One of the problems of our time is that there are many books to read and little time to do it. Drag from the eighties of the last century the life of Socrates, by Antonio Tovar, from Alianza Editorial, which I bought because they told me it was a magnificent book. Then they warned me that its author was “a Francoist” and, until this week, I did not read it. It is a masterpiece, of course, and, although what it tells happened 25 centuries ago, with many lessons for this world that could be blown to pieces if Russia, as it seems, invades Ukraine and suddenly and inadvertently arms the Third World War . This is how the Second and First were born, without anyone planning them, and above all without their consequences —the millions of deaths— being foreseen.
No one knows exactly what happened and why Athens, which had been a democracy since Solon’s time, brought Socrates to trial. He was accused of perverting youth and offending the gods, accusations that did not stand because that philosopher or holy man, who walked the streets without shoes causing arguments everywhere, did no harm to anyone, except the envious and those resentful, green with animosity at his popularity and who wanted to put an end to it. Tovar says that Socrates defended himself very poorly in court, with a disjointed speech, and that the many judges who tried him had no choice but to condemn him. It gives the impression that he did not mind dying and that he even sought to be guilty of that ferocious and absurd accusation. Plato, the person responsible for his posthumous glory, did not come on the day of his defense, because he was ill, and the disciples present felt confused and disappointed with the things that Socrates said before the numerous court that judged him.
Running away was very easy and cost little money, so his disciple Crito, who was rich, proposed it, but Socrates refused to do so. He loved Athens too much, had fought in the Peloponnesian wars against the Ionians, defended her, and later taught, in his street talk, that the laws of the city are sacred and must be respected. On the other hand, he was convinced that the sentences, although absurd, should be carried out, because that was the mandate of the gods. He drank the hemlock serenely and submitted to the executioner’s instructions—he had to, after bathing, lie down and distend his stomach so that the poison would act faster—until death came to him.
What is known about him after that death is vague, speculative and, in truth, it is not known for sure what happened in that city where he was born and died, and the one that, almost immediately, after his death entered into hopeless decline. So much so that his natural adversaries, the Spartans, were able to invade it.
Had it not been for a philosopher, Plato, and a historian, Xenophon, and their faithful disciples who guarded and spread their teachings, the ideas of Socrates would have disappeared. He had no love for books—in truth, he detested them, because they isolated the individual and the audience disappeared. Therefore, he preferred the spoken word to the written word. This is why, although it is not in debate that he was a great and respected thinker, we do not know exactly what he defended or attacked, and that much confusion reigns over his philosophy, since Plato, who carefully collected his teachings, did not agree with him in many things and it is possible that, unconsciously, he had toned down and even adulterated his message.
But that does not matter much, because what remains of Socrates is an example. His death is much more important than his life as we know it. Apparently his wife, Xanthippe, was more of a nuisance than a companion to him; the testimonies of her disciples tell us that he hardly spoke with her and the same with her children, so that, to the company of her family, he preferred those of her followers, all of whom were men. The little we know about him is that he was a great arguer, even a provocateur, who challenged his adversaries in order to settle their differences with them, and that he gave his teachings in small circles of followers, avoiding large gatherings of people, for the ones I despised.
He preached respect and worship of the gods and tried at all costs to know himself thoroughly and without hiding his defects from anyone; on the contrary, exhibiting them. Thanks to these public discussions, he became popular, although some Athenians thought he was crazy. At the same time, he had many doubts about himself, a great mistrust of his own talent, so that his teachings renewed and disproved them from time to time. What was truly exemplary in him had more to do with his death than with his life. That is the greatest example he has left us.
How many contemporaries have been able to imitate him? Very few. Or it was about poor devils, like Hitler, who killed himself when all the doors had been closed to him and he was exposing himself to a more serious and long end than suicide. Not even Stalin and other bandits followed his example. In the long history of military coup plotters who ruined Peru and looted it, there are almost no suicides, and I think the same can be said for the rest of Latin America. Like Batista, Somoza, Perón and the rest of the great tyrants, they stocked up well with dollars and they waited for them when they came out of jail, to ensure a peaceful old age. It cannot be said that the fate of Western Europe has been very different. The disasters of its history are abundant and there are almost no suicides among its leaders. Those who take their own lives are usually bandits, bankrupt businessmen, desperate people fleeing misery and hunger.
Socrates had no financial problems; on the contrary, his disciples paid for his expenses and those of his family, although he ate very little and drank almost nothing. He had an excessive love for Athens, his native city, and believed that it, and all the important cities of the world, developed parallel to their real existence a double or ghost, even more important than themselves, and to whom the citizens owed loyalty. Probably the bulk of his ideas would not convince our contemporaries, if only because he believed in the gods and the afterlife, but everyone reveres the way he died, submissively, submitting to a power he perhaps despised, in order to give an example of obedience to the law to those young people who had abandoned everything to follow him. What example did he give them? The one that, in certain cases, death is worth more than life, especially when it comes to serving those hidden gods that direct human life, or giving an example of detachment to the living. And, above all, that of the dignity with which he resigned himself to respecting laws in which he surely did not believe because the world, or, at least, the city, had to have an order that would make it work, a structure that Mortals had to obey, even if it was against their personal interests, because it was the only way in which civilization would replace barbarism and humanity would be learning and surpassing itself, until reaching that moral dignity that would make us superior.
This is surely not valid today, because thanks to their atomic bombs, a handful of countries could make all mortals disappear and end the planet we inhabit. Socrates, when he drank the hemlock, that gray and rainy morning, could not even imagine that, one day, the world would be more fragile and vulnerable than what, 25 centuries ago, they called civilization.
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