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Socrates and Some Successors IV Socrates and Some Socratic Successors 1. THE LIFE OF SOCRATES Alcibiades: Well, gentlemen, I propose to begin my eulogy of Socrates with a simile. I expect he’ll think I’m making fun of him, but, as it happens, I’m using this particular simile not because it’s funny, but because it’s true. What he reminds me of more than anything is one of those little Sileni that you see on the statuaries’ stalls: you know the ones I mean—they’re modeled with pipes or flutes in their hands, and when you open them down the middle there are little figures of the gods inside. Plato, Symposium 215ab Socrates of Athens (470–399)1 was born about ten years after the battle of Salamis, in which the Athenians and their allies had destroyed the Persian fleet. His family, despite his own protestations of poverty, 1The chief evidence for Socrates, who wrote nothing, is found in the dialogues of Plato. Due to the survival of these dialogues, we know more about Socrates’s life than that of any other ancient philosopher. In most of these Socrates is the chief character, but unfortunately Plato does not make it obvious when this character is presenting the historic Socrates’s views and when he is presenting views of Plato at variance with the historic Socrates. (Throughout the dialogues Socrates represents philosophy, dialectical argument, itself, and so Plato holds on to the character even when he no longer puts Socratic views in his mouth. ‘The Socrates,’ as Aristotle puts it, may not have Socrates’s views, but he never deviates from a complete commitment, in the Socratic style, to philosophical investigation.) We get a lot of help with this from Aristotle, who must have known the truth of the matter, for in his works he clearly uses Plato’s dialogues to identify Plato’s doctrines and the reasons Plato held them, and identifies the chief dialogues in which Plato’s views are presented by the character Socrates (which he refers to as ‘the Socrates’), and he clearly identifies the chief Socratic doctrines and opposes them to Plato’s, identifying several dialogues in which Socrates (referred to as ‘Socrates’) speaks for himself rather than Plato. Stylistic studies of the dialogues have also helped date them, and sometimes one dialogue refers to another. All in all, opinion on the chronological order of the dialogues, and on which dialogues represent Socratic doctrines, is largely settled now. (See Irwin (1995) Ch. 1 for a good summary of the arguments.) Following current opinion, the earliest dialogues, which present Socrates’s views and reflect his methods, are the Apology, Charmides, Euthyphro, Hippias Minor, Ion, Laches, and the slightly later Euthydemus, Lysis, Hippias Major, and Menexenus (Vlastos (1983)). When Plato wrote these works he seems to have accepted Socratic views. The Protagoras, Gorgias and the Meno put a capstone on this group of dialogues. Longer and more complex, they present crucial objections to Socrates’s views, and defenses against those objections in the spirit of Socratic teaching, though they go beyond that teaching, or even contradict it, where it seems necessary. All three dialogues look forward to certain doctrines in the Republic which are put in the mouths of Socrates’s Sophistic opponents, presumably because they could not be attributed to Socrates and represented something to which Socrates must somehow respond. This is all in preparation for the presentation of Plato’s own views in his later work, views developed out of Socrates’s thought, but now significantly and intelligently at variance with it. The Crito is normally included in the Socratic group, and almost all the views in it are Socratic, but I believe it belongs with Plato’s middle dialogues for reasons I shall explain. For Socrates’s life and thought we have, in addition to Plato and Aristotle, Xenophon’s Socratic works, some comedies by Aristophanes and a few random remarks elsewhere. Xenophon is anxious to present a Socrates that will offend no one, and this deliberately uncontroversial Socrates is not to be preferred to that of Plato and Aristotle. The secondary literature on Socrates is very extensive, and, as usual, I cite only those items that have significantly influenced my own views. General works on Socrates from which I have learned much are Guthrie’s History III (1969) and IV (1975), Vlastos (1971a), (1983) and Irwin (1977) and (1995), Santas (1979), Kraut (1984), Benson (1992), Penner (1992), Brickhouse and Smith (1994), and most especially Vlastos (1991). A very nice piece reconstructing Socrates’s life in the context of Athenian politics is Nails (2009). I find I can make very little historical sense of the work of Leo Strauss and other Continental writers on Socrates, so my views are developed predominantly from the “Analytic” tradition, rooted in the work of Gregory Vlastos. I.IV. Socrates and Some Successors 2 seems both to have been of some antiquity and to have enjoyed some prosperity, for he was able to afford the arms of a heavy infantryman, and was not relegated to the light infantry, or service as an oarsman in the fleet. Probably he was poor only in comparison to his aristocratic friends, though, characteristically, he made a standing joke of his poverty. He inherited upper class connections from his father, and was intimate with members of the Periclean circle. Late in life he married Xanthippe, whose name2 suggests she was of good family, and had three sons by her, the eldest of whom was in his teens when his father was executed, at the age of seventy-one. Plato’s Phaedo reports that Xanthippe, with the children, had been with Socrates from very early in the morning when his friends arrived for the discussion, and she spent time with him again just before the execution. She wept, observing that this would be the last time Socrates could talk with his friends. Probably the stories of her shrewishness, which receive no support from Plato or Xenophon, were a later invention, a plausible misogynist deduction from Socrates’s supposed poverty and remarks in Plato’s Republic about how the inevitable poverty of a virtuous man draws contempt from his family. Though our sources may exaggerate, Socrates was notoriously ugly, with a pot belly, pug nose, pop eyes and ‘pelican gait’, and he made a joke of his appearance. At the performance of one of Aristophanes’s comedies in which he cut a figure, he stood up so the audience could compare the character’s mask to his actual face.3 In manner, Socrates was said to be ‘eiron’, that is, sly or canny, a word suggesting sophistry as well as the concealment of one’s true views. He was indeed ironic, going by Plato’s dialogues, but not because of a desire to deceive. He resorted to sarcasm when annoyed, but Socratic irony is not to be found there, either. Rather, it occurred when he spoke truths that others might be expected to misinterpret, taking him to be lying or 2‘Xanthippe’ means ‘Yellow horse’, and horse names generally indicated an older and richer family that served in the cavalry. 3The Clouds was performed first in 423 BCE, and presents Socrates as head of an atheistic school of natural philosophy, a purveyor of Sophistic wisdom, and an ascetic moral teacher. The picture of Socrates taking interest in physical doctrines (which in the Clouds seem to resemble those of Diogenes of Apollonia, who probably visited Athens around this time) is consistent with the report in Phaedo 96a, that Socrates took a keen interest in such things in his younger days, and with the tradition that he learned from Archelaus with whom he studied Anaxagoras. Socrates is not presented taking or asking for fees in the play (though Strepsiades, who is sent by his father to learn Unjust Argument from him, tells his father that he does!), and he and his students are depicted as impoverished, ill exercised and unwashed. Moreover, Socrates himself leaves the stage when Unjust Argument appears, and does not himself teach it. So the play seems to suggest a picture of Socrates that fits Plato, with Socrates’s students, perhaps those who are corrupt already, adopting Unjust Argument, but not with Socrates’s approbation or instruction. Remarks in the Apology would support this picture of Socrates’s reputation being harmed by the behavior of his students, and the issue of the teacher’s effects on his students is clearly on his mind in Plato’s early and middle dialogues. Similar use of Socrates as a stock character occurs in others of Aristophanes’s plays as well. It is well to remember that Aristophanes was a contemporary of Socrates, and by repute a friend, while Plato and Xenophon were both some 40 years or more younger. At the time of Socrates’s trial, the freedom of expression of Periclean democracy was a thing of the past, and the memories of the comic atheist with his amoral students presented in Aristophanes had taken on a darker meaning for many. For Socrates and Aristophanes, Donald Morrison, “Socrates,” Ch. 6 of Gill and Pellegrin (2006). I.IV. Socrates and Some Successors 3 indulging in sarcasm.4 Socratic irony is akin to that dramatic irony in which the audience understands the meaning or implication of the action or words, but the actors in the drama, due to some flaw of character, do not. This was a common device in Athenian tragedy, and Socratic irony was deliberately modeled on it, both by Socrates himself, and by Plato in his dialogues. Consider, in Sophocles’s play, Oedipus’s curse on whoever it was that had murdered the King—the audience realizes he is in fact cursing himself, but Oedipus does not, nor does any other character in the play except for the seer Teiresias.
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