Socrates’ daemon. This philosopher claimed to have a personal divinity whose warnings never urged him to undertake anything, but instead deterred Socrates from acting when an action would have been detrimental to him. Cicero reports in his book On divination ,  [1] that after the defeat of the Athenian army, commanded by Praetor Laches, Socrates, fleeing with this general and having arrived in a place that branched out into several different paths, he never wanted to follow the same route as the others, alleging that his daemon deterred him from doing so. Indeed, Socrates saved himself while everyone else was killed or taken by the adversary’s cavalry. This trait, and other similar ones, persuaded Socrates’ contemporaries that he actually had a daemon or a personal divinity. Writers, both ancient and modern, have long sought to understand what this daemon could have been, and several even went as far as to question whether it was a good or evil angel. The most reasonable of them ended up saying that it was nothing else but the justice and strength of Socrates’ judgment, who by the rules of prudence and the assistance of a long and sustained practice of serious reflections, made this philosopher anticipate what would be the outcome of matters on which he had been consulted, or on which he deliberated for himself. This fact recounted by Cicero, and which at the time appeared marvelous, is due much less to prodigy than to the cool-head which Socrates retained in his escape. Incidentally, the knowledge that he had of the country could have caused him to prefer this path, which protected him from enemies, and which perhaps proved impassible to their cavalry. But we speculate that Socrates was perhaps not sorry to convince his fellow citizens that some deity interested itself in his destiny, and through the personal interactions that it maintained with him, drew him away from the level of other men.

1. On Divination can be found in The treatises of M. T. Cicero (London, 1872).