Chapter 3: Walking with Socrates through the streets of old Athens

Tell us, dreammaker, daimon, ancient deity of the timeless psyche of vast unknown origins, of Socrates, that clever and noble man of Athens who fought in distant wars and wandered the sinuous narrow Homeric streets of the citadel with many courageous and unending questions until he was to death sentenced by his fellow citizens and with some humility and generosity that cruel destiny accepted. What is the mind of this man? What should we know to understand him better? From where do his thoughts, desires, dreams come, his doubts and uncertainties, his perplexity within the polis and without, that we may know and wonder at the mystery? What questions does that man to us bequeath that we may find a path of our own in our strange journey and escape the suffering and perdition of our arrogant, reckless, confused and foolish conjectures? Where does that sweet and genial – although occasionally irritating and irascible -- soul abide now that he has been set free? Tell us, we beseech and abjure, so that his dialogue may be revived like the seed that renews the olive tree afresh from its deep unknown source and sustenance without end. Please accept the sincerity of our plea. Is this not the moment fair and fitting for his spirit of depthless inquiry and speculation?

Invocations aside, let me pose the question, How much can Socrates’s original art of inquiry be abstracted as a rational process and duplicated in a dogmatic system of rules? For instance, Could the process be converted into an algorithm for a Socrates’ artificial intelligence program to use and how effective would that be? What if the way that Socrates developed and practiced his original art of inquiry is attuned to the individuality of his nature, like other great original thinkers, such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Darwin, Freud and Jung, to randomly name a few? From that point of view, the mind of Socrates might only make complete sense in the context of his autobiography – his character, his experiences, his spirituality, the people he knows, his chance interactions with those on the streets of Athens thousands of years ago. And don’t forget the zeitgeist too, the spirit of the time. And there is the difficulty of understanding the characters and context that are part of the meaning of the dialogues that Plato, knowing Socrates and sharing a common knowledge and experience with him and with the citizens of Athens, wrote into the dialogues, an autobiography within other autobiographies.

Socrates, hurry up. Do not linger too much or fall into one of your trances. Down a winding street in Athens comes Socrates in dusty, bare feet, a little ragged, a little frayed, his eyes large, round and sharp, observing details around him, searching for contact, seeking unscheduled, unofficial debates in the open air. Others notice the expressiveness of his eyes. Even with his eyes he can ask a question or show his concern. His friends observe in prison the sign in his eyes that he has died as they come to take the body to an unknown burial. Socrates, where are you going today, fleet footed and as quick as Hermes? Who will you question? The impromptu street discussions of Socrates evade and defy the traditional extroverted public life of Athens for an introverted style of his own creation. By Athena, oh grey-eyed one, cerebral warrior and daughter of mighty Zeus, the citizens of the polis need your conversation, Socrates, and only you, Athena, know what that topic will be today. No matter if the discussions are unofficial, private debates, Socrates is nevertheless condemned and punished with a death sentence as though he poses a public threat to Athens. He avoids a public role when he can. When he is forced to assume a public role to participate in an arrest of Melos for execution that he thinks unjust, he just refuses and goes home. It is a kind of passive civil disobedience that Gandhi in India will develop into a movement centuries later. The street debates of Socrates are not public oratory in a large forum to decide large matters of state and public justice. The debates are small, mutual exchanges between individuals to benefit the individual soul. As the Delphic oracle says and Socrates takes as a personal motto, know thyself. Examine thyself. Focus inwardly on the truth. Take personal responsibility for what you think and do. We never know what men in this city will do.

So Socrates makes his way in a predicable daily routine through the colonnades, the gymnasia, through the marketplace of the 37 acres of the sprawling Agora, almost a little city within the polis, with shops and houses and government buildings and a prison, baths and wrestling schools, dodging a wild herd of pigs stampeding down an alley, past the well where women draw water, through the cooler flickering shade of the plane trees. Socrates, are you thirsty? The water is as cool as melted snow from the mountains that sometimes falls in the city. Come out of the heat for a moment. It will help sustain those conversations today. Socrates stops at shops like that of Simon the Shoemaker, a friend of his. At the site of the shop and home of Simon a cup is unearthed later with the name of Simon inscribed on it. It is here that Socrates accepts with good nature the endless jokes about his bare feet: Socrates, maybe today you should have Simon make you some fine sandals for those old feet of yours. Then you can walk farther and talk longer. Simon’s shop is just one of the locations where Socrates debates with others, recorded as perhaps the first Socratic dialogues, in an excessive 33 volumes called The Dialogues of Simon, at least if Diogenes Laertius can be believed. Simon the cobbler and others are said to have scribbled down the conversations of Socrates after they heard them. The Dialogues of Simon haven’t been found yet. Maybe they will be some day. Maybe never. Only the gods know. There are others who write Socratic literature and develop different Socratic characters and theories, some of it now lost. Socrates is observed and imitated. It is a form of street entertainment. His influence on others is exceptional. When Socrates stops to talk, people anticipate with interest what will happen. People pause and stop to listen. Children follow him playfully. There is comic mimicry of Socrates and some of it is put on the stage. The activity of being a Socrates is given a name in Greek – to “socratize.” Socrates has earned respect and credibility on the streets for his time as a soldier and is thus justified in asking others questions about bravery, virtue and piety. Look over there. Socrates is conversing with the orator and master teacher Gorgias. Let us move closer and listen what they have to say with the long ears of foxes. It will be quite a contest this afternoon. And there is no fee to pay. Wait. Now he is talking to Protagoras, that skillful professor of oratory who will instruct young Hippocrates and maybe Socrates too -- but we have to get past the cantankerous slave of Callias to get into the house to listen. Are slaves more of a blessing or a curse?

For years during the Peloponnesian War, Socrates is a soldier at Potidaea, Amphipolis and at the retreat at Delium. He saves the life of the young and attractive aristocrat Alcibiades after Alcibiades is wounded at Potidaea. They share a tent and are fond of each other. They jokingly criticize each other in public to say the opposite of what they mean. Their banter is a sign of their affection and typical of Socrates. By Poseidon, you brainless and gullible folk, I warn you. Be careful of Socrates. He will bewitch you with his words just as flute music bewitches and casts a spell over those entranced by the sacred mysteries. For years, rumours circulate in Athens about Socrates and Alcibiades. Alcibiades, raised by the prominent statesman Pericles and attracted to Socrates, the son of only a stonemason, gives Socrates connections with the aristocracy and the powerful. Socrates cares deeply about the education of the soul of Alcibiades and Alcibiades, flattered and pampered by others, allows himself to be chastened and guided by Socrates as a tough moral teacher and a kind of Hermes. Alcibiades is assassinated four years before Socrates is executed. There is some envy of Socrates and resentment at the arrogance of Alcibiades over the years. But Socrates also has a magnetic personality that is difficult to resist. Be careful of the charm of Socrates. You will laugh and be bewitched.

It is in the Agora that some believe a young man named Xenophon – who is destined to be a supreme military commander and absent in a campaign when Socrates is executed – is lured into a debate with the older Socrates, a story that would explain the motivation that Xenophon has later to write his own version of the dialogues of Socrates. Socrates must have debated with Plato too, although Plato keeps himself out of the dialogues trying hard, for whatever reason, not to show even his shadow. In his own time Plato is not heeded. He is one of the throng of philosophers and educators. I have listened intently to Socrates since I was a child. I heard his speech of defence to the jury. I weep when he dies. Yet I was not there with his other friends for his last day in prison before his sweet soul was released. Regret of that plagues me the rest of my life. Socrates returns to the wandering streets of the Agora for his trial and walks the streets again to the prison in the Agora after his conviction. It is hard to imagine that even in prison Socrates doesn’t seize opportunities to debate with whoever will submit to his humour and charm. Plato writes of conversations of Socrates in prison. But while Socrates is still free and wandering, listeners flock around him. What will he say that will be comical and outrageous? Who will be irritated and embarrassed this time? Be quiet and listen. Socrates is too well known in Athens to be unexpected or ignored. His character is distorted grossly on the stage by the comic playwright Aristophanes, but even Socrates laughs without restraint, full bellied, at that and perpetuates the caricature even more. Do I teach that the sun is no god and yet the clouds are? Very well, so be it. When it rains the gods must be pissing on me for being so audacious. No one is wiser than me, if the oracle at Delphi can be believed. Is that what you think? Pros kyna, have I taught you to be so easily deceived by clever words?

People will believe what they want to believe and assume what they want to assume, with those ineradicable habits of thinking that Socrates always questions. And yet Socrates also respects gods, portents, oracles, prophecies and dreams – maybe too much, but that is normal in Athens. The gods speak to him in dreams, he says. It is commonly known in Athens that Socrates has his own personal daimon, a divine voice that has been his companion since childhood to guide him and the oracle at Delphi answers a question about him personally. The daimon persuades Socrates not to take specific actions that he is considering. A daimon like this is a rarity in Athens and it makes Socrates seem exceptional. From these forms of divine communication come a certainty in a Socrates who otherwise questions what human beings think. He feels no need to theorize or rationalize divine communication. It is simply a fact, although there are skeptics in Athens, particularly among the nature philosophers, who blaspheme that the sun is not a god. Not Socrates, for, whatever his doubts, he is a pious man who has found a balance in his life that others find difficult to understand of balancing spirituality and doubt like Job in the Old Testament. The daimon does not debate and converse with him as Socrates does with human beings or as Job in the Old Testament does with the deity. Do you see how the gods favour Socrates with their messages? The man must be pious. Have you not listened to him? How else is he inspired? What more proof do you need? Hundreds of years later the Greek chronicler and priest at a temple at Delphi, Plutarch, writes a dialogue of a debate about the daimon of Socrates, a daimon that one person describes as “illuminating his path in matters dark and inscrutable to human wisdom.” One time, distracted by his daimon, Socrates turns aside from a group of friends on their way to the house of Andocides and, because of that divine distraction, escapes a rush of rabble swine down an alleyway that splatter the others with mud.[40] The daimon of Socrates talks to him at any time, according to whatever obscure agenda it has that only the daimon itself knows, even while Socrates is wandering through the Agora marketplace. At Potidaea, apparently according to Alcibiades and repeated by Plato, at the battle site Socrates is staring blankly for hours through the night and also hearing messages from his daimon. His daimon advises him to abstain from politics, or essentially from public life. That abstinence has the effect of saving his life for a while and thus benefitting Athens, as he says in his defence in the Apology, with a tinge of humour and irony, as well as avoiding the psychological risk of inflated self-importance of public figures and the harm that inflated self-importance produces in public affairs. That might not be a popular argument. As Thucydides said of the revered statesman of Athens, Pericles, also a relative of Socrates’s young friend Alcibiades, the man who doesn’t engage in politics is worthless. Crito, do not puzzle at the voice of my daimon, for it is no stranger than the mysterious flutes heard in the trances of the Corbyants. As mortals, we must just listen. We do not always listen well. All this is part of life, of the mysteries beyond human understanding, despite the urge in human beings, the arrogance, to try to explain what can’t be explained. How else did the fiasco of the battle for Troy or the Peloponnesian war happen, if the gods don’t tamper unseen with human affairs? Isn’t that a reasonable answer to the arrogance of human thought? It is that arrogant vote of the democratic mob that hurls Athens into the Peloponnesian wars and later sentences Socrates to death. Socrates believes in the divine, but a divinity that is more intelligent than the human mind can sometimes understand. He believes that the quest of knowledge for human beings is not knowledge of the natural world, but the kind of self-knowledge that is spiritual and moral and heals the soul. Thus the purpose of the dialogues of Socrates and his art of inquiry is spiritual self-knowledge about oneself, not abstract empirical knowledge about the larger world, not a secular philosophy. But for some in Athens the behaviour of Socrates is arrogant and, in his accusations against Socrates, Meletus mocks his claim to have a rare daimon in his accusation of impiety. Others, like Plutarch, are more tolerant and accept claims of a daimon as no more unusual than rites, oracles and the presence of the gods in human affairs. Socrates is eccentric and entertaining, but what is wrong with that? Other politicians and warriors, like the Athenian naval commander Themistocles, if not always appreciated during their lives, are celebrated with coins struck in their images and memorials constructed after their death and worshipped like a deity. And yet Socrates, with no political or military stature, has enough friends and acquaintances and devotees to deplore his execution, to honor his burial, to socratize for years afterwards with their own different imitations and recreations of him. The spirit of Socrates is contagious and catches the imaginations of others and is easy to transmit. It is a life of creative interaction.

And so, Socrates makes his wandering bare-footed circuit through Athens, day by day and into the night. After dark, Socrates may arrive late at the banquet, full of liquor but never drunken and he will outlast all the others until dawn. He will not hurry home as the stars fade and set beyond the horizon. Maybe there is a stray conversation on the way home. One more word. One more question to pose. The cock is already crowing. Make an offering, Crito, to Asclepius, if it is not too late already.

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Socrates in discussion in Athens. Original idea for image by Shawn Thompson