2. Portrait of a Gadfly
Being curious and disputatious he became a student of philosophy, and was for a time fascinated by the Sophists who invaded Athens in his youth. There is no evidence that Plato invented the fact as well as the content of Socrates’ meetings with Parmenides, Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus, Hippias, and Thrasymachus; it is likely that he saw Zeno when the latter came to Athens about 450, and that he was so infected with Zeno’s dialectic that it never left him.142 Probably he knew Anaxagoras, if not in person then in doctrine; for Archelaus of Miletus, pupil of Anaxagoras, was for a time the teacher of Socrates. Archelaus began as a physicist and ended as a student of morals; he explained the origin and basis of morals on rationalistic lines, and perhaps turned Socrates from science to ethics.143 By all these avenues Socrates came to philosophy, and thenceforth found his “greatest good in daily converse about virtue, examining myself and others; for a life unscrutinized is unworthy of a man.”* So he went prowling among men’s beliefs, prodding them with questions, demanding precise answers and consistent views, and making himself a terror to all who could not think clearly. Even in Hades he proposed to be a gadfly, and “find out who is wise, and who pretends to be wise and is not.”144 He protected himself from a similar cross-examination by announcing that he knew nothing; he knew all the questions, but none of the answers; he modestly called himself an “amateur in philosophy.”145 What he meant, presumably, was that he was certain of nothing except man’s fallibility, and had no hard and fast system of dogmas and principles. When the oracle at Delphi, to Chaerephon’s alleged inquiry, “Is any man wiser than Socrates?” gave the alleged reply, “No one,”146 Socrates ascribed the response to his profession of ignorance.
From that moment he set himself to the pragmatic task of getting clear ideas. “For himself,” he said, “he would hold discourse, from time to time, on what concerned mankind, considering what was pious, what impious; what was just, what unjust; what was sanity, what insanity; what was courage, what cowardice; what was the nature of government over men, and the qualities of one skilled in governing them; and touching on other subjects . . . of which he thought that those who were ignorant might justly be deemed no better than slaves.”147 To every vague notion, easy generalization, or secret prejudice he pointed the challenge, “What is it?” and asked for precise definitions. It became his habit to rise early and go to the market place, the gymnasiums, the palaestras, or the workshops of artisans, and engage in discussion any person who gave promise of a stimulating intelligence or an amusing stupidity. “Is not the road to Athens made for conversation?” he asked.148 His method was simple: he called for the definition of a large idea; he examined the definition, usually to reveal its incompleteness, its contradictoriness, or its absurdity; he led on, by question after question, to a fuller and juster definition, which, however, he never gave. Sometimes he proceeded to a general conception, or exposed another, by investigating a long series of particular instances, thereby introducing a measure of induction into Greek logic; sometimes, with the famous Socratic irony, he unveiled the ridiculous consequences of the definition or opinion he wished to destroy. He had a passion for orderly thinking, and liked to classify individual things according to their genus, species, and specific difference, thereby preparing for Aristotle’s method of definition as well as for Plato’s theory of Ideas. He liked to describe dialectic as the art of careful distinctions. And he salted the weary wastes of logic with a humor that died an early death in the history of philosophy.
His opponents objected that he tore down but never built, that he rejected every answer but gave none of his own, and that the results demoralized morals and paralyzed thought. In many cases he left the idea that he had set out to clarify more obscure than before. When a resolute fellow like Critias tried to question him he turned his reply into another question, and at once recaptured the advantage. In the Protagoras he offers to answer instead of asking, but his good resolution lasts but a moment; whereupon Protagoras, being an old hand at the game of logic, quietly withdraws from the argument.149 Hippias rages at Socrates’ elusiveness: “By Zeus!” he cries, “you shall not hear [my answer] until you yourself declare what you think justice to be; for it is not enough that you laugh at others, questioning and confuting everybody, while you yourself are unwilling to give a reason to anybody, or to declare your opinion on any subject.”150 To such taunts Socrates replied that he was only a midwife like his mother. “The reproach which is often made against me, that I ask questions of others and have not the wit to answer them myself, is very just. The reason is that the god compels me to be a midwife, but forbids me to bring forth”151—a deus ex machina worthy of his friend Euripides.
In many ways he resembled the Sophists, and the Athenians applied the name to him without hesitation, and usually without reproach.152 Indeed, he was often a Sophist in the modern sense: he was rich in crafty dodges and argumentative tricks, slyly changed the scope or meaning of terms, drowned the problem in loose analogies, quibbled like a schoolboy, and beat the wind bravely with words.153 The Athenians might be excused for giving him hemlock, since there is no pest like a conscious logician. In four points he differed from the Sophists: he despised rhetoric, he wished to strengthen morality, he did not profess to teach anything more than the art of examining ideas, and he refused to take pay for his instruction—though he appears to have accepted occasional help from his rich friends.154 With all his irritating faults his students loved him deeply. “Perhaps,” he says to one of them, “I may be able to assist you in the pursuit of honor and virtue, from being mutually disposed to love; for whenever I conceive a liking for persons I devote myself with ardor, and with my whole mind, to love them, and be loved by them in return, regretting their absence and having mine regretted by them, and longing for their society while they long for mine.”155
Aristophanes’ Clouds represents the pupils of Socrates as forming a school with a regular meeting place; and a passage in Xenophon lends some color to this conception.156 Usually he is pictured as teaching wherever he found a pupil or a listener. But no common doctrine united his followers; they differed so widely among themselves that they became the leaders of the most diverse philosophical schools and theories in Greece—Platonism, Cynicism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Skepticism. There was the proud and humble Antisthenes, who took from his master the doctrine of simplicity in life and needs, and founded the Cynic school; perhaps he was present when Socrates said to Antiphon: “You seem to think that happiness consists in luxury and extravagance; but I think that to want nothing is to resemble the gods, and that to want as little as possible is to make the nearest approach to the gods.”157 There was Aristippus, who derived from Socrates’ placid acceptance of pleasure as a good the doctrine which he later developed at Cyrene, and which Epicurus would preach at Athens. There was Eucleides of Megara, who sharpened the Socratic dialectic into a skepticism that denied the possibility of any real knowledge. There was the young Phaedo, who had been reduced to slavery, and had been ransomed by Crito at the behest of Socrates; Socrates loved the lad, and “made him a philosopher.”158 There was the restless Xenophon who, though he gave up philosophy for soldiering, testified that “nothing was of greater benefit than to associate with Socrates, and to converse with him, on any occasion, on any subject whatever.”159 There was Plato, upon whose vivid imagination the sage made so lasting an impression that the two minds are mingled forever in philosophical history. There was the rich Crito, who “looked upon Socrates with the greatest affection, and took care that he should never be in want of anything.”160 There was the dashing young Alcibiades, whose infidelities were to discredit and endanger his teacher, but who now loved Socrates with characteristic abandon, and said:
When we hear any other speaker, even a very good one, his words produce absolutely no effect upon us in comparison, whereas the very fragments of your words, Socrates, even at second hand, and however imperfectly reported, amaze and possess the souls of every man, woman and child who comes within hearing of them. . . . I am conscious that if I did not shut my ears against him and fly from the voice of the siren, he would detain me until I grew old sitting at his feet. . . . I have known in my soul, or in my heart . . . that greatest of pangs, more violent in ingenuous youth than any serpent’s tooth, the pang of philosophy. . . . And you, Phaedrus, you, Agathon, you, Eryximachus, you, Pausanias, you, Aristodemus, you, Aristophanes, all of you, and I need not say Socrates himself, have all had experience of the same madness and passion for philosophy.161
There was the oligarchic leader Critias, who enjoyed Socrates’ quips against democracy, and helped to incriminate him by writing a play in which he described the gods as the invention of clever statesmen who used them as night watchmen to frighten men into decency.162 And there was the son of the democratic leader Anytus, a lad who preferred to hear Socrates discourse rather than to attend to his business, which was dealing in leather. Anytus complained that Socrates had unsettled the boy with skepticism, that the boy no longer respected his parents or the gods; moreover, Anytus resented Socrates’ criticisms of democracy.*163 “Socrates,” says Anytus, “I think you are too ready to speak evil of men; and if you will take my advice, I would recommend you to be careful. Perhaps there is no city in which it is not easier to do men harm than to do them good; and this is certainly the case at Athens.”165 Anytus bided his time.