The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World Read Online Free PDF Page B

father probably was a prosperous stonemason or sculptor, and Socrates himself may have begun learning the sculptor’s craft. His early years seem to have been conventional enough. He served as a hoplite, or member of the heavy-armed infantry. These were citizens not wealthy enough to provide themselves with cavalry horses, but able to afford the heavy body armor that we associate with the Greek warrior—a helmet with nasal and cheek pieces, a breastplate and greaves (for the leg below the knee). His chief defense was a heavy bronze shield, circular or elliptical, attached to the left arm. For weapons he carried a short straight iron sword and a nine-foot spear ready for thrusting. Burdened with this heavy armor, well-drilled hoplites in proper formation could resist archers or cavalry. Fighting for Athens in the Great Peloponnesian War, Socrates acquired a reputation for endurance and courage.
    It is hard to imagine the squat and diffident Socrates known to historians of philosophy in this belligerent macho role. But it was his feats on the battlefield that first brought him a citywide reputation. “I was with him in the retreat,” his companion Laches reported of him at Delium in Boeotia in 424, “and if everyone were like Socrates, our city would never have come to disaster.” During the expedition to Potidea he saved the life of Alcibiades, who would play a troublesome role for Socrates in the chaotic politics of his maturity. Socrates reputedly refused to take part in politics, for holding office, he said, would require sacrifice of his principles.
    As a citizen he showed conspicuous courage. In 406, as a member of the Boule, or legislative council, he alone stood out against popular demand that some accused generals be tried en masse instead of individually, as the law required. Membership on this council was not a political office but only a routine citizens’ duty. Again two years later when the oligarchy of the Thirty Tyrants tried to implicate Socrates in their acts of judicial murder, his friends went along, but at risk of his life Socrates stood firm. His independence then would have been fatal if there had not been a counterrevolution the next year restoring the democracy. And this same independence of spirit would lead to his trial in 399 B.C. for introducing strange gods and corrupting youth.
    How did the city’s admired model soldier become its insufferable gadfly—and martyr to the independent mind? To answer this interesting question we have no solid autobiographical evidence, and only the tendentious accounts of envious or adoring philosophers and historians. Still, despite the confusing evidence, there is incandescent coherence to the legendary Socrates. We, lay newcomers to the “Problem of Socrates,” must marvel at how the disparate rays of contradictory testimony collect into a brilliant beacon illuminating the philosopher’s endless quest.
    If there ever was a man with a vocation, it was surely Socrates, yet how or when he heard the call we do not know. There is no evidence of his being a member of any unorthodox religious sect. But there were legends of his occasionally sensing a divine sign (what he called “the customary sign”) of his daimonion. There is ample evidence that he was not governed only by the prosaic syllogism. When it might have incriminated him, in his final speech to the court, Socrates recalled his periodic mystic experience.
    I experience a certain divine or daemonic something, which in fact Meletus has caricatured in the indictment. It began in childhood and has been with me ever since, a kind of voice, which whenever I hear it always turns me back from something I was going to do, but never urges me to act. This is what has prevented me from taking part in politics. (Plato,
Apology,
Jowett trans.)
    Among the remarkable qualities of Socrates, Alcibiades recalled that Socrates was never seen drunk, that he had an astonishing fortitude and endurance.
    One morning he