There’s a quote bouncing around the internet that’s attributed to Socrates. In most versions it goes like this:
“The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they alone knew everything and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for girls, they are forward, immodest and unwomanly in speech, behaviour and dress.”
It could be used in conversations about “kids these days” or “the world is getting worse”, which may be what makes it so appealing to people. In fact, it’s a little too appealing and I can’t find the source anywhere in the works of Plato or Aristophanes. It’s a good quote but, as Oscar Wilde said, “An unsourced quote is about as useful as a pocketful of Campbell’s soup”.
It seems someone’s already done the legwork for me, see below for a well-researched look into what turns out to be a rather muddled history of the quote and its different versions and whether they originate with Socrates: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=408989
On it’s face, it seems a really unlikely thing for Socrates to have said.
Remember that one of the 3 charges against him in his trial was that he had “corrupted the young” (in one source) or “incited the young to contemn the established constitution, rendering them violent and headstrong” (in another source).
That hardly seems to match with this rather conservative quote, complaining that the young people of today are impatient of all restraint. That seems to be just what Socrates was teaching them, according to his trial.
The works of Xenophon might also be worth looking at. There is a lot more about Socrates there than there is in Aristophanes.
I would not call that well researched at all. It comes to no definite conclusion, and, frankly, the “history” of the quote from modern sources is worthless. It worries that the quote is merely “attributed to Socrates by Plato.” This is nonsense. Socrates himself wrote nothing. Every possible quotation from Socrates are words attributed to him, either by Plato or Xenophon (or, to a very limited degree, Aristophanes). The works of Plato and Xenophon have been widely available for centuries. Either this passage is attributed to Socrates in those works or it is not. Aside from differences in English translation, there is very little room for ambiguity or uncertainty here. Anyone with access to a concordance or a searchable electronic edition of the works of Plato and the works of Xenophon (and Aristophanes’ The Clouds) should be able to give a definitive answer.
I tried a quick search at The Perseus Project and failed to find it, but I am not sure what works are covered there. They have some Plato, but maybe not all, and I do not know if they have Xenophon at all.
I disagree. I think it is quite a likely thing for Socrates to have said (or for Plato or Xenophon to have put into his mouth, which is the best evidence, virtually the only evidence, we have for what he might actually have said).
Yes, he was charged with corrupting the young, and Plato’s Socrates certainly encourages his listeners (most of whom, in practice, were young men) to question conventional thinking. However, he strongly denied the charges made against him, and Plato and Xenophon, his leading admirers, were, in most respects, deeply conservative thinkers. Whatever Socrates was really teaching the young people, it was certainly not to be impatient of all restraint. He was a strict moralist.
Remember, it was the Athenian democrats who condemned him, and their real reason (as opposed to trumped up official charges) was probably to do with the fact that most of Socrates’ friends, followers and supporters (including Plato) came from the old aristocracy, including the Thirty Tyrants who had only recently been displaced by democratic rule.