- 17a. Socrates begins with a bit of characteristic irony. He does not know how the jury has been affected by the speeches of his accusers, but they were so persuasive that he has almost forgotten himself (Grube says, "carried away in spite of myself"). This seems unlikely, but it is typical of Socrates. Nor is recognition of his irony just a later or modern observation about him, since in the Apology itself Socrates mentions it, at 38a -- the verb he uses, eironeúomai, can also mean "dissemble" or "feign ignorance," which is what happens in irony and sarcasm: someone says, in a certain way, the opposite of what they really mean. Also characteristic, however, is what Socrates says next, which is that "hardly anything of what they said is true." Irony, where it is hard to tell if Socrates really believes what he says, is thus followed by very blunt statements that he certainly believes. His accusers are liars.
- 17a. "Men of Athens." Socrates usually addresses the jury as ándres Athênaîoi, "Athenian men" (men, Latin vir, not "persons"). Grube's translation often says "gentlemen," or the like, instead, which sounds more modern, but doesn't have quite the same flavor: Socrates is addressing the citizens of Athens, and uses those terms. A modern defendant could similarly think of themselves as addressing the "People" in a criminal case, when addressing the jury, who represent the People, but this no longer occurs to anyone today. Now, the prosecutors like to think of themselves as representing the People -- when often what they represent is a political class of lawyers, politicians, and police, whose interests are sometimes an outrage to the People.
- 17b. Socrates says he is accused of being "an accomplished speaker." He says if that means speaking the truth, then it is accurate. But if it means speaking in "embroidered and stylized phrases," like his accusers, then he is not like that. The unintentional and rather bitter irony here, of a different kind, is that to be able to use "embroidered and stylized phrases," his accusers would have to have been trained in speaking, and that training would have been from those who make that their business, namely the Sophists. But Socrates' accusers accuse him of being a Sophist, while they profess to despise them -- Antyus is quoted in the Meno saying that Sophists "clearly cause the ruin and corruption of their followers" (91c). So men who profess to despise Sophists and prosecute Socrates for being one, actually use the tools of the Sophists against one who really is not one.
- 17c. Socrates refers to his manner of speech as "things spoken at random and expressed in the first words that come to mind." We know from Xenophon that Socrates had not prepared a defense and just walked into court. The result that we find here may seem very considered and accomplished, but one thing to keep in mind is that the text is produced, not by Socrates, but by Plato, probably the greatest stylist in the history of philosophy. Plato need not have been manufacturing Socrates' speech for it to be reproduced in the manner of Plato's own writing.
- 17c. A warning that Socrates is concerned with justice, not with words or anything else. This is already putting the jury on notice.
- 17c. Having never appeared in a court before, Socrates warns the jury that he will speak in his "usual manner." In other words, they are going to have to accommodate him, not he them.
- 17c. "Market place." Socrates talks to anyone and is thus drawn to public places. Xenophon tells us (Memorabilia I-10) that "in the morning he went to the public promenades [perípatoi] and training-grounds [gymnásia]; in the forenoon he was seen in the market..." [Loeb ed., p.7]. The Agora, the market place, is probably the most public and busiest place in Athens. Since Socrates doesn't do much buying or selling himself, the only reason he is there is to talk to people. It is also noteworthy that he is going to meet few women there, since it was not seemly for respectable women to be out in such a place. Men, servants, or slaves are going to do the shopping.
- 17c. "Bankers' tables." We might not know apart from references like this that there were bankers in the Athenian marketplace. Greek bankers, however, are probably not much in the business of taking deposits and making loans. They are mainly going to be money changers, what now we would call currency speculators, and loan sharks. The ancient world never saw anything like modern banking. The Roman Empire never sold bonds, and we don't have any evidence of letters of credit, bank notes, or any other of the modern instruments of banking. Money was so new that no one even had a very good idea what it was all about (not too much different, really, today). When trade itself was regarded as morally questionable, charging interest was well beyond respectable practices (again, not too much different, in some quarters, today).
- 17d. "Age of seventy." We learn Socrates' age. This may explain a lot. People in the 5th century BC did not ordinarily live to seventy. Thirty-five is more like the average age of people in ancient cemeteries, but even in more recent times, as in Ireland, average lifespan has sometimes only been about nineteen. Socrates, therefore, has already perhaps lived something like two, or three, lifetimes. He has also outlived most of his own generation. He often refers to the youth of his accusers and of the jury. These are people who did not grow up with him but only know him by reputation. The reputation doesn't have much to do with what he is like. But his age may have a lot to do with why he is in trouble. His own contemporaries, who would never have dreamed of trying to effect a judicial murder on him, are mostly gone. He, and they, are now strangers to most of the jury.
- 18a. "The excellence of a judge..." Socrates is not just putting the jury on notice that he is going to proceed in his usual manner, he is telling the jury how to be a good jury. This does not seem so remarkable today, when juries are constantly told what to do, what (not) to say, and what (not) even to think, but it is unfamiliar and unwelcome to Athenian juries, who see trials more as entertainment than as discovery processes. We might take that as a lesson about a system where all authority is vested in one irresponsible agency. Unfortunately, the modern courtroom goes to the opposite extreme, vesting all authority in the judge. Modern judges would fail Socrates' test also, since their concern is not "whether what I say is just or not." And modern jurors, treated as peons, are told that the justice of a case is not their concern. The system of checks and balances, between judge and jury, established by the Founders of the United States in the Constitution, has failed, as judges have seized all power in their courtrooms, aided and abetted by other judges (the Supreme Court). What Socrates says gets him in trouble with his jury, but anyone saying similar things today -- on the "excellence (areté/virtue) of a judge" -- would receive summary jail sentences for "contempt of court" from modern judges suffering from the "insolence of office."
- Reputation
- 18a. The first problem is the reputation Socrates has. "Lying accusations" have been made against him for years, and he has previously never responded. Indeed. Socrates' technique, as we see in the Euthyphro, is simply to ask questions. He has never really explained himself. Now he will do so.
- 18b. "From childhood." Again, the important notice that Socrates' listeners have grown up with his reputation, not necessarily with him. Those who knew him personally are largely gone.
- 18c. "All things in the sky and below the earth, who makes the worse argument the stronger." This is the formula that Socrates repeats, whose origin will be evident shortly. It says a lot about the public perception of Greek philosophers. "All things in the sky and below the earth" would specifically refer to the Presocratics or, as the Greeks said themselves, the "natural philosophers" (physikoì philósophoi), whose concerns mainly were, indeed, the sky and the earth. Socrates is not interested in this stuff at all, and really has very conservative religious ideas about cosmology. "Who makes the worse argument the stronger." This is the reputation of the Sophists, who said that they taught "virtue" (areté or "excellence"), but who ended up largely teaching rhetoric and persuasion.
The connection was that the Greeks came to think of human virtue or excellence as political, since the life of the Greek city (pólis) seemed about the most noble activity for human participation -- a formula that excluded women from human excellence, since women were largely excluded from politics. Politics in a democratic city like Athens meant participation in the Assembly (Ekklêsía, the origin, from a later Christian context, of the word "church"), which consisted of all the free, adult, male citizens of the city. In turn, participation would mean, not just showing up and voting, but actually rising to speak and to propose actions. To speak well, one needs training in rhetoric, and to propose actions persuasively, one needs training in persuasion. The Sophists (Sophistaí, whose name simply meant "master of one's craft," or someone who knows something), became the teachers, the travelling paid teachers, of these skills. However, this began to get them a certain reputation. In teaching persuasion, what exactly is to be subject of persuasion? Well, it must be anything, or anything that someone is going to pay to learn to be persuasive about. This gave the Sophists a reputation of opportunism and lack of principles. They would teach you how to prove anything. Of course, not just anything can be proven. It is going to take dishonest and deceptive arguments to be persuasive about a lot of things. Today, a deceptive and fallacious turn of argument can be called a sophism, the constant practice of such is sophistry, and someone engaged in such practice is a sophist. What the Sophists did thus gives us the modern meanings for what they were called. Otherwise, the original meaning of sophistés is preserved in a word like "sophisticated," which implies knowledge, either the worldly knowledge of an individual or the complex adaptation of advanced knowledge to objects.
So to teach persuasion, the Sophists would "make the worse argument the stronger." But, whatever the quality of his own arguments, Socrates was not a paid teacher, did not teach persuasion, and in fact did not teach anything, except indirectly. All he did was ask questions. Thus, the terms of the reputation that Socrates has, although applicable to many Greek philosophers -- though not really all to one at the same time -- has nothing to do with him whatsoever.
- 18c. "Those who study these things do not even believe in the gods." Socrates is later going to be accused of being an atheist. Although this is ridiculous as a charge against Socrates, the Presocratics and the Sophists were vulnerable. That the Presocratics replaced most mythic talk about the gods with impersonal descriptions of nature was probably much more noticeable than that some of them, like Heraclitus and Xenophanes, also talked about the gods. With the Sophists, things were a little worse. The greatest and most famous of them, Protagoras of Abdera, said the gods were a difficult subject, life was short, and so he had nothing to say about them. Since Socrates' accusers see him as a sort of generic philosopher, all of this is attributed to him.
- 18d. "Writer of comedies." Although Socrates avoids mentioning him by name here, he does mention him, namely Aristophanes, shortly.
Greek comedies are really extraordinary artifacts. Topical and political, but also bawdy and scatological, the only modern equivalent would be a truly X-rated version of Saturday Night Live -- actors playing male parts (no women on stage) were easily identifiable because they wore large stuffed phalluses. Eleven such plays by Aristophanes (died c.388) have survived. One of those, Lysistrata (c.413), even became a footnote to the history of Los Angeles. Lysistrata was an anti-war play, expressing Aristophanes' frustration and unhappiness with the interminable Peloponnesian War (431-404) between Athens and Sparta. His approach, however, was to have the women of Athens go on a sex strike until the men ended the war. The comic possibilities of this are not hard to imagine. Since World War I had left many Americans feeling frustrated, unhappy, and disillusioned with its outcome, there was a fair amount of anti-war sentiment in the 20's, and some producers in Los Angeles decided to capitalize on that by staging Lysistrata. Unfortunately, the sentiment of the times, however pacifist, was not up to the level of bawdiness in the play: It was shut down as obscene by the police. A probably apocryphal story about the raid has the captain of the Vice Squad demanding to know who had written such "smut." He was told the name of the author, but of course had never heard of the man, and had no idea that Aristophanes was somewhat outside the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles Police Department. But, thinking about the name, he suddenly realized he knew who it was: "Harry Stophanes!" So a very perplexed Harry may have ended up in jail that night.
- 19a. "As the god may wish." Socrates often refers to "the god" (ho theós). If Socrates is thinking of a particular god, and he is, he never does actually name the god, though later we will have no difficulty understanding who it is. In older translations of the Apology, it is not uncommon to find Socrates referring to "God" rather than "the god." This is an accurate translation for mediaeval or modern Greek, where the article tends to be used with "God" (as in Arabic, Allâh = al-Ilâh, "the God"), but not for ancient Greek. Nor is the lack of a proper name unusual. Gods who are being invoked in a specific case are often left unnamed in ancient religious practice. This was common with the Egyptians (the "good god" was the King) and can also be seen in Homer, who invokes a Muse as "the goddess" without naming her, and also in Parmenides, who details a long instruction from a goddess who is never named. The more traditional translation, however, may also have been based on some idea that Socrates was a monotheist. Plato and Aristotle, maybe, but there is no evidence of monotheism in the Apology, or in the early dialogues that we can confidently say reflect Socrates' own ideas. No, "the god" is a common locution, as common as Socrates' oaths involving Zeus or Hera; and the more that this god happened to mean personally to Socrates, the less likely that he would actually pronounce his name. Indeed, the reluctance of the Jews to speak the Name of the God of Abraham and Isaac meant that its true pronunciation was actually forgotten: the vocalization written for the "tetragrammaton," the four consonants of the Name of God in the Bible, is that of the substitute word to be said instead, Adônâi, "the LORD" (as it is translated, and written, in the King James Bible).
- 18a. The first problem is the reputation Socrates has. "Lying accusations" have been made against him for years, and he has previously never responded. Indeed. Socrates' technique, as we see in the Euthyphro, is simply to ask questions. He has never really explained himself. Now he will do so.
- Defense
- 19b. Socrates must now answer the charges implicit in the kind of reputation he has, again that he is guilty of "studying things in the sky and below the earth," that "he makes the worse into the stronger argument," and that "he teaches these same things to others." Here we have the repetition of the characteristics of the Presocratics and the Sophists seen at 18c, with the addition of the characteristic of the Sophists as teachers.
- 19c. "Comedy of Aristophanes...walking on air and talking a lot of other nonsense about things of which I know nothing at all." This is a rather strong rejection by Socrates of any association with the Presocratics or Sophists, their projects or their reputations. This is a fundamental feature of the Apology: his accusers attribute all sorts of ideas and attitudes to Socrates that have nothing to do with him.
The play in question by Aristophanes was the The Clouds (423, rewritten 418), whose name comes from Socrates being shown floating up in the clouds -- like all philosophers. Everything that Aristophanes wanted to ridicule about the Presocratics and the Sophists he attributed to the man who was already the most famous philosopher at Athens, Socrates. This may, at the time, have all been in good fun. The story is that the mask of the actor playing Socrates,
who was legendarily ugly, was so good a caricature that Socrates himself stood up in the audience so that it could be compared to him. This makes it sound like Socrates was willing to take the joke. Exactly how much in fun Aristophanes intended it all is a good question. He certainly didn't like what the Presocratics and Sophists represented, but he hardly seems like one to blame Socrates for losing the war with Sparta (by undermining Athenians virtues), since Aristophanes never liked the war anyway. Aristophanes was, in his own way, deeply conservative, and he disapproved of most new-fangled things, like Euripides' plays. Socrates would not be immune to that disapproval. In Plato's Symposium, a drinking party where Socrates and Aristophanes are both present, they seem friendly enough. By the time of Socrates' trial, twenty-four years had passed since the first performance of the play, and, as Socrates says, some people have grown up knowing Socrates more from the play than from life. Aristophanes was still alive in 399; and if he was really friendly to Socrates, then Socrates might have brought him in as a witness. But then that would have required planning a defense, and this is what Socrates didn't do. If Aristophanes had been worried about him, he might have come in on his own. So it is hard not to suspect that Aristophanes was not close to Socrates and was, at the very least, cool. But we will never know the whole story.
Ironically, the artistic misrepresentation of Socrates continues today, when a largely unrecognizable Socrates turns up the popular movie, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989). Like his accusers, Excellent Adventure presents a Socrates talking the kind of "nonsense" that must sound vaguely "philosophical" but which has nothing to do with Socrates' interests, activities, or even personality. The movie even has Socrates anticipating the title line of the long-running NBC soap opera, "Days of Our Lives." This is pretty funny, but the real Socrates still, two thousand years later, just can't get a break.
- 19c. "I do not speak in contempt of such knowledge..." If the Presocratics and Sophists really knew about the things they claimed to, then this would be real wisdom, and Socrates would have to respect it. However, Socrates warns us, "IF someone is wise in these things." A very big "if." Such a careful qualification is always a red flag when we are dealing with Socrates. We soon discover that such people do not have knowledge in the matters that they claim.
- 19c. "Lest Meletus bring more cases..." An ironic jest that Meletus might sue Socrates for defamation or libel on behalf of the Presocratics and Sophists whose knowledge he could be seen disparaging. Attacking Socrates for the sins of the Presocratics and Sophists, indeed, makes no more sense than defending these same people against insult.
- 19d. "Witnesses" (mártyres). Since a great many people, even in the jury, have actually heard Socrates talking at one time or another (since he does so publicly), he confidently calls on them to inform everyone else if Socrates has ever talked much about any of the subjects imputed to him. Thus, not only has Socrates nothing to do with the Presocratics and Sophists, but if the jury were to rely, not on rumor and reputation, but on their own familiarity with his activities, the charges against him could be laid to rest. However, there is not much time here for the jury to consult among themselves about their own knowledge -- in a modern courtroom, by the way, they would be prohibited from doing this -- and Socrates himself passes on to things that they may find immediately irritating, whatever his reputation was.
- 19e. "Charge a fee..." A salient characteristic of the Sophists, which Socrates hasn't mention yet, but to which he returns. Sophists make money. Socrates doesn't.
- 19e. "Yet I think it a fine thing..." Irony verging on sarcasm, since Socrates has no respect for what the Sophists do, though he hasn't let that quite out into the open yet. "...pay them a fee, and be grateful to them besides." The young could learn from their fellow citizens for free. It is a foolish gratitude that is for the privilege of paying someone money for a questionable benefit. Of course, politicians earn their keep this way, but it also troubles me to read this passage, as a teacher feeding at the public trough myself. Students pay nominal fees up front to attend a Community College like Valley, but they may not realize that the drain on them through taxes is for the rest of their lives, as the rent seekers of the system gradually but steadily increase their benefits and privileges, all under the cloak of the educational "public good." I can at least think that, in the classroom 15 or 18 hours a week, a teacher in my college is more of a real pedagogue than university professors who get away with half, or less, as much.
- 19e. "Gorgias of Leontini...Prodicus of Ceos...Hippias of Elis." A brief catalogue of Sophists. Gorgias may have been the greatest Sophist after Protagoras, but one example of the kind of thing he did is that he is supposed to have written a book that proved, (1) knowledge is impossible, (2) even if knowledge were possible, we couldn't know that, and (3) even if knowledge were possible and we could know it, we couldn't know that we knew it. "Sophistry" anyone? Elsewhere (e.g. Meno 96d), Socrates jokes that he was a student of Prodicus, evidently because Prodicus was interested in definitions. One incident for which Hippias was famous was his appearance at the Olympic Games, wearing nothing that he had not made himself, as a walking advertisement for his instruction in such practical skills.
The 1st Olympiad was traditionally supposed to have occurred in 776 BC. Greeks historians later used the four-year period of the Olympiad as a unit of historical time, though this was never used to date either private or official transactions in ordinary life. 2001 would be the 1st year of the 695th Olympiad. The Games were held to celebrate the god Zeus, in his cult center at Olympia; and consequently were ended by the Christian Emperor Theodosius I, who made it his business to close pagan temples, in 394 AD (the 2nd year of the 293rd Olympiad) [note]. The "Modern" Olympics were first held in 1896, at Athens, and not, to my knowledge, in honor of Zeus. 1896 would have been the 4th year of the 668th Olympiad, so the modern games are actually held a year earlier than the ancient games would have been, had they continued down to the present (the modern games are, in effect, held in year zero of the Oympiad, instead of year one). Although the Olympic Games today are criticized for being excessively nationalistic and commercialized, the Greek Olympics were, given the differences of the times, not all that different. Competition between the Greek cities was intense, and an Olympic victor could expect a hero's welcome at home, receive a pension or other privileges, mentioned by Socrates in the Apology itself at 36d, or have some landmark named after him, like the grove and gymnasium of Akadêmos, later chosen by Plato as the site for his school, the Academy (Akadémeia). On the other hand, Aristotle divided men into three kinds -- those who go to participate at the Olympics, those who go as spectators, and those who go to sell things. Hippias would fall into the third group.
Nothing but the foundations of the temple of Zeus at Olympia are left. Within the temple was one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the great statue of Zeus by the sculptor Phideas, who had just finished decorating the Parthenon in Athens. The statue was moved to Constantinople, where it was later destroyed in an accidental fire. Nevertheless, Phideas' portrayal of Zeus may have influenced images of God in the art of Christian Constantinople. The stadium that survives at Olympia is still the place where the Olympic Torch is lit for every modern Olympic Games -- from Olympia carried all the way to Ventura Blvd. for the 1984 Games in Los Angeles.
- 20a. "If your sons were colts or calves..." Socrates loves his barnyard analogies. The humble professions he likes to mention, however, never seem to include his own, which was stonecutting. Here he compares a breeder or farmer to someone teaching virtue to young men.
- 20b. "...this kind of excellence, the human and social kind." A very important phrase, since this is what Socrates has in common with the Sophists. Both are concerned with the "human and social kind of excellence," but the Sophists with teaching it, and Socrates only with asking about it. This translation takes a couple of liberties. Hê toiaútê areté, hê anthrôpínê te kaì politiké is the phrase in Greek [with the cases returned to nominative], "such virtue, the human and political." "Excellence" is often a better translation for areté than "virtue," and it may be here. Rendering politiké, which hardly needs translating, as "social," however, is curious. "Society," a Latin word, now does not necessarily mean politics and government, and certainly does not in the term "civil society" -- even though a powerful tendency of 20th century politics, due to Marxism, is to erase the difference and abolish civil society, politicizing everything. "Human and social excellence" would be a notion compatible with liberal principles and civil society; but, in fact, this was not a Greek idea. There is private life in Greece, in the household (with the women), but not much in the way of "society" apart from political life, which literally meant the life of the pólis, the city. Religion, which included women also, somewhat mixed the private and the public, but was very much a matter of public concern -- as Socrates himself is charged with not honored the "gods of the city." The modern idea of the "political" is smaller to the same degree that the modern liberal idea of private "society" is larger. The Sophists taught, and Socrates asked, about the enlarged Greek "political" life. The translation as "social" thus leaves out most of the area of life covered by the Greek term, though it does cover matters that politiké does and "political" doesn't. A tough call.
- 20b-c. Callias informs Socrates that he has found a Sophist, Evenus of Paros, to teach his sons. "...and his fee is five minas." Socrates says that this is a "moderate" fee, but how moderate is it? The ins and outs of this calculation are discussed separately in "Money in Plato's Apology of Socrates." The upshot, however, is that we can put this five minas at about $7500 in 1990 dollars. Protagoras' fee reportedly was 100 minas, or the truly astronomical $150,000 -- no wonder Plato mentions (Meno 91d) that Protagoras died rich. He was the Ivy League education of Greece, while a Sophist like Evenus was merely the typical State University education.
- 20c. "...if he really possesses this art..." Again we are warned by his careful language that Socrates may not be willing to credit a Sophist like Evenus with the knowledge he claims to possess. And, of course, he mentions all this just to deny that he makes any such claims. He does not teach for a fee, or teach at all. He is not a Sophist.
- 19b. Socrates must now answer the charges implicit in the kind of reputation he has, again that he is guilty of "studying things in the sky and below the earth," that "he makes the worse into the stronger argument," and that "he teaches these same things to others." Here we have the repetition of the characteristics of the Presocratics and the Sophists seen at 18c, with the addition of the characteristic of the Sophists as teachers.
- Explanation
- 20c. "But Socrates, what is your occupation?" Here is, in a sense, the heart of the Apology. Socrates is now, perhaps for the first time ever, going to explain what he has been doing, why, and how it got started.
- 20d-e. "...a certain kind of wisdom... Human wisdom perhaps." Socrates is going to claim for himself "human wisdom" (anthrôpínê sophía). "...those whom I mentioned just now are wise with a wisdom more than human" -- actually, "greater than man," using the noun, ánthrôpos. If Socrates has "human wisdom," then the Presocratics and Sophists whom he has been discussing earlier would have to claim something rather more. Since he now calls that wisdom "greater than man," we already have a strong hint that they don't have it: They are not themselves "greater than man." Such a description would only fit the gods. It is thus not too surprising, later on, to learn that "only the god is wise" (23a).
- 20e. "Do not create a disturbance..." A reminder that what Socrates has to say is not always going over well with the jury. People are talking among themselves or shouting protests, and Socrates must periodically quiet them.
- 20e. "...the god at Delphi" (ho theòs ho en Delphoîs). The god at Delphi, was as it happens
Apollo. From now on, when Socrates refers to "the god," it is much more obvious who he is talking about. While Apollo, the son the Zeus and Leto, was not mythologically more important than most of the other Olympians, his shrine at Delphi came to be considered the second most sacred place, after Olympia, in all of Greece. It was even considered the center, the "navel," of the world. The importance of Delphi, however, was mainly because of the Oracle -- a priestess, the Pythía, who sat in an inner room (the ádyton), breathed fumes coming up through the floor (fumes from gas dissolved in spring water, in geologically active Greece, or from incense burning beneath), entered a trance, and was possessed by the god Apollo. For a suitable donation, a question could be put to the Pythia and an answer obtained from Apollo. Since the words of the Pythia were hard to understand, the priests attending her wrote up the answer in verse and delivered it to the petitioner. The answers were legendarily obscure or ambiguous -- the source of the modern of meaning of "oracular," which is precisely to be obscure or ambiguous.
One example of the kinds of answers Delphi gave occcurred when King Croesus of Lydia, of legendary wealth, sought advice on the attack against Persia he was contemplating. Cyrus the Great had just overthrown the Medes, in 550, and Croesus figured that this must reveal the weakness of the Median state, and that, in any case, Cyrus' new realm was bound to be disorganized for a while, giving the Lydians an opportunity to renew the war that had ended in 585. But he was a cautious ruler, and sent a question to Delphi, asking what would happen if he attacked the Persians. This is a revealing episode, since Croesus wasn't even a Greek. Delphi already had such a reputation. The answer that the Pythia delivered was that if Croesus attacked Cyrus, "a great kingdom will fall." Croesus thought this sounded good, so he attacked Cyrus. He had no idea who he was dealing with, and was defeated very swiftly indeed. Lydia became part of Persia in 547. But Cyrus didn't kill, torture, or imprison Croesus. The former king was sent home to live in retirement, where he had the leisure to write back to Delphi and complain that he had been misled. The priests answered his letter, telling him that what they had said was perfectly accurate. A great kingdom had indeed fallen, namely his. Croesus might have worried which kingdom the god had referred to.
Another example came when the Persians invaded Greece in 480. King Xerxes wished to avenge the defeat of his father, Darius, at the battle of Marathon in 490.
I had a student once who worked at the "Phidippides Sports Center," a sports supply store in Encino, California. This was named after the messenger who is supposed to have run back to Athens to report the defeat of the Persians. Unfortunately, Phidippides dropped dead once he had blurted out, "Victory is ours." The first Marathon as an Olympic event was in 1896, at Athens, when French philologist Marcel Bréal offered a trophy for the winner of a reenactment. I would like to know why Bréal thought this would make a good event for the modern Olympics, or why anyone would want to buy supplies from a store named after a guy who died doing his run! The distance of a Marathon run is 26.22 miles (42.2 kilometers). As it happens, the distance from Marathon to Athens is more like 19 miles (30 km). We get the difference because the distance for the event was determined in 1908, when the Olympics were in London, and the run was from Windsor Castle to London's Olympic Stadium. So Phidippides didn't run nearly as far as a Marathon. Indeed, Phidippides may not have done the run at all. He (or "Philippides") is mentioned by Herodotus as running to Sparta from Athens before the battle (to ask for help), but there is no account of the run from Marathon for many centuries. And when Plutarch relates the story, he doesn't mention Phidippides.
Xerxes' invasion would be a much more serious affair than Darius' amphibious landing, with a very large fleet and an army so huge that it could not even be carried by the ships. The army would have to march overland, cross over into Europe, and come down the peninsula into Greece. The Greeks, although forming a unified defensive league, hardly knew how they could resist this. Consequently, the city of Athens itself sent a question to Delphi, simply asking what to do. The god replied, "You shall find safety behind walls of wood." Some people thought this meant the Acropolis (the "high city"), the citadel of Athens. Others fled the city. Unfortunately, after the Persians had flanked and eliminated the Spartans at Thermopylae ("Hot gates," i.e. a pass with hot springs), killing King Leonidas of Sparta himself, they rolled all but unmolested into Athens, where the wooden walls of the Acropolis were simply set on fire, and all the defenders killed. Wrong interpretation. Athens, however, had just built a new fleet, under the command of Themistocles.
He figured that the "walls of wood" meant the ships and that he should try and bring the Persians to action. He drew them into an attack in the narrow waters between the island of Salamis and the mainland. Here the large Persian fleet could not deploy to advantage, and the Athenians started getting the better of the fight. Since most of the Persian fleet consisted of Phoenicians and Egyptians, who didn't want to be there anyway, they began to flee. Xerxes was apoplectic. Now, without a dangerous and humiliating march overland, his army was stranded in Greece, short of supplies. The Greeks allowed for the attrition of a whole year, and then the Spartans attacked and destroyed the remaining Persian force at Plataea, in 379. Themistocles had interpreted the Oracle correctly. This was the last Persian effort to invade Greece. Despite the leadership of the Spartans, the key to victory had been in the Athenian fleet. This made the fortunes of Athens for some time. 2183 years later, as Napoleon prepared to invade Britain across the English channel, a political cartoon has John Bull, who represents England, say to Napoleon, "where I sit is my own little land in the ocean -- and if you attempt to stir a foot -- there's a few of my wooden walls in the offing shall give you a Pretty Peppering." At Trafalgar, 21 October 1805, Horatio Nelson then destroyed the combined French and Spanish fleet.
Some scholarly comment has been that Athens became disillusioned with Delphi because it had favored Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, patronizing instead another oracle of Apollo at Delos. So when Socrates mentions Delphi, this actually adds to the things that are provoking the jury. However, Xenophon, who discusses at length in the Memorabilia the complaints that people had against Socrates, does not mention this one.
The fact that the Pythia's words were unintelligible and had to be translated by priests would lead most people to imagine that she was just babbling and that the priests made up the answers themselves. However, this kind of thing is quite familiar in shamanistic practices all around the world. For instance in Martin Scorsese's film about the Dalai Lama, Kundun (1997), we see a Tibetan shaman making statements while in a state of possession. These must be interpreted for the young Dalai Lama by the shaman's attendants. However, later in the movie, he starts becoming able to interpret what the shaman says himself. This will probably not stop people from considering the whole business to be nonsense, but the accusation that these performances are deliberately fraudulent, i.e. the inventions of cynical and manipulative priests, is probably not true.
The room of the Pythia, the Ádyton ("not to be entered," seen at right in "The Priestess of Delphi" by John Collier [1850-1934]), has been as mysterious in modern investigation as in ancient. When the temple of Apollo was excavated in 1913, the archaeologists did not think they had found any trace of the Ádyton or any crack for fumes to come up through. This has led generations of writers to dismiss the details of the Delphi cult as fictitious. Well, the room could have been in a secret location -- still secret -- or it was destroyed by the priests of Apollo when the temple was shut down, under the Emperor Theodosius I in 392. Many sanctuaries of temples were destroyed by their own devoted priests, lest they be desecrated by Christians. If still secret, one might imagine Indiana Jones finding the Pythia still there. On the other hand, the 1913 archaeologists were not able to get down to the bedrock below the temple because their excavation kept filling up with water. This is suggestive of itself, since the temple was supposed to have been built over a spring, and the fumes breathed by the Pythia were supposed to come out of the water. And there have been recent developments. When a geologist, Jelle Zeilinga de Boer (a Dutchman who grew up in Indonesia and now teaches at Wesleyan University), examined the Delphi area, he identified a fault running right under the temple. In 1995, when De Boer told John Hale, an archaeologist at the University of Louisville, this led to a more careful investigation at Delphi. In 1996 it was confirmed that there was such a fault, now the Delphi Fault, and there was an intersecting fault, now the Kerna Fault. These two faults crossed each other just about right where the Temple of Apollo was built. All along the Kerna Fault were natural springs, and the kind of rock nearby, and from the which temple itself was built, was travertine, which is formed from limestone interacting with gasses from geologically active waters. When they tested the stone, it had been infused with methane (CH4) and ethane (C2H6), which could have produced some of the poisonous effects recounted -- some Pythias died from breathings the fumes. When they tested the spring water, they discovered not only ethane but, more importantly, ethylene (C2H4). Ethylene, which would have broken down and not been preserved in the rock, is actually an anaesthetic, which in smaller doses can also produce euphoria and excitation. It also has a sweet smell, as actually reported by Plutarch, who was a priest at Delphi. New examinations of the temple revealed pipes underneath, apparently unnoticed in 1913, that would have brought spring water under a small alcove to one side of a sunken room in the naós, the holy of holies, of the temple. This appears to be the Ádyton itself. So now we may well have the actual place and mechanism of the Pythia's dangerous intoxication. The "crack" may have just been the joints between the rocks of the chamber, through which the gasses could accumulate in the space. The present temple was built after an earthquake in 373 BC rocked the area and destroyed the original temple. The new arrangements, apparently, were not as good as previously, perhaps because the flow of gas in the water had changed, a familiar effect in such springs in geologically active areas (like Yellowstone).- 20e-21a. "Chairephon [Khairephôn]...the friend of most of you, as he shared your exile and your return." What was this "exile" and "return"? These were events that attended the end of the Peloponnesian War. The Spartans occupied Athens, overthrew the democratic government, and set up a junta of Quislings that the Athenians called the "Thirty Tyrants." In predictable fashion, they began killing their political enemies, as Socrates mentions himself (32c-d). Thus, anyone who had been a conspicuous partisan of the democracy was in some danger, and many very prudently fled the city and went into exile. When the Spartans withdrew from Athens, the hated Thirty were promptly overthrown, and the exiles could return. This tells us something important about Chairephon, that he would have been a partisan of the democracy, and also something important about Socrates, who thus had a friend who was a conspicuous partisan of the democracy. This is an important point when Socrates is still being accused of being an enemy of the democracy and a partisan of Sparta. It seems unlikely that Chairephon would have been Socrates' friend, and have done what he did, if this had been true of Socrates. But this circumstantial evidence is only our first clue about this in the Apology. The entire issue of Socrates' attitude about democracy is separately discussed in "Socratic Ignorance in Democracy, the Free Market, and Science"; but the evidence of the Apology will also be examined at the appropriate places in the text. Chairephon, however, does provide us with a good clue.
- 21a. "...at one time.." (pote). We are not told when this happened, which is frustrating. Socrates could well have been an ordinary artisan for the ancient equivalent of entire lifetime, until 35, and still had another full 35 years to live a new life as a philosopher. Socrates would have been about 35 in 434, even before the Peloponnesian War, when we have several stories about Socrates serving in combat. "...if any man was wiser than I" (eí tis emoû eíê sophóteros). So Chairephon simply asked the Pythia, "Is anyone wiser than Socrates?" and the answer was just "No." This would not ordinarily make for an obscure answer; but, as we shall see, it is a very perplexing riddle for Socrates.
The nature of this answer may in part be due to Chairephon using a cut-rate version of the Pythia's services, where the response would only be "yes" or "no." However, this thesis is complicated by Xenophon's version of the Pythia's response (Xenophon's Apology 14), which was that "no man was more free than I, or more just, or more prudent (sôphronésteros)." This response hardly answers a yes or no question, it doesn't even mention wisdom (sophía), and Socrates is quoted as actually naming Apollo. While this confirms that Socrates mentioned the Delphic answer in his speech, we may suspect from the other features that it owes more to Xenophon's imagination than to a reliable account, especially when Xenophon does not use it to explain Socrates' investigation, but instead merely as an example of the pious consulting oracles, in defense of Socrates' piety.
21a. "...the Pythian..." Although the text says the Pythía, the translator has added an "n" to the name, perhaps because the Greek word itself is from an adjective (though maybe not -- it has an anomalous accent). The games associated with Delphi were the "Pythian Games." "Pýthios" was an epithet of Apollo, perhaps from an old place name, but also because he had slain in that place the Pýthôn, a great snake. The shamaness Pythia, indeed, may well be older than the god, Apollo, who comes to be associated with her.
- 21b. "Whatever does the god mean?" Although simplicity itself, the "no" answer of the Pythia is for Socrates another example of Delphic obscurity. It is impossible that no one was wiser than Socrates. "I am conscious that I am not wise at all." How can this be?
- 21b. "..he does not lie; it is not legitimate for him to do so." The god cannot lie. We get important details of Socrates' religious beliefs in little pieces like this. We might like to know how Socrates knows this, but then nobody else seems to have asked Socrates the kinds of questions he asked others -- we have Xenophon's testimony that Antiphon the Sophist tried to pin down Socrates (Memorabilia VI-1), but he does not seem to have questioned Socrates in the way that Socrates questioned others.
- 21b. "I went to one of those reputed wise..." Socrates' investigation begins by seeking out one who is thought wise. This is an important feature of Socrates' method. Reputation is what people believe. In fact, the term translated "reputed" is from the verb dokêô, which means "to think, suppose, imagine, expect," from which comes the word dôxa, "belief" or "opinion." Socrates is always interested in what people believe, not with hypothetical propositions.
- 21c. "...one of our public men..." Actually, one of the politikoí, which we might more easily translate "politicians." Today, Socrates would have no more difficulty than then finding politicians with plenty of answers, though few sensible people today would think of politicians as the kind of people who really are wise.
- 21c. "I thought he appeared wise to many people and especially to himself, but he was not." What we do not see is how Socrates determines this. We later get a small example of Socrates' method when he questions Meletus, but we must go to one of the dialogues proper, like the Euthyphro, to see the whole process in detail. The basic principle, however, is simple enough: Socrates asks questions until he finds a contradiction in what the person says. In most cases this is in the testing of a definition, but it can really be applied to any claim that someone makes. The logic of this is examined in more detail in "The Foundations of Value, Part I; Logical Issues: Justification (quid facti), First Principles, and Socratic Method." Here we simply get the result. The politician contradicts himself, so Socrates concludes that he doesn't know what he is talking about. He is not wise. "I then tried to show him..." Socrates must have tried to explain how the politician was contradicting himself, but usually people don't want to hear that kind of thing.
- 21d. "...he came to dislike me..." Powerful people do not like to be made to look like fools, and their supporters don't like it either. So the origin of Socrates' reputation is in the embarrassment that he causes these people. In their hostility, they imagine he must be like all the other "philosophers," the Presocratics and the Sophists.
- 21d. "I am wiser than this man." So now we get the definition of the "human wisdom" that Socrates mentioned earlier. "..neither of us knows anything worthwhile.." Actually, Socrates says that neither knows anything "beautiful and good" (kalòn k'agathón), which is much more evocative than "worthwhile." But the politician thinks that he knows something when he does not, while Socrates recognizes his own ignorance. Human wisdom is thus knowledge of human ignorance, and this is uniquely the possession of Socrates, which is why no one is wiser. The god, after all, did not say that Socrates was particularly wise, just that no one was wiser. "...so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know." This leaves it a little vague about just what Socrates does know. He certainly makes various claims to knowledge in the Apology, but he has also just said "neither of us knows anything beautiful and good." But, in general, the approach that he is basically ignorant about everything, "Socratic Ignorance," is the basis of his approach to the people he questions: Whatever they have to say, he is happy to accept it for the purpose of discussion. This is an idea that we can apply to many issues, as in "Socratic Ignorance in Democracy, the Free Market, and Science," and it also gets us the significance of the word "philosophy" itself (philosophía), as explained by Plato in the Symposium (203e-204a), that we love (philéo) wisdom (sophía) precisely because we don't have it. This is the Archimedean Point for Socratic philosophy.
- 21e. "I must go to all those who had any reputation for knowledge [or, who were believed to know anything] to examine its meaning." Socrates enters into his "mission from the god" (like the "mission from God" of The Blues Brothers [1980]), which is to test the Oracle continuously by giving everyone a chance to refute it. This pious project should be compared with the effort to define "piety" in the Euthyphro.
- 21e. "...by the dog..." Just what "dog" this is, is a good question. The footnote in the Grube edition mentions the phrase, "by the dog, the god of the Egyptians," in the Gorgias (482b). There is, of course, also a dog in Greek mythology, the three-headed dog Cerebus, who guards the entrance of the Underworld. This is not a dog we would be eager to encounter.
Cerebus turns up in some episodes of the Hercules, the Legendary Journeys television series. However, Hercules and its spin-off companion, Xena, Warrior Princess, although using many names and incidents from Greek mythology, cannot be relied upon as a guide to that mythology, or to anything else. In the original Hercules episodes, which were not weekly and had enough of a budget to hire Anthony Quinn to play Zeus, they have Hercules (Hêraklês in Greek) living with his wife Deianeira and their children. When the series went weekly, they eliminated the wife and children with a fireball from Hera. Well, Hercules did lose a wife and children, but he killed them himself. He had been driven mad by Hera, of course, but he was still considered guilty enough that his Twelve Labors were performed in penance. Now, in the age of O.J., Hercules killing his wife and children certainly could not be shown on television as the acts of the protagonist. Another curious aspect to this, however, is that Deianeira was not the wife who was killed in the mythological version. Megara was the victim of Hercules' madness. Deianeira was his second wife, and she ended up killing him, with a potion she just thought would ensure his fidelity. Hercules then was granted immortality by the gods and married the goddess Hebe. Just how lame the material of the television series can get is indicated by their constant references to "dinars" as the money in circulation -- even though dînâr is the Arabic pronuncation of the Latin denarius, all coins from eras long after Greek mythology, or even Greek Golden Age history.
- 22a. "Those who had the highest reputation were nearly the most deficient, while those who were thought to be inferior were more knowledgeable." We discover that we are in a catalogue of inversely proportional degrees of reputation and of wisdom. The politicians, examined first, had the best reputation but the least wisdom. Two more cases follow, as Socrates moved from the politicians to others.
- 22a-b. "..the poets... Almost all the bystanders might have explained the poems better than their authors could." While Socrates appears to respect the works of the poets, and hoped to "learn something from them," the poets were unable to explain what they had written themselves. This is actually a familiar phenomenon. The first time I saw a detailed analysis of T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land, I wondered if Eliot himself had really thought of all the stuff that the critic had read into the poem. Later, in a more popular medium, seeing movie makers talk about the movies they had made, it didn't always seem like they appreciated what they had actually accomplished. For instance, Spike Lee's 1989 movie, Do the Right Thing, seemed a much more profound moral and political statement than one would ever know from Lee's own explicitly stated, knee-jerk leftist, political views. The character played by Lee himself in the movie is a very un-idealized, morally ambiguous person -- all by itself a sign of good art. Socrates has already discovered that good art does necessarily mean good understanding on the part of artists.
- 22c. "...poets do not compose their poems with knowledge [sophía, wisdom], but by some inborn talent [by nature/phýsis] and by inspiration, likes seers [theománteis, holy diviners] and prophets [khrêsmôdoí, those who deliver oracles] who also say many fine [kalá, beautiful] things without any understanding of [/knowing] what they say." The poets are, as Socrates says, enthousiázontes, "inspired," those in (en) whom is the spirit (theós) -- getting us the word "enthusiasm," which was still used by John Locke (1632-1704) to mean possession by the Holy Spirit. This is an extremely important point. Socrates does not dismiss the poets, does not deny that they are for real and onto something. It is just that they do not produce their art through knowledge, understanding, or wisdom. They are given it by the gods. This means that Socrates allows for the fourth characteristic of mytho-poeic thought, that myth is self-justifying. It is just that this is not good enough for Socrates. He doesn't just want to be told things, he wants to understand them. Nor is this just his preference. If the poets do not have wisdom, then this confirms the Oracle again, that no one is wiser than Socrates. So wisdom is different from what they say, however true, and must contain some feature -- understanding -- that is distinct from the bare assertion of truth. Plato agrees with these distinctions and expands on them in the Meno (96e-99e).
- 22c. "...they thought themselves very wise men in other respects, which they were not." Because the poets knew they were good poets, they thought that this made them wise about other things, which of course they weren't.
This seems to be an occupational characteristic today of actors, who often are not reluctant to use their public presence to endorse politicians or promote their favorite causes. They can hardly be blamed for this, since they see their causes as good, and they have a perfect right, to the extent that we have a free country, to express their opinions. There is nothing about being an actor, however, that is going to give them any insight into politics or the good better than most other people. Indeed, the egotism and flattery that inevitably go with the acting profession might be thought to be more of a corrupting influence than otherwise, in which case their opinions might be treated with more than ordinary scepticism. In that respect, we might recall the Greek word for "actor." The word actor is Latin, from a verb that we still use, act (ago/agere in Latin itself). The Greek word is hypokrités, which originally meant "interpreter." Of course now it has become "hypocrite" in English. A hypocrite is a kind of actor, pretending to be something that he isn't. Ironically, the best actor and hypocrite among recent politicians is the Hollywood want-to-be Bill Clinton, while the actual professional actor who became President, Ronald Reagan, was often ridiculed as a second-rate actor, who nevertheless exuded complete sincerity in his politics -- his enemies thought he was stupid, not insincere.
- 22c. "...the craftsmen.." The politicians, evidently, neither knew nor said anything worthwhile. The poets didn't know anything either, but at least they said, under inspiration, many "fine things." Now we get to the "craftsmen" -- actually the kheirotékhnai, the "hand-artists." We have already been told that Socrates discovered that "those who were thought to be inferior were more knowledgeable," and here we get to those who might well be "thought to be inferior." They are also, interestingly, the people of Socrates' own class. Having been a "hand-artist" himself, Socrates discovers that they are the only people who actually know what they are doing. There could be a Marxist angle to this, though there is no talk of "exploitation," and Socrates ends up being disappointed again in what he is looking for.
- 22c-d. "I knew that I would find that they had knowledge of many fine [kalá, beautiful] things. In this I was not mistaken; they knew things I did not know, and to that extent they were wiser than I." So here at least is the real thing -- wisdom -- and actual knowledge of the beauty that the poets had merely produced. So the Oracle is now refuted? Right? Well, no. There is a little problem...
- 22d. "...same fault as the poets...because of his success at his craft [tékhnê, art], thought himself very wise in other most important pursuits [t'âlla tà mégista, the other greatest (things)]..." Because the craftsmen were good at something, they thought, like the poets, that they knew about everything, which they didn't. "...this error of theirs overshadowed the wisdom they had..." Wait a minute! This means that their wisdom isn't enough to refute the Oracle? How could that be? Socrates doesn't really explain just what the problem is. How does their lack of wisdom in other areas "overshadow" (apokrýptô, "hide from, conceal") their actual wisdom? The "other most important pursuits" must require a different and superior kind of wisdom. In fact, we have seen what this must be. To qualify as having real wisdom, and not just knowledge of this or that art, someone would have to know of the "human and social kind of excellence" -- "human and political virtue" -- hê anthrôpínê te kaì politiké areté. The politicians had had the reputation for wisdom because this is what they were supposed to know. They didn't; but then Socrates gets down to the craftsmen, who do know something, but have neither the reputation nor the actual knowledge of "political virtue" either. If someone had this real wisdom, it would not be overshadowed by their ignorance if they did not know about handicrafts. But the wisdom of the craftsmen doesn't cut it when they are lacking and self-deceived about the more fundamental knowledge.
- 22e. "...neither their wisdom nor their ignorance..." Socrates doesn't have the craftsmen's knowledge of their craft (though he did know his own craft, unmentioned), but he does recognize his own ignorance of the human and social kind of excellence, which they don't. Since that recognition then is "human wisdom," "...the answer I gave myself and the oracle..." is that the answer of the Oracle stands and that it is better for Socrates to be "as I am."
- 20e-21a. "Chairephon [Khairephôn]...the friend of most of you, as he shared your exile and your return." What was this "exile" and "return"? These were events that attended the end of the Peloponnesian War. The Spartans occupied Athens, overthrew the democratic government, and set up a junta of Quislings that the Athenians called the "Thirty Tyrants." In predictable fashion, they began killing their political enemies, as Socrates mentions himself (32c-d). Thus, anyone who had been a conspicuous partisan of the democracy was in some danger, and many very prudently fled the city and went into exile. When the Spartans withdrew from Athens, the hated Thirty were promptly overthrown, and the exiles could return. This tells us something important about Chairephon, that he would have been a partisan of the democracy, and also something important about Socrates, who thus had a friend who was a conspicuous partisan of the democracy. This is an important point when Socrates is still being accused of being an enemy of the democracy and a partisan of Sparta. It seems unlikely that Chairephon would have been Socrates' friend, and have done what he did, if this had been true of Socrates. But this circumstantial evidence is only our first clue about this in the Apology. The entire issue of Socrates' attitude about democracy is separately discussed in "Socratic Ignorance in Democracy, the Free Market, and Science"; but the evidence of the Apology will also be examined at the appropriate places in the text. Chairephon, however, does provide us with a good clue.
- 20c. "But Socrates, what is your occupation?" Here is, in a sense, the heart of the Apology. Socrates is now, perhaps for the first time ever, going to explain what he has been doing, why, and how it got started.
- Misunderstandings
- 23a. "...a reputation for wisdom, for in each case the bystanders thought that I myself possessed the wisdom that I proved that my interlocutor [Latin, inter, between, loquor, to speak] did not have." Socrates was doing something very unusual. He was taking things that people said and showing that they were incoherent, while at the same time he did not claim to have the right answers to any of the issues that came up. Since, as we know, everyone has an opinion, it was natural for people to think that Socrates must have opinions also, and must think that he had answers to the kinds of questions he asked. If he didn't give his answers in public, it was also natural that people might think he "taught" his answers privately, since that is what the Sophists and others actually did. Socrates probably had never tried to disabuse people of this impression before, and it is one of the very great misunderstandings about him that he must deal with in his defense. But it is not the only one. Seeing Socrates always ask questions and never give answers, there are other interpretations possible. Socrates made people look ridiculous. This is amusing and evidently drew crowds. This might suggest that maybe Socrates didn't care what the answers to his questions were. He just enjoyed getting a laugh out of making others look foolish. Maybe he was actually ridiculing people's beliefs about the issues he dealt with -- the just and the unjust, right and wrong, good and evil, etc. -- and didn't really believe anything about those issues himself. In short, people could see Socrates as what now we call a nihilist (Latin nihil = nothing). This was a much more serious misunderstanding of Socrates; for, although he was certainly not a nihilist himself, there were young men (néoi, "youth") who hung out with him who actually were nihilists.
This is the point to discuss this problem, since Socrates will mention these young men shortly (23c), but he doesn't do a very good job of explaining why people are angry about them. They are the principal reason why Socrates is in trouble. They did bad things, and what they did damaged Socrates' reputation. He was thought to be their teacher. As Socrates later makes fairly clear (33b), his business was not to teach anyone anything. He did his questioning in public, and if anyone wanted to hang out and watch what he did, it was not his business to drive them away. Some young men, like Plato himself, had some notion of what Socrates was about, and that it was not just a game. Others, however, could take from Socrates what amused them and forget the rest. Then they would commit crimes, and people would ask, "How did he get to be like that?" Socrates must have "taught" him to commit those crimes.
Just about the most spectacular example of one of these young men was the celebrated Alcibiades (c.450-404). He was born to privilege; and after his father died in battle (447/6), he was raised by his famous uncle, the great leader of Athens, Pericles. He hung out with Socrates. Plato wrote an entire dialogue featuring him (the Alcibiades), which begins with Socrates homoerotically admiring the first blush of beard on his face. In the Symposium, however, Plato has Alcibiades stumbling into the party, drunk, telling a story of how he had gotten Socrates to sleep over once, trying to seduce him, only to have Socrates pay him no more sexual attention "than an elder brother" (212d-219d). Alcibiades would have come of age in about 429 but first came to political notice in about 420. At that point the war with Sparta appeared to be over. The "Ten Years" or "Archidamian" War, 431-421, had ended in the aftermath of the Athenians trapping and capturing a force of Spartans on the island of Sphacteria, near the Homeric city of Pylos, in 425. This was sensational, since the Spartans were always expected to fight to the death, as they had against the Persians at Thermopylae. The Peace however, was compromised by continued fighting, often because of plans by Alcibiades himself to organize opposition to Sparta. The supreme opportunity came in 416, when Greek cities in Sicily appealed to Athens for help against Syracuse, the largest Greek city there, which was also an ally of Sparta. Alcibiades got himself elected general to lead an expedition against Syracuse, which would materially damage the Sparta cause and win the thanks of the other Sicilian Greeks (often called "Siciliots"). The older leader Nicias was also elected general to look after Alcibiades, since he already had a certain wild reputation...
In 415, the night before the expedition was supposed to leave for Sicily, someone went around and mutilated statues of the god Hermes that stood all over Athens. Hermês was the protector of, among other things, traffic, markets, and roads. His image was used in such locations, often at intersections, and to mark boundaries. Thus, there were a lot of these images. An individual statue is now called a "Herm"; and in the plural, the Latin form is used, "Hermae." The incident is called the "multilation of the Hermae."
The Hermae now seem like very strange objects, archaic and peculiar. They were usually just a square stone pillar, with the head of Hermes at the top, and otherwise unadorned
except for the erect genitals of Hermes at the appropriate location on the front of the pillar -- though the penis does not seem entirely erect in the example at right, since the (uncircumcised) foreskin still covers the glans. Today, of course, this would be regarded as funny or obscene. Not the kind of thing we see in public anymore. Indeed, after Christianity swept away this kind of stuff, it was forgotten that such things existed in the Classical world. It was brought back to modern attention when serious excavation began in 1748 at Pompeii, the Roman city buried by ash during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD. To the embarrassment of the Catholic Bourbon King of the Two Sicilies, obscene objects, and not just the Hermae, began to be found. The auspicious genitals of Hermes had even been carved on people's doorjambs. Much of this material was tucked away in a special warehouse, the "Secret Museum," to which only serious, respectable adult males were allowed entry. Elsewhere in the world, however, the idea of divine genitals being sacred and lucky still survives. Although suppressed for a while out of embarrassment of Western disapproval, such sights are beginning to revive somewhat in Japan, where colossal wooden phalluses can now be seen in religious processions. They are even being promoted as tourist attractions, drawing quite a few more foreign tourists than most other Japanese religious events. In pre-modern Japan, boundary stones in the shape of genitals, both male and female, were common.The Athenians did not think that the mutilation of the Hermae was funny, or a virtuous suppression of obscenity; they thought it was a shocking and terrifying sacrilege. Hermes was there to protect the city, and if he was offended, then he could withdraw his protection. Nevertheless, no one knew quite what to do about it at the moment. So the expedition left for Sicily. As the days passed, however, suspicion grew that Alcibiades and his friends were just the kind of guys, without much respect for traditional religion, to have done this. It is not hard to imagine what happened. Young men, about to leave for war, get drunk, and in the wee hours decide to go looking for trouble -- like Animal House (1978). Someone gets the bright idea to mess with the familiar statues of Hermes, which they may already think are rather more funny than holy. The next day, they would just as soon forget about it, but it's too late. A warrant was sworn out for Alcibiades and a ship sent to Syracuse. On the way back, however, Alcibiades jumped ship. Flight to avoid prosecution. Desertion. Evidence of guilt in a charge of sacrilege. But then Alcibiades went even further. He went over to the Spartans. He advised them how to defeat the Athenian expedition in Sicily. The Athenian army and fleet were annihilated. Alcibiades was condemned to death in absentia and his property confiscated. When Sparta then reopened the main war with Athens, the "Decelean" or "Ionian" War of 413-404, Alcibiades advised the construction of a fleet to contest the sea with Athens and accompanied the ships to Ionia, which was the scene of much of the subsequent fighting.
Thus, Alcibiades can be credited with sacrilege, desertion, flight to avoid prosecution, and, last but not least, treason. So people would ask, "How did he get to be like that?" And they might remember, "He used to hang out with Socrates. Indeed, they were very friendly, perhaps even lovers." So Socrates, a philosopher, who, as we all know, go around teaching their doctrines, must be responsible. If Alcibiades can be substantially blamed for the loss of the war against Sparta, then Socrates can ultimately be blamed also. So let's get him.
Alcibiades later began trying to play the Athenians, Spartans, and Persians off of each other. He got the Persians involved, ultimately to the benefit of Sparta, but he also helped the Athenians defeat a Spartan fleet in 410. This enabled him to return to Athens, with all forgiven, for a while. Things soured again with a defeat in 407, and Alcibiades again went into exile. Ironically, his place of exile in 405 was right by where the final battle, Aegospotami, was fought between Athens and Sparta. This historic location is the long peninsula along the straits, the ancient Hellespont and modern Dardanelles, that lead from the Aegean Sea into the Sea of Marmara, and so ultimately to Istanbul, the Bosporus, and the Black Sea. The entire peninsula now takes its name from the Greek city of Kallipolis ("Beautiful City"). Part of Turkey today, the Turkish name is "Gelibolu," but elsewhere it is known by its name in Italian, Gallipoli. Such a place has a common Italian name because of the presence in the area of Italians, mainly from Venice, Pisa, and Genoa, during the Middle Ages.
The name is best known, however, from the British landing there in 1915, during World War I. Winston Churchill, first Lord of the Admirality at the time, hoped to seize the Straits and knock Turkey out of the war. It was a good idea but a miserable failure in execution, not unlike the Athenian Sicilian expedition. A 1981 movie Gallipoli, by Peter Weir, starring the later super-star Mel Gibson, details the Australian participation in the campaign.
In 405 both the Athenian and Spartan fleets came into the Straits. For some days they simply maneuvered around each other. In the evening, the fleets separated and the ships were drawn up on the beach for the evening. The ships, of course, were rowed -- galleys -- with shallow draft, though with some hundreds of men as a crew. Although 100 some feet long, such ships could be pulled up on the beach by their own crews. Watching this, Alcibiades walked down to the Athenian camp and warned them that the Spartans might attack as the Athenians were getting out of their ships. The Athenians famously told him to take a hike. The next day, sure enough, the Spartans followed the Athenian fleet and attacked as the men were getting out. The Athenian fleet was destroyed. The Spartans sailed directly to Athens, put the city under siege, and starved it into surrender in 404. The war was over.
Alcibiades, like the boy who cried "wolf," was simply no longer someone to believe, even when he was giving good advice. He fled to the Persians and was assassinated, in 404, with the agreement of both Athenians and Spartans.
- 23a. "...the god is wise..." The key to Socratic philosophy. The Presocratics and Sophists claimed a "wisdom more than human" because only the gods actually have such knowledge. "'...his wisdom is worthless'." How "worthless" does Socrates really think his wisdom is? This is a problem for the "Questions about Socrates": Socrates does not act like he is entirely ignorant. No, after offering no definition of piety to Euthyphro, he conducts himself in a way that he says is "good [kalá, beautiful] and just and pious" (35c). And he claims to know some things, like that the god cannot lie. These inconsistencies are addressed, of course, by Plato.
- 23b. "...continue this investigation as the god bade me... anyone, citizen or stranger..." Socrates continues to vindicate the Oracle by questioning people anywhere. He is not an armchair philosopher. He deals with what people say. These can be "citizen or stranger," which he says because of the large resident alien population of Athens. It was almost impossible for immigrants to become Athenian citizens, but the wealth and market of Athens attracted immigrants in much the same way that the United States does. Since Socrates stops people in public places, there is a strong chance they will not be Athenians citizens.
Originally, someone was born an Athenian citizen if either parent was a native Athenian. However, Pericles married a woman who was not Athenian, and his politically enemies, who could not harm him directly, realized that they could do so indirectly. They passed a law that both parents had to be Athenian citizens for someone to be born an Athenian. It was also retroactive. So Pericles' own children were suddenly no longer Athenians -- though this injustice didn't affect his two sons for long, since they, like their father, died of the plague.
Some argue that Athens wasn't really a democracy because women, aliens, and slaves didn't vote. The best response I've heard to that argument was from a fellow student, when I was a Freshman at the University of New Mexico in 1967. She said that Athens was a democracy "because they made up the word and called it that." To the Greeks themselves, the key point was that the poor were included in democratic government -- "every free adult male citizen" did not mean universal suffrage, but it was free of the property qualifications that were long characteristic of British and American democracy. Nevertheless, some people get so confused about this that it is possible to find them saying that Athens was not really a democracy because the poor were not included. Where that comes from is mysterious, especially when Thucydides says in The Peloponnesian War that class war often resulted in Greek cities, with the poor, partisans of Athens, fighting the wealthy partisans of Sparta. This is also the key to many traditional criticisms of both Greek and modern democracies: that when the poor discover that they can vote themselves money, the government will collapse into a war of everyone trying to steal from everyone else.
- 23c. "...the young men (néoi)...sons of the very rich..." Here Socrates addresses the issue of the "youth" who used to hang out with him, and whose misdeeds had become associated with him. He doesn't do a very good job, at least at this point in his defense. Notice that the word for youth, nêos, is very commonly taken to be the Greek word for "new," but its meaning is originally more like "young." It can also mean "new," but another word, kaínos, can be used for that.
- 23c. "...often imitate me and try to question others." Socrates acts like the only objection people have to his erstwhile followers is that they made nuisances of themselves by questioning people the way Socrates did. This is a grave trivialization of the problem. As we saw above, things like sacrilege, desertion, and treason are more like what people were worried about. Socrates would not be seen as a possible enemy of Athens if all his friends had done was ask questions. But his friends going over to or collaborating with the Spartans -- that raises the issue of Socrates' own loyalty. He is not actually accused of treason, but the accusation of "corrupting the young" is definitely about something that is connected to such a serious charge.
- 23c. "...angry, not with themselves..." Socrates pursues the conceit that people are just angry about these young men asking questions. This is probably the least honest part of the Apology and perhaps might be considered evidence for the authenticity of Plato's rendition, since he might otherwise have been at pains to fix up the argument and address the real issue, treason, and not beat a straw man, as Socrates does.
A much more forthright and thorough treatment of all this is actually given by Xenophon, at Memorabilia II-12-48, where he addresses the case, not only of Alcibiades, but of Critias too, who actually went on to become one of the Thirty Tyrants. "Now, all the time that Critias and Alcibiades associated with Socrates they were out of sympathy with him," says Xenophon (II-39; Loeb trans. p.31). He thinks that they associated with Socrates just for their own ambitious purposes, hoping perhaps to acquire his own facility with argument -- "as soon as they thought themselves superior to their fellow-disciplines they sprang away from Socrates and took to politics" (II-16; Loeb trans. p.19). Interestingly, Xenophon details the vengeful steps that Critias took directly against Socrates under the oligarchy, while in the Apology Socrates never mentions that, even though he does talk about his problems with the Thirty (32c) and could win sympathy with a specific example of their hostility towards him. One suspects that Socrates had is own reasons for not mentioning Alcibiades or Critias by name, as considered below, at 23e.
- 23d. "...what he teaches to corrupt them..." People blame Socrates for making the young men the way they are, but then they can't say what he actually does teach to make them that way. This applies equally whether we are talking about the real crimes of people like Alcibiades or just about Socrates' trivialization, so it is a genuinely valuable part of his defense. "...they mention those accusations that are available against all philosophers..." So Socrates is thought of as a Presocratic and/or Sophist, and everything people believe about their teachings is attributed to him. Here the Presocratic line ("things in the sky") and the Sophist line ("the worse argument stronger") is supplemented by the atheist line, "not believing in the gods." "...when they know nothing..." Perhaps they cannot answer the questions of Socrates or his imitators, but Socrates cannot deny that they know sacrilege and treason when they see them -- so he avoids talking about it.
- 23e. "...these people..." Now Socrates simply veers away from his treatment of the "youth" and begins to attack his accusers. The accusers may deserve the attack, but Socrates seems to change the subject a bit abruptly, as though he is uneasy with the issue. I think he is. He has evaded the real charge, trivialized the reason why he has been accused, and now moves away from it quickly. This uneasiness may reveal that Socrates has some real guilt and uncertainty about this. Here it compromises his defense, since he cannot forthrightly address the real actions of the "young men" he was friendly with.
Socrates could feel guilty about this without really being guilty. It is not uncommon for people to have friends who seem to them to be headed for trouble. It is always a difficult personal dilemma what, if anything, to say to the friend about what they are doing. Frank and forthright advice may be interpreted as hostile or intrusive. The friend may say, "Mind your own business," or "Up yours," and then go away. Or, one may decide to set an example rather than give advice, and hope that the friend will hang around and stay out of trouble that way. If the friend then gets in trouble anyway, the thought, "I should have said something" is hard to avoid, however little a difference saying something might have made. But Socrates is in a more difficult position than most people. If his behavior in the Euthyphro is characteristic, and it is certainly consistent with his "knowing practically nothing" stand of Socratic Ignorance, then the problem is that Socrates does not tell people what to do. All he does is ask questions, and at some point, however obvious the conclusion, the interlocutor has to supply the final answer himself.
Socrates, it seems, is not alone in history in this respect. Thomas Jefferson tells us, in a letter to a grandson, on November 24, 1808:
Conviction is the effect of our own dispassionate reasoning, either in solitude, or weighing within ourselves, dispassionately, what we hear from others, standing uncommitted in argument ourselves. It was one of the rules which, above all others, made Doctor Franklin the most amiable of men in society, "never to contradict anybody." If he was urged to announce an opinion, he did rather by asking questions, as if for information, or by suggesting doubts.
Socrates, like Franklin on this description, never sets out to impose his opinion. He does not think that his opinions even have the status of being worthy of imposition. But this also puts him at a disadvantage. All he can do to straighten out someone like Alcibiades is ask friendly questions. Now that he is in trouble because of what people like Alcibiades did, he is ill at ease. It is a bit too awkward to explain that he might have given advice by asking his questions, indirectly, but it seems to him later (33b) better just to say that he was never anyone's teacher, never taught them anything, and is not responsible for whatever they did. In the present passage, however, he doesn't seem quite up to facing even that defense. He avoids the issue. Perhaps in bad conscience and feeling guilty, but without any real guilt or responsibility. Just the uneasiness over people he saw go bad, but about whom he could do less than even an ordinary friend might have done.
Xenophon, who often writes (in retrospect) as though Socrates had all sorts of direct advice to give people, nevertheless admits, "To be sure he never professed to teach this; but, by letting his own light shine, he led his disciplines to hope that they through imitation of him would attain to such excellence" (Memorabilia II-3-4; Loeb p.14-15). Socrates never sought anything more than friendship -- "his highest reward would be the gain of a good friend" (II-7; Loeb p.15) -- and no one could expect to be taught by him -- "Socrates indeed never promised any such boon to anyone" (II-8; Loeb p.15) -- except by example and by questioning. What we don't see in Xenophon is the ironic playfulness with which Socrates undertakes to become the "pupil" of someone like Euthyphro. Closer associates, indeed, would be little inclined to put on the airs that Socrates has no difficulty eliciting from him.
- 24a. "...I have hidden or disguised nothing." In fact, he has just finishing hiding and disguising perhaps the key issue in the charges against him. The charges are still not fair, and he might simply have handled the issue better, but it is the most awkward and hollow part in Socrates' entire defense. Not the best note on which to end his examination of his reputation. He reputation, indeed, as a teacher of traitors, has not been openly addressed at all.
- 23a. "...a reputation for wisdom, for in each case the bystanders thought that I myself possessed the wisdom that I proved that my interlocutor [Latin, inter, between, loquor, to speak] did not have." Socrates was doing something very unusual. He was taking things that people said and showing that they were incoherent, while at the same time he did not claim to have the right answers to any of the issues that came up. Since, as we know, everyone has an opinion, it was natural for people to think that Socrates must have opinions also, and must think that he had answers to the kinds of questions he asked. If he didn't give his answers in public, it was also natural that people might think he "taught" his answers privately, since that is what the Sophists and others actually did. Socrates probably had never tried to disabuse people of this impression before, and it is one of the very great misunderstandings about him that he must deal with in his defense. But it is not the only one. Seeing Socrates always ask questions and never give answers, there are other interpretations possible. Socrates made people look ridiculous. This is amusing and evidently drew crowds. This might suggest that maybe Socrates didn't care what the answers to his questions were. He just enjoyed getting a laugh out of making others look foolish. Maybe he was actually ridiculing people's beliefs about the issues he dealt with -- the just and the unjust, right and wrong, good and evil, etc. -- and didn't really believe anything about those issues himself. In short, people could see Socrates as what now we call a nihilist (Latin nihil = nothing). This was a much more serious misunderstanding of Socrates; for, although he was certainly not a nihilist himself, there were young men (néoi, "youth") who hung out with him who actually were nihilists.
- 24b. "Let this suffice...earlier accusers.... defend myself against Meletus..." Having addressed "the earlier accusers" of those who have generated and spread the kind of reputation he has, Socrates now moves to the real charges against him at the moment, and one of his real accusers, Meletus. Socrates never does bother with his other accusers, Anytus and Lycon.
- 24b. "Meletus, that good and patriotic man, as he says he is..." Both sarcasm, since Socrates really doesn't think that Meletus is a "good and patriotic man," and the warning qualification "as he says he is..." Here again, Socrates doesn't always just say things in an ironic way but he warns us with a qualifying statement. It is Meletus, not Socrates, who says this about Meletus.
- 24b. "Socrates is guilty of corrupting the young and of not believing in the gods in whom the city believes, but in other new spritual things..." We finally get the statement of the actual charges. The first part, about the young, Socrates has already touched on and will deal with first in his examination of Meletus. Then he will move to the second part and try to clarify what the accusation is. Clarification is necessary, not only in Greek, but especially in English, where the translation can create problems.
Socrates is accused of not believing in the "the gods in whom the city believes" but in hétera daimónia kainá. Now, daimónia kainá is translated as "new spiritual beings" by Harold North Fowler in the Loeb Classical Library edition (Harvard, 1914-1966, p.91), "new spiritual things" by W.H.D. Rouse (Great Dialogues of Plato, Mentor, 1956, p.430), and "new divinities" by G.M.A. Grube (Plato, Five Dialogues, 1981, 1986, p.31). Grube's original translation was thought better of and is now rendered "new spiritual things," like Rouse, in recent editions (p.29), which, however, are not dated, unless the isolated number "95" on the copyright page is evidence of the date (and we are not warned that the translation has been altered). The problem all these translation are dealing with is that there is no noun in the Greek phrase. Kainá is "new"; and daimónia is "of or belonging to a daímôn," where a daímôn is a god, spirit, or even soul -- though this is later the word "demon" used by Christianity. So the literal translation would be that Socrates believes in "other new spiritual." But this is not grammatical in English, as it is in Greek, since English requires a noun, not just adjectives, in that phrase. We do know something from the Greek phrase about what a noun would have to be like, since all three adjectives in the phrase are neuter plurals -- "things." Supplying the noun "divinities" or "beings" implies that what Socrates' teaching is about living things, or actual gods. This adds far too much to what the charge says, and makes Socrates' questions about it sound unmotivated. "Things" is the best noun to supply, a very indefinite, semantically neuter, plural. But it should be remembered that even this is more definite than the original Greek. Socrates is being accused of teaching new something-or-others about divine or spiritual things, without much of a clue about what those would be. No wonder that Socrates is going to ask about it.
- Examination of Meletus
- 24c-25c. First Line of Questioning, Education of Youth
- 24c. "Meletus is guilty... of professing to be seriously concerned with things about none of which he has ever cared." Socrates' examination on the first charge is directed to showing that Meletus doesn't have any ideas about education and so really hasn't thought about it. If so, he is in no position to know whether Socates has a beneficial teaching or not. Of course, Socrates doesn't have any teaching, so this is all besides the point anyway, but it should serve to impeach and discredit Meletus.
The following exchange is the only time that someone besides Socrates speaks in the Apology, and it is the only example we have in this work of Socrates' method of asking questions. Grube's text is not set up like a dialogue, with separate identified lines for each speaker. Meletus' answers are simply set off with a dash.
- 24d. "Surely you consider it of the greatest importance that our young men be as good as possible? -- Indeed I do." Socrates always starts with an innocent-sounding question. There is hardly another answer that Meletus could give here, but what it does is establish that Meletus has brought this prosecution about something that he thinks is of great importance, so presumably something that he is concerned about and devoted some attention to.
- 24d. "...tell the jury who improves them." This also seems like an innocent enough inquiry, but Meletus actually doesn't have an answer ready and at first doesn't say anything. "...you are silent and know not what to say..." After more prodding, he finally says, "The laws."
- 24e. Such an answer is not responsive, since Socrates asked "who?" After pointing this out, Socrates gets Meletus to answer "These jurymen." While Meletus sounds innocent of any understanding of Socrates, he is clever enough to know how to appeal to the jury. If Socrates questions the role or ability of the jury in improving the young, then he will be insulting the jury. Of course, such a consideration will not even slow him down. But he takes a slightly different tack. "All of them, or some but not others? -- All of them." It is not just that the jurymen are able to "educate the young and improve them," but that every one of them, without exception, is able to do so. "...a great abundance of benefactors." A bit of sarcasm.
- 25a. "...what about the audience? ... -- They improve them." If the jury was so rich with teachers, Socrates decides to check about the audience. How many are in the audience, and whether it includes women, is not known. But it turns out that the audience members are all good educators too.
- 25a. "..the members of the Council? -- The Councillors also."
The "Council" is the boulé, and the "members of the Council" are the bouleutaí. The Council of the Five Hundred was created by the democratic reformer Cleisthenes, with members ultimately chosen by lot from each deme, the thirty smallest divisions of the population of Athens (from dêmos, a district or the people who live in it, or just "the people"). The Council was effectively the day to day government of Athens and determined what laws to propose to the Assembly. The Council itself was divided into ten parts, corresponding to the ten Tribes (Phylaí) of Athens. Each of these ten parts presided for a tenth of the year, and the presiding Councillors were called the Prýtaneis or presidents. Socrates mentions being a Prýtanis below, 32b.
- 25a. "...but what about the assembly [ekklêsía]? ... -- They improve them." The Assembly means every free adult male citizen of Athens, if they were all to show up; so this is a significant part of the entire population of the city, in fact everyone of political significance, everyone with the franchise, which is why Socrates next refers to them as "all the Athenians" (pántes Athênaîoi).
- 25a. "...I alone corrupt them... -- That is most definitely what I mean." So, it turns out, Meletus thinks that Socrates is the only bad influence in Athens. He might not want to accuse others, or this could stir up far too much animosity, turning it into a political contest rather than just a trial, and Meletus might get sued for libel. No, better keep it simple. Socrates is the only corrupt influence in the city.
- 25b. "Does this also apply to horses do you think?" Socrates how moves his argument to one of his barnyard analogies. "...one individual is able to improve them, or every few... whereas the majority... corrupt them?" In having or teaching specialized knowledge, whether about animals or humans, Socrates now asks if this is something everyone has, or just one or a few. Of course, on the analogy, the answer must be only a few; and Meletus knows this, so he doesn't even give an answer. "Of course it is, whether you and Anytus say so or not." Socrates answers his own question. Meletus doesn't know who improves the youth, so he has simply said everyone, excepting only the person he wants to condemn. In the Meno, Anytus also wanted to say that "any Athenian gentleman" (92e) could teach virtue, but he also excepted all the Sophists (91c). If Meletus got into that here, then he would be open to questions about whether he thought Socrates was a Sophist, how Socrates would be a Sophist, and so to admission that what Socrates does has little to do with the Sophists. Instead, Meletus just shuts up.
In answering his own question, which he also does elsewhere in Plato's dialogues, especially with other uncooperative subjects (e.g. the Gorgias), Socrates opens himself to the charge that he has opinions about his questions after all, and is not just asking his questions to vindicate the god, on the principle that everyone is ignorant. This bears keeping in mind as a Question about Socrates, but Meletus is too slow to pick up on it here and belabor Socrates with the inconsistency.
- 25c. "...you have never had any concern for our youth..." So Meletus, far from treating education as "of the greatest importance," can't answer the simplest question about who actually are the most effective teachers of the youth. He has "given no thought" to the subject about which he is accusing Socrates. All he knows is that he doesn't like Socrates.
- 24c. "Meletus is guilty... of professing to be seriously concerned with things about none of which he has ever cared." Socrates' examination on the first charge is directed to showing that Meletus doesn't have any ideas about education and so really hasn't thought about it. If so, he is in no position to know whether Socates has a beneficial teaching or not. Of course, Socrates doesn't have any teaching, so this is all besides the point anyway, but it should serve to impeach and discredit Meletus.
- 25c-26a. Second Line of Questioning, Corrupting the Young
- 25c. "...tell us also whether it is better for a man to live among good or wicked fellow citizens." The second line of questioning opens with another innocent question. Meletus has already been burned, so now he doesn't even want to answer this question. "Do not the wicked to some harm...? -- Certainty." Finally Meletus answers.
This whole line of questioning is going to turn on one of Socrates' pet ideas, namely that No one knowingly does wrong. Although Socrates does occasionally give answers to his own questions, he does not do so in a systematic or complete way, which means he is consistent enough in his Ignorance not to have theories about the good, etc. But in the course of his investigation he does come up with some theories, more about knowledge than about the content of ethics. This is one of the more characteristic ones and seems just as peculiar today as it would have back then, since we tend to think that only the incompetent, children, the insane, or the senile don't know that they are doing wrong when they are doing it. That is what they can be punished for. Here, Socrates wants to get Meletus to apply this principle to him and to admit that Socrates could not have knowingly corrupted the young, that it wouldn't make any sense.
Socrates believes that no one knowingly does wrong for at least three reasons:
- If no one is wise, and so everyone is really ignorant of "the human and social kind of excellence," then no one really knows what they are doing, and those who do good are just as ignorant of the real value of their actions as those who do wrong. At Meno 100b, Plato has Socrates conclude that "virtue appears to be present in those of us who may possess it as a gift from the gods" [Grube p.88]. So what anyone thinks they are doing is more or less irrelevant to what they are doing.
- Socrates always takes at face value what it is that people say to him, and it is characteristic for people, even (or especially) the very wicked, to give justifications, excuses, and rationalizations for their actions. Thus, Socrates sees people as doing what they regard as right, because that is the way they talk about it. Of course, he then "examines" whether this is a "sound statement," as he says in the Euthyphro.
- Socrates suspects that the only reason anyone does anything is for a good end (Aristotle later defines the good as whatever it is at which anything aims). This is the point upon which this passage in the Apology turns. We get an actual argument for it at Meno 77c-78b. Socrates reasons that anything bad would contribute to unhappiness, and so only those desiring to be unhappy would want what is bad. Thus, he asks Meno, "Does anyone wish to be miserable and unhappy?" [78a, Grube p.67]. Meno answers no, but, curiously, other answers now seem possible. Today we are familiar with those who seem to enjoy being miserable, like Woody Allen in the movie Annie Hall, originally titled Anhedonia. Since Woody Allen seemed to think that he deserved misery out of guilt, Socrates could always argue that real guilt would merit punishment and so would be a good. Woody Allen thus desired what is good, but was simply mistaken since he was not really guilty of anything (until he married his step-daughter, perhaps). Another modern development, however, is a little different, and that is the prevalence of excuses based on helplessness. Scientific determinism now enables people to say that their actions are out of their own control. This divorces action from judgments of right and wrong altogether, which is probably the point, both for the those whose actions are in question and for the theorists would apparently don't believe that people should be accountable for their actions. Socrates, of course, would be free to express skepticism about this, as in Addiction Is a Choice by Jeffrey A. Schaler [Open Court, 2000]. Schaler's argument is that excuses of helplessness conceal judgments of preference, i.e. that addicts really find their addictions desirable in relation to the alternatives. Socrates might be challenged by the idea that a heroin high is preferable to almost any other goods in life, but he may have already been familiar with drunks who exhibited a similar problem. We have no record of Socrates questioning any alcoholics, but it certainly would have been an interesting encounter.
- 25c. "Does the man exist who would rather be harmed...?" Meletus is relucant to answer again, and Socrates must mention "...the law orders you to answer." Finally, we get the reply, "Of course not."
- 25d. "Do you accuse me here of corrupting the young... deliberately...? -- Deliberately." Does Socrates deliberately made his associates wicked, when they are going to then harm him? When Meletus answers yes, then the conclusion follows that such a person knows that he will be harmed, which seems foolish and senseless. Perhaps realizing that, this is the last answer the Meletus gives in the line of questioning.
- 25d-26a. "...are you so much wiser....but I have reached such a pitch of ignorance that I do not realize this...if I make one of my associates wicked I run the risk of being harmed by him..." Socrates draws the conclusion, putting it in the form of a question. Meletus is clearly a reluctant and hostile witness, so Socrates has to make the answer as obvious as possible. He is not going to get an answer out of Meletus. "...I do not think anyone else will..." While Meletus may know that he doesn't like the point, he is certainly unaware of Socrates' theory that is behind it. He is even more unlikely to understand or accept that, and the jury too. "Either I do not corrupt the young or, if I do, it is unwillingly..." Whether compelled by the argument or not, neither Meletus nor the jury is going to credit the conclusion.
- 26a. "...to instruct them and exhort them; for clearly, if I learn better, I shall cease to do what I am doing unwillingly." If Socrates has accidentally corrupted the young, then he doesn't belong in a lawcourt. Instead, Meletus should have just tried to straighten him out. "...you have avoided my company..." But Meletus was never interested in tangling with Socrates. "...punishment, not of instruction..." If no one knowingly does wrong, then, actually, no one would belong in the lawcourt and no one would be in need of punishment.
If no one knowingly does wrong, then, as Socrates say, "if I learn better," he will cease doing wrong. The idea that knowledge of the good would produce goodness is the principle that virtue is knowledge, i.e. to be virtuous, one must acquire the right knowledge, presumably the knowledge of the "human and social kind of excellence." Furthermore, if virtue is knowledge, then presumably it can be taught. In the Protagoras, Socrates argues about this with the great Sophist himself, with, in typical fashion, Socrates arguing against the thesis at the beginning and for it at the end. The Meno begins with the explicit question about whether virtue can be taught (providing an actual argument along the way that no one knowingly desires bad things, 77b-78b). The answer seems to be "ordinarily not," but then it turns out that this is only because everyone is ignorant and because real knowledge must be remembered, not taught -- Plato's theory of Recollection. In the Republic, Plato modifies this with his theory that the right part of the soul, reason, must be dominant both for knowledge to be obtained and for it to have its salutary effect. In the Apology one peculiarity is that, even as Socrates tries to get Meletus to admit that he would not knowingly do wrong, Socrates never concedes to his accusers the benefit of this principle. Jesus may have said, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34), but Socrates does not. This kind of inconsistency should make it clear that Socrates is not a systematic thinker. Even his own pet ideas are not applied consistently, and when it comes to his accusers, he is quite happy to appeal to ordinary ideas about intention, responsibility, and blame.
This same kind of inconsistency occurs a bit more recently. When "progressive" thought about crime became dominant in the 60's, with a social and psychological determinism that excused violent criminals as helpless victims of society, racism, capitalism, etc., this excuse was nevertheless almost never conceded to those whose crimes were less politically favored, i.e. the deeds of Southern Rednecks, or those who were guilty of no crimes at all except the Marxist offense of being capitalists, i.e. executives of corporations. This double standard persists today, when crimes by politically favored groups may be "understood" as resulting from righteous "anger," while crimes by politically disfavored groups are incomprehensible manifestations of "hate." Socrates would have had a job cut out for him, asking questions about this sort of thing, even though he commits the inconsistency in his own defense.
- 26b. "Meletus has never been at all concerned with these matters." The point is the same as at the end of the first line of questioning, though the first demonstrated that Meletus hadn't thought about education at all, while the second merely demonstrates that Meletus is not familiar with Socrates' own paradoxical theories about moral knowledge. In all fairness, he can hardly be expected to be thus familiar, or to accept them.
But a much cleverer Meletus could have answered Socrates' argument. What often happens in life is that the wicked corrupt others in the expectation that the wickedness will never rebound upon them. This may be foolish, and so senseless and impossible to someone like Socrates, but it is a common phenomenon. Thus, in Spike Lee's movie Malcolm X (1992), Malcolm himself, with a perfectly honest job, is corrupted by a Boston gangster and taught the ways of crime. Malcolm, as Socrates would predict, begins chiseling the gangster, raking off some of the profits that he should turn in. The gangster does not just reflect philosophically, "One I have made wicked is now harming me"; he intends to kill Malcolm, who gets away through a bathroom window and escapes to New York.
- 25c. "...tell us also whether it is better for a man to live among good or wicked fellow citizens." The second line of questioning opens with another innocent question. Meletus has already been burned, so now he doesn't even want to answer this question. "Do not the wicked to some harm...? -- Certainty." Finally Meletus answers.
- 26b-25c. Third Line of Questioning, the Gods
- 26b. "...by teaching them not to believe in the gods in whom the city believes, but in other new spiritual things. Is this not what you say I teach...? -- ...most certainty..." The next, and final, line of questions involves the next charge in the indictment, about belief in the gods and whatever other sort of spiritual teaching Socrates has.
"The gods in whom the city believes" is a an important phrase. Reading about Greek mythology may give people the impression that there was a unified Greek national religion. Nothing of the sort ever existed. Each Greek city essentially had its own state religion, with its own particular gods. Even gods with the same name in different locations may nevertheless be represented differently. Traditional and archaic cult statues, like the surviving one of the Artemis of Ephesus, laden with breasts or testicles or something, may look very strange compared to the humanistic images produced by later Greek art. The main gods at Athens were Athena, after whom the city was named, and Poseidon, who had a conspicuous temple on the height at Cape Sunion, the tip of the peninsula of Attica. Even the Acropolis, however, had more than one Athena -- Athena Parthenos, "Athena the Virgin," in the Parthenon and another one in the Temple of Athena Nike, "Athena of Victory." In time, some sites, like Olympia and Delphi, gained the reputation as representing Greek religion as a whole, but this was a very incomplete and non-institutional organization.
The particularity of the institutions of Greek cities extended to matters that now are taken for granted as universal. Thus, each city had its own calendar and even its own alphabet. All the calendars used lunar months, often with the same names; but which name went with which months, and how extra months were added to reconcile the seasons with the moon, was a local matter and often subject to political controversy. Aristophanes joked that if the gods regulated their lives by the civic calendars, they would often go to bed without their supper. Greek alphabets belonged to two broad families, the "blue," characteristic of Ionia and central Greece, and the "red" alphabets, characteristic of western and northern Greece, and of the Doric fringe of islands through Crete and Rhodes. A feature of the red alphabets is that they used the symbol X to write the letter ksi, while the blue alphabets used the same symbol to write the letter khi. The blue alphabet of Ionia later became the standard Greek alphabet. A red alphabet, however, was the one borrowed to write Etruscan and later Latin. The Greek language itself, of course, was also divided into several dialects. Athens had its own dialect, "Attic" Greek, which was basically Ionic but with some Doric influence. For instance, the Greek word for "day" was êmérê in Ionic, haméra in Doric, and hêméra in Attic. With some modifications, Attic became the basis for the later koiné or "common" Greek used in the Hellenistic period, and in the New Testament.
- 26c. "I cannot be sure..." Since the phrase daimónia kainá leaves it so vague about what Socrates is supposed to have been teaching, he now wants to clarify the matter. So he asks Meletus whether he is accused of believing in some gods, just not the gods of the city, or in no gods at all (átheos, "godless"). Meletus answers, "...you do not believe in gods at all."
- 26c. "...strange fellow..." Actually, Socrates says, "Oh amazing (thaumásios) Meletus..." Although the charge was ambiguous, Socrates finds it hard to believe that Meletus is really going to go ahead and say this, despite the difficulty that he is sure to have maintaining it in the face of the words of his own accusation.
- 26d. "Do I not believe... that the sun and moon are gods? -- No, by Zeus, jurymen, for he says that the sun is stone, and the moon earth." A very, very revealing passage, both about Socrates and about Meletus. Socrates does not share in the naturalism of the Presocrates. He still has the conservative religious belief that celestial objects are divine. Meletus doesn't know that and, as Socrates has said, simply attributes to Socrates the kind of things that "other philosophers" would believe.
- 26d. "...books of Anaxagoras of Clazomenae..." It was Anaxagoras who specifically said that the sun was a hot stone and the moon was made of earth. One out of two isn't bad, for the 5th century B.C., since the moon is made out of the same minerals (feldspars, etc.) as the earth. This statement by Socrates shows us that he is familiar with Presocratic doctrine, even if he doesn't believe it. Indeed, Socrates says elsewhere that he read a book by Anaxagoras once because he had heard that Mind (noûs) was the cause of everything. Unfortunately, the role of Mind was perfunctory, and Socrates was disappointed.
- 26e. "...a drachma at most in the bookshops..." A fairly startling revelation of Greek prices. A philosophy book might be purchased for a drachma. As we have seen, this would come to just about $15 in 1990 dollars, not all that much even today for a book, when bestselling hardbacks are in the $25 to $40 range, and textbooks can easily run from $50 to $100.
In 1970 I paid $40 for an Arabic dictionary, when a drachma in 1967 dollars would be more like $3.33. The inexpensive nature of a Greek book is rather surprising when we consider that the printing press was not invented for many centuries, and a book by Anaxagoras means a hand copied manuscript. Perhaps the price was so reasonable because the demand was not so great. There may not have been a mass market for Greek philosophy even in Greece; for, after all, Anaxagoras was driven out of Athens with the same kinds of charges leveled against Socrates (though this was mainly as an indirect political attack on Anaxagoras' friend, the statesman Pericles). He can't have been too popular. Of course, we tend to think of hand copied books as so valuable because literacy was so restricted in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, when copies might be made merely to replace a worn or worm-eaten original, and when such copies would be embellished, "illuminated," with color illustrations or gold leaf. That is not how publishing worked in the Classical world. Few manuscripts from that period survive (mainly from Egypt), but they were produced in a very utilitarian way. A fair number might have been produced for a real, if limited, market, especially during the Roman period. Since literacy was supposed to have been rather high in Athens, we are faced with the fact that pretty much anyone with an interest in "advanced" knowledge in the 5th century would have had access to it.
- 26e. "...especially as they are so absurd..." The final reminder that Socrates does not accept these Presocratic cosmological theories.
- 26e. "...you do not believe in the gods and all." And a reminder that Meletus sees Socrates as as much an atheist as he thinks of all the other philosophers and Sophists.
- 26e. "...cannot be believed...even...by yourself. ...insolent and uncontrolled." Socrates takes a moment to express his astonishment, which is considerable, that Meletus would try and make this stick. The charge is like a "riddle" or a joke, since Meletus must now reconcile the charge of atheism with his very own accusation, which is going to imply that Socrates does believe in gods, as the subsequent examination will reveal.
- 26a-27b. Now we get the most merciless cross-examination from Socrates. "...how we appears to contradict himself..." This makes explicit the goal of all Socratic examination, to expose a contradiction. "...you, Meletus, answer us...disturbance...proceed in my usual manner." We are reminded again that Meletus doesn't want to answer Socrates' questions and that the jury is restless with this procedure. They probably did not expect that his "usual [/customary] manner" was going to be so like himself and so little like the familiar courtroom.
- 27b. "Does any man, Meletus, believe in human activities who does not believe in humans?" The entire line of questioning here is going to be based on the principle that the existence and use of an adjective implies that there are nouns, and so things, that have the attributes of the adjective. First Socrates asks if anyone (anthrópôn, "of men") believes in anthrópeia prágmata, "human affairs," who does not also believe in anthrópoi, "men" or "humans." Here the Grube translation has been altered recently, with "activities" replacing "affairs" and with "humans" replacing "human beings," perhaps because no word corresponds to "beings" in Greek, and because "men" would have been politically incorrect. Prágmata could mean either "deeds" or "affairs." "Affairs" is more like the modern meaning of derived words like "pragmatic," while "deeds" or "activities" may be more to the point for Socrates' argument. There have been extensive alterations of Grube's translation in the following passages, not all of them necessary or felicitous. The earlier translation will often be given in brackets.
- 27b. "...make him answer, and not again and again create a disturbance." Meletus doesn't answer, but the jury is causing trouble. Socrates is perfectly willing to stand up to them and tell them what's what. "...horses....horsemen's activities [or equine affairs]... flute-playing activities [flute music] but not in flue-players?" Two more sets of adjectives and nouns, but still no answer from Meletus.
- 27b. "No, my good sir..." Actually, Socrates says, "Oh best (áristos) of men," with ironic exaggeration of Meletus' value. "no man could..." Actually, to the question, "Is there any man," Socrates answers "there is not (ouk éstin)." "...I will tell you and the jury." Actually, "you and these others." Again, nota bene, Meletus won't answer, so Socrates answers for him.
- 27c. "Does any man believe in spiritual activities (daimónia prágmata) who does not believe in spirits (daímones)?" Strangely enough, Meletus actually answers, "No one" -- though again the question and the answer are really "Is there a man..." and "There is not." This destroys Meletus' accusation. Now he must admit that Socrates believes in daímones, and it cannot be avoided, for Greek religion, that this will imply gods also.
- 27c. "Thank you..." Socrates thanks Meletus for obeying the jury to answer, but then he rubs it in by going over the point again. While Meletus has responded that there is not a man who believes in spiritual [things] without believing in spirits, when Socrates asks the same question with himself as the subject, Meletus won't answer again. So, again, Socrates answers for him, "I shall assume that you agree..."
- 27c-d. "...spirits to be either gods or the children of gods?" Now that Socrates has established his belief in spirits, then he asks what spirits are. His suggestion is that they are either gods or the children of gods, which is not necessarily how we use the word now, but Meletus actually agrees with this, "Of course (pánu ge)." These are actually the last words spoken, and the last answer given, by Meletus in the Apology.
- 27d. "...since I do believe in spirits, as you admit, if spirits are gods... you speak in riddles and in jest..." Socrates draws the obvious conclusion. "Spiritual" things imply
- 26b. "...by teaching them not to believe in the gods in whom the city believes, but in other new spiritual things. Is this not what you say I teach...? -- ...most certainty..." The next, and final, line of questions involves the next charge in the indictment, about belief in the gods and whatever other sort of spiritual teaching Socrates has.
- 24c-25c. First Line of Questioning, Education of Youth