Socrates: A Man for Our Times Read Free Page A

constitution and in spirit a democracy. The polis, or city, had long been identified with “the people in arms,” the aristocracy providing the cavalry and the tradesmen, artificers, and other skilled workingmen forming the hoplites and owning their own armor and weapons. The basis of a democratic constitution had been laid down by Cleisthenes in the generation before Socrates was born, using the expression iso-nomia, or equality, to describe the rights of citizenship. More democratic measures were passed, when Socrates was a child, under the leadership of Ephialtes, though the fact that he was murdered in 462 B.C. indicates that politics, with its class-war overtone, was a serious, even brutal business, remaining so throughout Socrates’ life.
    The population of Athens varied greatly, depending on war, trade, and the economy. It is likely that when Socrates was born the total number of citizens, who had full rights to vote in the ecclesia, or assembly, to stand for office as general ( strategos ) or magistrate ( archon ), or to sit as jurymen, was a little over 120,000, rising to 180,000 in about 430 B.C., when he was entering middle age, and falling to perhaps 100,000 by his death. In addition, there were large numbers of metics , or resident aliens, some of whom held citizen rights, their ratio to born citizens ranging from one in six to two in five. Then there were slaves, who had no rights, varying from 30,000 to perhaps 100,000. But in all it is unlikely that the population of Athens, in Socrates’ lifetime, ever exceeded 250,000. This was the population of Venice at its zenith and of London at the end of the seventeenth century; the entire population of the American colonies in 1700 was around 275,000.
    Socrates therefore was born (in May) in what we would call a medium-size town. His deme, or district, was on the south side of the city. In the Laches dialogue of Plato we are told his father, Sophroniscus, was friends with the family of Aristides the Just, the Athenian statesman who was at various times chief magistrate, statesman, and army and naval commander, but was later exiled for two years and reduced to poverty. His father is also credited with various carvings on the Acropolis, but without firm evidence. His mother, Phaenarete, came from a “good” family and in the Theaetetus dialogue is said to have been a skillful midwife—not a professional one, of course, as such did not exist. Socrates was proud of her and did not at all mind jokes being made about her activities as an accoucheuse , as for instance in Aristophanes’ Clouds . He was always interested in medicine and doctoring, bringing it into his dialogues, and it seems to me highly likely that he knew Hippocrates, the greatest doctor of ancient Greece, who was his exact contemporary and who evidently told Plato about medical science.
    From the Crito dialogue we learn that his father gave his son a good education at the gymnasium: reading, writing, athletics, music. Tradition says he went into his father’s trade as a stone carver. The travel writer Pausanias (second century A.D.), the Baedeker of ancient Greece, says in his day a group of statues, The Graces on the Acropolis, was shown as Socrates’ work, and this claim is repeated by Diogenes Laertius. But he may have been confused with another Socrates: it was a common name in fifth century B.C., and there were many stone carvers, for there was so much work for the trade in Athens, attracting masons from all over Greece and the Middle East. Socrates certainly held views on art. Sculptors, indeed, can be heavily sententious about it. Rodin could be a bore on the subject, as more recently could the Yorkshire-born Henry Moore. Socrates was never a bore—far from it—but Xenophon says he had a discussion on expressions in art with the sculptor Cleiton and the painter Parrhasius. “Nobility and dignity,” he is recorded as saying, “self-abasement and servility, prudence and understanding,