It is in this milieu that, shortly after he turns twenty, Socrates encounters an extraordinary person who will change his life for ever. The energetic young Aspasia has arrived from Miletus with her family by her sister’s marriage. People are gossiping about her throughout Athens; she is known for her beauty, eloquence, and education. She is happy to hold court in the house of her brother-in-law Alcibiades the Elder, chaperoned by other exotic women from her home city Miletus whom jealous Athenian wives speak of as ‘prostitutes’. Unlike other women who Socrates has encountered – and he has made it his business to get to know quite a few – the fiery Aspasia is unconcerned about being seen talking to men and telling them what she thinks.
Wagging tongues say that Aspasia is running a brothel, but Socrates has frequented many brothels in his time and knows otherwise. He starts to make occasional visits to her quarters with some of his high-born young friends and their wives, whom she impresses with her eloquent insights into the nature of love and relationships. She shares with Socrates a love of discussion and debate, and, since Socrates is already marked out as an unconventional young man, he is unconcerned by her status as a non-Athenian and the disapproval that some express about her activities. As it is, his own chances of making a respectable marriage are impaired by the general perception of his eccentric behaviour, such as when he stands still in the middle of the street for long periods, deep in thought.
When Socrates raises the subject of marriage with Aspasia, she makes clear that she knows better than he does what makes a good match: she is sought after by both sexes as a matchmaker, and for her advice about how to ensure a successful marriage. Meanwhile Pericles himself, though twice her age, is becoming no less captivated than Socrates by her beauty and intelligence, and Aspasia has her eye on making a beneficial liaison with Athens’ most powerful man. In seeking to quell Socrates’ disappointment, Aspasia presses him to answer what he thinks love really means, and presents him with her own doctrine of love and desire. Love, she explains, begins with desire for a mate, but in the end it transcends mere physical desire. True love aims to bring out goodness in another person, and then to produce goodness that goes beyond that particular individual and makes an impact that lasts beyond one’s own lifespan. Hard as it may be to accept the doctrine in practice, it strikes Socrates with extraordinary force. It will shape his thinking about the nature of the world, the transcendence of moral ideas, and the transmission of wisdom across generations.
Socrates turns to philosophy
Socrates cannot dwell on his feelings for Aspasia. Shortly before he turns twenty-three in 447 he is summoned for his first tour of duty in Boeotia, on a mission led by Tolmides. Among the commanders of the force is Cleinias, son of Alcibiades the Elder; Socrates has occasionally encountered both men in the company of Aspasia. The battle that takes place at Coronea ends in defeat for the Athenians. Socrates is forced to beat a retreat, and does so with practised deliberation; lucky to return alive, he mourns the deaths of young men he has served with in Boeotia, as well as the death of general Cleinias, who leaves a widow with two sons in Pericles’ care.
Young Alcibiades has lost his father and is now Pericles’ ward. He will need tutors to guide him through his teens, in both intellectual and physical development, in poetry, dancing, and wrestling. Pericles’ project to rebuild Athens’ Acropolis has acquainted him with Sophroniscus, and he has heard from Archelaus and from Aspasia herself about Socrates’ intelligence and cool-headed bravery during the disastrous retreat at Coronea. He summons Socrates to act as a mentor for Alcibiades along with other tutors, including the cranky Thracian Zopyrus and Alcibiades’ great-aunt Aspasia.
Shortly thereafter, Aspasia moves into Pericles’ house, and they live together as man and wife. By this stage Socrates has begun to forge his own branch of philosophical investigation, stemming from his conversations with Aspasia and his disaffection with the fashionable natural philosophy of his teachers. After Anaxagoras publishes a book on his theory of Mind, Socrates decides that he has no interest in the kind of doctrines represented by the philosophers of the day. Instead, he will take his cue from the questions raised by the great poetry and literature with which he has been brought up, and which he is surrounded by in symposia and at the theatre – accounts of personal heroism and choice, questions of courage, duty, prudence, and love. After a few years he discreetly marries his childhood friend, Myrto, who has been widowed after her husband has died in battle; she will shortly bear him two sons.
Recognising his intellectual brilliance and unique presence, a group of followers starts to gather around him, among them the skinny, belligerent Chaerephon, whose clothes hang from his bony frame like the wings of a bat. Meanwhile, with Aspasia now at his side, Pericles’ political and military ambitions accelerate. At her urging, he embarks in 440 BC on the subjugation of Samos. Socrates is distressed to hear the reports of the brutal execution of the Samian commanders, among them his former host Melissus. In his eyes, it throws a dark shadow on Pericles’ claim to virtue and wisdom. Rumours spread that the Athenians will surely be punished by plague for the offence given to the gods; but to the chagrin of Pericles’ political opponents, the astute Aspasia arranges for a series of public sacrifices, and the gods appear to be appeased.
Shortly afterwards, Socrates and Chaerephon visit Delphi to consult the oracle. On their return, Chaerephon jubilantly tells all and sundry that the Delphic oracle has declared that no man is wiser than Socrates. Socrates, however, feels that he has been challenged to understand the god’s meaning. He embarks on a life of questioning people of both high and low status, and concludes that he is only wiser than others because he knows that he does not know.
During the decade of Socrates’ thirties his father Sophroniscus dies, leaving a sizeable inheritance and some property from which Socrates can make a living and maintain his panoply. Socrates has by now decided that, apart from what is required to live and serve his city in battle, wealth and its trappings are of no importance, and are indeed an obstacle to his god-given mission. He will henceforth not care for his appearance or dress, but will use his years of physical training and self-discipline to go unshod and simply clothed, and to pay no heed to luxuries and creature comforts. He will leave the uses of prosperity to highly ambitious men such as his beloved Alcibiades, retaining the hope that they, too, will one day learn that the cultivation of their soul is worth more than anything they can achieve in material or reputational terms. His own god-given duty is to examine the meaning of love, justice, courage, and beauty – the components of true excellence.
Socrates the hero
In the decade that follows, 440–430, Pericles comes under increasing attack from his political foes. Aspasia will hear no criticism of her loving husband, and at Pericles’ bidding she more than once reproves Socrates for living the life of an itinerant thinker rather than engaging in politics. He points out that his continued service as a soldier shows his love of his city, but that he has an even more important duty of love to his fellow human beings: inspired by the very doctrine once imparted to him by Aspasia, it is his task to guide them beyond worldly concerns and in the pursuit of higher ethical ideals. He is by now pursuing philosophy with single-minded dedication, and his amatory feelings have been transferred to the young Alcibiades. He freely admits that he’s in love with the dashing, impetuous teenager with whom he argues and debates, attends sophistic presentations, trains in the gymnasium, and wrestles in the wrestling-halls.
The moral questions that seem so pressing to Socrates come to the fore in an intensely personal way when he serves on the gruelling three-year campaign in Potidaea, part of the time with Alcibiades as his tent-mate. His rescue of Alcibiades in the Battle of Potidaea in 432 BC is an act of courage, performed out of love and concern but at the expense of military discipline. It’s not something for which Socrates feels he merits a reward for heroism that Alcibiades says should by right be his. He is aiming to be a hero of a different kind, one who will be remembered f
or enlightening his fellow human beings. He will inspire them to follow the true path to the good life by forcing their assumptions to be constantly questioned and examined. Pericles and Aspasia disapprove, however, of Socrates’ decision to turn his back on civic engagement, a choice to which Pericles makes a veiled reference in the Funeral Speech delivered in 431 BC.
Unlike Pericles, who dies in 429 BC, Socrates survives the ravages of the plague. During the following war years he continues to fight in the service of Athens against its Peloponnesian enemies. He does so well into his late forties, seeing service at Delium in 424 BC and Amphipolis in 422 BC. Outside of the battlefield, he spends his time philosophising, teaching, and criticising the foibles and follies of his fellow-men. Before finally retiring from active service at the age of fifty, he takes up the lyre again under the instruction of Konnos to try to learn something of the music employed by avant-garde practitioners such as his playwright friends Euripides and Agathon. Socrates recalls Pericles’ adviser Damon of Oa warning that new styles of music could be used to revolutionise politics, and finds it hard to like or approve of the New Music that has gained huge popularity with the theatre-going masses. In Socrates’ ears it lacks the simplicity and nobility of the old music, and risks having a deleterious influence on the morals of the young.
Socrates has become a well-known figure in Athens, but his forthright style of questioning has made him more enemies than friends. In the 420s he is the subject of numerous parodic depictions on the comic stage, including the portrayals in Aristophanes’ Clouds and Ameipsias’s Konnos of 423 BC. After his military service ends, opportunities to keep himself fit become fewer. He develops a paunch and attempts to regain something of his youthful fitness by taking lessons in new styles of dancing. Although he can still hold his drink better than anyone young or old, he good-humouredly accepts that his ageing features increasingly give him the appearance of a satyr.132
Socrates has been married to Myrto for two decades, though he has been a somewhat detached father to their sons Sophroniscus and Menexenus, who are now approaching manhood. He has also retained occasional contact with Aspasia after the death of both Pericles and her second husband Lysicles. Some years later, Aspasia introduces him to Xanthippe, a relative of Pericles; with so many young men engaged in fighting, Xanthippe has failed to find a suitable match, and now approaching the age of twenty she is past the marriageable age of most respectable Athenian women. Socrates brings her into his household as his mistress, leading gossiping tongues to accuse him of bigamy. Xanthippe admires Socrates’ egalitarian outlook, which she sees as the mark of a man secure in his intelligence.133 She is a spirited woman, capable of holding her own and scolding Socrates for his domestic derelictions. His friends are surprised to see Socrates well groomed and better dressed than usual, such as when he attends a symposium at Agathon’s house in 416 BC, evidently thanks to the influence of his young mistress.
Income from rented properties has allowed Socrates to maintain his panoply and his family, but he is not interested in wealth or status, and over the next ten years he continues to pursue his philosophical investigations single-mindedly. He observes Alcibiades’ career as it first rises, then dips and dives. His failure to influence his favourite pupil to follow a more consistent path of wise action does not deter him from his avowed aim of educating his fellow-citizens. The Sicilian expedition of 415–413 BC advocated by Alcibiades ends in disaster, and the oligarchic plotters of 411 BC come and go. Socrates’ one spell of civic duty, as a member of the Council in 406 BC, is a bitter experience. He has to face calls from an angry, heaving mob for the execution of the generals who failed to collect the survivors and the dead after a storm following the sea battle at Arginusae. Aspasia, now long widowed but in good health, visits Socrates to beg him to try to save her son, Pericles Junior, from unjust execution. Socrates cannot persuade the Assembly that such a decision is both immoral and illegal, and is distressed to witness the execution of Pericles Junior, for whom, given his vexed status as the child of a non-Athenian mother, Socrates has always felt particular sympathy.
Aspasia and Socrates share a further sorrow on hearing the news that Alcibiades, after all his adventures and escapades, has been killed in Phrygia. Shortly afterwards, the political turmoil of the war years ends with the calamitous defeat of Athens in 404 BC. Spartan troops enter the city, and Socrates, who controversially remains in Athens while many others including Chaerephon flee into exile, comes close to losing his life through his vocal opposition to Critias and the Spartan-backed regime of the Thirty. By this date Myrto has died, and within a few years Xanthippe will be pregnant with Socrates’ third son, Lamprocles.
The End
Despite his courageous refusal to accede to the demands of the Thirty, when the democratic constitution is restored in 403 BC Socrates is perceived as one of the forces of anti-democratic sentiment that caused so much woe to Athenians over the past decade. Old enmities and grievances come back to haunt him; he is scapegoated for the sins of the oligarchs who staged a coup in 411 BC, as well as those of Critias and his associates, who have cut a bloody swathe through their democratic opponents during their brief reign of terror. A fevered atmosphere follows the restoration of democracy: Socrates’ foes gather their forces, and in 399 BC they charge Socrates with impiety and the corruption of young men. He is put on trial and found guilty. In his defence speech he claims that rather than be punished he should be rewarded for his useful work as a gadfly stinging the conscience of the city. His self-assured demeanour affronts the majority of the five hundred-strong jury, who condemn him to death. For religious reasons the Athenians delay his execution, and he spends some days in prison, in the course of which his friends and family visit him for the last time.
Perhaps one such friend is the elderly Aspasia, now increasingly prone to bouts of illness. At the hour of his execution, just before Socrates drinks the hemlock, he asks his friend Crito not to forget to sacrifice a cock to Asclepius, the god of healing. The act represents the discharge of a vow – a prayer to the god for the recovery of an invalid from sickness. We’re not told who that invalid is: Plato himself is too unwell at the time to visit the prison, and, since he has not yet recovered from illness, the discharge of the vow cannot relate to him.134 Nor will it be meant for Xanthippe, who has a short while earlier been led away from the prison, weeping aloud with grief and anxiety.
Plato will have known, as Crito does, to whom Socrates is referring in relation to the discharge of the vow, but he gives no name. Perhaps that is because the subject of Socrates’ vow happens to be Aspasia, the woman Socrates has always loved and admired, and whose instruction in eloquence and intellectual companionship he has occasionally sought in his latter years. Socrates’ last words have more often been interpreted, though hardly less fancifully, as implying that he recognised death as a kind of ‘healing’ from the disease of life or of sexual desire. What is undeniable is that in dying he fulfilled the aspirations of the young Socrates who had set his heart on being a hero and had sought to learn the truth about love; for in the end, it was for the love of wisdom and justice that Socrates died, a moral and intellectual example to posterity, and philosophy’s first and greatest hero.
NOTES
FOREWORD
1deus ex māchinā While the Latin term is commonly used, it dates only from the seventeenth century and is not found in Classical Latin; the Greek phrase apò mēkhanēs theós (‘god from the machine’) is found in a fragment of a play by the fourth/third-century BC Athenian dramatist Menander.
2came bottom Five comedies normally competed in the Dionysiac festival, but it is thought that the number was temporarily reduced to three during the Peloponnesian War. Clouds came in third place after Cratinus’s Wineflask and Ameipsias’s Konnos.
3published a few years later The date of the second version is not known, but internal evidence points to a date between 420 and 417 BC: Dover (1989).
4investigation of physical phenomena Plato,
Phaedo 96a–99d: see Vander Waerdt (1994).
5rose from his seat The story is told in Aelian’s Varia Historia 2.13.
6raised stage on three sides Csapo (2010) outlines the development of the site of the theatre, with images of its likely appearance in the fifth century.
7colourful fiction However, Marshall (2016), p. 201, argues that the details given by Aelian ‘are too vivid and plausible for them to be accidental or felicitous inventions’.
8some twenty-four years earlier Marshall (2012) argues that there will have been subsequent performances after 423 BC. Recurrent comic parodies (e.g. of Euripides’ Telephus) also suggest that memorable performances might have had an afterlife of more than twenty years, regardless of the fact that many spectators would not have seen the original play and may have had little idea what it was about.
9older man A parallel may be drawn with the biography of Dr Johnson, best known from Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791): Boswell first met Johnson in 1763, when he was twenty-two and his subject fifty-four years old.
10posterity As Lefkowitz (2008) writes, ‘it is not because of his thinking that Socrates has been remembered … Rather, Socrates has remained an inspiration to politicians, thinkers, and artists for more that two millennia because of his death.’
11comparison with the founder of Christianity See Taylor (2007) and Wilson (2007), pp. 141–52.
1
1‘The one thing I actually know’ Plato has Socrates say (Symposium 199b2–3) ‘See now, whether … you would like to hear the truth about Love’.
2famous for its music and styles of dance See Levin (2009).
3pun Elizabeth Belfiore (2012), for instance, suggests (p. 144) that Socrates ‘puns on Diotima’s epithet “Mantinean” (201d2), in stating that divination (manteia) would be required to understand what she means and that he doesn’t understand (ou mathonta) what she is talking about (206b9–10)’.
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