The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [134]
But the important thing to note is that he is still there. Unlike those unfortunate Pythagoreans who shut themselves up in a ‘Thinkery’ in Croton to philosophise (and were then burned alive), Socrates both refuses to cut himself off from the real world and yet has, so far, despite his lambasting in the Theatre of Dionysos, managed to escape persecution. His relationship with the other guests at the Symposium is immediate, comradely, corporeal, concrete, flirtatious, fond. It is in the Symposium that you get the sense of a man who thought it important to live life to the full, who refused to bend with the political wind.
Perhaps no surprise then that Socrates also allows for the pursuit of pleasure in his ‘good life’. Of course, this quest cannot be excessive, harmful, selfish, degenerate, but Socratic ‘good’ does not deny the place of delight – hedonism even – in human lives. In Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates himself declares that his two loves in life are ‘philosophy and Alcibiades’.14 He judges his own face to be that of a sensualist.15 Alcibiades is not to be rejected just because he is flawed. Alcibiades’ love is visible, it is ‘obvious’.16 But Socrates is attracted to him precisely because he is extrovert, charming. No one can accuse Socrates of asceticism; drinking, chatting, eating around a low dinner-table on a warm Athenian night, once again he proves himself a philosopher of the people, someone who did not divorce the physical from the meta-physical.17
And what the Symposium reveals most cogently about Socrates is what he thinks of the power of love in the real, messy human world that we all occupy.
34
THE TROUBLE WITH LOVE
Fifth century BC and beyond
SOCRATES: Love is the one thing I understand.
Plato, Symposium, 177d
EVERYONE KNEW THAT EROS WAS OFTEN an uninvited – but anticipated – guest at symposia. The rutting, squelching, hot, pounding business of physical love was much more evident in Athenian society than in our own. Vase-painters were obsessed with the activities, for example, of prostitutes – which they covered from every angle.
But whereas many evenings in fifth-century Athens ended (and sometimes began) with sex, Socrates seemed to be determined not to be a slave to his passions. He was ecstatic, sensuous, but not necessarily interested in the jiggery-pokery of sexual union. This abstinence is something we seem to find easier to imagine in the ecstasies of early Christians, not the pagans, but self-denial is certainly there in the character of Socrates as sold to us by Plato and Xenophon.
‘But to tell you the truth, gentlemen,’ he continued, ‘By Heaven! It does look to me – to speak confidentially – as if he had also kissed Cleinias; and there is nothing more terribly potent than this at kindling the fires of passion. For it is insatiable and holds out seductive hopes. For this reason I maintain that one who intends to possess the power of self-control must refrain from kissing those in the bloom of beauty.’1
‘Socrates,’ said Euthydemus, ‘I think you mean that he who is at the mercy of the bodily pleasures has no concern whatever with virtue in any form.’
‘Yes, Euthydemus; for how can an incontinent man be any better than the dullest beast? How can he who fails to consider the things that matter most, and strives by every means to do the things that are most pleasant, be better than the stupidest of creatures? No, only the self-controlled have power to consider the things that matter most, and, sorting them out after their kind, by word and deed alike to prefer the good and reject the evil.’2
A number of the vases depicting the imaginative, adventurous business of symposiast sex are now squirrelled away in locked rooms and cabinets in museums around the world: the Secretum at the British Museum, the Gabinetta Secreta in the Naples Archaeological Museum, a whole extension behind the Corinth Museum. The objects were stored here by nineteenth-century excavators