That Socrates had a close relationship to Euripides’ attitude did not escape their contemporaries in ancient times, and the clearest expression for this happy intuition is that rumour running around Athens that Socrates was in the habit of helping Euripides with his poetry. Both names were linked by the supporters of the “good old days” when it was time to list the present popular leaders whose influence had brought about a situation in which the old sturdy fitness in mind and body manifested at the Battle of Marathon was being increasingly sacrificed for a dubious way of explaining things, in a continuing erosion of the physical and mental powers.2

This was the tone, half indignation, half contempt, in which Aristophanic comedy habitually talked of those men, to the horror of the newer generations, who, although happy enough to betray Euripides, could not contain their surprise that Socrates appeared in Aristophanes as the first and most important sophist , as the mirror and essence of all sophistic ambitions. Their only consolation for this was to pillory Aristophanes himself as an impudent lying Alcibiades of poetry.3 Without here defending the profound instincts of Aristophanes against such attacks, I will proceed to demonstrate the close interrelationship between Socrates and Euripides as the ancients saw it. It’s important to remember, in this connection, that Socrates, as an opponent of tragic art, did not attended the performances of tragedy and only joined the spectators when a new piece by Euripides was being produced. The best known link, however, is the close juxtaposition of both names in the pronouncements of the Delphic Oracle, which indicated that Socrates was the wisest of men and at the same time delivered the judgment that Euripides captured second prize in the contest for wisdom.

Sophocles was the third person named in this hierarchy, the man who could praise himself in comparison with Aeschylus by saying that he (Sophocles) did what was right because he knew what was right. Obviously the particular degree of clarity in these men’s knowledge was the factor that designated them collectively as the three “wise men” of their time.

But the most pointed statement about that new and unheard of high opinion of knowledge and understanding was uttered by Socrates, when he claimed that he was the only person to assert that he knew nothing; whereas, in his critical wandering about in Athens conversing with the greatest statesmen, orators, poets, and artists, everywhere he ran into people who imagined they knew things. Astonished, he recognized that all these famous people themselves had no correct and clear insight into their careers and carried out their work only instinctually. “Only from instinct” — with this expression we touch upon the heart and centre of the Socratic attitude.

Given this, Socratism condemns prevailing art as well as prevailing ethics. Wherever he directs his searching gaze, he sees a lack of insight and the power of delusion, and from this lack he infers the inner falsity and worthlessness of present conditions. On the basis of this one point, Socrates believed he had to correct existence. He, a solitary individual, stepped forward with an expression of contempt and superiority, as the pioneer of an entirely different style of culture, art, and morality, into a world, a scrap of which we would count an honour and the greatest good fortune to catch.

That is the immensely disturbing thing which always grips us about Socrates and which over and over again stimulates us to find out the meaning and intention of this man, the most problematic figure of ancient times. Who is the man who can dare, as an individual, to deny the essence of Greece, which as Homer, Pindar, and Aeschylus, as Phidias, as Pericles, as Pythia, and Dionysus, as the most profound abyss and loftiest height, can count on our astonished veneration? What daemonic force is it that could dare to sprinkle this magic drink in the dust? What demi-god is it to whom the ghostly chorus of the noblest specimens of humanity had to cry out: “Alas, alas! You have destroyed the beautiful world with your mighty fist. It is collapsing, falling to pieces!”1

A key to the essence of Socrates is offered to us by that amazing phenomenon indicated by the term “Socrates’ daimonon.” Under special circumstances, in which his immense reasoning power was gripped by doubt, he got a firm clue from a divine voice which expressed itself at such times. When this voice came, it always sounded a cautionary note. In this totally anomalous character, instinctive wisdom reveals itself only in order to stand up now and then against conscious knowledge as a hindrance. Whereas in all productive men instinct is the truly creative and affirming power, and consciousness acts as a critical and cautioning reaction, in Socrates instinct becomes the critic, consciousness becomes the creator — truly a monstrosity per defectum [from some defect] !

Indeed, we do perceive here a grotesque defectus [defect] of every mystical talent, so that Socrates can be considered a specific case of the non-mystical man, in whom the logical character has become simply too massive through excessive use, just like instinctive wisdom in the mystic. On the other hand, however, it was utterly impossible for that logical drive, as it appeared in Socrates, to turn against itself. In its unfettered outpouring it demonstrates a natural force of the sort we meet, to our shuddering surprise, only in the very greatest of all instinctive powers. Anyone who has sensed in the Platonic texts the merest scent of that god-like naivete and confidence in the direction of Socrates’ life has also felt how that immense drive wheel of logical Socratism is in motion, as it were, behind Socrates and how we are compelled to see this through Socrates, as if we were looking through a shadow.

That he himself had a premonition of this relationship comes out in the dignified seriousness with which he assessed his divine calling everywhere, even before his judges. To censure him for this was basically as impossible as to approve of his influence on the dissolution of instinct. When Socrates was hauled before the assembly of the Greek state, there was only one single form of sentence for this irreconcilable conflict, namely, banishment: people should have expelled him beyond the borders as something completely enigmatic, unclassifiable, inexplicable, so that some posterity could not justly indict the Athenians for acting shamefully.

But the fact that death and not mere exile was pronounced over him Socrates himself appears to have brought about, fully clear about what he was doing and without the natural horror of death: he went to his death with that tranquillity Plato describes him showing as he leaves the Symposium, the last drinker in the early light of dawn, to start a new day, while behind him, on the benches and on the ground, his sleeping dinner companions stay behind, to dream of Socrates, the truly erotic man. The dying Socrates became the new ideal of the noble Greek youth, one never seen before. Above all, the typical Greek youth, Plato, prostrated himself before Socrates’ image with all the fervent adoration of
his passionately enthusiastic soul.

Footnotes:

1Orpheus in Greek mythology was the preeminent poet and musician, who perfected the lyre. He was said to have the power to charm nature with his music. Socrates was charged by the Athenians with impiety, put on trial, and sentenced to death. He died by drinking hemlock, the official method of execution.

2Battle of Marathon: (490 BC) one of the highest points of Greek (and especially Athenian) history, when a small force of Greeks, led by the Athenians, defeated the Persian expeditionary force at Marathon, near Athens. According to tradition, Aeschylus fought at Marathon and Sophocles, as a young lad, danced in the victory celebrations.
3The Sophists were professional teachers of rhetoric, who had the reputation of using clever arguments to criticize traditional truths and to help their clients and pupils succeed in legal disputes with sophisticated new reasoning, which many people regarded as specious. Aristophanes portrays Socrates as the leader of a school of sophistic reasoning in his play Clouds . Alcibiades : (c. 450 BC to 404 BC) was an erratic and charismatic Athenian politician and military officer, who repeatedly changed his allegiance during the Peloponnesian War (defecting to Sparta and Persia and then returning).

1The quotation comes from Goethe’s Faust .