Socrates and His Critics

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That Socrates remains one of the most—if not the most—influential figures in the Western tradition is due in large part to the emergence in the years following his death of a new literary genre, the Socratic discourse, and the output especially of the two most prominent Socratic authors, Plato and Xenophon. Extending in the next generation through the distinctive rhetoric of Diogenes of Sinope, and through him into the figures of the Cynic philosopher and the Stoic sage, Socrates provides the literary precursor of a character tried and executed for idiosyncratic political and religious views four centuries before the presumed time of Jesus. Already in his own lifetime, Socrates’ literary influence is apparent in Aristophanes and other writers of comedies. In modernity, the image of Socrates both fascinates and repels the attention, notably of Nietzsche. Apart from the rough outlines of his biography, it is all but impossible to recover any sense of the “historical Socrates”; at the same time we must ask whether Socrates’ influence is not the result of his intellectual contributions, but rather an artifact of the doxography itself. Even though he did actually live, isn’t what we have of him really just literary fiction?