The Last of the Wine: A Novel

NOTES ON SOME OF THE CHARACTERS

Alexias AND HIS FAMILY are all fictional persons.

Lysis appears in Plato’s eponymous dialogue on Friendship, as a lad of about fifteen. Plato quite commonly draws youthful portraits of people (e.g. Charmides, Alkibiades) who were in fact considerably his elders. The family details there given of Lysis suggest he was a real Athenian; but no more is known of him, beyond a comment of Diogenes Laertius that “by conversing with Sokrates, Lysis became an excellent person.” Even this may well be only a gloss upon Plato.

The account here given of Phaedo’s origins is from Diogenes Laertius. He calls him an Elian; but Grote points out that the Melians, not the Elians, were enslaved at a consistent date. After Sokrates’ death Phaedo lived in Elis, founding the Eleatic School, noted for its severe negative dialectic, derived from Sokrates’ elenchos. Athenaeus says that Phaedo used to disclaim the opinions Plato attributes to him. But the Phaedo attributes none; which strongly suggests that Plato, from delicacy, made Simmias and Kebes the spokesmen of a scepticism meant for his. Perhaps he had abandoned it; perhaps he thought his own dialectic would have been less easily demolished. It seems clear that a widening intellectual gulf separated the two friends.

No history of Xenophon’s youth has come down to us, beyond the anecdote of his first meeting with Sokrates, in Diogenes Laertius. His Memorabilia, and his handbooks on Hunting, Riding, the Command of Cavalry and Estate Management, supply his social and psychological background. The tradition that he was captured by the Thebans offers a likely origin for his friendship with Proxenos, whom he would have difficulty in meeting otherwise because of the war. In his own vivid account of the Persian Expedition, he relates how Proxenos was treacherously murdered. Xenophon himself was exiled for serving under Cyrus, and never saw Sokrates again.

Plato was credited by later generations with having won crowns for wrestling at all the principal Hellenic Games; but it seems unlikely that he devoted so much time to it after reaching manhood. He is generally believed to have contended at the Isthmus; and, owing to the exigencies of the war, 412 seems the likeliest year. Frequent allusions to wrestling in his Dialogues all show an expert grasp of its principles. His trainer is said to have given him his nickname.

In his Seventh Epistle he has described his change of heart during the tyranny, and disgust at the treatment of Sokrates. That he intervened with Kritias is only a conjecture; it seems not unlikely that Charmides did so too. Xenophon relates the incident of Euthydemos, Sokrates’ public rebuke, and his interview with Kritias during the tyranny. If Plato did save Sokrates, it would not be remarkable to find no mention of it in Xenophon, whose only reference to Plato, throughout his memoir of Sokrates, occurs in passing, during a derogatory judgement on a younger brother. Plato never mentions Xenophon at all. The cause is unknown.

Plato’s famous epitaph on Aster ends with the word “phthimenois”, which can refer to the waning or setting of a star, to extinction in general, or, specifically, to death from phthisis. The poem opens with a word-play; there may or may not be one at the end. It is full of heavily-charged, evocative words, only a part of whose feeling can be rendered in any translation.

Regarding Sokrates, I have leaned on the whole to Xenophon’s account of his life and teaching, without considering that it discredits the evidence of Plato, who probably met him on a very different plane. A tradition is preserved that his temper was naturally violent and that on the rare occasions when it escaped his control his language was uninhibited; which Xenophon’s story seems to confirm. Diogenes Laertius says that enraged citizens sometimes assaulted him in the street, and quotes his comment about the donkey.

In the year 399 B.C., shortly after this story closes, Sokrates was indicted by Melitos, Lykon the father of Autolykos, and Anytos, as follows: “Sokrates is guilty of refusing to recognise the gods recognised by the City, and of introducing other new divinities. He is also guilty of corrupting the youth. The penalty demanded is death.”

It may well be that Lykon held Sokrates responsible for forming the character of Kritias, and felt himself to be avenging the murder of his son. But according to Xenophon’s account, Sokrates himself after his trial seems to have regarded Anytos as his principal enemy, “I told him it became him ill to bring up his son in a tanyard.” (Xenophon adds that the young man soon became a chronic alcoholic and so died.) Plato represents Sokrates as making a fool of Anytos in argument; Diogenes Laertius adds that Anytos could not endure ridicule and never forgave it. It is to Plutarch that we owe the anecdote about Alkibiades, who seems always to have left, from youth till death, an enduring impress on the imaginations of those whose lives he crossed.

I have generally preferred the Greek spelling of names to the Latin, because it is more Greek, and because in particular the substitution of soft c for k produces such gross distortion of the sound. Here and there, however, to avoid disturbing the reader who is fond of them, I have kept some Latinisms specially hallowed by association; such as Plato for Platon, Phaedo for Phaidon, and a number of common place-names.