On Socratic Reading Groups

Careful readers of my blog may have noticed that reading Callard’s Open Socrates got me interested again in Socrates. Callard’s Socrates treats inquiry as an intrinsically social activity and in that sense is different from the paradigmatic Cartesian knower. Her Socrates divides epistemic tasks over different people. Yet, at the same, Socratic inquiry according to Callard is self-sufficient and this, in turn, evokes Descartes’ rejection of tradition and book-knowledge.

In my posts on Callard’s book, I have been critical of the idea that Socratic inquiry presents itself as self-sufficient as Callard implies. But I have not previously suggested that within Socrates’ apptoach to inquiry there is a role for book-knowledge. I will do so in what follows.

Be that as it may, for a while now, I have been suspecting that my art of government project has natural resonances with Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, which I ought to study. But enchanted by Callard’s Socrates, I decided, first to re-read Xenophon’s Memorabilia of Socrates in Martin Hammond’s translation (that’s the Oxford classics edition).

I have surprisingly much to say about these Memorabilia. But today I focus on a fun morsel that really startled me. It occurs near the end of Book 1, and it is reported as part of rather polemical exchanges with ‘Antiphon the sophist’ that Xenophon seems to have witnessed. It’s not wholly clear to me who this Antiphon might be. In Menexenus, which I tend to treat as echt-Plato, Socrates mentions a teacher of rhetoric, Antiphon the Rhamnusian, in somewhat dismissive fashion; he is nowhere near as good as Aspasia (235-236). And it seems likely to me, also because of the dismissiveness, that this is the very same Antiphon. Xenophon suggests that Antiphon is interested in poaching students from Socrates.

Anyway, during one of these exchanges with Antiphon the Sophist, Socrates notes that with his “friends,” he opens and searches “through those treasure houses which are the books written and bequeathed to us by the wise men of earlier times, picking out whatever we see to be good. And we consider it a great gain to form this shared friendship.” (I.6.14) We don’t often associate Socrates with reading groups.

It would be nice if the reading groups generate a kind of mutuality or friendship with past authors (but I am not sure the Greek allows that). However, the scrolls of the past are treated with a kind of reverence. At this point Xenophon comments, “Socrates was completely happy in himself [or blessed], and was guiding those who heard him towards a life of quality.”

Somewhat irritatingly, nowhere in Memorabilia does Xenophon show such a reading group in action.¹ And, in fact, it would undermine (even more) his apologetic argument that Socrates was always in public (1.1.10).

But near the end of the Memorabilia, we are re-introduced to Euthydemus who is a book-collector (4.2.1). And, in fact, Socrates has heard that Euthydemus has been collecting the books of the ‘reputed wise’ of the past (4.2.8). And when this is affirmed, Socrates refers to it as a “treasury of….wisdom” (οὐκ ἀργυρίου καὶ χρυσίου προείλου θησαυροὺς κεκτῆσθαι μᾶλλον ἢ σοφίας). And this evokes, as others have noted the material at 1.6.14.² Now, it’s pretty clear that Socrates is not impressed with Euthydemus, and they don’t read the works together.

In Phaedo, Socrates recounts how as a young man he heard someone read Anaxagoras (97B). In re-reading that passage, I was quite struck that Socrates himself then “seized the books very eagerly and read them as fast as I could, that I might know as fast as I could.” Even if we are supposed to take this passage metaphorically (and that Socrates didn’t literally grab a book), the spirit that animates Socrates here is quite different from the reverential reading groups described by Xenophon. Young Socrates is in a hurry and makes up his own mind even against the authority of an eminent thinker like Anaxagoras. Even if we like the independence here, Callard teaches us that this is not the way to engage in Socratic enquiry.

I know what I just wrote is not the point of the passage. Young Socrates is disappointed in Anaxagoras’ explanatory framework. And that’s the official message. But Plato also shows us that young Socrates has a different character than the more careful communal reasoner who invites refutation (and is lionized by Callard).

Now, it’s easy to miss but the Phaedrus is structured around a joint reading (by Socrates and Phaedrus) of a speech by Lysias.³ This is, of course, not quite like the reading groups intimated at 1.6.14. Lysias is very much alive at the time Socrates and Phaedrus discuss his speech, and Socrates’ attitude toward Lysias is not reverential. He lets Phaedrus present Lysias speech, and there is no attempt to pick out the real nuggets. But it is also worth emphasizing that we are shown Socrates and Phaedrus reading together because usually the Phaedrus itself is treated as the dialogue that rejects the written word.

But we do have another record that implies Xenophon’s report at 1.6.14 might have more than a germ of truth in it. As Emma Dyson (2024) notes, at Protagoras 342e–343b, Socrates “voices respect for the intellectual achievements of the seven sages.” (p. 478) My interest here is not to establish that Socratic reading groups are of the seven sages.

The passage at Protagoras is rather complicated. Socrates has just invited Prodicus into the conversation while Protagoras and Socrates are analyzing a poem by Simonides (from memory).⁴ In fact, Protagoras’ analysis is so dazzling he generates a roar from the audience which “blinds and makes dizzy” [ἐσκοτώθην τε καὶ ἰλιγγίασα] Socrates. (To me this evokes the bewitching effect of oratory at Menexenus.)

But somewhat amusingly, in Protagoras Socrates frames his own respect for the achievement of the sages, as a correction to the mistaken understanding of Spartan strength by the partisans of a Spartan education in Athens. In particular he suggests that secretly Spartans converse with sophists all the time rather than exercising Mortal Kombat. And the evidence for this is their widespread ability at making pithy remarks. At that point, Socrates suggests that the seven sages — Thales of Miletus, Pittacus of Mytilene, Bias of Priene, Solon of our city, Cleobulus of Lindus, Myson of Chen, and, last of the traditional seven, Chilon of Sparta —owe their own pithiness to their admiration of Spartan mores (343a)

In fact, what Socrates notes (with special reference to Pittacus) about the sages is their elegance in their maxims (γνῶμαι).⁵ And as Dyson also emphasizes (p. 478), Socrates seems to suggests that coining maxims just is ‘the ancients’ manner of doing philosophy’ (Prt. 343b4). Dyson treats this as a parody of Protagoras (p. 479), but recognizes that this manner also fits Socrates as part of the critique of the sophists’ ornate rhetoric.

So, I have to admit that I am very tempted by the thought that Xenophon may well be right to suggest that Socrates and his friends read ancient sages hunting for pithy maxims (including ‘know thyself.’) And like all hunts, the search may be a site of true friendship. As a side effect, such joint reading groups would prepare them with deep knowledge of bookish culture, so that they would best the sophists in public debate.

I admit I also find this a frankly too-instrumental attitude toward books. We don’t have to think of book-clubs as strip-mining the past. I miss here, as Helen de Cruz describes in her famous analysis of Machiavelli’s letter to Francesco Vettori dated December 10, 1513, the companionship and friendship they themselves supply (recall here my post).

1. In Xenophon’s Socrates (with a foreword by Christopher Bruell), Strauss implies here and elsewhere that Xenophon was quite discrete about what we are shown about the non-public Socrates (St. Augustine’s Press {1998 [1972], p. 30).

2. See, for example, Emma Dyson (2024) “Socrates and the Seven Sages,” The Classical Quarterly. 74(2):475. David K. O'Connor, "Socrates as Educator," in A Companion to Ancient Education, ed. W. Martin Bloomer (Malden, MA / Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), p. 81

3. David K. O’Connor, “Socrates as Educator,” p. 82.

4. I tend to think of Prodicus as being treated here with the kind of respect Socrates also shows Damon in the Republic.

5. In the Protagoras, Pittacus’ ‘It is difficult to be good’ [(χαλεπὸν ἐσθλὸν ἔμμεναι, 339b)] has pride of place because of Simonides’ poem. I hear Spinoza lurking here: Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt.