Why Socrates Died

by Robin Waterfield

  By the end of the fifth century, literacy in Athens had spread down to the artisan level, though the countryside remained largely unlettered. But by and large classical Athens functioned perfectly well without mass literacy. The uses to which writing was put – from letter-writing to legal documents such as wills and contracts, from the writing of literature to civic and political lists, from recording maritime loans to fixing magical curses – were usually things with which the masses were largely uninvolved. New laws and other civic information were posted in the Agora, but there was always someone around who could read them out to those who were illiterate, or educated slaves to write a letter. Even at the higher levels of society, ancient Athens was largely an oral culture: the literate tended to dictate letters rather than write them themselves, and to listen to a slave reading rather than read themselves. Reading as a pastime was virtually unknown; it was more common for men to gather in groups to hear a work being read out.

  Schooling began in Athens around the beginning of the fifth cen tury BCE, but schoolteachers remained few, underpaid and underrated in the classical period. Even in the fourth century Demosthenes taunted his rival Aeschines with being the son of a mere schoolmaster. Boys who were lucky enough to gain an education attended three kinds of school, each of which took in a dozen or so pupils. A grammatistēs taught them to read and write and do their sums, and made them study and even learn substantial amounts of the Homeric poems, for moral purposes. A kitharistēs taught them music, singing, dancing and the lyric poets, so that they would in due course be able to hold their own in the contests of the symposium. A paidotribēs supervised their physical education at a gymnasium or a palaestra (wrestling ground), to prepare them simultaneously for athletic contests and for warfare, since hoplite warfare required little skill, but only general fitness. Future knights were taught horse-riding at home. And that was it: education was upper-class indoctrination, not the development of critical, experimental or creative thinking.

  A typical day involved attendance at the palaestra early in the morning, returning home for the late-morning meal, and then spending the early afternoon at one of the other schools. Schooling continued only until the early teens. There were no state-sponsored schools, and the state did not interfere if you did not send your son to school. The lax attitude towards education reflects two principles: that children were not highly regarded in their own right, but were seen as adults in waiting; and that the Athenians had supreme confidence in the ability of the inherited conglomerate to condition their children into traditional Athenian mores. Plato has Socrates’ prosecutor Anytus express the opinion that ‘any decent Athenian gentleman’ made a better educator than the so-called professionals.

  School education was seen as supplementary to the company of adults, at home or elsewhere, from whom one could learn the behaviour and patterns of thought that were expected of an Athenian. Homer and the lyric poets generally reflected a suitably upper-class ethos, and so in their more problematic ways did the tragedians. Attendance at the dramatic festivals was therefore another part of a boy’s education – and perhaps one of the few parts that gave him some notion of critical thinking. Equally important, after the age of twenty, was attending to the decisions of the people in the Assembly and the law courts, to see what earned communal praise and what was blamed. A very few boys, only from the aristocracy, were further acculturated by being taken under the wing of an older lover.

  THE SOPHISTS

  A new breed of educators created a storm in this complacent world. The sophists (as they came to be called, though the single label disguises their differences) undermined the role of a boy’s family in his education by offering their wares outside the family context, and their courses might require some kind of attendance for several months or even years; they placed considerably less emphasis on rote learning of poems and more on criticizing them, or even re-interpreting them as allegories; they implicitly denied that lineage or traditional Athenian education automatically made a man a good citizen, let alone fit for government, and offered to supplement his paltry education with other branches of study that would be of practical use in the modern world. No longer need a man take pride in being conspicuous for his military prowess, athleticism and good looks; all a man needed for success (in this culture where competition for the limelight was taken for granted) was the ability to speak well. Naturally, then, these new educators were suspect. Plato has Protagoras of Abdera say about himself: ‘A foreigner who visits great cities and persuades the best of the young men to abandon the society of everyone else – family and friends, old and young – and to come to him instead for improvement has to be careful, because he is liable to a great deal of resentment, hostility and intrigue.’

  Despite this resentment, these teachers did not cause changes, any more than the rash of eastern or eastern-inspired gurus of the 1960s and 1970s were ‘brainwashing’ young people from the first world; they came because there was a demand for them, because people needed to make sense of what was happening and to cope with a new world in the future. Athens was, relatively speaking, swimming in cash, and the leisured young were hungry for new horizons, and bored with the status quo. Moreover, an aristocratic young man was expected to enhance his own and his family’s prestige by playing a part in the government of Athens. But the Athenian democracy exercised such control over its officers that a politician’s very life could depend on his ability to deliver a persuasive speech in the Assembly or law courts. So, of course, could his career: ‘A man who has a policy but does not explain it clearly is in the same situation as one who has none in mind,’ as Thucydides said. And greater sophistication, professionalism and clarity of thought were required to take charge of an empire, with all its financial, logistical and military responsibilities, and potential clashes of cultures. Every Greek city required a high level of involvement from those of its members who counted as full citizens, but none more so than democratic Athens. The issue was how to turn out competent statesmen: this was the need to which many of the new educators responded.

  Sophists attracted pupils by giving displays, either as they travelled from city to city, or at international festivals where they could find large numbers already gathered. They offered to teach a vast range of subjects, from music and martial arts to government, with the balance on skills useful for government and manipulating the democratic system. Athenian democracy was a congenial environment, because, as Harvey Yunis describes it,

  Persuasion was built into the system: in the assembly individual citizens volunteered to engage in open, competitive debate before the voting, sovereign audience; in court litigants were compelled to speak for themselves before the same audience. Verbal combat in the assembly and courts could be intense: personal fortunes, political careers, lives, or the welfare of the community often hung in the balance.

  Often, then, they were teachers of rhetoric and disputation (and hence of grammar, terminology, logic and other subjects that supported rhetoric and disputation). Most of them focused on the human sphere, social philosophy rather than highfalutin stuff, and approached issues empirically. They were very interested in effects: the effect of words on the human mind, the effect of music on the emotions.

  This rudimentary higher education was designed only for the rich, since the sophists tended to charge exorbitant fees, but it was a step in the right direction, and they also gave displays of their learning or speechifying to wider audiences. Plato and Aristotle made ‘sophist’ a term of reproach, on the grounds that their arguments were often invalid (Aristotle) and that they were concerned only with winning arguments rather than improving people (Plato). But originally the word had more or less the same implications as our ‘expert’: sophists were clever men who were prepared, for a fee, to impart their skills, information or theories to others.

  Many of the new educators focused less on doctrine than on method: how to use the right words, how to think, how to approach problems, how to argue. Some taught their student
s the ability to present either side of a case, especially by getting them to learn paired speeches with arguments and counter-arguments; they taught them to spot others’ assumptions (especially invalid ones), by learning speeches that defended legendary criminals and miscreants against just such implicit assumptions. It was up to their students to apply or adapt the general principles and methods of argument contained within the model speeches to the particular circumstances of their culture. They perhaps glimpsed, then, the postmodernist idea that speech is a good way, and perhaps the only valid way, of describing and interacting with a multivalent world of ambiguity and cultural relativism. If some of the sophists come across as our contemporaries in some ways, that is because their legacy has proved hardy: there are still strong tendencies to favour empiricism over idealism, relativism over absolutism, humanism over transcendentalism, sociology over metaphysics, ethics over moral philosophy, everyday language over jargon, engagement in the ‘real’ world over ivory-tower wiseacring.

  Rhetoric was not at this stage an abstract, literary art; it was the art of persuading live, mass audiences, especially for political purposes. Those sophists who focused on this sphere developed forensic and political rhetoric as a form of competition, and epideictic rhetoric as a form of display. The first was disturbing because it seemed that all one needed to win was the ability to argue well, whatever the facts of the case and whatever moral issues were involved; the second was disturbing because speech became the equivalent of actors’ masks – a semblance, but where was the reality?

  The Greek word aretē was traditionally applied to the canonical virtues: like the English word ‘virtue’ (from the Latin virtus), its root meaning is ‘manliness’. But the aretē the sophists claimed to teach meant the skills that enabled a man to lead his community and to get the better of others in debate. It was above all Socrates who took the word out of this competitive context and made it refer to an inner state of morality. Protagoras is made by Plato to describe the ‘virtue’ he taught as ‘the proper management of one’s own affairs, or how best to run one’s household, and the proper management of public affairs, or how to make the most effective contribution to the affairs of the city both as a speaker and as a man of action’. This was a direct attack on the aristocratic assumption that this kind of ‘virtue’ was their own privileged attribute, passed down from generation to generation. Politics became a subject that anyone with enough money and aptitude could undertake, never mind his family background. The sophists demonstrated for the first time in western history the sheer importance of education: it could enable people to improve themselves and rise in society. For the first time education itself became a subject deserving serious consideration: what should its content be, and to whom should it be made available?

  The sophists were suspect for a number of reasons, then: for undermining ingrained assumptions, for seeming to talk without substance, for teaching the ability ‘to make the morally weaker argument defeat the stronger’. They were feared as slick – as deinos, a word that simultaneously meant ‘clever’ and ‘formidable’. The most famous orator of them all, Gorgias of Leontini, who came as an ambassador from his Sicilian city to Athens in 427 and became a superstar for his florid rhetorical style, did nothing to alleviate such concerns when he likened speech to a powerful medicinal drug that operated by means of a kind of deceit or bewilderment to stir or pacify emotions and change men’s minds. As teachers of the ability to argue both sides of any case, they left most people, who held the naïve assumption that truth lay with one side or the other, fuming with frustration.

  They were thought either to be frauds, teachers of ‘nonsense and quackery’, or, if there was substance to their teaching, to be corrupters of the young. ‘It’s plain to see’, Plato has Socrates’ prosecutor Anytus say, ‘that sophists do nothing but corrupt and harm those who asso ciate with them.’ Above all, they were thought to have taught the young oligarchs, though in fact all they did was initiate discussion of politics at a theoretical level and so provide ammunition for champions of all constitutions, not just oligarchy. More important than any theory, however, was the confidence they gave the wealthy young men who could afford their services: since they could expect to win court cases by rhetorical means, some members of the elite began to wonder why they should submit any longer, why they should let the people be the arbiters of who received and who lost honour, rather than reclaiming that right for themselves. By pricing themselves beyond the reach of most Athenians, the sophists put a certain form of political expertise back in the hands of those who had once claimed a divine right to rule.

  NATURE AND CONVENTION

  The opposition developed in the fifth century BCE between ‘nature’ (physis) and ‘convention’ (nomos) has proved to be a robust and powerful tool of analysis; some of the sophists also used it to develop radical ideas about the relationship between an individual and his community. ‘Nature’ (by which the Greeks originally meant not the natural world, but the particular nature of anything) is whatever has not been interfered with by human beings, or even what cannot be affected by human interference; ‘reality’ or ‘essence’ are often good translations, while nomos is ‘law’, ‘convention’, ‘custom’, or ‘social norms’. A great many important and perennial questions were raised in the context of this opposition in the course of the second half of the fifth century.

  Did the gods exist in reality, or were they human inventions? If they did exist, were they really as the poets described them, and as tradition perpetuated them, or were such descriptions untrue to their natures? Was there such a thing as natural law and, if so, were its demands more binding on human beings than the demands of man-made law, especially since natural laws appear to be eternal and unbreakable, whereas men often change their laws? Laws and conventions also differ from culture to culture, so should a man follow the dictates of his nature or the dictates of his society? Which of these two sets of dictates will bring the greatest rewards? Is it not just stupid to believe that man-made laws are the only rules there are? Are some men natural slaves, or is slavery just a convention? Are any properties of any things natural, or are all conventional? Do words somehow express the essence of the things they refer to, or are they just arbitrarily made up? What, then, is the difference between reality and appearance, and can language do more than capture appearances? Are we in fact all equal, as far as our nature as human beings is concerned? Is it a natural law, which it is only realistic to recognize, that the stronger state or individual will rule the weaker, or should the strong restrain themselves, and curb their pursuit of self-interest, in accordance with conventional justice? But does this not make human law a kind of tyrant over certain individuals? Is one culture naturally superior to another, or are all equal, as human constructs? Even if cultures are human constructs, are they not of crucial importance, because without civilization humankind would long ago have been wiped out by wild animals and other natural forces? Is there, in fact, any such thing as ‘natural justice’ or is that an oxymoron?

  Positions taken in these important debates varied from mild to offensive. While some held that nomos was hugely beneficial to human beings, both individually and collectively, Antiphon (possibly the same man as the mastermind of the oligarchy of 411) argued that we can judge nature’s laws by seeing what causes us pleasure or pain, that indulging our natural capacities gives us the greatest pleasure, and that therefore this is what we should do – as long as we avoid unpleasant consequences, such as being spotted in a crime and punished. Writ large, this is precisely the logic of imperialism that Athens favoured. Alcibiades and others learnt from Antiphon that self-interest had as much right as social norms to motivate a person. In 423 Aristophanes brought such ideas to the attention of a mass audience in his Clouds; they were well known, and well known to be troubling.

  Plato’s Callicles argued that man-made laws were a means for the weak to defend themselves against the strong, but that a truly strong man would scorn conventions and se
t himself up as a despotic ruler, to give his appetites their head. Elsewhere Plato had Thrasymachus claim that conventional justice was for fools, weak in power and weak in mental ability, and a little later in Republic had a character argue that it was a fact of human nature that, if we could act with impunity, we would transgress every law in the world that obstructed the satisfaction of our desires, while in the Mytilenean debate Thucydides’ Cleon insisted that the Athenians had to choose between acting as decent human beings and holding an empire. Democrats argued, in favour of co-operative virtues, that ‘natural justice’ and concord required equality among all citizens, but oligarchs now knew how to reply, in favour of competition, that ‘natural justice’ required that the strong and the intelligent ruled everyone else, and that this went not just for individual politicians but for states too: concord has to be imposed from above.

  INTELLECTUALS UNDER ATTACK

  The sophists’ passion for extreme arguments made it easy for anyone so inclined to read them as subversive. At the same time, the other main intellectual trend of the period, the quasi-scientific explanation of the world, was widely regarded as equivalent to atheism, for its reliance on natural forces in explaining everything from the creation of the world to its tiniest phenomenon. There was no room for intervention by any supernatural entity, because there was nothing beyond nature and its principles.