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PART III
THE LATER SOCRATES
WE now come to the Socrates of the Platonic dialogues, of the Symposia, both of Xenophon and Plato, the gadfly of the Athenian democracy, the scourge of statesmen, artisans and sophists. We can discern a great deal, both what is explicitly stated by his apologists and what is written between the lines -- for silence is sometimes eloquent -- about his private life. We find, for example, that the Socrates of the Symposium moves in very good society. He comes to the banquet from the bath, adorned like a bridegroom, and wearing sandals. 1
There is the charming passage in the Symposium describing how Socrates is accosted by a friend who twits him on his appearance (the contretemps is described by a third person). ‘He said that he met Socrates fresh from the bath and sandaled and as the sight of sandals was unusual he asked him whither he was going that he had been converted into such a beau.'
On the whole there has been far too much enthusiasm wasted, we feel, on the ascetic Socrates, the philosopher who scorns all mundane interests and turns in contempt from the things of the flesh. The episode which Xenophon relates, of his conversation with the lovely courtesan, Theodoté, indicates that the body even in his riper years was not entirely sublimated. The advice that he lavishes on an aspiring young lady of her profession reflects a warm and lively interest in quite unspiritual pursuits.
So far as we know, no critics have ever noticed the exquisite humor of Aristophanes' reference to Socrates in the Birds (1553). / 53 /The Birds, be it remembered, was produced in 414, a year or so after the dramatic date of the Symposium. Socrates' new-found cleanliness was evidently a subject for widespread comment. So, too, was his new interest in "souls." The temptation was too much for Aristophanes; his restless, devastating humor pounced on the situation and twisted it into a mocking burlesque. Socrates is so entranced with his new "mission" as a "leader of souls" that he has quite lapsed from his new-found cleanliness. The notion of this recent convert to elegance paddling around the marshes "unwashed" must have been irresistibly comical to an Athenian audience!' He is now the friend of Alcibiades, Critias, Aristophanes, and Crito, and is close to the family of the great Aristides. At this period, if the tradition of later writers has any value, he marries into a great and proud patrician family. His wife is Myrto of the family of Aristides. At one point in the middle of his life he must have been moderately well off; but now he is said to have lost money -- eighty minas in speculation. 3
Plutarch has preserved two very interesting comments on Socrates' financial status. One was made by Demetrius of Phalerum who said that Socrates possessed seventy minas, held for him by Crito. The other, which strikes a provocative note, comes to us by way of Libanus who contends that Socrates had lost eighty minas in speculation.
It is tempting to connect this with the financial debacle that followed on the heels of the disastrous Sicilian expedition. We know also that one of his wealthy young friends -- Charmides --offered to transfer to him title to a number of slaves in order that he might derive an income from their labor. 4 This offer he refused. (There is a lurking trace of irony in Diogenes' account of the refusal; in the same sentence he says that some even suggest Socrates was able to resist the charms of Alcibiades.) The refusal itself is unimportant. What is significant to notice is the relationship that is being formed between Socrates and his new / 54 / disciples of the nobility. There is no need to press too literally the tradition preserved by Porphyry, 5 who is after all a very late and therefore unreliable authority, that Socrates profited financially from a too close intimacy with his followers. That such an intimacy existed not even Plato thought it necessary to conceal. Some of Plato's revelations are surprisingly candid. 6 While we must suspend judgment on the more immediate monetary aspects of this relationship, it is clear that Socrates was able to depend in any emergency on the generosity of his friends. In The Republic, for instance, when Thrasymachus demands payment for his instruction -- payment which Socrates obviously is unable to afford on his own account -- the young hearers display an instantaneous willingness to assist. 7
Following the lively interchange with Thrasymachus -- when the latter demands pay for his instructive discourse -- Socrates protests that he has no money; whereupon Glaucon offers to come to his rescue and says that all his friends will chip in for Socrates.
When, after his conviction, Socrates is languishing in prison, Crito offers to pay the fine for him and enable him to escape. He says at the same time that there are several others of his young friends who would be only too happy to help save him. 8
There is a clash of themes here, a contrast between the earlier and later figures of Socrates. Until the fatal transition his strongest characteristic is a kind of rugged honesty, an independence which is symbolized in his willingness to endure and even overlook the deprivations of poverty; his intense ardor to wrestle with the serious problems of physical philosophy in a tumbled-down, struggling school such as Aristophanes described. We can find far less to admire in the rather pathetic figure of later days -- the Socrates who has lost all but the shreds of this dignity. The price he paid for well-being and the flattering approval of the nobility was a complete sacrifice of his own independence. From the moment that he yielded to the temptations of the "good and true" he became their puppet and apologist and was forced into a position of moral and financial dependence. The semi-religious asceticism and half-wistful mendicancy which set the tone of our later Soc- / 55 / rates look oddly incongruous against the background of his earlier skepticism and the rugged, if honest, poverty of his artisan past. Perhaps even he was in some way conscious of this enormous in consistency; we might read into his growing conviction that the truly philosophic mind is always independent of trivialities, a rationalization of his own abject dependence.
From Plato's main dialogues dealing with this period -- the Symposium, Phaedo, and The Republic -- we get a complete enough picture of the select circle who gathered round the master and participated in the discussions on philosophy. Among the better-known figures was Alcibiades, whose erratic career we have already mentioned. In his mature life he showed a strong tendency to embrace the oligarchical position. We also find Aristophanes, Socrates' old adversary with whom a truce had now been concluded on the basis of unconditional surrender; Crito and Critias, ardent and wealthy young patricians, one of them a stalwart supporter of Socrates at the trial, the other an all too-prominent leader of the reactionary conspiracy of the Thirty; Cephalus -- the wealthy manufacturer who owned a large shield factory at the Piraeus -- a Periclean democrat whose thoughts began to center on the eternal at the first prickings of a guilty conscience and whose politics became more and more conservative, became even reactionary, under aristocratic pressure during the period of crisis for the slaveowning democracy. Each member of this group in his own way, either political or intellectual, was bound up with the party of bitter opposition to the democracy.
A brief glance at a few of these personalities will afford us an insight into the essential character of the whole later Socratic group. Alcibiades was perfectly prepared to abandon not only democracy but Athens as well. He did both. Xenophon carried hatred of democracy to the point not merely of pamphleteering against democratic principles; he even deserted his native Attica for Cyrus and a Persian camp. Plato's loathing for the ways of democracy is sufficiently apparent in almost every line of The Republic. Critias is perhaps the most singular example to be found. He began life as a democrat and as a vigorous exponent of demo- / 56 / cratic thought. That he became the most bloodthirsty and reactionary of even the Thirty was in wide circles, and quite naturally, attributed to the influence of Socrates.
It is concerning this stage in Socrates' life that we find the most complete information, although it is refracted through the not altogether impartial eyes of Xenophon and Plato.
Two phases of Socrates' activity at this period are very striking. The first is the attitude he adopts towards typical representatives of the democracy. He is now represented as a kind of gadfly, pricking and tormenting artisans and statesmen, by showing them that their pretended wisdom is only a groping kind of trial and error. This is the period of ethical search for an ethical certainty, the attempt to find absolute and unvarying principles by which to explain all human action and to show the inner nature and essential character of such virtues as justice, courage, temperance and the like. This is the period, too, when there develops the sharp, unmediated distinction between knowledge and ignorance with the corollary doctrine that any action or belief which is not founded on "knowledge" of the essence of each virtue is to be regarded as useless and unsatisfying. In this, the account given by Plato in the Socratic dialogues and the picture drawn by Xenophon in the Memorabilia completely agree, although Plato has a much clearer notion of the implications of this view. In setting out on the path of philosophy, Plato builds on the teachings of this period of Socrates' life. The early Plato developed his thinking from a purely Socratic position. But a fact which has never been given sufficient emphasis is this: that Plato could only have known the later Socrates. He was born, so Diogenes tells us, 9 in the year that Pericles died. He could hardly have been old enough to take an interest in philosophical questions until about 409 B.C. By this time, as we have seen, the conversion of Socrates was complete and no trace remained of his past except a vague reference to his disillusionment with materialism. The loving care which Plato put into the dialogues is a most compelling indication of Plato's complete absorption in the figure of the master. He has neither wish nor ability to think back to the bad old days when Socrates dallied / 57 with cosmological investigation and sophistic arguments. He is fascinated by the overpowering attraction of the Socratic idealism and finds no desire for research into the less beautiful, less coherent, less reputable past. And so when confronted with the silence of Plato (and equally of Xenophon, a faint and muddled echo of Plato), it is important to notice that Plato could not have known the earlier Socrates and was temperamentally incapable of the effort of historical imagination required to reconstruct a youthful figure so altogether inconsonant with the figure of the master.
Now what was it that Plato and Xenophon found so impressive in the activities of Socrates? To the historian of philosophy looking at the period many centuries later, there is little implication either of profound hope or profound danger about Socrates' activity. Why should the questioning of representative democratic figures have seemed to the democrats so disturbing?
Surely it is not difficult to realize that this questioning was not merely goodhumored dialogue or an intellectual game, played in vacuo, but represented a positive attack on the most fundamental democratic assumption that politics and ethics should be the career of the average man. It made these primary social functions -- ethics and politics -- not the concern of Everyman, but the private preserve of a highly select, cultivated and articulate minority. In this respect it could only be called profoundly anti-democratic. We can well imagine that the very skill with which this confounding of the vulgar was carried out won the excited and enthusiastic plaudits of the young men of patrician circles, who for years had writhed helplessly under the galling necessity of political submission to men whom they regarded as their social inferiors. We can well imagine that well-bred but inarticulate young noblemen would welcome with warm, if clumsy, admiration this doughty champion, this Athenian St. George who so manfully lowered his lance to attack the "many-headed beast." We can equally well imagine that the process of questioning and confounding was an infuriating thing not only to the discomfited individual, but also to all those who clung to the democratic way of life. As the war progressed, as the struggle between the two / 58 / factions grew more bitter, as the democracy felt itself more and more vulnerable, the role of Socrates, too, developed; from an amiable, if somewhat irrelevant, nuisance he became a positive menace. And so, in taking this argument out of the realm of abstract discussion and drawing-room conversation, we begin to re-create, at the same time, the clash of feeling and emotion and begin to recapture some of the more vital personal and political tensions that made the atmosphere surcharged with a sense of crisis.
The second phase of Socrates' thinking and activity that clearly appears is his affinity with certain Pythagorean thinkers and the Pythagorean clubs. There is no need to repeat the evidence on this point which Taylor has so well elaborated in his Varia Socratica. But while we here pay tribute to Taylor for this valuable insight, we must make one or two important amplifications and criticisms. Taylor, we feel, is wrong in assuming that the Socrates of the Clouds is already a Pythagorean. At the root of this notion there is an irreconcilable contradiction; namely, the attempt to bring together two inherently incompatible intellectual positions, that of askesis (or the Pythagorean doctrine of salvation) and materialistic scientific investigation. While such an anomaly is possible, even common, today, in Greece it was beyond even the reach of imagination.
One of the most attractive aspects of the Greek genius is its transparent consistency, its unity of thought and action, its profound sense for the essential oneness of all shades and aspects of human activity. Society was less complex: it was easier to distinguish the springs that energized all activity. In fifth-century Greece, when a man's politics changed, he altered his thinking. And so, to a Greek of this period it would have been unthinkable that one should devote one's life to an investigation of nature and natural phenomena and at the same time turn away from nature to a realm of pure and abstract form, denying to the body the validity of its functioning. He would have regarded it as incompatible with the integrity that was born of integration. The Pythag- / 59 / oreans had an interest in science, it is true, but almost solely in the mathematical sciences and the logic of pure form.10
It is true that the Pythagoreans interested themselves to some extent in medicine. But it is very significant that their primary interest was in dietetics; and even here they never attempted to make a science of dietetics, but abstained from certain foods for reasons which science could hardly approve. Iamblichus gives us a fairly good account of Pythagorean medicine in Chapter XXIV of Vita. From this description it is fairly clear that medicine was rather unsystematically mixed up with magical and semi-religious practices. They even cured certain diseases by incantation.
This kind of interest was not incompatible with a departure from materialism and scientific investigation.
Moreover, Taylor's concept of the sophistic movement is almost naively oversimplified. "In almost every point of importance the character ascribed to Socrates and his mathetai [pupils] throughout the play is ludicrously in contrast with all that we know of Protagoras, Prodicus, and their likes. They were fashionable men who moved in the highest circles, made large sums by their profession, and addressed themselves specially to the youth of the wealthy and well-born class. [Emphasis ours ]. It was not the small farmers and shopkeepers who made up the demos but the high-born and leisured misodemoi [haters of democracy] whose sons sought to buy the secret of success from Protagoras or Gorgias or Thrasymachus, and it is in this fact, as Plato plainly hints in the Gorgias and Meno, that we must look for the real cause of the unpopularity of 'sophists' with the demos." 11 This betrays a failure to distinguish between the infinitely complex shades and differences of sophistic thought and their relation to the corresponding shades and differences within the democratic movement led by Pericles.
Taylor sees in general that the implications of Pythagoreanism arc political. It is easy to discern the outlines of a very sharp antithesis between the struggles of the democracy and the semireligious views of the Pythagorean school. The whole aim of demo- / 60 / cratic policy was the improvement in the material lot of the slaveowning democracy. Any improvement must be based on the destruction of the monopoly of the old land-holding aristocracy upon the organs of state power. As the effort to destroy the power of the oligarchs seemed more and more to promise success there came prominently forward a group of men, the Pythagoreans, who deprecated the whole struggle of material interests, who proclaimed the nothingness and unreality of the body and its material strivings, who argued that the body is the "tomb of the soul," and that the whole task of man in this life is to prepare himself for blessedness in the next. "In the Gorgias, in particular, this theory of the duty of man is made the ground for a severe indictment of one and all the famous men of the fifth century, who had created imperial Athens, and 'philosophy' and the demos are pitted against one another, like God and Mammon as masters whom no one can serve at once." 12 It is a pity that Taylor, who has seen so much, fails to see that the demos had an independent, philosophical position of its own. He fails, we believe, to understand the political significance of Thrasymachus and, in opposing Thrasymachus to Gorgias and Protagoras, paints the democracy as moved by a blind, brute aversion to all philosophical thinking, as purely Philistine, as a kind of collective "average, sensual man."