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Socrates: Master and Martyr, Maverick and

Mystery

Victor Castellani

To cite this article: Victor Castellani (2014) Socrates: Master and Martyr, Maverick and Mystery,
The European Legacy, 19:3, 359-367, DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2014.898939

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 The European Legacy, 2014
Vol. 19, No. 3, 359–367, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2014.898939
Review
Socrates: Master and Martyr, Maverick and Mystery
The Cambridge Companion to Socrates.
Edited by Donald R. Morrison (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), xviii +
413 pp. £19.99/$29.99 paper.
Downloaded by [Gothenburg University Library] at 14:40 13 October 2017
VICTOR CASTELLANI
A heroic, seminal “lover of wisdom” who
denied that he possessed the divine knowl-
edge required for perfect virtue, Socrates of
Athens needs no basic introduction and has
needed none for centuries in the West or
among the educated in Western style. He has
often and long been perceived and admired as
a martyr who preferred ethical and intellectual
integrity such as he understood it, which pre-
scribed a lethal dose of poison hemlock over
a pleasant life among rich and powerful
friends, at Athens or in comfortable exile. On
the other hand, each new generation will
approach—sometimes confront—Socrates
anew.
From the very last page of the fifteenth
and final article of this well assembled collec-
tion, “Socrates in Later Greek Philosophy,” I
quote the distinguished ancient intellectual
historian A. A. Long. After demonstrating
how radically different versions of “Socrates”
and “Socratic thought” emerged over the
centuries after the man’s death in 399 BCE,
he summarizes: “generations would repeat-
edly interpret Socrates in their own image,
elide what did not suit them, or even turn
him into their own antithesis, as the Epicure-
ans did. Can we do better? Probably not, and
that is just as well. For, whatever we make of
Socrates, these words from [first-century CE
freedman-philosopher] Epictetus ring true:
‘Now that Socrates is dead, the memory of
Dept. of Languages and Literature, University of Denver 2040 S. Race St., Denver, CO 80208-2662 USA. Email:
vcastell@du.edu
© 2014 International Society for the Study of European Ideas
what he did or said when alive is no less ben-
eficial to people, or rather it is even more so.’
What matters about Socrates is that we never
tire of him or stop wanting to talk to him and
get mad with him” (378).
Anyone who knows the least about this
provocative figure is likely aware that he is
the protagonist of many dialogues, direct and
reported by one of the young Athenians who
associated with him, though he was not an
early or close disciple: Plato (d. 348/7 BCE),
perhaps the greatest prose writer of all classical
antiquity. However, we have other evidence
about the master from contemporaries, some
of whom were Plato’s elders. It begins with a
tendentious caricature in Aristophanes’ com-
edy Clouds (423 BCE, revised a few years
later). The playwright gives us a picture,
however distorted, of an already famous mav-
erick thinker and “gadfly” (as he calls himself
in Plato’s Apology), at a point in his life when
the other principal witnesses to it were only
little boys. Since Socrates himself left no writ-
ings, a “Socratic Question/Problem” has
complicated our effort to understand what he
himself did, thought, and stood for—and
against.
The first three articles help us around this
apparent obstacle. In the very first sentence of
“The Life and Death of the Socratic Prob-
lem,” Louis-André Dorion of the University
of Montréal refers to its “desperately unsolv-
able nature” (1). He traces the history of the
quandary since early in the nineteenth cen-
tury when Friedrich Schleiermacher raised it.
Some historians of thought have regarded
Plato’s dialogues, at least the supposedly ear-
lier ones written close to the master’s death
(when readers would have been able to reject
any misrepresentation by Plato), as a sort of
 360 REVIEW
accurate dramatized biography. Many have
accordingly rejected Plato’s contemporary
Xenophon as a clueless lowbrow bystander
who missed almost the entire point of the
“real” Socrates, cutting him down to his own
feeble intellectual level. Without taking Xen-
ophon’s part, Dorion argues that “everything
seems to indicate that neither Xenophon nor
Plato set out with the intention of faithfully
reporting Socrates’ ideas. Xenophon’s and
Plato’s Socratic writings belong to a literary
genre—that of the logos sokratikos, which Aris-
totle explicitly acknowledged and which
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authorizes by its very nature a certain degree
of fiction and a great freedom of invention as
far as the setting and the content are con-
cerned” (7); for “it is likely that Socrates rap-
idly became a sort of literary character
(dramatis persona) endowed with his own exis-
tence and placed at the center of the polemics
and rivalries that pitted one Socratic against
another. Each author of the logoi sokratikoi in
this way created ‘his own’ Socrates, whom he
contrasted with the competing ‘Socrates’ por-
trayed by the other Socratics. Each laid claim
to, and quarreled over, the heritage of their
bygone master, as well as faithfulness to his
memory and to his teachings” (9). Moreover,
sporadic agreement between those two prin-
cipal dialogists, Plato and Xenophon, is slight,
and where they do agree the latter may have
gotten the matter from the former; moreover,
Aristotle, despite his and Plato’s falling out,
seems to use only Plato as the source for his
information on Socrates (16). Socrates, there-
fore, must be best categorized as a stimulant
rather than a dogmatist—which, for good or
ill, is what each of the several feuding Socra-
tics increasingly did become.
“The Students of Socrates” by Bamberg
Professor Emeritus Klaus Döring may be a bit
of a misnomer. The man himself claimed to
teach nothing and thus to have no students,
only friends who listened to and sometimes
joined in his probing conversations. Who
even perhaps, like Alcibiades in some of Pla-
to’s dialogues, rooted for Socrates in his
debates with the reputed wise who crossed
their path. On the other hand, each of the
several persons who also wrote about him,
often though not always in dialogue or anec-
dote form, claimed to be his uniquely faithful
disciple, ostensibly deriving his method and/
or doctrine from Socrates. Döring treats sev-
eral of them, about whom we have varying
amounts of information, sometimes only evi-
dence that is itself indirect and dubious. The
doyen of these was Antisthenes, a much older
man, whom Plato opposed with regard to
epistemology and the sufficiency of available
“knowledge.” The last pages of this chapter
consider these differences (42–45), but also
identify a distinctiveness of attitude that
makes us regret the loss of Antisthenes’ writ-
ings. As well we might do, since nothing of
the latter’s work survives except through testi-
monia. The younger Aeschines, in contrast,
wrote seven dialogues about which we know
something—only their titles in five instances,
rather more in two. Though we lack
extended surviving quotations, those two
clearly dealt with “erotics” and the impor-
tance of love as in Plato’s Symposium. Phaedo
of Elis, the young man after whom Plato’s
famous death-of-Socrates dialogue is named,
wrote at least two himself, while a certain
Euclides of Megara left six. Aristippus of Cy-
rene, founder of the hedonist “Cyrenaic”
movement, seems to have written whatever
he did in other forms, but traced his thinking
to Socrates too. Döring’s chief contention,
however, is that “there is strong reason to
think that no other Socratic brought the
potential contained in the Socratic dialogue
to such fruition and full development as Plato
did, with respect to both literary form and
philosophical breadth and depth” (26).
Indeed, except for the immediately following
article, the subsequent contributions to the
Cambridge Companion equate Plato’s “Socra-
tes” with Socrates, albeit ever with the pre-
caution that Middle and Late dialogues,
however exactly they are to be ordered and
periodized, reflect Plato’s thinking as it
evolved to a point where it no longer
embodies that of Socrates, even when “Socra-
tes” is an interlocutor.
American scholar David K. O’Connor of
Notre Dame University contributed the third
article, “Xenophon and the Enviable Life of
Socrates.” Xenophon’s chief fault is that he
was not Plato. He was, however, hardly so
intellectually weak as is often supposed.
Indeed as a stylist of Attic prose he ranks
high; a non-Socratic historical work of his
would be a chief model for Julius Caesar’s
masterful Commentarii on the war in Gaul. “It
is useful to look at Xenophon to compare

him to Plato,” O’Connor writes, “but this
perspective can diminish or distort Xeno-
phon’s own achievement. Xenophon is more
interested in what makes politics and political
leaders work, and in improving politics in
ways that politicians can actually find credi-
ble” (49). Unlike Plato he wished to insulate
Socrates from politically catastrophic young
aristocrats like Critias and especially Alcibi-
ades who were invidiously associated with
him. Xenophon himself was less under the
sage’s spell. Two of his anecdotes “show
Xenophon was an affectionate admirer of
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Socrates but a less docile disciple than Eut-
hydemus. He maintained a certain distance
from Socrates despite his affection and admi-
ration” (71). Nevertheless, just as he found
Cyrus the Great to be an ideal ruler, he
judged Socrates to be an ideal private citizen.
Both the Persian King and the Athenian sage
established their eminence by benefaction and
patronage, according to Xenophon, by giving
more than they received from those whom
the one governed well as king, and whom the
other guided by example and exhortation to
the good life (50–60). Xenophon understands
this good life, in a secular, non-”philosophi-
cal” way. It includes mastery of self and oth-
ers, self-sufficiency and consequent freedom.
He believes further that pious Socrates, like
Xenophon himself, had a “good daimōn” who
blessed him with happiness by directing
sometimes quite mundane activity.1 One sus-
pects, I might add, that the Socrates who
“invented new divine entities that the nation
does not recognize” (as the capital indictment
against him alleged) was more superstitious in
an idiosyncratic way than Plato liked or indi-
cated.
The next trio of articles, Chapters 4–6,
place Socrates in the context of what has been
called the Greek Intellectual Revolution of
the fifth century BCE. In “Socrates in Aristo-
phanes’ Clouds,” Brown University’s eminent
scholar of ancient comedy David Konstan
makes two very important points. First,
“comedy has its own licenses” (80), far
greater than those likely allowed to the logos
sokratikos, for the specific purposes of comedy—to
raise laughs by surprise, by incongruity, and
especially by exaggeration. Secondly, in what
intellectual historian Eric Havelock deemed a
generic parody of undifferentiated “science,”
“philosophy,” and “rhetoric” the comic poet
REVIEW 361
concocts an intellectual composite, making
fun of all unconventional and suspect ‘think-
ers outside the box’ (sc. of conventional reli-
gion and morality). Socrates’ religious
unorthodoxy and his interrogation of the
common understanding of morals and values,
above all his undeniable energy and cleverness
in negative elenchus,2 discrediting respectable
persons and positions, made him an easy,
available target. Moreover, his was a familiar
ugly face to the Athenian audience, a joy for
the theatrical mask-maker. He may also have
had a characteristic voice or delivery—not a
charming speech impediment like that of Alc-
ibiades, but one that could he amusingly imi-
tated. “Socrates” is, in fact, as pious in the
comedy as ever in Plato’s pretrial-trial-impris-
onment-and-death tetralogy; on the other
hand, rejecting the conventional mythology
as he probably did (see below on Chapter 6)
and heeding his personal daimonion, he could
well be parodied as a worshipper of Clouds
and Vortex who figuratively ‘looked down
on’ conventionally religious common people
—as in a hilarious play he does, literally, from
an elevated basket. Indeed his greeting address
to the dense protagonist Strepsiades, “o crea-
ture-of-a-day,” could well reflect the man’s
insistence that the true Socrates was an immor-
tal “soul.”3
The fifth article, by Paul Woodruff of
the University of Texas at Austin, assesses
Socrates’ relationship to what Woodruff calls
“the new learning.” Socrates and his
sometime opponents had several things in
common: they challenged people’s tradition-
bound comprehension of the divine; they
demanded consistency in characterizing the
gods and their role, if any, in human affairs;
they respected the human intellect and con-
science, with consequent hope that humans
may gain by collaboration in the quest for
moral truth; they criticized irrational customs
and conventions (nomoi); and they were pas-
sionately dedicated to the art of words.
Woodruff maintains that “Socrates uses his
skill above all for a very serious call to philos-
ophy, and this use has no parallel in the sur-
viving works of the new learning” (108);
indeed, “his defenders—Xenophon and Plato
—show him resisting certain innovations [in
thought and speech]. But Socrates’ resistance
was evidently far from a defense of tradition.
Even as he was shown by his defenders, he
 362 REVIEW
was affected by the new learning, like other
thinkers of his time, so that his resistance...
consisted in developing alternatives to the
intellectual fashions of the day that were no
less revolutionary than the fashions he
opposed” (93–94). Presumably for this very
reason, he could (as Mark McPherran notes
in the next chapter) be grouped—in Clouds
for example—with the physicists and sophists
of his times with whom he shared “a willing-
ness to question the traditional ideas, a fasci-
nation with what it is to be human, and a
delight in the effective use of words” (95).
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The final sentence of the article adds that
“Through Socrates, Plato was no more critic
of, than he was heir to, the new learning” (109;
my emphasis).
Chapter 6, “Socratic Religion” follows
neatly upon the preceding piece, surveying
(1) Socrates’ public conduct, which seems to
have been reverential and unexceptional; (2)
his reported statements, which could provoke
pious polytheists, as he may be likened to a
street preacher who “challenged and renewed
the religious conceptions of his time” (112)
and which evidenced “a religious commit-
ment integral to his philosophical mission”
(111); and (3) his discoverable positive beliefs.
Belief, of course, for anyone but a religious
fundamentalist can be elusive, even to him-
or herself, and is surely so in Socrates’ case.
(We have already seen that Plato and Xeno-
phon found different levels and kinds of piety
in the master.) Here Canadian scholar Mark
McPherran of Simon Fraser University con-
siders Socratic critique of scandalous myths.
Rhetorician-sophists might cynically use these
to exculpate, if hardly to justify, atrocious
behavior (as Strepsiades’ ‘sophist’icated son
Pheidippides does toward the end of Clouds).
Socrates was more in earnest. McPherran
finds puzzles about him to solve, or try to
solve, in half a dozen concerns on a kind of
continuum. They range from his notions of
(1) strict rationality and (2) human ignorance,
through his (3) conviction of his divine
mission with (4) an oracular source, to (5)
extra-rational information and (6) the famous
daimonion. A discussion of contemporary
fifth-century popular religious notions (some
of which Aristophanes also chides in Clouds)
vis-à-vis intellectuals’ unsettling agnosticism
and skepticism is on the mark and valuable. It
is, however, surprising how McPherran
doubts that any true atheist was to be found:
notorious Diagoras of Melos was reputed to
be one such, and as such was brought to pub-
lic trial, judicially condemned, and expelled
from Attica. Athenian tragedy’s speculation
about and sometimes—in Euripides—critique
of the gods is also unfortunately overlooked
here. Socrates is said to have been an avid
theater-goer at the annual Dionysia, and tra-
gic poets were the Athenians’ de facto public
theologians through most of his lifetime.4
“Socrates and Democratic Athens” by
Stanford University scholar Josiah Ober
comes next. He examines, within the setting
of a recently restored democracy—restored
after some of the “beautiful and good” young
friends of the philosopher had instituted a
murderous tyranny—the philosopher’s indict-
ment, trial, and execution. Plato and Xeno-
phon both make the democrats ‘bad guys’ in
the event; but Ober, who devotes ten pages
to a mixture of legal and rhetorical aspects of
the case (166–76), asserts that the fundamental
question is not whether Socrates was “guilty”
as charged, but why and how those two liter-
ary defenders (and perhaps Socrates himself)
sought to show him “not guilty” not in a trial
before five hundred Athenian jurors but for
the ages (144). Ober also offers cautious and
reasonable guesses about what actually hap-
pened, including the poisonous background
—amnesty or no amnesty—of Socrates’
widely known friendship with several of the
hated Thirty Tyrants of 404–403 BCE and
his outspoken admiration for features of the
(oligarchic-royal) Spartan constitution. In
light of Plato’s Apology and Crito Ober also
considers Socrates’s attitude to the laws and
civic duty, divided and sometimes conflicted
between conventional (including brave mili-
tary service) and provocative (his “stinging”
Delphic missionary efforts).
The ensuing four articles, Chapters 8–11,
constitute a suite that should interest literary
critics and philosophers alike, the first,
“Socratic Method,” especially the philoso-
phers, because of its technical approach, and
“Reconsidering Socratic Irony,” the fourth,
both constituencies. In his discussion of the
dialectical method (Chapter 8) University of
Oklahoma’s Hugh H. Benson asks how dis-
tinctive Socrates’ method is as demonstrated
in those “Socratic” dialogues of Plato that he
identifies in a footnote. Conversations there

are often quite drama-like. Interrogated inter-
locutors often lose their patience with his per-
sistence in demanding “doxastic coherence”
through the famous elenchos, where he com-
pares the definitions that a victim proposes
with that person’s unarticulated beliefs and
behavior. Most of the earlier dialogues end in
an “aporetic” impasse, but not in despair. Pro-
fessor Benson analyzes how Socrates proceeds
from an initial (and soon rejected) answer to
the ‘What is F-ness?’ question, a refutand that
collides with new premises such as the inter-
locutors next establish. These premises need
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not reflect anything that Socrates himself
holds to be secure and true, only what his
examinee sincerely believes. The purpose of
such frequently embarrassing investigation is
not only to exhibit another person’s igno-
rance (as Plato’s Apology suggests), but also to
move toward robustly understood wisdom.
Benson treats at length and with finesse the
question of how ability to produce a sustain-
able definition is related to “knowledge,”
without depending upon the presumably post-
Socratic disembodied Idea-of-F-ness. A prob-
lem with this occurs to Benson: “Evidence
of... doxastic incoherence provides no reason
to suppose that some allegedly targeted belief
is false or that its negation is true. For this we
need evidence that Socrates thinks degree of
belief or definiteness of belief carries with it
some epistemic weight. But no such evidence
is to be found” (193). Nevertheless, “what
the attribution of the priority of definitional
knowledge [for secure comprehension of
F-ness] to Socrates indicates is not that he is
committed to an implausible view, but that
he is committed to a stronger conception of
knowledge than the ordinary one” (197). His
dialogical, elenchic method is “coherent and
distinctive” (198).
Christopher Rowe, Emeritus Professor of
Greek at Durham, explores Socrates’ “Self-
Examination” in the next article. He, too,
does not distinguish Socrates from Plato’s rep-
resentation of the master. His chief interest is
in how Socrates turns the testing inward,
albeit not to himself as individuated person
with such-and-such characteristics and experi-
ences. Rather it is to his rational soul, the
same as others’ though more self-conscious.
Rowe therefore also discusses how Socrates
examines others, not necessarily for their
deepest convictions, but rather for “what they
REVIEW 363
think,” on the chance that this may prove
sustainable as knowledge. “What is at issue
here is not what people believe, or are con-
vinced about, but rather whether they know
anything. Self-examination is an extension of
the examination of others, and vice versa—
and it will be self-examination just to the
extent that it is an examination of how one
stands, oneself, in relation to knowledge.
That, for Socrates, is the absolutely
fundamental question” (206; Rowe’s empha-
ses). The early direct dialogue Charmides
receives lengthy analysis. Rowe pronounces it
“a paramount example of self-examination”
(209). In fact, the discussion there is ulti-
mately about three things: about the virtue
“temperance” (sōphrosunē), which Socrates
wishes to define; about whether anyone can
possess it without understanding it; and about
whether and how one can understand it or at
least approach an understanding—that is, its
knowledge.
“Socratic Ignorance” follows as Chap-
ter 10. Knowledge in an impregnable sense
eluded the sage, as Johns Hopkins professor
Richard Bett observes here, yet not about
physics (pace Aristophanes) but about the
ethical matters that from a certain point in his
career as a thinker-inquirer Socrates deemed
to be immeasurably more important, the
most valuable things for a rational human
being to be certain about. Socrates, Betts
maintains, was quite sincere in his confes-
sion that he lacked the art/skill/practical sci-
ence (tekhnē) that he craved. Bett finds that
the philosopher had changing stances with
regard to the Priority of Definition ques-
tion. Could and should one who has
attained one specific virtue among many be
able to define it before claiming to possess it
when one is singled out for consideration
(as “piety” is in Euthyphro and others else-
where)? If several virtues are named (as ini-
tially in Meno) should “virtue” be narrowed
down, or must one first undertake a
descriptive-definitional quest for generic
“virtue”? Arete¯ as such becomes the object
of question and quest in Meno as in other
dialogues, with or without a qualification
like the “arete¯ politike¯” in Protagoras. No
“neat and tidy” conclusions can be drawn,
Bett concludes, whether because Plato chan-
ged his view, or because Socrates’ own
thinking evolved or simply was inconsistent.
 364 REVIEW
Melissa Lane, Professor of Politics at
Princeton, in “Reconsidering Socratic Irony”
makes one of the smartest, most appealing
contributions to this collection. She differen-
tiates dramatic irony, on the one hand, as
deployed in scattered anticipations of Socra-
tes’ trial, condemnation, and execution, from
what the Greeks called alazoneia, a false pre-
tense of something. In the case of Socrates
this would be his profession of knowing nei-
ther (1) the most important things at all, as in
Bett’s preceding chapter (and as he himself
declares in Plato’s Apology), nor (2) more, and
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better, than his interlocutor. This last would
include sarcastic flattery of a smug or arrogant
yet profoundly ignorant “partner” in his
inquiry. Eirōneia, whence we have English
“irony” and its cognate counterparts in other
modern European languages, has a history in
ancient discourse, which Lane reviews. One
cluster of corollary questions is whether, for
whose amusement (someone’s on the scene,
or only the reader’s?), and at whose expense
ironists do their sarcastic thing, and whether
the target is aware of mockery, mild or harsh.
A further one is whether irony is a sometime
instrument—with “a dialectical or argumenta-
tive purpose” (243)—or an essential character
trait of the person who employs it. Certainly,
for Socrates “The difficulty is to enlist pride
on the side of <one> entering the dialectic,
while avoiding the anger that might militate
against continuing the encounter” (254).
Critical Epicureans and, in modern times,
Nietzsche have found Socrates’ irony arro-
gant, and find fault in it. Lane denies that
“‘Socratic irony’ is a central organizing prin-
ciple of Socrates as depicted by Plato. ...
There is certainly a rhetoric to Socrates’ con-
versational interplay, but it need not amount
to irony. And if there is no basis for a system-
atic (as opposed to an occasional and casual)
imputation of Socratic irony, then those tradi-
tions positing its philosophical significance—
however one evaluates its purpose, audience,
and worth—need to be reconsidered” (256f.).
The following three articles endeavor to
distill a “philosophy” of Socrates, interrogat-
ing, as several preceding contributors do,
Plato, with scarcely a glance at Xenophon
even for secondary, corroboratory witness.
“Socratic Ethics and the Socratic Psychology
of Action” by University of Wisconsin Emer-
itus Professor Terry Penner is a provocative
piece of critical philosophy itself, as is the clo-
sely related following chapter, Christopher A.
Griswold’s “Socrates and Eudaimonia.” What
besides sensual appetite moves a person to
choose “the right thing”—and the right thing
for whom? For oneself? For another individual?
For one’s community? For all humankind?
And how is happiness, correctly understood
(an elusive question in itself), related to right
moral choice? Socrates’ answers, explicit or
more or less clearly implied in the Socratic
dialogues, are what these two chapters seek to
articulate.
Penner’s Socrates holds that all motivated
action worth judging is deliberate, the result
of our reasoning from desire of what we
believe to be beneficial for us toward its
achievement. Our good, however, is insepa-
rable from the good of others, or at least can
never entail harm to them. Ethics is one
among the sciences, all sciences are teleologi-
cal, and ethics’ end is “practicable happiness”
(265). It is “a purely factual matter. It is not a
matter of moral truth, or norms, or values,
not a matter of what is intrinsically good as
such, good in itself, good simpliciter, or any
such thing. It is simply what is good for
humans. For Socratic ethics, in total contrast
to most of modern moral philosophy, there
are no further elements of the subject-matter
of ethics involving any of the aforementioned
norms, values, moral principles, intrinsic
goods, or the like. There is just the science of
what is good for humans and of the means to
that good” (269); and “wisdom is the only
thing good in itself as a means to happiness”
(271). Penner considers and rejects objections
that such a stance is, on the one hand, merely
Selfish Egoism, if we only want what is good
for others because in the long run it is good
for us; or error-prone, on the other, because
our desires for apparent good often conflict
with our progress toward the actual good
when our human wisdom, which Socrates
concedes is imperfect, fails us. Nevertheless,
we always really want the really good, as the
Gorgias and the Republic both argue. Penner
also uses the Euthydemus as a key text, but
adduces as decisive the paradox of Plato’s (as
he believes) Hippias Minor, according to
which only the wise person is capable of
“doing wrong”—because he alone knows
what he is doing! In fact, no one can or will
“do wrong” on purpose, but only by accident

or mistake. Penner adds a cogent explanation
of Socrates’ “policy of almost never asserting
his views explicitly” (280), and diagnoses the
sage’s “ultra-realism” (286). He ends strik-
ingly with the comment that Socratic ethics
“is, I think, the one morality-free theory of
objective good available to us that contains
no elements of conventions of the sort
Socrates or Plato would have regarded as
unacceptable. The conjecture occurs to me
that it may be virtually alone among non-
conventionalist theories compatible with the
Descent of Man from the high primates. For I
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doubt that there could be a comparable
evolution of a non-conventional categorical
imperative” (291).
“Happiness” has been a notable topic
before Chapter 13 but becomes the subject of
the discussion here of its theory-and-practice,
“eudaimonism,” on the part of Plato’s Socra-
tes. Its author Christopher Bobonich, Profes-
sor of Philosophy at Stanford University, first
reviews language-historical applications of the
Greek words we translate as “happy” and
“happiness,” deploying a bit of philology
before the philosophy. Then he provides a
thorough discussion of the relationship
between happiness and virtue, which for Soc-
rates ultimately coincide (314–24). Virtue, of
course, is wisdom, upon which all other
goods depend—the wisdom to recognize that
what is truly best for Socrates is also truly best
for all. Bobonich treats much but not all of
the same Platonic evidence as Penner, since
the mechanism that effects happiness is at
once rational and psychological. He allows at
the outset that there are “gaps” in Socrates’
thought, which on these matters he extracts
from the probably very early Charmides and
Protagoras and from the somewhat later Gorgi-
as and Meno. He concludes that, although
rational eudaimonism has important advanta-
ges (which he lists on 328), “Socrates does
not provide a detailed account of what is
good for human beings” (330). Certainly, I
may add, he never brings an interlocutor in
earlier dialogues to a confident understanding
of precisely that. Plato himself, Bobonich
concludes, in middle-period dialogues makes
a better case that virtue is necessary or suffi-
cient for happiness and that all good depends
upon wisdom, when he defines human nature
and links virtue to “knowledge of the Forms”
(331).
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These matters of private moral virtue
clearly impinge upon the topic of Chapter 14,
“Socrates’ Political Philosophy,” since, at least
according to the Apology but also from a strik-
ing claim in Gorgias, Socrates was the unique
model citizen. He alone took pains to get his
compatriots to tend their true selves, their
souls, although the enterprise won him ene-
mies; and he alone practiced true statesman-
ship because only he was dedicated not to the
material benefit of Athens but to the intellec-
tual-moral improvement of each and every
Athenian citizen. The author of this article is
Charles A. Griswold, Professor of Philosophy
at Boston University, who gets the last word
in this Cambridge Companion, since only A. A.
Long’s article quoted at the outset follows,
dealing with what Socrates meant to thinkers
in Hellenistic Greece and the Roman Empire.
Griswold begins with a generalized treatment
of the relationship between philosophy and
politics, more precisely between philosopher
and statesman. He notes that Socrates might
not have been so public a figure as Plato’s
Apology would suggest, given the private set-
tings—in townhouses, at gymnasia, on walks
outside the city walls—of the other dialogues.
The Apology acknowledges the danger to a
candid teller of uncomfortable truth; how-
ever, its author Plato may exaggerate, if he
does not invent, a claim by Socrates himself
that he had a “divine mission” to wise Athens
up (343). Griswold also examines his involve-
ment in public affairs (as distinct from his
exemplary military career) and finds that he
was not much of an activist, resisting clearly
unconstitutional or criminal actions quietly
rather than vociferously. Such “civic” action
as he initiated was not public. Of course, his
overheard conversations seem sometimes to
have touched or even been centered upon
“political virtue,” but in the earlier dialogues
he does not himself define this or allow any-
one else’s definition to stand. Furthermore, in
the Apology and its sequel the Crito Plato’s
Socrates merely obeys the existing laws, and
in the latter, imprisoned on the Attic ‘death
row,’ explains his obedience. He does not
criticize them or the democratic government
that enacted them. “However much he con-
trasted a political ‘ideal’ with the unsatisfac-
tory reality of the historical polis, he did not
otherwise agitate for the radical reformation
of his polis by, say, proposing measures in the
 366 REVIEW
Assembly or organizing reform movements”
(336). Nor is he known to have criticized
Athens’ imperial wars, in which he personally,
patriotically fought. (Indeed at the beginning
of Pericles’ war he served in the besieging
force that invested a subject “allied” state,
Potidaea, which attempted to withdraw from
an involuntary “alliance.”) Implicit, however,
in the Crito and suggested more clearly in the
famous discussion of specious versus true,
moralizing statesmanship in Gorgias is the
thought that a good, wise rhe¯tōr—using per-
suasive speech, and not teaching it unless by
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example—ought to be able to talk legislators
into right legislation, policy-makers into right
policy. But what those laws and policies
would be, concretely, “Socrates” in Plato’s
earlier works does not give a reader to under-
stand. Griswold devotes a section to Republic,
where “Socrates” strives to relate the ideal to
the actually practicable—the management of
the soul to management of the state. Wishful
thinking about crowned philosophers, how-
ever, or philosophized kings does not amount
to a political philosophy. Griswold returns at
the end to Crito and Socrates’ thoughtful
acquiescence in his execution, of which (as
his friend Crito knew and found embarrass-
ing) all of Athens was aware. In fact, since the
amnesty of 404 BCE, executions were proba-
bly very rare. “Socrates is explicitly attempt-
ing to define and justify a new human
possibility—the ‘philosopher’ understood in a
distinctive and innovative way—and the
manner of his death was an inherent part of
his enactment of that deeply controversial life.
Socratic politics aimed to establish publicly
and persuasively, and therefore in deed as well
as in word, that the philosophically examined
life is best” (351). Government for him,
therefore, was individual personal, rational
self-government, more valuable than corpo-
real life.
As an idea, and a very flexible one, Socra-
tes never did die. Indeed “Socrates” stalked
the stage in a number of fourth-century come-
dies, where, though acknowledged to be very
smart, he was also somewhat odd in looks and
in behavior—something like Albert Einstein
in contemporary U.S. popular culture. In
comedy, of course, his martyrdom was
ignored.
In our book’s concluding Chapter 15
California-Berkeley Professor A. A. Long dis-
cusses “Socrates in Later Greek Philosophy.”
The Athenian gadfly became a stock charac-
ter, exemplary sage to many—though not for
Epicureans, who, joined later by some Peri-
patetics,5 blamed him for all that was wrong
with rival philosophies, whether mistaken
dogmatism or unwholesome skepticism. Soc-
rates’ importance depended upon how he was
interpreted, always with simplification, verg-
ing upon misrepresentation, of what he actu-
ally was, what he thought, and (however
indirectly or by negation) what he taught.
Competing and evolving schools of philoso-
phy seized upon one facet of his thinking or
another. Increasing skepticism among Aca-
demics in the generations after its founder
Plato, moral cynicism of the Cynics, Stoics’
determination to situate the rational soul in
the cosmos and in relation to the divine—all
derived from selective memorialization of a
mythologized Martyr to Philosophy. Long’s
article traces the doxographic ramifications,
from Socrates’ senior disciple Antisthenes,
who evidently attempted to codify Socratic
ethics, onward. As others noted in Chapters
1–3, Plato and Xenophon preserve clearly
contrasted versions of Socrates for us, if only
because their works survive. A century after
Socrates’ death, Plato’s fourth successor as
head of the Academy, Arcesilaus (called ‘the
Skeptic’) “pushed the aporetic Socrates to the
limit” (364). Diogenes the Cynic and Zeno,
founder of the Stoa, who took inspiration
both from Diogenes and (Long adds) from
Plato’s Euthydemus, had much in common.
Both stressed the ignorance and consequent
irrational conduct of everyone, beginning
with themselves, although Zeno came to
believe he could attain and impart positive
wisdom. Long devotes a detailed section
(371–74) to a novel interpretation of Socratic
elenchus centuries later by an important Mid-
dle Stoic of Roman times, Epictetus, who in
turn influenced the part-time self-examining
philosopher Marcus Aurelius. The chapter
also takes notice of Platonizing Plutarch,
author of On Socrates’ Divine Sign, who falls
chronologically between those two Stoics. He
ends with the contrasting reception of Socra-
tes by a pair of early Christian thinkers,
Augustine of Hippo (d. 420 CE), who
deemed the old Athenian’s daimonion truly a
“demon’s” prompting, in a bad, unholy sense,
whereas the earlier Justin Martyr (d. ca. 165

CE) admired and praised the Athenian as a
good person, a Christian precursor whom
divine inspiration guided toward a glimpse of
God’s truth, who rejected the numerous
divinities that the Athenians worshipped—
false gods, true “demons.”
There the book ends, but hardly the leg-
acy of Socrates!
Every chapter-article ends with a list of
works cited, in several cases with a specific
bibliography or suggestions for further read-
ing. Each therefore is useful in itself for treat-
ment of a sometimes controversial matter.
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Editor Donald Morrison also provides a topi-
cal bibliography, which itself acknowledges
other more comprehensive bibliographic
works. Especially valuable is a thirteen-page
Index of Passages—of all the ancient literature
cited anywhere in the collection—inevitably
lots and lots of Plato, but much and many
besides.
NOTES
1. The Greek word for “happiness,” eudaimo-
nia, suggests a fostering daimon/divinity;
REVIEW 367
the thirteenth article in this collection
book examines Socratic eudaimonism,
though without actual theology.
2. This term of Socratic art is variously trans-
literated as elenchos or elenchus. It could also
be elenkhos. Different contributors to the
book under review use different spellings,
which I respect here and below. The word
refers to the verbal testing of a statement
or of a moral or intellectual stance for its
soundness—what, under Socrates’ verbal
probing, like a suspect tooth under a den-
tist’s with her or his little pick, it often
lacks. Painfully to the victim!
3. Greek psuchē, “ghost” or (in religious and/
or philosophical application, “soul,” to
which certainly Socratic term Aristophanes
alludes explicitly some years later in his
masterpiece The Birds.
4. Aristotle, whose take on tragedy is so
influential, has misled many by his effective
nullification of the profound religious
dimension of the plays and their state-
cultic setting, part Carnival, part Passion
Week.
5. Aristotle himself, however, took issue with
Plato, not with Socrates.