42 Burnet,Plato’s“Euthyphro,”“Apology”and“Crito,”151. On Socrates’inadmissibility, see Douglas
M. MacDowell,The Law in Classical Athens(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 73–4.
43 Leibowitz,The Ironic Defense, 35, 161.
44 Burnet,Plato’s“Euthyphro,”“Apology”and“Crito,”150.
45 Aristotle (Rhetoric, 1390b31) says the sons of Socrates were stupid (abeleria), something that Socrates
would have known. Saxonhouse said that justice would be done“when the city becomes a surrogate father
to Socrates’sons as Socrates has been to the city of Athens”(“The Philosophy of the Particular,”296),
which may be true but is also an infinitely remote possibility and so evidence of a joke.
46 Greene,“The Spirit of Comedy,” 71 – 2.
47 Eric Voegelin,Order and History (Volume III): Plato and Aristotle,Vol 16 ofThe Collected Works of Eric
Voegelin, Dante Germino, ed. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 65. Compare Voegelin’s
argument with that of Nietzsche,Birth of Tragedy,12–13.
48 Voegelin,Plato and Aristotle, 67.
49 Strauss,Socrates and Aristophanes(New York: Basic Books, 1966), 312.
50 See Eric Voegelin’sOrder and History (Volume II): The World of the Polis,The Collected Works of Eric
Voegelin, Athanasios Moulakis, ed. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), Vol. 15, 319.
51 InOrder and History (Volume V): In Search of Order. The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin,EllisSandoz,ed.
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), Vol. 18, 84, Voegelin refers to Hegel’s discussion in
Phänomenologie des Geistes, J. Hoffmeister, ed. (Hamburg: Meiner, 1952), 517–20, 523, of Aristophanes
andof the“happy consciousness”of comedyfor which everythingofsignificanceislost,a state ofconscious-
ness that finds expression“in the pityless words, god has died”Gott gestorben ist.
52 Saxonhouse,Free Speech and Democracy, 110.
53 Ibid., 203.
54 Francesco J. Gonzales,“Caring and Conversing about Virtue Every Day: Human Piety and Goodness in
Plato’s‘Apology,’”inRe-examining Socrates, Fagan and Russon, eds., 118.
55 Gonzales,“Caring and Conversation,” 127 – 9.
56 Ibid., 134.
57 I would like to thank Ed Andrew, Leon Craig, Tom Darby, Tilo Schabert and John von Heyking for their
comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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32 Barry Cooper