At the beginning of the eighteenth-century it was a time of enlightenment, lumière.There was a change in focus from Roman antiquity which had been favoured in the Renaissance to the favouring reception of Greek antiquity in the enlightenment, when Greece became unmediated without the reception of Rome. There was a rediscovery of Greek text from antiquity, at a time when the Enlightenment resisted the lure of Christianity as the only way to think of spirituality. It also became a high moment for the reception of Greek art as can be demonstrated in the reception of the death of Socrates in Enlightenment art, which at the beginning of the eighteenth century was only dimly recognised but “enormously fashionable” in the middle decades of the century(Wilson 2007: 171, 172)Socrates, (469-399 BC), ancient Greek philosopher, a champion of reason, was a familiar but not central figure in the early eighteenth century, however, by the French Revolution he had become an essential model and martyr and embodiment of virtue and reason in an Age of Enlightenment. Socrates provided for the Enlightenment humanists “a model of political liberty in their struggle against the Ancien Regime” (Mclean2006: 353). His death was seen as an inexplicable mystery inexplicable as referenced against a corrupt and evil polity. Socrates was a pagan martyr because though he could foresee his own death had chose not to evade it. The Socrates depiction in the Enlightenment was both political and religious and seen in philosophic and spiritual depictions. An essential philosophic aspect of the Enlightenment involved the appeal towards antiquity as an alternative to Christianity and its biblical history. This involved a propensity by radical thinkers towards the idea that antiquity and the classics were superior to Christian philosophy and its values (Morris 2007: 209-213)
The new perception of Socrates provided a new way of understanding the manner of his death as an oppositional stand of the individual against the state in the name of reason and the freedom of the individual to resist the limitations upon the freedom of subjective thought and to be the arbiter of his own actions. The Enlightenment was a historical time of the overthrow “of all accepted customs, traditions and superstitions that could not withstand the probing criticism of the free and public use of reason” (Harrison 1994: 179).
Socrates displayed responsibility and positive action but though he is the great defender of justice and of law he became a victim in courts, however, the intellectual and political ideals of his trial provided a personal example in the revival and emergence of the classics during the Enlightenment. Antiquity and became an alternative conception of political structure historical structure and provides an alternative path to that which related to the Bible. The radical Enlightenment thought held Christianity to be an oppressive force (Morris 2007: 210).
Socrates is recorded through the agency of others and two of his pupils, Plato and Xenophon, wrote voluminously about him. One depiction from his own lifetime was Aristophanes distorted caricature of him as a rude and comical Athenian figure in The Clouds, holding the great teacher up to execration and contempt. Yet Socrates was the greatest of all Greek teachers who the Oracle at Delphos declared to be the wisest of all living beings. Physically Socrates, the son of a stonecutter, was ill clothed and ugly with a snub nose, he was “uglier than all the silenuses in the satyric drama” (Xenophon Symposium).He went barefoot and dressed shabbily in old clothes, and was indifferent to hunger and thirst, heat and cold, eschewing the comforts of civilisation, thus showing that Socrates anticipated the Stoics and the Cynics.
The disastrous Peloponnesian War fought between Athens and Sparta (431-404 BC), drained Greece of her strength and Greece turned from the ideal of state to the idea of the individual. Socrates sought to restore the authority of reason and justice and for the person to gain “wisdom” through individual acquisition of virtue but he made no appeal to the influence of religion. Socrates elicited the power of virtue by logic an argument conducting his quest in the form of dialogue, “Know thyself.” Socrates sought to throw doubt upon old beliefs and generated the beginning of intellectual freedom. The Athenian state, looking for a scapegoat upon which to blame the misfortunes of Athens summonsed Socrates for corrupting the young, impious teaching and worshipping new divinities. Instead of leaving Athens after the complaint was lodged he remained to face trial rendering a dignified and power defence.
Plato, who was present at the trial, portrays Socrates character through the Apology, where Socrates gives a powerful and dignified speech as his defence. Nevertheless he was found guilty and the court voted the death penalty. Socrates held that the judges could not harm him, that man could not be hurt or deprived of virtue by outside circumstances. Socrates was not afraid of death and indifferent to it believing the life in the next world would generate happiness.
In Socrates Greek civilisation was seen by the Enlightenment to have reached its highest ideals and his death resembles that of a Christian martyr. His ironic contempt for his accusers marked him as a heroic dissident for the age of Enlightenment pre-requisite for the French Revolution. The French Revolution was opposed to the church and therefore it embraced the pagan martyr from Greek antiquity.
The French revolution changed the political structure of Europe which before the eighteenth century had scant democracy in its political makeup. With the Enlightenment came a new way of understanding the state and the individual hence Socrates as an individual who had stood against the state received an iconic status. Charles Rollin, the French historian wrote at the execution of Socrates was an act that could never be obliterated (Rollin 1749: 248).Rollin in his Ancient History (1738-40) helped to generate the Socrates the legend in the reception history so that by the middle of the eighteenth-century it was inaugurated into popular culture and academic concern. According to Gay (1967-1970: 82) “Socrates was a symbol for the Enlightenment more through his death and through his ideas.” Socrates death was seen as political and “Socrates as a proto Christian martyr” and “his death was come to dominate Enlightenment views of the philosopher and of Athens itself” (Morris 2007: 213, 214).
At the time of the Enlightenment the popularisation of the death of Socrates was in response to a contemporary cultural need (Wilson 2007: 173).while the importance of Socrates has always been a preoccupation for philosophic focus from the fifth century BC, the eighteenth century provided a transformational metamorphosis, adapting Socrates to the requirements of modernity.
The Enlightenment was concerned with the concept of the individual standing against the state and Socrates and conjuncted with the Enlightenment provide a new way of understanding the defiance of the state. However, there is a paradox because the state in question against which Socrates stood was vastly different .the ancient state which Socrates defied was not particularly democratic. Socrates poses a relationship with the state in an intellectual sphere and his enduring classical heritage and concept of democracy in fact encompassed a rigid and harsh system which excluded large sectors of humanity from power including slaves and women.
Paintings
Socrates became popular in the visual art of painting as an exemplary figure from Greek antiquity (McLean 2006).Before the eighteenth century there were few paintings of the death of Socrates but as classical scholarship became popular “the death of Socrates was cultural obsession all over Europe, Britain and America.”(Wilson 2007: 172) The Athenian state brought great reproach on itself in condemning to death the greatest Greek from classical antiquity and in Enlightenment times Socrates’ glorified figure became a call to revolution and depicted revolutionary beliefs in a context of classical antiquity and ancient Greek artefacts. Wilson (2007: 173,177) holds that Socrates death at the time of the Enlightenment served “a specific cultural need: as an image of the social life of the intellectual.”
Early portraits displayed a different perception of Socrates’ death.
Mort de Socrate by Charles Alfonse Dufresnoy
Charles Alfonse Dufresnoy Mort de Socrate (1650) depicts a dismal scene of a well covered old man sipping his poison among lamenting followers, while Francois Boucher’s Death of Socrates (1761) shows a beardless Socrates collapsed in agony from the poison surrounded by his distraught disciples (Lapatin 2006:, 141).These paintings depicted the collapse of the body and focused on the distress of the disciples. The painting of Jacques-Louis David was quite different.
David was a French painter a Neo-classicist who was a close friend of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his political beliefs including reaction against the power of the church inspired his love for classical antiquity. David concern with the classical revival of classical antiquity is demonstrated in The Death of Socrates (1787) painted two years before the French Revolution as allegory for a contemporary political message of democratic resistance against the tyranny of state. The painting was also a clarion for resistance to unjust authority and adherence to civic virtue, duty and self sacrifice and served as a reminder of the large number of prisoners in the Bastille and those in exile on the eve of the Revolution.(Lapatin 2006:141),(Wilson 2007).
David used Plato’s Phaedo to create an idealised version of the undisturbed serenity of Socrates’ last hours, a powerful and dignified figure in tranquil conversation with his pupils and friends. Socrates, illuminated more brightly than the others, shown as the primary figure, sits upright in his prison cell extending his arm upward pointing his finger towards the heavens and a higher authority and the immortality of the soul. He reaches for the cup of hemlock which he does not touch because he is so preoccupied speaking to his twelve disciples, like Jesus, giving Christ like echoes to the painting, about the human soul and his immortality while his open shackles, symbolising release, lie on the floor, his robes adding to the Christian element linking the configuration to the crucifixion.
By choosing to take his destiny into his own hands and refusing the opportunity to escape and avoid death Socrates became a heroic subject for the enlightenment and his imprisonment and appropriate metaphor for the times. He refuses to allow outside forces to be guardians to his conduct and he is guardian to its own destiny, as Kant would prescribe. He has courage to use his own truth as an individual and to fight intellectual imprisonment which the state sought to impose upon him.
Plato sits at the foot of the bed introspective in meditation, Crito grasps Socrates’ knee while listening with intensity, and another disciple buries his head with grief while Apollodorus extends his hand as in despair at Socrates chosen fate. The figures are lined up in a frieze while in the background Socrates’ wife waves her goodbye unacknowledged by her husband intent on his stoic self sacrifice for his beliefs. Though Socrates was 70 and considered ugly, David paints him with an athletic and ideally proportioned body in the manner of the classical Greek standard of idealised beauty of the human form. The beauty of Socrates’ inward soul is matched harmoniously with the Greek conception of the beauty of the ideal heroic man, body and spirit matched outward and inward beauty as one. Socrates though a man of 70 is presented as much younger and more vigorously heroic, in the manner of classical Greek sculpture, with balance and proportion of the ideal man. This seems at odds with Socrates’ message of spirit and intellect, for Socrates states “Give me beauty in the inward soul, and made the outward and inward man be at one.”
The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (1787).
David concern with the classical revival of classical antiquity is demonstrated in his painting of the death of Marat, and iconic Revolutionary image, in classical depiction.
