Western philosophy
History of Western philosophy from its development among the ancient
Greeks to the present.
Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy » The seminal thinkers of Greek
philosophy » Socrates
Socrates (c. 470–399 bc) was also widely considered to be a Sophist,
though he did not teach for money and his aims were entirely different
from theirs. Although there is a late tradition according to which
Pythagoras invented the word philosopher, it was certainly through
Socrates—who insisted that he possessed no wisdom but was striving for
it—that the term came into general use and was later applied to all
earlier serious thinkers. In fact, all of the records of Socrates’ life
and activity left by his numerous adherents and disciples indicate that
he never tried to teach anything directly. But he constantly engaged in
conversations with everybody—old and young, high and low—trying to bring
into the open by his questions the inconsistencies in their opinions and
actions. His whole way of life rested on two unshakable premises:
(1)
the principle never to do wrong nor to participate, even indirectly, in
any wrongdoing and
(2) the conviction that nobody who really knows what
is good and right could act against it.
He demonstrated his adherence to
the first principle on various occasions and under different regimes.
When, after the Battle of Arginusae (406 bc), the majority of the
Athenian popular assembly demanded death without trial for the admirals,
Socrates, who on that day happened to be president of the assembly (an
office changing daily), refused to put the proposal to a vote because he
believed it was wrong to condemn anyone without a fair trial. He refused
even though the people threatened him, shouting that it would be
terrible if the sovereign people could not do as they pleased.
When, after the overthrow of democracy in Athens in 404 bc, the
so-called Thirty Tyrants, who tried to involve everybody in their
wrongdoing, ordered him to arrest an innocent citizen whose money they
coveted, he simply disobeyed. This he did despite the fact that such
disobedience was even more dangerous than disobeying the sovereign
people had been at the time of unrestricted democracy. Likewise, in the
time of the democracy, he pointed out by his questions the inconsistency
of allowing oneself to be swayed by the oratory of a good speaker
instead of first inquiring into his capability as a statesman, whereas
in private life a sensible citizen would not listen to the oratory of a
quack but would try to find the best doctor. When, after the overthrow
of democracy, the Thirty Tyrants had many people arbitrarily executed,
Socrates asked everybody whether a man was a good shepherd who
diminished the number of sheep instead of increasing it; and he did not
cease his questioning when Critias, the leader of the Thirty Tyrants,
warned him to take heed not to diminish the number of sheep by his
own—Socrates’—person. But the most fundamental inconsistency that he
tried to demonstrate everywhere was that most people by their actions
show that what they consider good, wonderful, and beautiful in
others—such as, for instance, doing right at great danger to
oneself—they do not consider good for themselves, and what they consider
good for themselves they despise and condemn in others. Although these
stands won him the fervent admiration of many, especially among the
youth, they also caused great resentment among leading politicians,
whose inconsistencies and failings were exposed. Although Socrates had
survived unharmed through the regime of the Thirty Tyrants—partly
because it did not last long and partly because he was supported by some
close relatives of their leader, Critias—it was under the restored
democracy that he was accused of impiety and of corrupting the youth and
finally condemned to death, largely also in consequence of his
intransigent attitude during the trial.
After Socrates’ death his influence became a dominating one through
the greater part of the history of Greek and Roman philosophy down to
the end of antiquity, and it has been significant ever since. Many of
his adherents—Plato first among them, but also including the historian
Xenophon (431–c. 350 bc)—tried to preserve his philosophical method by
writing Socratic dialogues. Some founded schools or sects that
perpetuated themselves over long periods of time: Eucleides of Megara
(c. 430–c. 360 bc) emphasized the theoretical aspects of Socrates’
thought, and Antisthenes (c. 445–c. 365 bc)
stressed the independence of the true philosopher from material wants.
The latter, through his disciple Diogenes of Sinope (died c. 320 bc),
who carried voluntary poverty to the extreme and emphasized freedom from
all conventions, became the founder of the sect of the Cynics. Aristippus of Cyrene (c. 435–366 bc), traditional founder of the
Cyrenaic school, stressed independence from material goods in a somewhat
different way, declaring that there is no reason why a philosopher
should not enjoy material goods as long as he is completely indifferent
to their loss. Although Aristippus renounced his son because he led a
dissolute life, the school that he founded (through his daughter and his
grandson) was hedonistic, holding pleasure to be the only good.
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Socrates
Greek philosopher
born c. 470 bc, Athens [Greece]
died 399 bc, Athens
Overview
Greek philosopher whose way of life, character, and thought
exerted a profound influence on ancient and modern
philosophy.
Because he wrote nothing, information about his
personality and doctrine is derived chiefly from depictions
of his conversations and other information in the dialogues
of Plato, in the Memorabilia of Xenophon, and in various
writings of Aristotle. He fought bravely in the
Peloponnesian War and later served in the Athenian boule
(assembly). Socrates considered it his religious duty to
call his fellow citizens to the examined life by engaging
them in philosophical conversation. His contribution to
these exchanges typically consisted of a series of probing
questions that cumulatively revealed his interlocutor’s
complete ignorance of the subject under discussion; such
cross-examination used as a pedagogical technique has been
called the “Socratic method.” Though Socrates
characteristically professed his own ignorance regarding
many of the (mainly ethical) subjects he investigated (e.g.,
the nature of piety), he did hold certain convictions with
confidence, including that: (1) human wisdom begins with the
recognition of one’s own ignorance; (2) the unexamined life
is not worth living; (3) ethical virtue is the only thing
that matters; and (4) a good person can never be harmed,
because whatever misfortune he may suffer, his virtue will
remain intact. His students and admirers included, in
addition to Plato, Alcibiades, who betrayed Athens in the
Peloponnesian War, and Critias (c. 480–403 bc), who was one
of the Thirty Tyrants imposed on Athens after its defeat by
Sparta. Because he was connected with these two men, but
also because his habit of exposing the ignorance of his
fellow citizens had made him widely hated and feared,
Socrates was tried on charges of impiety and corrupting the
youth and condemned to death by poisoning (the poison
probably being hemlock) in 399 bc; he submitted to the
sentence willingly. Plato’s Apology purports to be the
speech that Socrates gave in his own defense. As depicted in
the Apology, Socrates’ trial and death raise vital questions
about the nature of democracy, the value of free speech, and
the potential conflict between moral and religious
obligation and the laws of the state.
Main
Greek philosopher whose way of life, character, and thought
exerted a profound influence on ancient and modern
philosophy.
Socrates was a widely recognized and controversial figure
in his native Athens, so much so that he was frequently
mocked in the plays of comic dramatists. (The Clouds of
Aristophanes, produced in 423, is the best-known example.)
Although Socrates himself wrote nothing, he is depicted in
conversation in compositions by a small circle of his
admirers—Plato and Xenophon first among them. He is
portrayed in these works as a man of great insight,
integrity, self-mastery, and argumentative skill. The impact
of his life was all the greater because of the way in which
it ended: at age 70, he was brought to trial on a charge of
impiety and sentenced to death by poisoning (the poison
probably being hemlock) by a jury of his fellow citizens.
Plato’s Apology of Socrates purports to be the speech
Socrates gave at his trial in response to the accusations
made against him (Greek apologia means “defense”). Its
powerful advocacy of the examined life and its condemnation
of Athenian democracy have made it one of the central
documents of Western thought and culture.
Philosophical and literary sources
While Socrates was alive, he was, as noted, the object of
comic ridicule, but most of the plays that make reference to
him are entirely lost or exist only in fragmentary
form—Clouds being the chief exception. Although Socrates is
the central figure of this play, it was not Aristophanes’
purpose to give a balanced and accurate portrait of him
(comedy never aspires to this) but rather to use him to
represent certain intellectual trends in contemporary
Athens—the study of language and nature and, as Aristophanes
implies, the amoralism and atheism that accompany these
pursuits. The value of the play as a reliable source of
knowledge about Socrates is thrown further into doubt by the
fact that, in Plato’s Apology, Socrates himself rejects it
as a fabrication. This aspect of the trial will be discussed
more fully below.
Soon after Socrates’ death, several members of his circle
preserved and praised his memory by writing works that
represent him in his most characteristic
activity—conversation. His interlocutors in these (typically
adversarial) exchanges included people he happened to meet,
devoted followers, prominent political figures, and leading
thinkers of the day. Many of these “Socratic discourses,” as
Aristotle calls them in his Poetics, are no longer extant;
there are only brief remnants of the conversations written
by Antisthenes, Aeschines, Phaedo, and Eucleides. But those
composed by Plato and Xenophon survive in their entirety.
What knowledge we have of Socrates must therefore depend
primarily on one or the other (or both, when their portraits
coincide) of these sources. (Plato and Xenophon also wrote
separate accounts, each entitled Apology of Socrates, of
Socrates’ trial.) Most scholars, however, do not believe
that every Socratic discourse of Xenophon and Plato was
intended as a historical report of what the real Socrates
said, word-for-word, on some occasion. What can reasonably
be claimed about at least some of these dialogues is that
they convey the gist of the questions Socrates asked, the
ways in which he typically responded to the answers he
received, and the general philosophical orientation that
emerged from these conversations.
Philosophical and literary sources » Xenophon
Among the compositions of Xenophon, the one that gives the
fullest portrait of Socrates is Memorabilia. The first two
chapters of Book I of this work are especially important,
because they explicitly undertake a refutation of the
charges made against Socrates at his trial; they are
therefore a valuable supplement to Xenophon’s Apology, which
is devoted entirely to the same purpose. The portrait of
Socrates that Xenophon gives in Books III and IV of
Memorabilia seems, in certain passages, to be heavily
influenced by his reading of some of Plato’s dialogues, and
so the evidentiary value of at least this portion of the
work is diminished. Xenophon’s Symposium is a depiction of
Socrates in conversation with his friends at a drinking
party (it is perhaps inspired by a work of Plato of the same
name and character) and is regarded by some scholars as a
valuable re-creation of Socrates’ thought and way of life.
Xenophon’s Oeconomicus (literally: “estate manager”), a
Socratic conversation concerning household organization and
the skills needed by the independent farmer, is Xenophon’s
attempt to bring the qualities he admired in Socrates to
bear upon the subject of overseeing one’s property. It is
unlikely to have been intended as a report of one of
Socrates’ conversations.
Philosophical and literary sources » Plato
Plato, unlike Xenophon, is generally regarded as a
philosopher of the highest order of originality and depth.
According to some scholars, his philosophical skills made
him far better able than Xenophon was to understand Socrates
and therefore more valuable a source of information about
him. The contrary view is that Plato’s originality and
vision as a philosopher led him to use his Socratic
discourses not as mere devices for reproducing the
conversations he had heard but as vehicles for the advocacy
of his own ideas (however much they may have been inspired
by Socrates) and that he is therefore far more untrustworthy
than Xenophon as a source of information about the
historical Socrates. Whichever of these two views is
correct, it is undeniable that Plato is not only the deeper
philosopher but also the greater literary artist. Some of
his dialogues are so natural and lifelike in their depiction
of conversational interplay that readers must constantly
remind themselves that Plato is shaping his material, as any
author must.
Although Socrates is the interlocutor who guides the
conversation in most of Plato’s dialogues, there are several
in which he plays a minor role (Parmenides, Sophist,
Statesman, and Timaeus, all of which are generally agreed to
be among Plato’s later works) and one (Laws, also composed
late) in which he is entirely absent. Why did Plato assign
Socrates a small role in some dialogues (and none in Laws)
and a large role in others? A simple answer is that, by this
device, Plato intended to signal to his readers that the
dialogues in which Socrates is the major interlocutor convey
the philosophy of Socrates, whereas those in which he is a
minor figure or does not appear at all present Plato’s own
ideas.
But there are formidable objections to this hypothesis,
and for several reasons most scholars do not regard it as a
serious possibility. To begin with, it is unlikely that in
so many of his works Plato would have assigned himself so
passive and mechanical a role as merely a recording device
for the philosophy of Socrates. Furthermore, the portrait of
Socrates that results from this hypothesis is not coherent.
In some of the dialogues in which he is the principal
interlocutor, for example, Socrates insists that he does not
have satisfactory answers to the questions he
poses—questions such as “What is courage?” (raised in
Laches), “What is self-control?” (Charmides), and “What is
piety?” (Euthyphro). In other dialogues in which he plays a
major role, however, Socrates does offer systematic answers
to such questions. In Books II–X of Republic, for example,
he proposes an elaborate answer to the question, “What is
justice?,” and in doing so he also defends his view of the
ideal society, the condition of the human soul, the nature
of reality, and the power of art, among many other topics.
Were we to hold that all the Platonic dialogues in which
Socrates is the main speaker are depictions of the
philosophy of Socrates—a philosophy that Plato endorses but
to which he has made no contributions of his own—then we
would be committed to the absurd view that Socrates both has
and lacks answers to these questions.
For these reasons, there is a broad consensus among
scholars that we should not look to works such as Republic,
Phaedo, Phaedrus, and Philebus for a historically accurate
account of the thought of Socrates—even though they contain
a speaker called Socrates who argues for certain
philosophical positions and opposes others. At the same
time, we can explain why Plato uses the literary character
of Socrates in many of his writings to present ideas that go
well beyond anything that the historical Socrates said or
believed. In these works, Plato is developing ideas that
were inspired by his encounter with Socrates, using methods
of inquiry borrowed from Socrates, and showing how much can
be accomplished with these Socratic starting points. That is
why he assigns Socrates the role of principal interlocutor,
despite the fact that he did not intend these works to be
mere re-creations of Socrates’ conversations.
Accordingly, the dialogues of Plato that adhere most
closely to what he heard from Socrates are those in which
the interlocutor called Socrates searches, without apparent
success, for answers to questions about the nature of the
ethical virtues and other practical topics—works such as
Laches, Euthyphro, and Charmides. This does not mean that in
these dialogues Plato is not shaping his material or that he
is merely writing down, word-for-word, conversations he
heard. We cannot know, and it is implausible to suppose,
that in these dialogues of unsuccessful search there is a
pure rendering of what the historical Socrates said, with no
admixture of Platonic interpretation or supplement. All we
can reasonably suppose is that here, if anywhere, Plato is
re-creating the give-and-take of Socratic conversation,
conveying a sense of the methods Socrates used and the
assumptions that guided him when he challenged others to
defend their ethical ideas and their way of life.
The portrait of Socrates in these dialogues is fully
consonant with the one in Plato’s Apology, and it serves as
a valuable supplement to that work. For in the Apology,
Socrates insists that he does not inquire into natural
phenomena (“things in the sky and below the earth”), as
Aristophanes alleges. On the contrary, he says, he devotes
his life to one question only: how he and others can become
good human beings, or as good as possible. The questions he
asks others, and discovers that they cannot answer, are
posed in the hope that he might acquire greater wisdom about
just this subject. This is the Socrates we find in Laches,
Euthyphro, and Charmides—but not in Phaedo, Phaedrus,
Philebus, or Republic. (Or, rather, it is not the Socrates
of Books II–X of Republic; the portrait of Socrates in Book
I is similar in many ways to that in Apology, Laches,
Euthyphro, and Charmides.) We can therefore say this much
about the historical Socrates as he is portrayed in Plato’s
Apology and in some of Plato’s dialogues: he has a
methodology, a pattern of inquiry, and an orientation toward
ethical questions. He can see how misguided his
interlocutors are because he is extremely adept at
discovering contradictions in their beliefs.
“Socratic method” has now come into general usage as a
name for any educational strategy that involves
cross-examination of students by their teacher. However, the
method used by Socrates in the conversations re-created by
Plato follows a more specific pattern: Socrates describes
himself not as a teacher but as an ignorant inquirer, and
the series of questions he asks are designed to show that
the principal question he raises (for example, “What is
piety?”) is one to which his interlocutor has no adequate
answer. Typically, the interlocutor is led, by a series of
supplementary questions, to see that he must withdraw the
answer he at first gave to Socrates’ principal question,
because that answer falls afoul of the other answers he has
given. The method employed by Socrates, in other words, is a
strategy for showing that the interlocutor’s several answers
do not fit together as a group, thus revealing to the
interlocutor his own poor grasp of the concepts under
discussion. (Euthyphro, for example, in the dialogue named
after him, having been asked what piety is, replies that it
is whatever is “dear to the gods.” Socrates continues to
probe, and the ensuing give-and-take can be summarized as
follows: Socrates: Are piety and impiety opposites?
Euthyphro: Yes. Socrates: Are the gods in disagreement with
each other about what is good, what is just, and so on?
Euthyphro: Yes. Socrates: So the very same actions are loved
by some gods and hated by others? Euthyphro: Yes. Socrates:
So those same actions are both pious and impious? Euthyphro:
Yes.) The interlocutor, having been refuted by means of
premises he himself has agreed to, is free to propose a new
answer to Socrates’ principal question; or another
conversational partner, who has been listening to the
preceding dialogue, is allowed to take his place. But
although the new answers proposed to Socrates’ principal
question avoid the errors revealed in the preceding
cross-examination, fresh difficulties are uncovered, and in
the end the “ignorance” of Socrates is revealed as a kind of
wisdom, whereas the interlocutors are implicitly criticized
for failing to recognize their ignorance.
It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that, because
Socrates professes ignorance about certain questions, he
suspends judgment about all matters whatsoever. On the
contrary, he has some ethical convictions about which he is
completely confident. As he tells his judges in his defense
speech: human wisdom begins with the recognition of one’s
own ignorance; the unexamined life is not worth living;
ethical virtue is the only thing that matters; and a good
human being cannot be harmed (because whatever misfortune he
may suffer, including poverty, physical injury, and even
death, his virtue will remain intact). But Socrates is
painfully aware that his insights into these matters leave
many of the most important ethical questions unanswered. It
is left to his student Plato, using the Socratic method as a
starting point and ranging over subjects that Socrates
neglected, to offer positive answers to these questions.
Philosophical and literary sources » Aristotle
Another important source of information about the historical
Socrates—Aristotle—provides further evidence for this way of
distinguishing between the philosophies of Socrates and
Plato. In 367, some 30 years after the death of Socrates,
Aristotle (who was then 17 years old) moved to Athens in
order to study at Plato’s school, called the Academy. It is
difficult to believe that, during his 20 years as a member
of that society, Aristotle had no conversations about
Socrates with Plato and others who had been personally
acquainted with him. There is good reason, then, to suppose
that the historical information offered about Socrates in
Aristotle’s philosophical writings are based on those
conversations. What Aristotle tells his readers is that
Socrates asked questions but gave no replies, because he
lacked knowledge; that he sought definitions of the virtues;
and that he was occupied with ethical matters and not with
questions about the natural world. This is the portrait of
Socrates that Plato’s writings, judiciously used, give us.
The fact that it is confirmed by Aristotle is all the more
reason to accept it.
Life and personality
Although the sources provide only a small amount of
information about the life and personality of Socrates, a
unique and vivid picture of him shines through, particularly
in some of the works of Plato. We know the names of his
father, Sophroniscus (probably a stonemason), his mother,
Phaenarete, and his wife, Xanthippe, and we know that he had
three sons. (In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates likens his way
of philosophizing to the occupation of his mother, who was a
midwife: not pregnant with ideas himself, he assists others
with the delivery of their ideas, though they are often
stillborn.) With a snub nose and bulging eyes, which made
him always appear to be staring, he was unattractive by
conventional standards. He served as a hoplite (a heavily
armed soldier) in the Athenian army and fought bravely in
several important battles. Unlike many of the thinkers of
his time, he did not travel to other cities in order to
pursue his intellectual interests. Although he did not seek
high office, did not regularly attend meetings of the
Athenian Assembly (Ecclesia), the city’s principal governing
body (as was his privilege as an adult male citizen), and
was not active in any political faction, he discharged his
duties as a citizen, which included not only military
service but occasional membership in the Council of Five
Hundred, which prepared the Assembly’s agenda.
Socrates was not well-born or wealthy, but many of his
admirers were, and they included several of the most
politically prominent Athenian citizens. When the democratic
constitution of Athens was overthrown for a brief time in
403, four years before his trial, he did not leave the city,
as did many devoted supporters of democratic rule, including
his friend Chaerephon, who had gone to Delphi many years
earlier to ask the oracle whether anyone was wiser than
Socrates. (The answer was no.)
The expression of same-sex love was not unusual in Athens
at this time, and Socrates was physically attracted to
beautiful young men. This aspect of his personality is most
vividly conveyed in the opening pages of Charmides and in
the speech of the young and ambitious general Alcibiades at
the end of Symposium. Socrates’ long fits of abstraction,
his courage in battle, his resistance to hunger and cold,
his ability to consume wine without apparent inebriation,
and his extraordinary self-control in the presence of
sensual attractions are all described with consummate
artistry in the opening and closing pages of Symposium.
Socrates’ personality was in some ways closely connected
to his philosophical outlook. He was remarkable for the
absolute command he maintained over his emotions and his
apparent indifference to physical hardships. Corresponding
to these personal qualities was his commitment to the
doctrine that reason, properly cultivated, can and ought to
be the all-controlling factor in human life. Thus he has no
fear of death, he says in Plato’s Apology, because he has no
knowledge of what comes after it, and he holds that, if
anyone does fear death, his fear can be based only on a
pretense of knowledge. The assumption underlying this claim
is that, once one has given sufficient thought to some
matter, one’s emotions will follow suit. Fear will be
dispelled by intellectual clarity. Similarly, according to
Socrates, if one believes, upon reflection, that one should
act in a particular way, then, necessarily, one’s feelings
about the act in question will accommodate themselves to
one’s belief—one will desire to act in that way. (Thus,
Socrates denies the possibility of what has been called
“weakness of will”—knowingly acting in a way one believes to
be wrong.) It follows that, once one knows what virtue is,
it is impossible not to act virtuously. Anyone who fails to
act virtuously does so because he incorrectly identifies
virtue with something it is not. This is what is meant by
the thesis, attributed to Socrates by Aristotle, that virtue
is a form of knowledge.
Socrates’ conception of virtue as a form of knowledge
explains why he takes it to be of the greatest importance to
seek answers to questions such as “What is courage?” and
“What is piety?” If we could just discover the answers to
these questions, we would have all we need to live our lives
well. The fact that Socrates achieved a complete rational
control of his emotions no doubt encouraged him to suppose
that his own case was indicative of what human beings at
their best can achieve.
But if virtue is a form of knowledge, does that mean that
each of the virtues—courage, piety, justice—constitutes a
separate branch of knowledge, and should we infer that it is
possible to acquire knowledge of one of these branches but
not of the others? This is an issue that emerges in several
of Plato’s dialogues; it is most fully discussed in
Protagoras. It was a piece of conventional Greek wisdom, and
is still widely assumed, that one can have some admirable
qualities but lack others. One might, for example, be
courageous but unjust. Socrates challenges this assumption;
he believes that the many virtues form a kind of
unity—though, not being able to define any of the virtues,
he is in no position to say whether they are all the same
thing or instead constitute some looser kind of unification.
But he unequivocally rejects the conventional idea that one
can possess one virtue without possessing them all.
Another prominent feature of the personality of Socrates,
one that often creates problems about how best to interpret
him, is (to use the ancient Greek term) his eirôneia.
Although this is the term from which the English word irony
is derived, there is a difference between the two. To speak
ironically is to use words to mean the opposite of what they
normally convey, but it is not necessarily to aim at
deception, for the speaker may expect and even want the
audience to recognize this reversal. In contrast, for the
ancient Greeks eirôneia meant “dissembling”—a user of
eirôneia is trying to hide something. This is the accusation
that is made against Socrates several times in Plato’s works
(though never in Xenophon’s). Socrates says in Plato’s
Apology, for example, that the jurors hearing his case will
not accept the reason he offers for being unable to stop his
philosophizing in the marketplace—that to do so would be to
disobey the god who presides at Delphi. (Socrates’ audience
understood him to be referring to Apollo, though he does not
himself use this name. Throughout his speech, he affirms his
obedience to the god or to the gods but not specifically to
one or more of the familiar gods or goddesses of the Greek
pantheon). The cause of their incredulity, he adds, will be
their assumption that he is engaging in eirôneia. In effect,
Socrates is admitting that he has acquired a reputation for
insincerity—for giving people to understand that his words
mean what they are ordinarily taken to mean when in fact
they do not. Similarly, in Book I of Republic, Socrates is
accused by a hostile interlocutor, Thrasymachus, of
“habitual eirôneia.” Although Socrates says that he does not
have a good answer to the question “What is justice?,”
Thrasymachus thinks that this is just a pose. Socrates, he
alleges, is concealing his favoured answer. And in
Symposium, Alcibiades accuses Socrates of “spending his
whole life engaged in eirôneia and playing with people” and
compares him to a carved figurine whose outer shell conceals
its inner contents. The heart of Alcibiades’ accusation is
that Socrates pretends to care about people and to offer
them advantages but withholds what he knows because he is
full of disdain.
Plato’s portrayal of Socrates as an “ironist” shows how
conversation with him could easily lead to a frustrating
impasse and how the possibility of resentment was ever
present. Socrates was in this sense a masked interlocutor—an
aspect of his self-presentation that made him more
fascinating and alluring to his audiences but that also
added to their distrust and suspicion. And readers, who come
to know Socrates through the intervention of Plato, are in
somewhat the same situation. Our efforts to interpret him
are sometimes not as sound as we would like, because we must
rely on judgments, often difficult to justify, about when he
means what he says and when he does not.
Even when Socrates goes to court to defend himself
against the most serious of charges, he seems to be engaged
in eirôneia. After listening to the speeches given by his
accusers, he says, in the opening sentence of Plato’s
Apology: “I was almost carried away in spite of myself, so
persuasively did they speak.” Is this the habitual eirôneia
of Socrates? Or did the speeches of his accusers really have
this effect on him? It is difficult to be sure. But, by
Socrates’ own admission, the suspicion that anything he says
might be a pose undermines his ability to persuade the
jurors of his good intentions. His eirôneia may even have
lent support to one of the accusations made against him,
that he corrupted the young. For if Socrates really did
engage in eirôneia, and if his youthful followers delighted
in and imitated this aspect of his character, then to that
extent he encouraged them to become dissembling and
untrustworthy, just like himself.
Background of the trial
The trial of Socrates in 399 bc occurred soon after Athens’s
defeat at the hands of Sparta in the Peloponnesian War
(431–404 bc). Not only were Sparta and Athens military
rivals during those years, they also had radically different
forms of government. Athens was a democracy: all its adult
male citizens were members of the Assembly; many of the
city’s offices were filled by lot (election was regarded as
undemocratic, because it effectively pronounced some
citizens better qualified than others); and its citizens
enjoyed a high degree of freedom to live and speak as they
liked, provided that they obeyed the law and did nothing to
undermine the democracy and the public good. Sparta, by
contrast, was a mixed regime based on a complex
power-sharing arrangement between various elite groups and
ordinary citizens, and it exerted far more control than
Athens did over education and the daily life of its
citizens.
There was in Athens, particularly among the well-born,
wealthy, and young, a degree of admiration for certain
aspects of Spartan life and government. These young men, who
spent much of their time in the public gymnasia, prided
themselves on their toughness, practiced a certain
simplicity of style, and grew their hair long—all in
imitation of Spartan ways. (As Plato and Xenophon confirm,
Socrates himself shared some of these qualities. In
Aristophanes’ Birds [414], the young who express their
admiration for Sparta are said to be “Socratizing.”) No
doubt the fact that Athens, an empire-building city with
vast resources and a large population, could not defeat
smaller and poorer Sparta—and, in the end, lost its empire
to that rival regime—added to the allure of the Spartan
political system and way of life.
Ordinary Athenians—people who had to work for a living
and did not belong to any of the aristocratic families—were
proud of their democratic institutions and the freedoms they
enjoyed, and they were well aware that their form of
government had internal as well as external enemies and
critics. Furthermore, they did not think of civic and
religious matters as separate spheres but assumed instead
that participation in the religious life of the city, as
regulated by democratic institutions, was one of the duties
of all citizens and that great harm could come to the city
if the gods it recognized were offended or customary
religious prohibitions were violated.
Background of the trial » Religious scandal and the coup of
the oligarchs
During and soon after the war with Sparta, several events
revealed how much damage could be done to Athenian democracy
by individuals who did not respect the religious customs of
the community, who had no allegiance to the institutions of
democracy, or who admired their city’s adversary. One night
in 415, shortly before a major naval expedition to Sicily
was to set sail, many statues of the god Hermes (who
protected travelers) were mutilated, presumably by those who
wished to prevent the expedition from proceeding. While the
matter was being investigated, several men, including one of
Socrates’ greatest admirers, Alcibiades—who had sponsored
and helped to lead the Sicilian expedition—were accused of
mocking a religious ceremony and revealing its sacred
secrets to outsiders. Some of them were tried and executed.
Alcibiades, who had been charged with involvement in other
religious scandals before, was called back from Sicily to
face trial. The power of his enemies and the suspicion of
him was so great, however, that he decided to escape to
Sparta rather than return to Athens to face the likelihood
of a death sentence. Athens condemned him and his associates
to death in absentia, and he proceeded to offer counsel and
leadership to Sparta in its fight against Athens. In 407 he
returned to Athens and was cleared of the charges against
him, though he never fully regained the trust either of the
democrats or their opponents. Alcibiades was only one of
many followers of Socrates mentioned in Plato’s dialogues
who were involved in the religious scandals of 415.
In 411 a group of 400 opponents of Athenian democracy
staged a coup and tried to install an oligarchy, but they
were overthrown in the same year and democracy was restored.
Some of them, who were associates of Socrates, went into
exile after their revolution failed. In 404, soon after the
Athenians’ defeat, Sparta installed a group of 30 men (many
years later dubbed the Thirty Tyrants) in Athens to
establish a far less democratic regime there. The leader of
the most extreme wing of this group, Critias, was part of
the Socratic circle; so, too, was Charmides, another of the
30. The democrats, many of whom had left Athens when the 30
came to power, defeated them in battle, and democracy was
restored the following year. (In Plato’s Apology, Socrates
refers to the reign of the 30 and their unsuccessful attempt
to implicate him in their crimes.)
Background of the trial » The perceived fragility of
Athenian democracy
The year in which Socrates was prosecuted, 399, was one in
which several other prominent figures were brought to trial
in Athens on the charge of impiety. That is unlikely to have
been a coincidence; rather, it suggests that there was, at
the time, a sense of anxiety about the dangers of religious
unorthodoxy and about the political consequences that
religious deviation could bring. Two attempts to put an end
to Athenian democracy had occurred in recent years, and the
religious scandals of 415 were not so far in the past that
they would have been forgotten. Because a general amnesty
had been negotiated, no one, except the 30 and a few others,
could be tried for offenses committed prior to 403, when the
30 were defeated. But this would not have prevented an
accusation from being brought against someone who committed
a crime after 403. If Socrates had continued, during the
years after 403, to engage in the same practices that were
so characteristic of him throughout his adult life, then not
even the most ardent supporters of the amnesty would have
objected to bringing him to trial. And once a trial had
begun, it was common practice for prosecutors to mention
anything that might be judged prejudicial to the accused.
There was no legal custom or court-appointed judge that
would have prevented Socrates’ accusers from referring to
those of his admirers—Alcibiades, Critias, Charmides, and
the like—who at one time had been enemies of democratic
Athens or had been associated with religious scandal. The
law that Socrates was alleged to have violated was a law
against impiety, but in support of that accusation he also
was accused of having corrupted the young. His jury might
have taken his association with opponents of the democracy,
or with persons convicted or suspected of religious crimes,
to be grounds for considering him a dangerous man.
The fact that one of those who assisted in the
prosecution of Socrates and spoke against him—Anytus—was a
prominent democratic leader makes it all the more likely
that worries about the future of Athenian democracy lay
behind Socrates’ trial. And even if neither Anytus nor the
other prosecutors (Meletus and Lycon) harboured such fears,
it is hard to believe that they were entirely absent from
the minds of those who heard his case. In any event, because
Socrates openly displayed his antidemocratic ideas in his
defense speech, it would have been difficult for jurors to
set aside his association with opponents of the democracy,
even if they had been inclined to do so. Athenian democracy
must have seemed extremely fragile in 399. It is only with
the benefit of hindsight that we can see that its
institutions were strong enough to last most of the rest of
the 4th century.
It is not known with certainty whether those who
prosecuted Socrates mentioned Alcibiades and Critias at his
trial—there is no record of their speeches, and it is
difficult to interpret the evidence about what they did say.
But it is very likely that specific names were mentioned. In
Plato’s Apology, Socrates notes that his accusers alleged of
certain individuals that they were his students, an
accusation he lamely denies on the grounds that, because he
has never undertaken to teach anyone, he cannot have had
students. Furthermore, Xenophon reports in Memorabilia that,
according to “the accuser,” Alcibiades and Critias were
followers of Socrates. The word accuser is taken by some
scholars to be a reference to one of the three persons who
spoke against Socrates in 399, though others take Xenophon
to be defending Socrates against charges made against him in
a pamphlet written several years later by Polycrates, a
teacher of rhetoric. In any event, many years later, in the
4th century, the orator Aeschines, in his speech “Against
Timarchus,” asserted in public that Socrates was convicted
because he was “shown to have been the teacher of Critias,
one of the thirty who had overthrown the democracy.”
But even if Socrates’ association with Critias and
Alcibiades was an important factor leading to his trial and
conviction, it certainly was not the only ingredient of the
case against him, nor even the most important one. The law
that Socrates was alleged to have violated was a law against
impiety, and the thrust of his defense, as presented by
Plato, was that his life has been consumed by his
single-minded devotion to the god. The Socrates who speaks
to us in Plato’s Apology has no doubt that the charge of
impiety against him must be refuted. There is no reason to
suspect that this charge was a mere pretext and that what
Socrates was really being prosecuted for was his
antidemocratic associations and ideas. The political
background of his trial is important because it helps to
explain why he was not prosecuted in the 430s or 420s or at
any other time of his life. Everything known about him
indicates that he was the same man, and lived the same sort
of life, in 399 and in 423, the year of Clouds. What made
him the object of prosecution in 399, after so many years
during which his behaviour was tolerated, was a change in
political circumstances. But it remains the case, according
to the Socrates of Apology, that his alleged religious
unorthodoxy was deeply worrying to his prosecutors and
jurors. That is why this allegation receives all his
attention.
Background of the trial » The Athenian ideal of free speech
That Socrates was prosecuted because of his religious ideas
and political associations indicates how easily an ideal
held dear by his fellow Athenians—the ideal of open and
frank speech among citizens—could be set aside when they
felt insecure. This ideal and its importance in Athens are
well illustrated by the remark of the orator Demosthenes,
that in Athens one is free to praise the Spartan
constitution, whereas in Sparta it is only the Spartan
constitution that one is allowed to praise. Were there other
instances, besides the trial of Socrates, in which an
Athenian was prosecuted in court because of the dangerous
ideas he was alleged to have circulated? Centuries after
Socrates’ death, several writers alleged that many other
intellectual figures of his time—including Protagoras,
Anaxagoras, Damon, Aspasia, and Diagoras—were exiled or
prosecuted. Several scholars have concluded that Athens’s
allegiance to the ideal of freedom of speech was deeply
compromised during the last decades of the 5th century.
Others have argued that much or all of the evidence for a
period of persecution and harassment was invented by writers
who wanted to claim, as a badge of honour for their
favourite philosophers, that they, too, like the universally
admired Socrates, had been persecuted by the Athenians. What
can safely be said is this: the trial of Socrates is the
only case in which we can be certain that an Athenian was
legally prosecuted not for an overt act that directly harmed
the public or some individual—such as treason, corruption,
or slander—but for alleged harm indirectly caused by the
expression and teaching of ideas.
According to Plato’s Apology, the vote to convict
Socrates was very close: had 30 of those who voted for
conviction cast their ballots differently, he would have
been acquitted. (So he was convicted by a majority of 59.
Assuming, as many scholars do, that the size of his jury was
501, 280 favoured conviction and 221 opposed it.) It is
reasonable to speculate that many of those who opposed
conviction did so partly because, however little they cared
for what Socrates thought and how he lived, they cherished
the freedom of speech enjoyed by all Athenians and attached
more importance to this aspect of their political system
than to any harm Socrates may have done in the past or might
do in the future. The Athenian love of free speech allowed
Socrates to cajole and criticize his fellow citizens for the
whole of his long life but gave way—though just barely—when
it was put under great pressure.
Plato’s Apology
Although in none of Plato’s dialogues is Plato himself a
conversational partner or even a witness to a conversation,
in the Apology Socrates says that Plato is one of several
friends in the audience. In this way Plato lets us know that
he was an eyewitness of the trial and therefore in the best
possible position to write about it. The other account we
have of the trial, that of Xenophon, a contemporary of
Socrates, is of a very different character. We know that
Xenophon was not present as a live witness. He tells his
readers that he is reporting only a portion of Socrates’
speech and that he learned about the trial from Hermogenes,
a member of the Socratic circle.
It is not surprising, then, that there are significant
differences between Plato’s and Xenophon’s accounts of what
was said at the trial. (Xenophon, for example, dwells on the
troubles of old age from which Socrates is escaping by being
condemned to death, whereas Plato barely alludes to
Socrates’ age.) Of greater importance is the fact that the
two Apologys agree in many details. They agree about what
the charges against Socrates were: failing to acknowledge
the gods recognized by the city, introducing other new
divinities, and corrupting the young. They also agree that
Meletus supported his accusation by referring to a divine
voice or sign that Socrates claimed as his personal guide;
that Socrates acknowledged the guidance of this divine sign
in his speech; that part of Socrates’ defense consisted of a
cross-examination of Meletus; that Socrates referred to an
inquiry made by his friend, Chaerephon, to the Delphic
oracle; that the response of the oracle confirmed that a
unique status had been conferred upon Socrates by the gods;
that, having been found guilty, Socrates refused to propose
a punishment that the jury would find acceptable; and that,
after the jury voted in favour of the death penalty, he once
again addressed the jury and expressed no regrets for his
manner of living or the course of his trial. There is no
reason to suppose that Xenophon had learned of these aspects
of the trial from Plato. His agreement with Plato about
these matters assures us that they are not fabrications.
But can we go so far as to say that in Plato’s Apology
there is a word-for-word transcription (or something close
to it) of the speech Socrates gave in his defense? It would
not have been impossible for Plato to have managed such a
feat by taking extensive notes, comparing his memory with
that of others, and gradually perfecting a rendition that
aimed at replicating the original as closely as possible.
Unfortunately, there is no way to prove that Plato was
striving to achieve this kind and degree of accuracy. Some
scholars, in fact, have argued that Plato was engaged in a
much different project: his Apology, they have noted, is
similar in many respects to the works of contemporary
orators and teachers of rhetoric—in particular to a
rhetorical exercise, “Defense of Palamades,” by Gorgias—and
they infer that in composing the Apology in this fashion
Plato was not seeking historical accuracy but instead
striving to outdo or to parody the orators for whom he felt
disdain. But this hypothesis is just as speculative as the
supposition that Plato strove to record as accurately as
possible the actual speech of Socrates.
We cannot eliminate the possibility that some parts of
the speech Plato wrote were not actually delivered at the
trial or were expressed rather differently. Plato’s speech
represents his creative attempt to defend Socrates and his
way of life and to condemn those who voted to kill him. In
fact, Plato’s motives in writing the Apology are likely to
have been complex. One of them, no doubt, was to defend and
praise Socrates by making use of many of the points Socrates
himself had offered in his speech. But, as any reader of the
work can see, Plato is at the same time using the trial and
death of Socrates to condemn Athens, to call upon his
readers to reject the conventional life that Athens would
have preferred Socrates to lead, and to choose instead the
life of a Socratic philosopher. In the 4th century bc Athens
had no norm of accurate reportage or faithful biography, and
so Plato would have felt free to shape his material in
whatever way suited his multiple aims. Because it was
Socrates he wished to praise, he had no choice but to make
the Socrates of the Apology close to the original. But he
would not have felt bound merely to reproduce, as best he
could, the speech that Socrates delivered.
In any event, the historical accuracy of Plato’s Apology
should not be the only question on the reader’s mind. Of
equal importance is whether Plato’s Socrates really is
guilty of the charges brought against him, whether he is a
wholly just and admirable person, whether his manner of
living is the one that is most worthwhile (or perhaps even
the only one that is worthwhile at all, as Socrates
insists), and whether there is any reason for a political
community to be concerned about the harm such a person might
do. Surely the last thing Plato would have wanted his
readers to do with the Apology is to ignore its
philosophical, religious, and political dimensions in order
to concentrate solely on its accuracy as a piece of
historical reportage.
The public’s hatred of Socrates
Part of the fascination of Plato’s Apology consists in the
fact that it presents a man who takes extraordinary steps
throughout his life to be of the greatest possible value to
his community but whose efforts, far from earning him the
gratitude and honour he thinks he deserves, lead to his
condemnation and death at the hands of the very people he
seeks to serve. Socrates is painfully aware that he is a
hated figure and that this is what has led to the
accusations against him. He has little money and no
political savvy or influence, and he has paid little
attention to his family and household—all in order to serve
the public that now reviles him. What went wrong?
The public’s hatred of Socrates » The impression created by
Aristophanes
Socrates goes to some length to answer this question. Much
of his defense consists not merely in refuting the charges
but in offering a complex explanation of why such false
accusations should have been brought against him in the
first place. Part of the explanation, he believes, is that
he has long been misunderstood by the general public. The
public, he says, has focused its distrust of certain types
of people upon him. He claims that the false impressions of
his “first accusers” (as he calls them) derive from a play
of Aristophanes (he is referring to Clouds) in which a
character called Socrates is seen “swinging about, saying he
was walking on air and talking a lot of nonsense about
things of which I know nothing at all.” The Socrates of
Aristophanes’ comedy is the head of a school that
investigates every sort of empirical phenomenon, regards
clouds and air as divine substances, denies the existence of
any gods but these, studies language and the art of
argument, and uses its knowledge of rhetorical devices to
“make the worse into the stronger argument,” as the Socrates
of the Apology puts it in his speech. Socrates’ corruption
of the young is also a major theme of Clouds: it features a
father (Strepsiades) who attends Socrates’ school with his
son (Pheidippides) in order to learn how to avoid paying the
debts he has incurred because of his son’s extravagance. In
the end, Pheidippides learns all too well how to use
argumentative skills to his advantage; indeed, he prides
himself on his ability to prove that it is right for a son
to beat his parents. In the end, Strepsiades denounces
Socrates and burns down the building that houses his school.
This play, Socrates says, has created the general
impression that he studies celestial and geographic
phenomena and, like the Sophists who travel from city to
city, takes a fee for teaching the young various skills. Not
so, says Socrates. He thinks it would be a fine thing to
possess the kinds of knowledge these Sophists claim to
teach, but he has never discussed these matters with
anyone—as his judges should be able to confirm for
themselves, because, he says, many of them have heard his
conversations.
The public’s hatred of Socrates » The human resistance to
self-reflection
But this can only be the beginning of Socrates’ explanation,
for it leads to further questions. Why should Aristophanes
have written in this way about Socrates? The latter must
have been a well-known figure in 423, when Clouds was
produced, for Aristophanes typically wrote about and mocked
figures who already were familiar to his audience.
Furthermore, if, as Socrates claims, many of his jurors had
heard him in discussion and could therefore confirm for
themselves that he did not study or teach others about
clouds, air, and other such matters and did not take a fee
as the Sophists did, then why did they not vote to acquit
him of the charges by an overwhelming majority?
Socrates provides answers to these questions. Long before
Aristophanes wrote about him, he had acquired a reputation
among his fellow citizens because he spent his days
attempting to fulfill his divine mission to cross-examine
them and to puncture their confident belief that they
possessed knowledge of the most important matters. Socrates
tells the jurors that, as a result of his inquiries, he has
learned a bitter lesson about his fellow citizens: not only
do they fail to possess the knowledge they claim to have,
but they resent having this fact pointed out to them, and
they hate him for his insistence that his reflective way of
life and his disavowal of knowledge make him superior to
them. The only people who delight in his conversation are
the young and wealthy, who have the leisure to spend their
days with him. These people imitate him by carrying out
their own cross-examinations of their elders. Socrates does
admit, then, that he has, to some degree, set one generation
against another—and in making this confession, he makes it
apparent why some members of the jury may have been
convinced, on the basis of their own acquaintance with him,
that he has corrupted the city’s young.
One of the most subtle components of Socrates’
explanation for the hatred he has aroused is his point that
people hide the shame they feel when they are unable to
withstand his destructive arguments. His reputation as a
corrupter of the young and as a Sophist and an atheist is
sustained because it provides people with an ostensibly
reasonable explanation of their hatred of him. No one will
say, “I hate Socrates because I cannot answer his questions,
and he makes me look foolish in front of the young.”
Instead, people hide their shame and the real source of
their anger by seizing on the general impression that he is
the sort of philosopher who casts doubt on traditional
religion and teaches people rhetorical tricks that can be
used to make bad arguments look good. These ways of hiding
the source of their hatred are all the more potent because
they contain at least a grain of truth. Socrates, as both
Plato and Xenophon confirm, is a man who loves to argue: in
that respect he is like a Sophist. And his conception of
piety, as revealed by his devotion to the Delphic oracle, is
highly unorthodox: in that respect he is like those who deny
the existence of the gods.
Socrates believes that this hatred, whose real source is
so painful for people to acknowledge, played a crucial role
in leading Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon to come forward in
court against him; it also makes it so difficult for many
members of the jury to acknowledge that he has the highest
motives and has done his city a great service. Aristophanes’
mockery of Socrates and the legal indictment against him
could not possibly have led to his trial or conviction were
it not for something in a large number of his fellow
Athenians that wanted to be rid of him. This is a theme to
which Socrates returns several times. He compares himself,
at one point, to a gadfly who has been assigned by the god
to stir a large and sluggish horse. Note what this implies:
the bite of the fly cannot be anything but painful, and it
is only natural that the horse would like nothing better
than to kill it. After the jury has voted in favour of the
death penalty, Socrates tells them that their motive has
been their desire to avoid giving a defense of their lives.
Something in people resists self-examination: they do not
want to answer deep questions about themselves, and they
hate those who cajole them for not doing so or for doing so
poorly. At bottom, Socrates thinks that all but a few people
will strike out against those who try to stimulate serious
moral reflection in them. That is why he thinks that his
trial is not merely the result of unfortuitous events—a mere
misunderstanding caused by the work of a popular
playwright—but the outcome of psychological forces deep
within human nature.
The public’s hatred of Socrates » Socrates’ criticism of
democracy
Socrates’ analysis of the hatred he has incurred is one part
of a larger theme that he dwells on throughout his speech.
Athens is a democracy, a city in which the many are the
dominant power in politics, and it can therefore be expected
to have all the vices of the many. Because most people hate
to be tested in argument, they will always take action of
some sort against those who provoke them with questions. But
that is not the only accusation Socrates brings forward
against his city and its politics. He tells his democratic
audience that he was right to have withdrawn from political
life, because a good person who fights for justice in a
democracy will be killed. In his cross-examination of
Meletus, he insists that only a few people can acquire the
knowledge necessary for improving the young of any species,
and that the many will inevitably do a poor job. He
criticizes the Assembly for its illegal actions and the
Athenian courts for the ease with which matters of justice
are distorted by emotional pleading. Socrates implies that
the very nature of democracy makes it a corrupt political
system. Bitter experience has taught him that most people
rest content with a superficial understanding of the most
urgent human questions. When they are given great power,
their shallowness inevitably leads to injustice.
The charge of impiety
Socrates spends a large part of his speech trying to
persuade his fellow citizens that he is indeed a pious man,
because his philosophical mission has been carried out in
obedience to the god who presides at Delphi. It is
remarkable that this is nearly the only positive argument he
offers, in Plato’s Apology, to support his claim that he is
a pious man. The only other evidence he supplies is
introduced only because Meletus, upon cross-examination,
asserts that Socrates believes that there are no gods or
divinities at all, an accusation far more sweeping than—and
indeed contradictory to—the official indictment, which
asserted that Socrates did not acknowledge the gods
recognized by the city but instead believed in different and
new gods. Socrates quickly points out the absurdity of this
new accusation. Meletus, he notes, has referred in his
speech to a certain strange divinity (daimon) who comes to
Socrates to give him advice. Presumably Meletus has offered
this as evidence that Socrates believes in new gods that are
different from the ones generally recognized in Athens. But
if Meletus admits that Socrates is guided by a divine being,
then he cannot be taken seriously when he also says that
Socrates is a complete atheist.
The charge of impiety » Socrates’ radical reconception of
piety
These two modes of Socrates’ religiosity—serving the god by
cross-examining one’s fellow citizens and accepting the
guidance of a divine voice—are nothing like the conventional
forms of piety with which Socrates’ contemporaries were
familiar. The Athenians, like all Greeks in the ancient
world, expressed their piety by participating in festivals,
making sacrifices, visiting shrines, and the like. They
assumed that it was the better part of caution to show one’s
devotion to the gods in these public and conventional ways
because, if the gods were not honoured, they could easily
harm or destroy even the best of men and women and their
families and cities as well. The Socrates of Plato’s Apology
does not refer to his participation in these ceremonies and
rituals. (The Socrates of Xenophon’s Apology does, however,
and, in this and many other ways, Plato’s Socrates is the
more unconventional and provocative of the two and a figure
more likely to be hated and feared.) It is impossible to
know whether the historical Socrates participated fully (or
at all) in conventional forms of religious observance, but,
if Plato’s account of his philosophy is accurate, then
Socrates lacked the typical Athenian’s motives for doing so.
He cannot believe that the gods might harm him, because he
is confident that he is a good man and that a good man
cannot be harmed. That is why he has no fear of other human
beings. Even if the jury votes to banish him from Athens or
to kill him, he will not be worse off, because his peculiar
kind of wisdom and virtue—his acknowledgment of his
ignorance and commitment to continual self-examination—will
remain intact. That is also why he is sure that, when he
dies, his affairs will not be neglected by the gods. They
must be entirely benign in their attitude toward someone
like him, who has served them so well, and so he has no need
to offer them gifts, if gifts are a device for incurring
their favour or protecting oneself from their destructive
power.
In effect, then, Socrates admits that his understanding
of piety is radically different from the conventional
conception. In keeping with his conception of virtue as a
form of knowledge he uses an intellectual test, not merely a
ceremonial test, to determine whether someone is pious. You
may participate in the conventional practices of civic
religion, but can you say what piety is? If you cannot, do
you at least admit your ignorance and search constantly for
a better understanding of piety, as the god wishes you to
do? More generally, though you may think you are a good
person, can you say what your virtues consist of? If you
cannot, and if you do not spend your life trying, then your
goodness is a sham.
Socrates’ reconception of piety must have struck his
fellow citizens as all the more bizarre and threatening
because it was accompanied by his unapologetic and grateful
acceptance of the divine sign, which Meletus ridicules—a
voice that has come to him since childhood, warning him away
from certain undertakings and in doing so giving him
unfailing advice. In Xenophon’s Apology, Socrates seeks to
portray the daimon that guides him as a phenomenon akin to
others with which his fellow citizens are quite familiar:
“Those who rely on bird-calls and the utterances of men are,
I suppose, receiving guidance from voices. Can there be any
doubt that thunder has a voice or that it is an omen of the
greatest significance?” But an Athenian of conventional
piety would have been able to spot the weakness of this
attempt to assimilate Socrates’ divine voice to the
experience of a seer who makes predictions based on the
interpretation of natural phenomena. Such seers were
appointed and regulated by civic procedures. Socrates was
not designated by the city to serve in an official religious
capacity, and therefore, in claiming to have experiences
that put him directly in touch with the divine, he was
circumventing the normal route by which citizens gained
access to the sources of religious inspiration. The Socrates
of Plato’s Apology, unlike that of Xenophon’s, makes no
attempt to portray his divine sign as a phenomenon that can
create no rift or distance between himself and others. On
the contrary, he attributes his decision not to participate
in the political life of the community beyond the minimal
duties of citizenship to the influence of his divine sign,
and he is confident that his decision to come to court and
contest the charges against him (leaving the city and living
in exile was an option) was the right one because it was not
opposed by the divine sign. The daimon Socrates listens to
is a divinity that makes a political difference: it tells
him what kind of relationship he should have with his fellow
citizens and how he should conduct himself in public
affairs. Thus, not only does Socrates have an unorthodox
conception of piety and of what the gods want from the
citizens of the city, but also he claims to receive
infallible guidance from a voice that does not hesitate to
speak to him about public matters.
The charge of impiety » The danger posed by Socrates
An open-minded and conscientious member of the jury could
therefore have come to the conclusion that Socrates posed a
significant threat to the city and should be found guilty of
the charges against him. In a way, Socrates did fail to
acknowledge the gods recognized by the city, he did
introduce new gods, and, by teaching these things to the
young who gathered around him, he did corrupt them. He may
have referred to “the god” or “the gods,” but his conception
of what is involved in attending to the gods was utterly
novel and politically dangerous. The fact that Socrates saw
his piety as the genuine article, and the unreflective
virtue of his fellow citizens as false virtue, indicates
that he took the entire religious life of Athens, no less
than its political life, to be unworthy of a good man.
If there is any doubt that the unorthodox form of piety
Socrates embodies could have brought him into direct
conflict with the popular will, one need only think of the
portion of Plato’s Apology in which Socrates tells the
jurors that he would obey the god rather than them.
Imagining the possibility that he is acquitted on the
condition that he cease philosophizing in the marketplace,
he unequivocally rejects the terms of this hypothetical
offer, precisely because he believes that his religious duty
to call his fellow citizens to the examined life cannot be
made secondary to any other consideration: “Men of Athens, I
salute you and hold you dear, but I will obey the god rather
than you, and so long as I take breath and am able, I will
never cease philosophizing.” But there was no need for him
to have admitted, in such explicit terms, that his
conception of piety might require him, in certain
circumstances, to disobey a civic order. It is
characteristic of his entire speech that he brings into the
open how contemptuous he is of Athenian civic life and his
fellow citizens. He prides himself on the fact that he will
say nothing to curry favour with the jurors or to conceal
his attitude of superiority to them—even though he realizes
that this is likely to lead some of them to vote against him
out of resentment. Others may throw themselves on the pity
of the jury or bring their tearful children and friends to
court; but these typical modes of behaviour corrupt the
legal system, and Socrates will not stoop to such tactics.
Here, as in so many parts of his speech, he treats his day
in court as an opportunity to counter-indict his accusers
and his fellow citizens (those, at any rate, who voted
against him) for the way they lead their lives. (Another
example: after he has been found guilty and has the
opportunity to propose a punishment, he tells the jury that
he should receive free meals for the remainder of his life,
because this is what he deserves—though in the end he offers
to pay one mina of silver, equivalent to about one hundred
days’ wages, a penalty that his wealthy friends attending
the trial increase to 30 minas.) In effect, Socrates uses
the occasion of his trial to put his accusers and the jurors
on trial. But this was a natural role for him, because he
had done the same thing, day after day, to everyone he met.
Socrates versus Plato
We can conclude that Plato was not blind to the civic and
religious dangers created by Socrates. Part of what makes
his Apology so complex and gripping is that it is not a
one-sided encomium that conceals the features of the
Socratic way of life that lay behind the anxiety and
resentment felt by many of his fellow citizens. Plato, of
course, leaves no doubt that he sides with Socrates and
against Athens, but in doing so he allows us to see why
Socrates had enemies as well as friends. The multisidedness
of Plato’s portrait adds to its verisimilitude and should
increase our confidence in him as a source of our
understanding of the historical Socrates. A defense of
Socrates that portrayed him as an innocuous preacher of
moral pieties would have left us wondering why he was
sentenced to death, and indeed why anyone bothered to indict
him in the first place.
Plato gives no hint in his Apology that he had any
reservations about the way Socrates led his life or the
doctrines that guided him; the format of the Apology
prevents him from doing so. He has made the decision to let
Socrates speak for himself in this work and to refrain from
offering any of his own reflections on the justice or
injustice of the charges against his teacher. But, in the
Republic, he puts into the mouth of its principal
interlocutor, “Socrates,” an observation about the corrosive
power that philosophy can have when it takes hold at too
early an age. When young people first hear philosophical
questions about the traditional moral standards they have
learned from their parents and their community, and when
they see that it is difficult to defend these orthodoxies
without falling into contradiction, they are prone to reject
all traditional morality and to become essentially lawless.
For this reason, philosophy may come to be seen as a
dangerous and disreputable pursuit. The Socrates of the
Republic therefore suggests that in an ideal society the
young should not be exposed to ethical doubt until they are
well into their maturity. This, of course, is not a
restriction that the historical Socrates imposed on himself.
In Plato’s Apology, Socrates prides himself on addressing
his questions to every Athenian—no one, in his view, is too
young or too old for the examined life—and he freely
acknowledges that the young love to see their elders
embarrassed when they are unable to defend their beliefs.
Whereas the Socrates of Plato’s Apology assumes that there
is no need to place limits on philosophical inquiry, the
Socrates of the Republic—who speaks as the mouthpiece of
Plato—holds that in an ideal society this kind of activity
would be carefully regulated. Similarly, in Plato’s Laws,
the main speaker, an unnamed visitor from Athens, praises
Sparta and Crete for forbidding the young to criticize the
laws of their communities. Plato’s great admiration for
Socrates was all the more remarkable because it coexisted
not only with a recognition of why Socrates was considered
dangerous but also with his belief that Socrates was, to
some degree, guilty of impiety and of corrupting the young.
The legacy of Socrates
Socrates’ thought was so pregnant with possibilities, his
mode of life so provocative, that he inspired a remarkable
variety of responses. One of his associates, Aristippus of
Cyrene—his followers were called “Cyrenaics,” and their
school flourished for a century and a half—affirmed that
pleasure is the highest good. (Socrates seems to endorse
this thesis in Plato’s Protagoras, but he attacks it in
Gorgias and other dialogues.) Another prominent follower of
Socrates in the early 4th century bc, Antisthenes,
emphasized the Socratic doctrine that a good man cannot be
harmed; virtue, in other words, is by itself sufficient for
happiness. That doctrine played a central role in a school
of thought, founded by Diogenes of Sinope, that had an
enduring influence on Greek and Roman philosophy: Cynicism.
Like Socrates, Diogenes was concerned solely with ethics,
practiced his philosophy in the marketplace, and upheld an
ideal of indifference to material possessions, political
power, and conventional honours. But the Cynics, unlike
Socrates, treated all conventional distinctions and cultural
traditions as impediments to the life of virtue. They
advocated a life in accordance with nature and regarded
animals and human beings who did not live in societies as
being closer to nature than contemporary human beings. (The
term cynic is derived from the Greek word for dog. Cynics,
therefore, live like beasts.) Starting from the Socratic
premise that virtue is sufficient for happiness, they
launched attacks on marriage, the family, national
distinctions, authority, and cultural achievements. But the
two most important ancient schools of thought that were
influenced by Socrates were Stoicism, founded by Zeno of
Citium, and Skepticism, which became, for many centuries,
the reigning philosophical stance of Plato’s Academy after
Arcesilaus became its leader in 273 bc. The influence of
Socrates on Zeno was mediated by the Cynics, but Roman
Stoics—particularly Epictetus—regarded Socrates as the
paradigm of sagacious inner strength, and they invented new
arguments for the Socratic thesis that virtue is sufficient
for happiness. The Stoic doctrine that divine intelligence
pervades the world and rules for the best borrows heavily
from ideas attributed to Socrates by Xenophon in the
Memorabilia.
Like Socrates, Arcesilaus wrote nothing. He philosophized
by inviting others to state a thesis; he would then prove,
by Socratic questioning, that their thesis led to a
contradiction. His use of the Socratic method allowed
Arcesilaus and his successors in the Academy to hold that
they were remaining true to the central theme of Plato’s
writings. But, just as Cynicism took Socratic themes in a
direction Socrates himself had not developed and indeed
would have rejected, so, too, Arcesilaus and his Skeptical
followers in Plato’s Academy used the Socratic method to
advocate a general suspension of all convictions whatsoever
and not merely a disavowal of knowledge. The underlying
thought of the Academy during its Skeptical phase is that,
because there is no way to distinguish truth from falsity,
we must refrain from believing anything at all. Socrates, by
contrast, merely claims to have no knowledge, and he regards
certain theses as far more worthy of our credence than their
denials.
Although Socrates exerted a profound influence on Greek
and Roman thought, not every major philosopher of antiquity
regarded him as a moral exemplar or a major thinker.
Aristotle approves of the Socratic search for definitions
but criticizes Socrates for an overintellectualized
conception of the human psyche. The followers of Epicurus,
who were philosophical rivals of the Stoics and Academics,
were contemptuous of him.
With the ascendancy of Christianity in the medieval
period, the influence of Socrates was at its nadir: he was,
for many centuries, little more than an Athenian who had
been condemned to death. But when Greek texts, and thus the
works of Plato, the Stoics, and the Skeptics, became
increasingly available in the Renaissance, the thought and
personality of Socrates began to play an important role in
European philosophy. From the 16th to the 19th century the
instability and excesses of Athenian democracy became a
common motif of political writers; the hostility of Xenophon
and Plato, fed by the death of Socrates, played an important
role here. Comparisons between Socrates and Christ became
commonplace, and they remained so even into the 20th
century—though the contrasts drawn between them, and the
uses to which their similarities were put, varied greatly
from one author and period to another. The divine sign of
Socrates became a matter of controversy: was he truly
inspired by the voice of God? Or was the sign only an
intuitive and natural grasp of virtue? (So thought
Montaigne.) Did he intend to undermine the irrational and
merely conventional aspects of religious practice and thus
to place religion on a scientific footing? (So thought the
18th-century Deists.)
In the 19th century Socrates was regarded as a seminal
figure in the evolution of European thought or as a
Christ-like herald of a higher existence. G.W.F. Hegel saw
in Socrates a decisive turn from pre-reflective moral habits
to a self-consciousness that, tragically, had not yet
learned how to reconcile itself to universal civic
standards. Søren Kierkegaard, whose dissertation examined
Socratic irony, found in Socrates a pagan anticipation of
his belief that Christianity is a lived doctrine of almost
impossible demands; but he also regarded Socratic irony as a
deeply flawed indifference to morality. Friedrich Nietzsche
struggled throughout his writings against the one-sided
rationalism and the destruction of cultural forms that he
found in Socrates.
In contrast, in Victorian England Socrates was idealized
by utilitarian thinkers as a Christ-like martyr who laid the
foundations of a modern, rational, scientific worldview.
John Stuart Mill mentions the legal executions of Socrates
and of Christ in the same breath in order to call attention
to the terrible consequences of allowing common opinion to
persecute unorthodox thinkers. Benjamin Jowett, the
principal translator of Plato in the late 19th century, told
his students at Oxford, “The two biographies about which we
are most deeply interested (though not to the same degree)
are those of Christ and Socrates.” Such comparisons
continued into the 20th century: Socrates is treated as a
“paradigmatic individual” (along with Buddha, Confucius, and
Christ) by the German existentialist philosopher Karl
Jaspers.
The conflict between Socrates and Athenian democracy
shaped the thought of 20th-century political philosophers
such as Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, and Karl Popper. The
tradition of self-reflection and care of the self initiated
by Socrates fascinated Michel Foucault in his later
writings. Analytic philosophy, an intellectual tradition
that traces its origins to the work of Gottlob Frege, G.E.
Moore, and Bertrand Russell in the late 19th and early 20th
century, uses, as one of its fundamental tools, a process
called “conceptual analysis,” a form of nonempirical inquiry
that bears some resemblance to Socrates’ search for
definitions.
But the influence of Socrates is felt not only among
philosophers and others inside the academy. He remains, for
all of us, a challenge to complacency and a model of
integrity.
Richard Kraut
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Xenophon
Greek historian
born c. 430 bc, Attica, Greece
died shortly before 350, Attica
Main
Greek historian and philosopher whose numerous surviving
works are valuable for their depiction of late Classical
Greece. His Anabasis (“Upcountry March”) in particular was
highly regarded in antiquity and had a strong influence on
Latin literature.
Life
Xenophon’s life history before 401 is scantily recorded; at
that time, prompted by a Boeotian friend, he left postwar
Athens, joined the Greek mercenary army of the Achaemenian
prince Cyrus the Younger, and became involved in Cyrus’s
rebellion against his brother, the Persian king Artaxerxes
II. After Cyrus’s defeat at Cunaxa (about 50 miles [80 km]
from Babylon in what is now Iraq), the Greeks (later known
as the Ten Thousand) returned to Byzantium via Mesopotamia,
Armenia, and northern Anatolia. Xenophon was one of the men
selected to replace five generals seized and executed by the
Persians. The persistence and skill of the Greek soldiers
were used by proponents of Panhellenism as proof that the
Persians were vulnerable. Initially viewed with hostility by
Sparta (the current Greek hegemonic power), the mercenaries
found employment in the winter of 400–399 with the Thracian
prince Seuthes but then entered Spartan service for a war to
liberate Anatolian Greeks from Persian rule. Unpersuaded by
Seuthes’s offers of land and marriage to his daughter and
evidently disinclined (despite protestations to the
contrary) to return home, Xenophon remained with his
comrades. Although the Anabasis narrative stops at this
point and further details are lacking, he clearly became
closely involved with senior Spartans, notably (after 396)
King Agesilaus II. When a Greek coalition, including Athens,
rebelled against Spartan hegemony in mainland Greece,
Xenophon fought (at Coronea in 394) for Sparta.
Whether his service to Sparta caused or reflected his
formal exile from Athens remains a matter of some dispute,
but exiled he certainly was. The Spartans gave him somewhere
to live at Scillus (across the Alpheus River from Olympia),
a small city in the Triphylian state created after Sparta’s
defeat of Elis in 400. During his years there, Xenophon
served as Sparta’s representative at Olympia, and he sent
his sons to Sparta for their education. Some historians
believe that he also made a trip to Sicily during this
period. He certainly used his mercenary booty to buy land
and erect a small-scale copy of Artemis’s famous temple at
Ephesus. (In Anabasis, Book V, there is a well-known
description of this sacred estate and of the annual
quasi-civic festival celebrated there.) Too prominent to be
unscathed by Sparta’s loss of authority after the Battle of
Leuctra (371), Xenophon was expelled from Scillus and is
said to have settled in Corinth—though here, as elsewhere,
the biographical tradition is of debatable authority, since
the episode does not appear in Xenophon’s own writings. The
claim that his exile was formally repealed is another case
in point, but his Hipparchicus (Cavalry Commander) and
Vectigalia (Ways and Means) suggest that Xenophon had a
sympathetic interest in Athens’s fortunes, and rapprochement
is reflected in his sons’ service in the Athenian cavalry at
the second Battle of Mantinea (362). The death of Xenophon’s
son Gryllus there unleashed such a profusion of eulogies
that Aristotle later gave the subtitle Gryllus to a dialogue
that criticized Isocrates’ views of rhetoric. At the time of
his own death, Xenophon’s standing—as author of a
considerable oeuvre and hero of an adventure nearly five
decades old but ideologically vivid in a Greek world defined
by its relationship to Persia—had never been higher.
Posthumously his place in the canon of ancient authors was
secure; he was a historian, philosopher, and man of action,
a perfect model for the young (a view expressed, for
example, by Dion Chrysostom [Dio Cocceianus]) and an object
of systematic literary imitation by Arrian.
Works » General characteristics
Xenophon produced a large body of work, all of which
survives to the present day. (Indeed, the manuscript
tradition includes Constitution of the Athenians, which is
not by Xenophon.) The great majority of his works were
probably written during the last 15 to 20 years of his life,
but their chronology has not been decisively established.
His output was formally varied—the main categories were long
historical or ostensibly historical narratives, Socratic
texts, and short technical, biographical, or political
treatises—but these had common features, as enumerated
below.
First, Xenophon’s work is characterized by novelty. His
output includes the earliest or earliest surviving examples
of the short nonmedical treatise and of autobiographical
narrative (Anabasis). Other works, although not without
precedent in genre, are unusual in various ways; this is
true of the idiosyncratic contemporary history of Hellenica
(“Greek History”) and the fictive history of Cyropaedia
(“Education of Cyrus”); the second-order, philosophically
nontechnical response to (or exploitation of) Socratic
literature found in Memorabilia, Symposium (“Drinking
Party”), Oeconomicus (“Household Management”), and Apology;
and the novel form of encomiastic biography exemplified by
Agesilaus.
Second, the subject matter reflects Xenophon’s personal
experiences. Anabasis and Cyropaedia flowed from the
adventure of 401–400; the Socratic writings stemmed from
youthful association with a charismatic teacher; Hellenica
arose from a personal take on the politico-military history
of his times; treatises on military command, horsemanship,
household management, and hunting derived from prolonged
personal experience of each; Ways and Means was inspired by
concern about Athens’s finances and political fortunes; and
Hiero may have originated in a visit to Sicily.
Third, Xenophon’s agenda was essentially didactic
(usually with direct or indirect reference to military or
leadership skills), and it was often advanced through the
use of history as a source of material. As a narrative
historian Xenophon has a reputation for inaccuracy and
incompleteness, but he clearly assumed that people and
events from the past were tools for promoting political and
ethical improvement. His ethical system contained little
that jars in modern terms; but in today’s cynical world, the
apparent ingenuousness of its expression strikes some as by
turns bland and irritating. The system’s interconnection
with the gods may challenge readers who either disavow the
divine or are not reconciled to a pagan theological
environment, simply because—in ethical contexts, though not
in specific ritual ones (as illustrated in Anabasis, Book
VII)—divine power in Xenophon is frequently anonymous and
often singular or because he could apparently take a
pragmatic attitude (e.g., posing a question to the Delphic
oracle that was framed to produce the “right” answer). His
contemporaries perhaps saw things differently: for them the
gods were unproblematic (not that everyone thought the same
way about them, but Xenophon’s terms of reference were
readily understood), and his insistence on a moral component
to practical and (broadly) political skills may have been
distinctive.
Fourth, charges of ingenuousness have been partly fueled
by Xenophon’s style. Judged in antiquity to be plain, sweet,
persuasive, graceful, poetic, and a model of Attic purity,
it now strikes some as jejune. A more charitable, and
fairer, description would be that his style is
understated—the range of stylistic figures is modest, and
the finest effects are produced by his simplicity of
expression. Rereading a famous passage in which the Ten
Thousand first glimpse the sea, one is struck by the
disproportion between its remembered impact and its brevity
and indirect approach. Xenophon does not describe seeing the
sea; instead he describes, first, his gradual realization
that a commotion up ahead is caused by the shouts of those
who have seen the sea and, second, the scenes of celebration
as men embrace with tears and laughter, build a huge cairn
of stones, and shower gifts upon their local guide.
Works » Historical themes
Hellenica is a seven-book account of 411–362 in two distinct
(perhaps chronologically widely separated) sections: the
first (Book I and Book II through chapter 3, line 10)
“completes” Thucydides (in largely un-Thucydidean fashion)
by covering the last years of the Peloponnesian War (i.e.,
411–404); the second (the remainder) recounts the long-term
results of Spartan victory, ending with Greece in an
unabated state of uncertainty and confusion after the
indecisive second Battle of Mantinea (362). It is an
idiosyncratic account, notable for omissions, an unexpected
focus, a critical attitude to all parties, and a hostility
to hegemonic aspirations—an intensely personal reaction to
the period rather than an orderly history.
Anabasis, which probably initially circulated
pseudonymously (under the name Themistogenes of Syracuse),
tells the story of the Ten Thousand in a distinctive
version, one in which Xenophon himself plays a central role
in Books III–VII. The work provides a narrative that is
varied and genuinely arresting in its own right, but it also
invites the reader to think about the tactical, strategic,
and leadership skills of those involved. On a political and
ethnocultural front, it expresses a general view of Greek
superiority to “barbarians,” but, although it evokes
Panhellenism (the thesis that Persia was vulnerable to
concerted attack—and should therefore be attacked), it does
not provide unambiguous support for that view.
In Cyropaedia Xenophon investigated leadership by
presenting the life story of Cyrus II, founder of the
Persian Empire. Because the story differs flagrantly from
other sources and the narrative’s pace and texture are
unlike those of ordinary Greek historiography, many analysts
have classed the work as fiction. Story line is certainly
subordinate to didactic agenda, but Xenophon may have drawn
opportunistically on current versions of the Cyrus story
rather than pure imagination. The result is fictive history,
more analogous to Socratic literature than to the Greek
novel (to which it is sometimes pictured as antecedent). In
the Cyropaedia, techniques of military and political
leadership are exposed both through example and through
direct instruction; but Cyrus’s achievement (i.e., absolute
autocracy) is not an unambiguous (or readily transferable)
good, and the final chapter recalls that, Cyrus
notwithstanding, Persia had declined. (As is often the case
in the stories of Classical Greece, barbarian achievements
worthy of respect lie in the past.)
Works » Socratic works
Xenophon’s longest Socratic work is Memorabilia, a four-book
collection whose often charming conversational vignettes
depict a down-to-earth Socrates dispensing practical wisdom
on all manner of topics. The work also refutes the charges
of corruption and religious deviance advanced at Socrates’
trial (also addressed in Apology—a work very different from
Plato’s) by showing someone whose views on religion,
friendship, personal relations, ambition, education,
theology, temperance, and justice were entirely proper.
Symposium narrates a party where conversation,
interspersed with cabaret, shifts continually between
frivolity and seriousness. Personal relationships are a
common theme in the two most substantial sections (the
guests’ quirky accounts of their own most prized assets and
Socrates’ speech on physical and spiritual love) and
elsewhere. The work’s conclusion—a suggestive tableau of
Dionysus and Ariadne has the guests going home full of
libidinous thoughts—typically challenges the earnestness of
what has just preceded, while leaving a distinct, if
tantalizing, feeling that it is not all simply a joke. “What
good men do when having fun is as interesting as their
serious activities,” Xenophon wrote at the beginning of the
work; the beautifully realized, rather brittle comedy of
manners that ensues certainly justifies this assertion.
In Oeconomicus Socrates discusses agriculture and
household management. Leadership (“a harder skill than
agriculture”) is often the real subject. The most famous
section is an account of how the rich Ischomachus trains his
ingenuous young wife for an important role in running their
home. That there was a real Ischomachus who lost his fortune
and whose wife and daughter became involved in a squalid
sexual ménage with Callias (the host of Symposium) poses a
typical Xenophontic puzzle. His Socratic world often
resembles a sanitized version of reality; Xenophon created a
fictive history in which propositions about the pursuit of
virtue—though they derive authority from being rooted in the
past—acquire either a mythical aura or an intriguing
piquancy through the use of a deviant version of that past.
Works » Other writings
Six other works came from Xenophon’s pen. Cynegeticus (“On
Hunting”) offers technical advice on hunting (on foot, with
dogs and nets, the usual prey being a hare); Xenophon sees
the pursuit as a pleasurable and divinely ordained means of
promoting military, intellectual, and moral excellence
(something neither sophists nor politicians can match). De
re equestri (“On Horsemanship”) deals with various aspects
of horse ownership and riding, and Cavalry Commander is a
somewhat unsystematic (but serious) discussion of how to
improve the Athenian cavalry corps. Also Athenocentric is
Ways and Means, a plan to alleviate the city’s financial
problems (and remove excuses for aggressive imperialism) by
paying citizens a dole from taxes on foreign residents and
from the profits generated by using state-owned slaves in
the silver mines.
In Hiero the location is Syracuse (on the east coast of
Sicily), perhaps in allusion to contemporary Syracusan
tyrants. The 5th-century tyrant Hiero bewails the
unpleasantness of his situation, prompting the praise-poet
Simonides to suggest that things could improve if Hiero were
to adopt some recognizably Xenophontic leadership principles
and become a benevolent and much-loved autocrat. There are
shades of Cyropaedia (except that the story does not suggest
that Hiero’s transformation happened) and of the warnings
praise-poets sometimes offered tyrants (except that they
tried to check tyrannical self-confidence, whereas
Xenophon’s Simonides wants both to enhance and to eliminate
it). When defining leadership modes tyrants make good cases.
So do Spartan kings, or at least the “completely good man”
whose virtues are presented through narrative and analysis
in Agesilaus.
Finally, Respublica Lacedaemoniorum (“Constitution of the
Spartans”) celebrates the rational eccentricity of the
Lycurgan system while admitting its failure to maintain
Spartan values—a failure some find perceptibly implicit in
the system itself. In this work are shades of the Cyropaedia
again, and here the reader may see another example of the
slippery nature of the lessons of history.
Assessment
In post-Renaissance Europe Xenophon continued to be highly
valued as long as the valuation by antiquity retained its
authority. His works were widely edited and translated, and
the environment was one in which, for example, the esteem in
which Cyropaedia had been held by Romans such as Scipio
Aemilianus found an echo. More generally, Xenophon’s moral
posture and his conviction that proper instruction, both
practical and moral, could achieve human improvement had an
appeal even in a world of secular enlightenment.
By the 19th century the onset of the critical study of
historical sources, a growing preference for epistemology
over ethics, and the general professionalization of research
on the Classical world did Xenophon no favours. It became
harder to find much relevance in his practical treatises,
and a political philosophy that appeared monarchic rather
than republican was out of tune with the times. He remained
an author commonly read by those learning Greek, but he
ceased to be intellectually fashionable both among academics
and the wider educated public.
In the late 20th century his reputation began to rise
again. Scholars became more interested in early 4th-century
history and increasingly concerned with socioeconomic
structures, social institutions, and gender issues. They
also became more sensitive to the pitfalls of biographical
or quasi-biographical discourse in antiquity. There was a
considerable increase in the quantity and sophistication of
historical work on Persia and Sparta, and war studies
regained its status as a respectable branch of sociocultural
history. All these trends made Xenophon an author of crucial
importance and encouraged more-discriminating reading of his
works.
Xenophon was long characterized as a second-rate
practitioner of other people’s literary trades, but
more-sympathetic study suggests that the artfully simple
style masks a writer of some sophistication. Xenophon was in
the early 21st century starting to be taken seriously as a
distinctive voice on the history, society, and intellectual
attitudes of the later Classical era.
Christopher J. Tuplin
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Eucleides of Megara
Euclid (or Eucleides) of Megara, a Greek Socratic
philosopher who lived around 400 BC, founded the Megarian
school of philosophy. Editors and translators in the Middle
Ages often confused him with Euclid of Alexandria when
discussing the latter's Elements. Most modern translations
of Plato's Theaetetus render his name "Euclides."
The Megaric sect was instituted by Euclides of Megara,
and took its name from the place which gave birth to its
founder. From its disputatious character, it also received
the appellation of Eristic ( Eristiki, from erizein, " to
contend") ; and it was likewise termed the Dialectic, not
because it gave rise to dialectics or logical debates, which
had before this time exercised the ingenuity of
philosophers, particularly in the Eleatic school, but
because the discourses and writings of this class of
philosophers commonly took the form of a dialogue.
Euclides was a native of Megara, the capital of the
district of Megaris. According to some less probable
accounts, he was born at Gela, in Sicily. He was one of the
chief disciples of Socrates, but, before becoming such, he
had studied the doctrines, and especially the dialectics of
the Eleatics. Socrates on one occasion reproved him for his
fondness for subtle and captious disputes. On the death of
Socrates, Euclides, with most of the other pupils of that
philosopher, took refuge in Megara, and there established a
school which distinguished itself by the cultivation of
dialectics. The doctrines of the Eleatics formed the basis
of his philosophical system. With these he blended the
ethical and dialectical principles of Socrates. The Eleatic
dogma, that there is one universal, unchangeable existence,
he viewed in a moral aspect, calling this one existence the
Good, but giving it also other names (as Reason,
Intelligence, etc.), perhaps for the purpose of explaining
how the real, though one, appeared to be many. He rejected
demonstration, attacking not so much the premises assumed as
the conclusions drawn, and also reasoning from analogy. He
is said to have been a man of a somewhat indolent and
procrastinating disposition. Euclides was the author of six
dialogues, no one of which, however, has come down to us. He
has frequently been erroneously confounded with the
mathematician of the same name.
Euclides introduced new subtleties into the art of
disputation, several of which, though often mentioned as
examples of great ingenuity, deserve only to be remembered
as proofs of egregious trifling. Of these sophistical modes
of reasoning, called by Aristotle Eristic syllogisms, a few
examples may suffice.
1. The Lying sophism : If, when you speak the truth, you
say, you lie, you lie : but you say you lie, when you speak
the truth ; therefore, in speaking the truth, you lie.
2. The Occult : Do you know your father ? Yes. Do you know
this man who is veiled ? No. Then you do not know your
father, for it is your father who is veiled.
3. The Sorties : Is one grain a heap ? No. Two grains ? No.
Three grains ? No. Go on, adding one by one ; and, if one
grain be not a heap, it will be impossible to say what
number of grains make a heap.
In such high repute were these silly inventions for
perplexing plain truth, that Chrysippus wrote six books upon
the first of these sophisms ; and Philetas, a Coan, died of
consumption, which he had contracted by the close study that
he had bestowed upon it.
Euclides' philosophy was a synthesis of Eleatic and
Socratic ideas. He identified the Eleatic idea of "The One"
with the Socratic "Form of the Good," which he called
"Reason," "God," "Mind," "Wisdom," etc. This was the true
essence of being, and was eternal and unchangeable. As he
said, "The Good is One, but we can call it by several names,
sometimes as wisdom, sometimes as God, sometimes as Reason,"
and he declared, "the opposite of Good does not exists."
While these doctrines may appear to contradict empirical
reality, he argued that, since non-being cannot exist
without becoming a species of being (i.e., no longer
"non-being"), and since the essence of Being is the Good,
the opposite of the Good cannot exist. His doctrinal heirs,
the Stoic logicians, inaugurated the most important school
of logic in antiquity other than Aristotle's peripatetics.
Euclides had three important pupils: Eubulides of
Miletus, Ichtyas – the second leader of the Megarian school
– and Thrasymachus of Corinth. This last one was the master
of Stilpo, who was the master of Zeno of Citium, the founder
of the stoic school.
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Antisthenes
Greek philosopher
born c. 445 bc
died c. 365
Main
Greek philosopher, of Athens, who was a disciple of Socrates
and is considered the founder of the Cynic school of
philosophy, though Diogenes of Sinope often is given that
credit.
Antisthenes was born into a wealthy family, and the
philosophical ideas that he developed had their roots in the
contradictions and injustices that he found embedded in
society. He sought to build a foundation of ideas that would
serve as a guiding principle toward a happier, more
thoughtful way of life. Antisthenes believed that happiness
was dependent on moral virtue and that virtue could be
instilled through teaching.
In teaching people how to be virtuous, Antisthenes
demarcated two categories of objects: (1) external goods,
embracing such elements as personal property, sensual
pleasure, and other luxuries; and (2) internal goods,
including the truth and knowledge of the soul. He advocated
great restraint on the part of an individual tempted to take
pleasure in external goods, and he encouraged his students
to accept the burden of physical and mental pain that
accompanies the soul’s search for its own inner wealth. To
dramatize his method of teaching, Antisthenes, after the
myth of Hercules, would stand on his platform of ideas and
beliefs and “bark” at the folly and injustices of his
society. The Cynic (Greek: Canine, or Doglike) school of
philosophy long survived him.
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Diogenes
Greek philosopher
born Sinope, Paphlygonia
died c. 320 bc, probably at Corinth, Greece
Main
archetype of the Cynics, a Greek philosophical sect that
stressed stoic self-sufficiency and the rejection of luxury.
He is credited by some with originating the Cynic way of
life, but he himself acknowledges an indebtedness to
Antisthenes, by whose numerous writings he was probably
influenced. It was by personal example rather than any
coherent system of thought that Diogenes conveyed the Cynic
philosophy. His followers positioned themselves as watchdogs
of morality.
Diogenes is the subject of numerous apocryphal stories,
one of which depicts his behaviour upon being sold into
slavery. He declared that his trade was that of governing
men and was appointed tutor to his master’s sons. Tradition
ascribes to him the famous search for an honest man
conducted in broad daylight with a lighted lantern. Almost
certainly forced into exile from Sinope with his father, he
had probably already adopted his life of asceticism (Greek
askesis, “training”) when he reached Athens. Referred to by
Aristotle as a familiar figure there, Diogenes began
practicing extreme anti-conventionalism. He made it his
mission to “deface the currency,” perhaps meaning “to put
false coin out of circulation.” That is, he sought to expose
the falsity of most conventional standards and beliefs and
to call men back to a simple, natural life.
For Diogenes the simple life meant not only disregard of
luxury but also disregard of laws and customs of organized,
and therefore “conventional,” communities. The family was
viewed as an unnatural institution to be replaced by a
natural state in which men and women would be promiscuous
and children would be the common concern of all. Though
Diogenes himself lived in poverty, slept in public
buildings, and begged his food, he did not insist that all
men should live in the same way but merely intended to show
that happiness and independence were possible even under
reduced circumstances.
The program for life advocated by Diogenes began with
self-sufficiency, or the ability to possess within oneself
all that one needs for happiness. A second principle,
“shamelessness,” signified the necessary disregard for those
conventions holding that actions harmless in themselves may
not be performed in every situation. To these Diogenes added
“outspokenness,” an uncompromising zeal for exposing vice
and conceit and stirring men to reform. Finally, moral
excellence is to be obtained by methodical training, or
asceticism.
Among Diogenes’ lost writings are dialogues, plays, and
the Republic, which described an anarchist utopia in which
men lived “natural” lives.
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Aristippus
Greek philosopher
born c. 435 bc, Cyrene, Libya
died 366, Athens
Main
philosopher who was one of Socrates’ disciples and the
founder of the Cyrenaic school of hedonism, the ethic of
pleasure (see Cyrenaics). The first of Socrates’ disciples
to demand a salary for teaching philosophy, Aristippus
believed that the good life rests upon the belief that among
human values pleasure is the highest and pain the lowest
(and one that should be avoided). He also warned his
students to avoid inflicting as well as suffering pain. Like
Socrates, Aristippus took great interest in practical
ethics. While he believed that men should dedicate their
lives to the pursuit and enjoyment of pleasure, he also
believed that they should use good judgment and exercise
self-control to temper powerful human desires. His motto
was, “I possess, I am not possessed.” None of his writings
survives.
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