A Simpler Socrates (I)

I've been vaguely aware that Plato isn't the only source of information on Socrates for a while now. So when I saw the Penguin Classics edition of "Xenophon : Conversations of Socrates" in a bookshop, I felt duty-bound to give it a go.

First off, I have to say that the translator's notes (Hugh Tredennick and Robin Waterfield) are a lot more helpful and analytical than usual. They're more critical than these sort of notes tend to be, in the best sense of the word : trying to get at what Xenophon meant, what Socrates himself likely thought, which arguments are interesting and which are a pile of crap. They aren't afraid to be judgemental either, noting that while much of Xenophon is good, he had a tendency towards excessive repetition, prudishness, and doesn't have the razor-sharp incisiveness of Plato. The latter is certainly true; Xenophon comes nowhere close to Plato's outstanding level of minute, careful dissections of the arguments. 

However, while they do note that Xenophon is "often at his best", I still think Messrs Tredennick and Waterfield might be a bit harsh. True, large tracts of Xenophon are simply uninteresting. But if he has a prudish, "Victorian" streak, I found it to be no more than a streak; I didn't really find it excessively repetitive either. Xenophon is sometimes plodding, often forced (almost as though nameless characters were written as placeholders) but often witty, unafraid of colourful metaphors, and usually highly readable. If there are parts which are dull, there are also parts which are extremely interesting, even if he can't lay claim to Plato's level of genius. Xenophon, like Cicero, feels a bit like "Plato Lite", but is no less worth reading for that.

There are plenty of interesting aspects to Xenophon's work that stand in their own right, some of which I'll look at in the next post. In this first part though, I want to begin with a bit more of a direct comparison with Plato. By offering a similar but different contemporary perspective, I think Xenophon helps shed a good deal of light on why Plato came up with such thoroughly weird ideas - in short, because Athenian society itself was weird, and rather more alien and less familiar than we sometimes give it credit for.

This will be a bit of an implicit comparison : that is, I'm mainly going to give you my reading-between-the-lines impressions from both authors rather than quoting either of them at any length. More direct quotes will be used next time.

Religion

First, while Plato occasionally flirts with atheism and is quite unafraid of deliberately using religion as an opiate of the masses, he never crosses the line into a true disbelief. Large parts feel sincerely devout, even if wildly different from the common ideas of the gods living atop Olympus hurling thunderbolts at errant mortals below - let alone partaking in any of those crazy swan-based antics Zeus is famous for.

Xenophon feels different. His works seems altogether more authentically religious, as though he's never even stopped to consider any notion that divinity didn't exist. To Plato, divinity might be something real but highly abstract, having no scruples about manipulating specific beliefs to further his objectives in constructing an ideal society. Xenophon doesn't show any hint of this, and would probably react to such things with horror. To him, the beliefs don't seem like beliefs : they seem like something living, actively real, to the point where the mystical element is almost absent. Divination isn't some crazy-ass priest wailing in noxious fumes venting forth from the bowels of the earth on a moonlit night, but a perfectly ordinary, common-sense tool that anyone can use to obtain knowledge inaccessible by rational, evidence-based investigation. 

Xenophon feels like a far more ordinary, conservative member of Athenian society. While he shares Plato's disapproval of the execution of Socrates (most of the work appears to be a dedicated defensive tract rather than philosophy proper), he doesn't feel the need to remake the world, doesn't attempt to design any revolutionary new systems. If his world needed reform it was only to gently swing everyone back to a previous better era, when people just thought things through a bit more carefully.

Social democracy is not necessarily liberal democracy

The most interesting aspect of this to me is his gentle but inescapable (and frequently condescending, petty, and irritating) illiberalism. Plato's idea of justice was "minding one's own business", which in some ways is the very essence of liberalism. Ironically, his two attempts at designing Utopias were both tyrannically unfree. His reasoning boiled down to his claim that some people are more expert than others at various skills, one of which is managing other people : so logically, those people are the ones who should be in charge. Which is not itself entirely unreasonable, but by God did he go nuts with this.

I think Xenophon at least helps with an explanation. What comes across is the enormous social obligations placed upon each and every Athenian : it wasn't that you could participate in the Assembly and other political processes, it's that you were expected to. We all know about slaves and the rampant misogyny of Athenian society, but it would be a mistake to think that just because the rest of Athen's inhabitants were democratic, they were also liberal. They were not. Xenophon makes it clear that even (or perhaps especially) the rich were under enormous pressure to fulfil their duty to the State* : to offer sacrifices, entertain foreign visitors, do favours for citizens, provide horse-races, finance choruses and sponsor athletic competitions, contribute to the military... He concludes this list with a warning.

* It would be interesting to look at how this relates to taxation. Athens rarely imposed direct taxes, supposedly seeing it as an affront to personal freedom, but then it had to counteract this with almost mandatory philanthropy.

And if you give the impression of not doing enough in any of these areas, I have no doubt the Athenians will retaliate as severely as if they had caught you stealing from them.

Elsewhere, the State seems to play the role of a gossipy tabloid :

If anyone shows no consideration for his parents, the State imposes a penalty upon him and disqualifies him from holding public office... if anyone fails to tend the graves of his dead parents, even this becomes the subject of a State inquiry when candidates for office are having their conduct scrutinised.

Xenophon provides another, more shocking example of just how little the Athenians valued individualism. Bizarrely, rape was considered a lesser crime than adultery, because the act of rape "ruins the character" of only one person, whereas adultery is the fault of two. In essence this views people as extremely malleable sheep, and just doesn't make any sense in a more individualistic, liberal society.

The very fact that he uses not force but persuasion makes him more detestable, because a lover who uses force proves himself a villain, but one who uses persuasion ruins the character of the one who consents. 

So we should not conflate liberalism with democracy. The idea that each person should be able to live according to their preferences does not at all fit with the strong sense of social duty pervading everyday Athenian society. Democracy seems to have been a purely political decision-making process, not as a means to providing people with greater freedom.

No escape from the nomos

And this is not just my view either. Recall Michael Scott's Ancient Worlds, which posits that the big advantage of fledgling democracies was empowering societies to field larger, more capable armies than their neighbours (and Xenophon is far more explicitly warlike than Plato), that Socrates really did corrupt the youth in that he taught them an individualist mindset that was completely at odds with the social obligations of the day. Now when I read that book I wondered if this was a no more than a pet theory of the author, but intriguingly, the comments of the translator's of Xenophon are strikingly similar.

His [Socrates] questioning method was (and is) designed to get people to think for themselves and to prick the illusory conceit of knowledge. And what is the most common source for thinking that one knows something ? It is nomos, the unwritten conditioning that any society imposes on its members. Since Socrates was particularly concerned with morality... he could easily be made out to be a subversive : justice was regarded as a State issue, not a matter of private knowledge... In short, within the context of the restored democracy... and the Greek nomos, a good case could be made out that Socrates was guilty as charged.

Elsewhere they note that a strain of anti-intellectualism pervaded society because it was - quite correctly - perceived as undermining social values. They also note that the widespread use of slavery wasn't seen as an unfortunate reality but a necessity. As Sparta had its slave caste to allow a military elite, so Athens did the same (though to a lesser degree) to allow a kind of social elite.

The workforce would have been all, or mainly, slaves. The Athenian economy depended on slave-labour. The aristocratic Athenian citizen's rather supercilious attitude to manual labour fed and was fed by his reliance on slaves; the political system, in which every male citizen could play a part by taking time off work to vote in the Assembly or do jury service, could not have existed without slaves to do the everyday work.

Similarly, Xenophon expresses admiration for Spartan society, as did Plato at times, while Herotodus records something of a pro-Spartan sentiment in the broader society. What today we see as extreme, almost unbelievable fanaticism*, was at the time widely admired.

* Personally I think this has however been greatly exaggerated in popular culture. There are plenty of hints in all of these authors that even the Spartiate were not 100% models of military perfection in 100% of the things they did 100% of the time; human beings aren't built to live like that.

With this in mind, perhaps Plato's arguments become more understandable. There are some striking similarities to modern Western society to be found in ancient Athens : not least the notion of democracy itself, but also such mundane realities as the existence of Instagram influencers (or Only Fans if you're feeling less charitable); modern symposia, on the other hand, generally have less dancing girls and prostitutes than back in the day. But in some ways it was wholly alien, founded on very different principles, and the modern ideal of liberalism - that everyone gets a say in proportion to how much an issue affects them - was simply nowhere to be found*. The goal society was primarily concerned with was a functioning society, and the idea of everyone living their own lives for their own sake would have seemed incomprehensibly selfish. 

* One very explicit example : Xenophon casually states that it's fine to enslave an enemy city, and no-one at the time would think anything amiss with this. Even given that slavery in classical Greece was nothing much like the industrial-scale horrors of later centuries, nobody today would think that this was an example of proper behaviour, no matter how "wicked and hostile" the inhabitants of the unfortunate city might be !

Dangerous democracy ? 

Now you might be wondering, what about Plato's famous rants about how much democracy breeds false experts and leads to a presumption of excessive freedom ? Here again Xenophon's different perspective considerably changes how we might view this. At first, he too goes on a very similar "it's all part of the endless moral decline of society" grumpy-old-man rant, how everyone thinks they know more than they do and how this wasn't the case in the past. And at times it feels extremely ironic that the group-oriented democratic trend has engendered a debilitating drive towards individual selfishness.

But then he adds a major caveat : actually, he says, when you look at it more carefully, this really only applies to the military. The political process in his view is just fine, with the execution of Socrates being a lamentable exception. In fact it's not even the whole of the military forces which are suffering from incompetence, but just the infantry and cavalry, with the navy still being ably led and organised.

So was Plato just taking a legitimate grievance too far ? Not necessarily. There's no obvious reason (from these texts alone) to say who was right and who was wrong; both made essentially the same complaint, but Xenophon massively restricted its scope compared to Plato. Nor was either of them writing entirely at face value. The translator notes that Xenophon uses phrases like "I know that this happened" more as a literary device than an actual statement of truth, and his works are rife with anachronisms - while Plato never even speaks in the first person at all. Socratic dialogues seem to have been a literary genre of the time, most of which from other writers are now lost, so it's hard to see them in their full context.

Plato was essentially right that the democracies of the time were unstable, however. There were many other democracies present in antiquity (some dozens, albeit in different forms), most of which did simply fail pretty much as Plato said. Michael Scott notes that Rome's limited form of democracy was far more successful than the direct version of Athens, even if its Republic was eventually perverted into an Empire. But Xenophon's comments do at least give us pause for thought, reminding us that perhaps Plato's social observations were heavily biased.

Perhaps a safer general point is that this emphasises that social culture matters as much as political culture. Today we see liberalism and democracy as intertwined; the ancients simply didn't. Inasmuch as they had any concept of liberalism, or at least personal freedom, they wouldn't have thought it was a good idea in and of itself. They simply didn't seem to have anything much in the way of a mechanism to balance the conflicts inevitable when trying to deliberately maximise personal freedoms - this is something which took centuries to develop and remains highly imperfect. So looking for general lessons about the fate of democracies based on the earlier failures is interesting and important, but we should be wary of drawing direct parallels.

By the same token, this makes it unfair to judge the past by the standards of the present. It's absolutely true that they came up with some batshit crazy monstrous ideas, but I sometimes see people taking this very... personally. Plato is explicit that you can't really know what he really thinks based on his writings; to try and conclude anything much about Socrates himself (more next time) is even more risky. So I personally would not get at all hung up on the "anti democracy" vibe of these early thinkers. They lived in a very different social unwelt from us, and to expect them to have come up with things we ourselves haven't really managed, to expect them to have actually found a working harmonious social system, is simply folly.