Plato’s Trial of Athens 9781474227247, 9781474227278, 9781474227261

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Plato’s Trial of Athens

Bloomsbury Studies in Ancient Philosophy Also available from Bloomsbury: Happiness and Greek Ethical Thought, M. Andrew Holowchak The Ideas of Socrates, Matthew S. Linck Plato’s Trial of Athens, Mark A. Ralkowski Plotinus the Platonist, David J. Yount The Poverty of Eros in Plato’s Symposium, Lorelle D. Lamascus The Socratic Method, Rebecca Bensen Cain

Plato’s Trial of Athens Mark A. Ralkowski

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright © Mark A. Ralkowski, 2019 Mark A. Ralkowski has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ralkowski, Mark, author. Title: Plato’s trial of Athens / by Mark A. Ralkowski. Description: London : Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Series: Bloomsbury studies in ancient philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018026762 (print) | LCCN 2018040539 (ebook) | ISBN 9781474227254 (ePub) | ISBN 9781474227261 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781474227247 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Plato. Dialogues. | Socrates–Trials, litigation, etc. | Athens (Greece)–Politics and government. Classification: LCC B395 (ebook) | LCC B395 .R3255 2018 (print) | DDC 184–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018026762 ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-2724-7 ePDF: 978-1-4742-2726-1 eBook: 978-1-4742-2725-4 Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Ancient Philosophy Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For my parents

Contents List of Abbreviations Introduction: Don’t Blame Socrates

viii 1

1

The Politics of Impiety

11

2

Why Is Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium?

57

3

Plato’s Other Apologies of Socrates

105

4

Plato’s Atlantis Myth, or: Redesigning the ‘Democracy Based on Triremes’

155

Conclusion: Plato’s Trial of Athens

203

Bibliography

211

Index

227

Abbreviations Aesch. Alc. Aeschines’ Alcibiades Alc. I Plato’s Alcibiades Andoc. Andocides’ On the Mysteries Ap. Plato’s Apology Arist. Ath. Pol. Aristotle’s Athenian Politeia Arist. Pol. Aristotle’s Politics Arist. Rhet. Aristotle’s Rhetoric Bus. Isocrates’ Busiris Chrm. Plato’s Charmides CI Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony Cri. Plato’s Crito Criti. Plato’s Critias Diod. Sic.

Diodorus Siculus’ Library of History

D.L.

Diogenes Laertius

Ep. Plato’s Epistles Euthd. Plato’s Euthydemus Euthphr. Plato’s Euthyphro Grg. Plato’s Gorgias Hdt. Herodotus Hom. Il Homer’s Iliad Hp. Ma. Plato’s Hippias Major Isoc. 1

Isocrates’ To Demonicus



List of Abbreviations

Isoc. 3

Isocrates’ Nicocles or the Cyprians

Isoc. 5

Isocrates’ To Philip

Isoc. 7

Isocrates’ Areopagiticus

Isoc. 8

Isocrates’ On the Peace

Isoc. 9

Isocrates’ Evagoras

Isoc. 12

Isocrates’ Panathenaicus

Isoc. 13

Isocrates’ Against the Sophists

Isoc. 15

Isocrates’ Antidosis

Isoc. 16

Isocrates’ On the Team of Horses

La. Plato’s Laches Lg. Plato’s Laws/Leges Lib. Ap. Libanius’ Apology Lys. 12

Lysias’ Against Eratosthenes

Men. Plato’s Meno Menex. Plato’s Menexenus Oratio 1

Aeschines Rhetor’s Against Timarchus

Phd. Plato’s Phaedo Phdr. Plato’s Phaedrus Philb. Plato’s Philebus Plut. Alc. Plutarch’s Alcibiades Plut. Lys. Plutarch’s Lysander Plut. Per. Plutarch’s Pericles Plut. Quaest. Conv. Plutarch’s Questiones Convivales Plut. Them. Plutarch’s Themistocles Prm. Plato’s Parmenides

ix

x

List of Abbreviations

Prt. Plato’s Protagoras Ps.-Xen. Const. Ath.

Ps. Xenophon’s Constitution of the Athenians

R. Plato’s Republic Symp. Plato’s Symposium Theag.

The Platonic Theages

Tht. Plato’s Theaetetus Thuc. Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War TI Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols Ti. Plato’s Timaeus Xen. Apol. Xenophon’s Apology Xen. Hell. Xenophon’s Hellenica Xen. Mem. Xenophon’s Memorabilia Xen. Oec. Xenophon’s Oecomomicus

Introduction: Don’t Blame Socrates

When the Athenians first heard that their navy had been defeated at Aegospotami, they thought they were going to die or be sold into slavery. They had been at war for over fifty-five years; they had slaughtered and enslaved Spartan allies, and they had shown no mercy to anyone (Thuc. 5.84–116). Now they were defenceless and vulnerable. Terror swept through the port, echoing five miles through the Long Walls up to the city centre. It was at night that the Paralos [the sacred Athenian trireme] arrived at Athens with tidings of the disaster, and a sound of wailing ran from Piraeus through the Long Walls to the city, one man passing on the news to another; and during that night no one slept, all mourning, not for the lost alone, but far more for their own selves, thinking that they would suffer such treatment as they had visited on the Melians . . . and many other Greek peoples. (Xen. Hell. 2.2.3)

Lysander, the triumphant Spartan general, blockaded Athens and planned to starve the city into submission. For months, the Athenians refused to surrender; they held on through the winter, even as many people in the city were dying from starvation. But by early spring, they had no choice. Their provisions had run out, and so they agreed to Sparta’s terms, opened the mouth of the grand harbour, and watched as Lysander’s fleet sailed into the Piraeus and tore down the city’s Long Walls ‘to the music of flute girls’. The Peloponnesians celebrated as if they had ushered in the beginning of freedom for Greece (Xen. Hell. 2.2.23). As the Athenians starved, Lysander convened a meeting of allies to decide the fate of the Athenian empire. The Thebans and Corinthians insisted that the city be destroyed and the Athenians sold off as slaves. They wanted revenge for decades of Athenian abuse, and it looked like their proposal had won the day – until later at a banquet an unknown man from Phocis spontaneously sang a famous chorus from Euripides’ tragedy Electra, and all of the delegates present were ‘moved to compassion’ (Plut. Lys. 15.3). How could they enslave the people who gave them

2

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their culture? How could they destroy the city that helped save all of Greece from the Persians (Xen. Hell. 2.2.20)? The Spartans decided to be merciful and offered peace on the condition that Athens tear down its fortifications and burn all but twelve of its ships. Under the command of Pericles, the navy made the Athenians rich and gave them unprecedented power. But in the end, it was their poetry that saved them from the abyss (Hale 2009: 243). This was the environment that drove the young Plato into politics. He was born the year Pericles died from the Great Plague, and he came of age as the empire fell thanks to the pleonexia and flawed political values of the Athenian democracy. In his Seventh Letter, Plato says the trial of Socrates changed his life a second time.1 Immediately after the war, he thought his relatives and associates in the Thirty might ‘lead the city out of the unjust life she had been living and establish her in the path of justice’, so he accepted their invitation to participate in the new regime.2 But as he watched them abuse their powers, he felt ‘they showed in a short time that the preceding constitution had been a precious thing’ (Ep. VII 324d–e). He couldn’t be involved with their ‘reign of injustice’ any longer, and so he withdrew just before the democracy was restored. When the democrats returned from exile and sought reconciliation instead of revenge, his interest in politics was temporarily rekindled, albeit with lowered expectations. He was impressed with their initial moderation and restraint. But then they charged Socrates with impiety, and Plato turned his back on Athenian public life once and for all (Ep. VII 325b–c). As he withdrew from the political scene, he spent time reflecting ‘upon what was happening, upon what kind of men were active in politics, and upon the state of [the city’s] laws and customs’ (Ep. VII 325c–d). He got a bit older and wiser, and eventually he realized how difficult it is to govern the affairs of any city correctly. As a young man, he had been ‘full of zeal for public life’, but these firsthand experiences with political dysfunction left him feeling ‘quite dizzy’. This was the true turning point in Plato’s life. His future led him to the discoveries of the Academy, not to the mob on the Pnyx or in the agora.3 He continued to think about how to fix the city’s political culture, but he ‘refrained from action, waiting for the proper time’ (Ep. VII 325c–26a). At last I came to the conclusion that all existing states are badly governed and the condition of their laws practically incurable, without some miraculous remedy and the assistance of fortune; and I was forced to say, in praise of philosophy, that from her height alone was it possible to discern what the nature of justice is, either in the state or in the individual. (Ep. VII 326a–b)

Introduction

3

These passages tell us a lot about the evolution of Plato’s political attitudes. He gave up his hopes of changing the constitution with direct political involvement, but he says he never stopped thinking about how the city’s laws and constitution might be improved. In dialogues like Alcibiades I, Gorgias, Symposium, and the Republic, it is clear that he also never stopped trying to understand the events of 399 BCE. What was it about Socrates’ relationship with the city that led to his condemnation? Was it something about Socrates in particular, or did the trial of Socrates reveal something essential about the relationship between the philosopher and the city? As Plato answered these questions, he also turned the tables on the men who accused Socrates. They were the guilty ones. Their politeia, and their heroes (men like Cimon, Miltiades, Themistocles, and Pericles), were the real corruptors of the youth. Socrates was the only true politician in Athens, the only one who tried to improve the souls of the Athenians, and the city killed him because of it. At the end of the war, Euripides saved the city from the abyss with his poetry; Plato put it on trial with his dialogues. The first step was to retell the story of the fifth century and exonerate his hero: the Athenians blamed Socrates for what they had done to themselves. Democrats blamed ‘the stab in the back’ administered by men like Alcibiades and Critias; conservatives blamed ‘the demagogues’, Cleon and his successors. In Plato’s view both explanations were superficial:  it was the creators of the Athenian archē who set their country on the wrong course, and thus made its ruin inevitable. (Dodds 1959: 364)

In the Gorgias, this message is bitter; in the Republic and beyond, Plato resigns himself to philosophy’s inevitable failure to persuade and effect change. By the time he was finished, what started off as an ‘accusation of Athens’ developed into a stoic reflection on the tragic limitations of philosophy. Only a god could save Athens from pleonexia and the hegemonic ideology of its rhetorical culture. The city was incorrigible – it was the cause of its own affliction, the source of its own political disorder, and without divine intervention it was likely to suffer the same fate as fifth-century Athens and mythical Atlantis.

I.  What this book is about Scholars continue to disagree about the motivations of Socrates’ jury and accusers. Some people think the formal charges tell the whole story:  the

4

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prosecutors indicted Socrates for impiety, and they had impiety in mind when they charged him with corrupting the youth. Others argue that there were undisclosed political reasons for the trial, and so the formal charges are incomplete.4 One reason for this confusion is the inconsistent testimony in our original sources. Some sources say that Socrates’ associates were incriminating for Socrates; others, including the depictions of the trial that we get from Plato and Xenophon, focus on the impiety charge. However, Xenophon makes matters even more confusing by writing in his Memorabilia that Socrates’ associates were relevant to the prosecutors. One of the aims of Plato’s Trial of Athens is to move beyond this impasse by looking to several of Plato’s dialogues, not just his Apology, for clues about what the trial was really about. When we look outside of the Apology, we find that Plato responded to the trial again and again in dialogues like the Symposium, Gorgias, and Republic – among others – because he had a theory about why Socrates was tried and executed, and that theory evolved into a fuller critique of Athenian polis culture – its rhetoric, politics, and values – that started in 399 BCE and stuck with Plato for most of his life (Ep. VII 325c–d). The point of Plato’s Trial of Athens is to argue that Plato used several dialogues (1) to transfer the blame for corrupting the youth from Socrates to the Athenians themselves, (2)  to provide a causal explanation of the city’s ‘material and spiritual ruin’5 by diagnosing it with a pleonectic ‘fever’, (3)  to recommend an alternative way of life that could heal the troubled polis culture, (4) to caution the city against rebuilding her empire, and (5) to reflect on the fraught relationship between politics and philosophy. Plato wanted to set the record straight and save Athens from repeating the worst mistakes of the Periclean era. He also wanted to come to terms with what the trial meant for the philosopher’s role in the city. These literary and philosophical goals make the most sense if the trial was politically motivated.

II.  Theoretical framework The argument that I will develop in Plato’s Trial of Athens rests on a few important, and not universally accepted, interpretive principles about Plato’s dialogues. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. In the worlds of Plato and Socrates studies, there aren’t many principles that are universally accepted, and the difficulties involved in the interpretation of Plato’s dialogues are very challenging (Rowe 2009: 13–24). The

Introduction

5

ancient author of the Anonymous Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy recognized this problem back in the sixth century: Plato . . . shortly before his death, had a dream of himself as a swan, darting from tree to tree and causing great trouble to the fowlers, who were unable to catch him. When Simmias the Socratic heard this dream, he explained that all men would endeavour to grasp Plato’s meaning, none, however, would succeed, but each would interpret him according to his own views, whether in a metaphysical or physical or any other sense. (Westerink 1962: 3)

When we read Plato, the first step, whether we acknowledge it or not, is to begin with a set of assumptions about how to read his dialogues. Whichever assumptions we choose, others get eclipsed, and thus so do other ways of thinking about the dialogues.6 There isn’t space to justify the principles underpinning this book, but I do want to lay them out simply for the sake of full disclosure. First, Plato was not Socrates’ biographer, and it is a mistake to treat any one of his dialogues as a complete and accurate representation of what the historical Socrates believed or said on any particular occasion, including the day of his trial or death (Kahn 1988: 35 and 1992: 239; cf. Prior 1997, 2001,2006).7 Plato’s interest in Socrates was philosophical, not historical.8 He used Socrates to depict the nature of the philosophical life, not to portray the views of the historical Socrates. This principle has a corollary. While Plato didn’t aim objectively to preserve and communicate the beliefs of the historical Socrates, he did use the figure of Socrates to comment on history.9 Plato set his [dialogues] against the background of the larger history of Athens, the city in which Socrates spent his life, whose wars he fought, whose festivals he celebrated, whose young he counselled, whose history and politics he measured, and whose laws he obeyed. (Lampert 2010: 2)

These facts  – the settings and the character traits of Socrates’ interlocutors  – matter to our interpretation of the dialogues. Plato wrote dramatic philosophical literature, not treatises, and the drama of his dialogues situates Socrates’ discussions in carefully chosen times and places that contribute to their meanings (Clay 2000: 3–23; cf. Blondell 2002: 1–52).10 My third principle, which I adopt from Bill Prior, is that the early and middle dialogues form a unified literary and philosophical project whose goal is to depict and defend philosophy, understood as a way of life that is embodied by Socrates, and to condemn the lives (e.g. in conventional politics) and individuals with which it competed. All of these

6

Plato’s Trial of Athens

dialogues, not just the ‘middle’ and ‘late’ ones, are Platonic (Prior 1997: 115–18, 2006: 138). If Plato was not a historian or a biographer, and if the early and middle dialogues are parts of a unified literary and philosophical project, we are wrong to treat the Apology as if it were a complete and accurate depiction of the actual events at Socrates’ trial. We are equally mistaken to ignore Plato’s other dialogues as we attempt to reconstruct his views about what happened in 399 BCE. If Plato used his dialogues to comment on history, we cannot treat any of them as uncomplicated, straightforward historical sources; we would have to acknowledge that they contained a mixture of truth and fiction, and concede that we don’t know which is which. However, we could use them to understand how Plato saw the ‘politics’ of Socrates’ philosophical life, which involved ‘battling’ his fellow Athenians and trying to ‘cure’ them with therapeutic persuasion (Grg. 513c–d), all of which made him unpopular.11 In the Gorgias and the Republic, Plato suggests that Socrates’ trial was motivated by the city’s intolerance or misunderstanding of Socrates’ gadfly ethics. He also responds to the corruption charges by transferring the blame from Socrates to the city, and he continues to develop his views about the true causes of the city’s corruption in his myth of Atlantis, and even in parts of the Laws. One possibility is that none of this is relevant to the actual trial; it is just a response to Polycrates and the debates he initiated in the fourth century, long after the real facts of Socrates’ trial had been obscured or forgotten. But this seems unlikely, given the passion and literary genius behind these dialogues. It also requires that we treat the Apology as an authoritative and complete historical account of the trial whose contents are incompatible with and override the views expressed in these other dialogues, which is unnecessary. If we look at the Apology as one part of a larger literary and philosophical project, it is insignificant that Plato doesn’t include any references to Socrates’ associates in it. He makes plenty of such references, both direct and indirect, in other dialogues, where we can think of him as completing his ‘apology of Socrates’ and telling the fuller story. In Chapters 2 and 3, I discuss the Gorgias, Republic, Alcibiades I, and Symposium as Plato’s ‘other apologies’. Whether he was blaming the city, diagnosing it with an affliction, rewriting its ancient history, or using his portrait of Socrates to recommend the philosophical life, Plato was in constant dialogue with his readers about Socrates’ trial. This was not his only aim in any of his dialogues, but it was often a central concern because of its importance to him personally, its relevance to his city’s future in the fourth century, and its significance for understanding the relationship between

Introduction

7

politics and philosophy. By the time Plato wrote the Timaeus and Critias, the trial of Socrates had receded far into the background of his dialogues, but it still shaped some of his philosophical concerns. He developed his Atlantis myth to humble and inspire his fellow citizens, just as Socrates had seduced men like Alcibiades in the streets of Athens decades earlier, because he could see history repeating itself. Would Athens repeat her worst mistakes of the fifth century and squander the potential of another generation, or could the city be persuaded to practice a new form of politics? Socrates asked the young men of Athens to choose between two lives; Plato invited the Athenians to choose between two futures. If there was any hope for a second Athenian century, it would require redefining the Athenian way of life, since it was the old way of life that led to the collapse of the empire in 404 BCE, and to the city’s greatest mistake in 399 BCE. As Dodds says in an unpublished Oxford lecture from 1938, ‘what made [Plato] into a philosopher was his hatred of the past – his stored up memories of folly and injustice – and his fear of a future that should be like the past.’12

Notes I am very grateful to Bill Prior and John Bussanich for the guidance they have given me over many years. Many others have influenced my thinking in this book, at conferences, in the hallways of philosophy departments, and through feedback on various parts of book chapters. But I am particularly grateful to my students at George Washington University and the University of New Mexico. Over the years, in many different classes, they have influenced the way I think about everything in Plato’s dialogues, and they have helped me confirm the wisdom in Plato’s philosophy of education – that the best insights are the product of dialogue. 1 The authenticity of the Seventh Letter was taken for granted until modern times. Among others, Cicero, Plutarch, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Aristophanes of Byzantium (third century BCE), and Thrasyllus (first century BCE) each thought Plato wrote it (Morrow 1962: 5–6) – but today the letter’s authenticity is a live issue. The first objections appear in the eighteenth century, and the modern debate begins with Karsten and Grote in the nineteenth century; see Hackforth (1913: 1–35, 84–131) and Sayre (1995: xviii–xix). Morrow (1962: 3–16, 44–60) and Edelstein (1966: 1–15, 56–69) present classic cases for and against authenticity, respectively. For additional discussions of the letter’s authenticity, see Ledger (1989: 148–51), Brunt (1993: 313–25), Sayre (1995: xviii–xxiii), Kahn (1996: 48 n. 22), and Irwin

8

2

3

4 5

6

7

Plato’s Trial of Athens (2009). Brunt argues for ‘accepting the evidence of the seventh letter, even if it is not Plato’s own work, as substantially true, so far as it concerns Plato himself ’ (1993: 317). Nails (2009: 3) agrees, pointing out that the letter’s historical accuracy and stylistic similarities with Laws and Epinomis confirm that, at the very least, it was written by ‘an intimate of the philosopher with first-hand knowledge of the events reported’. On the other hand, Irwin (2009: 158) argues that the letter is unreliable as a source about Plato’s life and thought, even if he wrote it. The most recent, and now definitive, argument against authenticity is in Burnyeat and Frede (2015). Burnyeat thinks the author was ‘a distinctive, original, and interesting creative mind’, who was also ‘a philosophical incompetent’. He describes the letter as a whole as ‘a work of imaginative literature . . . a tragedy of Philosophy’s attempt to change the world, not merely to understand it’ (Burnyeat and Frede 2015: 135– 8). For a critical review of Burnyeat and Frede (2015), see Kahn (2015). Kahn (2015) thinks the letter’s authenticity is made more likely by the fact that it mentions Plato’s prolonged political ambition and initial support of the Thirty. Other authors would have found this information damaging to Plato’s reputation, and so would not have included it in a letter whose purpose was to defend Plato’s reputation. One got to the Academy by leaving the protective walls of the city and travelling along the Sacred Way toward Eleusis. Plato’s academic work was done halfway between the polis and the site of the Eleusinian mysteries, which seems apt for a philosopher whose philosophical vision was always split between metaphysical truth and political imperatives. I explain the complexities of this debate in Chapter 1. I borrow this language from Dodds (1959: 33), and I share many of his views about the key philosophical ideas in the Grg. But I reconstruct Plato’s causal theory about the ‘spiritual and material ruin’ differently. See Chapters 3 and 4. See Tigerstedt (1977) for an overview of the long and complicated history of Plato interpretation. As he observes, Plato has been read as a sceptic and as a dogmatist, as a system-builder and as an unsystematic questioner, as a ‘fervid mystic’ and as a ‘cool dialectician’, as a champion of human freedom and as a ‘sinister herald of the totalitarian state’. Some have looked for his ideas in his writings, available to every careful reader, while others have located them ‘hidden behind the work, a secret doctrine, to be extracted painfully from hints in him and other writers’ (Tigerstedt 1977: 13). See Vlastos (1971: 3) for a classic statement of the ‘historicist’ view. He argues that the Ap. is a ‘reliable recreation of the thought and character of the man Plato knew so well’, and of the defence speech he gave during his trial. On this view, Athens was ‘so gregarious’ and Socrates was such ‘a notorious public character’ that when Plato wrote the Ap., he would have expected his audience to be familiar with ‘the

Introduction

8 9 10

11

12

9

historical original’. And since his purpose was ‘to clear his master’s name and indict his judges’, it wouldn’t have made sense to make Socrates ‘talk out of character’ and ‘point to a figment of his own imagining’. This argument is speculative about when Plato wrote the Ap., his aims in writing it, and his intended audience. See Samaras (2007) for a refutation of Vlastos on all three points. For an excellent discussion of the long history and many interpretative difficulties involved with this complicated ‘Socratic Problem’, see Waterfield (2013). A few of the best sources on this issue are Saxonhouse (1983), Yunis (1996), Ober (1998), and Lampert (2010). For additional examples of the ‘literary’ approach to Plato’s dialogues, see Friedlander (1958), Tigerstedt (1977), Strauss (1987), Griswold (1988), Arieti (1991), Halperin (1992), Press (1993 and 2000), Rutherford (1995), Hyland (1995, 2004, 2008), Gonzalez (1995, 1998, 2009), Kahn (1996), Gribble (1999), Gordon (1999), Brann (2004), Ralkowski (2009), Rosen (1968, 2005, 2018), Zuckert (2009), and Lampert (2010). Some readers might object that my argument is based on a non-sequitur because it aims to draw conclusions about the historical Socrates from facts about Plato’s ‘literary use’ of him in his dramatic dialogues. Nick Smith raised this objection when he read the proposal for this book. He also argued that my argument ‘indicted’ Plato of ‘not telling the whole truth about the trial’ in his Ap. Both of these objections assume that the Ap. is a complete and accurate representation of the trial, and they assume further that the Ap. reports facts about the historical Socrates, while Plato’s other dialogues contain only literary uses of him. Without an additional outside source that can reliably distinguish fact from fiction in Plato’s dialogues, these assumptions are only articles of faith. The title of the lecture is ‘The Social Background of Athenian Philosophy’; it is accessible at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and it is quoted in Todd (2002: 55).

1

The Politics of Impiety

In his Twilight of the Idols (1889), Nietzsche suggests that Socrates wanted to die. That is what his last words – ‘Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius’ (Phd. 118a) – imply. Only a nihilist, only someone unhealthy, ‘tottery, decadent, late’, could equate death with healing and life with sickness. ‘Even Socrates was tired of [life]’ (Nietzsche 1977: 473).1 Socrates wanted to die: not Athens, but he himself chose the hemlock; he forced Athens to sentence him. ‘Socrates is no physician’, he said softly to himself; ‘here death alone is the physician. Socrates himself has only been sick a long time.’ (Nietzsche 1977: 479)

Nietzsche probably got this idea from reading Xenophon, who tells us that Socrates was boastful during his defense speech because he preferred ‘death to extending [his] life for a life worse than death’ (Apol. 9). He was trying to entice the jury to convict him.2 The alternative was old age, which just meant the general decline of his capacities and enjoyment of life (Apol. 6). Even his divinity wanted to protect him from that (Apol. 5).3 Waterfield (2009:  203–4) recently offered a new interpretation of Socrates’ dying words. ‘Playing on the close link between pharmakos and pharmakon, ‘scapegoat’ and ‘cure’, Socrates saw himself as healing the city’s ills by his voluntary death’. The city needed to make amends with the gods, whom the Athenians believed they had offended. How else could they make sense of their crushing loss to the Spartans, the loss of their proud empire and navy, the horrors of the Great Plague, and ongoing civil war and social crisis? There was something rotten in Athens, a sort of ‘pernicious vapor’ that could spread from one individual and infect the entire community.4 The execution of Socrates, who had come to embody everything that was wrong in Athenian culture – natural philosophy, sophistry, moral relativism, and questionable politics  – gave the Athenians an opportunity to purify their community: all of the city’s evils could

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be loaded onto Socrates the scapegoat and sent away, curing Athens of all its ills. Socrates understood and accepted this role (Waterfield 2009: 203). He was a sort of pre-Christian saviour who lived according to his principles and voluntarily died for Athens’ sins. Asclepius deserved a sacrifice as thanks in advance for restoring the city to health. These are fascinating and provocative ideas. But even if one of them were true, we would not have a complete answer to the question about why Socrates was tried and convicted, which asks about how Socrates was perceived, what he believed, and what could have motivated his jurors and accusers.5 These are historical questions about Athenian culture and religion, and philosophical questions about Socrates’ religious and political values. Even if Socrates wanted to die, either to cure Athens or to escape from this world to a more perfect one, we would still want to know how to account for his trial – why the accusers and jurors felt it important to execute an elderly man – which remains a mystery for many reasons. In 399 BCE, Socrates was brought to trial for impiety. Meletus, the accuser who wrote the indictment, clarified this charge with three specifications: Socrates was guilty of failing to recognize the city’s gods; he invented new spiritual beings, and he corrupted the youth.6 All three of these claims were part of the impiety charge, which was the punishable offense under Athenian law.7 At the conclusion of the trial, during which Socrates may or may not have defended himself,8 the jury convicted Socrates and sentenced him to death. Today scholars continue to disagree about the motivations of the jury and the prosecution. Did they mean what they said when they charged Socrates with impiety, and did they have impiety in mind when they charged him with corrupting the youth? Or were there political reasons for the trial that aren’t reflected in the formal charges?

I.  The standard positions and the difficulty Scholars typically take one of two general approaches in answering this ‘motivation question’. Some argue that the formal charges are all we need to make sense of why Socrates was brought to trial and convicted. Political considerations may have been relevant – we have no way of knowing for sure, especially as we examine the evidence – but they are superfluous. We can account for the trial without speculating about political grievances. These scholars, those who favour ‘the religious interpretation’, divide into two groups: those who think Socrates was guilty of impiety (Burnyeat 2002; Connor 1991; McPherran 2002), and those



The Politics of Impiety

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who think he was innocent.9 The main point of contention between these rival positions is whether Socrates’ religious views and practices were unconventional enough to warrant a trial and conviction for impiety (Brickhouse and Smith 2002: 8). The alternative approach to answering the motivation question, that taken by those who favour ‘the political interpretation’, denies that the impiety charge was the real reason for Socrates’ trial, and argues that Socrates was prosecuted because he was, or was perceived to be, a threat to the democracy.10 The problem here is vexed, and not merely because it involves questions about the irrecoverable psychological states of Socrates’ prosecutors (about whom we know very little)11 and jurors (about whom we know almost nothing).12 In a sense, this question encapsulates the entirety of the Socratic Problem. We cannot know whether Socrates was on trial for subversion,13 or for some other political reason, if we do not know what his politics were or how they were perceived. And we cannot know whether the impiety charge was justified, or whether it is sufficient for making sense of Socrates’ trial, without knowing what his religious beliefs were. The motivation question, in other words, has both historical and philosophical aspects. On the one hand, there are perhaps unanswerable historical questions about what Socrates believed and how he was perceived by his countrymen. And on the other hand, there are philosophical questions about how we ought to understand Socrates’ philosophy as it is reported in the writings of Plato and Xenophon, assuming it is reported there at all.

II.  The Amnesty Many scholars have dismissed the political interpretation out of hand because they have considered it incompatible with the Amnesty that was passed in 403,14 just after the fall of the Thirty and the end of the brutal civil war in Athens.15 Even some proponents of the political interpretation have thought the provisions of the Amnesty made it illegal just to mention political grievances during post-war trials – for example, this is how one might explain why Socrates does not discuss politics in either Plato’s or Xenophon’s account of the trial. However, if Brickhouse and Smith are correct, under Athenian law at the time there was a recognized difference between (1) what you could charge a person with, and (2)  what you could say during his trial (1989:  73–4). The Amnesty was not a complete forgiveness of crimes, and (so far as we know) it did not explicitly restrict what people said during the prosecution of defendants like Socrates. It only restricted the grounds on which people could be charged and

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convicted. If this is right, Socrates’ accusers were not allowed to charge him with political crimes alleged to have occurred prior to the Amnesty, but they were free to bring up their allegations as often as they wished once the trial was underway (Brickhouse and Smith 1994: 174).16 There are two kinds of evidence for this position:  (1) the details of the Amnesty, which are inconclusive, and (2) the speeches associated with other trials from the same time period, which strongly suggest that prosecutors could speak freely about political grievances once a trial began. The reconciliation agreement of 403 BCE made it illegal to charge people with political crimes (other than murder by one’s own hands, which remained prosecutable under the Amnesty agreement) committed before17 or during the reign of the Thirty, or for violating any of the laws that the Amnesty nullified.18 It had two important provisions. The first was a matter of distributive justice, which guaranteed that everyone who lost his property under the Thirty got it back or received something of comparable value. The second was a rule against reprisals, which governed the trials the oligarchs had to submit to as a precondition for staying in Athens:  the verdicts of those trials were final  – there could be no reprisals. The ‘no reprisals’ provision is the part of the reconciliation agreement that many scholars have interpreted as a blanket Amnesty, and some of the ancient evidence appears to support their interpretation. As Aristotle says in his Athenian Constitution, there was ‘a universal Amnesty for past events, covering everybody except the Thirty, the Ten, the Eleven, and those that have been governors of Peiraeus, and that these also be covered by the Amnesty if they render account’ (Arist. Ath. Pol. 39.6). Likewise, Andocides speaks very generally of the Amnesty’s application: the returning democrats, he says, ‘decided to let go of the past, and counted the safety of the city as more important than personal grievances, and so decreed not to recall past misdeeds committed by either side’ (Andoc. 1.81). These comments give us some reason to think the Amnesty established a very general rule against stirring up political controversies of any kind, not just a legal restriction on the drafting of formal charges. However, if Carawan (2002) and Waterfield (2009) are correct, it is a mistake to consider these statements as evidence of a blanket Amnesty, because the ‘no reprisals’ rule applied only to the two provisions in the reconciliation agreement:  ‘the term used [mē mnēsikakein] is common in ancient Athenian contract law and it always refers to the specific terms of a specific agreement’ (Waterfield 2009: 134). As Carawan (2002: 5) develops this point, ‘in treaties of reconciliation the pledge mē mnēsikakein is not in itself a bar against prosecuting



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partisan crimes in the first instance, but a rule against further retribution in matters that have been settled once and for all’. The Amnesty guarded against reprisals on post-war property agreements and the verdicts handed down during the post-war trials of the Thirty and their henchmen (Ostwald 1986:  501–2). But that was the extent of the Amnesty’s forgiveness. It did not protect Socrates or anyone else against having his relationships with members of the Thirty discussed during his trial. His accusers were free to use this information however they wished in their efforts to persuade the jury. We should note that Waterfield and Carawan could be mistaken about the application of the ‘no reprisals’ provision in the reconciliation agreement without other scholars being mistaken about the legal restrictions that Socrates’ accusers faced as they constructed and presented their case. These are logically independent points. As Brickhouse and Smith (1989:  74) have argued, ‘there was no provision in the Amnesty that would prevent Meletus et al. from making unmistakable references to Socrates’ associations with Alcibiades or Critias, through obvious insinuation, or even quite explicitly, by way of character assassination’. Juries were supposed to make their judgements on legal grounds alone, but it appears that there were no rules governing what people did or did not say during post-war trials – only a rule that restricted how one framed the legal matters in an indictment. There is some reason to think the Amnesty was more restrictive than Brickhouse and Smith suggest, and that it would have prevented Socrates’ accusers from mentioning his relationships with the Thirty at all. According to Aristotle, Archinus – who diligently supported the Amnesty and even created the procedure of paragraphē to protect against unfair trials – persuaded the Council of five hundred citizens to execute someone for violating the Amnesty: ‘When somebody began to stir up grudges against the returned citizens, he arraigned him before the Council and persuaded it to execute him without trial, saying that this was the moment for them to show if they wished to save the democracy and keep their oaths’ (Arist. Ath. Pol. 40.2). This sounds like evidence against the Brickhouse and Smith position, but in fact it does not settle the matter. Archinus and the Council may have been punishing someone for crafting a political indictment, or they may have been responding to someone who acted inappropriately simply by making politics relevant, through rhetoric instead of the law, during a post-war trial (or even outside of the courts). Aristotle does not tell us enough to know either way.19 On the other hand, there is independent evidence for thinking the Amnesty did not restrict Socrates’ accusers from expressing political grievances. Several

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speeches associated with and probably delivered at other trials from the same time period suggest that litigants enjoyed a great deal of rhetorical freedom. This is clearest in Lysias’ speeches (and at least one of Isocrates’), many of which would have violated the Amnesty if it had prohibited all references to political grievances during post-war trials.20 Lysias’ Against Eratosthenes, for example, attacks a member of the Thirty for being part of the tyranny and for abusing his power to murder the accuser’s brother. His Against Agoratus accuses Agoratus of crimes he committed before and during the reign of the Thirty, and it refers to another case that did so as well. His Defense Against the Charge of Subverting the Democracy defends a man for serving the Thirty as a knight. Defense of Mantitheus does the same for Mantitheus. His In Defense of Eryximachus, Who Remained in the City defends Eryximachus against the general resentment of men who stayed in Athens while the democrats were in exile. Isocrates’ Against Euthynus accuses a man of crimes he committed during the reign of the Thirty, and there may have been several more speeches that made similar accusations.21 Either we have misunderstood the meaning of the reconciliation agreement, or if the Amnesty really was supposed to protect oligarchs from having political grievances raised during their trials, it was not effective in the least. The political interpretation, then, cannot be ruled out because of the Amnesty. Some scholars have thought otherwise, but only because they have exaggerated the significance of the reconciliation agreement, which prevented Socrates’ accusers from charging him with a political crime, but not from slandering his character or eliciting an emotional response from his jury in order to convict him. His accusers, as we have seen, were legally permitted to talk about Critias and Alcibiades, as well as Socrates’ many other relationships with oligarchs.

III.  Ancient testimony It is one thing to say the political interpretation cannot be ruled out, and another to make a positive case for it. What evidence do we have that there was a political dimension to Socrates’ trial? Unfortunately, in addition to our various other challenges, we have a source problem. In fact, the lion’s share of confusion on this topic is caused by the inconsistent testimony found in our original sources. The most important and earliest accounts of the trial, Plato’s Apology and Xenophon’s Apology, focus almost exclusively on the charge of impiety, which was the lynchpin of the formal charges brought against Socrates.



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This is significant for our assessment of the political interpretation’s plausibility, because if there had been a political motive for the trial, neither Plato’s nor Xenophon’s Socrates spends much time responding to it directly. We can squeeze political significance out of Socrates’ remarks in both documents, but it would be an exaggeration to say that Socrates concentrates on political issues in either one of them (Brickhouse and Smith 2002: 7). These considerations seem to cast doubt on the political interpretation. If it is true that Socrates’ trial was politically charged, Plato and Xenophon either obscure the most important issues present at the trial (assuming their purposes were historical and not philosophical or political or something else that might explain the omission), or they show that Socrates avoided them (Brickhouse and Smith 2002: 7). But neither of those possibilities seems likely, given the extent to which both Plato and Xenophon present us with a Socrates who was often critical of the Athenian democracy, its institutions, and its people.22 On the other hand, however, many of our other ancient sources – Isocrates, Aeschines Rhetor, Aeschines of Sphettus, Libanius, and Xenophon in his Memorabilia  – tell us the prosecution was primarily or partly motivated by political reasons, not religious ones. The relevant testimony from these sources that survives is rather thin, but the most important passages, quoted below, provide us with a very different perception of Socrates’ trial. Xenophon (430–356 BCE): 1. ‘But, by god’, the accuser said, ‘he made his companions despise the established laws, saying that it was foolish to establish the rulers of the city by lot, and that no one would want to make use of a captain chosen by lot, or a builder, or a flute-player, or any other arts, any of which do far less damage when their practitioners make a mistake than do those who make a mistake about affairs of the city’. And such arguments, the accuser said, raised up young men to look down on the established constitution, and made them violent. (Xen. Mem. 1.2.9) 2. ‘But’, the accuser added, ‘Critias and Alcibiades became intimates of Socrates, and the two of them did the city the most grievous wrongs. Critias became the biggest thief and the most violent and murderous of all those in the Oligarchy, while Alcibiades became, for his part, the most irresponsible and high-handed and violent of all those in the democracy’. (Mem. 1.2.12) 3. It is said that, seeing Anytus pass by, Socrates said, ‘This man is proud, as if he had accomplished something great and honorable by killing me. Because seeing that he was thought by the city to be worthy of great things, I said that he should not educate his son in the ox-hide trade. . .I was in the company

18

Plato’s Trial of Athens of Anytus’ son for a short time, and he does not seem to me to have a weak soul, so I say he will not remain in the servile occupation that his father has prepared for him. But, on account of not having any serious guardian, he will fall into some shameful desire and advance further into wickedness.’ (Apol. 29)23 Aeschines Rhetor (390–320 BCE):  Men of Athens, then you killed Socrates, because it appeared that he educated Critias, one of the Thirty who destroyed the democracy. (Oratio 1.173) Aeschines of Sphettus (ca. 425–350 BCE):  I wonder how one ought to deal with the fact that Alcibiades and Critias were the associates of Socrates, against whom the many and the upper classes made such strong accusations. It is hard to imagine a more pernicious person than Critias, who stood out among the Thirty, the most wicked of the Greeks. People say that these men ought not be used as evidence that Socrates corrupted the youth, nor should their sins be used in any way whatsoever with respect to Socrates, who does not deny carrying on conversations with the young. (Frag. 1K)24 Isocrates (436–338 BCE): So, when you were accusing Socrates, as if you were trying to praise him, you gave him Alcibiades as a pupil, and although no one saw him being educated by [Socrates], all would agree that he was better by far than the others [who were around Socrates]. (Bus. 5) Libanius (314–393 CE):  In accusing Socrates of being someone who teaches others how to do evil and saying that he corrupts your young, Anytus cannot recall any examples except Alcibiades and Critias. (Lib. Ap. 136–41)

Each of these authors suggests, in one way or another, that Socrates’ evil associates, Athens’ most hated criminals, were connected in a meaningful way to Socrates’ trial. At the very least, they were part of the discussion, part of people’s deliberations. Xenophon and Aeschines Rhetor make the strongest claims, suggesting that the Athenians executed Socrates because of his pedagogical relationships with Critias and Alcibiades. The first passage from Xenophon’s Memorabilia is probably the strongest of all, and potentially the most revealing. It suggests, without any qualifications, that Socrates was perceived to be an enemy of the city who corrupted the youth by influencing them to despise and undermine the democracy. This is not Xenophon’s personal opinion, but rather that of ‘the accuser’, whose identity is undisclosed. Looking at the same testimony and the same historical evidence (in the conclusion I refer to this as ‘the conventional evidence’), different scholars have arrived at very different conclusions. Even scholars who share the same general



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interpretive approach to the trial will sometimes disagree about how to weigh the various pieces of evidence. This is certainly true among those who defend the political interpretation, which has both ‘extreme’ and ‘moderate’ variants.

IV.  The extreme political interpretation The extreme political interpretation is the idea that Socrates was prosecuted and convicted because he was perceived to be, and in fact was, a corrupting influence on Alcibiades and prominent members of the Thirty, the oligarchic government that Sparta installed in Athens after the Peloponnesian War. On this view, Socrates was opposed to democracy in theory and in practice, and he advocated or favoured oligarchy. We know this from his political teachings and from his actions, especially his failure to leave the city and join the democrats in exile after the Peloponnesian War. The trial of Socrates, then, was an effort by the Athenians to rid the city of a dangerous internal enemy, someone who threatened the democracy by trying to undermine it from within. He had influenced one generation of young Athenians to despise the democracy and replace it with an oligarchy. Best to purge the city of the poison before it struck again. This is ‘the case for the prosecution’ that some have put together to make sense of how the trial of Socrates could happen in ‘so free a society’ (Stone 1988: xi). The most well-known defense of the extreme political interpretation is I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates, which argues for two separate theses. The first relates to the indictment against Socrates, and in particular the charge of impiety, which Stone dismisses as a mere disguise for the real motivation. ‘It was the political, not the philosophical or theological, views of Socrates which finally got him in trouble. The discussion of his religious views diverts attention from the real issues’ (Stone 1988: 138–9). Stone’s second thesis is about Socratic politics:  Socrates was opposed to democracy in theory and in practice, as we can tell from his political teachings and from the fact that he stayed in Athens during the bloody dictatorship of the Thirty between 404 and 403 BCE, and he taught his subversive ideas to anti-democratic fanatics (Stone 1988: 174). Both of these claims are controversial, and neither is supported with a compelling argument. The first depends on inconclusive evidence, and the second depends on a problematic interpretation of Socrates’ politics. These points are worth developing in detail because they are relevant to our assessment of every position in this debate.

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1. Bad reasons to reject the religious interpretation Stone begins by rejecting the religious interpretation for two reasons. First, Athenians typically did not persecute people for holding or expressing unorthodox beliefs (Stone 1988: 138). Second, Aristophanes’ Clouds must have been unimportant because Athens did not condemn Socrates immediately after the play first showed. And, besides, it was a comedy intended to be entertaining, not a piece of political propaganda intended to destroy Socrates’ character. Only a humourless scholar would think that a few jokes led to Socrates’ trial. ‘To blame Socrates’ fate on the comic poets is like blaming a politician’s defeat today on the way he has been ‘misrepresented’ by newspaper cartoonists’ (Stone 1988: 136). Stone’s first point is fair enough. Socrates’ condemnation on religious grounds alone is hard to understand in light of what we know about the tolerance of religious innovation and scepticism in Athenian culture (Garland 1992). If impiety had been sufficient to bring someone to trial, there would have been many other trials for impiety in Athens, and not just of Xenophanes and Plato, the two ‘innovators’ that Stone mentions. Greece was full of famous and influential atheists and agnostics. Protagoras was a sceptic. Prodicus of Ceos reduced the gods to natural phenomena or people. Democritus of Abdera denied that the gods were immortal and argued that religion was rooted in fear. Thrasymachus of Chalcedon argued from injustice to the conclusion that the gods do not look after us. Diagoras was famous for his atheism, as was Euripides, who suggested that religion was merely a tool of social and political control. As Waterfield says, ‘Almost all of the most potent arguments against the existence of a divinity or the validity of worship were deployed by Socrates’ contemporaries, and this fact exacerbates the puzzle of Socrates’ trial.’ Because the Athenians tolerated impiety in so many other contexts, it seems that we must look elsewhere to understand why Socrates was taken to court (Waterfield 2009: 37–8). On this point Waterfield follows Stone, but it is this inference that does not follow automatically from the fact that the persecution of Socrates was exceptional. As I discuss below, there probably was something uniquely damaging about Socrates’ alleged impiety, either in terms of his specific beliefs or because it coincided with events (such as failure in war, Plague, and cultural crises) that spooked Athenians and made them unusually sensitive to this man who persistently questioned the beliefs and values of their society.25 Stone’s second point is also weak. Political comedy can be extremely damaging, even when it is not intended to be.26 Aristophanes’ play presents Socrates as a sophist who made bad arguments seem like good ones, and an



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atheist who questioned the value of conventional religious practices, such as the efficacy of prayer and sacrifice. This representation of Socrates was probably unforgettable for many Athenians, who had ‘long memories’ and ‘effective gossip networks’ (Cartledge 2009: 86): forgivable as long as things were good in Athens, but dangerous and unacceptable when things were bad. In fact, by 399 BCE the Athenians, who Pericles had proudly described as ‘free and tolerant’ of one another’s private lives (Thuc. 2.37), were ‘acting more like the stereotypical traditional Mediterranean villagers  – suspicious, conservative, superstitious, irrational’ (Cartledge 2009: 84). The bigger problem here is that Stone never explains why Plato would make an issue of Aristophanes if his play had been unimportant. As Irwin points out, the charges in the indictment were so close to Aristophanes’ caricature of Socrates in the Clouds that it would have been foolish for Socrates to remind Athenians that ‘the very same charges had been brought against him years ago, before anyone knew how Critias and Alcibiades would turn out’ (1989: 189). If the Apology is not a historical document, and instead is better thought of as a piece of Platonic philosophical propaganda, Irwin’s point still applies:  in that case it would have been amazingly foolish for Plato to remind his audience of Aristophanes’ old play. The opening pages of Plato’s Apology, during which Socrates singles out Aristophanes as his most damaging ‘first accuser’, make much more sense if we assume that Aristophanes had been effective in poisoning the well against Socrates. This was a time of social and spiritual crisis (Cartledge 2009: 81–2). Most Athenians worried that they had somehow lost the favour of the gods, that they had done something to enrage them. Their empire was gone. Their navy had been destroyed. They had lived through the Plague and multiple civil wars. It was a toxic psychological environment, full of bitterness and resentment and a desperate desire for a scapegoat (Waterfield 2009: 139–72). Aristophanes’ image of Socrates as a spiritual pariah, who dishonoured the gods by questioning the value of prayer and denying the gods’ capacity to intervene in human affairs, must have weighed heavily on the minds of many jurors (McPherran 2002: 162). Some undoubtedly worried that Socrates had provoked the gods to punish them, and might continue to do so unless he was exiled or eliminated. A final problem with Stone’s dismissal of the religious interpretation is that it may assume too little of the average Athenian’s ability to think logically. Stone focuses on Socrates’ relationships with men like Critias and Alcibiades, as if he was simply tarred with a kind of guilt by association: they were anti-democratic; Socrates was their teacher; therefore, Socrates made them anti-democratic. The

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problem with this, however, is that it rules out the possibility that Socrates was held responsible for corrupting the youth  – making them worse  – by making them into sceptics and atheists. Some of the characters in the Clouds, and perhaps Critias himself in his play Sisyphus, suggest that the gods were invented to give people a reason to be just even when they do not have to worry about getting caught by human authorities. Athens suffered profoundly during and after the war because of unrestrained self-interest. It is possible that some of Socrates’ jurors worried that Socratic philosophy had convinced criminals like Critias that the old values did not matter, that they were free to do as they pleased as long as they could get away with it. In other words, Socrates’ jurors may have had his associates in mind as evidence that his impiety was a dangerously corrupting force in the minds of young men, not as evidence of anti-democratic political values. If so, Stone and others could be correct that Alcibiades and Critias were relevant during the trial, and wrong that this was for political reasons.

2.  Unreliable testimony The strongest evidence for Stone’s view would seem to be in the testimony from Aeschines Rhetor and Xenophon’s Memorabilia, both quoted above and both relied on in The Trial of Socrates. Aeschines, as we saw, does not mince words. He claims straightforwardly that the Athenians executed Socrates because he was Critias’ teacher. The passage dates from 345 BCE and it is part of a speech that Aeschines used to encourage an Athenian jury to punish Demosthenes, who was an opponent of democracy. Stone finds this passage very revealing. ‘The speech of Aeschines shows that half a century after the trial of Socrates the popular view was that the old ‘sophist’ got what he deserved because he was the teacher of the hated Critias’ (Stone 1988: 178). Stone may be right that this was the popular view fifty years after the trial, but even if it was it does not follow that it was the popular view in 399 BCE (Irwin 1989: 186; Burnyeat 1988: 12). Fifty years is a long time, even by our own standards – it certainly is enough time for the facts to be distorted with respect to issues as controversial as these. As Burnyeat asks, ‘How much accurate knowledge would a present-day jury have about a famous trial in the Thirties?’ (1988:  13). How much accurate information do we have (ready in our minds) about the assassination of JFK, or even the impeachment of Bill Clinton? The other passage that Stone relies on is the one from the Memorabilia in which Xenophon reports that Socrates was charged by his ‘accuser’



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with influencing his students to despise the established constitution. Stone quotes this passage from the Memorabilia as saying that Socrates ‘taught his companions’ to look down on the laws of Athens (1988: 29). If this testimony were reliable, and if Stone had translated it accurately, it would serve as solid evidence for his first thesis. But there are two problems here. The first is that Stone’s translation of Xenophon is misleading, because the Memorabilia does not say anything about teaching in this passage. The text actually says that Socrates epoiei (‘tended to make’) his companions despise the established laws, and that his arguments epairein (‘provoked’) them to despise the established constitution and poiein (‘made’) them violent. As Irwin says, ‘The difference between Xenophon’s verbs and Stone’s “taught” is not trivial’ (Irwin 1989:  193). Xenophon’s word choice suggests an effect that Socrates allegedly had on his students (an effect that they might have experienced simply as a consequence of learning to do philosophy); Stone suggests that Socrates intended for his students to reach a particular conclusion thanks to his teaching. This is a difference that matters, because we want to know whether Socrates’ accusers believed he had taught his students to adopt antidemocratic political ideology. As we try to answer the motivation question, we must be very careful with the limited evidence available to us. And since the accuser talks only about the effect that Socrates had on his companions, Stone overstates his case, and even begs the question, with his translation. It is possible that Socrates was critical of democracy in theory without opposing the specific democracy in Athens, and certainly without encouraging his companions to reject it or replace it with an oligarchy. And it is possible that Socrates was feared or despised as a threat to the state because he corrupted, or was thought to have corrupted, his students with philosophy in general. He did not have to impart dangerous political doctrines to be a corruptor of the youth. His ‘examined life’ may have seemed bad enough. In the minds of many Athenians, Socratic philosophy, which subjected everything to rational analysis, appeared mostly to make bad arguments seem like good ones, and as a matter of fact may have caused its practitioners, including the young men in the Socratic circle, to reject the moral and political values on which they had been raised, as Plato himself suggests is a real possibility when one starts to philosophize (R. 539a–c). Philosophy, after all, as an argumentative technique and not only as a doctrinal system, often has the effect of waking people up and setting them free from what Bertrand Russell liked to call ‘the tyranny of custom’ (1999: 98).

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3. Unreliable testimony: Polycrates Some scholars have suggested that there is a second problem with relying on the passage in Xenophon’s Memorabilia. They argue that it is almost certainly a response to Polycrates’ ‘Accusation of Socrates’, a pamphlet written and published within a decade of Socrates’ trial and execution; it is not, as it seems, a response to the trial itself.27 If this is right, we run the risk of letting a troublemaking, second-rate sophist determine our perception of what was said during the trial. Surely we are better off trusting Plato and Xenophon. What should we think of this? The truth is that nobody knows whether Polycrates’ pamphlet records a speech that Meletus, Anytus, or anyone else actually delivered at the trial, just as nobody knows whether trusting Plato or Xenophon to tell us the whole truth about Socrates is as dangerous as trusting Oliver Stone to tell us the whole truth about JFK. Because Polycrates’ speech has been lost, we do not even know what it said, and we must rely on references to it as we reconstruct its contents.28 Nevertheless, some scholars have followed Chroust in arguing that the charges made by Polycrates (1) were not based on the actual speeches of the trial, and (2) were not part of the official indictment and proceedings (1957: 135).29 There are two arguments for thinking this. The first is that Isocrates’ Busiris, which contains the first known reference to Polycrates’ pamphlet, seems to imply that Polycrates invented the idea that Socrates was condemned because of his relationship with Alcibiades. He even denies (or seems to deny) that Socrates was Alcibiades’ teacher. As he says in his Busiris, Polycrates ‘gave [Socrates] Alcibiades as a pupil’ in spite of the fact that no one saw Alcibiades being educated by Socrates. Irwin thinks Isocrates’ criticism of Polycrates is ‘carping’ and overstated. And that seems fair enough, especially in light of Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Plato’s Symposium, Gorgias, Protagoras, and Alcibiades I, all of which confirm a close pedagogical relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades.30 However, Isocrates’ complaint would not make much sense, and in fact would seem rather obtuse and out of touch, if Socrates’ relationship with Alcibiades had been widely regarded as a primary reason for the prosecution of Socrates. It would not make any sense to deny the existence of a relationship that was well known and widely thought to be incriminating (Irwin 1989: 193). The second argument for thinking Xenophon’s ‘accuser’ refers to Polycrates is that neither Plato nor Xenophon gives us reason to believe the trial had a political motive or was politically charged. If politics had been relevant to the



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trial, we would have heard about it from one or both of them. Xenophon, of course, responds to Socrates’ ‘accuser’ in his Memorabilia, but he seems to make a meaningful distinction between ‘the accuser’ (katēgoros) (Mem. 1.2.12, 26, 49, 51, 56, 58) and ‘the ones who wrote the indictment’ (grapsamenos) (1.2.64). As Brickhouse and Smith have argued, this could be a distinction between Polycrates on the one hand, and Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon on the other (1994: 174 n. 85). The idea here is that ‘all the instances in which Socrates’ responsibility for the acts of Critias and Alcibiades is reported or refuted by ancient authors are compatible with its invention as an issue by Polycrates’ (Brickhouse and Smith 1989: 84). In other words, when Xenophon and Isocrates responded to Polycrates, they either joined or started a debate that other writers, such as Aeschines, carried on in the decades and centuries that followed. Chroust (1957: 71) argues that Polycrates’ pamphlet was a ‘literary sensation’ that inspired a ‘flurry of Socratic apologies, all of which took issue with Polycrates rather than the events that occurred during the official trial’. Brickhouse and Smith accept Chroust’s view but go even further. They suggest that ‘all of the evidence for a political motivation’ (Brickhouse and Smith 2002: 7, emphasis added) must be attributed to Polycrates, and that Polycrates may be credited with inventing the idea out of whole cloth.31 They quote the relevant passage from Isocrates’ Busiris, and they suggest that it can be interpreted to mean either (1)  that nobody at the trial had any evidence that Alcibiades had been Socrates’ student, or (2)  that ‘no one until Polycrates had ever perceived Alcibiades as having been a student of Socrates’ (Brickhouse and Smith (1989: 84). They favour (1): Polycrates simply made it up! There are two problems with this view, however. First, there is a third possibility that Brickhouse and Smith do not consider, and it is compatible with Socrates having a pedagogical relationship with Alcibiades: Isocrates may mean that Alcibiades never learnt anything from Socrates because he was a failed student, just as many of today’s Catholics can learn all about the sinfulness of contraception without making any meaningful changes in their lives. Isocrates could be saying simply that Alcibiades was Socrates’ student, but you’d never know it from his behaviour. The second problem is that it seems implausible on its face that Polycrates would have been capable of creating a myth powerful enough to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes, including Plato’s, regarding the nature of Socrates’ relationships with Alcibiades and Critias.32 More importantly, it does not square well with Libanius’ Apology – our primary source for reconstructing Polycrates’ pamphlet  – which says Anytus made Socrates’ relationship with

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Critias a material issue during the trial (Lib. Ap. 136 ff.). It is possible that Libanius confused the details here, but it is also possible that he learnt from Polycrates that Anytus made Socrates’ associates an issue during the trial. If that is right, those who think that Polycrates invented the political interpretation owe us an explanation of how we can know that Libanius was mistaken or that Polycrates was not telling the truth about Anytus. Some scholars have thought Polycrates’ pamphlet cannot be, or even be like, any of the prosecution’s speeches, because too much of its content has seemed to violate the terms of the Amnesty (Irwin 1989: 187 n. 5; Strycker and Slings 1994: 5). This position is unconvincing, however, when we consider it in light of more recent discussions of the Amnesty’s legal significance (Brickhouse and Smith 1994; Carawan 2002, 2004, 2006; Waterfield 2009). If it is true, as many scholars now believe, that the prosecution was free to slander Socrates as much as they wished, and constrained only in how they framed their charges in the indictment, we have to reconsider the possibility that the contents of Polycrates’ pamphlet accurately reflect what the prosecution said at the trial. This is much easier said than done, however, because (1)  we cannot be certain about what Polycrates’ pamphlet said, and (2)  we cannot be certain about Polycrates’ rhetorical aims in writing and publishing it. Some scholars have thought Polycrates wrote his pamphlet as an epideixis, a rhetorical display intended to showcase his rhetorical skills, not to preserve historical truth (Brickhouse and Smith 1989:  71–2). There is some commonsense plausibility to this idea, since we know the pamphlet was exceptionally provocative. The problem with this view, however, is that Xenophon took the political charges seriously enough to refute them in his Memorabilia. Brickhouse and Smith can answer that Xenophon responded to Polycrates because he wrote such a provocative epideixis. But it is not clear how the subject of Socrates’ politics could have served epideictic rhetorical purposes. If (1) we can assume that Polycrates’ pamphlet was an epideixis, as Brickhouse and Smith (1989: 72) do, and (2) the point of an epideixis was to argue persuasively for positions that most people would consider impossible to defend, as Gorgias does in ‘Nothing Exists’, Polycrates chose extremely low-hanging fruit:  given Socrates’ evil associates and publicly stated political views, it would not have been difficult to defend the thesis that Socrates was politically subversive. Before we can accept the epideictic interpretation of Polycrates, therefore, we need an account of why the pamphlet’s thesis would have been counter-intuitive to its audience. After all, it is just as likely that the pamphlet was provocative because the trial was



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controversial (D.L. 2.43) and it was the first time many Athenians encountered the details of Anytus’ prosecution speech.33 The biggest problem with assessing the significance and historical reliability of Polycrates’ pamphlet is that the original document has been lost, and so we must rely on Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Libanius’ Apology of Socrates, both of which seem to contain responses to Polycrates, as we reconstruct its primary claims.34 On the basis of these two sources, Chroust (1957:  ch. 4, especially 99–100) and Waterfield (2009:  196–200) suggest that the political contents of Polycrates’ pamphlet looked something like this:  Anytus argued that Socrates caused his students to despise Athenian laws and disregard Athenian values; he was anti-family and undermined the authority of fathers, claiming to be a better friend than any parent; he quoted elitist poets to support his anti-democratic political teachings; he produced students who opposed the democracy in principle and in practice; he used linguistic sorcery to embarrass his intellectual and political opponents in public; he was a sophist and he taught his students to be clever with rhetoric as they sought their own interests; he criticized sortition and popular election; he disparaged the demos; the fruits of his teaching are evident in the characters of Critias and Alcibiades; and he cannot be trusted when he denies being a teacher because he clearly influenced the opinions of his pupils, and there is no more profound or more dangerous kind of teaching than that. If, indeed, Socrates’ accusers could employ some incriminating evidence from Socrates’ personal relationships, it seems plausible to suppose they would not hesitate to do so. ‘It is, therefore, hard to doubt that the names Critias and Alcibiades, and the word [miso-demos] “hater of the people” was spoken at the trial’ (Parker 1996:  150). Socrates’ guilt by association was overwhelming: he taught Alcibiades and Charmides, Critias, and Euthydemus; Aristotle of Thorae (a member of the Thirty) and Cleitophon (who helped engineer the oligarchic coup in 411); as well as many other lesser-known oligarchs who were involved in subversive activities during and after the war (Nails 2002: 18). In addition to having relationships with these enemies of the democracy, Socrates may have held and taught – and been famous for holding and teaching – a variety of anti-democratic political doctrines. If so, and if it is true that Socrates’ accusers were not prohibited by the Amnesty from making politics an issue as they made their case to the jury, the probability that they focused exclusively on the religious charges expressed in the indictment, quickly approaches zero.35

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V.  The moderate political interpretation Political interpretations of the trial, whether extreme or moderate, depend on evidence derived from (1) Plato’s middle dialogues, the contents of which are widely, though not universally, taken to be representative of Plato’s thought, not Socrates’,36 and (2) Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Apology, which are often thought to be philosophically obtuse and, in some cases, obscured by Xenophon’s own political values.37 Xenophon himself was an oligarch. That alone is not sufficient reason for dismissing his representation of Socratic politics, but it certainly is a reason to be cautious. We face a different problem as we look through Plato’s dialogues for evidence  – namely, he seems to provide us with more than one Socrates, and no key for distinguishing between them – although he also was no friend of democracy, and so for similar reasons (as well as others, such as the fact that he was a philosopher with an ambitious literary, philosophical, and political agenda of his own) may be an unreliable reporter of Socratic politics. Proponents of the political interpretation rely on these sources, despite the many reasons to be sceptical, because the Socrates of Plato’s early dialogues is not obviously an enemy of democracy. In fact, some have even found him to be a sympathetic democrat.38 In other words, without the evidence from Xenophon’s writings and Plato’s middle dialogues, it is much harder to accept the idea that Socrates’ accusers were motivated by political grievances. And it is virtually impossible to believe that Socrates was tried and convicted because he was or was perceived to be an oligarch or sympathetic to oligarchy.39 Some might think that the interpretive method used by proponents of the political interpretation therefore begs the question. But maybe that puts the cart before the horse. Maybe we should count the fact of Socrates’ trial as evidence in favour of an anti-democratic Socrates, and even evidence against the view that Plato’s dialogues fit cleanly into Socratic and Platonic categories. Who says Plato had to shift gears once and for all after writing the Gorgias? Why could he not have used the Republic to blend Socratic politics with his own ideas about psychology, metaphysics, and epistemology?40 Due to limitations of space and the focus of this chapter, I cannot enter the debate over the historical Socrates here. Instead, for simplicity’s sake, and to make the best possible case for the political interpretation, I will assume that Socrates’ political views show up wherever Plato’s and Xenophon’s representations of those views converge.41 This interpretive method produces a Socrates who opposed democracy and oligarchy equally: he favoured rule by experts, not rule by the wealthy or the masses, since neither wealth nor citizenship were sufficient



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conditions for having the knowledge necessary for governing. It does not give us a Socrates who would have favoured the Thirty over Athenian democracy. And it certainly does not give us a Socrates who would have supported Critias or any of the other tyrants who murdered Athenian democrats in the name of moral reform after the war. Socrates was an intellectual and moral reformer, and he was a critic of democracy. But he was not a political revolutionary who would have advocated the use of Critias’ ‘bully-boys’ (Stone 1988: 144) to terrorize the people of Athens. This is another way of saying that the extreme political interpretation is unsupportable. We can reconstruct Socratic politics to make sense of why the historical Socrates was misperceived as an enemy of the democracy, but there is not any evidence that he was an oligarch, sympathetic to oligarchy, or interested in political revolution. This will become clearer as we look more closely at the most political Socrates we can construct on the basis of the available evidence.42 What, then, were Socrates’ political views? If Socrates had a political philosophy, its first principle was that experts should rule.43 Governing is a craft, and as such it has a specific function and excellence. The function is to benefit the citizen body by providing them with a high standard of living, freedom, and concord, and the excellence is knowledge, the possession of which enables a ruler to perform his function well (Euthd. 292b–c). The true statesman is someone who knows how to rule, not someone who can win an election, get appointed by lot, or take power by force or by fraud (Xen. Mem. 3.9.10). In fact, without knowledge of the state’s affairs – regarding the budget, agricultural capacity, war needs, available natural resources, and so on – a ruler can neither benefit his city nor do anything of credit to himself (Xen. Mem. 3.6–7). Indeed, as long as one is ignorant, it is much easier to cause oneself, or those in one’s care, lasting harm (Cri. 47a–b, 25a). Insofar as democracy conflicted with this necessary condition for good government (expertise held by one’s rulers), it was unjustifiable.44 Socrates thought a true statesman relates to his people the way a doctor relates to his patients, and that a citizen body relates to a true ruler the way patients relate to a doctor: they see that their best interests are served by obeying his commands, and they do not think they know more than he does about such matters. They are happy to obey, because they realize that he knows better.45 This is not the only undemocratic analogy in Socrates’ political thought. He also compared the ruler of a state to a shepherd looking after a flock of sheep (R. 342c–e; Xen. Mem. 1.2.32, 3.2). Successful Athenian democrats like Pericles enjoyed king-like power over the Athenian demos because of their excellence and

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popularity (Thuc. 2.65.9), but none of them actually held absolute power over the city the way a shepherd does over his flock. Even Pericles, who held power in Athens for more than thirty years, was driven out of office, put on trial for embezzlement, convicted, and punished with a heavy fine when the Athenians were frustrated with his war policy and were looking for a scapegoat. Pericles had many enemies and rivals in Athens. Many of them were able to use the democratic checks and balances – such as the rules governing the re-election of generals and free speech in the assembly and agora – to stir up public resentment against Pericles, who in fact was ‘most resistant to bribery’ and correct about the war (Thuc. 2.65.2). Socrates no doubt objected to these safeguards for the same reasons he objected to the lottery: they put too much power – in this case the power to influence policy – in the hands of people who did not know what was best for them personally or for the city as a whole.46 Socrates was also famous for arguing against sortition  – the selection of decision makers by lottery  – which was common practice in the Athenian democracy. He thought it made more sense to appoint directly rulers who had the relevant expertise, as it was highly unlikely that the lottery would make the right selections (Xen. Mem. 1.2.9, 3.1.4; Arist. Rhet. 1393b). Anyone can be appointed by lot, but most people aren’t fit to govern because they are ignorant (Ap. 25b; Cri. 47c-d; Hp. Ma. 284e; La. 184e; Xen. Mem. 3.7.5–7). Expecting sortition reliably to select qualified rulers, therefore, is like expecting it reliably to select the best athletes or doctors from among the masses (Arist. Rhet. 1393b; Grg. 455b–c; Prt. 319bd). Why not just identify the ones who really have the relevant capacities and select them on that basis? If merit-based selections make sense in the other crafts, Socrates argued, such as in athletics or medicine or navigation, surely they make sense in politics, where the craft is more challenging and the consequences of making a mistake are so much more costly (Xen. Mem. 1.2.9). Socrates may have even considered sortition impious, because it was equivalent to praying for knowledge that we can discover by learning. We cannot know whether the consequences of our actions will be good or bad (Xen. Mem.1.1.8)  – only the gods can know this, and so we must pray to them for assistance and success in our endeavours (Xen. Mem. 1.1.9) – but otherwise we can make reliable judgements about matters ‘within the control of human reason’. For example, we can know without consulting the gods that we are better off with a captain who has knowledge of navigation than we would be with one who lacks it, and that it is better to assess quantity by weighing, measuring, and counting than by prophecy or any other non-rational means. According to Xenophon,



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Socrates ‘thought that those who asked such questions of the gods were acting impiously. For, he said, what the gods have given us to know by learning, we should learn; but what is unclear to humans, we should attempt to find out from the gods by means of prophecy’ (Xen. Mem. 1.1.9). The lottery might appear to be pious, because it puts the selection of rulers in the gods’ hands (Lg. 757b), but Socrates considered it impious because it requires abandoning the capacity with which the gods endowed us to make leadership decisions for ourselves. Meetings of the assembly were not much better, because the masses are ignorant (Ap. 25b; Cri. 47c–d; Hp. Ma. 284e; La. 184e; Xen. Mem. 3.7.5–7) and corrupt or misguided, especially in large gatherings (Ap. 29d, 31c–2a; Cri. 48c, 49c–d; R. 492b-c), where orators use flattery to trick them into believing that what is good for the orators (or those who pay the orators) is good for the city (Grg. 502e).47 Against this kind of sophisticated trickery, the demos did not stand a chance, Socrates thought, because they do not know the difference between rhetoric and dialectic (Grg. 471e–2d). Most of them had been impaired by a life devoted to manual labour and consequently lacked the self-knowledge and other virtues necessary for good judgement (Alc. I 131a–b; Xen. Oec. 4.2.3, 6.4–9).48 They needed benevolent statesmen to use persuasion for the sake of redirecting the city’s appetites and making its citizens better (Grg. 517b, 29d–30b). But instead, the democracy proved most effective at ‘serving’ the city by satisfying its appetites and thereby making it worse (Grg. 517b–c). It is no wonder, then, that Socrates admired the Spartan and Cretan governments (Cri. 52e) for their hierarchy and structure. Both states enjoyed political harmony because every Spartan and Cretan knew his proper place and function in his city, whereas Athens suffered from self-undermining disharmony thanks to its aimless freedoms, which served only to make Athenians wilder rather than more self-controlled (Grg. 516c, 513e).49 If the objective of the statesman is to care for the city and make the citizens as good as possible, as Socrates believed (Grg. 515cd), then Pericles ‘was not good at politics’ (Grg. 516d), and neither were the other political heroes  – namely, Themistocles, Cimon, and Miltiades  – whom the masses adored for making them wealthy and for bringing glory and power to the city. These men left the polis and its people more disordered than they found them, filling the city ‘with harbors and dockyards, walls, and tribute payments and such trash as that, but did so without justice and self-control’ (Grg. 519a). And so, by Socratic political standards, the heroes of the masses were failed statesmen: ‘we do not know any man who has proved to be good at politics in this city’ (Grg. 517a).50 None of them achieved the revaluation of Athenian values that Socrates considered central to his own

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god-appointed mission (Ap. 29e–30b), which he identified with the true craft of politics (Grg. 521d).51 All of these arguments and analogies imply that Socrates was, at a minimum, a fierce critic of democracy. Having compared the demos to subhuman sheep in need of a shepherd  – that is, a ruler so different from them, in cognitive capacity and self-knowledge, that he can only be represented metaphorically by a different species – Socrates could hardly have been surprised when he we was thought to believe and teach anti-democratic ideas. But do we have any evidence that he was an oligarch?52 Some have thought it revealing that Socrates stayed in Athens during the rule of the Thirty while the democrats went into exile. Socrates did not – like his accuser, Anytus – leave the city and join the exiles who were already planning the overthrow of the dictators. He would have been a welcome and inspiring recruit. He ‘simply went home’. Was that fulfilling his civic duty against injustice? Or was he merely avoiding personal complicity and, as he expressed it, saving his soul? (Stone 1988: 114)53

Is this evidence, as some have argued, that Socrates was part of a ‘conspiracy against the democratic constitution of Athens’ (Winspear and Silverberg 1939: 84) and trying to replace the democracy with ‘the rule of an aristocratic oligarchic elite’ (Wood and Wood 1978: 97)? Not in its own right. As Irwin points out, unless we somehow knew that ‘Athens was deserted by everyone except a hard core of collaborators with the Thirty, we could not use Socrates’ failure to leave as a reason for special animosity against him, or as reason for thinking he favored the Thirty and did not prefer democracy’ (1989: 199).54 Socrates argued that, in order for the aims of politics truly to be served, statesmen must be knowledgeable, not wealthy and privileged by birth  – the defining characteristics of oligarchic leaders in the ancient world. Because the wealthy were more likely to acquire the knowledge necessary for ruling, thanks to the leisure their wealth afforded them, Socrates was more inclined toward the aristocratic youth than he was toward anyone else in his search for future statesmen.55 Moreover, because he believed knowledge was possessed by a very select few, if at all, his own political values more closely resembled oligarchy (Waterfield 2009:  181), which distributed power selectively, than democracy, which distributed power equally. But the existing oligarchies at the time certainly would not have appealed to him (Brickhouse and Smith 1994: 166). They allocated power no more rationally than democracies, since wealth, like citizenship, is not a sufficient condition for having political expertise. Socrates was not interested in wealth, high birth, or amoral political oratory. His ideal



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was a government by experts who had theoretical and practical knowledge of the good (Waterfield 2009: 181). Existing democracies and oligarchies were equally offensive to these political values, because neither one valued political expertise, and both failed to achieve the aims of true statesmanship, which were to make the city and its inhabitants as good as possible. Socrates’ equal dissatisfaction with oligarchy and democracy is probably clearest in his willingness to criticize past political leaders from both factions (Brickhouse and Smith 1994: 161). There is an additional problem with thinking that Socrates was an oligarch. Apart from his personal and pedagogical relationships with men like Alcibiades and Critias, which we can explain in terms of Socrates’ moral mission in Athens (Brickhouse and Smith 1994:  170–3), we do not have any positive evidence that he identified with anti-democratic politicians and political values: there is not a single passage in Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, or Aristophanes in which Socrates praises oligarchy or existing oligarchic politicians. He never couples his criticisms of democracy with favourable assessments of oligarchy, whether in principle or in practice (Brickhouse and Smith 1994:  160). He singles out specific democrats for criticism, but he never singles out specific oligarchs for praise. Oligarchs are never said to have more knowledge or virtue, or to be better educators of their sons, and Socrates never claims that Athens would have been better off if the oligarchs had been in power instead of Pericles. Those scholars who have identified Socrates with the oligarchic faction in Athens seem to assume that Socrates was either a democrat or an oligarch, since those were the conventional options in Athens. But this is a false dichotomy (Brickhouse and Smith 1994: 160–1). Socrates was an idealist, not a democrat or an oligarch, and as such he was mostly critical of all existing governments. He was a devoted servant of the democracy and its laws. In the Crito, Socrates says it is impious to use violence against the state, just as it is impious for a child to use violence against a parent (Cri. 51bc). In the Apology, Socrates proudly tells his jury that he disobeyed the democracy and the Thirty in the name of justice (Ap. 32a–e). And in both cases, he acted as he did because he refused to do anything unjust or impious (Ap. 32d). He fought for the democracy – at Potidaea (alongside Alcibiades), Amphipolis, and Delium (Ap. 28e)  – and he was willing to die in prison for the sake of preserving the democratic laws of Athens. When the laws say that Socrates’ life – the overwhelming majority of which he spent inside the city walls, leaving only to fulfil his military duties, showing little or no interest in other cities or other laws – was itself evidence of his satisfaction with Athens, he agrees that what they have said is true (Cri. 52b– d). These are not the ideas or the actions that we would expect from someone

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who was willing to replace the democracy with an oligarchy by means of a violent revolution (Brickhouse and Smith 1994: 163). If Socrates was an oligarch who advocated violence against the democracy and its supporters, Plato has thoroughly deceived us. The point of this reconstruction of Socratic politics is not to answer the vexed question of what the historical Socrates believed about politics. We will never answer that question once and for all. Instead, my aim was to see what the most political Socrates would have believed and then reflect on how, if at all, that affects our assessment of the motivation question. There is simply no evidence for the extreme political interpretation of the trial:  Socrates was not an oligarch, and he was not sympathetic to oligarchy; he did not favour revolution, and he would not have favoured replacing the Athenian democracy with an oligarchy, let alone a murderous tyranny. He was fiercely critical of democracy, however, because he (1)  rejected the notion of mass wisdom, (2)  condemned the results and practices of mass deliberation, (3)  could not accept sortition as a means for selecting political officers, and (4) felt that the aims of true statesmanship were incompatible with the reckless and aimless freedoms of Athenian democracy. It certainly is possible that Socrates was well known for expressing and teaching these ideas. If so, it is easy to imagine how Socrates might have been misperceived as a teacher who taught all of his students, including monsters like Critias and Charmides, to despise and replace the democratic constitution in Athens. Is this enough to establish the truth of the moderate political interpretation of the trial? Probably not. We cannot rule it out, but if it is possible, as other scholars believe, to account for the trial without appealing to political factors, which do not show up in our most important sources on the trial – Plato’s and Xenophon’s accounts of Socrates’ defense speech – the political interpretation is unnecessary. However, as I argue in Chapters 2–4, everything changes when we look outside of the Apology in Plato’s dialogues that refer to the trial or the war in some way.

VI.  The religious interpretation As we have seen, many scholars have argued that the corruption charge was politically loaded. They have argued that the Athenians believed Socrates was at least sympathetic to oligarchy and that he shared the amoral and revolutionary conclusions that some of his students reached by practicing Socratic philosophy.



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But if we empathize with Socrates’ countrymen, remembering their time and place, it seems just as likely that the corruption charge was closely related to the complaint against his impiety: Socrates could have been considered a corruptor of the youth because his philosophical life had the effect of undermining traditional beliefs in the gods, as well as traditional beliefs about the value of living a just life. Athenians could have considered Socrates a threat to the democracy without attributing any positive political beliefs to him. If so, it was his philosophical life, not his political ideology, that they could not tolerate. Plato went out of his way to distinguish the Socratic philosophical life from the trickery of sophistic oratory and eristic (Grg. 457c–d; Men. 75c-d; Euthd. 306ad), but his distinctions were undoubtedly lost on most uneducated Athenians, just as most Americans could never distinguish between the style of political commentary one gets from, say, Paul Krugman and Sean Hannity. Maybe Stone and others are right that the corruption charge was politically loaded. It is possible. But, on the basis of the testimony from Xenophon and Aeschines alone, we lack sufficient evidence for rejecting the simplest explanation of Socrates’ indictment, which is that the corruption charge was rooted in the charge of impiety. Socrates was charged with (1)  failing to believe in the city’s gods, (2) introducing new divinities, and (3) corrupting the youth (Ap. 24b–c; Xen. Mem. 1.1.1; D.L. 2.40). Proponents of the religious interpretation argue that these charges, whether fair or not, are enough to explain Socrates’ trial and condemnation. Are they? The topic of Socratic theology is even more complicated than that of his political beliefs, and it is the focus of many other excellent studies.56 Instead of providing a complete reconstruction of Socratic theology, then, I intend to make a case for the religious interpretation by discussing some but not all of Socrates’ religious beliefs and practices, namely, those features of Socratic theology that are relevant to the motivation question. The first principle of Socrates’ religious beliefs is that the gods are completely wise (Ap. 23a; Xen. Mem. 1.1.19) and – given Socrates’ identification of virtue with wisdom – completely good. In Plato’s Republic (379c), Socrates argues that the essential goodness of ‘the god’ makes him incapable of doing anything bad, and in Plato’s Euthyphro (6a), Socrates says he cannot believe the traditional myths about the gods, which show them lying, committing adultery, murdering, castrating their fathers, and so on. Some scholars have thought that this ethical transformation of the gods is the best way to understand the formal charges (Connor 1991: 56; Vlastos 1991: 166). However, this position has been decisively rejected (Brickhouse and Smith

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1994:  182–7):  numerous thinkers in the ancient world revised the myths and rationalized belief in the gods, and there is no ancient evidence that these were the grounds on which Socrates’ enemies found him impious (Brickhouse and Smith 1994: 182). Aristophanes represents Socrates as a natural philosopher, and thus as an atheist by implication, not as a religious reformer. The same is true of Socrates’ ‘first accusers’ in Plato’s Apology, as well as his later accusers who brought the formal charges against him. Not even Polycrates found fault with Socrates’ moral purification of the gods (Brickhouse and Smith 1994: 183). It is equally important to point out that Socrates was not the only thinker to revise the traditional myths. He had plenty of company on that score:  Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Solon, Pericles, Pindar, Euripides, and Prodicus – each of these men engaged in rational revisions of traditional religious beliefs, and none of them was tried for impiety (Waterfield 2009: 40). Indeed, with these men in mind, it is difficult to support the claim that Socrates was prosecuted for insisting that the gods are good and wise, responsible for everything good that befalls humans (Euthphr. 15a), and not at all responsible for their suffering of evils (R. 379b). It is true, as Burnyeat points out, that Socrates never addresses the charge that he failed to believe in the city’s gods. ‘Yet that was the central charge of the indictment, the part on which the rest depends’ (Burnyeat 2002: 136). One explanation for Socrates’ silence on this matter is that his moral purification of the gods made it impossible for him honestly to say that, yes, he did believe in the city’s gods. That would mean believing that Apollo brought plague to the city, that Poseidon caused earthquakes, and the like. But he did not believe these things, and so he faced a genuine dilemma: (1) he could not say that he believed in the city’s gods without telling the whole truth (namely, that he believed in a morally purified version of them), but there was not time for that during his short trial. And (2) he could not lie and say that he did believe in the city’s gods without violating his own commitment to only speak the truth (Ap. 18a, 20d, 22b, 28a, 32a, 33c). Instead, he traps Meletus in a contradiction (Ap. 27a), getting him to claim both that Socrates believes in gods and that he does not. This makes Meletus look bad, but it does not answer the question put before the jury: whether Socrates is an atheist or a spiritual innovator. Socrates’ dialectical abuse of Meletus leaves the jury with that choice, and in either case he would be guilty of not believing in the city’s gods. But was it a crime in Athens not to believe in the city’s gods? Was it a crime to introduce new gods? Waterfield (2009: 43–6) makes the case that the first charge is strange since the city was home to thousands of cults, more than any individual could follow, and the second charge is just as strange because the introduction



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of new gods was common practice, and in many cases sanctioned by the state (Parker 1996: ch. 9). There was no specific set of gods that every Athenian was required to recognize or worship, and the introduction of new cults into Athens during the fifth century was very common: Athena, Zeus, Heracles, Ares, and Theseus were raised to a sudden prominence because they were held responsible for the Athenian victory over the Persians. In addition to these innovations, many foreign gods were introduced to the city, sometimes under the supervision of the city and sometimes not: Pan (an Arcadian deity), Asclepius (the Epidaurian god of healing), Bendis (a Thracian goddess), and Sabazius and Cybele (both from the Near East) – all of these innovations were tolerated in Athens as part and parcel of life in a cosmopolitan city. Even instances of recognized impiety rarely moved the city to action (Parker 2002: 152). What had Socrates done that was uniquely criminal?57 Plato’s character Euthyphro thought Socrates was on trial because of his private divine sign (Euthphr. 3b), his claim to direct contact with the divine, not because of his ethically purified conception of the gods.58 Plato and Xenophon agree on this point. Both suggest that Socrates’ divine sign accounts for the charge of religious innovation (Ap. 31c; Euthphr. 3b; Xen. Mem. 1.1.2; Apol. 12). In Plato’s Apology, Socrates says Meletus ridiculed it in his deposition, and he suggests that it is something his jurors are familiar with: they have heard him cite it as a reason for not engaging in politics on many occasions (Ap. 31c). In Xenophon’s Apology, Socrates asks rhetorically how his divine sign, the voice of a god that tells him ‘what it is necessary to do’ (Apol. 12), constitutes the introduction of new gods. Having (1) ruled out the possibility that Socrates was on trial for his unconventional conception of the divine as absolutely good and wise, (2)  rejected the political interpretation, and (3)  finding a unified voice between Plato and Xenophon on the motivation question, Brickhouse and Smith conclude that Euthyphro is right: Socrates was on trial because his prosecutors and his jurors considered his divine sign an unacceptable form of religious innovation, regardless of what Socrates might have thought about it. ‘Where the ancients agree, we see no reason not to believe them’ (Brickhouse and Smith 1994: 183; cf. Kraut 2000: 15; Reeve 1989: 97–107; Waterfield 2009: 46). Still, questions linger here. Xenophon and Plato mention the divine sign as the issue that got Socrates in trouble with his countrymen, but neither answers the question that Xenophon has Socrates ask in his version of the defense speech:  how did the Athenians turn a form of divination into an instance of religious innovation and grounds for prosecution? Atheism was commonplace in ancient Greece  – familiar enough, in fact, that it was a regular feature of

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popular culture. Aristophanes jokes in his Thesmophoriazusae (450–1) that Euripides was so effective at making the case for atheism, via his characters, that a garland seller went out of business when people no longer wanted to buy her garlands for religious ceremonies. Moreover, there was no religious uniformity across the thousands of cults in Athens, and the city regularly introduced new gods, often from distant cities and cultures. Why would the Athenians care if an elderly man claimed to be able to talk directly to the gods? What made it a matter of enough significance to the city to warrant a trial and, in the end, the death penalty? Yes, it was an unprecedented phenomenon, but surely its novelty was not enough to make people feel threatened – again, they welcomed new and foreign gods into the city regularly. Furthermore, it is not as if Socrates did radical things on account of its guidance – in fact, it may have even had some part in his refusal to obey the Thirty when they ordered him to take part in the execution of Leon from Salamis (Ap. 32c). As Kraut (2000:  16) asks, why was Socrates’ divine sign not just brushed off as a harmless eccentricity? This is the lacuna in the religious interpretation that points us back in the direction of politics. As Parker observes, ‘It may be that an accusation of impiety was almost never brought before an Athenian court without political anxiety or hatred being present in the background’ (1996: 147). Xenophon has Socrates describe his divine sign as though it is no different from other forms of divination (Ap. 12), and Plato has him describe it in equally harmless terms: it opposed him whenever he was about to do something wrong (Ap. 40a, 40c). This seems innocuous enough, but ‘there were still problems with having such a friendly private deity:  it seemed to privilege Socrates (and by extension his friends and followers) and to exclude others in a most undemocratic fashion’ (Waterfield 2009: 46).59 A character in Aristophanes’ Frogs (888–91) condemns the ‘gods’ of the scientists as kaina daimonia, ‘newfangled spiritual beings’, the same words used in the charges brought against Socrates, and complains that they are private and inaccessible to the people of Athens.60 The Athenians were democratic through and through, and their religion was part and parcel of their lives as citizens of a democracy.61 There was nothing about Socrates’ well-known divine sign that was problematic or illegal in principle, but it gave his prosecutors rhetorical leverage. They could use it to stir up common prejudices against natural philosophers and political grievances held against enemies of the democracy. There was something subversive about Socrates’ private deity, something undemocratic or even anti-democratic about it (Cartledge 2009:  88). Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon could have used it to



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position Socrates as an outsider who felt he was free from, and stood above, the religious norms of Athens, all of which were governed and carefully protected by the Assembly (Kraut 2000: 16). It allowed his accusers to argue that he was the follower of a god not recognized by the state, and this would have found traction with his jury because it made him seem undemocratic. ‘Plato has Euthyphro superciliously sympathize with Socrates: “Such things [his divine sign] are easily misrepresented to the masses”’ (Waterfield 2009: 47). Socrates’ loyalty to his divine sign was, in a sense, a rejection of the city and especially its traditions. It suggested that he felt superior to everyone, including the city’s religious institutions, and that he had privileged access to what the gods wanted from and for Athens. When we look at the divine sign in this light, it no longer seems like a harmless eccentricity; it sounds more like a claim to special authority (Kraut 2000:  17). It begins to look like the rejection of traditional religious institutions and the claim of superiority by one individual ‘over the political decisions of the whole city. . .it is not the sign itself that alarmed Athenians, but the disloyalty and antitraditionalism implied by it’ (Kraut 2000: 17).62 This may be why Socrates defends himself in terms of his service to the city. He felt he needed to justify a broader pattern of activities that appeared hubristic, undemocratic, and even subversive. But in defending himself by justifying his philosophical life as a new form of piety, a kind of service to the god in which he is ‘a gadfly god-sent to sting the Athenians into caring about virtue above all else’ (Burnyeat 2002:  137), Socrates reinforces his position as an outsider and as a threat to the status quo. If Socrates’ jurors were to ask themselves what would be left of their religion and the traditional Athenian way of life if (1) the entire city were to live as Socrates did and (2) replace their religious sacrifices, festivals, and processions with moral philosophy, what would they think? ‘I submit that our jurors are bound in good conscience to say to themselves: Socrates has a religion, but it is not ours. This is not the religion of Athenians’ (Burnyeat 2002: 138).63 At this point we have to ask, do these arguments sound like strictly religious considerations? Does the impiety charge really matter outside of a social and political context?

VII.  The mixed motivations theory Some of the most recent scholarship on the trial of Socrates has argued for a mixture of religious and political elements in accounting for the trial (hereafter

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‘the mixed motivation’ theory).64 The crux of these arguments is that, in Socrates’ Athens, religion and politics were so interrelated and inseparable in the lives of most Athenians that it is ‘anachronistic and misleading to distinguish a “political” from a “religious” charge’ (Cartledge 2009:  77).65 On this view, we have already missed the point if we ask, as many scholars have, whether political motivations trumped religious concerns (or vice-versa) in the minds of Socrates’ accusers and jurors. In Athens, impiety was always political, because it always ran the risk of endangering the city as a whole (Strauss 1987:  95; Cartledge 2009: 79). Religion was not a separate sphere in society. ‘If Socrates rejects the city’s religion, he attacks the city. Conversely, if he says the city has got its public and private life all wrong, he attacks its religion; for its life and its religion are inseparable’ (Burnyeat 2002: 138). Atheism, or any other form of impiety, was a public concern because both had the potential to anger the gods and turn them against the city (Waterfield 2009: 164). Waterfield’s point is very important because it helps us appreciate that, for the Athenians, piety and impiety were matters of the deepest existential significance  – an impious citizen could endanger the entire city. Other scholars, therefore, have been wrong to think that the impiety charge was ‘unrelated’ to politics,66 and to ask why Socrates ‘was charged with a religious crime, rather than a political crime’ (Brickhouse and Smith 2002: 8). Athenian society was so thoroughly ‘permeated and cemented’ by religious sensibilities that a catastrophe like the loss to Sparta, or a public health crisis as devastating as the Great Plague of 430 BCE, which killed one third of the Athenian population, could only be understood as a sign of the gods’ disapproval of Athens (Waterfield 2009: 202). From the perspective of the average Athenian, the outcome of the war, like the social, economic, ideological, and health crises that preceded it, meant the gods were punishing the city. Even Pericles, who famously rationalized religious beliefs, referred to the Great Plague as daimonion (Thuc. 2.64.3), as heaven-sent or supernatural (Cartledge 2009: 82). In the extraordinarily ‘aweful’ circumstances of 399 BCE, ‘ordinary pious Athenians were practically bound to ask themselves’ whether the gods had ‘deserted Athens – or had the Athenians deserted the gods?’ (Cartledge 2009: 83). The mixed motivation theory has several advantages over the standard positions. Some scholars have argued implausibly that Socrates was condemned because he was an oligarch or had oligarchic sympathies and favoured overthrowing the Athenian democracy (Stone 1988). This position is not supportable for several reasons, as we have seen. Other scholars have suggested more plausibly but without sufficient evidence that Socrates was condemned



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because he was perceived as a ‘crypto-oligarch’ or Spartan sympathizer. Perception alone, and in this case a misperception, was sufficient to turn Athenian democrats against Socrates (Vlastos 1983:  495–516). Still other scholars have argued that, regardless of Socrates’ political beliefs and associations, ‘the most plausible conclusion from our available evidence’ is that Socrates’ trial ‘had no political dimension’ (Irwin 1989:  142; cf. Brickhouse and Smith 1994:  173–5, 1989:  69–87). Meletus and his supporters meant what they said when they charged Socrates with impiety, and they had impiety in mind when they accused him of corrupting the young men of Athens. The mixed motivations theory avoids this hornet’s nest of irresolvable disagreements by grounding the political motivations for Socrates’ trial in Athenian religious beliefs. Socrates was not the only atheist in Athens, but he was the only atheist who had become a figurehead and symbol of Athenian decline. He was not an oligarch, but because of his connections to the oligarchic circles in Athens, he had been living on ‘borrowed time’ since the Thirty’s defeat in 403 BCE (Waterfield 2009: 193). As a representative of all that had gone wrong in Athens, Socrates was no longer welcome in a city still reeling from the humiliation of what Thucydides called her moment of ‘total destruction’. She had been defeated ‘in every respect . . . army, navy, and everything else was lost’ (Thuc. 7.87). In the wake of so much devastation, Athenian religious beliefs produced a political imperative to make amends with the gods by cleaning house, and Socrates was the poison that needed to be purged. The mixed motivations theory has the added advantage of being compatible with (1)  the formal charges taken at face value (rather than as a cover for hidden political grievances), and (2) Plato’s account of why Socrates was on trial (Brickhouse and Smith 1994: 187). As Socrates says in the Apology (20c ff.), he infuriated the wrong people with his gadfly questioning, and this made him both unpopular and open to the misrepresentation that he was a sophist who made ‘the weaker argument the stronger’ and an atheist who did not believe in any gods, let alone the gods of the city. Over time these prejudices against Socrates became embedded in Athenian commonsense, which enabled Socrates’ accusers to craft their indictment broadly, so as to trigger as many Athenian prejudices as possible while also insulating itself from Socratic refutation. Given the troubled times, and the brevity of the trial, which prevented Socrates from adequately defending himself, these prejudices were easy to develop into the idea that Socrates was a danger to the city. For some jurors, religious considerations probably weighed most heavily; for others, political grievances were probably more pressing; still others may have simply wanted revenge for having been

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embarrassed in public – the broadly construed indictment was able to exploit all of these resentments.67 What someone like Cartledge (2009) or Waterfield (2009) can add to this story is an account of the cultural factors that helped warrant a trial in 399 BCE.

VIII.  Conclusions When we weigh our evidence and assess the quality of the arguments for the various positions in this debate, it is clear that the mixed motivation theory is the most reasonable. There are several problems with the standard positions. The first is a matter of insufficient evidence. We do not know what the historical Socrates believed about religion or politics,68 and we have even less evidence about the beliefs and motivations of Socrates’ accusers and jurors. We certainly do not know enough to attribute a single mindset to all of them – in fact, it is not clear what that sort of evidence could be: is it ever possible to recover the psychological states of a jury or prosecution team on any evidence? Perhaps there is something fundamentally misguided about the way the standard positions account for Socrates’ trial. Moreover, we have a source problem and so do not know what Socrates said in his defense speech (or even whether he spoke at all!), or what his prosecutors said in their speeches. It is tempting to trust Plato and Xenophon more than other sources, but (1) we do not know where to distinguish between fact and fiction in their writings, and (2) we have to work awfully hard on the basis of very weak evidence to limit ourselves to Xenophon’s Apology, where politics are not mentioned, and not his Memorabilia, where they are a central issue. Without reliable evidence about these matters we cannot say with certainty what Socrates believed, how he was perceived, or what was or was not said during his trial. Even Xenophon confesses that he ‘often wondered what the arguments could have been by which the prosecutors persuaded the Athenians that Socrates was worthy of death as far as the city was concerned’ (Mem. 1.1.1). If he could not figure it out, it is not clear how we can, especially when he is a primary source! The second problem with the standard positions is that neither one of them is necessary and sufficient for answering the motivation question. The moderate political interpretation, while impossible to rule out, is not necessary, since we can account for the trial without appealing to a political subtext involving Socrates’ political ideology. Even if we knew for certain that the maximally political Socrates that I reconstruct above were a correct representation of the



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historical Socrates, it still would not follow that he was on trial for political reasons. His accusers and his jurors might have found his philosophical life in general to be intolerable because it, and not any of his particular beliefs, was the real corrupting influence on the youth. Anytus and Meletus could have argued that philosophical analysis caused young Athenians to question the value of Athenian values, and so freed them in a way that was dangerous and even harmful to the state. They could have had Alcibiades and Critias in mind as evidence of Socrates’ social toxicity without attributing any political beliefs to him. The religious interpretation is not much stronger, because it is not sufficient for answering the motivation question, and it rests on an anachronistic assumption about the separability of religion and politics in the civic life of ancient Athenians. The crucial point here is that apart from political concerns about the welfare of the city, the impiety charge would not have mattered to the city – the Athenians would not have gone out of their way to execute an elderly man if his impiety was not a matter of social and political concern. Athens was full of atheists and sceptics, many of whom (including Pericles and Euripides) rationalized traditional religious beliefs and/or revised traditional myths; there was no law requiring every Athenian to believe in one god or set of gods or to follow one cult or to perform certain sacrifices; religious innovation was something the city sponsored; and there was nothing criminal or impious in principle about Socrates’ divine sign. In fact, the impiety charge, understood in terms of Socrates’ divine sign, as both Plato and Xenophon understood it, only carries weight when it is connected to the city’s democratic politics: it was a private deity and so unavailable to other Athenians to worship, and it positioned Socrates as an extreme outsider who questioned the authority of traditional religious institutions and thus the authority of the Assembly. The mixed motivations theory has several advantages over these positions: (1) it can float free from the unanswerable questions about the historical Socrates, since it does not depend on any particular views about Socrates’ politics or religion; (2) it does not depend on any of our inconsistent sources, and it does not require us to speculate about whether Xenophon responded to Polycrates or the speeches actually delivered at Socrates’ trial; (3) it can accept the sincerity of the charges that were brought against Socrates, because it is sensitive to their unspoken but (to Athenians) obvious political significance; and (4)  it is compatible with much more probable hypotheses about what Socrates’ accusers said during their speeches, given the freedom to slander and engage in character

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assassination afforded by the Amnesty, which restricted what they could put in their indictment but not what they could say as they spoke to the jury. The mixed motivations theory depends on two things: (1) the formal charges and (2)  some background knowledge about the inseparability of politics and religion in ancient Athens. These two things cannot give us answers to questions about what Socrates did and did not believe, how he was and was not perceived, and so on. But perhaps that is for the best, since those questions only lead to irresolvable disagreements. Instead of leading us further down that path, the mixed motivations theory points us in a new direction, and it is a promising one: we should focus primarily on reconstructing the political culture of Socrates’ trial, not Socrates’ irrecoverable beliefs, which, after all, probably were not known or understood by anyone on his jury, and may not have been reported by Xenophon or Plato. When we study the trial and think about the motivation question we typically reason from facts about our sources to conclusions about the trial. The mixed motivation theory invites us to reverse this train of thought so that we reason from facts about the trial to conclusions about our sources, and then back again. In the end, we are still left with lacunae in our understanding of what happened to Socrates in 399 BCE. But perhaps we can make progress in putting together a more complete picture of who Socrates was by looking more closely at his trial as his truest available reflection. This is where the traditional debate, the standard positions, and the conventional evidence leave us:  there is insufficient evidence for the extreme political interpretation; the moderate political interpretation is possible but superfluous, and the religious interpretation is based on anachronistic assumptions about the separability of religion and politics in ancient Athens. This leaves us with the mixed motivations theory, which is fine as far as it goes. But the problem is, it doesn’t go very far in answering the key questions about the relevance of Socrates’ evil associates during Socrates’ trial. In the next two chapters, I will make the case for including the Symposium, Gorgias, Alcibiades I, and parts of the Republic as important ancient evidence that supports a political interpretation of Socrates’ trial. Once these dialogues are on the table, one must work very hard to deny the likelihood of a political subtext to the formal charges brought against Socrates in 399 BCE. Not only must one ignore Plato’s direct statements about the trial in these other dialogues (Plato’s ‘other apologies of Socrates’); one also must (1) rely on insubstantial speculation about the contents of a document – Polycrates’ ‘Accusation of Socrates’ – that has been lost since the fourth century BCE, (2) make very significant inferences about the impact



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of that document (Polycrates was so successful in ‘giving Alcibiades to Socrates’ as one of his students that he tricked Plato and the Socratics into thinking the relationship was real), and (3)  undercut the historical contents of Alcibiades’ speech in the Symposium, which Ellis (1989: xviii) has described as ‘the most indelible portrait of Alcibiades from antiquity’. If the ‘no politics’ view is correct, Plato made it all up in response to a political pamphlet by a second-rate sophist.69 In other words, the mixed motivations theory is a minimalist view; it is the least of what is required by the available evidence. It follows from the formal charges and certain facts about the Greek way of life in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, and it tells us that Socrates’ trial had to have been politically motivated because Socrates was charged with impiety, and Athenian religious matters always had a political significance. The problem here is that this conclusion doesn’t tell us whether Socrates’ pedagogical relationships with men like Alcibiades and Critias were decisive considerations in the deliberations of the prosecutors and the jury. As I argue in Chapters 2 and 3, however, this interpretive impasse disappears as soon as we look outside of the Apology and consider the relevant evidence in other Platonic dialogues. To do this, we have to make inferences from Plato’s literary use of Socrates to conclusions about the historical Socrates, which some people will reject as inconsistent, or as a non-sequitur. But this objection assumes that the Apology is not itself a literary representation of Socrates, and ignores or downplays the fact that Plato’s depiction of Socrates as a moral educator who sought to improve the souls of men like Alcibiades and Callicles unambiguously shows that his associates were relevant at the trial.70 In the Symposium, Gorgias, and Republic, Plato clarifies the nature of Socrates’ relationships with these men, and he challenges the verdict of the trial, arguing not only that Socrates was innocent, but also that the city itself – especially its values and democratic political order – was truly to blame. The city accused Socrates for what it had done to itself. Socrates taught Plato that the philosopher’s role in the city is to serve as a cultural physician. The next two chapters suggest that Plato took this medical analogy very seriously. In the Symposium, he depicts Alcibiades as a symptom of an underlying cultural affliction, and he uses the Gorgias and Republic to present a diagnosis and therapeutic recommendation. In the Timaeus and Critias, Plato no longer relates everything back to the trial, but he employs the same medical reasoning as he warns the Athenians against the dangers of maritime imperialism. When we put all of this textual evidence together, it is clear that Plato’s thinking, from 399 BCE until quite late in his life, was shaped by a desire to understand the true causes of corruption in fifth-century Athens.

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He went out of his way to set the record straight regarding Socrates’ pedagogical relationships with men like Alcibiades, and he spent almost as much time and energy developing an alternative corruption theory that put Athens on trial. The next three chapters explain the details of Plato’s trial of Athens, and they explain how it sheds light on the political motivations underlying the trial of Socrates.

Notes

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2

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5 6

An earlier version of this chapter appeared in the Bloomsbury Companion to Socrates. Nehamas (1998: 153) challenges Nietzsche’s assessment of Socrates’ health, pointing out that Nietzsche was sick most of his life, while Socrates was an embodiment of health and vigour; Nietzsche was always bundled up against the cold, while Socrates wore the same tunic during both winter and summer, and walked around barefoot; Nietzsche could not tolerate any alcohol, while Socrates could drink prodigiously without getting drunk; Nietzsche spent his life writing in private, completely alone and withdrawn from the world, while Socrates was a street philosopher, always in public, always talking to people. When we compare Socrates and Nietzsche in these respects, ‘the question’, Nehamas says, ‘Who is decadent and who is healthy begins to appear perfectly senseless’. For an argument in favour of Socratic sincerity, according to which Socrates was committed to telling the truth and could not possibly have been enticing his jury to convict him unjustly, see Brickhouse and Smith (1989: 37–47). We might complain that Nietzsche has turned Socrates’ narrow claim about the value of old age into a broad assessment of the value of life in general, but Nietzsche’s point is that death can appear to be a benefit only if you believe that this life and this world are inferior to the ones that are to come. Since Nietzsche was an atheist whose central value was life, this logical consequence of two-world metaphysical beliefs seemed unhealthy and particularly deplorable. On this point, see Cartledge (2009: 89), who suggests that the trial of Socrates would have performed ‘something like the collective civic rite of purification. . .purifying the citizen body by purging it of a cancerous irreligious traitor. . .’ I discuss Waterfield’s complete answer to these questions throughout this chapter. Nietzsche does not seem to have any opinions about them. Plato (Ap. 24b–c), Xenophon (Mem. 1.1.1), and D.L. (2.40) preserve essentially the same indictment. There are slight variations in the wording, but the charges are the same. For a detailed discussion of the precise meaning of each formal charge, see Brickhouse and Smith (1989: 30–6).



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7 Some scholars have seen a political motive underlying the corruption charge, and there may have been one. Just as there may have been a political motive underlying the jury’s decision to convict. But that does not mean there was a political meaning intended in the indictment. There could not have been, as a matter of legal fact. The Amnesty prohibited it. The Amnesty passed under the archonship of Eucleides in 403 BCE made it illegal to charge Socrates with crimes he committed before or during the reign of the Thirty. As I will discuss, however, the Amnesty did not prevent Socrates’ accusers from making his relationships with criminals and traitors issues during the trial. The Amnesty merely prevented these relationships from being part of the formal charges. 8 Some writers in later antiquity suggested that Socrates refused to defend himself and instead chose to remain silent. See, for example, Maximus of Tyre (late second century CE) who in Oration III addresses the question of whether Socrates did the right thing when he did not defend himself. Most scholars reject these stories because Plato and Xenophon, both of whom knew Socrates personally, present us with a Socrates who had plenty to say during his trial. Brickhouse and Smith (2002: 117) speculate that the story of Socrates’ court-day silence derives from a distortion of the tradition ‘of apologists trying to explain why Socrates, although a brilliant thinker and speaker, was not able to persuade his jurors to release him’. 9 See Brickhouse and Smith (1989, 1994) for the most systematic development of this view. See also Reeve (1989), Irwin (1989), Kraut (2000), and Cartledge (2009). 10 Many scholars have argued along these lines. See Barker (1951), Bonfante and Radista (1978), Burnet (1924), Bury (1926), Cartledge (2009), Chroust (1957), Dover (1976), Finley (1968), Guthrie (1971), Hansen (1996), Lofberg (1928), MacDowell (1978), Montuori (1981), Roberts (1984), Seeskin (1987), Stone (1988), Strauss (1987), Taylor (1976), Vlastos (1983), Waterfield (2009), and Winspear and Silverberg (1939). See Irwin (1989) and Burnyeat (1988) for line-by-line refutations of Stone (1988). For further responses to Stone, see Sobran (1988), Annas (1988), Bowersock (1988), and Kagan (1988). See Ralkowski (2011) for a critical review of Waterfield (2009), and see Brickhouse and Smith (1989), Finley (1968), and Hackforth (1933) for general arguments against the political interpretation. Cartledge and Waterfield, but especially Cartledge, are difficult to classify using these categories, which may be anachronistic. Waterfield clearly identifies more strongly with the political interpretation, as we will see below. But Cartledge (2009: 77) argues that the Athenian jury was ‘indeed right to convict Socrates. More especially, I shall argue that they did so on the basis of the main charge, that of impiety.’ He rejects the straightforward political interpretation. ‘I argue against that view’, he says. But he also argues that it is ‘anachronistic and misleading’ to

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distinguish the political from the religious charge, because impiety was always political. For agreement on this important point, see also Waterfield (2009: 193), Irwin (1989: 190), Strauss (1987: 94–6), Burnyeat (1988, 2002: 138), Kraut (2000: 13–18), and Parker (2002). 1 1 As we will see, scholars usually debate the prosecution’s motivations in terms of what they were legally permitted to do, given the Amnesty, what the indictment explicitly said, and how Socrates defended himself according to Plato and Xenophon. But why should we limit ourselves to these factors when we’re trying to unearth the psychology of three men? Why not ask what Socrates’ accusers had to gain from persecuting and silencing Socrates? What did they most want, and how is that related to Socrates’ execution? For example, the Thirty killed Lycon’s son. That seems extremely relevant to his participation in the trial as one of the two prominent democrats on the prosecution team. If Socrates could be linked in any way to the Thirty, it is hard to imagine how Lycon would not want revenge against him for his son. But we rarely include ordinary human elements like this in our discussions about Socrates’ last days. Maybe, as a consequence, we have missed the forest for the trees. Anytus might have been driven by something as basic as self-aggrandizement. Smith and Woodruff (2000: 4) think this would implicate Anytus in an ‘improbable hypocrisy’, because he had been an architect of the Reconciliation Agreement. But this assumes that Brickhouse and Smith (1989, 1994) are wrong about the legal significance of the Amnesty. Like several other scholars, Brickhouse and Smith argue for the view that the Amnesty prevented prosecutors from including political grievances in their indictments, but it did not prevent them from speaking freely about politics once a trial got started. If that is right, Anytus could have supported the Amnesty vigorously and made politics relevant during Socrates’ trial. Besides, how probable is it to expect a politician to be constrained by hypocrisy? We know Anytus was not exactly a man of principle: during the war, he resorted to bribery to get himself acquitted from a trial for incompetence, and at the end of the war, he initially supported the Thirty. It was not until he fled into exile that he joined the resistance movement with Thrasybulus and eventually became a prominent democratic leader in Athens. Maybe his role as a prosecutor in Socrates’ trial was a calculated political step taken to solidify his credentials as a trustworthy protector of the Athenian democracy. As Strauss says, the prosecution of Socrates four years after the fall of the oligarchy gave him an opportunity to focus the ‘ever-smouldering anger’ of the demos against a symbol of their enemies, as well as a chance to ‘build up his own reputation as a popular champion’ (1987: 95). Anytus was also known to be a suitor of Alcibiades (Plut. Alc. 4.4–6), and a bitter father who blamed Socrates for ruining his son (Xen. Apol. 29–31). For all we



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know, Anytus may have wanted revenge against Socrates for stealing his man (since Alcibiades loved Socrates, and not Anytus) or harming his family. If we could develop a more comprehensive understanding of these issues, we would be well on our way to a clearer picture of what happened to Socrates. But alas, such a clearer understanding is probably impossible. Arguably the most sensible thing ever said about this issue is Burnyeat’s observation that Socrates’ jurors will not have all voted ‘Guilty’ for the same reasons (2002: 135). In fact, Socrates could have been charged with sedition or subversion, but he was not. For an example of an Athenian law against subversion, see Andoc. 1.96–7, and see MacDowell (1978) for a general discussion of the law in classical Athens. Socrates was charged with impiety. Nobody seriously disputes this. Our question is whether the formal charge of impiety was used to disguise political motivations for Socrates’ trial, or whether there were political grievances operative in the decision-making of Socrates’ jury. And when scholars attempt to answer these questions, they are not merely interested in knowing how Socrates was perceived. Typically there is a desire to understand what Socrates’ politics were in fact. Our ancient evidence for the Amnesty is in Aristotle’s Ath. Pol. 38–9, especially 39.1–6, and Andoc. 1.81–7. See, for example, Allen (1975: 12), Burnet (1924: 101), Bury (1940: 393), Davies (1983: 187), Navia (1985: 14, 39 n. 2), Reeve (1989: 99), and Roberts (1984: 245). Each of these scholars thinks the Amnesty would have made it illegal for the prosecutors to use Socrates’ relationships with Critias and Alcibiades, or anyone else affiliated with crimes against the democracy, as part of their case against him. For an additional discussion of this point, see Loening (1981: 203). Joyce (2008: 514) argues that the Amnesty only applied to the time period in which the Thirty held power, and that the point of the reconciliation was merely to settle grievances that their dictatorship had produced throughout the city. Hansen (1996) makes the important point that Socrates’ prosecutors would have been free to discuss politics as much as they wanted, even if the Amnesty did offer a blanket forgiveness for crimes committed before or during the reign of the Thirty, provided the issues they raised related entirely to things Socrates did and said between 403 and 399 BCE. However, if that had been the prosecution’s focus, and if the prosecutors had been limited in this way, they would not have been able to discuss Alcibiades or Critias, both of whom were dead by 403 BCE. However, it does seem fair to say that Socrates’ accusers would have been careful not to be perceived as violating the Amnesty, and so may have constructed and presented their case in a way that steered clear of politics as much as possible. The success of their case, as well as their lives, may have depended on it. See Rhodes

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Plato’s Trial of Athens (1981: 473), Harrison (1971: 106), and Krentz (1982: 115–18). For a general discussion of the Amnesty, see Ostwald (1986: 497–509). Rhodes points out that defendants could appeal for acquittal at a preliminary hearing if they could prove they were being prosecuted in violation of the Amnesty. See Parker (2002: 150) for a discussion of Lysias’ speeches and what they mean for our understanding of the Amnesty. For additional examples of post-war trials that made open references to crimes committed before and during the reign of the Thirty, see Lysias’ Against Agoratus, Against Evandros, and Against Alcibiades 1. Lintott (1982: 176) mentions twelve such speeches by Lysias, and three by Isocrates. At the very least Socrates was critical of sortition and popular election, and he rejected the idea of mass wisdom. He also may have favoured rule by experts, and he was fiercely critical of Athens’ most famous democratic statesmen, including Pericles. For important and representative passages, see Plato’s La. 184e, Grg. 519a, Prt. 319b–20b, Ap. 24e–5c, 29d, 31c–2a, Cri. 47c–d, 47a–8d, Hp. Ma. 284e, Men. 93e–4e2, Euthd. 292b–c, and Xen. Mem. 1.2.9, 3.14, 3.7.5–7, 3.9.10. Xenophon’s implication here seems to be that Anytus participated in the prosecution because he was angry with Socrates for suggesting that he had raised his son badly. Plato also hints at personal grievances between Anytus and Socrates. At Men 91c–2b, 93a–4b, Anytus expresses hostility toward the sophists, with whom he probably identified Socrates, and he specifically warns Socrates to watch what he says about Athenian politicians. This fragment is from Publius Aelius Aristides’ In Defense of Oratory. According to Plato, Aeschines of Sphettus was present at Socrates’ trial (Ap. 33e) and death (Phd. 59b). See Irwin (1989: 189–90). To be fair to Waterfield, this seems to be his point as well, only he puts the emphasis on the political dimension of impiety, not the religious one, as I discuss below. On this point, Cartledge (2009: 76–91) and Strauss (1987: 94–6) are also helpful. Newspaper cartoons may not change many minds, but Stone’s analogy is a poor one. Jon Stewart’s Daily Show is a much more apt analogue to the plays of Aristophanes. Stewart often says he does not have a political agenda. But who honestly thinks that he and his colleagues do not shape opinions and impact American politics? See Cost (2009) for a discussion of recent studies of Stewart’s influence. See Chroust (1957: ch. 4) for a detailed discussion of the arguments relevant to dating Polycrates’ pamphlet. Chroust (1957: ch. 4) and Waterfield (2009: 197–200) both try to reconstruct the content of Polycrates’ speech. Irwin (1989: 193 n. 19) calls Chroust’s reconstruction of Polycrates’ pamphlet ‘overconfident’. This is a fair criticism, since Chroust



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relies so much on Libanius’ Apology and we cannot know how faithful Libanius’ paraphrase of Polycrates is. For developments of Chroust’s position, see Brickhouse and Smith (1989, 1994, 2002). Assuming his dialogues are informative about history, Plato confirms a whole host of other potentially damaging relationships between Socrates and many of Athens’ worst enemies of the state. Alcibiades, Charmides, and Critias are all present in the Prt. The Chrm. says outright that Socrates and Critias have known each other for more than a decade, and it presents Socrates as Charmides’ teacher. The Symp. and Grg. both present Socrates as Alcibiades’ lover, and the Symp. and Chrm. both tell us that Socrates was attracted to Charmides. For a more detailed development of this argument, see Brickhouse and Smith (1989: 84–5). Plutarch says that after Alcibiades’ speech to the assembly in favour of the Sicilian Expedition, ‘the young were soon elevated with these hopes, and listened gladly to those of riper years, who talked wonders of the countries they were going to; so that you might see a great number sitting in the wrestling grounds and public places, drawing on the ground the figure of the island and the situation of Libya and Carthage. Socrates the philosopher and Meton the astrologer are said, however, never to have hoped for any good to the commonwealth from this war’ (Plut. Alc. 17.3). Plato was probably twelve or thirteen the year that Alcibiades made his case for the Sicilian Expedition. And he was a wrestler. How can we not imagine Plato at the wrestling grounds described by Plutarch, either involved in this excitement or watching it disapprovingly from a distance? But if Plato was acutely aware of Alcibiades and his role in the Sicilian disaster, how could he have muddled the details of Alcibiades’ pedagogical relationship with Socrates? Anything is possible, but this seems particularly unlikely. All he had to do was ask Socrates. According to Diogenes Laertius, the Athenians were so repentant after the trial that they executed Meletus and banished the others. When Anytus reached Heraclea Pontica as a fugitive, the citizens there exiled Anytus immediately upon hearing the news about Socrates (D.L. 2.43) or they stoned him to death. See Nails (2002: 38). We also have to find a way to explain why Plato never mentions the political issues that Polycrates suggests were central to the prosecution’s case against Socrates. Brickhouse and Smith would object to this conclusion because it contradicts Plato’s and Xenophon’s accounts of the trial, neither of which show Socrates responding directly to political charges (Brickhouse and Smith 2002: 7). This is an important argument, but it depends on the assumption that Xenophon’s and Plato’s apologies were intended to be straightforward (i.e. not rhetorical) and exhaustive (i.e. complete) historical reports. Unfortunately, we cannot know whether this

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Plato’s Trial of Athens assumption is true, although one might find it unlikely simply on the grounds that Plato, for one, was a philosopher and not a biographer or historiographer (Kahn 1988: 35). The question, therefore, is what should weigh more heavily in our speculations: (1) the evidence of absence (i.e. what Plato and Xenophon did not write) or (2) the probability that Socrates’ accusers would have exploited their audience’s post-war resentments and bitterness to convict Socrates? Brickhouse and Smith favour (1); I favour (2). For a classic account of the distinction between the Socratic and Platonic dialogues, see Guthrie (1971: 29–35). There is an exception to this rule, as we will see in the penultimate section of this chapter. It is possible to attribute a political significance to the trial without taking a position on Socrates’ political teachings. See Cartledge (2009). On this view, the anti-democratic ideas in the dialogues are Plato’s innovations and therefore tell us nothing about the historical Socrates or the motivations for his trial. For some classic and representative examples, see Popper (1945), Vlastos (1983), Kraut (1984), and Irwin (1989). Each of these scholars, with the exception of Vlastos, argues that Socrates was not opposed to democracy in theory or practice, and they attribute the anti-democratic ideas of the middle dialogues to Plato alone. Several scholars have argued that Socrates was part of the oligarchic faction, and perhaps even part of a conspiracy against the democratic constitution. See Grote (1865, vol. 7: 144–6), Guthrie (1971: 61–4), Stone (1988: 117–39), Taylor (1933: 103), Vlastos (1983: 495–516), Winspear and Silverberg (1939: 84), and Wood and Wood (1978: 97). For discussions of the relationship between Plato’s political theory in the R. and Socrates’ political thought, see Kraut (1984: 10), Ober (1998: 10), Schofield (2006: 315–16), and Rowe (2007). Vlastos (1983) argues that the incompatibilities between Plato and Xenophon are too significant for this to be a plausible interpretive method. For a response to him on this point, however, see Wood and Wood (1978) and Schofield (2000). Brickhouse and Smith (1994: 157) agree with Vlastos on this point. They make the case that the Socrates of Plato’s early dialogues cannot be reconciled with the one we find in Plato’s middle dialogues or with the one we find in Xenophon’s writings. My own view is that we cannot know what the historical Socrates believed about anything. It seems plausible that the historical Socrates is correctly represented some places in Plato and Xenophon, but we lack the objective standard necessary for distinguishing fact from fiction. I do not see any way around this problem, short of discovering a time machine. And even then we would have to find our way past Socrates’ various ironic facades, assuming he really was a master of irony. The point of this subsection is to present a maximally political Socrates so that we can bring such a Socrates’ views to bear on the debate about the trial’s motivations.



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It is worth noting that some scholars, for example Penner (2000), think Socrates was completely apolitical, cynical about the possibility of producing or discovering political experts, and interested only in a kind of ground-up reform via discussions with interlocutors aimed at changing them as individuals. Horn (2008) also denies that Socrates had political ambitions to change Athenians by changing the polis. Woodruff (1993) acknowledges that Socrates was often focused on the kind of virtue that political leaders should have, suggesting that the moral reform of individuals was inseparable from politics. Socrates emphasizes the importance of experts in several of Plato’s early dialogues. See Ap. 24e–5c, Cri. 47a–8c, and La. 184ce. Socrates’ arguments against democracy were not unique to him. Some of his contemporaries made the same or similar points. See Waterfield (2009). This analogy is ubiquitous in Xenophon. See Gray (2010) for a discussion. Stone thought Socrates’ challenges to the possibility of knowledge ‘undermined the polis’ (1988: 81), but only because he was committed to contradictory positions. He argues both (1) that Socrates denied the possibility of knowledge and (2) that only someone with knowledge should rule, which produces the conclusion that nobody is qualified to rule. See Irwin (1989) for a discussion of Stone’s ‘absurdly incoherent’ position on this issue. Socrates’ scepticism is probably clearest in his distinction between divine and human wisdom (Ap. 20c–3b). But his scepticism may have been restricted to knowledge of the consequences of our actions, which is unattainable – at best, we must pray to the gods that our actions will have desirable consequences (Xen. Mem.1.1.7–9). The topic of Socrates’ disavowal of knowledge is complex and too much to discuss in detail in this chapter. For a few classic discussions, see Burnyeat (1977), Irwin (1977), Kraut (1984), and Vlastos (1985). Socrates mentions the trial of Pericles as an instance of the demos not taking responsibility for its own failings, and evidence of Pericles’ failed leadership (Grg. 516a–d). Socrates and Pericles appear to have been well acquainted, although Socrates may have preferred Aspasia’s company to Pericles’ (Plut. Per. 24.3). On this point he disagrees with Plato’s Protagoras (Prt. 319a–28d), who argues that everyone can learn civic virtue, albeit at different ability levels, and so is capable of developing a worthwhile opinion of what is just and lawful. Brickhouse and Smith (1994: 164) argue that Socrates had a favourable opinion of the craftsmen. Their evidence of this is Socrates’ claim in Plato’s Ap. (22d) that, unlike the politicians who know nothing, the craftsmen ‘know many fine things’ – they have craft knowledge. This point is overstated, however. Socrates’ criticism of the craftsmen’s bloated self-assessment – they believed they had knowledge about everything because of their craft knowledge – is compatible with the oligarchic dismissal of the craftsmen as being unable to deliberate properly about moral and

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Plato’s Trial of Athens political matters: if their craft knowledge made them hubristic and closed-minded, that sounds like an instance of impaired judgement. In Plato’s Ap. (31e–2a), Socrates suggests that the Athenian people are so ‘wild’, so far gone from the path to virtue, that they cannot even tolerate an activist who is devoted to justice. The democracy, he said, was a ‘with us or against us’ institution. Socrates makes a similar point in Plato’s Men. (92d–4e), where he angers Anytus, one of Socrates’ accusers, by suggesting that none of the Athenian statesmen had succeeded in giving his children a proper education in virtue. Later in Plato’s Grg., Socrates offers high praise to Aristeides, who, despite failing to teaching his sons virtue (Men. 92d–4e), was admirable for remaining uncorrupted by his power (Grg. 526a). I discuss these passages more closely, and in different contexts, in Chapters 2, 3, and 4. Several scholars have argued that Socrates’ criticism of democracy was theoretical, not practical (Vlastos 1983, Kraut 1984; Irwin 1989; Ober 2011). These positions are worth considering very closely, since it is one thing to be a critic of democracy, and another to support the alternative faction. For counterarguments to these positions, however, see Waterfield (2009). Burnyeat (1988) suggests that Stone may not have correctly understood Socrates, but he may nevertheless have provided us with ‘a sympathetic understanding of the ordinary, politically involved Athenian citizen’s reaction to Socrates’. On the other hand, some of Lysias’ speeches give us reason to believe there was a prejudice against those who stayed in the city during the reign of the Thirty. For example, one was titled ‘In Defense of Eryximachus, Who Remained in the City’. These men were also the most likely to be blinded by self-satisfaction and pretensions to wisdom, and so most ‘in need of being stung by Socrates, the gadfly’ (Brickhouse and Smith 1994: 171) For helpful overviews, see Bussanich (2012) and McPherran (2013). I discuss the introduction of Bendis in the Conclusion of this book. On Socrates’ divine sign, see Bussanich (2012). Parker (2002: 155) offers this solution to our paradox: the city could introduce new gods (e.g. Pan and Bendis), provided the introductions were done formally, publicly and with approval from the assembly. ‘All religious practice undertaken on Attic soil occurs therefore by gracious permission of the assembly.’ For additional discussion of these practices, see Garland (1992). Parker (2002: 149) makes a similar point about Aristophanes’ Clouds: ‘admission to [Socrates’] school is portrayed as a form of initiation into Mysteries (255 ff.), but the effect is much less to present Socrates as a man of strong if misguided piety than to stress the secret, elitist, anti-social character of his teaching’. For example, they began their meetings of the Assembly with the ritual slaughter of piglets. Their blood was used to ceremonially purify the meeting place on the



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Pnyx hill: ‘religion therefore was implicated with everything, and everything was imbricated with religion’ (Cartledge 2009: 78). Burnyeat (2002: 137–8) makes a similar point. He argues that Socrates’ selfdescription in Plato’s Ap. is both ‘one long counter-indictment’ of Athens, charging Athenians with ‘rampant injustice’, and a revision of traditional Athenian religious beliefs. It is a counter-indictment of Athens because it implies that Athenian values must be revised. And it is a revision of traditional religious beliefs because it implies ‘what divinity minds about, in Socrates’ view, is two things: (1) that people should try to be virtuous, (2) that they should realize they do not yet know, but have to find out, what it is to be virtuous. . .And in making this counter-indictment Socrates claims to be speaking on behalf of divinity’. See also Parker (2002: 156). Parker (2002: 153) thinks the important connection, made by many Athenians, was between atheism and relativism. See Waterfield (2009) and Cartledge (2009: 76–90). For older and much less developed statements of the same basic idea, see Irwin (1989: 190), Strauss (1987: 94–6), Burnyeat (1988, 2002: 138), Kraut (2000: 13–18), and Parker (2002). For details on the inseparability of religion and civic life in ancient Athens, see Parke (1977) and Parker (1996). See especially Brickhouse and Smith (1994: 175): ‘Those who find a political motive lurking behind the prosecution simply cannot explain why Meletus and his supporters would choose such an unrelated indictment.’ Brickhouse and Smith (1994, 1989) argue for this version of the mixed motivations theory, but they couple it with an absolute rejection of the political interpretation. We should point out, however, that their ‘prejudice interpretation’ is separable from their rejection of Polycrates’ pamphlet as a source, just as it is separable from their more general case against the political interpretation. They are right that it is a problem for the political interpretation, whether extreme or moderate, that Plato’s and Xenophon’s apologies do not give us evidence of a political trial. But their own position – the idea that the Athenian hotshots went after Socrates because they wanted revenge for having been humiliated in public – has an equally serious difficulty accounting for why it took twenty-four years for the prejudice against Socrates to become actionable. However, if we combine (1) their prejudice interpretation of the prosecution’s motives for crafting a one-size-fits-all indictment with (2) the historians’ analyses of the troubled times in Athens (Cartledge 2009; Waterfield 2009), we get what I think is the fullest and most accurate account of why Socrates was on trial and condemned. This matters a great deal. If Socrates’ political views are reflected only in Plato’s Socratic dialogues, one can make the case that he was a proponent of democracy, as some scholars have argued. On the other hand, if we couple Plato’s Socratic dialogues with Xenophon’s Socrates and a few passages from Plato’s middle

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dialogues, it is clear that Socrates was a theoretical opponent of democracy and favoured rule by experts. 69 See the subsection ‘What Alcibiades teaches us about Socrates’ in Chapter 2 to get a sense of what we lose if we undermine the historical reliability of Alcibiades’ speech. 7 0 See Prior (2001) and Samaras (2007) for arguments against the historicity of Plato’s Ap. If all or many of Plato’s dialogues contribute to the same literary and philosophical project, as I argue in the Introduction, the Ap. should not have a privileged evidentiary status with respect to the trial and the historical Socrates. See Vlastos (1971) for a classic defense of the Ap.’s historicity. And see Brickhouse and Smith (1989: 3 n. 9) for a list of scholars who defend some version of this view.

2

Why Is Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium?

Alcibiades lived in a golden age and knew many of the ancient world’s most important people.1 Pericles was his cousin and guardian; Socrates was his lover; Aspasia, one of the most intelligent and powerful women in the ancient world, raised him.2 He knew Euripides, Sophocles, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Plato, and Xenophon.3 As he turned thirteen, he saw Phidias’ Athena revealed and put in her temple. He watched the construction of the Parthenon, listened to Pericles deliver the Funeral Oration, and probably attended the first production of Sophocles’ Antigone (Ellis 1989: 1–9). Everybody in the city knew him. He was a celebrity even in his youth.4 He was famous for his sexual appetites and his beauty, reportedly drawing women away from their husbands and men away from their wives (D.L. 4.49).5 In the Olympic games of 416 BCE, he entered seven chariots and won first, second, and fourth places (Thuc. 6.16; Plut. Alc. 11).6 This made him a hero to the city, as all victorious Olympians were.7 As commander of a naval fleet, he was ruthless (Plut. Alc. 27–32).8 In the assembly, he was spellbinding: people felt they had to listen to him,9 and when they did they were carried away by his visions. Plutarch says Alcibiades’ speech in favour of the Sicilian Expedition was so intoxicating that afterwards, wherever you went in the city, you’d find young boys drawing pictures of Sicily in the sand at the palaestras, while their elders couldn’t stop talking about the promise of the expedition (Plut. Alc. 17.3).10 Alcibiades was an Athenian Achilles or JFK, ‘the young prince who could take on the world and win big’ (Ober and Strauss 1990b: 50).11 That was on his good days. On his bad days, he was an enemy of the state. The Athenian democracy was notoriously fickle,12 but nothing aroused the Athenians’ scorn or made them indecisive quite like Alcibiades:  he was banished in 415 BCE, recalled in 407 BCE, and banished again a few months later. Aristophanes captures their sentiment perfectly in his Frogs: ‘Athens longs for him, it detests him, but it wants to have him’ (1425).13

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There was good reason for the Athenians’ ambivalence. Alcibiades was ‘at once inside the city and outside it; its savior, but also its greatest threat; its darling, but at the same time its enemy’ (Gribble 1999: vii). When he was thirtyfive, shortly after convincing the Athenian assembly to invade Sicily, Alcibiades fled for Sparta to avoid trial for impiety back in Athens. The Athenians were enraged and immediately voted for his execution. According to Plutarch, the moment Alcibiades heard this news he smiled and said, ‘I will show them that I am still alive’ (Plut. Alc. 22.2). Some Athenians saw his treachery coming all along. As Thucydides says, People became frightened at a quality in him which was beyond the normal and showed itself both in the lawlessness of his private life and habits and in the spirit in which he acted on all occasions. They thought that he wanted to become a tyrant, and so they turned against him. (Thuc. 6.15)14

Alcibiades’ stay in Sparta got off to a good start. He provided King Agis II with valuable strategic advice against the Athenians, advising him in particular to build a fortified garrison in the hills above Athens, which the Spartans used as a base for raiding Athenian territory year-round. The Spartans loved him. He had what Plutarch calls ‘a particular talent for gaining men’s affections . . . He could at once comply with and really embrace and enter into their habits and ways of life, and change faster than a chameleon’ (Plut. Alc. 23.4). He cut his hair, bathed in cold water, ate the Spartan’s black broth, and denounced his old love of Athenian luxury. He made himself at home in Sparta, but in the end he couldn’t stay for long. In fact, he had to escape and run for his life because he impregnated the queen – not out of lust or love, he said ‘in his mocking way, but because he wanted his descendants to rule over Sparta’ (Plut. Alc. 23.7)15 – and thus earned the distinction of being the one man condemned to death by both sides of the war. In 407 BCE, the rogue returned. Athens had recalled him four years earlier, shortly after the demos overthrew the Four Hundred and restored the democracy. But Alcibiades waited. He knew he would receive a hero’s welcome if he made the right entrance. And so he did, sailing into the Piraeus three years later ‘in a blaze of glory’ (Plut. Alc. 37.1). His Attic triremes were adorned all round with many shields and spoils of war; many that he had captured in battle were towed along in his wake; and still more numerous were the figure-heads he carried of triremes which had been overwhelmed and destroyed by him. There were not less than two hundred of these all together. (Plut. Alc. 32.1)16



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As he climbed down from his ship, people ‘ran in throngs to Alcibiades with shouts of welcome, escorting him on his way, and putting wreaths on his head as they could get to him’ (Plut. Alc. 32.4). It was ‘as if he were a victorious athlete, a divine hero – or a king’ (Hale 2009: 220). In the assembly, the demos voted to revoke his death sentence, return his property, and restore his citizenship. They also elected him stratēgos autokratōr, which made him commander supreme on land and sea (Plut. Alc. 33.2–3), an honour that not even Pericles had been awarded at the peak of his popularity. ‘Achilles’ was back! And so were Athenian aspirations.17 As Plutarch notes, hope sprung eternal in Athens ‘so long as Alcibiades was alive’ (Plut. Alc. 38.2) – or until the next time he was banished. Predictably, just a few months after his triumphant reunion with the demos at the Piraeus, Alcibiades found himself in exile once again, this time holed up in his private fortress on the northern shore of the Sea of Marmara, never again to return to Athens. By the time of his legendary death – his assassins set fire to his house and then killed him with javelins and arrows when he ran out to escape (Plut. Alc. 39.4) – Alcibiades had been exiled from Athens twice; he had overseen the slaughter of an island colony’s male population (Plut. Alc. 16.5);18 he had disrupted a peace treaty with Sparta (Thuc. 5.44–6), and he was responsible for the disaster in Sicily, which cost Athens thousands of lives and may have ultimately caused her downfall years later. Why was this man, this treasonous, self-serving pirate-king playboy, given such a prominent place in Plato’s Symposium?19 That is the question for anyone who thinks Alcibiades was irrelevant or insignificant during the trial of Socrates.20

I.  Alcibiades and the trial of Socrates Alcibiades’ presence in the Symposium makes sense if one of Plato’s intentions was to ‘set the record straight’ by showing that Socrates did not corrupt Alcibiades (Gribble 1999: 214–59; cf. Gomperz 1905: 394–5; Bury 1909: xvii– xix, li–lii; and Hunter 2004:  103–4). As Bury (1909:  lii) says, ‘The speech of Alcibiades . . . fulfills a serious purpose – the purpose of vindicating the memory of Socrates from slanderous aspersions and setting in the right light his relations with Alcibiades.’ That was certainly one of Xenophon’s goals in his Memorabilia (1.2.12–48);21 it was also a goal in the writings of many Socratics,22 including the author of the Alcibiades I.23 However, if Alcibiades did not play a role, or only played a minimal one, in the trial and execution of Socrates (Chroust 1957: 135;

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cf. Brickhouse and Smith 2002: 7 and Rosen 1987: 283), why would Plato put him centre stage in a dialogue that alludes to the Sicilian Expedition, the mutilation of the Herms (Rosen 1987: 285 n. 31),24 and the trial (Nails 2006: 200–7), and also depicts Alcibiades’ relationship with Socrates?25 One possibility is that Plato was responding to Polycrates’ ‘Accusation of Socrates’ and the debates that followed its publication. As Chroust (1957: 71) suggests, Polycrates’ pamphlet may have been a ‘literary sensation’ that elicited a ‘flurry of Socratic apologies, all of which took issue with Polycrates rather than the events that occurred during the official trial’. Chroust states this possibility as a certainty, which is a mistake. Plato’s Symposium may have been part of such a literary flurry (Gomperz 1905:  394–5; cf. Bury 1909:  xvii–xix, li–lii).26 We cannot rule out that possibility (Johnson 2002: xiii). However, we also must not forget the conclusions and caveats from Chapter 1. First, Polycrates may have gotten it right. His pamphlet may have recorded a speech actually given by Meletus, Anytus, Lycon, or someone else at Socrates’ trial. Unfortunately, we don’t know what it said because it has been lost,27 and so we must reconstruct its contents by relying on references to it in two other sources, one of which provides evidence in support of the idea that Anytus made Socrates’ associates an issue during the trial.28 In other words, Polycrates’ pamphlet may have been a flurry-causing ‘literary sensation’ simply because its publication made the content of the prosecution’s case against Socrates more widely known. If that is right, Polycrates publicized but did not invent the idea that Socrates’ relationship with Alcibiades was among the reasons he was condemned in 399 BCE.29 Second, the fuss over Polycrates is misguided because the significance of his pamphlet, whatever it said, has been overstated. Even if it is true that Polycrates’ pamphlet was a fabrication or an epideixis and did not reflect the actual speeches that Socrates’ accusers gave during his trial, it is still very likely that some of the jurors were prejudiced against Socrates because of his close relationships with people like Alcibiades, Critias, Charmides, Euthydemus, Aristotle of Thorae (a member of the Thirty), and Cleitophon (who helped engineer the oligarchic coup in 411 BCE), not to mention the lesser-known oligarchs who were involved in subversive activities during and after the war (Nails 2002: 18; cf. Ober 2011: 171). If any of Socrates’ jurors were prejudiced against him, implicitly or explicitly, their prejudices would have been operative in their deliberations, even if Socrates’ accusers never said a word about his associates during the trial, and even if the jurors tried their best to observe the spirit of the Amnesty by focusing exclusively on the merits of the case. There are limits to any person’s capacity for objectivity.



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Third, it is hard to imagine a scenario in which Socrates’ accusers remained silent about his politics, real or imagined. It is possible that Socrates held and taught  – and was well known for holding and teaching, or was mistakenly believed to hold and teach  – undemocratic or even anti-democratic political doctrines. As Ober (2011:  164) says, ‘There can be little doubt that Socrates’ reputation as an outspoken critic of the status quo was securely established well before 399 BC’.30 This is compatible with him being a loyal but critical friend of the democracy – that is, a devoted, god-appointed servant of Athens and her laws  – because not all critics of the democracy were oligarchs or subversives who supported regime change. And since the Amnesty did not prevent Socrates’ accusers from making politics an issue in their prosecution speeches, it is very unlikely that none of them took advantage of residual political resentments among the jurors. In sum, the political interpretation of the trial can have merit regardless of whether Polycrates ‘got it right’. His pamphlet either accurately represented the prosecution’s speeches (which seems likely, given the Amnesty’s limited restrictions on what could be said during post-war trials), or made explicit what was implicit (e.g. as prejudice) on the day of the trial, and thus allowed everyone to acknowledge and debate what had been suppressed but felt. It is therefore implausible that Plato’s depiction of Alcibiades in the Symposium was merely a response to Polycrates’ pamphlet.31 It is far more likely that it was part of Plato’s response to the city’s condemnation of Socrates. He wanted to set the record straight and tell a different story about the trial of Socrates and the corruption of Alcibiades.32 One of the better reasons for thinking that Socrates’ trial did not have a political motivation or subtext is the simple fact that our best sources on the trial, the apologies of Socrates written by Plato and Xenophon, do not paint that kind of picture. Neither of them shows Socrates responding directly or indirectly to political accusations or innuendo. Plato was an eyewitness at the trial. If he really was there and Socrates’ accusers did make his associates a material issue that day, why would he write the Apology in a way that makes it seem that they did not (Brickhouse and Smith 2002: 7)?33 I will call this the ‘Sources Argument’. As I hope to show, the Sources Argument casts too small of a net and begs the question. It casts too small of a net because there is no reason for us to limit ourselves to Plato’s Apology as we look for evidence that, according to Plato, Socrates’ trial had political motivations. He alludes to the trial in several other dialogues, such as Symposium, Gorgias, and Republic, all of which do suggest that politics played a role in the condemnation of Socrates.34 The Sources Argument

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also begs the question because it assumes that Plato’s Apology was meant to be an objective and comprehensive historical account of Socrates’ trial. Plato was a master artist and philosopher, not a biographer or historiographer (Kahn 1988: 35, 1992: 239; cf. Prior 1997, 2001, 2006). He could have had any number of philosophical or literary reasons for writing the Apology without referring to the politics of that day. The point of this chapter is to show that Plato put Alcibiades in his Symposium to exonerate Socrates and to condemn the democratic city that made Alcibiades who and what he was. For Plato, Alcibiades was a human symbol of the political problem in all of its social and psychological complexity.35 He was a symptom of the city’s ‘fever’, and Socrates was his failed ‘physician’. Some scholars have understood the Gorgias as Plato’s ‘second apology of Socrates’ (Dodds 1959: 28; cf. Gomperz 1905:  343–4). The Symposium, I  shall argue, was his third. In addition to being a dialogue about love and the good life, the Symposium plays a significant role in Plato’s exoneration of Socrates and trial of Athens.

II.  Alcibiades and the tragedy of the Symposium Plato’s depiction of Alcibiades undoubtedly had more than one intended meaning.36 Several scholars have connected it with Socrates’ comments about tragedy and comedy at the end of the Symposium, that ‘the skillful tragic dramatist should also be a comic poet’ (Symp. 223d). As Jonathan Lear (1998: 150) says, Socrates’ point ‘is that a tragic poet ought to be able to write a single drama which can be read both as a tragedy and as a comedy . . . The Symposium is just such a drama’, and Alcibiades is a central character in the drama’s tragedy. Nails (2006) and Nussbaum (1986) agree that we can connect Alcibiades to a tragic element of the Symposium, but they have different ideas about how we should do so. For Nussbaum, the tragedy is one of choice and practical wisdom; it is an existential tragedy rooted in Plato’s metaphysics. For Lear, the tragedy is a by-product of human finitude but manifest in human psychology and politics. Nails, who is critical of both Nussbaum and Lear, thinks the tragedy in Plato’s dialogues is always epistemological, and she argues that the Symposium alludes to two specific ‘offstage’ tragedies involving ignorance and religious hysteria:  the profanation of the mysteries and the execution of Socrates. As we will see, each of these views has significant weaknesses, and so none of them fully explains why Alcibiades is in Plato’s Symposium. Nevertheless, they are worth considering in some detail because



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their limitations of scope shed light on a neglected meaning of the dialogue, namely, the incompatibility of philosophy and society symbolized by the character of Alcibiades.37

1.  An existential tragedy Martha Nussbaum famously suggests that the Symposium is a ‘harsh and alarming book’ (1986:  199) that presents a kind of existential tragedy ‘of choice and practical wisdom’. Through Alcibiades, she says, we can recognize the importance that ‘genuine passion’ has in the lives of ordinary people; we see ‘its irreplaceable contribution to understanding’ (Nussbaum 1986:  197). Diotima’s account of the soul’s ascent to the ‘great sea of beauty’ (Symp. 210d) shows us how we can transcend personal and appetitive eros, and make progress on the basis of desire to the Good. In the end, though, we find this account unpersuasive because we feel it is missing something essential, and so we cannot accept Diotima’s vision of ‘self-sufficiency’ and ‘model of practical understanding’. What Diotima’s account is missing is illustrated in ‘the person and the story of Alcibiades’ (Nussbaum 1986: 197).38 He helps us see that nobody can know and love another person as an individual, and at the same time know and love the Good. We cannot love the particular and the universal at the same time because personal and objective knowledge are incompatible; one eclipses the other. You think you can have both, that you ‘can have this love and goodness too, this knowledge of and by flesh and good-knowledge too. Well, says Plato, you can’t’ (Nussbaum 1986: 198). You must blind yourself to one or the other. You have to refuse to see something, apparently, if you are going to act. I can choose to follow Socrates, ascending to the vision of the beautiful. But I cannot take the first step on that ladder as long as I see Alcibiades. I can follow Socrates only if, like Socrates, I  am persuaded of the truth of Diotima’s account; and Alcibiades robs me of this conviction. He makes me feel that in embarking on the ascent I am sacrificing beauty; so I can no longer view the ascent as embracing the whole of beauty . . . I can, on the other hand, follow Alcibiades, making my soul a body. I can live in eros, devoted to its violence and sudden light. But once I have listened to Diotima, I see the loss of light that this course, too, entails – the loss of rational planning, the loss, we might say, of the chance to make a world. And then, if I am a rational being, with a rational being’s deep need for order and for understanding, I feel that I must be false to eros, for the world’s sake. (Nussbaum 1986: 198)

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Plato gives us a choice between (1) the full-blooded ‘unique passion’ for another person, which Alcibiades embodies in his love for Socrates, and (2)  the cold, stone-like ‘stable rationality’ that Diotima’s ascent promises to the lover of wisdom. Plato lets us ‘see two kinds of value, two kinds of knowledge; and we see that we must choose. One sort of understanding blocks out the other.’ The Symposium presents us with a life choice, and at the same time it argues that we cannot make this choice. ‘We see that philosophy is not fully human; but we are terrified of humanity and what it leads to’ (Nussbaum 1986: 198). This is a conflict that Plato himself didn’t fully work out. Which is why at the dialogue’s conclusion, Socrates and Alcibiades go separate ways – ‘Socrates, sleepless, to the city for an ordinary day of dialectic, Alcibiades to disorder and to violence’ (Nussbaum 1986: 199).39 There is more to Nussbaum’s account than some of her critics have suggested.40 Most importantly, she captures Plato’s idea that philosophy was a way of life in competition with other lives, such as the one Alcibiades lived and espoused. She is also correct to emphasize that, for Plato, the experience of transcendence is always finite (cf. Hyland 1995; Gonzalez 1998; and Ralkowski 2009), and so there is a real tension or disconnect between ‘objective’ and ‘personal’ forms of love. As Vlastos puts this point, ‘The high climactic moment of fulfilment – the peak achievement for which all lesser loves are to be “used as steps” – is the one farthest removed from affection for concrete human beings’. The soul’s ascent up Diotima’s heavenly ladder toward to kalon is a departure from individuals into the intelligible world insofar as they reflect it (Vlastos 1973: 32).41 Nussbaum is right to emphasize these points. For Plato, the philosophical life was a radical existential choice (Ep. VII 340–1) that made a person atopos (Symp. 221de), ‘strange’ or ‘weird’.42 It should not be surprising, Socrates says, that philosophers ‘are unwilling to occupy themselves with human affairs and that their souls are always pressing upwards, eager to spend their time above’, given the implications of the cave analogy (R. 517c). However, Nussbaum goes too far in suggesting that Plato had not made up his mind between these two forms of love and understanding, and that he was sympathetic to the ‘unique passion’ that Alcibiades felt for Socrates. There isn’t evidence of this in the Symposium or anywhere else in Plato’s dialogues. Quite the opposite: philosophy is a godlike activity that makes its practitioner ‘dear to the gods’; Socrates’ strangeness is evidence of his excellence. ‘He turns conventional atopia on its head, making his opponents the ones who are decentred or “out of place”, while himself reclaiming the heroic norm’ (Blondell 2002: 74). In contemplating the Form of Beauty, Socrates does not leave his humanity behind; he perfects it – to



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be fully human is (1) to become ‘like the divine so far as we can’ (Tht. 176b) and also (2) to be devoted to the cultivation of others in a way that gives birth to true virtue in their souls (Symp. 212a). Philosophy takes us away from the world in our ascent to the Good, but it culminates with our return to the cave when we serve as liberators.43 The final problem with Nussbaum’s view is that her focus on the incompatibility of objective and personal senses of love prevents her from accounting for the bigger picture of Alcibiades’ significance in Plato’s Symposium. The tragedy isn’t just personal; it is also political (Reeve 1992: 114).44 Nussbaum mentions Alcibiades’ politics at the beginning of her chapter, but she does not develop them in her interpretation of Alcibiades’ speech. And so, while it is plausible that Alcibiades is in the Symposium in order to develop the dialogue’s reflections on the nature of love, this cannot be the whole story, especially given the many noted references to the Peloponnesian War and Athenian politics.

2.  An ethical and political tragedy Jonathan Lear gets this right. He agrees that Plato’s depiction of Alcibiades helps us see one of the deepest meanings of the Symposium, but he thinks the tragedy of the dialogue is psychological and political, not just existential and metaphysical. In a way, Lear spells out the ethical and political implications of the human finitude that Nussbaum emphasizes in her account. On Lear’s view, Socrates fails to convert Alcibiades to the philosophical life for two reasons  – one related to Socrates’ ‘blindness’, which is a by-product of his love of what Nussbaum calls the ‘objective’; the other related to Alcibiades’ ‘blindness’, which is a by-product of his love of what Nussbaum calls the ‘personal’. Nussbaum’s was a tragedy of choice and practical wisdom; Lear’s is a tragedy of divine indifference to human finitude, which leads to social and political catastrophe.45 Alcibiades, who is ‘the incarnation of the human-erotic’ (Lear 1998:  156), is unable to develop according to Diotima’s path because ‘human eros functions as a resistance’,46 while Socrates, who has become ‘as divine as humanly possible’, is indifferent to Alcibiades’ struggles and ‘looks on humanity and the human world with the indifference of the gods’ (Lear 1998: 164). Which is exactly what we should expect from someone who has climbed Diotima’s heavenly ladder. Alcibiades is, of course, as human as they come. He is trapped in the humanerotic, and the only help which Socrates offers is as an exemplar in the human realm of the divine beauty: that is to say, he offers Alcibiades no help at all . . .

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Lear thinks Diotima fails to appreciate the implications of her ‘rites of love’, which encourage one to treat beautiful individuals as having only instrumental value: ‘they are to be used, stepped on, like rungs on a ladder which leads away from any concern for them’. Having climbed the ladder, ‘the best thing would be to kick it away’ (Lear 1998: 163). If we look at Socrates’ relationship with Alcibiades from the standpoint of Athenian culture, it is a failed encounter of ‘inestimable cost’ because of the role that Alcibiades plays in the downfall of Athens and the eventual disintegration of classical Greece (Lear 1998: 164–5). However, ‘from a divine point of view’, human politics is just a distraction, and it ‘does not matter which particular form the distraction takes’ (Lear 1998: 164). That is what Plato’s depiction of Alcibiades symbolizes:  the ‘divine’ Socrates does not care about Alcibiades or Athens or politics as long as they are disordered. He doesn’t care about individuals or cities for their own sake because he only sees one true value in the Good. Everything and everyone else is either a conduit to that true value or a distraction from it. Alcibiades’ failure to learn from Socrates, therefore, calls ‘into question the very idea of eros as a developmental force’. In fact, we should see Alcibiades as ‘acting out a refutation of Socrates’ theory’ (Lear 1998: 149). For Socrates, eros may function as a divine source of ascent, but for those in whom it functions as a source of social distraction, there is nothing to be done. From a psychoanalytic perspective, by contrast, this erotic distraction needs to be worked with and worked through if human life is to be afforded comic restoration. This, I believe, is a possibility which Socrates ignored. It is Socrates’ failure to grasp this possibility which is dramatized in the Symposium. And it is this possibility which Freud takes up when he thanks the ‘divine Plato’ for inspiration. (Lear 1998: 166)

This is an important argument to take seriously.47 If Lear is right, we should see a significant failing in Socrates’ teaching, not just in Alcibiades’ character. Socrates may not have been guilty of corrupting Alcibiades, but he was responsible for failing to care for him. He was too busy behaving like ‘the camp queen’ (Lear 1998: 161) to be of any help.



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There are two problems with Lear’s interpretation of the Symposium. The first is that it depends on an unrepresentative sample of Socrates’ relationship with Alcibiades, who is thirty-five years old in the Symposium. By this time, Socrates and Alcibiades had known each other for at least sixteen years (Alc. I 103ab),48 and Alcibiades had already chosen politics over philosophy (Symp. 216bc). When Socrates first started talking to Alcibiades in 432 BCE, the Peloponnesian War had not yet begun, and Alcibiades was ‘not yet twenty’. This was around the same time that Socrates risked his own life to save Alcibiades on the battlefield at Potidaea (Symp. 220e).49 During these years, Socrates would have cared for Alcibiades as part of his divine mission to do no harm (Ap. 25ab) and to improve the psyches of all Athenians (Ap. 29e–30a). In Alcibiades I, for example, Socrates humbles Alcibiades by exposing his ignorance, and then urges him to care for himself and gain self-knowledge, since only then will he be able to achieve his ambitions:  ‘nobody is capable of providing you with the influence you crave, neither your guardians nor your relatives, nor anybody else except me – with the god’s help, of course’ (Alc. I 105e). The whole point of Socrates’ interactions with Alcibiades was to ‘reflect and bait Alcibiades’ desires, and then to redirect them to more worthy objects’ (Gordon 2012: 154). These are not the actions of a man who was ‘remote’ and ‘indifferent’ to Alcibiades’ welfare, although they do suggest that Socrates’ relationship with Alcibiades changed significantly between 432 and 416 BCE. What happened during those intervening years? Alcibiades rejected philosophy for politics; he disrupted the Peace of Nicias; he was preparing for his unprecedented display of wealth and power at the 416 Olympics, and he was organizing support for the debate over invading Sicily. At the time of the Symposium’s drama, therefore, Alcibiades was already incorrigible. The second problem with Lear’s interpretation of the Symposium is that he unfairly blames Socrates for Alcibiades’ betrayal of Athens. On Lear’s view, Socrates didn’t recognize and so didn’t respond to the dangers of ‘erotic distraction’, which were embodied in the person and the career of Alcibiades. This may be a reasonable psychoanalytic critique of Socrates’ behaviour in the Symposium, but from Plato’s perspective, the city was to blame for Alcibiades’ failings; Socrates was not:  ‘I should like to believe that you will persevere’, Socrates says to Alcibiades, ‘but I’m afraid – not because I distrust your nature, but because I know how powerful the city is – I’m afraid it might get the better of both me and you’ (Alc. I 135e).50 As we will see, it was precisely because of the powerful and disordered eros in Alcibiades that Socrates took an interest in him in the first place (Alc. I 131e). He hoped to direct Alcibiades’ eros away from wealth, fame, and power, toward self-knowledge, justice, and the improvement

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of his soul. Alcibiades showed potential, but the city, ‘a third party to this love triangle’ (Gordon 2012: 181), was too powerful for Socrates to counteract. Just as Socrates fears at the end of Alcibiades I, both he and Alcibiades become victims of the city ‘for not loving her as she wants to be loved’ (Gordon 2012: 181).

3. An epistemological tragedy Like Lear, Debra Nails (2006) connects the Symposium’s tragedy with Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War. She argues that ‘the most defensible notion of tragedy across Plato’s dialogues is a fundamentally epistemological one:  if we do not know the good, we increase our risk of making mistakes and suffering what are sometimes their catastrophic consequences’ (Nails 2006:  180). This may seem like a rather pedestrian general principle, one too obvious for Plato to stress, but Nails thinks there are two specific tragedies of this kind ‘envisioned by the Symposium’, corresponding to the two dramatic dates of the dialogue, the dramatic events of which ‘occur offstage’. First, within months of Agathon’s victory party of 416 BCE, half the characters present in Plato’s Symposium will suffer death or exile resulting from charges of impiety. Second, Socrates will be executed in 399 BCE, just weeks after the date of the Symposium’s frame. Nails’ point is that the cause of both calamities was the ignorance  – superstition and religious hysteria – of the Athenians. Not only did the polis use its democracy to destroy the lives and happiness of hundreds of people through summary executions, exiles, confiscations, and disenfranchisement, they killed Socrates, the city’s best friend, because they mistook him for an enemy. (2006: 180)

On Nails’ view, Plato used his portrayal of Alcibiades to remind his readers of the ‘religious hysteria’ that led to the exile of Alcibiades in 415 BCE, and the ‘religious backlash’ that led to the execution of Socrates in 399 BCE. In both cases, ‘thoughtless religious fervor . . . a persistent and insidious kind of ignorance’ (Nails 2006: 200–1) led the Athenians to error and great suffering. The Athenians did not kill Socrates out of malice. ‘More profound and more tragic’, Nails says, ‘his ordeal resulted from a catastrophic mistake, a misunderstanding that could not be reconciled in the single day the law allowed for his trial’ (2006: 207). Nails’ view has two strengths and several flaws. She is right to point out the dialogue’s references to the profanation of the mysteries and the trial of Socrates, and she is right to suggest that the tragedy of the Symposium is partly about limitations of knowledge. However, her analysis of the profanation of



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the mysteries is problematic because she implies that the downfall of Periclean Athens was a tragedy for Plato. This is implausible. Plato would have been critical of ‘mass religious hysteria’, and he surely regretted the deaths and other harms that resulted from the city’s feverish hunt for the herm-smashers in 415 BCE. But he would not have shared Thucydides’ view that the loss of ‘Alcibiades’ leadership, to which the defeat in Sicily is sometimes attributed’ (Nails 2006: 204), was a great tragedy for Athens. For Plato, victory in Sicily would have been a disaster.51 The second problem for Nails’ view is that she does not identify the true epistemological tragedy in the dialogue. On her view, Plato’s message is that we will make bad mistakes and suffer the consequences if we do not know the Good. The problem here is not merely that such a message is too pedestrian to be Plato’s point; it’s that the argument of the Symposium goes further than this. Diotima says the goal of contemplation is transcendent and unknowable; there is no explanation or knowledge of it (Symp. 211a; cf. Tim. 28c and Parm. 142a). According to the argument of the Symposium, then, there is an epistemological tragedy built into human nature, which is partial and incomplete, always restless and never in permanent possession of the Good. Which is why a philosopher knows that, ‘as striving to be wise, i.e., to be a god (Symposium 204a), he is striving for something which in principle, because he is mortal, he cannot have’. A philosopher therefore is ‘in the classic tragic situation; striving to overcome a fate which has already been decided in advance, and thus bound to fail, but fail in a way which ennobles him’ (Hyland 1968: 48).52 If we use Hyland’s formulation of the epistemological tragedy in the Symposium to modify Nails’ principle, we get something far darker than what she suggests. Plato’s warning to his reader is not that we will make catastrophic mistakes if we do not know the Good. It’s that we are likely to make catastrophic mistakes and suffer greatly because the Good is unknowable and wisdom is unattainable for human beings. Only the gods are wise (Symp. 204ab). The biggest problem with Nails’ view is that it is too particular.53 Plato undoubtedly had the profanation of the mysteries, the desecration of the Herms, and the trial of Socrates in mind as he thought about the real-life ‘offstage’ tragedies that could be related to the drama and characters of his Symposium. But, as I show in the next section, he saw something more universal, and thus more tragic, in the fate of Alcibiades, namely, a deep incompatibility between philosophy and society. Plato used the depiction of Alcibiades to reverse the verdict of Socrates’ trial – Socrates did not corrupt Alcibiades or Critias; he tried to save them from corruption (Bloom 1968: 400) – but he also went a few steps further than this. He used the depiction of Alcibiades (1) to condemn the city

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for condemning Socrates, (2) to reflect on the limitations of Socratic ethical and political philosophy, and (3) to display the consequences of failing to convert young men like Alcibiades to the philosophical life.54 The arguments of Nussbaum, Lear, and Nails have many strengths. Nussbaum helps us see that, for Plato, philosophy was a way of life that one chooses at the expense of other lives. Lear emphasizes the ethical and political implications of this choice, and Nails directs our attention to real-life events  – exile, military defeat, and execution  – that resulted from the choices that Alcibiades and Socrates made. However, all of these positions suffer from limitations of scope because they do not highlight Plato’s apologetic purposes in the Symposium.55 They also do not recognize Plato’s intentions to indict the men who indicted Socrates. Whatever else Alcibiades was doing in this dialogue – whether it was to make a point about Platonic existentialism, or the ethics and politics of Platonic eros, or the dangers of mass ignorance and religious hysteria – he was there at the end of the Symposium, in part, as a response to the condemnation of Socrates. This is something we can see more clearly if we take a closer look at the details of Plato’s depiction of Alcibiades.

III.  Alcibiades and the limits of philosophy In Alcibiades I, Socrates says he will not leave Alcibiades ‘unless the Athenian people make [him] corrupt and ugly’. That is his ‘greatest fear’, he says  – that a love of the demos will ‘corrupt’ (diaphtheirein56) Alcibiades:  ‘Many noble Athenians have already suffered this fate, for the demos of the great-hearted Erechtheus has a fair face’ (Alc. I 131e10–32a5). When we see Alcibiades in the Symposium, we learn that Socrates’ worst fears have become reality: Alcibiades was a gifted young man who showed unusual insight, intense passion, and even self-awareness, but the city corrupted him before he could be of any use to himself or to others. We see evidence of Alcibiades’ potential in the contents of his speech at the end of the Symposium, and we also see the beginnings of a theory about what went wrong. Plato suggests that Alcibiades turned his back on philosophy because he suffered from what Harry Frankfurt (2004: 92) calls ‘volitional fragmentation’. He loved Socrates and philosophy, but not with a whole heart. He was torn between ‘self-love and the love of philosophy, worldly ambition and appreciation of contemplative truth, reckless sensuousness and a deep admiration for Socratic self-control’ (Gribble 1999: 251). Alcibiades was persuaded that he should change his life and abandon politics for philosophy,



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but he couldn’t make this understanding an operational part of his life. He suffered from moral weakness, and it was the city’s fault. This is Plato’s counterindictment of Athens: the city was to blame for corrupting its best men. It wasn’t an individual or the introduction of new ideas; the democracy itself was the problem. Socrates was innocent. If anything, he deserved praise for trying to introduce Athens to the life of self-examination and self-care. In this long section, I will look closely at the relevant textual evidence from Plato’s Symposium. First, I will provide a thumbnail sketch of Diotima’s theory of love. Second, I will summarize the contents of Alcibiades’ speech. And finally, I will ask what we learn about Alcibiades when we interpret his speech in terms of the conceptual framework provided by Diotima’s ‘ladder of love’. In the end, this will tell us quite a lot about Alcibiades’ potential for philosophy, as well as the tragedy of his wasted talents and capacities. It will also shed light on how Plato understood and responded to the trial of Socrates.

1.  Eros and the good life Diotima tells Socrates that Love is a spiritual being, intermediate between mortals and immortals (Symp. 202de). Like all spiritual beings, he is a messenger who conveys ‘prayer and sacrifice from men to gods, while to men [he] bring[s]‌ commands from the gods and gifts in return for sacrifices’. Being in this middle position, spiritual beings ‘round out the whole and bind fast the all to all’ (Symp. 202e–3a). They are mediating beings, connecting the heavenly and earthly realms. Love gets his particular characteristics from his parents, Poros (Resource, son of Metis) and Penia (Poverty or Need). As the son of Penia, Love is neither beautiful nor wise. But as the son of Poros, he is clever and skilled in his search for both beauty and wisdom. According to Diotima (Symp. 204b), eros ‘necessarily’ (anangkaion) is a lover of wisdom. In other words, built into the being of Love is ‘a divided consciousness, passionately aware that it is not what it ought to be. It is from this feeling of separation and lack that love is born’ (Hadot 1995: 163). The central claim in Diotima’s account is that the lover’s desire for good (agathon) and beautiful (kalon) things is really a desire for the happiness (eudaimonia) that one obtains from permanently possessing true Beauty (Symp. 206d). Possession is imperfect if it comes to an end, which is why love involves a longing for immortality (Symp. 207a–d, 208b, 212a) and a desire to possess the good forever (Symp. 206b). However, the ultimate goal of love is not selfish possession or control, and it does not culminate in the transcendent and solitary

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contemplation of Forms. Love’s highest aspiration is for generous begetting upon the beautiful, ‘reproduction and birth in beauty’ (Symp. 206e). Some people, those who are ‘pregnant in body’, satisfy this longing by having children. Diotima does not condemn this form of procreation, but she makes it clear that the nobler form of begetting occurs in the soul of a person in whom true virtue is brought forth and nourished. These ‘parents’, she says, are pregnant in soul (Symp. 208a–9e). The climax of Diotima’s teaching is her description of the soul’s ascent and progression through stages of love to a sudden revelation of the Beautiful itself (Symp. 209e–12a). The lover begins his philosophical trek by loving the beautiful body of a single individual, and ends with a revelation of divine beauty (to theion kalon) (Symp. 211e), which exists ‘by itself with itself . . . always one in form’ (Symp. 211b). This is what it is to go aright, or to be led by another, into the mystery of Love: one goes always upwards for the sake of this Beauty, starting out from beautiful things and using them like rising stairs: from one body to two and from two to all beautiful bodies, then from beautiful bodies to beautiful customs, and from customs to learning beautiful things, and from these lessons he arrives in the end at this lesson, which is learning of this very Beauty, so that in the end he comes to know just what it is to be beautiful. (Symp. 211c–d)

According to Diotima, our lives become worth living thanks to this culminating vision of the Beautiful and the procreativity it makes possible. ‘There if anywhere’, she says, a person should ‘live his life, beholding that beauty’, because it is in ‘that life alone’ that we are able to bring forth true virtue in the souls of other people, and that activity makes us dear to the gods (Symp. 212a). It also makes us resemble them: ‘The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given birth to true virtue and nourished it’, Diotima says, ‘and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he’ (Symp. 212b).57

2.  The speech of Alcibiades Alcibiades begins his speech by comparing Socrates to statues of Silenus (these were hollow statues of a flute or pipe playing satyr, which contained tiny figures of the gods made out of gold or other precious materials)58 and to Marsyas, the flute-playing satyr (Symp. 215b) who was flayed alive by Apollo for challenging him to a music contest.59 Alcibiades uses the Silenus analogy to describe Socrates’ character and arguments, and he uses the example of Marsyas to describe the



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effect that Socrates’ ideas have on him and his other sympathetic listeners. In both cases, the analogies tell us a great deal about Alcibiades himself. They give us glimpses of his philosophical potential. Marsyas, he says, could transport people and cast spells over them with his music. Socrates does something similar with his words. Whether they are played by the greatest flautist or the meanest flute-girl, his melodies have in themselves the power to possess and so reveal those people who are ready for the god and his mysteries. That’s because his melodies are themselves divine. The only difference between you and Marsyas is that you need no instruments; you do exactly what he does, but with words alone. You know, people hardly ever take a speaker seriously, even if he’s the greatest orator; but let anyone – man, woman, or child – listen to you or even to a poor account of what you say  – and we are all transported, completely possessed. (Symp. 215c–d)

In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche suggests that Socrates fascinated the Athenians by appealing to their competitive nature. He transferred the excitement of the wrestling match into the streets of Athens where he engaged his fellow citizens in a ‘new kind of contest’ (TI §8) – only in this contest, philosophical argument, he was undefeated and unbeatable. Everybody wanted to listen and watch, especially the young men of Athens (Ap. 23c–d). In a way, Alcibiades confirms Nietzsche’s observation in this passage (Socrates was the best show in town60), but he also goes a step further. He says Socrates’ ideas were like divine melodies; they contained a power to transport and possess their listeners in a way that was revealing of them: to be transported, he says, was to be disclosed as particularly suited for the ‘god and his mysteries’. The effect of Socrates’ ‘divine melodies’ on Alcibiades was so profound that it caused him to have an existential crisis. Socrates forced Alcibiades to see himself, not as he was but as he could be. And in doing so, he forced Alcibiades to confront the fact that, as long as he failed to care for himself, he would always fall short of the potential that Socrates saw in him. The moment he starts to speak, I am beside myself: my heart starts leaping in my chest, the tears come streaming down my face, even the frenzied Corybantes seem sane compared to me – and let me tell you, I am not alone. I have heard Pericles and many other great orators, and I have admired their speeches. But nothing like this ever happened to me: they never upset me so deeply that my very own soul started protesting that my life  – my life!  – was no better than the most miserable slave’s. And yet that is exactly how this Marsyas here at my

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Plato’s Trial of Athens side makes me feel all the time: he makes it seem that my life isn’t worth living! (Symp. 215e–16a; cf. Alc. I 132b–c)

For Alcibiades, talking to Socrates wasn’t simply an intellectual pleasure, as it was for a person like Nicias61 (La. 188a–b)  – it wasn’t just a kind of ‘lite entertainment’ for a bored and privileged aristocrat.62 It turned his world upside down and made him question the value of his chosen life in politics (Hadot 1995: 153): when Socrates spoke, Alcibiades’ heart leapt in his chest; he cried and he felt shame. Compared to the life that Socrates helped him imagine, his political career in the city seemed like a waste of his abilities. Socrates has this effect on Alcibiades by forcing him to recognize the deficiencies of his character and career choice, and the limited powers that he has over himself. ‘It is as though Socrates is able to hold up a mirror to Alcibiades, and Alcibiades is revolted by the reflection he sees in it’ (Scott and Welton 2009: 168). What he finds in that mirror is an image of a man who doesn’t act freely and who isn’t his own master:  Alcibiades doesn’t choose politics over philosophy – he constantly runs away from choice and flees from philosophical truth (Gribble 1999:  256). This is what makes him feel cornered. ‘He always traps me’, Alcibiades says, ‘and he makes me admit that my political career is a waste of time, while all that matters is just what I most neglect: my personal shortcomings, which cry out for the closest attention’ (Symp. 216a). Nobody else could affect Alcibiades this deeply. And as we will see, nobody else in Plato’s dialogues understood the existential challenge of Socratic philosophy as acutely as Alcibiades did. Socrates is the only man in the world who has made me feel shame – ah, you didn’t think I  had it in me, did you? Yes, he makes me feel ashamed:  I know perfectly well that I can’t prove he’s wrong when he tells me what I should do; yet, the moment I leave his side, I go back to my old ways: I cave in to my desire to please the crowd. My whole life has become one constant effort to escape from him and keep away, but when I see him, I feel deeply ashamed, because I’m doing nothing about my way of life, though I have already agreed with him that I should. (Symp. 216cd)

Socrates has altered Alcibiades’ aspirations, although not decisively and so he is unable to follow through. He genuinely identifies with the values he has adopted from Socrates, but there is something in him that resists, a less noble desire for a less noble life. Alcibiades may appear powerful to his fellow citizens, who admire his oratory and military successes. But Alcibiades knows better (Bacon 1959: 425). He can feel that deep down he is as unfree as a slave, because his



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will is too weak for him to live in congruity with his aspirations to change his life and become a better man. This madness-inducing spell that Socrates casts over Alcibiades makes him acknowledge that his life, such as he is living it, is not worth living. And so, Alcibiades treats Socrates like Homer’s Sirens (Symp. 216a); he deliberately avoids him, not wanting to hear his intoxicating divine melodies. At the same time, however, he knows he should be with Socrates and change his life, and this self-knowledge fills him with a kind of self-loathing (Hunter 2004: 102–13). At this point in his speech, having finished his evocative comparison with Marsyas, Alcibiades compares Socrates to the statues of Silenus. They are ugly on the outside, but they contain images of the gods inside. The same is true of Socrates, although most people do not recognize this about him. He pretends to be a lusty satyr who is in love with beautiful boys (Symp. 213c, 216d; cf. Charm. 154c; Prt. 309a; and Grg. 481d), and he likes to say that he is ‘ignorant and knows nothing’. But this is just a deceptive outer appearance, ‘like the outsides of those statues of Silenus’ (Symp. 216d). You can’t imagine how little he cares whether a person is beautiful, or rich, or famous in any other way that most people admire. He considers all these possessions beneath contempt, and that’s exactly how he considers all of us as well. In public, I tell you, his whole life is one big game – a game of irony. I don’t know if any of you have seen him when he’s really serious. But I once caught him when he was open like Silenus’ statues, and I had a glimpse of the figures he keeps hidden within: they were so godlike – so bright and beautiful, so utterly amazing – that I no longer had a choice – I just had to do whatever he told me. (Symp. 216d–17a)

One of the recurring themes in Alcibiades’ speech is the remarkable fact that, unlike most Athenians, Alcibiades was able to look beyond Socrates’ bizarre physical appearance and unimpressive social status to the inner beauty of his soul and ideas. This wasn’t easy. As Nietszche observes in Twilight of the Idols, everything about Socrates was ‘exaggerated, buffo, a caricature’ (TI §4).63 He was short and balding; he had a potbelly, bulging eyes, an oversized forehead, and an unflattering snub nose. When most Athenians looked at Socrates, they saw either a dangerous influence on the youth or an unabashedly ‘ignorant’, physically awkward, professionally undistinguished old man who spent most of his time, as Callicles says, ‘whispering in a corner with three or four boys, never uttering anything well-bred, important, or apt’ (Grg. 485e). Nietzsche was right:  everything about Socrates was strange. But, remarkably, Alcibiades

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saw beyond the deceptive appearance. Socrates’ behaviour was merely an ironic façade: his whole life was ‘a big game of irony’ (Symp. 216e). If one looks behind Socrates’ masks when he is ‘open like a Silenus’, Alcibiades suggests, one can see the virtue he conceals within. For Alcibiades, Socrates’ character traits were so remarkable – so ‘godlike’, ‘bright . . . beautiful’, and ‘utterly amazing’ – that he felt overwhelmed, as if he had seen the Forms themselves (Hunter 2004: 106).64 Alcibiades eventually uses his Silenus analogy to describe Socrates’ arguments as well, but not before giving an account of his unsuccessful attempts to seduce Socrates. He begins by emphasizing the embarrassing nature of his story. He wouldn’t share it with most people, he says, but he’s willing to share it with Agathon’s guests because he is drunk, because it is one of Socrates’ proudest and most impressive accomplishments, and because everyone there has ‘shared in the madness, the Bacchic frenzy of philosophy’ (Symp. 218b). They won’t judge him unfairly because they will be able to relate to his experience. And, furthermore, you know what people say about snakebite  – that you’ll only talk about it with your fellow victims: only they will understand the pain and forgive you for all the things it made you do. Well, something much more painful than a snake has bitten me in my most sensitive part – I mean my heart or my soul, or whatever you want to call it, which has been struck and bitten by philosophy, whose grip on young and eager souls is much more vicious than a viper’s and makes them do the most amazing things. Now, all you people here . . . have . . . shared in the madness, the Bacchic frenzy of philosophy. And that’s why you will hear the rest of my story; you will understand and forgive both what I did then and what I say now. (Symp. 218ab)

Ferrari (1992:  262) stresses that Alcibiades was in love with Socrates and not philosophy, which was a failing on his part: ‘instead of loving wisdom, he falls in love with the wisdom lover’.65 Nussbaum (1986: 168) also stresses the ‘unique passion’ that Alcibiades felt for Socrates. In this passage, however, it’s clear that Alcibiades’ passion was, at least in part, for philosophy itself (Hunter 2004: 106; cf. Prior 1997: 118), whose hold on the soul of a young person, he says, is as vicious as a snakebite and has the power to make people do all kinds of things. This isn’t a pleasant experience for Alcibiades (Symp. 215e); it’s painful and overwhelming. Alcibiades says he will pay any price for the virtue and knowledge he finds in Socrates because he’s certain that Socrates is uniquely capable of helping him become the best he can possibly be: ‘you can have me, my belongings, anything my friends might have. Nothing is more important to me than becoming the best man I can be, and no one can help me more than you to reach that aim’



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(Symp. 218c–d). Socrates listens to Alcibiades’ offer, and he is both impressed and discouraged by what he hears. Dear Alcibiades, if you are right in what you say about me, you are already more accomplished than you think. If I really have in me the power to make you a better man, then you can see in me a beauty that is really beyond description and makes your own remarkable good looks pale in comparison. But, then, is this a fair exchange that you propose? You seem to me to want more than your proper share: you offer me the merest appearance of beauty, and in return you want the thing itself, ‘gold for bronze in the exchange’. (Symp. 218d–19a)

On the one hand, Socrates was impressed with Alcibiades because he saw a transformational beauty in Socrates’ soul. As Hadot (1995: 163) says, ‘The cause of [Alcibiades’] love is that he senses that Socrates can open up to him a path toward an extraordinary beauty, transcending all earthly beauties’. It’s true that Alcibiades does not yet love the Good in its own right, but he does love the manifestation of it he sees in Socrates’ character. And this is a measure of his philosophical progress:  he appears to have ascended at least the first rung up Diotima’s ladder of love, from bodies to souls. On the other hand, however, Alcibiades demonstrates his ‘ineptitude for Platonic eros’ when he asks to trade his body and ‘prostitute himself ’ for Socrates’ wisdom (Blundell 1992:  123). Whatever philosophical progress Alcibiades had made was clearly limited and confused ‘if he [thought] that wisdom is the sort of thing that can be exchanged for the physical charms of his body’ (Sheffield 2006: 204). The first thing he needs to learn about wisdom is that it is not the kind of thing that one can (or would) trade for sex.66 In the end, to his credit, Alcibiades seems to learn this lesson (Gribble 1999:  252).67 He is able to see Socrates’ rejection as evidence of his virtuous character, and he begins to think about what it is, if not sexual desire, that attracted Socrates to him in the first place. This is an extraordinary moment of self-reflection and discovery. Socrates’ speech had introduced everyone to Diotima’s teachings about eros and the good life; Alcibiades’ stories introduce us to the ‘equally wondrous and awe-inspiring truths about Socrates’ (Rutherford 1995:  202), whose moral fortitude, Plato suggests, surpassed that of Ajax (Rosen 1987: 309–10). Of course, I was deeply humiliated, but also I couldn’t help admiring his natural character, his moderation, his fortitude – here was a man whose strength and wisdom went beyond my wildest dreams! How could I bring myself to hate him? I couldn’t bear to lose his friendship. But how could I possibly win him over? . . . The only trap by means of which I had thought I might capture him had already

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Plato’s Trial of Athens proved a dismal failure. I had no idea what to do, no purpose in life; ah, no one else has ever known the real meaning of slavery! (Symp. 219d–e)

Alcibiades continues his speech by telling stories about Socrates’ military service at the battles of Potidaea and Delium. He reports that Socrates fought with great courage (Symp. 221b) and physical endurance (Symp. 220b–c), and that he sometimes showed otherworldly powers of concentration, one time standing motionless for twenty-four hours, completely absorbed in thought:  ‘he stood on the very same spot until dawn! He only left the next morning, when the sun came out, and he made his prayers to the new day’ (Symp. 220d). All in all, Socrates’ qualities made him atopos, out of place: ‘as a whole’, Alcibiades says, ‘he is unique; he is like no one else in the past and no one in the present – this is by far the most amazing thing about him’ (Symp. 221c). Just before concluding his speech, Alcibiades returns to his Silenus analogy, this time in an effort to describe what he has discovered in Socrates’ arguments. His point is similar to the one he made earlier about Socrates’ character. With Socrates, there is always a difference between appearance and reality. Even his ideas and arguments are just like those hollow statues of Silenus. If you were to listen to his arguments, they’d strike you as totally ridiculous; they’re clothed in words as coarse as the hides worn by the most vulgar satyrs. He’s always going on about pack asses, or blacksmiths, or cobblers, or tanners; he’s always going on making the same tired old points in the same tired old words. If you are foolish, or simply unfamiliar with him, you’d find it impossible not to laugh at his arguments. But if you see them when they open up like the statues, if you go behind their surface, you’ll realize that no other arguments make any sense. They’re truly worthy of a god, bursting with figures of virtue inside. They’re of great  – no, of the greatest  – importance for anyone who wants to become a truly good man. (Symp. 221e–2a)

As we saw above, Plato went out of his way to underscore Alcibiades’ remarkable capacity to look beyond Socrates’ unexceptional appearance to his exceptional character, because he thought it suggested something philosophically significant about Alcibiades. He wanted us to see that Alcibiades had advanced beyond the first rung of Diotima’s heavenly ladder, the stage when one merely loves beautiful bodies (Symp. 210b). Undoubtedly, Alcibiades has not finished the ascent – he does not quite love wisdom or Beauty Itself – but he loves Socrates insofar as he is a living manifestation of both (Symp. 218e). In the passage above, we learn that Alcibiades loved Socrates’ arguments for the same reason (Symp. 221d–2a). Like Socrates himself, his arguments appear ridiculous and laughable on the surface.



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Socrates talks about pack-asses, blacksmiths, cobblers, tanners, and the like. But if one looks beneath this ironic surface, as Alcibiades did, one sees they contain traces of a beauty ‘bursting’ with images of the divine inside (Symp. 222a3–5), and the revelation is intoxicating (Symp. 215e). In the Apology, Socrates explains how he challenged everyone he met (Ap. 29e). ‘Good Sir’, he said, ‘you are an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city with the greatest reputation for both wisdom and power; are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation and honors as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom and truth, or the best possible state of your soul?’ Most Athenians ignored him. Aristophanes wrote comedies about him. But Alcibiades listened carefully. He understood Socrates. He understood his mission, and he was inspired by it. When he says that Socrates’ arguments are of the greatest importance for anyone who aspires to be a ‘truly good man’ (Symp. 222a), he suggests that, through Socratic philosophy, he has begun to love virtue in addition to Socrates’ character and arguments. Thanks to Socrates, his soul began protesting that his life was ‘no better than the most miserable slave’s’ (Symp. 216a). Diotima does not mention beautiful arguments or beautiful character traits, but she does discuss the love of knowledge, and she places it near the top of the ladder (Symp. 210d). If Alcibiades has ascended this high, he has accomplished something extraordinary indeed.

3.  Where is Alcibiades on the ladder of love? I have already suggested that Plato depicted Alcibiades as a passionate, self-aware man who has made at least some progress up Diotima’s ladder of love. He sees a transformative beauty in Socrates’ character and arguments, which suggests he has begun Diotima’s philosophical ascent to the Beautiful. This interpretation of Alcibiades’ speech is by no means a universally held view. Many scholars think Alcibiades didn’t understand Socrates at all. The case they make against Alcibiades typically rests on the fact that he tried to seduce and take advantage of Socrates. On this view, Alcibiades’ attempts to trade sex for Socratic wisdom show that he lacked a true appreciation for the philosophical life. Blundell (1992:  123), for example, accuses Alcibiades of engaging in a ‘hopelessly illconceived attempt to prostitute himself in exchange for Socrates’ wisdom’, and she suggests this proves he was completely unfit for Platonic eros – at best, he confused ‘Socrates with the Form as the ultimate object of desire’ (Blondell 2006: 158). Ferrari (1992: 262) similarly argues that Alcibiades’ mistake was to love the wisdom-lover instead of wisdom itself, while Reeve (2006: 141) suggests

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that instead of treating Socratic virtue as a ‘resource that can lead to the forms of the good or the beautiful’, Alcibiades experiences Socrates’ rejection as ‘a genuine loss, recoupable only by gaining possession . . . of Socrates himself, and the agalmata-based wisdom he is imagined to contain’. Rosen (2005: 237) finds Plato’s depiction of Alcibiades to be so unflattering that he asks rhetorically, ‘Are we to suppose that if Alcibiades had been raised by Socrates instead of Pericles, he would have become a philosopher rather than seeking to conquer Greece?’ Rosen and the others who make the case against Alcibiades deny this. Nightingale develops the case against Alcibiades by explaining what his seduction attempts reveal about his character. On her view, Plato’s Alcibiades interprets the whole world, including his experience with Socrates, ‘in terms of an on-going struggle for power’. For example, he talks about feeling ‘enslaved’ to Socrates (Symp. 219e3; cf. 215e6–7), and he mentions feeling ‘forced’ to do whatever Socrates told him to do (216b3–4, 217a1–2, 218a6–7). The driving force behind this story, Nightingale thinks, is Alcibiades’ ‘desire to conquer Socrates . . . [He] sees the world in terms of winners and losers, victors and victims. Socrates’ refusal to be manipulated is therefore interpreted by Alcibiades as an arrogant attempt to dominate’ (1993: 125). This contest for power, not the philosophical life, is the true basis of Alcibiades’ attraction to Socrates. He wants Socratic wisdom, but he doesn’t want to change his life and live more like Socrates. He can’t even imagine what a life of philosophical activity would entail, let alone why anyone would choose it for its own sake. ‘We can only infer’, Nightingale says, ‘that he wanted knowledge for private and political ends rather than those of philosophy’ (1993: 126).68 Each of these arguments treats Alcibiades’ attempts to trade sex for wisdom as evidence that he lacked philosophical potential. As Plochmann (1963:  16) puts the point, Alcibiades provides us with a ‘clarification of what philosophy is not’. On the one hand, this judgement is understandable because Plato portrays Alcibiades as a profoundly flawed individual. On the other hand, however, it is inconsistent with the most important details of Alcibiades’ speech:  (1) it ignores or downplays the significance of his insights into the beauty of Socrates’ character and arguments; (2) it misinterprets his attempts to seduce Socrates; (3) it misunderstands the eros that he feels for Socrates and for philosophy itself; (4) it is insensitive to the self-knowledge that he reveals throughout his speech; (5) it does not acknowledge the uniqueness of Alcibiades; (6) it undermines one of the most important portraits of Socrates in Plato’s dialogues; (7) it conflicts with the Socratics’ depictions of Alcibiades, all of which responded to the political controversy that Alcibiades provoked in Athens; (8)  it treats the conflict in



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Alcibiades’ soul as evidence against his philosophical potential instead of seeing it as a condemnation of the city and an exoneration of Socrates; and (9) it strips the Symposium of its greatest tragedy, which depends on Alcibiades possessing squandered philosophical potential. These arguments are worth looking at more closely because so much hangs in the balance. If Plato’s Alcibiades was a failed philosopher, and if the city corrupted him, that affects our understanding of Alcibiades’ speech and the Symposium as a whole, as well as Plato’s apology of Socrates and condemnation of Athens.

3.1.  Transformative beauty The first problem with the case against Alcibiades is that it doesn’t appreciate his insights into the beauty of Socrates’ character and arguments (Symp. 216e–17a, 221e–2a). It doesn’t give Alcibiades credit for seeing a transformative beauty – a beauty with the power to make him a better man – in Socrates, a man who was legendarily unattractive.69 Most people couldn’t see beyond this surfacelevel appearance, but Alcibiades did. He understood that Socrates’ beauty was psychological and intellectual, not physical – he and his ideas contained images of the gods. Alcibiades’ appreciation of this beauty suggests he has at least reached the second rung of Diotima’s ladder (Symp. 210b–c), the stage at which one sees that the beauty in people’s souls is more valuable than the beauty of their bodies.

3.2.  Erotic education A related problem with the case against Alcibiades is that it mischaracterizes the significance of his attempts to seduce Socrates. According to Diotima, the pursuit of wisdom begins when one falls in love with beauty, and Socrates seems to have had this effect on Alcibiades. He attuned him to ‘a beauty that is really beyond description’ (Symp. 218e), and Alcibiades literally fell in love. This shouldn’t be surprising or count against his philosophical potential. According to Diotima, philosophy is always erotic. It isn’t a mistake to be excited erotically by philosophy, because philosophy arouses one’s eros for the Beautiful. For Diotima, philosophy is love. Alcibiades’ mistake was to confuse his eros for the Beautiful with eros for Socrates the individual. As Ferrari says, he made the mistake of loving the wisdom-lover instead of loving wisdom itself. However, Alcibiades’ confusion is understandable, and even predictable, because he wasn’t fully advanced on Diotima’s ladder. He was ‘beside himself ’ with eros, but his experience was ‘beyond his comprehension’ (Phdr. 250a).

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This is why it is also wrong to fault Alcibiades for thinking he could enter into a conventional pederastic relationship with Socrates. He was acting on a desire for moral improvement in a cultural environment where older men offered their wisdom and guidance to boys in exchange for sexual gratification, and the greatest of all moral exemplars led him on: ‘what I thought at the time was that what he really wanted was me, and that seemed to me the luckiest coincidence: all I had to do was to let him have his way with me, and he would teach me everything he knew’ (Symp. 217a). Alcibiades, of course, was wrong about this; Socrates was only pretending to have a sexual interest in him. Hadot (1995:  159) calls this Socrates’ ‘erotic irony’, the aim of which, according to Kierkegaard, was to draw the Athenian youth into philosophy by causing them to fall in love.70 In this sense one might possibly call him a seducer, for he deceived the youth and awakened longings which he never satisfied, allowed them to become inflamed by the subtle pleasures of anticipation yet never gave them solid and nourishing food. He deceived them all in the same way as he deceived Alcibiades, who . . . observes that instead of the lover, Socrates became the beloved. And what else will this say except that he attracted the youth to him, but when they looked up to him, when they sought repose in him, when forgetting all else they sought a safe abode in his love, when they themselves ceased to exist and lived only in being loved by him – then he was gone, then the enchantment was over, then they felt the deep pangs of unrequited love, felt that they had been deceived and that it was not Socrates who loved them but they who loved Socrates. . . (CI 213)

If Socrates intended for Alcibiades to fall in love with him as a first step toward falling in love with wisdom, how can we blame Alcibiades for taking the bait? He had a strong desire for moral improvement; he sincerely believed Socrates could help him more than anyone else could to achieve his goals; he had lived his entire life in a culture where pederasty was the norm, and Socrates misled him to think he was offering to be his erastes. He wanted to acquire wisdom, and he genuinely thought Socrates was his best bet. It’s fair to say that Alcibiades was confused about the object of his erotic longing. And it is also fair to say that he had been corrupted by the Athenian cultural practice of pederasty. What is remarkable about Alcibiades, however, is how much he learns from being rejected. He discovers and reports that love’s highest aspiration is the improvement of the soul, not sexual pleasure, and he recognizes that the beauty he sees in Socrates is one that has the power to make him a better man (Symp. 218d). Socrates himself was impressed with this. As he says to Alcibiades, ‘You are already more accomplished than you think. If



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I really have in me the power to make you a better man, then you can see in me a beauty that is really beyond description’ (Symp. 218e). Alcibiades was wrong to think he could exchange the beauty of his body for the beauty in Socrates’ soul and arguments, but the mere fact that he saw such a beauty and was erotically attracted to it is evidence of his progress, not his unqualified ‘ineptitude for Platonic eros’ (Blundell 1992: 123). On the whole, Alcibiades learnt two extraordinary lessons from being rejected by Socrates. First, he learnt that the philosophical life was superior to the political life (Symp. 216a–c), and that the value of wisdom was greater than the value of physical beauty, wealth, and fame (Symp. 216e). Second, he discovered the deceptive appearances of Socratic irony:  Socrates pretended to be in love with beautiful boys, but in reality he was leading them toward philosophy; he pretended not to know anything, but in reality his ideas contained images of the divine with the power to lead a person toward virtue. The significance of these facts is clearest when we contrast Plato’s portrait of Alcibiades with the one we find in Xenophon, who speculates that ‘had heaven granted [Alcibiades and Critias] the choice between the life they saw Socrates leading and death, they would have chosen rather to die’ (Xen. Mem. 1.2.16). Those who make the case against Alcibiades seem to have inserted Xenophon’s Alcibiades into Plato’s Symposium. Xenophon’s Alcibiades was ‘out of sympathy’ with Socrates, and associated with him strictly for the sake of ‘political advancement’ (Xen. Mem. 1.2.39). This is the Alcibiades who Nightingale (1993) describes, but it is not the man who appears in Plato’s dialogue. Plato’s Alcibiades was ambitious and self-interested, narcissistic and dissolute. But he was also a sensitive, self-aware, and self-critical intellectual who wept when he heard Socrates speak and felt shame when he considered the implications of his ideas for his own life. As Faulkner (2007: 102) says, we must ‘not miss the moral in such a man, who is moved by a certain justice and a certain nobility as well as by pride’, because it was Alcibiades’ ‘scruples [that were] the toehold for Socrates’ development in him of a truer understanding’.71

3.3.  Eros and the snakebite of philosophy A third problem with the case against Alcibiades is that it doesn’t account for the eros that Alcibiades feels for Socrates and for philosophy. He describes it as a kind of ‘madness’ and ‘Bacchic frenzy’ that takes possession of him and makes him feel shame (Symp. 215c–16c, 217e–18b). As Hunter (2004:  106) points out, Alcibiades’ reference to philosophic madness ‘cannot fail to suggest

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to us Socrates’ mystical account in the Phaedrus of precisely the ‘madness’ of the philosopher whose soul ascends to the realm of the Forms . . . an account which shares important features with Diotima’s final mystery’. As Socrates says, when a ‘divine intelligence’ or any nous like it ascends to the limits of heaven’s dome and journeys through the intelligible realm of the Forms, it is ‘delighted at last to be seeing what is real and watching what is true, feeding on all of this and feeling wonderful’ (Phdr. 247d). This isn’t easy for human souls, which have lost their wings and fallen to the earth (Phdr. 248c–e) where they are entombed in human bodies (Phdr. 250c). However, every human being gets its wings back after a ten-thousand-year cycle, and a philosopher can enjoy a shortcut to this reunion with the divine thanks to a sudden and shocking appearance of beauty – one that strikes like ‘a bolt of lightning’ (Phdr. 254b) – which causes him to remember when his soul ‘lifted its head up to what is truly real’ (Phdr. 249c) and was initiated into ‘the most blessed of all’ mysteries (Phdr. 250b–c). A recent initiate . . . one who has seen much in heaven – when he sees a godlike face or bodily form that has captured Beauty well, first he shudders and a fear comes over him like those he felt at the earlier time. (Phdr. 251a)

Alcibiades has gone one step further than this. He has seen a godlike soul that ‘captures Beauty well’, and this has caused him to feel something like theia mania. There is no textual basis for thinking that Alcibiades reached the top of Diotima’s ladder, but the love madness he feels for Socrates suggests that, thanks to the beauty he has seen in Socrates’ soul, he has started to recollect the Forms. That would explain the intensity of his eros. It would also explain his shame and confirm his potential for philosophy. Alcibiades felt shame because he got a taste of what it feels like to ‘stand outside human concerns and draw close to the divine’, to be ‘beside himself ’ with ‘madness’ for the ‘radiant beauty’ (Phdr. 249d–50a) he saw manifest in Socrates’ soul, and yet he was too weak to remain committed to the philosophical life that would keep him there. Socrates made him realize that, powerful as he was in the city, he was powerless to secure his highest good. He had the insight; he had the passion, but he didn’t have the power over himself to follow through. Paradoxically, this shame and failure is what also confirms Alcibiades’ potential for philosophy.

3.4.  The uniqueness of Alcibiades The fourth problem with the case against Alcibiades is that it doesn’t account for his uniqueness. It should surprise us that Alcibiades felt shame, and that Socrates made him feel it. This is an extraordinary moment of Platonic characterization.



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Socrates’ other interlocutors don’t talk this way. They don’t confess to lacking wisdom or feeling shame. Consider the difference between Alcibiades and characters like Euthyphro, Meno, and Callicles (Gordon 2012: 179): Alcibiades is insightful and passionate; the others are resistant or obtuse. As Gribble (1999: 236 n. 67) puts this point, ‘Callicles is represented as violently opposed to Socratic philosophy, whereas Alcibiades is attracted to it. We cannot imagine Alcibiades brutally putting down Socrates with a simple “Might is Right” argument.’ And as Gordon (2012:  179) develops this idea, Alcibiades stands out among Socrates’ interlocutors: when he acknowledges his ignorance (Alc. I 108e4, 112d10, 113b6–7, 116e2–3, 118a15–b3, 127a9–13) and confesses to a life of bad faith (Symp. 216a–c), he ‘signals his potential for philosophy, his erotic openness, and at least an inkling of the kind of self-knowledge that Socrates esteems highly, knowing when one does not know’. Plato’s dialogues are full of what Prior (1997: 117) calls ‘unhappy encounters’ between Socrates and non-philosophers. Most of Socrates’ interlocutors didn’t understand his principles, or didn’t find them appealing. This typically is not because his interlocutors are unintelligent, or because Plato misrepresents or mocks their positions (Prior 1997:  118). Protagoras, for example, is depicted as Socrates’ intellectual equal, while Thrasymachus and Callicles are portrayed as sceptics who simply reject Socrates and his values – they don’t want to live the philosophical life because they think there are better life options available to them. These dialogues present us with ‘genuine debates between competing visions of life . . . and the point of the encounters is to show the incompatibility between the life of philosophy and that lived by non-philosophers’ (Prior 1997: 117). In other dialogues, Socrates talks to people who are sympathetic to him and accept his arguments (e.g. Crito, Nicias, Agathon, Simmias, Cebes, Glaucon, and Adeimantus). But these men also lack Alcibiades’ potential for philosophy. None of them has his insight, passion, or self-knowledge. Alcibiades stands out in Plato’s dialogues because he is the only character who fully appreciates what Socrates is about. In the Apology, Socrates argues that the unexamined life is not worth living (Ap. 38a), and he tells his jury that he spent his life encouraging all Athenians to value wisdom and truth more than wealth, reputation, and honour (Ap. 29d). As we have seen, Alcibiades understood this message (Symp. 216a–c) and was deeply affected by its existential challenge. The fact that Alcibiades had this reaction to Socrates – that he understood his message, internalized it, and felt deeply attracted to the transformative beauty he discovered in Socrates’ soul and ideas  – is what makes him unique among Socrates’ interlocutors. Plato

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went out of his way to emphasize the point that nobody knew Socrates the way Alcibiades did.

3.5.  What Alcibiades teaches us about Socrates The fifth problem with the case against Alcibiades is that it undermines the second most important account (second only to the Apology) of Socrates and his life in Plato’s dialogues (Brickhouse and Smith 1994: 105 n. 5; cf. Lacey 1971: 43; Vlastos 1991:  35; Prior 2006:  161–3). Schleiermacher (1836:  278) argued that Alcibiades’ speech was the ‘crest and crown’ of Plato’s Symposium because of its inimitable portrait of Socrates. His gloss on its importance is worth quoting at length because it gives us a sense of what we give up when we question Alcibiades’ reliability as a witness. In our Symposium [Socrates] is ennobled as he lived, by that panegyric of Alcibiades, which is manifestly the crest and crown of the whole dialogue, and exhibits Socrates to us in the unwearied enthusiasm of contemplation, and in joyous communication of the results, in the contempt of danger and exaltation above external things, in the purity of all his relations, and in his inward divinity under that light and cheerful exterior; in short, in that perfect soundness of body and mind, and consequently, of existence generally.

If Alcibiades is an unreliable witness, as Reeve (2006:  146) and Blondell (2006:  158) suggest, then all of the contents of his speech are untrustworthy, including the biographical details that scholars usually trust as historically reliable or philosophically informative.72 Alcibiades tells us about Socrates’ irony, wisdom, courage, endurance, self-control, uniqueness, erotic pedagogy, transformative beauty, and disdain for wealth, as well as his otherworldly powers of concentration and indifference to the effects of hunger, cold, wine, sleep, and physical eros.73 It’s implausible that Plato intended for us to question the details of this portrait (Prior 2006). In fact, he seems to suggest that we can trust them, because Alcibiades asks Socrates to correct him if he says anything untrue, and Socrates never does so (Symp. 214e, 217b, 219c). This seems to be an implicit endorsement of the speech’s contents (Nussbaum 1986; cf. Scott 1995). If it is, Plato’s Apology is the only ancient source that tells us more about Socrates than Alcibiades does in his Symposium speech, and yet we throw it all away  – the distinguished soldier, the satyr who occupies an ‘ambiguous position between the lowly and the divine’ (Sheffield 2006: 198), the ‘living embodiment of Eros’ (Bacon 1959: 428), the educator who rejected pederasty as morally bankrupt – if we accept the case against Alcibiades and discredit him as an ‘unreliable witness’



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(Reeve 2006; cf. Blondell 2006). This is an extremely high price to pay for an interpretation that has virtually no upside in shedding light on the meaning of Plato’s Symposium as a whole or Alcibiades’ specific role in it.

3.6.  The Socratics The sixth problem with the case against Alcibiades is that it conflicts with many of the literary representations of Alcibiades that emerged in the fourth century BCE. Euclides, Phaedo of Elis, Antisthenes, and Aeschines of Sphettus are all credited with writing works called Alcibiades.74 These authors wrote about Alcibiades because they wanted to respond to Socrates’ accusers and Alcibiades’ enemies. As Gribble (1999: 216) suggests, ‘The [literary] confrontation between Alcibiades and Socrates was used to illustrate the direct political relevance of Socratic ethical analysis, and the consequences of the failure to pursue philosophy.’ This shared interest in Alcibiades, and the apologetic contents of these writings, don’t make sense apart from this historical context and literary purpose. As the Socratics depicted Alcibiades and responded to the controversies of their time, they took part in a ‘postwar debate of public trial and published speech’ that speculated about how Alcibiades’ career and the Athenian imperial project might have taken a different course if Alcibiades had managed to care for himself (Gribble 1999: 216). The Alcibiades who appears in these writings is a talented and powerful young man who neglects self-examination and self-care because he is distracted by politics and the attractions of the city. He is characterized by extreme ambition, military talent, an elevated standing in the city, and a more-thannormal quality (Thuc. 6.15; cf. Alc. I 104a–b; Symp. 216d–e, 217a, 219c, 218c–d); he is complacent because of his inborn talents and capacities (Alc. I 119b; cf. Xen. Mem. 1.2.24–5), and his natural gifts are not just physical  – Socrates is drawn to him, and believes he is suited for philosophy, because of qualities in his soul (Alc. I 104b; cf. R. 494c–d and Aesch. Alc. Frag. 11c). Unfortunately, he is also susceptible to the flattery of people who want to use him and direct his eros toward worldly pursuits (Alc. I 104e–5c; cf. Thuc. 5.43, 6.15 and Xen. Mem. 1.2.14). Socrates’ role in these writings is to help Alcibiades realize that his ambitions must be redirected toward inner goals. He must be shown ‘that the true challenge and the true victory is over himself ’. In each of these dialogues, Socrates defeats Alcibiades in argument, and ‘his subsequent failure to heed Socrates’ words merely adds to his failure’ (Gribble 1999:  221). In Alcibiades I, for example, Alcibiades admits to Socrates that he does not know what he is saying, and he

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confesses that he has been in this disgraceful position for a long time without knowing it (Alc. I 127d). Likewise, in Aeschines, Alcibiades puts his head on Socrates’ knees and literally weeps for despair as he realizes that he lacks the preparation he needs for success in politics (Aesch. Alc. Frag. 9). This pattern of a conflicted Alcibiades submitting to Socrates is redemptive from the Socratic point of view – philosophy is portrayed as superior to politics and Socrates is vindicated against an unjust city that executed him (Gribble 1999:  222)  – but it is also meant to be alarming because it underscores the limitations of philosophy (Gribble 1999:  215–16). For Plato, Socrates’ failure to persuade his interlocutors develops into a cynical and bitter rumination on the relationship between philosophy and society, the philosopher and the city (Gribble 1999: 216).75 These literary themes make sense only if Alcibiades had philosophical potential (either in reality or merely as a literary character). He cannot serve as a symbol of the consequences of the failure to pursue philosophy if he was a lost cause from the beginning, as the case against Alcibiades suggests.

3.7.  The corruption of the philosopher The seventh problem with the case against Alcibiades is that it treats his disordered soul as evidence against his potential for philosophy rather than seeing it as a symbol of Athenian social and political dysfunction. For Plato, Alcibiades is a symptom of the city’s corruption, an example of how the democracy squandered its greatest talents.76 And in that respect, he is a first step in Plato’s counter-indictment and trial of Athens:  Socrates didn’t corrupt the youth; he tried to elevate their souls by converting them to the philosophical life and teaching them about the higher aspirations of eros, but the city’s influence was too strong to counteract. Alcibiades is Plato’s symbol of this problem, and the Symposium is a centrepiece in his exoneration of Socrates and condemnation of the city that executed him. Within the larger context of praise of Socrates as a great educator, the recollection of Alcibiades’ wayward desires can be seen as playing a role in the exoneration of Socrates . . . Alcibiades failed to evince the necessary commitment to the philosophical life because he was so enraptured by the values perpetuated by the city . . . (Sheffield 2006: 202)

The case against Alcibiades doesn’t recognize his symbolic significance because it doesn’t look for the causes of his character flaws. Reeve (2006:  141), for example, suggests that the ‘negative interpretation of Alcibiades is very much a part of Plato’s own’, and he cites Republic 500b–d as the relevant evidence. Part



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of that long passage certainly sounds like a description of Alcibiades’ disruptive entrance into the Symposium: The harshness of the masses towards philosophy is caused by those outsiders who do not belong and who have burst in like a band of revelers, abusing one another, indulging their love of quarreling, and always arguing about human beings – something that is least appropriate in philosophy. (R. 500b)

Reeve points out that, in the Symposium, Alcibiades accuses Socrates of ‘abusing’ him (Symp. 213d); he gives a speech that is entirely about human beings, which is as ‘anti-the-philosopher-Socrates as possible’ (Reeve 2006: 141), and there is the ‘crowd of revelers’ that shows up at the end of the Symposium (Symp. 223b) and ‘bursts in and puts an end to all of the order . . . The echoes are surely too insistent to be accidental’ (Reeve 2006: 141). Plato’s point, Reeve argues, is that Alcibiades is an unreliable source because his speech in the Symposium is ‘the product of a life which, torn between shame and desire for the approval of the masses (Symp. 216b3–6), self-confessedly does not itself run well’ (Reeve 2006: 146). Reeve is right that the echoes of the Symposium in Republic 500b ‘are too insistent to be accidental’, but he is wrong to analyse this passage out of context. Several pages earlier, at Republic 487b–c, Adeimantus tells Socrates that people usually feel refuted but unpersuaded by philosophical arguments, and so they fail to see the value of philosophy and the just life. Most of them think philosophers are useless or vicious, not at all like the philosophic phusis that Socrates has just described. Socrates’ long response to this concern (R. 489d–502c) is an attempt to explain society’s toxic effect on the souls of young men. None of our present constitutions is worthy of the philosophic nature, and, as a result, this nature is perverted and altered, for, just as a foreign seed, sown in alien ground, is likely to be overcome by the native species and to fade away among them, so the philosophic nature fails to develop its full power and declines into a different character. (R. 497b–c)

The first problem with the ‘present constitutions’ is that society is engineered in a way that makes it all but impossible for the true philosopher to be heard (R. 487e–9d): he risks his life by speaking up in public, and he may be executed for what he says (R. 488c). Second, the city ruins its best men before they can fully develop their talents and capacities:  a young man who has a natural aptitude for philosophy, and who might develop into a philosopher, is systematically corrupted by the mob (R. 489d–95c), and in particular by the meetings of the assembly where the shouts of approval and disapproval are so loud that the

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‘rocks and surroundings echo in the din of their praise or blame and double it’ (R. 492b–c). What kind of training can hold out and not be swept away by that kind of praise and blame and be carried away by the flood wherever it goes, so that he’ll say the same things are beautiful or ugly as the crowd does, follow the same way of life as they do, and be the same sort of person as they are? (R. 492c)

As we saw in Chapter 1, Socrates’ accusers had grouped him with the sophists and argued that the sophists corrupted the youth. But the true corruptors of men like Alcibiades, Plato says, are the people who accuse the sophists, the citizens of the democracy (R. 492a–b). The excitement of the mob stole Alcibiades’ heart away from philosophy (R. 492c), despite his noble nature, and so his disordered soul and failure to live the philosophical life shouldn’t surprise us at all: ‘There isn’t now, hasn’t been in the past, nor ever will be in the future anyone with a character so unusual that he has been educated to virtue in spite of the contrary education he received from the mob’ (R. 492e).77 If anything is surprising, it’s that Alcibiades made as much progress as he did.

3.8.  The tragedy of the Symposium The final problem with the case against Alcibiades is that it strips the Symposium of its most significant tragedy. If Alcibiades is an unreliable witness who lacked philosophical potential, then there was nothing tragic about his rejection of Socrates. On the other hand, if we set aside the case against Alcibiades and look at the details of Plato’s portrait of him in the Symposium, what we find is a profound tragedy: Alcibiades (1) saw a transformative beauty in Socrates, (2) learnt an important lesson about the true aims of eros, (3) felt snake-bitten by philosophy, (4) was unique in his appreciation of Socrates and the value of philosophy, (5) was equally unique as a witness to Socrates’ extraordinary life, and (6) was ‘guided and drawn to philosophy because of his noble nature’ (R. 494d) but was ‘perverted and altered’ like a foreign seed sown in alien ground (R. 497b). All of these considerations give us reason to place Alcibiades very high on Diotima’s ladder of love. He was genuinely interested in philosophy, and he was sure he needed to change his life and follow Socrates, but he was unable to overcome his parallel desires for political power and honour. Plato developed other characters in his dialogues that felt the same conflict: consider Glaucon in the Republic and Hippocrates in the Protagoras, for example. But there is no other character who exhibits the existential tension between philosophy and



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politics as acutely as Alcibiades does, and Alcibiades is the only character in the dialogues who chooses politics over philosophy. He understood Socrates’ ideas (Faulkner 2007: 95); he recognized the superiority of philosophy over other lives (Prior 1997); and he felt a genuine attraction to Socrates and to the philosophical life, but he could not change his life. This was a tragedy for Alcibiades, whose life ended in infamy, and for Athens, whose empire collapsed in large part because of Alcibiades’ treachery. The most tragic element of the Alcibiades episode in Plato’s dialogues, however, is the disconnect between philosophy and the city that Alcibiades symbolizes.

IV.  Conclusions: Alcibiades and Plato’s trial of Athens As I explain in the introduction of this book, I do not argue for a grand theory about all of Plato’s dialogues, such as ‘developmentalism’ or ‘unitarianism’ or ‘dramatic chronology’. Instead, I propose a much humbler claim, namely, that one of Plato’s aims in some of his dialogues – and especially Alcibiades I, Gorgias, Republic, and Symposium (hereafter the ‘apologetic dialogues’) – was to respond to the accusations brought against Socrates by telling an apologetic story about Socrates’ noble attempt and tragic failure to attract the most promising young men of Athens away from politics and toward philosophy. In these apologetic dialogues, Plato presents Socrates as a man who offered the youth of Athens a choice between two lives: the philosophical life, represented by Socrates, and the political life, represented by individuals like Callicles (Grg. 485e–486c, 489e, 506b–e) and Alcibiades (Symp. 216a–c). The philosophical life was characterized by the pursuit of truth and wisdom (Ap. 29d–e), as well as a commitment to principles that seemed to turn the world upside down, for example, that it is better to suffer injustice than it is to commit it (Grg. 483a–c). The ‘political life’, on the other hand, was characterized by hedonism (Grg. 495a), a corrupting love of the demos (Grg. 513c; Symp. 216b), realpolitik (Grg. 482c– 6d), and the accumulation of wealth and power (Alc. I 104e–5c). Socrates’ efforts to convert his students to the philosophical life fail, and some of these men go on to become ‘outstandingly bad’ (R. 491e). But the city was to blame for this, not Socrates and not the sophists (R. 492b). The city corrupted these men by teaching them the values of Periclean Athens, a constitution that Aristotle called a ‘democracy based on triremes’ (Pol. 4.4), whose leadership Plato condemned for measuring its excellence in terms of walls and dockyards and other rubbish (Grg. 519a), and which Thucydides represented famously

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in his Melian Dialogue as unconcerned with justice (Thuc. 5.84–116).78 Such values, dinned into the ears of the youth by the assembly, can only lead to political and psychological disorder (R. 492b–c). Which is why Socrates’ failure to convert his students to philosophy is a tragedy: the city must be reformed if there is any hope for the good life, but it cannot be reformed because philosophy isn’t powerful enough to educate would-be philosophers against ‘the contrary education’ they receive from the city (R. 492e–93a). Alcibiades is Plato’s symbol of this conflict. He embodies the existential choice between two powerful desires – one for Socrates and the life he represents, the other for politics and the eros of the demos – as well as the moral weakness that leads him to choose politics over philosophy against his better judgement (Symp. 216a–c). This story is Plato’s counter-indictment of the Athenians who executed Socrates. It completely revised the narrative that emerged from the trial. Socrates didn’t corrupt the youth of Athens. He spent his life trying to convert them to the philosophical life, and he tried to overturn the arguments for moral relativism and scepticism that characterized Athens during the Periclean era. In fact, Plato suggests, Socrates is the only man in the city who tried to improve his fellow Athenians, which is why he should be considered the true craftsman of politics (Grg. 521d). Socrates wasn’t an oligarch or a threat to the city.79 He was the one man who could have saved Athens from herself during the war, and the city killed him because it couldn’t tolerate Socratic virtue (Grg. 521d–2d). Alcibiades is Plato’s symbol of this profoundly complex problem:  the nobility and ultimate futility of Socrates’ ethical and political aspirations, the corrupting influences of the democratic city, the tragedy of squandered philosophical potential, the injustice of the trial, and the ineluctable limits of philosophy in the city. Plato’s depiction of Alcibiades was meant to remind us of the unjust condemnation of Socrates, and to overturn the verdict of the trial. It was also meant to symbolize the powers and limits of philosophy, and to serve as a provocation to reflect on the futility of Socratic philosophy in the context of society as it is. Given the influence and the values of the city, the philosopher is predetermined to fail in his efforts to reform its institutions and most promising individuals. Alcibiades embodies this problem more than any other character in Plato’s dialogues because he is represented as a person who has unusual philosophical insight and fails anyway. This is the real tragedy of the Symposium. For Plato, the human condition itself is tragic because there is an inevitable conflict between philosophy and society that philosophy cannot hope to win.



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Notes 1 The ancient sources on Alcibiades’ life are Thucydides’ History, Xenophon’s Hellenica, and Plutarch’s Life of Alcibiades. Some scholars have wondered whether Alcibiades was one of Thucydides’ sources for his History (Rhodes 2011; Brunt 1952). For modern sources on Alcibiades’ life and disputed ‘genius’, see Hatzfeld (1951), McGregor (1965), Bloedow (1973), Ellis (1989), and Rhodes (2011). 2 Alcibiades was four when his father died at the battle of Coroneia in 447 BCE and Pericles became his guardian. Two years later, Pericles divorced his first wife and Aspasia came to live with him. Some think Aspasia was Plato’s inspiration for Diotima, Socrates’ teacher in the Symp. Aspasia’s contemporaries suggested that she wrote Pericles’ speeches and even convinced him to go to war with Sparta. ‘Socrates himself would sometimes go to visit her, and some of his acquaintances with him; and those who frequented her company would carry their wives with them to listen to her’ (Plut. Per. 22.3). For a thorough discussion of the ancient world’s various representations of Aspasia, see Henry (1995: 19–57). 3 Plutarch (Plut. Per. 36.4) says that a variety of intellectuals were regular guests at the home of Pericles, and so it is likely that, from a young age, Alcibiades was exposed to many other important figures from this time, including Protagoras and Anaxagoras. 4 Aristophanes mentioned Alcibiades twice in the now lost Banqueters, which was produced in 427 BCE. At the time, Alcibiades would have been twenty-four years old – not yet old enough to participate fully in public life (one needed to be thirty to be elected general or serve on the Athenian Council), but evidently well-known enough to earn an appearance in Athenian popular culture. 5 According to Xenophon, many ‘great ladies’ pursued Alcibiades ‘on account of his beauty’ (Xen. Mem. 1.2.24). In his Axiochus, Aeschines of Sphettus calls Alcibiades a drunkard and a chaser of other men’s wives. For a detailed analysis of the incidents concerning Alcibiades’ sex life, see Littman (1970). 6 Isocrates (16.34) says Alcibiades won first, second, and third places in the chariot race. Euripides reports the same in his ‘Victory Song to Alcibiades’ (Edmonds 1964: 241). According to Gribble (2012: 45), the Olympic games of 416 BCE had an extraordinary impact on other events in the ancient world, and Alcibiades was to thank for this. His unprecedented victory and disturbing display of wealth affected the Peace of Nicias ‘Cold War’ between Athens and Sparta (420–415 BCE), and it influenced the debate about the Sicilian Expedition, which happened soon after the Olympic games. After that, it was decisive in Alcibiades’ recall from the Sicilian Expedition. 7 Gribble (2012: 54) observes that ‘victory in the crown games signified for the Greeks not just extraordinary personal enterprise, but also a godlike and talismanic

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Plato’s Trial of Athens achievement, a quasi-cultic individual honour’. Olympic victors were thought to have special powers in achieving military success and in the founding of colonies. According to Plutarch (Quaest. Conv. 2.5.2), the Spartans had Olympic victors fight next to their king during battle. Diodorus of Sicily says the victorious Olympian Milo fought in battle while wearing his Olympic crowns, and was later given credit for his army’s victory (Diod. Sic. 12.9.5.2). See Gribble (2012). See Hale (2009: 205–21). McGregor (1965: 28) speculates that, during his twenties, Alcibiades learnt the art of manipulating the demos with a ‘specious but exciting argument . . . put violently by a clever speaker’ by watching the flamboyant Cleon defeat the dull Nicias in public debate. According to Thucydides, thanks to the speeches of Alcibiades and Nicias, ‘a passionate lust to sail burst upon everyone equally’ (Thuc. 6.24.3): the older men were convinced the unprecedented power of the Athenian forces could not fail; the young hungered for new experiences in an unknown land, and the mob was driven by a desire for everlasting pay. This feverish atmosphere was so stifling of public debate that critics of the expedition withheld their objections because they did not want to be considered traitors to the city (Thuc. 6.24.4). According to the Theag. (129d1), Socrates was one of the few to speak out against the expedition. On the day of the expedition’s departure, ‘the whole population, one may say, of the city, both citizens and foreigners’ went down to the Piraeus to watch the launching (Thuc. 6.30.2). Alcibiades had literally set the whole city in motion with his intoxicating, aspirational speech. On the role of eros in the Sicilian Debate, see Cornford ([1907] 1965: 201–20) and Forde (1989: 12–67). ‘People of the humbler and poorer sort he so captivated by his leadership that they were filled with an amazing passion to have him for their tyrant, and some proposed it, and actually came to him in solicitation of it’ (Plut. Alc. 34.6). As Goldstein (2014: 234) puts the point, ‘Imagine John F. Kennedy, Donald Trump, David Petraeus, Muhammad Ali, Julian Assange, Johnny Knoxville, Bernie Madoff and Jude Law all combined in one.’ For examples of Thucydides’ scornful judgements of the demos, see Thuc. 1.20.1, 2.59.3, 2.65.4–11, 4.28.3, 7.48.3, 8.1.4, 8.68.1. And for an analysis of these passages and a general discussion of Thucydides’ politics, see McGregor (1965: 99). It is telling that Aristophanes’ Frogs was first performed after the naval disaster at Aegospotami. The Athenians worried that the Spartans were preparing to enter their harbours and massacre everyone, but they still attached their hopes to Alcibiades. See Gribble (2012: 55–62) for a detailed account of the lengths Alcibiades went to pay for his chariot teams and for the display of wealth and aristocratic entertainment that followed his victory. These festivities were a ‘form of



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competition almost as important as the athletic one, designed to establish the reputation of the spender for magaloprepeia on a Panhellenic stage’ (59). In this competition, an individual competed with other individuals, other cities, and in some cases his own polis. The problem with Alcibiades’ unprecedented victory and display of wealth was that it competed with ‘the Athenians’ conception of themselves as the tyrant city. The Athenians were used to, and apparently not averse to, the comparison of their own empire to a tyranny’ (61). Leotychidas, the alleged son of Alcibiades and Timaea, lost the throne of Sparta on the charge of bastardy (Plut. Alc. 23.8). Hale (2009: 220) notes that Alcibiades did not go straight home to Athens on this day. He first took a detour to the Spartan harbour of Gythium. ‘There Alcibiades looked alertly for signs of shipbuilding even as he brazenly flaunted his trophies to the Spartans on shore. He was reminding them, as he had reminded the Athenians during the Sicilian campaign, that he was indeed still alive’. See Plut. Alc. 32.1–5. As the Athenians watched Alcibiades mingle with the crowds, some felt their hearts fill with regret about what might have been. They were certain that ‘if they had only left Alcibiades at the head of that enterprise’, they would not have lost Sicily or had ‘any other great expectation of theirs miscarried’ (Plut. Alc. 32.4–5). In Andocides’ Against Alcibiades (4.22) and in Plutarch’s Alcibiades (16.5), Alcibiades is alleged to have supported the massacre of the Melian men and the enslavement of the Melian women and children. They both also say that Alcibiades chose one of the women from among the prisoners to be his mistress and that he had a child with her. The reason for this colourful introduction is to give some sense of the controversy and mixed feelings that Alcibiades evoked in Athens. For more on this point, see Dodds (1959: 29). One might worry that my treatment of Alcibiades depends on the biographical accuracy of the portraits of Alcibiades that appear in the Symp., Alc. I, and several other works of ancient literature. As John Bussanich has suggested to me in private correspondence, the ancient representations of Alcibiades, including Plato’s in the Symp., may be imaginative projections of a ‘type of personality’ – like the tyrant in R. Book IX. However, as I explain in the Introduction, I don’t think any of Plato’s representations of people, including those of Socrates, are strictly historical. None of the Greeks was objective in our sense. In other words, Plato’s Trial of Athens depends on how Plato used his representations of Alcibiades, not on the historical or biographical accuracy of these portraits. Xenophon argues (1) that Critias and Alcibiades were politically ambitious before they met Socrates: ‘ambition was the very life-blood of both’ (Xen. Mem. 1.2.14); (2) that they tried to use Socrates to gain an advantage over their political rivals: ‘it was for political ends that they wanted Socrates’ (1.2.16); and (3) that Socrates

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Plato’s Trial of Athens was able to moderate both men as long as he was with them: ‘even those two were prudent so long as they were with Socrates’ (1.2.18), but they were corrupted by others later in their lives (1.2.24–5): ‘Politics had brought them to Socrates, and for politics they left him’ (1.2.47). Xenophon thought Socrates deserved to be praised for this, not condemned as a corrupter: ‘Does he deserve no word of praise for having controlled them in the days of their youth?’ (1.2.26) ‘How can he be held to blame for the evil that was not in him?’ (1.2.28). Works called Alcibiades were attributed to the several Socratic authors. Unfortunately, most of these writings have been lost. They survive as titles or fragments, although the Aeschines fragment (Johnson 2002) is more substantial. See note 74. See Gordon (2012: 146–83) and Helfer (2017: 9–12) for recent discussions of the authenticity of Alc. I. Gordon makes a case for authenticity by arguing against Schleiermacher and engaging with all of the relevant literature. See Chapter 3, note 13. See Corrigan and Glazov-Corrigan (2004: 174), Gribble (1999: 251–2), Nichols (2009), Nussbaum (1986), Reeve (2006: 131), Rosen (1987: 285), Scott and Welton (2008: 157), and Sheffield (2006: 192). Historians mostly agree that Alcibiades mocked the Mysteries but was uninvolved in the desecration of the Herms (Ellis 1989: 58–62). However, many of Plato’s readers probably thought Alcibiades was guilty of both crimes (Johnson 2002: x; cf. Nichols 2009: 83–4). Plato didn’t go out of his way to clear Alcibiades’ name. As Nichols (2009: 83–4) points out, he has Alcibiades appear in the Symp. as a man who gets very drunk, travels through the city in the middle of the night with an entourage, and talks about statues (Symp. 215b). Rosen (1987: 285 n. 31) thinks the dramatic date of the Symp. is the night of the mutilation of the Herms. Cf. Bloom (1993: 72) and Strauss (2001: 1, 15, 24, 40, 287). This is unlikely, because Agathon’s victory at the Lanaea festival in 416 BCE occurred more than one year earlier than the mutilation of the Herms in 415 BCE. On the other hand, Plato may have made a mistake with the dates, or he may have been trying to evoke a general timeframe and suggest a type of behaviour as he does in the Grg. (see Chapter 3): when people thought of Alcibiades in connection with the mutilation of the Herms and profanation of the Mysteries, it was because they had seen him have many nights like the one Plato depicts in the Symp. (Gribble 1999: 251). See Bury (1909: ix), Dover (1980: 164), Rowe (1998: 206), and Sheffield (2006: 201– 6). On this point, I am following Dodds’ reasoning about the Grg. As he says in his commentary, ‘To drag in two allusions to “my friend Alcibiades” may appear positively foolhardy, when one of the counts in the new accusation was that Alcibiades was Socrates’ pupil’ (Dodds 1959: 28).



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26 Gomperz thought the Grg. was Plato’s ‘counterblast’ to Polycrates (1905: 343), and that his representation of Alcibiades in the Symp. served a similar ‘apologetic purpose’ (394–95). Bury (1909: xviii) speculates that Plato’s Symp. was a response to a ‘banqueting-scene’ in Polycrates’ pamphlet, one ‘in which Socrates and Alcibiades were pictured in an odious light’. I agree with the general idea that Plato’s Symp. had an apologetic purpose. However, Bury focuses on the preface of the dialogue, and Gomperz concentrates on Alcibiades’ encomium of Socrates. My argument is based on the depiction of Alcibiades’ moral weakness and squandered philosophical promise. 27 Some think the received view that the Socratics responded to Polycrates gets the chronology the wrong way around. See Gribble’s discussion (1999: 223–30). He discusses Humbert’s view (1967: 65–6) that Polycrates’ pamphlet was a response to the Socratic dialogues on behalf of the democracy. On this view, Polycrates was defending the restored democracy, including Anytus, against its Socratic critics, especially Plato’s Ap. This would explain the anachronisms in his pamphlet, such as mentioning Conon and the rebuilding of the Long Walls. 28 The most important source for reconstructing the contents of Polycrates’ pamphlet, Lib. Ap. (136–41), says that Anytus made Socrates’ associates an issue at the trial. For more details on these sources and their reliability, see the section entitled ‘Unreliable testimony: Polycrates’ in Chapter 1. 29 One consideration in favour of this view is the fact that Polycrates’ pamphlet was such a sensation, which is much harder to understand if its contents were merely a fabrication. 30 See Plato’s Ap. 32e–3a. 31 As Brickhouse and Smith (1989: 84) have argued, because Xenophon appears to distinguish between (1) ‘the accuser’ (katēgoros) (Xen. Mem. 1.2.12, 26, 49, 51, 56, 58), which may refer to Polycrates, and (2) ‘the ones who wrote the indictment’ (grapsamenos) (1.2.64), which is a reference to Anytus, Meletus, and Lycon, ‘all the instances in which Socrates’ responsibility for the acts of Critias and Alcibiades is reported or refuted by ancient authors are compatible with its invention as an issue by Polycrates’. Brickhouse and Smith are not alone in making this point. See also Chroust (1957) and Treves (1952). 32 As Schein (1974: 166) puts a related point, ‘From [Plato’s] fourth-century, philosophical perspective, the imperialist careers of fifth century Athens and its leaders were instances of loving appetitively, irrationally, in the wrong way. Socrates, Plato thought, had understood this, and his persistence in pointing out these leaders’ irrationality . . . had led to his being tried and killed.’ 33 Xenophon’s silence on the subject of politics is easier to explain. He does not show Alcibiades in conversation with Socrates at all in his writings. He also does not mention their love affair or the battles they fought together. In fact, ‘on the whole . . . Xenophon attempts to distance Socrates from Alcibiades’ (Johnson 2002: xiii–xiv).

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34 This chapter focuses on the Symp. Chapters 3 and 4 will look more closely at the Grg. and R. 35 For a helpful discussion of Plato’s association of Alcibiades with ‘politically suggestive language [that] implies fifth-century, imperialistic Athens, so that Alcibiades is made to represent that same political world and value as, e.g., Callicles in the Gorgias and the democratic man and state in the Republic’, see Schein (1974: 158ff.; cf. Bacon 1959: 430). 36 As Lutz (1998: 111) suggests, ‘After Socrates himself, Alcibiades may be the most significant character in all of Plato’s writings.’ 37 For other sources on the topic of Plato’s dialogues and Greek tragedy, see Bacon (1959: 415–30), Anton (1974: 277–94), Clay (1975: 238–61), Sider (1975: 41–56), Patterson (1982: 76–93), Kuhn (1942: 37–88), and Halliwell (1984: 50–8). 38 Cf. Rutherford (1995: 198): ‘[Alcibiades] supplies what was lacking, and puts the case for the other side’. 39 Nussbaum draws similar conclusions from the fact that Aristophanes and Agathon fall asleep, ‘tucked in by the cool hand of philosophy’, while Socrates returns to the agora for his ordinary day of dialectic: philosophy and poetry cannot live together or know each other’s truths. ‘Not unless literature gives up its attachment to the particular and the vulnerable and makes itself an instrument of Diotima’s persuasion. But that would be to leave its own truths behind’ (1986: 199). 40 For important criticisms of Nussbaum, see Corrigan and Glazov-Corrigan (2004: 174–5 n. 20), Gill (1990: 71–83), Nails (2006: 191–4), Nightingale (1995: 121), Price (1991: 294–8), and Sheffield (2006: 183–206). 41 For a recent critique of Vlastos, see Sheffield (2012), who argues that the Symp. was never intended to give an account of interpersonal love. Plato’s aim was to give an argument ‘for the superiority of the philosophical life as the happiest life (211d), and the central claim that the fullest satisfaction of eros is to be had in the contemplation of the Form of the Beautiful’ (118). On this view, a person cannot be a proper object of eros (127). In fact, if we think a person can be the foundation of our happiness, we have ‘a limited view of the rich possibilities of human aspiration’ (128). Sheffield may be right that Plato did not intend for the Symp. to be his final word on interpersonal love or the value of individual persons, but this misses Nussbaum’s point, part of which is the worry that contemplation of Forms cannot possibly be the highest good for human beings. Plato’s sexual metaphor for knowledge (R. 490b) only reinforces this point: the philosopher is passionate, but his passion is directed at an immaterial and intelligible metaphysical world, not a human one. 42 See Sheffield (2006: 200 n. 36) for an insightful development of this point, especially in her correspondence with Lesher, which she quotes at length. For additional instances of Socrates’ atopia, see Tht. 149a, La. 195a, Symp. 175a, 215a, Grg. 473a, 480e, 494d, Phdr. 230c, Prt 361a, and R. 515a. For discussions of Socratic



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atopia, see Hadot (1995: 57, 158), Gribble (1999: 254–5), Blondell (2002: 73–4), and Nightingale (2004: 105–7). As Sheffield (2006: 196) puts this point, ‘Philosophical eros is a revisionary approach to human affairs, but not a rejection of them as such . . . Socrates’ revisionary behavior informs a distinctively human life.’ For a critique of Nussbaum’s overgenerous interpretation of Alcibiades’ ‘lover’s knowledge of the particular other’, see Nightingale (1993: 124–5). Reeve goes on to identify Alcibiades with the R.’s description of the corrupted philosophic nature, and he suggests that Alcibiades did not become a philosopherking because he did not receive the right kind of education. I agree with Reeve on all of these points, but I differ from him in not placing the blame on Socrates (1992: 111–14). As I will show in this chapter and the rest of Plato’s Trial of Athens, Plato’s aim in the Symp., Grg., and R. was to place the blame on the Athenian democracy. Anton (1974: 42–6), Gagarin (1977), Nussbaum (1986), Rosen (1987: 286), Reeve (1992: 111–14), and Lear (1998) suggest, for a variety of reasons, that part of Plato’s intention with the Alcibiades episode was to give us reason to question and criticize Socrates. For a strong critique of the view that Alcibiades’ speech undermines Diotima’s account of love, see Sheffield (2006: 183–206); cf. Scott and Welton (2008: 155–80). For a more balanced interpretation, see Rutherford (1995: 197–204). Lear (1998: 156) thinks Diotima begs the question in assuming (1) ‘that a beautiful soul is more beautiful than a beautiful body’, and (2) ‘that a lover’s heart will track the truth’. He argues that Alcibiades acts out a refutation of both assumptions. Reeve makes a similar point, although in addition to being critical of Socrates’ erotic pedagogical practices, he mentions a limitation of eros itself: ‘If I am right, the major function of [Alcibiades’] speech is to question that eros, to question whether it would lead us to the good and the beautiful’ (Reeve 1992: 112). Reeve cites Nussbaum (1980) and Grote (1865) as his predecessors on this point. They argue that Plato in the R. was critical of the elenchus as a pedagogical method, and of Socrates in particular as a teacher of ethics (538c6–39a3). Reeve thinks the same critique of Socrates is implicit in the Symp. If Plutarch is right that Socrates was a regular visitor to the house of Pericles because he enjoyed talking to Aspasia about politics (Plut. Alc. 24.3), it is likely that Socrates knew Alcibiades long before he started talking to him about philosophy (Alc. I 103ab). They fought alongside each other, and at one point Alcibiades was badly injured and fell to the ground, unable to stand up. As the Athenian line moved ahead, Socrates stayed behind to guard the wounded and defenceless Alcibiades until a rescue party could help him.

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50 I discuss Plato’s critique of democratic Athens in the Grg. and R., in Chapter 3. 51 Albeit in hindsight, since he was only a teenager at the time of the Sicilian Expedition. Other scholars make the same mistake on this point. For examples, see Sheffield (2006: 204 n. 42) and Rowe (1998: 206). 52 Cf. Sheffield (2006: 196–206) and Scott and Welton (2008: 179–80). 53 Cf. Gordon (2012: 180–1). 54 I develop these points in Chapter 3. 55 In fact, Nails seems to be unaware of them. She thinks Socrates did not blame Athens for wrongly condemning him because ‘they did not willingly do wrong . . . The Athenians . . . ought not to be blamed, but to be understood and instructed’ (2006: 207). I think this view is unsupportable when we look at the details of Plato’s allusions to the trial in the Symp., Grg., and R. 56 The same word used in the indictment of Socrates. 57 For fuller discussions of Diotima’s theory of love, see Corrigan and GlazovCorrigan (2004), Ferrari (1992), Gould (1963), Hunter (2004), Patterson (1991), Price (1989), Rosen (1987), Santas (1988), Scott and Welton (2008), and Sheffield (2006). 58 Sheffield (2006: 189) points out that the satyrs were a particularly apt ‘figuration of [Socrates’] ugliness’ because they also were ‘bearded and goatish’. Xenophon (Symp. 4.19) confirms Socrates’ satyr-like appearances. The satyr was not just an ugly and ridiculous character, however. It was ‘an ambiguous creature, cruder than man and yet somehow wiser, combining mischief with wisdom and animality with divinity’ (Seaford 1984: 40; cf. Sheffield 2006: 197ff.). This is why the satyrs were an apt choice of analogy: Socrates occupied exactly the same ambiguous position between the lowly and the divine, the ugly and the beautiful. 59 There seems to be an allusion to the trial here. Socrates may be like Marsyas in his powers to transfix his listeners, but he also shares his fate. Apollo punished Marsyas for hubris. See Nichols (2009: 74 n. 78; cf. Scott and Welton 2009: 166). 60 Alcibiades mentions that Ionian soldiers in the Athenian army moved their bedding outside on the night that Socrates stood silently in contemplation for twenty-four hours. They wanted to see ‘if Socrates was going to stay out there all night’ (Symp. 220c–d). To them, Socrates was a spectacle (Sheffield 2006: 194; cf. Rosen 1987: 313, 316). 61 Nichols (2009: 80) suggests that Nicias is more advanced than Alcibiades because he uses one of Socrates’ definitions of courage (La. 187e–8a), something he picked up during a previous conversation with Socrates. As Nichols (2009) says, Nicias thereby demonstrates a ‘fuller understanding of Socrates’ than Alcibiades shows during his speech in the Symp. This is wrong for two reasons. First, Socrates refutes Nicias in the La., and shows that he is conceited, ignorant, and self-satisfied. Nicias is like the soldier Stesilaus (183c8–4a7), who was too reliant on an acquired skill or art, because he was too reliant on definitions and was therefore unequipped



62

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to engage in dialectic (Gonzalez 1998: 22–41). Second, as I argue below, because Nicias thinks Socratic philosophy is fun (La. 188b5), he shows that he doesn’t understand its existential challenge. I am alluding to Edmundson’s ‘On the Uses of a Liberal Education as Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students’ (1997). The point here is that Alcibiades was not the recognizable type of student who thinks philosophy is fun but isn’t truly affected by it. He was the type who has an existential crisis and feels he needs to change his life after being introduced to it. I once had a student who dropped out of her sorority after reading Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. She had an Alcibiadean experience. Plato (Symp. 215b–c and Phd. 117b), Xenophon (Symp. 4.19, 5.7), and Aristophanes (Clouds, 362) provide the ancient textual evidence. Sheffield (2006: 189) compares the language Alcibiades uses to describe the ‘wondrous and divine inner beauty’ of Socrates’ character (Symp. 216e–17a) with the language Socrates uses to describe the form of beauty (Symp. 210e, 211e). For similar developments of this point, see Nussbaum (1986: 195) and Blondell (2006: 157). Cf. Sheffield (2006: 203–6): ‘Alcibiades’ profanation of the Mysteries of philosophy was to misidentify its real object. His idolatrous attachment to Socrates prevents Alcibiades from making genuine progress towards wisdom and virtue’ (204). Nightingale (1993: 126) thinks this is decisive evidence against the notion that Alcibiades is a reliable witness of Socrates, or that he had any philosophical potential. The problem, she says, is that ‘even in the act of erotic seduction, this is a man who wants to enrich himself at the expense of others’. His interest in Socrates ‘cannot be disentangled from his passion for honour and power’. He wants to ‘possess Socrates’ knowledge, but he does not want to live the philosophical life’. Indeed, he seems to have ‘wanted knowledge for private and political ends rather than those of philosophy’. Cf. Gribble (1999: 243) and Scott and Welton (2008: 172). I argue against this view below. In short, this interpretation is unjustifiably pessimistic about Alcibiades, because (1) it does not acknowledge his growth after his failed seduction attempts, and (2) it ignores the genuine and profound conflict in Alcibiades’ soul. Cf. Hunter (2004: 105–7). Nightingale (1993: 125–7) provides the opposite interpretation of these stories. She thinks Alcibiades’ speech is a ‘systematic misreading of Socrates’ (127). Cf. Belfiore (1984: 141–3), Blondell (2006: 158), Halperin (1992: 115), Nichols (2009: 75–6), Reeve (2006), Rosen (1987: 301–9). For very similar interpretations of Alcibiades’ character, see Schein (1974: 158–67) and Scott (1995: 26 n. 1, 33 n. 8, 43). Schein (1974: 161) presents perhaps the most extreme version of this thesis: ‘Alcibiades’ attempt to seduce Socrates physically is directly related to the political goals of [Athenian] imperialism.’

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69 Blondell (2006: 158–65), for example, is so set on discrediting Alcibiades that she contradicts herself regarding the significance of seeing such beauty in Socrates. On the one hand, she acknowledges, ‘It is of course hard to attain this kind of vision. The ordinary soldiers cannot see Socrates’ inner beauty, so they become hostile (220c1), foreshadowing his death’ (158 n. 44). This seems to suggest that Alcibiades has accomplished something important and difficult. On the other hand, however, just a few pages later, Blondell takes it all back, suggesting that ‘the whole of Alcibiades’ discourse regarding Socrates’ “hidden” interior seems in an important sense misbegotten, since all Socrates’ virtues are open to view’ (2006: 165). Both of these claims cannot be true. As I argue below, there are very good reasons to believe that Alcibiades is unique in Plato’s dialogues in part because of his capacity to see and truly appreciate this beauty. 70 Socrates calls himself Alcibiades’ first, longest, and only true lover (Alc. I 103a, 104c, 119c, 131e, 132a). He doesn’t profess love to anyone else in the dialogues (Lutz 1998: 111). Cf. Grg. 481d where Socrates says he has two loves, Alcibiades and philosophy. 71 Forde (1986: 223) points out that Alc. I is unique in Plato’s dialogues because it depicts ‘the profound transformation of an interlocutor’. 72 Blondell (2006: 158) tries to distinguish between the veracity of Alcibiades’ ‘purported insights into Socrates’ inner nature’ and Alcibiades’ reports about ‘Socrates’ behavior’ on the grounds that Socrates does not contradict his stories. However, Socrates doesn’t contradict any part of Alcibiades’ speech, including his comparison of Socrates with Marsyas and Silenus (Symp. 215b), and so Blondell’s distinction is arbitrary: there is no reason to think Socrates has given his ‘tacit assent’ only to the biographical details of Alcibiades’ speech. 73 It is thanks to this information that several scholars have identified Socrates with Diotima’s description of Eros as a spiritual being (Bacon 1959; cf. Hadot 1995; Blondell 2006), that is, as a ‘complex mixture of the human and the divine’ (Sheffield 2006: 197), and speculated that he has glimpsed the form of beauty (Blundell 1992: 128) without attaining a god’s state of understanding (Sheffield 2006: 196 n. 27). As Bacon (1959: 424) puts this point, ‘Socrates is first of all the dramatic realization of Diotima’s Eros, shoeless and hardy and poor and homely, but ultimately resourceful in his pursuit of beauty and wisdom.’ This association of Socrates with Eros wouldn’t be possible without Alcibiades’ portrait of Socrates. It is thanks to his comparison of Socrates with the satyrs Marsyas and Silenus that Socrates ‘manifests a similarly ambiguous position in between the lowly and the divine’ (Sheffield 2006: 198). 74 Most of these works no longer exist and are known of only as titles or very small fragments. The one exception is the Alcibiades by Aeschines of Sphettus, which survives as a more substantial fragment (Johnson 2002). Xenophon’s Mem. also



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deal directly with the question of Socrates’ associates (Xen. Mem. 1.2.12–48). For references, see Gribble (1999: 214). See Chapter 3, note 13. I discuss these themes and look closely at the relevant passages from Alc. I, Grg., and R., in Chapter 3. Many scholars have seen Plato’s account of the philosophical phusis in the R. as based on the life of Alcibiades and his relationship with Socrates. Adam (1902) notes that Plutarch draws upon Plato in developing his own account of Alcibiades’ squandered talents (Alc. 4.1). See also Lee (1974: 290), Gribble (1999: 219), Taylor (1976: 64), and Rosen (2005: 237–41). I discuss these and related passages in greater detail in Chapter 3. If Plutarch (Alc. 16.5) and Andocides (4.22) are right that Alcibiades was responsible for the slaughter and enslavement of the Melians (see note 18), the Melian Dialogue might represent an ideology that Alcibiades agreed with. It is very close to the ideas that Callicles defends in the Grg. (Saxonhouse 1983), and Alcibiades and Callicles have many things in common (Vickers 2008; cf. Gribble 1999). See Chapter 3, note 33. Hornblower (1987) speculates that Thucydides actually knew Socrates. At the very least, Plato seems to have been influenced by Thucydides, either through Socrates or through carefully studying Thucydides’ work. Rutherford (1995: 66–8) sees connections between Plato and Thucydides regarding their criticisms of democracy, their depictions of demagogues, their characterizations of Alcibiades, their analyses of ‘imperial expansion and political-moral decline, and the ideology of power as expressed by Callicles and Thrasymachus in Plato and by the Athenians at Sparta and Melos in Thucydides’. Their primary disagreement is in their assessment of Pericles’ leadership. Cf. Schein (1974: 158–67), Forde (1992: 10, 30), Hornblower (1995: 55), de Romilly (1995: 246–7), and Gribble (1999: 236). See Chapter 3, note 9. See Stone (1988: 121–9, 138–9) for an account of Socrates as a pro-Spartan sympathizer, and see Irwin (1989) for a devastating, premise-by-premise critique of Stone’s argument.

3

Plato’s Other Apologies of Socrates

Alcibiades’ entrance in Plato’s Symposium is extraordinary.1 Socrates has just finished describing the soul’s ascent to the form of Beauty, and he is taking his seat to loud applause (Symp. 212c). Everyone but Aristophanes is celebrating his otherworldly vision (Symp. 210d) and aspirational account of the good life (Symp. 212a–b). As Aristophanes tries to make himself heard over everyone’s cheers for Socrates’ speech, ‘all of a sudden, there was even more noise’. Alcibiades has arrived with his entourage, ‘a large drunken party’ accompanied by a flute girl (Symp. 212c). They are all gathered outside in the courtyard of Agathon’s house, rattling and knocking loudly at the door. This is not a group of philosophers. They are ‘outsiders. . .who don’t belong and who’ve burst in like a band of revelers . . . indulging their love of quarrels, and arguing about human beings in a way that is wholly inappropriate to philosophy’ (R. 500b). They have missed the evening’s great speeches about love, and they interrupt a philosophical conversation that is still ongoing.2 Aristophanes had wanted to respond to something Socrates said about his own speech, but his efforts were hopeless now that everyone could hear Alcibiades shouting in the courtyard, very drunk and very loud (Symp. 212d), ‘roaring like a bull’ (Corrigan and Glazov-Corrigan 2004:  164). Alcibiades eventually staggers to the door, halfcarried by the flute girl and crowned like Dionysus with a wreath of violets and ivy and ribbons in his hair.3 He is drunk and lusty, quarrelsome and bossy.4 ‘Good evening, gentlemen. I’m plastered’ (Symp. 212d–e). His friends help him to a couch – he cannot walk without their support – and as he tries to remove the ribbons from his hair to make a crown for Agathon, ‘all he succeeded in doing was to push them further down his head until they finally slipped over his eyes’ (Symp. 213a). The sober philosophical conversation is clearly over. Alcibiades has arrived with all of the disorder and intemperance of the democratic city at his side and in his bloodstream.

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Alcibiades is ‘plastered’, but he is not too drunk to tell us unforgettable stories about Socrates: the satyr (Symp. 215c–16d), the teacher of shame (Symp. 215e– 16d), the Silenus statue (Symp. 216d–17a), the sleepless mystic (Symp.  220c– d), the fearless soldier (Symp. 219e–21c), the barefoot snow walker (Symp. 220b–c), the prodigious drinker (Symp. 220a), and the Ajax-like resister of Alcibiades’ body (Symp. 219c–e).5 In this characterization of Alcibiades, Plato carefully presents us with a man who is split in two, one half devoted to the higher aspirations of Socratic philosophy, the other half attached to the politics and hedonism of the Athenian way of life. He is intoxicated, and he missed the grand metaphysical vision of Socrates’ speech. But he is not too drunk to provide a metaphysics of his own – a metaphysics of Socrates – the ironist who hides transformative images of the gods in his soul (Symp. 216e–17a) and in his arguments (Symp. 221e–2a), the man whose life was his philosophy, and whose life, for most others, was shrouded in mystery. Where has Alcibiades been? In the city, with the true corruptors of the youth (R. 492a–b)  – his adoring followers from ‘the agora crowd’ (Prt. 347c–8b)6  – drinking in excess, satisfying his appetites, and flattering his narcissistic ego. Who dressed him as Dionysus, and how had he spent his Dionysian evening before arriving at Agathon’s house? We aren’t told, but we see the disorderly effects and the wasted potential.7 This spectacularly disruptive entrance in its own right is a symbol of the political problem as Plato understands it. As we saw in the previous chapter, Alcibiades is a man who knew better and wanted more. He saw a beauty in Socrates that others literally couldn’t see, and he reported on this beauty with eloquence and passion, even when he was drunk  – even when he was most under the influence of the democratic city. He was rationally and emotionally persuaded that he should change his life, but he couldn’t follow through. Why not? What did the city do to stunt his philosophical development? Plato gives his answer to these questions in the Gorgias and Republic. Each of these apologetic dialogues contributes to Plato’s counter-indictment of Athens. The Symposium gives us the symptom; the Gorgias and Republic give us the diagnosis. In the last chapter, we saw that Plato’s depiction of Alcibiades served a wide variety of purposes, many of which were part and parcel of his response to the trial of Socrates. For Plato, Alcibiades is Athens; his flaws are the city’s flaws,8 and Socrates’ failure to convert him to the philosophical life is a symbol of philosophy’s failure to reform society. This message was meant to exonerate Socrates by overturning the verdict of the trial, to refute Socrates’ accusers and transfer the blame from Socrates to the city itself – the polis culture in Athens,



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not Socrates or the sophists, corrupted the Athenian youth  – and to shed light on the inevitable conflict between philosophy and Athenian politics, the philosopher and the city. The purpose of this chapter is to look more closely at Plato’s critique of fifth- and fourth-century Athens, and then to revisit the trial with this critique in mind. After the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians wanted to understand what had happened to their city. Many Athenians pointed to Socrates and the sophists as scapegoats. But Plato had a very different theory about what went wrong: he didn’t vilify any individual or political faction in the city; the real problem of corruption ran too deep for that. He argued that it was the social and political structure of the city that was most to blame for Athenian failings because it let human nature run riot (Dodds 1959: 364). As de Romilly (1963: 322) has pointed out, Human nature being what it is, man allows himself to be so carried away by success that he conceives immoderate desires. This law is used by Thucydides to explain all the political mistakes described in his work, and those of Athens in particular.

Plato may have read Thucydides.9 At the very least, he seems to have agreed with him on this point. The city suffered from pleonexia, the insatiable desire to have more and to rule over the world, and it cultivated this character flaw in its people – Alcibiades more than anyone (Alc. I 103b–5c). This chapter is divided into three parts. In the first, I contrast the depiction of the young and impressionable Alcibiades – in Alcibiades I and other important pieces of ancient literature10 – with the portrait of the older, corrupted Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium. As we saw above, the drama of the Symposium invites us to ask where Alcibiades spent his evening before arriving at Agathon’s house; the contrast between these two indelible portraits of Alcibiades, the first in Alcibiades I and the second in Plato’s Symposium, invites us to ask what happened to Alcibiades in the intervening years.11 In the second part of this chapter, I turn to the Gorgias because it is there that Plato answers the question about what the city did to Alcibiades. Some commentators have described the Gorgias as Plato’s ‘second apology of Socrates’.12 I reconstruct the argument of that apology and apply it to our question about why Socrates was on trial. In the third part of this chapter, I show that the Republic expands on the Gorgias’ indictment of Athens, and it also looks ahead toward a diagnosis of an even deeper social and political dysfunction. I  conclude by making some general observations about Plato’s apologetic dialogues. As a group, they look like Platonic contributions to the fourth-century debates about the condemnation of Socrates. Plato wrote

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these dialogues to depict the philosophical life and represent it alongside its existential alternatives, partly because he wanted to give Socrates a posthumous victory over his critics and enemies, and partly because he wanted to show the ineluctable conflict between the philosopher and the democratic city.

I.  Alcibiades I: The corruption of the youth Dionysus: What should we do with Alcibiades? . . . Aeschylus: It’s best not to raise a lion in the city; But if you do, it’s best to accede to his ways. —Aristophanes, Frogs

1. Alcibiades I and Plato’s trial of Athens We don’t know whether Plato wrote Alcibiades I.13 Nevertheless, it is an important document for thinking about the motivations behind the trial of Socrates (Johnson 2002: viii).14 If Plato wrote it, we have an additional apologetic dialogue that fits directly into his counter-indictment of Athens. And if someone else from the fourth century is the author, its ideas and themes are compatible with Plato’s counter-indictment in a way that reinforces and develops its core messages.15 Regardless of who wrote the dialogue, Alcibiades I helps make the case that the true corruptor of the youth was the city of Athens, not Socrates; he was innocent, and Socratic philosophy had noble intentions. We can see both points, the dialogue suggests, if we look back to a time when Alcibiades was nineteen years old, still open to philosophy and not yet an enemy of the state, nor even the wild carouser that he is in Plato’s Symposium. At this time, philosophy is still a ‘live option’ for Alcibiades, who is proud and complacent, but also impressionable (Alc. I 135d). The city has not yet gotten its hands on him fully and exploited his dunameis; it hasn’t yet disordered his soul and made him a slave to the demos (Alc. I 132a). And so, Socrates is able successfully to ‘seduce’ Alcibiades into philosophy, away from his premature ambitions. As Johnson (2002: xiv) points out, it is ‘perhaps Socrates’ greatest success . . . Socrates, who regularly wins the argument but fails to win over his interlocutors . . . here seems to have a convert to philosophy. But we all know how this story ends. Alcibiades fails.’16 This message only makes sense for an author who wanted to set the record straight. And as far as Plato’s trial of Athens is concerned, it doesn’t matter whether Plato was that author. If Plato didn’t write Alcibiades I, it would just



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mean that the message of Plato’s counter-indictment of Athenian polis culture was shared widely, and that some friends of Socrates felt it important to spread the word even further. In Alcibiades I, a young Alcibiades is defeated in argument and shown that he lacks the self-knowledge he needs if he is going to be a successful statesman (Alc. I 105c–e, 124b–d):  he realizes that he is ignorant about the nature of justice (Alc. I 106c–16e), having learnt it from the many (Alc. I 110d), and about the power and wealth of his true rivals in Sparta and Persia (Alc. I 119c– 24a); he even acknowledges how much he has to work on himself if he ever hopes to achieve his goals (Alc. I 124a–d).17 Until then, just the thought of him challenging Artaxerxes or the Spartans, as an uneducated and lazy teenager, relying on things like looks and height, wealth and birth, was laughable (Alc. I 123d–4a). Those things are of no concern to anybody, ‘nobody, that is, except perhaps some man who may happen to be in love with you’ (Alc. I 122b). Alcibiades is poor and simple compared to the magnificent Persians, and he is a ‘mere child’ with respect to virtue compared to the hardy, disciplined Spartans (Alc. I 122c–d). Socrates uses a thought experiment – hypothetical conversations in which Spartan and Persian queens laugh at the idea of the young Alcibiades fighting their sons or husbands (Alc. I 124a) – to trigger and manipulate Alcibiades’ competitiveness, to ‘reflect and bait [his] desires, and then to redirect them to more worthy objects’ (Gordon 2012: 154; cf. Denyer 2001: 7).18 Don’t you think it’s disgraceful that even our enemies’ wives have a better appreciation than we do of what it would take to challenge them? No, my excellent friend, trust in me and in the Delphic inscription and ‘know thyself ’. These are the people we must defeat, not the ones you think, and we have no hope of defeating them unless we act with both diligence and skill. If you fall short in these, then you will fall short of achieving fame in Greece as well as abroad; and that is what I think you’re longing for more than anyone else ever longed for anything. (Alc. I 124a–b)

In these passages, Socrates doesn’t just expose Alcibiades’ ignorance; that wouldn’t persuade someone as ‘aristocratically self-confident’ as he is (Denyer 2001: 7). Instead, he pretends to praise the Spartans and the Persians because he wants Alcibiades to recognize the gap between himself and them, to understand his limitations (to ‘know himself ’), and to see the practical value in self-care. It’s a tactic based on Socrates’ knowledge of what Alcibiades wants and fears most, and so it may be an example of the ideal rhetoric that Socrates describes in the

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Phaedrus (271a–e).19 Either way, it works: Alcibiades immediately takes the bait and asks for help. He didn’t like the idea of being laughed at by his rivals: ‘Well, Socrates’, he says, ‘what kind of self-cultivation do I need to practice? Can you show me the way? What you said really sounded true’ (Alc. I 124b). Socrates does lead the way, and by the end of the dialogue Alcibiades has had his world turned upside down: he learns that he must contemplate his reflection in a divine mirror (Alc. I 129a–33c); he considers himself slavish and unready for a political career, and he ends up expressing a desire for justice and mentorship from Socrates (Alc. I 135b–e). Alcibiades has been humbled, and he appears to be fundamentally changed. However, as we know from the Symposium, he does nothing about his ignorance and self-neglect. Which means he fails twice: first, in his argument with Socrates, which exposed his limitations (Alc. I 132b); second, in not changing his life and caring for his soul (Symp. 216a–c), which exposed his weakness of will. These failures underscore the two most important political messages of the dialogue. One is exculpating and points to Socrates’ noble aims to educate Alcibiades and save him from corruption. The other is a pessimistic reflection on the inability of Socratic philosophy truly to change others and make the city better: Socrates defeats Alcibiades in argument and seduces him into philosophy, but it doesn’t make any difference in his life. The first of these messages is a direct response to the corruption charges levelled against Socrates during and after his trial (Gribble 1999: 240–5). The second is the cornerstone of Plato’s counter-indictment of Athens. In his commentary on Alcibiades I, Proclus suggests that ‘every human being is more or less clearly subject to the very same misfortunes as the son of Kleinias’ (1965:  7).20 Socrates failed to improve the youth because he couldn’t quite win their hearts back from the democracy and overcome these universal experiences. Human nature proved incorrigible in the city as it was – only radical reform or divine intervention could save them (R. 492e).21

2. The philosopher and the city Alcibiades I concludes by alluding to a competition between Socrates and the city: ‘I shall never forsake you now, never’, Socrates promises, ‘unless the Athenian people make you corrupt and ugly. And that is my greatest fear, that a love of the common people might corrupt you’ (Alc. I 132a). This is the ‘war and battle’ that the Gorgias refers to in its opening lines:  ‘Who will



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form the future leaders of the polity’, the dialogue asks, ‘the rhetor who teaches the tricks of political success, or the philosopher who creates the substance in soul and society?’ (Voegelin 2000: 24). Socrates must act as saviour before the city acts as corruptor; he must cultivate the potential in Alcibiades’ soul before the city destroys it.22 Alcibiades I 132a clearly refers to Socrates’ trial, and directly challenges its verdict: the city is the true corruptor of the youth because it engenders a misguided eros for the demos in its young men. Alcibiades’ complacent, overconfident ignorance proves it. His love of the common people has already begun to take a toll on him. Good God, Alcibiades, what a sorry state you’re in! I  hesitate to call it by its name, but still, since we’re alone, it must be said. You are wedded to stupidity, my good fellow, stupidity in the highest degree. (Alc. I 118b)

On the one hand, Alcibiades is like Euthyphro: he is ready to act – he is ready to address the Athenian Assembly at once – despite having absolutely no idea what he is doing. And on the other hand, he is like the Atlanteans in Plato’s myth of Atlantis: he appears to have everything, and is admired by most for that reason (Alc. I 104a–c). But ‘for anyone with eyes to see’ (Criti. 121b), he was pitiable, ‘wedded to stupidity’. Alcibiades thinks he knows what he does not know, which makes him foolish (Alc. I 116e–18b), and he has every external advantage, but he wants more. This is what one should expect from the imperialist Athenian democratic system (Gordon 2012:  158):  misplaced confidence, immoderate desires, and dangerous ignorance. Remarkably – thanks to something noble in Alcibiades’ soul  – Socrates breaks through these attitudes of self-satisfaction and overconfidence. Alcibiades is humbled: ‘Well, Socrates, I swear by the gods that I don’t even know what I mean. I think I must have been in an appalling state for a long time, without being aware of it’ (Alc. I 127d6–8).23 In Aeschines, this humbling moment of self-recognition and submission is even more dramatic: Alcibiades puts his head on Socrates’ lap and weeps in despair as he recognizes that he is nowhere close to Themistocles in his preparation for a career in politics (Aesch. Alc. Frag. 9). This dramatic taming of the young lion Alcibiades is a kind of Socratic literary revenge against the culture and people who killed Socrates and continued to belittle his way of life after his death. As Nietzsche might say, Plato and the Socratics couldn’t fight back physically  – they couldn’t undo what had been done – so they fought back spiritually24: Socrates is the victor in these dialogues, and he defeats the most powerful man in the city, who promises to attend

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on Socrates ‘from this day forward’ (Alc. I 135d), suggesting that philosophy is superior to politics, despite appearances and opinions to the contrary. The related message here, as I have noted, is Socrates’ innocence, and the city’s guilt, in the corruption of the youth: I should like to believe that you will persevere but I’m afraid  – not because I distrust your nature, but because I know how powerful the city is – I’m afraid it might get the better of both me and you. (Alc. I 135e)

The young Alcibiades listened to reason, confronted his ignorance, expressed genuine humility, and asked Socrates for guidance. But by the time we see Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium, almost everything has changed. He is no longer teachable, no longer open to Socrates, and no longer willing to consider a life of self-examination, despite remaining persuaded that he should drop everything and change his life (Symp. 216a–c). Instead of becoming Socrates’ life-long attendant (Alc. I 135d; cf. 131d), he fled from him (Symp. 216b). What happened during these intervening fifteen years? What did the city do to ‘get the better’ of Alcibiades? Plato’s answers to these questions in the Gorgias and the Republic fill in the details of his counter-indictment of Athens. They explain how the city corrupted the youth of Athens, rather than simply outlining the problem, as the Symposium and Alcibiades I do. In the Gorgias and the Republic, Plato criticizes the aimless political order of the city, and the ‘ideological hegemony’ of Athenian polis culture, because both corrupted Athenian desire and marginalized philosophy.25 Plato’s arguments in these dialogues are well known and widely discussed by others; what is less well established is how they are relevant to Plato’s views about the trial of Socrates: its political motivations, its hypocrisy, its failure to identify the true causes of corruption in Athens, and what it showed about the relationship between the philosopher and the city. If Nietzsche is right that Plato’s Socrates was meant to be seen as a physician for culture, Alcibiades should be understood as a symptom of the social and political affliction that he tried and failed to heal.26 The Gorgias and Republic are the dialogues where Plato provides his diagnosis of the social and political affliction in democratic Athens, and it is this diagnosis that we must now connect to the fourth-century debates about Socrates and the fall of the Athenian empire. Because the political theory and moral psychology in these dialogues were designed in part to solve what Ober (1998: 165) calls the ‘Socrates and Athens problem’, I will argue that they are as relevant as any other ancient evidence in our assessment of why Socrates was on trial.



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II.  Gorgias: Athens on trial Plato and the Socratics appear to have used the depiction of Alcibiades to respond to the trial of Socrates.27 The Symposium on its own tells a story of failed persuasion:  Socrates made the young Alcibiades feel shame, and even convinced him that he should change his life. But the appeal of the honour that comes from the many was overwhelming, and so he could not help but cave in to his desire to please the crowd (Symp. 216b–c), just as Socrates feared in Alcibiades I (135e). The portraits of the young Alcibiades in Alcibiades I and in Aeschines add to the gravity of this failed persuasion, because they suggest that there really was an opportunity for Socrates to have an impact, and for Alcibiades to live a different kind of life. For Plato, the point of dramatizing this failure to persuade was threefold: first, he wanted to respond directly to the verdict of the trial by suggesting that Socrates was innocent of the corruption charges, and that he deserved credit for trying to improve Alcibiades’ character; second, he wanted to transfer the blame for corrupting the youth, and for undermining the city during and after the war, from Socrates and the sophists to the Athenians themselves; third, he used the case of Alcibiades to reflect on the relationship between philosophy and the city, and he suggested that philosophy could not improve the city because its social and political order was too powerful to overcome. The Gorgias takes up this same set of problems, but in general terms. Alcibiades was clearly an important case, for Plato and for the Socratics; he was a symptom of a profound social and political dysfunction that afflicted his entire generation and, in the fourth century, continued to shape Athenian culture. His traits were the city’s traits; more than anyone else, he embodied the city’s best and worst characteristics.28 He is mentioned twice in the Gorgias (481c–2d, 519a–b), which links the dialogue with the trial of Socrates and the ‘Alcibiades literature’. However, the problem that Plato addresses in the Gorgias is much larger than any individual or event, which may explain why he avoids giving the Gorgias a specific dramatic date. The place is stated clearly. They are in democratic Athens, ‘where there is more free speech than anywhere else in Greece’ (Grg. 461e).29 But the dramatic date is ambiguous: on the one hand, Callicles says Pericles ‘died just recently’ (Grg. 503c); and on the other hand, Socrates says he served as bouleutes ‘last year’ (Grg. 473e). These references point toward different dates:  Pericles died in 429 BCE, and the Apology tells us that Socrates served as bouleutes during the trial of the Arginousae generals in 406 BCE – which means the dialogue is set in the 420s and also in the year 405 BCE – among other dates.30

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It’s possible that Plato didn’t care about the dramatic date of the Gorgias. But it’s also possible that his goal was to lift the dialogue out of the actual circumstances, and party politics, of democratic Athens (Dodds 1959: 17–18; cf. Ober 1998:  191–2 and Saxonhouse 1983:  140–1).31 The same might be said for his choice of Callicles as Socrates’ most important interlocutor. He could have used Alcibiades or Critias in this role, but instead he chose an unknown figure who may or may not be a real person (Dodds 1959: 12–13; cf. Ostwald 1986: 245–7).32 The advantage of an anonymous interlocutor and an indeterminate dramatic date is that they allow Plato to talk in general about a time period as a whole  – the duration of the Peloponnesian War  – and an entire generation of wealthy young Athenian gentlemen. Plato may have felt that Callicles would be a more philosophically significant character if he represented these men as a group, and so called into question their shared philosophy of life, than he would have been if he were a particular individual with a highly unusual life story, like Alcibiades’ or Critias’.33 If Callicles is a type of person, or a sort of cross-section of elite Athenian society, Plato can use him – and especially the flaws in his arguments and attitudes – to critique his city more generally.34 The point of this section is to explore how Plato uses the representativeness of Callicles to develop Socrates’ failure to persuade him into a wholesale critique of the Athenian democracy and its rhetorical culture. This critique links the Gorgias with Alcibiades I and the Symposium, since Alcibiades is drawn away from Socratic philosophy by the same eros for the demos (Symp. 216b–c) that prevents Callicles from accepting the conclusions of Socrates’ arguments (Grg. 513c). But it also links the Gorgias with Plato’s ‘Socratic’ dialogues, since so many of them end in aporia and highlight Socrates’ failure to persuade and improve his interlocutors. These dialogues show that, for Plato, philosophy and the city are incompatible with each other, not just that philosophers and nonphilosophers are committed to different principles.35 One of the main points of the Gorgias is that the philosopher cannot persuade non-philosophers, and so cannot change the city, because the democracy has fostered an eros for the demos that eclipses everything else. This is the decisive move in Plato’s trial of Athens, because it is the basis for his argument that the real corruption in the city was caused by the city itself, not by Socrates or the sophists. Plato portrays this conflict in the Socratic dialogues, explains it in the Gorgias, and reaches a pessimistic conclusion about it in the Republic, where he expands the argument of the Gorgias into what Ober calls an ‘epic rejection of Athenian political culture’ (1998: 213).36



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1.  War, battle, and pastry cooking As the Gorgias begins, Socrates is arriving from the agora. Callicles tells him that he has just missed Gorgias’ rhetorical performance, and he quips, with smug aristocratic irony, that his late arrival is just what they say you should do to do your part in a war or a battle (Grg. 447a). Socrates says he is late because Chaerephon held them up in the agora, and he asks whether they have missed the ‘feast’, conspicuously rejecting Callicles’ battle metaphor, which Socrates will later use to describe his own philosophical practice,37 and replacing it with a food metaphor that anticipates his later criticism of rhetoric as a kind of ‘pastry’ for the soul (Rutherford 1995: 144). We aren’t told what Socrates and Chaerephon were doing in the agora, but we can guess since this is the Chaerephon whose trip to Delphi set Socrates on his life’s mission to question his fellow Athenians and expose their ignorance (Ober 1998: 192–3). Plato’s early reference to Chaerephon seems designed to link the Gorgias with the Apology, and to introduce Socrates in this dialogue as the critic of culture – the gadfly on the neck of man – who spent his life serving his city by trying to improve the souls of his fellow citizens. While Callicles was ‘inside’, talking in private, Socrates was out in the streets of Athens, maintaining ‘his post’ (Ap. 28c) and truly doing ‘battle’ (Grg. 513d) by living the examined life. In the pages that follow, Plato makes it clear that Socrates has more practical experience of Athenian public life than anyone else present in the dialogue, including Callicles, who later criticizes Socrates for wasting his time with philosophy, which he considers unmanly and useless (Grg. 484c–5e): Socrates is familiar with the language and procedures of the city’s institutions (Grg. 451b–c, 489d, 495d, 500a), and he was there in the Assembly when Pericles ‘advised us on the middle wall’ (Grg. 455d) – he hadn’t merely heard about it, as Gorgias had.38 Plato is very quietly laying out the battle lines of the Gorgias, and he is already responding to Callicles’ arguments about the value of philosophy.39 Socrates doesn’t just defeat Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles in the arguments of the dialogue; Plato wants us to see that, out of all these men, Socrates stands out as the most active and engaged in public life, despite his unwillingness to address the Assembly and take part in the city’s rhetorical culture (Grg. 474a), and despite fumbling his responsibilities as prutanis during the trial of the Arginousae generals in 406 BCE, which is referenced later.40 Plato is beginning to show that there is no role for Socrates’ therapeutic philosophy in the democratic city because there is no hope for a philosopher to persuade his fellow citizens – not in Athens, and not in any other democratic

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polis. Socratic philosophy and Athenian democracy are incompatible because they are founded on incommensurable principles: philosophy seeks the true and the good; rhetoric aims at power and persuasion, ‘the thing that is in actual fact the greatest good’ (Grg. 452d). Gorgias helps make these points by arguing that the proper context for rhetoric is any large gathering of people that might take place, and its goal is the persuasion of mass audiences with public speeches (Grg. 452e). For Socrates, this just means that rhetoric is most useful among the ignorant (Grg. 459a), since people with knowledge are most persuaded by experts, not by orators. Gorgias sheepishly agrees, and while he also concedes that rhetoric is a ‘competitive skill’, like boxing and wrestling, that should not be used against one’s friends or family who have not been similarly trained (Grg. 456d–e); and while he believes that rhetoric is concerned with the public good, ‘the just and the unjust’ (Grg. 454b), he nevertheless accounts for its value in terms of the power it gives to those who master it (Grg. 452d). Rhetoric is about persuasion, and persuasion makes you powerful because it enables you to enslave the city’s experts – the doctor, the physical trainer, the financial expert – and make them work for you, to your own advantage (Grg. 452e). Rhetoric, Gorgias says, ‘is the source of freedom for mankind itself and at the same time it is for each person the source of rule over others in one’s own city’ (Grg. 452d; cf. Philb. 58b). By the end of this exchange, Gorgias has contradicted himself and admitted that rhetoric is the persuasion of ignorant people by other ignorant people who merely seem to have knowledge. Socrates refutes Gorgias by exposing the contradiction in his view – he said that a student of rhetoric both can and cannot use it unjustly (Grg. 460d–e; cf. 457e)  – but Plato has already hinted at the biggest problem with Gorgias’ optimistic account of rhetoric’s value: power is a means, not an end, and rhetores don’t know the telos in politics (Grg. 459d).41 Themistocles, Pericles, and their Long Walls are Plato’s illustrations of this. Gorgias cited them as evidence of the good that rhetoric can accomplish (Grg. 455d–e). But what he didn’t mention, and what is alluded to later in the dialogue (Grg. 517c–19a), is their foundational role in the ‘incredible expansion of Athenian hegemony, of the freedom Athenians exercised after the Persian Wars to enslave the islands of the Aegean, to take their resources in order to build up the free Athens, the . . . tyrannos of the Aegean’ (Saxonhouse 1983: 147; cf. Yunis 1996: 142), which created enemies abroad and instability at home.42 As far as Socrates is concerned, rhetoric can only be ‘an image of a part of politics’ (Grg. 463d), because it is based on belief (pistis), not knowledge



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(epistēmē), and it aims at gratifying, rather than improving, the demos (Grg. 459c–5a). Rhetoric is not a techne, like medicine, which produces a genuine good and is based on a rational account of its own procedures (Grg. 465a). It is a subset of flattery, like pastry baking, a mere ‘knack . . . for producing a certain gratification and pleasure’ (Grg. 462c).43 We learn it from experience rather than training; it is concerned with seeming rather than being (Grg. 464a), and it ‘guesses at what is pleasant with no consideration of what is best’ (Grg. 465a).44 The danger is that flattery-based rhetorical practices produce the illusion of ‘fitness’, for individuals and for cities, which is the source of social and political disorder. The city appeared to be flourishing under Pericles in the fifth century, and it certainly held the tyrannical power that Gorgias celebrates as one of the benefits of rhetoric. But in reality, Plato suggests, the harbours, Long Walls, and wealth were illusions of fitness that concealed an underlying dysfunction.45 Without an account of the end of politics, rhetoric is blind and dangerous.46 As Socrates says, ‘I don’t suppose that any evil for a man is as great as false belief about the things we’re discussing right now’ (Grg. 458a). Socrates thinks the status of rhetoric as a mere knack means that its practitioners cannot in fact be the most powerful people in their cities. Thanks to their reliance on flattery, which is bad for their audiences and bad for themselves, rhetores are unable to do what is best for anyone. ‘If by “having power” you mean something that’s good for the one who has power’, Socrates argues, ‘I think that rhetores have the least power of any in the city’ (Grg. 466b–c). Polus strongly disagrees. Like Gorgias, he thinks the best measure of the rhetores’ power is their ‘freedom’ to do whatever they want: ‘don’t they, like tyrants, put to death anyone they want, and confiscate property and banish from their cities anyone they see fit?’ (Grg. 466b–c). They can do those things and many others, Socrates admits, but he thinks real power is measured by one’s ability to promote the good for those affected by its use. Rhetores don’t have any power because they don’t know the difference between seeming and being, and so they don’t know what is best; they only know what seems good (Grg. 466d–7a). At most, they produce the illusion of flourishing while actually creating conditions of disorder. Their power is harmful rather than beneficial; they ‘disable’ virtue instead of promoting it (Yunis 1996: 121).47 Plato is beginning to drive a wedge between two rivalling conceptions of the good life:  ‘the heart of the matter is that of recognizing or failing to recognize who is happy and who is not’ (Grg. 473c; cf. 500c).48 Socrates thinks the highest goods are sophrosune and dikaiosune; Polus thinks they are power

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and freedom, and he is sure everyone agrees, regardless of what they might say publicly. He can’t even imagine that Socrates wouldn’t want to be a tyrant: ‘As if you wouldn’t welcome being in a position to do what you see fit in the city, rather than not! As if you wouldn’t be envious whenever you’d see anyone putting to death some person he saw fit, or confiscating his property or tying him up!’ (Grg. 468e).49 This same ideological conflict about the good life comes up later when Socrates and Callicles discuss the value of pleasure. In that case as well, Plato is laying the foundations for his broader critique of Athens, the central point of which is that the city’s political order and polis culture were the true corruptors of the youth because they encouraged catering to the epithumiai of the demos. If the Athenians truly wanted to understand what happened to them during the War, they needed to look closely at their own values, which were bad for the city and bad for individuals. This point will be clearest in Chapter 4, where I trace Plato’s early critique of Athens in the Gorgias and Republic into his later critique of the navy and the imperialism it encouraged.50 These introductory discussions with Gorgias and Polus set up Plato’s argument for the rest of the dialogue by establishing a few essential premises about the nature of rhetoric itself: it is based on experience (empeiria) and belief (pistis) instead of knowledge (epistēmē) and a rational account of its own procedures; it aims at persuasion and power, not the good; and it is indifferent toward the true aim in politics, which is the improvement of souls (Grg. 464b). On the one hand, these are general philosophical points that are meant to apply to every instance of rhetoric in a democratic polis, and it is to Plato’s credit that most of these points are still important for thinking about the rhetoric of our own time  – he saw into the heart of political communications in societies that reward professional speakers for seeming to know, and not so much for truly knowing, for seeming to care about the common good, and not so much for actually contributing to it. But on the other hand, these are also premises in his trial of Athens and counterindictment of the Athenians who executed Socrates. It is not just a coincidence that Gorgias mentions the Long Walls and the harbours as evidence of rhetoric’s powers. As I discuss below and in the next chapter, for Plato, these fortifications of the city were symbols of Athenian imperialism and political dysfunction.51 They reflected a city with a fevered soul in need of therapeutic persuasion, not the power and freedom that Gorgias and others thought. The discussion with Callicles explores whether therapeia is a genuine possibility in a city like Athens, and it concludes that it may not be, given the ideological hegemony of its rhetorical culture.



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2.  Athenian rhetorical culture Callicles is different from Polus and Gorgias. Of the three, he is the only Athenian, and he is the one who wants to pursue a career in politics (Grg. 484c). He is the clearest about what he gains from mastering the art of rhetoric  – the satisfaction of his political ambitions  – and he appears to be ‘a long way further than Polus down the road of deliberate immorality’ (Rutherford 1995:  142).52 From his perspective, Socrates lives an ‘inverted existence’ (Voegelin 2000: 31): ‘for if you are in earnest, and these things you’re saying are really true, won’t this human life of ours be turned upside down, and won’t everything we do evidently be the opposite of what we should do?’ Callicles and Socrates have profound ideological and temperamental differences. They represent different philosophies of life, different ways of living, and their differences go to ‘the spiritual core of human existence’. For Callicles, ‘existence must not be interpreted in terms of Eros toward the Agathon, but in terms of the stronger and the weaker physis. Nature is the fundamental reality, and the victorious assertion of the physis is the meaning of life’ (Voegelin 2000: 28–32; cf. Saxonhouse 1983: 147–8).53 What’s most surprising about Callicles, though, is that he is also the most like Socrates. This is one of the first things we learn about him. Socrates thinks they have a common pathos, because they both have a double eros:  Socrates loves Alcibiades and philosophy; Callicles loves Demos, the good-looking son of Pyrilampes, and the Athenian demos (Grg. 481c–2d).54 This last point establishes the strongest link between Callicles and Alcibiades, because their shared eros for the demos is what ultimately explains Socrates’ failure to persuade them of philosophy’s merits. The second thing we learn about Callicles follows from the first:  his double eros has left him ‘out of harmony with himself ’ (Grg. 482c), because he cannot contradict his beloveds (Grg. 481d). And this has turned him into a demos-slave who must hide his own convictions: he keeps ‘shifting back and forth’, Socrates tells him, because any time he says something that upsets the demos, he immediately changes his position and tells them what they want to hear. It doesn’t matter how childish the masses are; Callicles can’t contradict them, and so he won’t stop saying childish things until someone stops the demos from saying them (Grg. 481e–2a). Plato returns to this point at the end of the Gorgias:  ‘it’s a shameful thing for us, being in the condition we appear to be in at present  – when we never think the same about the same subjects, the most important ones at that – to sound off as though we’re somebodies’ (Grg. 527d). The state of disharmony with oneself, and the poor deliberation it leads

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to, are among the primary reasons that Socrates rejects Callicles’ political life as ‘worthless’ and encourages its philosophical alternative (Grg. 527e). This is already a bold criticism of Callicles and his profession. He sees himself as one of the elites in Athenian society, one who is powerful in just the senses that Polus described earlier. But from Socrates’ point of view, he is an unknowing mouthpiece of the demos; he is completely under their control because he seeks their approval in everything he says and does. Socrates is in the opposite state because he is a philosopher: his love of wisdom allows him to keep saying the same thing, even when he is at odds with the public (Grg. 482b–c). Which is why Socrates can be trusted to do ‘battle’ with his countrymen, and guide them toward the path of flourishing, while Callicles is just another enabler of all the city’s vices (Grg. 513d). Socrates struggles against the ideological hegemony in Athens; Callicles and the other rhetores reinforce its grip. Callicles isn’t interested in Socrates’ talk about eros and pathos, and so he changes the subject to the relationship between nomos and phusis. He accuses Socrates of behaving like a public orator by equivocating on their meanings, and he argues that it is Socrates who defends the wishes of the demos, because he argues for justice and equality, neither of which is natural, and both of which serve the interests of the many (Grg. 482c). Callicles and his fellow elites are the ones who recognize that nomos tends to distort phusis – what is conventionally good or just is not naturally good or just. In fact, they are usually opposites because nomoi are the by-product of agreements that the weak and numerous many establish to protect themselves and advance their own self-interest. And so, Socrates is foolish to say that it would be better to suffer injustice than it would be to commit it. A ‘real man’ avoids injustice whenever he can; only the naturally slavish allow themselves to suffer, and they are the most shameful people because they cannot defend themselves or their friends when they are threatened (Grg. 482e–3c). These same shameful people invented ‘justice’ when they created the conventions of praise and blame ‘with themselves and their own advantage in mind’. They wanted to protect themselves against the powerful few, ‘who were capable of having a greater share’, and they did so by convincing everyone, contrary to nature, ‘that getting more than one’s share is “shameful” and “unjust” ’ (Grg. 483c). They talk about the benefits of equality, but their real motivation is self-interest: they ‘like getting an equal share, because they are inferior’ and an equal amount is more than they can get for themselves (Grg. 483c–d). All of this violates a law of nature, Callicles says, and he cites the behaviour of animals – and of cities in their relations with one another – as evidence. In both cases, ‘the



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superior rule the inferior and have a greater share’ (Grg. 483d; cf. Thuc. 1.76 and 5.105). Men like the Persian kings Xerxes and Darius act ‘in accordance with the nature of what’s just – yes, by Zeus, in accordance with the law of nature, and presumably not with the one we institute’ (Grg. 483d). The laws and conventions of Athens aren’t natural; they are socially constructed and contingent. The elite individual can see this; he recognizes the social indoctrination for what it is, and he will set himself and others free. We mold the best and the most powerful among us, taking them while they’re still young, like lion cubs, and with charms and incantations we subdue them into slavery, telling them that one is supposed to get no more than his fair share, and that what’s admirable is just. But I believe that if a man whose nature is equal to it were to arise, one who had shaken off, torn apart, and escaped all this, who had trampled underfoot our documents, our tricks and charms, and all our laws that violate nature, he, the slave, would rise up and be revealed as our master, and here the justice of nature would shine forth. (Grg. 483e–4a)

Socrates was wrong about Callicles’ double eros: he doesn’t love the demos; he plans to overthrow their tyrannical rule over ‘the best and most powerful’. They don’t deserve the power they hold, and the city will be better served when the elite take over – that’s when natural justice will shine forth and the ideological fog of the weak will finally lift. Socrates had argued that Callicles was out of harmony with himself, because he could not contradict the demos, regardless of what they said. But Callicles reverses this picture: Socrates is the slave of the many; he defends their self-serving conventions of praise and blame. And he does so ignorantly, because, like most others in the city, he lives under their spell, fully captured by their charms and incantations. Many of these ideas are also implicit in Callicles’ critique of philosophy: when he says it makes a person ‘unmanly’, he means philosophy makes a man dependent on the protections of equality and unable to attain the good for himself.55 The study of philosophy is good for young people, to complete their educations (Grg. 485c), but not for men who want to be well-regarded in the city: ‘when I see an older man still engaging in philosophy and not giving it up, I think such a man needs a flogging’ for wasting his time (Grg. 485d). He will be inexperienced in the laws of cities and the language used in public and private business; he will be unfamiliar with human pleasures and appetites, and inexperienced with human beings in general (Grg. 484d). Philosophers avoid city centres and marketplaces, where ‘real men’ earn their reputations, and instead live their lives ‘in hiding, whispering in a corner with three or four boys’, never doing anything important

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or befitting a free man (Grg. 484d–5d). This is why philosophers are laughing stocks when they get involved in the public affairs of their cities, and why politicians sound like fools when they try to talk to philosophers (Grg. 484c). The problem with philosophy, in other words, is that it cannot help one become the superman Callicles imagines himself to be, which means it cannot help the elite attain power and get more than their share.56 At this point, it is already clear that Plato has been refuting Callicles since the opening lines of the dialogue: while Socrates was in the marketplace, doing philosophy in public, Callicles had been ‘inside’, listening to a private rhetorical performance. Socrates isn’t hiding in a corner, avoiding the city centre and marketplace: he has practical knowledge and experience in the city’s operations; he is familiar with the language of its institutions, and he was there when Pericles gave his advice on the middle wall. Callicles thinks he is a radical thinker who has transcended the city’s culture and slavish values, but his attack on the value of philosophy shows that he is, by most measures, an ordinary Athenian:  he cares about his reputation; he wants power, and he identifies the good life with pleasure and the satisfaction of desire.57 As for the quality and content of his thinking, his ideas about history are confused: Xerxes and Darius both failed in their attempts to ‘dominate the weak’, and his use of literature is self-undermining: his smug references to Euripides’ Antiope (Grg. 484e, 485e), which were meant to give cultural authority to his critique of philosophy (Dodds 1959: 275), ignore the fact that the play endorses Amphion, the musician and proponent of the contemplative life, over Zethus, the herdsman and advocate of the life of action, when Hermes predicts that Amphion’s music will build the walls of Thebes (Carter 1986:  163–86; cf. Rutherford 1995: 167 and Nightingale 1992: 122).58 To top it all off, his theory of justice and his ideas about the mass-elite relationship are unoriginal. The Athenians make the same point about the justice of the stronger in Thucydides (Thuc. 1.76, 5.105), and the idea that democracy is based on the demos controlling the elite is part of conventional wisdom in writers like Demosthenes and Ps.Xenophon (Ober 1998: 199). On the whole, Callicles appears to be the kind of person he disparages. He is ‘caught and restrained’ by the conventional wisdom that he claims to see through; and he is so ‘blinded by his socialization’ that he considers himself ‘a master and a predator’ while revealing himself to be ‘a slave and a victim of popular ideology’ and the whimsical demands of the demos, his childish beloved (Ober 1998: 202).59 Plato appears to use Callicles to illustrate just how difficult it is truly to extricate oneself from the customs and values of the Athenian polis



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culture. Callicles has been ‘well-enough educated, as many Athenians would attest’, Socrates says, ironically referencing Callicles’ own account of how the city educates the ‘young lions’ with charms and incantations into a kind of unnatural slavery (Grg. 483e). He is an embodiment of his own worst fears. This is clearest in his confused ideas about power, and in his defence of hedonism. In both cases, Plato shows that Callicles really is a representative of his generation. His views about power lead first to an agreement with the masses about the justice of democratic rule (Grg. 488d–9b), and second to an agreement with Socrates about the virtues of a single wise man holding power over his countless inferiors (Grg. 490a). He refutes himself and then takes up the view of his opponent – it’s a perfect illustration of his intellectual superficiality and tendency to think in the terms of Athenian conventional wisdom and platitudes. Callicles begins by arguing that the better are the stronger and more powerful (Grg. 488c–d). That’s the way the world works, as he has argued: in nature, the best hold power and enjoy a larger share of goods. Socrates easily gets Callicles to abandon this view by making the obvious point that, in a democracy, the countless many are more powerful than any individual, because their laws are binding on everyone. On Callicles’ own reasoning, it follows that these laws are ‘the rules of the superior’, and that they are natural. Equality is therefore just, and it is better to suffer injustice than it is to commit it, since the many believe these things and make them into rules. It also follows that Callicles was wrong to think there is a distinction between nomos and phusis: what is conventionally just and what is just by nature will be the same thing, provided the conventions are established by the many who have a monopoly on power (Grg. 488d–9b). This is so far from Callicles’ views that he erupts and complains that Socrates ‘will not stop talking nonsense . . . Or do you suppose that I’m saying that if a rubbish heap of slaves and motley men, worthless except perhaps in physical strength, gets together and makes any statements, then these are the rules?’ (Grg. 489c). Callicles’ sneering rhetorical question does nothing to address the logic of Socrates’ argument, and it ignores the fact that this was the way the Athenians justified democratic rule: the many held power in the city because, collectively, they were stronger than any individual. Callicles is not just trapped in Socratic wordplay; he is being exposed as holding the same views as everyone else. His thinking is not elite or radical in any way. Plato’s larger point here seems to be that the ideology of the Athenian polis culture is so powerful that it shapes the thinking of every citizen, including the rhetores (Ober 1998). When Callicles tries to save his position by modifying it to identify ‘the better’ with ‘the wiser’, he ends up adopting the view that Socrates has held all along (Friedlander

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1958:  262; Dodds 1959:  291–2; Barker 1951:  138–9), namely, that the wise should rule (Grg. 490a). But this is an abandonment of his earlier identification of power and nature with justice. Callicles’ defence of hedonism doesn’t go much better, and in this case his conventional wisdom is on full display as a primary source of corruption in Athenian polis culture. He argues that the happiest life is characterized by the maximization of pleasure and desire, and he argues against the Platonic virtues of sophrosune and dikaiosune, both of which are slavish and unworthy of ‘a real man’. This discussion begins with Socrates asking questions about Callicles’ claim that the superior individuals, ‘those who are intelligent in the affairs of the city’, should rule their cities and have a greater share of goods than the people they rule (Grg. 491c–d). Callicles thinks the enjoyment of these goods should be unlimited, and so it is best not to be self-controlled and master of oneself (Grg. 491d). For him, one is either a ruler or among the ruled, and since selfmastery involves being ruled, albeit by oneself, it is a form of slavery that the weak promote as part of their resentful, elite-inhibiting propaganda (Grg. 492a– d). The happiest man will ‘allow his own appetites to get as large as possible and not restrain them’, Callicles says. No man who has enjoyed this kind of freedom and power, and enjoyed the pleasures it affords, will put limits on himself simply because the many say that doing so is virtuous: What in truth could be more shameful and worse than self-control and justice for these people who, although they are free to enjoy good things without any interference, should bring as master upon themselves the law of the many, their talk, and their criticism? Or how could they exist without becoming miserable under that ‘admirable’ regime of justice and self-control, allotting no greater share to their friends than to their enemies, and in this way ‘rule’ their cities? Rather, the truth of it, Socrates – the thing you claim to pursue – is like this: wantonness, lack of discipline, and freedom, if available in good supply, are excellence and happiness; as for these other things, these fancy phrases, these contracts of men that go against nature, they’re worthless nonsense! (Grg. 492b)

It is only the weak and cowardly many who say pleonexia is a vice and that selfcontrol and justice are excellences of character, and they do this because they are unable to ‘provide for themselves the fulfilment for their pleasures’ (Grg. 492a). Callicles seemed to adopt Socrates’ view when he identified the wise with the better, but in this passage he returns to his earlier distinctions between ruler and ruled, nature and custom. For him, it is only unnatural ‘worthless nonsense’ that says great men should control themselves, and it is only the unmanly who find



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value in sophrosune and dikaiosune. These ideas are part of the indoctrination that a superman like Callicles will shatter as soon as he has sufficient influence in the city (Grg. 491d–2c).60 Socrates responds to Callicles by suggesting that his absolute devotion to pleasure leads logically to an endorsement of the catamite’s lifestyle (Grg. 494e). Callicles has repeatedly put his views in terms of what is ‘manly’ and ‘unmanly’ (Stauffer 2002:  633), and so Socrates responds in the same terms:  hedonism is compatible with the ‘frightfully shameful and miserable’ (Grg. 494e) life of the kinaidos (a male who enjoys being penetrated sexually by other males), a particular lifestyle that Callicles himself (like most ancient Greeks) rejects as the paradigm of unmanliness (Rutherford 1995:  164). Plato is distinguishing between good and bad pleasures in this passage (Grg. 494e–5a), and his example is carefully chosen to force Callicles’ hand. But he is also making a subtler point against rhetores like Callicles:  they are no different from the kinaidos because they take the passive role in their ‘erotic’ relationships with the demos. Instead of acting as leaders of the people, they give themselves pleasure (from honour and self-promotion) by slavishly serving the demos and catering to their preferences. The image of Callicles, the would-be tyrant-orator, being endlessly penetrated sexually due to his bottomless desire, is not casual. By employing the sexual imagery from Old Comedy, Plato cuts to the heart of Callicles’ ‘manliness’ obsession, and reveals the true nature of his love affair with the demos. (Ober 1998: 205)

Callicles’ eros for the demos explains his inconsistency, and causes him to be the kind of man that he himself finds ‘frightfully shameful and miserable’. Callicles cannot dominate the demos with rhetoric, regardless of his skills, because in the Athenian democracy the audience dominates the speaker. The rhetor is a servant, not a leader, because he is driven by his own self-promotion to pander to the preferences of the demos. This is bad for the speaker because it enslaves him to the masses (first he imitates them, and in time he takes on their character and resembles them); it is bad for the demos because they don’t know what is truly best for them, and it is bad for the city because the wisest and best should be leading the people and truly improving their souls, not flattering them indiscriminately and telling them what they want to hear. These last two issues (Callicles’ confusion about the relationship between power and justice, and his defence of hedonism as the best and most natural way to live) support Plato’s main argument against Callicles, his profession, and his philosophy of life. As we have seen, he portrays the Callicles type as

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defiantly ignorant, about himself and the world. And he depicts his profession as corrupting of both rhetor and audience, leader and led. The people really do rule in Athens, and they shouldn’t, because they are blinded by a polis culture that obscures the difference between what is good and what seems good. The problem with Callicles’ philosophy of life is that it misidentifies the good with pleasure and power. This misguided idea about the highest good is a part of the ‘ideological hegemony’ that bound fifth- and fourth-century Athenians to the Periclean archē, the unnegotiable expansionistic imperial pursuits that corrupted the desires of the polis, undermined the city during the War, and ultimately led to the trial of Socrates. This aspect of Plato’s critique of Athens is captured perfectly in Saxonhouse’s visionary article on the Gorgias. As she suggests, Socrates’ refutation of Callicles in the Gorgias is Plato’s critique of the Athenians in Thucydides; it is his refutation of the Periclean way of life.61 Filling the city is like filling the leaky jar . . . The walls are never enough, nor the harbors, nor the ships, and thus there is the need for external conquests, for domination over others because Athens herself, like the human body, can never be completely satisfied. It is the constant need for more, however, that leads to Athens’ stature, and the ambivalence surrounding her position in Greece at the end of the fifth century, an ambivalence captured brilliantly by Thucydides, especially in the speech of the Corinthians at Sparta. Athens is both enslaver as she acquires more, and model to be envied, hateful and admired, shameful and glorious. All of this is the result of her refusal to be content with little, to deaden her desires. And yet, she loses the war; encouraged by politicians such as Alcibiades to desire too much, she tries to get too much power. The Athenians do not limit or question the nature of their desires for more. They refuse to engage in the questioning Socrates urges upon Callicles during the second half of the Gorgias. (Saxonhouse 1983: 166)

One of the most important aspects of the Gorgias is its constant fluctuation between two levels of analysis, the general and the particular, the philosophical and the historical. The dialogue is set in democratic Athens, during the duration of the Peloponnesian War, not in a particular year or place, and Callicles is a representative of his generation, not any single individual. Saxonhouse (1983) suggests that this was part of Plato’s method as a philosopher. Instead of describing speeches and events objectively, as Thucydides does in his history, Plato ‘offers a fictional dialogue to explain the war – to reveal its premises and underscore its vanity’ (145), and to describe and evaluate ‘the actions and the motivations of . . . the political leaders who turn Athens into an empire and a threat to the freedom of others’ (168–9). Plato wasn’t a historian, but he uses his



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characters to comment on history. Callicles doesn’t talk about particular battles or strategies; he describes the natural drive for power that underpins them. And like the frank Athenians in Thucydides, he is dismissive of talk about justice as ‘fancy phrases’ that weak people use to protect themselves.62 For Callicles and for Thucydides’ Athenians, it is natural for the ‘weaker to be held down by the stronger’ (Thuc. 1.76, 5.105), and it is best (and even approved of by the gods) that the stronger rule. Plato’s fluctuation between the universal and the particular, the philosophical and the historical, allows him to be critical of individuals and their principles, events and their causes. He wants philosophically to refute the Calliclean portrait of the good life, its assumptions about desire and pleasure, and its attitudes toward the philosophical alternative. But he also wants to connect the dots between those values and ideas  – the Athenian ideological hegemony  – and the actions and politics of the Athenians in the fifth century. In critiquing the empire, he also took aim at those who defended the ‘Hobbesian’ view that there is no highest good beyond pleasure, that life is at its peak when we can maximize our desires and their satisfaction, and that there is no ultimate state for us to achieve, since there will always be more to do, more to acquire, and more pleasure to enjoy. When Plato criticized this philosophy directly, he also took aim at the Athenian empire, since these ideas produced the empire, and the empire led to social and political disorder, making it all but impossible for Socrates to practice his true political techne.63 In setting up the Gorgias, Plato is careful to make the place of the dialogue indefinite; they are in democratic Athens, and they are ‘inside’ a building that is not in the agora. But we don’t know where exactly – what’s important is that they are inside, because it helps us see an essential difference between conventional and Socratic politics. This is not a conversation that the rhetores would have in public, because it would be offensive to the demos, and so there is something anti-democratic and duplicitous about it, on their part, from the very outset. One can’t say the same thing about Socrates, because his politics destroy the traditional distinction between private and public; he says and does the same thing wherever he is, no matter who he is with; he is the same ‘inside’ as he is in the agora; he is in harmony with himself and always working on improving his fellow citizens, even as the city is fighting for its life and making life and death decisions. Plato refers to things like the trial of the Arginousae generals and the death of Pericles, but he is also careful not to restrict the dialogue to one particular year or cultural backdrop; these characters travel through time as their single conversation takes place over the course of twenty years or more. It’s

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as if the Gorgias represents all of the conversations that Socrates had in Athens during the war, in the agora and in people’s homes, with his fellow Athenians and with visitors from cities like Syracuse. The pleonexia that Callicles celebrates as the centrepiece of a life well lived will lead the Athenians under Pericles to cause the war by threatening Sparta with their power, and it will lead the Athenians under Alcibiades, who promised them ‘everlasting pay’ in Sicily (Thuc. 6.24), to overreach and lose everything. And so, Callicles’ theory of justice and the good life is refuted in theory and in practice; Socrates defeats him in argument and points to the real-life consequences of taking his views seriously. In the end, however, the corrupted eros in Callicles resists Socrates’ efforts to cure him of his affliction, his eros for the demos, just as Athens will resist his efforts to provide the city with a therapeia, to persuade them to give up their traditional values and engage in the struggle against doxa that constitutes the examined life.

3. The corruption of desire In the last third of the Gorgias, Plato’s critique of Athens becomes pointed, ominous, and bitter. Socrates first distinguishes between two lives, the political life, which Callicles represents, and the Socratic philosophical life, which is also presented as the true form of politics (Grg. 521d): ‘one of them [the political life] deals with pleasure and the other [the philosophical life] with what’s best and doesn’t gratify it but struggles against it’ (Grg. 513d, emphasis added). Plato then uses this distinction to criticize the Athenian democracy and its most respected former leaders (‘the Four’). Judged according to results (Grg. 515e–17c, 519b), they were bad at politics because they didn’t improve the citizens or the city; they flattered the demos and catered to their appetites. If the Four had practiced the true political techne, which Plato equates with battling (Grg. 513d) and curing (Grg. 513e) one’s fellow citizens, they would have cultivated dikaiosune and sophrosune in the souls of their citizens, and they would have studiously avoided the pleonexia of the fifth century, realizing that ‘flattery is to the citizens like alcohol to the alcoholic’ (Yunis 1996: 130). They would have recognized the political significance of proportionate equality (Grg. 507d–8b), which can act as a therapeia for those who are out of sync with the natural order of the universe (Dodds 1959: 338). Our discussion is . . . about the way we’re supposed to live. Is it the way you urge me toward, to engage in these manly activities, to make speeches among the people, to practice oratory, and to be active in the sort of politics you people engage in these days? Or is it the life spent in philosophy? Perhaps it’s best to



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distinguish them, as I just tried to do; having done that and having agreed that these are two distinct lives, it’s best to examine how they differ from each other, and which of them is the one we should live. (Grg. 500c–d)

This is the agon between two lives that the Gorgias is famous for. Socrates begins by criticizing the rhetoric addressed to the Athenian people. Instead of aiming at ‘what’s best’ and ‘setting their sights on making the citizens as good as possible’, Athenian rhetores focus on gratifying their audiences and pursuing their own private advantage at a direct cost to the common good (Grg. 502d–3a). The true rhetor aims at ‘getting the souls of the citizens to be as good as possible and . . . striving valiantly to say what is best’, regardless of whether the audience finds it pleasant or unpleasant. But Athenians have never seen this type of rhetoric. No Athenian politician has aspired to make the Athenians better by improving their souls (Grg. 503a–d). They have only contributed to the corruption of the polis. When Callicles asks Socrates what he means by this, given how highly esteemed the Four still were in the city, Socrates says that, by his standard of true politics, they were bad for the city, because they did not battle with but merely gratified the Athenians and disordered their souls. If true virtue is what you originally said it was, the filling up of appetites, both one’s own and those of others, then yes, the Four were ‘good men’. But if it is what we later agreed it was – that a man should satisfy those of his appetites that, when they are filled up, make him better, and not those that make him worse, and that this is a matter of craft – then I don’t see how I can say that any of these men has proved to be such a man. (Grg. 503c–d)

Excellence in the city depends on systematic discipline, like medical treatment or the education of children, that is painful because it suppresses and redirects natural desires rather than giving them free rein (Grg. 517b),64 and that requires leaders who will ‘go to battle’ with their subjects and resist their appetitive demands. The politics of flattery and gratification are just the opposite of this. Instead of moderating destructive impulses, it feeds them and makes them worse. When Plato returns to his evaluation of the Four later in the dialogue, he develops this criticism by connecting the corruption of epithumia to the most famous and controversial symbols of the Athenian empire:  the city’s harbors, dockyards, Long Walls, and treasury (Grg 518e–19a).65 The Four didn’t aim to make ‘the citizens as good as possible’; they built an empire that aimed to satisfy every Athenian desire, which sowed the seeds of social and political disorder (Grg. 516c). An agathos rhetor addresses all of his speeches and actions to nurturing dikaiosune and sophrosune ‘in the souls of his fellow citizens’ (Grg.

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504d–e). Since none of the Four did this, and in fact did the opposite, each of them must be judged a failed politikos. Before turning to these issues in more depth, Socrates circles back to Callicles’ claim that Socrates lives a shameful life because he is defenceless against every kind of abuse: theft, exile, unjust prosecution, and death – he is always vulnerable to being ‘knocked on the jaw unjustly’ (Grg. 508c–d). Socrates responds with two points, the second of which is a trap that he sets for Callicles. First, he denies that being the victim of injustice is the most shameful thing, since it is worse ‘for the one who does these unjust acts than it is for me, the one who suffers them’ (Grg. 508e). Second, he acknowledges ironically that you have to be powerful, or have access to power, to protect yourself from harm – you have to be either a tyrant or a ‘partisan (hetairos) of the regime in power’ (Grg. 510a). Callicles excitedly agrees with this idea (‘I think this statement of yours is right on the mark’), not recognizing that Socrates is setting him up for his strongest criticism. What does it take to be friends with a tyrant? What kind of person do you have to be? Socrates notes that tyrants aren’t friends with their superiors, because they are afraid of them; and they also aren’t friends with their inferiors, because they find them useless. And so, only a man ‘of like character, one who approves and disapproves of the same thing and who is willing to be ruled by and subject to the ruler’ can befriend a tyrant (Grg. 510b–e). Callicles agrees with these points as well, still not recognizing that he has taken Socrates’ bait. Plato’s knockout punch here is to show Callicles that rhetores make themselves ‘safe’ in Athens by submitting to and becoming like the demos, the city’s unrecognized tyrant. They can save themselves and others from death in the law courts (Grg. 511c–d), and they can stand out in Athenian public life. But Socrates argues that ‘the choice of this kind of civic power will cost us what we hold most dear’ (Grg. 513a), our principles and our character, because it requires giving up one’s own convictions to gratify the demos, the fickle tyrant-beloved that has left Callicles ‘out of harmony’ with himself (R. 482b–d). For Socrates, this is the most shameful way to live, because it prioritizes mere living over living well. For all of Callicles’ talk of being a ‘real man’, there isn’t much to his manhood if he is just a demos-slave. Perhaps one who is truly a man should stop thinking about how long he will live. He should not be attached to life but should commit these concerns to the god and believe the women who say that not one single person can escape fate. He should thereupon give consideration to how he might live the part of his life still before him as well as possible. Should it be by becoming like the regime under



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which he lives? In that case you should now be making yourself as much like the Athenian people as possible if you expect to endear yourself to them and have great power in the city. (Grg. 512e–13a)

Socrates returns to Callicles’ talk of manliness here, and suggests that one’s degree of focus on living well is the true measure of manhood, given the inevitability of death. If Callicles means what he says about the value of security against injustice, and if he agrees that security requires conformity to the regime in power, then Callicles should be trying to be as much like the demos as possible, given his desire for power. This is where Callicles’ own logic leads the discussion:  he should become ‘naturally like’, and not just imitate, hoi polloi. If you think that some person or other will hand you a craft of the sort that will give you great power in the city while you are unlike the regime, whether for better or worse, then in my opinion, Callicles, you’re not well advised. You mustn’t be their imitator but be naturally like them in your own person if you expect to produce any genuine result toward winning the friendship of the Athenian people . . . Whoever then turns you out to be most like these men, he’ll make you a politician in the way you desire to be one, and an orator, too. For each group of people takes delight in speeches that are given in its own character, and resents those given in an alien manner. (Grg. 513a–c)

Callicles is given pause by this argument. He can’t deny the force of Socrates’ reasoning: the best rhetor won’t be an elite at all. He will be one of the many; he will take on the character of his regime to win the friendship of hoi polloi. For Callicles, nothing could be less appealing. He has spent most of the dialogue up until this moment expressing his contempt for the demos, which he compared to a ‘rubbish heap of slaves and motley men’. And so, a part of him feels inclined to agree with Socrates’ conclusion that Athenian rhetorical culture is slavish and shameful, beneath the dignity of a ‘real man’. He is almost persuaded, but not quite. Something in him resists. Callicles: I don’t know how it is that I think you’re right, Socrates, but the thing that happens to most people has happened to me: I’m not really convinced by you. Socrates: It’s your love for the people, Callicles, existing in your soul, that stands out against me. But if we closely examine these same matters often and in a better way, you’ll be convinced. (Grg. 513c–d)

This is the moment in the Gorgias when Callicles most resembles Alcibiades. He recognizes the logic of Socrates’ argument, but he isn’t persuaded;66 Alcibiades

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was even worse off since he was persuaded but unable to act accordingly – he could not help but cave in to his ‘desire to please the crowd’ (Symp. 216b). In both cases, eros for the demos leads to Socrates’ failure to convert his interlocutor to philosophy. Alcibiades is rationally persuaded, but not psychologically, as we saw in the previous chapter. Plato diagnoses Callicles with the same malady, but here in the Gorgias he digs deeper, pointing out the social and political basis for this shared psychological affliction. As Ober (1998: 208 n. 94) says, Callicles ‘has a bad case of the ‘hoi polloi disease’. Like Alcibiades, he was a victim of the toxic public life in fifth-century Athens.67 This is how Plato saw the Athenian democracy: it undermined its most talented young men by enslaving them to the many. The polis culture indoctrinated them with the wrong ideas about justice, power, and the highest good, and it encouraged them to turn toward rhetoric and away from philosophy. Both Alcibiades and Callicles showed promise, despite their failings, and Socrates held out hope that, with more time and consideration, he could persuade Callicles. For a time, he felt the same way about Alcibiades, as we saw above. But this hope is disappointed in both cases; Callicles turns away from Socrates and his alternative politics, just as Alcibiades did. He returns to his obstinate rejection of philosophy, and eventually falls silent, leaving Socrates to talk in a void (Rutherford 1995:  171). As he does so, the dialogue makes additional references to the trial of Socrates (Grg. 521e–2c), suggesting that Socrates’ failure to persuade Callicles is similar to and might even help explain his later failure to persuade his jury in 399 BCE. Before reaching this pessimistic conclusion, the dialogue returns to an assessment of the Four. Socrates isn’t finished with Callicles, and he still has a few things to say about the fifth century. He first notes that Callicles is just beginning his political career, and so he suggests that they discuss his qualifications – his record of actually improving people’s souls (Grg. 515a–b) – and his ideas about how to conduct the city’s business and make the citizens as good as possible (Grg. 515c–d). Callicles doesn’t have any record to talk about, and so the discussion turns toward the Four. Socrates argues that the Four didn’t improve the Athenians, and so they were failures by the standards of Socratic politics, although they were excellent (markedly better than the fourth-century politicians) at giving the Athenians what they wanted. In fact, ‘they proved to be better servants than the men of today, and more capable of satisfying the city’s appetites’. They didn’t ‘battle’ or ‘cure’ the demos with therapeutic persuasion, which is the true ‘task of a good citizen’  – and so ‘they were really not much different from our contemporaries’. Socrates says he agrees with Callicles that



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the Four were cleverer than ‘our present leaders’, and so they were better servants of the demos-tyrant, but only at ‘supplying ships and walls and dockyards’ and all of the other means to Athenian imperialism (Grg. 517b–c). These men are ‘servants’ and ‘satisfiers of appetites’ who don’t understand what is truly ‘admirable and good in such cases’ (Grg. 518c). They are like the pastry chefs and bread makers who receive praise while they ‘fill and fatten people’s bodies’, and then escape blame when the same people get sick from over-indulging themselves. Callicles acts just as foolishly when he praises the Four, because they filled and fattened the city. You sing the praises of those who threw parties for these people, and who feasted them lavishly with what they had an appetite for. And they say that they have made the city great! But that the city is swollen and festering, thanks to those early leaders, that they don’t notice. For they filled the city with harbors and dockyards, walls, and tribute payments and such trash as that, but did so without justice and self-control. So, when that fit of sickness comes on, they’ll blame their advisors of the moment and sing the praises of Themistocles and Cimon and Pericles, the ones who are to blame for their ills. (Grg. 518e–19c)68

Plato is setting many records straight with this powerful indictment of the Four and the demos who celebrated their imperial pursuits. The Athenians lost everything in the fourth century, and when they did they blamed men like Alcibiades instead of looking at the social and political order that produced them. Like Callicles, they didn’t see how they were accessories to all of the fifthcentury ‘ills’ that destroyed Athens’ power. For Plato, this was predictable: when the city suffers in any way, it blames its current advisors and ignores the true causes (aitioi). The Four weren’t capable of being ‘good citizens’ in Socrates’ sense, because they built the foundations of the society that produced selfreinforcing cycles of corruption. Callicles sees this point when he admits that he doesn’t go to battle with the Athenians, or try to make them better, ‘like a doctor’, but aims to serve and gratify them to avoid execution (Grg. 521a–c). Socrates doesn’t flatter his fellow citizens; his philosophical life isn’t aimed at charis. And Callicles warns him ‘many times’ that he is vulnerable to being put to death precisely because he does battle with the Athenians and tries to improve them (Grg. 521b; cf. 486a–b). Socrates is aware of the risks he takes in living as he does, and he isn’t bothered by it. He knows that, in Athens, he is always in danger of being abused by wicked men, and that their false accusations can lead to death. He also knows that his chosen life of taking up ‘the true political craft’ – of struggling against and improving his fellow citizens  – is what makes him

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vulnerable (Grg. 521c–e). Because he doesn’t aim at gratification with prepared speeches, he will be unable to defend himself in court; he will be ‘judged the way a doctor would be judged by a jury of children if a pastry chef were to bring accusations against him’ (Grg. 521e). It won’t help the doctor to argue that his bitter medicine really is good for the jury of children, and so he will have nothing to say in his defence (Grg. 522a). ‘That’s the sort of thing that would happen to me, too, if I came to court’, Socrates says. He won’t be able to ‘point out any pleasures’ that he has provided them, and he won’t be able to explain how or why his political craft, which in some cases involved ‘speaking bitter words against them in public or private’, was always done in the interest of the demos and the improvement of souls (Grg. 522b–c). And so, he must resign himself, as he says ominously, to ‘whatever comes my way’ (Grg. 522c). A man like Callicles cannot understand the excellence in Socrates’ self-inflicted vulnerability (Socrates could defend himself if he used the rhetorical art of flattery), but Socrates’ only worry is that he lives as well as he can and avoids saying or doing ‘anything unjust to either men or gods’. As long as he has cared for his own soul, he can bear an unjust death ‘with ease’ (Grg. 522c–e; cf. 527c–e; Ap. 38d–e). The pessimistic conclusion of the Gorgias is not just that there aren’t any true politicians in Athens; it’s that there cannot be any.69 Therapeutic persuasion is impossible in the city, because the democratic structure of Athenian society enslaves the rhetores to the demos, and the ideological hegemony of the polis culture is too powerful to overcome. Men like Callicles can’t be persuaded because they don’t understand that they are indoctrinated, and they don’t see that their eros for the demos has turned them into menial servants. As Ober (1998: 211) puts this point, ‘Socrates has no real capacity to do good in his polis (he cannot “heal” either the political community as a group or the would-be political leader) by “rhetorical” means’; he cannot improve the city or the souls of the men he talks to. And so, society must be rebuilt from the ground up (as the Republic suggests), or philosophers like Socrates must learn to live in harmony with a culture that is out of harmony with itself, and prepare for anything, including an unjust trial and death. The ethics of ‘battle’ and ‘therapy’ are futile and dangerous, even if they are also admirable.

III.  Republic: Only a god can save us It would be impossible to provide a comprehensive interpretation of the Republic in one book chapter, let  alone a small section of one book chapter.



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The purpose of this section is merely to connect the Gorgias’ critique of Athens with the related arguments in Republic Book VI. A quick look at the relevant passages in the Republic will show that, even as Plato imagined his city with a new constitution, he continued to respond to the trial of Socrates by arguing that therapeutic persuasion was impossible in Athens because of the city’s social and political structures.70 The Republic’s discussion of these issues also helps us connect the Gorgias with the Symposium and Alcibiades I, because it refocuses our attention on Alcibiades as an individual and as a symbol of philosophy’s tragic limitations. If the contrast between Alcibiades I and the Symposium evokes questions about what happened to Alcibiades between his adolescence and his career in politics, the Gorgias and the Republic provide the answer. And as they do so, they overturn the verdict of Socrates’ trial and blame the Athenians for corrupting the youth. The city was its own educator and its own corruptor. If the Athenians really wanted to prevent a repeat of the fifth century’s disasters, they needed to undertake a revaluation of their own values.71 Some have suggested that the Republic’s sophisticated psychology was designed to make sense of individuals like Alcibiades, who was ‘a living refutation of the psychology of the early dialogues’, and that the plans for political reform were intended to solve the problem of failed persuasion that is inevitable in the heavily ideologized polis culture of democratic Athens. On this view, Plato’s decades-long reflections on Alcibiades’ moral weakness led him to conclude that radical change was necessary to ensure that talented men like Alcibiades ‘made proper use of their philosophical gifts’ (Prior 1997: 119). If Socrates cannot heal the political community, or its leading individuals, because of the democratic state, ‘Plato can only square the circle by moving Socrates’ critical enterprise out of the democratic polis-as-it-is and into the polis-as-it-should-be, that is, the ideal state of the Republic’ (Ober 1998: 212). He must do more than expose the failings of an unjust society. He must give the polis a new foundation.72 The conclusion of the Gorgias points in this direction. Socrates invites Callicles to live according to the principles he has argued for in the dialogue – that doing what is unjust is worse than suffering injustice; that actually being good, and not just seeming good, is the most important thing in life; that the unjust benefit from punishment; that flattery of self or others, of few or many, is to be avoided; and that rhetoric must always be used ‘in support of what is just’ (Grg. 527b–c) – and he suggests that ‘after we’ve practiced [such a life] together, then at last, if we think we should, we’ll turn to politics’. In their current condition, having fallen so far back in education, they aren’t ready for the deliberation demanded by true politics; Callicles has been turned into a political chameleon who never thinks

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or says the same thing (Grg. 527d–e), and he is no different from any of his contemporaries – if anything, he represents them in their greatest potential. And so, true politics is impossible in democratic Athens. If there is any possibility of practicing virtue together, abandoning the corrupt politics of flattery, and becoming capable of therapeutic persuasion, it will be in a different kind of polis, like the Kallipolis. However, if the Gorgias looks ahead toward the Republic as a solution to the problems it identifies, the Republic also looks back toward the Gorgias and retains most of its pessimism. The Republic begins with an exchange between Socrates and Thrasymachus that recalls the Gorgias in both form and content. Like Callicles, Thrasymachus argues for an identification of justice with power, and he is critical of the Socratic alternative as slavish. Socrates refutes him, but Glaucon and Adeimantus are like Callicles in not being persuaded by the logic of Socrates’ argument (R. 357a–b, 368b). Much later in the text (R. 487b–c), the same issue of failed persuasion comes up when Adeimantus explains that most people aren’t convinced by philosophical arguments: they consider them clever but unconvincing; they make people feel outwitted, but not persuaded. As Socrates replies, the full force of the Gorgias’ pessimistic argument resurfaces. He isn’t surprised by his failure to persuade Glaucon and Adeimantus, or anyone else, because society is structured in a way that makes it all but impossible for philosophers to have a voice (R. 487e–9d) – they might even be executed for threatening the city’s values (R. 492d).73 Socrates’ first point repeats the Gorgias’ critique of democracy in the famous image of a true captain who is ignored. He is the most fit to be captain, just as the true politikos is most fit to practice the political techne, but he is dismissed as ‘useless’ while the sailors, who are ignorant about sailing but clever at persuasion – and so force the ship owner to let them be in command of the ship – are called ‘captain’ and ‘navigator’, and given credit for knowing about ships. These sailors don’t know what kind of knowledge (of the stars, seasons, winds, etc.) is required to be a ‘true captain’, and they don’t believe there is a craft that would enable them to sail well. They are like Polus and Gorgias, who are ignorant of the end in politics and can’t even imagine that the political techne focuses on improving souls, and not on self-aggrandizement. Just as Callicles ridicules philosophy for being useless in Athenian public life, the ‘true captain will be called a real stargazer, a babbler, and a good-for-nothing’ (R. 488a–e). This simile is meant to explain why philosophers aren’t honoured, and to compare the city’s leaders to the ignorant, untrained ‘sailors’ (R. 489c).



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Socrates’ next move explains why those who are endowed with the phusis to be philosophers, men like Alcibiades and Callicles, are turned away from philosophy by the education they receive from the polis (R. 489d–95c). Men of this type can go either way: if they receive the right education, they will ‘inevitably grow to possess every virtue’, but if they are raised in the wrong polis culture, they will ‘develop in quite the opposite way, unless some god happens to come to [their] rescue’ (R. 492a). In these passages, Plato returns to the argument of the Gorgias and directly engages the fourth-century debates for and against Socrates: he was innocent, and Athens was to blame. Or do you agree with the general opinion that certain young people are actually corrupted by sophists – that there are certain sophists with significant influence on the young who corrupt them through private teaching? Isn’t it rather the very people who say this who are the greatest sophists of all, since they educate the most completely, turning young and old, men and women, into precisely the kind of people they want them to be? (R. 492a–b)74

This passage provides a straightforward statement of Plato’s counter-indictment of Athens: the true corruptors of the youth are the citizens themselves, because they provide the masses with the most complete education of all, turning every person into the kind of people they want them to be.75 The claims here clearly parallel the Gorgias’ suggestion that the polis culture is the true educator in the city, since it requires every citizen to take on the character of the regime. But the argument here explains what that means: the city’s education includes the inculcation of an ideology about what to say, what to value, how to live, and what kind of person one ought to be. When many of them are sitting together in assemblies, courts, theaters, army camps, or some other public gathering of the crowd, they object very loudly and excessively to some of the things that are said or done and approve others in the same way, shouting and clapping, so that the very rocks and surroundings echo the din of their praise or blame and double it. In circumstances like that, what is the effect, as they say, on a young person’s heart? What private training can hold out and not be swept away by that kind of praise or blame and be carried away by the flood wherever it goes, so that they’ll say the same things are beautiful or ugly as the crowd does, follow the same way of life as they do, and be the same sort of person as they are? (R. 492b–d)

Here again, Plato is overturning the verdict of Socrates’ trial and expanding the argument of the Gorgias: the democratic city is its own educator, and the means it employs is mass gatherings. In a public space like the Assembly or the courts

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or the theatre, the pressures on individuals to take on the beliefs and values of the democratic city, to conform to and develop an eros for the demos, are so strong that a young person cannot retain his own convictions, let alone listen to Socrates’ critique of the city and its way of life. Like Callicles, such a young person will inevitably be out of harmony with himself, constantly changing his position to please the demos and prevent them from punishing him with ‘disenfranchisement, fines, or death’ (R. 492d). As Socrates says to Callicles, the only way truly to keep safe in a democracy is to become friends with the tyrant. No other education (e.g. the Socratic kind) can survive in this environment. No, indeed, it would be very foolish even to try to oppose them, for there isn’t now, hasn’t been in the past, nor ever will be in the future anyone with a character so unusual that he has been educated to virtue in spite of the contrary education he received from the mob – I mean, a human character; the divine, as the saying goes, is an exception to the rule. You should realize that if anyone is saved and becomes what he ought to be under our current constitutions, he has been saved – you might rightly say – by a divine dispensation. (R. 492e–3a)

For Plato, a citizen in the Athenian democracy is ignorant, ignorant of his ignorance, a slave to his appetites and a defender of that slavery, and imprisoned (as if in an underground dwelling!) by an ideological hegemony that eclipses or, if need be, eliminates alternative visions of the good life. The sophists weren’t radicals or revolutionary thinkers. The ‘new learning’ of the fifth century was already a familiar component of Athenian social and intellectual life, and it had been pretty well absorbed into Athenian culture (Waterfield 2009:  37–8). When the sophists worked as ‘paid private teachers’ for the sons of the elite, they weren’t undermining the city at all. They didn’t teach ‘anything other than the convictions (dogmata) that the majority express when they are gathered together’ (R. 493a); they were sycophantic, ingratiating servants of popular opinion, not supermen leading a coup against the Athenian way of life. Their techne was about pretending to be wise and gratifying the masses, not helping them learn new truths. This ability to pretend and flatter is ‘what the sophists call wisdom (sophia)’. It’s as if someone were learning the moods and appetites of a huge, strong beast that he’s rearing – how to approach and handle it, when it is most difficult to deal with or most gentle and what makes it so, what sounds it utters in either condition, and what sounds soothe or anger it. Having learned all this through tending the beast over a period of time, he calls this knack wisdom, gathers his information together as if it were a craft, and starts to teach it. In truth, he



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knows nothing about which of these convictions is fine or shameful, good or bad, just or unjust, but he applies all these names in accordance with how the beast reacts – calling what it enjoys good and what angers it bad. He has no other account to give of these terms. And he calls what he is compelled to do just and fine, for he hasn’t seen and cannot show anyone else how much compulsion and goodness really differ. Don’t you think, by god, that someone like that is a strange educator? (R. 493b–c)76

Gorgias and Polus had celebrated the wondrous freedom and power of Athenian rhetores; Plato is describing them here as radically unfree because of their professional roles in the polis. They are ‘servants to slaves’ (Lampert 2010: 339), and it’s as if they are ‘under Diomedean compulsion’ to do only what ‘[the demos] approve’ (R. 493d). They don’t give any other account of good and bad, just and unjust. It’s all relative to what tames and angers the beast, the demos, who really do rule in Athens, as Socrates argues in the Gorgias. There is wisdom in this city, but it has nothing to do with philosophical ideas about the good life. It is entirely about the feelings of the demos, what soothes and angers them in their mass gatherings. The wise man in the democratic city is just any person who knows how to manipulate other people’s emotions.77 The many don’t want to think about things like ‘the reality of the beautiful itself ’, and so Socrates argues that they are not and ‘cannot be philosophic’ (R. 493e–4a). The sophist is a friend of the city, not an enemy; he really can help young men become successful in the democracy, because he knows how to take on the character of the regime – he is an expert at pretending – and he can teach his knack to others. For Plato, that is the problem with sophistry. It’s just an extension of the beast, the appetites and the passions dominating the intellect on a grand scale. Athenian rhetores are just ‘ideologized pawns’ of the demos, the true ‘great Sophists’ in the city, who corrupt its citizens and institutions, and threaten philosophers (Ober 1998:  237). The majority think they dislike the sophists, but it’s really the philosophers they disapprove of (R. 494a), and the sophists help spread this disapproval. There is no salvation for a man ‘who is by nature a philosopher, to ensure that he’ll practice philosophy correctly to the end’ and remain free from the ‘ideological demotic paideia’ (Ober 1998: 242). His brilliance is too valuable to the polis-as-it-is, the ‘tyrant of the Aegean’; he has too many qualities that can serve the interests of the empire (R. 494b). As a young boy, he will be first at everything he does, and as he gets older, ‘his family and his fellow citizens will want to make use of him in connection with their own affairs’. They will see how his capacities can be assets to them. And so, ‘they’ll pay

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court to him with their requests and honors, trying by their flattery to secure for themselves ahead of time the power that is going to be his’ (R. 494b–c). That is how Plato understood Alcibiades’ life, or it is how he uses the story of his life to develop his critique of democracy in Book VI of the Republic. He was a symbol of the failure to persuade, and of the impossibility of practicing Socratic politics successfully, which requires going to battle with and healing a culture that ‘cannot be philosophic’ (R. 494a), and which rewards impressionable young men with the honour that they want more than anything. Ancient authors agree that Alcibiades was spoiled by his good fortune (his looks, wealth, and status in the city: R. 494c; Xen. Mem. 1.2.24–5; Alc. I 123d–4a) and exploited by men, the demos, who used his powers for their own imperialist aspirations. The Athenian democracy was characterized by the ignorant and self-interested persuading the ignorant and self-interested to turn the city into a ‘leaky jar’. As the city’s power and ambitions grew, Alcibiades – as rhetor – learnt to have ‘impractical expectations and think himself capable of managing the affairs, not only of the Greeks, but of the barbarians as well’ (R. 494c; cf. Thuc. 6.15). His love of the truth, which Socrates nurtured in him when he was a young man, quickly ‘deteriorated into the love of honor’ because of the education he received from his polis culture. And as he lost ‘his love for the whole cosmos’, it resurfaced as ‘love for the whole city’ (Rosen 2005:  237). Socrates got into trouble, according to the Republic, because he tried to redirect men like Alcibiades toward ‘the cosmos’. In the Gorgias, Plato makes the same point. He connects the trial of Socrates with his political techne; the Athenians condemned him to death because they couldn’t tolerate his efforts to benefit and improve them (Grg. 521e). He was like the medical doctor who has to force his treatment on children: they didn’t recognize that the pain of his therapeutic treatment (giving up the unlimited pleasure and absolute freedom that Callicles celebrated) was just a by-product of getting healthy, and so they accused him of threatening to ruin them (Yunis 1996:  132). If they were going to practice virtue in common, as Socrates recommends at the end of the Gorgias, they would have to give up the Athenian way of life. But that wasn’t an option. The polis culture was not up for negotiation, and it would protect itself at any cost. If a young man [with the philosophical phusis] somehow sees the point and is guided and drawn to philosophy because of his noble nature and his kinship with reason, what do you think those people will do, if they believe that they’re losing their use of him and his companionship? Is there anything they won’t do or say to prevent him from being persuaded? Or anything they won’t do or



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say about his persuader – whether plotting against him in private or publicly bringing him into court – to prevent him from such persuasion? (R. 494d–e)

There is no chance that the many will be philosophic – they cannot be – and there is no chance that such a person will practice philosophy (R. 495e), because his natural brilliance will cause him to fall ‘away from the philosophic way of life’ (R. 495a). In the democratic city, the best men will be ‘destroyed and corrupted’ in ‘many ways’ and so they ‘cannot follow the best way of life’ (R. 495a–b), unless they are beneficiaries of rare circumstances, such as exile or illness or a lack of possibilities in the city or divine intervention (R. 496a–c). But these men won’t be anything like the Gorgias’ true politician, and so they won’t engage in any efforts to heal their fellow citizens or go to battle with their cities’ ideological hegemony. They will choose the pleasures of philosophy over dealing with ‘the madness of the majority’, realizing the impossibility of reform. Like Plato himself, they will choose a life of study over the mob on the Pnyx. Thus, like someone who takes refuge under a little wall from a storm of dust or hail driven by the wind, the philosopher – seeing others filled with lawlessness – is satisfied if he can somehow lead his present life free from injustice and impious acts and depart from it with good hope, blameless and content. (R. 496c–e)

In the best-case scenario, the philosopher would live under ‘a constitution that suits him’ (R. 497a), but if he doesn’t experience that good fortune, he will live a quiet life, withdrawn from the disorder of the democratic city, recognizing that ‘the mob is not educable in the current situation’ (Morgan 2004:  133).78 These passages are even more pessimistic than the ones in Gorgias about the possibility of solving the political problem. There is no way to escape the polis education that Plato describes in the Republic (Ober 1998: 236). It affects politicians and sophists, but also ‘young and old, men and women’, because it is a by-product of mass culture. Given the structure and values of existing society, the philosopher-healer cannot be heard, and he may be executed for appearing (correctly) to be a threat to the city’s way of life. The best men who are born with the natural brilliance for philosophy are corrupted by the city and absorbed into the imperialist projects of the empire. And so, only a god can save the city from its own corrupting civic education.79 Until then, until a god intervenes, the city will continue to squander its best citizens, and the ‘ills of man’ will continue to be left unhealed. The Republic makes a significant contribution to Plato’s trial of Athens because it builds on the political pessimism of the Gorgias, suggesting that the corrupting powers of the city are so great that it is truly incorrigible from

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within. The Gorgias explains why the true politikos cannot effect change in the polis: his political techne is unacceptable from the city’s point of view; the city isn’t open to his therapeutic persuasion, because that would mean being open to its dissolution. The Republic makes the same point in Book VI when Socrates describes the corruption of the philosophical phusis and the execution of the would-be educator, but it also goes one step further by adding that only a god can save the city from itself: there is no human solution to the political problem, because the power of demotic ideological hegemony is too strong for a true politikos to counteract. Socratic ethics cannot perform its function of critical resistance in the democratic city, and so a revolution is necessary. But it also isn’t possible without sacrificing its own justification:  ‘a founding act that requires us to kill everyone over the age of ten can hardly be the basis of justice’ (Rosen 2005: 244). In the Republic, Plato follows through with the Gorgias’ conclusion that a ‘complete reorientation of politics’ is needed, and it concludes that only the greatest ‘absurdities follow from such a reorientation’ (Rosen 2005:  236). Plato may have been satirizing philosophy, as Rosen suggests, but he was also continuing to put his city on trial. He absolves the professional sophists, and Socrates, of any blame for corrupting the youth, and he accuses the Athenian citizens themselves of the greatest sophistry of all. The Republic helps us see that Alcibiades and Callicles are symbols of philosophy’s failure to persuade, and of corrupted eros and its political consequences. They also represent society’s intolerance of the philosopher as a physician for culture, and so the futility of his way of living. Socrates’ commitment to the city’s therapeia could not succeed, because the city would resist his ‘treatment’ and punish him for rejecting its values. The demos could not be educated, and yet they were the greatest educators in the city; they could not be persuaded, and yet they demanded that every citizen adopt their way of living. In the Gorgias, this analysis is applied to a generation of elite Athenians in the fifth century. But by the time we get to the Republic, Plato’s account has started to describe a universal and necessary feature of life in any democratic polis. Socrates never had a chance, and neither did the men he tried to educate. Only a god could save the city.

IV.  Conclusion: Plato’s other apologies of Socrates The Apology of Socrates has as its primary purpose an apology, as its title makes clear, but it is also an accusation of the Athenians, seeing that they brought such a



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man to court. And the bitterness of the accusation is concealed by the moderation of the apology; for the things spoken in self-defense are an accusation of the Athenians. These are two strands in the speech. A third is this: the speech is an encomium of Socrates. . .The fourth strand, which was, as Plato saw it, the most important theme, with a deliberative or counseling function and philosophical content, is this: the book is an exhortatory proclamation of what sort of a person the philosopher ought to be.80

If this ancient commentator is correct, Plato’s Apology had several aims, one of which was to put the Athenians themselves on trial. It does this by depicting Socrates as a man who spent his life trying to improve the souls of his fellow citizens, and letting that depiction speak for itself as an ‘accusation’. Why did the Athenians kill a good man for trying to serve his city? What does it say about them that they did? The main point of this chapter has been to argue that several other dialogues  – Symposium, Alcibiades I, Gorgias, and Republic (the ‘apologetic dialogues’) – had these four aims as well: (1) they contributed to Plato’s apologetic response to the trial of Socrates (apology); (2) they helped shift the blame from Socrates to the city of Athens by indicting the Athenians (accusation), and they depicted Socrates as an exemplar (3)  to admire for his refusal to ‘abandon his post’, even when his life was on the line (encomium) and (4) to emulate as a new kind of hero: a seducer, a midwife, an ideological soldier, a healer, and a liberator who is executed for trying to emancipate his countrymen, his fellow cave dwellers (exhortation). On the whole, Plato’s many apologies of Socrates set the record straight by depicting and defending how Socrates lived and what he lived and died for. They diagnose the city with an affliction, and they offer two therapeutic visions, neither of which can succeed, given the intractability of the social and political disorder in democratic Athens. It is possible that Plato wrote all of these apologetic dialogues in response to Polycrates and the debates that his pamphlet initiated. As I  discuss in the first two chapters, we cannot rule out that possibility because we don’t have conclusive evidence either way. However, it is also possible, and I think more plausible, that Plato wrote the apologetic dialogues in response to the trial itself. He had a theory of his own about why Socrates was on trial, and he presented it obliquely in the Gorgias and Book VI of the Republic. On this view, Athens was intolerant of Socrates because he was a threat to the Athenian way of life, though not in the sense that many had thought. Socrates had been grouped with the sophists, and the sophists were blamed for teaching impious, relativistic views about justice, among other things. Socrates was critical of democracy, but he rejected sophistic relativism as much as anyone did; and as we saw in the

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Gorgias and Republic, he argued that the principles underlying the democracy were essentially the same, not in conflict with, sophistic theories about justice and power. His alternative vision of politics was a threat to the Athenian way of life because it rejected pleasure and power as the highest goods, and called for the re-education of desire. In Alcibiades I, Socrates has a breakthrough with Alcibiades. He persuades him and converts him to philosophy. The dialogue ends with Alcibiades expressing a desire for justice and self-control, as well as mentorship from Socrates. But then, as he pursues his career in politics, he contracts what Ober calls the ‘hoi polloi disease’; Alcibiades’ desire for the recognition of the many is overwhelming; it overrides any desire he once had to give up politics and follow Socrates. In the end, Socrates fails to persuade Alcibiades, and the reason for his failure is corrupted eros. We see the same pattern in the Gorgias with Callicles, who also cannot be reasoned with because of his corrupted eros; and again in the Republic, when Socrates faces the same failure to persuade with Glaucon and Adeimantus, who are much more sympathetic to Socrates, but no less able fully to accept his principles. In the Gorgias and Republic, Socrates is equipped with a theory that explains the inevitability of this failed persuasion in a democratic political order: the rhetores are slaves of the beast, not its master, and they enable its addiction to power and pleasure, helping to turn the city into a ‘leaky jar’. The problem of corrupted eros sticks with Plato throughout his life and career. As we will see in the next chapter, it resurfaces in his Atlantis myth, and again in the Laws, as Plato enters his city’s debates about whether to recover the Periclean Archē. Callicles said that he and Socrates were considering an agon between two ways of life. In the Timaeus and Critias, Plato returns to that agon and warns fourth-century Athenians against their ancestors’ greatest stupidity.

Notes 1 It’s as ‘sudden’ (exaiphnēs) and disruptive – albeit in a completely different way – as the revelation of Beauty to an apprentice in Diotima’s Greater Mysteries (Symp. 212c; cf. 210e): ‘like the highest beauty, Alcibiades. . .and the last group of revelers burst onto the scene with the force of a revelation that cannot be compelled or managed’ (Corrigan and Glazov-Corrigan 2004: 164; cf. Rosen (1987: 288–9). 2 Rosen (1987: 279) suggests that Alcibiades’ abrupt entrance in the Symp. is meant to represent ‘the impossibility of remaining in the presence of the divine through the medium of speech’. It is more likely that Alcibiades’ late arrival is



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meant to represent the distractions and temptations of the disordered democratic city – Alcibiades misses the ‘mystical sublimity’ (Corrigan and Glazov-Corrigan 2004: 166) of Socrates’ speech because he was too busy carousing, not because words failed him or Socrates. For discussions of Alcibiades’ ‘Dionysian’ appearance in the Symp., see Bacon (1959: 419), Nussbaum (1986), and Rosen (1987: 287). As Sheffield (2006: 184 n. 5) points out, Plato even emphasizes Alcibiades’ drunkenness ‘in the language of his speech: he is repetitive, garrulous and over-demonstrative’. All of which, he insists, is nothing but the truth: 214e–15a, 216a, 217b, 219c, 220e. In the Prt., Plato associates flute girls with ‘the second-rate drinking parties of the agora crowd’ (347c–8b), and so it appears that Alcibiades is late to Agathon’s symposium because he has been attending a very different kind of party with a very different kind of crowd. Plato’s contemporaries probably also saw exactly the type of man who would castrate the city’s Hermae and profane the Eleusinian mysteries, just as Alcibiades’ political rivals had alleged. See Chapter 2, note 23 for a discussion of this issue. As Rosen (1987: 280) points out, Alcibiades is a perfect illustration of Thucydides’ ‘judgment on the defects of political life, and especially the Athenian democracy’. See Rutherford (1995: 66–8), Hornblower (1987: 55), de Romilly (1995: 246–7), Yunis (1996: 34, 136, 142–5), and Gribble (1999: 236). Yunis is sure that Plato ‘sought’ Pericles – ‘the greatest [rhetor] among the Greeks’ (Menex. 235e) – in Thucydides, since Plato didn’t have any other source for Periclean rhetoric, and he makes an elaborate literary allusion to him in his Menex. Yunis also asks rhetorically whether one can reasonably ‘imagine that the Melian dialogue does not belong to the intellectual background of the Republic’ (1996: 136–7, 137 n. 4). Ober (1998: 210) is not so sure of these points: ‘there is no reason to suppose that Plato knew Thucydides’ history and attempts to prove it are unsuccessful’. See Chapter 2, note 76. In this section, I focus mostly on Alc. I, but I include references to other writers when their portraits of Alcibiades overlap with the one we find in the Platonic dialogue. Alcibiades is ‘not yet twenty’ in Alc. I (123d), and he is about thirty-five in the Symp. because its dramatic date is 416 BCE. See Dodds (1959: 28; cf. Gomperz 1905: 343–4) and Saxonhouse (1983: 141). All of these views derive from Schleiermacher’s much earlier argument that the Grg. repeats the essential matters of the Ap. and changes their aim ‘into a defence of the Socratic modes of thought and action’, and then develops them into a ‘defence of Plato’ himself (1836: 184–5). On this view, the Grg. is both a second apology of Socrates and the first apology of Plato.

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13 In the ancient world, no one doubted that Plato was the author of Alc. I; the Neoplatonists even considered it ‘the gateway to the temple’, containing in outline the ‘whole of philosophy’ (Denyer 2001: 14). It wasn’t until the early nineteenth century that the dialogue’s authenticity was first challenged by Friedrich Schleiermacher. See Gordon (2012: 146–83) and Helfer (2017: 9–12) for recent discussions of the dialogue’s authorship. Gribble (1999: 215–16) suggests that the author of the dialogue, if it wasn’t Plato himself, was at least someone who was steeped in Plato (cf. Pangle 1987; Lutz 1998: 114; Faulkner 2007: 83; Nails 2009). 14 Johnson’s point is that Alcibiades I and Alcibiades II ‘hold answers (if not necessarily Plato’s) to many of the most important questions raised by the relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades’ (cf. Gordon 2012: 148). Several of those questions are related to the trial. For a different view about Plato’s motive in writing Alc. I, see Denyer (2001: 11–14), who thinks the dialogue was inspired by Plato’s disappointing experiences with Dionysius in Syracuse. He suggests that Alc. I was written in the early 350s. If he is right about this, Alc. I could provide a link between the earlier apologetic dialogues (Grg., Symp., R.) and the dialogues I focus on in Chapter 4 (Ti., Criti., and Lg.) where Plato concludes his counter-indictment of Athens with a critique of naval imperialism. 15 As Helfer (2017: 12) puts a related point, it is plain to see that [Alcibiades I and Alcibiades II] were composed as dramas belonging to the world of the Platonic Socrates’. 16 Denyer (2001: 8) suggests that ‘Plato also includes many indications that the seduction is not yet complete and maybe never will be’. See Chapter 2 for arguments in favour of the view that the seduction succeeds, and that Alcibiades suffered from moral weakness, not from a failure to be fully persuaded of the merits of philosophy and the life it demands. 17 See Annas (1985: 121–2) and Johnson (1999, 2002) for discussions of what ‘selfknowledge’ means in this dialogue. As Johnson (2002: xvii) says, ‘We are all to look for the same thing, not who we are as individuals, but what we are as rational persons.’ Alcibiades needs to understand (1) what he is and (2) what he lacks so that he can cultivate and gain control over himself (Alc. I 128e–34a). 18 Socrates is interested in Alcibiades because of his desire for power and notoriety, not in spite of it. It is this unprecedented eros that Socrates hopes to redirect toward the higher pursuits of philosophy (Gordon 2012: 180; cf. Forde 1992: 25–30; Gribble 1999; Denyer 2001; Johnson 2002; Faulkner 2007: 90) – the desire for honour, Diotima suggests, is metaphysical eros misunderstood (Symp. 208b–9e; cf. Alc. I 124b). And so, ‘paradoxically . . . it may be precisely Alcibiades’ passion for glory which makes him a potential philosopher, though this very passion will ultimately destroy him’ (Johnson 2002: xv; cf. Forde 1992: 25–30).



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19 See Gordon (2012: 153) for a discussion of this possibility. 20 Proclus develops this point by saying that, like Alcibiades, (1) we are ‘bound by the forgetfulness’ that is a necessary counterpart of life in the sensible world; (2) we are ‘sidetracked by the disorder of the irrational forms of life’; (3) we don’t know ourselves; (4) we think we know things that we really don’t know; and so (5) we need the ‘same assistance’ that Alcibiades receives from Socrates ‘to keep ourselves from excessive conceit and to light upon the care appropriate to us’. 21 Alc. I is not the only piece of ancient literature that contains these themes. See Chapter 2, notes 21 and 72. As others have shown, several Socratic authors contributed to ‘the whole “Alcibiades literature” ’ (Chroust 1957: 174; cf. Gribble 1999), and they appear to have had some shared apologetic purposes (Field 1967: 150). They also shared certain literary strategies (Denyer 2001: 5–6). First, Alcibiades’ distinguishing qualities are established (Alc. I 104a–c; cf. Symp. 216d–e, 217a, 218c, 219c; Isoc. 16.25, 29–31, 36, 41); second, Socrates confronts the young Alcibiades with his flaws (Xen. Mem. 1.2.24–5; cf. R. 494b–d; Alc. I 119b5–10, 123d–4a); finally, Alcibiades submits to Socrates (Alc. I 127d6–8; cf. Aesch. Alc. Frag. 9), who emerges from these writings as a kind of lion tamer, and so confirms Nietzsche’s view in Twilight of the Idols that Socrates’ fame was partly due to his ability to make philosophical argument into a new Athenian agon. See Forde (1986: 223; cf. Faulkner 2007: 87; Gribble 1999: 214). 22 Friedlander (1958: 232) called this competition a ‘tension unequalled in Plato’. 23 At 135b–d, Alcibiades acknowledges that his current state of ignorance makes him suitable for slavery, not for statesmanship. Faulkner (2007: 88) notes that Alcibiades’ admission of ignorance in these moments is ‘a remarkable admission showing remarkable strength of soul’. 24 See the first essay of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, ‘Good and Evil’, ‘Good and Bad’ for his concept of ‘spiritual revenge’. 25 I borrow the concept of ‘ideological hegemony’ from Ober (1998: 190ff.). 26 In his ‘The Study of the Platonic Dialogues’, Nietzsche suggests that Plato ‘received the decisive thought as to how a philosopher ought to behave toward men from the apology of Socrates: as their physician, as a gadfly on the neck of man’. Cited in Kaufmann (1950: 398). 27 See Chapters 1 and 2 for discussions of the possibility that they were responding to Polycrates’ pamphlet, and not to the trial itself. 28 On this point, see especially Forde (1989). 29 Plato doesn’t say exactly where in democratic Athens. They are in an undefined space, ‘inside’ (Grg. 447c). See Saxonhouse (1983: 141; cf. Ober 1998: 194), who thinks the relevant distinction is between a ‘public’ and ‘private’ Socrates. 30 Dodds (1959: 17–18) mentions five other possible dates. See Nails (2002: 326–7) for further discussion of the issues.

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31 For a helpful discussion of Plato’s efforts to avoid ideological debates, see Dodds (1959: 244–5; cf. Yunis 1996: 140–1, 146–8). 32 Vickers (2008) identifies Callicles with Alcibiades. Gribble (1999: 235–6) argues against this view on the grounds that Alcibiades is mentioned in the dialogue as a separate individual. Ostwald (1986: 291; cf. 245–7) thinks Callicles may have been a fictional character, but if so he was based on Alcibiades. Dodds (1959: 12; cf. Saxonhouse 1983: 141) thinks Callicles was a real person, but he cannot explain why ‘such a vigorous and richly endowed personality left no mark whatever on the history of his time’ (13). He also does not consider the advantages of an anonymous and representative interlocutor. Zuckert (2009: 551 n. 70) and Benardete (1991: 63) think Callicles’ name is a compound of the word for ‘most noble’, kallistos, and ‘glory’ or ‘acclaim’, kleos. 33 Dodds (1959: 14; cf. 30–4) thinks Callicles ‘stands for something which Plato had it in him to become (and would perhaps have become, but for Socrates)’. See Rutherford (1995: 161) for a fair criticism of Dodds’ overstatement. Voegelin (2000: 33–4) perhaps comes closer to the truth in suggesting that Callicles talks to Socrates ‘in the manner in which a friend of the family might have on occasion given Plato a piece of his mind. . .One has to realize. . .the effect which advice of this kind must have had on a proud man who was conscious of his qualities’. In either case, the existential dilemma built into the Grg. – the choice between two lives – is one that Plato faced himself (cf. Jaeger 1943: 138). 34 Saxonhouse (1983: 139) argues that Callicles ‘stands for Athens, giving expression to the assumptions behind Athenian politics . . . revealing at the same time the inherent inconsistencies of her international expansion’. The argument of this chapter is indebted to this view and that of Yunis (1996: 117–71). As Yunis says, Plato makes it clear that ‘the welfare of Athens hinges on the political and rhetorical issues discussed by Socrates and Callicles’ (119). 35 Prior (1997: 117) argues that the Socratic dialogues depict ‘unhappy encounters’ between Socrates, ‘who is philosophy for Plato in these dialogues’, and nonphilosophers, because he wanted to show that Socrates’ interlocutors ‘do not understand principles and values that underlie the philosophical life’ (emphasis in original). 36 Ober (1998) argues that the Grg. explains why the Socratic ideal of ‘therapeutic persuasion’ cannot be met in the ‘polis-as-it-is’ (190), and thus ‘points toward the foundationalist political, moral, and metaphysical project of the Republic’ (191). I discuss the relationship between the Grg. and the R., and their place in Plato’s trial of Athens, in the next section. 37 Just as a he does in his defence speech (Ap. 28c). 38 As I discuss below and in Chapter 4 (see note 29), it is significant that Gorgias mentions Athens’ walls, harbours, and dockyards as examples of rhetoric’s power



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to produce results in the city, each of which was seen as a symbol of Athenian imperialism, and all of which were destroyed after Athens surrendered in 404 BCE. This competition between two lives is one of the most important themes in the Grg., and it may reflect a debate that was going on in Athens at the time (Carter 1986: 173). It is explicit in the exchange between Callicles and Socrates; it is alluded to in the dialogue’s references to Euripides’ Antiope (484e–6, 489e, 506b–e, 500c–d); it is used to reflect on the limited powers of Socratic philosophy, and it is implicit in these opening pages of the dialogue. See Grg. 473b–4a; cf. R. 517a, where Socrates recalls the moment when the Athenian demos laughed at him for not knowing what to do as prutanis. He didn’t know how to put a vote to the Assembly, and so everyone laughed at him while they were preparing to sentence the Arginousae generals to death without a trial. This laughter appears to echo Polus’ laughter at Socrates for thinking that a tortured would-be tyrant is happier than a successful tyrant (Ober 1998: 197). Ober thinks this passage shows that Polus doesn’t understand the dangers of democratic politics ‘in which rhetorical stimulation of strong emotions in mass audiences can quickly lead to genuine evil’. Polus can make Socrates’ skin crawl with a colourful and disturbing description of torture, but it is Socrates who is depicted as the one with experience of rhetoric’s real-world dangers. Rutherford (1995: 151) makes a similar point: Socrates gives ‘real life precision to vague ideas’ in Polus’ abstract immoralism. Dodds (1959: 317) notes that the Grg. contains ‘perhaps the earliest instance of telos in the sense of “purpose”, “end of action”, so common in later Greek from Aristotle onwards’. One compelling piece of evidence that the Long Walls were seen as symbols of Athenian expansionism is the fact that, when the war ended, the Spartans’ first condition of peace was that the walls and other fortifications be destroyed (Garland 1987: 24, 32). Likewise, as the Athenians debated what to concede to Sparta during the blockade, a decree was passed that made it illegal to accept or propose terms involving the destruction of the Long Walls (Xen. Hell. 2.2.15). See Chapter 4, note 29. Cf. Menex. 235a–c, where Socrates ironically praises Athenian funeral orations for producing powerful but fleeting feelings of pride and patriotism. See Irwin (1979: 71–101, 127–31) for a helpful account of Plato’s techne analogy. Politics is supposed to be about caring for the soul, just as medicine cares for the body. But Athenian rhetoric cannot care for the soul because it doesn’t convey truth; it does not improve people because it aims at their gratification; it isn’t based on knowledge, and so it isn’t teachable; and because it is based on belief, there cannot be any experts. As Socrates says famously, medicine is to pastry baking as justice is to rhetoric; gymnastics is to cosmetics as legislation is to sophistry (Grg.

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Plato’s Trial of Athens 464b–5d): baking, rhetoric, cosmetics, and sophistry do not care for their subjects, but they pretend to. They are in the business of seeming; for Socrates, true politics and philosophy are in the business of being. As Yunis (1996: 142) puts this point, Plato rejected the ‘glorification of Pericles and imperial Athens as a huge misunderstanding of the aims of political life’. Pericles made the city great only if ‘great’ means ‘the will to exercise tyranny’ since he converted the city into the tyrant of the Aegean (Thuc. 2.63). Plato’s distinctions between seeming and being, belief and knowledge, provide the foundation for his claim that past Athenian rhetores have produced apparent goods (wealth and power) that are actually bad for the city, because they undermine justice. For assessments of Socrates’ ‘refutation’ of Polus, see Kahn (1996) and Vlastos (1967). For discussions of Plato’s critique of rhetoric in general, see Vickers (1988), Kastely (1991), and Yunis (1996). Kahn (1996: 127) thinks this explains why the Grg. is so full of passion and bitterness: ‘the question here is not of who wins the argument, but how one must live one’s life and, if necessary, die’. Voegelin (2000: 25) thinks Plato uses the character of Polus in part to undermine Gorgias’ claims to be a teacher of justice. His advertising speech is ‘given the lie by the vulgar and unscrupulous Polus, his follower and partisan in the dialogue, a glaring object lesson of the evil consequences of his corrupting activity’. Cf. Yunis (1996: 139–46), who argues that Plato compares rhetoric to empire: ‘Like rhetoric, Athenian military power is used as a means to satisfy desire’ (142). See Garland (1987: 7–57) and Chapter 4, note 29. For example, Gorgias both endorses and rejects the traditional values of justice and virtue. He endorses them when he agrees that the rhetor must teach his students justice (Grg. 460a), and he presupposes them when he says he cannot be held accountable for the crimes of his students (Grg. 457b–c). But he rejects them when he explains how a rhetor can benefit from using oratory unjustly (Grg.457e; cf. 460d–61b). McKimm (1988: 44–8) and Brickhouse and Smith (1994: 74–8) discuss Polus’ inconsistency on the same issue. Callicles suffers from his own inconsistencies, but not this one. He is a fully committed and unashamed immoralist. Kahn (1996: 126) describes Callicles as ‘a product of the new Enlightenment, an ambitious young politician willing to attack the very notion of justice and morality as Socrates understands it’. He cites Shorey (1934: 154) who suggests that Plato used Callicles to articulate ‘the most eloquent statement of the immoralist’s case in European literature’. For similar views, see Friedlander (1958: 244–72) and Voegelin (2000: 24–5). For provocative comparisons of Callicles and Nietzsche, see Dodds (1959: 387–91), Klosko (1984: 127), Kagan (1986: 126), Euben (1997: 227–8), and Newell (2000: 17).



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54 Pyrilampes was Plato’s stepfather and great uncle; he married Plato’s mother around the time of his birth, just after his father died. Demos was Plato’s stepbrother (Nails 2009: 1; cf. Nails 2002: 124–5). Surely there’s an intended irony in Plato reminding his readers – in the Grg.of all dialogues – that he was the brother of Demos. 55 Plato may be responding to the Periclean notion that inactive citizens are useless (Thuc. 2.40). Socrates wasn’t politically active, from the city’s perspective, but from Plato’s perspective that was a virtue, not a vice, since true politics required a very different kind of activity. 56 Cf. Tht. 174a–6a. 57 See Saxonhouse (1983: 139, 142, 154–7, 164–6) and Yunis (1996: 142). 58 Nightingale (1992: 123) argues that the relationship between the Grg. and the Antiope is more vital than other scholars have recognized. Among other things, it ‘provides fresh material for assessing Plato’s attitudes toward tragic drama’. 59 Cf. Rutherford (1995: 164–6, 170): ‘despite his claim to cut through what is customary . . . Callicles is still very much concerned with dignity and appearances, whereas Socrates is indifferent to all but what he sees as reality’ (166). 60 Klosko (1984: 128–34), Gentzler (1995: 37–9), and Stauffer (2002: 642–3) argue that Plato has given Callicles a straw man argument here: one doesn’t need to defend ‘unrestricted hedonism’ (Gentzler 1995: 38), or the ‘indiscriminate pursuit’ of pleasure (Stauffer 2002: 642), to defend the view that pleasure is the good. This may be true philosophically, but if Saxonhouse and Yunis are right about the ‘unspoken theme’ of the Grg., Plato is criticizing a philosophical view while also attacking the cultural ideology of Periclean Athens. The city often acted as if unrestricted hedonism were the best life. Isocrates makes this point in his On the Peace. See Chapter 4. 61 For similar readings of the Grg., and of Callicles’ character in particular, see Benardete (1991: 61–102), Yunis (1996: 136–210), Euben (1997: 227), Ober (1998: 190–213), Newell (2000: 9–41), Stauffer (2002: 627–57), and Zuckert (2009: 546–56). 62 The Athenians tell the Spartans that the language of justice is merely the disguised self-interest of the weak, and that it is bound to fail because it doesn’t deter anyone with power (Thuc. 1.76). 63 Yunis (1996: 141) argues that Plato’s main objection to Periclean rhetoric is ‘an objection to the public, authoritative encouragement of brute power and wealth – empire – in preference to the real political virtues of knowledge and justice’. 64 Cf. Grg. 504a–5b, 507d–e, 525b. 65 See Chapter 4, note 29. 66 See Dodds (1959: 352), who sees this passage as indicating that Plato believed ‘moral attitudes are commonly determined by psychological, not logical reasons’. Irwin (1979: 233) denies that Plato had such a distinction in mind. On his view,

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Plato’s Trial of Athens Plato thought Socrates just needed more time to see that his position was logically inconsistent. He does not comment on Alcibiades in the Symp., however. Stauffer (2002: 649 n. 23) thinks fear is ‘the true content or basis’ of Callicles’ love of the demos, given all of his concerns about ‘assimilation’ and ‘safety’. However, this puts the cart before the horse: Callicles’ fear is rooted in eros, since Callicles fears losing power and recognition, as well as his life and safety, because they give him pleasure. Thucydides (2.65, 6.15) makes a similar point when he blames the leader and the led, the Athenians and Alcibiades, for their losses in Sicily. For an excellent analysis of this passage in the Grg., see Yunis (1996: 142–3). Irwin (1979: 238) struggles to make sense of this passage in the Grg.. As he says, the projects of the Four ‘have caused some kind of sickness, presumably moral degeneracy, reaching its crisis in some disaster to the city’. He recognizes that the mention of ships and walls refers to ‘the Athenian defeat of 404’, but he complains that ‘Socrates does not trouble to show how Athenian moral sickness caused the defeat, or how moral health might have avoided it’. In general, ‘Socrates does not make his diagnosis very clear, or support it with the evidence it needs’. One of the points of this chapter has been to clarify Socrates’ diagnosis. As Rutherford (1995: 171) says, Plato uses the Grg. to set Socrates’ ‘moral optimism and conviction’ in a ‘deliberately tragic’ setting. In the conditions of democratic Athens, the political expert ‘cannot establish his authority and cannot accomplish his educative goal’, because he cannot persuade the citizens to ‘adopt courses that would improve them’ (Yunis 1996: 130–1). I quote these passages at length because the details of Plato’s observations help reveal the depth of the overlap between the R. and Grg. on this particular issue. Scholars often mention, but then downplay or do not analyse, the passion and ‘rhetorical brilliance’ of this section of R. Book VI (487b–502c). For examples, see Reeve (1988: 193–4) and Annas (1981). Rosen (2005: 237) thinks Plato’s ‘generalizations’ point toward valuable truths, ‘but in an exaggerated form’, and a lot of his analysis focuses on how ‘dubious’ it is to think that people like Hitler and Stalin would have become philosophers if they had been given the right education (238). For my purposes, it does not matter whether Plato has identified a ‘valuable truth’ about education or politics; the crucial point is that the R. develops the Grg.’s critique of Athens and contributes to Plato’s trial of Athens. See Yunis (1996: 117– 71) for a similar interpretation of the Grg. in its relation to the R.. Bloom (1968: 307) calls the R. ‘the true Apology of Socrates, for only in the Republic does he give an adequate treatment of the theme which was forced on him by Athens’ accusation against him. That theme is the relationship of the philosopher to the political community’. Cf. Yunis (1996: 161).



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73 The issues of failed persuasion and the excessive power of the many are introduced in the opening pages of the R.. Socrates is on his way back to Athens, but Polemarchus wants him to come to Cephalus’ house for a conversation, and he points out that his group is more numerous and stronger than Socrates and Glaucon. Socrates asks whether he could persuade Polemarchus and his friends to let them go, but Polemarchus tells him that one can’t persuade a person who refuses to listen. What can seem like ornamental stage setting is actually a subtle foreshadowing of the R.’s critique of Athenian democracy and its rhetorical culture. 74 For Socrates, the sophists and the rhetores are ‘one and the same’ (Grg. 520a; cf. 465c). 75 As Morgan (2004: 130–1) puts this point, ‘The crowd is cast as the most important educator of the young. Since it is the teacher, it is also the corruptor . . . The harm attributed to sophists and philosophers is more accurately laid at the door of their accusers.’ 76 Plato repeatedly compares the demos to children and animals (Grg. 464d, 502e, 521e, 516a–b; R. 493a–c, 496c). 77 The same is true of the art in the city. The poets and the painters, like the politicians, accept the demos as their master and produce only what they will praise (R. 493c–d; cf. R. 602a–b; Grg. 464c–d, 502b). At most, Athenian poetry imitated and disseminated popular opinion, because the poets were motivated by the same desire for a good reputation. 78 Cf. Yunis (1996: 158), who suggests that the Ap. introduces the problem of the philosopher and the city, which then develops, in the Grg. and R., into ‘an unbridgeable chasm and the philosopher withdraws from politics altogether’. The philosopher’s growth is ‘fuller’ if he can live a public life, but that life requires a different kind of politeia, one that may not be realizable. 79 Plato is extremely consistent on this point. Early in the R., Socrates mentions that he has always admired the ‘divine’ natures of Glaucon and Adeimantus because of their ability to resist the city’s miseducation: ‘you must indeed be affected by the divine if you’re not convinced that injustice is better than justice and yet can speak on its behalf as you have done’ (R. 368a, 492a). 80 From the first of two books ‘On Figured Speeches’ (date and author unknown), which have come down to us in the corpus of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Cited in Burnyeat (2002: 137). It’s worth noting that none of the ‘strands’ mentioned here is about biography or history. It didn’t even occur to the author of this ancient commentary that Plato was reporting on the trial of Socrates.

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Plato’s Atlantis Myth, or: Redesigning the ‘Democracy Based on Triremes’

Each year during the final week of July, at a festival called Panathenaea, the Athenians marked the beginning of a new civic year with a citywide celebration of Athena’s birthday.1 The festival involved musical competitions, recitations of Homer’s poetry, athletic and equestrian contests, torch racing and a regatta in the harbour, feasts and religious rites, dancing in armour, and an ‘all-night revel’ followed by a grand procession at sunrise to Athena’s shrine on the Acropolis (Neils 1992: 13–15).2 The climax of the Panathenaea was the presentation of the new peplos of Athena, a carefully woven and specially decorated robe, weaved and embroidered by young girls from aristocratic Athenian families over a period of nine months. The peplos was first displayed as a sail on the mast of an old naval vessel, which was placed on wheels and pulled like a ‘parade float’ (Barber 1992: 114) along the Sacred Way, from the Dipylon Gate through the Kerameikos and Agora, and finally to the north slope of the Acropolis where it was removed from its mast and taken up to the Propylaea. This was the Athenians’ annual birthday gift for Athena: a robe proudly displayed as a sail, decorated in purple and saffron dyes, depicting Athena and Zeus in the gods’ victory over the Titans (Barber 1992: 116).3 The Athenians had many festivals, but this one had a special significance in their lives thanks to its ‘importance and grandeur’ (Neils 1992: 23). It touched the life of every Athenian:  men and women, young and old, rich and poor, citizen and metic.4 And by the time of Pericles, it had evolved into an occasion for commemorating the city’s identity as a sea power. The use of a ship in the Panathenaea began shortly after the Persian Wars, and the ship itself was from the fleet that fought in the battle of Salamis. It was added to the procession in an effort to ‘celebrate and recall’ the navy’s role in saving the city (Barber 1992:  114).5 ‘With this act of devotion [the Athenians] reminded themselves, their maritime allies, and the world at large that Athens, from its harbours right

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up to its highest citadel, was a city wedded to the sea’ (Hale 2009: 137).6 This ‘democracy based on triremes’ (Arist. Pol. 4.4), as Aristotle described Athens, couldn’t do anything without thinking of its naval empire. And so, as a new year began, Athena stood on the sunlit summit of the Acropolis, looking out toward the Piraeus, dressed in a sail. The Panathenaea is the backdrop for Plato’s Timaeus-Critias (Ti. 21a), the companion dialogues where Plato presents his Atlantis story, his great ‘allegory on the evils of sea power’ (Hale 2009: 275) and ‘charter myth for modern Athens’ (Morgan 2000: 264–6; cf. Gill 1993: 62–5). The dialogues’ characters – Socrates, Critias,7 Timaeus, and Hermocrates8 – are gathered at Critias’ house to finish a conversation they started the previous day. Socrates had been the host and the primary speaker,9 and according to his summary of their conversation (Ti. 17c– 19b), he had given them a partial account of the Republic’s ideal state.10 ‘I talked about politics yesterday’, Socrates says, and his main point was the ‘political structure cities should have’ and the kind of people that should make them up ‘so as to be the best possible’ (Ti. 17c). As Socrates’ friends prepare to repay him for the ‘feast’ of ideas he shared with them (Ti. 17b), Socrates reminds Timaeus that he has requested an account of how their ideal city makes war. He compares himself to a man looking at beautiful but stationary animals, ‘longing to look at them . . . engaged in some struggle or conflict’ that reveals their distinctive qualities (Ti. 19b). That’s how Socrates feels about the city they’ve described so far. It’s beautiful but stationary. He wants to see it engaged in a character-revealing action (Ti. 20b). I’d love to see our city distinguish itself in the way it goes to war and in the way it pursues the war: that it deals with the other cities, one after another, in ways that reflect positively on its own education and training, both in word and deed – both in how it behaves toward them and how it negotiates with them. (Ti. 19b–c)

Socrates’ interlocutors don’t perfectly grant his wish.11 Instead of describing Socrates’ ideal city at war, Critias tells a story, a muthos – originally told to Solon at Sais in Egypt by an old priest of the goddess Neïth (the Egyptian name for Athena),12 and then handed down to Critias through his family – of a war between mythical Athens13 and Atlantis, a huge island empire outside the Mediterranean that captured parts of Italy and Egypt, and eventually invaded Greece. After being abandoned by her allies, mythical Athens defeated Atlantis on her own, saving the Greeks from slavery and liberating the cities that Atlantis had already captured. Immediately following the war, ‘excessively violent’ earthquakes and



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floods swallowed the Athenian army into the earth, and caused Atlantis to sink into the ocean and disappear (Ti. 24d–5e). The Athenians have no memory of this conflict, or of mythical Athens in general, which ‘excelled in war’ and ‘distinguished itself by the excellence of its laws in every area’ (Ti. 23c), only because of ‘the passage of time and the destruction of human life’ (Ti. 20e). If Solon had perfected his talents as a poet and completed the telling of this story, he would have become more famous than Homer and Hesiod (Ti. 21d), and the Atlantis myth would have served as the foundational text for Greek culture. All Greeks would have known that Athens had once been a model city, built according to Plato’s principles, and they would have feared the fate of hubristic and greedy Atlantis, Plato’s ‘anti-model’ (VidalNaquet 1992: 300). Critias thinks the retelling of Solon’s tale would be a fitting gift of thanks to Socrates for yesterday’s speech, as well as a hymn for the goddess Athena ‘of just and true praise on this her festival’ (Ti. 20e–1a).14 This is Plato’s preface to his Timaeus. The Panathenaic Festival is underway outside. Thousands of people have crowded into the Agora to celebrate Athena’s birthday and listen to stories of Athenian heroism during the Persian Wars. Soon, the Praxiergidai will present Athena with her new peplos, and in the process the city will commemorate, and symbolically recommit to, its imperial identity. As the Athenians in the Agora recall their proud naval history and prepare to dress their patron goddess in her magnificent ‘sail’, Hermocrates, the Syracusan general who will destroy the Sicilian Expedition many years later, joins Socrates in the home of Critias, the grandfather of the infamous Athenian tyrant, to listen to a story about a very different kind of ‘Athenian’ greatness. ‘It’s the story about the most magnificent thing our city has ever done, an accomplishment that deserves to be known far better than any of her other accomplishments’ (Ti. 21d). At this Panathenaic festival, behind these closed doors, instead of memorializing the Athenian navy’s victory at Salamis, Critias’ unusual tale will warn its listeners about the risks of sea power, and point them toward a superior political order, the anti-Athenian, anti-democratic political structures that Socrates had described the previous day.

I.  Plato’s Atlantis story: charter myth or cautionary tale? Socrates says the occasion is perfect for Critias’ Atlantis story. ‘We’re in the midst of celebrating the festival of the goddess, and this speech really fits the occasion’ (Ti. 26e). Why is this? How does Critias’ speech fit the occasion of

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the Panathenaea? The answer to this question depends on how one interprets the ‘elaborate layering of historical stories’ that Plato has embedded in his Atlantis myth (Annas 2010: 55). It also depends on whether Plato is being ironic or sincere. For example, there wouldn’t be any question here if Plato simply intended to recommend that the Athenians return to the culture and values of the Marathon era, which Plato respected and admired (Lg. 698a–701e),15 and restore the ‘ancestral constitution’ that governed the Athenians at that time, which many conservatives believed could help the Athenians recover the virtue of their ancestors and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past (Gill 1980: xix). On this view, we should interpret Plato’s Atlantis story as a new ‘charter myth for modern Athens’ (Morgan 2000: 264–71), one that eulogized the paradigmatic moments of Athenian history and held them up for contemporary emulation.16 Such a message would be appropriate for a ‘festival speech’ at the Panathenaea (Kennedy 1963: 166–7). It would also fit with some of Plato’s stated views about the Persian wars. He thought the battle at Salamis made the Athenians worse, while the victories at Marathon and Plataea made them better (Lg. 707b–d). This ‘charter myth’ view makes good sense until we recognize, as Vidal-Naquet (1964) and others have shown, that Critias’ story also refers to the Athenians’ devastating losses during the Peloponnesian War.17 Some have looked at these allusions as evidence that Plato wanted to warn Athens against rebuilding its empire (Morgan 1998; Hale 2009; Vidal-Naquet 2007). On this ‘cautionary tale’ view, the Atlantis myth is a ‘counter-eulogy’ (Loraux 2006: 298) that questions Athenian culture and values from the perspective of Platonic philosophy, not a typical festival speech that eulogizes imperial Athens. Plato didn’t want his readers to identify with the fictional ancient Athenians who defeated the Atlanteans, or with their own ancestors who defeated the Persians in the fifth century. He wanted them to recognize the distance between themselves and such men (Annas 2010), and to see reflections of their self-destructive greed and arrogance in the story of Atlantis’ utter defeat (Vidal-Naquet 2007; cf. Hale 2009). It’s not clear how this message is appropriate for a speech at the Panathenaea. I hope to show, first, that the ‘charter myth’ and ‘cautionary tale’ interpretations of the Atlantis story are compatible, and that it is precisely because the myth contains both messages that it is suited for the Panathenaea: Plato’s myth praises Athens as she could be, not the city as it was in 355 BCE, or as it had been under Pericles. As Vidal-Naquet (1992: 302) puts the point, The Athens and Atlantis of ancient lore represent the two faces of Plato’s own Athens. The former, the old primordial Athens, is what Plato would have liked



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the city of which he was a citizen to be; the latter is what Athens was in the age of Pericles and Cleon, an imperialistic power whose very existence constituted a threat to other Greek cities.18

Second, I will show that when these messages are taken together, the Atlantis myth makes an important contribution to Plato’s trial of Athens:  it helps to exonerate Socrates by (1) pointing to fifth-century Athenian imperialism, and the polis culture that gave rise to it, as the true corruptor of the youth, and (2) presenting an alternative to the democracy that built the empire, a way of life ‘oriented to happiness’ (Criti. 121b).19 When Plato sat down to write the Timaeus and Critias, some of his views had evolved, and many of his concerns had shifted from the time when he wrote his first apologetic dialogues (Klosko 2006).20 But one of his earliest messages remained the same: Socrates didn’t corrupt the youth; the imperialist city did, and the Athenians would corrupt another generation of young men if they did not change their polis.

1.  Charter myth Gill (1980; cf. 1993) and Morgan (2000; cf. 1998) develop the ‘charter myth’ interpretation of the Atlantis story by focusing on its normative and panegyric contents.21 As Morgan (2000:  268) argues, ‘The myth tells its audience how they should live their lives (on the model of the Republic), and celebrates the paradigmatic achievements of the Athenian past.’ She notes that Plato ‘concluded that Athens’ imperial and mythological pasts are equally flawed and he makes, therefore, a fresh mythological start’ (267), but her emphasis, like Gill’s, is on describing how the myth recommends the way of life of an earlier, fictional generation of Athenians, and thus ‘stands recognizably in the tradition of eulogistic Athenian festival speeches’ (266).22 In this way, Critias’ speech ironically imitates and so undermines Athenian funeral orations and other panegyric discourses that recreated the city’s past in the form of charter myths, most of which had a tendency to gloss over Athenian vices and failures, producing a ‘designer history’ aimed at flattering the ‘narcissistic Athenian desire for self-congratulation’ (Morgan 1998: 107). For the average Athenian, panegyric discourses, much more than the complex writings of intellectuals like Herodotus and Thucydides, were the primary sources of historical knowledge. It ‘made small difference that this history was largely myth’ (Morgan 1998: 108). Plato wanted to replace this ‘crude patriotism’ with a charter myth built on sound philosophical foundations.23 On this view, the

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purpose of the Atlantis story is to serve as a Noble Lie for Athens (Gill 1993: 65), a didactic encomium designed to persuade fourth-century Athenians to take proper care of their city and of each other. Plato playfully establishes the historiographic authority of the Atlantis myth in two ways24:  first, by suggesting the story originated with Solon, ‘the wisest of the Seven Sages’ (Ti. 20d) and the Athenians’ most famous and respected lawgiver; second, by suggesting that Solon was told the myth by the Egyptians, who are ‘conveniently fetishized as preservers of accuracy about the past’ (Morgan 2000:  264).25 Compared to the Egyptians, the Greeks are spiritual children, ignorant of their city’s past achievements. Ah, Solon, Solon, you Greeks are forever children. There isn’t an old man among you . . . Your souls are devoid of beliefs about antiquity handed down by ancient tradition. Your souls lack any learning made hoary by time. (Ti. 22b–c)

This is the first step of Plato’s charter myth project. He portrays the Athenians as spiritually naïve because he wants to invent their history for them, and then invite them to ‘repeat’ it. As Morgan (2000:  271) suggests, ‘Even more than Thucydides, Plato would like his historicizing narrative to be a “possession for all time”’. He wants his history to become a new paradigm for the city to emulate, a Noble Lie that shapes all future Panathenaic orations. Solon is Plato’s messenger, as he was for many fourth-century Athenians involved in politics. At least since the restoration of the democracy in 403 BCE, Solon’s name had become shorthand for the ‘ancestral constitution’ (Andoc. I.83). He was universally recognized as the founder of the modern Athenian state (Finley 1975: 50), and thus many politicians used his name during the post-war constitutional struggles to confer authority on their legal and political opinions. As Finley (1975: 40) observes, some ‘went on cheerfully citing in the courts what they called “a law of Solon”, even when it was blatantly impossible to have been very ancient’. By having Solon be the original storyteller of Atlantis, then, Plato was appropriating a common fourth-century practice of leveraging the authority of Solon for current political purposes. Plato wanted to reconstruct his city’s past, and Solon solved the problem of validation for him. His inimitable cultural status made him uniquely equipped to give Plato’s didactic encomium, which was also a Noble Lie, the stamp of ‘authoritative truth’ (Morgan 2000: 264).26 This ‘charter myth’ interpretation of the Atlantis story stresses its normative qualities. On this view, as we have seen, the content of the myth is a ‘narrative celebration’ of the ideal state of the Republic (Gill 1993: 64) and a spur to present action; it tells people how to live their lives, and it reinvents Athenian history to



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create a ‘powerful new paradigm for reform’ (Morgan 2000: 265). Plato wanted an audience of political elites and ordinary citizens to attribute the success of mythical Athens to the excellence of her laws (Annas 2010:  54), which were the laws of his Republic disguised as the laws of Solon (Morgan 2000: 267–9). As I will show next, this interpretation captures half of Plato’s message, but it neglects or downplays the other half:  the critical message to fourth-century Athenians, warning them against renewing their imperialist ambitions. These details are worth looking at closely because they help explain the complete message of Plato’s Atlantis myth, and they are essential to Plato’s trial of Athens.

2.  Cautionary tale The proponents of the ‘cautionary tale’ view argue that Atlantis is an allegory of Athens (Vidal-Naquet 2007:  23) that critiques fifth-century Athenian imperialism and warns against rebuilding the empire. On this view, Plato’s message to his readers is that Atlantis’ fate  – being destroyed by the gods as punishment for greed and hubris (Criti. 121c)  – was Athens’ fate in the fifth century, and this fate would be repeated in the fourth century if the Athenians didn’t resist the ‘seductive temptations of maritime wealth and power’ (Hale 2009: 279). In order fully to understand this ‘cautionary tale’ view, we need to answer two questions. First, what did Atlantis do to deserve being destroyed by the gods? Second, how does Atlantis resemble Athens? If we can answer these questions, we can then see how the ‘cautionary tale’ is part of Plato’s intended ‘charter myth’, and that the Atlantis myth is designed to be a protreptic tale for the city of Athens, the most fitting form of praise to give her during the Panathenaea. In the beginning, and ‘for many generations’, Atlantis’ power was extraordinary because the Atlanteans had true and high-minded ideas; they were obedient to their laws, and they were on good terms with the gods ‘who were their kin’ (Criti. 120e). They responded with prudence and self-control to the disasters and chance events of life, and they managed their relationships with grace, exhibiting traits like moderation and good sense in all of their dealings. Except for virtue, they held all else in disdain and thought of their present good fortune of no consequence. They bore their vast wealth of gold and other possessions without difficulty, treating them as if they were a burden. They did not become intoxicated with the luxury of the life their wealth made possible; they did not lose their self-control and slip into decline, but in their sober judgment they could see distinctly that even their very wealth increased with their amity and its companion, virtue. But they saw that both wealth and concord

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decline as possessions become pursued and honored. And virtue perishes with them as well. (Criti. 120a–1e)

That is what happened to the Atlanteans. As the ‘divine portion within them began to grow faint . . . and as their human nature gradually gained ascendancy’ (Criti. 121a–b), they abandoned their commitment to virtue and focused on ‘materialistic goals and ambitions’ (Criti. 121a). All of a sudden, ‘in their inability to bear their great good fortune, they became disordered’ (Criti. 121b):  their thinking was no longer sound; they lost their self-control, and they destroyed their most valuable possessions (Criti. 121b). Some people could recognize the Atlanteans’ decadence for what it was, but others continued to think they lived a charmed life. To whoever had eyes to see they appeared hideous, since they were losing the finest of what were once their most treasured possessions. But to those who were blind to the true way of life oriented to happiness it was at this time that they gave the semblance of being supremely beauteous and blessed. Yet inwardly they were filled with an unjust lust for possessions and power. (Criti. 121b)

Zeus wasn’t fooled by appearances. He did ‘have the eyes to see such things’. He could tell that the Atlanteans were suffering from the corruption of desire – that this once ‘noble race’ was living in a ‘degenerate state’ (Criti. 121b)  – and so he decided to punish them, thinking it would introduce more harmony into their lives. He called a meeting for all of the gods ‘in the most awesome of his dwellings, which is located in the centre of the entire universe and so sees all of creation’ (Criti. 121c). Unfortunately, Plato doesn’t tell us what Zeus had to say at this meeting. Just as Zeus is about to address the assembly of the gods, the Critias breaks off in midsentence. Plato seems to have ‘thrown down his pen’, either because he had reached an impasse in his original idea (Gill 1980: xxiv) or because he intended for the story to be unfinished, as the start of the Timaeus suggests (Vidal-Naquet 2007:  15). However, we know from the Timaeus that the gods decide to destroy Atlantis, and the end of the Critias tells us that the gods reached this decision because the Atlanteans had become disordered and corrupt due to their inability to bear their great good fortune (Criti. 121b).27 That is what the Atlanteans ‘did’ to deserve the punishment of the gods: they acquired more wealth and power than is compatible with human nature, and they lost their self-control as they pursued materialistic goals.28 How, then, do the Atlanteans resemble the Athenians? Plato complicates our answer to this question by inviting us to make two very different comparisons. As the Atlantis story is told in the Timaeus, it recalls the Persian empire and



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its invasion of Greece, as well as the Athenians’ victory over the Persians at Marathon:  Atlantis resembles Persia, and mythical Athens appears to be an idealized description of historic Athens during the Marathon era. This is the part of the story that is the basis for the charter myth view. However, as we get more details about mythical Athens in the Critias, it begins to look much more like historic Sparta, or Plato’s ideal state in the Republic, and it is Atlantis that resembles historic Athens, transforming the Atlantis myth into an account of a ‘civil war’ between (1) ‘an Athens such as Plato would have wished it to be’ and (2) the ‘imperialist Athens that the city became after the Persian War’ (VidalNaquet 2007: 23).29 Consider part of Plato’s description of mythical Athens. Now, at that time, the other classes of citizens who dwelt in our city were engaged in manufacture and producing food from the earth, but the warrior class that had originally been separated from them by god-like men lived apart. None of them had any private possession, but they thought of all their possessions as the common property of all, and they asked to receive nothing from the other citizens beyond what they needed to live. (Criti. 110c–d; cf. 112b–e)

This simple and virtuous city is nothing like the Athens that Plato had known throughout his life, and the differences don’t stop here. While historic Athens was despised as a tyranny at the outset of the Peloponnesian War (Thuc. 2.8), the ancient Athenians ‘were the guardians of their own citizens and the leaders of the rest of the Greek world, which followed them willingly’ (Criti. 112d). Mythical Athens, unlike historic Athens, has no harbour or navy, no marketplace, and no propagandistic temples. It has a large military ruling class that includes women (Criti. 110b–c), and it maintains a hierarchical political structure under a code of excellent laws (Criti. 110c; cf. Ti. 23c), not the ‘unfettered liberty’ of historic Athens’ democracy (Lg. 699e). Like historic Sparta, mythical Athens is a land power (Criti. 110e), not a sea power, and it has much more land than historic Athens. Even the land itself has changed, thanks to the deforestation undertaken for the sake of building and maintaining historic Athens’ naval fleet (Hale 2009:  256). ‘Attica of today is like the skeleton revealed by a wasting disease’, Critias complains, ‘once all the rich topsoil has been eroded and only the thin body of land remains’ (Criti. 111b). Plato has gone out of his way to create a mythical Athens that is as different as possible from the city his readers would be familiar with (Gill 1980:  xvii). It resembles historic Sparta and the political ideal of Plato’s middle and late dialogues, not fifth or fourth-century Athens. And its advantages over historic Athens are confirmed by its victory over Atlantis, which is fashioned in the image

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of historic Athens. Atlantis is a ‘sea power and an evil power – two associated, or even twin, concepts in Plato’s view’ (Vidal-Naquet 1992: 301). Its capital city, like Athens, is built on and around a hill that is five miles from the sea; it is wealthy and powerful thanks to maritime imperialism and trade throughout the Mediterranean (Ti. 25a; Criti. 114c–d; cf. Grg. 517), and its architecture and city plan had features resembling the Long Walls (Criti. 116a), the Piraeus (Criti. 115b–c, 117d–e), the Navy Yard (Criti. 117d), and the Parthenon (Criti. 116c–e) – four of the best-known symbols of the Athenian empire.30 Atlantis’ central acropolis and citadel, like the Athenian Acropolis, was decorated with ostentatious temples (Criti. 116c), and the Atlanteans were given a significant advantage over their rivals by an abundance of natural resources, including a precious metal (oreichalkos, ‘mountain copper’ or yellow copper ore) in their mines (Criti. 114e), just as the Athenians benefitted from the wealth of silver in the Laurion mines.31 They amassed more wealth than had ever been amassed before . . . And they provided for everything that was needed, both in the city and in the rest of the island. For their empire brought them many imports from outside, and the island itself provided most of what was needed for their livelihood. . .They took all these products from the earth and from their proceeds they constructed their sanctuaries and their palaces, their harbors and their ship-sheds, and they improved the rest of their land. . . (Criti. 114d–15b)

Like historic Athens, Atlantis was a gigantic naval base, a busy centre of commerce, and a beautifully decorated city (Gill 1980:  xviii). And in most respects, the Atlanteans were similar to the historic Athenians, both in terms of what they valued and how they lived.32 In the end, the war between mythical Athens and Atlantis resembles the Peloponnesian War, not the Persian War, only the role of Athens is played by Atlantis, and the role of Sparta is played by Athens: a powerful and wealthy naval empire (Atlantis/Athens) fights a simple and moderate, agriculture-based land power (Athens/Sparta), and the land power wins:  driven by an unjust lust for wealth and power (Criti. 121b), the naval empire launches an ill-advised imperialist expedition it cannot win (Ti. 24e) and loses all of her former territories (Ti. 25c).33 If all of these parallels are intended, Atlantis was real and ‘clearly visible’ from the Acropolis; you could visit it by walking from the city centre of Athens, through Themistocles’ Long Walls, down to the Piraeus and Zea Harbour, the home of the Athenians’ famous fleet of triremes (Hale 2009: 279). Atlantis didn’t just resemble Athens. It was Athens (Gill 1980:  xix), and the Athenians were



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supposed to be disturbed by its destruction. Plato’s Atlantis story, like most festival speeches at the Panathenaea, blended myth and history to send a political message to its audience. According to the cautionary tale view, Plato’s message was a warning. He hoped to advise Athenians against renewed imperialist ambitions as they contemplated their future in the middle of the fourth century (Gill 1980: xx; cf. Morgan 1998: 114–18).

3.  A protreptic tale for the city of Athens The cautionary tale and charter myth views aren’t mutually exclusive. But they are separable from one another (Taylor 1928: 50; Hackforth 1944: 9, Gill 1976: 9, Hale 2009),34 and it is possible that Plato intended one without intending the other. The most persuasive interpretations, however, are able to make sense of the myth as a whole – the apparent endorsement of Marathon era Athens and critique of the fifth-century empire (Vidal-Naquet 1964, 1986, 2007; cf. Gill 1980 and Morgan 1998). When we combine the charter myth and cautionary tale views, we get the idea that Plato used the Atlantis story to describe his native city from ‘two different points of view’, one that was aspirational and one that was critical (Vidal-Naquet 1986: 268): when mythical Athens goes to war with and defeats Atlantis, ‘she really overcomes herself ’, which is why the mythical battle was, ‘at once a ‘Persian’ war and a civil war’ (Vidal-Naquet 2007: 30). Plato wanted to recommend both that Athens return to the ‘ancestral’ constitution that enabled the Athenians to beat the Persians, and abandon the imperialism and decadence of the previous century that resulted in catastrophe (Gill 1980: xx; cf. Waterfield 2008:  lvi). The Atlantis story, therefore, is both a charter myth for modern Athens (Morgan 2000) and a cautionary tale about the evils of sea power (Hale 2009). And Plato’s praise of Athens, offered to her ironically at the Panathenaea, is an instance of Platonic protreptic. It is meant to problematize and critique actual Athens, the city as it was and had been, and point toward a possible Athens, the moderate and stable, non-democratic, non-commercial land power that she was not but ought to be.35 This combination of the charter myth and cautionary tale views is persuasive for at least three reasons. First, it makes sense of the Atlantis myth’s prescriptive and critical components, rather than emphasizing one and ignoring or downplaying the other, as we have seen; second, it fits with Plato’s known political views (Waterfield 2008:  lvi):  it is critical of the Athenian navy and associated imperialism, and it recommends reform of the extreme democracy; third, it explains why the Timaeus and Critias appeal to the authority of Solon

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and include Hermocrates as an interlocutor – they are essentially symbols of the myth’s two primary messages: Solon was the author of the celebrated ‘ancestral constitution’, and Hermocrates was the general who defeated the Athenians in Sicily. There is a fourth reason for preferring this combined view: it fits with the historical context in which Plato wrote the myth. As Morgan (1998) and Hale (2009) have suggested, Plato’s Atlantis myth can be read as making a contribution to a fourth-century debate about the future of Athenian foreign policy. Athens was at war with its allies, and the Athenians argued about the costs and benefits of maintaining an empire. Plato seems to have agreed with other conservatives, such as Isocrates, who argued for peace and moderation.36 In the next section, I will show that Morgan (1998) and Hale (2009) are right to connect Plato’s myth to its fourth-century context, but their interpretations don’t go far enough because they don’t identify Plato’s general philosophical reasons for entering his city’s particular foreign policy debate. As Morgan (1998) suggests, and as Vidal-Naquet (1964) first pointed out, there is a significant parallel between the Atlantis myth’s reform messages and the concerns of Isocrates in his fourth-century speeches. In fact, as we will see in the next section, in some places it even seems that Isocrates is expressing Plato’s charter myth and cautionary tale messages explicitly and directly, rather than in the form of an allegory or myth. However, neither Morgan nor Vidal-Naquet adequately explain Plato’s intentions, in view of the fact that ‘Plato rejects contemporary politics’ (Morgan 1998: 117). How can Plato both reject the politics of his city and also have an interest in contributing to a contemporary political debate? Morgan recognizes the problem here. She denies that Plato is merely presenting a ‘cryptic version’ of Isocratean advice, and she even suggests that the cosmology of the Timaeus and the politics of the Republic allow Plato to ‘trace the root of the problem far deeper than Isocrates can’ (Morgan 1998: 117). However, she does not follow Plato in tracing the root of the problem, and so she doesn’t explain the philosophical reasons underpinning the political messages in the Atlantis story. That is what I hope to do in the remainder of this chapter. First, I will show how Isocrates’ On the Peace articulates both the charter myth and cautionary tale messages of Plato’s Atlantis story. Second, I will compare the arguments of On the Peace with a variety of passages from Plato’s dialogues to get at Plato’s views about the ‘root of the problem’, which Morgan and Vidal-Naquet do not explain. Plato and Isocrates were rivals, and Plato was often very critical of Isocrates, but the two men shared some significant moral and political values. As Ober (1998: 250) suggests, ‘Isocrates’ epideictic orations demonstrate that some of the big ideas best articulated by Plato and Thucydides not only were drawn



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from, but eventually were reintegrated (often in modified form) into the broader critical-intellectual culture’. Finally, I will conclude that Plato’s biggest concern in the Atlantis story, was the corruption of desire.37 Plato was critical of the Athenian democracy and its naval empire because they caused moral decline in the city. His critical reflections on the sea and the navy, in the Laws and in the Atlantis story, are linked with his critique of democracy and luxury in the Republic, Gorgias, and Phaedo. Given Plato’s desire to put Athens on trial, it is fitting that, as Socrates prepares to drink his hemlock and shoulder the blame for all of Athens’ fifth-century vices, he takes a moment to talk about the origins of war. Beware of desire, he warns his friends – it is the root of war and civil discord (Phd. 66c). This is a warning that Plato evidently took to heart.

II.  Isocrates and the corruption of desire 1.  Isocrates and Plato Isocrates (436–338 BCE) taught rhetoric and politics during the fourth century BCE.38 At the time, his school was better known than Plato’s Academy,39 and Isocrates himself was the chief proponent of a new form of written rhetorical texts – carefully crafted speeches intended for private reading audiences – that were becoming increasingly common during the fourth century.40 Isocrates and Plato saw each other as rivals,41and neither had much respect for the other’s craft: Plato categorized rhetoric as a branch of sophistry antithetical to genuine philosophy; Isocrates thought philosophers like Plato and Aristotle were devoted to unfruitful ‘disputations’ (Isoc. 13.1)  – at best, a ‘gymnastic of the mind’ (Isoc. 15.266) – that was of no practical use in the actual conduct of life (Isoc. 15.262–3). Isocrates wanted to ‘recast philosophy as rhetoric’, and he hoped to shift rhetoric’s focus away from the ‘ghostwriting’ and ‘ambulance chasing’ it had become known for (Poulakos and Depew 2004: 2–3; cf. Sheeks 1975).42 He and Plato both ‘laid claim’ to the word ‘philosophia’ (Yunis 2014: 244), giving it very different meanings,43 and both sought to develop a new education programme aimed at reforming a degenerate Athenian political culture (Marrou 1956; Poulakos 1997: 93–104; Morgan 2004). Plato famously offered an ‘epic theory’ designed to ‘remake the world’; Isocrates settled for ‘limited amelioration within an existing political system’. Unlike Plato, he saw the Athenian democracy as ‘revisable and worth revising’ (Ober 1998:  248). And he was sure that his

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beautifully written speeches, studied in private by elites, could transform all aspects of civic education and political life in Athens. Despite their differences of opinion about metaphysics and epistemology, the value of democracy, and the problems with the ‘education’ offered by the current polis culture in Athens, Plato may have had genuine respect for Isocrates’ natural talents (Marrou 1956: 135). I wouldn’t be surprised at all if, as he gets older and continues writing speeches of the sort he is composing now, he makes everyone who has ever attempted to compose a speech seem like a child in comparison. Even more so if such work no longer satisfies him and a higher, divine impulse leads him to more important things. For nature, my friend, has placed the love of wisdom in his mind. That is the message I will carry to my beloved, Isocrates, from the gods of this place. (Phdr. 279a–b)

Scholars disagree about whether this reference to Isocrates is sincere or ironic. Many support an ironic interpretation (hereafter the ‘ironic view’).44 As Werner (2012:  229) puts the point, ‘The concluding prophecy of the Phaedrus is not genuine praise or an attempt at reconciliation, but an ironic statement designed to underscore Isocrates’ distance from true philosophy.’ The strength of the ironic view is that it accords with Plato’s critique of rhetoric in the Phaedrus and elsewhere; it is consistent with the fact that, by the 360s (when the Phaedrus was likely written), Plato would have seen Isocrates as a leading representative of the fourth-century Athenian rhetoric that he hoped either to abandon or reform, and it makes some sense of why Socrates refers to a young Isocrates at a time when the historical Isocrates was in his sixties or seventies. If the ironic view is correct, Plato’s reference to Isocrates at the end of the Phaedrus is meant to be disparaging. He might have seen Isocrates as a rival in name only, and he may have wanted to mock the older Isocrates by alluding to the kind of teacher and writer he should have become. There are at least two problems with the ironic view. First, it doesn’t fully account for Plato’s suggestion that the ‘young’ Isocrates had philosophical potential. It is true that Isocrates’ school had very little in common with Plato’s Academy (Marrou 1956; Perkins 1984; Asmis 1986; Morgan 2004), and that Plato designed his metaphysics and epistemology to ‘invalidate and obviate the rhetorical paideia Isocrates offered his students’ (Ober 1998: 251). But the young Isocrates whom Plato refers to in the Phaedrus had an alternative path, an unrealized potential for philosophy.45 Werner thinks the jury was no longer out on this question, since Isocrates would have been in his sixties or seventies



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when Plato wrote the Phaedrus,46 surely beyond the point of giving up political rhetoric for the sake of Platonic philosophy. Readers of the Phaedrus, he says, would have seen that Isocrates ‘had conspicuously failed to do the things . . . that the fictive Socrates had prophesied for [Isocrates’] younger self ’ (Werner 2012: 229). The mistake here, however, is to think of Isocrates strictly as a cause, and not also as a symptom, of the problem Plato hoped to solve with his social and political reforms. If this ‘sincere’ interpretation of the Phaedrus’ reference to Isocrates is correct, Plato would have seen Isocrates as a victim, and not simply as a perpetrator and proponent, of the corrupt rhetorical culture in Athens. In fact, he may have wanted his readers to see the corrupted Isocrates who failed to realize his potential as an example of what was at stake in reforming Athenian education.47 The second problem with the ironic view is that it oversimplifies the relationship between Isocrates and Plato. They had genuine differences of opinion, but they also shared a concern that the political culture in fourth-century Athens needed reform. Each recognized in his own way that ‘the ethos of the polis, expressed through the organization and actions of governmental institutions’, had a profound normative impact on the city because Athenians received so much of their education, not from their ‘literary culture and its popular byproducts’, but ‘through the performance of a political role’ (Ober 1998: 159–60). And each thought the political roles that fourth-century Athenians ‘performed’ were bad for the city. As we saw in Chapter  3, Plato shifted the blame for corrupting the youth from Socrates to Athens. This was part of his counter-indictment and trial of Athens. While it had been popular to suggest that the Sophists in general, and especially Socrates, were to blame for the city’s decline during the Peloponnesian War, Plato argued that it was ‘the very people who say this who are the greatest sophists of all, since they educate (paideuein) most completely, turning young and old, men and women, into precisely the kind of people they want them to be’ (R. 492a–b). This education isn’t intentional or organized. It occurs  – via loud and excessive censure and approval  – in the assemblies, the courts, the theatres, the army camps, and the other public gatherings of the crowd. It overwhelms any ‘contrary education’ (e.g. in philosophy) that a young man might receive (R. 492e), and it encourages him to adopt the crowd’s opinions and attitudes, lead their kind of life, and be the sort of person they respect (R. 492b–d). For Plato, the hoi polloi are the primary educators of the young – the Sophists teach nothing ‘other than the convictions that the majority express when they are gathered together’ (R. 493a) – and so they are also the ones most

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responsible for the formation of the city’s character. If anyone corrupts the youth, it is the crowd. Its influence is irreversible without ‘a divine dispensation’ (R. 492e). Plato thought the hoi polloi were incorrigible, and that the fate of the philosopher was to be marginalized in his city, and so he counselled withdrawal from politics (R. 496). Isocrates did not share Plato’s attitude, toward the crowd or toward politics. He wanted to align himself with the heroes of the democracy, not to blame them in principle for the city’s worst vices (Grg. 515c–17a); he thought the crowd was educable; he was committed to the political life of the city; he wanted to reform Athenian rhetorical culture, and he probably had Plato in mind when he argued in his Panathenaicus that one’s teaching must have a practical application (Isoc. 12.28). Plato and Isocrates disagreed about democracy, rhetoric, epistemology, and metaphysics, and they sniped at each other in their writings, each treating the other as the pretender. These are the philosophical disagreements scholars have in mind when they suggest that Plato couldn’t possibly have been sincere in his praise of Isocrates at the end of the Phaedrus. However, for all their differences, Isocrates shared Plato’s view that fourth-century Athenian politics were degenerate and unstable, and the two of them fought against ‘a common paideutic enemy: the “education” offered by the current polis culture’ (Morgan 2004: 127). Like Plato, Isocrates didn’t blame the Sophists for Athenian vices; he pointed to the city itself, and especially the narcissism and imprudence of its citizens, as the true cause of Athens’ recent hardships:  ‘Indeed, you have caused the orators to practice and study, not what will be advantageous to the state, but how they may discourse in a manner pleasing to you’ (Isoc. 8.5). Since the death of Pericles (Isoc. 8.126), political leaders in Athens have created confusion and given harmful advice because they’ve learnt to ‘strive always to speak for the gratification of their audience but plunge those who are persuaded by them into many distresses and hardships’ (Isoc. 12.140). Isocrates returns to this complaint several times in his speeches. As he says in his On the Peace, the Athenians are ‘in the utmost confusion of mind’, and they govern themselves poorly, because they ‘are not willing to listen to any except those who speak for [their] pleasure’ (Isoc. 8.9). The best thing they could do is reverse their habits as listeners. If you really desired to find out what is advantageous to the state, you ought to give your attention more to those who oppose your views than to those who seek to gratify you, knowing well that of the orators who come before you here, those who say what you desire are able to delude you easily – since what is spoken to



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win favor clouds your vision of what is best – whereas those who advise you without regard to your pleasure can affect you in no such way. (Isoc. 8.10)

Isocrates clearly shared Plato’s view that the political culture of fourth-century Athens fostered sycophantic oratory that was harmful to the city. As Plato puts the point, Athenian rhetoric prioritizes the flattery of its audience over what is best for them (Grg. 502e–3a; cf. R. 493b–c). This significant point of agreement may have been the reason Plato praised Isocrates at the end of the Phaedrus. From his perspective, Isocrates had the right intuitions about the political problem in Athens; he just hadn’t gone far enough in thinking about the solution. Because the ironic view focuses exclusively on the philosophical differences between Plato and Isocrates, it doesn’t even consider the possibility that Plato may have had mixed feelings about his ‘rival’, which seems likely if he thought of him as one of Socrates’ failed students. For my purposes here, it doesn’t matter whether Isocrates’ speeches were intended to offer policy advice (Moysey 1982; cf. Davidson 1990) or serve merely as a rhetorical exercise (Harding 1973), since his ideas were at least plausible enough for Plato to share some of them. It also doesn’t matter whether Plato’s praise of Isocrates in the Phaedrus was sincere or ironic, since it is possible that Plato underestimated Isocrates and didn’t appreciate the degree to which they were kindred spirits, critiquing the fifth-century empire and the fourth-century political culture in Athens, as well as celebrating Solon’s constitution – all for similar reasons. As we will see, Isocrates’ speech On the Peace contains and even helps explain several important ideas in Plato’s Atlantis myth.48 These shared ideas, on their own, are insufficient evidence for thinking the second half of Socrates’ ‘prophecy’ had been fulfilled, or even that Plato was aware of Isocrates’ speech.49 However, regardless of what Plato did or did not know about On the Peace, Isocrates’ speeches are helpful for making sense of the intellectual climate in which Plato wrote his Atlantis myth. And they are especially useful for understanding the link between Plato’s critique of the navy and his ‘trial of Athens’.50

2.  Isocrates and the fourth-century debate The debate over the costs and benefits of sea power was not new in the fourth century. The Athenians had been debating the issue for decades,51 and many had long since settled on the view that the democracy in Athens was a ‘tyranny’ (Thuc. 2.63) based on sea power (Momigliano 1944: 2).52 For some, this was a

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troubling problem for Athens. In his On Themistocles, Thucydides, and Pericles, for example, Stesimbrotus of Thasos (470–420 BCE) criticized sea power in general, and Themistocles in particular, for corrupting the city of Athens: ‘Themistocles robbed his fellow-citizens of spear and shield, and degraded the people of Athens to the rowing-pad and the oar’ (Plut. Them. 4). Pseudo-Xenophon made a related point, suggesting that Athenian sailors had attained too much power in the city because Athenian strength depended on the sea (Ps.-Xen. Const. Ath. 1.2). For others, the benefits of sea power outweighed its costs. In his last speech in Thucydides, Pericles celebrates Athens’ thalassocracy, suggesting that it had made the Athenians ‘absolute masters’ over one of the ‘two divisions of the world accessible to man’ (2.62). And Thucydides himself connects the growth of Greece leading up to the Persian Wars with the development of Greek sea power and the formation of leagues (Thuc. 1.15).53 As Plato approached the end of his life, the Athenians found themselves in a war with several of their allies (the ‘Social War’ of 357–355 BCE) who wanted to secede from the Second Maritime League because Athens had returned to her old imperialistic habits, and a significantly weakened Sparta no longer warranted a defensive alliance (Cargill 1981).54 The Social War went badly for the Athenians, ending in defeat and humiliation only two years after it started, and this triggered a renewed public debate in Athens about the costs and benefits of empire. Isocrates, by then a famous rhetorician and teacher, argued for peace with all of Greece (Isoc. 8.16), and for the end of Athenian imperialism. He wanted ‘things to be just the opposite of what they were in the world that Thucydides had described’ (de Romilly 1958: 92).55 And he specifically argued that sea power was a primary cause of Athenian social and political disorder. In his On the Peace, Isocrates argues that sea power is unsustainable and undesirable (Isoc. 8.66), and he points to the examples of Athens and Sparta as evidence: in both cases, great cities were corrupted and undermined soon after taking up sea power (Isoc. 8.74; cf. 101). Isocrates expressed these views from a position of considerable experience (Hale 2009). When he was in his early twenties, he either sat in the Assembly and watched Alcibiades defeat Nicias in their debate over the Sicilian Expedition, or he heard all about it after the fact, as everyone did at the time (Alc. 17). When he was in his early thirties, Athens fought in the Battle of Arginusae and then infamously executed the victorious generals after a controversial trial. One year later, the Athenians lost the Battle of Aegospotami and surrendered to Sparta, ending the twenty-seven-year war and exposing the Athenians to slavery. These experiences, and many others like them, seem to have shaped Isocrates’ views



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about the corrupting influence of sea power (Isoc. 8.86; cf. 30, 37, 64, 90, 92, 105, 116, 121). But the true beginning of the disaster for Athens was the formation of the Delian League in 478 BCE. That was the moment Athens laid the foundations for sea power (thalassocracy), and Isocrates believed that thalassocracy destroys those who possess it (de Romilly 1958: 93). The dangers of thalassocracy were clear enough in 404 BCE:  ‘Athens barely escaped being enslaved and would have suffered this fate’ if Sparta hadn’t been merciful (Isoc. 8.78; cf. 7.6). But it was the damage sea power caused to Sparta in the decades following the Peloponnesian War that provided ‘convincing proof ’ of thalassocracy’s toxic effects on a city. For this power revealed its nature much more quickly in their case. Indeed it brought it to pass that a polity which over a period of seven hundred years had never, so far as we know, been disturbed by perils or calamities was shaken and all but destroyed in a short space of time. For in place of the ways of life established among them it filled the citizens with injustice, indolence, lawlessness and avarice and the commonwealth with contempt for its allies, covetousness of the possessions of other states, and indifference to its oaths and covenants. (Isoc. 8.94–5)

By the time the Social War broke out between Athens and her allies, Isocrates felt compelled to advise the Athenians to give up their desire for empire. He thought the Athenians had triggered the conflict by sending governors and garrisons to various cities and islands (Isoc. 8.16), and he saw this as a predictable by-product of sea power, which is imperialistic by nature (Isoc. 8.114–15).56 Isocrates wanted his countrymen, who claimed to love democracy and oppose tyranny in all of its forms, to understand that there was something inherently oppressive and undemocratic about thalassocracy (Isoc. 8.69). He argued that if they chose peace, they could end the war with their allies (Isoc. 8.134), truly regain the virtue of their ancestors (Isoc. 8.37–44), and enjoy sustainable prosperity after correcting their imperialistic habits (Isoc. 8.32). Isocrates acknowledged that his recommendation would not be popular because it would ‘appear to put Athens at a disadvantage’ (Isoc. 8.17).57 But this appearance was deceiving because, while peace would bring prosperity to Athens, imperialistic wars only produce the illusion of power:  they create enemies abroad (Isoc. 8.29, 47, 78–9, 82, 100)  and cause social and political corruption at home (Isoc. 8.74, 64, 70, 126). He cites fifth-century Athens as an example. At that time, the city was always on a rollercoaster of success and failure, ‘at one time having more than is sufficient, at another time in the midst

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of famine, siege, and the greatest of all disasters’ (Isoc. 8.90). To Isocrates, these extraordinary successes and devastating losses were symptomatic of the same ‘underlying tendency’: the corruption of Athenian desire (Davidson 1990: 25). The ‘simple-minded’ couldn’t see this because they lacked the foresight and so didn’t recognize the long-term consequences of the city’s actions. They considered the city prosperous and blessed, for example, when it collected tribute from allies, but only because they didn’t understand that the wealth ‘flowing into the city unjustly’ would soon ‘destroy also that which justly belonged to it’ (Isoc. 8.83).58 Like Plato’s Atlanteans (Criti. 121b), Isocrates’ fourth-century Athenians were blinded by their greed. They underestimated the power of their enemies, and they were unaware of their own domestic dysfunction (Poulakos 1997: 44). Isocrates compares himself to a medical doctor (Isoc. 8.39),59 and he suggests that the Athenians’ greed was symptomatic of an underlying ‘disease’ that could be cured with the right reforms, some of which were needed at the level of rhetoric itself because the corruption of desire laid the foundations for a dangerous vulnerability to persuasion. Athenian orators didn’t look after their city’s best interests (Isoc. 8.121–4). They were sycophants who had a gift for telling the Athenians what they wanted to hear: ‘those who say what you desire are able to delude you easily, since what is spoken to win favour clouds your vision of what is best’ (Isoc. 8.10). They ‘speak for the gratification of their audience but plunge those who are persuaded by them into many distresses and hardships’ (Isoc. 12.140). This is how Athens’ worst social and political crises started. ‘Men of this character’ gained power and led the city into misguided conflicts, undermining the polis and enriching themselves (Isoc. 8.121–4). Isocrates cites Sparta’s fourth-century decline as a similar case, involving the same symptoms and the same pernicious cause (Isoc. 8.104),60 and he compares the desire for naval empire to desires for foods and habits that harm the body and soul (Isoc. 8.109).61 Thalassocracy is like a hetaera, an alluring but deadly courtesan. . . .This license which all the world aspires to attain is a difficult thing to manage . . . it turns the heads of those who are enamored by it, and . . . it is in its nature like courtesans, who lure their victims to love but destroy those who indulge in this passion. And yet it has been shown clearly that it has this effect; for anyone can see that those who have been in the strongest position to do whatever they pleased have been involved in the greatest disasters, ourselves and the Lacadaemonians first of all. For when these states, which in time past had governed themselves with the utmost sobriety and enjoyed the highest esteem,



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attained to this license and seized the empire, they differed in no respect from each other, but, as is natural in the case of those who have been depraved by the same passions and the same malady, they attempted the same deeds and indulged in the similar crimes and, finally, fell into like disasters. (Isoc. 8.104–5)

In passages like this, Isocrates describes cities as individuals. He saw Athens as analogous to a single agent, possessing a character or soul of its own. As he says in his Areopagiticus, a separate speech focused on the renewal of the democracy, prosperity and political order are closely related because the politeia is the ‘soul’ (psuchē) of the polis; it has a power (dunamis) over the city that is analogous to the mind’s power over the body (Isoc. 7.14). Athenians often praise self-control as a virtue in individuals, and they widely believe that those who practice it ‘live the most secure life and make the best citizens’. But nobody suggests ‘that we should practice it as a state’ (Isoc. 8.120), and Isocrates thought this was a mistake; the Athenians should cultivate sophrosune as a polis. The problem with sea power is that it stunts the city’s moral development by creating unnecessary desires for the ‘goods’ that empire introduces into the polis. These desires pull the city in opposing directions, inhibiting its ability to deliberate effectively (Isoc. 8.52), and fostering the vices of arrogance (akolasia) and insolence  – moral opposites of sophrosune – which Isocrates points to as the true sources of Athens’ greatest misfortunes (Isoc. 8.119).62 After becoming a sea power, Athens went from sophron to parasophron, from being a city in control of its desires to being a city enslaved by them (Poulakos 1997: 43). This is what the fifth and fourth centuries had taught Isocrates. Sea power causes cities to act against their own self-interest. Its apparent advantages turn out to be harmful (Poulakos 1997: 38–9). Instead of making Athens and Sparta more powerful, thalassocracy ‘incited these two cities both to do and suffer abominable things’ (Isoc. 8.105). Sea power doesn’t simply cause a moral decline in the souls of its citizens, although it does do that (Isoc. 8.126). It also causes a city to suffer a loss of material advantages since, like Socrates in the Apology (30b), Isocrates thought virtue and happiness were inextricably linked (Isoc. 8.32). Many Athenians felt their city had peaked during the Pentecontaetia, but Isocrates thought the power and wealth from this time were misleading appearances, disguising an underlying social malady. For him, the years between the second Persian invasion of Greece and the end of the Peloponnesian war were a time of unbridled excess, characterized by radical instability, not genuine power or prosperity. The material gains were impermanent, consistently giving way to equal or greater losses. And the city suffered a decline in the character of

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its citizens (Isoc. 8.126), because the power and wealth afforded by the empire led the Athenians into self-destructive license (Isoc. 8.69).

3. Isocrates and the Atlantis myth Isocrates’ speeches contain both of Plato’s messages in his Atlantis story  – (1) the reform plans of the ‘charter myth’ and (2) the warnings about the evils of sea power in the ‘cautionary tale’. They also provide a simple causal theory that connects sea power with political disorder and decline. During the time of the Persian invasions of Greece, the Athenian army prospered and won the respect of other city-states thanks to Athens’ ‘order and sobriety (sophrosune) and discipline’ (Isoc. 12.115). It was the formation of the navy that led the Athenians to believe they ‘were licensed to do whatever they pleased’, and that plunged the city as a whole ‘into great confusion (tarache)’. The Athenians quickly lost ‘supremacy both on land and sea’ (Isoc. 8.102; cf. 5.61, 7.7), just as Isocrates would expect: cities under the influence of sea power are like ‘animals lured by bait, at first deriving pleasure from what they seize, but the moment after finding themselves in desperate straits’ (Isoc. 8.34). As we saw above, Isocrates compares the effects of thalassocracy to a disease, and he presents himself as a physician with a cure (Isoc. 8.39). The disease is the corruption of desire, which leads to the loss of a city’s sophrosune (Isoc. 8.119; cf. 22, 30, 34, 83–4, 93). Such a city only manages to bring about its own undoing: as it attempts to fight wars of conquest overseas, it loses its own wealth and property at home (Isoc. 8.83–4, 92),63 enrages its neighbours (Isoc. 8.90), and decimates its home-grown population (Isoc. 8.44, 88; cf. 12.116), fundamentally changing the character of the city.64 These views are extremely close to the cautionary tale message in Plato’s Atlantis myth. The Atlanteans acquired more wealth and power than was compatible with human nature, and it destroyed them, undermining their obedience to the law and commitment to virtue. They became blinded by their greed; they hubristically invaded the Greek world, and they were utterly defeated by mythical Athens, causing them to lose everything, including their original Mediterranean possessions. The ‘cure’ for such a city is sophrosune (Isoc. 8.119), which for Athens would require a complete transformation of the Athenian way of life. But no such thing can come to pass until you are persuaded that tranquility is more advantageous and more profitable than meddlesomeness, justice than injustice, and attention to one’s own affairs than covetousness of the



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possessions of others . . . I observe that happiness is to be found in these ways of life and not in those which we now follow (Isoc. 8.26)65. . . For we are so dependent on our hopes and so insatiate in seizing what seems to be our advantage that not even those who possess the greatest fortunes are willing to rest satisfied with them but are always grasping after more and so risking the loss of what they have (Isoc. 8.7) . . . Let me ask, then, whether we should be satisfied if we could dwell in our city secure from danger, if we could be provided more abundantly with the necessities of life, if we could be of one mind amongst ourselves, and if we could enjoy the high esteem of the Hellenes. I, for my part, hold that, with these blessings assured us, Athens would be completely happy. (Isoc. 8.19)

Here we see Isocrates’ version of Plato’s charter myth message. Sophrosune was the virtue that characterized Sparta’s social and political conduct during its seven hundred years of stability (Isoc. 8.104), and on Isocrates’ view it was a necessary condition for any city hoping to be its own master (Isoc. 8.32). Socrates makes the same point to the young Alcibiades. So it’s not walls or war-ships or shipyards that cities need, Alcibiades, if they are to prosper, nor is it numbers or size, without virtue. . .What you need to get for yourself and for the city isn’t political power, nor the authority to do what you like; what you need is justice and self-control. (Alc. I 134b–d, emphasis added)

As Barney (2001: 211) suggests, ‘Plato is adamant that only the cultivation of virtue is the proper concern of a citizen; and this is a good which, as the Republic will show, can be provided only by a radically un-Athenian system of education.’ In the Atlantis myth, Plato adds to the case for the city-wide cultivation of sophrosune by alluding to Athens’ victory over the Persians at Marathon. The values and the way of life of that earlier, more moderate generation of Athenians deserved the utmost respect, in part because they made those Athenians capable of genuine heroism during the Greco-Persian Wars (Lg. 698a–701e; cf. 679d). In principle, thalassocracy promises to satisfy all of the city’s appetites, and it does provide short-term gains that look good to those who don’t know any better (Criti. 121b). But in practice, it produces an excess of greed and leads to catastrophe. That is what happened to Athens in the fifth century, and then to Sparta in the fourth. Isocrates advises his countrymen to give up their aspiration to a second Athenian Archē because thalassocracy will only cause more suffering (Isoc. 8.19). They should make peace with their allies, be content with their current possessions, and cultivate moderation at home. Plato offered similar advice to Athens, using his Atlantis myth to suggest to Athenians that they recover their

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‘ancestral constitution’ and abandon the imperialism and democratic politics that caused their downfall in the fifth century. Isocrates and Plato agreed about the dangers of thalassocracy, and they both tried to influence Athenian foreign policy in the fourth century. Isocrates did so directly with his speeches. Plato did so obliquely with his Atlantis story. They both favoured ending the Social War and making peace with Athens’ allies, abandoning the city’s naval empire, and returning to the moderate principles of Solon’s constitution. These points of agreement are helpful for understanding the politics of Plato’s Atlantis myth. As Ober (1998: 250) suggests, Isocrates’ speeches can provide us with important insight into ‘the intellectual culture that formed the background and provided the original audience for the monumental and startlingly original projects of Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle’. Plato rejected contemporary politics, and he would never limit himself to the particularities of a contingent policy debate in his city. He was not, as Morgan (1998: 117) says, ‘constructing a more cryptic version’ of Isocrates’ or anyone else’s orations; he was looking at the phenomena at a more general level.66 As Heidegger would say, Isocrates dealt with the ‘ontic’ while Plato focused on the ‘ontological’. This is why Plato’s myth is set in the remote past: his proposal for Athenian politics is something old, not something new; his advice is ancient and timeless, based on the eternal truths of Platonic cosmology, metaphysics, and psychology. Plato can ‘trace the root of the problem’ deeper than Isocrates can (Morgan 1998: 117) because he is looking mostly at causes while Isocrates can see mostly symptoms. Isocrates saw a causal connection between sea power and political decline, but he didn’t have political and ethical theories, a theory of human nature and psychology, a cosmology, a theory of knowledge, and a metaphysical theory to make sense of it. Despite these differences of focus and method, Plato and Isocrates had a shared causal theory (up to a point) about what went wrong in Athens during the fifth century: they agreed that thalassocracy is corrupting of a city’s desire. Isocrates saw this in the examples of historic Athens and historic Sparta; Plato represented it allegorically with the example of Atlantis, his symbol of Athenian imperialism, social disorder, and political decline.

III.  Plato and the navy The Atlantis myth is not the only place where Plato talked about the sea and the navy, and their unhealthy impact on the polis. There is additional textual



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evidence scattered across Plato’s dialogues that suggests he had ongoing concerns about the corrupting influence of the sea and the navy – on Athenian politics, on the education of desire, on social order in the city, and on the character development of Athenian soldiers. These passages show that Plato thought at length about the navy and the ‘naval mob’. He connected both to the corruption of desire in the city, which links them to the ‘charter myth’ and ‘cautionary tale’ messages of the Atlantis story, and makes them part and parcel of Plato’s trial of Athens.

1.  Plato’s nautical imagination Plato was no stranger to the sea or to the navy. His dialogues are full of references to both (Hale 2009: 270). In the Theaetetus, he compares quick-tempered people to ‘ships without ballast’ that are easily swept away (Tht. 144b). In the Republic, he describes the cosmos with a naval metaphor: ‘. . .They came to the light itself, and there, in the middle of the light, they saw the extremities of its bonds stretching from the heavens, for the light binds the heavens like the cables girding a trireme and holds its entire revolution together’ (R. 616b–c). In the Phaedo, he uses the sea as a metaphor for the sensible world. Imagine someone living in the depths of the sea. He might think that he was living on the surface, and seeing the sun and the other heavenly bodies through the water; he might think that the sea was the sky. He might be so sluggish and feeble that he had never reached the top of the sea, never emerged or raised his head from the sea into this world of ours, and seen for himself – or even heard from someone who had seen it – how much purer and more beautiful it really is. . . (Phd. 109c–d)

As Socrates goes over the education programme for the guardians, he is careful to specify that they are not to imitate ‘those who row in triremes, or their timekeepers, or anything connected with ships’ (R. 396a–b). In Alcibiades I, he compares a statesman without justice and self-control to a sea captain ‘completely lacking in insight and skill in navigation’ (Alc. I 135a). In the Critias, he suggests that the gods guide human beings the way helmsmen steer their ships, not by force as shepherds do with their flocks; the gods guide us ‘from the stern, as if they were applying to the soul the rudder of Persuasion. And in this manner they directed everything mortal as do the helmsmen their ships’ (Criti. 109c). In the Laws, he compares moral education to shipbuilding, and in particular to

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laying down the keel ‘as a foundation and as a general indication of the shape’. The Athenian Stranger says his own procedure is ‘exactly analogous’. I’m trying to distinguish for you the various ways in which our character shapes the kind of life we live; I  really am trying to ‘lay down the keel’, because I’m giving proper consideration to the way we should try to live – to the ‘characterkeel’ we need to lay if we are going to sail through this voyage of life successfully. (Lg. 803a–b)

In the Republic, Plato famously uses a ship of state metaphor to describe the democratic city and its inevitable neglect and mockery of philosophers, whom he refers to as ‘true captains’ (R. 488).67 And in the Gorgias, Plato bitterly describes Athens as ‘swollen and festering’, feverish and disordered, thanks to the failed leadership of Themistocles and Pericles, who ‘filled the city with harbours and dockyards, walls, and tribute payments and such trash as that, [and] did so without justice and self-control’ (Grg. 519a). These men failed to realize that cities need justice and self-control, ‘not walls or war-ships or shipyards’, in order to prosper (Alc. I 134b–c).

2. The ‘salty-sharp and bitter neighbor’ In the passages above, Plato looks to the sea as a source of metaphors for understanding the structure of the cosmos, the role of the gods in human life, the purpose of education, the place of the philosopher in the democratic city, and the limitations of Athens’ most cherished former leaders. In other passages, he treats the sea and the navy as insidious causes of the ‘sickness’ afflicting the Athens of his day, just as it had afflicted Periclean Athens (Stalley 1983: 97; cf. Momigliano 1944: 4–5 and Schofield 2016: 140 n. 1). Most Athenians identified with the sea and knew their city’s power derived from the navy (Ps.-Xen. Const. Ath. 2.11; Arist. Pol. 7.1327a–b). But from Plato’s perspective, each was a curse rather than a blessing, and both played a role in destabilizing Athens by harming the souls of Athenians. Plato thought the sea was inherently corrupting, and so the Athenian Stranger suggests that the ‘future state’ they are describing should not have harbours and should not be established near the sea. If it were going to be founded near the sea and have good harbors, and were deficient in a great number of crops instead of growing everything itself, then a very great savior indeed and lawgivers of divine stature would be needed to stop sophisticated and vicious characters developing on a grand scale: such a state would simply invite it. (Lg. 704d, emphasis added)



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The countryside should produce everything needed for daily life, and not enough to develop a surplus for foreign trade: ‘If it yielded a surplus that could be exported in bulk, the state would be swamped with the gold and silver money it received in return – and this, if a state means to develop just and noble habits, is pretty nearly the worst thing that could happen to it’ (Lg. 705b). It is equally important that the resources needed for shipbuilding are not readily available since shipbuilding leads a city into the same troubles (Lg. 705c; cf. Ps.-Xen. Const. Ath. 2.11). Plato understands that people enjoy living by the sea, but this is only because they don’t recognize what it does to their communities: it leads to foreign trade, which leads to social and psychological disorder, which lead to domestic dysfunction and foreign conflict. For a country to have the sea nearby is pleasant enough for the purpose of everyday life, but in fact it is a ‘salty-sharp and bitter neighbor’ in more senses than one. It fills the land with wholesaling and retailing, breeds shifty and deceitful habits in man’s soul, and makes the citizens distrustful and hostile, not only among themselves, but also in their dealings with the outside world. (Lg. 705a)68

As for the navy, the Athenian Stranger complains that sea power has a corrupting influence on character because it ‘relies on cunning and stratagem rather than on the virtues of courage, endurance and self-control’ (Stalley 1983: 101). The earliest Athenians had been infantrymen, and ‘infantrymen can stand their ground’. But later Athenians, those who rowed triremes for the democracy, were sailors, and ‘sailors have the bad habit of dashing at frequent intervals and then beating a very rapid retreat back to their ships’ (Lg. 706c). This kind of practice is bad for individuals and worse for a city. As the Athenian Stranger says, it’s ‘the sort of habit-training that will soon make even lions run away from deer’ (Lg. 707a). Plato focuses on two specific problems with the navy: one related to moral corruption, one related to factional politics. He first complains that sailors don’t see anything wrong with retreating, and he blames their cowardice on their training as sailors: They see nothing disgraceful at all in a craven refusal to stand their ground and die as the enemy attacks, nor in the plausible excuses they produce so readily when they drop their weapons and take to their heels – or, as they put it, ‘retreat without dishonor’. This is the sort of terminology you must expect if you make your soldiers into sailors. (Lg. 706c; cf. Hom. Il. 14.96–102; Plut. Them. 4; Isoc. 12.115–16, 8.77)

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The Athenian Stranger’s second complaint is that, following naval victories, cities don’t reward the bravest soldiers, but instead praise and give credit to ‘the skill of steersman, boatswain and rower and the efforts of a motley crowd of ragamuffins’ (Lg. 707a–b). The oligarchs of Plato’s day had complained for decades that the navy empowered the democracy by putting power in the hands of the ‘naval mob’ (Balot 2014:  187). According to Plutarch, for example, the Thirty Tyrants blamed Themistocles for ‘fastening the city to the Piraeus, and the land to the sea’.69 And so it was that he increased the privileges of the common people as against the nobles, and filled them with boldness, since the controlling power came now into the hands of skippers and boatswains and pilots. Therefore it was, too, that the bema in Pnyx, which had stood so as to look off toward the sea, was afterwards turned by the thirty tyrants so as to look inland, because they thought that maritime empire was the mother of democracy. (Plut. Them. 19.4; cf. Thuc. 1.14, 1.93)70

Plato seems to have shared the oligarchs’ worry about the political repercussions of sea power, explicitly connecting it to the democracy.71 But he also argued that naval tactics and training in their own right had a corrupting influence on the moral character of sailors. The navy was bad for the souls of individual sailors, and bad for the city as a whole. It was ‘too democratic’ and ‘too implicated in Athenian expansionism’ (Reeve 1992: 308). These views shaped Plato’s political imagination, and even his opinions about Athens’ proud history. He acknowledges that most people believe it was ‘by fighting at sea at Salamis against the barbarians that the Greeks saved their country’, but he disagrees and points to two land battles, namely Marathon and Plataea, as the true source of Greek virtue. ‘We maintain that these battles improved the Greeks, whereas the fighting at sea had the opposite effect’ (Lg. 707c). When the Athenian Stranger recounts the earlier mythical history of Athens, the time long before it became a dominant naval power, he notes that the Athenians were defenceless against the Cretan navy, which ‘exercised a tremendous power at sea’. However, tribute payments to Minos were trivial compared to the troubles Athens experienced after becoming a naval power: ‘it would have done them more good to lose seven boys over and over again rather than get into bad habits by forming themselves into a navy’ (Lg. 706b–c). On the whole, there’s nothing to be gained from life by the sea, or from sea power, and there is everything to lose. Foreign trade inflames the appetites; training in the navy discourages the cultivation of courage and other virtues,



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and cities dependent on sea power are inclined toward democracy because naval successes shower praise and rewards on ‘a motley crowd of ragamuffins’ (Lg. 707b) instead of the ‘citizen-elite’ (Lg. 706d).

3.  The corruption of desire and the origins of war Plato also connected war with the corruption of desire in the Phaedo (66c) and the Republic (369a–74a). He does not discuss the navy or the sea in these dialogues, at least not directly,72 but he accounts for the origins of war in terms of unnecessary desires, which give rise to a city with a ‘fever’ and an imperialist foreign policy. These passages, like the ones discussed above, connect some of Plato’s dialogues with fourth-century debates in Athens about the costs and benefits of sea power. As we have seen, Isocrates is one person who may have influenced Plato’s thinking on these issues. Thucydides is another. The exact nature of the relationship between Plato and Thucydides will always be a vexed question.73 Unless miraculous new evidence is discovered, we will never know whether Plato had a copy of Thucydides’ writings; Plato never mentions him, and it is ‘a notorious fact that no fourth-century writer does’ (Rutherford 1995: 66). Regardless of what Plato knew about Thucydides or his writings, Plato’s theory about the corruption of desire, and the imperialism it promotes, complements Thucydides’ views about the ‘real cause’ of the Peloponnesian War. They analysed the same phenomena, but at different levels: Plato saw the cause of war in human psychology, in pleonexia, which gives rise to wars of conquest like the ones Athens fought while building her empire; Thucydides thought the Peloponnesian War had its origins in the threatening expansion of Athens: ‘The real cause I consider to be the one which was formally most kept out of sight. The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon, made war inevitable’ (Thuc. 1.23). If Nails (2012: 10) is right, this threatening expansion of Athens is ‘exactly what [Plato] describes’ in Book II of the Republic, ‘complete with the inevitability of war’ and a theory about ‘expansion as overreaching, desiring beyond what is necessary, pleonexia’.74 These passages in the Republic are related to Plato’s critique of the navy because, as we saw above, the problem of pleonexia can be triggered by sea power. Which is the reason ‘a State aiming at peace ought not even to be within sight of the sea lest it should succumb to the sea’s temptations’ (Momigliano 1944: 5). The elements of Plato’s theory about the origins of war are worth reviewing in broad outline here because they help us see that Plato’s worries about the navy are rooted in his theory of human nature.75 When you place human beings, with their

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‘dangerous, savage, and lawless form of desire’ (R. 572b), in a polis governed by pseudo-politicians who pander to the whims of the assembly and do nothing to address the true welfare of society (Grg. 519a), you have a recipe for disorder, civil strife, and overseas conflict (Phd. 66c). Plato introduces his theory about the origins of war as part of his response to Glaucon’s challenge in Republic Book II (R. 357a–74a). We are all interdependent, Socrates says (R. 369b). Each of us has the same basic needs, and none of us can provide everything for himself. The original polis comes into existence to satisfy these basic needs. ‘Mutual aid, not mutual restraint, is the key to Socrates’ notion of justice’ (Cooper 2000: 12). It is a simple, moderate city (R. 370e). A farmer joins a weaver, builder, cobbler, doctor, and a few other craftsmen and merchants. They exchange basic necessities, and their resources end up distributed equally. Everybody is fed and clothed, and everyone has shelter. Their lives are good. They enjoy peace, health, and long life (R. 372cd). They are moderate and selfcontrolled in everything they do, having ‘no more children than their means allow, cautious to avoid both poverty and war’ (R. 372bc). Everyone has what he needs, and everyone is comfortable enough to feast with his children, drink wine, and hymn the gods (R. 372a–c). Socrates admires the society he describes. He calls it the ‘true city’, and he compares it to a healthy man (R. 372e). Glaucon, the consummate ‘modern’ Athenian, considers it subhuman, at best ‘a city for pigs’ (R. 372d). He complains that it lacks luxuries, and he demands that Socrates add them. Socrates adds the luxuries that Glaucon requests: fancy furniture, delicacies, perfumed oils, prostitutes, pastries, ivory, and gold. To do this, however, he must enlarge the original city, which is inadequate to meet these new demands. ‘We must increase it in size and fill it with a multitude of things that go beyond what is necessary for a city’ (R. 373b). And this changes everything. The original, ‘healthy’ city develops a ‘fever’ (R. 372e). New goods and services mean new people, because one cannot have luxuries without luxury makers, and so the city grows: the original inhabitants are joined by artists and entertainers, jewellery makers and servants, tutors and nannies, beauticians and barbers, chefs and swineherds. ‘We didn’t need any of these in our earlier city, but we’ll need them in this one’ (R. 373c). The consequent influx of people, together with the inflammation of the city’s desires, puts a new strain on the city’s basic resources:  as demands for one thing increase, demands for related goods increase as well. People need to eat, for example, and Glaucon has insisted on an upgrade from the earlier city’s vegetarian diet. If everyone is going to eat meat, however, the city will have to acquire more cattle (R. 373c), and since the original city’s land holdings will no



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longer be adequate for the city’s food production, it will have to acquire new lands from its neighbours by fighting wars of conquest – ‘we’ll have to seize our neighbors’ land’ – and defend its current holdings against any neighbours who have likewise ‘surrendered themselves to the endless acquisition of money and have overstepped the limit of their necessities’ (R. 373d). This will require an army, which means the city must grow even further (374a). If nothing is done to curb the city’s appetites for luxuries, it will be unable to avoid a state of endless expansion and conflict: ‘Having destroyed the land by excessive grazing in the production of meat, and having expanded its boundaries at the expense of its neighbours, it continues to be threatened by war and pillage’ (Hodges and Pynes 2002: 282). Plato saw four general problems with wealthy cities: (1) they turn temperate producers into hedonistic consumers, addicting them to luxury and making them idle (R. 420a–421a); (2)  they cause poverty in neighbouring cities (R. 373e) and live with the constant threat of invasion from the people they have impoverished (R. 374a); (3) they produce social disharmony at home, dividing the city into warring factions, one rich and one poor, and laying the foundations for ‘revolution’ (R. 422e–423a); and (4) they exhaust their own natural resources (R. 373d; cf. Criti. 111b), which reinforces the cycle of domestic dysfunction and foreign conflict. Socrates calls this  – the love of luxury and the extraordinary lengths we go to for its sake – ‘the origins of war’ (R. 373e). ‘It comes from those same desires that are most of all responsible for the bad things that happen to cities and the individuals in them’ (R. 373e). Cities are driven to war with each other, in a competition for limited resources, because they surrender themselves to the demands of their appetites and live beyond the limits of what is necessary (R. 373d). For Plato, philosophy was the remedy for the ‘fever’ that transforms the tranquil original city into an intemperate, expansionistic, and ultimately selfdestructive empire. As Barney (2001: 214) notes, ‘Part of Socrates’ project in the Republic is to make Glaucon see that it is really the pursuit of appetitive pleasure which should be despised as shameful and subhuman’, and the only way to make Glaucon, or anyone else, see such a thing is to introduce him to the higher goods of philosophy. From that perspective, ‘the bribes and lures of [wealth and] power are trash’ (Vlastos 1995: 140). Until a person can reach this perspective, what Shelley called ‘the white radiance of Eternity’, he will be bound to the hedonic treadmill. Therefore, those who have no experience of reason or virtue, but are always occupied with feasts and the like. . .wander in this way throughout their lives,

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never reaching beyond this to what is truly higher up, never looking up at it or being brought up to it, and so they aren’t filled with that which really is and never taste any stable or pure pleasure. Instead, they always look down at the ground like cattle, and, with their heads bent over the dinner table, they feed, fatten, and fornicate. To outdo others in these things, they kick and butt them with iron horns and hooves, killing each other, because their desires are insatiable. For the part they’re trying to fill is like a vessel full of holes, and neither it nor the things they are trying to fill it with are among the things that are. (R. 586a–b)

The idea was not to return to the original city, which is irrecoverable and undesirable given all that it lacks (Reeve 1992: 176–8; cf. Rosen 2005: 72–108 and Barney 2001), such as philosophy and protection against the wolfish individuals who will inevitably arise in it. As Reeve (1992: 176) puts this point, the inhabitants of the original city ‘work, feast, and have sex, but they neither fight nor philosophize’.76 They are all producers, the lowest class in Plato’s final city. If they are going to have any hope of being moderate, they need ‘the careful ongoing rule of a rationality external to their own souls’ (Barney 2001:  219), because the rationality in their own souls is too weak to resist the demands of their appetites (R. 588d; cf. 428d). Even if Plato did not expect the radical political reforms of the Kallipolis (Rosen 2005: 82), he thought it essential to establish moderation as one of his city’s guiding principles by eliminating its unnecessary desires and making the cultivation of virtue a central part of every citizen’s daily discipline. Anything short of that would result in the existential confusion described above (R. 586a– b):  (1) most people, dominated by their appetites, would be trapped on the hedonic treadmill, and (2) the city, dominated by the appetitive hoi polloi, would be driven by an intemperate and irrational pursuit of pleasure and power  – just as it had been in the fifth century under a variety of immoderate political leaders.77 Plato wanted a revaluation of Athenian values. ‘What he attacks is the whole way of life of a society which measures its “power” by the number of ships in its harbours and dollars in its treasury, its “well-being” by the standard of living of its citizens. Such a society, he holds, was Periclean Athens, a society whose basically corrupt principles led to the corruption of all its institutions’ (Dodds 1959:  33). If he couldn’t have a true revolution in Athens and install philosophical leadership in place of the appetitive democracy, at a minimum Plato wanted to change Athenian culture, as ‘its first message man’, and transform Athenian politics as a sort of ‘think-tank activist’ (Allen 2010: 4). Plato brings these themes together in the Gorgias when he criticizes the heroes of the Athenian democracy  – Themistocles, Cimon, Miltiades, and



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Pericles  – for leaving the Athenians ‘wilder’ than they were before they held power in the city (Grg. 515d–16d).78 The true aim of politics is ‘to care for the city and its citizens with the aim of making the citizens themselves as good as possible’ (Grg. 513e) through the moral reform of society (Grg. 504e). And the true statesman is like a doctor; he ‘must have a doctor’s mandate’, because his role is ‘ruthlessly to restore the health of a sick society (such as that of Athens)’ (Dodds 1959: 328). But the former political leaders of fifth-century Athens did the opposite. They made the city worse because they were ‘servants, satisfiers of appetites’ (Grg. 518c) who ‘threw parties’ for the Athenians and ‘feasted them lavishly with what they had an appetite for’ (Grg. 518e). These men were not incompetent; they were good at satisfying the demands of the imperialist democracy. They just had the wrong conception of the true statesman’s aim, which is therapeia (Grg. 517e). The crucial point here is that Plato identifies the navy, and the imperialism it encouraged, as an ‘illness’ that undermined the city during the Peloponnesian War. ‘For [the former leaders] filled the city with harbours and dockyards, walls, and tribute payments and such trash as that’, which caused the city to be ‘swollen and festering’ (Grg. 519a) with appetites that make a man worse (Grg. 503c), and this made the city so intemperate that the Athenians lost ‘not only what they gained but what they had originally as well’ (Grg. 518e–19b).79 All of these passages resonate with Plato’s Atlantis myth and Isocrates’ On the Peace: naval imperialism is corrupting of desire, and it leads to imprudence and the loss of one’s possessions. They also help us connect Plato’s critique of the Athenian navy with his broader trial of Athens. The message is the same: Socrates didn’t corrupt the youth; the city did. When Themistocles ‘fastened the city to the Piraeus, and the land to the sea’, turning Athens into a sea power, he sealed Athens’ fate, making the city’s future leaders into ‘servants and satisfiers of appetites’ and turning the Athenians away from the self-control and discipline necessary for their happiness (Grg. 507c–d). During the opening moments of the Phaedo, Socrates criticizes the body for a handful of reasons, most of them related to what he calls ‘training for death’. The body is ‘an evil’, he says, because it’s an obstacle in our pursuit of truth. It keeps us busy with its need for nurture; it is vulnerable to disease; it ‘confuses’ the soul with wants, desires, fears, and illusions; and it sows the seeds of war: only the body and its desires ‘cause war, civil discord and battles, for all wars are due to the desire to acquire wealth, and it is the body and the care of it . . . which compel us to acquire wealth’ (Phd. 66c). This last point links the purification passages in the Phaedo with the Republic’s account of the luxurious city.80 It also

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provides a link between the Phaedo and both the Gorgias’ critique of democratic Athens (Grg. 519a) and the Apology’s account of the philosophical life (Ap. 29de): Socrates’ ‘street philosophy’, what he calls the ‘true political craft’ (Grg. 521d), was partly aimed at preventing imperialist wars of conquest by changing the souls of the individuals who lead cities into them (Barney 2001: 214). Making these connections allows us to see some of the early and middle dialogues in a new light. The Phaedo, for example, doesn’t just complete the drama of Socrates’ trial and death. It adds to Plato’s counter-indictment of Athens: had she listened to the pestering gadfly on her neck, she wouldn’t have overreached in the war, and so wouldn’t have had reason to murder the best man in her city.

IV.  Praise for Athena on her birthday The purpose of this chapter was, first, to confirm that Plato’s Atlantis myth had at least two intended meanings:  (1) the ‘cautionary tale’ warning that Athens is better off not rebuilding its naval empire, and (2) the ‘charter myth’ recommendation that the Athenians should abandon their extreme democracy and replace it with the ideal city of the Republic; and, second, to connect these intended meanings to Plato’s ‘trial of Athens’. It is impossible to know Plato’s intentions with certainty, for all kinds of reasons (most importantly, he never speaks in the first person, and he never explains what the myth means or how it fits with the rest of his philosophy). However, it helps to situate the myth in its mid-fourth-century historical context. As we saw above, Plato wrote the Atlantis myth around the time of a public debate about the virtues and vices of thalassocracy, and he may have intended to influence that debate and the future of Athenian foreign policy. At a minimum, it is fair to say that Plato’s myth is compatible with the detailed arguments in Isocrates’ speech On the Peace, which warns its audience about the evils of sea power and invites Athenians to return to the noble values and way of life that served them so well in the fifth century. Plato and Isocrates were rivals who had very little in common:  one was a philosopher who trashed Athenian oratory; the other was an Athenian orator who trashed philosophy. But both shared a concern about the corrupting influence of the polis culture in fourth-century Athens, and both believed that the navy, and the imperialistic way of life it promoted, was bad for the souls of individual Athenians, and bad for the city as a whole. If Plato’s views in the



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Atlantis myth are ambiguous, he makes them very clear in the Laws and in the other dialogues where he mentions the sea and the navy, and their effects on the city. There it is clear that Plato agreed with the conservatives who blamed Themistocles for Athens’ humiliating fifth-century defeat. The city was better off not being ‘fastened to the sea’. The ‘charter myth’ and ‘cautionary tale messages’ of the Atlantis myth are relevant to Plato’s ‘trial of Athens’ because they underscore his case against the city as the true corruptor of the youth. Socrates wasn’t to blame for the crimes committed by men like Alcibiades and Critias. He couldn’t really communicate with them, just as he couldn’t communicate with Callicles in the Gorgias, because the city got to them first. Nothing would change this disconnect between the philosopher and the city until Athens underwent a genuine political revolution, one that replaced the extreme democracy with a politeia more conducive to moderation and discipline. Until then, the corruption of desire in the souls of the youth was a foregone conclusion. And that meant more war, more suffering, and more catastrophic losses. On that path, the best-case scenario is that Athens ascends to the same heights as Atlantis, only to be destroyed by Zeus and the other gods for acquiring more wealth and power than is compatible with human nature. This is Plato’s festival speech of ‘just and true praise’ for Athena on her birthday. Like any good Panathenaea speaker, Plato invites his audience to remember the fifth-century victories over the Persians. But not as part of a recommitment to the city’s identity as a sea power. His goal is to seduce Athens (with memories of Athenian heroism) and then humble her (with memories of utter defeat), that is, to show his countrymen the gap between who they are, who they were, and who they aspire to be. His method, like Socrates’ in Alcibiades I, is ad hominem, but in this case his target is the character of an entire city, not just of an individual. He is attempting to lay down the ‘ “character-keel” we need to lay if we are going to sail through this voyage of life successfully’. Nothing could be more appropriate for a speech at the Panathenaea, the annual festival that symbolized and celebrated the Athenians’ understanding of themselves, since ‘our character shapes the kind of life we live’ (Lg. 803b).81 For at least a generation, the Athenians had proudly dressed their patron goddess in a beautiful sail on her birthday, and they had looked out toward the Aegean as the source of their future prosperity and power. Plato used his Atlantis myth to turn his city’s attention inward, to reflect on the evils of thalassocracy, and to unfasten his polis from the sea.

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Notes 1 The Panathenaea was held annually, but it was given a special celebration every four years. Neither the Timaeus nor the Critias indicates whether this is an ordinary or grand Panathenaea. See Waterfield (2008: xii). Clay (1997: 49) thinks the occasion ‘is almost certainly the quadrennial Panathenaea’, since it attracted both Timaeus and Hermocrates to Athens. 2 See Parker (1996: 89–92) and Parke (1977: 33–50) for important details about the Panathenaea. Parke (1977: 34) notes that the competitive recitations of Homer ‘may have had a permanent effect on the transmission of the Iliad and Odyssey’; they became so important to the Panathenaea that Pericles ‘built the Odeion as a concert hall for their performance’, where professionals of high standing would compete for valuable prizes of cash and sacred olive oil. 3 The Athenians sang and danced, and then followed the peplos at sunrise as it was taken up to the statue of Athena and placed on her as a robe by priests and priestesses from the Praxiergidai, a clan whose ancestral privileges included washing the statue and caring for its garments (Barber 1992: 113). As part of the same ritual, over one hundred sheep and cows were sacrificed by being set aflame on Athena’s altar (Neils 1992: 16–17), the meat from which was then distributed through the city and enjoyed in many feasts. See Aristophanes’ Clouds (386–7) where Socrates associates the Panathenaea with indigestion: ‘When you have heartily gorged on stew at the Panathenaea, you get throes of stomach-ache and then suddenly your belly resounds with prolonged rumbling.’ 4 Barber (1992: 114) observes that the peplos was such an attraction that foreigners would make special trips into Athens every four years to see it. 5 Cf. Neils (1992: 22) who speculates that many elements of the Panathenaea were ‘later additions motivated by political developments in Athens or influenced by events taking place in the greater Greek sphere. . .Festivals like the Panathenaea, which involved so much of the voting populace and large expenditures, would have been of keen interest to Athenian politicians, and could be exploited for political ends.’ The use of the Panathenaea to intertwine the city’s patron goddess with a famously beautiful symbol of the navy is a good example of this. In his ancient guidebook of Athens, Pausanias recorded that the ship-cart was kept near the Areopagus from one Panathenaea to the next, and it became one of the many sights for visitors to admire (Parke 1977: 39). 6 Cf. Parke (1977: 39) who speculates that the ship was added to the procession because the ‘power and glory of Athens was based so clearly on its fleet’. 7 This Critias is either Plato’s mother’s cousin – the Critias of the Charmides and Protagoras, the Critias of the Thirty Tyrants – or that cousin’s grandfather (Zuckert 2009: 429–30 n. 24). Morgan (2000: 262) presents the possibilities without taking



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a position; Vidal-Naquet (2007: 14) assumes it is Critias the tyrant; Lampert and Planeaux (1998: 95–6) make the case that, simply as a ‘matter of temporal possibilities’, the Critias of the Ti. and Criti. is the grandfather of the Tyrant. For a comprehensive discussion of this Critias’ identity as the grandfather of the infamous tyrant, see Nails (2002: 106–8). She also calls it a ‘living controversy that shows no signs yet of abatement’ (108). Broadie (2013: 253) avoids the controversy by suggesting that, at a minimum, Plato must have expected the names ‘Critias’ and ‘Hermocrates’ to ‘bring to mind’ the Sicilian Expedition and the brutal regime of the Thirty Tyrants. Hermocrates is the Syracusan general who defeated the Sicilian Expedition in 413 BCE. Socrates had four guests on the previous day, but one of them is absent on the day of the Timaeus due to illness. Lampert and Planeaux (1998: 107–19) argue that this unnamed person was Alcibiades. Cornford (1952: 6–8) considers possible contents for the projected Hermocrates. Many commentators since Proclus (412–485 AD) have thought Socrates’ speech ‘yesterday’ just was the Republic itself. See Lampert and Planeaux (1998: 90 n. 10) for a list of sources who make this assumption, which they reject. Brann (2004: 29), Waterfield (2008: xii), and Annas (2010: 52) note the problems with making such an assumption: Socrates is at a different festival, at a different time of the year, in different company, and he seems to underscore the fact that they covered only some of the reforms discussed in the R. (Ti. 19a–b): most significantly, they omitted the distinction between the auxiliaries and the guardians, and the ideal of the philosopher ruler. For a nuanced position on this issue, see VidalNaquet (2007: 16), who suggests that Plato’s intention was to ‘convert the normative analysis of the Republic into history’, and at the same time to place the R. as a whole in the ‘world of myth’. But they come close: Critias’ ‘mythical Athens’ (see note 13) was ruled by a harmonious and separate military class like the one depicted in the R. (Ti. 24a, 26c). And the outcome of the war between Atlantis and Athens confirms Socrates’ claim in the R. that a ruling class prevented from owning property helps produce a state that is cohesive, stable, and able to defeat any enemy, regardless of its wealth and resources (R. 422a–e). Mythical Athens was harmonious and stable; it was governed by a ruling class that was not allowed to own private property, and it won a surprising victory against Atlantis, a resource-rich imperialist state (Criti. 110c–d, Ti. 23c, 25b). Morgan (2000: 263) suggests that Plato refers to the ‘universe of the Egyptian priests’ because he wanted to portray the Greeks as ‘historiographic children’, cut off from their ‘cultural past’, and thus create ‘a blank state on which more philosophical history may be written’. Vidal-Naquet (2007: 23–4) suggests that Plato was imitating

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Plato’s Trial of Athens Herodotus – parodying the very first sentence of his Histories – and presenting a ‘pastiche of history’. Cf. Gill (1980: xvii, xx–xxi, 1976: 6). For the sake of clarity, when talking about the Atlantis myth in this chapter, I refer to the Athens of the myth as ‘mythical Athens’, and I refer to the historical city as ‘historic Athens’. It’s worth noting that, among other things, this passage (Ti. 20e) reveals that, through his mother Perictione, Plato could trace his ancestry back to Solon. However, it is important to note, as Dodds (1959: 357) does, that Plato’s critique of Athenian political heroes in the Grg. (515b–19b) ‘applies not only to Pericles and Themistocles but to the “grand old men” of the conservatives, Miltiades and Cimon’. Miltiades commanded the Athenians at Marathon, so Plato’s praise of the Marathon era cannot be unqualified. This point is relevant to Plato’s trial of Athens because it shows that, as Dodds observes, Plato is careful throughout the dialogue ‘not to present Socrates as a mere ‘party-man” ’. This moral nostalgia is not uncommon in Plato: ‘Weren’t our primitive men simple and manlier and at the same time more restrained and upright in every way?’ (Lg. 679d) For discussions of the Atlantis myth as a story with moral and political lessons, see Vidal-Naquet (1986 , 2007), Gill (1980), Morgan (1998, 2000), Hale (2009), and Annas (2010). For a similar view, see Broadie (2013: 256–7). It is not clear how the politics of the Atlantis myth fit together with the cosmology of the Timaeus (Waterfield 2008; cf. Annas 2010) partly because the Criti. is unfinished. For example, we don’t know what Hermocrates, the Syracusan general who defeated the Sicilian Expedition, would have had to say. And we don’t know whether the unnamed fourth interlocutor might have appeared in the Crit., perhaps arriving late like Alcibiades in the Symp. (Lampert and Planeaux 1998). As Gill (1980: xiv) notes, the omission of the philosopher-ruler ideal in the Ti and Criti. might reflect some of the changes in Plato’s later political thinking, which increasingly expresses scepticism about the idea that anyone, however good or wise, could hold unchecked power without being corrupted by it. He therefore replaces the ideal of the philosopher-king with a new ideal of submitting to a well-drafted code of laws, which is given the authority of ‘divine rule’ (Lg. 713c; cf. 875 and Plt. 33). As Gill (1980: xiv) sums up the important point, one of Plato’s messages in the Atlantis myth seems to be ‘that political authority, unchecked by law, leads to moral decline, political disunity and, ultimately, disaster for the whole state’. More on this below in the ‘Cautionary Tale’ section. Earlier versions of the ‘charter myth’ view appear in Taylor (1928: 50) and Hackforth (1944: 8–9). Morgan (1998) presents a more complete picture of Plato’s message in the Atlantis myth. In addition to stressing the story’s positive recommendations, she also points



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out its implications for fourth-century deliberations about Athenian foreign policy and the legitimation of their constitution. See Morgan (2000: 265–6) for a comparison of Plato’s Atlantis myth and Isocrates’ Panegyricus and Panathenaicus, both of which stress the splendours of Athens’ past in order to argue for the best course of action in the present. See Gill (1977, 1979, 1993) for careful discussions of the Atlantis myth’s fictionality; he compares the myth with modern concepts of fiction and with earlier forms of historiography. Gill (1979: 75 n. 1) notes that Plato may have borrowed the literary device of appealing to Egyptian authority from Herodotus and Hecataeus. This use of Solon as a symbol of constitutional excellence, and of Egypt as ‘a repository of the antiquity of the world’ (Vidal-Naquet 2007: 17), is probably ironic, and it may be intended to mock and exploit his contemporaries’ appeals to authority. Plato didn’t approve of his city’s cultural practices, but he was happy to use them as masks for disguising his revisionary history. The fact that Solon was the founder of Athenian democracy makes him the perfect ‘Trojan Horse’ for Plato’s reform-oriented charter myth. What mattered most was ‘Solon’s aura’, not any legal or historical detail (Morgan 2000: 270) – in the fourth century his name had become a ‘floating signifier of constitutional excellence’ (Morgan 1998: 113). The Athenian army was also destroyed by the earthquakes and floods that sank Atlantis, but not all of the Athenians perished. Some survived as ‘illiterate mountain people’ who lived on with ‘dim legends’ of their former city (Criti. 109d– e). These people eventually repopulated Athens, and their descendants transformed the city into the naval empire and cultural centre it was in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Vidal-Naquet (2007: 20) observes that the same predominance of the human element over the divine is alluded to in the Atlantis story’s subplot involving Poseidon’s desire (epithumia) for a girl named Clito, whose name evokes glory (kleos). Clito’s father, Evenor, ‘evokes a man of valor, while the name Leukippe evokes the white horse which, in the mythical team of horses of the Phaedrus, symbolizes noble passion, thumos . . . Right from the start, there is thus a mixture, an intermingling of the divine and the human’. When mythical Athens meets and vanquishes Atlantis, ‘she really overcomes herself ’, which is why the mythical battle was, ‘at once a ‘Persian’ war and a civil war’ (Vidal-Naquet 2007: 30). In his Against Androtion, Demosthenes says the dockyards, the Propylaea, and the Parthenon were unique sources of civic pride for the Athenians – thanks to them, ‘the People inherits possessions that will never die’ (22.76). Isocrates points out that the ‘democracy so adorned the city with temples and public buildings that even today [mid-fourth century] visitors from other lands consider that she is worthy to rule not only over Hellas but over all the world’. In fact, the dockyards were such a

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Plato’s Trial of Athens potent symbol of the Athenian democracy, Isocrates says, the Thirty disassembled shipsheds and sold the pieces ‘for the sum of three talents the dockyards upon which the city had spent no less than a thousand talents’ (Isoc. 7.66). Cf. Lysias’ Against Eratosthenes for an extremely bitter critique of the Thirty for exactly these actions: ‘there has been no lack in defence of the temples which these men have either sold or defiled by their presence; in defence of the city which they abased; on behalf of the arsenals, which they demolished. . .’ (Lys. 12.99). Garland (1987: 33) comments that these measures were aimed at the Piraeus ‘because it symbolized the exact antithesis of the oligarchic value-system which both they [the Thirty] and the Spartans espoused’. Meiggs (1982: 122) describes the Athenians’ decision to follow Themistocles’ advice and use profits from the Laurion mines to build the Athenian fleet as ‘one of the most important events in the history of western civilization’. Gill (1980) and Vidal-Naquet (2007) note that Plato’s descriptions of Atlantis also recall Herodotus’ account of the Persian Empire (Hdt. 7.23, 33). But, in a way, as Gill (1980: xviii) argues, such resemblances reinforce the allusions to Athens since, according to Thucydides, Athens was accused by Hermocrates of becoming ‘the new Persia’ (Thuc. 6.76; cf. 6.33), and Pericles was thought to have consciously imitated Persian architecture in his redevelopment of Athens during the late fifth century (Plut. Per.13.5-6; cf. Criti. 116d). With this, Plato seems to be alluding to the Sicilian Expedition for a second time. Plato first evokes the memory of Sicily in the Timaeus by the presence of Hermocrates, the Sicilian general who defeated the Athenians at Syracuse, and he alludes to the outcome of the war in general by having the grandfather of Critias, the most reviled of the Thirty Tyrants, serve as the storyteller. Consider Momigliano (1944: 4–5), who suggests that ‘the myth of the Critias was imagined to describe the victory of the ideal State over sea imperialism, though even there navigation is not taken as an evil ipso facto’. See Griswold (1996: 147) for a discussion of Plato’s use of myth as a ‘complex mirror’ in which we can see both who we are and who we ought to be. Dodds (1959: 362) thinks the influence went the other way around: Plato influenced Isocrates. Athens rebuilt its Long Walls (394–3) and Conon led the city’s efforts to build a new Athenian navy. ‘It is evident that Plato viewed with disfavour these attempts at recreating vanished glories (cf. 519a) . . . It is interesting that many years later, in [On the Peace] (64), Isocrates came around to something like Plato’s view on this question.’ One could argue that Plato’s whole project as a political philosopher was to develop an ideal state that protected against the social ills of greed and excesses of power. In Book VIII of the R. it is the abuse of power that destroys timocracy; excess wealth undermines oligarchy, and the spread of license causes democracy to collapse into tyranny.



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38 Davidson (1990: 20) notes, ‘The work of Isocrates occupies an important position in Greek intellectual history. More philosophically-minded than Thucydides or Xenophon, more obviously concerned with current issues and present practicalities than Plato, and more disposed to a broad view and a great subject than the other Attic orators, he is a unique figure in the fourth century.’ For a similar view that focuses on the relationship between Plato and Isocrates, see de Romilly (1958: 93): ‘What I feel sure about is that there must have been much discussion, in many places, starting from the same origin, and fed by arguments which became conventional, almost classic. And it should be added that this discussion seems to have arisen in connexion with foreign politics.’ This positive assessment of Isocrates’ significance is not a universally shared opinion. See Ober (1998: 248 n. 1) for an overview of the debate about whether Isocrates was a serious political thinker or a rhetorician who simply aimed to attract students. 39 Isocrates’ school was open for more than fifty years, and it may have attracted more students than ‘all of the other sophists and philosophers combined’ (Berquist 1959: 254). 40 Isocrates studied under Prodicus, Tisias, Protagoras, and Gorgias. Some (Norlin 1929; Kennedy 1963; Benoit 1991) have wondered whether he also studied with Socrates, although the evidence is inconclusive. Aristotle mentions Isocrates’ name more than any other in his Rhet.; Cicero considered him the ‘master of all rhetoricians’; and Quintilian described him as a master writer and teacher. See Hudson-Williams (1940), Marrou (1956), Berquist (1959), Benoit (1991), Nightingale (1995), Poulakos (1997), Livingstone (1998), Ober (1998), and Morgan (2004) for discussions of Isocrates’ unique contributions to the fourth-century rhetorical and educational culture in Athens. 41 For discussions of the ‘rivalry’ between Plato and Isocrates, see Werner (2012), Poulakos and Depew (2004), Nightingale (1995), and Ford (1993). 42 For a comparison of Plato, Isocrates, and Xenophon regarding attitudes toward sophistry and rhetoric, see Sheeks (1975). As de Romilly (1958: 100–1) says, ‘Isocrates stands halfway between Plato and the sophists; and that makes him look a little silly; but it is on this intermediate position that, through Cicero, was built our modern literary education (at least in France)’. She also thinks Isocrates, with his emphasis on using enlightened opinion (instead of Platonic knowledge) to make the world more sensible, stands halfway between the ‘realistic acuteness’ of Thucydides and the ‘moral intolerance’ of Plato’s city. 43 For discussions of the different ways in which Plato and Isocrates use the word ‘philosophia’, see Marrou (1956: 120–3), de Vries (1969: 15–18), Nightingale (1995: 13–59), Ober (1998), Morgan (2004: 135–6), Livingstone (2007), and Werner (2012: 229 n. 158). 44 For examples of this interpretation, see Howland (1937), de Vries (1953, 1969: 15–18), Coulter (1967), Asmis (1986: 171–2), Rowe (2000: 215–16),

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Waterfield (2002: 105), Werner (2012: 229), and Yunis (2014: 243–4). As Howland (1937: 159) says, ‘It is surely the most comprehensive damnation with the faintest possible praise’. For a detailed examination of Plato’s many references to Isocrates in the Phdr., see Asmis (1986). 45 Yunis (2014: 245–6) sees this point, although he focuses on Plato’s ‘ironic praise’, despite going on to explain that Plato recognized philosophical potential in Isocrates: his ‘natural endowment suits him for philosophy, like the souls at the top of the palinode’s hierarchy of souls (248d2–3), which is high praise from Plato’. Yunis thinks Plato’s praise, ironic or not, is mixed with criticism, because Isocrates would have to give up his profession as a writer of epideictic speeches in order truly to pursue the ‘greater things’ Socrates mentions. And he never did that. If Yunis’ view is correct, Hackforth (1952: 168) is wrong to read this passage as Plato’s attempt to make amends with Isocrates. It would read more as a slap in the face. On this last point, see de Vries (1953), Waterfield (2002: 105), and Werner (2012: 230 n. 162). For a position that supports the argument of this chapter, see Vidal-Naquet (1986: 276). 4 6 In fact, he may have been well into his eighties. See Yunis (2014: 23–5, 244) for a discussion of the Phdr. likely composition date. He calls the evidence ‘meagre’, but he also notes that it is more than what we have for most Platonic dialogues. Yunis’ idea is that Plato wouldn’t have seen Isocrates as a representative of Athenian rhetorical culture until he was advanced in his career and widely known. Yunis concedes that we cannot know precisely when Isocrates would have reached this point, ‘but he had clearly done so by the 360s’, which makes that decade or the 350s the likeliest for the composition of the Phdr. It would certainly be interesting if Plato wrote the Phdr. in the same decade that Isocrates wrote his On the Peace, which I discuss below. 4 7 For a classic statement of the sincere interpretation, see Hackforth (1952: 168): ‘kind words they are, and meant sincerely’. Hackforth first notes that, by 380 BCE, with the publication of his Panegyricus, Isocrates ‘had already put all previous orators in the shade’. The second half of Socrates’ prophecy – Isocrates’ conversion to philosophy – had not been fulfilled, but Hackforth thinks Plato still hoped for its fulfilment: ‘If Plato had, as he surely had, any hope of his proposals for a philosophic rhetoric being adopted, he must win over Isocrates to his cause.’ Hackforth also observes that Isocrates had been offended by R. 500b, which he took to be a criticism of himself, and he speculates that Plato intended the compliment to Isocrates at the end of the Phdr. ‘as an amende, a generous recognition of Isocrates’ merits, though implying no retraction of Plato’s criticisms’ (143 n. 2). Cf. Werner (2012: 229 n. 160) who denies that Plato had any such motive because he aimed for the abandonment of rhetoric, not its reform. For additional supporters of the sincere interpretation, see Perkins (1984), Poulakos and Depew (2004), Asmis (1986), and Coventry (1990).



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48 Wagner (1922: 323) suggests that Isocrates’ work deserves genuine praise, regardless of what Plato thought about it. Cf. Perkins (1984: 51). Isocrates shared many of Plato’s criticisms of the sophists. They both argued (1) that the sophists only pretended to teach virtue, (2) that the sophists were unconcerned with the truth – albeit on the basis of very different epistemological and metaphysical assumptions (Isoc. 15.271, 10.5, 5.4, 12.9; cf. Phdr. 237b–c, 259e, 261a and Grg. 473, 508) – and (3) that the sophists put their own self-interest ahead of the common good (Benoit 1991: 63). 49 For a plausible explanation of why Plato was critical of Isocrates, see Cooper (1985: 77): in short, Isocrates lacked theory and did not understand the justificatory need for it. Isocrates had many of the right principles, from Plato’s perspective, but he lacked the philosophical tools with which to justify them, and he was hostile toward those who tried to do so. 50 It is also possible that these shared ideas were among Plato’s reasons for praising Isocrates in the Phdr. 51 As Dodds (1959: 32) notes, Plato seems to have written his Grg., in part, as a response to the Athenians’ renewed imperialist ambitions in the fourth century. The city’s economy was back on its feet; the Long Walls had been rebuilt, and Conon, ‘like a second Themistocles’, had built a new Athenian navy. The Grg. was Plato’s prolonged meditation on the causes of the ‘material and spiritual ruin of Periclean Athens’, and it was intended to persuade fourth-century Athenians against ‘recreating vanished glories’. Cf. Garland (1987: 37–45). 52 There was probably a lot of literature attacking Athenian sea power immediately after 404 BCE, but if so it has mostly been lost, with a few exceptions (Momigliano 1944: 3–4). 53 Aristotle was more measured than Isocrates and Plato on the value of sea power, suggesting that its economic and military advantages were too great for any prudent city to ignore. However, even moderate Aristotle advocated (1) controlling the port’s markets, (2) separating the port from the city, and (3) not granting sailors the rights of citizenship: ‘it is not necessary for states to include the teeming population that grows up in connection with common sailors, as there is no need for these to be citizens’ (Arist. Pol. 7.6). On the whole, none of the Athenian philosophers overcame ‘the distrust of the acquisitive instinct and of the plebeian habits which were believed to be peculiar to sailors and maritime cities’ (Momigliano 1944: 7). As we will see below, Plato was no exception to the rule. In fact, he was one of navy’s harsher critics. 54 The Second Maritime League was founded in 377 BCE as part of Athens’ efforts to regain what it had lost at the end of the Peloponnesian War. The charter for this alliance included guarantees of autonomy and constitutional freedoms for Athens’ allies. Members were promised freedom from garrisons and tribute payment, and the Athenians were strictly prohibited from owning allied land.

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Plato’s Trial of Athens The degree to which Athens violated the terms of the League charter is unclear (Marshall 1905: 50–3; cf. Cargill 1981: 146–50). Yunis (1996: 145) thinks Plato began ‘warning his fellow citizens against repeating the mistake of the generation of Pericles’ as early as when he wrote the Grg. Harding (1973: 148) questions this interpretation of Isocrates’ speech. He thinks it’s misguided to believe that a man who took ten years to write a speech had any intention ‘to influence the politics of the moment’. Isocrates describes the tribute collected by Athens as the product of extortion (Isoc. 8.29) and plundering (7.46), and he describes the Athenians as acting like pirates (8.90) and tyrants (8.91), none of which is democratic (8.89). This last point appears to be aimed at the common Athenian presumption that Athens was especially democratic and opposed to tyranny (8.114). Isocrates specifically points to the display of tribute at the Dionysia as a cause of hatred for Athens (8.82), and he warns that the Athenians cause hostility, wars, and great expenses to themselves by sailing through the islands and forcing other cities to make contributions to the empire (8.29). At the Dionysia festival in Athens, before the staging of new plays and in front of thousands of Athenians, a procession of porters would walk through the orchestra carrying the annual tribute money – hundreds of silver talents, an extraordinary display of imperial wealth – that had been gathered from allies that spring. This kind of imperialism, hubris, and cruelty had predictable consequences: the oppressed cities learnt to hate Athens, and that hatred led to revenge and conflict, which caused the destruction of Athens (8.78). Thucydides (Thuc. 1.99) makes a similar point, pointing to tribute and Athenian oppression as primary reasons for the unpopularity of Athens at the outbreak of the war. He also realized he was arguing against prevailing opinion. As we have seen, the city’s most popular orators were experts at telling the Athenians what they wanted to hear, and in doing so they spread confusion and foolishness, transforming healthy ambitions into a foolish desire to dominate (Isoc. 8.10, 102; cf. 12.140). The Athenians lost everything ‘because of the war and of the disorder which these sycophants have caused’ (8.121). As examples, Isocrates cites (1) the Sicilian Expedition, whose goals were utterly foolish: ‘at a time when they were not even masters of their own suburbs they expected to extend their power over Italy and Sicily and Carthage’ (Isoc. 8.84), and whose consequences were a catastrophe for Athens; and (2) imperialism after the formation of the Delian League in 478 BCE, which led to the losses of Athens’ old territories and the power she enjoyed following the Persian Wars (Isoc. 8.7, 30, 42, 92). See Ober (1998: 264) for a discussion of how Isocrates frequently described his critique of the speaker/audience relationship around the concept of therapeia. Plato used the same metaphor for describing the relationship between statesman and



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city: Grg. 503c, 518a, R. 425e, Lg. 650b, and Ep. VII 330d. I discuss some of these passages in Chapter 3. In his address to Philip of Macedon, Isocrates credits Alcibiades with undermining the Spartans by persuading them to take up thalassocracy: ‘the Lacedaemonians, who then appeared to be at the height of their fortune, are [now] reduced to their present state of misfortune – all on account of Alcibiades. For because they were persuaded by him to covet the sovereignty of the sea, they lost even their leadership of the land’ (Isoc. 5.60–1). Poulakos (1997: 36–7) suggests that, in this passage, Isocrates follows Plato in using metaphors of eating ‘to link the pleasurable with the harmful. In turn, he relies on that same linkage to align the desires for pleasure in sharp contrast to self-interest.’ The connection between self-control and freedom is a recurrent theme in Isocrates’ writings (Poulakos 1997: 41). In his letter to Demonicus, Isocrates recommends self-control to the monarch on the grounds that it is ‘shameful to rule over one’s servants and yet be a slave to one’s desires’ (Isoc. 1.21). He makes a similar point to Nicocles, suggesting that a man becomes a true king only when he is ruler over his own desires (Isoc. 3.29), and to Evagoras whom he applauds for becoming a master of himself and avoiding slavery to his pleasures (Isoc. 9.45). There was no better example of this than the Sicilian Expedition, which sent ships to conquer Sicily while Athens was losing Attica to the Spartans (Isoc. 8.84). In his Panathenaicus, Isocrates connects the navy’s impact on the city’s population to a profound change in the Athenian character. Thanks to the desire for absolute power, Athens had become overly reliant on mercenaries and non-citizens (Isoc. 12.116), ‘the common enemies of all mankind’, and they paid them by ‘doing violence to [their] own allies’ (8.46). This produced only the illusion of power since the rowers’ allegiance could be purchased away from Athens by a higher bidder, and it destroyed former alliances in the process (8.44). For a treatment of Isocrates’ political theory that focuses on his case for eunoia (good will) and omonoia (concord), and compares him with Thucydides and Plato, see de Romilly (1958). As she says, ‘What people in Thucydides wanted to do by use of force, Isocrates wants to do by the use of good will.’ See also Harding (1973: 140–3) who describes the same goal but questions whether we can attribute it to Isocrates. For a similar view that engages the more general question of Plato’s interest in reconstructing of the past, see Tulli (2013: 274–5). Cf. Alc. I 135a. Cf. Lg. 949e and 952b–d, which criticize travel and travellers for similar reasons. Plato’s Atlantis had a similar history. The original ‘city’ was an isolated and fertile garden separated from mankind and from the sea (Criti. 113d–e). It isn’t until the descendants of Atlas fasten the city to the sea by digging canals and converting

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natural land formations into harbours and dockyards (115c–16c) that everything changes (Gill 1976: 8–9): the city is exposed to the many influences of the sea; the garden paradise develops into a busy commercial centre, and the Atlanteans become spoilt by an influx of wealth. As I note above (note 29), the Thirty were so concerned about the connection between the navy and the democracy that they also destroyed the prized shipsheds of the Piraeus. See Garland (1987: 33–5) for a discussion of the Thirty’s reforms to the speaker platform on the Pnyx. He notes that the Thirty were often motivated to do things strictly for their symbolism, even at great expense. But because the Pnyx ‘affords a very poor view of the sea’, he finds it implausible that the Thirty would waste so much labour and money on a reform that ‘could only marginally assist’ in asserting a new political ideology. These are fair points, but it may have been sufficient for the Thirty that the old platform faced the sea; and the extraordinary expense and labour involved in its reorientation would have helped ‘assert’ the new ideology. In fact, Plato is one of Plutarch’s sources in the biography of Themistocles (Plut. Them. 4). Just before citing Stesimbrotus of Thasos, an opponent of Pericles and early critic of Athenian sea power, Plutarch cites Plato’s Laws (Lg. 706). As I discuss in the conclusion of this book, the setting of the R. in the Piraeus gives the dialogue dramatic irony and contributes significantly to its overall meaning. And in his discussion of the guardians’ education in Book III of the R., Socrates mentions the rowers in the navy, their timekeepers, and the triremes themselves; and he says the neophyte guardians must avoid these things because they must avoid imitating ‘madmen’ (R. 396a–b). See Chapter 2, note 76, and Chapter 3, note 9. The Kallipolis is designed, from the beginning in Book II, to solve the problem of corrupted desire, the desire for luxuries and the need to protect them from others (R. 373d–e). Plato’s concerns about human nature’s ‘pleonectic tendencies’ (Ober 1998: 222) are also evident in the R.’s abolition of private property for the guardians. As Annas (1981: 77) says, Plato did not want to build his political theory on ‘the optimistic assumption’ that everyone will limit themselves to the satisfaction of natural and necessary desires, because he knew ‘they just won’t’. This is the ‘root of the problem’ that Morgan (1998: 200) and Vidal-Naquet (1964, 1992, 2007) do not connect to Plato’s critique of the navy in the Atlantis myth. In this short section, I provide an outline of Plato’s views about the development of the luxurious city with a fever. Among other things, the original city lacks the means to defend itself against internal and external enemies; its stability depends on ‘a fantasy world in which people never pursue pleonetic satisfaction (R. 359c3–5), never lose control of themselves or succumb to akrasia’ (Reeve 1992: 178). It also lacks philosopher kings



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who have knowledge of the Good, and without their leadership there is no hope to solve the political problem (R. 473c–e). As Barney (2001: 220) says, ‘Nuts and berries are no substitute for the rule of reason.’ Annas (1981: 78) suggests that ‘we have to conclude, though reluctantly, that Plato has not given the first city a clear place in the Republic’s moral argument’. The first city is flawed in important ways, but it is also admirable for its moderation, especially its freedom from the destruction caused by satisfying unnecessary desires (R. 373b). Cf. Crombie (1962: 89–90) and Reeve (1992: 308). See Gill (1976: 8–9). I discuss these passages, and the Grg. as a whole, at great length in Chapter 3. See Dodds (1959: 364) for an important discussion of this passage. Barney (2001: 226) comes very close to this view. She suggests that ‘Plato consistently presents his ethical and political programme as one of opposition, not to dangerous modernity, but to the perennially mesmerizing desire for wealth. It is that desire which is, more than anything, at the root of all misdeeds; it is the cause of all wars and civil strife.’ However, she also argues that the political point of the Atlantis myth is to guard against a predictable ‘misreading of the Republic, by emphasizing that material austerity is optional for a virtuous society’ (223). On her view, Plato’s point with the Atlantis myth was to suggest that the ‘mere presence or absence’ of wealth is irrelevant to a society’s health; what matters is that wealth is not ‘wrongly valued’ (224). It is unclear how we are supposed to square this with Plato’s conviction that ‘it is a permanent feature of our nature that most people are dominated by appetite, and it is in the nature of appetite to be non-self-regulating’ (226). If human nature really does contain ‘a dangerous, savage, and lawless form of desire’ (R. 572b; cf. 588c), then the presence of wealth would be a constant threat to stability in society, not an irrelevant presence. Moreover, she fails to make sense of the R.’s abolition of private property in the ruling class. If the presence of wealth really were ‘irrelevant’, the communism in the ruling class would be superfluous. As Parker (1996: 91) notes, the procession at the Panathenaea was ‘the supreme example in the Greek world of civic pageantry, of a society on display before itself and the rest of Greece’.

Conclusion: Plato’s Trial of Athens

As the Timaeus begins, it refers to the Republic.1 And as the Republic begins, Socrates mentions the Piraeus. ‘I went down to the Piraeus yesterday with Glaucon, the son of Ariston. I wanted to say a prayer to the goddess, and I was also curious to see how they would manage the festival, since they were holding it for the first time’ (R. 327a). A  lot has been written about these opening remarks since antiquity (Riginos 1976: 185–6). They have been associated with the Heraclitean depth of the soul ‘that cannot be measured by any wandering’, the Aeschylean dramatic descent ‘that brings up the decision for Dike’, and especially Odysseus’ descent into Hades (Voegelin 2000: 53).2 Plato was the sort of writer who might have intended all of these associations, and he may have had others in mind as well.3 For most Athenians, though, the Piraeus was a naval base and commercial centre, a symbol of Athenian democracy and power, both economic and military – it was the beating heart of Periclean Athens, where life was always under the influence of the sea.4 At dawn, when the Aegean Sea lay smooth as a burnished shield, you could hear a trireme from Athens while it was still a long way off. First came soft measured strokes like the pounding of a distant drum. Then two distinct sounds gradually emerged within each stroke: a deep percussive blow of wood striking the water, followed by a dashing surge. Whumpff! Whroosh! These sounds were so much a part of their world that Greeks had names for them. They called the splash pitylos, the rush rhothios. Relentlessly the beat would echo across the water, bringing the ship closer. It was now a throbbing pulse, as strong and steady as the heartbeat of a giant. (Hale 2009: xxiii)

In the ancient world, one couldn’t think of Athens without thinking of her democracy. And in Athens, one couldn’t think of the democracy without thinking of the navy and the Piraeus. Aristotle notes that ‘the inhabitants of the Piraeus are more democratic than those who live in the city’ (Arist. Pol. 5.3; cf. 7.6), and he famously called the constitution of Athens a ‘democracy based on

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triremes’ (Arist. Pol. 4.4), because the demos had served in the navy that defeated the Persians at Salamis, and that victory translated directly into Athenian power in the fifth century (Arist. Pol. 5.4). Several other ancient writers made similar observations. Ps.-Xenophon argued that ‘it is the demos who man the ships and impart strength to the polis far more than the hoplites, the high-born, and the good men’ (Ps.-Xen. Const. Ath. 1.2), while Plutarch observed that Themistocles increased the power of the demos with his development of the Piraeus  – his fastening of the polis to the sea  – because it made the city dependent on the thétes, one of the lowest social classes in Athens: they were the ones who rowed and piloted the ships in the fleet (Garland 1987:  19). There was no Athenian navy without them, and there was no Periclean Archē without the navy. This intimate association between democracy and naval power lies at the heart of the political events in which the Piraeus exercised a shaping hand, for it was always the rowers, and hence the Piraeus, which through thick and thin remained rootedly committed to democracy. Hence, whenever Athens fell victim to oligarchical oppression, it was natural and inevitable that the democratic resistance should focus on the Piraeus, the region where loyalty to the democracy was staunchest. (Garland 1987: 19)5

When we think of ancient Athens our ideas are immediately populated by images of the Acropolis, its Parthenon and statue of Athena, and the other temples and art that have made the city famous. The ancient Athenians thought of themselves quite differently, even after Pericles’ extraordinary building programme. ‘In terms of civic pride’, as Hale suggests, ‘the temples of the gods were eclipsed by the vast complex of installations for the navy’ (2009: xxiii). At one point in the fourth century, the Athenians were so proud of Philo’s Arsenal – a four-hundred-footlong building in the Piraeus where the Athenians stored the rigging, ropes, and sails of the fleet – that the assembly voted to record its architectural specifications in marble.6 The Parthenon was important to the Athenians, but the Navy Yard and Piraeus were sources of a genuinely democratic patriotism. These facts contribute in important ways to the meaning of the Republic. Plato chose the naval base and democratic stronghold as his setting for a conversation about anti-imperialist and anti-democratic political reengineering. The time period he chose is no less ironic. The dramatic date of the Republic is 429 BCE, because that is the year Athens formally accepted Bendis, a Thracian goddess, into its civic religion, and Bendis is the goddess for whom the Athenians and Thracians held the festival at the Piraeus.7 At this time, the Peloponnesian War has been underway for two years. We know from the Charmides (Chrm. 153a;

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cf. Ap. 28e; Symp. 219e–20e) that Socrates has just returned from the protracted, expensive, and ultimately failed military campaign at Potidea. And he has come home to find his city fundamentally changed. When Socrates left for Potidea, the city was at the peak of its powers. It was a Golden Age: they had never been so wealthy or felt so powerful. But by 429 BCE, that city and that way of life already appeared to be lost. Athens had been ravaged by the plague and demoralized by a failing war strategy. Pericles was dying,8 and the Athenians were still crowded behind their defensive walls, powerless against the periodic Spartan invasions of their lands. As the Athenians introduce Thracian Bendis, a goddess associated with healing,9 ‘in hopes of delivery from the curse of plague and war’ (Lampert 2010: 241), Socrates is in the Piraeus, recently returned from war abroad, with Thracian healing charms and incantations, ‘beautiful words’ designed to produce temperance in the souls of those who hear them (Chrm. 156d–7a). If he can heal the souls of his fellow citizens, he will be able to deliver them from their suffering (Lampert 2010). The city’s healing efforts aimed at treating symptoms; Socrates hoped to address their underlying causes. Plato’s calls for reform, then, are set against the backdrop of an imperial fortress, the symbol of Athenian excess and overreach. Socrates will talk through the night, in the home of a rich Sicilian shield maker (Cephalus), about the benefits of moderation and the need for radical reform. But we know how this story ends, and so did Plato’s immediate audience. Athens is doomed. They will reject Socrates, listen to Pericles and Alcibiades and Cleon, and lose everything. It’s just a matter of time before Lysander sails into the Piraeus and dismantles the Athenian empire, burning its ships and tearing down its Long Walls. The Republic is set before the nightmare has begun. These images of Socrates proposing to reform Athens get their force from the incongruity between his proposals and the way things actually turned out for the Athenians. In a similar way, the festival for Bendis alludes to and undermines the formal charges that will be brought against Socrates thirty years later: Athens will execute Socrates for doing something that it permitted, and even celebrated with a pannuchis, an all-night festival, during a profound social and political crisis.10 ‘One of the most fascinating questions raised by the introduction of Bendis is how a semibarbarian goddess succeeded in gaining entry into Athens in the first place’ (Garland 1992: 112). Plato may have rejected poetry and given up tragedy in his youth, but this is as powerful as dramatic irony gets.11 Plato’s choice of the Piraeus at this time in Athenian history as the setting for the Republic is part and parcel of Plato’s trial of Athens. It invites us to think ahead to the outcome of the war and the outcome of Socrates’ efforts to change

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the young men of Athens. Or, more exactly, it invites us to look back to the beginning of the war from the perspective of knowing its outcome and knowing what happens to Socrates and the city because of it. And in doing so, Plato turns the Republic as a whole, as well as the many dialogues that are related to it, into an apologetic response to the charges brought against Socrates by the city. He also invites his reader to reflect on the relationship between philosophy and politics in ancient Athens, and even lays the foundations for a theory about why the city of Athens was literally incapable of benefitting from Socrates’ healing charms.

Athens on trial We will never know exactly what happened on the day of Socrates’ trial in 399 BCE, especially if we continue to rely exclusively on the conventional sources. What motivated his accusers to put him on trial, the contents of the prosecution’s speeches, and what drove his jury to convict and sentence him to death – these facts have disappeared from the historical record. The subjective motivations of Socrates’ prosecutors and jury were never fully knowable; the formal charges are vague and open to very different interpretations, and the usual ancient testimony about Socrates’ trial is inconclusive: some of it suggests the trial had a political subtext, but a lot of it does not, and one of our best sources, Plato’s Apology, is a work of literature. It’s because of this evidentiary deficit that scholars have reached different conclusions about the meaning of Socrates’ trial and its significance for the formation of the young Plato’s political theory and critique of Athenian culture. The point of Plato’s Trial of Athens has been to look outside of the Apology, in other Platonic dialogues, for evidence about the motivations for Socrates’ trial. The benefit of making this move is that it eliminates what otherwise looks like an interpretive impasse. It does this for two reasons: first, the Gorgias and Republic accuse the Athenians of corrupting the youth, and in doing so they exonerate Socrates while transferring the blame to the city, its rhetorical culture, and its pleonectic fever; second, Alcibiades I and the Symposium depict Alcibiades as a kind of case study: Socrates’ failure to persuade him, despite his insight, is a symbol of the political problem – the philosopher cannot reform the city, and he will risk his life if he tries. In these apologetic dialogues, Plato goes out of his way to address the political reasons for the trial (he didn’t corrupt Alcibiades and Critias; he tried to save them from the corrupting influences of the city), and he doesn’t respond to the impiety charge at all. In the Timaeus and Critias,

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Plato’s earlier critique of Athenian polis culture evolves into a cautionary tale and charter myth that is designed to warn fourth-century Athenians about the dangers of naval empire while offering them a vision of who they have been, who they are, and who they ought to be. The Atlantis myth expands on Plato’s critique of Athens by identifying the navy as one of the causes of the city’s selfundermining pleonexia, which led to the catastrophic losses of the war, the trial of Socrates, and the corruption of an entire generation of Athens’ best men. It is fitting that Socrates is in the Piraeus at the beginning of the Republic, ‘the true apology of Socrates’ (Bloom 1968: 307). The city is hoping a foreign goddess and her healing consort can provide Athenians with relief from their suffering, and Socrates has just returned from Thrace with divine healing charms and incantations of his own. The city will reject his therapeia, not realizing that his treatment could truly heal the city’s ills, and they will double down on their corrupt institutions and practices until they lose everything. Instead of listening to Socrates and accepting his therapeutic reforms, they will kill him before he can serve as their physician. For Plato, this was a reason to draw back from Athenian public life (Ep. VII 325a); it also solidified his views about philosophy’s limited powers in a corrupt society like fifth- and fourth-century Athens. When one is advising a sick man who is living in a way injurious to his health, must one not first of all tell him to change his way of life and give him further counsel only if he is willing to obey? If he is not, I think any . . . self-respecting physician would break off counseling such a man . . . So too with respect to a city: whether it be governed by one man or many, if its constitution is properly ordered and rightly directed, it would be sensible to give advice to its citizens concerning what would be to the city’s advantage. But if its people who have wandered completely away from right government and resolutely refuse to come back upon its track and instruct their counselor to leave the constitution strictly alone, threatening him with death if he changes it, and order him instead to serve their interests and desires and show them how they can henceforth satisfy them in the quickest and easiest way – any man, I think, who would accept such a role as adviser is without spirit, and he who refuses is the true man. These are my principles. (Ep. VII 330c–1a)

In response to the trial and death of Socrates, Plato put the Athenians on trial and charged them with the accusations they had levelled against his hero. As a young man, he expected to have a career in politics. Euripides saved Athens from the abyss; Plato wanted to rebuild it on a new foundation. In the end, however, he concluded that the city was incorrigible, that it would always be its own worst enemy, and that it was senseless to go on trying to heal a patient who rejected

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her medicine. If these ideas and messages, in the apologetic dialogues and in the Seventh Letter, don’t suggest that the trial and death of Socrates was political through and through, it’s not clear what could.

Notes

1

2

3 4

5

I would like to thank Clare O’Connor for working with me as my research assistant on this book. She was particularly helpful during the production stages. To be more exact, the Timaeus refers to parts of the Republic, but the references do not go beyond the contents of Book V, and Timaeus agrees that they didn’t cover anything else. See Chapter 4, note 10. Cf. Lampert (2010: 244–5) and Brann (2004: 117–18). On the importance of Plato’s ‘introductions’ to his dialogues, see Press (1993: 123–4) and sections 18–19 of Proclus’ commentary on Alcibiades I. Proclus argues that the beginnings of Plato’s dialogues always ‘accord with their overall aims’ and are never merely for the sake of ‘dramatic charm’ or ‘narrative accuracy’. In some cases, ‘he shows us through the very first verbal encounter the whole object of the composition’. According to Dionysus of Halicarnassus, when Plato died he left behind a tablet that contained many variations on the beginning of the Republic’s opening line. Hale (2009: xxviii–xxx) points out that most well-known Athenians served in the navy: Pericles, Thucydides, Demosthenes, and even Sophocles commanded fleets of triremes. Aeschylus was a veteran of the Persian wars; he fought at and wrote about the battle at Salamis in Persians. Athenians named their children after the navy – things like Naubios (‘Naval Life’), Naukrates (‘Naval Power’), and Naumache (‘Naval Battle’) – and ‘in the bedroom, nautical terms for rowing and ramming quickly became Athenian slang for sexual foreplay and penetration’. Athenian political rhetoric, poetry, drinking parties, and philosophy contained naval metaphors, and Aristotle’s school developed a science of sailing, rowing, and navigation. The Athenians were a sea-oriented people, and the Piraeus was their lifeline to the sea (Sterling 2009: 13–63). Xenophon (Mem. 2.7.2) says there was a mass exodus to the Piraeus after the revolution in 404 BCE, suggesting that democrats felt they would be safe from harm there. The Thirty had executed 1,500 citizens, and expelled 5,000 others to the Piraeus. The following year, democrats led the final six months of their resistance against the Thirty from the Piraeus (Garland 1987: 35–7; cf. Bloom 1968: 344 n. 3), and it wasn’t until ‘the men from the Piraeus’ entered Athens under arms and offered a sacrifice to Athena on the Acropolis that unity in Athens was considered restored (Xen. Hell. 2.4.39). Perhaps most important of all, Critias died in the

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6

7

8 9

10

11

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Piraeus (along with Charmides) while fighting against the democrats in the battle of Munychia in 403 BCE. When the Romans conquered Athens in 86 BCE, Sulla burned and destroyed the fortifications, shipsheds, and Philo’s Arsenal, but the Arsenal was so famous that it was ‘remembered for centuries afterwards by various Greek and Roman authors’ (Lorenzen 1964: 5). Philo himself wrote a book on the Arsenal, which included information about sacred proportions (Lorenzen 1964: 26). See Morgan (1992: 228). There is a lot of disagreement about the dramatic date of the Republic, in part because there are competing dates for the formal introduction of Bendis in Athens. For details of the relevant arguments about Bendis, see Planeaux (2000–1: 165–92). Garland (1992: 111) says 429/8 BCE is the latest possible date for Bendis’ arrival in Athens, given the appearance of ‘her name in the treasury accounts of the Other Gods for that year’. The main question, then, is whether the festival, which included a procession from the Prytaneum to the Piraeus, a sacrifice, torch races on horseback, and an all-night revel, occurred when Bendis first appeared in Athens in 429 BCE, or were added later in 421, 413, or 411 BCE (Planeaux 2000–1: 168). Lampert (2010: 405–11) and Planeaux (2000–1) make the complicated case that the evidence favours the earlier date of 429 BCE. For a very different view about the dramatic date of the Republic, see Nails (2002: 324–6) who discusses a wide variety of views and argues that the Republic is set ‘throughout the Peloponnesian war’. Bendis was introduced in early June of 429, and Pericles died in the autumn of the same year. Bendis was not herself a healing god, but she was accompanied by Deloptes, a ‘Thracian Asklepios’ whose ‘healing cult’ predated the later arrival of Asclepius in Athens in 420 BCE (Planeaux 2000–1: 181). As Lampert (2010: 406) suggests, ‘The introduction of Bendis thus included the prayer that the gods themselves heal Athens of the plague.’ The introduction of Bendis into Athenian civic religion was ‘revolutionary’. It was the first time in decades that a foreign god had been formally accepted into Athenian religious life. See Garland (1992: 111–14 and 1987: 118–22) and Parker (1996: 170–3). Bloom (1968: 311) thinks ‘Socrates hints that it is the Athenians who bring in new divinities; if he, too, does so, he only imitates the democracy, with which he has more kinship than appears on the surface’. According to legend, when he was twenty, after listening to Socrates in the agora, Plato stood outside of the theatre of Dionysus and burned his manuscripts. He had planned on entering a tragedy festival and competing for a prize, but Socrates changed his life. Instead of competing in the festival, he gave up tragedy for philosophy and made his first contribution to the ‘ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry’ (R. 607b). This anecdote may be a fabrication, something

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Index Aeschines Rhetor and the trial of Socrates. See the trial of Socrates Aeschines of Sphettus and Alcibiades 87–8, 93 n.5, 96 n.22, 102 n.74, 111, 113 and Plato 50 n.24 and the trial of Socrates. See the trial of Socrates Agathon 68, 76, 85, 96 n.24, 98 n.39, 105–7, 119, 145 n.6 Alcibiades and the Athenian democracy 3, 205 at the battle of Potidaea 67 as beloved of Socrates 119 the case against 79–81, 101 nn.64–9 as celebrity 94 n.11 as Dionysus 105–6 as an embodiment of Athens 62, 88, 106–7, 113, 126, 135 and erotic education 81–3 the life of 57–9, 140 the love life of 57–8, 93 n.5 and moral weakness 70–1, 92, 97 n.26, 113, 135, 146 n.15 and the mutilation of the Herms 60, 69, 96 n.24 and philosophical madness 83–4 and Plato’s trial of Athens. See Plato and Plato’s Critias 192 n.19 and Plato’s Republic 135, 140, 142 and Plato’s Timaeus 191 n.9 as portrayed in Plato’s Alcibiades I 107–14, 135, 144, 145 n.10, 146 nn.14–18, 147 nn.21 and 23, 177, 179, 206 as portrayed in Plato’s Symposium 70– 91, 105–7, 113–14, 135, 144 n.1, 145 nn.2–7, 152 n.66, 206 Proclus on 110, 147 n.20, 208 n.2 and the profanation of the Mysteries 62, 68–9, 96 n.24, 101 n.65, 145 n.5

and the Republic’s account of the corrupted philosopher 88–90 Socrates’ pedagogical relationship with 7, 15–19, 21–2, 24–5, 27, 33, 43, 45–6, 49 nn.11 and 15, 50 n.21, 51 nn.30 and 32, 57–153 and the Socratics 87–8, 96 n.22, 102 n.74, 147 n.21 as a source on Socrates 86–7 as symbol 62–3, 66, 69, 88, 91–2, 106, 135, 140, 142, 206 and the tragedy of the Symposium 62–70, 90–1 and transformative beauty 81, 85 and the trial of Socrates. See the trial of Socrates the uniqueness of 84–6, 90–1 the Amnesty of 403 13–16, 26–7, 44, 47 n.7, 48 n.11, 49–50 nn.14–15, 17–20, 60–1 Andocides 4, 95 n.18, 103 n.78 Anonymous Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy 5 Antiope 122, 149 n.39, 151 n.58 Anytus 17 n.3, 18, 24–7, 32, 38, 43, 48 n.11, 50 n.23, 51 n.33, 54 n.50, 60, 97 nn.27–8, 31 Aristophanes and Alcibiades 57, 93 nn.4 and 13, 108 and natural philosophy 38 and the Panathenaea 190 n.3 and Socrates’ appearance 101 n.63 and Socrates’ politics 33 and the trial of Socrates. See the trial of Socrates and his understanding of Socrates 79, 98 n.39, 105 Aristotle on the Amnesty of 403, 14–15, 49 n.14 on the constitution of Athens 91, 156

228

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and Isocrates 167, 178, 195 n.40, 197 n.53 on the nature of ‘telos’ 149 n.41 on the Piraeus 203 and Socrates 33 and the study of boats, sailing, and the sea 208 n.4 Aspasia and Alcibiades 57 and Plato 93 n.2 and Socrates 53 n.46, 99 n.48 Athens the democracy of 2 imperialism of 45, 101 n.68, 118, 133, 146 n.14, 149 n.38, 159, 161, 163–5, 172, 178, 183, 187, 194 n.34, 197 n.51, 198 n.56 the navy of 1–2, 11, 21, 41, 57, 94, 118, 146 n.14, 155–7, 163–5, 167, 171–6, 178–83, 187–9, 190 n.5, 193 n.27, 194 n.36, 197 nn.51–3, 199 nn.60 and 64, 200 nn.70–2, and 75, 203, 203–4, 207, 208 n.4 the rhetorical culture of and Isocrates 169–70 Plato’s critique of 3–4, 106, 109–53, 159, 167–72, 174, 188, 195 n.38, 195 nn.40 and 42, 196 nn.46 and 47, 196 n.46, 206–7, 208 n.4 the state-sanctioned religious innovations of 37, 204–8 as the true corruptor of the youth 3–4, 6, 7, 59, 69–71, 81–2, 88–92, 95–6 n.21, 99 n.44, 106–14, 118, 124, 126, 128–9, 133, 135–44, 150 n.49, 153 n.75, 159, 162, 167–89, 200 n.74, 206–7 the Atlantis myth and Alcibiades 111 as cautionary tale and charter myth 3, 7, 156–67, 179, 188–9, 192 nn.17–20 and 22, 193 nn.27–9, 194 n.32 and fiction 193 n.24 and Isocrates 169, 171, 176–8, 187, 193 n.23 as a Noble Lie 160 and Plato’s cosmology 192 n.19 and Plato’s Republic 199 n.69, 200 n.75, 201 n.80

and Plato’s trial of Athens. See Plato Bendis and Plato’s Republic 204–5, 209 nn.7–10 and religious innovation in Athens 37, 54 n.57 Callicles compared with Alcibiades 85, 98 n.35, 113–14, 119, 131–2, 137, 142, 148 n.32 and the contest between two lives 7, 91, 119–20, 128–9, 149 n.39 the defining characteristics of 119 and immoralism 85, 150 nn.52 and 53 as Plato’s alter ego 148 n.33 Plato’s critique of 119–34, 151 n.59 and Plato’s Republic 134–44 on pleasure 91, 118, 121–8, 134, 140, 144, 151 n.60, 152 n.67 as a representative of Athens 126, 148 n.34 as a representative of his generation 113–14, 123, 125–6, 136 and Thucydides 103 n.78 on the value of philosophy 75, 115, 121–2 as victim of the city’s corruption 189 Cimon 3, 31, 133, 186, 192 n.15 Cleon 3, 94 n.9, 159, 205 Critias and the Athenian democracy 3 as the author of the play Sisyphus 22 the death of 208–9 n.5 and the identity of the Critias who appears in Plato’s Critias 190–1 n.7, 194 n.33 and Plato 14, 156–9, 162–3, 189, 206 and the trial of Socrates. See the trial of Socrates Critias 7, 144, 146 n.14, 156, 163, 165, 174, 179, 190 n.1, 191 nn.7 and 11, 192 nn.19–20, 194 n.34, 206 Diotima 63–6, 69, 71–2, 77–9, 81, 84, 90, 93 n.2, 98 n.39, 99 nn.45 and 46, 100 n.57, 102 n.73, 144 n.1, 146 n.18 dockyards. See the Navy Yard

Index Dodds, E. R. on Aristotle 149 n.41 on Callicles 148 nn.32–3 and the counter-indictment of Athens 62, 95, 96 n.25, 107, 124, 128, 145 n.12, 186–7, 192 n.15, 201 n.79 and the date of the Gorgias 114, 147 n.30, 197 n.51 and Euripides’ Antiope 122 on Isocrates 36 and Nietzsche 150 n.53 on Plato’s formation as a philosopher 7 on Plato’s moral psychology 151–2 n.66 on Plato as an outside in Athenian politics 148 n.31 on the true corruptors of the youth 3, 8 n.5 Edmundson, M. 101 n.62 Euripides and Alcibiades 57, 93 n.6 the Antiope of 122, 149 n.39 and the end of the Peloponnesian War 1, 3, 207 and the rationalization of religious beliefs 20, 36, 38 Euthyphro 37, 39, 86, 111 failure to persuade and Alcibiades 114, 119, 140, 142, 206 and Callicles 114, 125, 128, 131–2, 114, 119 and eros for the demos 111, 114, 119, 132, 134, 138, 144 in Plato’s Republic 136, 144 and Plato’s trial of Athens. See Plato the Four 128–30, 132–3, 152 n.68 Gorgias as character in Plato’s Gorgias 115–19, 139, 148 n.38, 150 nn.49 and 52 the historical individual 26, 195 n.40 Great Plague 2, 11, 20–1, 40, 205, 209 n.9 Heidegger, Martin 178 Hermocrates the historical figure 191 n.8, 194 nn.32 and 33 in Plato’s Timaeus and Critias 156–7, 166, 190 n.1, 191 nn.7 and 9, 192 n.19

229

Herodotus 159, 191–2 n.12, 193 n.25, 194 n.32 Imperialism. See Athens Isocrates and Alcibiades 93 n. 6, 172, 199 n. 60 and the Amnesty of 403, 16 on Aristotle and Plato 167 and Atlantis 171, 176–8 Cicero on 195 n.40 the education of 195 n.40 on hedonism 151 n.60 and the navy 171–6, 183, 187–8, 193–4 n.30, 198 nn.56–9, 199 nn.60 and 64 On the Peace by 151 n.60, 166, 170–7, 187–8, 194 n.36, 196 n.46, 198 nn.56–8, 199 n.63 and Plato 167–78, 183, 187–8, 193 n.23, 194 n.36, 195–6 nn.38 and 41–4, 196 nn.45–7, 197 nn.48–50 and 53, 198 n.56, 199 n.61 the school of 195 n.39 and the Social War 166, 171–2 on sophistry 195 n.42 Kierkegaard, S. on erotic education 82 Libanius 17–18, 25–7, 51 n.28 the Long Walls at the end of the Peloponnesian War 1, 205 and Plato 116–18, 129, 164 and Polycrates 97 the rebuilding of 194 n.36, 197 n.51 as symbols of Athenian imperialism 129, 149 n.42 Lycon 25, 38, 48 n.11, 60, 97 n.31 Lysander 1, 205 Lysias speeches of 16, 50 nn.20–1, 54 n.54, 194 n.30 Meletus 12, 15, 24–5, 36–8, 41, 43, 51 n.33, 55 n.66, 60, 97 n.31 Miltiades as corruptor of the youth 3, 31, 186, 192 n.15

230 the navy. See Athens the Navy Yard and Plato 31, 91, 129, 199–200 n.69, 133, 148–9 n.38, 164, 180, 187 as symbol of Athenian democracy 193–4 n.30, 200 n.70, 204, 209 n.6 Nicias 74, 85, 94 nn.9–10, 100–1 n.61, 172 Nietzsche, Friedrich Compared with Callicles 150 n.53 the health and life of 46 n.1 on Socrates’ celebrity 73, 147 nn.21 and 24 on Socrates’ last words 11, 21, 46 nn.3 and 5 on Socrates’ physical appearance 75–6 on Socrates as a physician for culture 112, 147 n.26 on spiritual revenge 111 Thus Spoke Zarathustra by 101 n.62 Olympics of 416 BCE 57, 67, 73, 93–4 nn.6–7 Panathenaea the annual festival 155, 157, 165, 190 nn.1–6, 201 n.81 as an occasion for celebrating Athenian sea power 155–6, 190 n.6 and the peplos of Athena 155, 157, 190 nn.3–4 and Plato’s Atlantis myth 156–8, 160–1, 165, 189 the Peloponnesian War the end of 1–2 and Isocrates 173, 175 and Plato 65, 67–9, 107, 114, 126, 158, 163–4, 169, 183, 187, 204, 209 n.7 and the Second Maritime League 197 n.54 and Thucydides 183 Pericles and Alcibiades 57, 59, 73, 80, 93 nn.2 and 3, 99 n.48 the building program of 194 n.32, 204 on the character of the Athenians 21 and the date of the Gorgias 113, 127

Index the death of 205, 209 n.9 as naval commander 2, 208 n.4 and the Panathenaea 190 n.2 Plato’s critique of 3, 31, 115–17, 133, 150 n.45, 155, 158–9, 172, 180, 187, 192 n.15, 198 n.54, 205 Plato’s knowledge of 145 n.9 and the rationalization of religious beliefs 36, 40, 43 and Socrates’ critique of Athenian politics 29–31, 33, 50 n.22, 53 n.46, 103 n.78, 115–17, 122, 128, 133 in Thucydides 172 Phidias 57 the philosopher and the city 3, 63, 88, 91, 106–7, 110–12, 153 n.78, 189 the Piraeus and Alcibiades’ return to Athens 58–9 and the Amnesty of 403, 14 and the Atlantis myth 164 and the beginning of Plato’s Republic 200 n.72, 203–7 and the democracy 194 n.30, 200 n.70, 204, 208–9 n.5 and the navy 182, 187, 200 n.70, 204, 208 n.4 and the Panathenaea 156, 209 n.7 Lysander’s entrance into 1, 205 Plato and Alcibiades. See Alcibiades the Alcibiades I attributed to as an apologetic dialogue 3–6, 59, 70, 91–2, 107, 101–12, 142–4, 146 n.14, 189, 206 and Plato’s Gorgias 113–34 and Plato’s Republic 134–42 and politics 179 Proclus on. See Proclus and the taming of Alcibiades 67–8, 87 and the trial of Socrates. See the trial of Socrates the Apology of and Aristophanes 21 the historicity of 4–6, 8–9 nn.7 and 11, 13, 16–17, 21, 34, 45, 55–6 n.68, 56 n.70, 61–2, 86, 113, 143, 153 n.80, 206

Index and Isocrates 175 and the mixed motivations theory 41 and Plato’s trial of Athens. See Plato and the religious interpretation of the trial 36–7 and the Socratic mission 79, 85, 115 and Socratic politics 33 the Charmides of 190 n.7, 204 the Critias of and Athenian imperialism 146 n.14, 174, 188–9, 194 n.34 and the Atlantis myth 163 the character Critias in 156–9, 163, 190–1 n.7, 191 n.11, 194 n.33 the incompleteness of 162, 192 n.19 and the Panathenaea. See Panathenaea and Plato’s ‘nautical imagination’ 179 and Plato’s Republic 191 n.11, 192 n.20 and Plato’s trial of Athens. See Plato and Solon 165 the Gorgias of and Alcibiades. See Alcibiades as an apologetic dialogue 3–6, 45, 61–2, 91, 106, 206 and Callicles. See Callicles on the corruption of Alcibiades 106–7 and the critique of Gorgias and Polus 115–18 and the debate with Callicles 119–34 and Euripides’ Antiope. See Antiope and imperialism 116, 118, 133, 146 n.14, 149 n.38, 167, 180 on philosophy as battle 110, 115, 120, 128–9, 132–4, 140–1 on philosophy as therapeia 6, 118, 127–8, 132, 134–6, 142, 148 n.36, 187–8, 198 n.59, 207 on pleasure. See Callicles and Plato’s Phaedo 187–8 and Plato’s ‘Socratic’ dialogues 114 and Plato’s trial of Athens. See Plato and the Republic 98 n.35, 134–6, 140–2, 148 n.36 the Laws of and Athenian democracy 31

231 and the Atlantis myth 163, 177, 192 n.20 and the authenticity of the Seventh Letter 8 n.1 on education 180, 189 and Isocrates 198 n.59 and the navy 144, 167, 179, 189, 200 n.71, 158, 180–3, 200 n.71 and Plato’s trial of Athens. See Plato on the life and development of 1–7, 209 n.11 the Phaedo of and the corruption of desire 167, 183, 187–8 and the sea 179 the Phaedrus of and the dark horse 193 n.28 and ideal rhetoric 109–10 and Isocrates 168–71 and madness 83–4 on the real corruptors of the youth 3–4, 6, 7, 59, 69–71, 81–2, 88–92, 95–6 n.21, 99 n.44, 106–14, 118, 124, 126, 128–9, 133, 135–44, 150 n.49, 153 n.75, 159, 162, 167–89, 200 n.74, 206–7 the Republic of and Alcibiades 88–91, 140, 142 as an apologetic dialogue 3–6, 44–5, 61–2, 106, 143, 152 n.71, 206 and the Atlantis myth 156, 159–61, 163, 166 the beginning of 203–10, 208 n.3, 209 n.7 and Callicles 98 n.35, 134–42 on the corruption of desire 167, 177, 183–7, 201 nn.77 and 80 and the critique of democracy 136, 180 the dramatic setting of 203–5, 209 n.7 the ‘original city’ in 184–6, 200 nn.75–6, 201 nn.76–7 and 80 and the Piraeus 203–4, 207 and Plato’s Gorgias 134–42, 148 n.36 and Plato’s Timaeus 191 n.10, 192 n.20, 203, 206–7, 208 n.1 and Plato’s trial of Athens. See Plato and polis education 141

232

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and Socrates 28, 35 and Thucydides 145 n.9 on the true political craft. See true politics and the trial of Socrates. See the trial of Socrates the Symposium of and Alcibiades 45, 57–103, 105–8, 110, 112–14, 132, 135, 143–4, 145–7, 152, 192 n.19, 205–6 as an apologetic dialogue 3–6, 24, 44–5, 61–2, 105–8, 110, 143, 152 n.71, 206 and the limits of philosophy 70–91 and Plato’s trial of Athens. See Plato and tragedy 62–70, 81, 90–2, 98 n.37 and the trial of Socrates. See the trial of Socrates the Timaeus of and the Atlantis myth 156–9, 162 and cosmology 166, 192 n.19 as intentionally unfinished 162 and the Panathenaea. See Panathenaea and Plato’s Republic 191 n.10, 192 n.20, 203, 206–7, 208 n.1 and Plato’s trial of Athens. See Plato and the Sicilian Expedition 194 n.33 and Solon 165 and the trial of Athens 3, 6–7, 44–5, 61, 91–2, 106–44, 146 n.14, 152 n.17, 158, 167, 180–3, 186–9, 192 n.16, 205–7 and the trial of Socrates. See the trial of Socrates pleonexia and the good life 124, 128 as the true corruptor of the youth 2–4, 107, 128, 183, 199 n.63, 207 Plutarch on Alcibiades 48, 51 n.32, 57–9, 93 n.1, 94 n.11, 95 nn.16–18, 103 n.78 and the authenticity of the Seventh Letter 7 n.1 on the end of the Peloponnesian War 1 on Pericles 93 n.3, 194 n.32 on Socrates 53 n.46, 93 n.2, 99 n.48 on Spartan Olympic victors 94 n.7

on Themistocles 172, 181–2, 200 n.71, 204 Pnyx 2 Polus 115, 117–20, 136, 139, 149 n.40, 150 n.47, 150 nn.49 and 52 Polycrates and the ‘Accusation of Socrates’ 24–7, 36, 43–5, 50 n.27, 50 n.27, 50–1 n.28, 51 n.34, 55 n.67, 60–1, 97 n.26, 97 nn.27–9 and 31, 143, 147 n.27 and the fourth-century debates about Socrates’ guilt 6 Protagoras 20, 85, 93 n.3, 195 n.40 the Seventh Letter the authenticity of 7–8 nn.1 and 2 and Plato’s development 2–3 and Plato’s politics 2–4, 198–9 n.59, 207 Schleiermacher, F. 86, 96 n.23, 145 n.12, 146 n.13 shipsheds. See the Navy Yard the Sicilian Expedition and Alcibiades 51 n.32, 57–60, 67, 69, 93 n.6, 94 n.10, 95 nn.16–17, 128 and Isocrates 172, 198 n.58, 199 n.63 and the Piraeus 94 n.10 and Plato 69, 100 n.51, 157, 166, 190–1 n.7, 191 n.8, 192 n.19, 194 n.33 and Thucydides 94 n.10, 152 n.68 the Social War 172–3, 178 Socrates as Ajax 77, 106 and Alcibiades 7, 15–19, 21–2, 24–5, 27, 33, 43, 45–6, 49 nn.11 and 15, 50 n.21, 51 nn.30 and 32, 57–153, 177, 187–9 and the Atlantis myth 155–7, 159, 167 at the battle of Potidaea 33, 67, 78 as bouleutes 113 and Callicles. See Callicles the divine sign of 37–9 as Eros 102 n.73 and the interpretation of Plato 4–7, 8–9 n.7, 9 n.11 and Isocrates. See Isocrates as Marsyas 72–3, 75, 100 n.59, 102 nn.72–3

Index as opponent of the Sicilian Expedition 94 n.10 and the philosophical life 5–6 as physician for society 6, 45, 62, 112, 142, 147 n.26, 205–7 and Plato’s philosophical development 1–7 the politics of 13, 17, 19, 22–3, 28–34, 52–4 nn.38, 56–7 n.68, 192 n.15 the religious beliefs of 35–9, 54 nn.56– 60, 55 n.62 as satyr 72, 75, 78, 86, 100 n.58, 100 n.58, 102, 106 as scapegoat 11–12, 21, 46 n.4 as soldier 6, 86, 100 n.60, 102 n.69, 106, 143, 205 as Silenus 72, 75–6, 78, 102 n.72, 106 and ‘the Socratic Problem’ 5, 9 nn.8 and 11, 13, 28–34, 42–5, 52 nn.38– 42, 56 n.70 as teacher of shame 18, 74, 79, 83–5, 89, 106, 113, 119, 125, 130–1, 185 the trial of. See the trial of Socrates as the true politician of Athens. See true politics Solon the ancestral constitution of 158, 160, 165–6, 178 and atheism 36 and the Atlantis myth 156–7, 160–1, 165–6, 171, 178, 192 n.14, 193 n.26 the sophists as corruptors of the youth 91, 107, 113– 14, 137–8, 142–3, 153 n.75, 169 the ideas of 139, 141, 144 and Isocrates 170, 195 nn.39 and 42, 197 n.48 and Plato 35, 50 n.23, 149–50 n.44, 153 n.74, 167, 195 n.42, 197 n.48 and Polycrates 24, 45 and Socrates 11, 20, 22, 27, 41, 90 and Xenophon 195 n.42 Sophocles 57, 208 n.4 Sparta and Alcibiades 58–9, 93 n.6, 95 nn.15 and 16, 109, 199 n.60 and Aspasia 93 n.2 and the Atlantis myth 163–4, 178

233

the corruption of 172–8, 199 n.60 Isocrates’ views of 173–5, 177, 199 n.63 and Olympic victors 94 n.7 and the Peloponnesian War 1–2, 11, 19, 94 n.13, 126, 128, 142, 149 n.42, 194 n.30, 205 and the Social War 172 Socrates’ admiration of 31 in Thucydides 103 n.78, 151 nn.62–3 and the trial of Socrates 40–1, 103 n.79 Stewart, Jon 50 n.26 Symposium and Alcibiades 59–103 and tragedy 62–70 and the trial of Socrates. See the trial of Socrates and the unity of tragedy and comedy 62 Themistocles and Alcibiades 111 and Conon 197 n.51 as corruptor of the youth 3, 31, 116, 133, 172, 180, 186–7 and the Laurion mines 194 n.31 the Long Walls of 164 Plato’s critique of 192 n.15, 200 n.71 and Plutarch 182, 189, 204 the Thirty Tyrants 2, 13–16, 19, 182, 190–1 n.7, 194 n.33 Thrasymachus 20, 85, 103 n.78, 136 Thucydides 1, 57 and Alcibiades 57–8, 69, 93 n.1, 94 n.10, 145 n.8 on the Athenian democracy 94 n.12, 122 and the Atlantis myth 194 n.32 on the character of the Athenians 91–2 compared with other ancient Greek intellectuals 195 n.38, 199 n.65 and the education of Athenians 159 on the end of the Peloponnesian War 41 and Isocrates 172, 198 n.56 and the navy 172 as naval commander 208 n.4 and Plato 103 n.78, 103 n.78, 107, 126– 7, 145 n.9, 152 n.68, 160, 166–7, 178, 183, 195 n.42

234

Index

the trial of Socrates and ‘the accuser’ 18 and Aeschines Rhetor 17–18, 22, 25, 35 and Aeschines of Sphettus 17–18 and Alcibiades 15–19, 21–2, 24–5, 27, 33, 43, 45–6, 48–9 nn.11, 15 and 18, 50 n.21, 51 nn.30 and 32, 56 n.69, 59–62, 133, 189 and Alcibiades I 108–11, 113, 146 n.14 and the Amnesty of 403, 13–16 ancient testimony about 16–19 and Aristophanes 20–1, 33, 36, 38, 50 n.26, 54 n.60 and atheism 20–1 and Critias 15–16, 18, 21–2, 25–7, 29, 33–4, 43, 45, 49 n.15, 49 n.18, 51 n.30, 60, 69, 83, 95 n.21, 97 n.31 debates about the motivations of 3–4, 6, 12–13 and the formal charges 12, 16 Isocrates’ views of 16–18, 24–5, 50 n.21 and Meletus 12, 15 the mixed motivation theory of 39–46, 55 n.67 and the Peloponnesian War 19 and Plato’s early development 2–3 and Plato’s Gorgias 45, 100 n.55, 107, 112, 114, 126, 130–2, 134–5, 137, 140–1, 143, 145 n.12, 192 n.15, 206 and Plato’s Republic 88, 100 n.55, 112, 114, 134–5, 137, 141–3, 206 and Plato’s Symposium 59–62, 68–70, 92, 100 nn.55 and 59, 106 the political interpretation of 12–13, 16–17, 208 extreme variants of 19–28, 34

moderate variants of 28–34 the religious interpretation of 12–13, 16–17, 19–22, 34–9 and the Seventh Letter 2–3 and the speeches of Lysias 16 and Socrates’ refusal to defend himself 47 n.8 and the Socratics 113 Xenophon’s account of 13, 16–18, 22–8, 33–8, 42–4, 46 n.6, 47 n.8, 48 n.11, 50 n.23 51–2 n.35 52 nn.41–2, 53 n.45, 55 n.67, 59, 61, 97 n.31 true politics and Athens 135–6 as battle 110, 115, 120, 128–9, 132–4, 140–1 and Socrates 3, 28, 127, 150 n.44, 151 n.45, 149–50 n.44 as therapeia 6, 118, 127–8, 132, 134–6, 142, 148 n.36, 187–8, 198 n.59, 207 Xenophanes 20, 36 Xenophon and Alcibiades 57, 59, 83, 93 n.1, 93 n.5, 95–96 n.21, 97 n.33, 101 n.63, 102–3 n.74 on the end of the Peloponnesian War 1–2, 4, 208 n.5 and Plato 122, 195 nn.38 and 42 on Socrates’ appearance 100 n.58 on Socrates’ desire to die 11 and Socrates’ political philosophy 28–34, 55 n.68 on the trial of Socrates. See the trial of Socrates