The words of Socrates survive and always will, although he wrote nothing and left no work or testament.
Dio Chrysostom, On Socrates, 54, first century AD
TRADITIONALLY WE MEET Socrates when a few of the key authors from antiquity, in particular Plato and Xenophon (both pro-Socrates) and Aristophanes (mixed), decide to open the door to him: but in that doorway there is always the screen of the authors’ opinions, their take on what they choose us to see. So, when we read the ‘words’ of Socrates, it is hard to tell whether these are his or another’s attitude, another’s philosophical enterprise.1
There is a second challenge. Plato, Aristophanes and Xenophon – Socrates’ immediate or close contemporaries, men who are the fathers of Western philosophy, drama and chronicle – each deal with Socrates in a notably theatrical way.
Plato writes as a dramatist, a frustrated playwright. In his work the ‘character’ of Socrates is – as all great theatrical characters are – essentially charismatic, articulate and, to some extent, fabricated. The dramatic persona is both amplified and collapsed, it is extra-articulate and two-dimensional. Plato’s Socratic Dialogues – crafted between twenty and forty years after Socrates died – are brilliantly constructed, designed to engage. Plato teases us and plays with us (he throws all the tricks of the entertainer into his work), which of course leaves us with the possibility that it is all just a fantasy. Xenophon is not much more help. Although more down-to-earth and literal, his hard-fact histories are communicated via animated, reported dialogue. Aristophanes, who satirises Socrates mercilessly, is not a biographer – he is a dramatist with a biting wit, he plays to the gallery; he strives to make his audience howl with laughter. Spend long enough with the Socratic texts from the fifth and fourth centuries BC and you feel as though you have sat through a series of ‘Socrates Shows’ – the TV docudrama, the West End, Hollywood and Broadway versions of a man’s life.2
Yet these individuals, Socrates’ contemporary biographers,3 were not just showmen. They understood that drama can be an arterial route to truth. Socrates never wrote anything down, because, as he went about his philosophical business on the streets of fifth-century Athens, he believed in the honesty of joint-witnessing. For Plato to give Socrates a living voice in dialogue was as close as he could get to the original ‘Socratic’ experience.4 The detail in Plato’s work is conspicuous. We hear of the species of trees that shade Socrates, the birds he hears sing, the discomfort of the wooden benches he lies upon, the shoemakers he talks to, the hiccups he cures.
If this detail were utterly inappropriate, or fanciful, Plato would have been laughed out of the Academy he set up in around 387 BC, and out of history. Plato, along with Xenophon and Aristophanes, wrote for their fifth- and fourth-century BC peers – for men who were contemporaries of Socrates, many of whom were intimately involved in the philosopher’s life and eyewitnesses to the events of the age. Downright lies just wouldn’t have washed.5
Plato’s memory matters. As a species, we remember and often we think in pictures, not words. Our visual memories are more acute than our aural.6 In neuroscience these experiences are known as ‘episodic memories’ – vivid, patchy, but with a sensory quality that can be remarkably accurate. It is very likely that the physical setting that Plato provides for Socrates can be relied upon; the punchy, sensuous real-life scenarios he supplies are exactly the kinds of details that stick in the cortex. Add to that the fact that the Ancient Greeks invested in landscape in a way we can only begin to imagine: not only was visual stimulus, visual expression fundamental to society, but the world they saw was a place where spirits resided, a place full of signs and symbols. One begins to realise that the Platonic setting of ancient Athens was no mere convenient backdrop, but a four-dimensional landscape that Socrates, in real life as well as in Plato’s imagination, almost certainly, vigorously occupied.7
Plato was perhaps over-compensating; doubtless some of those ‘Socratic’ sentiments were in fact his own – and so he gave us a virtual world, stocked with the real things that he and Socrates saw around them, copper-plating his own credibility as the historical Socrates’ mouthpiece. But Plato’s reputation now has archaeology on its side.8 His philosophies work on many levels, but the hard facts they contain were certainly not all a lie. Archaeological digs – each year – are substantiating and backing up in precise detail the picture of fifth-century Athens that Plato so skilfully and energetically painted just after Socrates’ death, 2,400 years ago. For the first time, for example, we can walk beside the narrow streets that lie under the new Acropolis Museum and across the Painted Stoa (a covered area or walkway) where Plato, as a young, impressionable man, sat and listened to Socrates speak. The ancient stones match Plato’s ancient words.9
And so my attempt has been to re-create Socrates’ world.10 To follow the clues in Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes to the physical reality of fifth-century Athens and therefore the physical reality of the story of Socrates’ life. Through his dialogues Plato has given us the ‘play’ of Socrates’ life, and described the most appropriate scenery before which the character of Socrates should enter. It is that scenery, that setting, that is now turning up in digs across the city.
The life of fifth-century Athens was itself, in essence, dramatic. Not only does Socrates’ life span seventy of the busiest, most wonderful and tragic years in Athenian history, but the Athenians did, physically, construct a backdrop of democratic ‘theatre’ in which to play out their lives – democratic buildings, scenery, speeches, statues, props, music to help make their new democracy feel real.
Socrates will be best served not by Aristophanes’ pantomime Clouds, but by a solid stage to stand on, from which he can speak audibly and directly to us, his audience. To this end I have used the latest sources – archaeological, topographical, textual – to construct a life for a man we can all benefit from getting to know a little better.11