Socrates: A Man for Our Times (4 page)

Greece, in the mid-fifth century B.C., like Britain in 1940, had a leader who embodied everything it seemed to stand for, and who articulated its message to all the world and to posterity. Pericles (495–429 B.C.) was arguably the greatest statesman of antiquity. He was son of Xanthippus, who had plunged up and down the roller-coaster of Athenian politics at the time, round the turn of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., when Cleisthenes had founded Athenian democracy. Agariste, Pericles’ mother, was the great man’s niece, and he aspired to complete his great-uncle’s work by perfecting the city’s democratic system. The victory over Persia filled Athens, and Pericles in particular, with a spirit of optimism that he put to practical use by devising immense schemes of progress. He was rich, and we first hear of him as a theatrical angel, or choregus, financing Aeschylus’ stupendous tragedy
Persae
, commenting on the Athenian victory, produced in 472 B.C., two years before Socrates’ birth. Ten years later, he was elected chief magistrate and continued to be so for a generation. It was Pericles’ gift to transmute Athenian optimism into a spirit of constructive energy and practical dynamism that swept through this city like a controlled whirlwind. Pericles believed that Athenians were capable of turning their brains and hands to anything of which human ingenuity was capable—running a city and an empire, soldiering, naval warfare, founding a colony, drama, sculpture, painting, music, law, philosophy, poetry, oratory, education, science—and do it better than anyone else. Do it, moreover, in a mood of joyful freedom.

It was Pericles’ good fortune not only to come to power at exactly the right time, but to be attended by a passionate admirer who was also a writer and historian of genius. Thucydides was born in 460 B.C., making him ten years younger than Socrates but to all intents his contemporary, who died in the same year. He was the perfect historian: He saw events more accurately and objectively, inquired more pertinaciously, and recorded them more truthfully than any other historian of antiquity. But he also felt himself involved, had strong opinions, and worshipped Pericles—as Plato worshipped Socrates a generation later—because he, too, loved energy and the dynamism it makes possible. Whereas Churchill wrote his own history, Pericles—who might have done so—was cut short by the plague. But he had Thucydides to do it for him. Perhaps its highest point was the funeral oration Pericles was appointed by Athens to pronounce over his dead soldiers after the first year of the Peloponnesian War. This was a grand and solemn occasion, attended by the elite and the populace of the city. Socrates was certainly there, alongside the dramatic poets Sophocles and Euripides, the architect-sculptor Phidias, and the painter Zeuxis.

It was the underlying theme of Pericles’ panegyric over the dead that human beings were not the helpless victims of fate but masters of their own destiny. The soldiers had died defending Athens, which was the supreme human artifact. Then, being more explicit, he said Athens was the one society where justice applied equally to all, where men might not be equal but where social differences did not stop anyone getting to the top if he had enough ability. All Athenians voluntarily submitted to law and government, which they ultimately controlled, and this included fighting to defend it and, if necessary, dying, as these soldiers had done.

Athens was thus a disciplined, indeed a self-disciplined society, but its discipline was balanced by intellectual freedom. Society was open, the exercise of power transparent—there was no secrecy by authority and so no suspicion among those who freely submitted to it. Hence Athenian society was a model to other Greeks—“the School of Hellas”—and if it controlled other cities, it did so on its merits, and its subjects had no reason to complain of its rule any more than the soldiers who died to preserve it. This remarkable speech was faithfully recorded by Thucydides (who no doubt embellished and polished it), and it gave Socrates much food for thought as it raised so many issues on which he had strong opinions of his own, as we shall see. Not least, it illustrated the distinction he drew between oratory, which sought to persuade, and philosophy, which sought truth. That Pericles was persuasive was abundantly evident. But was what he said true?

The question was all the more important in that Pericles, in proclaiming his grandiose visions of Athenian humanism, was not alone. He was leader of a pleiad, a cluster of stars, gifted men of all kinds united by their high opinion of human capacity. They included the elderly Aeschylus, who died in 456 B.C., five years after Pericles swept to power, but whose
Prometheus Bound
, his last, unfinished play, tells the story of the mythical figure punished by Zeus for giving mankind fire and the arts. Prometheus is presented as the champion of the oppressed and a highly independent thinker, and this grand play, enormously exciting for Socrates—whose sympathies were strongly for and against its protagonist—was often revived in his lifetime. Also in the humanist circle was Sophocles (496–406 B.C.) who, though a quarter century older than Socrates, was known to him all his life and whose
Antigone
(441 B.C.), a desperate tragedy of cruelty, suicide, and despair, shows humans at their noblest and is a hymn to man and woman. It was so successful that Pericles put the playwright on his ticket when he next stood as
strategos
, and Sophocles was elected general in 440 B.C., the first of many public services he rendered in the intervals between his writing.

The most important of the pleiad, both in Pericles’ eyes and in the view of Athens generally, was Protagoras (485–415 B.C.), who came from Abdera in Thrace but who made Periclean Athens his headquarters and taught there as a sophist from 455 B.C. He was the chief theorist and articulator of the Periclean doctrine of anthropocentrism and is quoted by Plato in his
Theaetetus
as laying down the maxim “Man is the measure of all things.” His books,
On Truth
and
On the Gods
, have not survived, but the second came as close to atheism as was possible in ancient Greece. He was quoted as saying, “As for the gods I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not. Or what they are like in form. Many things prevent us knowing about them, including the sheer difficulty of the subject, and the brevity of human life.” Socrates, like most Athenians, was not happy about that or about the fact that Protagoras taught
arete,
or virtue, to young men of rich or noble families, and taught it in a worldly way, as the means to “get on.” He also charged high fees and became rich. Inevitably Protagoras and Socrates came to verbal blows in the fertile and fascinating dialogue named after Protagoras. This reveals him as urbane and reasonable and Socrates as unworldly and reasonable, the two philosophers competing to proclaim “progressive” views, Protagoras being particularly innovatory. He sets forth the view that criminal justice should not be guided by revenge or retribution: The aim of any punishment ought to be to deter the criminal and others from committing further crimes. This was a theme Socrates was to develop with huge historical consequences, as we shall see. This dialogue is one of the best Plato records. I do not want to anticipate Socrates’ methods of arguing and teaching, which I will come to later. But Protagoras posed him an unusual problem, for unlike most of the clever men Socrates met and debated with, Protagoras was highly rational, moderate and what Jane Austen would have called “a sensible man.” His worldliness, though distasteful to Socrates, bringing forth his most biting irony, was displayed with a disarming veneer of common sense as well as considerable acumen. That was exactly the combination Pericles valued. He ordered him to give public lectures on progress and, in 443 B.C., to draw up a working constitution for the new Athenian colony of Thurii.

It was Pericles’ view, reflecting a deep-rooted Athenian conviction, that the civilized life of a polis was a whole, and that the sensible citizen should, as a matter of duty to his city and to himself, participate in every aspect of it. Greek cities were planned, perhaps the first in history to be arranged in an intelligent and purposeful fashion. By the fifth century B.C., the Greeks had adopted the grid structure developed in parts of the Middle East, and this made planning easier. The defensive core of the city, like the Acropolis of Athens, might be dictated by geography and geology. But within certain limits, the city could be made rational. All the facilities—assembly room, theater, lyceum (for music), the various gymnasia or schools, the stadium, and the agora or shopping center—were placed in convenient relationship to one another. And all were usually capable of accommodating the entire adult male citizenship.

Athens was a mobile society, upward and sideways. A young slave called Pasion, born when Socrates was forty, worked hard and intelligently at the bank where he ran errands, won his freedom, later parlayed his way into getting citizenship from the Assembly, or possibly bought it, and ended up the richest man in Greece, becoming unpopular enough to merit angry speeches from Demosthenes and Isocrates (his famous Trapeziticus or “Speech Against the Banker”). Again, in Socrates’ time, a champion wrestler became a well-known philosopher. Playwrights and historians became generals; and generals, historians. Poets became statesmen, and politicians wrote plays. An architect might found a colony, and a man who made lamps might rule the city. Plato nearly devoted his life to poetry. Socrates thought seriously about going into public life before rejecting the idea at a sign from heaven “which coincided with my reason.” Athens in the fifth century B.C. was unique in history in making it so easy for men of talent to cross professional and vocational boundaries.

It was also unique, at least in Pericles’ heyday, in blending democracy, empire, and cultural triumph, indeed triumphalism. The secret was money. The Delian League, originally formed to fight Persia, became the basis for an Athenian empire of allies and colonies, each of which contributed to a common treasury held in Athens. Some rebuilding had taken place in the city to make good the damage inflicted by the Persian sacking. But Pericles, once installed in power, formed a scheme to use the common funds to rebuild Athens, especially its Acropolis, in the most splendid manner. The centerpiece was the erection of the Parthenon at the highest point of the Acropolis to house a gigantic gold and ivory statue of the goddess Athena. He claimed that the money was being spent in the interest of all the city-states forming the alliance, since Athena was the protectress of each one, and all looked to Athens and its glories, as Greeks still do, as epitomizing the Greek spirit of civilization. But others felt the money was being misapplied, especially whenever Athens felt the need to raise the tribute levied on each city. It is a common problem of supposedly liberal empires, whether taxes are raised to benefit all, as the mother country claims, or in fact benefit her alone. It formed a thread of argument that ran through the history of the British Empire and was the source of Britain’s dispute with the thirteen American colonies, leading to the Revolutionary War and the founding of the United States.

At all events, Pericles pressed ahead and spent the money, in the process making Athens the artistic and architectural center of the ancient world, attracting craftsmen, and particularly skilled stone carvers, from all over Greece, and beyond. This was of particular interest for Socrates, for it was the family trade, and tradition has it that both he and his father shared in the work. More likely, in my view, he was fascinated by the Parthenon project because of the technical and, indeed, philosophic problems it raised. Pericles put in overall charge of the cultural and building program his friend and supporter Phidias (490–432 B.C.), who occupied the same role in the regime as Michelangelo did to Pope Julius II, Charles Le Brun to Louis XIV, or Baron Haussmann to Napoléon III. This brilliant man could turn his hand to painting or building or anything else requiring artistic skill, judgment, and grand ideas, but his chief work was as a sculptor. He had already created a bronze statue of Athena ten meters high, placed on a prominent part of the Acropolis. She was known as the Champion, and when the morning sun caught her helmet and spear tip, she could be seen by sailors as they rounded Cape Sunium twenty miles away, letting them know they were almost home.

Phidias now set about making a gigantic gold and ivory (or chryselephantine, as it was known) representation of Athena, as the climax of the restored Acropolis, together with a suitably grand and decorative temple to house it, the Parthenon. The statue’s face, arms, and other visible flesh were composed of ivory, but many parts were made of solid gold, some of them concealed. The function of the work was not only to astonish the world but to house in holy safety Athens’s gold reserve, for the hidden parts could be raided in time of need. Phidias’s Athena, therefore, was the Central Bank of the city-state, as well as its presiding deity.

The Parthenon, which housed this precious cult figure, was the culminating master piece of the Doric order, a style of stone building that the Greeks had copied from pharaonic Egypt (though they would not admit it) and hugely improved. It was monumentally simple and, by the fifth century B.C., archaic and therefore suitable for a solemn religious building on the largest possible scale.

This enormous work was begun in 447 B.C. and dedicated, complete, a decade later, in 438 B.C. The working architect of the Parthenon was Ictinus, assisted by a man called Callicrates and another called Carpion. We know nothing of these two, but Ictinus was an able fellow, creator of the splendid Temple of Apollo at Bassae in Arcadia and also a writer, for he provided (according to a treatise on architecture written by the Roman engineer Vitruvius) an account of the building.

It is a pity this work has not survived, for the Parthenon raised, in magnificent form, two philosophical problems, which is why it was so important to Socrates. The first was the way in which architects created an illusory tension and excitement in their buildings by almost imperceptible deviations from the straight line. This art or science is called entasis and comes from the Greek verb
enteinein,
which conveys the idea of opposing forces holding an object in their power. Greek architects of the fifth century B.C. would have agreed with Albert Einstein’s dictum on space-time: “Everything is slightly curved.” By minute deviations from straight lines working in conjunction with arcs of wide radials in all three planes, by a slight upward curvature of the stylobate, echoed in the entablature, by thickened corner columns and double contractions of corner intercolumniations, and by many other such devices the Parthenon was made to seem more “real” and was given a sense of movement, of organic life. The measurements involved to produce these effects had to be exact and added an extra dimension to the work of architects, draftsmen, carvers, and stonemasons. When Socrates insisted that mathematics should be used for practical purposes (not the metaphysical speculations that his pupil Plato came to propound), the building of the Parthenon, which he had observed from start to finish, was exactly what he had in mind.