SOCRATES AND THE SEVEN SAGES

Abstract This article demonstrates the importance of the Seven Sages to the rhetorical projects of Xenophon and Plato. Though Aristotle represents Socrates as the first to turn philosophy towards ethics, Xenophon and Plato present us with a Socrates who inherited elements of earlier Greek moral thought, and particularly the thought of the Seven Sages. Xenophon’s Socrates shares important features with the Sages, such as his ‘usefulness’ to his friends. In a passage unparalleled in other Socratic literature, he reads and teaches with texts that, as this article proposes, were written by the Sages. The Xenophontic Socrates’ respect for (and affinity with) the Sages constitutes an attempt to vindicate Socrates from his reputation for strangeness. Plato, by contrast, fashions the Sages after Socrates. In defiance of traditions attesting their political involvement, Plato makes the Sages, like Socrates, apolitical. Elsewhere, he anachronistically likens their gnomic utterances to Socratic elenchus. In all Platonic passages that mention the Sages, Plato assimilates the Sages’ activity with Socrates’ methods against those of the sophists. For Plato, then, Socrates’ alignment with the Seven Sages places the weight of tradition on the side of philosophy and against sophistry.