The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World by Daniel J. Boorstin

provide “a possession for all time,” which he describes as if it were a new literary form. Reading aloud was still the common way of enjoying literature. The crucial event in Socrates’ intellectual life (reported by Plato in
Phaedo
)
,
which we have noted, was not his own reading from a book of Anaxagoras, but hearing someone read the book. The rhetorician and Sophist Alcidamas (fourth century B.C.), champion of Gorgias and the old school of Sophists, was still arguing that speeches should never be written down, even for delivery, but should always be improvised. We can better understand the Athenians’ impatience with the written word when we recall the cumbersome form of the written word in their time. The reader had to unroll the papyrus, seeking passages without aid of an index—in an unpunctuated text, without paragraphs or even spaces between words.
    Athens, we must remember, was not governed by pieces of paper shuffled among bureaucrats. Government was by a live assembly of citizens, each of whom served as soldier and, in the democratic interludes, as judge and member of the governing body, all in his own person. The idea of
representative
government did not occur to them. In the sovereign assembly the citizens could debate, offer proposals, decide on war or peace, on taxation or other government measures. A smaller body of some five hundred, the
boule
prepared for these meetings, controlled foreign policy, supervised administration, and sat as a judicial body (as in Socrates’ case). These five hundred were chosen by lot for one year, but no one could serve more than twice in his lifetime. Most officials, too, were chosen by lot, and all were directly responsible to the Assembly or the Council (Boule). Participation in Athenian democracy meant being physically present, and saying your piece in your own voice. Being a citizen meant going frequently to the center of government, an automatic limitation on the size of the city-state.
    Since political wisdom was assumed to emerge from these encounters of the spoken word, it is not surprising that Athenians thought the fires of philosophic wisdom might be ignited in the same way. “After much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself” (Seventh Letter). What the Assembly and the Boule were to Athenian politics, the Dialogue would be to Athenian philosophy.
    It is significant but not surprising that none of Socrates’ writing has survived, since his way of seeking was in the living words. Yet all of Plato’s dialogues that we know about have survived in writing. And nothing is more revealing of Plato’s way of seeking than his chosen vehicle, the dialogue. Just as the exchanges of the living words of citizens would ensure the health of the city-state, so the converse of citizens in dialogue could promote the health of their souls. Socrates, a man of notable physical vigor, and an admirer of medical science, considered himself a doctor of the soul. His conversations were not in a lecture hall, but in an open-air Athenian athletic center. To the gymnasium (from the Greek word meaning “place to exercise naked”) Athenians came for the vigor of their bodies, filling rest periods with conversation. An ancient Greek gymnasium was usually an open court surrounded by columns, with places for running and jumping and a covered hall for wrestling and bathing. This legacy—athletics for body and mind—survived in the names of two great Athenian schools of philosophy, Plato’s “Academy” and Aristotle’s “Lyceum.” Both were names of gymnasium groves near Athens.
    The playful interludes and interruptions in Plato’s dialogues remind us that the Way of Dialogue was exercising the mind at play. Plato believed that learning could not be forced, and that to be remembered, lessons should take the form of play. Man must be