Socrates and Aristophanes

by Leo Strauss

Overview

In one of his last books, Socrates and Aristophanes, Leo Strauss's examines the confrontation between Socrates and Aristophanes in Aristophanes' comedies. Looking at eleven plays, Strauss shows that this confrontation is essentially one between poetry and philosophy, and that poetry emerges as an autonomous wisdom capable of rivaling philosophy.

"Strauss gives us an impressive addition to his life's work—the recovery of the Great Tradition in political philosophy. The problem the book proposes centers formally upon Socrates. As is typical of Strauss, he raises profound issues with great courage. . . . [He addresses] a problem that has been inherent in Western life ever since [Socrates'] execution: the tension between reason and religion. . . . Thus, we come to Aristophanes, the great comic poet, and his attack on Socrates in the play The Clouds. . . [Strauss] translates it into the basic problem of the relation between poetry and philosophy, and resolves this by an analysis of the function of comedy in the life of the city." —Stanley Parry, National Review

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226777191
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	11/15/1996
Edition description:	1
Pages:	332
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Leo Strauss (1899–1973) was one of the preeminent political philosophers of the twentieth century. From 1949 to 1968 he was professor of political science at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many books, among them The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, Natural Right and History, and Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, all published by the University of Chicago Press.
 

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Socrates and Aristophanes

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By Leo Strauss

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 1966 Leo Strauss
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-77719-1

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CHAPTER 1

The Acharnians

The Acharnians begins, like the Clouds, with a soliloquy by an oldish rustic who gives vent to his discomfort; but in the Acharnians the soliloquy takes place not indoors but in public, and it concerns matters that are not merely private but also public. Regarding the Clouds, one may doubt whether the oldish rustic Strepsiades or Socrates is the chief character; regarding the Acharnians, there can be no doubt that the oldish rustic Dikaiopolis is the chief character. Dikaiopolis has come to the Pnyx, as is his wont, very early. He is the very first to arrive, long before the Assembly begins, while the other citizens and even the magistrates, in their indifference to the concerns of the city, linger elsewhere and arrive only at the last moment. He is the only Athenian for whom the Assembly can not begin soon enough. Compelled by the war to live in town, he longs for his village where he produced everything he needed; he loathes the town where he has to buy everything. While waiting for the beginning of the Assembly he passes his time by doing a great variety of things, among them yawning and writing. At the beginning of the play we find him engaged in attempting to count the very few pleasures—exactly four—that he had in town, whereas he had there innumerable pains. He succeeds in enumerating a political pleasure, a Music pain, a Music pleasure, and another Music pain. We learn from his enumeration that he loves Aeschylus. After having mentioned his second pain he turns not to his third pleasure but to his third pain, his present pain—a pain so great and so intense that it prevents him from even completing his enumeration of his four pleasures. His present pain is connected with the war, the source of his innumerable pains. Compared with these pains, even the pains that he derived from bad poetry or music might well appear to him to have been pleasures; to say nothing of the fact that bad poetry or music, by virtue of being laughable, affords some pleasure. The political pleasure that he felt was caused by Kleon's having been heavily fined, thanks to the knights; it is possible that this event occurred in a comedy, rather than in life. Surely Dikaiopolis is as little an average rustic as Strepsiades; he is an unusually Music rustic. It is because he loves the Muses that he loathes war more than the average rustic. Loathing the war wholeheartedly, he has come to today's Assembly resolved to do everything he can in favor of peace. His private woes—in contradistinction to Strepsiades'—can not be removed except by political action, or his private pleasures can not be obtained except by benefiting the city.

Dikaiopolis finds wholly unexpected and even miraculous support. The first speaker in the Assembly, Amphitheos, and only he, has been charged by the gods to treat with the Spartans about peace; although he is an Athenian citizen he is not a human being (cf. 46 and 57), but himself an immortal. He needs the assistance of the Assembly because the magistrates have declined to supply him with funds for travel to Sparta. The gods obviously wish the Athenians to show their earnest desire for peace (without such earnestness they do not deserve peace, or there will be no genuine peace); and the clearest proof that men wish something earnestly is that they are prepared to spend money for it. Surely, the peace must be negotiated between the Athenians and the Spartans; if an immortal is to negotiate for the Athenians, he must himself be an Athenian, and he must travel to Sparta like an Athenian, i.e., he needs money for travel; but being an immortal, Amphitheos, as he says, has no travel money. The Athenians do not pay the slightest attention to the will of the gods. Against Dikaiopolis' protest, Amphitheos is silenced by the police. Dikaiopolis' pain is increased when the Assembly, far from discussing peace with Sparta, turns to alliances with barbarians against Sparta. The Athenians who had been sent to the king of Persia as ambassadors years ago have finally come back. One of them gives an account of the unheard-of things they have experienced abroad and of the efforts they have made on behalf of the city. To Dikaiopolis' disgust, the ambassador is unaware of the shocking contrast between their experiences and the simultaneous experiences of the bulk of the Athenians, between the wartime austerity in Athens and their own leisurely progress to the Persian court in the utmost comfort, being wined and dined—to say nothing of the even grander progress of the Persian king to his privy. The Athenian ambassadors introduce the Persian ambassador, the king's Eye. He has an immense eye in the midst of his forehead. It is not an Aristophanean character who understood "the king's Eye" to mean a man who is almost nothing but an eye; the poet himself presents the king's Eye as a Big Eye. The poet himself does what Strepsiades does: He understands things too literally; generally speaking, he achieves some of his comical effects by Strepsiadizing, by making himself more stupid than he is. Or, to state this from the point of view of Socrates—of a man whose fundamental defect induces him, among other things, to regard the imitation as prior to the imitated—Strepsiades is a comedian (Clouds 296). Dikaiopolis' strong loathing of Persian bombast and Athenian boasting, as well as of everything tending to perpetuate the war—perhaps co-operating with his ignorance of the Persian tongue and Persian gestures, and the Persian's ignorance of the Greek tongue and Greek gestures—make him certain that the whole embassy from the Persian king is a gross fraud perpetrated by the Athenian ambassadors. But so great is the Athenians' addiction to the war that Dikaiopolis' apparent unmasking of the Persian ambassadors is not even noticed by the Assembly. His patience has now reached its limit. He decides on an enormous and grand deed. He pays Amphitheos the money required for the journey to Sparta and back out of his own pocket, so that the immortal citizen can bring a truce for him alone, i.e., for him, his wife, and his children. He knows that he acts according to the will of the gods and that peace is best for the city as a whole, i.e., that his action is just; the city that prefers war to peace is unjust. He must act for the good of the city against the will of the city. Yet, since he can not force the city to make peace, the most he can do, in order to be just, is to make peace for himself alone. Amphitheos, who alone has been charged by the gods to make peace with Sparta, is to make that peace for Dikaiopolis alone (52, 131). The superhuman and the private conspire against the city.

After Amphitheos leaves, the Assembly is addressed by the Athenian ambassadors to King Sitalkes, who introduce the troops sent in support of Athens by that ally. While Dikaiopolis never believes that the Persian king would send gold to the Athenians, he is but too certain that the Thracian king has sent mercenaries for gold, at atrociously high pay, for these murderous and thievish fellows are a menace to every Athenian. Fortunately he observes, or rather invents, an omen which, by putting an end to the meeting of the Assembly, prevents a decision in favor of the Thracians' pay. As the contrast between his failure regarding the Persian embassy and his success regarding the Thracian embassy shows, fraud can not be fought by the truth, but only by fraud. The Assembly is barely dissolved when Amphitheos returns from Sparta; he has performed his mission with the speed of an immortal. Dispatch and secrecy are indispensable for the success of treason, as Machiavelli would say. Since he made the journey within such a short time, he must have netted considerable savings from his travel funds; he does not return the surplus to Dikaiopolis, who indeed does not even ask for it. It is not necesary to assume that Amphitheos is greedy for money, since he is in a great hurry because he is being pursued by some old Acharnians. Dikaiopolis does not pay attention to the dangers threatening Amphitheos. He is only interested in the treaties that Amphitheos brought back. With characteristic literalness—spondai means both truce and libations—and sensuality he chooses the truce that smells best and tastes best, i.e., that runs for the greatest number of years. Freed from the war, he will celebrate the rural Dionysia. Amphitheos however must run away from the Acharnians who pursue him. He is never seen or heard of again. Amphitheos' action is kept completely separate from the main action of the play; Amphitheos is a Euripidean deus ex machina, or rather the comic equivalent thereof. His speed is equal to his fear. He will not benefit from Dikaiopolis' truce. The only benefit that he himself derives from his philanthropic action is the possession of the travel funds.

The Acharnians do not find Amphitheos. They mistake Dikaiopolis for Amphitheos. The mistake is inevitable: Dikaiopolis and no one else celebrates the Dionysia in the country. The mistake is in fact no mistake at all, for the crime that arouses their patriotic indignation was in the first place committed by Dikaiopolis, and its fruits are enjoyed only by him. Dikaiopolis has then to face the Acharnians. Amphitheos' action proves to be only the necessary condition for Dikaiopolis' private peace, and not its sufficient condition. He must remove his private woes by private and, in addition, purely human action. The alleged crime against gods and men for which the Acharnians pursue him is treason; he has made peace for himself alone, with utter disregard of the city, by negotiating privately with the city's hated enemy; his pursuers act on behalf of the city; they embody the spirit of the city: They are old men, Marathon fighters, the most passionate haters in Athens of the Spartans, from whom they have suffered more than did any other part of the city; accordingly they hate Dikaiopolis even more than they hate Kleon. (Dikaiopolis too hates Kleon; Dikaiopolis and the Acharnians belong to the same political party; their opposition is not located on the political plane.) The Acharnians remind us of the Just Speech. Accordingly, Dikaiopolis—in spite of his name—reminds us of the Unjust Speech. Surely Dikaiopolis has in common with Strepsiades that he puts his family above the city. Yet while Strepsiades turns against the city's laws, or at least some of them, Dikaiopolis turns against the city's war; and while Strepsiades acts against the will of the gods, Dikaiopolis acts in agreement with it. Accordingly, while the Clouds is a playful presentation of the issue of father-beating, the Acharnians is a playful presentation of the much more political, grave, and explosive issue of treason; and whereas the father-beating is only partly successful, the treason is entirely successful.

Dikaiopolis is not conscious of any guilt. He has simply forgotten the city. Besides, he had the gods on his side in making peace with Sparta for himself and his family. The family is more powerfully present in the Acharnians than in the Clouds; there are no quarrels within Dikaiopolis' family. Dikaiopolis is less unerotic than Strepsiades. The Acharnians find him engaged in sacrificing and praying to Dionysos; without knowing it, he thus may gain the help of that god against the Acharnians. Dionysos is a god of sex, but not of the family; in his phallic song Dikaiopolis lovingly and jubilantly calls the god's companion adulterer and pederast, and he praises the pleasure of lying with a young slave girl in the woods. The Acharnians refuse to listen to anything Dikaiopolis might say in justification of his truce; his treason being manifest, there is nothing for them to do but to punish him with death. Realizing that the Acharnians will not permit him to say anything in favor of the Spartans, he first tries to defend his truce with the Spartans without any regard to its being a truce with the Spartans. He implies that not every private truce is defensible or decent, wholly regardless of who and of what character the enemy is; perhaps he means that in order to be decent a private truce must not be made from cowardice (from preferring slavery to fighting), or must be authorized by the gods. Dikaiopolis shows by deed that he is not a coward, yet he never justifies his action by referring to Amphitheos' commission; he never even mentions Amphitheos to the Acharnians or to anybody else: Even the Acharnians might not have believed the story. More simply, if peace is good and war is bad, it does not seem to make a difference who and of what character the enemy is. Yet can peace be better than war against an absolutely unjust enemy? Dikaiopolis is therefore driven to assert that the Spartans are not absolutely unjust, that not all injustices have been committed by the Spartans or that some injustice has been done to the Spartans. The Acharnians are still more incensed by Dikaiopolis' boldness, not to say impudence, in defending the enemy. Yet he goes still further. He almost demands that he be given the opportunity to prove the justice of his case in a court of law; he surely demands that he should be permitted to state his case with his head on the executioner's block. The Acharnians now can no longer restrain themselves. In this most desperate situation Dikaiopolis stops them by convincing them that he has as hostages for his life their very best friends, i.e., that he completely controls their sources of livelihood. Thereupon the Acharnians permit him not only to live but to say anything he pleases in favor of his Spartan friends: They who were such passionate enemies of the Spartans because of the damage the Spartans had done to their property cease to be passionate enemies of the Spartans when their passion appears to them to lead to complete destruction of their property; in other words, they who regarded the betrayal of the fatherland as a heinous crime, which they must capitally punish on the spot, would rather tolerate betrayal of the fatherland than betrayal of the sources of their livelihood (340, 290). Dikaiopolis has succeeded in convincing the fire-eating Marathon fighters that there is a higher good than the fatherland. He has stopped them and disarmed them. He could have sent them away. But he is a just man; he uses his stranglehold on them not to escape punishment for a capital crime but only to get a hearing for his side of the case. In spite or because of his victory, he is going to state the case for the Spartans with his head on the executioner's block, with the understanding that he will be executed if he does not convince the Acharnians of the justice of the Spartans. His justice—the justice of his apparent act of treason—stands or falls by the injustice of the Athenians' war against Sparta, or by the justice of the Spartans' war against Athens. It is not sufficient that the Athenians become inclined to peace because they are tired of the war; they must first come to acknowledge their war guilt; they must free themselves from their conceited patriotism. Only then can Dikaiopolis' peace be secure. But the fact that his action is just does not prove that it is legal; he settles illegally the question of whether the injustice of a city's war entitles a citizen to withdraw from that war. Still, Dikaiopolis' action against the will of the city in favor of his family succeeds because it develops into a public demonstration and thus shows a way to the city; whereas Strepsiades' action against the will of the city in favor of his family fails because it does not show a way to the city.

After they have seen that Dikaiopolis is an honest man, the Acharnians, as one might have expected, recover their open hostility to him; they are now anxious that he undergo his quasi-trial. But he is not yet ready for it. He is not yet able to speak to the Acharnians. He reveals his situation to the audience, or to us, in a soliloquy. He will not go back on his promise to speak bravely and frankly in favor of the Spartans, the enemy, but he is not eager to die. He has many fears; he knows that he is one against many, not to say against all; against him the Acharnians (old rustics, Marathon fighters) and Kleon are united; he is much more exposed than Socrates. And, in contradistinction to Socrates, he is unable or unwilling to win his case by hook or by crook. He must reveal his thought on a most dangerous subject to his fellow citizens without any cleverness or disguise; he must reveal himself; he must strip. Hitherto we knew him only as an oldish rustic, if a particularly Music rustic, an Attic Hesiod, as it were. Now he reveals himself as the comic poet Aristophanes himself. In other words, Aristophanes first comes to sight as something lower than he is, in the disguise of an oldish rustic. Among the many things that Dikaiopolis admits fearing, we may then count without hesitation the danger that the Acharnians will not receive the first prize. Dikaiopolis' danger is so great, not only because of his justice and the unpopular character of his cause, but also because he can not use his only power—that of the comic poet—against men filled to overflowing with righteous indignation. What he needs is something that the comic poet is unable to provide: He must arouse his mortal enemies' compassion. Only by appearing as a man who is not provocative, fearless, or fear-inspiring, but most pitiable, fearful, or submissive can he who fears to die act fearlessly. Despite his immense courage, he needs, as the Acharnians see, a most clever and complete disguise, but they do not see that the disguise must not reveal his cleverness; under no circumstances must he appear to the Acharnians to be clever. Even the disguise of a rustic is no longer sufficient; he needs a still lower disguise; he must go beyond Strepsiadizing. In order to be able to endure his ordeal, he needs such a disguise as only that tragic poet who is a past master in arousing compassion can provide. However much he loves Aeschylus, he now needs the help of Euripides. Without knowing or revealing it, he, the lover of peace, who puts the household above the city, was all the time in sympathy with Euripides or the Unjust Speech (or Pheidippides), rather than with the Just Speech (or Strepsiades) or the Marathon fighter Aeschylus, who praises Ares and Lamachos, Dikaiopolis' chief antagonist. Strepsiades' cause becomes publicly defensible through Socrates' art and thus destroys itself; Dikaiopolis' cause becomes publicly defensible through Euripides' art and thus preserves itself. Considerable parts of the Acharnians are parodies of Euripidean tragedy; but just like the other characteristics of the Aristophanean comedy, his parodies of tragedies too have their noncomic meaning. This is shown by the mere fact that each parody performs a necessary function within the particular comedy in which it occurs. Surely in the present case the parody of Euripides indicates that Aristophanes is in need of Euripides or "depends" on him in a manner that is comically reflected in Dikaiopolis' need for Euripides.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Socrates and Aristophanes by Leo Strauss. Copyright © 1966 Leo Strauss. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

I: Introduction
II: The Clouds
III: The Other Plays
1: The Acharnians
2: The Knights
3: The Wasps
4: The Peace
5: The Birds
6: The Lysistrate
7: The Thesmophoriazusai
8: The Frogs
9: The Assembly of Women
10: The Plutos
IV: Conclusion
Notes
Index