The battle of Potidaea was fought in the summer or early autumn of 432 BCE outside the walls of Potidaea, a Corinthian colony on the isthmus of Pallene in Chalcidice that paid tribute to Athens, between an Athenian army under Callias son of Calliades and the Potidaeans, reinforced by volunteers from Corinth and mercenaries from the Peloponnese under Aristeus son of Adimantus and supported by the neighbouring Chalcidians and by Perdiccas II, king of Macedon. The Athenians won the field, lost their general and about a hundred and fifty citizens, and began a siege that lasted until the winter of 430/29 and cost Athens two thousand talents — a talent being six thousand drachmae of silver, enough to pay a warship’s crew for a month.
With the affair of Corcyra, the siege gave Corinth its case against Athens at Sparta in the months before the Peloponnesian War, the war of 431–404 between Athens and its empire and Sparta and its allies, whose history Thucydides, an Athenian general, wrote and is the chief source for everything that follows.
The battle is remembered for three things besides its place among the war’s causes. First, Socrates served in it, aged about thirty-seven, as a hoplite, a heavy-armed citizen infantryman who supplied his own armour; and there, according to the speech that Plato gives Alcibiades in the Symposium — a dialogue written in the 380s and set at a drinking party of 416, where each guest speaks in praise of Love — he saved the life and the arms of the wounded Alcibiades, the ward of Pericles who was then a young man of about nineteen and would become the most brilliant and least trustworthy general of his generation. When the generals, out of regard for Alcibiades’ rank, wanted to give the young man the prize of valour that Socrates had earned, Socrates urged them to do so. In Plato’s telling the rescue is the public proof of the virtue that Alcibiades had found hidden in Socrates: a lover who shields the beloved and asks nothing back, not even the prize, and who could save the young man’s life but not his character.
Second, the same speech records the frost through which Socrates walked barefoot and the summer day and night through which he stood motionless in thought before praying to the rising sun, and Plato’s Charmides opens with his return from the camp to a wrestling-school in Athens, where the first question put to him is how he survived the fighting.
Third, the Athenian dead of the battle were buried at home under a public epigram, now in the British Museum, which declares that “Aither received the souls” of the fallen and — in a probable restoration of the broken line — the earth their bodies. It is the earliest dated statement, on a monument of the Athenian state, of a doctrine of the soul’s ascent to the upper air that the tragic poet Euripides would repeat within a decade and that Plato’s later followers would make their own.1
The city and the crisis#
A Corinthian colony in the Athenian empire#
Potidaea was founded by Corinth about 600 BCE on the isthmus that joins Pallene, the westernmost of the three prongs of Chalcidice, to the mainland, a site that gave it a share in the trade with Macedonia and the interior; the tradition that its founder was Evagoras, a son of the Corinthian tyrant Periander, rests on a fragment of Nicolaus of Damascus, a historian of the first century BCE. After the Persian Wars it joined the Delian League, the Athenian-led alliance against Persia whose members paid a yearly tribute and which had become, by the 440s, an Athenian empire; in the inscribed lists that record the sixtieth of each city’s tribute dedicated to Athena, Potidaea is assessed at six talents. A rise to fifteen talents shortly before the crisis has been proposed, but the line of the tribute list on which it rests is disputed between Potidaea and its neighbour Scione. What made Potidaea unlike every other tributary city was that it had never loosened its tie to its mother city: Corinth still sent it magistrates every year. Thucydides introduces the Potidaeans, when the trouble begins, as those “who inhabit the isthmus of Pallene, being a Corinthian colony, but tributary allies of Athens”. A city that paid Athens and was governed by Corinthians could remain at peace with itself only so long as Athens and Corinth were at peace with each other.2
The Athenian demands and the revolt (433–432)#
They ceased to be at peace in 433, when Athens intervened in Corinth’s quarrel with its rebellious colony Corcyra and Athenian ships fought Corinthian ships at Sybota. Thucydides moves at once from Corcyra to Potidaea: “Almost immediately after this, fresh differences arose between the Athenians and Peloponnesians, and contributed their share to the war. Corinth was forming schemes for retaliation, and Athens suspected her hostility.” The Athenians, “immediately after the battle at Corcyra”, sent Potidaea an order in three parts. The Potidaeans “were ordered to raze the wall looking towards Pallene, to give hostages, to dismiss the Corinthian magistrates, and in future not to receive the persons sent from Corinth annually to succeed them. It was feared that they might be persuaded by Perdiccas and the Corinthians to revolt, and might draw the rest of the allies in the direction of Thrace to revolt with them.” (Thucydides’ “Thrace” is the whole northern coast of the Aegean, Chalcidice included; the Thracian kingdom proper lay inland to the east.) The motive, in Thucydides’ own word, was fear, and the revolt the order was meant to forestall had not yet happened.
Besides Corinth, a second power was working on Potidaea: Perdiccas II, king of Macedon. Once Athens’ ally, he had turned enemy when Athens allied itself with his rivals, his brother Philip and Derdas, a prince of upper Macedonia, and he worked on three fronts at once. He sent to Sparta “to try and involve the Athenians in a war with the Peloponnesians”, he tried “to win over Corinth in order to bring about the revolt of Potidaea”, and he made overtures to the Chalcidians and to the Bottiaeans, a neighbouring people. Athens was already sending against him “thirty ships and a thousand heavy infantry … under the command of Archestratus, son of Lycomedes”, and it instructed these commanders “to take hostages of the Potidaeans, to raze the wall, and to be on their guard against the revolt of the neighbouring cities”. The Potidaeans negotiated on both sides. They sent “envoys to Athens on the chance of persuading them to take no new steps in their matters”, and they “also went to Lacedaemon with the Corinthians to secure support in case of need” — Lacedaemon being Sparta. Three things decided them: the failure of “prolonged negotiation” at Athens, the knowledge that the ships for Macedonia would sail against them too, and a promise from the Spartan authorities — “a promise to invade Attica, if the Athenians should attack Potidaea”, Attica being the home territory of Athens — and so they “at last entered into league with the Chalcidians and Bottiaeans, and revolted”. Perdiccas meanwhile persuaded the Chalcidians “to abandon and demolish their towns on the seaboard and, settling inland at Olynthus, to make that one city a strong place”, and gave them land round Lake Bolbe for the duration of the war. Diodorus of Sicily, writing four centuries later, tells the story the other way round, with Corinth inciting the revolt and Athens reacting to it, and says nothing of the demands; Thucydides’ order of events — demand, negotiation, revolt — stands alone in the sources but is detailed, and modern historians have followed it while disagreeing about where the blame lies.3
The campaign, the battle and the siege#
The armies#
When Archestratus reached the northern coast he “found Potidaea and the rest in revolt”, judged it “quite impossible with their present force to carry on war with Perdiccas and with the confederate towns as well”, and went on to Macedonia, where he took Therme and laid siege to Pydna. Corinth’s help came at arm’s length, as “volunteers from Corinth, and mercenaries from the rest of Peloponnese, to the number of sixteen hundred heavy infantry in all, and four hundred light troops”, under “Aristeus, son of Adimantus, who was always a steady friend to the Potidaeans”, so that “it was principally for love of him that most of the men from Corinth volunteered”; they “arrived in Thrace forty days after the revolt of Potidaea”. Thucydides later calls the whole Corinthian involvement “a private enterprise on the part of Corinth”, which is why, in his reckoning, the war had not yet begun. Athens answered with a second force, “two thousand heavy infantry of their own citizens and forty ships … under the command of Callias, son of Calliades, and four colleagues”. Callias joined the siege of Pydna and then “came to terms and concluded a forced alliance with Perdiccas, hastened by the calls of Potidaea and by the arrival of Aristeus at that place”. The two Athenian forces, now united, marched overland “with three thousand heavy infantry of their own citizens, besides a number of their allies, and six hundred Macedonian horsemen, the followers of Philip and Pausanias” — Macedonian princes opposed to Perdiccas — while “seventy ships” sailed along the coast. “Advancing by short marches, on the third day they arrived at Gigonus, where they encamped.” The route Thucydides gives, “to Beroea and thence to Strepsa”, is a known difficulty, since Beroea lies inland away from the road, and the modern scholar A. G. Woodhead proposed that the “Beroea” of the medieval copies conceals Brea, the Athenian colony whose name “soon became unknown”.4
The battle before the walls (432)#
Thucydides describes the dispositions before the battle in some detail. The Potidaeans and Aristeus’ Peloponnesians “were encamped on the side looking towards Olynthus on the isthmus, in expectation of the Athenians, and had established their market outside the city”. The allies made Aristeus general of all the infantry and gave the cavalry to Perdiccas, “who had at once left the alliance of the Athenians and gone back to that of the Potidaeans”. Aristeus’ plan was a trap: he would hold the isthmus with his own force while the Chalcidians, the allies from outside the isthmus and Perdiccas’ two hundred horse waited at Olynthus, some seven miles off and in sight of the city, ready to march when a signal was raised and “to act upon the Athenian rear, on the occasion of their advancing against him; and thus to place the enemy between two fires”. Callias parried it by sending the Macedonian horse of Philip and Pausanias, who were fighting for Athens, “and a few of the allies to Olynthus, to prevent any movement being made from that quarter”, and marched on Potidaea with the rest.
The battle divided at once into two actions. “After they had arrived at the isthmus, and saw the enemy preparing for battle, they formed against him, and soon afterwards engaged. The wing of Aristeus, with the Corinthians and other picked troops round him, routed the wing opposed to it, and followed for a considerable distance in pursuit. But the rest of the army of the Potidaeans and of the Peloponnesians was defeated by the Athenians, and took refuge within the fortifications.” Aristeus came back from his pursuit to find the field lost and himself cut off. “Being at a loss which of the two risks to choose, whether to go to Olynthus or to Potidaea, he at last determined to draw his men into as small a space as possible, and force his way with a run into Potidaea. Not without difficulty, through a storm of missiles, he passed along by the breakwater through the sea, and brought off most of his men safe, though a few were lost.” The relief from Olynthus came forward when the signals went up, was faced by the Macedonian horse, and withdrew when victory declared for the Athenians and the signals were taken down: each side had cavalry in the field, and neither engaged, so that, as Thucydides notes, “there were no cavalry present on either side”. “After the battle the Athenians set up a trophy” — a battlefield monument of captured armour — “and gave back their dead to the Potidaeans under truce. The Potidaeans and their allies had close upon three hundred killed; the Athenians a hundred and fifty of their own citizens, and Callias their general.”5
The date depends on a single numeral. Thucydides says that the Theban attack on Plataea that opened the war, at the beginning of spring 431, fell “in the sixth month after the battle at Potidaea”, which puts the battle in about September 432, and most historians keep the text as it stands; H. M. Hubbell, anchoring the campaign in the Athenian treasury accounts of 432/1, put it on 7 September. Others have changed the numeral, supposing a copyist’s slip: A. B. West read “tenth” and dated the battle to mid-May 432, and Felix Jacoby, accepting an older conjecture, moved it back to November–December 433. “Summer or early autumn 432” follows the text as it has come down.6
The blockade and the war in Chalcidice#
The Athenians walled off Potidaea from the isthmus side at once but not from Pallene, since “they did not think themselves strong enough at once to keep a garrison in the isthmus and to cross over to Pallene and raise works there”. Athens then sent a second army, “sixteen hundred heavy infantry of their own citizens under the command of Phormio, son of Asopius”, who made Aphytis on Pallene his base, “led his army against Potidaea by short marches, ravaging the country as he advanced”, and, “No one venturing to meet him in the field”, raised works against the wall on that side too. “So at length Potidaea was strongly invested on either side, and from the sea by the ships cooperating in the blockade.” Aristeus proposed that all but five hundred should leave by sea so that the food would last, offering to stay himself; when the Potidaeans refused he slipped through the guardships and carried on the war from outside, ambushing the people of nearby Sermylia and appealing to the Peloponnese for help. Phormio’s men ravaged Chalcidice and Bottice and took some towns, and were later withdrawn. The blockading force of three thousand hoplites was kept at that strength to the end, each man drawing “two drachmae a day, one for himself and another for his servant”, a drachma being a day’s wage. In the autumn of 431 Thucydides counts Athens’ ten thousand heavy infantry “besides the three thousand before Potidaea”, and Pericles, the city’s leading statesman, reviewing the reserves in the same year, named the siege, with the new gateway of the Acropolis and the other public buildings, among the drains on the nine thousand seven hundred talents that had once lain in the treasury.7
The siege turned a private enterprise into a public cause. Corinth’s grievance was “that her colony of Potidaea, and Corinthian and Peloponnesian citizens within it, were being besieged”; Athens’ was that the Peloponnesians “had incited a town of hers, a member of her alliance and a contributor to her revenue, to revolt, and had come and were openly fighting against her on the side of the Potidaeans”. Corinth “had men inside it: besides, she feared for the place”, and, summoning the allies to Sparta, “she came and loudly accused Athens of breach of the treaty” — the Thirty Years’ Peace of 446/5 between Athens and Sparta. The Corinthian speech names Potidaea as a place that “lies most conveniently for any action against the Thracian towns” and ends by demanding that Sparta “assist your allies and Potidaea in particular, as you promised, by a speedy invasion of Attica”; and in the embassies that followed the Spartan vote for war the demand to “raise the siege of Potidaea” stood beside freedom for Aegina, an island Athens had subjected, and the repeal of the decree that barred Megarians from the harbours and markets of the empire. Thucydides is careful to distinguish these stated occasions from what he calls the truest cause, Sparta’s fear of Athenian power; but they were the occasions, and Pericles, refusing them all, told the Athenians that Sparta had dropped “the tone of expostulation” for “that of command”.8
Hagnon, the plague and the capitulation (430–429)#
In the summer of 430 Hagnon son of Nicias and Cleopompus son of Clinias took the armament that Pericles had just used against the Peloponnese “against the Chalcidians in the direction of Thrace and Potidaea, which was still under siege”, brought up siege engines “and tried every means of taking it, but did not succeed”. They had brought with them the epidemic that had broken out in Athens that summer. It “attacked them here also, and committed such havoc as to cripple them completely, even the previously healthy soldiers of the former expedition catching the infection from Hagnon’s troops”; Hagnon “returned with his ships to Athens, having lost one thousand and fifty out of four thousand heavy infantry in about forty days; though the soldiers stationed there before remained in the country and carried on the siege of Potidaea”. The same summer ended Aristeus. He was travelling with Spartan envoys to the king of Persia by way of Thrace, partly to persuade the Thracian king Sitalces “to march on Potidaea then besieged by an Athenian force”, when Sitalces’ son had the party seized and handed to the Athenians. The Athenians, “afraid that Aristeus, who had been notably the prime mover in the previous affairs of Potidaea and their Thracian possessions, might live to do them still more mischief if he escaped”, killed him and the envoys the same day, “without giving them a trial or hearing the defence which they wished to offer, and cast their bodies into a pit”.9
The end came in the following winter. “The same winter the Potidaeans at length found themselves no longer able to hold out against their besiegers. The inroads of the Peloponnesians into Attica had not had the desired effect of making the Athenians raise the siege. Provisions there were none left; and so far had distress for food gone in Potidaea that, besides a number of other horrors, instances had even occurred of the people having eaten one another. So in this extremity they at last made proposals for capitulating to the Athenian generals in command against them—Xenophon, son of Euripides, Hestiodorus, son of Aristocleides, and Phanomachus, son of Callimachus.” (This Xenophon, an Athenian general, is not the writer Xenophon, Socrates’ pupil, nor is his father the tragic poet.) The generals accepted, “seeing the sufferings of the army in so exposed a position; besides which the state had already spent two thousand talents upon the siege”. The terms gave “a free passage out for themselves, their children, wives and auxiliaries, with one garment apiece, the women with two, and a fixed sum of money for their journey”. The Potidaeans dispersed to Chalcidice and elsewhere. The Athenians “blamed the generals for granting terms without instructions from home”, thinking that the city would have had to surrender unconditionally, and “afterwards sent settlers of their own to Potidaea, and colonized it” — a thousand of them, according to Diodorus, who alone gives a number. The next summer Xenophon led two thousand hoplites against the Chalcidians and was routed at Spartolus, “four hundred and thirty men and all the generals having fallen”; the survivors took refuge in Potidaea, now an Athenian town.10
The Athenian settlement did not endure. The city was taken by the Athenian general Timotheus in the 360s and received Athenian cleruchs — citizens settled on confiscated land abroad — by a decree of 362/1. Philip II of Macedon, Alexander’s father, captured it in 356, sold its people into slavery and gave the site to the Olynthians, and about 316 Cassander, who ruled Macedon after Alexander, absorbed it into his new foundation of Cassandreia, which united “the cities of the peninsula, Potidaea, and a considerable number of the neighbouring towns”. The classical circuit that the Athenians besieged has left little above ground; the cross-wall that runs across the isthmus today is late Roman and Byzantine, and a canal was cut beside it in 1935–37.11
Socrates at Potidaea#
The sources and the dates#
Thucydides does not mention Socrates, and nearly everything known of his service at Potidaea comes from Plato and from writers who read Plato; the one exception is a fragment of Antisthenes, a companion of Socrates, discussed below. Three passages of Plato concern Potidaea, and a fourth vouches for Socrates’ courage at Delium, the Athenian defeat by the Boeotians in 424. In the Symposium, set at the party the poet Agathon gave in 416 for his victory in the tragic competition, Alcibiades, drunk and reproachful, gives an account of Socrates on campaign that runs from the messes of Potidaea to the retreat from Delium. The Charmides opens with Socrates himself, narrating. “We arrived yesterday evening from the army at Potidaea, and I sought with delight, after an absence of some time, my wonted conversations.” He goes into the wrestling-school of Taureas, and his devoted friend Chaerephon, “like the mad creature that he is”, runs to him and asks, “Socrates, he said, how did you survive the battle?” Athens has heard, Chaerephon says, “that the battle was very severe, and that many of our acquaintance have lost their lives in it”, and Socrates answers, “Then the report, I replied, is pretty near the truth.” Later in the same dialogue Socrates claims to have learnt, “on campaign over there”, a charm for the headache “from one of the Thracian physicians of Zalmoxis, who are said even to make one immortal”, whose king and god “says that as you ought not to attempt to cure eyes without head, or head without body, so you should not treat body without soul”; the charm turns out to be the conversation about self-control that fills the rest of the dialogue. In the Apology, Plato’s version of Socrates’ speech at his trial in 399, Socrates names Potidaea among the three campaigns in which he stayed where his commanders posted him. And in the Laches, Plato’s dialogue on courage, the general Laches vouches for Socrates’ conduct at Delium. Later writers add to these: Plutarch’s Life of Alcibiades (c. 100 CE); Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers (third century CE); and the fifth book of Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists (c. 200 CE), which preserves both the fragment of Antisthenes and a polemic against the whole story.12
The dates are secure within a year. Socrates was born in 469/8, “in the archonship of Apsephion, in the fourth year of the 77th Olympiad, on the 6th day of the month of Thargelion”, as Diogenes Laertius reports from Apollodorus, and he tells his jurors in 399 that he is seventy; he was therefore thirty-six or thirty-seven in the summer of 432. Alcibiades, whom Plutarch calls “still a stripling” at Potidaea and who is “as yet barely twenty years old” in the First Alcibiades, the dialogue ascribed to Plato in which Socrates first approaches him, was about eighteen to twenty, born around 452–450. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s chronology, by Debra Nails and S. Sara Monoson, states the consensus: “Both Socrates and Alcibiades were posted that summer, 432, to Potidaea to put down a revolt, Socrates as a footsoldier (hoplite).” How long Socrates stayed is another matter. Alcibiades’ narrative requires at least one winter in the camp, “in those parts the winters are awful”, and one summer, and the Charmides has Socrates come home “after an absence of some time” after a severe battle of which Athens had “only just had news”. The usual assumption identifies that battle with the battle of 432. Christopher Planeaux has argued instead that the two dialogues describe different engagements: the battle of the Symposium, in which Alcibiades was decorated, is the battle of 432 under Callias, while the battle of the Charmides, after which the army was sent home, is the disaster at Spartolus in May 429. On that reading Socrates “returned from Potidaea in the last weeks of May 429” after nearly three years’ continuous service, and the Charmides “has not only an historical setting but a very precise and accurate historical setting”. Against it may be set Plato’s own words: the Charmides battle was “at Potidaea”, whereas Thucydides puts the Spartolus fighting under the walls of Spartolus, with the Athenians taking refuge in Potidaea afterwards. The orator Isocrates, in a court speech written for Alcibiades’ son about 397, On the Team of Horses, ties the father’s decoration to a different phase again: “when Phormio led a thousand of the flower of Athenian soldiers to Thrace, my father served with this expedition, and so distinguished himself in the perilous actions of the campaign that he was crowned and received a full suit of armour from his general”. Phormio, in Thucydides, arrived after the battle with sixteen hundred men, and no battle is recorded under his command; a court speech need not be exact, and the discrepancy is Planeaux’s chief objection to the Isocratean version.13
That Socrates served as a hoplite at all is a puzzle of its own. He professed “vast poverty”, and the writer Xenophon, in the Oeconomicus, values his whole property, house included, at five minae — five hundred drachmae, a year and a half of a labourer’s wages. The modern scholar Mark Anderson, who has examined the question, concludes that under either the old property classes that decided who served as a hoplite or the classical cost of a full set of armour “Socrates would not have qualified for hoplite service”, and that his service is the record of a man who “believed in Athenian hoplite culture” and “admired and aspired to live up to the aristocratic ideal of the kalokagathos”, the “beautiful-and-good” gentleman. On the same evidence Anderson observes that Socrates’ “imperviousness to the elements, his frugality, moderation, and powers of concentration became widely known at Potidaea, as did his intimate association with Alcibiades”.14
Endurance: hunger, frost and the standing from dawn to dawn#
Alcibiades tells the campaign as a rising scale of endurance. He has just described the night on which Socrates refused his advances, and he goes on: “Now all this, you know, had already happened to me when we later went on a campaign together to Potidaea; and there we were messmates.” First hunger: “whenever we were cut off in some place and were compelled, as often in campaigns, to go without food, the rest of us were nowhere in point of endurance”. Then wine, which Socrates drank only when overruled and which never overcame him: “no man has ever yet seen Socrates drunk”. Then the cold. “But it was in his endurance of winter — in those parts the winters are awful — that I remember, among his many marvellous feats, how once there came a frost about as awful as can be: we all preferred not to stir abroad, or if any of us did, we wrapped ourselves up with prodigious care, and after putting on our shoes we muffled up our feet with felt and little fleeces. But he walked out in that weather, clad in just such a coat as he was always wont to wear, and he made his way more easily over the ice unshod than the rest of us did in our shoes. The soldiers looked askance at him, thinking that he despised them.” The word that governs the passage is karteria, endurance; Alcibiades introduces the next feat with Helen’s line about Odysseus in the Odyssey, “the valiant deed our strong-souled hero dared”, and the feat is not a fight but a thought. “Immersed in some problem at dawn, he stood in the same spot considering it; and when he found it a tough one, he would not give it up but stood there trying. The time drew on to midday, and the men began to notice him, and said to one another in wonder: ‘Socrates has been standing there in a study ever since dawn!’ The end of it was that in the evening some of the Ionians after they had supped — this time it was summer — brought out their mattresses and rugs and took their sleep in the cool; thus they waited to see if he would go on standing all night too. He stood till dawn came and the sun rose; then walked away, after offering a prayer to the Sun.”15
Plato’s words for the standing are words for thinking and searching, not for rapture, and he presents the behaviour as habitual. On the way to Agathon’s house Socrates drops behind, absorbed in his own thoughts, and stands in a neighbour’s porch, and his follower Aristodemus explains that “it is a habit he has. Occasionally he turns aside, anywhere at random, and there he stands.” The prayer to the rising sun is ordinary Greek piety, of the kind that Socrates in the Apology claims to share with everyone else when he asks whether he is thought not to believe, like other men, that the sun and moon are gods. Plato’s Laws describe “the prostrations and devotions of all the Greeks and barbarians” at “the rising and setting of the sun and moon”. Later antiquity filed the standing under bodily endurance, but in words that the Renaissance would take literally. Diogenes Laertius records that at Potidaea Socrates “is said to have remained a whole night without changing his position”. The Roman writer Aulus Gellius, in the second century CE, citing the philosopher Favorinus, put it in a chapter on how Socrates trained himself in physical endurance: he would stand “from early dawn until the next sunrise, open-eyed, motionless, in his very tracks and with face and eyes riveted to the same spot in deep meditation, as if his mind and soul had been, as it were, withdrawn from his body” — in Gellius’ Latin, tamquam quodam secessu mentis atque animi facto a corpore — and Favorinus said that “He often stood from sun to sun, more rigid than the tree trunks.” Marsilio Ficino, the Florentine who translated Plato into Latin in the fifteenth century, dropped Gellius’ “as it were”. In his Platonic Theology, a treatise on the immortality of the soul, he set the standing among the proofs that the soul can withdraw from the body, after the fifty-year sleep of the Cretan seer Epimenides and the retreats of Pythagoras and Zoroaster: “Socrates, ut scribit Plato, a solis ortu usque ad solem alterum orientem inconnivens, immobilis, iisdem vestigiis et ore atque oculis in eumdem locum directis cogitabundus et abstractus a corpore stabat” — “Socrates, as Plato writes, stood from one sunrise to the next, unblinking, motionless, in the same tracks, his face and eyes fixed on one spot, deep in thought and withdrawn from the body.” The Latin copies Gellius almost word for word, with “as Plato writes” and “withdrawn from the body” added; next in Ficino’s list comes Plato himself, said to have died in such a withdrawal. Montaigne, a century later, called it “an ecstasy”. Modern readers have called it a similar “fit of abstraction” (Benjamin Jowett, the Victorian translator of Plato), “curious cataleptic seizures” (Bettany Hughes), the self-absorption of a man so cut off from his body that he no longer feels its pain (Martha Nussbaum), the paralysis of an ironist who does not know what his next step as a human being should be (Jonathan Lear), and courage as standing fast (Ryan Balot). Plato’s words say only that he was thinking about something and would not give it up.16
The rescue of Alcibiades and the prize of valour#
Only after endurance and the standing does Alcibiades come to the battle, and he asks Socrates to correct him if he lies. “Then, if you care to hear of him in battle — for there also he must have his due — on the day of the fight in which I gained my prize for valor from our commanders, it was he, out of the whole army, who saved my life: I was wounded, and he would not forsake me, but helped me to save both my armor and myself. I lost no time, Socrates, in urging the generals to award the prize for valor to you; and here I think you will neither rebuke me nor give me the lie. For when the generals, out of regard for my consequence, were inclined to award the prize to me, you outdid them in urging that I should have it rather than you.” The translation is W. R. M. Lamb’s (1925), used for Plato throughout. The Greek is spare and exact. The verb of saving is used twice, of the man and of his arms, whose loss was a hoplite’s disgrace; the moral core is that Socrates was “not willing to leave” the wounded man (ouk ethelōn apolipein); and the reason the generals gave the prize to the young man is stated without softening, “looking to my rank” (axiōma). Jowett’s older translation, “which the generals wanted to confer on me partly on account of my rank”, adds a “partly” that is not in the Greek. The prize itself, the aristeia, was awarded by the commanders after a battle, as the Greek admirals had voted a prize of valour after the victory over Persia at Salamis; here it was the generals’ to give, Callias having fallen, and the surviving generals gave it to Alcibiades. What he received was, on the evidence of Isocrates and Plutarch, a crown and a full suit of armour.17
Plutarch, who had the Symposium before him, retells the rescue with detail that Plato withholds and adds a motive: “While still a stripling, he served as a soldier in the campaign of Potidaea, and had Socrates for his tentmate and comrade in action. A fierce battle took place, wherein both of them distinguished themselves; but when Alcibiades fell wounded, it was Socrates who stood over him and defended him, and with the most conspicuous bravery saved him, armour and all. The prize of valor fell to Socrates, of course, on the justest calculation; but the generals, owing to the high position of Alcibiades, were manifestly anxious to give him the glory of it. Socrates, therefore, wishing to increase his pupil’s honorable ambitions, led all the rest in bearing witness to his bravery, and in begging that the crown and the suit of armour be given to him.” Diogenes Laertius has a slightly different story, in which Socrates himself wins the prize and hands it over: he “served at Potidaea, whither he had gone by sea, as land communications were interrupted by the war; and while there he is said to have remained a whole night without changing his position, and to have won the prize of valour. But he resigned it to Alcibiades, for whom he cherished the tenderest affection, according to Aristippus in the fourth book of his treatise On the Luxury of the Ancients.” Diogenes cites this source, a scandal-book ascribed to Aristippus, only for Socrates’ affection, not for the prize. Neither Diogenes nor Isocrates mentions the wound or the rescue; the rescue is Plato’s, repeated by Plutarch and, in Plutarch, made mutual: at Delium, eight years later, “Alcibiades, on horseback, saw Socrates retreating on foot with a small company, and would not pass him by, but rode by his side and defended him, though the enemy were pressing them hard and slaying many”.18
Delium and the post: the soldier of the Apology#
Alcibiades completes his picture with Delium, in the winter of 424/3, and it reverses the terms of Potidaea. “I happened to be there on horseback, while he marched under arms. The troops were in utter disorder, and he was retreating along with Laches, when I chanced to come up with them and, as soon as I saw them, passed them the word to have no fear, saying I would not abandon them. Here, indeed, I had an even finer view of Socrates than at Potidaea — for personally I had less reason for alarm, as I was mounted; and I noticed, first, how far he outdid Laches in collectedness”. Socrates walked, Alcibiades says, as he walked in the streets of Athens — he borrows a phrase from the comic poet Aristophanes, another guest at the party, “strutting like a proud marsh-goose, with ever a side-long glance” — “turning a calm sidelong look on friend and foe alike, and convincing anyone even from afar that whoever cares to touch this person will find he can put up a stout enough defence. The result was that both he and his comrade got away unscathed: for, as a rule, people will not lay a finger on those who show this disposition in war; it is men flying in headlong rout that they pursue.” At Potidaea courage saved another man by fighting; at Delium it saved by composure. Alcibiades’ word for that composure, emphrōn, “in his right mind”, names what the Laches finds missing from the general’s own definition of courage as “a certain endurance of the soul”: Socrates there asks, “And endurance joined with wisdom is noble and good?”, and concludes that “by your account, wise endurance will be courage”. Laches himself, in that dialogue, is Plato’s second witness: “He accompanied me in the retreat from Delium, and I assure you that if the rest had chosen to be like him, our city would be holding up her head and would not then have had such a terrible fall.”
The Apology gives the service its final form, and there Potidaea stands first. Socrates, refusing to imagine abandoning philosophy to save his life, argues that “wherever a man stations himself, thinking it is best to be there, or is stationed by his commander, there he must, as it seems to me, remain and run his risks”. He would have done a terrible thing, he says, if, “when the commanders whom you chose to command me stationed me, both at Potidaea and at Amphipolis and at Delium, I remained where they stationed me, like anybody else, and ran the risk of death, but when the god gave me a station, as I believed and understood, with orders to spend my life in philosophy and in examining myself and others, then I were to desert my post through fear of death or anything else whatsoever.” The three campaigns — Amphipolis is the failed Athenian expedition of 422 — are the model for the philosophic life: the hoplite who holds the post assigned by his generals is the visible figure of the man who holds the post assigned by the god.
Potidaea, unlike Delium, has no story of the divine sign. Socrates spoke of a daimonion, an inner voice or “divine sign” that, he said, held him back from actions, and later writers attached it to the retreat from Delium. Plutarch’s dialogue on the sign tells how an Athenian, Pyrilampes son of Antiphon, wounded and captured by the Thebans in the pursuit, hearing that Socrates “with Alcibiades and Laches” had come home safely by one road, mourned the friends and comrades who had fled with him by another and been cut down by the Theban horse “for not obeying Socrates’s Daemon and retreating that way which he led”; Cicero has the same story, with Socrates at a fork in the road refusing the way the others took because “The god prevents me”, while “Those who fled by the other road fell in with the enemy’s cavalry”. None of the ancient authors cited here connects the sign with Potidaea. What gave the Potidaea episode its aura in later centuries was the standing and the prayer to the sun, not the sign.19
The ancient dispute#
The story had its critics in antiquity. Book 5 of Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists, a learned miscellany of about 200 CE, has a section on philosophers who made poor soldiers that draws on the second-century BCE polemic of Herodicus of Babylon Against the Socrates-worshipper, and its verdict on Plato’s soldier is flat: “But all this is fictitious.” Herodicus, as Athenaeus reports him, makes four charges. Thucydides, who narrates the campaigns, never mentions Socrates. The expedition to Amphipolis was of picked men, and Socrates, who owned nothing but a cloak and a staff, could not have been one of them. As for Potidaea, “when did he go on a campaign against Potidaea, as Plato has asserted in the Charmides, alleging that on that occasion he also resigned the prize for the bravest to Alcibiades”, when neither Thucydides nor Isocrates says a word of Socrates, and when “No battle whatever occurred then, according to the account in Thucydides”? And at Delium Socrates would have fled with the rest, while Alcibiades, to whom he is supposed to have resigned the prize — Herodicus, like Antisthenes, puts the prize at Delium — “had not taken the smallest part in this campaign”; besides, Plato’s Crito, set in Socrates’ prison, says that Socrates never left Athens except once, for the Isthmian games. Antisthenes, the critic adds, tells the same story of the prize as Plato, and both should be disbelieved by anyone who has Thucydides in view: “For this Cynic, as well as Plato, displays favouritism toward Socrates in many ways; consequently neither of them should be trusted by those who have Thucydides in regard.”
Each charge can be answered. The resignation of the prize is assigned to the Charmides, which mentions only the return from the camp. The claim that no battle was fought is false of the battle of 432 but would fit the campaign of Phormio, under whom Isocrates had placed Alcibiades’ decoration, and Herodicus himself dates “the expedition to Potidaea, under command of Phormion”; his “no battle” may therefore mean Phormio’s campaign. Alcibiades is put at Delium, on horseback, by Plato and by Plutarch. And the Crito excepts military service in the very sentence Herodicus cites: “you never went out from the city to a festival, or anywhere else, except on military service”. The one witness of independent weight is the fragment of Antisthenes, in which a stranger says to Socrates, “We hear that in the battle with the Boeotians, also, you won the prize for the bravest”, and Socrates answers, “Hush, stranger! That glory belongs to Alcibiades, not to me”, to be told, “Yes, for you gave it to him, as we hear.” Antisthenes, then, placed Socrates’ prize, and his giving it to Alcibiades, at Delium; the little word “also” suggests that he knew of an earlier one; but he says nothing of a wound or a rescue, and the statement sometimes met with, that an ancient tradition set the rescue at Delium, has no support in the text. The only rescue by Socrates at Delium in the ancient sources is of the writer Xenophon — an impossibility, since Xenophon was born about 430 — told by the geographer Strabo: Socrates, on foot “since his horse had got away from him”, saw Xenophon lying fallen from his horse and “took him up on his shoulders and carried him in safety for many stadia, until the flight ceased”. Where the sources agree and have no literary purpose to serve, they can be trusted. That Socrates served at Potidaea and endured its hardships is secure; that he let the prize go to Alcibiades is told by Plato, by Antisthenes (of Delium) and by Diogenes Laertius; the wound and the rescue rest on Plato, whom Plutarch repeats.20
The meaning of the rescue#
In Plato’s design#
Alcibiades’ speech is the only praise in the Symposium addressed to a man rather than to Love (Eros), and he announces its method at the start: “The way I shall take, gentlemen, in my praise of Socrates, is by similitudes. Probably he will think I do this for derision; but I choose my similitude for the sake of truth, not of ridicule.” The first image is the Silenus, the squat, snub-nosed figure that sculptors made with pipes in its hands, which “when their two halves are pulled open” is found “to contain images of gods”. Socrates, snub-nosed and pot-bellied himself, wears such a casing; “But if you opened his inside, you cannot imagine how full he is, good cup-companions, of sobriety. I tell you, all the beauty a man may have is nothing to him; he despises it more than any of you can believe; nor does wealth attract him, nor any sort of honor that is the envied prize of the crowd.” “Sobriety” is Lamb’s word for sōphrosynē, self-control. The story of the failed seduction, in which Alcibiades offered his body and rose in the morning as if he had slept a night “with my father or my elder brother”, is the private proof of that self-control, and Alcibiades ends it “marvelling at the sobriety and integrity of his nature” — where Lamb’s “integrity” translates the Greek word for courage, andreia. The war stories that follow are the public demonstration of the same two virtues: self-control under hunger, drink and frost, courage in battle and in retreat. The rescue at Potidaea is the hinge of the speech, the point at which the virtue that refused Alcibiades’ body is shown saving it; and the man who “despises” beauty, wealth and “any sort of honor” is shown, later in the speech, letting the one honour the army had to bestow go to the young man he had saved.21
Read against the earlier speeches of the evening the rescue is also an answer, and to follow it one custom must be kept in mind. In the Athenian custom an adult “lover” courted an adolescent “beloved”, who might grant favours in return for the older man’s protection, education and devotion. Phaedrus, the first speaker at the party, had opened with the fantasy of an army of such pairs: “as for leaving his favorite in the lurch, or not succoring him in his peril, no man is such a craven that Love’s own influence cannot inspire him with a valor that makes him equal to the bravest born”. At Potidaea Socrates is exactly this lover — he does not leave the wounded beloved, and he saves his arms — but he acts outside the exchange of favours that Phaedrus and Pausanias, the second speaker, assumed, since he has just declined the favour Alcibiades came to give, and he turns the love of honour, which Phaedrus made the spring of the lover’s courage, away from himself. The speech’s last word makes the reversal explicit: Socrates has treated the young Charmides and Euthydemus and “any number of others” as he treated Alcibiades, so that “he might rather be their favorite than their lover” — so that they end by courting him. The Plato scholar C. D. C. Reeve puts it that Socrates turns the custom upside down “by playing the part of the pursued boy rather than of the pursuing older lover”, and that whether “in resisting Alcibiades’ beautiful body, or on campaign at Potidaea or Delium, he is the paradigm of wisdom, temperance, fortitude, and courage”. Potidaea is where the reversal becomes public. The older man does what custom asks of a lover and shields the younger in battle; he then lets the younger have the prize, and the beloved becomes the pursuer, the praiser and the debtor who cannot repay. The speech is staged as a mock trial in which Alcibiades accuses Socrates of hybris, contemptuous arrogance, for laughing at his beauty, and calls the drinkers “to try Socrates for his lofty disdain”; the prize at Potidaea is Socrates’ counter-plea, since the man accused of pride is the one who gives honour away.22
The portrait also shows, from outside, the life that Diotima has just described from within. Diotima is the priestess whose teaching on love Socrates reports in his own speech: a “ladder” that climbs from the love of one beautiful body to the sight of beauty itself, the changeless original that all beautiful things copy. At the summit she tells Socrates that this beauty, once beheld, “will outshine your gold and your vesture, your beautiful boys and striplings”, for whose sake men are “ready to do without either food or drink”, and that the man who sees it will “breed not illusions but true examples of virtue, since his contact is not with illusion but with truth”. Every item of her list returns in Alcibiades’ Socrates: gold, in the man “far more proof against money on every side than Ajax against a spear”; vesture, in the one old coat worn on the ice; beautiful boys, in the seduction refused; food and drink, in the hunger borne and the wine mastered. Diotima’s Love himself, whom she calls a daimōn, a spirit between gods and men, is “hard and parched, shoeless and homeless”, one who “on the bare ground always he lies with no bedding”, “brave, strenuous and high-strung, a famous hunter”; Richard Hunter has noted the resemblance of Socrates to this “unshod, impoverished, wanderer”, and Ficino, five centuries earlier, had matched Diotima’s attributes of Love to Socrates one by one. On this reading Socrates is unmoved by the cold for the same reason that he is unmoved by Alcibiades: he has seen something more beautiful, and the rescue and the surrender of the prize are true virtue rather than its image. The reading has its critics. Gregory Vlastos charged that Platonic love is directed not at persons but at “that abstract version of persons which consists of the complex of their best qualities”. Martha Nussbaum, in the most influential modern reading of the speech, took Alcibiades’ portrait as Plato’s own challenge to Diotima: the ascending man is not “just like us, only happier”; “Socrates is weird”; he “refuses in every way to be affected”. The rescue tells against Vlastos, since here Socrates’ love risks his life for one particular, wounded young man; it fits Nussbaum’s man whom nothing touches, since the honour he lets go is one he does not value. Reeve notes a further discomfort: Alcibiades’ own love “for Socrates has not led him to love the beautiful itself”.23
As a defence of Socrates the episode is plain. In 399 Socrates was condemned for impiety and for corrupting the young, and within a few years the pamphleteer Polycrates had written up the accusation with Alcibiades named as Socrates’ pupil; the orator Aeschines could later tell an Athenian jury that they had put Socrates to death “because he was shown to have been the teacher of Critias”, Plato’s kinsman and the head of the junta of 404. Plato makes the most notorious of the associates testify, drunk and therefore truthful, that he owes Socrates his life and his crown and not his vices. And as a document of Athenian life the award itself has been read as an indictment: S. Sara Monoson observes that in giving the prize to Alcibiades the generals “betrayed that their foremost concern was to curry favor with those who shared Alcibiades’ social status, not fairly to recognize battlefield acts of valor”.24
Plutarch: the provision of the gods#
Plutarch is the first surviving writer to set the rescue beside the language of divine care. In his Alcibiades the young man, giving ear “to the words of a lover who was in the chase for no unmanly pleasures, and begged no kisses and embraces, but sought to expose the weakness of his soul and rebuke his vain and foolish pride”, “came to think that the work of Socrates was really a kind of provision of the gods for the care and salvation of youth” — in Greek, a service of the gods for the care (epimeleia) and salvation (sōtēria) of the young. Three chapters later the same Socrates stands over the wounded Alcibiades and begs the crown and the armour for him, “wishing to increase his pupil’s honorable ambitions”. Timothy Duff observes that in the battle “Socrates’ protective role, exercised in the physical rather than spiritual dimension, is made concrete”, and that Plutarch has Alcibiades repay it at Delium, where the horseman “would not pass him by”. The rescue thus becomes, in Plutarch, the bodily instance of a saving that is first of all a saving of souls.25
The Neoplatonic frame#
The Neoplatonists — the Platonic philosophers of the third to sixth centuries CE, who read Plato as a theology of the soul’s return to its divine source — did not, so far as their surviving commentaries show, discuss the rescue at Potidaea; but they built a theology of Socrates and Alcibiades on the First Alcibiades, and it is within that theology that Plutarch’s “salvation of youth” and Plato’s “he would not forsake me” were afterwards read. Their fixed reading order of the dialogues placed the First Alcibiades first “because it teaches us to know ourselves”, and Proclus reports that the fourth-century philosopher Iamblichus put it first because it held the whole of Plato’s philosophy in it like a seed. The dialogue itself speaks the language of guardianship. Socrates is the only lover who does not leave Alcibiades, “the only lover of you, whereas the rest were lovers of what is yours”, and he promises: “So now, if you are not blighted and deformed by the Athenian people, I shall never forsake you.” The verb, apoleipein, “to leave behind”, is the one Alcibiades uses of Socrates at Potidaea: the lover who would not leave the wounded young man in battle promises not to leave his soul. The dialogue ends with Alcibiades promising to care for Socrates in turn, “just like a stork; for after hatching a winged love in you it is to be cherished in return by its nestling” — storks being believed to feed their aged parents.
Proclus, in the fifth century, turned this into a doctrine of what he called providential love, a love that foresees and cares for its object. The love of a superior for an inferior, he writes, is provident and “preservative of the beloved, able to perfect and maintain them”; “So gods too love gods, the superior their inferiors providentially, and the inferior their superiors, reversively”, the lower turning back towards the higher. Socrates, “as being an inspired lover and elevated to the intelligible beauty itself”, is the human instance, present to the beloved “before the many lovers and with them and after them, but in silence and quiet and forethought alone” — a good daimon, in D. Gregory MacIsaac’s paraphrase, “who seeks to lead Alcibiades’ whole life upwards towards the higher realities”. The saving image is Heraclean: Socrates “descends to an activity inferior to that which abides within him; since for divine lovers, to turn towards the inferior is at any rate venturesome; but nevertheless Socrates does descend, in order that like Hercules he may lead up his beloved from Hades”, as Heracles brought Alcestis back from the dead. And the saving has a limit. If the divinely inspired lover finds the beloved “small-minded and ignoble and concerned with things below”, he “turns back to himself and looks towards himself alone”, “taking refuge in the proverbial ‘I saved myself.’” Olympiodorus, teaching the same dialogue to Christian students in sixth-century Alexandria, kept the frame: for the late antique commentators, in Sara Ahbel-Rappe’s summary, “Socrates represents the intellect, the most divine aspect of the human being”, and his love “is paradoxically unique to Socrates but also an exemplum, suggesting the correct way to love”.26
Ficino, Montaigne and after#
Ficino’s commentary on the Symposium (De amore, 1469), cast as seven after-dinner speeches, gives its seventh oration to Alcibiades’ speech, and the second chapter of that oration argues that Plato painted Love from the person of Socrates, matching Diotima’s attributes of the god one by one to the man. Potidaea appears under Love’s boldness: “Audax feroxque. Quanta eius fuerit in rebus bellicis fortitudo, Alcibiades in Convivio explicat copiosissime, cui Socrates cum in Potidea vicisset victoriam sponte dicitur concessisse” — “Bold and fierce. How great his courage was in war Alcibiades sets out at length in the Symposium; when Socrates had won the victory at Potidaea he is said to have yielded it to him of his own accord.” The sixteenth chapter, on the usefulness of the true lover, gives the saving role its Florentine form. Having shown that force and reproof cannot rescue the young from corruption, Ficino concludes, “Unica restat iuventuti via salutis, Socratis consuetudo” — “The only road of salvation left to the young is the company of Socrates” — and describes the true lover as a shepherd who guards the flock of lambs from the false lovers as from wolves, and who, among his successes, “Alcibiadem ex ignorante doctissimum reddidit”, made Alcibiades from an ignorant man a most learned one. Ficino thus divided the Potidaea material as it would stay divided for two centuries: the standing was the soul’s withdrawal from the body, the divine sign belonged to Delium, and the rescue stood for the courage of Love and the true lover’s saving care.27
Montaigne, who read his Plato in Ficino’s Latin, returns to Potidaea twice in the third book of the Essays, and to Delium once. In “Of Experience” the episode stands in the catalogue of extremes that one ordinary man contained: “This same man was seen in an ecstasy, standing upon his feet a whole day and a night together, in the presence of all the Grecian army, surprised and absorbed by some profound thought. He was the first, amongst so many valiant men of the army, to run to the relief of Alcibiades, oppressed with the enemy, to shield him with his own body, and disengage him from the crowd by absolute force of arms.” (Montaigne then gives him the rescue of Xenophon at Delium as well.) In “Of Physiognomy” his Socrates tells the jury, “in the wars of my country, at Amphipolis, Potidea, Delia, and other expeditions where I have been, I have effectually manifested how far I was from securing my safety by my shame”, and “Of Coaches” retells the retreat from Delium from Alcibiades’ report as the model of a retreat without fear. The German poet Hölderlin’s epigram “Sokrates und Alcibiades” (1798) asks why the holy Socrates pays court to this youth and answers, “Wer das Tiefste gedacht, liebt das Lebendigste” — he who has thought the deepest loves what is most alive.28
What the rescue means#
The rescue can be read at three levels. As history it is the act of one hoplite for a messmate in a hard-fought victory outside a town that was then besieged, remembered because the messmate became the most famous Athenian of his generation and because the hoplite became Socrates; the award of the prize to the young aristocrat “out of regard for my consequence” is a small, exact document of how honour was distributed in the Athenian army, and Socrates’ urging that Alcibiades should have it is either generosity or, as Plutarch thought, pedagogy. As an element of Plato’s portrait it is the public proof of the virtues Alcibiades had found inside the Silenus: courage that is endurance joined with wisdom, self-control that despises “any sort of honor that is the envied prize of the crowd”, and a love that fulfils the lover’s duty of Phaedrus’ speech while refusing its wages, so that the beloved is left, as Alcibiades confesses, the debtor; and it is, with the rest of the speech, Plato’s answer to those who said that Socrates had corrupted Alcibiades. As a figure in the Platonic tradition it became the bodily image of a saving that Plutarch called “a kind of provision of the gods for the care and salvation of youth”, that Proclus described, without naming the battle, as the providential love of the superior for the inferior descending “like Hercules” to lead the beloved up from Hades, and that Ficino called the young man’s only road of salvation. The tradition also kept the limit that Plato built into the story. Socrates saved Alcibiades’ body and his arms; he did not save the man, who, as Xenophon says of him and Critias, sprang away from Socrates “as soon as they thought themselves superior to their fellow-disciples”, and who told the drinkers at Agathon’s that Socrates alone made him ashamed and that he had “wandered about in the most abject thraldom to this man that ever was known” without changing his life. The Neoplatonic lover who, finding the beloved “concerned with things below”, takes refuge in “I saved myself” is a commentary on that failure. What the rescue shows, in the end, is the shape of the philosophic life as Plato’s Socrates describes it at his trial: a man who stays at the post his commanders gave him “at Potidaea and at Amphipolis and at Delium” and will not leave the post the god has given him either, and who can save another’s life and let the prize go because, as Diotima’s ladder would have it, his eyes are on something else.29
The dead of Potidaea and the soul in the aether#
The hundred and fifty Athenians who fell before Potidaea were brought home, as the custom of the city required, and buried in the public cemetery on the road from the Dipylon, the main city gate, to the Academy, a sacred grove and gymnasium outside the walls where Plato would later teach. The inscribed block of their monument was dug up by Lord Elgin’s agents near the Academy in 1802 and has been in the British Museum since 1816; a small fragment with the ends of three lines was found in the 1930s in the Agora, the civic centre of Athens. The names of the dead, the casualty list proper, are lost. What survives is a heading, which the editors restore as “At Pot[eidaia these Athenians died?]”, and three epigrams in elegiac couplets, the usual metre of epitaphs, of which the first is reduced to the openings of its lines and one nearly complete verse, the second is complete enough to read and the third is almost whole. The museum describes the object as a “marble wall-block from a civic tomb with a metrical epitaph commemorating the Athenians (Kallias, the General, and 150 men) who fell at Potidaea in 432BC”; the general and the number come from Thucydides, not from the stone. The second epigram, in Robert Pitt’s translation for Attic Inscriptions Online, reads: “Aither received the souls (phsuchas), and earth the bodies of these men; and around the gates of Poteidaia were they severed. And of their foes, some have their share of a tomb, others fled and set their wall as the surest hope of life.” The third: “This city and People of Erechtheus longs for these men, who before Poteidaia died in the front ranks (promachois), sons of the Athenians; but casting their lives into the scales, they drew the lot of excellence (areten) and brought glory (eukleisan) to their country.” (“People of Erechtheus” means the Athenians, after their legendary king; the bracketed transliterations follow the old Athenian alphabet, in use until 403, which spelled psychas, “souls”, as phsuchas.) The second epigram describes a pitched battle before the gates, in which the enemy dead were buried and the survivors fled behind their wall; that matches Thucydides’ battle of 432 and not the capitulation of 429, and the stone is dated to 432 by the museum, by Attic Inscriptions Online and by William Nichols, the epigram’s most recent student, “though not with certainty”; Harold Mattingly thought 429 “a viable alternative”, and Marco Tentori Montalto has argued for the siege.30
The famous line is only half preserved. “Aither received the souls” stands entire on the stone; of the balancing clause only the first three letters of “bodies” survive, and “and earth” is a modern restoration — a natural one, but the word is not on the marble. What the city declared, in the old Athenian script, is that the souls of its soldiers had been received by the aether, the bright upper air above the clouds. The idea has a history. In Homer the soul leaves the limbs at death and goes down to Hades. The aether that takes souls upward belongs to the natural philosophy of the fifth century, and Euripides gave it a voice: his Athenian king Theseus, in the Suppliant Women of about 423, demands burial for the Argive dead so that “each element return to the place from whence it came to the body, the breath to the air, the body to the ground” (the Greek says aether, not air), and his Helen speaks of the mind of the dead as a “consciousness that lasts for ever, eternal as the ether into which it takes the final plunge”. A saying ascribed to the Sicilian comic poet Epicharmus, “earth back to earth, / The soul on high”, and a joke in Aristophanes’ Peace about the dead becoming stars in the air show that the belief that each part of us returns at death to where it came from was in circulation. The commentary of Attic Inscriptions Online calls the epigram’s idea “in many ways a Pre-Socratic concept that blurs the lines between mortals and gods”, and Robert Parker, the historian of Greek religion, surveying the verse epitaphs, finds that until the fourth century “complete silence about eschatology is the norm”, calls the Potidaea epigram “the one exception”, and wonders “whether this is a privilege for good souls, or the fate of all”. Nichols has argued that the parallel in Euripides is not the reflection of a commonplace but a deliberate echo of the Potidaea monument, “recontextualiz[ed]” to the disaster at Delium and so expressing the war-weariness of the city; on his showing the epigram and the Suppliant Women “are the two earliest dateable instances” of the doctrine, none of the inscriptions that mention the aether is earlier, and the only earlier literary passage that may allude to it, in Sophocles’ Ajax, lacks the antithesis of soul and body. The Potidaea epitaph is therefore the earliest dated Athenian public monument to say that the soul at death goes up to the aether and — if the restoration is right — the body to the earth; the Epicharmus saying may be older, but it is Sicilian, undated and speaks of breath going “on high” rather than of the aether.31
The epigram and the Symposium commemorate the same engagement from opposite ends, if the battle of the epigram and the battle of Alcibiades’ speech are both the battle of 432, as most scholars hold. The city honoured the hundred and fifty who “casting their lives into the scales … drew the lot of excellence” and whose souls the aether received; Plato’s Alcibiades, half a century later, remembered the one man who came out of the same fight having saved a life and let a prize go; and the Charmides set that man’s return beside “many of our acquaintance” who “have lost their lives in it”. No ancient author links the two records, but they describe the same day.32
Reception and significance#
Modern historians have treated the battle as they treat Thucydides’ account of it: as a problem of dates and text. Thucydides’ chapters on the affair were already, for H. D. Westlake, a narrative “often … criticized for their lack of clarity and precision”, probably written early and never revised; the literature since has settled the sequence of the campaign, argued over the numeral that dates the battle, used the treasury accounts of 432/1 to fix the expeditions to the month, proposed Brea for the manuscripts’ Beroea, disputed the rise in Potidaea’s tribute, and read a Potidaean coinage of about 435 as the colony’s contribution to Corinth’s war-chest. The larger question, how far Athens provoked the revolt and how far Sparta’s promise to the Potidaeans committed it to war before any vote, runs through the standard histories of the war’s outbreak. The epigram of the dead has become, since Adrian Mihai’s study of its “aitherial abode” and Nichols’s article of 2024, a text of the history of Greek religion as much as of Greek epigraphy.33
As an episode in the life of Socrates the battle has been read in many ways, and the readings divide by what they take his virtue to be. For Plato it was courage joined with wisdom and a love that let honour go; for Diogenes Laertius, and for Antisthenes at Delium, a prize won and resigned; for Herodicus and Athenaeus, a fiction; for Plutarch, the physical form of “a kind of provision of the gods for the care and salvation of youth”; for Gellius and Favorinus, a body trained to endurance; for Ficino, the courage of Love, with the standing read as the withdrawal of the soul from the body; for Montaigne, the proof that one ordinary man could contain “ecstasy” and force of arms together; for the Neoplatonists, who never named the battle, the frame within which such a saving could be understood. Modern scholarship since Nussbaum’s essay of 1979 has made Alcibiades’ speech the crux of the Symposium’s account of love, and the rescue the hardest case for the charge that Platonic love is not a love of persons; since Anderson’s “Socrates as Hoplite” (2005) and Monoson’s studies of Socrates’ military service (2014, 2016), the campaigns have been read for what they say about Socrates’ relation to the hoplite culture of his city and about endurance under the conditions of war.34
The battlefield rescue is a rarer subject in art than the moral rescue that the eighteenth century preferred, Socrates tearing Alcibiades from the arms of pleasure, of which Jean-Baptiste Regnault’s small canvas of 1791 in the Louvre, Socrate arrachant Alcibiade du sein de la Volupté, is the best-known example. Antonio Canova treated the battle in a plaster relief of 1797, Socrate salva Alcibiade nella battaglia di Potidea, which he gave to the Accademia di San Luca in Rome in 1801, the year after his election as academician of merit, and which remains there: the figures of the combatants “form two facing groups, leaving at the centre a void cut through by Socrates’ arm reaching out in a gesture of defence” over the wounded comrade, on a plain ground without setting, the whole conceived as a frieze. It belongs with Canova’s other reliefs of Socrates — the defence before the judges, the drinking of the hemlock, Crito closing the dead man’s eyes — as one panel of a philosopher’s life told in the manner of the ancient sarcophagi. Bernardino Riccardi’s painting of 1840 in the Galleria Nazionale at Parma, Socrate che fa da scudo in battaglia ad Alcibiade, takes the same moment.35
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IG I³ 1179 (= IG I² 945; CEG 10; Clairmont, Patrios Nomos, no. 41). Epigram for the Athenians who fell at Potidaea. British Museum 1816,0610.348 and Agora I 2277. Text: PHI Greek Inscriptions; translation and commentary by Robert Pitt, Attic Inscriptions Online, AIUK 4.6 no. 79 (2022; updated 2025).
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Guided Inquiry
Questions for Socrates
12 questions grounded in this entry open directly in Socrates with Potidaea, Battle of (432 BCE) as the reading context.
The City and the War
- How did Potidaea’s ties to Corinth and obligations to Athens make its position unstable?→
- How did Athenian demands, Macedonian interests, and Spartan promises combine to produce the revolt?→
- Why did the siege become a grievance between states even though Corinth’s first reinforcements were volunteers?→
- What do the costs, plague, and terms of surrender reveal about the limits of Athenian power?→
Socrates in Battle
- What can we establish about Socrates’ military service, and where does the evidence remain uncertain?→
- How does Plato’s description of Socrates standing in thought differ from later accounts of ecstasy or withdrawal from the body?→
- What is at stake in Socrates saving both Alcibiades and his armour, then letting him have the prize?→
- How does the image of holding a military post become a model for Socrates’ philosophical life?→
Love and Remembrance
- How does the rescue fulfil and transform the lover’s duty described by Phaedrus?→
- Does risking one’s life for Alcibiades support or challenge the claim that Platonic love overlooks particular people?→
- Why does the entry distinguish later providential readings of the rescue from direct ancient commentary on the battle?→
- What can the Potidaea epitaph tell us about beliefs concerning the soul, and how does its damaged text limit the conclusion?→
Source ApparatusNotes35 notes
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The narrative rests on Thucydides 1.56–66, 1.139–140, 2.13, 2.31, 2.58, 2.67, 2.70, 2.79 and 3.17, quoted throughout in Richard Crawley’s translation (1874; text of the Standard Ebooks edition, checked against the Perseus digitisation of the Dent text) with the Greek of H. Stuart Jones’s Oxford text; Diodorus 12.34, 12.37, 12.46 (Loeb, tr. C. H. Oldfather); Plutarch, Pericles 29 and Alcibiades 4, 7 (Loeb, tr. Bernadotte Perrin); Plato, Symposium 219e–221c (Loeb, tr. W. R. M. Lamb), Charmides 153a–d, Apology 28e, Laches 181b; and the epigram IG I³ 1179 (= CEG 10), for which see below. Socrates’ age: born 469/8 (Diogenes Laertius 2.44, from Apollodorus; Apology 17d); Alcibiades’ birth, c. 452–450, is inferred from Plutarch, Alcibiades 7.2 (“still a stripling” at Potidaea) and Alcibiades I 123d (“as yet barely twenty” on entering public life). Dates of the form 430/29 are Athenian civil years, which ran from midsummer to midsummer. Where a Greek or Latin phrase is followed by an English rendering and no translator is named, the rendering is the entry’s own. The date of composition of the Symposium is not known; the 380s is the usual estimate. The standard modern accounts of the campaign are A. W. Gomme, A Historical Commentary on Thucydides, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1945), on 1.56–66; Simon Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1991); Donald Kagan, The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War (Ithaca, NY, 1969), ch. 16; G. E. M. de Ste Croix, The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (London, 1972); J. E. Lendon, Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins (New York, 2010); and J. A. Alexander, Potidaea: Its History and Remains (Athens, GA, 1963) — of which Gomme, Hornblower, Kagan, de Ste Croix, Lendon and Alexander could not be consulted beyond their tables of contents and the pages cited by others.
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Thucydides 1.56.2 (Crawley); the Greek names the magistrates τοὺς ἐπιδημιουργούς and says that the Corinthians sent them κατὰ ἔτος ἕκαστον. Foundation c. 600: N. G. L. Hammond, “Potidaea”, Oxford Classical Dictionary (online edn, 2015), “founded c.600 bce for trade with Macedonia and along the line of the later via Egnatia”; the founder Evagoras: Nicolaus of Damascus, FGrHist 90 F 59 (not seen). Tribute: six talents in the quota lists of 446 and 443 (IG I³ 266, 269, as edited on ToposText); the proposed rise to fifteen talents, “probably in 435/4”, with the evidence “complex and imperfect”: Jonathan Kagan, “Epidamnus, Anactorium, and Potidaea: Corinthian-style Pegasi at the Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War”, American Journal of Numismatics 25 (2013): 1–9, at 7, citing Hornblower, Commentary, vol. 1, pp. 97–98, and noting that the entry may belong to Scione; Kagan also identifies a Potidaean issue of Corinthian-type “colts” of c. 435 as the colony’s contribution to Corinth’s war-chest. Herodotus’ notices of Potidaea in 480/79 (8.126–129; 9.28) were not consulted.
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Thucydides 1.56.1–2, 1.57.1–6, 1.58.1–2 (Crawley). The Athenian accounts for the Corcyra expeditions (IG I³ 364) are dated 433/2, which puts Sybota in the Athenian year beginning midsummer 433. The verb of the order is imperfect (ἐκέλευον) and the motive is δείσαντες μὴ ἀποστῶσιν; the promise was made by the Spartan authorities (τὰ τέλη τῶν Λακεδαιμονίων), not by an assembly, and the Corinthians hold Sparta to it at 1.71.4. The transmitted text gives Archestratus “ten” colleagues (μετ᾽ ἄλλων †δέκα†), impossible for a board of ten generals; Crawley translates the emendation “four”, and Gomme preferred “two” (“I.G. i². 296 and the Dates of τὰ Ποτειδεατικά”, Classical Review 55 (1941): 59–67, at 60 n. 1). Diodorus 12.34.1–3 (Corinth “incited the city of Potidaea, which was one of their own colonies, to revolt”; the Athenians acted only “When the Athenians heard of the revolt of the Potidaeans”); Plutarch, Pericles 29.4 (“Potidaea, too, a city that was subject to Athens, although a colony of Corinth, revolted, and the siege laid to her hastened on the war all the more”). A. G. Woodhead, “The Site of Brea: Thucydides I. 61.4”, Classical Quarterly n.s. 2 (1952): 57–62, at 57, accepts Thucydides’ sequence: the Macedonian expedition “was not diverted from its destination by the revolt of Poteidaia”.
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Thucydides 1.59–61 (Crawley); “a private enterprise on the part of Corinth”, 1.66. Diodorus 12.34.4 gives only “two thousand soldiers” for the Corinthian force. Woodhead (as in n. 3) on Brea for “Beroea”; whether “Strepsa” is itself an emendation could not be established.
- ↩
Thucydides 1.62.1–63.3 (Crawley). The Greek is precise about Aristeus’ route, παρὰ τὴν χηλὴν διὰ τῆς θαλάσσης, literally along the mole and through the sea (Crawley: “he passed along by the breakwater through the sea”), and about the distance to Olynthus, ἑξήκοντα μάλιστα σταδίους, some sixty stades, which Crawley converts to “about seven miles”; the enemy dead are ὀλίγῳ ἐλάσσους τριακοσίων, a little fewer than three hundred, the Athenian Ἀθηναίων δὲ αὐτῶν πεντήκοντα καὶ ἑκατὸν καὶ Καλλίας ὁ στρατηγός. Diodorus 12.34.4 has “over three hundred of the enemy” and a battle “on the isthmus near Pallenê”. H. D. Westlake, “Aristeus the Son of Adeimantus”, Classical Quarterly 41 (1947): 25–30, at 25, judges that Thucydides’ chapters on the affair (1.56–65) “have often been criticized for their lack of clarity and precision”, were probably “written in the earliest years of the Peloponnesian war and never revised”, and that the narrative “achieves warmth and colour only where its subject is the Corinthian Aristeus”.
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Thucydides 2.2.1: μετὰ τὴν ἐν Ποτειδαίᾳ μάχην μηνὶ ἕκτῳ; C. F. Smith’s Loeb translation prints “in the sixteenth month”, following an emendation, and should not be cited for the date. H. M. Hubbell, “The Chronology of the Years 435–431 B.C.”, Classical Philology 24 (1929): 217–230, at 224–225 (the revolt c. 1 July; Callias paid in the second prytany — the tenth part of the Athenian year — and departed 16 August; the battle 7 September; Phormio in the fourth prytany, 22 October – 27 November); A. B. West, “The Chronology of the Years 432 and 431 B.C.”, Classical Philology 10 (1915): 34–53, at 34–35, 51 (the battle “in the tenth month before the attack on Plataea”, c. 15 May 432; the revolt c. 25 March); Gomme (1941), p. 59 n. 2, reporting Jacoby’s date of November–December 433 and finding it “impossible to follow his conclusions for the chronology”. The documentary evidence is the Athenian treasury accounts of 432/1, IG I² 296 (IG I³ 365); there is no “Potidaea decree”. Gomme’s own dates in the Historical Commentary and Hornblower’s could not be checked.
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Thucydides 1.64.1–3, 1.65.1–2 (Crawley; Phormio “fixed his headquarters at Aphytis”, ἐξ Ἀφύτιος ὁρμώμενος); the pay and the withdrawal of Phormio’s men, 3.17.3–4 (“besides sixteen hundred with Phormio who went away before it was over”; whether this chapter is authentic and in its right place has been debated, but the discussion was not consulted); the muster of 431, 2.31.2; the reserves, 2.13.3 (“there were still six thousand talents of coined silver in the Acropolis, out of nine thousand seven hundred that had once been there, from which the money had been taken for the porch of the Acropolis, the other public buildings, and for Potidaea”). Diodorus 12.37.1 makes Phormio the replacement of the fallen Callias and has him make “continuous assaults”, neither of which Thucydides says.
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Thucydides 1.66, 1.67.1 (“Immediately summoning the allies to Lacedaemon, she came and loudly accused Athens of breach of the treaty and aggression on the rights of Peloponnese”), 1.68.4, 1.71.4, 1.139.1, 1.140.2–3 (Crawley); the “truest cause”, 1.23.6. Plutarch, Pericles 29.4–5, keeps the same list of grievances and concludes that the war would not have come if the Athenians “could have been persuaded to rescind their decree against the Megarians”.
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Thucydides 2.58.1–3, 2.67.1–4 (Crawley; the Athenians “slew them all the same day, without giving them a trial or hearing the defence which they wished to offer, and cast their bodies into a pit”). Diodorus 12.46.2–5 adds that Athens wished “for the glory of it to take Potidaea by storm”, that Hagnon knew “that the Athenians had spent more than a thousand talents on the siege”, and that he sailed home “having lost more than a thousand of his soldiers”.
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Thucydides 2.70.1–4 (Crawley; the Athenians were “of opinion that the place would have had to surrender at discretion”); the Greek of the famine is laconic, καί τινες καὶ ἀλλήλων ἐγέγευντο, and some had even tasted one another, where Crawley has “instances had even occurred of the people having eaten one another”; the generals’ position is ἐν χωρίῳ χειμερινῷ, in a wintry place; the settlers are ἐποίκους … ἑαυτῶν. Diodorus 12.46.6–7 (the thousand colonists, “and portioned out to them in allotments both the city and its territory”). Spartolus: Thucydides 2.79.1–7 (the Greek gives τριάκοντα καὶ τετρακόσιοι, 430 dead; the digitised Loeb prints “three hundred and thirty” in error).
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Diodorus 15.81.6 (Timotheus “besieged and took Toronê and Potidaea”), 16.8.5 (Philip “having sold the inhabitants into slavery … handed it over to the Olynthians”), 19.52.2 (Cassandreia); Plutarch, Alexander 3.8 (“To Philip, however, who had just taken Potidaea, there came three messages at the same time”); the cleruchy decree IG II² 114 (362/1). The site: Ephorate of Antiquities of Chalkidiki and Mount Athos, “Nea Potidaea, the Diateichisma of Cassandreia” (online), on the late Roman cross-wall repaired under Justinian and by John VII Palaiologos (1407) and the canal of 1935–37; the classical remains are treated by Alexander (1963), not seen.
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Plato, Symposium 219e–221c; Charmides 153a–d and 156d–157b, tr. W. R. M. Lamb (Loeb, 1927; Jowett has “the physicians of the Thracian king Zamolxis, who are said to be so skilful that they can even give immortality”); Apology 28d–29a, tr. H. N. Fowler (Loeb, 1914); Laches 181a–b, tr. Lamb (Loeb, 1924); Plutarch, Alcibiades 4 and 7, tr. Perrin (Loeb, 1916); Diogenes Laertius 2.22–23, tr. R. D. Hicks (Loeb, 1925); Athenaeus 5.215c–216c, tr. C. B. Gulick (Loeb, vol. 2, 1928) and C. D. Yonge (1854). The Greek is Burnet’s Oxford text of Plato, Kaibel’s and Gulick’s of Athenaeus. The Loeb translations are quoted from the Perseus Digital Library’s digitisations, which normalise some spellings (“valor”, “armor”, “honorable”, “tentmate”) where the printed volumes have “valour”, “armour”, “honourable”, “tent-mate”; the printed forms should be restored if the entry is set from the books.
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Diogenes Laertius 2.44 (Hicks; his note gives “469-468 b.c.”); Apology 17d, ἔτη γεγονὼς ἑβδομήκοντα; Plutarch, Alcibiades 7.2 in the Perseus numbering (7.3 in the printed Loeb), ἔτι δὲ μειράκιον ὤν; Alcibiades I 123d, ἔτη οὐδέπω γεγονὼς σφόδρα εἴκοσιν (Lamb: “as yet barely twenty years old”); Debra Nails and S. Sara Monoson, “Socrates”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (revised 26 May 2022); Nails, The People of Plato (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), pp. 264–65 (cited by Monoson; not seen). Christopher Planeaux, “Socrates, Alcibiades, and Plato’s τὰ Ποτειδεατικά: Does the Charmides Have an Historical Setting?”, Mnemosyne 52 (1999): 72–77 (“If there was more than one battle at or near Potidaea, then we are not required to equate Symp. 220d5-e7 with Chrm. 153b5-7”; “The conflict close to Spartolus (May 429) meets all of these stipulations”; the quoted conclusions; and, on the Symposium battle, “This earlier battle, then, ought to be the one where Alcibiades was wounded”); the objection from ἐν τῇ Ποτειδαίᾳ (Charmides 153b) against Thucydides 2.79.3, 7 is made here. Isocrates 16.29–30, tr. L. Van Hook (Loeb, 1945), στεφανωθῆναι καὶ πανοπλίαν λαβεῖν παρὰ τοῦ στρατηγοῦ; Thucydides 1.64.2, 1.65.2.
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Apology 23b–c (“vast poverty”, Fowler), 38b; Xenophon, Oeconomicus 2.3 (Marchant); Mark Anderson, “Socrates as Hoplite”, Ancient Philosophy 25 (2005): 273–289, at 282, 285, 287.
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Symposium 219e–220d (Lamb); the Homeric line is Odyssey 4.242; the Greek of the frost, ἀνυπόδητος δὲ διὰ τοῦ κρυστάλλου ῥᾷον ἐπορεύετο ἢ οἱ ἄλλοι ὑποδεδεμένοι, οἱ δὲ στρατιῶται ὑπέβλεπον αὐτὸν ὡς καταφρονοῦντα σφῶν; of the standing, συννοήσας γὰρ αὐτόθι ἕωθέν τι εἱστήκει σκοπῶν, καὶ ἐπειδὴ οὐ προυχώρει αὐτῷ, οὐκ ἀνίει ἀλλὰ εἱστήκει ζητῶν … ὁ δὲ εἱστήκει μέχρι ἕως ἐγένετο καὶ ἥλιος ἀνέσχεν· ἔπειτα ᾤχετ᾽ ἀπιὼν προσευξάμενος τῷ ἡλίῳ.
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Symposium 174d–175b (Lamb); Apology 26d; Laws 887e (Bury). Diogenes Laertius 2.23 (Hicks); Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 2.1.1–3, tr. J. C. Rolfe (Loeb, 1927), the chapter headed “How Socrates used to train himself in physical endurance”, with Favorinus’ Greek, πολλάκις ἐξ ἡλίου εἰς ἥλιον εἱστήκει ἀστραβέστερος τῶν πρέμνων. Ficino, Theologia Platonica XIII.2, quoted from an online transcription of the Latin, not collated with the edition of Michael J. B. Allen and James Hankins (I Tatti Renaissance Library, 2001–06); the English rendering is the entry’s own; the sentence on Plato reads “Plato cum frequenter contemplationis intentione longe secessisset a corpore, tandem in ea ipsa abstractione a corporis vinculis decessit omnino”. Montaigne, Essays III.13, in Charles Cotton’s translation, ed. William Carew Hazlitt (1877; Project Gutenberg e-text). Jowett, introduction to his Symposium (“a similar fit of abstraction occurring when he was serving with the army at Potidaea”; his “fit or trance of Socrates” refers to the porch episode); Bettany Hughes, The Hemlock Cup (London: Jonathan Cape, 2010), and Jonathan Lear, A Case for Irony (Cambridge, MA, 2011), pp. 33–34, and Ryan K. Balot, Courage in the Democratic Polis (Oxford, 2014), p. 337, as reported by Christopher Moore, “Why Socrates stood so long at Potidaea (Symp. 220c–d)” (online, 4 November 2014), and not seen at first hand; Martha C. Nussbaum, “The Speech of Alcibiades: A Reading of Plato’s Symposium”, Philosophy and Literature 3 (1979): 131–172, at 151 (Socrates “has so dissociated himself from his body that he genuinely does not feel its pain”, as read in an online copy of the article; revised as ch. 6 of The Fragility of Goodness, Cambridge, 1986).
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Symposium 220d–e (Lamb); Burnet’s text: ὅτε γὰρ ἡ μάχη ἦν ἐξ ἧς ἐμοὶ καὶ τἀριστεῖα ἔδοσαν οἱ στρατηγοί, οὐδεὶς ἄλλος ἐμὲ ἔσωσεν ἀνθρώπων ἢ οὗτος, τετρωμένον οὐκ ἐθέλων ἀπολιπεῖν, ἀλλὰ συνδιέσωσε καὶ τὰ ὅπλα καὶ αὐτὸν ἐμέ … ἀλλὰ γὰρ τῶν στρατηγῶν πρὸς τὸ ἐμὸν ἀξίωμα ἀποβλεπόντων καὶ βουλομένων ἐμοὶ διδόναι τἀριστεῖα, αὐτὸς προθυμότερος ἐγένου τῶν στρατηγῶν ἐμὲ λαβεῖν ἢ σαυτόν. Jowett (Gutenberg text): “for I was wounded and he would not leave me, but he rescued me and my arms”, and “which the generals wanted to confer on me partly on account of my rank”. The custom of the aristeia: Herodotus 8.123–124 (the vote of the commanders “at the altar of Poseidon”; the Spartans’ “crown of olive as the reward of excellence” to Eurybiades); the crown and panoply: Isocrates 16.29 and Plutarch, Alcibiades 7.3 (στεφανοῦν ἐκεῖνον καὶ διδόναι τὴν πανοπλίαν). That the award was made by Callias’ surviving colleagues is an inference from Thucydides 1.61.1 and 1.63.3; Plato and Plutarch say only “the generals”.
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Plutarch, Alcibiades 7.2–4 (Perrin; Perseus numbering); the Greek of the generals’ motive is διὰ τὸ ἀξίωμα, and of Socrates’, βουλόμενος αὔξεσθαι τὸ φιλότιμον ἐν τοῖς καλοῖς αὐτοῦ; at 4.4 the city was amazed to see Alcibiades “eating, exercising, and tenting with Socrates”. Diogenes Laertius 2.22–23 (Hicks); the Greek, καὶ ἀριστεύσαντα αὐτόθι παραχωρῆσαι Ἀλκιβιάδῃ τοῦ ἀριστείου· οὗ καὶ ἐρασθῆναί φησιν αὐτὸν Ἀρίστιππος ἐν τετάρτῳ Περὶ παλαιᾶς τρυφῆς, attaches Aristippus’ report to the love, not to the prize; Hicks’s note observes that the reason for going by sea “will not hold”, since Thrace was reached by sea in any case. The authenticity of the work ascribed to Aristippus is doubted.
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Symposium 221a–c (Lamb; the Aristophanes quotation is Clouds 362); Laches 181b, 192b–d (Lamb: “a certain endurance of the soul”; “And endurance joined with wisdom is noble and good?”; “So, by your account, wise endurance will be courage”; the Greek is φρόνησις, not Alcibiades’ ἔμφρων, but the thought is the same); Apology 28d–e (Fowler; the Greek, τοῦ δὲ θεοῦ τάττοντος … λίποιμι τὴν τάξιν). Thucydides 4.89–101 for Delium (the generals were Hippocrates and Demosthenes; Laches is not named); Plutarch, De genio Socratis 581d–e, in the Creech–Goodwin version (Plutarch’s Morals, ed. W. W. Goodwin, Boston, 1874), with the Greek ὡς τοῦ Σωκράτους δαιμονίου παρακούσαντας; Cicero, De divinatione 1.123, tr. W. A. Falconer (Loeb, 1923), who makes Laches the commander (“Lachete praetore”), which Thucydides does not support. The Theages (129d) and Maximus of Tyre (Or. 8.6) list other occasions of the sign; none names Potidaea. The commentaries of Proclus and Olympiodorus on the First Alcibiades, which discuss the sign at length, could not be searched.
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Athenaeus 5.215c–216c, in Gulick’s translation as far as it could be recovered (“But all this is fictitious”; “And when did he go on a campaign against Potidaea, as Plato has asserted in the Charmides …”; “No battle whatever occurred then, according to the account in Thucydides”; “who had not taken the smallest part in this campaign?”; “For this Cynic, as well as Plato, displays favouritism toward Socrates in many ways; consequently neither of them should be trusted by those who have Thucydides in regard”; “But according to all the historians, the expedition to Potidaea, under command of Phormion, preceded that against Delium”), with Yonge for the rest; Herodicus is named at 215f, ὡς ἱστορεῖ Ἡρόδικος ὁ Κρατήτειος ἐν τοῖς πρὸς τὸν Φιλοσωκράτην (Gulick: “Against the Socrates-worshipper”), and how much of the section is his is a matter of inference; on him, J.-J. Flinterman, “‘… largely fictions …’: Aelius Aristides on Plato’s Dialogues”, Ancient Narrative 1 (2002): 32–54, and I. Düring, Herodicus the Cratetean (Stockholm, 1941), not seen. The Greek of the Potidaea charge, ὡς ἐν τῷ Χαρμίδῃ εἴρηκεν ὁ Πλάτων φάσκων αὐτὸν καὶ τῶν ἀριστείων τότε Ἀλκιβιάδῃ παραχωρῆσαι, can be read so that only the campaign is placed in the Charmides; Gulick and Yonge take the prize with it. Crito 52b (Fowler), εἰ μή ποι στρατευσόμενος. The Antisthenes fragment, in Kaibel’s text: ἡμεῖς δὲ ἀκούομεν κἀν τῇ πρὸς Βοιωτοὺς μάχῃ τὰ ἀριστεῖά σε λαβεῖν. — εὐφήμει, ὦ ξένε· Ἀλκιβιάδου τὸ γέρας, οὐκ ἐμόν. — σοῦ γε δόντος, ὡς ἡμεῖς ἀκούομεν (216b–c); its place in Giannantoni’s Socratis et Socraticorum Reliquiae and in S. H. Prince, Antisthenes of Athens (Ann Arbor, 2015), and the work of Antisthenes from which it comes, could not be verified. Maximus of Tyre, Or. 18.5, likewise speaks of “the feat of valour at Delium” (τῇ ἐπὶ Δηλίῳ ἀριστείᾳ). Strabo 9.2.7, tr. H. L. Jones (Loeb, 1927; the Greek genitive absolute more naturally makes the horse Xenophon’s); Diogenes Laertius 2.22 repeats the story. Anderson (2005), p. 273 n. 1: “I intend to take the literary accounts as evidence for historical facts where they are consistent with one another and are not obviously serving purely literary ends.”
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Symposium 215a–b, 216d–e, 219c–d (Lamb); the Greek of 219d is ἀγάμενον δὲ τὴν τούτου φύσιν τε καὶ σωφροσύνην καὶ ἀνδρείαν, “admiring his nature, his temperance and his courage”, which Lamb renders “marvelling at the sobriety and integrity of his nature”. The “despises … any sort of honor” passage is at 216d–e and the prize at 220e.
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Symposium 178d–179b (Lamb: Phaedrus’ lover would sooner “die many deaths” than be seen “forsaking his station or flinging away his arms”; Greek λιπὼν τάξιν ἢ ὅπλα ἀποβαλών), 215b (ὑβριστὴς εἶ· ἢ οὔ;), 219c (“to try Socrates for his lofty disdain”), 222b (Lamb; Greek ὡς ἐραστὴς παιδικὰ μᾶλλον αὐτὸς καθίσταται ἀντ᾽ ἐραστοῦ). C. D. C. Reeve, “Plato on Friendship and Eros”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (revised 14 June 2023), and “A Study in Violets: Alcibiades in the Symposium”, in J. H. Lesher, D. Nails and F. C. C. Sheffield (eds), Plato’s Symposium: Issues in Interpretation and Reception (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2006), ch. 6 (quoted from the online edition). The correspondence with Phaedrus’ speech is drawn here; it was not found in the scholarship that could be consulted. Michael Gagarin, “Socrates’ Hybris and Alcibiades’ Failure”, Phoenix 31 (1977): 22–37, is the standard study of the charge but could not be read.
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Symposium 211d, 212a, 203c–d, 219e (Lamb); Diotima calls Love “a great spirit” (δαίμων μέγας) at 202d–e. Richard Hunter, Plato’s Symposium (Oxford, 2004), p. 82, as reported by Joseph Almeida, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2005.04.54 (“Socrates himself bears a resemblance to Diotima’s description of eros — an unshod, impoverished, wanderer”); Ficino, De amore VII.2 (below), where the bare feet are supported from the Phaedrus. Gregory Vlastos, “The Individual as an Object of Love in Plato”, in Platonic Studies (Princeton, 1973), 3–34, at 31 (as quoted by Brian Mooney, “Loving Persons”, 1998); Nussbaum (1979), pp. 151, 164 (as quoted by Zoë Poole, Berkeley Undergraduate Journal of Classics 6 (2017); the pages of the revised chapter in The Fragility of Goodness were not checked); Reeve, SEP entry.
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Polycrates’ Accusation: Isocrates, Busiris 5 (Van Hook: “you gave Alcibiades to him as a pupil who, as far as anybody observed, never was taught by Socrates”); Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.2.12 (Marchant: “Among the associates of Socrates were Critias and Alcibiades; and none wrought so many evils to the state”), whose “accuser” is usually identified with Polycrates; Aeschines 1.173 (Adams: the Athenians put to death “Socrates the sophist … because he was shown to have been the teacher of Critias”). Hunter, p. 102, as reported by Almeida, calls Alcibiades’ speech a “master stroke” of apologetics. Monoson, “Socrates’ Military Service”, in Our Ancient Wars: Rethinking War through the Classics, ed. Victor Caston and Silke-Maria Weineck (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 96–117 (read in the author’s revised pages).
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Plutarch, Alcibiades 4.3–4, 7.3–4 (Perrin; Perseus numbering); the Greek of 4.3 is θεῶν ὑπηρεσίαν εἰς νέων ἐπιμέλειαν εἶναι καὶ σωτηρίαν. Timothy E. Duff, “Plato’s Symposium and Plutarch’s Alcibiades”, in Symposion and Philanthropia in Plutarch, ed. J. Ribeiro Ferreira and others (Coimbra: Classica Digitalia, 2009), 37–50, at 40, 47–48.
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Anonymous Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy 26.18–20 (tr. Westerink), as quoted by James Ambury, “Neoplatonic Pedagogy”, Dionysius 33 (2015): 49–75, at 50 n. 7; Proclus, In Alcibiadem 11.1–17 on Iamblichus, in Ambury’s paraphrase (p. 49 n. 5). Alcibiades I 131e–132a, 135e (Lamb), with the Greek οὐ μή σε ἀπολίπω; the authenticity of the dialogue is disputed, but the Neoplatonists did not doubt it. Proclus, Commentary on the First Alcibiades, in William O’Neill’s translation (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1965; 2nd edn 1971), with the page and line numbers of L. G. Westerink’s edition (Amsterdam, 1954): 55.12–17 and 55.20–56.4 (the latter “slightly modified”), as quoted by Zdenek Lenner, “What are the Sources of Pseudo-Dionysius’ ‘Spiral of Love’?”, in Platonism and its Heritage, ed. John F. Finamore, Ioanna Patsioti and Giannis Stamatellos (The Prometheus Trust, 2023), 148–160; 43.7–9, 44.11–45.1 and 61.2–5, and the paraphrase, as quoted by D. Gregory MacIsaac, “The Nous of the Partial Soul in Proclus’ Commentary on the First Alcibiades of Plato”, Dionysius 29 (2011): 29–60; 133.6–13 and 139.18–140.2, as quoted by Dimitrios A. Vasilakis, “Love as Descent: Comparing the Models of Proclus and Dionysius through Eriugena”, Religions 12 (2021), art. 726. All the Proclus quotations are second-hand and should be checked against O’Neill and Westerink or against A.-Ph. Segonds’s edition (Paris, 1985–86) before print. Olympiodorus, On Plato First Alcibiades, tr. Michael Griffin, 2 vols (London: Bloomsbury, 2015–16), not seen; Sara Ahbel-Rappe, review of M. Johnson and H. Tarrant (eds), Alcibiades and the Socratic Lover-Educator (London, 2012), Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2013.07.13.
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Ficino, Commentarium in Convivium Platonis de amore VII.2 (“Socrates fuit verus amator et Cupidini similis”) and VII.16 (“Quam utilis verus amator”), quoted from an online transcription of the Latin with evident scanning slips, not collated with Raymond Marcel’s edition (Paris, 1956) or with Sears Jayne’s translation (1944; rev. Dallas, 1985); the English renderings are the entry’s own. VII.2 supports Socrates’ bare feet from the Phaedrus (“Sine calceis incedentem, ita semper solitum incedere Socratem apud Platonem Phedrus ostendit”) and attaches Potidaea only to Love’s boldness. For the Theologia Platonica on the standing, see n. 16.
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Montaigne, Essays III.13 (“Of Experience”), III.12 (“Of Physiognomy”), III.6 (“Of Coaches”), in Charles Cotton’s translation (ed. W. C. Hazlitt, 1877); the French was not consulted; that Montaigne read Plato in Ficino’s Latin is the common view and was not checked for these passages. Hölderlin, “Sokrates und Alcibiades” (1798). Erasmus’ adage Sileni Alcibiadis (1515) made the opened Silenus a commonplace but takes nothing from the war stories; Kierkegaard’s Concept of Irony (1841) discusses the Silenus image but was not consulted for Potidaea; Foucault’s lectures of 1981–82 on the First Alcibiades (The Hermeneutics of the Subject) were not seen. Searches of Theosophical and occult literature (Blavatsky, Manly P. Hall, Schuré, Steiner) for the rescue found nothing.
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Symposium 216d, 219e, 220e (Lamb); Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.2.16 (Marchant, in his own reply to the accuser: “as soon as they thought themselves superior to their fellow-disciples they sprang away from Socrates and took to politics; it was for political ends that they had wanted Socrates”); Apology 28e (Fowler); Plutarch, Alcibiades 4.3; Proclus, In Alc. 133.6–13, 139.18–140.2 (as in n. 26). The summary is the entry’s own.
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IG I³ 1179; the Greek from PHI Greek Inscriptions (Old Attic spelling: ℎ = h, φσ = ψ, χσ = ξ, ε and ο for the long vowels), the translation by Robert Pitt, “adapted from Bowie”, from Attic Inscriptions Online (AIUK 4.6 no. 79), with its heading “At Pot[eidaia these Athenians died?]”; British Museum 1816,0610.348 (“Greek inscription: marble wall-block from a civic tomb with a metrical epitaph commemorating the Athenians (Kallias, the General, and 150 men) who fell at Potidaea in 432BC”; 30 cm high, 87.6 cm wide; “Academia”); the Agora fragment I 2277 “contains the right end of ll. 11-13” (AIO); M. Divincenzo, Axon 6.2 (2022), gives January 1935 for its discovery and February 1802 for the block’s. The find-spot: Pitt, AIUK 4.6, pp. 11–12, on the confusion in the travellers’ reports and the eyewitness testimony of the French consul Fauvel, “près l’emplacement de l’Académie, nouvellement découverte”; Divincenzo places the discovery along the Demosion Sema between the Kerameikos and the Academy. The three epigrams: Nichols (2024), p. 452 (“Although written continuously as if the entire text were a single poem, there seem to be three separate elegies”); of the first, line 5 (νίκεν εὐπόλεμομ μνε͂μ’ ἔλαβο<μ> φθ̣[ίμενοι]) survives almost whole. Date: AIO and the British Museum, 432; Nichols, p. 452, “The inscription can be dated to the year 432, though not with certainty”, and n. 1, “The 432 battle seems the most likely occasion to me”; Mattingly, ZPE 83 (1990): 110–122, at 110–111 (“They are usually dated 432, though 429 remains a viable alternative”); Tentori Montalto (2017), pp. 130–34 (as reported by Divincenzo and Nichols; not seen). Boeckh reported a relief of three warriors, “one apparently wounded and lying on the ground”, with the inscription (Hansen, CEG, p. 8, per Nichols, p. 452 n. 2); whether it survives could not be established. The observation that the second epigram fits the battle rather than the siege is the entry’s own; it rests partly on the restored ℎο̣[ι δὲ φυγόντες], but the preserved τεῖχος πιστοτάτεν ℎελπίδ’ ἔθεντο and ἔχοσι τάφο μέρος support it.
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The stone preserves αἰθὲρ μὲμ φσυχὰς ὑπεδέχσατο in full and ΣΟΜ̣ of the next word; σόμ̣[ατα δὲ χθὸν] is the restoration printed by IG and PHI. Homer, Iliad 16.856 (Murray: “and his soul fleeting from his limbs was gone to Hades”); Euripides, Suppliant Women 531–34 (Coleridge; the Greek πνεῦμα μὲν πρὸς αἰθέρα, τὸ σῶμα δ᾽ ἐς γῆν; the lines are suspected by Nauck, as Coleridge’s notes record) and Helen 1014–16 (Coleridge’s own wording, as printed in his 1906 translation; the Perseus text modernises it); Epicharmus fr. 9 Diels–Kranz (= fr. 213 Kassel–Austin), in [Plutarch], Consolatio ad Apollonium 110a–b, tr. F. C. Babbitt (“Gone is he whence he came, earth back to earth, / The soul on high”; the Greek has πνεῦμα δ᾽ ἄνω); Aristophanes, Peace 832–33. Attic Inscriptions Online, commentary on IG I³ 1179 (the concept “in many ways a Pre-Socratic concept that blurs the lines between mortals and gods”; the mid-fourth-century parallel IG II² 11466); Robert Parker, “Individuals Facing Death: The Evidence of Verse Epitaphs”, Greece & Rome 71 (2024): 217–240, at 224; Nichols (2024), pp. 452–55 and nn. 11, 17–18, reporting the older view (Jaeger, “quite widespread at the time of Euripides”; Dodds, “a fairly common fifth-century view”; Collard) and dissenting from it; his note 17 collects the other aether passages (Euripides, Electra 59, Orestes 1086–88, and fragments; Sophocles, Ajax 1192–96, possibly of the 440s but without the soul–body antithesis; CEG 2.535, 545, 558, 593, 737), and note 18 states that “none of those cited” among the inscriptions is earlier. Adrian Mihai, “Soul’s Aitherial Abode according to the Poteidaia Epitaph and the Presocratic Philosophers”, Numen 57 (2010): 553–582, is the fullest study of the philosophical background (its argument known here only from its title and from Simon Trépanier’s citation of it); Lattimore (1942), Clairmont (1983), Bremmer (1983), Burkert’s Greek Religion and Sourvinou-Inwood’s ‘Reading’ Greek Death (1995) could not be consulted for their treatment of the epigram. The Orphic gold tablets’ “child of Earth and starry Heaven” and the Erechtheus fragment (370 Kannicht) in which Athena settles the dead daughters’ breath in the aether were not checked.
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Charmides 153b–c (Lamb); IG I³ 1179, lines 12–13. On Planeaux’s reading the Charmides battle is Spartolus (429), and on Mattingly’s and Tentori Montalto’s dating the epigram may belong to 429 as well; the identification of all three with the battle of 432 is the majority view.
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Westlake (1947), p. 25, on Thucydides 1.56–65; Hubbell (1929); Gomme (1941); West (1915); Woodhead (1952); Jonathan Kagan (2013); Donald Kagan (1969), ch. 16; de Ste Croix (1972); Lendon (2010); Alexander (1963); Mihai (2010); Nichols (2024). Of the works listed, Gomme’s commentary, Hornblower, Donald Kagan, de Ste Croix, Meiggs, Lendon, Alexander, Dover, Rowe, Sheffield, Hunter, Gribble, Nails (2002), Lattimore, Clairmont, Bremmer, Mihai, Düring, Gagarin and the Neoplatonic commentaries in their editions could not be consulted beyond the passages cited by others; their bibliographic details are given as published.
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Nussbaum (1979); Anderson (2005); Monoson (2014, 2016); Nails and Monoson, “Socrates”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2022), which states as history that at Potidaea Socrates “distinguished himself there by saving the life and armor of the wounded Alcibiades (Plato, Symposium 220d–e)”.
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Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, Rome, inv. 68: Antonio Canova, Socrate salva Alcibiade nella battaglia di Potidea, 1797, plaster, 110 × 140 × 6.5 cm, “Dono dell’autore”; catalogue entry by Paola Picardi (“Il 5 gennaio 1800 Antonio Canova venne nominato accademico di merito e l’anno successivo donò, secondo le prescrizioni statutarie, il bassorilievo … Il rilievo in gesso, modello di un successivo marmo, fu realizzato nel 1797”; “Canova scelse di rappresentare l’episodio su un fondo piatto, privo di qualsiasi elemento ambientale, con una composizione a fregio, dove le figure dei combattenti si dispongono in due gruppi contrapposti, lasciando al centro un vuoto colmato dal gesto di Socrate che stende il braccio a difesa del compagno ferito”), and the Academy’s English text on Google Arts & Culture, quoted above. No record of the marble that the catalogue entry mentions, or of a version at the Gipsoteca in Possagno, was found; the Possagno Gipsoteca holds Socrate beve la cicuta (1787–90), and the Rezzonico reliefs now at the Gallerie d’Italia, Milan, include Socrate che beve la Cicuta and Critone che chiude gli occhi a Socrate. Bernardino Riccardi, Socrate che fa da scudo in battaglia ad Alcibiade, 1840, oil on panel, 103 × 147 cm, Galleria Nazionale di Parma, inv. 498 (Catalogo generale dei Beni Culturali). Jean-Baptiste Regnault, Socrate arrachant Alcibiade du sein de la Volupté, Salon of 1791, oil on canvas, 46 × 68 cm, Louvre RF 1976 9. Monoson (2014) discusses Canova’s Socrates reliefs (not seen).