The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [147]
This much is clear. Suppose that there were men whose bodily physique showed the same superiority as is shown by the statues of the gods, then all would agree that the rest of mankind would deserve to be their slaves.5
The passions this larger-than-life character aroused were violent. Alcibiades was handsome, brash, materialistic, ambitious, feckless, power-hungry, decadent – and yet Socrates did not condemn the boy, he was fascinated by him. Alcibiades was the Athens that Socrates was struggling to live with. Socrates was drawn to all that was heady and worldly and meritocratic about the ‘Queen of Cities’ (and he was himself famously ‘hedonistic’), but he smelled its weakness, he feared for the future of a thing that was driven by individual ambition and was called, all too conveniently, a democracy.
Alcibiades, boasting (thinly disguised) that even he, even he with his luxuriant charms, could not seduce Socrates, framed his time with Socrates as a love-story. This should be a great fable. The meeting of the perfect mind with the perfect body. In the Symposium, Alcibiades protests that he wants to be a better man and that only Socratic magic can work to achieve this end. Again he is like Athena’s city herself – full of potential, successful, but still seeking a position on a moral compass:
Nothing is more important to me than becoming the best man I can be, and no one can help me more than you to reach that aim …6
And tonight Alcibiades sits with Socrates while the party rocks, and lies with him when it is over. Alcibiades recalls another night the two lay close together, around the time of the Potidaean campaign. Socrates has only a thin cloak, but he is wrapped in Alcibiades’ rich mantle. Excited by his words – as Alcibiades says – still energised even by the memory of what was said (‘I can feel it at this moment even as I’m speaking’7), the lusty, lusting young warrior is determined to have his curious bedfellow.
We have all been there: the dark, the whispers, the unseen skin pricks connecting flesh to flesh. Yet Socrates chose to love Alcibiades with his heart, not his body. He wanted to live in an Athens that could deny itself, as well as indulge. And so in Plato’s Symposium, Socrates turns the advances of Alcibiades down. The power of love, Aphrodite’s tricky gift to man, was of great fascination for Socrates. He recognised the trouble love caused, when sexual desire drove you mad (mania is a Greek word that can mean a kind of erotic frenzy) …
‘By Herakles!’ said Xenophon, ‘What awesome power you attribute to a kiss!’
‘And this amazes you?’ said Socrates. ‘Don’t you know,’ he said, ‘that scorpions, even though they are no bigger than a half-obol’s size, when they merely touch one’s mouth wear humans down with gut-wrenching pains and deprive them of their good sense?’
‘Yes, by god,’ said Xenophon. ‘The reason is that scorpions have some poison in their bite.’
‘You foolish one!’ said Socrates. ‘Don’t you think that beautiful boys also have some poison in their love, which you don’t see? Don’t you know that this beast, which they call “the beautiful boy in the prime of his youth”, is so much more dangerous than scorpions because scorpions at least have to touch whereas this beast can poison from a distance? … But I advise you, Xenophon, whenever you see some beautiful boy, to flee with all speed.’8
And of course Socrates’ philosophy cannot but bear relevance to eroticism and sex. In this Greek world the physical and the spiritual were two breaths in the same whisper. An older man made love to a younger to instil virtue in him. This was the ‘good’ love that could be complemented by ‘bad’ physical love. Plato allows Socrates’ philosophy to be heavy with his sexual overlay. And even ‘bad’ love has a greater purpose. For Socrates sex is a means to an end – a way of producing beautiful men and (since the advice is given by Diotima in the Symposium) beautiful women too. To