Benquo

They were not statesmen like Pericles, who managed Athens' rise from preeminent city to imperial capital.

Sophocles and Europides were the men who could inhabit other minds, who could construct characters who, to all appearances, each had their own distinctive interiority.

They imagined all these people well enough to put words in their mouths for declamation in a public theatre.

They could dramatize what it is like to be media deciding to kill her children or Antigon choosing to die.

If someone at Delphi had met Socrates and reached for a comparison, they did not reach for a statesman or a priest.

They reached for the people who were most alive to other people's experience.

The oracle's pronouncement likely came before Socrates was famous for questioning people.

Cheriphon, an excitable and devoted friend, likely went to Delphi on his own initiative, to get divine confirmation of something he had already noticed.

And what he had noticed was not a method.

It was a quality.

Speaking with Socrates, one felt the presence of a living intelligence, curious about one's situation.

One felt excitingly seen and at the same time uncomfortably exposed.

In a city where public life had become a drama where the actors were principally concerned with their own appearance, this was so unusual that it shone brilliantly to anyone looking for intelligent life, like a beacon ablaze on a clear moonless night.

What came after was Socrates trying to figure out what the oracle could have meant.

If I am the wisest, what does that say about everyone else?

So, by his own account, he went to talk to the people who were supposed to be wise, the politicians and the poets and the craftsmen, and he found that the politicians and the poets could not give a coherent account of the knowledge they claimed to possess.

The craftsmen could, within their crafts.

but the knowledge that was being wielded with lethal force in the courts and the assembly, the knowledge of justice and piety and how the city should be governed, that knowledge was nowhere.

The people who claimed it were performing a script, and the script could not survive contact with someone who was trying to make sense of what they were saying.

Xenophon, who knew Socrates as a person and not only as a character in philosophical dialogues, shows us what this same aliveness looked like when it met people who wanted help.