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By Root 1745 0

in the city – for his thoughts. And yet somehow he had become wealthy enough to be a hoplite; to be a vertebra in the backbone of the Athenian city-state, a soldier who could afford to provide his own spear, helmet and hoplon. At this time in Athens there were about 14,000 of these, not uncomfortably well-off, lower-middle-ranking men.9 Perhaps his stonemason father had benefited quite significantly from the Periclean building boom. One source connects Sophroniscus to the family of Aristeides the Just – a dynasty influential in Athens since before the Persian Wars. So the budding philosopher could have had ‘good connections’. Maybe the father had a wit that prefigured that of his son; maybe he was paid well for his skill and his original ideas. Whatever the fiscal context, Socrates could afford to fight.

Alternatively, perhaps, Socrates was sponsored by one of those wealthy friends he had met in the aristocratic milieu of Athens’ new ‘think-tanks’, and it is not impossible that his patron was Pericles himself – possibly the greaves he strapped on, the leather wristbands he shaped to fit around his thick arms, signified just how well in with the in-crowd Socrates had already become. He drank, ate and talked with those who would once have been called oligarchs – and now, of course, he had to stand shoulder to shoulder and fight with them too. Socrates was no mere oarsman, not just muscle to power-row triremes, a human-machine whose bones the fish would soon be scouring clean; he had also earned the right to be spear and hatchet fodder.10

And so if he had sailed to Samos as a hoplite passenger, a deck-boy, his lips and eyelashes stiff with wind, stinging, briny, he would have beached at the point of his – some would argue – first battlefield. The possibility of an involvement in Athens’ Samian campaign reminds us that although Socrates loved Athens, and lived in the city-state most of his life, when we look at his life-story, and indeed the life of the Athenian democracy, we also have to set the compass north, south, east and west. Socrates’ skill with a stabbing sword and an outsize hoplon shield would have been as important to his fellow citizens as any cleverness with philosophical words.

A contemporary of the philosopher’s, Ion of Chios, is quoted as saying that without a doubt Socrates was at Samos in the company of another great thinker of the day, Archelaus, the pupil of Anaxagoras, a favourite of Pericles. Socrates could indeed have visited the island as a young man with the philosopher Archelaus in order to debate heavenly matters like the nature of cosmology11 (comedians would mock Socrates for such airy-fairy interests later in life,12 remembering that in his early days a wide-eyed Socrates ‘had an extraordinary passion for that branch of learning that is called natural science’13). Socrates might have come to Samos to learn, or he might simply have come here to kill. Because if he did travel to Samos as a soldier, he would have been required to shed blood. Pericles’ orders to his Athenian troops were unyielding. The Athenians fighting in Samos exemplified perfectly Aristotle’s summary, one hundred years later, of the purpose of all that intense military training back in the bosom of the city-state.

Military training … has three purposes:

1. To save ourselves from becoming subject to others.

2. To win for our own city a position of leadership, exercised for the benefit of others …

3. To exercise the rule of a master over those who deserve to be treated as slaves.14

The ‘pax Atheniensis’ had been short-lived. For the next thirty years Socrates, Aspasia, Euripides, Alcibiades, the young men in the gym, the traders in the Agora, the priestesses on the Acropolis will live through, or be destroyed by, one of the most pitiless wars that human history has known.

Isthmus, near Corinth, c.441–411 BC

You never left the city to go to a festival, except once to go to the Isthmus, nor to go to any other place except when you were serving in the army somewhere, nor did you ever make a trip abroad, as other people