The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [215]
15 Plato, Alcibiades, 1, 130e.
16 Plato, Sophist, 227d.
17 Plato, Phaedo, 69b–c. Trans. H. N. Fowler (1914) [LCL].
18 We still have their titles: On the Virtue of Socrates; Socrates’ Pronouncements; Of Socrates’ Death – to name but a few.
19 To understand Socrates’ place in Islam, works by Ilai Alon are hugely helpful, e.g., Socrates Arabus: Life and Teachings (Jerusalem, 1995).
20 ‘Know yourself.’ ‘What counts most is not to live, but to live right.’ A summary of Socrates’ aims is provided eloquently by Louis E. Navia: ‘Self-knowledge, the key that unlocks the door to virtue, is accessible only within a person’s own soul. The path that leads to it is narrow, rugged and steep. This is why most people do not choose to strive in so uninviting a direction. Their intellectual inertia and spiritual barrenness prevent them from doing so. Here is a source of their guilt, that is, in the abandonment of what Socrates viewed as the only solution to the riddle of human existence. This abandonment becomes even more reprehensible when it involves the rejection of the opportunity furnished by the presence of someone like Socrates.’ Navia (2007), 234.
21 Plato himself debates the conflict between legalistic and true justice.
22 Plato, Apology, 34d.
23 Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.1.16.
THE DRAMATIC STORY OF SOCRATES
1 The fact that Socrates has, as advocates, the mischievous, assiduous trio of Plato, Aristophanes and Xenophon no doubt has resulted in an inflation of the Socratic tradition – but archaeology backs up the importance of the key moments of his life-story, and goes partway to explain Socrates’ preoccupations with particular issues of the challenging world in which he lived.
2 Theatre gives us a version of the external world and the internal worlds of imagination, of thought, of emotion that is comprehensible. More than that, that is believable. And more than that, that moves us in some way. The challenge of a playwright is to transfer ideas, emotions to an audience and to create a make-believe experience that we also comprehend as the real world. See Chapter 31, ‘Brickbats and bouquets’.
3 ‘Biography’ as we understand it today does not exist in this period – the works dealing with Socrates are therefore ‘ancient-style’ biographies.
4 Writers are often tempted to understand Socrates’ trial and death in hard political terms. It is indeed exciting to try to unpick our extant textual sources and work out who was in whose faction, what political undercurrents were in play. I have tried to take Socrates’ story one stage further back. Political squabbles are emotional – and the one thing that Plato is certainly trying to do is to convey the emotional complexity of how a city such as Athens dealt with a man like Socrates.
5 But throughout this book where a particular line of Plato is ambiguous, tricky or contested, or where later interpolation is an issue, I have either omitted it or flagged up the difficulty in hand. Where ideas are clearly Plato’s and not Socrates’ own, I have made note – but I have not censored. Following scholarly convention, the Socrates in this book is the character depicted in Plato’s ‘early’ or ‘sceptical’ dialogues (Apology, Charmides, Crito, Euthydemus, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Hippias Major, Ion, Laches, Lysis, Menexenus, Meno, Protagoras and Republic 1, with the exception of Theaetetus).
6 Many thanks to Professor Patrick Haggard, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, for his confirmation of my initial enquiry and for his help with these points.
7 For an overview, see the websites of the Greek Archaeological Service. Specific sites dealing with places and events relevant to Socrates’ life are marked in the map section of this book.
8 And similar details