The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life

by Bettany Hughes

  Beauty at the time of Socrates

  Beauty in Athens at this time was seriously considered to be the sign of a brilliant and noble spirit; a gift of the gods. Those laudable qualities that justified privilege and dominance were believed, naturally, to have been given an appropriately attractive shell. And all those heroically naked paragons around the city itself (both the living, breathing men in the gymnasia and the bronze and marble statues) reflected the visual experience of Athens – this was a land where men stripped to exercise, to bathe, to talk, to worship their gods, to work in the fields. The goddess Athena was honoured by a city-wide kallisteion, an all-male beauty contest at the time of the Pan-Athenaea. The winning beauty was handsomely rewarded with more than one hundred amphoras of sacred olive oil. In Socrates’ Athens the ‘body-beautiful’ also signified a beautiful mind.10 Being beautiful meant that you possessed a moral beauty; kalon in Greek means ‘fine’ and ‘praiseworthy’ as well as ‘fit’.

  And so the notion proposed here, that inner beauty can sometimes be contained within a hoary shell, is radical. In the Socratic canon itself, an entire dialogue, the Hippias Major, is devoted to a discussion of the definition of ‘the beautiful’. Socrates suggests that beauty is not just to do with the line of your leg, the proportion of your nose, the gleam of your skin, but with the state of your soul:

  By means of beauty, all beautiful things become beautiful.11

  If you weren’t yourself beautiful, your inner beauty, your virtue could catalyse great things; a man ‘moving towards the goal of the erotic suddenly glimpses a “beautiful” which is of wondrous essence, precisely that for which he had previously given such pains, the pure being, imperishable and divine, the “idea of the beautiful”.’12 These are left-field thoughts for Greek society; an internal character differs from, but is as potent as, external show. Beauty is an attitude, a psychological goal, not just a set of vital statistics.

  In classical Athenian terms, Socrates’ appearance was utterly dysfunctional, repellent. As soon as figurines of Socrates were commissioned, they were moulded in the form of a satyr. Satirical Socrates seemed to care not two hoots.

  My eyes are more beautiful than yours, because yours only look straight ahead, whereas mine bulge out and look to the sides as well.13

  Socrates takes the affectionate jibes at the symposium on the chin. Once again he wrong-foots Athenian standards and the mono-allure of kleos (fame, celebrity, being talked about). Here, in Agathon’s friendly soirée with its spiky guests, the philosopher proves how odd he is: he resists sexual advances; despite drinking all night he talks cogently; he is happy not to fit into the good Athenian stereotype of being kalos k’agathos – beautiful on the outside and noble on the inside – he’s a satyr and that’s the end of it. After the symposium he does not even need access to one of the many hangover cures available in Athens, and bounces off the following day for a full philosophising session, plus a quick trip to the gym.

  But the important thing to note is that he is still there. Unlike those unfortunate Pythagoreans who shut themselves up in a ‘Thinkery’ in Croton to philosophise (and were then burned alive), Socrates both refuses to cut himself off from the real world and yet has, so far, despite his lambasting in the Theatre of Dionysos, managed to escape persecution. His relationship with the other guests at the Symposium is immediate, comradely, corporeal, concrete, flirtatious, fond. It is in the Symposium that you get the sense of a man who thought it important to live life to the full, who refused to bend with the political wind.

  Perhaps no surprise then that Socrates also allows for the pursuit of pleasure in his ‘good life’. Of course, this quest cannot be excessive, harmful, selfish, degenerate, but Socratic ‘good’ does not deny the place of delight – hedonism even – in human lives. In Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates himself declares that his two loves in life are ‘philosophy and Alcibiades’.14 He judges his own face to be that of a sensualist.15 Alcibiades is not to be rejected just because he is flawed. Alcibiades’ love is visible, it is ‘obvious’.16 But Socrates is attracted to him precisely because he is extrovert, charming. No one can accuse Socrates of asceticism; drinking, chatting, eating around a low dinner-table on a warm Athenian night, once again he proves himself a philosopher of the people, someone who did not divorce the physical from the meta-physical.17

  And what the Symposium reveals most cogently about Socrates is what he thinks of the power of love in the real, messy human world that we all occupy.

  34

  THE TROUBLE WITH LOVE

  Fifth century BC and beyond

  SOCRATES: Love is the one thing I understand.

  Plato, Symposium, 177d

  EVERYONE KNEW THAT EROS WAS OFTEN an uninvited – but anticipated – guest at symposia. The rutting, squelching, hot, pounding business of physical love was much more evident in Athenian society than in our own. Vase-painters were obsessed with the activities, for example, of prostitutes – which they covered from every angle.

  But whereas many evenings in fifth-century Athens ended (and sometimes began) with sex, Socrates seemed to be determined not to be a slave to his passions. He was ecstatic, sensuous, but not necessarily interested in the jiggery-pokery of sexual union. This abstinence is something we seem to find easier to imagine in the ecstasies of early Christians, not the pagans, but self-denial is certainly there in the character of Socrates as sold to us by Plato and Xenophon.

  ‘But to tell you the truth, gentlemen,’ he continued, ‘By Heaven! It does look to me – to speak confidentially – as if he had also kissed Cleinias; and there is nothing more terribly potent than this at kindling the fires of passion. For it is insatiable and holds out seductive hopes. For this reason I maintain that one who intends to possess the power of self-control must refrain from kissing those in the bloom of beauty.’1

  ‘Socrates,’ said Euthydemus, ‘I think you mean that he who is at the mercy of the bodily pleasures has no concern whatever with virtue in any form.’

  ‘Yes, Euthydemus; for how can an incontinent man be any better than the dullest beast? How can he who fails to consider the things that matter most, and strives by every means to do the things that are most pleasant, be better than the stupidest of creatures? No, only the self-controlled have power to consider the things that matter most, and, sorting them out after their kind, by word and deed alike to prefer the good and reject the evil.’2

  A number of the vases depicting the imaginative, adventurous business of symposiast sex are now squirrelled away in locked rooms and cabinets in museums around the world: the Secretum at the British Museum, the Gabinetta Secreta in the Naples Archaeological Museum, a whole extension behind the Corinth Museum. The objects were stored here by nineteenth-century excavators who considered them offensive and ‘anti-Hellenic’. Those first-draft democrats of the fifth century would have been politely puzzled. What better way to express the health of your community than with sex? This society was extremely priapic. Herms (busts of the god Hermes) on street corners boasted fine erections, their penises carved onto the shafts of the columns that supported them. Girls on vases take it in every orifice. Athenian sex seems to have been gymnastic and athletic – in the Greek sense of the words – a great deal of flesh on show and all very athlon (contest-driven), all aiming for much satisfaction, high prizes. The Gabinetta Secreta and the Secretum are packed because the Greeks cheerfully filled their own lives with so much erotica.

  But despite Socrates’ undoubted belief in the power of love, tribadic, gasping, physical love for its own sake was not for him.3 In Xenophon’s Symposium a slave-boy and slave-girl tenderly re-enact Psyche’s seduction by Eros. All in the room are stimulated to go home and make love to their wives. Socrates goes for a walk.

  [SOCRATES:] Of course, you don’t suppose that lust provokes men to beget children when the streets and stews are full of means to satisfy the sexual urge …4

  Instead he suggests that love means more than a moment in the sack. That real love make
s you richer:

  SOCRATES: The man who is attracted only by his beloved’s appearance is like one who has rented a farm; his aim is not to increase its value but to gain from it as much of a harvest as he can for himself. On the other hand, the man whose goal is friendship is more like one possessing a farm of his own.5

  The stories that Socrates shares around the drinking couches of the symposia are not stories of sex, but stories of love. Ta erotika in his book means ‘the good things’ or ‘what leads us to the good things and good spiritedness’. And the philosopher does not pull his punches. He criticises one of the most powerful men of the day – a man who will then go on to bring civil war and tyranny back to Athens – for being obsessed with plain, burning, fluid-exchange sex. Critias was the name of this influential, reactionary, oligarchic individual.6 A relation of Plato and an aspiring tragedian with a darkly tragic bent, he moved in Socrates’ circle. Critias was hot for a younger man called Euthydemus. Socrates did not approve.

  Critias seems to have the feelings of a pig: he can no more keep away from Euthydemus than pigs can help rubbing themselves against stones.7

  Critias was furious. After the event he tried to gag Socrates, to stop him talking to anyone under thirty. Critias despised the self-righteous philosopher.8 This tells us as much about Socrates as it does about Critias. Often criticised by modern authors for being more than a little reactionary and ‘educating’ some of the most oppressive oligarchs of the day, this spat over Euthydemus exemplifies that in fact Socrates was troubled by Critias and his crowd. Just because the philosopher drank with them and they listened to him did not make him their role-model; we should never confuse a catholic taste in friends and acquaintances with evidence of indoctrination or sectarian cliquery.

  Socrates was perfectly at ease in the symposia, but in the minds of others he sits there a little uncomfortably. He was not after all an aristocrat – and neither the democrats nor the oligarchs of the city would forget that he had broken convention by dining late into the night with the great and the good.

  The philosopher was perhaps that troubling mix: a demotic highflyer. The Athenians cherished those who were ‘first in wealth and breeding’. They believed the beautiful kaloi k’agathoi were fit to rule. Socrates was not quite fully the ascetic, not fully the democrat, not fully the oligarch – and he was ubiquitous. A few years from now, when Athens has suffered so much and yet Socrates still swaggers through the Agora with his infuriating sense of purpose and his beatific attitude, perhaps he was just too vexatious, exasperating; a gadfly that needed swatting. Already we know from the plays of Aristophanes that the philosopher was beginning to rub his fellow citizens up the wrong way. And there is another, sadder possibility. Perhaps towards the end of the fifth century BC Athens was simply tired of him. The conversations about Socrates, once excited, indulgent, were now tetchy, damning. Those who have an extended stretch in the saddle are often wearied of; as time passes the tallest poppies are frequently cut down.

  And Socrates should perhaps have chosen a little more carefully the men he decided to insult, thought twice before taking on and cutting down to size a character such as Critias, one of the high-flyers of the day.

  One street proverb from the period should have sounded a warning bell in Socrates’ ears:

  I hate a drinking companion with a memory.9

  35

  OH, TELL ME THE TRUTH ABOUT LOVE

  Athens, 416 BC

  Wisdom is a most beautiful thing, and love is of the beautiful; and therefore love is also a philosopher or lover of wisdom, and being a lover of wisdom is in a mean between the wise and the ignorant … Such, my dear Socrates, is the nature of the Spirit of Love.

  Plato, Symposium, 204b1

  IN SOME SENSES THE SYMPOSIUM IS the most urgent of all Plato’s works – the narrative trips over itself to arrive on the page, the dining room in a back street of Athens is a factory for beautiful ideas, ideas of beauty, beautiful things. Even the silences sparkle.

  At this dinner party, set more than 2,400 years ago, Love is the night’s theme. The Symposium can still be read as one of the greatest stories of love in Western literature. The only subject in the world that Socrates believes himself to be the unsurpassed master of is love.2 ‘I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with someone.’3 Socrates loves his fellow men with an overpowering eroticism, and because he believes he can look into their eyes and understand a little about himself as he does so, we are taught that it is through our relationship with the world around us that we can become whole. Socrates sees the massive power of love.4 We too are just beginning to unpick the complex, psychophysical parcel that love is. Socrates makes our relationships with one another his life’s work.

  Socratic love is enormously powerful, it turns the world upside down. What the philosopher knows is that we love love-stories, and our love is often a love-story played out. But nowhere does he mock. Socrates’ love is literal: the point of life is to love it. He is erotic. He states that if Eros passes you by in life, you are a nonentity. All those aspects of love he approves of, as good-life glue for society, since ‘festivals, sacrifices, dances’ are motivated by Eros. And, more than that, love is a guide – a passion for what is good and a horror for what is degrading.5

  And the genuinely heart-warming revelation of Socrates in the Symposium is that dedication to love is not a selfish pursuit. The point of love is not gratification, but symbiosis. And love, desire, ambition, hope, concord, enthusiasm, drive whatever you want to call it – if tended, if not allowed to burn itself out, plays a long game. His love is not flash-in-the-pan passionate. In Socrates’ eyes, it is honesty and a pursuit of knowledge rather than ignorance that leads to loveliness in life. For him, love has a purpose. It is the life-force, the desire to do, to be, to think. It is the thing that makes us feel great about our world, and therefore makes us be great in it. Socrates describes these ‘good’ dynamos as ta erotika – the things of love.

  SOCRATES: Those who are already wise no longer love wisdom, whether they are gods or men. Neither do those who are so ignorant that they are bad, for no bad and stupid person loves wisdom. There remain only those who have this bad thing, ignorance, but have not yet been made ignorant or stupid by it. They are conscious of not knowing what they don’t know.6

  Socrates and women

  Socrates has positioned love, goodness and companionship squarely at the centre of his idea of a well-functioning society. But still the philosopher needs to sort out what to do about women. The nobility of love between men is possible to imagine – but between a man and a woman? Given that the first created woman was nominated by Hesiod the kalon-kakon, the beautiful-evil thing, this is going to take quite some untangling. Unlike so many men of his day, Socrates does not choose just to ignore the female of the species. And since he is keen on those who really know about a subject rather than just pretend knowledge, he turns to the figure of a woman for illumination.

  They praise in such splendid fashion that … they bewitch our souls … [E]very time I listen fascinated [by their praise of me], I am exalted and imagine myself to have become all at once taller and nobler and more handsome … owing to the persuasive eloquence of the speaker.7

  And so into the theatrical setting of the symposium enters a female character: the priestess Diotima.

  Diotima is, I am sure, used to some extent as a mouthpiece for Platonic ideals – voicing ways to build the perfect society. (She is one character who is a free and equal participant in Plato’s Symposium, and, atypically, she is a woman.) It is useful to have a woman here in Socrates’ symposium because the discussion is so much about the male/female act of fertilisation and then the female business of gestation and parturition. There are complex discussions of how what we would describe as ‘heterosexuals’ and ‘homosexuals’ give ‘birth to beauty’, through children and through accounts of virtue, respectively – the former via pregnancy of the body, the latter via pregnancy of the soul. Relationships with bea
uty and beautiful things can lead to a bigger and better kind of beauty. You can see why Socrates lends himself so well to Judaeo-Christian and Islamic philosophy; positively seeking out good here on earth brings about the good of mankind and the good of the hereafter. Unfortunate, perhaps, that Socrates’ respect for the opinions and standing of this priestess character did not also prove tenacious within the later iterations of the monotheistic religions that supplanted paganism, nor unassailable within Golden Age Athens itself. Because the character of Diotima tells us much about the value of women both then and now.

  36

  DIOTIMA – A VERY SOCIAL PRIESTESS

  Naples and Athens, Fifth century BC and beyond

  Look at what people usually do – all women in particular, they dedicate the first thing that comes to hand, they swear to offer sacrifice, and promise to found shrines for gods and spirits and children of god.

  Plato, Laws, 909e–9101

  This counterfeit coin, woman, to curse the human race.

  Euripides, Hippolytus, 616–172

  ONE OF THE FEW REMAINING IMAGES of Socrates and Diotima is lost in the vast Naples Archaeological Museum: literally. I turned up there one blisteringly wet October afternoon to examine the little bronze plaque (originally used to decorate furniture in some well-to-do household). It was not on show, so a curator took me backstage, to the fabulously functional, creaking, gargantuan storerooms where much of the finest art from an entire antiquity is kept under lock and key.