Chapter 15. Socrates: The New Aesop

In many ways, the Platonic Socrates fits into the pattern of Aesop, the mythical blame poet who is moral, called by god, yet rejected by a corrupt society.

Socrates, like Aesop, was seen as the best of men. Thus, in the ending of the Phaedo: “Such, Echecrates, was the end of our comrade, who was, we may fairly say, of all those whom we knew in our time, the best [aristou] and also the wisest and most upright man.” [1] The jailer in Phaedo refers to Socrates as “the noblest and gentlest and best [ariston] of all the men that have ever come here.” [2] In Xenophon’s Apology, Socrates reports that, after Chaerephon consulted Delphi concerning him, “in the presence of many people, Apollo answered that no man was more free than I, or more just, or more prudent … Apollo did not compare me to a god; he did, however, judge that I far excelled the rest of mankind.” [3]

Socrates receives a divine commission, a consecration, and thus is sacred. He was given his obligation to crossexamine and unmask the pseudo-wise “in obedience to God’s commands given in oracles and dreams and in every other way that any other divine dispensation has ever impressed a duty upon man.” [4] Socrates’ mission “is what my God commands.” [5] He claims that “God has specially appointed me to this city.” [6] Socrates describes himself as given (dedosthai) to Athens by god. [7] He is, in fact, the “gift of God,” theou dosin, to Athens (Apology 30d)—or, perhaps, god’s dose of medicine or dose of poison.

Like Aesop and Archilochus, Socrates had a close connection with Delphi, [8] which was, as it were, the instrument of his consecration. In the Apology, he calls on “the god at Delphi” to be witness on his behalf, an Aesopic theme. [9]

Like Aesop, Socrates uses an animal quasi-fable (the gadfly and the horse) in his last statement to his accusers that, among other things, defends his divine mission, and includes a prophecy of his death. It is also somewhat insulting to his listeners, and allegorizes his satirical role. Socrates describes the fable as sounding “rather comical [geloioteron]”; it is itself in the satirical tradition. Like many of the poets we have studied, Socrates was a soldier on occasion. This would not be especially worthy of note, except that Alcibiades, in the Symposium, used the military theme, Socrates’ heroism in battle, to heroize his master. [10] Socrates’ soldiering is part of his persona as best of men.

Socrates was also seen as the worst of men in some ways. He was poverty-stricken, [11] and most importantly, was accused of criminal impiety, for which crime he was executed. [12] Late evidence (Josephus) denies that he was a temple thief, [13] which may or may not imply that there was such a tradition extant.

Significantly, as in the case of Aesop, as in the case of Sappho and Hipponax and Tyrtaeus, we also have a strong tradition that Socrates was ugly. According to Xenophon, he had protruding eyes, which seemed to want to see round the back of his head, and a snub nose [14] with wide nostrils. [15] Alcibiades in the Platonic Symposium likens Socrates to a Silenus, particularly to the satyr Marsyas; these creatures were proverbially coarse featured, bestial, and ugly. [16] Xenophon’s Banquet (4.16–19) shows that satyrs were seen as ugly, and that Socrates resembled a satyr. Banquet chapter 5 is Socrates’ self-defense of his ugly features. Here again he argues that he is a silenus. The comparison with the sileni is apt, for these creatures were artistic, Muse-inspired (they were pipers), and mantic (they prophesied when captured). [17] The explicit identification of Socrates with Marsyas (“this latter day Marsyas,” Symposium 215e, τουτουῒ τοῦ Μαρσύου) is also richly suggestive, for in addition to being a surpassingly sweet piper (215b–d), Marsyas is a mythological poet whom Apollo kills. [18] Plato is once more mythologizing his master and his upcoming death. [19]

Plato emphasizes the magical nature of Marsyas’ playing; it “bewitches mankind” (ἐκήλει τοὺς ἀνθρώπους), and his tunes “have a magic power” (μόνα κατέχεσθαι ποιεῖ, 215c). The grotesquely ugly, animalistic satyr’s tunes are also holy: “Because they are divine they reveal those men who need the gods and initiation.” [20]

As we have seen, Socrates freely satirized his fellow citizens. The allegory of the horse and gadfly, a brilliantly satirical ainos, shows Socrates “rousing, persuading, reproving”; the drowsy horse is annoyed enough by this to slap the fly dead. Expressed more directly, the Athenians have found his “discussions and conversation” to be “too irksome and irritating” so they try to “get rid of them” (Apology 37c–d). [21] Socrates’ historian was even seen to be in the iambic tradition. Gorgias, reading Plato’s Gorgias, reportedly said, “How well Plato knows the art of producing iambs [iambizein],” and Gorgias even referred to him as a new Archilochus. [22]

As in the case of Aesop, Socrates’ greatest occasion of blame is his farewell speech before death. “When I leave this court I shall go away condemned by you to death, but they [his accusers] will go away convicted by truth herself of wickedness and injustice [mokhthērian kai adikian]” (Apology 39b). [23] This opposition of true and false wickedness is an important theme in the story of Aesop’s death.

Yet Socrates was often an urbane satirist. “All his life he spends … practicing irony and mocking people [eirōneuomenos de kai paizōn]” (Symposium 216dff.). [24] At one point, Socrates is about to tell a friend, “One must, o Hippothales, converse with a beloved friend in such a way as will bring down his pride and humble him [tapeinounta kai sustellonta], but not, as you, make him more blown up and conceited.” [25]

Puncturing blown-up pride obviously does not ingratiate a person with the conceited, who are by nature indisposed to receive criticism. Thus Socrates made enemies among some prominent citizens of Athens. In particular, Socrates criticized Anytus, his main accuser, a politician, for making his son a tanner. [26] Because of this, this politician brought suit against him. The Seventh Letter says Socrates was brought to trial by “some of those in authority” (dunasteuontes tines). [27] His blame is explicitly a cause for the charge being brought against him. [28]

After being condemned (unjustly) [29] by a public meeting, a trial, and a vote, [30] he was imprisoned. [31] All these are Aesopic themes, developed with consummate skill by Plato. Moses Finley writes of the different versions of Socrates’ trial, “These versions do not agree with each other, and in places they are quite contradictory. Here before our eyes is the mythmaking process at work.” [32]

After the condemnation, his acceptance of death seems voluntary, for he refuses to go into exile, [33] and takes his poison without any cowardice or delay. [34] Plato emphasizes this point: Socrates takes the cup of poison “cheerfully” (Phaedo 117b, mala hileōs) and drinks the poison “with no sign of distaste” (117c, eukolōs). This serenity is probably an idealization, to some extent. [35]

Oddly enough, or perhaps naturally enough, in the days before he drank the hemlock, Socrates occupied his time in versifying Aesop’s fables (Phaedo 60c–61b). [36] While one cannot disallow the possibility that this is historical, it is also possible that it is purely Platonic. In any case, Plato was enough of a conscious artist that he was using this detail for more than incidental meaning. Before Socrates mentions his versifying of Aesop, he discusses pain and pleasure and makes up a fable about them (they are like quarreling men joined at the head by god) that he describes as Aesopic—“I am sure that if Aesop had thought of it he would have made up a fable about them, something like this” (60c). [37] Socrates makes up Aesopic fables and (re-)writes Aesop’s fables (almost as Pierre Menard rewrites the Quixote in Borges’s story); he is being assimilated to Aesop by Plato, and surely Aesop’s death is being echoed here, in the Phaedo, the dialogue of Socrates’ death. The story of Aesop’s unjust execution was already a commonplace in Athens, since Herodotus and Aristophanes refer to it. [38] Diogenes Laertius even preserves a purported excerpt from one of these poems: Even if this is not authentic, it shows that Socrates is being assimilated to Aesop because of Aesop’s unjust death.

Versifying Aesop explicitly makes Socrates a poet, [39] though his philosophical pursuits and verbal artistry would have qualified him as a poet in a less technical sense; as we have seen, Alcibiades refers to him as a Marsyas, a maker of supernaturally beguiling music. He is specifically a blame poet, a satirist, and a moral critic, to a significant degree.

These Aesopic allusions are closely connected with the cult of Apollo, for Socrates is working on adapting the Aesopic fables and is composing a hymn to Apollo at the same time; and he is doing both of them in response to dreams encouraging him to “practice and cultivate the arts [mousikēn].” [40] Socrates makes poems by “versifying the tales of Aesop and the hymn to Apollo.” [41] Socrates works at these poems during a festival to Apollo that is delaying his death—in fact the hymn is written in honor of that festival and its god. [42] And perhaps we are to understand that Apollo has inspired the dreams—if so, Apollo himself is extending the link from Aesop to Socrates, in Plato’s elaborate system of correspondences.

Socrates’ daimon has engineered his death; [43] but, as Socrates makes clear, death is not a bad thing for a just man, [44] so the daimon is his patron, working for his good. This is a clear expression of the notion of divinity as beneficent executioner that lies behind so many of these lives of poets.

Like Aesop and Homer, Socrates prophesies serious consequences arising from his unjust execution: So there will be a moral, rhetorical plague (more, harsher critics) following Socrates’ death. This is to a certain extent a departure from the earlier prophecies. Aesop warns of plague and war, and Homer prophesies a shortage of poets for Cyme, a plague of poetic sterility, as it were, but Plato prophesies more and harsher satirist philosophers, an inversion of the Homeric plague. However, Socrates’ prophecy perhaps by implication predicts a dearth of moderate philosophers and thus continues the Homeric tradition. [46] Thus this theme shows us three outcomes: the cultic, the literary, and the literary/philosophical. The cultic reality continues in literary trappings; we have a literary cult hero and a literary cult myth. We have the echo of cultic honors to Socrates: not long after his death (“immediately,” euthus), the Athenians feel such remorse that they put Meletus to death and exile other prominent accusers. Then “they honoured [etimēsan] Socrates with a bronze statue [eikoni], the work of Lysippus, which they placed in the hall of procession.” [47]

The Xenophonic Apology has a different prophecy: Anytus’s son will not continue in the servile profession that his father forced him into, and “through want of a worthy adviser he will fall into some disgraceful propensity and will surely go far in the career of vice” (30). As it turns out, this prophecy is later fulfilled when the son becomes an alcoholic. [48] Anytus himself suffers exile, misery, and finally stoning. [49]

There is another curious coincidence in Socrates’ biographical tradition. According to Apollodorus, Socrates was born on the sixth day of the month Thargelion, [50] the day on which the pharmakos ritual was carried out, the first of two days of the Thargelia. If this were factual, it would be an interesting coincidence; but it is more likely that it is once again an example of mythical elaboration. According to Greek tradition, this was also the day on which Troy fell; the day of the Greek victories at Marathon and Plataea; and the date of the victory of Alexander over Darius. “Evidently,” writes Bremmer, “the expulsion of evil was felt so intensely that this seemed to be the appropriate day to celebrate these victories.” [51] It also seemed right, evidently, that Socrates should be born on such a mythically charged ritual day.

Poison is a major theme in the Phaedo. [52] To Socrates, poison, the means of death, is really the means of achieving life, for in the Platonic scheme of things, this body is a tomb [53] or a prison. [54] Separating the soul from the body is called “catharsis—purification.” [55] And “true philosophers make dying their profession.” [56] Socrates says, in his famous last words: “Crito, we ought to offer a cock to Asclepius. See to it and don’t forget.” [57] Though this is a muchdisputed problem, one certainty is that Asclepius was a god of healing. A reasonable interpretation of these last words is that Socrates is being healed by the poison that is bringing about his death. The poison is his medicine, just as he is the dose of healing poison administered to Athens.

Thus, Socrates, as portrayed by his disciples, is the best of men, and sacred—he is commissioned by god to deliver his message—he was closely connected with Apollo and Delphi. He was also the worst—poor, accused of criminal impiety, and remarkably ugly. He was a blame “poet,” occasionally using the animal fable to attack the Athenians, and his fellow citizens found his teachings intolerable. He was condemned in a trial, imprisoned, and sentenced to death—in actuality, a practical sentence of exile. But he chose obedient death over exile. He felt that the situation of his trial was directed by god—so his patron deity engineered his death—and he calls upon Apollo as his witness during his last speech. His condemnation was followed by disastrous consequences for Athens, but it was also followed by the influence of his teachings in the hands of such disciples as Plato.

It is entirely possible, as many scholars have argued, that Plato especially shaped Socrates’ vita into the form of such a myth. Montuori argues that the Apology is not a faithful account of Socrates’ defense at his trial, or even a mixture of truth and fiction; it is “above all an apologia for Plato and of Socrates’ disciples.” To portray Socrates’ relentless cross-examining as beneficial, not corrupting, Plato must invent the oracle to Chaerephon, which transforms Socrates into something of a prophet, an Apolline gift to Athens. [58] Though Montuori is generally correct on Plato’s skillful mythologizing, the oracle to Chaerophon is in Xenophon (Apology 14), so cannot have been a purely Platonic invention.

In the generation after Socrates’ death, a literature of polemic grew up attacking and defending Socrates—Polycrates, Plato, Xenophon, and Isocrates began “a vast literary movement by which the followers of Socrates” rehabilitated the relationship of the philosopher and Alcibiades. This “vast literary movement” eventually was reduced to one powerful myth, the Platonic Socrates, die Sokratesdichtung, as Olof Gigon expresses it. [59] Gigon is the radical skeptic, for whom the Platonic life of Socrates is a poem that has nothing to do with history. [60] It is possible that the Socratic myth is dependent for its genesis on an anti-myth, of which we have especially the Clouds remaining.

Many of the features highlighted above are paralleled in the Aesop biographical traditions, and these similarities are cemented by the Platonic Socrates versifying Aesop in his last days, because of a divine directive, during a festival of Apollo. Aesop is the mythological poet-pharmakos, and Socrates is the new Aesop. [61] Plato would assimilate Socrates to Aesop chiefly because of the blatant injustice of what amounted to a political murder in both cases. And in assimilating Socrates to Aesop, he also calls on archaic resonances of the pharmakos, who was selected for execution “by a public vote”— psēphidi … boulēi dēmosiēi, to deepen his narrative. In the cases of Aesop, Archilochus, and Socrates, the community uses the selection process to unwittingly select itself as polluted, and doomed to a certain extent. As the group of citizens isolates the poet as a sinner, the lone pseudocriminal, both holy and animalistic filth, is able to invert and reciprocally broadcast the judgment through his expulsion or execution. The poet is, as it were, the unwanted moral mirror of the community, and the trial is the moment of mirroring, of ambiguous moral reciprocity.

That these suggestions of Aesop and pharmakos are a conscious strategy on Plato’s part is suggested by the fact that in the Apology, he also skillfully compared Socrates to other mythical figures who were victims of injustice, as Socrates wishes to speak to Palamedes and Ajax in the underworld. “It would be a specially interesting experience for me to join them there, to meet Palamedes and Ajax, the son of Telamon, and any other heroes of the old days who met their death through an unfair trial [krisin adikon], and to compare my fortunes with theirs—it would be rather amusing, I think.” [62] Palamedes was killed by stoning on a false accusation of treason because of false evidence planted by Odysseus and Diomedes in his tent. As a result of this death, Palamedes’ father, Nauplius, caused a great number of the Greek ships to be shipwrecked. Here we have Plato skillfully assimilating Socrates to a mythological model who was stoned after a krisin adikon based on falsely planted evidence, and whose death caused a disaster to the perpetrators. [63]

Yet many other aspects of Aesop would be suggestive—his ugliness (which certainly makes him a more sympathetic figure), the punishment that descends upon the city that has killed him, his satirical bent. Most important would be the suggestion of the poet’s ambiguity—though he is ugly and hated by the community for his just satire, which is his real “crime,” he is also the best, sent by the gods, protected by the gods, and will always be famous. One wonders how far Plato took the comparison; perhaps he saw Aesop’s death as part of a divine mechanism, and wanted to show the same mechanism operative in Socrates’ death. It was an attempt on his part to construct a theodicy for what was still a traumatic, chaotic event; to create meaning from his master’s death. Socrates’ “voice” does not dissuade him from speaking at his trial, or keep him from escaping execution by leaving Athens; the philosopher learns to die; his death is prepared by the god. [64]

Thus the poet is ambiguous, enigmatic. To Vernant, Oedipus is “a man in the form of a riddle.” [65] Aesop is even referred to as a riddle, ainigma (G 98). Yet Aesop is also referred to as a sign, sēmeion (G 87), [66] and if he is a teras, “monster,” teras can also mean “sign.” The ambiguity of the poet, so well captured in the myth of his trial, points to meaning. The trial of the poet, especially as expressed in Plato’s Apology, is one of the most meaningful myths in ancient Greece.