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By Root 1748 0

this, the most powerful man in all Athena’s city. He was wet-nursed by a Spartan woman – fashionable in those days, as Spartans were thought to be, physically, the lustiest of breeds – and, with Spartan relatives, Alcibiades was a character in the fifth-century BC play of democracy, with a foot in both the Montague and the Capulet camps. Raised in Pericles’ halls from the age of seven, allowed to join the meetings of high minds that Pericles sponsored (thus enjoying an upbringing starkly unlike those of his seven-year-old Spartan cousins in the agoge down south), Alcibiades may well have first been met by Socrates as an indulged, mop-headed youngster, a beautiful boy.

Alcibiades appears one of those charmed individuals. He was, by all accounts, striking. Five hundred years after his death, authors such as Plutarch were still entranced by the idea of him – he was written of extensively throughout antiquity.27 A Roman-period mosaic still on display in the Sparta Museum captures what men thought so lovely about him. Alcibiades is a latter-day Adonis – all flowing golden locks, a fine profile and with androgynously smooth skin.28 He lisped sensuously, he loved women, girls, men, boys, dogs. He paraded through the Agora trailing a long purple cloak. A contrapunto character, he matured to be everything that Socrates was not: brash, feckless, loud-mouthed, debauched. Indeed, the relationship between the two men incarnates symptoms of both Golden Age Athens and Socratic thought; the struggle between personal liberty and social ambition; the relationship between the physical and the spiritual, between inner and outer beauty; the difficulty in identifying the true form of the good life.

Theirs was a testing, paradoxical match. But of all the long-lashed, bright-eyed, honed and eager young men of the Athenian city, it was Alcibiades – with his oligarchic, Spartan blush – who would endure as Socrates’ favourite.

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PADDLING IN THE RIVER, SWEATING IN THE GYM: SOCRATIC YOUTH

The River Ilissos, 450–399 BC

He [Socrates] did not neglect his body, and he did not praise those who neglected theirs.

Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1. 2. 41

HOW CRUSTED WITH DIRT MOST ATHENIANS must have been; snotty-nosed kids, hormone-stinking teenagers, veterans with ulcerating wounds, men matt with the patina of pollution, droplets of sweat briefly cleaning grimy skin – all physical joys of living in the urban centres of the eastern Mediterranean. What pleasure then to be made clean.2

Socrates, from youth through to old age, was often to be found at the south-east face of the city walls, at the edge of the River Ilissos. Here he would talk with young men – paddle with them (as Plato has Phaedrus point out, the philosopher has the advantage as he always has bare feet) and, after a long walk, stretch out on a bank cushioned with grass, shaded by a spreading plane tree and a fragrant, flowering willow. Here there are chasteberry bushes and cult statues, the breeze is cool and cicadas fill the air with their almost unbearably heady percussion.

PHAEDRUS: I am fortunate, it seems, in being barefoot; you are always so. It is easiest then for us to go along the brook with our feet in the water, and it is not unpleasant, especially at this time of the year and the day.3

This pretty, pastoral stretch – running half a mile downstream – was a deeply ancient district, an area sacred since the Bronze Age. There were many sanctuaries here, many shrines. Religious processions regularly wound around the rocks and rivulets. One of Athens’ most powerful and recondite festivals, the Great Eleusinian Mysteries, had its dress rehearsal by the banks of the river; priests of Eleusis (always from the same dynastic families), called in Greek the mystagogos, coached ‘mystery’ candidates in the mysteria on the banks of the Ilissos in March. These ‘Lesser Mysteries’ promised to open one of life’s greatest secrets to their participants. All the best (and richest) families of Athens tried to ensure they could take part. Thanks to the Eleusinian Mysteries, an Athenian