,
;
The Master said, "To know when you know,
and when you do not know; that is wisdom."Confucius, Analects II:17, translation after James Legge [1893], Arthur Waley [1938], D.C. Lau [1979], and Joanna C. Lee [2010]
It was one of the rules which, above all others, made Doctor Franklin the most amiable of men in society, "never to contradict anybody." If he was urged to announce an opinion, he did it rather by asking questions, as if for information, or by suggesting doubts.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Thomas Jefferson Randolph (Jefferson's grandson), November 24, 1808.
ἐλεύθεροι παρρησίᾳ θάλλοντες οἰκοῖεν πόλιν κλεινῶν Ἀθηνῶν.
Free, outspoken, and flourishing, let them live in the city of famous Athens.Phaedra, Hippolytus, by Eurpides, lines 421-423, translated by David Kovacs, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1995, pp.164-165, translation modified.
There is, therefore, no fundamental irony in Socrates. Rather he is -- like Cassandra, that other misunderstood servant of Apollo -- someone it has proved very difficult to take at his word...
On trial for his life, Socrates neither argues fallaciously nor evades the real charges or their real basis nor intentionally provokes the jury. His response to the formal charges may not be the best one he could have made. That is an open question. But it is part of a reasonable and intelligible defense compatible with his deepest principles, and it establishes his innocence...
If, on the other hand, it was Socrates' association with Alcibiades and Critias and his supposed antidemocracy that told against him with the jury, then the verdict was not only unjust because irrelevant to the charges he faced, it was also, because of the Amnesty of 403, in violation of Athenian law.
C.D.C. Reeve, Socrates in the Apology, Hackett Publishing Company, 1989, pp.184-185, boldface added.
ὁ ἄναξ οὗ τὸ μαντεῖόν ἐστι τὸ ἐν Δελφοῖς
οὔτε λέγει οὔτε κρύπτει ἀλλὰ σημαίνει.The lord whose oracle is in Delphi
neither speaks nor conceals but gives a sign.Heraclitus of Ephesus, quoted by Plutarch, De Pythiae oraculis 21, 404 E, The Presocratic Philosophers, G.S. Kirk & J.E. Raven, Cambridge, 1964, p.211
Unless Plato had already written some short dialogues to illustrate Socrates' technique of questioning (like the Euthyphro), the Apology of Socrates is the earliest thing by him that we have. This would mean that it is the oldest extant document of Greek philosophy -- everything earlier (e.g. Parmenides) was lost and is known only through quoted fragments in later works, like those of Plato himself. There is something fitting in this. Socrates substantially refounded philosophy, and the Apology is still, all by itself, about the best introduction to Western philosophy that there is.
At the trial for his life in 399 BC, Socrates, Σωκράτης, astonished his listeners by appearing, despite his vigorous defense, to deliberately provoke the jury and get himself found guilty and condemned to death. What he had said was then a matter of some curiosity, but there were no Greek court reporters, and of course no audio or video tape, so there was no official record, or news recording, of the trial. No film at 11. If Socrates' words were going to be remembered, the spectators were going to have to record them. This is what happened, and various versions of the Apology of Socrates were produced. Only two survive, Plato's and one by Xenophon, Ξενοφῶν ὁ Ἀθηναῖος, Xenophon of Athens.
A friend of Socrates, Xenophon also produced the valuable Recollections of Socrates (or Memorabilia). Unfortunately, Xenophon was not a philosopher, did not, I expect, understand Socrates very well, also, as he admits, was not at the trial, and did not try to reproduce the whole speech. Plato has his own presence at the trial affirmed by Socrates himself, who mentions Plato by name twice in Plato's Apology. Xenophon's Apology thus is an abbreviated and disappointing document next to Plato's, but it does tell us a couple of things that we might not know otherwise. These will be noted at the appropriate points in the course of Socrates' speech. Some scholars seem to think that Xenophon understood Socrates better than Plato did, and other scholars that Xenophon's information is not worth considering. Neither kind seems well motivated.
Now, although the word "apology" is the direct descendant into English of the Greek word ἀπολογία, apología, the meaning has changed. Socrates was not apologizing or making excuses. He wasn't sorry. The Greek word apología simply and precisely meant a defense, or a defense speech. This meaning has been preserved in English in some related words: An "apologist" is still someone who argues a defense of someone or something, and "apologetics" is still a discipline or system of argued defense of something, usually a doctrine, cause, or institution. Socrates' speech thus might be translated The Defense of Socrates without the possible confusion over the modern meaning; but after long usage, it is hard to imagine calling the Apology anything else.
The meaning of "apologetics" has drifted somewhat. Calling someone an "apologist," or speaking of an "apologetic" or "apologia," now may imply an element of dishonesty, bias, or a distorted form of special pleading. This may have happened for a couple of reasons. (1) as "defense" and "defender" do adequate jobs of expressing the meaning of defense, "apologetic" is free to assume a slightly different meaning, perhaps because of (2) that "apologetics" is tainted by associations, e.g. with the traditional defenses of Christianity, that have become targets of skepticism or condemnation. An "apologist" may now be viewed as a kind of Sophist or hack. By the same token the neutral meaning of "dogma," as embodying religious doctrine, has became tainted with a sense of the arbitrary, the irrational, and the dictatorial.
The opposite of an "apologetic" is a "polemic," from Greek πόλεμος, pólemos, "war." "Polemics" is the systematic attack on a doctrine, position, cause, or institution. A "polemic" is a particular such attack; and the "polemicist" does such an attack. Apologetics and polemics are easily combined, as we see in the Summa Contra Gentiles of St. Thomas Aquinas, who defends Christianity by attacking the "gentiles," i.e. Jews and Muslims.
Part of the tradition of the Apology is that it is the first complete text read in the formal study of Classical Greek. This was not the case with me, since my Greek professor at UCLA in 1968 decided that we should break with tradition and read the Euthyphro and Crito instead. I'm not sure that was an improvement on tradition -- more like variety for the sake of variety -- though that meant variety for the professor rather than for us students. I think that the Apology is far too important to be skipped over like that.
Although Socrates is on trial for his life, his prosecutors (Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon) are private individuals. There is no public prosecutor at Athens, no District Attorney. All actions are brought by private individuals, although they themselves might be politically prominent, or officials. If there is a murder, and basically no one cares about the victim, there might be no prosecution -- though the city did take an interest in murder cases, because of the pollution, and from an early date the Council of the Areopagus, the ancient senate of the aristocracy, undertook to protect the state from vengeful spirits.
It is also noteworthy in the Apology that Socrates never mentions a judge. All his remarks are addressed to the jury, and from the evidence of this text alone, we might not know whether there was a judge or not. We do know, however, even from the Euthyphro, that Socrates is in the court of one of the major officials of Athens, the "King Archon."
There were nine archons (ἄρχων, árkhon = ruler, regent, commander) in the classic constitution at Athens. Six were judges, the Thesmothetae. The other three were the Eponymous Archon, after whom the year was named (Athenian dates were in the form "the year so-and-so was Archon"), the Polemarch, who was the commander-in-chief, and the King, Βασιλεύς, who succeeded to the religious duties of the original Kings of Athens. One of these duties was to preside over court cases involving religion. That included murders, which involved the pollution of spilled blood, and accusations of impiety. That is why Socrates was in the King's court. He was accused of impiety.
The King Archon, the judge, is not mentioned by Socrates because he has almost no power. Most of the power in the courtroom is in the hands of the jury, which is said to be 501 jurors. There is no screening of jurors. The jury is pretty much any free adult male citizen who shows up. However, whether you got on a jury, and which case it would be, was a matter of chance. Individual jurors for a particular jury were drawn by lot. Given that, there were otherwise no challenges. The comedy The Wasps by Aristophanes is about an old man who amuses himself by getting on a jury every day, and by voting everyone guilty.
The jury has all but absolute power. At the same time, there was not much in the way of rules of evidence. The prosecution and defense could say pretty much whatever they wanted. Thus, ironically, Socrates, who in a sense was put to death for practicing free speech (παῤῥησία, parrhêsía, or ἐλευθερία παῤῥησίᾳ, eleuthería parrhêsíai, the "freedom of speech"), nevertheless had more freedom of speech at his trial than most defendants do in the courts of the United States of America, where judges can prohibit defendants from making certain kinds of defenses, e.g. that the law under which they are charged is unjust or unconstitutional.
If the modern jury rules on considerations of Constitutionality or justice, they are practicing what is called "nullification," something hated by almost all judges, prosecutors, law professors, and politicians, even though it is endorsed by all the Founding Fathers, even political enemies like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. The Supreme Court did not begin to undermine the power of juries until Sparf and Hansen v. United States in 1894. All Socrates had to worry about was how to appeal to the jury, but he then made his defense in such a way as to antagonize the jury instead.
The procedure of the trial is that the prosecutor or prosecutors make their speeches, accusing the defendant, then the defendant makes his defense speech. This is where the Apology begins, as we can tell, since Socrates initially comments on what he has just heard from his prosecutors. After the defense, the jury votes innocent or guilty. Only a bare majority is needed, though, as Socrates mentions, the prosecution is fined if it does not get a fifth of the vote. In this case, Socrates is barely (by 30 votes) found guilty. Then we get what today is called the "penalty phase of the trial." The prosecution proposes a punishment it thinks is fitting, in this case death. Then Socrates proposes a counter-penalty. The jury again votes to pick which penalty to impose. Socrates is condemned to death. The final part of the Apology, then, is what Socrates has to say after that vote, after he knows that he is sentenced to die.
Greek words here are rendered with their accents, but ētas and ōmegas, i.e. long e's and o's, are shown with a circumflex, just to indicate length, unless they otherwise have an acute or grave accent, which is then shown instead. Greek accents indicated tones, just like in Chinese, except that a polysyllabic Greek word usually only has one tone. Acúte accents were rising tones, gràve falling, and circûmflexes rising and falling. Iota subscripts are not, regretfully, indicated. Consult the full treatment of The Pronunciation of Greek. Also, see the discussion of disputes over Greek transcription here. With Unicode, combinations of macrons for long vowels and acute or grave accents can be properly rendered. Thus an eta with an acute can be ḗ and with a grave ḕ. An omega with an acute can be ṓ and with a grave ṑ. I have been slowly upgrading the Greek transcriptions with these Unicode symbols, but there is no urgency about it. I would rather simply add the word in Greek. And, unfortunately, there is no provision for iota subscripts in Unicode.
This commentary is largely based on lectures given on the Apology at Los Angeles Valley College from 1987 to 2009, using the G.M.A. Grube translation, in different editions [Plato, Five Dialogues, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo, Hackett Publishing Company, 1981, pp. 24-44]. The original commentary was written up and posted on line while I was on sabbatical in the academic year 1999-2000, and it has been updated at intervals since then, down to the present -- μέχρι τοῦ νῦν in Greek. Some comment and complaint will be made below about Grube's translation, but it does seem to me overall a fine rendering. A postumous edition altered the translation, in some cases badly, in other cases well -- especially well on the issue of the δαιμόνια καινά, at 26c. Although it may be possible to read this commentary independent of the Apology itself, it would probably be better to have read the text first.
Indeed, it was my custom, not just to lecture on the Apology, but to read the entire text to all my Introduction to Philosophy classes. Over the years, as the commentary increased, I started skipping some parts of the text, but the earliest parts I would always read in full. I told classes that this is how teaching was done in the Middle Ages, when books were rare and expensive, and it was the professor's job to read the text as well as talk about it. As it happened, this could not be done with the Apology in the universities of Francia, because the Greek text was not available there until the Renaissance, when it was rescued from the Fall of Constantinople [note].
How far the irony of Socrates goes is a matter of debate among scholars. The extreme is that the whole Apology is an ironic pose and that Socrates is an atheist who doesn't believe in the god at Delphi, the Oracle, or this fairy tale he relates about being on a mission from the god. So all this is a kind of joke, and Socrates is simply a liar. But no one who knew Socrates, including Plato, Xenophon, and several early Hellenistic philosophers, believed anything of the sort. It is hard to know what kind of respect Socrates is owed if his entire defense is a fraud, although some modern nihilists may like to see their own nihilism in him.
Less extreme is the view, considered in detail here, that Socrates wasn't an atheist but that his views about the gods were extreme enough that he was actually guilty of θεοὺς οὓς ἡ πόλις νομίζει οὐ νομίζοντα, "not believing in the gods whom the City believes in," as he was charged. If this is so, then his defense is still a fraud, deeply dishonest if not actually mendacious. This reading of the Apology may be hostile; but another reading, with some tradition behind it, not at all hostile, is that Socrates was actually a monotheist. This was common in the 19th century -- we see it in the actual translation of the Apology by Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893) -- but it survives as recently as historian Paul Johnson, in his Socrates, A Man for Our Times [Viking, 2011]. But such an interpretation is all based on a basic misreading of the text. Where Socrates says, ὁ θεός, "the god," this has been confused with its meaning in the Bible or in Modern Greek, where ὁ Θεός actually means the unitary "God" of Judaism and Christianity. We see that in first line of the Bible in Greek: Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἐποίησεν ὁ Θεὸς τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ τὴν γῆν, "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth" [Genesis 1:1]. See the extended discussion of this issue here.
We might not know apart from references like this that there were bankers -- τραπεζίται, trapezítai (singular, τραπεζίτης, trapezítês) -- in the Athenian marketplace. Greek bankers, however, may not have been much in the business of taking deposits and making economically useful loans. They are mainly going to be money changers, what now we would call currency speculators, and loan sharks. The ancient world never saw anything like modern banking. The Roman Empire never sold bonds, and we don't have any evidence of letters of credit, bank notes, or any other of the modern instruments of banking. A lot of this may have begun with the Crusades, when pilgrims began to carry paper instruments that they could redeem once they arrived in Outremer. This was the beginning of Italian banking, from which families like the Medici became rich and powerful. With the Greeks, money was so new that no one even had a very good idea what it was all about (not too much different, really, today). When trade itself was regarded as morally questionable, charging interest (τόκος) was well beyond respectable practices (again, not too much different, in some quarters, today).On the other hand, later we see Jesus speaking about deposits with bankers to earn interest. Also, when coinage existed in both copper, silver, and gold, as it did for much of the history of the Roman Empire, there was the problem that there was not a fixed exchange between the coins of these different metals, which could vary in value depending on their supply and demand. If the Roman government, as it sometimes did, demanding tax payments in gold, which most people might have rarely seen...
The rhetorician, philosopher, and Aristotle commentator Themistius (317-c.390) tells us that such coins were, τι καὶ θέαμα ἀγαπητὸν τοῖς πολλοῖς ἀνθρώποις, "a sight so dear [i.e. rare] for all people." [Orations, Greek text Themistio, Sophista et Apud Imperatores Oratore, Eugène Baret, Excudebant Firmin Didot Fratres, Paris, 1853, Forgotten Books, 2018, p.37]...sufficient coins of the other metals needed to be assembled, sometimes pooling the resources of several families, or even a whole village, taking them to a money changer, and getting the needed gold coin(s) in return, at the current exchange rate (with commission). The opposite dynamic also happened, where soldiers or other officials might be paid in gold but then needed small coins for daily purchases. The practice of going to the money changers frequently is attested for this problem. In other words, vendors themselves were not always expected to "make change."
Nor was this just an artifact of ancient exchange. The varying rates of gold and silver were a headache for modern states, and the exchange between gold and silver coin was occasionally, or frequently, adjusted by governments (probably following the rate found among black market money changers). This can be nicely followed with English coinage, where the modern standard gold coin, introduced for a 20 shilling pound, varied from a value of 13 shillings 4 pence (13s4d or 13/4) to 30 shillings. Stable for a century at 21 shillings (a "guinea"), a principle was introduced, in 1817, that silver and copper coins would be no more than tokens for the value of gold coins, with the weight of the silver coins reduced, and a new 20 shilling gold coin introduced, the "Sovereign." This was the "Gold Standard," whose meaning is generally confused to irrelevant in most of the popular usage of the term.
My own experience with a French changeur was because I had a lot of money left in Swiss coinage when I arrived in Paris in 1970. Currency exchanges didn't like coins. But the changeur gave me French francs at par with Swiss francs, even though the former was only worth 20¢ and the latter no less than 25¢. I did not think this was a good deal, but there wasn't any alternative. He wouldn't even look at my Syrian money, which I actually still have. I was a lot happier with the money changer in Beirut, who seemed to have some of every kind of money, and was in the business of undercutting the phony official exchange rates of places like Egypt.
A memorable occasion when modern banking was done from an actual table is when Amadeo Giannini (1870-1949) set one up among the ruins, for his Bank of Italy, to begin making loans to rebuild San Francisco after the great earthquake and fire of 1906. Giannini's bank later became the Bank of America -- which has since moved its headquarters from San Francisco to North Carolina, to avoid the taxes and regulations of California, where the political culture is what Ayn Rand called "looters." Meanwhile, my impression is that San Francisco got rebuilt faster after 1906 than New Orleans did after hurricane Katrina in 2005. There certainly were a lot more complaints about the latter, which everyone seem to regard as the responsibility of the Federal Government -- which of course had done nothing in 1906.
The connection was that the Greeks came to think of human virtue or excellence as political, since the life of the Greek city (πόλις, pólis) seemed about the most noble activity for human participation -- a formula that excluded women from human excellence, since women were largely excluded from politics. Politics in a democratic city like Athens meant participation in the Assembly (Ἐκκλησία, Ekklêsía, the origin, from a later Christian context, of the word "church"), which consisted of all the free, adult, male citizens of the city. In turn, participation would mean, not just showing up and voting, but actually rising to speak and to propose actions. To speak well, one needs training in rhetoric, and to propose actions persuasively, one needs training in persuasion. The Sophists (Σοφισταί, Sophistaí, whose name simply meant "master of one's craft," or someone who knows something), became the teachers, the travelling paid teachers, of these skills. However, this began to get them a certain reputation. In teaching persuasion, what exactly is to be subject of persuasion? Well, it must be anything, or anything that someone is going to pay to learn to be persuasive about. This gave the Sophists a reputation of opportunism and lack of principles. They would teach you how to prove anything. Of course, not just anything can be proven. It is going to take dishonest and deceptive arguments to be persuasive about a lot of things. Today, a deceptive and fallacious turn of argument can be called a sophism, the constant practice of such is sophistry, and someone engaged in such practice is a sophist. What the Sophists did thus gives us the modern meanings for what they were called. Otherwise, the original meaning of sophistés is preserved in a word like "sophisticated," which implies knowledge, either the worldly knowledge of an individual or the complex adaptation of advanced knowledge to objects.
So to teach persuasion, the Sophists would "make the worse argument the stronger." But, whatever the quality of his own arguments, Socrates was not a paid teacher, did not teach persuasion, and in fact did not teach anything, except indirectly. All he did was ask questions. Thus, the terms of the reputation that Socrates has, although applicable to many Greek philosophers -- though not really all to one at the same time -- has nothing to do with him whatsoever.
Greek comedies are really extraordinary artifacts. Topical and political, but also bawdy and scatological, the only modern equivalent would be a truly X-rated version of Saturday Night Live -- actors playing male parts (no women on stage) were easily identifiable because they wore large stuffed phalluses. Eleven such plays by Aristophanes (died c.388) have survived. One of those, Lysistrata (c.413), even became a footnote to the history of Los Angeles. Lysistrata was an anti-war play, expressing Aristophanes' frustration and unhappiness with the interminable Peloponnesian War (431-404) between Athens and Sparta. His approach, however, was to have the women of Athens go on a sex strike until the men ended the war. The comic possibilities of this are not hard to imagine. Since World War I had left many Americans feeling frustrated, unhappy, and disillusioned with its outcome, there was a fair amount of anti-war sentiment in the 20's, and some producers in Los Angeles decided to capitalize on that by staging Lysistrata. Unfortunately, the sentiment of the times, however pacifist, was not up to the level of bawdiness in the play: It was shut down as obscene by the police. A probably apocryphal story about the raid has the captain of the Vice Squad demanding to know who had written such "smut." He was told the name of the author, but of course had never heard of the man, and had no idea that Aristophanes was somewhat outside the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles Police Department. But, thinking about the name, he suddenly realized he knew who it was: "Harry Stophanes!" So a very perplexed Harry may have ended up in jail that night.
Nor is the lack of a proper name unusual. Gods who are being invoked in a specific case are often left unnamed in ancient religious practice. This was common with the Egyptians (, the "good god" was the King) and can also be seen in Homer, who in the Iliad invokes a Muse as "the goddess" without naming her, and also in Parmenides, who details a long instruction from a goddess who is never named. Scholars are still often confused by this usage.
The more traditional translation, however, may also have been based on some idea that Socrates was a monotheist. Plato and Aristotle, maybe, but there is no evidence of monotheism in the Apology, or in the early dialogues that we can confidently say reflect Socrates' own ideas. Some scholars, like the admirable Paul Johnson, can still be confused by this (e.g. Socrates, A Man for Our Times, Viking 2011).
No, "the god" is a common locution, as common as Socrates' oaths involving Zeus or Hera; and the more that this god happened to mean personally to Socrates, the less likely that he would actually pronounce his name. Indeed, the reluctance of the Jews to speak the Name of the God of Abraham and Isaac meant that its true pronunciation was actually forgotten: the vocalization written for the "tetragrammaton," , the four consonants of the Name of God in the Bible, is that of the substitute word to be said instead,
, ʾAdōnāi, "the LORD" (as it is translated, and written, in the King James Bible). Commentators who are unaware of this ancient religious reluctance to name the god to whom one is appealing may use the absence of the name "Apollo" in the Apology as evidence that Socrates did not believe in the god and is referring to Delphi ironically. But quite the opposite is the case. That Apollo is not named is the best evidence of the power that the identity of the god held for Socrates. Confusions in this matter, and false constructions of it, are examined elsewhere.
The play in question by Aristophanes was the The Clouds (423, rewritten 418), whose name comes from Socrates being shown floating up in the clouds -- like all philosophers. Everything that Aristophanes wanted to ridicule about the Presocratics and the Sophists he attributed to the man who was already the most famous philosopher at Athens, Socrates. This may, at the time, have all been in good fun. The story is that the mask of the actor playing Socrates,who was legendarily ugly, was so good a caricature that Socrates himself stood up in the audience so that it could be compared to him. This makes it sound like Socrates was willing to take the joke.
Exactly how much in fun Aristophanes intended it all is a good question. He certainly didn't like what the Presocratics and Sophists represented, but he hardly seems like one to blame Socrates for losing the war with Sparta (by undermining Athenians virtues), since Aristophanes never liked the war anyway. Aristophanes was, in his own way, deeply conservative, and he disapproved of most new-fangled things, like Euripides' plays. Socrates would not be immune to that disapproval. In Plato's Symposium, a drinking party where Socrates and Aristophanes are both present, they seem friendly enough. By the time of Socrates' trial, twenty-four years had passed since the first performance of the play, and, as Socrates says, some people have grown up knowing Socrates more from the play than from life. Aristophanes was still alive in 399; and if he was really friendly to Socrates, then Socrates might have brought him in as a witness. But then that would have required planning a defense, and this is what Socrates didn't do. If Aristophanes had been worried about him, he might have come in on his own. So it is hard not to suspect that Aristophanes was not close to Socrates and was, at the very least, cool. But we will never know the whole story.
Ironically, the artistic misrepresentation of Socrates continues today, when a largely unrecognizable Socrates turns up the popular movie, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989). Like his accusers, Excellent Adventure presents a Socrates talking the kind of "nonsense" that must sound vaguely "philosophical" but which has nothing to do with Socrates' interests, activities, or even personality. The movie even has Socrates anticipating the title line of the long-running NBC soap opera, "Days of Our Lives." This is pretty funny, but the real Socrates still, two thousand years later, just can't get a break.
The 1st Olympiad was traditionally supposed to have occurred in 776 BC. Greeks historians later used the four-year period of the Olympiad as a unit of historical time, though this was never used to date either private or official transactions in ordinary life. 2001 would be the 1st year of the 695th Olympiad. The Games were held to celebrate the god Zeus, in his cult center at Olympia; and consequently were ended by the Christian Emperor Theodosius I, who made it his business to close pagan temples, in 394 AD (the 2nd year of the 293rd Olympiad) [note].The "Modern" Olympics were first held in 1896, at Athens, and not, to my knowledge, in honor of Zeus. 1896 would have been the 4th year of the 668th Olympiad, so the modern games are actually held a year earlier than the ancient games would have been, had they continued down to the present (the modern games are, in effect, held in year zero of the Oympiad, instead of year one). Although the Olympic Games today are criticized for being excessively nationalistic and commercialized, the Greek Olympics were, given the differences of the times, not all that different. Competition between the Greek cities was intense, and an Olympic victor could expect a hero's welcome at home, receive a pension or other privileges, mentioned by Socrates in the Apology itself at 36d, or have some landmark named after him, like the grove and gymnasium of Akadêmos, later chosen by Plato as the site for his school, the Academy (Ἀκαδήμεια, Akadémeia). On the other hand, Aristotle divided men into three kinds -- those who go to participate at the Olympics, those who go as spectators, and those who go to sell things. Hippias would fall into the third group.
Nothing but the foundations of the temple of Zeus at Olympia are left. Within the temple was one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the great statue of Zeus by the sculptor Phidias, Φειδίας, who had just finished decorating the Parthenon in Athens. The statue was moved to Constantinople, where it was later destroyed in an accidental fire. Nevertheless, Phidias' portrayal of Zeus may have influenced images of God in the art of Christian Constantinople. The stadium that survives at Olympia is still the place where the Olympic Torch is lit for every modern Olympic Games -- from Olympia carried all the way to Ventura Blvd. for the 1984 Games in Los Angeles.
This translation takes a couple of liberties. In Greek we get, τίς τῆς τοιαύτης ἀρετῆς, τῆς ἀνθρωπίνης τε καὶ πολιτικῆς, ἐπιστήμων ἐστίν; Grube's translation we have above. The translation in the Loeb Classical Library has, "Who has knowledge of that kind of excellence, that of a man and a citizen?" [Plato, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Greek text and translation by Harold North Fowler, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1914, pp.76-79]. I would suggest the translation, "Who is knowledgeable of such virtue, the human and political?"
Where Grube says "Who is an expert?" and Fowler, "Who has knowledge?" the Greek literally says, τίς... ἐπιστήμων ἐστίν;, "Who is of knowledges?" This is an idiom unknown to English; but I think that "Who is knowledgeable?" might come the closest.
With ἡ τοιαύτη ἀρετή, "excellence" is often a better translation for ἀρετή, than "virtue," and it may be here. But I do prefer "virtue," since it has a moral valence that "excellence" lacks. Note that both Grube and Fowler say "kind of excellence," when there is no word for "kind" there in Greek, and τοιαύτη just means "such." Hence knowledgeable "of such virtue."
Grube rendering πολιτική, "political," which hardly needs translating, as "social," is curious. "Society," a Latin word, now does not necessarily mean politics and government, and certainly does not in the term "civil society" -- even though a powerful tendency of 20th century politics, due to Marxism, is to erase the difference and abolish civil society, politicizing everything. "Human and social excellence" would be a notion compatible with liberal principles and civil society; but, in fact, this was not a Greek idea. There is private life in Greece, in the household (with the women), but not much in the way of "society" apart from political life, which literally meant the life of the πόλις, pólis, the city. Religion, which included women also, somewhat mixed the private and the public, but was very much a matter of public concern -- as Socrates himself is charged with not honoring the "gods of the city." The modern idea of the "political" is smaller to the same degree that the modern liberal idea of private "society" is larger. The Sophists taught, and Socrates asked, about the enlarged Greek "political" life. The translation as "social" thus leaves out most of the area of life covered by the Greek term, though it does cover matters that politiké does and "political" doesn't.
Fowler translating ἡ ἀνθρωπίνη τε καὶ πολιτική as "that of a man and a citizen" turns the adjectives that modify virtue into nouns, solving the problem of πολιτική by turning it into "citizen." So our translators contrast "social excellence" with the "excellence of a citizen." Both of these seem to be in the ballpark, and it is a tough call how to get the right range of meaning for πολιτική. This is a case here, since English has inherited the Greek word, that is the word that should be used. And since there really isn't an English word with quite the same meaning, it should just be glossed or footnoted and discussed, as here.
The importance of Delphi, however, was mainly because of the Oracle -- a priestess, the Πυθία, Pythía, who sat in an inner room (the Ἄδυτον, Ádyton), breathed fumes coming up through the floor (fumes from gas dissolved in spring water, in geologically active Greece, or from incense burning beneath), entered a trance, and was possessed by the god Apollo. For a suitable donation, a question could be put to the Pythia and an answer obtained from Apollo. Since the words of the Pythia were hard to understand, the priests attending her wrote up the answer in verse and delivered it to the petitioner. The answers were legendarily obscure or ambiguous -- the source of the modern of meaning of "oracular," which is precisely to be obscure or ambiguous.
One example of the kinds of answers Delphi gave occurred when King Croesus of Lydia, of legendary wealth, sought advice on the attack against Persia he was contemplating. Cyrus the Great had just overthrown the Medes, in 550, and Croesus figured that this must reveal the weakness of the Median state, and that, in any case, Cyrus' new realm was bound to be disorganized for a while, giving the Lydians an opportunity to renew the war that had ended in 585. But he was a cautious ruler, and sent a question to Delphi, asking what would happen if he attacked the Persians. This is a revealing episode, since Croesus wasn't even a Greek. Delphi already had such a reputation. The answer that the Pythia delivered was that if Croesus attacked Cyrus, "a great kingdom will fall." Croesus thought this sounded good, so he attacked Cyrus. He had no idea who he was dealing with, and was defeated very swiftly indeed. Lydia became part of Persia in 547. But Cyrus didn't kill, torture, or imprison Croesus. The former king was sent home to live in retirement, where he had the leisure to write back to Delphi and complain that he had been misled. The priests answered his letter, telling him that what they had said was perfectly accurate. A great kingdom had indeed fallen, namely his. Croesus might have worried which kingdom the god had referred to.Another example came when the Persians invaded Greece in 480. King Xerxes wished to avenge the defeat of his father, Darius, at the battle of Marathon in 490.
I had a student once who worked at the "Phidippides Sports Center," a sports supply store in Encino, California. This was named after the messenger who is supposed to have run back to Athens to report the defeat of the Persians. Unfortunately, Phidippides dropped dead once he had blurted out, "Victory is ours." The first Marathon as an Olympic event was in 1896, at Athens, when French philologist Marcel Bréal offered a trophy for the winner of a reenactment. I would like to know why Bréal thought this would make a good event for the modern Olympics, or why anyone would want to buy supplies from a store named after a guy who died doing his run! The distance of a Marathon run is 26.22 miles (42.2 kilometers). As it happens, the distance from Marathon to Athens is more like 19 miles (30 km). We get the difference because the distance for the event was determined in 1908, when the Olympics were in London, and the run was from Windsor Castle to London's Olympic Stadium. So Phidippides didn't run nearly as far as a Marathon. Indeed, Phidippides may not have done the run at all. He (or "Philippides") is mentioned by Herodotus as running to Sparta from Athens before the battle (to ask for help), but there is no account of the run from Marathon for many centuries. And when Plutarch relates the story, he doesn't mention Phidippides.Xerxes' invasion would be a much more serious affair than Darius' amphibious landing, with a very large fleet and an army so huge that it could not even be carried by the ships. The army would have to march overland, cross over into Europe, and come down the peninsula into Greece. The Greeks, although forming a unified defensive league, hardly knew how they could resist this. Consequently, the city of Athens itself sent a question to Delphi, simply asking what to do.
At first the god brushed off the Athenians with terrifying predictions of defeat; but when humbly supplicated again, the Pythia replied, "You shall find safety behind walls of wood." Some people thought this meant the Ἀκρόπολις, Acropolis (the "high city"), the citadel of Athens. Others fled the city. Unfortunately, after the Persians had flanked and eliminated the Spartans at Θερμοπύλαι, Thermopylae ("Hot gates," i.e. a pass with hot springs), killing King Leonidas of Sparta himself (fuliflling a prophecy of Delphi that either Sparta, or a King of Sparta, must fall), they rolled all but unmolested into Athens, where the wooden walls of the Acropolis were simply set on fire, and all the defenders killed. Wrong interpretation.
Athens, however, had just built a new fleet, under the command of Themistocles, Θεμιστοκλῆς.
He figured that the "walls of wood" meant the ships and that he should try and bring the Persians to action. He drew them into an attack in the narrow waters between the island of Salamis, Σαλαμίς (where most Athenians had fled), and the mainland. Here the large Persian fleet could not deploy to advantage, and the Athenians started getting the better of the fight. Since most of the Persian fleet consisted of Phoenicians and Egyptians, who didn't want to be there anyway, they began to flee. Xerxes, observing from a headland, was apoplectic.
Now, without a dangerous and humiliating march overland, his army was stranded in Greece, short of supplies. The Greeks allowed for the attrition of a whole year, and then the Spartans attacked and destroyed the remaining Persian force at Plataea, in 379. Xerxes had long gone home. Themistocles had interpreted the Oracle correctly. This was the last Persian effort to invade Greece.
Despite the leadership of the Spartans, the key to victory had been in the Athenian fleet. This made the fortunes of Athens for some time. 2183 years later, as Napoleon prepared to invade Britain across the English channel, a political cartoon has John Bull, who represents England, say to Napoleon, "where I sit is my own little land in the ocean -- and if you attempt to stir a foot -- there's a few of my wooden walls in the offing shall give you a Pretty Peppering." At Trafalgar, 21 October 1805, Horatio Nelson then destroyed the combined French and Spanish fleet.
Some scholarly comment has been that Athens became disillusioned with Delphi because it had favored Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, patronizing instead another oracle of Apollo at Delos. So when Socrates mentions Delphi, this actually adds to the things that are provoking the jury. However, Xenophon, who discusses at length in the Memorabilia the complaints that people had against Socrates, does not mention this one; and such a complaint would have discredited the "walls of wood" pronouncement, which was Delphi's principal contribution to the defense of Athens and the defeat of the Persians.
The room of the Pythia, the Ἄδυτον, Ádyton ("not to be entered," seen at right in "The Priestess of Delphi" by John Collier, 1850-1934), has been about as mysterious in modern investigation as in ancient.
"The Priestess of Delphi," 1891, John Collier (1850–1934), Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide A French team began to excavate Delphi in 1892. They were disappointed with what they found, and their results only slowly became public. In 1904 information was published by British historian Adoph Oppé, in what appears to have been a leak from the French, that "no cave or fissure" was found under the Temple of Apollo (although they had found water coming in through what they themselves called "fissures"). Finally, in 1927, in the officially published results of the excavation, it was announced that what was believed to be the Ádyton had been found, but no cracks or fissures for fumes to come up through, or any rooms under the Temple where anything might have been burned. In 1950, French archaeologist Pierre Amandry asserted that there was no active volcanism near Delphi and that the fumes described in the ancient sources were impossible [William J. Broad, The Oracle, The Penguin Press, 2006, p.103].
All this led generations of writers to dismiss the details of the Delphi cult as fictitious, and I was long under the impression that the Ádyton had not even been discovered. I could imagine that perhaps the room had been in a secret location -- still secret -- or it was destroyed by the priests of Apollo when the temple was shut down, under the Emperor Theodosius I in 392. Many sanctuaries of temples were destroyed by their own devoted priests, lest they be desecrated by Christians. If still secret, one might imagine Indiana Jones finding the Pythia still there.
On the other hand, the French archaeologists found that their excavation kept filling up with water. This is suggestive of itself, since the temple was on a hillside, above any real water table, was supposed to have been built over a spring, and the fumes breathed by the Pythia were supposed to come out of the water.
Now there have been recent developments. When a geologist, Jelle Zeilinga de Boer (a Dutchman who grew up in Indonesia and now teaches at Wesleyan University), examined the Delphi area, he identified a fault running right under the temple. In 1995, when De Boer told John Hale, an archaeologist at the University of Louisville, this led to a more careful investigation at Delphi. In 1996 it was confirmed that there was such a fault, now the Delphi Fault, and there was an intersecting fault, now the Kerna Fault. Some of this was already known to Greek geologists, but there had not been good communication about it with earlier archaeologists.
The two faults crossed each other just about right where the Temple of Apollo was built. All along the Kerna Fault were natural springs, and the kind of rock nearby, and from the which temple itself was built, was travertine, which is formed from limestone interacting with gasses from geologically active waters. When they tested the stone, it had been infused with methane (CH4) and ethane (C2H6), which could have produced some of the poisonous effects recounted -- some Pythias died from breathing the fumes. When they tested the spring water, they discovered not only ethane but, more importantly, ethylene (C2H4).
Ethylene, which would have broken down and not been preserved in the rock, is actually an anaesthetic, which in smaller doses can also produce euphoria and excitation. It also has a sweet smell, as actually reported by Plutarch, who was a priest at Delphi. New examinations of the temple revealed pipes underneath, apparently unnoticed in 1913, that would have brought spring water under a small alcove to one side of a sunken room in the ναός (naós), the holy of holies, of the temple. As the French had already concluded, this appears to be the Ádyton itself.
So now we have the place and mechanism of the Pythia's dangerous intoxication. The "cracks" may have just been the joints between the rocks of the chamber, through which the gasses could accumulate in the space. The present temple was built after an earthquake in 373 BC, centered at Helikê (Ἑλίκη, Helice), directly across the Gulf of Corinth from Delphi, rocked the area and destroyed the original temple. The new arrangements, apparently, were not as good as previously, perhaps because the flow of gas in the water had changed, a familiar effect in such springs in geologically active areas (like Yellowstone). This change at Delphi was perhaps one of the reasons why Plutarch wrote about the "Obsolescence of Oracles."
One source of skepticism about Delphi is that the Pythia just must have been high off of whatever kind of intoxicant was being administered to her. However, ethylene usually produces a very mild euphoria, and historically much, much stronger hallucinogens, like peyote, have been used to induce states of trance, possession, or visions. With ethylene, the nature of the experience also depends on the state of mind brought to it.
The Pythia, as with any traditional shaman, underwent preparatory practices of purification and concentration. Many modern representations of the Pythia have shown her raving, manic, and frenzied. This has gone along with the idea that she was just babbling incoherently and that the actual answers to questions posed to the Pythia were given by the (manipulative) priests. The classic portrait by Collier above does not show her this way, but she does seem to be withdrawn in a trance.
Greek representations were usually not of the Pythia at all, but of the god Apollo actually sitting in her place on the temple tripod. He gives answers without either frenzy or trance.
There is one Greek representation of the Pythia, however, from a 5th century Athenian "red-figure" cup, showing King Aegeus consulting the Oracle. Here the Pythia is quietly inspecting a dish, probably holding water, neither frenzied nor trance-like. While either frenzy or trance are possible from ethylene, and may well have occurred, the ordinary practice of the Oracle sounds like it is more what we see in this representation.
It is often said that the Pythia's words were unintelligible and had to be translated by priests. It is not clear that this was actually the case; but if so, it has led people to imagine that she was just babbling and that the priests made up the answers themselves. However, this kind of thing is quite familiar in shamanistic practices all around the world. For instance in Martin Scorsese's film about the Dalai Lama, Kundun (1997), we see a Tibetan shaman making statements while in a state of possession. These must be interpreted for the young Dalai Lama by the shaman's attendants. However, later in the movie, the older Dalai Lama starts becoming able to interpret what the shaman says himself. This will probably not stop people from considering the whole business to be nonsense, but the accusation that these performances are deliberately fraudulent, i.e. the inventions of cynical and manipulative priests, is probably not true -- and may largely be a function of Protestant and modern anti-clericalism.
Although it may just be cultural relativism, anthropologists tend to take traditional practices of this sort with some seriousness. A possible cynical and manipulative Delphic priesthood can no longer be invesigated -- except through the actual testimony of one of them, Plutarch -- but it is not likely that Delphi was conducted in ways very different from those open to modern description. Indeed, a striking feature of this whole business has been the failure of archaeologists and historians to consult anthropologists and historians of religion on the phenomena of shamanism, spirit possession, and oracles. There is a rich history of these things, including practices in sophisticated cultures like China and Japan, or, as noted, in Tibet. They continue even today, and one can find oracles in Chinese temples around Southeast Asia. Even writers who get excited about the "mystic," "occult," or "metapysical" implications of the Oracle of Delphi usually exhibit no awareness that they can witness the religious, not the "spiritualist," practice of this right now.
Simlarly, also striking has been the willingness of archaeologists to make firm judgments about geology, denying, for instance that there were faults or gases, when none of them was a geologist or had bothered to consult any. They looked at a cliff and just saw a cliff, when any educated geologist would immediately see a fault scarp. Thus, in relation to either geology or shamanism, it was more important to apply Protestant anti-clericalism, and accuse the priests of Delphi of fraud, than to document and understand, even from recent evidence or hard science, how these things work.
This tells us something important about Chairephon, that he would have been a partisan of the democracy, and also something important about Socrates, who thus had a friend who was a conspicuous partisan of the democracy. This is an important point when Socrates is still being accused of being an enemy of the democracy and a partisan of Sparta. It seems unlikely that Chairephon would have been Socrates' friend, and have done what he did, if this had been true of Socrates. But this circumstantial evidence is only our first clue about this in the Apology. The entire issue of Socrates' attitude about democracy is separately discussed in "Socratic Ignorance in Democracy, the Free Market, and Science"; but the evidence of the Apology will also be examined at the appropriate places in the text. Chairephon, however, does provide us with a good clue.
The nature of this answer is sometimes said to perhaps be due to Chairephon using a cut-rate version of the Oracle's services, which involved a black or white bean popping out of a jar, where the response would only be "yes" or "no." However, the evidence for existence of this practice is thin; and the thesis is compromised both by Socrates referring to the speech of the Pythia and by Xenophon's version of the Pythia's response (Xenophon's Apology 14), which was that "no man was more free than I, or more just, or more prudent (σωφρονέστερος, sôphronésteros)." This response hardly answers a yes or no question, and it doesn't even mention wisdom (σοφία, sophía). While this confirms that Socrates mentioned the Delphic answer in his speech, we may suspect from the other features -- for instance that Socrates names Apollo -- that it owes more to Xenophon's imagination than to a reliable account, especially when Xenophon does not use it to explain Socrates' investigation, but instead merely as an example of the pious consulting oracles, in defense of Socrates' piety. In any case, there is no basis in either Xenophon or Plato for modern speculation about the bean Oracle.
21a. "...the Pythian..." Although the text says the Πυθία, Pythía, the translator has added an "n" to the name, perhaps because the Greek word itself is from an adjective (though maybe not -- it has an anomalous accent). The games associated with Delphi were the "Pythian Games." Πύθιος, Pýthios, was an epithet of Apollo, perhaps from an old place name, but also because he had slain in that place the Πύθων, Pýthôn, a great snake. The shamaness Pythia, indeed, may well be older than the god, Apollo, who comes to be associated with her.
Cerebus turns up in some episodes of the Hercules, the Legendary Journeys television series [1995-1999] starring Kevin Sorbo, who otherwise turns up in these pages in God's Not Dead. However, Hercules and its spin-off companion, Xena, Warrior Princess [1995-2001], although using many names and incidents from Greek mythology, cannot be relied upon as a guide to that mythology, or to anything else. In the original Hercules episodes, which were not weekly and had enough of a budget to hire Anthony Quinn to play Zeus, they have Hercules (Ἡρακλῆς, Hêraklês in Greek) living with his wife Deianeira and their children. When the series went weekly, they eliminated the wife and children with a fireball from Hera. Well, Hercules did lose a wife and children, but he killed them himself. He had been driven mad by Hera, of course; but, although morally innocent, he was still tainted by the pollution, Greek μίασμα, of the killing (see here), enough that his Twelve Labors were performed in penance. Now, in the age of O.J., Hercules killing his wife and children certainly could not be shown on television as the acts of the protagonist. Another curious aspect to this, however, is that Deianeira was not the wife who was killed in the mythological version. Megara was the victim of Hercules' madness. Deianeira was his second wife, and she ended up killing him, with a potion she just thought would ensure his fidelity. Hercules then was granted immortality by the gods and married the goddess Hebe. Just how lame the material of the television series can get is indicated by their constant references to "dinars" as the money in circulation -- even though, dînâr, is the Arabic pronuncation of the Latin denarius (first minted by the Omayyads), all coins from eras long after Greek mythology, or even Greek Golden Age history. Greek coinage is addressed here.
This seems to be an occupational characteristic today of actors, who often are not reluctant to use their public presence to endorse politicians or promote their favorite causes. They can hardly be blamed for this, since they see their causes as good, and they have a perfect right, to the extent that we have a free country, to express their opinions. There is nothing about being an actor, however, that is going to give them any insight into politics or the good better than most other people. Indeed, the egotism and flattery that inevitably go with the acting profession might be thought to be more of a corrupting influence than otherwise, in which case their opinions might be treated with more than ordinary scepticism. In that respect, we might recall the Greek word for "actor." The word actor is Latin, from a verb that we still use, act (ago/agere in Latin itself). The Greek word is ὑποκριτής, hypokrités, which originally meant "interpreter." Of course now it has become "hypocrite" in English. A hypocrite is a kind of actor, pretending to be something that he isn't. Ironically, the best actor and hypocrite among recent politicians is the Hollywood want-to-be Bill Clinton, while the actual professional actor who became President, Ronald Reagan, was often ridiculed as a second-rate actor, who nevertheless exuded complete sincerity in his politics -- his enemies thought he was stupid, not insincere. Today, politicans who want to ban air travel because of "climate change," fly private jets to plush conferences.
Socrates doesn't have the craftsmen's knowledge of their craft (though he did know his own craft, unmentioned), but he does recognize his own ignorance of the human and social kind of excellence, which they don't. Since that recognition then is "human wisdom," "...the answer I gave myself and the oracle..." is that the answer of the Oracle stands and that it is better for Socrates to be "as I am," ὥσπερ ἔχω ἔχειν.
This is the point to discuss this problem, since Socrates will mention these young men shortly (23c), but he doesn't do a very good job of explaining why people are angry about them. They are the principal reason why Socrates is in trouble. They did bad things, and what they did damaged Socrates' reputation. He was thought to be their teacher. As Socrates later makes fairly clear (33b), his business was not to teach anyone anything. He did his questioning in public, and if anyone wanted to hang out and watch what he did, it was not his business to drive them away. Some young men, like Plato himself, had some notion of what Socrates was about, and that it was not just a game. Others, however, could take from Socrates what amused them and forget the rest. Then they would commit crimes, and people would ask, "How did he get to be like that?" Socrates must have "taught" him to commit those crimes.
Just about the most spectacular example of one of these young men was the celebrated Alcibiades, Ἀλκιβιάδης, (c.450-404). He was born to privilege; and after his father died in battle (447/6), he was raised by his famous uncle, the great leader of Athens, Pericles. He hung out with Socrates. Plato wrote an entire dialogue featuring him (the Alcibiades), which begins with Socrates homoerotically admiring the first blush of beard on his face. In the Symposium, however, Plato has Alcibiades stumbling into the party, drunk, telling a story of how he had gotten Socrates to sleep over once, trying to seduce him, only to have Socrates pay him no more sexual attention "than an elder brother" (212d-219d). Alcibiades would have come of age in about 429 but first came to political notice in about 420. At that point the war with Sparta appeared to be over. The "Ten Years" or "Archidamian" War, 431-421, had ended in the aftermath of the Athenians trapping and capturing a force of Spartans on the island of Sphacteria, near the Homeric city of Pylos, in 425. This was sensational, since the Spartans were always expected to fight to the death, as they had against the Persians at Thermopylae. The Peace however, was compromised by continued fighting, often because of plans by Alcibiades himself to organize opposition to Sparta. The supreme opportunity came in 416, when Greek cities in Sicily appealed to Athens for help against Syracuse, the largest Greek city there, which was also an ally of Sparta. Alcibiades got himself elected general to lead an expedition against Syracuse, which would materially damage the Sparta cause and win the thanks of the other Sicilian Greeks (often called "Siciliots"). The older leader Nicias was also elected general to look after Alcibiades, since he already had a certain wild reputation...In 415, the night before the expedition was supposed to leave for Sicily, someone went around and mutilated statues of the god Hermes that stood all over Athens. Ἑρμῆς, Hermês was the protector of, among other things, traffic, markets, and roads. His image was used in such locations, often at intersections, and to mark boundaries. Thus, there were a lot of these images. An individual statue is now called a "Herm"; and in the plural, the Latin form is used, "Hermae" (Ἑρμαῖ). The incident is called the "multilation of the Hermae."
The Hermae now seem like very strange objects, archaic and peculiar. They were usually just a square stone pillar, with the head of Hermes at the top, and otherwise unadornedexcept for the erect genitals of Hermes at the appropriate location on the front of the pillar -- though the penis does not seem entirely erect in the example at right, since the (uncircumcised) foreskin still covers the glans. Today, of course, this would be regarded as funny or obscene. Not the kind of thing we see in public anymore. Indeed, after Christianity swept away this kind of stuff, it was forgotten that such things existed in the Classical world. It was brought back to modern attention when serious excavation began in 1748 at Pompeii, the Roman city buried by ash during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD. To the embarrassment of the Catholic Bourbon King of the Two Sicilies, obscene objects, and not just the Hermae, began to be found. The auspicious genitals of Hermes had even been carved on people's doorjambs. Much of this material was tucked away in a special warehouse, the "Secret Museum," to which only serious, respectable adult males were allowed entry. Elsewhere in the world, however, the idea of divine genitals being sacred and lucky still survives. Although suppressed for a while out of embarrassment of Western disapproval, such sights are beginning to revive somewhat in Japan, where colossal wooden phalluses can now be seen in religious processions. They are even being promoted as tourist attractions, drawing quite a few more foreign tourists than most other Japanese religious events. In pre-modern Japan, boundary stones in the shape of genitals, both male and female, were common.
The Athenians did not think that the mutilation of the Hermae was funny, or a virtuous suppression of obscenity; they thought it was a shocking and terrifying sacrilege. Hermes was there to protect the city, and if he was offended, then he could withdraw his protection. Nevertheless, no one knew quite what to do about it at the moment. So the expedition left for Sicily. As the days passed, however, suspicion grew that Alcibiades and his friends were just the kind of guys, without much respect for traditional religion, to have done this. It is not hard to imagine what happened. Young men, about to leave for war, get drunk, and in the wee hours decide to go looking for trouble -- like Animal House (1978). Someone gets the bright idea to mess with the familiar statues of Hermes, which they may already think are rather more funny than holy. The next day, they would just as soon forget about it, but it's too late. A warrant was sworn out for Alcibiades and a ship sent to Syracuse. On the way back, however, Alcibiades jumped ship. Flight to avoid prosecution. Desertion. Evidence of guilt in a charge of sacrilege. But then Alcibiades went even further. He went over to the Spartans. He advised them how to defeat the Athenian expedition in Sicily. The Athenian army and fleet were annihilated. Alcibiades was condemned to death in absentia and his property confiscated. When Sparta then reopened the main war with Athens, the "Decelean" or "Ionian" War of 413-404, Alcibiades advised the construction of a fleet to contest the sea with Athens and accompanied the ships to Ionia, which was the scene of much of the subsequent fighting.
Thus, Alcibiades can be credited with sacrilege, desertion, flight to avoid prosecution, and, last but not least, treason. So people would ask, "How did he get to be like that?" And they might remember, "He used to hang out with Socrates. Indeed, they were very friendly, perhaps even lovers." So Socrates, a philosopher, who, as we all know, go around teaching their doctrines, must be responsible. If Alcibiades can be substantially blamed for the loss of the war against Sparta, then Socrates can ultimately be blamed also. So let's get him.
Alcibiades later began trying to play the Athenians, Spartans, and Persians off of each other. He got the Persians involved, ultimately to the benefit of Sparta, but he also helped the Athenians defeat a Spartan fleet in 410. This enabled him to return to Athens, with all forgiven, for a while. Things soured again with a defeat in 407, and Alcibiades again went into exile. Ironically, his place of exile in 405 was right by where the final battle, Aegospotami, was fought between Athens and Sparta. This historic location is the long peninsula along the straits, the ancient Hellespont and modern Dardanelles, that lead from the Aegean Sea into the Sea of Marmara, and so ultimately to Istanbul, the Bosporus, and the Black Sea. The entire peninsula now takes its name from the Greek city of Καλλίπολις, Kallipolis ("Beautiful City"). Part of Turkey today, the Turkish name is "Gelibolu," but elsewhere it is known by its name in Italian, Gallipoli. Such a place has a common Italian name because of the presence in the area of Italians, mainly from Venice, Pisa, and Genoa, during the Middle Ages.The name is best known, however, from the British landing there in 1915, during World War I. Winston Churchill, first Lord of the Admirality at the time, hoped to seize the Straits and knock Turkey out of the war. It was a good idea but a miserable failure in execution, not unlike the Athenian Sicilian expedition. A 1981 movie Gallipoli, by Peter Weir, starring the later super-star, and then pariah, Mel Gibson, details the Australian participation in the campaign.
In 405 both the Athenian and Spartan fleets came into the Straits. For some days they simply maneuvered around each other. In the evening, the fleets separated and the ships were drawn up on the beach for the evening. The ships, of course, were rowed -- galleys -- with shallow draft, though with some hundreds of men as a crew. Although 100 some feet long, such ships could be pulled up on the beach by their own crews. Watching this, Alcibiades walked down to the Athenian camp and warned them that the Spartans might attack as the Athenians were getting out of their ships. The Athenians famously told him to take a hike. The next day, sure enough, the Spartans followed the Athenian fleet and attacked as the men were getting out. The Athenian fleet was destroyed. The Spartans sailed directly to Athens, put the city under siege, and starved it into surrender in 404. The war was over.
Alcibiades, like the boy who cried "wolf," was simply no longer someone to believe, even when he was giving good advice. He fled to the Persians and was assassinated, in 404, with the agreement of both Athenians and Spartans.
Originally, someone was born an Athenian citizen if either parent was a native Athenian. However, Pericles married a woman who was not Athenian, and his politically enemies, who could not harm him directly, realized that they could do so indirectly. They passed a law that both parents had to be Athenian citizens for someone to be born an Athenian. It was also retroactive. So Pericles' own children were suddenly no longer Athenians -- though this injustice didn't affect his two sons for long, since they, like their father, died of the plague.Some argue that Athens wasn't really a democracy because women, aliens, and slaves didn't vote. The best response I've heard to that argument was from a fellow student, when I was a Freshman at the University of New Mexico in 1967. She said that Athens was a democracy "because they made up the word and called it that." To the Greeks themselves, the key point was that the poor were included in democratic government -- "every free adult male citizen" did not mean universal suffrage, but it was free of the property qualifications that were long characteristic of British and American democracy. Nevertheless, some people get so confused about this that it is possible to find them saying that Athens was not really a democracy because the poor were not included. Where that comes from is mysterious, especially when Thucydides says in The Peloponnesian War that class war often resulted in Greek cities, with the poor, partisans of Athens, fighting the wealthy partisans of Sparta. This is also the key to many traditional criticisms of both Greek and modern democracies: that when the poor discover that they can vote themselves money, the government will collapse into a war of everyone trying to steal from everyone else.
A much more forthright and thorough treatment of all this is actually given by Xenophon, at Memorabilia II-12-48, where he addresses the case, not only of Alcibiades, but of Critias too, who actually went on to become one of the Thirty Tyrants. "Now, all the time that Critias and Alcibiades associated with Socrates they were out of sympathy with him," says Xenophon (II-39; Loeb trans. p.31). He thinks that they associated with Socrates just for their own ambitious purposes, hoping perhaps to acquire his own facility with argument -- "as soon as they thought themselves superior to their fellow-disciplines they sprang away from Socrates and took to politics" (II-16; Loeb trans. p.19). Interestingly, Xenophon details the vengeful steps that Critias took directly against Socrates under the oligarchy, while in the Apology Socrates never mentions that, even though he does talk about his problems with the Thirty (32c) and could win sympathy with a specific example of their hostility towards him. One suspects that Socrates had is own reasons for not mentioning Alcibiades or Critias by name, as considered below, at 23e.
Socrates could feel guilty about this without really being guilty. It is not uncommon for people to have friends who seem to them to be headed for trouble. It is always a difficult personal dilemma what, if anything, to say to the friend about what they are doing. Frank and forthright advice may be interpreted as hostile or intrusive. The friend may say, "Mind your own business," or "Up yours," and then go away. Or, one may decide to set an example rather than give advice, and hope that the friend will hang around and stay out of trouble that way. If the friend then gets in trouble anyway, the thought, "I should have said something" is hard to avoid, however little a difference saying something might have made. But Socrates is in a more difficult position than most people. If his behavior in the Euthyphro is characteristic, and it is certainly consistent with his "knowing practically nothing" stand of Socratic Ignorance, then the problem is that Socrates does not tell people what to do. All he does is ask questions, and at some point, however obvious the conclusion, the interlocutor has to supply the final answer himself.Socrates, it seems, is not alone in history in this respect. Thomas Jefferson tells us, in a letter to a grandson, on November 24, 1808:
Conviction is the effect of our own dispassionate reasoning, either in solitude, or weighing within ourselves, dispassionately, what we hear from others, standing uncommitted in argument ourselves. It was one of the rules which, above all others, made Doctor Franklin the most amiable of men in society, "never to contradict anybody." If he was urged to announce an opinion, he did rather by asking questions, as if for information, or by suggesting doubts.Socrates, like Franklin on this description, never sets out to impose his opinion. He does not think that his opinions even have the status of being worthy of imposition. But this also puts him at a disadvantage. All he can do to straighten out someone like Alcibiades is ask friendly questions. Now that he is in trouble because of what people like Alcibiades did, he is ill at ease. It is a bit too awkward to explain that he might have given advice by asking his questions, indirectly, but it seems to him later (33b) better just to say that he was never anyone's teacher, never taught them anything, and is not responsible for whatever they did. In the present passage, however, he doesn't seem quite up to facing even that defense. He avoids the issue. Perhaps in bad conscience and feeling guilty, but without any real guilt or responsibility. Just the uneasiness over people he saw go bad, but about whom he could do less than even an ordinary friend might have done.
Xenophon, who often writes (in retrospect) as though Socrates had all sorts of direct advice to give people, nevertheless admits, "To be sure he never professed to teach this; but, by letting his own light shine, he led his disciplines to hope that they through imitation of him would attain to such excellence" (Memorabilia II-3-4; Loeb p.14-15). Socrates never sought anything more than friendship -- "his highest reward would be the gain of a good friend" (II-7; Loeb p.15) -- and no one could expect to be taught by him -- "Socrates indeed never promised any such boon to anyone" (II-8; Loeb p.15) -- except by example and by questioning. What we don't see in Xenophon is the ironic playfulness with which Socrates undertakes to become the "pupil" of someone like Euthyphro. Closer associates, indeed, would be little inclined to put on the airs that Socrates has no difficulty eliciting from him.
Socrates is accused of not believing in the "the gods in whom the city believes" but in ἕτερα δαιμόνια καινά, hétera daimónia kainá. Now, daimónia kainá is translated as "new spiritual beings" in the Loeb Classical Library edition [op.cit., p.91], "new spiritual things" by W.H.D. Rouse (Great Dialogues of Plato, Mentor, 1956, p.430), and "new divinities" by G.M.A. Grube (Plato, Five Dialogues, 1981, 1986, p.31). Grube's original translation was thought better of and is now rendered "new spiritual things," like Rouse, in recent editions (p.29), which, however, are not dated, unless the isolated number "95" on the copyright page is evidence of the date (and we are not warned that the translation has been altered). The problem all these translation are dealing with is that there is no noun in the Greek phrase. Kainá is "new"; and daimónia is "of or belonging to a daímôn," where a δαίμων, daímôn, is a god, spirit, or even soul -- though this is later the word "demon" used by Christianity. So the literal translation would be that Socrates believes in "other new spiritual." But this is not grammatical in English, as it is in Greek, since English requires a noun, not just adjectives, in that phrase. We do know something from the Greek phrase about what a noun would have to be like, since all three adjectives in the phrase are neuter plurals -- "things." Supplying the noun "divinities" or "beings" implies that what Socrates' teaching is about living things, or actual gods. This adds far too much to what the charge says, and makes Socrates' questions about it sound unmotivated. "Things" is the best noun to supply, a very indefinite, semantically neuter, plural. But it should be remembered that even this is more definite than the original Greek. Socrates is being accused of teaching new something-or-others about divine or spiritual things, without much of a clue about what those would be. No wonder that Socrates is going to ask about it.
The following exchange is the only time that someone besides Socrates speaks in the Apology, and it is the only example we have in this work of Socrates' method of asking questions. Grube's text is not set up like a dialogue, with separate identified lines for each speaker. Meletus' answers are simply set off with a dash.
The "Council" is the βουλή, boulé, and the "members of the Council" are the βουλευταί, bouleutaí. The Council of the Five Hundred was created by the democratic reformer Cleisthenes, with members ultimately chosen by lot from each deme, the thirty smallest divisions of the population of Athens (from δῆμος, dêmos, a district or the people who live in it, or just "the people"). The Council was effectively the day to day government of Athens and determined what laws to propose to the Assembly. The Council itself was divided into ten parts, corresponding to the ten Tribes (Φυλαί, Phylaí) of Athens. Each of these ten parts presided for a tenth of the year, and the presiding Councillors were called the Prýtaneis or presidents. Socrates mentions being a Πρύτανις, Prýtanis below, 32b.
In answering his own question, which he also does elsewhere in Plato's dialogues, especially with other uncooperative subjects (e.g. the Gorgias), Socrates opens himself to the charge that he has opinions about his questions after all, and is not just asking his questions to vindicate the god, on the principle that everyone is ignorant. This bears keeping in mind as a Question about Socrates, but Meletus is too slow to pick up on it here and belabor Socrates with the inconsistency.
This whole line of questioning is going to turn on one of Socrates' pet ideas, namely that No one knowingly does wrong. Although Socrates does occasionally give answers to his own questions, he does not do so in a systematic or complete way, which means he is consistent enough in his Ignorance not to have theories about the good, etc. But in the course of his investigation he does come up with some theories, more about knowledge than about the content of ethics. This is one of the more characteristic ones and seems just as peculiar today as it would have back then, since we tend to think that only the incompetent, children, the insane, or the senile don't know that they are doing wrong when they are doing it. That is what they can be punished for. Here, Socrates wants to get Meletus to apply this principle to him and to admit that Socrates could not have knowingly corrupted the young, that it wouldn't make any sense.Socrates believes that no one knowingly does wrong for at least three reasons:
- If no one is wise, and so everyone is really ignorant of "the human and social kind of excellence," then no one really knows what they are doing, and those who do good are just as ignorant of the real value of their actions as those who do wrong. At Meno 100b, Plato has Socrates conclude that "virtue appears to be present in those of us who may possess it as a gift from the gods" [Grube p.88]. So what anyone thinks they are doing is more or less irrelevant to what they are doing.
- Socrates always takes at face value what it is that people say to him, and it is characteristic for people, even (or especially) the very wicked, to give justifications, excuses, and rationalizations for their actions. Thus, Socrates sees people as doing what they regard as right, because that is the way they talk about it. Of course, he then "examines" whether this is a "sound statement," as he says in the Euthyphro.
- Socrates suspects that the only reason anyone does anything is for a good end (Aristotle later defines the good as whatever it is at which anything aims). This is the point upon which this passage in the Apology turns. We get an actual argument for it at Meno 77c-78b. Socrates reasons that anything bad would contribute to unhappiness, and so only those desiring to be unhappy would want what is bad. Thus, he asks Meno, "Does anyone wish to be miserable and unhappy?" [78a, Grube p.67]. Meno answers no, but, curiously, other answers now seem possible. Today we are familiar with those who seem to enjoy being miserable, like Woody Allen in the movie Annie Hall, originally titled Anhedonia. Since Woody Allen seemed to think that he deserved misery out of guilt, Socrates could always argue that real guilt would merit punishment and so would be a good. Woody Allen thus desired what is good, but was simply mistaken since he was not really guilty of anything (until he married his step-daughter, perhaps). Another modern development, however, is a little different, and that is the prevalence of excuses based on helplessness. Scientific determinism now enables people to say that their actions are out of their own control. This divorces action from judgments of right and wrong altogether, which is probably the point, both for the those whose actions are in question and for the theorists would apparently don't believe that people should be accountable for their actions. Socrates, of course, would be free to express skepticism about this, as in Addiction Is a Choice by Jeffrey A. Schaler [Open Court, 2000]. Schaler's argument is that excuses of helplessness conceal judgments of preference, i.e. that addicts really find their addictions desirable in relation to the alternatives. Socrates might be challenged by the idea that a heroin high is preferable to almost any other goods in life, but he may have already been familiar with drunks who exhibited a similar problem. We have no record of Socrates questioning any alcoholics, but it certainly would have been an interesting encounter.
If no one knowingly does wrong, then, as Socrates say, "if I learn better," he will cease doing wrong. The idea that knowledge of the good would produce goodness is the principle that virtue is knowledge, i.e. to be virtuous, one must acquire the right knowledge, presumably the knowledge of the "human and social kind of excellence." Furthermore, if virtue is knowledge, then presumably it can be taught. In the Protagoras, Socrates argues about this with the great Sophist himself, with, in typical fashion, Socrates arguing against the thesis at the beginning and for it at the end. The Meno begins with the explicit question about whether virtue can be taught (providing an actual argument along the way that no one knowingly desires bad things, 77b-78b). The answer seems to be "ordinarily not," but then it turns out that this is only because everyone is ignorant and because real knowledge must be remembered, not taught -- Plato's theory of Recollection. In the Republic, Plato modifies this with his theory that the right part of the soul, reason, must be dominant both for knowledge to be obtained and for it to have its salutary effect. In the Apology one peculiarity is that, even as Socrates tries to get Meletus to admit that he would not knowingly do wrong, Socrates never concedes to his accusers the benefit of this principle. Jesus may have said, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34), but Socrates does not. This kind of inconsistency should make it clear that Socrates is not a systematic thinker. Even his own pet ideas are not applied consistently, and when it comes to his accusers, he is quite happy to appeal to ordinary ideas about intention, responsibility, and blame.This same kind of inconsistency occurs a bit more recently. When "progressive" thought about crime became dominant in the 60's, with a social and psychological determinism that excused violent criminals as helpless victims of society, racism, capitalism, etc., this excuse was nevertheless almost never conceded to those whose crimes were less politically favored, i.e. the deeds of Southern Rednecks, or those who were guilty of no crimes at all except the Marxist offense of being capitalists, i.e. executives of corporations. This double standard persists today, when crimes by politically favored groups may be "understood" as resulting from righteous "anger," while crimes by politically disfavored groups are incomprehensible manifestations of "hate." Socrates would have had a job cut out for him, asking questions about this sort of thing, even though he commits the inconsistency in his own defense.
But a much cleverer Meletus could have answered Socrates' argument. What often happens in life is that the wicked corrupt others in the expectation that the wickedness will never rebound upon them. This may be foolish, and so senseless and impossible to someone like Socrates, but it is a common phenomenon. Thus, in Spike Lee's movie Malcolm X (1992), Malcolm himself, with a perfectly honest job, is corrupted by a Boston gangster and taught the ways of crime. Malcolm, as Socrates would predict, begins chiseling the gangster, raking off some of the profits that he should turn in. The gangster does not just reflect philosophically, "One I have made wicked is now harming me"; he intends to kill Malcolm, who gets away through a bathroom window and escapes to New York.
The main gods at Athens were Athena, after whom the city was named, and Poseidon, who had a conspicuous temple on the height at Cape Sunion, the tip of the peninsula of Attica --
Even the Acropolis, however, had more than one Athena -- who we see named as Ἀθηνᾶ in Attic or Ἀθήνη in Ionic Greek -- namely, Athena Parthenos, Ἀθήνη Παρθένος, "Athena the Virgin," in the Parthenon, Παρθένον, another one in the Temple of Athena Nike, Ἀθήνη Νίκη, "Athena of Victory," another, Athena Polias, Ἀθήνη Πολιάς, Guardian of the City in the Erechtheum, and then Athena Promachus, Ἀθήνη Πρόμαχος, the "Foremost Fighter," whose bronze statue stood in the open on the Acropolis, reportedly visible from out to sea,
See discussion of "Parthenos" and other epithets with apparently masculine endings here.
In time, some sites, like Olympia and Delphi, gained the reputation as representing Greek religion as a whole, but this was a very incomplete and non-institutional organization.
In Mediaeval Europe, one place where a cash economy and continued market prices for books existed was in the Roman Empire. Historians call the continuing Roman state at Constantinople the "Byzantine Empire," but it was known to its citizens as the "Empire of the Romans" or "Romania," Ῥωμανία. Thus, Arethas had an edition of Euclid that was produced in the year 888 by the calligrapher Stephanos, at a cost, according to N.G. Wilson, of "fourteen gold pieces" [Scholars of Byzantium, Duckworth, 1983, 1996, p.121]. "Gold pieces," unexplained by Wilson, can really only mean the gold solidus
"The gods in whom the city believes," θεοὺς οὓς ἡ πόλις νομίζει, is a an important phrase.
Reading about Greek mythology may give people the impression that there was a unified Greek national religion. Nothing of the sort ever existed. Each Greek city essentially had its own state religion, with its own particular gods. Even gods with the same name in different locations may nevertheless be represented differently. Traditional and archaic cult statues, like the surviving one of the Artemis of Ephesus, Ἄρτεμις ἡ Ἐφεσία, laden with breasts or testicles or something, may look very strange compared to the humanistic images produced by later Greek art.
The Parthenon, 1970
ships rounding the Cape to approach Piraeus in the morning may see the temple dramatically silhouetted against the dawn.
Athena Nike, 1970
and which may have been moved to the Acropolis of Byzantium when the Emperor Constantine founded Constantinople.
The Erechtheum, 1970 The particularity of the institutions of Greek cities extended to matters that now are taken for granted as universal. Thus, each city had its own calendar and even its own alphabet.
All the calendars used lunar months, often with the same names; but which name went with which months, and how extra months were added to reconcile the seasons with the moon, was a local matter and often subject to political controversy. Aristophanes joked that if the gods regulated their lives by the civic calendars, they would often go to bed without their supper. Greek alphabets belonged to two broad families, the "blue," characteristic of Ionia and central Greece, and the "red" alphabets, characteristic of western and northern Greece, and of the Doric fringe of islands through Crete and Rhodes. A feature of the red alphabets is that they used the symbol X to write the letter ksi, while the blue alphabets used the same symbol to write the letter khi. The blue alphabet of Ionia later became the standard Greek alphabet. A red alphabet, however, was the one borrowed to write Etruscan and later Latin. The Greek language itself, of course, was also divided into several dialects. Athens had its own dialect, "Attic" Greek, which was basically Ionic but with some Doric influence. For instance, the Greek word for "day" was ἠμέρη, êmérê in Ionic, ἁμέρα, haméra in Doric, and ἡμέρα, hêméra in Attic -- Modern Greek ημέρα, iméra -- e.g. καλημέρα, kaliméra, "Good Morning." With some modifications, Attic became the basis for the later Κοινή, koiné or "common" Greek used in the Hellenistic period, and in the New Testament.Athena in
the Parthenon Frieze,
Acropolis Museum, 1970In 1970 I paid $40 for Wehr's Arabic dictionary in hardback, when a drachma in 1967 dollars would be more like $3.33. The inexpensive nature of a Greek book is rather surprising when we consider that the printing press was not invented for many centuries, and a book by Anaxagoras means a hand copied manuscript. Perhaps the price was so reasonable because the demand was not so great. There may not have been a mass market for Greek philosophy even in Greece; for, after all, Anaxagoras was driven out of Athens with the same kinds of charges leveled against Socrates (though this was mainly as an indirect political attack on Anaxagoras' friend, the statesman Pericles). He can't have been too popular. Of course, we tend to think of hand copied books as so valuable because literacy was so restricted in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, when copies might be made merely to replace a worn or worm-eaten original, and when such copies would be embellished, "illuminated," with color illustrations or gold leaf. That is not how publishing worked in the Classical world. Few manuscripts from that period survive (mainly from Egypt), but they were produced in a very utilitarian way. A fair number might have been produced for a real, if limited, market, especially during the Roman period. Since literacy was supposed to have been rather high in Athens, we are faced with the fact that pretty much anyone with an interest in "advanced" knowledge in the 5th century would have had access to it.
One extraordinary remnant of the lost world of the civilization of Constantinople is that we possess eight volumes from the personal library of Arethas of Patras, Ἀρέθας ὁ Πατρεύς, Archbishop of the city of Caesarea, Καισάρεια, in Cappadocia, Καππαδοκία (born circa 860, died after 932), whose image we actually see at right. Arethas, who seems to have actually spent little time in rural Cappadocia, did not buy these books off the shelf. He ordered them from professional copyists and calligraphers in Constantinople; and we know when they were ordered, from whom, and for how much because this information is included in the colophon on each manuscript [note].
, the "dollar of the Middle Ages." In 2011, with gold now up around $1700 an ounce, the solidus would be worth a good $255, which puts Arethas's copy of Euclid at $3570 -- a stiff price for any book at any time. In 895 Arethas ordered an edition of twenty-four dialogues by Plato from a calligrapher named John. This cost 21 solidi, or $5355. This scale of prices puts such books well beyond the means of most of the fellow citizens of Arethas. Even members of the elite Varangian Guard might only earn 40 solidi a month. However, we are definitely looking at the high end of the market. Arethas's manuscripts are custom ordered and written by elite copyists on parchment. One wonders what prices would have been for used copies of books on paper, which was in production at the time. I don't know if there is information about this. I suspect that even such books still would have been more valuable than Socrates's "drachma at most."
Here the Grube translation has been altered recently, with "activities" replacing "affairs" and with "humans" replacing "human beings," perhaps because no word corresponds to "beings" in Greek, and because "men" would have been politically incorrect. Prágmata could mean either "deeds" or "affairs." "Affairs" is more like the modern meaning of derived words like "pragmatic," while "deeds" or "activities" may be more to the point for Socrates' argument. There have been extensive alterations of Grube's translation in the following passages, not all of them necessary or felicitous. The earlier translation will often be given in brackets.adjective + noun imply noun text
human affairs
humans27b
equine affairs
horses
flute activities
flute playerstherefore,
spiritual affairsimplies
spirits27c
Achilles seems to be a far less admirable character than the Trojan hero, Hector, whom Achilles slays at the climax of the epic. We see Hector lovingly interacting with his wife and infant son, but the whole Iliad begins with Achilles storming off in a pique after he is deprived of a female prisoner whom he has been enjoying -- i.e. raping. This may sound like good Nietzschean morality, but in actual practice, this kind of thing is pretty nasty stuff.It is precisely Hector's role as husband and father, depicted in his devotion to Andromache and their son, that established his image as the premier defender of a peaceful civilization. This role assured him moral superiority over Achilles, who fought only to secure revenge and personal glory. [F. Carolyn Graglia, Domestic Tranquility, A Brief Against Feminism, Spence Publishing Company, Dallas, 1998, p.231]Homer says, "I sing the wrath of Achilles," and the whole Iliad, indeed, is about just what happens when Achilles gets angry. First of all, he goes to sulk in his tent and doesn't fight anymore. Without him, things do not go well for the Greeks, and the Trojans are even breaking into the Greek camp. Achilles simply gets ready to leave. But then his best friend, Patroclus, asks if he can borrow Achilles' armor, to make the Trojans think that Achilles has returned to the battle. Achilles loans the armor. But the Trojan hero, Hector, is not fooled, fights, and kills Patroclus, stripping off the armor. When the body of Patroclus is brought back to Achilles, does he blame himself? Is there any mea culpa? No, Achilles is not the kind of guy who will blame himself for anything. It is all Hector's fault. So Achilles has some new divine armor made, and goes after Hector, who has simply been defending his country against invaders. Even the king of the gods, Zeus, who has more or less been planning all this, is unhappy that maybe the better man will lose; but he holds up a curious pair of scales, and the fate of Hector "sinks down to Hades." When Achilles kills Hector, he even insults and mutilates the body. With the help of the gods, Hector's father Priam has to beg for Hector's remains, and Achilles finally relents. The Iliad ends with the funerals.
One might ask, "What was all that for?" The Iliad doesn't seem to be about the Trojan War, just one incident. Nothing about Achilles' Heel or the Trojan Horse is in it. Indeed, the Iliad is just about one thing, how Achilles became immortally famous, by killing Hector. We know that he will die because of that, since he was prophesied to either live long and obscure or die famous and young. And we know that he can only be killed by his heel, since his goddess mother Thetis was holding him there when she dipped him as an infant into the River Styx, the boundary of the Underworld. But none of those details are in the Iliad.
Later readers of the Iliad have often sympathized much more with the Trojans than with the quarrelsome, underhanded Greeks. Roman readers of the Iliad did not hesitate to imagine themselves descendants of the Trojans -- as in Virgil's Aeneid, where the Prince Aeneas, saved from Troy by his mother Aphrodite, travels to Italy and, anticipating Romulus, founds the Roman nation. There is also a school in Southern California, the arch-rival of the University of California at Los Angeles, where the student body is named after the warriors of Troy. All this testifies to the moral ambivalence of the mythic story. It is especially striking because, as the saying goes, history is written by the winners, but the Greeks, who won at Troy, ended up writing a history rather unflattering to themselves, not to mention rather unflattering to the gods also. Such ambivalence, so authentic and truthful to life, is the very thing that Socrates, and some earlier philosophers, wanted to fix up. Perfectly good gods, however, consequently lost most of their personality, and the later perfectly good God, Creator of Everything, was then saddled with allowing the evil that existed elsewhere.
I like the Grube translation "I am grateful and I am your friend" [op cit., p.34], but this doesn't really look like what Socrates says. The Loeb translation is "I respect and love you" [op cit., p.109]. "I love," φιλῶ (uncontracted φιλέω), is the easiest. Grube takes it to mean being a friend because "friend," φίλος, does derive from the verb φιλεῖν, "to love." Socrates does not provide an object for the verb, but we can take that as understood from his address to the ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι, "Athenian men," i.e. the jury. The more interesting problem is with the verb ἀσπάζομαι, which Grube translates as "grateful" and Loeb as "respect." But it is not clear that it means either. The Liddell & Scott lexicon gives definitions as, "to welcome kindly, bid welcome, greet, Latin salutare; to embrace, kiss, caress, Latin blandiri; to follow eagerly, cleave to, Latin amplector." We don't really see "grateful" or "respect" in there. "Salute" might be the most obvious translation, which has respectful overtones and is certainly consistent with the following "love." Since Socrates is denying that he will obey the jury, then "follow eagerly" may not be appropriate. Also, "salute" is compromised by its sense as "bid welcome" or "greet," which Socrates hardly needs to do at that point.The issue here over ἀσπάζομαι and φιλῶ has a curious parallel in the New Testament. Jesus says:
[Matthew 5:46] ἐὰν γὰρ ἀγαπήσητε τοὺς
ἀγαπῶντας ὑμᾶς, τίνα μισθὸν ἔχετε;
οὐχὶ καὶ οἱ τελῶναι τὸ αὐτὸ ποιοῦσιν;Si enim diligatis eos qui vos diligunt, quam mercedem habebitis? Nonne et publicani hoc faciunt?
For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?
[5:47] καὶ ἐὰν ἀσπάσησθε τοὺς ἀδελφοὺς ὑμῶν μόνον, τί περισσὸν ποιεῖτε; οὐχὶ καὶ οἱ ἐθνικοὶ τὸ αὐτὸ ποιοῦσιν;
Et si salutaveritis fratres vestros tantum, quid amphlius facitis? Nonne et ethnici hoc faciunt?
And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?
Between Socrates and Jesus, we have parallel passages here with both "love" and "salute." The verbs for love are different, contrasting the φιλεῖν of Socrates with the ἀγαπᾶν (1st person singular ἀγαπάω) of Jesus. With Socrates, the love is friendly, φιλία, while with Jesus, the love is of divine kinship, ἀγάπη, whose requirements are explained in the quote we have here. Greek words for love are discussed here.
Next we get the same word. Where Socrates uses ἀσπάζομαι, in the 1st person singular (the citation form in Greek dictionaries), Jesus uses the 2nd person plural, ἀσπάσησθε (which is slightly anomalous, since the paradigms give an episilon, ε, where here we see an êta, η). Now I am not sure that "salute" is the best translation in either case. "Embrace" or "cleave to" might be better, as long as "embrace" isn't meant too literally. As a companion to "love," Jesus uses ἀσπάζομαι with "brethren," ἀδελφόι ("brother," ἀδελφός). In these terms, which also seem appropriate for Socrates, greeting and embracing go together as an affirmation of kinship, mutual citizenship, or just mutual humanity. Perhaps there is not just one really good word for this in English.
Looking at these parallel passages, Socrates seems to be doing what Jesus enjoins, although we can imagine that he does so just because the jury are his fellow citizens. In the use of these terms, Socrates is of course first, but we can't say that Jesus actually uses them at all, since he spoke Aramaic, and the text we have is a translation. So it is the translator, the Evangelist, who uses the terms; and it is not beyond possibility that a Greek speaking Evangelist might actually have been familiar with the Apology. It would be a nice touch if the Evangelist, anticipating the "Pray for us, St. Socrates" of Erasmus, has Socrates in mind here.
Some of the other terms are noteworthy. "Tax collectors" is τελῶναι (singlular τελώνης), which in Latin is publicani (singular publicanus). The definitions of these tend to include "tax farmers," which means private officers allowed to steal from the public, as long as they return a certain portion to the government. An infamous example of this was under the Phanariots in Romania under the Ottoman Empire. It is not surprising that Jesus should cite such predators as unrighteous. The irony now is that "publican" in English has come to mean the keeper of a "Pub," i.e. a "public house" -- a bar. But people are going to run towards pubs, instead of away from tax farmers.
Then we get the reference to ἐθνικοί, the "nations" (or perhaps "ethnics" or "nationals," as an adjective), from ἔθνος, ethnos. This is the Greek equivalent of Hebrew
, goyîm, translated as "Gentiles" or even "heathen." In Latin here we see ethnici, from Greek, but gentiles is more familiar (from the noun gens). The Hebrews are themselves a "nation," but the term comes to be used for non-Jews.
What Socrates says here is still not the kind of thing that judges like to hear from defendants in a courtroom. Indeed, someone who said to a judge in court, "I will obey God rather than you," which is something, for instance, that anti-abortion protestors might well say, is not only likely to provoke self-righteous anger and summary "contempt of court" jail time, but to be dismissed as an "extremist" who is obviously outside the bounds of civilized and responsible behavior. The anti-abortion protestors, after spending some time in jail a few years ago, seem to have given up on the civil disobedience approach, with some of them turning to terrorism and fleeing from justice -- to be protected by sympathizers. This is a shame, since civil disobedience, especially in front of judges, is not outside the bounds of civilized and responsible behavior. Martin Luther King, who very much practiced civil disobedience in the name of God, in the foursquare American tradition of Henry David Thoreau, who invented the whole idea, spent a great deal of time in jail and thereby accomplished, as did Gandhi, his goal of exposing the inhumanity of his enemies to themselves. One might wonder if the protestors against abortion, upon the morality of which reasonable persons can disagree, lost their conviction in the inhumanity of their opponents.
This is worth noting because of the occasional bizarre "Afro-centric" claim that Socrates was an African. The evidence for that? Because Socrates was supposed to have had a "snub-nose," σιμός, and the Greeks said that all "Ethiopians" had snub-noses. The absurdity of such reasoning, unfortunately, is characteristic, not just of such ethnic myth-making, but of most of the product of politicized educational theory and schools of "education." It's application has come up again recentingly in the "blackwashing" of Queen Cleopatra, who is claimed to be "Black," but about whose nose much is made, although, from multiples images, including here her own coin, it is very, very far from being "snub."
This may tell us something important about Socrates' personality. The way in which he stood his ground and provoked the jury seemed arrogant to many people -- certainly to the jury. But was Socrates really an arrogant person? Was he full of himself? This may tell us. Would a Socrates with an inflated ego really compare himself to a fly? I think not. This is a rather unpleasant sort of creature, and the south end of a horse is also not a very pleasant place to be hanging out. The sacred animal of Athena, and the symbol of her wisdom, was the owl. A Socrates convinced of his own wisdom and dignity might well have chosen that animal over an unpleasant and undignified insect.
History would be a lot poorer if anyone who ever heard voices were simply dismissed as insane. The Prophet Muḥammad, for instance, at first simply heard a voice say, "Recite!,", ʾIqraʾ! [Sûrah 96:1]. Later, he believed this was the angel Gabriel (Jibrâʾîl in Arabic), and what he was then given to recite was the Qurʾân,
, which means "Recitation." Now, some might think that the world would actually be better off without such religious revelations, but sometimes the voices have a more immediate and practical application. France might never have defeated England in the Hundred Years War if Joan of Arc, the "Maid of Orléans," had not briefly led and inspired the resistance. Nobody necessarily believed that angels were telling her things -- such messages could just as easily be deceptions of Satan -- but they did think it was possible. The test of having her pick the king, Charles VII, out of a crowd was thought to be effective because, if Joan had been touched by the divine, she should be able to recognize the monarch, by divine right, of France -- the kings of France always claimed their throne directly from God, and never acknowledged the suzerainty of the Emperors or Popes. It is not hard to imagine what would happen today if a teenage girl showed up at the Pentagon or White House claiming that God had sent her to lead the armies of America. This is no longer comprehensible.
This may be a bad example for Socrates to bring up, for the Assembly was angry with the stratêgoí about the dead for much the same reason that the jury is suspicious about Socrates now. What the Greeks believed was that the dead needed to be properly buried to have a chance at the afterlife. A proper burial meant that the dead needed a coin in their mouth, to pay the Boatman, Charon (Χάρων), who ferried the dead across the River Styx [note].Without the coin, the dead would just wander on the banks of the Styx for ever. What the Assembly suspected was that the stratêgoí didn't believe this and so didn't much care whether they recovered the dead or not. Mentioning this, Socrates may remind the jury that they suspected the stratêgoí of impiety, just like him.
The principle of the rule of law is now commonly misunderstood and misrepresented, usually by people who want to avoid it and to transform it into its opposite. The proper idea is to avoid the exercise of arbitrary authority, and to limit the extent of authority itself. If those in power find their power limited, and their jurisdiction restricted to only certain things, where they cannot just operate at their discretion, then this is the "rule of laws, not of men" -- where the law, not the will of the ruler, tells people what they can and cannot do.Although the abolition of the rule of law was characteristic of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, fascist and communist, a very similar desire for absolute and arbitrary power is a rot that has crept far into the democracies. Thus, when judges, police, and politicians say that the law and the Constitution mean whatever the Supreme Court says they mean, and that everyone else must simply obey, this is a fundamental violation of the rule of law, not an affirmation of it, because creatures of the government are then able to allow violations of the fundamental law, the Constitution, which is actually supposed to limit them, and to protect the citizen, with the citizen then left helpless against abuses that were supposed to be prohibited. As Thomas Jefferson already understood, this principle puts the foxes in charge of the hen house and means that any level of sophistry and dishonesty can be perpetrated, without practical remedy, to expand the power of government.
What is now commonly called the "rule of law" is therefore really its opposite, the principle of blind obedience to authority. No one, indeed, thought that the true principle would work all by itself. We must ask something rather like what Socrates asked Meletus: Who has knowledge of the law to enforce it in the first place? It will not enforce itself. Indeed. That was the genius of the idea of checks and balances, that different authorities would be jealous to limit each other's powers, and so would enforce the law and the Constitution against each other. Already in the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, who later began planning the expansion of federal power, nevertheless argued that the federal government would enforce the Constitution against the States, and the States against the federal government:
Power being almost always the rival of power, the general government will at all times stand ready to check the usurpations of the state governments, and these will have the same disposition towards the general government. The people, by throwing themselves into either scale, will infallibly make it preponderate. If their rights are invaded by either, they can make use of the other as the instrument of redress. [Federalist Paper No. 28, Alexander Hamilton]It never quite worked out like this; for the Constitution did not contain a mechanism for its own enforcement, the States never had a formal means of checking usurpations of the federal government, and the eventual claim by the Supreme Court of final appeal in all Constitutional cases simply delivered to the federal government the coveted discretion of being the judge of its own powers. There was no redress, for instance, against the Alien and Sedition Acts, passed under John Adams, which grossly and undeniably violated the First Amendment, except to vote the Federalists out of power and repeal them. Luckily, that is what happened, but it already revealed a grave flaw in the system, which was not remedied when Adams' own Federalist Chief Justice, John Marshall, claimed ultimate Constitutional authority for the Supreme Court. The abuses piled up slowly but steadily, until by now large parts of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights have been informally repealed by mere judicial fiat, with the very idea of civil rights, which are supposed to preserve us from the power of government, turned around to become just another means of expanding the power of government. Indeed, the rule of law has been fundamentally abolished when Congress has ceded to bureaucrats the power to write regulations, often retroactively, that have the force of law, "interpret" those themselves, and even judge defendants in their own "administrative law" courts.
Neither Jefferson nor Madison thought that Constitutional government would last forever. Certainly it hasn't. Nor is it clear when the lessons of the collapse of the United States Constitution can be applied to the reform of this, or any other, government. But Socrates, in a sense, already understands in the Apology what is needed. Like Socrates himself as a Prýtanis, someone must be in a position of authority with both the power and the interest to enforce the law against the abuses and usurpations of other authorities. We may say that Socrates was among the first to do that, and know what he was doing. Now, instead, we have forms of rule that George Washington himself called "real despotism." Citizens, indeed, have a final veto through the power of juries, but few people called to jury duty are aware of what they can do, and most jurors believe the lies that judges instruct them with.
When the government of East Germany disappeared, and the files of the Secret Police, the Stasi, were opened, it turned out that no less than 25% of the entire country had, at one time or another, voluntarily or involuntarily, been police informers. One woman, who had been jailed as a dissident, on the basis of an anonymous denunciation, had the chance, after the fall of the regime, to see in the Stasi files who had denounced her. It was her husband -- a great way to get a divorce with custody of the children, the house, no alimony, etc. I think a slightly less one-sided divorce ensued.
Involving others in the crimes of the regime is insurance against later retribution. The tyrants can always say, "Everyone was doing it!" Thus, East German border guards were prosecuted for shooting, under orders, people trying to flee to the West, but their superiors, who ordered the shootings, seem to have escaped largely unscathed.
So, when Socrates had the chance to get in good with the Spartan sympathizers, he was no more interested in their politics than he was in that of the democracy, but had to cross them nevertheless, when they tried to involve him in their doings. The evidence of the Apology, then, gives us a good picture of Socrates' political views. (1) He was not an overt enemy of the democracy, which we can infer from his friendship with Chairephon; (2) he was not an sympathizer of the Spartans, which we can infer from his non-cooperation with the Thirty Tyrants; but (3) he did criticize the democracy as not, in effect, observing the rule of law, which was a perfectly apt criticism, and the basis of all subsequent efforts to create "responsible" or democratic government.
The Athenian "Empire"
The actions of Athens, after all, discredited democracy for many centuries. Not only did Athens kill Socrates, but the democracy had carried on in such a high handed way with the city's own allies, that a large part of Athens' defeat in the Peloponnesian War was due to allies going over to Sparta. Unhappiness with Athens had begun even before the War. The Treasury of the League of Delos, into which contributions were originally paid to fight the Persians, and which had been kept at the temple of Apollo at Delos, was moved unilaterally by Pericles to Athens. Henceforth, the contributions were treated as "tribute" to Athens, and Pericles soon began spending them, not on the common defense, but on purely Athenian projects, like the temples on the Acropolis. This combination of extortion and embezzlement absurdly gets called the Athenian "Empire," despite its power, origin, and structure bearing no comparison to historic empires like Rome or China. It was also precarious.
The allies, now the subjects of Athens, of course, never liked this, but there wasn't much they could do about it, at the time. Once the War started, however, they could go over to Sparta. When Athens could recover such a defector, sometimes the men would be massacred and the women and children sold into slavery. The Athenians inflicted this treatment on the neutral island of Melos in 416, dramatized by Thucydides, as an illustration of the moral debasement of the Athenians. This sort of thing, indeed, did not endear Athens to the Greek world.
After great defections to Sparta in 412, Athens very nearly did the same thing to the great island of Lesbos. Fortunately, Lesbos is rather far from Athens; and the day after the order was sent, the Assembly sobered up and thought better of it. A galley was then sent to countermand the order. It was at least 24 hours behind the original messenger but made up most of the time in the passage and arrived shortly after the unpleasant order was delivered. But it was really too late to save the popularity of Athens, even with other Greek democracies.
With Plato as an active critic of democracy, and the triumph of monarchy in the Hellenistic period, democracy seemed to have little future either in theory or in practice. Much later, a government of mixed and mutually limiting forms, a Republic, on analogy with the Roman Republic, came to be admired and recommended by political writers like Polybius, describing the Roman Republic, and Niccolò Machiavelli. In time, as limited and constitutional government grew organically in England and elsewhere, it looked like these governments worked for the very reasons that Republics had been recommended. Such a government was then deliberately formulated in the Constitution of the United States of America.
Unfortunately, as the United States and other governments became more democratic over time, the idea grew that the democratic aspect was all that counted to have good government. Rousseau's suggestion that the true Will of the People might not even be known to the People later enabled some of the worst dictatorships of the 20th century to call themselves "democracies" (often redundantly as "peoples' democracies"). But it is not democracy, just the rule of law, that is the foundation of just government. Democratic institutions are just some among many that can be used in a system of checks and balances to limit power and preserve the rule of law. The situation, critique, and fate of Socrates are the most sobering reminders of that.
The "Prytaneum," Prytaneîon, is where the Prytanes met and contained the hearth (ἑστία) of Athens, sacred to Hestia, just as the temple of the Vestal Virgins at Rome contained the hearth of Rome. The meals here were an interesting institution. At Sparta, all the male citizens were expected to eat at the common mess. At Athens, a representative group of citizens were invited by lot to something that was then rather like the family meal of the city. Others, like Olympic victors, might be honored with a permanent seat at the meals. Someone so honored became a παράσιτος, parásitos ("one who eats at another's table, one who lives at another's expense") -- our word "parasite." So Socrates is proposing that he be made a "parasite" on the city.
This famous statement, curiously, is actually not explained in its context. Whether a life is "worth living" or "liveable" is a different issue from whether it is commanded by the god or even is the greatest good. After all, many people find the task of doing their duty or doing the good oppressive and unendurable. So why would quiet really be unliveable for Socrates? We have, perhaps, already seen the answer. The "greatest good" sounds rather like ἡ τοιαύτη ἀρετή, ἡ ἀνθρωπίνη τε καὶ πολιτική, "the human and social kind of excellence," and Socrates himself has claimed to possess "human wisdom." If ἀνθρωπίνη σοφία, "human wisdom," is the best we can do, because only the god is really wise, then Socrates' investigation is itself the "human and social kind of excellence," which means it is the perfection of being human. The cows in the pasture do not ask each other about the meaning of life -- except in Gary Larson cartoons. Only human beings ask questions about being and value, or anything. So if Socrates had to be quiet, this could mean ceasing to be human. That would be unendurable to someone who has come to appreciate the uniqueness of human abilities.
In Homer, the dead are miserable, and even "without sense or feeling." In the Odyssey, Odysseus makes a blood sacrifice to call up the dead and give them enough rationality that he can talk to them. One of the spirits he talks to is that of Achilles, whom he assumes is as honored among the dead as he was among the living. But Achilles disabuses him: he would rather be farming a small plot among the living than be king of the dead. The irony of this is bitter indeed, since the entire Iliad was about how Achilles gained fame at the cost of his life. Now he says it wasn't worth it. Most other ancient peoples shared this idea, as we see in the Epic of Gilgamesh, or even in the Bible, where Sheʾôl,, doesn't sound too promising. Only the Egyptians held out a hope that the afterlife could be as good or better than this one.
Socrates says that the dead are "happier" (εὐδαιμονέστεροι, eudaimonésteroi) and "deathless" (ἀθάνατοι, athánatoi). In Homer, these are more like attributes of the gods, not of humans, whether dead or alive. Where does Socrates get this stuff? Well, there was a source. Perhaps from Egyptian influence, there was a movement in Greek religion that did promise a happier afterlife -- real life, not just the miserable shadow existence of Homer. These were the "mystery" cults or "mystery religions." Initiation into the "mysteries" conveyed immorality. Later, they would be proper independent religions -- Isis, Mithraism, and Christianity itself. In Socrates' day, the Greek cults were integrated into Greek religion. The most famous was in Athenian territory at the temple of Demeter at Eleusis: the Eleusinian Mysteries. We do not know if Socrates was an initiate or not. If he was, he certainly would not say much about it. At Athens, riots sometimes started when theater goers thought that some play was divulging Secrets from the Mysteries. The Secrets, indeed, were kept so well, that no full account of them survives, not even from Christian writers who would have had no scruples about exposing pagan blasphemies (see discussion here).
So when Socrates says, "what we are told," he may actually have been told something of the sort. He certainly would not consider the Homeric possibility, since death then would be bad rather than good. And he did decide that death was good. But what about the gods? To be happy and deathless is about all that distinguished the Homeric gods from humans. But Socrates has already introduced something else. His gods are good and wise, unlike Homer's often mean and foolish deities. So now the dead may be happy and deathless, but they still can only have "human wisdom" and remain distinct from the gods themselves.
However, the problem here may be the translation, not Socrates. What both Grube and the Loeb Classical Library edition translate as "trouble" or "troubles" is πραγμάτων, pragmátôn, the genitive plural of πρᾶγμα, which we have seen above. So Socrates is being freed from "deeds, acts, affairs, matters, business," which we might well call "troubles" but which seems very different from "trouble" in a sense that might be conformable to Xenophon's information or speculation. What's more, the word has just been used in this passage, where Grube says that "his affairs [πράγματα, prágmata] are not neglected by the gods." The Loeb edition avoids translating the word, saying that "God [!? -- the word is actually in the plural here] does not neglect him." As Harold Ravitch considers in these pages, discussing John Burnet's gloss on the passage, the implication here may be that Socrates will be relieved of the task, the investigation, with which the god has charged him. He thus will escape from "troubles" in the sense of no longer carrying out his mission from the god, who thus, by not neglecting his affairs, enables Socrates to enter a well deserved retirement. Finally, see the discussion by Anthony Kaldellis of πράγματα translating Latin res.
| "The Death of Socrates," La Mort de Socrate, 1787, Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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The Socrate Soda Fountain, Beirut, Lebanon, 1970
"The Impiety of Socrates," by M.F. Burnyeat, Ancient Philosophy, 17, No. 1, 1997
Euripides & the Gods, by Mary Lefkowitz, Oxford, 2016
Jeannine O'Brien Parvati Baker Reading the text in class actually began in my high school, in the Fall 1966 "World Literature" class of Frank Cousens, whose course sparked my interest in philosophy, as I recount elsewhere. There were many very bright people in that class, ready to go on to college the next year, some of whom already knew their Plato, and much else. Cousens had students read the texts we studied aloud in class, so everyone got to voice a bit of the Apology, Antigone, and a lot more. Some of these people I never saw again after graduation. Others I might run into at UCLA years later. A couple were friends I kept in touch with. And there were others I wasn't in touch with but met at class reunions years later. One of the latter was Jeannine O'Brien, who had sat right across the aisle from me in Cousens' class. Not only was she never a friend, but she seemed to take a strong dislike to me almost immediately. I found her attactive, but we never talked. Once, on some occasion I can't remember, she expressed her dislike out loud in detail, some of which at the time may have been merited, since I was going through a phase of being more than a bit of an arrogant jerk. Some might think that phase never ended.
Then years later, my high school class had its ten year reunion in 1977. One classmate who interested me was Ariela Harber, who I had sat near in Mr. Falb's chemistry class, and with whom I had been somewhat friendly. For a while I had unintentionally kept calling her "Mary Ellen" instead of "Ariela" ( I made a date with Ariela to go see the newly released movie Star Wars, which was playing at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. I had just read the review in Time magazine and had a good impression about it. The reviewer thought that it was some sort of revolutionary movie.
Someone else that Ariela connected with at the reunion was Jeannine O'Brien, who had adopted the name "Pârvatî" ( Ariela and I went our separate ways, but we both turned up again at the 20th year class reunion in 1987. We got a table, which ended up including Jeannine Parvati Baker and her family. I have never understood it, but as soon as Jeannine saw me, I was suddenly her long lost best friend ever. I had no objection, since I had never had anything against her, except that she didn't like me. Now that was all different. We got along fine, and afterwards kept in touch. Jeannine was living in Utah, while I already had my job at Valley College, across the street from our old high school, and was back living in LA.
Before long I was getting ready to get married, and Jeannine had a gift. Her book. This was Conscious Conception [1986]. Jeannine had given birth to many children. I have forgotten how many, but it was a lot. The Wikipedia page about her does not mention them, or how many. Thus, she had gotten involved in midwifery and other issues about childbirth. She also was involved in Yoga and various features of Indian philosophy or religion, including astra projection. She believed that it was possible to search for a soul waiting rebirth, in the "interim state," and invite it to be her next child. I suspend judgment on the reality of such things, but I am always willing to hear out sincere believers -- especially with people I like, as in this case. I had been teaching Indian philosophy for years and am more than willing to entertain the possibility of reincarnation.
I saw Jeannine and Ariela again at the 30th year reunion in 1997. It was fun, but nothing new came up. We had all been married a while by then. It was nice to see everybody. I had just started this website, and we all had begun using e-mail.
The next news was not so good. As with some other people I've known who I write about here, Jeannine's was a productive and interesting life cut short. I didn't have a whole lot to do with it; but after we seemed to become friends, I was happy that this had happened. I hope that Jeannine has passed through the Bardo to Enlighenment or an advanced rebirth. If she was reborn after 40 days, she is already about 15 years old by now, about ready to set out on new adventures. Maybe she (or he) will find this webpage, and maybe it will mean something out of the ordinary.
Commentary on the Apology of Socrates, Note 1
In Memoriam:
(1949-2005)
). She got me straightened out.
She seemed about the only person at the reunion who was still dressing as a hippie. I was a graduate student in Austin at the time, but I was still dressing Hawaiian from my years living there.
It may have been the only Hawaiian shirt at the reunion -- many others were wearing suits.
), with the addition of a married name, "Baker." Ariela and Jeannine had been living rural and had both, I think, been raising goats. Their interests seemed to overlap. Jeannine still wasn't talking to me. Which became awkward, because Ariela and I ran into her and her whole family in the line at the movie theater. We ended up all sitting together to see Star Wars for the first time. The audience cheered. Quite an experience. Jeannine barely glanced my way the whole time.
Jeannine thought she was pregnant again, and was excited, but it turned out to be an illness instead. Without specifics, I got the impression that it was cancer, but now I see on her Wikipedia page that it was actually Hepatitis C, from which she died in 2005. Sadly, this can now be cured in a substantial percentage of cases. The 40th reunion in 2007 featured her photograph among those classmates we had lost.
| Model of the temple precinct at Olympia, 1970 |
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The circuit of the games, which many athletes seem to have followed, was the περίοδος, periodos, the "period," which literally means the "way around."
| The stadium and race course at Olympia, 1970 |
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An athlete (ἀθλητής, athlêtés) following the περίοδος, who wins his event in all the Stephanic games, becomes a περιοδονίκης, periodoníkês, or "circuit victor." Curiously, this was a term not used before well into the Roman period. It is thus nice evidence about the popularity of the games in Roman times.
| Olive, Olympic |
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The actual crowns for these stephanitic games were made of leaves and small branches of particular plants. For the Olympic games, these were from the
| Laurel, Pythian |
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Although we think of the Olympic games as the most prestigious, it is definitely the laurel crown that is now remembered as the most symbolic of victory. Indeed, the laurel has a strong tie to the god Apollo in Greek mythology. Daphne (Δάφνη, Greek for "laurel") as it happens was a nymph who attracted the attention of Apollo (perhaps as the result of some mischief by Eros). This was unwelcome attention, and Daphne fled, calling on her father Peneus, a river god, for help. He changed her into a tree (as we see in Gian Lorenzo Bernini's sculpture at left; click for larger image popup -- and see here for his immortal sculpture of St. Teresa of Ávila), whose leaves Apollo then adopted as his own symbol. Since Athena created the olive tree, its association with Zeus at Olympia seems less direct.
The Olympic, Pythian, and Nemean Games were held in the Summer, but the Isthmian were in the Spring.
| the Four Stephanitic Games, the 75th Olympiad | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 481 BC | Zero Year, -480 AD | |
| 1 | 480 BC | July-August | Olympic Games |
| 2 | 479 BC | July-August | Nemean Games |
| 478 BC | April-May | Isthmian Games | |
| 3 | July-August | Pythian Games | |
| 4 | 477 BC | July-August | Nemean Games |
| 476 BC | April-May | Isthmian Games | |
| 1 | July-August | Olympic Games | |
The table distinguishes between the Greek years of the Olympiad and the calendar years BC. The table also includes the year 0 of the Olympiad, which would be year 4 of the previous Olympiad, since this simplifies calculation.
| Pine, Isthmian |
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To determine the Olympiad, we need to convert the BC year into an AD year. This is done by subtracting 1 and making the number negative. Thus, 481 BC is -480 AD. Divide this by 4 and add 195: -480/4 = -120, + 195 = 75. So 481 is year 0 of the 75th Olympiad. With 2004, we already have the AD year, so we just divide by 4 and add 195, so it is year 0 of the 696th Olympiad. As noted in the text, this is the year in which the modern Olympics are now held. 2005 is the 1st year of the Olympiad, when the Olympic Games would originally have been held; and 2007 is the 3rd year of the Olympiad, when the Pythian Games would originally have been held.
Although Greek historians began to use the Olympiads to date events, this was never done in daily or political life. For instance, at Athens, dating was done by the Eponymous Archons, for which, of course, you needed a list.
| Parsley, Nemean |
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The Winter Olympics are now held two years later than the Summer Games, as in 2006, which would be the 2nd year of the 696th Olmpiad. Since the Winter Olympics are thus offset from the Summer Olympics, as the Pythian Games were offset from the Olympic, the authorities might consider renaming the Winter Olympics the Pythian Games and carrying the torch for them, not from Olympia, but from Delphi. With Mt. Parnassus in the background, Delphi would be more suitable for the mountain venues of the Winter Games, and snow falling there is not unheard of.
| The Temple of Zeus at Olympia, 1970 |
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Not much is left of the actual temple of Zeus at Olympia, as we see at left, when I visited in 1970. However, the fame of the temple rested mainly on the statue of Zeus, done by Phidias, Φειδίας, in ivory and gold, to be found in the interior. This was one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The Emperor Constantine is said to have moved the statue to Constantinople, where it was kept at the Lauseion, Λαυσεῖον, Palace, owned by the eunuch and imperial chaimberlain Lausus, Λαῦσος (d.436 AD). The palace burned down in 475, apparently with the statue of Zeus and other Classical figures, including the famous, or infamous, Aphrodite of Cnidus. Later the Emperor Justinian II built a Lausiakos, Λαυσιακός Hall in the Great Palace, some two hundred years later; but I am unaware how this structure got its name and if there was any connection, conceptually or physically, to the earlier building.
| Apollo on the West Pediment of the Temple of Zeus, 1970 |
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Collected from the ruins of the temple were fragments of the pedimental and other sculpture with which it was originally decorated. Of particular interest are the sculptures from the West Pediment, seen at right. Here we find Apollo, with a commanding gesture, halting the battle of the Centaurs and Lapiths. The image of this Apollo is actually used on the cover of Euripides & the Gods, by Mary Lefkowitz. It comes in for notice because it is thus a well attested mythological example of the deus ex machina, the sudden appearance of a god that resolves the conflict of a Greek play. This was frequently used by Euripides, with Apollo himself appearing in the Orestes, and has been an object of criticism, derision, or dismissal by both ancient and modern commentators, with the moderns thinking that is part of the ironic atheism of Euripides himself.
| Atlas on metope, μετόπη, from the Temple of Zeus, 1970 |
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A striking feature of the ancient Olympic Games is that deaths in the competition were not considered unfortunate. Indeed, since boxing matches did not end until one contestant yielded, a particularly stubborn competitor might fight to the death. Today, deaths in athletic contests are viewed with alarm, even horror, with suggestions that sports like boxing be abolished because of the potential for fatal injuries. The Greek attitude was very different. Athletic contests and games had a ritual origin. Games are mentioned for the funeral of Achilles in the Iliad. As such, there was always an overtone that games were substitutes for sacrifices, even human sacrifices.
| the Four Stephanitic Games, the 700th Olympiad | XXXII Modern Olympiad | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 2020 AD | Zero Year, 2020 AD | Summer Games, Tokyo, delayed | |
| 1 | 2021 AD | July-August | Olympic | |
| 2 | 2022 AD | July-August | Nemean | Winter Games, Beijing |
| 2023 AD | April-May | Isthmian | ||
| 3 | July-August | Pythian | ||
| 4 | 2024 AD | July-August | Nemean | Summer Games, Paris |
| 2025 AD | April-May | Isthmian | ||
| 1 | July-August | Olympic | ||
This is an attitude whose character today is hard to recover. Of course, the Romans developed the practice into deliberate killing during their Games, with very little left of its religious origin. The Games became no more than a spectacle for public entertainment. But the auspicious nature of an accidental death in religious ritual was not confined to Greek religion. The Chinese had annual "dragon boat" races in honor of various river gods. As with the Greeks, it was not at all a bad sign if a participant died during the races. Similarly, in Japan, there are contests involving sliding down the mountains on logs. This is dangerous, and deaths sometimes result. This is not always viewed as unfortunate. The mountains, after all, are where the gods, the kami, , live.
The table at right brings us down to the present. The Greek (ordinalist) reckoning of the 700th Olympiad is in the year 2021 AD. As it happens, the XXXII Modern Olympiad, which was scheduled in the zero year of the 700th Olympiad, 2020, has been delayed until 2021 because of the Coronavirus pandemic. Travel spreads the virus, so the idea of the world traveling to Tokyo in 2020 was rejected. The XXXII Modern Olympiad Winter Games are still scheduled for China early in 2022. The next Summer Olympics, the XXXIII Modern Olympiad, is scheduled for Paris in 2024. It is still the case that no one has suggested, or noticed, that the Pythian Games were offset from the Olympic by two years and could be used to correspond to the Winter Olympics.
Return to Text According to Anthony Kaldellis: Kadlellis cites a Scholion on Clement of Alexandria's Pedagogos 3.3.21.3. "Lesbian" in the masculine is ὁ Λέσβιος; but there would be more than one Greek word for "Lesbian" in the feminine -- e.g. Λεσβίς, Lesbis (plural Λεσβίδες, Lesbides) or Λεσβία, Lesbia (plural Λεσβίαι, Lesbiai) -- but Kaldellis does not indicate which one is used by Arethas. Modern Greek uses Λεσβία.
The absence of this use of "Lesbian" earlier did not mean there was no Greek word for homosexual women. There were at least two, τριβάς, tribas (plural τριβάδες, tribades), defined by Liddell and Scott as "a woman who practices unnatural vice with herself or with other women," and διεταρίστρια, dietaristria (plural διεταρίστριαι, dietaristriai), glossed by Liddell and Scott as simply the equivalent of τριβάς. Both words are of obscure etymology, but τριβάς likely comes from τρίβω, tribô, "to rub." Liddell and Scott give the earliest use of τριβάς as in, of all things, the Egyptian historian Manethô. Their lone citation for διεταρίστρια is a Roman writer, Hesychius Lexicographus, questionably in the 5th century AD.
"Lesbian" gets used in its modern meaning in the first place because of the poetess Sapphô (Σαπφώ). She was much admired for her poetry. It was also noted that, as teacher of girls, some of her poems seemed to express love and sexual desire for some of them. This was interesting to pagan Greeks but disturbing to Christians. Nevertheless, her poetry was reproduced and admired into the Middle Ages. Since she was from the island of Lesbos (Λέσβος), we get the association of female homosexuality with the island. However, since there a lot of people living on Lesbos, there would have been a difficulty in implying that all the women of Lesbos were attracted to other women. Hence the delay in the introduction of the modern meaning of "Lesbian." There was no need for the word, since others were available, and the potential for perhaps insulting confusion was considerable.
Arethas is called "Arethas of Patras," Ἀρέθας ὁ Πατρεύς, because that is where he was born. The word Πατρεύς has that form because it is the habitation name. See discussion of this kind of thing for Alexandria. The city of Patras itself was Πάτραι in Classical Greek, the plural of Πάτρας, Patras, which tends to be used in English, but is now Πάτρα in Modern Greek. As the Archbishop of Caesarea, however, Arethas is also known as Ἀρέθας ὁ Καισάρειος, using the habitation name (or just the adjective) for Caesarea. Patras, on the Gulf of Corinth, is now the third largest city in Greece. It is where I took an overnight ferry to Brindisi (Greek Βρεντέσιον) in Italy in 1970, after coming in on the train from Olympia.
The Underworld, Hades, ᾍδης (or Ἅιδης), is supposed to have five rivers: the Ἀχέρων, Acheron, "Woe," Κωκυτός, Cocytus, "Wailing," Λήθη, Lethe, "Forgetful," Φλεγέθων, Phlegethon, "Fire," and Στύξ, Styx, "Hateful." The Styx is clearly at the border of the Underworld, since the dead are ferried across it into Hades. Otherwise, there is not a very clear geography or function for all the rivers. Plato could use the Lethe in his own vision of the afterlife, where each person, before rebirth, would drink of the river and forget all they knew. This complemented his theory of knowledge as Recollection.
In Dante's Inferno, from the Divine Comedy, we get an elaborate version of all this. The Acheron is at the top of Hell, outside the First Circle, surrounding all of it. The Styx occupies the Fifth Circle, surrounding the City of Dis, which is Nether Hell. The Phlegthon, which burns, is part of the Seventh Circle. The Cocytus forms a frozen lake, the Ninth Circle, surrounding Satan. The Lethe is not actually part of Hell but flows out of Purgatory, down through the Earth, and empties into the Cocytus. If souls were coming up out to Hell to be reborn, as in Plato's cosmology, this arrangement would make some sense. But in Dante's world, there is no regular traffic along this river -- souls neither leave Hell nor journey to it from Purtagory -- so the mythical quality of the river is rather wasted. However, the Lethe then does provide the avenue by which Dante and Virgil can leave Hell and ascend to Purtagory.
Why did Dante reverse the order of the Styx and the Acheron? I don't know. Upper Hell, however, is not entirely a place of punishment. The First Circle, Limbo, holds those unbaptized and the "Virtuous Pagans," who are morally deserving of no punishment, including the noble Sulṭân of Egypt, Saladin. In one version of the mythology, Phlegyas was the brother of Centaurus, Κένταυρος, who mated with mares and sired the race of Centaurs. Later, at a wedding, a battle erupted, the "Centauromachy," Κενταυρομαχία, between the Lapiths and the Centaurs, who tried to abduct the bride. The Greeks took the battle to symbolize the conflict between civilization and bestiality, with many representations of it, including one by Michelangelo.
I don't remember any reference, but I am under the impression that the waters of the Styx are supposed to be black. The Phlegethon, as fire, must be red. Some Mediaeval Christian texts do speak of the Acheron as white. Blue I have assigned to the Cocytus by default; and green seems appropriate for the Lethe because of a much later association with the drink absinthe, "the green fairy," la fée verte.
Absinthe gained the reputation of being hallucinogenic or toxic, for which it came to often be banned. However, the real drink has neither qualities; but sometimes inferior or fake brands were colored with toxic agents, like copper salts. Properly prepared absinthe indeed is naturally green. The "forgetfulness" associated with the drink may be from the power of suggestion, and its up to 148 proof (74%) alcohol. For making the Cocytus blue, I do have a real world inspiration. In Dante, the Cocytus is the only river that is actually frozen. As it happens, old ice in glaciers and icebergs can become blue, sometimes a very deep and rich blue -- or green. This color can be revealed, in dramatic fashion, when the upper part of an iceberg melts and the whole thing rolls over. Dante, of course, living in Italy, never would have seen or known of anything of the sort, and we naturally don't get any description of such events in the Ninth Circle of Hell. But it is tempting, and the Cocytus must be somewhat disturbed by the inflow of water from the Lethe.
Commentary on the Apology of Socrates, Note 3
The first person in history to call women who engaged in homosexual acts "Lesbians" was Arethas, the bishop of Caesarea in Asia Minor, in 914. [A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities, Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from History's Most Orthodox Empire, Oxford University Press, 2017, p.17]
Commentary on the Apology of Socrates, Note 4;
The Rivers of Hades
This inspired a novel, The First Circle, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn [1968, 2009], about Russian political prisoners who have not been sent to prison or labor camps in Siberia. Dante, however, does have the dead ferried over the Acheron by Charon, Χάρων, the traditional boatman of the Styx. At his own Styx, Dante's boatman is Phlegyas, Φλεγύας, who was not a boatman in Greek mythology, but King of the Lapiths, a legendary tribe from Thessaly.