ESSAYS
REFINED
JOURNAL
In the spring of 399 BC, in an Athenian cell, a seventy-year-old man wrote a poem for the first time in his life. The sacred galley had sailed for Delos and no execution could proceed until it came back, which handed Socrates several unexpected weeks. He used part of them turning Aesop's fables into verse and composing a hymn to Apollo. His friends found this so strange they asked him to account for it. A dream had recurred throughout his life telling him to practise the arts, he said, and his chances to obey it had run out. Neither poem survives.
Socrates
Jacques Louis David French 1787
His father Sophroniscus worked stone. His mother Phaenarete was a midwife, and that second detail explains his entire career. In Plato's Theaetetus he describes his own practice as maieutike techne, the craft of midwifery applied to minds, attending the labour of the soul and testing whether what emerges is a living idea or a phantom. The claim he makes about himself in that passage is the hinge of everything, because he calls himself barren of wisdom, incapable of generating ideas of his own, useful only for drawing out what was already gestating in the person across from him. A midwife cannot deliver a child by correspondence. His method required a specific body in a specific room on a specific afternoon, and it dissolves the moment anyone tries to package it.
The technique carries a name, the elenchus, and a reliable architecture. He asks for a definition. Agreement is then extracted on several further propositions the person already holds, those commitments are shown to contradict the original definition, and the target lands in aporia, a state of productive stuckness, having discovered that something he was certain of cannot survive contact with the rest of his own beliefs. In the Phaedrus he sets out why documents cannot perform this work at all. A written text resembles a figure in a painting, standing there as though alive and answering nothing when questioned, repeating one sentence forever no matter what is asked of it. Once released it circulates among people who understand it and people who do not, unable to select its audience or defend itself under attack, forever requiring its father to come and help it.
He also carried a private mechanism he called the daimonion, a voice present since childhood that never once told him what to do and only ever forbade. Twice in his life the principle behind it produced consequences worth recording. In 406 his tribe held the presiding rotation on the day the assembly moved to try eight generals in a single collective vote, which Athenian law prohibited, and Socrates happened to be epistates, chairman of the Athenian state for that one day, and he blocked the vote alone under open threats of impeachment until his term expired at nightfall. Two years later the Thirty Tyrants summoned him with four other men and ordered them to fetch Leon of Salamis for execution. The other four rowed to Salamis and brought Leon back. Socrates walked home.
None of this counts as settled history. Four sources describe him and they contradict one another so thoroughly that classicists gave the resulting mess a name, the Socratic problem, and now largely treat it as unsolvable. Aristophanes staged him in 423 as a buffoon suspended in a basket and coined a verb, to socratize, for the behaviour involved. Xenophon delivers a practical, decent, faintly dull moralist. Plato delivers a metaphysician whose views in the later dialogues are almost certainly Plato's own, and Aristotle was born fifteen years after the execution and worked mostly from Plato.
So the man became precisely what he had described to Phaedrus, a text circulating among readers who cannot question it, saying whatever the holder requires, with no father alive to defend it. Every era since has manufactured a Socrates fitted to its own needs, the Christian martyr, the Enlightenment rationalist, Nietzsche's villain who poisoned Greek vitality, the mascot of critical thinking in a hundred thousand classrooms. The reading of all this that flatters anyone who prefers talking to documenting deserves a harder look, and here I think the arithmetic matters more than the romance. He survived because a twenty-year-old aristocrat of rare literary gift happened to attend his conversations and then spent fifty years writing them up. Remove Plato and the man is a footnote inside a comedy. Anyone declining to write down what they think is buying into a lottery that has been drawn once in twenty-five centuries.
Even the heroism carries a complication I find difficult to set aside. I.F. Stone observed that a genuinely good citizen, ordered to arrest an innocent man, might have done more than walk home to bed, and Socrates never warned Leon, who was collected by the other four and killed within days. Declining to participate in an injustice and acting to prevent one are separate performances, and the record shows him delivering the first. What he demonstrated across seventy years is that a method built entirely on living presence travels further than any book and arrives unrecognisable at the other end. He wanted knowledge capable of answering questions. He became an answer that can be asked anything and will say whatever the asker needs.
Seventy years of refusing to write, then a dream, then a hymn composed in a cell by a man with weeks remaining, and the thing is simply gone. No copy, no fragment, not one quoted line. The only document Socrates ever made with his own hands is the single part of him that was properly lost, and everything he declined to write is what came through.
Until Sunday.