Xenophon suggests that, from the Athenian point of view, killing Socrates was a crazy mistake. From Socrates' own perspective, however, death at this precise moment and in this way was the best thing that could have happened to him. When his most emotional friend, Apollodorus, wails, 'But Socrates, what I find hardest to bear is that I see you dying unjustly!' Socrates replies, 'Dear Apollodorus, would you rather see me put to death justly?' He reproaches those who weep for his death: 'Are you only now starting to cry? Do you not realise that I have been condemned to death by Nature from the moment I was born?'
Socrates is willing to die, in Xenophon's version of events, because he has lived a good life, because he is constantly improving himself and because he is conscious of his own virtue. By dying he can exchange the worst part of his life for glory and achieve the most desirable possible death. This is a very over-motivated death. Socrates explains his pleasure in dying at this precise moment with a striking mixture of down-to-earth foresight and self-satisfaction:
I am enormously pleased with myself, and I know my friends feel the same way, because I know that my whole life has been spent behaving piously and justly. But now, if my life were prolonged, I know that I would have to experience the frailties of age: my eyesight would dete- riorate, my hearing would grow weaker, I would become slower to learn and more forgetful of what I have learned. If I see myself becoming worse and feel bad about myself, how can life be enjoyable for me any more? (Xenophon, Apology 5-6)
Better to leave a party early enough to be missed rather than waiting until you have made a fool of yourself. Socrates' death, for Xenophon, illustrates his favourite virtue: self- control. You can have too much of a good thing, even of life.
Xenophon's Socrates is, then, a completely different char- acter from that of Plato. For much of the twentieth century, Xenophon's Socratic writings were either neglected entirely or treated as pale shadows of the Platonic ideal. It has often been claimed that Xenophon must be an inferior source for the historical Socrates, because the uninspiring old bore he describes could hardly have attracted the attention of so many bright young men. But in plenty of periods before the twentieth century, Xenophon's Socrates was better known than Plato's. Xenophon's Socrates was an alternative kind of hero, offering a bourgeois, common-sensical ideal, to set against the paradoxes of Plato's philosopher.
As we will see in the final chapter of this book, the twenty- first century seems to have seen a return to a Xenophontic vision of Socrates. Our culture is making a move back to banality, away from the terrifying challenges of Plato.
plato and socrates
Socrates is Plato's central character, the heart of his liter- ary and philosophical achievement. And it was the death of Socrates, in particular, that provoked Plato into writing philosophy.
'Philosophy begins with wonder', says Aristotle. Perhaps Aristotle was led to philosophy that way. But Platonic phi- losophy - itself the foundation for all later western philoso- phy, including that of Aristotle himself - begins with grief. Plato was present at Socrates' trial. He was at the time a rich, well-connected young man, originally called Aristocles. He was an aspiring tragic and lyric poet, and a talented wres- tler, nicknamed Plato ('Butch', or 'Broad-shouldered') for his skill in the gymnasium. He had probably not written a word of philosophy before his teacher's death.
Plato wanted to find answers to the questions that Socrates - in life and in death - had raised and left unan- swered. If democratic Athens could execute the man who was 'the bravest, the wisest and the most just of any in our times', then Plato needed to imagine a new social system in which the philosophers were - as in his Republic - not social outcasts but kings. The dying Socrates was not only Plato's mentor, but his subject, and ultimately his creation. Plato's Socrates is the first novelistic character in literature. Plato, founder of western metaphysics and western politi- cal thought, was also the originator, through Socrates, of modern western literature.
I use the word 'novelistic' in order to emphasise that the Socrates of the dialogues cannot be identical with the histori- cal Socrates. We know that there are several philosophical positions that Plato ascribes to Socrates, but that the histori- cal Socrates did not hold. Aristotle assures us that Socrates did not invent the Theory of Forms, which became a central concept in Platonic ontology. Socrates was interested in eval- uative concepts, such as 'good', 'brave' and 'holy'. But he probably had no general theory about how they came into being. Plato supplied the theory. In the field of human psy- chology also, Plato's Socrates departs from the teaching of the historical master. The Socrates of Plato's Republic argues that people do bad things because their reason is overwhelmed by desire - not because of ignorance.
Scholars have often hoped to use Aristotle's hints to winnow out the pure Socratic grain from the chaff of Plato's work. The enterprise proved particularly tempting in the twentieth century, when - as we shall see in the final chapter of this book - Plato's own politics seemed suspect. The genial, chatty, humane Socrates could be identified as the true founder of western culture, and rescued from the distortions of that horrid old communist-fascist-totalitarian, Plato.
The search for the historical Socrates in Plato's work usually relies on a speculative account of Plato's literary development. When Plato began writing - so the story goes - he was entirely under the influence of Socrates and, in his 'Early' dialogues, Plato's Socrates expresses only the views held by the historical Socrates, and does not mention the Theory of Forms. A few years later, Plato began to develop his own ideas, and mixed these up with those of Socrates: in the 'Middle' dialogues, like the Republic, Socrates is begin- ning to become a mouthpiece for Plato himself. And by the time of the 'Late' dialogues, such as the Laws, Plato had all but forgotten about the historical Socrates.
The story is tempting, and it might even be true, but we should notice some important ways in which its methodol- ogy is problematic.
The dating of Plato's dialogues is difficult. We often do not have external evidence for which texts are 'early' and which are 'late'. We can make groupings that have stylis- tic similarities, but we cannot prove that all the dialogues that seem similar must have been written at the same time: generic considerations might have influenced style. In these circumstances, scholars may be tempted into a cir- cular argument: we know that Dialogue Y is early because it represents the ideas of the historical Socrates; we know the ideas of the historical Socrates because we get them in Dialogue Y.
The testimony of Aristotle may well be unreliable; we know that he often gives innaccurate reports of the views of other philosophers. Moreover, even if we believe Aristotle, we have no evidence whatsoever for the idea that Plato only gradually developed the Theory of Forms and his other complex philosophical ideas - beyond the evidence of the dialogues themselves (which is inconclusive) and the pre- supposition that philosophers always take a long time to invent their big theories (which is, of course, untrue).
Whatever we think about the chronology of Plato's dia- logues, it is clear that none of them gives us unmediated access to the historical Socrates. More likely, Plato invented the character of 'Socrates' in a new way in every dialogue he wrote.