Socrates Socked

Every schoolboy knows that Socrates was an influential Greek educator who was condemned to drink hemlock for "corrupting" Athens' youth. For 2,300 years Socrates has been pictured, on the strength of Plato's description of him, as a highborn philosopher who lived ascetically, spent his time asking searching questions of Athenians in the market place, showed up the Greek Sophists, avoided politics and was eventually martyred by an ignorant mob for teaching his pupils idealistic notions of justice and authority.

As it must to all great men, a debunking came to Socrates this week. The debunker, University of Wisconsin's Professor Alban Dewes Winspear, is a tall, slim scholar, British-born, educated in Canada and at Oxford (as a Rhodes scholar). He has a pedagogic urge to prove that "being in the field of classics doesn't make one an old fogy." Who Was Socrates?* is calculated to make old fogies furious.

Professor Winspear became suspicious of the Socratic tradition when he noticed that Socrates was described differently by Aristophanes than by Plato. In his satiric play, The Clouds, Aristophanes pictured Socrates as a ragged leader of the rabble, a Sophist, "a thoroughly subversive influence." Pondering this contradiction, Professor Winspear next noticed that The Clouds was produced in 423 B.C., when Socrates was 47 and Plato a child of six. He concluded that between 423 and about 400 B.C., when Plato knew him, Socrates changed, and that young Plato, who had a high contempt for the rabble, chose to overlook 70-year-old Socrates' past.

Professor Winspear spent several years investigating that past by combing the works of other Greek writers. His conclusion: Socrates was a turncoat, a radical in youth, in old age a conservative who undermined Greek democracy. The professor's account:

Born not an aristocrat but a stonecutter's son, Socrates was schooled by Sophists (the Leftists of Athens) and was at first a penurious democrat. As he grew more famed, Socrates began to hobnob with aristocrats, took gifts of money from them, became less ascetic, changed wives (from shrewish, lowborn Xanthippe to patrician Myrto). By the time he had passed 50, Socrates was followed by no rabble but by young aristocrats who plotted to overthrow the Athenian democracy.

One of his pupils was Critias, who, Professor Winspear says, "had been a young man of democratic sympathies" before he fell under Socrates' influence. Critias became the Adolf Hitler of his day. When Athenian aristocrats, with Sparta's help, established an oligarchy, Critias led "the notorious and bloody reactionary dictatorship of the Thirty," which executed some 1,500 Athenians. When Athenian democrats returned to power, they decided "to hew the head off and not hack the limbs," condemned Socrates to death.

Professor Winspear concludes that the picture of Socrates by Plato, himself violently antidemocratic, was not a true one, but "the extremely adroit and facile plea of a partisan." He believes that the evidence "should make us very hesitant to accept the conventional explanation that a high-minded and guiltless philosopher fell an innocent victim to the . . . passions of a . . . mob."

* The Cordon Co. ($1.25).

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