The Last Days of Socrates, Page 3

  This being the case, it is clear also that time contributes to Socrates’ later confidence, for that confidence is dependent upon his experience of the results of his questioning. Even so, we should see comparatively little of it if it were not for the openness with which Socrates speaks in parts of the Apology, as well as Crito and Phaedo. This is because Plato’s Socrates was a master of irony, a master of mystification said by Alcibiades to ‘spend his whole life playing the ironist and toying with mankind’.24 Alcibiades is contrasting Socrates’ external self, which one does not and should not take seriously, with an internal self whose splendour (by 416 BC) had only been revealed to those who knew him closely. It is possible to see Socrates’ non-serious mask as a defence mechanism – one which had long prevented the Athenians regarding him as a threat. But his own involvement in the political turmoil in 406–403 BC had forced him to reveal his hand. Without that mask public suspicion of his activities increased, forcing him all the more to talk plainly. The Euthyphro, describing events just before the trial, shows the mask breaking down and shows also how those who saw him as a friend and ally could come then to detest him. The Apology shows the mask being deliberately lifted. The Crito and Phaedo show the mask virtually gone.

  There is one other aspect of the Crito and Phaedo which is of relevance in this context: Plato appears to be quite deliberately portraying Socrates as a man whose powers of vision had reached their peak just as he was about to die. In the Crito revelatory forces associated with Apollo are operating with considerable impact upon Socrates. At 44a–b we are told of a prophetic dream, in which a lady in white appeared to him, and suggested through a Homeric quotation that it would be two more days before he died; and at the end of the work the voices of the Athenian Laws, which have charmed his ears like the Sirens, seem to be regarded as part of the machinery employed by Apollo to lead Socrates to his death. We are not meant to see this as entirely typical of Socrates; rather we must see it as characteristic of Socrates in his final hours.

  The Phaedo actually supplies the theory which underpins the picture of a man on the brink of divine knowledge. At 84e–85b Socrates compares himself with the swans, fellow-servants of Apollo, god of prophecy, who according to his account sing their swan-songs just before death not out of any sorrow, but out of joy at what they know is to come.25 Socrates has extra powers of insight as a result of his impending death, and so the familiar ironic Socratic elenchus has given way to a new and unfamiliar song which reaches its climax in the visionary account of the higher and lower regions of the world in the myth. The increase in Socrates’ visionary powers is likewise explained by the theory that the philosopher avoids the pleasures and pains of the body, striving to separate his soul gently from the body, practising being apart from the body so that the intellectual powers may reach their peak (cf. 65–8). The gentleness with which Socrates’ soul leaves his body after drinking the hemlock (117e–118a) testifies to the close proximity to the other world – and to its truth – that he has already achieved.

  The Crito and Phaedo, then, portray a Socrates who has achieved, when close to death, the maximum possible proximity to a divine knowledge of the truths of the other world. It is not surprising here if he speaks with unfamiliar voices and with an unfamiliar confidence. It is not surprising that Socrates’ earlier belief that death is either the end of all sensation or the beginning of a new journey (Apology 40c) has changed to confidence in that new journey. For it is no longer Apollo’s social critic who speaks, but the voice of Apollo speaking through him. Or so Plato would have us believe.

  SOCRATES’ CAREER AND HIS LAST DAYS

  Socrates was born in 470 or 469 BC, a decade after the Persian Wars had concluded and at a time when Athens was well on its way to a period of military, economic and intellectual hegemony of Greece. The son of Sophroniscus, a stonemason according to tradition,26 he would not have had any very special education. During his youth Presocratic philosophy flourished, concentrating on the origin, nature and workings of the universe and mankind’s place within it. Still in its infancy was the sophistic movement, piloted by Protagoras and other itinerant intellectuals who usually taught more practical skills, geared to the needs of ambitious young men and founded upon anthropocentric principles.

  Socrates must have become reasonably well known before the age of forty, not necessarily because of any overt philosophic activity, but rather because he was very much a man of the city and its public places. The earliest dramatic dates of works which show Socrates handling the conversation,27 those of the Protagoras and Charmides, belong to the later 430s BC. Socrates in both works is keen to ensure that the youth of Athens are correctly educated – with due concern for the quality of their ‘souls’. He is a man with obvious erotic feelings towards the most sought-after young men of this period, Alcibiades and Charmides, even though (if we are to believe Plato) his erotic relationships followed a rather unusual course. His feelings were perhaps tempered by his even greater thirst for knowledge which caused him to seek out professional intellectuals, though he had little money to take their formal courses28 and a preference for drawing them into conversation. He moves already in the company of men of pretensions, already knowing the future oligarchic leader Critias very well, but also being familiar with men prominent in the democratic camp. There seems to be some surprise at the beginning of the Charmides that Socrates had managed to survive a hard-fought campaign in Thrace, perhaps because his lapses into other-worldliness (immortalized in the Symposium) were already well known.29 In fact his qualities as a soldier earned him the admiration of others famed for their bravery.30 The Charmides and the Protagoras both paint a plausible youthful picture of Socrates; the former (155e–157c) has him delighting in a piece of blatant deception required to lure the attractive Charmides into conversation, while the latter shows him somewhat more contentious and headstrong in both argument and tactics than he will seem in works set at a later stage. Though he has already become something of a cult figure among young men (Charmides 156a), it seems that he has not yet acquired a reputation for wisdom: the young Hippocrates does not think of Socrates as a wise man in the same sense as Protagoras (309c–d), and the sophist himself suggests that he will not be surprised if Socrates becomes famed for wisdom (361d–e).

  The reputation for wisdom is acquired sometime during the next decade or so. It is interesting that in the Laches, set in or around 420 BC, the old man Lysimachus, because he had been spending most of his time indoors recently, had not connected the Socrates whom the young men are always praising with the son of Sophroniscus. The year in which Socrates came to great prominence was probably 424 BC, as two comedies in which he played an important role, Ameipsias’s Connus and Aristophanes’ The Clouds, were presented early in 423. Could the Delphic oracle recently have declared him to be wisest (Apology 21a)? Possibly, though we get no hint in The Clouds as we have it that Socrates was engaging as yet in any programme of moral questioning of the kind that the Delphic oracle is said to have provoked, nor do we receive the impression that the Delphic response story was well known at Athens. What we do find Socrates engaged in at this time is the seeking-out of teachers. While Aristophanes depicted Socrates as already running a school of miscellaneous learning himself, Ameipsias was showing him rather as the over-age pupil of a music-teacher-cumsophist, Connus.31 Another musical expert with whom Socrates is associated was Damon, who features as somebody who had learnt much from the sophist Prodicus in the Laches (197d), and as an expert on verse metres at Republic 400b4–5 – a passage surprisingly reminiscent of Socrates’ line 651 in Aristophanes’ Clouds.

  What picture of Socrates’ current interests and pursuits does The Clouds suggest? Socrates is in charge of a weird school of philosophy, but this hardly implies that he did ever run such a school. It might, perhaps, have been inferred that his purpose in taking up all sorts of quasi-sophistic studies himself had something to do with the desire to set up such an institution. Aristophanes might have been giving an
exaggerated and highly comic account of where he guessed Socratic activities might lead. In the background (at least of the extant version) hides the figure of Chaerephon, Socrates’ accomplice, who seems to attract at least as much venom as Socrates himself and is treated elsewhere by Aristophanes as a thief and cheat. It would be a reasonable guess that Chaerephon was the man whom Aristophanes judged to be promoting Socrates, especially in view of the fact that it was Chaerephon who at some stage asked the Delphic oracle about Socrates’ wisdom. Socrates himself remains an other-worldly type, and seems to show little interest in the payment which his school is being offered or in the uses to which his pupils intend to put their new-found knowledge. It is not he who had the entrepreneurial skills to turn philosophy into a profit-making business.

  When it comes to his picture of Socrates’ interests, they are indeed fairly broad, but contain nothing of any moral or practical significance. His concerns are for the heavens above, the earth below, for the study of language, poetry, argument and problem-solving. There is much here that is Presocratic, and it seems to rely fairly consistently on the cosmology and biology of Diogenes of Apollonia;32 there is much else that seems indebted to the teaching of the sophists, particularly that of Prodicus, with whom Socrates was much associated and who is mentioned in line 361 of the play. Only in the much-used theme, crucial to the plot, that there are two arguments on every topic is the influence of Protagoras obvious.33 Likewise absent is any strong indication of particular influences from the Presocratics Anaxagoras and Archelaus, with whom Socrates is associated in the Phaedo (96b, 97b–c). Now clearly Aristophanes must have had easy access himself to the doctrines of Diogenes, and in that case one assumes that Socrates did as well: from whatever source. Was there some representative of Diogenes’ philosophy at Athens whose expertise Socrates was also trying to tap at this time?

  Whatever the answer, I think it is clear that Socrates did consult various experts with strong connections with philosophic or sophistic views during the late 420s. The section on Socrates’ early career in the Phaedo says nothing to question such a belief. He once was an enthusiastic inquirer into various Presocratic theories, including those of Archelaus, Empedocles, Diogenes, Heraclitus and Alcmaeon of Croton (96b), but soon found that they raised more questions than they answered. Eventually he heard somebody reading from a book of Anaxagoras about Intelligence being the arranger of the universe (97b–c), and thought it might be possible to solve Presocratic questions by asking, ‘How is it best for things to be arranged?’ Curiously, he had already learnt much from Archelaus (a significant Athenian follower of Anaxagoras), but he had not at that stage encountered Anaxagoras’s famous doctrine of a cosmic Intelligence. Nor was it an aspect of Anaxagoras’s thought which played an important part in Archelaus. It is quite reasonable to suppose that it had not been Anaxagoras’s mature doctrine by which Archelaus was influenced.34 Anaxagoras probably died around 428 BC, and it may have been then that his mature work was brought to Athens and made public there. This could have prompted renewed interest in Presocratic philosophy on the part of Socrates, primarily in those Presocratics who made use of intelligent governing principles. This is what Diogenes did rather better than Anaxagoras, relating the cosmic Intelligence to crucial aspects of man’s environment such as the seasons and the weather (Anaxagoras fr.3), and modelling man’s intelligence on the divine intelligence (fr.4) so that it might control his sensations and thought (A 19). It is clear that he did not do this well enough to retain Socrates’ interest in cosmology and biology, but it is a reasonable bet that it was Diogenes, not Archelaus as is usually supposed, who had brought Anaxagoras’s work to Athens, and had inspired Socrates with temporary hopes of solving Presocratic problems.

  I conclude that it is extremely likely that Aristophanes, when he wrote The Clouds, was aware of Socrates’ studies not only with Prodicus and with musical theorists who had pronounced sophistic leanings, but also with Diogenes and with Anaxagorean doctrine as Diogenes presented it. It is often held that Aristophanes is a non-discriminating anti-intellectual who adds nothing to our knowledge of Socrates.35 But scholars are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with that view. His picture of Socrates is in many ways a sensitive one, and he was an intellectual of great cleverness himself.

  Study of the role of intelligence in the world and in mankind would have acted as an appropriate launching-pad for study into human wisdom and human excellence in general. It explains why Socrates placed so much emphasis on our need for knowledge to guide our actions, for if cosmic Intelligence automatically did what was best for the world then human intelligence would likewise do what was best for the human being. It shows too why the stimulus of the Delphic oracle should have sent him on a fruitless search for a wiser man, the man of intelligence, a search which in time became a mission to expose the vanity of others’ claims to expertise.

  The Socrates of The Clouds and just after belonged to an Athens which, though war-torn, was optimistic. Over the next two decades he was to witness his state involved in the most notorious recklessness, impiety and injustice. Implicated in the impiety scandals of 415 BC were his friends Phaedrus, Eryximachus and Alcibiades; leading the injustices of the Thirty Tyrants (404–403 BC) were his friends Critias and Charmides. He survived these troubled times, not as a result of apathy but because disappointment in others helped him remain aloof – and to resist strong pressures to participate in the injustices of 406 and 404 BC (Apology 32b–d).

  Remaining a loof was no longer safe under the restored democracy of 403 on. It must have been evident to all at his trial, if not before, that he did not share the popular confidence in the new order, its institutions, or its people; he saw there neither piety nor justice. Such a man could scarcely promote the new sense of working together. With cooperation from the popular politician Anytus and the little-known Lycon, Meletus brought the notorious impiety charges, claiming that Socrates failed to acknowledge the city’s gods, substituting his own private ones and undermining the moral fabric of the young. Tried before a huge jury, he lost his case by a small margin and the punishment of death proposed by the prosecution was chosen (by a greater margin) as more appropriate than the fine which he had proposed to pay. Execution, usually following rapidly upon sentence, was delayed while a religious mission to Delos was observed. Eventually, however, in spite of great efforts by his friends to have him escape, he drank from the official cup of hemlock poison.

  SOCRATIC PIETY AND SOCRATIC JUSTICE

  This is not the place to try and offer a reconstruction of Socrates’ moral philosophy, but various important points may nevertheless be made. Both piety and justice were classed as virtues in Socratic thought, and the virtues themselves were in some sense one. They tended to coalesce in one individual, and though one thought of them as manifesting themselves in different spheres of conduct they were all founded upon some basic moral knowledge, a knowledge which was sufficient to ensure correct conduct. The virtues of justice and piety (or holiness) were considered to be especially close, as one observes in the Euthyphro, Protagoras and Xenophon’s Memorabilia 4.6.

  The Euthyphro can be seen as a struggle between two competing conceptions of piety, one which places enormous emphasis on the acceptance of religious traditions – both religious beliefs and religious duties such as prayers, sacrifices and purification ceremonies, the other which seems to follow no prescription, relying instead on the individual’s power to discriminate between right and wrong both in theological belief and in action.

  The Apology might also be viewed as a struggle between two conceptions of piety, one which sees one’s religious duty as integrated with one’s duty to the traditional values of the city – not merely participating in its religious ceremonies but also respecting its political institutions and social principles, and that of Socrates who follows at all times whatever divine orders he believes he is receiving (28e–29a, 31c–d, 37e): which must surely be a recipe for social breakdown were it to be followed by everybody
. As Socrates concludes his defence speech (35c–d) he asks the jury not to expect him to do what he does not think honourable, just or holy; this is because, in soliciting an act of impiety from the jury, he would be convicting himself of overlooking the gods. He as an individual pleads the right to follow his own interpretation of divine law, an interpretation sufficiently original to give credence to the notion that his gods were not the gods of the city. In order to understand the importance of this dispute between Socrates and Athens we may refer to the Euthyphro once more. Euthyphro claims at 14b that piety as he conceives it preserves both private households and cities. The benefits of holiness and the disastrous effects of impiety were supposedly felt by families and by whole cities. The common good could be undermined by one dissident individual. Did Socrates have the right to follow his own private piety when the common good was at stake?

  Socrates himself, however, believed that any transgressions can cause genuine harm only to the individual. Divine law does not permit the better person to be harmed by the worse (Apology 30b–c). No amount of impiety or injustice on Socrates’ part would genuinely damage his family or state if they were not at least as guilty as he. Gorgias 474d–480d (like the Republic) depicts injustice as first and foremost a divisive quality within the soul, tearing the individual apart. Punishment is useful for the criminal in so far as it relieves him of injustice, the worst of all evils. So justice is a salutary quality in the soul, a quality which determines that the individual will act justly. Like other virtues it is associated closely with moral knowledge, and as such it must be allowed to determine what is just. To act contrary to one’s intuitions of justice will itself promote injustice within the soul, the greatest of human evils. The individual, if he thinks he knows what is just, becomes the arbiter of what is just for him, an arbiter whom no legal or judicial body can – in his eyes – override.