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to have unearthed his very home. The philosopher would (we are told) spend hours on end at Simon’s premises, riffing and chatting with the young men of the city, and after each debate the artisan would record the exchange. Eventually the cobbler collected enough material for thirty-three books, The Dialogues of Simon.5 The anecdote, intimately connecting the philosopher and a shoemaker, is curious, but believable. Socrates went about his thinking-business in a completely unorthodox way – not philosophising in a formal school, or in the courts of kings and noblemen, but right in amongst hoi polloi. A cobbler’s workshop-home would have seemed the most appropriate of places for unconventional Socrates to analyse the meaning and point of our everyday lives. And archaeology confirms that there was indeed a ‘Shoemaker’ who lived and worked in the Agora when Socrates was at his productive peak as a philosopher, c.435–415 BC.6 The ‘Dialogues of Simon’ have been lost to history, but later commentators throughout antiquity recorded that these debates, first heard within the warm-stoned, cottageindustries of Athens’ jangling, cosmopolitan marketplace, dealt with many of Socrates’ prime subjects: love, jealousy, the role of good in society.7 Essential topics, zestily explored by Socrates day in, day out.

But when we are travelling through the Agora, in the late spring of 399 BC, Simon the Shoemaker is long dead.8 Today Socrates has just one destination, the law-court. No roaming the Agora’s nooks and crannies, asking unsuspecting passers-by their views on the best way to live, as was once the philosopher’s wont. Soon this seventy-year-old man will be obliged to defend his case and his fundamental attitude to life in front of 500 judgemental Athenian democrats.

Ironic since for much of his life, the Agora has been where the philosopher has spoken freely – and for free. Stopping artisans and aristocrats alike, Socrates debated both the fripperies and the fundamentals of life. In a number of Plato’s and Xenophon’s chronicles he comes across as alarmingly unpredictable, leaping out at unsuspecting passers-by and startling them with a moral challenge. It was said that Xenophon first encountered Socrates in just such a manner. Walking as a young boy through the streets, Xenophon was approached by Socrates, who asked the lad where he could acquire a series of normal household goods. ‘And what about a brave and virtuous man?’ Socrates continued. When Xenophon was puzzled, Socrates suggested that the ingenu tag along for enlightenment.

Plutarch also recounts a tale of a visit that Socrates and his friends made to the Agora district where moneylenders set up their trapezai – banking tables – each morning. As the philosopher (surrounded as usual by a huddle of companions) walked southwards past the chipping-zone of the marble-workers he was struck by ‘sublime inspiration’ and suddenly dived off past a woodworking district while his colleagues took their normal route. The friends laughed at his abstraction, until they found themselves surrounded by a squealing, stinking herd of pigs, soon to be carved up into flesh and hide, their skins sent off down to be rinsed by the tanners at the Ilissos River just outside the city walls.9

Socrates had apparently, on this occasion, been enraptured by his own inner ‘voice’ – a kind of divine calling, a personal, private god; an idiosyncrasy that would attract suspicion and spark trouble as the years went by.10 He called it his daimonion – his demon. This personal spirituality was very unorthodox in Socrates’ day. The philosopher lived in a world where all religion was a matter for public consumption. In their demandingly polytheistic spiritual landscape, Socrates and his colleagues were expected to pay their dues to a range of the gods most of the time. This worship took place mostly out in the open; it was a collective experience. A visit to the Agora would never not have involved some kind of act of worship.11 Doubting the city’s gods went beyond affront. Socrates’ peers had dreamed up the atom,12 but