This episode too can be dated to around 433, because Alcibiades says that it took place before the two of them were together during the Athenian siege of Poteidaea, when they were messmates. Since they were from different demes (ancestral villages) and different tribes, and since they served in different branches of the armed forces (Alcibiades, because of his wealth, in the cavalry, Socrates as a hoplite), it was unusual for them to mess together, and Alcibiades perhaps pulled some strings to make it happen. It is a sign of continuing attraction between the two men.
The siege of Poteidaea, on the Chalcidice peninsula of what is now northern Greece, lasted from 432 until 429, and it is likely that both of them spent most of these years there. Alcibiades may have arrived a year or so later than Socrates, when he came of age to serve abroad, but then it is all the more significant that he chose to mess together with Socrates, after an interval apart. Alcibiades’ account of Socrates’ behaviour during the campaign is detailed and affectionate: he protests that the prize for valour which was awarded to him should really have gone to the older man – and not least because of his bravery in saving his, Alcibiades’, life, during a severe defeat inflicted on the Athenians when they were on their way home after the siege. He also recalls Socrates’ exceptional fortitude in enduring the bitter winters up north, and his self-control when times were good and there were plenty of provisions. He omits to mention what a nasty campaign it was, with the inhabitants of Poteidaea reduced eventually to cannibalism, and over a thousand of the Athenian soldiers succumbing to typhoid fever, the plague that was also decimating Athens itself at the time.
By contrast, when he tells of Socrates’ calm bravery during the retreat from Delium in 424, he speaks objectively, rather than as someone who was in love with Socrates at the time. Since he was not there, he does not mention the other Athenian campaign in which Socrates took part, back in the north in 422 (aged forty-seven or forty-eight), in a vain Athenian attempt to recover the town of Amphipolis from the Spartans.
The dramatic date of Symposium is 416, and Alcibiades is said to be still attracted to Socrates, but in a way that makes it clear that the affair is long over. His tactic now is to keep his former mentor at a distance by putting him on a pedestal of superhumanity. So how long did the affair last? In an obvious attempt to free Socrates of any responsibility for Alcibiades’ scandalous life, Xenophon tried to convince his readers that the young man had associated with Socrates only long enough to learn a few argumentative tricks that would help him in politics, but the extended campaign in Poteidaea alone makes that unlikely. Besides, five of the immediate followers of Socrates wrote dialogues featuring Socrates in close conversation with the young aristocrat (though of the two attributed to Plato, the Second Alcibiades is a late imitation, neither genuinely Platonic nor authored by any of the other four Socratics). It became standard to depict the course of the affair as on-again-off-again, with Socrates as the only person who could curb the young man’s excesses and point him towards better things, before the lure of the world, with its partying and power politics, finally overcame him. In other words, Alcibiades’ lawlessness was not the result of his following Socrates’ teaching, but of his ignoring it. Let us say, then, that Socrates and Alcibiades were, even if intermittently, an item up to 428 or 427, with the affair petering out well before Delium. The length of the relationship, as well as the subsequent notoriety of Alcibiades, explains why so many Socratic writers depicted the two together. If the affair had been brief, the Socratics would not have felt it important to defend their mentor against the charge of having corrupted Alcibiades; if they had spent no more than a few months in each other’s company, eighteen years before Alcibiades first got into really serious trouble, the charge that Socrates was somehow responsible for Alcibiades’ transgressions makes no sense.
Another aspect of the affair that made it so fascinating was its utter implausibility. In 433, when the affair began, the young man was dashing, daring, already the darling of Athenian high society, the leader of the fashionable young bloods and notorious for his arrogant and flamboyant escapades, which were excused as high spirits and a sign of future greatness. He seemed destined for glory, with his high birth into two of the greatest families of Athens – the Salaminioi on his father’s side and the Alcmaeonids on his mother’s side. Membership of one of these old Athenian families was the equivalent of being a highranking peer: he was not plain Alcibiades, but, in British terms, Lord Alcibiades. Nor was he an impoverished aristocrat: he owned estates that were exceptionally large by Athenian standards, and was rich enough to include among his slaves his own personal goldsmith. In addition to noble birth and great wealth, he had been made the ward, after the early death of his father Cleinias in 446, of none other than Pericles, the first cousin of his mother Deinomache and the almost undisputed first man of Athenian politics for over twenty years. Apart from any other advantages such an upbringing may have brought, Pericles was surrounded by the most gifted artists and intellectuals of the time, and Alcibiades would have met and conversed with them too. Hence Plato portrayed him, in Protagoras, as present at a glittering intellectual gathering in 433. He had the best teachers, the best of everything money could buy. He was eloquent as well as elegant, with a good, natural speaking voice enhanced by rhetorical tricks learnt from the new breed of educators.
In short, Alcibiades was so intelligent, so full of promise, so good-looking, self-assured and charming that he got away with almost everything that his mercurial nature led him to. Already courted by some of the wealthiest men in town, he took to trailing the end of his cloak along the ground, wearing soft boots and tilting his head in a foppish manner. Even before his full entry into Athenian public life, he was already being referred to by comic poets in a manner that assumed the audience knew him and his mannerisms. They made fun, in particular, of his lambdacism (he pronounced r as l); of his love of horses, bathing, gambling, drinking and ostentatious sacrifices; of his many affairs (‘In his youth he drew husbands from their wives and as a young man he drew wives from their husbands,’ as a later wit put it); of his periodic financial difficulties, brought on by extravagance; and of his proclivity for fisticuffs and general unruliness. Later, his fame was such that not only comic poets, but even tragedians portrayed some of their characters in ways that would remind the audience of Alcibiades.
Socrates, however, was a gift to the comic poets in a quite different way: he even looked like a comic actor’s mask, and behaved with impeccable eccentricity. He was ugly (with receding hair, bulging eyes, thick lips, a snub nose with wide nostrils, a protruding stomach and a rocking gait) and cared nothing for the fads and fashions of this society or any other. His father had perhaps been a successful statue-maker or stonemason, and his mother helped out as a midwife. But, despite later fabrications for tourists, Socrates seems not to have worked for a living, and to have done nothing with the modest fortune he inherited: he single-mindedly pursued his philosophical goals. So far from being attracted towards the luxury of Alcibiades’ lifestyle, he was invariably shoeless (in the Spartan fashion), and wore just a thin, threadbare gown, whatever the weather.
What did Alcibiades see in him? Was Socrates a trophy? By the late 430s he was one of the most famous teachers in town, already the guru of a number of well-bred and intelligent young men, and was increasingly being talked about with a mixture of respect and puzzlement. But in fact it is more plausible to see Alcibiades’ attraction to Socrates as genuine. Socrates may have been physically ugly, but he was charismatic, and it was one of his standard ploys to use this to attract young aristocratic men. Alcibiades was determined to be the brightest star in the Athenian firmament, and to make his mark in the wider world too; and to provide him with the kind of education that could help him achieve this goal, he chose Socrates over other available mentors.
Meanwhile, what did Socrates see in Alcibiades? The answer anticipates conclusions that will acquire a firmer foundation later, but Socrates was concerned above all
with the moral regeneration of Athens, and attracted into his circle precisely those young men who could be expected to become the leaders of Athens. Alcibiades was the pick of the crop, the one with the brightest future and the greatest potential. What Socrates saw in Alcibiades was megaloprepeia – the quality that is, literally, ‘suitable for a great man’. But such a quality often goes hand in hand with the arrogant assumption that one is greater than society.
What Alcibiades made of his potential will be the topic of the next chapters, after a little more of the background has been filled in. We will not understand Socrates or his trial without understanding Alcibiades, and we will not understand Alcibiades without seeing him in the context of the Peloponnesian War. War is a time of great stress for a society. Alcibiades was twenty-two when the war began, and he died right at the end of it. It consumed his entire adult life, as he tried to ride to glory on the energies created by the same social crisis that brought his former mentor to court.
ATHENIAN HOMOEROTICISM
Socrates used homosexual flirtatiousness to attract young men into his circle; Alcibiades offered Socrates the use of his body and affected habits – the slant of the head, the trailing cloak – that were recognized signs of passive homosexuality. Some readers might be thinking that this was a pretty kinky arrangement, and that Socrates was the guru of a sect of perverts.
In upper-class Athenian society, however, homoeroticism was not regarded as perverted against a standard of heterosexuality as ‘normal’. It was simply accepted that at a certain time of his youth a young man had a kind of beauty, and that older men – heterosexual older men, as well as the occasional homosexual – would be attracted towards him. If an affair took place, the partners would likely be faithful to each other (there was little homosexual promiscuity in Athens) and the affair would probably last only a few years, at the most. The most common form of homosexuality was, literally, pederasty – love for boys – since boys were found attractive from about the age of fourteen; even affairs between older partners tended to feature an age-group gap between the younger and the older man.
Athenian homoeroticism was largely an upper-class phenomenon. Any society that represses its women as much as ancient Athens did runs the risk of forcing its members to find other outlets for their sexuality. Respectable Athenian women would rarely even be seen on the street; their job was to keep house and bring up the children. This impeded the normal interplay between men and women that underpins a heterosexual society. Homoeroticism was more a feature of upper-class Athens, then, simply because these people lived in larger houses, with more opportunity to segregate their womenfolk. Then again, upper-class marriage was rarely for love, more commonly dynastic.
What the boy got out of the affair – and this too is why it was an upper-class phenomenon – was a form of patronage. In return for ‘gratifying’ his lover, as the Greeks tended somewhat delicately to put it, he would expect the older man to act as an extra guardian in public life, to introduce him into the best social circles, and later, perhaps years after the sexual side of the affair was over, to help him gain a foothold in the political life of the city, in which most upper-class Athenian men were naturally involved. Moreover, the older man was expected to cultivate the boy’s mind, to be an intellectual companion as well – a kind of godfather. The institution of homoerotic affairs filled a gap in the educational system by providing a boy with a better grasp of local culture and worldly wisdom.
Homosexual relationships were not widely approved, outside a limited circle of wealthy Athenians. They were sneered at by the Athenian poor as a class practice reeking of effeminacy, luxury and Spartan culture, and many regarded sexual penetration as something only women and slaves had to endure, and therefore inappropriate for a male citizen. But within certain aristocratic circles, such relationships were more widely tolerated. The fathers (we do not know what the mothers thought) worried about their sons being the objects of sexual advances, but they were also concerned to make sure that, if a boy did enter into such an affair, it was with someone who would do him as much good, in terms of social and political advancement, as could be expected. This might seem calculating, but that is an aspect of Greek views on friendship in general: they frankly acknowledged that a friend was not just someone for whom you felt affection, but someone who could help you out.
By and large, then, people turned a convenient blind eye towards the sexual side of the affair. Most societies do the same where lust is concerned. But Socrates himself was consistently portrayed as barely tolerant of the sexual side of such a relationship: he recognized that, human nature being what it is, it was likely to happen, but he did not approve of giving into the baser, animal parts of one’s nature under any circumstances. As far as we can tell from the available evidence, he refused to consummate his affair with Alcibiades, and there is no reason to think that he had sex with any of his other young followers, despite his evident attraction towards them: ‘Just then, I caught a glimpse inside Charmides’ clothes. I was on fire! I was in ecstasy!’ Among his followers, his name was especially linked not just with Alcibiades and Charmides, but also with Euthydemus – all three young men of exceptional promise.
Socrates was a non-ordinary homoerotic lover in another sense, too. In the normal course of Athenian events, the older partner pursued the younger. But Socrates flirted intellectually with young men, allowing them to glimpse what he had to offer, in order to make them attracted to him and want to spend time with him. He was trying to make them consummate a lifelong affair with philosophy, not with himself; he strongly emphasized the educational function of such relationships, to the exclusion, more or less, of the physical side. He exploited the homoerotic aspect of upper-class Athenian society for his own educational purposes.
THE ARISTOCRATIC MILIEU
Apart from the fact that they were such an unlikely couple, no one in their circle would have thought that the affair between Socrates and Alcibiades was odd. But how did Socrates, from a relatively humble family (his father worked for a living), come to penetrate the circles where he could meet young men like Alcibiades and Charmides? All our sources consistently portray him hobnobbing with the rich and famous, hanging out at the gymnasia, which were canonical aristocratic venues, and even attending elite symposia.
Socrates seems to have married well, and well above his station. Somehow, his father had become connected to the family of Aristeides the Just, a prominent figure before and after the Persian Wars, and a political ally of Alcibiades’ grandfather. So Socrates had an entrée into the highest strata of Athenian society. Although we know almost nothing of Socrates’ wife Xanthippe, her name, with its – hippe ending, indicates high birth: such names, which refer to horses and horse-breeding, tended to be given to elite men and women. A later tradition that Socrates simultaneously had a live-in mistress, a granddaughter of Aristeides called Myrto, must be discarded as typical of the hostile biographical tradition. He also had a younger half-brother called Patrocles, from his mother’s second marriage, after his father’s death; if this was the Patrocles who was the treasurer of Athena in 405 and suffect King Archon in 403, he was probably a wealthy man. At the time of his death, Socrates had three young sons called Lamprocles, Sophroniscus and Menexenus, ‘one a stripling [a meirakion, aged between eighteen and twenty], the others still children [under eighteen]’; so Socrates married late, around 420, and Xanthippe was considerably younger than him – a not unusual arrangement in ancient Athens. Marriage to Xanthippe would also have brought Socrates a dowry, to top up his inheritance.
Either through family connections, then, or simply as a result of his unique power as an educator, Socrates was admitted into a usually exclusive circle. The elite of Athens were the ones who were interested in taking their education further than the basics provided for boys. They did not have to spend their lives worrying about where their next meal was coming from, and so they had time for education; the ancient Greek word skholē, the origin of our ‘school’, mean
s ‘leisure’. Generally, however, they wanted the education they received to bring practical benefits, in the sense of improving their chances in the competitive world of Athenian politics. If it was becoming increasingly hard for them to maintain that nobility of birth automatically gave them the right to political power, they would have to learn how to gain and hold power in the modern world.
Athenian aristocrats usually possessed both landed wealth and membership of an old family, which may even have pretentiously traced its lineage back to a divine or semi-divine ancestor: Alcibiades’ family claimed descent from Zeus himself. They had traditionally kept themselves apart from the common herd by living an exclusive kind of life, which emphasized an enduringly Homeric concern with status, the cultivation of leadership qualities, competition of all kinds with others perceived to be of the same rank at home or abroad, honing a beautiful body by means of exercise, competition in the panhellenic games, xenia (ritualized, hereditary friendship with peers from outside the community), marrying outside the polis (until Pericles’ citizenship law of 451 BCE granted citizenship only to those both of whose parents were Athenian), conspicuous public spending, glorification of the family (for instance, by constructing large tombs and other monuments to celebrate the family’s achievements), control of the most important priesthoods, private luxury spending, symposia, refined and even effete manners and mannerisms (including long hair, ‘because it is hard to do menial work with long hair’, and rich clothing and seal-rings), a degree of dissoluteness among the young, pederasty and homoeroticism, cock-fighting, horse-breeding, hunting, dancing, music-making and versifying, contempt for physical labour, contempt for anyone not of their class – and, of course, marrying and forming political alliances only from within the same class.
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