D'Angour Armand: Zaljubljeni Sokrat

Armand D'Angour: Socrates in Love

 Socrates is usually thought to have been of "low birth" and to have had few opportunities for education; that as a youth he was certainly no less ugly than as an adult; that the scant evidence of his early love life suggests that there was none; and that he was always a man of thought, not of action. An examination of the evidence will show that all these assumptions can be radically changed. The image of a strong and attractive young man from a relatively wealthy family, growing up in an elite Athenian milieu where the boy's ambition was to shine on the battlefield and in political life, will surface; a young man who from an early age learned to sing the verses of the great Greek poets, play the lyre and undergo strict physical and mental discipline; a young man who learned from the best teachers of his time and strove to acquire the latest intellectual knowledge; and a young man whose lively erotic approach to life found expression not in marriage - he met Xanthippe in his fifties or later, and his relationship with his first wife, Mirto, is shrouded in mystery - but in association with smart people and, above all, in his love for one of the most exciting and ingenious women of his time, Aspasia of Miletus. Armand D'Angour is an associate professor at Oxford, Latinist and Grecist. He is the author of the study The Greeks and the New (2011). He wrote a number of articles on ancient Greek and Roman poetry, music and literature. He also deals with the reconstruction of ancient classical music, and he is a musician, pianist and cellist himself. Our ideas about Socrates rely mostly on Plato and Xenophon, the people who met him when he was in his fifties. What we don't know is - what turned the young Socrates into a philosopher? How and why did Socrates become - Socrates? In this biography, the classicist Armand D'Angour explores hitherto neglected historical sources in order to penetrate into the passions and motivations of the young Socrates, and tries to prove with argument to what extent he was shaped by the love dimension of life. A different character of Socrates emerges before us: a heroic warrior, an athletic wrestler and dancer, and a passionate lover. The study Socrates in Love sheds new light on the formative years of the famous philosopher, revealing - based on some of his passing remarks recorded in Plato's writings - the identity of the woman he claimed inspired him to develop ideas that would captivate thinkers for the next 2,500 years.