How To Be An Agnostic
The creed caused him great diffi culties for he was very good at
undermining the security and wounding the vanity of his fellow
over-confi dent citizens. We read that people thought talking
to Socrates was like being stung by a ray. Others rapidly made
themselves scarce when they saw him coming. If he was hard
to tolerate, they were hard on Socrates too. His new philosophi-
cal vocation rapidly became a source of danger to his person.
The men he tended to upset the most were also the most pow-
erful, and therefore the most ambitious and most prone to
violence. They slandered him in ways that were hard for him
to refute. At his trial, Socrates complains that they accused him
of things that he himself despised. For example, they said that
in debate he made ‘the worse argument the stronger’. This was
something the Sophists did, those professional know-it-alls who
could be bought and who turned philosophy into a cockfi ght.
To accuse Socrates of doing the same thing was to misunder-
stand him completely: he plumbed ignorance. They also said
he sought meaning in the clouds. One of the surviving plays of
Aristophanes is The Clouds, a harsh satire caricaturing Socrates
as a nebulous philosophiser. This was dangerous because it
carried the implication of atheism, not so much not believing
in gods, as questioning the gods people did believe in – a posi-
tion that while not unknown or overly shocking could become
politically charged, should someone choose to use it against
you. Protagoras had only just escaped being executed when his
agnosticism was misinterpreted in this way.
However, there was a silver lining to these dark clouds of
unpopularity. Young men, especially rich, well-turned-out
young men, with time on their hands, started to follow Socrates
around Athens. For them, it was like knowing Mark Twain or
Oscar Wilde: they hoped he would bump into someone of sig-
nifi cance and make a mockery of them. And they loved him
for it. Better yet, these youths began to realise that Socrates was
serious. They sought him out not just for entertainment but
because they thought they might learn something. At his trial
he was also accused of corrupting youth, meaning turning them