The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [199]
Within five years of Socrates’ death, Athens had allied herself with her one-time enemy, Persia – with the topsy-turvy outcome that in 394 BC it was an Athenian general, Konon, who led the Persians to victory over the Spartan fleet. A sea-power for just ten years, Sparta was land-locked once more, and now a shadow of her former self. Never again in her history could she claim to rival Athenian nous with Spartan brawn. Limestone block by limestone block, it was the Persians who helped the Athenians rebuild their totemic fortifications, the walls that the Spartans had eagerly destroyed in 404 BC. Socrates’ lifespan marked the beginning and an end of an idea – the idealistic vision of an autonomous, tolerant, democratic Athenian city-state.
AFTERWORD
The gods have put sweat between us and virtue.
Plato, Republic, 364
WHEREAS THE PORTRAITS THAT WENT UP of Socrates ten or twenty years after he died cast him in Silenus mode – as the plain, portly, peculiar anti-hero – as the years go by the philosopher becomes a bit over-refined, more of a gentleman-scholar. In Naples he leans on his staff, hand on hip, the very incarnation of the leisured conversationalist. In the British Museum there is a glistening marble statuette, based on that commissioned by one of the finest sculptors of the time, Lysippus of Sicyon. There again is the fashionable, classical contrapposto pose: his hair is fluffier, his paunch is sucked in, he modestly holds his himation drapes in place: this is the acceptable face of radical philosophy.1
Socrates has been tidied up. The smell of sweat and blood, the fried fish of Piraeus quayside have been scrubbed off him.
But perhaps the most telling Socratic image of all was dug up in the philosopher’s prison. We’ll never be sure exactly who this foot-high figure is. The location and proportion, though, suggest this is Socrates himself – an offering left by someone who mourned his forced death. Half his face has been chipped or rubbed off. Only his torso survives – but what a body, robust, firm-set, hairy. Unlike the fantasy heroes that lined most Athenian streets, this man is very human.
And whether it is Socrates or an idol Socrates, Socrates’ ghost, his eidolon that we follow, the idea of Socrates is an ethical one. He argues that the soul – the psyche – is all-important. That eudaimonia (a kind of good karma, realising all your potential as a human being) is more important than jewels, baths, designer clothes, warships, dogma. He focuses our minds on how we should live, how we should flourish. He throws down a gauntlet; it is not ‘them’, but ‘us’ who are responsible for the world’s happiness. You, and you alone, can hurt yourself by being unvirtuous. Vice is self-inflicted ignorance.
SOCRATES: Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing. And every word, when it is written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to whom to speak or not to speak; when ill-treated or unjustly reviled it always needs its father to help it; for it has no power to protect or help itself.2
Because Socrates generated not a single written word from his philosophising, we can never claim truly to have found him. His life and work will never be a tablet of stone. Socrates is recondite. And he is essential. He reminds us to keep debating the meaning of life, to keep questioning, to keep speaking to one another, to keep looking for answers. However you value him, you cannot argue with