by Walter Pater
“I can easily conceive Socrates in the place of Alexander,” says Montaigne, again, “but Alexander in the place of Socrates I cannot”; and we may take that as typical of the immense credit of Socrates, even with a vast number of people who have not really known much about him. “For the sake of no long period of years,” says Socrates himself, now condemned to death — the few years for which a man of seventy is likely to remain here —
You will have a name, Men of Athens! and liability to reproach from those who desire to malign the city of Athens — that ye put Socrates to death, a wise man. For in very truth they will declare me to have been wise — those who wish to discredit you — even though I be not. Now had you waited a little while this thing would have happened for you in the course of nature. For ye see my estate: that it is now far onward on the road of life, hard by death. Apology, 38.
Plato, though present at the trial, was absent when Socrates “consumed the poison in the prison.” Prevented by sickness, as Cebes tells us in the Phaedo, Plato would however almost certainly have heard from him, or from some other of that band of disciples who assisted at the last utterances of their master, the sincerest possible account of all that was then said and done. Socrates had used the brief space which elapsed before the officers removed him to the place, “whither he must go, to die” (hoi elthonta me dei tethnanai)+ to discourse with those who still lingered in the court precisely on what are called “The four last things.” Arrived at the prison a further delay awaited him, in consequence (it was so characteristic of the Athenian people!) of a religious scruple. The ship of sacred annual embassy to Apollo at Delos was not yet returned to Athens; and the consequent interval of time might not be profaned by the death of a criminal. Socrates himself certainly occupies it religiously enough by a continuation of his accustomed discourses, touched now with the deepening solemnity of the moment.
The Phaedo of Plato has impressed most readers as a veritable record of those last discourses of Socrates; while in the details of what then happened, the somewhat prosaic account there given of the way in which the work of death was done, we find what there would have been no literary satisfaction in inventing; his indifferent treatment, for instance, of the wife, who had not been very dutiful but was now in violent distress — treatment in marked contrast, it must be observed again, with the dignified tenderness of a later scene, as recorded in the Gospels.
An inventor, with mere literary effect in view, at this and other points would have invented differently. “The prison,” says Cebes, the chief disciple in the Phaedo, “was not far from the court-house; and there we were used to wait every day till we might be admitted to our master. One morning we were assembled earlier than usual; for on the evening before we heard that the ship was returned from Delos. The porter coming out bade us tarry till he should call us. For, he said, the Eleven are now freeing Socrates from his bonds, announcing to him that he must die to-day.”
They were very young men, we are told, who were with Socrates, and how sweetly, kindly, approvingly, he listened to their so youthfully sanguine discussion on the immortality of the soul. For their sakes rather than his own he is ready to treat further, by way of a posteriori arguments, a belief which in himself is matter of invincible natural prepossession. In the court he had pleaded at the most for suspended judgment on that question:— “If I claimed on any point to be wiser than any one else it would be in this, that having no adequate knowledge of things in Hades so I do not fancy I know.” But, in the privacy of these last hours, he is confident in his utterance on the subject which is so much in the minds of the youths around him; his arguments like theirs being in fact very much of the nature of the things poets write (poięmata)+ or almost like those medicinable fictions (pseudę en pharmakou eidei)+ such as are of legitimate use by the expert. That the soul (beautiful Pythagorean thought!) is a harmony; that there are reasons why this particular harmony should not cease, like that of the lyre or the harp, with the destruction of the instrument which produced it; why this sort of flame should not go out with the upsetting of the lamp: — such are the arguments, sometimes little better than verbal ones, which pass this way and that around the death-bed of Socrates, as they still occur to men’s minds. For himself, whichever way they tend, they come and go harmlessly, about an immovable personal conviction, which, as he says, “came to me apart from demonstration, with a sort of natural likelihood and fitness”: (Moi gegonen aneu apodeixeôs, meta eikotos tinos, kai euprepeias).+ The formula of probability could not have been more aptly put. It is one of those convictions which await, it may be, stronger, better, arguments than are forthcoming; but will wait for them with unfailing patience.— “The soul therefore Cebes,” since such provisional arguments must be allowed to pass, “is something sturdy and strong (ischuron ti estin)+ imperishable by accident or wear; and we shall really exist in Hades.” Indulging a little further the “poetry turned logic” of those youthful assistants, Socrates too, even Socrates, who had always turned away so persistently from what he thought the vanity of the eye, just before the bodily eye finally closes, and his last moment being now at hand, ascends to, or declines upon, the fancy of a quite visible paradise awaiting him. —
It is said that the world, if one gaze down on it from above, is to look on like those leathern balls of twelve pieces, variegated in divers colours, of which the colours here — those our painters use — are as it were samples. There, the whole world is formed of such, and far brighter and purer than they; part sea-purple of a wonderful beauty; a part like gold; a part whiter than alabaster or snow; aye, composed thus of other colours also of like quality, of greater loveliness than ours — colours we have never seen. For even those hollows in it, being filled with air and water, present a certain species of colour gleaming amid the diversity of the others; so that it presents one continuous aspect of varied hues. Thus it is: and conform- ably tree and flower and fruit are put forth and grow. The mountains again and the rocks, after the same manner, have a smoothness and transparency and colours lovelier than here. The tiny precious stones we prize so greatly are but morsels of them — sards and jasper and emerald and the rest. No baser kind of thing is to be found in that world, but finer rather. The cause of which is that the rocks there are pure, not gnawed away and corrupted like ours by rot and brine, through the moistures which drain together here, bringing disease and deformity to rocks and earth as well as to living things. There are many living creatures in the land besides men and women, some abiding inland, and some on the coasts of the air, as we by the sea, others in the islands amidst its waves; for, in a word, what the water of the sea is to us for our uses, that the air is to them. The blending of the seasons there is such that they have no sickness and come to years more numerous far than ours: while for sight and scent and hearing and the like they stand as far from us, as air from water, in respect of purity, and the aether from air. There are thrones moreover and temples of the gods among them, wherein in very deed the gods abide; voices and oracles and sensible apprehensions of them; and occasions of intercourse with their very selves. The sun, the moon and the stars they see as they really are; and are blessed in all other matters agreeably thereto. Phaedo, 110.
The great assertor of the abstract, the impalpable, the unseen, at any cost, shows there a mastery of visual expression equal to that of his greatest disciple. — Ah, good master! was the eye so contemptible an organ of knowledge after all?
Plato was then about twenty-eight years old; a rich young man, rich also in intellectual gifts; and what he saw and heard from and about Socrates afforded the correction his opulent genius needed, and made him the most serious of writers. In many things he was as unlike as possible to the teacher — rude and rough as some failure of his own old sculptor’s workshop — who might seem in his own person to have broken up the harmonious grace of the Greek type, and carried people one step into a world already in reaction against the easy Attic temper, a world in which it might be necessary to go far below the sur
face for the beauty of which those homely lips had discoursed so much. Perhaps he acted all the more surely as a corrective force on Plato, henceforward an opponent of the obviously successful mental habits of the day, with an unworldliness which, a personal trait in Plato himself there acquired, will ever be of the very essence of Platonism.— “Many are called, but few chosen”: Narthękophoroi men polloi, bakchoi de te pauroi.+ He will have, as readers of The Republic know, a hundred precepts of self-repression for others — the self-repression of every really tuneable member of a chorus; and he begins by almost effacing himself. All that is best and largest in his own matured genius he identifies with his master; and when we speak of Plato generally what we are really thinking of is the Platonic Socrates.
NOTES
79. +Transliteration: epagôgę. Liddell and Scott definition: “a bringing on, to, or in . . . argument from induction.”
80. +Transliteration: peri physeôs historian. E-text editor’s translation: “inquiry into nature.” Plato, Phaedo 96a.
81. +Transliteration: panta diakosmei, kai pantôn aitios estin. Pater’s translation: “arranges and is the cause of all things.” Plato, Phaedo 97c, offers a close paraphrase of Anaxagoras’ saying.
83. +Transliteration: Auto kath’ hauto zętein ti pot’ estin aretę. Pater’s translation: “to seek out what virtue is, itself, in and by itself.” Plato, Meno 100b.
83. +Transliteration: Męden estin agathon ho ouk epistęmę periechei. Pater’s translation: “There is no good thing which knowledge does not comprehend.” Plato, Meno 87d.
84. *Tauton pantachou eidos — holon kai hygies — hen kata pantôn, dia pantôn, epi pasi-kath’ holou. Pater’s translation: “One and the same species in every place: whole and sound: one, in regard to, and through, and upon, all particular instances of it: catholic.” Perhaps Pater is combining phrases here; only the first phrase was locatable. Plato, Meno 72d.
84. +Transliteration: kath’ hekastęn tôn praxeôn, kai tôn hęlikiôn pros hekaston ergon, hekastô hęmôn. Pater’s translation: “to every several act, and to each period of life, in regard to each thing we have to do, in each one of us.” Plato, Meno 72a.
84. +Transliteration: ho mę oida ti esti, pôs an hopoion ge ti eideięn. Pater’s translation: “That, about which I don’t know what it is, how should I know what sort of a thing it is.” Plato, Meno 71b.
84. +Transliteration: poiotętes. Pater’s translation: “qualities.”
84. +Transliteration: kath’ holou. Pater’s translation: “universal, or catholic, definitions;” the phrase might be translated, “in accordance with the whole.”
86. +Transliteration: Tois anthrôpois, mę hosion einai, autous heatous eupoiein, all’ allon dei menein euergetęn. Pater’s translation: “why is it forbidden to seize such an advantage as death must be by self- destruction.” Plato, Phaedo 62a.
87. +Transliteration: to pharmakon epien en tô desmôtęriô. Pater’s translation: “he consumed the poison in the prison.” Plato, Phaedo 57a.
90. +Transliteration: ton hęttô logon kreittô poiein. Pater’s translation: “to make the worse appear the better reason.” Plato, Apology 23d.
93. +Transliteration: hoi elthonta me dei tethnanai. Pater’s translation: “whither he must go, to die.” The pronoun should be first person— “whither I must go.” Plato, Apology 39e.
95. +Transliteration: poięmata. Liddell and Scott definition: “anything made or done . . . a poetical work.”
95. +Transliteration: pseudę en pharmakou eidei. Pater’s translation: “medicinable fictions.” Plato, Republic 389b contains a similar phrase.
95. +Transliteration: Moi gegonen aneu apodeixeôs, meta eikotos tinos, kai euprepeias. Pater’s translation: “came to me apart from demonstration, with a sort of natural likelihood and fitness.” Plato, Phaedo 92c.
95. +Transliteration: ischuron ti estin. Pater’s translation: “is something sturdy and strong.” Plato, Phaedo 95c.
98. +Transliteration: Narthękophoroi men polloi, bakchoi de te pauroi. Pater’s translation: “Many are called, but few chosen.” Plato, Phaedo, 69c.
PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS
“SOPHIST,” professional enemy of Socrates: — it became, chiefly through the influence of Plato, inheriting, expanding, the preferences and antipathies of his master, a bad name. Yet it had but indicated, by a quite natural verbal formation, the class of persons through whom, in the most effectual manner, supply met demand, the demand for education, asserted by that marvellously ready Greek people, when the youthful mind in them became suddenly aware of the coming of virile capacity, and they desired to be made by rules of art better speakers, better writers and accountants, than any merely natural, unassisted gifts, however fortunate, could make them. While the peculiar religiousness of Socrates had induced in him the conviction that he was something less than a wise man, a philosopher only, a mere seeker after such wisdom as he might after all never attain, here were the sophistai,+ the experts — wise men, who proposed to make other people as wise as themselves, wise in that sort of wisdom regarding which we can really test others, and let them test us, not with the merely approximate results of the Socratic method, but with the exactness we may apply to processes understood to be mechanical, or to the proficiency of quite young students (such as in fact the Sophists were dealing with) by those examinations which are so sufficient in their proper place. It had been as delightful as learning a new game, that instruction, in which you could measure your daily progress by brilliant feats of skill. Not only did the parents of those young students pay readily large sums for their instruction in what it was found so useful to know, above all in the art of public speaking, of self-defence, that is to say, in democratic Athens where one’s personal status was become so insecure; but the young students themselves felt grateful for their institution in what told so immediately on their fellows; for help in the comprehension of the difficult sentences of another, or the improvement of one’s own; for the accomplishments which enabled them in that busy competitive world to push their fortunes each one for himself a little further, and quite innocently. Of course they listened.
“Love not the world!” — that, on the other hand, was what Socrates had said, or seemed to say; though in truth he too meant only to teach them how by a more circuitous but surer way to possess themselves of it. And youth, naturally curious and for the most part generous, willing to undergo much for the mere promise of some good thing it can scarcely even imagine, had been ready to listen to him too; the sons of rich men most often, by no means to the dissatisfaction of Socrates himself, though he never touched their money; young men who had amplest leisure for the task of perfecting their souls, in a condition of religious luxury, as we should perhaps say. As was evident in the court-house at the trial of the great teacher, to the eyes of older citizens who had not come under his personal influence, there had been little to distinguish between Socrates and his professional rivals. Socrates in truth was a Sophist; but more than a Sophist. Both alike handled freely matters that to the fathers had seemed beyond question; encouraged what seemed impious questioning in the sons; had set “the hearts of the sons against the fathers”; and some instances there were in which the teaching of Socrates had been more conspicuously ruinous than theirs. “If you ask people at Athens,” says Socrates in the Meno, “how virtue is to be attained, they will laugh in your face and say they don’t so much as know what virtue is.” And who was responsible for that? Certainly that Dialogue, proposing to discover the essential nature of virtue, by no means re-establishes one’s old prepossessions about it in the vein of Simonides, or Pindar, or one’s elders. Sophist, and philosopher; Protagoras, and Socrates; so far, their effect was the same: — to the horror of fathers, to put the minds of the sons in motion regarding matters it were surely best to take as settled once and for ever. What then after all was the insuperable difference between Socrates and those rival teachers, with whom he had nevertheless so much in common, bent like him so effectively, so
zealously, on that new study of man, of human nature and the moral world, to the exclusion of all useless “meteoric or subterranean enquiries” into things. As attractive as himself to ingenuous youth, uncorrupt surely in its early intentions, why did the Sophists seem to Socrates to be so manifestly an instrument of its corruption?
“The citizen of Athens,” observed that great Athenian statesman of the preceding age, in whom, as a German philosopher might say, the mobile soul of Athens became conscious,— “The citizen of Athens seems to me to present himself in his single person to the greatest possible variety (pleista eidę)+ of thought and action, with the utmost degree of versatility.” As we saw, the example of that mobility, that daring mobility, of character has seemed to many the special contribution of the Greek people to advancing humanity. It was not however of the Greek people in general that Pericles was speaking at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, but of Athens in particular; of Athens, that perfect flower of Ionian genius, in direct contrast to, and now in bitter rivalry with, Sparta, the perfect flower of the Dorian genius. All through Greek history, as we also saw, in connexion with Plato’s opposition to the philosophy of motion, there may be traced, in every sphere of the activity of the Greek mind, the influence of those two opposing tendencies: — the centrifugal and the centripetal tendencies, as we may perhaps not too fancifully call them.
There is the centrifugal, the irresponsible, the Ionian or Asiatic, tendency; flying from the centre, working with little forethought straight before it in the development of every thought and fancy; throwing itself forth in endless play of undirected imagination; delighting in colour and brightness, moral or physical; in beautiful material, in changeful form everywhere, in poetry, in music, in architecture and its subordinate crafts, in philosophy itself. In the social and political order it rejoices in the freest action of local and personal influences: its restless versatility drives it towards the assertion of the principles of individualism, of separatism — the separation of state from state, the maintenance of local religions, the development of the individual in that which is most peculiar and individual in him. Shut off land-wards from the primitive sources of those many elements it was to compose anew, shut off from all the rest of the world, to which it presented but one narrow entrance pierced through that rock of Tempe, so narrow that “in the opinion of the ancients it might be defended by a dozen men against all comers,” it did recompose or fuse those many diverse elements into one absolutely original type. But what variety within! Its very claim was in its grace of movement, its freedom and easy happiness, its lively interests, the variety of its gifts to civilisation; but its weakness is self-evident, and was what had made the political unity of Greece impossible. The Greek spirit! — it might have become a hydra, to use Plato’s own figure, a monster; the hand developing hideously into a hundred hands, or heads.