‘Socrates in Love’ Review: A Vigorous, Brilliant Young Man - Wall Street Journal

Jamie James

May 17, 2019 9:50 a.m. ET

If there is one philosophical nugget most people know by heart, it is “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Socrates, who coined the phrase, is often called the founder of Western philosophy, his name the byword for wisdom, in a dead heat with Confucius. Yet the life of Socrates himself has remained largely unexamined.

There’s a good reason for that: Socrates never wrote a book. Everything we know about him survives in the reports of other ancient authors, primarily Plato, who makes his teacher the protagonist of most of his dramatic dialogues. Quizzical, feigning confusion about matters that he understands perfectly well, Plato’s Socrates is a portrait as crisply drawn and subtly modulated as a portrait by Velázquez. Yet like the painted portrait, it is a work of the imagination, reflecting the vision of the artist as much as the personality of the sitter. Plato’s Socrates is a fictional creation, intended to captivate the reader’s interest and express the author’s own ideas.

Marble bust of Socrates from the third century B.C. Photo: G. DAGLI ORTI/DE AGOSTINI/GETTY IMAGES

Socrates in Love

By Armand D’Angour
Bloomsbury, 247 pages, $28

It isn’t quite true that the life of Socrates has not been examined; at any rate his death, a court-ordered suicide by drinking poisonous hemlock, has been studied more thoroughly and often than any apart from that of Jesus Christ, to whom Socrates has frequently been likened (by Ben Franklin and Percy Bysshe Shelley, among others). Periodically, scholars undertake to solve what is known as the Socratic problem, shorthand for the attempt to disentangle an accurate, verifiable narrative of the life of the historical Socrates from the available sources. Plato is by far the most influential of those sources, but other contemporary reports have survived, an ill-assorted lot, frequently in conflict, that usually reveal more about the reporter than the subject. As a result, most attempts to establish a coherent narrative of Socrates’ life end in failure, a learned version of the Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant.

Armand D’Angour, a classics professor at Oxford, has undertaken a comprehensive study of the Socratic problem and distilled a biography of the life entire. Its provocative title, “Socrates in Love,” emphasizes that Mr. D’Angour intends to reconstruct the philosopher’s early life. It is a tour de force of scholarship, and he sifts through his vast reading with judicious care. Open-minded but not credulous, he accomplishes what was long thought to be impossible: a reliable, consistent account of the man that who forged the matrix of Western philosophy.

Plato’s principal weakness as a biographical source is that he did not meet Socrates until his mentor was a middle-aged man with an established reputation as Athens’s most distinguished philosopher. Plato created the enduring image of him as a saintly bum, wandering the streets barefoot, wrapped in a tattered cloak, too absorbed in his ceaseless contemplation of virtue and justice to take any interest in worldly affairs.

Mr. D’Angour pieces together a convincing portrayal of Socrates as a vigorous, brilliant youth who made a deliberate choice to renounce a role in public affairs. Only one line of Socrates’ writing survives, a verse from a poem written in youth: “Those who honor the gods best in dancing are also best at fighting.” Mr. D’Angour enlarges on these themes and portrays Socrates as a man of action, a robust soldier and celebrated dancer, pursued by older men in his adolescence and in adulthood himself a pursuer, of women as well as good-looking young men, notably Alcibiades, the ward of Pericles, “first citizen” of democratic Athens.

Yet by every account, the philosopher was exceptionally ugly, his mien marred by monstrous bulging eyes, in a society that prized manly beauty as a virtue partaking of the divine. Byron’s thumbnail sketch of Socrates as a “low, swarthy, short-nosed, round-eyed satyr” is typical; in a shallow moment, Nietzsche declared, “Socrates was rabble,” his repellent aspect “the sign of a thwarted development.” Mr. D’Angour cites modern research suggesting that Socrates’ protruding eyeballs may have resulted from the onset of hyperthyroidism in middle age; moreover, some of his eccentricities, such as his habit of standing stock still for hours, oblivious to his surroundings, may have been symptomatic of advancing catalepsy.

The earliest incident of Socrates’ life recounted by Plato is his rescue of Alcibiades after the dashing young aristocrat fell wounded in the thick of battle. Alcibiades’ telling of the story is the dramatic high point of the “Symposium,” probably Plato’s most well-known work, which reads more like a lively philosophical novella than a dialogue. In it, Socrates propounds his theory of love, introducing the concept of Platonic love, which formed the basis of his theory of ideal forms.

Mr. D’Angour saves his most exciting discovery for last. As usual, Socrates is Plato’s mouthpiece in the “Symposium.” He says that the concept of ideal love was taught to him in his youth by a woman named Diotima, his instructor in the arts of love. Diotima has always been identified as a fictional character, a narrative device that Plato’s Socrates uses from time to time. Mr. D’Angour, however, proposes that Diotima was a real person, Aspasia of Miletus, the beloved of Pericles, who was a brilliant intellectual in her own right, reputed to have ghostwritten Pericles’ famous funeral oration, recorded in Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War.

A non-Athenian, and thus probably barred from entering into a legal marriage with Pericles, Aspasia was the butt of scurrilous abuse, particularly by the comic playwrights, who portrayed her as a scheming courtesan. These slanders were accepted by classical scholars and reinforced by the misogyny of their own times. Mr. D’Angour rehabilitates Aspasia’s reputation and ingeniously argues that she originated the concept of Platonic love, one of the first principles of Western philosophy. Moreover, he moots the “attractive and compelling possibility that the advent of Aspasia into the young Socrates’ life” may present “an appealing and credible image of Socrates in love.”

The book occasionally suffers from a fault common among scholars writing for a lay readership: Mr. D’Angour explains what doesn’t need explaining, both in the sense of underestimating his readers (locating the Peloponnesian peninsula, defining “battering ram”) and making trivial distinctions, such as disambiguating one obscure historical figure from another equally obscure with the same name. When he ventures outside his field of expertise, he falls flat. In one little disaster, he quotes one of the most famous lines in English poetry, “The child is father of the man” and calls it a “saying,” then misinterprets Wordsworth’s meaning.

The book’s haphazard structure, or lack of one, is an almost endearing flaw: The author is equally excited by all his material and can’t wait to move on to the next point. Yet he writes clearly and well, and the reader happily follows him on his enthusiastic intellectual tour. In a satisfying conclusion, Mr. D’Angour pulls together his findings in a concise 15-page biography of Socrates, from his birth to the cup of hemlock, which sparkles with vivacity and does not overtax the scholarship that sets it up.

—Mr. James is the author of “Pagan Light: Dreams of Freedom and Beauty in Capri.”

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