PHAEDO, SOCRATES, and the CHRONOLOGY of the SPARTAN WAR with ELIS I. Why Phaedo?
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Methexis Il (1989) p. ]·]8 PHAEDO, SOCRATES, AND THE CHRONOLOGY OF THE SPARTAN WAR WITH ELIS E. I. MCQUEEN·· C. J. ROWE I. Why Phaedo? The origin 01' this paper lies in an attempt to understand the rea son or reasons (if any) why Plato chose to cast Phaedo of Elis as narra tor for the dialogue which goes by his name, and which ends by describ ing Socratcs' death. There were evidently a number of people present on the occasion.' What special qualifications, thcn, did Phaedo have, which other potential narrators lacked? (Socrates was obviously not a candidate, nor was Plato hirnself, 2 whether or nut we are supposed to be1ieve Phaedo's hesitant re port that he was ill.) That Phaedo was a non-Athenian -and that his report of the proceedings takes place out side Athens·- 110 doubt helps to underline the implicit irony of the si tuation: the execution by the city of Athens of the very man who was in Plato's eycs its own best citizen. 3 But five other foreigners were also there. 4 It is of course quite possible that the choice of Phaedo was largcly random. It was, we might suppose. conveniently plausible to have Phae- I. Phac:du 591>-c. 2. [t was, ekarly, a matter ur dcliberall' policy on Plato's part not to appcar in propria persona in his dialogucs. One may spcculatc on his rl'asons; it will be sufficicnt in this contcxt to notice thc fact. 3. "That", "hacoo says in the last scntcncc of thc dialogue, "was the end of our compa· nion, a man· so \\'c should say ",ho was the best \\c knew of his generation, and the wisest tao, and the most jus!." 4. The Thcb,ms Simmias, Cebes, and Phaidondes, and Fuclides and Tcrpsion from Mega ra (Phaedo 59cl-2). It is 01' course by no means certain that thc list Phaedo gives is authentie -··and there arc certainly many other features of thc dialogue which are not. But a) Phaedo is allowed to stress thdt his list is complete (59c5-6); aild b) some 01' those listcd as present play no individual rol<' in thc dialogue, so that unless we can dctcct some hidden reason for Plato's mcntioning their names, it seems rcasonable to suppose that he rnentions them because they werc actually there. (The prisoll regime seems to havc beeil extremely lax by modern standards: Phaedo's description 01' the rcgular visits made by his friends make it seem less Iike a prison than a hospital. But of course Socrates' was not a custodial sentcnce.) do returning horne to Elis and stopping off on the way to give a full account of events to the philosophical community in Phlius -since (as Echecrates teils him and us) the town had recently been starved of news from Athens.s The explanation of this latter state of affairs was presu mably Phlius' involvement on the Spartan side in the Peloponnesian War and its aftermath: when Echecrates says that "no one much from Phlius gocs to Athens nowadays", that perhaps is an ironie reference to the situation a few years before, when Phliasians would have formed part of the Peloponnesian forces which regularly invaded Attica. But this then raises the question why Phaedo hirnself was in Athens in 399. At about this time there occurred a war betwecn Sparta and Elis, in which the Athenians themselves fought as allies of Sparta und er the terms of the treaty forced on them at the end of the Peloponnesian War. 6 How was it then that Phaedo -apparently an able-bodied man of 7 military age - should have found hirnself in a city wh ich was either still engaged,8 or had very recently been engaged, in open hostilities with his own mother-city?9 An answer is provided by Diogenes Laertius, who teils us that Phaedo was a prisoner-of-war who turned to philosophy after being 5. 57a·b. 6. Xcnophon, Hellenica" 2.20, Diodorus XIII 107,4. 7. In the dialogue as a wholc, he appears to speak and to bc tn:atcd oS an adult. He i, young enough for the 70 year·old Socratcs to play with his hair (89b): on the othcr hund hc refers to Simmias and Cebcs as Ileaniskoi (89a). K. von hitz, in Paul.1'· Wissowa, Vol. XIX 2. Stuttgart 1938, col. 1538, asserts on the contrary that Plato rcprescnts Phacdo us "ganz jung": he claims that this is consistent with the story (reported by Diogenc, lacrtius Mldothcrs: sec below) of Phacdo's bcing forced into prostitution in Athens in 400. which in his vic\\" Ilnplies that he must then have been between 16 and 18 years of age. But a) he does not dt'cumcnt his assertion about the Phaedo; b) it is an unsafe assumption that all male prostitutes were bel\veen 16 and 18 years old (see e.g. K. J. Dover, Creek Homosexuality, New York 1980, p. 86). The best solution may perhaps be a compromisc between the two views: see n. 65 below. (Another and quite different position is represented by H. Dörrie, Der Kleine Pauly, Vol. IV, Munich 1972, cols. 691-692, who says that Phaedo may have come ("in jungen Jahren") to Athens as early as 418. This is largely in consequence of this outright rejection of Diogenes' story: see nn. 13 and 62 below.) 8. Sec below for the various dates which have rccently bcen assigncd tu the war. 9. Jt is or course in prindple possiblc that Plato might have inventcd Phacdo's prcscncc. and eithcr ignored or failed to notice the chronological difficulty. He certainly ducs not alway, get things right: so for example, as has recently bcen shown, there is no possible dramatic date for the Phaedrus (M. C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, Cambridgc 1986, p. ·212). But temporal loeation is actually im material to the discussion in the Phaedrus, whcreas the Phacdo centres around a historie event of great significancc, and in this case Plato seems Iikcly to have been more careful -unless he had some special reason fur introducing him. But as will becomc immediately apparent, if there is any sueh reason, it is in fact intimately connected with the Spartan·F.lean war. 2 .