ABSTRACT
It has sometimes been argued that, in the difficulty of believing at once in the historical character of Plato’s Socrates and of Xenophon’s, our safest course is to begin historical inquiry with an appeal to the authority of Aristotle. Aristotle, it is urged, has what is for us the great advantage of being neither too near in time to Socrates nor too far from him to be disqualified for the part of the dispassionate student of thought and character. Never having known Socrates himself, he is under no temptation to yield to hero-worship; as an immediate disciple of Plato, he may be trusted to give us actual facts unmixed with the fables and anecdotes of a later age. Hence in trying to form a notion of the personality and teaching of Socrates, we may safely treat information coming from Aristotle as recommended by a special guarantee of authenticity, and regard it as a residuum of undoubted fact by the standard of which the rest of our alleged information may be tested. The object of the present essay is to establish the direct opposite of such a view. What I am going to maintain is that Aristotle neither had, nor could have been expected to have, any particular knowledge of the life and thought of Socrates, except what he learned from Plato, or read in the works of the “Socratic men,” and more especially that every statement of importance made about Socrates in the Aristotelian corpus can be traced to an existing source in the Platonic 41dialogues. All that is left over, when we have set aside the dialogues, amounts, as we shall find, to one or two rather trivial anecdotes which have the appearance of coming from now lost “Socratic” writings, and add nothing to our comprehension of the man or his thought. I shall also do what I can to show that Aristotle exercised no kind of higher criticism on his documents, but simply accepted what he read in the Σωκρατικοὶ λόγοι of Plato and others as a dramatically faithful presentation of a real historical figure.
