the ideal set out elsewhere in the Symposium,in which male love (assumed by all the
speakers to be alone capable of fulfilling the highest and noblest aspirations) becomes
ideal when it inspires the search for truth and beauty. Alcibiades goes to the extent
of getting into bed with Socrates, who sleeps with him for the night. We are not to
suppose that Socrates is not tempted, but he chastely remains immune to the young
man’s charms. The anecdote is designed to illustrate, without solemnity, Socratic
sophrosyne:the divine inner being masked by the comic exterior. For Alcibiades, it is
both an insult and a revelation of Socrates’ strength of mind and character further
confirmed in the famous incident in which he walks barefoot on ice in the wintry siege
of Potidaea. Further testimony follows of his courage as a soldier of Athens, of his
endurance and of his essential indifference to the needs of the senses. Though a great
drinker, no one has ever seen him drunk. There is the story of his extraordinary trance-
like withdrawal into thought, an inner concentration that lasted a day and a night.
Little wonder that Alcibiades finds him absolutely untypical, indeed unique (221c).
The final part of the encomium stresses the extraordinary quality of his talk:
I forgot to say at the beginning that his talk too is extremely like the Silenus-figures
which take apart. Anyone who sets out to listen to Socrates talking will probably
find his conversation utterly ridiculous at first; it is clothed in such curious words
and phrases, the hide, so to speak, of a hectoring Satyr. He will talk of pack-asses
and blacksmiths, cobblers and tanners, and appear to express the same ideas in
the same language over and over again so that any inexperienced or foolish
person is bound to laugh at his way of speaking. But if a man penetrates within
and sees the content of Socrates’ talk exposed, he will find that his talk is almost
the talk of a god, and enshrines countless representations of ideal excellence and
is of the widest possible application.
(221d–222a)Xenophon and Plato represent him as patriotic and law-abiding. They record his
respect for the state religion. In their accounts, his mission is laid upon him by the
Delphic god, and his famous daimonion, the inner voice which acted as a warning
sign, is regarded as being of divine origin. For Xenophon he was the best and happi-
est of men: pious, just, self-controlled, sensible (Memoirs of Socrates, 1, 11).After
recounting his death in his dialogue the Phaedo, Plato pronounces him to have been
of all whom they knew in their time, the best, the wisest and the most upright man
(Phaedo, 118). Plato’s tribute culminates in the superlative form of the adjective
dikaios, which is related to the noun dikaiosyne, justice or righteousness, the sum of
the four cardinal virtues of the ancient world, including courage, wisdom and
temperance. In his life and in his manner of dying, Socrates embodied for his admirers
the perfection of the philosophic spirit.
PHILOSOPHY 195