The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [133]
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 – no, so completely – intent, they are relevant to most or rather to all things worth considering for someone who strives to be beautiful and good.9
Beauty at the time of Socrates
Beauty in Athens at this time was seriously considered to be the sign of a brilliant and noble spirit; a gift of the gods. Those laudable qualities that justified privilege and dominance were believed, naturally, to have been given an appropriately attractive shell. And all those heroically naked paragons around the city itself (both the living, breathing men in the gymnasia and the bronze and marble statues) reflected the visual experience of Athens – this was a land where men stripped to exercise, to bathe, to talk, to worship their gods, to work in the fields. The goddess Athena was honoured by a city-wide kallisteion, an all-male beauty contest at the time of the Pan-Athenaea. The winning beauty was handsomely rewarded with more than one hundred amphoras of sacred olive oil. In Socrates’ Athens the ‘body-beautiful’ also signified a beautiful mind.10 Being beautiful meant that you possessed a moral beauty; kalon in Greek means ‘fine’ and ‘praiseworthy’ as well as ‘fit’.
And so the notion proposed here, that inner beauty can sometimes be contained within a hoary shell, is radical. In the Socratic canon itself, an entire dialogue, the Hippias Major, is devoted to a discussion of the definition of ‘the beautiful’. Socrates suggests that beauty is not just to do with the line of your leg, the proportion of your nose, the gleam of your skin, but with the state of your soul:
By means of beauty, all beautiful things become beautiful.11
If you weren’t yourself beautiful, your inner beauty, your virtue could catalyse great things; a man ‘moving towards the goal of the erotic suddenly glimpses a “beautiful” which is of wondrous essence, precisely that for which he had previously given such pains, the pure being, imperishable and divine, the “idea of the beautiful”.’12 These are left-field thoughts for Greek society; an internal character differs from, but is as potent as, external show. Beauty is an attitude, a psychological goal, not just a set of vital statistics.
In classical Athenian terms, Socrates’ appearance was utterly dysfunctional, repellent. As soon as figurines of Socrates were commissioned, they were moulded in the form of a satyr. Satirical Socrates seemed to care not two hoots.
My eyes are more beautiful than yours, because yours only look straight ahead, whereas mine bulge out and look to the sides as well.13
Socrates takes the affectionate jibes at the symposium on the chin. Once again he wrong-foots Athenian standards and the mono-allure of kleos (fame, celebrity, being talked about). Here, in Agathon’s friendly soirée with its spiky guests, the philosopher proves how odd he is: he resists sexual advances; despite drinking all night he talks cogently; he is happy not to fit into the good Athenian stereotype of being kalos k’agathos – beautiful on the outside and noble on the inside – he’s a satyr and that’s the end of it. After the symposium he does not even need access to one of the many hangover