The rhetoric, if it was really Hippocrates’ and not the historian’s own, shows flashes of brilliance and a determination to lead his ragtag army head-on against the best infantry in the Greek world. What little we know of Hippocrates suggests that he was an avid supporter of an aggressive Athenian pursuit of the war and a coplanner of the invasion of Boeotia. Hippocrates was also the nephew of Pericles, the distinguished imperialist who had led Athens into the Peloponnesian conflict before dying from the plague in the second year of the war.
In most Greek battles, generals were posted on the right wing, occupied the front line, led the charge, and perished in defeat. Frequently their sudden deaths in the melee served to hasten the collapse of the phalanx itself. For Athens, the ruin of its right wing at Delium had irrevocable effects on the ultimate course of the battle. We do not know whether Hippocrates’ death preceded or followed the ruination of his elite right—Pausanias in his Description of Greece relates that he was killed rather early on in the fighting. But had he survived and perhaps held together his already victorious hoplites, the Athenians may well have won the battle outright, and then either annexed parts of Boeotia or at least forced a Boeotian withdrawal from the war—a coup that may well have brought the Spartans to negotiations at the end of 424 B.C.
From all accounts, despite his youth Hippocrates was a capable and energetic leader at the forefront of those Athenians determined to press home the war. Earlier in the conflict he had proposed Athenian citizenship for the survivors of the small Boeotian town of Plataea that had been overrun by Theban oligarchs and their Spartan supporters. And weeks before Delium, Hippocrates had attempted to stir up insurrection in nearby Megara and bring this critically important city near the Isthmus over to the Athenians. Moreover, the battle at Delium was part of a strategically ambitious theater campaign that failed largely due to the incompetence of his fellow general Demosthenes. Hippocrates’ entire tenure as general is evidence of relentless support for radical imperial democracy in the tradition of his uncle Pericles, advocacy of continued aggression toward Sparta, and keen interest in conquering or neutralizing neighboring Boeotia.
But even more intriguing, Hippocrates’ father was Ariphron, making him the nephew of Pericles—and the stepbrother of the adopted Alcibiades, who was six years his junior. We know little else about the personal life of Hippocrates other than he orphaned three children with his death at Delium. Yet his brief career suggests that his stepbrother Alcibiades was influential in his bold decision to invade Boeotia, and no doubt was stationed among the mounted Athenian elite that guarded the right wing. Hippocrates’ death, coupled with the bravery of his adopted sibling, had the effect of enhancing Alcibiades and removing a talented rival from among the radically democratic leadership. For Hippocrates and Alcibiades, Delium was the key moment in two stepbrothers’ promising careers, one aborted by death, the other launched in defeat. For Athens it would have been far better had their fates been reversed.
Other notable Athenians at Delium were also connected to Alcibiades through mutual acquaintances. Plato, the best remembered pupil of Socrates, nearly a half century after the battle wrote his Laches nominally on the subject of courage. The dialogue takes place between the Athenians Socrates, Laches, and Nicias. Purportedly set sometime around 420 B.C., four years after the Athenian defeat, the discussion draws on the battle in a variety of interesting ways. Laches was a prominent democratic statesman and general who is often mentioned as a leader in most of the Athenian campaigns and political initiatives during the first decade of the Peloponnesian War. In the Laches, the speakers have just watched young men training in armor. The question then arises as to the best type of education necessary for young Athenian infantrymen—should they learn set military moves and skills or simply rely on traditional bravery to win battles?
Nicias—the conservative general whom Alcibiades outmaneuvered to win approval of the Sicilian expedition—argues for specialized training. In doing so he seems to recall the situation at Delium:
The greatest advantage [of being trained in using weapons] arises when the ranks of the phalanx become broken, and the need arises for one-on-one fighting, either in pursuit attacking someone who is fighting back, or in flight defending against the attacker. Whoever possessed such skill, would not suffer anything in single engagements, nor even if attacked by a host of enemies; he could prevail in any situation.
Well over four decades after the battle, Plato here explicitly uses Socrates’ skill in escaping the Boeotians as proof that young men of his own age must learn how to use their weapons through set moves. Only that way can infantrymen of fourth-century Athens avoid just such a debacle as the defeat of a generation past. Delium serves the philosopher’s larger goal of stressing that education and training are not antithetical to innate ability, but rather, if properly pursued, refine and improve upon nature. Laches is made the foil to Socrates in his own eponymous dialogue. He confesses that the middle-aged philosopher “made his way with me in the retreat from Delium, and I can tell you that if the other Athenians had been willing to be like him, our city would be standing tall and would not have suffered such a terrible fall.” Later in the dialogue Laches reiterates that Socrates was alongside him during the rout and proved unshakable in the ensuing calamity.
Plato was only five when Delium was fought. Yet he must have grown up with general stories of the Athenian disgrace and Socrates’ own extraordinary courage in particular—so that the battle once again found itself immortalized in classical Athenian literature. A final footnote to the career of Laches: although he had been instrumental in brokering the peace with Sparta in 421 B.C., he also led the Athenian contingent at the battle of Mantinea in 418 B.C.—a result of the anti-Spartan confederation engineered by Alcibiades. The latter, who helped force the battle, was not present at the actual fighting. Laches, however, was. And six years after Delium, he seems to have experienced once more a similar failure of courage. Although cogeneral of the Athenian contingent at Mantinea, he joined in the panicked flight of his men from the pursuing Spartans. This time, however, there was no Socrates at his side. He, along with some two hundred Athenian hoplites, was killed. Plato must have had these two incidents in mind when he wrote Laches decades later: a shaky Laches saved at Delium by his proximity to the redoubtable Socrates, only to be later killed at Mantinea when he once more lost his nerve.
What explains this strange interest of Plato in Delium, a battle fought when he was a tiny boy? Besides the towering figure of Socrates, we also know that Plato’s own stepfather Pyrilampes was part of the call-up of the home guard, fled the battlefield, was wounded and then captured—only later to be ransomed from the Boeotians. Pyrilampes was probably fifty-six at Delium. His age reminds us again that Hippocrates’ home guard had drawn from the reserves of Athenian manpower and was full of hoplites well past their prime. Pyrilampes was a notorious Athenian bureaucrat, infamous for his lavish junkets to Persia to conduct state relations, and ridiculed as well for the prized peacocks he brought home from one such trip—and habitually showed off at public displays for years afterward. If Plato first met Socrates a decade and a half after Delium (somewhere around 410 B.C., when he was about twenty), he would have heard of the battle even earlier from his stepfather—and Pyrilampes’ own retreat, capture, and ransom would contrast markedly with Socrates’ successful fighting withdrawal. In fact, that very divergence in mettle between stepfather and mentor at Delium may have haunted Plato for the rest of his life.
In his utopia of the Republic, for example, a middle-aged Plato presents a variety of ideas about military service, along with advice to the state about how to improve the spirit of its soldiers. Fathers (does he have his stepfather Pyrilampes in mind?) are to take their sons out to the battlefield to make them watch the fighting, with the guarantee that the “older guides” can direct them away in safe retreat “if the need arises.” But those who are caught alive (again, like his stepfather?) are not to be ransomed but left to the desires of the enemy: “Any one of them who leaves his assigned rank or tosses away his arms, or is guilty of any similar act is to be demoted to the farmer or craftsmen class.”
Plato goes on to be quite clear about the fate of captives: “And anyone who is taken alive by the enemy, should we not give him over to his captors to deal with their ‘catch’ any way they please?” In contrast, the courageous—i.e., the Socratic—shall be given military prizes for their heroism, be greeted by all as heroes, even to the point of being publicly kissed by well-wishers. Had his general policies come true, Plato’s own stepfather would have languished in a Boeotian jail or have been summarily executed after the battle.
Delium affected a handful of individuals in the most remarkable ways—Alcibiades emboldened, Hippocrates finished, Laches and Pyrilampes embarrassed. The Socratic and Periclean common connections between all four are uncanny and perhaps provide a small glimpse into a close-knit cadre of friends and associates, mostly very young and middle-aged, who marched and rode out together somewhere on the Athenian right wing, hardly expecting to collide without support against the finest infantry in Greece. While the later careers of these notables affected the course of Greek history itself, one man’s experience at Delium—the common nexus to them all—changed the ages.
Socrates Slain?
Classical Greek thinkers saw no contradiction between a life of action and contemplation, even in the extreme polarities between military service and philosophy. Plato sighed that fighting “always exists by nature between every Greek city-state.” In classical antiquity philosophers rarely argued for pacifism or conscientious objection to military service. The idea of a “just war” centered on only two criteria—neither involving the moral question of killing the enemy in battle. Fighting instead was to follow the laws of the Greeks pertaining to the treatment of prisoners, heralds, and civilian populations; and war should be in the true interest of the state.
Nor did the intellectual class find it either fashionable or compelling to castigate war itself. Instead they were more likely to find themselves with spear and shield than in a study condemning man’s folly. A number of Greek writers, thinkers, and statesmen fought in the phalanx. The lyric poet Archilochus was killed in battle on the Aegean island of Thasos. The poets Tyrtaeus, Alcaeus, and Callinus, the playwrights Aeschylus and Sophocles, the democratic leader Pericles, the historian Thucydides, and the orator Demosthenes all took their slot in the files of the phalanx or on the banks of a trireme.
Plato himself may have served as a hoplite in the Corinthian War. At the siege of Samos (440 B.C.), Melissus, a Samian philosopher and student of Parmenides, led his ship into battle against Pericles’ fleet. Sophocles was also at sea there, among the elected high command of Athenians who came to enslave the island. The philosopher and mathematician Archimedes died in the storming of Syracuse, in his final hours employing his novel military machines against the Roman besiegers.
Likewise Socrates, the father of Western ethical philosophy and veteran of the fighting in the campaign of Potidaea, found himself on the battlefield at Delium. He is not mentioned by either Thucydides or Diodorus in accounts of the battle, who must have either not known of his presence there or felt that his battle service was not unusual and thus not worthy of special mention, given that only elected officers on both sides are expressly noted. Instead, what we know of his ordeal derives from Plato and the Platonic tradition that turns up in later writers such as the biographer and essayist Plutarch. In these sources Socrates fought heroically and was nearly killed. While we have mention of his actual hand-to-hand fighting in the melee, his fame derives from his stubborn retreat and refusal to join the panicky frenzy that overtook most of the Athenian army.
After the appearance of the Theban cavalry reinforcements and the subsequent hysteria that infected the Athenian right wing, and the continual battering on the left by Pagondas’s deep columns, most of the Athenian army took off at a run to the rear for safety in different directions. They headed in four directions—either to nearby Mount Parnes, to the fortified sanctuary at Delium proper, to the beach and the refuge of Athenian triremes, or to the woods in the Oropus along the border in Attica.
There were already over 10,000 lightly armed Boeotians present at the battle in addition to 1,000 cavalry and another 500 light-armed skirmishers. With the Locrian reinforcements and the victorious hoplites, there may well have been a swarm of nearly 20,000 or so enemy pursuers, many of them either mounted or agile, lightly equipped auxiliaries. The early evening chase turned into a massacre. The routed Athenians, without much cavalry support or auxiliary skirmishers, and struggling to fling away their heavy armor, were vastly outnumbered, slower, confused, and in many cases disoriented in the growing twilight. Theirs was a nightmare long remembered at Athens.
Socrates—he later thanked his “divine” voice for directing him out of danger—wisely avoided both the escape routes to Delium and the high ground of Parnes. And so he found safety in a third way through the forested borderland of the Oropus. Again, the disaster of this Athenian “home guard” must have quickly taken on mythic proportions and been recounted constantly throughout Athens: Hippocrates, nephew of Pericles, stepbrother of Alcibiades, and general of the army, killed; Alcibiades’ bravery during the retreat soon to inaugurate his meteoric political career; Laches’ dubious courage in the flight from Delium foreshadowing his demise at the subsequent battle of Mantinea (418 B.C.); and Plato’s own stepfather and great-uncle, Pyrilampes, captured when Plato was but a mere boy.
In three later dialogues—Laches, Symposium, and Apology—Plato makes direct mention of Socrates’ gallantry in the flight, how he backpedaled and made an orderly withdrawal toward the borderland of Oropus accompanied by both Laches and Alcibiades. In the Laches, Socrates is made to lecture about the proper technique of attacking and fending off blows when in isolated combat, with a clear allusion to his own nightmarish experience after Delium. Laches brags of Socrates that “if other Athenians had been willing to be like him, our city would be standing tall and would not then have suffered such a terrible fall.”
In Plato’s Apology, the last speech of Socrates’ life, the seventy-year-old philosopher reminds his accusers, who sought to have him executed on spurious charges, that long ago in three terrible battles he had kept rank and not left his position. The man they charge as a corrupter of youth and blasphemer of traditional religion was in fact a war hero. In Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades gives a detailed description of the acute danger Socrates found himself in during the general rout after Delium:
I happened to be riding; he was serving as a hoplite. As the army was scattered he was retreating with Laches when I happened on him. At first sight I told them to keep their courage up as I told them I would not abandon them. Then I had even a finer view of Socrates than at Potidaea. For my part I was less afraid since I was mounted. First off I noticed how much more in control of his senses he was than Laches, and how—to use your own phrase, Aristophanes—he made his way there just as he does here in Athens, “swaggering and glancing sideways.” So he looked around calmly at both his friends and the enemy; he was clearly giving the message to anyone even at a distance that if anyone touched this man, he quickly would put up a stout defense. The result was that he and his partner got away safely. For it is true that attackers do not approach men of this caliber but instead go after those fleeing headlong.
Plutarch, centuries later in his life of Alcibiades, also recalls this widely circulated story that Alcibiades rode past Socrates and his isolated contingent who were in dire straits. But in Plutarch’s version Alcibiades’ mounted presence saves the life of Socrates as the enemy “was closing in and killing many.” In his Moralia, Plutarch adds an additional twist—that Socrates’ choice of escape alone saved him and his friends, as most other Athenians who headed over the mountains were ridden down and slain, while those who reached Delium were eventually besieged.
The disparate ancient evidence nevertheless points to two characteristics of Socrates’ retreat: Delium was a horrific Athenian catastrophe where hundreds were mercilessly hunted down and killed right on the border of Attica, and where Socrates’ courage and good sense brought him out alive when most around him were killed. Had the middle-aged philosopher been stabbed by an anonymous Locrian horseman, or if his small band had been overtaken by pursuing Theban infantry, or if he had chosen to flee toward either Delium or Mount Parnes, where most of his terrified comrades were killed, the entire course of Western philosophical and political thought would have been radically altered.
Would Socrates’ ideas have survived without a young Plato to gather, write down, and interpret them? Plato, approximately forty years Socrates’ junior, was a boy at the time of the battle of Delium. Had Socrates been killed, then the entire scope of Plato’s dialogues would have been fundamentally changed. Even had a mature Plato written philosophical treatises, his dialogues—if there were to be any dialogues at all, since the original genre is patterned directly after Socrates’ oral interrogations—would have largely been non-Socratic both in form and content. In his autobiographical Seventh Letter, Plato admits that he was naturally gravitating toward a life of politics until his association with Socrates. Perhaps his youthful disillusionment over the philosopher’s execution prompted him to turn to philosophy and reject an active life in government.
Much of Plato’s singular literary genius drew inspiration from the magnetic character of an elderly Socrates, who wandered the streets of Athens engaging the strong, smug, and secure in tough question-and-answer sessions. In the process he apparently made an impression on the adolescent Plato, who probably came under Socrates’ tutelage sometime in his twenties—roughly in the last decade of the Peloponnesian War (e.g., 410–404 B.C.). The influence of the elder Socrates on the young student remained profound until the old man was executed when Plato was about thirty.
Socrates is the chief interlocutor in the majority of the Platonic dialogues and the hero of the masterpiece Apology, which chronicles his final defense on charges of impiety and moral corruption before an Athenian jury. Socrates’ concern that philosophy should deal with ethics, not the mere natural inquiry or cosmology of earlier formal speculation, characterizes nearly all of Plato’s early work. The idea that from knowledge comes virtue, and that ensuing morality can thus be taught through rational choices and the suppression of desire, seems to be derived from the thought and actual practice of the historical Socrates. And the notion of Socratic duality—men have souls whose integrity they must not endanger by a surrender to the appetites; the world we sense and live in is but a pale imitation of a divine and perfect counterpart—forms the basis of Plato’s later sophisticated investigation into morality, language, the hereafter, politics, and the fine arts.
Plato’s interest in philosophy—had he eventually developed such an interest from other contemporary thinkers—would have had little to do with Socrates. And Socrates himself wrote nothing. He founded neither a school nor an institutional framework to perpetuate his ideas. The philosopher received no money for his teaching. He had no literary executor. There was no formal cadre of trained students who were obliged to keep alive his teaching. In an imagined post-Delium world where Socrates never met Plato, would we now know anything about the itinerant philosopher or his ideas? Did the course of Western philosophy rest on how well Socrates avoided the jabbing of spears at Delium?
Could there have been any other contemporary record of Socrates without Plato—had the forty-five-year-old philosopher never made it out of the hills of Delium? Our other main source of Socrates’ thought is preserved in the works of the historian and essayist Xenophon, whose dialogues Memorabilia, Apology, Symposium, and Oeconomicus feature Socrates as the main questioner on topics as varied as love, agriculture, war, politics, and his own career as combatant against the Sophists. But like Plato, Xenophon also grew up under the influence of Socrates, veteran of Delium. He was born sometime around 430 B.C. and was probably at most a year or two older than Plato—despite later erroneous tales that Socrates had saved him at the battle.
Consequently, had Socrates been killed by a Boeotian spear when Plato and Xenophon were children, it seems impossible that any of their later work would have centered around the lively presence of Socrates as interlocutor, their tough questioner and role model who serves as the fountainhead of their own ideas. Socrates’ influence rested on two general criteria: memorable question-and-answer sessions that took place during his late forties, fifties, and sixties, and the written memoirs and derivative philosophy of Plato and Xenophon. Both facts required that the philosopher survive the spears of Delium.
The famous orator and educator Isocrates also claimed to be a pupil of Socrates. He is mentioned favorably in Plato’s Phaedrus as a star student of the old philosopher. But Isocrates was born in 436 B.C., twelve years before the battle of Delium, making him nearly a generation older than both Plato and Xenophon. Had Socrates been killed in 424 B.C., when Isocrates was twelve, the older philosopher would have had little if any indirect influence on the young orator, whose thought seems derivative from Socrates, especially the latter’s disdain for radical democracy. It would have robbed Isocrates of any indirect knowledge of a quarter century of Socratic anecdotes and teaching. His ideas probably would have had little place in Isocrates’ massive corpus of work.
Would we know anything of Socrates’ thought without the testimony of Plato and Xenophon? The philosopher Aristotle, of course, refers to Socrates often. But much of what he criticizes is derived from Plato and Xenophon, inasmuch as he was born (387 B.C.) twelve years after Socrates was executed (399 B.C.). A slain Socrates at Delium would also have played almost no role at all in Aristotle’s own thinking for a variety of reasons. First, there would have been no mention of Socrates in either Xenophon or Plato. Second, Socrates would have died not twelve, but instead thirty-seven years before Aristotle’s own birth. Third, a dead Socrates would have been deprived of a final twenty-five years of life in which his own thinking reached maturity. These were precisely the years that gave his ideas a chance to filter through the oral tradition of discourse at private parties and personal recollection of the last quarter of the fifth century B.C. in Athens. Most likely, a dead Socrates at Delium would not have even appeared by name in Aristotle’s entire corpus—much of which gains its power from its deliberate posture against the politics and theology of both Socrates and Plato.
Were there other writers and philosophers who might have captured for posterity Socrates’ ideas before he marched out at Delium? Not many. As we have seen, Thucydides, the contemporary historian and chief source for the battle of Delium, does not mention Socrates in his history at all. We also have no public or private Athenian inscriptions that mention him by name.
Instead, only a few names of other philosophers survive in association with Socrates. They, like Xenophon and Plato, were self-proclaimed followers of the unique Socratic emphasis on philosophy as ethics and dedicated themselves to ensuring his memory as a great man who fought rather than joined the Sophists—those contemporary intellectuals who charged stiff fees for their lectures that championed moral relativism and situational ethics. The chances, however, that any of these writers would have developed a sizable Socratic corpus of work had the philosopher died in 424 B.C. are nil.
The rather obscure Antisthenes, for example, may have been the same age as Socrates—and even known him well before Delium. Fragments of Antisthenes’ work survive. What little we know of Antisthenes suggests that he was especially interested in the Socratic method and lifestyle—or at least the need for the man of contemplation to set himself apart from society and the temptations of the flesh. But Antisthenes could hardly have kept alive the ideas of a middle-aged, rather than seventy-year-old, Socrates. For one thing, he seems to have written largely to combat Plato—and thereby may not have authored anything had Plato never met Socrates.
Plato names Antisthenes as being present at Socrates’ last hours. Much of what little we know about his work seems prompted by Socrates’ martyrdom and the fate of philosophical stalwarts who opposed mobs like the frenzied crowd of Athenian jurors. Had Socrates died at Delium, then, Antisthenes would not have found his striking model of principled resistance to the ignorant crowd.
Finally, we have only fragments of Antisthenes’ work. Although he seems to have been known to Aristotle and a few others, the chances that his work in changed circumstances would have survived classical antiquity seem remote. It is absurd to think that had Socrates died at forty-five rather than seventy, we would know any more of him through Antisthenes than the tiny scraps of his work we now possess; indeed, it is more likely that we would know nothing of Antisthenes at all!
Another Socratic follower, Aeschines of Sphettos, wrote seven dialogues. The theme of his works was apparently a defense of Socrates’ association with the dissolute Alcibiades. None of these dialogues survives except in a few fragments and quotations. But since Aeschines was roughly the same age as Plato and Xenophon, like the latter two, he met Socrates only after Delium—and thus obviously he would not have devoted his life to a philosopher who did not write and whom he did not meet. In short, without a direct Socratic connection, we have little reason to believe any of Aeschines’ work would have survived had Socrates died in 424 B.C.
Were there any others who might have known Socrates before Delium? Phaedon of Elis is just a name. Mere scraps of quotations of his two dialogues are extant. A near contemporary of Plato and Xenophon, he too was a small boy at the time of Delium. Nothing remains either of the work of Aristippus or Cebes, who both purportedly wrote panegyrics of Socrates. Again we are left with the conclusion that most Socratic followers who were inspired to write about their mentor did so only after meeting him in the period after the battle of Delium—when they were of an age to wander along after the itinerant questioner.
Many of these adherents seem to have been prompted to write after Plato began his early dialogues surrounding Socrates’ death, either to enhance or reject the Platonic testimony. Socrates’ other admirers, whose works are essentially lost, appear to have been influenced especially by his last courageous stand against his accusers in 399 B.C., in addition to the striking contrast between the grandfatherly philosopher and their own youthful zeal and impressionability. But in any case, the work of these lesser Socratics was either scarcely known or not highly regarded.
We are left with an inescapable conclusion: almost everyone who wrote anything about Socrates and his thinking came to maturity after the battle of Delium. Socrates’ influential students were nearly all acquaintances from his late forties, fifties, and sixties. Had he died at the battle in 424 B.C., the later Western tradition of philosophy would have known almost nothing firsthand about either Socrates’ life or thought.