IN1RODUCTION As the Sacred Ship Sailed Back from Delos, Nearing

IN1RODUCTION As the sacred ship sailed back from Delos, nearing Athens and bringing with it the time for Socrates' death, his lifelong friend Crito begged him to take the opportunity for an easy and safe escape. To his entreaties Socrates replied with one of history's most famous as well as most moving philosophical arguments. Dismissing all other considerations, he focused on the sheer rightness of the act-a category which, in this dialogue at least, is understood solely in terms of what to a Greek was a still more basic category, that of covenant or, more generally.promising. How, he asked Crito, could he reply if the Laws of Athens were to remind him that he had agreed to be governed by them in deed as well as in word? They would say of his plan to escape: You are breaking your covenants and agreements with us, which you made under no compulsion and undeceived. You were not compelled to decide quickly, but you had seventy years in which you could have gone away if you did not like us, or if the agreements did not seem to you just. But you did not prefer Lacedaemon or Crete, which you always declare to be under good laws, nor any other city, Hellenic or barbarian; but you were less out of town than the lame or the blind or others who are maimed: you, so much more remarkably than the other Athenians, like the city and us, the Laws-as is clear, for what city could please without laws? And now, then, will you not abide by your agreements? You will if you obey us, Socrates; do not make yourself ridiculous by leaving the city. (Crit. 53A) This is the voice that Socrates told Crito was humming in his ears, blocking all other voices even as he offered his friend the opportunity for one last word. Significantly, Crito did not take the opportunity. Overcome by not only personal grief but also the moral power of that voice, which spoke to both of them from the most ancient times and was the voice of Greece itself, Crito could only reply: "My dear Socrates, I have nothing to say." Why he had nothing to say is the topic of this book. Thinkers of later times-moral and political philosophers, theologians, scholars of jurispru dence, and others-would surely not have been reduced to silence as Crito was. To Socrates' argument they would have readily replied that, apart from the dubiousness of any such personification of the laws as parties to a contract, the "rightness" of the proposed escape involved many considerations not addressed, e.g., the fairness and utility of Socrates' death sentence and death sentences in general, and even that of the laws themselves. But for Socrates and Crito, discussion was closed as soon as the issue was cast in the promissory terms quoted above. By trying to escape, Socrates would make himself "ridiculous" in the profoundest possible sense: out of a "miserable desire for a little more life" (53C) he would violate what he considered a sacred agreement 2 INTRODUCTION There is an important sense in which all social life presupposes the insti tution of promising-which is the genus under which fall specific practices and conventions such as treaties, oaths, and less formal agreements. Contrary to what is sometimes suggested in contemporary philosophical literature about "the promising game," there is no place in human life where one can stand on the sidelines, i.e., decide not to play the promising game at all. However, promising assumes a variety of historical and culture-specific forms. These forms vary in the way an agreement is made as well as in the importance attached to keeping them. The ancient Greeks were one of the most promise-conscious of all cultures, as the scene from Socrates' death watch bears out. To be sure, there are important elements in that dialogue that could only have been expressed after the rise of the city state as a political entity and a moral force, which is to say well after the time of Homer and, a fortiori, after the grand pre-Homeric days that are depicted in the Iliad and Odyssey. But its underlying awareness is that the general practice of stabilizing expectations by means of agreements is indispensable to the social bond, and this awareness goes back to the beginnings of Greek civilization, shaping that civilization over nearly two millennia into the specific normative system and network of social conventions that would eventually produce a Socrates. IBEFOCUS Of course the Greeks were not the only people to have engaged in this general practice, constitutive as it is of social life per se. Prior to and contemporaneous with the pre-Homeric age of Greece were the promise making practices of other Mediterranean and Oriental cultures, many of which practices may very well have flowed over into the Greek world. In this as well as other respects the Iliad and Odyssey are a watershed of cultural streams, including not only those influences which came directly down from Mycenaean times but also those which flowed more remotely and indirectly from Near Eastern sources. Accordingly, this study concentrates on the promise-making practices depicted in the Homeric epics, in the belief that by doing so we can also learn something about times and places adjacent to Homer's. For hundreds of years, scholars have painstakingly explored the contents of these epics, as well as related issues such as their provenance and the identity of their author(s), and they have done so from nearly every conceivable angle. Even so, the present study revisits the Homeric corpus one more time, in hopes that what the poems suggest about the way treaties and agreements were made can help us to understand better not only the internal structure of the poems themselves, but also the social practices of promise-making that existed before, during, and after the Dark Ages when the poems were written. .

Load more