8Cf. Phaedrus 245c–250d, which ends with the words: “Let that be our tribute to memory, then, for the sake of which, and because of a longing for those earlier times, such a lengthy statement has been made.”
9In thePhaedrus, he is tolerant of those who can’t resist the carnal: “In the end they lack their wings, but they emerge from the body with the impulse to grow wings, so they carry away no small prize from their erotic madness” (256d).
ζ
SOCRATES MUST DIE
One of the numerous poison vials found in the vicinity of the ancient Athenian prison. Photo from the display in the Agora Museum, Athens (illustration credit ill.9)
A MOST PECULIAR MAN
For if he [the philosopher] holds aloof, it’s not for reputation’s sake. The fact is that it’s his body that’s in the state, here on a visit, while his thought, disdaining all such things as worthless, takes wings.
—Theaetetus 173e
And all the people said, “What a shame that he’s dead,
But wasn’t he a most peculiar man?”
—Simon and Garfunkel
On one of the rare occasions that he found himself in the countryside, he couldn’t stop exclaiming on the prettiness that he saw around him. Look at the spreading branches of the sycamore tree! Look at the splashing of the sparkling stream! It made the boy walking the path beside him burst into laughter to hear him exclaim over these commonplaces, natural beauty being such a novelty to him. He hardly ever wandered far outside the city’s walls, since what he wanted to learn the charming scenery couldn’t teach him (Phaedrus 230d).
Even during the hardest years of the war that brought so much filth and disease into the crowded city packed inside its walls, he did not let the conditions undermine his passion and his pleasure.1 Chances were good on any given day that you would find him in the agora, barefoot and eager, striking up an inquiry into the true nature of some virtue or other, having cornered someone in the long columned southern stoa where the merchants set up their stalls, or at the palestra of Taureas (Charmides 153da) or the gymnasium at the Lyceum (Euthyphro 2a, Lysis 203a, Euthydemus 271a, Symposium 223d),2 where the boys gathered to exercise and he was always on the lookout for new talent.
He showed up every day conscientiously, even after a night of hard drinking (Symposium 223d), for the work for which he declined to receive remuneration (Apology 19d–e). Perhaps his wife’s reputation as a shrew had something to do with his exalted decision to work without compensation; that might make any wife complain, especially as there were three sons. His wife’s name, Xanthippe, has come to mean a nagging ill-tempered woman. In The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare has Petruchio describe Katherina as a “Xanthippe or a worse” (act 1, scene 2). Their youngest was still a toddler when Xanthippe became his widow (Phaedo 60a). His net worth, including his house, was five minae (Xenophon, Oeconomicus 2.3.4–5), the equivalent of what a sophist might charge for a single course (Xenophon, Apology 209b), and less than a skilled laborer could earn in a year and a half. He saw no dishonor in his impecuniousness, and carried himself with the imperturbability of a man of independent means who lives exactly as he pleases. It was hard to know whether to laugh or be awed at his pose.
He was often the butt of the jokes of the most popular comic playwright in town, his activities lampooned as “hairsplitting twaddle” (Aristophanes, The Frogs 1495). He laughed at the poet’s stanzas with the same ironic distance with which he regarded all things that mattered not at all, though some of his friends, including Plato, will blame Aristophanes for contributing to his defamation (Apology 18d, 19c).3
He looked on his job as a high calling, to which he was singularly suited, and not even when his working conditions had deteriorated to the point of threatening his life would he consider quitting his post (Apology, passim).
He did not leave the city when, in its defeat, a garrison of Spartans camped out on the Acropolis, lending ominous support to the oligarchs who were set up after the victors sailed in, effectively dismantling the democracy for which the polis had been famous. It wasn’t only in the other poleis that many had looked on the political experiments within Athens as bizarre.4 Within Athens, too, there had always been those who held firm to the innate aretē of the aristocracy and despised the granting of citizenship to the unpropertied hoi polloi. They resented that any thēte’s vote counted as much as any aristocrat’s, and that that same thēte, coming straight to the Pnyx from his field or shop, could get up and address the ekklêsia as if his opinion mattered just as much as a worthier man’s. Pericles had long been dead, carried off by the plague in the early years of the decades-long war.5
The Thirty, who ruled for barely a year, were scions of the city’s oldest families, and in their brief and violent reign they allowed their hostility to the government that they had always regarded as rabble-rule to roil into vengeful lawlessness intensified by greed for power and property. Voting was restricted to the few and then to the even fewer, a designated Three Thousand who were allowed the privilege of bearing arms and of trial by jury.6 Those who didn’t make the cut went to live in the narrow streets and alleyways surrounding the harbor of Piraeus and could be summarily brought up on any trumped-up charges, a system of informers reticulating to entrap them. The dead and the exiled had their property confiscated, so that greed soon rivaled politics as a motivation. Metics, the foreign workers who had never been allowed citizenship in the city, were particularly vulnerable, especially if they were rich.
The Thirty had been “elected” by the ekklêsia, though the vote had been primed by Pausanius, king of the victorious Spartans, and the citizens had little choice, with the city half-starved by blockade. They were mandated to produce a constitution that would restore “the ancestral laws,” but the Thirty showed no inclination to produce a constitution, ruling instead by non-legitimized fiat. From September 404 to May 403, fifteen hundred Athenians were killed, which exceeded those killed in the last decade of the Peloponnesian War. Three hundred “whip-bearing servants” carried out the orders and induced a reign of terror. Besides the many who were dispensed with hemlock, thousands more had been sent into exile or had voluntarily fled, some of them organizing to retake their city and restore its democracy.
But not he. He continued on in the same way as he always had, trekking to his favorite haunts to pursue the impractical inquiries which almost always ended far short of resolution. Is virtue a matter of knowledge or of something else? If it isn’t a matter of knowledge, then how can it be trusted as reliable? But if it is a matter of knowledge, then can it not be taught? But then why do virtuous men so often have vicious sons, and virtuous teachers vicious students? It was as if he were oblivious to the great political events transpiring around him.
But then, among his various oddities was an oblivion that could settle over him, a fit of distraction that could lift him out of his immediate circumstances (Symposium 174d). Once he became intellectually engaged—and he was almost always intellectually engaged—his attention narrowly focused in. If circumstances weren’t relevant to his peculiar preoccupations, he paid them little notice, relegating them to the wide margins he kept for subjects worthy only of his mischievous sense of humor. The particularities of the political upheavals racking his city belonged to those margins, and he expressed the seriousness with which he regarded local politics by subjecting even the most deadly, if ephemerally, powerful men of his city to his quips.
He was an inveterate quipster.
Some might interpret his staying put during the year of mounting terror as de facto sympathy for the Spartan-sponsored Thirty. Any citizen who had failed to join the democrats in exile by 403 could later be said to have “remained in the city” and that alone could raise suspicions of having been one of the Three Thousand, the few allowed to retain citizenship. The list of the Three Thousand was never made public, so we still do not know his status. “Remained in the city” became, in the years after the Thirty had been dispatched—most to their gr
aves—code in the courts for having been one of their fellow travelers. And even though that particular suggestion isn’t lodged against him in any extant account, still it’s natural to conclude that he was suspected of Spartan leanings—especially since, years before the reign of the Thirty, rumors about his split loyalties had already been bruited, quite publicly in the plays of Aristophanes.
Among the aristocratic young men who flitted in and out of his influence were some with decidedly anti-democratic leanings. The famous comic playwright had hinted broadly that he was implicated in subversive politics, making up two words to send home his message, one of which meant “to be mad for Sparta,” and the other of which was based on his name.7 The play was performed in 414, during the period when Alcibiades was making himself the toast of Sparta, Athens having suffered disaster at Sicily. Of course, Sparta was just a passing phase on the part of the irrepressible Alcibiades, who would be held to no accounting but that of his own transgressive nature. But others who had hung on the man’s words had proved to be more lastingly mad for Sparta, including the most notorious of the Thirty, Critias. So what should we say then of the man whose name had been linked with them? Was he not also mad for Sparta?
No, he wasn’t. His cynicism about the Athenian democracy doesn’t mean he was keen on the oligarchy. To see subversive politics in his stance is to miss the point of what he was about.8 To see subversive politics hovering around him is to join the crowd of Athenians who never grasped the nature of his questions. He was about something far more subversive to Athenian values than mere party politics.
It is true that he had not joined the democrats in exile, and that he had not gone out of his way to protest the abuses of the Thirty, though he had balked when they ordered him to take part in one of their errands of evil. This was their way, to try to implicate as many as they could in their dirty deeds (Apology 32a–d). Those who share in guilt are unlikely to call out the guilt. So he kept himself unstained, refusing to fetch an innocent man, Leon of Salamis, for summary execution. Instead he took himself home, an act of passive resistance that, though mortally dangerous under the circumstances, was perhaps not sufficiently resistant—not sufficiently political—to convince those disposed to hold him in suspicion.
His pronounced apolitical stance can arouse, still, incredulity, suspicion that some deeper hidden political allegiance must be lurking below. How can a person of gravitas hold himself aloof from contemporary politics? And in his city in particular, which looked on participation in public policy as a measure of the superiority that each citizen could achieve, he seemed to take a perverse pride in not even knowing how, when he was elected to the Council of 500, to vote (Gorgias 473e). To be politically indifferent is to remove oneself from one’s own time. But that is precisely what he intended to do: to step out of his time. In so intensely a political culture as his, which could barely conceive of virtue except in terms of politics, his stance bordered on incoherent.
If conventional Athenian politics struck him as being beside the point of the elusive notion of aretē that he was endlessly trying to chase down, then the politics of the oligarchy were beneath his contempt. He never identified with the Thirty, any more than he had identified with the democrats, and, in fact, a good deal less.
As for the Thirty, they showed themselves increasingly ill disposed toward him. They framed a law expressly forbidding the art of disputation, which was, more than likely, specifically aimed at him (Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.2.31). The art of disputation is hardly compatible with the mood of intimidation their unconstitutional government required.
And then Critias had long had it in for him, the result of an insult that must have festered for years, when, in his irrepressible frank speaking, he had remarked on the unseemly erotic attentions that Critias was showing the beautiful young Euthydemus. He had compared the future oligarch’s behavior to a pig rubbing himself against the stones (ibid.). Critias, a ragingly proud man, with a noble ancestry that reached back to Solon the Lawgiver and a cultivated mind that made the man consider himself a philosopher and a poet of the first rank, was unlikely to forget such insolence.
And who were this man’s forebears that he took such liberties with the high and mighty? His father, Sophroniscus, had been a stonemason. His mother, Phaenarete, had been a midwife. He sometimes, at least according to Plato, likened his own profession to hers, remarking that he, too, helped people give birth, only to ideas rather than children, aborting those that weren’t worth rearing. He used the comparison to remark the lack of definite conclusions to which he ever came (Theaetetus 149a and 210d). Like his mother, too old herself to give birth, he helped others bring forth living ideas, but never bore his own. Plato at least puts those words into his mouth.
He loved to use homely analogies in his philosophical arguments, taking examples from the work of carpenters and shoemakers and others who worked with their hands. It was a way to show the continuity of philosophy with everyday affairs, as was his method of plying his profession in the streets of Athens and among all varieties of people.
But if by his language and rhetorical style he claimed solidarity with the people, his philosophical populism did not make him a democrat in his political sympathies, at least not Athenian democracy. He scoffed at the Athenians’ delusion of their participatory exceptionalism. He scoffed at how the artful speakers could sway the unsophisticated in the crowd.
They do their praising so splendidly that they cast a spell over our souls, attributing to each individual man, with the most varied and beautiful verbal embellishments, both praise he merits and praise he does not, extolling the city in every way, and praising the war-dead, all our ancestors before us, and us ourselves, the living. The result is, Menexenus, that I am put into an exalted frame of mind when I am praised by them. Each time, as I listen and fall under their spell, I become a different man—I’m convinced that I have become taller and nobler and better looking all of a sudden. It often happens, too, that all of a sudden I inspire greater awe in the friends from other cities who tag along and listen with me every year. For they are affected in their view of me and the rest of the city just as I am: won over by the speaker, they think the city more wonderful than they thought it before. And this high-and-mighty feeling remains with me more than three days. The speaker’s words and the sound of his voice sink into my ears with so much resonance that it is only with difficulty that on the third or fourth day I recover myself and realize where I am. Until then I could imagine that I dwell in the Islands of the Blessed. That’s how clever our orators are. (Menexenus 234e–235c)
Rhetoric is dangerous when the average citizen is empowered to make decisions, because the average citizen is in no position to withstand the rhetorician’s savvy manipulations. The way to get ahead in Athens’ democracy, he complained, was to flatter and ingratiate, to bypass the intellect and go for the emotions. The crowds wanted good theater in the ekklêsia and good theater demands large emotions, and large emotions overpower reason.
Still, he couldn’t help but cherish the spirit of free speech for which his polis was celebrated. He must have cherished it, since he so lavishly availed himself of it. And what hope could there be for arriving at some consensus about the most important questions a person could ask himself, what hope for blasting through the biases that make each person see the world at a severe slant depending on his own individual positioning, if we don’t bring lots of slants into the dialogue, so that, colliding with each other, something straighter can emerge?
Herodotus, in running down a list of Greek poleis, citing what it was that defined the distinctive exceptionality of each polis, commends the citizens of Athens for their wonderful discourse. The democracy had formalized the privilege of speaking one’s mind, legally guaranteeing isegoria, the right of all citizens to speak their piece in the ekklêsia.
But beyond the formal legal right, there was a spirit pervading the city’s culture at large, known as parrhêsia, which means “frank speaking.” Athenians
prided themselves on parrhêsia, and he, who was its very avatar, must have been highly prized by the friends of democracy.
Or so one might have thought.
In any case, the oligarchy brought an end to all such logorrheic liberty. And so, as sarcastic as he had often been about his city’s democracy, he despised the oligarchs. He defied them on the one occasion when they tried to implicate him in their wrongdoing, and he defied them, daily and uninterruptedly, by continuing his art of disputation, thumbing his nose at the law which might well have been framed with him specifically in mind, especially since, in the time of the Thirty, there were no more sophists visiting the city, and it hardly needed saying that the privilege of parrhêsia had been revoked.
Only he still partook of the privilege. Liberty of expression was one aspect of the democratic spirit that he was not prepared to forgo. As the deaths mounted he quipped, using his favored form of homely analogies, that just as a herdsman who randomly thins his flock and worsens their overall condition must regard himself as a poor herdsman, so a ruler who randomly thins his populace and worsens their condition must regard himself a poor ruler. The wisecrack earned him a summons before two of the tyrants, Charicles and Critias, who reminded him that his diurnal activities put him in violation of the law against disputation and then forbade him to engage in all conversations with young men. He immediately began to have his fun with the two, disputing with them over the meaning of the prohibition against disputation. Charicles, falling into the verbal trap, answered the increasingly ridiculous questions, until Critias, who had been silently listening, put an end to the farce, threatening him with a none-too-veiled threat that Charicles then emphasized: “And, if you continue,” Charicles put in, “you’ll find the herdsman has thinned the herd by one more” (Xenophon, Memorabilia 2, 32–138).
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