The origin of academic life

In this place of conversation, all topics apparently were open to discussion, and academic freedom was born. That is, all ideas were subjected to rigorous examination and debate. There were disagreements over the validity of even headmaster Plato's theories--some of which indeed were "far out" along the axis of credibility. The high priest of this temple was a poet of great imagination, not an infallible mouthpiece of the gods!

Plato passed his professional career trying to distinguish the Academy for excellence. He ran the school for the last forty years of his life, apart from a few sabbaticals, and he was singularly successful. From all over Hellas he attracted learner-companions, including the scholarly Aristotle  who stayed for some twenty years, and the school eventually specialized as a think-tank that turned out politicians versed in the social engineering of city-states. The government contract work appears to have been a good business because of demand for city charters and model laws. The Hellenes still were setting up new colonies, which needed organizational concepts and documents. Questions about the best form of government were timely, too, because political instability was widespread, as kings, aristocrats and democrats vied for power in city-states throughout the turbulent late-Hellenic world. 

On Plato's death at age 80, in 347 BC, his remains were buried on the grounds of the Academy, a shrine was erected there to his memory, and for many generations to come devoted followers heard his spirit speaking to them. The physical plant was handed on like a modern family business, or an ancient priesthood, to Plato's sister's son, Speusippus. (Plato had no children and never married.) 

The school survived under the direction of many other headmasters of various intellectual persuasions (all were "Platonists" but they came in assorted varieties) for almost 900 years. Legend says that it was shut down in 529 AD by the Christian Emperor Justinian as part of his dark age cultural campaign to suppress pagans and heretics. However, it may have been destroyed by the catastrophic event at the onset of the dark ages, which is contemporaneous. In any case, Platonism and some form of academic life (generously defined) seems to have survived not only this catastrophe but even the most vicious assaults of medieval and modern times.

We can't be certain how or when any of Plato's dialogues originally were written, published, or circulated, but we can see, simply by reading them, how cleverly they promoted the Academy. They establish Plato as a quiet but leading disciple of Socrates, and they portray Socrates as an entertaining wit, a penetrating thinker, and an inspired teacher, judged by Apollo himself to be the wisest of mortals. They show the master argumentatively routing all of the next-best teachers in Greece, attracting all of the brightest young people to sit at his feet, and exposing the ignorance of the Athenian authorities with a few pointed remarks. Who wouldn't want to be corrupted by Socrates? School just doesn't get any better than this!

Even today Plato's dialogues remain enshrined in colleges and universities throughout the western world, where they continue to be used for institutional promotion. "The unexamined life is not worth living," Socrates concludes in the Apology. So plunk down your tuition money and make your life worth something, say the academics!

Socrates' fate was written, twenty years before his trial, by the Athenian playwright Aristophanes in a comedy called The Clouds (419 BC). This farce features a character by the name of Socrates who is a sophist, who does not believe in Zeus or the Olympian gods, who introduces new gods, and who corrupts young people by teaching them tricks of rhetoric and setting them against their elders. This ridiculous, false image of "Socrates," as presented for laughs in the theater, became the basis for the Athenian prosecutors' indictment of the real Socrates. The Clouds is magic that comes true in the Apology. 

At the start of his self-defense, Plato's Socrates complains that his reputation has been smeared, and that the charges against him really apply to Aristophanes' absurd caricature of him:

I have had many accusers, who accused me of old, and their false charges have continued during many years; and I am more afraid of them than of Anytus and his associates, who are dangerous, too, in their own way. But far more dangerous are these, who began when you were children, and took possession of your minds with their falsehoods, telling of one Socrates, a wise man, who speculated about the heaven above, and searched into the earth beneath, and made the worse appear the better cause. These are the accusers whom I dread; for they are the circulators of this rumor, and their hearers are too apt to fancy that speculators of this sort do not believe in the gods. And they are many, and their charges against me are of ancient date, and they made them in days when you were impressionable in childhood, or perhaps in youth, and the cause when heard went by default, for there was none to answer. And, hardest of all, their names I do not know and cannot tell, except in the case of a comic poet.

The comic poet Aristophanes, that is. From The Clouds and its real-life sequel in the deadly serious prosecution of Socrates, Plato saw first hand  the power of literature, and theater in particular, to form prejudices based entirely on lies and falsehoods. Little wonder that Plato feared the corrupting influence of poetry on society! The Socratic dialogues can be understood as his attempt to set the record straight about Socrates, or to counteract the comic images with a set of positive, idealistic, and heroic ones.

In the final scene of Aristophanes' comedy, an enraged neighbor, whose son has been corrupted by Socrates, burns down Socrates' "Think Store," with Socrates and his students in it. One reason why this spectacular ending isn't funny is because Aristophanes didn't make it up out of the thin air of his imagination. Roughly thirty years before The Clouds, in about 450 BC, the real think shop of the Pythagoreans in Italy, together with most of the philosophers inside, had been burned by a group of their political enemies. The facts surrounding this catastrophe are lost in history, but we do know that the result was almost the annihilation of the Pythagorean cult. Only a few of the Pythagoreans escaped from the conflagration of the cult compound.

So now you can guess why Plato, after Socrates' execution, visited the Pythagoreans in Italy, in preparation for the founding the Academy. Clearly the Pythagorean survivors and the Socratic ones would have had points in common to discuss. . . and all because of the bad taste of a comedian. We might say that Plato's whole career came from The Clouds, as he restored the think shop to respectability through his uplifting images of Socrates.

So that's the basis for academic life: it all comes from The Clouds.

Making the seas safe for pirates
Athens without the bull

In the Apology, Socrates recognizes that Aristophanes' Clouds has poisoned his reputation with some of the jurors past any cure. Yet he sees a second problem, too, which is almost as difficult: the accusation of Anytus and his political followers. To grasp the politics of the situation, let's review the culture depicted by Homer once again. 

Heroic society was organized biologically. As seen in Homer, even the Trojan War was described as a family squabble within old father Zeus' family, with the eldest branch of Zeus-men (the lineage of Priam/Hektor) attempting to maintain its power against the more recent upstart lines of Atreus/Agamemnon, Peleus/Achilles and others.

The heroic pecking order generally was genealogical, so that the eldest ruled and was succeeded by the eldest, but this normal seniority system was disrupted from time to time because family fortunes always remained dependent on the wisdom (or whims) of father Zeus. The love of old Zeus toward his children was changeable, even capricious to the point of abusiveness. Hence, the children were insecure, but they could test and measure their father's love precisely at any time through the practice of warfare, at which consequently they excelled.

In the Trojan War, for example, the god's "hatred" for Priam, Agamemnon and Achilles was demonstrated in his extermination of their lines, while his favor and blessing were revealed in the salvation and promotion of the most "pious" man, Aeneas. Piety was the quality attributed to the fittest survivor, the alpha-male with the winning genes. 

Centuries later in classical times, Socrates' Athens still carries on the old heroic ways, with absurd results. The Zeus-men now wear clothes that hide their genitals some of the time, and they have modernized the field of battle too, so that legal wrangling replaces trial by combat as the game that establishes who is pious and who isn't. As always, however, the survivors of the ordeal are pious, and the dead are dead.

In the new-fangled ritual of the Athenian trial-at-law, Zeus has handed down the scales of justice so that fatal decisions now are put to a jury of mortals. Yet these good citizens, who will condemn Socrates to death, know exactly how Zeus is feeling and what the god wants them to do. They don't need to consult prophets or augurs about this because the signs are obvious: the Athenians have lost the Peloponnesian War, their navy, their empire and its piles of income, and the people have lost their theater entertainments and are facing starvation. Under the circumstances, only a fool would ask for more proof of Zeus' anger.

Because the city's fortunes aren't measuring up to those of the former glory days, Anytus and the officials are busy restoring the old piety, to win back the god's favor. Their holy work consists of hunting down potentially impious residents and offering them up as human sacrifices to appease the angry spirits. Like the ancient hero rituals, these legal ceremonies are intended to induce good fortune by smoothing things over with the angry spirits. The new twist is that there are no bulls or oxen or goats being offered to the god. There are human scapegoats instead. The heroes now are not dead ancestors, but dispensable people (like strange old Socrates at age 70, an obvious good-for-nothing) who can be killed to make the necessary hero-fertilizer of the rite. 

It's not the purpose of Socrates' trial to define "piety," or to examine the nature of human relations with the gods, or to investigate Socrates' particular religious beliefs. Socrates wants his trial to turn on any of these more or less relevant considerations (as a typical Socratic dialogue might do), but the trial simply doesn't work that way. The whole point of the ceremony is only to affix the label of "impiety" to Socrates, by common agreement among the citizens, so that impiety itself (whatever it is) can be killed off. The idea, as in any witch hunt, is to find fault so that fault can be removed, thereby restoring prosperity to the faithful who have endured so much suffering due to the presence of evil-doers in their midst. Ridding the city of Socrates will make the seas safe once more for pirates, if it so pleases father Zeus to accept the sacrifice.

Is this witch hunt the echo of some vary ancient form of ritual human sacrifice, or cannibalism, used in times of starvation to improve the chances of group survival? Perhaps. In the political context of Socrates' time, however, the trial is a crude display of official hypocrisy, used by inept politicians to divert public attention from their own political blunders, and it's a testimony to the subtlety and tact of Plato's art that he can make this point in the Apology without adding his own name to the official list of Athenian witch-suspects. All of the words spoken in this particular "dialogue" are presented as the words of Socrates, which Plato among other named witnesses was present in person to have heard. Presumably there was no stenographer's trial transcript to contradict Plato's account.

The most interesting point about the "trial" is not its ritual character, which was common in the ancient world (compare the sham "trial" of Jesus), but Plato's portrayal of the the official religious proceedings against Socrates as a political charade. The spirit that ought to direct the proceedings in the court of the high priest (love of God) is only a mask worn for show, while the facts that should be obvious (political ineptitude of the leaders who have destroyed Athenian society) are hidden beneath the disguise. This is the Platonic theater, Plato having been a closet dramatist.

Multiculturalism
and classical civilization

In a bad world, the good news is that the vote is not unanimous. Socrates has many supporters who refuse to go along with the prosecutors' charade. The majority of jurors vote that Socrates is impious and that he should be put to death, but sizeable minorities vote to acquit Socrates and, even after he has been found guilty of impiety, to spare his life.

In other words, in spite of its official state religion and intolerant persecution, Athens is not a unified cult. Not all Athenians share the same beliefs, and not all of them are silent in fear of the majority, the prosecutors, or the high priest of the city. That is to say, Athens is multi-cultural. 

Multiculturalism arose with the emergence of cities in the classical world, when genetically based societies no longer could meet growing social needs of the time. 

In form, the Hellenic city-state was stratified with the old family cults in the foundation layer below and a new multifamily, multicultural layer superimposed above. The collective overlay is what we call "politics"--a term derived from "polis," the Greek word for city. Politics did not grow out of religion, blood relationship, neighborly love or fellow feeling. It came from the practical need for groups to achieve more massive scale, to survive in competition against much bigger social organizations, such as the older, highly developed empires in Persia, Phoenicia and Egypt.

In the place that became Athens, politics is said to have started with Theseus. Before his time, the region had been occupied by independent families, each ruling its own turf in the name of the first ancestor to be buried there: the Cecropidae, the Eumolpidae, the Gephyraei, the Phytalidae, the Lakiadae and others. Each family or "house" was a separate culture because each one called up its own heroic dead and its own spirits (gods and goddesses, usually) who attended these ancestral heroes in death. 

For example, the important family of the Cecropidae, who occupied the rocky outcropping by the sea where the city of Athens later would be built, worshipped Athena and Poseidon as their escorts in death. The Eumolpidae who lived a few miles away, at the place that later would become Eleusis, home of the Eleusinian mystery rites, worshipped the grain goddess Demeter. Other nearby families worshipped Apollo (several different Apollos actually), Ares, the Dioscuri Twins, and other immortals.

Theseus was the Athenian Moses. He was an heir of the Cecropidae (the descendants of the hero Cecrops) who united twelve local tribes under the common worship of "Pallas Athena." She was not the same cunning trickster celebrated by Homer but a new Political Athena, a goddess of awesome military power and virgin motherhood (that is, non-biological or symbolic motherhood: the members of her congregation were related by the blood of their enemies, not by their own blood). Theseus founded Athens by establishing in that place the festival celebration of the Panathenaea. And this event, although religious in name and claim, was much more like a civic parade down Main Street, followed by a big picnic and ballgames in the park, than it was like feeding the angry ghosts of your ancestors in a spooky graveyard in the middle of the night.

Theseus apparently differed from Moses in his religious tolerance. In any case, the supremacy of Political Athena did not mean that all other gods and spirits and forms of ritual were abolished. Neighboring cults joined in a confederacy or league of allies under the political leadership of Athens, and they brought their worship with them. For example, the powerful Eumolpidae at Eleusis retained their own religion and priesthood, even after their territory eventually was folded into the Athenian political structure. Hence, the Eleusinian rites, or "mysteries" of rebirth of the dead, became popular among Athenians outside of Eleusis, and eventually many other Hellenic peoples were initiated into these mysteries, too. 

This then is the general profile of classical Athenian civilization: a polytheistic, multicultural society created by the overlay of a common military/political veneer over an underlying group of traditionally separate, local family religious cults.

The complexity of this new social arrangement was disorienting. Fundamental questions arose that were to endure in western history up to our own day. In such a multicultural world, do you serve Political Athena or your ancestral spirits? Do you take your values from the politicians or the priests? Do you follow man's law or god's? Are you practical or mystical? Superficial or superstitious? Realistic or spiritual? These are the kinds of questions, and the general reexamination of personal identity and divided loyalties, that arose with politics. 

In Plato's Athens, and in classical Greco-Roman civilization generally, the political state coexists uneasily with underlying spiritual organizations. Conflicts between political and spiritual factions are the central theme or problem in Plato (in the thoughtless state's prosecution of the thinker Socrates, for example) and also in many other classical writers. This theme remains central in modern histories of classical civilization.

In Plato, this duality is described not only in interpersonal conflicts (Socrates versus the politicians) but also in characterizations of individuals. Selves are dissociated or split into public and private identities that seem unrelated or even opposed to each other. Some characters, such as the sophists, traded their souls for political power or public image. The reverse case is the character of Socrates, the figure of inward spiritual depth and wisdom who is misunderstood by superficial politicians as a political subversive with dangerous ideas. Socrates is spiritual man living in a world dominated by politics.

Political writing has no use for the gods, the soul or salvation, the happiness of private individuals, or the brilliance of personal thought. It glorifies the victories of politicians over the forces of spirituality, or it laments the defeat of political factions by religious adversaries, as in Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788), where classical Rome decays mainly due to the growth of Christianity.

Within this tradition of political writing, Socrates is not necessarily understood as a wise man, creative thinker, or ideal character of any sort. He is seen as a menacing figure, a dangerous troublemaker and an ally of Athens' arch-enemy Sparta. This prosecutorial view overlooks the fact that Socrates fought for Athens in the war against Sparta, and that he was recognized by the city for outstanding valor in several important battles. Nonetheless, political presentations of Socrates as a bad apple persist; see books by I.F. Stone and Karl R. Popper cited in note 1 at the bottom of this page.

The bulk of classical literature, however, is spiritual rather than political. It endorses spiritual over political life, a Socrates over an Anytus without any question. Remember, for example, how the Iliad opens with the wise man Chryses, the faithful servant of Apollo, holding all of the real power while the bumbling politician Agamemnon tries to make himself look important by ranting, hoarding gifts, and pulling rank. 

When political rule was superimposed over the older network of traditional spiritual beliefs in the ancient world, one of the important results was the emergence of the idea of injustice. Social rewards and social punishments no longer were seen as divine judgments. Good people could be sentenced to bad ends because politicians could be wrong, depraved or mistaken. Like Antigone, Plato's Socrates is tried and condemned without having violated any divine law. The jury's verdict is not the truth about him. The justice system in the Apology is a mechanism of the flawed external world of politics, so it can declare Socrates guilty even while the man himself remains entirely virtuous and loyal to his deeper spiritual beliefs. Such is Plato's detached, secularized and multicultural view of the social order.

Undemocratic Plato

Political writing sometimes takes Plato to task not only for supporting subversive Socrates but for criticizing Athenian democracy. Some commentators (misleadingly, I think) have called Plato an aristocratic elitist, even a totalitarian and an enemy of free society. Much of this hard opinion comes from an idealized view of classical Athens as the first of the world's great democracies, somehow above criticism.

The Athenians who lived there knew better, and they left unambiguous records of their city's imperfections. Democracy was young in those days and entirely capable of blunders. It put many gifted Athenians to death, or it drove them into exile, before it completely self-destructed through internal bickering and ill-informed decision-making on a variety of issues. Read Thucydides' great history of the Peloponnesian War for everything you need to know about this self-inflicted blow-up. The framers of The Constitution of the United States read Thucydides with care, in fear that their new democracy similarly might fall apart due to the ignorance and fickleness of the general public. (That is why the United States is a republic, not a pure democracy.)

Plato's basic criticisms of the primitive democracy at Athens still have sting today. The barbs appear in one of Plato's best known dialogues The Republic, the first ever literary utopia. ("Utopia" = "nowhere," a kingdom of the mind or ideal dream-state.) In this dialogue, which takes place only days before Socrates is indicted, Socrates gets into political hot water for three general criticisms of democratic politics:  

• Superficial leadership: leaders in democracy aspire to popularity, not statesmanship. The leaders pander to the wishes of the voters rather than doing what is right. They focus on short-term goals as opposed to long-term needs of society. They tend to spend more than they take in since it is easier for them to give things to people than to ask for sacrifices. In fact leaders who ask for sacrifices are likely to be thrown out of office, even when sacrifices may be required.

• Social decay: Democracies breed social problems in that their people lose a sense of shared values. Personal values dominate over group values, leading to social instability and disorder, increase in crime, distrust of government and authority, increase in gaps between generations (since young people want to do their own thing and do not share the values of their elders), and an empty succession of fads and fashions to fill the vacuum left by the loss of shared values.  

• Preoccupation with images: Debate in democratic politics tends to be superficial, dominated by images rather than substantive issues, emotion rather than reason. How the candidate looks in debate is more important than what the candidate says, and both of these are more important than what the candidate actually does. Democracies are thus caught up with appearances or illusions, not realities or wisdom. Societies focused on images and appearances are an easy prey to those interested in manipulating public beliefs to their own advantage, rather than finding the truth. In other words, democracy is an ideal target for sophists who love power rather than wisdom. They use words to manipulate public opinion and to fulfill private desires, not to advance the public good.

Can Socrates have predicted the media consultants, advertising agents, lobbyists, spin doctors and public relations experts who control public discourse in Western democracies in our time?  He appears to have foreseen that manipulative propaganda and diversionary entertainment would flourish in the literature of democratic societies--and that the theater would re-assert itself if the masses had their druthers.

At the same time, Socrates is not a practical politician. He recognizes that his ideas of an ideal society in The Republic are merely fantasies. He knows that he is not cut out for political life. He has no wish to enter politics or to change Athens or its form of government. He is at home only in the world of thought.  He is, again, spiritual man in a disorienting political world.

If you live in a democracy, does it over-value "images" and under-value "thought"? Is it superficial or spiritually empty? Is it ruled by The Clouds? Or are criticisms of this kind merely the remnants of our soul's ancient quarrel with the external life of politics? 

While it warns about illusions, this parable itself is an extended illusion or metaphor: human awareness is like the restricted view of prisoners in a cave. Moreover, this likeness isn't just any metaphor but one that is rich in associations in traditional Hellenic art. Compare Plato's cave with the cave of the Paleolithic cave artist where the spirit of the victim animal was released and immortalized. Compare the cannibal Cyclopes' cave of fame where notorious people are consumed and "no man" escapes alive. Compare Antigone's cave of religious martyrdom where those who are faithful to traditional hero rites are loved by the gods though buried alive by politicians [note 8]. The cave at Eleusis and many other underground chambers in the Greek world were used for "mystery" rituals where descendants learned wisdom from the dead.

Where is Plato's cave? It's the Academy, of course, the place of spiritual enlightenment where the chains of illusion can be thrown off so that the learner-companions can see the truth. This is the model of academic life, and Plato links it back through his imagery to the earliest recorded form of western art.