PROLOGUE

All people, whatever their natural gifts, have to practice
what they want to excel in.

Socrates quoted in Xenophon's MEMORABILIA, III. 3

I RETURNED TO NEW YORK AFTER MANY YEARS SPENT FAR away. The city was a contrast to the fields of clover and wheat, the grazing horses, and the gravel road where I had lived and walked with an old companionable dog in Oregon, but I was glad to be back. Disembarking from the Metro North Railroad, taking the shuttle across town, and the subway uptown to Columbia University, I often met a New Yorker’s eyes, and found his smile, or hers, rushing up to meet mine from somewhere deep inside. Gazing into their eyes on the rattling train, I felt the lightest of touches, as if soul had recognized soul.

The year was 2003, two years after the destruction of the men and women inside the two World Trade Center towers. The great pit lay eight miles downtown from where I sat in the Barnard College Library. I did not dwell on the pit, but neither did I forget it.

On the green below my carrel window autumn leaves fell as I read about Socrates. I had been drawn to him, inexplicably attracted, though fifteen hundred years of Classical Greek literature offered many other choices. I read what a soldier, a comic playwright, and a philosopher had written about him, since Socrates had never written anything himself.

The men wrote in Classical Greek, a language as precisely built as a temple and as powerful and secret as the sea. By necessity I read the Greek slowly. At times I felt I was not reading, but laboriously shifting blocks of stone. Moving through the texts I stopped often, turning the pages of Liddell & Scott, a lexicon as big as a boulder, which sat on my desk.

Bending over the pages of Greek's lovely and peculiar alphabet I hunted for the verbs that like Proteus twisting under Menelaus' wrestling hands metamorphosed into unrecognizable shapes depending on their tense and voice. In the quiet of the library, in which the convivial roar of the city came faintly like the sea in a shell, I worked methodically, word by word. There were words I did not recognise and others that breathed with double and triple meanings that deepened and altered their powers.

As I studied reports about Socrates in the language he spoke, I had the sensation I was meeting a stranger. This was not the irritating philosopher I remembered from humanities classes, which wrapped him in the toga he never wore. The Socrates I met in the classical texts dressed in a short tunic and cloak, was a battle-hardened soldier who defied tyrants, and a man who liked to party, though he could take or leave a drink. The father of three sons, he endured hardships that destroyed other men, and risked his life to oppose injustice.

Aristotle rightly credits him with the development of inductive reasoning and universal definitions, rational breakthroughs crucial to the discoveries of science and the creation of the modern world. But to my surprise, Socrates unequivocally declared that he was passionate about reason because of its significance for the soul. Reading more I began to realize he had done what western civilization has not done but must do if it is to survive: he had reconciled the rational and the sacred. But if he had achieved this extraordinary feat it had gone largely unnoticed, certainly by me. Amazed, I read his unexpected words once and then again and then a third time.

I saw Socrates first. Then I saw the trail.

I saw how courage and beauty and ethical purpose and joy were part of the trail he followed and I saw them all at once, just as a person sees a constellation in the night sky. I saw Socrates walking the trail, and everything about him – his mysterious charisma and sense of humour, his defense of justice and odd, 'rapts," his mission and his mature happiness, even his quirky phrase, 'by the dog,' which he used when he was enthusiastic – fell into place and were part of the trail he followed.

I moved my base of operations to Hamilton Hall, climbing the six flights of stairs to the Classics Department, and passing the cluttered offices of the Department’s secretary whose screams sometimes pierced the quiet. Ahead, a door led to my workroom. Inside, a second door led to a small library, and a third door led to a classroom that students entered with the trepidation of Athenians approaching the Minotaur. I sat outside the door, and searched the Perseus program online, amassing citations, and studying them for content, context, and patterns. Had I really seen stars, their light traveling toward me from so many years ago?

Running down the six flights I headed to Butler Library, hiking up the great marble stairs to hunt for explanations of elenchus, Socrates' logical method. The beautiful old library's hushed and windowless stacks were under renovation. I searched for books with my head under the sheets of plastic silent workmen had hung over the shelves. At night I crossed the Quad by frosty lamplight, and took the subway downtown to Times Square and Grand Central, walking under the pale green dome high above my head before I went further underground, and caught the train out of the city. On board I read histories of Classical Greece for what they might reveal. Sometime before midnight I unlocked the door of my friends' house, and happily joined a household interested in playing music, prison reform, and the World Series, though perhaps not in that order. The next morning I walked back to the station, passing the old inn where George Washington had rested, and returned to the city and my research. I was aware that my advisor was extremely dubious about my thesis.

I never saw the trail described in the many secondary references about Socrates, but I saw it in the original texts of the three men who knew Socrates personally. The trail was hard to see. It glimmered in the texts, then disappeared, with only a sentence here and there, like a broken twig or a foot print, to give a clue Socrates had walked this way. The men were Xenophon, Aristophanes, and Plato.

Xenophon, the youngest of the three, invented shorthand for the express purpose of recording Socrates’ conversations. Not long after he began to transcribe his remarks, Xenophon headed to Asia, where he was elected general by ten thousand desperate Greek soldiers forced to fight their way north from Babylon through hostile tribes. Xenophon provided real glimpses of Socrates in Memorabilia, the book he wrote after his return, but the trail was hard to discern.

Like Socrates, Aristophanes experienced the brilliance of Athenian arts and theatre and the turbulence of the city-state's democracy firsthand. The times were gorgeous and ghastly, a flux of war, plague, political assassinations, and bloody and useless cruelties. It was a time not unlike our own. In his play The Clouds, which was panned at its premiere, Aristophanes calls Socrates an atheist and a sophist. In Athens the charge of atheism did not mean that a man did not believe in God, but that he did not believe in the gods that Athenians believed in. It was a serious accusation, punishable by death. The darkness of Aristophanes' view and the shadows in The Clouds heightened my perception of the track Socrates was following. However, there was always a danger that in looking for the trail, I saw what I wanted to see, not what was.

The third man to describe Socrates was Plato, the scion of a wealthy Athenian family who wrote the work to which, it has been famously said, all western philosophy is but footnotes. I sensed, as many have, that Socrates fascinated Plato. He appears in almost everything Plato wrote. Like others I also saw that the person that Plato describes is not always the historical Socrates. Indeed in the later dialogues Plato associated Socrates with ideas he would almost certainly have regarded with skepticism if not repugnance. Nevertheless it is in Plato’s Socratic dialogues that I saw the trail most clearly.

In three of Plato's dialogues, the Symposium, the Apology, and the Phaedo, Socrates describes the trail to his friends. He names it using the Greek word with the great X of the crossroads at its heart. The same word is used in the Odyssey, which Socrates is so fond of quoting. Odysseus, come home at last, is discovered by his old nurse as she washes his legs in the firelight and runs her hands over the scar he acquired as a young man tracking a boar to its lair on Mount Parnassus. In Homer the word for footprint becomes a trail scented by hounds. Socrates transforms Homer's word for trail into a spiritual path.

Plato’s texts confirm this, yet when I tried to see the trail I found it buried under Plato's rational arguments and erotic subterfuge. Always Plato’s brilliant and intimidating figure blocked the way. 

Why did Plato say so little about it?  Why did he not give his readers a coherent picture of it? Did it mean so little to him? Was he unaware of its significance – too young when Socrates died and too hypnotized as he grew older by thoughts of political perfection and human divinity to understand what it meant? Did Plato cover the trail in order to protect Socrates from the charge of atheism, or did arrogance prevent him from walking it?

I did not know the answers to these questions, but I had enough sense to know I should be concerned I was asking them. Plato is a formidable antagonist, and I do not lightly suggest that he ignored or deliberately concealed a spiritual path that shows men and women how to be brave, beautiful, ethical, and happy. 

Everywhere I went on campus I was surrounded by students. They were in some ways more worldly-wise than I, with the inscrutable expressions the young reserve for those who are not members of their tribe. As I met them in the library, in seminar, and talked with them on the sixth floor of Hamilton Hall, I saw more. I saw intelligence, an ardent desire to be loved, an incipient cynicism, and a poignant vulnerability. They were aware of their vulnerability, but not of its extent. I longed to show them the trail, but I doubted what I had discovered.

I questioned the evidence in the texts and my reading of them. I sat with my head in my hands, and wondered why what seemed so clear to me had not been clear to others.

In that darkness I saw once again the stars.

I saw the trail because I walked it. I have only walked it partway, and I stumble when I walk, but I know the trail exists.

I saw the trail because Socrates lived it. Socrates discovered the trail with Diotima, the woman who taught him, he said, "about love." This is their story, their myth, "an account of what may have been the historical fact." NEXT »

©2006 CATHERINE GLASS