Republic (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (3 page)

Religious life was centered on the proper fulfillment of rites in the home and in official public ceremonies. The Greeks put comparatively little emphasis on orthodoxy beyond the very basics of belief, and they had no sacred scriptures equivalent to the Bible or Qur‘an. This lack of orthodoxy accounts in part for the variety in the myths about the gods that have been handed down, often with contradictory details. In the absence of orthodoxy, the Greeks were generally tolerant of special religious sects and schools, such as those of the Pythagoreans and Orphics, and sometimes of foreign religious rites, as long as these could be accommodated to existing beliefs and practices. Because of such tolerance, the poet Xenophanes was able in the late sixth century B.C.E. to question with impunity the accuracy of the representation of the gods in the Homeric epics, and to suggest that popular anthropomor phized conceptions of the gods were mere projections of the human imagination.

As Athens grew in power and prominence during the fifth century, the city attracted intellectually active individuals who sometimes entertained skeptical attitudes toward traditional understandings of the gods. But such attitudes never became popular. Even as Athenians grew more sophisticated and self-conscious about the constructs of their society and culture, most seem to have remained attached to the beliefs and practices of their ancestors. Throughout the classical period (that is, the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E.), it remained possible to prosecute individuals for “impiety” and “not recognizing the gods recognized by the city.” Such was one of the charges faced in 399 B.C.E. by Socrates, Plato’s friend and mentor and the chief interlocutor of most of the Platonic dialogues.

By the fifth century, several poetic works enjoyed enormous popularity and achieved quasi-canonical status. Foremost among these were
Iliad
and
Odyssey,
two of the epic poems that the Greeks attributed to Homer, although most modern scholars view them as results of centuries of oral storytelling and poetic improvisation rather than as the work of one person. The epics
Cypria, Iliupersis
(“The Destruction of Troy”), and a series of poems collectively referred to as Returns
(Nostoi),
which all dealt with the Trojan War and its aftermath and which survive only in fragments, were widely known as well, as were
Theogony,
an epic dealing with the origins of the gods, and the didactic poem Works
and
Days, both composed by Hesiod in the late eighth century B.C.E. Memorizing extensive passages of poetry was a standard educational practice in the classical period. Most Athenians would have thus been well acquainted not only with the works of Homer and Hesiod, but also with those by such lyric poets as Sappho, Simonides, Pindar, and Stesichorus, and they would have known other poems in a variety of styles.

Choruses performed hymns and songs at familial rites, such as marriages, and at public festivals throughout the Hellenic world. In Athens, choral performances in honor of Dionysus gave rise during the sixth century to more sophisticated presentations featuring solo respondents. These were the precursors to the tragedies and comedies performed during the classical period at festivals in the Theatre of Dionysus on the southern slope of the Acropolis. The Dionysian festivals were “high holidays” when public and private business was suspended, and the dramas produced in them were of enormous cultural importance in democratic Athens. Although modern scholars debate whether playwrights attempted directly to influence decision-making by their fellow citizens, there is no doubt that these festivals, which intertwined civic and religious functions, helped create a sense of political identity for the Athenians.

Dramas were composed for a single performance. Nonetheless, many were circulated and memorized, and some quickly achieved quasi-canonical status in their own right. It is not surprising, then, that Plato liberally quotes passages from tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides as well as other poetic works, most notably
Iliad
and
Odyssey.
He cites comedies far less often, but this does not mean that they did not interest him. Plato was particularly concerned with Aristophanes’
Clouds,
which was performed in 423 B.C.E. and featured Socrates as a main character; even though
Clouds
was not the only comedy in which a “Socrates” appeared, Apology 18d-19d indicates that, in Plato’s view, it fostered particularly insidious prejudices against his mentor.

As readers of
Republic
and other dialogues discover, Plato has Socrates express deep reservations about relying on poetry to educate children and to foster senses of community and social identity among adults. In
Republic
especially, Socrates repeatedly professes his fondness for the Homeric poems while voicing serious criticism of their contents and ethical and social effects. His refrain concerning tragedy and lyric poetry is similar; they are said to be “charming” and “pleasing” but also dangerous. Comedy, as might be expected, receives almost no compliments in the Platonic dialogues. Yet
Republic’s
critique of poetry—especially dramatic poetry—is not free of ironies, since Plato is himself something of a dramatist whose dialogues are masterfully constructed “plays” in prose. Moreover, as Jacob Howland observes (The Republic:
The Odyssey of Philosophy,
pp. 28-29), he is also something of a comedian who delights, just as Aristophanes does, in exposing the foibles of prominent and self-important men.

The most self-important person we meet in Republic is Thrasymachus, a diplomat and professional rhetorician from the Greek city-state of Chalcedon on the Bosporus near the Black Sea. He does not play much of a role in the dialogue beyond its first book, but his activities as a rhetorician and, as some would say, a “sophist” lead us to consider another set of cultural, intellectual, and political phenomena that are significant in Plato’s work. The systematic study of effective public speaking, and the teaching of the theory as well as the practice of rhetoric, were innovations of the fifth century; they were impelled in part by the demands that democratic institutions such as public assemblies and courts, first in Athens and then elsewhere in the Hellenic world, created. To attain political prominence and power in a democratic setting, men had to be able to persuade large crowds and hold their own in heated debates. Even those who had more modest ambitions could find themselves needing the services of a teacher of rhetoric or a professional speechwriter when they went to court, whether as plaintiffs or defendants. Thus Athenian men—especially young and wealthy ones—began to study rhetoric and techniques of argumentation in ad hoc arrangements with professional and at times highly paid instructors.

The formal study of rhetoric and argumentation was also linked to a broader set of intellectual trends that originated in the Greek city-states of Ionia (the coastal area of Asia Minor) during the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E. The driving force behind these trends was the desire to comprehend the workings of the cosmos and all its constituent parts in systematic terms, which was fueled by a spirit of inquiry and skepticism about received truths. Xenophanes, an Ionian émigré to the Greek colonies in Italy, challenged Homer’s and Hesiod’s conceptions of the gods, and Pythagoras, another Ionian emigre to Italy, studied the mathematical bases of music and theorized about the reincarnation of the human soul. Others in Ionia and elsewhere became interested in studying the movements of celestial bodies and explaining astronomical phenomena such as eclipses, in discovering the causes for change and movement in physical objects, and in speculating about the nature of matter. By the fifth century, there were many “pre-Socratic philosophers,” as they are known today, active throughout the Greek world. Among them were Heraclitus, Empedocles, Zeno, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Leucippus, and—especially important to the development of Plato’s thought—Parmenides of Elea (in the northwest Peloponnese). In the early fifth century, Parmenides posited proto-metaphysical concepts of “Being” (or “That Which Is”—
to on
in Greek) that challenged the assumption that any physical object in the phenomenal world “is” in the absolute sense of the verb.

Although these sorts of speculation never became popular among ordinary people, they were nonetheless culturally influential in the fifth century. This was especially true in Athens, because the city’s prosperity and relative openness to foreign visitors and residents attracted itinerant teachers and intellectuals. Theorizing about natural phenomena gave rise to speculation in other fields, and human society, human behavior, and human nature were among the subjects of such observation and speculation. The development of social institutions, laws, customs, belief systems, and other cultural practices was of particular interest; the Athenian experiment with democracy arguably contributed to an increasing self-consciousness about the roles that human perception and choice, on both individual and communal levels, played in shaping society. In addition to theories about the development of civilization and the degrees of its success in molding human nature, there arose ideas about how the model society should be formed, as well as formulations concerning the correct responses by individuals to the pressures and demands of their societies.

Some of these theories seem quite bold. At the end of the fifth century, a rhetorician named Antiphon wrote a treatise titled “On Truth,” in which he asserts that the laws and customs of society are by nature’s standards “unjust,” and that it is consequently “just”—by nature’s standards—to disregard them, provided one is able to do so without being punished. Rational theories concerning the organization of the cosmos inevitably challenged traditional understanding of the roles played by the gods in ordering the world. These theories gave rise to speculation about the role of the gods in human affairs and, in turn, led some individuals to ponder whether the truth about the gods can be apprehended by the human mind. Less daring but still important were experiments with city planning undertaken in communities such as Thurii, the Athenian colony in southern Italy founded under the leadership of Pericles in 444 B.C.E., which drew on the skills of geometers (literally, “earth measurers”) as well as experts on law and social relationships.

Most of the itinerant intellectuals who gravitated to Athens during and after Pericles’ day—including famous figures such as Protagoras, Hippias, Prodicus, and Gorgias—integrated their study and instruction of rhetoric with broader interests in fields that we today might label psychology, sociology, social theory, anthropology, linguistics, language theory, epistemology, music theory, theology, and cosmology. Many of them also investigated astronomy, physics, and the other sciences, as well as mathematics and medicine. These men and their homegrown Athenian counterparts became known as “sophists” (that is, “men who profess wisdom”), although it is not clear that the term was commonly used in the fifth century.

In some regards, the sophists were not wholly unlike the traveling poets and professional performers of Homeric epic (“rhapsodes”) who had been received in Greek city-states for generations. Many of them performed official services for their home cities and, like Thrasymachus and the Sicilian rhetorician Gorgias (from Leontini in Sicily), served as ambassadors to Athens. Yet the presence of these intellectually adventurous and personally ambitious men would have inevitably struck many Athenians as an alarming sign that times were changing, and not necessarily for the better. Indeed, the activities of the sophists seem to have compounded anxieties about economic and social changes that the developments of democracy and “empire” had brought about. The sophists’ fees were typically so high that only wealthy men could afford to hire them to instruct their sons, and their direct influence was thus limited. Their ideas and modi operandi were generally if vaguely known, however, and the public tended to see their activities, not always fairly, as threats to the traditional norms and practices that were thought to guarantee stability and prosperity in Athenian society.

The fact that the sophists appropriated the family’s role in preparing young men for adult life and, moreover, charged fees for their efforts, very likely made them appear all the more suspect in the eyes of average Athenians. If Aristophanes’ comedy Clouds can be trusted for this kind of information, the lightning rod for popular misgivings about the sophists’ activities was the teaching of rhetoric. Rhetorical education, in the worst-case scenario presented by
Clouds,
could supply the means for young men to “make the weaker argument stronger” and justify their antisocial behavior; it could enable them to cast out all the received wisdom they had absorbed about the gods, society, and family.

Nonetheless, for all this apparent controversy and anxiety concerning the sophists’ newfangled ideas, the changes and upheavals of Athenian society in the late fifth century had less to do with their influence than we might suppose. These upheavals, leading up to the oligarchic coups of 411-410 and 404-403, are better understood as consequences of the Peloponnesian War and the ongoing transformation of the institutions and practices of democracy. Modern scholars are in a position to see how various theories expounded by intellectuals valorized the positions taken by both proponents and detractors of Athenian democracy, but it is unclear how frequently or how keenly average Athenians concerned themselves with the ideological implications, per se, of the sophists’ ideas. In addition, even though sophists were not popular in fifth-century Athens, there was relatively little backlash against them. It is true that the astronomer Anaxagoras was prosecuted on the charge of impiety in, perhaps, 450 B.C.E., and that Socrates was convicted on the charges of impiety and “corrupting the youth” in 399. Anaxagoras, however, was likely attacked because of his closeness to Pericles, and, as we shall soon discuss, there were probably political motivations behind the charges brought against Socrates as well.