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Socrates, Guilty in Law, Equity, Owls, Essence and Frogs
Page in Brief. The ancient Greek philosophers saw free speech (Gorgias 461e) as the search for truth through discussion (Protagoras 343b, Iliad 10.224, "when two go together"; cf. Acts 17.22-32), in Schweitzer's words "for truth must be exalted above everything else". The gods of the philosophers were fully good because fully rational. Conceptual investigation: law versus equity = justice. Aristophanes' The Frogs and Euripides: "For who knows if life be death and death be life?"
Topics on this page ...
- "Essence Belongs to Grammar"
- The Owl and the Egg
- About the Ancient Greeks
- Aristophanes - Aeschylus [the Poet] versus Euripides [Socrates]
- Poetic wisdom or Socratic quibbles?
- Who knew what and when?
- "Socrates was Guilty in Law"
- 'Equity' and 'Law' are Different Concepts
- Traditional Views about Socrates
- The Theater of Dionysius on the south slope of the Athenian Acropolis
- Aristophanes' The Frogs (Society is built on complacency, not on skepticism and doubt)
- "To reason out the How and Why" (Euripides, Socrates)
- Who shall best advise the city?
- Poetic wisdom or Socratic quibbles?
Background: the question of logic of language, namely: How is language with meaning distinguished from nonsense in philosophy? Note: the strings of words that follow "Query" were found in the site's server logs.
"Essence Belongs to Grammar"
Note: there is a later discussion "Essence as conjecture about a thing's nature", e.g. the essence of man, and an earlier discussion "Is the word 'God' a name?" in the context of the following quotation.
God's essence is said to guarantee his existence -- what this really means is that here what is at issue is not the existence of something. (CV p. 82, remark from 1949)
Essence is expressed by grammar. (PI § 371) Grammar tells what kind of object anything is. (Theology as grammar.) (ibid. § 373)
The question whether a thing exists is answered by an empirical test. But there is no test of whether there is a God; there cannot be a description of "what it would be like if there were God" (CV p. 82), not as the word 'God' is normally used. Then what is "at issue" is Wittgenstein's "grammar", i.e. description of the rules for the use of a word in the language (definition), in this case for the words 'God' and 'exists'.
Saint Anselm reasoned that "God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived, and that which exists is greater than that which does not exist", which is to say that existence belongs to God's essence ("that without which not"). What exactly can be deduced from a rule of grammar (which is what 'than which nothing greater can be conceived' or 'than which nothing more perfect can be imagined')? Can the existence of something be deduced (as Norman Malcolm thought)? But what are the words 'exist' and 'existence' to mean if there is no empirical difference between God's existing or not existing? The proposition 'God exists' is not as an empirical proposition, but seems to function as a rule of grammar, i.e. a rule for using language (strange as that may sound).
Query: words do not have exact meanings. Wittgenstein.
We can always assign words exact meanings, but "Generally, we do not use language according to fixed rules ..." (BB p. 25). What does Wittgenstein mean? That normally the borders of our concepts are not strictly defined, because most words do not have "general definitions" (i.e. essential, Socratic-Platonic definitions). Instead, most words are defined by what Wittgenstein called family resemblances (or myriad similarities). But "family resemblances" is not an explanation of concept-formation (as the essences of the theory of abstraction would be); it is simply a description of what we find when we look: "if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that" (PI § 66).
We can give words exact meanings in the particular case (cf. Zettel § 467); but there is no "exact meaning" that carries over between cases necessarily, or, in other words, there is no "halo" of meaning that accompanies a word through all contexts.
Thus it is necessary for the philosopher to be precise in speech in each particular case, because he should not (cannot) assume that words have essential meanings -- i.e. meanings that are independent of context. The assumption that meaning is like a halo that a word carries with it through all contexts (PI § 117) prompts philosophers to talk without ever saying (or knowing) what they are talking about; they presume that when someone learns a word, he abstracts the essence of the thing the word names and thus knows the word's meaning in every context. (The false presumption: "the meaning of a word is the essence of the thing the word names.")
Although rules of grammar depend for their usability -- i.e. for whether it is empirically possible to follow them or not -- on some very general facts of nature (PI II, xii, p. 230a), concept-formation is somewhat arbitrary ("After all, everything resembles everything else up to a point" (Protagoras 331d), i.e. in some way or another, but nonetheless the categories we use are limited in number). But Wittgenstein did believe that some concepts "force themselves on us", e.g. the concept 'object' (CV p. 86, remark from 1950).
Are some concepts forced on us?
Indeed, doesn't it seem obvious that the possibility of a language-game is conditioned by certain facts? (OC § 617)
If we imagine a tribe that has always been confined in a place where it never rains, where water never falls from the sky, will we imagine them to have a concept 'rain'? Will we imagine that a tribe that is familiar only with the tropics will have a concept 'snow'? H.G. Wells saw no place for the word 'see' in his story "The Country of the Blind".
Query: the opposite [of two] objects cannot occupy the same space [at the same time].
The difficulty is not to imagine the opposite, namely that two objects occupy the same space and time (for examples of the opposite are easily given) -- but to imagine the thing itself. Well, it cannot be imagined, although you can of course picture two billiard balls colliding if you like, but you can also as easily imagine them passing through one another. You simply state a rule -- a rule of grammar (a rule for the use of language), and yet that rule is used as a premiss in hypotheses of empirical investigation.
Query: Laws of Matter. Which scientist said two masses cannot occupy the same space at the same time?
What is the word 'masses' a euphemism for -- 'solid bits of matter' (Isaac Newton)? After the atomic bombing of Japan, Drury asked if anything was absolutely solid: what is "matter" (cf. DW p. 69: "particles of what")? Is anything "atomic" in the Greek sense of "uncuttable"? (Is the notion 'uncuttable matter' subject to the same criticism as 'unmoved Mover' and 'uncaused Cause' (Francis Bacon)?)
We mistake a picture with application to particular cases with a "Law" applicable to all cases. "A picture held us captive" (PI § 115), for how could two solid objects occupy the same space at the same time? Well, given the way we define the word 'solid', of course they could not.
The Owl and the Egg
Without waiting to be asked he embarked upon that well-worn theme, a notorious puzzle to philosophers, the Owl and the Egg. (C.E. Robinson, Days of Alkibiades (3rd ed. 1925), p. 97)
If we are unwilling -- or rather, "unable", but not because there is a logical impossibility, which there is not -- to set a criterion (a standard by which to decide), then there is no saying "which came first" (because that combination of words is undefined = nonsense in this context). To 'set a criterion' here means: to describe and adopt a set of rules to create a satisfying answer to the question (It is a satisfying picture that we seem unable to invent).
And this is another case where there is a picture we see no alternative to, although the picture that we have "makes no sense". At whichever point we start we find an endless recession and procession of owls and eggs, eggs and owls, and we think of no alternative picture to replace the picture that holds us captive -- a picture of our own invention.
Query: nonsensical language games.
The words 'language game' and 'nonsense' do not lose their original meaning (PI § 116) because they are also Wittgenstein's jargon. The word 'nonsense' is still used to mean 'foolishness' and 'game' to mean 'an activity conducted according to rules'. On the other hand: this appears to be an example of a "nonsensical language game" (in Wittgenstein's sense): Which came first the owl or the egg, the apple or the apple tree, the acorn or the oak? And the next query:
Query: what color is the number 3?
'What is the color of sound?' and 'What is the size of a geometric point?' These are certainly examples of nonsense, also known as "grammatical jokes". The combination of words 'What color is the number 3?' is nonsense -- i.e. an undefined combination of words -- that syntax allows the creation of: a combination that "sounds English", but for which there is no normal use in the language. (Of course any combination of words can be given a meaning -- i.e. a use invented by us for some special purpose; but no combination of words has a meaning merely because it sounds English.)
About the Ancient Greeks
Only Plato and Socrates were Athenians. The rest of the Greek philosophers came from elsewhere, from Ionia (as did Thales of Miletus) and Magna Graecia. Thus freedom of speech (or thought) was not confined to Athens, and yet ...
Ideas the Greeks Invented
According to H.D.F. Kitto, Plato created God. (Zeus the god of the Greek polis could not also be the god of barbarian ways of life; and Yahweh the god of the Jews exclusively could not also be the god of the Gentiles.) "It was Greek philosophy, notably Plato's conception of the absolute, eternal deity [Where does Plato conceive this? The Stoics did conceive this, however], which prepared the world for the reception of a universal religion" [such as Christianity] (The Greeks (Penguin 1951) xi, p. 202-203). Kitto's account of 'the gods' is like Etienne Gilson's (according to which it should be 'gods' rather than 'Gods', at least with respect to Greece): anything with power over man may be a god, whether that power is moral or immoral or indeed amoral, benevolent or malevolent. "... the Greek word theos does not mean God" (ibid. p. 195); Greek polytheism was a nature religion (ibid. p. 200). However, if Kitto's account were correct, then why would Xenophanes and Plato object to the gods being portrayed as immoral? Must it not be because they regarded the gods as not only powers -- but also as divinities?
The following is from C.E. Robinson's Zito Hellas (1946) [Hellas, Beacon Press (1955)]
[The Greeks "created the Individual Man".] It was Man [not gods nor God] that they placed at the center of their universe; and it was their intense preoccupation with man's affairs and problems that made them what they were. Their Humanism ... (Chapter xiii, 3 [p. 195])
[And] Individualism ... that the State exists for the Individual, not the Individual for the State. And Toleration, that hall-mark of a truly civilized society, implies the threefold right of the Individual, to think his own thoughts, to utter them in public, and, so far as the welfare of his fellows will permit, to act in accordance with his own private conscience. [These conceptions] we owe to the Greeks ... (ibid. [p. 198])
Freedom in Athens
Freedom of speech and thought was certainly their normal practice. Criticism of authority was unhampered. Aristophanes [even in the midst of Athens at war] could speak his mind frankly on policy and make what fun he liked of politicians. When Cleon on one occasion protested [Aristophanes, Acharnenses l. 377], he met with no sympathy.
Occasionally, it is true, exception was taken to unorthodox religious beliefs. Shortly after the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, the philosopher, Anaxagoras, was arraigned for impiety ... He was heavily fined and retired from Athens.
After the close of the war, Socrates, too, fell victim to [the] spite [of "Conservative-minded opponents frustrated in the political field"]. Yet against this must be set the fact that already for the better part of a life-time the pertinacious old critic had been allowed complete freedom to carry on his discussions and to call in question every belief of contemporary society. (Robinson, Chapter viii, 2 [p. 131-132])
But did Pericles make the Athenians morally better?
In Gorgias 517b Plato says that Pericles did not persuade and compel "citizens to adopt courses that would improve them" [cf. 502e, 503a], the proper aim of the statesman being the ethical perfecting of the individual and of society.
After [Prodicus, who has urged, "Let your conversation be a discussion, not a dispute. A discussion is carried on among friends with good will, but a dispute is between rivals and enemies" (337b), using "that art of yours whereby you discern the difference between 'wish' and 'desire' and make all those other elegant distinctions which we heard just now" (340a-b)] the wise Hippias spoke up. Gentleman, he said, I count you all my kinsmen and family and fellow citizens -- by nature [physis], not by convention [nomos]. By nature like is kin to like, but custom, the tyrant of mankind, does much violence to nature. For us then who understand the nature of things, who are the intellectual leaders of Greece and in virtue of that very fact are now assembled in Athens, the center and shrine of Greek wisdom ... (Protagoras 337c-e, tr. Guthrie)
Does that Plato puts these words in the mouths of rather silly characters mean that he does not regard Athens as "the center and shrine of Greek wisdom"? That form of speech is in fact Thucydidean-Periclean rhetoric; maybe Plato regarded it as bombast.
Aristophanes - Aeschylus [the Poet] versus Euripides [Socrates]
The shift of interest from the group to the individual upset the traditional relation between the state and the citizen. (A History of Greece to 322 B.C. by N.G.L. Hammond, 2nd ed. (Oxford 1967 [1st ed. 1959], p. 422)
If that account is correct then a conflict arose: the question of what is a good man was no longer identical with the question of what is a good citizen: the life that is the good for man can be found outside social life. [Plato's Phaedrus 230d ("men in the city will [teach me, whereas solitude will not]") and Crito 51c-d ("society's laws raised you, educated you, shared all the good things with you that they could") would not seem to share that view (but contrast those with Republic 496c-d (the "traveler sheltering from a storm"), and that philosophy enables one "to hold discourse with oneself").]
In 399 Aristophanes' charges against Socrates were to be correctly interpreted, but they were to be enforced against the person of Socrates with a severity which he cannot have condoned.... Aristophanes and Socrates may have been close friends, but as a poet Aristophanes judged the philosopher [as he judged Euripides] by his value to the state. (Hammond p. 427)
Aristophanes' charges in The Clouds (see Plato, Apology 18b, 19c, and Symposium 221b) against Socrates were the same as those Aristophanes made against Euripides, namely that as a preacher of individualism Socrates had led the young away from faith in the city's gods and taught them through the art of dialectic "to juggle with black and white, with right and wrong".
Contrast Aristophanes' stated judgment of Socrates' value to Athens with Plato's (Apology 30e and 36b-e). Plato has Socrates say that Socrates deserves public maintenance for his service to the Athenians. The Clouds shows Socrates sowing doubt, but Plato says he only shook complacency.
"I am teased ..."
In the context of "real definitions" I offered five hypotheses about the cause of thunder, but if we wish, we can add Aristophanes' gross suggestion in The Clouds (l. 394) and have six. In what spirit should Aristophanes really be read? Socrates: "I am chaffed" -- is there really anything more than teasing in these plays?
I am chaffed in the theatre as in a wine-party [symposium]. (Plutarch, De educatione puerorum 10c, quoted by B.B. Roger's in the introduction to his translation of Aristophanes' The Clouds, Loeb Classical Library, 1924, p. 263)
Poetic wisdom or Socratic quibbles?
At the end of The Frogs (l. 1491-1499) Aristophanes says -- or may say (that is, if there really is an author's message in this extremely amusing play) -- that for instruction in wisdom one should turn to the poets-playwrights (the best of whom is Aeschylus), not to the philosophers-sophists (in the person of Socrates):
Right it is and befitting,
Not, by Socrates sitting,
Idle talk to pursue,
Stripping tragedy-art of
All things noble and true.
Surely the mind to school
Fine-drawn quibbles to seek ...
Is but the part of a fool! (tr. B.B. Rogers)
Plato (in Gorgias 464b-465a) will say just the opposite, because the poet is unable to justify his claims to insight into the right way to live, whereas the philosopher has put his insights to the test through dialectic.
Who knew what and when?
Hammond says, but does not say how he knows this, that Aristophanes "cannot have condoned the severity" of Socrates' punishment, although Hammond implies that Aristophanes would regard the jury's verdict of guilt as just (as does Hammond himself at least in so far as it is a question of law). Here the question, never asked, is Who knew what and when? There were no newspaper in Athens, no radio ... When would Aristophanes have learned of Socrates' fate and what version of events would he have heard? Attica is not large, but there was no 10 o'clock news: "Socrates, son of Sophroniscus, of Alopece was tried and sentenced to death today." How did anyone know "what was going on in the world"?
When we read histories, we are given the impression that everyone knew what was happening, but how could that be? Of course it could not. Even after the fact, how did anyone learn what the fact was? "A man coming from ... said ..."
First of all, when the generals were still within the city, they sent to Sparta a herald, one Phidippides, an Athenian, who was a day-long runner and a professional. (Herodotus, History 6.105, tr. Grene; in Rawlinson's tr. "Pheidippides ... by profession and practice a trained runner.")
But along the way the son stopped to talk to people they met along the way and the word of what had happened was spread by word of mouth, and so by the time the son and his father arrived in the village, the doctor already knew what had been going on during the night. (How news spreads in the country, a story from Gambatesa, Molise)
Attica at its fullest extent was about 53 miles by 41 miles, resembling an equilateral triangle with the city of Athens occupying the midpoint of its baseline. From Athens to Marathon was 16 miles, and from Athens to the old port of Phalerum was 3.5 miles (the same as the distance from Athens to Alopece).
"Socrates was Guilty in Law"
This is from Hammond's A History of Greece to 322 B.C. 2nd ed. (1967).
[Following the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.), Sparta demanded of Athens] that thirty men should be appointed to draft "the ancestral laws" as the basis for a permanent constitution and meanwhile to direct the administration. (p. 443) [Note: Among this Thirty was the Critias who was to prohibit Socrates from "teaching the art of words" (Xenophon Memorabilia i, 2, 29-37).] [This] provisional government was formally established in the summer of 404 ... (p. 443) [In the following months] the Thirty [tyrants] executed 1,500 and banished 5,000 of their fellow-countrymen. Their excesses proved to be their undoing. The exiles and fugitives found a welcome [outside Attica]. (p. 444) [These democrats took over the Peiraeus, while the oligarchs held Athens (The Acropolis was occupied by a Spartan garrison) (p. 445). Sparta mediated to reconcile these two groups, and the Thirty were removed from Athens to form an independent state at Eleusis in Attica; but in 401 the restored democracy of Athens defeated the oligarchs at Eleusis to re-form a single state (p. 448).]
The terrible sufferings of these years left their mark. Political concord [amnesty for all but murderers] did not put an end to personal animosities. Hatred and fear of oligarchy in any form were so intense in the restored democracy that the word 'oligarch' became a term of abuse ... The prejudice against the extreme oligarchs [of whom the Thirty tyrants were representative] spread to the social and intellectual circles from which they had sprung -- aristocratic, free-thinking, and outspoken. Their intellectual association with the Sophists, and not least with the Athenian Socrates [and his "quizzical methods" (p. 426)], was more widely known than understood by the average citizen, who was less interested in the niceties of philosophical discussion than in the practice of traditional religion (p. 448) [which included many superstitions: belief in oracles and divinations "by stars or entrails" and omens (as typified by Nicias and the eclipse at Syracuse which he regarded as an omen to delay the Athenian retreat), and "miasma" (which required the sacrifice of a human scapegoat to free the state from the pollution brought about by sacrilege) (p. 434)].
In 399 Socrates was prosecuted on the charge of impiety "for not worshipping the gods whom the city worships, for introducing religious innovations, and for corrupting the young men" ... Socrates drank the cup of hemlock as the last rays of the sun were lingering on Mt. Hymettus.... In equity Socrates was innocent. In Attic law he was guilty of the charge preferred against him ... (p. 448-449)
The indictment against Socrates is preserved in Diog. L. ii, 40. It accuses Socrates of "introducing other new divinities", apparently the daemon (daimon) Socrates spoke of as a warning sign he experienced (Plato, Euthyphro 3b).
The community's relationship with the gods was contractual; legally, it was not a mere question of individual conscience, for impiety endangered the entire community. Not recognizing the state's gods or other any other form of impiety was thus an act of sedition. (This is the background to Plato's Euthyphro.)
Xenophon defended Socrates against the "corrupting the youth" charge in Memorabilia i, 2, 1-3, 12-28 (with respect to the association of Critias and Alcibiades with Socrates).
'Equity' and 'Law' are Different Concepts
A distinction between equity and law. The word 'equity' surely means 'fairness': we have a sense of fairness [of right and wrong] that may or may not be accord with our society's laws [legislation]. Indeed, without a sense of right and wrong independent of the law, the question of physis [nature] versus nomos [convention] would not arise, because our moral sense belongs to our nature, whereas laws are conventions.
But our concept 'law' is different [narrower] from our concept 'rules', because we expect the laws to coincide with our sense of right and wrong and with our ethics [rational moral virtue]; laws are not mere conventions.
[Our moral sense belongs to our nature, but our nature is part of Nature -- and yet nature is amoral, and so our moral sense must be part of the divine nature ["You shall be as gods knowing good and evil"], "the unwritten laws of God that know not change" (Antigone, tr. Plumptre). That would be a metaphysical account.]
Arbitration and Equity (Fairness)
... most civil actions in Athens ... were preceded by ... attempts at public or private arbitration. Only when that failed was the dispute referred to a court, and it is in the nature of arbitration that it cannot simply "enforce the law". [Aristotle in his Rhetoric 1374b20-22 says that] "an arbitrator looks to equity, a judge to the law, and arbitration was invented in order that equity might prevail". (M.I. Finley Ancient History: evidence and models (1985), p. 102-103; the meaning of that passage from Aristotle (and perhaps the translation itself) is apparently disputed (p. 125n57).)
Is our concept 'justice' closer to our concept 'law' or to our concept 'equity'? The State pretends -- the Courts of the land would like it believed -- that law is justice [The courthouse is titled in stone above its portal "Hall of Justice"]. But the child says, "But that's not fair!", and this shows that justice belongs essentially to equity and only accidentally to law.
("Philosophical investigations -- conceptual investigations." (Z § 458))
Query: equity among ancient Athenians.
"Guilty in law, but innocent in equity" -- now, which is justice -- law or equity? (Does that question ask for a definition of the word 'justice'?) It seems that we simply do use the word 'justice' ambiguously [equivocally]. [The English versus the Greek concepts in Plato's Republic Book One.]
Traditional Views about Socrates
N.G.L. Hammond's others views, however, are those usually found in history books:
[Socrates] died a martyr to his faith, that the individual is to be guided by his own intellect in every field of human life. (p. 449)
But what then of Socrates' belief in his "divine sign" and in the oracle at Delphi. Being guided by irrational things is the opposite of being guided by one's own intellect, because the intellect is rational? But Socrates' divine sign only served him as a warning (a premonition); it never took the place of Socrates' ethics, which was always a thoroughgoing use of reason. As to the Delphic oracle, when the words of Apollo's oracle were reported to him, Socrates' response was to put those words to the tests of experience and reason in order to discover the god's meaning, although he did presume that Apollo's words were true. In that sense, one might say that Socrates' fundamental guide was his intellect, even if he "believed in" things that are not rational.
Xenophon wrote that Socrates believed that the gods are concerned for human welfare (Memorabilia" i, 1, 19), even if, as Plato would say, we don't even know by what names to call them (Cratylus 400d).
Zeus -- whosoe'er He be, Whose state excels
All language syllables,
Knowing not so much
As whether He love that name or love it not; (Aeschylus, the Agamemnon, tr. Cookson, c. lines 160-162)Zeus -- if to The Unknown
That name of many names seem good --
Zeus, upon Thee I call. (tr. Morshead)
But when at the end of the Phaedo Plato has Socrates ask that an offering be made to Asclepius, in my view this is no more than an expression of Plato's view that the body is a tomb; Asclepius was the god of healing, and the soul is healed by its release from the body (Phaedo 66b-d).)
[Socrates'] martyrdom inspired the greatest philosophers in antiquity. In their eyes it discredited the restored democracy of Athens. (Hammond, ibid.)
Plato and democracy
Plato's objection to democracy was not practical (what does works or does not work); it was "theoretical" (what ought to work or not work: at Republic 558c democracy is described as "distributing equality to equals and unequals alike" (W.K.C. Guthrie)). The multitude of men were, in the eyes of the aristocrat Plato's eyes, vicious fools unworthy of philosophy (Crito 44d and Republic 496a and Gorgias 507e-508a).
Socrates and democracy
But as to Socrates himself and democracy, "His strength of will and attachment to the democracy are evident from his refusal to yield to Critias and his colleagues ..." (Diog. L. ii, 24) The Athens Socrates participated in, and respected enough to be willing to die for, was a democratic city, and Socrates had several times served as a democratic official when he had been called on to do so. So I do not think that anyone can claim that Socrates was an enemy of democracy.
As a man he surpassed all men in justice, in honesty of thought, and in probity of conduct. (Hammond, ibid. This was also Xenophon's view.)
Maybe "honest thinking" contrasts with philosophical stupidity, just as willingness to be refuted contrasts with vain denial (Gorgias 457e-458b versus Apology 21d). To 'think honestly' means: to think things all the way through, weighing both reasons for and reasons against a conclusion, always asking if there isn't some other possible explanation; it is deep not shallow reasoning -- i.e. not jumping to conclusions and counting on first blush judgments, not trusting in one's own common sense rather than in step-by-step Socratic investigation (Xenophon, Memorabilia iv, 6, 14-15).
As a citizen he obeyed the laws but not the dictates of those in power, whether they were the People ... or the Thirty Tyrants ... (Hammond, ibid. [Cf. Xenophon, Memorabilia iv, 4, 2-4]
Things I don't understand. Why did Critias not have Socrates exiled or put to death if there really was a reign of terror in Athens (1,500 put to death, 5,000 exiled) under the Thirty? Socrates survived the plague at Athens (Diog. L. ii, 25), but if the pestilence was as terrible as Thucydides wrote, why do I recall no reference to it in Plato's Socratic dialogues? or in Xenophon?
There are gaps in the knowledge, if it is knowledge, of Greek history. Just because a book was written by an historian you respect should not put skepticism to sleep. In ancient history uncertainty goes to the roots of the archeological evidence and written sources -- not everything makes sense (No one knows where the Greeks got most of their tin). The historian uses his own imagination to "knit up the ragged edges", so that we are not disturbed by the question of How-could-it-be? The historian emphasizes what we think we know rather than what we do not know, but that makes it look as if we knew much more than we do.
Why in the Symposium is Plato not angry with Aristophanes? Why is there no foretelling of what is to come (as there is in Meno 94e-95a)? And if Aristophanes had accepted Plato's account in the Apology as historiography, wouldn't he have been troubled after Socrates' death (although Diog. L. ii, 38 suggests that Aristophanes and Socrates were not friends)? But in the introduction to his translation of The Clouds (Loeb, 1924), B[enjamin] B[ickley] Rogers argues that Plato did not really hold Aristophanes responsible for the jury's verdict.