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By Root 1808 0

who considered them offensive and ‘anti-Hellenic’. Those first-draft democrats of the fifth century would have been politely puzzled. What better way to express the health of your community than with sex? This society was extremely priapic. Herms (busts of the god Hermes) on street corners boasted fine erections, their penises carved onto the shafts of the columns that supported them. Girls on vases take it in every orifice. Athenian sex seems to have been gymnastic and athletic – in the Greek sense of the words – a great deal of flesh on show and all very athlon (contest-driven), all aiming for much satisfaction, high prizes. The Gabinetta Secreta and the Secretum are packed because the Greeks cheerfully filled their own lives with so much erotica.

But despite Socrates’ undoubted belief in the power of love, tribadic, gasping, physical love for its own sake was not for him.3 In Xenophon’s Symposium a slave-boy and slave-girl tenderly re-enact Psyche’s seduction by Eros. All in the room are stimulated to go home and make love to their wives. Socrates goes for a walk.

[SOCRATES:] Of course, you don’t suppose that lust provokes men to beget children when the streets and stews are full of means to satisfy the sexual urge …4

Instead he suggests that love means more than a moment in the sack. That real love makes you richer:

SOCRATES: The man who is attracted only by his beloved’s appearance is like one who has rented a farm; his aim is not to increase its value but to gain from it as much of a harvest as he can for himself. On the other hand, the man whose goal is friendship is more like one possessing a farm of his own.5

The stories that Socrates shares around the drinking couches of the symposia are not stories of sex, but stories of love. Ta erotika in his book means ‘the good things’ or ‘what leads us to the good things and good spiritedness’. And the philosopher does not pull his punches. He criticises one of the most powerful men of the day – a man who will then go on to bring civil war and tyranny back to Athens – for being obsessed with plain, burning, fluid-exchange sex. Critias was the name of this influential, reactionary, oligarchic individual.6 A relation of Plato and an aspiring tragedian with a darkly tragic bent, he moved in Socrates’ circle. Critias was hot for a younger man called Euthydemus. Socrates did not approve.

Critias seems to have the feelings of a pig: he can no more keep away from Euthydemus than pigs can help rubbing themselves against stones.7

Critias was furious. After the event he tried to gag Socrates, to stop him talking to anyone under thirty. Critias despised the self-righteous philosopher.8 This tells us as much about Socrates as it does about Critias. Often criticised by modern authors for being more than a little reactionary and ‘educating’ some of the most oppressive oligarchs of the day, this spat over Euthydemus exemplifies that in fact Socrates was troubled by Critias and his crowd. Just because the philosopher drank with them and they listened to him did not make him their role-model; we should never confuse a catholic taste in friends and acquaintances with evidence of indoctrination or sectarian cliquery.

Socrates was perfectly at ease in the symposia, but in the minds of others he sits there a little uncomfortably. He was not after all an aristocrat – and neither the democrats nor the oligarchs of the city would forget that he had broken convention by dining late into the night with the great and the good.

The philosopher was perhaps that troubling mix: a demotic highflyer. The Athenians cherished those who were ‘first in wealth and breeding’. They believed the beautiful kaloi k’agathoi were fit to rule. Socrates was not quite fully the ascetic, not fully the democrat, not fully the oligarch – and he was ubiquitous. A few years from now, when Athens has suffered so much and yet Socrates still swaggers through the Agora with his infuriating sense of purpose and his beatific attitude, perhaps he was just too vexatious, exasperating; a gadfly that needed swatting. Already