Dover says
in the ‘Introduction’ to his edition of The
Clouds: ‘Nothing could be more alien from the Socrates of Plato and
Xenophon than to teach young men how to achieve worldly success by exploitation
of the arts to which the world yields. He professes total unfamiliarity with
the lawcourts (Pl. Ap. 17 d) and the
machinery of public life (ibid. 32 a b, Grg.
473 e), and his hostility to rhetoric is outspoken (Grg. passim, cf. X. M. i. 2. 60, 6. 3), he likens such a
procedure to prostitution (ibid. 6.13). (Dover xlv.)
Dover’s
mistaken view that Aristophanes’ Socrates taught forensic rhetoric for payment
does not invalidate his attempt to use Plato and Xenophon in developing a
picture of Socrates that can be meaningfully contrasted with the Socrates in The Clouds. In Plato’s Apology 17d-18a Socrates says: ‘I am
more than seventy years of age, and appearing now for the first time before a
court of law, I am quite a stranger to the language of the place; and therefore
I would have you regard me as if I were really a stranger, whom you would
excuse if he spoke in his native tongue, and after the fashion of his country: –
Am I making an unfair request of you? Never mind the manner, which may or may
not be good; but think only of the
truth of my word, and give heed to that: let the speaker speak truly and the
judge decide justly.’ This is Jowett’s translation, and Dover’s claim that
Socrates ‘professes total unfamiliarity with the lawcourts’ is in full accord
with it.
Jowett in
his translation failed to express the moral certainty with which Socrates determines
what justice requires from a judge and what it requires from an orator; he appears
to have given a lot of thought to law-courts. Jowett’s ‘Am I making an unfair
request of you?’ stands for Socrates’ kai
dȇ kai nun touto humȏn deomai dikaion ‘and now I ask from you to adhere to this
principle of justice’: ‘consider and examine only this (auto de touto skopein) and only to this pay your attention (kai toutȏi noun prosechein), whether what
I say is just or no (ei dikaia legȏ ȇ mȇ);
for this is the virtue of a judge (dikastou
men gar hautȇ aretȇ), that of an orator is telling the truth (rȇtoros de t’alȇthȇ legein, 18a3-6).
How
seriously Socrates meant his request becomes clear when the court finds him
guilty. Socrates’ accuser proposed death as the penalty: ‘And what shall I
propose on my part, O men of Athens? Clearly that which is my due. And what is
my due? What ought I to have done to me, or to pay – a man who has never had
the wit to keep quiet during his whole life; but has been careless of what the
many care for – wealth, and family interests, and military offices, and
speaking in the assembly, and magistracies, and plots, and parties. Reflecting
that I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live, I did not go
where I could do no good to you or to myself; but where I could do privately
the greatest good (as I affirm it to be) to everyone of you, thither I went,
and sought to persuade every man among you that he must look to himself, and
seek virtue and wisdom before he looks to his private interests, and look to
the state before he looks to the interests of the state; and that this should
be the order which he observes in all his actions. What shall be done to such
an one? Doubtless some good thing, O men of Athens, if he has his reward; and
the good should be of a kind suitable to him. What would be a reward suitable
to a poor man who is your benefactor, and who desires leisure that he may
instruct you? There can be no reward so fitting as maintenance in the Prytaneum
[Wikipedia: ‘The Prytaneum was regarded as the
religious and political center of the community and was thus the nucleus of all
government, and the official "home" of the whole people.’], O men of
Athens, a reward which he deserves far more
than the citizen who won the prize at Olympia in the horse or chariot race,
whether the chariots were drawn by two horses or many. For I am in want, and he
has enough; and he only gives you the appearance of happiness, and I give you
the reality. And if I am to estimate the penalty fairly, I should say that
maintenance in the Prytaneum is the just return.’ (36b3-37a1, tr. Jowett)
Throughout
his whole defence Socrates refrained from referring to the members of the jury as
‘judges’; he reserved this title only for those who voted ‘not guilty’: ‘O my
judges (ȏ andres dikastai) – for you
I may truly call judges (humas gar
dikastas kalȏn orthȏs an kaloiȇn).’ (40a2-3, tr. Jowett)
In The Clouds Socrates snatched away the
cloak from the wrestling-school with his performance in geometry; Strepsiades had
to take off his cloak and enter Socrates’ House-of-thinking naked. In Plato’s Theaetetus, staged in a gymnasium at
which Socrates stops on his way to the office of the King Archon to face the
charges raised against him by Meletus, Socrates meets Theodorus, an expert in
geometry, and ‘strips him naked’. Theodorus complains: ‘It isn’t easy to avoid
saying something when one’s sitting with you, Socrates. I was talking nonsense
just now, when I claimed that you’d let me keep my clothes on and not make me
take them off … you seem to me to act a part more like that of Antaeus [a
famous robber]: you don’t let go of anyone who comes up to you until you’ve
forced him to take his clothes off and wrestle with you in an argument.’
(169a-b, tr. McDowell)
In the light
of Aristophanes’ Clouds and Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates at his trial
stripped the jury naked. At the end of The
Clouds Aristophanes shows that stripping was what hurt Strepsiades most;
setting Socrates’ House-of-thinking on fire, he proclaimed himself to be the
one ‘whose cloak you took away’. (See my 4th entry on ‘Socrates in
Aristophanes, Plato, and Xenophon’, posted on the 3rd of June.)
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