Divine Fury (5 page)

But what exactly was this power, this
divinum quiddam
, as Cicero would later call it, struggling like Socrates to find the words to capture this divine and mysterious thing? Generations of scholars once passed over the question in embarrassed silence, or sought to explain it away, as if a man as rational as Socrates could never have believed anything so strange. The simple truth, however, is that this same man, who sought by the power of his intellect to clarify what was obscure, recognized the existence of mysterious forces, and obeyed them. Socrates, we can be certain, believed in his inner
daimonion
and heeded its call.
⁹

In that respect, at least, this extraordinary man was not all that different from the great majority of his contemporaries, who also believed in spirits hidden and unseen. Invoking
daimones
as a way to explain the silent forces that moved through their lives, they conceived of these powers as akin to fortune or fate, affecting their actions despite their explicit intentions, for better or for worse. That human beings were attended by guardian
daimones
of sorts, whether evil or good, was in fact a widely shared belief among ordinary people, who held that although a mischievous
daimon
might lead them astray, a “good
daimon
” (an
eu daimon
), could make them “happy” (
eudaimon
). The two words were one and the same.
¹⁰

Socrates’s own understanding of his
daimonion
likely drew on these broader beliefs, which were also sustained by widely received legends, myths, and poems. In the verses of Homer, for example, Greeks would have encountered scattered, if conflicting, references to the
daimones
, which the bard equates on occasion with the gods of Mount Olympus themselves. Homer’s rough contemporary, the poet Hesiod, was more specific, claiming that the
daimones
were originally heroes of the Golden Age, transformed by Zeus when their race died out into guardians and “watchers of mortal men.” And the followers of the sixth-century philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras maintained that they could see and hear
daimones
as a consequence of their superior enlightenment. When we bear in mind that a similar ability was attributed to soothsayers, priestesses, and priests, the mysterious
daimonion
of Socrates begins to seem rather less a mystery. As Xenophon insists, in defending the apparent normalcy of his master’s sign, “he was no more bringing in anything strange than other believers in divination, who rely on augury, oracles, coincidences and sacrifices.”
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Xenophon’s claim to normalcy, however, is an exception, and even he cannot sustain it. Whereas other men skilled in prophecy read in natural occurrences like the flight of birds the signs of the gods’ will, Socrates, Xenophon conceded, observed the sign in himself, and the sign was invariably right. Was this not a tacit admission that the wisest of all men had been specially touched, that his spiritual something was something special? Socrates himself seemed to acknowledge as much, observing, in a passing reference in Plato’s
Republic
, that few, if any, had ever possessed such a sign. In this respect, Socrates’s accusers had a point: his
daimonion
was strange, unlike any the world had known.
¹²

It was that understanding that came to dominate Socrates’s legend, which was perpetuated both by his detractors and his proponents. On the one hand, his detractors insisted on the essential monstrosity of this man possessed and apart. The point was given graphic illustration by Socrates’s notorious physical appearance. He was, by all accounts, “strikingly ugly,” short and squat with a broad, flat face, bulging eyes, swollen lips, and a deep-set nose. A bald head and an unkempt beard completed the picture, rendering Socrates the very antithesis of conventional Athenian beauty, like a university professor gone to seed. And given that it was common to relate physical appearance to character, Socrates’s ugliness was used by his detractors to highlight the base and demonic nature of his soul. Socrates as satyr, Socrates as monster, Socrates as sorcerer who trafficked with demons to seduce the young and threaten the stability of the state—these were the images that haunted the memory of
a man who, by his own admission, was an annoying gadfly, disturbing the peace with unsettling questions and impertinent remarks. It is revealing that the earliest known representation of Socrates—a bust executed within ten to twenty years of his death—depicts Socrates as Silenus, the drunken and unattractive tutor of the wine-god Dionysius, whose ecstatic trances were legendary.
¹³

The depiction of Socrates as Silenus, however, cuts another way. For the companion of the god was also renowned for his piercing insight and prophetic power. And though Silenus’s “frightening wisdom,” as Friedrich Nietzsche would later describe it in
The Birth of Tragedy
, may have heralded dismemberment, nothingness, and death, it was privileged wisdom all the same. In the hands of Socrates’s admirers, the prophetic and oracular forces allegedly mediated by the demon could be extolled. Thus Plutarch, a Greek writing under the Roman Empire in the first century, has one of his characters observe, in a celebrated dialogue devoted to Socrates’s sign, that his
daimonion
was heaven sent, a divine source of revelation and prophecy, illuminating him in “matters dark and inscrutable to human wisdom.” Despite Socrates’s insistence that his sign acted only negatively, characterizations of this kind, building on Xenophon’s early intimation of divination and prophecy, assumed considerable importance. Cicero reports on a collection in his possession by the Greek Stoic Antipater that gathered together “a mass” of stories regarding Socrates’s
daimonion
and its “remarkable” premonitions. And later classical commentators, such as Apuleius, Proclus, and Maximus of Tyre, devoted entire treatises to the subject, which were often frank in their embrace of an explicit demonology linking Socrates to higher powers. As Maximus explains, typically, in this vein, in the second century
CE:
“God himself, settled and immobile, administers the heavens and maintains their ordered hierarchy. But he has a race of secondary immortal beings, the so-called
daimones
, which have their station in the space between earth and heaven.” These
daimones
are the “middle term” of the universe. Some heal diseases, some “descend from their station above the earth to inhabit cities,” and still others “are assigned homes in different human bodies; one Socrates, another Plato, another Pythagoras, another Zeno, another Diogenes.” The greatest minds of the ancient world, in short, were singularly chosen and possessed. The indwelling presence of the
daimon
was what explained their superior powers.
¹⁴

Maximus’s understanding of Socrates’s demon was both literal and crude, and in this respect it was not unlike a great many Platonic and later Neo-Platonic accounts that speculated with lavish imagination about the sundry spiritual beings who filled the universe, interacting
with the gods and human beings alike. They found the basis for such speculation in Plato himself, who dwelled at considerable length in a number of his dialogues on the function and role of the
daimones
, describing them as angelic “messengers” who “shuttle back and forth” between the gods and men, or spiritual beings who were themselves “a kind of god,” existing “midway” between the human and the divine. Read literally, these descriptions offered a banquet of materials on which later admirers could feast in speculation about the
daimonic
forces that filled the cosmos. But more refined delicacies were also hidden in their midst, providing the basis for a different kind of reflection, an explanation of the
daimonic
man that dwelled less on the nature of the demon than on the nature of its host. For if outstanding individuals like Socrates excited wonder about the nature of the forces that might possess them, they also excited speculation about the nature of the forces they possessed. On whom did the gods lavish their powers, and why, anointing some while spurning others? These are questions even older than the
daimonion
of Socrates, and in the ancient world, it was poets as much as philosophers who begged them.
¹⁵

“S
ING,
O
GODDESS, OF THE ANGER
of Achilles.” “Sing, muse, of the man of twists and turns.” So begin the two most celebrated poems of the ancient world, Homer’s
Iliad
and Homer’s
Odyssey
, the epic tales of the exploits of Achilles and Odysseus during and after the Trojan War. Both men are heroes, favored by the gods. But the poet who conjures them is also divinely attended. A different translation hints at how: “Sing
in
me, Muse, and through me tell the story. . . . “A séance, petition, and prayer, the words are a summons to the goddess to take possession of the poet and command his voice, to settle and dwell in his person. The founding texts of the Western literary canon open with an incantation.
¹⁶

The conception of the poet as a medium who reveals divinely inspired words is by far the oldest understanding of this exalted being in the Greek tradition, and many others besides. Homer himself writes of the blind bard Demodocus, who moves Odysseus to tears and others to laughter when “the spirit stirs him on to sing.” “God has given the man the gift of song,” Homer declares, “to him beyond all others.” Generations of Greeks said much the same of Homer himself, who was also frequently represented as blind, though uniquely gifted with special sight. Hesiod, Homer’s only equal for early poetic fame, spoke similarly of the source of his power, recounting how the Muses appeared before him atop Mount Helicon and “breathed into me a divine voice so that I might celebrate the events of the future and the past. They bade me
sing of the race of the blessed, eternal gods, but always to sing of themselves first and last.” Poetry of this kind, invoking the gods even as it is dictated by their emissaries, provides a perfect illustration of what later writers will call
inspiration
, from the Latin verb
inspirare
, meaning “to breath into.” Hesiod uses a different word, a variant of the Greek verb
pneo
, to breathe, but his stress is on the same pneumatic source of poetic revelations, which are blown directly into the mind by the Muse. When we consider that poetry itself comes from the verb
poeien
, to create, it follows clearly enough that poems are the creation of the gods, realized through their human artisans and agents.
¹⁷

It is partly for this reason that poetry was so often likened to prophecy and prophets to poets. The famous priestesses at Delphi, who declared Socrates the wisest man, delivered their oracular pronouncements in bits of verse, filled with the breath of the gods and the sulfurous vapors that wafted up from the vents below their temple, inducing prophetic states of trance. And just as Hesiod “might celebrate the events of the future” when he was properly inspired, prophets frequently spoke in poetic language, serving, like the much older Hebrew
nabi
(one who communicates the thoughts of God), as divine ventriloquists, blending beauty and revelation. In the beginning was the word, and the word, in many traditions, was with the gods and from God, imparted to poets and prophets alike.
¹⁸

But though the Greek poet-prophet was by no means unique, he was accorded unique status within ancient Greek society, singled out as a special being. Painters, for example, or architects or sculptors, enjoyed no such favor, despite the ancient world’s admiration of their handiwork. Deemed craftsmen—artisans who labored with their hands—they were judged inferior to those who labored with their minds, a prejudice that would endure until at least the time of the Renaissance. In ancient Greece, poets were privileged. It was they who kept alive the memories of the past. It was they who told the stories of the gods and heroes. And it was they who served as the principal educators of the youth, imparting morals and models of conduct in what was still a predominantly oral culture. In the greatest masters—Hesiod and Homer above all—the culture conceived its spokesmen, and as the many surviving busts of these two men indicate, they were held in particularly high esteem.

But why should Homer and Hesiod have been singled out by the gods? Any simple answer to the question is complicated by the fact that the works of “Homer” and “Hesiod” were not composed by single “authors.” The thousands of lines we attribute to them, in other words, were a blend of different voices, worked and reworked by many as they
were handed down orally over the centuries. Still, contemporaries believed that the poems were the product of that special in-breathing conferred on those who exhaled them. Which only begged the question of why the Muse should choose to settle here and not there. Were the greatest poets like lightning rods, drawing energy from the sky? Perhaps there was special metal in their souls, a “conducting” agent that summoned this power? Or were they merely empty vessels, filled from on high?

The earliest Greeks seem to have had no notion of innate poetic ability, a perspective that would have harmonized well with the common observation, by no means confined to Greece, that the gods—or God—worked in mysterious ways, frequently conferring power on the unsuspecting. The greatest of the ancient prophets, Moses, for example, was “slow of speech and tongue” until God filled him with words. “Who gave human beings their mouths?” replies Yahweh in answer to Moses’s fumbling protests that he was not worthy to speak for the Lord. God himself decides whom to fill with his breath, and he needn’t give an account of his choices, however unlikely they might seem. In the same way, the gods and Muses inspired where they would.
¹⁹