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By Root 1699 0

prominent, it was set outside the Pompeion, where young men gathered and sacred artefacts were kept for use in pompe – religious processions. This was where Socrates himself had gone over half a century before, to join in the Great Pan-Athenaic procession, and to listen to the foreign philosophers Zeno and Parmenides bringing their ideas into the city-state. And so Athens memorialised Socrates as he wanted to live: at the edge of the city walls, a place that drank and swore and fucked; where soldiers were commemorated and women wove – but also a place that invited in new ideas, that welcomed men whose job it was to open minds. And most of all, a place where young people gathered, where heads could be turned to look to a better future.

Socrates thrived in a democracy – because this was a state that gave ordinary men voice, that tolerated new ideas. He was silenced, on the face of it, because democratic Athens could stand much criticism, but not criticism of the value of demos-kratia itself, and not by men who suggested it was neither walls nor fine buildings nor warships that made a democrat great, but the soul within him.5

Unpack that state of affairs a little. The democracy – the power of the demos, the people – was small, face to face, made up of men who knew one another, whose inspiration, animation, fear, genius, jealousy, frustration and prejudice rubbed off between citizens as they jostled together in the streets, at the Assembly, on battleships, by brothels, outside the law-courts. Socrates’ single most plangent message, that there can be no good, even in a democracy, if each individual is not as good as he can possibly be, is also beautifully exemplified in his death sentence. Athens might have been right to insist on Socrates’ conviction (to the letter of the law, this was state-sponsored suicide and his ideas could indeed, on the face of it, pose a threat to the robust orthodoxy of democratic Athens), but, in a Socratic system, he too was right to die as he did.6 Socrates would never have escaped, because this would not have been a ‘good’, or a sophon, a wise, thing to do.

In short true virtue exists only with wisdom, whether pleasures and fears and other things of that sort are added or taken away.7

When Socrates died, Athens was bleeding. Its city walls were broken down; confidence, talent, self-esteem seeped through the gap. Plato, sick to the stomach at the prospect of Socrates’ death, melted away to Megara, exiled or, sensibly, keeping a low profile while the political heat in Athens was high.8 Xenophon, one of Socrates’ closest supporters, had been away (since 401 BC) in Persian territory (modern-day Iraq and across Asia Minor and the Middle East), fighting as a mercenary. Socrates had advised him not to take up the commission. At the moment that Socrates was executed, Xenophon – now in Spartan service and leading Spartan troops – had just reached Greek territory on the Black Sea. Meno, the man once so impressed by the philosopher that he was struck dumb, betrayed the Greeks into the hands of the Persians. This was a time of despair and shame. The world had been turned upside down. Socrates was both an agent and a casualty of this turmoil. He exemplified the paradoxical brilliance and the brutality of his ‘Golden Age’.

Man is mortal

Socrates is a man

Therefore Socrates is mortal9

Socrates was indeed a mortal man, in a mortal world, but his spirit – because we still write about it, read about it, debate it today – was undimmed.

The fifth century BC had rough charisma. Poets, story-makers and politicians have always recognised this fact. There is something alluringly immediate about Golden Age Greece. Ordinary people were, for the first time, long-running players in the theatre of power. Philosophers could love wisdom as a viable profession; strategists – the strategoi, the generals – had to live out their fantasies face to helmeted face with their enemies. Men fought on the plains of war that they had engineered. You got what you saw, and you lived what you got.

Golden Ages are comforting; we love