Socrates ate little, bathed rarely, and always wore the same shabby clothes. He walked barefoot everywhere, even in the dead of winter, and with a strange gait, somewhere between a waddle and a swagger. He could go days without sleep, drink without getting drunk. He heard voices—well, a voice. He called it his daemon. “This began when I was a child,” he explained during his trial on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens. “It is a voice, and whenever it speaks it turns me away from something I am about to do, but it never encourages me to do anything.” Taken together, Socrates’s
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