THE results of recent scholarship on the subject of Socrates seem to make more and more imperative a fresh interpretation of his baffling and enigmatical figure. In recent years there has been a marked tendency to deal with all the great ancient thinkers in terms of a consistent pattern of development in their thought and to see them not, as it were, full grown and maturely developed but in the slow process of growth and evolution. The genetic method has been applied to Plato with marked success by generations of scholars and has culminated in the monumental work of Lutoslawski. Prof. Werner Jaeger's book on Aristotle seems to me to establish quite clearly the validity of applying a similar method to Aristotle. It is not, therefore, surprising that a suggestion made as long ago as 1811 by Wolf in his edition of the Clouds should in recent years be revived and that there should be a fresh disposition to believe that the Socrates of the Clouds and the Socrates of the Apology represent quite different and in a sense even contradictory stages in his development as a thinker. As evidence for this tendency we need only cite the introduction to Mr. W. R. F. Hardie's Study in Plato (page 6). One of the most important contributions of Prof. A. E. Taylor to the understanding of Socrates was made in his Varia Socratica - the perception that the trial was closely bound up with the political strivings of the time.

But before an adequate explanation of the development of Socrates was possible, it was necessary to see much more clearly than has heretofore been possible, the relation of Socrates to the political struggles and social currents of his time. This could scarcely have been done until the ingenuity of a number of scholars had reconstructed the case for the prosecution as it was offered in the lost pamphlet of Polycrates. This piece of reconstruction removes much of the problem of the relation of Socrates to the politics of his times from the realm of speculation to the realm of ascertained fact.

In addition to obligations noted at the proper time in footnotes, the authors feel conscious of a number of particular obligations. To Mr. William Kirsch and Miss Hildegard Pilger we owe the opportunity to consult the recent work done by the Russians on the subject of Greek philosophy. As if this debt were not  already a sufficient one, Mr. Kirsch has read the work through in MSS. and has made one or two extremely penetrating suggestions. Prof. W. R. Agard has been unfailing in his interest and help and on several points has made important contributions. Mr. J. J. Lyons has read the work in MSS. and helped immeasurably in bringing clarity into our exposition. Mr. Edwin Minar has assisted with the proofs and made a number of valuable suggestions.

A research grant from the Special Research Fund of the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin, though given for quite a different project, has in a sense made this work possible. When my studies in Spain were interrupted by the outbreak of the civil war, it was necessary to change my plans. The preliminary studies which culminated in this work were made in Paris at that time.

Last year, feeling that the possibilities of the genetic approach to Socrates and his relations to the life of his times had been by no means sufficiently explored, I suggested to Mr. Silverberg as a thesis subject the Socrates of the Apology and the Socrates of the Clouds. The results of his work coincided amazingly with my own developing convictions, and our collaboration has resulted in this little book.

A. D. WINSPEAR,
Madison, Wisconsin,
February, 1939

NYONE who reflects on the picture of Socrates which Aristophanes gives in his magnificent satiric drama, the Clouds, and then proceeds to contrast it with the picture given by Plato and Xenophon (a picture and a concept which have subsequently become part of the cultural tradition of the Western world), must be conscious of a contradiction. The Socrates of the Clouds excites the fury and the contempt of the playwright. Socrates is regarded as a thoroughly subversive influence, a typical sophist, a man who strives to undermine all right and justice, who indulges in a kind of eristic verbal quibbling, a technique that enables its master to question any and all absolute authority. In Plato we have the picture of a high-minded, noble and detached intellect, a recluse concerned only with spiritual values, a man devoted to law even to the point of sacrificing his own life. The Platonic Socrates holds it his supreme task to discover and transmit to others a concept of divine and absolute law and authority. As a result of his highminded quest, Socrates, in this tradition, excites the resentment of the vulgar, intolerant, Philistine mob of Athenian democrats. Pursuing inflexibly and unswervingly his high purpose, he walks with open eyes, with calm and unhurried tread to the final bourne of martyrdom. Typical of much that has been said and written in this tradition (a tradition, by the way, which has burgeoned brightly in the nineteenth century) is the following passage, ". . . inwardly there was the 'royal heart of innocence,' the high enthusiasm which has enabled so many to meet with cheerfulness a martyr's death, and the philosophic reason which entirely triumphed over the animal instincts, which saw things as a whole, and which counted the loss a gain."¹ [¹ Footnotes which do not contribute to the actual course of the argument have been incorporated in a final section. – Note at the bottom of first Foreword page in the original] As a result of this "interpretation" Socrates has come to occupy a position in the veneration of the ages second only, perhaps, to that of Jesus.

In this book we propose to demonstrate that such an interpretation is, to say the least, partial and one-sided. It results from turning one's back on the more earthy aspects of the historical Socrates, and viewing him as a kind of disembodied mind. It results, too, from a tendency to regard Socrates as a symbol of the triumphant, deathless idea; the vehicle of thoughts that in their own day excited persecution and derision, but which have for their followers a universal and timeless value.

If we are to be serious about the study of Socrates, the contradiction between the Aristophanic representation and the Platonic idealization of him is inescapable. The solution of this contradiction will do much to reveal Socrates as an historical figure. And it may be possible, in so doing, to supplant the tenacious conception of Socrates as a diaphanous, disembodied "moral example" with a new concept of Socrates as a personality and a human being.

The more one examines the historical Socrates, the more uncertain one becomes of his value as a moral example. To point out weaknesses and flaws in the picture of rounded perfection that the ages have invented (with the competent assistance of Plato) has a value that far transcends any mere muck-raking for its own sake. It sheds light on the genesis of a type of thinking, a kind of Weltanschauung, which is even to this day subtly pervasive in the intellectual centers of the Western world. For in dealing with Socrates, we are dealing with the historic beginnings of idealism, both as a philosophy and a way of life. The appearance of Greek idealism as a systematic philosophy before Socrates is tenuous and controversial. In the Platonic Socrates and Plato himself we have traditional idealism as a fairly rounded and apparently coherent philosophy of life.

Our intention, then, is to examine the incidents which surround the birth of an important epoch in the history of thought. And if we tend to substitute for the philosophic Socrates a philodoxical Socrates, there should be gain rather than loss in the process; for while we shall be giving up a beautiful and compelling picture which the nineteenth century made so emotionally poetic-we shall be drawing closer to a more prosaic truth, essentially more human and more real.

/ 11 /

OCRATES emerged from a humble background. His parents were members of the rising class of skilled artisans who, in the period just ten years after the Persia Wars, were for the first time beginning to achieve prominence. It was this class, created by the new mercantilism, that in the fifth century was to provide the backbone for the brilliant Athenian society.

Socrates was born around the year 470 B.C. ¹ His mother, Phaenarete, is mentioned as a skilled midwife.² Whether she turned this skill to profit is not certain, but it is possible.

According to the long accepted tradition, his father, Sophroniscus, was a craftsman who exercised his art in sculpturing and stone cutting.³ From this we get a hint immediately of Socrates' social position. In Greek antiquity the artist was not regarded with the same respect that the modern age accords him. Plutarch tells us that no well-born and well-endowed young man would want to be a Phidias or a Polycleitus. "Labor with one's hands on lowly tasks gives witness in the toil thus expended on useless things to one's own indifference to higher things."⁴

It is hardly necessary to use so late an authority as Plutarch. In the Phaedrus Plato describes the Souls who get only a partial grasp of truth. With a specious kind of mathematical accuracy, he places them in a hierarchical arrangement, giving the first and highest ranking to the philosopher and the second to the righteous king or warrior; the poet or other imitative artist is placed sixth; only the artisan or farmer, the sophist or demagogue, and the tyrant come lower in the scale. Plato represents the contemporary aristocratic point of view. Archimedes, who was perhaps the great / 12 / est practical engineering mind that antiquity produced, had this same prejudice so deeply ingrained that he turned his back on all practical studies, regarding every practical pursuit as ignoble and vulgar. According to Plutarch's account:

"And yet Archimedes possessed such a lofty spirit, so profound a soul, and such a wealth of scientific theory, that although his inventions had won for him a name and fame for super-human sagacity, he would not consent to leave behind him any treatise on this subject, but regarding the work of an engineer and every art that ministers to the needs of life as ignoble and vulgar, he devoted his efforts only to those studies, the subtlety and charm of which are not affected by the claims of necessity."⁵

There can be no question that in his early years Socrates followed the same useful and, to the Greeks, humble trade as his father. In fifth-century Greece there was a greater tendency for a son to follow in his father's footsteps, a tendency common in the early stages of the rise of a middle class. (The analogy of eighteenth century France and early nineteenth-century England is striking.) Pausanias and Diogenes Laertius⁶ speak of the three Graces on the Acropolis as the work of Socrates himself. The scholiast on Aristophanes' Clouds mentions the same tradition and says that they were in relief. Pausanias says that they were draped figures. Socrates playfully speaks of himself in the Euthyphro as a descendant of Daedalus, the legendary maker of wooden images.⁷ There is thus a very well established tradition that Socrates had a hand in certain sculptures on the Acropolis. The fact that his work cannot be certainly identified with any extant remains means that popular tradition was too eager to make a concrete and dramatic association.

Some scholars argue that because Plato and Xenophon make no mention of Socrates' hardly reputable past, he cannot have been a stone cutter. But such an argument cannot be taken seriously. "He is depicted as always having had absolute leisure to occupy himself as his tastes directed and as having consorted from the first with the most distinguished men of Athens-the circles of Pericles and Cimon."⁸ This is a clear misapprehension. It contradicts flatly the picture of Socrates and his ragged band of starving intellectuals / 13 / given by Aristophanes in the Clouds! The root of Taylor's misconception seems quite clear in the following sentence: "Whether Sophroniscus was a statuary or not, we must not make the mistake of thinking of Socrates as belonging to a needy class like the modern 'proletariat.’"⁹ Here lies a clear confusion in terms. There was nothing in ancient Athens at all analogous to the modem industrial proletariat. Sophroniscus was an artisan and as such a member of the dynamic, rising, radical class of fifth-century Athens. The attitude of patrician Athenians to this group is sufficiently shown by the passage from Plutarch quoted above; and it need hardly be demonstrated that Plato fully shared this prejudice.¹⁰ Plato and Xenophon were not anxious to make a hero of Aristophanes' vulgar, petty-bourgeois democrat. They were interested, as we shall show, in the later Socrates, the martyred intellectual, victim (so they chose to believe) of the intolerance of his own kind. It was important for Plato and Xenophon to ignore or conceal his artisan past.

The argument that Sophroniscus seriously attempted to trace his lineage to Daedalus is almost too fantastic. Only very great gentlemen had leisure and opportunity for such luxuries as divine or semi-divine ancestors. It is much more plausible to think of Daedalus as a kind of guild or craft patron, like Homer for the poets and Aesculapius for physicians.

The supreme difficulty of this traditional explanation of Socrates as a man of leisure is that it completely fails to make sense of Aristophanes' play, the Clouds. It must treat as harmless fun what is clearly biting and malicious social satire, in a difficult war period, when the issues between oligarchy and democracy were heightened and exacerbated, when for the first time in many years the reverses suffered by the democratic war policy gave reaction its opportunity to loose a flood of criticism. Under such treatment Aristophanic satire suffers the extraction of its sting and, instead of a weapon of social reality, becomes a mere pointless and good-humored buffoonery. Taylor even suggests that the Clouds is to be taken, simply in fun because in the Symposium, Socrates and Aristophanes are patcntly on turns of excellent good fellowship.¹¹

/ 14 / It is worth remembering that according to an ancient tradition Plato found keen delight in the works of Aristophanes; they were found on his death bed and he is said to have composed the following epigram to the poet. 'The Graces seeking to find a shrine that should never perish, discovered the soul of Aristophanes.' Obviously Plato [born in 429 or 427] could not have known Aristophanes in 423 when relations between the poet and the 'Master' were somewhat embittered.

In other words, this theory assumes that because Socrates and Aristophanes are intimate in 416 they were also intimate in the period from 432-423 when this terrific attack on the democracy, its artists, its thinkers, its policy, was being prepared.

It involves the further false assumption that the argument between the "sophists" and their conservative or religious opponents was a purely abstract, intellectual discussion. The very reverse is true. The intellectual argument was closely bound up with the political argument. Anaxagoras, Phidias, Euripides, Socrates, all excited the anger of the oligarchs because their thinking and their creative achievements represented the intellectual and artistic side of the radical or democratic movement. The general lines of this intellectual attack on the conservative and theological tradition are very clear. In the fifth century it took the form which we describe as the sophistic movement. Sophistic thought became a systematic philosophy -- a system in the sense that it developed formal precepts and dicta -- with Protagoras and Gorgias. But developed sophistic philosophy of the fifth century emerged out of several historical tendencies which must be traced back at least to the period of Hesiod's poems.

It is important to notice at the start that the great sophists were chiefly interested in the problem of justice; what it is for individual man, and what it is in society.

It is most important for the student of philosophy to notice that it is just in this period, when the tribal order, with its close- / 15 / knit interrelation of persons, is breaking up that the concept of the individual as opposed to society comes more and more into prominence. Greek literature from the Homeric poems to the fifth century is marked increasingly by a tendency to accentuate the ‘spirit of individualism.' In sophistic philosophy the individual becomes an independent unit. Here we might notice by way of comparison the increasing importance of the individual in the development of Roman jurisprudence, as well as the growth of a similar spirit in the literature and thought of the Renaissance, as man began to free himself from feudal relations.

It is precisely this problem of justice which occupies a central position in the primitive, peasant outlook of Hesiod. The poet is uncomfortably aware that justice had fled from the earth. For this he blames the gift-devouring kings who give crooked judgments. Hesiod represents the dispossessed peasantry who were ground down by the landowning class as the tribal order decomposed (a process represented in its later stages by the Homeric poems), as inequality developed and the patrician state arose. The peasant complains of his hardships, hunger, indebtedness and cold; he complains of the injustice of his social superiors, the gift-devouring kings. His relations to them are like those of the nightingale to the hawk, borne aloft in his talons and complaining piteously. But he (the hawk) exclaims, "Wretch, why do you weep? A much stronger creature now has you in his power. You will go where I take you, well though you can sing. I shall make a meal of you if I wish or let you go. He is a fool who wants to contend with his betters!"¹² Hesiod is unable to understand what has come about as a result of social transformations. What he does see is that justice is no longer a set of rules that govern the interplay of equals in a highly coherent society. Hesiod, in a primitive and groping way, actually inaugurates the search for justice ouitside the framework of society. He is vaguely confident that an eternal principle of justice exists somewhere beyond the strife. The more the Hesiodic peasant suffers from injustice, bribery and crooked decisions, the more confident he is that justice will in the end / 16 / prevail. In other words, with Hesiod, justice has begun its long ascent from earth to heaven. Interwoven with poetical imagery, Hesiod's own self-conscious realization is still struggling to bring into the clarity of explicit definition a concept that is still "felt" rather than thought. We might almost say that this is the birth of philosophy among the Greeks.

The social unrest which culminated in the reforms and concessions of Solon served to deepen and accentuate this interest in the nature of justice. For Solon the problem takes a different form. Justice for the first time in Western history becomes implicated with the state and its edicts. Solon was a liberal patrician,¹³ forced to make concessions to the rising discontent of the dispossessed peasantry, but refusing to adopt the radical program of a cancellation of debts and a redivision of the land. He is at the same time the forerunner of the liberal mercantile movement, anticipating and interpreting its needs.

For Solon, injustice results from the avarice and greed of the wealthy¹⁴ – "they have wealth through their following of unjust works and ways -- neither the Sacred treasure nor that of the state do they spare in any wise, but they steal, each in his own corner, like men pillaging. They take no heed of the holy foundations of justice, who in silence marks what happens and what has been and who in course of time comes without fail to exact the penalty." The function of the legislator, and here Solon was thinking of himself, was to stand above the strife of classes and, to use his own image, hold a protective shield over each. "To the people I have given just as much power as suffices, neither taking away from their due nor offering more; while for those who had power and were honored for wealth I have taken thought likewise, that they should suffer nothing unseemly. I stand with strong shield flung around both parties, and have allowed neither to win an unjust victory."¹⁵

Here we find Solon developing two highly important ideas which make their appearance for the first time in the history of Greek thought. Here, first, is the notion of justice as a principle involved in social relations, and, second. The earliest expression of / 17 / a view that has since become widespread; that the, state, in which justice is vested and with which it is identified, stands above and beyond the strife of particular interests.

Solon is, perhaps, the most germinal mind in early Greek thought, and we shall not be wrong in thinking of him not only as the father of Greek sophistic thought, but in a sense as the grandfather of political science and of all later philosophy. It is no accident that the Greeks thought of him as one of the seven great sophoi, or wise men; for from this concept of justice as embodied in human relations and realized in the state, stems both the critical and relativistic position of the sophists and the idealistic Platonic notion of the state as containing its own moral autonomy and as the reflection, here on earth, of the divine idea.

We may briefly touch on one further development of great importance. From Anaximander, the greatest and most mature of the Ionian physicists, we have a very interesting fragment preserved. It is short but pregnant with meaning: "They [i.e., the component elements of the physical world] make reparation and satisfaction to one another for their injustice as is appointed according to the ordering of time." (We prefer to translate "according to the ordered process of time.")¹⁶

It is difficult to see just what Burnet means by the 'ordering of time.' Does it mean that time is the subject and orders the process, or that time is the object and something else has established it in order? In either case what does it mean? Taxin seems ,to us to imply above all the notion of process. Burnet's translation obscures this.

The concept of justice as realized through the conflict of oppositions within the state, so explicitly developed by Solon, is transferred by this great Ionian to the cosmological oppositions which constitute the process of the natural world. Nothing could more clearly reveal than this fragment, when seen in its historical context, exactly how cosmological speculation developed among the / 18 / Greeks. And this is the first actual fragment preserved for us from the prose-writing philosophers of Greece.

We have here briefly outlined the two streams which reach their confluence in the widespread sophistic movement of the fifth century.

The sophists interested themselves in speculation about the nature of the physical universe.¹⁷

We are unable to understand Burnet's assertion, for which he gives no evidence, that the 'age of the Sophists is above all an age of reaction against science.' We much prefer the exposition offered by M. A. Dinnik in his 'Outlines of the History of Philosophy of Classical Greece,' ch. 7. 'One must especially mention the attack of Protagoras on Greek religion. It is this feature of his thought which sharply distinguishes him from Plato and marks his affinity with Democritus. This biographical detail about the historical Protagoras indicates the sharpness of the party conflict between science and religion in Ancient Greece. Protagoras was accused in Athens of atheism, a charge which necessarily carried with it the death sentence. As a result Protagoras was forced to flee Athens and at the time of crossing the sea he was drowned; his books were then publicly burned.'

The connection between Protagoras' ethical views and a scientific outlook is directly shown in a passage from Sextus Empiricus describing the philosophical position of this eminent sophist:

'What he states, then, is this -- that matter is in flux, and as it flows additions are made continuously in the place of the effluxions, and the senses are transformed and altered according to the times of and to all the other conditions of the bodies. He says also that the "reasons" of all the appearances subsist in matter, so that matter, so far as it depends on itself, is capable of being all those things which appear to all. And men, he says, apprehend different things at different times owing to their differing dispositions; for he who is in a natural state apprehends those things subsisting in matter which are able to appear to those in a natural state, and those who / 19 / are in a non-natural state the things which can appear to those in a non-natural state. Moreover, precisely the same account applies to the variations due to age, and to the sleeping or waking state, and to each several kind of condition. Thus according to him, Man becomes the criterion of real existences; for all things that appear to men also exist, and things that appear to no man have no existence either.'

On to Next Part

Table of Contents