Platos Biography of Socrates
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PLATO’S B I OGRAP HY OF S OCRATE S BY A E TAY OR . L FE LLOW OF THE ACADE MY Read March 8 1 1 9 , 9 7 THE p ap er which I ha ve the honour of laying before my colleagues of to- of a of the Academy day is the n ture a simple experiment, an experiment which can make no claim to represent the results of a or extr ordinary research profound speculation , but is, all the same, w o n . in my opinion well worth the making Its immediate interest is, of no doubt , for the special student of the history philosophic thought, but it should also prove in som e degree attractive to every one who in a has a genuine interest great literature, inasmuch as it ims at throwing some light on the literary methods of a great philosopher ’ who was at the same time one of the world s greatest literary and of of dramatic artists . The question the relation the Socrates who ’ figures as the protagonist in all the most widely known of Plato s prose dramas to the Socrates who was a prominent figure in the A of of B C of abso thens the last half the fifth century . , is, course, lutely critical for the historian of Hellenic thought on the funda of and of mental issues science, ethics, religion . It is also a question ‘ of interest to the student of the history literary forms . Even if we are indifferent to the whole history of the actual development of as of scientific thought, we can hardly students literature be equally indifferent to the general problem suggested by' the sudden appear ance in the early years of the fourth century of a wholly ne w type of wk a rtkb Aé o or prose composition, the E p s y g discourse of Socrates About the fact of the emergence of this type of composition just at can A this particular date there be no conceivable doubt . ristotle comments on the fact that the Socratic discourse is a distinct Poetics 1 4447 2 w literary form , in the b , here he associates it with the versifi ed mimes of S0phron and Xenarchus and complains that the G m reek language possesses no generic na e for the type, inasmuch as ‘ ’ of a the word mime implies the use verse, and is thus only ppro riate one of for as p to species a form which prose is, a matter of fact, as suitable a medium as verse . What Aristotle took to be the dis tinctive characteristics of this literary form is clear from the two remarks he makes about it . In the first place the recognition of the ’ community of form between the mime and the Socratic discourse ’ ’ implies that, in Aristotle s opinion, the Socratic discourse is dis ’ tin uished its g by realism . For, as we know from the ancient notices ‘ ’ ’ of the mimes and can see for oursel ves from Theocritus brilliant vm A 52 2$9 " PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY m of i n a r i itation a mime his fifteenth Idyll, and ag in f om the imita of He rondas it was u a t tion , j st by their re lism tha they were dis tin u ishe d of g from other and earlier kinds dramatic composition . It A is to the same purpose , as I take it, that ristotle observes in his Rhetoric 1 417 a 19 that mathematical discourses presumably he is of " thinking such dialogues as that he quotes elsewhere, in which eno and Protagoras figu red as discussing the difficulties about the infi ni ’ tesimal— not 6 1 do exhibit 7, characters , because they reveal nothing of w oa f ea t k c of the p p g, the wal and condu t the personages, whereas Socratic discourses do exhibit because it is about such matters that the personages speak What this means is made clear by a comparison with the passages of the Poetics in which Aristotle 1 00 explains rather more fully what he understands by 7 9 , character ization to and why, important as it is the dramatist, it is less impor a of cc t nt than plot To the intending composer a su essful tragedy, or the plot story must be the first consideration , because the primary object of tragedy is to represent an action of a certain kind it only represents the p ersons who do the act or have it done to them because it cannot represent the act in any other way , or, as he also puts it, not of tragedy is the representation a man but of action and life, 1 450 1 6 if 1 450 1 iii . happiness and misery ( a ; b ) Or, as we should perhaps prefer to phrase it, tragedy is concerned directly with the tragic situation with the personages who appear in that situation as d to do m oing or suffering its concern is secondary . It has with the only in so far as their being the sort of persons they are is an indis pensable factor in bringing about the tragic situation or determining a con its issue . Thus it shows us persons acting and by their ction to of of tributing the kind situation we call tragic . What kind per sonalit do y they have should be shown only by what they . But a ’ 5 man s 15009 is not fully disclosed by the way in which he hears him in self some specially tragic situation . To understand it you require 7r oa f e o' t s' — of to know not only his acts but his p p , his settled habit —in 6 0 will , a word, his personality, and this is why 6 g is only ‘ ’ exhibited by discourses in which it is made clear what some one ’ 1 Gor ias or Re u blic chooses or declines . Thus the g p , from this point a i 91 of view, would be first and foremost portraiture of f 7. Socrates, G Callicle s Th ras machus to P orgias, , y are not exhibited us by lato as m a a contributors to so e high tr gic situ tion , but as engaged in quiet a nd of peaceful conversation , but from the course the conversation it is made clear what sort of things each of them would choose or 1 We might illustrate th e point by c onsidering how a modern novelist would be l el to e ct suc a c a a amlet ik y d pi h h r cter as H . PLATO’S BIOGRAPHY OF SOCRATES how w decline, each might be expected to bear himself to ards the us issues between which life forces all to choose . We do not see the ’ ‘ m k a of personages in act , but fro their tal we g ther what manner f man (floié g m g) each o them is . If we put the two observations of Aristotle together we may fairly gather that in his view the Eco/( p a ‘ — rucbs Aé yog and he seems always to mean by the words just those Specimens of the type which dwarfed all others by their superior of P — merit, the dialogues lato is first and foremost a highly realistic o l representation of character r personality . It is just in the fu lness with which it reproduces or imitates a character that it differs from far drama proper, in which characterization is only valuable so as it of is inseparable from the adequate presentation the tragic situation . n A d it is important to remember, what we sometimes forget, that the characters depicted in the Socratic discourse are almost with out exception notable personages of the actual history of the half 450 400 Ar im century from to , so that when istotle insists upon the ‘ portance of making a character 8p ow v or like he must be taken to mean in the case of a figure in a Socratic discourse not merely that ' be to human or itse a t sibi it shall true nature, consistent with lf ( constet ori inal as Horace says), but that it shall be like its g , faithful to the broad historical trut h about the named and known man after who whom it is called, just as we should reasonably expect a novelist introduced Napoleon or Abraham Lincoln by name into one of his works to make the figure not merely possible and self-consistent but f a true to actual fact, and regard it as a de ect in Thackeray th t the f E smo d a a Ja o n . mes III , though natur l enough , is wholly f lse to history a P n We may reason bly infer, then, that Aristotle regarded the lato ic account of Socrates as in all essentials a true and trustworthy repre sentation of a great historical figure, just as we may infer from his exclusive use of Plato as a source of information about the teaching of Socrates that he looked on the dialogues as a faithful account of of . d we the philosophical tenets Socrates In mo ern times, as all know, it has been the fashion to reject both these positions and to hold that Plato not only fathered on Socrates a set of doctrines of w hich he knew himself to be the author, but even provided him with a largely fictitious biography, and invented an unreal personality for s Pl him .