A Cambridge Companion to Plato came out in 1992, and has been followed by one To Aristotle in 1995 and To Plato’s Republic in 2007. However, the new addition to the excellent series raises immediately the Socratic problem: are we — are the contributors — confident to whom and to what exactly Cambridge is now providing a companion?

For a start, how possible is it to distinguish Socrates from Plato, the most thoroughgoing witness? It can only remain an open question at what point we can say that Plato’s Socratic dialogues move from being records of an adored teacher, like the gospels an attempt to get down on paper as much of the great man’s public teaching and private table talk as possible. We may ask when they present Plato’s own thought, philosophical essays set out in the form of conversations on the model of those fondly remembered classes, but now in effect works of fiction rather than biography. This is however a false polarity. Plato was self-consciously poetic, and his redaction of memory interventionist, ready to improve on life and fictionalize Socrates, from the beginning. Such at least appears to be the implication of the well-known anecdote from Diogenes Laertes. Equally, memories of Socrates’ ideas (or at least questions) may well persist throughout the later, supposedly more independent, work.

In getting to grips with Socrates, this collection first addresses the Socratic problem in the well-balanced opening item by Louis André Dorion, and then pursues it though the contributions that follow.

In ‘The Students of Socrates’, Klaus Döring looks at the evidence of what the lost Socratic dialogues of Aeschines and others contained. The issues of inconsistency of thinking, the nature of virtue, pleasure and the good life are deduced from the witnesses to the several missing dialogues.

David K. O’Connor cross-examines Xenophon as a witness. Although he is the only actual historian on the task, the tendency, following Schleiermacher, has been to dismiss Xenophon as not up to the job of understanding Socrates’ teaching. More recently historians of philosophy have suggested that this may be missing the point that Xenophon, if not the better philosopher, may perhaps have been the better witness. O’Connor treats the evidence with appropriate caution, recognizing that in each case the friends and pupils of Socrates brought something of themselves to the task of recording his teaching and life. In the case of Xenophon, there is his interest in politics and his experience of leadership.

Socrates was like Jesus not only in leaving no written work, but also in that the earliest witnesses may not be the closest witnesses. Just as the gospels postdate the Pauline letters, so, as David Konstan reminds us, Plato’s dialogues were preceded by Aristophanes’ The Clouds (though it’s true that the issue of when the earliest of his dialogues were written remains under dispute; I leave in abeyance the dating of Xenophon). However, both Dorion and Konstan rehearse the suggestion that Aristophanes might actually be parodying philosophers in general (or Sophists in particular) rather than Socrates as such, making assessing the value of his witness yet more problematic.

Only after that do we move to the ‘New Learning’ (Paul Woodruff), but here too there is a reprise, as it was this new learning that lay at the heart of Aristophanes’ attack and then formed the prosecution case. Those who, like Ayn Rand, have lined Socrates up with Galileo as persecuted radicals, have tended to overlook Socrates’ expressed views: he did not argue for some antinomian abrogation either of religion or of its close relatives custom and law. Mark L. McPherran cites Xenophon as witness that Socrates was a consistent devotee in cult service and ritual observances. Some elenctic moderns have found this puzzling (and clearly it didn’t cut any ice with the jury), but the evidence that Socrates took seriously revelation as an essential counterbalance to reason seems clear. McPherran (it is not a fault: such is the evident nature of the Companion‘s brief) however makes no attempt to consider Socrates as a religious leader and philosophy as the religion, with its subsequent teachers, sects, fissures and reforms. Sometimes the platonic dialogues are indeed more religious, as the Timaeus, and sometimes the tradition itself is more explicitly so, as witness the Neo-Platonists, not to mention the gnostics. Socrates’ appearance in Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation is a reminder of the curious way in which Greek philosophy parallels religious developments in other cultures.

Josiah Ober takes these matters further by examining the trial of Socrates for neglecting old gods, introducing new ones and misleading youth, a topic that frequently recurs in this collection. He proceeds to consider the political background to events, and the idea that Socrates praised Spartan law yet remained in Athens, while Plato went on to define a polity in which Socrates could have practiced and not been condemned.

Then we come to what some readers may regard as the meat of the book: method (Hugh H. Benson), self-examination (Christopher Rowe) and ignorance (Richard Bett).  Melissa Lane’s topic of irony includes the difficulty for modern readers be being certain when irony is present and when not. Socrates’ own emphasis on the nature of ‘good’ leads naturally to an article on ethics and the psychology of action (Terry Penner) and eudaimonia (Christopher Bobonich). But it also leads straight into political philosophy (Charles L. Griswold).

Turning to later Greek philosophy, A. A. Long makes the important point that Socrates does not dominate Greek discourse in the years immediately after his death, as we might have assumed. His significance in the history of philosophy is due to ‘the diverse ways in which he was interpreted, lauded and … criticized’ by later writers from the Academy, the Lyceum and the Stoa.

At this point, we begin to see Socrates less as a teacher and more as a topos, and this book begins to tilt over into Rezeptionskritik. One could foresee a perfectly useful Cambridge Companion dealing with this in its own right.

© 2011 Lucien Jenkins

Lucien Jenkins teaches on the Guildhall School of Music and Drama’s music degree programme, and formerly taught a course on Arts and Spirituality at the London Inter Faith Centre. He is an A-level examiner in Religious Studies. He took his BA in English at Cambridge University, his MA in History and his PhD in French at London University. He is the author of Romanticism in Focus (Rhinegold), Modernism in Focus (Rhinegold), Discover Early Music (Naxos), Laying out the Body (Seren). Editor of George Eliot Collected Poems, Peter Teuthold The Necromancer (Skoob), Francis Lathom The Midnight Bell (Skoob), Dictionary of Music in Sound (Rhinegold), Musical Instrument Handbook (Flametree/Billboard). Contributor and consultant for Classical Music Encyclopedia (Collins), Music Instruments (Collins Gem). Formerly editor of Music Teacher, and founder of Early Music Today, Classroom Music and Teaching Drama. He has written for History Today, Classical Music, Piano, Poetry Review, Opera Now, The Singer and The Guardian.