John Anderson, University of Texas at Austin
Halcyon takes place on the desolate shores of Phaleron mid-winter where Socrates and Chaerephon hear the call of the kingfisher. Socrates narrates the myth of Aeolus’ daughter’s mourning after the death of her husband for which the gods honour her through her metamorphosis. I describe the dialogue as an inversion of Plato’s Phaedrus and its sojourn outside the city in mid-summer. The cicadas transformed for their love of singing are exchanged with the lone halcyon’s lament, instead of an ideal philosophical love the dialogue tells of the tragic end of a marriage. This Socrates vows to often (πολλάκις) tell not one, but two wives of Halcyon’s affectionate love for her husband (8).
By focusing on the opening and conclusion commentators have regarded the dialogue as a praise for marriage and relationship between man and wife. Jażdżewska concludes, “Socrates is such an advocate of the married life that he has two wives!“ (2022: 160). Müller in turn thinks the intent of the work is undermined by trying to exaggerate the exemplarity of Socrates with a second wife (1975: 285). I instead take Halcyon to be a more complex work which represents Peripatetic, Academic, and Stoic philosophical views and traditions. By considering the central part of the dialogue and its argument and locating its composition in the second century BCE as a response to Stoic views on marriage and the legacy of Socrates the work is a playful confrontation against the Stoics by an author affiliated with the Academic Skeptics.
I first detail the tradition of Socrates’ bigamy to be uniquely Peripatetic, and by authors such as Aristoxenus one that did not consider his domestic life to have enjoyed halcyon days. Panaetius the Stoic in the second century BCE took particular issue with the tradition (Plut. Arist. 27.2; Athen. 13. 556b) in a contemporary debate on the institution of marriage and Socrates’ part therein (Deming, 47 – 72). We cannot think the author of Halcyon to have included a tradition of Socrates’ turbulent bigamy to uphold the virtues of marriage, and at the same time the datable Stoic antagonism reveals the dialogue’s intervention in this debate. Socrates’ intention to remind his wives of Halcyon’s affection for her husband is surely ironic expecting for himself at his homecoming to not enjoy not the same fond reception.
That the dialogue takes issue with the Stoics becomes clearer from Halcyon’s unappreciated central argument. Following Brinkmann, this argument assumes a Stoic providential universe which by “sacred arts of the great aether” (τέχναις ἱεραῖς αἰθέρος μεγάλου) (7) brings about natural phenomena beyond human limits of understanding. Developing on Müller (2005) I contend the argument’s form to belong to the Academic Skeptics and further Charephon’s eventual conviction of the probability of Halcyon’s metamorphosis to extend to the historicity of Socrates’ bigamy. Once accounting for the philosophical eclecticism and central epistemological argument we must consider Halcyon not as an affirmation of marriage but an ironic critique on Stoic epistemology and contested legacy of Socrates.