Socrates: literature, philosophy, and myth

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The figure of Socrates, about whom we know nothing directly from himself, truly captured the imagination of his contemporaries and subsequent generations, and not only in philosophical writings. In many ways, he appears to have created his own 'myth' that required interpretation. In this course, we will be reading in the original Greek and discussing some key texts both from the philosophical and the literary traditions. Plato's staging of Socrates, for instance in his Symposium and Phaedrus, is the most well-known, but it was not the only account in Antiquity, and so we will also be reading excerpts from Xenophon's Memorabilia. Nor was Plato the only philosopher to have claimed Socrates for his views; we will read some of the lectures of a later Stoic, Epictetus, for whom Socrates continued to be a central role model. Finally, we will turn our attention to the ways in which the 'strangeness' of Socrates could also capture the literary imagination, as in Aristophanes' comedy the Clouds. In all these accounts and through all these perspectives, the enigma of Socrates remains.