But the similarities between David's work and the earlier paintings are as important as the differences. All focus on the foreground, in which Socrates is surrounded by only his male friends. None of these painters gives a central place to Xanthippe, as the unknown follower of Caravaggio had done. None of them suggests - as Dufresnoy's seventeenth- century painting had done - that there might have been other prisoners in that Athenian jail as well as Socrates. None of these paintings depicts any earlier moment in the story of Socrates' trial and death. None of these images is explicitly concerned with the confrontation between the individual and the state. Rather, all of them emphasise the intimate male Socratic circle - the closest ancient equivalent to the philosophes' salon.
This Enlightenment version of the death of Socrates is quite different from those of earlier ages. We can see the contrast most clearly by looking back to the Socrates of Montaigne, who was a particular hero of the French Enlightenment and whose questioning, secular, tolerant Socrates is the closest precursor. Montaigne saw Socrates as an ordinary hero and as an essentially solitary figure. In the Enlightenment, by contrast, Socrates' death is always seen as the climactic moment of his life - the moment that reveals his true charac- ter, or redeems all his faults.
Moreover, in this period the social role of Socrates - as teacher, leader and public intellectual - becomes more impor- tant than anything he actually said or did. Enormous empha- sis is placed on Socrates' relationship with his friends.
Taking Socrates as the most important ancient philoso- pher - above either Plato or Aristotle - was a bold, revision- ist move, in keeping with the self-perceived radicalism of the Enlightenment. One great advantage of Socrates as a philosophic model was that he wrote nothing, and could therefore be appropriated by later philosophers of all differ- ent strands of opinion. It was hard to read Aristotle except through scholasticism, or Plato unmediated by neoplaton- ism. A return to Socrates seemed to promise a fresh new beginning for philosophy and intellectual life.
Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau were all seen as versions of Socrates for the modern age. Like Socrates, they risked official disapproval and imprisonment, if not death, for their philosophical beliefs. Charles Palissot's satirical comedy attacking the philosophes was scorned by Voltaire as the work of a new Aristophanes.
But in comparison with later uses of the death of Socrates - in, for example, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty - the philos- ophes were not primarily interested in using this event to prompt political change. The life of the mind, as practised in the coffee shop, salon or Athenian prison, is represented as an alternative to the active life of politics. The point is clearly illustrated by Dr Johnson, who imagined the following thought experiment: 'Were Socrates and Charles the Twelfth of Sweden both present in any company, and Socrates to say, "Follow me and hear a lecture on philosophy"; and Charles, laying his hand on his sword, to say, "Follow me, and dethrone the Czar"; a man would be ashamed to follow Socrates. Sir, the impression is universal; yet it is strange.' Johnson, like many of his contemporaries, sees the phi- losophy of Socrates as unquestionably admirable, but also entirely useless.
In this chapter, I show how five very different European writers in this period imagined the death of Socrates:
Diderot, Rousseau, Nicholas Freret, Voltaire and Moses Mendelssohn. These writers produced at least five different versions of Socrates' death. But all of them share the assump- tions that the death of Socrates is the central event through which we can interpret his life and character; and that the dying Socrates is, or ought to be, a model for the contempo- rary intellectual in relation to his own social circle, friends and students. More surprisingly, all are anxious to distance themselves from this ancient model, even when they hold up the death of Socrates as an example of philosophic virtue. Even the most fervent proponents of Enlightenment ration- alism and Enlightenment notions of educational and politi- cal progress were surprisingly doubtful about whether they could really be friends with the dying Socrates.
the question of integrity: diderot and rousseau
Denis Diderot (1713-84), the polymath philosopher and founder of the famous Encyclopedia, was obsessed with the dying Socrates at a period when everybody was thinking about him. Diderot's Socrates is probably the closest literary model for the Socrates depicted by David.
Diderot dreamed of writing a drama about the death of Socrates, although he never actually did so; Voltaire beat him to it. But it would have been difficult for Diderot to put Socrates on stage, because he saw him almost as a saint. Certainly he was that least theatrical of characters, 'a person without passions', who lived and died for a rational ideal of virtue.
For Diderot, the dying Socrates was important because he provided a model of integrity or authenticity. Socrates suc- ceeded in creating a death that was in total accordance with the principles of his life. Diderot comes close to worship- ping his calmness and heroic rationality. Discussing Charles Michel-Ange Challe's (lost) painting Socrates Condemned by the Athenians to Drink the Hemlock, Diderot praises the art- ist's ability to capture the essence of the moment: Socrates' calmness, even in the face of death. 'C'est le plus sublime sang- froid.'
Diderot himself did not live up to his hero's model. When he was put in prison in Vincennes for impiety in 1749, he failed the Socratic test and chose life over imprisonment or death with dignity, renouncing his own earlier work as 'youthful folly'. This showed considerable chutzpah, since he had written his most controversial work (the Lettre sur les aveugles) only just before he was imprisoned.
But the dying Socrates remained the mark to which Diderot continued to look up, the measure of all that human- ity might be capable of. In the Encyclopedia entry on Socrates, Diderot exclaims, 'Ah, Socrates! I am not much like you; but all the same you make me weep with admiration and joy.' The intimacy of Diderot's engagement with Socrates is evident in his willingness to address him, indeed to tutoyer him, even as he points out his own distance from the ideal. Socrates was, for Diderot, an example of a truly authentic and integrated life and death.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), by contrast, thought Socrates' death sat uneasily with his life. Rousseau's Socrates is a man whose integrity is compromised by a willingness to conform to false social ideals.
The trial of Socrates on a charge of impiety seemed to find an obvious parallel in the troubles of Rousseau, whose Emile and The Social Contract were condemned as impious by the Geneva council in June 1762. The general groundswell of interest in the death of Socrates in the early i76os had a lot to
do with what was happening to Rousseau.
But Rousseau himself had extremely mixed feelings about Socrates. His favoured version of Socrates is an anti-philosophe, a non-philosophical philosopher - just as Rousseau hoped to be himself. In his First Discourse (Sur les Sciences et les Arts) of 1750, Rousseau celebrates Socrates for his ignorance and for his rejection of science. He admits that Socrates is a philosopher, but what makes his philosophy acceptable is his virtue, as proved by his death.
In the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar in Book 4 of Emile (1762), Rousseau seems in many ways to echo the stance of Socrates in the Apology. Like Plato's Socrates, the Savoyard Vicar is both humble and aggressive: he empha-