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Socrate and Alcibiades, by FA Vincent.

What we can learn from the love story between Socrates and Alcibiades.

Socrates struggled to make the young, rich, and handsome Alcibiades into a good man. He taught him that true love is the love of the soul, not of the body. When Alcibiades tried to seduce him, he rejected him with some pointed words.

Socrates was remarkably full-blooded for an ascetic philosopher. In Xenophon’s Symposium, he says, “For myself I cannot name the time at which I have not been in love with someone.” By all accounts, Socrates’ greatest love was with the blue-blooded Alcibiades (c. 450-404 BCE), who was by some 20 years his junior.

Alcibiades was the son of Cleinias, who claimed descent from Ajax the Great, and Deinomache, the granddaughter of Kleisthenes the Lawgiver. After the death of Cleinias at the Battle of Coroneia in 447 BCE, the 4-year-old Alcibiades passed into the guardianship of Pericles, the architect of the Athenian Golden Age.

Socrates and Alcibiades in Plato’s Alcibiades

Plato’s Protagoras, which is set in around 434 BCE, opens with an unnamed friend gently mocking Socrates for chasing the teenage Alcibiades. But in Plato’s Alcibiades, which is set two years later, Socrates warns Alcibiades, who is about to enter public life, that only knowledge can qualify him to advise the Athenians. Being noble, rich, and handsome are simply not good enough.

Since politics is about just action, Socrates asks Alcibiades to define justice. When he flounders, Socrates suggests that Alcibiades is perplexed about justice because he is ignorant about justice and does not know that he is ignorant about justice. When a person thinks he knows what he does not know, he will make mistakes, which, in politics, will be all the graver.

A humbled Alcibiades promises to take greater pains about himself to get the better of other politicians. Socrates points out that Alcibiades’ true rivals are not other Athenian politicians but the Spartan and Persian kings, who, in the long run, can only be overcome by virtue. So could Alcibiades tell him, what is virtue?

Alcibiades is at great pains to define virtue and variously suggests that it is “the better order and preservation of the city,” “friendship and agreement,” and “when everyone does his own work.” At last, he despairingly admits defeat: “But, indeed, Socrates, I do not know what I am saying; and I have long been, unconsciously to myself, in a most disgraceful state.”

Socrates continues: To make ourselves better, we must first know who or what we are. Neither the physician, nor the trainer, nor any craftsman knows his own soul, for which reason their arts are accounted vulgar. He who cherishes his body cherishes not himself but that which belongs to him, and he who cherishes money cherishes neither himself nor that which belongs to him but that which is at one further remove from him. He who loves the person of Alcibiades does not love Alcibiades but his belongings, whereas the true lover is the one who loves his soul. The lover of the body fades away with the flower of youth, but the lover of the soul remains for as long as the soul follows after virtue.

There is another similar-themed Alcibiades, written by Aeschines of Sphettus (another of Socrates’ students) and preserved in scattered fragments, in which Socrates relates a conversation that he once had with Alcibiades. To emphasize Alcibiades’ unpreparedness for public life, Socrates delivers an encomium [a formal expression of high praise] to the great Themistocles, whom Alcibiades arrogantly seeks to emulate and surpass—leading a weeping Alcibiades to place his head in his teacher’s lap and beg to be educated.

In the same year, 432, in which Plato’s Alcibiades is set, Socrates and Alcibiades fought in the Battle of Potidaea. Out in the field, the middle-aged plebeian and the young aristocrat became unlikely tent mates. In his Life of Alcibiades, Plutarch relates that “all were amazed to see [Alcibiades] eating, exercising, and tenting with Socrates, while he was harsh and stubborn with the rest of his lovers.” In Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades says that Socrates singlehandedly saved his life at Potidaea and, after that, let him keep the prize for valour.

Socrates and Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium

Plato’s Symposium is set in 416 BCE, some sixteen years after his Alcibiades. The setting is a drinking party held by the playwright Agathon. Most of the guests have a hangover from the previous night’s revels, and all agree to curtail the drinking in favour of conversation. Since the young Phaedrus has been lamenting that the god Eros [Love] is not sufficiently praised, the physician Eryximachus suggests that each person present make a speech in praise of love.

As the company applauds Socrates’ speech, a drunken Alcibiades stumbles in supported by a flute girl. When he sees Socrates, he picks off some ribbons from Agathon’s garland and, with them, crowns Socrates, “who in conversation is the conqueror of all mankind.” When Alcibiades entreats everyone to drink and match him in his drunkenness, Eryximachus objects to “drinking as if we were thirsty” and suggests that Alcibiades instead make a speech in praise of Socrates.

Alcibiades says that Socrates always makes him admit that he is wasting his time on his career while neglecting his several shortcomings. So he tears himself away from him as from the song of a siren and lets his love of popularity get the better of him. Socrates may look like a satyr and pose as ignorant, but, like the busts of Silenus [the tutor of the god Dionysus], he hides bright and beautiful images of the gods within him. Attracted by his wisdom, he tried several times to seduce him with his famed good looks, but each time without success. Eventually, he turned the tables around and began to pursue the older man, inviting him to dinner and on one occasion persuading him to stay the night. He then lay beside him and put it to him that, of all his lovers, he was the only one worthy of him, and he would be a fool to refuse him any favours if only he could make him into a better man.

Socrates replied in his usual, ironical manner:

Alcibiades, my friend, you have indeed an elevated aim if what you say is true, and if there really is in me any power by which you may become better; truly you must see in me some rare beauty of a kind infinitely higher than any which I see in you. And therefore, if you mean to share with me and to exchange beauty for beauty, you will have greatly the advantage of me; you will gain true beauty in return for appearance—like Diomedes, gold in exchange for brass.

After this, Alcibiades crept under the older man’s threadbare cloak and held him all night in his arms—but in the morning arose “as from the couch of a father or an elder brother.”

In the same year, 416, that the Symposium is set, the city of Egesta in Sicily asked Athens for assistance against its neighbour Selinous, and Alcibiades persuaded the assembly to let him lead a force to Sicily. But as the Athenian fleet was about to set sail, all the hermai [sculptures with the head and genitals of the god Hermes] in the city were vandalized. The assembly recalled Alcibiades to face charges of impiety, prompting him to defect to Athens’ archenemy, Sparta. The Sicilian Expedition ended in disaster, and so diminished Athens that its empire began to crumble.

After some years, Alcibiades returned to Athens and served for a time as a general before being exiled and murdered. In the History of Animals, Plato’s student Aristotle mentions in passing his place of death: “In the mountain called Elaphoïs, in Arginusa, in Asia, where Alcibiades died, all the deer have their ears divided, so that they can be known if they migrate to another place, and even the foetus in utero has this distinction.”

Neel Burton is author of The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.

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How Vegetarianism Was Born Out of Philosophy and Mysticism.

King Pentheus torn apart by Maenads in a Bacchic frenzy. Roman wall painting from the House of the Vettii, Pompeii. The Dionysian rite of sparagmos involved dismembering a living animal or even a human being. The flesh was then eaten raw, while still warm and dripping with blood. Pentheus, like Pythagoras and Empedocles, had refused to embrace Dionysus.

Pythagoras (d. c. 495 BCE) is usually remembered for the theorem that bears his name, concerning the relation between the three sides of a right triangle. But although he may have introduced the theorem to the Greeks, it had been discovered centuries earlier, and separately, by the Babylonians and Indians. Instead, Pythagoras ought to be remembered for being the first recorded vegetarian in the West.

At the age of 40, Pythagoras left his native Samos for Croton in southern Italy, where he established a philosophically minded religious community. The men and women who entered the community’s inner circle were governed by a strict set of ascetic and ethical rules, forsaking personal possessions, assuming a mainly vegetarian diet, and observing the strictest silence. Some of the community’s more idiosyncratic rules, such as “do not break bread” or “do not poke the fire with a sword,” may have stood as riddles or metaphors.

Music played an important role in Pythagoras’ community. Pythagoreans recited poetry, sang hymns to Apollo, and played on the lyre to cure illnesses of body and soul. One day, or so the story goes, Pythagoras passed by some blacksmiths at work and noticed that their hammering on anvils produced especially harmonious sounds. He then found that the anvils were simple ratios of one another, one being half the size of the first, another two-thirds of the size, and so on. This discovery of a relationship between numerical ratios and musical intervals led him to believe that mathematics underlies the structure and order of the universe. According to his “harmony of the spheres,” the heavenly bodies move according to equations that correspond to musical notes and form part of a grand cosmic symphony.

Pythagoras never divorced religion from philosophy and science, which, even in his day, left him open to accusations of mysticism. No doubt under the influence of Orphism, a mystery religion rooted in pre-Hellenic beliefs and the Thracian cult of Zagreus, he came to believe in metempsychosis, that is, in the transmigration of the soul at death into a new body of the same or a different species, until such a time as it became moral. According to lore, he once recognized the cry of his dead friend in the yelping of a puppy. He himself claimed to have lived four lives and to remember them all in detail: in his first life, he had had the good fortune of being Aethalides, son of the god Hermes, who had given him the faculty of remembering everything even through death.

Pythagoras’ influence and legacy

In Croton, Pythagoras laid down a constitution. According to the first-century historian of philosophers, Diogenes Laertius, he and his Pythagoreans governed the state so well that it was “in effect a true aristocracy (government by the best)”. But after Croton’s victory over neighbouring Sybaris in 510 BCE, certain prominent citizens demanded a democratic constitution. When the Pythagoreans rejected it, the supporters of democracy attacked them. Supposedly, Pythagoras almost managed to escape but came over a field of fava beans and refused to step over it. His aversion to fava beans might have owed to a belief that fava beans contain the souls of the deceased, or to favism, an inherited disease that is exacerbated by the consumption of fava beans.

After Pythagoras’ death, the Pythagoreans deified him, and attributed him with a golden thigh and the gift of bilocation (being in two places at once). He became a paradigm of the sage, such that the Romans tried to assimilate him and claim him as their own. But in his lifetime, Pythagoras had always been a paragon of humility, declining to be called a “wise man” [sophos] and preferring instead to be called a “lover of wisdom” [philosophos]—thereby coining the term “philosopher”.

In his Metaphysics, Aristotle says that Plato’s teachings owed much to those of the Pythagoreans; so much, in fact, that Bertrand Russell upheld not Plato but Pythagoras as the most influential of all Western philosophers. Pythagoras’ impact is perhaps most evident in Plato’s mystical approach to the soul and his emphasis on mathematics, and, more generally, abstract thought, as a secure basis for the practice of philosophy.

Pythagoras’ community served as an inspiration and prototype for later philosophical institutions such as Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum, and Epicurus’ Garden, and, subsequently, for the monastic life and associated early universities. Pythagoras’ teachings as represented in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE) influenced the modern vegetarian movement to such an extent that, until the word “vegetarianism” was coined in the 1840s, vegetarians were simply referred to in English as “Pythagoreans”.

Empedocles

Like Pythagoras, of whom he knew, the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles (d. c. 432 BCE) believed in metempsychosis, and his beliefs, at least in this area, may shed light on those of Pythagoras. Empedocles held that, to atone for an original sin involving bloodshed, souls must go through a series of mortal incarnations before they are able to rejoin the immortal gods. They can, however, help themselves by adhering to certain ethical rules, such as refraining from meat, beans, bay leaves, and heterosexual intercourse

Empedocles himself claimed to have already been a bush, a bird, and ‘a mute fish in the sea’. But now, as a doctor, poet, seer, and leader of men, he had reached the highest rung in the cycle of incarnations—and could, just about, count himself among the immortal gods. In a story that is almost certainly false but too good not to tell, he killed himself by leaping into the flames of Mount Etna, either to prove that he was immortal or make people believe that he was.

Empedocles and Pythagoras believed that animals and even certain plants are our kin and should not be killed for food or sacrifice. They were vegetarians and pacifists long before the hippies came around. Their mortification of the flesh is, in some sense, the apotheosis of the pre-Socratic privileging of Apollonian reason over Dionysian sense experience.

Neel Burton is author of The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.

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And the critical difference between relaxation and leisure.

In Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle outlines the nature of happiness, which, he reminds us, is the “end of living” or purpose of life. Happiness, he says, is not a disposition but an activity, or else it might belong to someone who slept through his whole life, or to someone suffering the greatest misfortunes.

Some activities, he continues, are chosen for the sake of something else, while others are chosen for their own sake. And it is among the latter that happiness is to be found, for happiness is not in want of anything. Activities that are chosen for their own sake are those from which nothing more is sought than the activity itself, and it is also of this kind that virtuous actions are thought to be.

It would be strange if happiness lay in amusement rather than in virtuous activity, for then man would toil and trouble all his life for the sake of nothing more than amusement. In truth, he amuses himself only so that he may exert himself. Amusement is a sort of relaxation, necessary only because of the impossibility of continuous activity.

Any chance person, even a slave, can enjoy the bodily pleasures no less than the best man; but no one assigns to a slave a share in happiness—unless he assigns to him also a share in human life. For happiness, as has been said, does not reside in sensual pleasure, but in virtuous activity.

Philosophic contemplation

Having established that happiness consists in activity that is chosen for its own sake, and especially in virtue, Aristotle argues that, of all such activities, it is philosophic contemplation that leads to the highest happiness.

The pleasures of philosophy, he says, are marvelous both for their purity and their enduringness. Man, more than anything, is distinguished by reason, and the life of reason is the most self-sufficient, the most pleasant, the happiest, best, and most godlike of all.

Indeed, the activity of God, which surpasses all others in blessedness, must surely be contemplative. All life aims at God and eternity: plants and animals participate in the eternal through reproduction, but man comes nearer through philosophic contemplation. Contemplation and, therefore, happiness are the fruits of leisure, for we are busy that we may have leisure, and make war that we may live in peace.

To be happy, one does not need many or great things, and the life of virtue and contemplation can be practiced, indeed, more easily practiced, with but moderate means. The happy person is bound to seem strange, since the many and miserable only perceive, and judge by, external possessions.

Leisure in Politics

Aristotle returns to the subject of leisure in Politics. The state, he says, should aim at something more than mere survival or self-sufficiency:

Men must be able to engage in business and go to war, but leisure and peace are better; they must do what is necessary and indeed what is useful, but what is honourable is better … If it be disgraceful in men not to be able to use the goods of life, it is peculiarly disgraceful not to be able to use them in time of leisure—to show excellent qualities in action and war, and when they have peace and leisure to be no better than slaves.

To make time for leisure, virtue, and contemplation, Athenian citizens should have no part in agriculture or manufacturing—which are to be left in the care of slaves.

Discussion and relevance today

Anyone who loves his or her work, and who does it for its own sake, will agree with Aristotle: performing this activity, whether it be a job or a hobby, is a source of bliss. And if this activity can help or touch others, then our happiness is all the more complete.

But the most complete happiness comes from reflecting on the preferred activity, its purpose, and its meaning. For instance, it is a great thing to love gardening, but it is an even greater thing to understand why we love gardening, because it tells us something eternal and universal about what it is to be a human being, and connects us with everyone else who loves, has loved, or will love gardening.

Insightful and illuminating is the distinction drawn between time spent in amusement and relaxation, necessary because of the impossibility of continuous activity, and time spent in leisure, that is, in contemplation, friendship, and other virtuous activities.

Economic imperatives have led us to associate free time exclusively with amusement and relaxation, so that many people who retire, and no longer need to flop on a beach or in front of a screen, find themselves at a loss—essentially, because they have never been schooled in leisure (in fact, the Greek word for “leisure”—schole— is the root of our word “school”). But by conflating relaxation and leisure, we risk losing out on the fruits of peace and civilization, and, so, on the highest happiness.

As a moral philosophy, Aristotelian ethics, also called virtue ethics, is astonishingly modern, even futuristic, with people poised to have much more free time as robots take over from slaves and workers.

So much has changed since the time of Aristotle, and yet so little.

Neel Burton is author of The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle