Historian’s note: Yet another Socratic dialogue has been unearthed. Many qualities point to this dialogue having been written by the author of the two other newly discovered Socratic dialogues — Aikaterina and Ilioloustos. The same distinctions exist here that were seen in those.
THE LOST SOCRATIC DIALOGUE — μέλισσα
(Socrates is discussing death with his friend Ikios as they walk through the streets of Athens. They come to the town square where they see a woman standing on a pedestal, surrounded by a group of Athenians.)
μέλισσα: Listen here, Athenians. Another Olympian has died. A healthy adult, dead unexpectedly. We should stand up and let our leaders know we will not sit by and allow them to kill us with their poisons.
HATHANA: Hurrah! Yes, we must speak up for the dead!
GULGIANA: Thank you for your bravery in speaking out against this crime of the state!
μέλισσα: We must get the families to speak up since it is obvious there is a common denominator with all of these sudden deaths!
(Socrates turns to his friend Ikios)
SOCRATES: I wonder what she is talking about.
IKIOS: Socrates, you remember we went to school with her. She is called Honeybee by her friends. She has been flying about, like a bee from flower to flower, spreading the idea across Athens that the medicine used to treat the plague is killing more people than the plague itself.
SOCRATES: I remember her. We were once friends. I tried to speak to her a little while ago concerning these rumors she is spreading, but she would not listen to me. I know the Olympian she speaks of. His cause of death has not been revealed, so it is interesting she claims to know the circumstances of his death. Is there truth to the rumor?
IKIOS: You would have to ask her.
(Socrates approaches μέλισσα through the crowd and addresses her.)
SOCRATES: Excuse me, Honeybee. I am familiar with the case of the Olympian who has died, and the other young Olympians who have died over the years. You say there is an obvious common denominator. What is the commonality among them? It seems to me that since the cause of this athlete’s death has not been revealed it is premature to draw conclusions about how he died, or whether it bears a relation to any other athlete’s death. What do you know that we do not?
(μέλισσα hears Socrates and ignores him. She continues her diatribe.)
μέλισσα: How many people must die before we muster the courage to fight the rulers poisoning our people? Will we stand idly by while they poison our children, our husbands, our wives?
SOCRATES: Do you have no answer? I guess the obvious common denominator is not so obvious.
μέλισσα: Socrates, I have not seen or heard from you in over twenty years. I do not know you and until now did not even know you lived in my city. I actually find this odd and unsettling that after all these years you are following me around and scrutinizing what I am saying. I will be filing a restraining order against you.
SOCRATES: That is a puzzling response to a reasonable question. Although you may find it odd and unsettling that I ask a simple question of you, that is normal behavior in the context of a public diatribe. Questions are to be expected, and a person who grasps what they are asserting should be able to respond to good-faith challenges about their claims. I think it is weird to be so shaken by such a mundane occurrence. Although you pretend not to know me, we were once friends, and I spoke to you only a few months back. I think your feigned outrage is designed to hide the fact that you have formed a conclusion about this athlete’s death that you cannot convincingly defend.
μέλισσα: Guard!
(μέλισσα screams for the guard, who rushes to her. She points to Socrates and demands that he be removed, and never allowed within a city block of her ever again. The guard nods and removes Socrates from the area.)
THE END
Historian’s closing remarks: No reader can come away from this dialogue without noticing its similarity to the other two newly found dialogues. The motifs by now seem so humorous and repetitive that one assumes they are products of invention, not reflections of real conversations. Once again Socrates attempts to engage a woman in dialogue about the qualities of her claims. Are the claims true? Do they make sense? Are there unfounded assumptions behind these claims? What is the justification for these assumptions?
Our expectation, informed by the genre of Socratic dialogue, is that we are about to witness a thoughtful exchange between two people thinking seriously about an idea the first party has introduced in a public forum. The person who has proposed these ideas will meet Socrates’s challenge with a response that shows they have put considerable thought into them, but upon further questioning we see the ideas do not quite survive scrutiny.
The author of these dialogues, however, seems to flip conventions and treat us instead to a more disappointing scene: a rapid departure from intellectual give-and-take, no attempt to craft an argument in defense of an idea, infantile appeals to emotion and authority, and what must certainly be a caricature of the person to whom Socrates is speaking, portraying them in a negative light. Recent scholarship, driven by the fashions of our time, has pointed out that these writings could not have been by Plato or Xenophon, because there is obvious misogyny in them that was not present in other Socratic dialogues. These claims are made by our colleagues who point to the fact that there are two things and two things alone that distinguish these dialogues from the rest of the genre: The people Socrates is speaking with are women, where before they have always been men, and the people he is speaking to are portrayed as shallow, dumb, emotional, reactive, and incapable of intelligent exchange, shutting down the conversation instead of engaging with ideas. Thoughts in the academy seem to be split. Our colleagues boldly claim that these writings are sexist propaganda by an anonymous Greek philosopher who was not creative enough to come up with compelling philosophical conversations like Plato, and so he let them spiral out of control into senseless garbage right away.
Others claim that these dialogues were not intended to convey any political or social message, but were instead intended to show a more realistic, modern form of philosophical interaction. That is, these dialogues answer the question: “If Socrates were alive today, would he find those making bold claims willing to have a conversation about them, or would he find dogmatic personalities too wrapped up in their own sense of self-righteous certainty to pause and reflect on the things they say? Is it possible that perhaps the people making such bloated and irreverent claims might also be too emotionally delicate to survive a mild challenge to their beliefs without seeking the comfort in knowing Socrates will never again be able to cast doubt on their sacred beliefs?”
If this contingent of the academy is right, then these dialogues are a cynical statement about the intellectual character of our society. One still has to ask, though: if these are products of fiction, did Socrates’s opponents all have to be women? Are the critics right in saying that these writings are fictions designed to poke fun at stereotypes of women? Since the dialogues seem to rely so heavily on behavior that is visibly stereotypical, this is taken as evidence that they must not have really happened, because we know stereotypes are always false. This historian hopes that if any more Socratic dialogues are uncovered, and they share this cynical tone toward our society, they will at least feature men spiraling into over-reactive nonsense instead of women. My fingers are crossed.
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