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The Master said, "To know when you know,
and when you do not know;
that is wisdom."Confucius, Analects II:17, translation after James Legge [1893], Arthur Waley [1938], D.C. Lau [1979], and Joanna C. Lee [2010]
It was one of the rules which, above all others, made Doctor Franklin the most amiable of men in society, "never to contradict anybody." If he was urged to announce an opinion, he did it rather by asking questions, as if for information, or by suggesting doubts.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Thomas Jefferson Randolph (Jefferson's grandson), November 24, 1808.
Free, outspoken, and flourishing, let them live in the city of famous Athens.Phaedra, Hippolytus, by Eurpides, lines 421-423, translated by David Kovacs, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1995, pp.164-165, translation modified.
.
The lord whose oracle is in Delphi
neither speaks nor conceals but gives a sign.Heraclitus of Ephesus, quoted by Plutarch, De Pythiae oraculis 21, 404 E, The Presocratic Philosophers, G.S. Kirk & J.E. Raven, Cambridge, 1964, p.211
Unless Plato had already written some short dialogues to illustrate Socrates' technique of questioning (like the Euthyphro), the Apology of Socrates is the earliest thing by him that we have. This would mean that it is the oldest extant document of Greek philosophy -- everything earlier (e.g. Parmenides) was lost and is known only through quoted fragments in later works, like those of Plato himself. There is something fitting in this. Socrates substantially refounded philosophy, and the Apology is still, all by itself, about the best introduction to Western philosophy that there is.
At the trial for his life in 399 BC, Socrates, 
, astonished his listeners by appearing, despite his vigorous defense, to deliberately provoke the jury and get himself found guilty and condemned to death. What he had said was then a matter of some curiosity, but there were no Greek court reporters, and of course no audio or video tape, so there was no official record, or news recording, of the trial. No film at 11. If Socrates' words were going to be remembered, the spectators were going to have to record them. This is what happened, and various versions of the Apology of Socrates were produced. Only two survive, Plato's and one by Xenophon.
A friend of Socrates, Xenophon also produced the valuable Recollections of Socrates (or Memorabilia). Unfortunately, Xenophon was not a philosopher, did not, I expect, understand Socrates very well, also, as he admits, was not at the trial, and did not try to reproduce the whole speech. Plato has his own presence at the trial affirmed by Socrates himself, who mentions Plato by name twice in Plato's Apology. Xenophon's Apology thus is an abbreviated and disappointing document next to Plato's, but it does tell us a couple of things that we might not know otherwise. These will be noted at the appropriate points in the course of Socrates' speech. Some scholars seem to think that Xenophon understood Socrates better than Plato did, and other scholars that Xenophon's information is not worth considering. Neither kind seems well motivated.
Now, although the word "apology" is the direct descendant into English of the Greek word 
, apología, the meaning has changed. Socrates was not apologizing or making excuses. He wasn't sorry. The Greek word apología simply and precisely meant a defense, or a defense speech. This meaning has been preserved in English in some related words: An "apologist" is still someone who argues a defense of someone or something, and "apologetics" is still a discipline or system of argued defense of something, usually a doctrine, cause, or institution. Socrates' speech thus might be translated The Defense of Socrates without the possible confusion over the modern meaning; but after long usage, it is hard to imagine calling the Apology anything else.
The meaning of "apologetics" has drifted somewhat. Calling someone an "apologist," or speaking of an "apologetic" or "apologia," now may imply an element of dishonesty, bias, or a distorted form of special pleading. This may have happened for a couple of reasons. (1) as "defense" and "defender" do adequate jobs of expressing the meaning of defense, "apologetic" is free to assume a slightly different meaning, perhaps because of (2) that "apologetics" is tainted by associations, e.g. with the traditional defenses of Christianity, that have become targets of skepticism or condemnation. An "apologist" may now be viewed as a kind of Sophist or hack. By the same token the neutral meaning of "dogma," as embodying religious doctrine, has became tainted with a sense of the arbitrary, the irrational, and the dictatorial.
The opposite of an "apologetic" is a "polemic," from Greek 
, pólemos, "war." "Polemics" is the systematic attack on a doctrine, position, cause, or institution. A "polemic" is a particular such attack; and the "polemicist" does such an attack. Apologetics and polemics are easily combined, as we see in the Summa Contra Gentiles of St. Thomas Aquinas, who defends Christianity by attacking the "gentiles," i.e. Jews and Muslims.
Part of the tradition of the Apology is that it is the first complete text read in the formal study of Classical Greek. This was not the case with me, since my Greek professor at UCLA in 1968 decided that we should break with tradition and read the Euthyphro and Crito instead. I'm not sure that was an improvement on tradition -- more like variety for the sake of variety -- though that meant variety for the professor rather than for us students. I think that the Apology is far too important to be skipped over like that.
Although Socrates is on trial for his life, his prosecutors (Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon) are private individuals. There is no public prosecutor at Athens, no District Attorney. All actions are brought by private individuals, although they themselves might be politically prominent, or officials. If there is a murder, and basically no one cares about the victim, there might be no prosecution -- though the city did take an interest in murder cases, because of the pollution, and from an early date the Council of the Areopagus, the ancient senate of the aristocracy, undertook to protect the state from vengeful spirits.
It is also noteworthy in the Apology that Socrates never mentions a judge. All his remarks are addressed to the jury, and from the evidence of this text alone, we might not know whether there was a judge or not. We do know, however, even from the Euthyphro, that Socrates is in the court of one of the major officials of Athens, the "King Archon."
There were nine archons (
, árkhon = ruler, regent, commander) in the classic constitution at Athens. Six were judges, the Thesmothetae. The other three were the Eponymous Archon, after whom the year was named (Athenian dates were in the form "the year so-and-so was Archon"), the Polemarch, who was the commander-in-chief, and the King, 
, who succeeded to the religious duties of the original Kings of Athens. One of these duties was to preside over court cases involving religion. That included murders, which involved the pollution of spilled blood, and accusations of impiety. That is why Socrates was in the King's court. He was accused of impiety.
The King Archon, the judge, is not mentioned by Socrates because he has almost no power. Most of the power in the courtroom is in the hands of the jury, which is said to be 501 jurors. There is no screening of jurors. The jury is pretty much any free adult male citizen who shows up. The comedy The Wasps by Aristophanes is about an old man who amuses himself by getting on a jury every day, and by voting everyone guilty. The jury has all but absolute power. At the same time, there was not much in the way of rules of evidence. The prosecution and defense could say pretty much whatever they wanted. Thus, ironically, Socrates, who in a sense was put to death for practicing free speech (
, parrêsía, or 
, eleuthería parrêsíai, the "freedom of speech"), nevertheless had more freedom of speech at his trial than most defendants do in the courts of the United States of America, where judges can prohibit defendants from making certain kinds of defenses, e.g. that the law under which they are charged is unjust or unconstitutional -- if the modern jury rules on considerations of Constitutionality or justice, they are practicing what is called "nullification," something hated by almost all judges, prosecutors, law professors, and politicians, even though it is endorsed by all the Founding Fathers, even political enemies like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. The Surpreme Court did not begin to undermine the power of juries until Sparf and Hansen v. United States in 1894. All Socrates had to worry about was how to appeal to the jury, but he then made his defense in such a way as to antagonize the jury instead.
The procedure of the trial is that the prosecutor or prosecutors make their speeches, accusing the defendant, then the defendant makes his defense speech. This is where the Apology begins, as we can tell, since Socrates initially comments on what he has just heard from his prosecutors. After the defense, the jury votes innocent or guilty. Only a bare majority is needed, though, as Socrates mentions, the prosecution is fined if it does not get a fifth of the vote. In this case, Socrates is barely (by 30 votes) found guilty. Then we get what today is called the "penalty phase of the trial." The prosecution proposes a punishment it thinks is fitting, in this case death. Then Socrates proposes a counter-penalty. The jury again votes to pick which penalty to impose. Socrates is condemned to death. The final part of the Apology, then, is what Socrates has to say after that vote, after he knows that he is sentenced to die.
Greek words here are rendered with their accents, but êtas and ômegas, i.e. long e's and o's, are shown with a circumflex, just to indicate length, unless they otherwise have an acute or grave accent, which is then shown instead. Greek accents indicated tones, just like in Chinese, except that a polysyllabic Greek word usually only has one tone. Acúte accents were rising tones, gràve falling, and circûmflexes rising and falling. Iota subscripts are not, regretfully, indicated. Consult the full treatment of The Pronunciation of Greek.
This commentary is largely based on lectures given on the Apology at Los Angeles Valley College from 1987 to 2009, using the G.M.A. Grube translation, in different editions [Plato, Five Dialogues, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo, Hackett Publishing Company, 1981, pp. 24-44]. The original commentary was written up and posted on line while I was on sabbatical in the academic year 1999-2000, and it has been updated at intervals since then. Some comment and complaint will be made below about Grube's translation (which was also altered, badly, in later editions), but it does seem to me overall a fine rendering. Although it may be possible to read this commentary independent of the Apology itself, it would probably be better to have read the text first.
, eironeúomai, can also mean "dissemble" or "feign ignorance," which is what happens in irony and sarcasm: someone says, in a certain way, the opposite of what they really mean. Also characteristic, however, is what Socrates says next, which is that "hardly anything of what they said is true." Irony, where it is hard to tell if Socrates really believes what he says, is thus followed by very blunt statements that he certainly believes. His accusers are liars. This is also characteristic of the speech of Socrates.
, ándres Athênaîoi, "Athenian men" (men, Latin vir, not "persons," Greek 
, ánthrôpoi). Grube's translation often says "gentlemen," or the like, instead, which sounds more modern, but doesn't have quite the same flavor: Socrates is addressing male citizens of Athens, and uses those terms. A modern defendant could similarly think of themselves as addressing the "People" in a criminal case, when addressing the jury, who represent the People, but this no longer occurs to anyone today. Now, the prosecutors like to think of themselves as representing the People -- when often what they represent is a political class of lawyers, politicians, and police, whose interests are sometimes an outrage to the People.
, perípatoi] and training-grounds [
, gymnásia]; in the forenoon he was seen in the market..." [Loeb ed., p.7]. The 
, Agora, the market place, is probably the most public and busiest place in Athens. Since Socrates doesn't do much buying or selling himself, the only reason he is there is to talk to people. It is also noteworthy that he is going to meet few women there, since it was not seemly for respectable women to be out in such a place. Men, servants, or slaves are going to do the shopping.
, trápezai, just "tables" (Latin mensae, singular, Latin mensa, Spanish mesa) -- in Chinese, "table," 
, means the table of a judge (equivalent to English "bench") and thus "official," "public," or "court" rather than what we get here in the marketplace. We might not know apart from references like this that there were bankers in the Athenian marketplace. Greek bankers, however, are probably not much in the business of taking deposits and making loans. They are mainly going to be money changers, what now we would call currency speculators, and loan sharks. The ancient world never saw anything like modern banking. The Roman Empire never sold bonds, and we don't have any evidence of letters of credit, bank notes, or any other of the modern instruments of banking. Money was so new that no one even had a very good idea what it was all about (not too much different, really, today). When trade itself was regarded as morally questionable, charging interest was well beyond respectable practices (again, not too much different, in some quarters, today).
) of a judge (
)..." Socrates is not just putting the jury on notice that he is going to proceed in his usual manner, he is telling the jury how to be a good jury. This does not seem so remarkable today, when juries are constantly told what to do, what (not) to say, and what (not) even to think, but it is unfamiliar and unwelcome to Athenian juries, who see trials more as entertainment than as discovery processes. We might take that as a lesson about a system where all authority is vested in one irresponsible agency. Unfortunately, the modern courtroom goes to the opposite extreme, vesting all authority in the judge. Modern judges would fail Socrates' test also, since their concern is not "whether what I say is just or not." And modern jurors, treated as peons, are told that the justice of a case is not their concern. The system of checks and balances, between judge and jury, established by the Founders of the United States in the Constitution, has failed, as judges have seized all power in their courtrooms, aided and abetted by other judges (the Supreme Court). What Socrates says gets him in trouble with his jury, but anyone saying similar things today -- on the "excellence (virtue, , areté) of a judge" -- would receive summary jail sentences for "contempt of court" from modern judges suffering from the "insolence of office."
, physikoì philósophoi), whose concerns mainly were, indeed, the sky and the earth. Socrates is not interested in this stuff at all, and really has very conservative religious ideas about cosmology. "Who makes the worse argument the stronger." This is the reputation of the Sophists, 
, Sophistaí, who said that they taught "virtue" (, areté or "excellence"), but who ended up largely teaching rhetoric and persuasion.
The connection was that the Greeks came to think of human virtue or excellence as political, since the life of the Greek city (, pólis) seemed about the most noble activity for human participation -- a formula that excluded women from human excellence, since women were largely excluded from politics. Politics in a democratic city like Athens meant participation in the Assembly (
, Ekklêsía, the origin, from a later Christian context, of the word "church"), which consisted of all the free, adult, male citizens of the city. In turn, participation would mean, not just showing up and voting, but actually rising to speak and to propose actions. To speak well, one needs training in rhetoric, and to propose actions persuasively, one needs training in persuasion. The Sophists (
So to teach persuasion, the Sophists would "make the worse argument the stronger." But, whatever the quality of his own arguments, Socrates was not a paid teacher, did not teach persuasion, and in fact did not teach anything, except indirectly. All he did was ask questions. Thus, the terms of the reputation that Socrates has, although applicable to many Greek philosophers -- though not really all to one at the same time -- has nothing to do with him whatsoever.
Greek comedies are really extraordinary artifacts. Topical and political, but also bawdy and scatological, the only modern equivalent would be a truly X-rated version of Saturday Night Live -- actors playing male parts (no women on stage) were easily identifiable because they wore large stuffed phalluses. Eleven such plays by Aristophanes (died c.388) have survived. One of those, Lysistrata (c.413), even became a footnote to the history of Los Angeles. Lysistrata was an anti-war play, expressing Aristophanes' frustration and unhappiness with the interminable Peloponnesian War (431-404) between Athens and Sparta. His approach, however, was to have the women of Athens go on a sex strike until the men ended the war. The comic possibilities of this are not hard to imagine. Since World War I had left many Americans feeling frustrated, unhappy, and disillusioned with its outcome, there was a fair amount of anti-war sentiment in the 20's, and some producers in Los Angeles decided to capitalize on that by staging Lysistrata. Unfortunately, the sentiment of the times, however pacifist, was not up to the level of bawdiness in the play: It was shut down as obscene by the police. A probably apocryphal story about the raid has the captain of the Vice Squad demanding to know who had written such "smut." He was told the name of the author, but of course had never heard of the man, and had no idea that Aristophanes was somewhat outside the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles Police Department. But, thinking about the name, he suddenly realized he knew who it was: "Harry Stophanes!" So a very perplexed Harry may have ended up in jail that night.
, ho theós). If Socrates is thinking of a particular god, and he is, he never does actually name the god, though later we will have no difficulty understanding who it is -- the "god at Delphi" is Apollo. In older translations of the Apology (like Benjamin Jowett's), it is not uncommon to find Socrates referring to "God" rather than "the god." This is an accurate translation for Biblical, mediaeval, or modern Greek, where the article tends to be used with "God" -- 
, an expression that can also feature capitalization, which did not exist in ancient Greek. The article is also used in Arabic, 
, Allâh = al-Ilâh, 
, "the God" for "God." But this is not an accurate translation for ancient Greek.
Nor is the lack of a proper name unusual. Gods who are being invoked in a specific case are often left unnamed in ancient religious practice. This was common with the Egyptians (
, the "good god" was the King) and can also be seen in Homer, who in the Iliad invokes a Muse as "the goddess" without naming her, and also in Parmenides, who details a long instruction from a goddess who is never named. The more traditional translation, however, may also have been based on some idea that Socrates was a monotheist. Plato and Aristotle, maybe, but there is no evidence of monotheism in the Apology, or in the early dialogues that we can confidently say reflect Socrates' own ideas.
No, "the god" is a common locution, as common as Socrates' oaths involving Zeus or Hera; and the more that this god happened to mean personally to Socrates, the less likely that he would actually pronounce his name. Indeed, the reluctance of the Jews to speak the Name of the God of Abraham and Isaac meant that its true pronunciation was actually forgotten: the vocalization written for the "tetragrammaton," 
, the four consonants of the Name of God in the Bible, is that of the substitute word to be said instead, 
, Adônâi, "the LORD" (as it is translated, and written, in the King James Bible). Commentators who are unaware of this ancient religious reluctance to name the god to whom one is appealing may use the absence of the name "Apollo" in the Apology as evidence that Socrates did not believe in the god and is referring to Delphi ironically. But quite the opposite is the case. That Apollo is not named is the best evidence of the power that the identity of the god held for Socrates. Confusions in this matter, and false constructions of it, are examined elsewhere.
The play in question by Aristophanes was the The Clouds (423, rewritten 418), whose name comes from Socrates being shown floating up in the clouds -- like all philosophers. Everything that Aristophanes wanted to ridicule about the Presocratics and the Sophists he attributed to the man who was already the most famous philosopher at Athens, Socrates. This may, at the time, have all been in good fun. The story is that the mask of the actor playing Socrates,who was legendarily ugly, was so good a caricature that Socrates himself stood up in the audience so that it could be compared to him. This makes it sound like Socrates was willing to take the joke. Exactly how much in fun Aristophanes intended it all is a good question. He certainly didn't like what the Presocratics and Sophists represented, but he hardly seems like one to blame Socrates for losing the war with Sparta (by undermining Athenians virtues), since Aristophanes never liked the war anyway. Aristophanes was, in his own way, deeply conservative, and he disapproved of most new-fangled things, like Euripides' plays. Socrates would not be immune to that disapproval. In Plato's Symposium, a drinking party where Socrates and Aristophanes are both present, they seem friendly enough. By the time of Socrates' trial, twenty-four years had passed since the first performance of the play, and, as Socrates says, some people have grown up knowing Socrates more from the play than from life. Aristophanes was still alive in 399; and if he was really friendly to Socrates, then Socrates might have brought him in as a witness. But then that would have required planning a defense, and this is what Socrates didn't do. If Aristophanes had been worried about him, he might have come in on his own. So it is hard not to suspect that Aristophanes was not close to Socrates and was, at the very least, cool. But we will never know the whole story.
Ironically, the artistic misrepresentation of Socrates continues today, when a largely unrecognizable Socrates turns up the popular movie, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989). Like his accusers, Excellent Adventure presents a Socrates talking the kind of "nonsense" that must sound vaguely "philosophical" but which has nothing to do with Socrates' interests, activities, or even personality. The movie even has Socrates anticipating the title line of the long-running NBC soap opera, "Days of Our Lives." This is pretty funny, but the real Socrates still, two thousand years later, just can't get a break.
, mártyres). Since a great many people, even in the jury, have actually heard Socrates talking at one time or another (since he does so publicly), he confidently calls on them to inform everyone else if Socrates has ever talked much about any of the subjects imputed to him. Thus, not only has Socrates nothing to do with the Presocratics and Sophists, but if the jury were to rely, not on rumor and reputation, but on their own familiarity with his activities, the charges against him could be laid to rest. However, there is not much time here for the jury to consult among themselves about their own knowledge -- in a modern courtroom, by the way, they would be prohibited from doing this -- and Socrates himself passes on to things that they may find immediately irritating, whatever his reputation was.
, kalón, "beautiful," no noun]..." Irony verging on sarcasm, since Socrates has no respect for what the Sophists do, though he hasn't let that quite out into the open yet. "...pay them a fee, and be grateful to them besides." The young could learn from their fellow citizens for free. It is a foolish gratitude that is for the privilege of paying someone money for a questionable benefit. Of course, politicians earn their keep this way, but it also troubles me to read this passage, as a teacher feeding at the public trough myself. Students pay nominal fees up front to attend a Community College like Valley, but they may not realize that the drain on them through taxes is for the rest of their lives, as the rent seekers of the system gradually but steadily increase their benefits and privileges, all under the cloak of the educational "public good." I can at least think that, in the classroom 15 or 18 hours a week, a teacher in my college is more of a real pedagogue than university professors who get away with half, or less, as much.
The 1st Olympiad was traditionally supposed to have occurred in 776 BC. Greeks historians later used the four-year period of the Olympiad as a unit of historical time, though this was never used to date either private or official transactions in ordinary life. 2001 would be the 1st year of the 695th Olympiad. The Games were held to celebrate the god Zeus, in his cult center at Olympia; and consequently were ended by the Christian Emperor Theodosius I, who made it his business to close pagan temples, in 394 AD (the 2nd year of the 293rd Olympiad) [note]. The "Modern" Olympics were first held in 1896, at Athens, and not, to my knowledge, in honor of Zeus. 1896 would have been the 4th year of the 668th Olympiad, so the modern games are actually held a year earlier than the ancient games would have been, had they continued down to the present (the modern games are, in effect, held in year zero of the Oympiad, instead of year one). Although the Olympic Games today are criticized for being excessively nationalistic and commercialized, the Greek Olympics were, given the differences of the times, not all that different. Competition between the Greek cities was intense, and an Olympic victor could expect a hero's welcome at home, receive a pension or other privileges, mentioned by Socrates in the Apology itself at 36d, or have some landmark named after him, like the grove and gymnasium of Akadêmos, later chosen by Plato as the site for his school, the Academy (, Akadémeia). On the other hand, Aristotle divided men into three kinds -- those who go to participate at the Olympics, those who go as spectators, and those who go to sell things. Hippias would fall into the third group.
Nothing but the foundations of the temple of Zeus at Olympia are left. Within the temple was one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the great statue of Zeus by the sculptor Phideas, who had just finished decorating the Parthenon in Athens. The statue was moved to Constantinople, where it was later destroyed in an accidental fire. Nevertheless, Phideas' portrayal of Zeus may have influenced images of God in the art of Christian Constantinople. The stadium that survives at Olympia is still the place where the Olympic Torch is lit for every modern Olympic Games -- from Olympia carried all the way to Ventura Blvd. for the 1984 Games in Los Angeles.
, 
, is the phrase in Greek [with the cases returned to nominative], "such virtue, the human and political." "Excellence" is often a better translation for , areté than "virtue," and it may be here. Rendering , politiké, which hardly needs translating, as "social," however, is curious. "Society," a Latin word, now does not necessarily mean politics and government, and certainly does not in the term "civil society" -- even though a powerful tendency of 20th century politics, due to Marxism, is to erase the difference and abolish civil society, politicizing everything. "Human and social excellence" would be a notion compatible with liberal principles and civil society; but, in fact, this was not a Greek idea. There is private life in Greece, in the household (with the women), but not much in the way of "society" apart from political life, which literally meant the life of the , pólis, the city. Religion, which included women also, somewhat mixed the private and the public, but was very much a matter of public concern -- as Socrates himself is charged with not honored the "gods of the city." The modern idea of the "political" is smaller to the same degree that the modern liberal idea of private "society" is larger. The Sophists taught, and Socrates asked, about the enlarged Greek "political" life. The translation as "social" thus leaves out most of the area of life covered by the Greek term, though it does cover matters that politiké does and "political" doesn't. A tough call.
, prâgma, which is "deed, act, affair, matter, business," etc. "Occupation" is a lot closer to this than "trouble," although it is still not quite right. "For surely if you did not busy yourself..." Here "busy yourself," where the Loeb edition simply says "doing," in Greek is 
, pragmateuomênou, which is a participle, "busying or exerting oneself, taking trouble," so that Grube's translation gives a better sense of it. We should note that "taking trouble" is different from just having "trouble." This use of and its derivatives continues through the Apology, as we will especially see at 41d, where Grube himself reaches for "trouble."
, anthrôpínê sophía). "...those whom I mentioned just now are wise with a wisdom more than human" -- actually, "greater than man," using the noun, 
, ánthrôpos. If Socrates has "human wisdom," then the Presocratics and Sophists whom he has been discussing earlier would have to claim something rather more. Since he now calls that wisdom "greater than man," we already have a strong hint that they don't have it: They are not themselves "greater than man." Such a description would only fit the gods. It is thus not too surprising, later on, to learn that "only the god is wise" (23a).
, ho theòs ho en Delphoîs). The god at Delphi, was as it happens 
Apollo. From now on, when Socrates refers to "the god," it is much more obvious who he is talking about. While Apollo, the son the Zeus and Leto, was not mythologically more important than most of the other Olympians, his shrine at Delphi came to be considered the second most sacred place, after Olympia, in all of Greece. It was even considered the center, the "navel," of the world. The importance of Delphi, however, was mainly because of the Oracle -- a priestess, the 
, Pythía, who sat in an inner room (the ádyton), breathed fumes coming up through the floor (fumes from gas dissolved in spring water, in geologically active Greece, or from incense burning beneath), entered a trance, and was possessed by the god Apollo. For a suitable donation, a question could be put to the Pythia and an answer obtained from Apollo. Since the words of the Pythia were hard to understand, the priests attending her wrote up the answer in verse and delivered it to the petitioner. The answers were legendarily obscure or ambiguous -- the source of the modern of meaning of "oracular," which is precisely to be obscure or ambiguous.
One example of the kinds of answers Delphi gave occurred when King Croesus of Lydia, of legendary wealth, sought advice on the attack against Persia he was contemplating. Cyrus the Great had just overthrown the Medes, in 550, and Croesus figured that this must reveal the weakness of the Median state, and that, in any case, Cyrus' new realm was bound to be disorganized for a while, giving the Lydians an opportunity to renew the war that had ended in 585. But he was a cautious ruler, and sent a question to Delphi, asking what would happen if he attacked the Persians. This is a revealing episode, since Croesus wasn't even a Greek. Delphi already had such a reputation. The answer that the Pythia delivered was that if Croesus attacked Cyrus, "a great kingdom will fall." Croesus thought this sounded good, so he attacked Cyrus. He had no idea who he was dealing with, and was defeated very swiftly indeed. Lydia became part of Persia in 547. But Cyrus didn't kill, torture, or imprison Croesus. The former king was sent home to live in retirement, where he had the leisure to write back to Delphi and complain that he had been misled. The priests answered his letter, telling him that what they had said was perfectly accurate. A great kingdom had indeed fallen, namely his. Croesus might have worried which kingdom the god had referred to.Another example came when the Persians invaded Greece in 480. King Xerxes wished to avenge the defeat of his father, Darius, at the battle of Marathon in 490.
I had a student once who worked at the "Phidippides Sports Center," a sports supply store in Encino, California. This was named after the messenger who is supposed to have run back to Athens to report the defeat of the Persians. Unfortunately, Phidippides dropped dead once he had blurted out, "Victory is ours." The first Marathon as an Olympic event was in 1896, at Athens, when French philologist Marcel Bréal offered a trophy for the winner of a reenactment. I would like to know why Bréal thought this would make a good event for the modern Olympics, or why anyone would want to buy supplies from a store named after a guy who died doing his run! The distance of a Marathon run is 26.22 miles (42.2 kilometers). As it happens, the distance from Marathon to Athens is more like 19 miles (30 km). We get the difference because the distance for the event was determined in 1908, when the Olympics were in London, and the run was from Windsor Castle to London's Olympic Stadium. So Phidippides didn't run nearly as far as a Marathon. Indeed, Phidippides may not have done the run at all. He (or "Philippides") is mentioned by Herodotus as running to Sparta from Athens before the battle (to ask for help), but there is no account of the run from Marathon for many centuries. And when Plutarch relates the story, he doesn't mention Phidippides.Xerxes' invasion would be a much more serious affair than Darius' amphibious landing, with a very large fleet and an army so huge that it could not even be carried by the ships. The army would have to march overland, cross over into Europe, and come down the peninsula into Greece. The Greeks, although forming a unified defensive league, hardly knew how they could resist this. Consequently, the city of Athens itself sent a question to Delphi, simply asking what to do. At first the god brushed off the Athenians with terrifying predictions of defeat; but when humbly supplicated again, the Pythia replied, "You shall find safety behind walls of wood." Some people thought this meant the
, Acropolis (the "high city"), the citadel of Athens. Others fled the city. Unfortunately, after the Persians had flanked and eliminated the Spartans at
, Thermopylae ("Hot gates," i.e. a pass with hot springs), killing King Leonidas of Sparta himself (fuliflling a prophecy of Delphi that either Sparta, or a King of Sparta, must fall), they rolled all but unmolested into Athens, where the wooden walls of the Acropolis were simply set on fire, and all the defenders killed. Wrong interpretation.
Athens, however, had just built a new fleet, under the command of Themistocles.
He figured that the "walls of wood" meant the ships and that he should try and bring the Persians to action. He drew them into an attack in the narrow waters between the island of Salamis (where most Athenians had fled) and the mainland. Here the large Persian fleet could not deploy to advantage, and the Athenians started getting the better of the fight. Since most of the Persian fleet consisted of Phoenicians and Egyptians, who didn't want to be there anyway, they began to flee. Xerxes, observing from a headland, was apoplectic. Now, without a dangerous and humiliating march overland, his army was stranded in Greece, short of supplies. The Greeks allowed for the attrition of a whole year, and then the Spartans attacked and destroyed the remaining Persian force at Plataea, in 379. Themistocles had interpreted the Oracle correctly. This was the last Persian effort to invade Greece. Despite the leadership of the Spartans, the key to victory had been in the Athenian fleet. This made the fortunes of Athens for some time. 2183 years later, as Napoleon prepared to invade Britain across the English channel, a political cartoon has John Bull, who represents England, say to Napoleon, "where I sit is my own little land in the ocean -- and if you attempt to stir a foot -- there's a few of my wooden walls in the offing shall give you a Pretty Peppering." At Trafalgar, 21 October 1805, Horatio Nelson then destroyed the combined French and Spanish fleet.
Some scholarly comment has been that Athens became disillusioned with Delphi because it had favored Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, patronizing instead another oracle of Apollo at Delos. So when Socrates mentions Delphi, this actually adds to the things that are provoking the jury. However, Xenophon, who discusses at length in the Memorabilia the complaints that people had against Socrates, does not mention this one; and such a complaint would have discredited the "walls of wood" pronouncement, which was Delphi's principal contribution to the defense of Athens and the defeat of the Persians.
The room of the Pythia, the
, Ádyton ("not to be entered," seen at right in "The Priestess of Delphi" by John Collier, 1850-1934), has been about as mysterious in modern investigation as in ancient. A French team began to excavate Delphi in 1892. They were disappointed with what they found, and their results only slowly became public. In 1904 information was published by British historian Adoph Oppé, in what appears to have been a leak from the French, that "no cave or fissure" was found under the Temple of Apollo (although they had found water coming in through what they themselves called "fissures"). Finally, in 1927, in the officially published results of the excavation, it was announced that what was believed to be the Ádyton had been found, but no cracks or fissures for fumes to come up through, or any rooms under the Temple where anything might have been burned. In 1950, French archaeologist Pierre Amandry asserted that there was no active volcanism near Delphi and that the fumes described in the ancient sources were impossible [William J. Broad, The Oracle, The Penguin Press, 2006, p.103]. All this led generations of writers to dismiss the details of the Delphi cult as fictitious, and I was long under the impression that the Ádyton had not even been discovered. I could imagine that perhaps the room had been in a secret location -- still secret -- or it was destroyed by the priests of Apollo when the temple was shut down, under the Emperor Theodosius I in 392. Many sanctuaries of temples were destroyed by their own devoted priests, lest they be desecrated by Christians. If still secret, one might imagine Indiana Jones finding the Pythia still there. On the other hand, the French archaeologists found that their excavation kept filling up with water. This is suggestive of itself, since the temple was supposed to have been built over a spring, and the fumes breathed by the Pythia were supposed to come out of the water.
Now there have been recent developments. When a geologist, Jelle Zeilinga de Boer (a Dutchman who grew up in Indonesia and now teaches at Wesleyan University), examined the Delphi area, he identified a fault running right under the temple. In 1995, when De Boer told John Hale, an archaeologist at the University of Louisville, this led to a more careful investigation at Delphi. In 1996 it was confirmed that there was such a fault, now the Delphi Fault, and there was an intersecting fault, now the Kerna Fault. Some of this was already known to Greek geologists, but there had not been good communication about it with earlier archaeologists. The two faults crossed each other just about right where the Temple of Apollo was built. All along the Kerna Fault were natural springs, and the kind of rock nearby, and from the which temple itself was built, was travertine, which is formed from limestone interacting with gasses from geologically active waters. When they tested the stone, it had been infused with methane (CH4) and ethane (C2H6), which could have produced some of the poisonous effects recounted -- some Pythias died from breathing the fumes. When they tested the spring water, they discovered not only ethane but, more importantly, ethylene (C2H4). Ethylene, which would have broken down and not been preserved in the rock, is actually an anaesthetic, which in smaller doses can also produce euphoria and excitation. It also has a sweet smell, as actually reported by Plutarch, who was a priest at Delphi. New examinations of the temple revealed pipes underneath, apparently unnoticed in 1913, that would have brought spring water under a small alcove to one side of a sunken room in the naós, the holy of holies, of the temple. As the French had already concluded, this appears to be the Ádyton itself. So now we have the place and mechanism of the Pythia's dangerous intoxication. The "cracks" may have just been the joints between the rocks of the chamber, through which the gasses could accumulate in the space. The present temple was built after an earthquake in 373 BC, centered at Helikê (Helice), directly across the Gulf of Corinth from Delphi, rocked the area and destroyed the original temple. The new arrangements, apparently, were not as good as previously, perhaps because the flow of gas in the water had changed, a familiar effect in such springs in geologically active areas (like Yellowstone). This change at Delphi was perhaps one of the reasons why Plutarch wrote about the "Obsolescence of Oracles."
One source of skepticism about Delphi is that the Pythia just must have been high off of whatever kind of intoxicant was being administered to her. However, ethylene usually produces a very mild euphoria, and historically much, much stronger hallucinogens, like peyote, have been used to induce states of trance, possession, or visions. With ethylene, the nature of the experience also depends on the state of mind brought to it. The Pythia, as with any traditional shaman, underwent preparatory practices of purification and concentration. Many modern representations of the Pythia have shown her raving, manic, and frenzied. This has gone along with the idea that she was just babbling incoherently and that the actual answers to questions posed to the Pythia were given by the (manipulative) priests. The classic portrait by Collier above does not show her this way, but she does seem to be withdrawn in a trance. Greek representations were usually not of the Pythia at all, but of the god Apollo actually sitting in her place on the temple tripod. He gives answers without either frenzy or trance.
There is one Greek representation of the Pythia, however, from a 5th century Athenian "red-figure" cup, showing King Aegeus consulting the Oracle. Here the Pythia is quietly inspecting a dish, probably holding water, neither frenzied nor trance-like. While either frenzy or trance are possible from ethylene, and may well have occurred, the ordinary practice of the Oracle sounds like it is more what we see in this representation.
It is often said that the Pythia's words were unintelligible and had to be translated by priests. It is not clear that this was actually the case; but if so, it has led people to imagine that she was just babbling and that the priests made up the answers themselves. However, this kind of thing is quite familiar in shamanistic practices all around the world. For instance in Martin Scorsese's film about the Dalai Lama, Kundun (1997), we see a Tibetan shaman making statements while in a state of possession. These must be interpreted for the young Dalai Lama by the shaman's attendants. However, later in the movie, the older Dalai Lama starts becoming able to interpret what the shaman says himself. This will probably not stop people from considering the whole business to be nonsense, but the accusation that these performances are deliberately fraudulent, i.e. the inventions of cynical and manipulative priests, is probably not true -- and may largely be a function of Protestant and modern anti-clericalism.
Although it may just be cultural relativism, anthropologists tend to take traditional practices of this sort with some seriousness. A possible cynical and manipulative Delphic priesthood can no longer be invesigated -- except through the actual testimony of one of them, Plutarch -- but it is not likely that Delphi was conducted in ways very different from those open to modern description. Indeed, a striking feature of this whole business has been the failure of archaeologists and historians to consult anthropologists and historians of religion on the phenomena of shamanism, spirit possession, and oracles. There is a rich history of these things, including practices in sophisticated cultures like China and Japan, or, as noted, in Tibet. They continue even today, and one can find oracles in Chinese temples around Southeast Asia. Even writers who get excited about the "mystic," "occult," or "metapysical" implications of the Oracle of Delphi usually exhibit no awareness that they can witness the religious, not the "spiritualist," practice of this right now.
Simlarly, also striking has been the willingness of archaeologists to make firm judgments about geology, denying, for instance that there were faults or gases, when none of them was a geologist or had bothered to consult any. They looked at a cliff and just saw a cliff, when any educated geologist would immediately see a fault scarp. Thus, in relation to either geology or shamanism, it was more important to apply Protestant anti-clericalism, and accuse the priests of Delphi of fraud, than to document and understand, even from recent evidence or hard science, how these things work.
, Khairephôn]...the friend of most of you, as he shared your exile and your return." What was this "exile" and "return"? These were events that attended the end of the Peloponnesian War. The Spartans occupied Athens, overthrew the democratic government, and set up a junta of Quislings that the Athenians called the "Thirty Tyrants." In predictable fashion, they began killing their political enemies, as Socrates mentions himself (32c-d). Thus, anyone who had been a conspicuous partisan of the democracy was in some danger, and many very prudently fled the city and went into exile. When the Spartans withdrew from Athens, the hated Thirty were promptly overthrown, and the exiles could return. This tells us something important about Chairephon, that he would have been a partisan of the democracy, and also something important about Socrates, who thus had a friend who was a conspicuous partisan of the democracy. This is an important point when Socrates is still being accused of being an enemy of the democracy and a partisan of Sparta. It seems unlikely that Chairephon would have been Socrates' friend, and have done what he did, if this had been true of Socrates. But this circumstantial evidence is only our first clue about this in the Apology. The entire issue of Socrates' attitude about democracy is separately discussed in "Socratic Ignorance in Democracy, the Free Market, and Science"; but the evidence of the Apology will also be examined at the appropriate places in the text. Chairephon, however, does provide us with a good clue.
, pote). We are not told when this happened, which is frustrating. Socrates could well have been an ordinary artisan for the ancient equivalent of entire lifetime, until 35, and still had another full 35 years to live a new life as a philosopher. Socrates would have been about 35 in 434, even before the Peloponnesian War, when we have several stories about Socrates serving in combat. "...if any man was wiser than I" (
, eí tis emoû eíê sophóteros). So Chairephon simply asked the Pythia, "Is anyone wiser than Socrates?" and the answer was just "None wiser." This would not ordinarily make for an obscure answer; but, as we shall see, it is a very perplexing riddle for Socrates.
The nature of this answer is sometimes said to perhaps be due to Chairephon using a cut-rate version of the Oracle's services, which involved a black or white bean popping out of a jar, where the response would only be "yes" or "no." However, the evidence for existence of this practice is thin; and the thesis is compromised both by Socrates referring to the speech of the Pythia and by Xenophon's version of the Pythia's response (Xenophon's Apology 14), which was that "no man was more free than I, or more just, or more prudent (, sôphronésteros)." This response hardly answers a yes or no question, and it doesn't even mention wisdom (
21a. "...the Pythian..." Although the text says the , Pythía, the translator has added an "n" to the name, perhaps because the Greek word itself is from an adjective (though maybe not -- it has an anomalous accent). The games associated with Delphi were the "Pythian Games." 
, Pýthios, was an epithet of Apollo, perhaps from an old place name, but also because he had slain in that place the 
, Pýthôn, a great snake. The shamaness Pythia, indeed, may well be older than the god, Apollo, who comes to be associated with her.
, dokéô, which means "to think, suppose, imagine, expect," from which comes the word 
, dôxa, "belief" or "opinion." Socrates is always interested in what people believe, not with hypothetical propositions.
, politikoí, which we might more easily translate "politicians." Today, Socrates would have no more difficulty than then finding politicians with plenty of answers, though few sensible people today would think of politicians as the kind of people who really are wise.
, kalòn k'agathón), which is much more evocative than "worthwhile." But the politician thinks that he knows something when he does not, while Socrates recognizes his own ignorance. Human wisdom is thus knowledge of human ignorance, and this is uniquely the possession of Socrates, which is why no one is wiser. The god, after all, did not say that Socrates was particularly wise, just that no one was wiser. "...so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know." This leaves it a little vague about just what Socrates does know. He certainly makes various claims to knowledge in the Apology, but he has also just said "neither of us knows anything beautiful and good." But, in general, the approach that he is basically ignorant about everything, "Socratic Ignorance," is the basis of his approach to the people he questions: Whatever they have to say, he is happy to accept it for the purpose of discussion. This is an idea that we can apply to many issues, as in "Socratic Ignorance in Democracy, the Free Market, and Science," and it also gets us the significance of the word "philosophy" itself (
, philosophía), as explained by Plato in the Symposium (203e-204a), that we love (
, phileîn) wisdom (, sophía) precisely because we don't have it. This is the Archimedean Point for Socratic philosophy.
Cerebus turns up in some episodes of the Hercules, the Legendary Journeys television series. However, Hercules and its spin-off companion, Xena, Warrior Princess, although using many names and incidents from Greek mythology, cannot be relied upon as a guide to that mythology, or to anything else. In the original Hercules episodes, which were not weekly and had enough of a budget to hire Anthony Quinn to play Zeus, they have Hercules (, Hêraklês in Greek) living with his wife Deianeira and their children. When the series went weekly, they eliminated the wife and children with a fireball from Hera. Well, Hercules did lose a wife and children, but he killed them himself. He had been driven mad by Hera, of course, but he was still considered guilty enough that his Twelve Labors were performed in penance. Now, in the age of O.J., Hercules killing his wife and children certainly could not be shown on television as the acts of the protagonist. Another curious aspect to this, however, is that Deianeira was not the wife who was killed in the mythological version. Megara was the victim of Hercules' madness. Deianeira was his second wife, and she ended up killing him, with a potion she just thought would ensure his fidelity. Hercules then was granted immortality by the gods and married the goddess Hebe. Just how lame the material of the television series can get is indicated by their constant references to "dinars" as the money in circulation -- even though
, dînâr, is the Arabic pronuncation of the Latin denarius (first minted by the Omayyads), all coins from eras long after Greek mythology, or even Greek Golden Age history.
)... Almost all the bystanders might have explained the poems better than their authors could." While Socrates appears to respect the works of the poets, and hoped to "learn something from them," the poets were unable to explain what they had written themselves. This is actually a familiar phenomenon. The first time I saw a detailed analysis of T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land, I wondered if Eliot himself had really thought of all the stuff that the critic had read into the poem. Later, in a more popular medium, seeing movie makers talk about the movies they had made, it didn't always seem like they appreciated what they had actually accomplished. For instance, Spike Lee's 1989 movie, Do the Right Thing, seemed a much more profound moral and political statement than one would ever know from Lee's own explicitly stated, knee-jerk leftist, political views. The character played by Lee himself in the movie is a very un-idealized, morally ambiguous person -- all by itself a sign of good art. Socrates has already discovered that good art does necessarily mean good understanding on the part of artists.
, sophía, wisdom], but by some inborn talent [by 
, phýsis, nature] and by inspiration, likes seers [
, theománteis, holy diviners] and prophets [
, khrêsmôdoí, those who deliver oracles] who also say many fine [
, kalá, 
beautiful] things without any understanding of [/knowing] what they say." The poets are, as Socrates says, 
, enthousiázontes, "inspired," those in (en) whom is the spirit (
, theós) -- getting us the word "enthusiasm," which was still used by John Locke (1632-1704) to mean possession by the Holy Spirit. This is an extremely important point. Socrates does not dismiss the poets, does not deny that they are for real and onto something. It is just that they do not produce their art through knowledge, understanding, or wisdom. They are given it by the gods. This means that Socrates allows for the fourth characteristic of mytho-poeic thought, that myth is self-justifying. It is just that this is not good enough for Socrates. He doesn't just want to be told things, he wants to understand them. Nor is this just his preference. If the poets do not have wisdom, then this confirms the Oracle again, that no one is wiser than Socrates. So wisdom is different from what they say, however true, and must contain some feature -- understanding -- that is distinct from the bare assertion of truth. Plato agrees with these distinctions and expands on them in the Meno (96e-99e).
This seems to be an occupational characteristic today of actors, who often are not reluctant to use their public presence to endorse politicians or promote their favorite causes. They can hardly be blamed for this, since they see their causes as good, and they have a perfect right, to the extent that we have a free country, to express their opinions. There is nothing about being an actor, however, that is going to give them any insight into politics or the good better than most other people. Indeed, the egotism and flattery that inevitably go with the acting profession might be thought to be more of a corrupting influence than otherwise, in which case their opinions might be treated with more than ordinary scepticism. In that respect, we might recall the Greek word for "actor." The word actor is Latin, from a verb that we still use, act (ago/agere in Latin itself). The Greek word is, hypokrités, which originally meant "interpreter." Of course now it has become "hypocrite" in English. A hypocrite is a kind of actor, pretending to be something that he isn't. Ironically, the best actor and hypocrite among recent politicians is the Hollywood want-to-be Bill Clinton, while the actual professional actor who became President, Ronald Reagan, was often ridiculed as a second-rate actor, who nevertheless exuded complete sincerity in his politics -- his enemies thought he was stupid, not insincere.
).." The politicians, evidently, neither knew nor said anything worthwhile. The poets didn't know anything either, but at least they said, under inspiration, many "fine things." Now we get to the "craftsmen" -- actually the , kheirotékhnai, the "hand-artists." We have already been told that Socrates discovered that "those who were thought to be inferior were more knowledgeable," and here we get to those who might well be "thought to be inferior." They are also, interestingly, the people of Socrates' own class. Having been a "hand-artist" himself, Socrates discovers that they are the only people who actually know what they are doing. There could be a Marxist angle to this, though there is no talk of "exploitation," and Socrates ends up being disappointed again in what he is looking for.
, tékhnê, art], thought himself very wise [
, "wisest"] in other most important pursuits [
, t'âlla tà mégista, the other greatest (things)]..." Because the craftsmen were good at something, they thought, like the poets, that they knew about everything, which they didn't. "...this error of theirs overshadowed the wisdom they had..." Wait a minute! This means that their wisdom isn't enough to refute the Oracle? How could that be? Socrates doesn't really explain just what the problem is. How does their lack of wisdom in other areas "overshadow" (
, apokrýptô, "hide from, conceal") their actual wisdom? The "other most important pursuits" must require a different and superior kind of wisdom. In fact, we have seen what this must be. To qualify as having real wisdom, and not just knowledge of this or that art, someone would have to know of the "human and social kind of excellence" -- "human and political virtue" -- , hê anthrôp?nê te kaì politiké areté. The politicians had had the reputation for wisdom because this is what they were supposed to know. They didn't; but then Socrates gets down to the craftsmen, who do know something, but have neither the reputation nor the actual knowledge of "political virtue" either. If someone had this real wisdom, it would not be overshadowed by their ignorance if they did not know about handicrafts. But the wisdom of the craftsmen doesn't cut it when they are lacking and self-deceived about the more fundamental knowledge.
] did not have." Socrates was doing something very unusual. He was taking things that people said and showing that they were incoherent, while at the same time he did not claim to have the right answers to any of the issues that came up. Since, as we know, everyone has an opinion, it was natural for people to think that Socrates must have opinions also, and must think that he had answers to the kinds of questions he asked. If he didn't give his answers in public, it was also natural that people might think he "taught" his answers privately, since that is what the Sophists and others actually did. Socrates probably had never tried to disabuse people of this impression before, and it is one of the very great misunderstandings about him that he must deal with in his defense. But it is not the only one. Seeing Socrates always ask questions and never give answers, there are other interpretations possible. Socrates made people look ridiculous. This is amusing and evidently drew crowds. This might suggest that maybe Socrates didn't care what the answers to his questions were. He just enjoyed getting a laugh out of making others look foolish. Maybe he was actually ridiculing people's beliefs about the issues he dealt with -- the just and the unjust, right and wrong, good and evil, etc. -- and didn't really believe anything about those issues himself. In short, people could see Socrates as what now we call a nihilist (Latin nihil = nothing). This was a much more serious misunderstanding of Socrates; for, although he was certainly not a nihilist himself, there were young men (
, néoi, "youth") who hung out with him who actually were nihilists.
This is the point to discuss this problem, since Socrates will mention these young men shortly (23c), but he doesn't do a very good job of explaining why people are angry about them. They are the principal reason why Socrates is in trouble. They did bad things, and what they did damaged Socrates' reputation. He was thought to be their teacher. As Socrates later makes fairly clear (33b), his business was not to teach anyone anything. He did his questioning in public, and if anyone wanted to hang out and watch what he did, it was not his business to drive them away. Some young men, like Plato himself, had some notion of what Socrates was about, and that it was not just a game. Others, however, could take from Socrates what amused them and forget the rest. Then they would commit crimes, and people would ask, "How did he get to be like that?" Socrates must have "taught" him to commit those crimes.
Just about the most spectacular example of one of these young men was the celebrated Alcibiades (c.450-404). He was born to privilege; and after his father died in battle (447/6), he was raised by his famous uncle, the great leader of Athens, Pericles. He hung out with Socrates. Plato wrote an entire dialogue featuring him (the Alcibiades), which begins with Socrates homoerotically admiring the first blush of beard on his face. In the Symposium, however, Plato has Alcibiades stumbling into the party, drunk, telling a story of how he had gotten Socrates to sleep over once, trying to seduce him, only to have Socrates pay him no more sexual attention "than an elder brother" (212d-219d). Alcibiades would have come of age in about 429 but first came to political notice in about 420. At that point the war with Sparta appeared to be over. The "Ten Years" or "Archidamian" War, 431-421, had ended in the aftermath of the Athenians trapping and capturing a force of Spartans on the island of Sphacteria, near the Homeric city of Pylos, in 425. This was sensational, since the Spartans were always expected to fight to the death, as they had against the Persians at Thermopylae. The Peace however, was compromised by continued fighting, often because of plans by Alcibiades himself to organize opposition to Sparta. The supreme opportunity came in 416, when Greek cities in Sicily appealed to Athens for help against Syracuse, the largest Greek city there, which was also an ally of Sparta. Alcibiades got himself elected general to lead an expedition against Syracuse, which would materially damage the Sparta cause and win the thanks of the other Sicilian Greeks (often called "Siciliots"). The older leader Nicias was also elected general to look after Alcibiades, since he already had a certain wild reputation...In 415, the night before the expedition was supposed to leave for Sicily, someone went around and mutilated statues of the god Hermes that stood all over Athens.
, Hermês was the protector of, among other things, traffic, markets, and roads. His image was used in such locations, often at intersections, and to mark boundaries. Thus, there were a lot of these images. An individual statue is now called a "Herm"; and in the plural, the Latin form is used, "Hermae" (
). The incident is called the "multilation of the Hermae."
The Hermae now seem like very strange objects, archaic and peculiar. They were usually just a square stone pillar, with the head of Hermes at the top, and otherwise unadornedexcept for the erect genitals of Hermes at the appropriate location on the front of the pillar -- though the penis does not seem entirely erect in the example at right, since the (uncircumcised) foreskin still covers the glans. Today, of course, this would be regarded as funny or obscene. Not the kind of thing we see in public anymore. Indeed, after Christianity swept away this kind of stuff, it was forgotten that such things existed in the Classical world. It was brought back to modern attention when serious excavation began in 1748 at Pompeii, the Roman city buried by ash during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD. To the embarrassment of the Catholic Bourbon King of the Two Sicilies, obscene objects, and not just the Hermae, began to be found. The auspicious genitals of Hermes had even been carved on people's doorjambs. Much of this material was tucked away in a special warehouse, the "Secret Museum," to which only serious, respectable adult males were allowed entry. Elsewhere in the world, however, the idea of divine genitals being sacred and lucky still survives. Although suppressed for a while out of embarrassment of Western disapproval, such sights are beginning to revive somewhat in Japan, where colossal wooden phalluses can now be seen in religious processions. They are even being promoted as tourist attractions, drawing quite a few more foreign tourists than most other Japanese religious events. In pre-modern Japan, boundary stones in the shape of genitals, both male and female, were common.
The Athenians did not think that the mutilation of the Hermae was funny, or a virtuous suppression of obscenity; they thought it was a shocking and terrifying sacrilege. Hermes was there to protect the city, and if he was offended, then he could withdraw his protection. Nevertheless, no one knew quite what to do about it at the moment. So the expedition left for Sicily. As the days passed, however, suspicion grew that Alcibiades and his friends were just the kind of guys, without much respect for traditional religion, to have done this. It is not hard to imagine what happened. Young men, about to leave for war, get drunk, and in the wee hours decide to go looking for trouble -- like Animal House (1978). Someone gets the bright idea to mess with the familiar statues of Hermes, which they may already think are rather more funny than holy. The next day, they would just as soon forget about it, but it's too late. A warrant was sworn out for Alcibiades and a ship sent to Syracuse. On the way back, however, Alcibiades jumped ship. Flight to avoid prosecution. Desertion. Evidence of guilt in a charge of sacrilege. But then Alcibiades went even further. He went over to the Spartans. He advised them how to defeat the Athenian expedition in Sicily. The Athenian army and fleet were annihilated. Alcibiades was condemned to death in absentia and his property confiscated. When Sparta then reopened the main war with Athens, the "Decelean" or "Ionian" War of 413-404, Alcibiades advised the construction of a fleet to contest the sea with Athens and accompanied the ships to Ionia, which was the scene of much of the subsequent fighting.
Thus, Alcibiades can be credited with sacrilege, desertion, flight to avoid prosecution, and, last but not least, treason. So people would ask, "How did he get to be like that?" And they might remember, "He used to hang out with Socrates. Indeed, they were very friendly, perhaps even lovers." So Socrates, a philosopher, who, as we all know, go around teaching their doctrines, must be responsible. If Alcibiades can be substantially blamed for the loss of the war against Sparta, then Socrates can ultimately be blamed also. So let's get him.
Alcibiades later began trying to play the Athenians, Spartans, and Persians off of each other. He got the Persians involved, ultimately to the benefit of Sparta, but he also helped the Athenians defeat a Spartan fleet in 410. This enabled him to return to Athens, with all forgiven, for a while. Things soured again with a defeat in 407, and Alcibiades again went into exile. Ironically, his place of exile in 405 was right by where the final battle, Aegospotami, was fought between Athens and Sparta. This historic location is the long peninsula along the straits, the ancient Hellespont and modern Dardanelles, that lead from the Aegean Sea into the Sea of Marmara, and so ultimately to Istanbul, the Bosporus, and the Black Sea. The entire peninsula now takes its name from the Greek city of, Kallipolis ("Beautiful City"). Part of Turkey today, the Turkish name is "Gelibolu," but elsewhere it is known by its name in Italian, Gallipoli. Such a place has a common Italian name because of the presence in the area of Italians, mainly from Venice, Pisa, and Genoa, during the Middle Ages.
The name is best known, however, from the British landing there in 1915, during World War I. Winston Churchill, first Lord of the Admirality at the time, hoped to seize the Straits and knock Turkey out of the war. It was a good idea but a miserable failure in execution, not unlike the Athenian Sicilian expedition. A 1981 movie Gallipoli, by Peter Weir, starring the later super-star Mel Gibson, details the Australian participation in the campaign.
In 405 both the Athenian and Spartan fleets came into the Straits. For some days they simply maneuvered around each other. In the evening, the fleets separated and the ships were drawn up on the beach for the evening. The ships, of course, were rowed -- galleys -- with shallow draft, though with some hundreds of men as a crew. Although 100 some feet long, such ships could be pulled up on the beach by their own crews. Watching this, Alcibiades walked down to the Athenian camp and warned them that the Spartans might attack as the Athenians were getting out of their ships. The Athenians famously told him to take a hike. The next day, sure enough, the Spartans followed the Athenian fleet and attacked as the men were getting out. The Athenian fleet was destroyed. The Spartans sailed directly to Athens, put the city under siege, and starved it into surrender in 404. The war was over.
Alcibiades, like the boy who cried "wolf," was simply no longer someone to believe, even when he was giving good advice. He fled to the Persians and was assassinated, in 404, with the agreement of both Athenians and Spartans.
Originally, someone was born an Athenian citizen if either parent was a native Athenian. However, Pericles married a woman who was not Athenian, and his politically enemies, who could not harm him directly, realized that they could do so indirectly. They passed a law that both parents had to be Athenian citizens for someone to be born an Athenian. It was also retroactive. So Pericles' own children were suddenly no longer Athenians -- though this injustice didn't affect his two sons for long, since they, like their father, died of the plague.Some argue that Athens wasn't really a democracy because women, aliens, and slaves didn't vote. The best response I've heard to that argument was from a fellow student, when I was a Freshman at the University of New Mexico in 1967. She said that Athens was a democracy "because they made up the word and called it that." To the Greeks themselves, the key point was that the poor were included in democratic government -- "every free adult male citizen" did not mean universal suffrage, but it was free of the property qualifications that were long characteristic of British and American democracy. Nevertheless, some people get so confused about this that it is possible to find them saying that Athens was not really a democracy because the poor were not included. Where that comes from is mysterious, especially when Thucydides says in The Peloponnesian War that class war often resulted in Greek cities, with the poor, partisans of Athens, fighting the wealthy partisans of Sparta. This is also the key to many traditional criticisms of both Greek and modern democracies: that when the poor discover that they can vote themselves money, the government will collapse into a war of everyone trying to steal from everyone else.
, néoi)...sons of the very rich..." Here Socrates addresses the issue of the "youth" who used to hang out with him, and whose misdeeds had become associated with him. He doesn't do a very good job, at least at this point in his defense. Notice that the word for youth, 
, nêos, is very commonly taken to be the Greek word for "new," but its meaning is originally more like "young." It can also mean "new," but another word, 
, kainós, can be used for that. Kainós is rendered ceno- for compounds in Latin, such as the Cenozoic ("New Life") Era.
A much more forthright and thorough treatment of all this is actually given by Xenophon, at Memorabilia II-12-48, where he addresses the case, not only of Alcibiades, but of Critias too, who actually went on to become one of the Thirty Tyrants. "Now, all the time that Critias and Alcibiades associated with Socrates they were out of sympathy with him," says Xenophon (II-39; Loeb trans. p.31). He thinks that they associated with Socrates just for their own ambitious purposes, hoping perhaps to acquire his own facility with argument -- "as soon as they thought themselves superior to their fellow-disciplines they sprang away from Socrates and took to politics" (II-16; Loeb trans. p.19). Interestingly, Xenophon details the vengeful steps that Critias took directly against Socrates under the oligarchy, while in the Apology Socrates never mentions that, even though he does talk about his problems with the Thirty (32c) and could win sympathy with a specific example of their hostility towards him. One suspects that Socrates had is own reasons for not mentioning Alcibiades or Critias by name, as considered below, at 23e.
Socrates could feel guilty about this without really being guilty. It is not uncommon for people to have friends who seem to them to be headed for trouble. It is always a difficult personal dilemma what, if anything, to say to the friend about what they are doing. Frank and forthright advice may be interpreted as hostile or intrusive. The friend may say, "Mind your own business," or "Up yours," and then go away. Or, one may decide to set an example rather than give advice, and hope that the friend will hang around and stay out of trouble that way. If the friend then gets in trouble anyway, the thought, "I should have said something" is hard to avoid, however little a difference saying something might have made. But Socrates is in a more difficult position than most people. If his behavior in the Euthyphro is characteristic, and it is certainly consistent with his "knowing practically nothing" stand of Socratic Ignorance, then the problem is that Socrates does not tell people what to do. All he does is ask questions, and at some point, however obvious the conclusion, the interlocutor has to supply the final answer himself.Socrates, it seems, is not alone in history in this respect. Thomas Jefferson tells us, in a letter to a grandson, on November 24, 1808:
Conviction is the effect of our own dispassionate reasoning, either in solitude, or weighing within ourselves, dispassionately, what we hear from others, standing uncommitted in argument ourselves. It was one of the rules which, above all others, made Doctor Franklin the most amiable of men in society, "never to contradict anybody." If he was urged to announce an opinion, he did rather by asking questions, as if for information, or by suggesting doubts.Socrates, like Franklin on this description, never sets out to impose his opinion. He does not think that his opinions even have the status of being worthy of imposition. But this also puts him at a disadvantage. All he can do to straighten out someone like Alcibiades is ask friendly questions. Now that he is in trouble because of what people like Alcibiades did, he is ill at ease. It is a bit too awkward to explain that he might have given advice by asking his questions, indirectly, but it seems to him later (33b) better just to say that he was never anyone's teacher, never taught them anything, and is not responsible for whatever they did. In the present passage, however, he doesn't seem quite up to facing even that defense. He avoids the issue. Perhaps in bad conscience and feeling guilty, but without any real guilt or responsibility. Just the uneasiness over people he saw go bad, but about whom he could do less than even an ordinary friend might have done.
Xenophon, who often writes (in retrospect) as though Socrates had all sorts of direct advice to give people, nevertheless admits, "To be sure he never professed to teach this; but, by letting his own light shine, he led his disciplines to hope that they through imitation of him would attain to such excellence" (Memorabilia II-3-4; Loeb p.14-15). Socrates never sought anything more than friendship -- "his highest reward would be the gain of a good friend" (II-7; Loeb p.15) -- and no one could expect to be taught by him -- "Socrates indeed never promised any such boon to anyone" (II-8; Loeb p.15) -- except by example and by questioning. What we don't see in Xenophon is the ironic playfulness with which Socrates undertakes to become the "pupil" of someone like Euthyphro. Closer associates, indeed, would be little inclined to put on the airs that Socrates has no difficulty eliciting from him.
Socrates is accused of not believing in the "the gods in whom the city believes" but in
, hétera daimónia kainá. Now, daimónia kainá is translated as "new spiritual beings" by Harold North Fowler in the Loeb Classical Library edition (Harvard, 1914-1966, p.91), "new spiritual things" by W.H.D. Rouse (Great Dialogues of Plato, Mentor, 1956, p.430), and "new divinities" by G.M.A. Grube (Plato, Five Dialogues, 1981, 1986, p.31). Grube's original translation was thought better of and is now rendered "new spiritual things," like Rouse, in recent editions (p.29), which, however, are not dated, unless the isolated number "95" on the copyright page is evidence of the date (and we are not warned that the translation has been altered). The problem all these translation are dealing with is that there is no noun in the Greek phrase. Kainá is "new"; and daimónia is "of or belonging to a daímôn," where a
, daímôn, is a god, spirit, or even soul -- though this is later the word "demon" used by Christianity. So the literal translation would be that Socrates believes in "other new spiritual." But this is not grammatical in English, as it is in Greek, since English requires a noun, not just adjectives, in that phrase. We do know something from the Greek phrase about what a noun would have to be like, since all three adjectives in the phrase are neuter plurals -- "things." Supplying the noun "divinities" or "beings" implies that what Socrates' teaching is about living things, or actual gods. This adds far too much to what the charge says, and makes Socrates' questions about it sound unmotivated. "Things" is the best noun to supply, a very indefinite, semantically neuter, plural. But it should be remembered that even this is more definite than the original Greek. Socrates is being accused of teaching new something-or-others about divine or spiritual things, without much of a clue about what those would be. No wonder that Socrates is going to ask about it.
The following exchange is the only time that someone besides Socrates speaks in the Apology, and it is the only example we have in this work of Socrates' method of asking questions. Grube's text is not set up like a dialogue, with separate identified lines for each speaker. Meletus' answers are simply set off with a dash.
The "Council" is the, boulé, and the "members of the Council" are the
, bouleutaí. The Council of the Five Hundred was created by the democratic reformer Cleisthenes, with members ultimately chosen by lot from each deme, the thirty smallest divisions of the population of Athens (from
, dêmos, a district or the people who live in it, or just "the people"). The Council was effectively the day to day government of Athens and determined what laws to propose to the Assembly. The Council itself was divided into ten parts, corresponding to the ten Tribes (
, Phylaí) of Athens. Each of these ten parts presided for a tenth of the year, and the presiding Councillors were called the Prýtaneis or presidents. Socrates mentions being a
, Prýtanis below, 32b.
, Ekklêsía]? ... -- They improve them." The Assembly means every free adult male citizen of Athens, if they were all to show up; so this is a significant part of the entire population of the city, in fact everyone of political significance, everyone with the franchise, which is why Socrates next refers to them as "all the Athenians" (
, pántes Athênaîoi).
In answering his own question, which he also does elsewhere in Plato's dialogues, especially with other uncooperative subjects (e.g. the Gorgias), Socrates opens himself to the charge that he has opinions about his questions after all, and is not just asking his questions to vindicate the god, on the principle that everyone is ignorant. This bears keeping in mind as a Question about Socrates, but Meletus is too slow to pick up on it here and belabor Socrates with the inconsistency.
This whole line of questioning is going to turn on one of Socrates' pet ideas, namely that No one knowingly does wrong. Although Socrates does occasionally give answers to his own questions, he does not do so in a systematic or complete way, which means he is consistent enough in his Ignorance not to have theories about the good, etc. But in the course of his investigation he does come up with some theories, more about knowledge than about the content of ethics. This is one of the more characteristic ones and seems just as peculiar today as it would have back then, since we tend to think that only the incompetent, children, the insane, or the senile don't know that they are doing wrong when they are doing it. That is what they can be punished for. Here, Socrates wants to get Meletus to apply this principle to him and to admit that Socrates could not have knowingly corrupted the young, that it wouldn't make any sense.Socrates believes that no one knowingly does wrong for at least three reasons:
- If no one is wise, and so everyone is really ignorant of "the human and social kind of excellence," then no one really knows what they are doing, and those who do good are just as ignorant of the real value of their actions as those who do wrong. At Meno 100b, Plato has Socrates conclude that "virtue appears to be present in those of us who may possess it as a gift from the gods" [Grube p.88]. So what anyone thinks they are doing is more or less irrelevant to what they are doing.
- Socrates always takes at face value what it is that people say to him, and it is characteristic for people, even (or especially) the very wicked, to give justifications, excuses, and rationalizations for their actions. Thus, Socrates sees people as doing what they regard as right, because that is the way they talk about it. Of course, he then "examines" whether this is a "sound statement," as he says in the Euthyphro.
- Socrates suspects that the only reason anyone does anything is for a good end (Aristotle later defines the good as whatever it is at which anything aims). This is the point upon which this passage in the Apology turns. We get an actual argument for it at Meno 77c-78b. Socrates reasons that anything bad would contribute to unhappiness, and so only those desiring to be unhappy would want what is bad. Thus, he asks Meno, "Does anyone wish to be miserable and unhappy?" [78a, Grube p.67]. Meno answers no, but, curiously, other answers now seem possible. Today we are familiar with those who seem to enjoy being miserable, like Woody Allen in the movie Annie Hall, originally titled Anhedonia. Since Woody Allen seemed to think that he deserved misery out of guilt, Socrates could always argue that real guilt would merit punishment and so would be a good. Woody Allen thus desired what is good, but was simply mistaken since he was not really guilty of anything (until he married his step-daughter, perhaps). Another modern development, however, is a little different, and that is the prevalence of excuses based on helplessness. Scientific determinism now enables people to say that their actions are out of their own control. This divorces action from judgments of right and wrong altogether, which is probably the point, both for the those whose actions are in question and for the theorists would apparently don't believe that people should be accountable for their actions. Socrates, of course, would be free to express skepticism about this, as in Addiction Is a Choice by Jeffrey A. Schaler [Open Court, 2000]. Schaler's argument is that excuses of helplessness conceal judgments of preference, i.e. that addicts really find their addictions desirable in relation to the alternatives. Socrates might be challenged by the idea that a heroin high is preferable to almost any other goods in life, but he may have already been familiar with drunks who exhibited a similar problem. We have no record of Socrates questioning any alcoholics, but it certainly would have been an interesting encounter.
] better [no word in Greek], I shall cease [
] to do what I am doing unwillingly." If Socrates has accidentally corrupted the young, then he doesn't belong in a lawcourt. Instead, Meletus should have just tried to straighten him out. "...you have avoided my company..." But Meletus was never interested in tangling with Socrates. "...punishment, not of instruction..." If no one knowingly does wrong, then, actually, no one would belong in the lawcourt and no one would be in need of punishment.
If no one knowingly does wrong, then, as Socrates say, "if I learn better," he will cease doing wrong. The idea that knowledge of the good would produce goodness is the principle that virtue is knowledge, i.e. to be virtuous, one must acquire the right knowledge, presumably the knowledge of the "human and social kind of excellence." Furthermore, if virtue is knowledge, then presumably it can be taught. In the Protagoras, Socrates argues about this with the great Sophist himself, with, in typical fashion, Socrates arguing against the thesis at the beginning and for it at the end. The Meno begins with the explicit question about whether virtue can be taught (providing an actual argument along the way that no one knowingly desires bad things, 77b-78b). The answer seems to be "ordinarily not," but then it turns out that this is only because everyone is ignorant and because real knowledge must be remembered, not taught -- Plato's theory of Recollection. In the Republic, Plato modifies this with his theory that the right part of the soul, reason, must be dominant both for knowledge to be obtained and for it to have its salutary effect. In the Apology one peculiarity is that, even as Socrates tries to get Meletus to admit that he would not knowingly do wrong, Socrates never concedes to his accusers the benefit of this principle. Jesus may have said, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34), but Socrates does not. This kind of inconsistency should make it clear that Socrates is not a systematic thinker. Even his own pet ideas are not applied consistently, and when it comes to his accusers, he is quite happy to appeal to ordinary ideas about intention, responsibility, and blame.This same kind of inconsistency occurs a bit more recently. When "progressive" thought about crime became dominant in the 60's, with a social and psychological determinism that excused violent criminals as helpless victims of society, racism, capitalism, etc., this excuse was nevertheless almost never conceded to those whose crimes were less politically favored, i.e. the deeds of Southern Rednecks, or those who were guilty of no crimes at all except the Marxist offense of being capitalists, i.e. executives of corporations. This double standard persists today, when crimes by politically favored groups may be "understood" as resulting from righteous "anger," while crimes by politically disfavored groups are incomprehensible manifestations of "hate." Socrates would have had a job cut out for him, asking questions about this sort of thing, even though he commits the inconsistency in his own defense.
But a much cleverer Meletus could have answered Socrates' argument. What often happens in life is that the wicked corrupt others in the expectation that the wickedness will never rebound upon them. This may be foolish, and so senseless and impossible to someone like Socrates, but it is a common phenomenon. Thus, in Spike Lee's movie Malcolm X (1992), Malcolm himself, with a perfectly honest job, is corrupted by a Boston gangster and taught the ways of crime. Malcolm, as Socrates would predict, begins chiseling the gangster, raking off some of the profits that he should turn in. The gangster does not just reflect philosophically, "One I have made wicked is now harming me"; he intends to kill Malcolm, who gets away through a bathroom window and escapes to New York.
"The gods in whom the city believes" is a an important phrase. Reading about Greek mythology may give people the impression that there was a unified Greek national religion. Nothing of the sort ever existed. Each Greek city essentially had its own state religion, with its own particular gods. Even gods with the same name in different locations may nevertheless be represented differently. Traditional and archaic cult statues, like the surviving one of the Artemis of Ephesus, laden with breasts or testicles or something, may look very strange compared to the humanistic images produced by later Greek art. The main gods at Athens were Athena, after whom the city was named, and Poseidon, who had a conspicuous temple on the height at Cape Sunion, the tip of the peninsula of Attica. Even the Acropolis, however, had more than one Athena -- Athena Parthenos, "Athena the Virgin," in the Parthenon, another one in the Temple of Athena Nike, "Athena of Victory," another, Athena Polias, Guardian of the City in the Erechtheum, and then Athena Promachus, the "Foremost Fighter," whose bronze statue stood in the open on the Acropolis, reportedly visible from out to sea, and which may have been moved to the Acropolis of Byzantium when the Emperor Constantine founded Constantinople. In time, some sites, like Olympia and Delphi, gained the reputation as representing Greek religion as a whole, but this was a very incomplete and non-institutional organization.The particularity of the institutions of Greek cities extended to matters that now are taken for granted as universal. Thus, each city had its own calendar and even its own alphabet. All the calendars used lunar months, often with the same names; but which name went with which months, and how extra months were added to reconcile the seasons with the moon, was a local matter and often subject to political controversy. Aristophanes joked that if the gods regulated their lives by the civic calendars, they would often go to bed without their supper. Greek alphabets belonged to two broad families, the "blue," characteristic of Ionia and central Greece, and the "red" alphabets, characteristic of western and northern Greece, and of the Doric fringe of islands through Crete and Rhodes. A feature of the red alphabets is that they used the symbol X to write the letter ksi, while the blue alphabets used the same symbol to write the letter khi. The blue alphabet of Ionia later became the standard Greek alphabet. A red alphabet, however, was the one borrowed to write Etruscan and later Latin. The Greek language itself, of course, was also divided into several dialects. Athens had its own dialect, "Attic" Greek, which was basically Ionic but with some Doric influence. For instance, the Greek word for "day" was, êmérê in Ionic,
, haméra in Doric, and
, hêméra in Attic. With some modifications, Attic became the basis for the later
, koiné or "common" Greek used in the Hellenistic period, and in the New Testament.
, átheos, "godless"). Meletus answers, "...you do not believe in gods at all."
, thaumásios) Meletus..." Although the charge was ambiguous, Socrates finds it hard to believe that Meletus is really going to go ahead and say this, despite the difficulty that he is sure to have maintaining it in the face of the words of his own accusation.
, noûs) was the cause of everything. Unfortunately, the role of Mind was perfunctory, and Socrates was disappointed.
In 1970 I paid $40 for Wehr's Arabic dictionary in hardback, when a drachma in 1967 dollars would be more like $3.33. The inexpensive nature of a Greek book is rather surprising when we consider that the printing press was not invented for many centuries, and a book by Anaxagoras means a hand copied manuscript. Perhaps the price was so reasonable because the demand was not so great. There may not have been a mass market for Greek philosophy even in Greece; for, after all, Anaxagoras was driven out of Athens with the same kinds of charges leveled against Socrates (though this was mainly as an indirect political attack on Anaxagoras' friend, the statesman Pericles). He can't have been too popular. Of course, we tend to think of hand copied books as so valuable because literacy was so restricted in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, when copies might be made merely to replace a worn or worm-eaten original, and when such copies would be embellished, "illuminated," with color illustrations or gold leaf. That is not how publishing worked in the Classical world. Few manuscripts from that period survive (mainly from Egypt), but they were produced in a very utilitarian way. A fair number might have been produced for a real, if limited, market, especially during the Roman period. Since literacy was supposed to have been rather high in Athens, we are faced with the fact that pretty much anyone with an interest in "advanced" knowledge in the 5th century would have had access to it.In Mediaeval Europe, one place where a cash economy and continued market prices for books existed was in the Roman Empire. Historians call the continuing Roman state at Constantinople the "Byzantine Empire," but it was known to its citizens as the "Empire of the Romans" or "Romania,"
.
One extraordinary remnant of the lost world of the civilization of Constantinople is that we possess eight volumes from the personal library of Arethas of Patras, Archbishop of the city of Caesarea in Cappadocia (born circa 860, died after 932), whose image we actually see at right. Arethas, who seems to have actually spent little time in rural Cappadocia, did not buy these books off the shelf. He ordered them from professional copyists and calligraphers in Constantinople; and we know when they were ordered, from whom, and for how much because this information is included in the colophon on each manuscript.
Thus, Arethas had an edition of Euclid that was produced in the year 888 by the calligrapher Stephanos, at a cost, according to N.G. Wilson, of "fourteen gold pieces" [Scholars of Byzantium, Duckworth, 1983, 1996, p.121]. "Gold pieces," unexplained by Wilson, can really only mean the gold solidus
, the "dollar of the Middle Ages." In 2011, with gold now up around $1700 an ounce, the solidus would be worth a good $255, which puts Arethas's copy of Euclid at $3570 -- a stiff price for any book at any time. In 895 Arethas ordered an edition of twenty-four dialogues by Plato from a calligrapher named John. This cost 21 solidi, or $5355. This scale of prices puts such books well beyond the means of most of the fellow citizens of Arethas. Even members of the elite Varangian Guard might only earn 40 solidi a month. However, we are definitely looking at the high end of the market. Arethas's manuscripts are custom ordered and written by elite copyists on parchment. One wonders what prices would have been for used copies of books on paper, which was in production at the time. I don't know if there is information about this. I suspect that even such books still would have been more valuable than Socrates's "drachma at most."
, anthrópôn, "of men") believes in 
, anthrópeia prágmata, "human affairs," who does not also believe in 
, anthrópoi, "men" or "humans." Here the Grube translation has been altered recently, with "activities" replacing "affairs" and with "humans" replacing "human beings," perhaps because no word corresponds to "beings" in Greek, and because "men" would have been politically incorrect. Prágmata could mean either "deeds" or "affairs." "Affairs" is more like the modern meaning of derived words like "pragmatic," while "deeds" or "activities" may be more to the point for Socrates' argument. There have been extensive alterations of Grube's translation in the following passages, not all of them necessary or felicitous. The earlier translation will often be given in brackets.
, áristos) of men," with ironic exaggeration of Meletus' value. "no man could..." Actually, to the question, "Is there any man," Socrates answers "there is not (
, ouk éstin)." "...I will tell you and the jury." Actually, "you and these others." Again, nota bene, Meletus won't answer, so Socrates answers for him.
, daimónia prágmata) who does not believe in spirits (
, daímones)?" Strangely enough, Meletus actually answers, "No one" -- though again the question and the answer are really "Is there a man..." and "There is not." This destroys Meletus' accusation. Now he must admit that Socrates believes in daímones, and it cannot be avoided, for Greek religion, that this will imply gods also.
, daimónia, "spiritual," and 
, theîa, "godly, divine") and the second phrase the plural nouns (, daímones and 
, theoí, "gods"). This reflects the structure of the original argument. The words "things," "activities," and "existence" do not exist in the Greek text. The newer Grube translation tries to reduce the supplied nouns to a minimum, both in number and semantically ("things"). The Loeb translation supplies "existences" for the adjectives [p.103], after the earlier device of translating the adjective as "spiritual beings" [p.97].
)..." This, of course, was Achilles, the greatest Greek hero of the Iliad. In this passage, two things are happening. (1) Socrates produces a paragon of fearlessness in the face of death; and (2) Socrates is overlooking the moral ambivalence of myth in order to cite this paragon. Achilles was certainly "contemptuous of danger" in just the way Socrates means (with the help of being nearly invulnerable to harm), but he doesn't quite pass the test Socrates has just mentioned, about the important question of whether one is a good or a bad man. Achilles was not entirely a good man, did not necessarily do the right thing; but in thinking of him as good, noble, and righteous, Socrates pursues his project of morally cleaning up Greek religion and breaking away from the fifth characteristic of mythopoetic thought. Achilles must be seen very selectively to do this.
Achilles seems to be a far less admirable character than the Trojan hero, Hector, whom Achilles slays at the climax of the epic. We see Hector lovingly interacting with his wife and infant son, but the whole Iliad begins with Achilles storming off in a pique after he is deprived of a female prisoner whom he has been enjoying -- i.e. raping. This may sound like good Nietzschean morality, but in actual practice, this kind of thing is pretty nasty stuff.It is precisely Hector's role as husband and father, depicted in his devotion to Andromache and their son, that established his image as the premier defender of a peaceful civilization. This role assured him moral superiority over Achilles, who fought only to secure revenge and personal glory. [F. Carolyn Graglia, Domestic Tranquility, A Brief Against Feminism, Spence Publishing Company, Dallas, 1998, p.231]Homer says, "I sing the wrath of Achilles," and the whole Iliad, indeed, is about just what happens when Achilles gets angry. First of all, he goes to sulk in his tent and doesn't fight anymore. Without him, things do not go well for the Greeks, and the Trojans are even breaking into the Greek camp. Achilles simply gets ready to leave. But then his best friend, Patroclus, asks if he can borrow Achilles' armor, to make the Trojans think that Achilles has returned to the battle. Achilles loans the armor. But the Trojan hero, Hector, is not fooled, fights, and kills Patroclus, stripping off the armor. When the body of Patroclus is brought back to Achilles, does he blame himself? Is there any mea culpa? No, Achilles is not the kind of guy who will blame himself for anything. It is all Hector's fault. So Achilles has some new divine armor made, and goes after Hector, who has simply been defending his country against invaders. Even the king of the gods, Zeus, who has more or less been planning all this, is unhappy that maybe the better man will lose; but he holds up a curious pair of scales, and the fate of Hector "sinks down to Hades." When Achilles kills Hector, he even insults and mutilates the body. With the help of the gods, Hector's father Priam has to beg for Hector's remains, and Achilles finally relents. The Iliad ends with the funerals.
One might ask, "What was all that for?" The Iliad doesn't seem to be about the Trojan War, just one incident. Nothing about Achilles' Heel or the Trojan Horse is in it. Indeed, the Iliad is just about one thing, how Achilles became immortally famous, by killing Hector. We know that he will die because of that, since he was prophesied to either live long and obscure or die famous and young. And we know that he can only be killed by his heel, since his goddess mother Thetis was holding him there when she dipped him as an infant into the River Styx, the boundary of the Underworld. But none of those details are in the Iliad.
Later readers of the Iliad have often sympathized much more with the Trojans than with the quarrelsome, underhanded Greeks. Roman readers of the Iliad did not hesitate to imagine themselves descendants of the Trojans -- as in Virgil's Aeneid, where the Prince Aeneas, saved from Troy by his mother Aphrodite, travels to Italy and, anticipating Romulus, founds the Roman nation. There is also a school in Southern California, the arch-rival of the University of California at Los Angeles, where the student body is named after the warriors of Troy. All this testifies to the moral ambivalence of the mythic story. It is especially striking because, as the saying goes, history is written by the winners, but the Greeks, who won at Troy, ended up writing a history rather unflattering to themselves, not to mention rather unflattering to the gods also. Such ambivalence, so authentic and truthful to life, is the very thing that Socrates, and some earlier philosophers, wanted to fix up. Perfectly good gods, however, consequently lost most of their personality, and the later perfectly good God, Creator of Everything, was then saddled with allowing the evil that existed elsewhere.
, oîda), however, that it is wicked and shameful to do wrong, to disobey one's superior, be he god or man." A key explicit claim of knowledge, about which Socrates would have thrilled to question anyone else. Socrates cannot maintain universal ignorance while saying things like this. It sounds like he has to know something "beautiful and good."
, 
), "But I will obey the god rather than you" (
, peísomai dè mâllon tô theô è hymîn). The bluntest statement in the entire Apology of Socrates' willfulness, or autonomy, or transcendent, extra-political loyalty, little and ineffectively qualified with "I am grateful and I am your friend [philô, I love]..." This is still not the kind of thing that judges like to hear from defendants. Indeed, someone who said to a judge in court, "I will obey God rather than you," which is something, for instance, that anti-abortion protestors might well say, is not only likely to provoke self-righteous anger and summary "contempt of court" jail time, but to be dismissed as an "extremist" who is obviously outside the bounds of civilized and responsible behavior. The anti-abortion protestors, after spending some time in jail, seem to have given up on the civil disobedience approach, with some of them turning to terrorism and fleeing from justice -- to be protected by sympathizers. This is a shame, since civil disobedience, especially in front of judges, it not outside the bounds of civilized and responsible behavior. Martin Luther King, who very much practiced civil disobedience in the name of God, in the foursquare American tradition of Henry David Thoreau, who invented the whole idea, spent a great deal of time in jail and thereby accomplished, as did Gandhi, his goal of exposing the inhumanity of his enemies. One might wonder if the protestors against abortion, upon the morality of which reasonable persons can disagree, lost their conviction in the inhumanity of their opponents.
, "wealth," 
, "reputation," and 
, "honor" -- sounds a lot like the "wealth and rank" that Confucius speaks of several times.
) and demósios (
) are indeed adjectives meaning "private" and "public," not "individual" and "collective" -- though agathá (
) does really mean "goods" rather than "blessings." But both versions error, I think, in the translation of areté (), which would be much better rendered as "virtue" here, rather than "excellence," since there is a moral quality to this that "excellence" does not capture.
, mýôps)." The most memorable and durable image of the entire Apology, Socrates as a stinging horsefly. Indeed, the word "gadfly" in English now is hardly used for its original sense of real flies, but exclusively for the sort of "annoying person" (as Webster's says), like Socrates, who bothers politicians and others with pestering complaints or criticism.
This may tell us something important about Socrates' personality. The way in which he stood his ground and provoked the jury seemed arrogant to many people -- certainly to the jury. But was Socrates really an arrogant person? Was he full of himself? This may tell us. Would a Socrates with an inflated ego really compare himself to a fly? I think not. This is a rather unpleasant sort of creature, and the south end of a horse is also not a very pleasant place to be hanging out. The sacred animal of Athena, and the symbol of her wisdom, was the owl. A Socrates convinced of his own wisdom and dignity might well have chosen that animal over an unpleasant and undignified insect.
, theîon) and spiritual (
, daimónion) [thing] comes to me..." The word "sign" is not there, but, just as in Meletus' indictment, we have neuter adjectives with no nouns. But we are then told that it is a voice (
, phôné). So Socrates hears voices. This doesn't sound good. Today the men in white coats might hustle him off -- "Now, Mr. Socrates, we have drugs that will make those nasty voices go away." Or, since people can no longer be committed just for hearing voices, he might end up wandering around on the streets annoying passersby with strange questions... Actually, that is what he did! But, as these things go, Socrates' voice is pretty unusual. It doesn't really tell him anything. He never quotes it. We never hear of him having conversations with it. All it does is stop him. Why it stops him, he has to explain for himself, as he does here. We know from Xenophon that this is why Socrates did not really prepare a defense: Whenever he would start thinking about it, his voice would stop him.
History would be a lot poorer if anyone who ever heard voices were simply dismissed as insane. The Prophet Muh.ammad, for instance, at first simply heard a voice say, "Recite!" Later, he believed this was the angel Gabriel (Jibrâ'îl in Arabic), and what he was then given to recite was the Qur'ân, which means "Recitation." Now, some might think that the world would actually be better off without such religious revelations, but sometimes the voices have a more immediate and practical application. France might never have defeated England in the Hundred Years War if Joan of Arc, the "Maid of Orléans," had not briefly led and inspired the resistance. Nobody necessarily believed that angels were telling her things -- such messages could just as easily be deceptions of Satan -- but they did think it was possible. The test of having her pick the king, Charles VII, out of a crowd was thought to be effective because, if Joan had been touched by the divine, she should be able to recognize the monarch, by divine right, of France -- the kings of France always claimed their throne directly from God, and never acknowledged the suzerainty of the Emperors or Popes. It is not hard to imagine what would happen today if a teenage girl showed up at the Pentagon or White House claiming that God had sent her to lead the armies of America. This is no longer comprehensible.
, plêthos)..." When it comes to Socrates' attitude towards the democracy, this doesn't sound too good. People who complain about "crowds" or "mobs" (another meaning of plêthos) usually would just as soon not have them in charge of things. So Socrates clearly has a problem with the democracy at Athens. Does this mean that he rejects it utterly, that he would just as soon have an aristocratic government, more like Sparta? It doesn't look like it. Socrates does have a problem with the democracy, but we learn exactly what that is. His problem doesn't extend to the legitimacy of the whole. This issue, again, is discussed separately elsewhere, but here we see the evidence in the text. "...really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public life if he is to survive..." The implied criticism here is that politicians were often prosecuted for "giving the Athenian people bad advice," or on trumped up charges that could bring the death penalty. This could be remedied, however, in the same way that is implied below.
, stratêgoí) who had failed to pick up the survivors of the naval battle." The "naval battle" was the battle of Arginusae in 406. This was the second to the last battle of the Peloponnesian War (the last, of course, was Aegospotami). The Athenians won, but it was a hard fought battle, with many ships sunk and men in the water, and a storm was blowing up as night fell. The stratêgoí had to decide whether to risk the fleet, upon which the fate of Athens rested, to try picking up the survivors and the dead, or to leave the men and bodies in the water and beach the ships to protect them. They decided to save the ships. When word of this got back to Athens, the Assembly was furious, not just because the survivors had been abandoned, as Socrates says, but because the dead had been abandoned also.
This may be a bad example for Socrates to bring up, for the Assembly was angry with the stratêgoí about the dead for much the same reason that the jury is suspicious about Socrates now. What the Greeks believed was that the dead needed to be properly buried to have a chance at the afterlife. A proper burial meant that the dead needed a coin in their mouth, to pay the Boatman, Charon, who ferried the dead across the River Styx [note]. Without the coin, the dead would just wander on the banks of the Styx for ever. What the Assembly suspected was that the stratêgoí didn't believe this and so didn't much care whether they recovered the dead or not. Mentioning this, Socrates may remind the jury that they suspected the stratêgoí of impiety, just like him.
The principle of the rule of law is now commonly misunderstood and misrepresented, usually by people who want to avoid it and to transform it into its opposite. The proper idea is to avoid the exercise of arbitrary authority, and to limit the extent of authority itself. If those in power find their power limited, and their jurisdiction restricted to only certain things, where they cannot just operate at their discretion, then this is the "rule of laws, not of men" -- where the law, not the will of the ruler, tells people what they can and cannot do.Although the abolition of the rule of law was characteristic of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, fascist and communist, a very similar desire for absolute and arbitrary power is a rot that has crept far into the democracies. Thus, when judges, police, and politicians say that the law and the Constitution mean whatever the Supreme Court says they mean, and that everyone else must simply obey, this is a fundamental violation of the rule of law, not an affirmation of it, because creatures of the government are then able to allow violations of the fundamental law, the Constitution, which is actually supposed to limit them, and to protect the citizen, with the citizen then left helpless against abuses that were supposed to be prohibited. As Thomas Jefferson already understood, this principle puts the foxes in charge of the hen house and means that any level of sophistry and dishonesty can be perpetrated, without practical remedy, to expand the power of government.
What is now commonly called the "rule of law" is therefore really its opposite, the principle of blind obedience to authority. No one, indeed, thought that the true principle would work all by itself. We must ask something rather like what Socrates asked Meletus: Who has knowledge of the law to enforce it in the first place? It will not enforce itself. Indeed. That was the genius of the idea of checks and balances, that different authorities would be jealous to limit each other's powers, and so would enforce the law and the Constitution against each other. Already in the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, who later began planning the expansion of federal power, nevertheless argued that the federal government would enforce the Constitution against the States, and the States against the federal government:
Power being almost always the rival of power, the general government will at all times stand ready to check the usurpations of the state governments, and these will have the same disposition towards the general government. The people, by throwing themselves into either scale, will infallibly make it preponderate. If their rights are invaded by either, they can make use of the other as the instrument of redress. [Federalist Paper No. 28, Alexander Hamilton]It never quite worked out like this; for the Constitution did not contain a mechanism for its own enforcement, the States never had a formal means of checking usurpations of the federal government, and the eventual claim by the Supreme Court of final appeal in all Constitutional cases simply delivered to the federal government the coveted discretion of being the judge of its own powers. There was no redress, for instance, against the Alien and Sedition Acts, passed under John Adams, which grossly and undeniably violated the First Amendment, except to vote the Federalists out of power and repeal them. Luckily, that is what happened, but it already revealed a grave flaw in the system, which was not remedied when Adams' own Federalist Chief Justice, John Marshall, claimed ultimate Constitutional authority for the Supreme Court. The abuses piled up slowly but steadily, until by now large parts of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights have been informally repealed by mere judicial fiat, with the very idea of civil rights, which are supposed to preserve us from the power of government, turned around to become just another means of expanding the power of government. Indeed, the rule of law has been fundamentally abolished when Congress has ceded to bureaucrats the power to write regulations, often retroactively, that have the force of law, "interpret" those themselves, and even judge defendants in their own "administrative law" courts.
Neither Jefferson nor Madison thought that Constitutional government would last forever. Certainly it hasn't. Nor is it clear when the lessons of the collapse of the United States Constitution can be applied to the reform of this, or any other, government. But Socrates, in a sense, already understands in the Apology what is needed. Like Socrates himself as a Prýtanis, someone must be in a position of authority with both the power and the interest to enforce the law against the abuses and usurpations of other authorities. We may say that Socrates was among the first to do that, and know what he was doing. Now, instead, we have forms of rule that George Washington himself called "real despotism." Citizens, indeed, have a final veto through the power of juries, but few people called to jury duty are aware of what they can do, and most jurors believe the lies that judges instruct them with.
, oligarkhía) was established, the Thirty summoned me to the Hall (
, Thólos, Rotunda)... to bring Leon from Salamis, that he might be executed." As is so dismally familiar from the 20th century, tyrants begin murdering their political opposition. "...many such orders to many people, in order to implicate as many as possible in their guilt." A policy very familiar from the 20th century.
When the government of East Germany disappeared, and the files of the Secret Police, the Stasi, were opened, it turned out that no less than 25% of the entire country had, at one time or another, voluntarily or involuntarily, been police informers. One woman, who had been jailed as a dissident, on the basis of an anonymous denunciation, had the chance, after the fall of the regime, to see in the Stasi files who had denounced her. It was her husband -- a great way to get a divorce with custody of the children, the house, no alimony, etc. I think a slightly less one-sided divorce ensued.
Involving others in the crimes of the regime is insurance against later retribution. The tyrants can always say, "Everyone was doing it!" Thus, East German border guards were prosecuted for shooting, under orders, people trying to flee to the West, but their superiors, who ordered the shootings, seem to have escaped largely unscathed.
So, when Socrates had the chance to get in good with the Spartan sympathizers, he was no more interested in their politics than he was in that of the democracy, but had to cross them nevertheless, when they tried to involve him in their doings. The evidence of the Apology, then, gives us a good picture of Socrates' political views. (1) He was not an overt enemy of the democracy, which we can infer from his friendship with Chairephon; (2) he was not an sympathizer of the Spartans, which we can infer from his non-cooperation with the Thirty Tyrants; but (3) he did criticize the democracy as not, in effect, observing the rule of law, which was a perfectly apt criticism, and the basis of all subsequent efforts to create "responsible" or democratic government.The actions of Athens, after all, discredited democracy for many centuries. Not only did Athens kill Socrates, but the democracy had carried on in such a high handed way with the city's own allies, that a large part of Athens' defeat in the Peloponnesian War was due to allies going over to Sparta. Unhappiness with Athens had begun even before the War. The Treasury of the League of Delos, into which contributions were originally paid to fight the Persians, and which had been kept at the temple of Apollo at Delos, was moved unilaterally by Pericles to Athens. Henceforth, the contributions were treated as "tribute" to Athens, and Pericles soon began spending them, not on the common defense, but on purely Athenian projects, like the temples on the Acropolis. The allies, now the subjects of Athens, of course, never liked this, but there wasn't much they could do about it. Once the War started, however, they could go over to Sparta. When Athens could recover such a defector, sometimes the men would be massacred and the women and children sold into slavery. After great defections to Sparta in 412, Athens very nearly did the same thing to the great island of Lesbos. Fortunately, Lesbos is rather far from Athens; and the day after the order was sent, the Assembly sobered up and thought better of it. A galley was then sent to countermand the order. It was at least 24 hours behind the original messenger but made up most of the time in the passage and arrived shortly after the unpleasant order was delivered. But it was really too late to save the popularity of Athens, even with other Greek democracies.
With Plato as an active critic of democracy, and the triumph of monarchy in the Hellenistic period, democracy seemed to have little future either in theory or in practice. Much later, a government of mixed and mutually limiting forms, a Republic, on analogy with the Roman Republic, came to be admired and recommended by political writers like Niccolo Machiavelli. In time, as limited and constitutional government grew organically in England and elsewhere, it looked like these governments worked for the very reasons that Republics had been recommended. Such a government was then deliberately formulated in the Constitution of the United States of America. Unfortunately, as the United States and other governments became more democratic over time, the idea grew that the democratic aspect was all that counted to have good government. Rousseau's suggestion that the true Will of the People might not even be known to the People later enabled some of the worst dictatorships of the 20th century to call themselves "democracies" (often redundantly as "peoples' democracies"). But it is not democracy, just the rule of law, that is the foundation of just government. Democratic institutions are just some among many that can be used in a system of checks and balances to limit power and preserve the rule of law. The situation, critique, and fate of Socrates are the most sobering reminders of that.
, ouk aêdés)." Socrates, of course, is fun. He is witty and amusing. This is good entertainment, especially for anyone who likes to see the pompous deflated, which is why Socrates attracts crowds and followers. The seriousness of his purpose, however, for anyone who did not already know him closely, is now revealed by a defense which is going to get him killed. Someone who was witty and amusing but had no other purpose in their practices could well scurry for cover, with profuse apologies (in the modern sense), once accused to real crime. But, instead, Socrates unfolds his mission from the god, which he takes seriously enough to die for.
, or ) and of religion. That, of course, is an aspect of the rule of law. The Bill of Rights, unless it is shamelessly distorted, or even ignored, both of which have happened, secures a sphere of private action free of government interference or retaliation.
, Xanthippe. We don't know how old she was, when Socrates married her, or anything. About all we hear is of her complaints. But, with a husband who didn't work, never brought home any money, and kept getting her pregnant in his sixties, I think it would be astonishing if she didn't have some complaints. We can imagine a woman who was uncomprehending and unworthy of her great husband, but it also seems that Socrates simply might not have included her in his "investigation." He was traditionalistic enough in court not to mention her in public -- women are not public business -- and so probably was traditionalistic enough not to include her in his professional life.
, hystéra, womb, uterus).
) or just (
) or (
) pious..." A nice list of the qualities upon which Socrates bases his actions. It is then a shame that we cannot ask him what these are in just the same way that he asks others. "...especially...as I am being prosecuted..for impiety..." He is not going to act in a way that he considers impious, when he is actually being accused of impiety -- note that this all still refers to his manner of defense. "...I would be teaching you not to believe that there are gods..." That is, if Socrates did what he considered impious, then he would have to act and believe as though there were no gods to punish him, and his actions would bespeak this atheism. "...for I do believe in them, as none of my accusers do..." Sometimes it is said that the whole Apology is an ironic put-on and that Socrates never does actually say he believes in the gods. But here we have the passage to refute that. Nomízô unequivocally means "I believe." The statement is not at all ambiguous or problematic. At this point, if Socrates does not actually believe in the gods, this is no longer simply irony: it would be an outright lie. I do not believe that Socrates packages lies as irony, and the only way for anyone to think so would be to assume that they have derived his true, esoteric teaching from some other source. Yet neither Xenophon, nor Plato, nor Aristotle allow that Socrates was actually an atheist, as charged by Meletus. A modern interpretation that he was really an atheist is relying on some other inspiration, like modern secular humanism, and not on Classical authors or the context of Socrates' own arguments. In the present statement, the curious thing is what comes next, "as none of my accusers do.." Since Socrates acts like his accusers know that they are prosecuting an innocent man, then they know that they are behaving unjustly and impiously. The only way that they would act that way is if they do not fear the punishment of the gods. But, no gods, no punishment. So they must not believe in the gods. This, again, passes over Socrates' own principle that no one knowingly does wrong. Socrates' accusers, one way or another, think that they are doing something just and pious.
The "Prytaneum," Prytaneîon, is where the Prytanes met and contained the hearth () of Athens, sacred to Hestia, just as the temple of the Vestal Virgins at Rome contained the hearth of Rome. The meals here were an interesting institution. At Sparta, all the male citizens were expected to eat at the common mess. At Athens, a representative group of citizens were invited by lot to something that was then rather like the family meal of the city. Others, like Olympic victors, might be honored with a permanent seat at the meals. Someone so honored became a
, parásitos ("one who eats at another's table, one who lives at another's expense") -- our word "parasite." So Socrates is proposing that he be made a "parasite" on the city.
, óstrakon, the piece of broken pottery that was used to record a vote, as even the ancient Egyptians had often used instead of expensive papyrus.
, eirôneuómenos)." While the Greek word can just mean "to dissemble," we can tell from this that the modern, subtle meaning of "irony" (
, eirôneía) in fact goes back to Socrates himself, who here uses the word about himself. Socrates' manner does make it possible that not everyone is going to pick up on what he really does believe and what he doesn't. Even modern commentators have not taken his "mission from the god" story in the Apology seriously. And if it really did figure in Socrates' defense, as Plato has it, then the evidence of Xenophon's Apology would seem to indicate that it just didn't register with many of those hearing it. But Socrates' relationship to the god has several dimensions, as we see in the question of an easy death, such as Socrates seeks, through the "sweet shafts," aganà bélea, of Apollo.
)...to discuss virtue ()... and those other things...you will believe me even less." As we saw in the earlier passages about the beneficial nature of Socrates' mission, here we find that examining goodness, justice, beauty, and the other things that Socrates asks about is "the greatest good." Just as an aside in this sentence, however, we find the most famous statement in the Apology: "...for the unexamined life is not worth living for a man (
, ho dè anexétastos bíos ou biôtòs anthrópô)." It should be noted that the Greek word , bíos, means a "way of life" rather than just biological life (as is inappropriately used in the modern word "biological" itself). Also, Socrates uses ánthropos, "man, human being" (Latin homo), rather than 
, anér, "man, male" (Latin vir) -- though, not being Plato, he probably is not thinking about an unexamined life being similarly not worth living for a woman. More importantly, what is translated here as "worth living" is just one word in Greek, 
, biôtós, "to be lived, worth living." A concise English equivalent might be "liveable": "The unexamined life is not liveable for (a) man."
This famous statement, curiously, is actually not explained in its context. Whether a life is "worth living" or "liveable" is a different issue from whether it is commanded by the god or even is the greatest good. After all, many people find the task of doing their duty or doing the good oppressive and unendurable. So why would quiet really be unliveable for Socrates? We have, perhaps, already seen the answer. The "greatest good" sounds rather like
, hê eiôthuîá moi mantikè hê toû daimoníou, "My accustomed mantic [what?] of the spiritual." Eiôthuîá is just a perfect feminine participle, from 
, éthô, "to be accustomed," where we get words like "ethos" and "ethics." "Mantic" is the Greek word, but "prophetic" or "oracular" are reasonable translations. But Grube did leave out toû daimoníou, which posed the same problems, lacking a noun, that we have been noticing all through the Apology. It is Socrates, not just his accusers, who leaves out the nouns. But in this case, with all the feminine adjectives, we may guess that one missing noun is actually "voice," , phôné. The word Socrates uses for "sign," 
, is neuter.
, tò toû theoû semeîon) has not opposed me..." Here we get a noun, in fact two, but one has been translated as an adjective. Socrates says "the sign (, sêmeîon) of the god (
, toû theoû)." "Divine" conceals the fact of Socrates' statement that the sign, indeed, is from the god.
, eiôthòs sêmeîon) did not oppose me if I was not about to do what was right (
, agathón, a good thing)." So Socrates knows that death is good, but he still doesn't know just what it is. That, and this inference itself, is something that he is going to have to supply for himself. This is one of the most enduring qualities of the Apology, that at this point Socrates is in no different a situation than we are. The possibilities that he lays out are still before us. In this respect, the human condition has not changed at all in two thousand years.
, mêdén) and have no perception of anything..." The word here is the same as in the Delphic Precept, 
, mêdèn ágan, "nothing too much," or "Nothing in Excess." This is what people normally fear the most about dying -- becoming nothing. Interestingly, Socrates does not advance the kind of argument that Parmenides, would have suggested, that the word "nothing" is self-contradictory and meaningless -- or a similar argument that something cannot become nothing, the view of the Bhagavad Gita. Instead, Socrates accepts the possibility of the nothingness, and deals with it.
, mégas basiléus), the King of Persia, would be happier with such dreamless sleep than with most of the other things that go on in life, waking or dreaming. This is a striking thought when compared to the theory of the Mân.d.ûkya Upanis.ad, where dreamless sleep is a higher consciousness, more real, and pure bliss (
, ânanda) compared to waking or dreaming realities. That is what we get from a Parmenidean-like move, where what seems at first to be Nothing actually turns out to be Being itself. Socrates, indeed, does not need to go into that kind of metaphysics to reflect that dreamless sleep is untroubled.
, hêmítheos, "half-god"), as well as meeting all the famous people of history, and those unjustly convicted like him.
In Homer, the dead are miserable, and even "without sense or feeling." In the Odyssey, Odysseus makes a blood sacrifice to call up the dead and give them enough rationality that he can talk to them. One of the spirits he talks to is that of Achilles, whom he assumes is as honored among the dead as he was among the living. But Achilles disabuses him: he would rather be farming a small plot among the living than be king of the dead. The irony of this is bitter indeed, since the entire Iliad was about how Achilles gained fame at the cost of his life. Now he says it wasn't worth it. Most other ancient peoples shared this idea, as we see in the Epic of Gilgamesh, or even in the Bible, where Sheol doesn't sound too promising. Only the Egyptians held out a hope that the afterlife could be as good or better than this one.Socrates says that the dead are "happier" (
, eudaimonésteroi) and "deathless" (
, athánatoi). In Homer, these are more like attributes of the gods, not of humans, whether dead or alive. Where does Socrates get this stuff? Well, there was a source. Perhaps from Egyptian influence, there was a movement in Greek religion that did promise a happier afterlife -- real life, not just the miserable shadow existence of Homer. These were the "mystery" cults or "mystery religions." Initiation into the "mysteries" conveyed immorality. Later, they would be proper independent religions -- Isis, Mithraism, and Christianity itself. In Socrates' day, the Greek cults were integrated into Greek religion. The most famous was in Athenian territory at the temple of Demeter at Eleusis: the Eleusian Mysteries. We do not know if Socrates was an initiate or not. If he was, he certainly would not say much about it. At Athens, riots sometimes started when theater goers thought that some play was divulging Secrets from the Mysteries. The Secrets, indeed, were kept so well, that no full account of them survives, not even from Christian writers who would have had no scruples about exposing pagan blasphemies (see discussion here).
So when Socrates says, "what we are told," he may actually have been told something of the sort. He certainly would not consider the Homeric possibility, since death then would be bad rather than good. And he did decide that death was good. But what about the gods? To be happy and deathless is about all that distinguished the Homeric gods from humans. But Socrates has already introduced something else. His gods are good and wise, unlike Homer's often mean and foolish deities. So now the dead may be happy and deathless, but they still can only have "human wisdom" and remain distinct from the gods themselves.
, prágmata] are not neglected by the gods." A final statement of Socrates' peculiar idea that the good cannot be harmed, though here with the implication that this is guaranteed by the gods, who watch over us -- as Socrates certainly felt watched over himself, by his "sign." This all by itself would imply that death is a good thing, since death happens to good people as well as bad.
However, the problem here may be the translation, not Socrates. What both Grube and the Loeb Classical Library edition translate as "trouble" or "troubles" is, pragmátôn, the genitive plural of
"The Impiety of Socrates," by M.F. Burnyeat, Ancient Philosophy, 17, No. 1, 1997
Euripides & the Gods, by Mary Lefkowitz, Oxford, 2016
The circuit of the games, which many athletes seem to have followed, was the An athlete (Commentary on the Apology of Socrates, Note 1;
The Olympic Games and the Other Panhellenic Games
The Olympic Games were the first and the most important of the four Panhellenic Games. The other three games were the Pythian, at Delphi, the Isthmian, near Corinth, and the Nemean, at Nemea near Argos (where Heracles killed the Nemean lion). These were also the "stephanitic" games, where competition was only for a crown (
, stéphos), not for some other kind of award, such as money or prizes. Like the Olympics, the Pythian Games were only held every four years, but the others were held every two years, meaning that victories there were less prestigious. But then the Nemean and Isthmian Games also provided valuable training in the years before the Olympic and Pythian Games. Where the Olympic Games were supposed to have begun in 776 BC, the Pythian began, or joined the cycle, in 586, the Isthmian in 580, and the Nemean in 573.
, periodos, the "period," which literally means the "way around." This is curious given the principal modern meaning of the word, which is to end a sentence -- or to express finality or completeness, as when Barack Obama (falsely) said, "You can keep your doctor -- period." However, the Greek word already had a range of meanings that often have modern forms, including "a cycle of time," a geographical "chart," a 
menstrual "period," the "orbit" of objects in the heavens, a "course" at a dinner, and a "well-rounded sentence." A "period" can still mean a sentence or passage of text or rhetoric, for which the "period" as punctuation -- not invented until the 9th century -- marks the culmination. As such, "period" means an ending, but in Greek that was 
, paûsis, which survives as "pause," meaning, not an end, but just a delay. Nevertheless, "pause" as an end is still found in "menopause," the end of menstruation, and "heliopause," where the solar wind becomes indistinguishable from the interestellar medium. Paûsis is thus the opposite of 
, arché, "beginning," as in "menarche," the beginning of menstruation.
, athlêtés) following the , who wins his event in all the Stephanic games, becomes a 
, periodoníkês, or "circuit victor." Curiously, this was a term not used before well into the Roman period. It is thus nice evidence about the popularity of the games in Roman times.
 |
| Olive, Olympic |
|---|
 |
| Laurel, Pythian |
|---|
, Greek for "laurel") as it happens was a nymph who attracted the attention of Apollo (perhaps as the result of some mischief by Eros). This was unwelcome attention, and Daphne fled, calling on her father Peneus, a river god, for help. He changed her into a tree (as we see in Gian Lorenzo Bernini's sculpture at left; click for larger image popup), whose leaves Apollo then adopted as his own symbol. )
Since Athena created the olive tree, its association with Zeus at Olympia seems less direct.
The Olympic, Pythian, and Nemean Games were held in the Summer, but the Isthmian were in the Spring.
| the Four Stephanitic Games, the 75th Olympiad | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 481 BC | Zero Year, -480 AD | |
| 1 | 480 BC | July-August | Olympic Games |
| 2 | 479 BC | July-August | Nemean Games |
| 478 BC | April-May | Isthmian Games | |
| 3 | July-August | Pythian Games | |
| 4 | 477 BC | July-August | Nemean Games |
| 476 BC | April-May | Isthmian Games | |
| 1 | July-August | Olympic Games | |
The table distinguishes between the Greek years of the Olympiad and the calendar years BC. The table also includes the year 0 of the Olympiad, which would be year 4 of the previous Olympiad, since this simplifies calculation.
 |
| Pine, Isthmian |
|---|
To determine the Olympiad, we need to convert the BC year into an AD year. This is done by subtracting 1 and making the number negative. Thus, 481 BC is -480 AD. Divide this by 4 and add 195: -480/4 = -120, + 195 = 75. So 481 is year 0 of the 75th Olympiad. With 2004, we already have the AD year, so we just divide by 4 and add 195, so it is year 0 of the 696th Olympiad. As noted in the text, this is the year in which the modern Olympics are now held. 2005 is the 1st year of the Olympiad, when the Games would originally have been held.
 |
| Parsley, Nemean |
|---|
A striking feature of the ancient Olympic Games is that deaths in the competition were not considered unfortunate. Indeed, since boxing matches did not end until one contestant yielded, a particularly stubborn competitor might fight to the death. Today, deaths in athletic contests are viewed with alarm, even horror, with suggestions that sports like boxing be abolished because of the potential for fatal injuries. The Greek attitude was very different. Athletic contests and games had a ritual origin. Games are mentioned for the funeral of Achilles in the Iliad. As such, there was always an overtone that games were substitutes for sacrifices, even human sacrifices. An athlete who then dies in the competition is himself, unintentionally, an offering to the god. He is fortunate, and the event renders the Games themselves particularly auspicious. This is an attitude whose character today is hard to recover. Of course, the Romans developed the practice into deliberate killing during their Games, with very little left of its religious origin. The Games became no more than a spectacle for public entertainment. But the auspicious nature of an accidental death in religious ritual was not confined to Greek religion. The Chinese had annual "dragon boat" races in honor of various river gods. As with the Greeks, it was not at all a bad sign if a participant died during the races.
The Underworld is supposed to have five rivers: the Acheron, "Woe," Cocytus, "Wailing," Lethe, "Forgetful," Phlegethon, "Fire," and Styx, "Hateful." The Styx is clearly at the border of the Underworld, 
Commentary on the Apology of Socrates, Note 2;
The Rivers of Hades
since the dead are ferried across it into Hades. Otherwise, there is not a very clear geography or function for all the rivers. Plato could use the Lethe in his own vision of the afterlife, where each person, before rebirth, would drink of the river and forget all they knew. This complemented his theory of knowledge as Recollection. In Dante's Divine Comedy we get an elaborate version of all this. The Acheron is at the top of Hell, outside the First Circle, surrounding all of it. The Styx occupies the Fifth Circle, surrounding the City of Dis, which is Nether Hell. The Phlegthon, which burns, is part of the Seventh Circle. The Cocytus forms a frozen lake, the Ninth Circle, surrounding Satan. The Lethe is not actually part of Hell but flows out of Purgatory, down through the Earth, and empties into the Cocytus. If souls were coming up out to Hell to be reborn, as in Plato's cosmology, this arrangement would make some sense. But in Dante's world, there is no regular traffic along this river -- souls neither leave Hell nor journey to it from Purtagory -- so the mythical quality of the river is rather wasted. I don't remember any reference, but I am under the impression that the waters of the Styx are supposed to be black. The Phlegethon, as fire, must be red. Some Mediaeval Christian texts do speak of the Acheron as white. Blue I have assigned to the Cocytus by default; and green seems appropriate for the Lethe because of a much later association with the drink absinthe.
)