Traditional Forms of Wisdom and Politics in Plato's Apology (original) (raw)

2009, The Classical Quarterly

When someone invokes the notion of 'wisdom literature', we in the Western world usually think of the books of the Hebrew Bible that are most associated with wisdom: Job, Proverbs, Koheleth, the apocryphal Ben Sirach and so forth, some of which were produced in the Hellenistic period, though clearly indebted primarily to the wisdom traditions of Egypt, Babylonia and elsewhere in the Middle East, rather than to Greek thought. Ancient Greece does not have a wisdom literature properly so called, self-consciously developed and transmitted, until the forms of Platonism developed in the later Academies, although some stories about Pythagoras have him learning from Egyptian wise men, Persian magi or Indian sages. 1 Aristophanes mocks the notion of professional 'thinkers', and thus of any kind of wisdom tradition associated with 'philosophers', in the in the Clouds, and criticizes Socratic 'chatter' (Frogs 1491-2) as well. 2 In a sense, wisdom was a concern of all, not just of one group of intellectuals. At the same time, the tradition of the 'Seven Sages', in so far as it can be demonstrated to go very far into the past, is spoken of by Herodotus and dramatized by Solon's conversation there with Croesus. 3 Socrates, in his particular way of stating and of approaching the problem of wisdom, is usually taken to mark a great substantive rupture or break with earlier Greek thought and expression. Indeed, the concept of 'pre-Socratic', rather than that of 'pre-Platonic', is already an interpretation of ancient philosophy from this point of view, putting Socrates together with Plato, in contrast to those who precede Socrates, as of somehow a qualitatively different stripe. The first great edition of the Pre-444