What I'm Reading: Timaeus and Critias

I'm behind on logging my reading. Let's start with Plato's Timaeus and Critias, twin works that take place on the same day. Although Socrates is a character, as usual in Plato's dialogues, he does not take a starring role in these two. Rather, his young friends Timaeus, Critias, and Hermocrates, describing how they were inspired by the speech Socrates gave the day before on the ideal city (with Timaeus giving a summary of the speech that sounds an awful lot like The Republic, which I reviewed here), have taken it upon themselves to come up with speeches of their own.

Socrates is delighted at this, and agrees to listen. Timaeus is to give an account of the origin and nature of the universe, and Critias is to describe the ancient lost city of Atlantis and its war against a city much like that in the Republic: an idealized prehistorical version of Athens. However, only Timaeus finishes his speech. Critias's leaves off in the middle. This is not because, as happens far too often with ancient texts, we are missing the last part. No, we know that it was missing in ancient times too--Plato simply never finished it. Nor did he apparently ever get to the speech of Hermocrates, so we don't even know what the topic of the final speech was going to be.

Anyway, back to Timaeus's speech, which of course comprises the dialogue with his name. Timaeus attempts to do no less than describe the creation and fundamental nature of the universe. The Greeks believed there were four elements--earth, air, water, and fire--but in Timaeus's conception, these elements were formless until a creator came along and shaped them into the universe as we know it. Because the creator would have to be perfect, of course he would create a perfect universe, and it's only because he created the gods, and then the gods created humans, that we are less than perfect, as we're pretty far down the chain, and made later, after the best and most perfect of the raw materials had been all used up. But while our bodies are imperfect, we do have one perfect part--our souls, and if we act as close to divine as possible while on earth, meaning rationally, after our death our souls will go and join the divine among the stars.

Well, there's a lot more than that in Timaeus's speech, all about how the universe is made up of triangles (interestingly, this comes off as sort of a primitive atomic theory), and how these fit together to create the four elements, and how the four elements themselves join to create all the different substances and materials we find in nature, and the way in which our senses perceive things. Plato really attempts to sort things out here without resorting to mythology. For a modern reader, though, I'm not sure there's a lot to learn. Plato's other dialogues are more about ethics and living a meaningful life, and provide a lot to think about. His ideas about how the world works in a physical sense, however, have all been superseded by modern science and are little more than a historical curiosity.

Critias's speech is a lot more fun for a modern reader. It is about the lost city of Atlantis, the greatest city ever to exist, and how its people were overtaken by hubris and determined to conquer the world, only to be stopped by a highly virtuous city, the prehistoric Athens. The problem is, we only get ten pages of description, and never even make it to the war. The description is quite interesting though--Atlantis is a highly-engineered city, with a perfectly round island in the middle inhabited by its ruler and his family, surrounded by three perfectly circular rings of water, with perfectly circular rings of land in between them for the city's residents and public buildings. There is a massive covered bridge with a canal underneath so boats can reach each of the rings, and outside of the city the canal leads to the ocean. Everything is on a monumental scale and covered with silver and jewels and so forth, in such abundance that the citizens have no special care for it, except as pretty building materials. We also get interesting discussions of the type of physically and mentally superior people who live there (descendents of the gods) and how fertile the land is, and some of the amazing creatures and crops and orchards that grow there. But just when we're about to get to the action, it stops abruptly.

This was apparently the first mention of Atlantis in history, although it's presented in Critias's dialogue as being a vague legend everybody's heard of, but that his grandfather had learned the truth about on a visit to Egypt. In fact, we believe now that Plato made it up--Atlantis was pure fiction. That hasn't stopped people through the ages from trying to trace historical antecedents, or searching for the location of this mysterious sunken city. Even today, there's still apparently some scholarly debate on whether there might not have been some kind of legend that Plato based this on, and that maybe we've simply lost the sources for? But that's most likely wishful thinking.

I've tried to read some Plato (or last summer, Xenophon) every year for the past several years. When people have seen me reading it, they often say something like, "Isn't that really difficult to read?" And the answer, until now, has been no. They're just dialogues, meaning conversations, among Socrates and his companions. They're not hard to read and they're often kind of humorous. I don't think I can say the same about Timaeus. There's a lot of geometry and long chains of logic in it as Plato tries to explain his somewhat esoteric theories about the universe, and it took some real effort to follow. Nor was it that rewarding, as, like I said, science by now has passed Plato by. Critias, however, was a fun read on a subject that's since driven a lot of speculation, although it was disappointing that it ended in the middle. I don't think I could recommend these two works except to people with a truly endless interest in ancient Greece or ancient philosophy.

What I'm Reading: Conversations of Socrates

After his execution in 400 BC, lots of Socrates' friends and students wrote accounts of him, but the writings of only two of those authors survive today: Plato, with more than 20 dialogues "starring" his old teacher, and Xenophon, with four accounts (although Xenophon also has other surviving, but non-Socratic, works). (I've previously written on some of Plato's works here, here, and here.)

Xenophon's four accounts are collected in the book Conversations of Socrates. The first is the Defense of Socrates, which is the briefest one and consists of Xenophon defending the arrogant tone Socrates took at his trial. As Xenophon explains it, Socrates believed the gods had already ordained he should die following the trial, and moreover believed the best time for a man to die was at the very beginning of old age, as he was, when he has all the accomplishments of his life to look back on, but the infirmities of age have not yet occurred. So in Socrates' mind, there was no reason to mount a standard legal defense begging the jury for his life, but felt free to make a vigorous justification of his life and actions, no matter what impression on the jury his words might make.

His second account is the Memoirs, and is the largest part of the book. The Memoirs consists of four parts, each with about eight to ten chapters, each chapter containing a little anecdote about the life of Socrates or a conversation he had. Most of these anecdotes or conversations have something of a moral or instructive purpose--Socrates explaining how to be a good friend, or telling a young man how to become a good orator, or similar. I think my favorite is his conversation with his son, Lamprocles, who I suppose is ten or eleven, and has gotten in an argument with his mother. Rather than yelling at or chiding his son, Socrates leads him through one of his little questioning dialogues (i.e., the Socratic method), using his son's own answers to help him reach the conclusion that he should be respectful of his mother.

The third account is the Dinner-Party, about a boozy get-together Socrates took part in with a number of friends on a holiday where they discuss the meaning of love. This is similar enough to Plato's Symposium that they clearly describe the same evening, yet Xenophon's recounting includes a somewhat different cast of characters and the content of the conversations are fairly different as well. Moreover, though Xenophon claims to have been present (I believe Plato merely claims to have heard about the dinner second-hand), the cast of characters is such that he would have to have been a small child, and it seems unlikely the adults would have let him stay in the room for their drinking and sometimes bawdy conversation. But it's fairly entertaining, and at a couple points we get the rare spectacle of his friends making fun of Socrates for his questioning method of conversing--replying "Certainly" in unison to a string of his questions even when that answer doesn't make sense.

The final account is the Estate-Manager, which is in two parts: in the first, Critobulus discusses with his friend Socrates his plan to buy a farm and how he should run it, and in the second, Socrates recounts the time he spoke to Ischomachus, a wealthy man, about the best way to run a farm. The topic may sound a little dry, but it is actually fascinating for it tells the reader a lot about how Greeks lived their day to day lives. Especially interesting is that Ischomachus considers having a good wife to be the most important aspect of managing an estate, and explains how he and his wife divide up their duties in the house and decide, for instance, where to store excess grain or how to reward a slave who does a good job.

The translator of the book, Robin Waterfield, brings up a question that I would like to discuss a bit. He points out that Xenophon's Socrates is somewhat different than Plato's Socrates--less purely philosophical, more concerned with giving good advice to his friends than in considering abstract concepts, perhaps earthier in his vocabulary. He suggests three explanations for this. The first, and the one that a lot of critics have gone with, is that Xenophon is somehow "wrong" in his description of Socrates, and Plato is "right," and thus we can pretty much dismiss Xenophon.

The second explanation, and the one I prefer, is that Socrates was a sophisticated speaker who talked with different people in different ways. To a young, educated aristocrat like Plato, he would talk about the nature of reality or the definition of justice or similar things. To a veteran soldier and landowner like Xenophon, he would discuss more practical matters like managing a farm or running for office, and using a more down-to-earth conversational style. It's not like Plato and Xenophon describe a vastly different man--they clearly are both writing about the same person, who could adjust his style and subject-matter for his audience.

The final explanation is that these are works of fiction though using an actual historical figure, so if Plato writes him one way, and Xenophon another, it has nothing to do with the real person because they're just stories. Note how in the Dinner-Party Xenophon claimed to have been present though that would have been highly implausible, or that both Xenophon and Plato describe the same party but none of the details reconcile. Or note how in Plato's later writings, especially the Republic, Socrates makes smooth, elaborate, chapter-long arguments in speech that seem rather unlikely to have actually occurred. Waterfield also points that Aristotle, who knew Plato personally, classifies the various Socratic dialogues as fiction in his catalog of literature. I must admit, I rather dislike this final explanation. There may have been details that Xenophon and Plato adjusted to make for a better story, but I find it hard to believe that most of what they wrote about Socrates wasn't true in some sense. Even if the words that reach us aren't precisely the way he really spoke them, I do think that in the works of Xenophon and Plato, Socrates is speaking to us across the ages.

What I'm Reading: Symposium and Phaedrus

I had originally included these under the roundup, just below, but decided they deserve their own entry.

Symposium I've also reviewed other dialogues by Plato--the Republic and a collection of five dialogues related to the execution of Socrates.

First, let me address the question--"Oh, you're reading Plato. Isn't it hard to read?"

And the answer is, no, not at all, I know this is philosophy, but this isn't Kant or Hobbes or Schopenhauer or somebody like that. Plato writes dialogues, i.e., conversations. His main character is always Socrates, an immensely likable character (how much Plato's Socrates reflects the real historical man is a matter of endless debate among scholars) who has a knack for leading his friends and students in discussions of philosophical matters that feel totally natural and are pretty easy to follow.

The Symposium is one of Plato's most beloved works, mostly because it relates the events of a Greek drinking party. Socrates and several others have gotten together to celebrate because their friend Aristophanes, the famous Greek comedian, has won an award for presenting the best play that year. Before they start drinking, they decide each will give a speech in praise of Eros, the god of love, and at the end they'll judge who gave the best speech.

Each gives a speech in turn praising love, with Aristophanes in particular giving an odd and humorous account. At the end, Socrates gives a high-minded speech about how the best kind of love is philosophical love, which benefits all mankind, and you think that's the end.

But then the party is crashed by a very drunk, semi-belligerent Alcibiades, the notorious Greek playboy, who tells them all not to heed a word of Socrates, because he doesn't know a thing about love. Alcibiades gives a rambling but funny account of trying to seduce Socrates, which he thought would be easy because Socrates is an older man, only to find himself thwarted at every turn.

The party ends at dawn with everybody drunk and passed out. Only Socrates remains awake. He walks to town, performs his morning prayers, and goes about his day none the worse for wear, his rational nature completely unaffected by a night of drinking.

Phaedrus Okay, the book with the Symposium included this dialogue as a sort of bonus. It starts off a little lightweight as far as Plato's dialogues go, though charming, and by the end has reached unsuspected depths.

Socrates runs into his friend Phaedrus one morning on walk in the countryside, and they agree to walk together while Phaedrus explains a speech his friend Lysias gave him, trying to talk Phaedrus into sleeping with him even though they aren't in love with each other.

At a beautiful creek that they think must by the home to water nymphs, Socrates explains why Lysias's speech was foolish, point by point. He then goes further, elucidating why one should avoid sophistry like Lysias's speech and always tell the truth, with digressions on such things as the nature of the soul. At the end, Phaedrus and Socrates walk back to Athens.

Simple in some ways, but so profound I anticipate rereading this in the near future.

What I'm Reading: The Greek Way

I know Edith Hamilton best as the English translator of the most common edition of Greek and Roman myths--the famous edition of her Mythology is typically assigned in high schools. When I saw her book The Greek Way on the fundraising book sale table at work recently, I had to have it. It was published in 1930 and 1942 (not sure how that works--maybe certain parts appeared first in magazines?) and is a collection of critical essays on Hellenic-age Greek literature (i.e. the 5th and 4th centuries B.C.).

She moves more or less chronologically through ten of the most important Greek authors, starting with the poet Pindar and ending with the dramatist Euripedes, with a few essays on special topics like the religion of the Greeks or the Greek way of writing thrown in. She takes the characteristic she finds most important with each of these ancient authors and highlights it, typically by comparing him to a more modern author--the raw, heroic tragedy of Aeschylus with Shakespeare, for example, or the "exuberant, effervescent" comedy of Aristophanes with Victorian light opera librettist W.S. Gilbert (of Gilbert and Sullivan)(!).

My favorite essay was on Xenophon, a Greek writer I was only slightly familiar with beforehand, whom Hamilton shows as the great portrayer of everyday Greek life, particularly for the leisured class in Athens. Xenophon is practically our only source outside of Plato to give an account of Socrates, but is also known for his autobiographical account of the retreat of 10,000 Greek mercenaries from Persia back to Greece after the general who had hired them was cut down in battle. The enemy didn't even bother mopping them up, assuming 10,000 leaderless foreign soldiers would simply perish, but that was not the case. Greek individualism and common sense carried them through a two-year journey across deserts and mountains, until they finally reached the Mediterranean Sea with most of their company intact. It is quite a stirring story.

I am not quite sure I could recommend this book generally. I think it would probably be most interesting to those who have somewhat more than a passing knowledge of ancient Greek literature and history. I found it quite fascinating myself, and my guess is if it sounds like a book that would interest you, you're probably right.

What I'm Reading: The Republic

Last year, I read Five Dialogues by Plato and reviewed them on this site. This year I've revisited Plato's Republic, which I read in college. In this most famous of Plato's dialogues, Socrates, who is always the main character in Plato's works, makes a proposal to some friends: he can demonstrate that a virtuous man is always happier than an unvirtuous man. Some of his interlocutors scoff, saying that virtuous men may be happier because society esteems them, but if they were able to be unvirtuous without anybody knowing, they would do so in an instant.

To demonstrate his point, Socrates builds a perfectly virtuous city, with the idea that by examining a larger entity (a city), it may be easier to spot virtue and its effects and then transfer those lessons to a smaller entity (a man). This conceptual building of the city takes up the bulk of the book. By the end, Socrates has described a city guarded by a well-educated warrior class, and led by a philosopher-king. He then compares this city, which he demonstrates to be the happiest of all cities, with four other types of cities in order of their happiness: first, honor-loving cities ruled by warriors; second, money-loving cities ruled by merchants; third, democracies ruled by the people; and finally the unhappiest of cities, despotisms ruled by a tyrant.

Then, he compares each of the type of cities to different types of men: philosophers who love knowledge and truth correspond to his perfect city; followed by honor-loving warriors, money-loving merchants; undisciplined democrats, and tyrants.

Thus, he demonstrates to his friends' satisfaction (if not quite the modern reader's) that each succeeding type of city is less and less happy. Correspondingly, he also shows that philosophers, who with their love of knowledge and truth are the most just of men, are also the happiest, and each succeeding type of man is less and less happy.

What I found interesting is how he believes the guardians and the philosopher-king in his perfect city should be educated. He thinks as children they should receive training in poetry and music, elementary mathematics, and physical training. Those who exhibit the right temperaments will move on as teenagers to three years of vigorous physical training followed by ten years of mathematics (!), at which point they'll be ready to be guardians. Those guardians who might advance to leadership roles will then receive five years of "dialectic" training (i.e. making and weighing arguments), followed by ten years of studying what we would call political science. Only then, in their mid-forties, would they be ready to lead a city.

If this sounds simplistic, it is not, for Socrates also anticipates all sorts of counterarguments and negates them. One counterargument I found impressive was his explanation of why an unjust man may appear to others to be successful and admirable. He compares such a man to a runner who gets a fast start in a race, and appears to spectators to be far in the lead. But as time goes on and the lead runner tires and falls behind, so the unjust man finds his way is not so easy as creditors, friends, and neighbors discover his true nature and gradually stop interacting with him.

Like the Five Dialogues, this book is pretty easy to read, at least on a line by line basis. Socrates' language is straight-forward and conversational, as indeed, it is supposed to be a conversation among he and his friends. The simplicity of the language frees your attention for the consideration of his sophisticated arguments.

I don't think I would recommend this to somebody looking for light reading (although as I say above, it is not actually that hard to read), but for those willing to think about ethics, virtue, and how we order our society, this is arguably the most basic text in Western literature on those topics. Actually, the book has much the feel of a late-night bull session in a dorm room, so for the right kind of person, I think the Republic might be not only thought-provoking, but even fun to read.

What I'm Reading: Five Dialogues

Plato's Five Dialogues is comprised of five short dialogues, each about 20-40 pages, and which all star Plato's teacher Socrates as the main speaker. The dialogues have to do with the trial and execution of Socrates by the city of Athens in 399 BC on the spurious charges of corrupting the youth of the city.

A person I know saw me reading this book one day said something like, "Plato? You read that for fun?" I think he had the idea that Plato is a hard read or a slog to get through, but nothing could be further from the truth. The dialogues are short and easy to read, and Socrates and the people he banters with are witty and clever. Socrates at times comes off as even a bit of a smart-ass. I think a thoughtful high-schooler would not find this book intellectually out of reach.

The first dialogue is called Euthyphro, and is a dialogue between Socrates and his friend Euthyphro outside the court building in Athens, where Socrates is about to be charged. Yet, Socrates is not interested in talking about that, he wants to know why Euthyphro is there. Euthyphro explains he is suing his father, who killed a slave who had himself killed a man. Euthyphro's relatives think he's crazy to sue his own father, but Euthyphro thinks it is the pious thing to do. Socrates digs a little deeper, hoping Euthyphro can explain to him what piety is, since he's so sure of himself as to sue his father in its name. Euthyphro cannot explain it adequately, even with Socrates's prodding, and the dialogue ends inconclusively with Socrates due at his trial.

The second dialogue is the famous Apology, when Socrates defends himself before the 500 assembled men of Athens on the charges that he has corrupted the city's youth. There is some debate among scholars about how much of Plato's works are truly the words of Socrates, and how much are Plato's own ideas that he put in Socrates's mouth. But there is little doubt here that this is a very close account of Socrates's actual speech in his defense, as Plato claims to have been there and this was apparently written soon after the trial took place. Despite a moving and powerful speech in defense of the philosopher's life, and that he had done nothing but help the youth of Athens seek wisdom, he is found guilty and sentenced to death.

The third dialogue is Crito, and is between Socrates and his old friend Crito, who has bribed the jailer and found a place for Socrates to live in Thebes, if he'll flee with him. Socrates however refuses to leave his cell, and walks Crito through a neat little philosophical argument, at the end of which Crito sees that Socrates could not possibly escape if he really meant all the fine words he said at the trial, for he had said that even if found guilty he would face death bravely because he knew he had always pursued the truth.

The fourth dialogue, Meno, seems to be something as an outlier since it takes place some unspecified time before the trial, when Socrates is speaking with Meno, a young man from a wealthy family in Thessaly who is visiting Athens. But it turns out to be necessary to understand the final dialogue, for here Socrates convinces Meno that the soul is eternal and people do not really learn, but only recall things that the soul already knew. He quite cleverly walks one of Meno's slaves through a geometry problem, with only an occasional suggestion helping the slave to find the right answer, as a demonstration of his theory.

The final dialogue is Phaedo, when Phaedo, who was at Socrates's side on this last day in prison before his execution, recounts the events of that day to a group of philosophically-minded men. That is something of a framing story, as the bulk of the dialogue is taken up with Socrates's own words describing his view to his friends that the soul is immortal, and that one who has lived an ethical, philosophical life may look forward to an afterlife in the company of the greatest of heroes and thinkers who have passed on before, In typical Socratic fashion he convinces them with beautiful arguments, calmly and rationally addressing all their objections, and ends with a moving description of his view of the world beyond. At the very end, he takes the poisoned chalice offered by the executioner with utmost serenity and drinks it without complaint, even chiding his companions for weeping when he himself is happy to see what comes after death.