The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [233]
13 Plato, Phaedrus, 275d. Trans. B. Jowett [adapt.].
14 When Pindar used the word he was probably referring to poets/educators.
15 Pindar, Isthmian, 5.28. Protagoras was one early visitor to Athens.
16 The Agora had, since Solon’s day, been a place where populist points were made. For years – until they were stolen away by Xerxes’ Persian soldiers – there stood here two bronze statues of Athens’ ‘tyrant-slayers’. These fine figures of men, copied many times over by Hellenistic and Roman artists (and then spending the whole of antiquity being looted and reclaimed, finally to be dredged up from the sea-bed off the coast of southern Italy in the 1960s and transferred to Naples’ Archaeological Museum), commemorated the termination of tyrannical rule in Athens a generation or so before Socrates was born.
17 Natural science, social science, political theory, the art of rhetoric, mathematics, ethics, logic – all these were rolled out into the public spaces of Athena’s city. Although more concerned with the nature of virtue than the nature of the universe, Socrates himself stated that the world was round. Plato, Phaedo, 108–9.
18 Plato, Apology, 17d; Republic, 1.350d.
19 See also Plato, Protagoras, 334c–d; Gorgias, 449b, 461e-2a.
20 Plato, Republic, 6.496a. Trans. B. Jowett (1953).
21 We associate fine-speaking with Athens, but in fact we are informed the art of rhetoric was a foreign import. Aristotle tells us that Corax and Tisias developed the form when the tyrants were banished from Sicily (cf. Rhodes [2005], 75–6: ‘by the end of the 470s the tyrants were on their way out’). For sophists travelling to earn money, see Plato, Greater Hippias, 282d.
22 It was said Gorgias had won plaudits at the Olympic Games, where his audience was closer to 20,000. He also spoke to the Athenian Council, or Assembly, in 427 BC.
23 Gorgias, Helen, 14. Trans. Sprague (2001).
24 This was also devised to prevent Greek-upon-Greek recriminations as a result of the Peloponnesian Wars.
25 Plato, Phaedrus, 279b–c.
26 Plato, Republic, 4.422a. Trans. B. Jowett (1953).
27 Plato, Republic, 7.536e. Trans. B. Jowett.
28 Plato, Republic, 8.557b–d. Trans. B. Jowett.
29 Plato, Symposium, 221e–2a. Trans. H. N. Fowler (1914) [LCL].
30 Plato, Apology, 33a–b. Trans. H. N. Fowler (1914) [LCL].
31 Plato, Hippias Minor, 376c. Trans. W. R. M. Lamb (1926) [LCL].
32 Plato, Euthyphro, 9c. Trans. Brickhouse and Smith (2002).
33 Plato, Euthyphro, 7d. Trans. Brickhouse and Smith.
34 Plato, Gorgias, 465a and following.
35 E.g., Plato, Republic, 337a. The basic meaning of eironeia (straightforward lying) is first found in the plays of Aristophanes (e.g., Wasps, 169–74, Birds, 1208–11, and Clouds, 444–51), but it is Socrates who imbues the word with all its subtleties and controversies. Cicero, writing in the first century BC, says that in his opinion Socrates surpassed all in his use of irony (Cicero, De Oratore, 2.67.270). Cf. Colebrook (2004), 22–64; Lear (2006), 442–62; Emlyn-Jones (2007), 151. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 4.7.3. See also Plato, Symposium, 216e: ‘ALCIBIADES: He spends his whole life in chaffing and making game of his fellow men. Whether anyone else has caught him in a serious moment and opened him, and seen the images inside, I know not; but I saw them one day, and thought them so divine and golden, so perfectly fair and wondrous, that I simply had to do as Socrates bade me.’ Trans. W. R. M. Lamb (1925) [LCL].
36 Plato, Republic, 337a. Trans. P. Shorey (1930) [LCL].
37 Scholars still fervently debate in what way Socrates was ironic, but all agree that irony was a Socratic hallmark. For some, then and now, Socratic irony is also the hallmark of the sophisticated mindset of a true civilisation.
38 Saxonhouse (2006), passim, expounds the view that Socrates was in fact executed because he was ‘shameless’, i.e. he felt completely unrestrained by a general ‘tenor’ of accepted