Socrates in Love

by Armand D'Angour

  Plato’s portrayal in Menexenus of the older Aspasia giving Socrates instruction seems to belie an earlier inclination, shared by Xenophon, to conceal any explicit indication that Aspasia ever had a close acquaintance with Socrates. If such a relationship is accepted, the strong likelihood is that it was formed much earlier, when the two first met in Pericles’ circle in their twenties.

  After Pericles’ death in 429 BC, Aspasia lived with (‘married’, according to an ancient commentator) a wealthy Athenian politician called Lysicles, from whom she bore a son. Lysicles, too, is spoken of disparagingly in comedy – Aristophanes calls him a ‘sheep-dealer’ – but given that he served in the role of general, he will have been a citizen of some status and possibly an acquaintance of the late Pericles. Lysicles was killed in action in Asia Minor shortly after the marriage, in 428 BC. Thereafter we hear little more about Aspasia’s activities, until her appearance as an older woman in Plato’s Menexenus.

  The exception to the silence is Aristophanes’ comedy Acharnians, performed in 425 BC, four years after Pericles’ death. There Aspasia is savaged in comic style for allegedly being the prime cause of the Peloponnesian War – rather as Helen was considered responsible for the Trojan War, and just as Aspasia herself had previously been blamed for instigating Pericles’ assault on Samos in 440 BC. The comedy blames her, this time, for prompting Pericles’ Megarian Decree in retaliation for the kidnap by Megarians of two prostitutes from her house of ill repute. The decree, which some have thought imposed restrictions on Megara from trading with Athens or its allies, was said to have sparked the war.10

  The opprobrium directed at Aspasia thus lasted for decades after her union with Pericles in the 440s; and Plato and Xenophon will have been concerned that Socrates should not be tainted by it. Moreover, in view of the fact that Aspasia and Pericles were together by around 445 BC (Pericles Junior was born not later than 437 BC), Socrates’ biographers would not have wished, writing over half a century after that time, to depict a close liaison at that period between Socrates and Aspasia, even had they known or suspected it to be the case. After Aspasia married Pericles, Socrates will have had to moderate, if not wholly renounce, any relationship with her, if only to avoid, for the sake of all concerned, the suspicion that they had ever shared a more intimate personal history.

  Aspasia and Socrates

  In 450 BC Socrates, a direct contemporary of Aspasia’s, was shortly to turn twenty. As the pupil and friend of Archelaus he will already have been known for a number of years to people in Pericles’ entourage such as Anaxagoras. As the son of the successful stonemason Sophroniscus, he will have come to the attention of men like Ictinus, Callicrates, and Pheidias, the architects and designers of the Parthenon who were also the close associates of Athens’ leading political figure.

  We are not told whether Socrates met Aspasia and associated with her in the years between her arrival at Athens and her marriage to Pericles. Those years certainly offered the opportunity for the two to have become acquainted. Whether or not Socrates fought at the Battle of Coronea and saw in person the death of Pericles’ friend Cleinias that year, he will have been drawn yet further into Pericles’ circle a few years later – as a tutor chosen to guide the future path of the young Alcibiades. If Aspasia and Socrates had not already come into contact in the milieu of Pericles when Aspasia arrived in Athens with her family from Miletus in 450 BC, they would have shared a concern for the welfare and education of Alcibiades after he lost his father in 447 BC.

  Socrates and Aspasia were kindred spirits. Both clever, eloquent, and argumentative, they were unusual and controversial figures within their social milieus. The Menexenus is the only source that gives us any explicit indication, however hard it may be to interpret correctly, of a close acquaintance between Socrates and Aspasia. Any further conjectures must arise from circumstantial evidence, and by reading between the lines of what Plato and Xenophon tell us. Such readings may be what inspired ancient authors from at least as early as the fourth century BC to assume that there had been an amorous relationship between the two. A learned pupil of Aristotle, Clearchus of Soli, writes that Pericles fell in love with Aspasia ‘who had formerly been a companion of Socrates’; and a poem by Hermesianax (third century BC) speaks of Socrates’ ‘unquenchable passion’ for Aspasia.11 As we have seen, such a liaison may underlie the account of love attributed to Diotima by Socrates in Plato’s Symposium.

  Might Socrates have fallen in love with the extraordinary Aspasia, only to know that his love could never be fulfilled? There would have been obstacles in the way of a liaison, including Socrates’ own concern about his inner voices, his proneness to cataleptic seizures, and his inclination to pursue a path in life that might make him less than suitable to become the husband of a clever and ambitious young woman. If Socrates had ever thought of Aspasia as a potential lover and partner, the possibility would have been foreclosed once Athens’ most powerful man had set his heart upon her. Perhaps, in seeking to assuage Socrates’ disappointment, the eloquent Aspasia urged him to ask himself what true love really means, and then proposed something like the doctrine allegedly imparted by Diotima in Plato’s Symposium to Socrates in his younger days: that physical desire is only the starting-point for true love, and that particular, personal concerns should ultimately yield to higher goals.

  If such ideas and expressions are to be attributed to Aspasia, they have a momentous implication for the history of thought. The principles that Diotima’s doctrine imply are central to the philosophy as well as to the way of life that Socrates was to espouse: that we need to define our terms before we can hope to know what they entail in practice; that the physical realm can and should be put aside in favour of higher ideals; that the education of the soul, not the gratification of the body, is love’s paramount duty; and that the particular should be subordinated to the general, the transient to the permanent, and the worldly to the ideal. Classicist Mary Lefkowitz has observed:

  Socrates would be an important figure in the history of philosophy even if all we knew about him was what Aristotle tells us: ‘He occupied himself with ethics even though he said nothing about the universe, but in the course of his activities he searched for the general (to katholou) and was the first to understand about the concept of boundaries (horismōn)’ (Metaphysics 987b.1–4). Poets and thinkers before him had thought about ethics. But what made Socrates different is that he was able to devise a process for discovering it that caused him to move away from particulars to general definitions. Without that significant step forward in thought, Plato could never have devised his theory of forms, and Aristotle could not have written his treatises on ethics.12

  In so far as Socrates created a philosophical method distinct from that of his alleged female mentor – one that involved continually questioning and eliciting answers rather than giving instruction, as Diotima does – it might have emerged in express contradistinction to a procedure that to his mind could only gesture at the elusive truth but could never attain it.13 But if the stimulus to Socrates’ adoption of his philosophical perspectives and procedures was the woman who first taught him ‘all about love’, we should recognise that Aspasia was not just a dynamic and unusually clever woman in her own right, but an intellectual midwife whose ideas, no less than what Socrates and his successors were to make of them, helped to give birth to European philosophy.

  Socrates in the Symposium is happy to admit that he learned his doctrine of love from ‘Diotima’; but had Plato supposed that Aspasia might be credited as the crucial inspiration for Socrates’ philosophical thinking, he would have been reluctant to attribute such influence to her directly. In any case, Aspasia’s choice to be with Pericles may have led to a cooling of relations between her and Socrates. She may have come to share Pericles’ disapproval, expressed in general terms in the Periclean Funeral Speech which she is alleged in Menexenus to have composed, of Socrates’ refusal to involve himself in his city’s political life. But in view of the confluen
ce of chronological, social, and intellectual factors, it becomes an attractive and compelling possibility that the advent of Aspasia into the young Socrates’ life around 450 BC is the moment for us to find, if only for a short while, an appealing and credible image of Socrates in love.

  AFTERWORD

  The Unknown Socrates

  My students in the Oxford tutorial session finish reading out their essays. Having presented and considered the evidence of different sources with care, they conclude that the ‘Socrates’ of the Clouds, though it may preserve some genuine elements of his life and personality, is essentially a caricature of the philosopher and his thoughts.

  ‘Do you think the notion of a genuinely historical reconstruction of Socrates’ life is impossible?’ I ask.

  They ponder the question. ‘Any reconstruction must be more or less fantasy,’ replies one. The other adds: ‘Plato and Xenophon give us a lot of information about his thoughts and personality, but there are many details about Socrates’ life we hear nothing about. We know very little about his early life before Potidaea, for instance.’

  ‘Perhaps what evidence there is could be extracted and a film made about the unknown Socrates,’ I suggest.

  Their eyes light up at the thought. ‘It would make a wonderful story,’ says one. The other nods vigorously in agreement.

  The foregoing pages have laid out evidence for a picture of Socrates that has never before been drawn. What emerges is the story of a man whose life can be viewed as dramatic in more ways than one.

  We have seen how Plato’s Symposium shows him as espousing a personal philosophy revolving around Love, and no less as a courageous and even heroic figure on the battlefield. Instead of affirming his origins to be lowly and humble, the evidence has pointed to his being the child of a wealthy and successful middle-class artisan. Rather than imagining him solely as the unprepossessing thinker of his later years, the earliest contemporary evidence to his young years suggest the image of a captivating, athletic teenager with a love for learning. And instead of focusing simply on his declared love for Alcibiades, his obscure early marriage to Myrto, and his much later relationship with Xanthippe, the evidence has allowed us to rediscover his first intimate association as a teenager with Archelaus, and to define a period during which Socrates as a young man might have formed a close acquaintance and even fallen in love with Aspasia.

  All these and other experiences will have laid the basis for the young Socrates to become the originator of the ideas for which, thanks mainly to Plato’s unremitting industry and intellectual brilliance, he is principally remembered. Since the evidence clearly shows that Socrates was already following the path of philosophy by at least the age of thirty, what is clear is that his decision to direct his life towards philosophical rather than political or military achievements must have been taken before that age. How, then, might a version of Socrates’ life be told which does justice to the vital experiences of his early years, as well as to the drama of his later ones?

  Socrates: A Life

  The Beginning

  The story begins in the spring of 469 BC with Socrates’ birth in the village of Alopeke. It is home to around a thousand Athenian citizens, along with their wives and children, as well as metics and slaves. Among the citizens is Sophroniscus the stonemason who, while not a man of elite birth or aristocratic status, is a respected and successful member of the community. His wife Phaenarete also comes from a good family, and his closest friend in the deme, Lysimachus, is the son of one of Athens’ most distinguished statesmen, Aristides the Just.

  Ten years have passed since the Persians withdrew from Greece after their resounding defeat at Plataea. The Athenians are busy rebuilding their lives and homes, with a proud new confidence in their democratic institutions and their naval power. The establishment of the Delian League under Athens’ leadership has brought a renewed sense of security, and Athens’ power as the leading city-state of Greece is being established throughout the Aegean.

  In his boyhood days in the 460s, Socrates spends his hours observing his father supervising workmen in the stone quarries and on the marble blocks that will be transported to different sites around Attica. Sophroniscus expects his son to take up the family trade, and Socrates clearly has the strength and intelligence to be a successful stonemason. Sophroniscus also recognises the benefit of providing Socrates with the kind of education that the high-born youths of his deme enjoy. These are athletic, horse-loving lads who will go on to command armies and win glory on the battlefield.

  However, Sophroniscus is often exasperated to find that his son is too preoccupied with leisure-studies to attend to his work duties. Whenever he can, Socrates slips off to town to listen to foreign-born thinkers, many of whose ideas the down-to-earth Sophroniscus considers worthless, impractical, and in some cases downright sacrilegious. He occasionally gives Socrates a beating for playing truant. The effect on Socrates is traumatic. He is torn between being a dutiful son and rebelling against his father’s expectations. His own aspirations are more in line with his ambitious fellow-schoolboys – to be a good speaker and a heroic fighter, and always to excel.

  Socrates starts to hear an inner voice from time to time, sounding rather like his own father’s admonitions, which warns him to stop doing what he is about to do. At first Socrates finds the voice to be a cause of alarm, but as time passes he persuades himself that it can be heard as a helpful companion, who can articulate his inner urgings about what to avoid and how best to act in any situation. He calls the voice his ‘divine sign’, and must sometimes stand still for long periods to work out what it requires him to do. Rather than thinking of the voice as an affliction, he sees it as a god-sent gift that will help him to live a good life and prevent him from taking the wrong path.

  Young Socrates

  As Socrates heads into his teenage years during the 450s, he imbibes the poetry of Homer, the lyric poets, and other classics, both at school and with a series of private tutors appointed by his father. He comes to know vast tracts of poetry and song by heart, and enjoys singing passages to the accompaniment of the lyre, for which he has some aptitude, having been taught by a leading musician of the day, Lampros. He is all the while developing his physique, not only by stoneworking but also by exercising in the gymnasia, practising war-dances, and competing with boys of his age and older in the wrestling-schools.

  Socrates’ unusual intelligence, as well as the persistent recurrence of his inner voice, sets him apart from his fellow-schoolboys, who nonetheless admire his skill, strength, and quiet self-reliance. His sense of being different from his peers is enhanced after he is picked out by the philosopher Archelaus of Athens. When Archelaus encounters Socrates at a sophistic presentation in the city, he is enchanted by the young man’s obvious intelligence and eagerness to learn. Socrates’ broad, open face and youthful, muscular physique make him an attractive pupil and protégé, and Archelaus takes him under his wing.

  By the time Pericles transfers the League treasury from Delos to Athens in 454 BC, Sophroniscus has long recognised that Socrates’ heart is not in stoneworking. He is pleased to see that the teenager is making a good impression on influential people in high circles, and accepts Archelaus’s offer to act as Socrates’ tutor. Socrates accompanies Archelaus on visits to a number of revered teachers, including the aged Parmenides and Archelaus’s own teacher Anaxagoras, who is considered the foremost thinker of the day and is a close friend and adviser of Pericles. In 452 BC Archelaus takes Socrates with him on a journey by boat to visit Parmenides’ star pupil, Melissus of Samos.

  Socrates finds Melissus’s abstract philosophical thinking perplexing and unrewarding. On his return to Athens, he keenly turns his attention to the rationalising philosophy of Anaxagoras. Brought up in a conventionally pious manner, he is familiar with the ritual acts of traditional Greek religion, and will continue to practise them throughout his life. Nonetheless, it’s exciting for him to discover that, by the use of rational thought, suppos
ed deities such as the Sun and Moon may be understood as material objects, while terrifying phenomena like thunder and lightning are subject to plausible physical explanations. Socrates is determined to go further down the path of the empirical investigation of nature.

  When he turns eighteen, Socrates is added to the deme-register as a citizen of Alopeke. Greece is experiencing a window of peace, and a five-year truce with Persia is negotiated in 451 by the conservative politician and general Kimon. As is conventional for future hoplites, Socrates is sent on military training exercises on the frontiers of Attica, and his father is happy to provide the considerable funds required for his son’s hoplite panoply. On his return from duty, Socrates embarks again on intellectual pursuits, going regularly into town to hear the thinkers of the day speaking in the Agora and in houses of rich Athenians.

  Socrates in Love