Plato: Euthyphro

What was the same then as now were those human appetites that were addictive. Repeated stimulus led to boredom that would result in a need to consume at a more refined level. The desire for more requires more exploitation of the common populace. Cronyism and nepotism that protected those privileges festered as important families centralized power and ownership, to make lasting those ever higher levels of consumption. Developing and growing the Athens economy for increasing consumption required more trade with other societies who could compare and envy, and so there was a parallel need to invest in security to protect goods and property from invasion and pillage. Alliances were made and broken as different groups jockeyed for dominance.

In this environment, Socrates was an easy target for scapegoating, because any questioning of religion, government, commerce, and philosophy could spread and sow discord within the prevailing system. There would be a hypervigilance from the established families to foresee acts of rebellion or foreign intrusion.

The Life of Socrates

When it comes to the life of Socrates, who left no written record, there are many historical accounts that inferred about his early life, including the inference that he was familiar with literary works and important political events throughout his life. “There was, of course, an official record of his trial and condemnation, which fell in the spring of the year 399 B.C., and Plato has told us that at the time of the trial he was seventy, or rather older. Hence we shall be very nearly right if we assume him to have been born in the year 470, only nine years after the decisive repulse of the Persian army at Plataea. Thus, when Socrates was born, Pericles was still a very young man, Sophocles and Euripides were lads; Aeschylus had produced his great drama of patriotism, the Persians, some two years before, at the charges of Pericles. The philosopher might have been present as a boy at the performance of the Agamemnon, and have witnessed every one of the great tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides. All the noble buildings and works of art with which Athens was enriched in the Periclean age, the Long Walls which connected the city with the port of Piraeus, the Parthenon, the statues of Phidias, the frescoes of Polygnotus, were begun and completed under his eyes. The confederacy of Delos, the germ of the Athenian maritime empire, had been formed less than ten years before his birth; he must already have been old enough to be beginning to take notice of what was happening around him when the foundations of Periclean democracy were laid by the ostracism of Pericles’ rival Cimon, son of Miltiades (461 B.C.), and the institution of public pay for the democratic jury-courts. He was already a young man of twenty-four or twenty-five when Athens and Sparta concluded the ‘thirty years’ peace, which left Athens, at the price of abandoning her aspirations to dominion on land, free to consolidate her control over the Aegean and to become the first naval power in the world. He was already on the verge of forty at the outbreak of the long war which was to end in the destruction of Athenian greatness.”

It’s also shadowy when it comes to Socrates’ family and method of livelihood, or if he received an inheritance. He was demonstratively poor towards the end of his life and the only certain wealth he would have earned on his own came from his military service. “We do not know much about the parents of Socrates. Plato tells us in the Laches that Sophroniscus was connected by ties of close friendship with the family of his famous fellow-demesman the ‘just’ Aristides, and implies that he was a man of some consideration in the deme. In the Crito it is implied that he was conscientiously careful to give his son the recognized elementary education in ‘gymnastic’ and music. Phaenarete—the name seems to indicate that she was a woman of good family—had, by another husband, a son named Patrocles; Plato tells us in the Theaetetus that she had high skill as an accoucheuse. (The statement has sometimes been regarded as a pleasantry, but there seems to be no point in it if it is an invention, and we are not, of course, to commit the anachronism of supposing that Phaenarete was a professional midwife.) The Alexandrian tradition, still commonly repeated as fact, is that Sophroniscus was a craftsman, a statuary, or stone-cutter…Socrates himself had never followed any craft. He is depicted as always having had absolute leisure to occupy himself as his tastes directed, and as having consorted from the first with the most distinguished men of Athens, the circles of Pericles and Cimon…Whether Sophroniscus was a statuary or not, we must not make the mistake of thinking of Socrates as belonging to a needy class, like the modern ‘proletariat.’ He was extremely poor in his old age—after a disastrous war which resulted in a general ‘financial crisis’—but Plato makes a point of it that this poverty was directly due to absorption in a ‘mission’ which left no time for attendance to ‘personal affairs.’ Down to his forty-sixth year, at any rate, he cannot have belonged to the poorest class of Athenian citizens, as he was still serving in as a ‘hoplite’ or fully-armed infantryman, and must have been officially credited with the income which rendered him liable to this service.”

Most of the records agree that Socrates had a distinguished military record which supports the idea that he was the type to be under control in the heat of battle, so he was capable of heroism, as can be seen in the events at the end of his life. “The military service of Socrates, so far as we are informed about it, belongs—apart from the probable early participation in the blockade of Samos under Pericles—to the Archidamian War. Plato relates that he distinguished himself by exceptional bravery at the siege of Potidaea (431-430 B.C.), and again on the disastrous field of Delium (424 B.C.), where the whole military force of Athens was routed by the Boeotians. A third campaign, before Amphipolis, mentioned by Plato, is commonly supposed to refer to the action outside that city in 422 B.C., in which both the Athenian and the Spartan commanders, Cleon and Brasidas, lost their lives, though Professor Burnet has suggested that the reference may be rather to the fighting which accompanied the foundation of Amphipolis, some fifteen years earlier. It is clear from Plato’s accounts that Socrates’ record for military courage and presence of mind stood very high.”

The records are not in agreement as to Socrates’ intimate partnerships, and like many ancient sources, they include embellishments and gossip. “Little is recorded of the external events of the life of Socrates during the first ten years of the struggle, those of the ‘Archidamian War’ beyond a few facts relating to his excellent military record. But it must have been at this time of his life that he married the only wife he is known to have had, Xanthippe, since we know from Plato that at the time of his death he left one son who was a lad, i.e. not more than seventeen or eighteen, and two small children, the youngest of whom appears to have been an infant in arms. The names of Xanthippe and of her eldest and youngest sons suggest good birth. The Alexandrian biographers represented Xanthippe as a shrew with an ungovernable temper and a foul tongue, but no hint of the kind is found in either Plato or Xenophon. In the Phaedo, the only place where Plato mentions her, she appears simply as an affectionate wife with whom Socrates has a prolonged last interview immediately before his death, and Xenophon records nothing of her except that her eldest son thought her, as sons often think a good mother, over-bearing, and that Antisthenes apparently did not like her. Presumably, then, Socrates only contracted the marriage in midlife. The Alexandrians had a story that he had also another wife, Myrto, said to be a relative of the great Aristides. But their stories about Myrto are contradictory. They make her sometimes the daughter, sometimes the granddaughter, of Aristides, sometimes the first wife of Socrates, sometimes the second. Sometimes they even assert that Socrates was married to both wives at once—apparently an invention of the scandal-monger Aristoxenus—and even tell a foolish tale that he took a second wife to comply with an imaginary Athenian statute providing for the repair of the loss of population due to the war by the legalization of bigamy. (It would be chronologically possible that Socrates should have been twice married, but the silence of Plato and Xenophon makes it unlikely that he was.)”

In terms of his identity, Socrates easily stood out as unusual to Athenians in both looks and personality. “From his earliest days Socrates must have been something of what we call an ‘oddity,’ both physically and mentally. His physical robustness and powers of endurance are dwelt upon by both Plato and Xenophon, and partly explain the excellence of his record as a fighting-man. Stress is laid upon his exceptional continence and abstemiousness in eating and drinking, and also upon his power, on appropriate occasions, of drinking deep without being affected by the winecup. In his manhood he used to wear the same single garment winter and summer, and habitually went barefoot, even, according to Plato, in the rigours of a winter campaign. But he was very far from being handsome or well made. Aristophanes compared his walk to the strut of a waterfowl, and made fun of his habit of rolling his eyes; Plato and Xenophon both allude to the breadth of his nostrils and the marked snubness of his nose, as well as to some peculiarity of his eyes, which may be either their prominence or the breadth of the space between them. He looked, says Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium, like some grotesque, a satyr or a Silenus…Mentally, also, Socrates was in more than one way singular. His most striking singularity was the mysterious ‘voice’ or ‘supernatural sign,’ which attended him from the days of his childhood. According to Plato, who treats the peculiarity very lightly, the ‘sign’ manifested itself sporadically, often on very trivial occasions, and always took the form of a sudden inhibition; experience showed that neglect of its warnings commonly led to unpleasant consequences. Its chief interest for us is that it is one indication among others that Socrates really possessed the temperament of the ‘visionary,’ though, unlike most seers of visions, he kept that side of his nature well in check, as St. Paul did his gift for ‘speaking with tongues.’ Another mark of the visionary temperament dwelt on by Plato is his liability to sudden fits of absorption and abstraction, amounting at times to actual trance or ‘ecstasy.’ These were apparently usually of brief duration, but Plato records one which befell the philosopher as he was serving before Potidaea, and lasted the whole of a day and a night.”

Socrates was aware of the Presocratics, was inspired by them, so the shift in philosophy from astronomy to concerns for humanity was partly his predilection. “Socrates began, we are told, as an enthusiast for research into Nature eager to discover the ’causes of the coming of things into being and their passing away. He studied the various current cosmological theories, Eastern and Western—it is indicated that he began with those of the two contemporary teachers of the Eastern type of theory at Athens, Archelaus and Diogenes of Apollonia—and was particularly struck by the disagreement about the shape of the earth. He knew the biological doctrines of the Sicilian Empedocles and the theories of the Italian Alcmaeon of Crotona about the brain as an organ of mental life, and had been much troubled by mathematical difficulties connected with the notion of the unit, a problem raised by Zeno. At first the flat contradictions between the tenets of rival theorists brought him to desperation, but a passage read to him from the book of Anaxagoras came as a revelation. Mind, said Anaxagoras, is the cause of all natural law and order, just as mind is the cause of the orderliness and coherence of human action. To Socrates this suggested that the universe at large is the embodiment, like a properly conducted human life, of coherent rational plan. If Mind is the cause of the world’s structure, the earth and everything else in the universe must have just the shape, position, place in the scheme, which it is best that each of them should have. He set himself to the study of Anaxagoras in the hope that he had found a teacher who would put an end to scientific uncertainty by showing how it is best that every detail of the universe should be disposed, and how it must therefore be disposed in a world controlled by Mind. These hopes were speedily dashed when it appeared that Anaxagoras merely introduced Mind into his scheme to provide the initial impetus to the vortex motion by which he supposed stellar systems to be generated, without making any use of the thought that a universe controlled by Mind must be the embodiment of intelligent plan. It was this early disappointment which led Socrates, as he humorously puts it, to conclude that he ‘had no head for the natural sciences’ and to strike out a line of investigation and a method of his own.”

The Presocratics: Anaxagoras: https://rumble.com/v4erh9k-the-presocratics-anaxagoras.html

The Presocratics: Zeno of Elea: https://rumble.com/v1ydoqc-the-presocratics-zeno-of-elea.html

The Presocratics: Empedocles: https://rumble.com/v4gwesw-the-presocratics-empedocles.html

The Presocratics: Diogenes of Apollonia: https://rumble.com/v4jqfph-the-presocratics-diogenes-of-apollonia.html

Euthyphro

One of the early Plato dialogues expands on Socrates’ questioning of common beliefs that originated from religion and traditional received wisdom. According to Plato and Socrates, what we receive from culture must be examined. Morality has dimensions of contradiction and hypocrisy that only appear if you question it. Socrates saw that when you dissect many beliefs, views, and attitudes, they often fail to be reasonable. He received an indictment of impiety in his last years, but instead of just accepting it, he wanted above all to understand it. By questioning Euthyphro, who was prosecuting his father at the time, also for a lack of piety, it was a perfect opportunity for Socrates to set things straight by comparing that suit with his indictment, and by proxy making Euthyphro a prosecutor of Socrates.

Soc: “His name, I think, is Meletus. He belongs to the deme of Pitthus, if you recall a Pitthean Meletus with lanky hair and not much beard, but a hooked nose…It is no small thing for him, young as he is, to be knowledgeable in so great a matter, for he says he knows how the youth are being corrupted and who is corrupting them. No doubt he is wise, and realizing that, in my ignorance, I corrupt his comrades, he comes to the City as to a mother to accuse me. He alone seems to me to have begun his political career correctly, for the right way to begin is to look after the young men of the City first so that they will be as good as possible, just as a good farmer naturally looks after his young plants first and the rest later. So too with Meletus. He will perhaps first weed out those of us who blight the young shoots, as he claims, and afterwards he will obviously look after their elders and become responsible for many great blessings to the City, the natural result of so fine a beginning…He says I am a maker of gods, and because I make new ones and do not worship the old ones, he indicted me on their account, he says.”

Euthyphro was friendly at first and esteemed himself and Socrates as being prognosticators, that are often right about many things, but those predictions at times disturbed others. Intuition in Socrates’ times appeared liked one was acting as if an oracle, but at the same time there was always a necessity for thinking ahead to avoid predictable consequences in daily life. The problem happens when awareness is placed on the powerful. “I see, Socrates. It is because you say the divine sign comes to you from time to time. So he indicts you for making innovations in religious matters and hales you into court to slander you, knowing full well how easily such things are misrepresented to the multitude. Why I, even me, when I speak about religious matters in the Assembly and foretell the future, why, they laugh at me as though I were mad. And yet nothing I ever predicted has failed to come true. Still, they are jealous of people like us. We must not worry about them, but face them boldly.”