ABSTRACT
Socrates is not usually seen as a religious visionary. Some would say that he is the father of logic and rationality, and he certainly seems to be the epitome of ‘sanity, shrewdness, physical robustness, and moral integrity’ (Myers, 1903). It does come as a surprise to those who know him just by this general reputation that he let himself be guided by ‘a voice’, to which he occasionally referred as ‘the daemon’, as did others in his time and since. The daemon has been of considerable interest to philosophers for well over 2,000 years; alienists and psychiatrists have become interested more recently. Plato mentioned the phenomenon in several of his dialogues (for instance, in Apology, Crito, Euthydemus, Phaedrus, Theaetetus) as well as in The Republic. Xenophon wrote about it in his Conversations of Socrates, and Plutarch dedicated a whole monograph, ‘On the sign of Socrates’, to the matter. In fact, allowing himself to be guided by a daemon was one of the charges levelled against Socrates at his trial—the daemon was not a god recognised in Athens. The daemon probably cost Socrates his life: it ‘stopped’ him from defending himself in his trial and from escaping once he was sentenced to death. Thus the daemon is a well-documented phenomenon which is important in understanding Socrates (Nares, 1782; Voltaire, 1773/1994; Nietzsche, 1872/1991). We are interested in both Socrates and his daemon.
