Justin wrote several important treatises defending Christianity to the Greek pagan community. He treats Christianity as the culmination of a tradition begun by the wise men of the Greeks, especially Socrates. 'Those who lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus and men like them.' Justin implies that the main distinctive feature of Jesus' teaching was that he managed to make people believe the message that Socrates and others had been teaching for hundreds of years, without effect. Socrates had already taught his disciples to reject Greek mythology and pagan religion, and exhorted people to get to know the unknown god through reason. Jesus, then, was exactly the same kind of teacher as Socrates; but he was more successful in getting his message across. Justin did not want his readers to abandon the good lessons of Platonism, but to incorporate them into the new Gospel.
Justin's sympathy for the pagan Socrates was fiercely attacked by Tertullian (c. ad 155-230), an influential Church leader who lived in North Africa. Like Justin, and like most Christians of this period, he was a convert from paganism. But whereas Justin stressed the continuity between Greek philosophy and the Christian religion, Tertullian insisted that there must be a radical break between the two.
He argued against the notion that Plato's dying Socrates could be compared either with Jesus or with the Christian martyrs. Two central issues set Christian deaths apart: faith and pain. These two topics recur repeatedly in later discus- sions of the parallels and differences between Jesus and Socrates.
Tertullian first guns down Socrates' lack of true faith even in the doctrine that he seems to espouse so wholeheartedly in the Phaedo: the immortality of the soul. Tertullian suggests that Socrates cannot possibly be taken seriously when he claims to believe that his soul will live for ever, in blessed immortality. How could a pagan possibly have such firm faith? Tertullian insinuates that Socrates' claim to believe in his own immortality was merely a pose, assumed in order to outwit his jailers, and make himself seem to have escaped their prison and their punishment: 'So all the wisdom of Socrates, at that moment, proceeded from the affectation of an assumed composure, rather than the firm conviction of ascertained truth. For by whom has truth ever been discov- ered without God?' Tertullian refuses to believe in the pos- sibility of pagans attaining access to divine wisdom or truth. The language he uses trades on the famous deceptiveness of Socrates, his eironeia. Socrates 'assumed' and 'affected' his confidence: in fact, as a pagan, he could have had no idea of the truth about death. All that calmness was faked for the occasion.
Secondly, Tertullian argues that Christian martyrdoms are always superior to the pagan death of Socrates, because they involve intense pain. Christian martyrdom
tastes death not out of a cup almost in the way of jollity, but it exhausts it in every kind of bitter cruelty, on gibbets and in holocausts. Meanwhile, in the still gloomier prison of the world among your Cebeses and Phaedos, in every investigation concerning man's soul, it directs its enquiry according to the rules of God.
Tertullian here appropriates the imagery of Plato's Phaedo and turns it around. It is the Christians, not the pagan Socrates, who are the real imprisoned philosophers, the ones who always practise how to die, even before their hideously painful deaths. It is they, not Socrates himself, who die in a truly 'Socratic' manner. Tertullian suggests that Socrates, who died so cheerfully and painlessly, knew nothing about death at all, because he failed to suffer.
The Socratic model of open enquiry with people of all different faiths - including Pythagoreans and foreign slaves, 'your Cebeses and Phaedos' - is converted into the Christian struggle to preach the Gospel, even in a world of persecu- tion. Socrates, Tertullian suggests, had it much too easy. It is as if Socrates did not properly die at all, because he seemed to enjoy himself so much.
Pagan opponents of Christianity attacked Jesus' shame- ful death on the Cross. They mocked Jesus for dying without any interesting last words: unlike Socrates, Jesus produced no final philosophical discourse about the immortality of the soul. One cited various noble pagan deaths, including that of Socrates, and asked, 'What saying equal to these did your god utter in his agony?' Any number of pagans had had a much more impressive death - including Socrates, Seneca and Cato.
But Christians argued that Jesus' death was all the more admirable for its relative silence. According to Origen (c. ad 182-251), who lived in Alexandria and Caesarea, 'The silence of Jesus under scourgings, and amidst all His suffer- ings, spoke more for His firmness and submission than all that was said by the Greeks when beset by calamity.'
Origen tried to argue on both sides of the fence, treating the death of Jesus as both like and utterly unlike the death of any pagan who came before him. On the one hand, Jesus, like Socrates, died an outcast, condemned by his city and country. Defenders of paganism can therefore not hold this against him. 'Jesus did indeed meet with a most sad death; but the same might be said of Socrates.'
But on the other hand, Jesus' death far outshone that of Socrates or any other pagan. Socrates was called 'wise', but only by a demonic, false pagan oracle: perhaps Apollo favoured him simply because he had bribed him with sac- rifices. Jesus, unlike Socrates, died with faith in the true revealed religion. He died in pain, suffering meekly and heroically, and he died in humble silence, not with the chatter so common to Greek philosophers. The theme of Socrates' failure to shut up - or, from a more sympathetic perspective, his ability to keep thinking and talking, even at the moment of death - recurs in discussions of the death of Socrates right up to the twentieth century.
The final words of Socrates - the cock for Asclepius - were an important piece of evidence for Christians trying to argue that paganism was in no way compatible with Christian rev- elation. Several writers in late antiquity believed that this last allusion to a pagan god undermined all that profound discussion of the immortality of the soul. Origen complains that Socrates and his friends 'pass from those great topics which God has revealed to them, and adopt mean and tri- fling thoughts, and offer a cock to Asclepius!' Another writer of the period comments that in his final desire to offer a sac- rifice to Asclepius, Socrates 'made good his statement' that he knew nothing. Writers of this period often invoked the idea that Socrates was 'the buffoon of Athens'.
By the fourth century ad, it had become much more dif- ficult to assimilate Socrates with Jesus. People began to take sides: one could admire Socrates or Jesus, but not both.
The fourth century was a period of extraordinarily rapid cultural and religious change in the West. Constantine - the first Christian Roman emperor - tried to ensure that Christians would be tolerated throughout his empire. In ad 313 his Edict of Milan outlawed the persecution of Christians. Less than 100 years later, in ad 380, Theodosius adopted Nicene Christianity as the official state religion of the Roman Empire. What had begun as a tiny Jewish-Palestinian cult had sud- denly become the world's most powerful ideology. The great eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon comments that 'the ruin of Paganism in the age of Theodosius is perhaps the only example of the total extirpation of any ancient and popular superstition, and may therefore deserve to be consid- ered as a singular event in the history of the human mind'.
But paganism did not die without a fight. Throughout the fourth and fifth centuries, pagans and Christians strug- gled to convert, convince or suppress each other. In doing so, both sides turned repeatedly to the connections and con- trasts between the death of Socrates and those of Christ and his followers.