Will The Real Socrates Please Stand Up?
Periodically someone re-opens the debate on whether Athens was justified in executing its most famous philosopher, Socrates. In 399BCE, Socrates was accused of, ‘impiety’, and ‘corrupting the youth of Athens.’ He was found guilty, and chose death by drinking hemlock. We don’t get to hear Socrates defence in his own words because he wrote nothing down. So what do we know about this seminal character in western philosophy?
‘[Socrates’] actual character is almost entirely undefined’[1] How is this possible when three great writers from antiquity, all of whom knew Socrates, have left their own versions of him to posterity? Certainly any investigation is dependent on reception as well as intention — what did each of these writers hope to achieve and how were their portraits received by their contemporaries and subsequent generations? Much scholarly argument has been devoted to the relative merits and veracity of the three surviving portraits of Socrates and AR Lacey warns us to remember that, ‘no source can be trusted or ignored entirely, and no source can be assumed to be equally reliable throughout.’[2] With that warning kept well in mind, I shall not be focusing on whether or not these portraits are believable but on what the possible agenda were that shaped Aristophanes’, Plato’s and Xenophon’s writings about Socrates.
Plato and Xenophon were two of the many[3] who wrote an Apologia or defence of Socrates in the decades after his untimely death and the only two of those whose writing has survived. Aristophanes by contrast, was writing about the living Socrates who was well-known enough to be recognisable to the audience watching his play, The Clouds.
Aristophanes’ portrait of Socrates is the earliest extant and was performed in 423 BCE when Socrates was in his mid-forties. By profession Aristophanes was a comedian and his stated purpose was to win the City Dionysia with The Clouds. Any other purpose is a matter of interpretation; amongst which may be; pointing out to fellow Athenians the folly of their pursuit of rhetoric and the dangers of investigating natural science, instead of believing in the traditional gods. It is also possible that Aristophanes was simultaneously warning Socrates of the dangers of philosophy whilst inviting laughs by denigrating the parasitic life of the fifth century philosopher.
Socrates wasn’t the only ‘celebrity’ honoured by Aristophanes’ notice; Euripedes and Cleon had both been ridiculed in his other comedies. Aristophanes may have meant to destroy the famous men he mocked so mercilessly, but even if that were not his intention, certainly ‘a play conceived at the time as a joke could in retrospect be seen as thoughtless and reckless’.[4] With the benefit of hindsight, Plato’s Apology gives this play as a contributory factor in Socrates’ trial and execution. Considering that the play was only performed once in 423 BCE and Socrates’ trial and execution took place in 399 BCE — those are some long memories! But then, misconceptions do endure despite all attempts to correct them — for example, that Marie Antoinette made the naïve comment about the poor eating cake when they had no bread. Or that Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Once established in the popular imagination, these myths are hard to dislodge; and so it appeared with Aristophanes’ portrait of Socrates.
Possibly Aristophanes was mocking the Athenians themselves and their new found interest in ‘philosophy and reason, sophistry and rhetoric’, which highlighted the tension between ‘the old values and the new that have broken them down (a complaint each generation makes about the succeeding ones!)’[5] Montuori agrees with this assessment — that Aristophanes is ‘drawing humour from a contrast between tradition and fashion’ and points out that it wasn’t the playwright who was accused of impiety and corrupting the youth![6]
It is also a remarkably enduring misconception that philosophers and scientists investigate pointless things with no benefit to humanity, and worse, which may even be dangerous.[7] ‘Aristophanes deliberately exploited for comic purposes the view [that] intellectuals .. pursued silly, boring questions about things which are ‘of no use’ [his quote marks] and more disturbingly, subjected traditional practices, assumptions, and beliefs to rational scrutiny.’[8] The Socrates in the play is just one such philosopher — a seeker after pointless wisdom. Is Aristophanes simply pointing out the absurdity of this position or does he mean his audience to believe that this is really what Socrates was doing at that time in Athens?
Perhaps Aristophanes was a traditionalist, who harrumphed over these new-fangled ideas much like the semi-mythical ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ in our own culture. Dover and Tremewan support this view by suggesting that Aristophanes like to pose at least as a ‘coarsely conservative, philistine … male, middle-aged, middle-class Athenian…’[9] Whether or not Aristophanes shared the Athenian man-on-the-street’s fear of novelty or not, he certainly made use of it in the hope that it was a key to gaining an audience’s sympathy and votes for his play.
Aristophanes could be utilising Socrates as a ‘generic philosopher’ that would be easy to recognise by his audience but didn’t necessarily mean this character to be taken seriously as the ‘real’ Socrates. ‘The target must be close enough to the real thing for us to recognize what is going on, but sufficiently distorted to be funny, an exaggeration, often a grotesque departure from normality…’[10] A modern example of this would be the ‘Spitting Image’ satirical series in the 1980’s where the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, was portrayed as Hitler, complete with Nazi uniform and little toothbrush moustache. Of course it is also a convention of comedy to put well-known figures into anomalous situations; for example, the Queen line-dancing or the Pope secretly running a condom factory, and this may have been similar to Aristophanes’ treatment of Socrates’ philosophical beliefs as Dover points out: ‘Aristophanes has foisted on to Socrates practices and beliefs which he could fairly have attributed to other intellectuals.’[11] In fact the beliefs and practices Aristophanes attributes to Socrates were actually those of Anaxagoras[12], but Aristophanes avoids any finicky separation of philosophers into schools of beliefs and practices — this is sledgehammer not scalpel humour. Socrates was a handy representative for all ‘intellectual parasites dependent on patronage’[13] and was also an Athenian citizen, so fair game. Montuori points out that Aristophanes didn’t invent this Socrates, he was ‘already alive’ in this form ‘in the popular imagination’ and that ‘satire had already focussed’[14] upon him in other works. One of the plays placed above Aristophanes’ was called Connus by the playwright Ameipsias and it too lampooned Socrates.[15]
It is one of the great ironies of history that the very things Socrates is portrayed as doing in The Clouds (denying the gods’ existence and corrupting youth) are exactly those he is found guilty of all those years later. It is almost as though Aristophanes knew that this would happen, although that is of course absurd — he could not know, but it is possible that he suspected that Socrates’ behaviour and interests could arouse the sort of vindictive accusations that were brought against him. ‘The Clouds shows us, with shocking clarity, why an ordinary citizen of Athens might have thought Socrates needed to be killed.’[16] At least in part because, ‘The Clouds suggests that there is a slippery slope from pedantic academic investigation … through cosmology and scientific explanation, straight to blasphemy and moral corruption.’[17] It is always possible that Socrates really was undertaking the sorts of research mocked in The Clouds at the time that Aristophanes was writing — (see page 4 below) — although this is a theory that is hotly debated and ultimately impossible to prove or disprove.
Whatever the playwright’s intention, performance of The Clouds crystallised existing hostility towards philosophers in general and towards Socrates in particular. Montuori agrees that Aristophanes’ work ‘reflected the judgement of a large part of the Athenians on the character, intention and aim of Socratic dialogue’[18], and clearly they weren’t impressed. Aristophanes was in the business of writing comedy and presented on stage a deliberate comic misrepresentation unlike Plato’s Apology which was written after Socrates’ death and for a different purpose.
Plato is an omniscient narrator, absent from his own writings to such a degree that the ones with Socrates as a character are often referred to as ‘Socratic Dialogues’ as though Socrates had dictated them. It would be easy for a reader to be left with the impression that these Dialogues are verbatim accounts of conversations and Plato does not anywhere set out his reasons for using Socrates as his mouthpiece instead of writing in the first person, as Xenophon does.
Plato offers his readers a ‘warts and all’ portrait of Socrates which does not shy away from describing him as a ‘gadfly’ whose role in Athens was similar to the effect of the insect on a lazy horse; to goad it into action. The action Socrates wants Athenians to take is to examine their own lives and to cultivate virtue through thorough understanding of what it is to be virtuous. Plato’s Socrates was a persistent questioner of anyone who claimed to know what it meant to be virtuous, courageous, or knowledgeable. What invariably happened was that the other party was shown up to be more ignorant than Socrates himself — a view also endorsed by the Delphic Oracle, which had told Chaerophon[19] that no-one was wiser than Socrates. As the Delphic Oracle specialised in gnomic pronouncements that should never be taken on face value, Socrates came to realise that he was only the wisest because he was aware of his ignorance, whereas everyone else believed themselves to have at least a degree of wisdom. This belief Socrates set out to test and invariably destroyed in the name of information gathering.
Plato’s account of Socrates is not hagiography. Socrates is hardly a likeable character in the Dialogues; in fact his questioning can result in a reader empathising with the unfortunate person who had so happily embarked upon a conversation with Socrates which ended with the demolition of their previously securely held beliefs. ‘Plato’s Socrates … was adept at reducing even the most difficult and recalcitrant interlocutors to confusion and self-contradiction.’[20] Plato engages the reader by demonstrating that faced with a character like Socrates, they too would find it expedient to re-examine their own lives and beliefs (or at least ensure they possessed coherent and defensible opinions). It is interesting that Socrates is not successful in his attempts to elicit wisdom from his victims; when they leave him they are annoyed, not humbled by their own ignorance or fired with enthusiasm to re-examine their beliefs. Plato shows us, in effect, that Socrates did not succeed by his chosen method of questioning and not providing any answers himself. All of which contributes to a picture of a character that is not being written with de mortuis in mind.
However, the Apology does give Plato the opportunity to defend philosophy, and to set the record straight about Socrates’ life, beliefs, and practices. Plato’s Socrates was not the scruffy purposeless Sophist that he had appeared to contemporary Athenians to have been. If Socrates was a genuine seeker or lover of wisdom, then so is Plato and all who carry on the enquiries that Socrates initiated. This then becomes a vindication not only of Socrates but of all his fellow philosophers. If Socrates is not defended by a fellow philosopher, every one of them is made vulnerable to an equally misguided and ill-founded attack by fellow citizens who do not understand or sympathise with what they are doing.
Plato’s Apology was written to ‘explain and defend his [Socrates’] devotion to philosophy’, and to prove that the way Socrates pursued that devotion was through harmless discussion with all sorts of Athenians, not just the young men and that Socrates had ‘piously followed their [the gods] lead (particularly that of Apollo, through his Oracle at Delphi) in making himself as good a person as he can and encouraging .. others to do the same.’[21] It is also possible that Plato genuinely wanted to write down as much as possible about Socrates’ ideas and methods in order to ‘find answers to the questions that Socrates — in life and in death — had raised and left unanswered.’[22] Unlike Aristophanes, Plato is not attempting to win a competition, but seems keen instead to ameliorate the harm that Aristophanes had (wittingly or not) done by presenting Socrates as a character who is a serious law-abiding Athenian brought to trial by detractors basing their evidence on long-discredited and outdated ideas of what a philosopher is and does and believes.
Plato’s Apology refers to the caricature of Socrates in The Clouds stating that this has led the Athenians to think that, ‘those who study these things do not even believe in the gods.’[23] The word ‘even’ is cleverly inserted there to imply scorn on those who think this. Plato also refers to Aristophanes more directly as, ‘a writer of comedies’ and compares defending oneself against mockery of that sort as ‘fight[ing] with shadows.’ Comedy is clearly powerful enough to last in the popular memory for many years and this kind of scandal is as nebulous as clouds themselves and as hard to fight against. It did not seem to matter whether the accusations were true or not, they were remembered and used against Socrates by his enemies. Because of, or at least since, Aristophanes’ play, Athenians believed that Socrates denied the gods and corrupted the youth[24] and these beliefs were too long-held and deep rooted for Socrates to successfully refute at his own trial. Plato wishes to ensure he answers all these prejudices in order to ‘uproot from your minds in so short a time the slander that has resided so long.’[25]
Plato has Socrates dismiss Aristophanes’ portrait of himself as false — but would either Plato or Socrates be likely to admit that it was, at that point in Socrates’ life, an accurate portrayal? Or admit that it was partly that unflattering and absurd caricature which warned Socrates to move away from natural science and on to the enquiries that would occupy the rest of his life? Montuori wearily dismisses the ‘ancient and ever-returning thesis that sees in the Aristophanic satire certain proof of a first naturalistic phase in Socratic teaching ..’[26] but there is evidence in Plato that backs up the ‘ever-returning thesis’[27] (and also evidence that refutes it[28]), but it is not entirely improbable that Socrates may have investigated these subjects earlier in his life if these were topics in discussion amongst fellow philosophers, whether or not this led Aristophanes to mock Socrates and Plato to defend him on the same score. Xenophon, on the other hand, is adamant that Socrates never investigated natural science.
Xenophon was also a student of Socrates and wrote his own Apology arguably with some of the same aims as Plato; to preserve the best of Socrates’ wisdom for the future and to reproach the Athenians for having had him put to death undeservedly. ‘It is entirely a practical work such as we might expect from the practical nature of Xenophon, and it professes to show Socrates as he taught.’[29] Xenophon’s accounts of Socrates were for many centuries the ones that were most consulted: his writing fell out of favour for a while when compared critically against the writings of Plato[30], but is currently undergoing a modest revival of appreciation[31]. A R Lacey argues that the purpose of Xenophon’s writing was to, ‘portray a Socrates altogether more human and plausible than Plato’.[32] Perhaps Xenophon was attempting to de-mystify a man who must have caused considerable mystification amongst those he chose to question and also to present a man who had valuable and admirable qualities.
At the start of his Apology, Xenophon says that, ‘… all without exception have touched upon[3] the lofty style of the philosopher,[4] which may be taken as a proof that the language used by Socrates was really of that type’. It seems clear that Xenophon wished to show that Socrates was not the type of philosopher who merely uttered empty lofty sentiments. Xenophon’s Socrates was a man whose conversation was ‘ever of human things … what is godly, what is ungodly; what is beautiful, what is ugly; what is just, what is unjust; what is prudence, what is madness; what is courage, what is cowardice…’[33] In other words, subjects of common interest that the average person could also engage with and learn from.
Xenophon states clearly his intentions for this Apology; ‘But my object has not been to mention everything that arose out of the suit. It suffices me to have shown on the one hand that Socrates, beyond everything, desired not to display impiety to heaven,[41] and injustice to men …’ By this point, he has carefully built up a picture of a Socrates who is unjustly accused by powerful men who have a grudge against him. Xenophon’s Socrates is a man in perfect control of himself, one who leads by example and practices a form of asceticism, avoiding ‘foppery’ and vice[34], taking no money from anyone and who is not afraid to criticise those in power if their actions warrant it. This Socrates is incorruptible despite the fact that he did associate with some dangerously ambitious people, but, as Xenophon points out, ‘if his own conduct was always prudent, how can he be fairly held to blame for the evil that was not in him?’[35]
Xenophon’s account of Socrates’ philosophical discourses may be considered the most hagiographic of the three accounts. Socrates had been executed because of his philosophical questioning and Xenophon wanted to show how harmless it actually was, how useful Socrates’ advice was to ordinary people, and that Socrates had many other sterling qualities. Xenophon was very keen to emphasize Socrates’ self-control, lawfulness, piety, and helpfulness. According to Xenophon, Socrates ‘did not even discuss that topic so favoured by other talkers, “the Nature of the Universe”: and avoided speculation on the so-called “Cosmos” of the Professors … indeed he would argue that to trouble one’s mind with such problems is sheer folly.’[36] Instead, Xenophon’s Socrates was ‘a man who is truly religious and deserves to be thought so.’[37] In Xenophon’s The Symposium, Socrates is invited impromptu to a dinner party and described by the host as someone who has ‘attained to purity of soul [14]’; Xenophon is keen to portray Socrates as the opposite of the man arraigned for impiety and corrupting the youth and sums up his defence of Socrates with an outright denial of the charges against him. ‘.. so far was he from “rejecting the gods,” as charged in the indictment, that no man was more conspicuous for his devotion to the service of the gods: so far from “corrupting the youth,” as his accuser actually charged against him, that if any among his companions had evil desires, he openly tried to reform them and exhorted them to desire the fairest and noblest virtue, by which men prosper in public life and in their homes.’[38]
Although Aristophanes’ portrait of Socrates may at first seem to be hostile and out of step with the other two accounts, it may well be that Aristophanes is exaggeratedly but accurately portraying a Socrates before he became the ground-breaking philosopher that Plato and Xenophon felt worthy of recording for posterity. After all, people are allowed to change their direction in life and to repudiate beliefs they once held or take up new interests at different times of their life. Why should Socrates at the age of 40 hold the same beliefs as Socrates at the age of 50, 60 or 70? By making Socrates a figure of fun, Aristophanes may have been attempting to divert the Athenians’ attention from the possible dangers that philosophers posed in their study of the natural world or he may have been warning Socrates himself of the dangers of his current pursuits. Or quite simply, Aristophanes wanted to win the Dionysia, and was prepared to use any means at his disposal to do so, even if it meant unjustly holding friends up to ridicule.
Socrates is a character in Plato’s creative writing: he left no writings of his own to confirm or deny Plato’s or anyone else’s account of his ideas and cannot refute anything that Plato writes in his name or deny any discourses that Plato places in his mouth. Plato’s Apology is less of a biography and more of an act of creative writing that Plato is engaged in, albeit with a serious purpose. In the same way that Aristophanes used Socrates as a ‘name’, someone famous to use as a character to present his own ideas through, so Plato uses Socrates to set out his own vision of philosophy while simultaneously preserving something of the original Socrates in his ideas, methodology and characteristics. Plato appears to have been at Socrates’ trial[39] but still presents his Apology as though he was an omniscient narrator, able to have a full overview of whatever all his characters said, thought and did.
Xenophon was not a ‘full-time philosopher’ like Plato, and his purpose in writing about Socrates seems to have been to rehabilitate his friend and clear his name to as wide an audience as possible, which he does by addressing the concerns of a potential readership in terms they are likely to be interested in and understand. Xenophon attempts to win over a non-philosophical audience with accounts of Socrates’ common-sense wisdom and helpfulness in matters that concern ‘ordinary’ people, or to at the very least lessen the hostility towards Socrates. However, Xenophon was not present at Socrates’ trial and makes it clear that he is relying on the evidence of ‘Hermogenes,[6] the son of Hipponicus’, who, presumably had some authority to relay this information to Xenophon and be believed.[40]
It is entirely possible that Socrates was many things to many people; the profound and ground-breaking philosopher that inspired Plato, the genial and helpful man of the people whose common-sense advice Xenophon valued and the inspiration behind the buffoon Sophist philosopher in The Clouds. Comedians have licence to be provocative and irreverent, but that does not mean they are also inventers of their material; it may be exaggerated but still (for a given value of truth) true. While a public figure is alive, criticism can be (and often is) robust, but on death a form of nostalgia shapes recall and it must be remembered that Aristophanes was writing about the living Socrates while Plato and Xenophon wrote after his execution. Certainly Socrates was fascinating enough for many writers to attempt to ‘capture’ him on paper; it is our misfortune that there are only three of those writers’ works from which we can catch a glimpse of what was, undoubtedly, a man who inspired others to great works.
Websites used for reference:
http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/bl/bl_text_xenophon_apology.htm
http://caae.phil.cmu.edu/cavalier/80250/part2/ApologyAnalysis.html
http://oyc.yale.edu/political-science/plsc-114/lecture-2
http://socrates.clarke.edu/aplg0220.htm
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/650658/Xenophon
http://www.egs.edu/library/plato/biography/
http://www.iep.utm.edu/xenophon/
http://www.roangelo.net/logwitt/delphi.html
www.san.beck.org/SocraticProblem.html
Podcasts from King’s College History of Philosophy Department, Numbers; 15 (Socrates Without Plato, the Portrayals of Aristophanes and Xenophon), 16 (Method Man — Plato’s Socrates), 17 (Raphael Woolf on Socrates), 18 (In Dialogue, The Life And Writings of Plato), 24 (Famous Last Words: Plato’s Phaedo) available at: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/ikings/index.php?id=409
Bibliography:
Aristophanes, The Clouds, Provided by The Internet Classics Archive. Available online at
http://classics.mit.edu//Aristophanes/clouds.html
Bartlett, Professor Robert C, Masters of Greek Thought: Plato, Socrates and Aristotle, The Teaching Company, 2008
Benardete, Seth, Socrates’ Second Sailing on Plato’s Republic, University of Chicago Press, 1989
Chroust, Anton Hermann, Socrates: Man and Myth: The Two Socratic Apologies of Xenophon, Routledge & K. Paul, 1957
Craig, E (ed), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2000
Dover, K J, Aristophanic Comedy, BT Batsford Ltd, London,1972
Dover, Sir Kenneth and Tremewan, Simon, Aristophanes; Clouds, Acharnians, Lysistrata, A Companion, Bristol Classical Press, 1989
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Field, G C, Plato and his Contemporaries, London Methuen, 1930
Guthrie, W. K. C. (William Keith Chambers), Socrates, 1906, London : Cambridge University Press, 1971
Lacey, A R (Alan Robert), A Dictionary of Philosophy, Routledge, 1996
Montuori, Mario, The Socratic Problem, JC Gieben Publishers, Amsterdam, 1992
Montuori, Mario, Socrates, Physiology of a Myth, JC Gieben Publishers, Amsterdam 1981
Montuori, Mario, Socrates, An Approach, JC Gieben Publishers, Amsterdam, 1986
Plato, Euthyphro, Apology, Phaedo, Symposium, (ed) Cooper, John M, Hackett Publishing Company, 1997
Wilson, Emily, The Death of Socrates, Profile Books, 2007
Xenophon, Apology, Memorabilia, Anabasis from http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text
[1] Wilson p.216
[2] Quoted in Montuori 1992
[3] M Schofield (1998, 2002) ‘Plato’ in E Craig (ed) and Xenophon also reports that ‘Others have written on this theme,’ at the beginning of his own Apology.
[4] Dover and Tremewan, p.xiii
[5] http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/introser/clouds.htm
[6] Montuori 1986 p.135
[7] A recent example would be all the panic over the Hadron Collider
[8] Dover and Simon Tremewan p.xii
[9] Dover and Tremewan p.xiv
[10] http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/introser/clouds.htm
[11] Dover 1972 p.117–8
[12] See Plato Apology 26d
[13] Dover 1972 p.118
[14] Montuori 1986 p.135
[15] www.ar.beck.org/SocraticProblem.html
[16] Wilson p.21
[17] Wilson p.24
[18] Montuori 1986 p.131
[19] Plato’s Apology 21a
[20] http://www.iep.utm.edu/plato/#SH8c
[21] Ed. Cooper 1997 p.17
[22] Wilson p.99
[23] Plato Apology 17c
[24] Although in the play, it’s Strepsiades the father, not Pheidippides the son who is finally corrupted
[25] Plato Apology 19a
[26] Montuori 1986 p.118
[27] ‘when I was a young man I was wonderfully keen on that wisdom which they call natural science’, Plato Phaedo 96a
[28] Including Plato’s Apology 19c-d
[29] http://www.iep.utm.edu/xenophon/
[30] Eg in the early 19th Century CE, Shleiermacher apparently criticized Xenophon for not being enough of a philosopher himself to understand the depth of Socrates’ brilliance.
[31] Eg GC Field, who thinks this is an opinion based on prejudice and Bartlett who praises Xenophon’s ‘delicacy’ of expression and his subtlety
[32] Quoted on www.san.beck.org/SocraticProblem.html
[33] Xenophon Memorabilia 1.1.16
[34] See Xenophon Memorabilia 4.8.11
[35] Xenophon Memorabilia 1.2.28
[36] Xenophon Memorabilia 1.1.11
[37] Xenophon Memorabilia 1.1.20
[38] Xenophon Memorabilia 1.2.64
[39] Plato Apology 38b
[40] Hermogenes also features in in Plato’s Cratylus and Phaedo as well as Xenophon’s The Symposium and appears to have spent a lot of time in Socrates’ company
