How Accurate Is Plato’s Portrayal of Socrates?

The Athenian philosopher Socrates (c. 470 – 399 BC) changed the way philosophers thought about the world. Yet, puzzlingly to modern audiences, for some reason, he himself never wrote any of his own ideas down. Nearly everything we know about him comes from what his students Plato (lived c. 428 or c. 424 – c. 347 BC) and Xenophon (lived c. 431 – 354 BC) wrote about him. Of these two, Plato is by far the more influential and generally agreed to be the more accurate. Consequently, we must question how accurate Plato’s portrayal of Socrates really is.

Why did Socrates never write anything down?

No one will ever know why Socrates never wrote anything down for certain, but it is a question that has been bothering people for millennia. Iohannes Stobaios, a fifth-century AD compiler of ancient sources, includes an anecdote in Book 3, Chapter 21 of his book Anthology collected from an earlier biographical source about Socrates’s alleged reply to this very question.

Iohannes Stobaios states that someone once asked Socrates why he never wrote anything down and Socrates replied, “Because I see that material to write on is far more valuable than anything I might write.” This anecdote is most likely apocryphal and the reason it gives is probably wrong, but it makes an interesting point. Both Plato and Xenophon, who were both Socrates’s students, stress his humility. It is also true that, at the time when Socrates was alive, papyrus had to be imported from Egypt and was therefore relatively expensive.

A far more likely explanation for why Socrates never wrote anything down, however, is that he simply did not feel it was the best teaching method. Classical Greece was very much an oral culture and most ideas were taught by word-of-mouth from teacher to student. It was only rarely that ideas were committed to papyrus. It is quite telling that Plato and Xenophon both chose to write about Socrates in form of dialogues, or written accounts of verbal discussions.

ABOVE: First-century AD Roman marble copy of a Greek bronze portrait head of Socrates originally created in the fourth century BC by the sculptor Lysippos

It is worth noting that Socrates was far from the only great philosopher of antiquity who never wrote anything down. Thales of Miletos (c. 624 – c. 546 BC), who is often credited with having been the first philosopher, never seems to have written anything down either and everything we know about him comes from later writers. Likewise, although ancient writers refer to writings attributed to Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570 – c. 495 BC), no such writings have survived to the present day and scholars dispute whether any of the writings attributed to him in antiquity were authentic. Socrates was far from alone in not writing anything down.

The historicity of Socrates

Because Socrates never wrote anything down, in order to find information about his life, we are forced to rely on the testimony of his students—especially Plato. Plato was a philosopher, not a historian, and he used Socrates as a character in his dialogues to essentially bounce ideas off of. On account of this fact, Plato’s portrayal of Socrates is not historically accurate in the sense that we would usually think of today. In spite of this, though, we can still learn a great deal about the historical Socrates from studying Plato’s dialogues and examining them critically.

Even though Plato’s dialogues are not strictly historically accurate, however, I must stress that Socrates was definitely a real person. Plato did not just make Socrates up. The reason why I am stressing this point about Socrates being a real person so keenly is because there are people on the internet who mistakenly assume that Socrates’s historicity is in question; it is not. There is not a single professional classical historian I know of who seriously doubts that Socrates existed as a person. It is only the accuracy of Plato’s portrayal that is in question—not Socrates’s historical existence.

How do we know Socrates was a real person? Well, for one thing, on the most basic level, even if we just had Plato’s word to go off of and nothing else, nearly all the other characters in Plato’s dialogues are real people who are mentioned in other surviving texts. It therefore makes sense to assume that the man who appears in nearly all of the dialogues and who is treated as a real person just like all the other characters was probably a real person also.

Furthermore, Plato was not the only contemporary of Socrates who wrote about him. As I mentioned above, Xenophon, who—like Plato—was a student of Socrates, also wrote Socratic dialogues. Along with the dialogues of Plato, the dialogues of Xenophon are among our most important historical sources about Socrates and his thought. Unlike Plato, Xenophon was a historian, not a philosopher, but, in spite of this fact, his portrayal of Socrates is generally thought to be less accurate than Plato’s. This is largely the inevitable result of the fact that Xenophon did not know Socrates as well as Plato did.

ABOVE: Presumed bust of Xenophon, a historian and student of Socrates who wrote about him

Socrates is also portrayed in The Clouds, a comedy written by the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes (lived c. 446 – c. 386 BC), which was originally performed at the City Dionysia in 423 BC. Aristophanes is actually the only writer known to have definitely written about Socrates while he was still alive in a work that is still complete today.

Aristophanes’s portrayal of Socrates, however, is starkly negative and not at all accurate; in The Clouds, Aristophanes ruthlessly mocks Socrates, portraying him as a wily, amoral sophist who teaches people how to use tricky rhetoric to make the right thing seem wrong and the wrong thing seem right.

ABOVE: Sixteenth-century engraving of a scene from Aristophanes’s comedy The Clouds, which was first performed in 423 BC at the City Dionysia in Athens, in which Socrates is portrayed observing the skies in a bucket suspended from a tree

Altogether, that makes a grand total of three ancient writers who were contemporaries of Socrates who wrote about him in sources that are completely extant: Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes. Of these writers, Plato and Xenophon both seem to have written all their works about Socrates after Socrates’s death, but Aristophanes wrote while Socrates was still alive.

In addition to these writers, we also have a number of fragmentary references to Socrates from various contemporary writers. For instance, Socrates is mentioned in a surviving fragment of a travel journal written by the Greek poet Ion of Chios (lived c. 480 – c. 420 BC), an older contemporary of Socrates who apparently met him when he was a young man on the island of Samos. There are also references to Socrates in surviving fragments from the mostly-lost comedies of the Athenian playwrights Ameipsias (late fifth century BC) and Eupolis (lived c. 446 – c. 411 BC), both of whom were contemporaries of Socrates.

ABOVE: Roman marble bust of the Athenian comic playwright Eupolis, a contemporary of Socrates who satirized him in his plays

There were also multiple other students of Socrates who are known to have written Socratic dialogues, including Antisthenes (lived c. 445 – c. 365 BC), Aischines of Sphettos (lived c. 425 BC – c. 350 BC), and Aristippos of Kyrene (lived c. 435 – c. 356 BC). The only reason you do not hear these authors referenced more often in discussion of Socrates’s historicity is because the dialogues they wrote about Socrates have not survived to the present day. Nonetheless, we know that these dialogues existed because they are referenced and even sometimes quoted by later writers.

Socrates is also spoken of as having been a real person by the philosopher Aristotle of Stageira (lived 384 – 322 BC). Aristotle was not a contemporary of Socrates, but he was a student of Plato. If Plato had just made Socrates up, then Aristotle certainly would have known. Aristotle, however, completely accepts Socrates as having been a real person and never once even remotely seems to suggest that Socrates might have been a fictional character.

There is also a brief mention of Socrates by the Athenian orator Aischines (lived 389 – 314 BC) in his oration Against Timarchos 173, which was delivered in either 346 or 345 BC. Aischines was not a contemporary of Socrates, but he was a contemporary of Plato and Xenophon and, unlike them, he was not a member of Socrates’s fan club.

By ancient standards, the amount of overwhelming evidence we have for Socrates’s historical existence is truly impressive. Of course, none of these sources are without problems, but they are more than ample enough evidence to establish that Socrates was definitely a real historical individual.

Now, someone who was really stubbornly, irrationally devoted to the argument that Socrates did not exist could try to argue—despite that overwhelming evidence to the contrary—that maybe Aristophanes made Socrates up as a caricature of the Sophists and that Plato and Xenophon latched onto this fictional character for some reason and appropriated him for their own purposes. There are, however, many very serious and very obvious problems with this attempted explanation.

First of all, ancient Greek Old Comedy characteristically derived much of its humor from the parody and mockery of real people who were known to everyone in the community. So, in historical reality, when Aristophanes came along wanting to parody the Sophists, he simply picked a real public figure who was inextricably associated with the Sophists in the public mindset (i.e. Socrates) to caricature as a representative of the whole group.

It would not have made sense for him to make up a fictional Sophist for this purpose because, if Socrates had not existed, he could have just picked someone else as a representative, perhaps Protagoras of Abdera (lived c. 490 BC – c. 420 BC) or Gorgias of Leontinoi (lived c. 485 – c. 380 BC). There would have been tons of other real people he could have chosen to mock.

Furthermore, it would make virtually no sense at all for Plato and Xenophon to latch onto a fictional character made up as a parody of the Sophists by a comic playwright from decades previously and write so many elaborate works portraying him as a great, real-life philosopher. Thus, this whole last desperate attempt to salvage the “Socrates-as-myth” hypothesis crumbles into shambles. The most obvious and most parsimonious explanation here is clearly that Socrates clearly must have been a real person.

ABOVE: Roman marble bust of Socrates from the Vatican Museums, a copy of an earlier fourth-century BC Greek original

The accuracy of Plato’s portrayal of Socrates

There is an anecdote recorded by the third-century AD Greek biographer Diogenes Laërtios in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, which holds that Plato once read his dialogue Lysis aloud to Socrates. Afterwards, Socrates exclaimed, “Herakles! What a bunch of lies the young man has written about me!” Like the story I told earlier from Iohannes Stobaios, this story comes from centuries after Socrates’s death and is almost certainly apocryphal. As I noted earlier, it is highly unlikely that Plato wrote any of his dialogues while Socrates was still living. Nonetheless, this anecdote draws us to our central question yet again: “How reliable is Plato’s portrayal of Socrates exactly?”

It is generally agreed that Plato presents many ideas through Socrates that Socrates himself never actually expressed. In that sense, no, Plato’s portrayal of Socrates is not historically accurate. Plato’s portrayal of Socrates is, however, historically authentic in the sense that, while he does not necessarily portray every precise detail of Socrates’s life exactly as it really happened, Plato does genuinely capture the general spirit of his mentor’s personality.

An idealizing tendency

Of course, Plato does have a strong tendency to idealize his beloved mentor. Xenophon displays this tendency also, but Plato seems to display it to a greater extent. A striking example of this comes from his description of Socrates’s defense at his trial. Both Plato and Xenophon wrote accounts of this defense, both of which are titled The Apology of Socrates. Of the two of them, only Plato was actually present at the trial; Xenophon was campaigning in Persia as a mercenary at the time.

Plato and Xenophon’s accounts of Socrates’s defense have many similarities, but also quite a few jarring discrepancies. In both accounts, Socrates comes across as extremely rude to the jury, but in Plato’s Apology, this rudeness is toned down and softened. In Xenophon’s Apology it is played up and portrayed much more prominently.

It is easy to see that Xenophon’s portrayal of Socrates as more condescending might be closer to the reality than Plato’s gentler one. On the other hand, though, Xenophon, who was not personally there at the trial and only learned about it later, may have been imagining Socrates as more condescending because this would explain why Socrates was condemned to death even though he was clearly innocent.

Plato’s evolving portrayal of Socrates

Ultimately, how accurate Plato’s portrayal of Socrates is depends greatly on which of Plato’s dialogues you happen to be reading. It is generally agreed that Plato’s portrayal of Socrates in his earliest dialogues is more accurate than his portrayal of Socrates in his later dialogues. This is because, when he wrote his early dialogues, Plato was still very much under Socrates’s influence, but, as he grew older and more mature, he developed ideas of his own that were different from those of his teacher.

Plato’s earliest dialogues portray Socrates as primarily questioning other people and deconstructing their arguments rather than presenting original, constructive ideas of his own. Many of the early dialogues are sometimes known as “aporetic dialogues” because they leave Socrates’s interlocutors at a loss for a satisfactory answer to the primary question of the dialogue. Many of these dialogues concern the trial, imprisonment, and execution of Socrates. These dialogues include The Apology of Socrates, Kriton, Euthyphron, Gorgias, Menon, Lysis, Laches, Charmides, and Hippias Minor.

ABOVE: The Death of Socrates, painted in 1787 by the French Neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David

After this, Plato entered a mature phase in which he wrote many of his most famous works, including The Symposion, Phaidon, Kratylos, The Republic, Parmenides, and Theaitetos. Dialogues from this period of Plato’s writing career mainly reflect Plato’s own mature views, rather than those of the historical Socrates. These dialogues are often more literary in nature than the earlier dialogues, indicating that, in addition to growing more sophisticated as a philosopher, Plato was also growing more sophisticated as a literary writer.

ABOVE: Plato’s Symposium, painted in 1869 by the German Academic painter Anselm Feuerbach

Finally, in his old age, Plato entered into a third, “late” stage. In dialogues from this final period of Plato’s life, Socrates’s role in the conversation is significantly reduced. In fact, in some of the late dialogues, Socrates is omitted from the dialogue entirely. During this stage, Pythagorean and mystical influences on Plato’s thought also become increasingly apparent. It was during this last stage of Plato’s writing career that he wrote Sophist, Statesmen, Philebos, Laws, Timaios, and, finally, his last, unfinished dialogue, Kritias.

Conclusion

Socrates never wrote anything down—most likely because he did not consider writing the best mode of conveying his teachings—and we are forced to rely on the testimonies of his students for information about his life. Although Socrates certainly existed as a historical figure, the dialogues of Plato and Xenophon are problematic as historical sources and both authors’ portrayals contain inaccuracies.

Nonetheless, Plato and Xenophon do authentically capture the personality of Socrates, albeit in a probably quite idealized fashion, and their dialogues do contain genuine historical information. Plato’s earliest dialogues are generally agreed to most accurately reflect the personality and ideas of the historical Socrates, while his later writings use Socrates more as a mouthpiece for Plato’s own ideas.