¹ E. de Strycker incorporates and extends the reflections of Burnet and other scholars in Slings, S. R., ed., Plato's Apology of Socrates: A Literary and Philosophical Study with a Running Commentary (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994)Google Scholar.

² Feaver, Douglas D. and Hare, John E., “The Apology as an Inverted Parody of Rhetoric,” Arethusa 14.2 (1981), 205–16Google Scholar. Cf. Slings, Plato's Apology of Socrates, 33: “Socratic speech always aims at truth. … [Socrates] is not primarily interested in securing his acquittal.”

³ Euben, J. Peter, The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 204Google Scholar.

⁴ Goldhill, Simon, “The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology,” in Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in its Social Context, ed. Winkler, John J. and Zeitlin, Froma I. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 97–129Google Scholar. There is some evidence that the tragedies were particularly directed toward an audience of ephebes, youths on the verge of manhood and the full responsibilities of citizenship; see John J. Winkler, “The Ephebes' Song: Tragōidia and Polis,” in Nothing to Do with Dionysos?, 20–62. Other scholars have argued that Aristotle valued tragedy primarily as a kind of adult education; see esp. Lord, Carnes, Education and Culture in the Political Thought of Aristotle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982)Google Scholar. For further discussion of the nature and limits of tragic education, see my article “Aristotle on Tragedy: Rediscovering the Poetics,” Interpretation 22.3 (1995), 359–403.

⁵ Socrates affirms this assumption immediately before his trial and on the last day of his life; cf. Euthphr. 6d–e with Phd. 100a–e. On the opposing assumption that reality is fundamentally fluid and disordered cf. Tht. 160d, where Socrates places Homer at the head of a “tribe” (phulon) that asserts all things are in motion, an opinion, he later remarks, that “the ancients concealed from the many with poetry” (180c–d). Socrates' denial at Rep. 377d–83c that the gods cause human suffering, take on different shapes (ideai), and tell lies effectively replaces the deities of the poets with Platonic forms.

⁶ 473c–74a. On the literal and figurative centrality of this claim in the Republic, see my article “The Republic's Third Wave and the Paradox of Political Philosophy,” Review of Metaphysics 51.3 (1998), 633–57.

⁷ Of course, both this gap and the philosopher who attempts to bridge it could also be the subject of comedy. But although the Apology contains seemingly comic elements, e.g., Socrates' admittedly “ridiculous” comparison of himself to a gadfly at 30e–31a, Socrates directly challenges the Athenians' conception of the difference between what is laughable and what is serious, including death. Thus the contrast between the gadfly and the “noble” horse (30e) is, as Saxonhouse, Arlene notes (Free Speech and Democracy in Ancient Athens [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006], 122)Google Scholar, part and parcel of Socrates' inversion of conventional hierarchies (concerning which, see n. 43, below). Socrates furthermore rejects Aristophanes' laughable portrayal of him in the Clouds (19c–d). The choice between comedy and tragedy depends on one's perspective (is one looking from above, so to speak, or from below?) as well as one's estimation of the worth of human life; cf. Socrates' contrast between the seemingly laughable philosopher and the stunted souls of non-philosophers at Theaetetus 172c–176a. My argument that Socrates largely transcends tragedy in the Apology may support the suggestion that Socratic philosophizing as a way of life finds its closest dramatic correlate in the satyr-play. For further reflection on this topic, see my discussions of the Cratylus and the Symposium as satyr-plays in The Paradox of Political Philosophy: Socrates' Philosophic Trial (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1998), 131–63 (esp. 161–62) and “Plato's Dionysian Music? A Reading of the Symposium,” Epoché 12.1 (2007), 17–47.

⁸ Seaford, Richard, “Dionysiac Drama and the Dionysiac Mysteries,” Classical Quarterly 31.2 (1981): 252–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar. These themes include the captivity and subsequent liberation of the followers of Dionysus and initiation into the Dionysiac mysteries.

⁹ Cadmus's brief eulogy emphasizes that Pentheus is aggressive in defense against any injustice to the bearers of ancestral authority and to the established traditions he embraces as his own: “No one who had seen your face dared outrage the old man, or if he did, you punished him. … No more, child, will you hug me and call me ‘Grandfather’ and say, ‘Who is wronging or dishonoring you? Does anyone trouble you or vex your heart, old man? Tell me, grandfather, and I will punish him’” (1310–12, 1318–23). Arrowsmith, William, trans., The Bacchae, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, vol. 4, ed. Grene, David and Lattimore, Richmond (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1959)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ See esp. 215–47, 451–514.

¹¹ On Pentheus as prey, see 847–48, 1146–47, 1203–07. At 539–44, the chorus connects Pentheus's savagery with the legend that the Thebans sprang from the teeth of a dragon slain by Cadmus. The justice of Pentheus's punishment, asserted by the chorus at 991–96 and 1013–16, is acknowledged by Cadmus at 1249–50.

¹² Seaford, “Dionysiac Drama,” 263.

¹³ Cf. Froma I. Zeitlin, “Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality, and the Feminine in Greek Drama,” in Nothing to Do with Dionysus?, 78: Greek tragedy is “the epistemological genre par excellence, which continually calls into question what we know and how we think we know it.” Yet it is not clear that the resulting knowledge of ignorance has any positive consequences. Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg suggests that “one of the dark lessons of tragedy is that there are no lessons to be learnt, in order to avoid tragedy” (“The Psychology of Aristotelian Tragedy,” in Essays on Aristotle's Poetics, ed. Rorty, [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992], 18)Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Note that a peculiar ambiguity results from the gulf between the philosopher and the city: to many of Socrates' interlocutors, being refuted may seem like a turn for the worse (especially if the refutation occurs in public), but it is from a Socratic perspective a great benefit (cf. Ap. 36c). The same ambiguity attaches to the death of Socrates. If he is indeed a great gift to the city, his death will in itself constitute a change from better fortune to worse. But if his death provides the Athenians with an opportunity to achieve greater self-knowledge (a possibility I consider below), it may also be of lasting benefit to them.

¹⁵ And like Dionysus, Socrates has aroused ire (he claims) because of his service to a god. One could push this comparison further by connecting his trial, as Munn, Mark does in The School of History: Athens in the Age of Socrates (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)Google Scholar, with his behavior as “a mystagogos, a Guide of Initiates” who has introduced into the city quasi-religious mysteries (284–291). These are the mysteries of philosophy, whose initiation-rites Aristophanes mocks in the Clouds (140–43, 250 ff.). Cf. Symp. 209e–12a.

¹⁶ In the case of the Bacchae, one might say that the reverent shame (aidōs: 828) that binds Pentheus to the civic tradition and that makes him an enemy of the god is, in the end, that of which he dies. Dionysus cruelly drives this point home by convincing the hyper-masculine Pentheus, attached as he is to manly conceptions of shame, honor, and courage, to dress in the garb of his female worshippers just prior to his death. In defeating Pentheus, Dionysus both literally and figuratively explodes the city as a masculine endeavor. This point is thoroughly developed in Zeitlin, “Playing the Other.”

¹⁷ On Socrates' deliberate provocation of the jury see Brann, Eva, “The Offense of Socrates: A Re-reading of Plato's Apology,” Interpretation 7.2 (1978), 1–21Google Scholar. Munn states that at his trial Socrates expresses “open contempt for the Athenian public in general” and thus “reinforce[s] a reputation for contempt of the assembled public that had a long history” (The School of History, 286).

¹⁸ See Wallace, ArthurPickard-Cambridge, , The Dramatic Festivals of Athens (Oxford: The Claerndon Press, 1968), 68Google Scholar, on the institution of the proagon.

¹⁹ Translations from the Apology are drawn from West, Thomas G. and West, Grace Starry, trans., Four Texts on Socrates: Plato's Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito and Aristophanes' Clouds (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984)Google Scholar, with occasional emendations.

²⁰ Saxonhouse notes that Socrates and Achilles are both “shameless” in scorning death, in that they act without concern for “the judgments of those who gaze upon them either in admiration or contempt”; it is this independence that most “unites Socrates and Achilles” (Free Speech and Democracy, 120). In disdaining death, Saxonhouse adds, Socrates and Achilles also “scorn the passion on which the city builds its penal code” and thus “stand outside the city” (119). I return to the theme of shame in the next section.

²¹ Note that the measure of what is ridiculous to Socrates' Achilles, and hence to Socrates, is not conventional opinion – which holds that there is shame in allowing oneself to be killed – but the opposite, a noble disdain for the danger of death. Cf. n. 7, above.

²² This assignment of roles is not unprecedented. Cf. Vernant, Jean-Pierre and Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. Lloyd, Janet (New York: Zone Books, 1990Google Scholar), 35, where Vernant argues that the city is the protagonist of Aeschylus's Seven Against Thebes.

²³ Vernant has illuminated the philosophical and political significance of Greek tragedy in a series of influential essays informed both by historical inquiry and by the structuralist methodology of Claude Lévi-Strauss. These essays are collected in Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy .

²⁴ Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy, 25, 27. Cf. Vernant's observation that “the tragic writers' use of a technical legal vocabulary underlies the affinities between the most favored tragic themes and certain cases that fell within the competence of the courts” (25).

²⁵ Ibid., 33.

²⁶ Ibid., 88, 25. Cf. the Athenian Stranger's condemnation of what might be called “theatocracy” in the courts (Laws 876b).

²⁷ On Meletus as a radical democrat, see Howland, The Paradox of Political Philosophy, 103. The hostility of the restored democracy toward Socrates was in part attributable to his association with men of tyrannical inclination such as Alcibiades and Critias, the cousin of Plato's mother and leader of the oligarchic regime of the Thirty Tyrants that was installed by the victorious Spartans in 404. See Xenophon Memorabilia 1.2.12 with the sources cited at Munn, The School of History, 425 n. 33. Both Plato and Socrates were members of the Three Thousand, citizens who had been selected by the Thirty to share in the government and who had remained in the city of Athens during the oligarchy; see Krentz, Peter, The Thirty at Athens (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 64–65Google Scholar. Munn notes that, by 400/399, Socrates' name “had been invoked often enough in connection with the enemies of democracy to create an ill-defined yet pervasive aura of sinister power about the man” (The School of History, 289).

²⁸ Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy, 33.

²⁹ Vernant's example of a drama where this issue is central is Aeschylus's Suppliants (Myth and Tragedy, 39), but the nature and source of political authority is obviously a major theme in tragedy. Outstanding examples include Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos and Antigone and Euripides' Hecuba.

³⁰ Fifteen, if my count is correct: 29d3, 30a8, 30e7, 31a3, 31b5, 35c2, 35d3, 36c5, 37a5, 37a6, 37e5, 38a1, 38a6, 38a7, 38d4.

³¹ The quotation is from Iliad 9.441.

³² The word Callicles uses is aischron, which echoes the verb aischunomai, “to be ashamed,” that Socrates uses at Ap. 28b.

³³ Cf. the speech of the Corinthians in Thucydides, 1.70–71. This paragraph adumbrates points that are developed at length in chap. 4 (“Paideia and the Preparation for Battle”) of Rahe, Paul A., Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 105–35Google Scholar.

³⁴ Beyond Good and Evil, 9.262. I have slightly modified the translation of Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966).

³⁵ Nietzsche's reflections on the “original tribal community” in the Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, section 19, may be germane in this context: “The conviction reigns that it is only through the sacrifices and accomplishments of the ancestors that the tribe exists – and one has to pay them back with sacrifices and accomplishments: one thus recognizes a debt that constantly grows greater since these forbears never cease, in their continued existence as powerful spirits, to accord the tribe new advantages and new strengths.” (Translation of Walter Kaufmann, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo [New York: Random House, 1967], emphases in original.)

³⁶ Christina Tarnopolsky distinguishes between the “flattering shame” employed by Callicles (and the imagined speaker at 28b), which caters to the existing prejudices of one's audience, and the “respectful shame” of Socrates and Plato, which “creates a potentially salutary discomfort and perplexity … that is necessary for self-consciousness, self-reflection, self-criticism, and moral and political deliberation.” “Prudes, Perverts, and Tyrants: Plato and the Contemporary Politics of Shame,” Political Theory 32.4 (2004): 479.

³⁷ Cf. Howland, The Paradox of Political Philosophy, 29.

³⁸ Cf. 30d, where Socrates states that Meletus is “attempting to kill a man unjustly.” At 39b, he says that his accusers have been “convicted by the truth of wretchedness and injustice.”

³⁹ Cf. Brann, “The Offense of Socrates,” 18–19: “Once a defendant, Socrates became a resister, the defender of philosophy from the city's attack. He must have thought that this public occasion was a moment to display spirit, to confirm the lifelong business of words in deed, to be what Achilles, to whom he compares himself, was in war, a hero for philosophy (28c).”

⁴⁰ At 31c–d, Socrates notes that he was previously prevented from entering public life by his daimonion; having just been condemned to death, he observes that his daimonion did not oppose him at any point prior to or during his defense speech (40a–b).

⁴¹ Socrates glosses over another important difference between himself and Achilles: whereas Achilles is a young man when he chooses to follow a path that will lead to his death, Socrates conveniently waits until the age of seventy to risk his life in confronting the city. He thereby implies that a life of “private” philosophizing is more choiceworthy than the public correction of injustice in which he is engaged in the Apology.

⁴² Cf. Slings, Plato's Apology of Socrates, 46: Socrates presents “the image of a man who, just because he is of exceptional stature, is not understood and has become the victim of the petty resentment of the crowd.”

⁴³ My reading of the Apology harmonizes in significant respects with that of Saxonhouse, Free Speech and Democracy, which focuses on the way Socrates effectively redefines shame, “destroying it as an emotion that entailed revering one's fellow citizens, following their traditions, and accepting their hierarchies.” In freeing shame from the “judgmental gaze and reverence [aidōs] that Protagoras had so praised as the grounding of political life [in the Protagoras, 322c],” Socrates “completely invert[s] the language of the Athenian democracy” (e.g., “‘daring’ is not to speak frankly; it is to pander to the jurors [cf. 38d–e]”) and effectively turns “the world … [of the Athenians] upside down: accuser is accused, the proud is the one who should feel shame, the free are enslaved, and from all these inversions, Socrates, the one who had been on trial, emerges as the unlikely hero of the story, the one who will ‘save’ Athens by his ‘shameless’ speech” (113, 115, 121). The Apology thus points to “the tension between the willingness to openly speak ‘the truth’ … and the respect for what is old and traditionally binds cities together in a Protagorean fashion” (111).

⁴⁴ Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy, 120, 431 n. 37

⁴⁵ The issues here are complex. I do not think that, in referring to Delphi, Socrates is merely playing with the religious sensibilities of the jury. On one hand, the oracle at Delphi arouses, focuses, and validates Socrates' desire for wisdom by setting him on the path to find the answers to two questions that it intertwines: “Who is Socrates?” and “What is wisdom?” On the other, the oracle has this effect only because Socrates presupposes that the god speaks the truth (21b). Perhaps, as an anonymous referee has suggested, it is a specifically philosophical understanding of god that measures man in the Platonic dialogues. For further discussion, see my Kierkegaard and Socrates: A Study in Philosophy and Faith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 66–67.

⁴⁶ With respect to this prediction, there is a tragically satisfying yet dubious tradition that Socrates' accusers suffered reprisal shortly after his trial. See the sources cited at Nails, Debra, The People of Plato: A Prosopography of Plato and Other Socratics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2002), 38Google Scholar, s.v. “Anytus.”

⁴⁷ Kierkegaard, Cf. Søren, Either/Or: Part I, ed. and trans. Hong, Howard V. and Hong, Edna H. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 143–144Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ Reprinted in Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy, 113–40.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 119.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 116.

⁵¹ Ibid., 128 with 433 n. 87.

⁵² Ibid., 128, 131.

⁵³ Ibid., 131–32.

⁵⁴ Moulinier, Louis, Le pur et l'impur dans la pensée des Grecs d'Homère à Aristote (Paris: Libraire C. Klincksieck, 1952), 98–99Google Scholar. For an extended reflection on the connection between these equally ambiguous terms, see Derrida, Jacques, “Plato's Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Johnson, Barbara (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 61–171Google Scholar. Derrida links the pharmakon of writing (Phdr. 230d, 274e) with Plato's representation of Socrates as a pharmakeus, a “synonym” of “pharmakos (wizard, magician, poisoner)” (130).

⁵⁵ Girard, René, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Coby, Patrick (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 71.

⁵⁷ Ibid., 79, 81.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 70, 85.

⁵⁹ Munn, The School of History, 186.

⁶⁰ It does not follow that Socrates was mistaken in asserting that the trial would be para tous nomous. Martin Ostwald argues that paranomia can refer to the transgression of general social codes of behavior if not also of specific legal, political, or religious injunctions. See Ostwald, , From Popular Sovereignty to the Sovereignty of Law: Law, Society, and Politics in Fifth-Century Athens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 111–29Google Scholar, esp. 113–16.

⁶¹ Burkert, Walter, Greek Religion, trans. Raffan, John (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 83Google Scholar.

⁶² If Munn is correct in inferring that the Meletus who accuses Socrates is the same one summoned by the Thirty to arrest Leon (The School of History, 426 n. 34), Socrates' reference to this episode is also a sharp dig at his accusers.

⁶³ The attempt of Socrates' accusers to root out pollution (miasma) by going to court is dramatically anticipated by Euthyphro's prosecution of his father, of which Socrates learns on the occasion of his preliminary hearing (Euthphr. 4b–c).

⁶⁴ On the practice of feeding and keeping the pharmakoi in the Prutaneion, see Aristophanes, Knights 1405, with the scholiast on Knights 1136. Socrates' birthdate is recorded at Diogenes Laertius 2.44. This evidence is cited in Harrison, Jane, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 3rd ed., 1922 (New York: Meridian Press, 1955), 95–106Google Scholar. The month of the sacred voyage to Delos is noted in Thesleff, Holger, Studies in Platonic Chronology (Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica 1982Google Scholar), 26 n. 24. On Socrates as pharmakos, cf. Derrida's reflections and extensive citations in “Plato's Pharmacy,” 128–34.

⁶⁵ Vernant follows R. R. Winnington-Ingram in connecting this point with the syntactical ambiguity of Heraclitus's dictum that ēthos anthrōpōi daimōn estin, “character for a human being is destiny” (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy, 37).

⁶⁶ Ibid., 37.

⁶⁷ On Socrates' response to the oracle, see above, n. 45. Socrates' openness to daimōn seems also to be reflected in his references to the private communications of his daimonion, the inner divine voice that he appears to have seamlessly incorporated within his self-conception (31c–d, 40a–b).

⁶⁸ In this sense, Socrates is indeed “a provocative and voluntary pharmakos (and not solicited and consenting),” as Lacoue-Labarthe, Philipe maintains in Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, trans. Fynsk, Christopher (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 135 n. 136Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ The revenge wrought by Hecuba and her accomplices against Polymestor in Euripides' Hecuba provides a good example of this feminine strategy.

⁷⁰ Cf. Saxonhouse, Free Speech and Democracy: “When shame serves as the glue of a community, the educator in shamelessness such as Socrates dissolves the glue. … The indifference to others and the past that this new meaning of shame [as redefined by Socrates] entails undercuts the community.” Furthermore, “the unveiling” entailed by Socrates' extreme exercise of frank speech (parrhēsia) “may challenge reflexively the conditions that gave rise to it” (117, 125).

⁷¹ On the other hand, an anonymous referee suggests that Socrates merely means to say that his accusers will have paid due recompense for their injustice to him by making his sons more just.

⁷² See Rep. 500b–c, 516c–e with Tht. 173c–76a.

⁷³ Interestingly, neither the word erōs nor any of its cognates appears in this dialogue. Yet it is Socrates' erotic desire for wisdom that leads him to respond as he does to the oracle at Delphi. See above, n. 45.

⁷⁴ See 29d–e: “I will not cease from philosophizing [philosophōn] and exhorting [parakeleuomenos] and explaining [endeiknumenos]. … I will question [erēsomai] and examine [exetasō] and test [elengxō] him, and if he does not seem to me to possess virtue, but says he does, I will reproach [oneidiō] him.”

⁷⁵ Rosen, Stanley, Plato's Republic: A Study (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 229Google Scholar.

⁷⁶ Cf. Pericles' remark at Thucydides 2.40.2: “we regard the citizen who takes no part in these duties [of public deliberation] not as unambitious but as useless … instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think of it as an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all.” Translation from The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War, ed. Robert B. Strassler (New York: The Free Press, 1996).

⁷⁷ Frank William Jones, trans., The Suppliant Women, in Grene and Lattimore, The Complete Greek Tragedies, vol. 4.

⁷⁸ For alternative formulations of this paradox as it emerges within the context of the Republic and the Statesman, see Howland, The Paradox of Political Philosophy (esp. 272–79).

⁷⁹ Tusculan Disputations, trans. King, J. E. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), 5.10–11Google Scholar.