What is the socratic dialogue written by plato

Atlantis as It Was Told in Plato’s Socratic Dialogues

The original story of the lost island of Atlantis comes to us from two Socratic dialogues called Timaeus and Critias, both written about 360 BCE by the Greek philosopher Plato.

Together the dialogues are a festival speech, prepared by Plato to be told on the day of the Panathenaea, in honor of the goddess Athena. They describe a meeting of men who had met the previous day to hear Socrates describe the ideal state.

A Socratic Dialogue

According to the dialogues, Socrates asked three men to meet him on this day: Timaeus of Locri, Hermocrates of Syracuse, and Critias of Athens. Socrates asked the men to tell him stories about how ancient Athens interacted with other states. The first to report was Critias, who told how his grandfather had met with the Athenian poet and lawgiver Solon, one of the Seven Sages. Solon had been to Egypt where priests had compared Egypt and Athens and talked about the gods and legends of both lands. One such Egyptian story was about Atlantis.

The Atlantis tale is part of a Socratic dialogue, not a historical treatise. The story is preceded by an account of Helios the sun god’s son Phaethon yoking horses to his father’s chariot and then driving them through the sky and scorching the earth. Rather than exact reporting of past events, the Atlantis story describes an impossible set of circumstances which were designed by Plato to represent how a miniature utopia failed and became a lesson to us defining the proper behavior of a state.

The Tale

According to the Egyptians, or rather what Plato described Critias reporting what his grandfather was told by Solon who heard it from the Egyptians, once upon a time, there was a mighty power based on an island in the Atlantic Ocean. This empire was called Atlantis, and it ruled over several other islands and parts of the continents of Africa and Europe.

Atlantis was arranged in concentric rings of alternating water and land. The soil was rich, said Critias, the engineers technically accomplished, the architecture extravagant with baths, harbor installations, and barracks. The central plain outside the city had canals and a magnificent irrigation system. Atlantis had kings and a civil administration, as well as an organized military. Their rituals matched Athens for bull-baiting, sacrifice, and prayer.

But then it waged an unprovoked imperialistic war on the remainder of Asia and Europe. When Atlantis attacked, Athens showed its excellence as the leader of the Greeks, the much smaller city-state the only power to stand against Atlantis. Alone, Athens triumphed over the invading Atlantean forces, defeating the enemy, preventing the free from being enslaved, and freeing those who had been enslaved.

After the battle, there were violent earthquakes and floods, and Atlantis sank into the sea, and all the Athenian warriors were swallowed up by the earth.

Is Atlantis Based on a Real Island?

The Atlantis story is clearly a parable: Plato’s myth is of two cities which compete with each other, not on legal grounds but rather cultural and political confrontation and ultimately war. A small but just city (an Ur-Athens) triumphs over a mighty aggressor (Atlantis). The story also features a cultural war between wealth and modesty, between a maritime and an agrarian society, and between an engineering science and a spiritual force.

Atlantis as a concentric-ringed island in the Atlantic which sank under the sea is almost certainly a fiction based on some ancient political realities. Scholars have suggested that the idea of Atlantis as an aggressive barbarian civilization is a reference to either Persia or Carthage, both of them military powers who had imperialistic notions. The explosive disappearance of an island might have been a reference to the eruption of Minoan Santorini. Atlantis as a tale really should be considered a myth, and one that closely correlates with Plato’s notions of The Republic examining the deteriorating cycle of life in a state.

Socrates in Plato’s Apology

The Agora was a cultural center of Athens, housing fountains and statues, a number of other public buildings (including the mint), a market, and various temples. It was “the place to be,” whether to hang out, or to attend to civic, religious, or intellectual life.

In the text, Socrates distinguishes himself from “the sophists,” a fairly new class of intellectuals for hire. The sophists (from the Greek ‘sophos‘ for ‘wise’) were often employed to teach the children of the wealthy; as hired “court coaches,” they have been considered trail-blazers in the legal profession. In a system like that of Athens, in which citizens themselves provided their own prosecution and defense, the strategic maneuvers a sophist might recommend could tip the scales of victory.

Unlike these self-declared wise ones, Socrates tells us he has never charged a fee. He implicitly suggests that the commercial nature of sophists’ ventures raises suspicions about their “wisdom.” They, Socrates might tell us, use their intellectual powers in order to achieve goals; Socrates, however, uses his in the service of wisdom — which inherently aims at truth, beauty, and goodness. It is no mere tool in the service of whatever purposes one might have.

Despite his claim to “know nothing,” there are a few trademark doctrines he asserts in The Apology — and they are somewhat counter-intuitive:

What arguments in favor of these views does he provide? Can you make out what he means by them?

Finally, it is worth highlighting some of his best known words. As he faced the 501-member jury, this is what he had to say to those charged with deciding his innocence or guilt:

As long as I draw breath… I shall… exhort you… [A]re you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation and honors as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul? (G.M.A. Grube translation)

‘apology’ here is a misleading translation of the Greek, apologia, which means defense, not “I’m sorry.”

Thomas and Grace West provide helpful context:

Here are some questions to bear in mind as you proceed.

The Scene and the Crime: Socrates’ First Speech

Socrates’ opening statement

Is Socrates speaking eloquently about not speaking eloquently? (On guard!)

17a I do not know what effect my accusers have had upon you, gentlemen, but for my own part I was almost carried away by them — their arguments were so convincing. On the other hand, scarcely a word of what they said was true. I was especially astonished at one of their many misrepresentations; I mean when they told you that you must be careful not to let me deceive you — the implication being that I am a skillful speaker. I thought that it was peculiarly brazen of them to tell you this without a blush, since they must know that they will soon be effectively confuted, when it becomes obvious that I have not the slightest skill as a speaker — unless, of course, by a skillful speaker they mean one who speaks the truth. If that is what they mean, I would agree that I am an orator, though not after their pattern.

What’s more emphasized in this country, substance and truth, or appearance and manipulation?

My accusers, then, as I maintain, have said little or nothing that is true, but from me you shall hear the whole truth — not, I can assure you, gentlemen, in flowery language like theirs, decked out with fine words and phrases. No, what you will hear [from me] will be a straightforward speech in the first words that occur to me, confident as I am in the justice of my cause, and I do not want any of you to expect anything different. It would hardly be suitable, gentlemen, for a man of my age to address you in the artificial language of a schoolboy orator. One thing, however, I do most earnestly beg and entreat of you. If you hear me defending myself in the same language which it has been my habit to use, both in the open spaces of this city — where many of you have heard me — and elsewhere, do not be surprised, and do not interrupt. Let me remind you of my position. This is my first appearance in a court of law, at the age of seventy, and so I am a complete stranger to the language of this place. Now if I were really from another country, you would naturally excuse me if I spoke in the manner and dialect in which I had been brought up, and so in the present case I make this request of you, which I think is only reasonable, to disregard the manner of my speech — it may be better or it may be worse — and to consider and concentrate your attention upon this one question, whether my claims are fair or not. That is the first duty of the juryman, just as it is the pleader’s duty to speak the truth.

* – Socrates here alludes to Aristophanes, whose comedy, The Clouds, caricatured Socrates.

Very well, then, I must begin my defense, gentlemen, and I must try, in the short time that I have, to rid your minds of a false impression which is the work of many years. I should like this to be the result, gentlemen, assuming it to be for your advantage and my own; and I should like to be successful in my defense, but I think that it will be difficult, and I am quite aware of the nature of my task. However, let that turn out as God wills. I must obey the law and make my defense.

The earlier charges, those of faceless invisibles

Socrates calls for fact-checking.

Let us go back to the beginning and consider what the charge is that has made me so unpopular, and has encouraged Meletus to draw up this indictment. Very well, what did my critics say in attacking my character? I must read out their affidavit, so to speak, as though they were my legal accusers: Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example. It runs something like that. You have seen it for yourselves in the play by Aristophanes, where Socrates goes whirling round, proclaiming that he is walking on air, and uttering a great deal of other nonsense about things of which I know nothing whatsoever. I mean no disrespect for such knowledge, if anyone really is versed in it — I do not want any more lawsuits brought against me by Meletus — but the fact is, gentlemen, that I take no interest in it. What is more, I call upon the greater part of you as witnesses to my statement, and I appeal to all of you who have ever listened to me talking — and there are a great many to whom this applies — to clear your neighbors’ minds on this point. Tell one another whether any one of you has ever heard me discuss such questions briefly or at length, and then you will realize that the other popular reports about me are equally unreliable.

The fact is that there is nothing in any of these charges, and if you have heard anyone say that I try to educate people and charge a fee, there is no truth in that either. I wish that there were, because I think that it is a fine thing if a man is qualified to teach, as in the case of Gorgias of Leontini and Prodicus of Ceos and Hippias of Elis. Each one of these is perfectly capable of going into any city and actually persuading the young men to leave the company of their fellow citizens, with any of whom they can associate for nothing, and attach themselves to him, and pay money for the privilege, and be grateful into the bargain.

There is another expert too from Paros who I discovered was here on a visit; I happened to meet a man who has paid more in Sophists’ fees than all the rest put together — I mean Callias, the son of Hipponicus. So I asked him — he has two sons, you see — Callias, I said, if your sons had been colts or calves, we should have had no difficulty in finding and engaging a trainer to perfect their natural qualities, and this trainer would have been some sort of horse dealer or agriculturalist. But seeing that they are human beings, whom do you intend to get as their instructor? Who is the expert in perfecting the human and social qualities? I assume from the fact of your having sons that you must have considered the question. Is there such a person or not?

Certainly, said he.

Who is he, and where does he come from? said I. And what does he charge?

Evenus of Paros, Socrates, said he, 20c and his fee is five minas.

I felt that Evenus was to be congratulated if he really was a master of this art and taught it at such a moderate fee. I should certainly plume myself and give myself airs if I understood these things, but in fact, gentlemen, I do not.

Here perhaps one of you might interrupt me and say, But what is it that you do, Socrates? How is it that you have been misrepresented like this? Surely all this talk and gossip about you would never have arisen if you had confined yourself to ordinary activities, but only if your behavior was abnormal. Tell us the explanation, if you do not want us to invent it for ourselves.

This seems to me to be a reasonable request, and I will try to explain to you what it is that has given me this false notoriety. So please give me your attention. Perhaps some of you will think that I am not being serious, but I assure you that I am going to tell you the whole truth.

The deep background: The Delphic Oracle

“The god at Delphi” is Apollo, introduced elsewhere as the god over the entrance to whose temple is inscribed, “Gnothi seauton,” or “Know thyself.” The peculiarity associated with this temple is telling: Apollo is said to leave annually on divine business — during which his half-brother, Dionysus, another divinity with whom Socrates allied himself, enjoyed a festival in his honor. Dionysus — the dancing god of wine and ecstasy, harvest and fertility — is so dynamic, so intimately connected to change and Becoming, he even dies and is reborn cyclically. Representing liberation from anxiety and embrace of the possibilities inherent in chaos, his spirit is perhaps more closely associated with the work of Jimi Hendrix, while the rational illumination of Apollo is perhaps a spiritual influence in the work of Vivaldi.

Please consider my object in telling you this. I want to explain to you how the attack upon my reputation first started. When I heard about the oracle’s answer, I said to myself, What does the god mean? Why does he not use plain language? I am only too conscious that I have no claim to wisdom, great or small. So what can he mean by asserting that I am the wisest man in the world? He cannot be telling a lie; that would not be right for him.

In search of someone wiser

After puzzling about it for some time, I set myself at last with considerable reluctance to check the truth of it in the following way. I went to interview a man with a high reputation for wisdom, because I felt that here if anywhere I should succeed in disproving the oracle and pointing out to my divine authority, You said that I was the wisest of men, but here is a man who is wiser than I am.

Socrates specifies three groups in which he sought wisdom. Who might fall into these groups today?

Well, I am certainly wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of, but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance.

Well, I gave a thorough examination to this person — I need not mention his name, but it was one of our politicians that I was studying when I had this experience — and in conversation with him I formed the impression that although in many people’s opinion, and especially in his own, he appeared to be wise, in fact he was not. Then when I began to try to show him that he only thought he was wise and was not really so, my efforts were resented both by him and by many of the other people present. However, I reflected as I walked away, Well, I am certainly wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of, but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know.

After this I went on to interview a man with an even greater reputation for wisdom, and I formed the same impression again, and here too I incurred the resentment of the man himself and a number of others.

is an oath apparently unique to Socrates. He swears “by the dog, the Egyptians’ god” at Gorgias 482b ; ‘the dog’ may be Anubis, the mediator between the upper and lower world, whose Greek counterpart is Hermes. (70)

I was trying to find out the meaning of the oracle… [A]s I pursued my investigation at the god’s command, that the people with the greatest reputations were almost entirely deficient.

“Socratic wisdom” & the backlash

[T]his oracle… has merely taken my name as an example, as if he would say to us, The wisest of you men is he who has realized, like Socrates, that in respect of wisdom he is really worthless.

The effect of these investigations of mine, gentlemen, has been to arouse against me a great deal of hostility, and hostility of a particularly bitter and persistent kind, which has resulted in various malicious suggestions, including the description of me as a professor of wisdom. This is due to the fact that whenever I succeed in disproving another person’s claim to wisdom in a given subject, the bystanders assume that I know everything about that subject myself. But the truth of the matter, gentlemen, is pretty certainly this, that real wisdom is the property of God, and this oracle is his way of telling us that human wisdom has little or no value. It seems to me that he is not referring literally to Socrates, but has merely taken my name as an example, as if he would say to us, The wisest of you men is he who has realized, like Socrates, that in respect of wisdom he is really worthless.

Lies and Wisdom. In The Matrix, “the Oracle” tells the protagonist Neo that he is “not The One,” which – as the plot unfolds – seems to have been false. If that’s so, was she wrong, or did she “lie”? Neo’s teacher Morpheus tells him:

“She told you exactly what you needed to hear, that’s all. Neo, sooner or later you’re going to realize, just as I did, there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.”

Perhaps Morpheus is right: The Oracle’s influence on Neo was what he needed in order to have the experience of being capable of transcendent generosity. That experience was essential to his ability to walk his path — both to exist in the Matrix, and to see through its illusions, both to “know” and, more, to “walk.”

Perhaps Socrates’ Oracle plays a similar role, providing objective truth only hazily, but opening the way to knowledge about oneself — the beginning of wisdom.

That is why I still go about seeking and searching in obedience to the divine command, if I think that anyone is wise, whether citizen or stranger, and when I think that any person is not wise, I try to help the cause of God by proving that he is not. This occupation has kept me too busy to do much either in politics or in my own affairs. In fact, my service to God has reduced me to extreme poverty.

The youth like hanging with Socrates: it’s a good time.

There is another reason for my being unpopular. A number of young men with wealthy fathers and plenty of leisure have deliberately attached themselves to me because they enjoy hearing other people cross-questioned. These often take me as their model, and go on to try to question other persons. Whereupon, I suppose, they find an unlimited number of people who think that they know something, but really know little or nothing. Consequently their victims become annoyed, not with themselves but with me, and they complain that there is a pestilential busybody called Socrates who fills young people’s heads with wrong ideas. If you ask them what he does, and what he teaches that has this effect, they have no answer, not knowing what to say. But as they do not want to admit their confusion, they fall back on the stock charges against any philosopher, that he teaches his pupils about things in the heavens and below the earth, and to disbelieve in gods, and to make the weaker argument defeat the stronger. They would be very loath, I fancy, to admit the truth — which is that they are being convicted of pretending to knowledge when they are entirely ignorant. So, jealous, I suppose, for their own reputation, and also energetic and numerically strong, and provided with a plausible and carefully worked-out case against me, these people have been dinning into your ears for a long time past their violent denunciations of myself.

There you have the causes which led to the attack upon me by Meletus and Anytus and Lycon, Meletus being aggrieved on behalf of the poets, Anytus on behalf of the professional men and politicians, and Lycon on behalf of the orators. So, as I said at the beginning, I should be surprised if I were able, in the short time that I have, to rid your minds of a misconception so deeply implanted.

There, gentlemen, you have the true facts, which I present to you without any concealment or suppression, great or small. I am fairly certain that this plain speaking of mine is the cause of my unpopularity, and this really goes to prove that my statements are true, and that I have described correctly the nature and the grounds of the calumny which has been brought against me. 24b Whether you inquire into them now or later, you will find the facts as I have just described them.

The current charges, starting with corruption of…

So much for my defense against the charges brought by the first group of my accusers. I shall now try to defend myself against Meletus — high-principled and patriotic as he claims to be — and after that against the rest.

Let us first consider their deposition again, as though it represented a fresh prosecution. It runs something like this: Socrates is guilty of corrupting the minds of the young, and of believing in deities of his own invention instead of the gods recognized by the state. Such is the charge. Let us examine its points one by one.

First it says that I am guilty of corrupting the young. But I say, gentlemen, that Meletus is guilty of treating a serious matter with levity, since he summons people to stand their trial on frivolous grounds, and professes concern and keen anxiety in matters about which he has never had the slightest interest. I will try to prove this to your satisfaction.

That is not what I mean, my dear sir. I am asking you to the person whose first business it is to know the laws.

These gentlemen here, Socrates, the members of the jury.

Do you mean, Meletus, that they have the ability to educate the young, and to make them better?

Does this apply to all jurymen, or only to some?

Excellent! A generous supply of benefactors. Well, then, do these spectators who are present in court have an improving influence, or not?

And what about the members of the Council?

Yes, the councilors too.

But surely, Meletus, the members of the Assembly do not corrupt the young? Or do all of them too exert an improving influence?

[T]he whole population of Athens has a refining effect upon the young, except myself, and I alone demoralize them…?

Then it would seem that the whole population of Athens has a refining effect upon the young, except myself, and I alone demoralize them. Is that your meaning?

Most emphatically, yes.

This is certainly a most unfortunate quality that you have detected in me. Well, let me put another question to you. Take the case of horses. Do you believe that those who improve them make up the whole of mankind, and that there is only one person who has a bad effect on them? Or is the truth just the opposite, that the ability to improve them belongs to one person or to very few persons, who are horse trainers, whereas most people, if they have to do with horses and make use of them, do them harm? Is not this the case, Meletus, both with horses and with all other animals? Of course it is, whether you and Anytus deny it or not. It would be a singular dispensation of fortune for our young people if there is only one person who corrupts them, while all the rest have a beneficial effect. But I need say no more. There is ample proof, Meletus, that you have never bothered your head about the young, and you make it perfectly clear that you have never taken the slightest interest in the cause for the sake of which you are now indicting me.

Here is another point. Tell me seriously, Meletus, is it better to live in a good or in a bad community? Answer my question, like a good fellow; there is nothing difficult about it. Is it not true that wicked people have a bad effect upon those with whom they are in the closest contact, and that good people have a good effect?

Is there anyone who prefers to be harmed rather than benefited by his associates? Answer me, my good man; the law commands you to answer. Is there anyone who prefers to be harmed?

Well, then, when you summon me before this court for corrupting the young and making their characters worse, do you mean that I do so intentionally or unintentionally?

I mean intentionally.

Either I have not a bad influence, or it is unintentional, so that in either case your accusation is false.

Why, Meletus, are you at your age so much wiser than I at mine? You have discovered that bad people always have a bad effect, and good people a good effect, upon their nearest neighbors. Am I so hopelessly ignorant as not even to realize that by spoiling the character of one of my companions I shall run the risk of getting some harm from him? Because nothing else would make me commit this grave offense intentionally. No, I do not believe it, Meletus, and I do not suppose that anyone else does. Either I have not a bad influence, or it is unintentional, so that in either case your accusation is false. And if I unintentionally have a bad influence, the correct procedure in cases of such involuntary misdemeanors is not to summon the culprit before this court, but to take him aside privately for instruction and reproof, because obviously if my eyes are opened, I shall stop doing what I do not intend to do. But you deliberately avoided my company in the past and refused to enlighten me, and now you bring me before this court, which is the place appointed for those who need punishment, not for those who need enlightenment.

Moving on to impiety…

Is the charge about “new gods” or “no gods“?

It is quite clear by now, gentlemen, that Meletus, as I said before, has never shown any degree of interest in this subject. However, I invite you to tell us, Meletus, in what sense 26a you make out that I corrupt the minds of the young. Surely the terms of your indictment make it clear that you accuse me of teaching them to believe in new deities instead of the gods recognized by the state. Is not that the teaching of mine which you say has this demoralizing effect?

That is precisely what I maintain.

Yes, I say that you disbelieve in gods altogether.

You surprise me, Meletus. What is your object in saying that? Do you suggest that I do not believe that the sun and moon are gods, as is the general belief of all mankind?

He certainly does not, gentlemen of the jury, since he says that the sun is a stone and the moon a mass of earth.

Do you imagine that you are prosecuting Anaxagoras, my dear Meletus? Have you so poor an opinion of these gentlemen, and do you assume them to be so illiterate as not to know that the writings of Anaxagoras of Clazomenae are full of theories like these? And do you seriously suggest that it is from me that the young get these ideas, when they can buy them on occasion in the market place for a drachma at most, and so have the laugh on Socrates if he claims them for his own, to say nothing of their being so silly? Tell me honestly, Meletus, is that your opinion of me? Do I believe in no god?

No, none at all, not in the slightest degree.

[T]his indictment… might just as well run: Socrates is guilty of not believing in the gods, but believing in the gods.

It certainly seems to me that he is contradicting himself in this indictment, which might just as well run: Socrates is guilty of not believing in the gods, but believing in the gods. And this is pure flippancy.

I ask you to examine with me, gentlemen, the line of reasoning which leads me to this conclusion. You, Meletus, will oblige us by answering my questions. Will you all kindly remember, as I requested at the beginning, not to interrupt if I conduct the discussion in my customary way?

Is there anyone in the world, Meletus, who believes in human activities, and not in human beings? Make him answer, gentlemen, and don’t let him keep on making these continual objections. Is there anyone who does not believe in horses, but believes in horses’ activities? Or who does not believe in musicians, but believes in musical activities? No, there is not, my worthy friend. If you do not want to answer, I will supply it for you and for these gentlemen too. But the next question you must answer. Is there anyone who believes in supernatural activities and not in supernatural beings?

How good of you to give a bare answer under compulsion by the court! Well, do you assert that I believe and teach others to believe in supernatural activities? It does not matter whether they are new or old. The fact remains that I believe in them according to your statement; indeed you solemnly swore as much in your affidavit. But if I believe in supernatural activities, it follows inevitably that I also believe in supernatural beings. Is not that so? It is. I assume your assent, since you do not answer. Do we not hold that supernatural beings are either gods or the children of gods? Do you agree or not?

Then if I believe in supernatural beings, as you assert, if these supernatural beings are gods in any sense, we shall reach the conclusion which I mentioned just now when I said that you were testing my intelligence for your own amusement, by stating first that I do not believe in gods, and then again that I do, since I believe in supernatural beings. If on the other hand these supernatural beings are bastard children of the gods by nymphs or other mothers, as they are reputed to be, who in the world would believe in the children of gods and not in the gods themselves? It would be as ridiculous as to believe in the young of horses or donkeys and not in horses and donkeys themselves. No, Meletus, there is no avoiding the conclusion that you brought this charge against me as a test of my wisdom, or else in despair of finding a genuine offense of which to accuse me. As for your prospect of convincing any living person with even a smattering of intelligence that belief in supernatural and divine activities does not imply belief in supernatural and divine beings, and vice versa, it is outside all the bounds of possibility.

As a matter of fact, gentlemen, I do not feel that it requires much defense to clear myself of Meletus’ accusation. What I have said already is enough. But you know very well the truth of what I said in an earlier part of my speech, that I have incurred a great deal of bitter hostility, and this is what will bring about my destruction, if anything does — not Meletus nor Anytus, but the slander and jealousy of a very large section of the people. They have been fatal to a great many other innocent men, and I suppose will continue to be so; there is no likelihood that they will stop at me.

Socrates’ mission; staying the course

28b But perhaps someone will say, Do you feel no compunction, Socrates, at having followed a line of action which puts you in danger of the death penalty?

I might fairly reply to him, You are mistaken, my friend, if you think that a man who is worth anything ought to spend his time weighing up the prospects of life and death. He has only one thing to consider in performing any action — that is, whether he is acting rightly or wrongly, like a good man or a bad one. On your view the heroes who died at Troy would be poor creatures, especially the son of Thetis [i.e., Achilles]. He, if you remember, made light of danger in comparison with incurring dishonor when his goddess mother warned him, eager as he was to kill Hector, in some such words as these, I fancy: My son, if you avenge your comrade Patroclus’ death and kill Hector, you will die yourself — ‘Next after Hector is thy fate prepared.’ When he heard this warning, he made light of his death and danger, being much more afraid of an ignoble life and of failing to avenge his friends. ‘Let me die forthwith,’ said he, ‘when I have requited the villain, rather than remain here by the beaked ships to be mocked, a burden on the ground.’ Do you suppose that he gave a thought to death and danger?

The truth of the matter is this, gentlemen. Where a man has once taken up his stand, either because it seems best to him or in obedience to his orders, there I believe he is bound to remain and face the danger, taking no account of death or anything else before dishonor.

Suppose, then, that you acquit me, and pay no attention to Anytus, who has said that either I should not have appeared before this court at all, or, since I have appeared here, I must be put to death, because if I once escaped your sons would all immediately become utterly demoralized by putting the teaching of Socrates into practice. Suppose that, in view of this, you said to me, Socrates, on this occasion we shall disregard Anytus and acquit you, but only on one condition, that you give up spending your time on this quest and stop philosophizing. If we catch you going on in the same way, you shall be put to death.

The Grube translation renders this passage: “…while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul?“

And if any of you disputes this and professes to care about these things, I shall not at once let him go or leave him. No, I shall question him and examine him and test him; and if it appears that in spite of his profession he has made no real progress toward goodness, I shall reprove him for neglecting what is of supreme importance, and giving his attention to trivialities. I shall do this to everyone that I meet, young or old, foreigner or fellow citizen, but especially to you, my fellow citizens, inasmuch as you are closer to me in kinship. This, I do assure you, is what my God commands, and it is my belief that no greater good has ever befallen you in this city than my service to my God. For I spend all my time going about trying to persuade you, young and old, to make your first and chief concern not for your bodies nor for your possessions, but for the highest welfare of your souls, proclaiming as I go, Wealth does not bring goodness, but goodness brings wealth and every other blessing, both to the individual and to the state.

Now if I corrupt the young by this message, the message would seem to be harmful, but if anyone says that my message is different from this, he is talking nonsense. And so, gentlemen, I would say, You can please yourselves whether you listen to Anytus or not, and whether you acquit me or not. You know that I am not going to alter my conduct, not even if I have to die a hundred deaths.

What did Socrates just say to rouse the jury?

Bad persons cannot harm the good.

Order, please, gentlemen! Remember my request to give me a hearing without interruption. Besides, I believe that it will be to your advantage to listen. I am going to tell you something else, which may provoke a storm of protest, but please restrain yourselves. I assure you that if I am what I claim to be, and you put me to death, you will harm yourselves more than me. Neither Meletus nor Anytus can do me any harm at all; they would not have the power, because I do not believe that the law of God 30d permits a better man to be harmed by a worse. No doubt my accuser might put me to death or have me banished or deprived of civic rights, but even if he thinks — as he probably does, and others too, I dare say — that these are great calamities, I do not think so. I believe that it is far worse to do what he is doing now, trying to put an innocent man to death.

The gadfly

Socrates – including the “stinging fly”-metaphor here – inspired Martin Luther King, Jr., who acknowledged his debt through explicitly comparing himself to Socrates, and claiming to do in society the kind of work Socrates did in individual minds. (← Read at least two paragraphs of King’s comparison by following the link.)

For this reason, gentlemen, so far from pleading on my own behalf, as might be supposed, I am really pleading on yours, to save you from misusing the gift of God by condemning me. If you put me to death, you will not easily find anyone to take my place. It is literally true, even if it sounds rather comical, that God has specially appointed me to this city, as though it were a large thoroughbred horse which because of its great size is inclined to be lazy and needs the stimulation of some stinging fly. It seems to me that God has attached me to this city to perform the office of such a fly, and all day long I never cease to settle here, there, and everywhere, rousing, persuading, reproving every one of you. You will not easily find another like me, gentlemen, and if you take my advice you will spare my life. I suspect, however, that before long you will awake from your drowsing, and in your annoyance you will take Anytus’ advice and finish me off with a single slap, and then you will go on sleeping till the end of your days, unless God in his care for you sends someone to take my place.

I busied myself all the time on your behalf, going like a father or an elder brother to see each one of you privately, and urging you to set your thoughts on goodness?

If you doubt whether I am really the sort of person who would have been sent to this city as a gift from God, you can convince yourselves by looking at it in this way. Does it seem natural that I should have neglected my own affairs and endured the humiliation of allowing my family to be neglected for all these years, while I busied myself all the time on your behalf, going like a father or an elder brother to see each one of you privately, and urging you to set your thoughts on goodness? If I had got any enjoyment from it, or if I had been paid for my good advice, there would have been some explanation for my conduct, but as it is you can see for yourselves that although my accusers unblushingly charge me with all sorts of other crimes, there is one thing that they have not had the impudence to pretend on any testimony, and that is that I have ever exacted or asked a fee from anyone. The witness that I can offer to prove the truth of my statement is, I think, a convincing one — my poverty.

Socrates’ courage and the voice

Is Socrates really silent about “matters of state” throughout this dialogue?

Socrates’ inner voice, sign, daimon.

The true champion of justice, if he intends to survive even for a short time, must necessarily confine himself to private life and leave politics alone.

I will offer you substantial proofs of what I have said — not theories, but what you can appreciate better, facts. Listen while I describe my actual experiences, so that you may know that I would never submit wrongly to any authority through fear of death, but would refuse even at the cost of my life. It will be a commonplace story, such as you often hear in the courts, but it is true.

The only office which I have ever held in our city, gentlemen, was when I was elected to the Council. It so happened that our group was acting as the executive when you decided that the ten commanders who had failed to rescue the men who were lost in the naval engagement should be tried en bloc, which was illegal, as you all recognized later. On this occasion I was the only member of the executive who insisted that you should not act unconstitutionally, and voted against the proposal; and although your leaders were all ready to denounce and arrest me, and you were all urging them on at the top of your voices, I thought that it was my duty to face it out on the side of law and justice rather than support you, through fear of prison or death, in your wrong decision.

Civil disobedience

Socrates’ followers appreciate a good time

Socrates’ description of his critical role suggests an element of comedy in his approach. Do you see comedy in our culture playing a Socratic role?

(Notice Plato’s cameo appearance in the paragraph?)

But how is it that some people enjoy spending a great deal of time 33c in my company? You have heard the reason, gentlemen; I told you quite frankly. It is because they enjoy hearing me examine those who think that they are wise when they are not — an experience which has its amusing side. This duty I have accepted, as I said, in obedience to God’s commands given in oracles and dreams and in every other way that any other divine dispensation has ever impressed a duty upon man. This is a true statement, gentlemen, and easy to verify. If it is a fact that I am in process of corrupting some of the young, and have succeeded already in corrupting others, and if it were a fact that some of the latter, being now grown up, had discovered that I had ever given them bad advice when they were young, surely they ought now to be coming forward to denounce and punish me. And if they did not like to do it themselves, you would expect some of their families — their fathers and brothers and other near relations — to remember it now, if their own flesh and blood had suffered any harm from me. Certainly a great many of them have found their way into this court, as I can see for myself — first Crito over there, my contemporary and near neighbor, the father of this young man Critobulus, and then Lysanias of Sphettus, the father of Aeschines here, and next Antiphon of Cephisus, over there, the father of Epigenes. Then besides there are all those whose brothers have been members of our circle — Nicostratus, the son of Theozotides, the brother of Theodotus, but Theodotus is dead, so he cannot appeal to his brother, and Paralus here, the son of Demodocus, whose brother was Theages. And here is Adimantus, the son of Ariston, whose brother Plato is over there, and Aeantodorus, whose brother Apollodorus is here on this side. I can many more besides, some of whom Meletus most certainly ought to have produced as witnesses in the course of his speech. If he forgot to do so then, let him do it now — I am willing to make way for him. Let him state whether he has any such evidence to offer. On the contrary, gentlemen, you will find that they are all prepared to help me — the corrupter and evil genius of their nearest and dearest relatives, as Meletus and Anytus say. The actual victims of my corrupting influence might perhaps be excused for helping me; but as for the uncorrupted, their relations of mature age, what other reason can they have for helping me except the right and proper one, that they know Meletus is lying and I am telling the truth?

No tears from Socrates’ family

Do you think Socrates is here silent about “matters of state,” as he claimed to be?

Why do I not intend to do anything of this kind? Not out of perversity, gentlemen, nor out of contempt for you; whether I am brave or not in the face of death has nothing to do with it. The point is that for my own credit and yours and for the credit of the state as a whole, I do not think that it is right for me to use any of these methods at my age and with my reputation — which may be true or it may be false, but at any rate the view is held that Socrates is different from the common run of mankind. Now if those of you who are supposed to be distinguished for wisdom or courage or any other virtue are to behave in this way, it would be a disgrace. I have often noticed that some people of this type, for all their high standing, go to extraordinary lengths when they come up for trial, which shows that they think it will be a dreadful thing to lose their lives — as though they would be immortal if you did not put them to death! In my opinion these people bring disgrace upon our city. Any of our visitors might be excused for thinking that the finest specimens of Athenian manhood, whom their fellow citizens select on their merits to rule over them and hold other high positions, are no better than women. If you have even the smallest reputation, gentlemen, you ought not to descend to these methods; and if we do so, you must not give us license. On the contrary, you must make it clear that anyone who stages these pathetic scenes and so brings ridicule upon our city is far more likely to be condemned than if he kept perfectly quiet.

Socrates’ Second Speech

The 501 jury vote is in…

35e There are a great many reasons, gentlemen, why I am not distressed by this result — I mean your condemnation of me — but the chief reason is that the result was not unexpected. What does surprise me is the number of votes cast on the two sides. I should never have believed that it would be such a close thing, but now it seems that if a mere thirty votes had gone the other way, I should have been acquitted. Even as it is, I feel that so far as Meletus’ part is concerned I have been acquitted, and not only that, but anyone can see that if Anytus and Lycon had not come forward to accuse me, Meletus would actually have forfeited his one thousand drachmas for not having obtained one fifth of the votes.

Socrates discusses his penalty

However, we must face the fact that he demands the death penalty. Very good. What alternative penalty shall I propose to you, gentlemen? Obviously it must be adequate. Well, what penalty do I deserve to pay or suffer, in view of what I have done?

What Socrates really deserves…

Perhaps… I… give you the impression… that I am showing a deliberate perversity. That is not so…

I should have to be desperately in love with life to do that, gentlemen. I am not so blind that I cannot see that you, my fellow citizens, have come to the end of your patience with my discussions and conversations. You have found them too irksome and irritating, and now you are trying to get rid of them. Will any other people find them easy to put up with? That is most unlikely, gentlemen. A fine life I should have if I left this country at my age and spent the rest of my days trying one city after another and being turned out every time! I know very well that wherever I go the young people will listen to my conversation just as they do here, and if I try to keep them off, they will make their elders drive me out, while if I do not, the fathers and other relatives will drive me out of their own accord for the sake of the young.

Perhaps someone may say, But surely, Socrates, after you have left us you can spend the rest of your life in quietly minding your own business.

[E]xamining both myself and others is really the very best thing that a man can do, and… life without this sort of examination is not worth living…

This is the hardest thing of all to make some of you understand. If I say that this would be disobedience to God, and that is why I cannot ‘mind my own business,’ you will not believe that I am serious. If on the other hand I tell you that to let no day pass without discussing goodness and all the other subjects about which you hear me talking and examining both myself and others is really the very best thing that a man can do, and that life without this sort of examination is not worth living, you will be even less inclined to believe me. Nevertheless that is how it is, gentlemen, as I maintain, though it is not easy to convince you of it. Besides, I am not accustomed to think of myself as deserving punishment. If I had money, I would have suggested a fine that I could afford, because that would not have done me any harm. As it is, I cannot, because I have none, unless of course you like to fix the penalty at what I could pay. I suppose I could probably afford a mina. I suggest a fine of that amount.

Plato makes his second cameo here, scraping together a heftier sum, in the hope that Socrates will suggest a fine more likely to appease the jury. In the 1980s, Grube explained that “one mina was the equivalent of 100 drachmas, equivalent to, say, twenty-five dollars, though in purchasing power probably five times greater. In any case, a ridiculously small sum under the circumstances” (Plato, The Trial and Death of Socrates. Trans. G.M.A. Grube. Hackett Publishing Company, 1981, p. 39).

One moment, gentlemen. Plato here, and Crito and Critobulus and Apollodorus, want me to propose thirty minas, on their security. Very well, I agree to this sum, and you can rely upon these gentlemen for its payment.

Well, gentlemen, for the sake of a very small gain in time you are going to earn the reputation — and the blame from those who wish to disparage our city — of having put Socrates to death, ‘that wise man’ — because they will say I am wise even if I am not, these people who want to find fault with you. If you had waited just a little while, you would have had your way in the course of nature. You can see that I am well on in life and near to death. I am saying this not to all of you but to those who voted for my execution, and I have something else to say to them as well.

Socrates: to those “who voted for… execution”

No doubt you think, gentlemen, that I have been condemned for lack of the arguments which I could have used if I had thought it right to leave nothing unsaid or undone to secure my acquittal. But that is very far from the truth. It is not a lack of arguments that has caused my condemnation, but a lack of effrontery and impudence, and the fact that I have refused to address you in the way which would give you most pleasure. You would have liked to hear me weep and wail, doing and saying all sorts of things which I regard as unworthy of myself, but which you are used to hearing from other people. But I did not think then that I ought to stoop to servility because I was in danger, and I do not regret now the way in which I pleaded my case. I would much rather die as the result of this defense than live as the result of the other sort. In a court of law, just as in warfare, neither I nor any other ought to use his wits to escape death by any means. In battle it is often obvious that you could escape being killed by giving up your arms and throwing yourself upon the mercy of your pursuers, and in every kind of danger there are plenty of devices for avoiding death if you are unscrupulous enough to stick at nothing. But I suggest, gentlemen, that the difficulty is not so much to escape death; the real difficulty is to escape from doing wrong, which is far more fleet of foot. In this present instance I, the slow old man, have been overtaken by the slower of the two, but my accusers, who are clever and quick, have been overtaken by the faster — by iniquity. When I leave this court I shall go away condemned by you to death, but they will go away convicted by truth herself of depravity and wickedness. And they accept their sentence even as I accept mine. No doubt it was bound to be so, and I think that the result is fair enough.

Having said so much, I feel moved to prophesy to you who have given your vote against me, for I am now at that point where the gift of prophecy comes most readily to men — at the point of death. I tell you, my executioners, that as soon as I am dead, vengeance shall fall upon you with a punishment far more painful than your killing of me. You have brought about my death in the belief that through it you will be delivered from submitting your conduct to criticism, but I say that the result will be just the opposite. You will have more critics, whom up till now I have restrained without your knowing it, and being younger they will be harsher to you and will cause you more annoyance. If you expect to stop denunciation of your wrong way of life by putting people to death, there is something amiss with your reasoning. This way of escape is neither possible nor creditable. The best and easiest way is not to stop the mouths of others, but to make yourselves as good men as you can. This is my last message to you who voted for my condemnation.

Socrates: to those “who voted for… acquittal”

As for you who voted for my acquittal, I should very much like to say a few words to reconcile you to the result, while the officials are busy and I am not yet on my way to the place where I must die. I ask you, gentlemen, to spare me these few moments. There is no reason why we should not exchange fancies while the law permits. I look upon you as my friends, and I want you to understand the right way of regarding my present position.

Gentlemen of the jury — for you deserve to be so called — I have had a remarkable experience. In the past the prophetic voice to which I have become accustomed has always been my constant companion, opposing me even in quite trivial things if I was going to take the wrong course. Now something has happened to me, as you can see, which might be thought and is commonly considered to be a supreme calamity; yet neither when I left home this morning, nor when I was taking my place here in the court, nor at any point in any part of my speech did the divine sign oppose me. In other discussions it has often checked me in the middle of a sentence, but this time it has never opposed me in any part of this business in anything that I have said or done. What do I suppose to be the explanation? I will tell you. I suspect that this thing that has happened to me is a blessing, and we are quite mistaken in supposing death to be an evil. I have good grounds for thinking this, because my accustomed sign could not have failed to oppose me if what I was doing had not been sure to bring some good result.

Given that Socrates lived in pursuit of goodness, he has nothing to fear, whether death be continuation or annihilation.

Socrates’ argument that death is not bad

You too, gentlemen of the jury, must look forward to death with confidence, and fix your minds on this one belief, which is certain — that nothing can harm a good man either in life or after death, and his fortunes are not a matter of indifference to the gods. This present experience of mine has not come about mechanically. I am quite clear that the time had come when it was better for me to die and be released from my distractions. That is why my sign never turned me back. For my own part I bear no grudge at all against those who condemned me and accused me, although it was not with this kind intention that they did so, but because they thought that they were hurting me; and that is culpable of them.

However, I ask them to grant me one favor. When my sons grow up, gentlemen, if you think that they are putting money or anything else before goodness, take your revenge by plaguing them as I plagued you; and if they fancy themselves for no reason, you must scold them just as I scolded you, for neglecting the important things and thinking that they are good for something when they are good for nothing. If you do this, I shall have had justice at your hands, both I myself and my children.

Does Socrates really have an open mind about death? And does he really feel peace about it no less?

Now it is time that we were going, I to die and you to live, but which of us has the happier prospect is unknown to anyone but God.

Now it is time that we were going, I to die and you to live, but which of us has the happier prospect is unknown to anyone but God.

Plato

Plato (429?–347 B.C.E.) is, by any reckoning, one of the most dazzling writers in the Western literary tradition and one of the most penetrating, wide-ranging, and influential authors in the history of philosophy. An Athenian citizen of high status, he displays in his works his absorption in the political events and intellectual movements of his time, but the questions he raises are so profound and the strategies he uses for tackling them so richly suggestive and provocative that educated readers of nearly every period have in some way been influenced by him, and in practically every age there have been philosophers who count themselves Platonists in some important respects. He was not the first thinker or writer to whom the word “philosopher” should be applied. But he was so self-conscious about how philosophy should be conceived, and what its scope and ambitions properly are, and he so transformed the intellectual currents with which he grappled, that the subject of philosophy, as it is often conceived—a rigorous and systematic examination of ethical, political, metaphysical, and epistemological issues, armed with a distinctive method—can be called his invention. Few other authors in the history of Western philosophy approximate him in depth and range: perhaps only Aristotle (who studied with him), Aquinas, and Kant would be generally agreed to be of the same rank.

1. Plato’s central doctrines

Many people associate Plato with a few central doctrines that are advocated in his writings: The world that appears to our senses is in some way defective and filled with error, but there is a more real and perfect realm, populated by entities (called “forms” or “ideas”) that are eternal, changeless, and in some sense paradigmatic for the structure and character of the world presented to our senses. Among the most important of these abstract objects (as they are now called, because they are not located in space or time) are goodness, beauty, equality, bigness, likeness, unity, being, sameness, difference, change, and changelessness. (These terms—“goodness”, “beauty”, and so on—are often capitalized by those who write about Plato, in order to call attention to their exalted status; similarly for “Forms” and “Ideas.”) The most fundamental distinction in Plato’s philosophy is between the many observable objects that appear beautiful (good, just, unified, equal, big) and the one object that is what beauty (goodness, justice, unity) really is, from which those many beautiful (good, just, unified, equal, big) things receive their names and their corresponding characteristics. Nearly every major work of Plato is, in some way, devoted to or dependent on this distinction. Many of them explore the ethical and practical consequences of conceiving of reality in this bifurcated way. We are urged to transform our values by taking to heart the greater reality of the forms and the defectiveness of the corporeal world. We must recognize that the soul is a different sort of object from the body—so much so that it does not depend on the existence of the body for its functioning, and can in fact grasp the nature of the forms far more easily when it is not encumbered by its attachment to anything corporeal. In a few of Plato’s works, we are told that the soul always retains the ability to recollect what it once grasped of the forms, when it was disembodied prior to its possessor’s birth (see especially Meno), and that the lives we lead are to some extent a punishment or reward for choices we made in a previous existence (see especially the final pages of Republic). But in many of Plato’s writings, it is asserted or assumed that true philosophers—those who recognize how important it is to distinguish the one (the one thing that goodness is, or virtue is, or courage is) from the many (the many things that are called good or virtuous or courageous )—are in a position to become ethically superior to unenlightened human beings, because of the greater degree of insight they can acquire. To understand which things are good and why they are good (and if we are not interested in such questions, how can we become good?), we must investigate the form of good.

2. Plato’s puzzles

Although these propositions are often identified by Plato’s readers as forming a large part of the core of his philosophy, many of his greatest admirers and most careful students point out that few, if any, of his writings can accurately be described as mere advocacy of a cut-and-dried group of propositions. Often Plato’s works exhibit a certain degree of dissatisfaction and puzzlement with even those doctrines that are being recommended for our consideration. For example, the forms are sometimes described as hypotheses (see for example Phaedo). The form of good in particular is described as something of a mystery whose real nature is elusive and as yet unknown to anyone at all (Republic). Puzzles are raised—and not overtly answered—about how any of the forms can be known and how we are to talk about them without falling into contradiction (Parmenides), or about what it is to know anything (Theaetetus) or to name anything (Cratylus). When one compares Plato with some of the other philosophers who are often ranked with him—Aristotle, Aquinas, and Kant, for example—he can be recognized to be far more exploratory, incompletely systematic, elusive, and playful than they. That, along with his gifts as a writer and as a creator of vivid character and dramatic setting, is one of the reasons why he is often thought to be the ideal author from whom one should receive one’s introduction to philosophy. His readers are not presented with an elaborate system of doctrines held to be so fully worked out that they are in no need of further exploration or development; instead, what we often receive from Plato is a few key ideas together with a series of suggestions and problems about how those ideas are to be interrogated and deployed. Readers of a Platonic dialogue are drawn into thinking for themselves about the issues raised, if they are to learn what the dialogue itself might be thought to say about them. Many of his works therefore give their readers a strong sense of philosophy as a living and unfinished subject (perhaps one that can never be completed) to which they themselves will have to contribute. All of Plato’s works are in some way meant to leave further work for their readers, but among the ones that most conspicuously fall into this category are: Euthyphro, Laches, Charmides, Euthydemus, Theaetetus, and Parmenides.

3. Dialogue, setting, character

There is another feature of Plato’s writings that makes him distinctive among the great philosophers and colors our experience of him as an author. Nearly everything he wrote takes the form of a dialogue. (There is one striking exception: his Apology, which purports to be the speech that Socrates gave in his defense—the Greek word apologia means “defense”—when, in 399, he was legally charged and convicted of the crime of impiety. However, even there, Socrates is presented at one point addressing questions of a philosophical character to his accuser, Meletus, and responding to them. In addition, since antiquity, a collection of 13 letters has been included among his collected works, but their authenticity as compositions of Plato is not universally accepted among scholars, and many or most of them are almost certainly not his (see Burnyeat and Frede 2015). Most of them purport to be the outcome of his involvement in the politics of Syracuse, a heavily populated Greek city located in Sicily and ruled by tyrants.)

We are of course familiar with the dialogue form through our acquaintance with the literary genre of drama. But Plato’s dialogues do not try to create a fictional world for the purposes of telling a story, as many literary dramas do; nor do they invoke an earlier mythical realm, like the creations of the great Greek tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Nor are they all presented in the form of a drama: in many of them, a single speaker narrates events in which he participated. They are philosophical discussions—“debates” would, in some cases, also be an appropriate word—among a small number of interlocutors, many of whom can be identified as real historical figures (see Nails 2002); and often they begin with a depiction of the setting of the discussion—a visit to a prison, a wealthy man’s house, a celebration over drinks, a religious festival, a visit to the gymnasium, a stroll outside the city’s wall, a long walk on a hot day. As a group, they form vivid portraits of a social world, and are not purely intellectual exchanges between characterless and socially unmarked speakers. (At any rate, that is true of a large number of Plato’s interlocutors. However, it must be added that in some of his works the speakers display little or no character. See, for example, Sophist and Statesman—dialogues in which a visitor from the town of Elea in Southern Italy leads the discussion; and Laws, a discussion between an unnamed Athenian and two named fictional characters, one from Crete and the other from Sparta.) In many of his dialogues (though not all), Plato is not only attempting to draw his readers into a discussion, but is also commenting on the social milieu that he is depicting, and criticizing the character and ways of life of his interlocutors (see Blondell 2002). Some of the dialogues that most evidently fall into this category are Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias Major, Euthydemus, and Symposium.

4. Socrates

There is one interlocutor who speaks in nearly all of Plato’s dialogues, being completely absent only in Laws, which ancient testimony tells us was one of his latest works: that figure is Socrates. Like nearly everyone else who appears in Plato’s works, he is not an invention of Plato: there really was a Socrates just as there really was a Crito, a Gorgias, a Thrasymachus, and a Laches. Plato was not the only author whose personal experience of Socrates led to the depiction of him as a character in one or more dramatic works. Socrates is one of the principal characters of Aristophanes’ comedy, Clouds; and Xenophon, a historian and military leader, wrote, like Plato, both an Apology of Socrates (an account of Socrates’ trial) and other works in which Socrates appears as a principal speaker. Furthermore, we have some fragmentary remains of dialogues written by other contemporaries of Socrates besides Plato and Xenophon (Aeschines, Antisthenes, Eucleides, Phaedo), and these purport to describe conversations he conducted with others (see Boys-Stone and Rowe 2013). So, when Plato wrote dialogues that feature Socrates as a principal speaker, he was both contributing to a genre that was inspired by the life of Socrates and participating in a lively literary debate about the kind of person Socrates was and the value of the intellectual conversations in which he was involved. Aristophanes’ comic portrayal of Socrates is at the same time a bitter critique of him and other leading intellectual figures of the day (the 420s B.C.), but from Plato, Xenophon, and the other composers (in the 390’s and later) of “Socratic discourses” (as Aristotle calls this body of writings) we receive a far more favorable impression.

Evidently, the historical Socrates was the sort of person who provoked in those who knew him, or knew of him, a profound response, and he inspired many of those who came under his influence to write about him. But the portraits composed by Aristophanes, Xenophon, and Plato are the ones that have survived intact, and they are therefore the ones that must play the greatest role in shaping our conception of what Socrates was like. Of these, Clouds has the least value as an indication of what was distinctive of Socrates’ mode of philosophizing: after all, it is not intended as a philosophical work, and although it may contain a few lines that are characterizations of features unique to Socrates, for the most part it is an attack on a philosophical type—the long-haired, unwashed, amoral investigator into abstruse phenomena—rather than a depiction of Socrates himself. Xenophon’s depiction of Socrates, whatever its value as historical testimony (which may be considerable), is generally thought to lack the philosophical subtlety and depth of Plato’s. At any rate, no one (certainly not Xenophon himself) takes Xenophon to be a major philosopher in his own right; when we read his Socratic works, we are not encountering a great philosophical mind. But that is what we experience when we read Plato. We may read Plato’s Socratic dialogues because we are (as Plato evidently wanted us to be) interested in who Socrates was and what he stood for, but even if we have little or no desire to learn about the historical Socrates, we will want to read Plato because in doing so we are encountering an author of the greatest philosophical significance. No doubt he in some way borrowed in important ways from Socrates, though it is not easy to say where to draw the line between him and his teacher (more about this below in section 12). But it is widely agreed among scholars that Plato is not a mere transcriber of the words of Socrates (any more than Xenophon or the other authors of Socratic discourses). His use of a figure called “Socrates” in so many of his dialogues should not be taken to mean that Plato is merely preserving for a reading public the lessons he learned from his teacher.

5. Plato’s indirectness

Socrates, it should be kept in mind, does not appear in all of Plato’s works. He makes no appearance in Laws, and there are several dialogues (Sophist, Statesman, Timaeus) in which his role is small and peripheral, while some other figure dominates the conversation or even, as in the Timaeus and Critias, presents a long and elaborate, continuous discourse of their own. Plato’s dialogues are not a static literary form; not only do his topics vary, not only do his speakers vary, but the role played by questions and answers is never the same from one dialogue to another. (Symposium, for example, is a series of speeches, and there are also lengthy speeches in Apology, Menexenus, Protagoras, Crito, Phaedrus, Timaeus, and Critias; in fact, one might reasonably question whether these works are properly called dialogues). But even though Plato constantly adapted “the dialogue form” (a commonly used term, and convenient enough, so long as we do not think of it as an unvarying unity) to suit his purposes, it is striking that throughout his career as a writer he never engaged in a form of composition that was widely used in his time and was soon to become the standard mode of philosophical address: Plato never became a writer of philosophical treatises, even though the writing of treatises (for example, on rhetoric, medicine, and geometry) was a common practice among his predecessors and contemporaries. (The closest we come to an exception to this generalization is the seventh letter, which contains a brief section in which the author, Plato or someone pretending to be him, commits himself to several philosophical points—while insisting, at the same time, that no philosopher will write about the deepest matters, but will communicate his thoughts only in private discussion with selected individuals. As noted above, the authenticity of Plato’s letters is a matter of great controversy; and in any case, the author of the seventh letter declares his opposition to the writing of philosophical books. Whether Plato wrote it or not, it cannot be regarded as a philosophical treatise, and its author did not wish it to be so regarded.) In all of his writings—except in the letters, if any of them are genuine—Plato never speaks to his audience directly (see Frede 1992) and in his own voice. Strictly speaking, he does not himself affirm anything in his dialogues; rather, it is the interlocutors in his dialogues who are made by Plato to do all of the affirming, doubting, questioning, arguing, and so on. Whatever he wishes to communicate to us is conveyed indirectly.

6. Can we know Plato’s mind?

This feature of Plato’s works raises important questions about how they are to be read, and has led to considerable controversy among those who study his writings. Since he does not himself affirm anything in any of his dialogues, can we ever be on secure ground in attributing a philosophical doctrine to him (as opposed to one of his characters)? Did he himself have philosophical convictions, and can we discover what they were? Are we justified in speaking of “the philosophy of Plato”? Or, if we attribute some view to Plato himself, are we being unfaithful to the spirit in which he intended the dialogues to be read? Is his whole point, in refraining from writing treatises, to discourage the readers of his works from asking what their author believes and to encourage them instead simply to consider the plausibility or implausibility of what his characters are saying? Is that why Plato wrote dialogues? If not for this reason, then what was his purpose in refraining from addressing his audience in a more direct way (see Griswold 1988, Klagge and Smith 1992, Press 2002)? There are other important questions about the particular shape his dialogues take: for example, why does Socrates play such a prominent role in so many of them, and why, in some of these works, does Socrates play a smaller role, or none at all?

Once these questions are raised and their difficulty acknowledged, it is tempting, in reading Plato’s works and reflecting upon them, to adopt a strategy of extreme caution. Rather than commit oneself to any hypothesis about what he is trying to communicate to his readers, one might adopt a stance of neutrality about his intentions, and confine oneself to talking only about what is said by his dramatis personae. One cannot be faulted, for example, if one notes that, in Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that justice in the soul consists in each part of the soul doing its own. It is equally correct to point out that other principal speakers in that work, Glaucon and Adeimantus, accept the arguments that Socrates gives for that definition of justice. Perhaps there is no need for us to say more—to say, for example, that Plato himself agrees that this is how justice should be defined, or that Plato himself accepts the arguments that Socrates gives in support of this definition. And we might adopt this same “minimalist” approach to all of Plato’s works. After all, is it of any importance to discover what went on inside his head as he wrote—to find out whether he himself endorsed the ideas he put in the mouths of his characters, whether they constitute “the philosophy of Plato”? Should we not read his works for their intrinsic philosophical value, and not as tools to be used for entering into the mind of their author? We know what Plato’s characters say—and isn’t that all that we need, for the purpose of engaging with his works philosophically?

But the fact that we know what Plato’s characters say does not show that by refusing to entertain any hypotheses about what the author of these works is trying to communicate to his readers we can understand what those characters mean by what they say. We should not lose sight of this obvious fact: it is Plato, not any of his dramatis personae, who is reaching out to a readership and trying to influence their beliefs and actions by means of his literary actions. When we ask whether an argument put forward by a character in Plato’s works should be read as an effort to persuade us of its conclusion, or is better read as a revelation of how foolish that speaker is, we are asking about what Plato as author (not that character) is trying to lead us to believe, through the writing that he is presenting to our attention. We need to interpret the work itself to find out what it, or Plato the author, is saying. Similarly, when we ask how a word that has several different senses is best understood, we are asking what Plato means to communicate to us through the speaker who uses that word. We should not suppose that we can derive much philosophical value from Plato’s writings if we refuse to entertain any thoughts about what use he intends us to make of the things his speakers say. Penetrating the mind of Plato and comprehending what his interlocutors mean by what they say are not two separate tasks but one, and if we do not ask what his interlocutors mean by what they say, and what the dialogue itself indicates we should think about what they mean, we will not profit from reading his dialogues.

Furthermore, the dialogues have certain characteristics that are most easily explained by supposing that Plato is using them as vehicles for inducing his readers to become convinced (or more convinced than they already are) of certain propositions—for example, that there are forms, that the soul is not corporeal, that knowledge can be acquired only by means of a study of the forms, and so on. Why, after all, did Plato write so many works (for example: Phaedo, Symposium, Republic, Phaedrus, Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman, Timaeus, Philebus, Laws) in which one character dominates the conversation (often, but not always, Socrates) and convinces the other speakers (at times, after encountering initial resistance) that they should accept or reject certain conclusions, on the basis of the arguments presented? The only plausible way of answering that question is to say that these dialogues were intended by Plato to be devices by which he might induce the audience for which they are intended to reflect on and accept the arguments and conclusions offered by his principal interlocutor. (It is noteworthy that in Laws, the principal speaker—an unnamed visitor from Athens—proposes that laws should be accompanied by “preludes” in which their philosophical basis is given as full an explanation as possible. The educative value of written texts is thus explicitly acknowledged by Plato’s dominant speaker. If preludes can educate a whole citizenry that is prepared to learn from them, then surely Plato thinks that other sorts of written texts—for example, his own dialogues—can also serve an educative function.)

This does not mean that Plato thinks that his readers can become wise simply by reading and studying his works. On the contrary, it is highly likely that he wanted all of his writings to be supplementary aids to philosophical conversation: in one of his works, he has Socrates warn his readers against relying solely on books, or taking them to be authoritative. They are, Socrates says, best used as devices that stimulate the readers’ memory of discussions they have had (Phaedrus 274e-276d). In those face-to-face conversations with a knowledgeable leader, positions are taken, arguments are given, and conclusions are drawn. Plato’s writings, he implies in this passage from Phaedrus, will work best when conversational seeds have already been sown for the arguments they contain.

7. Socrates as the dominant speaker

If we take Plato to be trying to persuade us, in many of his works, to accept the conclusions arrived at by his principal interlocutors (or to persuade us of the refutations of their opponents), we can easily explain why he so often chooses Socrates as the dominant speaker in his dialogues. Presumably the contemporary audience for whom Plato was writing included many of Socrates’ admirers. They would be predisposed to think that a character called “Socrates” would have all of the intellectual brilliance and moral passion of the historical person after whom he is named (especially since Plato often makes special efforts to give his “Socrates” a life-like reality, and has him refer to his trial or to the characteristics by which he was best known); and the aura surrounding the character called “Socrates” would give the words he speaks in the dialogue considerable persuasive power. Furthermore, if Plato felt strongly indebted to Socrates for many of his philosophical techniques and ideas, that would give him further reason for assigning a dominant role to him in many of his works. (More about this in section 12.)

Of course, there are other more speculative possible ways of explaining why Plato so often makes Socrates his principal speaker. For example, we could say that Plato was trying to undermine the reputation of the historical Socrates by writing a series of works in which a figure called “Socrates” manages to persuade a group of naïve and sycophantic interlocutors to accept absurd conclusions on the basis of sophistries. But anyone who has read some of Plato’s works will quickly recognize the utter implausibility of that alternative way of reading them. Plato could have written into his works clear signals to the reader that the arguments of Socrates do not work, and that his interlocutors are foolish to accept them. But there are many signs in such works as Meno, Phaedo, Republic, and Phaedrus that point in the opposite direction. (And the great admiration Plato feels for Socrates is also evident from his Apology.) The reader is given every encouragement to believe that the reason why Socrates is successful in persuading his interlocutors (on those occasions when he does succeed) is that his arguments are powerful ones. The reader, in other words, is being encouraged by the author to accept those arguments, if not as definitive then at least as highly arresting and deserving of careful and full positive consideration. When we interpret the dialogues in this way, we cannot escape the fact that we are entering into the mind of Plato, and attributing to him, their author, a positive evaluation of the arguments that his speakers present to each other.

8. Links between the dialogues

There is a further reason for entertaining hypotheses about what Plato intended and believed, and not merely confining ourselves to observations about what sorts of people his characters are and what they say to each other. When we undertake a serious study of Plato, and go beyond reading just one of his works, we are inevitably confronted with the question of how we are to link the work we are currently reading with the many others that Plato composed. Admittedly, many of his dialogues make a fresh start in their setting and their interlocutors: typically, Socrates encounters a group of people many of whom do not appear in any other work of Plato, and so, as an author, he needs to give his readers some indication of their character and social circumstances. But often Plato’s characters make statements that would be difficult for readers to understand unless they had already read one or more of his other works. For example, in Phaedo (73a-b), Socrates says that one argument for the immortality of the soul derives from the fact that when people are asked certain kinds of questions, and are aided with diagrams, they answer in a way that shows that they are not learning afresh from the diagrams or from information provided in the questions, but are drawing their knowledge of the answers from within themselves. That remark would be of little worth for an audience that had not already read Meno. Several pages later, Socrates tells his interlocutors that his argument about our prior knowledge of equality itself (the form of equality) applies no less to other forms—to the beautiful, good, just, pious and to all the other things that are involved in their asking and answering of questions (75d). This reference to asking and answering questions would not be well understood by a reader who had not yet encountered a series of dialogues in which Socrates asks his interlocutors questions of the form, “What is X?” (Euthyphro: what is piety? Laches: what is courage? Charmides: What is moderation? Hippias Major: what is beauty? see Dancy 2004). Evidently, Plato is assuming that readers of Phaedo have already read several of his other works, and will bring to bear on the current argument all of the lessons that they have learned from them. In some of his writings, Plato’s characters refer ahead to the continuation of their conversations on another day, or refer back to conversations they had recently: thus Plato signals to us that we should read Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman sequentially; and similarly, since the opening of Timaeus refers us back to Republic, Plato is indicating to his readers that they must seek some connection between these two works.

These features of the dialogues show Plato’s awareness that he cannot entirely start from scratch in every work that he writes. He will introduce new ideas and raise fresh difficulties, but he will also expect his readers to have already familiarized themselves with the conversations held by the interlocutors of other dialogues—even when there is some alteration among those interlocutors. (Meno does not re-appear in Phaedo; Timaeus was not among the interlocutors of Republic.) Why does Plato have his dominant characters (Socrates, the Eleatic visitor) reaffirm some of the same points from one dialogue to another, and build on ideas that were made in earlier works? If the dialogues were merely meant as provocations to thought—mere exercises for the mind—there would be no need for Plato to identify his leading characters with a consistent and ever-developing doctrine. For example, Socrates continues to maintain, over a large number of dialogues, that there are such things as forms—and there is no better explanation for this continuity than to suppose that Plato is recommending that doctrine to his readers. Furthermore, when Socrates is replaced as the principal investigator by the visitor from Elea (in Sophist and Statesman), the existence of forms continues to be taken for granted, and the visitor criticizes any conception of reality that excludes such incorporeal objects as souls and forms. The Eleatic visitor, in other words, upholds a metaphysics that is, in many respects, like the one that Socrates is made to defend. Again, the best explanation for this continuity is that Plato is using both characters—Socrates and the Eleatic visitor—as devices for the presentation and defense of a doctrine that he embraces and wants his readers to embrace as well.

9. Does Plato change his mind about forms?

This way of reading Plato’s dialogues does not presuppose that he never changes his mind about anything—that whatever any of his main interlocutors uphold in one dialogue will continue to be presupposed or affirmed elsewhere without alteration. It is, in fact, a difficult and delicate matter to determine, on the basis of our reading of the dialogues, whether Plato means to modify or reject in one dialogue what he has his main interlocutor affirm in some other. One of the most intriguing and controversial questions about his treatment of the forms, for example, is whether he concedes that his conception of those abstract entities is vulnerable to criticism; and, if so, whether he revises some of the assumptions he had been making about them, or develops a more elaborate picture of them that allows him to respond to that criticism (see Meinwald 2016). In Parmenides, the principal interlocutor (not Socrates—he is here portrayed as a promising, young philosopher in need of further training—but rather the pre-Socratic from Elea who gives the dialogue its name: Parmenides) subjects the forms to withering criticism, and then consents to conduct an inquiry into the nature of oneness that has no overt connection to his critique of the forms. Does the discussion of oneness (a baffling series of contradictions—or at any rate, propositions that seem, on the surface, to be contradictions) in some way help address the problems raised about forms? That is one way of reading the dialogue. And if we do read it in this way, does that show that Plato has changed his mind about some of the ideas about forms he inserted into earlier dialogues? Can we find dialogues in which we encounter a “new theory of forms”—that is, a way of thinking of forms that carefully steers clear of the assumptions about forms that led to Parmenides’ critique? It is not easy to say. But we cannot even raise this as an issue worth pondering unless we presuppose that behind the dialogues there stands a single mind that is using these writings as a way of hitting upon the truth, and of bringing that truth to the attention of others. If we find Timaeus (the principal interlocutor of the dialogue named after him) and the Eleatic visitor of the Sophist and Statesman talking about forms in a way that is entirely consistent with the way Socrates talks about forms in Phaedo and Republic, then there is only one reasonable explanation for that consistency: Plato believes that their way of talking about forms is correct, or is at least strongly supported by powerful considerations. If, on the other hand, we find that Timaeus or the Eleatic visitor talks about forms in a way that does not harmonize with the way Socrates conceives of those abstract objects, in the dialogues that assign him a central role as director of the conversation, then the most plausible explanation for these discrepancies is that Plato has changed his mind about the nature of these entities. It would be implausible to suppose that Plato himself had no convictions about forms, and merely wants to give his readers mental exercise by composing dialogues in which different leading characters talk about these objects in discordant ways.

10. Does Plato change his mind about politics?

The same point—that we must view the dialogues as the product of a single mind, a single philosopher, though perhaps one who changes his mind—can be made in connection with the politics of Plato’s works (see Bobonich 2002).

It is noteworthy, to begin with, that Plato is, among other things, a political philosopher. For he gives expression, in several of his writings (particular Phaedo), to a yearning to escape from the tawdriness of ordinary human relations. (Similarly, he evinces a sense of the ugliness of the sensible world, whose beauty pales in comparison with that of the forms.) Because of this, it would have been all too easy for Plato to turn his back entirely on practical reality, and to confine his speculations to theoretical questions. Some of his works—Parmenides is a stellar example—do confine themselves to exploring questions that seem to have no bearing whatsoever on practical life. But it is remarkable how few of his works fall into this category. Even the highly abstract questions raised in Sophist about the nature of being and not-being are, after all, embedded in a search for the definition of sophistry; and thus they call to mind the question whether Socrates should be classified as a sophist—whether, in other words, sophists are to be despised and avoided. In any case, despite the great sympathy Plato expresses for the desire to shed one’s body and live in an incorporeal world, he devotes an enormous amount of energy to the task of understanding the world we live in, appreciating its limited beauty, and improving it.

His tribute to the mixed beauty of the sensible world, in Timaeus, consists in his depiction of it as the outcome of divine efforts to mold reality in the image of the forms, using simple geometrical patterns and harmonious arithmetic relations as building blocks. The desire to transform human relations is given expression in a far larger number of works. Socrates presents himself, in Plato’s Apology, as a man who does not have his head in the clouds (that is part of Aristophanes’ charge against him in Clouds). He does not want to escape from the everyday world but to make it better (see Allen 2010). He presents himself, in Gorgias, as the only Athenian who has tried his hand at the true art of politics.

Similarly, the Socrates of Republic devotes a considerable part of his discussion to the critique of ordinary social institutions—the family, private property, and rule by the many. The motivation that lies behind the writing of this dialogue is the desire to transform (or, at any rate, to improve) political life, not to escape from it (although it is acknowledged that the desire to escape is an honorable one: the best sort of rulers greatly prefer the contemplation of divine reality to the governance of the city). And if we have any further doubts that Plato does take an interest in the practical realm, we need only turn to Laws. A work of such great detail and length about voting procedures, punishments, education, legislation, and the oversight of public officials can only have been produced by someone who wants to contribute something to the improvement of the lives we lead in this sensible and imperfect realm. Further evidence of Plato’s interest in practical matters can be drawn from his letters, if they are genuine. In most of them, he presents himself as having a deep interest in educating (with the help of his friend, Dion) the ruler of Syracuse, Dionysius II, and thus reforming that city’s politics.

Just as any attempt to understand Plato’s views about forms must confront the question whether his thoughts about them developed or altered over time, so too our reading of him as a political philosopher must be shaped by a willingness to consider the possibility that he changed his mind. For example, on any plausible reading of Republic, Plato evinces a deep antipathy to rule by the many. Socrates tells his interlocutors that the only politics that should engage them are those of the anti-democratic regime he depicts as the paradigm of a good constitution. And yet in Laws, the Athenian visitor proposes a detailed legislative framework for a city in which non-philosophers (people who have never heard of the forms, and have not been trained to understand them) are given considerable powers as rulers. Plato would not have invested so much time in the creation of this comprehensive and lengthy work, had he not believed that the creation of a political community ruled by those who are philosophically unenlightened is a project that deserves the support of his readers. Has Plato changed his mind, then? Has he re-evaluated the highly negative opinion he once held of those who are innocent of philosophy? Did he at first think that the reform of existing Greek cities, with all of their imperfections, is a waste of time—but then decide that it is an endeavor of great value? (And if so, what led him to change his mind?) Answers to these questions can be justified only by careful attention to what he has his interlocutors say. But it would be utterly implausible to suppose that these developmental questions need not be raised, on the grounds that Republic and Laws each has its own cast of characters, and that the two works therefore cannot come into contradiction with each other. According to this hypothesis (one that must be rejected), because it is Socrates (not Plato) who is critical of democracy in Republic, and because it is the Athenian visitor (not Plato) who recognizes the merits of rule by the many in Laws, there is no possibility that the two dialogues are in tension with each other. Against this hypothesis, we should say: Since both Republic and Laws are works in which Plato is trying to move his readers towards certain conclusions, by having them reflect on certain arguments—these dialogues are not barred from having this feature by their use of interlocutors—it would be an evasion of our responsibility as readers and students of Plato not to ask whether what one of them advocates is compatible with what the other advocates. If we answer that question negatively, we have some explaining to do: what led to this change? Alternatively, if we conclude that the two works are compatible, we must say why the appearance of conflict is illusory.

11. The historical Socrates: early, middle, and late dialogues

Many contemporary scholars find it plausible that when Plato embarked on his career as a philosophical writer, he composed, in addition to his Apology of Socrates, a number of short ethical dialogues that contain little or nothing in the way of positive philosophical doctrine, but are mainly devoted to portraying the way in which Socrates punctured the pretensions of his interlocutors and forced them to realize that they are unable to offer satisfactory definitions of the ethical terms they used, or satisfactory arguments for their moral beliefs. According to this way of placing the dialogues into a rough chronological order—associated especially with Gregory Vlastos’s name (see especially his Socrates Ironist and Moral Philosopher, chapters 2 and 3)—Plato, at this point of his career, was content to use his writings primarily for the purpose of preserving the memory of Socrates and making plain the superiority of his hero, in intellectual skill and moral seriousness, to all of his contemporaries—particularly those among them who claimed to be experts on religious, political, or moral matters. Into this category of early dialogues (they are also sometimes called “Socratic” dialogues, possibly without any intended chronological connotation) are placed: Charmides, Crito, Euthydemus, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Hippias Major, Hippias Minor, Ion, Laches, Lysis, and Protagoras, (Some scholars hold that we can tell which of these come later during Plato’s early period. For example, it is sometimes said that Protagoras and Gorgias are later, because of their greater length and philosophical complexity. Other dialogues—for example, Charmides and Lysis—are thought not to be among Plato’s earliest within this early group, because in them Socrates appears to be playing a more active role in shaping the progress of the dialogue: that is, he has more ideas of his own.) In comparison with many of Plato’s other dialogues, these “Socratic” works contain little in the way of metaphysical, epistemological, or methodological speculation, and they therefore fit well with the way Socrates characterizes himself in Plato’s Apology: as a man who leaves investigations of high falutin’ matters (which are “in the sky and below the earth”) to wiser heads, and confines all of his investigations to the question how one should live one’s life. Aristotle describes Socrates as someone whose interests were restricted to only one branch of philosophy—the realm of the ethical; and he also says that he was in the habit of asking definitional questions to which he himself lacked answers (Metaphysics 987b1, Sophistical Refutations 183b7). That testimony gives added weight to the widely accepted hypothesis that there is a group of dialogues—the ones mentioned above as his early works, whether or not they were all written early in Plato’s writing career—in which Plato used the dialogue form as a way of portraying the philosophical activities of the historical Socrates (although, of course, he might also have used them in other ways as well—for example to suggest and begin to explore philosophical difficulties raised by them, see Santas 1979, Brickhouse and Smith 1994).

But at a certain point—so says this hypothesis about the chronology of the dialogues—Plato began to use his works to advance ideas that were his own creations rather than those of Socrates, although he continued to use the name “Socrates” for the interlocutor who presented and argued for these new ideas. The speaker called “Socrates” now begins to move beyond and depart from the historical Socrates: he has views about the methodology that should be used by philosophers (a methodology borrowed from mathematics), and he argues for the immortality of the soul and the existence and importance of the forms of beauty, justice, goodness, and the like. (By contrast, in Apology Socrates says that no one knows what becomes of us after we die.) Phaedo is often said to be the dialogue in which Plato first comes into his own as a philosopher who is moving far beyond the ideas of his teacher (though it is also commonly said that we see a new methodological sophistication and a greater interest in mathematical knowledge in Meno). Having completed all of the dialogues that, according to this hypothesis, we characterize as early, Plato widened the range of topics to be explored in his writings (no longer confining himself to ethics), and placed the theory of forms (and related ideas about language, knowledge, and love) at the center of his thinking. In these works of his “middle” period—for example, in Phaedo, Cratylus, Symposium, Republic, and Phaedrus—there is both a change of emphasis and of doctrine. The focus is no longer on ridding ourselves of false ideas and self-deceit; rather, we are asked to accept (however tentatively) a radical new conception of ourselves (now divided into three parts), our world—or rather, our two worlds—and our need to negotiate between them. Definitions of the most important virtue terms are finally proposed in Republic (the search for them in some of the early dialogues having been unsuccessful): Book I of this dialogue is a portrait of how the historical Socrates might have handled the search for a definition of justice, and the rest of the dialogue shows how the new ideas and tools discovered by Plato can complete the project that his teacher was unable to finish. Plato continues to use a figure called “Socrates” as his principal interlocutor, and in this way he creates a sense of continuity between the methods, insights, and ideals of the historical Socrates and the new Socrates who has now become a vehicle for the articulation of his own new philosophical outlook. In doing so, he acknowledges his intellectual debt to his teacher and appropriates for his own purposes the extraordinary prestige of the man who was the wisest of his time.

This hypothesis about the chronology of Plato’s writings has a third component: it does not place his works into either of only two categories—the early or “Socratic” dialogues, and all the rest—but works instead with a threefold division of early, middle, and late. That is because, following ancient testimony, it has become a widely accepted assumption that Laws is one of Plato’s last works, and further that this dialogue shares a great many stylistic affinities with a small group of others: Sophist, Statesman, Timaeus, Critias, and Philebus. These five dialogues together with Laws are generally agreed to be his late works, because they have much more in common with each other, when one counts certain stylistic features apparent only to readers of Plato’s Greek, than with any of Plato’s other works. (Computer counts have aided these stylometric studies, but the isolation of a group of six dialogues by means of their stylistic commonalities was recognized in the nineteenth century. See Brandwood 1990, Young 1994.)

It is not at all clear whether there are one or more philosophical affinities among this group of six dialogues—that is, whether the philosophy they contain is sharply different from that of all of the other dialogues. Plato does nothing to encourage the reader to view these works as a distinctive and separate component of his thinking. On the contrary, he links Sophist with Theaetetus (the conversations they present have a largely overlapping cast of characters, and take place on successive days) no less than Sophist and Statesman. Sophist contains, in its opening pages, a reference to the conversation of Parmenides—and perhaps Plato is thus signaling to his readers that they should bring to bear on Sophist the lessons that are to be drawn from Parmenides. Similarly, Timaeus opens with a reminder of some of the principal ethical and political doctrines of Republic. It could be argued, of course, that when one looks beyond these stage-setting devices, one finds significant philosophical changes in the six late dialogues, setting this group off from all that preceded them. But there is no consensus that they should be read in this way. Resolving this issue requires intensive study of the content of Plato’s works. So, although it is widely accepted that the six dialogues mentioned above belong to Plato’s latest period, there is, as yet, no agreement among students of Plato that these six form a distinctive stage in his philosophical development.

In fact, it remains a matter of dispute whether the division of Plato’s works into three periods—early, middle, late—does correctly indicate the order of composition, and whether it is a useful tool for the understanding of his thought (See Cooper 1997, vii–xxvii). Of course, it would be wildly implausible to suppose that Plato’s writing career began with such complex works as Laws, Parmenides, Phaedrus, or Republic. In light of widely accepted assumptions about how most philosophical minds develop, it is likely that when Plato started writing philosophical works some of the shorter and simpler dialogues were the ones he composed: Laches, or Crito, or Ion (for example). (Similarly, Apology does not advance a complex philosophical agenda or presuppose an earlier body of work; so that too is likely to have been composed near the beginning of Plato’s writing career.) Even so, there is no good reason to eliminate the hypothesis that throughout much of his life Plato devoted himself to writing two sorts of dialogues at the same time, moving back and forth between them as he aged: on the one hand, introductory works whose primary purpose is to show readers the difficulty of apparently simple philosophical problems, and thereby to rid them of their pretensions and false beliefs; and on the other hand, works filled with more substantive philosophical theories supported by elaborate argumentation. Moreover, one could point to features of many of the “Socratic” dialogues that would justify putting them in the latter category, even though the argumentation does not concern metaphysics or methodology or invoke mathematics—Gorgias, Protagoras, Lysis, Euthydemus, Hippias Major among them.

Plato makes it clear that both of these processes, one preceding the other, must be part of one’s philosophical education. One of his deepest methodological convictions (affirmed in Meno, Theaetetus, and Sophist) is that in order to make intellectual progress we must recognize that knowledge cannot be acquired by passively receiving it from others: rather, we must work our way through problems and assess the merits of competing theories with an independent mind. Accordingly, some of his dialogues are primarily devices for breaking down the reader’s complacency, and that is why it is essential that they come to no positive conclusions; others are contributions to theory-construction, and are therefore best absorbed by those who have already passed through the first stage of philosophical development. We should not assume that Plato could have written the preparatory dialogues only at the earliest stage of his career. Although he may well have begun his writing career by taking up that sort of project, he may have continued writing these “negative” works at later stages, at the same time that he was composing his theory-constructing dialogues. For example although both Euthydemus and Charmides are widely assumed to be early dialogues, they might have been written around the same time as Symposium and Republic, which are generally assumed to be compositions of his middle period—or even later.

No doubt, some of the works widely considered to be early really are such. But it is an open question which and how many of them are. At any rate, it is clear that Plato continued to write in a “Socratic” and “negative” vein even after he was well beyond the earliest stages of his career: Theaetetus features a Socrates who is even more insistent upon his ignorance than are the dramatic representations of Socrates in briefer and philosophically less complex works that are reasonably assumed to be early; and like many of those early works, Theaetetus seeks but does not find the answer to the “what is it?” question that it relentlessly pursues—“What is knowledge?” Similarly, Parmenides, though certainly not an early dialogue, is a work whose principal aim is to puzzle the reader by the presentation of arguments for apparently contradictory conclusions; since it does not tell us how it is possible to accept all of those conclusions, its principal effect on the reader is similar to that of dialogues (many of them no doubt early) that reach only negative conclusions. Plato uses this educational device—provoking the reader through the presentation of opposed arguments, and leaving the contradiction unresolved—in Protagoras (often considered an early dialogue) as well. So it is clear that even after he was well beyond the earliest stages of his thinking, he continued to assign himself the project of writing works whose principal aim is the presentation of unresolved difficulties. (And, just as we should recognize that puzzling the reader continues to be his aim even in later works, so too we should not overlook the fact that there is some substantive theory-construction in the ethical works that are simple enough to have been early compositions: Ion, for example, affirms a theory of poetic inspiration; and Crito sets out the conditions under which a citizen acquires an obligation to obey civic commands. Neither ends in failure.)

If we are justified in taking Socrates’ speech in Plato’s Apology to constitute reliable evidence about what the historical Socrates was like, then whatever we find in Plato’s other works that is of a piece with that speech can also be safely attributed to Socrates. So understood, Socrates was a moralist but (unlike Plato) not a metaphysician or epistemologist or cosmologist. That fits with Aristotle’s testimony, and Plato’s way of choosing the dominant speaker of his dialogues gives further support to this way of distinguishing between him and Socrates. The number of dialogues that are dominated by a Socrates who is spinning out elaborate philosophical doctrines is remarkably small: Phaedo, Republic, Phaedrus, and Philebus. All of them are dominated by ethical issues: whether to fear death, whether to be just, whom to love, the place of pleasure. Evidently, Plato thinks that it is appropriate to make Socrates the major speaker in a dialogue that is filled with positive content only when the topics explored in that work primarily have to do with the ethical life of the individual. (The political aspects of Republic are explicitly said to serve the larger question whether any individual, no matter what his circumstances, should be just.) When the doctrines he wishes to present systematically become primarily metaphysical, he turns to a visitor from Elea (Sophist, Statesman); when they become cosmological, he turns to Timaeus; when they become constitutional, he turns, in Laws, to a visitor from Athens (and he then eliminates Socrates entirely). In effect, Plato is showing us: although he owes a great deal to the ethical insights of Socrates, as well as to his method of puncturing the intellectual pretensions of his interlocutors by leading them into contradiction, he thinks he should not put into the mouth of his teacher too elaborate an exploration of ontological, or cosmological, or political themes, because Socrates refrained from entering these domains. This may be part of the explanation why he has Socrates put into the mouth of the personified Laws of Athens the theory advanced in Crito, which reaches the conclusion that it would be unjust for him to escape from prison. Perhaps Plato is indicating, at the point where these speakers enter the dialogue, that none of what is said here is in any way derived from or inspired by the conversation of Socrates.

Just as we should reject the idea that Plato must have made a decision, at a fairly early point in his career, no longer to write one kind of dialogue (negative, destructive, preparatory) and to write only works of elaborate theory-construction; so we should also question whether he went through an early stage during which he refrained from introducing into his works any of his own ideas (if he had any), but was content to play the role of a faithful portraitist, representing to his readers the life and thought of Socrates. It is unrealistic to suppose that someone as original and creative as Plato, who probably began to write dialogues somewhere in his thirties (he was around 28 when Socrates was killed), would have started his compositions with no ideas of his own, or, having such ideas, would have decided to suppress them, for some period of time, allowing himself to think for himself only later. (What would have led to such a decision?) We should instead treat the moves made in the dialogues, even those that are likely to be early, as Platonic inventions—derived, no doubt, by Plato’s reflections on and transformations of the key themes of Socrates that he attributes to Socrates in Apology. That speech indicates, for example, that the kind of religiosity exhibited by Socrates was unorthodox and likely to give offense or lead to misunderstanding. It would be implausible to suppose that Plato simply concocted the idea that Socrates followed a divine sign, especially because Xenophon too attributes this to his Socrates. But what of the various philosophical moves rehearsed in Euthyphro—the dialogue in which Socrates searches, unsuccessfully, for an understanding of what piety is? We have no good reason to think that in writing this work Plato adopted the role of a mere recording device, or something close to it (changing a word here and there, but for the most part simply recalling what he heard Socrates say, as he made his way to court). It is more likely that Plato, having been inspired by the unorthodoxy of Socrates’ conception of piety, developed, on his own, a series of questions and answers designed to show his readers how difficult it is to reach an understanding of the central concept that Socrates’ fellow citizens relied upon when they condemned him to death. The idea that it is important to search for definitions may have been Socratic in origin. (After all, Aristotle attributes this much to Socrates.) But the twists and turns of the arguments in Euthyphro and other dialogues that search for definitions are more likely to be the products of Plato’s mind than the content of any conversations that really took place.

12. Why dialogues?

It is equally unrealistic to suppose that when Plato embarked on his career as a writer, he made a conscious decision to put all of the compositions that he would henceforth compose for a general reading public (with the exception of Apology) in the form of a dialogue. If the question, “why did Plato write dialogues?”, which many of his readers are tempted to ask, pre-supposes that there must have been some such once-and-for-all decision, then it is poorly posed. It makes better sense to break that question apart into many little ones: better to ask, “Why did Plato write this particular work (for example: Protagoras, or Republic, or Symposium, or Laws) in the form of a dialogue—and that one (Timaeus, say) mostly in the form of a long and rhetorically elaborate single speech?” than to ask why he decided to adopt the dialogue form.

The best way to form a reasonable conjecture about why Plato wrote any given work in the form of a dialogue is to ask: what would be lost, were one to attempt to re-write this work in a way that eliminated the give-and-take of interchange, stripped the characters of their personality and social markers, and transformed the result into something that comes straight from the mouth of its author? This is often a question that will be easy to answer, but the answer might vary greatly from one dialogue to another. In pursuing this strategy, we must not rule out the possibility that some of Plato’s reasons for writing this or that work in the form of a dialogue will also be his reason for doing so in other cases—perhaps some of his reasons, so far as we can guess at them, will be present in all other cases. For example, the use of character and conversation allows an author to enliven his work, to awaken the interest of his readership, and therefore to reach a wider audience. The enormous appeal of Plato’s writings is in part a result of their dramatic composition. Even treatise-like compositions—Timaeus and Laws, for example—improve in readability because of their conversational frame. Furthermore, the dialogue form allows Plato’s evident interest in pedagogical questions (how is it possible to learn? what is the best way to learn? from what sort of person can we learn? what sort of person is in a position to learn?) to be pursued not only in the content of his compositions but also in their form. Even in Laws such questions are not far from Plato’s mind, as he demonstrates, through the dialogue form, how it is possible for the citizens of Athens, Sparta, and Crete to learn from each other by adapting and improving upon each other’s social and political institutions.

In some of his works, it is evident that one of Plato’s goals is to create a sense of puzzlement among his readers, and that the dialogue form is being used for this purpose. The Parmenides is perhaps the clearest example of such a work, because here Plato relentlessly rubs his readers’ faces in a baffling series of unresolved puzzles and apparent contradictions. But several of his other works also have this character, though to a smaller degree: for example, Protagoras (can virtue be taught?), Hippias Minor (is voluntary wrongdoing better than involuntary wrongdoing?), and portions of Meno (are some people virtuous because of divine inspiration?). Just as someone who encounters Socrates in conversation should sometimes be puzzled about whether he means what he says (or whether he is instead speaking ironically), so Plato sometimes uses the dialogue form to create in his readers a similar sense of discomfort about what he means and what we ought to infer from the arguments that have been presented to us. But Socrates does not always speak ironically, and similarly Plato’s dialogues do not always aim at creating a sense of bafflement about what we are to think about the subject under discussion. There is no mechanical rule for discovering how best to read a dialogue, no interpretive strategy that applies equally well to all of his works. We will best understand Plato’s works and profit most from our reading of them if we recognize their great diversity of styles and adapt our way of reading accordingly. Rather than impose on our reading of Plato a uniform expectation of what he must be doing (because he has done such a thing elsewhere), we should bring to each dialogue a receptivity to what is unique to it. That would be the most fitting reaction to the artistry in his philosophy.

Bibliography

The bibliography below is meant as a highly selective and limited guide for readers who want to learn more about the issues covered above. Further discussion of these and other issues regarding Plato’s philosophy, and far more bibliographical information, is available in the other entries on Plato.

Late dialogues of Plato

The Parmenides demonstrates that the sketches of forms presented in the middle dialogues were not adequate; this dialogue and the ones that follow spur readers to develop a more viable understanding of these entities. Thus, the approach to genera and species recommended in the Sophist, the Statesman, and the Philebus (and already discussed in the Phaedrus) represents the late version of Plato’s theory of forms. The Philebus proposes a mathematized version, inspired by Pythagoreanism and corresponding to the cosmology of the Timaeus.

But Plato did not neglect human issues in these dialogues. The Phaedrus already combined the new apparatus with a compelling treatment of love; the title topics of the Sophist and the Statesman, to be treated by genus-species division, are important roles in the Greek city; and the Philebus is a consideration of the competing claims of pleasure and knowledge to be the basis of the good life. (The Laws, left unfinished at Plato’s death, seems to represent a practical approach to the planning of a city.) If one combines the hints (in the Republic) associating the Good with the One, or Unity; the treatment (in the Parmenides) of the One as the first principle of everything; and the possibility that the good proportion and harmony featured in the Timaeus and the Philebus are aspects of the One, it is possible to trace the aesthetic and ethical interests of the middle dialogues through even the most difficult technical studies.

The Theaetetus considers the question “What is knowledge?” Is it perception, true belief, or true belief with an “account”? The dialogue contains a famous “digression” on the difference between the philosophical and worldly mentalities. The work ends inconclusively and may indeed be intended to show the limits of the methods of the historical Socrates with this subject matter, further progress requiring Plato’s distinctive additions.

The Parmenides is the key episode in Plato’s treatment of forms. It presents a critique of the super-exemplification view of forms that results from a natural reading of the Symposium, the Phaedo, and the Republic and moves on to a suggestive logical exercise based on a distinction between two kinds of predication and a model of the forms in terms of genera and species. Designed to lead the reader to a more sophisticated and viable theory, the exercise also depicts the One as a principle of everything (see above The theory of forms).

The leader of the discussion in the Sophist is an “Eleatic stranger.” Sophistry seems to involve trafficking in falsity, illusion, and not-being. Yet these are puzzling in light of the brilliant use by the historical Parmenides (also an Eleatic) of the slogan that one cannot think or speak of what is not. Plato introduces the idea that a negative assertion of the form “A is not B” should be understood not as invoking any absolute not-being but as having the force that A is other than B. The other crucial content of the dialogue is its distinction between two uses of “is,” which correspond to the two kinds of predication introduced in the Parmenides. Both are connected with the genus-species model of definition that is pervasive in the late dialogues, since the theoretically central use of “is” appears in statements that are true in virtue of the relations represented in genus-species classifications. The dialogue treats the intermingling of the five “greatest kinds”: Being, Sameness, Difference, Motion, and Rest. Although these kinds are of course not species of each other, they do partake of each other in the ordinary way. The Statesman discusses genus-species definition in connection with understanding its title notion.

The Timaeus concerns the creation of the world by a Demiurge, initially operating on forms and space and assisted after he has created them by lesser gods. Earth, air, fire, and water are analyzed as ultimately consisting of two kinds of triangles, which combine into different characteristic solids. Plato in this work applies mathematical harmonics to produce a cosmology. The Critias is a barely started sequel to the Timaeus; its projected content is the story of the war of ancient Athens and Atlantis.

The Philebus develops major apparatuses in methodology and metaphysics. The genus-species treatment of forms is recommended, but now foundational to it is a new fourfold division: limit, the unlimited, the mixed class, and the cause. Forms (members of the mixed class) are analyzed in Pythagorean style as made up of limit and the unlimited. This occurs when desirable ratios govern the balance between members of underlying pairs of opposites—as, for example, Health results when there is a proper balance between the Wet and the Dry.

The very lengthy Laws is thought to be Plato’s last composition, since there is generally accepted evidence that it was unrevised at his death. It develops laws to govern a projected state and is apparently meant to be practical in a way that the Republic was not; thus the demands made on human nature are less exacting. This work appears, indirectly, to have left its mark on the great system of Roman jurisprudence.

Varia

The Epigrams are elegiac couplets attributed to Plato. Epigrams 1–3 are especially interesting: they may well be authentic, and if so they would give a glimpse into Plato’s personal affections. Correspondence purporting to be from Plato is collected as the Letters or Epistles; their authorship is controversial, and each must be evaluated separately. The Seventh Letter contains much that is relevant to Plato’s biography and to his joint project with Dion of Syracuse, as well as a criticism of putting philosophy into writing.

Three dialogues of uncertain authorship in the Socratic genre are the following. The Alcibiades depicts Socrates with the brilliant title character, whose meteoric career (before the date of composition but after the fictional date of the dialogue) contributed to the resentment against the older man. In the Clitophon, the title character objects that Socrates has awakened his wish for knowledge of virtue but has failed to help him reach his goal. The Hippias Major takes up the question “What is the beautiful (the fine)?” Widely agreed to be spurious are Axiochus, Definitions, Demodocus, Epinomis, Eryxias, Halcyon, Hipparchus, Minos, On Justice, On Virtue, Rival Lovers, Second Alcibiades, Sisyphus, and Theages.

Plato’s Apology

THE LITERARY WORK

A dialogue set in the year 399 b.c.e.; although the exact date it was written is uncertain, some sources argue that it was written shortly after the year in which it is set.

The Apology is a dramatization of the trial at which the philosopher Socrates was found guilty and condemned to death; its title comes from the Greek word Apologia, which means “defense.”

Plato was born in 427 b.c.e. to an influential, politically active aristocratic family and received the fine education typical for a boy of his background in fifth-century Athens. His various interests included wrestling (he was a champion), politics (his aspirations included running for office), and writing. According to ancient tradition, Plato began his career as a writer anxious to become the next Sophocles, and started composing dramas that supposedly showed some promise. These he promptly sent home and burned upon hearing a lecture by a man destined to become not only Plato’s, but the world’s teacher: Socrates. Plato studied with Socrates for just under a decade, until the teacher was tried and condemned to death (399 b.c.e.). A young man of 28 at the time, Plato was so disillusioned by the death of Socrates that he left Athens and began to travel. He visited parts of Egypt, Sicily, and present-day Italy before returning to Athens at the age of 40 to found the philosophical school known as the Academy. Plato spent the majority of his time happily absorbed by his writing and teaching of students (among whom would be Aristotle). At the age of 60, Plato received an invitation to act as advisor to the government in Sicily. Plato had written the Republic (also in Literature and Its Times) by this time, and it was thought that under his guidance the new Sicilian ruler might become the philosopher-king depicted in that dialogue. Things did not go as planned, however; not only were Plato’s proposals and ideas viewed as too radical, but Sicily’s political situation was unstable to the point of being dangerous. The King, in an attempt to consolidate his power, began exiling and then assassinating several members of his court. Amidst this turmoil, the philosopher decided to return home to Athens, where he devoted himself to his Academy until his death at the age of 81. During Plato’s lifetime Athens sank from a great empire to just one of the many Greek city-states jockeying for power. He bore witness to several of its brutal attacks on other city-states, which aggravated his already critical opinion of Athens because of Socrates’ trial and execution. Plato’s experiences in Sicily had confirmed that Athens was not unique in its less-than-scrupulous approach to public affairs. It should come as no surprise, then, that a great number of the 35 dialogues ascribed to him explore the relationship between morality, or virtue, and politics. In his first dialogue, the Apology, Plato’s portrayal of Socrates is that of a man committed to the truth at all costs, a man forced to stand trial in large part due to the misperceptions and wounded vanity of some of Athens’s most preemisper citizens.

Events in History at the Time the Dialogue Takes Place

Socrates and his trial

The philosopher Socrates was born in 469 b.c.e. to a middle-class family. His mother was a midwife. His father, an artist/craftsman, earned enough to leave Socrates a small inheritance. By all accounts, this is what Socrates lived on until he was put to death by the city of Athens at the age of 70. Socrates had a wife, Xanthippe, and three children, but he never held a job or worked at a trade. All his time was spent practicing philosophy in Athens, and as he reminds us more than once in the Apology, he never received payment for his efforts. According to most sources, his family members came second to his philosophic mission; they received little financial or emotional support from him.

Socrates is sometimes spoken of as the first philosopher, but he actually built on the foundation of a group of early Greek thinkers known as the pre-Socratics. Individuals such as Thales, Parmenides, and Heraclitus grappled with questions that can aptly be described as “cosmologi-cal”—what is the nature and structure of the cosmos? what set of elements is the world composed of? Generally this first stage of Greek philosophers shared a focus on the external, material world. Sources tend to agree that Socrates developed a different focus; although he began his career as a natural philosopher; at some point he abandoned that inquiry and became a moral philosopher, more interested in man and his search for truth.

Although Socrates was a prolific philosopher, he left no treatises or writings. The only written records of Socrates and his thought are from other people. The majority of Socrates’ ideas are handed down to us by Plato, a student of Socrates and one of his closest friends. Other accounts come to us by way of a contemporary of Socrates, Aristophanes, who was a poet and strident critic. Another of his students, Xenophon, wrote a version of Socrates’ trial too, as well as accounts of his philosophic conversations.

We know for certain that Socrates was tried on the charges of corrupting the youth of Athens and not believing in the city’s gods. Found guilty, he was put to death via ingestion of the poison hemlock. Precisely what transpired during the trial is a matter open to speculation and debate. To what extent the Socrates presented in Plato’s Apology is the true, historic Socrates, and his speech a close rendition of what he actually said, is a controversial question.

The sophists

The pursuit of philosophy was considered a dangerous, unsavory practice in the Athens of Socrates’ day. In part, this was due to the existence of sophists, men who became incredibly wealthy peddling their services as “teachers of wisdom.” In reality, many of the sophists taught nothing more than the art of rhetoric. Athens was a very litigious society, and “the Sophists professed to teach the right way of winning these lawsuits,” which, in other words, could easily mean “the art of teaching men how to make the unjust appear the just cause” (Copleston, p. 84).

The public at large probably found it hard to distinguish between Socrates and the sophists. It no doubt was difficult for them to differentiate the kind of arguments for which the sophists were famous from Socrates’ questioning of Athenian citizens in pursuit of the truth. In fact, it is significant that the Apology opens with Socrates denying that he is a sophist, and with an attempt to demonstrate the difference between his teachings and theirs:

Another key distinction Socrates makes between himself and the sophists is to point out that he receives no payment for his discussions or arguments with young people. Socrates mentions by name well-known sophists such as Gor-gias, Prodicus, and Hippias; and while they have earned a handsome living teaching young men from wealthy families the art of persuasive rhetoric, Socrates lives in abject poverty.

This association of Socrates with the sophists plagued him throughout his life and was difficult to overcome. They were held in very low regard by just about all segments of Athenian society, democrat and aristocrat alike. Perhaps that is one of the reasons that the most famous of the sophists appear so frequently as characters in Plato’s dialogues; like most of Socrates’ conversational partners, they are usually on the losing side of an argument, and Plato never misses an opportunity to poke fun at their flowery speeches, their tendency to focus on trivial and insignificant details during a debate, and their utter irreverence for the truth. One of Plato’s dialogues, called The Protagoras after a well-known sophist, is quite telling in this respect. In this dialogue, Socrates concedes that Protagoras is superior in “speech-making,” for he uses tactics that include making “a long speech in reply to every question, staving off objections and not giving answers, but spinning it out until most of the people listening forget what the question was” (Plato, Protagoras, p. 36). He himself cannot make such a speech, admits Socrates, but this skill is entirely different from genuine discussion and argument.

The conflict between poetry and philosophy

Ancient Greece was an extremely religious society. Belief in the gods played a major role in almost all aspects of daily life. In addition to the 12 major gods of Olympia, which all Greeks worshipped, each city-state had its own particular set of deities whose mythology often involved the founding of the city (for the Athenians, for example, this would include the goddess Athena). Citizens participated in all kinds of public religious rituals with their fellow citizens on a regular basis, and statesmen and military leaders frequently attempted to consult the gods to determine what their will was with regards to a specific decision or policy. Appeals were also made to the deities to determine what was right or just, a question to which the poets were thought to have particular insight. This was due partly to a belief that poets were inspired by muses, divine creatures who are privy to the ways of the gods. In fact, it was through epic and tragic poetry that the Greeks learned all about the gods, and came into intimate contact with their ways.

Socrates’ generation showed high respect for its poets, regarding them as spokesmen for the gods and preservers of the society’s religious

THE TEACHER OF TYRANTS?

traditions. On the other hand, his generation had little use for the notions of philosophers, which led to a rivalry that is apparent in the Apology. It has Socrates repeatedly mention and criticize a real-life comic poet of the day, Aristophanes,”the great reactionary who opposes with all the means at his disposal all the new-fangled things, be it the democracy, the Euripidean tragedy, or the pursuits of Socrates” (Strauss, p. 103).

Socrates used two insights to challenge the authority of the poets. Firstly, he observed a distinction between knowledge and opinion. In the Apology, Socrates describes his mission in life as a quest to discover the truth. What he finds is that all of the people he engages in dialogue have opinions about what is true, but these are often contradictory and illogical. These opinions do not seem to be the result of any kind of sustained analysis or even careful thought, and individual convictions are not strongly held. With very little effort, Socrates is able to persuade his dialogue partner to abandon his initial belief and proclaim another one true. Then Socrates examines yet another position, and the individual changes his mind again and adopts still another opinion as true. In this way, Socrates demonstrates that people’s opinions on even the gravest matters are not based on fact, and have not been subject to careful scrutiny. Even some beliefs about the Greek gods are a matter of opinion rather than objective knowledge or truth.

Philosophers like Socrates made a second distinction that resulted in an attack on poets and the religious tradition—the distinction between nature and convention. There are things like trees and birds and the sun that exist in nature, no matter what men do. There are other things, like robes, temples, and chariots, that are conventional, or manmade. Is it not possible, ask the philosophers, that the existence of gods is conventional rather than natural? The gods might simply be a function of the poets’ art, a fiction that is their creation. The creation, moreover, prevents men from asking questions about subjects such as the origin of man and the nature of the universe. The philosophers are not content with the so-called divine wisdom of the poets; they seek true knowledge rather than what they regard as religious myths about the nature of the cosmos. From the perspective of philosophy, the pronouncements of the poets do not provide definitive answers to the myriad questions of human existence. Meanwhile, the poets see the philosophers as dangerous in that they undermine piety, justice, and support of the city’s laws and traditions. Poetry and philosophy are at such cross-purposes that it seems almost natural for some of Socrates’ accusers to have been poets who bore him ill will. In fact, one interpretation of the Apology is that the dialogue is Plato’s attempt to answer the charges of the poets against the pursuit of philosophy and to convince them that the questions, investigations, and criticisms that philosophy generates can be beneficial to the city.

The Dialogue in Focus

The plot

The Apology, thought to be one of Plato’s earliest dialogues, is his portrayal of the trial and sentencing of his most esteemed teacher, Socrates. As the dialogue opens, Socrates seems to be preparing his audience, the jury, not to expect too much of him during his defense speech. First, he attempts to distinguish himself from the clever rhetoricians of his day by warning the jurors that unlike them, he will simply speak the truth “at random in the words that I happen upon,” and not “in beautifully spoken speeches like theirs, adorned with phrases and words” (Apology, p. 64). Socrates, referring to his jurors as “the men of Athens,” then entreats his fellow citizens to deal with him leniently, stating that although he is 70 years old, this is the first time he has ever appeared in court. A xenos, a stranger, or outsider to these proceedings, he asks for the court’s sympathy.

After this introduction, Socrates lays out the charges against him. He divides them into two groups, emanating from what he calls the “old” and the “new” accusers. The new accusers are the men who brought the specific,”official” charges against him for which he is on trial. But Socrates says that the older accusers are far more dangerous; they are the ones who have been slandering him and turning public opinion against him for years. Since he views them as the larger threat, he deals with their charges first.

Socrates refers to some of the older poets as his first accusers, specifically Aristophanes, who parodied Socrates in his comedic satire the Clouds, a play performed in Athens 24 years before the trial began. According to Socrates, Aristophanes’ play had made an informal “indictment” against him, accusing him of the following: “Socrates does injustice, and is meddlesome, by investigating things under the earth and the heavenly things, and by making the weaker speech the stronger, and by teaching others these same things” (Apology, p. 66).

ARISTOPHANES’ CLOUDS

The poet Aristophanes dedicated an entire play to portraying Socrates and his philosophy as a dangerous influence on lhe city. The lead character is a “regular guy” named Strepsiades. He has made an imprudent marriage, has a bad relationship with his son, and is struggling with seemingly insurmountable debts due to the extravagance of his family. Strepsiades decides that he and his son will attend Socrates’school, the so-called “thinkery,” to learn how to make the “weaker speech the stronger” and thus convince his creditors to forgive his debts. At the thinkery, a student of Socrates attempts to impress Strepsiades by recounting the “brilliant” investigations conducted by Socrates that very day. These include “how many of its own feet a flea could leap” when it jumped from person to person and whether “gnats hum through their mouth or through their behind” (Aristophanes, p. 122). As if these descriptions of Socrates were not sufficiently derogatory, the play says that while “investigating the courses and revolutions of the moon and gaping upwards,” Socrates was “crapped on” by a lizard (Aristophanes, p. 122). Not only does the play portray Socratic investigations as ridiculous in the extreme; it also portrays the philosopher’s preoccupation with metaphysical science as dangerous in that it distracts Socrates and his students from their own basic needs and city concerns. This is why when the play first introduces Socrates, he is hovering in the clouds, suspended from a basket, suggesting his detachment from ordinary citizens and their practical concerns.

Aristophanes also portrays Socrates and his students as purveyors of the art of rhetoric associated with the sophists. S’tepsiades’ son, Phidipides, is taught unjust speech at the thinkery, and is able to use it to his advantage with his father’s creditors. But Strepsiades soon realizes the full ramifications of life in a society that throws off all its laws and traditions when his son returns from the thinkery proclaiming the uselessness of his father’s old-fashioned ideas. Distraught, Slrepsiades asks the god Hermes what to do and is told to burn down Socrates’ thinkery: only then will society be rid ot this disease known as unjust speech. Lawsuits and other civil remedies are not an option, because sophists can simply talk their way out of them by making “the weaker speech the stronger.” Ironically Clouds closes with the death of Socrates, who some 20 years later refers to this very play in his self-defense speech. Athenian public opinion has been turned so heavily against him for so long by Aristophanes, says Socrates, that overcoming the jury’s prejudice against him is hopeless. He has only an afternoon to defend himself, while Aristophanes has been slandering him for many years.

Socrates simply states that “none of these things is so” (Apology, p. 66). If anyone in the Jury has ever heard him conversing about these topics, they should come forward. But, says Socrates, none of them can because he has never discussed the things Aristophanes accuses him of, and the same holds true for the rest of the rumors Aristophanes has spread about him. Socrates then admits that a member of the Jury might well ask why he has been so slandered if he is innocent of all charges. His response is that the Athenians resent him because he possesses wisdom. In order to explain what kind of wisdom he has and why it is unique, he tells the jury how his quest for the truth began.

Socrates recounts how his friend Chaerephon paid a visit to the Oracle of Delphi and asked if there were any man alive wiser than Socrates. The oracle replied that Socrates was the wisest. Socrates recounts his reaction to the oracle’s pronouncement for the jury:

Socrates’ inquiry consisted of questioning the three most well-respected segments of society to prove that they were wiser. He questioned the politicians, the poets, and the craftsmen, always seeking out those reputed to be the wisest. Each time Socrates discovered that while the person knew quite a lot about their particular pursuit, the individual did not possess what could be called true human wisdom.

Socratic wisdom, it turns out, consists of being able to recognize and admit what he does not know, which distinguishes him from his fellow citizens: “As I went away, I reasoned … I am wiser than this human being. For probably neither of us knows anything noble and good, but he supposes he knows something when he does not know, while I … do not even suppose that I do’” (Apology, p. 70). Socrates then took on the mission of demonstrating to those who thought themselves wise that they really were not. This, according to Socrates, is the source of the slander against him. His line of questioning made him hateful, not only to the person questioned, but also “to many of those present” (Apology, p. 70). Was the person embarrassed or insulted by his line of questioning? If so, the person could easily fall back on the standard prejudices against philosophy, since there has been a long-standing suspicion of it in Athens.

Next Socrates turns to the specific charges against him by his new accusers, led by the poet Meletus. The charges of the official indictment are that Socrates corrupts the youth, and that he believes not in the gods of the city but in other daimonia (or spirits). Socrates brings Meletus to the stand in order to cross-examine him, and what follows is worthy of the most popular courtroom drama. As far as the first charge goes, Socrates, using his dialectic method, succeeds in getting Meletus to agree that: 1) one person alone cannot corrupt the youth—that would take an effort by many, and furthermore; 2) no one would deliberately corrupt the youth in his society, since it would be foolish to turn them into dangerous villains and then be forced to live among them.

[Socrates] But tell us further, Meletus, before Zeus, whether it is better to dwell among upright citizens or villainous ones. … Do not the villainous do something bad to whoever are nearest to them, while the good do something good?

[Meletus] Quite so.

[Socrates] Is there anyone, then, who wishes to he harmed by those he associates with, rather than to be benefited? [Meletus] Of course not

[Socrates] What then, Meletus? Are you so much wiser at your age than I at mine, that you have become cognizant that the bad always do something bad to those who are closest to them … whereas I have come into so much ignorance that I am not even cognizant that if I ever do something wretched to any of my associates, I will risk getting back something bad from him?

Perhaps he has corrupted the youth involuntarily, admits Socrates, but in that case, the city should simply teach and admonish him, not punish him.

Socrates does a similarly brilliant job of disposing of the second charge against him. While the official charge is not believing in the gods of the city, Socrates gets Meletus to refine this charge while he is on the stand, and accuse Socrates of not believing in any gods at all. Socrates always claimed to hear a daimon, the voice of a spirit that warned him against or encouraged him toward a given action. Since such spirits were thought to be the children of gods, or nymphs, or some sort of divinity, Socrates was able to demonstrate that he did believe in gods after all, for “what human being would believe that there are children of gods, but not gods? It would be as strange as if someone believed in children of horses or asses—mules—but did not believe that there are horses and asses” (Apology, p. 78). Getting Meletus to change his accusation was a very clever move on Socrates’ part, for it allowed him to avoid any discussion of the original charge, which is not believing in the city’s gods, of whose traditional actions he was extremely critical.

Having dealt with the official charges against him, Socrates turns to one of the most poignant and powerful elements of his speech. He attempts to reconcile himself and his philosophy to the city of Athens. Socrates explains to the jury that his philosophizing, his relentless questioning and criticizing of fellow citizens is ultimately beneficial for both individual citizens and the city as a whole:

In his argument, Socrates compares himself to a gadfly on the sluggish horse that is Athens, a vivid analogy that has endured over time. He admits that his relentless questioning of citizens is annoying, but maintains that it is also necessary, portraying himself not as the self-absorbed, materialistic sophist/scientist described by Aristophanes, but rather as an engaged social critic concerned for the well-being of his city. According to Socrates, Athens desperately needs him to remind citizens of the high and noble aspects of life that are more important than individual wealth, or beauty, or glory. He enlightens them as to what is just and virtuous, and encourages their development of these attributes. Socrates, then, is not only pursuing wisdom for its own sake or his own personal edification; he is pursuing wisdom so he can exhort citizens to virtue, which indicates there is an element of public spiritedness to his philosophy.

Socrates then attempts to garner sympathy from the jury, while simultaneously explaining his aloofness and detachment from ordinary obligations, which Aristophanes has criticized. The defendant tells the jury that he has neglected many aspects of his private life in order to fulfill his mission to the city of Athens. He lives in poverty and his own family has been “uncared for” all these years so that he might go to citizens privately,”as a father or an older brother,” and persuade them to care for virtue (Apology, p. 82). (In fact, Socrates was known to spend all his time questioning fellow citizens or engaging in philosophical discussion with his followers.) So his philosophy, rather than consisting of abstract investigations of stars and gnats that are of little use to the city, actually focuses on the city and its affairs so much that Socrates neglects his own personal needs.

Next, Socrates attempts to account for his lack of involvement in public affairs, which would have been very damning in the eyes of the Athenians. Citizens were expected to participate in many facets of the democracy, and this included going to assemblies, holding public office, making speeches, and sitting on juries. Socrates admits that it might seem strange that he is “a busybody in private,” while “in public I do not dare go up before your multitude to counsel the city” (Apology, p. 83). According to Socrates, his divine voice warned him not to enter politics, probably because if he had he would have been killed: “For there is no human being who will preserve his life if he genuinely opposed either you or any other multitude” (Apology, p. 83). If he had died young, he says, he would not have fulfilled his god-given purpose of goading his fellow Athenians to virtue.

All of Socrates’ skillful argument comes to naught, for the jury finds him guilty. Then the sentencing phase of the trial begins. Meletus makes a speech requesting the death penalty, and Socrates is expected to make a counterproposal. Considering his various options, Socrates rejects exile, realizing that if his fellow citizens cast him out because of his philosophizing, so will every other city in the world. But what about,”being silent and keeping quiet” in exile? Socrates rejects this alternative, uttering the famous dictum that “the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being” (Apology, p. 92). Socrates makes an ironic counterproposal: he should be rewarded for his service to the city by being housed and fed at Athens’ expense, like the victorious Olympic athletes. He concludes with a second counterproposal, a fine of 30 minae, quite a large sum of money. As shown, the options of exile and silence are unacceptable. Socrates is prepared rather to make the ultimate sacrifice for his pursuit of truth: his life.

Once the jury has deliberated and handed down the death sentence for Socrates, he addresses the jury again. Tellingly he now uses the word judges in his speech for the first time. (It was customary in those days to address the members of juries by the title of judges during court proceedings, but Socrates has not used that term until this point.) He says that he will call only the men who voted to acquit him judges, because they are the only “judges in truth” (Apology, p. 95). He says he is not worried about death, because his divine voice is silent. It has not warned him of impending evil or tried to stop him from anything he was going to say during his trial. Either, he surmises, death is like a quiet restful sleep, which is nothing to fear, or it is a journey to Hades, the underworld. But if there is a Hades, even death will not stop him in his pursuit of true knowledge:

Certainly the greatest thing is that I would pass my time examining and searching out among those there—just as I do to those here—who among them is wise, and who supposes that he is, but is not. How much would one give, judges, to examine him who led the great army against Troy, or Odysseus, or Sisyphus, or the thousand others whom one might mention, both men and women? To converse and to associate with them and to examine them there would be inconceivable happiness.

Civil disobedience

Towards the end of his defense, Socrates decides to present the jurors with two examples of his political action. In this way he will offer proof of his commitment to virtue “not in speeches, but what you honor, deeds. (Apology, p. 83, emphasis Plato’s).

The first example occurs during Socrates’s tenure on the Athenian Council, which is the one political office he held during his lifetime. The citizenry of Athens were divided into administrative units called tribes, and every year men were chosen by lot to serve on an administrative council as pry tones, or board member for a portion of the year. In 406 b.c.e., Athens was in the midst of the Peloponnesian War with Sparta, a 27-year conflict which pitted democracy against oligarchy in a struggle for control of the Greek city-states. Socrates was serving as a pry tones when the ten generals who had commanded the Athenian naval fleet at the Battle of Arginusae were facing trial. Although the generals orchestrated a brilliant victory at Arginusae, which is an island in the Aegean Sea, they were forced to leave disabled ships and Athenian soldiers behind because of the confusion after battle and the arrival of a violent storm. Upon their return to Athens, the generals were brought up on charges of neglecting their duty, which included a charge of impiety because of their failure to insure that the dead soldiers received a decent burial with all the appropriate rites.

The board decided to try the generals together, which Socrates held was blatantly unfair; each commander had the right to be tried separately based on the merits of his own particular case. Socrates brought a motion challenging the decision, and according to legal procedure in fifth-century Athens, the trial should have been suspended until the motion was considered. But public indignation against the generals was so strong that the presiding officers brushed the motion aside and proceeded with the trial. All of the prytanes except Socrates succumbed to threats and other tactics of intimidation, and the trial culminated in the execution of the Athenian generals. Later, when cooler heads prevailed, the Athenians realized that they had committed an injustice. He alone, Socrates reminds his fellow citizens, refused to be a party to the “mob mentality” that had prevailed in Athens:

I alone of the prytanes opposed your doing anything against the laws then, and I voted against it. And although the orators were ready to indict me and arrest me … I supposed that I should run the risk with the law and the just rather than side with you because of fear of prison or death when you were counseling unjust things.

The second instance of Socrates’ involvement in the unjust proceedings of Athenian politics occurred not during the democracy, but during Athens’ brief rule by an oligarchy. The Thirty Tyrants had been installed in Athens by the Spartans at the end of the Peloponnesian War, aided and abetted by Athenian citizens who had anti-democratic leanings. The regime enjoyed little popular support, and its brief tenure was maintained by the presence of a garrison of Spartan soldiers in Athens. In order to raise money to support this garrison, the Thirty Tyrants began to execute wealthy residents who were not Athenian citizens, and then liquidate their assets. When the Thirty Tyrants summoned Socrates, along with several other prominent citizens, and gave them the order to “arrest Leon the Salamin-ian and bring him from Salamis to die,” Socrates refused (Apology, p. 84): “Perhaps I would have died because of this, if that government had not been quickly overthrown” (Apology, pp. 84–85).

With these two examples, Socrates demonstrates the difficulties of a public and political life. Communities do not always act justly, so there is often a conflict between true justice and the laws or will of the city. Socrates’ primary commitment is to the pursuit of true justice, which has sometimes prompted his taking political action against the city-state. In retrospect, this pursuit of justice, without regard for its consequences, can be seen as heroic.

Sources and literary context

The source material for Plato’s Apology was an actual event, the trial of Socrates. The only other account we have of the trial was the one written by Socrates’ student Xenophon. Xenophon’s Apology is sometimes described as corroborating evidence for Plato’s account, since the two works are, in many respects, similar. However, others argue that Plato’s Apology presents an idealized portrait of Socrates. This school of thought argues that Plato’s and Xenophon’s presentations of how Socrates conducted himself at the trial are indeed different, even contradictory, and that Plato’s Socrates is nothing like the poet Aristophanes’ portrayal of him either. These same scholars conclude that Plato, in attempting to respond to the various criticisms of his teacher, portrays a new Socrates in the Apology. This ideal Socrates is a teacher of civic virtue, interested in the concerns of the city. He has turned away from abstract philosophy as the lone pursuit of wisdom, and employs it to assist his fellow citizens in the attainment of true knowledge, which can be used in settling disagreements over what is good and just in Athens.

TWO PLATOS?

There is an ongoing debate among scholars as to the question of whether multiple authors are responsible for Plato’s body of work. According to a few critics, there is a great disparity between Plato’s earlier and later dialogues. A difference in tone, emphasis, perspective, and even conclusions has led some scholars to argue that certain dialogues were written by a student of Plato’s. But it is equally possible in view of the fact that Plato’s career spanned 40 years, that the mature Plato came to different conclusions than the young Plato, who was perhaps more susceptible to Socrates’ teachings. In his later dialogues, Plato often relegates Socrates to a minor character, and no longer uses him as his mouthpiece.

Precisely how much of this account is Plato’s simple transcription of Socrates’ words, and how much is Plato’s original thought is an ongoing debate that may never be settled definitively. Whatever the exact relationship between Socrates’ words and Plato’s writings, out of it was born a series of dialogues unparalleled in philosophic and literary achievement:

It is to Plato’s literary genius that Socrates owes his pre-eminent position as a secular saint of Western civilization. And it is Socrates who keeps Plato on the best-seller lists. Plato is the only philosopher who turned metaphysics into drama. Without the enigmatic and engaging Socrates as the principal character of his dialogues, Plato would not be the only philosopher who continues to charm a wide audience in every generation.

Events in History at the Time the Dialogue Was Written

Athenian imperialism

Athens dealt brutally with city-states that proved to be too independent for its taste, and Plato viewed these acts of the empire with “moral revulsion” (O’Hare, p. 2). In fact, some of the political realities of relationships between Athens and its allies were much harsher than one might assume. For example, a city-state was under strict instructions when initiated into the Delian League (an alliance of the various city-states originally formed for mutual protection against the common enemy of Persia, and ultimately dominated by Athens). The city-state had to adopt a constitution modelled on that of Athens, send offerings to the Athenian religious festivals, receive Athenian inspectors, adopt the Athenian systems of currency and weights and measurements, and require all of its own officials to take an oath of loyalty to Athens.

As Athens suffered increasing losses during the Peloponnesian War (432–404 b.c.e.), city-states that tried to assert their independence were

TREASURES IN THE DIALOGUES

one of the contributions to Western thought for which Plato is famous is his choice of format. The strategy that Plato’s Socrates uses is the dialectic method, whereby principles are examined and accepted or rejected via a dialogue consisting of questions and answers. In addition to the contributions that Plato’s dialogues have made to philosophy, they are invaluable from a social and historical perspective. The dialogues are peppered with events and individuals that comprised Athenian intellectual life in the late fifth century b.c.e. We meet notorious politicians such as Alcibiades, famous playwrights such as Aristophanes, clever sophists, or teachers of wisdom, such as Gorgias and Protagoras, and numerous scholars, scientists, and other imminent personages. As one scholar has noted, “Plato is conveying not only ideas but a portrait of the society in which they were formed” (Segal, p. xii).

appreciated even less. The examples of Melos and Mytilene are cases in point. When faced with the possible rebellion on the island of Mytilene, the Athenian assembly heard arguments for and against the total annihilation of its citizens. Although the arguments urging more moderate measures won the day, these consisted of bringing in thousands of Athenians to occupy the island as colonists, turning the inhabitants into serfs, and confiscating the island’s fleet and fortifications. The massacre at Melos is an even more violent example of Athenian brutality. The Melians insisted on remaining neutral during the Peloponesian War. Athens several times attempted to convince Melos to do otherwise, sending a large military contingent to the island to intimidate it, and one year later demanding tribute. When officials refused to comply, Athens sent a portion of its army to the island to convey in no uncertain terms that neutrality was no longer acceptable.

Melos was defeated after a long siege, whereupon the Athenian Assembly voted to execute all of Melos’s male inhabitants, take its women and children as slaves, and send Athenians to occupy it. The orders were executed by the Athenian forces, with predictably gruesome results.

In view of such real-life incidents, Plato saw a great disparity between Athens’ stated ideals of freedom and democracy and Athens’ often ruthless practices towards its so-called allies. It is this type of incident that may have inspired him to argue that Athens was in dire need of a philosopher to instruct the Assembly on moral issues and to remind citizens of what virtue is.

Political and social change in Athens

As disappointing as the gulf between the theoretical and practical aspects of Athenian politics in the fifth century was for an idealist like Plato, the situation would worsen considerably in the fourth century. The Peloponnesian War seemed to have exhausted Athens both materially and spiritually. Philip II of Macedon found it easy to seize one part of Greece after another as he made his conquering way through the areas surrounding Macedonia. He placated Athens on the way, assuring the once great city that it had nothing to fear from him. A single individual, an orator by the name of Demosthenes, attempted to alert the Athenians to the danger Philip presented, pleading with them to send out forces against his approaching armies. But Athens was already in a desperate state militarily. No longer were its garrisons composed of citizens; the work of soldiers was doled out to paid mercenaries, a practice unheard of in earlier days. Often as not, these mercenaries abandoned their post in the middle of a campaign to go off in search of a more lucrative war. This was a sad contrast to fifth-century Athens, when “Athenian forces were everywhere, the citizens ready for anything,” and no one had to be reminded to defend the polis and their most vital interests (Kitto, p. 155–56). In the end, Philip conquered not only Athens, but all of Greece, which led to the eventual collapse of the polis, the political/social unit known as a city-state.

There is no question but that the political upheaval of his time had a profound impact on Plato and the ways in which he used Socrates’s teachings in his writing. The decline of the Athenian empire, Athens’ decades-long struggle between oligarchy and democracy, and the dissolution of the Greek political system based on the polis help explain Plato’s concerns. They clarify why so much of his writing deals with questions of importance to political communities, such as what is the definition of virtue? the definition of justice? the organization of the best regime? the proper relationship between philosophy and politics? and the proper relationship between religion and politics?

Reception

Although Socrates was not successful in defending himself at trial, we know that he did convince a significant amount of the jurors, for it would only have taken 30 additional votes (out of a jury of 500) to acquit him. Socrates’s students were devastated by their teacher’s sentence, and a sequel to the Apology called the Crito tells of what lengths they were willing to go to save their teacher from what they saw as the height of injustice. In the Crito, a student visits a peaceful Socrates in his cell, offering to help him escape jail and the death sentence that awaits him the next day. Socrates refuses, arguing that even when laws or court verdicts are unjust, they must be respected and slowly challenged and changed, not blatantly disobeyed.

Aristotle, Plato’s student, actually saw much in Plato’s account of the trial that left something to be desired in terms of Socrates’s performance. Aristotle argues that Socrates neglected to follow the most basic rule in using persuasive rhetoric: do not anger those whom you are trying to persuade. In Aristotle’s reading, Socrates seems to go out of his way to be antagonistic toward the jury, which is no way to get them to vote for him. Interestingly, what Aristotle saw as a defect, others through the ages have seen as inspiring. Socrates was a martyr for truth and knowledge. He refused to pander to the masses, choosing instead to stand and fight for the individual’s right of free inquiry and free speech against the sometimes oppressive power of the state.

For More Information

Aristophanes. Clouds. In Four Texts on Socrates: Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito and Aristophanes’ Clouds. Trans. Thomas G. West and Grace Starry West. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.

Copleston, Frederick, S. J. Greece and Rome. Vol. 1, A History of Philosophy. New York: Doubleday, 1993.

Finely, M. I. Early Greece: The Bronze and Archaiac Ages. New York: W. W. Norton, 1982.

Kitto, H. D. F. The Greeks. Middlesex: Penguin, 1952.

Nichols, Mary P. Socrates and the Political Community: An Ancient Debate. New York: SUNY Press, 1987.

O’Hare, R. M. Plato. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Plato. Apology. In Four Texts on Socrates: Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito and Aristophanes’ Clouds. Trans. Thomas G. West and Grace Starry West. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.

_____. Protagoras. Trans. C. C. W. Taylor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Segal, Erich. Introduction to The Dialogues of Plato, by Plato. New York: Bantam, 1986.

Stone, I. F. The Trial of Socrates. New York: Random House, 1989.

Strauss, Leo. The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. Trans. Richard Crawley. London: Orion, 1993.

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