“KNOW that you know nothing,” and “Know yourself,” were the words of advice from Socrates, acknowledged as one of the brightest minds Greece had ever known. He lived in Athens some 430 years before Christ.
Though smallish, bowlegged and cross-eyed Socrates qualified as a hoplite or elite infantryman in Athens’ famed and feared army whose members volunteered and mostly paid for their own equipment. His robust physique enabled him to wear the same clothes, be it summer or winter.
During the long marches over hot sand, burning stone or frozen ground Socrates went barefooted. At night, when his comrades would halt, he would challenge them to drinking-bouts from which he would inevitably emerge as winner.
As a proof to the saying, “Sound mind in a sound body,” this thinker could be wrapped up in prolonged deep thinking and self-examination even during long marches, for as he said, “A life not examined is a life not worth living.”
For all his knowledge and wisdom Socrates glaringly erred when he, as our philosophy professor, Fr. Jose Vicente Braganza SVD remarked in a lecture, made a flippant remark highly offensive to feminists, namely that women are inferior to men because the former have two teeth less. Fr. Braganza, suppressing a grin, claimed that Socrates arrived at this false generalization after observing that Xanthippe, his constantly nagging wife, had two teeth less than his own.
But in other and more important matters, Socrates proved to be indeed wise. This he showed when after he had proven his valor in war, he was elected to the Athenian senate, the select body of seniors(senex, seneces); there he corrected the religious beliefs among the youth. He also stoutly defended the innocent.