The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [136]
And Socrates should perhaps have chosen a little more carefully the men he decided to insult, thought twice before taking on and cutting down to size a character such as Critias, one of the high-flyers of the day.
One street proverb from the period should have sounded a warning bell in Socrates’ ears:
I hate a drinking companion with a memory.9
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OH, TELL ME THE TRUTH ABOUT LOVE
Athens, 416 BC
Wisdom is a most beautiful thing, and love is of the beautiful; and therefore love is also a philosopher or lover of wisdom, and being a lover of wisdom is in a mean between the wise and the ignorant … Such, my dear Socrates, is the nature of the Spirit of Love.
Plato, Symposium, 204b1
IN SOME SENSES THE SYMPOSIUM IS the most urgent of all Plato’s works – the narrative trips over itself to arrive on the page, the dining room in a back street of Athens is a factory for beautiful ideas, ideas of beauty, beautiful things. Even the silences sparkle.
At this dinner party, set more than 2,400 years ago, Love is the night’s theme. The Symposium can still be read as one of the greatest stories of love in Western literature. The only subject in the world that Socrates believes himself to be the unsurpassed master of is love.2 ‘I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with someone.’3 Socrates loves his fellow men with an overpowering eroticism, and because he believes he can look into their eyes and understand a little about himself as he does so, we are taught that it is through our relationship with the world around us that we can become whole. Socrates sees the massive power of love.4 We too are just beginning to unpick the complex, psychophysical parcel that love is. Socrates makes our relationships with one another his life’s work.
Socratic love is enormously powerful, it turns the world upside down. What the philosopher knows is that we love love-stories, and our love is often a love-story played out. But nowhere does he mock. Socrates’ love is literal: the point of life is to love it. He is erotic. He states that if Eros passes you by in life, you are a nonentity. All those aspects of love he approves of, as good-life glue for society, since ‘festivals, sacrifices, dances’ are motivated by Eros. And, more than that, love is a guide – a passion for what is good and a horror for what is degrading.5
And the genuinely heart-warming revelation of Socrates in the Symposium is that dedication to love is not a selfish pursuit. The point of love is not gratification, but symbiosis. And love, desire, ambition, hope, concord, enthusiasm, drive whatever you want to call it – if tended, if not allowed to burn itself out, plays a long game. His love is not flash-in-the-pan passionate. In Socrates’ eyes, it is honesty and a pursuit of knowledge rather than ignorance that leads to loveliness in life. For him, love has a purpose. It is the life-force, the desire to do, to be, to think. It is the thing that makes us feel great about our world, and therefore makes us be great in it. Socrates describes these ‘good’ dynamos as ta erotika – the things of love.
SOCRATES: Those who are already wise no longer love wisdom, whether they are gods or men. Neither do those who are so ignorant that they are bad, for no bad and stupid person loves wisdom. There remain only those who have this bad thing, ignorance, but have not yet been made ignorant or stupid by it. They are conscious of not knowing what they don’t know.6
Socrates and women
Socrates has positioned love, goodness and companionship squarely at the centre of his idea of a well-functioning society. But still the philosopher