The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [91]
Socratic virtue
On each morning of battle Socrates would have heard the Corinthians clank and shuffle their camp into readiness for war. When Spartan troops were on the battlefield their advent was more sonorous, because this was a citystate that sacrificed to Eros before conflict, that encouraged its men to ‘embrace death like a lover’ and then played them into battle, singing and dancing as they had been taught to do from the age of seven. The Spartans rarely broke with tradition. They enjoyed doing what they were told. Spartiates believed that obedience was more important than freedom. ‘At Sparta the most powerful men show utmost deference to the officials; they pride themselves on their humility, believing that, if they lead, the rest will follow along the path of eager obedience.’8 For the Spartans, virtue resided in unflinching compliance and the well-developed biceps of their citizen fighting machine. The passion for conflict was visceral, sensuous. Their very war music was erotic. But Socrates tells us that the body is the tomb of the soul, not its manifestation. Physical submission, for him, was of no interest as a moral goal. Although the philosopher admired the Spartans in some respects – he approved of their selfless communality, their pursuit of excellence in this life – he appeared to have a much more nuanced notion of what ‘goodness’ really is.
Socrates, so Plato and Xenophon tell us, spent years of his philosophical life propounding the need for virtue, arete. The orthodox notion of virtue at this time was a courageous, virile, manly concept. Young men were taught arete in the gymnasia, during military exercises. The virtue they possessed had to equip them, in literal and precise terms, for the cut-and-thrust of life in the fifth century. Although Socrates was, quite rightly, later lauded by Christians, his philosophy came before the ‘turn-the-other-cheek’ ethos was developed. In Greece at this time the lex talionis still operated: all is fair in love and war, and civilian men can all be slaughtered, women and children enslaved.
So arete, manly virtue, could, and did, lead to abominable acts. But Socrates played around with a rather different concept of ‘goodness’. He thought of virtue in more subtle, multifaceted terms; for him, virtue was sophrosune, temperance, dikaiosune, justice, hosiotes, piety, and andreia, courage, all rolled together into one bigger ambition – Sophia, wisdom or knowledge.9 His belief was that this was not pie-in-the-sky idealism, but a real option; a virtue that could withstand the vicissitudes of pleasure and pain, of anger, of frustration and jealousy, and be enjoyed by all. And this particular brand of Sophia – not pat answers, not wisdom-as-product, but a deeper and more connected mode of thinking – he eventually concurred, could, and should, be taught.10
Perhaps it is not too fanciful to suggest that, surrounded as he was both by great, human possibilities and by awful, disgusting, debasing human acts, he was trying to will a better, a newly virtuous kind of man out of the world. He was living in extremis and so he understood the value of moderation. Socrates was exposed to so much that was ‘bad’ that his search for ‘the good’ was ever more urgent.
In these wars of attrition men must have lain down at night wondering what carnage the next day would bring. Potidaea was just one in a line of diminishing, besmirching campaigns – orchestrated by Athena’s city to protect her democratic interests. The ideology in play was discomforting. But at some point in this phase of his life, as he fought, as he lay in his tent with Alcibiades, the moonlight coming ghost-bright through the linen of the military awning, as he stood, frozen, a blank stare on his face but his mind whirring within, Socrates developed a new ideology,