Socrates’ disciples were young, gifted, intelligent, and some of them at least were well-connected. They were deeply hurt by recent events in Athens, but they were also dedicated to the memory of the most remarkable man Athens had ever known. Thus was born the Socratic movement.[4]
The Socratics were armed with a new medium, the Socratic dialogue, and the medium was the message. Armed with questions rather than answers, and questions directed at the soul, the Socratics would challenge the people of Athens to search themselves. Whatever the answers were, surely for Socrates they were always to be found in the soul, not in the heavens or earth or underworld.
Soon Athens was flooded by Socratic dialogues being written by at least seven Socratics. The people of Athens could read about Socrates’ encounters with the citizens of Athens, famous and obscure, old men and young men, with Socrates pursuing his ethical inquiries. He might be persistent and annoying, but he was not subversive or disrespectful. Indeed, readers would see him professing ignorance about important matters and asking for help understanding what virtue was and how to acquire it.
In his dialogue The Apology of Socrates, Plato has Socrates make a prophecy to the jurors at the end of his trial: “More people will arise to examine you, people I’ve restrained until now, unbeknownst to you. They will be tougher on you for being younger, and you will be more offended at them than at me. But if you think killing me will keep people from correcting you for your depraved way of life, you’re sadly mistaken.”[5] This prophecy is likely to be an addendum from Plato, made ex post facto as the Socratics were taking their stories to the world.
Socrates was now a martyr and his gospel was being spread in Athens and soon, thanks to the power of the written word, to the rest of the Greek world.
We have the complete dialogues of two Socratics, Plato and Xenophon. Plato was an important part of the early Socratic movement, but Xenophon was away from Athens and then exiled from his country and busy as a soldier and military leader until probably thirty years after Socrates’ death when he had the leisure to write his dialogues and memoirs. The other Socratics who wrote dialogues were Antisthenes, Aeschines, Phaedo, Aristippus, and Euclides, the host of the retreat. Their writings are lost except for some “fragments” or quotations and some “testimonies” or reports by contemporaries or near-contemporaries.
We have the important remains from Aeschines. One of his dialogues, the Alcibiades, presents Socrates’ efforts to improve his young friend and sometime follower, Alcibiades. Socrates tries to inspire the young man with the story of how Themistocles led the Greeks to victory against the Persians. Unfortunately, however, he fell from favor in Athens and ended up defecting to the Persian side. Socrates points out to Alcibiades that he lacks the skills and knowledge of Themistocles, which he will need if he wishes to make a name for himself. Alcibiades bursts into tears in a moment of awareness of his own limitations.
Narrating the encounter, Socrates reports, “If I thought it was by some art (technē) that I was able to benefit him, I would find myself guilty of great folly. But in fact I thought that it was by divine dispensation (theia moira) that this was given to me in the case of Alcibiades, and that it was nothing to be wondered at. For many sick people are made well by human art, but some by divine dispensation. The former are cured by doctors; for the latter it is their own desire which leads them to recover. … Because of the love (erōs) which I have for Alcibiades I have the same experience as the bacchantes. For when the bacchantes are possessed, they draw milk and honey from wells where others cannot even draw water. And so although I know no science or skill which I could teach to anyone to benefit him, nevertheless I thought that in keeping company with Alcibiades I could by the power of love make him better.”[6]
Here we see Aeschines showing Socrates as a good influence on his talented but unstable young friend—who would do much harm to the Athenian state. Socrates is deeply concerned with virtue and moral education but claims not to be a teacher or a practitioner of a craft. Nonetheless, by a kind of divine endowment he hopes to redirect Alcibiades into a better course of action that will benefit himself and his city.
[4] See Vander Waerdt 1994; Kahn 1996; Field 1967 [1930].
[5].Plato Apology 39d.
[6] Fr. 11 Dittmar = SSR VI A 53, trans. Kahn.