What Would Socrates Say about Modern Things?

Apart from Jesus, the ancient Athenian philosopher Socrates (lived c. 470 – 399 BCE) is possibly the one person who lived in ancient times who is most widely venerated today. Many people see him as a figure who is worthy of contemporary emulation. In the same way that Christians have often tried to justify their own actions and opinions by insisting that Jesus would be on their side, philosophers have tried to justify their actions and opinions by insisting that Socrates would be on their side—whatever their side happens to be.

Contemporary professors and philosophers have tried to posthumously marshal Socrates as a supporter for all kinds of contemporary causes, including going to graduate school in the humanities, opposing supposed university “cancel culture,” and even opposing vaccine mandates—but what was the historical Socrates like and what would he think of all the causes people are invoking his name in support of? More importantly, would Socrates’s opinion on any of these issues actually be worth listening to?

Socrates as a supporter of graduate school in the humanities?

On 30 January 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education published a notorious op-ed, written by William Pannapacker, a professor of English at Hope College, under the pseudonym Thomas H. Benton. The op-ed was titled “Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go.”

As the title suggests, in the article, Pannapacker gives sobering advice to undergraduates who are interested in graduate school in the humanities about the abysmal state of the academic job market and the exploitative nature of the academic system. He warns that, unless a student belongs to at least one of a set of four very small, specific groups, going to graduate school in the humanities is likely to be a very poor decision with far more negative outcomes than positive.

The advice that students shouldn’t go to graduate school in the humanities is now commonplace. My own current plan is to apply to PhD programs in ancient history later this year and every professor I have spoken to about this has warned me that, if I manage to finish the PhD, there are far more people with PhDs than tenure-track positions for them to fill, competition for those positions is extremely difficult, most people with PhDs will never be hired to a tenure-track position, it’s largely down to luck who does get hired, and the market will almost certainly be far worse by the time I earn my PhD than it already is.

At least back in 2009, though, Pannapacker’s advice of “just don’t go” was seen as shocking and radical—and it prompted some interesting responses. David R. Keller, a professor of philosophy at Utah Valley University Orem, wrote a letter to the editor, which was published on 24 April 2009, with the headline: “Graduate School? Socrates Would Approve,” in which he argued for the value of a graduate education in the humanities, regardless of the job prospects, by appealing to Socrates.

ABOVE: Screenshot of the headline of Keller’s letter to the editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education

Socrates as an opponent of “cancel culture”?

Now let’s fast forward twelve years. On 3 September 2021, Jennifer A. Frey, a professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina, issued a tweet complaining about how her university DEI office told her that all her students should “feel safe” in her classroom. She denounces this, saying:

“The way I would describe doing philosophy is feeling like the ground is moving out from under you. Nobody ‘feels safe’ doing philosophy if they are doing it correctly.”

I can understand Frey’s point here that students in a philosophy class should feel like they are being intellectually challenged and should be required to defend their positions using evidence and reason. Nonetheless, I think she is conflating two different kinds of “safety.”

Professors wield the power to determine whether their students pass or fail and consequently possess enormous power over them. A professor who takes the wrong approach to teaching can easily make their students feel like their lives and futures are in constant, immediate jeopardy. By contrast, a good professor should be able to make students feel like they are being intellectually challenged and like they need to put serious thought into their arguments without making them feel like their futures are in constant, immediate danger.

In any case, James W. Hankins, a professor at Harvard University who specializes in the intellectual history of Renaissance Italy, is the General Editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library, and is well known for his right-wing political views, replied to this tweet saying:

“It would take Socrates about 10 minutes to get cancelled in a modern university.”

Classicists and other philosophy scholars were swift to point out that Socrates was far more than merely “cancelled” in classical Athens; the Athenians literally executed him in 399 BCE by forcing him to drink hemlock. Hankins’s main point, however, seems to have been that Socrates would be an opponent of university “cancel culture” if he were alive today.

ABOVE: Screenshot of James W. Hankins’s tweet about Socrates getting “cancelled” at a modern university

Socrates as an opponent of vaccine mandates?

Just a few days after Hankins’s tweet, on 8 September 2021, The London Free Press published an article which describes how Julie Ponesse, an ethics professor at Huron University College, apparently posted a video online in which she denounces her university’s policy of requiring all students and faculty to be vaccinated against COVID-19. She declares that she will never take the COVID-19 vaccine, even if it means that the university will fire her, and directly compares herself to Socrates, declaring:

“My school employs me to be an authority on ethics. And I’m here to tell you it’s ethically wrong to coerce someone to take a vaccine. . . . In the spirit of Socrates, who was executed for asking questions, this lesson will consist of only one question: When a person has done the same job to the satisfaction of their employers for twenty years, is it right or wrong to suddenly demand that they submit to an unnecessary medical procedure in order to keep their job?”

I will return to Ponesse’s claims about Socrates later in this article. For now, I will merely note that, in my opinion, it is entirely reasonable for a university to require all students and faculty to be vaccinated for COVID-19, with exceptions for people who have specific preexisting medical conditions.

Universities have required students and faculty to receive vaccinations for generations, so this is hardly anything new. Furthermore, vaccination for COVID-19 is an extremely safe, simple, and effective procedure. It only takes a few minutes, it is completely harmless (unless you have certain preexisting conditions, such as an allergy to an ingredient in the vaccine), it ensures that people who receive the vaccine either won’t catch COVID-19 at all or will only have relatively mild symptoms if they do catch it, and it can prevent or slow the spread of the disease within a given population.

As I mentioned in a previous post I wrote about the history of vaccines, I received both doses of the Pfizer vaccine back in April and it was really not a big deal. The only side effect I experienced after the first dose was a mild ache in my arm where I received the shot, which lasted for about a day afterwards. After I received the second dose, I had a slightly more severe ache in my arm where I received the shot. The next day, I felt really tired, I had aches in my joints, and I think I had a mild fever. All these symptoms were gone when I woke up the day after that, two days after receiving the vaccine. After that, I was perfectly back to normal.

In any case, returning to Socrates, I think that these examples that I have cited illustrate how many professors today are invoking him. They see him as a kindred spirit and someone who would share their opinions if he were alive today. Now let us examine whether this is, in fact, a historically accurate perception of Socrates.

ABOVE: Screenshot used in this article in The London Free Press, taken from Julie Ponesse’s video in which she declares that she will never take the vaccine for COVID-19 and compares herself to Socrates

Early sources for the historical Socrates

First, we need to address the question of to what extent the character of Socrates who appears in Plato’s dialogues reflects the historical Socrates. Contrary to what some people mistakenly believe, Plato was certainly not the only contemporary of Socrates to write about him.

The earliest source that is known to have mentioned Socrates is a travel journal written by Ion of Chios (lived c. 480 – c. 420 BCE), an older contemporary of Socrates who apparently met him on the island of Samos when he was a young man. Ion’s journal has, unfortunately, not survived, but we know of its existence because the biographer Diogenes Laërtios, who lived in around the third century CE and apparently had access to a copy of the journal, references it in his book The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 2.5.23.

The loss of Ion’s travel journal is tragic, because it is the only source known to have been written by someone who met Socrates when he was a young man. The earliest surviving source of information about Socrates is the comedy The Clouds, which was written by the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes (lived c. 446 – c. 386 BCE) and is primarily a satire making fun of Socrates. The original version of this play was performed in 423 BCE at the City Dionysia at a time when Socrates was mature, but not yet elderly.

As I mention in the article I wrote last week about the survival of works of ancient Greek drama, the original version of The Clouds came in third place and has been lost, but a revised version of it that Aristophanes wrote sometime between c. 419 and c. 416 BCE has survived to the present day complete. This revised version of the play was probably never actually performed during Aristophanes’s lifetime.

Aristophanes portrays Socrates in The Clouds as a dangerous sophist who is teaching young men how to use rhetoric to make what is wrong seem right and what is right seem wrong. Modern scholars generally agree that this portrayal is a caricature and that it is not an accurate reflection of what the historical Socrates was really like. This conclusion is supported by the fact that Aristophanes’s portrayal of Socrates diverges quite drastically from the portrayals found in the works of Socrates’s own students.

Aristophanes was not the only contemporary comic playwright who made fun of Socrates. The playwrights Ameipsias (late fifth century BCE) and Eupolis (lived c. 446 – c. 411 BCE) are also known to have mocked him in their own plays. Unfortunately, only a couple fragments of the comedies by Ameipsias and Eupolis mentioning Socrates have survived and they don’t really tell us much.

ABOVE: Sixteenth-century engraving depicting a scene from Aristophanes’s comedy The Clouds, in which Socrates is portrayed observing the skies in a bucket suspended from a tree

Plato and Xenophon: our two main sources

The main sources of information about Socrates are Plato’s own writings and the writings of the historian Xenophon (lived c. 431 – 354 BCE), who was also one of Socrates’s students. Xenophon wrote his own Apologia of Socrates and his own Symposion. He also wrote a work titled Memorabilia or Memoirs of Socrates, which records various mostly fairly short conversations Socrates supposedly had with people in Athens, and a work titled Oikonomikos or The Estate Manager, which is a description of two long conversations Socrates allegedly had about estate management with a man named Kritoboulos and another man named Ischomachos.

Xenophon was primarily a historian, not a philosopher, and he is best known today for his many surviving historical writings, which include the Anabasis, the Hellenika, the Life of Agesilaos, and On Spartan Society. At first, someone might assume that, because Xenophon was a historian, his accounts of Socrates are therefore more likely to be accurate. Modern scholars, however, have raised doubts about how well Xenophon actually knew Socrates and understood his teachings.

There are many commonalities between Plato and Xenophon’s portrayals of Socrates. Notably, both authors portray Socrates as physically unattractive, but intellectually brilliant. Both authors also portray him as teaching primarily through asking questions and as wandering barefoot through the Athenian Agora with tattered clothes, often interrogating helpless random people and challenging their previously held beliefs and assumptions.

There are also, however, major discrepancies between Plato and Xenophon’s portrayals. While Plato portrays Socrates as being especially interested in big questions about the nature of things like truth, virtue, justice, poetry, society, and the state, Xenophon’s Socrates barely passes for a philosopher at all. Instead of contemplating the metaphysical reality of the Good, he is seemingly mostly concerned with the practical matter of teaching young aristocrats how to be model citizens and how to properly manage their households.

ABOVE: Greek portrait heads of Xenophon (left) and Plato (right), our two most important sources of information about the historical Socrates

Other students who wrote about Socrates

Plato and Xenophon were not the only students of Socrates who wrote about him. It is a well established fact that at least three other students of Socrates—Antisthenes (lived c. 445 – c. 365 BCE), Aischines of Sphettos (lived c. 425 – c. 350 BCE), and Aristippos of Kyrene (lived c. 435 – c. 356 BCE)—wrote their own dialogues featuring Socrates as a character.

Unfortunately, the writings of these other students of Socrates have all been lost and we only know that they once existed because ancient authors who had access to them reference them in works that have survived to the present day. Once again, this is really quite tragic, since it would have been very interesting to see how Socrates’s other students portrayed him.

Antisthenes in particular is said to have been a teacher to the notorious rogue philosopher Diogenes of Sinope (lived c. 412 – c. 323 BCE) and I think it would have been especially interesting to see his portrayal of Socrates. Alas, it is unlikely that any of us will ever get to see it.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble portrait bust depicting the philosopher Antisthenes, based on an earlier Greek original

Plato’s theory of ἰδέαι

The main historical evidence that Plato attributed his own views to Socrates pertains to the theory of ἰδέαι (idéai) or “forms.” I won’t delve too deeply into what the theory of ἰδέαι actually is because it’s really weird, a lot of people consider it to be the most confusing concept in Plato’s dialogues, and it’s not especially important for the present discussion. What really matters for this article is the fact that Plato portrays Socrates as talking about the ἰδέαι a lot in his later dialogues.

Plato’s student Aristotle (lived 384 – 322 BCE), however, writes the following words in his Metaphysics 1.987b, as translated by Hugh Tredennick (with some minor edits of my own):

“And when Socrates, disregarding the physical universe and confining his study to moral questions, sought in this sphere for the universal and was the first to concentrate upon definition, Plato followed him and assumed that the problem of definition is concerned not with any sensible thing but with entities of another kind; for the reason that there can be no general definition of sensible things which are always changing.”

“These entities he called ἰδέαι [i.e., “forms”] and held that all sensible things are named after them sensible and in virtue of their relation to them; for the plurality of things which bear the same name as the Forms exist by participation in them. (With regard to the “participation,” it was only the term that he changed; for whereas the Pythagoreans say that things exist by imitation of numbers, Plato says that they exist by participation—merely a change of term. As to what this ‘participation’ or ‘imitation’ may be, they left this an open question.)”

This passage seems to imply that the historical Socrates focused mainly on moral and social issues and that he never taught the theory of ἰδέαι (idéai), which was instead Plato’s own invention. As I mentioned earlier, Aristotle was Plato’s own student, so it stands to reason that he probably had a very good impression of what Plato learned from Socrates and what Plato came up with on his own. If what Aristotle says in this passage is correct, this would constitute clear evidence that Plato attributes some of his own ideas to Socrates in his dialogues.

Based on this information from Aristotle and the fact that Plato’s portrayal of Socrates in his earlier dialogues bears a closer resemblance to Xenophon’s portrayal of Socrates, the standard view among philosophy scholars is that Plato’s portrayal of Socrates in his earlier dialogues is the most accurate reflection of the historical Socrates and that Plato uses Socrates in his middle and later dialogues primarily as a mouthpiece for his own ideas.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble bust of Aristotle, based on a Greek bronze original made by the sculptor Lysippos (lived c. 390 – c. 300 BCE)

What would Socrates think of modern American universities?

Because everything we know about Socrates comes from what other people wrote about him, it is impossible for us to know for certain what the historical Socrates really thought about anything—even in his own time. It is even more difficult for us to assess what he would think of things that exist today that didn’t exist while he was alive.

Nonetheless, I do think that there are some things about the historical Socrates that we can say with a fairly high degree of likelihood. I also think that we can reasonably speculate about what he might think of some things that exist today based on what we can be reasonably sure he thought in his own time. Let’s start by examining the claims of the first two examples I cited in my first section, both of which pertain to what Socrates would think of contemporary western academia.

Socrates’s immediate reaction upon seeing a university campus in the United States in the twenty-first century would almost certainly be one of visceral, racist revulsion. Socrates and other Greek people of his time generally referred to people who did not speak the Greek language as βάρβαροι (bárbaroi), which is the root of the modern English word barbarians.

Unlike the English word barbarians, the Greek word βάρβαροι does not necessarily imply lack of intelligence or civilization, but it is generally pejorative; the ancient Greeks generally recognized the cultures of the ancient Near East as highly civilized, but nonetheless saw them as barbarian and inferior on account of their supposedly despotic nature.

By sharp contrast, ancient Greek people generally believed that northern European people are stupid and unskilled in comparison to Greek people. For instance, Aristotle, who, as I have already mentioned, was a student of Socrates’s student Plato, writes in his Politics 7.1327b, as translated by H. Rackham:

“The nations inhabiting the cold places and those of Europe are full of spirit but somewhat deficient in intelligence and skill, so that they continue comparatively free, but lacking in political organization and capacity to rule their neighbors. The peoples of Asia on the other hand are intelligent and skillful in temperament, but lack spirit, so that they are in continuous subjection and slavery. But the Greek race participates in both characters, just as it occupies the middle position geographically, for it is both spirited and intelligent; hence it continues to be free and to have very good political institutions, and to be capable of ruling all mankind if it attains constitutional unity.”

The ancient Greeks also regarded trousers as the most thoroughly barbaric and un-masculine garment that a person could possibly wear. An anonymous medical treatise titled On Airs, Waters, and Places, which is traditionally attributed to the physician Hippokrates of Kos (lived c. 460 – c. 370 BCE), even claims in chapter 22 that wearing trousers causes men to become impotent. The treatise declares, as translated by Francis Adams:

“But these complaints befall the Skythians, and they are the most impotent of men for the aforesaid causes, and because they always wear breeches, and spend the most of their time on horseback, so as not to touch their privy parts with the hands, and from the cold and fatigue they forget the sexual desire, and do not make the attempt until after they have lost their virility.”

If an all-powerful divine being somehow transported Socrates through time and space from Athens in the fifth century BCE to an American university campus in the year 2021, Socrates would almost certainly scowl to hear people speaking English (a thoroughly barbaric Germanic language), to see classes taught mostly by people of barbaric northern European ancestry (as opposed to people of superior Greek ancestry), and to see people wearing trousers (the most utterly barbaric form of clothing imaginable).

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a depiction of Skythian archers wearing trousers, dating to between c. 475 and c. 450 BCE

Even if Socrates managed to get over his initial disgust and grow accustomed to “barbarian” American culture, I don’t think he would have a high opinion of a modern university education. Plato and Xenophon both agree that Socrates roundly despised and condemned the formal, paid instructors of his own era, who were known as sophists.

Plato portrays Socrates in the Republic 6.493a-c as denouncing sophists who teach in exchange for payment, declaring that they only care about pleasing the ignorant masses. Plato’s Socrates declares, as translated by Paul Shorey:

“Each of these private teachers who work for pay, whom the politicians call sophists and regard as their rivals, inculcates nothing else than these opinions of the multitude which they opine when they are assembled and calls this knowledge wisdom. It is as if a man were acquiring the knowledge of the humors and desires of a great strong beast which he had in his keeping, how it is to be approached and touched, and when and by what things it is made most savage or gentle, yes, and the several sounds it is wont to utter on the occasion of each, and again what sounds uttered by another make it tame or fierce, and after mastering this knowledge by living with the creature and by lapse of time should call it wisdom, and should construct thereof a system and art and turn to the teaching of it, knowing nothing in reality about which of these opinions and desires is honorable or base, good or evil, just or unjust, but should apply all these terms to the judgements of the great beast, calling the things that pleased it good, and the things that vexed it bad, having no other account to render of them, but should call what is necessary just and honorable, never having observed how great is the real difference between the necessary and the good, and being incapable of explaining it to another.”

Xenophon portrays Socrates as, if anything, even more vicious in his condemnation of people who teach in exchange for payment. In fact, in his Memorabilia 1.6.13, he portrays Socrates as accusing such people of being outright prostitutes. Xenophon portrays Socrates as saying the following words, as translated by Hugh Tredennick:

“In our society, Antiphon, the same rules with regard to what is creditable and what is not are thought to apply equally to the disposal of physical attractions and of wisdom. A man who sells his favours for a price to anyone who wants them is called a catamite; but if anyone forms a love-attachment with someone whom he knows to be truly good, we regard him as perfectly respectable. In just the same way, those who sell wisdom at a price to anyone who wants it are called sophists; but if anyone, by imparting any edifying knowledge that he possesses, makes a friend of one whom he knows to be naturally gifted, we consider that he is behaving as a truly good citizen should behave.”

I don’t think that I need to remind anyone that universities in the United States in the twenty-first century require all students to pay tuition fees and they generally pay professors to teach. On account of this, Socrates would most likely see modern university professors as dishonorable prostitutes who provide people with knowledge in exchange for payment, just like the sophists of his own time whom he so passionately despised.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a statue from the Greek city of Smyrna, dating to between c. 193 and c. 211 CE, depicting a sophist

In addition to all this, Plato portrays Socrates as not overly fond of the written word as a method of transmitting and learning information. Plato portrays Socrates as telling the following fable about the invention of writing in his Phaidros 274c-275b, as translated by Benjamin Jowett:

“At the Egyptian city of Naukratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters.”

“Now in those days the god Thamos was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamos enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them.”

“It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamos said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, ‘This,’ said Theuth, ‘will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.’”

“Thamos replied: ‘O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.’”

“‘The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.’”

Many people have interpreted this passage as evidence that Socrates was a luddite who hated writing. As I discuss in this article I wrote in August 2018, however, this is probably a misinterpretation. There’s nothing in this passage to indicate that Socrates hated writing. Indeed, Xenophon portrays Socrates in his Memorabilia 1.6.14 as talking about how much he loves reading books written by great thinkers of the past and discussing them with his friends.

Socrates’s point in telling the story of Theuth and Thamos in Plato’s Phaidros is not that all writing is always bad, but rather that writing has certain disadvantages, including that, when people can write information down, they are less likely to memorize the information because they can simply look it up again later. Later, in Phaidros 275d-275e, Plato portrays Socrates as further expounding his discourse on the supposed disadvantages of writing as a means of transmitting information. He says, as translated by Jowett:

“I cannot help feeling, Phaidros, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.”

In any case, based on the opinions that Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates, I cannot possibly imagine him having anything positive whatsoever to say about modern American universities, which teach classes in English, generally expect men to wear trousers, charge students tuition fees, and generally expect students to take large quantities of written notes.

This brings me back to the claims made by Keller and Hankins. I think that contrary to Keller’s claim that Socrates would approve of graduate school in the humanities, Socrates would, in fact, condemn university education altogether as, at best, a distraction from the learning of true wisdom and the practice of true excellence.

Similarly, contrary to Hankins’s claim that Socrates would be “cancelled” at a modern university, I cannot possibly imagine Socrates seeking employment at a modern university in the first place. It is possible that Socrates might join modern conservatives in railing against university “cancel culture,” but I suspect that he would be far more greatly displeased with the systemic nature of modern universities as a whole.

ABOVE: Attic red-figure vase painting by the Douris Painter dating to c. 500 BCE, depicting a young man writing using a stylus and wax tablet

Socrates and university vaccine mandates

This brings us to Julie Ponesse’s claim that she is imitating Socrates by resisting her university’s vaccine mandate. Ponesse’s argument, like most anti-vaccine arguments, implicitly hinges on the idea that each person possesses individual liberty and the state (or, in this case, a university) cannot force a person to do certain things. This is an argument that I highly doubt Socrates would agree with. Plato and Xenophon both very consistently portray Socrates as arguing that the state should do whatever is best for society as a whole, with little to no regard whatsoever for individual rights or liberties.

To give one particularly striking example of this, in the Republic 5.460e–461c, Plato portrays Socrates as arguing that, in the ideal state, women should only be legally allowed to bear children when they are between the ages of twenty and forty and men should only be legally allowed to sire children when they are between the ages of thirty and fifty-five.

He argues that, if a person who is over the legal reproductive age either impregnates a woman or becomes pregnant as a woman, the state should force the woman who is pregnant to abort the fetus so that it never sees the light of day. I think that nearly everyone, regardless of what your position is on the morality of abortion, will agree that forced abortions fly totally in the face of the notion of individual rights and liberties.

Both Plato and Xenophon portray Socrates as critical of democracy and more favorably disposed towards an oligarchy run by knowledgeable experts. There is good reason to believe that these portrayals are accurate in this regard, since, as I will further discuss in a moment, based on what we know from our sources, most of Socrates’s students seem to have been young Athenian men from wealthy, aristocratic families who harbored anti-democratic and pro-oligarchic sentiments. Plato and Xenophon both fit this model perfectly, since both came from very wealthy and prestigious aristocratic Athenian families and both wrote works that are critical of democracy.

Plato portrays Socrates as arguing in the Republic 6.488a-489a that all policies of the ideal state should be devised by experts who possess specialized knowledge in the particular areas to which those policies pertain, without any regard for what the ignorant masses might say or believe on the matter. He does this using the famous allegory of the “ship of fools.” He describes the ship as follows, as translated by Paul Shorey:

“Picture a shipmaster in height and strength surpassing all others on the ship, but who is slightly deaf and of similarly impaired vision, and whose knowledge of navigation is on a par with his sight and hearing. Conceive the sailors to be wrangling with one another for control of the helm, each claiming that it is his right to steer though he has never learned the art and cannot point out his teacher or any time when he studied it.”

“And what is more, they affirm that it cannot be taught at all, but they are ready to make mincemeat of anyone who says that it can be taught, and meanwhile they are always clustered about the shipmaster importuning him and sticking at nothing to induce him to turn over the helm to them.”

“And sometimes, if they fail and others get his ear, they put the others to death or cast them out from the ship, and then, after binding and stupefying the worthy shipmaster with mandragora or intoxication or otherwise, they take command of the ship, consume its stores and, drinking and feasting, make such a voyage of it as is to be expected from such, and as if that were not enough, they praise and celebrate as a navigator, a pilot, a master of shipcraft, the man who is most cunning to lend a hand in persuading or constraining the shipmaster to let them rule, while the man who lacks this craft they censure as useless.”

“They have no suspicions that the true pilot must give his attention to the time of the year, the seasons, the sky, the winds, the stars, and all that pertains to his art if he is to be a true ruler of a ship, and that he does not believe that there is any art or science of seizing the helm with or without the consent of others, or any possibility of mastering this alleged art and the practice of it at the same time with the science of navigation. With such goings-on aboard ship do you not think that the real pilot would in very deed be called a star-gazer, an idle babbler, a useless fellow, by the sailors in ships managed after this fashion?”

For Socrates, I think that the answer to the question of whether it is just for a university to require all students and faculty to be vaccinated would not come down to the matter of individual rights, but rather to the matter of whose expertise is more relevant in deciding whether a procedure is medically necessary: an ethics professor or professional medical experts.

ABOVE: Title page of a 1695 printed edition of the Stultifera Navis or Ship of Fools by Sabastian Brant, which takes its title from Plato’s allegory

In general, Plato does not portray Socrates as having much respect for the expertise of people who are not philosophers—or, indeed, people who are not Socrates. Nonetheless, he does portray Socrates as recognizing that physicians possess necessary specialized knowledge that other people do not possess.

In the Republic, Plato notoriously portrays Socrates as arguing that poets should be banned from the ideal state, but he does portray Socrates as accepting the need for physicians. In the Republic 3.408c, Glaukon proposes to Socrates that there should be skilled physicians in the ideal state. He says, as translated by Paul Shorey:

“But what have you to say to this, Socrates, must we not have good physicians in our city? And they would be the most likely to be good who had treated the greatest number of healthy and diseased men, and so good judges would be those who had associated with all sorts and conditions of men.”

In the Republic 3.408d-e, Socrates agrees with him and they go on to discuss what makes a physician good. Socrates argues that physicians are most skilled if they have both learned the principles of medicine and possess experience with all kinds of different illnesses. He says, in Shorey’s translation:

“‘Physicians, it is true,’ I said, ‘would prove most skilled if, from childhood up, in addition to learning the principles of the art they had familiarized themselves with the greatest possible number of the most sickly bodies, and if they themselves had suffered all diseases and were not of very healthy constitution. For you see they do not treat the body by the body. If they did, it would not be allowable for their bodies to be or to have been in evil condition. But they treat the body with the mind—and it is not competent for a mind that is or has been evil to treat anything well.’”

In the Phaidon 118a, Plato portrays Socrates’s very last words as he lay dying after drinking hemlock as an admonition to his friend Kriton to sacrifice a rooster to Asklepios, the patron god of physicians, healing, and medicine. He says:

“ὦ Κρίτων . . . τῷ Ἀσκληπιῷ ὀφείλομεν ἀλεκτρυόνα: ἀλλὰ ἀπόδοτε καὶ μὴ ἀμελήσητε.”

This means, in my own translation:

“Oh Kriton, we owe a rooster to Asklepios. Pay the debt and do not forget.”

Obviously, this is Plato’s Socrates, who is distinct from the historical Socrates. Nonetheless, if we assume that Plato’s portrayal of Socrates as having at least a modicum of genuine respect for medical experts in his own time is accurate, it seems to me that, if Socrates were alive today, he would most likely believe that whether a polity should require people to be vaccinated should be decided by medical experts with specialized knowledge in preventing the spread of diseases.

Since medical experts with years of training and experience are saying that everyone who can be vaccinated should be vaccinated, I think that, even though Socrates would not like universities in general, he would most likely agree with policies that require all students and faculty at universities who can be vaccinated to be vaccinated.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a statue in the Museum of the Theatre of Epidauros depicting Asklepios, the patron god of physicians

Why the Athenians put Socrates to death

With that out of the way, let’s move on to Ponesse’s second claim, which is that the Athenians sentenced Socrates to death “for asking questions.” This assertion is demonstrably false. Socrates was, in fact, most likely put to death primarily because of his unsavory and close connections to a handful of particularly odious political figures. The New Zealand classicist Peter Gainsford has already written an excellent blog post on this subject, but I will address it here nonetheless.

I mentioned earlier that Socrates’s students were mostly men from wealthy, aristocratic Athenian families with anti-democratic and pro-oligarchic political inclinations. Well, as it happens, these students included Kritias, who was Plato’s mother Periktione’s first cousin, and Charmides, who was Plato’s mother’s brother and therefore Plato’s uncle.

In 404 BCE, the Spartans defeated the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War. The Spartans forced Athens to give up its navy and its many vassal states, tore down the Long Walls connecting the city of Athens to the port of Peiraieus, ended Athenian democracy, and imposed a pro-Spartan oligarchic regime. The highest-ranking members of this regime were a group of thirty Athenian aristocrats with pro-Spartan sympathies who eventually became known as οἱ τριάκοντα τύραννοι (hoi triákonta týrannoi), which means “the Thirty Tyrants.”

The ringleader of the Thirty Tyrants was none other than Socrates’s own pupil Kritias. Charmides was also a member. Under Kritias’s leadership, the Thirty unleashed a horrible reign of terror upon the Athenian populace with a whole slew of executions without trial, exiles, and confiscations of property.

ABOVE: Illustration from 1881 showing how the artist imagined it might have looked when the Spartan general Lysandros had the Long Walls of Athens demolished in 404 BCE after the Spartans defeated the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War

It is, of course, true that political violence was more common in ancient Greece than it is in most “western” countries today. Indeed, as I discuss in great detail in this article I wrote in January 2021, democratic Athens committed more than its fair share of wartime atrocities. Most notoriously, in early 415 BCE, the Athenians slaughtered all the men of the island of Melos and sold all the women and children into slavery in an act of mass genocide.

The Thirty Tyrants, however, were unusual for the extraordinarily brutal reign of terror that they unleashed against citizens of their own polis. Under Kritias’s leadership, the Thirty are reported to have executed somewhere around 1,500 Athenian citizens without trial, amounting to around five percent of Athens’ total citizen population. They killed or exiled anyone whom they suspected of plotting against their regime and they even killed or exiled wealthy Athenians without cause or evidence just so they could confiscate their property.

The Thirty were so bloodthirsty that even those Athenians who supported oligarchy and were initially inclined to support them were apparently startled and turned away by all the bloodshed. The Seventh Epistle is a surviving letter at least ostensibly written by Plato that discusses some aspects of Plato’s personal history. Some scholars today think that the letter is authentic and Plato really wrote it, but others are unconvinced. Even if the letter is a forgery written by someone else under Plato’s name, however, is was clearly written very early by someone who knew Plato’s works very well.

The epistle claims that Plato himself was initially sympathetic to the Thirty because he disliked democracy and some of his relatives were members of the Thirty. It claims that Plato only turned against the Thirty after he saw the horrible violence that the regime unleashed. The epistle claims, as translated by J. Harward:

“Some of these [i.e., the Thirty] were relatives and acquaintances of mine, and they at once invited me to share in their doings, as something to which I had a claim. The effect on me was not surprising in the case of a young man. I considered that they would, of course, so manage the State as to bring men out of a bad way of life into a good one. So I watched them very closely to see what they would do.”

“And seeing, as I did, that in quite a short time they made the former government seem by comparison something precious as gold—for among other things they tried to send a friend of mine, the aged Socrates, whom I should scarcely scruple to describe as the most upright man of that day, with some other persons to carry off one of the citizens by force to execution, in order that, whether he wished it, or not, he might share the guilt of their conduct; but he would not obey them, risking all consequences in preference to becoming a partner in their iniquitous deeds—seeing all these things and others of the same kind on a considerable scale, I disapproved of their proceedings, and withdrew from any connection with the abuses of the time.”

The Athenian general Thrasyboulos led an army of Athenian citizens who had been exiled, with the intention to overthrow the Thirty and restore democracy. In early 403 BCE, Thrasyboulos’s men decisively defeated the Thirty in the Battle of Mounychia. They killed both Kritias and Charmides in the fight.

Immediately after the battle, when the survivors of the army of the Thirty returned to the city, the Athenians deposed those of the Thirty who remained and elected ten men to make a peace deal with Thrasyboulos. The Ten immediately disregarded the purpose for which they had been elected and instead requested money from Sparta to continue the war. Since Thrasyboulos and his forces were clearly winning, the Athenians deposed the Ten and appointed ten new leaders to arrange a peace deal. These ten men negotiated with Thrasyboulos and his men, arranging the reconciliation of the two sides and the restoration of democracy.

As part of this peace deal for the restoration of democracy, the Athenians agreed to grant general amnesty to everyone affiliated with the Thirty except for the Thirty themselves, the eleven prison magistrates who worked for them, and the ten men who ruled over Peiraieus. Nonetheless, in the years that followed, many Athenians regarded fellow Athenians who had connections to the Thirty with intense suspicion and hostility.

Despite Socrates supposedly standing up to the Thirty on the occasion already mentioned in the Seventh Epistle, the fact that he was a mentor to Kritias, Charmides, and possibly other members of the Thirty is probably one of the main reasons why the Athenians executed him in 399 BCE.

One piece of evidence for this comes from the famous Athenian orator Aischines (lived 389 – 314 BCE), who was a younger contemporary of Plato and Xenophon. He is the only near-contemporary author who wrote about Socrates’s trial and execution who was not a member of Socrates’s fan club. He heavily implies in his speech Against Timarchos, section 173, that the Athenians sentenced Socrates to death because he was Kritias’s teacher. Aischines asks the rhetorical question:

“ἔπειθ’ ὑμεῖς, ὦ Ἀθηναῖοι, Σωκράτην μὲν τὸν σοφιστὴν ἀπεκτείνατε, ὅτι Κριτίαν ἐφάνη πεπαιδευκώς, ἕνα τῶν τριάκοντα τῶν τὸν δῆμον καταλυσάντων . . . ;”

This means, in my own translation:

“Did you, oh Athenians, kill Socrates the Sophist because he was shown to have been a mentor to Kritias, one of the Thirty who destroyed the populace . . . ?”

Notice that Aischines says nothing whatsoever about Socrates “asking questions”; as far as he is concerned, Socrates was executed because he was Kritias’s mentor.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Greek marble portrait herm dating to between the fourth and second centuries BCE depicting the Athenian orator Aischines, who mentions Socrates’s trial and execution in his Against Timarchos

The official charges against Socrates at his trial were included in the Athenian court records. These records have not survived, but, in the time of the Roman Empire, the orator Favorinus (lived c. 80 – c. 160 CE) was able to access them and he included a transcription of them in a work of his that has since been lost. The biographer Diogenes Laërtios, whom I have already mentioned, had access to Favorinus’s lost work and he quotes the charges against Socrates in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 2.5.40. The indictment reads as follows:

“τάδε ἐγράψατο καὶ ἀντωμόσατο Μέλητος Μελήτου Πιτθεὺς Σωκράτει Σωφρονίσκου Ἀλωπεκῆθεν· ἀδικεῖ Σωκράτης, οὓς μὲν ἡ πόλις νομίζει θεοὺς οὐ νομίζων, ἕτερα δὲ καινὰ δαιμόνια εἰσηγούμενος· ἀδικεῖ δὲ καὶ τοὺς νέους διαφθείρων. τίμημα θάνατος.”

This means, in my own translation:

“Miletos, son of Miletos, the Pitthean, wrote and swore the following things against Socrates, son of Sophroniskos, the Alopekian: Socrates does wrong by not recognizing the deities that the polis recognizes and by introducing new divine beings; and he also does wrong by corrupting the youth. Penalty: death.”

Philosophers and admirers of Socrates have long interpreted the charge of “corrupting the youth” to mean that Socrates’s accusers believed he was “corrupting” younger men by merely teaching them to think critically and generally question the established social order.

I used to think this too, but, over the past two years or so, I have grown convinced that “corrupting the youth” is probably more specifically meant in reference to Socrates’s tutelage of Kritias, Charmides, and others with similar oligarchic sympathies. When Miletos made the charge of “corrupting the youth,” he probably meant something less along the lines of “teaching young people to question things” and something more along the lines of “turning young people into murderous, democracy-hating oligarchic tyrants.”

If we interpret the charge this way, the charge against Socrates seems a little more credible. If just one of Socrates’s students had been a member of the Thirty, then we could dismiss it and say that it wasn’t Socrates’s fault. Given, however, the fact that two of his students were members of the Thirty, and one of them seems to have been the ringleader, we are forced to conclude that either Socrates—the man who is so often imagined as having been so extraordinarily perceptive of other people’s character—naïvely overlooked two of his pupils’ capacities for extreme murderous violence or, even more disturbingly for our image of him, he actively encouraged these capacities.

Plato, of course, tries very hard to distance Socrates from the Thirty Tyrants in his dialogues, always emphasizing the one occasion on which Socrates is supposed to have bravely opposed them. He portrays Socrates as delivering the following narrative to the jury at his trial in the Apologia of Socrates, sections 32c-32e, as translated by Harold North Fowler:

“…and after the oligarchy was established, the Thirty sent for me with four others to come to the rotunda and ordered us to bring Leon the Salaminian from Salamis to be put to death. They gave many such orders to others also, because they wished to implicate as many in their crimes as they could. Then I, however, showed again, by action, not in word only, that I did not care a whit for death if that be not too rude an expression, but that I did care with all my might not to do anything unjust or unholy.”

“For that government, with all its power, did not frighten me into doing anything unjust, but when we came out of the rotunda, the other four went to Salamis and arrested Leon, but I simply went home; and perhaps I should have been put to death for it, if the government had not quickly been put down. Of these facts you can have many witnesses.”

Whatever the truth of the matter may be, in 399 BCE, the Athenians sentenced Socrates to death and he was forced to drink hemlock.

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

One thing Socrates almost certainly wouldn’t approve of

Regardless of how Socrates would feel about the individual issues we have just discussed, if even half of what Plato and Xenophon tell us about Socrates’s personality has any truth to it whatsoever, there is one thing in the modern world that I am fairly sure the historical Socrates would not approve of: people born over thousand years after Socrates’s death trying to argue that what they think is true based on his hypothetical approval of it.

Socrates is a man who died over 2,400 years ago who certainly believed all sorts of very wrong things. Since a large part of Socrates’s shtick as a philosopher and public figure was supposedly about forcing people to question their own beliefs and assumptions to see if they have any rational basis, I’m pretty sure he would be the first person to point out that whether he would agree with a position is totally irrelevant to whether or not that position is correct.

If you want to argue for something, argue for it on its own merits; don’t argue for it on the grounds that you think Socrates would approve.