The Trials of Socrates: Six Classic Texts

200 Pages·2002·8.97 MB·English

by  C. D. C. Reeve (editor)

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THE TRIALS OF SOCRATES
Six Classic Texts
Edited by C. D. C. Reeve
Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Indianapolis/Cambridge
Copyright © 2002 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
06 05 04 03 2 3 4 5 6 7
For further information, please address:
Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
P. O. Box 44937
Indianapolis, Indiana 46244-0937
www.hackettpublishing.com
Cover design by Brian Rak and Abigail Coyle
Interior design by Meera Dash
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The trials of Socrates : six classic texts / edited by C.D.C. Reeve ; translations by
C.D.C. Reeve, Peter Meineck, and James Doyle.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.).
Contents: Euthyphro / Plato — Apology / Plato — Crito / Plato —
Phaedo, 115bl-118al7 / Plato — Clouds /Aristophanes — Socrates'defense
to the jury / Xenophon.
ISBN 0-87220-590-8 (cloth) — ISBN 0-87220-589-4 (paper)
1. Socrates. 2. Socrates—Trials, litigation, etc. I. Reeve, C. D. C,
1948- II. Meineck, Peter, 1967- III. Doyle, James. IV Plato.
V Aristophanes. VI. Xenophon.
B312.E5T75 2002
183'.2—dc21 2001051571
THE TRIALS OF SOCRATES
For my friends living and dead
JeffAlden
Liam Byrne
Kevin Madden
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vi
NOTE TO THE READER vi
INTRODUCTION vii
PLATO 1
Introduction 1
Euthyphro 3
The Apology of Socrates 26
Crito 62
Phaedo Death Scene (115bl-118al7) 79
Translations by C. D. C. Reeve
ARISTOPHANES 84
Introduction 84
Cast of Characters: Clouds 88
Clouds 89
Translation by Peter Meineck
XENOPHON 177
Introduction 177
Socrates' Defense to the Jury 178
Translation by James Doyle
FURTHER READING 185
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Peter Meineck and James Doyle for allowing me to
use and slightly modify their translations of Aristophanes and Xeno-
phon.
My own translations of Plato have benefited from the ever astute
comments of John Cooper and from the no less astute ones of an
anonymous reader. I owe a huge debt, naturally, to previous transla-
tors—especially David Gallop, whose translations would be difficult
to equal, let alone surpass, and G. M. A. Grube.
I would like to thank Deborah Wilkes for generous personal and
editorial attention; Jay Hullett for being his inimitable self; Meera
Dash for seeing the book through production with calm and finesse;
Abigail Coyle for helping with the cover design; and, above all, Brian
Rak for conceiving of this project, helping bring it to completion,
and finding the cover art.
Finally, I am happy to acknowledge support from the Stillman
Drake Fund at Reed College and a faculty research award from the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Note to the Reader
Marginal line numbers and references to them in the notes and intro-
ductions refer to the Greek text and are only approximate in the
translations themselves.
Introduction
By Socrates' own reckoning he was put on trial twice in Athens: once
on the comic stage in Aristophanes' Clouds, and once in the King
Archon's court by a jury of five hundred or so of his peers (Plato,
Apology 18a7—bl). Of the second trial—or more accurately of the
speech of defense Socrates made at it—we possess two supposed ver-
sions. The first is by Plato, who represents himself as present at the
trial (Apology 38b6).The second is by Xenophon, who wasn't present
but reports some of what he was told about it by Hermogenes, who
may have been present. Of Clouds, we possess not the version to
which Socrates refers in the Apology, but a later revised version. It is
substantially the same play, nonetheless, as we can see from Socrates'
own description of it.
Two other Platonic dialogues—Euthyphro and Crito—are closely
related to the Apology and illuminate it in different ways. Euthyphro
takes place as Socrates is on his way to the King Archon's court for a
pretrial hearing, and deals with a topic—piety—that is central to the
trial itself. Crito is set in the prison to which Socrates is confined after
he has been found guilty of impiety and sentenced to death, and deals
with his reasons for accepting what he believes to be an unjust verdict
and sentence. In both dialogues, we see Socrates engaged in the philo-
sophical activities that we only hear described in the Apology itself.
Phaedo, like Crito, finds Socrates in prison, now awaiting imminent
execution. He speaks about death, about his philosophy, and about the
afterlife. Then, "with the calm characteristic of him in adversity, and in
utter fidelity to his principles, he drinks the hemlock and dies.
In Clouds we find a comic parody of a Socrates who is represented
as a sophist, subversive of traditional Athenian values—including reli-
gious ones.
In Xenophon's Socrates' Defense to the Jury, we meet a very different
Socrates from either Plato's or Aristophanes'—a man who is wholly
orthodox in religious matters, and who provokes the jury into
unjustly convicting him of impiety because he wants to avoid the
pains of old age.
In this volume, these six related works are brought together for the
first time. Those by Plato and Xenophon appear in new, previously
unpublished translations, which aim to combine accuracy, accessibility,
viii INTRODUCTION
and readability. In their case, as in the case of Clouds, introductions
together with ample footnotes provide crucial background informa-
tion and important cross-references.
Socrates
Socrates was born in Athens in 470/69 B.C.E. and died in 399. He
was the son of Phaenarete (a midwife) and Sophroniscus (a stone
carver), husband of Xanthippe (and later, or perhaps earlier, of
Myrto), and father of three sons, two of whom were still children at
the time of his death. In Plato's Euthyphro (lib), he traces his ances-
try to the mythical sculptor Daedalus, so it may be that he too prac-
ticed his father's craft early in life. He served as a hoplite (heavily
armored infantryman) in the Athenian army during the Peloponne-
sian War with Sparta (Apology 28e), where he gained attention for his
courage, his capacity to tolerate hunger, thirst, and cold, and for
powers of concentration that could keep him rooted to the spot for
hours on end (Plato, Symposium 219e-221d). Since hoplites had to
own property and provide their own weapons, Socrates cannot
always have been poor. Still, he seems to have been exceptionally
frugal in his habits. He often went barefoot, seldom bathed, and
wore the same thin cloak winter and summer (Plato, Symposium
174a, 219b). In a society that worshipped male beauty, he was note-
worthy for his ugliness. He had a snub nose, bulging eyes, thick lips,
and a pot belly (Xenophon, Symposium 2.18, 5.3—8).Yet such was his
personal magnetism that many of the best looking young men fol-
lowed him around.
In 406 B.C.E., Socrates served on the steering committee (pryta-
neis) of the Athenian Assembly, where he alone voted against an illegal
motion to try as a group the generals who had failed to pick up the
bodies of the dead after the sea battle at Arginusae (Apology 32a—c).
Later, at the risk of his own life, he disobeyed the unjust order of the
Thirty Tyrants to bring in Leon of Salamis for execution (Apology
32c-d).
In 423 B.C.E., Socrates was made the subject of Aristophanes'
comedy Clouds, where he appears as a generic intellectual who
teaches a mixture of amoral sophistic argument and an atheistic
mechanistic theory of the cosmos. We may infer that Socrates must
have looked enough like other sophists to lend popular credibility to
Aristophanes' portrait.
INTRODUCTION ix
In 399 B.C.E., in any case, Socrates was brought to trial on a
charge of corrupting the youth by teaching them not to believe in
the gods. He was found guilty—in large part, he claims, because of
the prejudice against him fanned by Aristophanes—and condemned
by a close vote to death by hemlock poisoning. Central, it seems, to
the prosecution's case was one of the most puzzling aspects of
Socrates—his daimonion, or familiar spiritual voice, which held him
back whenever he was about to do something wrong. Though this
may, in fact, have been no different from other acceptable forms of
religious practice, in someone already suspected of being an atheistic
sophist, it no doubt seemed—or could be made to seem—much
more sinister and subversive.
Socrates' personal characteristics played—and continue to play—a
very significant role in attracting devotees to him. He demonstrates—
what every teacher knows—that charisma can be as important as
content. If Socrates hadn't had that certain compelling something,
who would have listened to what he had to say? As it was, however,
many listened. And, since Socrates himself wrote nothing, it is to
them that we have to turn for information. The problem is (1) The
writings of many of those who knew him—Antisthenes, Phaedo of
Elis, Eucleides of Megara, Aristippus of Cyrene, Aeschines of Sphet-
tos—have disappeared or exist only in very fragmentary form. (2) The
extant writings of others who knew him—Aristophanes, Plato, and
Xenophon—while extensive, present us with very different portraits.
(3) Plato's own portrait is—at least—a double one: the Socrates of the
early dialogues (Apology, Charmides, Crito, Euthyphro, Hippias Minor,
Hippias Major, Ion, Laches, Lysis, Menexenus) is thought to be based to
some extent on the historical figure (they are often called "Socratic"
dialogues for this reason). The Socrates who appears in later dia-
logues, however, seems to be increasingly a mouthpiece for Plato's
own developing doctrines. When we look at Socrates, therefore, we
are looking at many potentially different figures. For some were influ-
enced by the historical Socrates, some by portrayals of him only some
of which we know, some more by the man and his character, and
some more by his specific doctrines.
Nonetheless, a few significant ideas come close to being the com-
mon property of these different figures: (1) Knowledge or theory
(logos) is important for virtue. (2) Virtue is important for happiness.
(3) The use of questioning based on epagoge (induction, arguing from
parallel cases) is important in regard to the possession of knowledge,
x INTRODUCTION
and so of virtue. (4) The sort of self-mastery (enkrateia), self-suffi-
ciency (autarkeia), and moral toughness (karteria) exhibited by Socrates
in regard to pleasures and pains is important for happiness. (5) Eros
and friendship have important roles to play in philosophy—and phi-
losophy, because of (l)-(3), in life. (6) The traditional teachers of vir-
tue—the poets—as well as the alleged embodiments of wisdom—the
politicians—are deficient in various ways revealed by (3).
These ideas are vague, of course, and so can be understood in var-
ious ways. Socrates could hardly have influenced so many different
sorts of people had it been otherwise.