A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

world and challenged every kind of convention. The playwright Euripides, for
instance, used the rewriting of ancient myths to disturb the complacencies of his
audiences, while the dramas of Aristophanes mercilessly lampooned leading
figures of the day, including the philosopher Socrates in The Clouds. After 431,
this unabashed freedom of expression took place against the background of the
Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, when one would have expected
free speech to be curtailed. The case of Socrates, who offended his fellow
citizens through the alleged corruption of the young and attempts ‘to introduce
new gods’, and was executed in 399, shows that Athenian tolerance had its
limits. Yet it was this example that inspired Socrates’ fellow Athenian Plato to
develop his own antidemocratic philosophy, which, paradoxically, the tolerant
atmosphere of Athens gave him the opportunity to do.
The Greeks were sophisticated enough to realise that the use of words can
easily be coloured by emotion. The Sicilian orator Gorgias put it well in a speech
on Helen of Troy he made in Athens in the 420S BC: ‘The power of speech has
the same relationship to the order of the soul as the order of drugs has to the
nature of bodies. For just as different drugs expel different humours from the
body and some put a stop to illness, others to life, so too some speeches cause
pain, some pleasure, some fear, some induce confidence in the listeners, some
drug and bewitch the soul with a certain bad persuasion.’ 6 The response of the
great teacher of rhetoric of the period, Isocrates (436-338 BC), to these fears of
the ‘bewitching of the soul’ was that the speaker must be trained in moral
goodness so as not to exploit the vulnerabilities of his audience.
However, Isocrates’ contemporary Plato (c.429-347 BC) went further.
Shocked by the way the mob had condemned his hero Socrates, he attempted to
place philosophical discussion on a much more stable basis. Central to his own
philosophy was the belief that a world of Ideas or Forms, which were much
more ‘real’ than anything in the volatile world he saw around him, could be
grasped by the reasoning mind. His was essentially an elitist philosophy; only a
few, Plato said, had the intellectual capacity and discipline to reach an
understanding of the other world, but once they had, they had the key to
something vastly superior to anything that could be experienced in everyday life.
The Forms were arranged in a hierarchy, with some easier to grasp . than others
but the lower Forms led on to the higher ones. So the Forms of Justice and
Beauty would each contain something that could be termed ‘Good’, although the
essence of this ‘Good’ would be different for each. However, they could each
make up one strand of a higher Form, ‘the Good’, which would be at the summit