Richard Marranca (RM): Let me start with a cup that was found. A while back, I recall a news story about a cup found that has some connection to Socrates. Was it his – what’s the story on this?
Paul Cartledge (PC): To my knowledge no such inscribed cup has been found, but there is one, made of course of fired and painted clay, not precious metal, which possibly brings us within one degree of separation. A contemporary of Socrates called Simon had a cobbler’s workshop in the Agora: a cup inscribed with that name incised in the genitive case (meaning ‘belonging to Simon’) has been found in the SW corner. Later sources tell us that a Simon conversed with Socrates and may even have written philosophical dialogues, but whether he’s the same Simon is unfortunately not certain. It’s a shame too that neither of our two main contemporary sources on Socrates, Plato and Xenophon, found occasion to mention the philosophical Simon.
RM: Before we delve into some of the influences on Socrates, can you mention what Socrates would be up to on any given day?
PC: Socrates is found mooching in the center of Athens, often in the Agora area, looking for a suitable conversationalist and conversation topic to engage in dialectics with, asking ‘Socratic’ questions (unanswerable definitively) and using the ‘Socratic’ Q&A method. Socrates – or at any rate Plato’s ‘Socrates’ – apparently was primarily interested in two things: epistemology (theory of knowledge) and moral philosophy, how to live the best life (Plato may actually have coined the word ‘philosophia’).
RM: Who were the most important earlier philosophers and teachers who influenced Socrates?
PC: Socrates seems to us to have fallen from the sky, as it were, to emerge as a philosopher fully-fledged in mature adult years, but that’s due to the nature of our evidence as well as to the fact that in his youth Athens didn’t have a regular first- or second-level educational curriculum. There was a Greek tradition of intellectual enquiry going back at least as far as Thales of Miletus,who flourished around 600 BCE. These ‘Presocratics’ are sometimes called ‘natural philosophers’, since what they were chiefly interested in was non-human nature (phusis), what the universe was made of, etc. Some of them, for example Xenophanes of Colophon and Democritus of Abdera, anticipated Socrates’s interest in human morality, but it seems that it was indeed Socrates whose thinking was transformative in changing the focus of intellectual debate from heaven to earth, as it were.
Two other potential influences are worth mentioning: tragic drama and the philosophy of Parmenides of Elea. But probably the most important feature of Socrates’s day and of democratic Athens as the ‘City Hall of Wisdom’ (Plato) was that there emerged a group, not large but noisy, of itinerant intellectuals prepared to sell their brand of wisdom and knowledge to anyone willing or able to pay, and who found Athens a congenial place to expound and sell their wares. To Plato, however, what they were selling was neither wisdom nor knowledge but merely purveyors of fake news, and it was he who forever after gave the Greek word sophistēs, literally a ‘wise’ person or intellectual, its bad name – hence our ‘sophistical’, ‘sophistry’. In the dialogues, Plato spends a lot of time and effort trying to distinguish his Socrates, who accepted no pay, from the ‘sophists’, but the popular view of Socrates, as represented caricaturally in Aristophanes’s Clouds, was that he was every bit as much of a ‘sophist’ – and dangerous ‘free thinker’ – as they.
RM: In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates said he learned about love from Diotima. What did he learn?
PC: That all depends what’s meant by ‘love’! The ancient Greeks had some five words that could be translated by that one English word. They more than ‘had a word for it’! The specific kind that’s under discussion and dispute in the Platonic dialogue known as ‘The Symposium’ is erōs: erotic love, sexual passion, to be blunt about it. Diotima may or may not have been a real person. As presented by Plato, she’s a wise woman, possibly a priestess, from Arcadia in southern Greek Peloponnese, not a region noted for its intellectuals. There are scholars today who even think she may be a literary surrogate for a real ancient Greek woman, Aspasia from Miletus in what’s today Aegean Turkey. If so, she’s a surrogate for the woman with whom Pericles lived for about a quarter of a century. [see further next Answer.] But of course, it’s not who Diotima really was – another of the dialogists was the comic playwright Aristophanes who’s credited with spinning a myth of origin that accounts for why there are what we call heterosexuals and homosexuals – but what Diotima and the others are given to say that counts.
RM: And would Socrates have enjoyed wine and food and a comfortable lounge chair during these symposia?
PC: Two things go to the heart of the dialogue, which takes its name from its setting: a dinner/drinking party in a private house held to celebrate the victory of another playwright, tragic poet Agathon, during which the diner/drinkers would not slouch in lounge chairs but recline on couches, two to a couch. First thing, what IS erōs? Really, essentially, existentially, Aporia… Second: what good is it, what’s it good for? We happen to know that Plato himself never married – unlike Socrates, who married twice and possibly bigamously.
We also happen to know that in his last dialogue, The Laws, written in extreme old age, he, as it were, came out vigorously, almost viciously against homosexual erōs on the grounds that it was unnatural, i.e. could not lead to the production of offspring. But in The Symposium, Socrates was far more tolerant, far less gender-critical (as some of us now say): erōs was fine, on condition that it was not an end in itself, but a means towards the realization of finer things on the higher plane of the spiritual soul (psychē). For example, and here one suspects not a little autobiography, erōs was an especially potent and beneficial force pedagogically speaking – conducing as it did to two minds (he has in mind an adult and an adolescent male) being in intellectual harmony.
RM: You mentioned Aspasia, the partner of Athens’ incredible first citizen, Pericles. How might Aspasia have influenced Socrates?
PC: There’s a question! Plato was born very soon after the death of Pericles in 429, so he could have ‘known’ of the great man only by repute. Aspasia was still alive when Plato was very young, but again he would have had to rely on hearsay or written report to glean anything much for sure about her and Pericles’s relationship and private life. One thing he would have discovered at once was how outrageously unconventional it had been. Pericles, a wealthy aristocrat, did the ‘normal’ and conventional thing and married an upper-class Athenian woman – so upper-class we don’t know her name. With her he had two sons.
That would have been roughly between 465 and 455, but at around the latter date he divorced his wife – again that wasn’t uncommon among the social elite. But what followed was. Instead of remarrying, he remained single … until he somehow met and fell for Aspasia, a citizen of another (allied) Greek city. For a man of his class and station it would not have been uncommon for him to have both a wife AND a concubine, a bit on the side, as it were. But Pericles was an either/or man: for him, either a wife or a concubine. After some time of enjoying (?) his single status, Pericles made Aspasia his concubine, a sort of ‘common law’ wife, and lived with her for the remaining 25 or so years of his life. One irony of their partnership was that after 451 he would have been expressly forbidden by law to take a non-Athenian woman as his lawfully wedded wife – by a law that he himself had promoted! So, the son they had together – unimaginatively named ‘Pericles’ – was by definition illegitimate in law.
RM: Aspasia was amazing and quite famous – so much so that men wrote about her. Can you delve?
PC: The evidence for Aspasia is almost all scurrilously negative: for Pericles to be so besotted with her, she must have had special sexual powers, etc. But one piece of evidence stands out from that crowd, and it’s Plato’s dialogue the Menexenus. According to this, Aspasia was so smart she was able to give Socrates lessons in rhetoric, showing him how to compose a Funeral Oration. In the real Athens, even Athenian citizen women were second-class citizens, in that – apart from priestesshoods – they were denied any public political offices or functions in the democracy. In Athenian reality it was her partner Pericles who was chosen at least twice to deliver the public Funeral Oration over Athenian war-dead. I therefore think this is yet another way in which Plato, who vehemently disliked and disapproved of the Athenian democracy, was trying to expose that regime’s faulty, even immoral bases. This subtle variation on the ‘woman-behind-the-throne’ motif, whatever else it was, was fundamentally anti-democratic.
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About Paul Cartledge
Paul Cartledge is a British historian and scholar. From 2008 to 2014 he was the A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge, and previously held a personal chair in Greek History at Cambridge. (Text CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikipedia Commons)
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Image Top Left: Socrates at work. Maklay62, Pixabay
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