The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [101]
Sophists filled Athenian streets with their saleable advice on how to write or to speak the best lines. These travelling educators – who typically charged pretty steep fees for their services – claimed, no less, that being able to talk your way out of any situation would ensure your survival. During festivals, fine speakers would deliver grand, extended lectures for the enjoyment of the Athenian public: words as mass entertainment.17
Socrates loved the spoken word – but in honest, bite-sized chunks. By all accounts the philosopher was very wary of the great sophistic exercises where high-flying rhetoric and grand oratory could persuade men to do almost anything.18 As he says, mischievously, with lengthy rhetoric it is so easy at the end to forget what the point of the whole thing was at the beginning, quipping that in a long speech you lose your initial notion; or, more saliently, the audience does, and so can be duped by the power of language alone.19 For Socrates, the Athenian democracy was best served by dialogue, not by bombast.
When persons who are unworthy of education approach philosophy and make an alliance with her who is a rank above them, what sort of ideas and opinions are likely to be generated? Will they not truly deserve to be called sophisms, having nothing in them genuine, or worthy of or akin to true wisdom?20
But the philosopher’s tastes were unfashionable. Schooled in the epic, the Athenians of this period seemed to delight in a show-stopping rhetorical tour de force. And where you have an audience, you have a commercial opportunity. Sophists travelled long miles to exploit Athens’ market.21 Gorgias of Sicily stunned Athenian audiences with his Encomium of Helen – a defence of the indefensible femme fatale. It was said that thousands came, and paid, to hear him lecture in the Agora.22 His work was a self-fulfilling prophecy – one line in the Encomium declares that speech has an addictive, chemical power:
The effect of speech upon the condition of the soul is comparable to the power of drugs over the nature of bodies.23
Athens in the late fifth century became a land of bluff: worshipping (literally) at the shrine of the goddess of persuasion. Suddenly arguments mattered less than the amplified skill of the arguer. Every male citizen over the age of eighteen had the vote – and that citizen needed to be persuaded to vote in the right way. The Athenians wanted to hear the benefits of their city and their culture talked up. A law was passed that encouraged citizens me mnesikakein, ‘not to remember the bad things’.24
But Socrates’ approach was rather different. Socrates was a blot on the puff-filled, near-perfect city-state that Attic ambition was contriving to build. He encouraged men to humility rather than arrogance, to honesty rather than self-delusion. Even though the Athenians were living through one of the most debilitating wars in the history of the world, his fellow citizens endeavoured to keep their city band-box bright. There is a sense throughout these decades that the Athenian show must go on. But with all the sensitivity of a blunderbuss, Socrates discouraged his peers from fooling themselves.
Wisdom is wealth. Do we need anything more, Phaedrus? For me that prayer is enough.25
Wealth is the parent of luxury and indolence.26
Socrates’ candour has been described as ‘relentless’. Perhaps he suffered from the curse of the clear-sighted: to imagine that those around him would judge the world with corresponding clarity. His ideas were designed to stimulate, to provoke – and we all know how irritating, how needling that gadfly, that conscience-pricking gnat can be. Socrates appeared to challenge the great cobweb of spirituality and spirits of Olympian gods and demons that wrapped themselves around Athens and through its streets, by suggesting