SOCRATES VERSUS THE STATE
Socrates was condemned to death by taking a dose of hemlock not because he betrayed his city to the enemy or committed temple robbery, but because he swore new oaths and claimed—surely as a joke as some say—that something daimonic gave signs to him.
—FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS
My favorite story from the history of voice-hearing appears in a work of historical fiction by the ancient Greek writer Plutarch. The work takes place just prior to the restoration of democracy in the city of Thebes in 379 BCE, approximately 425 years before Plutarch’s birth. Three years earlier, Thebes had become a Spartan puppet state, overseen by a cabal of local oligarchs. The story’s action centers on the preparation by a group of exiled democrats to ambush and slaughter a party of these rulers as they sit and drink. As the democrats wait for the right moment to attack, they engage in a philosophical debate that comes to focus on Socrates’ daimonion—the admonitory sign that came to him unexpectedly throughout his life and stopped him from engaging in certain actions. The conversation is begun by Theocritus, a friend of Socrates’, who describes what happened one day when the philosopher was walking along the streets of Athens:
Socrates happened to be climbing the hill…and he was at the same time asking Euthyphro questions and lightheartedly testing him. Suddenly he stopped, went quiet and became withdrawn for quite a time; then he turned around and started to head down the box-makers’ street. He recalled those of us friends who had already gone ahead with the information that his personal deity had come to him. So most of the group turned back without him, including myself…but some of the young ones carried straight on, with the intention of showing up Socrates’ personal deity…. As they were going along the statuaries’ street, past the lawcourts, they encountered a herd of pigs: the pigs were covered in mud and there were so many of them that they were jostling one another. There was no escape; the pigs bumped into some of them and knocked them to the ground, and the rest of them just got filthy…. [C]onsequently, whenever we think of Socrates’ personal deity, we chuckle, although at the same time we are impressed by how God never abandoned him or overlooked him under any circumstances.1
There are a number of reasons to be attracted to this story. One is the improbability of a philosophical discussion preceding a mass political execution. Another is that it mitigates a reputation too pure for its own good. For centuries Socrates has been characterized as the prototypical Western thinker. He is our hero of rationality, celebrated for his intolerance of pretension, cant, and superstition. “Saint Socrates, pray for us!” Desiderius Erasmus is said to have cried. Less excitably, John Stuart Mill wrote, “Mankind can hardly be too often reminded, that there was once a man named Socrates…, acknowledged master of all the eminent thinkers who have since lived.”2
Plutarch’s anecdote scuffs this stainless steel image. In its apocryphal but honest way, it reveals a man who, though he was without doubt a rigorous thinker and a tireless pursuer of semantic precision, happened also to have heeded the instructions of a divine voice, and one that was so protective as to save him from nothing so lofty as a herd of filthy swine.
Socrates shouldn’t require this help. His life and work helped drive the Greek Enlightenment, that explosion in rational thought which ran its course in the second half of the fifth century BCE, but scholars have long known that era to have been thoroughly awash in gods, oracles, and cults, and not just in philosophy, arts, and the sciences. They have also long known that Socrates was an active participant in the religious as well as in the philosophical spirit of his time. Indeed, his intellectual renown rests on his faithfulness: The “Socratic method” for which he is known—the manner of proceeding carefully along logical pathways, interrogating reputed experts in their fields, and always standing in a position of professed ignorance—has its origin in a cryptic proclamation of the Delphic oracle of Apollo, which stated that Socrates was the wisest man in all of Athens. Both a believer and a logician, Socrates attempted through his famous tireless questioning to discover what the god might mean.
Yet the religious facet of Socrates’ character is typically missing from modern representations of him, or else conspicuously subdued. This is not difficult to understand. Once a man’s sanctity has been established, it is nearly impossible to diminish it in any noticeable way, and Socrates has been an object of veneration for centuries. But the sheer immaculateness of his intellectual reputation, its seeming imperviousness to scholarship that has not otherwise hesitated to admit the complexities of the Greek mind, does suggest that his caretakers have been complicit. Since E. R. Dodds published The Greeks and the Irrational, it has been impossible to maintain the old view of the Greeks as intellects alone. Socrates, the most notoriously rational of them all, has somehow eluded this reassessment. In this light, the value of the daimonion is humanistic. Appropriately examined—neither dismissed as beneath importance or contempt nor pressed too harshly into ideological service—it helps restore Socrates to a nuanced form that he has scarcely known since his death 2,400 years ago.
The extent of our biographical knowledge of Socrates can be fit into a single paragraph. He was born in Athens in or around 470 BCE. He was married to a woman named Xanthippe. He served in the military and fought with honor in the Peloponnesian War against Sparta. He had three sons. He had a profound influence on several prominent Athenians. He was charged by Athens with corrupting the young through religious nonconformism, found guilty, and executed by hemlock in 399. These are the basic facts. Beyond them, historical conviction stretches thin. The limiting element here is what is known as the Socratic problem, which is that Socrates left behind no account of his experiences or his thought. His entire adult life was lived verbally. In his seventy-odd years, he does not appear to have held a job, or even to have left Athens for any purpose other than war. He simply held conversations around the city. The impermanence of his vocation means that a careful distinction is typically made between the “historical” and the “literary” Socrates.
The distinction is in a sense meaningless, for the only way we know Socrates is through literary portraits of him. Socrates was fortunate in this regard. His ubiquitous presence around Athens and his talent for exposing the intellectual and moral pretensions of his interlocutors earned him the admiration of the city’s youth. A band of followers sat at his knee (probably literally) and learned to imitate his method of questioning. Among them was the brilliant Plato.
Plato’s Socrates begins like Boswell’s Johnson and winds up like Roth’s Zuckerman. The protagonist of nearly thirty dialogues written over the course of almost fifty years, the Platonic Socrates develops from an apparently biographical replica into an alter consciousness, a dramatic stand-in who can expound the author’s ideas more convincingly than the author can himself. He becomes a character, and such a compelling one that the Socrates of the collective imagination is unmistakably Plato’s: ironic, suspiciously humble, quick-witted, tireless, and as elusive as a snake. Plato was by no means the only writer of his generation to hit upon the idea of commandeering Socrates into dramatic or philosophical service. After the master’s death, Socratic dialogues became a literary fad much in the way that bleak, allusive poetry sprouted up after The Waste Land. But Plato’s work had the good fortune of being one of only two examples of the genre to survive more or less intact, and the second—the work of his near-exact contemporary Xenophon—is not as voluminous, sophisticated, or engaging. Compared with Plato’s Socrates, Xenophon’s is unsophisticated and inelegant. He is often dull, sometimes vulgar, and dismayingly weak in philosophical insights.
This isn’t to say that Xenophon’s Socrates is an imposter. He may, in fact, be more authentic by virtue of his banality. It is to say that the Socratic problem gets its intractability from the great difficulty of reconciling the surviving sources. That is why Albert Schweitzer, in his book The Quest of the Historical Jesus, expressed relief that his subject was not that other famous martyr. Jesus, he wrote, was at least depicted by “simple Christians without literary gifts.” Socrates comes to us via “literary men who exercised their creative ability upon the portrait.”3 The situation is even worse than that. Looking back at classical Greece from the twenty-first century, we see two visions of Socrates, two men who are often different in both character and the quality of their minds. It can sometimes seem as if they share only a vague familial resemblance, as if they were brothers separated at birth and raised by different families.
And yet, as with brothers, there are resemblances. The daimonion is one. Xenophon’s everyman and Plato’s genius may be dissimilar in spirit, but both authors portray their hero as having been routinely visited by a divine source; both write that the experience was well known in Athens; and both suggest that the daimonion’s implications for the city’s traditions and mores played a significant role in Socrates’ indictment, conviction, and execution. This last agreement is key. Socrates’ trial is not only the final act of his life, it is its culmination and its beacon to immortality. Just as the impact and importance of Darwin’s theory was illuminated by the Scopes trial, the impact and importance of Socrates’ mind was illuminated by his own, of which both Plato and Xenophon left accounts. And just as Christianity grew from the drama of Christ’s crucifixion, Western philosophy as we know it grew from the drama of Socrates’ execution. The injustice of the teacher’s death galvanized his students, Plato in particular.
Still, because the sources are so thin, there is no satisfying agreement on what caused Socrates’ martyrdom. Many scholars have argued that the primary motive behind Socrates’ prosecution was political. Socrates’ offense, the argument goes, was to have been an enemy of democracy and an all-around nuisance. It’s true that Socrates’ trial can’t be understood without reference to the political and cultural atmosphere of late-fifth-century BCE Athens, and to Socrates’ part in it, which was at best offensive and at worst treacherous. At the time of Socrates’ trial, Athens had just endured arguably the most convulsive twenty-five-year period in its history. It had been forced to accept an embarrassing, bitter defeat at the hands of Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, and its democratic system had twice been overturned by oligarchic coups, the second of which, in 404 BCE, ushered in a period of brutal extrajudicial executions, followed by paranoia and discord. Socrates had not played a direct part in these coups, but he was ideologically involved by virtue of his teaching.
The historical record indicates, for example, that Socrates had direct involvement with Critias, a prime mover in the murderous second oligarchy, the so-called Dictatorship of the Thirty, which left more than one thousand slaughtered democrats in its aftermath. In a speech delivered to an Athenian jury court fifty years after Socrates’ death, the famous orator Aeschines praised the body for having put Socrates to death “because he was shown to have educated Critias.”4 This comment, which suggests the tenor of the popular Athenian view, echoes an earlier speech made by the orator Polycrates. That speech, titled “Accusation of Socrates,” has been lost, but its argument has been preserved by Xenophon, who summarized and denounced it in his Memorabilia, a sort of hodgepodge of Socratic apologetics and reminiscences. According to Polycrates, Xenophon wrote, Socrates’ pernicious influence lay in the fact that
he encouraged his associates to make light of constitutional practice by saying that it was foolish to appoint political leaders by lot, and that nobody would employ a candidate chosen by lot as a pilot or carpenter or musician or for any other such post—although if these posts are badly filled, they cause less harm than political appointments; and the accuser said that this sort of talk encouraged the young to despise the established constitution and made them unruly.5
Polycrates makes a more expansive philosophical charge than Aeschines, and what he suggests—that Socrates was antidemocratic—is indisputable. In both Xenophon and Plato, Socrates professes a distaste for the direct democracy on which the Athenian state was based and continually dismisses and even mocks the idea that the populace could be a source of wisdom. His elitism was an intellectual assault on the political foundation of the city, and it would have been doubly insulting for the fact that Socrates was not shy about airing his opinions. In Plato’s dramatization of Socrates’ trial, the so-called Apology, Socrates even takes the time to lecture his main accuser, Meletus, on the folly of trusting the masses:
Tell me, my good sir, who improves our young men?
The laws.
That is not what I am asking, but what person who has knowledge of the laws to begin with?
These jurymen, Socrates.
How do you mean, Meletus? Are these able to educate the young and improve them?
Certainly.
All of them, or some but not others?
All of them.
Very good, by Hera. You mention a great abundance of benefactors. But what about the audience? Do they improve the young or not?
They do, too.
What about the members of the Council?
The Council-members, too.
But Meletus, what about the assembly? Do members of the assembly corrupt the young, or do they all improve them?
They improve them.
All the Athenians, it seems, make the young into fine good men, except me, and I alone corrupt them. Is that what you mean?
That is most definitely what I mean.
You condemn me to a great misfortune. Tell me: does this also apply with horses do you think? That all men improve them and one individual corrupts them? Or is quite the contrary true, one individual is able to improve them, or very few, namely, the horse-trainers, whereas the majority, if they have horses and use them, corrupt them? Is that not the case, Meletus, both with horses and all other animals? Of course it is, whether you…say so or not. It would be a very happy state of affairs if only one person corrupted our youth, while the others improved them.6
This is clever, deflating, and quintessentially Socratic. Indeed, while as a drama the Apology is among the most emotionally affecting of Plato’s works—the knowledge of its tragic outcome makes it so—it is also among the most intellectually lopsided. Meletus is a blustering, self-righteous idiot, ripe for Socratic evisceration. And if we consider the passage not as drama but as journalism, the only conclusion we can draw is that it could not have played well from the dock. The blatancy of Socrates’ condescension to his accusers even led Xenophon to venture an explanation, though it is an unsatisfying one. Socrates, he wrote, wanted to lose his case in order to avoid the infirmities of old age. Call it suicide by arrogance.
Does the unpopularity of Socrates’ political beliefs and the obnoxiousness with which he broadcast them, prove that they were the ultimate cause of his persecution? It couldn’t have helped. According to a census of the characters in Plato’s work conducted by the Danish historian Mogens Herman Hansen, nearly half of the men with whom Socrates consorted were “criminals and traitors.”7 Socrates also had a long-standing reputation, deserved or not, as a morally corrosive element. In 423, almost a quarter-century before his trial, he appeared as a character in Aristophanes’ comedic play The Clouds. The proprietor of a phrontisterion, or thinking shop, Aristophanes’ Socrates is a corrupt, fast-talking pseudo-intellectual who teaches young men how to prevail in unjust causes. At the end, his shop is burned to the ground, and he is savagely beaten.
But all this suggests only that politics permeated the atmosphere within which Socrates was convicted. It does not suggest that politics was the cause of that conviction. There is good reason to believe that it was not. First, it would have been illegal. Following the downfall of the Dictatorship of the Thirty, a reconciliation agreement was signed into law that granted political amnesty to all but the surviving members of the oligarchy. Socrates’ political actions, or at least those that occurred prior to 402, when the law took effect, would have been protected under this amnesty. Second, Socrates does not appear to have engaged in any indictable offense. He did not leave Athens, as many loyal democrats did, but he also did not submit to the authority of the Thirty—friends or not. As he tells the jury in Plato’s Apology (in one of his reluctant submissions to the convention of self-defense) when ordered by the Thirty to arrest a wealthy trader and deliver him for execution so that the trader’s assets could be liquidated by the state, he refused.8
There is a third, more substantial reason to discount the political interpretation of Socrates’ trial. If Socrates’ enemies had wanted to try him for his political transgressions, for an odiousness that included nonparticipation, a notion antithetical to Athenian democracy, they could have. With some cleverness, laws can be circumvented, and there even existed ones with which Socrates’ politics could have been ensnared. But they didn’t. Socrates was pulled into court not so much on the grounds that he had subverted Athenian politics, but more on the grounds that he had subverted Athenian religion. The historical record makes this clear. The third-century Roman Diogenes Laertius has even recorded the official indictment, which had been preserved in the Athenian archives:
This indictment is entered on affidavit by Meletus son of Meletus of the deme [district] Pitthus against Socrates son of Sophroniscus of Alopeke. Socrates is guilty of refusing to recognize the gods recognized by the State and introducing other, new divinities. He is also guilty of corrupting the youth. The penalty demanded is death.9
For the sake of clarity, the writer and translator Robin Waterfield has schematized this indictment as (1a) not recognizing the official gods of the city, (1b) introducing new gods, and (2) corrupting the young.10 Put this way, it becomes clear that charge number two follows logically from charge number one and is therefore ancillary to it. One cannot corrupt a young man’s mind by doing nothing, after all. Furthermore, Socrates himself confirms the religious impetus of the indictment in Plato’s Euthyphro, a dialogue set on the street just prior to his trial:
Euthyphro: Tell me, what does [Meletus] say you do to corrupt the young?
Socrates: Strange things, to hear him tell it, for he says that I am a maker of gods, and on the ground that I create new gods while not believing in the old gods, he has indicted me for their sake, as he puts it.11
In order to understand the religious charges leveled against Socrates and to determine whether he was in fact guilty of them—for an assessment of legality can proceed even when our sense of justice balks—some background on Athenian religion is necessary. For the modern reader it is a system simple enough to apprehend but nearly impossible to comprehend. Steeped as we are in the effluvia of two thousand years of monotheism, our unifying concept of organized religion is orthodoxy—tenets by which one’s level of adherence can be determined. We breathe religious rules and debate beliefs. Athenian polytheism had no organized system of doctrines. It had no book on which religious beliefs or actions were based. It had no organized system of churches. It had no priestly class. The only thing Greek state religion had that resembled a gravitational center was what we would today call a literary canon: the epics of Homer and the poetry of Hesiod. And even these authors, with whom all Athenians were familiar, could not stabilize the restless, volatile gods. The Athenian pantheon was a bewildering, ever-shifting array of characters—of proper Olympian gods, of popular demigods, and of quasi-divine legendary heroes.
At the same time, Greek religion was not a completely anarchic affair. It may not have been centralized, but it was certainly penetrative. For the Greeks, piety was inseparable from daily life, the sacred inseparable from the profane. Mark McPherran, a professor of philosophy at Simon Fraser University, in British Columbia, has summed up the matter well: “Greek religion did not comprise a unified, organized system of beliefs and rituals held at arm’s length from the social, political, and commercial aspects of life that we would term ‘secular.’ Rather, it was a complex tangle of practices and attitudes that pervaded every polis-member’s life in a variety of ways.” It was “seamlessly integrated into everyday life,” and like Athenian democracy, it was vitally, indispensably participatory.12 Piety meant frequent and often communal action through prayer, sacrifice, purification rituals, banquets, and festivals. No one was exempt.
In light of the centerlessness of Greek religion, it is nearly impossible to fathom how Socrates could have been found guilty, or even seriously accused, of not recognizing the gods of Athens. There were no “official gods”—or, rather, there were so many of them that the term nonrecognition is meaningless. Without a theological yardstick, Socrates’ faith could not be measured. What is more, the surviving evidence suggests that Socrates was diligent about performing the proper rituals and avoiding the improper ones. Both Plato and Xenophon wrote, we might say, as retroactive defense attorneys and should always be read with one eyebrow raised, but in their work Socrates comes across convincingly as a devout Athenian, unhesitating in his adherence to ritualistic tradition. In the Phaedo, the touching Platonic dialogue that tells the story of Socrates’ last hours, Socrates composes a hymn to Apollo while waiting for his execution, one of only two times he is reported to have written anything down. His dying words are even a request that one of his followers offer a sacrifice to the Greek god of medicine and healing:
The coldness was spreading about as far as his waist when Socrates uncovered his face—for he had covered it up—and said (they were his last words): “Crito, we ought to offer a cock to Asclepius. See to it, and don’t forget.”13
The only way in which it could be argued legitimately that Socrates did not recognize the proper gods of the city is in his almost monotheistic idealization of them. The Greek gods, though worshipped and idolized, were frequently human in their psychology. They fought, made love, committed murder and adultery, forged and broke alliances. But Socrates held the gods to a higher theological standard. To him, divinity meant perfect wisdom, and the popular stories of heavenly strife were nothing but the fantasies of poets.
Socrates’ moral elevation of the gods has often been emphasized by those who have intellectual and emotional stock in the Socrates of legend—a martyr for the cause of Reason, slaughtered for his philosophical purity. Gregory Vlastos, the foremost scholar of ancient Greek philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century, had this to say:
What would be left of…the…Olympians if they were required to observe the stringent norms of Socratic virtue…? Required to meet these austere standards, the city’s gods would have become unrecognizable. Their ethical transformation would be tantamount to the destruction of the old gods, the creation of new gods—which is precisely what Socrates takes to be the sum and substance of the accusation at his trial.14
The theme has also been taken up by Christian apologists, who have sometimes sought to remake Socrates not in the image of Jesus, as is traditional, but in the image of John the Baptist—a harbinger of truth in a world of heathens. But the theory that Socrates was killed for his claim of absolute divine morality ultimately teeters for lack of support. There are some intimations that Socrates’ contemporaries were troubled by his theology; in the Euthyphro, Socrates himself wonders whether he has been indicted because he finds it hard to believe the traditional stories about the gods.15 But during the trial, no one even hints at the possibility that Socrates’ guilt lies in his religious innovations. Meletus even denies him any belief at all, charging Socrates with atheism, an absurd claim that Socrates easily demolishes.16 Furthermore, Socrates’ innovations were not all that fresh. Several prominent intellectuals before him, such as Pindar, Xenophanes, Euripides, and Heraclitus, had openly criticized traditional Greek religion, and none had been persecuted by their cities.17 Of course, as with his politics, Socrates’ well-known theological dissent likely influenced his fate. Once indicted and brought in front of the jury—an intimidating mass of five hundred men—he was on trial for the whole of his life and all his beliefs. But without proof or even convincing evidence that Socrates failed to recognize the gods of Athens, we can conclude that the only charge with legal teeth was introducing new gods. And the only thing that could have given those teeth their bite was Socrates’ daimonion.
There are a number of reasons to conclude that Socrates’ daimonion was at the core of the charge that he invented new gods and therefore was at the core of the entire trial. First, though we no longer have the prosecution’s verbal arguments against Socrates, those that preceded his “apology,” we are told by Plato that Meletus “saw fit to travesty” the daimonion in his presentation to the jury.18 Second, in the Euthyphro, the eponymous seer whom Socrates meets at the start of his legal travails, makes it abundantly clear that the daimonion is what precipitated the trial: “I see, Socrates; it’s because of your saying that you are constantly visited by your supernatural voice. So [Meletus] has indicted you for introducing unorthodox views; and he is coming into court to misrepresent your conduct, because he knows that it is easy to misrepresent this sort of thing to the masses.”19 But the most convincing piece of evidence occurs in Xenophon’s brief, poorly written, but invaluable Apology, in which Socrates explicitly links his daimonion to the charge that he introduced new gods:
As for my claim that a divine voice comes to me and communicates what I must do, how in claiming this am I introducing new deities? Those who rely on bird-calls and the utterances of men are, I suppose, receiving guidance from voices. Can there be any doubt that thunder has a voice or that it is an omen of the greatest significance? And take the priestess who sits on the tripod at Pytho—doesn’t she too use a voice to announce messages from the god? Moreover, that God has knowledge of the future and communicates it in advance to whomever he wishes—this too, as I say, is a universal claim and belief. But whereas others state that it is birds and utterances and chance meetings and oracles which forewarn them, I call it divine, and I think that in using this description I am being both more accurate and more devout than those who ascribe the power of the gods to birds. Furthermore, I have evidence to show that I am not attributing things falsely to God: I have often told friends what God has advised and I have never been found to be wrong.20
According to Xenophon, this elicited from the jury a thorubos—a clamor of disapproval. Some of the jury members “didn’t believe what [Socrates] was saying, while others were jealous that he might have had more from the gods than they.” The speech stands out as the most dramatic moment in the text. The tumult only increases when Socrates goes on to recount the famous and ironic Delphic proclamation that he is the wisest man alive.21
What was it about Socrates’ daimonion that so scandalized the jury? Mark McPherran enumerates three reasons in his book The Religion of Socrates, which makes a definitive case for the legal and religious centrality of the experience to Socrates’ trial. The first reason pertains to the technically blasphemous relationship that Socrates had with his daimonion. The Greek gods were believed to have the ability to make contact with humans. They intervened both for their own sake and for the sake of mortals. But traditional Greek religion also set the gods apart from men by forbidding true relations between the two. Gods and men did not converse. One ordered and the other obeyed. In later antiquity the gulf between mortal and immortal widened further. By Socrates’ time, one could establish contact with the gods only at a formal remove, in the manner of the Delphic oracle, with a priestess serving as the medium between Apollo and whoever was asking his advice. Socrates obeyed one half of Greek tradition: He always and without hesitation obeyed his daimonion’s commands. But he flouted the other by proclaiming a level of intimacy that would have been profoundly offensive to conventional Greek piety. Socrates’ deity, as Plutarch wrote, was “personal.” It was private, exclusive. It spoke only to him. It was, therefore, unacceptable. As the historian Robert Garland has written, “The situation may not have been unlike that which prevails in the Roman Catholic Church today, where an alleged vision is treated as a mere delusion unless proof to the contrary can be supplied.”22 We can take this thought even further. The situation was not unlike what has prevailed throughout all of history. Claims of faith based on personal experience have always been suspect precisely because they are not prone to communal scrutiny.
The second reason McPherran gives follows directly from this. Because Socrates’ daimonion was by definition unverifiable, because it could not be subjected to public standards of wisdom or beneficence or decency, it could, by a short, paranoid stretch of the imagination, be deemed harmful to Athens. This imputation is familiar as well: Private religious experiences are still often feared for their demonic potential. And to the Greek mind the very word daimonion left ample room for the implication of a broad array of dark forces. This was especially true in Socrates’ day. In addition to the two great scourges of the fifth century BCE—the Persian War, which Athens effectively won, and the Peloponnesian War, which it did not—a plague broke out in the city in 430 that decimated a third of the population, and fundamentalists emerged proclaiming the fury of the gods and the guilt of Athens. Three decades later the mood was still jittery and apocalyptic. The presence of an untested and untestable deity in the midst of Athens, one potentially involved in “black magic,” would undoubtedly have stirred the jury to fear for the spiritual and physical health of the city.
It was the third and final implication of Socrates’ daimonion, however, that ultimately resulted in his conviction and death. Socrates was a stubborn, raffish, chronically unemployed, disputatious pest of a man in a city shimmering with the intolerance of its own decline; his demise was nothing if not overdetermined. But he might have survived had he not ignored one of the city’s most cherished civic functions. In accordance with a tradition that had been developed over the course of centuries, Athens had four rigid rules that all new gods were forced to follow in order to gain legal entrance to the city, almost as if they were applying for a visa. First, the god had to contact an individual by means of an epiphany—a voice, for example, or a vision or a sign. Second, the person who received the epiphany had to gain the support of the citizenry and the priests of any rival gods by arguing in public for the new god’s goodwill. Third, the individual and the new god’s partisans had to petition the Boule, the upper Athenian assembly, to send the matter to the Ekklesia, the lower, popular assembly, where it would be put to a vote. Finally, the new god had to receive the support of an oracle, a move that was considered the divine parallel to the support of the city.23
It is obvious that Socrates fulfilled his first obligation. He had heard a voice that, although he did not identify its source, might have suggested to many the arrival of a new deity. And in light of his contract with the Delphic oracle, it could be argued, with a bit of ingenuity, that he fulfilled the last. But the city was utterly absent from Socrates’ experience. It never entered the frame of his conception of the daimonion. It had ample time to do so. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates declares that he has been receiving divine visits since “early childhood.”24 If we take this to mean since he was ten years old, that’s sixty years that Socrates, from the perspective of Athens, kept his experience to himself. This is no crime when viewed through the lens of modern liberalism, according to which reticence is a right. It is none also when viewed through the lens of modern faith; for many mystics publicity is unholy and privacy the crux of divinity. But according to the Athenian code—a code applied by a band of small-minded, retributive hypocrites, but a code nonetheless—those long years of selective privacy bespoke a capital offense, and the verdict was just. The hemlock flowed legally.
Mark McPherran has observed that during the twentieth century, Socrates was conventionally portrayed as the Bertrand Russell of Athens—a cool atheist wrapped in a toga. In the past twenty years, the tide has shifted somewhat. In academic circles it is increasingly legitimate to speak of Socrates as a man of faith as well as a man of reason. But this development has had a countervailing effect. To many scholars a faithful Socrates is still an embarrassing Socrates, and the mounting emphasis on the irrational has led some to find innovative ways to blot out the stain of superstition from Socrates’ image. The most tenacious spot, and therefore the most infuriating, has been the daimonion—what Gregory Vlastos called, with palpable annoyance, that “unpredictable little beast.”25
The only way to understand the claims of those who would cut the daimonion out of Socrates’ biography is to establish its proper place there. Figuring out what someone’s voices are like is hard enough with the living; for a man who has been dead for 2,400 years, it approaches the impossible. Yet there are aspects of the daimonion that the evidence establishes more or less firmly and that give us a clearer understanding of the experience. The first of these is sensory. In the twenty-eight Platonic dialogues whose authorship is not generally disputed, the daimonion appears eleven times. Nine of these appearances are descriptively vague: Five refer to the experience as a “sign” (semeion), and four refer to it as a divine “something” (to daimonion). But in the Apology and in the Phaedrus, a dialogue on love and the art of rhetoric, as well as in Xenophon’s Apology, it is referred to specifically as a voice (phone). Precisely what kind of voice neither Plato nor Xenophon reveals. Was it internal or external? Audible or psychological? Socrates’ disciples are incurious on the finer points. But on the matter of modality we can be reasonably certain, based on the mere existence of the description, that the daimonion was sensory in quality and that it was verbal.
What it said is more difficult to discern. The most pointed descriptions of the daimonion appear in Plato’s Apology, but that work touches less upon content than structure. Socrates tells the jury, for example, that his daimonion “always dissuades me from what I am proposing to do, and never urges me on”;26 that it has often checked him “in the middle of a sentence”; and that it opposes him “even in quite trivial things if I [am] going to take the wrong course.”27 These statements clearly suggest that the daimonion was admonitory, but how did it admonish? Did it say “no” or “halt”? Did it offer arguments? Did it suggest alternative courses of action? The only answers we have to these questions are the scattered anecdotal appearances of the daimonion, and they are frustratingly elliptical. In the Phaedrus, Socrates relates how his voice stopped him from committing impiety. “My friend,” he says to the young title character of the dialogue, “just as I was about to cross the river, the familiar divine sign came to me which, whenever it occurs, holds me back from something I am about to do. I thought I heard a voice coming from this very spot, forbidding me to leave until I made atonement for some offense against the gods.” Socrates goes on to explain what happened. While delivering a discourse on love at Phaedrus’ prompting, he felt a deep uneasiness, but he couldn’t or didn’t try to understand what the sensation meant until the divine voice forced him to do so. He then realized what his error had been. He had spoken of love as if it were a bad thing, when “love is a god or something divine.” It can’t be bad.28
This is the daimonion at its most demonstrative. Elsewhere, it is laconic to the point of silence. In Plato’s Euthydemus, a complex drama about wisdom and argumentation, Socrates explains to his friend Crito how he came to have an illuminating conversation in the Lyceum (the future site of Aristotle’s school) with two men whom he had never met before. “I was sitting by myself in the undressing room just where you saw me and was already thinking of leaving. But when I got up, my customary divine sign put in an appearance. So I sat down again, and in a moment the two of them…came in, and some others with them….”29 The daimonion does not tell Socrates why he should sit down. It doesn’t predict the future. As far as we are told, it doesn’t even tell him to sit down. It simply “puts in an appearance,” and he understands what he is meant to do.
Little is added to our understanding of the daimonion from its remaining appearances. In Xenophon’s Symposium and Plato’s Theaetetus, it rejects the return of a prodigal student, as if it were an internal admissions officer. In the Republic we learn that few others have had a similar experience. In Xenophon’s Memorabilia we learn that Socrates and others considered it to be unfailingly correct. In Plato’s Apology we learn that even the daimonion’s absence could be meaningful. Socrates interprets it as proof that his death is for the best:
You too, gentlemen of the jury, must look forward to death with confidence, and fix your minds on this one belief, which is certain: that nothing can harm a good man either in life or after death, and his fortunes are not a matter of indifference to the gods. This present experience of mine has not come about mechanically; I am quite clear that the time has come when it was better for me to die and be released from my distractions. That is why my sign never turned me back. For my own part I bear no grudge at all against those who condemned me and accused me, although it was not with this kind intention that they did so, but because they thought that they were hurting me; and that is culpable of them.30
Is there anything definitive that we can pull from this slender profile? Is there any quality that emerges as a constant? Only one: the demand of strict obedience. Not once does Socrates disobey or even question his daimonion. From the examples that we have, both the trivial and the grave, the rule that coalesces is that in Socrates’ relationship to his deity, dissent was inconceivable. The wisdom of the daimonion was absolute, its word final. This is not to say that Socrates’ obedience was irrational. On the contrary, it was formed by reason. Socrates began to hear his voice when he was a child, and unless we conclude that he obeyed it reflexively, as even saints rarely do, it must only have been through the slow growth of trust in its reliability that he came to banish thoughts of resistance. Theoretically, life is scientific. Experiences multiply like lab experiments, and based on falsifications and confirmations, beliefs and behaviors are formed. Most of us are lucky enough to find a few shakily reliable theories. Socrates found a law: The daimonion was always right. And once that law was established, rationality fell from the equation. In his old age, Socrates did not have to apply his intellect to determine what the daimonion wanted. He knew what it wanted. It wanted him to stop whatever he was doing or about to do. Intelligent thought might have been necessary to determine precisely what that transgression was, but obedience was immediate.
The strict devotion of Socrates to his daimonion is the hurdle that some modern thinkers have refused to jump. In his book Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher, Gregory Vlastos based a lengthy dismissal of the daimonion’s importance on a famous passage from the Crito, the Platonic dialogue set in Socrates’ jail cell just days before his execution. The passage, a self-declaration, is curt, resolute, and defiant: “I am not just now but in fact I’ve always been the sort of person who’s persuaded by nothing but the reason that appears to me to be best when I’ve considered it.”31 It also has absolutely nothing to do with the daimonion. Socrates is merely proclaiming his fidelity to his own intellect over the capricious opinions of “the many.” Nonetheless, on the authority of this sentence, Vlastos drew two conclusions about the daimonion. First, that on several occasions it is nothing more than a “‘hunch’—a strong intuitive impression” such as we all have at times and find retroactive ways of articulating.32 Second, that on other occasions it is a legitimate religious experience, but one without meaning. It is a flicker, a mere switch for the intellect. Here Vlastos erected a thick wall between the irrational and the rational:
[All Socrates] could claim to be getting from the daimonion at any given time is precisely what he calls the daimonion itself—a “divine sign,” which allows, indeed requires, unlimited scope for the deployment of his critical reason to extract whatever truth it can from these monitions…. [T]here can be no conflict between Socrates’ unconditional readiness to follow critical reason wherever it may lead and his equally unconditional commitment to obey commands issued to him by his supernatural god through supernatural signs. These two commitments cannot conflict because only by the use of his own critical reason can Socrates determine the true meaning of any of these signs.33
Both of Vlastos’s interpretations wither in the face of the evidence, the first because Socrates shows elsewhere that he is capable of having rational hunches without calling the experience daimonic, and the second because at times the daimonion indisputably trumps his critical reason. As a negative force it must oppose something, and what it opposes is Socrates’ rationally thought-out actions.
Vlastos is not the staunchest of rationalists. He admits that Socrates was a religious man and that to deny him his faith would be a “surgery which kills the patient.”34 Others have not been so circumspect. In a 1985 essay, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum stripped the daimonion of all spiritual meaning, essentially recasting it in her own image as a metaphor for the intellect itself, “an ironic way of alluding to the supreme authority of dissuasive reason and elenctic argument.”* Her support for this proposition is based less on evidence than ideology. Nussbaum simply values, and wishes Socrates to value, reason above belief: “The daimonion is called daimonion, a divine thing, because human reason is a divine thing, a thing intermediary (as a daimon is intermediary) between the animal that we are and the god that we might be. By taking his cue from this sui generis sign and not from the authority of tradition, Socrates is telling us that reason, in each of us, is the god truly worthy of respect, a presence far more authoritative than Zeus or Aphrodite.”35
How can we say for certain that Nussbaum is wrong? Once reported, voice-hearing leaves the sanctity of the self and enters the fair territory of interpretation in which a perennial obstacle is the maw of metaphor. Swallowed, the experience transforms into witchcraft, into demonic possession, into schizophrenia, into intellect. It is almost a right. With Socrates there is even a good reason to sanction the process. Irony is the essence of the Socratic method. For the purpose of education, Socrates could turn meaning on its head. But one’s sense of order and truth must ultimately revolt against an interpretation that takes Socratic irony to be complete. It would be anarchical, even destructive, to conclude that everything Socrates said was in the service of a truth separate from the words themselves. It would also be anachronistic and antithetical to that basic tenet of human nature which disallows perfection. We may wish for Socrates to follow reason alone, but if we take his words in their proper contexts as our guide, the only conclusion we can draw is that Socrates, for all his peerless abilities to reason, to apply logic to the disorder of thought and action, believed strongly and completely in a phenomenon in which rationality was barely a factor. He followed his voice.