Minor Socratics

Abstract

Minor Socratics (Socratici minori, Petits Socratiques, Kleine Sokratiker) are conventionally labelled the direct disciples of Socrates that already in Antiquity were known as Sokratikoi. Indeed, they founded the so-called “Socratic Schools” or “Minor Socratic Schools.” From this perspective, it was understood that Plato was the “major” Socratic. During the 20th and 21st century a new critical approach emerged which gradually separated Plato from the group of the Socratics as such. In this way, because of the complexity of his thought and its huge theoretical influence (in Antiquity and beyond), Plato gained his own place in the history of ancient philosophy. As a consequence of that, scholarship prefers today to easily label as “Socratics” those philosophers who have been called for a long time “Minor Socratics.” The Socratics are as follows: Antisthenes of Athens, Euclides of Megara, Aristippus of Cyrene, Phaedo of Elis, and Aeschines of Sphettus. According to the ancient historiography, Antisthenes founded the Cynic school (while the modern scholarship tends to make Diogenes of Sinope the founder of Cynism); in his turn, Euclides of Megara founded the Megarian school (a school that seems to be strictly connected with the so-called Dialectic school, although the links of the two movements have been not yet entirely clarified); Phaedo of Elis was the founder of the Eliac school, whose thought was later followed by the Eretrian school, which was founded by Menedemus of Eretria; finally, Aristippus of Cyrene founded the Cyrenaic school. Aeschines of Sphettus was the only Socratic philosopher who did not found an own school. The terms Sokratikos and Sokratikoi were coined very early, during the last decades of the 4th century bce. They are already attested in the Peripatetic Phaenias of Eresus. Phaenias wrote a book On the Socratics, and this fact proves that the group of the Socratics had been already established before the Hellenistic historiography. Moreover, Phaenias explicitely refers to Antisthenes (= SSR V A 172). On this regard, also the testimonium on Antisthenes (= SSR V A 22) by the historian Theopompus of Chios is very important. In Diogenes Laertius one can find more complex distinctions. In II 47 the “most representative” successors of Socrates, who were called Socratics, are Plato, Xenophon, and Antisthenes. Within the same passage Diogenes Laertius specifies that, among the ten Socratics that the tradition knows, “the most illustrious” are four: Aeschines, Phaedo, Euclides, and Aristippus. The division of these “ten Socratics notorius to the tradition” cannot be identified with the division of the ten schools of ethics, of whom Diogenes Laertius speaks in the proemium of his work (I 18–19). However, much of these schools ideally developed from Socrates, because they were founded either by the Socratics or by their pupils.