The Funniest Joke in History

These days, hardly anyone gets the joke and if I’m entirely honest? I can’t see the situation getting any better. History will, I suppose, say we were so sharp that we cut ourselves fatally. Assuming History even bothers to note the joke in the first place. It seems more people are missing the point each day, so who is to say that posterity will get even the faintest notion that Plato was the greatest satirist who ever lived?

My name, for what it is worth, is Lachesis. I may be one of the last men walking under the bronzed sky who remembers the laughter of the Symposium as Plato gave his first reading of Apology. I know for certain that no-one but me remains of those clever, desperate men who came up with the idea of using our respective gifts to both promote and defend the ideal of Athenian democracy after our city had lost so much in the ruinous war against Sparta. The times were dark (though not, I must concede, so dark as they are now) and we were by no means alone in fearing that the conquering Spartans would enslave and extinguish Athens and it’s culture in much the same way as they had done to the Messenians al those years ago. Armed resistance was not an option, and even if it had been I must confess, somewhat shamefacedly, that we would never have taken that option. Our talents lay in other arenas; those of philosophy, poetry, rhetoric, and politics.

You may very well snigger at that. And, in truth, I would not blame you for doing so. The last Athenian government did not, and they were perhaps the only ones who didn’t. The Spartan conquerors did, and it was that condescending laughter from them that spared our lives and allowed us to continue writing, adding to the great joke that would rescue democracy. As I have mentioned, the times were doom-laden and the city was rife with mutterings against the government who were to be the stewards of the fall of Athens. How, asked the mob, had the great Democracy which was the envy of cities all over Greece and beyond, been driven to the brink of defeat by a city of rapacious, barely civilised warriors whose barbarity would’ve shocked even barbarians? How had we not been able to lead the rest of Greece into the enlightened age that the fathers of Democracy had promised? Was this not a sign that Athens’ experiment had failed, and should be abandoned in favour of something more in line with the leaderships of their enemies? “A tyrant would never have allowed this to happen!” was a common enough cry in the streets, jostling for pre-eminence amongst others who favoured monarchies, oligarchies, and the like.

It was with this as our backdrop that we presented our counter-propaganda proposal to the Council of 500. Cratylus spoke first;

“My fellow citizens, on behalf of my comrades I thank you for gifting us your precious time. I swear that gift we have to offer in exchange is of an equal value to you.

You know (how can you not?) that the streets are awash with talk of abandoning democracy in the face of our most desolate hour. You know too that to do so would invite not just defeat, but ignominy that will echo down the ages. The Athenians will gain a reputation for high-minded talk when it suits them, and for abandoning any of the principles that we have tried to instruct the world in when things go against us. We share what is no doubt your view that even, in fact especially, in times such as these we must hold fast to the course set for us by Solon and by Ephialtes.

Yet you must also have arrived at the same conclusions that we have; that to try to force the mob to see that Democracy must be adhered to would be counter-productive. To enforce a measure by strength of arms and tell the people that it is for their own good? That would be folly on the scale of Midas!”

At this point, I confess to a certain watery feeling in my bowels. Judging by the angered expressions that peppered the council at that last remark of Cratylus’, almost a quarter of that august body did not think that such a thing would be folly in the least. I suppose that in any system of government, no matter what its overall virtues, there will always be those who will see those that oppose them as an implacable enemy. Furthermore, they see an enemy that can only be curbed with harsh words and brutal treatment in order to impose the ‘correct’ beliefs on them. Whilst I of course abhor the blood thirst of such men, I had no wish to be seen aligning myself directly against them at such a delicate juncture in our history. Cratylus continued;

“No, to win back the mob to acceptance the true ways of governance will require something quite different from the oppressive measures that our enemies of the Peloponnesus use to whip their people into obedience. We need to appeal to the hearts of our people.”

Cratylus paused, and allowed a half smile to slowly appear. This had the usual effect in that the council, even those still outraged by the implication that they were of a no better heart and morality than the Spartans who sought our destruction, quieted down and waited to see where these fine words were leading them.

“Fellow citizens, if I were to ask you who was the worst fruit of the Athenian tree, would you tell me ‘Peisistratus; that fellow was the rankest that ever there was’? Judging by your silence (and, if I may say so of such eminent men, your puzzlement) I would assume you think he is not.

Would you all cry “There have been none so foul in our history as Hippias! The cur betrayed us to Spartans and Persians for his own profit!”? Again, I would say that the answer would be no.

And why should that be? Why should these two vice-sodden men be counted only among the lower ranks of those who have done evil to our fair city? Fellow citizens, I think we all know the answer to that question. It is because we have the worst example of what Athens has to offer within our living memory, and so we have no reason to plunder tales of our ancestors to find our city’s darkest demon.

Who is it that I speak of? Why, I am sure that I do not even need to recount any of his infamy for you to know. The man who, in the name of Philosophy, filled the heads of the sons of our greatest citizens with blackened, charred obscenities. The man who stood by, smugly claiming that the attempted coup of his students was ‘no business of his’. The man who the mob would have torn to pieces with their bare hands once the depth of his venal, self-serving sophistry was revealed had he not beat a hasty retreat to Hades with the aid of a cup of Hemlock. Fellow citizens, I see by your faces that you know of whom I speak. But I ask of you, say his name to me so that we are all in agreement before my friends and I continue.”

Cratylus’ voice had strengthened and the rhythm of his words quickened as he approached this point of his speech. I could see the puzzlement that had been so impertinently mentioned begin to melt away and be replaced with savage amusement as Cratylus led them down a merry path to the name of the man who would have seen Athens fall to a tyranny worse even than the yoke of Sparta. As one, they answered his question;

“Socrates!”

Cratylus beamed at the council, as if they had just unpicked a riddle set by Apollo himself.

“Socrates. The pot-bellied, pig brained degenerate himself. Yes my fellow citizens, Socrates. Of whom the best that can be said about his teaching is that if he was filling a pupil’s arse with his cock then at least he wasn’t filling their hearts with horseshit”.

A few scandalised gasps at this (surely forced and faked for the benefit of reputations more than anything else), but mainly the council rumbled with what mirth could still be coaxed from a leadership staring into the abyss.

“But what about him, you may be asking yourselves. Who cares about a dead villain? What use is idle talk of a monster from the past when we now have other monsters on our doorstep? My fellow citizens, I shall presently give way to my friend Plato who will explain in words more apt than I just how we shall use Socrates. It will be a great irony my friends, for we shall be using the man who tried to sow the seeds for the death of democracy to ensure that it does not just weather the Spartan storm, but thrives!”

To his credit, he clearly didn’t expect applause as he gave way to Plato. As you may have gathered from his words, he was a great one for self-promotion through rhetoric, old Cratylus. We’d always assumed that was another joke; the loquacious Cratylus of Athens, direct descendant of that other Cratylus who renounced the spoken word and communicated only by pointing at words he’d drawn in the dust. His boy is one of Aristotle’s pupils now. I’d say his father did a good job with him, although he’s too serious by half; he thinks of the whole world as a logic puzzle that can never be solved. Anyway, please excuse an old man’s digressions. Cratylus swiftly gave way to Plato, allowing not one moment between the ending of his speech and the beginning of Plato’s so that the council could not interrupt the flow of what was being said.

Plato was an unusual man to be speaking to the council. He was making a name for himself as a poet and satirist in Athens, and was a young man at the time. He had spoken at the Symposium a few times, and even once at the Assembly. But never before the Council, though if he truly was nervous then he did not show it.

“Citizens of the Council, I thank you. Socrates and his teachings are a byword for greed, venality, treachery, and vice. No decree was required from any leading citizen to destroy his books after his trial; so complete was his fall from grace that even those few philosophers outside of Greece and Alexandria burnt such works of his that they had in their possession rather than risk his poison dripping into the ears of antiquity. Within a few more years it will be as if he had never existed, save as the punchline to a ribald cookhouse joke. I think we can all agree that this is a good thing, can we not?”

A sea of furiously nodding heads erupted at this. Plato nodded sagely; a good move, as the council always liked to hear from men who agreed with them.

“Yet although he is dead and his teachings anathema to all, we do not live in a city that is content with the Democracy that he tried so hard to destroy. Many are of the opinion that, although Socrates railed and raged against we democrats, his aim of getting rid of Democracy was not such a bad one. It was only that which he sought to replace it with (which was, as I hardly need remind you, a travesty of good governance with himself as a debauched and flaccid ‘Philosopher Prince’ at the titular head of such a state) which made him such a villain.

Citizens of the Council, I ask you this; would these people be so keen to abandon democracy to some lesser form of government if they thought that these other forms would have been Socrates’ final aim? I ask you to consider this; if the people of Athens felt that Socrates had been in favour of, perhaps, an Oligarchic government under the watch of his beady eyes? Or a tyranny? A monarchy perhaps? Can any of you imagine how utterly bankrupt something would become in the eyes of the mob of Athens if it was seen to be allied with the desires of Socrates himself?

If you will allow, I have taken the liberty of composing a satire taking this very notion as my starting point. In it, I have placed the honeyed and plausible words of those enemies of democracy in the mouth of Socrates himself. I have made him unrecognisable from the uncouth lout that we all know he was, and made him into a man who (if Athens did not know the truth of him) is a paragon of reason and intellect. And I have then made him speak approvingly of both those people and those ideas that run contrary to the survival of Athenian democracy. If I may…”

And Plato began to read. The smiles came quickly to the faces of the council, far quicker than they had during anything Cratylus said and quicker still than when it came to be my turn to speak to them. The laughs took longer, but slowly and inexorably they came. Plato was a writer of true genius; starting with a nod to the feigned ignorance that hid Socrates’ base cunning, he built up a verbal picture that was hilarious precisely due to its utterly bizarre nature. The replies to the charges brought against him by Anytus, Meletus, and Lycon were far from the incoherent vitriol that he had actually brought to bear. They were plausible sounding and had the ring of a deeper truth about them. But to be delivered by such a grotesque, darkly comic figure as Socrates would have left the listener in no doubt that these words, though they may seem soothing to a mind fogged with the terror of the oncoming Spartans, were nothing more than the lies of a traitor.

Plato gave way to rapturous applause as I came forward to outline to the Council just how we would use satires such as this to bolster the Athenian commitment to democracy. There were some on the council who disapproved of what we were proposing, feeling that it was little better than trickery on their part. They said that they had no wish to deceive the Athenians into backing Democracy. At the time, I was able to dismiss such concerns as the worrying of womanish old men (and being of no small comedic gifts myself, was able to do so whilst keeping even those who had objected smiling). With the benefit of hindsight, I am inclined to think that those womanish old men were the wisest people in the council. Ah, but regrets are the main coin of we who have seen all that they have sown grow into a bitter harvest. You will, I trust, forgive me for more digression from the main thrust of what I have to say, but I will remind you again; we were young. We were fiercely intelligent, and believed that we knew better than the old men of the Council. Whilst they had shepherded Athens’ democracy, we believed we would be its sheepdogs; fighting off the many wolves who would tear our flock apart. Now I am older and I recognise our naivety for what it truly was.

The Apology was read out across the city within a few days. Our allies too wished to take advantage of our propaganda, subtly altering here and there to ensure that their citizens too would get the joke; that anything championed by Socrates was a sure path to damnation and suffering. We all received the warm thanks of the council, Plato more so than anyone. Seemingly inspired by the use of Socrates as a Philosophical device, he wrote many more works designed to ridicule those who held views contrary to those of the greater body of the Assembly and Council; Crito saw Socrates arguing for justice from a prison cell, and caused hilarity when first read. Laches silenced those citizens who called for surrender to the Spartans, saying that perseverance in the face of fortitude was no courage at all. Other works such as these helped rally Athens to the common good of our Democracy.

And it was all for naught. Athens still fell, and the 30 Tyrants began their rule. We were fortunate that they cared little for our wordplay and linguistic games. So we wished to write comedies that glorified an old sot? As long as we contented ourselves with clever words that did not stray into politics too overtly, then we were left to our own devices. The Tyrants ruled in the name of their Spartan masters, and did so with no small degree of viciousness. Plato for his part revisited the Apology, rewriting some parts to make Socrates (for all his incalculable vices) seem morally superior to those people who now controlled our city. So subtle were the changes that they were not noticed by any of the Tyrants’ men until the whole city had heard the new version. Similar changes were put into all of his other works to that point. This Socrates, whilst still the epitome of all that could be wrong with Athens, was used to make the Tyrants and their masters seem even lower than he.

Plato’s words were far too clever by half for the Tyrants. The end of their reign was brought about in no small part by the democratic fervour whipped up by his seemingly endless river of witty, inventive satires that helped make the people unafraid of their bullying masters. Once such a mindset had been forged, the Tyrants were doomed to meet their end.

After that, Athens was free from the dominion of anyone but Athenians. Plato had no reason to continue his polemics and savage attacks on the enemies of democracy, and he began gradually to work on matters that were closer to his actual philosophical interests; the cosmological musings of Empedocles and Protagoras were his chief passions. However, he still held bitterness in his heart for the militarism and vicious arrogance of the Tyrants, and for the many still-extant tyrannies that pock-marked Greece like boils on a Persian Princess. So he dusted off Socrates-as-literary-device one final time, and wrote a scathing rebuke of those who believed that a perfect state involved having one man sat at its head; The Republic.

Had Plato been content to read it in his newly founded Academy, then no doubt things would have ended there. But he was growing proud as well as old, and the acclaim afforded to him by his fellow Athenians was not enough for him. He wanted universal recognition of his gifts, and so he charged his Academy students to take Republic back to their homelands so that other cities would hear of and appreciate his work.

Unfortunately, Plato’s naivety had not shrunk in proportion to the growth of his ego. What was recognisable as satire to even the most ignorant Athenian was less so to a Persian, or a Syracusian, or even someone so near as a Corinthian. Where we saw the morally bankrupt words of a cunning fool, they saw the well reasoned arguments of an intelligent man. What we knew to be Socrates’ hack-Sophism was translated by Plato’s beautifully written comedy into compelling philosophy.

At first, we all thought little of this. We didn’t care whether more ignorant cities missed the point; that gave us one more thing to laugh at them for. In our hatred of the arrogance of our conquerors, it appears that we had allowed ourselves to sink into the arrogance of the conquered, in that we sneered at any and every man who was not an Athenian. We had lost because we were not as obsessed with force of arms as these barely-cultured Greeks surrounding us were. So it therefore followed that we Athenians were the most cultured, and the most concerned with matters of intellect out of all the cities of Greece. I suppose that such was the puncture to our armour of pride caused by our defeat against Sparta that we thought along such lines purely as a method of preserving our Athenian identities. But then again, maybe I’m just making excuses. For whatever the reason, we allowed the misconceptions to spread unchallenged for almost 15 years.

By this time, there were few outside of Athens who thought of Socrates as he really was. From villages on the highest mountains to colonies across the bronze sea, everyone spoke of the erudition and common sense of Socrates. Plato has recently tried to correct this misconception, charging one of his finest pupils to counter the fallacious Socratic thought that has swept the world. But it seems that this Aristotle is as much concerned with chiding his teacher for his pride as he is for ending the insidious spread of the venomous teachings that Plato placed in the mouth of Socrates. Disheartened and ashamed, Plato writes little these days. He seems tired, too tired to even attempt to correct the mistake that is starting to see works of satire being treated with the utmost po-faced seriousness by men who must surely lack a developed sense of humour.

I too feel I can do little to combat this monster of Plato’s creation. I am merely a poet whose works number less than 30, none of which can even be quoted now even though the most recent was written less than 2 years ago (and I would be lying if I said that that did not sting my soul more than a little). This, then, is my attempt. Not for me the duplicity and trickery that Plato first used, and which now seems to be getting compounded by Aristotle. No, I shall settle on what I now believe we should have stuck to in the first place. I have told you the truth. Though if Plato is as good a writer as I believe he is, much good it will do you. Soon the joke will become the truth. And if anyone actually tried to apply the thoughts and ideals outlined in, say, Republic? Then I truly don’t believe that anyone will be laughing.