Socrates and the Mask of Silenus
This third case study is an example not of the confirmation of collective norms, but of their denial, in paying honors to Socrates, who in life had so provoked and annoyed his fellow citizens with his questioning that they finally condemned him to death in 399 B.C. The earliest portrait of the philosopher originated about ten to twenty years after his death and shows him in the guise of Silenus. In flouting the High Classical standard of beauty so blatantly, this face must have disturbed Socrates' contemporaries no less than his penetrating questions.[49]
Starting with the influential circle of intellectuals around Pericles and the enormous success of the Sophists, there arose in Athens a tension between society at large and this new breed of intellectual, who exercised such great influence on political, religious, and moral thought.[50] We find traces of this tension in the parodies of Sophists in Old Comedy and even in vase painting. In both media, this ridicule targets bodily and aesthetic deficiencies. Such parody would seem to be the origin of a strategy, later employed so effectively by certain philosophers, such as the Cynics, of having themselves portrayed old and ugly or with unconventional appearance as an act of provocation. As in many cultures, the Greeks tended to dismiss the unpopular, the marginalized, and the dissident as physically defective and ugly. Their prototype is the ugly, bandy-legged Thersites (Il. 2.212ff.), in whom the Cynics would later, appropriately enough, take an interest. For the Greeks, this kind of ridicule was from the very beginning a form of social discrimination and moral condemnation, for in the ideology of kalokagathia a man's virtues and his noble heritage were expressed in the physical perfection of his body.
The earliest "portrait" of Socrates, in Aristophanes' Clouds of 423 B.C. (101ff., 348ff., 414; cf. Birds 1281f.), makes fun of his appearance.[51] Like his pupils, he is pale and thin from strain and deprivation, dirty and hungry, with long hair. Indifferent to his own appearance, he parades through the city barefoot, staring people down and trying out his corrupting intellectual experiments on them. It has long been recognized that this description of Socrates' physical appearance is as much a conventional topos as the caricature of his supposed teachings.
Fig. 19
So-called Aesop on a red-figure cup,
ca. 440 B.C. Rome, Vatican Museums.
Fig. 20
Caricature of a Sophist debating
(?). Red-figure askos, ca. 440
B.C. Paris, Louvre.
In any event, the starving thinker of the Clouds has little in common with the fat-bellied teacher with the face like a Silenus mask described by Socrates' own pupils Plato and Xenophon. Rather, it is a common stereotype, which we find occasionally in caricatures of "intellectuals" in vase painting.
On a small red-figure askos,[52] for example, of ca. 440 B.C. , a naked, emaciated little man with an enormous head leans far forward on his slender staff and seems to be simply lost in contemplation. Just so, we are told, Socrates could stand still for hours, concentrating on a problem (fig. 20). The vase probably caricatures one of the leading thinkers of the day. The creature's bare skull, swelling out in all directions, seems about to burst with all the profound thoughts churning inside it. He is nevertheless an Athenian citizen, and not a member of one of those categories of inferiors like slaves or barbarians, as we can infer from the characteristic pose of resting on the staff and short mantle.
The same is true of another example of a comical thinker, again with emaciated body and oversized head, who has always been identified in the scholarship as the writer of fables, Aesop (fig. 19).[53] With furrowed brow and open mouth, he listens carefully to the teachings of the fox sitting before him. He has pulled his mantle tightly around
his meagre body, as if he were shivering. Like Aristophanes' Socrates, he is ugly, with long hair, bald head, and unkempt, scraggly beard, and is clearly uncaring of his appearance.
These modest vase paintings probably convey some idea of the general antipathy that greeted the new breed of intellectual giants of Periclean Athens, on which Aristophanes could draw for his caricatures. Too much thinking and intellectual exercise are not for good, upstanding people: they make you strange and an object of ridicule.
The historical Socrates, from all that the ancient sources report, must have been strikingly ugly. But in this he was surely not alone among the Athenians. That his unfortunate appearance became such a focus of attention must derive from the offensive nature of his intellectual activities. The likening of Socrates to silens, satyrs, and Marsyas, as we hear from Plato and Xenophon, probably originated with his enemies and detractors, for the particular traits that are usually mentioned in the comparison—the squat figure with big belly, broad and flat face with bulging eyes, the large mouth with protruding lips, and the bald head—were all considered, by the standards of kalokagathia, not only ugly, but tokens of a base nature (Cic. Tusc. 4.81).[54] The decision to adapt the comparison with Silenus for a portrait statue intended to celebrate the subject, however, presupposes a positive interpretation of the comparison, such as we do in fact find, in particular, in the speech of Alcibiades in Plato's Symposium . Perhaps Socrates himself had already laid the groundwork for this new interpretation by accepting the comparison with his characteristic irony.
The copies of the head from this portrait statue convey very different nuances, though on all major elements of detail they are in agreement (fig. 21). That is, they all follow the basic analogy with Silenus iconography, especially in the flat, strangely constricted face, the very broad, short, and deep-set nose, the high-set ears and bald head, and the long hair descending from the temples over the ears and the nape of the neck (fig. 22). But at the same time, a comparison with images of the actual Silenus leaves no doubt that in Socrates the silen features have been at least partly mitigated.[55] This is particularly true of the eyes, the well-groomed beard, the hair, which, though long, is ex-
Fig. 21
Bust of Socrates (as in fig. 5). Naples, Museo Nazionale.
Fig. 22
Silenus on a silver coin from
Katane in Sicily, ca. 410 B.C. Berlin,
Staatliche Münzsammlung.
tremely carefully coiffed, and the full but well-formed lips. There is in addition probably a hint of introspection that can be detected in most of the copies. These positive features are the more remarkable in that literary descriptions emphasize Socrates' bulging eyes, swollen lips, and unkempt hair. Evidently the intention of the statue's patrons was to tone down the Silenus comparison by combining it with unmistakable features of propriety, to make an unambiguously positive statement. Furthermore, the Silenus mask of this portrait is a countenance artfully constructed of prescribed iconographical formulas. In real life, Socrates' ugliness might have been of an entirely different nature.
What sort of body could have been combined with this head? The loss of the body is especially frustrating in light of the complex associations of the head. It seems most unlikely that such a head could have sat on a perfectly handsome and conventional body, like that of the later portrait statue of Socrates (cf. fig. 33). An unimpressive bronze relief from Pompeii (fig. 23), about fifteen centimeters in height, made as a furniture appliqué, may give us a rough idea of the lost statue.[56]
The scene, known in a number of versions, is itself an eclectic pastiche of several prototypes, made by a Late Hellenistic artist, and probably depicting Socrates' initiation into the mysteries of love by Diotima. The figure of Diotima is based on the Tyche of Antioch. For the
Fig. 23
Socrates and Diotima. Bronze relief from Pompeii, first century B.C.
Naples, Museo Nazionale.
figure of Socrates, the artist has used a motif, standard in vase painting from the late sixth century on, of a man relaxing on his staff with the other arm casually propped on his hip. The motif appears occasionally as late as on Attic grave stelai of the fourth century, but not in the Hellenistic period. This would imply an early date for the prototype, unless we prefer to think of a historicizing invention. The motif expresses the qualities of leisure and delight in conversation that were such important elements of the ethos of Classical Athens. It marks the Athenian citizen who is not gainfully employed but has long stretches of free time in which to stand around discussing all that is going on in the city. Even the Eponymous Heroes on the Parthenon Frieze are represented in this manner.[57] This image of Socrates would thus be that of the properly behaved citizen, but at the same time, as in the
portrait head, with unmistakably ugly and deviant features—the small stature and bulging belly—just as described in our literary sources.
But we have yet to ask why the statue's patrons accepted in the first place an image of Socrates' ugliness, one that likened him to the semi-human followers of Dionysus best known for their indecent and drunken ways. And why above all in Athens, where all deviations from the ideal body were apt to be eliminated in art, as a glance at the countless Classical Attic gravestones will remind us?
There is surely more than one aspect to the comparison of Socrates to Silenus. In being likened to a mythological creature, he is presented as an extraordinary human being, transcending conventional norms. The old Silenus, unlike the rest of his breed, was considered the repository of ancient wisdom and goodness and for this reason appears in mythology as the teacher of divine and heroic children. As early as about 450 B.C. a vase painting shows Silenus with his citizen's staff in the role of the watchful paidagogos .[58] The connotation as the wise teacher was thus an obvious one for the portrait of Socrates-as-Silenus.
But the Silenus analogy does more than just pay homage to Socrates as the remarkable teacher; it presents a challenge as well. The deliberate visualization of ugliness represented, in the Athens of the early fourth century, a clash with the standards of kalokagathia . That is, a portrait like this questioned one of the fundamental values of the Classical polis. If the man whom the god at Delphi proclaimed the wisest of all could be ugly as Silenus and still a good, upstanding citizen, then this must imply that the statue's patron was casting doubt on that very system of values. We have to look at this statue of Socrates, with its fat belly and Silenus face, against the background of a city filled with perfectly proportioned and idealized human figures in marble and bronze embodying virtue and moral authority.
Such doubts can have originated only in the circle of Socrates' friends. It was long ago suggested that the statue might have been intended to stand in the Mouseion of Plato's Academy, founded in 385, where we know a statue of Plato himself, put up by the Persian Mithridates and made by the sculptor Silanion, later stood (D. L. 3.25). We may perhaps go even a step further and consider a possible connection between the concept behind the statue and an element of Platonic
thought contained in the very passage of the Symposium that compares Socrates to Silenus. The discussion there revolves around the contrast between interior and exterior. between appearance and reality. Socrates himself, it is suggested, is like a figure of a flute-playing Silenus (evidently a familiar object, perhaps of wood), which, when you open it, contains a divine image (Symp. 215B). True philosophy recognizes the "seemingness" of the external and leads instead to the perception of actual being. Socrates' body may be seen as an exemplar of these precepts, for the seemingly ugly form conceals the most perfect soul. This idea implies that the entire value system of Athenian society is built upon mere appearance and deception, misled by its fixation on the external form of the body.
Seen in this light, the portrait of Socrates makes a rather forceful and provocative statement and becomes a kind of extension of Socratic discourse into another medium. As the living Socrates once did, the statue now challenges his society on a fundamental principle of its identity.[59] We are witnessing here the discovery of a new dimension in the portraiture of the intellectual, one that will not be exploited again until the philosopher statues of the Early Hellenistic age.[60]
In the next chapter we shall see how this rigid value system, founded upon the principles of kalokagathia and conformity, persisted for more than a full half century, at least in the public sphere of the Athenian city-state, and even managed to bring about a transformation in the provocative image of Socrates.