Epigraph and Day One

 

             Epigraph

“. . . He demonstrated the prowess of his soul; for when he decided that it was better for him to die than to continue to live, just as he never had opposed the other good things in life, he did not show weakness in the face of death, but received death cheerfully and paid his debt in full. As I think of Socrates’ wisdom and nobility, I can not fail to remember him, nor, upon remembering him, can I fail to praise him. If any of the men who pursue virtue has ever encountered anyone more helpful than Socrates, that man, I believe, has a right to be called the happiest man alive.”

Xenophon, a “student” and biographer of Socrates. (The final 121 words of his “Recollections of Socrates and Socrates’ Defense before the Jury” circa 390-360 BCE—as eloquently re-translated by Anna S. Benjamin from the earlier E. G. Marchant Oxford Classical Text Series)

The cultural and intellectual parallels between the fifth century BCE Athenian world of Socrates and the 20^th century world of modern western civilization were oftentimes alluded to by the great 20^th century philosopher Karl Raymond Popper. In 1957 (more than twenty-three centuries after Xenophon), Popper published a book called: “The Poverty of Historicism.” The final “Conclusion, The Emotional Appeal of Historicism” ends with the following words:

“Historicism is a very old movement. . . . Although this divination of hidden purposes is far removed from the scientific way of thinking it has left unmistakable traces upon even the most modern historicist theories. Every version . . . expresses the feeling of being swept into the future by irresistible forces.

“Modern historicists, however, seem to be unaware of the antiquity of their doctrine. They believe . . . that their own brand of historicism is the latest and boldest achievement of the human mind, an achievement so staggeringly novel that only a few people are sufficiently advanced to grasp . . . that it is they who have discovered the problem of change . . . they believe their own advance has been made possible by the fact that we are now ‘living in a revolution’. . . . This story is, of course, sheer mythology . . . since the days of Heraclitus change has been discovered over and over again.

“To present so venerable an idea as bold and revolutionary is, I think, to betray an unconscious conservatism; and we who contemplate this great enthusiasm for change may well wonder whether it is not only one side of an ambivalent attitude, and whether there was not some inner resistance, equally great, to be overcome. If so, this would explain the religious fervor with which this antique and tottering philosophy is proclaimed the latest and thus the greatest revelation of science. May it not, after all, be the historicists who are afraid of change? And is it not, perhaps, this fear of change which makes them so utterly incapable of reacting rationally to criticism, and which makes others so responsive to their teaching . . . as if historicists were trying to compensate themselves for the loss of an unchanging world by clinging to the faith that change can be foreseen because it is ruled by an unchanging law.”

 

             Day One

[Editor’s Note: these memoirs of Socrates were dictated to scribes over the course of twenty-five mornings during which Socrates (convicted of impiety) resided chained to a wall in the prison of Athens awaiting his execution. A complete explanation of its discovery and its translation can be found in the first addendum at the back of the book. A brief outline of the minimally known facts that constituted the previously “understood” version of the life of Socrates will be found in the second addendum which ends with a chronology of the major historical events of his world. The entire Socratic text now follows.]

So here I sit, in this windowless putrid-smelling dungeon carved into the Hill of the Muses west of the Acropolis. And among the many other ironies of my circumstance is this: I am inarguably the most famous living Athenian. Not counting a handful of military figures (such as the devil Lysander) I am arguably the most famous living citizen in all of Hellas. In all of Athenian history, only Alcibiades who died six years ago is more famous today than I am. To most of today’s voting-age citizens, Pericles the Great has become a vague “character” from the distant past. Hardly anyone alive today speaks of him or even remembers his name. At least that’s the way it seems if one reads the pamphlets and listens to the rumors about politics and socially prominent “celebrities,” past or present, the “social gossip story” stuff. For several years now there are more bullshit stories about Socrates than anyone else who ever existed—man, God, or Demigod.

During the last several months when my indictment for “impiety” became a matter of “public” discussion, I should have paid closer attention to the political organizations dedicated to the eradication of this so-called “dangerous educator” of Athenian youths. But even if I had, I would have done nothing different than that which I have always done. As I said to some of my friends weeks before my trial began: “It is as if I were a physician arraigned by a confectioner and tried before a jury of children. My only refuge, my only defense is the factual ‘evidence’ of the innocence with which I have so publicly lived my entire seventy-year life.”

I have an awful lot of lies about me to correct, and only twenty-four or twenty-five or maybe twenty-six days in which to do it. So let me begin with this point: to call me an “educator” is to get the rational subjective point-of-view (or “vision”) of everything backwards. It would be more accurate to call me an “anti-educator.” With the rarest of exceptions, Sophists, professional paid educators, lecture and most especially teach “rhetoric.” I never charge for my time in conversation. I never lecture anybody. I practice the “dialectic.” They speculate and theorize and manufacture fancy words with which to befuddle those less capable of utilizing if not quite “comprehending” such empty sophistry, such sophisticated bullshit. I take the opposite approach: I ask clarification questions along two basic lines of reasoning. I ask questions that enable me to better visualize what I am told about the objective world of nature including human nature, and I ask questions to clarify the precise meaning of the words the “educated” use to describe what they so foolishly believe is “newly discovered” as true about nature or morality.

When I was a boy almost all voting citizens were very skeptical about any “new ideas” being “publicly advocated” with fancy rhetoric used by young articulate “politically active” or “socially prominent” types.

Well, times have changed—and not for the better! People can be made to believe in anything—even irrational ideas about nature or how to advantageously change it, or even “protect” nature from human intervention, so long as it is dramatically and repetitively “discussed” with little, if any, contradiction. The more prestigious the speakers are the more powerful the message. The more educated the sincere believer in the latest theoretical “scientific knowledge” (which always turns out to be extremely generalized and uselessly imprecise if not out and out misleading foolishness) the more sincere the motivation of the believer to spread the word of their “newly discovered” beliefs to the “nonbelievers.” Nowadays, quite a few people can be made to sincerely believe anything crazy. And the more articulate the “true believer” advocate is, the more they find clever verbal ways with which to “justify” an irrational belief in the crazy ideas their dopey “followers” so sincerely believe in. Human nature is what human nature is. Sometimes it’s pretty rational. Not often—but occasionally.

It’s a lot more “fun” going through life, minute-by-minute, with a palpable emotional awareness guiding your consciousness than it is applying reason and logic with the forcible application of “willpower.” After all, there are so many more ways to be “amused” today than there were way back when.

A little over thirty years ago, back at the beginning of the Great War, during the Potidaea campaign, I started to become progressively more generally known in Athens than I had previously been to what few young men had so willingly submitted the “benefit” of their higher education to my dialectic cross-examinations in the public Agora (or happened to be in the area and listening in). That all evolved over the ensuing thirty years.

You have to remember that during many of those war years, the city was crowded with suburban and rural citizens fleeing Spartan occupation of Attica where such non-urbanized citizens normally lived. And so, during the years the Spartan Army faced our Long Walls for many of the years of the Archidamian War, both from social gossip stories circulating when I was not present, and also because of the much larger number of people who crowded the Agora constituting an ever wider audience of my public cross-examinations or “elenchus,” I became progressively more and more “famous.” I can well remember in those Archidamian War years most everybody still knew who Pericles was and almost everybody remembered how free and wealthy and glorious Athens had become before the Peloponnesian League broke the treaty and started the war.

Athenian moral and rational degeneration during that decade was sad enough. But then each of the next two ten-year periods saw Athens degenerate to such a degree that its predecessor decade could pass for a Golden age (of Pericles or otherwise) by contrast.

And oddly enough, each of those decades, saw the “character” called Socrates proliferate ever more through the social gossip stories of Athens. In the last ten or so years, since the first Oligarchical Revolution, the political and social “character” Socrates has actually entered into the written literature. Pamphlets are written not only alleging what I teach, but even fabricating prestigious banquets where the character Socrates converses with famous people of today or even the distant past. They are all bullshit stories of course. I had a few completely private dinners with Pericles and several other famous people, but I never attended one of those fancy so-called “Symposium” public banquets.

Frequently wandering about the Agora as I have always done, it is only in the last six months or so that it has become impossible for me to fail to take conscious note of the vast political organizations and coalitions which have proliferated in our highly politicized snake pit of a postmodern Athens. At first, every anti-Socrates propaganda calumny—whether verbalized rumor or published in some social or political pamphlet only served to amuse me in its dishonesty. We have completely unfettered free speech in Athens, which provides a tremendous amount of security for liars and their lies. It is what it is.

But then, about six months ago, I had an experience that has repeated quite a few times since. The first time it happened I was so dumbfounded I could not stop laughing until the young man went away.

Each time, when I was alone in public, a young man I did not know would approach me, usually when I was all alone walking home from the Agora. He would tell me he wished to inform me, a stranger who might have sons to be educated, how he had been “corrupted” by his education with the Sophist called Socrates. For a while, in several subsequent such encounters I found some amusement in my regular dialectic cross- examination of their incompletely-formed bullshit story.

My wife was frightened by such incidents. After the first two times, I omitted or, at least, toned-down the information.

Well, the purpose of these memoirs is to set the record straight about the real Socrates. In a little while, I will get around to explaining the distribution of the two copies that we are producing here today and in subsequent days.

It would not be possible to go pamphlet by pamphlet with corrections. Practically speaking, everything that has been said and written about me is in whole or in part a lie.

I have real beliefs about what is true and what is good. And I can only explain what I believe is true and what I believe is good in a logical context of space and time. I cannot tell my story without telling it in a rational context of the real history of Athens in particular and Hellas in general. And for twenty years or more now hardly anybody among the citizenry really knows history anymore. The Sophists do not teach history. They lie about things in history but they certainly don’t teach history. How in a rational way can a rational human being understand anything about human politics if they don’t understand history to begin with? If you do not understand history you can be made to believe anything. Human nature is what human nature really is, not some potter’s clay to be molded into human perfection by the educated political leadership of the “best and the brightest.”

If there is one simple thematic truth I have pursued all of my life it is to learn and adapt to that which is true and that which is good. If knowledge of nature, including human nature, is not rationally acquired by reason, it is not reliable knowledge. It may not be knowledge at all—but it certainly is not “reliable knowledge.” Due to its logical implications, it can only lead you astray regardless of your motivation and regardless of your beliefs.

Well, to get back to these memoirs. I like to keep things in a logical context of space and time. It enables me to make sense of things. But then sometimes, it is rather difficult to keep things in a logical context of space and time when it extends over the years. I wish we had a way of calculating. We can’t even in a logically efficient manner count the years in a human lifetime. Each year is officially given the name of the new Eponymous Archon. There is no simple mathematical way of counting or calculating groups of years from one event to another without simply counting on your fingers and toes along a list of annually selected Eponymous Archons.

And we think we are the wisest people in the world. Ask any intellectual “educated” man and he will “explain” all the great mathematicians are of the great Hellenic race. Why those so-called mathematicians can play more meaningless games with “geometric” shapes and angles than any other race. They just can’t seem to find something useful to do with mathematical numbers. Not being even a mathematical expert, let alone a mathematical authority, being just an uneducated layman, I would think great mathematicians would make more use of numbers. Think of how much more efficient life could be if numbers became useful tools in calculating material world useful things. How is it possible to do complex real-world activities intelligently without weighing and counting and measuring things at a minimum? But then I am just a layman

Well to get back to my so-called “memoirs,” I have a wonderful, wonderful memory. It is an absolutely superior memory. My means of calculating the years is to simply remember how old I was when a particular event is being discussed. And when events that occurred before I was born are at issue, well then, I use my mom’s date of birth, or that of my dad. God bless their truly kind immortal souls! Sometimes I use for a reference point the date of birth or death or marriage of any of all four of my grandparents, although I only lived with and really knew my dad’s mom, my grandma—may God eternally bless her immortal soul! She is my true grandma for all eternity.

I want you to know of my family history so that you may truly know who I am and how I came to be. These are the years of my family. My mom was born ninety-four years ago and died at the age of seventy-two. My dad was born 114 years ago and died just before his eightieth birthday.

My mom’s mom was born 112 years ago and died eighty years ago only days after her husband, my maternal grandfather, was mortally wounded as a senior Athenian infantry officer at the battle of Plataea. My mom’s dad was almost fifty-seven when he died a true hero. (Outside the family and not counting Crito, only Pericles and Aspasia ever knew that little piece of knowledge before. I will get around to quite a lot of Pericles’ stuff in good time.)

My grandma that I knew, my dad’s mom, she was born almost twenty-two years before my dad, 136 years ago. And my blessed grandma died when I was almost eight years old. I think I miss her the most. She was so kind and good to me. And we all loved her so very much. My brother (my half-brother actually) Patrocles loved her at least as much as I. (My dad “adopted” him when he finally married my mom. My grandma was not Patrocles’ blood grandma at all. And yet she totally loved him as if he was my full-brother and her equally true grandson by birth.)

And then there is my dad’s dad: Socrates. I’m named for him. Socrates was born 161 years ago. And the old man lived three years past the battle of Plataea. He was eighty-three, almost eighty-four, when he died. Old Socrates lived almost four years longer in lifespan than his son, my dad.

I am the descendent of people who (if violent death can be honorably avoided) live a long, long time. My dad lived eighty years—the last twenty-five with a progressively worsening great deal of pain from all his physical injuries. Like my mom’s dad, old Lamprocles, my dad fought as a hoplite soldier at both Marathon and the other historic victory over the Persians at Plataea. My mom said my dad fought on our left flank at Marathon carrying a huge Spartan shield. She told me that though he was only twenty-three years old he had seriously hurt his shoulder—his left shoulder. And for the rest of his life, year-by-year, it, along with the inevitable back pain that people like us who work with stone tend to acquire, got worse and worse and worse. My dad never spoke in the presence of me or my brother about those two historic battles with two exceptions. They were both at two “private” dinners at Pericles’ table with my mom and me and Pericles’ wife Aspasia during Sophroniscus’ last few years with us.

I am told my dad’s dad, old Socrates, lived the last thirty years of his eighty-three years in this material world, also in a great deal of back pain from the arduous labor of cutting and moving and arranging stone and marble and granite. My brother and I too acquired our inevitable physical injuries from that same arduous labor of cutting and moving and arranging stone and marble and granite. (Crito likes to call it the “construction industry.” That way the work sounds much more sophisticated.)

Just to finish out all the numbers. My dad’s parents were married 115 years ago. My grandma liked to say my dad was born three quarters of a year and fifteen minutes later.

My mom’s parents met each other in Athens after the final Miltiades withdrawal from the Chersonese ninety-four years ago. It supposedly took all of three months for my mom’s parents to marry. (My mom’s mom wanted to wait until she was eighteen). And then it took another three quarters of a year and fifteen minutes more for my blessed mom to be born.

It is just one of the peculiar ironies about my family history that from two days after the battle of Plataea no one in my family ever left the Athenian homeland with the following exceptions: my three military campaigns during the Archidamian War, and that short little trip my mom and my dad and my brother and I took to Delphi along the Sacred Way and back after my grandma died.

But, ironically, if you drop back a bunch of years, my two grandfathers spent almost all of their adult lives (before settling in Athens) outside of the Athenian homeland. My mom’s dad spent almost twenty years in the little army in the Chersonese that Miltiades commanded protecting both sides, but especially the European side of the Hellespont. Everybody knows about the Hellespont. Everybody knows about Troy and Homer and all that stuff. And everybody ought to know to make Homer’s story sensible that’s the route the grain ships take each year from time immemorial, since way before Agamemnon, if there really was an Agamemnon, to keep our race from starving. Starving in part that is; there is always plenty of food for people who have “connections.” Even during Lysander’s blockade when countless people literally starved to death inside the walls of Athens, there was plenty of food available for people who had “connections.”

Well, old Lamprocles (my first son is named after my mom’s dad) signed up in Miltiades’ little army practically right after completing his cadet duties, and spent almost twenty years of his adult life working his way up the officer corps. He hated all the petty social and political disputes back home. He only wanted to do the honorable thing. All my grandparents only wanted to do the honorable thing—“to do the best they can” as my grandma would say. And so my mom’s family, right after her parents married, even before she was born, settled not far from where my dad’s family had been living for years, right near Marble Way in the Alopece deme. And my mom’s dad just stuck to military stuff until he, as the polite euphemism goes, “fell” at Plataea.

My other grandfather, old Socrates, also hated all the petty social and political disputes back home. But being so much older, he had an extra twenty-five years to get started hating all that childish behavior of putative adults. Old Socrates came from a destitute family (that would have thought of any typically “poor” family as a well-off family)—from the poorest area of Attica beyond the hills, actually very close to Brauron where the old tyrant Peisistratus himself had come from.

First, as a very young man, he went up to Thrace to learn mining engineering as a very bright laborer. Over time, he became a very skilled “stonecutter.” He spent most of his life cutting and rearranging stone and marble and granite in innumerable projects all over our world—except in Athens itself. The family briefly returned to Athens to register my dad as a citizen and then took off again. (My dad when he was a little boy, along with his parents, was actually up in the Hellespont area—right in the Miltiades territory—for several of the years that my mom’s dad was an unmarried professional soldier out there.)

And then, a little over 100 years ago, just as the brand-new Cleisthenes Constitution (the one that is coming to an end with my trial and execution you know) was about to go into effect, they all came home, my dad and his parents, and settled near Marble Way, bought the house, opened the business—and we still have them both today. (Previously, you know, old Socrates had spent a lot of time working on the interminable great restoration of Apollo’s Holy Temple at Delphi. You should know of the huge improvement that the Alcmaeonids paid for—for whatever mysteriously disputed motives.) That is how we settled in the deme of Alopece and became a part of the tribe of Antiochus. Or at least that is the story my grandma told me so very many times I could never forget it if I lived 100 lifetimes.

Not that I would have taken her word for it if she just lectured me. My grandma did her best to answer every single question I ever asked her. She loved it when I asked her about the family. She loved it even more when I’d repeat my questions in skeptically different forms, over and over again. That compulsive cross-examination process just happens to be the very kind of “dialectic” that has made me so unpopular among so many pretentiously “educated” people. I drive the world crazy by asking questions. I am trying to visualize what the speaker is telling me in the most rational way I am capable of. So I ask questions. Clarification questions mostly.

Pericles when he was being witty liked to refer to me as the “Master of the Clarification Line of Questioning.” All I am really doing is trying to visualize what I am being told. And once I can visualize what I am being told, I go off in those two areas that always make me most especially unpopular—even temporarily with Crito and my wife both. Once I understand what I am being told, I have to understand the next two questions: “Why?” and also, “How?” How do you know? Where is the real (facts and logic) proof?

My grandma loved it when I did that kind of stuff. And she loved it not just when I did that kind of stuff about the family and its history. But even when I was two or three years old and I asked her what color is the sky? And she told me it is blue, when those clouds are not in the way. So I asked her why? Why is the sky blue, grandma?

Why is the sky blue, grandma?

I miss my sweet grandma so.

(Socrates gasps for air and then briefly weeps.)

I’m sorry I don’t think I can continue anymore today. Thank you very much I’ll see you all tomorrow.

I would like to be alone for a while.

 

 

Bonus Excerpt

 

Still undecided? I have one last “freebie” before you seek out some romance novel to be entertained by, because this is not “your” kind of book. What follows is the thirteenth chapter (“Day Thirteen”) which runs from page 153 through 161 of the entire 353 page text.

Day Thirteen

Today I have a completely new topic to discuss. Today I wish to talk about my stonecutting history.

To many people (such as those on my jury) I am not thought of as anyone having anything to do with stonecutting or the construction industry. The magnitude of free time I have had through much of my adult life (to be able to amuse myself by hanging around the Agora) has apparently made me appear to many members of the Athenian public to be just another version of the highly privileged (and very affluent) social elite.

All the young men who have had the free time (whether they specifically hung around me for laughs or not) to hang around any part of the Agora, for lo’ these many years, have come from very privileged backgrounds. Their families were all rich enough to subsidize their lifestyle, beginning with sending them to (professional educators or) Sophists which can be quite a costly activity

[Cleon the Tanner’s father was so rich, that the son never went anywhere near the family owned “yards,” not even to collect his regular stipend. Anytus the Tanner could never feel secure enough to turn his business interests over to his son to more completely free up his own time to pursue his obsessive political ambitions which were extensive. (Anytus’ son “hung around” with many other useless young rich men in several pure “drinking clubs,” and lacked the ability to stop drinking when it was absolutely necessary. If he has not yet drunk himself to death, it is hard to visualize him failing to do so in the near future.) How sad it is the example of Sophocles could not be followed. His family was extremely rich from the sword-making industry; he richly enjoyed the wealth they provided him; and he wrote the greatest tragedies (with the one exception of “Prometheus”) that have ever been written.]

Having any form of paid (non-professional class, which is to say) regular (or business and commerce type of) gainful employment, other than paid (professional class) lawyer, or even better (professional class) politician-lawyer, or also paid (professional class teacher or) Sophist, is considered beneath the dignity of our social elite. Even physicians are looked down upon by the social elite (when not in dire need of their assistance) as mere “artisans” or “workmen.”

I have often heard it said by the social elite that even a very intelligent slave could more than adequately perform the duties of a physician, and such a concomitantly intelligent slave could, even more easily, perform the duties of a (mere regular reading and writing and social rules and regulations) teacher; however, for such a position as (“prestigious” teacher or) Sophist only a well-respected freeman who charges substantially for his services could be “trusted” to be a true “expert,” or better still “authority.”

As to the idea of following the leadership of a politician who was a slave, or hiring a lawyer who was a slave to represent your legal interests, everybody laughs at that kind of idea, including several slaves to whom I have told the joke. [That would be as silly as giving the responsibility to unregulated, unsupervised helots to secure all of Mardonius’ Persian treasure, the most massive treasure in all of the history of Hellas. Even the treasure of King Priam of Troy, if there really was a King Priam of Troy, was not likely to surpass the treasure of Mardonius. Those were primitive copper age days Homer wrote about! (If there really was only one, so-called, “Homer.”)]

[By the way, only a full-fledged Athenian citizen, rich or poor, has the legal standing to present, or defend, a law case in our city’s court system. Even the noble Spartans, individually or collectively, must be represented in our courts by a legal representative who is an Athenian citizen and is referred to as a Proxenos—I think I mentioned that some time ago.]

I was briefly a student once, a long, long time ago. When I completed my cadet duty, my brother gave me a tremendously generous present. He was already making quite a lot of extra money due to his immense skill as a sculptor. I should point out that every single member of my family in the stonecutting industry (my great-grandfather, my grandfather, my father, my brother, and I) was adequately versatile in all the necessary skills of construction of columns and walls and all the rest of that stuff. If you think that is easy to do, you ought to try it for a week!

The carving of statuary can be a very specialized skill. As I understand it, my brother was pretty generally acknowledged to be a true “genius,” my great-grandfather was the second most skilled (and only a near-genius) and only after them my grandfather and my father both were pretty good also. My work was embarrassing. (I’m just saying that to be ironic, it does not embarrass me at all! I am so proud of all my relatives and ancestors I sometimes feel like I will burst!)

There were two statues of Hermes I carved, sort of. My brother, who did practically all the detailed work in one-tenth of the time it took me to mess things up, made sure my name was attached to each of those two when they were delivered.

Athens is lousy with Hermes statues. Every rich person (and there are an awful lot of rich people) has at least one on their property. Some have more than one. Some of my brother’s statues have been sold overseas—there are rich people all over Hellas! Even my rich friend Crito owns two of our manufactured Hermes statues.

There is nothing particularly unique about a Hermes statue. It is just a nice-looking young man, wearing a funny helmet with wings on each side, and standing in two otherwise ordinary looking shoes, which also are winged. They’re almost always carved naked, with an ordinary sized penis sticking out. (I have never heard of any sculptor who put wings on the penis! In the postmodern era anything would be possible! Standards of decency and decorum are archaic ideas these days.)

[As all the world should know by now, possibly Alcibiades and certainly very many of his drunken friends seemed to find great amusement, in defacing, or more precisely de-penising, quite a few of those (private property) statues shortly before the expedition to Sicily was to set off.]

To me, thanks to Aeschylus’ great play “Prometheus,” Hermes will always be the “lackey,” or brown nose, of Zeus, the thunder God, the God of loud noises, who scares the shit out of people, especially children. And I guess you have figured out by now, though there may have been a real Agamemnon once upon a time, to my view of religious thought, Zeus is not a spiritual force but a powerful superstitious human fear turned into a pseudo-God.

[The Gamma Man is kind of a divine messenger too—only he is as real as any religious truth I believe to be “True.” But I’m still not ready to talk about him yet.]

As you probably know, for a working stonecutter I have spent an awful lot of time in the Agora. In the last fifteen years of his life, when heavy labor was physically impossible, my dad used to like to go to the business and see how things were going. My brother really ran the business for over twenty-five years right on up to the end when he got sick from yet another plague and died. For almost all his working life, my brother stayed in the yard, ran the business, and carved statuary. My brother is the one who made it possible for me to spend so much time in the Agora.

My regular routine for much of my blessed adult life was to drag my brother early in the morning to go publicly exercise and then he would decide whether he needed me in the yard that morning. I know I mentioned my brother had a very, very bad stuttering problem and obviously had difficulty speaking with new customers or new vendors or even new apprentices and other employees.

I am also pretty good at calculating. Even back when my dad was still actively really running the place, he sometimes would talk over with me how to work out a project and manage it financially.

My dear friend Crito, who has been a half-owner of our business for about three decades, has been managing the running of the business (of our business) all the time (with a small expenditure of his very valuable time). He is too nice a man, and needs my “coaching,” once in a while, so as to better understand how to judge the “character” of employees and vendors and customers, and that extends beyond the construction industry to many of his other business investments. No one can be perfect in judging human character, certainly not me, but I am pretty good at it.

So, starting at a very early adult age, after morning exercise with my brother, I either went to the yard with him (and my dad too for many years) to straighten out business stuff, or go wander around the Agora (and drive pretentious people crazy with all my questions). We all met at home for the midday meal, which gave my brother another opportunity to call me into the yard for the afternoon of work. My brother was so good to me, he rarely interrupted my fun. Everyone in the family enjoyed immensely my “bragging” about how foolish I had made the day’s pretenders seem. Dinner conversation was my time to shine at home. Nobody loved it more or laughed more joyously than my brother.

[Our whole family knew (from well before I was born) that in public places, the pointing and social ridicule and laughter at my mom’s once beautiful and now disfigured face got my brother to begin his lifetime problem of stuttering when he was very, very little and barely knew how to speak at all as a small child. Older children can be extraordinarily cruel until discipline (and minimally adequate reprimands) civilizes them into adults. How else are they to learn to treat other people—especially much older or more vulnerable people—in a manner they would prefer to be treated in such circumstances, especially at a minimum, courteously?

[And eighteen to fifty year-old assholes can be the worst form of so-called “children.” In those old (but thanks to the Cleisthenes Constitution modern Athens) days, that type of behavior towards my mom by putative adults was very rare but nonetheless present. (After all, we are the socially, as well as politically, freest city in all of Hellas. People are even free to be rude!) In postmodern Athens, such socially competitive (and therefore psychologically cruel) behavior likely would be close to the common pattern among an incalculable number of younger people in the public places, like the Agora.]

So I guess this is a good point, to inform the world how I was once a student of a so-called Sophist. As I said earlier, I had just completed my cadet duties when my brother gave me a course in “nature” and “science” taught by a young Sophist named Archelaus. He had been a student of the first great genius Sophist, Anaxagoras, the empirical scientist. (Anaxagoras had been Pericles first teacher.)

There were three lessons I learned best from Archelaus. The first one was: objective science (or empiricism) is based on accurate observation and (repetitive) skeptical testing and precise calculation and we have an awful lot to learn about accurate observation and testing and calculation to be really good at it. (About all that we are empirically capable of calculating these days is weighing and counting and measuring lengths.)

The second lesson was (religion and morality and) character cannot be removed, or isolated, or separated, or compartmentalized away from a rational understanding of all aspects of human life, if we are to be truly rational and truly human. There are an awful lot of decisions and choices and judgments to make going through life; and I like to think (sincerely believe), rightly or wrongly, that being as rational and in context with the truth about human nature is an absolute minimum requirement for us to arrive at rational judgments. It, along with logic, is what makes epistemology reliable and understandable and useful! (Or you could do what most people do these days: let emotion or social leadership lead you to what “your” choice or judgment or decision is. Your free-will will take you where you truly want to be—however irrationally!)

And the third lesson was I would get more reliable knowledge and wisdom from carefully reading and rereading all the textbooks that any truly useful teacher had to teach with. When you sit in a class with other students, however small the class may be, there is less learning and more social conformity to the authority of the teacher than just about anybody can comprehend. (Pericles was blessed to be born very, very wealthy and therefore had a personal relationship with all his teachers starting with the great Anaxagoras himself.)

(From private study, I would also more clearly see how foolish most of the Sophists and most of their textbooks truly are by reading and rereading and independently skeptically thinking about the inconsistencies and contradictions which rational comparisons uncover.)

You know, Crito, this is a perfect position to insert that scientific experiment I was able to perform on the ship going up to Amphipolis and again on the ship coming home from Amphipolis.

[Crito speaks: If you remember my friend, I was not an observer of either of those experiments of yours. On both voyages, I was leaning over the side of the ship (downwind after the first mistake) and vomiting pretty consistently.]

[Socrates resumes speaking.]

Well, I described it for you with great excitement both times. If you remember my friend, I had noticed almost ten years earlier when I was first shipped up to Potidaea, and even more acutely when I was shipped home from Potidaea that our “scientific experts” had their heads up their asses when the topic involved falling objects that do not float in the air.

All the scientific experts and all the scientific authorities will swear to anybody that it is a “scientific fact,” that if an object that does not float in the air falls on a moving ship, it will land anywhere but exactly under the location from which it was dropped. It will at least land slightly to the rear however slowly the ship is moving. The faster the ship moves over the water, the farther back the object will land.

It is considered such a “certain fact” in the “conventional wisdom” of the (scientific) Sophist educated classes that no one has ever tested it. They usually “explain” it by saying everything connected to the moving ship moves at the speed of the moving ship. If the object is falling it is not connected to the moving ship! It has been my experience, that seven out of ten of these assholes then give you a dirty look for asking such a “stupid” question.

Well, I tested it, quite a few times in fact. Sailors are often climbing up the mast to attend to sails and such. I noticed on my first two voyages, when objects fell, barring a powerful wind, they landed exactly under where they had been dropped. I thought that was a very peculiar and interesting anomaly.

On my last two voyages, several young seamen, climbed up the mast or the rigging and dropped objects at my request. They were all pretty much surprised at what they had not noticed before. (Sailors and every other kind of human being are always dropping things.)

When I explained to the young men how the “scientific experts and authorities” all swore that could not happen, they all had the exact same two-part reaction. We all shared laughs at the arrogant stupidity of the scientific experts and scientific authorities. And every single one of them told me not to say anything about it to anybody else. (Contradicting seriously prestigious authorities is a very dangerous activity.)

So I guess I ought to tell you what type of stonecutting skills I actually possessed. I don’t want to brag by claiming I was anywhere near as good as Sophroniscus, or old Socrates, or Menexenus at walls or columns or basic construction, but physically as well as visually I was better than my brother. I think I was better visually (or by design) because of the physical movements that I was comfortable doing when I did my share of the physical labor.

In sheer physical strength, only my dad and my grandfather each was slightly stronger than me. Apparently Menexenus was only slightly less strong than I. All four of us have often been described as “strong as an ox.” (All four of us have usually been considered, by varied standards of aesthetics to be pretty ugly, and not just because we are all very broad-boned.)

My brother was average in bone structure, average in strength, and almost as handsome as Alcibiades himself. He was at least as handsome as the famous Charmides.

My brother was injured at the earliest age trying to lift things and move things that were clearly too heavy for the average-sized teenager that he was at the time. My dad made Patrocles concentrate on statuary once we came back from Delphi. And as for my brother’s artistic skills, well, they just got better with age.

Once the legislative authorization for the construction of the Long Walls had been achieved my brother (very carefully, even delicately) tried to do some of the regular construction work. It was a huge project and he still hurt himself more and more. (He was fortunate not to have been seriously hurt during the hasty earlier construction project in the Megarid, at the time of Tanagra.)

I was a teenager when I started doing that kind of basic construction work too. My first teenage injury was a little unusual for a stonecutter. I was in a bent over position lowering a heavy weight when I heard loud cracking noises from my upper back. A little while later I experienced the typical lower back pain that all stonecutters know. But my subsequent serious injuries didn’t start until I was well into my twenties. That’s usually the way it works. The lower back pain problem, well, it comes and goes. The upper back pains that would come and go (and get worse over time in my body) started in my thirties. They are unique for a stonecutter, and have made the working on columns that I love so much impossible to perform for a very long time. There are a lot of rotation functions you have to perform in making columns that I have been incapable of performing for a very, very long time

My dad’s first real serious injury was when his shoulder was overly stressed (you could say) when being battered on the far left-wing at Marathon at the age of twenty-three. I cannot be too specific about my granddad or my great-granddad’s much more typical evolved injuries other than to say it started slightly in their twenties, got partially worse in their thirties, and followed a kind of normal pattern. By the time you get to be fifty years of age, everything gets worse faster, with or without further injury, with alternating periods of either peace if you are very lucky, or painful stability if you are merely lucky, over time.

[The human body is what the human body is. I’m recording all of this information like an empirical scientist documenting what is presently useless but maybe someday useful and reliable knowledge to real scientists practicing logical empirical science.]

Neither of those two older men did heavy lifting until they were in their twenties, because they were not fortunate enough to be the son of a stonecutter they could accompany to the yard as a teenager. And I’m not kidding about being fortunate—I surely feel I was and so did my brother! Both of us for every single day of our lives!

In time, even without more injuries, these kinds of pains grow worse. The physical debilitation (of movement as well as pain and other forms of perception) usually comes much, much later in life. But it will come, you can count on it!

Anyway, that’s pretty much the stonecutting personal history. Even in the best of circumstances, it is a physically difficult life. It tends to make people appreciate the good parts of their life, what the material world has “blessed” them with, in a way that people who have things handed to them rarely understand. Only exceptionally good moral training, such as Pericles obviously received from his parents and his Sophists, is likely to give a person temperance and humility, without which everything always turns to shit!