The year of Socrates’ birth fell nearly ten years after the vast invading army of the Persian king Xerxes, perhaps 300,000 strong, was repulsed by a combined force of Greeks amounting to less than half that number. The Athenians played an honourable part in the final decisive engagement in 479 BC at Plataea, a city near Thebes to the north of Athens. Their own land and villages, throughout the region of Attica that was considered Athenian territory, had endured bloodshed and carnage, the deaths of fathers and sons, and the destruction of hearths and shrines at Persian hands. In Socrates’ youth the landscape will still have borne the scars of the incursion – ruined buildings and burned-out homesteads. But the Persians had gone, and for a few decades peace was to reign in Attica.
Socrates was born in 469 BC in the suburb of Alopeke, a deme located just beyond Athens’ city walls.2 The name he was given, Socrates, means ‘safe in strength’: to judge from his later appearance and physique, he will have been a notably robust baby, with strength already apparent in his chubby limbs. The Attic peninsula, with Athens as its capital, was in Socrates’ day officially subdivided into demes – suburban villages and country towns. Historians have enumerated 139 demes, which ranged from large communities such as Eleusis and Acharnae, with populations of six or seven thousand, to much smaller ones such as Alopeke, with around three thousand inhabitants. Each deme was supervised by a deme-leader and local officers appointed for religious, military, and tax-collection purposes. A group of demes from the same region formed a trittys, or ‘third’ of a tribe; the Old English word for a district, ‘riding’, also originally meant ‘a third’.
The status of Athenian citizenship, awarded only to freeborn men and not women, was confirmed when a young man was enrolled at the age of eighteen on a deme list. In earlier centuries, men became citizens through being members of a family group (phratry) or clan, which varied in wealth, power, and landholdings. After the democratic reforms of the Athenian statesman Cleisthenes at the end of the sixth century BC, all freeborn Attic male residents over the age of eighteen became citizens of Athens, equal under the law.
As part of his reforms, which aimed to dilute the power of traditional landed families including his own Alcmaeonid clan, in 507 BC Cleisthenes had divided the territory of Attica into ten tribes, giving them names based on legendary local heroes such as Erechtheus and Aias (Ajax), after whom the tribes Erechtheis and Aiantis were named.3 Each tribe comprised three ‘ridings’, one taken from the coast, one from the city, and one from the inland area. These subdivisions created new tribal identities that, as Cleisthenes had intended, cut across traditional clan loyalties and laid the basis of Athens’ democratic constitution.
Alopeke was renowned for its stoneworkers, masons, and carvers, including Socrates’ father Sophroniscus. It was home to several thousand people, of whom perhaps twelve hundred were Athenian citizens – freeborn males of eighteen or over.4 The rest were women, slaves, metics (the resident non-Athenians who conducted much of the trade), teenagers, and children. Though Athens has been described as a ‘face-to-face’ society, it was a major conurbation by ancient standards; but the smaller demes of Attica will have been more close-knit than the centre. It’s likely that within Socrates’ deme most adult male citizens were acquainted with one another. Among those who lived in his deme were members of the prominent Athenian family that had produced some of the city’s political and military leaders for generations, the Alcmaeonids.
While it took some decades after the expulsion of the Persians for the Athenians to embark enthusiastically on a wave of public works, largely at the prompting of Pericles himself, in the 440s BC, the post-war years may have been a lucrative time for enterprising masons. The Athenians will have commissioned stoneworkers like Sophroniscus to provide sculptures for new and restored temples, and to adorn porticoes and civic buildings with new statues and friezes. It is noteworthy that Sophroniscus was known as being a close friend of Lysimachus, who was the son of the war hero and erstwhile associate of Cleisthenes called Aristides, who had been nicknamed ‘the Just’ for his perceived incorruptibility.
Such family connections belie the notion that Socrates had ‘base’ origins. His father’s profession, while not suitable for an aristocrat, was a respectable one. In Plato’s Laches, Socrates is said to have won ‘fine praise’ for living up to the example of a father who was ‘the best of men’ (aristos), a term that implies social as well as moral status.5 A similar indication is given by the term kalos kagathos, ‘a true gentleman’, in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus. There Socrates is presented as a judge of what such a ‘gentleman’ might be; and though Xenophon extends the term to moral qualities, its common implication of high social standing suggests that Socrates himself was thought to enjoy such a status.6
‘There are persistent hints – but mere hints – that Socrates was related to the Athenian aristocracy, despite his own poverty and his refusal to use the Assembly as a forum.’ So writes Debra Nails, author of a comprehensive scholarly work, The People of Plato, which gives the background and history of all the individuals named in the works of Plato. Socrates’ elite education, his long intimacy with the inner circle around Pericles, and his prolonged service as a hoplite all testify to a family with some degree of wealth and status. The lineage of Socrates’ wife Myrto, daughter of Lysimachus and grand-daughter of Aristides, also suggests connections to Athens’ high-born elite, as do the names of Xanthippe, Socrates’ companion in later life, and of Lamprocles, his eldest child by her. As the child of a man who worked for his living, Socrates could not be considered a member of the aristocracy; but he was certainly not, as Nietzsche supposed, of the ‘lowest class’.7 It also appears that Sophroniscus had married well, to Socrates’ mother Phaenarete, a woman whose name (meaning ‘shining virtue’) may point to high social connections. Her principal role would have been to tend to her immediate family and household, and Plato has Socrates speak of her as a ‘midwife’. Although usually taken literally, this hardly sounds like a settled occupation. It has been taken, rather, to allude to her symbolic role in Socrates’ life: just as the philosopher represented himself as a ‘midwife’ of noble ideas, his mother might be identified as the ‘midwife’ of a virtuous son – one who could be said to have won ‘fine praise’ for his family.
Athenian law stated that fathers must teach their sons a profession. For the elite, what was required was soldiery, politics, and the management of landed estates. Socrates was not born into a landed family, though many non-aristocratic Athenians owned some land, and most owned slaves; and alongside affording his boy an education in music and gymnastics, Sophroniscus would soon have set him to work as a stonecutter or mason in his workshop. In his early years Socrates may have developed the strength and dexterity that were to serve him well on the battlefield by lifting, transporting, and shaping great blocks of stone, or cutting and sculpting marble with saw, chisel, awl, and hammer. Socrates continued to sculpt stone figures for pleasure until the end of his life; but as a young man he had already discovered that the exercise of the mind was preferable to and of far greater importance to him than the hard labour of working with stone.
Education for an elite
Regardless of the precise social level that may be attributed to Socrates with respect to his birth, Plato and Xenophon testify to his perceived status by presenting him as a man of the highest education and cultural attainments. In their writings, Socrates is depicted frequently drawing on and quoting from Homer, Hesiod, and other poets such as Theognis, Pindar, Simonides, and Sappho. He is shown in Plato’s Meno as capable of teaching, with brilliant competence and clarity, the mathematical proof recently discovered in his day and now known as Pythagoras’s theorem – that a square drawn on the long side of a right-angled triangle will have an area equivalent to the sum of squares drawn on the two shorter sides.8 He is intimately conversant with the works that were taught as a key part of the education of the Athenian elite. In Plato’s Ion, Socrates outclasses the professional rhapsod
e (Homeric reciter) Ion, after whom the dialogue is named, by quoting Homeric passages accompanied by expert verbal commentary on his quotations.9 He knows how to play the lyre, to sing, to dance, and to compose poetry. And above all he is an extraordinarily fluent, wide-ranging, and powerful debater and conversationalist, who can hold his own confidently with the most brilliant thinkers of the time no less than with humble tradesmen and artisans.
These attributes are not the kind that are generally acquired late in life. While the sources offer no direct information on the question of how and where Socrates acquired his education, Plato’s dialogue Protagoras gives details of Socrates discussing how a boy in a well-off Athenian family could expect to be brought up. Protagoras, the respected sophist and Socrates’ older contemporary, there observes that ‘the children of men of means start their education earliest and end it latest’.
In an Athens burgeoning with stone statues, temples, and buildings in the wake of the defeat of Persia, a skilled stonemason could certainly have been a man of means. In keeping with his well-to-do father’s status and aspirations, Socrates’ primary education would have begun with instruction in reading and writing for some years prior to his reaching the age of twelve. We need not idealise the educational methods of the time, which were harsh and made frequent use of physical punishment. The men involved in imparting the rudiments of education were for the most part slaves – men of Greek or other extraction who had themselves been enslaved in war by Athenians, or men born from fathers who had been so enslaved. They themselves were likely to have been subjected to unkind treatment, even from their privileged pupils, as shown by the anecdotes about Alcibiades’ violent conduct towards his teachers.
Between the ages of twelve and fifteen, Athenian boys received instruction in music (mousikē) and in gymnastics. Their teachers at this stage were more likely to be freeborn Athenians with specialised skills. Boys were required to learn long passages of traditional poetry by heart, starting with the epics of Homer and proceeding to songs of love, life, and heroism by poets such as Sappho, Alcaeus, Anacreon, Simonides, and Pindar. They were taught how to play musical instruments, at least the lyre and possibly the aulos (double-pipes) as well, and expected to be able to sing and recite poetry, either accompanying themselves on the former or being accompanied on the latter. A clever boy such as Socrates might have been introduced by his father or mentor to revered teachers such as the musician Lampros or thinkers such as Archelaus and Anaxagoras: in Plato’s Theaetetus (183e) Socrates claims that he met the philosopher Parmenides ‘when I was very young and he was very old’.
The Athenian educational regime was thought to develop character as well as skill, and aimed to produce physically fit men of culture rather than simply intellectuals. Music – or, rather, mousikē, a much broader notion – was a key part of it. Ubiquitous in the ancient Greek world and at the heart of Athenian cultural and religious life, mousikē embraced song, literature, and dance. In addition to being a source of recreation and entertainment, it was considered vital both for social and intellectual education, a key means of expressing religious devotion, and a resource for practising and exercising military discipline.10
The young Socrates’ teacher of music and dance was said to have been the Athenian Lampros. Known as the teacher of the dramatist Sophocles too, who was more than twenty-five years’ senior to Socrates, Lampros (whose name means ‘famous’ in Greek, so might well have been a nickname) would have been an old man at this date. He was considered the finest music teacher of the era, and was later listed for his own compositions in the company of great lyric poets such as Pindar. Although he was later seen as a representative of the ‘most noble’ music of his era, a contemporary description suggests that despite his age he was in the forefront of the musical innovations of his day.11 One would expect no less of a highly respected practitioner of the discipline. The fact that Socrates had such a tutor testifies to a family background that was far from humble or impecunious.
In later life Socrates also took instruction on the lyre, as we have seen, from another music teacher, Konnos son of Metrobios. This has often been interpreted as indicating that Socrates took up the lyre only as an adult, and was therefore uneducated in music in his early years. However, the report of Socrates’ earlier instruction from Lampros, as well as his lifelong enthusiasm for and recall of music and poetry, are evidence of the opposite. Plato has him quote widely from what would have been sung renditions of classics by the great poets of earlier ages. The dictum that ‘philosophy is the supreme mousikē’ could have been made only by someone who had an intimate understanding of what mousikē might truly signify.
Socrates’ late resumption of music lessons would have introduced him to the music of the late fifth century, as represented in the dramatic works of his friend Agathon, host of the symposium depicted by Plato, and in the popular solo works of musicians such as Timotheus of Miletus. It’s possible that what prompted him to try to return to instruction as an adult, this time from Konnos, was the development in lyre technique and musical style that was a marked feature of the so-called ‘New Music’ of the period. Closely associated with the New Musical style was the tragedian Euripides, and a fascinating fragment of Euripides’ notated music, representing part of a sung chorus from his tragedy Orestes of 408 BC, survives on a scrap of papyrus.
The recently reconstructed music of the Orestes chorus shows characteristics of a bold melodic style, with musical leaps and cadences used to represent the meaning of the words of the chorus, and a striking use of declaimed words that intrude into the sung line at the climax of a verse. Anecdotes in popular sources of the time link Socrates with Euripides in various ways. They were felt to have so much in common intellectually that Socrates was even said to have been Euripides’ ‘teacher’.12 Socrates may, however, have felt that aspects of the New Music had gone too far and that they had a negative impact on social mores.13
The musical and gymnastic training Socrates underwent as a boy also gave him a love of dance. He was keenly aware that such activity was both aesthetically attractive and health-giving. In Xenophon’s Symposium, the group at the party are depicted watching with admiration a boy executing a dance, and Socrates remarks: ‘Do you see that, good-looking as the boy is, he is even better-looking when moving in the dance than when he is still? No part of his body was still during the dance, but his neck, legs, and hands were all active together. That’s how a man should dance if he wants to keep his body supple and healthy.’
Socrates later asks to be taught the moves of the professional dancers who have performed their energetic routines for the assembled company. As with the testimony to Socrates’ late instruction on the lyre, this has been misinterpreted as meaning that Socrates did not know how to dance; but one does not ask to be trained in virtuoso dance moves if one has had no previous training at all. Socrates clearly knew that dancing was a more serious matter than mere entertainment, and more than a means of exercise: a single line that survives of his writings comes from a poem he composed, and it reads ‘Those who honour the gods best in dancing are also best at fighting.’ To make such an assertion suggests that he was a good dancer himself, and it is indicative of a close connection between his training in dance and his ability in battle, for which, as we have seen, he was supremely well prepared.
Athenian soldiers needed to maintain their physiques to be fit for battle. Along with athletics training in the gymnasium, the pyrrhichē war-dance seems to have been a way of enhancing a young man’s ability to withstand the rigours of fighting. The pyrrichē tested the dancer’s strength and agility; like the Spartan war-dance, of which we are better informed, it may have involved leaping over obstacles, hurling and ducking missiles, and handling a shield.14 Such exercise apart, Athens did not provide any kind of formal military training in Socrates’ day. In the Funeral Speech attributed to Pericles, the lack of training is even held up as a virtue, in contrast to the Spartans’ constant practice and battle-readiness; th
e importance of Athenians’ morale and versatility is correspondingly emphasised.
As Socrates came of age he would have attended symposia, where participants reclining on cushions were attended on by courtesans and piper-girls to enjoy music and singing. The symposium was a masculine environment in which risqué lyrics were common, such as those of the poet-songwriter Anacreon, who mocks himself and hints at the sexual customs of the island of Lesbos in the words of a song:
Fair-haired Eros once again
with his crimson ball lets loose,
teasing me to take a turn
with the girl in fancy shoes.
She disdains my greying hair –
she’s from Lesbos, cool and smart.
See her open-mouthed desire
for the girl who claims her heart!15
Heroic aspirations
In his youth, then, Socrates will have learned to sing traditional poetry, play the lyre, and dance. Alongside his training in stoneworking, he will have exercised in gymnasia, wrestled, and participated as a member of the chorus in religious and dramatic performances. What sort of ambitions and aspirations would be expected in an Athenian boy brought up in a relatively well-off household, with upper-class connections and surrounded in his local village by children from elite families? The answer is that such a boy would have wanted to be, and to be viewed as, a hero. As we have seen, Alcibiades made glory his central aim. Socrates similarly would have sought the admiration and approval of his peers, and of Athenian society in general, through his exercise of physical valour and his intellectual achievement.
For the horse-breeding aristocracy, the height of non-martial glory was victory in athletic games, even if such success was often attained by the victors’ sponsoring at huge cost teams of riders or athletes rather than displaying their own athletic skills in person. Alcibiades gained a dazzling reputation by winning prizes in various international games, culminating in 416 BC with a spectacular success for three teams of horses out of the seven that he entered at Olympia.16
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