by Paul Johnson
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
I - Living Man and Ventriloquist’s Doll
II - The Ugly Joker with the Gift for Happiness
III - Socrates and the Climax of Athenian Optimism
IV - Socrates the Philosophical Genius
V - Socrates and Justice
VI - The Demoralization of Athens and the Death of Socrates
VII - Socrates and Philosophy Personified
FURTHER READING
INDEX
ALSO BY PAUL JOHNSON
ALSO BY PAUL JOHNSON
Jesus
Churchill
Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties
A History of the Jews
The Birth of the Modern World: World Society 1815–1830
Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky
A History of the American People
Art: A New History
George Washington: The Founding Father
Creators: From Chaucer and Dürer to Picasso and Disney
Napoleon: A Penguin Life
Heroes: From Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar
to Churchill and de Gaulle
PAUL JOHNSON
VIKING
VIKING
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First published in 2011 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Paul Johnson, 2011 All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Johnson, Paul.
Socrates : a man for our times / Paul Johnson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN : 978-1-101-54519-5
1. Socrates. I. Title.
B317.J65 2011
183’.2—dc23 2011019767
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To S.B., guide, philosopher, and friend
I
Living Man and Ventriloquist’s Doll
There is always a spirit of the times. Even in deep antiquity, strong and almost identical impulses drove forward the elites in societies separated by unbridged chasms of space. We cannot perhaps explain these coordinations. But we can profitably study them. Two and a half millennia ago, in the fifth century B.C., in three advanced areas, where literacy existed but was still in its infancy, three outstanding individuals echoed one another in insisting that the distinction between their civilizations and the surrounding barbarism must be reinforced by systematic moral education.
Confucius (a Latinized form of Kung Fu-tzu, meaning Philosopher Kung) was born in Shantung, China, in 551 B.C., dying aged seventy-three, in 479 B.C. He came from a poor but distinguished patrician family, whose descendants, in the seventy-sixth generation, still live in the district. He was a clever child and, while still a schoolboy, conceived the notion of devoting his life to the moral and cultural transformation of society by a new kind of education. It was to stress all that was best in Chinese learning, based on six arts: ritual, calligraphy, arithmetic, and music, with the physical skills of archery and charioteering. His pupils recorded him saying: “At fifteen I set my heart on learning. At thirty I firmly took my stand as a teacher. At forty I had no delusions about education. At fifty I felt the Mandate of Heaven to teach. At sixty my ear was attuned to my pupils. At seventy I followed heart’s desire without overstepping the boundaries of right.”
It was Confucius’s view, recorded by his pupils in what are called the Analects, that education was the key to everything: A person should be so deep in study that he forgets to eat, so full of joy in learning he ignores all practical worries, and so busy acquiring knowledge he does not notice old age coming on. Education was the process whereby civilization, and the minds and bodies of those privileged to enjoy it, breathed and lived.
In 458 B.C., the Hebrew priest and scribe Ezra returned to Jerusalem from Babylon. He had been born when Confucius was in his sixties and was the leading intellectual among the exiled Jewish community in Persia. He brought with him an edited and freshly transcribed version of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Torah, or Jewish Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament. The word Torah came to mean “the Law,” but its meaning originally, and certainly in Ezra’s day, was instruction, teaching, guidance. Ezra used the Torah as the basis for the refoun-dation of the Jewish community in the Promised Land, after the dislocation of the Exile. It was his manual of instruction, as the rest of his life was one of those rare occasions in history when education was used as the means to reform an entire society, morally, politically, economically, and socially.
When Ezra began his mission, Socrates was twelve. He had been born in Athens, then a city-state democracy, in 470 B.C., nine years after Confucius’s death. Whereas Ezra was of the priestly ruling elite, a direct descendant of Zadok, known in Hebrew history as the Priest, the archetypal hierarch, and Confucius was an aristocrat and magistrate, familiar with royal circles, Socrates was middle-class. His father was a mason and carver in stone, and his mother (he said) was a midwife. Socrates, thanks to his powerful intellect and still more to the way he employed it, contrived to make himself classless, the first classless person in history. Despite these different backgrounds, the three men were united by their passion for education, to which they devoted their lives. To all three, education involved learning all that was most valuable in their societies. But beyond knowledge, education was a process whereby virtue or the ability to lead a good life was acquired. And to cap it all, Socrates was in no doubt that education, by making one virtuous, was the surest road to happiness. He was the first seer we know of who pondered deeply on what makes humans happy and how such a blessing can be acquired.
Such a man is well worth knowing about, and for 2,500 years the learned and intellectually enterprising in all countries have sought to know him. At a superficial level, it is easy.
Socrates is the quintessential philosopher, the seeker and conveyor of wisdom. But the more one penetrates from the superficial to the essence of the man, the more difficult it becomes. Socrates wrote nothing. Nor did Confucius. But whereas Confucius was listened to attentively by scholars who then collaborated to produce an exact transcript of his teaching—rather as in the twentieth century the pupils of Wittgenstein, another philosopher who wrote little, tried to remember and set down every word from his life—Socrates had a quite different experience. Two remarkable men attached themselves to him and sought to immortalize him in words. Xenophon was a country gentleman, a traveler-adventurer and a general who, thanks to Socrates, whom he venerated, became an amateur student of philosophy. He loved writing and, as countless generations of schoolchildren know, wrote a pure form of classical Greek admirably adapted for the classroom. He wrote the Anabasis, the best book on a single military experience to come down to us from antiquity, and among many other works, the most thorough manual on training horses in the classical library, as well as its companion volume on the use of cavalry. He also produced his Memoirs, a verbatim account of a dinner party in which Socrates is the central guest. All this is valuable, but it has to be said that Xenophon never comprehended and so could not reproduce the sheer power of Socrates’ mind, its unique combination of steel, subtlety, and frivolity. If he were our sole authority for Socrates, we would never have learned to venerate him as the founder of philosophy as an expert science.
Our chief source, who sought with all his astounding ability as a writer and thinker to perpetuate the work of Socrates, was his pupil Plato. Plato was a genius, which is both our boundless delight and our misfortune. Being taught by Socrates was the central event of his life, and after his master’s death he spent much of his remaining time recording what he said in a series of dialogues or conversations. More than a score have survived, plus two companion documents: Socrates’ verbatim defense when on trial for his life, and a record of his last hours before his death sentence was carried out. These two documents, plus the earliest dialogues, are authentic records of Socrates the man, the historical seer at work.
However, Plato was not only a genius but one of a particular kind. He was a don, an academic. The very first academic, in fact, for after Socrates’ death, he founded, in a suburban park in Athens, a study place—we would call it a think tank—called the Academy, from which the profession takes its name. It was the earliest university, and its prize alumnus, who came to Plato’s classes when he was seventeen, was Aristotle, third of the sturdy tripod of masters on which the entire corpus of Western philosophy rests. Aristotle went on to found his own university, the Lyceum, in Athens as companion and rival to Plato’s, so that the characteristic pattern of academic life, competitive animosity, was well established before the end of the fourth century B.C.
When writing his documents on Socrates’ end, and his own early dialogues, Plato was still innocent enough, that is still sufficiently enraptured by Socrates’ thinking and method, to reproduce both accurately. They form a trustworthy record of Socrates’ enormous and vital contribution to the best way of using our mind to reach truth. But as Plato began to play his new role as academic, as the vesture of the don, the metaphorical cap and gown, settled comfortably on his head and shoulders, he underwent a transformation. To his persona as the first academic he added or superimposed the complementary persona of the first intellectual, by which I mean someone who thinks ideas matter more than people.
As an intellectual he began to formulate his own ideas. As an academic he quickly merged them into a system. And as a teacher he used Socrates to spread and perpetuate it. In his earlier writings Plato presented Socrates as a living, breathing, thinking person, a real man. But as Plato’s ideas took shape, demanding propagation, poor Socrates, whose actual death Plato had so lamented, was killed a second time, so that he became a mere wooden man, a ventriloquist’s doll, to voice not his own philosophy but Plato’s. Being an intellectual, Plato thought that to spread his ideas was far more important than to preserve Socrates as a historic, integrated human being. Using Socrates as an articulate doll was, he saw, the easiest way to bring about this philosophical dispersal. So the act of transforming a living, historical thinker into a mindless, speaking doll—the murder and quasi-diabolical possession of a famous brain—became in Plato’s eyes a positive virtue. That is the only charitable way of describing one of the most unscrupulous acts in intellectual history. Thus Plato, with no doubt the best intentions, created, like Frankenstein, an artificial monster-philosopher. It is particularly damaging to our understanding of Socrates in that the line of demarcation in Plato’s writings between the real Socrates and the monster is unclear. It has been argued about for centuries, without any universally accepted result, and anyone who writes on the subject must make up their own mind, as I have done in this account.
Happily we have other sources, independent of Plato and Xenophon, which give us bits of information about Socrates. His contemporary, the comic dramatist Aristophanes, who also seems to have been a friend—but then, in showbiz is there such a thing as friendship?—wrote a savagely hostile play about him, Clouds. There is an account of Socrates by Diogenes Laertius, written seven hundred years later but using sources since lost to us. There are anecdotes, aperçus, recorded sayings, and snippets of information in the works of many classical and early medieval writers, from Cicero and Seneca, Plutarch and Lucian, to St. Augustine and Tertullian—and many others—who had access to libraries that were totally destroyed in the Dark Ages.
These bits and pieces help us to flesh out or correct the primary material Plato and Xenophon provide. But we always have to bear in mind the low regard classical and, still more, postclassical writers had for truth, their habitual inaccuracy even when trying to be honest, their lack of impartiality, historicity, or plausibility or even, one feels, common sense, and the slovenly way books were written, copied, and preserved. Before the coming of the codex or book proper, writing was done on papyrus rolls about thirty-three feet (ten meters) long. A roll might contain a book of Thucydides or two of Homer. But there was no uniformity, and scribes wrote for other scribes, not for the reader (they were strongly trade-unionized in every epoch and area). There was no attempt to stick to a specific number of letters to a line or lines to a column. Punctuation did not exist nor capital letters nor regular spacing between words, and a short stroke under a line, known as a paragraphos, was the only indication of a change of subject, pause, or, in plays and dialogues—very important for Plato’s texts involving Socrates—a change of speaker, whose name, irritatingly, was hardly ever given. All these factors and many other slovenly habits increased the large number of textual errors inevitable in hand-copying, and as the manuscript chain stretched over centuries, even millennia, an incorrupt text became an impossibility. From the Renaissance onward, the prime task of generations of scholars until our own day has been to produce good texts. Even so, we have absolutely no guarantee that what we read of Socrates’ sayings were Plato’s transcriptions of them, as set down 2,450 years ago. And all this is in addition to the loss of manuscripts in their entirety or in part. Until Socrates’ time, no one who speculated about the cosmos and its inhabitants has been fortunate enough to have their conclusions survive. The works of pre-Socratic philosophers, as they are called, are quite literally fragments.
Nonetheless, Socrates himself is known to us as man and thinker, as a hugely real, living, and enjoyable human being. Let us meet him.
II
The Ugly Joker with the Gift for Happiness
Socrates was proud of being born an Athenian. He lived all his life in the city and never left it except in her service as a soldier. He was often critical of Athenian ways and leaders but never wavered in his conviction that it was the best of all city-states in which to live. And this, like most of his views, was sound and practical.
Greece in the fifth century B.C. was a collection of city-states, of which Athens was the la
rgest and usually the richest and most powerful. Greece as a whole was innovative, enterprising, and above all, competitive, and Athens was the epicenter of the competitive spirit. Most cities held their own annual competitions, both athletic and cultural, but in addition there were Panhellenic games open to the entire Greek-speaking world: the Olympian, Pythian, Isthmian, and Nemean games. The most prestigious were the Olympian, held every four years at Olympia in the northwest Peloponnese.
We know a lot about these occasions. They were founded in 776 B.C., two centuries before Socrates’ birth, and were held until A.D. 393, over a millennium later, when they were abolished as a pagan festival by the Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius I. And of course they were a pagan event for, like almost all Greek institutions, their origins were religious. Socrates was fond of reminding young men that the point of an Olympic victory was not the honor and money received by the victors, but service to god, in the shape of Zeus, whose magnificent giant statue of gold and ivory at Olympus was created during his lifetime by his friend Phidias. The race on foot the length of the stadium was the first and remained the chief event, but other tests of speed, strength, and endurance were added—including boxing, wrestling, a race for men in armor, and chariot and horse races. Both umpires and competitors took an oath of fair play and justice, but decisions were often challenged, and crowds booed and sometimes attacked the umpires. In early times, Sparta, the first city to train its athletes professionally, just as it took warfare with deadly seriousness, usually emerged the overall victor, but gradually other cities, not least Athens, produced fierce competition. Money began to talk. Socrates’ rich young friend Alcibiades, for instance, entered six chariot teams for the Olympics, and carried off first, second, and fourth prizes. We know this because a complete list of the Olympic winners, from 776 B.C. to A.D. 217, was drawn up by Julius Africanus, and preserved by the church historian Eusebius.
