“Yes!” said Alcibiades desperately. “Yes, because it is customawy political behaviour.”
Socrates, who had been leaning tensely forward in pursuit of the argument, clapped a hand to his brow and staggered back as if from a stunning blow.
“By Zeus I never thought of that! You’re right, you know. You argue beautifully. You’ve really driven me into a corner, Alcibiades. I don’t think there’s an answer to that one.”
His hearer stared at him suspiciously. Socrates said in a very ordinary voice, “So you plan to be one of those customary politicians? The kind that do what most people would do in their position? But didn’t you start by saying you wanted to be great?”
Alcibiades rubbed the side of his face ruefully while Socrates watched him keenly, kindly. Aristophanes the comic playwright had been listening to them for some time. With a forefinger he prodded Socrates in the chest saying, “I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with S.”
They looked at him enquiringly. He appeared to be slightly drunk which was not the case but enabled him to talk more freely at parties. He said, “Sssseduction. You, Ssssocrates are trying to sssseduce our Darling.”
“I’m hoping to make a friend of him.”
“No, you’re fishing for another disciple. All this man’s friends are his disciples, Alcibiades. You must have seen them around the marketplace. There’s a fat drunkard who makes money by telling rich folk that the goal of life is happiness, and a thin man in rags who says he’s a realist and would rather be dead than happy. There’s Chaerephon, a scientific democrat who investigates the guts of beetles and wants total equality of income, and Critias, that mine-owner over there who says only the rich should be allowed to vote. There’s even a cobbler who acts as unpaid secretary and writes down their conversations! A very peculiar crew.”
“What do you teach them, Socwates?” asked Alcibiades.
“Nothing,” he said smiling, “Nothing but what I learned from my mother, Phaenarete, the midwife.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She wasn’t a prolific woman. With my father’s help she made only one human being — ” Socrates slapped his chest “— but she helped a lot of others into the light who would never have opened their eyes without her, and aborted some that weren’t wanted. Have you heard of my voice? My demon?”
“Who hasn’t?” said Aristophanes.
“It’s nothing special,” said Socrates, ignoring him, “Everybody has one and it’s the best, the truest bit of them, but a lot of folk can’t hear their inner voice because of loud ideas shoved at them by friends and experts, greedy cliques and governments. Good ideas are a gift from God. He doesn’t send me any so I try to rid my friends of ideas that don’t fit them. I want to hear your voice, Alcibiades, telling me the fine godly things you really believe. But before I hear that voice you’ll have heard it first: inside yourself.”
“How do you rid folk of bad ideas?” said Aristophanes. “Do you use a flue-brush?”
“I use dialectics,” said Socrates, smiling at him.
Alcibiades stood up and told the comedian, “I’m going to a very different party from this one, but I want to see this ugly little wisest man again. May I, Socwates?”
“Please, yes.”
Alcibiades left. The comedian chuckled, helped himself to wine, said admiringly, “You really are a demon. I was trying to spoil your game but I helped you with it. I helped you with it!” “Have you money to spare, Aristophanes?”
The comedian produced a small leather bag, tossed it up and caught it overhand with a chinking sound.
“Can I have some?” said Socrates humbly. The comedian untied the mouth of the bag and held it out. Socrates removed four silver coins. His friend said, “Take more”.
“This is enough. A little at a time from a lot of different people stops them crossing the street to avoid me.”
“You’ll soon wish you had taken the whole purse because I am going to mock you in a play.”
“Why?”
“Because I am sick of clever buggers hanging about the market spouting smart ideas that leave ordinary, sensible people confused.”
“I am not a bugger Aristophanes and, as I’ve just said, I do my best to weed out what you call smart ideas.”
“Perhaps, but there are still too many clever buggers around and if I mocked the others they would sue me for libel. You won’t. Will you?”
“No.”
“Because your demon won’t let you!” cried the comedian, laughing.
“That’s right,” said Socrates sadly.
SEVEN TUNNOCK'S DIARY 2002
Depressed. I need a chapter describing a performance of The Clouds, but no matter how hard I study that play I cannot get the jokes. It caricatures Socrates as a sly meteorologist enriched by spreading fog through the minds of disciples. Aristophanes, as in all his plays, is satirising part of the democracy — in this case experts who taught fashionable young men the most modern ideas. He is surely attacking a very pernicious idea, like our recent one that Capitalism has abolished Socialism and brought world history to a satisfactory end. He is probably also mocking fashionable jargon, like our own dysfunctional instead of bad, vertically challenged for short, chronologically gifted for old, downsizing for dismissing a lot of workers, outsourcing for employing more poorly paid foreigners, spin doctor for writer of speeches that make lies seem truthful. In another fifty years such speech will sound meaningless along with comedy satirising it, not because folk will be talking more sensibly, but because the spin doctors will have invented a new truth-concealing jargon. And The Clouds was written two and a half thousand years ago! Yet I am sure Brecht or Ibsen COULD have made a funny, cutting, relevant modern version of it.
Remember, Tunnock, you are not a Glaswegian Brecht but a retired schoolmaster with literary ambitions inspired by Plato’s Symposium, which has Socrates joking about love with Aristophanes and Alcibiades, and rejecting all pretence to wisdom, preferring “right opinion”, which he describes as a referee between wisdom and ignorance. Scottish Enlightenment philosophers called it common sense. Socrates was therefore a sceptic like Diogenes, Voltaire, Hume, Nietzsche, not a system-builder like Plato, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant. And he defended common sense with uncommon courage. After the Shining Sands sea battle a huge parliamentary majority voted for the mass execution of sea captains who had not reclaimed the bodies of the dead. Socrates was president that day and Xenophon writes that he declared the vote illegal under Athenian law, which said everyone accused of a crime should be tried for it separately. Socrates ruled that a parliamentary majority, no matter how great, must not break its own laws. Courage was needed for that. Alas, next day the lot made a coward president who legalized the mass executions. Thucydides writes that Socrates, after the majority voted to invade Sicily, went through the streets shouting that this would lead to disaster. It did. Like Aristophanes he was of the anti-war minority, but strongly opposed majority decisions because democracy dies without that opposition.
Yet Plato’s later dialogues have Socrates advocating government by a clique of celibate academics who employ military police to manage productive people, rewarding the chief policemen by letting them rape who they like — an adolescent fantasy. And Aristophanes dramatized him as a money-grubbing obscurantist homosexual who sits on a rooftop to seem nearer heaven until an enraged pupil burns his house down. Was the play a flop because Athenians disliked the jokes? Or because Socrates went to every performance and stood quietly in the audience, showing the difference between himself and his caricature on stage? Or is Nietzsche right in saying Socrates started the decay of noble Athenian thinking by making men doubt their manliest instincts?