List of authors
Download:PDFTXT
The History of Western Philosophy
that the trial and death of Socrates took place ( 399 B.C.).,

-81-

Part II. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle

CHAPTER XI Socrates

SOCRATES is a very difficult subject for the historian. There are many men concerning whom it is certain that very little is known, and other men concerning whom it is certain that a great deal is known; but in the case of Socrates the uncertainty is as to whether we know very little or a great deal. He was undoubtedly an Athenian citizen of moderate means, who spent his time in disputation, and taught philosophy to the young, but not for money, like the Sophists. He was certainly tried, condemned to death, and executed in 399 B. C., at about the age of seventy. He was unquestionably a well-known figure in Athens, since Aristophanes caricatured him in The Clouds. But beyond this point we become involved in controversy. Two of his pupils, Xenophon and Plato, wrote voluminously about him, but they said very different things. Even when they agree, it has been suggested by Burnet that Xenophon is copying Plato. Where they disagree, some believe the one, some the other, some neither. In such a dangerous dispute, I shall not venture to take sides, but I will set out briefly the various points of view.

Let us begin with Xenophon, a military man, not very liberally endowed with brains, and on the whole conventional in his outlook. Xenophon is pained that Socrates should have been accused of impiety and of corrupting the youth; he contends that, on the contrary, Socrates was eminently pious and had a thoroughly wholesome effect upon those who came under his influence. His ideas, it appears, so

-82-

far from being subversive, were rather dull and commonplace. This defence goes too far, since it leaves the hostility to Socrates unexplained. As Burnet says ( Thales to Plato, p. 149): «Xenophon’s defence of Socrates is too successful. He would never have been put to death if he had been like that.»

There has been a tendency to think that everything Xenophon says must be true, because he had not the wits to think of anything untrue. This is a very invalid line of argument. A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand. I would rather be reported by my bitterest enemy among philosophers than by a friend innocent of philosophy. We cannot therefore accept what Xenophon says if it either involves any difficult point in philosophy or is part of an argument to prove that Socrates was unjustly condemned.

Nevertheless, some of Xenophon’s reminiscences are very convincing. He tells (as Plato also does) how Socrates was continually occupied with the problem of getting competent men into positions of power. He would ask such questions as: «If I wanted a shoe mended, whom should I employ?» To which some ingenuous youth would answer: «A shoemaker, O Socrates.» He would go on to carpenters, coppersmiths, etc., and finally ask some such question as «who should mend the Ship of State?» When he fell into conflict with the Thirty Tyrants, Critias, their chief, who knew his ways from having studied under him, forbade him to continue teaching the young, and added: «You had better be done with your shoemakers, carpenters, and coppersmiths. These must be pretty well trodden out at heel by this time, considering the circulation you have given them»
( Xenophon, Memorabilia, Bk. I, Chap. II). This happened during the brief oligarchic government established by the Spartans at the end of the Peloponnesian War. But at most times Athens was democratic, so much so that even generals were elected or chosen by lot. Socrates came across a young man who wished to become a general, and persuaded him that it would be well to know something of the art of war. The young man accordingly went away and took a brief course in tactics. When he returned, Socrates, after some satirical praise, sent him back for further instruction (ib. Bk. III, Chap I). Another young man he set to learning the principles of

-83-

finance. He tried the same sort of plan on many people, including the war minister; but it was decided that it was easier to silence him by means of the hemlock than to cure the evils of which he complained.

With Plato’s account of Socrates, the difficulty is quite a different one from what it is in the case of Xenophon, namely, that it is very hard to judge how far Plato means to portray the historical Socrates, and how far he intends the person called «Socrates» in his dialogues to be merely the mouthpiece of his own opinions. Plato, in addition to being a philosopher, is an imaginative writer of great genius and charm. No one supposes, and he himself does not seriously pretend, that the conversations in his dialogues took place just as he records them. Nevertheless, at any rate in the earlier dialogues, the conversation is completely natural and the characters quite convincing. It is the excellence of Plato as a writer of fiction that throws doubt on him as a historian. His Socrates is a consistent and extraordinarily interesting character, far beyond the power of most men to invent; but I think Platocould have invented him. Whether he did so is of course another question.

The dialogue which is most generally regarded as historical is the Apology. This professes to be the speech that Socrates made in his own fence at his trial—not, of course, a stenographic report, but what remained in Plato’s memory some years after the event, put together and elaborated with literary art. Plato was present at the trial, and it certainly seems fairly clear that what is set down is the sort of thing that Plato remembered Socrates as saying, and that the intention is, broadly speaking, historical. This, with all its limitations, is enough to give a fairly definite picture of the character of Socrates.

The main facts of the trial of Socrates are not open to doubt. The prosecution was based upon the charge that «Socrates is an evil-doer and a curious person, searching into things under the earth and above the heaven; and making the worse appear the better cause, and teaching all this to others.» The real ground of hostility to him was, almost certainly, that he was supposed to be connected with the aristocratic party; most of his pupils belonged to this faction, and some, in positions of power, had proved themselves very pernicious. But this ground could not be made evident, on account of the amnesty. He was found guilty by a majority, and it was then open to him, by

-84-

Athenian law, to propose some lesser penalty than death. The judges had to choose, if they had found the accused guilty, between the penalty demanded by the prosecution and that suggested by the defence. It was therefore to the interest of Socrates to suggest a substantial penalty, which the court might have accepted as adequate. He, however, proposed a fine of thirty minae, for which some of his friends (including Plato) were willing to go surety. This was so small a punishment that the court was annoyed, and condemned him to death by a larger majority than that which had found him guilty. Undoubtedly he foresaw this result. It is clear that he had no wish to avoid the death penalty by concessions which might seem to acknowledge his guilt.

The prosecutors were Anytus, a democratic politician; Meletus, a tragic poet, «youthful and unknown, with lanky hair, and scanty beard, and a hooked nose»; and Lykon, an obscure rhetorician. (See Burnet, Thales to Plato, p. 180.) They maintained that Socrates was guilty of not worshipping the gods the State worshipped but introducing other new divinities, and further that he was guilty of corrupting the young by teaching them accordingly.

Without further troubling ourselves with the insoluble question of the relation of the Platonic Socrates to the real man, let us see what Plato makes him say in answer to this charge.

Socrates begins by accusing his prosecutors of eloquence, and rebutting the charge of eloquence as applied to himself. The only eloquence of which he is capable, he says, is that of truth. And they must not be angry with him if he speaks in his accustomed manner, not in «a set oration, duly ornamented with words and phrases.» * He is over seventy, and has never appeared in a court of law until now; they must therefore pardon his un-forensic way of speaking.

He goes on to say that, in addition to his formal accusers, he has a large body of informal accusers, who, ever since the judges were children, have gone about «telling of one Socrates, a wise man, who speculated about the heavens above, and searched into the earth beneath, and made the worse appear the better cause.» Such men, he says, are supposed not to believe in the existence of the gods. This old accusation by public opinion is more dangerous than the formal

____________________

* In quotations from Plato. I have used Jowett’s translation.

-85-

indictment, the more so as he does not know who are the men from whom it comes, except in the case of Aristophanes. * He points out, in reply to these older grounds of hostility, that he is not a man of science—«I have nothing to do with physical speculations»—that he is not a teacher, and does not take money for teaching. He goes on to make fun of the Sophists, and to disclaim the knowledge that they profess to have. What,

Download:PDFTXT

that the trial and death of Socrates took place ( 399 B.C.)., -81- Part II. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle CHAPTER XI Socrates SOCRATES is a very difficult subject for the