We noted that Plato begins this dialogue with a declaration of war. The Gorgias is a dialogue very unlike any other early dialogue Plato wrote. It is longer by far than any other—only the Protagoras is similar in length. And it is full of bile. Whereas the Protagoras also pits Socrates against a famous sophist on a visit to Athens, in that dialogue Socrates treats his antagonist with deference and sometimes flatters him—as is common in Socratic dialogues, where Socrates deals with a self-proclaimed expert—in the Gorgias Socrates challenges his antagonist, then continues the debate with two of his students, Polus and Callicles, each more hostile than the last figure, each presenting a more extreme version of the power of oratory and the folly of moral restraints. While Socrates shows some restraint in his interactions,[25] he does not concede anything to his opponents, but silences them one by one. And, unlike the Protagoras and most other Socratic dialogues, Socrates does not end with a disavowal of knowledge and a failure to present a positive position, but he advertises himself as the real solution to the problems of Athens, both moral and political. He is, as he also reveals in Plato’s Apology, God’s gift to Athens.
Why the about-face? Why does the meek and self-effacing Socrates throw off the comic mask and step up to the podium as the answer to all problems? Why does Plato throw back the curtain and let us see Socrates in a wholly different light than the one he usually presents?
There is a historical answer to this question, one offered long ago but largely dismissed and ignored by subsequent scholars.[26] This is an occasion piece, a composition written in the heat of passion by the often coldly efficient author. Even in the Apology of Socrates, where we might expect a show of emotion from Plato, he offers a calm and even-tempered Socrates, who confronts his own death with equanimity.
In the period following Socrates’ death in 399 BC, Plato and other Socratics had, as far as we can see, flooded Athens and the Greek world with dialogues presenting Socrates in a sympathetic and positive light. They had let Socrates speak for himself, showing how he focused on moral questions and encouraged his interlocutors to think long and deeply about virtue and goodness. Step by step, dialogue by dialogue, they were winning the propaganda war by showing Socrates as a thinker devoted to improving himself and everyone he met, turning them to care, as Plato has Socrates say in the Apology, more about what is just and unjust than about health, wealth, and reputation. Thanks to the devotion of his followers, Socrates lived again in a new kind of literature featuring philosophical conversations between the barefoot philosopher and the citizens of Athens.
Suddenly, however, the peaceful reconstruction of Socrates was challenged. A pamphlet was published presenting an attack on Socrates, in the form of a speech purporting to be from Socrates’s trial. The title of the work was The Accusation of Socrates (Katēgoria Sōkratous), the speech given by Anytus, one of the accusers of Socrates. The speech was clearly a fictional invention. It was anachronistic, for it mentioned the rebuilding of the Long Walls of Athens by Conon, an event that happened in 393, six years after the trial in question. The author of the speech was not Anytus, but Polycrates the Sophist, an up-and-coming teacher of oratory in Athens, who wanted to make a splash and drum up business for himself, apparently around 392, some seven years after the trial it represented.
Polycrates’ speech was anachronistic also in a more subtle way: it attacked Socrates for his political views and commitments. Polycrates portrayed Socrates as searching literature for quotations that challenged political orthodoxy and flouted immoral behavior.[27] He also criticizes Socrates for befriending some of the leading scoundrels of his day, including Critias, the worst of the Thirty Tyrants, and Alcibiades, the arch-traitor of the Peloponnesian War.[28] What was anachronistic was the fact that the Amnesty agreement, championed, among others, by Anytus himself, made it a capital crime to charge anyone in Athens for deeds done under the rule of the Thirty—for the Thirty had coerced many citizens to arrest innocent people so as to make them complicit with their administration. The Amnesty aimed to let bygones be bygones and unify the people of Athens. Anytus seems to have abided by the terms of the Amnesty scrupulously, and Plato’s account of the trial presents no political charges against him.
But if the speech Polycrates put in the mouth of Anytus was anachronistic, it was not irrelevant. Trials in Athens were notoriously about politics, even when they were dressed up as something else, such as religious issues (which suddenly became important after the restoration of the democracy).[29] So even if Socrates was not arraigned on political charges, people in the know realized the real motive behind the indictment. Socrates was a critic of the democracy. And in another sense, it was no accident that Anytus was on the prosecution’s team. Meletus, who had brought the charges and supposedly recruited Anytus as a helper, was in fact a political nobody. He did not have the connections or the motivation to go after Socrates. The man pulling the strings was surely Anytus. Meletus was just a hired gun, a front man to make the trial look like a defense against dangerous new ideas rather than the political purge it really was.
Polycrates’ pamphlet, then, provided a kind of historical opportunity for the two sides to talk about what was really going on in Socrates’ trial. The cards were on the table. Was Socrates, as Anytus thought, a political liability to the restored democracy? Was he, along with his Socratic followers, a subversive trying to turn back the clock on democracy and free expression? The question could no longer be ignored or obscured. In Socrates’ actual trial, be sure, the political issues had been canceled. But now the defense of Socrates would have to address his political stance. It would have to consider his relationship to Critias, the tyrant-in-chief of the Thirty Tyrants, and Alcibiades, the arch-traitor of the Peloponnesian War, one of them a conservative or reactionary, the other a populist democrat. An adequate defense would have to consider also Socrates’ position on democratic governance and popular sovereignty. The speeches of both parties to Socrates’ trial had finessed these issues, but they were now in the public forum for all to see.
[25] In his speech at Gorgias 457c-458b, for instance, Socrates shows some deference to Gorgias. At 486e-488b he show some respect for Callicles.
[26] See Dodds 1959: 27-29. Cf. Irwin 1979, who does not mention Polycrates but does see some interaction between Plato and Isocrates, e.g. p. 123.
[27] Xenophon Memorabilia 1.2.56.
[28] Xenophon Memorabilia 1.2.12.
[29] See Todd 1993: 308.