Socrates in Love

by Armand D'Angour

  A peace accord, the Peace of Nicias, named after the politician and general who led the negotiations for Athens, was indeed struck at about the time Peace was staged in 421 BC. But the war of attrition waged by the Spartans had hit the landholders and farmers of Attica hard. The hero of Peace is the rustic Trygaios, a farmer from an Athenian village whose name means ‘vine-grower’ or ‘Wineman’. Sick and tired of the conflict in which Athens has been mired for a decade, Wineman decides to ride up to Olympus – as once, in a mythical account, had the hero Bellerophon – with the aim of bringing the personified goddess Peace back down to earth.

  Bellerophon had surfed the skies on the legendary winged horse Pegasus, but Wineman saddles a less noble creature, a giant dungbeetle. At the beginning of the play, slaves are seen rolling large balls of dung to feed the monstrous animal. The beetle would have been constructed from a scarab-shaped articulated wooden frame covered in skins and rugs, and equipped with ferocious-looking horns for Wineman to hold on to. This fearsome object was attached by ropes to the tip of the mēkhanē.

  The beetle is hoisted aloft by the crane, with Wineman the farmer clinging fearfully to its back. Rising skywards, it bucks and dives when it catches a whiff of evil-smelling sources of food far below. Wineman shouts out in alarm:

  Hey! What are you doing, sniffing out the cesspools? Raise your head up straight. Fly directly to the palace of Zeus, and stop foraging for food. What now, what’s caught your fancy? By Zeus, there’s a man down there taking a crap in the Piraeus.

  At this point the actor’s tone changes. Breaking the dramatic illusion he speaks in his own voice:

  This is scary. This is really no time for messing around. Crane-operator, watch what you’re doing! I can feel the wind whistling round my midriff. If you’re not careful, the beetle will get his dinner because I’ll shit myself for sure.

  How can we extract anything serious from this crude, scatological humour? Little detail can be extracted from Peace about contemporary historical attempts to end the war between Greek states. So can we hope to learn anything about the historical Socrates from the irreverent knockabout in Clouds?

  A tale of two Clouds

  In the case of Clouds there’s a further complication. The original play is lost, and the surviving text of the play is not the version that was performed in 423 BC, but a revised version that Aristophanes circulated in writing a few years later. In the original, performed version, Strepsiades’ cunning plan worked. Aided by the unscrupulous argumentation he has learned in the school of ‘Socrates’, he trounces his creditors before joining the adherents of the Thinkery in a raucous celebration of success.

  When the play was staged in 423 BC, however, as part of a competition involving two other comedies by rival playwrights, Aristophanes was in for a disappointment. He had thought, as we learn from the text of the play that survives, that Clouds was his funniest and cleverest work to date. The audience, however, disliked it: they found its message shocking and immoral, and disapproved of its outcome. Clouds came bottom in the drama competition.2

  We learn all this from the version of the play that survives, in which Aristophanes explains the circumstances of his revision. In a section of the revised play called the parabasis (‘stepping forward’), an actor representing the author comes forward on stage and speaks directly to the audience. ‘My fellow-Athenians,’ he rails at them, ‘you rejected this play when it was first performed. You didn’t get the humour, you missed the point; it was too ironic, too highbrow, too sophisticated for you.’ So, the poet declares, he has revised it to suit his audience’s lowbrow tastes, focusing on the standard tropes of knockabout comedy (such as ‘old men who whack people with a stick when they make bad jokes’) and changing the ending to suit their preference. The moral of the comedy – that the kind of instruction imputed to Socrates is to be condemned – should now be plain to the most dull-witted spectator.

  In this new version, then, the plot takes a different turn. Instead of revelling in dodgy arguments and dishonest dealings, Strepsiades is made to see the error of his ways. His change of heart takes place after his own son Pheidippides beats him up in an argument about a speech he chooses to recite at dinner. The speech comes from a racy play by the avant-garde tragedian Euripides, which the old-fashioned Strepsiades says he finds quite indecent. In response Pheidippides hits him, and proceeds to argue the case for thrashing his father with chilling conviction:

  Isn’t it the right thing for me to beat you for your own good – given that it’s in one’s best interest to be beaten? You say that the law permits only children to be beaten – but old men are in their second childhood. So it makes even more sense to punish them, because they have less excuse for their faults.

  Hitting one’s father was considered by Greeks to be about the worst thing a son could do. Appalled by Pheidippides’ behaviour, Strepsiades repents of his earlier initiative and turns against Socrates, his school, and all they stand for. In the final scene of the surviving play, the old man sets the Thinkery on fire and hurls rocks at the students, his own son among them, as they flee for their lives from the burning building. The triumph of sophistry and crooked arguments presented in the original play of 423 BC has been converted, in this version published a few years later, into a scene that symbolises the violent destruction of dangerous intellectualism.3

  The Socrates of the Clouds

  Aristophanes was aware that the success of the unscrupulous methods he imputes to ‘Socrates’ in the first version of Clouds had not gone down well with the audience. We have no way of knowing whether the revised version that we can still read today would have fared any better. There’s no evidence that the second Clouds was ever staged, at least not in the Theatre of Dionysus, Athens’ largest and most prestigious theatre and the venue of the city’s greatest religious and dramatic festival.

  Would the grim finale, with the conflagration of Socrates’ Thinkery, have been better received than the triumph of crooked arguments? Aristophanes clearly thought so. The implications are that the real Socrates, who would have been familiar to most of the spectators, was not only associated with this style of argumentation but deserved to be punished for it. The gleeful portrayal of his downfall also suggests that he may not have been particularly popular with the mass of Athenian citizens (the demos), many of whom would have been unlettered country folk who flocked from the demes (villages) of Attica to attend the festival in the city’s great theatre.

  The spectators watching the comedies were, however, primarily there to be entertained. It’s unlikely that, for the most part, they would have been aware of Socrates’ actual views or methods. Ancient comic plays were designed to be scurrilous and provocative and, like modern comedy revues or satirical shows, took liberal aim at personal and political targets. In this context, even those who had some knowledge of Socrates’ philosophical procedures were unlikely to feel great concern about whether the comedy gave an unfair or prejudicial account of them. It’s generally supposed, then, that the character of ‘Socrates’ in Clouds is far from a true or realistic portrayal of the man himself. It has usually been taken to represent a composite depiction of certain contemporary teachers, the public intellectuals grouped together under the title of ‘sophists’ – the name from which we derive the words ‘sophistry’ and ‘sophisticated’.

  The sophists were some of the cleverest and most original thinkers of the fifth century BC. Few of them were Athenian citizens. They mostly originated from Greek city-states outside Athens, such as those in mainland Greece and the islands of the Aegean, or from places further afield such as the Greek cities of southern Italy, Sicily, and Ionia (the coast of Asia Minor, now western Turkey). During the fifth century BC they converged on Athens, which after the wars with Persia had become the political and cultural hub of Greece. They lectured, and in many cases published books and treatises, on disciplines ranging from grammar, astronomy, and medicine, to sculpture, architecture, and warfare. Some offered advice on strate
gies for winning battles. Most were thought to be suspiciously adept at offering strategies for winning arguments.

  The disciplines that ‘Socrates’ and his school pursue in Clouds include typical ‘sophistic’ disciplines such as astronomy, geography, natural history, acoustics, measurement, and grammar. Ordinary Athenians, who were involved in practical activities – trade, crafts, fighting, and above all farming – considered such cerebral pursuits to be worthless or worse, and took a dim view of those who practised and taught them. Most Athenians were also superstitious, and there was a widespread anxiety that the rational examination of natural phenomena, which were traditionally considered manifestations of divine power, was a religiously unsound practice that risked arousing divine anger. A number of rationalistic thinkers, such as the philosopher Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, were said to have been charged with the offence of impiety and made to stand trial.

  High-flown intellectual pursuits are not the sort of thing Plato and Xenophon, the authors who provide the fullest information about Socrates, ever depict him actually engaging with. There’s evidence, however, that at an earlier stage of his life Socrates had taken an interest in scientific ideas, particularly in the investigation of nature. Plato has him say, in the dialogue Phaedo that recounts his final hours, that he was initially enthusiastic about the investigation of physical phenomena, only to be disenchanted with it later, because it offered none of the answers about life that he sought.4

  Plato was keen to differentiate Socrates from the sophists. He didn’t want their reputation for ingenious word-spinning at the expense of the truth to rub off on Socrates. As a result he may have downplayed the interest that the young Socrates showed in the disciplines with which they were associated. If there had been a period, however, of Socrates’ early life when, as Plato hints, he engaged with what were thought to be ‘sophistic’ ideas, his portrayal as a boffin or scientific type in Aristophanes’ comic play of 423 BC might not have been as off the mark as it has seemed to later readers.

  The comedy’s depiction of Socrates in the 420s, around the time Plato and Xenophon were just born, thus offers an important corrective to the biographers’ idealised pictures of him as, respectively, an analytic questioner of ethical assumptions and a paragon of sound common sense. The earthy comedy of Clouds reminds us that, for all his genuine virtues, Socrates was not a saint, but a flesh and blood man whose ideas and behaviour risked making him unpopular with his fellow-Athenians. His flaws, contradictions, and idiosyncrasies will have been more apparent to contemporaries than to subsequent generations, who must rely almost entirely on the selective and mostly admiring accounts provided after his death by his supporters and advocates.

  Nonetheless, no philosopher before or after Socrates was like him. He was the most unusual and original thinker of his time, and the legacy of his life and death made him a moral and philosophical hero for subsequent generations. What his biographers don’t tell us, and what they may not have fully known, despite leaving scattered clues in their voluminous writings, is how and why Socrates, who grew up as in many respects an ordinary Athenian young man of his time, changed at some time between his early youth and his middle age to become the extraordinary thinker that they knew and revered.

  Dramatising Socrates

  Around ad 200, six centuries after Clouds was performed, a learned Roman author called Aelian wrote about an incident that took place at the comedy’s first and possibly only fifth-century performance. He recounted how Socrates himself, who was present in the audience, rose from his seat to show the spectators who the butt of the comedy was meant to be.5

  Despite the lateness of the testimony, there’s good reason to think Socrates might have been present when the play was staged. The City Dionysia, Athens’ largest religious festival held in early spring, was attended by a sizeable proportion of Athens’ adult male population (and probably by some women as well, though they would have been a small proportion of the audience). In Plato’s version of Socrates’ trial speech, Apology, he has Socrates mention the depiction of him as a teacher of immoral argumentation in the Clouds, saying that it influenced the Athenians’ perception of him in a negative way.

  Socrates was forty-six years old when the comedy was staged. In his day the theatre of Dionysus was probably not the impressive semicircular stone structure preserved today, which was developed in the following century, but a large open space with rising tiers of wooden seats facing a raised stage on three sides.6 Socrates was said to have attended the theatre only rarely, but he did so in this case because he knew that Aristophanes’ comedy (and possibly others that were to be staged at the same festival) featured a character called ‘Socrates’.

  We might imagine Socrates rising early on that fine spring morning to make his way to the centre of the city from his home in the village of Alopeke, which was immediately to the south-east of the city walls. It was the start of the sailing season, when the weather was warm and the seas calm, so visitors from across the Aegean Sea would be present at the festival and its dramatic performances. There would be tourists, traders and teachers from the Peloponnese and the northern mainland, from the islands in the Aegean, and from the Greek cities of Ionia.

  To be made the centrepiece of a comedy staged at the City Dionysia suggests that Socrates was at the time already a well-known personality to his fellow-Athenians. A character designated ‘Socrates’ had appeared in previous comic plays, and also featured in at least two other comedies staged that year, one of which was performed at the same festival as Clouds. Konnos, by Aristophanes’ rival Ameipsias, was named after Konnos of Athens, the lyre-teacher who instructed Socrates as an adult pupil of the instrument. Ameipsias’s comedy is now lost apart from a few citations, which suggest that it presented Socrates on stage as an inept learner, perhaps trying to grapple with avant-garde styles of music that were the fashion of the day.

  In the event, Ameipsias’s play beat Clouds and won second prize in the contest; but the first prize was won by an older comic playwright, Cratinus, whose comedy Wineflask had nothing to do with Socrates. It presented the old Cratinus himself, who had been regularly mocked in his rivals’ comedies for his drunkenness, responding to his critics by demonstrating that drinking wine is necessary if a poet wants to write good comedy. The audience evidently preferred its down-to-earth humour both to Ameipsias’s lampoon of Socrates in Konnos and to Aristophanes’ sophisticated satire.

  Though well known to his fellow-Athenians, Socrates was not a familiar figure to Greeks visiting from city-states outside Athens. According to Aelian, some non-Athenian visitors watching the Clouds were heard to ask ‘Who’s this fellow Socrates?’, whereupon Socrates rose from his seat in the theatre and stood there in silence for the rest of the performance, a gesture designed to demonstrate to everyone who the real Socrates was (Aelian speculates that the portrait-mask of the stage character was a good likeness). Some have interpreted Socrates’ action as indicating ‘that character on stage is meant to depict me’, others as admonishing the audience ‘that character is not me’. Whatever his aim, one imagines the philosopher standing up with an impassive expression on his face to declare to all and sundry ‘I’m Socrates’ – somewhat reminiscent of the iconic moment of the film Spartacus, when the hero played by Kirk Douglas declares ‘I’m Spartacus’.

  Socrates’ action on this occasion reminds us of his tendency to stand still for long periods in a trance-like or even catatonic state, something that had attracted comment and curiosity from onlookers on previous occasions. It might be supposed that some kind of psychological or medical condition lay at the root of such behaviour; and if such a condition had afflicted Socrates from his youth, it is likely to have played some part in his turn towards the philosophical life.

  The real drama

  Listening to my students reading their essays and trying to distinguish the ‘real’ Socrates from the way that he is portrayed in the comedy, I visualise the dramatic moment as he is swung onto the stage suspe
nded from a crane. It must have been an effective comic entrée, and it reminds us that a number of episodes of Socrates’ life contain elements that have potentially dramatic qualities, if of a less light-hearted kind.

  In one section of Plato’s Symposium, for instance, we are told how Socrates participated in a long and wearying military campaign in northern Greece, how he marched through snow and ice in bare feet, and how he single-handedly rescued his friend Alcibiades from the thick of battle. In the course of this campaign, curious and amused fellow-soldiers once observed him standing stock still, apparently deep in thought, for a whole night. Another time when Socrates stood motionless, apparently lost in contemplation, was shortly before he arrived at the party that is the occasion described in Plato’s Symposium. As a result he arrived late for dinner; but at the end of a series of speeches on the theme of Love given by the participants at the event, the irrepressibly hardy Socrates is depicted cheerfully continuing to drink and debate into the early hours of the morning, while most of his fellow-diners succumb to wine and sleep.

  Elsewhere we learn how, when officiating on the State Council late in his life in 406 BC, Socrates stood in front of a hostile chamber, and possibly before an angry mob, trying his best to prevent the illegal mass execution without trial of six Athenian commanders who had failed to save drowning sailors in a storm following a battle at sea. He showed similar courage on another occasion two years later, when at the risk of being summarily executed he defied instructions to arrest an innocent citizen, Leon of Salamis, who had been condemned to death by the Thirty, a tyrannical junta that had taken power after Athens’ defeat by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War.

  The heroic and theatrical qualities of these episodes are capped by the dramatic climax of Socrates’ life, his trial and death. Indicted on charges of ‘corrupting young men and introducing new gods’, Socrates was put on trial in 399 BC before a jury of five hundred fellow-Athenians. After failing to persuade them to vote for his acquittal with the speech purportedly recorded in Plato’s Apology, he was condemned to death and imprisoned. Plato describes in Phaedo how Socrates’ distraught followers gathered in the prison for a final conversation about life and death. They then stood and watched as he calmly drank the draught of hemlock that slowly paralysed him from the feet upwards, and eventually stopped his heart beating in a matter of minutes.