Download Socrates the man

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Excellence level Articles for Socrates
This mainly focuses on Socrates role as a hoplite but has some interesting points in his character
and that of Alcibiades. Make points under the heading and focus on the three areas to be studied in
this topic.
 The reasons for Socrates’ trial and conviction.
 The citizen’s duty to the state
 The nature and purpose of the Socratic method.
Socrates the man
Socrates is, like Albert Einstein, one of those iconic historical figures almost everyone knows a few things about, but not
much. He is that bearded old philosopher showing his pectorals and reaching for a glass of poison in Jacques Louis
David’s The Death of Socrates, while grown men huddle nearby in grief-stricken poses. But few people outside of classics
departments could give you a description of the Socratic visage beneath the facial hair—an ugly man, snub-nosed and
thick-lipped, looking like the grotesque character Silenus, of Athenian satyr plays. And few could tell you that Socrates
was, according to late sources, the son of a stonemason and may have worked in stone himself. Or that he had three
sons by two different women, one of them the notorious shrew Xanthippe, whom a writer of the day called “the most
difficult of all women who ever have been or will be.” And very few people indeed, even within classics departments,
would be quick to associate Socrates with military heroics. But in that, we are doing Athens’ famous gadfly a great
disservice, for as his friends knew well, Socrates was also an able and courageous soldier.
The Citizen
Socrates’ acolyte, Plato, writes in his Apology, which purports to be the defense speech Socrates delivered at his trial in
399 b.c., that the philosopher had served in at least three campaigns abroad in the course of his long life. “…I remained
at my post where they stationed me,” Plato has Socrates say to the jury. “The officers whom you selected to command
me, and like everyone else, I, too, ran the risk of dying, at Potidaea, Amphipolis, and Delium.”
Socrates the Hoplite at Amphipolis
It is not clear to what campaign the second of these refers. Amphipolis was a strategically important city in northern
Greece, a few miles up the Strymon River, now known as the Struma River, from the Aegean Sea. The Athenians
managed to colonize the city in 437-36 b.c. (Greek historians regularly date events in this composite form because the
Athenian year ran from midsummer to midsummer. Amphipolis was colonized in the winter of 437-36, which may have
been either late 437 or early 436.) Settling the city and driving out its previous inhabitants entailed some military action,
and it may be that Socrates was involved on that occasion, when he would have been about thirty-two.
Socrates the Hoplite at Potidaea
The historian Thucydides, our principal source for the Peloponnesian War, famously distinguishes the immediate
causes of the Peloponnesian War from its underlying cause, which in his view was the Spartans’ fear of Athens’
growing power. The Potidaean affair at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War was one of the incidents
Thucydides mentions as having triggered the outbreak of hostilities. Potidaea, another strategically important city
in northern Greece, lay on the western prong of the Chalcidic Peninsula. It was a member of the Athenian Empire
and thus paid annual tribute to Athens. But Potidaea was, at the same time, a colony of Corinth, and it maintained
strong ties with its mother city. Corinth, meanwhile, was part of the Peloponnesian League, an alliance of states
that operated under Spartan leadership.
In the autumn of 433, Athens’ relations with Corinth were less than cordial. The Athenians had entered into an
alliance with Corcyra, a rebellious Corinthian colony, and as a result had wound up joining the Corcyraeans in
fighting the Corinthians at sea. After the battle, Corinth was openly hostile to Athens. At the same time, the
Athenians had learned that King Perdiccas of Macedonia was attempting to foment rebellion among Athens’ allies
in the north—Potidaea among them—and he was looking to Sparta and Corinth for help in this effort. The
Athenians responded to the threat by attempting to secure Potidaea against revolt, which meant severing its ties
with Corinth. They made a number of demands of the city. They required that the Potidaeans tear down a portion
of their walls, send hostages to Athens, dismiss the Corinthian officials who were currently serving in the city, and
refuse in the future to admit any magistrates the Corinthians should send them.
The Athenians’ demands resulted in protracted negotiations with the Potidaeans, but these broke down in the
spring of 432. At that time, the Athenians happened to be sending an expedition to the north to deal with
Macedonia and King Perdiccas. They issued additional orders to the commanders of the expedition, one of them
a certain Archestratus, instructing them to look after affairs in Potidaea as well. Specifically, the generals were
told to destroy the city’s fortifications, take hostages, and attempt to suppress any revolt in the area. By the time
the Athenian fleet arrived in the north, however, Potidaea had already joined a number of other cities and revolted
against Athens. Corinth, too, made preparations to send an army in support of Potidaea. The Athenians back
home heard of Potidaea’s revolt and Corinth’s plan, and they prepared a second expedition. Forty ships and two
thousand hoplites were sent north under the command of Callias and four other generals to join the original fleet.
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The combined army dealt first with Macedonia, and after coming to an agreement with Perdiccas they turned their
attentions to Potidaea.
The Athenian army of three thousand hoplites and a number of allied troops marched on the rebellious city in the
summer of 432. They defeated a combined Potidaean and Peloponnesian force at the cost of some 150
Athenians, among them their general Callias. The defeated army withdrew into Potidaea, and the Athenians
immediately laid siege to the city. In the fall of 432 or early in 431, a further sixteen hundred soldiers commanded
by Phormio reinforced the Athenians. With this extra manpower, Athens’ troops were able to complete their siege
fortifications. Potidaea was now firmly invested by land, and the Athenian fleet prevented supplies from getting in
by sea.
The methods used in siege warfare at this time were primitive. Most often a walled town could not be taken by
assault because its defenses were superior to the attacker’s offensive weapons. A siege could last for years, until
the besieged population was reduced by hunger, and in Potidaea’s case it would last two years, until the winter of
430-29.
Socrates, who was about thirty-seven at the time, was among the soldiers who shipped out with either
Archestratus or Callias in 432. He took part in the battle that immediately preceded the Athenians’ investment of
Potidaea. Plato provides us with an unusually detailed account of Socrates’ behavior during that battle in his
Symposium, a fictionalized account of a dinner party in which Socrates and others discoursed on the subject of
love. Among the guests addressing the topic was Socrates’ friend, Alcibiades, a notorious fifth-century character.
At the time of the battle at Potidaea, he would have been only about eighteen. But in his later years, Alcibiades
distinguished himself throughout Greece as a general, politician, traitor, and all-around rake. He was in exile in
Sparta for a time, for example, during the Peloponnesian War and discussed anti-Athenian strategy with Athens’
enemies, including Sparta’s King Agis. Rumor had it that he also spent time with Agis’ wife, Timaea. In 413, while
the king was off holding a fortified position at Decelea, a town in Attica near Athens, Alcibiades allegedly fathered
a son by Timaea. (Or, to paraphrase historian W.G. Forrest, while Agis lay at Decelea, Alcibiades lay with Agis’
wife.) Whether or not the rumor was true—and it may have been—the brazenness required for carrying through
with this bit of regal adultery fits well the personality Alcibiades displayed on other occasions.
When his turn came to address the assembled guests on the subject of love, the character of Alcibiades in Plato’s
Symposium delivered an encomium of Socrates. Part of his speech had to do with Socrates’ conduct on campaign and,
specifically, at the Battle of Potidaea. Alcibiades also had taken part in the fight, and he had been honored by the
generals afterward. They awarded him the aristeia, a prize for bravery in action, which the Athenians and other Greeks
regularly bestowed on soldiers who distinguished themselves in combat. But Alcibiades alleged in his speech at the
dinner party that Socrates had, in fact, been more deserving of the award:
“You see, in the battle for which the generals awarded me the aristeia, no one else saved me but
this man [Socrates], who refused to leave me behind when I was wounded. Instead, he saved both
me and my arms. And, Socrates, even then I told the generals to give the aristeia to you—and in
this you can neither reproach me nor say that I am lying. But the generals were looking to my
reputation, and they wanted to give the aristeia to me. And you were more eager than they were
that I take the prize rather than yourself.” Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium
Alcibiades emphasizes that Socrates had managed to save his arms in the fray. The reference may be to one or more
pieces of Alcibiades’ body armor. Greek hoplites were protected by a helmet, breastplate, and greaves, which covered
the fighter’s shins and calves. But the most likely piece of equipment to be abandoned by a soldier who found himself in
trouble was his great shield, or hoplon, from which the hoplite soldier got his name. The shield was a rounded, concave
piece of wood some three feet in diameter and covered on its face with a thin sheet of bronze. A warrior held the hoplon
with his left arm, his hand clutching a grip near its rim, while his forearm passed through an armband attached to the
shield’s interior. The great weight of the hoplon was thus not borne by a soldier’s hand and wrist alone, but was
distributed along the length of his entire arm. The shield protected his left side, but did not extend to cover the hoplite on
his right. This gave the bearer room to wield his offensive weapons—a six- to eight-foot-long thrusting spear and a short
sword—with his right hand.
In the thick of fighting, the hoplon was essential. Hoplites were arrayed in a phalanx of variable width, usually eight or
more rows deep, and advanced and fought as a unit, each man receiving some protection on his vulnerable right side
from the left-most part of the shield of the hoplite to his right. Opposing phalanxes crashed into one another, the soldiers
in the front ranks shoving and slashing at the enemy, trying to create a gap in their line. As long as a phalanx held,
presenting an unbroken barrier of shields to the opposition, its hoplites were well protected by their equipment. It would
have been unthinkable at this stage to drop the hoplon, despite its weight. But when a phalanx broke and its hoplites ran
and were no longer a cohesive fighting force, the hoplon became a burden. The cumbersome shield now weighed down
its bearer and made it far more likely that he would be overcome by the enemy and killed by a sword or spear thrust to
the back.
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It was best, in such circumstances, to discard the hoplon, and many soldiers did just that. In his description of the
Athenians’ defeat on the heights of Epipolae near Syracuse in 413, for example, Thucydides tells us that the panicked
Athenians dropped their arms in great numbers, and surely what is meant in particular is the unwieldy hoplon: “A large
number of the Athenians and their allies died, but more arms were left behind than corresponded to the corpses, for the
men were forced to jump down from the cliffs unarmed. Some died, and some were saved.” The poet Archilochus, too,
writing in the seventh century b.c., adopts the persona of someone who has thrown away his shield in order to save
himself. The speaker of the poem does not appear to have regretted the decision:
Some Thracian delights in my shield now, which I left behind, not wanting to, near a bush. A blameless
piece of equipment,but I saved myself. Why should that shield matter to me? Let it go. I will buy another
one just as good.
But throwing away one’s shield, an act the Greeks actually had a name for—rhipsaspia—was problematic. A hoplite who
came home without his hoplon had lost a valuable piece of equipment that would need to be replaced. More important, he
laid himself open to the charge that he had played the coward in battle, broke, and ran, impairing the fighting capacity of
the phalanx and throwing away his shield in the process to best save his skin. For a Spartan, in particular, a citizen of the
most military of Greek states, returning home without his shield would have meant disgrace. “With it or on it,” a Spartan
mother is said to have admonished her son as she handed him his shield and sent him off to battle. Return with the
shield, that is, or lying atop it as a corpse. For a Spartan, there was no honorable third course. In Athens, rhipsaspia was,
in fact, a prosecutable offense. A man could lose his civic rights if he was convicted on the charge. And to say of
someone that he had thrown away his shield was a serious insult. Indeed, to call a man a rhipsaspist was, itself, an
actionable offense, an accusation one had better be ready to substantiate in court if one made the charge at all.
Socrates, as we have seen, managed at Potidaea to save Alcibiades’ arms. We cannot know precisely what this
entailed—fighting off the enemy over the body of his wounded friend, for example, or carrying Alcibiades out of the action
together with both of their shields. In any case, it was a feat worthy of record. The philosopher proved valiant in battle,
acting to preserve not only Alcibiades’ life but his reputation as well.
Alcibiades was evidently not very badly wounded. He and Socrates stayed on in the north for the siege of Potidaea. The
character of Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium describes some of Socrates’ behavior during those long months:
First, in hardships he was superior not only to me but to everyone else. When we were cut off somewhere, as happens on
campaign, and compelled to go without food, the rest were as nothing in comparison with his endurance. When we had
plenty, on the other hand, he was able to enjoy himself like no one else. In particular, although he did not want to drink,
when he was forced to do so he beat everyone at it. And the most amazing thing of all is that no one has ever seen
Socrates drunk.
Socrates was capable of impressive feats of mental as well as physical endurance. He would, at times throughout his life,
stand transfixed for hours deep in thought, and he reportedly did so at Potidaea:
He was thinking over something there early one morning, and he stood considering it. When he did not figure out the
problem, he did not give up, but he stood there deep in thought. When it was midday, people started to notice. They were
amazed, and one man would tell another that Socrates had been standing from early in the morning thinking about
something. Finally, some of the Ionian Greeks, when it was evening, took their bedding outside after dinner (since it was
summertime then) and lay down in the cool air, keeping an eye on him at the same time to see if he would stand up all
night. He kept standing until it was dawn and the sun rose. Then he said a prayer to the sun and went off.
Plato portrays Socrates as likewise standing transfixed in thought prior to the dinner party that was the subject of his
Symposium. Socrates had been walking to Agathon’s house for the get-together, but immediately before reaching his
host’s door, he was waylaid by his own thoughts:
Another servant came in and said, “Socrates has gone off and is standing on the neighbor’s porch, and when I call him he
is unwilling to come in.”
“That’s odd,” Agathon said. “Why don’t you call him again and don’t give up.”
“No,” I said. “Let him be. This is a habit he has. Sometimes he goes off wherever he happens to be and he stands there.
He will come in shortly, I think. Don’t hurry him, but leave him alone.”
Socrates’ bizarre habit of delving into his own mind for very long periods, contemplating transcendent truths while
apparently oblivious to external stimuli, was another manifestation of his ability to endure hardships. The behavior, too,
may have helped to inure Socrates to discomforts. This was a most convenient lack of sensitivity for a man who spent
some two and a half years taking part in a rigorous military campaign in the cold of northern Greece. (Of course, it was
just this kind of eccentric behavior that won Socrates a lampooning on the Athenian stage. In his Clouds, performed in
423, Aristophanes has the character of Socrates sitting in a woven basket suspended over the stage, mingling his mind
with the air at that higher altitude, he says, so that Socrates could better contemplate celestial matters.)
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Potidaea capitulated in the winter of 430-29, after supplies in the city had become so scarce that the Potidaeans had
been reduced to cannibalism. (“Some had actually tasted one another,” Thucydides tells us.) Their punishment for having
revolted from Athens was quite lenient by the standards of the day, when conquered populations were very often
enslaved or killed. Those of the Potidaeans who were still alive were allowed to leave the city with a fixed sum of money,
the men with one piece of clothing each and the women with two.
Socrates seems to have remained with the army in the north after Potidaea fell. He probably returned to Athens in the
summer of 429, after taking part in a battle at Spartolus, some twelve miles from Potidaea. The Athenians were defeated
in the battle, losing 430 men, including three generals. But Socrates returned home safely, and upon his arrival in Athens
he sought at once, according to Plato, the company of his friends and the pleasures of philosophic conversation. “We
came back the previous evening from the camp at Potidaea,” Plato has Socrates say in his Charmides, “and arriving after
so much time, I was glad to go in search of my customary conversations.”
Socrates the Hoplite at Delium
Five years later, when Socrates was roughly forty-five, the war was still raging. Two of Athens’ generals of 424-23,
Demosthenes and Hippocrates (not the famous orator and physician), negotiated with various discontented parties in
Boeotia, the territory neighboring Attica to the northwest and an ally of Sparta. In the light of these intrigues, the
Athenians formulated an intricate plan to overthrow the Boeotian government and replace it with a democracy. The plot
called for a simultaneous three-pronged attack on Boeotian territory: A democratic faction within Chaeronea, on Boeotia’s
western border, would betray that town to the Athenians; Siphae, a small town on the Gulf of Crisa, would be betrayed
from within, and the general Demosthenes was to arrive with his fleet on the appointed day to receive its surrender;
Hippocrates, meanwhile, would cross into Boeotia from Attica and occupy the sanctuary of Apollo at Delium, some thirtyfive miles from Athens. With so much to respond to, the Boeotian forces would—or so the thinking went—be unable to
prevent the occupation of Delium, and the Athenians, in the end, would have three fortified positions within Boeotia from
which to raid their enemy’s territory.
The plan sounded good, but it would be difficult to execute: Everyone in the know would have to maintain strict secrecy
about the intrigues of the democratic factions in Boeotia, and the separate armies of Demosthenes and Hippocrates
would have to coordinate their movements accurately with only the simplest forms of communication.
In any event, the attack proved a dismal failure. The Boeotians found out about the plot to hand over the cities to Athens,
and Boeotian forces occupied Chaeronea and Siphae in time to prevent their betrayal. When Demosthenes arrived at
Siphae to receive the town’s surrender, there was nothing for him to do. And because he arrived there before Hippocrates
reached Delium, the Boeotian troops occupying the town were not drawn off to deal with the second army but were free to
concentrate on Demosthenes.
Hippocrates, meanwhile, marched unopposed into Delium at the head of a large army—some seven thousand hoplites
and more than three hundred cavalry, as well as a large number of noncombatants, unarmed resident aliens, and
nonresident foreigners who were there to help with the rapid construction of a fort in Boeotian territory. They spent three
days fortifying Delium. After lunch on the final day, when the work was done and there had been no sign of trouble
coming from the Boeotians, the greater part of the army started off toward Attica, leaving a garrison behind at Delium.
They paused a little over a mile from the sanctuary, waiting for their general Hippocrates, who had stayed behind at the
fort, to catch up to them. While they were waiting, news came that the Boeotian army was nearby and advancing against
them. The Athenians drew themselves up in formation and awaited the attack.
During the subsequent battle, the Athenians initially were successful on their right wing, while the Boeotians were pushing
back the Athenian left. But the Boeotian commander, Pagondas, sent two squadrons of cavalry around a hill to surprise
the Athenians who had been victorious. Their sudden appearance caused a panic in the Athenian lines, and the army
took to flight.
Predictably, a slaughter ensued as the vulnerable hoplites, running for their lives and unprotected by the phalanx’s barrier
of shields, were pursued and cut down by the enemy cavalry. Thucydides describes the pursuit: “Some fled to Delium and
the sea, others to Oropus or Mount Parnes, and still others wherever they expected to find safety. The Boeotians pursued
and killed them, particularly their cavalry and the Locrian cavalry, which had come to the Boeotians’ aid just when the rout
started.”
More than a thousand Athenians were killed in the battle, including the general Hippocrates. Socrates, of course, survived
the rout. The character of Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium, once again, describes the extraordinary presence of mind the
philosopher displayed on the occasion:
Socrates was worth seeing, gentlemen, when the army retreated in flight from Delium. I happened to be there in the
cavalry, and he among the hoplites. When the troops were already scattering, he withdrew together with Laches. I came
upon them, and straightway when I saw them, I told them to take heart, and I said that I would not leave them. I observed
Socrates better on that occasion than I had at Potidaea (for, since I was on horseback, I was not frightened). First of all,
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he was more self-possessed than Laches. And he seemed to me, as you put it, Aristophanes, to advance there just as he
does here, “holding his head high and looking from side to side,” calmly watching both his friends and the enemy. It was
clear to everyone even from far off that if anyone laid a hand on him, he would fight back with everything he had. And, for
that reason, he got away safely, both he and Laches. For pursuers do not touch the ones who act like that in a battle.
Instead, they go after those who are in headlong flight.
Later authors supplied other details, perhaps unhistorical, about Socrates’ heroics at Delium. Writing half a millennium
after the battle, Strabo claimed that Socrates saved a certain Gryllus in the retreat, the son of the historian Xenophon.
Gryllus, we are told, had fallen from his horse and was carried to safety on the philosopher’s shoulders. Plutarch, a prolific
writer of the first and second centuries a.d., writes in his essay On the Sign of Socrates that Socrates was saved at
Delium by his daimonion, a divine sign or voice that, we know from Plato and other sources, Socrates believed had come
to him throughout his life and restrained him from certain inappropriate or dangerous actions. At Delium, Socrates’
daimonion allegedly pointed him toward a safe escape route by warning him against making his way to Mount Parnes.
Those who disregarded Socrates’ sign and fled in that direction had ended up dead or wounded.
Socrates the philosopher:
So much we know of the courage, stamina, and presence of mind Socrates displayed during his lifetime in battle and on
campaign. A quarter century after his successful retreat from Delium, Socrates, an old man of seventy, was tried in an
Athenian court on a charge of corrupting the young and introducing strange gods (though political motives probably lay
behind the accusation). A majority of the jury, 280 of the 501 citizens trying the case, decided in an initial vote that the
military veteran and philosopher was guilty as charged. And in a second vote held to determine what punishment would
be inflicted—a choice between execution or a fine—an even larger percentage of the jury voted in favor of the death
penalty.
If Socrates’ defense speech was anything like what Plato has the philosopher say in his Apology, we must believe that
Socrates could have won an acquittal had he tried harder. It would have been to his advantage, for example, not to
antagonize the jury in the course of his trial by suggesting—as Plato has him do—that what he really deserved in return
for the life he had led was to be fed at the state’s expense. Escaping from the prison in which he was held before his
execution was also a possibility, but one that Socrates eschewed. His daimonion, after all, never suggested that he take a
different course than the one he chose to adopt. Plato portrays Socrates as remarking on this fact in his speech during
the trial:
The prophetic gift of my daimonion to which I have been accustomed in all of my previous life always occurred very
frequently, and it opposed me even over quite small matters, if I was about to do something that was not right. But now
there have happened to me, as you see yourselves, things which one might think to be and which are considered the
most awful of evils. But the divine sign did not oppose me as I went out of my house in the morning, nor when I came up
here to the court, nor at any time in my speech when I was about to say something. And, yet, in other speeches of mine it
has stopped me in the middle of speaking. Now, in this matter it has never opposed me when I was doing anything or
saying anything. What do I imagine is the reason? I will tell you: that this thing that has happened to me is perhaps a
good, and death is not really what we imagine, those of us who think that dying is an evil.
Death, Socrates suggests in the Apology, is either a lack of consciousness, like a dreamless sleep, or it is the migration of
the soul from one place to another, where one may meet and fraternize with all of history’s noble dead. In either case,
dying was not something for a seventy-year-old man to avoid through shameful pandering to a jury or an ignominious
escape from prison. Whether facing danger from enemy spears or confronting certain death at the hands of his fellow
citizens, Socrates remained stalwart to the end. A month after he was sentenced to death by the Athenian jury, the
philosopher drank down the hemlock that was handed him, and he lay down and died. “This,” Plato writes, “was the end
of our comrade, the best man, we may say, of those whom we knew in our time, and also the wisest and the most just.”
One late author fancied that Socrates’ military heroics did not end with his death. In the second century a.d., Lucian of
Samosata, a town on the Euphrates in what is now Turkey, gave life to Socrates’ second vision of dying—death as the
soul’s migration from one place to another. In his romantic fiction True Histories, Lucian writes of the Isle of the Blessed,
an island located in the real world, somewhere west of the Pillars of Hercules, deep in the unknown Atlantic. There, the
souls of the heroic dead, Socrates among them, enjoy the afterlife in a sweet-smelling paradise, dining together in the
Elysian fields and listening to epic recitations by Homer himself. On one occasion, however, the shades of these dead
heroes were obliged to arm themselves again as they had in life and return to the battlefield. The wicked souls who were
being punished on a nearby island had broken their fetters and overpowered their guards, and they were advancing on
the island. In the ensuing battle, as we would expect, Socrates showed his wonted courage:
They came together and fought, and the heroes were victorious, Achilles being the most successful. But Socrates, who
was stationed on the right wing, actually was best. He fought much more bravely than when he was alive at Delium: when
four of the enemy came against him he did not flee and his expression was unchanged. For this action later on a prize for
bravery was selected for him, a beautiful, large garden outside the city, where he would summon his friends and converse
with them. He called the place the Academy of the Dead.
This time around, in this battle between incorporeal shades, it was Socrates—and not a younger man with better
connections—who won the prize for valor.