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What was Aristophanes getting at? Scientists and philosophers remained unpopular with ordinary citizens, as men like Anaxagoras had been in Pericles’ day.
Throughout the Greek world intellectual life was in a ferment. Itinerant teachers called sophists wandered around the region and tested traditional values. The word sophistes in Greek originally meant a master craftsman and therefore someone with a claim to specialist knowledge. The new sophists claimed that they could impart wisdom, in a general sense, to their students. Gorgias, a famous sophist, claimed to know the answer to any question he was asked.
These public intellectuals embodied three different disciplines. First of all, they taught their late-teen pupils the art of oratory. In direct democracies like that of Athens, persuading the ecclesia to adopt a particular course of action or not was an essential talent. Also, there were no professional lawyers, no police force, and no professional prosecution service. Individual citizens brought charges or defended themselves in court. It was self-evident self-interest to learn the principles of advocacy. The impression spread that sophists were cynics who trained young men in rhetorical techniques that would win assent to the most disreputable of propositions.
The better class of sophist rejected this criticism, saying that a good speaker was a good man. Most of them offered to teach virtue or aretē. Virtue had been the prerogative of birth, but now it could be inculcated through training. It is true that, in general, sophists equipped young men with the skills needed to climb the greasy pole of power. However, they were interested in morality, if they failed always to promote it.
The traditional view was that the gods were just and that virtue consisted in establishing their will and obeying it. But Greeks were now asking how divine justice could be reconciled with the evil in the world. Also, could the Olympians make a convincing claim to be morally good? Xenophanes, a fifth-century critic of conventional theology, remarked: “Both Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods all sorts of thing that are shameful and a reproach among men: theft, adultery and mutual deception.” Readers of Homer could hardly resist this claim, for his gods and goddesses behave like spoiled children.
Many Greek thinkers were early scientists in that they wanted to understand natural phenomena. They asked questions about the nature of the universe and looked for governing principles. Thales of Miletus, whom we met when planning resistance to Cyrus the Great (see this page), was a geometer, astronomer, political adviser, and businessman; he flourished in the first half of the sixth century and was among the first to reject supernatural explanations featuring gods and goddesses. He proposed general principles and developed hypotheses. He used geometry to calculate the height of pyramids and the distance of ships from the shore. He asked what was the substance or substances from which all things were made. According to Aristotle, he guessed that the “permanent entity was water.” The fact that he was wrong should not obscure his claim to be the father of the rational sciences.
There were multifarious theories. Other thinkers argued for air, fire, and earth or all four elements. Pythagoras, who also flourished in the sixth century, and his followers “applied themselves to mathematics, and were the first to develop this science; and through studying it they came to believe that its principles are the principles of everything.”
Heraclitus, a younger contemporary and a member of the royal family of Ephesus, posited a constantly changing order of things. “You cannot step into the same river twice,” he said, gnomically. As a metaphor of the need for change, he added: “The barley drink separates if it is not stirred.” His writings were famously obscure; when Euripides was asked his opinion of them, he replied: “The bit I understand is excellent, and so too, I dare say, is the bit I do not understand; but it needs a diver from Delos to get to the bottom of it.” (The island seems to have been famous for its expert swimmers in search of fish.)
Heraclitus also appears to have anticipated an up-to-date version of the Big Bang theory. He believed that the universe “is generated from fire and it is consumed in fire again, alternating in fixed periods throughout the whole of eternity.”
By contrast, the Eleatic School (so-called after the town of Elea, today’s Velia, in southern Italy) was headed by Parmenides in the fifth century and held that change was only an illusion and that a divine and unvarying unity permeates the universe.
On the other hand, the atomists headed by the fifth-century thinker Democritus of Abdera in Thrace offered a hypothesis that also (remarkably) anticipated twentieth-century physics. They argued that the only things that were unchanging were small, indivisible units called atoms. These came together randomly to form the variousness of the world’s phenomena.
There was as little agreement among Greek philosophers as among politicians.
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The Socrates of The Clouds is obviously a parody of the typical all-purpose sophist—an amoral know-all and phony. Socrates, as he really was, was no sophist except in the sense that he taught young men through argument. Aristophanes was being dangerously unfair.
Sophists were restless travelers, but Socrates was a stay-at-home and never went abroad except when on military campaign. He was born in Attica not far from Athens in 469, and so was fifty-three at the putative date of The Symposium. His father, Sophroniscus, was a sculptor or stonemason and his mother, Phaenarete, a midwife. He himself seems to have worked at some stage of his life as a stonemason. He married Xanthippe and was reportedly henpecked. The couple had three undistinguished sons.
His economic circumstances are unclear. As we have seen, he served as a hoplite and so must have been a man of means, but he lived very simply and spent his time talking philosophy. Perhaps we should assume that he lived off the family savings from the masonry business.
Socrates was famously ugly. He had a broad, flat, turned-up nose, bulging eyes, thick lips, and a potbelly. He seldom changed his clothes or washed himself and had a habit of walking barefoot.
His lifestyle and ideas were unlike those of sophists. A teacher such as Gorgias charged his students high fees and was treated as a VIP. By contrast, Socrates spent most of his time out of doors talking to whomever he met. He made a point of not charging fees, although his followers, or perhaps more truly his disciples, tended to be wealthy young aristocrats who could easily afford to pay them. He fancied attractive boys (or at least allowed people to believe he did) and in today’s terminology may well have been bisexual; however, he appears not to have had sex with them.
Socrates was not much interested in scientific inquiry and restricted himself to the discussion of ethical questions. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” Plato has him say. Unlike the Aristophanes version, he was conventionally religious and respected the gods (especially Apollo) without question. However, unusually, he asserted that right and wrong are established independently of the pantheon. Also, he seems to have held the somewhat eccentric belief that the gods could never injure each other or human beings—in a word, they could do no evil. One can imagine the unquenchable laughter when that news reached Olympus.
Socrates was not altogether a rationalist; he spoke of a “divine sign” or spirit, a daimonion sent by the gods. This was an inner voice that turned him back from a given course of action, but never gave its approval to one. It was thanks to his daimonion, he used to say, that he steered clear of active politics.