Socrates, like most Athenians, probably had a series of affairs with teenage boys - including one who would later become a well-known tragic poet, Agathon. But his most notorious conquest by far was the young Alcibiades.
Plato assures us that, despite all appearances, Alcibiades and Socrates were not lovers in a full physical sense. They were, rather, the primary instance of that famous ideal of chastity: Platonic love. Plato's account (in his Symposium), suggests that the relationship contradicted all the norms of Athenian sexual practice. Alcibiades, the beautiful boy, pursued the older man, Socrates, not the other way around. And even when Alcibiades had manoeuvred Socrates into spending the whole night cuddled up with him, and even when he offered himself to him in the most explicit terms possible, Socrates still refused to go all the way. Alcibiades complained, 'By all the gods and goddesses, it was extraor- dinary! When I got up in the morning, I had "slept" with Socrates, but in no more eventful way than if I had been sleeping with my father or an older brother.'
Plato implies that Socrates did not object to snuggling under the same cloak as the object of his affections. In the Symposium, he carefully engineers things so that he can sit next to Agathon on the sofa. He obviously enjoyed the company of pretty boys and was pleased to offer special private tutorials. But he refused, on principle, to go all the way.
Interesting though it is to contemplate the physical details of Socrates' relationship with Alcibiades, the topic is probably irrelevant for determining the historical causes of Socrates' death. To most contemporary observers, the rela- tionship would surely have looked like any other intense love affair. Socrates had long conversations with Alcibiades, instructing him in moral virtue. They wrestled together in the public gymnasium, naked (as was the Athenian norm) and often at a distance from the other athletes - so there were plenty of opportunities. Alcibiades gradually began to meet Socrates without his chaperon.
The intimacy of the relationship deepened when Socrates and Alcibiades went on campaign together to Potidaea, sharing a number of hardships. Socrates saved Alcibiades' life in an act of extraordinary courage, though Alcibiades himself ended up being awarded the decoration for bravery, because it was thought more fitting that it should go to an aristocrat. Socrates and Alcibiades seem to have remained friends on a fairly flirtatious basis, even after Alcibiades was a grown man and ready to acquire boyfriends of his own.
There is no evidence of a falling-out between student and teacher, as in the case of Critias.
His associations with Alcibiades and Critias may have been the single most important cause of the charge that Socrates corrupted the young. Moreover, Alcibiades' profa- nation of the Mysteries may well have influenced the charge that Socrates failed to respect the gods of the city. The young Alcibiades had been the locus for many Athenian hopes - which were all devastatingly shattered. The Athenians were unwilling to blame Alcibiades himself for his defections to the enemy, or his failure to secure victory for his city. Easier to blame his teacher and, supposedly, lover who failed to put him on the path to virtue. If Critias and his henchmen had never seized control of Athens, then Socrates would surely not have been brought to trial. If Alcibiades had remained in supreme command of the army throughout the final years of the war, and if he had - miraculously - managed to engineer victory for Athens, then it is possible that Socrates would have died comfortably in his bed.
PLATO AND OTHERS: WHO CREATED THE DEATH OF SOCRATES?
the socratic problem
We have seen that Socrates may have been killed partly because of the people he knew: his enemies, acquaintances, students, lovers and friends. But the followers of Socrates also influenced his death in a different sense: by transform- ing a historical event into a literary legend.
So far, I have relied most heavily on a single contempo- rary source: Plato. The works of Plato provide by far the most vivid, philosophically interesting, detailed, entertain- ing and influential contemporary accounts of Socrates' life and death. Plato presents Socrates as an extraordinary char- acter who is both hilariously funny and deeply serious, who seems more charming, more irritating and cleverer than anybody you ever met.
Plato was a pupil of Socrates the historical figure. But he is also the creator of 'Socrates', in his best-known literary man- ifestation. The French theorist Jacques Derrida once wrote a series of meditations or quasi-novel, The Post Card, inspired by a medieval image of Plato and Socrates. This strikingly represents Plato hovering behind Socrates, teaching him to write or dictating to him - not the other way around. Plato is, paradoxically, Socrates' teacher, because it makes sense to
5. In this medieval illustration, a small, fish-faced Plato hovers behind his larger-than-life teacher, Socrates. Plato seems to be telling Socrates what to write. In real life, Socrates probably wrote nothing.
think of 'Socrates' - as we know or imagine him - as Plato's creation.
It is notoriously difficult to be sure of anything much about the historical Socrates, beyond the fact that he was a real person who really was executed in 399 bc. The details of his teaching, his philosophical beliefs, his politics, his social circle, his character and his death are represented in strik- ingly different ways by our various contemporary sources. It may well be the case that none of the philosophical beliefs I have ascribed to 'Socrates' - on the basis of Plato's dialogues - was in fact held by the historical Socrates. Perhaps Socrates had no fully developed philosophy; perhaps he was just a man who liked asking questions. The difficulty - perhaps impossibility - of reconstructing the historical Socrates is dubbed by scholars 'the Socratic Problem'.
Socrates' words, like his living face, will always be lost to us. Socrates became, even within his own lifetime and still more after his death, a 'mythic' figure, like Odysseus or Achilles. Each writer about Socrates created their own version of the character.
Most Socratic writings of the fourth century do not survive. Some of them, like Aristophanes' mockery in Socrates' own lifetime, were attacks. We know that Polycrates wrote a Prosecution of Socrates (393 bc), denouncing him as an enemy of democracy. Polycrates might well have felt concerned that the unpatriotic criminal Socrates would be made into a martyr by his friends - which was indeed what happened. We know too of a fourth-century biography, by one Aristoxenus of Tarentum, that seems to have presented the great man in a sensationalist but unflattering light. He was an impressive speaker, but 'uneducated, ignorant and licentious', and madly passionate about whores and other people's wives. This lust-crazed Socrates is impossible to reconcile with the temperate hero evoked by Xenophon and Plato.
Socrates' followers were probably provoked by such attacks into defending the great man. Each of them seems to have presented his teacher in a different way and to have used him to explore his own philosophical interests. One devoted follower, Antisthenes - who may have been a boy- friend of Socrates - was interested in the master's asceti- cism and his indifference to wealth. Antisthenes became the founder of the Cynic ('dog-like') sect of philosophy, whose adherents masturbated and scratched themselves in public, like dogs, and lived on scraps of food. The Cynics modelled their own scorn for material possessions on the poverty and temperance of Socrates.
Another student, the sophist Aristippus, was inspired by Socrates to invent hedonism - the idea that the only good thing in life is pleasure. He envied Socrates' painless death, commenting, 'I myself would like to die as Socrates died.' Yet another student, Aeschines of Sphettos, described Socrates as a serious moral teacher, whose homilies on virtue were addressed to the sexually promiscuous people of his time - including Alcibiades and Pericles' mistress, Aspasia. For Aeschines, Socrates' main concern was to persuade people to be more self-restrained in their appetites for sex and power.