Armand D’Angour - Socrates in Love: The Making of a Philosopher

SOCRATES
IN LOVE

BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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First published in Great Britain 2019

Copyright Armand DAngour, 2019

Map ML Design, 2019

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ISBN: HB: 978-1-4088-8391-4; eBook: 978-1-4088-8390-7

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CONTENTS

For better or worse, our Socrates is Platos Socrates.

Diskin Clay

None of us really knows Socrates.

Alcibiades in Platos Symposium

Know Yourself.

Motto written on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi

The unexamined life is not worth living by a human being.

Socrates in Platos Apology

Any account of Socrates life involves selection and conjecture. Socrates in Love is not written for specialists, but it brings into focus elements of Socrates biography to which insufficient attention has been paid. The amount of published writing on Socrates is enormous, but I have restricted the bibliography to items that I have found particularly useful: paramount among these are Debra Nails comprehensive scholarly work The People of Plato and Carl Huffmans discussion of Aristoxenuss Life of Socrates, a neglected source for the philosophers life.

This book is not fiction, but my narratives of the Battle of Potidaea at the start of and of Socrates life story at the end of the book, though based on the evidence presented, are put in italics to indicate that they are imaginative recreations. Peter Rhodes and Chris Pelling gave generous and invaluable feedback on earlier drafts. I am also grateful to Michael Anderson, John Birchall, Paul Cartledge, Jeannie Cohen, Coline Covington, Madeleine Dimitroff, Tom Dimitroff, Michael Fishwick, James Morwood, Toby Mundy, Peter Thonemann, and in particular my wife, Karen Ciclitira, for their thoughts and comments.

NOTE ON CHRONOLOGY:

The Athenian year began in our month of July; so the Battle of Marathon in September 490 BC fell in the year 49089BC. For simplicity, dates in this book are given as single years; so Socrates was born in the year 4698, but the date given is .

The symbol ~ below indicates that a date or event is conjectural.

NOTE ON THE SPELLING OF NAMES

I have used Latinate transliterations for many names, especially familiar ones (e.g. Socrates, Plato, Pericles, Miletus, Potidaea), and kept the Greek forms of others (e.g. Trygaios, Kimon, Lampros, Konnos). All who work in this area of history know that such inconsistency is unavoidable.

Who was Socrates?

Most people who know something about Socrates imagine him as a thinker, wise man, or philosopher of ancient Greece. Their image might be that of Rodins Thinker, or that of an old man with a white beard dressed in a toga. To some, his name brings to mind a method of eliciting answers to questions popularised as Socratic questioning, and his declaration that the unexamined life is not worth living. Others imagine the drama of his execution: how, put on trial and sentenced to death, he was imprisoned and made to drink poison a deadly draught of hemlock. Some will recall that Socrates had a devoted but demanding wife or mistress called Xanthippe.

The reader may imagine Socrates life and death taking place against the backdrop of ancient Athens during its Golden Age, five centuries before the birth of Christ. During that period, ancient Greek civilisation attained great heights in many areas of thought, art, and literature among other things, the Greeks invented philosophy, lifelike sculpture, magnificent architecture, and theatrical drama. The leading politician in Athens for many decades of the fifth century BC was Pericles, under whose direction Periclean Athens developed democratic institutions, became a maritime empire, and built the Parthenon.