The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [3]
Socrates’ arguments were perhaps just too incendiary, too dangerously charismatic. He believed that man had the potential to enjoy perfect happiness. A clue to the contemporary impact of his ideas is given by his pupil Plato. In the Allegory of the Cave,6 with cool detail, Plato has Socrates describe a race of men who have been born in chains, and who, staring for ever at a cave wall, see only the shadows of creatures above them and believe these shadows to be reality. He then reveals the dismay and joy these captives feel when they are brought, blinking, into the light of the real world. The chained men represent those of humanity who have yet to hear or understand what Socrates has to say.
However, when it comes to wholeheartedly embracing the new, mankind displays a poor record. In a superstitious city, Socrates’ spiritual and moral make-up was unconventional, troubling. He seems to have suffered from some form of epilepsy or ‘petit mal’ (hence his curious cataleptic seizures, when he stared into the distance for hours on end), which in a pious age was interpreted as a malign ‘inner voice’.7 His contemporary the playwright Aristophanes talks of the passionate men who go to hear him preach and turn their minds to fundamental issues rather than frivolities as having been ‘Socratified’. And in his comedy Clouds,8 Aristophanes jeers at Socrates’ high-minded eccentricities, has him clamber into a raised bath and scramble around in the clouds to ‘peer at the arse of the moon’. Democracies need pragmatists, yet Socrates refuses to contain himself, to temper the power of principle. So pheme – rumour, gossip – starts to fly through Athena’s city. As the robust philosopher is only too aware, a whispering campaign is the most pernicious and insidious of enemies.9
These people who have thrown scandal at me are genuinely dangerous. They’ve used envy and slander and they’re difficult to deal with. I cannot possibly bring them into court to cross-question them or refute their charges. I have to defend myself as if I were boxing with shadows.10
Socratic thought and the living Socrates
In all cities, it is easier to hurt a man than to help him.
Plato, Meno, 94e
In the Metropolitan Museum in New York hangs a painting of Socrates, just before death, by the great neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David. Socrates – speaking slowly but determinedly, the hemlock about to run through his veins, a martyr to virtue and high principle – is surrounded by agitated disciples.11 Crouched around his bed are those men such as Plato who will carry his words into literature and thus on into the very DNA of world civilisation.12
Now it is time for us to go away, for me to die and for you to live; but which of us is going to a better condition is not known to anyone except god.13
This is not a book of philosophic theory. I am a historian, not a philosopher, and cannot possibly better the work of those who have gone before me, who have squeezed ever-evolving interpretations out of Socrates’ philosophical ideas; Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes the Cynic, Al-Kindi, Yehuda ha-Levi, Thomas Hobbes et al. – all these men have tussled with what Socrates’ philosophy means. That is a bulging canon and one I would not presume to augment. But I can turn my eyes to the stones under my feet. I can see how Socrates’ philosophy evolved in his time and his place.
For the purposes of this book, the