The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [6]
There is a second challenge. Plato, Aristophanes and Xenophon – Socrates’ immediate or close contemporaries, men who are the fathers of Western philosophy, drama and chronicle – each deal with Socrates in a notably theatrical way.
Plato writes as a dramatist, a frustrated playwright. In his work the ‘character’ of Socrates is – as all great theatrical characters are – essentially charismatic, articulate and, to some extent, fabricated. The dramatic persona is both amplified and collapsed, it is extra-articulate and two-dimensional. Plato’s Socratic Dialogues – crafted between twenty and forty years after Socrates died – are brilliantly constructed, designed to engage. Plato teases us and plays with us (he throws all the tricks of the entertainer into his work), which of course leaves us with the possibility that it is all just a fantasy. Xenophon is not much more help. Although more down-to-earth and literal, his hard-fact histories are communicated via animated, reported dialogue. Aristophanes, who satirises Socrates mercilessly, is not a biographer – he is a dramatist with a biting wit, he plays to the gallery; he strives to make his audience howl with laughter. Spend long enough with the Socratic texts from the fifth and fourth centuries BC and you feel as though you have sat through a series of ‘Socrates Shows’ – the TV docudrama, the West End, Hollywood and Broadway versions of a man’s life.2
Yet these individuals, Socrates’ contemporary biographers,3 were not just showmen. They understood that drama can be an arterial route to truth. Socrates never wrote anything down, because, as he went about his philosophical business on the streets of fifth-century Athens, he believed in the honesty of joint-witnessing. For Plato to give Socrates a living voice in dialogue was as close as he could get to the original ‘Socratic’ experience.4 The detail in Plato’s work is conspicuous. We hear of the species of trees that shade Socrates, the birds he hears sing, the discomfort of the wooden benches he lies upon, the shoemakers he talks to, the hiccups he cures.
If this detail were utterly inappropriate, or fanciful, Plato would have been laughed out of the Academy he set up in around 387 BC, and out of history. Plato, along with Xenophon and Aristophanes, wrote for their fifth- and fourth-century BC peers – for men who were contemporaries of Socrates, many of whom were intimately involved in the philosopher’s life and eyewitnesses to the events of the age. Downright lies just wouldn’t have washed.5
Plato’s memory matters. As a species, we remember and often we think in pictures, not words. Our visual memories are more acute than our aural.6 In neuroscience these experiences are known as ‘episodic memories’ – vivid, patchy, but with a sensory quality that can be remarkably accurate. It is very likely that the physical setting that Plato provides for Socrates can be relied upon; the punchy, sensuous real-life scenarios he supplies are exactly the kinds of details that stick in the cortex. Add to that the fact that the Ancient Greeks invested in landscape in a way we can only begin to imagine: not only was visual stimulus, visual expression fundamental to society, but the world they saw was a place where spirits resided, a place full of signs and symbols. One begins to realise that the Platonic setting of ancient Athens was no mere convenient backdrop, but a four-dimensional landscape that Socrates, in real life as well as in Plato’s imagination, almost certainly, vigorously occupied.7
Plato was perhaps over-compensating; doubtless some of those ‘Socratic’ sentiments were in fact his own – and so he gave us a virtual world, stocked with the real things that he and Socrates saw around them, copper-plating his own credibility as the historical Socrates’ mouthpiece. But Plato’s reputation now has archaeology on its side.8 His philosophies