CONTEMPLATING SOCRATES – Chapter Five Copyright 2006 Catherine Glass

HE WAS AMAZED AND NONPLUSED BY HER QUESTION. HE HAD told no one about the daimonion, though he had been aware of it since childhood. He stared at her.

It had taken him awhile to learn to pay attention to the daimonion, which was not exactly a voice, but something like a sign or an inward knowing. When he was young he had shut it out since he didn't understand it. When it did penetrate his mind he had ignored it.

This was boneheaded since the daimonion didn't pester him, and never gave him orders, only, at unforseeable times, urged him not to do something he was about to do. He began to listen, if that was the word, because over time he found its advice reliable. He had assumed everyone had a daimonion, but when he raised the subject in a roundabout way at school, none of the boys were willing to admit it. Perhaps everyone had one, but most people were too busy to hear it.

Still staring at her silently, he knew that the word daimonion suggested a divine connection, which undoubtedly was why she was asking him to explain his cavalier dismissal of the role of spirit. However he only used the name daimonion because the knowledge he received seemed to come from outside him. He did not want to commit the crime of hubris by imagining a divine connection that didn't exist, but neither did he want to overlook the gods. Theos, the word for god, was connected with verbs for speaking. When the gods spoke heroes like Odysseus did their best to listen. When Achilles didn't pay attention Athene grabbed him by the hair, and jerked him backward. But how on earth had she known of the daimonion?

With these thoughts flashing through his mind, he gazed at Diotima, and blinked nervously.

She waited for him to answer her.

“I don’t know how to account for the daimonion,” he said truthfully. "How did you know about it?" As soon as the words jerked out of him, he felt a fool. She looked at him with her smiling eyes and her hair bright in the torchlight, and said nothing.

The wisdom of the priestess was well known even to those who doubted they spoke with the voice of a god. Priestesses interpreted the prophetic oak leaves rustling at Dodona. They spoke with insight and wit at Delphi. Sitting unseen on a tripod above hallucinatory gases seeping out of earthquake-cracked crevasses, the Delphic Pythia advised colonists where to found new cities. She famously told Croesus that if he went to war a great empire would be lost, and to Croesus' dismay the empire was his own. Her message to Athens, fighting for its life during the second Persian invasion, had proved invaluable, though her first oracle was so gloomy the messenger had gone back and asked for a second. Who knew what or how a priestess knew?

"What are you trying to tell me?" he asked.

She spoke, but the uproar behind him drowned her words. He turned round to look. He had been so focused on their conversation he had not noticed Pericles' arrival with a phalanx of friends, among them Protagoras.

Pericles had his arm around Aspasia, and with his intelligent eyes in his famously long head was sizing up his guests. Though it might seem an anomaly in the Athenian democracy, Pericles was the foremost citizen of Athens, their leader in the assembly and their commander in war. Serenely indifferent to the boy Alcibiades tugging on his free arm, Pericles nodded at Socrates, and appeared about to engage him in conversation. He apparently did not see Diotima standing behind him.

Protagoras, who had lost his remote Olympian airs, thrust himself between them. "Pericles," he cried, "you are the hero of Samos, yet some Athenians are still criticizing how you handle money. 'Athens is disgracing herself,' they say. 'The allies must be outraged when they see their contributions, extorted from them for defense against the Persians, being used to gild and beautify Athens as if she were some vain woman.'"

Pericles' friends roared in disgust, Aspasia looked rigid with anger, and Alcibiades giggled. Protagoras hurried on. "But your answer, O Pericles, what a model of wisdom," he enthused. "If I may quote you: 'We are not obliged to give our allies an account of how their money is spent. All the allies supply is money, and this belongs not to the people who give it but to those who receive it so long as they provide for the defense.'"

Another roar, this time of approval, greeted his words. Aspasia's face relaxed, but Socrates thought Pericles' response verged on sophistry. Personally Pericles was incorruptible, but he had taken the allies' defense money and used it for a public works program, and his action had transformed many Athenians into wage-earners dependent on him. Not surprisingly they voted to approve his policies and their salaries. Yet to those who claimed the expenditures were wrong, the beauty of the Parthenon rising on the Acropolis seemed a sufficient answer. It was like the pure solution to a complex problem in geometry. Anchored in the mathematical fact that the width of the average column base determined all the other major dimensions, incuding the spacing between the columns and the heights of the temple's facade and colonnade, the temple appeared to bridge earth and heaven. The effect was so staggering that even now, before the temple was finished, it was impossible to imagine the Acropolis without the Parthenon.

Protagoras, never loathe to use six words when one would do, was still speaking, but Alcibiades had gripped Pericles' hand so hard, he had inclined his head toward the boy, and was listening to his stammered question. Socrates turned toward Diotima, and found her Ethiopian companion standing close beside her, as if she expected to ward off an attack. Diotima, however, looked untroubled, and was gazing with interest at him. "What are you thinking?" he wanted to ask.

"Socrates," said Pericles in his rich, modulated voice. "Where have you been? We haven't seen you in far too long."

Socrates turned back to him, feeling somehow at fault that he had not been invited to Pericles' house for months. He found himself the center of attention. Pericles regarded him serenely, Alcibiades looked desperately unhappy, and Aspasia threw him an arch glance.

Protagoras, barely disguising his dislike, snickered, "Let's see if Socrates can explain areté to us. Areté has become his chosen subject, and he wrestles with it night and day."

"Explain areté? Really. And why would he do that?" enquired Pericles, his voice growing deeper and louder. "Our mighty monuments bear witness to areté," he declared pompously.

"Well of course they do. They most certainly do," agreed Protagoras and a dozen others.

"They are part of what makes Athens an education to Greece," concluded Pericles, and he lifted his long head, and swept away toward a dancer brought in to turn somersaults over a hoop set with upright swords. The swords were large and sharp. The excited crowd clapped and cheered the fearless, tumbling dancer as she somersaulted over the blades.

Socrates, beached like flotsam at low tide, stared at the floor. He suddenly grasped how it felt to be a woman shunted aside by a man.

With a hostility that seemed to include him and the men who had just left, the Ethiopian tapped the floor with her sandal, and said imperiously, "If you really wanted to learn about areté you would study with Diotima."

He raised his head. "Would I?" he asked Diotima. And then, as the words sank home, "You really know something about areté?"

"Of course she does!" cried the Ethiopian.

"I know a little about love," Diotima said reluctantly.

Her diffidence was so refreshing he laughed. “You seem to know a great deal about love, and quite a bit about me.”

She was smiling at him, full of joy and, he could have sworn, slightly mischievously. He felt elation lift him like a wave. She saw him. She knew him. He felt their bond, strong and warm as a hand.

But she remained silent, and extended no invitation. He heard himself say, “I’d like to learn. I’d like you to teach me.”

“Teach you?” Diotima asked, and she gave him a curious look. “You might be able to learn something. But it will take some effort. Are you really serious?”

“Maybe we could sit down sometime,” he said.

She smiled, and said nothing.

“We might need an afternoon,” he said, and realizing how that must sound, added, “or a day or two.”

She laughed, a lovely lilting laugh that made him smile.

In the beautiful, tender silence that followed, he seemed to meet her in the depths of her eyes, and step toward her in the sanctuary of her presence. NEXT »