Pauperism and Theology: Divine Influences on Socrates’ Choice of Poverty?

The essay argues in favor of the general hypothesis that Socrates believed in the existence of a god, who led him to deliberately embrace poverty and spend his time philosophizing, rather than pursuing financially rewarding activities. Indeed, both Plato’s Apology of Socrates and Xenophon’s first book of the Memorabilia report such an idea, although they disagree as to certain details. The former depicts poverty as an evil and Socrates’ embrace of it as being due to his decision to obey a providential deity who is interested in morally improving humankind and uses the philosopher to this end. The latter text instead presents a Socrates who becomes poor in order to imitate a self-sufficient divinity that has no needs. According to this perspective, Socrates considers poverty a good which leads to a blessed condition close to that of a god. Since we do not possess enough evidence to decide whether it is the Platonic or the Xenophontean account which represents the true position of the historical Socrates, the essay deliberately leaves the problem unsettled and outlines a second hypothesis, which may further be developed in future studies. These two representations of Socrates may have endured, mutatis mutandis, in the doctrines of the philosophers who regarded themselves as “Socratics”. This is especially the case with the Stoics, whose theology resembles the perspective of Plato’s Apology of Socrates, and the Cynics, who are instead closer to Xenophon’s position