Socrates: A Man for Our Times (2 page)

Our chief source, who sought with all his astounding ability as a writer and thinker to perpetuate the work of Socrates, was his pupil Plato. Plato was a genius, which is both our boundless delight and our misfortune. Being taught by Socrates was the central event of his life, and after his master’s death he spent much of his remaining time recording what he said in a series of dialogues or conversations. More than a score have survived, plus two companion documents: Socrates’ verbatim defense when on trial for his life, and a record of his last hours before his death sentence was carried out. These two documents, plus the earliest dialogues, are authentic records of Socrates the man, the historical seer at work.

However, Plato was not only a genius but one of a particular kind. He was a don, an academic. The very first academic, in fact, for after Socrates’ death, he founded, in a suburban park in Athens, a study place—we would call it a think tank—called the Academy, from which the profession takes its name. It was the earliest university, and its prize alumnus, who came to Plato’s classes when he was seventeen, was Aristotle, third of the sturdy tripod of masters on which the entire corpus of Western philosophy rests. Aristotle went on to found his own university, the Lyceum, in Athens as companion and rival to Plato’s, so that the characteristic pattern of academic life, competitive animosity, was well established before the end of the fourth century B.C.

When writing his documents on Socrates’ end, and his own early dialogues, Plato was still innocent enough, that is still sufficiently enraptured by Socrates’ thinking and method, to reproduce both accurately. They form a trustworthy record of Socrates’ enormous and vital contribution to the best way of using our mind to reach truth. But as Plato began to play his new role as academic, as the vesture of the don, the metaphorical cap and gown, settled comfortably on his head and shoulders, he underwent a transformation. To his persona as the first academic he added or superimposed the complementary persona of the first intellectual, by which I mean someone who thinks ideas matter more than people.

As an intellectual he began to formulate his own ideas. As an academic he quickly merged them into a system. And as a teacher he used Socrates to spread and perpetuate it. In his earlier writings Plato presented Socrates as a living, breathing, thinking person, a real man. But as Plato’s ideas took shape, demanding propagation, poor Socrates, whose actual death Plato had so lamented, was killed a second time, so that he became a mere wooden man, a ventriloquist’s doll, to voice not his own philosophy but Plato’s. Being an intellectual, Plato thought that to spread his ideas was far more important than to preserve Socrates as a historic, integrated human being. Using Socrates as an articulate doll was, he saw, the easiest way to bring about this philosophical dispersal. So the act of transforming a living, historical thinker into a mindless, speaking doll—the murder and quasi-diabolical possession of a famous brain—became in Plato’s eyes a positive virtue. That is the only charitable way of describing one of the most unscrupulous acts in intellectual history. Thus Plato, with no doubt the best intentions, created, like Frankenstein, an artificial monster-philosopher. It is particularly damaging to our understanding of Socrates in that the line of demarcation in Plato’s writings between the real Socrates and the monster is unclear. It has been argued about for centuries, without any universally accepted result, and anyone who writes on the subject must make up their own mind, as I have done in this account.

Happily we have other sources, independent of Plato and Xenophon, which give us bits of information about Socrates. His contemporary, the comic dramatist Aristophanes, who also seems to have been a friend—but then, in showbiz is there such a thing as friendship?—wrote a savagely hostile play about him,
Clouds.
There is an account of Socrates by Diogenes Laertius, written seven hundred years later but using sources since lost to us. There are anecdotes, aperçus, recorded sayings, and snippets of information in the works of many classical and early medieval writers, from Cicero and Seneca, Plutarch and Lucian, to St. Augustine and Tertullian—and many others—who had access to libraries that were totally destroyed in the Dark Ages.

These bits and pieces help us to flesh out or correct the primary material Plato and Xenophon provide. But we always have to bear in mind the low regard classical and, still more, postclassical writers had for truth, their habitual inaccuracy even when trying to be honest, their lack of impartiality, historicity, or plausibility or even, one feels, common sense, and the slovenly way books were written, copied, and preserved. Before the coming of the codex or book proper, writing was done on papyrus rolls about thirty-three feet (ten meters) long. A roll might contain a book of Thucydides or two of Homer. But there was no uniformity, and scribes wrote for other scribes, not for the reader (they were strongly trade-unionized in every epoch and area). There was no attempt to stick to a specific number of letters to a line or lines to a column. Punctuation did not exist nor capital letters nor regular spacing between words, and a short stroke under a line, known as a
paragraphos
, was the only indication of a change of subject, pause, or, in plays and dialogues—very important for Plato’s texts involving Socrates—a change of speaker, whose name, irritatingly, was hardly ever given. All these factors and many other slovenly habits increased the large number of textual errors inevitable in hand-copying, and as the manuscript chain stretched over centuries, even millennia, an incorrupt text became an impossibility. From the Renaissance onward, the prime task of generations of scholars until our own day has been to produce good texts. Even so, we have absolutely no guarantee that what we read of Socrates’ sayings were Plato’s transcriptions of them, as set down 2,450 years ago. And all this is in addition to the loss of manuscripts in their entirety or in part. Until Socrates’ time, no one who speculated about the cosmos and its inhabitants has been fortunate enough to have their conclusions survive. The works of pre-Socratic philosophers, as they are called, are quite literally fragments.

Nonetheless, Socrates himself is known to us as man and thinker, as a hugely real, living, and enjoyable human being. Let us meet him.

II

The Ugly Joker with the Gift for Happiness

S
ocrates was proud of being born an Athenian. He lived all his life in the city and never left it except in her service as a soldier. He was often critical of Athenian ways and leaders but never wavered in his conviction that it was the best of all city-states in which to live. And this, like most of his views, was sound and practical.

Greece in the fifth century B.C. was a collection of city-states, of which Athens was the largest and usually the richest and most powerful. Greece as a whole was innovative, enterprising, and above all, competitive, and Athens was the epicenter of the competitive spirit. Most cities held their own annual competitions, both athletic and cultural, but in addition there were Panhellenic games open to the entire Greek-speaking world: the Olympian, Pythian, Isthmian, and Nemean games. The most prestigious were the Olympian, held every four years at Olympia in the northwest Peloponnese.

We know a lot about these occasions. They were founded in 776 B.C., two centuries before Socrates’ birth, and were held until A.D. 393, over a millennium later, when they were abolished as a pagan festival by the Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius I. And of course they were a pagan event for, like almost all Greek institutions, their origins were religious. Socrates was fond of reminding young men that the point of an Olympic victory was not the honor and money received by the victors, but service to god, in the shape of Zeus, whose magnificent giant statue of gold and ivory at Olympus was created during his lifetime by his friend Phidias. The race on foot the length of the stadium was the first and remained the chief event, but other tests of speed, strength, and endurance were added—including boxing, wrestling, a race for men in armor, and chariot and horse races. Both umpires and competitors took an oath of fair play and justice, but decisions were often challenged, and crowds booed and sometimes attacked the umpires. In early times, Sparta, the first city to train its athletes professionally, just as it took warfare with deadly seriousness, usually emerged the overall victor, but gradually other cities, not least Athens, produced fierce competition. Money began to talk. Socrates’ rich young friend Alcibiades, for instance, entered six chariot teams for the Olympics, and carried off first, second, and fourth prizes. We know this because a complete list of the Olympic winners, from 776 B.C. to A.D. 217, was drawn up by Julius Africanus, and preserved by the church historian Eusebius.

The competitive spirit spread to every aspect of Greek life: poetry, drama, music, public speaking or rhetoric, and art. In most, Athens was incomparably the leader, and its annual city contests, especially in tragic and comic drama, were more important than any Panhellenic occasion. Socrates was concerned in such events, being a friend of Aristophanes, who won the first prize for comedy three times, and especially of Euripides, youngest of the three great Athenian tragedians. Euripides, though fifteen years Socrates’ senior, came to him for advice, and there is a tradition that Socrates had a hand in his plays, perhaps with his trio containing
Hippolytus,
which won first prize in 428 B.C.

The competitive atmosphere in Athens and the pride Athenians took in their city were much enhanced by external events in the early years of Socrates’ century. The Persian Empire, the greatest the world had ever known, west of China, was a constant threat to Greece, especially after Athens encouraged her fellow Ionian cities in what is now western Turkey to revolt against their Persian overlords. Persia invaded Greece but was repulsed by 10,000 Athenians at the Battle of Marathon (490 B.C.). According to Socrates’ friend the historian Herodotus, the Persians lost 6,400 killed, against Athenian losses of 192, making it one of the great victories of antiquity. Among those who fought in the battle was Aeschylus, senior of the three great tragedians, and it is possible Socrates’ father, Sophroniscus, was there too, as a hoplite or heavy infantryman.

The Persians invaded again in 480, in enormous strength—three hundred thousand men and six hundred ships. Despite heroic efforts by Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans, who died defending the pass of Thermopylae, the Persians pressed on, Athens was evacuated, and the city burned, the sacred buildings on the Acropolis being reduced to rubble. However, combined Spartan and Athenian forces routed the Persian army at the Battle of Plataea. Athens alone, under the leadership of Xanthippus, (father of Pericles, who was to dominate Athens for much of Socrates’ life), won a decisive naval war, and by 479 Athens had established herself as the leading power among the Greeks. In 477 Athens founded the Delian League of Greek States, confirming her ascendancy and laying the basis for an Athenian Empire. By 463 B.C. Miltiades’ son Cimon had ended any threat from Persia and the period of Athenian greatness had begun. By then Socrates was a boy of seven.

The city-state in which he grew up was by constitution and in spirit a democracy. The
polis,
or city, had long been identified with “the people in arms,” the aristocracy providing the cavalry and the tradesmen, artificers, and other skilled workingmen forming the hoplites and owning their own armor and weapons. The basis of a democratic constitution had been laid down by Cleisthenes in the generation before Socrates was born, using the expression
iso-nomia,
or equality, to describe the rights of citizenship. More democratic measures were passed, when Socrates was a child, under the leadership of Ephialtes, though the fact that he was murdered in 462 B.C. indicates that politics, with its class-war overtone, was a serious, even brutal business, remaining so throughout Socrates’ life.

The population of Athens varied greatly, depending on war, trade, and the economy. It is likely that when Socrates was born the total number of citizens, who had full rights to vote in the
ecclesia,
or assembly, to stand for office as general (
strategos
) or magistrate (
archon
), or to sit as jurymen, was a little over 120,000, rising to 180,000 in about 430 B.C., when he was entering middle age, and falling to perhaps 100,000 by his death. In addition, there were large numbers of
metics
, or resident aliens, some of whom held citizen rights, their ratio to born citizens ranging from one in six to two in five. Then there were slaves, who had no rights, varying from 30,000 to perhaps 100,000. But in all it is unlikely that the population of Athens, in Socrates’ lifetime, ever exceeded 250,000. This was the population of Venice at its zenith and of London at the end of the seventeenth century; the entire population of the American colonies in 1700 was around 275,000.

Socrates therefore was born (in May) in what we would call a medium-size town. His
deme,
or district, was on the south side of the city. In the
Laches
dialogue of Plato we are told his father, Sophroniscus, was friends with the family of Aristides the Just, the Athenian statesman who was at various times chief magistrate, statesman, and army and naval commander, but was later exiled for two years and reduced to poverty. His father is also credited with various carvings on the Acropolis, but without firm evidence. His mother, Phaenarete, came from a “good” family and in the
Theaetetus
dialogue is said to have been a skillful midwife—not a professional one, of course, as such did not exist. Socrates was proud of her and did not at all mind jokes being made about her activities as an
accoucheuse
, as for instance in Aristophanes’
Clouds
. He was always interested in medicine and doctoring, bringing it into his dialogues, and it seems to me highly likely that he knew Hippocrates, the greatest doctor of ancient Greece, who was his exact contemporary and who evidently told Plato about medical science.