Socrates: A Man for Our Times (6 page)

It is clear that Socrates, Plato, and later Aristotle were deeply concerned in theatrical developments, and there was a special reason for this. Greek tragedy in the fifth century showed a growing interest in human nature, in character and behavior under stress. While Aeschylus tends to present types—though there are notable individuals too—Sophocles specialized in noble individuals under appalling pressures, and Euripides often investigates unusual or extreme mentalities. What Athenians were beginning to see on the stage were not just bodies but embodied souls. This was very much Socrates’ world, for he was a psychologist as well as a philosopher. But in general, tragic playwrights and philosophers were moving in the same territory, and it is not surprising that Plato, when still much influenced by Socrates, almost became a tragic poet. He would have made a good one. We know that Socrates as an old man wrote poetry, though none has survived. But we are told that a play by Euripides was “patched up” by him. A man who could successfully doctor a work by a leading playwright obviously was a constant playgoer and thoroughly familiar with the medium.

Socrates, thanks to his Dionysiac appearance, sense of irony, wit, and critical approach to almost every aspect of life, was obviously a man capable of patching up a comedy, too, though there is no evidence he ever did so. Primitives, not only in Greece, like pretending to be somebody else in public, and doing grotesque, obscene, and comic things they would not dare to do in normal life. We know from inscriptions that a humorous adult male chorus was an archaic element in Athens’s Dionysiac feasting. An Attic black figure amphora from the sixth century B.C. shows men disguised as horses, mounted by other men, masked, with an accompanying flute player. Another, later one shows them dressed as birds. Vases from this time show dancing men wearing phalluses, and a krater from Corinth displays masked dancers with giant bellies strapped on. Enormous phalluses were carried in Dionysiac processions, and Aristotle writes of bawdy, comic verses, crude sex jokes, and what he calls “phallic songs”—he says they were still “customary to many cities,” but no longer in Athens, which had become too sophisticated. Another feature was the crude abuse of audiences. This is a ploy used in our own day by American comics, and it was the great stock-in-trade of Aristide Briand, the Montmartre nightclub singer, lovingly drawn by Toulouse-Lautrec. The Old Comedy of the fifth century B.C., as historians call it, would have struck us as more like charades or a variety show than a play. There were lots of talking animals as in children’s stories and folklore.

Aristophanes (445–385 B.C.), about whom we know little, though he figures in the famous Socratic dinner party recorded by Plato, transformed this theatrical ragbag of tricks into satiric plays, of which eleven survive (plus the titles and fragments of thirty-two more). Part of a play of his called
The Banqueters
, written when he was eighteen, survives, and it won a second prize. In the next two years, 426 and 425, he won first prize with the
Babylonians
(lost) and
Acharnians
, the first play of his to survive. This is about war and peace and is intended to be serious, though there are comic elements. Aristophanes, though classed as a comic playwright, in fact always hovers precariously between huge exaggerations of actual events and real people, and buffoonery. He is really a satirist, in the proper sense of the term.
Knights
(424 B.C.), the first play he produced himself (hitherto he had been classed as too young under the rules) and which, probably for this reason, won the first prize, was an attack on the reigning demagogue, Cleon.
Wasps
(422) is a satire on the Athenian jury system.
Peace
(421) is an antiwar play in which a giant beetle draws Peace from a cavern where she has been imprisoned.
Lysistrata
(411) is also antiwar, and both it and
Thesmophoriazusae,
produced the same year, show women taking over.
Frogs
(405), another first-prize winner, is about the sad plight (in his view) of Athenian drama and literature generally, featuring Aeschylus, Euripides, and others.

Aristophanes’ almost exact equivalent in English drama is Ben Jonson, whom we know learned from these old Greek plays. They deal with real as well as imaginary people, actual events, and current customs, usually presented in a grotesquely exaggerated form. He took on some very unpleasant and powerful people, such as Cleon, and it is amazing to me that he escaped prosecution, exile, or death: Perhaps he was lucky that Cleon, who certainly attacked him publicly, was killed in battle.

In 423 Aristophanes produced
Clouds
, an attack on Athenian sophists, intellectuals, and philosophers generally, with particular attention paid to Socrates, who is really the chief character. We have it only in a revised form, which was not produced, and what the original and actual production was like we do not know exactly. It played badly, and the play as we have it seems to me crude, implausible, and dull, though it can be, and has been, successfully produced in modern times. Like other Aristophanes works, it lends itself to ingenious direction. It bears no relation to the real Socrates and his views or the actual life he lived but presents him as a very unpleasant and wicked man. Why, then, did Plato in his
Symposium
present Socrates and Aristophanes as friends, and the latter as an attractive person? I can only suppose that Aristophanes knew Socrates only by malicious hearsay at the time he wrote
Clouds
and that his views changed dramatically once they met and talked. Socrates bore no grudge. He said of attacks on him in the theater: “If the criticism is just, I must try to reform myself. If it’s untrue, it doesn’t matter.”

Aristophanes was deeply and strongly critical of Pericles in
Acharnians
. This was only to be expected in view of his personal opinions. For his evident hatred of war was created by the unhappiness, destruction, and slaughter that Pericles’ imperialism and vainglory made inevitable. Behind its cultural achievements lay a presumption of Athens’s right to control the Greek world, and that led inevitably to a struggle with Sparta that could only end in her destruction, or that of Athens. As Pericles himself said, Greece was not big enough for both. The Peloponnesian War, which was to settle, once and for all, which was to be the paramount Greek power, began in 431 B.C., and Pericles’ famous oration was delivered the following year. That marked the acme of his influence. Thereafter it was downhill.

In 430 B.C., almost certainly as a direct result of the war, Athens was afflicted by the worst plague in her history. Thousands died. Pericles’ own family was devastated. The plague broke the morale of Athens. It was seen as the punishment of the gods for their neglect by the Periclean power. It is true that their humanism came close to atheism in the minds of many. His favorite philosopher, Anaxagoras, was seen as impious for his cosmology and cosmogony. Phidias, his cultural commissar, was blamed for his depiction of human figures in the frieze of the Parthenon. Protagoras’s dictum that “Man is the measure of all things” was held to be a plain declaration of disbelief in divinity. Thucydides, the historian of the regime, was already known for denying the gods any role in the march of great events. At the end of the plague year, the revulsion of popular feeling drove Pericles from office. He was tried for embezzlement of public funds and fined. The next spring, public opinion swung round again. He was once more elected
strategos
and tried to rebuild his position. But it seems he had caught the plague germs, which undermined his strength and now humbled his proud spirit. He died of it six months after being reelected, and men said it was a punishment. There was a witch hunt of his entourage. Phidias had been prosecuted for stealing public gold when making his giant statue of Athena. He was acquitted but was then arraigned for impiety and put in prison, where he died. Protagoras and Anaxagoras were likewise hounded, and enemies even indicted Pericles’ mistress Aspasia (about whom more will be said), though she won acquittal. By 428 B.C., the brilliant group of humanists who had run and adorned Athens in the name of man had been broken up and dispersed.

Socrates survived the plague, something his friends noted with surprise. While many fled the city or kept to their houses, Socrates continued his usual practice of walking the streets and talking to all, regardless of possible contagion. The fact that he escaped was taken as a tribute to his generally healthy life and exercises. By now he was forty, a middle-aged man and becoming, in his own way, an Athenian celebrity. It is time for us to turn to his work and in particular his idiosyncratic methods of practicing philosophy.

IV

Socrates the Philosophical Genius

T
he onset and ravages of the plague, the death of Pericles, the decline of his regime and the suspension of his cultural program, the prosecution of his leading followers, and the general malaise in Athens, had a personal effect on Socrates. They forced him to ponder seriously his function in life. He had always been a thinker and enjoyed talking and debating with fellow Athenians. But he had never had a job. Now he began to feel he had a mission. The age of Pericles had been admirable in many ways: It had encouraged architecture and building, painting and pottery, music and the theater, as well as manufacturing and commerce and the useful arts. But there was something missing. It was all very well to reiterate its slogan, “Man is the measure of all things,” and to insist that human beings were not helpless playthings of the gods but masters of their fate. But what sort of a person was man? The Pericleans were eager to improve art and technology in all their aspects, and had to a great extent succeeded in doing so. But what about improving man? Was it possible? And if so, how? It seemed to Socrates that these questions were never asked and ought to be asked.

It was not that clever and thoughtful Greeks were idle. On the contrary. They asked questions all the time. But they tended to concentrate on the world, and the distant worlds—or whatever they were—in the sky. The Greeks called it the cosmos, and enquiry centered on how it worked, cosmology, and how it was originally created, cosmogony. As a young man, Socrates engaged in such questioning himself. He inherited a considerable body of knowledge, or as he came to see, pseudo-knowledge. There were, for instance, a group of wise inquirers in Ionian Greece, to the east, especially in Miletus. Such were Thales, active around 580 B.C., over a century before Socrates, his pupil Anaximander, and
his
pupil Anaximenes. Thales, who was possibly a Hebrew, or Semitic, was later called by Aristotle the founder of the physical sciences. He used the Egyptian system of land measurement to invent the technique of geometry. He was said to have foretold the solar eclipse that occurred during the Battle of the Halys (May 28, 585 B.C.). He was a polymath who drew snatches of exact knowledge from the accumulated wisdom of the Semitic world, but his conjectures were eccentric. He believed, for instance, that magnets have souls. He thought the earth floated on water.

Anaximander wrote the first treatise on the cosmos, which has survived, though only in fragments. He conceived it as a unity, operating under laws, with the moon and the sun moving in cycles. He was the first to draw a map of the earth. He invented the gnomon for astronomic observation. Like Darwin, he believed that man and animals evolved. He answered the question, “If the earth rests on water, what supports the water?” by answering that it was not necessary because it lay at the center and at equal distance from everything, so was held in tension: everything is in conflict and tension, and this is the principle of universal stability, an argument often described as the first example of a priori reasoning in science. He was aware of the sheer size of things and introduced terms for “unlimited” and “the infinite.” But his follower Anaximenes rejected the water explanation and substituted air, which when dense became fire or winds or clouds and was subject to condensation. Another Easterner, Heraclitus of Ephesus, expanded the tension theory, noting that this was exactly how the bow and the lyre worked, an example of the close observation and shrewd deductions of which these early Greek philosopher-scientists were capable. To him, the principle of tension was signified by the
logos
, the symbol of eternity. It was also transcendent wisdom and the elemental fire. He was of royal blood but gave over the throne to his brother so he could write his
Treatise
, dealing with the
logos
. A fragment reads:

God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, plenty and famine, all the opposites which sustain things. Men are foolish creatures who must subject themselves to the logos or law. . . . The people must fight for the law, as for a defensive wall, for all human laws are nourished by the divine, which is one.

He also wrote: “We ought to grasp that war is common and natural, as is justice which is strife, that all things come about in accordance with strife and what must be.” His best-known saying is “You cannot step twice into the same river.” But what does it mean? In antiquity he was known as Heraclitus the Obscure. When Euripides gave Socrates his works, Socrates commented, “What I understand is splendid. What I do not understand may be good too. But it would take a deep-sea diver to get to the bottom of it.”