Socrates

INDEX

I

INTRODUCTORY

THE life of a great man, particularly when he belongs to a remote age, can never be a mere record of undisputed fact. Even when such facts are plentiful, the biographer’s real business is with their interpretation; he must penetrate behind mere events to the purpose and character they disclose, and can only do so by an effort of constructive imagination. And in the case of both the historical figures whose influence on the life of humanity has been profoundest, Jesus and Socrates, indisputable facts are exceptionally rare; perhaps there is only one statement about each which a man might not deny without forfeiting his claim to be counted among the sane. It is certain that Jesus ‘suffered under Pontius Pilate,’ and no less certain that Socrates was put to death at Athens on a charge of impiety in the ‘year of Laches’ (399 B.C.). Any account of either which goes beyond such a statement is inevitably a personal construction. Hence even this unpretentious sketch must be introduced by some remarks on the sources from which its writer has drawn the materials of his own construction, and the principles which have guided him in his use of them.

Socrates himself left no record of his own thought or actions. That he did not is a direct consequence of the character of the society to which he belonged. Though the part of his life of which we know most, his old age, was prolonged into a different and less happy time, Socrates was, by birth and upbringing, a man of the great age of Pericles; in fact, he was a man of over forty at the death of that statesman. Now the Athenians of those spacious days did not write books; it was an age of great tragedies, but not of prose literature. This is why, apart from one single instructive, but not absolutely certain, allusion, we have no contemporary record of anything done or said by Socrates until he was close on fifty. He was already forty-seven or more when the famous comic poets, Aristophanes and Amipsias, for some reason both selected him as the butt of their topical burlesques for the year 423 B.C.; a third comedian, Eupolis, followed suit two years later. We still possess Aristophanes’ brilliant caricature, the Clouds, though in a version perhaps retouched by the author, and it is the only document dealing with Socrates which dates from a time before his own death.

The deep impression made by the trial and death of the philosopher led at once to the creation of a whole literature in which younger men who had come under his influence sought to preserve his memory by depicting his personality and conversation. Much of this has perished, but we still have the imposing series of dialogues in which Plato has made Socrates the central figure, the apologetic Memorials of the Master composed by Xenophon, with one or two minor works of the same kind from his hand, and a few pages of the Socratic dialogues of a third contemporary, Aeschines of Sphettus, and these, of course, are the main sources for any account of the philosopher. The problem is to know the right way to handle them. It is important to remember that all three writers were many years the juniors of their hero. Plato was some forty-three years younger than Socrates, Xenophon almost certainly a few years younger still, and though we have no exact dates for Aeschines, he must be roughly contemporary with the others.¹

None of the three, then, can have had trustworthy recollections of Socrates as he was before the age of fifty-five; when they tell us anything of his prime, or his early life, they are not speaking from first-hand knowledge.¹

Biography as a recognized form of literature only appears among the Greeks in the third century B.C. (300-200 B.C.) as characteristic of the Alexandrian age. Philosophers, like poets, had by that time become objects of curiosity to a reading public, and more than one writer set himself to gratify this curiosity. The works thus produced have perished, but their substance is preserved for us in the Lives of Philosophers, which bears the otherwise unknown name of Diogenes Laertius, and, in its final form, dates from about A.D. 200. The account given of Socrates in this work remains as the chief monument of what was known or surmised about its subject by men of letters living under the Ptolemies and later. Of course it has preserved some statements of great value, substantiated by the names of the earlier authors who vouch for them. But the critical standard of the biographers of the Alexandrian age was not high. Their public demanded not so much accuracy as piquant anecdote, scandal, and repartee, and the writer had to study the taste of his public. Moreover, an author of this age was not very favourably placed for ascertaining the facts about the career of a fifth - century Athenian. The material was scanty, and consisted largely of unexplained passing allusions, often enough of topical jests in some comedy, the meaning of which was as obscure to an Alexandrian as it is to us. Biographies compiled under such conditions must not be expected to throw much light on the personality of any one, least of all on that of a man who, like Dr. Johnson, was already becoming the centre of a legend in his own lifetime. Thus for serious purposes we are thrown back almost entirely upon what we are told about Socrates by persons who could speak from their own direct knowledge, that is, in the main, upon Aristophanes, Plato, and Xenophon.

How far can we trust the representations of any or all of these writers? If certain theories widely held in the nineteenth century are sound, it would be rash to trust any of them. Aristophanes, it was said, is a comic poet, and his business is not to tell the truth but to distort it. The differences between his Socrates and those of Xenophon and Plato are so marked that we cannot take them for portraits of a single original. Either the poet and his audience must have known nothing about the ostensible hero of his play, or his object must have been something different from effective personal caricature. His satire must be pointed not at an individual but at a ‘movement,’ and we must take his Socrates, like Molière’s Tartuffe, to be no more than an imaginary type, to which he has tacked the name of a particular contemporary as a label without troubling himself about the justice of the selection. Plato, no doubt, had the intimate knowledge and the dramatic gifts which might have enabled him to draw a faithful and vivid picture. But his purpose, it was generally held, was not that of the portrait-painter. His Socrates was meant either as a fancy picture of what a great philosopher should be, or as a ‘mask’ for himself. This was supposed to be proved by alleged discrepancies between Plato’s account and Xenophon’s. The Socrates of Xenophon is an excellent, but rather prosy, preacher of a good common-sense morality, with a marked dislike of unpractical speculations and ‘useless’ science.¹ Plato’s is a humorist and a great philosopher, with profound metaphysical convictions and a wide acquaintance with the highest science of his time. Hence it was assumed that the genius, the humour, the metaphysics, have been imported into the picture by Plato; they are disguised self-revelation.² It was inferred at first that the true way to get at the historical facts about Socrates is to pin our faith to Xenophon and use his statements to reduce the great figure of the Platonic dialogues to conventional proportions. (The ‘historical Socrates,’ of whom nineteenth-century writers had much to say, meant, in fact, the Socrates of Plato with the genius taken out of him.) On further inquiry, however, it appears that there are good reasons for being uneasy about the competence of Xenophon himself as a witness. It does not appear from his own writings that he was ever particularly intimate with Socrates, and it seems to be certain that he cannot have been more than twenty-four at the outside when he saw the Master for the last time.¹ In any case, he was far away in Asia when Socrates was tried and condemned, and his own Socratic writings must have been composed at various intervals after his subsequent return to Greece, when he was living in exile from Athens and without much opportunity of consulting other surviving members of the Socratic circle. In some of them he tries our belief hard by attributing to the notoriously town-loving Socrates his own marked taste for farming and country life, and the most considerable of them, the Memorabilia, is further put out of count to an unknown extent by the fact that it has an avowedly ‘apologetic’ purpose. It is also pointed out that there is good reason to think that Xenophon has eked out his own, probably not very extensive, recollections by using as material for his picture the very Platonic dialogues which he was at one time used to ‘control.’ This explains why there was a tendency among many of the foremost scholars at the opening of the present century to complete scepticism about the very possibility of any knowledge of the ‘historical Socrates.’¹ An agnosticism of this kind must always be a melancholy pis aller for the historian; in the case of Socrates there is fortunately a way out of it, if we are careful to interpret our evidence in the light of certain sound general principles.

To begin with the question of the worth of the testimony of Aristophanes and his brother comedians. We have in the first place to remember that the Old Attic Comedy dealt throughout in personal burlesque, not in satire on generalized social ‘types,’ and that it was essential to the comedian’s success that the object of the burlesque should be a public notoriety. We may therefore be perfectly certain that Socrates was already a well-known figure when Aristophanes attacked him, and that the poet counted upon the excellence of the caricature as something which the audience would recognize. Also we have to remember the general principle that a successful burlesque must be founded on notorious fact, or what is believed to be such.¹ It must be a distortion, for comic effect, of something which is not the mere invention of the caricaturist. Consequently, when Aristophanes makes it the main point of his play to represent Socrates as the head of something like a regular ‘School’ who combine physical science with what we should call ‘spiritualism,’ though we should be very foolish if we took his representations at anything like their ‘face value,’ we should be equally foolish not to ask ourselves what are the real facts which explain the caricature, and whether we cannot discern them reappearing from a different angle of vision in what we are told by Plato or Xenophon.

It is true, again, that there is a marked contrast between the Socrates of the Aristophanic play, with his ‘pupils’ and ‘thinking-shop,’ and the Platonic (or Xenophontic) Socrates with his ‘mission’ to every one who will listen to him. But when we remember that Aristophanes is burlesquing Socrates as he was, or was believed to be, at a time when Plato and Xenophon were little more than babies, we should see that the contrast may well be largely explained by this difference in date. It may prove to be the fact that Socrates at forty-five was in some ways a different man from Socrates at fifty-five or sixty, and that evidence of the fact is actually supplied by the works of Plato and Xenophon themselves, when we read them with proper attention. I shall accordingly make use, for the purpose of this sketch, of the evidence of Attic comedy, though, I hope, always with due caution.

When we come to consider the real or alleged discrepancies between Plato and Xenophon themselves, the first thing that