Republic (Barnes & Noble Classics Series), Page 3

  Intellectual Innovations:

  “Scientists,” “Sophists,” and Rhetoricians

  The most self-important person we meet in Republic is Thrasymachus, a diplomat and professional rhetorician from the Greek city-state of Chalcedon on the Bosporus near the Black Sea. He does not play much of a role in the dialogue beyond its first book, but his activities as a rhetorician and, as some would say, a “sophist” lead us to consider another set of cultural, intellectual, and political phenomena that are significant in Plato’s work. The systematic study of effective public speaking, and the teaching of the theory as well as the practice of rhetoric, were innovations of the fifth century; they were impelled in part by the demands that democratic institutions such as public assemblies and courts, first in Athens and then elsewhere in the Hellenic world, created. To attain political prominence and power in a democratic setting, men had to be able to persuade large crowds and hold their own in heated debates. Even those who had more modest ambitions could find themselves needing the services of a teacher of rhetoric or a professional speechwriter when they went to court, whether as plaintiffs or defendants. Thus Athenian men—especially young and wealthy ones—began to study rhetoric and techniques of argumentation in ad hoc arrangements with professional and at times highly paid instructors.

  The formal study of rhetoric and argumentation was also linked to a broader set of intellectual trends that originated in the Greek city-states of Ionia (the coastal area of Asia Minor) during the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E. The driving force behind these trends was the desire to comprehend the workings of the cosmos and all its constituent parts in systematic terms, which was fueled by a spirit of inquiry and skepticism about received truths. Xenophanes, an Ionian émigré to the Greek colonies in Italy, challenged Homer’s and Hesiod’s conceptions of the gods, and Pythagoras, another Ionian emigre to Italy, studied the mathematical bases of music and theorized about the reincarnation of the human soul. Others in Ionia and elsewhere became interested in studying the movements of celestial bodies and explaining astronomical phenomena such as eclipses, in discovering the causes for change and movement in physical objects, and in speculating about the nature of matter. By the fifth century, there were many “pre-Socratic philosophers,” as they are known today, active throughout the Greek world. Among them were Heraclitus, Empedocles, Zeno, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Leucippus, and—especially important to the development of Plato’s thought—Parmenides of Elea (in the northwest Peloponnese). In the early fifth century, Parmenides posited proto-metaphysical concepts of “Being” (or “That Which Is”—to on in Greek) that challenged the assumption that any physical object in the phenomenal world “is” in the absolute sense of the verb.

  Although these sorts of speculation never became popular among ordinary people, they were nonetheless culturally influential in the fifth century. This was especially true in Athens, because the city’s prosperity and relative openness to foreign visitors and residents attracted itinerant teachers and intellectuals. Theorizing about natural phenomena gave rise to speculation in other fields, and human society, human behavior, and human nature were among the subjects of such observation and speculation. The development of social institutions, laws, customs, belief systems, and other cultural practices was of particular interest; the Athenian experiment with democracy arguably contributed to an increasing self-consciousness about the roles that human perception and choice, on both individual and communal levels, played in shaping society. In addition to theories about the development of civilization and the degrees of its success in molding human nature, there arose ideas about how the model society should be formed, as well as formulations concerning the correct responses by individuals to the pressures and demands of their societies.

  Some of these theories seem quite bold. At the end of the fifth century, a rhetorician named Antiphon wrote a treatise titled “On Truth,” in which he asserts that the laws and customs of society are by nature’s standards “unjust,” and that it is consequently “just”—by nature’s standards—to disregard them, provided one is able to do so without being punished. Rational theories concerning the organization of the cosmos inevitably challenged traditional understanding of the roles played by the gods in ordering the world. These theories gave rise to speculation about the role of the gods in human affairs and, in turn, led some individuals to ponder whether the truth about the gods can be apprehended by the human mind. Less daring but still important were experiments with city planning undertaken in communities such as Thurii, the Athenian colony in southern Italy founded under the leadership of Pericles in 444 B.C.E., which drew on the skills of geometers (literally, “earth measurers”) as well as experts on law and social relationships.

  Most of the itinerant intellectuals who gravitated to Athens during and after Pericles’ day—including famous figures such as Protagoras, Hippias, Prodicus, and Gorgias—integrated their study and instruction of rhetoric with broader interests in fields that we today might label psychology, sociology, social theory, anthropology, linguistics, language theory, epistemology, music theory, theology, and cosmology. Many of them also investigated astronomy, physics, and the other sciences, as well as mathematics and medicine. These men and their homegrown Athenian counterparts became known as “sophists” (that is, “men who profess wisdom”), although it is not clear that the term was commonly used in the fifth century.

  In some regards, the sophists were not wholly unlike the traveling poets and professional performers of Homeric epic (“rhapsodes”) who had been received in Greek city-states for generations. Many of them performed official services for their home cities and, like Thrasymachus and the Sicilian rhetorician Gorgias (from Leontini in Sicily), served as ambassadors to Athens. Yet the presence of these intellectually adventurous and personally ambitious men would have inevitably struck many Athenians as an alarming sign that times were changing, and not necessarily for the better. Indeed, the activities of the sophists seem to have compounded anxieties about economic and social changes that the developments of democracy and “empire” had brought about. The sophists’ fees were typically so high that only wealthy men could afford to hire them to instruct their sons, and their direct influence was thus limited. Their ideas and modi operandi were generally if vaguely known, however, and the public tended to see their activities, not always fairly, as threats to the traditional norms and practices that were thought to guarantee stability and prosperity in Athenian society.

  The fact that the sophists appropriated the family’s role in preparing young men for adult life and, moreover, charged fees for their efforts, very likely made them appear all the more suspect in the eyes of average Athenians. If Aristophanes’ comedy Clouds can be trusted for this kind of information, the lightning rod for popular misgivings about the sophists’ activities was the teaching of rhetoric. Rhetorical education, in the worst-case scenario presented by Clouds, could supply the means for young men to “make the weaker argument stronger” and justify their antisocial behavior; it could enable them to cast out all the received wisdom they had absorbed about the gods, society, and family.

  Nonetheless, for all this apparent controversy and anxiety concerning the sophists’ newfangled ideas, the changes and upheavals of Athenian society in the late fifth century had less to do with their influence than we might suppose. These upheavals, leading up to the oligarchic coups of 411-410 and 404-403, are better understood as consequences of the Peloponnesian War and the ongoing transformation of the institutions and practices of democracy. Modern scholars are in a position to see how various theories expounded by intellectuals valorized the positions taken by both proponents and detractors of Athenian democracy, but it is unclear how frequently or how keenly average Athenians concerned themselves with the ideological implications, per se, of the sophists’ ideas. In addition, even though sophists were not popular in fifth-century Athens, there was relatively little backlash against them. It is true that the astronomer Anaxagoras was prose
cuted on the charge of impiety in, perhaps, 450 B.C.E., and that Socrates was convicted on the charges of impiety and “corrupting the youth” in 399. Anaxagoras, however, was likely attacked because of his closeness to Pericles, and, as we shall soon discuss, there were probably political motivations behind the charges brought against Socrates as well.

  The market for the higher education of young men with wealth and aspirations to political prominence did not abate in the fourth century. Various individuals, some of them native Athenians like Isocrates (436-338 B.C.E.), established schools in which rhetoric and other subjects were taught. Thus, after only a generation or so, the novel and at times controversial educational offerings of the fifth-century sophists and rhetoricians were well on their way to becoming institutionalized and mainstreamed. Plato was a direct beneficiary of this process of institutionalization and, in something of a paradox, he was indirectly beholden to the sophists. To be sure, Plato’s portrayals of men like Protagoras, Hippias, and Prodicus (in Protagoras), Polus and Gorgias (in Gorgias), Euthydemus and Dionysodorus (in Euthydemus), and Thrasymachus (in Republic) are not flattering. He dismisses the claims to knowledge and expertise and educational proficiency that such “professors of wisdom” had staked for themselves, and discredits the ways in which these men and their successors—notably Isocrates—taught rhetoric and the “art” of public persuasion. Nonetheless, Plato’s Academy capitalized upon the desire and demand for higher education that Protagoras, Gorgias, and others had cultivated during the preceding decades. Without the fertile field the sophists planted, Plato might never have had the opportunity to found his Academy—or write his dialogues.

  Socrates

  It is impossible to conceive of Plato apart from Socrates. A native Athenian who lived from approximately 470 B.C.E. until his execution in 399, Socrates committed nothing to writing. What we know of his activities comes largely from the dialogues of Plato and Xenophon, in which Socrates is very often the primary interlocutor. The other intact source—and the sole one dating to Socrates’ lifetime—is Aristophanes’ Clouds, which antedates Plato’s and Xenophon’s works by twenty-five years at the minimum and was composed when Socrates was not yet fifty years old. There are fragments of other comedies from the 420s that mention Socrates, and a very few fragments of works by other “Socratics” who, like Plato and Xenophon, took to writing about the man after his death and using him as a figure in dialogues.

  Aristophanes presents an image of Socrates very different from those of Plato and Xenophon. In Clouds, Socrates is portrayed as a professional sophist running a “Think Factory.” His students pay to learn rhetoric (that is, how to “make the weaker argument the stronger”) and other language arts, as well as absurd “scientific” techniques (for example, how to measure the leaps of fleas) and a novel cosmology positing that Zeus “is not.” This Socrates has no scruple about taking on a pupil who wants to cheat his creditors in court, and he is indirectly responsible for a young man’s beating of his aged father.

  According to Plato and Xenophon, however, Socrates was in no way a professional; he had no pupils and took no fees. Plato takes particular pains to distance Socrates from Aristophanes’ caricature and from the sophists. He has him disavow all interest in rhetoric and admit to only a youthful and unsatisfying flirtation with the cosmological theories of Anaxagoras (for example, in Phaedo 96a-100a). The Socrates of Plato’s works professes an exclusive commitment to making his fellow Athenians “better” by urging them to examine their values and actions systematically, on the grounds that “the unexamined life is not worth living” (Apology 38a). He exhorts them to think and act in consistently virtuous, just, temperate, and courageous ways, even if such behavior endangers material prosperity and life itself (for example, Apology 29c-30b); he argues that the welfare and health of the soul are more important than any consideration of material comfort. The Platonic Socrates is depicted, moreover, as a paragon of this consistently virtuous way of life, always electing to do what is truly beneficial over what is immediately convenient and gratifying. So consistent is his devotion to the pursuit of the “good life,” for himself and others, that he is willing to permit himself to be killed for its sake (Apology 35c; Gorgias 522d-e).

  Plato may well have crafted his representations of Socrates to suit his own purposes, just as Aristophanes doubtless shaped the portrayal in Clouds in accordance with his comic agenda. If we prefer to believe that Plato’s depiction is the more accurate, it is still possible to understand how Aristophanes could have proffered such a disparate perspective on Socrates’ activities. According to Plato, Socrates’ self-appointed mission of spurring his fellow citizens toward self-examination—he describes himself as a gadfly sent to “rouse” Athens, as if it were a large and lazy horse, in Apology 30e—necessitated challenges to their most cherished values and assumptions—including their own presumptions to wisdom. As a result, he may well have irritated, infuriated, and at times humiliated them. For all the distance that Plato strives to create between his mentor and the sophists, we may imagine that, to the average Athenian, the differences between the challenges to traditional conceptions of just behavior offered by Socrates and someone like Antiphon might not have seemed so great. Socrates could have come across as just another sophist who was relentlessly critical of the traditional and the time-honored.

  If Plato’s depiction is reliable, Socrates was also highly critical of Athens’ democratic government. We know that he traveled in the elite circles of Athenian society and was closely linked to prominent men from aristocratic families. He was particularly friendly with Pericles’ ward, the charismatic and ambitious Alcibiades (450-404 B.C.E.), whose extravagant behavior and defection to the Peloponnesian alliance in 415 left his associates under a cloud of suspicion. He also knew Critias, the infamous leader of the Thirty Tyrants of 404-403, and other men who harbored open hostilities to democracy. Socrates was almost certainly not actively involved with the Thirty, but his past associations with Critias and Alcibiades may have caused unease in the tense years immediately after the democratic government was restored in 403. The general amnesty obviated his prosecution on political charges, and it is likely that the charges of impiety and corrupting youth that were officially laid against him in 399 were efforts to drive him into exile because of his political associations and views.

  Socrates, however, did not go into exile, even though he could have done so after his conviction. On orders from the court that convicted him, he committed suicide by drinking hemlock. He left behind a band of friends and followers who, because of their dedication to preserving Socrates’ legacy, came to be known as “Socratics.” By the late 390s B.C.E., several texts purporting to contain the speeches of prosecution and defense given at Socrates’ trial were in circulation; two texts by Plato and Xenophon, both titled Apology (which literally means “Defense”), are the only extant examples of the latter, and none of the former survives. Dialogues featuring Socrates as an interlocutor remained popular throughout the fourth century, so much so that Aristotle’s Poetics identifies Socratic dialogues as “examples of imitation.” How scrupulously any of these works—including those of Plato—aimed to represent the actual views and activities of Socrates remains an open question.

  Plato

  We know the names of several Socratics active during the fourth century B.C.E. in Athens and elsewhere: Antisthenes, Phaedo, Eucleides, Aristippus, Aeschines, as well as Plato and Xenophon. Only works by Plato and Xenophon survive intact, and, of these two authors, Plato is by far the more philosophically significant.

  Plato was born into a wealthy, aristocratic Athenian family in 428 or 427 B.C.E., and he lived until 348 or 347. (A note in passing: “Plato” was a nickname according to one tradition, but it is now generally accepted as his given name.) He had kinship ties with many prominent men, including the notorious Critias. A large body of writing attributed to Plato survives from antiquity, including Apology (a recreation of Socrates’ defense speech), Republic and a
number of other dialogues, and a series of letters. Most of these works are considered genuinely Platonic, although the authenticity of some texts (including some of the letters and a handful of dialogues) has been doubted at various points in the past 2400 years.

  The Seventh Letter, which many scholars today view as authentic, offers an autobiographical account explaining how the vicious abuse of power by the Thirty Tyrants and the subsequent trial and execution of Socrates under the restored democracy persuaded Plato to eschew a political career in Athens. It also details his association with the rulers of the Sicilian city of Syracuse, Dionysius I and his son Dionysius II, and their kinsman Dion, who was Plato’s close friend and student. Plato visited Sicily three times during the period from the early 380s to the late 360s. He and Dion evidently planned to educate the younger Dionysius in the hopes that, upon succeeding his father, he would put into practice the political ideals they cherished. Several scholars have speculated that these political ideals were something like the proposals for the ideal state and the government of philosopher-rulers that Socrates advances in Republic. Whatever their aspirations were, Plato and Dion were disappointed when Dionysius II took power in the early 360s and quickly broke with his kinsman and his tutor.