Emma Dyson, University of Pennsylvania
Aristotle claims that Socrates founded ethical philosophy (Metaphysics 987b1; cf. Diogenes Laertius 1.14). But Plato and Xenophon present us a Socrates who esteemed the ethical wisdom of the traditional Seven Sages (σοφοί or σοφισταί) even as he disdained the activity of natural scientists. Xenophon’s Socrates is a student of the Sages who incorporates their maxims into his teaching. Plato’s Socrates, conversely, makes the Sages resemble himself. Both Plato and Xenophon, though, seek to establish Socrates within the tradition of earlier ethics. This paper demonstrates a greater degree of continuity between Socrates and his predecessors than Aristotle suggests.
Parallels between Socrates and the Sages have long been noticed. Already Snell (1971) and Wehrli (1973) remarked on the appearance of motifs associated with the Sages in Socratic literature. Martin (1998) has gestured toward the continuance of the Sages’ competitive performativity in Socrates’ activity. Gray (1998) demonstrates that Xenophon’s account of Socrates is a development of the chreia form that characterized writing about the Sages. While these earlier studies highlight the continuance of folk motifs in Socratic texts, this paper treats Socrates’ attitude toward the Sages as evidence of Plato’s and Xenophon’s effort to position their teacher within an older tradition. Ιn this it follows Kurke (2010), who argues that Plato and Aristotle assimilated the representatives of pre-philosophic sophia into a teleological narrative of philosophy’s development.
Xenophon’s Socrates reads the books “of the wise men of old” (Memorabilia 1.6.14). Socrates’ suggestion that these texts contain moral maxims (4.2.9) implies that their authors are the Sages. Socrates shows he has incorporated the Sages’ gnomic wisdom into his teaching when he expounds on the meaning of γνῶθι σεαυτόν (Mem. 4.2.24-29), a maxim associated with the Sages in the fourth century. By emphasizing Socrates’ respect for the Sages, Xenophon attempts to counteract the philosopher’s reputation for “strangeness.”
If Xenophon makes Socrates resemble a Sage, Plato makes the Sages resemble Socrates. Plato’s Socrates assimilates the Sages’ teaching to his own practice by calling their moral precepts φιλοσοφία (Protagoras 343b). Perhaps more strikingly, he makes the Sages apolitical. Plato substitutes the self-isolating Myson for the tyrant Periander in his list of canonical Sages, a decision that received comment already in antiquity (DL 1.30, 1.41). He makes Thales into an otherworldly figure (Theaetetus 174ab), eliding Thales’ achievements as a political advisor and military engineer (Hdt. Histories 1.74-75, 1.170). Socrates even claims, despite their well-known activity as lawmakers, that the Sages refrained from participation in affairs of state (Hippias Major 281c). By making them abstain from politics, Plato’s Socrates turns the Sages into paradigmatic Socratic philosophers (cf. Apology 31de, Theaetetus 173d-174a).
Socrates here emerges as a figure in direct dialogue with traditional Greek wisdom. Whether this serves to make him more palatable to a readership leery of his teaching (Xenophon) or to re-write the tradition itself (Plato), it shows that Socrates did not look askance at all σοφισταί. Despite Aristotle’s claim, Socrates does not represent himself as the founder of ethics.