24
Sophistry, 426–416 BC
SOCRATES: Stop trembling. You should look away from some of your thoughts; and, having dismissed them, depart for a while. Then, go back to your brain; set it in motion again and weigh the issue.
Socrates in Aristophanes, Clouds, 807–101
IN THESE SCABROUS, TAINTED DAYS, WHEN life continued, but the Spartans breathed down the Athenians’ necks, Athens remembered an old, new friend. Words had been the fairy godmother of the democracy; word-ideas; demos-kratia (people-power),eleutheria(liberty), parrhesia (freedom of speech) had been chiselled into architecture and broadcast on ocean currents around the Mediterranean; words had promoted the aspirations of democrats in assemblies and law-courts, and then made public the decisions that a democratic assembly chose to take. By the mid-fourth century, Athens was described as a ‘City of Words’.2 Rhetors ruled, and words on the streets of Socrates’ city seemed to give comfort, to suggest that the Athenian democracy was still a logical, a solid thing.
Walking through the bleached bones of ancient sites, it is easy to forget how hectic they once were. Not just with smells and colours, but in the case of Athens, with a massive barrage of information. Stone stele blocks, the length of roadways, at crossroads, outside sanctuaries, like stained teeth jutting from the ground, were laced with ideas. As stonemasons gouged out the hopes and fears and codes of society, granite, marble and limestone sparks would have flown. The public spaces bristled with urgent, talkativestelai like newly filled graveyards.3
Here the workings of the world’s first democracy were inscribed. Two jigsaw-puzzle pieces of marble, each half a foot square, discovered near the Agora and dating from c.500 BC, have just been reunited in the National Epigraphical Museum in Athens. Although the remains are very battered, the precise wording is just about visible. The fragment ‘DE’ has been joined with ‘MOS’ to give us the earliest extant hard evidence of DEMOS, ‘the people’, as an active political body.4
Democratric Athens strove for transparency. Decisions from the sublime to the ridiculous were published on stele noticeboards. Chipped out of stone and then emphasised with red paint, these could deal with issues as lofty as the state of public finances (newly restored inscriptions have just been installed in the new Acropolis Museum, covered in carefully calculated lines, these aimed to prevent backhanders, political sweeteners, and to name and shame those suspected of sequestering public funds).5 Elsewhere the correct pricing for offal for sale to citizens and foreigners has been immortalised. In the Piraeus Museum a 3-foot-high block declares that the market inspectors have passed the quality of tripe on a particular stall down by the harbour; the feet, head, brains, womb, breast, liver and lungs of pork and goat-meat have all been diligently listed: the stone inventory then was matter-of-factly, democratically put on public display.6
Athens’ word-fetish was unusual. In a democracy ideas have to be shared, outcomes agreed, and that consensus then made public. A dictatorship has little need for written confirmation, no taste for the brouhaha of village squares. And whereas earlier cultures – the Hittites, for example, the superpower of the Bronze Age who controlled much of modern-day Turkey, Palestine, the southern Black Sea shore and northern Iraq – wrote everything down on tablets so numerous they were stored in a central temple-archive the size of four football pitches, and in Lower Egypt Ramesses II built his power into the very cliff-face at Abu Simbel, in Athens the decisions of the democracy were declared, but in order to communicate the will of the demos, not simply as a means of control.
The walls of Athenian houses and public buildings would also be daubed with painted letters, white and red.7 Scraps of papyri notices rolled off hawkers’ stalls. Books were coming to be objects of desire. A biblion (a papyrus sheet, typically the length of an armspan and coiled around a central dowl, the omphalos) was designed to be portable and user-friendly. Some of these books were small enough for the ancients to fold them up in their fists, or tuck them into their clothes. When Socrates bumps into one colleague, Phaedrus, the Athenian has a suspicious bulge in his tunic – as it turns out, a book.8 Twenty years later, we hear of bundles of papyrus rolls stacked up on book stalls and in the Agora’s warehouses.9 In the Metroon, a stocky public library, scores of scribes bent over papyrus sheets and wax tablets, day in, day out, recording the ‘office’ copies of democratic business. Here too the ‘personal effects’ of Athenians – letters, contracts, writs – were stored. Because of systematic military activity in the Agora area, not to mention a climate that rots papyrus within a matter of weeks, this fund of knowledge is no longer available to us. The majority of the rich papyri of Athens represent portable history that, sadly, will never make the journey down time, although one recent discovery in an Oxford University collection of Egyptian papyri from the Greek-run town of Oxyrhynchus can go some way to help us to visualise Athens as a city of words: a place where notices were pinned to public buildings, to walkways and outside private homes.10
The water-table in Egypt is lower than it is elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, and as a result much organic material has survived in the sands there – evidence lost everywhere else in the world. So if we want to get an impression of the written landscape of Athens, oddly it is to evidence from Egypt that we must turn. This particular piece of papyrus in the Oxford collection, just under a foot long, half a foot wide, has emerged from a dig in the necropolis city of Saqqara, which once served ancient Memphis. The papyrus rectangle is a notice – one that was pinned up on the tent of Alexander the Great’s chief commanding officer and then discarded once its message no longer applied. The neatly, swiftly made, confident ink characters in perfect Ancient Greek read:
ROYAL ORDER OF THE MAIN GENERAL OF THE MACEDONIAN ARMY BY ORDER OF PUCHESTOS
DO NOT COME IN. OUT OF BOUNDS TO SOLDIERS.
RITUAL IN PRACTICE11
In that royal tent in Memphis priests were clearly at work and did not want to be disturbed. Although they have not survived, Athens’ streets would have been full of such messages. The Athenians set a precedent for keeping hoi polloi up to speed with what was going on behind closed doors. ‘Keep out’, ‘Occupied’, ‘Out to lunch, back in a short time’, ‘Ritual in progress’. All these day-to-day messages would have formed part of Socrates’ Athenian landscape.
But words in Athens could also have a sinister ring. Those whom the democracy disliked found their names scratched onto broken pottery shards – ostraka – gathered together by officials in giant pots and then systematically counted. The unfortunate man whose name appeared most frequently on these ostraka was ostracised, exiled from the city for ten years. Kleisthenes had instituted the system – originally to rid the city of would-be tyrants. But quickly ostracism came to be a handy way of eliminating the unsuccessful, or unpopularly successful, individuals. The piles of scratched ostraka in the Agora Museum in Athens are hard evidence of lives ruined; ‘Kallias’ is ostracised in c.450 BC, ‘Hyperbolus’ in 417–15 BC and another ‘Sokrates’, ‘Sokrates Anargyrasios’, in 443 BC. Tens of thousands of these ostraka have been discovered – many in the same hand, suggesting that votes were sometimes rigged. Resourceful law-breakers in Athens clearly offered a service whereby they could effect block-vote ostracism.12
Socrates was wary of the written word. His anxiety was that it could neither account for itself nor answer back. Words were everywhere in Athena’s city, but Socrates, unusually, did not set his own down on papyrus with an inky flourish. In a city filled with authors of every kind, he was anxious about the impact of writing without the accountability of face-to-face contact. ‘I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the appearance of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence.’13
For the first time in recorded history, words, and in particular written words, started to count as much as deeds. Socrates lived through an information revolution. By the time of his trial, a huge swathe of Athenians right down to the artisan class had become literate. Every excavating season wheelbarrow-loads of written material are rescued from the levels of Classical Athens. It was in Athens in the fifth century BC that the written word – which gives all of us so much – took flight. Athens declared its authority not just with fine monuments, but with strings of letters.
Now, from 429 BC onwards, that democratic life was not looking so rosy, perhaps words could warm things up a little again. So the Athenians employed wily words as protection against their pain. Words, both oral and inscribed, became a commodity. Wordsmiths, sophists, peddled a new kind of product in Athens’ Agora. Pindar refers to ‘sophistes’14 as early as 478 BC.15 But these pay-by-the-hour philosophers would wait another fifty years before they really flooded the Athenian market. It was during the Peloponnesian War, when the purpose of life must suddenly have seemed a little less clear, that the services of sophists, in effect travelling wisdom-merchants, apparently became indispensable.16
Sophists filled Athenian streets with their saleable advice on how to write or to speak the best lines. These travelling educators – who typically charged pretty steep fees for their services – claimed, no less, that being able to talk your way out of any situation would ensure your survival. During festivals, fine speakers would deliver grand, extended lectures for the enjoyment of the Athenian public: words as mass entertainment.17
Socrates loved the spoken word – but in honest, bite-sized chunks. By all accounts the philosopher was very wary of the great sophistic exercises where high-flying rhetoric and grand oratory could persuade men to do almost anything.18 As he says, mischievously, with lengthy rhetoric it is so easy at the end to forget what the point of the whole thing was at the beginning, quipping that in a long speech you lose your initial notion; or, more saliently, the audience does, and so can be duped by the power of language alone.19 For Socrates, the Athenian democracy was best served by dialogue, not by bombast.
When persons who are unworthy of education approach philosophy and make an alliance with her who is a rank above them, what sort of ideas and opinions are likely to be generated? Will they not truly deserve to be called sophisms, having nothing in them genuine, or worthy of or akin to true wisdom?20
But the philosopher’s tastes were unfashionable. Schooled in the epic, the Athenians of this period seemed to delight in a show-stopping rhetorical tour de force. And where you have an audience, you have a commercial opportunity. Sophists travelled long miles to exploit Athens’ market.21 Gorgias of Sicily stunned Athenian audiences with his Encomium of Helen – a defence of the indefensible femme fatale. It was said that thousands came, and paid, to hear him lecture in the Agora.22 His work was a self-fulfilling prophecy – one line in the Encomium declares that speech has an addictive, chemical power:
The effect of speech upon the condition of the soul is comparable to the power of drugs over the nature of bodies.23
Athens in the late fifth century became a land of bluff: worshipping (literally) at the shrine of the goddess of persuasion. Suddenly arguments mattered less than the amplified skill of the arguer. Every male citizen over the age of eighteen had the vote – and that citizen needed to be persuaded to vote in the right way. The Athenians wanted to hear the benefits of their city and their culture talked up. A law was passed that encouraged citizens me mnesikakein, ‘not to remember the bad things’.24
But Socrates’ approach was rather different. Socrates was a blot on the puff-filled, near-perfect city-state that Attic ambition was contriving to build. He encouraged men to humility rather than arrogance, to honesty rather than self-delusion. Even though the Athenians were living through one of the most debilitating wars in the history of the world, his fellow citizens endeavoured to keep their city band-box bright. There is a sense throughout these decades that the Athenian show must go on. But with all the sensitivity of a blunderbuss, Socrates discouraged his peers from fooling themselves.
Wisdom is wealth. Do we need anything more, Phaedrus? For me that prayer is enough.25
Wealth is the parent of luxury and indolence.26
Socrates’ candour has been described as ‘relentless’. Perhaps he suffered from the curse of the clear-sighted: to imagine that those around him would judge the world with corresponding clarity. His ideas were designed to stimulate, to provoke – and we all know how irritating, how needling that gadfly, that conscience-pricking gnat can be. Socrates appeared to challenge the great cobweb of spirituality and spirits of Olympian gods and demons that wrapped themselves around Athens and through its streets, by suggesting that it was not divine influence but men who can make mankind good. His words were doubtless threatening; the difficulty with proposing immense moral individualism is that each individual is under pressure to be immensely moral.
Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.27
In the first place, are they not free; and is not the city full of freedom and frankness – a man may say and do what he likes?
’Tis said so, he replied.
And where freedom is, the individual is clearly able to order for himself his own life as he pleases?
Clearly.
Then in this kind of State there will be the greatest variety of human natures?
There will.
This, then, seems likely to be the fairest of States, being an embroidered robe which is spangled with every sort of flower. And just as women and children think a variety of colours to be of all things most charming, so there are many men to whom this State, which is spangled with the manners and characters of mankind, will appear to be the fairest of States.28
And there was an added issue. In a world that believed in magic, Socrates was thought to have the power of a goes – a sorcerer. As he walked through the lanes, gymnasia and green spaces of Athens, crowds of the young followed him as though he were pulling them by an invisible thread. Plato tries, throughout his Dialogues, to dissociate Socrates from the kind of cheapskate street-magic that many sophist-sorcerers used to entrance their listeners. But nonetheless he allows Socrates’ friends and acquaintances, through the Dialogues, to assert that Socrates’ words are, somehow, spell-binding.
ALCIBIADES: … If you chose to listen to Socrates’ discourses you would feel them at first to be quite ridiculous; on the outside they are clothed with such absurd words and phrases – all, of course, the hide of a mocking satyr. His talk is of pack-asses, smiths, cobblers and tanners, and he seems always to be using the same terms for the same things; so that anyone inexpert and thoughtless might laugh his speeches to scorn. But when these are opened and you obtain a fresh view of them, by getting inside, first of all you will discover that they are the only speeches that have any sense in them; and secondly, that none are so divine, so rich in images of virtue, so largely – nay, so completely – intent on all things proper for the study as such as would attain both grace and worth.29
For whatever reason, Socrates, throughout the 420s BC, became a big draw. Perhaps it was simply that here was an ordinary man who did not just satiate with honeyed lies, but who plumped up the soul. Socrates was not happy just to consolidate the Athenians’ sense of themselves: he did not only want to talk about the world, he wanted to change it. All around him were forging the trappings of civilisation – but this philosopher seems to have been interested in forging the civilisation of inner lives.
SOCRATES: If anyone, whether young or old, wishes to hear me speaking and pursuing my mission, I have never objected, nor do I converse only when I am paid and not otherwise, but I offer myself alike to rich and poor; I ask questions, and whoever wishes may answer and hear what I say.30
In a sibling dialogue (to Xenophon’s Symposium), the Hippias Minor, another Socratic characteristic is revealed that would have troubled the Athenians:
I go astray, up and down, and never hold the same opinion.31
And again in Plato’s Euthyphro: ‘In any case, I was thinking while you were talking and I put this question to myself …’32 Socrates has moved on to the next strain of thought in his head while we are all still struggling with the first – infuriating and fascinating in equal measure. The philosopher chews away at ideologies. He does not spit them out, verbally, like half-sucked acid drops. And he also proposes an unusually feminine idea for this macho society – true consensus: ‘Isn’t it when we disagree and aren’t able to come to a sufficient answer that we become enemies to each other, whenever we do, I and you and everyone else?’33
This was a land at war, decimated by plague. Athens wanted action, not theories; heroes, not nay-sayers; answers, not questions.
Stellar in intellect, Socrates was also, we are told, infuriating. Unlike the sophists, who gave the audience what they wanted, Socrates wrong-footed hoi polloi. There is something of the Lord of Misrule about him. The apparent open-season of conversation in the Agora seems to goad the philosopher into pushing the boundaries of good taste.
The iconic superheroes of Athens – Themistocles, Pericles, Miltiades and his son Cimon – are described by Socrates as ‘pastry-cooks, flatterers of the ignorant multitude.’34 ‘Ironic’ and ‘irony’ (derived from eironeia in Ancient Greek) are words first applied to Socrates. To be the first ironic man on earth was not necessarily an enviable position.35
… And he on hearing this gave a great guffaw and laughed sardonically and said, ‘Ye gods! Here we have the well-known irony of Socrates, and I knew it and predicted that when it came to replying you would refuse and dissemble and do anything rather than answer any question that anyone asked you.’36
There are many ways to translate eironeia; it is a nuanced expression to describe a tricky concept. In Aristophanes’ comedies it meant a downright lie, in Plato more of an intended simulation. For Aristotle, irony was a concealed superiority – the opposite of boasting. Ancient authors tussled with this new, spikily playful notion.37 But all were clear that, while fascinating to witness, irony could wrong-foot the ordinary man. Ironic Socrates had the ability to make honest democrats look like fools. To have been closeted in a debate with Socrates must, in many ways, have been an uncomfortable experience; sitting in the Agora, or gym, or at a drinking session with friends and discovering you’ve been seated next to a laser-sharp barrister, an odd-looking man who elegantly slices through your woolliness and lights up your inadequacies. Socrates was a philosopher who, over dinner, made others pink and shiny with embarrassment:38
Thrasymachus produced an amount of sweat that was a wonder to behold, since it was summer – and then I saw what I had never seen before, Thrasymachus blushing.39
His enemies said that by employing irony Socrates dissembled, that he covered up his true feelings, that he mocked Athenians as he appeared to indulge them, laughing at the demos from behind his sturdy, hairy hands. But his friends and admirers were roused, aroused by his ironic smile, his cleverness, his just-out-of-reachness. Of all the attractions on offer in the Agora, Socrates was coming to be (particularly for the impressionable population of the young) one of the most eagerly sought out. A fact that, later, would be used against him:
So what gives one a deal of happiness is not to park next to Socrates and waffle all day long, neglecting all great culture, music and the best of the tragedian’s works. It’s sheer madness to waste your time with lofty, pompous, idle words, with words for idle speculation! That’s the sign of a man who’s lost his mind!40
On the fringes of the Agora men today still cluster when it looks like there could be the chance to make a fast buck, or a rumpus is brewing. It might be a gambler or an illusionist, throwing dice, hiding ping-pong balls in tumblers, a makeshift cardboard-box gaming table quickly kicked aside when the local police cruise by. Or it might be a row, a debate that’s attracted attention; a small crowd (even in the twenty-first century still mainly of men), worry-beads clacking, can cluster together so fast, setting the world to rights. Nearby students gather, buying up past-their-expiry-date spray cans from the flea-market so that they can protest on the streets. They are, in one sense, all Socrates’ children. The fact that they talk about politics, and challenge one another’s opinions – not to mention the status quo – is what Socrates would have wanted them to do.
SOCRATES: I am one of the few Athenians – not to say the only one – who undertakes the real political craft and practice of politics.41
Socrates took the democratic experience to its logical conclusion. Not just gassing in the Assembly or orchestrating himself onto committees, but walking through the streets and lanes, talking to other Ancient Greeks about their political experience. Absolutely of his time, he is also of ours. He realised that the more we learn to do in and with the world, the more we need to learn about ourselves. The more sophistication and complication there is around us, the more important it is to be sure of what is going on within us.
SOCRATES: So the command that we should know ourselves means that we should know our souls.42
And so for Socrates the Agora was the home of our conscious selves, of our souls.43 Socrates believed humanity was society. He said he would travel to the ends of the earth just for human company. His credo was that we cannot be wise and utterly alone. The further we quest for knowledge, the more human companionship we need. Ignorance is evil, knowledge is good. If we know (or admit) what is good, we will enact it. And we do that not by shutting ourselves away from the world, but by engaging with it, by taking it on, warts and all.
So Socrates speaks in the Agora, but he sticks out like a sore thumb.
He did not believe himself to be a sophist. He was not there to teach, not there in the market to sell wisdom; and anyway, he declared that he knew nothing – how can a man who has no knowledge cite knowledge as his stock-in-trade? Socrates argued that only God can be a sophist, only God can be truly wise. He would perhaps be happier with the title we give him – a philo-sophos, someone who loves, who yearns for wisdom. Unfortunately for Socrates, Homo sapiens has always been very good at rewriting history. The one man who counselled against empty, clever words was remembered as, and punished as, one of the most prominent ancient sophists of all.
This confounded Socrates, they say; this villainous misleader of youth! And then if somebody asks them, ‘Why, what evil does he practise or teach?’ they do not know, and cannot tell; but in order that they may not appear to be at a loss, they repeat the ready-made charges which are used against all philosophers about teaching things up in the clouds and under the earth, and having no gods, and making the worse appear the better cause; for they do not like to confess that their pretence of knowledge has been detected – which is the truth: and as they are numerous and ambitious and energetic, and are all in battle array and have persuasive tongues, they have filled your ears with their loud and inveterate calumnies.44
Socrates’ stock-in-trade was words. Yet words would prove both his weapon and his executioner.
SOCRATES: You might think written words spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing. And every word, when it is written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to whom to speak or not to speak; when ill-treated or unjustly reviled it always needs its father to help it; for it has no power to protect or help itself.45