The Search for the Historical Socrates: Was Socrates a Failure? (essay © 2007)

This essay is the fruit of an independent study project I did with Dr. D. Stefan Schindler, a philosophy professor at La Salle University of many specialties and author of the forthcoming article, “The Tao of Socrates” (TBA).  As with “The Search for the Historical Confucius,” my style has gotten a lot better (or so I like to think) since 2007, and I also no longer subscribe to evolutionary historiography.  Both essays were written before I discovered John Wansbrough and the possibility of applying literary theory and criticism to historical research.  Nevertheless, I really enjoyed writing them, especially the argumentative sections.  — CS 12.07.2008

INTRODUCTION

“You have had no desire to know another city or other laws; we and our city satisfied you. So decisively did you choose us and agree to be a citizen under us” (Ap. 52c). Thus did Socrates imagine the laws of Athens saying to him, and rightfully so, for the historical Socrates was through and through a citizen of his city-state. Because I believe it is frequently overlooked as a topic, I will focus on his citizenship as the key to understanding the man he may have actually been. However, due to a long entrenched tendency within the historiography of Socratic studies to idealize the philosopher, in order to gain a holistic understanding of him I must restore the balance by adding to the scales a few uncomfortable realities about the man. My approach will be elenctic: by engaging the topic of Socrates’ rarely mentioned failures as a citizen, and in doing so refute iconic depictions of him, I hope to gain greater depth of understanding of the way in which he succeeded.

I perceive his failures to be the following:

(A) He never questioned the justice of the way in which his society decided who was and who was not a citizen.

(B) He did not participate in his government—a duty expected of him by custom. Furthermore, it appears that he never questioned the policies of Cleon and Alcibiades, despite the terrible consequences these polices had for Athens.

And, (C) because he conceived his divine mission very much as a patriotic duty, he may have actually undermined it when he submitted to the unjust death sentence of the tribunal.

Hereafter, I will refer to these points as my “Accusations.” For Accusations (A) and (B), I owe the idea to the late Dr. Gregory Vlastos. He discusses these matters in his book, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher, and the essays, “The Historical Socrates and Athenian Democracy” and “Socrates and Vietnam” in Socratic Studies. For Accusation (C), I owe the idea to an observation by my mentor in Socratic studies, Dr. Stefan D. Schindler.

I could be asked, “By what standard do you measure Socrates’ success or failure as a citizen?” My standard is Socrates’ own divinely-defined version of citizenship which he gave in the Apology: “Be sure that this is what the god [Apollo] orders me to do, and I think there is no greater blessing for the city than my service to the god. For I go around doing nothing but persuading both young and old among you not to care for your body or your wealth in preference to or as strongly as for the best possible state of your soul, as I say to you: ‘Wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively’” (Ap. 30b) and “I was attached to this city by the god… as upon a great and noble horse which was somewhat sluggish because of its size and needed to be stirred up by a kind of gadfly” (Ap. 30d).[1] In all ages, things such as slavery and the oppression of women have been identified by thoughtful men as injustices, no matter what their society’s rationalizations to the contrary. Not long after Socrates’ own age, the Stoics, who identified him as their ideological forefather, proclaimed universal brotherhood. Writing about Plato’s Republic, F.M. Cornford remarks,

Nor was that particular form of polity adequate to contain the spirit discovered by Socrates. The new morality was a universal morality. The life genuinely inspired by its demands, for its political frame, a world-wide organization, co-extensive with the human race. It cannot be arrested at the boundaries of the city-state, nor yet of the nation. In the next century, after the conquests of Alexander, the Stoics began to perceive this truth. Their ideal of the wise man—the self-ruling and free individual—was derived from Socrates, rather than Plato; and they were the first to understand that the wise man is a citizen of the universe. The soul discovered by Socrates cannot pay allegiance to the laws of any city narrower than the city of Zeus.[2]

That Socrates in the Crito ended up paying allegiance to the laws of the city-state instead of “the city of Zeus”—perhaps the most enlightening puzzle in the whole question of Socrates the citizen—is an issue I will take up in my analysis of Accusation (C) and the essay’s conclusion.

In examining the grounds for my Accusations, and exploring whether or not I am correct, I face two difficulties. The first is the issue of sources. I’ll return to this matter more thoroughly in the next section of this essay. In the meantime I’ll state straight away that I am reliant upon the exegesis of Gregory Vlastos. The second is that I stand opposed to the historiographical tradition as I understand it. The overwhelming consensus has been to concur with the eulogy of Plato in the Phaedo, namely, that Socrates was “of all those we have known the best, and also the wisest and the most upright” (Ph. 118a). Though they fiercely disagree as to the content of his uprightness, scholars have nevertheless been equally fierce in their praise of the man—so much so, I believe, they forget that he was a man, not some man-god, or an incarnation of pure reason, rational inquiry, intellectual freedom, or some other pristine virtue. The unabashed high priests of this cult, in my mind, are A.E. Taylor and F.M. Cornford; even Vlastos often partakes in the ritual recital of Socratic majesty, though to his credit he does make several brave and insightful criticisms.[3] This cult goes so far as to scoff at and disregard any validity there may have been to the Athenian public’s anger against Socrates. Hence, while I by no means agree with the thesis of I.F. Stone—that Socrates was an anti-populist who “was proposing not kingship in its ancient form but a new kind of one-man rule, the basis of an ideal society,” distinct from oligarchy and democracy[4]—I empathize with the writer’s revisionism, and so I am not as quick as Cornford et al to dismiss “popular virtue,” unreflective though it may be, as no virtue at all.[5] But in saying that, I also recognize that there was a very real conflict between the Socratic personality and its social environment, a conflict that raised meaningful questions about right and wrong, and a citizen’s relation to history and morality.

My procedure will be as follows. First, I will meditate upon the difficult nature of the extant sources and establish my own position with regards to which evidence to use and which to disregard. Second, I will begin my analysis of Socrates, going through each of my Accusations. I will do so from a macroscopic perspective: I ask, “What are the major underlying patterns or themes of his era, and how do these relate to Athenian democracy and the historical Socrates?”

My position is that classical Greece underwent a monumental shift toward social and political consolidation. The loose agrarian affiliations of the immediate post-Dark Age period evolve, over the course of the Sixth through Fourth Centuries BCE, into organized city-states. Those city-states, in turn, evolve (and in evolving, succumb to) centralized empire. I adopt the term “synoecism,” which is normally used to describe the initial formation of the city-state, and apply it to this entire process. This massive synoecic sweep toward centralized consolidation was manifest in Athenian society at the trial of Socrates: a clash between the hybridized Homeric and democratic values of the polis against the individual moral conscience of the philosopher. Thus, in answering my Accusations, I must ask, “What was the class structure of Athens, especially as it related to citizenship and moral behavior?” and, “How did the Socratic personality conflict with that structure?”

I am interested in the historical Socrates because I am curious whether the real man has any relevance to contemporary times. As an historian, I am duty bound to both restore this man to his rightful context, as a matter of principle as much as for knowledge’s sake, and I am duty bound to utilize the knowledge gained to assist my own era. I specifically chose the facet of the historical Socrates that deals with citizenship because my concern is that today, in the West and in the East, citizens are being replaced by consumers, while in Islamic regions, citizens are being replaced by fanatics. Too many people are losing their humanity. In America and China, millions toil for debt and monetary profit, not for each other, not for life; among Muslims, a frightful number strive for death. It is hard to decide which is more terrifying. Nevertheless, it is my faith as an historian that knowledge of important legendary figures from the past, such as Socrates, will help ground us again in what it means to be authentic and felicitous human beings. Real people, even monks, exist in communities; more to the point, real people exist in polities. We interact with each other not only as compatriot spiritual animals, but as countrymen, and we move side by side, toward an unknown future and an unknown destiny. The method should be to move toward that distant point in solidarity. The measure of an individual person, then, lies not only in their hopes and ideals; it also, if not more, lies in their acting upon their hopes and ideals: whether they do so consistently, constructively, and in fairness to their loved ones and fellow citizens.

THE PUZZLE OF PLATO

Vlastos argues convincingly for a tripartite division of Plato’s writings into early, middle, and later periods that correspond to his elenctic (refutational), maeutic (“midwifing”), and elderly phases, and that it is in the early/elenctic dialogues in which an historian can find the best approximation to the historical Socrates. These dialogues were among Plato’s earliest, and as such were his most memory-informed and imaginatively re-creative.[6] Vlastos’ exegesis demonstrates that the crucial text among this group is the Apology. That text supplies crucial data for a broad range of questions pertaining to the historical Socrates, including mine. Because the Crito contains the most in-depth discussion of the Socrates from the early/elenctic dialogues on the subject of citizenship, it is the other important text from this group. Therefore, these two dialogues will be the center of my analysis. (At the end of the next section I will also make use of the Meno, a key transitional dialogue between the early/elenctic and the maeutic groups that has discernible threads from the historical Socrates.[7])

What of the other sources, namely, Xenophon, Aristotle, and Aristophanes? With regards to Xenophon, Vlastos dismembers him. Out of many reasons Vlastos gives, the most salient one is that in the attempt to portray Socrates as an ideal and law-abiding Athenian citizen, he inadvertently slips in the Memorabilia an important mention of the philosopher’s refutational argument style. Consequently, this tacit concession to the Platonic portrayal of Socrates undermines Xenophon’s entire project.[8] With regards to Aristotle, Vlastos pretty much sums it up when he writes, “That Socrates has no part in the metaphysical theory of Ideas,” something so very characteristic of the Socrates from the maeutic and last dialogues, “strikes Aristotle as so obvious that he feels no need to argue it,” which gives credence to its historical accuracy.[9] Because Aristotle “offers no support to scholars who divide the theory of Forms”—another Platonic innovation—“in two, giving an earlier version of it to Socrates, a subsequent one to Plato. As Aristotle understands the matter, all of it is Plato’s: Socrates has no part in it,”[10] he therefore confirms Vlastos’ division and interpretation of the texts.

With regards to Aristophanes, his play The Clouds has puzzled historians because Socrates himself was very likely to have been a member of its viewing audience. The philosopher’s statement in the Apology that the use of the Aristophanic caricature as a basis for the charge of heresy was “absurd” (Ap. 18d) indicates that at one time, Athenians and Socrates himself treated the play as no more than a joke. “His satire must be pointed not at an individual but at a ‘movement,’” suggests Taylor, “and we must take his Socrates, like Moliere’s Tartuffe, to be no more than an imaginary type [consistent with the traditions of Attican Comedy], to which he was tacked the name of a particular contemporary as a label without troubling himself about the justice of the selection.”[11] Moreover, Vlastos notes, “The anti-hero of the Clouds is many things to many men, but an ironist to none: too solemn by half as natural philosopher, sage or heirophant, too knavish as a preceptor of the young.”[12] The character’s interest in metaphysics, epistemology, ontology, or any other investigation that fell outside the purview of moral philosophy are bizarre when compared to the figure in Plato’s early/elenctic dialogues. In other words, he is utterly un-Socratic—and I reckon that was Aristophanes’ point.

What, then, of the notorious “Socratic Problem,” namely, what is an historian to make of Plato’s later use of his mentor as the mouthpiece of doctrines that, according to Vlastos’ division of the dialogues, are alien to Socrates’ own thinking? This has been the single greatest puzzle of Socratic studies, and the cause of clashing since ancient times. “[There] are two extreme views of the question. In one, Socrates is not a philosopher at all, but an ethical inspiration, a hero of the moral life. In the other, he is the creator of speculative philosophy, which Plato personifies in him. The meaning of this dichotomy is simply that the old division which, apparently immediately after Socrates’ death, split his disciples into opposing schools [Antisthenes against Plato], has reappeared, and once again each school is creating its own Socrates.”[13] In modern times, the chasm opens along exegetical lines: the dominant party, from the late 19^th Century through Cornford to Vlastos, has been the tripartite division; the dissenting party, represented by such multifarious types as Taylor and Stone, has tended to treat the entire corpus as truly Socratic, either in essence or in literal word.[14]

Over the years, the tripartite party has been able to refute the dissenters through the cumulative effect of their research. However, they have never adequately dismantled head-on the most cogent of the latter party’s arguments—Taylor’s argument: “Historians, as a matter of fact, habitually draw on [the entirety of Plato’s] dialogues for their picture of the intellectual movements of this great age, but they would lose their right to do so if Plato could be suspected of playing fast and loose with historical truth, as he is often alleged to have done in his statements about Socrates. A theory of his literary methods which its own adherents are constantly driven to ignore is hardly likely to be a sound one.”[15] There are only two counters I can think of against Taylor:

(1) He misunderstands historical method. There is no necessary requirement that a text must be straightforward and honest in order to give up facts. Furthermore, our tools have become much more sophisticated since the 1950s, when Taylor is writing. As Aristotle notes about the well-trained philosopher, historians are now able to hold within our minds two conflicting realities, in this case Plato’s simultaneous obfuscation and transmission of the historical Socrates.

And, (2) Vlastos explains the Platonic agenda: “those earlier works of Plato, no less than all those he was to produce thereafter, are meant as contributions to philosophy—not biography as such… Plato’s overriding concern, in stark contrast to Xenophon’s professed aim in his Socratic writings, is not to preserve memories of Socratic philosophizing but to create it anew—to bring it alive in dramas… Plato is producing, not reproducing, Socratic philosophizing.”[16]

As it happens, Taylor does have a rebuttal against Vlastos. He alleges that when the Apology was published, its author had in mind those who are personally acquainted with the philosopher or who attended the trial.[17] Would Plato be so foolish as to risk his reputation by publishing a false account of the event? If not, then should this not apply for the entirety of his dialogues? I respond that the Apology’s peculiarity within the Platonic corpus—it is neither an epistle nor a dialogue—can be construed to mean that it was not written for the purposes of either philosophy or history. The Apology is a memoriam. As such, all it needs to succeed as a valuable and informative document that captures Plato’s impression of his mentor, and capture this it does. With regards to the rest of the dialogues, it is very possible that Plato envisioned the dialogues as a new form of literature, one that was capable of out-competing the Homeric epic and the theater; if so, then he would have also had aimed for some kind of broader readership when he wrote them. Historians cannot know for certain whether this was the case; though, due to their structure and style, most of the dialogues seem to have been almost certainly first and foremost pedagogical tools for use within the small community of the Academy. Those few that were not were probably for Plato’s own private reflection.[18]

I am in Vlastos’ corner on this topic, but where we differ is that I nevertheless put Plato to task for how he bequeathed his teacher to posterity. That he had no concern other than memoriam is the problem, and his failing. It cannot be argued that Plato had no idea about history the discipline, for the masterpieces of Herodotus and Thucydides must have been circulating among the Athenian intelligentsia, even the secluded halls of the Academy. “Even if we assume that Herodotus’ Histories were not published in full in Athens until about 415, it is still possible that he had earlier given public readings from his ethnographies. Certainly the demand for such information was already there [as a consequence of maritime trade and colonialism].” [19] I reckon that Plato was simply disinterested in history. Perhaps it did not fit his mental temperament; perhaps he lacked an aptitude for it; or perhaps he was simply more interested in the future than the past. Whatever the reason, the problem with the historical Socrates is that Plato does not allow us to ever meet him mind-to-mind, person-to-person. Like a coyote fleeing its hunters, the true man slips away from us and hides somewhere within the matrix of his student’s memories. In this condition, an historian can only ever hope to see glimpses of him as he might have really been.

ACCUSATION (A): Socrates never questioned the justice of the way in which his society decided who was and who was not a citizen.

In the Crito, Socrates mouthed the laws of Athenian society as saying about him:

We have convincing proofs that we and the city were congenial to you. You would not have dwelt here most consistently of all the Athenians if the city had not been exceeding pleasing to you. You have never left the city, even to see a festival, nor for any other reason except military service; you have never gone to stay in any other city as people do; you have had no desire to know another city or other laws; we and our city satisfied you. (Cr. 52b-c)

Vlastos argues that what satisfied Socrates so much about his home was the radical democratism of its constitution.[20] Yet, his was a society founded upon the seclusion of women,[21] the disdain of foreigners,[22] and the free labor of slaves.[23] If it was true that, as Vlastos argues, Socrates’ vision was one in which “the philosophical life was open to all,”[24] can we reconcile reality with this contradictory assertion?

Vlastos’ position is that Socrates was not an anti-populist, as he was portrayed by his accusers. Rather, his attitude “is demophilic, though not strictly democratic,”[25] a love for the masses, yet not necessarily to the extent of believing the masses always know what is best for themselves: “We should not credit Socrates with a democratic political theory, for he has no political theory at all. But he does have political sentiments and loyalties, strong ones.”[26] The nature of that vision had everything to do with his conception of arête (virtue) and its relations to personhood. The content of Socratic arête possessed both an ideological and existential aspect—what he believed, and how he lived. The answer to Accusation (A) is to be found in the latter aspect, namely, that he questioned the justice of Athenian society by his lifestyle.

Athenian society was the result of the transition ancient Greece underwent from Mycenean civilization to Macedonian unification. This transition was the process of synoecism. “Synoecism” is derived from ancient Greek, “dwelling together” or “to unite together under one capital,” and means the composition or combination of parts or elements to form a whole. The term applies to the process by which Greek settlements recovered from the Dorian invasion. Many cities had been destroyed by the cataclysm; those that survived dissolved and dispersed into loosely affiliated farming communities. Lured by the potential of greater trade and power, these communities slowly coalesced or synthesized, starting in the Sixth Century BCE, into recognizably urban territories—the polis or city-state.

The term is also used to denote the process by which democracy originated and developed. In modern political science, synoecism is similar to consolidation and centralization, and would be opposed to federalism and decentralization. In ancient Greece, society was split between the demos, literally, “the country people,” and the aristos, the aristocratic, sacerdotal, and military families who tended to reside around the mountain and hill peaks that later became the acropoli (citadel). The distinction between the aristos and the demos was of great importance to the city-states. There was often severe antagonism between these two bodies, as evidenced by the numerous coups, revolutions, and counter-revolutions during the Peloponnesian War. Many city-states, most notably Sparta, relied upon and even relished the division between the two bodies; the democratic city-states, however, were formed by the forced combination of the demos with, and submerged under, the aristos. This included Athens, in which the villages of Atttica were so thoroughly combined with the aristos that the term demos eventually became identical with the whole community.

There is a catch: synoecism is one of those historical processes, like technological invention and proliferation, or the spread of religious ideas, that, once begun, seems to be pulled by its own logic toward a final end—in this case, centralized consolidation. Atoms are crushed together into molecules, and molecules stitched together into tissue, and tissues compiled into organs, and organs connected into physiological systems, and physiological systems arranged into bodies, all brought about by the simple, necessary, and nearly invisible romance of positive and negative charges at the subatomic level. So, too, for ancient Greece: the very conditions that gave birth to the city-state also brought its absorption into the Macedonian empire. These conditions were primarily the need to amass, control, and safeguard resources and trade routes, and the need to regulate class conflict (principally, the demos-aristos split).

Synoecism was therefore not a symptom of the region’s holistic recovery from the Dark Age, a recovery that bloodily culminates with the conquests of Phillip II. Rather, synoecism itself is the recovery, and all other things, even war and rationalism, are its symptoms. It is a human process resulting from the expression of certain human traits when put under certain geo-psychological conditions. Events such as the Persian Wars, which threatened the fruition of synoecism, and the Peloponnesian War, which created the conditions for the Macedonian unification, could be re-understood in this interpretation. Ironically, the invasions of Darius and Xerxes energized the process—Leonidas and his 300 Spartans died for national self-determination in ways far more profound than they realized. The catastrophic contest between Sparta and Athens, itself the product of the Greeks’ successful repulsion of Persian imperialism, was neither a step away from the process, as Thucydides unconsciously interpreted it, nor was it the decline and calamitous fall of the polis system, as modern scholarship interprets it. The Peloponnesian War can instead be re-construed as an intermediary step between chieftainship and empire. The same was true for the polis itself.

Let’s analyze the synoecic (r)evolution through its overt and subvert features, namely, politics and philosophy, respectively.[27] I will begin with the subvert feature. The Athenians were distinctly aware of their gradual transformation from chieftainship and archaic monarchy to tenuous oligarchy to aristocratic democracy, and finally, to participatory direct democracy for (nearly) all males. This evolution paralleled and interacted with their development from the loosely associated agrarian households (oikoi) of the Dark Age, into the citadel-based town of the Persian Wars, and eventually into the walled and ported polis of the imperial era. When communities consolidated into polities, so, too, did sensibilities and attitudes consolidate into psychologies. By this I mean that just as the impulse to constitutionalize (democracy in the case of Athens, oligarchy in the case of Sparta) sprung from the new polities, so, too, from increasing urbanization and stratified social interaction, grew the self (psyche in pre-Socratic and Socratic terminology, noumous in post-Socratic), recognized and conceived by its own awareness of impressions upon that very awareness.^[28] From the self, like a chemical chain reaction, sprung forth another heretofore unseen impulse, namely, the desire, indeed the drive, to inquire into the nature of things, and thus, rational inquiry, the subvert feature of the era began.

For we moderns, the era of Socrates is a time of legend: “Everything that any one of us can do to help or hinder his fellow man has been done, at least once, by a Greek.”^[29] This was not so for Socrates and his fellow Athenians. Their time of legends, immortalized in the poetry of Homer, Hesiod, and Pindar, had already long passed, and written history, during which Athenian democracy and high culture occurred—the Persian Wars, the Pentecontaetia (literally, “Fifty Years of Glory”), and the Peloponnesian War—was well underway. Of course, Homer, Hesiod, and Pindar were not only poets and prophets; they were also the repositories of ancient information, chroniclers in a sense. Before Herodotus and Thucydides, the distinction modern historians make between legend and fact was initially hazy or altogether nonexistent in their conception of things. The first historians were part of an emerging historical consciousness, correspondent with the growth of the self.

The fervent literary activity of the Pentecontaetia and post-Peloponnesian War periods indicates that Greeks as a whole, and Athenians especially, were ever more aware of change. “Many thoughtful people were wondering about the status of culture, the web of attitudes, beliefs and practices that raises human life above the life of beasts… Whatever initial role might be ascribed to Zeus, Prometheus, or anonymous deity, the essence of the new conception was that, under pressure from a hostile environment, man had had the wit to create, stage by stage, both technology and society.”^[30] Athens was only three centuries removed from the destruction of Mycenean institutions. In the cresting wave of synoecism, the remnants of that civilization were being swept away, taking with it a dimly remembered existence of forest hunting, equestrianism, chieftainship and monarchy, close-knit familial communities and simpler societal stratification. In the wave’s wake was a civilization of ever increasing complexity, intellectual sophistication, and new dangers from imperialism abroad and class warfare at home. Most unsettling of all was that for all this transitioning, the condition and nature (physis) of Man himself remained unchanged. “The daemonic world has withdrawn, leaving man alone with his passions… Yet, for ceasing to be supernatural, it is not the less mysterious and terrifying.”^[31]

The Peloponnesian War heated up things to a fever: “the effects of the catastrophe [the Spartan victory] were, inevitably, far more than merely political. It shook all moral laws; it struck at the roots of religion. If the disaster was to be repaired, the process must start with religion and ethics… It was in that time of suffering that the Greek spirit first began to turn inwards upon itself.”^[32] A humongous portion of the literature from the Fifth and Fourth Centuries, pre- and post-war, contains sophisticated inquiry into the facets of human existence, especially through the lens of the Athenian historical experience. “The real impression of the Spartan victory is to be found not in Athenian politics, but in Athenian philosophy and paideia [‘culture/education’]. The intellectual conflict with the Spartan point of view exercised Athens all through the Fourth Century down to her death as an independent democratic city-state.”^[33] It is no surprise that Herodotus and Thucydides, contemporaries of Socrates who represent the first concerted attempt by this society to demarcate legend from history (indeed, we derive our word “history” from the Greek istoria, meaning, “inquiry”), appeared at this juncture. Clearly there was a cognitive dissonance between the heroes of old, flawed though they may have been, and the Cleons and Alcibiadeses of the present.

This is the philosophical tenor of the times; what of the political? The Athens an historian meets in the sources is a community psychically decimated not only by enemies from without, but also, if not more so, by demons from within. During the thirty-year conflict with Sparta, Athens was resolute and frequently victorious. According to Thucydides, the Athenians’ downfall is a result of a series of strategic blunders, the greatest being a woefully misconceived expedition to Sicily, and ultimately, in a tragic irony befitting Sophocles, by their own violent disagreements as a community: “it was only because they had destroyed themselves by their own internal strife that finally they were forced to surrender” to Spartan hegemony (Hist. 2.65). Clearly, something went terribly wrong.

What went wrong was a topic of great debate. Xenophon and Plato blamed democracy, while Thucydides and Socrates blamed immorality (though they differed in their definition of immorality: inexpediency and impropriety for the former, a severe want of self-mastery for the latter). Both points of view were correct, yet insufficient, for the cause was far more complex. Since politics is as much a manifestation as a shaper of a society’s culture, an historian must look into the synoecic effects upon Athenian values.

J.W. Roberts identifies three principles shared by all Athenians:

(1) “Those who contribute most to the community should receive the most from it”^[34]—though the definition of a contribution was disputable, i.e., as in Socrates’ defense speech (Ap. 30b, 30d, and his notorious, “if I must make a just assessment of what I deserve, I assess it as this: free meals in the Prytaneum” at 36e).

(2) “As Greeks are superior to other men (in courage, intelligence, and political organization), so is Athens superior to other Greek cities.”^[35] In their minds, this superiority was demonstrated in the Persian Wars, especially on the field of Marathon (though, of course, they discounted the Spartan contribution at Thermopylae and Salamis).

And, (3) eudaemonia (“the good life,” “the felicitous existence”) consisted of inheriting an estate prosperous enough to render a man as nearly self-sufficient as possible. The goal of self-sufficiency, as is heard in Aristotle’s philosophy, was to become free enough to devote himself to politics, that is, the management and cultivation of the state.^[36]

This third principle is very important for, though he lived in a time of unprecedented transition and change, the average Athenian’s mentality was archaic. Athens’ values were distinctly Mycenaean or Homeric. The goal of liberated political activity was a merging of the ideals from their oikoi past, and the needs, responsibilities, and opportunities presented by the new reality of the polis. Athenian citizenship retained a conception of the good (agathos) from the Homeric past, specifically, that a good man was he who acquired enough resources to preserve or augment his household. His reason for doing so was also Homeric, in that he thirsted for historical glory (philotimia) as much, if not more than in the case of the imperial era, as for supporting his family. In order to accomplish either, he was required to cultivate an excellence (arête), a lá Achilles or Hercules, say, courage and prowess in war, or financial success in farming.

While this was an important force when Athens was on the rise, it proved too tenuous a glue when their society was faced with calamity. “Traditional morality offered little encouragement to a Greek to stay loyal to the community in time of adversity… [That] the welfare of the individual and his household depended on the welfare of the city, traditional morality prescribed primarily preservation of your own household if not its advancement; secondarily, the preservation, if not the advancement, of your city, but only if that was compatible with attaining the primary objective.”^[37] Little surprise that there could have existed among the democratic Athenians men of such ravenous character as the Thirty Tyrants.

The effect of the Spartan victory can now be understood in a new perspective. Five years before Socrates’ execution, Athens—this most politically and culturally experimental of ancient Mediterranean societies—had undergone a moral deformation so extreme that “a good proposal honestly put forward is just as suspect as something thoroughly bad, and the result is that just as the speaker who advocates some monstrous measure to win over the people by deceiving, so also the man with good advice has to tell lies if he expects to be believed,” wrote Thucydides (Hist. 3.43), himself as much victim as agent of Athenian excesses and atrocities during its imperial era. The result was that radical democracy, so hard-won by the Athenians, suddenly gave way to an authoritarian and terrorist regime so gluttonous in its brutality that, as Lysias described during the trial of Eratosthenes, “They had driven many of their fellow-countrymen over to the enemy [Sparta, et al]. They had put to death many without cause and had denied them a grave, and many who were about to give their daughters in marriage they had prevented,”^[38] things so horrific to Athenian sensibilities as to have been inconceivable only a generation prior.

To relate this all back to my Accusation (A), I must now ask the question, “Where did Socrates fit into this society?” In terms of hard facts, historians possess little about the man. His parentage and deme are known, and historians have a fairly good map of his social circle. But with regard to his civic and political life, little is known from direct evidence, and much of what I will argue here is extrapolation.

Socrates enjoyed all the rights and privileges of a fully fledged Athenian. He also shared in duties overtly stipulated by law, notably military service.[39] There is debate whether he was of middle- or working-class background. If his profession had been stonemasonry (as commonly believed since late antiquity), why then did he interrogate the craftsmen only after exhausting the poets and politicians, rather than the reverse (Ap. 22)? Indeed, that he first engaged the leadership of Athens could suggest that he was actually of similar social rank as they.

This debate about his class and profession is key. To restate, Vlastos’ position is that Socrates was not an anti-populist, as he was portrayed by his accusers or I.F. Stone. My position is that what so enraged his persecutors must have been the existential aspect of his conception of virtue, that is, the way he lived. Intrinsic to the subject of how one lives is their social rank and how they go about making a living. Thus, if it is true that Socrates was actually a member of the middle-class, then there are now three new underlying causes for the trial:

(1) Because of his resultant poverty. When he imagined the tribunal saying, “Are you not ashamed, Socrates, to have followed the kind of occupation that has led to your being now in danger of death?” (Ap. 28b) this carried with it the stigma of ruin. According to the oikoi conception of honor, “The generally admired style of life was to derive a large enough income from landed property to be able to afford the panoply of a heavy infantryman (hoplite) if not horses, and to have leisure for political activity.”[40] Socrates had therefore failed to increase the monetary wealth of his household, and so cursed his descendants to dependency upon others (something he and his friend argued over in the Crito – Cr. 45c-d).

(2) Because the professions of philosophy and sophistry were generally seen in Athens as little different from each other. Both were educational, shared much of the same pedagogical repertoire, and occupied similar social functions (analogous to our university education).[41] Indeed, this conflation of the two professions was at the heart of Socrates’ trial. In his defense speech, Socrates denied ever being paid for his services (Ap. 20), in contrast to the sophistic profession; this also explained his penury. He was required to contest the claim that he was a sophist because “what to us seems so preposterous—that a brilliant statesman’s role in public affairs could be accounted for by personal effect of a sophist’s teaching—was evidently not thought at all implausible at, or near, Socrates’ own lifetime… Socrates, because of his association with Critias, was believed […] to have been a breeder of subversion.”[42] This perception of him was very much active in the minds of his jury when they sent him to his death.

The fact that no charge of subversion appeared in the formal indictment does not necessarily mean he was convicted for the charges officially raised against him. To substantiate a subversion charge would have required a rehearsal of Socrates’ tutelage of Critias, and thus would have violated the amnesty signed after the fall of the Thirty Tyrants. Instead, Anytus et al resorted to what Roberts identifies as the two main methods of social control in Athens: comic theater and the judicial system.[43] “Socrates had provoked powerful enmities by blasting the credibility of big mouths in Athens and they, retaliating, had done their best to get people to believe that the Aristophanic caricature, a comic extravaganza, had been in fact the ugly truth.”[44] What this means is that Socrates “was prosecuted and convicted both as impious speculator and shyster rhetorician, on the one hand, and as a fomenter of oligarchic sentiment, on the other.”[45]

Finally, (3) because both professions were also generally seen as xeno (“alien,” “stranger,” “foreigner”). Though sophistry was Sicilian in origin while philosophy was Ionian (the ethnicity of Athens), both professions’ practitioners were, until Socrates and Plato, always foreign, that is, not born and raised Athenians. Make sure not to conflate the definition of xeno with that of the term barbaros. Barbaros meant “un-Greek,” the connotation being cultural. Xeno had a bodily and psychological connotation. In the case of philosophy and sophistry, at minimum these disciplines were xeno in the sense of being “inauthentically” Athenian; at maximum, they were akin to psychical disease infiltrating and corrupting the moral condition of society. Hence the charge against Socrates that he was a detrimental influence on youth (Ap. 23-27) can now be re-construed to have possessed a kind of racist undertone.

In total, then, Socrates appears to have been a radical peculiarity: a possible member of the middle-class who willingly, even happily, fell out from it, and joined the ranks of the disregarded classes of the xenoi, thetes, metics, slaves, and so on. His discussion with the slave in the Meno, in which he (or rather, an early maeutic version of him) demonstrated that even the lowest social ranked individual could still have the same intellectual capacities as a member of the middle class or higher (Mn. 82a-86b), evidences the egalitarian demophilia Vlastos identifies as characteristic of his historical personality. The Crito supplies information about the mentality which underlied his demophilia—as well as the clash that mentality had with its own social environment: “Crito urged the claims of Socrates’ friends and children. Socrates preferred to urge the claims of the community. […] By his life and death, Socrates poses the question whether a cohesive community is more likely to result from households responsive to public opinion,” that is, the Homeric oikoi value system in the new context of the polis, “or individuals responsive to conscience.”[46]

The clash between the Homeric and the Socratic mentalities helps explain the nature of Socrates’ trial in terms of where it stood within the legal system. “There was a distinction drawn between Public and Private suits, which however was not the same as that between our criminal and civil cases. The chief difference was that a public action usually came at once before a jury, when the preliminary investigation had been completed; whereas a private suit was taken in the first place to an arbitrator and was often settled without coming before a jury-court.”[47] Additionally, the polis government normally “took no cognizance of any crimes, not even murder, unless committed against itself: that is to say, the State did not prosecute for offenses now commonly regarded as committed against the community, but only for offenses against the government’s actual administration, such as treason or cheating the public treasury.”[48] Finally, the presence of Anytus, the size of the jury, and the communal tenor of the charges suggest a major governmental interest, if not role, in the trial. In other words, Socrates’ lifestyle, a laughable strangeness before the war, very likely could have been seen retrospectively after the war as an insidious danger to the community. It’s easy to imagine the thought process of the jury: “Here is a man who seems to through and through disdain Athenian social values, and may topple what’s left of our society—as those he once taught attempted to do—if he’s not done away with quickly.”[49]

We now confront a paradox: Socrates’ behavior—his life—is demophilic and egalitarian; yet philosophically, he never examines the basic justice or injustice of his society’s class structure. Vlastos writes,

There is no evidence that Socrates’ moral vision was exempt from that blindspot in the Athenian civic conscience which made it possible for Demosthenes, addressing a lot-selected court, to put compassion at the forefront of his city’s ethos, yet no less possible for his contemporary, Lycurgus, addressing a similar court, to declare that it is “most just and democratic” to make it mandatory that court evidence by slaves should be given under torture. To subject citizens to such treatment would be unthinkable in the Athenian judicial system. Nowhere in our sources is there the slightest indication that this and other forms of grossly discriminatory conduct towards slaves, sanctioned by the prevailing moral code, drew any protest from Socrates. His critique of the code leaves institutional morality untouched. It is directed solely to that area of conduct which falls entirely within the limits of the habitual expectations sustained by the institutional framework.[50]

Indeed, in the Meno, when Socrates demonstrated the universal and inalienable rationality of all human beings with a man of no less a demeaning social rank than a slave, the philosopher accepts his bondage as a matter of fact. Thus, in answer to Accusation (A), I judge it was by his chosen lifestyle, and not what he actually said, that he succeeded existentially where he failed philosophically. Overall, he appears to have acquiesced to the basic injustices of Athens’ class structure.

ACCUSATION (B): Socrates did not participate in his government—a duty expected of him by custom. Furthermore, it appears that he never questioned the policies of Cleon and Alcibiades, despite the terrible consequences these polices had for Athens.

It was demonstrated in the previous section that Socrates may have failed on multiple levels as a citizen by the established norms of his society. That he was a staunch upholder of the laws of Athenian democracy is never in doubt—after all, he ended his life in accordance with them. Nothing he had done was illegal strictly speaking, only improper. His only transgressions were against custom. This shouldn’t be taken lightly, however, for custom can be just as important, and as the case of Socrates illustrates can be more important, than written code. Take for example our own American custom regarding presidential war-making powers. Technically, only the Congress has the power to initiate armed conflict against another sovereign government. However, since the Korean War, which was characterized as a police action under the auspices of the United Nations, presidents have been finding ways of skirting this fundamental constitutional requirement. After Korea, Viet Nam, Libya, Lebanon, Panama, and Grenada, our nation became so accustomed to the expeditionary discretion of our executive branch that not even our own elected representatives realized the legal limbo in which the Iraq War was conceived. Today, people make a fuss about President Bush’s pretenses for the invasion, but they do not realize that lying to the American people is technically not illegal or impeachable; lacking a formal declaration of war from our legislature, on the other hand, is illegal. (The Congress’ 2003 resolution does not pass the established constitutional standards for a formal declaration of war.) Ironically, the expectation that a president must always be honest with the American people is itself another custom—one rarely abided.

Vlastos identifies one salient impropriety committed by Socrates: “What Socrates had made his own business throughout his life had been elenctic soul-saving. This had filled his life, day in, day out, leaving no time for what would count as ‘doing politics’ (prattein ta politika) in Athens, i.e., taking part in the debates in the Assembly and other functions where public policy was shaped. From what the Athenians would have counted as prettein ta politika Socrates had conscientiously abstained.”[51] Vlastos bases this on the statement by Pericles in Thucydides’ History:

Here [Athens] each individual is interested not only in his own affairs but in the affairs of the state as well: even those who are mostly occupied with their own business are extremely well-informed on general politics—this is a peculiarity of ours: we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all (Hist. 2.40).[52]

The key passage in our sources is Socrates’ own admission of political abstention: “Be sure, men of Athens, that if I had long ago attempted to take part in politics, I should have died long ago, and benefited neither you nor myself… No man will survive who genuinely opposes you or any other crowd and prevents the occurrence of many unjust and illegal happenings in the city. A man who really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public, life if he is to survive for even a short time” (Ap. 32a). Was his claim justified?

When we moderns look upon Socrates’ era, there exists a preference to think of it as a kind of ancient Enlightenment, akin our 18^th Century CE. E.R. Dodds chastens us, explaining that “the evidence we have is more than enough to prove that the Great Age of Greek Enlightenment was also, like our own time, an Age of Persecution—banishment of scholars, blinkering of thought, and even (if we can believe the tradition about Protagoras) burning of books.”[53] There was nothing unprecedented about the fact that a philosopher’s countrymen wanted his head on a platter:

[The] most striking feature of the reaction against the Enlightenment is to be seen in the successful prosecutions on religious grounds which took place at Athens in the last third of the Fifth Century. About 432 B.C., or a year or two later, disbelief in the supernatural and the teaching of astronomy were made indictable offenses. The next thirty-odd years witnessed a series of heresy trials which is unique in Athenian history. The victims included most of the leaders of progressive thought in Athens—Anaxagoras, Diagoras, Socrates, almost certainly Protagoras also, and possibly Euripides. In all these cases save the last the prosecution was successful… All these were famous people. How many obscurer persons may have suffered for their opinions we do not know.[54]

Dodds identifies several parallel and intersecting causes for the persecutions:

(1) “[The] new rationalism carried with it real as well as imaginary dangers for the social order”[55]; hence the accusations against Socrates of inventing new gods and corrupting the young. Additionally, philosophy may have represented a new economic competitor to professional diviners, who may have done their part to instill ant-rationalist sentiment among the general population.[56]

(2) “The new rationalism did not enable men to behave like beasts—men have always been able to do that. But it enabled them to justify their brutality to themselves, and that at a time when the external temptations to brutal conduct were particularly strong [i.e., the policies and personas of Cleon and Alcibiades].”[57] As I explained in the previous section, this dark side of rational inquiry, in the form of the sophists, very likely contributed to Socrates’ sentencing.

Finally, and most importantly, (3) was the influence of wartime hysteria. “If we allow for the fact that wars cast their shadows before them and leave emotional disturbances behind them, the Age of Persecution coincides pretty closely with the longest and most disastrous war in Greek history.”[58] In total, with conditions such as these, I would judge Socrates warranted in his political caution, though not necessarily warranted in his political abstention.

Virtue is the umbrella concept under which Socrates’ behavior as a citizen has to be understood. Fundamentally, he saw its attainment as a way of life: a total excellence encompassing, involving, and evolving one’s entire person. “The good life, the beautiful life, and just life are the same; does that still hold, or not?” he asked Crito (Cr. 48b). Cornford explains,

The true self is a faculty, not only of intuitive insight, but of will—a will that can override all other desires for pleasure and seeming happiness. The soul which sees what is really good infallibly desires the good it has discerned. Socrates held that this desire of the enlightened soul is so strong that it cannot fail to overpower all other desires whose object the true self sees to be illusory.[59]

I prefer Vlastos’ definition of Socratic virtue as “the invariant and sovereign good,” the grabbing hold of which “would of itself assure a sufficiency of happiness—enough of it to yield deep and durable contentment—but would still allow for small, but not negligible, enhancements of happiness as a result of the virtuous possession and use of non-moral goods.”[60] Yet, what both men are trying to elucidate is that in Socratic virtue, the problem of evil is not connected to incontinence of the will. “You may have known that other people think what you did was bad, or that you have been told it was bad; but if you had known for yourself it was bad, you would not have done it. Your fault was a failure of insight. You did not see the good; you were misled by some pleasure which seemed good at the moment… No one does wrong against his true will, when once that will has been directed to its object, the good, by a genuine and clear vision.”[61] The road to Hades is paved with good intentions.

The content of Socratic virtue is precise:

(1) In the Crito he spelled it out: “One should never do wrong in return, nor do any man harm, no matter what he may have done to you” (Cr. 49b). This was a multifaceted principle. On the one hand, its application to relationships between people was not as obvious as may be expected today. In fact, the established moral code was that of lex talionis, the law of retaliation.[62] He did not stop there, but deepened the concept by connecting it to personal cultivation: “[We] shall harm and corrupt that part of ourselves that is improved by just actions and destroyed by unjust actions” (Cr. 47d). On the other hand, he also expanded the application of this principle from the interpersonal to the sociological. “Tell me, Socrates, what are you intending to do?” he made the laws of Athens say, “Do you not by this action you are attempting intend to destroy us, the laws, and indeed the whole city, as far as you are concerned? Or do you think it possible for a city not to be destroyed if the verdicts of its courts have no force but are nullified and set at naught by private individuals?” (Cr. 50b) Thus, revolutionary though his rejection of retaliation may have been in terms of interpersonal relations, his conception of virtue also possessed a potential for conformity to established norms. This potential was as shocking to his friend Crito as it is for us today.

More importantly, virtue is (2) the courage to utilize rational inquiry in all matters, no matter what stresses may be bearing down upon you. This is the essence of his maxim, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” for not only would an existence without self-reflection be deprived of self-knowledge—and by extension, the potential to have more meaningful relationships with other human beings—it would also mean a shrunken existence, a life lived in fear, a life not really lived. Socrates insisted that a philosopher should not fear death, and his employment of reason in the direst, darkest moment of his life, alone in his jail cell with only his friends to keep him company, testifies to his commitment to such a belief.

Like eironia (irony), which Vlastos explains Socrates changed “not by theorizing about it but by creating something new for it to mean: a new form of life realized in himself which was the very incarnation of eironia… a previously unknown, unimagined type of personality,”[63] so, too, does the philosopher change the meaning of virtue, not so much by any definition, but by his actions. His philosophical method was crucial to the way in which he changed the definition of arête. “[The] question, ‘Why should I be moral?’ which some modern moralists would find tendentious—perversely predicated on the reduction of morality to interest—is for all Greek moralists a perfectly proper and unavoidable one, the most urgent of all the questions they must confront,”[64] a question Socrates chose to confront through refutational dialectical argument, or elenchus. This was a man who, as Vlastos envisions him, was through and through a street philosopher. Intrinsic to his professional and personal identities was the need to find salvation for himself and for others person-by-person, in the gymnasium, in the marketplace, at the dinner table, and so on. Elencticism was a full-time job. More, it demanded long overtime hours without vacation. Thus, “addressing a multitude [i.e., the Athenian Assembly] even in the best of causes would not have been what Socrates understands by ‘philosophizing’; only one-to-one elenctic argument could measure up to the specifications of what Socrates understands by that: anything else would be diversionary from that god-ordered mission to his city.”[65]

From his point of view, then, the abstention from politics would have been warranted: not only did it run the risk of his divine mission being cut short, but due to the fact that it is impossible to dialogue with a mass, it would have been inconsistent with his chosen technique. But is his political abstention warranted in the eyes of posterity? “It may seem incomprehensible that a man like Socrates, who would rather lose his life than connive in an injustice to a single person, should nonetheless have kept silent when his own participation might have saved Athens from the vilest crime yet perpetrated in war between Greek states, and should have kept silent again when Athens was to commit just such a crime against Torone, Scione, and Melos.”[66] So writes Vlastos, referring to Athens’ extermination of those city-states. I can’t help but agree: Socrates’ defeatism with regards to the efficacy of applying elencticism to political problems was not justified. It is peculiar and troubling that he discounted the effect coolheaded reason could have had upon his countrymen when they were voting to wipe out entire communities or to launch a foolhardy expedition to Syracuse. Was he not Athens’ gadfly? Did he not at some point have the ear, or at least the loins, of Alcibiades, the leading demagogue himself? The philosopher’s search for truth, if often lonely, can, must, and does correspond with his society’s struggle for justice, even if he is convinced that his society wants nothing to do with him. Thus, to answer my Accusation (B): yes, Socrates failed as a citizen in this regard.

ACCUSATION (C): Because Socrates conceived his divine mission very much as a patriotic duty, he may actually have undermined it when he submitted to the unjust death sentence of the tribunal.

“Indeed, men of Athens, I am far from making a defense now on my own behalf, as might be thought, but on yours,” declared Socrates in his famous “gadfly” speech, “to prevent you from wrongdoing by mistreating the god’s gift to you by condemning me: for if you kill me you will not easily find another like me.  I was attached to this city by the god… It is to fulfill some such function that I believe the god has placed me in the city” (Ap. 30e).  There are two tensions that arise from the interaction of this source, the Apology, with the Crito, that cast into doubt Socrates’ own fidelity to his mission:

(1) Socrates insisted to his jury that he would not stop philosophizing, for he had a higher duty to his god (Apollo)[67] (Ap. 30). However, he did not reconcile this divinely-defined version of citizenship with the obeisance-defined version he argued for in the Crito. In fact, the two versions seem diametrically opposed.

And, (2) “the god’s gift” had a double meaning, signifying both the personal soul (in the Socratic conception, the seat of moral agency) and Socrates himself. This was a train of thought Crito failed to follow, though in my eyes he seems to have orbited it (Cr. 44c, 45c and e, and 46a). More importantly, it was a train of thought Socrates failed to take up.

The two versions of citizenship are irreconcilable. Why Socrates opts for one in his defense speech, and opts for the other in the Crito, is indiscernible. This may very well be a result of the jail dialogue’s Platonic transmission to us: either Plato’s information was flawed, or his memory was flawed, or both. However, the overall textual evidence from the Platonic corpus does confirm that Socrates in his life did hold both perspectives of citizenship. How they related to each other within his mind—did he suffer cognitive dissonance? did he engineer a reconciliation now lost to posterity?—is unknown, but I wager that the key to how these two could even co-exist at all in that mind was his belief in the daemon.

Strictly speaking, the technical use of the term daemon today is meant to signify good or malevolent supernatural beings in ancient Greek culture that operated between mortals and gods, including demi-gods, fallen heroes of lore, and in the case of Socrates, a person’s own soul or something similar to it. What exactly the term signified then is difficult to ascertain. Various meanings include “divine power,” “fate” or “god” (hence, Socrates’ usage in the conclusions of the Apology and Crito), and intriguingly, “replete with knowledge.” Daemones scarcely figure in Greek mythology or Greek art. It seems that, like the keres (female death-spirits), theirs was an unseen but felt or assumed presence. Xenophon and others, including Plato later on in his writing career, portray daemones almost wholly as malevolent. This may be confirmed by the heresy charge of “inventing new gods” raised against Socrates, and by the fact that his appeal to an inner daemon was unsuccessful. Quite possibly, in the eyes of his jury, that he confessed to the possession of an inner daemon may have been, ironically, evidence that damned him.

Socrates’ daemon preferred negative direction as opposed to positive direction, that is, it only ever told him what not to do, i.e., when the philosopher was about to make a mistake. It may have been this inner compass that prevented Socrates from entering into politics (see previous section). Was his daemon intuition? Socrates’ very characterization of the phenomenon as a “daemon” suggests that he may have experienced its origin as divine, mysterious, and independent of his own thoughts. However, Dodds explains, “the Classical Age inherited a whole series of inconsistent pictures of the ‘soul’ or ‘self’—the living corpse in the grave, the shadowy image in Hades, the perishable breath that is spilt in the air or absorbed in the aether, the daemon that is reborn in other bodies. Though of varying age and derived from different culture-patterns, all these pictures persisted in the background of Fifth Century thinking…”[68] I add Cornford:

[If] it is true that the individual still recapitulates in miniature the history of the race, we are here concerned with something that goes very far back in human development. It is only in the first weeks of life that the human baby is a solipsist, taking for granted that his environment is a part of himself… [The] nascent belief in the independent existence of external objects is the foundation of the philosophy of common sense, forced on the infant by the breakdown of his naive solipsism. In the development of the race, the discovery that there are things outside the self must, as I said, lie very far back. But it is one thing to make this discovery, and quite another to reach the idea that these external objects have a nature of their own, foreign to man’s nature, and having neither sympathy nor hostility towards his passions and desires. A very long time must elapse before the line between the self and the object will be drawn where science draws it, and the object will be completely detached.[69]

Thus, another possibility is that Socrates’ daemon represented a bridge between humanity’s non-differentiating infanthood and a differentiating adolescence that, ironically, the philosopher himself helped nurture with his dialectical method.[70]Whatever the actual nature of this daemon, Socrates must have believed it came to him from Apollo. At the end of the Crito, he described himself as being “led” by his god; earlier, at the climax of the Apology, he indicated as much (Cr. 54e and Ap. 42a). To answer my Accusation (C), the resolution seems to be that, regardless of whether he was aware of the logical contradictions of his position, he went forward with his chosen course of action in the belief that it was consistent with his divine mission because his daemon never told him it wasn’t.

CONCLUSION

I see in Socrates a subtle irony: he was the dialectic of Athens, embodying the very push-and-pull of Athenian democracy and Athenian philosophy. The Athenian political system proved to be a boon for intellectual exploration: “’Live as you please’ was a slogan of radical democracy… In any other city, Socrates, had he tried to live as he lived in Athens, would have been silenced much sooner.”^[71] But it was that democracy that did silence him.^[72] In sum, the two forces for which Athens is remembered by history—radical democracy and rational inquiry—conflicted as much as they conciliated, a yin-yang tension best exemplified in the city-state’s martyred son.

Socrates was not only a living, breathing dialectic; he was a living, breathing man. As such, he was subject to the same immutable laws as the rest of us. Chief among those laws is that, no matter how far he or she may be able to expand their field of vision, paradoxically, a person’s perspective is always narrow. Einstein’s relativity holds true: we are all bound to a particular time within a particular space. The salient lesson of Socrates the citizen, then, is twofold: that even the greatest revolutionaries are at points not so revolutionary, but that it is better to have aspired and failed than to have never aspired at all.

The question now becomes: “To what do we aspire?” I reckon Socrates would answer with another question: “For whom do we aspire?” This was what he was trying to tell his friend Crito: there would have been no worth in fleeing to Thrace to escape execution. Better to die for those he loved, deadly wrong though they were, than to abandon them to darkness. Perhaps that was the way in which he reconciled his two notions of citizenship—or tolerated their opposition. It may have also been the reason why his daemon did not attempt to keep him from his chosen course of action. That for Socrates the “whom” in the “for whom do we aspire” did not always include slaves or xenoi or women is, in the long view of the historian, just as important as those it did include; his moral bivalence places Socrates rightly places him in historical context. And thus the deeper meaning of the lesson becomes clear: true service begins with authentic citizenship in your time, injustices and all.

WORKS CITED

Cornford, F.M. Before and After Socrates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932.

Freeman, K.W. The Murder of Herodes and Other Trials in the Athenian Law Courts. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1991.

Jaeger, Werner. Paideia: the Ideals of Greek Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1943.

Plato and Grube, G.M.A., tr. Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo. 2^nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2002.

Roberts, J.W. City of Sokrates. 2^nd ed. London: Routledge, 1998.

Stone, I.F. The Trial of Socrates. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1988.

Taylor, A.E. Socrates: The Man and His Thought. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1953.

Thucydides and Warner, Rex, tr. History of the Peloponnesian War. Reprinted ed. Suffolk: Penguin Books, 1986.

Vlastos, Gregory. Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher. Ithaca: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

— Socratic Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

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[1] My textual citations are from John M. Cooper’s revision of G.M.A. Grube’s translation: Plato and Grube, G.M.A., tr. Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo. 2^nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2002. Additionally, my citation from Thucydides in Accusation (B) is from Rex Warner’s magnificent translation: Thucydides and Warner, Rex, tr. History of the Peloponnesian War. Reprinted ed. Suffolk: Penguin Books, 1986.

[2] Cornford, F.M. Before and After Socrates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932. pp. 83-84.

[3] None of this is to say that I find zero value in Taylor’s and Cornford’s research. In fact, I will make use of them in this essay. However, in my eyes, Vlastos’ exegesis is of superior quality compared to these two scholars.

[4] Stone, I.F. The Trial of Socrates. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1988. pp. 11-12.

[5] Cornford, Before and After Socrates, p. 52.

[6] Vlastos, Gregory. Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher. Ithaca: Cambridge University Press, 1999. pp. 46-47, 50-51, and 94.

[7] Following Vlastos’ reasoning, the Meno is divisible into two sections: in 70a-81a, the early/elenctic Socrates; from 81 on, the maeutic Socrates emerges. We also find in this dialogue other historical information, such as the philosopher’s conflict with Anytus, in which the politician ruefully warns him, “I think, Socrates, that you easily speak ill of people. I would advise you, if you will listen to me, to be careful” (94e). There is also an exploration of sophistry’s claim to be able to teach virtue (beginning at 95c).

[8] Vlastos, Ironist, pp. 99-106. In particular, see: p. 105.

[9] Ibid., p. 91.

[10] Ibid., pp. 92-93.

[11] Taylor, A.E. Socrates: The Man and His Thought. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1953. pp. 16 and 20.

[12] Vlastos, Ironist, p. 29.

[13] Jaeger, Werner. Paideia: the Ideals of Greek Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1943. p. 26

[14] There is also a third party, best represented by Leo Strauss, who stand apart from the ravine. This party looks to Xenophon for their historical Socrates. See Leo Straus’ Xenophon’s Socrates from St. Augustine Press (2004).

[15] Taylor, Socrates, p. 34.

[16] Vlastos, Ironist, p. 50.

[17] Taylor, Socrates, pp. 31.

[18] Taylor, Socrates, pp.26-31. See also the introduction to Cooper, John M., ed. Plato: The Complete Works. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1997.

[19] Roberts, J.W. City of Sokrates. 2^nd ed. London: Routledge, 1998. p. 217. Roberts used his own revised spellings of Greek pronouns. Whenever I quote from him, I am also converting his spellings according to established precedence.

[20] Vlastos, Ironist, p. 92.

[21] Roberts, City of Sokrates, pp. 23-29.

[22] Ibid., pp. 29-31.

[23] Ibid., pp. 31-40.

[24] Vlastos, Ironist, p. 18.

[25] Ibid., p. 18.

[26] Ibid., p. 18.

[27] Note: the interplay of these two features in the historical Socrates occured during—and is part and parcel of—the Axial Age. This was a global phenomenon of civilizational development first identified by Karl Jaspers. In his book, The Origin and Goal of History, he points out a number of key thinkers in ancient Greece, the Middle East, India, and China, during the time span 800-200 BCE, who share strikingly similar intellectual projects, the conclusions of which profoundly influence their respective civilizations and all human thinking thereafter. In essence, Socrates is Greece’s Confucius (or Confucius China’s Socrates!), a simplistic comparison, true, but handy enough to grasp the undercurrents of the era, undercurrents far more archetypal and profound than I can address in this essay.

^[28] Cornford, Before and After Socrates, pp. 8-14 and Taylor, Socrates, pp. 132-140. Impressions could and were internal as well as external: “The Greek had always felt the experience of passion as something mysterious and frightening, the experience of a force that was in him, possessing him, rather than possessed by him. The very word pathos testifies to that: like its Latin equivalent passio, it means something that ‘happens to’ a man, something of which he is the passive victim.” Dodds, E.R. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951. p. 185.

^[29] Yourcenar, Marguerite. Memoirs of Hadrian. New York: The Noonday Press, 1963. p. 36.

^[30] Roberts, The City of Sokrates, p. 218.

^[31] Dodds, Greeks and the Irrational, p. 186.

^[32] Jaeger, Paideia, pp. 3-4.

^[33] Ibid., p. 6.

^[34] Roberts, City of Sokrates, p. 68.

^[35] Ibid., p. 68.

^[36] Ibid., p. 68.

^[37] Ibid., pp. 82-83.

^[38] Freeman, K.W. The Murder of Herodes and Other Trials in the Athenian Law Courts. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1991. p. 58.

[39] We know that he served with distinction in three foreign campaigns during the war with Sparta. Cross-checking of sources, particularly Thucydides, has helped scholars confirm the sections of his autobiography in the Apology and elsewhere in the Platonic corpus that pertain to his on-again-off-again hoplite career. So strong was his attachment to the polis of his birth and upbringing that these campaigns are also the only instances during which he visited foreign soil. His acquaintance with the constitutions of other city-states may therefore be explicable not only by dint of his having been a citizen in the center of the Hellenic cultural sphere, but also his adventures to Potidea, Amphipolis, and Delium. I think it doubtless that the ever-curious Socrates probably would have seized the opportunity to leave the barracks in order mingle and debate with locals, allies, and when possible, enemies.

[40] Roberts, City of Sokrates, p. 39.

[41] Ibid., pp. 224-226.

[42] Vlastos, Gregory. Socratic Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. p. 88.

[43] Roberts, City of Sokrates, pp. 80-81.

[44] Vlastos, Socratic Studies, p. 90

[45] Ibid., p. 90

[46] Roberts, City of Sokrates, p. 84.

[47] Freeman, The Murder of Herodes, pp.25-26. Also: Roberts, City of Sokrates, pp. 246-248 (his 11 points).

[48] Ibid., p. 19

[49] Of course, his countrymen overlooked the fact that he had risked his own life opposing, in his own way, the Critian regime, and that he did so precisely because that regime violently violated the traditional Athenian way of life.

[50] Vlastos, Ironist, p. 180.

[51] Vlastos, Socratic Studies¸ p. 128.

[52] Essentially, one way my argument in this section can be understood is that Socrates’ trial is counter-evidence to Pericles’ claim that being “well-informed on politics” was a satisfactory minimum for fulfilling one’s civic duty. Also of interest: “We give our obedience to those whom we put in positions of authority, and we obey the laws themselves, especially those which are for the protection of the oppressed, and those unwritten laws which it is an acknowledged shame to break” (Hist. 2.37). One could write an entire dissertation on the ways in which this statement was contradicted by Athenian realities, and how the Socratic personality challenged or conformed to those contradictions. But, for the sake of giving food for thought, here is my dissection in brief: (A) “We give our obedience” to “obey the laws themselves”: it is true that the Socrates of the Crito acted consistent with this statement, but he went against it in the Apology (see: next section). (B) “…especially those which are for the protect of the oppressed”: as we saw in the previous section, the Athenians followed very particular definitions for who could and could not qualify as “oppressed,” and Socrates certainly conformed to the status quo in this regard. And , (C) “…those unwritten laws which it is an acknowledged shame to break”: this is a strong statement in support of the importance of custom in Athens, and adds more evidence to my argument in this section.

[53] Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 189.

[54] Ibid., p. 189.

[55] Ibid., p. 191.

[56] Ibid., p. 190.

[57] Ibid., p. 191.

[58] Ibid., p. 190.

[59] Cornford, Before and After Socrates, p. 51.

[60] Vlastos, Ironist, p. 217.

[61] Cornford, Before and After Socrates., pp. 51-52.

[62] Ibid., pp. 50-51.

[63] Vlastos, Ironist, p. 29.

[64] Ibid., pp. 203-204.

[65] Vlastos, Socratic Studies, p. 131.

[66] Ibid., p. 130.

[67] The Oracle of Delphi was the vicar of Apollo; hence, the god to whom Socrates was pious in Plato’s dialogues must be him. The confusion over whether “the god” referred to an actual Greek deity or to his daemon stems from the tribunal’s own confused indictment, and from Xenophon’s rendition of the philosopher.

[68] Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, pp. 179-180.

[69] Cornford, Before and After Socrates, pp. 8-9.

[70] Taylor, Socrates, pp. 157-162.

^[71] Roberts, City of Sokrates, p. 77.

^[72] Ironically enough, by the very same tool the Thirty Tyrants used to silence their enemies, that is, poison by imbibing hemlock. See: Freeman, The Murder of Herodes, p. 57.