I’ve known more than a few professors who enjoy turning the classroom into a stage. My own foray into the dramatic came several years ago, when I decided to bring Socrates to life in my “Cultural Perspectives” course. I had done a bit of acting in high school and college, but all I’d performed for students were occasional imitations of annoying celebrities. I thought Socrates would make an ideal subject for dramatic treatment because his story is, indeed, high drama, and because his trial in ancient Athens is a watershed moment in our intellectual history.
“Cultural Perspectives” is required of all our students, and the challenge of reading great books is daunting for many of them. Those who were raised on Eminem and Grand Theft Auto often struggle with Greek philosophy and Roman history. No matter how much we stress the influence of classical culture on contemporary life, there is simply too great a chasm between that world and ours.
Each year I ask students to read Socrates’ Apology as we consider the importance of education to a well-lived life. Students who are convinced that the real purpose of college is to get a better job and enjoy a higher standard of living (nearly all of them) are skeptical of Socrates’ notion that material well-being should be secondary to questions of truth, beauty, and purpose. Philosophical understanding, they have been told through the media, is, at best, a distraction from the skills needed to attain worldly success.
So once a year, to bring home the issues at stake in Socrates’ trial before the Athenian Council, I enter the room in a toga. The students are shocked to see their professor emerging from a side entrance in such unfamiliar dress. At first there are a few murmurs and titters, but as I maintain the bearing and attitude of a visitor from the ancient world, they soon buy in to the illusion. (I try for a Greek accent in the vein of the father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding). I talk about my love for Athens and ask them to tell me about their cities: Do they have great theaters? Temples to their gods?
I then re-enact that moment in 399 BC when Socrates was put on trial for corrupting the youth and teaching false gods. First I explain that I am on trial not so much for what I have been teaching, but because of old prejudices against me. From the day the oracle at Delphi revealed that I was the “wisest of all,” I became a target for those who felt I was a troublemaker and a nuisance.
There is a common notion that professors are arrogant and overbearing. Perhaps the risk of appearing silly is a small price to pay to keep my professional ego in check.
Every generation has such “nuisances": Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, Ralph Nader and Rachel Carson, Tea Party members and Occupy Wall Street protesters. Such people are often the target of public suspicion and government reprisals. They are investigated, arrested on false charges, have their tax records scrutinized, and sometimes they are assassinated. The dangers of challenging the status quo are ever-present.
I then address the particular charges that have been brought against me. I usually pick some unsuspecting student and make him my Meletus, the citizen who brought formal charges against Socrates. Although the student may not remember specific passages from the Apology, the answers to the questions Socrates poses are usually self-evident. If the student stumbles, I simply correct him or her with a reference to what actually happened.
In the end, Meletus is forced to admit either that I, Socrates, have committed such “crimes” unknowingly and should have been corrected rather than arrested, or that, in fact, there were no crimes, simply some trumped-up charges brought against an unpopular teacher. But the jury finds Socrates guilty and sentences him to death. I note, as did Socrates, that a handful of voters were the margin of difference on whether he lived or died.
Socrates’ final speech is a combination of resentment and resignation. The resentment comes through in his curse on his accusers: “And I prophesy to you who are my murderers, that immediately after my death punishment far heavier than you have inflicted on me will surely await you.”
It is not that Socrates wishes divine judgment on his foes; he simply believes that a government that will not learn from its critics is unlikely to survive. Although Athens did not experience immediate destruction, it did eventually fall prey to unethical leaders. And the struggle epitomized by Socrates between liberal democracies with freedom of dissent and tyrannical leaders who stifle opposition continues to our own day.
Having made his parting shot at the Athenian hard-liners, Socrates accepts his fate with resignation. The man being put to death for his atheism ponders what life after death might hold, and he reflects with pleasure on the thought of conversing with great writers like Hesiod and Homer.
And the person convicted for corrupting the youth makes an appeal to the men of Athens to look after his own children:
When my sons are grown up, I would ask you, O my friends, to punish them; and I would have you trouble them, as I have troubled you, if they seem to care about riches, or anything, more than about virtue; or if they pretend to be something when they are really nothing, then reprove them, as I have reproved you, for not caring about that for which they ought to care, and thinking that they are something when they are really nothing.
This speech still has great power, and by the time I reach this point in the monologue, my students seem genuinely moved by Socrates’ appeal for his own children, and by extension, all the children of Athens. They seem to understand that ideas have consequences, and that a just society requires courage as well as wisdom.
Former students inquire if I am still dressing up as Socrates. They may have forgotten some of the finer points of the Apology, but they remember that Socrates gave up his life rather than his freedom to speak truth to power.
I have sometimes thought about giving up the monologue. It’s tedious to rehearse my lines every year, and it sometimes seems more effort than it’s worth. But the real reason I contemplate giving up is the threat of humiliation. Will my colleagues think of this as a cheap stunt? Will I be accused of pandering to students? Is such a re-enactment beneath the dignity of not only a professor but the college dean? (In fact, I seldom mention to colleagues that I’ve given such a dramatic monologue in costume.)
But if I am humbled by my appearance as Socrates, that may be a good thing. After all, Socrates warns against those who “pretend to be something when they are really nothing.” There is a common notion that professors are arrogant and overbearing. Perhaps the risk of appearing silly is a small price to pay to keep my professional ego in check.
So when next September rolls around, I will once again don the toga, stand before a new group of freshmen, and tell them, in Socrates’ own words, how he would rather die than recant his teaching, defiant to the end. It is a story every generation needs to hear.
David W. Chapman is a professor of English and dean of the Howard College of Arts and Sciences at Samford University.
