The Politics of Platonism: Voltaire’s Socrate and the Dynamics of Canons

Abstract

What role do canonical figureheads play in the process by which philosophical ideas gain political substance? This paper explores an interpretive shift in the reception of Plato in eighteenth-century Europe, focusing on Voltaire’s Socrate (1759), a three-act play dramatizing the trial and death of Socrates. I advance a reading of the play as an effort to offer a new political extension of a recent epistemological realignment in interpretations of Plato’s philosophy. Plato’s eighteenth-century readers developed an understanding of his epistemology that negotiated a compromise between Neoplatonism and Academic Skepticism. Working out the political ramifications of this compromise, I argue, was central to Voltaire’s reimagination of Socrates’s trial. In turn, Voltaire’s play calls attention to a neglected dimension in which the contingencies of historically situated, idiosyncratic interpretations can bear out in the dynamics of disciplinary canons: how authors’ philosophical receptions interact with their receptions in political thought. At the same time, the play also offers a case study of an intervention in the symbolic meanings of Plato, one in which the deep-rooted associations he accrued in two ancient traditions that claimed him as a figurehead were reshuffled in a distinctly modern, political key.

Political theorists who study the dynamics of canonization often see their work as a project of denaturalizing the canon, revealing it to be the product of contingent forces rather than some sort of inherent necessity. In excavating the circumstantial factors that shape how select figures gain canonical status and become representatives for particular ideas, these scholars have rightly called attention, for instance, to the accidents of historically specific agendas and ideologies that drove the canonization of certain authors and interpretations of their thought; the arbitrary, inconsistent ways in which disciplinary standards are applied to evaluate importance; and the mental habits of those individuals and groups who just so happen to be positioned to determine a canon’s contents—including those who helped construct the very idea of a canon in the first place. ¹

These lessons in contingency reinforce parallel developments in classical reception studies and in “new historicist” approaches to literary criticism, which share a principled commitment to embracing the “mediated, situated, contingent” nature of texts and readings that may otherwise appear to us as a timeless tradition. ² Doing so can better equip us to adopt a more critical, reflexive stance toward disciplinary canons and, in turn, treat them as the versatile things they fundamentally are. Against the familiar concerns of critics who find canons inherently problematic, ³ then, scholars who seek to bring out their contingency also offer us resources for working with them constructively. Canons, they tell us, evolve and expand to meet changing needs and values, and they have continually inspired—and have in turn been transformed by—creative forms of engagement from unexpected sources, often by readers from those very groups they have historically excluded. ⁴

Such approaches, however, run up against an especially fraught test case in Plato, who occupies such a foundational role in the political theory canon as to be virtually constitutive of the discipline as it’s practiced. To be sure, scholars of Plato’s reception have done much to uncover the incidental pathways that led to some of the most basic features of contemporary approaches to his thought—from the pride of place given to the Republic to the equal or greater standing he commands relative to Aristotle ⁵ —and the diverse interpretations that readers have developed to enlist him in particular modern debates that unfolded in highly specific historical contexts. ⁶ At the same time, as many of these same scholars readily point out, one reason Plato has inspired so many reimaginings was precisely that, for a vast majority of his readers, he embodied something essential about “the original character of philosophy.” ⁷ His symbolic status as an original point of departure for Western philosophy was famously what made rereadings of Plato so central to the projects of twentieth-century postmodern philosophy, ⁸ but he represented such an origin point even through periods in which he was scarcely read or overshadowed by other ancient authorities like Aristotle or Cicero. ⁹ Plato’s symbolic baggage has thus had a distinctly self-reinforcing effect, where the philosophical origin stories told about him have ended up shaping the canon in decidedly tangible—and not just symbolic—ways: say, by setting substantive agendas for what a critical mass perceived as a coherent tradition of Western philosophy, which in turn determined how that tradition was taught and institutionalized, or the terms on which contributions to it were measured for relevance.

The stickiness of such stories is something that an overemphasis on contingent factors in the workings of canons can fail to account for in cases like Plato’s. But as much as chance and circumstance shape the meanings that canonical figures carry, they do so by intervening in a kind of symbolic field with its own inertial logic. Often occluded—or merely taken for granted—is the extra layer of complexity that the symbolic dimension of authors’ receptions introduces to canon dynamics: the enduring webs of go-to associations and idioms, aesthetic vocabulary, and imaginative habits coded into the narratives formed around certain canonical figures. Studying these more deliberately, in turn, offers a promising avenue for tempering what the classicist James Porter has called “the spectre of contingency” and its disorienting effect on a discipline’s self-understanding. ¹⁰ This presupposes that navigating the contingency-riddled reception histories of canonical authors additionally requires contending with the path-dependent effects of those disciplinary narratives that claim them as founding figures.

This paper explores these considerations by focusing on an especially visible instance of the convergence of contingency and symbolic inertia in one reader’s engagement with Plato. I make a case for reading Voltaire’s Socrate (1759), a three-act play dramatizing the trial and death of Socrates, in the context of changing trends in the Enlightenment reception of Plato—and specifically as an effort to offer a new political extension of a recent epistemological shift in interpretations of his philosophy. Voltaire’s play, on my reading, demonstrates how little there is that’s predetermined in the way the philosophical reception of a canonical author interacts with their reception in political thought, and that it often falls on the contingencies of their readers’ creative imaginations to fill in the gaps. At the same time, the same work also offers a case study of an intervention in the symbolic meanings of Plato, one in which the deep-rooted associations he accrued in the traditions that held him as an original figurehead were reconfigured in a distinctly modern, political key. These dynamics suggest a more bounded understanding of the contingency of canonical reception—one that takes readers like Voltaire as idiosyncratic agents responding to, rearranging, and adding new layers to a rich inherited field of symbolic connotations that trail canonical figures.

In reading Voltaire’s play as an opportunity to observe these dynamics, I aim to draw the attention of political theorists to a work that is seldom read outside of Voltaire studies, where it is typically approached as a polemic on events and personages highly specific to his milieu. At one level, some of the salient features of Voltaire’s intervention in the reception of Plato will be familiar to scholars of nineteenth-century British classicism—including, in particular, the effort to disassociate Plato and Socrates from Neoplatonism and to draw them into a modern discourse on democracy. ¹¹ In that regard, I hope to show that some of the major interpretive turns traced to Plato’s nineteenth-century reception were in fact anticipated much earlier, during a period more commonly associated with the adoption of critical reason as a foundation for modern politics. At another level, a larger ambition of this paper is to invite political theorists to appreciate how philosophical shifts in the ideas associated with an author do not necessarily have built-in political ramifications. Rather, Voltaire’s project teaches us that the corresponding political portrait also has to be actively constructed and imaginatively filled in.

I begin by presenting two ancient interpretive traditions in Platonism that Voltaire and his contemporaries inherited, and I show how negotiating between the two resulted in a distinct epistemological compromise. Where the political consequences of these new philosophical commitments were far from clear, I argue that some of the most striking features of Voltaire’s reimagined Socrates make most sense as an attempt to take up that question. I focus, in particular, on the marriage plot that frames the play, the casting of its central villain as a priest of ancient Greek religion, and the depiction of Socrates’s trial as judged by a small, elite tribunal.

Two Pre-Enlightenment Platos

Voltaire once described Plato as “more poet than philosopher,” “sublime because he was scarcely understood.” ¹² He admonished a correspondent for being too eager, when it came to Plato, to “forgive false reasoning in favor of a little eloquence.” ¹³ It was hardly Voltaire’s only impression of Plato, to whom he returned repeatedly over the course of his life, fluctuating between effusive enthusiasm and outright disdain. ¹⁴ But if one of the ways Plato kept recurring in Voltaire’s imagination was as an eloquent mystic, this was because it was the prevailing image of Plato that eighteenth-century Europe had inherited.

When early modern Europeans encountered Plato, he almost invariably came couched within the context of a wide-ranging philosophical tradition now known to us under the heading of Neoplatonism. This tradition first flourished in late antiquity from the third to seventh centuries CE under the likes of Plotinus (204/5–270) and Porphyry (ca. 234–ca. 305) and was revived in fifteenth-century Italy by Renaissance humanists like Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), whose Latin translation of Plato’s extant corpus marked what was likely the single most important milestone in the modern reception of Plato. Even in Voltaire’s time, a student who received a traditional classical education usually encountered Plato through a humanist Neoplatonic lens.

As it is defined today, Neoplatonism tends to be distinguished by its emphasis on the radical coherence of Plato’s metaphysics, arranged around a highest, unifying Form of goodness. It often has a mystical bent, which the tradition acquired, in part, as it gradually negotiated a place for itself alongside Christian orthodoxy: to reassure Christians who were wary of granting too much authority to a pagan who lived before the birth of Christ, Christian Neoplatonist interpreters often insisted that Plato had arrived at his philosophy from being divinely inspired, as a vessel of providential history. ¹⁵ Closely tracking the humanist revival of Plato, for instance, was the proliferation of a distinctive epithet referring to the philosopher as “the divine Plato”—ironically, a phrase first used by Proclus in late antiquity to defend Platonic theology against Christianity (see Figures 1–2).

Figure 1.

Title page insert in the 1491 or second edition of Ficino’s translation of Plato’s works, containing verses praising “Divus Plato.” ¹⁶

Figure 2.

Title pages of editions of Ficino’s translation from 1588 (left) and 1592 (right), both attributing authorship to “Divini Platonis.” ¹⁷

In Neoplatonic tradition, the content of such divine inspiration was pointedly beyond the reach of human rationality. Neoplatonic approaches often drew on dialogues like the Ion and Phaedrus, whose accounts of divine poetic inspiration seemed to concede Plato’s own awareness of the incompleteness of human knowledge without revelation. Their interest in underscoring related themes in Plato’s work—enthusiasm, love, the divine gift of eloquence—had the effect of deemphasizing reason as a means of gaining proximity to the Forms, and it lent a more esoteric cast to his philosophy. ¹⁸ The resulting portrait of Plato, then, was of a philosopher whose metaphysics anticipated elements of monotheistic religion and whose epistemology privileged inspiration as the ultimate path to the truth of the Forms.

By Voltaire’s time, there had already been a number of prominent expressions of distaste with Neoplatonist readings of Plato. Christian tradition had long abounded with polemics, dating back to the Early Church, protesting the contamination of religious doctrine by Neoplatonist commentaries and ideas, and as early as in the 1578 edition of Plato’s works produced by Jean de Serres and Henri Estienne—the source of the Stephanus pagination system still in use today—gestures were made to appeal to a more authentic Plato “strip[ped] . . . of ‘les gloses des Platoniciens,’ meaning the Neoplatonists.” ¹⁹ But it was not until the eighteenth century that these lines of criticism took hold against the backdrop of a broader climate of rationalism that had little patience for extrarational claims to religious inspiration. ²⁰ Johann Jakob Brucker’s Historia Critica Philosophiae (1742–44), an important source for Diderot and the other encyclopedists in Voltaire’s circles, drew a systematic distinction between “the true sense of Plato” and the corrupting influence of the mystical framework that had long been superimposed on his philosophy by commentators like Ficino. ²¹ Brucker’s larger aim was to argue for the purification of Christianity from Neoplatonism by discrediting the latter tradition as a false deviation from even Plato’s own doctrines. His efforts, as Leo Catana has convincingly argued, ended up laying the crucial groundwork for the coinage of the term “Neoplatonism,” which, by the time it emerged in later eighteenth-century German scholarship, appeared only as a pejorative phrase. The negative image of Plato suggested by Brucker’s influential account was one that was disassociated from precisely those traits that Christian Neoplatonists had long emphasized: The authentic Plato had little to do with approximations of the divine or with the divine fury of enthusiasm. ²²

As the tide turned away from the Neoplatonic Plato in which they had been educated, Voltaire’s contemporaries had increasing recourse to the tropes and trappings of a more ancient, countervailing interpretive tradition. This was Academic Skepticism, which had been the dominant school of thought in Plato’s Academy through its “middle” and “new” phases, spanning the third through the first centuries BCE, and whose best-known figureheads included Arcesilaus (ca. 316–241 BCE) and Carneades (214–129 BCE). In contrast to their Neoplatonic successors and their commitment to the coherence of Plato’s metaphysical system, Academic Skeptics had developed a program of denying that he had any system at all. For the Skeptics, Plato was fact philosophically opposed to systems, perpetually rejecting systematic thinking and the temptations of dogma in favor of the critical suspension of judgment. Accordingly, they downplayed Plato’s theory of Forms and instead directed their emphasis to the merciless rigor of Socratic interrogation and the aporetic endings of the early Socratic dialogues, which to their eyes represented a disavowal of certain knowledge. ²³

Academic Skepticism, especially through the account given of it in Cicero’s Academica, had seen growing interest since the sixteenth century. ²⁴ Across the editions of his Essais (1580–95)—so important for the popular French reception of Platonic ideas, and likely the most significant precedent to Voltaire’s portrait of Socrates—Montaigne progressively rejected Plato’s metaphysics and mysticism while celebrating the skeptical spirit of his critical investigations. ²⁵ But Academic Skepticism held special appeal for Enlightenment philosophes like Voltaire, who similarly cultivated a deep distrust of self-sustaining systems of knowledge, ²⁶ and for whom the redeeming virtue of ancient Greek civilization was its invention of a broadly skeptical mode of inquiry: a “rigorous” philosophy that, as the Abbé Yvon put it in the Encyclopédie, “defies all authority, and which wants to be led by the glow of evidence alone in its search for truth.” ²⁷ Granted, the philosophes’ treatment of Plato was notoriously inconsistent and, in spite of their significant debts to Platonic ideas, not always sympathetic. But where Plato or his philosophical tradition was spoken of approvingly, it tended to be in a skeptic vein in step with the philosophes’ unambiguous embrace of Socrates as a symbolic figure. ²⁸ In the Encyclopédie, Diderot would eventually go on to credit Plato with correctly seeing that “doubt was the basis of true science; so all his dialogues breathe skepticism.” ²⁹

Plato’s eighteenth-century admirers, however, were unwilling to associate him with the fully skeptic conclusion that certain knowledge was impossible. The philosophes’ interest in skepticism had been beset from the outset by anxieties concerning the dangers of a critical form of reason that was purely destructive and, for all their strong rhetoric against philosophical systems, their faith in the capacity of human knowledge for growth was never in doubt. Rescuing Plato from the mystical valences of Neoplatonic tradition accordingly also meant shielding him from the most radical interpretations of his work offered by Academic Skepticism. Even the figure of Socrates, whose centrality to the dialogues formed the cornerstone of skeptic readings of Plato, underwent a corresponding transformation. Brucker cautioned that the Socratic dictum of knowing only that one knows nothing “is not to be drawn out” to the point of embracing “skeptical uncertainty.” ³⁰ Drawing heavily on Brucker in the Encyclopédie, Diderot would likewise end up qualifying Socrates’s denial of substantive knowledge by attributing to him the restraint of “the philosopher” who “knows to stop” his critical inquiry at the right place, in contrast to “the imprudent sophist” whose “entire dialectic dissolves into uncertainties.” ³¹ Being able to present Plato as an advocate of positive knowledge—and not just as the champion of a solely destructive philosophical method—was all the more important for defending him against the challenge, raised by the so-called Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, that real knowledge could be obtained only from modern philosophy. It was also important for fending off a prevalent complaint of the time that, even if Plato’s ideas were correct, they were too disconnected from reality to have any practical value. ³²

What emerged, then, was an interpretive crossroads that called for a reconfiguration of the characteristic markers of two Platonic traditions being regarded, to a large extent retroactively, in opposition to one another. The result was a view that rejected the Neoplatonic emphasis on divine inspiration in favor of the skeptic spirit of Socratic inquiry, but that—in the interest of showing Plato did indeed have a constructive philosophy—gave renewed focus to Plato’s metaphysics, a hallmark of Neoplatonism spurned by Academic Skeptics. Brucker, who played a pivotal part in decoupling Platonic metaphysics from an inspiration-based model of knowledge, crucially advanced a reading of Plato’s thought as a systematic philosophy held together by the theory of Forms, where, pointedly, the Forms or Ideas figure as “objects of philosophy” and of “science.” ³³ Echoes of this evaluation can be found throughout the Encyclopédie, in which the critically “rigorous” and “systematic” character of ancient Greek philosophy is repeatedly extolled as a defining achievement that set the Greeks apart from other cultures. ³⁴ On this recalibrated reading, Plato did have a coherent philosophical system, and certain knowledge was indeed possible. But the path to knowledge was not through revelation or inspiration, but through the kind of critical reason that the Academic Skeptics so prized.

It bears emphasizing that the eighteenth-century renegotiation of the Neoplatonic and Skeptic accounts was essentially an epistemological compromise. Arguably, it was also not a particularly revolutionary shift in Platonic interpretation, but rather an easy synthesis of readily available elements drawn from well-established traditions. It would hardly spell the death of Neoplatonic approaches to Plato, which went on to thrive in various renewed guises throughout the nineteenth century, ³⁵ nor was it sufficient to cement a consensus view amidst the eclectic chaos of eighteenth-century arts and letters. But for at least one Enlightenment reader of Plato, this interpretive turn was just provocative enough to open up an unexpected question entirely extrinsic to the debates at hand: What are the political ramifications of this epistemological shift? Voltaire’s Socrate, I argue in what follows, can be read as an effort to work through this very question, and the portraits of Plato and Socrates to emerge from it were strange and revolutionary indeed.

Voltaire’s Socrate

Voltaire wrote Socrate during a time when Socrates’s symbolic valences were being reconfigured in various eclectic—often contradictory—ways. The eighteenth century has been famously described as an “age of Socrates,” in which a seemingly endless parade of causes claimed the philosopher as their figurehead. ³⁶ These included, but were not limited to: natural religion, intellectual freedom, practical wisdom, the natural sciences, the decoupling of morality from natural science, both sides in the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, chastity, homosexuality, polygamy, individualism, and sociability. ³⁷ The Enlightenment rediscovery and reinvention of Socrates unfolded in philosophical tracts and scholarly reflections, but also in private letters, in general histories, abridged translations of Plato for popular audiences, and, notably, in literary depictions. In England, these included John Gilbert Cooper’s influential biography The Life of Socrates, George Adams’s tragic play The Heathen Martyr, and Amyas Busche’s dramatic poem Socrates. ³⁸ On the continent, Wieland wrote a Socratic dialogue on love, and, in what was possibly the immediate catalyst to Voltaire’s own venture into the genre, Diderot announced his plans to write a “philosophical drama” based on Plato’s Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. ³⁹

Diderot never ended up finishing his Socrates play, but Voltaire wrote his just a year later. The result was a genre-bending work that begins as a rehashing of a standard comedic plotline and ends as a tragedy, with an idiosyncratic reconstruction of the trial and execution of Socrates fitted in the middle. The play initially centers on a young couple, Aglaé and Sophronime, who have both been raised and educated by Socrates. ⁴⁰ Aglaé is being romantically pursued by the corrupt and powerful Anitus, one of the historical accusers of Socrates. The historical Anytus was a leader of the faction that helped restore democracy to Athens after the rule of the Thirty Tyrants at the close of the Peloponnesian War. In Voltaire’s play, however, he is cast as the high priest of Ceres and assumes the role of the ridiculous suitor pestering the young couple—a staple plot in early modern French comedy. Socrates’s wife, Xantippe, has already agreed to arrange the match, but Socrates defies her by encouraging Aglaé to marry as she wants. There is even a mix-up concerning Aglaé’s inheritance that Socrates resolves by giving her most of his own money.

What begins as a conventional marriage comedy, complete with misunderstandings about inheritances, takes a conspicuous turn when Anitus, the spurned suitor, plots vengeance against Socrates. To do so, he recruits a group of conspirators, including Mélitus, his own political enemy. (Although the historical Meletus is Socrates’s main accuser in the accounts of his trial given by both Plato and Xenophon, Voltaire styles him as a high court judge.) Anitus’s plan is to intimidate Socrates by bringing charges against him, and then to offer to save him should he agree to pressure Aglaé into the unwanted marriage. Rejecting the offer, Socrates goes to trial—where a tribunal of eleven judges decides his fate. Aglaé and Sophronime return to the play as Socrates, having been sentenced, prepares for death. The pair has exposed Anitus’s machinations and organized the people to revolt in Socrates’s defense. But they are too late; Socrates has already drunk the hemlock. The timing is tragic, but the concluding message is hopeful: the people have risen, and the priests and priestesses of Athens cower in fear.

*

Voltaire published Socrate under a pseudonym, but had left a trail of clues that effectively rendered its authorship an open secret. ⁴¹ It is hardly his best-known work. ⁴² Nor was Socrate deemed, including by Voltaire himself, to have much literary merit. In fact, the only contemporary critics to doubt Voltaire had written the play did so because they were incredulous he would pen something so “mediocre.” ⁴³ All the same, Socrate helped fuel a fad for dramatic portrayals of Socrates. The first Socrates plays after Voltaire’s began appearing as early as 1762, and the remainder of the eighteenth century saw no fewer than fourteen literary and musical portrayals of Socrates—a record that would be unsurpassed until the twentieth century. ⁴⁴

Commentators often locate the interest of the play in its polemical features. On this reading, Socrate is most remarkable as a satire on contemporary French society, designed to lambast the opponents of the philosophes. The play was written during an especially intense period of strife between the philosophes and their persecutors, over the course of which Voltaire himself was accused of being a deist or an atheist. ⁴⁵ Socrate itself also became a prop in the public feuds that involved the philosophes: the following year, they found themselves lampooned mercilessly in Charles Palissot’s Les Philosophes (1760), in which Palissot explicitly described himself as a modern Aristophanes to the Socrates of the age. Voltaire faced pressure from his friends to finally put Socrate on stage as a retort—a consideration he ultimately rejected in part because he deemed its open parody of contemporary figures too dangerous. ⁴⁶ Scholarship on the play has always been rightly sensitive to this fraught background, drawing attention to Socrates’s advocacy of natural religion in the climactic trial scene; the allusions throughout the play and its preface to particular enemies of Voltaire; ⁴⁷ and the overt, self-conscious efforts among contemporary philosophes to style themselves as modern incarnations of Plato and Socrates, persecuted for their nonconformity. ⁴⁸ Focusing on such elements can suggest a reading of Socrate as a straightforward polemic about Voltaire’s personal beliefs and grievances. ⁴⁹ As one commentator once put it, the play is so obviously shaped around “Voltaire’s own interests” that it “is not about Socrates at all.” ⁵⁰

To be sure, there is no question that Socrate was a product of its time, and that it is a work in which Voltaire appropriates the figure of Socrates as a stand-in for some of his own views. All the same, the standard polemical reading can also understate the interest of the play as an intervention in the contemporary reception of Plato. Voltaire clearly drew his source material from Plato—there is little evidence of his having read Xenophon ⁵¹ —and the play marks a watershed in his decades-long engagement with Plato’s dialogues. Voltaire almost certainly studied some of them as a student at the Collège de Clermont and in the 1730s went through an extensive period of reading and annotating André Dacier’s translation of Plato’s works with Émilie du Châtelet. ⁵² Voltaire’s reimagining of Socrates, then, was specifically a reinterpretation of the Socrates he had encountered more or less exclusively through Plato’s writings, while reflecting on Plato’s philosophy.

When we approach the play through this alternative lens, we can better appreciate the extent to which the more radical among Voltaire’s authorial decisions track the latest shift in understandings of Plato’s epistemology. Three related aspects of this project deserve special emphasis:

1. The distancing of Socrates from otherworldly abstraction, in favor of having him embody the idea that philosophy entails a political way of life.

2. The distancing of Socrates from contemporary accounts of the logic of classical myths, and in so doing emphasizing the critical character of Socratic inquiry.

3. The disassociation of Socrates from a world view premised on a hierarchical model of the universe, in favor of presenting him as a democratic figure.

The Reinvention of Socrates

The Marriage Plot: Philosophy as a Way of Life

Students of Platonic reception encountering Voltaire’s play for the first time will undoubtedly be struck by its comedic frame, where Socrates’s trial comes couched inside a marriage plot. ⁵³ On one plausible explanation, Voltaire was simply borrowing the conventions of a popular genre to present the story of a philosopher—a potentially dreary subject—in an accessible, appealing manner. In fact, the sheer difficulty of transforming Socrates into a dramatically compelling figure was a significant factor in Diderot’s decision to abandon his own attempt to dramatize the same material from Plato’s corpus. ⁵⁴

But the marriage plot also serves a more distinct function in Voltaire’s play, as an entry point for presenting a different picture of the nature of philosophy than that offered in humanist Neoplatonism. In the preface to Socrate, the persona of the pseudonymous author explains the decision to include “characters of the people” in the tragedy as an effort to give “one of those naïve representations of human life” that mix “the pathetic and the familiar”—a genre he contrasts to “the continuous sublime.” ⁵⁵ As applied to the play’s philosophical subject, this choice takes on new resonance as a rejection of the rarefied content of poetic inspiration in favor of themes drawn from ordinary life, and it reflects a set of misgivings about Plato held by Voltaire and his contemporaries.

Time and again in his experience of reading Plato, Voltaire was put off by the vertiginous quality of his “metaphysical wanderings.” ⁵⁶ He was often concerned not just by the metaphysics itself, which he found unconvincingly speculative, but by its abstract nature and the distance it put between philosophy and everyday life. As he once protested after a bout of studying Plato intensely, “We are not born solely to read Plato and Leibnits, to measure curves, and to arrange facts in our heads.” ⁵⁷ Such complaints were of a piece with a more general worry among the philosophes about the impractical nature of Plato’s philosophy: His political writings often seemed too utopian to offer lessons for actual affairs of state, whereas his natural philosophy had been rendered obsolete by modern empiricism. ⁵⁸ (In a stealthy attack in the Questions sur l’Encyclopédie, Voltaire later praised Locke as “the Plato of England, so superior to the Plato of Greece.” ⁵⁹ ) Where there was demand for a different account of the value of Plato’s work, it was for something in the spirit of Cicero’s famous description of Socrates—appreciative quotations of which were increasingly widespread in eighteenth-century writing about ancient philosophy—as “the first to call philosophy down from the heavens and set her in the cities of men and bring her also into their homes.” ⁶⁰

Socrate can be read as Voltaire’s best effort to draw up a literal rendering of Cicero’s remark. In dramatizing a portrait of Socrates playing matchmaker to his young charges, Voltaire ends up superimposing onto Plato’s canonical account of Socrates’s death an unapologetically quotidian, nonmystical portrayal of the value of philosophy. Presented this way, philosophy is not so much an academic exercise as a practice that is primarily applicable to the way people lead their lives and manage their personal relations. Crucially, in Socrate, this practical application of philosophy to life is inherently political, constantly raising the question of who rules and who is ruled.

Socrates’s intervention in the play’s marriage plot is as a defender of the idea that individuals—even penniless orphans like Aglaé—ought to be equipped to make rational decisions over their own lives. Readers of Plato might recognize this as the kind of freedom an individual obtains from allowing the rational part of one’s soul to govern over the rest. ⁶¹ But Plato’s readers would also be surprised to find it primarily applied in Voltaire’s play to Aglaé’s freedom to choose her husband, unconstrained even by the financial circumstances of her inheritance. As Socrates explains at a crucial point, he cannot compel Aglaé to marry a suitor of someone else’s choosing because he is her “tutor, not her tyrant” (I.vi.215–6).

The autonomy Socrates ascribes to Aglaé is a specifically rational agency. When she initially refuses to wed Sophronime, whom she loves but secretly does not wish to burden with her poverty, Socrates insists that they first “hear her reasons; if they are right, we must comply” (I.vi.217–8). Here, the principles of the Socratic elenchus, the argumentative give-and-take of reasons that characterizes Plato’s portrayal of his philosophical investigations, have been transplanted into the context of a marriage plot. (At no point does Voltaire showcase Socrates refuting interlocutors in his famous manner.) As Socrates assures Xantippe, so following the dictates of reason through the management of one’s personal affairs amounts to an entire lifestyle:

I don’t need to pay a doctor, because I live simply, or a lawyer, because I’m not extravagant and not in debt. As for the philosophy you reproach me for, it teaches me to bear Anitus’s malice and your own insults—to love you, despite your ill humor. (II.iii.70–4)

Voltaire pointedly contrasts this picture of philosophy to Xantippe’s understanding of it. For Xantippe, philosophy is a luxury for those with the means to enjoy it as a pastime, but it is not sufficient on its own to constitute a way of living. Philosophy is “a wonderful thing when you’ve got some leisure time,” but a girl like Aglaé, who lacks such resources, “must live first, and philosophize after” (I.vii.272–3). Whereas Socrates consistently emphasizes Aglaé’s capacity to reason for herself, Xantippe advises her to obey without further thought the judgment of those who have determined what is in her interest. Xantippe’s plan for Aglaé to marry Anitus is “for [her] own good—stop reasoning, then, and follow me” (I.vii.276–7).

At stake is the question of who ought to make practical decisions over one’s life and those of others in their immediate community—a question that Voltaire consistently poses in the language of governing and rule. When Xantippe accuses philosophers of “reasoning endlessly, without any common sense,” the crux of her complaint is that they “set about trying to lead others” when they themselves “need to be kept on a leash” (II.iii.59–61). Her verdict is that philosophers, though they may believe otherwise, are not to be entrusted with matters of life and are better off being governed by those with the requisite practical wisdom. “You’re a fine one,” she tells her husband,

getting involved with organizing young women’s marriages! You’re a good man, but you don’t have a clue how the world works. You’re very lucky that I’m here to govern you. (I.vii.281–5) ⁶²

Voltaire’s point, however, is that philosophers do indeed govern in the sense that Xantippe has in mind. Socrates does trouble himself with matrimony, and the sphere of such everyday affairs is precisely where philosophy is properly practiced. But this understanding of philosophy is hardly quietist in its scope and ambition: in the play, Socrates’s involvement in Aglaé’s marriage is the catalyst that leads to his trial and execution and then to a full-scale popular uprising. For Voltaire, then, the personal was philosophical. But he would have also insisted: The philosophical was necessarily political.

Anitus and Greek Religion: Rescuing Socrates from Myth

What Voltaire layered onto Plato’s portrait of Socrates was not just a rejection of an idea of philosophy tied to lofty abstractions. He was also loosening the longstanding association of this portrait with the classicism of humanist Neoplatonism and specifically insulating it from the contemporary connotations of classical mythology, which was increasingly becoming a byword for unenlightened credulity or the privation of critical reason. Reading Socrate through this lens, in turn, helps shed light on Voltaire’s eccentric decision to reinvent the historical Anytus—a leader of Athens’s democratic restoration—as the high priest of Ceres.

For a long time, the Neoplatonic tradition was intimately intertwined with the preservation of classical mythology: medieval Neoplatonic writing was rife with borrowings from, imitations of, and commentaries on ancient Greco-Roman myths. ⁶³ In turn, the humanist revival of Neoplatonism in the fifteenth century was part of a far broader revival of interest in classical antiquity that proved to be definitional for Renaissance culture. Greco-Roman mythology figured particularly heavily in the sprawling, often undifferentiated mass of inherited classical material that comprised this cultural repository. Starting in the late seventeenth century, however, a new wave of critics had begun to question the value of the myths that their ancestors had valorized—often by drawing attention to their absurd elements, or their similarity to the myths of supposedly savage peoples in the New World, Africa, Scandinavia, and Asia. ⁶⁴ By the eighteenth century, as Enlightenment thinkers railed against superstition and tradition, the enduring cultural prestige of Greco-Roman mythology had become a potent symbol for the dead weight of unenlightened thinking. ⁶⁵ From these cultural reappraisals emerged a new, critical genre of mythographic writing focused on reconstructing a cognitive portrait of the “primitive” mind that generated and believed in such myths. ⁶⁶

Even for Voltaire’s more direct predecessors and contemporaries, who were still picking up the pieces of the humanist legacy, it would have been easy to lump historical figures from Greco-Roman antiquity alongside mythology in the same loose category of the classical heritage. Yet in Socrate, Voltaire systematically disassociates the figure of Socrates from classical mythological tradition, and so from the anti-Enlightenment overtones this tradition had begun to acquire. This effort pervades Voltaire’s treatment of Greek religion—headed by Anitus in the world of the play—which otherwise tends to be read as a polemic against the corrupt state of institutionalized religion in Voltaire’s own time. In particular, the portrayal of Greek religion in Socrate is remarkable for how closely it tracks some of the specific diagnoses of mythic reasoning offered in contemporary mythographic writing as a foil to the critical spirit of inquiry that set apart the modern enlightened mind.

In the trial scene, for instance, Socrates speculates that his contemporaries have been mistakenly worshipping aspects of the Supreme Being as multiple distinct entities: “Minerva” is just a name for “the wisdom of God,” and “Neptune” just a name for the “immutable laws” that govern the tides (III.i.28–30). Such speculations into the origins of pagan mythology were typical in early eighteenth-century mythography, where their cause was similarly attributed to confused, erroneous understandings of nature or of the Judeo-Christian God. ⁶⁷ In the same scene, Socrates suggests that, in believing that the supreme god had intercourse with humans, their ancestors had really only “imagined dangerous fables.” Almost precisely reproducing Pierre Bayle’s infamous commentary on Jupiter’s sexual transgressions in the Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697), he elaborates that it is “an insult to the divinity to claim it committed, in any way, what we call adultery” (III.i.39–42). ⁶⁸ In turn, Anitus and his followers are routinely depicted exhibiting exaggerated errors of logic of the kind that contemporary mythographers conjectured to be a root cause of mythology (II.vi.102–3).

In pitting Socrates’s critical manner against the mythical logic of his opponents, Voltaire also distances himself from humanist Neoplatonic readings that had long enjoyed a far more comfortable relationship to the mythological strand of the classical heritage. In the Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (1770–72), he would go on to praise Plato’s portrayal of Socrates for advocating for skepticism regarding the content of Greek myths, “proving . . . that the moon was not a goddess and that Mercury was not a god.” ⁶⁹ Where a healthy appreciation for classical myths, alongside a practice of furnishing allegorical readings of them, had grown naturally out of the Neoplatonic emphases on divine poetic inspiration and eloquence, Voltaire was keen to represent Socrates as a philosopher who rejects extrarational sources of knowledge. The philosopher, according to the corresponding entry in the Philosophical Dictionary (1764), is “not enthusiastic; he does not set himself up as a prophet; he does not say that he is inspired by the gods.” ⁷⁰ In Socrate, too, the quality of being divinely inspired—a signature Neoplatonic motif—is transferred instead to Anitus, who speaks “like wisdom herself” so that “surely some divinity inspires” him (II.vi.110–1).

If the need to liberate Plato’s Socrates from his prior associations can help explain why Anytus appears in Socrate as the high priest of Ceres, it also speaks to why he could not remain the democratic politician he historically was. Voltaire’s reinvention of Anytus accords with his well-known allegiance to the idea that placing a critical form of doubt at the center of thinking has concrete political consequences. ⁷¹ An important feature of the neat set of oppositions Voltaire develops between Socrates and Anitus, and between the critical and mythical modes of reasoning they each come to embody, is that it also maps onto a contrast between two forms of political rule. Greek religion in the world of the play is a sham, a tool used by the elite to uphold an oligarchy by divine right. This is directly contrasted with a politics of popular sovereignty and accountability that Socrates heralds. Whereas Anitus alleges that the Areopagus, “instituted by heaven,” acts “by divine right” (III.i.83–4), Socrates maintains that Anitus and the Areopagus “have no rights beyond those your nation has granted” (III.i.79–80). For Anitus, the political consequences of acquitting Socrates are plain: invoking the “anger of the gods,” he reminds the judges presiding over the trial that, should they permit Socrates to live, they will “no longer [be] judges appointed by Minerva” but “will become accountable” for their proceedings (III.i.85–9). Socrates, by contrast, appeals to the common sense that most people possess not to be deceived by the Greek religious establishment, but instead to “laugh at [their] little gods” (III.i.57–9).

Losing the Jury: Socrates the Democrat

Turning his protagonist into a spokesperson for popular sovereignty is of a piece with the boldest liberty that Voltaire takes with the story of Socrates. In Voltaire’s telling, Socrates is tried, not by a citizen jury of 501 ordinary Athenians chosen by lot, but instead by an elite tribunal of eleven professional judges headed by Mélitus. Voltaire’s authorial license on this score was unlikely to have been uninformed. ⁷² Through his extended studies of Plato, he was very familiar with the dialogues that served as his primary source material—as evidenced in Socrate by the obvious care he took to ensure that the most immediately recognizable highlights from the Apology and Phaedo were not left out in his adaptation. ⁷³ He likely took the number of judges in his fictional tribunal from the Eleven (hoi hendeka), the ancient Athenian magistrates in charge of prisons and executions, who are mentioned explicitly in both these dialogues. ⁷⁴

Why this deliberate departure from historical fact? The explanation most consistent with the rest of the play is that the choice not to have Socrates tried by a citizen jury was the most radical move in a larger effort to position Socrates on the side of “the people” politically, and his enemies on the opposing side. At some level, this much should be uncontroversial to any reader of Socrate, whose anti-elitism is hardly subtle, and it appears to anticipate the increased sympathy with le peuple and flirtation with democratic ideas that would mark Voltaire’s later years in Ferney. ⁷⁵

But the real significance of the move does not so much lie in the fact of Socrates’s affiliation with the people as in its overt reversal of the political position that had hitherto been ascribed to Plato by a long line of commentators, both traditional and contemporary, who marshalled his portrayal of Socrates’s trial as evidence of the perils of democracy. ⁷⁶ This realignment of Plato’s political associations, in turn, offers the most concretely spelled out ramification of a conception of philosophy centered on a critical mode of inquiry, the rejection of Neoplatonic inspiration, and a commitment to the possibility of constructive knowledge.

Closely tied to Neoplatonic understandings of divine inspiration, in particular, was a distinctive model of the universe that gets singled out for scrutiny in Socrate. A defining structural principle of Christian Neoplatonic metaphysics was an all-pervading conception of hierarchy that Peter Gay once identified as “the master metaphor of the Middle Ages”: the idea that all creation participates in the highest Form in differing degrees, with every creature’s place in the cosmic hierarchy determined by its ontological proximity to the One. ⁷⁷ The metaphysical principle had proved highly transferrable to various spheres of knowledge including, most prominently, cosmology, where a geocentric model of a series of nested celestial spheres rotating in perfect harmony with one another—as depicted in the Republic and Timaeus, and extensively commented on by a long line of Neoplatonic scholars—remained essentially unchanged until the sixteenth century. ⁷⁸ In an important sense, the hierarchical image of the universe offered by the Neoplatonic commentary tradition had a counterimage in the radical equality suggested in the Skeptic stance of holding all sources of epistemic authority as potentially suspect.

In the Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire would go on to describe the trajectory by which he was first “struck with admiration” for the coherence of “this gradation of beings” offered in Plato’s thought, but was soon disillusioned, “the way all apparitions flee in the morning at the rooster’s crow.” ⁷⁹ In Socrate, this disillusionment takes a political form, as the pre-Copernican, Neoplatonic image of the universe is explicitly linked to the antidemocratic politics of Socrates’s enemies. In the trial scene of Act III, Anitus conflates the geocentric universe with a model of political rule by divine right:

Gentlemen of the Areopagus, allow me to interrogate Socrates. Do you believe that the sun turns, and that the Areopagus acts by divine right? (III.i.72–4)

The allusion to Galileo’s trial is hard to miss, and it in turn reflects Voltaire’s own deep intellectual investment in Newton’s theory of a heliocentric solar system governed by gravity. ⁸⁰ But the target of Voltaire’s parody in this scene is also the metaphorical logic bound up with the old cosmology. In his response to Anitus, Socrates denounces the reasoning that a hierarchical cosmology and a hierarchical politics follow from one another, and thus distances himself from a world view premised on the radical coherence of all the universe’s domains of knowledge. Politically, he positions himself squarely against Anitus’s advocacy of unaccountable elite rule (III.i.75–80). The principles Socrates invokes instead—popular accountability and the rule of law—are thus presented as part of a far more comprehensive upheaval of an outdated world order. As Anitus confirms to the tribunal, such principles can only mean “there will be no more magistrates, and no more sun,” and he accordingly calls on the judges to “punish the rebellion, and avenge heaven and earth” (III.i.82–88).

If Socrates’s political alignments were intended to mark a profound rupture from the prevailing paradigm of a prior age, they also broke specifically with what had long been considered one of the most readily available political lessons to be extracted from Plato’s works. As late as in Charles Rollin’s influential Ancient History (1730–38), the sentencing of Socrates was uncontroversially regarded as an event that would, “through all ages, cover Athens with infamy and reproach,” and as a testament to the fatal cracks in a system enabled such bad judgments to win “the suffrages of almost an whole people.” The democratic assemblies of Athens, therefore, were like “a tempestuous sea; as that element, like the people, though calm and peaceful of itself, is subject to be frequently agitated by a violence not its own.” ⁸¹

In Socrate, by contrast, not only are the people of Athens absolved of responsibility for Socrates’s death, but some of the common pathologies attributed to democracy in this discourse—its vulnerability to demagogic manipulation, its tendency to be swayed by passions—make their way into the political playbooks of Socrates’s enemies. The resulting portrait of Socrates’s politics trades on the contrast between his own appeal to the people as a sovereign entity to whom magistrates are accountable, and his persecutors’ disingenuous efforts to agitate the populace in order to maintain their own power, usually by exploiting their elite connections. In the build-up to the trial, Anitus claims to have “prepared the minds of the people” by starting rumors linking Socrates to a confused barrage of generic vices (II.viii.192–3). His associates are instructed to take with them “some devout person from among the people” to cry out those charges as the judges pass (II.vi.123–4), and they oblige by shouting for “justice in the name of the people” (II.ix.199). ⁸² Where Anitus’s and Mélitus’s tactics rely on an understanding of the people as essentially credulous, superstitious, and easily influenced, Socrates credits them with an adequate level of sense to reach the right conclusions once given access to correct information—a faith that is vindicated at the close of the play when Anitus’s schemes are publically exposed, and the people respond accordingly. Socrates ascribes to the people a version of the rational autonomy with which he characterizes Aglaé’s agency in the marriage plot: The people have to be treated as rational agents rather than as targets for manipulation, and they are entitled to transparent information about political ongoings.

To wrest the story of Socrates’s trial from the antidemocratic lens through which Plato’s dialogues had overwhelmingly been read, then, was also to speculate on what it might look like to combine a non-hierarchical outlook on the world, unfettered from the structure of the Neoplatonic cosmos, with a vision of philosophy that was critical rather than mythical in essence, quotidian rather than transcendent in its purview. And for Voltaire, this entailed vaulting the figure of Socrates from the permutations of timeworn interpretations into fresh political terrain as of then unfamiliar to Plato’s readers.

Conclusion

I have tried in this paper to make a case for reading Voltaire’s idiosyncratic dramatization of the trial and death of Socrates as a more significant moment in the history of the reception of Plato than commonly acknowledged, and to argue that doing so in fact positions us to make better sense of some of the play’s more puzzling features. Against the backdrop of shifting intellectual trends in Plato’s reception, Voltaire drew up a vivid account of the political consequences of a conception of philosophy built around the faith that critical inquiry can yield positive, systematic knowledge. The resulting vision was one that avoided the mystical esoterism of the Neoplatonic interpretive traditions that Voltaire and his Enlightenment contemporaries had abandoned, and it instead turned the figure of the philosopher into a skeptical hero. But this image also broke away from the aporetic conclusions of classical Academic Skepticism. In place of a figurehead whose only philosophical commitment is the disavowal of all substantive philosophical commitments, Voltaire helped convert the perpetually blank canvas of the Skeptical Socrates into a fully formed character capable of embodying political ideas.

Contained in Voltaire’s project, in turn, is a window into the eclectic and synthetic nature of the dynamics that underpin canons. Just as his predecessors and contemporaries had no qualms about picking and choosing from the philosophical traditions in their inheritance to construct new, hybrid readings of Plato’s epistemology, so too Voltaire curated his material from this noisy mixture, not to mention the cultural and literary repertoire at his disposal, to assemble an updated portrait of the philosopher as a political thinker. If this act of politicization was the eccentric product of Voltaire’s idiosyncratic imagination and of incidental forces specific to his circumstances, it was also one that took place within an inherited conceptual landscape etched over time by generations of thinkers who had bought into the narrative of Plato as the founder of their respective traditions.