Thread by @ft_variations

Good morning!

This is a pure revisionist fantasy. Socrates was the friend, lover, and teacher of a group of brutal tyrants who took over Athens and murdered 5% of the population. Socrates was tried for collaboration, not for resistance.

External Tweet loading...
If nothing shows, it may have been deleted
by @existentialcoms view original on Twitter

Let's do just a little bit of history to wrap up the week.

I've done versions of this thread before on my old account, but here it is again. Also, I'm writing a book about this and I'm no longer in the habit of giving away my best work for free, so this is very schematic.

The Peloponnesian War was an imperial war between Athens and Sparta for control of the Aegean and the Greek-speaking world. It lasted from 431 BC until 404 BC.

The war ended with the defeat of Athens by Sparta.

We have an idealized, almost cartoonish image of democratic ancient Athens. In truth, power corrupts and imperial power corrupts imperially, and the foundations of Athenian democracy had been slowly eroding ever since Athens became an imperial power after the Greco-Persian Wars.

In 404 BC, when Athens was finally defeated, a faction of pro-Spartan nobles called the Thirty Tyrants seized control of the city and installed a brief but brutal dictatorship.

The Thirty Tyrants were in power less than a year, from 404-403 BC.

According to the testimony of Aristotle (in The Constitution of Athens), they seem to have managed in that brief window of time to slaughter about 5% of the population of Athens without trial.

You can find Aristotle's account in §30-41 of The Constitution of Athens.

Here he is describing the way in which the Thirty first seemed like moderates, but quickly stepped up their crackdown (trans. F.G Kenyon in the Princeton Aristotle, ed Barnes).

Typical tyrant stuff.

Among the other actions the Thirty Tyrants undertook was to make a list of "real" citizens and to disenfranchise, exile, or murder anyone not on the list. Naturally, the list changed at whim.

Here's Aristotle again:

Any of this sounding familiar?

History is fractal and tyranny is boringly predictable.

But I digress.

The leader of the Thirty Tyrants seems to have been a dude named Critias.

This same Critias also happens to have been a student of Socrates and a cousin of Plato's mother.

There's some debate whether the Critias of Plato's dialogue Critias was the same guy or that guy's grandfather.

But one thing seems clear: Plato was completely unashamed to be affiliated or associated with the Thirty Tyrants, and his dialogues show them as Socrates' star pupils.

Plato's dialogues, by the way, are full of reactionary anti-democratic arguments, but that's a different thread.

The thing with Socrates is, even though he's one of the best-attested figures in all antiquity, the sources are still pretty thin.

With one major exception, all the surviving sources who knew Socrates personally were his own students, whose reputation was bound up with his.

The primary accounts of the trial and death of Socrates are the Socratic writings of Plato and Xenophon, Socrates' pupils. These are also our main sources for his character and his philosophy.

These are not very objective sources.

Plato, especially, was by now the head of a school of philosophy; in a newly-restored democracy, with fierce competition from foreign teachers and dialecticians, Plato had a strong motive to preserve his reputation and whitewash the alliegances and investments of his dead mentor.

A major clue to the real motive behind the trial of Socrates is the fact that both Xenophon and Plato make a point of describing how Socrates #resisted the Thirty, even though the trial took place after democracy was restored, and even though the official charges were unrelated.

In Xenophon we find the assertion, later repeated by Diogenes Laertius, that "the Thirty forbade him to teach the art of words" (εκώλυσαν τέχνας διδάσκειν λόγων, DL II.19-20).

In Plato's Apology we find Socrates proving how committed he is to justice and democracy with this very flimsy story (trans. Grube in the Hackett Plato):

The thing you have to ask yourself about these stories is - even if they're true, what do they tell us?

Tyranny is generally accompanied by a crackdown on education and other institions of civil society. To say that Socrates was one of the teachers affected, as Xenophon does, is hardly to say that he was specifically targeted by the regime.

Plato's story, on the other hand, is much more bizarre. You were given a direct order by ruthless, murderous tyrants but you didn't feel like it so you went home and let the other four deal with it...and suffered no consequences? That sounds odd to me.

Whether or not he was allowed to teach, it's clear that Socrates survived unscathed a period of violent oppression and persecution during which anyone at odds with the regime was exiled or murdered.

Socrates not only stayed put, he seems to have had some measure of impunity.

Is there unilateral, unambiguous evidence that the trial of Socrates was motivated by his affiliation with the Thirty Tyrants?

There isn't.

But there isn't unilateral, unambiguous evidence of *anything,* because our only sources are protreptic apologias written by acolytes.

On the other hand, there IS evidence that the myth of the ascetic, pious Socrates who only wanted truth is a post-mortem invention of Plato's.

The most important piece of that evidence is The Clouds of Aristophanes, which paints Socrates as greedy, manipulative, and conniving.

The main interpretive difference, to my mind, is that the Saint Socrates version relies on a literal, good-faith reading of the testimony of a man who had every reason to lie. The collaborationist reading, OTOH, triangles all available evidence with what we know of human nature.

In the 420s, before the trial, Aristophanes shows us a money-grubbing, sophistical Socrates.

In the 380s, long after the trial, Plato's middle dialogues show Socrates hob-nobbing with the rich and famous, teaching their children, and flattering their vanity.

Are we really to believe that somehow, in between those testimonies, Socrates had a magical interlude speaking truth to power as a relentless social justice warrior, in defiance of his class, his friends, and his income? Really? Is that how human nature works, in your experience?

Philosophy doesn't happen in a void. If an account of a philosopher's thought doesn't correlate with what we know of human nature and what we know of history, we have every reason to be suspicious of it.

Philosophers might be less than human, but certainly never more than.

This is true when the account in question is Plato's apologia for Socrates' collaborationism, and it's true when the account in question is Jacques Derrida's apologia for Heidegger's Nazism.

OK kids! That's all for today. I have to hop in the shower and start getting ready.

I hope you enjoyed this little throwback to FuckTheory 2012.

Like I said, I'm writing a book about all this. If you want to make the book happen faster, throw a dollar in my Patreon.