Socrates in Love

by Armand D'Angour

  Socrates was in his mid teens in 454 BC when, at Pericles’ urging, the Athenians voted to transfer the Delian League’s reserves of gold and silver from the island of Delos to Athens. The move symbolised Athens’ transformation from the leader of an alliance into an imperial power. Pericles took the opportunity to use the tribute flowing into Athens from its former allies to implement the vast programme of building works that would aggrandise the city and confirm it as the centre of an empire. The focus of construction was the Parthenon, the temple dedicated to Athens’ goddess Athena on the hill known as the Acropolis. It was to be a building of unrivalled magnificence, containing the colossal gold and ivory statue of Athena created by Pericles’ friend, the sculptor Pheidias.

  Socrates’ father Sophroniscus, along with other masons, stoneworkers, sculptors and artisans, was well placed to benefit handsomely from the construction programme initiated by Pericles. Financial accounts for the Parthenon inscribed on stone survive to this day, showing that the largest single expense incurred was the cost of transportation of stone from Mount Pentelikon about ten miles away. The cost of working and sculpting that stone cannot have been much less substantial. During the following years Pericles was bitterly criticised for the excessive cost of the building programme by his political rival, Thucydides son of Melesias, who was Kimon’s successor as the leader of the conservative faction after the latter died. This Thucydides was not the historian (though he may have been a relative), but a politician whom Socrates may have known in person, since he came from his own deme of Alopeke. Pericles won the argument when he gave a speech in which he agreed to reimburse the city from his private assets for all questionable expenses, on condition that his own name would be inscribed on the dedications. Thucydides was subsequently forced into exile by popular vote in 443 BC, through the process known as ostracism: if a sufficient number of the voting public scratched a politician’s name on ostraka, bits of broken pot, the target would be exiled. Thucydides’ departure left Pericles, just as Lampon had interpreted the omen of the ram’s single horn, the largely unchallenged leader of Athens.

  During this time Pericles was no less active as a military leader and in domestic politics. In about 450 BC, when Socrates had just reached military age, a peace agreement was made with the Persians, leaving Athens free to expand its power and influence in the Aegean.15 In 447 BC, when the construction of the Parthenon had begun, Pericles’ friend Cleinias was appointed to lead the hoplite force that was defeated at Coronea, the action which, as I suggested earlier, may have given the twenty-two year old Socrates his first taste of the battlefield. Perhaps the young stonemason’s usefulness on the field of battle, in addition to his obvious searching intelligence, made him conspicuous to the commander-in-chief himself. If so, it would explain why Pericles might personally have approved the appointment of Socrates as one of the tutors for his ward Alcibiades in the autumn of 447 BC when the latter’s father Cleinias died on the field at Coronea, leaving the four-year old boy in his friend’s care.

  The Intellectuals

  Commemorating the dead in 430 BC, at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War, Pericles used the occasion to give a speech summing up a quarter of a century of Athenian success under his leadership. In part of the famous Funeral Oration composed by the historian Thucydides according to the kind of speeches he recalls having heard himself, Pericles claims: ‘We pursue beauty without extravagance, and intellect without loss of vigour: prosperity for us is a spur to action, not a reason for boasting.’16 He goes on:

  In short, I declare that our city as a whole is the school of Greece. Every individual among us possesses a self-sufficiency that allows them to enjoy a wide range of experience, and to adapt to new circumstances with ease.

  The pursuit of beauty was to produce its most lasting architectural achievement with Pericles’ instigation of the construction of the Parthenon. Given the vast expense of the project, to suggest that it was achieved ‘without extravagance’ may seem to strike a defensive note; but it has been suggested that Pericles intended to draw a contrast with the vastly more extravagant architectural splendour of Persia, just as the phrase ‘intellect without loss of vigour’ raises a contrast with the Spartans, who were considered to be physically supreme but intellectually undistinguished.17 The latter reference might also have brought to mind the philosopher-warrior Socrates, who could be admired on both counts; though as Socrates was notorious for his rejection of material wealth and ostentation, he would undoubtedly have challenged Pericles’ view that prosperity was required as a ‘spur to action’.

  Pericles was, however, right to call Athens ‘the school of Greece’ and to extol the versatility and innovative energy of his fellow-Athenians. The chief architects of the Parthenon were the Athenians Ictinus and Callicrates, while the overall supervisor of the works was Pericles’ close friend and associate, the sculptor Pheidias, whose giant statue of Athena in ivory and gold was dedicated in the temple in 438 BC. These brilliant men, and many other members of Pericles’ entourage who jostle through the pages of Plato’s dialogues, will have been well known to the young Socrates. While most artisans and practical men such as these had modest or middle-class backgrounds, many of the thinkers and artists of the fifth century BC who presented their wares in Athens were distinguished and high-born members of non-Athenian communities, and attracted equally high-born local pupils, a number of whom Plato names.

  Some sophists were also of local birth, including the man who was said to have taught Socrates musical theory, Damon, from the Athenian deme of Oa. Damon was a close associate of Pericles, and was said to have wielded a powerful influence on the latter’s political ideas. How did a music teacher come to be politically influential? Damon is described by Plato as ‘a sophist in disguise’, suggesting that his expertise in music was a cover for deeper political aims. If so, presumably they supported Pericles’ anti-elitist inclinations. Populist though his politics are likely to have been, Damon’s most famous statement, as cited by Plato in his Republic, has long been interpreted as revealing a strongly conservative bent in respect of music: ‘Styles of music are not altered without creating radical changes in society and politics.’ It has been argued, however, that Damon’s remark should not be heard as promoting musical stability but something rather more sinister: the idea that music – presumably the introduction and encouragement of new, popular styles – could be used as a means of fostering or bringing about radical change in the political sphere.18 Whatever their aim, his efforts aroused disapproval, as was also said to have happened with other prominent figures in the circle of Pericles including Anaxagoras, Pheidias, and Aspasia: Damon was eventually ostracised and forced into exile. It was difficult in Athens for influential and successful individuals to stay popular for long.

  The most eminent of the sophists, and another intimate of Pericles, was Protagoras of Abdera. He is portrayed in Plato’s dialogue Protagoras giving a lecture in the house of a rich man, Callias son of Hipponicus (not the Callias son of Calliades who was a commander at the Battle of Potidaea), where he subsequently engages in a wide-ranging discussion with Socrates about virtue, knowledge, and education. Protagoras was said to have been the first sophist to take fees for teaching, and to have earned from his instruction more than Pheidias and ten other sculptors put together. When the Athenians set out to establish the new settlement of Thurioi in southern Italy in 443 BC, Protagoras was appointed to draw up a constitution for them, no doubt for a substantial consideration.

  The wealthy Callias lavished his fortune on thinkers such as Protagoras and on younger contemporaries of Socrates such as the sophists Hippias of Elis and Prodicus of Ceos. Socrates himself, who at this stage of his life had rejected material gain, accepted no payment for his teaching. Nor, despite his familiarity with Athens’ political leaders and his regular army service, was Socrates interested in becoming politically active or influential. In fact, the only occasion on which we know Socrates held a public office was
very late in his life, in October 406 BC.

  Socrates’ civic duty

  Let us fast-forward briefly to 406 BC. The Athenian democracy operated a system of assigning responsibilities to citizens by lot, and in that year Socrates’ tribe of Antiochis had been allotted the responsibility to manage the agenda for the democratic Assembly. On one day in 406 BC it fell to Socrates to be President of the Council for a twenty-four hour spell of duty. It meant that he was responsible that day for presiding over the Assembly – the parliament of Athenian democracy – and its smaller guiding body, the Council. He was also required to fulfil ceremonial duties such as guarding the symbols of the city, the keys to treasuries and archives, and the official seal of Athens.

  Socrates’ service on the Council fell on a day of extreme contention. The sea battle of Arginusae earlier that year had been a success for the Athenian fleet, but afterwards eight of the ten generals serving in the battle were accused of failing to collect the wounded and bodies of the dead. One of those generals was Pericles Junior, the son of the statesman by Aspasia, with whom Socrates is shown by Xenophon to have been on familiar terms. During the day, six generals were to be tried en masse for this dereliction (two of the accused were absent, having failed to return to Athens), apparently in violation of an Athenian law that defendants on capital charges should be tried separately.19

  Socrates refused to put the proposal for condemnation to a vote of the Assembly, arguing that it was illegal. However, he failed to sway their decision, and was later prepared to claim that he had ‘made himself look foolish’ – a remark that contains considerable (if in this case unintended) irony, given the courage he had shown in opposing populist anger. Despite his efforts, the generals were condemned and executed. It was an extreme and hasty decision that the Athenians soon came to regret.

  Over twenty years earlier, in the Funeral Speech of 430 BC reported by Thucydides, Pericles was said to have stated: ‘We consider the man who takes no part in civic duties not as unambitious, but as useless.’ Later authors were to suggest that Aspasia had a hand in drafting the speech. Whether or not she did, these words could be read as a sidelong reference to Socrates himself, since he had evidently set his mind against engaging in political life, even if his approval of Pericles’ leadership was less than wholehearted. In the first book of Plato’s Republic, we find Socrates remarking on political ambition in the following terms:

  The main drawback if a man will not himself hold office and take charge is that one may be governed by someone inferior. This fear, I think, leads to the better-off holding office when they do. They approach it not as something to enjoy or benefit from, but as a necessary evil, because they can’t find better men than themselves to leave it to.

  While Socrates’ service on the battlefield will have allowed him to counter the charge of being ‘useless’ to Athens, his deliberate choice to keep aloof from politics, in marked contrast, for instance, to the activities of his friend and pupil Alcibiades, may have met with disapproval from Pericles and Aspasia, both of whom were aware of his intellectual brilliance and the moral influence he wielded within his circle of high-born admirers and followers. Socrates was known not only to be loved by many but also as a lover himself, devoted to the investigation of Eros. So when Pericles uses an unusual and strikingly erotic metaphor in urging his audience ‘to gaze, day after day, on the power of the city, and to become her passionate lovers (erastai)’, his words present a tacit corrective to the philosopher who promoted, in his life and thought, the passionate love not of his city and its power but of individuals and ideas.20

  The silence of the sources

  In the writings of Plato and Xenophon, when Pericles is mentioned Socrates speaks of him with some familiarity and a certain guardedness, suggesting a less than wholehearted approval of his personal and political achievements. In Plato’s Alcibiades, for instance, Socrates suggests that Pericles could not be considered wise because he had not transmitted his wisdom to his sons or to his friend Cleinias. ‘Tell me of any Athenian or non-Athenian,’ asks Socrates, ‘slave or free, who is thought to have become wiser through associating with Pericles?’ Alcibiades has no answer to give.

  The question suggests that Socrates knew Pericles well enough to discount his claim to be thought wise, but we are given no indication of personal familiarity. Yet so much in Socrates’ background – his birth in one of the demes in which Alcmaeonids resided, his father’s likely association with Pericles’ building programme, his connections to Archelaus, Anaxagoras, and Damon, his intimacy with Pericles’ ward Alcibiades and with Aspasia, his friendship with their son Pericles Junior as depicted by Xenophon – makes it impossible to think that Socrates did not have at some stage a closer connection to Athens’ leading statesman than our sources indicate.

  If so, why are Plato and Xenophon reticent? Perhaps they did not have much information about it; after all, Pericles was dead in 429 BC, some years before they were born. Or it may be because, despite Socrates’ early closeness to the milieu of the older politician – Pericles himself was twenty-five years his senior – his subsequent choice of an exclusively philosophical, rather than political or military, career was viewed with angry disapproval by Pericles. Socrates in turn seems to have taken a dim view of the way the Athenian people became increasingly indisciplined under Pericles’ leadership.21 Such differences may have led to a cooling in relations that had once been warm.

  Plato is among the ancient authors who credit Pericles’ companion Aspasia with the drafting of the Funeral Speech. The notion that Aspasia might have contributed to it in some way has been dismissed, perhaps overhastily, by most modern historians. Socrates clearly avoided the hurly-burly of Athenian politics, and it may have been a choice of which both Pericles and Aspasia disapproved; by contrast, they will have encouraged their son, Pericles Junior, to play an active part in public life. Socrates might have countered that, long after he dedicated himself to philosophical inquiry, he did not abandon service to the state, as shown by his active part in fighting at Delium in 424 BC and Amphipolis in 422 BC. But there is no indication that Socrates served on any local or national bodies, as would have been expected of an articulate and educated citizen, until he was finally called by lot to do so in 406 BC.

  If Pericles or Aspasia did disapprove of Socrates’ choice to become a civically inactive philosopher, Plato and Xenophon, in their eagerness to present Socrates after his death in the best possible light, would have been reluctant to report such criticism. Equally, there was a danger that Socrates’ critical view of Pericles’ populist politics might have been construed as an anti-democratic stance, a suggestion the biographers are at pains to dispel. There may have been another reason, however, for their glossing over Socrates’ acquaintance with Pericles. It concerns the nature of Socrates’ possible relationship with Aspasia, before she became Pericles’ beloved partner and mistress. To understand what this relationship was and how it might have been allowed to develop, we must take a fresh look at the evidence for Socrates’ background and earliest youth.

  5

  A Philosopher Is Born

  Writing in the 1880s, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, in his Twilight of the Idols, levels an unremittingly hostile tirade at Socrates and his ‘base’ origins. His views exemplify an aesthetic prejudice that has been attributed to, or even foisted onto, the Greeks of classical times – the view that birth, character, and breeding are clear from a person’s looks:

  Socrates belonged, in his origins, to the lowest orders: Socrates was rabble. One knows, one sees for oneself, how ugly he was. But ugliness, an objection in itself, is among Greeks almost a refutation. Was Socrates a Greek at all? Ugliness is frequently enough the sign of a thwarted development, a development retarded by interbreeding. Otherwise it appears as a development in decline. Anthropologists among criminologists tell us the typical criminal is ugly: monstrum in fronte, monstrum in animo [a monster in face, a monster in soul]. But the criminal is a decade
nt. Was Socrates a typical criminal? At least that famous physiognomist’s opinion which Socrates’ friends found so objectionable would not contradict this idea. A foreigner passing through Athens who knew how to read faces told Socrates to his face he was a monstrum – that he contained within him every kind of foul vice and lust. And Socrates answered merely: ‘You know me, sir!’1

  However, Nietzsche exaggerates the older Socrates’ ugliness: as we have seen, the ‘foreigner passing through Athens who knew how to read faces’ – Zopyrus the Thracian – did not base his hostile assessment on a reading of Socrates’ face. Nietzsche fails, moreover, to relate the continuation of that account, where Socrates wittily remarks that through the exercise of reason he has managed to suppress the innate character traits that Zopyrus ascribed to him. Even if his looks were subject to hostile reaction, he had the personality and intellect to rebut his critics.

  What else might observers of the older Socrates have wrongly assumed about the younger one? The previous chapters have given evidence for Socrates’ close association with Pericles’ circle. His youthful relationship with Archelaus, his subsequent acquaintance with leading intellectuals such as Anaxagoras and Damon, his frequenting of such places as the house of the super-wealthy Callias, and above all his long intimacy with Pericles’ ward Alcibiades, all make it likely that Socrates was, at some stage, personally acquainted with Pericles himself.

  The nexus of relationships that links Socrates to the leading politician in Athens, an aristocratic descendant of the Alcmaeonid family, raises further questions about the philosopher’s background and social status which have not been resolved by biographers. To do so, we need to go back to the beginning of Socrates’ life and see what can be said about his origins.

  Birth, Class, and Status