He has one more opportunity to speak to the men of Athens among whom he has lived and played his strange, ironic role. He takes full advantage of it, typically chastising his fellow citizens and telling them how they must live if they are to remain free, telling them to be honorable and good. He wishes them well and bids farewell in the famous, enigmatic words: “The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows”
The three speeches of Socrates at his trial, as recounted by Plato in the Apology, are among the most moving ever written. No one who has any feeling for the Greece that gave us the arts and sciences, or who has any love for philosophy, can avoid the catch in the throat as he reads them. But there is more. The Crito is almost more moving than the Apology. Crito is an old man Socrates’ age and a friend of long standing, who visits Socrates in prison. He tells Socrates his escape from prison has been arranged. It will be a simple matter for him to leave the city never to return and to sojourn with his friends in some pleasant spot for the rest of his life, discoursing on philosophy. But Socrates refuses to go. Not only would he find it difficult, perhaps impossible, to survive anywhere except in the city that has been his home throughout his life but, more important, what would the Athenians think of him if he were to flee and thereby show his contempt for the laws of his city? Would not their judgment of him at his trial be thus confirmed—that he was a bad man and deserved to be punished with death? Crito and the others attempt to persuade him, to no avail.
Finally, in the Phaedo, the last visit to Socrates by his friends, and their last conversation with him, is described by Plato. Not surprisingly the talk turns to death and to the great question of what comes after it. I do not fear, says Socrates, for either I shall cease to exist altogether or, since I have been a good man, I shall enjoy the rewards of virtue in the afterlife. “For no evil,” he says, “can come to a good man, in life or death.”
The conversation ends. The executioner appears with the poison that Socrates must drink. He does so with the simple grace that has always marked his actions, and lies down to die. It does not take very long.
The Trial and Death of Socrates as described by Plato in this series of dialogues presents few problems for modern readers. Consequently many students are assigned the story to read at an early age, an age when they are not yet fully able to comprehend its meaning. It is well enough that the reading of Plato should start here, but it shouldn’t stop here. Read the Symposium and the Republic, and then Meno and Protagoras and Thaeatetus, Sophist, and Statesman—read as much Plato as you can. But keep coming back to the Apology and the Crito. Here beats the heart and here shines the soul of one of the finest men who ever lived. He can be our teacher too, as he was the teacher of the Athenians many years ago.
ARISTOTLE
384–322 BCE
Poetics
Ethics
Aristotle was born in the summer of 384 BCE in the small Greek colony of Stagira, in Macedonia—hence he is often called the Stagirite. Coming from a family of wealthy physicians, the boy received an excellent education, with the emphasis on biology, botany, and medical procedures. In his early twenties, Aristotle’s father died, and he was sent to Athens to study and work at Plato’s Academy. There he remained for twenty years, as the greatest of Plato’s many pupils. But he was gathering his forces for the inevitable break. This occurred during the twelve years, starting in 348, that he spent away from Athens, partly because of strong anti-Macedonian feelings there, partly because of his intense curiosity about the world. These were happy years, during which he married, fathered two children, and attempted to teach philosophy to the heir of the Macedonian throne, the young man who would become Alexander the Great. Aristotle is said to have spanked his pupil more than once, but the boy did not learn much from him. Alexander did, however, later rebuild Stagira, after it had been destroyed in one of his father’s campaigns. The relationship between the great philosopher and the great conqueror is a matter of conjecture—but irresistible to speculate about nevertheless.
Aristotle returned to Athens in 335. Plato being dead, and perhaps disappointed at not being named to replace him as the head of the Academy, Aristotle established his own competing institution, the Lyceum. There he worked and taught until 323 when, on the death of Alexander, Aristotle, having lost his great protector, was charged with impiety. It appears that condemnation was certain. Aristotle, declaring (in reference to the judicial murder of Socrates in 399 B.C.) that he would not give the Athenians a second chance to sin against philosophy, went into voluntary exile at Chalcis, north of Athens. He died there the next year, in 322, at the age of sixty-two.
The challenge that had been thrown down by Plato in the Republic is taken up and answered by Aristotle in the Poetics, the short, precious work that has shaped our thinking about theater and drama for more than two thousand years. The pages—only twenty or so, but rich in content—of the Poetics are filled with profound insight, and reading them makes going to the theater or the cinema more pleasurable.
Plato—or Socrates—had made the claim that the free exercise of the artistic imagination is a danger to the state, since poets and dramatists (and moviemakers and TV producers) are likely to tell stories that make people feel dissatisfied with their lot in life. Plato therefore proposed banning poets from his ideal Republic—a proposal that has offended nearly all of his readers ever since. Socrates, the protagonist of the dialogue, had left a loophole, however, conceding that though he himself could see no good that poets might do to balance the disruption he knew they could produce, someone else might see some countervailing benefit in poets and therefore allow them to return to the state—where, Socrates also conceded, they could provide much pleasure.
The good that poets can do—especially dramatists, and among them especially the writers of tragedies—constitutes the main subject of the Poetics. There are certain emotions, Aristotle says, that are in all people and that are harmful to them—emotions likely to disturb the equanimity of their lives and impede their going about their business with pleasure and success. Among these emotions he particularly mentions pity and fear, but these apparently harmless emotions clearly imply (by his argument) envy and ambition, and the implication also extends to other strong emotions, like anger and overweening desire and pride.