Socrates Read Online Free PDF

fictional is a further question.
    Ancient sources credit different authors with the invention of the ‘Socratic conversation’, but there is no dispute that the composition of such conversations was widespread among Socrates’ associates, at least nine of whom, in addition to Plato and Xenophon, are mentioned by one source or another as having written them. There is no good evidence that any of this literature was written before Socrates’ death, and it is reasonable to assume that its authors shared the intention, explicit in Xenophon, to commemorate Socrates and to defend his memory both against the charges made at the trial and against hostileaccounts such as the Accusation of Socrates , a pamphlet (now lost) written by a rhetorician named Polycrates some time after 394 BC . Some friends of Socrates are reported by Diogenes Laertius to have made notes of his conversations, and there is no reason to reject that evidence, but just as we must not assume that ‘Socratic conversations’ were wholly fictional, so we must avoid the opposite error of thinking of them as based on transcripts of actual conversations. The function of note-taking was not to provide a verbatim record for later publication, but to preserve authentically Socratic material for incorporation into broadly imaginative reconstructions.
    Apart from the writings of Plato and Xenophon, very little of this literature has survived. For most authors all that we have are titles and occasional snippets. Some of the titles indicate thematic interconnections, including connections with Platonic dialogues. Thus, Crito is said to have written a Protagoras and a defence of Socrates; Aeschines, Antisthenes, Eucleides, and Phaedo all wrote an Alcibiades ; Aeschines and Antisthenes each wrote an Aspasia (Aspasia was the celebrated mistress of the statesman Pericles and the inspiration of Plato’s Menexenus ); and Antisthenes wrote a Menexenus . A particularly interesting survival is an anonymous papyrus fragment now in Cologne; 3 this contains part of a dialogue between Socrates and an unnamed person in Socrates’ cell after his sentence (recalling Plato’s Crito ) in which Socrates is asked why he did not defend himself at the trial. In his answer Socrates is represented as maintaining, as in Protagoras , that pleasure is the supreme end of life, a position taken by the Cyrenaic school founded by Socrates’ associate Aristippus (also an author of dialogues). It has been plausibly suggested that the author may have belonged to that school. Another possible association with Plato’s Protagoras is provided by Aeschines’ Callias (whose house is the setting for Plato’s dialogue, as well as for Xenophon’s Symposium ). In addition to his Alcibiades , Eucleides of Megara wrote an Aeschines , a Crito , and an Eroticus (the last on a characteristically Socratic theme, as evidenced by Plato’s Phaedrus and Symposium and by Aeschines’ Alcibiades ). The prominence of the name of Alcibiades in this catalogue is not accidental. As we saw in the previous chapter, Socrates’ association with Alcibiades had certainly fuelled the accusation of corruption of the young and was probably still being used to blacken his reputation after his death; in Xenophon’s words ( Mem . 1.2.12), ‘The accuser [perhaps Polycrates] said that Critias and Alcibiades, associates of Socrates, did the greatest harm to the city. For Critias was the most covetous and violent of all the oligarchs, and Alcibiades the most wanton and licentious of all the democrats.’ It then became a central theme of Socratic literature to show that, far from encouraging Alcibiades in his wantonness, Socrates had sought to restrain him, and that his crimes (which included sacrilege and treason) had issued from his neglecting Socrates’ advice and example, not from following them. Xenophon argues prosaically in Mem . 1.2 that (like Critias) he was well behaved as long as he kept company with Socrates and went to