Socrates: A Man for Our Times (10 page)

In the first book of the
Republic
, Socrates, who is still himself at this point, disputes with the Sophist Thrasymachus the answer to the question “What is justice?” Thrasymachus answers, “Justice is the interest of the stronger.” In every society, the rules defining what is just and unjust, he says, are determined by the ruling elite, the strongest section of society, in its own interests. Socrates does not accept this, but he does not give his own answer, and book 1 ends inconclusively. In book 2, he ceases to be himself and becomes Platsoc. But what we gather, in this and other places, is that Socrates thinks each issue should be judged on its merits and that the virtuous man has no difficulty in distinguishing between justice and injustice. What he does make plain, again and again, and in the strongest possible language, is that doing justly comes before any other consideration. It is better, he says, to suffer anything, even death, rather than act unjustly. He says in the
Apology
: “If a man is worth anything, he would give no weight whatsoever to any other consideration—even life itself—rather than act unjustly. All that matters, when he acts, is whether his action is just or unjust, the action of a good or an evil man.” That Socrates’ emphasis on the paramountcy of acting justly was widely adopted is shown by the emphatic statement of Isocrates in
Panathenaicus
, two generations later: “Victories won in violation of justice are more despicable than are morally righteous defeats.”

It is evident that justice in the abstract did not concern Socrates. What did concern him, always, was action in practice. One common Greek view in his day, as Thrasymachus implied, was that justice was usually a form of self-interest. Asked, “What is a just man?” a Greek would reply, “A man who does good by his friends, and does evil to his enemies.” Socrates would not have this. “A just man is one who does good by his friends, certainly, but also does good to those who have harmed him, thereby seeking to convert an enemy into a friend.” This view appears in several versions, the theme always being to return evil with good. We are close here to Christ’s advice to “turn the other cheek.” Socrates says plainly in
Crito
, “It is never right to do wrong, or to requite wrong with wrong, or when we suffer evil to defend ourselves by doing evil in return.” It is this clear view that marks the point at which Socrates turns his back on moral relativism, in any guise or circumstances, and opts firmly for moral absolutism. If you know a thing is wrong, never do it, ever.

This rule led Socrates to cross another historic moral watershed and to repudiate absolutely one of the deepest-rooted maxims of Greek behavior, both by individuals and states—the law of retaliation. Of course retaliation was not peculiar to Greece. It is common to most if not all societies emerging from savagery and tribalism and feeling their way to civilized modes. In the Hebrew Book of Exodus, immediately after chapter 20, in which God gives Moses and the Israelites the Ten Commandments—which seem to have stood the test of time in many if not most societies—there follows a chapter laying down the law of retaliation, in the case of a woman with child, hurt in a struggle, in drastic fashion (Exodus 21:23–25): “And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” We do not know when the Book of Exodus was compiled, but one theory is around 700 B.C., which would make the compiler a contemporary of the Greek poet Hesiod, second only to Homer as a moral mentor. Hesiod goes further than Exodus: “If an enemy starts it, saying or doing something harmful to you, you must certainly pay him back twice over.” That is more vengeful than the Hebrew sage, who only demands one eye for an eye, not both: That would be wrong.

Socrates set his face against the entire theory and practice of retaliation. In the
Crito
he lays down the five principles of his command. We should never do injustice. Therefore we should never return an injustice. We should never do evil to anyone. Therefore we should never return evil for evil. To do evil to a human being is no different from acting unjustly. Socrates was fully aware of the momentous nature of his rejection of traditional Greek morality and justice. For immediately after announcing his five principles, he adds that “few are those who believe or will believe this. And between those who do and those who don’t there can be no common ground. Each feels contempt for the other.”

Socrates’ stand was taken up at a time when the issue of retaliation as a public policy was of vivid and immediate importance. In 431 B.C. Euripides set the scene with his
Medea
. Socrates was almost certainly in the audience. This horrifying play is a tale of revenge in the name of justice. What Medea does is totally out of proportion to what she has suffered, and it may be that Euripides is making the point that, if retaliation (or revenge) is accepted as a principle of justice, it is extremely difficult in practice to ensure that the retribution corresponds to the offense. Medea says she is exacting “just repayment with God’s help,” but admits afterward that she “has dared to do a most impious deed.” The word impious is significant, for it conveys the implication that the whole notion of “just revenge” may be impious. We know that Socrates helped Euripides with at least one of his plays—“patched it up.” It is possible that he persuaded the poet to insert this line in
Medea
.

Then, four years later, the whole question came up in the most startling fashion in the real world of war and politics. Athens had to decide what to do about Mytilene, the chief city of the island of Lesbos, which had rebelled against Athens. It had now been occupied by Athenian troops. The question of punishment came before the Athenian Assembly. Such cities were often shown no mercy in the heat of war. Both Sparta and Athens could be ruthless in exacting what they saw as justice. In four cases—Histiaea, Melos, Scione, and Torone—what we would call genocide occurred. But these massacres were carried out by army commanders acting on their own authority. In 427 B.C., the decision was taken by the democratic Assembly of a constitutional state, after full debate. Thanks to the oratory of the demagogue Cleon, a proposal was passed ordering the commander to execute without trial all adult males in Mytilene and to sell into slavery all women and children.

This motion of extermination, or genocide, carried democratically after argument, is unique in Greek history or, so far as I know, in any history. It clearly pleased the majority. But it must have shocked a minority, including Socrates, who I assume was present. I like to feel—indeed, I am pretty certain—that he played a part in what followed. After the vote, Cleon had immediately dispatched a ship to Mytilene to take the Assembly’s decision to the commanding general with instructions to carry it out before the Assembly had second thoughts. But it
did
have second thoughts. After a night of anxious discussion among the moderates, in which I assume Socrates took part, their leader, Diodotus, appealed to the Assembly the next day to reverse their decision. His arguments were for the most part practical. It was the oligarchy at Mytilene, he said, that had ordered the rebellion, not the demos. Most of the people were on the side of Athens and had forced the city’s surrender to the Athenian troops who now occupied it. To punish them, alongside the oligarchs was obviously wrong, for the oligarchs were guilty, whereas the demos was innocent, indeed on Athens’s side. This injustice would be noted among all Athens’s allies and colonies. Diodotus says, “I think it better for the empire to allow ourselves to suffer wrong than to destroy, however justly, those whom we ought not to destroy.” The last phrase reveals a Socratean thought peering out among the general argument of expediency, and it persuades me that Diodotus allowed himself to be guided by the philosopher, in part at least. He does not go so far as to repudiate the principle of retaliation as justice: He wanted to win the vote. He did so. The decision was reversed, and a fast trireme was dispatched immediately to Mytilene to rescind the instructions to the general. Happily, it arrived in time, and the honor of Athens and its people was saved.

Here we have an episode when the views of Socrates were applied immediately in public action, rather than slowly becoming consensual over generations. And there is strong reason to believe that his personal intervention was decisive in securing this outcome. His voice from God might forbid him to become a politician, but it did not inhibit him from seeking to influence political decisions in the name of true justice, as opposed to the false justice that was the norm of Greek society in the mid-fifth century B.C.

Socrates’ rejection of retaliation was the most important practical event of his philosophical life. It was also one of the most important events in the history of philosophy. The best discussion of it is chapter 7 in Gregory Vlastos’s
Socrates
(which I strongly advise readers to peruse, if they have the time). What Socrates argued is extraordinarily uncompromising. It is moral absolutism at its most stringent. He is saying in effect: If something you do wrongs somebody else and, a fortiori, large numbers of people, it is so bad in itself, and so bad for you, that nothing of good which it achieves can compensate for the evil. It may win a victory or even a war; it may bring you everything you value, joy, comfort, security, and long life; it may arouse the approval of those you love, your family and friends; it may be necessary, as you think, for their self-preservation and your own; but if it is wrong, then you must not do it. Even if it would win the whole world, you must not do it. Your life itself would not be worth living if you can preserve it only by wronging others.

This is a hard doctrine, and it is not surprising that the world in the last two and a half millennia has often, even usually, found it too hard to follow, even while accepting it in principle. There is some evidence that Plato found it hard, and abundant references show that Aristotle could not quite swallow it. He felt that revenge was a constant impulse in human nature, as ineradicable as the anger that prompted it. Indeed, he defined anger as “the desire to inflict retaliatory distress.” The absolutely fundamental moral truth that a wrong done to me gives me no right whatever to inflict the same wrong on the doer was a little too much for Aristotle to take. In fact, Socrates was the only Greek to grasp and fully accept the moral axiom that retaliation, or revenge, or whatever we choose to call it, is wrong and must never be accepted or defended. He was the first to articulate the axiom, and to insist upon it
contra mundum
.

Since Socrates first laid down, or discovered, this new moral law—God’s law, as opposed to man’s law—it has been broken countless times, by statesmen and generals and democracies, let alone dictatorships and absolute monarchs, as well as by countless individual men and women in their personal dealings. If we examine World War II, for instance, we are forced to admit that the self-righteous democracies, Britain and the United States, in pursuing what they reasonably argued was a just war, against infamous enemies, on occasions—some might say often—yielded to the temptation of retaliation. Yet they recognized that it was a temptation, and that what they did was open to criticism. Even at the time, and certainly on many occasions since, the rightness of the bombing of Germany and Japan and the use of the atomic bomb has been debated endlessly. The fact that these debates took place at all is due to the initial moral revelation of Socrates and its subsequent illumination of the universal conscience.

There was another aspect of justice to which Socrates devoted attention and produced new insights: the position of women and men’s attitude to them. Now Socrates had important things to say about women, which again marked a historic turning point, but before we come to them, it is convenient to clear out of the way the question of homosexuality in ancient Greece and the extent to which it was fashionable and involved Socrates. In the late seventh and sixth centuries B.C. a large number of Attic black and red figure cups were inscribed “[a boy] is beautiful,” and one or two vessels that have survived even show men and boys engaged in anal intercourse. In the second half of the fifth century B.C., however, such visual evidence of the practice declined and by Socrates’ death was rare.

The practice was largely confined to the landowning and wealthy families whose young, well-dowered virgins, once they became nubile, were strictly segregated. It was hard, up to the mid-fifth century B.C., for a young man of good family to find himself alone with a young woman, and romantic lovemaking in upper-class circles was difficult if not impossible. Instead, young men formed romantic friendships with older men, exchanging their good looks for instruction, wisdom, guidance, and patronage. These liaisons were further promoted by the formal sports and exercise of the elite, in which men were naked, by the institution of the
symposium,
or all-male dinner party, and by warfare, with its stress on courage, friendship, and glamorous display. But it is doubtful if many of these friendships took a physical form. Male prostitutes, we know, were held in detestation, and males who enjoyed the passive role in sodomy were despised by Greeks of all classes. There was a good deal of talk about the beauty of male youth, however, and this found itself reflected in literature, including the works of Plato.

Socrates spent his life in argument with men (chiefly), not least young men, and regularly attended
symposia.
Inevitably, then, he has been said to have had sexual relations with men or at least to have tolerated homosexuality among his society friends. In my reading of the relevant texts, I find no evidence that Socrates ever engaged in homosexual lovemaking. He certainly agreed that a boy or young man might be beautiful. But Socratic love for males was limited to eye and mind contact. The endless talk of passion between males at
symposia
he put up with in rather the same way he accepted popular polytheism and superstition. But when he participated in it his tone was jocular. There is an important passage in Plato where a speech by Lysias, a metic (immigrant second-class citizen), son of a rich shield maker, who himself became wealthy by speech-writing, is analyzed. In it, Lysias says a youth should grant his favor to a man who is
not
in love with him rather than to one who is. Socrates treats it as a joke: “Splendid! I would have walked to Megara and back to hear such a speech!” Then he says, “I wish Lysias would add that a youth should grant his favors to a poor man rather than to a rich man, to an elderly man rather than to a young man and, in general, to ordinary people like myself. What an attractive democratic thing that would be!”