Words for Board: Gorgias, Socrates, Aristophanes

This is philosophy during and after the Peloponnesian War.

Gorgias was an ambassador to Athens who came from a nothing city-state. He was the greatest speaker of the day. He gave a great speech in 408 BC at the Olympics that asked for peace. Everyone said it was a great speech, but nobody paid any attention. He wrote a book called Nature that we've lost most of but we have the three topic statements of what the book was about. He said he could proved 3 propositions: 1. Nothing exists. 2. If anything did exist, it would be unknowable. 3. If anything were knowable it would be incommunicable. Huh? What Stockmyer thinks he's talking about is the world beyond your senses, like the gods for instance. If gods did exist, we wouldn't know about it cuz we tell things by our 5 senses and they can't be seen, felt, etc. If we did, in some way, know about it, we couldn't explain it cuz all our words are in terms of our senses. For instance–Stockmyer says he knows of a color called Blotto. What's it like, you ask. Is it blue, red, light, dark? No, he says, it's just Blotto. After a couple of hours like that, you can haul him off in a funny jacket. Stockmyer sees this as another attack on conventions of culture and religion. It's called destructive philosophy. It destroyed the older ideas. But it didn't offer anything in place of the old.

Socrates tried to build philosophy back. His dates are 469-399 BC, he lived during and after the Peloponnesian War. He was said to be the homeliest man in Athens. We have lots of sculptures today of what he looks like. To be ugly is bad in Greece cuz they treasure good looks as meaning good people. We don't really know exactly what Socrates said cuz he never wrote anything down. We have what his students say he said to them. So, you have to take it with a grain of salt, cuz it could be what the students want to say and put words into Socrates' mouth. The students say he said some conflicting things. But he had the ability to stimulate independent thought and he could have made a statement which could be taken in many ways. He also could have changed his mind and said different things as he got older. He was a stonemason when young and worked on the Parthenon up on the Acropolis. He was supposed to be chipping grooves in the stone and got bored and quit. From then on, he was unemployed for the rest of his life. His students looked after him and his family. He had a wife who was supposed to be a "nag" (that may mean that she suggested he get a job once a year). He wore rags, was shabby, shoeless, dirty. He was a soldier during the Peloponnesian War. He didn't have much religion in the conventional Greek sense. He believed he had a guardian spirit that warned him of danger. (We'd call that a guardian angel.) There is some evidence that he may have had epilepsy and epileptics have the feeling they have a spirit with them who warns them before seizures. He'd kind of slip into a trance where his students said he was deep in thought. He was kind of a social pest.

He was concerned with morality. He loved definition of words and terms. He would jump out from a building and grab you and ask, "What do you mean by truth?" He felt there was a link between knowledge and morality, ignorance and evil. He said the most satisfying life is a moral, honest one. Stockmyer asked: "How many of you really ever considered holding up a bank?" Hopefully, none. It was a rhetorical question, don't answer out loud. Anyway, the risk to us, the common type citizen is much greater than the money we'd get, even if we were to succeed. Besides, the risk of having to look over our shoulder and feel guilty everyday doesn't make it worthwhile. But, to the ghetto type, it might sound like a good idea. He would see it as moving up cuz he has no future anyway, so things could only get better with more money.

Socrates didn't have lots of friends. Lawyers in his time tried to help the rich against the poor and keep you from being sued. The new philosophy was trying to show you how to save yourself. But Socrates would come along, listen to a new philosopher and start questioning his terms. He was a social critic. Athens went back to democracy right after the war. Socrates criticized democracy as a lousy form of government but he was saying this at the wrong time. Eventually, someone charged Socrates (at age 70) of atheism and corrupting the youth. He was guilty if you consider that he doesn't believe in the old religion and that he tried to make people think for themselves. As was the custom, Socrates defended himself at his trial. The jury voted im guilty. But there was no judge in those days to hand down a sentence. What happened was the prosecuting attorney and the defendant would both suggest a sentence and the jury would vote on it. The prosecutor asked for death, and the defendant usually asked for banishment. But Socrates said he was valuable to the city cuz he made people think so he thought they ought to give him a pension. The jury had no choice but to give him death. (They'd just decided he was guilty, how could they give him a pension?) He was put in jail with lots of chance to escape. His students tried to get him to leave but he'd been a law-abiding citizen all his life and he wasn't going to quit now. He neatly arranged for the state to kill him to make a point. We probably wouldn't remember him except for the style in which he exited made him a martyr-type. The state let him drink hemlock (poison).

Aristophanes was the best of the comic playwrights. His comedies were a little better than the X-rated Stooges type that the rest of the comedies were. But comedy doesn't preserve well through time. Tragedies are always understandable cuz the situations could be understood–death, loss of friends or family, etc. Something funny has to be taken in its time period. Comedy is localized with the news of the day stuff. For example: this is a joke in a 1900's ladies magazine: 1st lady: Did you see my new silk stockings? 2nd lady: I thought you were saving your money for a rainy day. 1st lady: I was. That's it–that's the joke. Now for the interpretation: See, back then, ladies wore their skirts to the floor. They even put skirts on furniture so you couldn't see its legs cuz men were thought to be sex fiends and even the sight of a leg of any kind would turn them on. But you have to raise your skirt to jump a puddle when it rains and you want your legs to look their best so you can show a little ankle. Therefore, by buying silk stocking, she was waiting for a rainy day. Get it?!! For the rest of Aristophanes, read the syllabus.