P E N G U I N n|l C L A S S I C S' PLAtQi The East da^s OF Socrates PENGUIN THE LAST DAYS OF SOCRATES Plato (c. 427-347 b.c.) stands with Socrates and Aristotle as one of the shapers of the whole intellectual tradition of the West. He came from a family that had long played a prominent part in Athenian politics, and it would have been natural for him to follow the same course. He declined to do so, however, disgusted by the violence and corruption of Athenian political life, and sickened especially by the execution in 399 of his friend and teacher, Socrates, Inspired by Socrates' inquiries into the nature of ethical standards, Plato sought a cure for the ills of society not in politics but in philosophy, and arrived at his fundamental and lasting conviction that those ills would never cease until philosophers became rulers or rulers philosophers. At an uncertain date in the early fourth century B.C. he founded in Athens the Academy, the first permanent institu- tion devoted to philosophical research and teaching, and the proto- type of all western universities. He travelled extensively, notably to Sicily as political adviser to Dionysius II, ruler of Syracuse. Plato wrote over twenty philosophical dialogues, of which the Laws — in which he depicts a practical 'Utopia' - is probably the last and certainly the longest; there are also extant under his name thirteen letters, whose genuineness is keenly disputed. His literary activity extended over perhaps half a century: few other writers have exploited so effectively the grace and precision, the flexibility and power, of Greek prose. Hugh Tredennick was born in 1899 and educated at King Edward's, Birmingham, and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he got a double first in classics. He was Professor of Classics at Royal Holloway College from 1946 until 1966. He was Dean of the Faculty of Arts at London University from 1956 to i960, and joint editor of the Classical Review from 1961 to 1967. He edited and translated works by Aristotle, as well as Xenophon's Conversations of Socrates, for the Penguin Classics. He died in 1982. Harold Tarrant was born in Slough, England, in 1946, and studied at Cambridge and Durham universities. He has taught at the Department of Greek (subsequently Classics) at the University of Sydney since 1974, and is currently a Senior Lecturer. His pub- lications include Scepticism or Platonismf (1985) and Thrasyllan Platonism (1993). He has received recent grants from the Australian Research Council for work on an annotated translation of Olympi- odorus' On Plato's Gorgias and on the chronological unity of Plato's dialogues. He is also an officer of the NSW Chess Association and a keen bush-walker. PLATO THE LAST DAYS OF SOCRATES EUTHYPHRO • APOLOGY • CRITO • PHAEDO Translated by HUGH TREDENNICK AND HAROLD TARRANT Introduction and Notes by HAROLD TARRANT PENGUIN BOOKS PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London w8 5TZ, England Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2. Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England This translation first published 1954 New edition, with additions 1959 Reprinted with revisions 1969 Revised translation with new introduction and notes 1993 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 Copyright ^ Hugh Tredennick, 1954, 1959, 1969 Copyright ^ Harold Tarrant, 1993 All rights reserved The moral right of the new translator has been asserted Filmset in 9.5/12 pt Monophoto Sabon Typeset by Datix International Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which It IS published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser CONTENTS Preface vii General Introduction ix HOLINESS Socrates in Confrontation: Euthyphro i JUSTICE AND DUTY(i) Socrates Speaks at his Trial: the Apology 29 JUSTICE AND DUTY(ii) Socrates in Prison: Crito 69 WISDOM AND THE SOUL Socrates about to Die: Phaedo 93 Postscript: The Theory of Ideas in the Phaedo 186 Notes 192 Select Bibliography 232 Index 235 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2010 http://www.archive.org/details/platolastdaysofsOOplat PREFACE Hugh Tredennick's The Last Days of Socrates has helped introduce these works of Plato to countless readers. It has been part of an important project which has made great literature accessible to all sorts of readers. Since 1954, however, much has changed in Platonic studies; as a result the original volume was being outshone by many of the newer Plato translations in the Penguin series. I have tried to write a more extended general introduction, taking account of modern directions in the study of Plato, but without straying into the kind of technicalities which the general reader would find problematic. I have divided the translation into segments in order to give the reader 'signposts' marking a dialogue's development. The footnotes and the introductions to the individual dialogues have also been rewritten and to some degree expanded. As for the translation, I have altered chiefly what I thought needed to be altered, and in the Apology, Crito and Phaedo most of the credit must still go to Tredennick. In the Euthyphro, where the tone of the original translation seemed to me less suited to Socrates as there depicted, I have included much more original material. It is extremely useful to have the Phaedo in the same volume as the other three works, though because of its literary qualities and philosophic rigour it may seem to have deserved a volume of its own. There have been several annotated translations dedicated to that work alone, and yet there is merit in refusing to be drawn too far along the path towards producing a full commentary. Many readers will not need in-depth discussion of Platonic metaphysics in order to appreciate a work of this power; some will find too much commentary tedious. I have tried to steer a middle course here between unhelpful shallows and mystifying depths. The reader who is still ready for a further challenge will find a number of suggestions in the bibliography. Sydney harold tarrant March 1992 GENERAL INTRODUCTION PLATONIC LITERATURE The works of Plato, with few exceptions, are fully philosophy and fully literature. He therefore presents a double task for the inter- preter, and at times a more complex task still. For his works abound with mathematical examples, illustrations from a variety of walks of Athenian life, quasi-religious myths and quasi-rhetori- cal speeches. The true interpreter must somehow try to match Plato's tremendous breadth of interest as well as his philosophical depths. Ideally he will see himself as a philosopher, mathematician, historian, speech-maker, literary critic and as a moral and religious being. It is not surprising that over the ages interpreters have failed the test. Platonic scholarship is still moving, and still for the most part moving forward, but there will always be a further challenge: more to do, more to understand. Yet whereas the ideal Platonic interpreter is as remote an ideal as Plato's Ideal State in the Republic, there are countless numbers who are attracted to his works because they have one or more of those interests which coincide with his. Because he can appeal to us as literature or as philosophy or as religion or as a source for Greek society, etc., he attracts a multitude of readers with a variety of special interests. His works have the qualities which allow them to be interpreted, and reasonably interpreted, in many ways and from many points of view. This has much to do with the fact that they take the form of dialogues, rather than treatises addressed to the reader. We are not directly asked to believe anything; we are not required to take anything on trust. We are asked to be spectators at an occasion, whether historical or fictitious, when lifelike characters talked on real issues, issues which are sometimes remote from us but which we can feel were pressing ones for them. We are asked to react to X GENERAL INTRODUCTION human experience and human ideas, for which we, as human beings, have some understanding. We are asked to Hsten to the arguments critically; we are also asked to respond to the personali- ties of those participating. We may be encouraged to learn certain lessons and to form certain conclusions as a result; but many of the problems superficially seem left unresolved, and we are not bullied into taking the author's line. Consequently Plato's dialogues have continued to have appeal over the ages, and have survived numerous changes of intellectual and religious fashion, for some- body has always found something of value within them. The term 'dialogue' in fact embraces a wide variety of works. We shall meet in this volume the Apology, which in most respects resembles other law court speeches which have come down to us; it is essentially a monologue, interrupted only by a short cross-examination of the principal accuser, Meletus. But cross- examination also occurs in other forensic speeches,^ and the skilful characterization of Socrates has parallels in the contemporary speeches of Lysias, which are likewise tailored to bring out (in the most attractive and sympathetic light possible) the character of the speaker. The Menexenus has a brief dramatic introduction, but is otherwise little more than a mock funeral-speech for a public burial, apparently parodying the Periclean funeral speech from Book 2 of Thucydides. In the Critias another short dramatic introduction leads into something more like a novel - except that it is a novel without any individual personalities. In the Symposium dialogue provides a frame for seven related speeches; in the Phaed- rus it is a frame for a rich mixture of speeches, myth and argu- ment. Perhaps the earliest fundamental division of Plato's works to be widely accepted was that into dramatic and narrative works. ^ A 'dramatic' work, in this technical sense, was one in which the main conversation was written in a form rather like a drama. Only the words supposedly spoken were written down. The speakers were identified by the way in which they frequently named each other as they conversed. There were limitations inherent in this kind of presentation, in so far as every time the writer wanted to draw attention to actions or to the appearance of the participants, he had to have one of the speakers comment upon what was happening. It is also difficult to handle many characters simultane- GENERAL INTRODUCTION ously within the 'dramatic' dialogue, for one might easily lose track of who was supposed to be speaking. Consequently, where Plato has to handle a large number of characters, as for example in the Protagoras or the Symposium, or where the argument is to be accompanied by a great deal of action, he inclines towards presenting the conversation in the form of a narrative. This narrative often, but not always, emerges out of a short 'dramatic' introduction where the narrator converses with somebody eager to hear the tale, as in the Phaedo. Dialogues were not exclusive to Plato. They were written by a number of followers of Socrates, and it was a natural form for these writers to adopt. They wanted to depict Socrates in action, i.e. in conversation: for Socratic philosophy can only be truly realized through question and answer. We have plenty of examples of Socratic conversations in the works of Xenophon, most notably his Memorabilia.^ These are all in the narrated form, even though Xenophon does not exploit the advantages of that form in the way that Plato can. It is very likely that the narrated form was favoured by other well-known writers of Socratic dialogues, such as Anti- sthenes and Aeschines.* A famous passage of Diogenes Laertius (3.48) gives Plato the credit for the introduction of the philosophic dialogue, allegedly after he had developed great enthusiasm for the 'mimes' (brief non-philosophical dramatic sketches) of Sophron. A fuller parallel passage in an Oxyrhynchus papyrus published by M. Haslam in 1976 (P. Oxy. 3219, fr. i) makes it clear that it is the dramatic dialogue which is supposed to have owed so much to Plato. ^ We may suppose that with his great dramatic talents, which may at one time have been encouraging him to write tragedies, Plato was able to inject extra life into bare dramatic sketches, which, like other prose works, were probably read aloud by the author in the first instance. To read a narrated work one only had to play one character, the narrator; to read a dramatic work one had to become a minimum of two.^ Playing such a double role seems to have been considered educationally dangerous at Republic 394b ff., but all the same Theaetetus 143c speaks as if Plato had begun to see the perpetual inclusion of such phrases as 'I said' and 'He agreed' as unnecessarily cumbersome. Dramatic works often have a freshness and immediacy about them. We enter directly, often xii GENERAL INTRODUCTION quite suddenly and with little or no introductory conversation,^ into the world of Socratic debate. The Euthyphro and Crito are examples of such works. By contrast, narrated dialogues, particu- larly the Phaedo, Symposium and Parmenides where setting of the introductory dialogue is remote from the action, ease us gradually into the world of Socratic legend. It should be clear to virtually any reader that Plato greatly enjoyed writing, and enlisting his literary powers in the service of philosophy. We are confronted, however, with a well-known pas- sage of his Phaedrus (275c ff.) which questions whether written compositions have any serious purpose. Certainly Plato valued face-to-face teaching more than any written message which he left behind, but an important part of his criticism of the written word concerns its habit of addressing all alike; moreover the literature criticized always says the same thing when the reader tries to ask it questions. The dialogues, however, are asking us the questions, and as we change ourselves so do the answers. For an author who had a fear of the finality of the published word, Plato did at least choose the most flexible form of composition possible, and the effort which has gone into many of his compositions clearly demonstrates that he usually took his activities as an author with considerable seriousness. Seriousness, of course, does not mean that the dialogues are all serious in tone. A work like the Euthydemus is distinctly comic for the most part, and the Euthyphro is another work with important comic elements, ridiculing not only Meletus and Euthyphro, but 'Daedalan' Socrates as well (see iic-e). Even in the sombre setting of the Phaedo there is room for the occasional joke. Irony and caricature play their part from time to time. Humour spices the dialogues, as do some of Socrates' grotesque analogies and charm- ing tales. Humour invites the reader in, and sometimes an erotic element plays this role. But once we have been captured Plato does not waste the opportunity to make us think. He may even try to persuade us to adopt his own beliefs. Plato's principal tool of persuasion is of course argument. There are two particular terms which are often used in this context, elenchus and dialectic. The former is Socrates' means of examining the soundness of the views of others. Typically an interlocutor will make a moral claim that Socrates cannot accept. He then secures GENERAL INTRODUCTION XIU the interlocutor's assent to some further proposition or group of propositions, and, accepting these, proceeds to demonstrate that they are inconsistent with the original claim. It is a tool for the exposure of problems with beliefs and inconsistencies in sets of beliefs rather than for demonstrating what is true and what is false. ^ It makes considerable use of inductive arguments. It is the weapon employed in the Euthyphro for example, or in the cross- examination of Meletus in the Apology. It is not, however, characteristic of the Crito or the Phaedo. In the latter work Socrates is not trying to expose the false beliefs of others so much as attempting to give a thoroughly argued justification of his own deep-rooted beliefs. To such reasoned justification the term 'dialec- tic' would apply. The term is derived from the verb 'to converse', and need mean no more than 'conversational art' - not the art of polite conversation, but the art of employing person-to-person discussion in such a way as to come nearer to the truth of a given issue. The teaching of dialectic is to constitute the culmination of the education of the Guardians in Book 7 of Plato's Republic. Even dialectic is conceived more as a means of legitimate persua- sion than as a means of proof. In the Gorgias there is talk of 'arguments of iron and adamant', but it is denied that they have led to knowledge (5o8e-509a). In the Phaedo Socrates wants the argument to suggest to him that its conclusion is true (91a); he seeks for sound and trustworthy arguments, and for the skill in argument to be able to recognize them. The medium of language (logos), and presumably of argument in particular, is thought to provide in a sense a reflection of the truth rather than a guarantee of it (99e-iooa).' The concept of formal validity is not yet in evidence, though already the connection between dialectical and mathematical procedure is present.^" Whatever Plato himself thought of the proof-giving powers of argument, his readers were bound to be cautious; hence the appeal to those who have trusted in unsound arguments (and regretted it) not to become detesters of argument {Phaedo 89d ff.). After an age in which sophists and orators had discovered the art of arguing convincingly for all sorts of conclusions, and often for contradic- tory ones, it is possible that many of Plato's readers viewed argument more as a tool of deception than as a source of truth. Others still would have mistrusted their ability to recognize a good