Would Socrates’ ideas have survived without a young Plato to gather, write down, and interpret them? Plato, approximately forty years Socrates’ junior, was a boy at the time of the battle of Delium. Had Socrates been killed, then the entire scope of Plato’s dialogues would have been fundamentally changed. Even had a mature Plato written philosophical treatises, his dialogues—if there were to be any dialogues at all, since the original genre is patterned directly after Socrates’ oral interrogations—would have largely been non-Socratic both in form and content. In his autobiographical Seventh Letter, Plato admits that he was naturally gravitating toward a life of politics until his association with Socrates. Perhaps his youthful disillusionment over the philosopher’s execution prompted him to turn to philosophy and reject an active life in government.
Much of Plato’s singular literary genius drew inspiration from the magnetic character of an elderly Socrates, who wandered the streets of Athens engaging the strong, smug, and secure in tough question-and-answer sessions. In the process he apparently made an impression on the adolescent Plato, who probably came under Socrates’ tutelage sometime in his twenties—roughly in the last decade of the Peloponnesian War (e.g., 410–404 B.C.). The influence of the elder Socrates on the young student remained profound until the old man was executed when Plato was about thirty.
Socrates is the chief interlocutor in the majority of the Platonic dialogues and the hero of the masterpiece Apology, which chronicles his final defense on charges of impiety and moral corruption before an Athenian jury. Socrates’ concern that philosophy should deal with ethics, not the mere natural inquiry or cosmology of earlier formal speculation, characterizes nearly all of Plato’s early work. The idea that from knowledge comes virtue, and that ensuing morality can thus be taught through rational choices and the suppression of desire, seems to be derived from the thought and actual practice of the historical Socrates. And the notion of Socratic duality—men have souls whose integrity they must not endanger by a surrender to the appetites; the world we sense and live in is but a pale imitation of a divine and perfect counterpart—forms the basis of Plato’s later sophisticated investigation into morality, language, the hereafter, politics, and the fine arts.
Plato’s interest in philosophy—had he eventually developed such an interest from other contemporary thinkers—would have had little to do with Socrates. And Socrates himself wrote nothing. He founded neither a school nor an institutional framework to perpetuate his ideas. The philosopher received no money for his teaching. He had no literary executor. There was no formal cadre of trained students who were obliged to keep alive his teaching. In an imagined post-Delium world where Socrates never met Plato, would we now know anything about the itinerant philosopher or his ideas? Did the course of Western philosophy rest on how well Socrates avoided the jabbing of spears at Delium?
Could there have been any other contemporary record of Socrates without Plato—had the forty-five-year-old philosopher never made it out of the hills of Delium? Our other main source of Socrates’ thought is preserved in the works of the historian and essayist Xenophon, whose dialogues Memorabilia, Apology, Symposium, and Oeconomicus feature Socrates as the main questioner on topics as varied as love, agriculture, war, politics, and his own career as combatant against the Sophists. But like Plato, Xenophon also grew up under the influence of Socrates, veteran of Delium. He was born sometime around 430 B.C. and was probably at most a year or two older than Plato—despite later erroneous tales that Socrates had saved him at the battle.
Consequently, had Socrates been killed by a Boeotian spear when Plato and Xenophon were children, it seems impossible that any of their later work would have centered around the lively presence of Socrates as interlocutor, their tough questioner and role model who serves as the fountainhead of their own ideas. Socrates’ influence rested on two general criteria: memorable question-and-answer sessions that took place during his late forties, fifties, and sixties, and the written memoirs and derivative philosophy of Plato and Xenophon. Both facts required that the philosopher survive the spears of Delium.
The famous orator and educator Isocrates also claimed to be a pupil of Socrates. He is mentioned favorably in Plato’s Phaedrus as a star student of the old philosopher. But Isocrates was born in 436 B.C., twelve years before the battle of Delium, making him nearly a generation older than both Plato and Xenophon. Had Socrates been killed in 424 B.C., when Isocrates was twelve, the older philosopher would have had little if any indirect influence on the young orator, whose thought seems derivative from Socrates, especially the latter’s disdain for radical democracy. It would have robbed Isocrates of any indirect knowledge of a quarter century of Socratic anecdotes and teaching. His ideas probably would have had little place in Isocrates’ massive corpus of work.
Would we know anything of Socrates’ thought without the testimony of Plato and Xenophon? The philosopher Aristotle, of course, refers to Socrates often. But much of what he criticizes is derived from Plato and Xenophon, inasmuch as he was born (387 B.C.) twelve years after Socrates was executed (399 B.C.). A slain Socrates at Delium would also have played almost no role at all in Aristotle’s own thinking for a variety of reasons. First, there would have been no mention of Socrates in either Xenophon or Plato. Second, Socrates would have died not twelve, but instead thirty-seven years before Aristotle’s own birth. Third, a dead Socrates would have been deprived of a final twenty-five years of life in which his own thinking reached maturity. These were precisely the years that gave his ideas a chance to filter through the oral tradition of discourse at private parties and personal recollection of the last quarter of the fifth century B.C. in Athens. Most likely, a dead Socrates at Delium would not have even appeared by name in Aristotle’s entire corpus—much of which gains its power from its deliberate posture against the politics and theology of both Socrates and Plato.
Were there other writers and philosophers who might have captured for posterity Socrates’ ideas before he marched out at Delium? Not many. As we have seen, Thucydides, the contemporary historian and chief source for the battle of Delium, does not mention Socrates in his history at all. We also have no public or private Athenian inscriptions that mention him by name.
Instead, only a few names of other philosophers survive in association with Socrates. They, like Xenophon and Plato, were self-proclaimed followers of the unique Socratic emphasis on philosophy as ethics and dedicated themselves to ensuring his memory as a great man who fought rather than joined the Sophists—those contemporary intellectuals who charged stiff fees for their lectures that championed moral relativism and situational ethics. The chances, however, that any of these writers would have developed a sizable Socratic corpus of work had the philosopher died in 424 B.C. are nil.
The rather obscure Antisthenes, for example, may have been the same age as Socrates—and even known him well before Delium. Fragments of Antisthenes’ work survive. What little we know of Antisthenes suggests that he was especially interested in the Socratic method and lifestyle—or at least the need for the man of contemplation to set himself apart from society and the temptations of the flesh. But Antisthenes could hardly have kept alive the ideas of a middle-aged, rather than seventy-year-old, Socrates. For one thing, he seems to have written largely to combat Plato—and thereby may not have authored anything had Plato never met Socrates.
Plato names Antisthenes as being present at Socrates’ last hours. Much of what little we know about his work seems prompted by Socrates’ martyrdom and the fate of philosophical stalwarts who opposed mobs like the frenzied crowd of Athenian jurors. Had Socrates died at Delium, then, Antisthenes would not have found his striking model of principled resistance to the ignorant crowd.
Finally, we have only fragments of Antisthenes’ work. Although he seems to have been known to Aristotle and a few others, the chances that his work in changed circumstances would have survived classical antiquity seem remote. It is absurd to think that had Socrates died at forty-fi
ve rather than seventy, we would know any more of him through Antisthenes than the tiny scraps of his work we now possess; indeed, it is more likely that we would know nothing of Antisthenes at all!
Another Socratic follower, Aeschines of Sphettos, wrote seven dialogues. The theme of his works was apparently a defense of Socrates’ association with the dissolute Alcibiades. None of these dialogues survives except in a few fragments and quotations. But since Aeschines was roughly the same age as Plato and Xenophon, like the latter two, he met Socrates only after Delium—and thus obviously he would not have devoted his life to a philosopher who did not write and whom he did not meet. In short, without a direct Socratic connection, we have little reason to believe any of Aeschines’ work would have survived had Socrates died in 424 B.C.
Were there any others who might have known Socrates before Delium? Phaedon of Elis is just a name. Mere scraps of quotations of his two dialogues are extant. A near contemporary of Plato and Xenophon, he too was a small boy at the time of Delium. Nothing remains either of the work of Aristippus or Cebes, who both purportedly wrote panegyrics of Socrates. Again we are left with the conclusion that most Socratic followers who were inspired to write about their mentor did so only after meeting him in the period after the battle of Delium—when they were of an age to wander along after the itinerant questioner.
Many of these adherents seem to have been prompted to write after Plato began his early dialogues surrounding Socrates’ death, either to enhance or reject the Platonic testimony. Socrates’ other admirers, whose works are essentially lost, appear to have been influenced especially by his last courageous stand against his accusers in 399 B.C., in addition to the striking contrast between the grandfatherly philosopher and their own youthful zeal and impressionability. But in any case, the work of these lesser Socratics was either scarcely known or not highly regarded.
We are left with an inescapable conclusion: almost everyone who wrote anything about Socrates and his thinking came to maturity after the battle of Delium. Socrates’ influential students were nearly all acquaintances from his late forties, fifties, and sixties. Had he died at the battle in 424 B.C., the later Western tradition of philosophy would have known almost nothing firsthand about either Socrates’ life or thought.
We do, however, have at least one contemporary source for the life of Socrates who knew him well before the battle of Delium, a critic who has left us a gripping portrait a mere year after the battle—the comic playwright Aristophanes. The picture of Socrates in his Clouds (423 B.C.) is not pretty. His Socrates is a vicious caricature of a middle-aged huckster. Indeed, because of Aristophanes’ influential status, and since he portrayed Socrates on the stage before thousands of Athenians, both Plato and Xenophon in part spent their entire lives trying to counteract that apparently commonly embraced Aristophanic portrait of Socrates as con man and Sophist. Aristophanes’ depiction of Socrates reached far more Athenians—mostly the men in the street who made up the audience of Attic comedy—than did his portrait by either the more refined Xenophon or Plato.
Some scholars have suggested that Socrates’ hagiography in the works of both Plato and Xenophon was partly meant as a response to the vehemence of Aristophanes’ earlier slander. Other comic poets—Ameipsias and Eupolis especially, whose works are now lost but were widely popular during the 420s—also caricatured Socrates onstage. They reinforced the devastating portrayal by Aristophanes, whose lasting vilification so bothered Plato and Xenophon. Again, small numbers of elites read or attended private recitations of Plato and Xenophon. In contrast, thousands of working Athenians viewed the comedies of Aristophanes and his rival comic poets.
In Aristophanes’ comedy The Clouds—often considered his masterpiece and produced on the stage in 423 B.C.—Socrates is the worst of the sophistic charlatans. He appears as a leader of that infamous collection of slick tricksters who made a living by filling the heads of an idle rich elite with word games and relativist morality—relativists who were in part responsible for the cultural decline of Athens and its purported increasing lethargy and decadence during the long war with Sparta. In the comedy, Socrates attempts to “make the weaker argument stronger.” He is a windbag. His superficial cleverness with words is attractive to untrained minds like the play’s main characters, Strepsiades and Pheidippides, father and son who are willing to pay for a foolish veneer of learning in hopes of hoodwinking other Athenians into giving them something for nothing. At the end of the play an irate Strepsiades, cured of Socratic double-talk, burns down Socrates’ “thinking house”—and presumably incinerates Socrates with it!
So influential was Aristophanes’ invective that in the last speech of his life, as reported in Plato’s Apology, Socrates attempts to defend himself from the popular prejudice incurred from the attacks of the “comic poets.” One tradition has it that he watched the comedy and purportedly stood up during a presentation of The Clouds to assure the audience he was not bothered by the caricature. Plutarch records that Socrates remarked that the attacks on him on the comic stage were no different from barbs at wine parties.
Without Plato’s and Xenophon’s earlier acquaintance with Socrates, neither writer would have had any zeal to counteract the more prevailing view of Aristophanes, who unlike themselves, at least had met and known Socrates for a good many years. Thus Socrates dead at forty-five would have survived in history as little different from the notorious but obscure Gorgias, Hippias, Protagoras, and other Sophists whose writings are for the most part lost, but whose reputations have generally been sullied by nearly all their contemporaries. Socrates would not have been the hero of Plato and Xenophon—impressionable youths who both idealistically worshiped the aged philosopher whom they watched at seventy be unjustly killed by an ignorant mob.
Instead, he would have remained the rascal of the cynical and jaded Aristophanes, joining the scoundrels Cleon and Alcibiades, whose reputations as knaves par excellence were cemented forever on the Athenian comic stage. Had Socrates died that afternoon in 424 B.C., whatever and whoever he was until the age of forty-five when he stalked the battlefield of Delium would mostly be unknown and of little interest to us outside the rather devilish creation of Aristophanes a year later.
Finally, it is impossible to gauge the development of Socrates’ own thought at age forty-five, inasmuch as he wrote nothing. Nor does Plato’s work give us any clue to any chronological evolution in Socratic reasoning. Nevertheless, there is some evidence that his development as a first-class thinker came during the last twenty-five years of his life. Only then did he attract the best minds of Athens to his side, such as Alcibiades, Agathon, Plato, Xenophon, and Isocrates—as well as the ire of Aristophanes. Other older and near-contemporaries of Socrates, for example, who appear in Plato’s dialogues as his close friends are curiously often non-Athenian—Phaedo of Elis, Echecrates of Phlius, Simmias and Cebes of Thebes, Aristippus of Cyrene, Euclides and Terpsion of Megara. And these elderly men are often interested not so much in ethical questions, but rather in natural philosophy and cosmology—especially Orphic thought, the teaching of Pythagoras, the ontology of Parmenides, the natural inquiry of Empedocles, and the radical views of Anaxagoras. When and where did Socrates meet these other disciples, who seem somewhat different from his later and more famous Athenian adherents?
Perhaps before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War (431 B.C.), Socrates was even better known outside of Athens as an itinerant natural philosopher in the earlier tradition of speculating about the nature of matter, the cosmos, and the soul. Only later, with the outbreak of the war and the difficulty of these former associates to travel freely and to live in Athens (Elis, Thebes, and Megara were all on occasion at war with Athens), an older and more Athens-bound Socrates turned his attention increasingly away from these earlier concerns of cosmology to personal ethics, rhetoric, and politics.
There were issues of vital interest as he watched his home city tear herself apart in open assembly during the war. When The Clouds was
staged in 423 B.C., although Socrates was perceived as part and parcel of the new sophistic trend, he nevertheless is caricatured often for his obsessions with “the heavens” (ta meteôra) and “the things above earth,” suggesting a long prior career that concerned itself with cosmology and astronomical speculation.
A new following among wealthy, young, and impressionable Athenians suggests a more mature Socrates in his forties and fifties—beginning around the time of the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. During the war he traveled less and focused his philosophy on more germane concerns of everyday life. Thus, not only would we have known little about Socrates had he died in the darkness of Delium, but what little information that would have survived would suggest to posterity a picture of a rather obscure natural philosopher who only very recently had turned his attention to ethical inquiry inside Athens, and so caught the attention of Aristophanes and the comic poets. The original fault line of Western philosophy—pre-Socratic as cosmology and natural inquiry; Socratic as ethical and moral thought—would not have existed. And of course there would be no such term as “Socratic” at all.
Can we continue our counterfactual speculations about Plato’s own career without the influence of Socrates? If we would now know very little of Socrates without Plato, what would we know of a non-Socratic Plato?—of a philosopher who never met Socrates? The purpose of Plato’s most famous treatises—Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, the tetrad that surrounds the trial and death of Socrates—would vanish with a Socrates dead in 424 rather than executed in 399. But even more important, at least a third of Plato’s earliest work, the so-called early Socratic dialogues, would probably not have been written at all, or at least not written in their present form.
Scholars have spent the past century trying to arrange Plato’s thirty-one dialogues into some sort of chronology by date of their composition—a difficult task given that Plato probably wrote over a forty- to fifty-year period and told us little about his own life as an author. But on stylistic grounds, philosophical content, and contemporary references to historical events, there is now a rough consensus of what represents his “early” work (Apology, Crito, Laches, Lysis, Charmides, Euthyphro, Hippias Major and Minor, Protagoras, Gorgias, and Ion) written in Plato’s thirties and forties (i.e., 390s B.C.). They are rather distinct from the twelve subsequent “middle” dialogues (written in the 380s and 370s B.C.) and a final eight “late” works (composed in the 360s and 350s B.C.).
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