Throughout the book I aim to evoke the diverse, multiple voices of those who have struggled with the dying Socrates. I imagine all these voices as participants in an ever-growing set of new Socratic dialogues or conversations which are not over yet.
SOCRATES' PHILOSOPHY
The charges against Socrates vary slightly in different sources but went roughly like this: 'Socrates is guilty because he does not respect the gods that the city respects. Instead, he introduces new deities. He is also guilty of corrupting the young.' The prosecution convinced the jury that Socrates' teachings threatened the religious traditions of the city and were morally damaging to the young.
But how exactly was Socrates' teaching incompatible with the religious traditions of the city? What were these 'new deities'? What made his teaching seem liable to corrupt young minds?
We can try to answer these questions only by turning to the accounts of his friends, pupils and enemies. We can never be certain that we have got it right. Socrates' charac- ter, his life and his ideas come to us filtered through other writers - above all, through Plato.
In this chapter, I try to reconstruct Socrates' teaching and consider why Socratic philosophy seemed so radical, and potentially dangerous, to his contemporaries. But Socratic philosophy is a highly controversial field among contem- porary academics. Several of the claims I make here for Socrates' beliefs about religion, ethics and politics, as well as my assessment of the relative value of the ancient sources, will not command universal agreement from specialists in the field. I refer interested readers to the bibliographical sug- gestions at the end of the book.
the first death of socrates: aristophanes' clouds
The most extensive surviving discussions of Socrates' philo- sophical teaching are by his pupils Plato and Xenophon. But the reader of either Plato or Xenophon may be left puzzled about a fundamental question: how Socrates' philosophy got him killed. Were the people of Athens really such fools as to kill their wisest citizen?
If we want to explain how Socrates' philosophy led to his death, we should begin with our earliest surviving descrip- tion of the philosopher, a text that was composed during his own lifetime. Aristophanes' comedy the Clouds includes the first account in literature not only of Socrates' teaching, but also - surprisingly - of Socrates' death. The comedian created a fictional 'death of Socrates' some twenty years before the trial. Plato later suggested that Aristophanes' play was an important factor in the actual condemnation of Socrates. The Clouds shows us, with shocking clarity, why an ordinary citizen of Athens might have thought Socrates needed to be killed.
It is a comedy about a middle-aged man called Strepsiades ('Mr Topsy-Turvy') who has run up enormous debts because of his aristocratic wife's thriftlessness and their young son's penchant for horses. Strepsiades decides that he should enrol as the pupil of a teacher of wisdom - a 'sophist' - in order to learn 'how to make the weaker argument appear the stronger' and hence be able to evade his creditors. The sophist he chooses is a boffin called Socrates, who keeps his 22 THE DEATH OF SOCRATES
head literally in the clouds. He rides aloft in a basket and talks to his pet deities, the Clouds, who appear in person, presumably clad in fluffy white costumes, as the Chorus of the play.
Strepsiades is happy to parrot Socrates' view that he should reject the old gods in favour of new-fangled deities like Whirlwind and Tongue and Vapour. But he proves too stupid and senile to do well at the absurd linguistic pedant- ries peddled by Socrates. Eventually the philosopher gives him up as a bad lot.
Strepsiades' son, Pheidippides, seems much more capable of being taught - and hence more subject to the corrupting influence of Socrates. He takes over his father's place as a student in the school. Socrates delegates the education of Pheidippides to the Worse and Better Arguments them- selves, who appear on stage to fight it out. Better Argument turns out to represent the old-fashioned Athenian values of an earlier generation, while Worse Argument articulates the more cutting-edge ideas brought into the city by the sophists. Better Argument insists on the importance of self- control, gymnastics, military training and cold showers - the foundations that helped the Athenians beat the Persians at the Battle of Marathon in 490 bc. Worse Argument favours rhetorical cleverness and mocks the idea that self-control could be valuable in itself: 'Have you ever seen anybody get any benefit from self-discipline?'
Strepsiades is emboldened by Socrates to do what he had been intending to do all along. He refuses to pay his creditors, fobbing them off with specious puns and nonsen- sical meteorology. Becoming like his own headstrong son, he treats the creditors as hard-driven horses: he clinches his case by setting his slave on them with a whip.
But his pleasure is short-lived, since Pheidippides imme- diately starts beating his father, and threatens to beat his mother too. At this, Strepsiades at last sees the error of his ways and realises that he should never have listened to Socrates or rejected the old gods. He climbs up on the roof of the school with a lighted torch and sets fire to it. One pupil protests in horror, 'You'll murder us, you'll murder us!' But Strepsiades replies, 'That's exactly what I want to do!' Socrates is presumably killed in the fire, along with his remaining pupils. Anyone who escapes the flames will be hacked to death by Strepsiades, who is armed with an axe.
Socrates' last words are a desperate cry: 'Ah no, poor me, it's terrible! I am going to suffocate!' Suffocation seems, within the play, an appropriate death for one who has relied so heavily on various forms of hot air. Socrates, who spouts windy nonsense, who worships the Air and the Clouds them- selves and who explains thunder as a cosmic fart, finally gets the death he deserves. Strepsiades shows no sympathy for his plight. Indeed, he urges his slave to attack the inhabit- ants of the school all the harder as they try to escape the flames: 'Pursue them! Hit them! Hurl your weapons at them! For all number of reasons, but especially because you know that they did wrong to the gods.'
From the perspective of many modern readers, the end of the Clouds makes for disturbing reading. It suggests that we should cheer - or, worse, laugh - when new ideas are suppressed. Those who challenge received wisdom deserve to be lynched.
Equally worrying is Aristophanes' failure to distinguish those aspects of Socratic philosophy that might be danger- ous from those that are merely silly. The play mixes up at least four distinct stereotypes about intellectuals. Socrates is a word-chopping academic, interested only in trivia such as (false) etymologies and how to measure the jump of a flea. He is also a materialist, atheist scientist who gives purely physical explanations for cosmic phenomena like rain, and who rejects the worship of Zeus. He lives a life of asceti- cism and semi-deliberate poverty, forcing his pupils to sleep in beds riddled with bugs (although he also seems to steal other people's cloaks, on occasion). Finally, he is a master of 'spin' who poses a serious threat to traditional morality. It is striking how persistent all these cliches remain in our own cultural imagination.
The Clouds suggests that there is a slippery slope from pedantic academic investigations and petty theft, through cosmology and scientific speculation, straight on to blas- phemy and moral corruption. The implication, then, is that no intellectual pursuit at all - even those that ostensibly have no ethical or social consequences - can be practised without threatening the fabric of society.
But although Socrates and his school are primarily responsible for the breakdown of moral values in Athens, Aristophanes seems to condemn traditionalists almost as fiercely. In the debate between the Better and Worse Arguments, the former is, if anything, more ridiculous than the latter, being obsessively interested in sex, with a particu- lar fondness for young boys' buttocks. The debate suggests that the 'good old days' of Athenian culture were not so great after all. Society has become less decorous than it used to be, and more heterosexual, but the old days were no better than the new.