clouds of 423 BC. There the character ‘Socrates’ offers sacrilegious theories about the gods’ true names and functions, and describes ingenious methods of investigating how the world works. One imaginary experiment, for instance, involves assessing how many lengths of its own leg a flea can jump by creating wax boots for the insect and measuring the number of boot-lengths. Elsewhere in the comedy ‘Socrates’ explains the buzzing of a gnat and the actions of thunder and lightning using homely, farcical explanations, mainly involving human flatulence. Comically absurd as they are, these scenarios strongly suggest that Socrates, then already in his forties, was popularly thought of as being an enthusiast for empirical experiment and scientific speculation.
Virtually no examples survive from the fifth century BC of the use of observation and experiment to measure natural phenomena, the kind of approach to the natural world that we would now consider to be scientific. Earlier in the century, a physician called Alcmaeon had sought to trace by dissection the ‘pores’ that connected sense-organs with the brain; but the cosmological theories of thinkers such as Anaxagoras and Melissus were the closest that most educated Athenians got to science. Socrates may have wanted to push beyond such speculations to understand the way the world really worked by studying its actual operations in detail.
In practice, however, such kinds of study and the explanations they generated were considered irrelevant, and even unwelcome, by most of his contemporaries. The story of the ram’s head recounted above is unique for its time in combining experimental observation with rational explanation of a natural phenomenon. Even so, as the story is told, Lampon’s superstitious interpretation of the omen was accepted as being on a par with Anaxagoras’s rationalistic one, since Pericles did indeed triumph over his rival, as the seer had predicted, to become Athens’ sole leading man.11
Socrates expresses in Phaedo the perplexity that led him to give up scientific inquiry:
When I was a young man I was wonderfully keen on that wisdom called natural science, for I thought it a great thing to know the causes of everything – why it comes to be, why it perishes, and why it exists. I was often changing my mind in the investigation of questions such as these: are living creatures nurtured when heat and cold produce putrefaction? Do we think with blood or air or fire, or none of these? Or is it the brain that provides our sense of hearing and sight and smell, and from these arise memory and opinion, and do memory and opinion, when these become secure, create knowledge?12
Some two generations later, an evidence-based methodology would be introduced by Plato’s successor Aristotle, the inventor of science more or less as we understand the term.13 But the age of Socrates did not entertain sustained, painstaking investigations of the kind that Aristotle describes himself as having undertaken. Instead, thinkers like Anaxagoras who tried to replace religious with rationalistic ideas came under attack from superstitious Athenians at all levels of society.
At some point in his late youth, Socrates realised that he was not going to get far in his search for truth by pursuing the empirical study of natural phenomena. Instead, he shifted his focus to something that held out a greater chance of success and appealed more to his personal and ethical inclinations: he resolved to study his fellow human beings and their strangely unreflective ways of thinking.14
The leader of Athens
Socrates’ reported connections to Alcibiades, Archelaus, and Anaxagoras all draw him closer into the circle of Pericles, the leading statesman, orator, and general of Athens’ Golden Age. Born around 495 BC, Pericles led Athens in war and peace for four decades from the late 460s BC. A populist leader of aristocratic birth, described by the historian Thucydides as ‘the people’s champion’, he was descended on his mother’s side from the powerful family of Alcmaeonids, from whose ranks had come Cleisthenes, the founder of Athens’ democratic constitution, and other important political figures.
Pericles was known for his determined and incorruptible leadership. He was also mocked by comic playwrights for his slavish devotion
to Aspasia, and for the pointy shape of his head, a physical peculiarity that was said to be the reason he always wore a helmet when he appeared in public. The comedians called him ‘Olympian Zeus’ because of his lofty oratory, but they also taunted him as ‘onion-head’. Given comedy’s penchant for lampooning physical features in this way – Aristophanes mocks his own baldness, and refers to others as ‘squint-eyed’, ‘skinny’, ‘straggle-haired’ and so on – it is noteworthy that the satyr-like features attributed to Socrates as an older man, such as his snub nose and bulging eyes, pass without mention in Clouds; rather, we are asked to imagine him as one of the emaciated, long-haired, and raggedly-clad denizens of the Thinkery.
Pericles grew up in the shadow of the imminent threat of invasion by the forces of the mighty Persian empire. At the naval battle of Salamis in 480, the rowers of the Athenian fleet, newly enfranchised as Athenian citizens, had played a central part in repelling the threat. In 472 BC Pericles arranged to fund the production of Persians, a tragedy by Aeschylus; the only historically-based Greek drama that survives, it emphasises and celebrates how the army of the Persian king Xerxes was defeated thanks to the courage and determination of the Athenian marines. Their actions may have encouraged the aristocratic Pericles to set himself up as a populist leader; he was to expand the benefits of citizenship so as to bring all Athenians, poor no less than rich, into the fold as active participants of Athens’ uniquely democratic system. He and his political associates cultivated the support of the naval veterans to carry out radical policies at the expense of the aristocrats who were led by the general and conservative politician Kimon.
Socrates in Love Page 10