The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [98]
But Socrates himself was clearly the opposite of this type of person – he was a man of the people, and a lover of mankind. For he took in many enthusiastic followers, both citizens and foreigners, and never charged anyone any fee for his companionship, but rather gave of his goods unstintingly to everybody. Some of them received small portions from him as a gift, sold them to others for much money, and were not men of the people as he was; for they refused to speak with those who could not give them money.14
Socrates’ ambition is to find the psyche, humanity’s soul, its spirit. If the Agora is a blast-furnace for civilisation, then Socrates believes there must be bellows at work, pumping a life-breath into all these flames. As he strides through the marketplace, through conversation with those around him, he tries to wrestle the answer to the ground:
Then the wise or temperate man, and he only, will know himself, and be able to examine what he knows or does not know, and to see what others know and think that they know and do really know; and what they do not know, and fancy that they know, when they do not. No other person will be able to do this. And this is wisdom and temperance and self-knowledge – for a man to know what he knows, and what he does not know. That is your meaning?
Yes, he said.15
It is an invigorating, a terrifying search.
While Socrates’ contemporary Protagoras declares at this time, ‘Man is the measure of all things’, the exciting, the difficult, the inconvenient truth of Socrates’ philosophy is its plangent suggestion that ‘man’s relationship with man’ and ‘man’s relationship with the world around him’ is the measure of all things. In addition his opinion seems to be that this relationship can never work unless each of us is as ‘individually good’ as we can be. The philosopher, in amongst the traders and tanners and soldiers and sailors who thronged the Agora, explores the unique capacity of man to be conscious of things, and to be conscious of being conscious of things. He does it as a real man, in a real historical place, in real terms. The Roman statesman Cicero makes a perceptive comment about Socrates’ ideas:
He applied it [philosophy] to ordinary life, directing his enquiries to virtues and vices, and in general to the study of good and evil.16
But there were others in the Agora at this time who saw in the trading of words a less high-minded opportunity. These were the sophists. Rather than simply view philosophical exploration as a route to enlightenment, some also exploited words as a means of personal enrichment. Socrates was (Plato vehemently declared) not a sophist, but because his business was words and the ideas behind them, he came to be tarred by his contemporaries and by history with the brush of sophistry.
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HOT AIR IN THE AGORA
Sophistry, 426–416 BC
SOCRATES: Stop trembling. You should look away from some of your thoughts; and, having dismissed them, depart for a while. Then, go back to your brain; set it in motion again and weigh the issue.
Socrates in Aristophanes, Clouds, 807–101
IN THESE SCABROUS, TAINTED DAYS, WHEN life continued, but the Spartans breathed down the Athenians’ necks, Athens remembered an old, new friend. Words had been the fairy godmother of the democracy; word-ideas; demos-kratia (people-power), eleutheria (liberty), parrhesia (freedom of speech) had been chiselled into architecture and broadcast on ocean currents around the Mediterranean; words had promoted the aspirations of democrats in assemblies and law-courts, and then made public the decisions that a democratic assembly chose to take. By the mid-fourth century, Athens was described as a ‘City of Words’.2 Rhetors ruled, and words on the streets of Socrates’ city seemed to give comfort, to suggest that the Athenian democracy was still a logical, a solid thing.
Walking through the bleached bones of ancient sites, it is easy to forget how hectic they once were. Not just with smells and colours, but in the case of Athens,