Unkempt and jobless, Socrates would begin his journey by asking questions of people in the street, gas stations and malls. He would find people not only hostile to his questions, but hostile to his appearance and apparent waste of his life. Most would tell him: " Get a job you bum," because work defines our existence these days. He surely would be repeatedly and condescendingly harrassed by the police. The so called intellectuals engaged in "deep" conversations in chain coffee houses, would ignore what the old coot had to say, and condescendingly offer him a dollar or some change to get rid of him. The professors in their ivory towers would dismiss him as a nut, and call up one of their enlightened professors of psychology if they actually took anything he said seriously.
Within a week, he would ask for and happily take hemlock.
Oh and there is an excellent book on Socrates by Luis Navia. It is one of the modern scholarly written for a university crowd books, but Navia's sense of humor and playful cynicism poke through every once and awhile. He is quite the scholar of Socrates, and claims through the sources, and Xenophon especially, that Socrates was done a grave injustice by one of his less than favorite pupils--Plato. Navia goes on to prove Socrates was the true father of Stoicism and Cynicism, and not Platonism.
