Argos is the first to recognise Odysseus upon his return to Ithaca—and then dies.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Why does being ghosted hurt so much? Homer and the Mahabharata point to a timeless answer, hidden in the faithfulness of two dogs.
The reunion of Odysseus and Argos occupies barely forty lines, yet it is one of the most moving episodes in Homer’s Odyssey.
After twenty years away, Odysseus returns to Ithaca disguised as a beggar. Outside the palace lies his old hunting dog, Argos, blind, flea-ridden, and abandoned on a dung heap. Recognising his master, the dog lifts his head, gives a final wag of his tail—and dies.
Christopher Nolan greatly expanded Argos’ role in his film adaptation, showing the dog ageing under the neglect and abuse of the suitors. Many cinema-goers, myself included, found the brief reunion between dog and master to be the film’s most moving scene. Nolan has said that Argos was one of the elements that drew him to the project, even describing the epic as the ‘ultimate dog movie’.
Why does this scene move us so deeply? There are many reasons. But one of the deepest is that Argos fulfils one of our most fundamental human longings: the longing to be recognised. Long before we seek fame or deeds, we seek to be known. Friends delight in being understood without explanation. Lovers hope to be recognised beneath the depredations of time. One of the quietest forms of suffering is not to be hated, but to be overlooked—to become as if invisible.
That is why being ghosted can be so painful. It is not merely rejection, but the withdrawal of recognition: the feeling that someone who once knew you now behaves as though you no longer existed. Argos does the opposite.
After twenty years of disguises and transformations, he alone recognises the man who once gave his name as ‘Nobody’. The old dog sees beyond age and suffering—and Athena’s best work—to the man he has always known. Odysseus weeps for the dog, but he weeps also for himself. For twenty years, he has been all things to all men. Then, for one fleeting moment, someone recognises the one man beneath all the disguises.
Homer was not alone in seeing something profound in a dog’s fidelity. The Mahabharata, along with the Ramayana, is one of India’s two great epics. At the end of the Mahabharata, after the great war has been fought and every earthly hope has been shattered, the five Pandava brothers journey to Mount Meru, followed only by a stray dog. One by one, they fall on the ascent, leaving only the eldest, King Yudhisthira, to arrive at the gates of heaven. The god Indra invites Yudhisthira into heaven, but refuses to admit the dog. Yudhisthira turns away, explaining that he cannot bring himself to abandon his faithful companion. At this, the dog reveals himself as none other than Dharma (cosmic order, duty, right way of living), and Yudhisthira is reunited with his brothers in Heaven. Like Argos, the dog embodies something much greater than himself. By remaining faithful to faithfulness, Yudhisthira proves himself worthy of Heaven and saves his clan.
The two stories mirror one another. In Homer, it is the dog who remains faithful to a man. In the Mahabharata, it is just as much the man. Yet both honour the same virtue. Homer and the authors of the Mahabharata independently arrived at the same intuition, namely, that the fidelity of a dog is not merely an animal instinct. It is a revelation.
The irony, certainly in Homer, is that Argos remembers better than we do—better even than Penelope. Anyone who has ever ghosted, or been ghosted, may find themselves asking: are we better than dogs?
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If this essay has left you wondering why certain stories continue to speak across centuries, you may enjoy The Meaning of Myth—an exploration of how myths become enduring sources of meaning, shaping not only our imagination but the civilisations we inherit.
Did Rome’s Greatest Orator Live Up to His Own Ideals?
Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? How long, O Catiline, will you abuse our patience?
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Who was Cicero? Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE) has been hailed as Rome’s greatest orator. Lawyer, statesman, philosopher, and master of prose, he shaped not only the Latin language but the ideals of rhetoric, public service, and civic education for centuries to come. More than any other Roman, he sought to unite wisdom with eloquence.
But can someone understand virtue without consistently practising it? Cicero wrote brilliantly about virtue, duty, and the public good, yet struggled with ambition, anxiety, and political compromise. Admired by saints, humanists, and the American Founding Fathers, he remains one of the most influential—and most contradictory—figures in Western intellectual history.
A Frail Body for a Formidable Mind
Marcus Tullius Cicero was born in Arpinum, around 60 miles south of Rome, into a wealthy equestrian family. His cognomen, or personal surname, derives from the Latin for ‘chickpea’ (cicer), by which his ancestors may have prospered. He lived through a time of great civil unrest, famously decrying, O tempora, O mores (‘Oh the times, oh the customs’). Despite his frail and sickly constitution, he served in the army in 89–88 BCE, notably under Pompey’s father, Pompeius Strabo. But what he lacked in virility and nobility he more than made up in study and oratory.
In 87 BCE, Philo of Larissa, the last undisputed scholarch of Plato’s Academy, arrived in Rome, and Cicero came to sit at his feet—later opining that, if Zeus were to speak, it would be in none other than the language of Plato. He studied law under Quintus Mucius Scaevola, who founded the study of law as a systematic discipline. Scaevola also served as Pontifex Maximus (High Priest of Rome) before falling victim to the power struggle between Marius and Sulla. In 82 BCE, he was murdered in the Temple of the Vestal Virgins.
Cicero began practising the law in around 83–81 BCE and, in 80, made his reputation on the back of his brilliant defence of Sextus Roscius against a fabricated charge of patricide. In 79, partly on account of his health, he travelled to Greece, Asia, and Rhodes, meeting with several leading philosophers, including Antiochus of Ascalon in Athens. While in Greece, he asked the oracle at Delphi how he might attain the greatest glory. The pythoness (priestess of Apollo) replied, ‘By making your own genius and not the opinion of the people the guide of your life.’
Pater Patriae
In the next period, Cicero climbed the cursus honorum, or ‘ladder of offices’, holding each office at or near the youngest possible age: quaestor in 75 BCE, aedile in 69, praetor in 66, and consul in 63. He became consul at the age of just forty-two, making him the youngest non-patrician to serve in the office in the five-hundred-year history of the Republic.
As quaestor in western Sicily, Cicero seemed so formidable that the locals asked him to prosecute Gaius Verres, who, as governor, had plundered the province. He fought the case with such aplomb that he came to be regarded as the greatest orator in Rome. While in Sicily, he took it upon himself to rediscover the forgotten tomb of Archimedes, which he described as surmounted by a sphere and cylinder. He then chided the Syracusans for leaving it to a man from Arpinum to remember their most illustrious citizen.
As praetor, Cicero made his first great speech in the Senate, arguing that Pompey should be given the command of the campaign against Mithradates VI, King of Pontus. But the crowning glory of his political career came during his consulship, when, by the force of his four Catiline Orations, he exposed and crushed Catiline’s conspiracy to overthrow the Republic. He had five of the conspirators executed and announced their deaths to a cheering crowd with the single word, Vixerunt (‘They lived’). For ‘saving the Republic’, as he liked to boast, he received the honorific Pater Patriae (‘Father of the Fatherland’) from his ally Cato the Younger, but lived forever after in fear of reprisal for having put Roman citizens to death without trial.
Exile and Return
In 62 BCE, Cicero added a large townhouse on the Palatine Hill to his portfolio of properties. The house, which he described as ‘in sight of nearly the whole city’ (in conspectu prope totius urbis), had belonged to Rome’s richest citizen, Crassus, and cost him 3.5 million sesterces.
When Julius Caesar pressed him to join his alliance with Pompey and Crassus—the First Triumvirate—Cicero refused, believing that their arrangement undermined the Republic. He also declined Caesar’s offer of a place on his staff in Gaul, leaving himself exposed to the many enemies that his sharp tongue had made.
When Publius Clodius Pulcher became tribune in 58 BCE, he passed a law, with retroactive effect, to exile any official who had executed a Roman citizen without trial. The law was squarely aimed at Cicero. He fled to Greece while Clodius’ supporters ransacked his house on the Palatine and his villas at Formiae and Tusculum.
Writing to his friend Atticus, he lamented:
I say this deliberately—that no one was ever afflicted with so heavy a calamity, that no one had ever greater cause to wish for death; while I have let slip the time when I might have sought it most creditably. Henceforth death can never heal, it can only end my sorrow.
It is difficult to imagine Socrates—or indeed Cato—ever saying such a thing. In his Life of Cicero, Plutarch put his finger on the discrepancy between the man and his learning:
He was become so poor-spirited, so humiliated and dejected by his misfortunes, as none could have expected in a man who had devoted so much of his life to study and learning… But the desire for glory has great power in washing the tinctures of philosophy out of the souls of men.
In the event, Cicero’s exile lasted little more than a year. In 57 BCE, he was recalled by the Senate, with Clodius casting the single vote against the motion. He was met by cheering crowds all the way from Brundisium (modern-day Brindisi) to the Capitol, and his destroyed properties were rebuilt at public expense.
Caesar and Civil War
He took to opposing Cæsar, but this only drove Cæsar closer to Pompey and Crassus. So he swallowed his principles and made a show of supporting the triumvirs, before quietly withdrawing into his library. In 53 BCE, the year that Crassus died, he freed Marcus Tullius Tiro ‘to be our friend instead of our slave’, and it is Tiro who, after his death, collected his letters and speeches for publication. In 51 BCE, Tiro, himself a prolific writer, accompanied him to Cilicia (in modern-day Turkey) after he reluctantly accepted the governorship of the province. He restored calm and order to the entire region, repulsing Parthian incursions, suppressing brigands, and stemming corruption. He stopped in Rhodes and Athens on the return to Rome, where the Senate granted him a supplicatio, or period of public thanksgiving—instead of the full-blown triumph that he had been hoping for.
Only six days after Cicero’s return to Rome, Cæsar crossed the Rubicon into Italy, thereby declaring war on the Senate. Cicero hesitated in picking between putative tyrants, but in the end crossed the Adriatic to join Pompey’s camp. After Pompey’s defeat to Cæsar at Pharsalus, Cato offered him the command of the Pompeian forces, but he preferred to return to the Eternal City to be pardoned by Cæsar.
He had divorced Terentia in 51, and in 46 or 45 wedded a wealthy girl called Publilia, who had been his ward, and who jealoused the great love that he bore for his daughter Tullia. The marriage did not withstand Tullia’s sudden death in 45, with Cicero writing to Atticus that he had ‘lost the one thing that bound me to life’. For solace, Cicero went to Atticus, and in his library mined the Greek philosophers, especially Crantor, to write his Consolatio. Sadly, the Consolatio has largely been lost, as has Crantor’s On Grief, which, according to Panætius, deserved to be learnt by heart.
The Philippics and Death
Cicero was not a party to Cæsar’s assassination in 44, although Brutus did call out his name upon raising his blood-stained dagger, beseeching him to ‘restore the Republic’. He later wrote to one of the conspirators, ‘How I wish that you had invited me to that most glorious banquet on the Ides of March.’
Mark Antony, as consul, leader of the Caesarian faction, and unofficial executor of Cæsar’s public will, began throwing his weight around. Cicero, who had been hoping to restore the Republic, responded by playing the young Octavian, Cæsar’s grandnephew, adopted son, and heir, against Antony. More than that, he overtly and vehemently attacked Antony in a series of speeches which he referred to as the Philippics, after the speeches delivered by Demosthenes to rouse the Athenians into fighting Philip II of Macedon. But this strategy failed when Octavian and Antony reconciled and joined forces with Lepidus to form the Second Triumvirate.
Estimating that Cæsar had been undone by his clemency, the Second Triumvirate brought back the ruthless proscription, the legally sanctioned murder of opponents and rivals. The proscription also served to fund the Triumvirate’s war, the so-called Liberators’ Civil War, against Brutus and Cassius, who were finally defeated at the Battle of Philippi in 42. When Antony put Cicero at the head of the proscription list, Octavian tried to have him removed, but did not insist or prevail. Also on the list were Cicero’s son, brother, and nephew. The Triumvirate, in the words of Plutarch, ‘let their anger and fury take from them the sense of humanity, and demonstrated that no beast is more savage than man, when possessed with power answerable to his rage.’
On 7 December 43, Cicero, betrayed by a freedman of his brother, was intercepted near his villa at Formiæ, travelling down to the coast in a bid to escape to Greece.
He literally bowed to his assassins, extending his neck out of his litter to ease their task.
After killing him, they hacked off his head and hands so that Antony could have them displayed on the Rostra in the fashion of Marius and Sulla. According to the historian Cassius Dio, Antony’s wife Fulvia took up Cicero’s severed head, pulled out his tongue, and jabbed it repeatedly with her hairpin.
Cicero’s brother and nephew were also murdered, but his son, who was then in Greece, escaped unscathed.
Twelve years later, in 31, Cicero the Younger took part in the Battle of Actium, in which Octavian defeated Antony; and in 30, he had the satisfaction, as consul, of announcing Antony’s suicide to the Senate.
Many years later, Octavian, now Augustus, chanced upon one of his grandsons reading a book by Cicero. The boy tried to hide the book in his gown, but the emperor took it from him and stood a long time leafing through its pages. Finally, he handed it back, saying, ‘My child, this was a learned man, and a lover of his country.’
Cicero as Philosopher
Was Cicero a Stoic, as is sometimes claimed? The answer, as with all things Cicero, is complicated. He studied, at various times in his life, under philosophers from all four major schools: Academic Skeptic, Peripatetic, Stoic, and Epicurean. But he saw himself primarily as a statesman, and his philosophical output, prolific though it is, mostly owes to those periods in which he was unable to partake in the cut and thrust of politics.
Cicero subordinated philosophy to public life because he believed that the purpose of philosophy is to enlighten political action, not least by encouraging virtue in political actors and the population at large. (He even subordinated philosophy to rhetoric, arguing, in essence, that an orator is a philosopher with the benefit of style.) Thus, his overarching project outside of immediate politics was to bring Greek philosophy to a Roman audience by writing expository works in Latin and, to a lesser extent, translating Greek texts into Latin. By coining Latin equivalences for specialised Greek terms, he enriched the Latin language and endowed it with an abstract vocabulary which is at the root of modern English words such as appetite, essence, humanity, individual, infinity, image, instance, moral, notion, property, quality, quantity, science, species, temperance, and vacuum.
In epistemology (theory of knowledge), Cicero favoured the Academic Skeptics, which afforded him the fluidity and flexibility to practise law, and, in politics, to privilege conciliation and expediency over principle or dogma. In his writings, he often imitated Plato in adopting the dialogue form, in which each speaker represents a different philosophical outlook and the reader is left to make up his or her own mind. For example, in On the Nature of the Gods, he pits an Epicurean spokesman and a Stoic spokesman against the Academic Skeptic Gaius Aurelius Cotta. Similarly, in On Ends, he expounds and critiques, in dialogue form, the central tenets of Epicureanism, Stoicism, and the Platonism of Antiochus of Ascalon. (The ubiquitous Lorem ipsum placeholder text, used to demonstrate the visual form of a template or typeface without imputing meaning, is a corrupted extract of On Ends.)
But Cicero felt that such relativism and amoralism would not do for the Senate and People of Rome, so that when it came to the spheres of ethics and political philosophy, he turned instead to the Peripatetics and especially to the Stoics, who emphasized virtue and offered positive doctrines.
Stoic or not, books such as On the Nature of the Gods, On Ends, On Duties, and Stoic Paradoxes make Cicero one of our most important sources on ancient Stoicism.
Cicero as Rhetorician
At the age of just sixteen or seventeen, Cicero wrote a handbook of rhetoric entitled On Invention, which in later life he dismissed as youthful work. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, On Invention became the standard textbook of rhetoric, alongside the anonymous Rhetoric for Herennius, which also came to be attributed to Cicero.
Although practical in scope, On Invention opens with a preface in which Cicero reflects upon the relationship between dialectic and rhetoric, concluding from the height of his teenage years that ‘wisdom without eloquence has been of little benefit to states, but eloquence without wisdom has for the most part been a great hindrance and never an advantage’. Until recently, everyone who was anyone would have read this.
Cicero’s mature works on rhetoric, On the Orator, Brutus, and Orator were little known until the Renaissance. Eloquence, he argued in these works, is not merely a gift of language but the culmination of a broad education. The ideal orator has a good grasp of philosophy, history, literature, and law, and speaks not merely to persuade but to guide the state.
His ideal of the educated citizen-orator shaped Western education for centuries. Rhetoric formed one of the three subjects of the trivium, alongside grammar and logic, and generations of students learnt to think, write, and speak by reading Cicero.
The rediscovery of his letters by Petrarch in 1345 sparked a search for other lost classical texts that helped kindle the Renaissance. Later, his writings profoundly influenced Enlightenment thinkers and the American Founding Fathers. John Locke, for instance, owned no fewer than nine editions of On Duties.
His influence endured well into the twentieth century, and it was not until the 1960s that the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge dropped the matriculation (entry) requirement for an O level in Latin.
Did Cicero Live Up to His Own Ideals?
In an age that often prizes confidence over judgement and persuasion over truth, Cicero’s ideal of the orator as a philosopher and statesman remains as relevant as ever. But how well did he himself live up to that ideal?
Cicero had studied under and corresponded with the greatest minds of his day and written countless books on oratory and philosophy. Yet he seemed quite unable to control his passions, seeking always after fame and fortune, and coping poorly with adversity and hardship. Clearly, he did not need to have so many villas. His villa at Tusculum did not need to have two exercise areas. And these exercise areas did not need to be called the Academy and the Lyceum. Such grandeur, and his boastfulness, debased him, his learning, and his achievements.
The extraordinary oratory that had made him also unmade him. He loved to make an impression, so that he spoke more, and more forcefully, than he needed to, and often fell to attacking the person rather than the problem. As a result, he had not just adversaries but enemies.
In mitigation of the man, he lived through troubled times. The Roman Republic was collapsing around him, and political moderation had become almost impossible. His repeated reversals, compromises, and hesitations were not always signs of weakness, but sometimes the price of trying to preserve a constitutional order that others had already abandoned.
As a novus homo, or self-made man, he might also have harboured a deep-seated inferiority complex, explaining his need for achievement and affirmation.
Seneca once observed that Cato seemed more virtuous than wise. The converse might be said of Cicero: he could seem more wise than virtuous.
Unlike Cato, Cicero may not have met the standard of a Stoic sage. But for all his failings, the people loved him, because they knew him, at heart, to be a good man.
Plato’s Apology: Why the Father of Philosophy Refused to Save His Own Life
The Hemlock Cup
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
An outline and summary of Plato’s Apology, explaining why Socrates chose death rather than abandon philosophy.
At his famous trial, Socrates could almost certainly have saved his life.
He could have appealed to the jury’s emotions, begged for mercy, proposed exile, or simply promised to stop practising philosophy. Instead, he did none of these things. He was found guilty of impiety and corrupting the youth, and sentenced to death by hemlock.
His defence speech, preserved by his student Plato in the Apology, is one of the founding texts of Western philosophy—not because it saved Socrates’ life, but because it illuminates why he refused to save himself.
The Official Charges—and the Real Charge
Plato’s Apology consists of three speeches delivered by Socrates before the supreme court of Athens (heliaea): the first in reply to the charges, the second concerning the appropriate penalty, and the third in response to the passing of the death sentence.
Three Athenians, Meletus, Anythus, and Lycon, had charged Socrates with refusing to recognise the Olympian gods and introducing different gods, and, relatedly, with corrupting the youth. Seeming to associate or confuse him with Anaxagoras and the sophists, they accused him of ‘studying things in the sky and below the earth’, ‘making the worse into the stronger argument’, and ‘teaching those same things to others’.
Although Socrates had been charged with the crime of impiety (asebeia), the underlying reason for his indictment may have been his anti-democratic leanings and close association with aristocrats such as Charmides and especially Critias, the leader of the Thirty Tyrants. Both Critias and Charmides died in 403, fighting against the exiled democratic forces. Although Socrates had refused to be tainted by the tyranny, he had remained in the city throughout, and, for all his moralising, had done little to actively oppose the regime. To many democrats, Socrates no longer seemed like the harmless eccentric of old, but like a dangerous and corrupting influence, a breeder of tyrants and the enemy of the common man. In the febrile atmosphere that had taken hold over the city, any accusation, however false or fanciful, could be seized upon as a pretext to punish him and scapegoat him for sufferings of the tyranny.
At his trial, before replying to Meletus and the other prosecutors, Socrates first answered what he called his ‘older accusers’: the rumours and prejudices that had dogged him for decades. These anonymous but far more dangerous enemies had turned many Athenians against him. Even the comic playwright Aristophanes had mocked and misrepresented him on the stage. But as many of the jurors could attest, he had never pronounced himself on divine matters, nor, like the sophists, pretended to understand virtue or taken money from his students. What, then, had given rise to the accusations against him?
The Oracle of Delphi and Socrates’ Lifelong Mission
Over the years, he says, he acquired a certain reputation for wisdom—not the superhuman wisdom of the sophists, but the sort of wisdom which is within our ken. When he learnt that the Oracle of Delphi had pronounced him the wisest of all men, he did not know what to make of it. So he questioned a politician with a reputation for wisdom and cross-examined his words to reveal their inconsistencies and contradictions. But the result was that the politician, instead of thanking him, hated him. Whereas both he and the politician knew nothing, he at least knew that he knew nothing, and, in that much, was wiser than the politician.
After that, he went from one man to another, first the politicians, then the poets, and then the craftsmen, and found that those with the greatest reputation for wisdom were, in fact, the most foolish of them all. By this exercise, he came to understand the oracle’s meaning: that the wisdom of men is little or nothing, and those who know this are as wise as any man can be. Inspired by this revelation, he entered the service of the god of the oracle, seeking out anyone who laid claim to wisdom and putting his wisdom to the test. Over the years, he made many friends, but also made many enemies, people who got angry at him rather than at themselves and who, not knowing why they were angry, made up all sorts of charges against him.
Now, at the age of seventy, that lifelong mission had finally landed him before the courts of Athens.
Cross-Examining his Principal Accuser
Having addressed his older accusers, Socrates turns to Meletus and reproaches him for being too eager to prosecute men for matters in which he takes no interest. To prove his point, he asks Meletus to name the improver of the youth. After some hesitation, Meletus replies, ‘the law’. ‘Who,’ asks Socrates, ‘knows the laws?’ ‘The judges, Socrates, who are present in court.’ Under questioning by Socrates, and forced to follow his own logic, Meletus blurts out that every enfranchised Athenian improves the youth except for Socrates.
Having proven his point out of Meletus’ own mouth and, by the same token, made a demonstration of the method which landed him in court, Socrates puts it to Meletus that, when it comes to horses, it is not the case that everyone does them good except for one man who does them harm, but rather that no one does them good except for one man, namely, the horse trainer.
Socrates now sets out to show that, if he did corrupt the youth, he could not have done so intentionally:
S: Do not the good do their neighbours good, and the bad do them evil?
M: Certainly.
S: And is there anyone who would rather be injured than benefited by those who live with him?
M: Certainly not.
S: And when you accuse me of corrupting and deteriorating the youth, do you allege that I corrupt them intentionally or unintentionally?
M: Intentionally I say.
Hereupon, Socrates argues that he could not have corrupted the youth intentionally because he would have known that doing so would have amounted to injuring himself. Thus, if he did corrupt the youth, he must have done so unintentionally, and ought to be educated rather than punished.
This argument reflects his general outlook that people only do wrong because, in the moment, they think that it is the right thing to do. To put this differently, all people incline towards goodness, but are waylaid by their foolishness or narrowness.
Finally, Socrates asks Meletus what he meant when he accused him of teaching the youth to acknowledge gods other than those acknowledged by the state: did he mean that he believed in some gods but not in the right ones, or that he did not believe in any gods at all? The latter, says Meletus, ‘since you believe the sun to be stone and the moon to be earth.’ Socrates points out that these are in fact the beliefs of Anaxagoras. But as for himself, he would not have introduced different gods, as charged, if he had not believed in at least some gods.
The Gadfly of Athens
Having done with Meletus, Socrates turns back to address the jurors.
Despite its dangers, he had chosen the life of a philosopher because it seemed like the right and best thing to do. Had he chosen safety over philosophy, he would have been pretending to a wisdom which he did not possess, for no one knows whether death is the greatest evil or, in fact, the greatest good. It is not death that Achilles feared, but living in dishonour by failing to avenge the death of Patroclus. ‘Let me die at once’ he said, ‘…rather than remain here, a laughingstock by the curved ships, a burden upon the earth.’
Just as he had not abandoned his post in battle, so he would not now abandon the life of philosophy.
Men of Athens, I am grateful and I am your friend, but I will obey the god rather than you, and as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practise philosophy, to exhort you and in my usual way to point out to any one of you whom I happen to meet: Good Sir, you are an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city with the greatest reputation for both wealth and power; are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation, and honours as possible, whilst you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul?
By exhorting men to excellence, he had brought the greatest good to the state. Wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else that is good for men. Such is the core of his teaching: if it is held to corrupt the youth, then so be it. By condemning him to death, the jurors would be doing themselves a far greater harm than they would be doing him, since putting an innocent man to death is much worse than dying oneself. Besides, they would struggle to replace him. In homage to the god, he had attached himself to Athens like a gadfly to a noble but listless horse, and his poverty was proof enough that he had never taken payment for his service.
He had at one time considered going into politics but his daimonion (inner voice, or guardian spirit) had dissuaded him from doing so on the grounds that a dead man is of no use to anyone. Nevertheless, he had behaved in the private sphere with the same integrity as in the public sphere, and it is a matter of public record that he opposed the collective prosecution of the generals at the Battle of Arginusæ and disobeyed the Thirty Tyrants when they sought to implicate him in the execution of Leon of Salamis.
Although he had freely conversed with rich and poor alike, he had never taught anyone anything, and could be neither praised nor blamed for their subsequent actions. If he did indeed corrupt the youth, why had their fathers and brothers not come forth to accuse him? And why had Meletus not called upon them as witnesses?
This is all the defence that he has to offer. Some of the jurors may take offence that he did not shed tears, resort to prayers and supplications, or bring forth his young children, but such bathetic scenes would hardly have been worthy of him, or them, or Athens, or philosophy.
The jury pronounced him guilty by a margin of sixty votes.
Proposing a Penalty
Under Athenian law, once a defendant had been convicted, both prosecution and defence proposed an appropriate penalty, and the jury chose between them. Socrates might have proposed exile. He might have asked for imprisonment. He might have offered to pay a substantial fine. Instead, he courted the death sentence by asking for what he truly deserved: free meals in the Prytaneion, or town hall.
He had never wronged anyone and was not going to start now by asking the jury for a penalty that he did not deserve. He could ill afford a fine, and imprisonment would turn him into a slave. Exile could be tolerable, but only if he were willing to hold his tongue:
For if I tell you this would be a disobedience to a divine command, and therefore that I cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe that I am serious; and if I say again that the greatest good of man is daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living—that you are still less likely to believe.
Only upon the insistence of his friends did he reluctantly propose a fine of thirty minæ (half a talent, or around 13kg of pure silver). But it was too late. In the second ballot, eighty more jurors voted for the death sentence than had voted for the guilty verdict, a split, this time, of 360 to 141.
The Final Address
After the death sentence had been passed, Socrates addressed the jurors one last time.
To those who had voted to acquit him, he offered a remarkable reflection. Throughout his life, his daimonion had often intervened to restrain him from making some momentous mistake. Yet throughout the trial—even when he had refused to flatter the jury or propose a more acceptable punishment—it had remained completely silent. This could only mean that what had happened was not, after all, an evil.
Death, he argued, must be one of two things. If it is a state of unconsciousness, there is nothing to be feared. But if it is a journey to a land inhabited by great men such as Homer and Hesiod, he would take infinite delight in conversing with them.
For in that world they do not put a man to death for this; certainly not… Wherefore, O judges, be of good cheer about death, and know this of a truth—that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.
Having concluded that it would be better to die than to live, he was not in the least angry with those who had accused and condemned him. For although they had not meant to do him any good, neither had they done him any harm.
He asks only that his friends take good care of his three sons:
When my sons are grown up, I would ask you, O my friends, to punish them; and I would have you trouble them, as I have troubled you, if they seem to care about riches, or anything, more than about virtue; or if they pretend to be something when they are really nothing… The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.
Why Socrates Chose to Die
On the force of the arguments alone, Socrates had produced a brilliant defence. But instead of behaving with the customary humility and contrition, he turned the tables round and made himself judge and jury, cross-examining all of Athens before his court of philosophy. For the first and last time, he let drop his ironic mask, and his unapologetic apology turned many a juror against him. After being found guilty, his arrogance in suggesting a punishment of free meals and insolence in proposing a paltry one-mina fine only hardened hearts.
But this, from such a fine psychologist, may well have been the intention. Socrates knew that his best years lay behind him, and that a timely death could be a blessing as much as a curse. Moreover, by martyrizing him, the Athenians promised to preserve his memory, and, more importantly, the memory of his method and philosophy. Had the Athenians acquitted Socrates, you would not have read this book, and I would not have written it.
For Socrates, the hemlock was never a deadly poison, but the very elixir of life.
Plato’s Euthyphro, the Euthyphro Dilemma, and Why They’ll Never Leave You
Socrates questions Euthyphro outside the Stoa Basileios, or Porch of the King Archon, in Athens.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
The Euthyphro is one of Plato’s shortest dialogues—and one of his finest. It is funny, dramatic, and unexpectedly modern. What begins as a chance encounter outside an Athenian courthouse turns into one of the most profound and celebrated conversations in the history of philosophy.
On his way to answer a charge of impiety, Socrates meets the self-professed religious expert Euthyphro, who has decided to prosecute his own father for the manslaghter of a servant. Intrigued by his resolve, Socrates asks him an apparently simple question: What is piety? The answer proves far more elusive than either man expects. The problem has exercised philosophers ever since—not least the ‘last universal genius’ Gottfried Leibniz.
The core of the dialogue is the so-called Euthyphro dilemma: is something pious because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is pious? In modern terms, are things like justice, virtue, and beauty merely matters of authority, or are they woven into the very fabric of reality? Does God, or anyone else, decide what is good, or is there an independent standard?
Outline and Summary of Plato’s Euthyphro
Socrates is on his way to answer a charge of impiety for ‘corrupting young men’ and ‘creating new gods and not believing in the old ones’. The charge is being pressed by a certain Meletus, a little-known young man with a beak-like nose, long straight hair, and a sparse beard.
In the agora (market or central square), Socrates runs into the dogmatically religious Euthyphro. Following the death of a servant, Euthyphro has pressed a charge of manslaughter against his own father. Euthyphro tells Socrates that he is prosecuting his father for inadvertently killing a servant who, in a drunken rage, murdered one of the household slaves. After binding the servant and throwing him into a ditch, Euthyphro’s father sent a messenger to a priest to enquire what ought to be done. Unfortunately, the servant died of hunger and cold before the messenger could return.
Socrates flatters Euthyphro, saying that he must be far advanced in wisdom if he is willing to prosecute his own father on so questionable a charge. Euthyphro responds that his relatives are angry at him for prosecuting his father on behalf of a murderer whom he did not deliberately kill. Although they would say that he is behaving impiously, he himself thinks that he is behaving piously—and that he has knowledge of the pious and impious.
Posing as ignorant, Socrates asks Euthyphro to define the pious and impious. Euthyphro replies that the pious is to prosecute a wrongdoer regardless of who he is, and the impious not to prosecute him. He cites the example of Zeus, ‘the best and most just of gods’, who bound his father Cronus for unjustly swallowing his children.
Socrates says that many actions can be pious: but what is it that makes all pious actions pious, and all impious actions impious? What, in short, is the essence of piousness? Euthyphro offers that the pious is that which is dear to the gods. An action or man that is dear to the gods is pious, whereas an action or man that is hated by the gods is impious.
Socrates points out that the gods may be at odds, so that what is pious to one god may not be so to another. Euthyphro replies that none of the gods would be at odds on a matter such as his. Socrates argues that while both gods and men agree that whoever has killed someone unjustly ought to pay a penalty, they might disagree about who the wrongdoer is, what he did, and so on. Can Euthyphro be sure that, in his case, all the gods are in agreement? Even assuming that they are, this merely signifies that the action is hated by the gods. It does not signify that what is hated by the gods is impious, or that what is loved by them is pious. Even assuming that it does, is that which is pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods? If the gods love something because it is pious, it cannot be their love that makes it pious. Whereas if something is pious because the gods love it, we still don’t know for what reason they love it.
Euthyphro complains that Socrates makes his arguments go around in circles. But Socrates points out that all he is doing is asking questions: it is Euthyphro’s answers and Euthyphro’s arguments that are going round in circles.
Socrates next argues that all that is pious is necessarily just. But whereas all that is pious is necessarily just, not all that is just is necessarily pious. Thus, where there is piety there is also justice, but where there is justice there is not necessarily piety, because piety is a part or aspect of justice. So what part of justice is piety? Euthyphro replies that piety is the part of justice that is concerned with the care of the gods, with the rest of justice being concerned with the care of men. Socrates asks Euthyphro what he means by ‘care’. In most instances, ‘to care’ means ‘to aim at the good of that which is cared for’. So does piety, which is concerned with the care of the gods, aim to make them better? Euthyphro suggests that piety, the care of the gods, is the sort of care that slaves have for their masters, and thus that it is a kind of service. If piety is a kind of service to the gods, asks Socrates, what is the goal of this service? The goal of service to doctors is health, and the goal of service to shipbuilders is the building of a ship. So what is the goal of service to the gods? Euthyphro answers that service to the gods is the knowledge of how to say and do what is pleasing to the gods at prayer and sacrifice, for the preservation of private households and public affairs of state.
Socrates says that, if the pious is the knowledge of how to pray and sacrifice, it is the knowledge of how to beg and give to the gods. To beg correctly would be to ask from them the things that we need, whereas to give correctly would be to give to them the things that they need—so that piety would amount to a sort of trading skill between gods and men. Euthyphro says, ‘Trading yes, if you prefer to call it that’—to which Socrates replies, ‘I prefer nothing, unless it is true.’
Socrates wonders what benefit the gods might derive from the gifts that they receive from us. Or do we have such a trading advantage over them that we receive all our blessings from them and they receive nothing in return? Euthyphro now claims that we give gifts to the gods so as to honour and please them. Socrates asks whether the pious is then pleasing, rather than beneficial or dear, to the gods—to which Euthyphro replies, ‘I think it is of all things most dear to them.’ Socrates points out that they have returned to Euthyphro’s original definition of piety, namely, that piety is that which is dear to the gods.
Socrates says that Euthyphro is more skilful than Daedalus, in that Daedalus could only make arguments move whereas Euthyphro can make them go round in a circle. Socrates suggests that they begin their inquiry anew, but Euthyphro says that he is in a hurry and leaves!
Analysis and Themes of Plato’s Euthyphro
The Euthyphro is often treated as an early Platonic dialogue, interesting only insofar as it introduces the Euthyphro dilemma. But that would be to miss much of its richness. It is also a brilliant study of dogmatism, intellectual humility, and the nature of dialectic and philosophical enquiry. And, chronologically, it is the first of the four dialogues that retrace the final days of Socrates—to be followed by the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. If Plato’s internal chronology is to be relied upon, the conversation in the Euthyphro takes place on the same day as the conversation in the Theatetus, which follows the preliminary hearing (anakrisis) at the porch of the King Archon.
At no point does Euthyphro realise that he may be ignorant, or even that his knowledge of impiety may be less than complete. He confidently prosecutes his own father, without questioning whether this is what the gods would really want. When Socrates challenges the source of his self-esteem—knowledge of the gods—he finds himself unable to refute Socrates—and so simply leaves. It is a masterclass in the psychology of self-deception. The irony, too, is striking. Socrates is on his way to answer a charge of impiety, yet proves far more concerned with piety than the supposed expert on religion.
Whereas Euthyphro mistakes certainty for knowledge, Socrates is content to admit his ignorance and continue the search. It is apparent, especially in the unabridged dialogue, that Euthyphro struggles to understand what Socrates is asking of him—in other words, he struggles to understand what Socrates means by a definition. The same might be said of other so-called experts who engage with Socrates, including Laches in the Laches and Meno in the Meno. The confusion of these experts, some of whom, like Meno, were philosophically trained or at least philosophically aware, suggests that Socrates’ search for rigorous definitions was something original and radical.
For Socrates, it is not sufficient simply to define an ethical concept in terms of itself or related concepts, or by a list of its instances, or according to convention or popular opinion (‘piety is what is dear to the gods’). Instead, a rigorous definition is one which, by picking out the nature or essence of the ethical concept, applies to all its instances and no more. For example, Meno’s definition of virtue as ‘the ability to rule over people’ is both too narrow for excluding children and slaves, and too broad for including those who rule unjustly. Today, we take the search for rigorous definitions so much for granted that it is easy to forget how revolutionary it once was.
If beauty, courage, justice, and piety can have an essence that can be defined, perhaps they can also have an independent reality. In time, Socrates’ search for essences would evolve into Plato’s Theory of the Forms. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle is quite clear that Socrates did not originate the Theory of the Forms: ‘Two things may properly be ascribed to Socrates, inductive reasoning and definition by universals… But Socrates did not assign to the universal or the definitions an independent existence.’ Nonetheless, the seeds of the Theory of the Forms are already present in dialogues such as the Euthyphro.
Leibniz and the Best of All Possible Worlds
In the modern era, Leibniz (1646–1716) followed the direction of Socrates’ argument while going beyond anything that Socrates himself explicitly claimed. God does not make something good simply by willing it; rather, he wills it because it is good. Eternal or necessary truths—including the standards of the beautiful, the good, and the just—depend on God’s understanding, but not on his will.
This is no mere point of theology. It underpins Leibniz’s most famous doctrine, that this is the best of all possible worlds. If goodness depended solely on God’s will, then whatever world God chose to create would de facto have been the best, rendering the claim empty.
The very idea that God chose to create the best of all possible worlds presupposes an objective standard of goodness by which the alternatives can be judged. Notice that, in the Bible, in Genesis, as God created the world, he kept on checking that what he had done was ‘good’—and even, at the end of the sixth day, ‘very good’. Had there not been an independent standard of goodness, he would not have needed to look.
Where I Wrote The German Greeks, surrounded by all the right sounds.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Silence is God’s first language; everything else is a poor translation. —Thomas Keating
I am excruciatingly sensitive to noise. I always carry earplugs and sometimes fantasise about living in the middle of the woods or on top of a hill. If I were browsing property listings, the first word I’d search for would be ‘secluded’. Is the problem with me—or with the world?
As a misophone (‘hater of sounds’), I’m in pretty good company. Kant hated noise, as did Proust, Kafka, and Darwin—and even, ironically, Wagner. Kant is said to have moved lodgings on account of a crowing rooster, while Proust lined his bedroom with cork.
Among all the great thinkers, none hated noise more openly or fervently than Arthur Schopenhauer.
Schopenhauer and the Noisy Seamstress
In August 1821, while living in Berlin, the 33-year-old Schopenhauer had an altercation with a neighbour, the 47-year-old seamstress Caroline Louise Marquet. On that day, he was enraged by the noise of three women talking in the private anteroom to his apartment. When he demanded that they leave, two of the women complied but Marquet refused.
Later, Marquet claimed that Schopenhauer kicked and punched her and threw her down the stairs, leaving her paralysed on the right side and unable to work. He countered that he had only pushed her, and that she fell to the ground on purpose so that she could sue him.
Following a six-year legal battle ending in May 1827, he was made to pay her medical expenses along with a maintenance allowance of 60 thalers per annum for the rest of her life. On the day she died in 1842, the great philosopher of compassion recorded in his ledger, in Latin, Obit anus, abit onus (‘The crone dies, the burden is lifted’). Moral of the story: Don’t make noise around philosophers.
Schopenhauer built his pessimistic philosophy on that of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who lived all his life in Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad). Although gregarious and fond of laughter, Kant needed absolute quiet to write. In May 1784, he penned a letter to the police superintendent to complain about the ‘stentorian singing of prayers by the hypocritical inmates of the jail’ (in the Iliad, the Greek herald Stentor had a voice as loud ‘as fifty voices of other men’). He was offended not merely by the noise but also by the insincerity of the prayers, which were offered, he thought, simply to appear God-fearing to the jailor.
Schopenhauer on Noise
In his essay On Din and Noise (1851), Schopenhauer rails hardest not against the nattering of women but the cracking of whips in narrow resounding streets (the nineteenth-century equivalent of revving motorbikes, or those fart-can cars with modified exhausts): ‘Hammering, the barking of dogs, and the screaming of children are abominable; but it is only [his emphasis] the cracking of a whip that is the true murderer of thought.’ To him, the cracking of whips was all the more unbearable for being unnecessary and, worse than unnecessary, useless.
He goes on to link noise intolerance (misophonia, ‘the hatred of sound’) with intellect and creativity:
Certainly there are people, nay, very many, who will smile at [my predicament], because they are not sensitive to noise; it is precisely these people, however, who are not sensitive to argument, thought, poetry, or art, in short, to any kind of intellectual impression: a fact to be assigned to the coarse quality and strong texture of their brain tissues.
The Difference Between Sound and Noise
But not every sound is noise. The difference between sound and noise is not merely one of acoustics but also of perception. The sounds of nature, I find, are almost always more tolerable than those of man. Years ago, I toured Copenhagen Zoo—the only thing open on a Monday—and noted that the most disturbing cries came not from the animals but from the human children.
I enjoy birdsong, the burbling of a stream, or waves lapping or breaking on a shore, but not, say, an air conditioner humming (unless it is very hot outside), children crying, or people shouting or talking without saying anything useful, interesting, or amusing. If I believe that something is important, meaningful, or beautiful, the sound that it makes is much less likely to constitute noise. Noise, then, is whatever I don’t think is worth hearing. In the final analysis, it is whatever dissipates rather than concentrates my energies.
For Schopenhauer, genius is precisely this: the ability of the mind to remain focused on a single point and object. But as soon as a focused mind is interrupted or distracted, it is no better than an ordinary mind. It is, says Schopenhauer, as with a large diamond, which, if shattered, loses most of its value; or as with an army, which, if dispersed, loses most of its power.
It is not merely a matter of genius but also of happiness. For anyone who has experienced it, deep concentration is one of life’s greatest pleasures. Aristotle famously conceived of God, the traditional fount of all reason, as a mind that turns blissfully upon itself. In contrast, people who are too frightened to put two and two together, or too dense to do so, use noise to occupy and numb their minds.
The Stoic Answer: Can We Rise Above the Noise?
Unlike Schopenhauer, the Stoic Seneca (d. 65 CE) sought not to eliminate noise but to rise above it. In his Letters to Lucilius, he claims to be living above a bustling Roman bathhouse, and paints a vivid picture of the soundscape: the grunts of the weightlifter, the slaps and pummelling of the masseur, the splashing of the enthusiast who bombs into the pool, the ceaseless chatter of the hair-plucker who makes his victims yell… ‘So picture to yourself the assortment of sounds, which are strong enough to make me hate my very powers of hearing!’
Despite the din, Seneca remains able to read and write, assuring Lucilius that ‘this racket means no more to me than the sound of waves or falling water.’
Still, he recognises that some noises are worse than others. Intermittent noises, he says, are more upsetting than steady ones. Spoken words are more distracting than mere sounds, in that they demand our attention: compared to speech, even the saw-sharpener is easier to bear.
Yet Seneca is able to force his mind to concentrate and ‘keep it from straying to things outside itself’. More than that, he sees this as a test of his Stoicism, mental fortitude, and even virtue. Ultimately, he reasons, noise only disturbs us insofar as it resonates with our own emotional turmoil. If our mind is still, no amount of noise can unsettle it; but if our mind is angry or fearful, or burning with greed or envy, no amount of silence can still it: ‘For of what benefit is a quiet quarter or neighbourhood if our emotions are in an uproar?’
We tend to associate sleeping with resting. But unless we are able to still our mind by the use of reason, the night merely changes the form of our worries. Real tranquillity, in contrast, ‘is the state reached by a rational mind when it is at rest.’
I think there is a lot of truth in that. When overwhelmed by noise, I find it helpful to ask myself, ‘Is my annoyance more to do with me or my prejudices than with the noise itself?’ But I would contest that even if we are able to concentrate in a din, our concentration is less profound or complete than it would otherwise have been, and more wearing too.
Seneca concedes that, having tested ourselves, it is simpler to avoid the uproar, or block it out, just as Odysseus blocked his ears and had his men row faster to get past the Sirens. According to lore, the Sirens were fated to die if someone ever escaped their singing, and after Odysseus were never again seen or heard.
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