ABSTRACT
Even after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West the life and teachings of Socrates were never entirely forgotten in the lands of Latin Christendom. The Athenian philosopher was familiar to medieval readers from the writings of early Christian writers such as Lactantius and Eusebius, as well as from the pages devoted to him in the church fathers, particularly Jerome and Augustine. He was known as well from pagan writers like Cicero, Seneca, Apuleius, and Valerius Maximus, all of whom were part of the medieval literary canon and were read in cathedral schools and other educational settings throughout the Middle Ages. Already in the eleventh and twelfth centuries Socrates had become a symbol of pagan virtue, as the presence of his portrait on the façade of Chartres Cathedral and other medieval decorative programs attests. With the recovery of Aristotle’s writings in the twelfth century medieval scholastics were able to acquire a more sophisticated understanding of his place in Greek philosophical thought, and scholastics such as Thomas Aquinas and Henry Bate of Malines were already fumbling with the problem of distinguishing Socrates’ thought from Plato’s. Yet the ‘Socratic Problem’ does not appear to have preoccupied the medieval expositors of Plato’s own works. Two of Plato’s dialogues – the Phaedo and the Crito – were available in Latin translation in their entirety after the twelfth century and parts of two others – the Timaeus and the Parmenides – were also known in Latin. Yet only the Timaeus was the subject of a developed commentary tradition, and almost all the medieval commentators, including Bernard of Chartres and William of Conches, followed the lead of Calcidius in identifying the doctrine of the Timaeus as Plato’s own doctrine, not that of Socrates. Medieval commentators usually explained that Plato put his own doctrine in the mouth of Socrates out of humility or out of a desire to honour his teacher – both motives regarded with high approval by medieval masters.1
