Aeschines Socraticus

Aeschines (c. 425 - c. 350 B.C.E.) (Greek: Αἰσχίνης, sometimes but now rarely written as Aischines or Æschines), son of Lysanias, of the deme Sphettus of Athens, was in his youth a follower of Socrates. (He is called Aeschines Socraticus — "the Socratic Aeschines" — by historians to distinguish him from the more historically influential Athenian orator named Aeschines.) According to Plato, Aeschines of Sphettus was present at the trial and execution of Socrates. We know that after Socrates' death, Aeschines went on to write philosophical dialogues, just as Plato did, in which Socrates played the role of the main interlocutor. Though Aeschines' dialogues have survived only in the form of fragments and quotations by later writers, he was renowned in antiquity for his accurate portrayal of Socratic conversations. In this sense, he was probably superior to Xenophon and may have been closer to Plato in dramatic skill. (Many modern scholars believe that Xenophon's writings are inspired almost entirely by Plato's and/or by the influence of other Socratics such as Antisthenes and Hermogenes. On the other hand, there is no good reason to think that Aeschines' writings were not based almost entirely on his own personal recollections of Socrates.)

Socratic Dialogues

We know that Aeschines wrote the following dialogues: Alcibiades (not to be confused with either Platonic dialogue of the same name), Aspasia, Axiochus (not to be confused with the dialogue of the same name erroneously included in the Platonic corpus), Callias, Miltiades, Rhinon, Telauges.

Of these, we have the most information about the Alcibiades and the Aspasia, and only a little about the others.

The 2nd century CE sophist Publius Aelius Aristides quotes from the Alicibiades at length, preserving for us the largest surviving chunk of Aeschines' written work. Just before WWI, Arthur Hunt recovered from Oxyrhynchus a papyrus containing a long, fragmentary passage from this dialogue that had been lost since ancient times. In the dialogue, Socrates converses with a young, ambitious Alcibiades about Themistocles and argues that Alcibiades is unprepared for a career in politics since he has failed to "care for himself" in such a way as to avoid thinking that he knows more than what he actually knows on matters of the most importance. Socrates seems to argue for the view that success is directly proportional to knowledge (though knowledge may not be sufficient for complete success), as opposed to being dependent merely on fortune or divine dispensation, independent of knowledge. Socrates' arguments cause the usually cocky Alcibiades to weep in shame and despair — a result also attested to by Plato in the Symposium. Socrates claims that it is only through loving Alcibiades that he can improve him (by cultivating in him a desire to pursue knowledge?), since Socrates has no knowledge of his own to teach.

Our major sources for the Aspasia are Athenaeus, Plutarch, and Cicero. In the dialogue, Socrates recommends that Callias (grandson of the more famous Callias who served in the battle of Marathon) send his son Hipponicus to Aspasia to learn politics. In the dialogue, Socrates argues, among other things, that women are capable of the exact same military and political "virtues" as are men, which Socrates proves by referring Callias to the examples of Aspasia herself (who famously advised Pericles), Thargelia of Miletus (a courtesan who supposedly persuaded many Greeks to ally themselves with Xerxes who in turn gave Thargelia part of Thessaly to rule), and the legendary Persian warrior-princess Rhodogune. (The doctrine is likewise found in Plato's Meno and Republic, and so is confirmed as genuinely Socratic.) A certain Xenophon is also mentioned in the dialogue — Socrates says that Aspasia exhorted this Xenophon and his wife to cultivate knowledge of self as a means to virtue — but the Xenophon in question is likely distinct from Xenophon of Erchia, who is more familiar to us as another author of Socratic memoirs.

In the Telauges, Socrates converses with the Pythagorean ascetic Telauges (a companion of Hermogenes who was Callias' half-brother and a follower of Socrates) and Crito's young son Critobolus. In the dialogue, Socrates criticizes Telauges for his extreme asceticism and Crito for his ostentatiousness, apparently in an attempt to argue for a moderate position.

The Axiochus - named after the uncle of Alcibiades - contained some kind of condemnation of the vices into which Alcibiades had fallen. Evidently, it was, like the Alcibiades, one of the many works that the Socratics published to clear Socrates of any blame for Alcibiades' corruption.

In the Callias, there is a discussion of the "correct use" of wealth; it is argued that how one holds up under poverty is a better measure of virtue than how well one makes use of wealth.

The Miltiades is a dialogue between Socrates, Euripides, Hagnon (leader of the colonization of Amphipolis and stepfather of Theramenes), and Miltiades son of Stesagoras (not to be confused with Miltiades the Younger). This may be the Miltiades who would later accompany Lysander to the Athenian Assembly where the rule of the Thirty Tyrants was established. The extant fragments of the dialogue make it clear that the conversation took place in the stoa of Zeus Eleutherios, but they tell us little else.

Anecdotes

Diogenes Laertius, in his brief Life of Aeschines, reports that Aeschines, having fallen into dire financial straits, went to the court of Dionysius the Younger in Syracuse and then returned to Athens after Dionysius was deposed by Dion. (If this is true, Aeschines must have lived at least until 356, which would mean that he probably died of old age in Athens, as he was likely not less than 18 at the time of Socrates' trial in 399.) He is also said to have practised rhetoric, writing speeches for litigants.

Athenaeus quotes a passage from a lost trial speech by Lysias Against Aeschines, in which Aeschines' adversary chastises him for incurring a debt while working as a perfume vendor and not paying it back, a turn of events that is surprising — the speaker alleges — given that Aeschines was a student of Socrates and that both of them spoke so much of virtue and justice. Among other charges, Aeschines is basically characterized as a sophist in the speech. (We gather that the litigation in question was one brought by Aeschines himself against his lender for reasons that are not made clear in Athenaeus' quotation.)

Diogenes Laertius claims that, contrary to Plato's Crito, it was Aeschines rather than Crito who urged Socrates after his trial to flee Athens rather than face his sentence; Diogenes says that Plato puts the arguments into Crito's mouth because Plato disliked Aeschines due to his association with Aristippus. But Diogenes' source for this is Idomeneus of Lampsacus, a notorious scandalmonger.

From Hegesander of Delphi (2nd century CE) — via Athenaeus — we hear of the scandal that Plato stole away Aeschines' only student Xenocrates. But Hegesander is notoriously unreliable, and the story is entirely uncorroborated. There is no other evidence of Aeschines' having a "philosophy" of his own to teach or any followers of his own.

References

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The extant fragments and quotations concerning Aeschines were collected by the German scholar Heinrich Dittmar in his Aischines von Sphettos of 1912. That collection has been superseded by the Italian scholar Gabriele Giannantoni's 1991 work on Socratic writings Socratis et Socraticorum Reliquiae. English translations are hard to find. G.C. Field, in his Plato and His Contemporaries (1930, out of print), has a translation of some of the Alcibiades fragments - and paraphrases the other Alcibiades fragments - and a translation of one of the fullest passages we have from the Aspasia (namely from Cicero's De Inventione 1.31.51-52). More recently, David Johnson has published a translation of the all the extant passages from the Alcibiades in his Socrates and Alcibiades (2003).

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