We do, however, have at least one contemporary source for the life of Socrates who knew him well before the battle of Delium, a critic who has left us a gripping portrait a mere year after the battle—the comic playwright Aristophanes. The picture of Socrates in his Clouds (423 B.C.) is not pretty. His Socrates is a vicious caricature of a middle-aged huckster. Indeed, because of Aristophanes’ influential status, and since he portrayed Socrates on the stage before thousands of Athenians, both Plato and Xenophon in part spent their entire lives trying to counteract that apparently commonly embraced Aristophanic portrait of Socrates as con man and Sophist. Aristophanes’ depiction of Socrates reached far more Athenians—mostly the men in the street who made up the audience of Attic comedy—than did his portrait by either the more refined Xenophon or Plato.
Some scholars have suggested that Socrates’ hagiography in the works of both Plato and Xenophon was partly meant as a response to the vehemence of Aristophanes’ earlier slander. Other comic poets—Ameipsias and Eupolis especially, whose works are now lost but were widely popular during the 420s—also caricatured Socrates onstage. They reinforced the devastating portrayal by Aristophanes, whose lasting vilification so bothered Plato and Xenophon. Again, small numbers of elites read or attended private recitations of Plato and Xenophon. In contrast, thousands of working Athenians viewed the comedies of Aristophanes and his rival comic poets.
In Aristophanes’ comedy The Clouds—often considered his masterpiece and produced on the stage in 423 B.C.—Socrates is the worst of the sophistic charlatans. He appears as a leader of that infamous collection of slick tricksters who made a living by filling the heads of an idle rich elite with word games and relativist morality—relativists who were in part responsible for the cultural decline of Athens and its purported increasing lethargy and decadence during the long war with Sparta. In the comedy, Socrates attempts to “make the weaker argument stronger.” He is a windbag. His superficial cleverness with words is attractive to untrained minds like the play’s main characters, Strepsiades and Pheidippides, father and son who are willing to pay for a foolish veneer of learning in hopes of hoodwinking other Athenians into giving them something for nothing. At the end of the play an irate Strepsiades, cured of Socratic double-talk, burns down Socrates’ “thinking house”—and presumably incinerates Socrates with it!
So influential was Aristophanes’ invective that in the last speech of his life, as reported in Plato’s Apology, Socrates attempts to defend himself from the popular prejudice incurred from the attacks of the “comic poets.” One tradition has it that he watched the comedy and purportedly stood up during a presentation of The Clouds to assure the audience he was not bothered by the caricature. Plutarch records that Socrates remarked that the attacks on him on the comic stage were no different from barbs at wine parties.
Without Plato’s and Xenophon’s earlier acquaintance with Socrates, neither writer would have had any zeal to counteract the more prevailing view of Aristophanes, who unlike themselves, at least had met and known Socrates for a good many years. Thus Socrates dead at forty-five would have survived in history as little different from the notorious but obscure Gorgias, Hippias, Protagoras, and other Sophists whose writings are for the most part lost, but whose reputations have generally been sullied by nearly all their contemporaries. Socrates would not have been the hero of Plato and Xenophon—impressionable youths who both idealistically worshiped the aged philosopher whom they watched at seventy be unjustly killed by an ignorant mob.
Instead, he would have remained the rascal of the cynical and jaded Aristophanes, joining the scoundrels Cleon and Alcibiades, whose reputations as knaves par excellence were cemented forever on the Athenian comic stage. Had Socrates died that afternoon in 424 B.C., whatever and whoever he was until the age of forty-five when he stalked the battlefield of Delium would mostly be unknown and of little interest to us outside the rather devilish creation of Aristophanes a year later.
Finally, it is impossible to gauge the development of Socrates’ own thought at age forty-five, inasmuch as he wrote nothing. Nor does Plato’s work give us any clue to any chronological evolution in Socratic reasoning. Nevertheless, there is some evidence that his development as a first-class thinker came during the last twenty-five years of his life. Only then did he attract the best minds of Athens to his side, such as Alcibiades, Agathon, Plato, Xenophon, and Isocrates—as well as the ire of Aristophanes. Other older and near-contemporaries of Socrates, for example, who appear in Plato’s dialogues as his close friends are curiously often non-Athenian—Phaedo of Elis, Echecrates of Phlius, Simmias and Cebes of Thebes, Aristippus of Cyrene, Euclides and Terpsion of Megara. And these elderly men are often interested not so much in ethical questions, but rather in natural philosophy and cosmology—especially Orphic thought, the teaching of Pythagoras, the ontology of Parmenides, the natural inquiry of Empedocles, and the radical views of Anaxagoras. When and where did Socrates meet these other disciples, who seem somewhat different from his later and more famous Athenian adherents?
Perhaps before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War (431 B.C.), Socrates was even better known outside of Athens as an itinerant natural philosopher in the earlier tradition of speculating about the nature of matter, the cosmos, and the soul. Only later, with the outbreak of the war and the difficulty of these former associates to travel freely and to live in Athens (Elis, Thebes, and Megara were all on occasion at war with Athens), an older and more Athens-bound Socrates turned his attention increasingly away from these earlier concerns of cosmology to personal ethics, rhetoric, and politics.
There were issues of vital interest as he watched his home city tear herself apart in open assembly during the war. When The Clouds was staged in 423 B.C., although Socrates was perceived as part and parcel of the new sophistic trend, he nevertheless is caricatured often for his obsessions with “the heavens” (ta mete?ra) and “the things above earth,” suggesting a long prior career that concerned itself with cosmology and astronomical speculation.
A new following among wealthy, young, and impressionable Athenians suggests a more mature Socrates in his forties and fifties—beginning around the time of the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. During the war he traveled less and focused his philosophy on more germane concerns of everyday life. Thus, not only would we have known little about Socrates had he died in the darkness of Delium, but what little information that would have survived would suggest to posterity a picture of a rather obscure natural philosopher who only very recently had turned his attention to ethical inquiry inside Athens, and so caught the attention of Aristophanes and the comic poets. The original fault line of Western philosophy—pre-Socratic as cosmology and natural inquiry; Socratic as ethical and moral thought—would not have existed. And of course there would be no such term as “Socratic” at all.
Can we continue our counterfactual speculations about Plato’s own career without the influence of Socrates? If we would now know very little of Socrates without Plato, what would we know of a non-Socratic Plato?—of a philosopher who never met Socrates? The purpose of Plato’s most famous treatises—Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, the tetrad that surrounds the trial and death of Socrates—would vanish with a Socrates dead in 424 rather than executed in 399. But even more important, at least a third of Plato’s earliest work, the so-called early Socratic dialogues, would probably not have been written at all, or at least not written in their present form.
Scholars have spent the past century trying to arrange Plato’s thirty-one dialogues into some sort of chronology by date of their composition—a difficult task given that Plato probably wrote over a forty- to fifty-year period and told us little about his own life as an author. But on stylistic grounds, philosophical content, and contemporary references to historical events, there is now a rough consensus of what represents his “early” work (Apology, Crito, Laches, Lysis, Charmides, Euthyphro, Hippias Major and Minor, Protagoras, Gorgias, and Ion) written in Plato’s thirties and forties (i.e., 390s B.C.). They are rather distinct from the twelve subsequent “middle” dialogues (written in the 380s and 370s B.C.) and a final eight “late” works (composed in the 360s and 350s B.C.).
The first group of dialogues is usually considered to deal primarily with moral issues and the need to establish proper definitions of ethical problems—in contrast with Plato’s middle and later interests that turn to metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology. In addition, Socrates is the primary figure of Plato’s first eleven dialogues. But he seems to fade somewhat in importance in later texts. Indeed, in the Laws, considered one of Plato’s last treatises, he does not appear as a questioner. Some scholars believe that Plato began his early dialogues while in his late twenties (e.g., 408–399 B.C.), at a time when Socrates was still alive.
In any case, at least eleven of his most important works were written within a decade and a half of Socrates’ death, employed Socrates as chief questioner, and dealt with concerns made famous by Socrates during the last years of his life. Had Plato never met Socrates, then, these eleven dialogues either would not exist or would not exist in their present form.
Plato’s middle and later dialogues, in contrast, when the memory of a Socrates was decades past, show renewed interest in the work of Parmenides, Protagoras, and Empedocles, drawing on their notions of causation, change, sensation, cosmology, and reincarnation. Like the younger Socrates, Plato seems to regard these earlier thinkers—who, unlike Socrates, wrote substantial works—as the most influential philosophers of the Greek tradition. As Plato matured, as the memory of life and conversations with Socrates dimmed, and as the value of the written philosophical texts of others was more appreciated, Plato diverged from Socrates in important areas of philosophy and relied more and more on these earlier giants.
An irony thus arises. The philosophical interests of the elder Plato resemble somewhat the thought of the younger Socrates. This suggests that the last two decades of Socrates’ life were an exceptional period in the history of Greek philosophical thought, devoted far more to the practical and ethical, and attuned to debunking the false knowledge prevalent in the streets of Athens during the stressful period of the Peloponnesian War. Had Socrates died at forty-five at Delium, at least a third of Plato’s most interesting work would either be gone or not exist in its present form. His entire corpus might better resemble his middle and later dialogues—and thereby belong more to the mainstream of Hellenic cosmological and ontological speculation.
Finally, Plato himself seems to have sensed that Delium was a momentous event in Socrates’ life, one that was related over and over to the younger student by a variety of associates. Not only is the battle mentioned three times in his work, but there are a number of veiled allusions that arise unexpectedly elsewhere as well. In the utopian Laws and Republic, the nightmare of Delium is never far away. Both the disgrace of the Athenian loss and the Theban sacrilege in the battle’s aftermath offer implicit lessons for the military reformer. In the Laws, for example, Plato urges regular peacetime military drill, regardless of weather and lasting for an entire day (Delium atypically took place in the late afternoon in November). All residents—men, women, and children—are to join in, but in an ordered and disciplined manner (surely unlike the chaotic levée en masse at Delium).
Plato also makes it clear in his Republic that the dead shall not be stripped or desecrated. And he insists that the corpses of the defeated must be returned to their countrymen for a decent burial (in contrast to the notorious Theban behavior). Nor should the Greeks (as the Thebans did after Delium) display the weapons of the defeated in sanctuaries as dedicatory offerings but instead regard such desecration as “pollution.” Many of Plato’s discussions about war, then, as we have seen in veiled references to his stepfather Pyrilampes, probably drew on the experience of the horrifying tales of the battle surrounding the elder Socrates and his friends.
One of the most moving texts in Western literature is Plato’s Apology—the account of Socrates’ final rebuttal before his peers in the Athenian jury (dramatic date 399 B.C.). The influence of Plato’s version of the speech has been enormous in the past two and a half millennia. Two fundamental traditions in the practice of Western philosophy followed from that majestic defense. First is the accepted notion that even a free society through its legal institutions can kill those who question its authority and values. Thus the role of the true philosopher is properly to be tragic. As a principled outsider he will inevitably meet with the revenge of the more unenlightened masses if he remains true to his ideas.
Second, democracy—not oligarchy or autocracy—killed Socrates. In large part because of its trial and execution of Socrates—so vividly portrayed through four moving dialogues of Plato—Athenian democracy suffered a terrible reputation among subsequent political thinkers, from Cicero and Machiavelli to almost every major philosopher until the late-eighteenth-century revolutionaries in France and America.
In addition, the early Christian apologists of late antiquity, many responding to the renewed interest in Socrates among the Neoplatonists, found the parallel with the martyr Jesus especially unmistakable. Both men were teachers who wrote nothing but were quoted widely by a close cadre of disciples. Both were also dragged before the mob, publicly humiliated, and then executed by lesser men who made use of a frightened and paranoid establishment. In the view of the early Christian apologists, Socrates’ courageous end—and his advocacy of preferring to be hurt rather than to hurt others—was confirmation of his prescience: he surely had a blessed premonition of Jesus—and therefore, like Jesus, preached that we do not die with our bodies but rather have an eternal soul that lives on after our physical death. Socratic thought, via Plato, became critical to the early exegesis of the Christian Church.
Needless to say, there would have been no image of Socrates as pre-Christian pagan martyr had he died at Delium. Rather than a tragic man of conscience, he would have been a nondescript Athenian patriot and sophistic thinker who fell during an Athenian rout. In that sense, Socrates perhaps would have been embraced by, rather than at odds with, Athenian democracy. Nor would we have quite the negative appraisal of Athenian democracy itself, had it honored Socrates as a fallen hero of 424 rather than executed him as the perceived subversive agitator and tutor to the right-wing revolutionaries of 404 B.C. who, for a time, overthrew the government.
Perhaps the chief significance of the entire battle is the philosopher’s close escape from Theban pursuers. On that autumn late afternoon in 424 B.C., Western philosophy as we know it was nearly aborted in its infancy. Had Socrates been speared or ridden down by the enemy, today we would know almost nothing about him. The philosophical tradition would claim him only as an early and rather obscure cosmologist and natural philosopher in the tradition of Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Empedocles—or perhaps a budding Sophist. He wrote nothing. So his legacy was entirely dependent on the remembrances of others.
There would have been no Platonic or Xenophonic Socrates. Plato’s own work—even if Plato would have gone on to write about philosophy without the tutelage and inspiration of Socrates—would be far different and probably exist as rather abstract utopian and technical theory with far less concern with everyday ethics or politics in general. A large percentage of Xenophon’s treatises would never have been written. The Clouds of Aristophanes, produced a year after Delium, not the Apology of Plato, would be the sole source of Socrates the man, a character not much different from the other rogues that inhabit the Athenian comic stage. A dead Socrates at Delium might mean today there would not be a book in any library or bookstore on Socrates. Plato himself might be as little known to the general reader as a Zeno or Epicurus.
More important, Socrates’ death at seventy—why and how he was killed—had fundamental repercussions in the Western liberal tradition. Had he fallen to a spear thrust in the twilight of Delium and not been dragged away to be executed on the verdict of a jeering and ignorant mob, the image of the philosopher would be entirely changed today, the heritage of Athenian democracy far brighter, and the obvious association between Socrates, martyr and founder of Western thought, and Jesus, who died on the cross to establish Western religion, not so apparent.
But Socrates did not die at Delium. He instead fought courageously. Bolstered by that record of bravery, he withstood the attacks of Aristophanes. His proven courage helped him weather the assaults of radical demogogues, as he went on to teach Plato and Xenophon—before as an old man earning a martyr’s death at the hands of the very democracy he fought so hard to save a quarter century earlier on that terrible autumn afternoon.