(Disaster ensues when Phaedra falls for her stepson!)
Crop of Phaedra and Hippolytus (1802), by the French neoclassical painter Baron Pierre-Narcisse Guérin (Louvre, Paris). The painting manages dramatically to squeeze in several elements of the plot: the youth expresses his resistance to Phaedra, even as the nurse whispers in her ear; meanwhile Theseus clenches his fist in rage.
The gods will have their play, and we piteous humans must suffer in double jeopardy. First, vice will eventually bring destruction, and yet we are by nature weak and prone to vice. Second, everyone is subject to fate, which is not kinder to good people than to bad. So we are doomed—we cannot be virtuous as we want to be, and so we are in trouble; and yet even if we could be virtuous we would get smacked anyway by the vicissitudes of fate! Hence Euripides’ fist-waving at the gods… yet he manages to preserve some reverence. Artemis tells us that the pious are still much more highly regarded by the gods than the impious. When the impious person suffers, the gods nod “take that!”, whereas the faithful incur their favor, which can bring some benefit. So, given our sad lot in life, it is better to be suffering and good than suffering and evil. Or that is Euripides’ line anyway. In this play we see how this web of cosmic influences plays out in the life of a chaste and honorable man destined for greatness by rights, when (through no fault of his own) his stepmother takes an improper liking to him.
(An innocent man delivers an inspiring speech to the court before he is executed.)
Jacques Louis David’s neoclassical masterpiece The Death of Socrates (1787), which can be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Socrates is a bit of a mystery, if you insist on being a real evidentiary hardliner. He wrote nothing himself, so we have to rely on others’ characterizations of him. Xenophon paints him as the conventional wise man of the day. Aristophanes deems his philosophizing empty and ridiculous. Plato’s conception, the fullest and most detailed, is of a man worthy of admiration, even awe, both for his intellect and his noble spirit. Plato’s Socrates seeks truth despite fashion or convention; he is imaginative, reverent, humble, perceptive, eloquent, and sharp as a razor. I’ll go with Plato, not just because his picture is most complimentary, but because Xenophon’s is simplistic (in fact it suggests that Xenophon—with all due respect—knew Socrates only casually, but wished to write as though he knew him well); and Aristophanes did nothing more than exploit a famous name, attaching it to a caricature for effect. In fact there were many philosophers in Athens who were very much like those “Sophists” Aristophanes pillories in his play TheClouds. Socrates was the most famous philosopher around at the time, and he certainly would have associated and debated with the general run of them. His was probably a household name, to be thrown about as representative of the lot of lounging jabberers even though– to one who actually listened to him– he towered above the rest.
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Apology of Socrates
October 3, 2014 / Leave a comment
(Απολογια Σωκρατους)
Plato
4th century BC
(An innocent man delivers an inspiring speech to the court before he is executed.)
Socrates is a bit of a mystery, if you insist on being a real evidentiary hardliner. He wrote nothing himself, so we have to rely on others’ characterizations of him. Xenophon paints him as the conventional wise man of the day. Aristophanes deems his philosophizing empty and ridiculous. Plato’s conception, the fullest and most detailed, is of a man worthy of admiration, even awe, both for his intellect and his noble spirit. Plato’s Socrates seeks truth despite fashion or convention; he is imaginative, reverent, humble, perceptive, eloquent, and sharp as a razor. I’ll go with Plato, not just because his picture is most complimentary, but because Xenophon’s is simplistic (in fact it suggests that Xenophon—with all due respect—knew Socrates only casually, but wished to write as though he knew him well); and Aristophanes did nothing more than exploit a famous name, attaching it to a caricature for effect. In fact there were many philosophers in Athens who were very much like those “Sophists” Aristophanes pillories in his play The Clouds. Socrates was the most famous philosopher around at the time, and he certainly would have associated and debated with the general run of them. His was probably a household name, to be thrown about as representative of the lot of lounging jabberers even though– to one who actually listened to him– he towered above the rest.
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