116 Ancient Ideals
Socrates comparable to Achilles? How outrageous! Socrates was
homely and poor. He had no noble lineage; his mo ther was nothing
like Thetis, the sea goddess. Socrates’ mo ther was Phaenarete, a
midwife. His father was a stonecutter. Achilles’ father was Peleus,
the king, formidable with a spear. Socrates was married to Xan-
thippe, a shrew formidable with a plate of urine. But Socrates says it
directly: he is like Achilles in that he has a duty to himself and to the
gods. And, Socrates suggests, his way of life is no less im por tant than
the way of the warrior. The quest for wisdom matters, and it matters
as much to the world as the quest to become a hero. “When a man has
once taken up his stand, either because it seems best to him or in the
obedience to his orders, there I believe he is bound to remain and face
the danger, taking no account of death or anything else before dis-
honor” (Plato, 54). This is the traditional language of heroism: now,
with Socrates, it is also the language of the phi los o pher.
But of course the majority of Socrates’ fellow citizens cannot
concur with his high sense of his vocation: they judge him guilty,
and eventually he is put to death. What has he done wrong? By the
end of the trial it’s clear that the overt charges against Socrates don’t
amount to much. No one is seriously worried about his not believing
in the gods or making the weaker argument appear the stronger.
What raises his contemporaries to the pitch of murder is that he has
made fools of them. He has asked them the simplest questions about
who they are and why they live as they do, and they have found they
cannot answer them, either to Socrates’ satisfaction or (presumably)
to their own. They can’t employ reason, the gift that Nature has
given them and that separates them from animals, to understand
themselves or the world as they truly are. They can calculate; they
can mea sure and weigh and discern their material advantage in
this exchange or that, but they cannot give an account of what a
just life or a good life might be. This might cause them to pause
and think hard about themselves, but such thinking would be