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Xenophon’s first encounter with Socrates illustrates the philosopher’s pickup technique. Born about 430, he was a well born youth, modest and (this always helped with Socrates) extremely good-looking. One day Socrates came across him in a narrow passage walking in the opposite direction. He stretched out his stick to block his path and asked Xenophon where every kind of food was sold. On receiving a reply, he put another question: “And where do men become good and honourable?”
Xenophon was stumped. He admitted he had no idea. “Then follow me,” said Socrates, “and learn.”
The boy was smitten. From that moment he became a pupil of Socrates and remained so for the rest of his life. In later years Xenophon wrote a memoir of his mentor, in which he drew a sketch of him at work:
Socrates was always in the public eye. Early in the morning he used to make his way to the covered walkways and open-air gymnasia, and when the marketplace became busy he was there in full view; and he always spent the rest of the day where he expected to find the most company. He talked most of the time and anyone who liked was able to listen.
A familiar figure walking among the plane trees in the agora, the philosopher used to visit a shoemaker called Simon who had a shop just beyond its edge or boundary. Boys were not allowed into the square, so they often met in shops of this kind. Simon wrote down Socrates’ sayings and was one of the first to publish them as dialogues (sadly, they are lost).
The remains of a building have been found near the Tholos, the circular building where the Prytaneum, the executive committee of the boulē, conducted its business; its floor was covered with hobnails and a cup base was found with the word “Simon’s” scratched on it. Pericles heard of his writings and offered to pay for Simon’s upkeep if he would come and live in his house. Simon refused, on the grounds that he was unwilling to sell his freedom of speech.
Socrates’ method of philosophical inquiry was highly original. Unlike Gorgias, who claimed to know everything, he insisted that he knew nothing. He wrote nothing down although many of his followers did, but proceeded by spoken question and answer, the so-called dialectic. Where the sophist would study virtue by means of the art of oratory, Socrates insisted on justifying propositions through reason. He seldom offered an opinion himself, but concentrated on pursuing definitions and demonstrating the wrongness of his interlocutor’s views. “What is courage?” he would inquire. “What is justice?” He drew a sharp distinction between opinion (bad) and knowledge (good, but hard to attain).
He seems to have believed that virtue, or aretē, was necessary for the fulfilled and happy life. But he always denied that he knew what it was, simply what it wasn’t. Understanding the nature of aretē was a function of the divine, he sometimes said, and the most that humans can attain is to acknowledge their own ignorance.
Socrates equated virtue with knowledge. The good leads to happiness, or is itself a part of happiness. More than anything else we all want to be happy, so it follows that anyone who has an inkling of what the good is will inevitably choose to embrace it. It is impossible to know the better and follow the worst.
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Socrates had little difficulty dismissing the other speakers at Agathon’s celebration dinner, but when his turn came to discourse on love he modestly avoided offering his own opinion. Instead, he reported a conversation on the same topic he had once had with a mysterious personage called Diotima.
She was a woman from Mantinea, a town in the Peloponnese. It is not at all certain whether she was fact or figment. All other speakers in Plato’s many philosophical dialogues existed in real life, so maybe Diotima did too. Some modern scholars used to speculate that she was a pseudonym for Aspasia, Pericles’ companion. Not a very plausible thought, for Diotima appears to have been something of a seer, whose intercession succeeded in postponing the Athenian plague by ten years.
As recalled by Socrates, she claimed that love “is the perpetual possession of the good.” It is a ladder between the sensible world and the eternal world. Through procreation a man can have children and win a kind of immortality. But if he can rise above sex, the next rung is to reckon beauty of soul more valuable than beauty of body. He will procreate with his lover (a male eromenos, of course) in a spiritual sense by “bringing forth such notions as may serve to make young people better.”
In a continuing progression, he will recognize that passion for one human being is beneath him and fall in love with all beauty. He will discern it in activities and institutions and realize that love of a beautiful person is an overrated pastime.
By gazing upon the vast ocean of beauty to which his attention is now turned, [he] may bring forth, or procreate, in the abundance of his love of wisdom many beautiful sentiments and ideas.
Finally, the seeker after wisdom encounters
a beauty whose nature is marvelous, indeed the final goal, Socrates, of all his previous efforts. This beauty is first of all eternal; it neither comes into being nor passes away, neither waxes nor wanes; next, it is not beautiful in part and ugly in part, nor beautiful at one time and ugly at another, nor beautiful in this relation and ugly in that, nor beautiful here and ugly there, as varying according to its beholders; nor again will this beauty appear to him like the beauty of a face or hands or anything corporeal, or like the beauty of a thought or a science, or like beauty which has its seat in something other than itself, be it a living thing or the earth or the sky or anything else whatever; he will see it as absolute, existing alone with itself, unique, eternal and all other things partaking of it, yet in such a manner that, while they come into being and pass away, it neither undergoes any increase or diminution nor suffers any change.
How much of all this is Socrates and how much the thinking of his great disciple? We will not go far wrong if we agree that Plato offered a speaking likeness, copied accurately his question-and-answer method, and echoed his interest in the correct definition of ethical terms. The historical Socrates probably also advocated the sublimation of sexual desire into some kind of spiritual or (as we respectfully name it) “platonic” love.
But the notion, adumbrated in The Symposium, that the everyday world, which seems so real to us, consists only of shadows, is merely appearance, can almost certainly be attributed to Plato. In his On the State he makes his thinking clear with a celebrated allegory. Men have been kept as captives in a cave since childhood. Their heads are fixed so that they can only look at the cave wall. Some way behind them a fire is burning and between the fire and the prisoners an array of objects of all kinds casts shadows on the wall. For the prisoners these shadows are reality, but if one of them is released and he turns around, he will be blinded by the fire and the sunlight outside the cave mouth. He will seek to return to the world of shadows. But in fact the objects, what Plato calls “forms,” are the real reality and the sun represents perfect knowledge. The flickering shadows are only inadequate copies. We human beings are the prisoners and our task is at least to glimpse the truth that lies behind our backs.
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A clatter was heard at the front door and loud knocking. A moment later Agathon and his guests heard the voice of Alcibiades, the onetime ward of Pericles, shouting tipsily from the courtyard. At thirty-four years of age or thereabouts he was now one of the city’s foremost politicians. But he was still a spoiled boy and insisted on seeing Agathon.
He was helped into the dining room by a flute girl and some companions. He stood in the doorway with a thick wreath of ivy and violets on his head, from which some ribbons were hanging. He usually wore his hair long and, like most adult males, will have been bearded—a curious combination of masculine and feminine.