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By Root 1715 0

from Thasos and conjured up pounding horses and Amazons in the Stoa Poikile, the Painted Stoa, as did a rival painter, Agatharchos of Samos.19 The philosopher Protagoras of Abdera was here; the sculptor Kresilas from Cydonia in north-west Crete worked in Athens; Democritus came from Thrace too – he whose mind gave the atom its name, a particle so tiny it is a-tomos, in-divisible. An extraordinary thing – to imagine and name something 2,500 years before it can be seen.20 A bit of a local celebrity up north, ‘in the streets of Athens,’ Democritus would say, ‘no one knows who I am!’21 Aristotle from Stageira will travel this way too. Athens is an expanding pond crammed with big fish.

From infancy, Socrates would have glimpsed the capabilities of man and of the men around him.

And then when the boy Socrates was just two, an extraordinary thing. A celestial event that would be the talk of the town for years to come: a massive meteorite blazed through the sky and crashed to earth close to the Hellespont at a place called Aegospotami.22 Some fields were burned – but, unusually, the Greeks did not all wail that this was the wrath of the gods. One of the rogue philosophers in Athena’s city, Anaxagoras, would soon amuse others with his crazy theories – that the stars and planets were not heavenly creatures, but rock-hot masses. His belief seemed to have willed evidence out of the sky itself. The reformer-general-politician, Pericles, one of the rising stars of the new democratic city, started to take serious note of the theories – suddenly all sorts of wild, provocative ideas were a possibility.

So we should picture Socrates as a youngster. Riding on his mother’s shoulders; being beaten for bad behaviour by his father (years later Plato has him referring to a truant running away from his pa);23 at the age of three being listed on the ‘he’s-one-of-us’ phratries24 list – celebrating along with other three-year-olds at the festival of the Anthesteria. We see these Athenian minors on diminutive vases and cups in children’s graves: pulling one another along in carts, pinging pebbles into pots, catching birds, playing with a stick and ball. Being children – for those who survived – and also becoming an essential part of the community.

At this time in history, death was something associated not with the old, but with the young. Socrates is one of the minority who weathers the illnesses that, in the fifth century BC, laid low three out of five children in Athens. The Persians stayed in the East, and young Socrates was not slaughtered, as so many from the generation before him had been, in a pitiless raid. His childhood was unusually calm. He and his deme-mates had time to play; jointed dolls were popular, as were astragaloi, knucklebones (discovered in a number of digs, jumbled on the earth as they would be on the mud floor of an Ancient Greek’s hut), or, if you could afford them, dice, identical to those we use today – all favourite time-wasters for Athens’ upcoming generation.

The boy Socrates would almost certainly have had an education. Typically the slave-tutor, the paidagogos, was a constant companion of young Athenians25 – and, like the other sun-browned kids around him, Socrates would have watched as, down the lanes and footpaths, artisans and scientists, astrologers, painters, sculptors, quacks, slave-dealers and spice merchants all started to pace along arterial routes into the city, into the magnet that ‘violet-crowned’26 Athens had become.

So, for a Greek boy, an ordinary start to life in a place of quite extraordinary energy.

Yet if we believe our sources, there always seems to have been something that set Socrates slightly apart. It may just be hagiography, wishful thinking with hindsight, but the story goes that Socrates was somehow ‘different’ – savant-ish. His father went so far as to ask the Oracle at Delphi how he should deal with his eccentric son. The Oracle was laissez-faire: let the boy do ‘whatever came into his mind and not to constrain or divert his motivations but let them be’27 Heads down and keep out