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Eva Gomez
Fledgling
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Tom Trelogan
Forum Admin
1368 Posts |
 Posted - Jan 29 2013 : 7:18:32 PM
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Before you make up your mind about this, Eva, two things.
First, if anything, Xenophon suggests that there were judges who envied Sokrates his special relation to the gods, not that there were judges who envied either the way he lived his life or his being intelligent or "carefree." I think this is clear even from the translation—the H.G. Dakyns translation—that you're using, which is not, I think, a very good translation. In the translation in Conversations with Socrates—the Robin Waterfield translation—these two passages read as follows "There was uproar from the jurors at this speech: some of them didn't believe what he was saying, while others were jealous that he might have had more from the gods than they. So Socrates continued:..." (CS 44), and "Socrates was so arrogant in court that he invited the jurors' ill-will and more or less forced them to condemn him" (CS 49). In the translation at the Perseus Project—the O.J. Todd translation I recommended you use if you wanted to go with one available on line—they read thus: "Hermogenes further reported that when the jurors raised a clamour at hearing these words, some of them disbelieving his statements, others showing jealousy at his receiving greater favours even from the gods than they, Socrates resumed:… (14)" and "And as for Socrates, by exalting himself before the court, he brought ill-will upon himself and made his conviction by the jury more certain" (32).
Second, even if Sokrates can be said to have wound up being a victim of "petty emotion," do you really think he could have been trying to make himself seem likable if he was willing to make himself out to have received special favors from the gods and to exalt himself, to laud himself, to act arrogantly, before the court? Or is the "grand scheme" of which you speak one you think was cooked up by Xenophon, or perhaps by both Xenophon and Plato—presumably working independently of one another—if you have both accounts of his trial in mind in speaking of a scheme in this connection? |
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Eva Gomez
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Xenophon's Apology
