The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life by Hughes Bettany

Author:Hughes, Bettany [Hughes, Bettany]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2011-02-07T16:00:00+00:00

Beauty in Athens at this time was seriously considered to be the sign of a brilliant and noble spirit; a gift of the gods. Those laudable qualities that justified privilege and dominance were believed, naturally, to have been given an appropriately attractive shell. And all those heroically naked paragons around the city itself (both the living, breathing men in the gymnasia and the bronze and marble statues) reflected the visual experience of Athens – this was a land where men stripped to exercise, to bathe, to talk, to worship their gods, to work in the fields. The goddess Athena was honoured by a city-wide kallisteion, an all-male beauty contest at the time of the Pan-Athenaea. The winning beauty was handsomely rewarded with more than one hundred amphoras of sacred olive oil. In Socrates’ Athens the ‘body-beautiful’ also signified a beautiful mind.10 Being beautiful meant that you possessed a moral beauty; kalon in Greek means ‘fine’ and ‘praiseworthy’ as well as ‘fit’.

And so the notion proposed here, that inner beauty can sometimes be contained within a hoary shell, is radical. In the Socratic canon itself, an entire dialogue, the Hippias Major, is devoted to a discussion of the definition of ‘the beautiful’. Socrates suggests that beauty is not just to do with the line of your leg, the proportion of your nose, the gleam of your skin, but with the state of your soul:

By means of beauty, all beautiful things become beautiful.11

If you weren’t yourself beautiful, your inner beauty, your virtue could catalyse great things; a man ‘moving towards the goal of the erotic suddenly glimpses a “beautiful” which is of wondrous essence, precisely that for which he had previously given such pains, the pure being, imperishable and divine, the “idea of the beautiful”.’12 These are left-field thoughts for Greek society; an internal character differs from, but is as potent as, external show. Beauty is an attitude, a psychological goal, not just a set of vital statistics.

In classical Athenian terms, Socrates’ appearance was utterly dysfunctional, repellent. As soon as figurines of Socrates were commissioned, they were moulded in the form of a satyr. Satirical Socrates seemed to care not two hoots.

My eyes are more beautiful than yours, because yours only look straight ahead, whereas mine bulge out and look to the sides as well.13

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