CODA
SOCRATES: For no one knows whether death happens to be the greatest of all goods for humanity, but people fear it because they’re completely convinced it is the greatest of evils.
Plato, Apology, 29a–b1
SOME WILL TELL YOU THERE IS still a mausoleum for Socrates right in the heart of Athens. Many visitors continue to pay their respects to the philosopher here; eighteenth-century watercolours show Grand Tour eagers bowing their heads at the place as if in prayer. It is folly. The ‘Tomb of Socrates’ is in fact a huge time-machine, the Horologion of Kyrrhestos, probably built by the astronomer Andronikos from Macedonia in the first century BC.
This chunky, confident, octagonal tower (much approved of by the Roman architect Vitruvius and listed in his catalogue of classical excellence De Architectura) decorated with flying, bearded figures was designed to house one of those relatively newfangled measures of human life – a water-clock.
When I last visited the Horologion it was being renovated. The bronze weathervane that showed the direction of the winds was under reconstruction, the sun-clock was absent, the vigorous carved figures under the parapet needed more than a little expert attention. Inside, scaffolding poles and bags of mortar lay abandoned – there was, it seemed, no urgency to shore up this tower, which has already stood for 2,000 years. But somewhere in the Horologion there was a leak – and nature’s own water-clock was drumming drip by drip, marking out the span of all our mortal lives.
In a sense this is Socrates’ true tomb – the trap of calibrated time, the false friend, some would say, of which Socrates was acutely, atypically, aware. The tyrant time that civilisation brings, that allows us to do so much and stops us from doing more.
Socrates despised the artificial constraints that time-counting puts on human affairs, he raged against the ludicrous notion that the volume of a terracotta water-clock should determine how long a man is given to argue for his life. But he had a powerful sense of one measure of time – a lifespan. For him it was vital for each and every living individual to think how well man spent his time on earth.
So in some ways the ‘House of the Winds’ is not an inappropriate memorial for Socrates. It is muscular, odd, ferocious – an eccentric, anachronistic folly, plonked as it is at the top of Athens’ Roman forum. And yet it has endured. Socrates’ name lives on in the great civilisations of both East and West. Although traditionally we focus on his trial and death, he was actually a survivor. By 399 BC, many men in Athens were destroyed or were shadows of their former selves. As Socrates chooses not to escape, chooses to take the hemlock and obey the laws of his city, as he jokes with his friends, no one could describe him as a destroyed man. All democratic Athenians were architects of Athenian democracy, and Socrates was one of the few who lived to see its demolition, and its rebirth. He lived through much.
As has that Horologion. Just two generations after Socrates’ death, Aristotle declares democracy dead. For him the hierarchical warrior-greatness of the Iliad is still the way to run things; an opinion enthusiastically taken up by Aristotle’s protégé Alexander the Great. Democracy has a very light hold on history. In antiquity it lasted just over 180 years. The Horologion in the centre of Athens saw many political systems, many civilisations come and go: republics, empires, tyrannies, monarchies – but not until the twentienth century did it live through a democracy once again. All faiths passed by here too: pagans, Byzantine Christians, Frankish Christians, Muslims. In the Ottoman period the ‘Tomb of Socrates’ was used as a tekke, where whirling dervishes would free their own souls, to the delight of European visitors.
And for 400 years the ‘Tomb of Socrates’ stood opposite one of Athens’ great madrasas, the Islamic school where the faithful learned to praise Allah, and also to praise Socrates. Because, remember, Socrates does not just belong to a Western tradition. The mystic and philosopher Ibn ’Arabi approved of the Socratic maxim ‘I know that I do not know’. Al-Razi, the prolific writer, produced more than 200 books and modelled himself closely on Socrates. The madrasa in Athens, continuously – for 200 years – employed the Socratic method of question and counter-question.
When Islamic culture made Greece its home throughout the Ottoman period, locals elevated Socratic influence. They believed that the Parthenon was ‘Plato’s Academy’ – the place from which the ‘divine’ pupil of Socrates would share his pearls of knowledge. They imagined Plato sitting in the marble throne in the apse, considering the decoration of the east wall.2
Sometimes in history it is helpful to put the cart before the horse. When we see how enthusiastically Islam embraced Socrates as ‘The Source of Wisdom’, we are reminded both that the philosopher’s own, fifth-century life was orientated east before the chart was reset west, and that Plutarch was prophetic when he described Socrates: ‘Not as a citizen of Athens, or a citizen of Greece, but a citizen of the world.’3
Socrates escapes the compass. His ideas were peddled by caliphs as avidly as they were in the courtyards of Renaissance princes. The humanist philosopher Marsilio Ficino self-consciously replicated Socratic-style seminars in Florence, but so too did the scholars of Coptic Alexandria. One of the oldest surviving copies of Plato – from the tenth century AD – sits in the library of the Carouine Mosque behind the souk in Fez; its edges are crumbling, like fine biscuit, but the internal pages are yesterday-bright. Plato (in Arabic ‘Aflatones’) is still a very popular Islamic name; as popular as the name Socrates still is in the US and Europe. Whether we approve of Socrates or not, whether we believe Athens was or was not justified in contriving his death, we must remember him. Because he is part of our heritage and because our lives can only be better if we keep pursuing knowledge, and ‘the good’. We are indeed ignorant if we pretend that we already have all the answers to life on earth.
SOCRATES: For no one knows whether death happens to be the greatest of all goods for humanity, but people fear it because they’re completely convinced that it’s the greatest of evils. And isn’t this ignorance, after all, the most shameful kind: thinking you know what people don’t?4
I know that I do not know.
Ibn ’Arabi – following ninth century AD Islamic Hadith
Socrates is a strange hero. His life interrupts the predictable beat of world civilisation, a rhythm that pumps out wars and tyrants, experiments, certainties, old solutions to new problems. We strive for answers, for closure; but all Socrates does is ask questions. His notorious slogan is stimulating and troubling in equal measure: ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’
Socrates’ debates between duty and desire, between politics and personality, between sex and sophistication, between the power of men and the capabilities of women, between principle and pragmatism, still inform our lives today. He embraced paradox; he delighted in the essence of what it is to be human, in the extremes of the human life as lived. The heady, paradoxical, essential, extreme world of fifth-century Greece provided the flashpoint for his ideas.
Within five years of Socrates’ death, Athens had allied herself with her one-time enemy, Persia – with the topsy-turvy outcome that in 394 BC it was an Athenian general, Konon, who led the Persians to victory over the Spartan fleet. A sea-power for just ten years, Sparta was land-locked once more, and now a shadow of her former self. Never again in her history could she claim to rival Athenian nous with Spartan brawn. Limestone block by limestone block, it was the Persians who helped the Athenians rebuild their totemic fortifications, the walls that the Spartans had eagerly destroyed in 404 BC. Socrates’ lifespan marked the beginning and an end of an idea – the idealistic vision of an autonomous, tolerant, democratic Athenian city-state.