ABSTRACT
Socrates boasts one of the most particularized bodies of antiquity: we possess detailed, sometimes even loving, descriptions of the shapes of his eyes, nose, and belly, his gait and gaze. His habits of eating and bathing and his manner of dress were widely discussed and widely copied. These curious and atypical bodily traits often overtook and eclipsed the characteristics of mind that ultimately make his name known today. In some portrayals those peculiar bodily habits were all that remained: in time his manner of dress was widely imitated by those who wished quite literally to put on the trappings of a philosopher, and already in Plato we hear of Aristodemus, ‘the craziest of all men of his day for Socrates’, whose passion for philosophy seems to have extended little further than his adoption of Socrates’ habit of always walking about barefoot.2 The details of his appearance, which are well known, do not make an appealing portrait: snub nosed (Tht. 143e, Xen. Symp. 5.6); thick lips ‘uglier than an ass’s’ (Xen. Symp. 5.7); potbellied (Xen. Symp. 2.19); bulging eyes (Tht. 143e, Xen. Symp. 5.5) which were nonetheless said to produce a gaze that could be described in the same terms (Symp. 221b3-4; Aristoph. Clouds 362) as intense or comical, and that gave the appearance of a man in
command of the evil eye.3 Later authors confirm these features and Lucian (Dialogues of the Dead 6.4-6) adds that he was bald. He seemed to merit the epithet ‘ugliest of all the Silens in Satyr-plays’ (Xen. Symp. 9.19; cf. Plato Symp. 221d-222a), and we may justly apply to him the judgment Austen makes of her heroine Catherine Moreland, that no one looking upon Socrates would think him born to be a hero. Yet herein is one of the paradoxes at Socrates’ core. Eulogized soon after his death as ‘the best, and in general wisest and most just man of his day’ (Phd. 118a16-7), touted as a sage by the Stoics,4 Socrates seemed to stand as a vigorous rebuttal of societal prejudices that linked physical beauty to ethical worth as reified in the primary fifth-century term of moral approbation: kalokagathos, literally, ‘beautiful-and-good’.5 Not only did beauty play a central and continuing role in ancient conceptions of the good life, but in the developing practice of physiognomy, physical appearance – judged an ethically significant property – was interpreted as an index of inner worth.6 Socrates’ notorious ugliness must have made him a fascinating target or test-case for physiognomic study, and we know that the science of physiognomy was a topic of discussion among the Socratics. A treatise on the subject attributed to Antisthenes (Ath. Deipn. 14.656f; Diog. Laert. 6.16) is, regrettably, lost, and we have no testimony on how Antisthenes might have dealt with his master’s appearance. We are, however, fortunate to have reports of one fascinating literary encounter between Socrates and a physiognomist, which appeared in the work of the Socratic Phaedo of Elis, the eponymous narrator of Plato’s account of Socrates’ death.7 The story probably appeared in Phaedo’s dialogue Zopyrus, one of only two works attributed to Phaedo that Diogenes Laertius considered authentic (D.L. 2.105). Some idea of its contents can be gleaned from two passages in Cicero
(Tusc. Disp. 4.80; Fate 5.10).8 We learn that a certain physiognômôn named Zopyrus who claimed the ability to determine an individual’s character (mores naturasque, Fate 5.10) by his appearance, challenged to demonstrate his skills on Socrates, announced that he gave evidence of ‘many vices’ (multa vitia, Tusc. Disp.). The charges are detailed in Fate: Socrates was declared ‘foolish, slow-witted, and a womanizer’ (stupidum ... et bardum ... [et] mulierosum.) As Cicero tells the story, upon hearing the latter charge Alcibiades was unable to suppress a guffaw. When Socrates’ companions angrily objected to this assessment, he quieted them with the assurance that while these were indeed his natural inclinations, he had cast them out by means of reason (ratione, Tusc. Disp. 4.80). The story exercised an immense influence on the science of physiognomy from antiquity to the waning days of the practice in the eighteenth century, and was one of the most widely-cited case studies in that field. As a test-case of the validity of physiognomic inquiry, it became a free-floating anecdote, attached not to Socrates but to Hippocrates, and popularized in this form by the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum Secretorum;9 known in this form to authors such as Albertus Magnus (De Animalibus 1.2.127), this account largely supplanted the Zopyrus legend in the Middle Ages, becoming so popular that Thomas Hill (1571, preface) cited Cicero as the source of Hippocrates’ failed physiognomic exam, conflating and thereby inadvertently reintegrating the anecdotes. In addition to its role in the history of physiognomy, however, the story of Socrates’ body has played a large and important role in the reception of the philosopher, and gave rise to a galaxy of concerns more complex than I can discuss in this essay.10 In what follows, I limn the history of the Zopyrus anecdote and discuss its importance for physiognomic inquiry, concentrating especially on the extended polemical engagement with Socrates’ body in the work of Lavater. I then briefly examine one significantly different tactic for dealing with the problem of Socrates’ hideous exterior, that developed by Plato. Finally, I consider how physiognomic interests have continued to shape our understanding of Socrates.
