Since the invention of writing, literature's function has been to preserve things, facts, information, from the ravages of oblivion. Those Mesopotamian list makers were trying to preserve knowledge. Gilgamesh tries to preserve his great adventure stories by carving them on the walls of his own city, Herodotus says at the very beginning of his Histories that he wants to preserve the great deeds of men, both Greeks and barbarians. As a result, historians and historians of literature sometimes feel as if they know a very great deal about some figure of the past, while other times they know that there is very little we know about them.

In the case of Socrates c.470-399 BCE, we have a strange case where we don't know whether we know a great deal or very little, since the evidence itself is contradictory. Now Socrates appears over and over again in the dialogues of Plato c.427-c.347 as a character and speaker, so we think we know him pretty well. One of the earliest of these Platonic writings is probably the Apology of Socrates, which records his defense in 399 BCE. This is the trial in which he's been placed, having been charged with two crimes. One is disrespect for the gods, and the other is corrupting the youth of Athens.

So we think we kind of know Socrates pretty well from this transcript, however there is another account of the same trial by Xenophon c.430-c.350, another of Socrates' students and a very important writer. One of the things he apparently did was to add a continuation onto Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. So he's a very estimable guy, yet his account of Socrates and the trial, is different. He shows Socrates as an old man of 70, who is actually welcoming execution as a form of euthanasia.

Yet the great comic playwright of the period, Aristophanes c.450-c.388, also gives us an account of Socrates in his play of 423 BCE, the Clouds. In this comic version, Socrates becomes a kind of clown who twists and manipulates logic to bamboozle his way out of debt. Again, Aristophanes knew the man himself. Plato's Symposium describes the victory party the tragic playwright Agathon threw to celebrate his own victory. Among the guests are Socrates and Aristophanes. So they really knew each other.

So Here are three great writers of the western tradition, all writing about Socrates, but giving us different versions of the man. There's a real question of which is the true witness to the representation, the reality of the man Socrates? Do we have an early instance of a justified skepticism about the ability of any storyteller to give you the right, true, authentic version?

We've already had reason to suspect storytellers in Homer's Odyssey. Remember Odysseus tells his great overblown version of his adventures to the Phaeacians, yet when he gets home to his wife Penelope, he tones down the story and definitely omits any account of his philandering with the various nymphs and goddesses he's met along the way.

So here you have a sense that not only storytellers, but more and more so, writers themselves can't always be trusted. Writers perhaps are even less trustworthy, since they don't have to actually confront their audiences face to face, and account for the reliability of their story. They put it down in writing, walk away, and don't have to take responsibility.

Now we've talked about Athens a lot, and we'll keep doing so as the birthplace of western literature as we've some to know it. Yet in a sense, Athens remains a very oral culture. Greek tragedy and comedy was still being performed, more like opera than written texts to be studied in school yet. You have the Homeric epics being preformed by live specialists. Plato actually writes a dialogue called the Ion that concerns one of these professional reciters called a rhapsode who is doing live performances with musical backup group in Athens at this time. Remember that Herodotus comes to Athens so he can do live performances of his Histories, as a kind of ongoing work of literature as well. So Athens, for all of its literacy, is also a very oral culture.

Plato's Phaedrus c.370 actually criticizes the invention of writing, since it induces forgetfullness. People stop training their memories and start relying on written accounts, texts, files, and so on, to help them remember the past. Also there's the sense that if you publish a text in written form, you as the author, loose control over it. People will read it, understand it the way they want, and interpret it in ways that maybe the author didn't intend.

Yet the flip side of this is that the author doesn't have to take responsibility for his text. He can write it and then walk away, to let a readership make of the text what they want.

Now Socrates himself didn't have this problem with texts, since he didn't write anything. If you want to describe Socrates, he was more like a performance artist, working the streets of Athens, talking to anyone he met in the course fo his travels. These included craftsmen, politicians, whomever, talking to all of them and imposing his ideas, probing their ideas, and so on.

So here we have our first encounter anyway, with a major figure in western and even world intellectual and religious history, who didn't write down everything. This lineup is very impressive, including the Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, Mohammad, all the great teachers were just that. They just simply taught, and it was up to their students, disciples, and later generations, to put down in some sort of written form what the teachers had transmitted. Socrates fits into this group of a great teacher who is not a writer, and left it up to his students, Plato and Xenophon, to put down the wisdom that the had transmitted orally.

So when we get to a text like the Apology of Scorates, we're dealing with a text that was never meant to be literature. It's Socrates' courtroom defense in 399 BCE, under these true criminal charges of corrupting the youth, and disrespect to the state gods. Of course disrespect to the state religion means disloyalty to the state, which is why it becomes a criminal matter for them. Since it's meant to be a court transcript, this is the one moment when we think we catch Socrates at his most accurate.

There was a jury of 501 male citizens of Athens, and many spectators in the gallery. One of the latter that we know from the text itself, was Plato. He was an eyewitness, which is what the Greeks called autopsy. It was meant to be one of the most reliable forms of history writing, which Herodotus involves himself with. He'll actually say he saw something, so you can believe it.

So the Apology of Socrates comes off as a court transcript, eyewitnessed and recorded by one of those present, Plato himself. The courtroom interestingly becomes another aspect of Athenian democracy, trial by jury. it also means that rhetoric, speechifying, the uses of logic and persuasion, are also central to the events of the courtroom, one of those things that comes down to the modern world.

Socrates' title of Apology comes from a kind of technical Greek word meaning defense. Yet he is not apologetic at all, as it turns out. He's serving as his own lawyer, which even to this day they tell you never to do, never to act as your own attorney. Not only does he do this, but he actually flips the whole strategy of the defense, turning it topsy turvy to ensure and guarantee his conviction according to the charges.

The text needs to be divided into the traditional phases of any trial, and the first phase would be the defense itself. In this, Socrates says that instead of showing disrespect to the gods and the state religion, he has in fact devoted his entire life to showing respect. Going back to the time that someone sent to the Delphic oracle, the question of who the wisest of all men was, the following pronouncement was rendered and preserved in the original Greek:

"Sophocles is wise-Euripides is wiser-but of all men the wisest is Socrates."

It's a very interesting lineup of these canonic figures. Yet it's a pronouncement of the Delphic oracle, and from earliest times in those Mesopotamian tablets, interpreting oracles was one of the primary functions of literacy and books. People wanted to find out what the oracles really meant. These oracles were usually ambiguous, so you had to interpret them. Remember king Croesus of Lydia who thought he was the most prosperous of men, yet Solon said to wait and see how your life turns out. Well at the end of his life, king Croesus thought he might want to go to war against the Persians. So he sent to the Delphic oracle, who said if you fight the Persians, a great empire will fall. This emboldened Croesus, and indeed the prophesy was true. A great empire did fall, yet it was his own.

So you always have to look within the ambiguities of the oracle. The amazing thing about is pronouncement about Socrates however, is that there is no ambiguity. The oracle said he is the wisest of all men, so what Socrates has done is to spend his whole career challenging that unambiguous pronouncement of the god's oracle at Delphi. So it would seem to be an admission of guilt, that he truly has shown disrespect for the divine prophetess, the pythia.

In the course of his defense, he says he's always gone around questioning people, looking for someone smarter and wiser than himself. He went to the statesmen who run the country who must be wiser, but no. He went to the playwrights, the poets, the tragic masters, asking them about their work, no. He even went to the craftsmen, by whom he means the artisans who built the Parthenon and the great sculptors, asking them about their work. Yet they couldn't explain it, and they couldn't talk about it. So he's constantly offended everyone in Athens, and reminds people that he has spent a career humiliating people in public. This of course arouses further antagonism in that jury of 501, many of whom contained victims of his public humiliation.

In the course of this argument of whether he has been disrespectful to divine forces, he says that instead of being out of tune with the divine, he's actually been an agent of god. He actually goes so far as to say he is the gods' gift to Athens. To make the point, he tells a famous allegory in which Athens figures as a great sleeping horse, and he is a gadly or horsefly, trying to awaken this great steed into consciousness awareness. This is what he says:

"The state is a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you. You will not easily find another like me, and therefore I would advise you to spare me."

So this claim that he is god's gift to Athens, only further rendering the jury hostile. Yet notice he uses an allegory, that the state it like the horse, he is like a gadlfly. This is something we'll see over and over again, in the western tradition. The Greek word allegory means basically to say one thing and mean another. So teachers and writers will use allegory, and Jesus for example will teach in parables. The parable of the prodigal son, makes a point about the kingdom of heaven. Eventually readers and critics of literature, will read other works allegorically. So the time will come when readers look at Homer's Odyssey and see it as an allegory of man's journey from the city of destruction, Troy, to the true home Ithaca. It's sort of a moral allegory of the spiritual life of man.

Modern critics will even read novels with these sort of extraordinary leaps of allegorical interpretation. For example, they will find in Jane Austin's novels, allegories of capitalism and early imperialist economic systems. Yet these are all allegorical readings and understandings. So here we see a kind of classic starting point for that practice in Socrates' use of the allegory of the horse and gadfly.

The second phase of the trial has Socrates entering the sentencing phase. Here's where he gets to conjure with the possible penalties that will come down to him. There are possibilities of exile, of large fines, and the worst would be execution. So he systematically eliminates the lesser penalties, for example by saying if he were sent into exile, he'd just continue to question people and look after the truth, following his divine mission. In the course of this, he drops one of the great one liners, not ever a whole lines, but just a phrase:

"The unexamined life is not worth living."

That phrase or concept embedded in this larger speech, will have tremendous resonance throughout our tradition, the idea of self-examination. We'll see it in St. Augustine's Confessions, entirely a kind of examination of his life, emotional and spiritual. It will continue on to Montaigne's Essays, all the way through the tradition, that sense of self-examination, examenging your own life.

As we said, it's a jury of 501 men, actually a mid-sized jury in Athens at the time, which might be as low as 100 or as high as 1000. So it's not like the trial of the century as far as the Athenians are concerned. Now the vote to find him guilty was 280 to 221, yet the vote for the death penalty was 360. That is, a larger number of the jury, voted to sentence him to death, than had originally voted to condemn him as guilty. So he has done his job of really riling up the jury here!

The third phase of the trial is the appeals phase, where he's supposed to ask for a lesser sentence or clemancy of some form. You're supposed to come into the courtroom ripping your garments or tearing your hair, bring in your wife and small children, all to really get the sympathy of the jury at this point.

Yet that's not what Socrates does, of course. When threatened with execution, he says, "Hmm, yeah, I wonder if that's such a bad thing? Maybe it's actually a good thing" He begins to reason along these lines:

"...there is great reason to hope that death is a good; for one of two things - either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another."

Note the little phrase "as men say." That skepticism is almost another omission of guilt. He doesn't accept whole-heartedly the traditional teachings. When he thinks about the soul going to the other world, what he imagines is the opportunity to talk with the great figures of the past. He recalls the opportunity that Odysseus had to question Agamemnon, Achilles, and Tiresias. Yet Socrates says he can go and talk to the great men of the past who were condemned by unjust juries, again sort of guaranteeing that there's going to be no reversal of the death sentence for him. In fact, that's just how things turn out.

What is really going on in this speech? Why does Socrates rig the defense to guarantee his execution? John's explanation is that five years earlier, the Peloponnesian War had ended with Athens losing, which included losing many of its democratic institutions. So what Socrates is doing, is using the rhetoric of the period, what they call forensic or courtroom rhetoric, to insult the jury and make himself into a scapegoat. he is offering himself up as a sacrificial victim for the Athenian loss in the Peloponneisan War, and its oppressive aftermath. Why does he have to be the fall guy? It was his student, particularly Alcibiades, who was so much to blame for the reversal of fortunes for the Athenians. Yet Alcibiades is dead, so he's not available for the kind fo fall guy role, and the teacher Socrates steps up to accept the responsibility.

Now remember that one charge was corrupting the youth. This was at base, what they had in mind. That he had taught his students, like Alcibiades, to think independently, to question authority, not to act in a sort of mindless union, but in fact in a sense, not to be a good member of the chorus, not to be a team player.

Alcibiades had turned out to be a real extraordinary example of a bad team player, disobeying orders when coming to return from Sicily to Athens, to kind of face the music for what had gone wrong there. He went over to the other side and offered strategic advice to Sparta. He fermented revolt in the tributary islands of the Aegean, and even encouraged intervention against the Athenians by the Persian king Darius. So he's been a traitor all up and down. He's dead now, after being ambushed, so he's not there to suffer the consequences. So in a sense, Socrates is providing himself as that kind of sacrificial victim.

In a sense then, he's entering a tragic role. He's seeing himself as the protagonist of a great sort of civic ritual of sacrifice. Listen for example to the last line of Sophocles' Oedipus the king. The chorus gets the last line, a very pessimistic one:

"...count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last."

Now listen to Socrates' closing line, because it sounds like the exit line for a tragic protagonist:

"The hour of departure has arrived, and we fo our ways-I to dies, and you to live. Which is better God only knows."

That's a great exit line, wonderfully dramatic, where he's really sort of offering himself as this kind of scapegoat to sort of put trauma to the loss of Athens in the Peloponnesian War.

He also becomes henceforth a kind of prototype for the martyr figure, the sacrificial figure. Early Christians will even identify him with Christ, very much so in the Greek speaking world. In the first century this identification is made by Justin Martyr, and in the second century by Tertullian, who thinks drinking the hemlock was a pretty easy out, compared to the suffering of Christ and some of the other Christian martyrs.

Yet nonetheless, Socrates was first in 399, and so he establishes this as a kind of template upon which later figures will be written about, especially in the Greek, Roman, and western tradition.

What else is going on here? Plato always wanted to write a tragedy. The rumor was that he actually drafted a tragedy, showed it to his teacher Socrates, who grilled him on it, showing he really didn't understand the craft, so Plato burned the tragedy. What happens is that the Apology becomes Plato's chance to write that tragedy with Socrates as the heroic protagonist figure, that tragedy he'd always wanted to write.

He's also giving us something that's going to have a long legacy within the west, that of courtroom drama. In a sense, Athenian democracy encouraged a kind of political theater, the speechifying of the statesmen, the rhetoric, the arts of persuasion, the skills that were taught by the sophists, allowed a kind of conflict which came into the courtroom on the on head. While on the other hand, it came into the theater with the pitting of the protagonist against the antagonist in the tragedy. So courtroom conflict was ripe for this kind of dramatic interplay with these kinds of personalities and causes.

It has a long afterlife in the western tradition. Shakespeare loved to sort of bring his plays into the courtroom. Perhaps the most famous example is the Merchant of Venice, where Portia, disguised as a young lawyer, comes into to defend Antonio against Shylock, who's demanding his pound of flesh.

Sir Thomas Moore was a wonderful courtroom figure, and in the film version of his life, A Man for All Seasons, the great culminating event is that scene where Moore comes before Parliament to defend himself and eventually to offer himself again as a kind of martyr to the catholic cause in England.

So it goes, whereby Plato sort of actually breaks the mold by writing his philosophical treatises as dialogue. He's taken drama into the realm of philosophy, with characters talking to each other. They're written in a wonderfully dramatic way, comical, touching by turns, as though he's going to make sure that these dialogues also get written down. Unlike his student Aristotle who was rather careless about his teachings, Plato was very careful apparently to get his dialogues published in written form.

How do we know? Because all of them survive. All 26 works by Plato survived, including the Apology. It's a complete canon of a single author's works. This is so rare, especially in the ancient world. We know for example about the loss of poems by Sappho, we know we have just fractions of the total works of the great three playwrights of Athens, and we know we've lost that third epic by Homer, the Nostoi (Homecoming). So for all of Plato's dialogues to have survived intact, must mean that he took very careful precaution to get them written down, get them copied, get them transmitted out there.

Plato is also going to be very lucky in his connections. His student is Aristotle, who has a pupil by the name of Alexander the Great. He will spread Greek culture, by which we mean Athenian culture, throughout his empire. This cultural legacy will long outlive the conqueror and his generals, so that in a place like Alexandria, there will be the great library. This is going to be one of the places where the dialogues of Plato will continue to be copied, studied, edited, and then made available throughout the world.

So in a very funny way, Plato was the one who criticized writings in his dialogue of the Phaedrus, saying one shouldn't really trust in writing, that men don't train their memories if they put things in writing, as is so often the case, following the example of his teacher Socrates, he flips things, is very careful about getting them into written form, so that it can be read, not only be his immediate audience, but by his later audiences in later lands.

This is a great advantage of books, as we come to see, they are transportable. Plays don't move very well. Remember that the Greeks living in Sicily don't have the most recent plays of Euripides, because they were live performances, the scripts are being carefully guarded, there's reasons for keeping those scripts under wraps. So Plato's works, written down, are works that can go anywhere in the empire, to Alexandria, are copied, edited, and understood.

Plato's works will enter into a later literary tradition, even not in their original forms. Platonism, the kernel of his teachings, will enter into many writers over the coming centuries, even those who might not have read the original dialogues, would consider themselves Platonists.

A good example as we'll see is St. Augustine. Living in the western empire during the 3rd and 4th century, can't read Greek, or can't read it well, or doesn't have the material available. Yet he has read Latinized versions of Plato, has absorbed Platonic thought, the Christian theology that he will devise and transmit to the west, is strongly influenced by Plato, without the author himself having read the original Platonic dialogues.

The last time we see Plato in the Classical world, is going to be with Boethius in the early 6th century CE. Boethius saw himself standing at the end of Classical civilization, knowing that the Greek language had already been lost in the west, and he has a project, a literary, scholarly, and philosophical project that involves bringing the essential ingredients of Greek culture into the Latin language so that it might be preserved in the European west. So it's going to be Boethius' Latinized version of Plato, that will circulate in Europe for the next 1000 years, until the rediscovery of the originals and their printing in those first presses in Venice and elsewhere.

There's a great sort of cliche about Plato, where it's said in philosophy departments that all philosophy is Plato, and the rest is footnotes. how very true that is, nearly every topic of philosophical conversation in the west, has some place within Plato. Contemporary philosophers like Jacques Derrida reconsiders the issues of Plato and writes a wonderful 1972 work called Plato's Pharmacy where he actually goes back and considers the Phaedrus in which Plato challenges the whole technology of writing and putting things down into books.

Yet note it's only because things are written that they can acquire footnotes. So there's a wonderful and very true cliche which presumes Plato has written something down, has created literature, which itself can now have footnotes.