Texts in Context:
The Legacy of Socrates

About a month passed, during which at least one wealthy friend, Crito, is supposed to have tried to get Socrates out to the safety of exile by bribing the guard, only for the philosopher to refuse to break the law by escaping. At last, the fateful night came. According to his own account of this final conversation, Plato was taken ill and was unable to be there, but learned of it later through a friend; Socrates bade his wife farewell and had a final discussion with his friends on the immortality of the soul. At the appointed hour—with the same serenity he displayed when asking people questions in the marketplace—he took the hemlock that was brought to him.

Examined Lives

One might have expected Socrates’ students, especially the most attached, to have been too devastated to carry on their master’s habitual forms or topics of inquiry, and one would almost certainly expect them to produce inferior work to his. The fact that neither of these anticlimactic fates came to pass is chiefly a reflection of the genius of Plato. Attentive, loyal, and imaginative, he was the first heir to Socrates’ mantle. Using some of his inherited wealth, he purchased an olive grove a little less than a mile outside Athens’ city limits; within a very few years, he had dedicated the place, and himself, to training pupils the same way his master had—questioning, defining, doubting, theorizing. To this day, we commemorate this place when we describe the profession of higher education or select names for certain schools, for it was called Akadēmeia [Ἀκαδήμεια].

Plato’s own intellectual career is too subtle and voluminous to trace here; though some of the works attached to his name are forgeries or misattributed anonymous works, he composed between twenty and thirty genuine works, mostly dialogues. Moreover, these first enunciated some of the most significant subjects in all later philosophy: the problem of universals; the nature and loves of the soul; the foundations of epistemology; how to define the four cardinal virtues (wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance); and what are the best principles on which to organize society (as well as on whose say-so that is the case).

Plato was not the only founder of a philosophical school that followed in Socrates’ footsteps and looked to him as its spiritual if not literal originator. A few of the others were even fellow students of Plato who had learnt from Socrates directly—Antisthenes, for instance, who founded the school of the Cynics (iconoclastic ascetics who rejected civilization’s comforts and restraints alike as unnatural). Others were derived at greater removes, like Aristotle, Plato’s own prize pupil, whose comprehensive school of thought was known as the Peripatetics, or “Walkabouts.” Zeno of Citium founded of the rigorously moral school of Stoicism in Socrates’ honor, and Pyrrho of Elis founded of classical Skepticism (which differs slightly from skepticism in the modern sense,^§ and which embraced the Platonic Academy itself not long after Plato’s death).

We have now given the Socratic background. For the rest of the foreground, and especially the start of its entanglement with the rest of the Mediterranean, our readers will have to wait until next week.

*We do possess one other contemporary account, that of Xenophon‘s Memorabilia. However, its author, though a fellow disciple of Socrates, was not an eyewitness: a professional soldier, he was on a campaign in Asia Minor and Mesopotamia (modern Türkiye and Iraq) at the time. His source, Hermogenes of Alopece, was a friend of Socrates but is not known to have been present at the trial either, although Plato does name him among those who were with Socrates when he died.
**Plato, really Platōn [Πλάτων], was a nickname—his given name was Aristocles. The most literal interpretation of Platōn is “wide”; he was a wrestler in youth, and the nickname likely meant “wide-shouldered.” (Some Classicists would rather drink their own bowl of hemlock than admit it, but the exact equivalent of this nickname in modern English is “Brad.”)
†A common, if less literal, translation of this work’s title is The Acts of the Apostles.
‡Much Ado About Nothing III.3.
^§Specifically, classical Skepticism was not interested in encouraging doubt of unusual claims (still less in refuting the supernatural or paranormal). Rather, the ancient Skeptics were of the opinion that most philosophical claims on all subjects were unproven and probably unprovable, and therefore commended not presumption against them, but entire suspension of judgment in either direction. Put simply, one might describe them as urging that “it isn’t necessary to have an opinion, just in general.”

Gabriel Blanchard, a proud uncle to seven nephews, has a baccalaureate in Classics from the University of Maryland, College Park. He serves as CLT’s editor at large, and lives in Baltimore, MD.

Thank you for reading the Journal of the Classic Learning Test. To read more about the great writers of our Author Bank, try our brief bios of Confucius, St. Jerome, St. Catherine of Siena, John Milton, and Willa Cather. Or, to begin at the beginning with our “Texts in Context” history series, you can start with these posts on history as a discipline, or jump right in with the two on prehistory and protohistory, advancing immediately into the Bronze Age.

Published on 22nd July, 2024. Page image of La Mort de Socrate or “The Death of Socrates” (1787) by Jacques-Louis David.