The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [102]
Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.27
In the first place, are they not free; and is not the city full of freedom and frankness – a man may say and do what he likes?
’Tis said so, he replied.
And where freedom is, the individual is clearly able to order for himself his own life as he pleases?
Clearly.
Then in this kind of State there will be the greatest variety of human natures?
There will.
This, then, seems likely to be the fairest of States, being an embroidered robe which is spangled with every sort of flower. And just as women and children think a variety of colours to be of all things most charming, so there are many men to whom this State, which is spangled with the manners and characters of mankind, will appear to be the fairest of States.28
And there was an added issue. In a world that believed in magic, Socrates was thought to have the power of a goes – a sorcerer. As he walked through the lanes, gymnasia and green spaces of Athens, crowds of the young followed him as though he were pulling them by an invisible thread. Plato tries, throughout his Dialogues, to dissociate Socrates from the kind of cheapskate street-magic that many sophist-sorcerers used to entrance their listeners. But nonetheless he allows Socrates’ friends and acquaintances, through the Dialogues, to assert that Socrates’ words are, somehow, spell-binding.
ALCIBIADES: … If you chose to listen to Socrates’ discourses you would feel them at first to be quite ridiculous; on the outside they are clothed with such absurd words and phrases – all, of course, the hide of a mocking satyr. His talk is of pack-asses, smiths, cobblers and tanners, and he seems always to be using the same terms for the same things; so that anyone inexpert and thoughtless might laugh his speeches to scorn. But when these are opened and you obtain a fresh view of them, by getting inside, first of all you will discover that they are the only speeches that have any sense in them; and secondly, that none are so divine, so rich in images of virtue, so largely – nay, so completely – intent on all things proper for the study as such as would attain both grace and worth.29
For whatever reason, Socrates, throughout the 420s BC, became a big draw. Perhaps it was simply that here was an ordinary man who did not just satiate with honeyed lies, but who plumped up the soul. Socrates was not happy just to consolidate the Athenians’ sense of themselves: he did not only want to talk about the world, he wanted to change it. All around him were forging the trappings of civilisation – but this philosopher seems to have been interested in forging the civilisation of inner lives.
SOCRATES: If anyone, whether young or old, wishes to hear me speaking and pursuing my mission, I have never objected, nor do I converse only when I am paid and not otherwise, but I offer myself alike to rich and poor; I ask questions, and whoever wishes may answer and hear what I say.30
In a sibling dialogue (to Xenophon’s Symposium), the Hippias Minor, another Socratic characteristic is revealed that would have troubled the Athenians:
I go astray, up and down, and never hold the same opinion.31
And again in Plato’s Euthyphro: ‘In any case, I was thinking while you were talking and I put this question to myself …’32 Socrates has moved on to the next strain of thought in his head while we are all still struggling with the first – infuriating and fascinating in equal measure. The philosopher chews away at ideologies. He does not spit them out, verbally, like half-sucked acid drops. And he also proposes an unusually feminine idea for this macho society – true consensus: ‘Isn’t it when we disagree and aren’t able to come to a sufficient answer that we become enemies to