“Socrates himself seems not to have been interested in any revolutionary implications of his discourse, but they were not lost on some of the young men who enjoyed watching him dissect the flawed logic of his interlocutors.
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The most vicious of the self-styled Socratics was Critias, not only the leader of the oligarchs who seized control of Athens in 404. but a prolific writer on political-philosophical subjects. His grave monument reportedly featured the personification of Oligarchy setting fire to personified Democracy. His epitaph read: ‘This is a memorial to those excellent men who, for a short time, restrained the arrogance of the cursed Athenian demos.’
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It was in part because the Athenians supposed that Critias had learned his evil ways from him, that Socrates was convicted at his trial and executed.”
— Josiah Ober, “Political conflicts, political debates and political thought”,
in Robin Osborne (ed.) Classical Greece, p. 130.
3 Comments
I wish today’s politicians would have the balls to get pictures of the financial and social elite gleefully burning personifications of democracy put up on their tombstones too.
I guess the “problem”, if you want to call it that, is that many today’s politicians owe their careers to democracy; without it they would hardly have amounted to much, and consequently they probably don’t feel like doing things like that.
Luckily, the timocratic element in Norwegian politics is virtually non-existant.
But it would doubtlessly have been so much more awesome, I’ll agree with that.
You’ll note that I never said politicians, I said financial and social elite.