who actually knew Socrates are the works of Plato and Xenophon, who were in their late twenties at the
time of Socrates’ trial. They belonged to the same upper class of Athenians from which most of Socrates’
admirers were drawn; in fact, Plato was a relative of Critias as well as of Charmides, another member of
The Thirty who was an admirer of Socrates. After Socrates’ trial and death both Plato and Xenophon
wrote many works in which Socrates is a character. It is scarcely surprising that this Socrates bears little
resemblance to the morally bankrupt character satirized in Aristophanes’ comedy; frustratingly, Plato’s
Socrates and Xenophon’s are very different from one another. What the two have in common can probably
be taken as representing a reasonable portrait of the real Socrates. Unfortunately, it amounts to very little
indeed and that little conflicts markedly with what we find in Aristophanes: The Socrates of Plato and
Xenophon did not teach in any formal sense and certainly did not charge a fee for instruction. Instead, he
spent his time for the most part in public places in the city eagerly engaging in conversation with anyone
who shared his interests. Those interests were not at all connected with linguistics, geometry, and the
physical sciences, but almost exclusively with questions of ethical behavior and moral character.
This is not very concrete and may be thought to be a description that could fit any number of Athenians.
Clearly, there was much more to Socrates’ character than this. Still, even this little can be seen to be
politically subversive in the context of democratic Athens. The fact that Socrates did not engage in formal
instruction and did not charge a fee set him apart from the sophists, who claimed to be able to teach
virtually anything and who prided themselves on the size of their earnings. Only the very wealthiest
citizens could afford the services of the sophists, and yet there is something inherently democratic about
the sophists and their teaching. Democratic Athens operated on the assumption that public office could be
filled by any citizen, as is clear from its use of a lottery for selecting most public officials, and the
sophists accordingly advertised their services as guaranteed to confer on any citizen the ability to be an
effective public speaker and to hold successfully a position of leadership. This is why the sophists spent
so much of their time in democratic Athens rather than in oligarchic cities, even in quite wealthy
oligarchic cities like Corinth. For an oligarchic government is based on the conviction that there is an
inherent and inborn quality or set of qualities by virtue of which oligarchs are naturally suited to rule.
This distinction is nicely articulated in a speech that Thucydides puts into the mouth of a Corinthian envoy
trying to persuade the Spartans to go to war with Athens in 432 BC. The Corinthian acknowledges
Athens’ obvious military superiority at sea, but he insists that Sparta, Corinth, and their Peloponnesian
allies can easily learn skill in naval warfare, whereas the Athenians can never attain by instruction the
innate superiority that the Peloponnesians enjoy in character and in courage. By spending his time
discussing ethical issues, Socrates must have seemed to his fellow citizens to consider himself an expert.
But by declining to teach (and perhaps even rejecting the notion that such things can be taught at all) he
must have seemed entirely too sympathetic to the oligarchic way of thinking, and the oligarchs, after all,
had been “the enemy” in the recent war and had inflicted an appalling reign of terror on the city in the
war’s aftermath. All of this will have been confirmed in the minds of many jurors by the fact that
Socrates’ closest associates included several of those very oligarchs.