The Socratic Way of Life by Thomas L. Pangle

Author:Thomas L. Pangle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

The Profitable Beauty of Socrates’s Soul, Reflected in Comic Allegory

From showing how Socrates helped an unusually successful artisan-producer-entrepreneur, Xenophon descends next to showing how Socrates helped a prosperously successful practitioner of the courtesan’s art.88 This scenario displays Socrates at his most playfully “unbuttoned,” and most roguishly allusive (it contains more profane oaths by Socrates than any other single conversation [XS 89], even more than the dialogue with Critobulus, with which this conversation has obvious affinities, in tone, mood, and substance).

Grave scholars have been most disapproving. Xenophon’s presentation of Socrates assimilating himself, in his art of seduction, to a beautiful courtesan and her art “has scandalized most commentators, ancient and modern,” led by the tight-laced Kierkegaard.89

“A woman was once (pote) in the city, a beauty, whose name was Theodote [Gift-of-god].”90 When Socrates was told both that “the beauty (kallos) of the woman was beyond the power of rational speech (kreitton logou),” and that she was frequented by painters for whom she posed, “displaying as much of herself as would be noble,” Socrates immediately insisted that he and his associates should go to behold her, declaring that “it is not possible for those who merely hear to grasp/learn (katamathein) what is beyond the power of rational speech.”91 Socrates did not doubt that the beauty of a woman could be indescribable by rational speech and, as such, something that he was eager to behold;92 he affirmed by his deed as well as by his speech that only through personally experiencing, seeing with one’s own eyes, could one truly know and appreciate such beauty—even or especially if one were a painter (or a philosopher).

Socrates was (perhaps surprisingly) confident that Theodote would be generous enough to allow him and his associates to be appreciative onlookers as she posed for a painter—and he was not disappointed. But when the session of contemplation of beauty concluded, Socrates insisted on raising, to his male companions, a surprising (and spell-breaking93) question of justice: Which of us—we contemplators, or “the Gift-of-God” that we have been contemplating—owes more gratitude to the other? Still more surprisingly, Socrates submitted that since Theodote “reaped the profit” of “praise” from “us” onlookers, and stood to “benefit still more” when “we shall spread the word to many,” while “we now desire to touch, and we go away excited, and, when we are departed, we will long for the things we have beheld,”94 it follows that “we serve, and this one is served.” Theodote (no shrinking violet), having overheard this, broke in with a manly oath—“By Zeus!”—to announce that from this it followed that she was the debtor, to “you” (pl.). It seems that Socrates and “the Gift-of-god” agree (but would Zeus?) in discounting, though not denying, the intrinsic value to the adorers of their sheer contemplation of beauty such as is incarnate in Theodote. The chief benefit, and thus value, of her beauty lie in its attracting and transfixing those who subsequently praise and long for and serve the (needy) being who has the beauty—and who, on account of being praised and served, comes to owe a justly deserved return to her devotees (3.

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