He didn’t supply answers at the end of the elenctic exercises he was always conducting, after he had destroyed the increasingly unsteady responses of his interlocutors. What better circumstances could there have been to reveal—ta-da!—his own discoveries to the questions he foisted on others. So was it true that he lacked the answers? If he had the answers, then why didn’t he come out and share them with his fellow citizens, yield up his superiority for the good of the polis? And if he didn’t have them, then on what basis could he be so certain that his neighbors lacked them? Why always the insincerity masking the smug certainty that he would get no satisfaction from his fellow Athenians?
It had been one thing to tolerate his impudence when they had been riding high. They could afford to tolerate a genuine Athenian eccentric like him in the days when, as Pericles had made so clear for them, their worthiness was so manifest as to need no publicizing Homer. But now, clinging to a sense of their collective exceptionalism as best they could, his incessant challenges had simply become too much. They were no longer to be tolerated.
They would not be tolerated.
And so at the first opportunity, with the Spartan forces withdrawn and the democratic government once again on a stable footing, an indictment was entered at the stoa of the archon basileus by one Meletus, son of Meletus.
Meletus was a young and obscure poet. The accused, who spent his days wandering the streets of Athens in search of conversation and got himself invited to the best parties in town, had never heard of his accuser, neither by reputation nor by personal dealings. “I do not really know him myself, Euthyphro. He is apparently young and unknown,” he says as he waits to go before the archon basileus, continuing with his brand of irony: “[I]t is no small thing for a young man to have knowledge of such an important subject. He says he knows how our young men are corrupted and who corrupts them. He is likely to be wise, and when he sees my ignorance corrupting his contemporaries, he proceeds to accuse me to the city as to their mother” (Euthyphro 2c). Always with the sarcasm.
Two others, more prominent in the polis, stood as Meletus’ supporting speakers, or synegoroi.
There was a rich man, Anytus. He had both a tannery and a problematic son, who had displayed an enthusiasm for Bacchus and a taste for vice. The accused had warned Anytus that his scion was in need of guidance higher than what an inherited tannery could offer him (Xenophon, Apology 31.1–4), which no doubt offended the father. Like many of the polis’s citizens, Anytus’ political allegiances were complicated. He had supported the regime of the Thirty until it deemed him either too unreliable or too rich and banished him from the city, helping itself to his property. He became a general for the exiled democrats and then a leader in the restored democracy.
The other supporter of the accusation was Lycon, an orator of the polis. Lycon also had a son, Autolycus, who had associated with the accused. Sadly, Autolycus had been executed by the Thirty.13 Lycon, like Anytus, had a complicated history of allegiances; he had been accused of having betrayed the city of Naupactus to the Spartans during the Peloponnesian War.14
But it was Meletus who entered the formal indictment, which brought the famous eccentric of Athens, now a man of seventy, to trial:
This indictment (graphê) is brought on oath by Meletus, son of Meletus of Pithus, against Socrates, son of Sophroniscus, of Alopece. Socrates is guilty of not believing in the gods the city believes in, and of introducing other divinities (daimōnia) and he is guilty of corrupting the young. The penalty assessed is death.15
CONTRETEMPS
Meletus made his formal indictment against Socrates in the spring of 399. The archon basileus, an official who had jurisdiction over cases of both homicide and impiety, ruled that the case had sufficient merit to go to court. The trial took place a month or two later, in Thargelion (May/June). It was held outdoors to accommodate the full crowd, not only the 501 jurors,16 but the large crowd of onlookers. Great swaths of material were laid out as awnings to protect them from the blazing sun. The trial lasted for the better part of the day, the three accusers together having three hours to make their case, and the accused accorded three hours in defense. The time was measured out by a water clock. The day before the trial, the Athenians had sent a ship, dedicated to Apollo, to the island of Delos. This was a yearly event, in commemoration of the legendary victory of Theseus over the Minotaur, which the Athenians celebrated as part of their history. To preserve the ritual purity, Athenian law prohibited any executions from taking place until the ship returned (Phaedo 58a–b). The duration of the voyage varied with conditions, but in this year it took thirty-one days for the ship to return (Xenophon, Memorabilia 4.8.2), which means that Socrates lived thirty days beyond his trial, into the month of Skirophorion (June–July).
Of the twenty-six dialogues of Plato, the internal dramas of seven of them are set during the spring and summer of 399: Theaetetus, Euthyphro, Sophist, Statesman, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. No matter how scholars argue the chronology of the dialogues, it seems safe to say that these seven dialogues were written over the course of Plato’s long life. Not only was Plato’s ongoing philosophical imagination organized around the figure of Socrates, but it continuously reverted to those months in the spring and summer of 399. Even in the Sophist and the Statesman, late dialogues in which the figure of Socrates is withdrawn from the philosophical center into the margins, still the temporal settings give singular priority to the drama of Socrates’ death.
Other dialogues as well, set before those few months of 399, make allusions to the Socratic death drama. For example, an irascible Anytus makes a late entrance in the Meno, pulled into the conversation Socrates is conducting with the eponymous visitor from Thessaly on the subject of whether aretē can be taught. Scholars agree that the character is meant to be the same Anytus who will play a part in Socrates’ downfall. When Socrates asks Anytus who are those who can teach virtue to the rich visitor Meno, Anytus impatiently answers, much like Cheryl the media escort of chapter β, that any decent Athenian citizen whom Meno happens to meet can teach him aretē (92e). This is telling, as is Anytus’ threatening outburst, after he has heard Socrates argue that aretē cannot be taught, given the failure of such men as Themistocles and Pericles to raise exemplary sons. “I think, Socrates, that you easily speak ill of people. I would advise you, if you will listen to me, to be careful” (94e). Socrates remarks, “I think, Meno, that Anytus is angry and I am not at all surprised. He thinks, to begin with, that I am slandering those men, and then he believes himself to be one of them. If he ever realizes what slander is, he will cease from anger, but he does not know it now” (95a). Knowing what lay ahead in Socrates’ future, we read this passage and hear its ominous undertone.17
There are large historical events transpiring as Plato writes. The Ionian poleis, which had served as the casus belli of the last century’s Persian Wars, were absorbed once again into Persia. Philip of Macedon was making steady encroachments into Greece. None of this is paid any mind in Plato’s writing. Instead, time is altogether stalled in the last quarter of the fifth century. It is life as it was then, during Socrates’ heyday, that Plato re-creates the bulk of the dialogues set either before Plato was alive or when he was a boy.
The earliest dialogue, according to its internal dramatic chronology, is the Parmenides, though it was probably written relatively late in Plato’s life. Its internal date is the summer of 450, and Socrates is a young man. The last of the dialogues, according to its internal chronology, is the Phaedo, extended to a bare few moments after Socrates’ death.
But it is most particularly those seven dialogues crowded into the spring and summer of 399 that reveal how the Socratic death drama functioned in the ongoing philosophical project of Plato’s life. Plato presents Socrates as always maintaining a certain distance from the personal crisis in which he finds himself. He is not going to let a contretemps like being brought up on a capital offense interfere with his pursuing the philosophical subjects that interest him.
18 The positioning of the personal drama—being accused, convicted, imprisoned, and executed—as a mere backdrop to discussions of timeless questions is meant itself to convey a moral lesson. To reflect on the conditions that make a life worth living is to remove oneself from the circumstances of that life as much as possible. It is to see that life in the context of a perspective that does not take the contingencies of that particular life that you happen to be living overly seriously. To philosophize is to prepare to die. Or, to truly take your life with the seriousness that philosophy demands, you can’t take your life all that seriously. This is to give a new philosophical spin, more dizzyingly paradoxical, to the old Greek idea that the hero is, like Achilles, prepared to shorten his life in order for that life to be something extraordinary, aretē achieved.
The first of the dialogues that is set against the death drama of Socrates is the Theaetatus, a dialogue which is often grouped (for those who group) with Plato’s vigorously doctrinal Middle Period, even though it ends, as the earlier dialogues do, in aporia. It deals with the nature of knowledge and how it differs from belief even when that belief happens to be true. The Theaetetus is set on the day that Socrates is to answer the summons of the archon basileus. This might be an anxious time for an ordinary person, but not for Socrates, at least as Plato tells it. It turns out to be an excellent day for Socrates because he meets an excellent boy, Theaetetus,19 the prized student of the mathematician Theodorus. Theodorus tells Socrates that he’s not ashamed to praise Theaetetus because nobody will suspect he’s in love with him, since he’s not handsome “but—forgive my saying so—he resembles you in being snub-nosed and having prominent eyes” (143e). Socrates employs his maieutic methods on Theaetetus, and neither is altogether satisfied with the results. (The term “maieutic” derives from the Greek maieutikos, pertaining to midwifery. Maieutics is the pedagogical method that tries to draw a conclusion out of a mind where it latently resides. As Leibniz remarks of the method, it consists in drawing valid inferences.)
The conclusion that Socrates draws out of Theaetetus—that knowledge is true belief fortified with an account of why it is true, does not seem altogether adequate to them. (Future epistemologists, seeing in Plato’s Theaetetus the core analysis of knowledge as “justified true belief,” would be far more appreciative of what that dialogue accomplished than its own author might have been.) But by the end, Socrates is ready to see the young mathematician as beautiful. Here are the closing words of the dialogue, and, they, together with the framing drama of the dialogue, which reports that Theaetetus, now a respected mathematician, has been fatally wounded in battle and is being carried back to his city to die, provide a certain pathos to the epistemological work that is done in the Theaetetus:20
And so, Theaetetus, if ever in the future you should attempt to conceive or should succeed in conceiving other theories, they will be better ones as the result of this inquiry. And if you remain barren, your companions will find you gentler and less tiresome; you will be modest and not think you know what you don’t know. This is all my art can achieve—nothing more. I do not know any of the things that other men know—the great and inspired men of today and yesterday. But this art of midwifery my mother and I had allotted to us by God; she to deliver women, I to deliver men that are young and generous of spirit; all that have any beauty. And now I must go to the King’s Porch to meet the indictment that Meletus has brought against me; but let us meet here again in the morning, Theodorus. (209b–210d)
The Euthyphro, which is one of Plato’s earlier dialogues and deals with the relationship between theism and morality—an issue still fraught for us today—takes place later that same day, the date of the preliminary hearing, and it transpires while Socrates is on the portico of the Royal Stoa, awaiting his turn to appear before the archon basileus. Unwilling to squander any opportunity for meaningful discussion, he falls into conversation with a diviner-priest named Euthyphro, a priceless character whose sacerdotal vanity cannot be pierced. A self-declared expert on all things holy, Euthyphro has come to the Royal Stoa to indict his own father on a charge of homicide for having accidentally killed a hireling, who had himself killed another worker in a fit of anger. Socrates is amazed to hear that Euthyphro is so secure in his moral certitude as to charge his own father. (The ancient Athenian codes of family loyalty make Euthyphro’s actions seem all the more questionable.) Euthyphro responds with the telltale conviction of the self-righteous. Socrates immediately launches in, having his fun, declaring that Euthyphro alone can save him, in this his moment of need, by instructing him on the nature of piety or holiness so that he can present himself as chastened to Meletus—though “Meletus, I perceive, along presumably with everybody else, appears to overlook you.” With an interlocutor as deaf to sarcasm as to philosophical subtlety, Plato’s Socrates proceeds to formulate a line of reasoning that will prove to be of fundamental importance in the history of secularism, one that will be adapted by freethinkers from Spinoza to Bertrand Russell to the so-called new atheists of today, persuasively arguing that a belief in the gods—or God—cannot provide the philosophical grounding for morality.
Plato begins the inquisition innocently enough, with Socrates asking Euthyphro, “Is what is holy holy because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it’s holy?” (10a). Plato uses this question to pry apart the notion of an action’s being divinely ordained from its having moral worth. The argument is formulated in terms of “the gods,” but is, without loss of force, susceptible to the substituting of “God” for “the gods.” Plato’s argument, in a nutshell, is this: If God approves of an action, either he approves of it arbitrarily, for no reason at all, so that it is only his approving it that confers on it moral value; or else there is a reason for his approving it, so that it is not simply an arbitrary whim on God’s part but rather he has a reason for his approval, that reason being the independent moral worth of that of which he approves. If the former is the case, then how does this arbitrary whim, even if it is a divine arbitrary whim, confer moral value? How can something be good just because someone up there feels like calling it good, when, if he were of a different disposition or in a different mood, he could just as easily call the opposite act good? But if the latter is the case, then there is a reason for the divine normative attitude, and that reason is the reason both for God’s approval and for the moral worth of that of which he approves. This makes God’s approval, normatively speaking, redundant—he is, as we say today, a rubber stamp. In neither case—whether the approval is arbitrary or whether it is not—does the supernatural approval make any difference to whether an act is genuinely right or wrong.
What is still referred to as “the Euthyphro Dilemma” or “the Euthyphro Argument” remains one of the most frequently utilized arguments against the claim that morality can be grounded only in theology, that it is only the belief in God that stands between us and the moral abyss of nihilism.21 Dostoevsky may have declared that “without God all is permissible,” but Plato’s preemptive riposte, sent out to us across the millennia, is that any act morally impermissible with God is morally impermissible without him, making clear how little the addition of God helps to clarify the ethical situation.
The argument Plato has Socrates make in the Euthyphro is one of the most important in the history of moral philosophy. When it is joined with another of Plato’s claims, namely that a person’s action is virtuous only if he can supply a reason for its being so, the Euthyphro Argument demonstrates the need for moral philosophy. We humans must reason our way to morality or we will not get there at all. Relying on fiats, even should they emanate from on high, will not allow us to achieve an understanding of virtue. Any progress in our moral understanding—progress that, in time, would take us some distance away from the slave-abusing, captive-slaughtering, philosopher-executing, misogynistic Athens that held itself up as the very standard of aretē—has been made on the basis of an argument that Plato put into the mouth of a man awaiting a hearing on charges of
impiety and corruption of the young.
This moment in Socrates’ life, as Plato has rendered it, is sufficiently important to step away from it, and reflect. It has a bearing on the question that is always hovering over this book, as it traces the sources of philosophy as we know it, and that is the question of philosophy’s progress. If one evaluates what the ancient Greek philosophers did solely in terms of Thales and Co., then of course one will conclude something like “Philosophy used to be a field that had content, but then ‘natural philosophy’ became physics, and physics has only continued to make inroads.” But this is to focus on only one type of question the ancient Greek philosophers posed to self-critical reason, the protoscientific questions that awaited the mature sciences. It is to ignore such questions as those that Plato has Socrates raising with Euthyphro on the portico of the archon basileus. It is to ignore Plato’s argument that, since religious authority can’t answer these questions, we had better get to work on formulating the reasons that make right actions right and wrong actions wrong. It is to ignore the work that has since been done, not only on the normative questions of ethics but on the normative questions of epistemology, the work that is necessary to speak about rationality at all. It is to ignore the conclusions to which philosophy-jeerers freely help themselves, most certainly when they speak in the name of rationality.
When philosophy-jeerers are scientific, then their jeering frequently takes on religion as well as philosophy. Typically, they do not differentiate between philosophy and theology. Anything that isn’t science is philosophy/theology. Lawrence Krauss, whom I keep mentioning only because he conveniently articulated a viewpoint that many scientists share, lumps philosophers and theologians together. Such jeerers should pause and reflect on this moment of the Euthyphro. Plato is arguing that ethical questions can only be answered by way of human reason, with no religious input, and that is a conclusion that radically separates philosophy from theology. It is ironic when freethinkers like Krauss lump philosophy and theology together. The Enlightenment came about when philosophers like Baruch Spinoza went back to the work of grounding ethics on purely secular reasoning, a project which had been interrupted by the centuries of theological ideology. Spinoza made his goal clear when he titled his magnum opus The Ethics. This was to take up again work which had been initiated by Plato’s Socrates, there on the portico of the archon basileus.
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