Socrates’ Questqualities: knowledge, goodwill and willingness to speak freely,’
Socrates once said to one of his interlocutors. Alternatively, in
the Lysis, he later confesses that he would rather have a friend
more than anything else in the world, even more than all the
gold of the Great King. With such a friend he would understand
himself: they would be perfect mirrors to each other and, in
that mutual trust, would know each other as well as they knew
themselves.
Living uncertainty
This picture of Socrates’ philosophy can be developed some
more by considering further his engagement with the Delphic
oracle. Ancient oracles are much misunderstood today. It is easy
to think of them as a kind of cryptic fortune-teller or sophis-
ticated roller of dice. But they are more fascinating than that.
While no doubt they could be corrupted and ridiculed, at heart
they were a system for decision making in a world very con-
scious that nothing could be predicted, much was up to luck,
and everything was uncertain. Consulting the oracle, and
receiving equivocal replies, did three things. It dramatised the
experience of not knowing. It impelled the work of interpreta-
tion. It called all possibilities into question.
Consider two of the most famous consultations at Delphi.
A fi rst was when Croesus, the king of Lydia, sought the oracle’s
blessing on his proposed war against Persia. The Pythia uttered
the words: ‘A great empire will be destroyed.’ In his hubris,
Croesus took the empire to be that of his enemy. It was, in fact,
that of his own. The cynic would respond to this by saying that
the oracle always has the last laugh: it speaks in ways that can
be re-interpreted after the event. But that, I think, would be a
misunderstanding. Ancient people too knew that oracles must
be doubted. Croesus himself had previously tested all the major
oracles of the ancient world by asking them what he would be
doing at a certain time on a future day. Only Delphi got it right
(cooking lamb and tortoise in a bronze pot, as it happens). It is as