Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 015 - Socrates without Plato - the Portrayals of Aristophanes and Xenophon.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Liverhume Trust. Today's episode, Socrates without Plato – The Portrayals of Aristophanes and Xenophon. Socrates is without doubt the most influential and famous philosopher who never wrote anything. With no book to his name, Socrates owes his renown to the impression he made on the people he met face to face, and above all, to the fact that one of those people was Plato. It is mostly through the dialogues of Plato that Socrates lives on today. In those dialogues, Socrates appears as one of the great literary characters of the ancient world. Humorous, ironic, thoughtful, courageous, seductive, outrageous, and remarkably ugly. His personality stays relatively consistent through the many dialogues in which he appears, but there are also shifts of emphasis and doctrine. It is clear that Plato admired Socrates greatly, yet this did not stop him from using Socrates for his own purposes. And in my opinion, at least, we should never take Plato as a straightforward witness as regards the historical Socrates. That's one reason why, before I get into the Platonic depiction of Socrates, I want to devote an episode to Socrates without Plato. In particular, I want to talk about the way Socrates was portrayed by two very different authors from Athens, who, like Plato, couldn't resist using him in their literary productions. Most of us start by picturing Socrates at his end, the philosopher sitting calmly in his jail cell, cheerfully draining a poisonous brew of hemlock after being sentenced to death by a jury of his peers. The trial may have been politically motivated. It happened in 399 BC, several years after Athens had capitulated to Sparta at the end of the Peloponnesian War. In 404 BC, the same year that the war ended, Athens was taken over by a group of thirty oligarchs or tyrants. One of these tyrants was Critias, an associate of Socrates. A more famous friend of Socrates was Alcibiades, a man as good-looking as Socrates was ugly, talented and ambitious in equal measure. Alcibiades was, to say the least, a controversial figure. He had been exiled from Athens after a scandal involving the defacement of religious statues, and he'd subsequently switched sides, more than once, in the long war between Sparta and Athens. So it's possible that the citizens of Athens had Socrates executed in part because he had unpleasant and anti-democratic friends. On the other hand, we know that Socrates refused an order from the thirty tyrants when he was told to arrest someone unjustly. And in fact, if anyone was ever his own man, it was Socrates. It's rather difficult to imagine him promoting any one political faction in Athens. As we'll see next week, Plato makes it clear that Socrates was quite capable of annoying people all on his own. So maybe the citizens of Athens just got fed up with him. Both Plato and Xenophon portray Socrates as constantly in conversation with both friends and more hostile interlocutors such as the Sophists. The classic image of Socrates, enshrined in more than one painting and sculpture, may show him taking the hemlock, but a better image to hold in your mind is of Socrates in the marketplace, a group of young men gathered around him discussing the nature of virtue. His young friends were not exempt from the razor-sharp edge of Socrates' wit. Xenophon and Plato both show friends and foes alike being cut down to size. The classic Socratic approach is of course to ask questions. What is virtue? What makes a good leader? Do you really think you're justified in what you're doing? Once you answer his first question, you're done for. Socrates will expose the thoughtlessness of your assumptions. He'll show you that you quite literally don't know what you are talking about. But this isn't to say that Socrates did nothing else in his life. In fact, he'd fought against the Spartans and was involved in several battles including a major loss at the Battle of Delium in 424 BC. In one dialogue, Plato has Alcibiades tell of Socrates' amazing performance in battle and on military campaign generally. He was, says Alcibiades, so imposing in his fearlessness that no one from the enemy army wanted to come anywhere near him. Of course we're very used to this sort of admiring portrait of Socrates as an almost superhuman hero and martyr of philosophy. Yet the earliest portrayal of Socrates shows him as anything but heroic. It was written by the comic poet Aristophanes, a younger contemporary of Socrates who died in 385 BC. Aristophanes was the greatest writer of comedy in Athens and makes Socrates an important character in a play called The Clouds. Anyone who found out that they were to feature in a play by Aristophanes would have known that they were in for some rough handling. His plays are full of brilliant wordplay and political satire. In them one can find deep and powerful protest against war and injustice, but on the other hand the plays are also brimming with toilet humor and sex gags, and The Clouds is certainly no exception. Aristophanes was a great poet, but a comic poet, and he never forgot his central task of getting his audience to laugh. And for good reason. Aristophanes was quite literally competing for the approval of the audience. At the Festival of the God Dionysius in Athens each year, celebrated over several days, numerous plays would be performed. Aristophanes's productions were pitted against those of other playwrights. He won the prize several times, albeit not with The Clouds, which was voted third and last in the year 423 BC. Aristophanes's ignominious defeat on this occasion would no doubt have allowed Socrates a wry smile, if it weren't for the fact that Socrates was surely above such pettiness. Indeed, above is precisely where Aristophanes puts Socrates. He called for Socrates to enter on a kind of crane normally used in other plays for depicting gods and heroes in the sky looking down on the action of the drama. Socrates quite literally has his head in the clouds. He explains to the main character, one Strepsiades, that he is engaged in meteorology, which in Greek meant study of things in the sky generally, and not just weather. Strepsiades is there to get Socrates and the other philosophers he consorts with to teach him how to win arguments. He wants to be able to make speeches and wield bewildering wordplay in order to get out of some financial debts that are pressing down on him. Socrates assures Strepsiades that he can teach him arguments to prove any point, and along the way teaches him to give up belief in the traditional Greek gods and to worship the clouds instead. These clouds are played by the chorus of the play. Also along the way, as I say, is a healthy serving of those toilet and sex jokes. All this is something of a shock, not just because we don't normally associate Socrates with this sort of lowbrow frivolity, but also because Aristophanes is making it crystal clear that he thinks Socrates is a sophist. Surely this is wrong? As we'll see, both Xenophon and Plato show Socrates clashing repeatedly with sophists. But of course sophists could and did clash with one another. So Aristophanes evidently saw little distinction between Socrates and his sophisticated contemporaries. After all, both Socrates and the sophists left their opponents dazed by raining down arguments on them, and both traded in fine attention to the meanings of words. Of course, we want to insist that Socrates' motives were different, pure and virtuous, but that seems to have been lost on Aristophanes. Plato, too, by the way, more than once suggests that Socrates was widely seen as a sophist. In one dialogue, he describes a kind of noble sophistry which eliminates false belief, rather than encouraging it. It seems clear that Plato has Socrates in mind here. But to less subtle observers, the most obvious difference between Socrates and the sophists would have been his poverty. Unlike them, he never asked a fee from his associates. He considered them to be his friends. Whereas Xenophon and Plato emphasize this and think it puts clear water between Socrates and the sophists, for Aristophanes, it's just more material for jokes. He has great fun with Socrates' voluntary indigence, his barefooted ragtag appearance. Still more confusing is that Aristophanes uses Socrates to represent not only the sophists, but also the pre-Socratic philosophers. This Socrates' fascination with meteorology is a case in point, and the worship of clouds is evidently designed as a dayget philosophers who thought that air was a divine principle, like Diogenes of Apollonia. This too is directly contradicted by Plato and Xenophon, who go out of their way to stress that Socrates did not engage in physical sciences, except perhaps early in his career. His interest was virtue, not clouds. Again, Aristophanes was not interested in these fine distinctions. For him, Socrates was useful because he was a very visible and notorious character to put in a play. It's even been speculated that Socrates was chosen in part because he was so ugly. His protruding eyes and snug nose would have made him an ideal person to put on the Greek stage, where all characters wore masks, and historical figures would have had masks designed as caricatures of the real people. Still, it's telling that Aristophanes selected Socrates, of all people, to stand in for the whole movement of sophists and philosophers in Athens in the late 5th century. For Aristophanes, and no doubt for most of his audience, Socrates was just one more intellectual who peddled the same impious sophistry as all the others. The fact that Aristophanes depicts Socrates as rejecting the gods makes it hard to laugh at the clouds, at least if you know why Socrates was put to death a quarter century later. One charge leveled at him was that he invented new gods, the other was that he corrupted the youth. When Aristophanes showed him on stage, telling Strepsiades that the traditional gods don't even exist, he was, presumably unwittingly, helping to prepare the case for the prosecution. By contrast, our other witness Xenophon was out to defend Socrates. He defended him posthumously, because by the time Xenophon wrote Socrates had been dead for some years. Xenophon was a close contemporary of Plato, born one year before Plato in 429 BC. Like Alcibiades, Xenophon was exiled from Athens, and spent many years away from his home, before finally returning to spend the last decade of his life there. Xenophon actually left Athens voluntarily before being exiled in Absentia, and his choice to leave was a fateful one. Socrates advised him to think twice before doing it, but he went anyway. He left to join an attempt to overthrow the ruler of Persia, working as a mercenary among a large cohort of Greek soldiers. When this failed, he underwent a harrowing journey as the leader of the Greeks, trying to bring back as many as possible alive to Greece. He later wrote a record of this experience, his most famous work, the Anabasis, which means going up, in other words, going back to Greece. In addition to this tale of adventure, and some other broadly historical works, Xenophon wrote several pieces about Socrates. Sometimes he was imitating his fellow Socratic admirer Plato. For instance, he wrote a dramatization of a drinking party or symposium, like the Symposium of Plato, with Socrates sitting and discussing love with other men. His longest Socratic work, the Memoirs of Socrates, is also reminiscent of Plato, with Socrates shown in discussion with a succession of characters, most of whom get put firmly in their place. And again like Plato, he wrote an apology of Socrates, describing what Socrates said at the trial where he was condemned to death. Yet Xenophon's Socrates is very different from Plato's. As Xenophon tells us, his primary motivation is not to exploit the philosophical potential of Socrates as a character, as Plato did, but to vindicate Socrates and his way of life, and in particular, to undermine the accusations that had been made against Socrates in that fatal trial. As I said, these accusations were basically twofold. Socrates departed from traditional religion, and he corrupted the youth. Where Aristophanes stoked these slanders for humorous effect, Xenophon strenuously rejects both. For him, Socrates was a paragon of virtue, albeit one who few, if any, people could hope to imitate. He duly emphasizes Socrates' piety. Rather than rejecting the gods, his Socrates goes on at length about divine providence and says that we must be grateful to the gods who take care of us by designing us and the world around us so well. Xenophon also emphasizes Socrates' hotline to God. This was Socrates' famous divine sign, something also mentioned more than once by Plato. Socrates could not see the future exactly, but he claimed that the gods would warn him to avoid certain activities when he began to undertake them. For instance, he did not prepare a defense speech for his apology, because when he was about to write it, the divine sign warned him off. As Xenophon stresses, the moral of the story here seems to be that it was better for Socrates to die. Certainly Xenophon agrees with Plato that Socrates did nothing to avoid death once he'd been brought on trial. Far from it. In fact, he went out of his way to outrage and offend the jurors in his impromptu defense speech. In both versions, but especially that of Xenophon, Socrates is stunningly arrogant. Xenophon shows him bragging about his perfect virtue, modesty not ranking very high among the character traits valued by the Greeks. He also shows Socrates claiming to be specially favored by the gods, in particular, because of the divine sign. As Xenophon himself says, this was the last thing Socrates should have said if he wanted to save his skin, because the jury was outraged, either with incredulity or envy, at Socrates's special favor from the gods. But Socrates was, it would seem, not trying to save his skin. He was trying to die as he had lived, with perfect and uncompromising virtue. That brings us to the second accusation, Socrates's supposed corruption of the youth. Xenophon has Socrates argue that this could hardly be the case, because he was always perfectly virtuous, and so should serve as a good, not a bad, example for his young friends. If these boys' fathers objected to Socrates hanging about with their sons in the marketplace, it was no doubt due again to envy. The fathers were not well pleased that the boys sought education at the feet of Socrates, rather than with them. But what would such boys have seen in Socrates? He was, after all, ugly, poor, and apt to mete out biting criticism to anyone unlucky enough to pass by. That last habit was no doubt part of the attraction, though. These young men liked learning to catch out their elders. Xenophon, in a scene hardly designed to solidify our admiration of Socrates, shows Alcibiades imitating Socrates's argumentative style as he deftly refutes the great statesman Pericles. This is no doubt fictional, but there's also no doubt that Socrates's young friends did imitate him, mightily annoying a good many powerful men in the process. Socrates was also seductive for these young men because they could admire his sort of virtue. His virtue was in essence independence and freedom. He was poor not because he had to be, but because he knew that an utterly destitute man can paradoxically be more self-sufficient than a man who has to worry about his wealth and his hangers-on. For Socrates, the greatest slaves were tyrants, who had many enemies but also friends who might turn on them. As for the sophists, they were nothing but whores who sold their supposed wisdom for cash. Socrates took no money for the wisdom he dispensed, and secured something more valuable—friendship. Beholden to no one, Socrates was his own man, and he followed the dictates of no one apart from his divine sign. A young Athenian gentleman could see much to admire here. Socrates's total freedom was precisely what they sought—freedom and self-sufficiency—even though they planned to pursue this goal through a political life. They might not follow Socrates's path because it was too ascetic, too self-denying, but they could see the point of it. And Socrates knew how to play on the ambitions of such men. In one scene Xenophon shows us how Socrates could use the desire of a young man for honour and political success by showing him that knowledge is the only sure route to these ends. Socrates is being quite cunning here, because for him of course honour and political success were nothing to be prized. For him it is knowledge itself which is valuable. Success as a political leader is something he dangles as bait to get his young friend to pursue what Socrates offers. Xenophon agrees with Plato that Socrates did indeed teach that knowledge is the most important thing in life, and that knowledge is in fact virtue itself. This idea will be explored in much greater depth by Plato, but Xenophon gets across the basic point. To do anything virtuously is to do it well, and to act well means to act with knowledge. Again, Xenophon Socrates appeals to the political interests of his audience in making this point. He says that choosing an ignorant man to be the leader of a city would be like choosing an ignorant man as one's doctor. We don't let untrained men experiment on our bodies, and neither should we let men without knowledge experiment on the body politic. Here Xenophon doesn't sound much different from the Plato of the Republic. But in many other respects, Xenophon gives us a very different Socrates from the one we find in Plato. As we'll see next time, in Plato Socrates makes a big deal of proclaiming his own ignorance. Plato's Socrates is puzzled when the oracle at Delphi pronounces him the wisest man in Athens because he knows that he knows nothing, so how can he be wise? By contrast, Socrates in Xenophon is swaggering with confidence in his own perfection. He tells the jury at his trial that the oracle at Delphi proclaimed him to be the wisest and most free of men, but in Xenophon's telling, this comes as no surprise, it simply confirms what Socrates knew all along, which is that he is the most virtuous man walking the earth. He does add, modestly, that the oracle stopped short of calling him a god. Instead of claiming ignorance, Xenophon Socrates feels free to dispense advice on a wide range of topics. Often, Xenophon puts rather banal ethical advice into the philosopher's mouth. We see him chastising a man for being unable to bear his hectoring mother. Just remember, says Socrates, that she means well. We see him telling a man that spending time with beautiful women is as dangerous as somersaulting through knives. We see him telling off a man who complains that the drinking water in his house is too cold. After all, Socrates points out, it's better for taking baths, and the slaves don't complain about the water. Do you really want to be more choosy than one of your slaves? In such passages, Socrates seems more like an advice columnist than a philosopher. It's hard to escape the conclusion that Xenophon is using Socrates as a mouthpiece, just as Plato does, but putting much less interesting ideas into his mouth. Yet, we should not underestimate Xenophon, or Aristophanes for that matter. They both made careful choices in their use of Socrates, and made this most extraordinary of men subordinate to their own authorial purposes. Aristophanes gives us valuable insight into the late 5th century perception, not just of Socrates, but of the whole intellectual blossoming of that period, the sophist, the philosophers, and Socrates as the ugly face of the whole phenomenon. Xenophon, meanwhile, manages to capture many of the themes that will be associated with Socrates by Plato, and for centuries thereafter. Some of the ideas I've highlighted, for instance the ideal of self-sufficiency, and the focus on virtue as the only thing worth having, will be carried on by the philosophical schools of the Hellenistic period, especially the Stoics and the Cynics. We should give Xenophon credit for already seeing these aspects of Socrates. If it wasn't for Plato, we might see his record of Socrates as a milestone text in the history of philosophy. But that's a bit like saying that if Shakespeare hadn't written Romeo and Juliet, then Westside's story would be the classic tale of doomed lovers. Our Socrates is inevitably the Socrates we find in Plato, and next week we'll examine his life on the history of philosophy without any gaps.