Socrates in Love

by Armand D'Angour

  The Delphic injunction

  In respect of one phenomenon, however, the notion that hearing a ‘divine voice’ might be a genuine source of insight into the truth was taken for granted by most Greeks. That phenomenon was the utterance of the Pythian Priestess, the inspired communicant of the god Apollo’s oracle at Delphi. The Pythia, as she was known, was a young girl chosen from the local community in Delphi, who was enthroned in the inner sanctum of Apollo’s temple. She would fall into a frenzy or a trance-like state, thought to be caused by the hallucinogenic vapours emanating from a chasm below where she sat, and would communicate the oracular statements of the god to inquirers from all over the Greek world and beyond.30 Hundreds of oracles are recorded in relatively polished poetic form; but it’s likely that the oracles uttered by the Pythia herself were mysterious or unintelligible, and would conveniently require interpretation by well-versed and suitably remunerated Delphic officiants, the priests of Apollo’s sanctuary.31

  One of the central episodes of Socrates’ life story was the endorsement of his wisdom by the Delphic Oracle. In Plato’s Apology Socrates describes the event as follows:

  I will refer you to a witness who is worthy of belief who can tell you about my wisdom – whether I have any, and of what sort. That witness shall be the god of Delphi.

  You must have known Chaerephon. He was a friend of mine from early on – and also a friend of yours, for he shared in the exile of the people, and returned with you. Well, Chaerephon, as you know, was very impetuous in all he did. He went to Delphi and boldly asked the oracle to tell him whether – as I said, please don’t interrupt – he asked the oracle to tell him whether there was anyone wiser than I was. The Pythian prophetess answered that there was no man wiser. Chaerephon is dead, but his brother, who is in court, will confirm the truth of this story.

  The interruptions of the listening jurors to which Socrates is made to allude suggest that this was not a story that all Athenians would have been pleased to be reminded of – hardly surprisingly, given the unique status it accords Socrates. His public mention of it, however, and reference to Chaerephon’s brother as a witness to its truth, shows that it was not simply a fabrication but a well-known, if controversial, element of his personal history. Plato’s account discreetly veils the fact that Socrates himself was present when the Delphic Oracle gave its pronouncement: Aristotle claimed that Socrates visited Delphi in person, and that the injunction ‘Know Yourself’ inscribed on Apollo’s temple was what first inspired him to start questioning and inquiring.32

  The response given by the oracle was of enormous significance to Socrates, and acted as a spur to his decision to pursue the life of a questioning philosopher. As he puts it later on in the speech:

  When I heard the answer I said to myself, ‘What can the god mean? What is the interpretation of this riddle? I know that I have no wisdom, small or great. What can he mean when he says that I am the wisest of men? And yet he is a god and cannot lie – that would be against his nature.’

  After long consideration, I thought of a method of testing the issue. I thought that if I could only find a man wiser than myself, I might go to the god with a refutation in my hand. I would say to him ‘Here is someone wiser than me, but you said that I was the wisest.’ So I went to someone who had the reputation of being wise, and observed him – I won’t mention his name, but he was a politician – and the result was as follows. When I began to talk to him, I couldn’t help thinking that he was not really wise, although he was thought wise by many, and wiser still by himself. I tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was not really. The consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity was shared by several who were present and heard me.

  So I left him, saying to myself as I went away ‘Well, although I don’t suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I’m better off than he is: for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows, while I neither know nor think that I know. In this respect, then, I seem to have a slight advantage over him.’ Then I visited someone else who had still higher philosophical pretensions, and my conclusion was exactly the same. I made another enemy of him, and of many others besides him.33

  Socrates already considered himself unusual as a child, given his strange condition of his hearing an inner voice. His decision as a young man to test the word of the oracle will have made him an unpopular figure with those who resented his apparent claim to superior wisdom.

  The sense of isolation resulting from Socrates’ awareness both of his inner voice and of the Delphic confirmation of his wisdom may have made him determined to pursue at all odds, and in defiance of the challenges that he was bound to face, the life of examination that he was to embark upon. And there may have been a further personal factor in confirming his resolve to follow the solitary path of philosophy: his encounter with, if not rejection by, the beautiful, clever, and mysterious woman whom we have already identified as the true subject of the remark, directed at Diotima in Plato’s Symposium, that ‘she taught me all I know about love’: Aspasia of Miletus.

  6

  The Mystery of Aspasia

  Plato’s Menexenus has long posed a difficult and, to some, infuriating riddle. It begins with Socrates describing how he meets the young man Menexenus heading from the Council Chamber in the Athenian Agora. Menexenus tells Socrates that he has been at a meeting at which someone was due to be chosen to give a Funeral Speech, but the selection was left undecided. He says that the decision will be made the following day, and imagines that the speaker selected will be Archinus or Dion. The latter is unknown, but the former was an active politician in 403 BC, which gives the dramatic date of the ‘dialogue’ as somewhere near that date.

  Menexenus’s comment is the cue for Socrates to launch into a critique of orators for their hackneyed eulogies:1

  Really, Menexenus, dying in battle seems to be a splendid fate in many ways. Even if he died a pauper, a man gets a magnificent funeral, and even if he were a worthless fellow, he wins praise from the lips of accomplished men who do not give extemporised eulogies but speeches prepared long beforehand. And they praise so splendidly, ascribing to every man both merits that he has and others he does not, that with the variety and splendour of their diction they bewitch our souls. And they eulogize the State in every possible fashion, praising those who died in the war and all our ancestors of former times and ourselves who are living still.

  As a result, Menexenus, when praised by them I myself feel mightily ennobled. I become someone different, and imagine myself to have become all at once taller and nobler and more handsome. And as I’m generally accompanied by some strangers, who listen along with me, I become in their eyes also all at once more majestic. They also manifestly share in my feelings with regard both to me and to the rest of our City, believing it to be more marvellous than before, owing to the persuasive eloquence of the speaker.

  And this majestic feeling remains with me for over three days. The speech and voice of the orator ring in my ears so deeply that it’s scarcely till the fourth or fifth day that I recover and remember that I’m really on earth, whereas I almost imagined myself to be living in the Islands of the Blessed. So expert are our orators!

  Menexenus responds to this ironic diatribe by saying that in this case, given the short notice, the speech will probably have to be improvised. Socrates retorts that few speeches are truly improvised, but are generally based on a prepared template. He says that he was himself taught a Funeral Speech by a teacher skilled in the art of rhetoric, who had been the teacher of an orator of no less note than – he gives the name in full to emphasise that distinction – Pericles son of Xanthippus: that teacher was Aspasia.

  Socrates proceeds to relay to Menexenus, on the latter’s insistence, the speech that he says he was taught by Aspasia. ‘I was listening to her only yesterday,’ he recounts, ‘as she went through a funeral speech for the audience in question. She had heard the report, you see, that the Athenians were going to selec
t a speaker. So she rehearsed to me the speech in the form she thought it should take, partly improvising and partly using bits that I assume she’d previously composed for the funeral oration given by Pericles. It was fragments of these that she patched together to make her oration.’ Menexenus asks if he can remember Aspasia’s speech and relay it to him verbatim, to which Socrates replies: ‘Yes, I’m sure I can. You see, I was practising it with her as she went along. Once I forgot the words and almost got slapped!’

  This is an extraordinary comment for an Athenian man to make, even if it occurs in a scenario that may be wholly imaginary. Plato here allows Socrates not only to concede intellectual authority to Aspasia, but has him draw attention to conditions of close physical intimacy with a woman who is not his wife or relative. Socrates proceeds to give Menexenus a rendition of the speech that Aspasia is supposed to have composed for the Athenians who fell in war.2 The speech is conventional in form and content, and has generally been thought a parody of the genre. It also poses a chronological conundrum: one of the military actions mentioned towards the end of the oration, the Battle of Lechaeum, took place in 390 BC, and the ‘King’s Peace’ of 386 BC is also referred to. These dates fall many years after both Socrates and Aspasia were dead.

  What, then, are we to make of this scenario? Does the inclusion of a datable anachronism simply confirm its fictionality? Scholars have almost universally dismissed the genuineness of the occasion, often seeing Menexenus as little more than a Platonic parody of oratorical techniques. But what this strange dialogue also shows, if only incidentally, is that Plato was prepared to present Socrates and Aspasia, albeit at a late stage of their lives, engaging in intimate discussion and collaboration.

  Since the chronology is deliberately vexed, perhaps we should recognise that a scenario that can be projected forward in time might also be projected backwards. No other passage in Plato’s voluminous writings mentions any kind of relationship between Socrates and Aspasia. So Menexenus might be read as, among other things, representing a concession by Plato that there had indeed once been an intimate relationship between the two, something to which he was unprepared to give witness in any other dialogue. It bids us take a closer look at the historical background of Aspasia herself.

  Enter Aspasia

  One of the most striking, eloquent, and controversial women of her age, perhaps the most extraordinary woman in all of classical antiquity, Aspasia daughter of Axiochus was just twenty when she sailed to Athens with her sister and her brother-in-law, the elder Alcibiades, in around 450 BC. The family left behind the busy, bustling mercantile Ionian city of Miletus across the Aegean, where Alcibiades the Elder, father of Cleinias and grandfather-to-be of the younger Alcibiades, had been sent from Athens into exile, a victim of political infighting, ten years earlier in 460 BC.

  A recently discovered inscription suggests that Aspasia had a family connection to Alcibiades through her father Axiochus as follows:3

  What emerges from this is the following picture. While in exile in Miletus, Alcibiades the Elder met Aspasia’s father Axiochus. A wealthy member of the Ionian Greek elite, which had long-standing family connections with Athens, Axiochus would have been happy to marry one of his daughters (whose name is unknown) to Alcibiades the Elder, a member of the deme of Scambonidae; their son Cleinias was to become Pericles’ friend and associate. When Alcibiades the Elder returned from Miletus with his new spouse and their children, he brought with them his wife’s sister Aspasia, perhaps with an eye to arranging for her an illustrious marriage with an Athenian aristocrat.

  It was not a good moment to embark on such a project. Just a year earlier, in 451 BC, Pericles had introduced a citizenship law which precluded the sons of non-Athenian wives from becoming Athenian citizens. The law was intended to discourage high-born Athenian men from marrying non-Athenian wives by warranting that such a choice would disadvantage the children of such a union. Athenian citizenship would become an even more exclusive privilege than it had been, and the hoped-for result would be an enhancement of the status of Athenian-born mothers.

  Although a non-Athenian, Aspasia, the sister of Alcibiades the Elder’s wife, was a great-aunt to the infant Alcibiades son of Cleinias. So it seems natural that when, three years later in 447 BC, Cleinias was killed at the Battle of Coronea, the glamorous, energetic, unmarried young woman from across the water would have been involved in supporting the youngster’s transition into his new household, that of his guardian Pericles. It may even be precisely at that point, and with that in mind, that she was first brought into the household of Athens’ leader.

  The fathers of Miletus appear to have been more open to educating their daughters than were the Athenians. In addition to beauty and character, Aspasia had high educational attainments. Pericles was twice her age, and already had two children from an earlier marriage; but ten years had passed since he had divorced his wife.4 Now the youthful Aspasia captivated him with her looks, charm, and intellect; and around 445 BC she joined Pericles as his wife in effect, if not in name.5 It would have been hard for Pericles to circumvent his own law and establish her as his legal spouse. The comic poets gleefully vilified the union, calling Aspasia a ‘harlot’ (pornē) and ‘concubine’ (pallakē) and their son Pericles Junior a ‘bastard’ (nothos).

  Later authors report, as we have seen, that Pericles was so in love with Aspasia that throughout their relationship he would not let a day pass without kissing her in the morning and at night. They became adoring and inseparable partners until Pericles’ death from the plague sixteen years later, in 429 BC.6 Honoured above all women by Pericles, honoured by and honouring the very man nicknamed ‘Zeus’ in comic drama and popular parlance: it would be hard for alert readers of Plato’s Symposium not to make the connection with the fictional Diotima, the character whose name means ‘honoured by Zeus’ and who Socrates could claim taught him ‘all I know about love’.

  Aspasia’s reputation

  Ancient authors often speak of Aspasia in derogatory terms, not least because of the evidence from contemporary comic poets such as Cratinus and Hermippus, whose plays reflected popular resentment against her and Pericles. The comedians dubbed her a ‘whore’ and a ‘dog-eyed concubine’, while the biographer Plutarch compared her to Thargelia, the Ionian courtesan who seduced powerful men and wielded influence over them. At best, therefore, Aspasia has been considered a hetaira, a high-class courtesan; though it is telling that this less pejorative designation is favoured by modern scholars seeking to accord Aspasia a more ‘respectable’ status rather than by the ancient sources themselves.

  Stemming mainly from non-Athenian backgrounds, hetairai were the female entertainers of high society; they were often well educated and financially independent, and in addition to selling sexual favours might earn their living by providing refined forms of diversion at symposia. They were well enough remunerated for a tax to be levied on their profession, and some even became wealthy as the proprietors of brothels. It was to this latter category that some censorious Athenians might have been inclined to assign Aspasia.

  Scholars have accepted this attribution as a historical fact despite the lack of confirmation in ancient writings for Aspasia’s status as a hetaira. Aspasia’s upper-class family connections – as the daughter of Axiochus she was after all, of Alcmaeonid stock – and her respected status in Pericles’ circle reveal it to be nothing more than a misogynistic slander. The scurrilous accusations of comedy cannot be taken, as they so often have been, at face value. An egregious instance is the report by Plutarch that Aspasia was actually put on trial for alleged ‘impiety’ and for ‘procuring free-born women for Pericles’. Not only is it doubtful that Athenian law of the time accorded women – let alone those of non-Athenian birth – sufficient status to merit being brought to trial on such charges, but the accuser in this case was said to be none other than the one-eyed comic poet Hermippus, the author of a play lampooning Pericles as a sex-maniac. The report can be nothing but a garbled int
erpretation of a scene in comedy or of the kind of ‘accusation’ regularly levelled against Aspasia (no doubt as a substitute for their real target, Pericles) by the comic playwrights.7

  It is noteworthy that Plato and Xenophon refer to Aspasia in a manner that is far more respectful than they would have had she been a hetaira. Plato’s Aspasia is an admirable, self-confident woman, whose eloquence and intellect entitled her to act as an instructor to both Pericles and Socrates, two of the most remarkable speakers of the age. In a passage of Xenophon, when Socrates is asked about how a wife may come to be educated, he replies: ‘I will introduce Aspasia to you, since she knows much more about the matter than I do, and she will explain everything to you.’

  Commentators have dismissed such passages with incredulity, largely because of their insistence that Aspasia was a courtesan.8 But in a lost work entitled Aspasia by Plato’s contemporary Aeschines of Sphettus, Aspasia is portrayed as someone Socrates is happy to recommend as a teacher, presumably of oratorical technique, to the son of the wealthy Callias. In a section of that book, a discussion takes place between Aspasia and the wife of a certain Xenophon (probably not the historian), and later with Xenophon himself. Using a recognisably Socratic style of questioning, Aspasia leads both her interlocutors to understand that the secret of obtaining the best or most virtuous of spouses is to be such a spouse oneself. Her focus on the aim of being ‘the best’ emphasises, in what we might also recognise as a Socratic mode of thinking, the moral aspect of achieving marital success. Plutarch reports that Socrates occasionally went to Aspasia together with his friends and their wives to seek Aspasia’s advice and to hear her speak about ‘matters of love’ (erōtika). Albeit she is assigned in these accounts something like the role of a relationship coach and matchmaker, these testimonies offer striking confirmation that Aspasia was known for her interest in discoursing on love and – like Diotima in Plato’s Symposium – for her unusual eloquence and expertise in that particular area.9