You can find Part One of this essay here and Part Two, here.
Like War and Peace, the lessons regarding Duty contained within Lysistrata touch upon ideas so ubiquitous within the Greek culture that they are rarely discussed in the abstract and must, instead, be inferred from the characters’ commentary on seemingly divergent topics. What makes Lysistrata stand out from the rest of her conspirators is not the abstention from sex but her willingness to first identify that a conflict has arisen between differing modes of duty and then reconcile them, thus bringing harmony not only to her own life but to all of Greece. Aristophanes places great emphasis throughout the play on women’s primary role in Greek culture as wives and keepers of the home . In the opening scene, as Lysistrata complains to her first arrival, Calonice, about the other women’s tardiness to hear her plan, her friend plainly lays out the many obligations that may have kept them from the appointment.
CALONICE: Don’t worry, dear, they’ll come. It’s not so easy for a wife to get out of the house, you know. They’ll all be rushing to and fro for their husbands, waking up the servants, putting the baby to bed or washing and feeding it—
LYSISTRATA: Damn it, there are more important things than that.
Note that Lysistrata does not say that those things are unimportant, only that there are concerns that go beyond them in dire need of resolution. What does this tell us? First, there are than more one set of duties that a woman might have an obligation to fulfill and that some of them are more important than others. Only the most banal would argue that women are born with no obligations to duty whatsoever. The fact that a woman is a human being, subject to the same laws of life and death that govern us all means that her first and most basic obligation is, in fact, to continue living as long as possible, just as it is for anyone else.
Unlike men, women carry the potential for creating more human life; a necessity, that must acknowledged as pertinent to some percentage of women of reproductive age or the species would have terminated aeons ago. So, looking at it from a strictly biological perspective, a woman’s most basic potential obligation is to, first, survive, and, second, potentially give birth and nurture that offspring until the child is capable of fending for her own survival. Through the course of human evolution, it became advantageous for a woman trying to accomplish goals number one and two to pair-bond with a capable male partner, creating a third sense of duty; expressed mostly simply as the relationship between husband and wife—though every culture and civilization develops an unique set of mores regarding this relationship (sometimes called marriage) reflective of its peculiar values and always subject to periodic re-examination.
These three obligations (to husband, to child, to self; listed in order of importance) can be thought of three-fourths of the Greek status quo for a woman’s duties as assumed by both Aristophanes and his audience. For the purpose of placing them on a more pragmatic continuum, I found it useful to think of these obligations as Internal at one extremity and progressing from self, to child, and then to husband (the opposite of Greek attitudes) towards another extreme that might be thought of as External. While the institution of Marriage (as observed by the Greeks) still represents an Internal obligation (as it is tied at least historically into both the preservation of self and nurturing of offspring), the final duty assumed in Lysistrata, a woman’s relations to the gods and goddesses represents the only socially acceptable foray into territory that is inarguably Exterior. As one might suspect, this piety is restricted to some extent to those goddesses specifically tied to home and the hearth. Athena, goddess of wisdom, war, and patroness to the city of Athens, despite her gender, is considered, to some extent, off limits to the women. As the women storm the Acropolis (Athena’s temple), the chorus of men sound their indignation.
CHORUS:
Incredible! Impossible!
Our women, if you please!
We’ve kept and fed within our doors
A pestilent disease!
They’ve seized our own Acropolis
With bars they’ve shut the gate!
They hold the statue of the Maid,
Protectress of our state!
Come on and let us hurry there
And put these logs around,
Smoke out the whole conspiracy
From Pallas’ sacred ground! [828]
The female chorus, a short time later responds, saying:
CHORUS:
Some frail old men
Approach with limping gait,
And carry logs
Of an enormous weight.
Dire threats they make,
Our friends they hope to see
Roasted alive.
O Maid, this must not be!
No, may they save
All Greece from war insane
For that is why
They occupy thy fane. [829]
Later, as Lysistrata is able to make her case before the magistrate, another exchange is even more descriptive of this divine segregation inherent to the culture.
MAGISTRATE: Well, the first thing I want to know is—what in Zeus’ name do you mean by shutting and barring the gates of our own Acropolis against us?
LYSISTRATA: We want to keep the money safe and stop you from waging war.
MAGISTRATE: The war has nothing to do with the money—
LYSISTRATA: Hasn’t it? Why are Peisander and the other office-seekers always stirring things up? Isn’t it so they can take a few more dips in the public purse? Well, as far as we are concerned they can do what they like; only they’re not going to lay their hands on the money in there.
MAGISTRATE: Why, what are you going to do?
LYSISTRATA: Do? Why, we’ll be in charge of it.
MAGISTRATE: You in charge of our finances?
LYSISTRATA: Well, what’s so strange about that? We’ve been in charge of all your housekeeping finances for years.
MAGISTRATE: But that’s not the same thing.
LYSISTRATA: Why not?
MAGISTRATE: Because the money here is needed for the war!
LYSISTRATA: Ah, but the war itself isn’t necessary.
MAGISTRATE: Not necessary! How is the City going to be saved then?
LYSISTRATA: We’ll save it for you.
MAGISTRATE: You!!!
LYSISTRATA: Us.
MAGISTRATE: This is intolerable!
LYSISTRATA: It may be, but it’s what’s going to happen.
MAGISTRATE: But Demeter!—I mean, it’s against nature. [832]
Parsing that passage, we see the magistrate open his attack with a double invocation of the patriarchal prerogative; first condemning her actions in the name of Zeus and then referring to the Acropolis as “our own”, meaning belonging rightly to the men. Sidestepping this condemnation to her authority, Lysistrata refutes his argument against it. He is left at the end only to invoke a “proper” female goddess, Demeter and labeling the entire spectacle as “against nature.”
Once Lysistrata moves beyond the conventions of her culture, she finds that there is very little that does not concern her more directly than she ever supposed, opening up a whole new sphere of duties that women might share alongside the men of Greece.
LYSISTRATA: In the last war we were too modest to object to anything you men did—and in any case you wouldn’t let us say a word. But don’t think we approved! We knew everything that was going on. Many times we’d hear at home about some major blunder of yours, and then when you came home, we’d be burning inside but we’d have to put on a smile and ask what it was you’d decided to inscribe on the pillar beneath the Peace Treaty.—And what did my husband always say?—“Shut up and mind your own business!” And I did.
MAGISTRATE: He’d have given you one if you hadn’t!
LYSISTRATA: Exactly—so I kept quiet. But, sure enough, next thing we knew you’d make an even sillier decision. And if I so much as said, “Darling, why are you still carrying on with this silly policy?” he would glare at me and say, “Back to your weaving, woman, or you’ll have a headache for a month. ‘Go and attend to your work; let war be the care of the menfolk.’”
MAGISTRATE: Quite right too, by Zeus.
LYSISTRATA: Right? That we should not be allowed to make the least little suggestion to you, no matter how much you mismanage the City’s affairs? And, now, look, every time two people meet in the street, what do they say? “Isn’t there a man in the country?” and the answer comes, “Not one.” That’s why we women got together and decided we were going to save Greece. What was the point of waiting any longer, we asked ourselves. Well now, we’ll make a deal. You listen to us—and we’ll talk sense, not like you used to—listen to us and keep quiet, as we’ve had to do up to now, and we’ll clear up the mess you’ve made. [833]
Now our continuum continues on its journey away from the traditional Greek sphere of women's obligation and into territory deemed by culture, convention and dogma to be exclusively male. This is Aristophanes’ radical leap as he begins to question what a woman’s obligations to her City, to Greece, and, indeed, to all humanity might very well be.
Showing posts with label Duty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Duty. Show all posts
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Great Books: Aristophanes' Lysistrata (Part 1 of 4)
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
Time: First performed in 411 BCE
Place: Athens, Greece
Great Ideas Considered: Duty, Courage, War and Peace
[The complete text of Lysistrata can be found online at http://drama.eserver.org/plays/classical/aristophanes/lysistrata.txt. This text differs some from the Sommerstein translation I'll be quoting from, most notably in Sommerstein's playful use of a Scottish dialect to differentiate the Spartans from the Athenians.]
Among Aristophanes’ eleven extant plays, Lysistrata is the one with which modern readers most often identify though for reasons that have more to do with modernity than the play itself. This wishful story of an Athenian woman who brokers a lasting peace to the Peloponnesian War generates its humor in the typical Aristophanic fashion through the inversion of particular status quo value. In this case, Aristophanes takes the typically passive role that women played in classic Greek culture and reverses it as the women refuse to perform their wifely duties until the war’s conclusion. Lysistrata’s ribald dialogue and openness in discussing sexual relationships between men and women has made it a perpetual source of controversy and, no doubt, contributed to its persistence within the Western cultural tradition. Aristophanes’ device of placing a woman at the story’s center as its heroine has also gained attention from post-feminist thinkers as prescient in its depiction of women as co-equal to men, in deed if not social status.
In contrast to its reputation, Lysistrata is not unique among Aristophanes’ work (even among those extant) in its candid discussions of sex. If anything, Lysistrata is positively moral by Victorian standards in comparison to The Clouds which is replete with homoerotic humor and nary a female character to be found. Most of the sex discussed in Lysistrata is of the marital variety and predominantly heterosexual in nature. While it does presuppose, if only satirically, that women have sexual needs that go beyond their desire to procreate (a subject of much debate in the US up through the 1950s), no actual sex occurs within its narrative frame; literally, much ado about nothing.
As a reader well-grounded in the canon of feminist writing, I also have extreme difficulty thinking of Lysistrata as a feminist work of any sort. At best, it might be described as ‘womanist,’ tacitly acknowledging the personhood of women without seeing this distinction as grounds for a true reconsideration of the gender roles as prescribed by the traditions of culture. For all the attention paid to sex by the play and posterity that has received it, sex is but a magnified symbol of the many contributions that women make to society through their management of the household while men are away, busy slaughtering one another. In their refusal to perform the totality of those duties (including but hardly limited to sex), Lysistrata and her band of conspirators cripple the productivity of Greece in the same way that a slave rebellion or a grain embargo might. In this sense, Lysistrata can be read as a vigorous defense of the traditional Greek values of womanhood even as it upsets the social order for comedic purposes with its value inversion.
So, if Lysistrata is neither the Greek equivalent of the Tropic of Cancer nor The Feminine Mystique, then what the heck is it? To begin that discussion, it is important to set Lysistrata as most immediately relevant to a particular place and time; namely, Athens in 411 BCE, when and where the play was first performed. Socially, Athens was in utter turmoil. After fifty years of unquestioned superiority among the Greek city-states and the dominions beyond, Athens’ status began to slowly erode with the onset of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE. Their military and naval might forced the first leg of the War to a conclusion in 421 but, within six years, conflict broke out again and, in 415, the Athenian navy was destroyed by Syracuse allied with Sparta. Humiliated by that defeat and the loss of some of their colonies, Athens elected to double down and use the lumber and wealth that had placed in reserve at the war’s onset to raise a second fleet. In 411, the same year that Lysistrata was first performed, the Athenian democracy was overthrown by an oligarchy known as the Council of Four Hundred. The tension between the democratic and oligarchic factions could be essentially boiled down to how the remaining funds and resources would be spent in preparation for the recommencement of full-scale war. While the Council of Four Hundred would only persist for four months before Athens’ democratic system was restored, one can only imagine the degree of anxiety about the future that the average Athenian (such as one who might have attended this play) was feeling. In a way, the mere inversion of women’s relationship to war that sits at the play’s heart would be a comfort in comparison to the whiplash reversals of fortune that had plagued the city for over two decades.
Sitting down with the Syntopicon to decide which of the Great Ideas might prove illuminating for a discussion of Lysistrata, I found myself embroiled in a quandary. Much to my surprise (and I must admit, chagrin), Gender is not one of the Great Ideas. Woman and/or Womanhood are not Great Ideas. Man, on the other hand, is a Great Idea and, as one might suspect, this is the Old School definition of Man that presumes both men and women under its authority. However one might see fit to measure it, I’m just feminist enough in my acculturation that I loathe hearing the words ‘Man’ or ’Mankind’ as a synonym for humanity. Whenever reading a passage aloud that insists upon doing it, I usually insert the parenthetical (“because they didn’t have women back then”) just to keep from feeling like an ass.
One of the most persistent and, frankly, well-earned criticisms of The Great Books series and the editorial materials that accompany it is that it is, at best, chauvinist and, at worse, openly misogynist in its organization of ideas and in its selection of works for consideration. We nearly lost Kendra a couple of weeks ago to the dunes of seething anger when we realized that the only woman represented by ALL TEN YEARS of the Great Books reading list was Jane Austen. The argument I made then and then one I present now is that the lion’s share of the scholarship that went into compiling the Great Books series was done in the early 1950s. The editorial board, at the time, didn’t feel that enough time had elapsed in the 20th century for them to develop the amount of cultural objectivity requisite to deciding what might be of lasting historical merit and what might not. When Adler and his staff returned to the task in the late 1980s, they did feel confident enough to include works published from 1900 to 1950. Consequently, the selections from the second edition highlight a virtual explosion of women contributing to the Great Conversation in the first half of the 20th century. For all the Aphra Behn’s and Sappho’s that might have been considered in the first edition but weren’t, the second edition does improve upon its relationship with women, if not repair it altogether with a more exhaustive examination of what the breadth and depth of that contribution to the written tradition might actually be.
Deprived by the Great Ideas of a direct way to address the womanist aspects of Lysistrata, my thinking turned immediately subversive. I considered selecting Slavery and drawing parallels from the play between that institution and the one of marriage. I also considered selecting Man and using it as an opportunity to criticize the inadequacies of the Great Ideas as they stand. In the end, however, my desire to utilize the Great Ideas in the constructive spirit in which they were collected prevailed. I visualized them as an elaborate Tarot Deck, broadly sketching various aspects of the human experience with the assumption that the aspirant will bring their own knowledge to the table to truly flesh out the medians between the various ideas. Narrowed down to three from a possible field of six, I chose to filter my discussion of Lysistrata through the Great Ideas of Duty, Courage, and War and Peace.
Time: First performed in 411 BCE
Place: Athens, Greece
Great Ideas Considered: Duty, Courage, War and Peace
[The complete text of Lysistrata can be found online at http://drama.eserver.org/plays/classical/aristophanes/lysistrata.txt. This text differs some from the Sommerstein translation I'll be quoting from, most notably in Sommerstein's playful use of a Scottish dialect to differentiate the Spartans from the Athenians.]
Among Aristophanes’ eleven extant plays, Lysistrata is the one with which modern readers most often identify though for reasons that have more to do with modernity than the play itself. This wishful story of an Athenian woman who brokers a lasting peace to the Peloponnesian War generates its humor in the typical Aristophanic fashion through the inversion of particular status quo value. In this case, Aristophanes takes the typically passive role that women played in classic Greek culture and reverses it as the women refuse to perform their wifely duties until the war’s conclusion. Lysistrata’s ribald dialogue and openness in discussing sexual relationships between men and women has made it a perpetual source of controversy and, no doubt, contributed to its persistence within the Western cultural tradition. Aristophanes’ device of placing a woman at the story’s center as its heroine has also gained attention from post-feminist thinkers as prescient in its depiction of women as co-equal to men, in deed if not social status.
In contrast to its reputation, Lysistrata is not unique among Aristophanes’ work (even among those extant) in its candid discussions of sex. If anything, Lysistrata is positively moral by Victorian standards in comparison to The Clouds which is replete with homoerotic humor and nary a female character to be found. Most of the sex discussed in Lysistrata is of the marital variety and predominantly heterosexual in nature. While it does presuppose, if only satirically, that women have sexual needs that go beyond their desire to procreate (a subject of much debate in the US up through the 1950s), no actual sex occurs within its narrative frame; literally, much ado about nothing.
As a reader well-grounded in the canon of feminist writing, I also have extreme difficulty thinking of Lysistrata as a feminist work of any sort. At best, it might be described as ‘womanist,’ tacitly acknowledging the personhood of women without seeing this distinction as grounds for a true reconsideration of the gender roles as prescribed by the traditions of culture. For all the attention paid to sex by the play and posterity that has received it, sex is but a magnified symbol of the many contributions that women make to society through their management of the household while men are away, busy slaughtering one another. In their refusal to perform the totality of those duties (including but hardly limited to sex), Lysistrata and her band of conspirators cripple the productivity of Greece in the same way that a slave rebellion or a grain embargo might. In this sense, Lysistrata can be read as a vigorous defense of the traditional Greek values of womanhood even as it upsets the social order for comedic purposes with its value inversion.
So, if Lysistrata is neither the Greek equivalent of the Tropic of Cancer nor The Feminine Mystique, then what the heck is it? To begin that discussion, it is important to set Lysistrata as most immediately relevant to a particular place and time; namely, Athens in 411 BCE, when and where the play was first performed. Socially, Athens was in utter turmoil. After fifty years of unquestioned superiority among the Greek city-states and the dominions beyond, Athens’ status began to slowly erode with the onset of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE. Their military and naval might forced the first leg of the War to a conclusion in 421 but, within six years, conflict broke out again and, in 415, the Athenian navy was destroyed by Syracuse allied with Sparta. Humiliated by that defeat and the loss of some of their colonies, Athens elected to double down and use the lumber and wealth that had placed in reserve at the war’s onset to raise a second fleet. In 411, the same year that Lysistrata was first performed, the Athenian democracy was overthrown by an oligarchy known as the Council of Four Hundred. The tension between the democratic and oligarchic factions could be essentially boiled down to how the remaining funds and resources would be spent in preparation for the recommencement of full-scale war. While the Council of Four Hundred would only persist for four months before Athens’ democratic system was restored, one can only imagine the degree of anxiety about the future that the average Athenian (such as one who might have attended this play) was feeling. In a way, the mere inversion of women’s relationship to war that sits at the play’s heart would be a comfort in comparison to the whiplash reversals of fortune that had plagued the city for over two decades.
Sitting down with the Syntopicon to decide which of the Great Ideas might prove illuminating for a discussion of Lysistrata, I found myself embroiled in a quandary. Much to my surprise (and I must admit, chagrin), Gender is not one of the Great Ideas. Woman and/or Womanhood are not Great Ideas. Man, on the other hand, is a Great Idea and, as one might suspect, this is the Old School definition of Man that presumes both men and women under its authority. However one might see fit to measure it, I’m just feminist enough in my acculturation that I loathe hearing the words ‘Man’ or ’Mankind’ as a synonym for humanity. Whenever reading a passage aloud that insists upon doing it, I usually insert the parenthetical (“because they didn’t have women back then”) just to keep from feeling like an ass.
One of the most persistent and, frankly, well-earned criticisms of The Great Books series and the editorial materials that accompany it is that it is, at best, chauvinist and, at worse, openly misogynist in its organization of ideas and in its selection of works for consideration. We nearly lost Kendra a couple of weeks ago to the dunes of seething anger when we realized that the only woman represented by ALL TEN YEARS of the Great Books reading list was Jane Austen. The argument I made then and then one I present now is that the lion’s share of the scholarship that went into compiling the Great Books series was done in the early 1950s. The editorial board, at the time, didn’t feel that enough time had elapsed in the 20th century for them to develop the amount of cultural objectivity requisite to deciding what might be of lasting historical merit and what might not. When Adler and his staff returned to the task in the late 1980s, they did feel confident enough to include works published from 1900 to 1950. Consequently, the selections from the second edition highlight a virtual explosion of women contributing to the Great Conversation in the first half of the 20th century. For all the Aphra Behn’s and Sappho’s that might have been considered in the first edition but weren’t, the second edition does improve upon its relationship with women, if not repair it altogether with a more exhaustive examination of what the breadth and depth of that contribution to the written tradition might actually be.
Deprived by the Great Ideas of a direct way to address the womanist aspects of Lysistrata, my thinking turned immediately subversive. I considered selecting Slavery and drawing parallels from the play between that institution and the one of marriage. I also considered selecting Man and using it as an opportunity to criticize the inadequacies of the Great Ideas as they stand. In the end, however, my desire to utilize the Great Ideas in the constructive spirit in which they were collected prevailed. I visualized them as an elaborate Tarot Deck, broadly sketching various aspects of the human experience with the assumption that the aspirant will bring their own knowledge to the table to truly flesh out the medians between the various ideas. Narrowed down to three from a possible field of six, I chose to filter my discussion of Lysistrata through the Great Ideas of Duty, Courage, and War and Peace.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Great Books: Plato's Crito
Crito by Plato
The unabridged text to Benjamin Jowett's translation of Crito can be read in its entirety online at http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/crito.html
In Crito, the titular character comes to Socrates in the last days before his impending execution with the unenviable task of convincing his mentor to flee Athens. By adding but one extra voice to Apology’s bombastic monologue, Plato transforms the ongoing saga from a philosophical screed into a haunting portrait of Crito’s helplessness in the face of his teacher’s inarguable logic—the same logic that has condemned Socrates to death. Say what you will about the dialogue form but there is unmistakable poetry in Plato’s opening.
SOCRATES: Why have you come at this hour, Crito? It must be quite early?
CRITO: Yes, certainly.
SOC.: What is the exact time?
CR.: The dawn is breaking.
SOC.: I wonder that the keeper of the prison would let you in.
CR,: He knows me, because I have often come, Socrates; moreover, I have done him a kindness.
SOC.: And are you only just arrived?
CR.: No, I came some time ago.
SOC.: Then why did you sit and say nothing, instead of at once awakening me?
CR.: I should not have liked myself, Socrates, to be in such great trouble and unrest as you are—indeed I should not: I have been watching with amazement your peaceful slumbers; and for that reason, I did not awake you, because I wished to minimize the pain. I have always thought you to be of a happy disposition; but I never did I see anything like the easy, tranquil manner in which you bear this calamity. [43:1-22]
It is easy to imagine Crito, sitting silent in the early morning light, wondering to himself what possible argument he could construct to change his teacher’s mind; knowing that Socrates’ very life depended on his success or failure. Failure to try to is not an option, though he knows he is destined to fail. Failure to succeed is not an option, though he knows he is destined to fail. And so he sits, in the dark of the prison, formulating the arguments he knows can’t work and, as Socrates awakens, sets out about his task anyway. This sense of drama, it should be remembered, is of Plato’s construction and may bear little resemblance to the reality experienced by the original players.
Crito bases his argument for Socrates’ escape primarily on the Great Idea, Duty. He frontloads his argument with several elements, perhaps hoping to wear Socrates down with the frenetic pace of his accusations. Socrates, he first argues, cannot throw his life away on principle because of the obligations he has to those he leaves behind. “People who do not know you and me,” Crito argues, “will believe that I might have saved you if I’d be willing to give the money but that I did not care” [44:22-24]. When Socrates rightly dismisses the opinions of the uninformed as unimportant, Crito changes his tactic, appealing to his teacher’s sense of familial obligation. “You,” he accuses, “are deserting your own children…No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nurture and education” [45:38-41]. One may assume that Crito refers not only to Socrates’ actual children but also to the many followers and students he leaves behind, of whom Crito is one.
Socrates nonetheless ends Crito’s opening salvo of arguments by identifying his only real obligation left unmet, noting that “I am and always have been one of those natures who must be guided by reason…and now that this chance has fallen befallen me, I cannot repudiate my own words” [46:17-22]. His duty is to the integrity with which he has conducted his life and to see that it end in a manner consistent with his principles of living.
Having defused Crito’s initial barrage of arguments, Socrates begins his rebuttal by re-framing it as a question of Good and Evil, the second of the Great Ideas under consideration. Interestingly, the contrast between the two poles turns almost immediately into a contrast between the individual and the many. “We must not regard,” Socrates notes, “what the many say of us: but what he, the one man who has understanding of just and unjust, will say, and what the truth will say” [48:7-10]. He circles back briefly to Crito’s opening arguments, stating outright that, “the other considerations which you mention, of money and loss of character and the duty of educating one’s children are only the doctrines of the multitude, who would be as ready to restore people to life, if they were able, as they are to put them to death—and with as little reason” [48:32-38].
Socrates’ commitment to identifying and then acting according to the good lays the groundwork for his refusal to flee Athens. Even under the conditions that the judgment was evil and Socrates himself, good, he argues that the good is never justified by evil to commit evil in retaliation. Socrates points out the radicality of this position to Crito, noting that “this opinion has never been held, and never will be held, by any considerable number of persons; and those who are agreed and those who are not agreed upon this point have no common ground and can only despise one another when they see how widely they differ” [49:49-55]. The logical extension of this is that those determined to commit evil will always seem to triumph over those they murder who in turn refused to return the evil perpetuated upon them.
As logically sound as this argument is, the abstract victory of principle over petty mob politics that Socrates’ execution would symbolize is not powerful enough on its own to win over Crito’s grief at losing his teacher. To accomplish this, Socrates turns to his most compelling argument and the third Great idea under examination, the duty of the Citizen. One must admire the unflinching clarity with which Socrates outlines his responsibilities to the state of Athens as a free person, whether enjoying the benefits of its largesse or the unbridled fury of its judgment. Again, one feels Plato’s narrative hand at work in the irony of Socrates immaculate defense of his city’s right to destroy him on a whim; in a sense, imposing the authority of the state on to the impeccable reasoning of his teacher to construct a trap from which there was simply no escape.
”’Tell us, Socrates,’ they say; ‘what are you about? Are you not going by an act of yours to overturn us—the laws, and the whole state, as far as in you lies? Do you imagine that a state can subsist and not be overthrown, in which the decisions of law have no power, but are set aside and trampled upon by individuals?’ What would be our answer, Crito, to these and like words?” [50:11-18]
Note how Socrates speaks as if the laws themselves accuse him, manifested as the state, but elevated to a status seemingly coequal to the gods—invisible but unmistakable in both the protection they offer and the punishment they promise to those who break faith with their contract. This equivocation is made explicit when Socrates describes the state as, “to be soothed, and gently and reverently entreated when angry, even more than a father, and either to be persuaded, or if not persuaded, to be obeyed” [51:11-14] with only the “or we will destroy you” left to the imagination. Playing devil’s advocate, Socrates goes on to identify the state’s investment in the individual as three-fold: first, in sanctioning the marriage that produced them; second, in mandating an education appropriate to their station in life; and lastly, in offering them the freedom to leave with their property at any time they should choose as long as they live in accordance with the state’s laws while within its sovereign territory.
Crito’s final heartbreaking moment comes as Socrates equates the degree of his culpability with the depth of his undying love for Athens. “’Of all Athenians you have been the most constant resident in the city, which, as you never leave, you may be supposed to love. For you never went either to see the games, except when you went to the Isthmus, or to any other place unless when you were on military service; nor did you travel as other men do…your affections did not go beyond us and our state; we were your special favorites, and you acquiesced in our government of you; and here in this city, you begat your children, which is proof of your satisfaction’” [52:14-28].
Though delivered in the voice of his accuser, Law as manifested in the flesh by the State, Socrates’ reasoning is no less sincere or ill-reasoned than ideas presented as his own and, indeed, Plato presents them as one in the same. His refusal to flee is the last virtuous act of a virtuous man who, having made his bid to persuade the state of his innocence and, having failed, stands ready to obey its edict on principle unto his death. The historicity of this death cannot be questioned and so Crito leaves the reader wondering only to what degree Plato’s narrative influence heightens our ability to relate to this otherwise private conversation between two old friends saying goodbye.
The unabridged text to Benjamin Jowett's translation of Crito can be read in its entirety online at http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/crito.html
In Crito, the titular character comes to Socrates in the last days before his impending execution with the unenviable task of convincing his mentor to flee Athens. By adding but one extra voice to Apology’s bombastic monologue, Plato transforms the ongoing saga from a philosophical screed into a haunting portrait of Crito’s helplessness in the face of his teacher’s inarguable logic—the same logic that has condemned Socrates to death. Say what you will about the dialogue form but there is unmistakable poetry in Plato’s opening.
SOCRATES: Why have you come at this hour, Crito? It must be quite early?
CRITO: Yes, certainly.
SOC.: What is the exact time?
CR.: The dawn is breaking.
SOC.: I wonder that the keeper of the prison would let you in.
CR,: He knows me, because I have often come, Socrates; moreover, I have done him a kindness.
SOC.: And are you only just arrived?
CR.: No, I came some time ago.
SOC.: Then why did you sit and say nothing, instead of at once awakening me?
CR.: I should not have liked myself, Socrates, to be in such great trouble and unrest as you are—indeed I should not: I have been watching with amazement your peaceful slumbers; and for that reason, I did not awake you, because I wished to minimize the pain. I have always thought you to be of a happy disposition; but I never did I see anything like the easy, tranquil manner in which you bear this calamity. [43:1-22]
It is easy to imagine Crito, sitting silent in the early morning light, wondering to himself what possible argument he could construct to change his teacher’s mind; knowing that Socrates’ very life depended on his success or failure. Failure to try to is not an option, though he knows he is destined to fail. Failure to succeed is not an option, though he knows he is destined to fail. And so he sits, in the dark of the prison, formulating the arguments he knows can’t work and, as Socrates awakens, sets out about his task anyway. This sense of drama, it should be remembered, is of Plato’s construction and may bear little resemblance to the reality experienced by the original players.
Crito bases his argument for Socrates’ escape primarily on the Great Idea, Duty. He frontloads his argument with several elements, perhaps hoping to wear Socrates down with the frenetic pace of his accusations. Socrates, he first argues, cannot throw his life away on principle because of the obligations he has to those he leaves behind. “People who do not know you and me,” Crito argues, “will believe that I might have saved you if I’d be willing to give the money but that I did not care” [44:22-24]. When Socrates rightly dismisses the opinions of the uninformed as unimportant, Crito changes his tactic, appealing to his teacher’s sense of familial obligation. “You,” he accuses, “are deserting your own children…No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nurture and education” [45:38-41]. One may assume that Crito refers not only to Socrates’ actual children but also to the many followers and students he leaves behind, of whom Crito is one.
Socrates nonetheless ends Crito’s opening salvo of arguments by identifying his only real obligation left unmet, noting that “I am and always have been one of those natures who must be guided by reason…and now that this chance has fallen befallen me, I cannot repudiate my own words” [46:17-22]. His duty is to the integrity with which he has conducted his life and to see that it end in a manner consistent with his principles of living.
Having defused Crito’s initial barrage of arguments, Socrates begins his rebuttal by re-framing it as a question of Good and Evil, the second of the Great Ideas under consideration. Interestingly, the contrast between the two poles turns almost immediately into a contrast between the individual and the many. “We must not regard,” Socrates notes, “what the many say of us: but what he, the one man who has understanding of just and unjust, will say, and what the truth will say” [48:7-10]. He circles back briefly to Crito’s opening arguments, stating outright that, “the other considerations which you mention, of money and loss of character and the duty of educating one’s children are only the doctrines of the multitude, who would be as ready to restore people to life, if they were able, as they are to put them to death—and with as little reason” [48:32-38].
Socrates’ commitment to identifying and then acting according to the good lays the groundwork for his refusal to flee Athens. Even under the conditions that the judgment was evil and Socrates himself, good, he argues that the good is never justified by evil to commit evil in retaliation. Socrates points out the radicality of this position to Crito, noting that “this opinion has never been held, and never will be held, by any considerable number of persons; and those who are agreed and those who are not agreed upon this point have no common ground and can only despise one another when they see how widely they differ” [49:49-55]. The logical extension of this is that those determined to commit evil will always seem to triumph over those they murder who in turn refused to return the evil perpetuated upon them.
As logically sound as this argument is, the abstract victory of principle over petty mob politics that Socrates’ execution would symbolize is not powerful enough on its own to win over Crito’s grief at losing his teacher. To accomplish this, Socrates turns to his most compelling argument and the third Great idea under examination, the duty of the Citizen. One must admire the unflinching clarity with which Socrates outlines his responsibilities to the state of Athens as a free person, whether enjoying the benefits of its largesse or the unbridled fury of its judgment. Again, one feels Plato’s narrative hand at work in the irony of Socrates immaculate defense of his city’s right to destroy him on a whim; in a sense, imposing the authority of the state on to the impeccable reasoning of his teacher to construct a trap from which there was simply no escape.
”’Tell us, Socrates,’ they say; ‘what are you about? Are you not going by an act of yours to overturn us—the laws, and the whole state, as far as in you lies? Do you imagine that a state can subsist and not be overthrown, in which the decisions of law have no power, but are set aside and trampled upon by individuals?’ What would be our answer, Crito, to these and like words?” [50:11-18]
Note how Socrates speaks as if the laws themselves accuse him, manifested as the state, but elevated to a status seemingly coequal to the gods—invisible but unmistakable in both the protection they offer and the punishment they promise to those who break faith with their contract. This equivocation is made explicit when Socrates describes the state as, “to be soothed, and gently and reverently entreated when angry, even more than a father, and either to be persuaded, or if not persuaded, to be obeyed” [51:11-14] with only the “or we will destroy you” left to the imagination. Playing devil’s advocate, Socrates goes on to identify the state’s investment in the individual as three-fold: first, in sanctioning the marriage that produced them; second, in mandating an education appropriate to their station in life; and lastly, in offering them the freedom to leave with their property at any time they should choose as long as they live in accordance with the state’s laws while within its sovereign territory.
Crito’s final heartbreaking moment comes as Socrates equates the degree of his culpability with the depth of his undying love for Athens. “’Of all Athenians you have been the most constant resident in the city, which, as you never leave, you may be supposed to love. For you never went either to see the games, except when you went to the Isthmus, or to any other place unless when you were on military service; nor did you travel as other men do…your affections did not go beyond us and our state; we were your special favorites, and you acquiesced in our government of you; and here in this city, you begat your children, which is proof of your satisfaction’” [52:14-28].
Though delivered in the voice of his accuser, Law as manifested in the flesh by the State, Socrates’ reasoning is no less sincere or ill-reasoned than ideas presented as his own and, indeed, Plato presents them as one in the same. His refusal to flee is the last virtuous act of a virtuous man who, having made his bid to persuade the state of his innocence and, having failed, stands ready to obey its edict on principle unto his death. The historicity of this death cannot be questioned and so Crito leaves the reader wondering only to what degree Plato’s narrative influence heightens our ability to relate to this otherwise private conversation between two old friends saying goodbye.
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