it (904b6–905b2). This illustrates a point of some importance to my overall interpretation. The re-evaluation of Socratesin the Theaetetus is not exclusively backward-looking, historical, and apologetic. In re-evaluating Socrates it also, where desirable, reappropriates hisideasfor Platonism.
The theme of ‘becoming like god’ is itself another such case. That the object of our emulation should be god, more directly than the transcendent Forms, is an idea which, once ignited in the Theaetetus, continued to dominate Plato's thinking to the end, showing up notably in the Timaeus and Laws.125It culminatesin the celebrated dictum of LawsIV, in unmistakable paraphrase of the Theaetetus: ‘It will be god who, par excellence, isthe measure of all thingsfor us, rather than a man, assome people claim’ (716c4–6).
by public opinion (172b5), making them the most ostensibly culture-relative of the virtues.
Also of great importance is the rarely noticed fact that in the Theaetetus piety isputting in a reappearance after a mysteriousabsence. It isa well-known enigma for interpretersthat in book IVof the Republic Plato reducesSocrates' fivefold set of cardinal virtues to four, quietly dropping piety from the standard list. Its equally sudden reappearance is among the most significant Socratic features of the Digression. I shall have more to say about this shortly, but it is worth speculating even on the basis of what we have already learnt that what licenses the return of piety to centre stage may be the idea, expressed in the mouth of Socrates, that the way to moral improvement lies in imitation of god.
Gregory Vlastos argued convincingly that the basis of Socratic piety is service to god, where god is conceived as an essentially good being. The way to serve god is, on this account, not by sacrifice and other rituals, but simply by leading a morally good life.127 Recalling the same principle makes it easier to see how piety might turn out, as Socrates maintainsin the Protagoras, ultimately to be nothing over and above justice and the other virtues: all five are, from different perspectives, one and the same science of being good. This Socratic doctrine that the virtues are identical to each other, so paradoxically defended in that earlier dialogue, starts to take on a richer profile in the Theaetetus, when we learn that by becoming like god you ‘become just and pious, together with wisdom’ (176b1–2). By getting more distant from mankind and closer to god, you acquire the authentic virtue of piety thanksto sharing god'smoral and intellectual outlook, and in the very act of doing so you also acquire true justice, properly conceived as an absolute value informed by a godlike state of the intellect.
In the light of all this, it is remarkable how much we are told about justice in the Digression, yet how little about piety.
It seems that the lessons about the latter virtue, mentioned in only two, albeit strategically placed, passages, are ones we are left to work out for ourselves. What then are these lessons? The parallelism to justice says it all. Becoming just, let us recall, starts with the philosopher's intellectual detachment from the civic environment in which both demotic justice and its fraudulent imitations are located: the law
127 Vlastos (1991, ch. 6).
courts, assembly, council, and all legal and political institutions governed by man-made rules. It is not hard to work out that becoming pious must start with a similar philosophical detachment, but this time from the temples, the cults, the festivals, and the other religious institutions of the city. Some of these may well embody what we could call demotic piety, although others undoubtedly, in Socrates' eyes, fall short even of that, shamefully misrepresenting gods as bad and quarrelsome and thus setting the worst possible model for emulation.128 What all have in common istheir relativization of the pious to local perspectives, dependent on civic practice and belief. Only when we detach ourselves intellectually from such practices, and approach instead an understanding of god's true nature, can we aspire to genuine piety.129
Almost inevitably that process of derelativization will subtract, one by one, the anthropomorphic traits which characterize and differentiate the individual deitiesof Greek religion. The result will be a conception of the godsas(a) free of all human failingsand morally perfect; and (b) not differentiated from each other by the characteristics that traditional religion imposes on them. True piety appears to be founded on just such a reformed conception of divinity.130If Socrates, for hispart, hasprivileged insight into thisdivine nature, we may try connecting hisinsight to the fact that his mission as midwife is one directly imposed on him by god (cf. principle 1, p. 33 above). Early in the dialogue he argued that despite appearances to the contrary his midwifery can only be a force for the good, because ‘no god ismalevolent to mankind’ (151d1). It ishisaccount of piety that linksthat earlier insight to what he isnow implicitly advocating, a radical break from the particularized and morally variable divinitiesof Greek religion.
128 Euthyphro 6a7–9; cf. Rep. II 377a1–383c7. Socrates' objections in these passages to the misrepresentation of divinity as having human failings follow in the tradition of Xenophanes (cf. n. 50 below). They do not in themselves amount to a denial of the individual deities in question, although they may, as Socrates himself suspects in the former passage, have been taken by his accusers to point that way.
129 That is, in existing cities like Athens a true philosopher will detach himself from religious institutions as much as he will from the law courts and assembly. Thisisnot to exclude the likelihood that in an ideal city there would be an appropriate form of worship (cf. Rep. IV 427b6–c5), just as there would be appropriate law courts (Rep.
433e3–434b8).
130 Such a move, from the rejection of locally relativized religiousbeliefsto the revelation of a unitary and perfect divine nature, had strong antecedentsin Xenophanes (B10–16, 23–6, 34 DK).
If such is the Digression's message about piety, why did Socrates not make it explicit?131Here it will help to call on the findingsof MylesBurnyeat in a ground-breaking article entitled ‘The Impiety of Socrates’.132Burnyeat pointsout that in Plato's Apology Socratesnever directly rebutsthe charge against him that he doesnot believe in the godsthat the city believesin, but only the charge of atheism, which he did not actually face (at Apology 26b8–c8 Plato makesMeletus, in a misguided—and much debated—moment, substitute the stronger charge of atheism, conveniently allowing Socrates to concentrate on rebutting this). Moreover, in referring back to the Delphic god whose cryptic oracle set him on his mission of interrogating the self-styled experts, Socrates speaks simply of his service to ‘the god’, never to ‘Apollo’.
Likewise Socrates' personal ‘divine sign’ is sent simply by ‘the god’ (40b2). It isnot that Socratesshowsany inclination to monotheism, but it does seem clear that his belief in the essential goodness of divinity prevents his acknowledging the often mutually antagonistic deities worshipped by the Athenians, whether in local or in pan-Hellenic cults.
A background of studied caution about Socrates' theology makes immediate sense of what we encounter in the Theaetetus. Here it is worth stressing that Socrates' mission, as redescribed in the famous Midwife passage early in the dialogue, appeals to just the same homogenized and anonymous kind of divinity as Burnyeat findsin the Apology's version of that mission. The only deity mentioned by name is Artemis: Socrates, in explaining the tradition that midwives (literal midwives, that is) are women beyond their own childbearing years, refers to what is popularly said about Artemis' patronage of childbirth (149b9–c3). But in then proceeding to outline his own god-given mission as intellectual midwife, he speaks simply of ‘the god’ (ho theos), using a masculine form which excludes any direct
131 One relevant consideration, though surely not sufficient to account for Socrates' laconic treatment of piety, is a disanalogy with justice: while god himself is supremely just (176b8–c1), it would be contrary to usual Greek practice to call him ‘pious’, and Socrates does not do so here, despite the fact that in other respects the parallelism of justice and piety iscarefully maintained (176b1–2, d1). The same limitation would of course apply to courage and moderation, neither of which can be attributed to gods. Apart from justice, the only other cardinal virtue shared with the gods is wisdom, and this, as we have seen, plays a different role in the account from the other virtues.
132 Burnyeat (1997a ).
reference back to Artemis,133but equally without reference to any other previously named divinity.134Those who make progress under Socrates' midwifery are those ‘to whom the god grantsit’ (150d2–6). ‘The god’ and Socrateshimself are jointly responsible for the process of midwifery (150d8–e1). Many such people believe Socrates' questioning to be maliciousin intent, not realizing that he isacting out of benevolence and that ‘no god ismalevolent to mankind’
(151c5–d1). Thislast remark confirmsthat what Socratesrefersto simply as‘the god’ is not necessarily meant to be the only god, but that like any god he isin hisown intrinsic nature good. In the Apology Socrates' mission of interrogation washis‘service to the god’, while in the Theaetetus it sounds more like a partnership between the two of them; but we should have no doubt that the very same divine mission is being redescribed, albeit with a new set of metaphors, and that the underlying theology remains a Socratic one.
In the light of these considerations, it is not hard to see why the Digression is so reticent on the subject of piety, and leaves us to work out its nature from the parallel case of justice. If true piety means radically distancing oneself from local cult practices and beliefs, in much the same way as true justice means distancing oneself from the law courts, to present Socratesasopenly saying thismight have been little lesshazardousdecadesafter hisexecution than it had been in that event'simmediate aftermath, when the Apology ispresumed to have been written. Whether Socrateshimself was, in life, equally guarded about his theological views is a question we can scarcely hope to answer with any confidence, although hiscondemnation may suggest that he wasnot.
What can be said with greater confidence isthat the Socratesof the Theaetetus, with his divine mission and his subtly encoded
133 The masculine noun θεός can designate a goddess, but the masculine article ὁ cannot. Hence at the end of the dialogue, 210c6–7, ‘Both I and my mother have been allotted the role of midwife by god (ἐϰ θεοῦ)’, where ‘god’ refers to Artemis in his mother's case but not in Socrates' own, he omits the definite article, thusthistime keeping the gender appropriately indeterminate.
134 Thispointedly anonymized usage in the Theaetetus seems to me to lend strong support to Burnyeat's interpretation of ‘the god’ in the Apology, against the rejoinder of Reeve (2000), who argues that the expression refers throughout straightforwardly to Apollo (although I happily concede that Socrates' artful vagueness isdesigned to permit such an understanding). I am not of course denying that in middle-period dialogues Plato does allow Socrates to acknowledge individual divinities, including Apollo.
distrust of local religious custom, is recognizably the Socrates of Plato's Apology. And it is this same Socrates' moral religiosity and consequent commitment to absolute values that Plato, by carefully interlacing it with themes from the Republic and other dialoguesof hismaturity, celebratesashaving blazed a trail for hisown greatest discovery, the transcendent realm of moral Forms.