View across the Aegean

Chapter One

THE SEARCH

Some people want horses or dogs or money or fame. Ever since childhood I have wanted a friend more than anything else in the world.
Socrates quoted in Plato's LYSIS 211d-212a

ENTERING HIS HOUSE ALONE AND LATE AT NIGHT AFTER A
party, Socrates moves quietly so as not to awaken his old servant. Holding a small, burning lamp, he crosses his dark courtyard, and walks into his bedroom. After a moment he blows out the light, sits down on his bed in the dark, and puts his head in his hands. He is twenty-nine.

All his life he has wanted a friend of the heart. Ever since he was a child, he has wanted a friend who knows him and loves him exactly as he is, who sees what he sees and loves what he loves and understands the feeling, so difficult to describe, that he wants something from life as dear as home and as evanescent as the sun glinting on a wave. Where is that friend? Where is the person who will respond to him, really respond to him, not with falsehoods or evasions or pleasant nothings, but understanding and loving who he is and what is in his mind and heart. This more than anything was what he longed for and what he lacked – a friend who trusted him and to whom he could speak with complete trust; a friend who always wished the best for him, but never wished to possess him. Together, they could explore all the questions about life that he wanted to answer. Together, standing shoulder to shoulder, they could stand up to anything.

He has been looking for this friend since he was a small, sturdy boy, standing in a field in a crowd of boys, gripping a spear in his right hand, and grasping a shield in his left. He and the other boys move in the tightly packed body of the phalanx, standing shoulder to shoulder, eight lines deep, practicing how to defend their city. He is preoccupied with learning to hold spear and shield, trying to step in time with the other boys to the sound of the flutes. Under their sandaled feet a deeper time beats Marathon, Marathon, Salamis, Marathon, for Athens has no army, only citizens willing to come to her defense. There is no closer comradeship than this, men willing to die for each other, yet he cannot say any of these men is a friend of the heart.

They have grown up together, playmates and fellow students and citizens in the phalanx, but not one of them sees what he sees or loves what he loves. He felt as lonely in the crowd at the party as he feels now, sitting alone in the dark.

He is not sure why this is so. He has always felt different, but almost every one of us feels different from others, and it is the nature of loneliness that everyone who feels lonely feels he alone is suffering from loneliness. Perhaps his loneliness really is rooted in his schooldays, for he has seen his homeliness – really, his ugliness – reflected in the quick eyes of other children who judge him, and turn away. Like their elders they are keen judges of beauty and wealth, and he has neither. No brothers or sisters, either. Like Odysseus and his son Telemachus, he is an only child.

Half-shutting his eyes Socrates can see Telemachus carrying his solitude within him. Surrounded by his mother's hostile suitors, oppressed by the uncertainty of his father's fate, and unable to truly live until he knows what has become of him, he has not one friend standing beside him. He has just one ally, old Mentor, but he suffices for an army since he is the goddess Athene in disguise. Mentor arranges a ship for him, and men to sail it, so he can escape. In one of the many memorable phrases he had memorized, Telemachus "followed in the footsteps of the goddess." He left sea-girt Ithaca, and crossed the wine-dark sea in search of his father.

Like Telemachus, he, too, had made a voyage, but he had sailed east. He had left behind everything he knew to look for the truth about the universe. He wanted to grasp the beautiful jewel that is the cosmos. He longed to know what the cosmos is and who or what made it and why.

Samos, off the coast of Asia, and not far from Ithaca, was famous for its cosmologists. Sitting in the stern-sheets he had relived Telemachus' journey, watching as the crew loosed the the stern cables, and raised the fir mast aloft, heeling it, and making it fast with forestays, then hauling up the white sail by halyards of pliant cowhide. They were moving before he knew it, the ship sliding out of harbor as the wind caught the sail, bellying it out, and the men sat their benches and rowed. The blue-shadowed waves resounded under her bow as their ship lay over on her course, and raced out to sea. Two days later he saw the island's tall peak and wooded hills drawing him across the water.

He had half-imagined he would make the kind of landing Telemachus made when he arrived at Pylos, Nestor's stately citadel. Telemachus and his men had beached their ship, and Telemachus had followed in the footsteps of the goddess until he reached old Nestor and his sons. They were sacrificing bulls to Poseidon on the sands by the sea, and roasting joints of beef. Nestor welcomed him, seating him on a sheepskin spread over the sand, and served him juicy meat cooked on a spit.

He had not experienced Nestor's welcome at Samos, or any kind of welcome at all, but he had left his ship and pressed on into the city. He found a number of men interested in the cosmos, and plunged into research. There were plenty of cosmological theories to think about, and he didn't notice immediately that all the theories were short on facts.

One man stood out, Archelaus, who was his own age, but rich, and stunningly handsome. Their first conversation had been thrilling. Archelaus could think. He liked to ask questions. They had stayed up talking about the latest cosmological theories over wine until the stars grew pale in the sky. Archelaus treated him as an equal, and laughed with pleasure when he found inconsistencies in the ideas of certain cosmologists. It never occurred to him that Archelaus would take it amiss if he aimed his rational arrows at Anaxagoras, a cosmologist he admired. For a few heady weeks he had imagined this was the friend of a lifetime, a man who shared his love for pursuing the truth.

He could still remember the day he had listened to Archelaus reading aloud from a work by Anaxagoras. It was hot. They sat in the shade of a tree, but there wasn't a breeze from the sea, and the back of his neck was wet with sweat. Archelaus read well, giving him a glance now and then when he reached an important line. He had been struck by the sentence, “A universal mind causes and arranges all things,” and he stopped Archelaus, and asked him to repeat it. He liked this theory immediately. It seemed right to him that the mind should be the cause of everything in the cosmos.

He waited to hear more, but to his disappointment "Anaxagoras never developed the idea." He was thunderstruck. He told Archelaus that Anaxagoras must have said more about his fascinating concept of a universal mind.

"Not a thing," Archelaus said blithely.

"He can't just throw out a statement like that, and say nothing else," he protested. He had made no effort to speak politely because he was so certain Archelaus saw the same truth. To make a statement like this and not expand onit was useless. Surely that was obvious.

But, "You ought to realize Anaxagoras knows far more than you do, and accept his statement as read," Archelaus said coldly.

For a moment he thought he was joking, and he lightly asked Archelaus whether it was wise to accept statements that were unproven. Archelaus lost his temper, and began to shout. They weren't standing shoulder to shoulder searching for the truth, but face to face, quarreling.

He was shaking before it was over, and sick that he had lost the friendship of the person he cared about most. In the lonely months that followed he became disillusioned. He looked into the starry darkness, and saw he did not understand the cosmos. More staggering, he saw he did not understand himself.

He decided to make human life his cosmos, and study it. How will he live? How should he bring up his children? How does a man become happy? For him these became the important questions. Certain that these questions could be answered rationally, he realized that reason required a method. If he, like many other people, wanted to make rational decisions about his life, how did he arrive at the rational decisions he wanted to make?

The answer is elenchus, a method he develops. Elenchus is the first step on the trail. It has rational, psychological and spiritual powers. But to pursue elenchus he has to have a partner.

Socrates stood and stripped off his tunic and cloak. He did not expect that the partner he needed for elenchus and the friend of his heart would be a woman, or that he would meet her very soon. NEXT »

©2006 CATHERINE GLASS