LIFE

Socrates was a native Athenian, son of Sophroniscus and Phaenarete, of the deme Alopeke. He was born in 470 or 469 B.C., for the records of his trial and execution put them in the spring of 399, and plato gives his age as seventy at the time. His father is said to have been a stonemason or sculptor, and references in plato to Daedalus as his ancestor (Euthyphro IIb, Alc. I 121 a) do something to confirm this. As doctors traced their descent to Asclepius as eponymous ancestor (so Parentage and Life ofSocrates Eryximachus in Plato, Symp. 186e), sculptors would naturally trace their line back to Daedalus. The justification for the mythical genealogy is that it was regular Greek practice for a craft to be handed on from father to son. Accordingly it was said that Socrates himself was brought up in the sculptor's craft, which he may have practised in his earlier years (Zeller, Ph. d. Gr. 52, nne 1 and 2), before he ‘deserted it for paideia’ as Lucian later put it (Somn. 12). Sophroniscus seems to have been a respected citizen who could hold up his head in any company, since plato makes Lysimachus son ofAristides speak ofhim as a lifelong friend whom he held in the highest esteem. It is unlikely that he was poor, or that Socrates's later poverty was anything but self-chosen, as plato in the Apology (23b) says it was.

The Peloponnesian War involved him in much active service, and he earned high praise for his courage and coolness, especially in adversity, and his powers of endurance.

GENERAL

It is a bold—some will say over-bold—procedure to try to separate Socrates from plato. In the dialogues of plato it would seem that he has so blended his own spirit with that of Socrates that they can never again be separated. I thought so myself until I came to write an account of the Sophistic movement; but the study which this necessitated has made me see Socrates as squarely set in his contemporary world of the Sophists, Thucydides and Euripides and an eager participant in their arguments. Certainly it has been impossible to leave him out of the previous sections describing fifth-century controversies. Plato, for all his reverence for Socrates as the inspiration and starting point of his own reflections, is a more sophisticated philosopher and marks a new and fateful development in the history of thought. I would even claim that in reading plato himself, without any checking or supplementation from other sources, one gets a strong impression that he was an essentially different philosophical character from the master through whose mouth he so often expresses the results of his own maturer and more widely ranging mind. He was still passionately concerned with the questions which excited the previous two generations—whether law and morals were natural or conventional in origin, whether ‘virtue’ could be taught, whether intelligence or inanimate nature was prior, whether all values were relative, the nature and standing of rhetoric, the relation between being and seeming, knowledge and opinion, language and its objects—and to him Protagoras and Gorgias, Prodicus and Hippias were still opponents whose challenge had not been adequately met; but to meet it called for something far more radical and comprehensive than the simple ethical intellectualism of Socrates.

‘PHILOSOPHIA DE CAELO DEVOCATA’

For the Greeks themselves the name of Socrates formed a watershed in the history of their philosophy. The reason they give for this is that he turned men's eyes from the speculations about the nature of the physical world which had been characteristic of the Presocratic period, and concentrated attention on the problems of human life. In the most general terms, his message was that to investigate the origin and ultimate matter of the universe, the composition and motions of the heavenly bodies, the shape of the earth or the causes of natural growth and decay was of far less importance than to understand what it meant to be a human being and for what purpose one was in the world. This estimate of Socrates as a turning-point can be traced to Aristotle, though he does not perhaps give it such incontrovertible support as later writers supposed, and the exaggeratedly schematic view of Greek philosophy which it suggests was the work of the Hellenistic and Graeco-Roman periods. The chief testimonies in Aristotle are these:

(i) In the first chapter of De partibus animalium he is asserting the importance of recognizing the formal–final cause as well as the necessary or material. This had not been clear to earlier thinkers because they had no adequate conception of essence (‘what it is to be’ so-andso) nor of how to define the real being of anything. Democritus had an inkling of it, ‘and in Socrates's time an advance was made as to the method, but the study of nature was given up (εληξε), and philosophers turned their attention to practical goodness and political science’ (642a 28).

In 1894 Edmund Pfleiderer observed that, since innumerable writers, many of them men of the highest reputation, had written about Socrates and Plato, anyone undertaking the task once more must surely, in tanta scriptorum turba, ask himself like Livy: Facturusne operae pretium sim? I should not like to have to count the number of books and articles about Socrates that have appeared in the seventy-odd years since Pfleiderer wrote, but I must hope that yet another presentation of him, in the context of the history of Greek philosophy and especially of the philosophic preoccupations of his own century, will prove worth while. The enormous bulk of the scholarly literature means that my own reading in it has been even more—much more—selective than for earlier periods of Greek thought. I have tried to make the selection representative of at least the more recent work, but it is probably inevitable that some of my readers will look in vain for their favourite items. I hope however that I have made myself sufficiently familiar with the ancient evidence to be entitled to views of my own, and it would not be safe to assume that the omission of a writer or a theory is necessarily due to ignorance. In putting Socrates into his setting in the history of Greek thought, it is impracticable to take note of every theory about him, including those which seem to me (though others may differ) to be highly improbable. I shall not, for instance, say much about what may be called the pan-Antisthenean school, who see Antisthenes lurking anonymously in many of Plato's dialogues and disguised as Socrates in Xenophon's Memorabilia.

Jaeger saw Aristotle's departure from Athens in 347 as the expression of a crisis in his inner life and described that departure as a secession. Although we may readily believe that leaving Athens marked an important development in his relationship with the Academy, we know that he began to criticise the Platonists while still considering himself a member of their circle. He regularly uses the first person plural in referring to the Platonists in his critical review of their philosophy in Metaphysics A ch. 9, and even before that he had set out his objections to the theory of Forms at length in the lost work On Forms. His rejection of this central doctrine of Platonism may well date from a period when Plato was still alive. Ultimately Aristotle's criticisms of his master's theories extended over a very wide range of topics, including physics, cosmology, psychology and ethics. But the key to his reaction against the philosophy of Plato is undoubtedly his rejection of the theory of Forms. This was the corner-stone of his master's teaching and from the rejection of this doctrine many of his other minor objections stem.

Aristotle's arguments are directed not so much against the Plato we know from the Phaedo and the Republic, as against the Platonism current in the Academy in his own day. Indeed both the positions he attacked, and the arguments he used to attack them, owe a great deal to the discussions of the Academy.