Ebook: Socrates: A Source Book

The main sources from which our knowledge of Socrates is drawn are Plato and Xenophon. Both knew him personally. Both wrote voluminously about him. Both depict him in dramatic situations. Both include a certain amount of biographical detail incidentally to their main purpose. Both record the defence Socrates is supposed to have made at his trial. Unfortunately, their evidence conflicts. It is not merely that the two defence speeches are completely different. It is that in the pages of Xenophon Socrates appears as an eminently worthy but dull, prosy and sententious moralist (‘the patron-saint of moral twaddle’, said Hegel); in the pages of Plato, he is witty and humorous, and a great metaphysical thinker as well. It is Socrates who propounds the Theory of Forms, the theory that the material world is unstable, fluctuating and unreal, and true reality exists in the stable, unchanging Forms which lie behind the material world, invisible and inaccessible to the senses, but accessible to the intellect. Thus, all the beauty in this world is imperfect. Perfect beauty is the Form of beauty, and the objects we call beautiful are beautiful in so far as they imitate or participate in the Form of beauty: use what account of the relationship we may, it is by Beauty that beautiful things are beautiful.

The main body of the book is a collection in English of ancient source-material on Socrates. Plato and Xenophon are treated in selection, and there is a comprehensive coverage of other authors down to the Byzantine era, the major omissions being repetitive passages, passages dependent on Plato and Xenophon, and passages which are plainly without historical value. Works presented in full are Plato. Apology, Crito, Alcibiades I; Xenophon, Apology, Libanius, On the Silence of Socrates. Apology. Brief notes and cross-references are appended where necessary. An introduction explains the main problems associated with the evidence, gives a brief account of the historical and intellectual background to Socrates, identifies fact from fiction in the biography, and essays an evaluation of his contribution to the history of thought. The evidence is there for students to make up their own minds. Many of the passages are translated for the first time.