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Review: Socrates in Love — how the philosopher was made
★★★★☆4.0 / 5.0 (editorial rating)
Verdict: the "and now something new" of this shelf. The famous accounts open with Socrates already old, barefoot and awkward. D'Angour asks the question they skip — how did that man come to be? — and reconstructs the young Socrates as soldier, lover and pupil from the scattered evidence. Best read once you know the legend, so you can feel it being turned over.
- Title
- Socrates in Love: The Making of a Philosopher
- Author
- Armand D'Angour (classics, University of Oxford)
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury
- Length
- ~240 pp.
- Difficulty
- Intermediate ★★☆ — about five hours
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What it is — in three lines
A modern study by the Oxford classicist Armand D'Angour, arguing that the Socrates we know — the ascetic old questioner — had a youth we have largely overlooked: he served as a soldier, moved in Periclean high society, and was formed intellectually and emotionally by others, including, on D'Angour's reading, a formidable woman. Part detective work, part biography of the years the sources leave dark. A book of arguments, not a retelling.
The core — the young man before the legend
Almost every portrait of Socrates begins with the finished article. D'Angour's wager is that a philosopher is made, not born wise, and that the evidence for the making is there if you read across it carefully — battlefield notices, contemporary comedy, hints inside Plato. His most striking move concerns Diotima, the priestess who in Plato's Symposium teaches Socrates the nature of love: D'Angour argues she points back to a real woman who shaped the young man. Whether or not you are convinced, the effect is bracing — the marble statue turns back into a person with a history.
The one thing I say I understand is the art of love.
— Socrates in Plato, Symposium 177d (editorial gloss; the thread D'Angour pulls on)
It is the freshest thing on this shelf precisely because it refuses the reverent, finished image and asks where it came from.
Three highlights
1. Socrates the soldier and citizen
The campaigns, the Athens of Pericles, the social world the old philosopher had already lived through — restored, these give the courtroom Socrates a past, and the trial a sharper political edge.
2. The Diotima argument
The book's boldest thread: that the woman who teaches Socrates about love in the Symposium is more than a literary device. Handled as a case to be argued, it is genuinely gripping, whatever verdict you reach.
3. A classicist's craft, worn lightly
D'Angour writes for a general reader without softening the scholarship: you watch a professional weigh fragments, and the reasoning is as much the pleasure as the conclusions.
What to watch out for
Two honest notes, and they matter here. First, this is the most speculative book on the shelf. The evidence for Socrates' early life is thin, and reconstructing it means arguing beyond it; D'Angour is candid about that, but read him as a bold, contestable case, not settled fact — and hold it against the sober source-criticism of Taylor's Very Short Introduction. Second, it is not an introduction to Socratic philosophy: the ideas take a back seat to the life. Come to it after the dialogues, when you have someone to reconstruct.
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