Socrates: A Man for Our Times Read online

  Pictures on pottery—our chief window on fifth-century Athens—give us illuminating glimpses of ceremonial music. A black-figure Attic amphora done thirty years before Socrates was born, now in the Munich Gallery of Antique Art, shows such a band of aulos and kithara (the professional form of lyre), barbitos (a bass lyre), and clappers—the clapper man dancing. Instrumentalists were usually men—women specialized in the harp, which was too large to be portable—but men, women, boys, and girls sang in the choirs. The lyre had originally been made from the shell of a tortoise, which formed the soundbox, but this had been replaced by wood in Socrates’ day. The kithara was more substantial, its arms prolonging the soundbox, and being big and heavy had to be held against the body, with a strap running over the shoulders and a band attached to the left wrist to steady it. A lyre, being much lighter, could be played by women. We also see them on pottery playing the aulos.

  Only about a thousand bars of ancient Greek music has survived (some of them carved on rock), but Aristoxenus, a musical theorist born a generation after Socrates’ death, says the notes covered three octaves and were grouped in five vocal headings, corresponding to bass, baritone, tenor, alto, and soprano, the last two often sung by children. Music was of several different types: processionals, with a strong beat of various speeds; religious hymns; comic hymns to Dionysus called dithyrambs, sung under the influence of alcohol and male-only; and paeans, songs of praise to gods and goddesses and to heroes, both mythical and contemporary.

  The paean flourished under Pericles, who liked to add a triumphant, even military note to public occasions. He usually had himself sculpted wearing a helmet, visor lifted, showing his stern, handsome features: There is a fine Roman copy of a fifth-century-B.C. bronze original in the British Museum. But thanks to his efforts, music became a much more important element in Athenian life, and in Socrates’ time we begin to hear of professional composers: Cinesias, Timotheus, Philoxenus, Melanip-pides, though not one of their notes survives. Greece had held musical competitions for some time, at Delphi, for instance, for the Pythian Games: One of Pindar’s odes celebrates the victory of an aulos player. But Pericles created the Panathenaea music festival at Athens, which included prizes for every kind of music, including solo singing to the kithara and aulos, and the solo playing of both. Socrates’ eventual interest in music and its ethical implications reflects this increase in quality and variety.

  The dynamism of Pericles’ cultural revolution likewise affected the theater, though it is misleading to draw any clear distinction between music and drama, even though the Athenian theater and the Odeon were two separate buildings, for most musical performances had dramatic elements, and nothing performed on the stage was without a musical element, before and after and often during the dramatic recitations. The Greeks did not feel there was much difference between the rhythm of their music and their poetical meters. The original essence of the drama was the chorus, chanted or sung. The unit was not the metrical foot but the phrase, and poets built up phrases of their choral lyrics into complex stanzas. The Greeks had always produced poets, long before they became literate. And all poetry was religious in origin: That is, it dealt with the actions of gods and their relations with men and women. Poets recited their works, which they knew by heart of course—a tradition still valid in England, for example, in the days of Coleridge and Wordsworth. And the audience learned them by heart too, in part; sometimes whole, even in Socrates’ day. He refers to a friend who could recite the whole of the Iliad. Homer’s works were quasi-religious, the nearest equivalent the Greeks had to the Jewish Torah, since they not only recounted their history but taught, after a fashion, manners and morals, too.

  The theater was also religious in origin, springing from the cult of Dionysus. This half-human, half-animal, tragicomic, bibulous, and satyr-like god, springing from a barbarous tribal past, has no equivalent in Judeo-Christian religion and is difficult for us to understand. Yet his hold on the Greek cultural imagination was very powerful, and the fact that Socrates had a strong facial and bodily resemblance to caricatures of the god was an important source of his fascination to Athenians, his popularity and his unpopularity. They could not take their eyes off him when he held forth. Dionysus stood for the aspect of religion we would call fundamentalist or evangelical: highly emotional, noisy, singing, clapping, shouting, and dancing. Its solemnity was heavily qualified by wine-drinking, especially by the men. The women went into ecstatic convulsions and were then known as maenads. They wore human masks. This was the true origin of the drama, which in time bifurcated into comic and tragic performances.

  Initially music played a dominant role, and the main performers were the chorus. In both its moods, it was much closer to what we would call an oratorio than a play. In the original Dionysiac drama, the dithyramb to the god was a hymn in the form of an ode, and the action was a service of worship, the chorus being the Athenian people doing homage to their god. Gradually the Dionysiac element diminished, then disappeared, clinging on only in the comedies as a species of masked buffoonery. Meanwhile plays appeared in which both the action and the lyrics presented in dramatic form stories from Greek myths and legends that were essentially tragic, the chorus providing narrative commentary and pointing morals. There were religious dramas throughout Socrates’ lifetime and well into the fourth century B.C., for the subject matter was the relations between humans and the gods who controlled their destiny.

  Some Greeks were coming to believe in the idea of eternal life and the immortality of the soul—it was a central theme of Socrates’ thinking—and the Dionysian theater, certainly in its tragic form, gave a spur to these beliefs, as Dionysus was the Lord of Souls. Similar notions of eternity and soul salvation were stirring in other civilized societies in the fifth century B.C., especially in Egypt and still more in Hebrew Palestine. The Hebrews even developed a form of drama as a result of these forces, a notable example being the Book of Job, which has survived because it found its way into the canonical writings. Scholars seem to think its date was around 400 B.C., the time of Socrates’ death, when Greek tragic drama had matured but was still religious. With its mocking chorus, Job’s dialogue with God, and its tremendous descriptions of the natural world, Job is essentially a play about the mysterious workings of God’s providence, and it is poetry intended to be recited in public—all characteristic of Greek fifth-century-B.C. drama. It would be surprising if it was not influenced by the Greek religious theater, as were no doubt other Hebrew plays now lost to us. There is no evidence I know of that Jews visited Athens or lived there in Socrates’ time, but plenty of Greeks lived in Palestine.

  We now see this tragic poetry of Athens, usually enacted first in the Theater of Dionysus, as Greece’s greatest contribution to world literature, Homer alone excepted. It was changing and maturing throughout the fifth century B.C. but Pericles’ cultural program hugely accelerated its development. Competition became annual, and substantial prizes were awarded. There were in consequence a large number of playwrights, but the stage was dominated by three. The earliest and historically the founder of the genre was Pericles’ favorite, Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.), who had fought at the Battle of Marathon and probably Salamis, too. He was a passionate Athenian religious patriot. He won many competitions in his lifetime, and his plays continued to receive prizes after his death, but only 7 out of 70 to 80 have survived. We have only 7 by Sophocles (496–406) too, though he wrote 136, and 96 secured first or second prizes (he was never third). Euripides (485–406) was more fortunate: We have the texts of 19 of his plays out of 92, and he, too, won prizes.

  According to Aristotle, who wrote at length about the theater, it was invented by Thespis, a sixth-century writer who introduced a solo actor who alternated with the chorus. Aeschylus built on this innovation and had two actors, three in his late plays, though it was Sophocles who brought in the third actor. Soon there were four or more, and as the actors multiplied, the role of the chorus, originally dominant, declined. It became a
mere episode between scenes, like our curtain, and by the end of the fifth century B.C. had ceased to have anything to do with the play, being a mere musical punctuation mark. The religious element declined, too, after the death of Aeschylus, and the mythical heroes and heroines were developed into real-life characters. Sophocles and, still more, Euripides invented episodes, and toward the end of the century a new playwright, Agathon, who won his first victory in 416 B.C., when still a young man, invented entire plays, such as his Antheus, though only forty of his lines have survived. Plato’s Symposium about Socrates was to celebrate this victory.

  In Socrates’ day there was no such thing as a purpose-built theater, like the magnificent one at Epidaurus, with its superb acoustics, which allow someone in the back row to hear whispers on the stage. Everything took place in broad daylight, though some scenes were set at night. Sophocles introduced stage scenery, and soon actors entered and left through doors, though there was no upper stage until the fourth century, after Socrates’ death. Plays were taken with increasing seriousness and great efforts were made to judge the competitions fairly. Athens was divided into ten districts (originally tribes), and names of winners from each were sealed in an urn. But Plato says that decisions of judges were usually determined by the amount of applause from the audience.

  It is clear that Socrates, Plato, and later Aristotle were deeply concerned in theatrical developments, and there was a special reason for this. Greek tragedy in the fifth century showed a growing interest in human nature, in character and behavior under stress. While Aeschylus tends to present types—though there are notable individuals too—Sophocles specialized in noble individuals under appalling pressures, and Euripides often investigates unusual or extreme mentalities. What Athenians were beginning to see on the stage were not just bodies but embodied souls. This was very much Socrates’ world, for he was a psychologist as well as a philosopher. But in general, tragic playwrights and philosophers were moving in the same territory, and it is not surprising that Plato, when still much influenced by Socrates, almost became a tragic poet. He would have made a good one. We know that Socrates as an old man wrote poetry, though none has survived. But we are told that a play by Euripides was “patched up” by him. A man who could successfully doctor a work by a leading playwright obviously was a constant playgoer and thoroughly familiar with the medium.

  Socrates, thanks to his Dionysiac appearance, sense of irony, wit, and critical approach to almost every aspect of life, was obviously a man capable of patching up a comedy, too, though there is no evidence he ever did so. Primitives, not only in Greece, like pretending to be somebody else in public, and doing grotesque, obscene, and comic things they would not dare to do in normal life. We know from inscriptions that a humorous adult male chorus was an archaic element in Athens’s Dionysiac feasting. An Attic black figure amphora from the sixth century B.C. shows men disguised as horses, mounted by other men, masked, with an accompanying flute player. Another, later one shows them dressed as birds. Vases from this time show dancing men wearing phalluses, and a krater from Corinth displays masked dancers with giant bellies strapped on. Enormous phalluses were carried in Dionysiac processions, and Aristotle writes of bawdy, comic verses, crude sex jokes, and what he calls “phallic songs”—he says they were still “customary to many cities,” but no longer in Athens, which had become too sophisticated. Another feature was the crude abuse of audiences. This is a ploy used in our own day by American comics, and it was the great stock-in-trade of Aristide Briand, the Montmartre nightclub singer, lovingly drawn by Toulouse-Lautrec. The Old Comedy of the fifth century B.C., as historians call it, would have struck us as more like charades or a variety show than a play. There were lots of talking animals as in children’s stories and folklore.

  Aristophanes (445–385 B.C.), about whom we know little, though he figures in the famous Socratic dinner party recorded by Plato, transformed this theatrical ragbag of tricks into satiric plays, of which eleven survive (plus the titles and fragments of thirty-two more). Part of a play of his called The Banqueters, written when he was eighteen, survives, and it won a second prize. In the next two years, 426 and 425, he won first prize with the Babylonians (lost) and Acharnians, the first play of his to survive. This is about war and peace and is intended to be serious, though there are comic elements. Aristophanes, though classed as a comic playwright, in fact always hovers precariously between huge exaggerations of actual events and real people, and buffoonery. He is really a satirist, in the proper sense of the term. Knights (424 B.C.), the first play he produced himself (hitherto he had been classed as too young under the rules) and which, probably for this reason, won the first prize, was an attack on the reigning demagogue, Cleon. Wasps (422) is a satire on the Athenian jury system. Peace (421) is an antiwar play in which a giant beetle draws Peace from a cavern where she has been imprisoned. Lysistrata (411) is also antiwar, and both it and Thesmophoriazusae, produced the same year, show women taking over. Frogs (405), another first-prize winner, is about the sad plight (in his view) of Athenian drama and literature generally, featuring Aeschylus, Euripides, and others.

  Aristophanes’ almost exact equivalent in English drama is Ben Jonson, whom we know learned from these old Greek plays. They deal with real as well as imaginary people, actual events, and current customs, usually presented in a grotesquely exaggerated form. He took on some very unpleasant and powerful people, such as Cleon, and it is amazing to me that he escaped prosecution, exile, or death: Perhaps he was lucky that Cleon, who certainly attacked him publicly, was killed in battle.

  In 423 Aristophanes produced Clouds, an attack on Athenian sophists, intellectuals, and philosophers generally, with particular attention paid to Socrates, who is really the chief character. We have it only in a revised form, which was not produced, and what the original and actual production was like we do not know exactly. It played badly, and the play as we have it seems to me crude, implausible, and dull, though it can be, and has been, successfully produced in modern times. Like other Aristophanes works, it lends itself to ingenious direction. It bears no relation to the real Socrates and his views or the actual life he lived but presents him as a very unpleasant and wicked man. Why, then, did Plato in his Symposium present Socrates and Aristophanes as friends, and the latter as an attractive person? I can only suppose that Aristophanes knew Socrates only by malicious hearsay at the time he wrote Clouds and that his views changed dramatically once they met and talked. Socrates bore no grudge. He said of attacks on him in the theater: “If the criticism is just, I must try to reform myself. If it’s untrue, it doesn’t matter.”

  Aristophanes was deeply and strongly critical of Pericles in Acharnians. This was only to be expected in view of his personal opinions. For his evident hatred of war was created by the unhappiness, destruction, and slaughter that Pericles’ imperialism and vainglory made inevitable. Behind its cultural achievements lay a presumption of Athens’s right to control the Greek world, and that led inevitably to a struggle with Sparta that could only end in her destruction, or that of Athens. As Pericles himself said, Greece was not big enough for both. The Peloponnesian War, which was to settle, once and for all, which was to be the paramount Greek power, began in 431 B.C., and Pericles’ famous oration was delivered the following year. That marked the acme of his influence. Thereafter it was downhill.

  In 430 B.C., almost certainly as a direct result of the war, Athens was afflicted by the worst plague in her history. Thousands died. Pericles’ own family was devastated. The plague broke the morale of Athens. It was seen as the punishment of the gods for their neglect by the Periclean power. It is true that their humanism came close to atheism in the minds of many. His favorite philosopher, Anaxagoras, was seen as impious for his cosmology and cosmogony. Phidias, his cultural commissar, was blamed for his depiction of human figures in the frieze of the Parthenon. Protagoras’s dictum that “Man is the measure of all things” was held to be a plain declaration of disbelief in divinity. Thucydid
es, the historian of the regime, was already known for denying the gods any role in the march of great events. At the end of the plague year, the revulsion of popular feeling drove Pericles from office. He was tried for embezzlement of public funds and fined. The next spring, public opinion swung round again. He was once more elected strategos and tried to rebuild his position. But it seems he had caught the plague germs, which undermined his strength and now humbled his proud spirit. He died of it six months after being reelected, and men said it was a punishment. There was a witch hunt of his entourage. Phidias had been prosecuted for stealing public gold when making his giant statue of Athena. He was acquitted but was then arraigned for impiety and put in prison, where he died. Protagoras and Anaxagoras were likewise hounded, and enemies even indicted Pericles’ mistress Aspasia (about whom more will be said), though she won acquittal. By 428 B.C., the brilliant group of humanists who had run and adorned Athens in the name of man had been broken up and dispersed.

  Socrates survived the plague, something his friends noted with surprise. While many fled the city or kept to their houses, Socrates continued his usual practice of walking the streets and talking to all, regardless of possible contagion. The fact that he escaped was taken as a tribute to his generally healthy life and exercises. By now he was forty, a middle-aged man and becoming, in his own way, an Athenian celebrity. It is time for us to turn to his work and in particular his idiosyncratic methods of practicing philosophy.