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Socrates: Devious or Divine?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

Paul W. Gooch
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Extract

Perhaps happiness can be attributed only to the dead because they are beyond the reach of fortune: but that security is denied to one's reputation. The case of Socrates makes this clear, and it is his reputation which is this paper's theme. For since his death Socrates has been the object of such competing assessments that some have despaired of ever finding the real person executed in Athens in 399 B.C. Although that search need not be fruitless, this study is concerned not so much with the sources of our knowledge of Socrates as with the ways in which Plato's Socrates has been represented and assessed. On the one hand are interpreters who hold him up as a model for life and thought, an ideal figure approaching sainthood if not divinity; and on the other more sinister hand are those who claim to discern under the saint's clothing the sly fox, the devious devil whose major aim is to destroy other people's beliefs and arguments. Socrates has been praised and condemned with fervour since his original trial, and although we will not reach yet another final verdict here, perhaps by canvassing a little of the evidence we may come to understand not only something of his reputations, but also how they find their sources in Plato's own writings.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , April 1985 , pp. 32 - 41
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1985

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References

NOTES

1. I choose Plato's presentation as the most influential, and the most philosophically interesting, Socrates. For a helpful discussion of some of these issues see Lacey, A. R. in Vlastos, G. (ed.), The Philosophy of Socrates (Garden City, N.Y., 1971), pp. 22–49Google Scholar.

2. Ancient authors are quoted from the Loeb translations of their works.

3. For references see my note, ‘The Celebration of Plato's Birthday’, CW 15 (1982), 239–40Google Scholar; see also Penella, P. J., CW 77 (1984), 295Google Scholar.

4. Beckman, J., The Religious Dimension of Socrates' Thought (Waterloo, 1979), pp. 180–1Google Scholar.

5. The Son of Apollo (Boston and New York, 1929), p. 269Google Scholar.

6. Plato's Earlier Dialectic(Oxford2, 1953), p. 9Google Scholar.

7. ibid., p. 18.

8. Riley, M. T., Phoenix 34 (1980), 67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. An earlier form of this paper was read to the Toronto Classics Club, 12 January 1982.