Great Friendships: That Changed the World

By Rodney Castleden

This e-book is an extract from Encounters that Changed the World and is also available as part of that complete publication.

In many relationships we know a great deal about a friendship from one participant’s point of view and much less from the other’s. Because Plato wrote and Socrates did not, we know a great deal about what Plato thought of Socrates, but we know absolutely nothing about what Socrates thought of Plato. We think of Plato as Socrates’ greatest pupil and perhaps Socrates did too ... or did he see the young Plato as just another pupil? This book shines a light back in time to reveal great friendships that were so significant that they changed the world forever.

Contents: Plato and Socrates, Elizabeth I and Sir Walter Raleigh, Richard Savage and Samuel Johnson, Hume and Rousseau, Goethe and Schiller, Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, Grigori Rasputin and Tsarina Alexandra, C.S.Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, Michael Tippett and T.S.Eliot

• Language: English
• Publisher: Canary Press eBooks Limited
• Release date: Jul 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781908698384

Book preview

Introduction

We all have encounters that change the way we think, the way we see the world, and ultimately the way we behave. It is one of the characteristics that make us human beings. A lot of these encounters are commonplace, like the encounters we have with our teachers at school, and most of us can remember moments when a teacher somehow, by telling us or showing us something, made us see things differently.

Then there are encounters with friends, colleagues, husbands, wives and lovers, building over the course of months, years and decades to change us piecemeal in all sorts of ways. And there are fleeting encounters with strangers, maybe a brief conversation, maybe no more than a fragment of someone’s conversation overheard as they pass.

All these different encounters, significant and insignificant alike, are woven into the fabric of our lives, changing us sometimes subtly and gradually, sometimes with dramatic suddenness, into different people.

Some encounters are life-changing meetings between generations when an older person hands on knowledge and experience to a younger person. The older person acts as a role model, encouraging and cultivating a nascent talent, such as Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell or Sigmund Freud and Car1 Jung.

In some encounters, we know a great deal about one participant’s point of view and much less about the other’s, such as in the friendship of Socrates and Plato. Because Plato wrote and Socrates did not, we know more about what Plato thought of Socrates than what Socrates thought of Plato. We think of Plato as being Socrates’ greatest pupil, and perhaps Socrates did too, or did he see the young Plato as just another pupil?

It is striking how many friendships happen quite by chance. Michael Tippett met T. S. Eliot by chance, when they both (separately and independently) visited someone else’s house, and the chance meeting led on to Tippett himself writing the words for his own operas.

Some famous friendships have been engineered by one of the participants such as the encounter between Sir Walter Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth I. Raleigh had set his sights on the path to fame and fortune by gaining the favour of the queen. He set about using his charm, wit and ‘caressing’ manners to ingratiate himself with her. Easily flattered, Elizabeth found Raleigh’s good looks hard to resist and he quickly became her favourite among the courtiers.

Royal rewards poured onto him that were far beyond what he deserved. Elizabeth knighted Raleigh in 1584 and granted him 40,000 acres of land in Ireland. In return Raleigh launched a series of voyages of exploration, sailing along the eastern seaboard of North America and naming Virginia in Elizabeth’s honour.

This book is inevitably about great friendships experienced by people who have made their mark, famous people whose lives are a matter of record. Some friendships look full of promise, as if they should lead on to something momentous, yet they don’t. Others come out of nothing such as between Raleigh and Elizabeth, which result in a longstanding relationship full of mutual admiration. But as I hope the book shows, the unpredictability of human encounters is what gives them their peculiar interest.

1

Plato and Socrates

(399 bc)

The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates was born in Athens in 469 bc and executed for corrupting the young in 399 bc . He had no formal disciples, founded no school of philosophy, and as far as we know he wrote nothing down – and yet he was a profoundly influential figure. One of the people he influenced was Plato, a man 40 years younger than himself and who was about 27 years old at the time of Socrates’ death. Plato was a friend and pupil of Socrates and it is mainly through Plato’s writings that we know about Socrates.

In fact, so little is known about Socrates from any other contemporary sources that we really cannot be sure what Socrates was like. Plato idolized Socrates, held him and his teachings up as models, and there must be a suspicion that his hero-worship distorted his representation of his master. Plato was a great philosopher in his own right, yet again and again in his writings he hides behind the persona of Socrates to say what he thinks. Plato is a ventriloquist, and Socrates is the dummy. There is, all the time in Plato, the sense that he is putting words and ideas into Socrates’ mouth. This unusual situation – knowing about the one man only through the testimony of the other – has come to be known as the Socratic problem.

Socrates certainly existed, as there is corroboration from writers other than Plato. Xenophon, Aristotle and Aristophanes all referred to Socrates, giving us a bit more evidence of the sort of man he was. But a difficulty in seeing the historical Socrates is that nearly all the texts that were written about him are philosophical or dramatic. Listening to what Aristophanes has to say about Socrates is rather like watching a Spitting Image sketch featuring Norman Tebbitt or Margaret Thatcher. In his play The Clouds, Aristophanes shows Socrates as a clown teaching his students how to bluff and cheat their way out of debt: how to argue for profit. But Aristophanes nearly always caricatures people, so we need not think of the historical Socrates as clownish. The sort of abuse of philosophy shown in Aristophanes is exactly what Socrates denounced – and that was the joke!

There is virtually nothing contemporary with Socrates in the way of a purely historical treatment. Those who have left us with character sketches or caricatures of Socrates were well-disposed towards him. We have no testimony from the Athenians who prosecuted and condemned him to death, so we have only one side of the story. Plato’s Apology portrays Socrates’ defence at his trial. Many scholars suspect that because of Plato’s enormous respect for Socrates he left out some of the evidence that was produced for the prosecution. The Apology is obviously not a word-for-word transcript of the trial, but it is likely to be