John Chrysostom (c. ad 347-407), a Syrian Christian who became Bishop of Antioch, explains that the Christian martyrs were far superior to that most famous of pagan martyrs. The Christian martyrs would have found it easy to drink hemlock in their thousands, if only they had thought it right to do so: 'Had it been lawful when prosecution befell them to drink hemlock and depart, all had become more famous than he.' But the Christians were morally superior to Socrates, because they refused to kill themselves. John reverts to the possibility that Plato tried to suppress: Socrates' death may seem like suicide and, as such, an evasion of responsi- bility.
Somewhat inconsistently, John Chrysostom also argues that Socrates' death was inferior because it was forced upon him, not chosen willingly for the greater glory of God. Socrates drank hemlock when he had been condemned to death: he 'drank when he was not at liberty to drink or not to drink; but willing or against his will he must have undergone it: no effect surely of fortitude but of necessity, and nothing more.' Moreover, Socrates was old, at an age when he hardly had any life left to lose by dying: 'When he despised life he stated himself to be seventy years old; if this can be called despising.' Xenophon's account of Socrates' reasons to die becomes fuel for his Christian opponents.
But a few pagan voices still spoke up for the hemlock against the cross. In his youth, John Chrysostom had been taught by a pagan rhetorician, Libanius. Libanius retained a lifelong devotion to the old gods and the traditions of antiquity, even when friends, students and colleagues dropped away. Libanius wrote another Apology for Socrates. He was not, of course, hoping to save a man who had been dead for over 300 years. He was led to the subject by its contemporary relevance. Libanius' Apology can be read as a defence of paganism over the new religion. The emperor Julian ('the Apostate') had recently abandoned Christianity and gone over to pagan neoplatonism. Julian's mentor, Maximus of Ephesus, was a friend of Libanius. The Apology may be a veiled argument in favour of Maximus and of a pagan empire, against Christian detractors. The dying Socrates thus becomes an icon for everything that is best and noblest in the pagan tradition.
Libanius also wrote another shorter and stranger piece about Socrates, the Silence of Socrates. The premise of this little speech is that Critias has forbidden Socrates to speak at all after his sentence has been passed. It is thus as if the whole conversation reported in the Phaedo had been banned. The piece can plausibly be read as a defence of pagan, and specifically Platonic, learning, at a time of Christian-pagan controversy.
Libanius' speaker shows us why we need the Phaedo. Plato's dying Socrates represents all the beauty and truth of the pagan past, which is in danger of being lost forever. The speech ends with a plea to Socrates himself: 'to talk even after the hemlock, not to stop even when you die'. The works of the divine Plato have kept Socrates alive.
But the speech also has a melancholy tinge to it. In one of the most heartfelt passages, the speaker reminds his audience that, soon enough, Socrates will be dead, and silent for ever: 'All the haunts of beauty will be taken over by barbarism and silence ... You will indeed have your fill of the absence of Socrates. He will have so many silences.' Libanius mourns the fact that Plato's Socrates has been overshadowed by the pale Galilean.
the middle ages: socrates as suffering sage
During the Middle Ages, the death of Socrates continued to hold an important place in the cultural memory of Europe. But the dying Socrates was a less complex and controversial figure during this period than he had been in antiquity, and would become again.
Many writers and thinkers simply dismissed Socrates. Augustine called him a 'heathen idolator' - although he showed a certain amount of interest in Socratic irony and Socrates' courage in the face of death. In Book Eight of the City of God (written in the early fifth century ad), Augustine echoes Cicero's claim that Socrates brought down philoso- phy from heaven to earth. Augustine's Socrates is a spiritual leader, who hopes to purify the minds of his contemporaries 'from the depressing weight of sinful desires'. He was con- demned to death because ignorant men were angry at the revelation of their own folly.
The death of Socrates was most often encountered, in this period, not through Plato's Phaedo or Apology, but through the Latin writers who alluded to Socrates, especially Seneca and Cicero. This change in sources helps to explain why the Socrates of the Middle Ages often seems so much simpler than the Socrates of earlier or later periods.
Socrates' death became an instance of unjust martyr- dom, nobly and philosophically endured. Boethius, for
8. In this medieval illustration to Augustine's City of God, a melancholy and beardless Socrates, clad in a bright purple and green outfit, drinks the
hemlock alone in a spindly prison which seems to double as a study: he totters backwards from a desk piled with books. The two kneeling men who point towards him are presumably his accusers, Anytus and Meletus. In the foreground, two men and two women weep for the dying master. Perhaps they are the two disciples, Plato and Xenophon, along with Socrates' two wives, Myrto and Xanthippe.
example, a Christian philosopher of the sixth century ad, compared his own imprisonment and threatened execution to the sufferings of Socrates in prison. 'Philosophy', who appears to Boethius as a beautiful woman, reminds him of those whom she has aided in the past, including Socrates
9. Socrates said, when his nagging wife poured a bowl of slops over his head, 'Did I not say that her thunder would end in rain?' In some versions, the bowl contained urine. Socrates' patience with Xanthippe was supposed to illustrate a tag from Horace (Odes 1. 24): 'It is hard, but whatever it is wrong to change becomes easier by patience'. This engraving of the scene is by Otto van Veen (1612); the people in the boat in the background may represent foolish impatience.
and Plato: 'Socrates won by my aid the victory of an unjust death.'
In the later Middle Ages, Socrates was often seen as a kind of Christian, or at least a monotheist. In the thirteenth century, St Johannes Bonaventura says, 'All true philoso- phers worshipped one God. Which is also the reason why Socrates, because he forbade men to sacrifice to Apollo, was killed, since he worshipped one God.' In the Roman de la Rose (a poem composed in the thirteenth century), we are told that Reason bids us imitate Socrates, who died calmly, bidding his jailers not to swear by more than one God. Socrates' 'impiety', in the eyes of the pagan Athenians, is often taken as a sign that he was 'pious' by the standards of Christianity.
For many writers in this period Socrates became a rep- resentative sage - with no more specific characteristics than wisdom and a capacity to put up with bad treatment. In Dante's Inferno (composed in the early fourteenth century), Socrates appears as one of Aristotle's underlings, in 'the company of those who know'. Nothing more is said about him, and it is quite possible that Dante himself did not know all that much more.
The story of Xanthippe pouring the contents of a chamber pot over the head of Socrates was popular in the Middle Ages and into the early modern period. Socrates drenched by the slops is very clearly not Plato's Socrates, who is never put in such an undignified position. This Socrates is a fairly unindividuated representative of the life of the mind. The story shows how difficult it is to get on with your thinking in the midst of daily distractions and domestic life.