PLATO

THE MAN AND

HIS WORK

By the same author

*

THE ELEMENTS OF METAPHYSICS

PLATO: TIM^EUS AND CRIT1AS

(a translation)

A. E. TAYLOR

Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Edinburgh

PLATO

THE MAN AND

HIS WORK

.rest Graduate Library

ollf.gf. of Arts & Commerce. 0. U.

METHUEN & CO. LTD, LONDON

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First published October a8th 1926

Second Edition June if)2j

Third Edition, Revised and Enlarged, October 1929

lonrth Edition, Revised, October iyj?

Fifth Edition July 1048

Sixth Edition June 1949

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PREFACE

I HOPE two classes of readers may find their account in this

book "Honours students " in our Universities, and readers

with philosophical interests, but no great store of Greek

scholarship. What both classes most need in a work about Plato

is to be told just what Plato has to say about the problems of

thought and life, and how he says it. What neither needs is to be

told what some contemporary thinks Plato should have said. The

sense of the greatest thinker of the ancient world ought not to be

trimmed to suit the tastes of a modern neo-Kantian, neo-Hegelian,

or neo-realist. Again, to understand Plato's thought we must see

it in the right historical perspective. The standing background of

the picture must be the social, political, and economic life of the

age of Socrates, or, for the Laws, of the age of Plato. These con-

siderations have determined the form of the present volume. It

offers an analysis of the dialogues, not a systematization of their

contents under a set of subject-headings. Plato himself hated

nothing more than system-making. If he had a system, he has

refused to tell us what it was, and if we attempt to force a system

on a mind which was always growing, we are sure to end by mis-

representation. This is why I have tried to tell the reader just

what Plato says, and made no attempt to force a " system " on the

Platonic text. My own comments are intended to supply exegesis,

based as closely as may be on Plato's own words, not to applaud

nor to denounce. The result, I hope, is a picture which may claim

the merit of historical fidelity. For the same reason I have been

unusually careful to determine the date and historical setting

assumed for each dialogue. We cannot really understand the

Republic or the Gorgias if we forget that the Athens of these con-

versations is meant to be the Athens of Nicias or Cleon, not the

very different Athens of Plato's own manhood, or if we find polemic

against Isocrates, in talk supposed to have passed at a time when

Isocrates was a mere boy. If it were not that the remark might

sound immodest, I would say that the model I have had before me

is Grote's great work on the Companions of Socrates. Enjoying

vii

viii PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

neither Crete's superb scholarship nor his freedom from limitations

of space, I have perhaps the compensation of freedom from the

prejudices of a party. Whatever bias I may have in metaphysics

or in politics, I have tried to keep it out of my treatment of Plato.

I must apologize for some unavoidable omissions. I have been

unable to include a chapter on the Academy in the generation

after Plato and Aristotle's criticisms of it ; I have had to exclude

from consideration the minor dubia and the spuria of the Platonic

corpus ; I have passed very lightly over much of the biology of the

Timaeus. These omissions have been forced on me by the necessity

of saying what I have to say in one volume of moderate compass.

For the same reason I have had to make my concluding chapter

little more than a series of hints. This omission will, I trust, be

remedied by the publication of a study, "Forms and Numbers," which

will, in part, appear in Mind simultaneously with the issue of this

volume. The details of the Timaeus are fully dealt with in a

Commentary now in course of printing at the Clarendon Press. A

brief account better than none of the transmission of the Platonic

tradition will be found in my little book, Platonism and its Influence

(1924 ; Marshall Jones Co., Boston, U.S.A. ; British Agents,

Harrap & Son).

Want of space has sometimes forced me to state a conclusion

without a review of the evidence, but I hope I have usually indicated

the quarters where the evidence may be sought. May I say, once

for all, that this book is no " compilation " ? I have tried to form

a judgment on all questions, great and small, for myself, and mention

of any work, ancient or modern, means, with the rarest of exceptions,

that I have studied it from one end to the other.

There remains the grateful duty of acknowledging obligations.

I am a debtor to many besides those whom I actually quote, and I

hope I have not learned least from many whose views I feel bound

to reject. In some cases I have echoed a well-known phrase or

accepted a well-established result without express and formal

acknowledgment. It must be understood that such things are

mere consequences of the impossibility ol excessive multiplication

of footnotes, and that I here, once for all, request any one from

whom I may have made such a loan to accept my thanks. The

recommendations at the ends of chapters are not meant to be

exhaustive nor necessarily to imply agreement with all that is said

in the work or chapter recommended. The last thing I should wish

is that my readers should see Plato through my spectacles. I wish

here to make general mention of obligation to a host of scholars of

our own time, such as Professors Apelt, Parmentier, Robin, Dr.

PREFACE ix

Adolfo Levi, the late Dr. James Adam, and others, besides those

whose names recur more frequently in my pages. The immense

debt of my own generation to scholars of an earlier date, such as

Grote, Zeller, Diels, Baeumker, Bonitz, is too obvious to need more

than this simple reference.

To two living scholars I must make very special acknowledgment.

How much I owe to the published writings of my friend and colleague

in Scotland, Professor Burnet, will be apparent on almost every page

of my book ; I owe even more to suggestions of every kind received

during a personal intercourse of many years. I owe no less to

Professor C. Ritter of Tubingen, who has given us, as part of the

work of a life devoted to Platonic researches, the best existing

commentary on the Laws and the finest existing full-length study

of Plato and his philosophy as a whole. One cannot despair of

one's kind when one remembers that such a work was brought to

completion in the darkest years Europe has known since 1648. It

is a great honour to me that Dr. Rittnr has allowed me to associate

his name with this poor volume. Finally, I thank the publishers

for their kindness in allowing the book to run to such a length.

A. E. TAYLOR

EDINBURGH, July 1926

NOTE TO SECOND EDITION

THIS Second Edition only differs from the first by the

correction of misprints, the addition of one or two

references and the modification of a few words in two or

three of the footnotes.

A. E. TAYLOR

EDINBURGH, March 1927

NOTE TO THIRD EDITION

APART from minor corrections and some additions to the

references appended to various chapters, this edition only

differs from its precursors by the presence of a Chronological

Table of Dates and an Appendix, dealing briefly with the dubia

and spuria of the Platonic tradition. (I have, for convenience*

sake, included in this a short account of a number of Platonic

epistles which I myself believe to be neither dubious nor spurious,

but have not had occasion to cite in the body of the book.) I

should explain that this essay was substantially written in 1926,

though it has been revised since.

1 take this opportunity of mentioning the following recent works,

to which I should have been glad to give more specific references

in the text, had they come into my hands a little sooner. All will

be found valuable by the serious student of Plato.

STENZEL, J. Platon der Erzieher. (Leipzig, 1928.)

SOLMSEN, F. Der Entwichlung der Aristotelischen Logik und

Rhetorik. (Berlin, 1929.)

WALZER, R. Magna Moralia und Aristotelische Ethik. (Berlin,

1929.)

TOEPLITZ, O. Das Verhdltnis von Mathematik und Ideenlehre bei

Plato, in Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Mathematik I. i.

(Berlin, 1929.)

ROBIN, L. Greek Thought and the Origins of the Scientific Spirit.

(E. Tr. from the revised edition of the author's La Pense'e

Grecque, London, 1928.)

A. E. TAYLOR.

EDINBURGH, July, 1929

NOTE TO FOURTH EDITION

I HAVE made few changes in this new edition of the text,

though I have been led to rewrite one or two paragraphs in

the chapter on the Timaeus by study of Professor Cornford's

valuable commentary on his translation of the dialogue. I have

tried to remove misprints and detected errors throughout. Among

works important for the student of Plato published since the earlier

editions of this book I could mention in particular the following :

FRUTIGER, P. Les Mythes de Platon. (Paris, 1930.)

SHOREY, P. What Plato Said. (Chicago, 1933.)

NOVOTNY, F. Platonis Epistulae. (Brno, 1930.)

HARWARD, J. The Platonic Epistles. (E. Tr. Cambridge, 1932.)

FIELD, G. C. Plato and His Contemporaries. (London, 1930.)

CORNFORD, F. M. Plato's Cosmology, the Timaeus of Plato trans-

lated with a running commentary. (London, 1937.)

SCHULL, P. M. Essai sur la Formation de la Pense'e Grecque. (Paris,

1934)

A. E. TAYLOR.

X

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I. THE LIFE OF PLATO. ...... i

II. THE PLATONIC WRITINGS ...... 10

III. MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES : HIPPIAS MAJOR, HIPPIAS MINOR,

ION, MENEXENUS . . . . . 23

IV. MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES : CHARMIDES, L ACHES t LYSIS . 46

V. MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES : CRATYLUS, EUTHYDEMUS . 75

VI. SOCRATIC DIALOGUES : CORGI AS, MENO .... 103

VII. SOCRATIC DIALOGUES : EUTHYPHRO, APOLOGY, CRITO * , 146

VIII. PHAEDO . . . . * 174

IX. SYMPOSIUM . ...... 209

X. PROTAGORAS ........ 235

XI. REPUBLIC ........ 263

XII. PHAEDRUS ........ 299

XIII. THBABTETUS ........ 320

XIV. PARMENIDBS ........ 349

XV. SOPHISTES-TOLITICUS . . . . . 37 1

XVI. PHILEBUS ........ 40^

XVII. TlMARUS AND CRITIAS , . . . 3. 6

XVIII. LAWS AND EPIKOMIS ...... 463

XIX. PLATO IN THE ACADEMY FORMS AND NUMBERS . . 503

ADDENDA . . . . . . . . 517

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE . . . . . 519

APPENDIX THE PLATONIC APOCRYPHA . . -521

INDEXES

I. INDEX OF PROPER NAMES . . . 557

II. INDEX OF SUBJECTS . . . . .561

xi

THE following abbreviations have occasionally been used :

E.G.Ph* = BURNET, Early Greek Philosophy (yd edition),

1920.

E.R.E. = HASTINGS, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics,

1908-1921.

R.P. = RITTER AND PREFER, Histona Philosophiae Graccae

(9th edition), 1913.

xu

PLATO

THE MAN AND HIS WORK

CHAPTER I

THE LIFE OF PLATO 1

PLATO, son of Ariston and Perictione, was born in the month

Thargelion (May-June) of the first year of the eighty-eighth

Olympiad by the reckoning of the scholars of Alexandria,

428-7 B.C. of our own era, and died at the age of eighty or eighty-

one in Ol. 108.1 (348-7 B.C.). These dates rest apparently on the

authority of the great Alexandrian chronologist Eratosthenes and

may be accepted as certain. Plato's birth thus falls in the fourth

year of the Archidamian war, in the year following the death

of Pericles, and his death only ten years before the battle of Chae-

ronea, which finally secured to Philip of Macedon the hegemony

of the Hellenic world. His family was, on both sides, one of the

most distinguished in the Athens of the Periclean age. On the

father's side the pedigree was traditionally believed to go back to

the old kings of Athens, and through them to the god Posidon. On

the mother's side the descent is equally illustrious and more his-

1 The chief extant lives are : (a) Apuleius, de Platone, \. 1-4 ; (6) Diogenes

Laertius, iii. i (critical edition, Basle, 1907) ; (c) Olympiodorus (Platonis Opera,

ed. Hermann, vi. 190-195). The least bad of these is (6), which appears

to have been originally composed for a lady amateur of Platonic philosophy

((/uXoTrXaruw W COL StKa/wj virapxov<ry , 47), not before the latter part

of the first century of our era. The one or two references to the scholar

Favorinus of Aries may possibly be later marginal annotations by an owner

or copier of the text. If they are original, they would bring down the date

of the Life to the latter part of the second century A.D. In the main Diogenes

Laertius appears to give the version of Plato's life accepted by the literati

of Alexandria. But we can see from what we know of the work of Alex-

andrians like Sotion, Satyrus, and Hermippus, that biographies were already

being ruined by the craze for romantic or piquant anecdote before the end

of the third century B.C. In Plato's case there is a peculiar reason for

suspicion of Alexandrian narratives. The writers were largely dependent

on the assertions of Aristoxenus of Tarentum, a scholar of Aristotle who

had known the latest generation of the fourth century Pythagoreans. Aris-

toxenus has long been recognized as a singularly mendacious person, and

he had motives for misrepresenting both Socrates and Plato. See Burnet,

Greek Philosophy, Part /., p. 153.

2 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

torically certain, and is incidentally recorded for us by Plato himself

in the Timaeus. Perictione was sister of Charmides and cousin of

Critias, both prominent figures in the brief " oligarchic " anarchy

which followed on the collapse of Athens at the end of the Pelopon-

nesian war (404-3 B.C.). The grandfather of this Critias, Plato's

maternal great-grandfather, was another Critias, introduced in the

Timaeus, whose own great-grandfather Dropides was a " friend and

kinsman " of Solon, the great Attic legislator. The father of this

Dropides, also called Dropides, the first member of the house who

figures in authentic history, was the archon of the year 644 B.C.

Besides Plato himself, Ariston and Perictione had at least three

other children. These were two older sons, Adimantus and Glaucon,

who appear as young men in Plato's Republic, and a daughter

Potone. Ariston appears to have died in Plato's childhood ; his

widow then married her uncle Pyrilampes, whom we know from the

allusions of the comic poets to have been a personal intimate of

Pericles as well as a prominent supporter of his policy. Pyrilampes

was already by a former marriage the father of the handsome

Demus, the great " beauty " of the time of the Archidamian war ;

by Perictione he had a younger son Antiphon who appears in Plato's

Parmenides, where we learn that he had given up philosophy for

horses. 1

These facts are of considerable importance for the student of

Plato's subsequent career. Nothing is more characteristic of him

than his lifelong conviction that it is the imperative duty of the

philosopher, whose highest personal happiness would be found in

the life of serene contemplation of truth, to make the supreme

sacrifice of devoting the best of his manhood to the service of his

fellows as a statesman and legislator, if the opportunity offers.

Plato was not content to preach this doctrine in the Republic ; he

practised it, as we shall see, in his own life. The emphasis he lays

on it is largely explained when we remember that from the first he

grew up in a family with traditions of Solon and accustomed through

several generations to play a prominent part in the public life of

the State. Something of Plato's remarkable insight into the realities

of political life must, no doubt, be set down to early upbringing in

a household of " public men." So, too, it is important to remember,

though it is too often forgotten, that the most receptive years of

Plato's early life must have been spent in the household of his step-

father, a prominent figure of the Periclean regime. Plato has often

been accused of a bias against " democracy." If he had such a

bias, it is not to be accounted for by the influence of early sur-

roundings. He must have been originally indoctrinated with

" Periclean " politics ; his dislike of them in later life, so far as it

1 See the family tree in Burnet, Greek Philosophy, Part I., Appendix I., p. 357.

For Pyrilampes, cf. Charmides, 1580, and for Demus, Gorgias, 48 id 5, Aristo-

phanes, Wasps, 98. According to Ep. xiii. 3610, Perictione was still alive

at the date of writing (i.e. about 366), but her death was expected, as

Plato speaks of the expense of the funeral as one which he will shortly have to

meet. Nothing is known of Pyrilampes after the battle of Delium (424 B.C.).

THE LIFE OF PLATO 8

is real at all, is best intelligible as a consequence of having been

" behind the scenes." If he really disliked democracy, it was not

with the dislike of ignorance but with that of the man who has

known too much.

The actual history of Plato's life up to his sixtieth year is almost

a blank. In his own dialogues he makes a practice of silence about

himself, only broken once in the Apology, where he names himself as

one of the friends who urged Socrates to increase the amount of the

fine he proposed on himself from one mina to thirty and offered

to give security for the payment, and again in the Phaedo, where

he mentions an illness as the explanation of his absence from the

death-scene. 1 Aristotle adds the one further detail that Plato had

been " in his youth familiar with " the Heraclitean Cratylus, though

we cannot be absolutely sure that this is more than a conjecture of

Aristotle's own. The later writers of the extant Lives of Plato add

some details, but these are mainly of a purely anecdotal kind and

not to be implicitly trusted. In any case their scraps of anecdote

throw no light on Plato's life or character and we may safely

neglect them here. All we can be sure of, down to Plato's twenty-

sixth year, is that the influence of friendship with Socrates must

have been the most potent force in the moulding of his mind. (We

may add that if Aristotle's statement about Cratylus 2 really is

more than an inference, the Heraclitean doctrine, learned from

Cratylus, that the world disclosed to us by our senses is a scene of

incessant and incalculable mutability and variation, was one which

Plato never forgot. He drew, says Aristotle, the conclusion that

since there is genuine science, that of which science treats must be

something other than this unresting " flux " of sense-appearances.)

The gossiping Alexandrian biographers represented Plato as

* hearing " Socrates at the age of eighteen or twenty. This cannot

mean that his first introduction to Socrates took place at that age.

We know from Plato himself that Socrates had made the close

acquaintance of Plato's uncle Charmides in the year 431, and was

even then familiar with Critias. 8 Presumably Plato's acquaintance

with Socrates, then, went back as far as he could remember. The

Alexandrian tales will only mean that Plato became a " disciple "

of Socrates as soon as he was an tyyfios or " adolescent," a period

of life currently reckoned as beginning at eighteen and ending at

twenty. Even with this explanation the story is probably not

accurate. Both Plato and Isocrates, his older contemporary,

emphatically deny that Socrates ever had any actual " disciples "

whom he " instructed," and Plato himself, in a letter written nearly

at the end of his life, puts the matter in a truer light. He tells us

there that at the time of the " oligarchical " usurpation of 404-3,

being still a very young man, he was looking forward to a political

career and was urged by relatives who were among the revolu-

tionaries (no doubt, Critias and Charmides) to enter public life

1 Apology, 386 6, Phaedo, 596 10. Aristotle, Met. 98 ;a 32.

1 See the opening pages of the Charmides.

4 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

under their auspices, but waited to see first what their policy would

be. He was horrified to find that they soon showed signs of lawless

violence, and finally disgusted when they attempted to make his

" elderly friend Socrates/' the best man of his time, an accomplice

in the illegal arrest and execution of a fellow-citizen whose property

they intended to confiscate. The leaders of restored democracy

did worse, for they actually put Socrates to death on an absurd

charge of impiety. This, Plato says, put an end to his own political

aspirations. For in politics nothing can be achieved without a

party, and the treatment of Socrates by both the Athenian factions

proved that there was no party at Athens with whom an honourable

man could work. The suggestion clearly made here is that Plato

did not regard Socrates as, properly speaking, a master. He loved

him personally as a young man loves a revered elder friend, and he

thought of him as a martyr. But it was not until the actual execu-

tion of Socrates opened his eyes once for all that he gave up his

original intention of taking up active political life as his career.

His original aspirations had been those of the social and legislative

reformer, not those of the thinker or man of science. 1

Hermodorus, 2 an original member of Plato's Academy, stated

that for the moment the friends of Socrates felt themselves in

danger just after his death, and that Plato in particular, with

others, withdrew for a while to the neighbouring city of Megara

under the protection of Euclides of that city, a philosopher who was

among the foreign friends present at the death of Socrates and

combined certain Socratic tenets with the Eleaticism of Parmenides.

This temporary concentration at Megara presumably would only

last until the feelings aroused in connexion with the cause celebre

had had time to blow over. The biographers narrate that it was

followed by some years of travel to Cyrene, Italy, and Egypt, and

that the Academy was then founded on Plato's return to Athens.

How much of this story none of it rests, like the mention of the

sojourn in Megara, on the evidence of Hermodorus may be true, is

very doubtful Plato himself, in the letter already alluded to,

merely says that he visited Italy and Sicily at the age of forty and

was repelled by the sensual luxury of the life led there by the well-

to-do. His language on the whole implies that most of the time

between this journey and the death of Socrates had been spent at

Athens, watching the public conduct of the city and drawing the

conclusion that good government can only be expected when

" either true and genuine philosophers find their way to political

authority or powerful politicians by the favour of Providence take

to true philosophy." He says nothing of travels in Africa or

Egypt, though some of the observations made in the Laws about

the art and music, the arithmetic and the games of the Egyptian

children have the appearance of being first-hand. The one

fateful result of Plato's " travels," in any case, is that he won

the whole-hearted devotion of a young man of ability and

1 See the full explanation of all this at Ep. vii. 3246 8-3266 4. D.L., iii. 6.

THE LIFE OF PLATO 5

promise, Dion, son-in-law of the reigning " tyrant " of Syracuse,

Dionysius I. 1

The founding of the Academy is the turning-point in Plato's

life, and in some ways the most memorable event in the history of

Western European science. For Plato it meant that, after long

waiting, he had found his true work in life. He was henceforth to

be the first president of a permanent institution for the prosecution

of science by original research. In one way the career was not a

wholly unprecedented one. Plato's rather older contemporary

Isocrates presided in the same way over an establishment for higher

education, and it is likely that his school was rather the older of the

two. The novel thing about the Platonic Academy was that it

was an institution for the prosecution of scientific study. Isocrates,

like Plato, believed in training young men for public life. But unlike

Plato he held the opinion of the " man in the street " about the

uselessness of science. It was his boast that the education he had

to offer was not founded on hard and abstract science with no

visible humanistic interest about it ; he professed to teach

" opinions," as we should say, to provide the ambitious aspirant

to public life with " points of view/ 1 and to train him to express his

" point of view " with the maximum of polish and persuasiveness.

This is just the aim of " journalism " in its best forms, and Isocrates

is the spiritual father of all the " essayists/ 1 from his own day to

ours, who practise the agreeable and sometimes beneficial art of

saying nothing, or saying the commonplace, in a perfect style. He

would be the " Greek Addison " but for the fact that personally

he was a man of real discernment in political matters and, unlike

Addison, really had something to say. But it is needless to remark

that an education in humanistic commonplace has never really

proved the right kind of training to turn out great men of action.

Plato's rival scheme meant the practical application to education

of the conviction which had become permanent with him that the

hope of the world depends on the union of political power and

genuine science. This is why the pure mathematics the one

department of sheer hard thinking which had attained any serious

development in the fourth century B.C. formed the backbone of

the curriculum, and why in the latter part of the century the two

types of men who were successfully turned out in the Academy

were original mathematicians and skilled legislators and admini-

1 T have said nothing of the story related, e.g., in D.L., iii., 18-21, that

Dionysius I had Plato kidnapped and handed over to a Spartan admiral who

exposed him for sale at Aegina, where he was ransomed by an acquaintance

from Gyrene. The story, though quite possible, seems not too probable, and

looks to be no more than an anecdote intended to blacken the character of

Dionysius, who in fact, though masterful enough, was neither brute nor fool.

In spite of the counter-assertion of Diels, it is pretty certainly not referred to in

Aristotle, Physics, B iggb 13. Simplicius seems clearly right in supposing that

Aristotle's allusion is to some situation in a comedy. The statement that

Dionysius attempted to kidnap Plato is made earlier by Cornelius Nepos,

Dion, c. 2, and perhaps comes from the Sicilian historian Timaeus.

6 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

strators, a point on which we shall have a word or two to say in

the sequel. It is this, too, which makes the Academy the direct

progenitor of the mediaeval and modern university : a university

which aims at supplying the State with legislators and administrators

whose intellects have been developed in the first instance by the

disinterested pursuit of truth for its own sake is still undertaking,

under changed conditions, the very task Plato describes as the

education of the " philosopher king." The immediate and percep-

tible outward sign of the new order of things in the Greek world is

that whereas in the age of Plato's birth aspiring young Athenians

had to depend for their " higher education " on the lectures of a

peripatetic foreign " sophist/' in the Athens of fifty years later

aspiring young men from all quarters flocked to Athens to learn

from Isocrates or Plato or both. The travelling lecturer was

replaced by the university or college with a fixed domicile and

a constitution.

Unfortunately the exact date of the foundation of the Academy

is unknown. From the obvious connexion between its programme

and the conviction Plato speaks of having definitely reached at

the time when he visited Italy and Sicily at the age of forty, we

should naturally suppose that the foundation took place about this

time (388-7 B.C.) ; and it is easier to suppose that the visit to Sicily

preceded it, as the later biographical statements assume, than that

it followed directly on its inception. If there is any truth in the

statement that the real object of Plato's journey was to visit the

Pythagoreans, who were beginning to be formed into a school again

under Archytas of Tarentum, we may suppose that it was precisely

the purpose of founding the Academy which led Plato just at this

juncture to the very quarter where he might expect to pick up

useful hints and suggestions for his guidance ; but this can be no

more than a conjecture.

We have to think of Plato for the next twenty years as mainly

occupied with the onerous work of organizing and maintaining his

school. " Lecturing " would be part of this work, and we. know

from Aristotle that Plato did actually " lecture " without a manu-

script at a much later date. But the delivery of these lectures

would be only a small part of the work to be done. It was one of

Plato's firmest convictions that nothing really worth knowing can

be learned by merely listening to " instruction " ; the only true

method of "learning " science is that of being actually engaged, in

company with a more advanced mind, in the discovery of scientific

truth. 1 Very little in the way of actual " new theorems " is ascribed

to Plato by the later writers on the history of mathematical science,

but the men trained in his school or closely associated with it made

all the great advances achieved in the interval between the downfall

of the original Pythagorean order about the middle of the fifth

century and the rise of the specialist schools of Alexandria in the

1 />, vii. 341^-0. See the comments on this passage in Burnet, Greek

Philosophy, Part I., 220-222.

THE LIFE OF PLATO 7

third. In estimating Plato's work for science it is necessary to

take account first and foremost of the part he must have played

as the organizer and director of the studies of this whole brilliant

group. It was, no doubt, this which induced the first mathematician

of the time, Eudoxus of Cnidus, to transport himself and his scholars

bodily from Cyzicus to Athens to make common cause with the

Academy. Probably we are not to think of Plato as writing much

during these twenty years. He would be too busy otherwise, and,

as we shall see, there is the strongest reason for thinking that most

of his dialogues, including all those which are most generally known

to-day, were all composed by his fortieth year, or soon after, while

the important half-dozen or so which must be assigned to a later

date most probably belong definitely to his old age.

In the year 367 something happened which provided Plato,

now a man of sixty, with the great adventure of his life. Dionysius I

of Syracuse, who had long governed his native city nominally as

annually elected generalissimo, really as autocrat or " tyrant/' died.

He was succeeded by his son Dionysius II, a man of thirty whose

education had been neglected and had left him totally unfitted to

take up his father's great task of checking the expansion of the

Carthaginians, which was threatening the very existence of Greek

civilization in Western Sicily. The strong man of Syracuse at the

moment was Dion, brother-in-law of the new " tyrant," the same

who had been so powerfully attached to Plato twenty years before.

Dion, a thorough believer in Plato's views about the union of

political power with science, conceived the idea of fetching Plato

personally to Syracuse to attempt the education of his brother-in-

law. Plato felt that the prospect of success was not promising,

but the Carthaginian danger was very real, if the new ruler of

Syracuse should prove unequal to his work, and it would be an

everlasting dishonour to the Academy if no attempt were made to

put its theory into practice when the opportunity offered at such a

critical juncture. Accordingly Plato, though with a great deal of

misgiving, made up his mind to accept Dion's invitation.

If the Epistles ascribed in our Plato MSS. to Plato are genuine

(as I have no doubt that the great bulk of them are), they throw

a sudden flood of light on Plato's life for the next few years. To

understand the situation we must bear two things in mind. Plato's

object was not, as has been fancied, the ridiculous one of setting up

in the most luxurious of Greek cities a pinchbeck imitation of the

imaginary city of the Republic. It was the practical and statesman-

like object of trying to fit the young Dionysius for the immediate

practical duty of checking the Carthaginians 1 and, if possible, ex-

pelling them from Sicily, by making Syracuse the centre of a strong

constitutional monarchy to embrace the whole body of Greek com-

munities in the west of the island. Also, Plato's belief in the value

of a hard scientific education for a ruler of men, wise or not, was

absolutely genuine. Accordingly he at once set about the task

1 Ep. vii. 3330 i, viii. 353**.

8 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

from the beginning and made Dionysius enter on a serious course of

geometry. For a little while things looked promising. Dionysius

became attached to Plato and geometry the " fashion " at his court.

But the scheme wrecked on a double obstacle. Dionysius was too

feeble of character and his education had been left neglected too

long, and his personal jealousies of his stronger and older relative

were easily awakened. In a few months the situation became

strained. Dion had to go into what was virtually banishment and

Plato returned to Athens. Relations, however, were not broken off.

Dionysius kept up a personal correspondence with Plato about his

studies and projects, and Plato endeavoured to reconcile Dionysius

and Dion. This proved not feasible when Dionysius not only

confiscated Dion's revenues but forced his wife, for dynastic

reasons, to marry another man. Yet Plato made another voyage

to Syracuse and spent nearly a year there (361-360) in the hope of

remedying the situation. On this occasion something was really

done on the task of drafting the preliminaries to a constitution for

the proposed federation of the Greek cities, but the influence of the

partisans of the old regime proved too strong. Plato seems at one

time to have been in real personal danger from the hostility of

Dionysius' barbarian body-guards, and it was with difficulty and only

by the mediation of Archytas of Tarentum that he finally obtained

leave to return to Athens (360 B.C.).

At this point Plato's personal intervention in Sicilian politics

ceases. The quarrel between Dion and Dionysius naturally went

on, and Dion, whose one great fault, as Plato tells him, was want of

" adaptability " and savoir-faire, made up his mind to recover his

rights with the strong hand. Enlistment went on in the Peloponnese

and elsewhere, with the active concurrence of many of the younger

members of the Academy, and in the summer of 357 Dion made a

sudden and successful dash across the water, captured Syracuse, and

proclaimed its " freedom." Plato wrote him a letter of congratula-

tion on the success, but warned him of his propensity to carry things

with too high a hand and reminded him that the world would expect

the " You-know-who's " (the Academy) 1 to set a model of good

behaviour. Unfortunately Dion was too good and too bad at once

for the situation. Like Plato himself, he believed in strong though

law-abiding personal rule and disgusted the Syracusan mob by

not restoring " democratic " licence ; he had not the tact to manage

disappointed associates, quarrelled with his admiral Heraclides

and at last made away with him, or connived at his being made

away with. Dion was in turn murdered with great treachery by

another of his subordinates, Callippus, who is said by later writers

to have been a member of the Academy, though this seems hard to

reconcile with Plato's own statement that the link of association

between the two was not " philosophy " but the mere accident of

having been initiated together into certain " mysteries." Plato

still believed strongly in the fundamental honesty and sanity of

1 Ep. iv. 320 c-e, and for Dion's want of " tact," ibid. 3216, vii. 3286.

THE LIFE OF PLATO 9

Dion's political aims and wrote two letters to the remnants of his

party, justifying the common policy of Dion and himself and calling

on them to be faithful to it, and making suggestions for conciliation

of parties which were, of course, not accepted. As he said in one of

these letters, the fatal disunion of parties seerr-ed likely to leave

Sicily a prey either to the Carthaginians or to the Oscans of South

Italy. 1

It is not necessary to follow the miserable story of events in

Syracuse beyond the point where Plato's concern with them ends.

But it is worth while to remark that Plato's forecast of events was

fully justified. The " unification of Sicily," when it came at last,

came as a fruit of the success of the Romans in the first two Punic

wars ; and, as Professor Burnet has said, this was the beginning of the

long series of events which has made the cleavage between Eastern

Europe, deriving what civilization it has direct from Constantinople,

and Western Europe with its latinized Hellenism. If Plato had

succeeded at Syracuse, there might have been no " schism of the

churches " and no " Eastern problem " to-day.

Nothing is known, beyond an anecdote or two not worth re-

cording, of Plato's latest years. All that we can say is that he must

still have gone on from time to time lecturing to his associates in

the Academy, since Aristotle, who only entered the Academy in

367, was one of his hearers, and that the years between 360 and his

death must have been busily occupied with the composition of his

longest and ripest contribution to the literature of moral and

political philosophy, the Laws. Probably also, all the rest of the

dialogues which manifestly belong to the later part of Plato's

life must be supposed to have been written after his final return from

Sicily. A complete suspension of composition for several years

will best explain the remarkable difference in style between all of

them and even the maturest of those which preceded. It may be

useful to remember that of the years mentioned as marking im-

portant events in Plato's life, the year 388 is that of the capture of

Rome by the Gauls, 367 the traditional date of the " Licinian

rogations " and the defeat of the Gauls at Alba by Camillas, 361

that of the penetration of the Gauls into Campania.

See further :

BURNET, J. Greek Philosophy, Part /., Chapters xii., xv.

BURNET, J. Platonism (1928).

FRIEDLANDER, P. Platon : Eidos, Paideia, Dialogos (1928).

GROTE, G. Plato and the other Companions cf Socrates, Chapter v.

RITTER, C. Platon, i., Chapters i.-v. (Munich, 1914.)

WILAMOWITZ-MOELLENDORFF, U. v. Platon. (Ed. 2. Berlin,

1920.)

SIENZEL, J. Platon der Erzieher. (Leipzig, 1928.)

The general historical background of Plato's life may be studied

in any good history of Greece. Specially excellent is

MEYER, E. Geschichte des Altertums, vol. v. (Stuttgart and

Berlin, 1902.)

ROBIN, L. Platon, pp. 1-8.

CHAPTER II

THE PLATONIC WRITINGS

PLATO is the one voluminous author of classical antiquity

whose works seem to have come down to us whole and entire.

Nowhere in later antiquity do we come on any reference to a

Platonic work which we do not still possess. It is true that we

know nothing of the contents of Plato's lectures except from a few

scanty notices in Aristotle or quotations preserved from con-

temporaries of Aristotle by the Aristotelian commentators. But

the explanation of this seems to be that Plato habitually lectured

without any kind of manuscript. This explains why Aristotle

speaks of certain doctrines as taught in the " unwritten teaching "

(ay/oa</>a Soy/xara) of his master, and why at least five of the auditors

of a particularly famous lecture (that on " The Good "), including

both Aristotle and Xenocrates, published their own recollections of

it. We must suppose that Plato's written dialogues were meant to

appeal to the " educated " at large and interest them in philosophy ;

the teaching given to Plato's personal associates depended for its

due appreciation on the actual contact of mind with mind within

the school and was therefore not committed to writing at all. As

we shall see later on, this has had the (for us) unfortunate result

that we are left to learn Plato's inmost ultimate convictions on the

most important questions, the very thing we most want to know,

from references in Aristotle, polemical in object, always brief, and

often puzzling in the highest degree.

When we turn to the contents of our manuscripts, the first

problem which awaits us is that of weeding out from the whole

collection what is dubious or certainly spurious. We may start

with the fact that certain insignificant items of the collection were

already recognized as spurious when the arrangement of the dialogues

which we find in our oldest Plato MSS. was made. By counting

each dialogue great or small as a unit, and reckoning the collection

of Epistles also as one dialogue, a list of thirty-six works was drawn

up, arranged in " tetralogies " or groups of four. It is not abso-

lutely certain by whom or when this arrangement was made, though

it certainly goes back almost to the beginning of the Christian era

and perhaps earlier. It is commonly ascribed by later writers to

a certain Thrasylus or to Thrasylus and Dercylides. The date of

THE PLATONIC WRITINGS 11

neither of these scholars is known with certainty. Thrasylus has

been usually identified with a rhetorician of that name living under

Augustus and Tiberius. But it is notable that Cicero's contem-

porary, the antiquary M. Terentius Varro, refers l to a passage of

the Phaedo as occurring in the " fourth roll " of Plato, and the

Phaedo actually happens to be the fourth dialogue of the first

" tetralogy. " Hence it has been suggested that the arrangement

is older than Varro. If this is correct, it will follow that either

Thrasylus has been wrongly identified or the arrangement was merely

adopted, not originated, by him. On the other hand, this grouping

cannot be earlier than the first or second century B.C. For Diogenes

Laertius 2 informs us that an earlier arrangement of the dialogues in

" trilogies " had been- attempted, though not carried completely

through, by the famous third-century scholar Aristophanes of

Byzantium. There is no hint anywhere that the " tetralogies " of

Thrasylus admitted any work not regarded as Platonic by Aristo-

phanes or excluded any which he had admitted. We may fairly

conclude that the thirty-six " dialogues " were currently regarded as

genuine by the librarians and scholars of the third century B.C.

As far as the extant dialogues omitted from the " tetralogies " go,

there is no question that they are one and all spurious, and no one

proposes to reverse the judgment of antiquity on any of them.

The same thing is true of the collection of " definitions " also

preserved in Plato MSS. There is no doubt that in the main the

definitions of the collection are genuinely ancient and Academic.

Some of them are actually extracted from the Platonic dialogues ;

others are shown to be Academic by their coincidence with Academic

definitions used or commented on by Aristotle in his Topics. But

since some of them can be pretty clearly identified with definitions

we can prove to be characteristic of Plato's immediate successors,

Speusippus and Xenocrates, we cannot regard the collection as the

work of Plato. Our only real problem is whether the list of the

thirty-six dialogues must not be further reduced by the elimination

of spurious items. Even in antiquity there were doubts about one

or two dialogues. The Alcibiades II 3 was thought to be unauthen-

tic by some, and the Neoplatonist Proclus wished to reject the

Epinomis. In modern times doubt has been carried much farther.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, especially in Germany, the

" athetizing " of Platonic dialogues became a fashionable amuse-

ment for scholars ; the Laws was pronounced spurious by Ast and,

at one time, by Zeller, the Parmenides, Sophistes, and Politicus by

Ueberweg and others; extremists wished to limit the number of

genuine dialogues to nine. Fortunately the tide has turned, since the

elaborate proof of the genuineness of the Sophistes and Politicus

by Lewis Campbell. There is now a general agreement that

every dialogue of any length and interest in the list of the thirty-

1 Varro, de lingua Latina, vii. 88. * D. L., iii. 61-62.

Athenaeus (5060) records an opinion which ascribed the dialogue to

Xenophon.

12 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

six is Platonic, and an equally general agreement about the spurious-

ness of a number of the smaller and less interesting, though there

still remain one or two works about which opinion is divided. Thus

there is little doubt of the un-Platonic character of the following

works : Alcibiades II, Hipparchus, Amatores (or Rivales), Theages,

Clitophon, Minos. Opinion may be said to be divided about Alci-

biades I, Ion, Menexenus, Hippias Major, Epinomis, Epistles.

The scope of the present work allows me only to make one or two

very brief remarks on the subject.

As to the now generally rejected dialogues it may be observed

that they are all brief and of no great moment. Our conception

of Plato as a thinker and a writer is not seriously affected by the

rejection of any of them. If it were possible to put in a word on

behalf of any of these items, I should like personally to plead for

the short sketch called the Clitophon, which seems to be in any case

a mere unfinished fragment, the main purport of which can only be

conjectured. The style and verve are not unworthy of Plato, and

I believe I could make out a case for the view that the point to which

the writer is working up is also Platonic, as well as important. Yet

there is the difficulty that the little work appears on the face of it

to be in form a criticism of the parts played by Socrates and Thrasy-

machus in Republic I, and it is hard to think of Plato as thus playing

the critic to one of his own writings.

About all these dialogues we may say at least two things.

There is only one of them (the Alcibiades II) which does not seem

to be proved by considerations of style and language to be real

fourth-century work. And again, there is no reason to regard any

of them as " spurious " in the sense of being intended to pass falsely

for the work of Plato. They are anonymous and inferior work of

the same kind as the lighter Platonic dialogues, and probably, in

most cases, contemporary with them or nearly so, not deliberate

" forgeries. 11 Hence this material may rightly be used with caution

as contributing to our knowledge of the conception of Socrates

current in the fourth century. Alcibiades II is probably an excep-

tion. It is the one dialogue in the list which exhibits anything

very suspicious on linguistic grounds, and it appears also to allude

to a characteristic Stoic paradox. 1 But, even in this case, there is

no ground to suppose that the unknown writer intended his work

to pass current as Plato's. A little more must be said of the

dialogues which are still rejected by some scholars, but defended

by others. The Alcibiades I has nothing in its language which

requires a date later than the death of Plato, and nothing in its

1 There seems to be a definite polemic running through the dialogue

against the Stoic thesis that every one but the Stoic " sage " is insane. Cf.

in particular Ale. II, 1390-140^. (Personally I regard the attack on this

paradox as the main object of the work.) Hence it cannot date from any

period of the Academy before the presidency of Arcesilaus (276-241 B.C.), with

whom anti-Stoic polemic became the main public interest of the school

For a discussion of the question see Appendix, pp. 528-9,

THE PLATONIC WRITINGS 13

contents which is not thoroughly Platonic. In fact, it forms, as

the Neoplatonic commentators saw, an excellent introduction to

the whole Platonic ethical and political philosophy. It is just this

character which is really the most suspicious thing about the

dialogue. It is far too methodical not to suggest that it is meant

as a kind of " textbook," the sort of thing Plato declared he would

never write. And the character-drawing is far too vague and

shadowy for Plato even in his latest and least dramatic phase. In

the interlocutors, though they bear the names Socrates and Alci-

biades, there is no trace of any genuine individuality far less than

there is even in the anonymous speakers in the Laws. It is a

further difficulty that on grounds of style and manner the dialogue,

if genuine, would have to be assigned to a late period in Plato's life

when he is hardly likely to have been composing such work. On

the whole, it seems probable that Alcibiades I is the work of an

immediate disciple, probably written within a generation or so of

Plato's death and possibly even before that event.

The Ion, so far as can be seen, has in its few pages nothing

either to establish its authenticity or to arouse suspicion. It

may reasonably be allowed to pass as genuine until some good

reason for rejecting it is produced.

The Menexenus offers a difficult problem. It is referred to

expressly by Aristotle in a way in which he never seems to quote

any dialogues but those of Plato, and it seems clear that he regarded

it as Platonic. 1 On the other hand, the contents of the work are

singular. It is mainly given up to the recital by Socrates of a

" funeral discourse " on the Athenians who fell in the Corinthian

war. Socrates pretends to have heard the discourse from Aspasia

and to admire it greatly. Apparently the intention is to produce

a gravely ironical satire on the curious jumble of real and spurious

patriotism characteristic of the Xoyot cVira^tot, which are being

quietly burlesqued. The standing mystery for commentators is,

of course, the audacious anachronism by which Socrates (and, what

is even worse, Aspasia) is made to give a narrative of events belonging

to the years after Socrates 1 own death. To me it seems clear that

this violation of chronological possibility, since it must have been

committed at a time when the facts could not be unknown, must be

intentional, however hard it is to divine its precise point, and that

Plato is more likely than any disciple in the Academy to have

ventured on it. (As the second part of the Parmenides proves,

Plato had a certain " freakish " humour in him which could find

strange outlets.) And I find it very hard to suppose that Aristotle

was deceived on a question of Platonic authorship. Hence it seems

best to accept the traditional ascription of the Menexenus, however

hard we may think it to account for its character.

The Hippias Major, though not cited by name anywhere in

Aristotle, is tacitly quoted or alluded to several times in the Topics

in a way which convinces me that Aristotle regarded it as a Platonic

1 Aristot. Rhetoric, 14156 30.

14 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

work. 1 As the " athetizers " have really nothing to urge on the other

side except that the dialogue is not Plato at his best, and that there

are an unusual word or two to be found in it (as there are in many

Platonic dialogues), I think Aristotle's allusions should decide the

question of genuineness favourably.

The Epinomis and Epistles are much more important. If the

Epinomis is spurious, we must deny the authenticity of the most

important pronouncement on the philosophy of arithmetic to be

found in the whole Platonic corpus. If the Epistles are spurious,

we lose our one direct source of information for any part of Plato's

biography, and also the source of most of our knowledge of Sicilian

affairs from 367 to 354. (As E. Meyer says, the historians who reject

the Epistles disguise the state of the case by alleging Plutarch's

Life of Dion as their authority, while the statements in this Life

are openly drawn for the most part from the Epistles.) Documents

like these ought not to be surrendered to the " athetizer " except

for very weighty reasons.

As to the Epinomis the case stands thus. It was certainly known

in antiquity generally and regarded as genuine. Cicero, for example,

quotes it as " Plato." On the other hand, the Neoplatonic

philosopher Proclus (410-485 A.D.) wished to reject it as spurious

because of an astronomical discrepancy with the Timaeus. Dio-

genes Laertius also tells us that Plato's Laws were " copied out from

the wax " by the Academic astronomer Philippus of Opus, adding

" and his too, as they say, is the Epinomis/' It has become common

in recent times to assert, on the strength of this remark, that the

Epinomis is an appendix to the Laws composed by Philippus. It

ought, however, to be noted that Proclus was apparently unaware

that any doubt had been felt about the Epinomis before his own time,

since he based his rejection wholly on argument, not on testimony.

His argument is, moreover, a bad one, since the " discrepancy with

the Timaeus " of which he complained is found as much in the

Laws as in the Epinomis. The internal evidence of style seems to

reveal no difference whatever between the two works. And it

may be urged that since the state of the text of the Laws shows that

the work must have been left at Plato's death without the author's

final revision and then circulated without even the small verbal

corrections which the editor of a posthumous work commonly has to

make in the interests of grammar, it is most unlikely that disciples who

treated the ipsissima verba of a dead master with such scrupulous

veneration would have ventured on adding a " part the last " to

the work on their own account. Hence it seems to me that Hans

Raeder is right in insisting on the genuineness of the Epinomis,

and that the remark of Diogenes about Philippus of Opus only means

1 Twice for the unsatisfactory definition of rd Ka\6v as r& irptirov (Topics,

AS. IO2 6, 5. 1350 13) ; once for the still worse definition of Ka\6v as

rb St fycw $ <Uor?s 7)86 (Topics, Z6. 1460 22). That both these bad attempts

at definition occur in the dialogue seems to make it clear that Aristotle is

alluding to it and not to any other source.

THE PLATONIC WRITINGS 15

that he did for this work was also transcribed by, or perhaps

dictated to, him, (The now customary disparagement of the

Epinomis seems to me due to mere inability to follow the mathe-

matics of the dialogue. 1 )

Professor Werner Jaeger 2 has incidentally done a service to

the student of the Epinomis in his recent work on the development

of Aristotle's thought by showing that there is an intimate connexion

between the Laws and Epinomis and Aristotle's work nepl <iAoo-o<ui$,

of which only fragments are now extant. In particular, as he shows,

there is an immediate connexion between the " fifth " or " etherial "

bodily region of the Epinomis and Aristotle's famous " celestial

matter " of which the " heavens " are assumed to be made (the

essentia quinta or materia coelcslis). Professor Jaeger interprets the

connexion thus. We have first the Laws circulated promptly after

Plato's death, then Aristotle's proposals for modifications of Platonic

doctrine in the TTC/K <iA.oo-o<tas, finally (all in the course of a year

or two), the Epinomis, rejoining to Aristotle, and composed by

Philippus. While I regard Professor Jaeger's proof of the intimate

relation between Epinomis and ircpl <tAoo-o<ias as important, I

think it more natural to interpret the facts rather differently by

supposing the Laws and Epinomis together to have been tran-

scribed and circulated shortly after the death of Plato, and then

followed by Aristotle's criticism of Platonic doctrine in the -repl

c^iAocro^tW This at least leaves Aristotle more leisure than Professor

Jaeger's hypothesis for the composition of a work which, as we

know it ran to three " books," must have been of considerable

compass. Whatever the truth about the Epinomis may be, I am

at least sure that it is premature to assume that it is known not to

be Plato's.

As for the Epistles, it is not necessary now to argue the case for

their genuineness as elaborately as one would have had to do some

years ago. Since Wilamowitz in his Platon declared for the genuine-

ness of the very important trio VI, VII, VIII, those who depend on

11 authority " for their opinions have been in a hurry to protest

that these three at least must be accepted. But the acceptance of

the three logically carries with it recognition of the correspondence

between Plato and Dionysius (II, III, XIII) and the letter of con-

gratulation and good advice to Dion (IV) ; and when these are

accepted as Platonic, there remains no good ground for rejecting

any of the thirteen letters of our MSS. except the first, which is

written in a style wholly unlike the others, and by some one

whose circumstances, as stated by himself, show that he can be

neither Plato nor Dion, nor have any intention of passing for either.

Presumably this letter got into the correspondence by some mistake

at a very early date. The twelfth letter (a mere note of half a

dozen lines) was apparently suspected in later antiquity, since our

1 For a good recent defence of the dialogue see the discussion in H. Raeder,

Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 413 ff. and cf. infra, pp. 497-8.

* Jaeger, Aristoteles, c. 3.

16 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

best MSS. have a note to that effect. No grounds have ever been

produced for questioning the authenticity of any of the rest which

will bear examination. Most of the difficulties raised in modern

times, especially those alleged in connexion with II and XIII,

rest on mere misunderstandings. It is safe to say that the present

tendency to accept only VI, VII, VIII is a consequence of mere

servile deference to the name of Wilamowitz. None of these

documents should have needed the imprimatur of a professor as a

recommendation ; their acceptance is bound to lead logically to

that of the rest with the exception of I and possibly XII. As far

as external testimony goes, it is enough to say that Aristophanes

of Byzantium included in his " trilogies " Epistles (pretty obviously

our thirteen, or we should have heard more about the matter), and

that Cicero quotes IV, IX, and especially VII (nobilissima ilia

epistula, as he calls it) as familiar Platonic material. This, taken

together with the thoroughly Platonic style of the letters, disposes

of the notion that they can be " forgeries/ 1 The art of writing

such prose was already dead in half a century after Plato's death,

and the revival of " Atticism/ 1 which might make such a production

barely conceivable, belongs to a time some generations later than

Cicero. 1

II

To understand a great thinker is, of course, impossible unless

we know something of the relative order of his works, and of the

actual period of his life to which they belong. What, for example,

could we make of Kant if we did not know whether the Critique of

Pure Reason was the work of ambitious youth or of ripe middle age,

whether it was written before or after the discourse on the Only Pos-

sible Demonstration of the Being of a God or the Dreams of a Ghost-seer ?

We cannot, then, even make a beginning with the study of Plato

until we have found some trustworthy indication of the order in

which his works, or at least the most significant of them, were

written. Even when we have fixed this order, if it can be fixed, we

need, for a completer understanding, to be able also to say at what

precise period of life the most important dialogues were written,

1 The reader will find an elaborate collection of linguistic and other

arguments against the Epistles in the section devoted to them in H. Richards'

Platonica, 254-298, and, as regards most of the series, in C. Ritter, Neue Unter-

suchungen uebev Platon, 327-424. Most of the alleged objections appear

frivolous, or at best based on misreading of the Syracusan situation. Why

the German critics in general think that it is in some way " unworthy " of Plato

to have had a " business settlement" with Dionysius such as that to which

Ep. xiii. relates is to me as unintelligible as Wilamowitz's assertion that the

statements of the same letter about the great age of Plato's mother and the

existence of four nieces for whom he may have to provide must be fiction.

Old ladies do sometimes live to over ninety, and any man of sixty may quite

well have four nieces. The names of Bentley, Cobet, Crote, Blass, E. Meyer,

are enough to show that there is plenty of good " authority " for belief in the

Epistles. See Appendix, pp. 541-544, for further discussion.

THE PLATONIC WRITINGS 17

whether in early'manhood, injmid life, or in old age, and again whether

they are an unbroken series of compositions or whether there is

evidence of a considerable gap or gaps in Plato's literary activity.

These are the questions which we have now to face.

The external evidence supplied by trustworthy testimony only

assures us on one point. Aristotle tells us (Pol. 12646 26), what

could in any case never have been doubted, that the Laws is later than

the Republic. There was also an ancient tradition, mentioned by

Proclus and implied in the statement of Diogenes Laertius about

Philippus of Opus, that the Laws was left by Plato " in the wax/'

and the " fair copy " for circulation made after his death. The

statement is borne out by the frequency in the dialogue of small

grammatical difficulties which cannot reasonably be ascribed to

later " corruption/' but are natural in a faithfully copied first text

which has never received the author's finishing touches. Trust-

worthy testimony takes us no farther than this. Comparison

of certain Platonic dialogues with one another yields one or two

other results. Thus the Republic must be earlier than the Timaeus,

where it is referred to and the argument of its first five books briefly

recapitulated. The Politicus must be not earlier than the Sophistes,

to which it is the professed sequel ; and the Sophistes, for the same

reason, later than the Theaetetus. These are all the certain indica-

tions furnished by the matter of the dialogues themselves. There

may be an allusion in the Phaedo to a point more fully explained in

the Meno, and the Republic has been supposed to allude to both.

Both the Theaetetus and the Sophistes refer to a meeting between

Socrates, then extremely young, and the great Parmenides ; and

there must be some connexion between these references and the

fact that the Parmenides professes ostensibly to describe this

encounter. But we cannot say that the allusions enable us to

determine with certainty whether the Parmenides is earlier than

both the others, later than both, or intermediate between the two.

Raeder has tried to show at length that the Phaedrus contains

allusions which would only be intelligible to readers who already

knew the Republic] but there are gaps in his argument, and it

has not completely convinced some prominent Platonic scholars.

Clearly, if we are to arrive at results of any value, we need a clue

to the order of composition of the dialogues which will take us

much farther than the few certain indications we have so far found.

In the earlier part of the nineteenth century more than one

unsatisfactory attempt was made to provide such a clue. Thus

it was at one time held that we can detect signs of comparative

youth in the gorgeous rhetoric of certain dialogues, and the Phaedrus

in particular was often assumed to be the earliest of the dialogues

on this ground. But it is obvious that reasoning of this kind is

inherently untrustworthy, especially in dealing with the work of a

great dramatic artist. Inferences from the manner of the Phaedrus

are, for example, to be discounted partly on the ground that its

rhetoric is largely parody of the rhetoricians, partly because so

18 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

much of its content is imaginative myth which lends itself naturally

to a high-flown diction. The assumption that works in which there

is a large element of semi-poetical myth must be "juvenile " obviously

rests on another assumption, for which we have no evidence at all,

that we know independently what the personal temperament of the

youthful Plato was. We have only to think of the known chrono-

logical order of the works of Goethe to see how unsound a method

must be which would require us to regard the second part of Faust

or Wilhelm Meisters W under jahre as juvenile productions. A

still more arbitrary assumption underlies the attempt of E. Munk

to arrange the dialogues in order on the assumption that the age

ascribed to Socrates in a dialogue is an indication of its date. On

the theory that dialogues which represent Socrates as a young man

must be early, those which represent him as old, late, we should

have to put the Parmenides, where Socrates is " very young/' at the

opening of the series, the Theaetetus, which narrates a conversation

held just before his trial, at the other end, though the allusion in

the one dialogue to the meeting which provides the setting for the

other shows that they are probably not to be separated by too long

an interval.

The serious scientific investigation of the internal evidence for

the order of composition of the dialogues really begins in 1867 with

Lewis Campbell's philological proof of the genuineness of the

Sophistes and PolMcus. It has been further developed, sometimes

with too much confidence in its results, by a whole host of writers,

notably Dittenberger and C. Ritter in Germany, and W. Lutoslawski

in this country. The underlying and sound principle of the method

may be simply stated thus. If we start with two works which are

known to be separated by a considerable interval and exhibit a

marked difference in style, it may be possible to trace the transition

from the writer's earlier to his later manner in detail, to see the

later manner steadily more and more replacing the earlier, and this

should enable us to arrive at some definite conclusions about the

order of the works which occupy the interval. The conclusion will

be strengthened if we take for study a number of distinct and inde-

pendent peculiarities and find a general coincidence in the order in

which the various peculiarities seem to become more and more

settled mannerisms. The opportunity for applying this method to

the work of Plato is afforded by the well-authenticated fact that the

Laws is a composition of old age, while the Republic is one of an

earlier period, and forms with certain other great dialogues, such as

the Protagoras, Phaedo, Symposium, a group distinguished by a

marked common style and a common vigour of dramatic representa-

tion which experience shows we cannot expect from a writer who is

not in the prime of his powers. Growing resemblance to the manner

of the Laws, if made out on several independent but consilient lines

of inquiry, may thus enable us to discover which of the Platonic

dialogues must be intermediate between the Laws and the Republic.

There are several different peculiarities we may obviously select for

THE PLATONIC WRITINGS 19

study. Thus one obvious contrast between Republic and Laws is

to be found in the marked decline of dramatic power. A second is

that the Laws conforms carefully to a whole number of the graces of

style introduced into Attic prose by Isocrates, the Republic and the

other great dramatic dialogues neglect these elegancies. A third

line of study which has been very minutely pursued, especially by

Lutoslawski, is the examination of special uses of connecting

particles throughout the dialogues. Without going into detail, it

is enough to say here that the result of these converging lines of

study has been to convince students of Platonic language and idiom,

almost without an exception, that we can definitely specify a

certain group of very important dialogues as belonging to the post-

Republic period of Plato's life. The group comprises Theaetetus,

Parmenides, Sophistes, Politicus, Timaetis, Philebus, Laws. The

identification of this group of " later " dialogues may be taken as a

pretty assured and definite result, not likely ever to be seriously

modified.

It is another question whether the employment of the same

method would enable us to distinguish more precisely between the

earlier and later dialogues belonging to either of the two great groups,

so as to say, e.g., whether the Philebus is earlier or later in composi-

tion than the Timaeus, the Symposium than the Phaedo. When two

works belong to much the same period of an author's activity, a

slight difference of style between them may easily be due to acci-

dental causes. (Thus in dealing with the Symposium we should

have to remember that a very large part of it is professed imitation

or parody of the styles of others.) Lutoslawski in particular seems

to me to have pushed a sound principle to the pitch of absurdity in

the attempt, by the help of the integral calculus, to extract from

considerations of " stylometry " a detailed and definite order of

composition for the whole of the dialogues. It may fairly be

doubted whether " stylometric " evidence can carry us much beyond

the broad discrimination between an earlier series of dialogues of

which the Republic is the capital work and a later series composed

in the interval between the completion of the Republic and Plato's

death.

It is possible, however, that some supplementary considerations

may take us a little further. Plato himself explains, in the intro-

ductory conversation prefixed to the Theaetetus, that he has avoided

the method of indirect narration of a dialogue for that of direct

dialogue in order to avoid the wearisomencss of keeping up the

formula of a reported narrative. Now the greatest dialogues of

the earlier period, the Protagoras, Symposium, Phaedo, Republic,

are all reported dialogues, and one of them, the Symposium, is

actually reported at second-hand. So again is the Parmenides,

where the standing formula, as Professor Burnet calls it, is the

cumbrous " Antiphon told us that Pythodorus said that Parmenides

said. 11 The original adoption of this method of narration of a con-

versation is manifestly due to the desire for dramatic life and colour.

20 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

It permits of the sort of record of the by-play between the personages

of the story which contributes so much to the charm of the Phaedo.

But the labour required to keep up the " formula " is so great that

it is not surprising that Plato finally dropped it, and that the

Theaetetm and all the works we find reason to place later are in the

form of direct dialogue. To me it seems highly probable, though

not certain, that it was the special complication of the formula

required for the Parmenides which led to the final abandonment of

the method, and that we may plausibly infer that the Parmenides

was written either simultaneously with the Theaetetus or immedi-

ately before it. Another inference which I should draw with some

confidence is that, since no young writer is likely to have made his

first prentice experiments in .dialogue with so difficult a form, the

popular view that the Protagoras is one of the earliest of the Platonic

dialogues must be erroneous. The certainty and vigour of the

dramatic handling of the characters there should prove that the

Protagoras belongs as a fourth with the Phaedo, Symposium, and

Republic to the period of Plato's supreme excellence as a dramatist

and stylist. In particular, it must be a considerably later work

than the comparatively undramatic and rather unduly diffuse

Gorgias, a point which has some bearing on the interpretation of the

purpose and ethical teaching of the Protagoras.

We may turn next to the question whether it is possible to fix

any definite date in Plato's life as a terminus ad quern for the earlier

series of dialogues, or a terminus a quo for the later. Something, I

believe, may be done to settle both these questions. I have already

referred in the last chapter to the statement made by Plato in

Ep. vii., written after the murder of Dion in the year 354, that he

came to Sicily in his forty-first year already convinced that the

salvation of mankind depends on the union of the philosopher and

the " ruler " in one person. The actual words of the letter are that

Plato had been driven to say this " in a eulogy on true philosophy/'

and this seems an unmistakable allusion to the occurrence of the

same statement in Rep. 499 ff. It should follow that this most philo-

sophically advanced section of the Republic was already written in

the year 388-7, with the consequence that the Republic, and by

consequence the earlier dialogues in general, were completed at least

soon after Plato was forty and perhaps before foundation of the

Academy. If we turn next to the dialogue which seems to prelude

to the later group, the Theaetetus, we get another indication of date.

The dialogue mentions the severe and dangerous wound received by

the mathematician Theaetetus in a battle fought under the walls of

Corinth which cannot well be any but that of the year 369. It is

assumed tacitly all through that Theaetetus will not recover from

his injuries and is clear that the discourse was composed after his

death and mainly as a graceful tribute to his memory. Thus,

allowing for the time necessary for the completion of so considerable

a work, we may suppose the dialogue to have been written just

before Plato's first departure on his important practical enterprise

THE PLATONIC WRITINGS 21

at Syracuse. This, as Professor Burnet has said, seems to be the

explanation of the magnificent eulogy of the retired and contem-

plative life, a passage confessed by Plato himself to be an irrele-

vance so far as the argument of the dialogue is concerned. Plato

is giving expression to the reluctance with which he leaves the

Academy, at the bidding of duty and honour, for the turmoil and

sordidness of the political arena.

Once more, the Sophistes seems to give us an approximate date.

It is the first of the series of dialogues in which the deliberate

adoption of the Isocratean avoidance of hiatus occurs. This would

naturally suggest a probable break of some length in Plato's activity

as a writer just before the composition of the Sophistes. Now it is

antecedently probable that there must have been such an inter-

ruption between 367 and 360, the year of Plato's last return from

Syracuse. His entanglements with Dionysius and Sicilian affairs,

combined with his duties as head of the Academy, are likely to have

left him little leisure for literary occupation in these years.

Thus we may say with every appearance of probability that

there are two distinct periods of literary activity to be distinguished

in Plato's life. The first cannot have begun before the death of

Socrates ; apart from the absurdity of the conception of Plato as

" dramatizing " the sayings and doings of the living man whom he

revered above all others, it is fairly plain that the original motive

for the composition of " discourses of Socrates " by the viri Socratici

was to preserve the memory of a living presence which they had lost.

It apparently continued down to Plato's fortieth or forty-first

year and the opening of the Academy, and it includes all the work

in which Plato's dramatic art is most fresh and vigorous. The main

object of this incessant activity seems to be to immortalize the

personality of Socrates. For twenty years after the foundation of

the Academy Plato seems to have written nothing, unless the

Phaedrus, a difficult dialogue to account for on any theory, falls

early in this period. This is as it should be : the President of the

Academy would for long enough after its foundation be far too busy

to write. Then, probably on the eve of the Sicilian adventure, after

twenty years of work the Academy is sufficiently organized to

leave its head, now a man of some sixty years, leisure to write the

Theaetetus and Parmenides; but an opportunity for continuous

writing does not present itself until Plato's final withdrawal from

active personal participation in " world politics." The composition

of five such works as Sophistes, Politicus, Timaeus, Philebus, Laws,

is a notable achievement for any man between the ages of sixty-

seven and eighty-one. But we must think of this work as being

executed simultaneously with regular oral exposition of the doctrine

described by Aristotle as the " philosophy of Plato." It is an

entire misconception to relegate this last stage in the development

of Plato's thought, as the textbooks often seem to do, to a " senile "

year or two subsequent to the close of Plato's activity as a writer.

It must have been contemporary with the writing of the whole

22 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

" later " group of dialogues, and the man who was still at his death

labouring on the Laws can never have sunk into " senility.' 1

See further :

BURNET, J. Platonism, Ch. i, 4.

CAMPBELL, L. " Sophistes " and " Politicus " of Plato (1867),

General Introduction.

HACKFORTH, R. The Authorship of the Platonic Epistles,

(Manchester, 1913.)

RAEDER, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung. (Leipzig,

1905.)

LUTOSLAWSKI, W. Origin and Growth of Plato's Logic. (1897.)

PARMENTIER, L. La Chronologie des dialogues de Platon.

(Brussels, 1913.)

RITTER, C. Untersuchungen ueber Platon. (Stuttgart, 1882.) ;

Neue Untersuchungen ueber Platon. (Munich, 1910.)

LEVI, A. Sulle interpretazioni immanentistiche della filosofia di

Platone. (Turin, N.D.)

SHOREY, P. The Unity of Plato's Thought. (Chicago, 1903.)

SHOREY, P. What Plato Said, pp. 58-73.

ROBIN, L. Platon, pp. 19-48.

NOVOTNY", F. Platonis Epistulae.

HARWARD, J. The Platonic Epistles (Introduction).

NOTE. I do not deny that Plato's" first period " may have extended

into the opening years of his career in the Academy. On my own

reasoning this must be so if the Phaedo should, after all, be later than

the Republic. It has been argued (e.g. by M. Parmentier) that the

Symposium must be later than 385, the year of the death of Aristo-

phanes. I doubt, however, whether too much has not been made of

the supposed Platonic rule not to introduce living persons as speakers.

Callias was alive and active years after any date to which we can

reasonably assign the Protagoras. Euclides, who was alive and appar-

ently well when Theaetetus received his wound, is more likely than

not to have survived the writing of the Theaetetus. Socrates " the

younger " can hardly be taken to have been dead when the Politicus

was written. Gorgias may have lived long enough to read the Gorgias.

Simmias, if we may believe Plutarch de genio Socratis, was alive and

active in 379. That the majority of Plato's personages are characters

already dead when his dialogues were written, seems to me a mere

consequence of the fact that the dialogues deal with Socrates and his

contemporaries .

[It might be urged against the reasoning of the first paragraph of

p. 20 supra that several, if not all, of the dialogues of Aeschines (cer-

tainly the Aspasia, Alcibiades t Callias, Axiochus) were of the " nar-

rated " type. But they were narrations of the simplest kind of which

the Charmides and Laches are examples, and such evidence as we have

suggests that they are all later in date of composition than the earliest

work of Plato.]

CHAPTER III

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES : H1PPIAS MAJOR,

HIPPIAS MINOR, ION, MENEXENUS

LOVERS of great literature have every reason to be whole-

heartedly thankful that once in the world's history a supreme

philosophical thinker should also have been a superb dramatic

artist. But what is to them pure gain is, in some ways, gain at the

expense of the average student of " metaphysics." For several

reasons it is quite impossible to construct a neatly arranged syste-

matic handbook to the " Platonic philosophy." In the first place,

it is doubtful whether there ever was a " Platonic philosophy " at

all, in the sense of a definite set of formulated doctrines about the

omne scibV.e. Plato has done his best to make it quite clear that he

took no great interest in " system-making." To him philosophy

meant no compact body of " results " to be learned, but a life spent

in the active personal pursuit of truth and goodness by the light of

one or two great passionate convictions. It is not likely that, even

at the end of his life of eighty years, he fancied himself to have

worked out anything like a coherent, clearly articulated " theory of

everything." Systematization of this kind commonly has to be

paid for by intellectual stagnation ; the vitality and progressiveness

of Platonism is probably largely owing to the fact that, even in the

mind of its originator, it always remained largely tentative and

provisional. If there ever was a Platonic " system," at least Plato

himself resolutely refused to write an exposition of it, 1 and we of

later times, who do not possess any record of the oral teaching

which was clearly intended to be the vehicle of Plato's most personal

and intimate thinking, are not in a position to make the lack good.

The dialogues will tell us something of Plato's fundamental life-

1 Ep. vii. 34 ic : " There does not exist, and there never shall, any treatise

by myself on these matters. The subject does not admit, as the sciences in

general do, of exposition. It is only after long association in the great

business itself and a shared life that a light breaks out in the soul, kindled, so

to say, by a leaping flame, and thereafter feeds itself." Ep. ii. 314^: "I have

never myself written a word on these topics, and there neither is nor ever

shall be any treatise by Plato ; what now bears the name belongs to Socrates

beautified and rejuvenated." That is, all that a teacher can do in philosophy

is to awaken in a younger mind the spirit of independent personal thinking ;

the dialogues are meant not to expound a " Platonic system," but to preserve

the memory of Socrates. One of Plato's grounds for dissatisfaction with

Dionysius II was that he had circulated a work professing to expound " Platon-

ism " (Ep. vii. 3416).

24 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

long convictions ; of his " system/' if he had one, they hardly tell

us anything at all. With Aristotle we are in a very different posi-

tion. We have lost the " works " in which he recommended his

" views " to the world at large, and possess the manuscripts of

courses of lectures in which we see him, for the most part, feeling his

way to his results through the criticism of others.

Further special difficulties are created for us by certain peculiar-

ities of Plato's literary temperament. Unlike Aristotle, he does not

introducejiimself and Msjopinions into his dialogues.__. Hgjs^-in-f act ,

at .S^JL^P 3 -^ 1 -?' w **h thelnstinct of the greaQramatist, to keep his

own^ersonality comp^tel^jCES^^ckgrourid. Socrates isjpresent

asTone'of thFspeakers in affThe dialogues except the Laws, and in all

exceptrth^^wKi^"^Tiave seen reaso'nToTegafd as written in late

life, Socrates is not only the chief speaker but dominates the whole

dialogue by his vivid and strongly marked personality. It can

hardly be doubted that in the long list of works written before Plato

had found his real vocation as head of the Academy, the main

conscious object of the writer is to preserve a faithful and living

portrait of the older philosopher.

Even if we accept the view originated about the beginning of

the nineteenth century, that Plato has transfigured the personality

and teaching of Socrates out of recognition, we are bound, I think,

to hold that the transfiguration has been unconscious. We cannot

seriously ascribe to Plato deliberate and pointless mystification.

This means, of itself, that Plato carefully devotes himself to re-

producing the life and thought of a generation to which he did not

himself belong, and that whatever indications he may have given

us of his personal doctrines have to be given under restrictions im-

posed by this selection of a vanished age as the background of the

dialogues. (Thus we cannot read the Republic intelligently unless

we bear carefully in' mind both that the whole work presupposes

as its setting the Athens of the Archidamian war and that this

setting had vanished into the past by 413, when Plato was still no

more than a boy. So to understand the Protagoras we have to

remember that we are dealing with a still earlier time, Athens under

Pericles shortly before the outbreak of the great war, and that

Plato was not even born at the date of the gathering of the " wits "

in the house of Callias.) There are only two characters among

the host of personages in Plato's dialogues of whom one can be cer-

tain that they are not actual historical figures of the fifth century,

the unnamed Eleatic of the Sophistes and Politicks and the un-

named Athenian of the Laws. They have been left anonymous

apparently on purpose that their creator may be at liberty to

express thoughts of his own through them with a freedom impossible

in the case of figures who are " kennt men/ 1 with characters and

views of their own which have to be taken into account.

This is generally admitted on all hands except for the one most

important figure of all, that of Socrates. Him, it is still maintained

in many quarters, though not so confidently as it used to be main-

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 25

tained thirty or forty years ago, Plato treated without scruple, to

the point of putting into his mouth all sorts of theories invented by

Plato himself after the death of their ostensible exponent. I cannot

myself believe in this extraordinary exception to the general rule,

but even if one does believe in it, the general situation is not very

seriously affected. Even those who most freely credit Plato with

fathering his own views on Socrates commonly admit that some of

the views ascribed to Socrates in the dialogues (if only those ex-

pressed in the Apology) are those of the actual Socrates, and to

admit this means admitting at least that we have somehow to

distinguish between those utterances of " Socrates " which are

really deliverances of " Plato " and those which are not, and it

becomes a difficult problem to know on what principle the distinction

is to be made. Finally, there is a further difficulty arising from the

very life-likeness of the dialogues of the earlier groups. In nearly

all of them except the shortest, the conversation wanders, as actual

talk does, over a wide field of topics. Metaphysics, ethics, the

principles of government, of economics, of art-criticism, of education,

may all come under consideration in one and the same conversation.

If we try to isolate the topics, putting together under one head all

Plato has to say anywhere about economics, under another all his

utterances about religion, under a third his views on beauty and the

arts, we run the very serious risk of confusing what may be views

learned early in life, and very largely taken over receptively from a

predecessor, with the very ripest fruits of a life of intense personal

thought. (Thus it would be rash to confound in one amalgam

utterances about early education taken from the Republic, written

probably before Plato was forty and at any rate possibly more

Socratic than Platonic, with others taken from the Laws, the

magnum opus of Plato's old age, where there is no Socrates in

question to cause any difficulty.) A work on Platonic philosophy

composed on these principles may be an admirably digested " cram-

book " ; it is certain to obliterate every trace of the development of

Plato's thought. For all these reasons, it seems the better choice

between evils, to deal with the different dialogues seriatim, even at

the cost of some repetition.

Accordingly I propose first to consider what we may call the

" Socratic " group among the dialogues, the series of works cul-

minating, so far as ripeness of thought and compass of subjects are

concealed, in the Republic, grouping the slighter dialogues together

but dwelling more fully on the detail of the greater and richer.

Next I propose to treat separately each of the great dialogues of

Plato's later age in the same way. In both cases I must remind

my reader that I do not believe that many results of anything like

certainty can be reached in the determination of the precise order

of composition of particular dialogues. In the case of the earlier

group, which I call Socratic in the sense that they are dominated by

the personality of Plato's Socrates, I make no assumption about

this order beyond the general one that the four great dialogues which

26 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

have the widest range of subject-matter and are also reported at

second-hand are maturer work than the slighter dialogues which

have the form of direct conversation, and presumably also than

shorter " indirect " conversations like the Charmides and Euthydemus.

Beyond this, the order in which I shall examine the dialogues has

no merit except that of convenience. Similarly the arrangement

I shall adopt for the dialogues of later life is not meant to carry any

silent chronological implications.

With one or two trifling exceptions most of the dialogues we

shall have first to review have an ethical purport. (Perhaps the

only complete exception of any importance is afforded by the

Cratyhis.) The interest of many of them is by no means exclusively

ethical, sometimes (as in the case of the Euthydemus) not ostensibly

primarily ethical, but we commonly find that the discussion either

begins with, or is found as it proceeds to involve, the great practical

issue of the right direction of conduct. It is therefore advisable to

begin at the outset by formulating very briefly and in a way which

brings out their interconnexion, a few simple principles which we

shall find running through the whole of Plato's treatment of the

moral being of man. Since we find these principles taken for granted

in what has every mark of being Plato's earliest work as well as in

his ripest and latest, we may fairly regard them as a legacy from

Socrates ; and the most characteristic of them are, in fact, specific-

ally attributed to Socrates by Aristotle, though we have no reason

to suppose that Aristotle had any reason for the attribution beyond

the fact that the principles in question are put into the mouth of

Socrates in the Platonic dialogues, notably in the Protagoras. The

most bald and straightforward statement of these principles as a

whole in the Platonic corpus is perhaps that of the Alctbiades I,

which has every appearance of being intended as a compendium of

ethics composed by an immediate disciple and possibly during

Plato's lifetime. We may reproduce the main line of argument

adopted there and elsewhere much as follows.

The one great standing aim of men in all they do is to attain

happiness (eudaimonia), in other words to make a success, in the

best sense of the word, of life. Every one wants to make a success

of his private life ; if a man is conscious of abilities and opportunities

which open the way to prominence as a public man, he is anxious to

make a success of the affairs of his " city," to be a successful states-

man. This is what we mean by being a good man ; the good man is

the man who " conducts his own affairs, those of his household, those

of the city, well." And the words good and well are not used here in

a narrowly moralistic sense. To conduct your business well means

to make a thorough success of it ; the good man is the thoroughly

effective man. But to make a thorough success of life means to

achieve and possess good. We may say then that all men alike

desire good and nothing but good. A man may conceivably prefer

the appearance or reputation of some things to their reality ; e.g.

a man may prefer a reputation for a virtue he does not possess to

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 27

the possession of the virtue, or he might prefer being thought hand-

some or witty to being really so. But no one ever prefers being

thought to enjoy good to the actual enjoyment of good. Where

good is concerned, every one wishes really to have it, and not to

put up with a counterfeit. If a man chooses, as many men do,

what is not really good, the reason must be that he wrongly supposes

it to be good. No one would ever knowingly choose evil when he

might choose good, or leave a good he might have had unchosen.

This is the meaning of the famous " Socratic " paradox that " all

wrongdoing is involuntary." It is involuntary in the sense that the

man who chooses what is bad only chooses it because he wrongly

thinks it good. And so with the other " paradox " that no one ever

knows the good without acting on his knowledge. It cannot be

true that men " know the good but do the bad " ; that would imply

choice of an evil known to be evil, and such a choice is impossible.

Now when we come to consider the different things which men

commonly call " good " and wish to have, we see at once that they

are of various kinds. Some of them are material possessions.

Many men think that good means just plenty of things of this sort.

But we can easily see that material things are not good except for a

man who knows how to use them. It would be no good to a man,

for example, to have flutes, or musical instruments of any kind,

unless he knew how to use them. Flutes are good for the man who

knows how to play on them. Similarly it would be no real good to

you to possess all the gold in the world, unless you know how to use

it. Again, men think that bodily beauty, strength and agility,

robust health, are very good things. But health and strength

again may be misused ; they are good only for the man who knows

how to make the proper use of them. If a man has not this know-

ledge, but " abuses " his physical advantages, it might be much

better for him if he had been less robust and active. The same thing

is true of intellectual " parts/' A man is not really the better for

parts and accomplishments which he does not know how to use

rightly. In fact we may say that if health, wealth, and the recog-

nized " good " things are to be really good, it is first of all necessary

that the user of these things should be good. Now that which uses

all other things, even a man's body, is his soul. The soul is the

man, and everything else that is his is merely something he has or

owns. A man, in fact, is a " soul using a body " (this is the standing

Academic definition of " man "). 1 Hence the first condition of

enjoying real good and making a real success of life is that a man's

soul should be in a good or healthy state. And the good or healthy

state of the soul is ]ust the wisdom or knowledge (sophia, phronesis)

which ensures that a man shall make the right use of his body and

of everything else which is his. Hence the first duty of every man

who means to enjoy good or happiness is to " tend his soul," " to

i For this reasoning see Ale. I uga-i^d. Euthydemus, 278^-282^, 288**-

292*. For the soul as the real " man " which " uses " the body see Ale. I

28 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

see to it that his soul is as good as it possibly can be," that is, to get

the knowledge or insight which ensures his using everything rightly.

And before a man can develop this quality of soul, he must be

brought to " know himself," that is, to recognize the imperative

need of moral wisdom and the dreadfulness of his present state of

ignorance. 1 This is why Socrates taught that " all the virtues are

one thing," wisdom or moral insight, and why he insisted that the

necessary preparation for the private man or the statesman who

means to make life a success is the " tendance of his own soul/ 1

and the first step towards this " tendance " is true self-knowledge.

The same considerations explain the peculiar character of the mission

Socrates believes himself to have received from heaven. He does

not claim, like the professional teacher of an " art " such as

medicine or music, to have ready-made knowledge to impart to

anyone, and hence he denies that he has ever had " disciples."

For he does not profess to have attained the wisdom or insight of

which he speaks, but only to have attained to the perception that it

is the one thing needful for the conduct of life. He claims only that

he makes it the business of his life to " tend his own soul " and

exhorts all his fellow-citizens, high and low, old and young, to do

the same, and that he has a certain power of bringing home to others

by his questions the grossness and danger of their ignorance of them-

selves. His function is simply to impress on all and sundry the

misery of the state of ignorance in which they find themselves " by

nature " and the importance of " coming out of it." How a man is

to come out of this state of nature is not explained anywhere, 2 but

in proportion as he does come out of it and advance to true insight,

true knowledge of moral good and evil, all the different " virtues "

or excellences of character and conduct will automatically ensue

from this knowledge.

These fundamental elementary notions will suffice to explain

the general character of most of the earliest " Socratic " dialogues.

The procedure adopted is commonly this. Some term of moral

import for the conduct of life, one of those words which everybody

is using as familiar expressions daily without much consideration of

their precise meaning, such as " courage," " self-mastery," or even

" virtue " itself, is taken and we ask the question whether we can

say exactly what it means. A number of answers are suggested and

examined, but all are found wanting. None of them will stand

careful scrutiny. Usually the result arrived at is a negative one.

We discover to our shame that we do not really know the meaning

of the most familiar epithets which we use every day of our lives to

convey moral approval or censure. This revelation of our own

ignorance is painful, but it has the advantage that we have taken a

1 This is the message with which Socrates regarded himself as charged by

God to his fellow-citizens and mankind in general (Apol. zgd-e, 360, 41$).

1 Naturally not. An answer to this question would raise the issues

covered in Christian theology by the doctrine of " grace." We must not look

for an anticipation of Augustine in Hellenic moral philosophy.

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 29

step forward. At any rate, our knowledge of our own ignorance

will henceforth prevent our fancying that we really knew when we

were repeating some of the formulae which our inquiry has con-

demned. Now that we know that we do not know what it is so

necessary for the conduct of life to know, we are at least left with

a heightened sense of the importance of " tendance of the soul " ;

we shall not, like the rest of mankind, suppose ourselves to be in

spiritual health when we are really inwardly diseased ; our very

knowledge of the gravity of our spiritual malady will make us all

the more unremitting in our determination to make the attempt

to escape from our ignorance the great business of life. This,

rather than anything more specific in the way of " positive results,"

is the conclusion Plato means us to draw from these " dialogues of

search/' It has been objected to Plato by unsympathetic critics,

as he makes some of his characters object it to Socrates, that such

a conclusion is not satisfactory. Socrates, Grote thinks, should

have exchanged the easier part of critic for that of defender of theses

of his own. He would have found that they could be subjected to a

dialectic like his own with effects as damaging as those produced on

his rivals 1 theories by himself. The objection misses the mark.

Plato's object is not to propound theorems in moral science for our

instruction, but to rouse us to give our own personal care to the

conduct of our moral life by convincing us of the ignorance we

usually disguise from ourselves by acquiescence in uncriticized half-

truths and the practical gravity of that ignorance. He wishes to

make us think to the purpose about the great concern of life, not to

do our thinking for us. From his point of view, complacent satis-

faction with false conceptions of good is the deadliest of all maladies

of the soul ; if he can make us honestly dissatisfied with our

customary loose thinking, he has produced exactly the effect he

designed.

We may now, bearing these few simple ideas in mind, consider

the arguments of some of the early dialogues.

The Greater Hippias. The form of the dialogue is the simplest

possible ; it is a direct colloquy between Socrates and a single

speaker, the well-known polymath Hippias of Elis, who figures also

in the Lesser Hippias, the Protagoras, and a conversation, perhaps

suggested by the opening remarks of our dialogue, in the fourth

book of Xenophon's Memorabilia. 1 The presence of Hippias at

Athens implies that the time is one of peace, and, as the first visit

of Gorgias to the city is referred to as a past event (2826), the sup-

posed date must be after 427 B.C., and therefore during the years of

the peace of Nicias. Hippias is depicted as childishly conceited on

the strength of the great variety of topics he is able to expound, and

the brilliant financial success which attends him wherever he goes.

Even at Sparta a city where he is often called on matters of state

though no interest is taken in his astronomy and mathematics, he

has made a resounding success with a more immediately practical

1 Xenophon, Memor. iv. 4.

80 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

subject, a set homily put into the mouth of Nestor on " the kind of

fine achievements by which a young man may win high reputation "

(2866). This remark leads on to the main subject of the dialogue,

the question what is really meant by the word xaMv, beautiful,

which was commonly employed, like its Latin equivalent honestum,

and our colloquial " fine," to express both physical and moral beauty.

Socrates professes to have much trouble in satisfying the question

of a certain combative and ill-mannered acquaintance who has

reproached him for constantly using the epithets Ka\6v and ato-^poV,

" fine " and " ugly/' in judgments of value without being able to

explain their exact meaning. Can Hippias help him out of his per-

plexity ? (It does not call for much perspicacity to see that the

imaginary " rude fellow " who insists on asking awkward questions

is no other than Socrates himself. 1 ) The precise problem is this.

We call an act of remarkable courage a " fine "act, and we say the

same thing about an act of outstanding and remarkable justice.

The use of the same word " fine " in both cases implies that there

is a something (a certain i8os, form, or character the word is

little more than a synonym for a " something ") common to both

cases, or why do we give them the same name, " fine " ? What is

" the fine itself," " the just fine " (avrb TO /caAoi/), i.e. what is it

which is exactly and precisely named when we use the word " fine " ? 2

Hippias, like many interlocutors in Plato, underrates the difficulty

of the problem because he confuses the meaning of a term with an

example of it. He answers that a " fine girl " is, of course, something

" fine " (2870). But this clearly tells us nothing about the meaning

of " fine." There are also " fine " horses, " fine " musical instru-

ments, even " fine " pots and pans, like those made by the masters

of Attic pottery (288^), and, after all, the beauty of the " fine girl "

is relative. She would not be " fine " by comparison with a goddess

(2896). What then is " the just fine," the character which all " fine "

things exhibit ? (289^). Here again Hippias makes an elementary

blunder. Anything, he says, is made " fine," if it is gilded, and so

" that which by its presence makes a thing fine " may be said to

be just gold (2890).

But then the objection occurs that Phidias notoriously did not

gild the features of his famous chryselephantine Athena, and surely

Phidias may be presumed to have known his own business as an

artist (2906). This leads, at last, to a real attempt to define " the

fine." ^The " fine " is " the becoming " or " fitting " or " appro-

priate " (TO TT/ocVov, 2900). It would follow from this at once that

a soup-spoon of wood, because more " fitting," is more beautiful or

" fine " than a golden spoon (2910). Note that Socrates does not

1 See 2&Sd t where Socrates humorously describes his pertinacious ques-

tioner as " no wit, one of the canaille who cares nothing for anything but

the truth," and 2986 n, where he as good as identifies him with " the son of

Sophroniscus."

The characteristic phrases ai5rd rb Ka\6v and eWoi are introduced at

289^ without explanation, as something quite familiar. They bear the same

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 81

positively assert this conclusion, as he is represented as doing by

interpreters who are determined to see nothing in him but a common-

place utilitarian. He obviously intends to raise a difficulty. It

seemed a satisfactory explanation of the procedure of Phidias to

say that a statue with a gilded face would not be " beautiful "

because the gilding would not be " befitting." Yet, though a com-

mon wooden spoon would be more " in place " where one is eating

soup than a golden one, it is a paradox to say that because the wooden

spoon is " in place," it is a thing of beauty. Whatever may be the

true answer to the question what " beauty " is, the identification

of the aesthetically " fine " with the " befitting " is far too crude a

solution.

Hippias evidently feels the difficulty, and is made to fall back

again on an illustration, this time from the moral sphere. It is

eminently " fine " to live in health, wealth, and honours, to bury

your parents splendidly, and to receive in the fullness of days a

splendid funeral from your descendants (291^). But this, again, is

manifestly no true definition. A definition must be rigidly uni-

versal. But every one will admit that Heracles and Achilles and

others who preferred a short and glorious to a long and inglorious

life, and so died young and left their parents to survive them, made

a " fine " choice (292^-293^). The illustration has thus led nowhere,

and we have still to discuss the definition of the " fine " as the

" fitting " or " becoming " on its own merits. When a thing has

the character of being " becoming," does this make it " fine," or

does it only make the thing seem " fine " ? Hippias prefers the

second alternative, since even a scarecrow of a man can be made to

look "finer" if he is "becomingly" dressed. But, obviously, if

" propriety " makes things seem finer than they really are, " the

appropriate " and the " fine " cannot be the same thing (2946).

And we cannot get out of the difficulty, as Hippias would like to do,

by saying the " appropriateness " both makes things " fine " and

makes them seem " fine." If that were so, what really is " fine "

would always seem fine too. Yet it is notorious that communities

and individuals differ about nothing more than about the question

what sort of conduct is " fine " (2940-^). Thus if " appropriate-

ness " actually makes things " fine," the proposed definition may

possibly be the right one ; but if it only makes them " seem " fine

(we have seen that the alternatives are exclusive of one another]

the definition must clearly be rejected. And Hippias is satisfied

that this second alternative is the true one (2940). (Hume's well-

known ethical theory affords a good illustration of the point of this

reasoning. Hume sets himself to show that every society thinks

the kind of conduct it " disinterestedly " likes virtuous and the

meaning which they have in dialogues where the so-called " ideal theory " is

expounded. They mean that which is denoted without excess or defect by a

significant name, a determinate character. This is a good illustration of the

way in which the " ideal theory " is directly suggested by the everyday use of

language. It is assumed that if several things can each be significantly called

x t then x has a determinate significance which is the same in all the cases.

32 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

conduct it " disinterestedly " dislikes vicious. He then assumes

that he has proved that these two kinds of conduct really are

virtuous and vicious respectively, and that because a society knows

certainly what it likes and what it dislikes, it is infallible in its

judgments about virtue and vice. There is manifestly no con-

nexion between the premises of this reasoning and its conclusion.)

Socrates now (2950) throws out a suggestion of his own for examina-

tion. Perhaps it may be that the " fine " is the same as the

" useful." At any rate, by " fine eyes " we seem to mean eyes

which do their work of seeing well, by a " fine " or " handsome "

body one which discharges its various functions well, and the same

considerations seem to hold good of " fine " horses, ships, imple-

ments of all kinds, and " fine " social institutions. In all these cases

we seem to call " fine " that which serves the use to which it is to

be put well, and " ugly " that which serves that use badly. The

examples, drawn from a wide range of facts, thus suggest an obvious

generalization, and the use of them to suggest it is an illustration

of what Aristotle had in mind when he specified " inductive argu-

ments " as one of the contributions of Socrates to philosophical

method. 1

If the definition once given were magisterially proposed for our

acceptance, Socrates would thus stand revealed as a pure utilitarian

in moral and aesthetic theory. But it is, in fact, put forward

tentatively as a suggestion for examination. The examination

is conducted in strict accord with the requirements of the dialectical

method as described in the Phaedo.* The first step is to see what

consequences follow from the suggested " postulate " (uTroflco-ts).

If the consequences are found to be in accord with known facts,

and thus so far " verified," the postulate will be regarded as so far

justified ; if some of them prove to be at variance with fact, it must

be modified or dismissed, it cannot hold the field as it stands.

What consequences follow, then, from the identification of the

" fine " with the " useful " ? There is one at least which must

give us pause. A thing is useful for what it can do, not for what it

cannot ; thus our formula apparently leads to the identification of

TO KaXov with power to produce some result. But results may be

good or they may be bad, and it seems monstrous to hold that

power to produce evil is " fine." We must, at the least, modify

our statement by saying that the " fine " is that which can produce

good, i.e., whether the " useful " is " fine " or not will depend on

the goodness or badness of the end to which it is instrumental.

Now we call that which is instrumental to good " profitable "

(co^cXt/xov) ; thus our proposed definition must be made more

specific by a further determination. We must say " the fine "

1 Aristot. Met. MioySfc 27. Note that neither Socrates nor Aristotle regards

the "induction" as a proof. The generalization rb Ka\6v=T6 xPWWfo has

yet to be tested and may have to be rejected. The testing is the work of

intellectual analysis, or, as Socrates and Plato call it " dialectic,"

* Phaedo, iooa-6,

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 83

is that which is profitable (instrumental to the production of

good) (2960).

Even so, we have a worse difficulty to face. We are saying in

effect that the " fine " = that which causes good as its result. But

a cause and its effect are always different (or, in modern language,

causality is always transitive). Hence, if the "fine " is the cause

of good, it must follow that what is " fine " is never itself good, and

what is good is never itself " fine," and this is a monstrous paradox

(2970). It seems then that the attempt to give a utilitarian

definition of TO KO.\OV must be abandoned.

Possibly we may succeed better with a hedonist theory of beauty.

The pictures, statues, and the like which we call " fine " all give us

pleasure, and so do music and literature. In the one case the

pleasure is got from sight, in the other from hearing. This suggests

the new theory that the " fine " is " that which it is pleasant to see

or hear " (2980). And we may even get in " moral beauty " under

the formula, for " fine conduct " and " fine laws " are things which

it gives us pleasure to see or to hear. But there is a logical diffi-

culty to face. We are trying to define the " fine " as " that which it

is pleasant to see and hear." But, of course, you do not hear the

things which it is pleasant to see, nor see the things which it is

pleasant to hear. Thus our proposed definition will not be true of

either of the classes of things which are " fine," and, being true of

neither, it cannot be true of both. We assumed that TO *a\ov,

whatever it may be, must be a character common to all ' fine "

things, but " to be seen and heard " is not a character either of the

" pleasures of sight " or of the " pleasures of hearing " (3000, 6).

Aristotle comments on the fallacy, formally committed in this

argument, of confusing " and " with or," but the real trouble Ties

deeper. When the reasoning has been made formally sound by sub-

stituting " or " everywhere for " and," it still remains the fact

that it is hard to say that the " pleasures of sight " and those of

hearing have anything in common but their common character of

being pleasant, and it has been the standing assumption of the

dialogue that all " fine " things have some one common character.

But the conclusion, which might seem indicated, that the " fineness "

which all " fine " things have in common is just " pleasantness "

is excluded by the firm conviction of both Plato and Aristotle that

there are " disgraceful," morally " ugly " pleasures, e.g. those of the

sexual " pervert." At the same time, the proposed formula is at

any rate suggestive. There must be some reason why the two un-

mistakably " aesthetic " senses should be just sight and hearing,

though the utilization of the fact demands a much more developed

aesthetic psychology than that of our dialogue. The equivocation

between " and " and " or " is, on Socrates' part, a conscious trap

laid for his antagonist, as he shows when he goes on to remark that,

after all, it is possible for " both " to have a character which belongs

to neither singly, since, e.g., Socrates and Hippias are a couple, though

Socrates is not a couple, nor is Hippias. Thus it would be logically

84 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

possible that " the pleasures of sight and hearing " might collectively

have some character which belongs to neither class separately ; but

the possibility is nothing to our purpose. For we agreed that the

" fine " is a character which makes all " fine " things " fine," and

obviously a character which " fine sights " do not possess, (though

the collection "fine sights and sounds " may possess it,) cannot be

what makes " fine " sights fine (303^). If we look for some common

character which distinguishes both pleasures of sight and pleasures of

hearing from other pleasures, and so justifies our calling them in

particular the " fine " pleasures, the only obvious character is that

both are " harmless " and therefore better than other pleasures,

(indulgence in which may easily harm our health or character or

repute). But this brings us back to our old formula that the " fine "

is the " profitable " with the added specification that it is " profitable

pleasure " (3030). And thus we are faced once more with the diffi-

culty that the " fine " is made productive of good, or a cause of good,

with the consequence that the " fine " is not itself good nor the good

itself " fine " (30401). Thus the result of the whole discussion is nega-

tive. We have only learned that though we are always talking about

" fine conduct," as though we knew our own meaning, we are really

in a state of mental fog of which we ought to be ashamed. We have

discovered our own ignorance of what it is most imperative we should

know and what we fancy ourselves to know exceptionally well.

It is in this salutary lesson and not in any of the proposed

definitions of the " fine " that we must look for the real significance

of the dialogue. But it is also suggestive in other ways. The lesson

it gives in the right method of framing and testing a definition is

more important than any of the tentative definitions examined.

Yet it is a valuable hint towards a more developed aesthetic theory

that sensible " beauty " is found to be confined to the perceptions

of the two senses of sight and hearing, and the illustration of the

golden and wooden spoons might well serve as a warning against

the dangers of an unduly " rationalistic " aesthetic theory. A

wooden porridge-spoon is not necessarily a thing of beauty because

it may be admirably " adapted " for the purposes of the porridge-

eater. It is a still more important contribution to sound ethics to

have insisted on the impossibility of reducing moral excellence

(the " fine " in action) to mere " efficiency," irrespective of the moral

quality of the results of the " efficient " agent. 1 And the emphatic

insistence on the " transitive " character of all causality a view

which pervades all the best Greek metaphysics from first to last

may be regarded as the opening of a discussion which has continued

to our own time and has issues of the most momentous kind for the

whole interpretation of existence. 2

1 Mr. Chesterton remarks somewhere that Fagin was probably an excep-

tionally " efficient " educator of boys ; the trouble was that he was efficient

in teaching them the wrong things.

1 E.g. the cause of Theism is bound up with the position that all genuine

causality is " transitive," and that purely " immanent " causality is not caus-

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 85

The Lesser Hippias. This short dialogue, though less ambitious

in its scope, is much more brilliantly executed than the Hippias

Major. Its authenticity is sufficiently established by the fact that

Aristotle, though not mentioning the author, quotes the dialogue by

name as " the Hippias " ; such explicit references never occur in

his work to writings of any " Socratic men " other than Plato. 1

The conversation discusses a single ethical paradox, and its real

purport only emerges in the closing words of Socrates.

Socrates opens the talk by quoting an opinion that the Iliad

is a finer poem than the Odyssey, as the hero of the former,

Achilles, is a morally nobler character than Odysseus, the

hero of the latter. The moralistic tone of this criticism is

characteristically Athenian, as we can see for ourselves from

a reading of the Frogs of Aristophanes, but does not concern us

further. The remark is a mere peg on which to hang a discussion

of the purely ethical problem in which Socrates is really interested.

The transition is effected by the declaration of Hippias that Achilles

was certainly a nobler character than Odysseus, since Achilles is

single-minded, sincere, and truthful, but Odysseus notoriously ruse

and a past master of deceit. We see this from the famous lines in

the ninth book of the Iliad, where Achilles pointedly tells the " art-

ful " Odysseus that he hates the man who says one thing and means

another " worse than the gates of Hades " (365^). Socrates replies

that, after all, Achilles was no more " truthful " than Odysseus, as

the context of this very passage proves. He said he would at once

desert the expedition, but, in fact, he did nothing of the kind, and,

what is more, he actually told his friend Aias a different story. To

him he said not that he would sail home, but that he would keep

out of the fighting until the Trojans should drive the Achaeans

back to their ships (371 b). (This is meant to negative the suggestion

of Hippias that Achilles honestly meant what he said when he

threatened to desert, but changed his mind afterwards because of

the unexpected straits to which his comrades-in-arms were reduced.)

It looks then as though Homer, unlike Hippias, thought that the

" truthful man " and the " liar " are not two, but one and the same.

This is the paradox which Socrates proceeds to defend, and Hippias,

in the name of common sense, to deny. Or rather it is the application

of a still more general paradox that the man who " misses the

mark " (a/xapram) on purpose (CACW^) is " better " than the man

who does so " unintentionally " (aKw). Popular morality rejects

ality at all. This becomes specially obvious from a study of the famou?

Aristotelian argument for the " unmoved Mover."

1 It is barely credible that Aristotle should not have read the admired

" Socratic discourses " of Aeschines of Sphettus or the Alcibiades of Antis-

thenes, and it is therefore significant that he never mentions any of these

works. We may take it that a named dialogue introducing Socrates always

means to him a dialogue of Plato, or one regarded by the contemporary

Academy as Plato's. And I cannot believe that the Academy itself can have

been liable to error about the Platonic authorship of dialogues within a quarter

of a century of Plato's death.

56 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

a view of this kind as monstrous. It holds that we ought, as

Hippias says, to show o-vyyrtu/x.^ (to " make allowances ") for

involuntary wrong-doing, but that for deliberate wrong-doing there is

no excuse. The main interest of the dialogue lies in the line of argu-

ment by which Socrates impugns this generally accepted thesis.

He proceeds, as usual, by an " inductive " argument, i.e. an appeal

to analogy. In general, the man who knows most about a subject

is of all men the one who can mislead you in his own subject if he

chooses to do so. An able mathematician, like Hippias, would be

much better able to impose a false demonstration on others than a

non-mathematician, who would only commit fallacies unintentionally

and incidentally, and thus be led into visible self-contradictions.

And the same thing holds good for astronomy (366^-3680). The

same thing is true about arts involving manual dexterity (3686-

3696). The man who only fails when he means to fail is a much

better craftsman than the man who fails unintentionally from in-

competence. It is true also of all forms of bodily dexterity. The

runner who falls behind only when he means to do so, the wrestler

who is thrown when he means to let himself be thrown, is a better

runner or wrestler than the man who falls behind his competitor

or is thrown against his will, because he " can't help it " (3730-

374&). So with physical " talents." The man who only makes a

false note when he means to do so is a better singer than the man

who can't help singing out of tune. And in the world of industry,

a tool with which you can make a bad stroke when you mean to do

so, is a better tool than one with which you can't help making false

strokes. And to come to living " implements," a horse or a dog

which does its work badly only when the owner means that it shall,

has a " better soul " than one which does the wrong thing when the

owner means it to do the right one (3746-3750). The same thing

would be true of a servant. (Bob Sawyer's boy, who took the medi-

cines to the wrong houses because he was ordered to do so, was much

more efficient than the sort of boy who blunders about errands

because he is too stupid to do what he is told.) We may argue by

analogy that our own souls are better if they " go wrong " on pur-

pose than if they do so unintentionally (375^). In fact, we may

condense the principle of the argument thus. Righteousness or

morality (StKcuoow^) is either " power " (Suva/us), or " knowledge "

(eTrioTTfttoy), or both. But the man who can do right is better in

respect of " power, 1 ' a more " able " man than the man who

cannot ; and the man who knows how to do it has more knowledge

than the man who does not. And we have seen that it takes more

ability and more knowledge to " go wrong " when you mean to do so,

than to blunder unintentionally. And the better man is the man

who has the better soul. Hence it seems to follow that " the man

who does wrong on purpose, if there is such a person, is a better man

than the man who does wrong unintentionally " (375^-3766). Yet

this is such a paradox that Socrates hesitates to assert it, though

he does not see how to escape it.

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 8

What is the real point of this curious argument ? It is clear,

of course, that the main assumption on which it is based is the famous

Socratic thesis that " virtue is knowledge," and again, that the

method by which the conclusion is reached is the appeal to the

analogy of the arts and crafts so constantly employed by Socrates.

It is clear also that Plato does not mean us to accept the alleged

inference ; he does not seriously think that the deliberate " villain "

is morally better than the man who does wrong, in an hour of

temptation, against his settled purpose in life ; it is the impossibility

of such a doctrine which leads Socrates to say that he cannot

commit himself consistently to the conclusion. Yet we cannot

take the dialogue as intended to expose and refute either the doctrine

that virtue is knowledge, or the use of the analogy from the " arts "

as valuable in ethical reasoning. That a man who knows " the

good " will, of course, aim at it is a standing doctrine of all Greek

ethics ; to suppose that Plato means either to deny this or to

reject reasoning from the " arts," would be to treat nearly the

whole of the Republic, to name no other Platonic dialogues, as a

prolonged bad joke. We must therefore find some other method 'of

interpretation.

On reflection we see that the key to Plato's meaning is really

supplied by one clause in the proposition which emerges as the

conclusion of the matter : " the man who does wrong on purpose,

if there is such a person, is the good man." The insinuation plainly

is that there really is no such person as " the man who does wrong

on purpose," and that the paradox does not arise simply because

there is no such person. In other words, we have to understand

the Socratic doctrine that virtue is knowledge, and the Socratic

use of the analogy of the " arts," in the light of the other well-known

Socratic dictum, repeated by Plato on his own account in the Laws,

that " all wrong-doing is involuntary." It is this, and not the

formulated inference that the man who does wrong on purpose is

the good man, which is the real conclusion to which Plato is con-

ducting us. And we need have no difficulty about admitting this

conclusion, if we bear in mind the true and sensible remark of

Proclus about the Platonic sense of the word " voluntary " (IKOV'O-IOV).

In Plato, the voluntary, as Proclus says, 1 means regularly what we

really wish to have. Now no man wishes to have what he knows or

believes to be bad for him. Many men wish for what, in fact, would

be bad for them, but they can only do so because they falsely think

the thing in question good. To wish to have a thing because you

know it would be bad for you would be impossible. As Aristotle puts

it, " every one wishes for what he thinks good." Many men choose

evil in spite of the fact that it is evil, no one chooses it because it is

evil and he knows it to be so. (Of course he may know or believe

that he will be sent to prison or to hell for choosing as he does, but

at heart he thinks that it will be " worth his while " to take these

consequences, he will be " better off " even after paying this price

1 Proclus, in Remp. ii. 355 (Kroll).

88 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

for what he desires. 1 ) Thus the proposition " all wrong-doing is

involuntary/ 1 has nothing to do with the question of human

freedom ; it is merely the negative way of stating that a man who

really knows what his highest good is, will always act on this know-

ledge. The man who really knows the good but chooses something

else is as much of a nonentity as a round square, and it is just because

" there is no such person " that the wildest paradoxes can be asserted

about him.

It follows that knowledge of the good is, in one respect, different

from every other kind of knowledge, and this difference affects the

employment of the analogy from professional and technical know-

ledge, the sort of thing the " sophists " meant by " knowledge/ 1

It is the only knowledge which cannot be put to a wrong use ; every

other kind of knowledge can be abused, and is abused when it is

put to a bad use, as, e.g., when the medical man employs his special

professional knowledge to produce disease or death, instead of

curing the one or preventing the other. There is a real analogy

between " goodness " and the " arts " ; false beliefs about what is

good or bad will ruin the conduct of life, as surely as false beliefs

about what is wholesome will ruin a man's practical success as a

medical man ; but if you press the analogy to the point of arguing

that a man can use his knowledge of good for the deliberate doing of

evil, as he might use his knowledge of medicine to commit a clever

murder, you will be led astray, a truth with which Socrates is made

to show himself familiar in Book I. of the Republic, when he urges

this very point against Polemarchus ; that the analogy has its limits

does not prevent it from being a sound analogy within those limits ;

that it becomes unsound when you forget them is no reason for

denying that virtue really is knowledge, though it is not, like the

" goodness " taught by the sophists, mere technical knowledge

how to produce certain results, if you happen to wish for them.

Ion. Little need be said about this slight dialogue on the nature

of " poetic inspiration." The main ideas suggested are expounded

much more fully in those important Platonic works with which we

shall have to deal later. We may, however, make a few remarks

about the current conceptions of poetry against which Socrates is made

to protest. It is important to remember that the whole conception

of " inspiration, 1 ' so familiar to ourselves, is foreign to the way of

thinking of poetry characteristic of the age of Pericles and Socrates.

Poets were habitually reckoned, along with physicians, engineers,

engravers, and others, as <ro<oi, "wits " or "clever men." This

means that what was thought distinctive of the poet was not what

we call "native genius," but "craftsmanship," "workmanship,"

" technique." He was conceived as consciously producing a

beautiful result by the deft fitting together of words and musical

sounds, exactly as the architect does the same thing by the deft

putting together of stones. Of all the great Greek poets Pindar is

1 Cf. " To reign is worth ambition though in Hell :

Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n."

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 8d

the only one who pointedly insists on the superiority of </>ua, " native

genius/ 1 to the craftsmanship (r^xvrj) which can be taught and

learned; but to our taste conscious workmanship, rather than

untaught " inspiration/ 1 is the characteristic quality of Pindar

himself. We should never dream of talking of his " native wood-

notes wild/' or of comparing htm with a skylark pouring out its soul

in " unpremeditated art/' Also it was held commonly that the service

the poet does us is definitely to " teach " us something how to fight

a battle, how to choose a wife, to retain a friend, or something of

that kind. This explains why, in the Apology, when Socrates is

speaking of his attempts to discover a "wiser man " than himself,

he mentions poets along with statesmen as the two classes of recog-

nized o-o^ot to whom he first turned his attention (Apol. 220).

Since he found that the most admired poets were quite helpless

at explaining the meaning of their own finest passages, he came to

the conclusion, which he repeatedly maintains in Plato, that poets

are not deliberate " craftsmen " at all, (do not compose in virtue of

(ro<ia, ibid. 226,) but that poetry is a matter of " natural endowment "

(<uo-is) and non-rational' 'inspiration/' and thus became the originator

of the conception of the " poet " conventional among ourselves.

Ion, who is represented as an eminent professional rhapsode,

shares the current views of the " wisdom " of the poets ; it is a

matter of " skill " or " art " (rc^vr;), and he assents at once to

the inference that the professional reciter of poetry absorbs from

his study of the poet's works a special measure of their author's

" skill." The interpreter of the poet to the audience is, like the

poet himself, the possessor of a " craft " or " profession." Yet

he has to admit that his own skill as an interpreter is confined to

the poetry of Homer ; he cannot succeed in declaiming any other

poet or explaining the "beauties " of his work; in fact, his interest

flags as soon as any poet but Homer is made the topic of conversa-

tion. This, as Socrates says, serves to show that the rhapsode's

accomplishment is not the result of specialist skill. All the poets,

as Ion admits, treat of much the same topics the conduct of men and

women in the various occupations of life, the " things in the heavens

and the underworld," and the births and doings of "gods,"

though Homer treats all these topics better than any one else,

Hence if the exposition of a poet were a matter of professional

expert knowledge, the same knowledge which makes a man able

to appreciate and expound Homer, would equally make him a good

critic and expositor of poetry in general. Consequently, Socrates

suggests that the conception of the interpreter of the poet as a

conscious " craftsman " is mistaken. The poets themselves are not

self-conscious " artists " ; they compose their works in a mood of

"inspiration " in which they are " taken out of themselves/' and

are temporarily, like "seers" or Bacchanals, vehicles "possessed "

by a higher power of which they are the unconscious mouthpieces

In the same way, the " rhapsode " with a special gift for reciting

Homer is " inspired " by the poet at second-hand. He becomes

40 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

temporarily himself the " mouthpiece " of the poet, as the poet is

the mouthpiece of the god. And he in turn " inspires " his hearers

by communicating to them, in a non-logical way, something of the

" inspiration " he has received from the poet. Thus poet, reciter,

audience, are like so many links of iron, the first of which is " attrac-

ted " by a magnet, and in its turn attracts another. It is evidence

for the non-rational character of this influence that the rhapsode

for the time actually enters into the feelings of the characters whose

speeches he is declaiming, shudders with their fears and weeps

over their distresses, and makes his audience (Jo the like, though

neither they nor he may really be faced with any danger or distress.

So far Ion is not unwilling to go with Socrates, but he is less ready

to follow him when Socrates turns to the other chief feature in the

popular conception of the poet, and denies that the poet as such is

a " teacher " with knowledge to impart to us. If Homer were

really a great teacher of wisdom human and divine, it should follow

that a rhapsode, whose profession compels him to be intimately

acquainted with Homer's poetry, is also a high authority in all

fields of knowledge. But it is undeniable that a physician would

be a sounder judge of Homer's statements about medicine than a

rhapsode, and again that a racing man would be better able to

appreciate and criticize the advice Nestor gives in the Iliad about

horse-racing than a professional rhapsode, unless the rhapsode

happens incidentally to be a specialist in horse-racing. If then

there really is any department of specialist knowledge which can be

acquired by a study of Homer, what is it ?

Ion falls back on the traditional view that at any rate Homer is

a specialist in the art of warfare, and that a close student of Homer,

such as he himself has been, learns from Homer the " art of the

general." The Iliad, in fact, is a first-rate manual of military science,

and Ion professes, on the strength of his familiarity with it, to be a

great general in posse. But how comes it, then, that he has never

attempted to distinguish himself in so eminently honourable a

profession ? If there is no opening in his native city of Ephesus,

which is now a subject-ally of Athens, why has he never, like some

other aliens, entered the military service of Athens herself ?

Nominally the little dialogue is concerned with the question

whether rhapsodes and actors owe their success to professional

or expert knowledge, or to some kind of "genius " or non-rational

" inspiration." But it is clear that the real points intended to be

made are that the poet himself is not an " expert " in any kind of

knowledge and, as poet, has not necessarily anything to teach us.

These points are enforced more impressively in other Platonic

works, notably in the Phaedrus, but the Ion has its value, both as a

contribution to the psychology of the " rhapsode " (or, as we should

say to-day, the actor), and as a particularly clear and simple refuta-

tion of the never-dying popular delusion that the function of the

poet himself, and consequently of his exponent, is primarily didactic.

The type of critic who conceives it to be his business to find

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 41

" morals " and " lessons " in the plays of Shakespeare, and regards

it as the object of Hamlet or Macbeth to warn us against procrastina-

tion or ambition, has something to learn even from the Ion.

Menexenus. The Menexenus offers, in a way, a worse puzzle to

the reader than any other work of the Platonic corpus, and it is not

surprising that its authenticity should be doubted by students of

Plato who are in general on the conservative side in questions of

genuineness. Externally the evidence for it is good. It is twice

cited by Aristotle, 1 and once with a formal title, " the Funeral Dis-

course/' and this seems to show that Aristotle at least believed it to

be Platonic. Now the systematic production of works falsely

ascribed to eminent authors seems not to occur in the history of

Greek literature until long after the time of Aristotle. And again

it is not likely that Aristotle, of all men, should have been mis-

informed about the real authorship of an Academic dialogue. Thus

it is hard to believe either that the dialogue is a deliberate forgery

or that it is a production of some lesser member of the Academy

which has been ascribed by a simple mistake to Plato, as seems to

be the case with a few of the minor items of the " canon of Thrasylus."

Nor have modern stylometrical investigations given any reason to

suspect the little work. Aristotle's allusion thus seems to compel

us to accept it as genuine. On the other hand, there are two

notorious difficulties which we have to face when we admit Plato's

authorship. One is that it is at least hard to see what Plato's

object in such a composition can be. The other is that the dialogue

commits an anachronism to which there is no parallel anywhere

in Plato, and which cannot be unconscious. The body of it is made

up of a recital by Socrates of a " funeral oration " on the Athenians

who fell in the Corinthian war, and Socrates professes to have

heard the speech from the lips of the famous Aspasia, the wife of

Pericles. It is certain that Socrates was put to death in the summer

of the year 399 B.C., long before the opening of the Corinthian war

(395 B.C.). Yet he is made to carry his review of Athenian history

down to the pacification dictated by the Persian king, which ended

the war in the year 387. Aspasia, the nominal speaker, must

have died before Socrates. This is implied in the structure of

the Aspasia of Aeschines, on which see H. Dittmar, Aeschines

von Sphettus, 45-56. Plato must have violated chronology quite

deliberately and with a view to producing a definite effect. But

what can we suppose the intention to have been ?

It is idle to suggest that the whole affair is a mere Aristophanic

jest, and that Plato only wants to show that he can rival the

comedians on their own ground by putting ludicrous " topical

allusions " into the mouth of his hero. We cannot reconcile such

a use of Socrates, for purposes of pure burlesque, with the tone of

reverence and devotion in which Plato continues to speak of

Socrates in the letters written at the very end of his own life ; even

1 Rhetoric, 13676 8, 1415^ 30.

42 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

if one could, we have to remember that Socrates is not being made,

as he might be made in a burlesque, to offer a remarkably intelligent

" anticipation of the course of events " ; he is represented as com-

menting on the events of the twelve or thirteen years after his own

death ex post facto. And we still have to explain why Socrates

should pretend that Aspasia too is still a well-known figure at

Athens, and that he has learned his discourse from her. Again, we

cannot account for this use of Aspasia by appealing to the passage

(Menexenus, 2366) where Socrates is made to credit her with the

authorship of the famous " funeral speech/' delivered by Pericles

in the first year of the Archidamian war, and reported by Thucydides.

Plato's object is not to ridicule oratory of this kind by the insinuation

that its tone is what might be expected from a woman and an

hetaera. The remains of the Aspasia of Aeschines of Sphettus,

make it clear that the view, which underlies the proposals of

Republic v., that " the goodness of a woman and that of a man are

the same/' was a genuine doctrine of Socrates, and that he quite

seriously believed in the " political capacity " of Aspasia. His

profession of owing his own " Funeral Discourse " to her is, no doubt,

only half-serious, but it is quite in keeping with what we know to

have been his real conviction. We have therefore to discover the

object of the whole singular mystification, if we can, from an

analysis of the oration itself.

It will not be necessary to insert here a full analysis, but there are

certain points, well brought out in such a commentary as Stall-

baum's, which we have to bear in mind.' The discourse is framed

on the lines we can see from comparison with the extant examples

to have been conventional on such occasions. It treats first of

the glorious inheritance and traditions of the community into which

the future warriors were born and in which they were brought up,

then of their own achievements, by which they have approved

themselves worthy of such an origin, and finally of the considera-

tions which should moderate the grief of their surviving friends

and relatives. In this respect it exhibits a close parallel with the

discourse of Pericles in Thucydides, the " funeral speech " included

in the works ascribed to Lysias, the Panegyricus of Isocrates, the

discourse of Hyperides on Leosthenes and his companions in the

Lamian war. There are direct verbal echoes of the speech of

Lysias, perhaps of that of Pericles, and, I suspect, also of the

Isocratean Panegyricus, a work of the year 380. The diction

again has clearly been modelled on that actually adopted in real

encomia of the fallen, and it is this which makes it impossible to

use evidence from style to date the dialogue. " Funeral orations "

belong to the type of oratory called by the Greeks " epideictic," and

demand an artificial elevation of diction and use of verbal ornament

avoided in " forensic " pleading and political speaking. Hence

all the extant specimens exhibit, to a greater or a less degree, the

high-flown and semi-poetical character distinctive of the Sicilian

" show declamation " introduced to Athens by Gorgias, and Plato

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 43

has been careful to preserve this peculiarity. When we examine

the contents of the discourse, we see that he has been equally careful

to conform to the accepted model. His oration, like those of

Lysias and Isocrates, but unlike the really statesmanlike discourse

of Pericles, dwells on the topics afforded by mythology for the

glorification of Athens, the origination of the cultivation of corn

and of the olive in Attica, the contest of Athena with Hephaestus

for the patronage of the city, the public spirit and chivalry displayed

in such legendary exploits as the protection of the family of Heracles

and the rescuing for burial of the corpses of the champions who fell

before the gates of Thebes. Lysias and Isocrates both expatiate on

these prehistorical events at great length a length apparently

satirized by Socrates in the remark (2396) that they have already

received their due meed of celebration from the poets. The speech

then proceeds, like those which are apparently its immediate

models, to a sketch of the history of Athens down to date, the

object of which is to glorify the city on two grounds its rooted and

inveterate antipathy to " barbarians," (2420-0, 245^,) and its

unselfish Panhellenism, shown by its readiness always to make

sacrifices to preserve the " balance of power " between the different

Greek cities by supporting the weaker side in these internal quarrels

(244^). The demonstration of the second point in particular leads

to a bold falsification of history, by which the fifth century attempts

of Athens to dominate Boeotia and the Archidamian war itself

are made to appear as heroic struggles against the " imperialism "

of other communities. We know enough from Plato of the real

sentiments both of himself and of Socrates to understand that this

version of history cannot represent the serious convictions of

either ; it has all the appearance of satire on the " patriotic " version

of history given by Isocrates in an inconsistent combination with

Panhellenism. Similarly, after reading the Gorgias and Republic

and the sketch of Athenian history given in Laws iii., we shall

find it impossible to take the Menexenm seriously when it glorifies

the existing constitution of Athens as a true aristocracy in which the

men who are reputed to be " best " govern with the free consent of

the multitude (238^-0). When we are told that at Athens, as

nowhere else, " he who has the repute of wisdom and goodness is

sovereign/* the emphasis must be meant to fall on the words " who

has the repute/ 1 and the encomium is disguised satire. Probably,

then, the real purpose of the discourse is to imitate and at the same

time, by adroit touches of concealed malice, to satirize popular

" patriotic oratory." It is no objection to such an interpretation

to say, what is true enough, that the speech contains noble passages

on the duty of devotion to one's State and the obligation of per-

petuating its finest traditions. Even the " flag-flapper " who

distorts all history into a romantic legend of national self-glorifica-

tion, usually has some good arguments, as well as many bad ones,

for his " patriotism/ 1 and we may credit Plato with sufficient

penetration to have seen that satire misses its designed effect unless

44 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

it is accompanied by intelligent recognition of the good which is

mingled with the evil in its objects. (This is why so much of the

writing of Juvenal, Swift, Victor Hugo, merely wearies a reader

by the monotony of the invective. 1 )

If Isocrates is the person against whom the satire of the Menex-

enus is largely directed, we can see an excellent reason why that

satire should be so liberally mixed with sympathy. Isocrates was

honourably distinguished by his real superiority to mere particu-

larism and his real concern for the interests of Greek civilization as

a whole, and in this he and Plato were wholly at one. But, unlike

Plato, who regarded the hard and fast distinction between Greek

and " barbarian " as unscientific superstition, Isocrates takes the

antithesis seriously and tends to regard hate of the barbarian as

equivalent to love for civilization. The combination of the two

points of view in the Menexenus is a fair representation of his lifelong

attitude towards affairs. So again the distortion of history by which

the most aggressive exploits of Attic imperialism, such as the attempt

of Pericles and his friends to dominate Boeotia, and the Archida-

mian War as a whole, are represented as " wars of liberation,"

is no very violent parody of the methods of Isocrates when he is

anxious, as in the Panegyricus, to gratify Athenian partiality for

Athens or Athenian dislike of Sparta. One may suspect the same

purpose of parody in the false emphasis which is laid in the Menex-

enus on the naval exploits of Athens in the Sicilian expedition as

efforts for the " liberation " of the oppressed. Isocrates notoriously

held the view that the naval ascendancy of Athens had been a

national misfortune, since it had led to the lust for empire, and

there are passages in the Laws which show that Plato sympathized

with this conviction. But it would be a telling criticism of the

Isocratean way of manipulating history to show that it could easily

be employed for glorifying precisely the side of Athenian history

which gave Isocrates himself least satisfaction. You have only to

sit as loosely to facts as Isocrates habitually allows himself to do

when he wishes to praise or to abuse some one, and you can make

Alcibiades into a hero of chivalry who was only doing his duty by

the oppressed when he lured Athens on to its ruin by the prospect of

the conquest of Sicily ! 2 If we read the Menexenus in this light, we

can perhaps understand the point of the curious anachronism in

its setting. The satire of the actual " Funeral Discourse " is so

subtly mixed with sympathetic appreciation that it would be easy

to mistake the whole speech for a serious encomium a mistake

which has actually been made by a good many interpreters of Plato.

The ordinary reader needs some very visible warning sign if he is

to approach the discourse with the required anticipation that

1 Cf. the excellent remarks of Sir A. Quiller-Couch, Studies in Literature,

p. 290 ff .

* Lysias takes care to " skip " the Peloponnesian War entirely ; Isocrates

does worse. He actually justifies the two great crimes of the enslavement

and massacre of the Melians and the destruction of Scione I

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 45

its purpose is satirical. The warning is given, for any intelligent

reader, by the amazing introduction of Socrates at a date years

after his death. It is as though Plato were telling us in so many

words that we are dealing with the utterances of a mere puppet

who has nothing to do with the great man to whose memory the

dialogues in general are a splendid tribute. Even so, the fiction is

singular, and hardly to be accounted for unless we realize the

presence in Plato himself of a peculiar vein of freakish humour

which comes out notably in the singular " antinomies " of the

Parmenides as well as in the whimsicalities of the Sophistes and

Politicus. It was an " impish " trick to put the discourse of the

Menexenus into the mouth of a puppet Socrates, and we may be

glad that the trick was never repeated, as we are glad that Shake-

speare never perpetrated a second Troilus and Cressida. The very

audacity of the trick is some additional evidence of the genuineness

of the dialogue. We can understand that Plato might take such

a liberty once, and in an unhappy moment ; it is surely incredible

that a younger member of Plato's entourage should have ventured on

it at all.

See further:

RITTKR, C. Platon, i. 297-308 (Hippias //), 359-361

(Hippias I), 485-496 (Menexenus}.

RAEDER, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 92-94 (Ion),

94-95 (Hippias /I), 101-106 (Hippias /), 125-127

(Menexenus) .

APELT, O. Beitrdge zur Geschichte der griechischen Philosophic

(1891), 369-390 (der Sophist Hippias von Elis) ; Platonische

Aufsdtze (1912), 203-237 (on Hippias I and //).

KRAUS, O. Platons Hippias Minor. (Prague, 1913.)

DITTMAR, H. Aeschines von Sphettus 1-59 (on the connection

of the Menexenus with the Aspasia of Aeschines. The

connection is clearly made out, but I think it an exaggera-

tion to find the purpose of Plato's dialogue mainly in a

41 polemic " against Aeschines).

CHAPTER IV

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES : CHARMIDES,

LACHES, LYSIS

WE may group the three dialogues which form the subject

of this chapter together for several reasons. From the

dramatic point of view all show an advance upon what is

likely to have been the earliest form of the Platonic dialogue, the

direct presentation of Socrates in conversation with a single interloc-

utor. The Lysis and Charmides both profess to be reports of recently

held conversations given by Socrates to an unnamed friend or friends,

and thus conform to the type of such masterpieces of literary art

as the Protagoras and Republic. The fiction that the dialogue is

reported enables Socrates to draw a highly dramatic picture

of the persons engaged in the conversation and the circumstances

in which it is held. This device is not adopted in the Laches, where

the method of direct reproduction of the conversation is maintained,

but the same advantage is obtained by adding to the number of the

interlocutors, so that we have a vivid characterization of three

persons, two of them notabilities, besides Socrates himself. All three

dialogues, again, are connected by the fact that they deal with

Socrates in the special character of older friend and adviser of the

very young, and two of them, the Charmides and Lysis give us an

attractive picture of his personal manner as mentor to his young

friends. In the cases of Charmides and Laches Plato has been

careful to indicate approximately the period of life to which Socrates

has attained, and we see that both are meant as pictures of the

master as he was between the ages of forty and fifty, and thus take

us back to a time when Plato himself was either an infant or not yet

born. . tt is closely connected with this that both dialogues, and

especially the Laches, are pervaded by the atmosphere of the Archi-

damian war and remind us of the fact that Socrates was, among

other things, a fighting man. A further point of connexion

between these two dialogues is, that they are both concerned at

bottom with a difficulty arising directly out of the Socratic concep-

tion of virtue as identical with knowledge. Each deals with one

of the great recognized virtues demanded from a Greek " good

man " the Charmides with "temperance/ 1 the Laches with " valour "

or " fortitude " and in both cases the discussion follows the same

general lines. We are gradually led up to the point of identifying

the virtue under consideration with knowledge of the good, and then

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 47

left to face the difficulty that the identification seems to involve

the further identification of this particular virtue with all virtue.

If valour, for example, is knowledge of the good, how can we con-

tinue to distinguish the soldier's virtue of valour from any other

virtue, and what becomes of the popular belief that a man may have

one virtue in an eminent degree, and yet be deficient in another

may be, for example, a very brave soldier but very " licentious " ?

This problem of the " unity of the virtues " forms the starting-point

for the discussion of the Protagoras, and cannot be said to receive its

full solution until we come to the Republic. Thus, by raising it, the

Laches and Charmides prelude directly to what must have been the

great achievements of Plato's literary prime of manhood ; this is

an additional reason for holding that they must not be placed among

his earliest compositions. It is, for example, quite possible, if not

even probable, that both may be later works than the Gorgias,

which still retains the method of simple direct reproduction of a

conversation and, for all its impressive eloquence, shows less insight

into the more difficult philosophical problems raised by the Socratic

conception of morality.

The Charmides. Formally, like several of the dialogues, the

Charmides has as its object the finding of a definition. To us it

seems at first pedantic to attach importance, in morals at any rate,

to mere definitions of the different virtues. A definition, we are

inclined to think, is at best a matter of names, whereas ethical

thinking should concern itself directly with " concrete realities."

If a man recognizes and practises a noble rule of life, it matters very

little by what name he calls the right act, whether he looks at it as

an exhibition of courage, or of justice, or of " temperance/ 1 The

" fine " deed can, in fact, easily be made to wear the semblance of

any one of these " virtues." This is true enough, but it would be

out of place as a criticism on the Socratic demand for " definitions "

in matters of conduct. From the Greek point of view, the problem

of definition itself is not one of names, but of things. If our moral

judgment is to be sound, and our moral practice good, we must

approve and disapprove rightly. We must admire and imitate

what is really noble, and must not be led into false theory and bad

practice by confused thinking about good and evil. The problem

of finding a definition of a " virtue " is at bottom the problem of

formulating a moral ideal, and it is from this point of view that we

ought to consider it. The important thing is that we should know

quite definitely what we admire in conduct and that our admiration

should be rightly given to the things which are really admirable.

Failure in finding the definition means that we really do not know

what we admire, and so long as we do not know this, our moral life

is at the mercy of sentimental half-thinking.

The particular virtue selected for discussion is one which bulks

very large in all Greek thought about the conduct of life the

beautiful characteristic called by the Greeks sophrosyne, and by the

Romans temperantia. It is easier to indicate from the usage of the

48 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

language what this moral excellence is, than to find any one name

for it in our modern English. In literature we find sophrosyne spoken

of chiefly in the following connexions. As its derivation implies,

the word means literally the possession of a " sane " or " wholesome "

mind ; sophrosyne is thus contrasted with the " folly " of the man

who " forgets himself " in the hour of success and prosperity, and

" presumes on " his advantages of wealth or power, pushes them

to the full extreme in his dealings with the less fortunate. Or it

may equally be contrasted with the " unbalanced " conduct of the

fanatic who has only one idea in his head, can only see one side of

a situation and is blind to all the others. In this sense, as the virtue

opposed to the pride of the man who forgets that the gods can cast

him down as low as they have raised him high, the recklessness of the

successful man who forgets that he may himself come to be as much

at the mercy of another as others are now at his, the pitilessness of

the fanatic who can only see one side to every question, sophrosyne

covers very much of what we call humility, humanity, mercy.

Again, the word is a name for the kind of conduct thought becoming

specially in the young towards elders, soldiers towards their superior

officer, citizens towards their magistrates. In this sense it means

proper modesty and even covers such minor matters as a becoming

outward deportment in speech and gesture. In still a third sense,

it is the characteristic of the man who knows how to hold his

imperious bodily appetites, " the desire for meat and drink and the

passion of sex," in easy and graceful control, as contrasted with the

man who offends us by unseemly and untimely greed of these

appetitive enjoyments. In this aspect, sophrosyne is what in good

English is still called " temperance," if we take care to remember

that it is part of the virtue itself that it is not the imperfect self-

restraint of the man who holds himself in check ungracefully and

with difficulty, but the easy and natural self-restraint of the man

who enjoys being " temperate." x If it does not seem an affectation

to use such a phrase, we may say that sophrosyne is the spirit of the

ophrosyne is the spirit of

e insinuates, 2 a " monkis

" disciplined life. It is not, as Hume insinuates, 2 a " monkish "

virtue, except in the sense that you certainly cannot be a good

monk without it. Neither, as Hume forgot, can you be a good

soldier, and that is why in the Laws 3 Plato throws sophrosyne

and valour together, and insists that the former is the major and

the harder part of the lesson every good " fighting man " has to

master. The very wide range of the use of the word in literature

goes a long way to explain the importance Socrates attaches to a

clear and coherent statement of its meaning, and the difficulty the

company have in producing such a statement. The introductory

narrative provides an opportunity for a clear indication of the date

1 Hence Aristotle's sharp distinction throughout the Ethics between the

<rc60po;*> and the ^par^y or morally " strong " man in whom judgment and

" will " in the Elizabethan sense are at variance though he habitually

compels himself to follow judgment.

2 Inquiry into the Principles of Morals, Section IX. Part I.

1 Laws,

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 49

at which the conversation is supposed to take place. Socrates has

been serving before the walls of Potidaea, in the campaign of the

year 431 with which hostilities between Athens and the members

of the Peloponnesian confederacy opened, and has just returned safe

and sound, after having displayed his courage and coolness in

danger, as we learn from the Symposium, 1 by saving the life of Alci-

biades. He is then a man of some forty years (Plato, we must

remember, is not yet born). He goes direct, on his arrival, to his

"wonted haunts," the palaestrae, and begins at once to ask ques-

tions about the way in which " philosophy and the young people "

have been faring in his absence on service (Charm. 153^). (This,

we observe, implies that the interest of young men of promise in

Socrates as a wise counsellor was already a reality, eight years before

Aristophanes burlesqued these relations in the Clouds.) Critias,

cousin of Plato's mother, afterwards to be unhappily known as a

leader of the violently reactionary party in the " provisional

government " set up after the capitulation of Athens to Lysander,

but at present simply a young man of parts but with a touch of

forwardness and self-confidence, thereupon promises to introduce

Socrates to his own cousin Charmides (Plato's uncle, subsequently

associated with Critias and his party as the head of the commission

set up to dominate the Piraeeus), as a lad of exceptional promise. 2

Socrates had already seen him as a mere child, but he has now grown

to be a youth of wonderful beauty and equally wonderful sophrosyne.

It is agreed that Socrates shall have some conversation with the

lad and judge of him for himself.

Socrates leads up playfully to his real purpose, the examination

of the boy's spiritual state. Charmides has been complaining of

headaches. Socrates professes to have brought back from his

northern campaign a wonderful remedy which he has learned from

a Thracian. 8 The Thracian, however, had explained that not only

can you not treat a local disorder properly without treating the

patient's whole body, you cannot treat the body successfully

without treating the soul, which is the real seat of health and disease.

Hence Socrates is under a promise not to practise the recipe against

headache on anyone who is not spiritually sound in constitution.

It would be useless if employed on a subject with a deep-seated

spiritual disorder. Sophrosyne is presupposed in spiritual health ;

before Charmides can be treated for his headaches, then, we must

find out whether he has sophrosyne (Charm. 155^-158^). Now if a

man has this or any other character of soul, it must, of course, make

1 Symposium, 219-220.

f According to Xenophon (Mem. iii. 7, i), it was Socrates himself who

first persuaded Charmides to enter public life. But this looks like a mere

inference from what is said in our dialogue of the modest and retiring disposi-

tion of Charmides in boyhood. If the fact were so, it is singular that no one

ever seems to have accused Socrates of " corrupting " Charmides, though he

was made responsible for Critias and Alcibiades.

8 For the reputation of Thrace as a home of this kind of lore it was the

land of Orpheus, we must remember cf. Eurip. Ale. 986 ff.

50 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

its presence felt, and its possessor will therefore have an opinion of

some kind about its nature. (It is not meant, of course, that the

possessor of the character need have a " clear and distinct idea " of

it, but only that he must have some acquaintance with it ; language

about it will have some meaning for him, exactly as language about

.sight or hearing will mean something to anyone who can see or hear,

though it would be meaningless to beings born blind or deaf.) Thus

we are led to the question what kind of thing Charmides takes

sophrosyne to be. As is natural in a mere lad, Charmides fixes first of

all on an exterior characteristic, and equally naturally it is a charac-

teristic of sophrosyne in the form which would be most familiar to

a boy the form of decent and modest bearing towards one's elders

and " good behaviour " generally. One shows sophrosyne by walking,

talking, doing things generally, in an " orderly and quiet " fashion ;

so perhaps we may say that it is " a sort of quietness " (V^X"* 1 " 1 ? 5 )*

a " slowness " which may be contrasted with undignified and un-

graceful " hurry " (159^). This, of course, is true, so far as it goes,

only it does not go very far. There is a " hurry " which means that

one's limbs or one's tongue are not really under control as they should

be. But we want to get behind such mere outward indications to

the interior condition of soul from which they spring ; and besides,

clearly " slowness," " deliberateness," does not always arise from

being " master of one's soul." As Socrates says, in the various

physical and mental accomplishments it is what is readily and

quickly done, not what is done slowly and with difficulty, that is

" well " or " fairly " (*aAs) done. He who reads or writes, or

wrestles or boxes well, does these things quickly ; he who can only

make the proper movements slowly does not do them well. So

with accomplishments of the mind. A fine memory or judgment or

invention is a quick, not a slow, memory or judgment or invention.

Now it is admitted that sophrosyne, whatever it is, is something

" fine " (Ka\6v). Clearly then it cannot be right to fix on " slow-

ness " as what is specially distinctive of sophrosyne (1590-160^).

The point is that, in small things as well as in great, the man who

is master of his soul is free from " hurry." There is, in a sense, a

spacious leisureliness about his behaviour. But this freedom from

" haste " and " hurry " is not the same thing as slowness : slowness

may be, and often is, a mere consequence of awkwardness, of not

being master of yourself.

Charmides next makes a suggestion which shows a real attempt

to get behind the externals of behaviour to the spirit and temper

they reveal. Sophrosyne makes a man quick to feel shame, and

perhaps it is the same thing as modesty (cuSok, 1602). The boy

is still clearly thinking of the form in which sophrosyne would be

most familiar to a well-bred boy the sense of being " on one's best

behaviour " in the presence of one's parents, one's elders, and in

general of those to whom respect is due. (We may compare Kant's

well-known comparison of the reverence for the moral law which is,

according to him, the specific ethical feeling, with the sense of restraint

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 51

we feel in the presence of an exalted or impressive personage the

sort of feeling an ordinary man would have if he were suddenly sum-

moned to an interview with the King or the Pope. There is a real

analogy between the two things ; as Kant says, our feeling in both

cases is primarily one of inhibition or restraint. You don't " loll '

in the King's presence, and a good man is not " free and easy " in

the presence of a moral obligation.) But again, the analogy is only

an analogy, not an identity. Sophrosyne cannot be simply identified

with shamefacedness (aurxvwj) or modesty (utSws). 1 For, by

general consent, it is something which is always not merely " fine "

(/caXoi/) but good (uyaflov), and there is a false modesty which is not

good. As Homer says, " Modesty is not good in a beggar." (Cf.

the Scots saying, " Dinna let yer modesty wrang ye.") The shame or

modesty which makes a man too bashful to tell his full need on the

proper occasion is not good, but sop hro syne is always good (i6oe-

1610).

This leads to a third suggestion which is more important than

any we have yet met. Charmides has heard some one it is hinted

that this some one is Critias say that sophrosyne means " attending

to one's own matters " (TO ra eavroi) TrparreiK, i6i6), 2 and this,

perhaps, may be the true account. It does obviously present one

advantage. The formula is a strictly universal one, applicable to

the whole conduct of life in all its different " ages," not merely to

the kind of conduct appropriate to the young in particular. In a

boy the shyness, or backwardness, of which we have just been speak-

ing is a laudable thing, and "forwardness " a fault, but " shyness "

is far from being a laudable characteristic in a grown man. But

at any age of life it is laudable to " mind your own affairs " and

censurable to be a " meddler " or busybody. Unfortunately, as

Socrates goes on to point out, the phrase " to attend to one's own

matters " is so ambiguous that the new suggestion is something of

a " conundrum " ; we have to guess, if we can, what its author may

have meant (i6id). Clearly he cannot have meant that a man

should only read and write his own name and no one else's, or that

the builder or the physician should build his own house or cure his

own body and no other, on pain of being noted for a " meddler."

Life would be intolerable to a community where the rule was that

every one should " attend to his own matters " in the sense that he

must "do everything for himself" (i6ie). The alleged saying,

then, is what we called it, a pure conundrum. In the Republic, as

1 Strictly, ald&s is the name for laudable modesty, alaxvv-r) for the back-

wardness which is not laudable, mauvaise honte. But the words are freely

treated as interchangeable.

2 rb TO, toLvrov irpdrrciv is the conduct which is the opposite of rb Tro\virpa.ynove'iv t

" having a finger in everyone's pie." In Attic life iro\vTrpayfio<njvrj would show

itself, e.g., in that tendency to quarrel with one's neighbours and drag them

into law-suits about trifles which Aristophanes regularly ascribes to his petits

bourgeois. Hence ATrpdypuv is in Attic sometimes an epithet of censure

" inert," " lazy " but often one of approval " a quiet decent man," a man

who " keeps himself to himself."

52 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

we all know, this very phrase " to mind one's own matters " is

adopted as an adequate definition not merely of one type of " virtue,"

but of StKatocruViy, " right-doing/' the fundamental principle of

the whole moral life. There is no inconsistency between the two

dialogues. The point made in the Charmides is simply that the

phrase as it stands, without further explanation leaves us in the

dark. In the Republic the necessary explanation has been supplied

by the educational theory and moral psychology which precede its

introduction, so that when we come to it, it has a very definite

significance, and is seen at once to embody the whole content of the

Socratic ideal that a man's business in life is the " tendance of his

soul." If it had been sprung upon us, without this preparation, in

the course of Republic i. as an answer to the ethical nihilism of

Thrasymachus, it would then have been exactly what Socrates

calls it in the Charmides & conundrum.

The defence of the proposed definition is now taken up by

Critias. He replies to the objection of Socrates by making a dis-

tinction between " doing " (TO Trparrciv, TO Ipydfca-Oai) and " making "

(TO TToicti/). The shoemaker " makes " shoes for his customers, but

in " making " their shoes he is " doing " his own work. The

shoes he makes are not his own shoes, but the making of them is

his " own " trade or work. Here again we are dealing with a real

and important distinction ; in the Republic we shall learn the true

significance of the conception of a " work " or " vocation " which

is a man's " own/' not because the products of it are to be his " own "

property for his own exclusive use, but because it is the contribution

he and no one else can make to the " good life." Critias has not,

however, thought out the implications of his own distinction, and

goes wrong from the start by an elementary confusion of ideas.

He appeals in support of the distinction to the saying of Hesiod that

" no work is disgraceful," x on which he puts a glaringly false inter-

pretation. Hesiod, he says, cannot have meant that no occupation

is a base one, for there are base trades like those of the shoemaker

and fishmonger, not to mention worse ones. By " work " Hesiod

must have meant " making what is honourable and useful," and

similarly, when we say that sophrosyne is " minding your own

matters " or " doing your own work " we mean that it is doing what

is " honourable and useful " (i6^b-c).

We might expect that Socrates would fasten at once on the

obvious weakness of this definition ; it presupposes that we already

know what we mean by " good and useful." We should then be

led direct to the conclusion which it is part of Plato's purpose to

drive home, that we cannot really know the character of sophrosyne

1 tpyov 5' Mkv tfmSos (Hesiod, O.D. 311). Xenophon (Mem. i. 2, 56-57)

states that Socrates was fond of the saying, apparently taking it in the sense

that " honest work is no disgrace." His " accuser " twisted it to mean that

no one need feel ashamed of anything he does. Comparison with the similar

charges of getting an immoral sense out of the poets considered in the

Apologia Socratis of Libanius, seems to show that what Xenophon has in view

is the pamphlet of Polycrates against Socrates.

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 58

or any other virtue until we know what good and evil are, and when

we know that we have answered the question what virtue is. In

point of fact, Socrates prefers to make an unexpected deviation

from the direct line of the argument, which raises a still more general

issue, and apparently takes us out of the sphere of ethics into that

of epistemology. The length of this section shows that it is meant

to be the most important division of the dialogue, and we shall need

therefore to consider it with some care.

According to the explanation of Critias, a physician who cures

his patient is doing something good and useful for both himself and

the patient and is therefore acting with sophrosyne. But he need

not know that he is doing what is " good and useful." (The physi-

cian cannot be sure that he will really be the better, or that his

patient will be the better, for his services. It might be better for

the patient that he should die, or for the physician that he should

not make the income he does make.) Thus it would seem that a

man may have sophrosyne without being aware that he has it

(1640-0). This would not only seem inconsistent with the assump-

tion Socrates had made at the beginning of his conversation with

Charmides, but also flatly contradicts the generally accepted view,

with which Critias agrees, that sophrosyne actually is the same thing

as " self-knowledge." (The thought, of course, is that " sanity of

mind " is precisely a true understanding of yourself, your strength

and your weaknesses, your real situation in relation to gods and

men, the kind of self-knowledge which was inculcated by the Nosce

teipsnm l inscription in the Delphic temple.) We thus find ourselves

embarked on a double question : (i) Is self-knowledge possible at all ?

(2) If it is, is it profitable ; has it any bearing on the practical conduct

of life ? Or again : (i) What is the object apprehended by self-

knowledge ? (2) What is the result it produces ?

The second question is met by Critias with the reply that self-

knowledge, like such " sciences " or " arts " as arithmetic and

geometry, and unlike such " sciences " or " arts " as building or

weaving, has no " product/' This is, in untechnical language, the

distinction which is more clearly drawn in the Politicus and finally

takes technical form in Aristotle as the distinction between " specu-

lative " knowledge, which has no further end than the perfecting of

itself, and " practical " knowledge, which has always an ulterior

end, the making of some thing or the doing of some act. Critias

is unconsciously assuming first that self-knowledge is cVurrwn? or

re'xi'Tj, knowledge of universal rules or principles of some kind, and

next that it is " speculative," not " practical " science. The result

is that he is virtually confusing the direct acquaintance with one's

own individual strength and weaknesses really meant in the Delphian

inscription with the " science " of the psychologist. He is taking it

for granted, as too many among ourselves still do, that to know

psychology and to have a profound acquaintance with your own

1 heart " are the same thing (Charm. i6$d-e.) Socrates lets this

1 yv&Ot ffavr6f.

3

54 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

confusion of " direct acquaintance " with " knowledge about " go

uncriticized, because his immediate purpose is to raise a more general

issue, one which concerns not the effect of knowledge, but the object

apprehended. In all other cases, he urges, that which is appre-

hended by a " knowledge " or " science " is something different

from the knowing or apprehending itself. Arithmetic for example

is knowledge of " the even and odd," as we should say, of the

characters of the integers. But " the even and odd " are not the

same thing as the knowing which has them for its object. (In fact,

of course, arithmetic is a mental activity, the integers and their

properties are not.) We shall find the same distinction between the

" knowing " and the object known in the case of any other " know-

ledge " we like to take (i66a-b). Critias admits the truth of this

in general, but asserts that there is one solitary exception. The self-

knowledge of which he had spoken is this exception ; it is quite

literally a knowing which " knows itself and all other knowledges/'

and the virtue sophrosyne is no other than this " knowing which

knows itself " (i66c). In effect this amounts to identifying soph-

rosyne with what is called in modern times " theory of knowledge/'

We proceed to test this thesis in the true Socratic way by

asking what consequences would follow from it. It would follow

that the man who has sophrosyne would know what he knows and

what he does not know but merely " fancies " (otcrat), and also

what other men know and what they only " fancy." Let us once

more put our double question, Is such knowledge as this possible, and

if it is, is it of any benefit to us ?

There is a grave difficulty even about its possibility. For, in all

other cases, we find that a mental activity is always directed on

some object other than itself. Sight and hearing do not see or

hear sight or hearing ; they see colours and hear sounds. Desire

is never " desire of desire " but always desire of a pleasant object ;

we do not wish for "wishing " but for good. What we love is not

" loving " but a beloved person, what we fear, not fear but some

formidable thing, and so forth. That is, it is characteristic of

mental activities of all kinds that they are directed upon an object

other than themselves (1670-168^). It would'be at least " singular "

(aroTTov) if there should be a solitary exception to this principle, a

" knowing " which is not the knowing of a science (/m0^a) of some

kind,' but the " knowing of itself and the other knowings " (i68a).

Knowing, in fact, is always a knowing of something, and so relative

to an object known ; its " faculty " is to be of something (1686), and

so where there is knowing there must be a known object, just as

where there is a " greater than " there must always be a " less "

than which the greater is greater. Hence, if there is anything which

is greater than itself, it must also be less than itself ; if anything

which is double of itself, it must also be half itself, and so on. If

" seeing " can see itself, "seeing " itself must be coloured. Some of

these consequences are patently absurd, e.g. that there should be a

number which is greater than, and by consequence also less than

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 55

itself ; if it is not so obvious that seeing cannot see itself, and that sight,

by consequence, is not a colour, the position is at any rate difficult to

accept. It would require a great philosopher to decide the question

whether any activity can be its own object, and if so, whether this

is the case with the activity of knowing, and we have not the

genius needed to determine the point (1686-1696). But in any case,

we may say that such a supposed " knowing of knowing " cannot be

what men mean by sophrosyne unless it can be shown that it would

be " beneficial " to us, as sophrosyne admittedly is (1696-0).

(So far then, the point of the argument has been the perfectly

sound one that no mental activity is its own object. Manifestly

this is true of the knowing of the epistemologist, as much as of any

other activity. If there is such a science as the " theory of know-

ledge/' its object will be " the conditions under which knowledge is

possible." But these conditions are not the same thing as anyone's

knowing about them. The doctrines of the Critique of Pure Reason,

for example, are one thing and Kant's knowing or believing these

doctrines is another.)

We can now take a further step. Let us concede, for the pur-

poses of argument, that there is such a thing as a " knowing of

knowing." Even if there is, it is not the same thing as " knowing

what you know and what you do not know," and therefore is not the

self-knowledge with which Critias has been trying to identify

sophrosyne. Critias does not readily take in the distinction, which

has therefore to be made gradually clearer by illustrations. Sup-

pose a man to " know about knowing," what will this knowledge

really tell him ? It will tell him that " this is knowledge " and " that

is not knowledge," i.e. that this proposition is true, that proposition

is not certainly true. But to know so much and no more would

certainly not be enough for the purposes of the practitioner in

medicine and statesmanship. The physician needs not merely to

know that " I know such and such a proposition," he needs to know

that the true proposition in question is relevant to the treatment of

his patients. In other words, it is not enough for him to know

what knowledge is, he needs to know what health is, and the states-

man similarly must know not merely what knowledge is, but what

right is. Ex hypothesi they will not learn this from a science which

has knowledge as its object, but from medicine, of which the object

is health in the body, or from politics, which knows about " right."

Thus we must not say that the man who has only " knowledge of

knowledge " will know what he knows and what he does not ; we

may only say that that he will know the bare fact that he knows or

does not know. (The meaning is, for example, that a man who was

a mere epistemologist and nothing more might be aware that when

he says, " So many grains of arsenic are fatal, " he is saying something

which satisfies all the conditions required for genuine scientific

knowledge ; but, if he only knew epistemology and nothing else,

he would not even know that he must not administer fatal doses of

arsenic to his fellow-men.) Thus if sophrosyne is the same thing as

56 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

a " knowledge of knowledge, " the man who has it will not be helped

by it to distinguish a genuine practitioner from a pretender in

medicine or in anything else. To distinguish the true physician

from the quack, you need to know not epistemology, the " know-

ledge of knowledge," but medicine, the " knowledge of things

wholesome and unwholesome." The true judge of medical theory

and practice is not the epistemologist but the medical specialist, and

no one else (i6gd-ijic). And this conclusion seems to dispose of

the worth of sophrosyne, if we were right in identifying it with a

" knowledge of knowledge." A self-knowledge which taught us to

know, in the first instance, our own strength and weakness, and, in

the second place, the strength and weakness of others, and so

enabled us to be on our guard against self-delusion and imposture,

would be of the highest value for the conduct of life. But we have

just seen that all that the epistemologist as such could possibly

tell about himself or anyone else would be merely whether he really

knew epistemology (1710-0).

The point to which all this leads us up is manifestly that though

sophrosyne is a knowledge of something, it cannot be a " knowledge

about knowledge," nor can this be what was really meant by those

who have insisted on self-knowledge as the one thing needful for a

happy life. It is clearly indicated that the sort of knowledge of

ourselves really needed as a guide to practice is knowledge of good and

evil and of the state of our souls in respect of them, a view which

would immediately lead to the further result that all the genuine

virtues are at bottom one and the same thing, knowledge of the good,

and the distinctions commonly made between the different types

of virtue at best conventional. (It is incidentally a further valuable

result of the argument that it has vindicated the autonomy of the

various sciences by exposing the pretensions of the " theory of

knowledge " to judge of scientific truths on a priori grounds, and

making it clear that in every case there is no appeal from the verdict

of the expert in a specific science, so long as he claims to be the final

authority in his own speciality.)

The main purpose of the discussion becomes apparent when we

reach its final section. Even if we waive all the difficulties we have

raised, and admit that sophrosyne really is a " knowledge of know-

ledge," and that such a knowledge is, (as we just said that it is

not,) " knowing what we do know and what we do not," would this

supposed knowledge be of any value for the direction of life ?

It is clear, of course, that if we had such a knowledge, and directed

our actions by it, everything would be done " scientifically " (Kara

ras 7nor?7/Aas, ITTICTT ^ovwi) . Our medical men, our soldiers, our

sailors, all our craftsmen in fact, would be real experts ; lives would

not be lost by the blunders of the incompetent physician or strategist

or navigator, clothes would not be spoiled by the bungling of their

makers ; we may even imagine that " prophecy " might be made

" scientific," and that we could thus have confident anticipations of

the future, and, if you like, we may suppose ourselves equally

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 57

correctly informed about the past (a suggestion which curiously

recalls Du Bois-Reymond's fanciful picture of his omniscient

" demon " l ). But we should be none the happier for all this know-

ledge unless we had something more which we have not yet men-

tioned knowledge of good. Without this we might know all about

healing the sick, sailing the sea, winning battles, but we should not

know when it is good that a sick man should recover, or that a

vessel should come safe to port, or a battle be won. If our life is to

be truly happy, it is this knowledge of our good which must take

the direction of it; apart from that knowledge, we may be able to

secure the successful accomplishment of various results, but we

cannot make sure that anything will be " well and beneficially " done.

But sophrosyne by our assumed definition is not this knowledge of

good ; even when we waived all other difficulties about it, we still

retained the thesis that it is a " knowledge about knowledges," a

" science of sciences." Thus sophrosyne seems to fall between two

stools ; it is not the knowledge of good which would really ensure

happiness. It is not even a knowledge which will ensure that the

practitioners of the various " arts " shall be experts and practise their

callings with success ; for we have just seen that it is the specialist

in each department and not the man who knows the " theory of

knowledge " who is the final judge in his own department. Sophro-

syne, if we accept the proposed definition of it, even with the most

favourable interpretation, thus seems to be of no practical value

whatever (171^-1750) . Yet this conclusion is so extravagantly para-

doxical that it clearly cannot be sound. We can only suppose that the

fault is with ourselves ; our notions on the subject must be hopelessly

confused. This is unfortunate, as it makes it impossible to employ

the Thracian's recipe for the cure of Charmides, but there is no help

for it. (Of course, the real, as distinct from the dramatic, conclusion

has already been reached in the suggestion that what is really needed

for the direction of life is the knowledge of good, and that this know-

ledge is something quite different from any of the recognized special

" sciences " or " arts." The purpose of the dialogue is to show that

serious examination of the implications of the current conceptions

of sophrosyne conducts us straight to the two famous Socratic "para-

doxes " of the unity of virtue and its identity with knowledge of good.)

The Laches. The Laches, which we may now treat more briefly,

aims at reaching these same results by starting with the current

conceptions of the great fighting-man's virtue courage or valour

or fortitude. As in the Charmides, the discussion is accompanied by

an interesting introduction which enables us to refer it to a definite

period in the life of Socrates. Lysimachus and Melesias, the un-

distinguished sons of two of the greatest Athenians of the early fifth

century, Aristides " the just " and Thucydides, the rival of Pericles,

are both anxious that their own sons should rise to distinction, and

therefore that they should receive the careful education which

1 Du Bois-Reymond, Ueber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens, 178. ; Ward,

Naturahsm and Agnosticism, i. 40 ff. (ed. i).

58 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

their own parents were prevented by their preoccupation with

public affairs from bestowing on themselves. They have just wit-

nessed a public exhibition given by one Stesilaus, who professes to

be able to teach the art and mystery of fighting in full armour, and

have brought with them two of the most famous military men of

the day, Laches and Nicias, in order to get their opinion on the

advisability of putting the lads under such an instructor.

Socrates also has been present at the display, and at the recom-

mendation of Laches, who witnessed and highly admired his

presence of mind and courage in the disastrous retreat of the

Athenian forces from Delium (424 B.C.), he is taken into consultation

(Laches, i8oa-b). It now comes out that Sophroniscus, the father

of Socrates, had been a lifelong friend of Lysimachus, and that

Socrates himself is a person of whom Lysimachus has heard the boys

speak as an object of great interest to themselves and their young

companions (iSod-e). Laches, as it comes out later, knows nothing

of him except his admirable behaviour on the field of Delium (1880),

but Nicias is perfectly familiar with him and his habit of turning

every conversation into a searching examination of the state of his

interlocutor's soul (187^-1886). These allusions enable us to date

the supposed conversation pretty accurately. It falls after Delium

in 424, but not long after, since it is assumed that Laches, who

fell at Mantinea in 418, is still burdened by the cares of public

office (iSya-b). The references to the comparative poverty of

Socrates it is not said to be more than comparative (i86c)

may remind us that Aristophanes and Amipsias both made this

a prominent feature in their burlesques of him (the Clouds of

Aristophanes and the Connus of Amipsias), produced in 423. It

points to the same general date that the two old men should be

thinking of the speciality of Stesilaus as the thing most desirable

to be acquired by their sons. After the peace of Nicias, which

was expected to put an end to the struggle between Athens and

the Peloponnesian Confederation, it would not be likely that

fathers anxious to educate their sons well should think at once of

6nlona%ia as the most promising branch of education. We thus

have to think of the conversation as occurring just about the time

when Aristophanes produced his delightful caricature of Socrates

as a guide of youth ; Socrates is a man of rather under fifty ;

Nicias and Laches, as Plato is careful to remind us (181^), are older

men, and Lysimachus and Melesias quite old and ' ' out of the world. ' ' *

The two military experts, as it happens, are of different minds

1 The same approximate date is suggested by the allusion to the famous

Damonides, or Damon, of Oea. Nicias expresses gratitude to Socrates for

having procured an introduction to Damon for his son Niceratus. Laches

professes to think Damon a mere spinner of words and phrases, but Nicias

retorts that it is not for him to judge, since he has never even met the man

(2006). The assumption is that Damon is living in retirement from society

generally. Since he was one of the two " sophists " who " educated " Pericles

(Isocr. xv. 235), he must have been bora, like his colleague Anaxagoras, about

500 B.C., so that his advanced age will account for his seclusion.

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 59

about the practical value of the proposed instruction in the conduct

of spear and shield. Nicias, who is represented all through as the

more intellectual of the two, is inclined to recommend it on the

grounds that a soldier needs to know how to handle his weapons,

that he is likely to find skill of fence serviceable in actual fighting,

that it may awaken in him an interest in other branches of the

military art, such as strategy, finally that the training produces

grace and agility and banishes awkwardness (i8ie-i82d). Laches,

a brave fighting-man with no intellectual capacity, takes a different

view. He holds that the " proof of the pudding is the eating of it."

There cannot be much in this technical skill, for we see that the

Spartans, who ought to be the best judges of things military, set

no store by its professors, and the professors themselves avoid

Sparta like the plague. They reap their harvest from communities

who, by their own admission, are backward in warfare. (This is an

excellent little bit of dramatic characterization ; Laches is mentally

too dull to see the obvious explanation that the professionals take

their wares to the market where the need for them is likely to be

most felt.) Besides, in actual warfare, the professional masters of

fence never distinguish themselves. 1 Laches remembers having

seen this very professor make himself a laughing-stock by his clumsy

handling of a complicated weapon of his own forging (182^-1840).

In this disagreement of the experts, Socrates is now called upon

to give the decisive opinion. But, as he says, a question of this

kind is not to be settled by a majority of votes. The deciding voice

should be left to the expert, the man who really knows, even if he

were found to be in a minority of one. But who is the expert to

whom we ought to appeal in the present case ? Not the mere expert

or connoisseur in O7r\o/xa^t'a. The problem is really concerned with

the " tendance " of the young people's souls, and the expert to

whom we must appeal is therefore the expert in " tending " his

own soul, the man who can achieve " goodness " in himself and, by

his influence, produce it in others (iS^a-e). Now, if a man really is

an expert, he may take either of two ways of convincing us of his

claims. If he has learned his skill from others, he can tell us who

his teachers were, and convince us that they were competent. 2 If

he has picked it up for himself, as expert knowledge is often picked

up, he can point to its results, he can give us examples of persons

who have been made better by his influence on them (iS6a-b).

Socrates confesses himself to be no expert, but maliciously suggests

that the case may be different with the two generals. They are

richer than he, and may have been able to pay " sophists " for in-

struction in the art of " tending the soul " ; they are older and more

experienced, and so may have discovered the secret for themselves

1 In the Republic Socrates himself is made to propose a training for his

young men from which all specialism of this kind is expressly excluded

(Rep. iii. 4040 ff.).

* We shall see the full significance of this when we come to examine the

Protagoras.

60 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

(1860). At any rate, they must be experts, or they could not

pronounce on a question in which only the expert is competent

with such confidence and readiness. (The insinuation, of course, is

that, as we might expect from their disagreement, neither is a real

" expert " ; both are talking about what they do not understand.)

We may, however, contrive to avoid the demand for direct

evidence that there is an expert among us. For if a man really

knows what, e.g., good sight is, and how to produce it in a patient, he

can tell us what sight is ; if he cannot, he is manifestly not a specialist

in the treatment of the eye. So, in the present case, the man whose

judgment we need is the expert in " goodness," which makes our

souls better souls. If a man cannot even say what goodness is, it

would be waste of time to take his advice on the kind of education

which will produce it. Thus the original question whose judgment

is authoritative in the problem of education may be replaced by the

question who knows what goodness is. And this question may be,

for convenience, further narrowed down. For our present purpose,

judging of the worth of the art of the professional teacher of skill

with shield and spear, it will be sufficient to consider only one

" part " of goodness courage or valour. A competent judge on

the question whether the accomplishment makes its possessor a

better soldier must at least be able to say what courage is (189^-

1900) . We have now got our ethical question fairly posed : What is

it that we really mean to be talking about when we speak of dy3pa'a

manliness, valour, courage as one of the indispensable points of

manhood ? Laches, the less thoughtful of the two professional

soldiers, thinks that any man can answer so simple a question

off-hand. " A man who keeps his place in the ranks in the presence

of the enemy, does his best to repel them, and never turns his back

there is a brave man for you " (1900). Thus, just as in the Char-

mides, we start with a proposed definition of an interior state of soul

which confuses the state itself with one of its common and customary

outward expressions. The further course of the discussion will

reveal the double defectiveness of this formula. It is not even

adequate as a description of the conduct of the fighting-man himself,

and fighting is far from being the only business in life which demands

the same qualities as those we expect from the good soldier. As

usual, Plato is anxious to insist upon the real identity of the spiritual

state under the great apparent variety of its outward manifestations.

To discover that other occupations than those of warfare also call

for the " soldierly " virtues is a long step towards discovering the

essential unity of the " virtues " themselves.

Even Laches is ready to admit at once that a feigned withdrawal

is a proper manoeuvre in warfare, as is shown by the practice of

the Scythians, the pretended retreat by which the Lacedaemonians

drew the Persians from their defences at Plataea, and other

examples (iqia-c) . He is even ready to allow that fighting is not the

only situation in which courage may be shown. A man may show

himself a brave man or a coward by the way he faces danger at sea,

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 61

poverty, disease, the risks of political life ; again, bravery and

cowardice may be shown as much in resistance to the seductions

of pleasure and the importunities of desire as in facing or shirking

pain or danger, a consideration which, incidentally, shows the arti-

ficial nature of the popular distinction between valour, the virtue of

war, and sophrosyne, the virtue of peace and non-combatants

(191^-0). (It is this passage of the Laches which Aristotle has in

view in the Ethics where he distinguishes valour in the " primary "

sense of the word from the very kind of conduct here called by the

name. 1 The disagreement, however, is a purely verbal one. Aris-

totle does not mean to deny that the qualities in question are indis-

pensable to the good life, nor that there is a close analogy between

them and the quality of the soldier, which justifies a " transference "

of the name valour to them. He is concerned simply, in the interests

of precise terminology, to insist that when we speak of " putting up

a good fight " against disease, financial distress, temptation, and the

like, we are using language which originally was appropriated to the

actual " fighting " of actual soldiers, and Aristotle's purpose in

giving the series of character-sketches which make up this section

of the Ethics requires that he shall describe the various " virtues "

in the guise in which they are most immediately recognizable by

popular thought.)

Now that he sees the point, Laches replies very readily that

there is a certain spirit or temper which is to be found universally

in all the examples of courageous behaviour Socrates has produced.

They are all cases in which a man " persists " in the face of opposi-

tion or risk of some kind. Hence he proposes as the definition of

courage that it is in all cases a certain Kaprept'a, " persistence/'

" endurance/' " sticking to one's purpose " (igzc). This definition

clearly has some of the qualities of a good definition. When you

speak of courage as a " persistence of soul/' just as when we com-

monly use the word " resolution " as a synonym for it, you are

really trying to indicate the spirit which underlies all the manifold

expressions of the quality. And it is, of course, true that persistence

or resolution is a characteristic of courage ; the brave man is one

who " sticks it out." But, as a definition, the formula is still too

wide. All courage may be persistence, but all persistence is not

courage. In the technical logical language which makes its appear-

ance in Plato's later dialogues, we need to know the " difference " 2

which discriminates persistence which is courage from persistence

which is not. Since unwise persistence, mere obstinacy, is a bad and

harmful thing, whereas we certainly mean by courage something

we regard as eminently good, it looks as though we might remedy

the defect of our formula by saying that " wise persistence "

(<t>p6vip.os /caprepia) is courage (192^). But the question now arises

what wisdom we mean. A man may wisely calculate that by per-

sisting in expenditure he will make a commercial profit, but we

should hardly regard this as an example of courage. When a

1 E.N. Ui. 6, 11150 7 ff. * hafopd, Sia<pop6rris (Theaetet. 2oSd ff.)

62 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

physician persists in refusing the entreaties of his patient for food

which he knows would be bad for the patient, we do not think the

physician has shown any particular courage. In warfare, we do

not commend the courage of a force which " holds out " because it

knows that it is superior in numbers and still has the stronger

position and is certain of reinforcement. It is just the " per-

sistence " of an inferior force, with a worse position and no hope

of relief, that impresses us as singularly courageous. So we think

more of the courage of the man who acquits himself well in the

cavalry though is he an unskilled rider, or the man who makes a

plucky dive into deep water though he is a poor swimmer, than we

do of the persistence of the man who acquits himself well because he

has mastered these accomplishments. (E.g., we think Monmouth's

raw countrymen showed great courage at Sedgemoor in putting up

a fight against the Household troops ; we do not commend the

courage of the Household troops because they " held out " against

a crowd of peasants.) This looks as if, after all, it is " unwise "

persistence (afow /capreprjo-is) rather than " wise " which is the true

courage. We have plainly not found the right formula yet, and shall

have to call on ourselves for the very quality of which we have been

speaking, " persistence " in the inquiry, if we are to approve our-

selves " courageous " thinkers (1920-1940). We must not miss the

point of this difficulty. Socrates does not seriously mean to suggest

that " unwise " resolution or persistence is courage. His real object

is to distinguish the " wisdom " meant by the true statement that

courage is " wise resolution " from specialist knowledge which

makes the taking of a risk less hazardous. The effect of specialist

knowledge of this kind is, in fact, to make the supposed risk unreal.

The man whom we admire because we suppose him to be rightly

taking a great risk is, in reality, as he himself knows, taking little or

no risk. Our belief in his courage is based on an illusion which he

does not share. But it is true that we do not regard the " unwise "

persistency of the man who takes " foolish " risks as true courage.

What we really mean is that the brave man faces a great risk, being

alive to its magnitude, but faces it because he rightly judges that

it is good to do so. The " wisdom " he shows is right judgment of

good and evil, and this is what Socrates means to suggest.

At this point Nicias comes into the discussion. He has " often "

heard Socrates say that a man is " good " at the things he " knows "

(aTrcp cro^o's, 194^) and ' ' bad ' ' at the things he does not know (a d/m^s) .

If this is true, as Nicias believes it to be, courage, since it is always

a good quality or activity, will be a o-o^ta or &rt<m?/Ai?, a knowledge

of some kind. It is clearly not the same thing as any form of

specialist technical knowledge, for the reasons we have already

considered. But it may well be that it is " the knowledge of what

is formidable and what is not " (17 T&V Scu/wi/ K<U tfappaAcW cirMroj/My,

1940) ; i.e. the truly brave man may be the man who knows, in all the

situations of life, what is and what is not a proper object of fear.

This suggestion is plainly a step in the right direction, as it in-

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 68

corporates the important distinction between specialist knowledge

and the kind of knowledge which might conceivably be the same

thing as virtue, the distinction which would be made, in the fashion-

able terminology of our own day, between knowledge of facts and

knowledge of values. Laches, however, who is in a bad temper from

his own recent rebuff, treats the theory as a mere piece of mystifica-

tion, and can hardly be brought to express his objections to it in

decently civil language. A physician or a farmer knows the dangers

to which his patients or his cattle are exposed, but such knowledge

does not constitute courage (1956). The objection shows that

Laches has missed the whole point of the definition, as Nicias goes

on to observe. The physician may know that a patient will die or

will recover ; he does not know whether death or recovery is the

really " formidable " thing for the patient. It may be that it is

recovery which would in some cases be the " dreadful " thing, but

medical science cannot tell us which these cases are ; (e.g. a man might

use his restored health in a way which would bring him to public

disgrace worse than death, and, of course, his medical man cannot

learn from the study of medicine whether this will happen or not 1 ) .

Even the " seer " can only predict that a man will or will not die,

or lose his money, that a battle will be won or lost ; his art cannot

tell him which event will be better for the man or the State (1950-

196^). This is, of course, exactly the reply which might be made

to Laches' criticism from the Socratic standpoint. But it still leaves

something to be said which Socrates is anxious to say. In the

first place, if courage is knowledge of some kind, we must deny that

any mere animal can be brave. In fact, the truly brave will be a

small minority even among men. Must we say, then, that there is

no difference in courage between a lion and a deer, a bull and a

monkey ? Laches thinks the suggestion a sufficient refutation of

what he regards as the sophisticated nonsense of Nicias, but, as

Nicias observes, its edge is turned if we distinguish between natural

high temper and fearlessness (TO a<o/fov) and genuine courage

(TO avSptlov, i<)6d-i()jc). So far Nicias is simply insisting on what we

shall see from the Phaedo and Republic to be the Socratic view.*

Native fearlessness is a valuable endowment, but it is only in a

human being that it can serve as a basis for the development of the

loyalty to principle we call courage, and it is only in " philosophers "

that this transformation of mere " pluck " into true valiancy is

complete. But there is a further difficulty which Nicias has left

out of account. By a " formidable thing " or " thing to be feared "

we mean a future or impending evil. Now there is no science of

future good and evil distinct from the science of good and evil

1 So in Dickens's Great Expectations it is " better for " the returned convict

that he dies in the prison hospital, since, if he .had recovered, he would have

been sent to the gallows for returning from transportation. The hero is glad

to hear on each inquiry that the patient is " worse/'

2 The distinction is more obvious to a Greek than to ourselves, since the

vox propria for " brave " is dpfyeios, " manly," and to call a brute " manly"

is felt to be at least a straining of language.

64 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

simpliciter, just as there is no special science of "future health and

disease " or of "future victory and defeat." There is simply the

science of medicine or of strategy, and these sciences apply

indifferently to past, present, and future. So our definition, if we

are to retain it, must be amended ; we must say that courage is

" knowledge of good and evil/ 1 without any further qualification

(198^-1990). But as now amended our formula covers not merely a

part but the whole of goodness. If it is a definition at all, it is the

definition of " goodness," not of one of several different varieties or

departments of "goodness" (1990)- Yet it is commonly held

that courage is not the whole of " goodness " ; a good man needs

to display other virtues, such as " justice " and sophrosyne. It

appears then that, after all, we have not answered the question what

courage is. So far from being competent to choose masters for the

education of the boys, we all need to go to school ourselves, if only

we could find a teacher (201 a).

Thus the dialogue has led us to the same result as the Charmides.

If we try to explain what any one great typical moral virtue is, we

find ourselves driven on to define it as " the knowledge of what is

good." Every virtue thus seems on examination to cover the whole

field of the conduct of life, and none can be in principle distinguished

from any other. Yet it is commonly thought, and we shall see in

dealing with the Republic that there are facts of experience which

strongly support the view, that the different virtues are so really

distinct that a man may be eminent for one and yet no less eminent

for the lack of another, (as the typical soldier is commonly thought

to be at once braver and more licentious than the ordinary peaceable

civilian). We are forced by our intellect to accept the Socratic

" paradox " of the unity of virtue, but we have to explain how the

" paradox " is to be reconciled with the facts upon which popular

moral psychology is based. How the reconciliation is effected we

shall be able to say when we have studied the Protagoras, Phaedo,

and Republic. The all-important point, on which too many inter-

preters went wrong in the nineteenth century, is to understand that,

to the end of his life, Plato never wavered in his adherence to the

" paradox " itself.

Lysis. The dialogue is linked with the Charmides by its setting,

which presents another charming picture of the manner of Socrates

with promising boys ; some of the problems of moral psychology it

suggests point forward to one of the supreme achievements of

Plato's literary prime, the Symposium. It is specially interesting

as the unnamed source from which Aristotle derives most of the

questions discussed in a more systematic way in the lectures which

make up the eighth and ninth books of the Nicomachean Ethics.

(The extensive use of the Lysis in these books of itself disposes of the

misguided attack made on its authenticity by some nineteenth-

century scholars.)

The subject of the discussion is Friendship, a topic which plays

a much more prominent part in ancient than in modern ethical

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 65

literature, for easily assignable reasons. It is quite untrue to say

that the Greeks " had no family life," but it is true that owing to

the neglect of the education of their women, the family tended to

be more a close " business partnership " than a centre of intellectual

interests and spiritual emotions. Again, though conjugal affection

could be a real thing in the Hellenic world, for the same reasons,

romantic love between the sexes had little scope for the moralizing

and spiritualizing effects we are accustomed to ascribe to it.

" Passion " was relatively more prominent, " affection " much more

secondary, in the sexual life of Periclean Athens than in that of any

community which has been stamped by Christian traditions. In

the Greek literature of the great period, Eros is a god to be dreaded

for the havoc he makes of human life, not to be courted for the

blessings he bestows ; a tiger, not a kitten to sport with. 1 Love, as

known to the classical writers, is a passion for taking, not for giving.

Hence in life, as seen from the Hellenic point of view, there are just

two outlets for the spirit of eager unselfish devotion. It can show

itself in a high impersonal form, as absolute devotion to the ' city "

which is the common mother of all the citizens. For the man who,

like most of us, needs a personal object of flesh and blood for pas-

sionate affection and self-sacrifice, there is the lifelong friend of

his own sex, whose good is to him as his own. This is why, in

Aristotle's Ethics, an elaborate study of friendship immediately pre-

cedes the culminating picture of the " speculative life/' in which

man puts off the last vestiges of his human individuality to lose

himself in the contemplation of God. We may suspect that those

who condemn the tone of Greek ethics as " self-centred "have usually

" skipped " these books in their reading of the Ethics, and forgotten

that they are only the remains of what was once a vast literature. 2

Plato's interest in the Lysis is partly a psychological one. He

is fascinated by the mystery of the attraction which can draw two

human beings so close, that each is to the other as dear or dearer

than himself, as modern philosophers have been by the mystery

of the attraction of a particular woman for a particular man. What

does A see in B rather than in C, to account for this attraction ?

But he has also a more specifically ethical purpose, as will appear

from an analysis of his argument. As usual, we shall find the

fundamental conceptions of the Socratic morality, the doctrine

1 Cf. Bevan, Hellenism and Christianity, 93-94.

2 There are linguistic difficulties about any precise reproduction of the

argument of the Lysis in English. <t>i\iv can only be rendered " to love,"

i.e. with the love of affection (not that of sexual desire). But for (j>t\os, used

as a substantive, we have to say " friend," while the adjective has to be

rendered in various ways. If we said regularly either " friendly " or " dear,"

we should obscure the reasoning, since " friendly " means definitely " a person

feeling affection," and " dear " a " person towards whom affection is felt."

Either rendering would make nonsense of the question, whether our <f>l\ot are

those whom we " love " or those who " love us." Further, when the adjective

is used about things, like wine and the like, we cannot render it by either.

We have to say that a man " likes " wine or horses. This must be my apology

for the shifts to which I have been driven.

66 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

of the " tendance " of the soul and the dependence of happiness

upon knowledge of good, emerging from the paradoxes in which the

discussion appears to entangle itself.

The introduction of the dialogue closely resembles that of the

Charmides. Socrates is taking a walk outside the city wall from

the suburb of the Academy on the N.W. to the Lyceum on the

E., when he is accosted by some of his young friends and drawn

into a palaestra to make the acquaintance of Lysis, a beautiful and

modest boy passionately admired by Hippothales, one of the elder

lads. Hippothales, in fact, as the others complain, makes a nuisance

of himself by inflicting on them endless bad poems, in which he

belauds the antiquity, wealth, and splendid renown of the family of

Lysis. Socrates good-naturedly banters Hippothales on the mal-

adroitness of attempting to make a "conquest " by flatteries which

would be more likely to spoil the recipient, by making him arrogant,

conceited, and domineering, and is then invited to enter the palaestra

and give a practical example of the kind of conversation really

appropriate to a " lover " (Lysis, 2030-2070).

(The tone which Socrates adopts in his conversation with Lysis

discloses quietly but unmistakably the difference between his own

conception of a romantic attachment and that of his fashionable

young companions. The tacit presupposition is that the " true

lover's " desire is for the real felicity of the beloved ; his passion is

thus an entirely pure and disinterested thing, a form of <iAia, " affec-

tion/ 1 not of selfish lust ; and this, no doubt, is why Socrates can open

the argument by examples drawn from wise parental affection. 1 )

Lysis has parents who love him dearly. Since they love him so

well they are, of course, anxious for his "happiness." Now a man

cannot be happy if he is not his own master and cannot " do what

he desires/ 1 " have his own way/' Yet the very parents who are

so devoted to the boy's happiness will hardly let him have his own

way about anything. He is not allowed to drive his father's

horses or mules, though a hired coachman or a groom who is a slave

is allowed to do as he thinks good with them. He is even made to

go to school under the conduct of a paedagogus and, though the

man is a slave, has to do what he tells him. When he comes back

from school, he may not do as he pleases with his mother's wools and

implements for spinning and weaving ; he would even be whipped

if he meddled with them. This does not look like being happy or

being one's own master (207^-209^).

Lysis gives the boyish explanation that he is not yet old enough

to meddle with such matters. But the real reason cannot be one of

age. There are things in which he is allowed to have his own way.

When his parents want him to read aloud, to write or to sing, he is

allowed to have his own way about the order in which he reads or

1 The brutal selfishness of the fashionable <?/xxo-rv)j is the theme of Socrates

homily in the Phaedrus, on the text " that one's favours should not be granted

to a ' lover.' " Cf. the proverb quoted at the end of the homily, that this sort

of " love " is the " love of the wolf for the lamb " (Phaedrus, 238^-241^).

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 67

writes words and about tuning the strings of his instrument, because

these are things which he knows how to do. Any man, or any body

of men, will be ready to let us manage any kind of business at our

own discretion, if only it is believed that we know how to do it

better than anyone else. When you know how to handle an

affair, every one will trust you to handle it ; no one will interfere

with your action if he can help it ; the affair will really be your

affair and you will be free in dealing with it. But our best friends

will be the first persons to check us from having our own way in

matters we do not understand ; they will not be our affair, and we

shall be " under the control of others," " not our own masters " in

handling them (2oga-2iob). The reason is that we are " unprofit-

able/' " useless " (dvw^cActs), in matters we do not understand.

But we cannot expect anyone to " love " us for our " uselessness."

If we are " wise/ 1 everybody will be our friend, because we shall

be " good and useful " ; if we are not, even our parents and relatives

will not be our friends. Thus the sample conversation is made to

lead up to the point that to be happy and to be free is the same

thing as to have true knowledge. Socrates adds, with a sportive

play on words, that it is absurd, /xc'ya <poi/tv, " to have a high mind/'

to be conceited, about matters we do not know, and where, there-

fore, we haven't a " mind " of our own at all (ei/ ots ns /XT/TTO) <poi/-i).

This is, of course, directed against the vanity of the pride of family

which we were told Hippothales encouraged in Lysis (ziob-d).

Some by-play follows here, and when the argument is resumed

it is with a different interlocutor. This is a device for calling our

attention to the fact that the main issues of the dialogue have not

yet been raised ; they are to be looked for, not in the example of the

right way of conversing with an e/xo/Acvos, but in the apparently more

desultory talk which is to follow. Socrates remarks that though he

has always thought a good friend the most precious possession a

man can have, he himself does not so much as understand how a

friend is acquired. Young people who have had the good fortune

to form a passionate friendship in their earliest days could, no doubt,

enlighten him out of their experience. In this way we make the

transition to the main problem of the dialogue, the question:

What is the foundation of the personal attraction of one man for

another ?

" If one man loves another, which is the friend of the other the

lover of the loved, or the loved of the lover, or does this make no

difference ? " I.e., where there is a one-sided affection of A for B,

does this entitle us to say that A and B are " friends " ? If not,

does it entitle us to call one of them a " friend," and, if so, which is

the friend ? Are my friends the persons who love me or the persons

whom I love ? The difficulty lies in the existence of unrequited

affection. A may be strongly attracted to B, while B is indifferent to

A, or even repelled by him. Can we talk of friendship in cases of

this kind ? Or should we say that there is not friendship unless

the attraction is reciprocal ? It seems most reasonable to hold that

68 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

the relation of friendship only exists when there is this reciprocal

affection. In that case nothing is <i'Aov to you unless it " loves

you back." To a Greek this creates a linguistic difficulty. When

he wishes to say that a man is " fond of " anything wine, for

example, or wisdom he has to form a compound adjective with

<t>i\o for its first component, <t'Xoivos, <iAdo-o<os, or the like, much

as when a German wishes to say that he is fond of animals he has

to call himself a Tierfreund. Language thus seems to be against

the view just suggested, but there are undeniable facts on its side ;

very young children may feel no love for their parents, and may

feel actual " hate " when they get a whipping, but the parent, even

when he punishes the child, is its " best friend." This suggests

that it is being loved that makes a friend. If you love me, I am

your friend, whether I love you or not (2125-2130).

But a difficulty arises when we remember that, by parity of

reasoning, it should follow that it is being hated which makes a man

an enemy : (if you hate me, I am your enemy, though my heart

may be full of nothing but goodwill to you, or though I may not

know of your existence). This leads to the paradox that when A

feels love to B, but B hates A, A is being hated by a friend and B

loved by an enemy, and thus the same couple may be said to be at

once friends and enemies, a contradiction in terms (213^).

If we revise our view and say that it is not being loved but loving

that makes a friend, so that he who loves me is my friend, whatever

my attitude to him may be, the same paradox equally follows,

since I may love a person who cannot abide me. Since we began

by setting aside the view that reciprocal affection is necessary

for friendship, we seem thus to have exhausted all the possibilities,

and to have shown that there is no such relation as friendship

(2I3C).

The absurdity of this shows that we must have made a false

start. We must go over the ground again, and we may take a hint

from the poets, who talk of friendships as " made in heaven/

God, they say, " draws like to its like." The scientific men who

write cosmologies also make use of this principle of " like to like '

to account for the distribution of bodies in the universe. Perhaps

this may be the secret of friendship ; the drawing of A to B may

be one case of a great universal principle which underlies the struc-

ture of the universe. Yet, on closer examination, we see that

unfortunately, so far as the relations of men are concerned, the

principle of " like to like " cannot be, at best, more than half the

truth. Bad men are not made friends by being " drawn together."

The more closely they are drawn together, the more each tries to

exploit the other, and the more hostile they become. Perhaps the

poets knew this, and really meant to say that a bad man, being

without principle, is an unstable and chameleon-like being. He is

a " shifty " fellow, who is perpetually " unlike " and at variance

with himself, and a fortiori unlike and at variance with every one

else. Hence the poets perhaps meant to hint that only men of

MINOR SOCRATtC DIALOGUES 69

principle, the good, are really " like " one another, and that friend-

ship can only exist between the good (213^-2140).

Yet, when we come to think of it, there is a worse difficulty to

be faced. If one thing can act on another and influence it in any

way, can the two be exactly alike ? Must there not be some un-

likeness, if there is to be any interaction ? And if one party is

wholly unaffected by the other, how can the one " care for " (ayairav)

the other ? What " comfort " (cTrtKovpt'a) can the one bring to the

other ? And how can you feel friendship for that which you do not

care for ? If good men are friends, the reason must be in their good-

ness, not in their " likeness " (i.e. they must be good in different

ways, so that their respective goodnesses supplement each other,

2140-2150) . And this, again, seems impossible. For the good man is

' sufficient for himself " in proportion as he is good. He therefore

feels no need of anything but himself. But he who feels no need

does not " care for " anything, and he who does not care for a thing

can have no affection for it. By this account there can be no friend-

ships bet ween the good ; being " self-sufficient/' they will not miss

one another in absence or have any occasion for one another's offices

when they are together. On what ground, then, should they " set

a value " on one another (2150-6) - 1

Again we have gone off on a false track. Socrates once heard

some one say that likeness is the source of the keenest rivalry and

opposition, but extreme unlikeness the source of friendship. There

is poetic authority for this in the Hesiodic saying about " two of

a trade," and, in fact, we see that it is so. The rich and the poor,

the feeble and the strong, the ailing man and the physician, are

brought into friendly association precisely because they are unlike ;

each needs the services of the other (e.g. the rich man needs in-

dustrious and honest servants, the poor need an employer who

has wherewithal to pay for their industry ; the sick man needs the

physician's skill, the physician needs the fee for it). In fact, said

this speaker, the attraction of unlikes is the key to cosmology. 2

Everything in nature needs to be tempered by its opposite : the

1 Obviously we are here raising a question of vast significance. In its

extreme form it is the question whether there can be, as Christianity assumes,

a love of God for the sinner, or indeed whether God can love anything but

Himself. Socrates is raising a difficulty, but not solving it. It is true that

the better a man is, the less does the removal of friends, by accident or estrange-

ment or death, wreck his life. In that sense the good man is " sufficient to

himself."

*Note the way in which it is assumed throughout the dialogue that

Socrates is quite familiar with the theories of the cosmologists, and that his

young friends will recognize allusions to them. This is strictly in keeping

with the standing assumption of the Clouds as well as with the autobiographical

section of the Phaedo. The conception of 0i\Ja in particular as " attraction

of unlike for unlike " comes from Empedocles and the Sicilian medicine which

goes back to him ; the thought that one opposite is the rpoQj, " food " or

" fuel," of the other is that of Heraclitus. Heracliteanism was actually repre-

sented at Athens in the time of the Archidamian war by Cratylus ; from the

speech of Eryximachus in the Symposium we see that the Sicilian medical

ideas were at home there also.

70 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

hot by the cold, the dry by the moist, and so on, for everything is

" fed by " its opposite the familiar doctrine of Heraclitus. Thus

it would be tempting to say that friendship is a case of attraction

between opposites. Yet if we say that, we shall at once fall an

easy prey to those clever men, the dvriXoytKot, who love to make a

man contradict himself. For they will say that hatred and love

are a pair of extreme opposites, and so are " temperance " and

profligacy, or good and evil. Our principle would thus require us

to believe that a man will generally be most attracted to the very

persons who detest him, that a remarkably temperate man will

make his bosom friend of a notorious profligate, and the like. But

manifestly these statements are not true. So once more we have

come to no result. Neither simple " likeness " nor simple " unlike-

ness " can be the secret of the attraction between friends (2150-2160). l

We may attempt a more subtle explanation. Perhaps the truth

is that in friendship one party is good, the other " neither good nor

bad," the only alternative of which we have yet taken no account.

(The suggestion is that the relation is regularly one between the

possessor of some excellence and some one who aspires to the

excellence but has not yet attained it. The friend to whom we are

drawn is what we should like to become.) We may illustrate by a

simple example from medicine. Health is a good thing, disease a

bad thing ; the human body may be said to be neutral, because it

is capable of both. Now no one cares about the doctor, so long as

he is well. But when he is afraid of being ill, he welcomes the doctor.

He does this not when he is at his last gasp, but before, when he

apprehends illness, i.e. when he is neither in full health nor beyond

help. We may say that this is a case in which " that which is

neither good nor bad becomes friendly to that which is good because

of the presence of what is evil " (2176). And here we must make a

careful distinction. " Some things are such as to be themselves

such as that which is present to them, others are not " (2170). Thus

if the golden locks of a boy are daubed with white paint, " white-

ness " is present to them, but they are not themselves white

(since, of course, the paint can be washed off). But when the boy

has become an old man, " whiteness " will be " present " to his

hair in a different sense ; his hair will itself be white. (The only

object of these remarks is to warn us against supposing that when

Socrates speaks of the " presence " of what is evil to what is " neither

good nor bad," he is using the term in the sense in which it is

employed when we explain the possession of a predicate by a thing

by saying that the corresponding form is " present " to the thing.

In this sense mipouo-t'a, " presence " of the form, is an equivalent for

ju,c'0ci5, the " participation " of a thing in the form, as we see from

the free use of both expressions in the Phaedo? It is assumed that

1 I.e. it is not true either that any and every " likeness," nor yet that every

and any " unlikeness," can be the foundation of friendship.

8 Cf. Phaedo, loprf, where Socrates says that we may call the relation of

form to sensible thing irapowla or Kowuvta or " whatever you please " (efre STT-Q

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 71

the technical language of the theory of forms is so familiar a thing

that Socrates needs to warn the lads not to be misled by it ; an

odd representation if the whole theory had been invented by Plato

after Socrates' death.)

The theory, then, works out thus. So long as a thing is not yet

itself evil, the " presence " of evil makes it desire the corresponding

good ; when the thing itself has become evil, it has lost both desire

and affection for good. This explains why neither those who are

already wise, like the gods, nor those who are simply ignorant are

" lovers of wisdom " (^tAdo-o^oi). " Philosophers/' as we are also

told by Diotima in the Symposium, are between the two extremes

on the way to wisdom, but only on the way. They are aware of

their ignorance and anxious to get rid of it. The theory naturally

appeals to the lads, since a boy's enthusiastic devotions are regularly

attachments of this kind to some one older than himself whom he

admires and wants to grow like (2i6c-2i8b).

Still, on reflection Socrates finds a fatal flaw in this attractive

solution of his problem. If we revert to our illustration, we observe

that the patient is attached to his physician " because of something "

and " for the sake of something/' He values the doctor because he

is afraid of illness and for the sake of health, and of these disease is

bad and " hateful " to him, health is dear or welcome (4>i'Aoi/) and

good. Thus, if we generalize the principle, we must state it more

exactly than we did at first. We must say, " That which is neither

good nor bad is friendly to that which is good because of that which is

bad and hateful, and for the sake of that which is good and welcome/'

Now, passing by all merely verbal points to which exception might

be taken, this statement implies that whatever is dear, or welcome,

or friendly (<i'Aov) to us, is welcome as a means to something else,

just as the physician's skill is welcome as a means to keeping or

recovering health. But health itself is surely also welcome (</>tAov).

Are we to say that it too is only welcome as a means to something ?

Even if we say this, sooner or later we are bound to come upon

something which is dear to us simply on its own account, and is

that for the sake of which all other " dear " things are dear. A

father whose son has swallowed hemlock will be eager to put his

hand on a jar of wine. But he only cares for the jar because it

holds the wine, and he only cares about the wine because it will

counteract the poison. It is his son, not a sample of Attic pottery

or of a particular vintage, about whom he is really concerned. So

long as a thing or person is only " dear " to us for the sake of

something else, it is only a J 'aeon de parler to call it " dear." What is

really " dear " to us is " just that upon which all our so-called

affections terminate " (cVcii^o avro ck o irao-at avrat at A.yo/xo'cu <t>t\tai

T\vrG>(riv, 22ob). (Thus the question about the secret sources

5fy Kal flrwsf Trpoffycvo^vrj). Elsewhere in the dialogue the form is said to

" occupy " (K<LTt\w, a military metaphor) the thing, the thing to " receive "

(Mxc<rOai, again a military metaphor) or to " partake in " (furtxtty) the

form.

72 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

of affection has brought us face to face with the conception

of the summum bonum, which is the source of all secondary and

derivative goodness, 2186-2206.)

We have thus eliminated from our last statement the clause

" for the sake of that which is good and welcome. " Will the rest

of the formula stand criticism ? Is it true that what we " care for "

is "good" and that we care for it " because of " (to escape from)

evil ? If the second of these statements is sound, it should follow

that in a world where there were no evils, we should no longer care

about anything good, any more than we should value medicine in a

world where there was no disease. If this is so, then our attitude

to the supreme object of all our affections is unique. We care

about the secondary objects of affection " for the sake of something

welcome to us " (<t'Aov), i.e. because they are means to this primary

object ; but we must say of the primary object of all affection itself

that we care for it " for the sake of the unwelcome " (fyOpov), if

we should really value it no longer in a world where there were no

evils. Perhaps the question, as we put it, is a foolish one, for who

can tell what might or might not happen in such a world ? But

our experience of the world we live in teaches us as much as this.

To feel hungry is sometimes good for us, sometimes harmful.

Suppose we could eliminate all the circumstances in which being

hungry is harmful, hunger would still exist, and so long as hunger

existed we should " care for " the food which satisfies it. (Even

in a socialist Utopia where every one was sure of sufficient food,

and every one too healthy and virtuous to be greedy, men would

still have " wholesome appetite " and care about their dinners.)

This is enough to dispose of the theory that we only care about good

as an escape from evil (2206-2210).

Thus our formula seems to have gone completely by the board,

and the course of the argument has suggested a new one. It seems

now that the cause of all attachment (<f>i\ia) is desire (eVi0u/u'a),

and that we must say " what a man desires is dear to him and when

he is desiring it." (Thus we arrive at a purely relative definition

of TO <f>i\ov, probably intentionally modelled on the famous relativist

doctrine of Protagoras that " what a man thinks true is true for

him, and so long as he thinks it so/ 1 ) We may proceed to develop

this thought a little farther. A creature which desires regularly

desires that of which it is " deficient " (cvSofs). So we may say

that " the deficient " (TO frSccs) is " attached " (<i'W) to that

of which it is " deficient." And deficiency means being " deprived "

of something. (The " deficient " creature is " defective " ; it is

without something it must have in order to be fully itself.)

" Passion " (<po>?), friendship, desire, then, are all felt for something

which "belongs to one's self" (TO OIKCIOV). Friends or lovers,

thus, if they really are what they profess to be, are oiKeiot to one

another ; they " belong to " one another ; each is, as we might say,

a " part of the other " in " soul, or temper or body " (*aTa TO TT}$

rj cTSos). A thing for which we feel affection

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 78

is then something <vo-ct oi/ceiW to ourselves, " our very own/' It

follows that since each party to the affection is thus " the very

own " of the other party, affection must be reciprocal, and Socrates

is careful to apply this lesson by adding that " a genuine lover "

must be one who has his love reciprocated. (This is plainly in-

tended as a comment on the current perversions of " romantic "

passion. Reciprocated affection was the last thing the pervert

could expect from his 7rcu6W, a point of which we shall hear more

in the Phaedrus. The fashionable epacmfc, it is meant, is not

worthy of the name of a lover at all (221^-2226).)

Formally the dialogue has ended in a circle, or seems to have

done so. If TO ot/ctov, " what belongs to one's self/' is also TO ofiotov,

" what is like " one's self, we have contradicted our earlier con-

clusion that friendship is not based on " likeness/' If we try to

escape from the contradiction by distinguishing between TO ot/cetov

and TO o/xotov, it is attractive to say that all good things are oiVeta

to one another (in virtue of their common goodness), all bad things

otKcta in virtue of their badness, and all " neutral " things again

OIKCUI. But this would contradict our decision that friendship is

impossible between the bad. Or if we identify TO OIKCIOV, what is

one's own, with TO ayaOov, one's good, we should have to say that

friendship is only possible between two men who are both good,

and this again would contradict another of our results (222b-e).

In ending in this apparently hopeless result, the Lysis resembles

a much more famous dialogue, the Parmenides. In neither case

need we suppose that Plato's real intention is to leave us merely

befogged. The way in which the thought that what is most near

and intimate to each of us (TO otVctor) is the good is kept back to

the very end of the conversation suggests that this that man as

such has such a " natural good," and that it is the one thing worth

caring for in life is the thought he means the discussion to leave

in our minds. If we go back to the various proposed explanations

of the secret of friendship with this thought in our minds, it may

occur to us that they do not, after all, formally contradict one

another. The common bond between the parties to associations

which are all correctly called " friendships " may be different in

different cases. Or rather, the bond between the " friends " may

in every case be association in the pursuit of some " good," but

goods are of very different levels of value, and " friendships " may

exhibit the same variety of levels. Thus it may be that the full

and perfect type of friendship can only be based on common pursuit

of the true supreme good, and in that case friendship in the fullest

sense will only be possible between " the good." Yet there may

be associations between men founded on the common pursuit of

some good inferior to the highest (e.g. the common pursuit of the

" business advantage " of both parties, or the common pursuit of

amusement or recreation). These would be " friendships " but of

a lower type, and it may quite well be the case, e.g., that a good man

and a bad one. or even two bad men may be associated in this

74 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

inferior sort of " friendship." Such, at least, are the lines on which

Aristotle in the Ethics develops a theory of friendship in which all

the conflicting points of view of our dialogue are taken up, and each

is found to have its relative justification.

See further :

RITTER, C. Platon, i. 284-297 (Laches) , 343-359 (Charmides\

497-504 (Lysis).

RAEDER, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 95-99 (Laches

Charmides), 153-158 (Lysis).

STOCK, ST. GEORGE. Friendship (Greek and Roman) in E.R.E.

vol. vi.

CHAPTER V

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES: CRATYLUS,

EUTHYDEMUS

BOTH the dialogues to be considered in this chapter have

something of the character of "occasional works." Both

are strongly marked by a broad farcical humour, which is

apparently rather Socratic than Platonic ; we meet it again, e.g.,

in the comic fury of the satire in some parts of the Republic, but it

is quite unlike the grave and gentle malice of such works as the

Parmenides and Sophistes. The mirth, especially in the Euthydemus,

has something of the rollicking extravagance of Aristophanes, and,

according to the Symposium, there really was a side to Socrates

which made him congenial company for the great comic poet.

(Both men could relish wild fun, and both could enjoy a laugh at

themselves.) In neither of our two dialogues is the professed main

purpose directly ethical, though the Socratic convictions about the

conduct of life incidentally receive an impressive exposition in

the Euthydemus. It seems impossible to say anything more precise

about the date of composition of either than that stylistic con-

siderations show that both must be earlier than the great dramatic

dialogues, Protagoras, Symposium, Phaedo, Republic. Since the

Cratylus is a directly enacted drama with only three personages,

while the Euthydemus is a reported dialogue with numerous per-

sonages and a vigorously delineated " background," this second is

presumably the more mature work of the two.

Cratylus. The personages of the dialogue other than Socrates

are two, Hermogenes and Cratylus. Hennogenes is well known

to us as a member of Socrates 1 entourage. Both he and Cratylus

figured in the Telauges of Aeschines, 1 where Socrates was apparently

made to criticize the squalor affected by the extreme Orphic and

Pythagorist spirituali. We learn from Plato (Phaedo 596) that

Hennogenes was present at the death of Socrates. Xenophon

mentions him several times and professes to owe some of his in-

formation to him. He was a base-born brother of the famous,

or notorious, " millionaire " Callias, son of Hipponicus, the muni-

ficent patron of "sophists" (Crat. 391^), but himself poor, and

apparently on no very good terms with his brother. As Callias

was connected by marriage with Pericles, the appearance of him

and his brother among the associates of Socrates is one of the many

1 See E.R.E., art. SOCRATES, and H. Dittmar's Aeschines von Sphettus

213-244. He and Callias are prominent figures in Xenophon's Symposium-

76 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

indications that the philosopher stood in early life in close relations

with the Periclean circle. Of Cratylus we apparently know only

what Aristotle has told us in his Metaphysics, 1 that as we could

have inferred from our dialogue itself he believed in the Heraclitean

doctrine of universal " flux/' and that he carried his conviction of

the impermanence of everything to the length of refusing to name

things, preferring to point at them with his fingers. (The use of a

significant name would suggest that the thing named really had

some sort of relatively permanent character.) But one may

reasonably suspect the story of being no more than an invention of

some wag which Aristotle has perhaps taken too seriously. 2 Accord-

ing to Aristotle, Plato had been "familiar" with him, and derived

from him his rooted conviction that sensible things, because of their

complete impermanence, cannot be the objects of scientific

knowledge.

It is not clear whether Aristotle means to place this connexion

of Plato with Cratylus before or after the death of Socrates, but

presumably he means that it was before that event, since he says

that it belonged to Plato's youth. The fact is likely enough, since

Cratylus seems to have been one of Socrates' associates. (We must

not suppose Aristotle to mean that when Plato associated with him

he had not yet met Socrates ; the close relations of Socrates with

Critias, Charmides, Adimantus, Glaucon, show that Plato must

have been acquainted with him from early childhood.) We need

not believe, and we can hardly believe, that the influence of Cratylus

really counted for much in determining Plato's own thought ; he

would not need any special master to inform him that sensible

things are mutable. Most probably Aristotle, who only knew

Plato in Plato's old age, has exaggerated the importance of an

acquaintance which had really no great significance. In any case,

the tone of the whole dialogue requires us to suppose that both

Cratylus and Hermogenes are youngish men, decidedly younger

than Socrates. 8 The " dramatic date " of the conversation is

hardly indicated with certainty. If we may suppose, what seems

to me most likely, that the " curfew regulations " in Aegina, alluded

to at 433a, were connected with the Athenian military occupation

of the island in 431, this would suggest a date not too long after

the beginning of the Archidamian war, when Socrates would be in

the early forties, and the other two perhaps twenty years younger.

1 Aristotle, Met. 9870 32, loioa 12.

2 Since Cratylus appears in our dialogue as holding that many of the names

by which we actually call things are not their " real names," the point of the

jest may have been less recondite. It may lie in his uncertainty what the

" real name " of a given thing is. A good deal of fun might obviously be

got out of this, e.g., in a comedy.

This was certainly true of Hermogenes, since his elder brother Callias

was still alive and active in public affairs at a date when Socrates, if he had

still been living, would have been a centenarian. The active career of Callias

hardly begins until the end of the fifth century. The youth of Cratylus is

expressly remarked on by Socrates at the end of the dialogue (440^, ri -ydp

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 77

This is further borne out by the reference (386^) to Euthydemus

as a person whose views are of interest. We shall see below that

the Euthydemus requires to be dated at latest not after 421 or 420. l

The ostensible subject of discussion is the origin of language.

Are names significant by "nature" (<vcm), in virtue of some

intrinsic appropriateness of the verbal sign to the thing signified,

or only significant " by convention " (VO/AW), i.e. arbitrary imposi-

tion ? Cratylus takes the first view ; there is a natural " Tightness "

of names which is one and the same for every one, Greek or barbarian

(3836). If you call a thing by any other name than its own in-

trinsically " right " name, you are not naming it at all, even though

you are using for it the word which every one else uses. Hermogenes

is on the side of " convention " or arbitrary imposition ; he holds

that whatever we are accustomed to call anything is, for that

reason, the name of the thing. The dispute is referred to Socrates,

who is careful to explain that he cannot decide the question with

expert knowledge, as he has never attended the expensive fifty-

drachma lecture of Prodicus on the right use of language ; he can

only contribute the suggestions of his native mother- wit (384&). a

The issue under consideration is thus only one aspect of the

famous " sophistic " antithesis between " nature " and " social

usage " which we know to have been the great controversial issue

of the Periclean age. The fancy that if we can only discover the

original names of things, our discovery will throw a flood of light on

the realities named, seems to recur periodically in the history of

human thought. There are traces of it in Heraclitus and Herodotus ;

in the age of Pericles it was reinforced by the vogue of allegorical

interpretations of Homer, which depended largely on fanciful

etymologies. Much of the dialogue is taken up by a long series of

such etymologies poured forth by Socrates under what he himself

declares to be " possession " by some strange personality. It is

1 Reference is made several times in the Cratylus to a certain Euthyphro

who exhibited the phenomena of "possession" (tvQov<ria<Tfji6s) . This may be

the same person who gives his name to the dialogue Euthyphro, and was

attempting to prosecute his own father for murder in the spring of the year 399.

There is no difficulty about the chronology if we suppose that at that date

Euthyphro, whose manner is that of an elderly rather than a very young

man, was a year or two over fifty, and his father seventy-five or more. But

the identification, though accepted by eminent scholars, seems precarious.

There is nothing about the religious fanatic Euthyphro to suggest that he was

subject to " possession." It is true that Socrates playfully calls him a p&vrit

(Euthyph. 3^), but tiavrtK-fi had many forms.

2 It is not suggested that it was poverty which prevented Socrates from

attending the lecture. It seems clear that Socrates was not really poor until

his middle age. As Burnet has said, the way in which the comic poets dwelt

on his poverty when they attacked him in 423, suggests that his losses were then

fairly recent. In the Protagoras, which takes us back before the Archidamian

war, he appears to have a house of his own with a courtyard, and at least one

servant (3106, 31 ia) t and speaks of himself in a w*ay which implies that he could

at need have helped to pay Protagoras on behalf of his young friend (31 id,

y<6 TC KO.I <rb Apytpiov tKeivy iwrBbv trotpoi Mpeffa reXeir Ivtp ffov). Hence the

absence of any reference to poverty is perhaps an indication of " dramatic

date."

78 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

plain that we are not to find the serious meaning of the dialogue

here, especially as, after delighting Cratylus by a pretended demon-

stration that language supports the Heraclitean philosophy, since

the names of all things good contain references to movement, and

the names of all bad things to arrest of movement, he turns round

and produces equally ingenious and far-fetched etymological

grounds for supposing that the original " giver of names " must

have held the Eleatic doctrine that motion is an illusion, since all

the names of good things appear to denote rest or stoppage of

motion. Obviously, we are to take all this as good-humoured

satire on attempts to reach a metaphysic by way of " philology " ;

as far as etymologies go, a little ingenuity will enable us to get

diametrically opposite results out of the same data.

The real purpose of the dialogue, so far as it has any purpose

beyond the preservation of a picture of Socrates in one of his more

whimsical moods, is to consider not the origin of language, but its

use and functions. If we consider the purposes which spoken

language subserves, we shall see that if it is to be adequate for those

purposes, it must conform to certain structural principles. Hence

the formula of the partisans of " convention " that the " right

name " of anything is just whatever we agree to call it, makes

language a much more arbitrary thing than it really is. A " right

name " will be a name which adequately fulfils all the uses for

which a name is required, and thus one man's or one city's voca-

bulary may name things more rightly, because more adequately,

than that of another. But so long as the purpose for which names

are required is adequately discharged by any vocabulary, things

will be rightly " named " in the vocabulary. The names for

things will not have the same syllables and letters in Greek and in

a " barbarian " language, but if the purposes for which speech is

required are equally well achieved in both languages, both names

will be equally " true " names for things. So the partisans of

Averts, who hold, like Cratylus, that there is one particular com-

bination of sounds which is the one and only " right name " of a

given thing, are also only partly right. They are right in thinking

that the right assignment of names is not arbitrary, but depends on

principles of some kind, and that a nomenclature which " every one

agrees in using " may, for all that, be a bad one ; they are wrong in

thinking that if a given succession of sounds is a " right name " for

a certain thing, no other such combination can be its " right name."

The Cratylus is thus not so much concerned with the " origin " of

language, as with the principles of philosophical and scientific

nomenclature, though it contains many incidental sound observa-

tions about those analogies between the different movements of

articulation and natural processes which seem to underlie the

" onomatopoeic " element'in language, as well as about the various

influences which lead to linguistic change.

Hermogenes, at the outset, adopts an extreme form of the view

that language is wholly arbitrary. If I like to call a thing by a

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 79

certain name that is its name for me, even in the case of my inverting

the usage of every one else. Thus, if I call " horse " what every

one else calls ''man/' "horse" really is my private name, the

name in my private language (tSi'a, 3850) for that being, as truly as

"man" is its name "in the language of the public" (8r//xoo-ta) .

Now this assertion raises a very large question. A name is a part,

an ultimate part, of a \oyos or statement. Statements may be true

or they may be false ; they are true if they speak of realities (ovra)

as they really are, false if they speak of them otherwise. But if a

whole " discourse " or " statement " may be either true or false,

we must say the same about its parts. Every part of a true state-

ment must be true, and thus, since there are true and false Xoyot,

there must be true and false names (385^). This looks like a fallacy,

but we shall see that it is not really one if we note carefully the use

Socrates makes of the distinction. His point is the sound one,

that language is a social activity ; it is primarily an instrument of

communication. A "name" given by me privately to something

which everybody else calls differently does not discharge this

function ; it misleads, is a bad instrument for its purpose. This

is what Socrates means by calling it a " false " name. It is a

spurious substitute for the genuine article which would do the work

required.

This disposes of the suggestion of a purely " private " language

peculiar to the individual, but still it may be reasonably main-

tained that at any rate though the names " barbarians " give to

things are not the same as those used by Greeks, they are just as

much the " true names " of things as the Greek words (385^).

I.e. we may urge that the plurality of languages shows that language

is an arbitrary thing, though it depends on the arbitrium of a group,

not of a single man. But if names are arbitrary, is the reality

(oucn'a) of the things named equally arbitrary ? If a thing's name

is just whatever some one likes to call it, is the thing itself just

whatever some one thinks it to be ? Protagoras actually held that

everything really is for any one just what he thinks it to be, so long

as he thinks it to be so, and Hermogenes reluctantly admits that he

sometimes feels driven to accept the view, strange as it is. How-

ever, we may perhaps dismiss it with the remark that it leaves no

room for distinguishing wiser and less wise men, since it says that

every one's beliefs are true for him and no one else, and just as

long as he holds them. But it seems the most patent of facts that

some men are good, and therefore wise, and some wicked and there-

fore unwise. Yet we can hardly go to the opposite extreme with

Euthydemus, who says that all statements whatever are true, always

and " for every one." This would equally lead to the view that

there is no distinction between the virtuous and the vicious, and

consequently none between wisdom and the lack of it * (386^).

1 Since, if Euthydemus is right, you can always truly predicate both virtue

and vice of any subject whatever. Formally, Protagoras says that a proposition

is true only when it is being believed by some one ; Euthydemus, that what we

80 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

Now if neither of these doctrines can be true, " objects " (ra

Trpay/xara) clearly have some determinate real character of their

own (overlay rtVa pifianov) which is independent of our " fancy " ;

and if this is so " activities " (7rpafs) will also have a " nature "

or " reality " ($v'crii>) of their own, since " activities " are one form

of " object " (lv rt 1809 Tu)i/ oi/rujf, 3860). Hence, if we want to

perform an act, we cannot do it in any way and with any instrument

we please. We must do it in the way prescribed by the nature of

the object we are acting on, and with the "naturally proper"

instrument (<5 irtyvKt). For example, in cleaving wood, if we are

to succeed, we must split the wood " with the grain " and we must

use a naturally suitable implement. Speaking of things and naming

them is an activity (xrpa&s), and what we have just said applies

therefore to naming. If we want to name things we must name

them not just as the fancy takes us, but " as the nature of the

objects permits and with the instrument it permits." The instru-

ment or tool for naming things is, of course, the name itself. We

may define a name as " an instrument by which we inform one

another about realities and discriminate between them " (3886-0,

oi/o/xa apa SiSacrKoAiKov TI eamv opyavov Kat Sia/cpmKov rr)s oucrtas).

In all the crafts (weaving, for example) one craftsman (e.g. the

weaver) has to make a proper use of some implement which has

been properly made by some other craftsman (e.g. the carpenter,

who makes the wooden implements which the weaver uses). Now

from our definition of a name we see at once who is the expert crafts-

man who " uses " names as his tools ; he is the " teacher " or

"instructor" (6 SiSao-KaAi/cds). But who is the other expert who

makes the tools which the teacher uses ? According to the very

theory from which we started, they are made by vd/xos, " social

usage." Hence we may say that they are the manufacture of the

" legislator," the institutor of social usage. And legislation is

not work that anyone can do, " unskilled labour " ; it is " skilled

labour," work for an expert, or professor of a TC'XVT/. Clearly then,

it is not correct to say that anyone whatever can arbitrarily give

names to things (386^-3890). (Thus the result so far is that, since

the function of language is the accurate communication of know-

ledge about things, the vocabulary of " social usage " will only be

satisfactory when it supplies a nomenclature which corresponds to

the real agreements and differences between the things named.)

Well, what would the expert in establishing usages have before

his mind's eye in assigning names ? We may see the answer by

considering the way in which the carpenter works when he makes a

KcpKts for the weaver. He " keeps his eyes on " the work the

Kcpjct's is meant to do in weaving its function. If one of his

articles breaks while he is making it, of course he makes a fresh one,

and in making it he does not " fix his eye " on the spoilt and broken

u's but on the form (e!8os) with an eye to which he had been

all disbelieve is as true as what we all believe. Both positions make science

impossible.

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 81

making the one which broke (3896). It is this "model" /cc/m's,

kept by the carpenter before his mind's eye in making all the

different wooden Kcpja'&s, which best deserves the name of avro

o com/ K6/3Kt9, " just the Kepi's, " the K/3/as and nothing else " (ib.).

There are three points to be got hold of here, (i) The carpenter

cannot give the tools he makes for the weaver just any shape he

pleases ; the shape or form of the Ke/Ws is determined, independently

of anyone's fancy, by the work it is meant to do. (2) Strictly

speaking, when the carpenter is said in common parlance to make

a K(pKi<s, what he does is to put the form, which is the " natural "

or " real " KC^KIS, into the wood on which he is working. 1 (3) And

though the shape of a KC/WS is something fixed, it will be repro-

duced by the carpenter in different material, according as the

implement is wanted for weaving different sorts of cloth (e.g., you

would need the wood to be harder for work on some kinds of material

than on others). We may transfer these results to the case of the

" legislator " who makes names. The letters and syllables, like

the wood of the carpenter, are the material into which he has to

put " the real name " (eVeu/o o co-rtv ovofjia). Differences in the

material will not matter, in this case any more than in the other,

so long as the resulting instrument answers its purpose. This is

why, though the sounds of a Greek word and those of the " bar-

barian " equivalent may be very different, each is a true name if

it discharges the function of a name adequately (3896-3900). (It

should be noted that all through this passage the technical language

of the doctrine of forms is used without explanation. Plato

assumes that Hermogenes and Cratylus may be counted on to know

all about it. To my own mind, it is just the frequency with which

this assumption is made, apparently without any consciousness

that it calls for any justification, which is the strongest reason for

refusing to believe that the whole doctrine was " developed " by

Plato or anyone else after the death of Socrates.)

Who, then, decides whether a given piece of wood has really

received the " form of Kepi's," as it should have done ? Not the

expert who makes the implement (the carpenter), but the expert

who will have to use it (the weaver). And this is a general rule.

The man who makes an implement must " take his specifications "

from the man who is to use it. Thus we arrive at a distinction

1 According to the well-known statements of Aristotle (Met. 9916 6, io8oa 3,

royoa 18, a/.), the Academy of his own day held that there are no " forms " of

artificial things. No doubt the statement is true, but it has no bearing on the

form of KtpKls in the Cratylus or that of K\IVTJ in Republic x, Aristotle is

speaking of the theory as he knew it, i.e. after 367, and it is notorious that this

version of the doctrine has to be learned from his writings, not from Plato's.

The only character in the dialogues of Plato's later life who ever says anything

about the doctrine is Timaeus, and he speaks pretty much as Socrates is made

to do in the earlier dialogues. In the Cratylus there is no suggestion that the

etfios is a sort of supra-sensible " thing." It is just a " type " to which the

manufacturer's articles must conform, and its independence means simply

that the structure of the icepick is determined by its function, independently

of anyone's caprice.

82 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

afterwards explicitly formulated in the Politicus and reproduced as

fundamental in the opening paragraphs of the Nicomachean Ethics,

the distinction between superior and subordinate " arts/' the rule

being that it is the " art " which uses a product that is superior,

the " art " which makes it that is subordinate. This will

apply to the case of the " legislator " who makes names. There

must be a superior expert, whose business it is to judge of the

goodness of the names, namely, the expert who is to use them, and

he can be no other than the expert in asking and answering questions,

that is the " dialectician " or metaphysician. The " legislator "

who is to bestow names rightly must therefore work under the

superintendence and to the specifications of the " dialectician,"

the supreme man of science. (In other words, the test of the

adequacy of language is not mere " custom," but its capacity to

express the highest truth fully and accurately.)

Cratylus, then, is right in thinking that language depends on

" nature," and that names can only rightly be given by a man who

" fixes his eye on the real (<vVei) name and can put its form into

letters and syllables " (389^-390^). * At any rate, this is how the

matter looks to Socrates, though, as he had said, he cannot go on

to convince Hermogenes by explaining which names are the " right "

ones. For that one must go to the professional sophists, such as

Protagoras, or, since Hermogenes has no money to pay them, he

might ask his brother Callias to teach him what he has learned from

Protagoras on this very subject foqia-c). Perhaps we can hardly

do this, since Hermogenes has already decided against the main

principle of Protagoras' book on Truth. But something can be

done, to make a beginning, with Homer. He sometimes gives two

names for a thing, that used by " gods " and that used by " men,"

and in such cases we sometimes find that the name used by the

" gods " is significant (e.g., we call a certain river Scamander, but

the gods call it " the Yellow River," Eavtfos). Or again he tells us

that Hector's son was called Scamandrius by the women, but

Astyanax by his father and the men. Now, on the average, the

men of a society are more intelligent than their women-folk, 2 and

their name for the boy is presumably his " right " name. And,

1 It is, of course, with intentional humour that Socrates forgets that

Cratylus had meant something quite different when he said that names are

11 by nature." Note the repeated insistence on the point that Greek has no

necessary superiority over a " barbarian " language (like, e.g., Persian). The

notion that " barbarians " are intrinsically inferior to Hellenes, so prominent

in Isocrates and Aristotle, is foreign to the Platonic dialogues, though it is

recognized as a fact that Hellenes show more aptitude than Egyptians and

other peoples for science. The all-round inferiority of the non-Hellene is not

a Socratic or Platonic doctrine. That the point should be insisted on in a

discussion about language is all the more interesting since pdppapos seems

originally to have meant one who " jabbers " like a swallow, as Clytaem-

nestra says in Aeschylus.

* This is given as a mere statement of fact, and in a place like the Athens

of the fifth century it was true. It is not implied that it ought to be so, or

need be so. Indeed, as we shall see, Socrates held that it need not be so.

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 88

in fact, we see that it has a significance which makes it appropriate.

The name means " Burgh- ward," and is therefore very suitable to

the son of Hector who " warded " Troy so effectually (3910-3920).

Once started on this trail, Socrates proceeds to propound a

host of derivations of names proper names of heroes and gods, and

common nouns with the general purpose of showing that in their

original form, often widely different from that to which we are

accustomed, they have a " connotation " which makes them

specially appropriate. There is no need to follow this part of the

conversation in any detail, all the more since Socrates professes to

be surprised by his own readiness and suggests that he must have

been infected by an abnormal " possession " from having just left

the company of the "inspired" Euthyphro (396^). We could

hardly be told more plainly that the extravagances which are to

follow are meant as a caricature of the guesses of " etymologists "

working in the dark without any scientific foundation. 1 But, like

a wise man, Socrates mixes some sense with his nonsense. Thus it

is a sound principle, whatever we may think of some of the applica-

tions made of it, that proper names of men and gods are likely to

have been originally significant, though their meaning has been

lost through linguistic changes. It is sound sense again to say

(398^) that we may often be put on the true track by considering

archaic forms which are obsolete in current speech, or peculiar

dialectical variants (4010). So again Socrates is quite right in

calling attention to the presence of " barbarian " words in the

current vocabulary (4090), though the use he makes of the fact as

a convenient way out of a difficulty whenever he is at a loss is

manifestly jocular (4210-^). The jocularity is even more patent

when he pretends (4020) to make the sudden discovery, which he

then rides to death, that the ancient names of the gods and a host

of other words show that the creators of the Greek language were

Heracliteans, or (4096) that the name Selene conveys the discovery,

connected at Athens with the name of Anaxagoras, that the moon

shines by reflected light. It is no surprise to us when, after a long

interval of more serious discussion, we find him (4370 ff.) expressing

his doubts whether after all etymology might not be made to bear

equal witness to Parmenides and his doctrine of the absolute

motionlessness of the real.

We come back to seriousness at 4220: with the reflection that,

after all, the process of derivation cannot go on for ever. We must,

in the end, arrive at a stock of primitive names, the ABC (erroix*"*)

of all the rest. How are we to account for the appropriation of

each of these to its signification ? We may do so if we reflect that

language is a form of gesture. If we were all deaf and dumb we

1 Probably, if only we had adequate literary records of the Periclean age

we might find that a good many of the etymologies are specimens of the

serious speculations of the persons satirized. Few of them are much more

extravagant than, e.g., the derivation of /tfyw from KJP hinted at in Euripides,

Troad. 425.

84 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

should try to communicate information by imitating with our own

bodies the shapes and movements oi the things to which we wanted

to call attention. Now we can imitate in the same way by vocal

gestures. If a man could reproduce the " reality " of different

things by the vocal gestures we call " letters " and " syllables/' he

would be naming the various things (4230-4246) . The primitive

names may be supposed to have been produced by this method of

imitation. We may test this suggestion and judge of the " right-

ness " of these primitive words by making a careful classification

of the elementary components of our speech the vowels, consonants,

and so forth and considering the movements by which they are

produced. We shall ask whether there are not analogies between

these various processes and processes in nature at large, and whether

primitive names do not seem to be composed of sounds produced

by movements analogous with those of the things they signify,

allowance being made for a considerable amount of variation for

the sake of euphony and greater ease of articulation. We might,

to be sure, save ourselves trouble by simply saying that the primi-

tive words were invented by gods or " barbarians " of long ago,

but this would be shirking the chief problem which the scientific

expert in the theory of language has to face (425^-4266). Socrates

therefore ventures, with misgivings, to state some of his observa-

tions on the subject. The pages in which he does so (4266-427^)

have often been commended for their penetration, but the subject

has more interest for the student of phonetics than for the philo-

sopher, and we need not delay over the details. What is of real

interest to others than specialists in phonetics is the discernment

shown by the insistence on the general principle that speech is to be

regarded as a species of mimetic gesture, and the clear way in

which such vocal gesture is distinguished from direct reproduction

of natural noises and the cries of animals (4230-^).

Hitherto the conversation has been a dialogue between Socrates

and Hermogenes ; Cratylus now replaces the latter as interlocutor.

He is delighted with all that Socrates has said no doubt because

Socrates has professed to find Heracliteanism embodied in the very

structure of language and thinks it could hardly be bettered. But

Socrates himself has misgivings, and would like to consult his second

thoughts. (What the by-play here really hints is that we are

now to come to a discussion to which Plato attaches greater im-

portance than he does to the entertaining etymological speculations

on which so much time has been spent.)

We said that name-giving is a trade, and that the workman

(8r}fj.iovpy6s) who makes names is the " legislator." Now in general

there are better and worse workmen in any trade ; we should expect,

then, that there are degrees of goodness and badness in the names

made by different legislators (i.e. linguistic tradition, of which the

vo/uo0rn?s is a personification, approximates more or less nearly,

in the case of different idioms, to the ideal of a " philosophical "

language). Cratylus denies this, on the ground that a word either

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 85

is the right name of a certain thing, or is not that thing's name at

all, but the name of something else. There cannot be any inter-

mediate degree of " Tightness " in this case. If you call a thing by

the name of something else, you are not speaking of the thing in

question at all ; (e.g. to say " Hermogenes " when you meant Cratylus,

is trying to say " what is not/' and that is impossible). You cannot

say nothing. Whenever you speak you must be saying something.

Not only must you mean (Xcyecv) something, but you must

enunciate (<avai) something. Hence when a man uses any but the

" right name " Cratylus holds that he merely makes a senseless

noise, like a " sounding brass " (\f/o<J>civ cywy* a.v faty rov rotovro^,

p,aTrjv currov eavrov Kii/ovvra, wcrTrcp av et TIS ^aXjciov Ktv^o-ctc K/oowag,

43oa). In other words, you cannot make a statement which is

significant and yet false. Every statement is either true or mean-

ingless. The difficulty here suggested only seems fanciful to us,

because the explanation of it given for the first time in Plato's own

Sophistes has become part of our current thought. To say " what

is not " does not mean to say what is simply meaningless, but only

to say what means something different from the real facts of the

case. Until this had been explained, there was a double difficulty

for the Greek mind in understanding how it is possible to speak

falsely. Partly the difficulty is due to the accident of language

that the word eivcu is ambiguous ; it means " to be " or " to exist " ;

in Greek, especially in the Ionic Greek, which was the original

tongue of science, it also means " to be true," as when Herodotus

calls his own version of the early life of Cyrus TO coV, " the true

narrative," or Euripides in Aristophanes speaks of the story of

Phaedra as an o>v Adyos, " an over-true tale." Behind the merely

verbal ambiguity there is further a metaphysical one, the confusion

between " what is not " in the absolute sense of " blank nothing/'

and " what is not " in the merely relative sense of " what is other

than " some given reality. So long as you confuse " what is not "

in this relative sense with what is just nothing at all, you must

hold it impossible to say significantly " what is not " (i.e. to make

a false statement which has any meaning). This explains why, in

the age of ^ Pericles ^and Socrates, it should have been a fashionable

trick of dvriAoyiKoi or tpurrucoi, pretenders who made a show of

intellectual brilliance by undertaking to confute and silence every

one else, to argue that no statement, however absurd, if it means

anything, can be false. The most violent paradoxes must be true,

because they mean something, and therefore he who utters them is

saying " what is." Plato regularly connects this theory of the

impossibility of speaking falsely with the philosophy of Parmenides,

and its unqualified antithesis between " what is " and mere non-

entity. He means that the doctrine arises as soon as you convert

what Parmenides had meant for a piece of physics into a principle of

logic. Cratylus, to be sure, is a follower not of Parmenides, who

regarded change of every kind as an illusion, but of Heraclitus,

who thought change the fundamental reality. But he is led by a

4

86 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

different route to the same result. Whether you start with the

premise that " what is not," being just nothing at all, cannot be

spoken of, or with the premise that to call a thing " out of its name "

must be to speak of something else and not of the thing in question,

in either case the conclusion has to be drawn that you cannot

significantly say what is false, since that would be to speak of a

given thing and yet not to speak of it " as it is." l

Though this issue of the possibility of significant false statement

has been raised, we need not go to the bottom of it for our present

purposes. (In fact, Plato's own logical studies had presumably

not yet led him to the complete solution.) It is enough to remember

that we have already agreed that a name is a " representation "

(/At/Ai/fia) of that which it names. It is like a portrait, except that

the portrait is a visible, the name an audible, representation. Now

we might take the portrait of a woman for a portrait of a man ; we

should then be connecting the portrait with the wrong original,

but still it would be a portrait of some original. We do the same

thing when we misapply a name ; it does not cease to be a name

because we apply it to the wrong thing. Again, a portrait is not

an exact replica. One artist seizes points which another misses,

and thus there may be a better and a worse portrait, and yet both

are portraits of the same original. Why may not the same thing be

true of the primitive names in language ? Why may not a name

be an imperfect but real " representation " of that for which it

stands ? (This would explain why the primitive names in different

languages may all be genuine " vocal gestures," denoting the same

thing, in spite of the differences between them.) Cratylus suggests

that the analogy with portraiture does not hold. A bad portrait

may leave out some characteristic of its original, or put in some-

thing not present in the original, and yet be a recognizable portrait

of the man. But in the case of a name, if, for example, we put in

or leave out a single letter, we have not written that name at all.

1 It has been the fashion, especially in Germany, for a generation and more,

to connect the paradox about false-speaking specially with the name of

Antisthenes, and to regard all the references to it in Plato as direct attacks on

that rather insignificant person. This seems to me quite unhistorical.

The standing assumption of Plato is that the dvriKoytKot are quite a numerous

and fashionable body. Socrates even refers to them in the Phaedo (gob),

where Antisthenes is supposed to be present (596) and all possibility of an

attack on his own old friend is out of the question. The one dialogue of

Plato's early life in which they are singled out for special satire is the Euthy-

demus, and we see from the Cratylus itself that Euthydemus really was a well-

known personage who held views of this kind. Isocrates too (x. i) implies

that the " eristics " who maintain the paradox are a fairly numerous body of

the generation before his own. lor this reason it seems to me put of the

question to find attacks on Antisthenes in any of the Platonic dialogues in

which Socrates is the principal figure. Whether in the later dialogues, when

Socrates has fallen into the background, Plato ever criticizes Antisthenes on

his own account, is another question with which we shall not be concerned

until we come to deal with the Parmenides and Sophistes, though I believe we

shall find reason to think that there also he has very different antagonists

in view.

MINOR SOCRAT1C DIALOGUES 87

We may reply that it is not with quality as it is with number. Any

addition or subtraction will make, e.g., the number 10 another

number (such as 9 or n), but a " representation " may be like the

original without reproducing it in its details. Thus the portrait-

painter reproduces the outward features and complexion of his

sitter, but leaves out everything else. The sitter has entrails,

movement, life, thought ; the picture has none, and yet it is a

picture of him. In fact, if it did reproduce the whole reality of the

sitter, it would not be a portrait at all but a reduplication of the

man himself. Full and complete reproduction is thus not the kind

of " Tightness " we require in a portrait, and we have already recog-

nized that a name is a kind of portrait of which vocal gesture is the

medium (4300-4336).

If we are agreed so far, we may now say that a well-made name

must contain the " letters " which are " appropriate " to its signi-

fication ; i.e. those which are " like " what is signified (i.e. the

vocal gestures which compose the name must have a natural

resemblance to some feature in that which it names ; a name which

contains inappropriate sounds may be still a recognizable name if

some of its components are appropriate, but it will not be a well-

made one). The only way of escaping our conclusions would be

to fall back on the view that names are purely conventional and

arbitrary. This is impossible, since in any case there must be

some sort of natural appropriateness about the elementary com-

ponents of vocal gesture to lead the imposers of names in the making

of their first conventions, just as there must be in nature colouring

materials appropriate for the reproduction of the tints of a face if

there is to be such an art as portraiture. But we can see that

" convention " and the arbitrary play their part in language too.

Thus there is a " roughness " about the sound of the letter r which

makes it appropriate in the name of anything hard and rough,

while there is a smoothness of articulation about / which makes

it inappropriate for the same purpose. Yet this letter actually

occurs in the very word o^At/pos itself, and even Cratylus must

admit that " thanks to custom " he knows what the word means.

It discharges its function as a name none the worse for containing

an inappropriate sound (433&-435&). In particular we should find

it quite impossible to show that the names of the numerals are

made up of gestures naturally appropriate to signify those particular

numbers. The principle of natural significance, however sound,

is a most uncertain guide in etymological studies (435&-c).

We revert to a position we had laid down at the outset. The

" faculty " (8wa/us) or function of a name is to convey instruction

(StSacTfcetv). Does this imply that a man who has knowledge of

names will also have a corresponding knowledge of the realities

(TrpdypaTo) for which the names stand ? Cratylus is inclined to

think so, and even to hold that the knowledge of names is the only

way to the knowledge of things. Not only is the understanding

(TO navOdvw) of words the one way to the understanding of

88 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

things ; inquiry into language is the only road of inquiry and dis-

covery. The one way to discover the truth about things is to

discover the meanings of names (4360). But obviously this would

put all science in a very unfavourable position. The study of

names will only at best show what the givers of the names sup-

posed to be the truth about things, and how if these name-givers

were wrong in their suppositions ? Cratylus holds that we need

not feel any anxiety on the point. The best proof that the " giver

of names " was one who knew all about things is the consistent way

in which all names support one and the same theory about things.

Has not Soci ates himself shown that they all point to the Heraclitean

doctrine of the flux (4360) ? Unfortunately this is not conclusive ;

if you start with false initial postulates you may be led to gravely

erroneous conclusions, and yet these conclusions may be quite

compatible with one another, as we see in the case of certain geo-

metrical false demonstrations. 1 The supreme difficulty in any

science is to be sure that your initial postulates themselves are true

(4360-^). And, on second thoughts, we may doubt whether the

testimony of language is quite so self-consistent as we had fancied.

There are many words which seem to indicate that the " giver of

names " was an Eleatic rather than an Heraclitean (437^-^), and

it would be absurd to decide on the truth of such incompatible views

by appeal to a " numerical majority " of derivations.

In any case, the view Cratylus is maintaining is self-contra-

dictory. He holds that the inventors of the first names must have

known the truth about things in order to give each its " true "

name, and also that the truth about things can only be discovered

by the study of names. How then did the original makers of

names discover it ? Perhaps, says Cratylus, the first names were

of a superhuman origin ; language began as a divine revelation,

and its divine origin guarantees the " Tightness " of the primitive

names. If that is so, then both our sets of derivations cannot be

sound, or, as Cratylus says, one set of words cannot be real " names "

at all (4380). But the question is, which set those which suggest

the " flux " or those which suggest that movement is an illusion

are real names ? We cannot decide the issue by appeal to other

words, for there are no other words than those employed in language.

The appeal will have to be to the realities words signify, and we

shall have to learn what these realities are, not from words, but "from

one another and from themselves " (4380). Besides, even if we

admit that the truth about things can be learned by studying their

names, since well-made names, as we have said, are " likenesses "

1 436^. Siaypdp/uLara here seems, as in some other passages in Plato and

Aristotle, to mean " proofs " rather than " figures." One might illustrate the

point by reference to the entertaining section of De Morgan's Budget of Para-

doxes which deals with James Smith the circle-squarer. Mr. Smith's method

of proving his tnesis (that *= y) was to assume it as a postulate, and then

show that it led to consequences compatible with itself and with one another.

He forgot to ask whether it did not lead also to consequences incompatible

with independently known truth.

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 89

of the things they name, it must be a nobler and more assured

method to study the reality (aA^eia) directly in itself, and judge

of the merits of the " likeness " from our knowledge of the original

than to try to discover from a mere study of the " likeness " whether

it is a good one, and what it represents (4390). How a knowledge of

realities is to be acquired it may take greater thinkers than our-

selves to say, but it is satisfactory to have learned that at least we

cannot acquire it by the study of names (439&).

Socrates keeps the point on which he wishes to insist most until

the end. Whatever the opinion of the framers of language may

have been, the Heraclitean doctrine of universal impermanence

cannot be true. There are such things as " Beauty " and " Good-

ness " (OLVTO KOL\OV KOL ayaOov) and other realities of that kind. Even

Cratylus admits this at once. He does not extend his doctrine

of impermanence to the realm of " values." Now they cannot

be everlastingly mutable ; they are what they are once for all and

always. You could not call anything " the so-and-so " (avro, 439^),

if it had no determinate character but were merely mutable. And

the merely mutable could not be known. What is known is known

as having this or that determinate character, but if the doctrine

of " flux " is true, nothing ever has such determinate character.

Not to mention that knowing as a subjective activity also has a

determinate character, so that in a world where everything is

incessantly becoming something else, there could be neither objects

to be known nor the activity of knowing. But if knower (TO

yiyvwo-Kov) , object known (TO yiyvwo-Ko/xevoi/), Beauty, Good, are

real, the Heraclitean doctrine cannot be true. We will not now

ask which of these alternatives is the right one, but we may say

that it does not look a sensible procedure for a man to have such

confidence in names and their givers that he hands over his soul

to " names " for " tendance/ 1 and asserts dogmatically that all

men and all things are sick of a universal " defluxion " and as

leaky as a cracked pitcher (4400-^). This is the issue which young

men like Cratylus and Hermogenes should face seriously and

courageously and not decide in a hurry (440^). Thus the dialogue

leaves with us as the great problem, or rather the two aspects of

the same great problem of all philosophy, the metaphysical problem

of the reality of the forms and the moral problem of the right

" tendance of the soul. 11 1

Eulhydemus. The dialogue, as we have said, has more of the

spirit of broad farce than any other work of Plato ; it would be

possible to see in it nothing more than an entertaining satire on

" eristics " who think it a fine thing to reduce every one who opens

his mouth in their company to silence by taking advantage of the

1 1 can see no reason to fancy that the dialogue is intended as a polemic

against the nominalism of Antisthenes in particular. A.'s preoccupation

with names, like the choice of the themes for his extant declamations, only

shows that he was influenced by the general tendencies of the " sophistic "

age. I am wholly sceptical about theories which represent the Platonic

Socrates as engaged in attacks on one of his own companions.

90 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

ambiguities of language. Even if this were Plato's main object,

it would still be a reasonable one. An attempt to detect and

expose the principal fallacies in dictione would be a useful contri-

bution to the as yet only nascent study of logic. It is thus not

surprising that Aristotle should have made frequent use of the

dialogue in his own systematic essay on Fallacies, the de Sophisticis

Elenchis. But the real purpose of the dialogue is more serious and

proves to be a moral one, arising out of the claim of the sophists

of the Periclean age to be able to " teach goodness." A man who

undertakes this task must be prepared to win the adherence of a

pupil by satisfying him first that " goodness/' the secret of a satis-

factory life, can be taught ; and next, that the speaker is one of the

experts who can teach it. No one will go to school to you unless you

can persuade him that you have something important to teach,

and that you are competent to teach it. This accounts for the

rise of a distinct branch of literature, the " protreptic " discourse,

which aims at winning the hearer's assent to the idea that he

must live the " philosophic " life, and encouraging his confidence

that a particular teacher will show him how to do it. To this type

of literature belonged, among other works, Aristotle's famous

Protrepticus and Cicero's almost equally famous Latin imitation

of it, the Hortensius, both now unhappily lost. The true object of

the Euthydemus is to exhibit the directness, simplicity, and power

of Socratic " protreptic," addressed to a young and impressionable

mind ; the fooleries of the two sophists afford an entertaining

background, without which the picture would not produce its full

effect. We might suppose Plato to have felt that to a careless

observer the close cross-questioning characteristic of Socrates must

seem very much the same sort of thing as the futile sporting with

words on which the ordinary " eristic " plumes himself. By pitting

the one thing directly against the other he drives home his point

that, for all their apparent minute hair-splitting, the questions of

Socrates are no idle displays of ingenuity, but have the most

momentous and most truly practical of all objects ; their purpose

is to win a soul from evil for good.

In form the Euthydemus is a narrated drama. Socrates describes

to his old friend Crito, with a great deal of humour, a mirthful scene

in his favourite haunt, the palaestra near the Lyceum, at which he

had been present the day before. The supposed date can only be

fixed by consideration of a number of bits of internal evidence.

It is, as we see from Euthydemus, 2710, " many years " after the foun-

dation of Thurii (444 B.C.), and must be before the year of the great

scandal about the " profanation of the mysteries," just before the

sailing of the Athenian Armada for Sicily (416-5), since Axiochus

of Scambonidae, father of the lad Clinias who figures as respondent,

was one of the principal persons ruined by the affair. 1 A date not

later than about 420, and possibly a little earlier, seems to fit all the

1 For the ruin of Axiochus, the uncle of Alcibiades the person whose de-

struction was the main object of the raisers of the scandal, see Andocides, i. 16.

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 91

indications. The centre of attraction in the dialogue is the beautiful

and modest Clinias ; it is on his person that Euthydemus, whom we

have already met in the Cratylus, and his brother Dionysodorus,

natives of Chios who had been among the original settlers of Thurii, but

found themselves banished in the years of faction which followed on

the foundation of the city and have since then haunted Athens and her

dependencies, make the experiment of displaying a new educational

discovery, a method of instantaneously " teaching goodness/'

Hitherto they had taught, like other professionals, the art of fence

on the field and in the law-courts ; their crowning achievement is a

recent invention which they are anxious to parade and Socrates to

witness. It proves, in fact, to be simply " eristic/ 1 the trick of

stopping a man's mouth by catching at the natural ambiguities of

language. Perhaps it is an indication of date that Socrates is

made to lay the stress he does on the contrast between this latest

marvel and the now familiar art of effective forensic pleading which

had been the thing taught by Protagoras and the earliest " sophists."

The two men, however, are described as elderly, so that they will

be at least as old as Socrates himself, and we must remember that

though Socrates was the first Athenian to interest himself in logic,

it had been founded by Zeno, who cannot at most have been more

than ten years younger than Protagoras. Hence too much must

not be made of this point. 1 The serious business of the dialogue is

opened by Socrates in a short speech, laying down the main lines

it is to follow. Clinias is a lad of great promise and illustrious

connexions ; it is of the first moment that he should grow up to be

a thoroughly good man. The sophists are therefore invited to

prove the value of their latest discovery by convincing him " that

one must give one's attention to goodness and philosophy " (2750).

They fall to work at once by asking a series of questions so con-

structed that they can only be answered by "Yes" or "No."

and that the respondent can be equally silenced whichever answer

he gives. The first question from its recurrence elsewhere we

may infer that it was a " stock " puzzle turns on the double sense

of the word yavOdvciv, which means primarily to " learn " ; but

derivatively, in colloquial language, to " understand," " take the

1 The pair of " eristics," Euthydemus and his brother Dionysodorus, are

natives of Chios who had been among the first settlers at Thurii (this is implied

by the tense of dw^Krjo-av at 271^), but had been exiled thence and have spent

"many years " ire pi rofode roi)s T^TTOUS, i.e. Athens and the islands of the Aegean

(ayic). The date of the foundation of Thurii is 444. Socrates is ij$rj irpce pure pot

(2726), " not exactly a young man," but no more ; this suggests an age

not far off fifty, but probably something short of it. Perhaps the allusion of

272$ to the figure he cuts among the boys in the music-class of Connus is best

taken as a humorous reference to some shaft aimed at him in the Connus

of Amipsias (exhibited in 423), and in that case, we must suppose that play to

be still a recent work. Alcibiades is spoken of at 275^ in a way which implies

that he is already in the prime of manhood. 286$ refers to Protagoras in a

way which seems to mean that he is already dead. But since Plato insists

that Protagoras was a generation older than* Socrates (Protag. 317^) and also

says that he died at about seventy (Meno, gie), this does not take us with

certainty much below the year 430.

92 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

meaning of " a statement. The eristic method of the two brothers

may be reproduced in English by taking advantage of the double

sense which " learning " happens to bear in our own language.

Who are learners, the wise or the ignorant, i.e. those who already

know something or those who do not ? There is here a triple

equivoque, since the " wise " (<ro<oi) may mean " clever, intelligent "

pupils, as well as persons who already know the thing to be taught,

and the " ignorant " (dfta0c?s) may mean " the dull, stupid," as

well as those who are ignorant of a given subject. The lad takes

the question to mean, " Which class of boys learn what they are

taught, the clever boys or the dull ones ? " and answers, " The

clever." But, it is retorted, when you lads were learners in reading or

music, you did not yet know these subjects and therefore were not

" wise " (o-o^ot) about them, and so must have been " ignorant "

(a/*a0ets) . And yet again, in your schooldays, it was not the

" dull " (d/mfcis) among you, but the quick or clever (o-o^oi) who

" took in " (cpdvOavov) what the schoolmaster dictated. Ergo, it

is the cro^oi, not the d//,a0is who " learn." (As we might say,

the dull don't get learning from their schoolmasters, but the quick

(275^-2760)).

A new puzzle is now started. When a man learns something,

does he learn what he knows or what he does not know ? (This

again is a standing catch, intended to prove the paradox that it is

impossible to learn anything, to get new knowledge.) The natural

answer is that a man learns what he does not already know, since

learning means getting fresh knowledge. But when a schoolmaster

dictates something to you, you " learn " the sense of the passage

(you take in its meaning). What he dictated is a series of " letters,"

but you must have " known " your letters before you could do

dictation. Thus when you " learn," you must already " know "

the thing you are learning. Yet, per contra, to learn means to get

knowledge, and no one can get what he already has. Ergo, after

all, it is what you do not know that you learn (2760-2770) .

It is clear, of course, what the origin of " eristic " of this kind is.

Euthydemus and his brother are borrowing and degrading the

logical method of Zeno. 1 In Zeno's hands, the deduction of

apparently contradictory conclusions from the same premisses

had a legitimate object. The intention was to discredit the pre-

misses themselves. And in fact, Zeno's antinomies do establish

the important result that the postulates of Pythagorean mathe-

matics are incompatible with one another and require revision

(e.g. it is indispensable to Pythagorean geometry that every straight

1 This is made especially clear twice over (2755, 2760), by the whispered

remark of Dionysodorus that his brother will " catch the boy out " equally

whichever way he answers the question. This construction of " antinomies,"

to show that the affirmation and the denial of the same proposition are

equally impossible, was the special contribution of Zeno to the development

of logical method. There is also probably intentional point in the way in

which we are reminded of the connexion of the brothers with Thurii the

place, of all others, where they would be most certain to meet Eleatics.

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 93

line should be capable of bisection, and yet, on the Pythagorean

principles, a line may contain an odd number of " points " and

therefore be incapable of bisection, because you cannot " split the

unit "). With eristics like Euthydemus this hunting after " anti-

nomies," perfectly legitimate when intended as a criticism ol pre-

suppositions which lead to an " antinomy/' becomes a mere delight

in entrapping the respondent into contradicting himself by mere

neglect to guard against ambiguity in words, and its object is not

to detect error but to produce admiration for the ingenious deviser

of the ambiguous formula. This is the point on which Socrates

now fastens. The two " sophists " care nothing about convincing

Clinias of the need for " goodness and philosophy " ; their concern

is merely to make a display of their own cleverness. Accordingly,

Socrates interrupts the performance. He professes to think that

what has gone before is not meant as any sample of the " wisdom "

of the brothers. It is a mere piece of " fun/' like the sportive

preliminaries which precede initiation into the Corybantic rites,

or, as we might say, like those popularly supposed to precede an

initiation into freemasonry. So far the two great men have merely

been playing a " game " with the lad, enjoying a " practical joke "

at his expense ; no doubt the serious part of their " protreptic "

is yet to come. Before it comes, Socrates would like to show, by a

conversation of his own with the boy, what, in his " foolish and

amateur fashion " (I&WTIKWS TC KCU ycXouos), he supposes the

drift of such exhortations must be, though, of course, he fully

expects to be left in the shade by two such eminent professionals

(277^-2780).

There follows at once a simple statement, in clear language such

as a mere boy can follow, of the root ideas of Socratic ethics. Of

course every one of us wants cv Tr/oarTeiv, to " fare well/' to

" make a success of life." And equally, of course, making a success

of life means having " abundance of good " (TroXXa dyafla). Now

what things is it good to have ? " The first man you meet " will

mention some of them : wealth, health, beauty, bodily advantages

in general, good birth, a position of influence and respect. But

there are other good things than these, or at least other things which

Socrates and Clinias regard as good : sophrosyne, justice, courage,

wisdom. Is the list of goods now complete ? Perhaps we have

left out the most important of all, " good luck " (curuxta), without

which any other advantages may turn out to be disguised curses.

And yet, on second thoughts, we have not forgotten it. For wisdom

is itself evruxta. Who have the best " luck " or " good fortune "

in playing musical instruments, in reading and writing, in navigation,

warfare, medicine ? The men who know how to do these things

expert musicians, sailors, soldiers, physicians. One would, e.g.,

think it a great piece of luck in war to be serving under a com-

petent and not under an incompetent commander. In general,

wisdom or knowledge (oro^ca) leads to efficient achievement

and so to " good fortune/ 1 If we have wisdom, then

94 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

we may expect " success," " good fortune " (TO evrvxelv) in the

department of practice which our " wisdom " covers (2780-2800).

On reviewing these results, we see ground to criticize one of

them, the statement that we shall be happy and " make life a

success " (ev$aijjLovLv KOL cu Trparrciv) if we " have abundance ol

good things." To have them will not benefit us unless we also use

them, any more than it would benefit an artisan to have the materials

and tools of his trade if he never used them. So, e.g., " wealth "

is of no benefit unless we use it. And it would not be enough to

say that we must not only have the various good things but use

them. We must add that, to be happy, we must use them right.

They are, in fact, dangerous tools ; if you use them in the wrong

way you do yourself a harm ; it would be better to leave them

alone than to use them wrongly. Now in all crafts and businesses

it is the expert's knowledge (eVio-TT//^) of his craft which enables

him to use his materials and implements in the right way,

and the same thing holds good of health and wealth and the goods

in popular esteem generally. Knowledge enables us to use wealth,

health, and all other " advantages " rightly, and to achieve success

(euTrpayia). If a man had all other possessions besides wisdom

and were not directed by " sense " (vovs) in his undertakings, the

less he undertook the fewer blunders he would make, and the

happier he would be. It would be happier for him to be poor than

rich, timid than courageous, sluggish and dull rather than of active

temper and quick perception, since the less he undertook the less

mischief he would do. In fact, none of the things we began by

calling good can be called unconditionally (aura *a0' aura) good.

They are better than their opposites when they are conjoined with

the wisdom to make a right use of them (^po'i^o-is re KOL <ro<ta),

but worse when they are disjoined from it. It follows that, properly

speaking, there is just one thing good, wisdom, and just one bad

thing, apaOia, "dullness," stupidity (2806-281^). (Compare the

precisely similar line of reasoning by which Kant reaches the con-

clusion that the good will is the only thing which is unconditionally

good, because it is the only good which cannot be misused.)

We may draw a final conclusion. We now see that since happi-

ness depends on wisdom and knowledge, the one end after which

every man should strive is to become " as wise as possible." Hence

what we should crave to get from our parents, friends, fellow-

citizens, alien acquaintances, before everything else, is just wisdom.

One should be ready to " serve and slave " and render " any service

that is comely " l to any man for the sake of wisdom ; that is to say,

provided that wisdom can really be taught and does not " come by

accident " (d Tavro/xctTov), a difficult question which we have not

1 onovv TUV tca.\G)v bin)pTr]iJLdTwjf, 2826. The qualification is inserted be-

cause tpaffral have been mentioned, and Socrates wishes to guard himself

against being supposed to include chastity as one of the prices which mav

be paid for " wisdom." His attitude on that point is as unqualified as Plato's

own in the Laws.

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 95

faced. If we may assume that wisdom can be taught, we have

satisfied ourselves of the absolute necessity of pursuing it, "being

philosophers " (2820-^).

Socrates has really given us so far only half of a " protreptic

discourse " such as would be to his mind. He has led up to the

conclusion that happiness depends on the direction of life and

conduct by knowledge, but has not so far told us what knowledge

in particular it is of which we cannot make an ill use. It is funda-

mental for his purpose that we should distinguish such knowledge

from every recognized form of expert professional knowledge, and

the distinction will be made later. For the present we return to

the " comic relief " of the fooleries of Euthydemus and his brother,

which become increasingly absurd, precisely in order that the

heightened contrast of tone shall mark the second part of Socrates'

discourse, when we reach it, as the most important thing in the whole

dialogue. For the present he proposes that the "professionals"

shall now take up the argument at this point, and decide the question

whether one needs to learn every kind of " knowledge/ 1 or whether

there is one special knowledge which conducts to happiness. Or,

if they prefer, they may go over the ground he has already covered

and do so in a less amateurish fashion. Of course they do neither ;

their object is simply epater les bourgeois, and Dionysodorus, the

older of the two, sets to work at once to administer a thoroughly

sensational shock. Can Socrates and the others, who profess to

feel so much affection for Clinias, be serious in saying that they are

anxious that he should become " wise " ? For their language

implies that he is not yet what they wish him to become. They

say they want him to " be no longer what he now is " ; but to wish

a man to " be no longer " is to wish that he may perish a pretty

wish on the part of one's " affectionate friends " (2830-^). (Here

again we are on Eleatic ground, and we see that it is not for nothing

that Plato reminds us repeatedly that his two sophists had lived at

Thurii. The argument that nothing can change, because that

which " becomes different " is becoming " what it is not/ 1 and

therefore becoming nothing at all, derives directly from Parmenides

as soon as his physics are converted into logic, and, like the rest of

the puzzles connected with it, only gets its solution when we come

to the distinction between absolute and relative not-being intro-

duced in the Sophistes. In our dialogue Plato is not seriously

concerned with the solution of these difficulties ; what he is con

cerned with is the futility of regarding them as a preparation for

the conduct of life, and the moral levity of the professors who make

a parade of them.) The immediate effect of the sally of Dionyso-

dorus is to call forth from Ctesippus, an older lad deeply

attached to Clinias, an angry complaint of the " falsity " of the

accusation, and this gives Euthydemus an opening for airing his

principal piece of "wisdom/ 1 which we have already met in the

Cralylus the doctrine that all statements are true, or, as he puts

it now, that " it is impossible to speak falsely/ 1 for the reason that

96 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

whenever you make a statement, you must either be saying " what

is " or saying " what is not." In the first case, you are telling

the truth, for to " say what is," is truth-speaking. As for the

second case, " what is not " is just nothing at all, and no one can

speak and yet say " nothing " ; whoever speaks at all is saying

something (283^-284^). The regular corollary is promptly drawn

that OVK <mv di/rtXcycti/, no man can contradict another, since there

can be no contradiction unless both parties are speaking of the

same " thing " (the logical subject must be the same in the two state-

ments). But since you cannot speak of a thing " as it is not/'

in the case of apparent contradiction, one or both parties would

have to be speaking of " what is not," and this is impossible. If

the two parties are making significant statements at aU, since such

statements must be statements of " what is," they must be talking

about two different subjects, and so there is no contradiction (285^-

286C). 1

It is characteristic of Socrates that he insists at once on calling

attention to the practical bearings of this piece of logical paradox.

It implies that two men cannot even think contradictory pro-

positions ; if a false statement is impossible, mental error is

impossible too, and from this it follows that no one can commit an

error in practice (^a^aprdv^v orav irpa.rrrj), and the claim of the

brothers to be able to teach goodness must therefore be an empty

one, for their teaching is superfluous. 2 Dionysodorus eludes the

difficulty partly by insisting that his present assertion should be

considered on its own merits independently of anything he may

have said before, and partly by catching at the phrase which

Socrates has used, that he cannot understand what the statement

" means " (vow). How can a statement be said to " mean "

anything ? 3 The conversation is rapidly degenerating into mere

personalities (AoiSopta) when Socrates saves the situation by

repeating his former suggestion that the eminent wits from Thuni

are still only engaged on the " fun " which is to introduce their

serious wisdom. They need to be pressed a little more, and we

shall then get at last to the earnest. This gives him an excuse

l Note that at 286c Socrates describes this paradox as "stale," and

ascribes it to " Protagoras and men of a still earlier date," as, in fact, it does

follow from the foffpuiro* ^rpov doctrine. This should dispose of the fancy that

Antisthenes is specially aimed at in the dialogue. The " still older " person

meant is presumably Parmenides, who expressly denies that " what is not "

can be spoken of or named.

1 Exactly the same point is urged against Protagoras at Theaetet. 161 c-e.

But in that dialogue, where Plato's main purpose is epistemological, Socrates

is careful to consider whether Protagoras might not make a rejoinder to this

criticism (i66tf-i68c), and to examine the soundness of the rejoinder (1710-

1726, 1780-1796).

8 The cjuibble turns on the uses of the word votw, which signifies (a) to

think, to intend, to purpose, (b) to mean or signify. The sophist pretends to

take the expression " your words mean so-and-so," in the sense that they

" intend " or " think," and asks how anything but a tyvxh can possibly

" think " anything. There is the same Aquivoqtie in the distinction in English

between " to mean " and " to mean to " say or do something.

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 97

for returning to his own specimen of serious " protreptic " at the

point where he had left off.

We saw that the one thing needful for the conduct of life is

knowledge. But what kind of " knowledge " ? Of course, the

knowledge which will " profit " us, " useful knowledge." Now

what kind of knowledge is that ? It cannot be any kind of know-

ledge which merely teaches us how to produce something without

also teaching us how to use the thing we have produced. This

enables us to dismiss at once all the specialized industrial arts,

like that of the maker of musical instruments, none of which teach

a man how to use the thing they have taught him to make. In

particular, this consideration applies to the art of the AoyoTroios, which

looks so imposing. We might think that this art of composing

effective speeches is just the kind of knowledge we need for the

conduct of life, since it teaches us how to make the " charm " or

" spell " which is potent against those most deadly of enemies,

angry and prejudiced dicasteries and ecclesiae. Yet, after all,

the important thing is to know how to use the " spell/ 1 but the

XoyoTTotos only teaches you how to make it. 1 There might be some-

thing to say for the soldier's profession, the art of catching a human

prey ; but, after all, the hunter does not know how to use the game

he captures, but has to pass it on to the cook or restaurateur ; and

in the same way the commander who " captures " a city or an

army has not learned from his profession what to do with his

capture when he has made it. The military art, then, is clearly

not the supreme art needed for the right conduct of life (288b-

290^).*

Incidentally we note that the claim of any of the purely specula-

tive branches of knowledge, the mathematical sciences, has been

disposed of by this criticism. The mathematicians also are, in

their way, " hunters " on the trail of " realities " (ra WTO). But

though their 8taypa/x/xara (here again the word means " proofs "

1 The point here, as in the Gorgias, which classes " rhetoric " with " swim-

ming " as a device for preserving your life, is that the patron of the \oyoTroi6*

is normally one of the well-to-do minority of whom the Periclean democracy

were naturally suspicious precisely because democracy really meant the

" exploitation " of this class for the benefit of the " proletarian." From the

well-to-do victim's point of view, effective public speaking is exactly what it

is called here, a " spell " to put the watchful, hostile belua of democracy to

sleep ; from the democrat's point of view, it is a trick by which the fu<r<55?;/*os

gulls the simple citizens into taking him for the " people's friend."

1 Socrates is made to assert that this criticism was delivered by Clinias

on his own account ; Crito thinks such a mere boy could not have shown such

acuteness, and hints that the remark must really have come from Socrates

himself (2905). This is dramatically in keeping with the picture Plato has

drawn 01 Crito a dull, honest man. But the real point is that the " pro-

treptic " of Socrates is effective in the right way ; it elicits from a younger

mind flashes of insight which would have been impossible but for the way

in which the preceding questions have led up to them. This is the true

answer to the criticism of Grote that anyone can ask puzzling questions.

The peculiarity of the Socratic Question is not to be puzzling, but to be

enlightening.

&8 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

rather than " figures ") " find " the quarry, the mathematicians

do not know how to " treat/' it ; that task, if they have any sense,

they leave to the SiaA**?, the critical philosopher. 1 On

scrutiny, the " art " which seems to have the best claims to suprem-

acy is the /Sao-iAt/o) r^vr/, the " art of the king/ 1 i.e. statesman-

ship. If there is any " speciality " which can secure happiness,

it should certainly be that of the man who knows how to govern

and administer the community (since, of course, no one except a

paradox-monger would deny that " human well-being " is what all

true statesmanship takes as its end). But with this result we seem

to have come round in a complete circle to the same point from

which our argument set out. It is clear that statesmanship

(77 TroAmKT) rfyvrj) is the supreme master-art ; generals and other

functionaries are only servants of the statesman. He uses, as

means to his end the well-being of the state victory in war and

all the other results which the generals and the rest make ; and we

have seen already in the Cratylus that the art which uses a product

is always the master-art in relation to those which made the product.

But the statesman too has something to produce ; he uses the

products of all the other " craftsmen " as means to producing

something himself, and this something must be something bene-

ficial, and therefore good. Now we had already satisfied ourselves

that knowledge is the only thing which is unconditionally good.

Hence, if statesmanship is really the art of the conduct of life, such

results as wealth, civic independence, freedom from party strife,

must be its mere by-products ; its main product must be wisdom

and goodness. Yet what wisdom and goodness does true states-

manship produce in those on whom it is exercised ? It does not

aim at making them all " good " shoemakers or " good " carpenters,

or " good " at any other special calling. Apparently we must

say that the knowledge which the art of the statesman produces in

us is the knowledge of itself. But what use do we make of this

knowledge of statesmanship ? Perhaps its use is that it enables us

to make other men good. But then we come back to the old

question, " Good at what ? " We seem to have reached the con-

clusion that happiness depends on knowing how to make other

men good at knowing how to make yet other men (and so on ad

indefinitum) good at knowing ... no one can say precisely what

(2910-2920).

1 The point becomes clear if we think of the relation of a Pythagorean

geometer to the typical $iaXe/crut6s Zeno. The mathematicians " track " or

" hunt down " truths like the Pythagorean theorem, but they are so far from

knowing what to " do with them " that it is left for a 8ta\e/mK<5s like Zeno

to show that the discovery itself leads to consequences which are fatal to

some of the postulates of the Pythagorean geometer (such as the incommen-

surability of the " side " and the " diagonal "). The last word on the

question what can be " made of " the results of the sciences rests with the

critical " metaphysician," who has to test the claims of these sciences to give

a finally satisfactory account of " the real." Note the complete acceptance

here of the " primacy of the practical reason," which is as characteristic ol

Socrates and Plato as of Kant.

MINOR SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 99

The serious positive purpose of the argument, which has in-

cidentally slipped into becoming a direct conversation between

Socrates and Crito, is not hard to discover. The knowledge on

which the right conduct of life and the right government of men

alike depend is not knowledge of the way to meet any one particular

type of situation or to discharge any one particular calling or

function ; it is knowkdge of good, or, to put the point in more

modern phraseology, knowledge of absolute moral values. On the

Socratic assumption that knowledge of this kind is always followed

by corresponding action, and is therefore the only knowledge which

is guaranteed against all possible misuse, the question for what we

are to use it becomes superfluous ; we do not " use " it as a means

to some ulterior end at all, we simply act it out. To put the matter

in the Greek way, every " art " is an " art of opposites " ; that is,

may be used for a bad as well as for a good end. The special know-

ledge of toxicology which makes a man a medical specialist may

also make him a dangerous secret poisoner. The intimate know-

ledge of the Stock Exchange and share market which makes a

man an excellent trustee for the fortune of his ward will also

make him a particularly dangerous " fraudulent trustee " if he

applies it for dishonest ends. But " knowledge of the good "

is in a unique position which distinguishes it from all special

professional or technical knowledge, the thing with which the

" sophists " and their pupils regularly confuse it. It too,

in a sense, is " of opposites, " since to know what is good in-

volves knowing that what is incompatible with good must be evil.

But, on Socratic principles, this knowledge is not a knowledge of

opposites in the sense that it can be put to either of two opposite

uses, a good one and a bad one. The possession of the knowledge

carries along with it the possession of the " good will." We thus

recover the fundamental positions of the Socratic ethics from the

apparently fruitless argument. The reason why the positive result is

not stated is simply that the object of Socrates' " protreptic " is

not to do another man's thinking for him and present him with

ready-made " results," but to stimulate him to think along the

right lines for himself, so that when the " result " emerges, it

comes as a personal conviction won by a genuine personal exercise

of intelligence. Hence Socrates is represented as breaking off at

the point we have reached, and appealing to the two distinguished

strangers to help him out of the " squall " in which he seems to be

threatened with shipwreck. As we should expect, they do nothing

of the kind, but fall to their old trick. $ Socrates does not need any

help, for they will prove to him that he already has the knowledge

for which he is seeking. He knows some things, ergo he has know-

ledge ; but one cannot both have knowledge and not have it, ergo

he knows everything. And so, for the matter of that, does every

one else (2930-0). Euthydemus and his brother have, in fact, a

sort of universal infallibility ; they know all trades and the answers

to all the most trifling speculative questions. This, says Socrates,

100 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

must be the great truth to which all that has gone before was the

playful prelude. 1

From this point onwards the dialogue becomes increasingly

farcical as the two brothers go on to develop one absurdity after

another, until Socrates, the only member of the company who has

preserved his gravity, takes his leave of them with many ironical

compliments and the advice to take care, in their own interests, not

to cheapen the price of their wisdom by too many public exhibitions.

There is no need to follow in detail the whole series of ludicrous

paralogisms which precedes this finale. Aristotle found good

material in it for his own study of fallacies, but Plato's object is

ethical rather than logical, as has been already said. 2 The extreme

absurdity of the performances by which the brothers follow up the

second and more important part of the " protreptic " argument are

merely meant to throw that section of the dialogue into the strongest

relief. The one comment it may be worth while to make is that the

standing rule of " eristic/ 1 by which the respondent is expected to

reply to each question exactly as it has been put, without raising

any objection to its form or qualifying his answer by the introduc-

tion of any distinguo, however simple, of itself provides exceptional

opportunity for the perpetration of every kind of " fallacy in the

diction." From this point of view much of the dialogue might be

said to be a criticism of the method of question and answer as a

vehicle of philosophic thought. It is clear, and Plato may have

meant to hint this, that the method is the most uncertain of

weapons unless the questioner combines intelligence with abso-

lutely good faith ; this is why it may be a powerful weapon of

criticism in the hands of Socrates, but is nothing but an instru-

ment of sophistry in those of a Euthydemus whose only object is to

make men stare.

At the end of Socrates' narrative, Plato adds a sort of appendix,

a page or two of direct conversation between Socrates and Crito.

Crito observes that the remark had already been made to him by a

certain writer of speeches for the law-courts who fancied himself a

" great wit " (vaw cro<os), that the disgraceful scene in the Lyceum

was enough to show that " philosophy " is " mere waste of time "

(ovScv 7r/oay/Aa), for the professionals who had just been making

egregious fools of themselves were actually among its most eminent

1 We are still dealing with the misuse of Eleatic doctrine. The proof of

the infallibility of every one is made to turn on the principle of contiadiction

plus the neglect of qualifying conditions. We cannot both have knowledge

and not have it ; if you know anything, you have knowledge, and therefore

have all knowledge. This is just the Eleatic doctrine that there is no half-way

house between " what is " and blank nonentity, transferred from physics

to logic. Whenever we come on dim\ayiKol we are safe in looking for the

influence of Zeno.

1 Note that at 30 ia Socrates, without any explanation, falls into the

technical language of the so-called " ideal " theory when he says that *a\d

wpdyftara are different from aM rb Ka\6v, though a certain /rdXXos " is present "

to them, and that this peculiar Socratic use of the word irapelvai is even made

the subject of a jest.

MINOR SOCRAT1C DIALOGUES 101

living representatives. The critic who made the remark was not

himself a political man, nor had he ever addressed a law-court,

but had the reputation of being a skilled professional composer of

speeches for litigants (3046-3050). Socrates replies that these men,

who, as Prodicus once said, are on the border-line between politics

and philosophy, are always jealous of the philosopher ; they think

he keeps them out of rightful recognition. The truth is, that the

man who tries to combine two callings is regularly inferior in

both to the man who confines himself to one. // the philosophic

life and the life of affairs are both good things, the man who tries

to play both parts is certain to be inferior in each to the specialist

in his own line (3050-306^).

Ic has naturally been suspected that there is some personal

allusion underlying these remarks, and the view has often been taken

that Plato is aiming a shaft on his own account at his rival Isocrates.

It is true, of course, that during the lifetime of Socrates, Isocrates

was known only as a Aoyoypa<o9 or composer of speeches for the

courts, but that some time early in the fourth century he gave up

this profession for that of presiding over a regular institution for

the preparation of young men of promise for a political career.

It is true also that Isocrates called the kind of education he bestowed

on his pupils his " philosophy," and that he affected to look down

on the severely scientific studies of Plato's Academy as " useless "

and unpractical. From Plato's point of view, it would be highly

d propos to speak of Isocrates as "on the border line " between a

politician and a philosopher, and inferior to each in his own depart-

ment except that one might doubt whether Plato did really think

Isocrates inferior in statesmanship to the commonplace Athenian

men of affairs of his own time.

Yet I think the identification quite impossible. At the date

indicated by all the allusions of the Euthydemus Isocrates would

still be no more than a lad, whereas the person spoken of by Crito

is already a Xoyoypa^og of established repute. Still less could

Socrates, at this date, be supposed to anticipate that Isocrates

would some day lay claim to the reputation of a philosopher. (The

case is rather different with the express references of the Phaedrus

to Isocrates, since, as we shall see, the date of that dialogue is

supposed to be later.) We must suppose Socrates to be alluding

rather to some well-known figure of the time of the Archidamian

war. There is no reason why there should not have been more

than one personage of the age to which Callicles and Thrasymachus

belong who fancied himself as a blend of the philosophical thinker

and the practical " statesman." The remains of Antiphon " the

sophist," for example, suggest by their character that he might

perfectly well be the person intended, and we know from a notice

preserved by Xenophon l that he was among the acquaintances of

1 Xen. Mem. i. 6. It is important to note, as Professor Burnet has

done, that the information cannot depend on Xenophon's personal recollec-

tions, but must have been taken from some source describing Socrates a? he

102 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

Socrates. It is true that there is no direct proof that he was a

writer of speeches for the law-courts, but there is no reason why he

may not have been. In fact, it does not seem to me by any means

established that Antiphon the " sophist " and Antiphon of Rhamnus,

the famous politician and Aoyoypa^os, are two distinct persons. 1

And I feel sure that we have no right wantonly to attribute to Plato

the anachronisms which a reference to Isocrates in our dialogue

would imply, nor is there, in point of fact, any real evidence that

there ever was any personal ill-feeling between Isocrates and Plato. 2

The real object of the passage is probably simply to recognize the

fact that to a good many persons the dialectic of Socrates must have

seemed much on a par with the frivolities of Euthydemus and

his brother, and to hint that, if we choose, we may discover the

real difference between the two things from the dialogue itself, as

we certainly can.

See further :

RITTER, C. Platon, i. 450-462 (Euthydemus), 462-496 (Cvatylus).

RAEDER, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 137-153-

STEWART, J. A. Plato's Doctrine of Ideas, 34-39 (Cratylus.)

WARBURG, M. Zwei Fragen zum Kratylos. (Berlin, 1929.)

was at the time of the Archidamian war. This gives it all the more historical

value.

1 The question should probably be decided, if decided at all, on linguistic

and stylistic grounds. But are the remains of the " sophist " extensive enough

to permit of effective comparison with those of the Xoyoypd^os ? And to

what extent should we expect to find a \oyoypd<f>os exhibiting in his composi-

tions for the courts the peculiarities of his personal literary style ? Professor

S. Luria calls my attention in particular to two articles by Bignone in the

Rendiconti del R. Istituto Lombard, di scienze, 1919, pp. 567 f., 755 If., as estab-

lishing the non-identity of the two men. I regret that I have not myself

seen these essays.

8 On this point see the remarks of Burnet, Greek Philosophy, Part I., 215.

Isocrates may have enjoyed aiming his shafts at the Academic mathematics,

but the deliberate adoption of Isocratean tricks of style in the Sophistes and

the other later dialogues seems to show that Plato is not likely to have borne

him any malice on account of his inability to appreciate science,

CHAPTER VI

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES : GORGIAS, MENO

THE Gorgias is a much longer work than any we have yet

considered, and presents us with an exposition of the Socratic

morality so charged with passionate feeling and expressed

with such moving eloquence that it has always been a prime

favourite with all lovers of great ethical literature. The moral

fervour and splendour of the dialogue, however, ought not to blind

us, as it has blinded most writers on Platonic chronology, to certain

obvious indications that it is a youthful work, earlier in composition,

perhaps, than some of those with which we have been concerned.

We might have inferred as much from the mere fact that Plato

has adopted the form of the direct dialogue for so considerable a

' work, and thus missed the chance of giving us a description of the

personality of Gorgias to compare with his elaborate portrait of

Protagoras. Personally, I cannot also help feeling that, with all

its moral splendour, the dialogue is too long : it " drags. 1 ' The

Plato of the Protagoras or Republic, as I feel, would have known

how to secure the same effect with less expenditure of words ;

there is a diffuseness about our dialogue which betrays the hand

of the prentice, though the prentice in this case is a Plato. For

this reason I think it a mistake in principle to look, as some have

done, for an ethical advance in doctrine as we pass from the

Protagoras to the Gorgias. As we shall see when we come to deal

with the Protagoras, the ethical doctrine of the dialogues is identical,

and it is inconceivable to me that any reader of literary sensibility

can doubt which of the two is the product of a riper mastery of

dramatic art. Beyond this general statement that the Gorgias must

be an early work, and probably a work dating not many years after

the death of Socrates, I do not think it safe to hazard any con-

jecture as to the date of composition. 1

1 We shall see when we come to deal with the Republic that it, and con-

sequently any dialogues which precede it, must be dated not much later than

387, within twelve years of Socrates' death. If the Gorgias falls early in this

period, we must place its composition quite soon after that event, while the

feelings connected with it were still in their first freshness in Plato's mind.

Professor Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, in his Plato, i. 221, ii. 94-105, makes an

ingenious attempt at a more exact dating. He starts from the curious mis-

quotation of Pindar's well-known lines about p6juoj, as given by all our best MSS.

at Gorgias 4846 (where the text has been corrected back again in all the printed

editions). He rightly, as it seems to me, holds that the misquotation is what

Plato actually wrote, and then goes on (again, I believe, rightly) to infer from

103

104 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

It is unusually difficult to determine the date at which the

conversation is supposed to be held. It has sometimes been sup-

posed that a reference made by Socrates to some occasion when he

was a member of the committee of the /3ov\rj who had to preside

over the meetings of the lKK\rj<ria, and raised a laugh by his ignor-

ance of the formalities to be observed in " putting the question "

(Gorg. 473*), has to do with the events of the trial of the generals at

Arginusae, where we know from both Plato and Xenophon that

Socrates actually was one of the presiding committee. If this

interpretation were certain, we should have to suppose the con-

versation to fall somewhere in the last year of the Peloponnesian

war, when Athens was fighting with her back to the wall for her

very existence. There are certainly no signs in the dialogue that

this situation is presupposed ; it seems rather to be taken for

granted that the political and commercial life of the city is in a

normal condition. Moreover, as Burnet has said, the democracy

was in no laughing mood at the trial of the generals, and we thus

seem forced to suppose that the reference is to some unknown

incident which happened on some former occasion when Socrates

was a member of the /SovA*?. 1 On the other side, it would appear

from the opening sentences of the dialogue that Socrates is as yet a

complete stranger to Gorgias and his profession, and this suggests

that Gorgias is in Athens for the first time. There seems no good

reason to deny the statement of Diodorus Siculus that Gorgias

visited Athens first as a member of the embassy sent thither by his

native city, Leontini, in the year 427, and such a date would fit in

very well with certain other indications in the work, e.g. the refer-

ence to the " recent " death of Pericles, 2 and the statements about

the almost despotic power of the Athenian demagogue. 8 (These

would suit the time when the place of Pericles was being taken by

Cleon and men of his stamp to perfection.) Possibly, too, the date

Libanius' Apology of Socrates that the accusation of misquoting Pindar had

figured in the pamphlet of Polycrates against Socrates published somewhere

about 393. His final inference is that the accusation was based on this

passage of the Gorgias, which must thus be anterior to the pamphlet of

Polycrates. I hope to suggest reasons for believing that the misquotation

in Plato is conscious and made for a legitimate purpose. At this point I

merely wish to observe that it cannot have been the foundation of an accusa-

tion against the memory of Socrates for two conclusive reasons : (i) that in

any case a misquotation in Plato would be no proof of anything against

Socrates, and (2) that the person who is made by Plato to misquote Pindar is

not Socrates, but Callicles, who is arguing against him. Polycrates, to judge

from the line Isocrates takes with him (Isoc. xi. 1-8), was pretty much of a

fool, but it is hard to believe that he could have used a misquotation put by

Plato into the mouth of Callicles to damage the reputation of Socrates. At

the same time, I feel no doubt that the Gorgias was written as early as Pro-

fessor Wilamowitz holds, and most probably earlier.

1 This is quite compatible with the statement of Apology, 326 i. Socrates

says there that he has been a member of the /fovXi}. He does not say that he

had only served once in that capacity. See Burnet's note in he. cit. The best

historians hold that Xenophon has made a slip in saying that Socrates was the

Anerdrijf at the famous trial.

1 Gorgias, 503$. Ibid. 466$.

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 105

would not be too early for the allusion to the handsome Demus,

the son of Plato's own stepfather Pyrilampes, as a reigning beauty,

though there may be a very small anachronism here since Aristo-

phanes first mentions the craze for Demus in the Wasps, which

belongs to the year 422. l On the other side, again, we find the

Antiope of Euripides quoted as a well-known and popular work, 2

and the date of that tragedy seems to be c. 408. The career of

Archelaus of Macedon, again, comes in for a good deal of discussion, 3

and it has commonly been inferred from Thucydides that his reign

did not begin until 414-413, though disputed successions and the

simultaneous existence of several pretenders to the crown were so

common in Macedonia that we cannot build very confidently on

such data. It is very unfortunate that we have no independent

information about Callicles of Acharnae, who appears ill the dialogue

as a cultivated and ambitious young man who has lately entered

political life, though the mere fact that Plato specifies his deme is

enough to show that he is an actual man, and not, as has been

suggested, an alias for some one. If he really attempted to act

up to the Nietzschian theories ascribed to him in the dialogue, it

may not be wonderful that no record of his career has survived.

In the names which Plato gives as those of his immediate associates

we recognize some which were prominent in the second half of the

great war, but, of course their early days would belong to its

first half. On the whole, the arguments for an early dramatic

date seem to preponderate, though the references to the Antiope

and the usurpation of the Macedonian crown by Archelaus,

especially the second, seem to create a little difficulty. 4

The characters of the dialogue besides Socrates are four Gorgias,

the famous " orator " of Leontini, whose well-known rhetorical

devices for adding pomp and glitter to language represent the first

stage in the development of a literary prose style rising above

colloquialism or bald narration of matter of fact and yet remaining

prose ; Polus of Agrigentum, his enthusiastic disciple and admirer ;

Callicles of Acharnae, of whom we only know what Plato has

thought fit to tell us ; and Chaerephon, the lean, impetuous, and

apparently rather superstitious companion of Socrates, whom

1 Gorgias, 481^, Aristoph. Wasps, 89.

* Gorgias, 4840-486^. Since Aristotle appears to have been the first person

to attempt to construct a chronology of the Attic drama by making a collection

of didascaliae, I should have attached no importance to this particular point

but for the fact that if the commonly accepted view about the date of the

Antiope is correct Plato must pretty certainly have seen the performance

himself.

8 Ibid. 470^-47 id.

* The way in which Nicias is mentioned at 472*2 certainly seems to assume

that he is living and at the very height of his prosperity. This would

exclude any date much later than the sailing of the Syracusan expedition in

415. The difficulties seem to me to be created by the very wealth of topical

allusions for which the dialogue is remarkable. It would be very hard, in

the absence of something like the complete files of a newspaper, to make so

many of these allusions without falling into a small error here or there, and

there were no newspapers or gazettes at Athens.

106 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

Aristophanes finds so useful as a butt. 1 The precise scene is not

indicated ; apparently it is not in the house of Callicles, who is

acting as host to the distinguished visitor, but in some public place

where Gorgias has been giving a display of his gifts. 2 The ostensible

subject of the conversation must be carefully distinguished from

the real subject. Professedly the question propounded for dis-

cussion is the new speciality which Gorgias has introduced to

Athens, the art of impressive speech ; the points to be decided are

whether it is really an " art " at all, and if it is, whether it is, as

Gorgias claims, the queen of all other " arts." But to discover

the real object of the work we need to look carefully at the general

construction of the argument, and particularly at the end of the

whole composition. If we do this, we find that the dialogue really

consists of three successive conversations of Socrates with a single

interlocutor ; it has, so to say, three scenes, each with two " actors."

In the first conversation between Socrates and Gorgias the topic

of conversation really is the character and worth of the " rhetori-

cian's " art ; in the second, between Socrates and Polus, we find

that the rival estimates of the worth of rhetoric depend on sharply

contrasted ethical convictions about the true happiness of man.

In the final conversation with Callicles, where the tone of the dialogue

reaches its level of highest elevation, all secondary questions have

fallen completely into the background and we are left with the

direct and absolute conflict between two competing theories of life,

each represented by a striking personality. The true object of the

whole work thus emerges : it is to pit a typical life of devotion to

the supra-personal good against the typical theory and practice of

the " will to power " at its best. We are to see how the theory of

the " will to power," expounded by a thoroughly capable, intelligent,

and far from merely ignoble champion, like Callicles, and the

" practice " of it as embodied in Periclean Imperialism look from

the point of view of a Socrates, and also how the convictions and

career of a Socrates look to the intelligent worshipper of " strength " ;

and when we have looked at each party with the eyes of the other,

we are to be the judges between them. Life and the way it should

be lived, not the value of rhetoric, is the real theme, exactly as the

real theme of the Republic is not the merits and demerits of com-

peting political and economic systems, but " righteousness, temper-

ance, and judgment to come." 3

1 For the leanness, cf. Aristoph. Clouds, 502-503 ; for the impetuousness,

Apology, 2 1 a, cr<po5p6s <f> 6n 6pfj,-/i<rcicv ; for the superstition, Aristoph. Birds,

*553 where his taste for things ghostly is burlesqued by making him the

fraudulent confederate who plays the " spirits " in Socrates* stances.

* Or perhaps we are to suppose that Socrates and Callicles meet in the

street, and that the scene changes to the house of Callicles after the opening

courtesies.

3 The Gorgias stands in sharp contrast with the greatest of the dialogues

in respect of the way in which the three sections of which the argument consists

are marked off, like scenes on the Greek or French stage, by the putting

forward of a new respondent to bear the brunt of the argument. Where his

dramatic geuius is at its highest, Plato is accustomed to interweave the

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 107

Formally the dialogue opens in a familiar way. Socrates is

anxious to discover tne precise"cEafacter of the an or JJ speciality "

(TCX^) profession by Gorgias, the art of "rhetoric." It is, as

Gprgias says (449^), an arLpf" speech "~ or "discourse 11 (^pl

Aoyovs), and as such it makes those who possess it skilled in " speak-

ing/' and therefore, since speech is the expression of thoughTbr

intelligence, makes them intelligent (Swarov? <pov<V, 4500) about

something. But this is far from an adequate definition. We

may say that " arts " are of two kinds : the operations of the

one kind are wholly or chiefly manual, those of the other kind are

purely or principally effected by Aoyot, " discourses " (450^), a

first intimation of the distinction, which becomes fundamental in

Plato's later dialogues and in the philosophy of Aristotle, between

" theoretical " and " practical " sciences. Now rhetoric is not the

only " art " of the second kind ; there are many others, such as

theoretical and practical arithmetic (apiB^riKri and XoytoriK^),

geometry, medicine, and others, in which manual operations play

no part or a subordinate one ; but Gorgias certainly does not mean

to say that he teaches medicine or mathematics. To complete the

definition we need to know what is the subject-matter with which

the " discourse " of the rhetorician is concerned, as the " discourse "

of the arithmetician is concerned with " the odd and even " (i.e.

with the properties of the integer-series (4510-^)). Gorgias thinks

it enough to say that the subject-matter is " the most important

of human concerns " (TO. psy terra TWV av^/owTrettur 7r/my/xaTa/), " the

supreme interests of mankind." But a statement of this kind,

which attempts to define by means of a mere formula of laudation,

is ambiguous, since there are different opinions on the question

what is the " great concern " of man. A physician might say that

it is health, an economist or a business man that it is wealth.

Hence, though Gorgias may be right in his estimate of his art, the

estimate itself presupposes an answer to the ethical question what

is the chief good for man (452^). Gorgias replies that the chief

good for man is eAr0pt'a, freedom, in the sense of having his own

way and being able to impose his will on his fellow-citizens, and

that it is rhetoric, the art of persuasive or plausible speech which

produces this good (452^). Thus the thought is that " power "

is the chief good and that rhetoric, the art of persuasion, is the

supreme art, because, in the life of a city like Athens, persuasive

eloquence is the great weapon by which the statesman acquires

power ; the persuasive speaker gets his policy adopted by the

ecclesia, his financial schemes by the ftovX^ and successfully

impeaches his opponents and defends his partisans before the

dicasteria. The secret of a Pericles, for example, is simply his

command over the resources of persuasive eloquence. Gorgias

holds that he can teach this secret to a pupil, and that is why he

regards his own r^vy as the supreme achievement of the human

threads of his plot more subtly. This, again, is a fair ground for an inference

about the place of the dialogue in the series of Plato's works.

108 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

intelligence. 1 It should be noted that the hint is thus given early

in the dialogue that the real problem to be discussed is the ethical

question, not formally reached until we come to the scene in which

Callicles is the respondent, whether " power," unchecked freedom to

do as one likes and to make others do as one likes, is the highest

good. The dispute about the "merits" of the art of rhetoric is

wholly subservient to this ethical purpose and is mainly introduced

because, in a Greek democracy, facility and persuasiveness in speech

were necessarily the chief instruments by which such " power "

was to be attained. 2

We know now what Gorgias means by " rtietgric " : he means

an "jirt" of^ersnasion. It is an " art " because ifis, or claims

o~T>e, reducible to intelligible principles ; its end or aim is to

" persuade " men to accept the views of the practitioner, and

so to make them consenting instruments of his will. But the

definition has the fault of being too wide : it does not, in fact,

state the specific differentia of the orator's accomplishment.

There are other "arts," including that of the arithmetician, of

which we might equally say that they are arts by which men are

persuaded to accept the specialist's opinion, since they " teach "

us certain truths, and he who is taught is certainly persuaded of

the things taught him. We must ask then, further, what kind

of persuasion does rhetoric employ, and about what matters does

it produce persuasion? (4540). Gorgias replies that rhetoric is

the kind of persuasion employed " before dicasts and mobs in

general," and that it persuades about " matters of right and

wrong," i.e. it is the art of effective public speaking on ques-

tions of morality (4546). This at once suggests an important

distinction. Persuasion or conviction (TO irwTww) may be pro-

duced by instruction or without it. In the first case, a man

is not only persuaded to hold an opinion, he is led to know-

ledge; in the second, he is convinced but does not really know

that his conviction is true. Now obviously a " mob " cannot be

conducted to knowledge on grave and complicated issues in the

short time required for the delivery of an effective speech. The

orator, therefore, must be a practitioner of the mere persuasion

which does not produce real knowledge. We must expect, then,

We are certainly dealing here with a thesis actually maintained by

Gorgias. For in the Philebus, Protarchus remarks (Phileb. tfa-b) that he

had often heard Gorgias maintain that the art of persuasion is far superior

to all others, because the man who possesses it can make every one do hia

will and do it voluntarily. Obviously the reference is not to the Gorgias

itself (though 458^ implies that an audience is present at the discussion),

but to some statement actually made in a discourse of Gorgias. Gorgias

452(i fl. clearly refers to the same statement and probably reproduces it

with close fidelity.

1 We might say, in fact, that the great weakness of ancient democracy was

that it really meant government by irresponsible orators, as modern demo-

cracy tends to mean government by equally irresponsible " pressmen."

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 109

that such a man will not attempt to persuade his audience about

matters which obviously demand special technical knowledge,

such as naval and military engineering, but only about " right and

wrong " (which are popularly held not to be questions for specialists).

Yet, as Gorgias observes, the greatest naval and military con-

structions of Athens the dockyards, the harbours, the " long walls "

were undertaken not at the instigation of engineering specialists,

but at that of Themistocles and Pericles, who were eminent

"orators," but not engineers. In fact, you will find that before

any public audience a skilful orator will always succeed in

proving more " convincing " than an " expert " who is no orator,

even on questions which fall within the expert's province. The

" orator " who knows nothing of medicine, for example, will always

be more persuasive, even on a medical question, than the medical

specialist who is no orator. In general, the man who is merely

an " orator " who understands his business will be able to pass

himself off before the public as a consummate authority in matters

where he has no real technical knowledge at all, and this is precisely

the secret of his power. (The trick is that habitually employed

in our own age by the able and eloquent advocate " speaking from

his brief/ 1 and the view of Gorgias amounts to holding that states-

manship is just a matter of consummate skill in speaking from a

brief.) To be sure, bad men may employ this formidable weapon

for the worst of ends, but that is not the fault of the teacher from

whom they have learned to use it, but their own. It is as absurd

to blame the teacher for a pupil's abuse of the art as it would be

to hold a boxer or fencing-master responsible for a foul blow struck

by one of his pupils (455^-457^). Thus we see that Gorgias makes

no claim to " teach goodness." It is important that his pupils

should make a right, not a wrong, use of the weapons he teaches

them to use, but his concern is merely to teach the " manage " of

the weapons.

There is an obvious weak point in this commendation of the

orator's art, and Socrates fastens on it at once. The " orator, 11 by

Gorgias' own account, is no " expert," and the " mob " or " crowd "

before whom he succeeds in silencing the real expert are not experts

either. Thus, on the showing of Gorgias himself, oratory is a

device by which an ignorant man persuades an audience equally

ignorant with himself that he understands a question better than

the expert who really knows about it. Does this apply to the

moral issues with which the " orator " will be largely concerned ?

Does he need to know no more about right and wrong, honour and

dishonour, than about, e.g., naval engineering or medicine ? If he

does need knowledge of this kind, where is he to get it, since Gorgias

has explained that it is not his own business to impart it ? Gorgias,

rather inconsistently, suggests that, in case of need, a pupil might

incidentally get the knowledge of right and wrong from himself ;

in any case, he needs to have it. The " orator " must be St'/cotos,

" a moral man/' (If he were not, of course, he might make the

110 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

worst use of his oratorical skill.) But if he is " a moral man,"

he will not have the wish to do wrong. At this rate, a true orator

would never abuse his skill, and this seems inconsistent with the

former contention that when an orator does misuse his art, the

blame lies with himself and not with his teacher (457^4616).

So far our results have come to this : it has at least been sug-

gested that a statesman, who owes his power in a democracy to

skill in persuasion, need not be an expert in any of the technical

arts, but does require sound moral principles, though it is not

quite clear how he is to come by them. Here Gorgias retires from

the argument, and his place is taken by his younger disciple and

admirer Polus, who is prepared to break with conventional views

about morality, as the respectable Gorgias is not. According to

Polus, Socrates has taken an unfair advantage of the conventional

modesty which had led Gorgias to disclaim the status of a pro-

fessional teacher of right and wrong. The disclaimer was a mere

piece of good manners, and Socrates has himself committed a

breach of manners in pretending to take it seriously. Polus also

insists that Socrates shall play the part of " respondent " and

submit his own definition of rhetoric for examination, as Socrates,

in fact, is quite willing to do. According to this definition, which

opens the second of the three sections of the dialogue, rhetoric is

not an "art," a matter of expert knowledge, at all. It is a mere

empirical " knack " (c/xTreipta, Tpi/?r?), and more precisely, a

" knack of giving pleasure " (4620). In this respect it is like

confectionery. The confectioner pleases the palates of his cus-

tomers by a clever combination of flavours, and the " orator "

in the same way " tickles the ears of the groundlings " by attractive

combinations of words and phrases. It is meant that neither

confectionery nor oratory is really an application of rational prin-

ciples ; you cannot lay down rules for either, since both are mere

tricks of gratifying the tastes of a body of patrons, and in each case

the trick depends on nothing more scientific than a tact which

cannot be taught but only picked up by long personal experience

of successes and failures. There is thus nothing " fine " about

either ; they are both branches of a " knack " for which the proper

name is KoXaKeia, " humouring the moods of a patron," l " acting

the parasite."

We may, in fact, distinguish four species of this KoA.aKta,

each of which is a spurious counterfeit or " ghost " (etSoAov) of a

real science or art. We start from the now familiar Socratic con-

1 The word must not be translated " flattery." The successful demagogue

often scores his point better by "slanging " his audience than by flattering

them. In the language of the fifth century, *6\a meant what the new

comedy calls ira/>d<nros, the " trencherman " or sycophant or toady who keeps

his place at a great man's table by compliance with his moods, like the

" hangers-on " of Gaunt House in Thackeray. The thought of Socrates is

that the " statesman " who supposes himself to be imposing his will on the

" many-headed monster '" is merely adroitly " pandering " to the creature's

lusts. This is the verdict of philosophy on all successful " opportunism."

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 111

ception of the " tending " of a thing. There is a double art oi

tending the body, that is, of keeping it in a state of health and

fitness, and a corresponding double art of tending the soul. In the

case of the body, the two arts of " tending " have no common

name ; they are those of " gymnastic/' bodily culture (which sets

up the ideal of true bodily " fitness "), and medicine (whose function

it is to restore the " unfit " to health). The art of " tending " the

soul has a single name ; it is called TroAm/a/, " statesmanship " :

but it also has two branches, legislation (vo^ofoTiKT?), which sets

the standard of spiritual health, and " justice " (or righteousness,

SiKaiocruV^) , which corrects and repairs disease in the soul. Each

of these four is a genuine art ; it aims at the good or true best con-

ditjon of body or soul, and thus rests on a scientific knowledge of

good and evil. The regulations of " gymnastic " and medicine

are based on knowledge of what is wholesome for the body, those

of the legislator and the judge on knowledge of what is wholesome

for the soul. But each of the four arts has its counterfeit, and the

counterfeit differs from the true art in taking as its standard the

pleasant and not the good. Thus the confectioner is a counterfeit

of the physician. The physician aims at prescribing the diet which

will be wholesome for us, the confectioner at prescribing that which

will please our palates. Now it is possible to know what diet is

wholesome, but you can only discover what diet will please a man's

palate by guesses based on long acquaintance with his moods and

whims, and even when you guess right, the dishes you prepare will

commonly not be good for your patron.

In the same way, KOju/xum/crj, the " art," if you could call it

so, of bodily adornment (the calling of the friseur, the professional

beautifier, the jeweller, and many others), is a parody of the genuine

art of the trainer. " Gymnastic " makes the body inherently

attractive and graceful by training it in the exercises which produce

genuine grace, agility, and vigour ; KOfi/Mmm; mimics this real art

by producing a sham grace and charm effected by the artifice of

cosmetics, fashionable clothes, and the like. (Here, again, there is

no real standard, nothing but the caprice of the passing " fashion. 11 )

So with the arts which have to do with the health of the soul. The

sophist professes to teach goodness, but what he teaches as goodness

is merely the kind of life which is likely to recommend itself to his

auditors ; the " orator " claims to be the physician of the disorders

of the body politic, but the measures he recommends only persuade

his audience because he is careful to recommend what is agreeable

to their mood of the moment. Thus we may define rhetoric by

saying that it is the counterfeit of one part of " politics/' namely, of

justice (4630-4660). *

Polus urges in reply that rhetoric cannot be a form of KoXaWa,

1 The most extravagant " public man " always insists that he is only

advocating the " just rights " of his nation, or church, or class. But a " just

right" in his mouth means, in fact, whatever his supporters are keenly set on

demanding.

112 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

since the " hanger-on " is a disreputable character, whereas the

" orator " is the most powerful person in the community, and, it is

implied, the figure of highest consequence. He can use his influence

to secure the banishment of anyone he pleases, to confiscate his

goods, even to procure his execution. Thus he is virtually an

autocrat with no superior. Socrates admits the fact, but denies the

inference that either orator or autocrat is really powerful, if by

" power " you mean anything which it is good for a man to have.

The autocrat, recognized or unrecognized, no doubt always does

"as he thinks good/' but for that reason he never does " what he

wishes " (4660). And it is not good for a man to do " as he thinks

good " if his thinking is false. To explain the point more fully,

we may put it thus. There are many things which we do, not for

the mere sake of doing them, but as means to something else, as

when a man drinks a disagreeable medicine at his doctor's order,

for the sake of recovering health, or follows the fatiguing and

dangerous calling of the sea with a view to making a fortune. In

all such cases, where a thing is done as a means to some ulterior end,

it is the ulterior end, not the disagreeable or indifferent means to it,

that the man wishes for. 1 And he wishes for the end because he

thinks it a good. So when we put a man to death, or banish him,

or confiscate his property, we always have an ulterior end. We only

do these things because we think they will be " useful " in view of

that end. If the autocrat, then, is mistaken in supposing that such

steps will " be for his good/' if they are really bad for him, he is

not doing " what he wished," and should not be called " powerful."

(The thought is thus that every one really wishes for good, no one

wishes for evil. " The object of every man's desire is some good

to himself." To be really powerful means to be able to get good ;

it is weakness, not power, to " do whatever you please," if the

consequence is that you reap evil and not good (4660-4690) .)

We now pass to the direct enunciation of the main ethical

doctrine of the dialogue. This is elicited by the unmannerly

remark of Polus that, whatever Socrates may be pleased to

profess, he would certainly envy the man who could forfeit, im-

prison, or kill anyone he pleased. Socrates replies that he would

not. The man who inflicts such things on another, even when they

are righteously deserved, is not to be envied ; the man who inflicts

them undeservedly is miserable and pitiable. What is more, he is

more pitiable and miserable than the unfortunate innocent victim,

since to commit injustice is much worse than to have to suffer it.

Socrates himself would, of course, like Candide in a similar case,

1 Note that in the course of this argument (at 4680) Socrates talks of things

" participating " in good and " participating " in evil, using the very word

(fju-rfaiv ) which appears in connexion with the theory of Forms as technical

for the relation between the " particular thing " and the " universal " we

predicate of it. Since it cannot reasonably be doubted that the Gorgias is a

considerably earlier work than the Phaedo, this creates a grave difficulty for

those who suppose that the theory is an invention of Plato's own, expounded

for the first time in 'the Phaedo.

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 118

"choose neither the one nor the other/' but if he had to choose,

he would much rather suffer the crime than commit it (469^-^).

Polus treats this view as a ridiculous paradox. He admits

that any man with a knife under his cloak might claim to be

" powerful/ 1 in the sense that he can, like the autocrat, kill any

one he has a mind to kill, but for one thing, the certainty of punish-

ment. Impunity must be stipulated for as one of the conditions

of " power/' but a child could refute Socrates' view that it is only

" better " to kill, banish, and confiscate at will when these acts are

done " justly." One has only to consider the very latest example

from contemporary life, that of Archelaus, who has made himself

king in Macedonia. His whole career has been one of rebellion

and murder, but he has gained a throne by it. By Socrates' theory

he ought to be the most wretched of men, but he is, in fact, the

happiest, and there is not a man in Athens, not even Socrates, who

would not dearly like to change places with Archelaus (469^-471^).

An appeal of this kind is, however, an ignoratio elenchi in the most

literal sense. Even if every one but Socrates would be willing to

go into the witness-box on behalf of Polus, it is possible that a

solitary witness may be a witness to truth, and the testimony of

numbers on the other side erroneous. Socrates will not consider

his own case as established unless he can produce one solitary

witness to it, the antagonist himself (472^). In other words, the

appeal must be to argument and not to authority. The first step

we must take is to define the issue at stake as precisely as we can.

It is, in fact, the most important of all practical issues, the solution

of the question, " Who is the truly happy man ? " Polus maintains

that a man may be happy but wicked ; Socrates denies this. As

a corollary, there is a secondary disagreement. Polus holds that

the wicked man, to be happy, must go unpunished ; Socrates, that

such a man is in any case unhappy, but more unhappy if he escapes

punishment than if he suffers it, and he must try to convince Polus

on both points (472^-474^).

The precise point of disagreement between the opposing views

now receives a still more exact definition. Polus is still so far

under the influence of current moral conventions that he admits

at once that to commit a wrong is more " ugly " or " disgraceful "

(aurxiov) than to suffer one, but he declines to draw the further

inference that the " uglier " thing must also be the greater evil.

He distinguishes, as Socrates refuses to do, between the good (ayaOov)

and the " fine " or " noble " (KaXo'i/), and consequently also between

the " ugly " (cuVxpoV) and the evil (KCIKO'V). The task of Socrates

is to show that these distinctions are unreal The argument runs

as follows. When we distinguish between " fine " bodies, coloum

sounds, callings (cViT^Scv/xara) and others which are " ugly "

or " base," our standard is always either " benefit " or " pleasure."

By a " fine " shape or colour or sound, we mean one which is either

serviceable or immediately agreeable in contemplation or both.

The same thing holds good when we speak of " fine " or " noble "

114 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

usages (vd/xot) and callings in life, or of the " beauty " of a science. 1

We mean that the usage or business or science in question either is

highly beneficial or " creates in the disinterested spectator a pleasing

sentiment of approbation/' or both, a view which delights Polus

by its apparent Hedonistic implications. It follows that by calling

anything " ugly " or " base/' we must mean that it is either dis-

serviceable, or painful, or both. Also, that when we say " A is

finer than 5," we must mean that A is either more pleasant or

more useful than B, or both more pleasant and more useful. And

when we call A " more ugly " than B, we mean that it is either

more harmful or more painful, or both. Now we are agreed that

the commission of wrong (TO d8iKti>) is an " uglier " thing than the

suffering of it (TO dSiKcicrflcu), and it is certainly not the case that it is

more painful to commit the crime than to have it committed on

you. It must follow that the commission of the wrong is the more

harmful, i.e. the more evil course, the worse course. Now no one

can rationally prefer an alternative which is at once the worse

and the more " ugly " of those open to him, and Socrates has thus

established his main point out of the mouth of his antagonist

(4740-476^). We come now to the proof of the corollary.

We begin with a consideration of general logic. Wherever

there is an agent (TTOLW) there is a correlative " patient "

(TTtto-x^v), a thing or person which is acted upon. Also the

modality of the activity gives rise to strictly correlated qualifica-

tions (rraQrj) in agent and patient. If the agent, e.g., strikes a

sudden, or a severe, or a painful blow, the patient is suddenly,

severely, or painfully struck. If the agent " cuts deep/ 1 the patient

is " deeply cut/' and so forth. Now to be punished for a crime is

to be the patient in a relation in which the inflictor of the penalty

is the agent. Hence, if the agent inflicts the penalty deservedly or

justly, the patient undergoes it deservedly or justly. 2 And, as

Polus does not deny, what is just is " fine/' and therefore, as we

have seen, either good or pleasant. Hence the man who is justly

punished has something good done to him (since no one will suggest

that he finds the punishment pleasant). He is benefited by what

is done to him. We may go on to specify the nature of the benefit.

Goods and evils may be classed under three heads : good or bad

1 Note that the " induction " is exactly parallel with that of the famous

speech of Diotima (Symposium, 2ioaff.), when the successive stages in the

ascent to the contemplation of Beauty are delight in one person's bodily beauty,

in bodily beauty universally, in beauty of soul and character, beauty of

occupations and usages (^TiTTjSetf/iara and v6^oi) t beauty of sciences (^rwrT^cu).

The more carefully the Platonic dialogues down to the Republic are studied,

the more of a piece we find their teaching to be, and the harder it becomes to

trace any " development " within them.

* Observe once more that the logical principle presupposed ners of the

interconnexion between the modalities of correlates is that which is used in

the Republic to establish the reality of the distinction between the " parts in

the soul "( Rep. iv. 4$8b-e). Both passages presuppose the existence of a

good deal of recognized logical doctrine as early as the time of the Archi-

damain war.

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 115

conditions of fortune (x/o^ara), of body, of soul. A bad condition

of fortune is poverty ; of body, weakness, disease, deformity. The

corresponding bad state of soul is wickedness (dSt/a'a), and admittedly

wickedness is the " ugliest " of the three. Yet it is certainly not

more painful to be wicked than to be destitute or physically ill.

By our preceding reasoning, therefore, it must be very much more

evil or harmful. Badness of soul is thus the very greatest evil to

which a man is exposed, and thus we get back to the fundamental

principle of the whole Socratic ethics (4766-4770) - 1

One further step remains to be taken. There is an " art "

which covers each of the three kinds of evil. Business (xprj^ana-TiKri)

releases us from poverty, medicine from physical disease, " justice "

administered by a competent judge from wickedness. The judge

who passes sentence on the criminal is thus a physician of the soul,

and his calling is a " finer " one than that of the healer of the body,

because he cures a graver disease. In both cases the process of

treatment is disagreeable but salutary for us. And again, in both

cases, the happiest condition is to be in bodily or spiritual health,

and so not to need the physician. But in both also, the man who

is cured of a grave disease by a sharp treatment is much less badly

off than the man who has the disease without receiving the cure.

Thus a man like Archelaus who lifts himself by successful crime

above all possibility of correction is like a man with a deadly disease

who refuses to submit to the surgeon. The claim advanced for

rhetoric, then, that it enables its possessor to " get off " when he

is called to account for his misdeeds, is wholly vain. The best use

a man who has fallen into crime could make of eloquence would be

to expend it in denouncing himself and ensuring that he shall

receive from the judge whatever chastisement may be needed to

restore his soul to health. If eloquence is to be used to enable

the criminal to " get off " the penalties of his misdeeds, it would be

appropriate to reserve this employment of it for the case of our

mortal enemies, as the deadliest injury we can inflict (477^-481^).

So far we have been concerned simply with an emphatic state-

ment of the thesis that to do wrong is always worse than to suffer

it, with the inevitable corollary that it is worse to do wrong with

impunity than to be punished. With the opening of the third scene

of Plato's drama we proceed to the application of these moral

principles to the theory of statesmanship and government. That

this application is the principal theme of the dialogue is indicated

both by the fact that this part of the work is longer than both the

others together, and by the introduction of a new spokesman whose

case is presented with an unmistakable gusto quite absent from all

that has gone before. The new speaker is a certain Callicles of

Acharnae, of whom we learn little more than that he has recently

begun to aspire to a prominent place in Athenian public life. He is

1 Note the assumption of the threefold classification of goods as goods of

soul, body, and "estate/' as something quite familiar (Gorg. 4770 ff.). This

too, then, is clearly pre-Academic.

116 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

one of the very few characters in Plato's dialogues of whose historical

reality we have no independent evidence, but it should be clear

from the very vigour with which his character is drawn that he

is a genuine man of flesh and blood. His intervention at once

gives a more realistic touch to the dramatic picture and lifts the

argument to a distinctly higher level. Polus was not only half-

hearted in his professed rejection of conventional moral convictions,

but also wanting in moral seriousness. He had nothing more

inspiring to say in support of his eulogy of the " tyrant " than that

it is a pleasant thing to be able to gratify all your passions without

apprehension of consequences. Clearly, established morality is in

no danger from the assaults of worldlings of this type, least of all

when they are mere literary gentlemen talking for talking's sake.

Callicles is quite another matter. His morality, like Nietzsche's,

may be an inverted one, but it is one with which he is in downright

earnest. He has a definite ideal which carries him off his feet, and,

though it is a false ideal, Plato plainly means to make us feel that

there is a certain largeness about it which gives it a dangerous

fascination. To be fascinated by it, indeed, you need to have a

certain greatness of soul ; it is notable that Callicles himself is

wholly above the appeal to the mere en joy ability of being able to

gratify ignoble cupidities, of which Polus had made so much. The

ideal he is defending is that of the men of action for action's sake,

the Napoleons and Cromwells, and it is his conviction that there is

a genuine moral right on which the ideal rests. His imagination

has been fascinated by the vision of a Nature whose law is that

" the weakest goes to the wall/ 1 and he sees the life of human

societies in the light of this vision. He is as earnest as Carlyle in

his conviction that superior ability of any kind gives the moral

right to use the ability according to your own judgment and without

scruples. Hence he feels that in rejecting " conventionalism " in

morals he is not rejecting morality itself ; he is appealing from a

petty and confined morality of local human conventions to an

august morality of " Nature " or " things-as-they-are." The case

for the partisans of Averts in the fifth-century dispute about <vo-ts

and VO/AOS could not well be argued more persuasively, and it is

Plato's purpose that it shall be argued with the maximum of

persuasiveness with a view to its thorough refutation.

If Socrates is in earnest and his theory is true, Callicles says,

the whole of our actual social life is organized on wrong lines ; our

whole conduct is " topsy-turvy." Socrates does not deny this, but

replies that he and Callicles are lovers of two very different mis-

tresses, " philosophy " and the Athenian democracy. Socrates'

mistress, " philosophy," has taught him to speak her language, and,

unlike the mistress of Callicles, she always holds the same language.

It is she, not her lover, whom Callicles will have to refute. 1 Callicles

1 481^. Here comes in the humorous reference to the mortal " sweetings "

of Socrates and Callicles respectively, Alcibiades and Demus, son of Pyri-

lampes. We know from Aristophanes ( Wasps, 98) that Demus was the fashion-

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 117

thinks the task will not be difficult if once we make the distinction

between mere " convention " and Nature, or " reality." Polus

had only been silenced because he had not the courage to say

what he really thought. He deferred to the tradition of the average

respectable man by saying that it is " uglier " to commit a wrong

than to suffer one. But this is a mere convention of weaklings,

set up for their own protection. In " reality " to commit a wrong

or aggression is not the " ugly " thing ; the " ugly " thing is to have

it committed on you. It is weaklings, slaves, persons who cannot

stand up for themselves like men, who have to " put up " wrongs ;

the strong are aggressive and commit what the conventions of the

weak call " wrongs." If we look at <u<m, " things-as-they-are,"

we see that the stronger animal regularly pushes the weaker aside.

Human life displays the same features, if we look at it on the large

scale. By what right, for example, but that of the stronger did

Darius attack the Scythians or Xerxes the Greeks ? Their pro-

ceedings may have been unlawful by the standard of the self-

interested conventions of the weak, but they had Nature's right

the right of the strong to impose his will on the weak on their

side ; indeed, the conqueror is acting in strict accord with " Nature's

VO/AOS " x in disregarding pur paltry human vofwi. When a really

strong man in fact, the Ubermensch appears, he will soon tear up

pur " contracts " and " formulae," and prove himself what he really

is " by right of nature," the master of us all, as Pindar hinted in his

well-known eulogy of the piratical feat of Heracles who drove the

cows of Geryones " without leave asked or price paid." 2

able beauty at Athens in the year 422. So far the jest makes for giving

the Gorgias a dramatic date in the Archidamian war. But the supposed

relations between Socrates and Alcibiades could also be used playfully in the

Symposium, the assumed date of which is the year 416, so that the argument

is not conclusive. If Socrates is thinking of the profession of the " Paphla-

gonian," to the personified Attic Demus in Aristophanes (Knights, 732,

0tX ff\ & AT?/*.'* ipMTfy T cl/j,l 06$), this would also make for the earlier date.

1 Gorg. 4830, KCIT& v6fu>v ye rbv 0tfo-ews. The first occurrence, so far as I

know, in extant literature, of the ominous phrase "law of Nature." Callicles,

of course, intends the words to be paradoxical "a convention, if you like,

but Reality's convention, not a human device."

2 Gorg. 4846. I agree with Wilamowitz that the misquotation by which the

MSS. made Callicles credit Pindar with saying that vdpos dyct fttaiQv rb SiKaibraTov

" does violence to the most righteous claim " (whereas the poet wrote SIKCUUV

r& /Sia^raTov, " makes the most high-handed action just ") comes from Plato

and should not be " corrected," as it has been by all the editors. (Callicles

expressly says that he does not know the lines accurately.) But I doubt the

cogency of the far-reaching inferences, including one as to the date of com-

position of the dialogue, which Wilamowitz bases on the misquotation. I

should conjecture that Plato makes it quite deliberately, and that the verses

had been actually quoted in this form by the champions of 0tf<ns against VO/MOS

in the fifth century. We must remember that in the time of Socrates there

were no " official " texts at Athens, even of the Attic dramatists ; still less

would it be possible to secure the text of a foreign poet against misquotation.

In the Apologia Socratis of Libanius (fourth century A.D.) Anytus is repre-

sented as having made a point of this particular misquotation at the trial of

Socrates. This probably means, as Wilamowitz holds, that the complaint

occurred in the pamphlet of Polycrates against Socrates, published some

118 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

As for what Socrates has said about the lessons of philosophy,

philosophy is a graceful accomplishment in a young man, but to

take it in earnest in mature life is ruin. It unfits a man for the

life of action, leaves him ignorant of the laws of the community, the

Erinciples of public and private business, and the real passions of

is fellow-men, like Amphion in the Antiope of Euripides. One

should cultivate philosophy up to a certain point, when one is a

lad, but a grown man should lay it aside with the toys of his boy-

hood. It is unmanly in a man of ability and ripe years to take

no part in affairs and sit whispering " with a parcel of lads in a

corner." l Callicles pushes the point " in a spirit of friendship " ;

Socrates is a man of admirable natural parts, but his way of life

has left him at the mercy of anyone who wishes to do him a harm.

If he were falsely accused on a capital charge, he would be quite

incapable of making an effective defence more's the pity (4810-

486^). Socrates professes himself delighted to have such an

opponent to deal with, a man who is at once " educated," sincere

(as is shown by the fact that his professed view of the proper place

of philosophy in man's life is one which Socrates knows him to hold

in common with several distinguished associates), and perfectly

frank in speaking his mind without any deference to the conventions.

If we can convince a man with these qualities of the soundness of

our view of life, there can be no reasonable doubt of its truth.

But first we must be quite clear on the point that, in the doctrine

of Callicles, " better " is a mere synonym of " stronger " and

" worse " of " weaker." If this is granted, as it is, then, since " the

many " are stronger than one man, their conventional usages are

the usages of the stronger, that is to say, of the better, and should

be regarded as the " naturally fine " (Kara <uViv Ka\d). But their

convention is just what Callicles has been denouncing, the conven-

tion that aggression is wrong and that to commit it is " uglier "

than to suffer it. Thus the antithesis between " nature " and

" convention " on which Callicles had based his argument is unsound.

This, says Callicles, is mere catching at a word. He never meant

by the " stronger " (KPCITTOVS) those who are merely superior in

muscle and brawn (icrxvporepoi). A canaille of slaves would, at

that rate, be stronger and better than the " strong man." By

the "stronger" he really meant "the wiser" (<poi/i/xwTcpoi) , the

" men of parts." " Natural right " is that " the better and wiser

should rule and have the advantage over (TrAeW *x* iv ) the worse "

(486^-4900).

years after 399 B.C. But the complaint cannot have been based on our pas-

sage, where it is Callicles, not Socrates, who misquotes.

1 Gorg. 485^ 7. Plato has sometimes been thought to have fallen here

into attributing his own way of life in the Academy to Socrates. But (a) it

is most unlikely that the Academy existed when the Gorgias was written ;

(6) from Plato's account it appears that most of the conversations of Socrates

with his young friends were held " in a corner," in places like the gymnasium

of the Lyceum or the palaestra of Taureas, so that Callicles' language is perfectly

appropriate.

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 119

But what exactly may this mean ? If food and drink are to be

distributed to a company of men of varying physique, and there is

just one physician among them, he is certainly the " wisest " in

matters of diet, and it may be reasonable that he should regulate

the distribution by his orders ; but is he to get the biggest ration,

even if he should be the greatest invalid of the party ? Should

the weaver always have the biggest and finest clothes or the maker

of shoes the biggest shoes and most of them ? Naturally not ;

Callicles really means that the " strong " are men with the intel-

ligence to know how a city may be " well administered," and

the daring to carry out their designs (ot av ts TO. -rifc TroXcws

irpdyaara tfrpovifJLoi wart, Svrwa av rpoirov V OIKOLTO, /cat ftr) aovov

<f>p6vip.oi a\\a KCU avSpcioi, IKQVOI wres a av vo^crwcrtv cTJTreAetv, 49*^)'

It is right that such men should be sovereign in the State and

" have the advantage " (TT\OV evctv) of their subjects.

Should we add that the best men are also sovereigns over them-

selves in the popular phrase, i.e. can govern their own passions ?

No ; for in the nature of things the great man is one who has great

passions and is intelligent and daring enough to secure them full

gratification. The popular commendation of temperance is a

mere trick by which the weaklings of the " herd/ 1 who have not

manhood enough to live the best kind of life themselves, enslave

their " natural superiors " (4920). If a man is born to a throne,

or has the manhood to win his way to a throne, it would be base

and bad in him not to rise above the conventional " temperance "

and " justice " of the herd, and reap the full benefit of his capacity

for himself and his friends. In the capable, lawless self-will (rpv^ij

/cat d/coAacrta /cat \vOcpta, 4<)2c) are virtue and happiness ; regard

for the " unreal catchwords " (TO, ?rapa <f>vo-iv (TwOy/mara) of the

vulgar is contemptible. Thus the ideal of Callicles, like that of

Nietzsche, is the successful cultivation of the Wille zur Macht, and

his " strong man," like Nietzsche's, is a being of the type of Caesar

Borgia as conceived in popular legend. 1

The thesis of Callicles and the moralists of the " will to power "

then is that one " ought " (del) to have violent desire and gratify

it to the full ; to " want nothing " is the condition of a stone. But

perhaps, as Euripides said, what we call life is really death. There

is a rival view, developed by a certain wise man of Italy, that the

tale of those who are condemned in the underworld to draw water

in leaky pitchers is an apologue descriptive of the death-in-life

1 Cf . Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell : " Those who restrain Desire do

so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained ; and the restrainer or

Reason usurps its place and governs the unwilling. And being restrained,

it by degrees becomes passive, till it is only the shadow of Desire." The

recently discovered Oxyrhynchus fragments of Socrates' contemporary,

Antiphon " the sophist," have revealed to us one of the quarters in which

these conceptions found literary expression in the age of the Archidamian war.

It is, I believe, of Antiphon among others that Plato is thinking when he

makes Glaucon declare that this same theory is widely current in his owo

circle (Rep. ii. 3586).

120 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

of the service of the passions. The leaking pitcher, or sieve, is

" the part of the soul in which our desires are " ; the more grati-

fication you give them, the more they crave, and this impossibility

of ever contenting them shows the intrinsic absurdity of the

attempt. 1 And it is clear that if one had to fill a number of vessels

from a few scanty springs, a man who did not care whether his

vessels were sound or cracked, and who allowed a vessel to run over,

would have a very difficult task. The man who made sure that

his pitchers were sound and that none of them ran over would be

much more successful. Callicles, however, thinks this simile

misleading. When the vessel has been filled, you can get no more

enjoyment out of the process of " filling " it ; the enjoyment

(^80 vri) depends on the continuance of the flow. To get it, you

must always have room for " more " to flow in (4946). 2 (Callicles

thus assumes the psycho-physical theory according to which pleasure

is or accompanies the theory hardly distinguishes these alter-

natives the " filling-up " or making good of a process of " de-

pletion " in the organism, pain the process of " depletion " itself.

The doctrine is familiar to us from Plato's acceptance of it, so far

as the satisfaction of physical appetites are concerned, in the

Republic and Philebus, and Aristotle's vigorous polemic against it

in the Nicomachean Ethics. Plato rejects it, except for these cases,

and the rejection of it is the basis of the important distinction of the

Philebus between " pure " or " neat " and " mixed " pleasures.

It is taught more unreservedly by the Pythagorean Timaeus at

Tim. 6^a-6^b, and we see from Aristotle's polemic that it was fully

accepted by Speusippus and the extreme anti-Hedonists of the

Academy. Its origin is pretty clearly to be found in the medical

doctrine of Alcmaeon, according to which all disease is disturbance

of the state of iVovo/xtu ("constitutional balance") between the

hot, the cold, the moist, and the dry in the organism. The im-

mediate assumption of Callicles that rjSovrj and ir\rjp<D<ris may

1 Gorg. 498a-c. Note (i) that, as Burnet says, the allusion to the Italian

" sage " seems plainly meant for Philolaus or some contemporary Pytha-

gorean ; (2) that the unexplained mention of " the part of the soul in which

the iri0vfj.lai are " presupposes the doctrine of the " tripartite soul " more

fully explained in Rep. iv., which must thus be, as there is much in the

Republic itself to indicate, of Pythagorean origin, as Posidonius is known to

have asserted (Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy*, 278, n. 2). It is evidence of

the same thing that the doctrine is taught also in Plato by the Italian Pytha-

gorean Timaeus, who cannot be supposed to have learned it from Socrates

just before delivering his own discourse. (3) The tale of the cracked pitchers

is not connected by Plato with the Danaids. His version represents it as

describing the future destiny of the "uninitiated"; this suggests Orphic

Provenance.

1 Cf. Hobbes, Leviathan, c. xi. : " There is no such Finis ultimus (utmost

ay me) nor Summum Bonum (greatest Good) as is spoken of in the Books of

the old Morall Philosophers. Nor can a man any more live, whose Desires

are at an end, than he, whose Senses and Imaginations are at a stand. . . .

So that in the first place, I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a

perpetual! and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 121

be equated shows us that this doctrine was a commonplace in culti-

vated circles of the age of Socrates.)

Obviously, if happiness depends on such a process of unending

" filling-up," it demands a similarly unending process of " depletion/'

If water is always to be running into the pitcher, it must also be

always running out at the cracks. Would it then be intense happi-

ness to have a continual itch, provided one could go on endlessly

getting the gratification of chafing the itching place ? You must

admit this if you mean to be serious with the theory. 1 What is

more, the life of a catamite must be eminently happy, if he can only

get a perpetual series of satisfactions for his unnatural prurigo. For

all his " freedom from convention/' Callicles objects to this par-

ticular " transvaluation of values/' but you cannot avoid it so

long as you persist in identifying good with pleasant. To condemn

any kind of gratification, you must distinguish good from pleasant,

and this Callicles admits he cannot consistently do (4950).

We proceed next to consider the identification of good and bad

with pleasure and pain on its merits. Two difficulties occur to us

at the very outset, (a) Good and bad are " contraries " ; you

cannot predicate both at once of the same subject, nor can you

deny both at once. A man cannot have both predicates at once, nor

" get rid " of both at once. Pleasure and pain are not opposed in

this way. E.g., when a hungry man is satisfying his hunger by a

square meal, he feels at once the pleasure of appeasing the hunger

and the painfulness of the still unappeased hunger which urges

him to eat more. When his hunger is sated and he leaves off, the

pleasure and the pain are both at an end. But it is just at this

point, where both the pleasure and the pain are over, that the man

reaches the good to which eating ministers, the restoration of normal

equilibrium in his organism. 2 (b) Callicles himself makes a dis

tinction between " good " men and " bad " ones, the " good/ 1

according to him, being the intelligent and bold, the " bad " the

silly or timorous. He must hold, therefore, that good is " present

to " 8 the former and not to the latter. But he cannot deny that

fools and cowards feel pleasure and pain at least as keenly as the

1 Dante, it may be remembered, regards such a life as a torment for the

damned, and the worst of the damned (Inferno, xiv. 40, xv. 131, xxix. 76 ff.).

* The presupposed doctrine is that explained at length in the Philebus,

that the satisfactions of appetite attend on the process (ytvcerts) by which

a " depletion " of the organism is made good. Thus they are (a) preceded

by a painful consciousness of " want" (ft/Seta), and (6) are not, even while

they last, wholly pleasurable. Their piquancy and intensely exciting char-

acter depends on the tension between satisfied want and the persistence of

still unsatisfied want. This is why these pleasures are " mixed," not " neat "

3 Gorg. 4970, " We call good men good in virtue of the presence of good

things " to them (ayaO&v vapowtq.} . irapovvia has here precisely the sense

it bears when used in connexion with the forms in the Phaedo. The predicate

" good " is predicable of a certain man because he " has " goodness of some

kind or other, is " possessed of " good. On a Hedonist theory this means that

" X is good " always implies " X is enjoying pleasure," and it is this implica-

tion Socrates is calling in question.

122 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

intelligent and daring, if not more keenly, since cowards, for example,

seem to feel more distress in the face or the enemy and more delight

at their disappearance than brave men do. Thus there are empirical

objections to the identification of pleasure with good (4950-4996).

Callicles extricates himself for the moment in the only way

possible to a Hedonist in a " fix/' Like Mill, he declares it obvious

that " pleasures differ in quality" ; there are better pleasures and

worse pleasures, and it is unfair in Socrates, as Mill said it was in

his opponents, to neglect the distinction. For example, a pleasure

which contributes to bodily health is good, one which is detri-

mental to health is bad, and the same thing is true of pains. The

rule for choice is that we should choose the good pleasures and pains

and avoid the bad ones. In fact, Callicles is prepared to admit now

that pleasure is a means to good (5000). But the right selection

of pleasures will demand a " competent expert " ; not every one

can be trusted to make it.

We are thus brought face to face with the final problem raised

by our dialogue. Socrates and Callicles stand respectively for two

antithetical ideals in life, the one for the " life of philosophy," the

other for the " life of action " as followed by a man of affairs in the

Athenian democracy. The choice between these competing ideals

is the ultimate practical problem, and it is this issue which is to be

decided by the " competent judge." The distinction we have been

forced to make between the pleasant and the good shows that the

qualifications of the competent judge must not be based (as Mill

tries to base them) on an empirical acquaintance with the flavours

of pleasure (a thing of which the empiric understands neither the

character nor the cause, 5oi#), but on a true r^xvrj, which knows

about the good of the soul as medicine does about the good of the

body ; in fact, Socrates means, moral science is to prescribe the

soul's regimen as medicine prescribes the regimen of the body

Now there is certainly one class of " rhetoricians," i.e. practi-

tioners of the use of language to work on men's feelings and

imaginations, who are empirics of the type of the confectioner,

namely, the poets. Their standard is always simply the " taste "

of their public. They aim at pleasing this taste, and incidentally

gaining their own advantage by doing so, without troubling them-

selves in the least whether their productions will make any one a

better man. And what is poetry, when you divest it of the addition

of tune, rhythm, and metre, but rhetoric the effective use of

language ? Has the rhetoric of an Athenian politician any saner

basis ? Does the politician aim at the improvement of his public,

or merely at gratifying their moods (501^-5020) ? a

1 Thus Socrates disposes in advance of Mill's preposterous appeal to a

jury of pleasure-tasters devoid of all ethical preferences. From his point

of view, to consult judges with such a " qualification " about pleasures

would be like selecting medicines by the agreeableness of their tastes.

1 The whole indictment of poetry in the Republic is contained in principle

in what is said here about its character as a " mere mechanic " trick of pleasing

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 123

Callicles thinks that, though the suggestion of Socrates may be

true about some statesmen, there are others who really are guided

by regard for the good of their fellow-citizens. He could not say

so much for any living man of affairs, but it is true of the great

men of the past, from Themistocles to the recently dead Pericles.

They did make Athenians " better " by their careers. Socrates

will not admit this. Themistocles and the rest made Athens great,

if it is greatness to gratify all your cravings and passions, good and

bad alike. But the scientific practitioner in any department must

have an ideal before him into accord with which he sets himself to

bring the material on which he works, as, e.g., the physician has an

ideal standard of health which he tries to reproduce in his patients.

Has there ever been a statesman in Athens who, in the same way,

has had an ideal of character, " goodness of soul," and set himself

to promote it in the citizens ? The physician, unlike his counterfeit

the confectioner, aims at producing in a human body a definite

14 order and regulation " (rafts K<U KOO-/XOS) ; the statesman, if he

is more than a mere unprincipled empiric, should aim at doing the

same thing for the human soul. This is to say that his purpose

should be to produce " temperance and justice " (o-ox^poo-vvT/ *ca!

&iKaio<ruvrj) in the souls of his public. The object of a statesman

and orator secundum art em is the production of national character.

If the cTTiflv/buai of the citizens, the " national " aspirations and

ambitions, are unhealthy and evil, the public man who is not a mere

" toady " will aim at repressing them, and so making the national

soul " better " by " chastisement " (5056-0).

Callicles is so disgusted with this return of the argument to the

apparent paradox which had led to his intervention in the dis-

cussion, that Socrates is left to act as respondent to his own ques-

tions as he draws to his formal conclusion. Good is not the same

thing as pleasure ; it depends universally on " order and Tightness

and art" and shows itself in a condition of " regulation and orderli-

ness/ 1 This means that the temperate or " disciplined " soul is

the good soul, the " unchastened " (dKoAao-ros), " undisciplined"

soul is bad. The former acts " appropriately to the situation "

in all the situations of life, and consequently acts well, does well,

and is " happy " ; the latter, not meeting the situations of life with

the appropriate responses, is not merely bad but unhappy, especially

if it is not held in check by " chastisement." These are the

principles on which public no less than private conduct should be

organized ; the life of the " superman " or of the " superstate "

is simply that of a bandit, and a bandit has the hand of gods and

men against him. He does not know how to " communicate " or

" go shares " (Koivwclv) , but all social life depends on " communica-

and amusing. That poets aim merely at pleasing the taste of an audience,

good or bad, was a current view. Herodotus uses it (ii. 116) to explain why

Homer adopted a " false version " of the story of Helen, Euripides (H.F.

1341-6) to discredit the whole poetical mythology. In the flurcroi \6-yoi it

occurs more than once as an objection to the appeal to poets on questions of

morality that their standard is dfovd,

124 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

tion." Indeed the " wise " (the Pythagorean men of science) say

that " communication " or " reciprocity " (KOWWIO.) is the basis

not only of all human affections and moral virtues, but of the whole

physical order of heaven and earth. " Geometrical equality " is

the great law of the universe (5080), x and this is why the " wise "

call the universe KOO^OS, " the order of things." In setting up

TrAcop^ta, " going beyond the limit," as a principle for life, Callicles

has forgotten his geometry. But if these convictions are sound,

we must also admit Socrates' paradox that the best use an offender

can make of rhetoric is to ensure his own conviction. Callicles was

right in saying that Socrates' rule of life left him at the mercy

of an aggressor, but wrong in thinking the position " ugly."

The " ugliness " is not in the suffering but in the perpetrating of

aggression. To escape this conclusion you must show that the

principle that " wickedness is the greatest of evils to its possessor "

is false (5090).

To commit wrong, then, is the worst evil which can befall a man ;

to have to submit to it, though a lesser evil, is also an evil. In

neither case will the mere purpose to avoid the evil avail of itself

to secure its end. To avoid being wronged you also need " power "

or " strength." And, since we long ago agreed on the principle

that wrong-doing is " involuntary," a consequence of error, you

need to secure yourself against it by acquiring some " power

or TC'XVT/, organized knowledge" (5100). 2 If you want to avoid

being wronged, you must either DC an " autocrat " or a friend of

the sovereign body, whatever it may be (ercupos TIJS vTrapxovVijs

TroAiTa'as, 5100). In an autocracy this means that you must be

a " creature " of the autocrat ; in a democracy, like Athens, you

must make yourself a favourite with your " master " the populace,

and conform yourself to its moods and prejudices. In neither

case have you secured yourself against the greater evil of committing

wrong. On the contrary, to be a favourite with either autocrat

or populace you must sink to their moral level and sympathize

with their injustices. Callicles thinks this only sensible, for the

" leviathan " will kill you if you do not humour it. But this plea

rests on the assumption that life at any cost and on any terms is

supremely desirable, even at the cost of moral corruption. It

amounts to basing the high claims made for rhetoric on the view that

rhetoric is an art of saving your skin. No doubt it is ; the politician

is constantly saving his skin by his plausible speech. But swimming

} ycwptTpucri, i.e. proportion, " equality of ratio." It is called

so, in contradistinction to " arithmetical " or absolute " equality," because

of the part it plays in the geometry of " similar " figures. The " wise "

meant are the Pythagoreans who were the discoverers of the various elemen-

tary " progressions," or, as the Greeks called them, dvaXoylai, " proportions,"

and gave the name K<S<T/AOJ to what had before them been called ofyav6s.

For the thought we might compare Kant's insistence on the principle of

Gemeinschaft and reciprocal interconnexion in nature.

1 Cf. Ep. vi, 322^, where Plato recommends Erastus and Coriscus to the

" protection " of Hermias on much the grounds here spoken oi.

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 125

and seamanship save your skin too, and are not thought of supreme

moment for a gentleman's education. An ordinary skipper will

bring you, your family, and all your belongings safe from Egypt

or the Pontus, but he asks a very modest fare, and his calling is

thought a very humble one. And this is as it should be, for the

skipper has really done a man who is hopelessly diseased in body

or soul no real service ; it would be better for such a man to

go to the bottom (5110-5126). So an ordinary engineer may save

the lives of a whole community by the machines he builds, but a

man like Callicles regards the engineer as a " base mechanic "

and would not dream of intermarriage with his family. If mere

life is the highest good, why should not all these " mechanics "

advance the same claims which are put forward on behalf of

rhetoric ($i2c-d) ? The truth is that the important thing is not

to live long, but to live well ; is a man likely, or is he not, to attain

that end by conforming himself to the spirit and temper of the

community, e.g. of the Athenian 8171*09, as he must do if he means

to be a " public man " (5120-5 130) ?

" Impressive, but not convincing/' is the verdict of Callicles

on all this. Convincing or not, however, it is plain that if we aim

at a statesmanship which is more than successful " parasitism " l

(fcoAaiceta), a statesmanship which is a genuine art of " tendance of

our fellow-citizens/ 1 our chief problem will be to promote national

character ; it is no true service of the State to increase its wealth

or power, unless its citizens are fitted by their character to use

wealth or wield power 2 (5140). On the hypothesis, then, our

fitness for the statesman's calling depends on our possession of a

science (cTno-Tr//^) , in fact, on our knowledge of moral values. Now

an expert can establish his claim to be an expert in two ways : (a) by

pointing out the master from whom he has learned his knowledge, (b)

by pointing to the results in which his knowledge has been em-

bodied. If a man can satisfy neither of these tests, we cannot take

his claims to be an expert seriously. No one would give an appoint-

1 We might perhaps use a biological analogy to bring out better the full

meaning of the distinction between the *6\a and the genuine " craftsman "

which runs all through the dialogue. The ic6\a or " trencherman " of

social life lives, and lives, according to the vulgar estimate, well by living on

his patron (whom he really depraves by "pandering" to his vices), exactly

as the parasitical organism fattens itself on the tissues of its unfortunate

" host." So the empiric in statesmanship, the " opportunist," makes a

"good thing" for himself of depraving the national character and lowering

the national ideals. The best comment on the view Socrates takes of the

influence of the " orators " on national life is the humorous caricature of the

same thing in the scene of Aristophanes (Knights, 725 ff.) where the sausage-

seller and the Paphlagonian bid against each other for the lucrative post of

pimp-in-chief to Demus. Aristophanes and Socrates agree in their estimate

of the vvv iro\iTiKot.

2 Cf. the lesson, e.g., of the Euthydemus that wealth and power are good or

bad according as the " soul " which is to use them is good or bad. Note that

there is once more a tacit allusion to the apologue of the " three lives."

" Wealth " and " power " are the ends of the " body-loving " and " distinc-

tion-loving " lives respectively, ^irurr^i} the end of the " philosophic " life.

126 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

ment as a public physician to a candidate who could not prove

that he had effected any cures as a private practitioner. So an

aspirant to statesmanship may fairly be expected to satisfy us

that he has " in private practice " made the souls or characters

of his fellow-men better. How do the famous public men of Athens,

from Miltiades to Pericles, stand this test (515^) ? It is Socrates'

conviction that one and all fail under it. Pericles, as every one is

saying, made the Athenians worse, not better ; he made them

" idle, cowardly, talkative, and greedy " (5150). The best proof

of this is the notorious fact that at the end of his career, they actually

turned on him and found him guilty of embezzlement. 1 The con-

viction was, to be sure, iniquitous, but whose "tendance " of the

animal civis Atticus had taught it these iniquitous ways ? The

" tendance " of Pericles himself ($i6a-d). He made the animal

" wilder," and this disposes of his claim to be a statesman. The

same is true of Cimon and Miltiades : the very wrongs they ended

by suffering from the 8^05 prove that they too had made their

" cattle " worse by their treatment (516^-^). 2 None of these

famous men was even skilled in the spurious " parasitic " kind of

rhetoric for each of them ended by displeasing the common

patron (517*).

You may say that, after all, these must have been great men,

for their " public works " (e.g. the creation of the Athenian navy,

the building of the walls, docks, and the like) speak for them. And

this really proves that they were, so to say, good " domestics " or

" personal servants " of Demus ; they knew how to provide their

master with the things he desired. But what they did not know

and true statesmanship consists in knowing just this was how to

get him to desire what is really good (5i7&). 3 To call them states-

men is like calling a confectioner or a fancy baker a specialist in

hygiene and medicine ; it is to compare a subordinate "art,"

which makes things, with the master-art which " uses " them

aright (517^-5180). If a man made that confusion, his cooks and

confectioners would soon ruin his constitution, and he would lay

the blame for his want of wholesome appetite on the inferiority of

his present cook as compared with his old one. Callicles is making

1 5150, ravrl y&p tywye d:oi/a; KT\. Socrates means that this is the verdict

to be heard on all sides now that Pericles is dead and his dominance is at an

end. He would " hear " this, of course, from many quarters. It is, e.g., the

view of Aristophanes and apparently of the contemporary comic dramatists

generally. The statement that Pericles had made Athenians " lazy and

greedy " dt& rrjv tuff0o$oplai> refers, of course, to his establishment of the

dicasts' fjuvOfa. The picture of Philocleon and his friends in the Wasps is

an admirable illustration of the point.

* Socrates would have the Old Comedy on his side in what he says about

Pericles ; the point about Miltiades and Cimon is made to show that the heroes

of Aristophanes and the anti-Pericleans are in the same condemnation.

8 5 l 5t, ovd' 4y& \f/{y<*) TOVTOVS ws yc dia.K6vov? elvai 7r6\eo>s. Pericles and the rest

have no claim to be " physicians of the commonwealth," but they were com-

petent purveyors, major-domos, and butlers. So much Socrates will concede,

but no more.

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 127

precisely the same blunder. The real authors of the disorders of

the " body politic " were the " statesmen " of the past who ruined

the constitution of the public by filling it with " harbours and docks

and such stuff, without justice and temperance.' 1 When the

" cold fit " of the disorder arrives, the sufferer will lay the blame

for his disorder on Alcibiades, or perhaps Callicles himself, who are

at worst only minor contributors to the mischief. 1 When the public

turns and rends one of its leaders in this fashion, he usually com-

plains of its injustice. But the complaint is as ludicrous as that of

the sophists who profess to teach their pupils " goodness/' and then

accuse them of cheating them of their fees. The very complaint

shows that neither sophist nor politician can do what he professes

to do ; the one cannot make his pupils " good," the other cannot

promote the real good of the " people " (5176-5200). Of the two

pretenders, there is a certain advantage on the side of the sophist.

The art he caricatures, that of the legislator, is a nobler thing than

the art of the judge, as that of the physical trainer who keeps the

body fit is nobler than that of the physician who banishes disease.

If either pretender really believed in himself, he would exercise

his calling gratis ; a man who can make an individual or a people

" good " has no need to take precautions against ungrateful or

unfair treatment (^2oc-e). 2

What, then, did Callicles mean when he recommended Socrates

to take up " public life " ? Did he mean that Socrates should be a

physician to the public or merely a " toady " and " body-servant " ?

The truth is that Socrates himself is the only real statesman of his

time, for he is the only Athenian who aims in his use of speech not

at giving pleasure but at doing real good to those with whom he

speaks. He may very possibly be dragged into court as a " corrupter

of youth/' and if that should happen, his condemnation is certain,

for he would be the physician pleading against the confectioner

before a jury of children of whom he had already spoken. 3 But he

would die innocent of offence, and the dreadful thing is not to die,

but to enter the unseen world with a soul laden with guilt (5210-

5220).

1 This allusion to a possible turning of the STJ/AOS against Alcibiades seems

to make it clear that the supposed date of the conversation must at any rate

be well before the event which fulfilled the prophecy the scandal about the

" profanation of the mysteries " in 415. Observe the contempt expressed

by Callicles at 5200 for the professional " teachers of goodness." This is

strictly in keeping with his theories about the superman, since no one can

teach you to be a superman ; you have to be born one.

2 Is this an allusion to the anecdote told by later writers about Protagoras

and his defaulting pupil ? Or, more probably, is not the story to which

Plato alludes a contemporary jest into which the name of Protagoras was

worked before the time of Aristotle ?

8 We might at first be surprised to find Socrates at what seems to be an

early stage in his career contemplating the possibility of prosecution for

"corrupting the young." But we should compare Apoloey 9 i86ff., where

Socrates insists that the prejudice against him and his influence goes back

to the old caricatures of the comic poets, who charged him with useless

speculations and " making the worse argument appear the better."

128 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

The argument of the dialogue is now complete. We reach the

climax of the Socratic ethics of the " tendance of the soul " with

the declarations that statesmanship is nothing but the practice

of this same " art " on the large scale, that its indispensable basis

is knowledge of moral values, and that the apparent " mugwump "

Socrates is in fact the one man of his age and city who is leading the

real " active life," because he has himself, and tries to communicate

to every one else, a moral faith and moral ideals. He alone, in a

world of " opportunist " careerists, is doing work which will last,

because he alone is building on a rock. What makes the Gorgias

so important in spite of its longueurs, is that, more fully than any

other dialogue, and with an intenser ?ra0o?, it works oat the applica-

tion of the conception of " tendance of the soul " to the whole

complicated business of life. Formally, the conversation is pro-

longed for a few pages, to give Socrates the opportunity to drive

home the exceeding horror of sin by an imaginative myth of judg-

ment after death, the earliest in order of composition of Plato's

masterpieces in this kind. The basis of the story, in this case,

seems more strictly Orphic and less Pythagorean than in the com-

panion pictures of the Republic and Phaedo. The scenery, " the

meadow where the three ways meet," x the judges before whom

the dead appear, the original division of the universe into heaven,

earth, and the underworld, used as the motif for the tale, are all

familiar to us as features of the Orphic mythology. On the other

hand, nothing is said of the Pythagorean reincarnation which plays

so prominent a part in the eschatology of the Republic, Phaedo, and

Phaedms. This presumably means that that doctrine is no part of

the serious convictions of Socrates or Plato, and this may be why

Socrates expressly says at 5246 that he accepts the present account

of the judgment as true, without any warning, such as he gives

in the Phaedo, against pressing its details.

The main thought of the myth is the impossibility of escaping

the scrutiny of the eye of the divine judge. In the old days, men

were judged while still in the body, and the stains and sores of the

soul often escaped notice, especially when the party to be judged

was a great man, who appeared with all the splendours of external

pomp and circumstance. To prevent such mistakes, the judgment

has now been placed after death, that the soul may appear at the

tribunal naked, without the " tunic " of the body. This ensures

that its destiny shall be decided by its worth, not by the station it

has held on earth. We shall find Plato preaching the same doctrine

of a divine judgment which neglects nothing and can make no

1 The three ways are the roads which lead (a) from earth to " the meadow,"

(6) from the meadow to heaven, (c] from the meadow to hell. As usual, hell

is depicted in the main as a purgatory for the not wholly depraved. A few

incurables are detained there permanently as a warning to others, but these

are chiefly " supermen " of the Napoleonic type. Ordinary human weakness

is regarded as curable." Not all "statesmen " take the road to destruction.

Aristides " the just " is instanced as an example of a man who filled high

office nobly and went " straight to heaven " (5266).

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 129

error, in the tenth book of the Laws, without any mythology at all.

In the Gorgias, the point to notice is the tone of earnestness with

which Socrates is made to profess the doctrine as his own personal

faith. This representation is quite incompatible with the singular

view that " the historic Socrates " was an agnostic on the problem

of immortality. If Plato misrepresented his master in the matter,

the misrepresentation did not begin with the Phaedo. He must

have ended the Gorgias with a deliberate mystification. 1

The Meno. There are points of contact between the Meno and

the Gorgias which make it convenient to consider them together,

though the main purpose of the Meno connects it rather with two

more mature dialogues, the Phaedo and the Protagoras, as well as

with the Apology. The dramatic setting of the dialogue is of the

simplest. It is a conversation between Socrates and the young

Thessalian Meno, who is attended by at least one slave, broken by

an interlude which brings on the scene the prominent politician

Anytus, afterwards the instigator of the proceedings against

Socrates. Where the conversation takes place we are not told,

except that it is, of course, somewhere in Athens. The dramatic

date can be readily fixed by reference to the facts about Meno

recorded in Xenophon's Anabasis. Meno joined the expedition

of Cyrus the younger against his brother Artaxerxes II at Colossae

in the middle of March 401 B.C. (Anab. i. 2, 6), rendered the im-

portant service of being the first of the Greek adventurers to declare

for Cyrus openly when the army had reached the Euphrates and

its real objective became clear (ibid. i. 4, 13), and was present with

1 I may here append a very brief statement about the conclusion which

seems to me safest on the question of the dramatic date of the dialogue. As

I have said, 1 think the tone of the reference to a possible revulsion of feeling

against Alcibiades excludes any date later than about 416. The main

difficulty to set against this conclusion is the free use made by both Callicles

and Socrates of the Antiope of Euripides, which is assumed to be a familiar

and popular work. The scholiast on Aristophanes' Frogs 53 refers to the play

as " recently produced " at the time of production of the Frogs (405 B.C.), and

implies that it was a later work than the Andromeda (produced in 412 along

with the Helena, both of which are burlesqued by Aristophanes in the Thesmo-

phoriazusae, a play of the year 411). Unless Plato has forgotten the real

date of a play of which he probably saw the first performance, there must be

some error in the scholiast's reckoning. The references to the actual state of

affairs throughout the dialogue suggest that Pericles has not yet found a

successor recognized as such by admirers like Callicles. The picture of the

power actually wielded by the " orators " seems to me so completely in

keeping with the tone of Aristophanes' Knights and Wasps, that I would

suggest that the most suitable date is during the career of Cleon, somewhere

about 424-422, or at most a little later. As the demagogues had been able

to disgrace Pericles at the end of his life, 427 would be a possible date, but I

think rather less likely. We need not suppose that Gorgias is in Athens for

the first time, or that he only came there once. Andron, the best known of

the associates of Callicles, is specially connected for us with the events of

411-410 ; he had been a member of the " four hundred," but, like Critias,

took a prominent part in the overthrow of that body, being the proposer of

the psephism which " attainted " its leading spirit, the orator Antiphon.

But in the Gorgias, no doubt, we are to think of him as, like Callicles, only

just beginning his career.

180 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

the others at the battle of Cunaxa. The rivalry between Clearchus

and Meno, after the battle, led directly to the capture of the prin-

cipal Greek leaders by Tissaphcrnes and the death of Clearchus

(ibid. ii. 5, 27 ff.). Meno, with the rest, was sent a prisoner to the

Persian court, where he was executed after a year's confinement

(ibid. ii. 6, 29). Xenophon, who was a fervid admirer of the stupid

and brutal Clearchus, gives Meno the worst of characters. One

may discount a great deal of this, but the general impression that

the man was a spoilt and petulant boy, only half civilized, is borne

out by Plato's dialogue. Xenophon does not mention Meno's age

at death, but implies that he was still a mere lad (crt u>/><uos, he says)

when he was put in charge of the 1500 men he brought to the

expedition. Hence we shall hardly be far wrong if we suppose his

presence in Athens to be connected with the forthcoming enterprise.

This means that we must date it not long before his arrival in

Colossae. We must thus think of Socrates as an old man, within

two or three years of seventy, and of the conversation as taking

place after the restoration of the democracy in 403, when Anytus

was one of the two or three most powerful and respected public men.

The Meno then, anlike any of the dialogues we have so far con-

sidered, is dated at a time which would be compatible with sup-

posing Plato to have been actually present at the conversation

and to be describing it from his own recollections. 1 The dialogue

opens with an abruptness hardly to be paralleled elsewhere in the

genuine work of Plato by the direct propounding of a theme for

discussion ; there are not even the ordinary formalities of salutation.

May we argue that this indicates that its composition belongs to

the very earliest years of Plato's literary activity ? This would be

an important consideration, since, as no one denies, the whole

characteristic metaphysics of the Phaedo, the theory of forms and

the doctrine of " reminiscence/' are explicitly taught in the Meno.

In any case there ought to be no doubt that the Meno is a cruder

and earlier work than either of the two great dramatic dialogues

with which it is most intimately connected, the Phaedo and the

Protagoras, and this of itself would be enough to prove that the

Phaedo is not, as has been supposed, a first publication of an im-

portant philosophical discovery.

The question raised by .Meno (700) is one directly suggested

by the activity of Protagoras and the other " teachers of goodness "

Can " goodness " be taught, or, if not, can it be acquired

1 The only other " Socratic " discourses for which this would be possible,

so far as I can see, are the Apology (where Plato mentions his own presence).

Theaetetus and Euthyphro, (?) Philebus. It would consequently be possible

for the Sophistes and Politicus also, though the fiction by which the Theaetetus,

with which these dialogues are especially connected, is represented as read

from notes made by Euclides is probably intended to suggest that Plato is

not a Kw<f>&v vptowTrov in these discourses. These facts suggest that, except

in the case of the Apology, Plato means us to think of himself as absent even

in the one or two instances when he might, so far as date goes, have been

present : his intention is to suppress his own personality altogether.

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 131

by " practice " is it do-K^roV ? If it can be acquired neither by

instruction nor by practice, is it " naturally " inborn, or how do

we come by it ? This is just the point at issue between the

champions of vd/xos and the partisans of <vW in the time of

Socrates. (For the Socratic answer to the problem we need to go

partly to the Protagoras, still more to the elaborate account of the

training proposed for the " auxiliaries " and the " philosopher

kings " of the Republic. Plato's own final position has to be learned

from the educational sections of the Laws. At present it will be

enough simply to state summarily the results reached in the Re-

public. There is no formal discussion of the problem in the dialogue,

but the solution of it is given implicitly in the educational pro-

gramme laid down in the course of books iii.-vii. Socrates' solution

there depends on a distinguo. There are two distinct levels of

" goodness/' one which will be sufficient for the ordinary good

citizen and even for the " auxiliaries/' the executive force of society,

and a higher, indispensable to the statesmen who have to direct

the whole of the national life and determine its standard. For those

whose business in life is to obey rules based on the ideals of the true

statesman, all that is necessary is a discipline in absolute loyalty

to the traditions in which the ideals are embodied, and this dis-

cipline is secured by the moulding of temper, taste, and imagina-

tions described in Republic iii.-iv. Such an education, however, does

not result in personal insight, but at best in loyalty to a noble rule

of life taken on trust. The " goodness " of the classes who are

" under authority " is thus not ^aOrjrov but dovo/ToV, a result

not of enlightenment but of discipline. But in the statesman who

has to create the national tradition, something more is needed.

He must know, as a matter of personal insight, what the true moral

" values " are. The statesman is therefore required to possess a

" philosophic " goodness, based on direct personal insight into the

structure of the universe and man's place in that structure. Such

insight can only be won by the mind which has been trained in

arduous scientific thinking for itself, and is therefore " knowledge,"

and, like all knowledge, comes by "teaching"; but this teaching

is no mere communication of " results." A man is not made a

thinker of the first order by any imparting of " information," but

by stimulating in him the power and the ambition to think for

himself. This is why the one effective method of teaching in philo-

sophy and science is the association of an older and a younger mind

in the prosecution of an " original research.")

To return to the Meno. Meno's question, flung out in an airy

way as though it could be disposed of in a sentence, cannot really

be answered without facing one still more fundamental. We cannot

expect to know how " goodness " is produced until we know what

it is. And this is more than anyone at Athens, and most of all

Socrates, professes to know. We are thus brought back to the

problem of definition which has met us already in other dialogues

(jic-d). According to Meno, this problem is no real problem at

182 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

all. Gorgias could have told Socrates what goodness is, or, if

Socrates has forgotten what Gorgias has to say, Meno, whose

admirer Aristippus had been a patron of Gorgias, can remind him.

There are a variety of " goodnesses " (dperai). The goodness of a

man is to have capacity for public affairs, to be a valuable ally and

a dangerous enemy, and to know how to hold his own ; that of a

woman is to look after " the home " and to obey her husband ; and

there are yet other goodnesses appropriate to a child, an elderly

man, a slave, and so forth. In fact, every age of life and every

social station has its own peculiar goodness (720). (Thus we have

once more the confusion of definition with enumeration.) These

commonplaces, however, do not answer our question. We want

to know what the oucr/a, or essentia of " goodness " is, and this

must be something in respect of which the " goodnesses " of male and

female, old and young, bond and free, do not differ, a " single

identical pattern " (cv ci^os, 720), in virtue of which the common

name apcrr/ is bestowed. 1 Consider the analogy of health or

strength. One might say, as Meno has done, that there is " health

in a man " and " health in a woman," " manly strength " and

" womanly strength/' and that they have their differences. And

Meno himself must admit that " in respect of being health " or

" in respect of being strength " masculine health and strength

do not differ from feminine. 2 There is a single " pattern " of

health (cV Travraxotf cTSo?) in all healthy beings, and similarly

with strength. So, since we can speak of a good man and of a good

woman, there must be some one " pattern " of goodness in man

and woman, young and old. (In the language of to-day, " good-

ness " must be a determinable, of which the " goodness of a man/ 1

the " goodness of a woman/' and the rest are the determinants.)

We may note that this position, which arises at once from the

application of the theory of forms to human conduct, is of first-

1 The " something which is the same in all cases " and justifies the use of a

common name is successively spoken of as ova-La (what the thing is, its

quid) (726), as a single eTSos, pattern (720, d, e), as something which " pervades "

all the cases, 5tA tr^vrtav &rr/j> (740), is the same " over them all," M iraa-i raMr

(750). All these are names for the objective reality indicated by the employ-

ment of a common predicate of many subjects, and the abundance of them

presupposes the existence of an already rather elaborate logical doctrine

founded on the metaphysics of forms. Linguistically, ovvia is the most

interesting of them, since in this sense it is a loan-word from Ionic science ;

the only familiar meaning in the Attic of the fifth century was the legal one,

"estate," "property, personal or real." On the probability that the philo-

sophical meaning of the word comes from the Pythagoreans, see Burnet's note

on Euthyphro, loa 7. As to e?5os, criticism has not shaken my conviction

that its philosophical use is a development from its source in Pythagorean

mathematics "regular figure."

2 That in a sense there is male health and female health is clear from the

simple fact that there are professors of and treatises on gynaecology. But

the eI5os of health, namely, that it is "equilibrium in the constituents of the

organism," holds good for both sexes. 'Ihe thesis that the " goodness " of a

woman is the same as that of a man was ascribed to Socrates also by Aeschines

in his Aspasia, and is thus a genuine tenet of the Socratic ethics (cf. Burnet,

art. SOCRATBS, in Encyclopaedia oj Religion and Ethics, xi. 667).

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 133

rate importance for both logic and ethics. In logic it means that

there is no third alternative between realism and nominalism. A

universal, unambiguously employed, signifies something or it does

not. If it signifies anything, that something is not an arbitrary

fiction of my mind ; if it signifies nothing, there is an end of all

science. Science stands or falls with " objective reference." l

In ethics the doctrine means that there really is one moral standard

for all of us, male or female, Greek or barbarian, bond or free.

There really is one " eternal and immutable " morality, not a

variety of independent moral standards, one perhaps for the

" private man " and another for the " nation " or its politicians,

or one for " the herd " and another for the " superman." The

particular application of this conviction to the case of man and

woman is shown to be genuinely Socratic by the fact that it not

only appears in Republic v. as the principle on which Socrates

justifies the participation of women in public life, but is also

implied in the fragments of the Aspasia of Aeschines as his reason

for asserting the capacity of women for the tasks of war and

statesmanship. 2

Meno is inclined at first to deny the position. But he has to

admit that both what he regards as man's work and what he calls

woman's work are only well done if they are performed with

sophrosyne and justice, and similarly that wilfulness (uKoAacria) and

unfairness are faults alike in children and in elderly men. Thus

sophrosyne and justice emerge as characteristic of human goodness,

irrespective of age, sex, or status. There is then such a thing as a

" goodness in virtue of which all human beings are good " ; can

Meno remember what Gorgias supposed this goodness to be ? He

suggests that it may be " capacity to command " (f>xcu> olov T cTvai

ruv avBpuirw, 73^). But what then about a child or a slave

(who, of course, show their " goodness " not by giving orders, but

by obeying them) ? And again, one may give unjust commands,

and this can hardly be goodness, since it is not disputed by Meno

that justice is a virtue and injustice a vice. We must at least

qualify the statement by saying that goodness in man is the capacity

1 We could not meet the argument by falling back on Aristotle's well-

known doctrine of the " analogous " employment of universals. True as

that doctrine is, it remains also true that in its strict and primary (Ktipiov)

sense the universal can still be asserted of a plurality of subjects, and to be

significant must be asserted of each and all of them in the same sense. Thus,

even if it be granted, that there is no one common " goodness " of all things,

e.g. that there is no more than an analogy between the goodness of a good

razor and that of a good man, the Aristotelian ethics is based on the view that

there is a " human goodness " which is one and the same for all men ; there

is not one goodness of Peter and a different and merely analogous goodness of

Paul. Peter and Paul have to be pronounced good or bad by the same

standard. Aristotle's attempt in the Politics to justify the conventional pre-

judice which sets up a different moral standard for the two sexes amounts to

a denial of the moral unity of humanity, and contradicts the very principles

on which his own ethics are constructed.

1 See the collection of these fragments in H. Dittmar's Aeschines von

SpheUos.

134 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

to command justly (73d). This at once raises the question whether

commanding justly is goodness or only ap^rrj ns, one form of

goodness ; in fact, in the language of a more developed logic, whether

we are not confusing a genus with one of its own species. We may

illustrate the confusion by a simple example. It would be false

to say that " circularity is figure " (o-x^tu), though true to say

that it is one figure among others (732). There are other figures

besides circles, and Meno admits that there are " many " forms of

goodness besides justice. Our attempt at definition has failed ;

like the original enumeration, it has left us with many goodnesses

instead of one (746).

Perhaps we may get a hint of the kind of statement we really

want if we go back to our illustration of the circle. There are

many figures (o^/mra) of which the circle is only one, just as there

are many colours, of which, e.g., white is one among others. But we

might try to define figure in a way which would express what is

common to all figures, by saying, for example, that " figure is the one

thing which always accompanies colour/' " the sole inseparable con-

comitant of colour " (o p,6vov ru)j> OVTCOI/ rvy^ai/ct ^pupaTi act CTTO/XCVOV,

750). It is true, as Meno remarks, that such a " definition "

would involve the undefined term " colour." A pugnacious eristic

would ignore this criticism ; he would retort that he had done

his part in giving his own definition and that any amendment

of it was the business of his antagonist. But we are not disputing

for victory, and Socrates is ready to meet the criticism by attempting

a better definition. Meno will admit that he knows what mathe-

maticians mean by a " boundary " ; if we say then that " figure is

the boundary of a solid " (o-reptov ircpa?), the statement will hold

good universally and exclusively, and not be open to the criticism

that it introduces a second " unknown " (760).

Meno should now attempt a similar definition of goodness, but

irrelevantly insists that Socrates shall go on to define colour. This,

as Socrates says, is the mere whim of a capricious " beauty/' but

he will comply with it. Meno at any rate will be satisfied by a

definition based on the doctrine of Gorgias, which is derived from

the " efflux " theory of Empedocles. 1 Assuming this theory, we

may say that colour is "an efflux from surfaces which fits into the

passages of the visual apparatus and is sensible " (aTroppoy o-^/xarwv

6\l/i <rv/A/xTpos KCU cuo^Tos, j6d) , a definition which Meno thinks

1 For the Empedoclean theory of the part played by these " effluxes "

and the " passages '' in the sense-organs into which they fit, see Theophrastus

de Sensu, 7-9, and the criticism of Aristotle de General. A 324^ 25^., de Sensu t

4376 23ff., with the striking fragment 84 of Empedocles, quoted by Aristotle,

de Sensu, 4376 26 [R.P. 1776, c] ; Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy 8 , 246-249.

The definition is based on the Empedoclean theory because Gorgias, as a

Sicilian, is assumed to be in accord with the biological views of the founder of

Sicilian medicine. Quintilian iii. i, 8 [R.P. 232] gives it as the " tradition "

that Gorgias had originally been a " disciple " of E. Cf. D.L. viii. 58-59.

In the Timaeus Plato makes his spokesman, who is represented as holding the

principles of the Sicilian medicine, give the same account of colours. (Tim.

SOCRAT1C DIALOGUES 185

admirable, though Socrates calls it " stagy " and says it is inferior

to that just given of figure. 1

Meno at last makes an attempt at the definition of goodness.

It is " to desire the fine things and to be able to secure them "

(iinOv^ovvTa TWV KaA.o)i> Swarov slvai 7roptcr#ai, 776). But the State-

ment is doubly open to criticism, (a) It implies that it is possible

to desire what is not " fine," that is, to " desire evil." But, in fact,

no one can or does desire what he knows to be evil, for that

would be equivalent to the impossibility of desiring to be unhappy

(770-786). The first clause of Meno's definition is thus superfluous,

and it reduces to the statement that goodness is " ability to secure

goods." (b) By " goods " he means, as he explains, such things as

wealth, health, and high civic and social distinction (the ends, be

it noted, of the " body-loving " and " distinction-loving " lives).

But we cannot call ability to get these things by any means, fair

or foul, goodness ; it would be truer to say that the virtuous man

is /ncapable of gaining fortune or position by foul means. So we

have to introduce the qualification that goodness is capacity to

secure good things " by righteous " or " honest " means, or some-

thing to that effect. Now righteousness, honesty, or whatever

other qualifications we introduce, have already been admitted to

be " parts " of goodness, so that we are in effect saying that good-

ness or virtue is attaining certain ends by the practice of some

specific virtue (i.e. we introduce one or more of the determinants

of a given determinable into a proposed definition of that deter-

minable itself, and thus commit a vicious "circle," 7?b~7ge).

We are thus no nearer to a satisfactory definition than we were

before.

Meno is half inclined to lay the blame for the collapse of the

argument on Socrates, who, he says, has the reputation of always

being bepuzzled himself and communicating his bewilderment to

others. He benumbs men's wits as the fish called vdpicrj benumbs

their muscles if they touch it. In any other company Meno would

have plenty to say about " goodness," but in the presence of

Socrates he is " paralysed." In any foreign city Socrates would

run a real risk of being arrested for sorcery. Socrates has to admit

the accusation, with the reservation that the comparison with the

vdpKr} is only apt on the assumption that the creature itself is as

" numb " as its victims. The difficulties his conversation creates

in others are only the reflection of those he finds in his own thinking.

But if Meno will adventure on the definition of " goodness " over

again, he will do his best to examine the new result (80 a-d). At

this point Meno again tries to run off on an irrelevant issue. He

brings up the " sophistic " puzzle which we have already met in

1 Why does Socrates prefer the definition of figure to that of colour ?

Presumably because the second implies a detailed physical and physiological

speculation which is highly problematic ; the other presupposes only the

principles of geometry, and geometry is an indubitable " science." The

definition of colour is rpayuc/i, " stagy," because it makes a show with grand

words which are only a cover for imprecision and uncertainty.

136 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

the Euthydemus, that " inquiry " is impossible because you cannot

inquire after something you already know, nor yet after what you

do not know (since, in the second case, you would not even recog-

nize the object you were looking for, if you should succeed in finding

it). This dilemma, however, would cease to be a difficulty if there

should be truth in a doctrine which Socrates has learned from

" priests and priestesses who have been at the pains to understand

their professional duties " and also from Pindar and other poets.

The doctrine is that our soul is immortal and our present life only

one episode in its history. If this is so, the soul must long ago

have "learned" everything, and only needs to be "put in mind "

of something it has temporarily forgotten in order to regain its

knowledge by diligent following of the clue provided by " re-

miniscence." Learning, in fact, is just a process of " re-call "

(d^a/xv^o-ts) , and for this reason the sophistic argument to show

that it is impossible to learn a new truth is a mere appeal to mental

indolence (Soe-S2a). (As we are encountering the doctrine of

" recollection " for the first time, it is worth while to note what the

exact point of it is. It must be observed that it is not a theory of

" innate ideas," or " innate knowledge," in the popular sense of the

words. We are not supposed to bring any actual knowledge into

the world ready-made with us. On the contrary, we are said to

" have learned " truth but to have lost it again, and we have to

recover what we have lost. The recovery requires a real and

prolonged effort of steady thinking ; what " recollection," or more

accurately " being reminded," does for us is to provide the starting-

point for this effort. In the Phaedo, this is illustrated by the

way in which chance " associations " will start a train of thinking,

as when the sight of an absent friend's belongings or his portrait

sets us thinking of the friend himself. The main emphasis thus

falls not on the Orphic doctrine of pre-existence and re-incarnation,

which Socrates professes to have learned from poets and priests,

but on the function of sense-experience as suggestive of and pregnant

with truths of an intelligible order which it does not itself adequately

embody or establish. And the philosophical importance of the

doctrine is not that it proves the immortality of the soul, 1 but that

it shows that the acquisition of knowledge is not a matter of pas-

sively receiving " instruction," but one of following up a personal

effort of thinking once started by an arresting sense-experience.

But for this " suggestiveness " of sense-experience the ignava ratio

of the eristic, " you cannot learn the truth from any teacher, because

unless you know it already, you will not recognize it for the truth

when he utters it," would be valid. We see, then, why both

Socrates and Plato hold that " knowledge " can only be won by

1 In the Phaedo itself the argument is found insufficient to meet the

formidable difficulty raised by Cebes that even if pre-existence is true,

it gives us no guarantee that we shall continue to be after the dissolu-

tion of our present body. For the illustrations from " association," see

Phaedo, 73$ fi.

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 137

personal participation in " research " ; it cannot simply be handed

on from one man to another. 1

An illustration of the principle that " learning " is really " being

reminded of something/' i.e. is the following up by personal effort

of the suggestions of sense-experience, may now be given. Socrates

calls forward the lad who is attending on Meno, after satisfying

himself that the boy can understand a question in plain Greek, but

has never been taught any mathematics, and undertakes to show

how he can be brought to see geometrical truths for himself by

merely asking appropriate questions which enable the answerer

to correct his own first hasty thoughts. The point to be estab-

lished is that the areas of squares are proportional to the second

powers of the lengths of their sides, and in particular that the area

of a square described on the diagonal of one previously described

is double the area of the original figure. 2 We are to think of

Socrates, of course, as drawing the requisite figure, which will be

found in any commentary on the Meno, in the sand as he speaks.

The boy's first thought is that if we want to make a square with

twice the area of a given one, we must make its sides twice as long.

(That is, he argues, " since 2 2 =2 x 2, 4 2 =2 x 4.) He is easily made

to see for himself that this cannot be true (since 4x4=16), and

amends his first answer by suggesting that the side of the second

square should be to that of the first as 3 to 2 (i.e. he suggests that

3 2 =8). Again it is easy to get him to see that this is impossible

(since 3 x 3 =9). The length of the line we require must be greater

than that of our original line, but less than half as great again

U/2 >!<!). And with a few more questions, the lad is led to

see that the line we require as the base of our second square is no

other than the diagonal of our original figure (826-856) . 3 The

point insisted on is that the lad starts with a false proposition, is

led to replace it by one less erroneous, and finally by one which, so

far as it goes, is true. Yet Socrates has " told " him nothing. He

has merely drawn diagrams which suggest the right answers to a

series of questions. The only " information " he has imparted to

the slave is that a certain line is technically called by " the sophists,"

i.e. " professionals/' a " diagonal." Everything else has been left

to the boy to think out for himself in response to the suggestions

provided by Socrates' diagrams and questions. Yet undeniably

1 See the language on this point of Plato, Ep. vii. 34 ic. Perhaps I may

refer to the statement of the theory in my little volume, Platonism and its

Influence (Boston, U.S.A., 1925) c. 2, as well as to Burnet, Greek Philosophy,

Part I., pp. 220-222.

1 The particular theorem is chosen, no doubt, because of the importance

of the " side and diagonal " as the most elementary instance of a pair of " in*

commensurable " magnitudes.

8 Thus, to put it arithmetically, what has been proved is that ^/2 lies some-

where between i and 1-5. In the famous passage Rep. 5466 ff. it is made

clear that Socrates, in fact, knows quite well how to construct the whole series

of fractions which form the " successive convergents " to /^/2. For his

purpose here it is enough to consider the " second convergent," |, and to

show that this is too large a value.

138 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

the lad began by not knowing something and ended by knowing it.

Thus he " brought up the knowledge from within " (avaXaftw

avros e avrov TYJV eTrtorr^ryv) , and such a process is " being re-

minded," " recalling " something. We infer then that the slave

once " had " the knowledge he had forgotten, and since he has

never in this life been " taught " geometry, the " once " must have

been " before he was a man, 1 ' l and thus we see that the soul is

immortal. (Socrates, however, hastens to remark that he would

not care to be too confident about anything in the theory except

the main point that it proves that we can arrive at truth and thus

saves us from the sloth and self-neglect which are natural conse-

quences of the eristic ignava ratio (86ft). 2 )

We have wandered away far from our original question about

the teachability of goodness, and Meno is anxious to have that

answered without further digression. The humour of the situation

is that this is impossible. We cannot really expect to know whether

goodness or anything else can be taught unless we first know what

the thing in question is, as we have admitted that we do not. But

we may give a tentative and provisional answer to the question

* v7ro0o-G>s, subject to an initial postulate, sous condition. Only

we must make another digression to explain what we mean by

this restriction. If you ask a geometer whether a certain problem

is soluble, he may often have to say that he does not know whether

the problem has a perfectly general solution or not, but that he can

give a solution for it, subject to a specified restriction. This is

illustrated for us by the example of a problem about the inscription

of a triangle of given area in a circle of given diameter. The geo-

meter may be unable to say whether the inscription can be effected

unless the data are further specified by some restricting condition.

He will then answer that " I cannot solve your problem as it

stands, but if the area in question satisfies the condition X, the

inscription is possible." 3 So we, in our present state of uncertainty

1 The same way of speaking about our ante-natal condition as the " time

when we were not yet men " is characteristic of the Phaedo. It implies that

the true self is not, as is commonly thought, the embodied soul, but the soul

sitnpliciter, the body being the instrument (tpyavw) which the soul " uses,"

and the consequent definition of " man " as a " soul using a body as its instru-

ment." Since that which " uses " an implement is always superior to the

implement it uses, this definition merely embodies the Socratic conviction

that the soul is the thing of supreme value in us.

* The caution should not be understood to mean that Socrates doubts the

fact of immortality. His firm belief in that is the assumption of the Phaedo

and is really presupposed by Apolog. 40^-410. He means, as he says, that he

wiJl not go bail for the Xyos ; it is not really a complete demonstration of

pre-existence and immortality, as is frankly admitted in the Phaedo, though, no

doubt, it suggests their possibility. The real reason why Socrates attaches so

much importance to the doctrine of " reminiscence " (di/d/uo/tm) is independent

of the use of it as an argument for " survival." One should be careful to

bear in mind that dpd/xiojcris does not properly mean in the theory " remember-

ing," but " being reminded of " something. Sensible experiences are always

" suggesting " to us " ideal " standards which none of them actually exhibit.

3 The precise character of the restriction imposed by the geometer in

Socrates' illustration has been a matter of much dispute, which is due partly

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 139

about the true character of goodness, can only answer Meno's ques-

tion sous condition If goodness is knowledge, then it is something

which can be taught, i.e. according to the theory of learning we

have just laid down, something which can be " recalled to mind "

(dvajjivrjGrTov, 8jb) \ if goodness is anything other than knowledge,

it cannot be taught. (We now see the real purpose of the introduc-

tion of the doctrine of dva^i/^a-ts. The object is to show that though

the " teachability " of goodness is a direct consequence of the

Socratic principle that " goodness is knowledge," Socrates does not

mean, as some of the " sophists " seem to have done, that a man

can become good by any mere passive listening to the " instruc-

tions " of a lecturer, since no knowledge whatever is acquired in this

way ; all " learning " is an active response of personal thought and

effort to the " hints " derived from a more mature fellow-learner.)

Goodness, then, can be taught, if goodness is knowledge and not

otherwise, and we are thrown back on the antecedent question

whether goodness is or is not knowledge. (Thus we conform to the

rule of order laid down at Phaedo wic-e. We first consider what

are the " consequences," o-v/x/Jai'vovra, of a " postulate " ; only

when we are clear on this preliminary question do we go on to ask

whether the " postulate " itself can be " justified.") To answer

our new question, we have again to start with an unproved " postu-

late," the V7r69c<ri<> that apcrr} is a good thing. (No question arises

of a " justification " of this inroOtans, because both Socrates and

Meno accept it as common ground ; it is an i/cavoi/ T t such as is

spoken of in the passage of the Phaedo about logical method.) It

follows at once that if knowledge is the only good, " goodness " or

" virtue " (aptrrj) must be knowledge ; if there are other goods

besides knowledge, it is possible that apT-j may be one of these other

goods (87^). Thus we find ourselves driven in the end to face the

ultimate question whether knowledge is not the only good, or at any

rate an indispensable constituent of all good. This question is now

treated in the way already familiar to us. Whatever is good is

" beneficial " (ox^cXi/xdv), i.e. does us good. Now the commonly

recognized goods are such things as health, physical strength,

comeliness, and we may add, wealth. But none of these is " un-

conditionally " good ; all may " harm " their possessor ; they

benefit him when they are rightly used but harm him when they are

misused. So with the commonly recognized good characters of

the " soul," of which Socrates proceeds to give a list. Courage,

in the popular sense, covers " daring " or " venturesomeness "

(Oappos) of every kind. But though venturesomeness combined

with sound sense (vofc) is beneficial, senseless daring is harmful to

its possessor, and the same thing is true of o-axfrpoa-vvr}, " appetitive

coldness," retentive memory, and qualities of soul generally. To

to uncertainty about the technical terminology of geometers in the fifth

century. For our purpose it is sufficient to grasp the main point that there

are such restrictions. It is, e.g., obvious that some restricting condition must

connect the area of the given triangle with the radius of the given circle.

For a correct solution see A. S. L. Farquharson in C.Q., xvii. i (Jan. 1923).

140 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

be beneficial, they must be accompanied by intelligence or under-

standing (^poFTyo-ts) ; they, too, are harmful when misused. We

infer, then, that the goodness of all other good things is conditional on

the " goodness of soul " of the possessor, and this again conditional

on his intelligence (foovrjo-is). It follows that intelligence, or some

specific form of intelligence (TJTOI a-v^nao-a r) juc'pos rt), is identical

with " goodness," and therefore that " men are not good by

nature/ 1 i.e. goodness is not a matter of congenital endowment (as

Callicles maintains in the Gorgias for example, Sjd-Sqa). 1

This last inference admits at once of empirical verification, for

if goodness were congenital endowment, we could detect its presence

in early life, and so we could secure a succession of true statesmen

by merely selecting the properly endowed natures in early life and

bringing them up " under guard/ 1 carefully isolated from all

risks of contamination. 2 Yet, on second thoughts, we may see

reason to distrust our identification of goodness with knowledge.

If it were knowledge, surely there would be professional teachers

of it and they would have " pupils." But there does not appear

to be any such " profession." It is lucky for us that Anytus has

just taken a seat by our side at this point of the conversation. He

is the son of a worthy citizen who made a fortune by steady intelli-

gence and industry ; the popular judgment is clearly that he has

had an excellent early training and education, as is shown by his

repeated election to high offices. His opinion on the question

whether there are " teachers of goodness " ought therefore to be

highly valuable (Sgb-qob).

(Why does Plato introduce Anytus at this particular point ?

Note that he is not supposed to have heard the preceding discussion,

which he would have been quite incapable of appreciating. He

comes up to the bench on which Socrates and Meno are sitting,

and joins them just in the nick of time, as they are beginning to

consider the problem about the professional teachers of goodness.

Nor is there any appearance of " irony " in what is said about him ;

unlike Xenophon, Plato never suggests that Anytus had any dis-

creditable private motives for supporting the prosecution of Socrates.

The irony of the passage only concerns Anytus to the same degree

1 Note again the exact correspondence of the Socratic argument for the

identity of virtue and knowledge with Kant's argument for the thesis that

the only unconditional good is the " good will." Kant's further proposal to

make conformity with the bare form of a universal imperative the direct and

sufficient criterion of right action might be said to be simply a reckless develop-

ment of one side of the Socratic ethics, its " intellectualism," in unreal isolation

from its " eudaemonism."

3 It might be objected, is not this selection, here assumed to be impossible,

actually proposed as the very foundation of the " ideal state " in the Republic ?

The answer is No. In the Republic it is, of course, recognized that endowment

counts for something, and therefore there is an early initial selection of pro-

mising future " guardians." But educational tradition counts for much

more ; hence the length at which the problem of the creation of a right

educational tradition is discussed, and the provision for promotions and

degradations at all stages according as the subject under education justifies

Qr belies his early " promise/'

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 141

as the whole of the Athenian public who respect and trust him.

It is clearly meant that, to the measure of his intelligence, Anytus

is an able and public-spirited man who deserves the trust he receives.

This defect, one which he shares with the whole Athenian public,

is simply that he is an esprit borne. He has the average Athenian

democratic prejudice against men who are " too clever/' the

intelligentsia, and the average Athenian's incapacity for ever calling

his own prejudices in question, and it is just because he is such a

" representative man " that the public trust him. The purpose of

bringing him in is clearly to make us realize the violence of the

Athenian prejudice against the " intellectuals/ 1 and the inability

of even a well-to-do and " educated " public man to discriminate

between Socrates and the " intellectuals by profession. 1 ' If

Socrates could be so misconceived by the " leaders of public opinion,"

we understand how he came to be prosecuted without needing to

impute his fate to anything worse than honest stupidity.)

If you wish a young man to learn a science such as medicine or an

accomplishment such as flute-playing, to whom do you send him ?

You always select a teacher who claims to be a professional expert,

and for that very reason charges a fee for his instructions ; you

would never think of putting him under a mere " amateur "who

does not make a profession of imparting his own skill. It should

seem, then, that statesmanship, the science of the right conduct of

affairs and the right manage of life must, by parity of reasoning, be

learned from the specialists who claim to have made a profession

of teaching its principles, and consequently, like all professionals,

charge a fee that is, from the " sophists, as men call them."

Anytus has the profoundest horror of the whole profession ; they

are, he says, as every one can see, mere depravers and corrupters

of all who frequent their lectures. Yet it is difficult to accept this

view of them. It would be a unique fact that any class should

make a paying profession of visibly spoiling the materials entrusted

to it. 1 In point of fact, Protagoras made a considerable fortune

by the trade of " teaching goodness," and he exercised it for over

forty years. Thus there was plenty of time for him to be found

out in, but he never was found out, and his high reputation has

survived him to this day, and he is not the only example in point. 2

Anytus is quite sure, though he is thankful he has never in his life

had to do with a sophist, that the sophist is a designing scoundrel,

1 E.g. the medical profession would not continue to provide anyone with

a living wage if medical men really killed off their patients. In real life a

"faculty" of Sangrados would be "found out." Anytus supposes that the

" sophists " have been found out, and yet contrive to grow fat on their quackery.

2 1 think we are bound to take the observations about Protagoras (Meno,

gid-e) quite seriously. Socrates seriously means that the lifelong success

of Protagoras, and the high esteem in which he was and is held, show

that the democratic view that there was nothing at all in him, that he

was " a palpable and mischievous impostor/' is far too simple to account

for the facts. Protagoras may not have been all he supposed himself to be,

but there must have been something in him to inspire such long-continued trust

and veneration.

142 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

and the society which does not make penal laws to suppress him a

silly dupe. But, however true his views may be though by his

own showing he must be arriving at them by " divination " they

are not to the point. The question is not who are the corrupters

of youth, but who are the " teachers of goodness " from whom the

young may learn the true principles of the conduct of life. Anytus

holds that we need specify no particular professional teachers ; the

conduct of life can be learned from any " decent " Athenian, and

he has learned it from his father, who learned it again from his.

It is simply a matter of imbibing an hereditary tradition a view

illustrated in the Protagoras by the way in which children pick up

their mother-tongue or their father's trade without any formal

teaching or apprenticeship (Prolag. 3270 ff.). To doubt the possi-

bility of this would amount to denying that there have been " good

men " in Athens (90^-93^).

Socrates does not deny that there are and have been at Athens

men who are " good at citizenship " (ayaOol ra iroAmica), 1 but what

he does doubt is whether such men have also been competent

teachers of the goodness they practise. The difficulty is that the

sons of these men have all proved either worthless or insignificant.

Thus they clearly did not teach their goodness themselves to their

sons, and it is notorious that even those of them who, like

Themistocles, were careful to have their sons trained in mere elegant

accomplishments, never sent them to anyone for special education

in " goodness." The obvious inference is that the " good Athenians/'

whom Anytus regards as competent teachers of goodness, do not

think themselves or anyone else competent to teach it ; they must

have supposed that goodness is not the kind of thing which can be

taught. Anytus is so chafed at having to listen to such unsparing

criticism of the eminent figures of the national history that he misses

the point and relapses into silence with an angry warning to Socrates

that the Athenian democracy is no safe abode for a man who will

not learn to bridle his tongue, 2 a plain hint, on Plato's part, that

1 It has been suggested by Th. Gomperz that these words are meant to

soften down the asperity of the declaration of the Gorgias that none of the

great figures of Athenian democracy was a true statesman, and even that the

chief motive of Plato in writing the Meno was to placate a public opinion

naturally irritated by such utterances. This seems to me hopelessly fanciful.

(a) There is really no " recantation " in the Meno. The democratic leaders

had been denied in the Gorgias to be statesmen on the ground that they were

empirics, whereas statesmanship is a science. According to the Meno, these

same leaders are so convinced that their own " goodness " is not teachable

that they make no attempt to get it taught to their sons. This is just the

criticism of the Gorgias put in other words, (b) In one respect the Meno

goes further than the Gorgias. That dialogue had conceded Athens at least

one genuine statesman, Aristides " the just " (Gorgias, 5266). In the Meno

Aristides figures among the rest of the famous men who must have supposed

that goodness cannot be taught, since he never had it taught- to his son

(Meno, 94^).

* Hannibal Chollop's advice to Mark Tapley, " You had better crack us up,

you had," is much the same as that Anytus gives to Socrates, and in both

cases the warning is probably not meant unkindly.

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 148

it was just this sort of unsparing and impartial free speech about

the democracy and its leaders which caused the mistaken but

intelligible suspicion of incivisme to attach to the philosopher

(936-950). That Socrates was really in the habit of employing

these criticisms is clear from the fact that the wry same use of the

argument about statesmen and their sons occurs both in the Prota-

goras and in the Alcibiades,

The sophists may, in any case, be dismissed from the discussion,

since Meno, on the whole, agrees with Anytus that they cannot teach

goodness and thinks it a point in favour of Gorgias that he dis-

claimed the pretension. In fact, most men, like the poet Theognis,

find themselves unable to make up their minds whether goodness is

teachable or not. They say " Yes " and " No/' according to their

moods. Goodness is thus in a uniquely unfortunate position.

The claims of the professional teachers are generally disbelieved,

and the persons whose practice is generally admired cannot make

up their own minds whether their specialty can be taught. It looks

as though there were neither teachers nor learners of goodness, and

consequently that it is not a thing which can be taught. But how,

then, is it ever produced, as we must admit that it is ? On second

thoughts, we see a way out of the difficulty. Knowledge is not the

only thing which is beneficial in practice. A right belief (opOrj 8da)

will direct practice as satisfactorily as genuine knowledge. A guide

who had a right belief about the road to Larissa would take you

there as successfully as one who really knew the way. For practical

purposes, then, a right belief is as good as knowledge but for one

trifling drawback. There would be no practical difference, if you

could make sure that a man will always retain his right belief.

But beliefs are like the fabled statues of Daedalus, which can walk

away if they are not fastened to their place. The statues are fine

pieces of work, but their price is naturally low if they are loose.

So a correct belief is a fine thing, if it will only stay with you, but

it will not stay long unless you fasten it down am'as Aoy tor/up " by

thinking out the reason why " of it (980), and this process is what

we have already called " being reminded " (dva/Av^cris). When

we have thought out the " reason why," the belief becomes know-

ledge and is abiding. We may apply this distinction to the solution

of our problem.

The " eminently good men " of Athens plainly do not owe their

usefulness as political leaders to knowledge, for if they did, they

could teach " statesmanship " to others. Themistocles and the

rest were therefore not "scientific statesmen/' not o-o^ot (996)

the conclusion also reached in the Gorgias and it is absurd to think

they owed all their achievements to accident. Their successes

must have been due to " correct opinions " (cv8oia, 996). They

were much on a level with givers of oracles and diviners, who often

say very true things without knowing it (since the responses are

delivered in a sort of temporary "frenzy"). Thus we may class

together " seers/' poets, and statesmen, as beings who all say and

144 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

do brilliant things without really knowing what they are saying

or doing, because they are all acting in a state of " possession,"

though Anytus, perhaps, will not like our conclusion (956-995) , 1

To sum up, then : goodness is neither inborn nor yet learned from

teachers, but arises from a happy irrational " divine possession "

(0ip /Wpa avtv vov), unless, indeed, there could arise a statesman

who could teach statesmanship to others. His " goodness " would

be to that of other men what substance is to shadow. We must,

however, remember that our conclusion is tentative ; we cannot

say with certainty how goodness arises until we have answered the

still outstanding question what it is. In the meanwhile Meno

would be doing Athens a service if he could make Anytus more sym-

pathetic with our point of view (gge-iooc).

The full meaning of these last remarks only comes out when we

read them in the light of the Republic and Phaedo. The " states-

man who can make another a statesman " is just the philosopher-

king of the Republic, where the crowning achievement of the " ideal

state " is to make provision for the permanent teaching of a states-

manship which is science, clear intellectual insight into fundamental

moral principles, not a succession of " inspired " adventures, and

the provision takes the form of a system of thorough education in

hard scientific thinking which culminates in the direct apprehension

of " the good/' In the light of this educational scheme, we can

see that the main object of the concluding argument in the Meno

is to distinguish between a higher and a lower kind of goodness.

The higher kind is that which the Republic calls the goodness of the

philosopher, and it is based upon certain and assured personal

knowledge of the true scale of goods, and is therefore " abiding."

The lower kind, which is at best a " shadow " of true goodness, is

based on " opinions " which are true, but are not knowledge, and

therefore not to be counted on as permanent ; in fact, it rests on

acceptance of a sound tradition of living which has not been con-

verted into personal insight into the scale of goods. This is all

which is demanded in the Republic even of the soldiers of the

State ; their goodness is loyalty to a tradition of noble living in

which they have been brought up, but of which they have never

even asked the reason why, life by an exalted standard of " honour."

Since there are sound elements in the moral tradition of any

civilized community, it is possible for an Athenian statesman in

whom the best traditions of his city are inbred to " profit " the

State by goodness of this inferior kind, " popular goodness," as the

Phaedo calls it, But security for permanent continuance in well-

doing is only to be had when a sound traditional code of conduct

has been converted into " knowledge " by understanding of the

1 Socrates regards the achievements of a Themistocles or a Pericles as

''wizardry," but he does not mean this as a compliment. "Possession"

was popularly regarded as a kind of disease, and we have only to go to Aristo-

phanes to see what the current estimate of xpWWSoL an ^ QCOUL&VTW was.

The effect of his classification is much that which might be produced to-day by

speaking together of " ventriloquists, mediums, and cabinet ministers."

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 145

lc reason why," that is by personal insight into the character of

good and personal understanding of the place of each of the

" goods " of life in the hierarchy of good. Thus the true states-

man would be the Socratic philosopher who understands the

principle that the " tendance of the soul " is the supreme business

of both individual and State, and judges soundly of the nature of

the " spiritual health " at which the " tendance " aims. Of course,

we readily see that " philosophic goodness," being thus identical

with knowledge of true good, must be " teachable," if you go to

work the right way, whereas a " goodness " which does not repose

on apprehension of principles cannot be taught ; it can only be

" imbibed " by habit uat ion in conformity to a tradition. The

vacillation of mankind in their attitude to the teachability of

virtue is thus to be explained by the ambiguity of the word " good-

ness " ; men are dimly aware that real goodness depends on grasp

of intelligible principles and thus ought to be teachable, but they

confuse this real goodness with its shadow, loyalty to an established

tradition qua established, and common experience shows that this,

however it is to be secured, cannot be secured by teaching. The

contributions of the dialogue to the theory of knowledge, the ex-

position of the doctrine of " reminiscence " and of the principles

of method, with all their importance, are meant to be secondary

to this main result ; the account of pre-existence and immortality,

again, is strictly subordinate to the theory of ai/a'/x^crts itself.

It would be a complete misunderstanding to find the main purport

of the dialogue in these things, though there is no reason to doubt

that they were connected in the personal Welt-Anschauung of

Socrates with his main tenet, the supreme worth of the i/^?/ and

its specific good, knowledge.

See further :

RITTER, C. Platon, i. 391-449 (Gorgias), 476-484 (Meno).

RAEDER, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 111-125

(Gorgias), 130-137 (Mend).

THOMPSON, W. H. The Gorgias of Plato.

NETTLESHIP, R. L. Plato's Conception of Goodness and the Good

(Lectures and Remains, i. 238-394).

DIES, A. Autour de Platon, ii. 414-418, 462-469.

STEWART, J. A. Myths of Plato, 1-76 (Introduction), 114-132

(The Gorgias Myth) ; Plato's Doctrine of Ideas, 24-29

(Meno), 29-34 (Gorgias).

STENZEL, J. Platon der Erzieher, 147-178.

CHAPTER VII

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES : EUTHYPHRO, APOLOGY,

CRITO

I HAVE reserved these well-known dialogues for considera-

tion at this point for the simple reason that it is difficult to

separate them from the Phaedo ; thus it is natural to make

the treatment of them the immediate prelude to a study of the

four great works in which Plato's dramatic genius shows itself

most perfect. I do not mean to imply that I regard the whole

series of dialogues which centre round the trial and death of Socrates

as uninterruptedly following one another in order of composition.

As I have already explained, I do not feel satisfied that we are safe

in saying more on the question than that the slighter works we are

considering must, at least in the main, be regarded as earlier than

the four great dramatic dialogues. It is possible, perhaps even

probable, that at any rate the Apology may have been written

before several of the works we have already dealt with, but the

probability need not affect our treatment if it is true, as the present

analysis tries to show, that there is no serious variation in the

doctrine of Plato's dialogues until we come to the series unmistak-

ably shown by style to be later than the Republic. In treating of

the whole series of these " dialogues of the trial and imprisonment "

I shall avail myself fully of the commentaries of Professor Burnet

(Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, 1924; Phaedo, 1911) ; this will make it

possible to aim at a brevity which I should have been only too glad

to secure for some other parts of this book.

i. Euthyphro. On all questions connected with the scene and

personages of the dialogue, see Burnet's Introductory Note, to which

I would only append the following remarks. It is not certain that

the Euthyphro of our dialogue is the person of the same name whom

we have encountered in the Cratylus, though this is possible. If

the two men are one and the same, we shall clearly have to think of

Euthyphro as now in middle age and his father as a man of some

seventy-five or more. To my own mind, the tone of the conversa-

tion is consistent with these suppositions and inconsistent with

regarding Euthyphro as in any sense young. (He is a familiar

figure in the ecclesia which he often addresses.) I fully agree with

Burnet that the supposed proceedings by Euthyphro against his

father as a murderer must be historical fact ; the situation is too

bizarre to be a natural fiction. Also I think it clear that legally

146

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 147

Euthyphro had no case and was probably non-suited by the

Basileus, but I would add that in all probability Euthyphro himself

counted on this issue. His object, as he explains at 4^, is to clear

himself from the religious pollution incurred by being in any way

accessory to a </>ovos. If he files an information against his father,

even with full knowledge that it will be dismissed on technical

grounds, he has done all that a scrupulous conscience can require.

Any possible " pollution " will henceforth rest not on him but on

the authorities, and he would probably feel himself free for the

future to live in ordinary family relations with his father. This

is presumably what he wished to do. We need not suppose that

he expects or desires any grave consequences to happen to the old

gentleman. As to the main purpose of the dialogue, again, I think

Burnet is clearly right. As both Plato and Aeschines represent,

Socrates had lived in association with religious ascetics and mystics

of the Orphic type ; every one also knew that he had been formally

convicted of some kind of religious innovation. The natural

inference would have been that he was himself a sectary much of the

same type as Euthyphro, as Euthyphro seems to suppose. It was

a duty of piety to his memory to make it clear that his views on

religion were very different from those of a sect who found the

" deep things of God " in stories like those of the binding of Cronus

and the mutilation of Uranus tales which had nothing to do with

the official worship of Athens and were repulsive to the ordinary

Athenian. It is equally clear that Euthyphro is not intended, as

has often been said, to represent "Athenian orthodoxy," i.e. the

attitude of the dicasts who voted for the conviction of Socrates,

since, as Burnet points out, he instinctively takes the side of

Socrates as soon as he has heard the nature of the charge against

him, and classes Socrates and himself together as theologians

exposed to the unintelligent derision of the " vulgar." x

Ostensibly the problem of the dialogue is to determine the real

character of OO-IOTT/S, "piety," or as we should probably say now,

" religion," that part of right conduct which is concerned with

man's duty to God. As usual, no final result is expressly arrived

at, but the interest lies in the comparison of two different con-

ceptions of what " religion "is. The conclusion to which we seem

to be coming, but for an unexpected difficulty, is that religion is

the " art of traffic between man and gods," or the art of receiving

from the gods and giving to them (Euthyphro, iqd, e). On the face

of it, this is a view of religion thoroughly in keeping with the more

sordid side of the ancient State cultus, which was very much regulated

1 See the full treatment of all this in Burnet, op. cit. pp. 2-7. As to the

ordinary Athenian estimate of the Hesiodic stories about Uranus and Cronus,

see Aristophanes, Clouds, 904, Isocrates, xi. 38-40. How far the Athenians

were from taking Cronus seriously is sufficiently shown by the simple fact that

Kpbvot is Attic for " old Methusalem " or " Rip van Winkle." Even the

allusion of Aeschylus, Ag. 168 ff., has a touch of contempt for the unnamed

being who is now " down and out" (rpm/mfcoj otx^r cu rvx&v) and the " bully "

who preceded him (ra^/idx^ Bpdafi

148 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

on the do ut des principle. It exactly hits off, for example, the

spirit of religio as understood in the early days of the Roman

republic. Hence it is not surprising that more than one editor

(Adam, Burnet) should have found the real point of the dialogue

in a hint thrown out, but not lollowed up, a little earlier (Euthyphro,

130), that religion should rather be thought of as the co-operation of

man with God towards some noble result (wdyKaXov cpyoy) which

is left unspecified. It is at least certain that the making of this

point is one of the main objects of the discussion, and that the view

is shown to arise directly out of the application to religion of the

notion of " tendance " (Oepairfia), so fundamental in the Socratic

ethics. But I think it would probably be mistaken to suppose

that the other formula is intended to be rejected as conveying

a selfish and sordid conception of religion. In the sense put upon

it by ordinary Athenian practice, and apparently by Euthyphro

himself, that religion consists in knowing how to perform a ritual

worship which will procure tangible returns for the worshipper,

the formula is, no doubt, sordid enough and wholly at variance with

the conception of God and the service of God attributed to Socrates

throughout the dialogues. But this interpretation is not the only

one which could be put on the phrase. If we think rightly of the

blessings for which it is proper to pray, it will be a worthy con-

ception of religion that it is an intercourse between man and God

in which we offer " acceptable sacrifice " and receive in return the

true goods of soul and body. 1 And there can be no doubt both that

" praying and sacrificing aright " are oo-tor^ and that 60-101-779,

since it is virtue or a part of virtue, is in the Socratic view an eVionJ/^

or Txrq, an application of knowledge to the regulation of practice.

Plato himself, who deals with the regulation of institutional religion

at length in the Laws, would have had nothing in principle against

such a formula, rightly interpreted. The early Academy seem to

have been right in including among their definitions of "piety"

(cvcre/?cia) alternative formulae which are obviously conflations

of the different suggestions of our dialogue, " a faculty of the

voluntary service of the gods ; right belief about honouring the

gods ; the science of honouring the gods." 2 Hence I do not feel

at liberty to treat the two suggestions about the nature of religion

as meant to be exclusive of one another.

A very brief analysis of the argument will enable us to re-

1 Cf. the model of an acceptable prayer offered by Socrates, Phaedrus,

2jgc, and the conception of dai/novcs as the middlemen in the " traffic

between man and God" in the speech of Diotima reproduced by Socrates in

Symposium, 2020.

2 [Plat.] Def. 4120 14, Sfoafus OcpcnrevTtK^ Oe&v tKofotos' irepl Oe&v TI/JLTJS vw6\r)\J/is

6p6J)' tTriffTJijLL'y) irepl Oe&v TIJULTJS. Cf. the definition of ayveiu (ibid. 414^ 12), TT?S

0eov T(^J /card <f>fotv Oepcnrcla, and of d<noi> (ibid. 415^1 g], OepAirevfJui 0eou Apetrrbv

0y. That the Academic definitions of our Plato MSS. in the main belong

to the earliest days of the Academy is shown by the frequent appeals made

to them in Aristotle, especially in the Topics. In some cases the testimony

of Aristotle enables us to refer a definition specifically to Speusippus or

Xenocrates as the author.

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 149

discover in the Euthyphro the principal points of both ethical and

metaphysical doctrine with which we are already familiar.

The act for which Euthyphro is arraigning his father, we must

remember, is specifically an offence against religious law, not a

civil wrong, and Euthyphro does not profess to be in any way

actuated by motives of humanity or regard for civil right. He is

afraid of incurring religious " pollution " by living in household

relations with a " sacrilegious person," and wishes to safeguard

himself. It is implied that, the average Athenian, who is shocked

at his procedure, is ignorant of or indifferent to the religious law

in which Euthyphro considers himself an expert. Obviously, then,

as a " doctor in theology " he may be presumed to know what we

might call " canon law " in its entirety, not merely the paragraphs

of it which deal with homicide. Hence Socrates, as a person

shortly to be accused of irreligion, appeals to him as an expert for

an answer to the question what " piety " (TO cvo-cjSe?) or " religious

duty " (TO oo-iov) is in its genuine character. There must be some

one character which belongs to all action which is " religiously

right " (oo-ioi/), and an opposite character which is shown in all

action which is religiously wrong. There must be a definition of

" religious obligation/' and we want to know what it is. It is

noticeable that this common character of the " religiously right "

is at the outset spoken of as a single tSe'a (Euthyphro, $d) and subse-

quently as an cToo? (6d) and an ouo-ta (ua). This is the language

familiar^ to us as technical in the so-called Platonic " theory of

Forms,' 1 but it is represented as understood at once by Euthyphro

without any kind of explanation. It seems quite impossible to

escape the conclusion that from the very first Plato represented

Socrates as habitually using language of this kind and being readily

understood by his contemporaries. 1

Like so many of the interlocutors in these early dialogues of

Plato, Euthyphro at first confuses definition with the enumeration

of examples. " Religious duty " is to proceed against the party

guilty of an offence against religion, whether it be a homicide or a

sacrilegious theft, or any other such crime, without being deterred

by any regard for the ties of blood ; to neglect this duty is " irre-

ligious " (5d-e). We have the best of examples for this, that of

Zeus himself who " chained " his own father. Of course, if this

statement is taken to be more than a production of instances, it

would be delightfully " circular/ 1 since it makes religious duty

amount to active opposition to irreligion. Socrates prefers to

regard the statement as a mere illustration and simply repeats

his request for an account of the " one form " in virtue of which

1 There is indeed an important point on which Socrates is represented as

needing to explain himself in the Phaedo ; he has to explain at some length

how the theory of Forms bears on the problem of " coming into being and

passing out of being." We may readily believe that this would need some ex-

plaining to most persons, but the meaning of the words, ISta, elSos, and the

reality of the existence of " forms," is simply presupposed in the Phaedo, as

elsewhere, without any explanation or justification.

6

150 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

all religious duties are religious. This leads to a first attempt at

definition : " the religious is what is pleasing to the gods, the

irreligious what is not pleasing to them" (6e). This is, in form, a

good definition ; whether it is sound in substance remains to be

seen. The difficulty is that, according to Euthyphrp himself, dis-

sensions and enmities exist among the gods. 1 Now it is not every

disagreement which leads to quarrels and enmities. A difference of

opinion about number, size, or weight is readily settled by an

appeal to counting, measuring, or weighing. It is when we come to

disagreement about moral questions " right and wrong, fine and

ugly, good and bad " that it is hard to find a standard by which to

settle the disagreement, and this is why it is regularly differences of

this kind which lead to quarrels and factions among us 2 (jc-d).

We may fairly reason that if the gods quarrel and fight, it is over

the same questions ; they quarrel about right and wrong, and each

party will be pleased by what it regards as right and offended by

what it thinks wrong. Thus what pleases one god may offend

another, and the same act will be, in that case, both religious and

irreligious (So). Cronus, for example, can hardly be supposed to

approve of Euthyphro's present proceedings.

Euthyphro's way of meeting the difficulty is to commit in an

undisguised form the circle already implied in his original state-

ment. There are points, he urges, on which all the gods would

agree ; they would all agree, for example, that wrongful homicide

ought not to go unpunished. (Thus he suggests that the definition

might run that religious acts are those which the gods approve

unanimously, with the explanation that the class " acts unani-

mously approved by the gods " is identical with the class of rightful

acts.) But the suggestion makes matters no better. No one, not

even the defendant in a prosecution for homicide, ever denies that

wrongful homicide, or any other wrongful act, ought to be punished.

The issue at stake is always which of the two parties is in the wrong

and what is the precise character of the wrong committed. If the

1 These " wars in heaven " refer principally to the stories of the dethrone-

ment of Cronus and the Titans and the war of the gods with the giants, to

which allusion has already been made. They are part of the Orphic and the

Hesiodic theogonies. Socrates does not believe such stories (Euthyphro, 6a-c)

and it is easy to show that they were not taken seriously by Athenians in

general, but Euthyphro has expressly avowed his belief in them and still

stranger tales (66), and it is he who is offering the definition. Hence the

objection is perfectly valid against him.

* The passage is noteworthy. Plato is fond of assimilating the use of a

true " scale of values " to the employment of number, measure, and weight.

We may fairly conjecture with Burnet that the suggestion comes from

Socrates. Knowledge of good, by enabling us to estimate correctly the relative

worth of different " goods," would reduce our heated quarrels about our

" rights " to a problem in " moral arithmetic." There is much truth in this.

In the bitterest of such quarrels both parties often sincerely wish for no

more than their " fair due." The trouble is that they cannot agree on the

question how much that is. Compare Leibniz's hope that a perfected

" symbolic logic" would reduce all philosophical disputes to the working of

a" calculation."

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 151

gods are at variance, then, their difference cannot be on the

question whether a wrongful act should be punished, but on the

very different question what acts are wrongful. How do we know,

for example, that different gods might not be of different mind

about the Tightness or wrongfulness of the step Euthyphro is

now taking ? This, however, is only a minor difficulty. We may

allow Euthyphro to put his definition in the amended form, " The

religious is that which the gods approve and the irreligious that

which they disapprove unanimously/ 1 But we still have to ask

the graver question, " Is a religious act religious because the gods

approve it, or do they approve it because it is religious ? " (86-ioa).

(The question is one which has played a prominent part in

ethical controversy in later days. It amounts to asking whether

acts of piety, or more generally virtuous acts, derive their character

of being right from the mere fact of being commanded, or are com-

manded because they are antecedently intrinsically right. Are the

" commandments of God " arbitrary ? Is moral obligation created

by the imposition of a command ? This is, in effect, the thesis of

both Hobbes and Locke, and is what Cudworth is denying in his

treatise on Eternal and Immutable Morality, when he sets himself

to argue that acts are good or bad " by nature " and not by " mere

will." The same issue reappears in a different terminology in the

objection taken against Hutcheson's doctrine of an " implanted

moral sense " by those who urged that on the theory in question

our Creator might have given us an inverted " moral sense," and

then the promotion of human misery would have been our highest

duty.) x The point is too fine to be taken at once by a man of

Euthyphro's type, and therefore has to be explained at a length

which we find superfluous. The difficulty hardly exists for us,

because we are accustomed from childhood to the distinction be-

tween the active and passive " voices " of a verb. In the time of

Plato there was, as Burnet reminds us, no grammatical termin-

ology ; the very distinction between a verb and a noun is not

known to have been drawn by anyone before Plato himself, and

that in a late dialogue, the Sophistes. The point to be made is

the simple one that a definition of an ouo-ta cannot properly be

given by means of a verb in the passive voice (Burnet, loc. cit.).

That is, it is no answer to the question what something is, to be

told what some one or something else does to it. In more scholastic

terminology, a formula of this kind would be a definition by means

of a mere " extrinsic denomination," and would throw no light

on the quiddity of the definiendum. 2 (It must be remembered that

1 The problem was also a prominent one in the age of Scholasticism. It

is against the view that obligation is created by command that St. Thomas

(S.C.G. iii. 122) says that fornication is not sufficiently proved to be sinful

by alleging that it is an " injury to God." " For we only offend God by

doing what is against our own good." It therefore still remains to show

that the conduct in question is " against our own good."

1 Of course such definitions are common enough ; e.g. you could not define

" trustee " except by a verb in the passive voice or its equivalent. But what

152 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

in a question of moral science we are not concerned with a purely

nominal definition, like those of mathematics, the mere interpreta-

tion of a new symbol by a combination of symbols already familiar.

The definition of a character such as oViov is inevitably a real

definition, and this is why Socrates calls it a discourse about an

' \

ouo-ta.)

The principle to be laid down is that when something happens

to, or is done to, a thing there is always a correlated person or

thing who is the doer. Thus if a thing is carried, or is seen, there

is some one or something who carries or sees that thing. And when

we use a " passive " participle or adjective to characterize any-

thing, we do so "because something is being done to the thing by

something else. (Thus, it is meant, if a thing is being seen by

some one it is a " thing seen " or visible (opw/xevov), but you could

not argue that because a thing is visible some one must actually

be seeing it. 1 ) In other words, a passive participle or adjective

of passive sense is always a denominatio extrinseca. Now a thing

which is liked or approved (<j[>i\ovju.evov) comes under this rule ;

"it is not because it is a-thing-approved that some one ap-

proves it ; it is because some one actually approves it that it is

a-thing-approved" (T.OC.) But this consideration is fatal to our

proposed formula, if the formula be taken as a definition of

TO oViov. If " all the gods " approve the " religious act," that, as

Euthyphro concedes at once, is because the act is " religious " ;

its character as o<ru>v is the cause of their approbation. The

" extrinsic denomination " thing - approved - by - the - gods, on

the other hand, only belongs to TO 6Viov as a consequence of

the fact that the gods approve it. Thus the formula does not

tell us what the character on the ground of which the gods

approve certain acts is (its ovo-t'a), but only something which

happens to these acts, namely, that the gods approve them;

it tells us an "affection" (?ra0os) of the "religious," not its

quiddity (na). 2

Thus we have to begin the work of looking for a definition of

the " religious " over again. Our definitions keep running away

from us, like the mythical statues of Daedalus, the reputed ancestor

you are really defining in this case is a relation, the relation of the trustee to

the " truster." In the case of rb &ffiov we are attempting to define a

quality (irA0os)> and it is no definition of this quality to say that " the gods

like it."

1 Berkeley, it is true, seems sometimes to be arguing as though we could

infer from the fact that a thing is visible, the further fact that some one is

always seeing it. But even he would hardly have argued that if a thing is

eatable, some one must be eating it.

1 It is tacitly assumed that if the gods approve x, y, z . . . they do so

for an intelligible reason. There is some character common to x, y, z over

and above the " extrinsic denomination " of being in fact approved, and this

character is the ground of the approbation. On the use of the words otota,

wdOos (the most general name for anything, mode, quality, relation, etc., which

can be asserted of a subject), see Burnet's notes, loc. cit. The way in which

the terms are used without explanation implies that they are part of an

already familiar logical terminology.

SOCRAT1C DIALOGUES 158

of Socrates. 1 Socrates must have inherited, much against his will,

a double portion of his ancestor's gift, for it seems that he can

bestow mobility on other men's " products " as well as on his own.

But he will try to do what he can to remedy the trouble. At this

point (120) the discussion makes a fresh start a start, we may note,

due to the direct suggestion of Socrates, whose part in the dialogues

is by no means so exclusively that of a mere critic of others as is

sometimes fancied. What is the relation of oo-tov (religion) to

oiKatoo-vvy (duty, obligation, morality in general)? We both

admit that whatever is religious (oo-tov) is " dutiful " or " right "

(OIKCLIOV) ; can we convert the proposition simpliciter and say that

whatever is right is religious ? I.e. is all duty duty to God ?

Euthyphro has the difficulty which seems to beset all beginners in

logic in seeing that the universal affirmative proposition does not

admit of simple conversion, and the point has to be made clear

to him by examples. All reverence (atSws) is fear, but it is not

true that all fear (e.g. fear of illness) is reverence. All odd integers

are numbers, but all numbers are not odd. Reverence is a " part "

of fear as " odd number " is of number. In the more developed

logical terminology of Aristotle, the thing would, of course, be

expressed by saying that reverence and odd number are species

(etSr;) of the genera fear and number, but Plato, who sits loose to

terminology, except when it is needed for the purpose immediately

in hand, habitually uses the word " part " (/*O/HOV, /IC/DOS) for what

we still call the membra dividentia of a logical " division." When

the point has been explained to him, Euthyphro at once answers

that TO OO-IQV is only one part of TO SiWoi/ that is, in modern

language, that duty to God is not the whole of the duty of man, but

one specific branch of it. Thus, like the mass of mankind, he

believes in a plurality of distinct " virtues. 1 ' Man has, e.g., a certain

set of " duties to God," and another distinct set of duties to his

fellow-men, and it would follow that you might specialize in one of

these branches of duty but neglect the others. You might be

strong in " religion " but weak, e.g., in honesty, like the legendary

Welshman who " had a wonderful gift in prayer but was an awful

liar. 1 ' From the Socratic point of view, this would be impossible.

All virtue is knowledge of good, and consequently any one real

virtue, if you live up to it, will prove to cover the whole of human

conduct. The " content " of morality and that of religion would

thus alike be the whole sphere of human conduct, and it would be

quite impossible in principle to distinguish a man's " religious "

from his " moral " duties. At bottom, the reason why the Euthyphro

ends negatively is the same as that which accounts for the formally

negative result of the Laches or Charmides, the fact that genuine

" goodness " is a unity.

1 For the point of the jest, see Burnet, loc. cit. It would be spoilt if there

were any truth in the later story that Socrates was actually the son of a

sculptor and had practised the calling himself, as any intelligent reader ought

to see.

154 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

This is suggested at once for us in izd. If " religion " is a

" part " of morality, we must go on to ask " which " part it is;

i.e., to use the technical phrase which meets us as such for the first

time in the Theaetetus, we must ask for the " difference " which

marks off " religious " duties from the rest of our duties. We

may suggest that TO Suctuov can be divided into two species, the

" cult " or " service " (OepaTreta) of the gods and the cult or service

of man ; the former will be religion (120). The thought is that all

morality is service, and that service falls under two mutually

exclusive heads, the " service of God," and " the service of man/' a

view still widely popular. (From Socrates' point of view, of course,

the view would be false ; you cannot serve man without in the

very act serving God, nor serve God without serving man.)

To follow the argument to which this third attempt at a defini-

tion gives rise, we have to remember that the word Otpavtta was

in use in two special connexions. It was used of the cult of a

deity by his worshipper (cp. our objectionable use of the phrases

" divine service/' " Sunday services "), or of a great man by his

courtiers, and of the " tending " of men or animals by professionals

such as physicians and grooms (the sense of the word from which

Socrates developed his conception of the " tending of one's soul "

as the supreme business of life). The problem is to determine in

which, if either of these senses, religion is to be called the " service "

of God. If we start with the second sense, that in which the pro-

fessional trainer of hounds or oxherd may be said to " tend " or

" serve " the hounds or oxen, we see that the aim of such tendance

is always to make the " tended " better, to get the dogs or oxen

into the pink of condition and keep them so. But we cannot

suppose that religion is the service of God in this sense. No one

would say that by performing his " religious duties " he " makes his

gods better " (i^a-c) . We must mean " service " in the very different

sense in which slaves are said to "serve " or " tend " their owner.

Now the " service " of a slave consists in acting as an instrument

or " understrapper " in carrying out his owner's business ; it is a

form of VTTT; pcriKT/, " co-operating as a subordinate with a superior

for the achievement of some result " (13^).

Now we can say at once what the result to which the slave of a

medical man contributes under his master's direction is ; it is the

curing of the master's patients. So the slave of a builder contri-

butes as a subordinate to the construction of a ship or a house. If,

then, " serving God " means contributing as an underworker

contributes to the business of his superior, if it is " co-operation

as an instrument," what is the great work to which we contribute

" under the gods " ? (130). (No answer is given to the question in

our dialogue. None could be given by a man like Euthyphro who

keeps his morality and his religion in separate " water-tight com-

partments, "and Socrates naturally does not answer his own question.

But it is not hard to discover from other dialogues what the Socratic

answer would be. The great business of man, we kno.w, is to " tend "

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 155

his own soul, and so far as he can the souls of all who come into

contact with him, to " make them as good as possible." We shall

find him, in the Phaedo and elsewhere, describing this course of life

as " assimilation to God" (6/Woxns few). Thus we shall not go far

wrong if we say that the " great and glorious work of God " is to be

the source of order and good to the universe, and that we " contri-

bute under God " to that work in the degree to which we bring

order and good into the little " world " of our own personal life

and that of the society to which we belong. Such an answer would,

of course, presuppose the " unity of the virtues," and break down

all barriers between the service of man and the service of God,

morality and religion ; it would make irreligion a breach of morality

and laxity of morals an offence against religion.)

Euthyphro 's inability to follow the thought of Socrates throws

him back on what had all along been his implied position, the position

of the fanatic who divorces religion from morality. " If a man

knows how to please the gods by his words of prayer and his acts

of sacrifice that is religion, and that is what makes private families

and public commonwealths prosperous " (14^). In briefer phrase,

religion is " a science of sacrificing and praying " (140) . (Euthyphro,

of course, takes the word " science " employed by Socrates to

mean simply correct knowlege of the ritual to be observed.) Now

in sacrificing we give something to the gods and in prayer we ask

something from them. So we may finally put Euthyphro's thought

into this definition (the fourth and last of the dialogue), "Religion

is the science of asking the gods for things and giving things to

them " (14^). Now the right way of asking will be to ask for what

we really need, and the right way of giving will be to give the gods

what they want of us, and thus religion turns out to be " an art of

traffic between men and gods " (fjjuropiKYj r\vrj #eots K<U di/flpowrots

vap dXA.7yXwj/, i^e). But traffic is, of course, a transaction between

two parties for mutual advantages ; one " cannot be buyer and

seller too." What one party to the traffic between gods and men

gets out of the transaction is obvious ; the gods send us all the good

things we enjoy. But what " advantage " (<o<cAi'a) do they get

from us ? No " profit," says Euthyphro, but " honour and thanks

and gratitude" (n^ r *a! ycpa KCU xapts, I 5 a )- "The religious

act "thus turns out to be "that which is grateful (xcxapto-ftcVov) to

the gods," and this brings us back to the very definition we have

already had to reject, that " the religious " is TO rots 0ois <t'A.oi/, " what

the gods approve " (150) ; so that we are no nearer knowing what

religion is than when we began our discussion.

As I have said, the gentle satire on the unworthy conception of

religion as a trade-enterprise carried on by God and man for their

mutual benefit ought not to blind us to the fact that the definition

of it as knowing how to ask from God and how to make a return to

Him is capable of being understood in a genuinely Socratic sense.

The very introduction into this formula of cmon/fLi; as the genus

of religion should indicate that it contains a suggestion we are

156 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

meant to follow out. " Imitation," says the proverb, " is the

sincerest form of flattery." And we may add that the " imitation

of God " shown in a life devoted to the " tendance of the soul " is

the one acceptable Tirf and the true thanksgiving for the goods we

receive from God. So understood, the formula that religion is

asking the right things from God and making the right return does

not contradict but coincides with the other formula that it is co-

operation as agents " under God " in a great and glorious " work."

2. Apology. The Apology is too well known to require any

elaborate analysis, though it must not be passed over without some

remarks on points of general interest. Apart from its strictly

historical interest as a professed faithful reproduction of the actual

language of Socrates at the memorable trial, it has a philosophical

interest as a picture of the life of " tendance of the soul " adopted

with full consciousness and led at all costs to its appropriate and

glorious end. What is depicted is the life of a " martyr " of the

best type as seen from within by the martyr himself ; the object

of the picture is to make us understand why the martyr chooses

such a life and why the completion of his career by the martyr's

death is a corona and not a " disaster." In our more commonplace

moods we are accustomed to think of martyrdom as a highly dis-

agreeable duty ; perhaps it must not be shirked, but we feel that,

to be made tolerable to our imagination, it must be " made up " to

the martyr by an " exaltation " to follow it. Plato means us

rather to feel that the martyrdom is itself the " exaltation " :

in cruce gaudium spiritus ; ambula ubi vis . . . non invenies

altiorem mam supra, nee securiorem viam infra, nisi viam sanctae

crucis. The Apology is the Hellenic counterpart of the second

book of the Imitatio.

For the considerations which make it certain that in substance

Plato has preserved the actual speech of Socrates (which, as he lets

us know, he himself heard), see Burnet's Introductory Note and the

works referred to there. We must, of course, understand that,

like all the circulated versions of celebrated speeches (those of

Aeschines and Demosthenes in the matter of the " Crown," for

example), the published speech is supposed to have been " revised "

in accord with the canons of prose- writing. Plato has, no doubt,

done for the defence of Socrates what men like Demosthenes did

for their own speeches before they gave them to the world. At the

same time we clearly have no right to assume that the process of

revision and polishing involves any falsification of fundamental

facts. That what we possess is in substance a record of what

Socrates actually said is sufficiently proved by the single considera-

tion that, though we cannot date the circulation of the Apology

exactly, we can at least be sure that it must have been given to the

world within a few years of the actual trial, and would thus be read

by numbers of persons, including both devoted admirers of the

philosopher and hostile critics (and presumably even some of the

judges who had sat upon the case), who would at once detect any

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 157

falsification of such recent facts. 1 It should also be added that

even the subtle art by which Socrates, while professing to be a mere

" layman " in forensic oratory, actually makes his speech conform

to precedent in its general structure, an art most readily appreciated

by following Burnet's careful analysis, is certainly not a mere

stylistic " improvement " by Plato. The Gorgias and Phaedrus

would be mere mystifications if it were not the fact that, for all

his contempt for the ideals of contemporary " rhetoric/' Socrates

was quite familiar with its recognized methods and principles.

Indeed, the Apology might be said to afford an ironical illustration

of the paradox of the Gorgias about the uses which may legitimately

be made of rhetorical devices. Socrates is in the position of an

accused party, and he makes a "defence " which has been felt from

the time of Xenophon onward to be something very much like an

avowal of guilt. This is exactly in accord with the principles of

the Gorgias. Socrates is accused of an offence, and in the eyes of

an average Athenian, though not in his own, he has done what

amounts to the commission of that offence. Consequently he uses

impressive eloquence, not to veil the facts but to put their reality

in the clearest light. He is, and for many years has been, a " sus-

pected character," and the whole " defence " consists in insisting

on the point and explaining that the suspicion has been inevitable.

Even the act of which an ordinary advocate would have made the

most as evidence of " sound democratic sentiments/' Socrates'

defiance of the order of the " Thirty " in the affair of Leon (Apol.

32c-d), is deliberately introduced by a previous narrative of ap

event of which such an advocate would have been careful to say

nothing, or as little as possible, Socrates' opposition to the %xos

at the trial of the Arginusae generals. Thus what might have been

used by a man like Lysias to make an acquittal morally certain is

actually employed by Socrates as an opportunity to warn the

court that they must expect from him no sacrifice of conviction to

"democratic sentiments." From the point of view of a Lysias,

Socrates must have been " throwing away the ace of trumps " by

using the story of his defiance of the Thirty as he does.

The very singular historical circumstances of the trial of Socrates

have been better explained in Professor Burnet's notes to his

edition of the Apology and the chapter on the " Trial " in Greek

Philosophy, Part I., than anywhere else. I shall therefore refer

the reader to those works for full discussion, contenting myself with

an indication of the points which seem most important.

Though the actual prosecutor was Meletus, every one knew that

the real instigator of the whole business was Anytus, one of the two

1 In particular, it is quite unthinkable that Plato should have invented

the few words, addressed to friends and supporters after the court had voted

the penalty of death, with which the Apology closes. Modern writers, who

think it " impossible " that Socrates should have spoken after sentence had

been pronounced, are simply transferring the procedure of a modern European

court of justice to the Athens of the fifth century. For the opportunity the

case would give fpr the making of the remarks, see Burnet, Apology, p. 161.

158 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

most admired and trusted leaders of the restored democracy.

Since Anytus was in one and the same year assisting the prosecution

of Socrates but helping the defence of Andocides on the very same

charge of " irrelig^on," we cannot suppose motives of fanaticism

to have had anything to do with his action. We may fairly suppose

that what he attributed to Socrates was the " corruption of the

young men/' and that this meant exercising an influence hostile

to the temper of unquestioning loyalty to the democracy. That

this crime, if it is a crime, was one of which Socrates was guilty can

be proved from the Apology itself, where his capital point is that he

is ready to encounter the hostility of the TrA^os or of any one else

at the bidding of conscience. Such criticisms of the heroes of the

old democracy as we read in the Gorgias and Meno are additional

evidence, though, in fact, a " practical politician " like Anytus

would need no evidence beyond the notorious intimacies between

the philosopher and men like Alcibiades, Critias, and Charmides.

But there was a reason why Anytus could neither put his real case

forward without disguise of some kind nor appear as the actual

prosecutor, and this reason has rightly been insisted on by Burnet.

The worst " offences " of Socrates had been committed under the

old democracy and all open reference to them was banned by

the Act of Oblivion forbidding all questioning of citizens for any-

thing done before the archonship of Euclides. Anytus had himself

been one of the foremost promoters of this Act and could therefore

neither himself prosecute, nor instigate anyone else to prosecute, acts

covered by this amnesty. It was necessary to put forward some

further pretext for proceeding and to find a nominal prosecutor

who would make the pretext the main charge in his indictment.

This explains why, to judge from the Apology, the precise nature

of the " corruption of the young " by Socrates was left so much in

the dark that we only discover what is meant by reading rather

carefully between the lines of the defence. It also explains the

selection of " irreligion " as the accusation to be pressed home and

of Meletus as the nominal prosecutor. Burnet is plainly right in

holding that it is most improbable, since the name Meletus is a

rare one, that there should have been two men of that name, one of

whom prosecuted Socrates and another Andocides for the same

offence in the same year. If, as is probable, the prosecutor in both

cases was the same man, and the speech " against Andocides "

preserved to us under the name of Lysias that delivered by Meletus

in the prosecution of Andocides whether it is a composition of

his own, or one written by Lysias to be spoken " in character/ 1

we see at once why Meletus was selected. The speech against

Andocides is that of a sincere but hopelessly crazy fanatic the

very man to make the right sort of tool for a political intrigue just

because he combines absolute honesty with the simplicity of a half-

wit. Such a man would throw himself heart and soul into the

prosecution of an impie, none the less effectively because, as is

dear from the line taken by Socrates in his defence, neither he nor

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 159

anyone else knew precisely what the " impiety " consisted in.

(It is also worth notice that according to Andocides Meletus was

one of the party who executed the illegal arrest of Leon, in which

Socrates refused to be concerned, and thus, as a man who had

contracted the pollution of <oVos, ought to have been in the dock

himself on the very charge he was bringing against less guilty folk.

That Socrates disdains to make a point of this is strictly in keeping

with his character.) As to the meaning of the " impiety " charged

against Socrates, all that we learn from the Apology is that Socrates

regards it as having something to do with the caricatures of his

earlier scientific pursuits in the Clouds and other comedies, where

men of science in general are represented as having no respect for

the gods of the current official worships. No doubt this statement

is correct, as far as it goes, but there must have been something

more behind the indictment of Socrates. The fact that Andocides

was tried on the same charge about the same time for a ritual offence

and found it necessary in his defence to go into the whole old

scandal of the " mutilation of the Hermae " and the " profanation

of the mysteries " seems, as Burnet has urged, to give us the key

to the secret. Alcibiades and other prominent men among the

associates of Socrates had been deeply implicated in the affair

of the " mysteries," and this would, no doubt, be in the minds of all

the judges. Socrates makes no allusion to the matter in his de-

fence, but this only proves what we should expect from the whole

tenour of his life, that, even in defending himself on a capital charge,

he was scrupulous to observe the spirit of the law by which

offences before the archonship of Euclides had been " amnestied."

Meletus is likely to have been less cautious.

We cannot well acquit Anytus of having stooped to instigate

a proceeding in which he was ashamed to take the principal part,

and of having used a tool whom he must have despised. But this

is no more than has often been done by politicians who, as the

world goes, are counted high-minded. His object was simply to

frighten away from Athens a person whose influence he believed to

be undesirable, much as Dutch William resorted to trickery to

frighten King James out of England an act for which he is eulogized

by Macaulay. Socrates might have preserved his life by going

away before trial, as it was customary to do when there was any

doubt about acquittal. Indeed Plato is careful to let us see that

even when the case came into court, escape would have been easy.

The verdict of guilty, even after the uncompromising speech of the

accused had been delivered, was only obtained by a small majority.

We may safely infer that an opposite verdict could pretty certainly

have been secured by a little deference to popular opinion, a little

adroit silence about one or two incidents and stress on others

such as the excellent military record of the accused with a few

words of regret for the past and promise of cautious behaviour in

future. Even without any of this, it is clear that if Socrates had

chosen to propose a moderate fine as a sufficient penalty, the offer

160 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

would have been accepted. (Not to mention that he could readily

have escaped during his unexpected month of detention in custody,

and that public opinion would not have blamed him.) The accusers

had no wish to have the guilt of any man's blood at their doors ;

Socrates himself forced their hand. Without any desire for a

martyrdom, they had created a situation in which there must in-

evitably be one, unless the other party would compromise with his

conscience, and a martyrdom Socrates determined they should

have. This is what he means (Apology, 396) by saying that both

sides must abide by their TI/A^/XCU Socrates holds in conscience

that his conduct has been that of a public benefactor, his opponents

that it amounts to crime worthy of death. They would like a

confession from himself that their estimate is correct ; if by act or

word he would admit this, they are willing not to inflict the penalty.

They do not wish to inflict death, but they do wish for the ad-

mission that it is deserved. // it is deserved, says Socrates, let it

be inflicted ; you shall be compelled to " have the courage of your

opinions. 11

In dealing with the analysis of the Apology we have to start by

understanding that the real and serious defence of Socrates, which

is made to rest on his conviction of a special divine mission to his

fellow-countrymen, does not begin until we reach page 280. What

goes before (ApoL 170-270) is introductory matter, and is concerned

with two preliminary points, the explanation of the prejudices

which have grown up about Socrates (180-246), and a proof that

the accuser himself cannot say, or at any rate dares not say, what

he really means by his charges (246-270). Throughout the whole

of the preliminary pages we must expect to find abundant traces of

the whimsical humour which the enemies of Socrates in Plato call

his " irony " ; at every turn we have to allow for the patent fact

that he is " not wholly serious " ; the actual defence of his conduct

through life, when we reach it, is pure earnest. (It is important

to call attention to this, since the well-known narrative of the

part played by the Delphic oracle in the life of the philosopher

belongs to the preliminary account of the causes of the popular

misconceptions about him, and has to be taken with the same

allowance for his native humour as the account of the burlesques

on him by the comic poets. The claim to be conscious of a special

mission, imposed not by " the gods," nor by " Apollo/ 1 but " by

God," comes from the actual defence. The two things have very

little to do with one another, and are treated in very different

tones ; nothing but misconception can come of the attempt to

confuse them. Similarly the point of the " cross-examination " of

Meletus has repeatedly been missed by commentators who have

not seen that the whole passage is humorous, though with a humour

which is deadly for its victim.)

(a) Plea for an Impartial Hearing and Explanation of the Existing

Prejudices unfavourable to the Speaker. The speech opens in a

very usual way with an apology, mainly playful, for the speaker's

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 161

unacquaintance with the diction of the courts, and a request to be

allowed to tell his story in his own way (ija-i8d). The one piece

of downright earnest in this exordium is the insistence that the

supreme business of " oratory " is to tell the truth a business in

which tb* speaker may claim to be more than a match for his

accusers. Like every one who wishes for an impartial hearing, he is

first bound to remove any prejudices the audience may have con-

ceived against him. It will not be enough to deal with the attempts

the prosecution has just made to create such prejudices ; there is

a more inveterate prejudice dating from old days ; the judges who

are to decide the case have heard long ago that Socrates is a " clever

man " who " busies himself about things aloft and under the earth,

and makes the weaker cause appear the stronger " the double

accusation of being a physicist and being an " eristic, 1 ' which is,

in fact, made in the Clouds of Aristophanes. " Intellectuals " of

this type are popularly suspected of disregard of the gods ; the

charges were made in comedies which many of the judges must have

seen a quarter of a century ago, in boyhood, when impressions

are easily made ; they have never received any rejoinder; what is

more, they have been repeated since of malice prepense l by a host

of anonymous slanderers, and it is these vague prejudices rather

than the accusations of the present prosecutors that are likely to

stand in the way of a fair trial (iSa-e).

The sufficient answer to all this is that Socrates is not responsible

for the nonsense he is made to talk in the Clouds. His judges them-

selves must know whether they ever heard him discourse on such

topics. But he is careful to add that he means no disparagement

to knowledge of this kind ; if it exists. 2 Neither is it true that

he has ever made a " profession " of " educating men " ; i.e. he

is not one of the professional teachers of " goodness," though,

again, he is far from disparaging so splendid a calling. If he

really could " teach goodness," he says humorously, he would not,

like Evenus, do it for a paltry five minae. He would know how

se faire valoir (20 fc).

How then has he got the name for being " clever " or " wise " ?

Here comes in the well-known tale of the Delphic oracle and its

response to Chaerephon, that no man living was wiser than Socrates.

Socrates says that he was at first staggered by this pronouncement,

and set to work to prove Apollo of Delphi never a persona grata at

Athens, for excellent reasons a liar. With this view he went round

looking for a wiser man than himself in the various sections of

society. He began with the "statesmen/ 1 but soon found that

though they fancied themselves very wise, they certainly had no

Kal $taj8o\S, i Sd. It is implied that there was no real ill-feeling on

the part of the comic poets who started these stories. They meant no more

than fun. We can see for ouiselves that this is true of Aristophanes.

2 Apol. IQC. As Burnet points out, loc. cit. % what is said here is quite in

keeping with the representation of the Phaedo that Socrates was deeply in-

terested in all these matters in early life, until he discovered that he " had no

head for them " (an expression itself to be taken playfully).

162 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

wisdom. Next he tried the poets with much the same result. He

found that they were hopelessly incapable of explaining what they

meant in their finest work ; this showed that the poet, like a

possessed person, speaks under the influence of a genius and inspira-

tion of which he is not master. 1 Finally, he turned to the artisans ;

they were less disappointing than " statesmen " and poets, since

it turned out that they did know something. They knew their

own trades. Unfortunately they fancied that because they knew

their trades, they must equally be competent to judge of the greatest

questions (e.g., no doubt, as Burnet has said, how to govern an

empire).* It seemed then as though the Delphic god was not

lying after all ; he was merely speaking in riddles, the notorious

trick of his trade. He meant to say that human wisdom is such a

sorry affair that the wisest man is one who, like Socrates, knows

that he does not know anything to boast of (Apol. 2oa-2$b).

Naturally enough, the victims of this experiment did not take

it any too kindly, and the matter was made worse by the young

folk, sons of wealthy and leisured citizens, who accompanied

Socrates, " without any pressing on his part " (avrd/xaroi, 230 ; i.e.,

they were not in any sense " pupils "), for the sport to be got out

of the thing, and even tried to practise the trick themselves. Their

victims, of course, complain that Socrates is the ruin of the young

people. When they are asked how he ruins them, shame prevents

the reply, " By exposing the ignorance of us older men,' 1 and so

they fall back on the old charges against scientific men in general,

the accusation of irreligion and " making the weaker case the

stronger." The present prosecutors are the mere mouthpieces

of this idle talk (230-246).

(b) Direct Reply to Meletus. Socrates now turns to the charges

actually brought against him by the prosecution, with which he

deals very curtly. The humour of the situation is that the prose-

cutor cannot venture to say what he means by either of his charges

without betraying the fact that, owing to the " amnesty," the

matters complained of are outside the competency of the court.

What he really means by the " corruption of the young " is the

supposed influence of Socrates on Alcibiades, Critias, Charmides,

and others who have been false to the democracy ; the charge of

irreligion is connected with the scandals of the year 415. But to

admit this would be to invite the court to dismiss the case. Hence,

when Meletus is pressed to explain what he means, he has to take

refuge in puerile nonsense. The judges could understand the

situation and, no doubt, enjoy it amazingly ; many modern com-

mentators have been badly perplexed by the " sophistical " char-

acter of Socrates' reasoning simply because they have not set them-

1 As Burnet says, loc. cit. t Euripides would be about the first of the " trage-

dians " to whom Socrates would apply his test. We have seen already that

Socrates held the " modern " view of poetry as dependent on " inspiration."

1 Compare Mr. Chesterton's mot about " the authority which obviously

attaches to the views of an electrical engineer " on the existence of God or the

immortality of the soul.

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 168

selves to realize the difficulty of Meletus' position. They have

missed the irony of Socrates' pretence that a prosecutor who is

fanatically in earnest is merely playing a stupid practical joke.

Meletus professes to have detected Socrates depraving the

young. If he has, clearly he must be able to say who improve

them. Under pressure, Meletus has to fall back on the view that

any good Athenian improves the young by his association with

them (because his influence is exerted in favour of the moral tradi-

tion of society, exactly as we have found Anytus maintaining in the

Meno, and shall find Protagoras explaining more at length in the

dialogue called after him). Socrates stands alone in making young

people worse by his influence on them (250). Now this is contrary

to all analogy ; if you consider the case of horses or other domestic

animals, you find that they are improved by only a few, the pro-

fessionals who understand the art of training them ; they are

spoiled when entrusted to anyone else. Moreover, a man must

be very dull not to see that he would be acting very much against

his own good by depraving the very persons among whom he has

to live. No one would do such a thing on purpose (the Socratic

doctrine that " no one does evil voluntarily "). If a man makes so

grave an error involuntarily, the proper course is not to prosecute

him but to open his eyes to his mistake. But Meletus, by prose-

cuting Socrates, makes it clear that he thinks him capable of the

absurdity of purposely trying to deprave the very persons whose

depravity would expose him to risk of harm at their hands (250-266).

Again, in what particular way does Socrates " deprave " his

young friends ? No open allusion to the facts really meant being

permissible, Meletus has to fall back on the reply that the de-

pravation consists in incitement to the religious offence alleged in

the indictment. Socrates sets the example of irreligion (266). This

brings us to the consideration of this accusation on its own account.

Socrates professes to be quite unable to understand what can be

meant by the statement that he " does not worship the gods of

the city but practises a strange religion. 1 If Meletus means any-

1 As to this accusation, see Burnet, he. cit. It is quite certain on linguistic

grounds that the meaning of the phrase that Socrates 01) po/tffec rods fleofo oDs 17

7r6Xis yo/ilfei is that he does not conform to the cultus, does not " worship "

the official gods, not that " he does not believe in their existence. 'V Aristoph-

anes is punning on this sense of the word voidfav when he makes Socrates

explain to Strepsiades that fyu? 6eol voiu<rfi ofl/c ftm ("the gods are not legal

tender here "). It is certain also that in the additional clause re/>a 5 5at/*6i>ta

jccupd, 8aip6vta is adjective, not substantive, and that the sense is therefore,

" but practises certain other unfamiliar religious observances." The meaning

of this is made clearer by comparison with the Clouds, where Socrates is

represented as combining the functions of a scientific man with those of

president of a conventicle of ascetics. It was true that the Ionian men of

science used the word 0e6s in a wholly non-religious way for whatever they

took to be the primary body (this is why in the Clouds Socrates swears by

Respiration and Air, and prays to " the Clouds "), and also that Socrates was

an associate of Orphic and Pythagorean ascetics, like Telauges in the dialogue

of Aeschines called by that name, who had a religion of their own not

officially recognized by the State. So far there is an intelligible basis for the

164 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

thing, he must presumably mean that Socrates is an atheist.

(Meletus does not really mean this, and Socrates knows that he

does not mean it. But he cannot explain what he really means

without risking the collapse of his case, and Socrates is fully entitled

to embarrass him for his own and the court's amusement. He

despises the charge too much to take it seriously.) If this is what

he means, and he dares not explain that it is not, his charge refutes

itself. A man cannot be both an atheist and the votary of a

" strange religion " ; to make an accusation of this kind is simply

wasting the time of the court 1 (260-270).

(c) The Vindication of Socrates' Life and Conduct (280-35^.

We come at last to Socrates' serious defence of his character, not

against the frivolous charges on which he is being ostensibly tried

but against grave misconceptions of old standing. He is well

aware that his life is at stake, a thing which has happened to many

a good man in the past and will happen again. But there is nothing

dishonourable in such a situation. A man's part is to stand loyally,

in the face of all risks, to the part which he has judged to be the best

for himself, or to which his commander has ordered him. Socrates

himself has acted on this principle in his military career, when his

superior officers have commanded him to face dangers. Still

more is it his duty to be loyal to the command of God which, as he

is persuaded, has enjoined him to " spend his life in devotion to

wisdom and in examining himself and his fellows " (280). The

real atheism would be to disobey the divine command. Dis-

obedience would be a known evil, but the death with which he is

threatened if he does not disobey may, for all he knows, be the

greatest of good. Hence if he were offered acquittal on the condi-

tion of abandoning " philosophy," with certain death as the alter-

native, he would refuse acquittal. For God is more to be obeyed

than any human law-court. For that reason, so long as life is

in him, Socrates will never cease urging on every man the duty of

" care for wisdom and truth and the good of his soul " and the

relative unimportance of care for health or fortune. That is God's

commission to him, and if Athens only knew it, his " service "

ia) 2 of God is the greatest 'blessing that could befall the

reference to the Saiju.6via KO.IV&. But it is still unexplained what ground ther$ is

for saying that Socrates does not worship the gods of the city, and it is this part

of the charge on which Socrates fastens. It seems to me that Burnet is right

in supposing that what is really meant is the old affair of the " profanation

of the mysteries." The " psephismof Diopithes " has nothing to do with the

matter. All " psephisms " before the year of Euclides were invalidated

(Andocides i. 86).

1 Formally, the argument is rather more elaborate. A man who concerns

himself with rd dcu/iopta (the ** supernatural," as we might say) must believe

that there are Salpove* (" supernatural beings ") ; these Sal/Movis are either

themselves '* gods " or are the " offspring of gods," and in either case, a man

who believes in them cannot be an atheist. This is pure persiflage, but it

is as good as Meletus and his backer Anytus deserve.

* Compare what has been already said in connexion with the Euthyphro

about the conception of religion as serving God in the production of a irdyic aXw

Socrates pleads that his whole life has been dedicated to this work.

SOCftATlC DIALOGUES 165

whole community (30*2). If he " corrupts the young " at all, it

must be by preaching to them his unchanging conviction that

"it is not wealth which makes worth (ager*?), but worth makes

wealth and all else good." His present speech is not made to

save his own life Anytus and Meletus may procure his death, but

the really dreadful thing is not to lose your life but to take a life

wrongfully (the thesis of the Gorgias) he would save his fellow-

citizens from misusing the gift God has bestowed on them, and is

not likely to give them a second time, a gadfly whose buzzing

prevents that high-bred but somnolent animal "the People " from

drowsy sloth (300-310).

It may be asked why a man with such a mission has never

attempted to act as a public monitor and adviser. 1 Well, the fact

is that the " mysterious something " which has warned Socrates

ali his life against " unlucky " proceedings has always checked any

attempt to take part in public life. Et pour cause : a democracy

(w\rj6os) soon puts an end to anyone who defies its humours in the

cause of right. Hence it was a condition of the exercise of the

mission that it should be exercised on individuals, not on the multi-

tude (310-320). In fact, Socrates has only twice been called upon

by his mission to come into conflict with authority, once when he

withstood the popular sentiment by refusing to be accessory to the

unconstitutional steps taken against the generals after Arginusae,

and once, more recently, when he disregarded the illegal command

of the " Thirty " to arrest Leon. In both cases he ran a great

personal risk, and in the second, might well have lost his life but for

the downfall of the " Thirty " (yza-e). As for the charge of de-

moralizing his "pupils," he has never had any "pupils/ 1 though

he has never refused to communicate his convictions freely to every

one (33^-6) as his mission required of him. 2 He is ready to summon

the parents and elder brothers of the young men who have associated

with him as witnesses that none of them have been made worse

by his companionship (33^-34^).

The defence is now, in substance, concluded, and we have

reached the point at which it was customary to make an appeal

1 The implication is that a man of the remarkable gifts of Socrates, who

carefully abstains from putting them openly at the service of the community,

though he is believed to have employed them freely for the service of men

like Alcibiades, must be a formidable anti-democratic conspirator.

* Note that in denying that he ever had /xaflijra/, Socrates is still referring

to the suspicion connected with his relations with prominent persons who

ire now dead. From Isocrates xi. 3, we learn that the pamphleteer Polycrates

made it a principal charge that Alcibiades had been Socrates* pupil, just as

Aeschines the orator (i. 173) says the same thing about Critias. Isocrates

relates that Alcibiades had never been " educated " by Socrates, thus agreeing

with Plato and Xenophon (Mem. i. 2, 12 ff.). Socrates is too scrupulously

observant of the " amnesty " to explain himself, but it is Alcibiades and

Critias, not younger unknown men like Plato and Aeschines of Sphettus,

whom he means by his supposed " disciples." The reference to the " divine

sign " at 3ic is playful, like other allusions of the kind in Plato. The real

reason why Socrates took no part in active politics is the one he goes on to

give, that he knew the hopelessness of such an attempt

166 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

to the clemency of the court for the sake of one's family and

connexions. Socrates declines to follow the usual course, not

because he has not dependents, friends, and relatives to whom

he is bound by natural ties, but because the procedure would

be unworthy of his character and an attempt to seduce the

court from its duty. That would be a real " impiety. 11 The

issue must now be left in the hands of God and the judges

The object of the pages which follow (360-386) is to explain why

Socrates did not, after conviction, secure his life by proposing a

moderate fine as an alternative penalty, as he clearly could have

done. This must have been felt as a real difficulty by common-

place persons even among the philosopher's friends, as we see

from the absurd explanation given by Xenophon (Apol. 1-8)

that Socrates deliberately provoked his own execution in order to

escape the infirmities of old age. It has to be explained that his

real motive was a worthy one. To propose any penalty whatever

would amount to admitting guilt, and Socrates has already told

the court that he regards himself as a minister of God for good to

his countrymen. Hence he cannot in consistency propose any

treatment for himself but that of a distinguished public benefactor,

a place at the public table (o-tV^o-ts cV Trpvrai/ei'w). It should be noted

that, strictly speaking, this is the TWO-IS which Socrates offers as an

alternative to the death-penalty demanded by the accusers. The

whimsical mood has returned on him after the intense earnestness

of the defence of his life and character. He urges that as he regards

himself as a benefactor he can only propose the treatment of a

benefactor for himself. The subsequent offer to pay the trifling

sum of a mina (only raised to one of thirty minae at the urgent

instance of friends) is made with the full certainty that the court,

which has just heard Socrates' real opinion of his deserts, will

reject it. The real issue is not whether a prophet of righteousness

is a major or a minor offender, but whether he is. a capital traitor

or the one true " patriot," and Socrates is determined that the court

shall not shirk that issue, as it would like to do. (As to the sum of

thirty minae which Socrates' friends offer to pay for him, one should

note (a) that in Epistle xiii. Plato, writing a generation later, mentions

it to Dionysius II as a good dowry for anyone but a very rich man

to give his daughter and that this estimate is borne out by a careful

examination of all the references to dowries in the fourth-century

orators, (b) that, though Plato and Apollodorus are joined with

Crito as " security," the main burden of payment would, no doubt,

fall on the wealthy Crito. The family of Plato are not likely to

have been particularly well off just after the failure of the revolu-

tion in which its most prominent members had taken the losing

side. 1 As we see from the speeches of Lysias belonging to this

1 Cf. what Xenophon makes Charmides say about his own finances at

Symp. 29 fi., where there seems to be an (anachronistic) allusion to the effects

of the " Decelean " war.

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES let

period, the downfall of Athens in 404 had been followed by a wide-

spread commercial crisis. Socrates' friends are making what, in

the circumstances, must have been a very strenuous effort to save

him. This is why they " ask for time " instead of offering to pay

money down. 1 )

In the concluding remarks of the speech made after the voting

on the penalty, note in the first place how clearly it is recognized

that Socrates has forced the issue, and that he could have secured

his acquittal by simply " asking for quarter" (38^-396). This is,

of course, true of every typical martyr. Martyrdom is dying when

you could escape if you would compromise a little with your con-

science ; in this sense every martyr forces the issue. Anytus would

rather not have killed Socrates, just as the average Roman pro-

consul would rather not have condemned Christians, or as Bonner

(as appears even from the partial accounts of his enemies) would

much rather not have sent Protestants to the stake. But it is not

the business of the martyr to make things easy for the forcer of

consciences.

In the impressive words of encouragement directed to his

supporters (39^-410), the important thing to note is that, contrary

to the absurd opinion of many nineteenth-century writers, Socrates

makes his own belief in a blessed life to come for the good perfectly

plain. The best proof of this is that to which Burnet has appealed,

comparison of his language with the brief and hesitating phrases

in which the Attic orators are accustomed to allude to the state of

the departed. In this respect the Apology agrees completely with

the Phaedo, when we allow for the fact that in the former Socrates

is speaking to a large audience, most of whom would not share his

personal faith. No one but a convinced believer would have said

half what he is made to say about his " hope " (not to mention

that the " divinity " of the soul is at bottom the reason why the

" tendance " of it is so much more important than that of the body,

and, as Rohde long ago observed, to the Greek mind " immortality "

and "divinity" are equivalents). The specific allusions of 410.

to Hesiod, Musaeus, Orpheus and the Orphic judges of the dead,

also make it clear that Socrates' convictions are not meant as

simply inferences from " natural theology " ; we have to see in

them the influence of the Orphic religion, though the Euthyphro

and the second book of the Republic show that Socrates thought

very poorly of the ordinary run of " professing " Orphics in his

own time.

3. Crito. The Euthyphro and Apology between them have made

us understand what Socrates meant by religion, and why his sense

of duty to God forbade him either to evade prosecution or to pur-

chase his life by any concessions. There is still one question

connected with his death to which the answer remains to be given.

Owing to unexpected circumstances, a month elapsed between

1 This is implied in the mention of " security " (ai/rol 5' tyyva<r0at, 386).

Socrates could clearly have paid down the " one mina " of which be had spoken.

168 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

condemnation and execution. His friends took advantage of this

delay to provide means of escape ; Socrates might still have avoided

drinking the hemlock if he would have walked out of his prison, but

he refused. Why was this ? No one would have thought the

worse of him, and there would have been no question of a compro-

mise with the leaders of the democracy. Persons who held with

Socrates himself that the whole proceedings against him had been

frivolous, and that he had been condemned for an offence which he

had not committed, by a court which had no competence, might

fairly be puzzled to know why he thought it a duty to refuse the

means of escape. This is the point to be cleared up in the

Crito. The explanation depends on an important distinction which

the ordinary man to this day finds it hard to draw. The

condemnation was in point of fact, as Socrates himself insisted,

iniquitous. He was quite innocent of any real impiety. But it

was strictly legal, as it had been pronounced by a legitimate court

after a trial conducted in accord with all the forms of law. And it

is the duty of a good citizen to submit to a legal verdict, even when

it is materially false. By standing a trial at all, a man " puts

himself on his country, 1 ' and he is not entitled to disregard the

decision to which he submits himself, even if his country makes a

mistake. The " country " is entitled to expect that the legally

pronounced sentence of a legitimate court shall be carried into effect ;

there would be an end of all " law and order " if a private man were

at liberty to disregard the judgment of the courts whenever he

personally believed it to be contrary to fact.

Even so, there is a further point to be considered. We have

seen that, strictly speaking, the court was not competent to take

account of the offences which the prosecutors really had in mind,

and that Socrates shows himself aware of this in the Apology when

he cross-examines Meletus. It might, then, be urged that if Socrates

had escaped he would not have been disregarding the decision of a

competent court ; is it wrong to disrespect the sentence of an in-

competent one ? Two things need to be remembered : (a) the

court thought itself competent, and Athenian law made no provision

for the quashing of its findings as ultra vires ; (b) this being so,

for an individual man who had all his life set the example of strict

and complete compliance with the vopoi of the city to follow his

private judgment on the question of the competency of the court

would have been to stultify the professions of a lifetime. Plato

himself, in the same situation, Adam says, would probably have

chosen to escape. This may be, but the second consideration just

mentioned would not have applied to Plato in 399. A young man

of under thirty, whose most important relatives had just four years

before lost their lives in the cause of " oligarchy/ 1 could not be

considered as having thrown in his lot definitely with the demo-

cracy and its vo/xot ; his position would have been really different

from that of an old man of the Periclean age. The argument, used

by Socrates, that to have neglected the opportunity to settle else-

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 169

where is equivalent to a compact to live by the fo'/zos of the city,

would have been inapplicable to a younger man who, in fact, had

never had the option in question. Thus, in the last resort, there

is a " subjective " and personal element in the considerations

which lead Socrates to feel that he would be belying his whole past

by escaping. Plato's object is not to lay down a categorical im-

perative for the guidance of all the wrongfully condemned, but to

throw light on the motives of an individual great man. (Whether

Plato would himself have chosen to escape, if he had been placed in

the same situation in his own seventieth year, is another question.

Much would depend on his view as to the work which might re-

main to him to do elsewhere.)

The dramatic mise-en-scene is necessarily exceedingly simple.

The conversation is tete-d-tete between Socrates in his apartment in

the prison of the Eleven and Crito, unless we count the " Laws "

into whose mouths the last word of the argument is put as an

unseen third party to the talk. The time is in the " small hours "

before dawn, while it is still dark. Crito, who brings the news that

the " sacred vessel " on whose return Socrates will have to die

has just been sighted off Sunium, has been some time watching

Socrates as he sleeps, when Socrates wakes from a strange dream

and the conversation ensues. Crito fears that Socrates, whose

sentence will be executed the day after the vessel reaches port,

has only one more night to live ; Socrates, on the strength of his

dream, expects, as turned out to be the fact, that the boat will not

make so quick a voyage and that his death will be deferred another

day. (In his interpretation he evidently takes the " fair and

comely woman " of 440 for the " fetch " of the approaching vessel,

and her " white garments " for its gay white sails.) This brief

introduction leads straight to the conversation in which Crito puts

the case for escape, to which Socrates replies point for point.

(a) The friends of Socrates will suffer in reputation if he persists

in dying. It will be supposed that they were too mean to find

the money necessary for corrupting his jailers. The answer is that

" decent folk " will know better than to think anything of the sort,

and what the " many " think does not matter (44^). (b) Un-

fortunately it does matter what the " many " think. The power

of popular prejudice is shown only too plainly by the present posi-

tion of Socrates himself. Answer : the " many " are powerless

to do much in the way of either good or ill, for they can neither

make a man wise nor make him a fool ; hence it matters very little

what they do to him (44^). (c) Perhaps Socrates is really thinking

of the interests of his friends, who will be exposed to " blackmailers "

(<rvKo<t>dvTai) l if he breaks prison, and be forced to pay these persons

to hold their tongues. He need not consider that point ; his

friends are in duty bound to take the risk and, besides, these worthies

against the " public.*'

170 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

are not very expensive to satisfy. If Socrates has a delicacy about

exposing Crito to the risk, his "foreign" friends, Simmias, Cebet>,

and others, are ready to open their purses (450-6) - 1 He need have

no difficulty in finding an abode where he will be made welcome.

Crito himself has relations with powerful men in Thessaly who

would honour his friend and act as his protectors (45^) (d) Besides,

it is not even morally right that Socrates should throw away his

life. That would be gratifying the very men who have prosecuted

him. Also it would be deserting his family, and an honourable

man has no right to disregard his obligations to his children. Thus

refusal to escape will look like a display of unmanly cowardice in

both Socrates and his friends (450-460).

Socrates begins his formal reply by saying that all through life

it has been his principle to act on his deliberate judgment of good.

He cannot feel that the judgments he expressed in his defence

before the court are in any way affected by the result of the trial.

If he is to take Crito's advice, he must first be convinced that there

is something unsound in these principles ; it is useless to work on

his imagination by setting up bugbears. The strength of Crito's

case all through has lain in the appeal to " what will be thought

of us." Now formerly we both held that it is not every opinion

nor the opinions of every man which matter. Socrates is still of

the same mind about this, and so, as he has to confess, is Crito.

We should attach weight to the opinion of those who know (the

<t>p6vifjioi), and disregard the opinion of those who do not. For

example, in the matter of bodily regimen the physician and the

trainer are the experts who know, and their approval or disapproval

ought to count, whereas a man who followed by preference the

approvals and disapprovals of the " many," who are laymen in

such matters, would certainly suffer for it in bodily health. The

same principle applies to matters of right and wrong, good and bad,

such as the question we are now considering, whether it will be

right or good for Socrates to break prison. We have not to take

into account the opinions of the " many," but those of the one

expert, if there is such a man, by neglecting whose advice we shall

injure " that which is made better by right but depraved by wrong."

(That is, the soul ; the argument is from the standing analogy

between health in the body and moral goodness in the soul.)

Further, we agree that if a man has ruined his physical con-

stitution by following the opinions of the " many " and disre-

garding those of the medical expert, life with a ruined physique

1 The point is that " aliens " would run no risks from the o

because they could get out of Attic territory in a few hours. The purpose for

which Simmias is said to have brought money at 456 4 is not to appease the

ffVKofdrrcu, from whom a Theban could suffer no trouble. From the Phaedo,

Simmias appears to have spent the month between the trial and death of

Socrates at Athens, but this need not exclude a journey to Thebes to procure

money to pay the warders who were to connive at Socrates' escape. Hence,

as I now see, I was wrong in my Varia Socratica in supposing that Meletus is

one of the persons meant by the reference to blackmailers.

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 171

is not worth preserving. But " that in us, whatever it is, in which

wickedness and righteousness have their seat " is not less but more

precious than the body. (Much less, then, is life worth preserving

if this that is, the soul is vitiated.) Crito has therefore raised a

wrong question. We ought to ask not what '* the many " will

think of Socrates 1 behaviour or that of his friends, but what will

be thought by the man who " understands " right and wrong.

True, the " many " can put you to death if you disagree with them ;

but then another principle which both Socrates and Crito hold

as strongly since the recent trial as before it is that the all-important

thing is not to live but to live a good life, and that living a good life

means the same thing as living aright (&Kcua>s). The real question

to be answered then is, " Would it be right for me to take my leave

of this place without a public discharge ? " All the other considera-

tions which Crito has raised are irrelevant (466-48^).

Again, we both still retain our old conviction that to commit

a wrong is, in all conditions, a bad thing for the man who commits

it (the thesis of the Gorgias). It follows that we must hold, con-

trary to the opinion of the " many/' that a man must never repay

wrong by retaliatory wrong (avTa8u<v), and therefore that we

must never repay ill-treatment by ill-treatment (avrtKaKovpytiv

KCIKWS TTuVxovTa). In a word, no treatment received from another

ever justifies wronging him or treating him ill, though this is a

conviction so opposed to the code of the " many/' that those who

accept and those who reject it cannot even discuss a problem of

practice with one another (OVK CO-TI KOIVJJ ftovX^, 49^). Socrates

and Crito can only discuss the course Socrates is to adopt because

they agree about this initial principle (490-2).

Next, ought a man, on these principles, to keep his word when

he has given it (assuming that what he has promised to do is in se

morally right), 1 or may he break- it ? Of course, he must keep it.

Our immediate problem, then, reduces to this. If Socrates leaves

the prison without a public discharge, will he, or will he not, be

wronging the very party whom he ought to be most careful not to

wrong ? Will he be keeping a right and lawful pledge, or will he be

violating it ? Let us consider what the Laws, or the State, might

have to say if they could take us in the act of " making our lucky "

(/xcXXovo-iv d7ro8i8pao-Kiv). This appeal to the personified figure

of the State or the Laws is, as Burnet says, in principle a Platonic

" myth/' Its function is the same as that played in other dialogues

by the vision of the Judgment to come. That is, it does not carry

the argument further, but brings it home powerfully to the imagina-

tion. Artistically the function of the picture is to evoke a mood of

ideal feeling adequate to the elevation of the ethical demands of

6vTa, 490. This is inserted to exclude a promise to do what is

impermissum in se. Socrates' view is that a promise to do what is in itself

illicit is null and void. But we see in the sequel that the tacit " compact "

by which Socrates is pledged to the rfaoi or writ of Athens involves

nothing but what is strictly licitum.

172 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

Socraticism on the conscience, to arouse unconditional " reverence "

for the dignity of the moral law as that which demands and justifies

the philosopher's martyrdom. So far, and no further, it acts as

the sight of the Crucifix does on a Christian. The conception of

society implied, as something too obvious to need explanation, is

the same which underlies all the versions of the doctrine of " social

contract," a doctrine naturally familiar to the members of a society

which knew from its own experience how legislation is made. But

it gives us the fundamental truth of the theory of " contract " un-

contaminated with any element of historical error about the first

origins of " society/' The thought is that a man who has cast in

his lot with the community by accepting its " social system " all

through life has tacitly bound himself to support the organization

on which the social order depends, and cannot in honour go back

from his pledge for the sake of his personal convenience. This is

what is really meant by the much-misrepresented doctrine of

" passive obedience," and it is interesting to remark that Socrates

thus combines in himself the " nonconformist's " reverence for

" conscience " and the " non-juror's " reverence for the " powers

that be." He is the one absolutely consistent " conscientious

objector" of history, because, unlike most such " objectors," he

respects the conscience of TO KOWQV as well as his own.

The Laws might complain that Socrates would by an Evasion

be breaking his own " compact," and that without the excuse that

the compact had been made under duress, or obtained by false

representation or without sufficient time for consideration. 1 He has

had a life of seventy years for reflection and in all this time has

never attempted to adopt a new domicile, but has absented himself

less than almost any other citizen from Athens. Thus he cannot

plead any of the recognized excuses for regarding his assent to live

under the laws of the city as anything but free and deliberate.

(Of course the meaning is not that Socrates could have been

" naturalized " in some other community ; but he might have

chosen to live as a resident alien under the protection of another

society, or as a colonist at e.g. Amphipolis or Thurii.) The whole

course of his life bears silent witness that he has accepted the

system of institutions into which he had been born, and it is an

integral part of the system that an Athenian citizen shall respect

the decisions of the duly constituted courts. He is not at

liberty to reject the jurisdiction because in his own opinion the

decision of a court does him a material wrong (SQC). To run

away to escape the execution of the court's sentence would be

following up the exalted speeches he made before the judges by

the conduct of the paltriest of eloping slaves. If he does break

his " compact," what good can he expect to accrue to his connexions

or himself ? His family and friends will certainly run the risk of

1 Force majeure, fraudulent misrepresentation, insufficient time for con-

sideration, are thus recognized as the three conditions which might, severally

or conjointly, make a promise void.

SOCRATIC DIALOGUES 178

banishment or loss of property. As for himself, suppose he makes

his escape to a neighbouring city such as Thebes or Megara, which

have good institutions, and where, as we know, he would find warm

friends, he must be looked on by all honest citizens as an enemy,

who has defied one society and may be expected to do the same by

another, and thus will fairly be under the suspicion of being a

" corrupt er " of the young who may associate with him. If, to

avoid such reproach, he takes refuge in a disorderly and lawless

community, what kind of life does he propose to lead ? For very

shame, he cannot continue his professions of devotion to " goodness

and law " with his own conduct staring him in the face. Even in

so lawless a society as that of Thessaly, he might for a while live

under the protection of Crito's connexions there, and they might

find the story of his successful escape from prison an excellent joke,

but he must expect to hear the painful truth about his behaviour

as soon as he offends anyone. Even if he escapes that disgrace

by making himself a general toady, his life will be that of a

" trencherman " and parasite, and what will become of all his

fine professions about right and goodness ? As for the final appeal

which Crito had made to his parental affections, what good will

such an existence do to his children ? Does he propose to bring

them up as hangers-on in Thessaly ? If they are to grow up as

free men and citizens at Athens, will his friends neglect them more

because he has removed to the other world than they would if he

had removed to Thessaly ? Besides, the plea will be useless when

life is over at last and a man has to stand before the judges of the

dead. If Socrates abides execution now, he will have a good defence

before that tribunal. He will appear as an innocent victim of the

injustice not of law, but of individuals who have abused law for

his destruction. 1 If he does not, he will have to answer for having

done what lay in him to shake the authority of law itself, and must

expect to have the law itself against him in the next world as well

as in this. It is this appeal which rings in the ears of Socrates and

makes him deaf to the voice of Crito, nor can Crito find anything

to set against it. We must, therefore, be content to follow the

path along which God is leading us (500-540).

See further :

BURNETT. Euthyphro, Apology, Crito. (Oxford, 1924.)

RIDDELL. Apology of Plato. (Oxford, 1867.)

BURNET. Early Greek Philosophy, Part /., Chapter IX. 180-192.

RITTER, C.Platon, i. 363-390.

RITTER, C.Sokrates. (Tubingen, 1931-)

TAYLOR, A. E. Socrates. (London, 1932.)

1 546. This is, in fact, the fundamental distinction on which Socrates

founds his whole argument. When a man is legally but wrongly convicted

of an offence he has not committed, the wrong is inflicted not by the law, but

by the persons who have misused the law. Anytus, not the law, has done

Socrates a wrong. But the prison-breaker is doing what he can to make the

whole social system ineffective. His conduct is a direct challenge to the

authority of law itself.

CHAPTER VIII

THE PHAEDO

WE are now to consider the group of four great dialogues

which exhibit Plato's dramatic art at its ripest perfection.

It may fairly be presumed that they all belong to one and

the same period of his development as a writer, a view borne out

by a cautious and sane use of the available " stylometric " evidence.

Outwardly they have all the same form, that of a conversation

supposed to have taken place before a numerous audience and

subsequently described either by Socrates himself (Protagoras,

Republic), or by one of the original auditors (Phaedo, Symposium).

We have already found Plato using this difficult literary form for

comparatively short dialogues (e.g. Charmides, Euthydemus), but it

is a more arduous task to keep it up successfully throughout a work

of considerable compass ; as we have seen, in the dialogues which

there is other reason for thinking later than the Republic, it is only

adopted once (in the Parmenides), and there is a formal explanation

of its abandonment in the Theaetetus. This is good reason for

thinking that Plato's great achievements in this kind belong neither

to his more youthful nor to his later period of literary activity, but

to his prime of maturity as a writer (which need not, of course,

coincide with his ripest maturity as a thinker). I do not think there

is any satisfactory method of dating the four dialogues themselves

in the order of their composition. We may reasonably presume

that the Republic, as the work of greatest range and compass among

them, must have taken longest to write, and was the last to be

completed. It also contains what looks like a concealed reference

to the Phaedo (Rep. 6116 10), though the fact is by no means

certain. 1 Now there is one consideration which perhaps allows

us to fix an approximate date in Plato's life for the writing of the

Republic. In Ep. vii. 3266, where Plato is describing the state of

mind in which he paid his first visit to Italy and Sicily, he says that

he had been driven to state, in a eulogy of genuine philosophy

(cVcuvwv TTJV opOrjv <t>i\o<ro<t>(av) , that humanity will never escape

its sufferings until either true philosophers occupy political office

1 The ' other arguments " (AXXoi \6yoi) for immortality referred to in

passing may mean those which Plato's readers would know from the Phaedo,

but they may equally well mean those which readers of Socratic literature

would know to be current among Orphics or Pythagoreans generally. Thut

the words cannot be pressed as an argument for the priority of the Phaedo,

74

THE PHAEDO 175

or political " rulers," by some happy providence, turn to philo-

sophy. It seems impossible not to take this as a direct allusion to

Republic vi. 4996, where the same thing is said, almost in the same

words, as part of a " eulogy " of true philosophy. Since Plato

also says (Ep. vii. 3240) that he was about forty years old at the

time of his voyage, this seems to give us 387 B.C. as an approximate

date for the writing of the Republic, or, at least, of its central and

most difficult section, and we are led to think of his dramatic

activity, culminating in the four great " reported dialogues," as

marking the late thirties of his life. Beyond this, so far as I can

see, we have no means of going. We cannot tell, for example,

whether the Phaedo is earlier or later than the Symposium, or either

earlier or later than the Protagoras. My own reason for taking the

Phaedo before the other two is simply that it connects outwardly

with the events of Socrates' last day, and consequently illustrates

the same side of his thought and character as the three dialogues

we have just examined.

As in the case of these three dialogues, I must be content to a

considerable extent to refer my reader to Professor Burnet's com-

mentary for treatment of details. The scene of the conversation

is laid at Phlius, where Phaedo of Elis, apparently on his way home

from Athens, relates the story of the last hours of Socrates to a

party of Phliasian admirers of the philosopher who have not yet

had any account of the details. The one member of this party who

is named is Echecrates, independently known to us as a Pythagorean.

Hence Burnet is probably not far wrong in supposing the story to

be told in the " meeting-house " of the local Pythagoreans. The

surroundings will thus harmonize with the general tone of the con-

versation, in which the two principal interlocutors are also pupils

of an eminent Pythagorean, Philolaus. It should be noted that

these two speakers, Simmias and Cebes, are both represented as

young, and that they evidently belong to the group of Pythagoreans

in whom the religious side of the original movement has been com-

pletely overshadowed by the scientific. It is Socrates who has to

recall them to the very conceptions which are at the root of Pytha-

gorean religion, and persuade them that their scientific " develop-

ments " are inconsistent with the foundations of that religion. We

need also to be alive in reading the Phaedo to two important facts

which are sometimes forgotten. One is that Socrates himself is

very careful to qualify his assent to the main tenet of the Orphic

and Pythagorean faith, the deathlessness of the soul, by cautious

reserve as to the details of the eschatology in which that faith has

found expression. He is sure that he will leave this world to be

with God ; he is very far from sure about the rest of the Orphic

scheme of rewards and punishments. The other is that we. must

not take the Phaedo by itself for a complete expression of the whole

spirit of Socraticism. It sets Socrates before us in the last hours

of his life, and dwells on just the side of his thought and character

which would be sure to be most prominent in the given situation,

176 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

but we should misconceive his doctrine if we did not integrate the

picture of the Phaedo with such a representation of the philosopher

in the midst of life as we get, for example, in the Protagoras, where

the underlying body of doctrine is identical but the situation wholly

different and the emphasis correspondingly different. Probably

the directest way to an understanding of the influence and per-

sonality of Socrates would be to read and meditate these two great

dialogues together, interpreting each in the light of the other. (It

is worth observing that Aristotle seems to have done something of

the kind. His views about the philosophy of Socrates as a whole

seem to be derived chiefly from the Phaedo ; when he has occasion,

in his own Ethics, to discuss the Socratic theses about the conduct

of life, it is demonstrable that the unnamed source of his informa-

tion is primarily the Protagoras.)

There can be no doubt that Plato intends the reader to take the

dialogue as an accurate record of the way in which Socrates spent

his last hours on earth, and the topics on which he spoke with his

intimate friends in the face of imminent death. This is indicated,

for example, by the care shown to give a full list of the names of

the persons present. Most of these were probably still living when

the Phaedo was circulated ; it is quite certain that this was the case

with some of them, e.g. Euclides and Terpsion, who, as we see from

the Theaetetus, were still alive and active thirty years later ; Phaedo,

the actual narrator, who is represented in the dialogue as still a

mere lad; Aeschines of Sphettus, and others. Though Plato is

careful to mention and account for his own absence, it is quite

certain that he must have been fully informed of the facts, since

the statement that he spent some time after the death of Socrates

with Euclides and Terpsion at Megara comes to us on the excellent

authority of his own pupil Hermodorus. We are therefore bound

to accept his account of Socrates' conduct and conversation on the

last day of his life as in all essentials historical, unless we are willing

to suppose him capable of a conscious and deliberate misrepresenta-

tion recognizable as such by the very persons whom he indicates as

the sources of his narrative. This supposition is to my own mind

quite incredible, and I shall therefore simply dismiss it, referring

the reader who wishes for discussion of it to the full Introduction

to Burnet's edition of the dialogue.

The purpose of the dialogue is not quite accurately described

by calling it a discourse on the " immortality of the soul." To us

this suggests that the main object of the reasoning is to prove the

soul's endless survival, and nothing more. But to the Greek mind

aOavaa-ia or a<t>0apcria regularly signified much the same thing as

" divinity," and included the conception of ingenerability as well

as of indestructibility. Accordingly, the arguments of the dialogue,

whatever their worth may be, aim at showing that our souls never

began to be quite as much as at proving that they will never cease

to be. But neither of these positions is the main point of the

reasoning. The subject of the dialogue is better indicated by the

THE PHAEDO 177

name used by Plato himself in Ep. xiii. 3630, where it is said to be

" the discourse of Socrates about the ^vxy." The immediate and

principal object of the whole conversation is the justification of the

life of " tendance of the soul " by insisting on the divinity of the

human soul, and on " imitation of God " as the right and reasonable

rule of conduct ; the immunity of the soul from death is a mere

consequence, though an important consequence, of this inherent

divinity. The argument is, in the proper sense of the phrase, a moral

one ; the worth and dignity of the soul afford reasonable grounds

for hoping that death is, to a good man, entrance on a better life,

an " adventure " which he may face with good comfort the

summary of the whole matter given by Socrates himself at 114^-1150.

A possible misconception which would be fatal to a real under-

standing of the dialogue is to look upon the members of the series

of arguments for immortality as so many independent substantive

" proofs," given by the author or the speaker as all having the same

inherent value. Any careful study will show that they are meant

to form a series of " aggressions " to the solution of a problem, each

requiring and leading up to the completer answer which follows it.

In particular, Plato is careful, by skilful use of dramatic by-play

and pauses in the conversation, to let us see what he regards as the

critical points in the argument. These pauses are principally two,

that which occurs at S&c-Sga, where the narrative is interrupted

by a short dialogue between Phaedo and Echecrates, and 950-1000,

where Socrates relates the story of his early difficulties with the

physical " philosophy " of Empedocles, Diogenes, and others. It is

evidently meant that the two outstanding difficulties which must

be faced by the philosophical defender of the doctrine of immortality

are the " epiphenomenalist " theory of consciousness and the

" mechanical theory of nature/ 1 the one represented for us in the

Phaedo by the " objection " of Simmias, and the other by that of

Cebes.

As I shall point out later on, Plato himself in the Laws specifies

just these theories as being at the root of all irreligious philo-

sophizing, and it would still be true to say that to-day they con-

stitute the speculative basis for most of the current denials of human

immortality. We are thus directed to find in the Phaedo a state-

ment of the position of Socrates on these two perennial issues ; for

Plato's own personal attitude towards them we need to look primarily

to the express refutation of the " unbeliever " in the tenth book of

the Laws. The background presupposed in one refutation is the

science of the fifth century, that of the other is the Academic science

of the fourth, but both agree in the assertions (a) that mental life

is not the effect of bodily causes, and that physical reality itself

" coming into being and passing out of being " is not explicable

in purely mechanical terms. This apart from the impressive

picture of the fortitude of the true philosopher in the moment of

death is the main lesson of the Phaedo.

The immortal narrative must be passed over in the present

178 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

connexion with just one word. It may not be superfluous to

associate ourselves with Burnet 's protest against the absurd charge

of " hardness " as a husband which has been brought against

the dying Socrates. It is clear that his wife and infant son are

supposed to have spent the last night of his life with him in the

prison. They are conducted home at the opening of the discourse

(6oa) for the reason at which Socrates himself hints later on (117$),

because Xanthippe is, naturally enough, on the verge of a " nervous

breakdown," and Socrates desires to spare both her and himself.

The children and the "ladies of the family " reappear again at the

end (n6b) for a final interview in the presence of no witness but

Crito, the oldest friend of the family, and we are expressly told that

the interview was a lengthy one. Phaedo cannot describe this

eminently private scene, because he had not witnessed it, but it is

the mere fact that he was not present which has given rise to mis-

understanding (assisted, perhaps, by the incapacity of modern

sentimentalists to understand the reticence of all great art).

THE ARGUMENT OF THE DIALOGUE

I. STATEMENT OF THE MAIN THESIS (606-706)

The main issue of the dialogue is made to emerge in a simple

and natural way from the remark of Socrates that the genuine

" philosopher " is one who is ready and willing to die, though he

would regard it as " criminal " to put an end to his own life (6ic).

(That is, he trusts that death is the entrance on a better state,

but holds that we may not force the door ; we must wait for it

to be opened to us in God's good time. The Pythagorean origin of

the absolute veto on suicide is indicated by the allusion to Philolaus

at 6id.) This may seem a paradox, but it is intelligible if we con-

ceive of man as a " chattel " (KT^O) of God, just as a slave is a

" chattel " of his owner, and therefore has no right to dispose of

his own life, as it does not belong to him. Socrates would not like

to commit himself entirely to the Orphic dogma that while we are

in the body we are "in ward/' i.e. undergoing penal servitude for

ante-natal sin, but he thinks it at least adumbrates this truth that

" we men are chattels of the gods" (626), l and therefore may not

dispose of ourselves as we please. (The kind of K-HJ/xa (" chattel ")

meant is clearly a 8ouXos, who is, as Roman lawyers put it, in the

1 For the doctrine in question see in particular the important fragment of

Clearchus the Peripatetic quoted by Burnet loc. cit. I think it clear that the

(ppovpd means " house of detention," not " post of military duty." To the

passages making for the former interpretation quoted by Burnet add Plutarch,

de sera numinis vindicta, 554^. The diroSi&pdffKetv of 626 5 exactly suits a

prisoner " breaking prison," but not a sentry leaving his post, for which we

should need ai/ro^oXftV. Socrates' refusal to commit himself to the " mystical "

dogma is important. It makes it clear a t the start that, in spite of all ap-

pearances to the contrary, it is no part of the object of the dialogue to prove

" pre-existence " and " transmigration. "

THE PHAEDO 179

dominium of his owner and therefore has no " proprietary rigfyt "

in his own body.) Yet in saying this we seem to be merely replacing

one paradox by another. If we are the " chattels " of the gods,

that means that we are under the " tendance " of good and wise

owners who know what is best for us much better than we do our-

selves. Death would seem to mean being released from this

tendance and left to look after ourselves. Surely a wise man

would think such an emancipatio a thing to be dreaded (exactly,

that is, as a shrewd slave would be very unwilling to be "freed"

from a first-rate owner and left to fend for himself (62^)). The

paradox would be a very real one if Socrates were not convinced

that after death one will equally be under the care of good and wise

gods, and perhaps though of this he is not equally sure (630) in

the company of the best men of the past. This is the faith (cAm's)

which gives him courage to face death, and he will try to impart

it to his friends. Thus the thing to be proved is primarily not the

" natural immortality " of the soul. A proof of immortality,

taken by itself, would not be adequate ground for facing death in

a hopeful spirit. It would be quite consistent with holding that

we only leave this world to find ourselves in a much worse one.

What is really to be proved, if possible, is that " the souls of the

just are in the hand of God " after death as much as before.

Socrates, like all great religious teachers, rests his hopes for the

unseen future in the last resort on the goodness of God, not on the

natural imperishability of the human ^v^r/. (So in the Timaeus

faa-b), it is the goodness of the Creator's will which guarantees the

immortality even of the "created gods," i.e. the stars.) What

is to be shown, in fact, is that the faith and hope with which the

" philosopher " faces death is the logical consequence and supreme

affirmation of the principles by which he has regulated his whole

life. To lose faith when, you come to die would be to contradict

the whole tenour of your past life ; for, though the world may not

know it, the life of " philosophy " itself is nothing but one long

"rehearsal 1 * (/ucAen?) l of dying (640). Possibly, indeed, the

" world " would say that it does know this well enough ; it knows

very well that " philosophers " are " morbid " creatures who are

only half alive, and that it serves them right to eliminate them

(a plain allusion to the Aristophanic caricature of the ^/oovrurrat as

1 Not " meditation " of death. /ueXlrii means the repeated practice by

which we prepare ourselves for a performance. It is used of the " practising "

of a man training for an athletic contest, and again of the " learning by heart "

of such a thing as a speech which you have procured from a \oyoypd<f>os and

want to have " perfect " when the time for deliverance comes. No doubt,

then, it was also the word for an actor's " study " of his " part." (Cf. ripttition

as used of the rehearsals of a play or a symphony in French.) The thought is

thus that " death " is like a play for which the philosopher's life has been a

daily rehearsal. His business is to be perfect in his part when the curtain

goes up. Note that, as Burnet says (Phaedo, 646 3 n., E.G.Ph.*, 278 n. i), it is

implied throughout the argument that " philosophy " has the special sense,

which is clearly Pythagorean, of devotion to science as a way to the salvation

of the soul.

180 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

living " ghosts "). Only the world is mistaken on one small point ;

it does not understand the sense in which the philosopher uses the

word " death, ".and that is what we must explain (64^. It is all

the more necessary to attend to the explanation that it is really the

key to the whole of the Phaedo, and that its significance has been

often misapprehended by both admirers and critics down to our

own time as completely as by the (5?]/iog of Thebes or Athens. 1

To put the matter quite simply, death, as every one under-

stands, is the " release " of the soul from the body ; in other

words, it is the achievement of the soul's independence. Now

we can see that what the philosopher has been aiming at all his

life long is just to make the soul, as completely as he can, inde-

pendent of the fortunes of the body. We can see this from the

following considerations: (a) The philosopher sets no great store

on the gratifications of physical appetite, and disregards the

" tendance of the body " in general (fine clothes and foppery)

" beyond what is needful." 2 What he " tends " is the soul, and

that is why the " mass of men " think him as good as a ghost or

corpse (640-65^). (b) In his pursuit of knowledge he finds the

limitations of the body a hindrance to him in more ways than one,

and is always doing his best to escape them. He soon discovers

the grossness and untrustworthiness of our senses, even of the two

most acute of them, sight and hearing, and tries to arrive at truth

more accurate and certain than any which the evidence of sense

could furnish. This is why he trusts to thinking rather than to

sense ; but in thinking the soul is independent of the body in a

way in which she is not independent in sensation. (This is, of course,

strictly true. Socrates would probably be thinking primarily

of the danger of trusting to a " figure " in mathematics, a danger

which will be mentioned a little further on. It is equally true that,

even in our own times, when the scientific man is so abundantly

supplied with " instruments of precision," we have always to allow

for a margin of unknown error in all conclusions depending on data

derived from sense-perception ; absolute accuracy and certainty

can only be obtained, if at all, in " pure " science which makes

no appeal to sense, even for its data.) So pleasurable or painful

excitement derived from the body also gravely interferes with the

prosecution of truth. (One is hampered in one's scientific work

when one's head aches or one's liver is out of order.) (c) The

supreme objects of our studies, " the right," " the good," " the

beautiful," " figure," " health," in short, the " reality " (oucrt'a)

investigated by any science is always something which none of the

1 Socrates' point is that to use the language of Christian mystics the

" world " confuses a dying life with a living death. The " philosopher " is

out for " dying into life " ; the world thinks he is making his existence a

death in life, but it is really the worldling who is " dead while he lives."

1 64*. Kaff foot ^ TroXXi) dvAyicr) avr&v. This is inserted to show that

Socrates has no sympathy with the gratuitous slovenliness of persons like the

Telauges of A esc bines' dialogue or his own companion Antisthenes. He does

not regard " dirt " as a mark of godliness.

THE PHAEDO 181

senses perceives, and the less we depend on any of them the less,

that is, we substitute " sensing " for " thinking " in our science

the nearer we come to apprehending the object we are really study-

ing (6^d-66a). 1 Having all these considerations in mind, we may

fairly take a " short cut " (aiy)cwros) to the conclusion that so long

as we have the body with us it will always be a hindrance to the

apprehension of " reality " (TO dA^flcs) as it is. At the best we lose

much valuable time by being obliged to take care of the body.

If it gets out of condition, our quest of " the real " (TO ov) is even

more hindered. Bodily wants and the passions connected with

them which, incidentally, are the causes of business and war,

the two great occupations of the " active life " leave us hardly

any opportunity or leisure for the pursuit of knowledge. And even

in the scanty time we are able to devote to the things of the mind,

the body and its needs are constantly " turning up " and diverting

our attention. Thus the man who is really " in love with know-

ledge " must confess that his heart's desire is either only to be

won after death, when the soul has achieved her independence of

her troublesome partner, or not at all. While we are in the body,

we make the nearest approach to our supreme good just in propor-

tion as we accomplish the concentration of the soul on herself and

the detachment of her attention from the body, waiting patiently

until God sees fit to complete the deliverance for us. When that

happens, we may hope, having become unmixed and undiluted

intelligence, to apprehend undiluted reality. Meanwhile the life

of thinking itself is a progressive purifying of intelligence from the

alien element and a concentration of it on itself. The philosopher

is the only type of man who makes it the business of his life to

accomplish this purgation and concentration and so to win spiritual

independence. This is why we may call his life a " rehearsal of

death," and why unwillingness to complete the process would be

ridiculous in him (66c-686). The conception set before us in these

pages is manifestly the Hellenic counterpart of the " mystical way "

of Christianity. The underlying ideas of both conceptions are

1 That is, the object studied by any science is always what Socrates calls

an eTSos or I6ta, though the technical term is not yet introduced. It is

important to note the immediate and emphatic assent of Simmias to this

statement (65^). He is clearly supposed to have learned all about the matter

from his Pythagorean teachers. The examples are taken from ethics (SLxaiov,

dya&6v t Ka\6v), mathematics (ptycOos), medicine (vyleta, texts)- Of course you

can see pcytOrj, but it is quite true that you cannot see ftfryeOot. So you

can see or draw approximately elliptical lines, but you cannot even approxi-

mately draw " the general conic " or " the curve of the third order." If you did

try to draw them and relied on some characteristic of your figure as a property

of the curve on no better evidence than that of your eyes, you would soon

be led into error about the " reality " you are investigating. A thorough

empiricist would have to go to much wilder extremes. He would, for example,

have to hold that it is quite uncertain whether, if you only went on counting

long enough, you might not come on two odd integers without an even one

between them, or on a highest prime number, or even on an integer which is

neither odd nor even. These things are actually maintained by some empiri-

cist mathematicians, but they would be the death of ^a

7

182 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

that there is a supreme good for man which, from its very nature,

cannot be enjoyed " in this life." The best life is therefore one

which is directed to fitting ourselves for the full fruition of this

" eternal " good beyond the limits of our temporal existence.

In both cases this means that the highest life for man while on

earth is a " dying life," a process of putting off the old man with

the affections and the lusts and becoming a " new creature."

The constant presence of this aim makes the life of devotion to

science, as conceived by Socrates and his friends, a genuine via

crucis. And they, like the Christian mystics, conceive of the best

life as one of contemplation, not of action. The ultimate aim of

the " philosopher " is not to do things, but to enjoy the vision of a

reality to which he grows like as he looks upon it, the ideal already

expressed in the apologue of the " three lives " popularly ascribed

to Pythagoras. We must be careful, however, to guard ourselves

against two insidious misconceptions. For all the stress laid on

" purification " of the mind from contact with the body, we must

not suppose that Socrates is thinking of a life of mere negative

abstentions.

The whole point of the insistence on unremitting preoccupation

with thinking as the philosophic form of " purgation " is that the

object of the renunciation of the philosopher is to make his life

richer ; by " purification " from external preoccupations, his

intelligence becomes more and more intense and concentrated,

just as, e.g., alcohol becomes more potent the more nearly your

specimen is " pure " alcohol. Nor must one suppose that the

contemplative life, because it is not directed ultimately on action,

is one of indolence or laziness. Socrates, who claims in our dialogue

to have spent his whole life " in philosophy/' was busy from morning

to night with his " mission." Probably, when we remember the

way in which Plato in the seventh Epistle insists on the political

character of his own original ambitions and on his lifelong con-

viction that the business of the philosopher among men is to be a

statesman, we may infer that he would not himself at any time

have subscribed to the doctrine of the vita contemplativa without

a great deal of cxplanat ion and reservation. Even the Pythagoreans

who formulated the doctrine had stood alone among the scientific

schools in playing an important part, as a society, in the politics

of the early fifth century. They only became a merely scientific

society when their political activities had been crushed by revolu-

tion. But it may well be that the ablest men of action feel even

more strongly than the rest of us that the " conduct of business,"

the carrying on of commerce, governing, and fighting cannot be

its own justification. To be everlastingly " meddling " seems an

end not worthy the dignity of human nature ; at bottom we all

want not to do something but to be something. To make " doing

things " your ultimate object is merely to take " Fidgety Phil who

couldn't keep still" as your model of manly excellence. It has

been said with truth that the great "practical reforms" which

THE PHAEDO 183

have proved of lasting value have mostly been the work of men

whose hearts were all the time set on something different.

If a man, then, plays the craven when death comes, we may be

sure he is no true "lover of wisdom," but a " lover of the body/'

which is as much as to say a man whose heart is set on wealth

(a <iAoxpi7/xaT09) or on " honours " (a $iA<m/xos), or both at once

(68c. This direct allusion to the Pythagorean " three lives " is,

of course, intentional.) On the other hand, the philosopher will be

marked by eminent courage and eminent " temperance " in the

popular sense in which the word means control over one's physical

appetites. In fact, when we come to reflect, there is something

paradoxical about the courage and temperance of the rest of man-

kind. They are courageous in the face of danger because courage

serves to protect them against death, which they fear as the worst

of evils. Thus their very valour is rooted in a sort of cowardice.

(As an Indian says of the English in one of Kipling's tales, "they

are not afraid to be kicked, but they are afraid to die.") And the

decent (icoayuoi) among them keep their lusts in hand because they

think they will get more pleasure by doing so than by giving way,

so that " slavery to pleasure " is the source of what they call their

" temperance." But the truth is that real virtue is not a business

of exchanging pleasures and pains against one another. Wisdom

is the true " coin of the realm " for which everything else must be

exchanged, and it is only when accompanied by it that our so-

called " virtues " are genuine goodness (a\r)0r)s aptrrj). Without

it, the kind of goodness which is based on the " calculus of pleasure

and pain " is no more than a painted show (a-KLaypa^ta) . l The

Orphic saying is that " many carry the narthex but few are real

paKxoi," and we might apply tin's to our purpose by taking the

"real J&IKXOS," who genuinely feels the "god within," to mean the

true philosopher. Of these chosen few Socrates has all his life

tried to become one ; with what success he may know better in a

few hours (686-69*). 2

II. THE ARGUMENTS FOR IMMORTALITY

In substance, what has gone before contains Socrates' vindica-

tion of his attitude in the face of death. But, as Simmias remarks,

the whole vindication has tacitly assumed that there is an here-

after. Now most men find it very hard to believe that the soul

1 690 6-c 3. On the text and grammar of this sentence, which have

undergone much corruption, see Burnet, loc. cit., where it is also pointed out

that <TKiaypa<f>ta does not mean an " imperfect outline," but a stage-painting in

which, e.g.> a flat surface is made to look like the fa9ade of a temple. The

point is not that " vulgar " goodness is " imperfect " but that it is illusory.

8 In this context Socrates' claim can hardly be understood to mean less

than that he had been a " follower of the way." We cannot well believe

that Plato invented this, still less that he had anything to do with " the way "

himself.

184 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

is not " dispersed like smoke " when a man dies, and Simmias

shares their difficulty. To complete his " case " Socrates must

therefore satisfy us that the soul continues to be, and to be intelli-

gent after the death of the "man." Accordingly he now proceeds

to produce three considerations which point to that conclusion.

It is not said that they are demonstrative. Simmias had asked

only for TTI'OTIS (conviction), not for demonstration, and Socrates

professes no more than to consider whether immortality is " likely "

(ei/cds) or not. In point of fact, the first two proofs are found to

break down and the third, as Burnet observes, is said by Socrates

(10766) to need fuller examination. Thus it is plain that Plato

did not mean to present the arguments as absolutely probative to

his own mind. The argument he does find convincing and develops

at great length in the Laws is put briefly into the mouth of Socrates

in the Phaednis, but no mention is made of it here. 1

(a) THE FIRST ARGUMENT (700-77^. This argument itself

falls into two parts, a (yoc-y2e) and ft (720-77^ ; the two have to

be considered in conjunction to make anything which can be called

a proof, and what they go to prove is not " immortality " but

merely that the soul continues to be " something " after death.

It is not simply annihilated. This, of course, is only the first step

to establishing what is really in question, the persistence of in-

telligence beyond the grave.

(a) First Reason for holding that the Soul is not simply anni-

hilated at Death (700-720) . There is an ancient doctrine (it is,

in fact, Orphic) of rebirth, according to which a soul which is born

into this world is one which has come back from " another world "

to which men go at death. This, if true, would establish our point.

To look at the matter from a more general point of view, we see

that the world is made up of " opposites " (eVavria) such as hot,

cold ; great, small ; good, bad. Now if a thing " becomes bigger " it

must have first been " smaller," if it becomes hotter it must have

been cooler, if it becomes " better " it must have been " worse/'

and so on. So we may say universally that whatever comes to be,

comes to be " out of its opposite/' and that to correspond to each

pair^of opposites, there are two antithetical processes of " becom-

ing." Hot and cold are opposites, and similarly there are the two

processes of contrasted sense, " becoming hotter," " becoming

1 It is the argument from the " self-moving " character of the soul

( Phaedrus, 245^ 5-2460 2, Laws, x. 8936 6-896^ 4). Why is nothing said of this

argument in the Phaedo ? It has been suggested that the reason is that the

argument is an invention of Plato's own and that he had not thought of

it when he wrote the Phaedo. I do not think this likely, since the argument is

really in principle that of Alcmaeon of Crotona, and is thus much older than

Socrates (Aristotle, de Anima, A2. 4053 30), I should suggest a different

explanation. The argument starts from the reality of motion. But this

would have been denied by the Eleatic Eu elides and Terpsion, and Socrates

wishes to base his reasoning on premisses his company will admit. We

must remember also that Euclides and his friend were very probably the

persons from whom Plato derived most of his knowledge of the last hours of

bocratet

THE PHAEDO 185

cooler." All this will apply to the case of life and death. Being

alive and being dead are opposites, just as being awake and being

asleep are. And we have agreed that everything comes to be

" out of its opposite/' The living must come from the dead, and

the dead from the living, and thus here, as elsewhere, there will be

two opposed processes, corresponding to the two opposed condi-

tions of being alive and being dead. We see and have a name for

one of these processes, that by which a living being becomes dead ;

we call it dying. But there must, on our principle, also be an

antithetic process of " coming to life " which terminates in actual

birth. In fact, if the whole process were not cyclical, life would

ultimately perish, and there would be only a dead universe left.

Thus the drift of the argument is simply to confirm the " ancient

doctrine " of rebirth by showing that it is only one case of the

universal natural law of cyclical " recurrence/ 1 The illustrations

from the alternation of sleep and waking seem to show that Socrates

is thinking primarily of the way in which this " law of exchange "

had been assumed as the fundamental principle of the philosophy

of Heraclitus, with whom death and life, sleeping and waking,

are explicitly co-ordinated (Her. Fr. 64, 77, 123, Bywater). But

the general conception of the world as made up of " opposites "

which are generated " out of one another " was, of course, a common-

place of the earliest Greek physical science (cf. Burnet, E.G.Ph. 3 ,

p. 8). Socrates' Pythagorean auditors, in particular, would be at

once reminded of their own table of " opposites " by reasoning of

this kind.

(It is easy to see that the reasoning is neither cogent nor, if it

were, probative of what we want to prove. As Aristotle was after-

wards to explain more fully, the whole conception of the generation

of opposite " out of " opposite is vitiated by an ambiguity in the

phrase " out of." A thing which grows cool has previously been

warmer, but it is not true that " heat " is a stuff or matter out of

which " cold " is made. In Aristotelian language, the thing which

grows cool has lost the " form " of " the hot " and acquired the

" form " of the cold ; the original " form " has not itself been made

into an " opposite " form. Again, it is simply assumed, without

warrant, that cyclical alternation is the universal law of all pro-

cesses. To us there is no absurdity in the view that living organisms

should finally vanish, or that differences of temperature should

cease to exist. If the " principle of Carnot " could be taken to

be true without any restriction, we should have to regard these

consequences as inevitable. For the purposes of Socrates, however,

it is sufficient that the reasoning should be based on assumptions

which would be granted as common ground by his audience ; it

is not necessary that they should be admitted by anyone else.

Still, even when his assumptions are granted, nothing follows so

far beyond the bare admission that the soul which has passed from

this world to the other, and will, in turn, come back from the other

world to this, has some sort of reality in the interval ; it has not

186 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

become a mere nothing. To admit so much would, of course, be

compatible with the crudest kind of materialism, and would do

nothing to justify the conviction Socrates means to defend, the

belief that the soul which has won its independence has passed to

a " better " life. 1 Hence the necessity for a combination of this

line of reasoning with that which is next introduced.)

(ft) The Argument from the Doctrine of Reminiscence (720-77^.

Cebes observes that we might have reached our conclusion, in-

dependently of the doctrine of recurrence, by arguing from Socrates*

habitual position that what we call " learning " a truth is really

being " put in mind " of something we had forgotten. If this is

true, we must at one time have known all that in this life we have

to be " reminded " of. Our souls must have existed " before we

were men/' and presumably therefore may continue to exist when

we have ceased to be men. (This argument, if sound, brings us

nearer to the conclusion we want, since it goes to prove that the

soul not only was " something " but was fully intelligent before it

had been conjoined with the body.) The main argument for this

doctrine of reminiscence, we are told, is the one already considered

in the Meno, that a man can be made to give the true solution of a

problem by merely asking him appropriate questions, as we see

particularly in the case of problems of geometry. 2 The answer is

produced from within, not communicated by the questioner.

1 Note that Socrates himself in the end throws over the principle of universal

cyclical recurrence. His " hope " is that the final destiny of the righteous

soul is to be with the gods and to live endlessly " apart from the body "

(114^). This would be a swallowing up of death by life just as impossible on

the principle of recurrence as the universal reign of death. He is, in fact,

borrowing from two pre-philosophical traditions, that of endless " reincarna-

tion " and that of the soul as a fallen divinity destined to regain its forfeited

place among the gods. These traditions are not really concordant with one

another, and it is the second which really represents his personal faith.

* dv rts M rA Si.aypdiuiij.ara ayy (736) may mean literally " if one shows the

man a diagram," but since dtaypd^ara sometimes means simply " geometrical

proofs " (e.g. Xenophon, Mem. iv. 7, 3, where the Svo-ffvvera diaypd/mpaTa seem

to mean simply " intricate demonstrations "), probably we should not press

the literal sense of the word here. It is an interesting point that though

Cebes knows all about the doctrine and attaches importance to it, Simmias,

who appears later on as having gone further than Cebes in dropping the

religious side of Pythagoreanism, has forgotten it. I think we may infer two

things from the passage, (a) The doctrine of reminiscence was not originated

by either Socrates or Plato, since Cebes knows both what it is and what is the

recognized " proof " of it. It is presumably a piece of old Pythagoreanism

which the " advanced " members of the school had dropped or were dropping

by the end of the fifth century. (This explains why we never hear anything

about it in Plato's later writings.) (6) I suggest that the connexion with

immortality comes about in this way. To judge from the Orphic plates found

at Thurii and elsewhere, the original idea was that what the soul has to be

reminded of is her divine origin and the dangers she will have to surmount

on her way back to the abode of the gods. The Orphic plates are, in fact,

buried with the votaries to serve them as a kind of Baedeker's guide. The

conversion of this piece of primitive theology into a theory of the a priori

character of mathematics will be part of the spiritualization of old theological

traditions due to the mathematician-saint Pythagoras.

THE PHAEDO 18?

Hence the answerer is plainly in possession of the truth which the

questioner elicits. Socrates points out that the conclusion might

be reached by a simple consideration of what we call " association."

When you see an article belonging to an intimate friend, you not

only see the article, but think of the owner, and that is what we

mean by saying that the coat or whatever it is, " reminds " us

of its owner (" association by Contiguity "). Again, when you

see a portrait, you think of or " are reminded " of the original

(" association by Resemblance "). Thus you may be " reminded "

of something both by what is unlike it (" Contiguity ") and by what

is like it (" Resemblance "). In the second case we also note whether

the likeness is complete or not (e.g. whether the portrait is a good

one or a bad one).

Well, then, let us consider a precisely parallel case. In mathe-

matics we are constantly talking about " equality " not the equality

of one stone to another stone, or of one wooden rod to another

wooden rod, but of the " just equal " (avro TO to-ov), which is neither

wood nor stone and we know that we mean something by this talk.

But what has put the thought of the " just equal " into our minds ?

The sight of equal or unequal sticks, or something of the kind. And

we note two things, (a) The " just equal " is something different

from a stick or a stone which is equal to another stick or stone ;

we see the sticks or stones, we do not see " mathematical equality."

(b) And the so-called equal sticks or stones we do see are not exactly,

but only approximately, equal. (Even with instruments of pre-

cision we cannot measure a length without having to allow for a

margin of error.) Thus plainly the objects about which the mathe-

matician reasons are not perceived by the eye or the hand ; the

thought of them is suggested to him by the imperfect approximations

he sees and touches, and this suggestion of B by A is exactly what

we mean by " being reminded of B by A." But A cannot remind

us of B unless we have already been acquainted with B. Now from

the dawn of our life here, our senses have always been thus " remind-

ing us " of something which is not directly perceptible by sense

(i.e. perception has always carried with it estimation by an " ideal "

standard). Hence our acquaintance with the standards themselves

must go back to a time before our sensations began, i.e. to a time

before our birth. We have argued the case with special reference

to the objects studied by the mathematician, but it applies equally

to all other "ideal standards/' like those of ethics, the good, the

right ; in fact, to everything which Socrates and his friends called a

" form." The only alternative to supposing that we had ante-

natal acquaintance with these " forms " would be to say that we

acquired it at the moment of birth. But this is absurd, since we

are quite agreed that we bring none of this knowledge into the

world with us ; we have to recover it slowly enough from the hints

and suggestions of the senses. We conclude then that if " the

kind of being we are always talking about," that is the " forms,"

exist, and if they are the standard by which we interpret all our

188 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

sensations, it must be equally true that our souls also existed and

were actively intelligent before our birth (?6d-e). (One should

note several things about the way in which the doctrine of the

" forms " is introduced into this argument. For one thing, we

see that there is no room in the theory for " innate ideas " in the

strict sense of the word, and that there is no question of a knowledge

acquired independently of experience. The whole point of the

argument is that we should never be " put in mind " of the " forms/'

but for the suggestion of the senses. Again, the most important

feature of the process of " being reminded " is that sense-per-

ceptions suggest standards to which they do not themselves con-

form. The same visual sensations which suggest the notion

" straight " to me, for example, are the foundation of the judgment

that no visible stick is perfectly straight. The " form " is thus

never contained in, or presented by, the sensible experience which

suggests it. Like the " limit " of an infinite series, it is approxi-

mated but never reached. These two considerations, taken together,

show that the theory does full justice to both parts of the Kantian

dictum that " percepts without concepts are blind, concepts without

percepts are empty. 11 1 We may also note, as Burnet has done,

that the stress laid on the point that the sensible thing always falls

short of a complete realization of the " form " means that sensible

things are being treated as " imitations " (fjn^ara) of the

" form/' a view we know from Aristotle to have been Pythagorean.

It is quite untrue to say that the " imitation " formula only appears

in Plato's latest dialogues as an improvement on his earlier formula

of " participation." In the Phaedo itself Socrates starts with the

conception of things as " imitating " forms ; " participation "

will only turn up at a later stage in the argument.)

Simmias is particularly delighted with this argument precisely

because, as he says, it proves the ante-natal existence of the soul

to be a consequence of the doctrine of Forms, and that he regards

as the most clear and evident of all truths (770). (This delight,

by the way, would be quite unintelligible on the theory that the

doctrine was an invention of Plato.) But, as he goes on to say

after a moment's reflection, to prove that the soul " arose " before

our birth is not to prove that it will survive death, and it is against

the fear of death that Socrates has to provide an antidote.

Formally, as Socrates says, the point would be established if we

take arguments (a) and (J3) together, (ft) has proved the pre-

1 It is very important to remember that on the theory there are no " forms "

except those which sense-experience suggests, or, to use the language which

will meet us later in the dialogue, there are no " forms " which are not " partici-

pated in " by sensible particulars. The " forms " are not Kantian " things

in themselves." But equally the " form " is not " the sensible thing rightly

understood," for the first fact you discover about any sensible thing, when

you begin to understand it, is, in Socrates' phrase, that "this thing is trying

(oCXrrcu) to be so-and-so, but not succeeding" (74^). This implies a " real-

istic " metaphysic ; from the point of view of " nominalism/' " terminalism,"

or " conceptuaiism," the whole doctrine is nonsense.

THE PHAEDO 189

existence of the soul, (a) will prove on the assumption that the

alternate cycle of birth and death is endless that the souls of the

dead must continue to exist in order that men may continue to be

born. But the " child in us " which is afraid of the dark is not

to be quieted so readily, and we must try the effect of a more potent

" charm " on him (jja-j8b).

(b) SECOND ARGUMENT FOR IMMORTALITY (786-84^). This

argument goes much more to the root of the question, since it is

based not on any current general philosophical formula, but on

consideration of the intrinsic character of a soul. In Aristotelian

language, the first proof has been " logical/' the second is to be

" physical." The reasoning adopted lies at the bottom of all the

familiar arguments of later metaphysicians who deduce the im-

mortality of the soul from its alleged character as a " simple sub-

stance," the " paralogism " attacked by Kant in the Critique oj

Pure Reason. The " proof," as Kant knew it from the writings of

men like Wolff and Moses Mendelssohn, is a mere ghost of that

offered in the Phaedo. Socrates' point is not that the soul is a

" simple substance," he had not so much as the language in which

to say such a thing but that it is, as the Orphic religion had taught,

something divine. Its " deiformity," not its indivisibility, is what

he is anxious to establish ; the indivisibility is a mere consequence.

Hence he is not affected by Kant's true observation that discerption

is not the only way in which a soul might perish. No doubt it

might perish, as Kant said, by a steady diminution of the intensity

of its vitality, if it were not divine, 1 but what is divine in its own

nature is in no more danger of evanescence than of discerption.

Simmias had spoken of the possible "dissipation "of the soul

at death. Now what sort of thing is liable to dissipation and what

not ? Obviously it is the composite which, by its own nature, is

liable to be dissipated ; the incomposite, if there is such a thing,

should be safe from such a fate. And it is reasonable to hold that

whatever maintains one and the same character in all circumstances

is incomposite, what is perpetually changing its character is com-

posite. Thus for the crude contrast between the " simple " and

the composite, we substitute the more philosophical antithesis

between the permanent and the mutable. (This takes us at once

to ground where Kant's criticism would not affect us. If the soul

is, in any sense, immutable, it is so far secured against the lowering

of intensity of which Kant speaks.) In the kind of being of which

we speak in our scientific studies, the being we are always trying

to define the " forms," in fact we have a standard of the abso-

lutely immutable. " Just straight," "just right," " just good,"

are once and for all exactly what they are, and are invariable.

1 And yet, does not Kant's argument rest on the erroneous assumption

that if a series has the lower limit o, o must actually be a term of the series ?

But he is at least right in saying that survival as a " bare monad " would not

be the kind of immortality from the thought of which any man could derive

hope or comfort.

190 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

But the many things which we call by the same names as the

" forms " are in perpetual mutation. (The " good " man loses his

goodness, the " handsome " garment its beauty, and so on.) Now

these latter mutable things are all things you can touch or see or

apprehend by one or other of the senses ; the immutable " standards "

are one and all apprehensible only by thought (8<avoias /\oyioy*a>).

This suggests that we may recognize two types of objects, each type

having a pair of characters the invisible and immutable, and the

visible and mutable. 1 Also we are agreed that we have a body and

have a soul. To which of our types does each of these belong?

Clearly the body can be seen, the soul is invisible (of course " seen "

and "unseen " are being used here per synecdochen for "sensed," "not

sensed," respectively). In respect of this character there can be no

doubt of the type to which each belongs. What about the other pair

of contrasted characters ? As we said before, when the soul relies

on the sense-organs in her investigations she finds the objects she

is studying perpetually shifting, and loses her own way (TrXavarat)

among them. When she relies on her native power of thinking

and attends to objects which are strictly determinate and un-

changing, she finds her way among them without uncertainty and

confusion, and it is just this condition of the soul we call " wisdom "

or intelligence (^oi^o-is) . This would indicate that the soul

herself belongs more truly to the type with which she is most at

home, the immutable, whereas the body certainly belongs to the

mutable. 2

Again, in the partnership of soul and body, it is the soul which

is rightly master and the body servant (the thought which the

Academy crystallized in the definition of man as a soul using a

human body as its instrument). Now it is for the divine to com-

mand and rule, for the mortal to serve and obey ; hence it is the

soul in us which plays the divine, the body which plays the mortal

part. (This brings us at last to the point on which Socrates really

means to insist, the " deiformity " or " kinship with God " of the

1 This is identical at bottom with Dr. Whitehead's recent distinction

between " objects " and " events," e.g. between " Cambridge-blue " and

" Cambridge-blue-here-and-now." Dr. Whitehead, I think, does not expressly

say that it is only events which can be " sensed," but that is really implied in

his language. I see " Cambridge-blue-occurring-here-and-now " ; the object

" Cambridge-blue," which does not " happen," is suggested to me by my sensa-

tion of what is " happening ". I recognize it, am " put in mind of it " by the

event which happens. Cf. Principles of Natural Knowledge, p. 81 : " Objects

are entities recognized as appertaining to events ; they are the recognita amid

events. Events are named after the objects involved in them." This is

precisely the doctrine of " forms " and of " recollection."

* Of course it is not said that the soul is absolutely immutable. This

would not be true ; we can change even our most deeply cherished scientific

and moral convictions. But it is true that, by contrast with the body, the

.soul emerges as the relatively immutable. My intellectual and moral con-

victions do not undergo " adaptive " modifications to a changing environment

with the readiness shown by my organism. My body, for instance, will adapt

itself to a great climatic change more readily than my mind to a society with

a different morality or religion from my own.

THE PHAEDO 191

soul. In view of the standing Greek equation of " immortal "

with " divine, 1 ' the formal inference to the immortality of the

soul follows as a matter of course.)

The soul, then, is relatively the permanent and divine thing

in us, the body the merely human and mutable. We should

therefore expect the body to be relatively perishable, the soul to be

either wholly imperishable or nearly so. And yet we know that,

with favourable circumstances, 1 even a dead body may be pre-

served from corruption for ages, and there are parts of the body

which seem all but indestructible. Much more should we expect

that a soul which has made itself as far as possible independent of

the mutable body, and has escaped by death to the divine and

invisible, will be lifted above mutability and corruption. But if a

soul has all through life set its affections on bodily things and the

gratifications of appetite, it may be expected to hanker after the

body even when death has divorced them, and be dragged down

into the cycle of births again by this hankering. We may suppose

that the place in the animate system into which it is reborn is

determined by the nature of its specific lusts, so that each soul's

own lusts provide it with its appropriate " hell," the sensual being

reborn as asses, the rapacious and unjust as beasts of prey, and

so forth. The mildest fate will be that of the persons who have

practised the " popular goodness " misnamed temperance and

justice without " philosophy " (i.e. of those who have simply

shaped their conduct by a respectable moral tradition without true

insight into the good, or, in Kantian phrase, have lived " according

to duty," though not " from duty "). These, we may suppose,

are reborn as "social creatures," like bees and ants, or as men

again, and they make " decent bodies " as mankind goes. The

attainment of " divinity " or " deiformity " is reserved for the

man who has resolutely lived the highest of the three lives, that of the

" lover of wisdom," and subdued his lusts, not like the " lover of

wealth " from fear of poverty, nor like the " lover of honour " from

concern for his reputation, but from love of good. This explains

the reason why the lover of wisdom lives hard. It is because he

knows that what a man comes to feel pleasure and pain about be-

comes his engrossing interest. To find your joy and woe in the

gratifications of the body means to come to be bound up with its

fortunes, and this bars the way to deification and binds you down

to the wheel of birth. It is for the sake of this supreme good,

" deification," that the lover of wisdom denies " the flesh." To

consent to its motions would be to act like Penelope, who unwove

by night what she had spent the day in weaving. Now a man

whose whole life has been an aspiration to rise above mutability

to deiformity will be the last person to fear that the new and abiding

l The meaning of tv rotai/r^ wpg. (Soc) has been much disputed. From a

comparison with Tim. 24^ 6, Phileb. 266 i, Critias, me 5, 1 take the meaning to

be " climate," though I cannot produce another example of the singular of

that sense.

192 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

deiform self which is being built up in him will be unbuilt by the

event of death. 1

(I make no apology for having drawn freely on the character-

istic language of Christian mysticism in expounding this argument.

Under all the real differences due to the Christian's belief in the

historical reality of the God-man, the ideal of Socrates and the

Christian ideal are fundamentally identical. The central thought

in both cases is that man is born a creature of temporality and

mutability into a temporal and mutable environment. But, in

virtue of the fact that there is a something " divine " in him, he

cannot but aspire to a good which is above time and mutability,

and thus the right life is, from first to last, a process by which the

merely secular and temporal self is re-made in the likeness of the

eternal. If we understand this, we shall be in no danger of suppos-

ing that Socrates is merely anticipating the jejune argument from the

indivisibility of a " simple substance/' or that the Kantian polemic

against Wolffian rationalism seriously affects his reasoning. The

thought is that the real nature of the soul has to be learned from a

consideration of the nature of the specific " good " to which it

aspires. A creature whose well-being consists in living for an

" eternal " good cannot be a mere thing of time and change. In this

sense, the morality of the Platonic dialogues, like all morality

which can command an intelligent man's respect, is from first to

last " other-worldly/' )

FIRST INTERLUDE (84^-856). At this point the thread of the

argument is broken ; a general silence ensues, but Simmias and

Cebes are observed to be whispering together, as though they were

not quite satisfied. Artistically the break serves the purpose of

lowering the pitch of the conversation and relieving the emotional

strain. It also has a logical function. Impressive as the moral

argument for immortality is, there are scientific objections to it of

which we have so far heard nothing, and these deserve to be care-

fully stated and adequately met, since we cannot be called on to

accept any view of man's destiny, however attractive, which contra-

dicts known scientific truth, nor is Socrates the man to wish, even

in the immediate presence of death, to acquiesce in a faith which is

not a reasonable faith. That would be simple cowardice (840). He

has just broken out into his "swan-song," and like the swans, his

fellow-servants of the Delphic (? Delian) god, he sings for hope

and joy, not in lamentation. He is therefore robust enough in

his faith to be only too ready to hear and consider any objections.

OBJECTIONS OF SIMMIAS AND CEBES (850-880). Simmias thinks,

like a modern " agnostic/' that certainty about our destiny may be

unattainable. He would at heart like to be able to appeal to

1 Like Spinoza, but without, like him, being hampered by a naturalistic

metaphysic, Socrates holds that the man who lives best has the soul of which

the greatest part is eternal, i.e. the more thoroughly you live the philosophic

life, the less is the personality you achieve at the mercy of circumstance, even

if the circumstance is the change we call death.

THE PHAEDO 198

" revelation " (a Ao'yo? fleios, 85^) on such a question, but agrees

that, in the absence of a revelation, one should resolutely examine

all human speculations on the problem, and adopt that which will

stand close scrutiny best. The difficulty he feels about Socrates'

reasoning is that what he has said about the soul and the body

might equally be said about the " melody " of a musical instru-

ment and the strings which make the music. The strings are

visible and tangible bodies, are composite and perishable, the music

is invisible, incorporeal, and " divine." But it would clearly be

absurd to argue that, for this reason, the music still exists and

sounds " somewhere " when the instrument is broken. Now it

is " our belief " that the body is like a musical instrument whose

strings are its ultimate components, the hot, cold, moist, and dry,

and that the soul is the music this instrument gives out when these

' strings " are properly tuned. If this is so, we may grant that

the soul is " divine/' like all beauty and proportion, but we must

also grant that disease and other disturbances of the constitution

of the organism break the strings of the instrument or put them

out of tune, and this makes it impossible to argue that because the

debris of the broken instrument continues to exist after the fracture,

a fortiori the music must persist still more immutably (850-86^).

Cebes has a different objection. He does not attach much

importance to the epiphenomenalism of Simmias, but he complains

that nothing has really been proved beyond " pre-existence," which

has been all along regarded as guaranteed by the doctrine of

"reminiscence." Even if we grant that the soul, so far from being

a mere resultant of bodily causes, actually makes its own body,

this only shows it to be like a weaver who makes his own cloak.

In the course of his life he makes and wears out a great many cloaks,

but when he dies he leaves the last cloak he has made behind him,

and it would be ridiculous to argue that he cannot be dead because

the cloak which he made is still here, and a man lasts longer than a

cloak. So the soul might make and wear out a whole succession of

bodies indeed, if it is true that the body is always being broken

down by waste of tissue and built up again by the soul, something

of this sort happens daily. But even if we go so far as to assume

that the soul repeatedly makes itself a new body after the death

of an old one, it may be that, like the weaver, it exhausts its vigour

sooner or later, and so will make a last body, after the death of which

the soul will no longer exist. And w r e can never be sure that the

building up of our present body is not the last performance of such

a worn-out soul, and consequently that the death we are now

awaiting may not be a complete extinction (S6e-S8b).

These objections, Phaedo says, struck dismay into the whole

company, with the single exception of Socrates. For they appeared

to dispose of the whole case for immortality, and, what was worse,

they made the hearers, who had been profoundly impressed by

Socrates' discourse, feel that they would never be able to put any

confidence in their own judgment again, if what had seemed to be

194 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

completely proved could be so easily disposed of. Plato is careful

to interrupt the narrative at this point still more completely, by

allowing Echecrates to add that he sympathizes with the general

consternation, since he too has hitherto been strongly convinced

that the soul is the " attunement " of the body and is therefore

anxious to know how Socrates met the difficulty (SSc-e).

The purpose of all this by-play is to call attention to the critical

importance of the two problems which have just been raised. We

are, in fact, at the turning-point of the discussion. The " moral "

argument based on the divinity of the soul, as proved by the char-

acter of the good to which it aspires, has been stated in all its im-

pressiveness, and we have now to consider whether " science " can

invalidate it. To use Kantian language, we have seen what the

demand of " practical reason " is, and the question is whether there

is an insoluble conflict between this demand and the principles of

the "speculative reason," as Echecrates and the auditors of

Socrates fear, or, in still more familiar language, the question is

whether there is or is not an ultimate discord between " religion "

and " science."

As to the source and purport of the two objections it may be

enough to say a very few words. That of Simmias, as is indicated

by the remarks of Echecrates, is represented by Plato as based on

the medical and physiological theories of the younger Pythagoreans.

It is a natural development from the well-known theory of Alcmaeon

that health depends on the Ivovoptrj or " constitutional balance "

between the constituents of the organism. The comparison with

the " attunement " of the strings of a musical instrument would be

suggested at once by the Pythagorean discovery of the simple

ratios corresponding to the intervals of the musical scale. From

this to the conclusion that " mind " is the tune given out by the

" strings " of the body, the music made by the body, is a very easy

step ; and since we now know that Philolaus, the teacher of Cebes

and Simmias, had specially interested himself in medicine, we may

make a probable conjecture that we are dealing with his doctrine

(which is also that of his contemporary Empedocles, Frs. 107, 108).

Since the same doctrine appears in Parmenides (Fr. 16), it was

clearly making its way among the Pythagoreans by the beginning

of the fifth century, though it is, of course, quite inconsistent with

their religious beliefs about re-birth in animal bodies : (on all this,

see E.G.Ph* 295-296).

In principle the theory is exactly that of modern " epiphe-

nomenalism," according to which " consciousness " is a mere by-

product of the activities of the bodily organism, the " whistle,"

as Huxley said, given off by the steam as it escapes from the engine.

A satisfactory refutation of it must ipso facto be a refutation of the

whole epiphenomenalist position.

The source of the difficulty raised by Cebes is different. His

allusion to the alternation of waste and repair in the organism at

once suggests a Heraclitean origin ; he is thinking of the view of

THE PHAEDO 195

Heraclitus that the apparent stability of " things " lasts just so

long as the antithetical processes of the " way up " and the " way

down " balance one another, and no longer. (For the evidence

of Heraclitean influences on fifth-century Pythagoreanism, see

E.G.Ph* Index, s.v. Hippasos ; Greek Philosophy, Part I., 87-88.)

How " modern " Cebes' point is will best be seen by reflecting

that the Heraclitean theory of " exchanges " is really a dim antici-

pation of the modern principle of the conservation of energy. The

argument is, in effect, one quite familiar in our own times. If we

reject epiphenomenalism and admit interaction between mind and

body, it is argued that the mind must part with " energy " in

acting on the body, and Cebes, like a modern physicist appealing

to the principle of Carnot, holds that this loss of energy cannot be

made good indefinitely. A time will come when the effective

energy of the \lrvxj has been wholly dissipated. Thus his criticism,

like that of Simmias, is precisely of the kind which a man of science

is tempted to urge against the belief in immortality in our own day.

The one difference between the two positions is that the objection

of Simmias is primarily that of a biologist, the difficulty of Cebes

is that of a physicist. Cebes may also be said in a way to be antici-

pating Kant's criticism of the argument from the "simplicity 11 of

the soul. His conception of the soul as perishing by wearing out

her stock of vitality answers pretty closely to Kant's conception of

a gradual sinking of the "intensity" of "consciousness" to the

zero-level.

SOLUTION OF THE SCIENTIFIC DIFFICULTIES (880-1020). This

section of the dialogue falls into three subdivisions. There is first

a preliminary discourse by Socrates intended to warn us against

being disgusted with serious thinking by the occurrence of diffi-

culties and so led into mere " irrationalism," next a discussion of

the difficulty of Simmias, and then a longer treatment of the much

more fundamental problem raised by Cebes, this last subdivision

receiving a special narrative introduction of its own.

(a) The Warning against Misology (Sga-gic). Socrates, alone

of the company, shows himself calm and even playful in the presence

of the bolt or rather bolts just shot from the blue. The " argu-

ment," at any rate, shall be " raised again," if he can perform the

miracle. But whether he succeeds or not, he would at least utter

a solemn warning against " misology," irrationalism. Distrust of

reason arises much in the same way as misanthropy, distrust of our

fellows. The commonest cause of misanthropy is an unwise con-

fidence based on ignorance of character. When a man has re-

peatedly put this ignorant confidence in the unworthy and been

disillusioned, he often ends by conceiving a spite against mankind

and denouncing humanity as radically vicious. But the truth is

that exalted virtue and gross wickedness are both rare. What the

disillusioned man ought to blame for his experience is his own

blind ignorance of human nature. So if a man who has not the

art of knowing a sound argument from an unsound one has found

190 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

himself repeatedly misled by his blind trust in unsound " discourses/'

there is a real danger that he will lay the blame on the weakness

of our intellectual faculties and end as a mere irrationalist. 1 To

avoid this fate, when we find our most cherished convictions appar-

ently breaking down under criticism we must lay the blame not

on the inherent untrust worthiness of " discourse " but on our own

rashness in committing ourselves to an uncriticized position. We

will therefore reconsider our case and try to meet the objections

which have been brought against us, in the spirit of men who are

contending honestly for truth, not for an argumentative victory.

(#) The Objection of Simmias removed (gic-g^a). In the first

place, it may be pointed out that the difficulty raised by Simmias is

incompatible with his own professed principles. He avows himself

satisfied now by what had been already said that knowledge is

" reminiscence/' and that, consequently, our souls existed before

they wore our present bodily guise. Plainly that cannot be the

case if the soul is an " epiphenomenon/ 1 the melody given out by

the body, the " whistle of the engine/' to recur to Huxley's version

of the same doctrine. The musical instrument must pre-exist and

its strings be screwed up to the right pitch before the melody can

be there. We may assert either that all knowledge is " reminis-

cence " or that the soul is an epiphenomenon ; we must not assert

both propositions at once. And Simmias himself has no doubt

which of the two positions has the better claim to acceptance.

The doctrine of " reminiscence " has been deduced from the

" postulate " (u7ro0c(m) of the reality of the " forms," a principle

which Simmias has all through accepted as certain. The epi-

phenomenalist theory of the soul rests on nothing more than a

plausible analogy, and we all know how deceptive such analogies

can be in geometry, for example (92^).

(There is real point in Socrates' argumentum ad hominem, inde-

pendently of the assumption of pre-existence. We may compare

the story of W. G. Ward's crushing reply to Huxley, who had just

explained mental life to his own satisfaction by epiphenomenalism

plus the laws of association, " You have forgotten memory," i.e.

the fundamental fact of the recognition of the past as past. As

Huxley had to admit, his scheme could give no account of recog-

nition, and without presupposing recognition it would not work.)

But the epiphenomenalist theory is not merely incompatible

with our unproved postulate about " forms " ; it is also demon-

strably false on independent grounds. There are two things which

are characteristic of every " attunement " or " melody " ; every

" attunement " is completely determined by its constituents, and

no " attunement " admits of degrees. If a pair of vibrating strings

1 The description of the misologist would equally cover both the case of

the man who ends in pure scepticism and that of the man who takes refuge

in a blind faith in what he openly avows to be irrational. Socrates stands for a

fides quaerens intellectum against both " universal doubt " and indifferentism

and blind ndeism or " voluntarism." Hence the partisans of the one call him

a " dogmatist," those of the other an " intellectualist."

THE PHAEDO 197

have one determinate ratio, the interval their notes make will be

the fourth, and cannot possibly be anything else ; if they have

another determinate ratio, the interval will be the fifth, and so on.

Again, a string either is " in tune " or it is not, and there is no third

alternative, Between any pair of notes there is one definite in-

terval ; they make that interval exactly and they make no other.

C and Gfr, for example, make an interval as definite, though not as

pleasing, as C and G. " No attunement is more or less of an attune-

ment than any other." What inferences about the soul would

follow from these two considerations, if the soul is an " attune-

ment " ? It would follow at once from the second thesis that no

one soul can be more or less of a soul than any other. But we have

to reckon with the recognized fact that some souls are better or

worse than others. Now there seems to be a real analogy between

goodness and being " in tune/' and between badness and being

" out of tune." Either then we should have to express this differ-

ence by saying that one " attunement " (the good soul) is more

" attuned " than another (the bad soul), and our own admissions

forbid us to say this ; or we must say that the good soul not only

is an " attunement " but has a second further " attunement "

within itself, and this is manifestly absurd. If a soul is an " attune-

ment," we can only say that every soul is as much an " attunement "

as any other, and this amounts to saying that no one soul is morally

better or worse than another, or even that all souls, since all are

precise " attunements," are perfectly good. But this denial of

differences of moral worth is manifestly ridiculous. The argument

is, then, that epiphenomenalism is incompatible with the recognition

of differences of moral worth, and that these differences are certainly

real. A theory which conflicts with the first principles of ethics

must be false, since these principles are certain truth.

(The argument, though stated in a way unfamiliar to us, is

precisely that which weighs with men who are in earnest with

ethics against a philosophy like Spinoza's. Though Spinoza does

not make " consciousness " depend causally on the organism, for

practical purposes his theory of the independent " attributes "

works out in the same way as epiphenomenalism. The tyvxn, though

not causally dependent on the constituents of the organism, is

supposed to be mathematically determinable as a function of them.

Consequently, just as Simmias has to allow that no " attunement "

is more or less an " attunement " than any other, Spinoza holds

a rigidly nominalist doctrine about " human nature." There is

really no such thing as a " human nature " of which Peter or Paul

is a good specimen, but Nero a very bad one. Nero is not, properly

speaking, a bad specimen of a man ; he is a perfect specimen of a

Nero. To say that he may be' a perfect Nero, but is a very bad

man, is judging by a purely arbitrary and " subjective " standard.

(See Ethics, Part L, Appendix, Part IV., Preface.) But, if this is

so, Spinoza is undertaking an impossible task in writing a treatise

on the good for man and the way to obtain it.)

198 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

Again, we have to consider the consequences of the thesis that

an " attunement " is a determinate function of its constituents.

Given the constituents, the musical " interval " between them is

also once and for all completely given. Now the most potent fact

about our moral life is that it is a conflict or struggle between an

element whose rightful function is to dominate and direct, and a

second whose place is to obey and be directed. The soul is con-

stantly repressing the desires for gratification of appetites connected

with the body. (It is not meant, of course, that the whole of moral

discipline consists in subduing such elementary appetites ; they are

taken as examples because they are the simplest and most obvious

illustration of a principle.) The moral life is a process of subjugation

of the " flesh " and its desires to the " godly motions of the spirit."

The "spirit" which dominates the "flesh" clearly cannot be itself

just the " attunement " or " scale " constituted by the ingredients

of the " flesh." If this were so, the state of soul at any moment

should be simply the resultant and expression of our " organic "

condition at that moment, and there should be no such experience

as the familiar one of the division of " spirit " or " judgment "

against " flesh " or " appetite." (Here, again, the criticism is

conclusive for a serious moralist against all forms of epipheno-

menalism. The epiphenomenalist is tied by his theory to a " one-

world " interpretation of human experience ; morality presupposes

a " two-world " interpretation. Its very nature is to be a " struggle "

between a higher and a lower. If man were merely a creature of

time, or again if he were simply eternal, the struggle could not arise ;

its tremendous reality is proof that man's soul is the meeting-place

of the two orders, the temporal and the eternal, and this, of itself,

disposes of the simpliste theory of human personality as a simple

function of the passing state of the " organism " or the " nervous

system." The epiphenomenalist psychophysics merely ignore the

most important of the " appearances " which a true account of

moral personality ought to " save." Like all the arguments of the

dialogue, this reasoning, of course, presupposes the objective

validity of moral distinctions ; to the denier of that vTrotfeo-is it will

bring no conviction.)

(y) The Difficulty of Cebes discussed (95a-i02). As has been

said already, the difficulty raised by Cebes is of a much more serious

kind than that of Simmias. As the subsequent history of psychology

has proved, epiphenomenalism is after all a thoughtless and in-

coherent theory based on hopelessly misleading analogies and in-

competent to take account of the obvious facts of mental life. The

theory on which Cebes is relying is a very different matter ; he is

appealing to the first principles of a <c mechanical " philosophy of

nature. Put in modern language,* his contention comes to this,

that the action of mind on body presupposed in ethics cannot be

reconciled with the principles of natural science except by supposing

that mind " expends energy " in doing its work of " direction."

If this expenditure of energy goes on without compensation, a

THE PHAEDO 19&

time must come when the available energy of the mind is exhausted.

Thus the issue raised is at bottom that which is still with us, of the

universal validity of the postulates of a mechanical interpretation

of nature.

Does the guiding influence of intelligence on bodily movement

come under the scope of the two great laws of the Conservation

and the Degradation of Energy ? If it does, we must look with

certainty to the disappearance of our personality after the lapse of

some finite duration ; if it does not, the principles of mechanics

are not of universal application. The development of Energetics

in the nineteenth century has enabled us to state the problem with

a precision which would have been impossible not merely to Plato,

but even to Descartes or Leibniz, but in principle the problem itself

has remained the same under all these developments ; Socrates

in this part of the Phaedo is dealing with the very question which

is the theme, for instance, of James Ward's Naturalism and

Agnosticism.

The importance of the problem demands that we should formu-

late it with very special care. We may state it thus. Granting the

" real distinction of mind from body," it is possible that in every

act of intercourse with the body the mind parts with energy which

it cannot recover ; if that is so, its progress to destruction begins

with its very first entrance into contact with a body, and the com-

pletion of the progress is only a matter of time (95^). Now in

discussing this problem we are driven to face a still more funda-

mental one, the question of " the causes of coming into being and

passing out of being "(950), that is, the question of the adequacy of

the whole mechanical interpretation of Nature. Socrates' object

is to persuade his friends that no single process in Nature is ade-

quately explained by the mechanical interpretation. He can

most readily carry them with him by first giving an account of his

own personal mental history and the reasons why he gave up the

mechanical philosophy in early manhood. This brings us to the

SECOND INTERLUDE (95e-io2a). The Origin of the Socratic

Method. (For the, to my mind, overwhelming evidence that the

narrative which follows is meant by Plato as a strictly historical

account of the early development of Socrates I must refer to Burnet's

detailed notes in his edition of the dialogue. The main point is

that the general state of scientific opinion described can be shown

to be precisely that which must have existed at Athens in the middle

of the fifth century, and cannot well have existed anywhere else

or at any later time. The " scientific doubts " of which Socrates

speaks are all connected with two special problems the reconciliation

of Milesian with Pythagorean cosmology, and the facing of the

contradictions Zeno had professed to discover in the foundation of

Pythagorean mathematics. It is assumed that the system of

Anaxagoras is the last great novelty in physics, and there are clear

references to those of Diogenes of Apollonia and of Archelaus.

This fixes the date to which Plato means to take us back down to the

200 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

middle of the fifth century, a consideration which disposes at once

of the preposterous suggestions that the narrative is meant as a

description either of Plato's own mental development or of the

development of a " typical " philosopher. Of course, Plato cannot

tell us at first-hand what Socrates was doing and thinking more than

twenty years before his own birth, but he has, at least, taken care

that his story shall be in accord with historical probabilities, and

we may fairly presume that some of the information employed in

constructing it came to him directly from Socrates himself. Thus

we have as much evidence for its accuracy as we can have for

that of any narrative of events related by a narrator born a quarter

of a century after the period he is describing. 1 )

The general drift of the narrative is as follows. As a young

man, Socrates had felt an enthusiasm for " natural science " and

made himself acquainted with the biological theories of the

Milesians, the Heracliteans, Empedocles, the psychology of

Alcmaeon, the flat-earth cosmologies of the lonians and the spherical-

earth cosmologies of the Italian Pythagoreans, as well as with the

mathematical subtleties of Zeno about the "unit " and the nature

of addition and subtraction. The result of all this eager study was

to induce a state of dubitatio de omnibus ; so far from discovering

the cause of all processes, Socrates was led to feel that he did not

understand the " reason why " of the simplest and most everyday

occurrences. At this point he fell in with the doctrine of Anaxagoras

that " mind " is the one cause of order everywhere. The doctrine

appealed to him at once, from its teleological appearance. If all

the arrangements in the universe are due to intelligence, that must

mean that everything is " ordered as it is best it should be," and

Socrates therefore hoped to find in Anaxagoras a deliverer from all

scientific uncertainties. He expected him to solve all problems in

cosmology, astronomy, and biology by showing what grouping of

things was best, and consequently most intelligent. But when he

read the work of Anaxagoras, he found that its performance did

not answer to its promise. Anaxagoras made no use of his principle

when he came to the details of his cosmology ; he merely fell back

on the same sort of mechanical causes (" airs " and " waters ")

as the rest of the cosmologists. Like them, he made the fatal

mistake of confusing a cause, or causa principalis, with " that with-

out which the cause would not act as a cause/' causae concomitantes

or " accessory conditions. 11 This was much as though a man should

say that the reason why Socrates is now sitting quietly awaiting

death, instead of being in full flight for Thebes or Megara, is the

condition of his sinews, muscles, and bones. The real reason is

1 The autobiographical pages of our dialogue are thus the ancient counter-

part of Descartes' Discours de la mtthode pour bien conduire sa raison with

the interesting differences, (i) that though both philosophers are concerned to

simplify philosophy by getting rid of a false and artificial method, Descartes'

object is to revive the very "mechanical" interpretation of nature which

Socrates rejected, and (2) that Socrates left it to the piety of another to do for

his mental history what Descartes did for himself.

THE PHAEDO 201

that he judges it good to abide by the decision of a legally consti-

tuted court ; if he judged otherwise, if he thought flight the more

reasonable course, his bodily mechanism would be in a very different

condition. Of course, if he had not this apparatus of bones and

sinews and the rest, he could not follow up his judgment, but

it remains true that it is his judgment on the question which

really determines whether he shall sit still or run. This is pre-

cisely what we mean by saying that Socrates acts rw, rationally

or intelligently.

The disappointment, Socrates says, confirmed his opinion that

he was " no good " (d<w)s ws ovfev XPW -) 1 a ^ natural science,

and must try to find some way out of his " universal doubt " by

his own mother-wit, without trusting to " men of science/' each of

whom only seemed to be able to prove one thing that all the others

were wrong. His description of the " new method " reveals it to

us at once as that which is characteristic of mathematics. It is a

method of considering " things " by investigating the \6yoi or

" propositions " we make about them. Its fundamental char-

acteristic is that it is deductive. You start with the " postulate/'

or undemonstratcd principle, which you think most satisfactory

and proceed to draw out its consequences or " implications "

(av/A/fotWra), provisionally putting the consequences down as

" true," and any propositions which conflict with the postulate

as false (loofl). Of course, as is made clear later on, a " postulate "

(v-n-oOecTLs) which is found to imply consequences at variance with

fact or destructive of one another is taken as disproved. But the

absence of contradiction from the consequences of a " postulate "

is not supposed to be sufficient proof of its truth. If you are called

on by an opponent who disputes your postulate to defend it, you

must deduce the postulate itself from a more ultimate one, and

this procedure has to be repeated until you reach a postulate which

is " adequate " (1010 i), that is, which all parties to the discussion

are willing to admit. (We hear more of this part of the method in

Rep. vi. 510-511, where we discover that the ideal goal of the method

is to deduce the whole of science from truths which are strictly

self-evident, but nothing is said of this in the Phaedo.) The most

important special rule of the method, however, is that, also insisted

on by Descartes, that a proper order must be observed. We are

not to raise the question of the truth of a " postulate " itself until

we have first discovered exactly what its consequences are. The

1 Of course this is said humorously. It is the man who can discourse

learnedly about " airs " and " waters " we might say about " electrons "

and " electric fields " and yet ignores the distinction between "cause" and

" accessory conditions " who is really, from Socrates' point of view, d$vfys o>s

ottev XP^MO- for the work of hard thinking. Later on (99^), Socrates calls

the method he fell back on a 5etfre/>os TrXoOs, or " second-best " course. As

the phrase originally refers to taking to the oars when the wind prevents

using the sails, the suggestion is that Socrates' method is "second-best"

rather in being slower and harder than the slap-dash dogmatism of the physi-

cists than in leading to inferior results.

202 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

confusion of these two distinct problems is the great error of the

dvrtXoytKot (loie). In spite of his humorous depreciation of

his proceeding as that of an amateur, Socrates has evidently, like

Descartes, reflected carefully on the nature of geometrical method,

and, like him, he is proposing to introduce the same method into

scientific inquiry in general. An illustration, he says, may be given

by considering his own familiar practice of " postulating " such

" forms " as " the good/' " beauty/ 1 and the rest. He intends, in

a few minutes, to show that if this " postulate " is made, the im-

mortality of the soul will follow as an implication (ioo&). (There

is no question of proving the " postulate " itself, as the whole

company are ready to concede it.) At this point we leave the

autobiographical narrative and pass to an application of the

" postulate " of " forms " to the theory of causation, which

is a necessary preliminary to the final argument for immortality

(iooc-i02a).

What Socrates intends to explain is what we have learned from

Aristotle to call " formal " causality, but he has no technical

terminology ready to hand and therefore makes his meaning clear

by examples. If we ask why something is beautiful, we may be told

in one case, "because it has a bright colour/' in another "because

it has such-and-such a shape/ 1 The point that Socrates wants to

make is that such answers are insufficient. There must ultimately

be one single reason why we can predicate one and the same char-

acter, beauty, in all these cases. Having a bright colour cannot be

the cause of beauty, since the thing we call beautiful on the strength

of its shape may not be coloured at all ; having a particular shape

cannot be the cause of beauty, since we pronounce things which

have not that shape to be beautiful, on the strength of their colour,

and so on. Hence Socrates says he rejects all these learned ex-

planations and sticks to the simple one that universally the reason

why anything is beautiful is that " beauty " is " present to it/'

or that it " partakes of " beauty. The thought is that whenever

we are justified in asserting the same predicate univocaUy of a

plurality of logical subjects, the predicate in every case names one

and the same " character." It is these characters which Socrates

calls " forms." We might call them " universals " if we bear two

cautions carefully in mind. They are not to be supposed to be

" ideas in our minds " or anything of that sort ; they are realities

of which we think. Also, as the case of " beauty " is well adapted

to show, a " form " may be " present " to a thing in very varying

degrees. A thing may be very beautiful, or it may be only very

imperfectly beautiful, and it may well be that nothing is super-

latively and completely beautiful. We should also note that the

precise character of the relation which Socrates calls " presence "

or " participation " or " communication " (gotiwyta) is nowhere

explained, and his hesitation about the name for this relation (lood)

may perhaps mean that he feels that there is an unsolved problem

involved by his " postulate." There obviously is such a problem.

THE PHAEDO 208

We naturally ask ourselves at once what else a particular sensible

thing is, besides being a complex of " forms " or " characters/'

As far as the Phaedo goes, we are not told that the thing is any more

than a " bundle of universals." The attempt to say what else it

is has played a prominent part in later philosophy. Plato's answer

has to be collected with difficulty from Aristotle's scattered notices

of his informal oral discourses. Aristotle and the mediaeval

Aristotelians tried to answer the same question by their doctrine

of " matter " and " form/' Scotus by the difficult doctrine of

haecceitas. But there is no evidence that Socrates had any answer

to the difficulty. The immediate point is simply that if we admit

the existence of " forms/' we must say in every case that the

" cause " or " reason " why a predicate ft can be asserted of a

thing a is that a corresponding " form " B " is present " to a, or

that a " partakes of " the " form " B. How it has come to do so

is a different question, and we must not suffer ourselves to be led

away on a false trail. (The question is, e.g., " Why is this thing now

beautiful ? What do I mean by calling it so ? not, What had to

be done to it before I could call it so ? ) l

We might seem here to have lost sight of the insistence on

teleology which had marked Socrates' comments on Anaxagoras,

but there is really a close connexion between " end " and " formal

cause," as Aristotle was to show at length. To say that the primary

problem is always to explain what a thing is by reference to its

" form " carries the implication that we have to explain the origins

and rudimentary phases of things by what the things are, when they

are at last there, not to explain what they are by discoursing on

their origins, and this is precisely what we mean by taking a

" teleological " point of view. But it would take us too far away

from the Phaedo to discuss the full implications of such teleology. 2

At the point we have reached, the narrative of Phaedo is once

more broken in order that Echecrates, as a mathematician, may

express his high approval of Socrates' doctrine of method (which, in

fact, is pretty plainly inspired by the example of Zeno in his famous

polemic, the point of which was to show that there must be some-

thing amiss with the " postulates " of the early Pythagorean

1 The importance of Socrates' warning against substituting some other

problem for that of the formal cause is well illustrated by the perpetual

confusion in our own times between explaining what a thing is and theorizing

about its origin. Thus we are incessantly being offered speculations about the

way in which morality or religion or art may have originated as if they were

answers to the question what art or religion or morality is.

2 One obvious implication may just be mentioned. As the earlier stages in

our own life can only be fully explained in the light of what we were then

going to be, so to explain a man's life as a whole we need to know not only

what he is now, but what he may yet grow to be. Thus the problem of our

ultimate destiny is strictly relevant to the ethical problem proper, on what

principles we ought to regulate our present conduct. It is idle to say that it

" makes no difference to ethics " whether the soul is immortal. It ought to

make all the difference, just as it makes all the difference to the rules of the

nursery that babies do not remain babies.

204 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

geometers, since they could be shown to lead to pairs of contra-

dictory implications). We then embark formally on the

(c) THIRD (AND FINAL) PROOF OF IMMORTALITY (io2a-io7&).

The " forms " had entered incidentally into both the proposed

proofs which have been already examined. In this final proof we

are offered a direct deduction of immortality from the fundamental

postulate that the " forms " exist. This marks the argument as

intended to be the climax of the whole reasoning, since the proof, if

successful, must be recognized as complete by Cebes or any one

else who regards the reality of the " forms " as the basis of his

whole philosophy.

We have, in the first place, to stipulate for an unusual accuracy

of expression which is necessary if we are to avoid fallacy. We

commonly speak, for example, of one man as taller or shorter than

another. We say Simmias is taller than Socrates but not so tall as

Phaedo. On the face of it this looks as though we were calling

Simmias at once tall and short, and therefore asserting the simul-

taneous presence in him of two " opposed " Forms. But all we

really mean is that Simmias happens to be relatively taller than

Socrates and shorter than Phaedo. It is not " in virtue of being

Simmias " (en sa qualite de Simmias) that these things can be pre-

dicated of him. The distinction here taken is that between essential

and accidental predication since made familiar to us all by Aristotelian

logic. Or, in scholastic terminology, it is the distinction between

an intrinsic and an extrinsic denomination. The point has to be

made, because the force of the argument now to be produced depends

on the fact that it deals entirely with essential predication.

This being premised, we may go on to assert (a) that not only

will no " form/ 1 e.g. magnitude, combine with an opposed " form,"

but further, " the magnitude in us will never admit the small "

(i02d). That is, not only can we dismiss at once as false such

assertions as that " virtue is vice," " unity is plurality," but we

can also equally dismiss any proposition in which a subject, other

than a " form," of which that form is essentially predicated, is

qualified by a predicate opposed to that which attaches to it

essentially in virtue of the " form " under consideration. Thus, if

" shortness " were an essential predicate of Socrates, we could say

that " Socrates is tall " must be false ; it is only because a given

stature is an " accident " of Socrates that it is possible to say of him

at one date that he is short, but at another (when he has grown)

that he is " tall." (Or to take an example which perhaps illustrates

the point even better, not only is it absurd to say that virtue itself

is vice, it would also be absurd to say " the virtues of the old pagans

were splendid vices," if we meant such a phrase as anything more

than a rhetorical exaggeration.) When a " form " opposite to that

which is essential to a certain thing " advances " to " occupy " the

thing, the original " form " cannot subsist side by side with its

rival in joint occupation of the ground. It must either " beat its

retreat " (\>irK%<i>pclv) or t>e " annihilated " (dTroAwAo/ai). (The

THE PHAEDO 205

metaphors, including that indicated in the last phrase,

are all military.) And this statement is quite consistent with that

of our first " proof " about the generation of " opposites " from one

another. For we were talking then about " opposite things "

(Trpay/xara), and meant that a thing which becomes cool must

have been warm, a thing which becomes big must have been small.

Now we are talking about the predicates or characters of the things,

and mean that hot does not become cold nor cold hot. The two

positions are thus fully compatible with each other (1036).

(/3) We can make a further assertion which will conduct us

straight to the conclusion we want. There are certain things

which are not themselves " forms," but of which participation in

a given form is an essential character. Thus fire is not " warmth "

nor is snow " cold." But fire will not " admit " the form " cold,"

nor snow the form " warmth." Fire is never cool nor snow hot.

As we said already, when " cold " attempts to " occupy " fire, or

heat to " occupy " snow, an essential character of the thing must

either " withdraw " or be " annihilated," and in either case the

thing, the fire or the snow, is no longer the thing it was. But we

may now add that in cases like that of fire and snow, when each

of a pair of subjects has predicated of it essentially " participation "

in a form " opposite " to one in which the other member of the pair

essentially participates, the same thing will occur. Thus " cold "

is essentially predicated of snow and " hot " of fire. And we may

say not only the snow will " retire " or be " annihilated " rather

than allow itself to be " occupied " by heat, but further that snow

will not abide the " advance " of fire. It melts and ceases to be

snow when you expose it to fire. (This is a case of the alternative

of " annihilation." The snow, so to say, allows itself to be " cut

up " in defence of its " position " when the forces of the fire make

their onslaught.) So again the number "three" is not the same

thing as " the odd," or " odd number," since there are many other

odd numbers, but it " participates" essentially in the " form " odd.

(It is true that " three " and the other numbers, unlike fire and

snow, are also themselves spoken of freely in this and other dialogues

as " forms," but Socrates makes no difficulty about treating the

" participation " of a sensible thing in a " form "and the " participa-

tion " of one " form " in another as examples of the same relation.

As we might put it in the terminology of modern " logistic," he

does not discriminate between the relation of an individual to a

class, and the relation of total inclusion between one class and

another.) Consequently " whatever is occupied " by the " form "

three is also "occupied" by the accompanying "form" odd ; the

cardinal number of every " triplet " is an odd integer. Hence no

triplet will allow itself to be " occupied " by the " form " even

number. You cannot make an even triplet (e.g., when a man's

fourth child is born, the class " children of So-and-so " does not

become an even triplet ; it ceases to be a triplet as well as to be

" odd." This is an example of the alternative of " withdrawal "

206 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

or " retreat/ 1 since " oddness " is not, like low or high temperature,

a character which can be " destroyed/ 1 The whole " universe "

might conceivably be reduced to a uniform low temperature, but

not the number-series to a series with all its terms even.)

We now apply these results to the case of the soul. Life is a

necessary concomitant of the presence of a soul, as illness is of the

presence of fever, or heat of the presence of fire. A soul always

brings life with it to any body in which it is present. Now there

is an " opposite " to life, namely, death. Hence we may say that

a soul will never allow itself to be occupied by the opposite of

the character it always carries with itself. That is, life may be

essentially predicated of the soul and therefore death can never be

predicated of it. Thus the soul is, in the literal sense of the word,

" undying " (aiOdvaTos) ; that is, the phrase " a dead soul " would

be a contradictio in adjecto. So much has now been actually de-

monstrated (1050).

Of course this does not take us the whole of the way we wish to

go. What has been " demonstrated," and would probably not be

denied by anyone, is that, properly speaking, " death " is a process

which belongs to the bodily organism. It is the body which dies,

speaking strictly, not its " mind/' But to prove that there is no

such thing as a " dead soul," though there are dead bodies, does

not prove that the soul oontinues to live after the body has died,

and Socrates is well aware of this. His demonstration, on his own

admission, leaves us with an alternative : since " dead " cannot be

predicated of a soul, the soul must either be annihilated or must

" retire " when the body dies. Socrates' faith is that the second

member of the alternative is correct, but the emphatic " so much

has been demonstrated " of 1050 8 seems to show that, when all

is said, this remains for him an article of faith, not a demonstrated

proposition of science. Our decision between the two alternatives

will depend on the question whether the soul is not only " undying "

but " imperishable " (di'u>\e#/>os). If it is, then we may safely

say that what befalls it at death is merely " withdrawal elsewhere."

He is not actually called on to argue this fresh point, since his

auditors at once assert their conviction that if what is " undying "

is not imperishable, nothing can be supposed to be so, whereas

there are, in fact, imperishables, such as God, and " the form of

life." Thus, in the end, the imperishability of the soul is accepted

as a consequence of the standing conviction of all Greek religion

that TO a.Quiva.Tov =TO $ctov =TO atfrQapTov. It is the soul's " divinity "

which is, in the last resort, the ground for the hope of immortality,

and the divinity of the soul is a postulate of a reasonable faith

which the dialogue never attempts to " demonstrate." The last

word of Socrates himself on the value of his demonstration is that its

" primary postulates " (i.e. the " forms " and the divinity of the soul)

really demand further examination (1076 5).

THE PRACTICAL BEARING OF THE DISCUSSION (lojc-ioSc).

This brings us to the real moral of the dialogue. As we have

THE PIIAEDO 207

just seen, even if we are satisfied with the deduction of immortality

from the doctrine of " forms," that doctrine itself is a postulate which

is not exempt from reconsideration. But the mere admission that

the hope of immortality is not irrational has a profound significance

for the conduct of life. It follows that the " tendance of the soul "

is incomparably the most serious of human interests, and the danger

of neglecting this " tendance " the most awful to which we can

expose ourselves. If death ends all, it may not matter so much

what sort of soul a man has, since, in a few years, his wickedness

will end with his life. But if the soul lives for ever, it takes with

it into the unseen world nothing but its own intrinsic character for

good or evil, and its unending future depends on that. This is

really what the Orphic stories about the judgment of the dead

should teach us. On the character we bring with us into the unseen

world, our company there will depend, and our happiness and

misery will depend on our company. As in the Gorgias and Re-

public, the hope of immortality is thus used for a moral purpose.

The value of faith in it is that it drives home the question what

manner of men we ought to be, if there is an endless future before

us, and thus invests the choice for moral good and evil with an

awful importance it would otherwise not have (Phaedo lojc ; Rep.

6oSb, 6zib-d. Plato enlarges on the same theme on his own

account at Laws, 904^-9056). In the end, for Socrates and Plato,

no less than for Kant, immortality is a postulate of the " practical "

use of "reason." *

I do not propose to make this chapter longer by dwelling either

on the impressive myth in which Plato fits an imaginative picture

of the future lot of the virtuous and the vicious into a framework

supplied partly by a scheme of astronomy which seems to be Pytha-

gorean, and possibly, as the admiring comment of Simmias at 109^

suggests, due to Philolaus, and subterranean geography which

manifestly comes from Empedocles, or on the famous description

of the last earthly moments of Socrates. I must be content to

refer the reader to Burnet's commentary, and, for a study of the

influence of the picture on later eschatology, to Professor J. A.

Stewart's Myths of Plato. It is useless to discuss the question

how much in these myths of the unseen represents a genuine " extra-

belief " of either Socrates or Plato, and how much is conscious

" symbolism." Probably neither philosopher could have answered

the question himself. But we must bear in mind that Socrates

regularly accompanies these stories with the warning (e.g. Phaedo,

n^d) that no man of sense would put much confidence in the

details, and that the one thing of serious moment is that we should

1 If the question is asked whether the faith defended in the Phaedo is a

belief in " personal " immortality, I can only reply that, though the language

of philosophers was not to acquire a word for " personality " for many

centuries, the faith of Socrates is a belief in the immortality of his ^i/xij, and

by his ^vxt he means the seat or suppositum of all we call " personal character,"

and nothing else. " Tendance of the soul " is precisely what we call the

development of " moral personality."

208 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

live as befits men who are looking for a city that does not yet appear,

and that the real object of " tending the soul " is to make us fit for

citizenship in the eternal (Phaedo, 1156). From the historical

point of view, the supremely interesting feature of this particular

myth is that it is an attempt to get into one picture the flat earth

of the old Ionian science and the spherical earth of the Pythagoreans,

as Burnet notes. This is done by imagining the sphere of the earth

to be of enormous magnitude and to contain a number of shallow

depressions like that of the Mediterranean Each of these de-

pressions will look very much like the flat earth of Anaximenes or

Anaxagoras or Democritus. As Burnet says, some such recon-

ciliation of the two cosmographies may have suggested itself at

Athens in the middle of the fifth century to some one ; it would

be absurd to suppose that it could ever have been entertained by

contemporaries of Plato.

See further :

BURNET. Plato's Phaedo (Oxford, 1913) ; Greek Philosophy,

Part /., Chapters IX.-X.

RITTER, C. Platon, i. 532-586.

RAEDER, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 168-181.

NATORP, P. Platons Ideenlehre, 126-163.

STEWART, J. A.Myths of Plato, 77-111 (The Phaedo Myth) ;

Plato's Doctrine of Ideas, 39-47.

NOTE. Plutarch's essay de Genio Socratis is rich in interesting

traditions about Simmias and the Pythagoreans at Thebes. It de-

scribes Pelopidas and his fellow-conspirators, who recaptured the

citadel of Thebes from the Spartans in 379, as meeting for their enter-

prise in the house of Simmias. Plutarch, as a Boeotian, was well informed

on Theban matters and his story presumably has historical foundations.

CHAPTER IX

THE SYMPOSIUM

THE Symposium is perhaps the most brilliant of all Plato's

achievements as a dramatic artist ; perhaps for that very

reason, it has been worse misunderstood than any other of

his writings. Even in its own day it was apparently quite mis-

apprehended by Xenophon, if one may judge by the tone of the very

inferior imitation of it in his own piece of the same name. Xenophon

was led by the form of the dialogue to suppose that it is meant to

deal with the sexual passion and to pit against it a Symposium of

his own, which has as its climax a eulogy of the pleasures of married

life. Our own and the last generation, with the poison of Romanti-

cism in their veins, have gone farther and discovered that the dialogue

anticipates William Blake's " prophecies " by finding the key to the

universe in the fact of sex. This means that such readers have

sought the teaching of the Symposium in the first instance in the

Rabelaisian parody of a cosmogony put very appropriately into

the mouth of Aristophanes. The very fact that this famous speech

is given to the great ycXwroTrotos should, of course, have proved to

an intelligent reader that the whole tale of the bi-sexual creatures

is a piece of gracious Pantagruelism, and that Plato's serious purpose

must be looked for elsewhere. Similarly, it is more from the Sym-

posium than from any other source that soul-sick " romanticists "

have drawn their glorification of the very un-Platonic thing they

have named " platonic love/' a topic on which there is not a word

in this or any other writing of Plato. We must resolutely put

fancies like these out of our heads from the first if we mean to

understand what the real theme of the dialogue is. We must

remember that Eros, in whose honour the speeches of the dialogue

are delivered, was a cosmogonic figure whose significance is hope-

lessly obscured by mere identification with the principle of " sex."

We must also remember that the scene is a festive one, and that

the tone of most of the speeches is consequently more than half

playful, and rightly so, as the gaiety of the company is meant to

set off by contrast the high seriousness of the discourse of Socrates.

It is there that we are to find Plato's deepest meaning, and when

we come to that speech we shall find that the " love " of which he

speaks the praises is one which has left sexuality far behind, an

amor mysticus which finds its nearest modern counterpart in the

writers who have employed the imagery of Canticles to set forth

the love of the soul for its Creator.

SOI

210 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

In form the dialogue is an indirectly reported drama. The

actual narrator, Apollodorus of Phalerum, a friend of Socrates (who

is mentioned at Apol. 386 as one of the persons who offered to give

security for a fine of thirty minae, and at Phaedo iijd as breaking

into hysterical tears when Socrates drained the hemlock, and again

by Xenophon as a constant attendant on the master, at Mem. iii.

ii, 17), repeats to some friends the story of the banquet held in

honour of the first tragic victory of the poet Agathon. Apollo-

dorus is too young to have been present, but had the story direct

from an eyewitness, Aristodemus, of the deme Cydathenaeum,

apparently the same person as the Aristodemus whom Xenophon

makes Socrates take to task (Mem. i. I, 4) for his neglect of public

worship. The time of narration is supposed to be " a good number

of years " (1720) after Agathon's retirement from Athens. When

that was we do not know, except that it was after the production

of Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae (411) and before that of the

Frogs (405), so that the actual narration must be supposed to be given

some time in the last few years of the fifth century. The real object

of introducing all these particulars seems to be to remind us that

Plato himself could not have been present at the banquet, and

does not therefore pretend to guarantee the historical accuracy of

the narrative in detail.

It is more interesting to remark the careful way in which the

spirit of the time is kept up in the account of the banquet itself.

Not only is the occasion itself, the first public victory of a new poet,

a festive one, but the year is one in which the temper of the Imperial

city itself was exceptionally joyous and high. The date is only a

few months before the sailing of the great Armada which was

confidently expected to make the conquest of Sicily a mere stepping-

stone to unlimited expansion, possibly to the conquest of Carthage

(Thuc. vi. 15) ; the extraordinary tone of v/fyus characteristic of

Alcibiades in the dialogue becomes much more explicable when we

remember that at the moment of speaking he was the commander-

designate of such an enterprise and drunk with the ambitions

Thucydides ascribes to him quite as much as with wine. We note

that Aristophanes also is depicted as he must have been at the height

of his powers, when the Birds and the Lysistrata were yet to be

written, not as the broken man, whom Plato might have known

personally, who could sink to the tiresome dirtiness of the

Ecclesiazusae. In a few months' time the whole situation was

changed by the scandal about the Hermae and the profanation

of the mysteries ; Alcibiades was an exile at Sparta, bent on ruining

the city which had disgraced him, and there is good reason to think

that at least two other speakers in our dialogue (Eryximachus and

Phaedrus) were badly implicated in the same affair. 7 For the

8^0? itself, the year may be said to have been the crisis of its fate.

It had staked its all on a great aggressive bid for Weltmacht and the

bid failed. The city never recovered the loss of men and material ;

1 For the evidence see Burnet, Greek Philosophy, Part /., 190-191.

THE SYMPOSIUM 211

the commander of whom she had made a deadly enemy was the

man who taught the thick-witted Spartans where to deal her the

wound which would, in the end, prove fatal. It is part of Plato's

consummate art that he hints at nothing of this. He fixes the

mood of the time and of the man of the time, " flown with insolence

and wine," with complete objectivity and without after-thought,

as a background to set off the figure of " philosophy " incarnated in

Socrates. 1

INTRODUCTION (1720-1780). Aristodemus, then, related that,

the day after Agathpn's victory, he met Socrates in very unusual

" festal array," on his way to Agathon's dinner-party and accepted

his proposal to join him. On the way Socrates fell into one of his

ecstasies and left his companion to enter Agathon's house, where

he was warmly welcomed, alone. Agathon knew enough of

Socrates' habits not to be startled by learning that he was standing

" tranced " in the doorway of the next house. He did not make

his appearance until dinner was half over, when he took his seat

by Agathon in the gayest of humours. When the dinner was

finished, the party resolved, on the advice of the physician Eryxi-

machus, that there should be no enforced deep " potting " and no

flute-playing. They would entertain themselves, as sensible men

should, with discourses. Phaedrus, another member of the party,

had often remarked on the singular fact that though so many

persons and things have been made subjects of eulogy, no one has

as yet made an adequate eulogy of Eros. 2 It would be a good way

of spending the evening if each member of the party would deliver

such a eulogy, beginning with Phaedrus, as the source of the pro-

posal. Socrates fell in at once with the suggestion which, he

declared, suited him admirably, as the " science of love " was the

only science he possessed.

The main object of this little introduction is plainly to call our

attention to a marked feature in the character of Socrates. He is at

heart a mystic and there is something " other-worldly " about him.

We shall hear a great deal more about this later on from Alcibiades

when he describes Socrates' long " rapt " in the trenches before

Potidaea, an experience which may have had a great significance

1 I do not think it necessary, with Mr. R. G. Bury, to look for any hidden

meaning in the references made by Apollodorus to a less accurate narrative of

the scene given by a certain Phoenix. These touches are intended merely to

suggest that thfi incidents had aroused a good deal of interest and been much

talked about. I do not believe that there is any reason to suppose that

Plato is replying to charges made in the KaTarjyopla. Sow/wlrou* of Polycrates

anywhere in our dialogue. If he had done so, we should probably have learned

something about the matter from Xenophon or from the Apologia of Lib-

anius (which shows signs of a knowledge of Polycrates' pamphlet).

1 Mr. Bury naturally reminds us that there is a chorus about Eros in the

Antigone and another in the Hippolytus. But the ode of the Antigone (781-

80 1 ) deals with the ruin and havoc Eros causes and the crimes to which he

prompts even " the just." That of the Hippolytus (525-564) is similarly a

prayer against his u tyrannical " violence. Neither can be called a eulogy.

Cf. E. Bevan, Hellenism and Christianity t pp. 93 ff.

212 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

for his " mission." A minor experience of the same kind is intro-

duced at the outset to prepare us for this narrative and for the high

" other-worldliness " of Socrates 1 own discourse on Eros. But,

as with other great mystics, Socrates' other-worldliness is compatible

with being a " man of the world " in the best sense and knowing

how to adapt himself readily to the mood of the gayest of com-

panies. (It is worth noting that the biographers of the fervent

" ecstatic " St. Francis Xavier dwell on precisely the same com-

bination of qualities as part of the secret of his influence over

company of every kind, and that Xavier himself, in his instructions

to his remplagants, lays almost as much stress on the importance of

knowing how to win men by being " good company " as on that of

intense secret devotion.)

Speech of Phaedrus (ij$a-i8ob). Phaedrus is known to us

chiefly from the part he plays in the dialogue called after him,

where he appears as an amateur of rhetoric and a fervid admirer

of the fashionable stylist of the moment, Lysias, in contradistinction

to Socrates, who regards Lysias as intellectually inferior to the, as

yet, little known Isocrates. Socrates is made to say of him there

(Phaedrus, 2426) that he has been the cause of more " discourses,"

either by delivering them himself or being the occasion of their

delivery by other men, than any living person, if we leave Simmias

of Thebes out of account. If we may trust the list of names in-

serted in Andocides i. 15, he was among the persons accused, a few

months after Agathon's dinner, of having " profaned the mysteries "

(unless, though this is not so likely, the reference is to some other

Phaedrus). In Lysias xix. 15 he is said to have fallen into poverty,

but " not through vicious courses." There is a well-known epigram

in the Anthology, ascribed to Plato, which makes him an epw/xcvos of

the author, but, since Phaedrus was a man in 416 when Plato was

a small boy, this is chronologically impossible. 1

The speech of Phaedrus is properly made jejune and common-

place, for a double reason. As a point of art, it is necessary to

begin with the relatively tame and commonplace in order to lead

up by a proper crescendo to the climax to be reached in the discourse

of Socrates. And the triviality and vulgar morality of the dis-

course is in keeping with the character of the speaker as depicted

for us in the Phaedrus. Phaedrus understands by Eros sexual

passion, and particularly passion of this kind between two persons

of the same sex. At Athens these relations were regarded as

disgraceful both by law 2 and, as the next speaker in our dialogue

will remind us, by general opinion, but literature shows that they

1 Of course the Phaedrus of the epigram might be another person. But

when we find Agathon and Phaedrus figuring in an Ipvrtfcfo Xifyo? by Plato

and also appearing as tpw^vot in epigrams ascribed to Plato, it is surely most

likely that the epigrams were composed and fathered on Plato by some later

author who had read the Symposium and forgotten that it is Socrates and

not Plato who poses playfully there as an tywTi/c6s.

1 For the attitude of Attic law to ircuSepaorfa, the great source of informa-

tion is the speech of Aeschines against Timarchus.

THE SYMPOSIUM 218

were in fact cultivated particularly by the " upper classes " as

part of the general craze for imitation of Sparta. It is important

to remember that all such aberrations were strongly disapproved

by the viri Socratici. The present dialogue and the Phaedrus are

complete evidence for the theory and practice of Socrates ; Plato's

attitude in the Laws is the same. At Laws 6366 it is made a

special reproach to Sparta to have set an example of such " corrup-

tions," and their complete suppression in a really moral society is

taken as a matter of course at S^id. 1 Xenophon's attitude is the

same.

The argument of the speech is that Eros is entitled to honour

on two grounds (a) his noblesse, as proved by his antiquity, and

(b) the advantages he bestows on us. The.fireLpPintis_Stablishfid

by an appeal to Hesiod and the cosmqgonists generally,, who ^pre-

suppose Eros the impulse_tQ ^generation as an_ original Jirst

principle of the universe. It is brought in as a regular common-

place of encomiasts, who are fond of dwelling on the " pedigree " of

their hero. (Socrates regarded this pride of birth as pure vanity

as he tells us at Theactet. ij$a-b, where he criticizes the common

run of panegyrists on this ground.) The second point is supposed

to be proved by the argument that " love " is the most powerful of

incitements to ambition. A lover will do anything and endure

anything to win the admiration of his " beloved " and avoid dis-

gracing himself in his eyes. (Note then that Phaedrus has no

conception of any " good " surpassing that of the " lover of

honours. 11 ) Hence an army of " lovers/' if one could be raised,

would be invincible. In short, the great service which Eros renders

to men is that he inspires them with /xeW ("prowess"). (This

was, in fact, exactly the view taken in Spartan and other Dorian

communities, where " homo-sexual love " in its coarsest form was

encouraged because it was believed to contribute to military

" chivalry." 2 ) The point is illustrated by the cases of Alcestis

who died for her " love " Admetus, and Achilles who died for his

" lover " Patroclus. Heaven rewarded this devotion by restoring

Alcestis to life 3 and translating Achilles to the " isles of the blest."

Orpheus, a mere " chicken-hearted " musician, was not allowed

to recover his Eurydice, because he had not the " pluck " to

die for her but sneaked down to the house of Hades without

dying. In substance, then, the speech simply amounts to a

defence of an unnatural practice on the plea of its military

value. It is an apologia for the theory and practice of Sparta.

1 These considerations show that we must not put a gross interpretation

on the passing remark of Socrates at Rep. 468^. The reference is merely to

innocent marks of affection and admiration which the younger people are to

show to the brave soldier, and is half playful in tone.

1 On this aspect of the subject see in particular the instructive article of

Bethe (Rheinisches Museum, Ixii. 438 fL).

8 Symp. 1796. Apart from the play of Euripides, which Phaedrus prob-

ably has in his mind, this is the first reference in extant Greek literature to

the famous story.

8

214 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

In manner it is a poor and inadroit " encomium " of a common-

place type. 1

Speech of Pausanias (i8oc-i8$c). Pausanias is virtually an

unknown figure to us. He appears also in the Protagoras (the

supposed date of which must be roughly some twenty years before

416), in company with Agathon, then a mere stripling, and Socrates

is there made to say playfully that he should not be surprised if

the pair are "lovers" (Prot. 315^). Xenophon has dutifully

worked him in in his own imitation of the Symposium (viii. 32),

where he is said to be the " lover of the poet Agathon " and to have

" defended homo-sexual vice/' 2 This, however, is merely a Platonic

reminiscence. Xenophon has taken the remark of Socrates in the

Protagoras with dull literalness and gone on to attribute to Pausanias

the remark about an " army of lovers " actually made in our

dialogue by Phaedrus.

The speech of Pausanias, unlike that of Phaedrus, really does

attempt to take account of specifically Athenian moral sentiment,

and is much more elaborately worked out in point of form. He is

dissatisfied with Phaedrus on moral grounds, because he has drawn

no distinction between worthy and criminal "love." The dis-

tinction is even prefigured in mythology, which recognizes a differ-

ence between a " heavenly " Aphrodite, daughter of Uranus without

any mother, and a " vulgar " (TTCIV^/AOS) Aphrodite, daughter of

Zeus and Dione. Since Aphrodite is the mother of Eros, we must

consequently distinguish between a " heavenly " and an earthly

or " vulgar " Eros. The one is admirable, the other not. In fact

so far Pausanias agrees with Socratic ethics there is a right and a

wrong in all human activities, and consequently there must be a

right and a wrong way of " being in love. 11

The "..low 'Ifonn^oflQY^hasjtwp characteristics : (i) its object

may be of eiffier'sex, and (a)^hat Tt loves in that object is the body

rather than the soul, and this is why the vulgar lover prefers his

beloved to be ,empty-Tiiea3eJ "J&o^fos) and ther^f^^n~ea^

qu8^^1The/ r 5eaveri^"_lpve is all mas^ttnrmTlils'ccmpos^n.

The object of this love is therefore always male anoTtTie passion is i

free from " grossness " (v/fyis). It is directed not on the young)

and pretty but on an object just on the verge of manhood, a person

whose character promises assured lifelong friendship.

To this distinction corresponds the apparently self-contra-

dictory character of the Attic " use and wont " in respect of Eros.

In some communities, such as Elis and Boeotia, the " vulgar " and

the more refined Eros are both permitted, in the Ionian cities both

are regarded as disgraceful. This is because Eleans and Boeotians

1 Cf. Bury, Symposium, p. xxv. But he is unjust to the " sophists " in

suggesting that it is a fair specimen of their performances, and 1 think he

would be nearer the mark if he had said that the moral standpoint of the

speech is that of an average Spartan, than he is in speaking of " the average

citizen " of Athens.

1 For another clear echo of our dialogue, cp. Xen. op. cit. ii, 26 with

Symp, igSc 3. There are plenty of others.

THE SYMPOSIUM 215

are dull and stupid ; lonians have been inured to slavish conformity

to institutions which serve the purposes of their Persian masters.

Eros, philosophy, bodily culture, are all discouraged by the Persians

as influences unfavourable to acquiescence in despotism. At

Athens and Sparta (this last statement can hardly be strictly true)

social custom is not so simple. Use and wont are divided ; public

opinion " loves a lover " and sympathizes with all his extravagances,

but the young, on the other hand, are expected to resist his advances

and promises, and parents and relatives take all possible care to

protect their charges against them. (Just as in a " romantic "

society it is thought honourable in a man to practise "gallantry,"

but the point of female honour to be " cruel " to the gallant.) The

explanation of this apparent contradiction is that the difficulties

put in the way of the " lover " are intended to make it certain that he

loves with the higher and celestial kind of Eros, directed to the soul,

and that the " beloved " is won not by the wealth or social posi-

tion of the lover but by his genuine " goodness " and " intelligence/'

In some respects the speech is morally on a higher level than

that of Phaedrus. It_is a real contribution _to__the discusslpii_tp

introduce as fundamentaTijie,^^

ignoble u love? 1 And Pausanias is sp^jai; foljowingji right instinct

^HeipSESS^^thejib^le , fr Tove " ind^er^erit of obvious physical

jjrettiness and attractiveness and maintains that it^'^bjet-Js^a

consortium totius vitae in^thHIIes:Lsense oftlie words. So far he is

irFaCCord"wTth the distinction we should draw ourselves between

the love that is little more than a sensual weakness and the love

which can lead to a " marriage of true minds." To this extent, I

cannot agree with the disparaging estimate of Mr. Bury (Symp.

xxvii). That Pausanias conceives of a consortium totius vitae as only

possible between a younger and an older male is to be explained by

the Attic neglect of the intellectual and moral education of the

womenfolk of the citizens. There is no possibility of the " shared

life " where one of the partners is an intelligent human being and

the other a spoilt child or a domestic animal, and it is fair to re-

member this when we find Pausanias assuming that all love of

women belongs to the ignoble kind. On the other hand, Pausanias'

conception of the noble Eros is pitched far too low. As his inclusion

of Sparta as one of the places where the distinction is recognized

would be enough to show, he quite definitely means to give his

approval to what Socrates and Plato, like ourselves, regard as not

merely " guilty " but " unnatural," provided that it is made the

basis for a permanent life of intimate devotion. The persons on

whom he bestows unqualified admiration as having achieved the

perfection of human excellence are just those whom Socrates is

made to treat in the Phaedrus much as we should treat the " knight "

who is spurred to chivalrous exploits by a love which, though

" sinful," is not merely " carnal." (Unlike Socrates, Pausanias

would clearly never have understood why Sir Lancelot came short

in the spiritual quest of the Sangraal.) He does, indeed, expect

216 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

passion to be " sanctified " by being pressed into the service of

" goodness/ 1 but his conception of " goodness/ 1 if it is not as crude

as that of Phaedrus, who makes it equivalent to mere " prowess/' is

still unspiritual. Harmodius and Aristogiton who " slew the

tyrant " furnish him with his standard of " noble love " and its

services to man. On the formal merit of the speech, as judged by

the rules of "epidictic" introduced to Athens by Gorgias, see the

remarks of Mr. Bury in his edition of the dialogue (Introduction,

xxvii-xxviii).

Interlude and Speech of Eryximachus (1850-1880). We must not

forget that we are listening to the speeches delivered at a gay party

by guests, many of whom are in a merely festive humour. The

f-ave moral issues which have been raised by the magnification of

ros will receive their proper treatment when we come to the great

discourse of Socrates, but before Plato can so much as introduce

that, he must raise the imaginative level of the conversation to a

pitch at which the first crude glorification of " passion " only

survives in an undertone. Otherwise, there will be far too violent

a " modulation into a different key." This function of desensualis-

ing the imaginative tone of the dialogue is to be achieved by making

the speech of Socrates follow directly on one by Agathon, which is

a brilliant but passionless and fanciful tissue of jewelled conceits.

Even this needs to have the way prepared for it, if we are not to be

conscious of too violent a change of mood. Hence the two inter-

posed speeches of Eryximachus and Aristophanes with the little

interlude which introduces them. The tone of this part of the

dialogue is wholly playful, and I think it would be a mistake to

regard it as anything more than a delightful specimen of " Panta-

gruelism." The numerous persons who are unhappily without

anything of the Pantagruelist in their own composition will con-

tinue, no doubt, to look for hidden meanings in this section of the

Symposium, as they look for them in Rabelais, and with much the

same kind of success. Fortunately, we need not imitate them,

any more than we need take Rabelais' book to be a disguised

treatise on the " new monarchy."

It was now, we are told, the turn of Aristophanes to speak, but

as he was impeded by a hiccough, the physician Eryximachus under-

took to speak out of order as well as to prescribe for the poet's

"passing indisposition." Hidden allusions have been suspected

in this simple incident, but without reason. Aristophanes, one

of the sturdy topers of the party (1766), is held up, when his turn

to speak comes, by an accident which is a small joke in itself ; the

medical man of the group, who also happens to be a sober soul

(1760) not able to carry much liquor, gives him professional aid and

fills up what would otherwise be a gap in the evening's programme.

There is nothing here which calls for a " serious " explanation.

Eryximachus is presumably the same person as the Eryximachus

who was implicated in the business of the " profaning of the

mysteries " (Andoc. i. 35) ; at least, there was a certain Acumenus

THE SYMPOSIUM 217

who was also among the denounced (ibid. i. 18), and the name is

a very unusual one, so that it looks as though the denounced persons

were our physician and his father. He is, we might almost say,

the F.R.S. of Agathon's party, and all his behaviour is strictly

in character. He announces himself from the first as a very

" moderate drinker/' and, as Mr. Bury observes, takes his departure

later on, as soon as the scene has become one of wild revelry. His

speech is carefully adapted to his character and profession. It is,

in fact, under the guise of a panegyric of Eros, a little discourse

on the principles of " science/' especially of medical science. The

scientific, and particularly the medical man, is the real repository

of the secrets of love. The style of the speech is appropriately

sober, free from the artifices of rhetoric and marked by a plentiful

use of professional terminology. We may, with Mr. Bury, call

him a " pedant/ 1 if we do him the justice to believe that the pedantry

is, of course, part of the fun of the evening and is presumably

intentional. The learned man is presumably amusing himself,

as an eminent man of science might do to-day in an after-dinner

speech, by making a little decorous " game " of his own professional

occupations. I see no need to suppose that Plato intends any serious

satire on the " science " of the speaker, especially as it represents

the views of the Sicilian medical school, the very type of biology

from which both Plato and Aristotle draw the biological analogies

which play so large a part in their ethics.

Eryximachus opens his speech by giving emphatic assent to

the distinction between a good and a bad Eros, but protests against

looking for the effects of these contrasted forces exclusively in the

souls of men. - They can be traced everywhere in the structure of

the universe, no less than in the human organism. 1 This may be

illustrated from medicine. The healthy and the diseased con-

stituents of the body have both their " cravings " ; there are whole-

some appetitions and morbid appetitions. The business of medical

science is to gratify the one and check the other. We might define

the science as " knowledge of the body's passions for repletion and

evacuation," and the man who can tell which of these " passions "

are healthy and which " morbid," and can replace the morbid

cravings in his patient by healthy ones, is the complete physician.

The body is, in fact, composed of " opposites " which are at strife

with one another, the hot, the cold, the dry, the moist, etc. ; medi-

cine is the art which produces " love and concord " between these

opposites. The task of " gymnastic/' agriculture, music, is pre-

cisely similar, and this may be what Heraclitus meant by saying,

"It is drawn together in being drawn apart/ 1 and talking of the

" concord of opposites/' though his language is inadequate, since

in the establishment of " concord," the previous " opposition " is

1 1866, Kdl KO.T dvOpu)irtva Kal Karb Beta irpdynara, i.e. not only in biology but

in physics. The 6eta here gets its meaning from the habit, universal in

Ionian science, of giving the name 06$ or Oeot, in a purely secular sense, to

the assumed primitive body or bodies.

218 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

cancelled out and disappears. In music, again, we can distinguish

the " good " and the " bad " Eros. The " good Eros " is exemplified

by those scales in which a really cultivated taste takes pleasure,

the " bad " by those which tickle the fancy of the vulgar. So in

the wider world of the physicist, a good and healthy climate is a

right and equable " temperament " (K/mo-ts) of heat and cold, rain

and dry weather, a bad climate is an instance of the " violent "

Eros ; it is an unhealthy " blend " of heat and cold, dry and wet

weather. Astronomy thus is another science of " love.' 1 So,

there is a " good " and a " bad " Eros of gods and men ; a religious

and an irreligious way of sacrificing and interpreting signs and

portents, and the professional knowledge of the priest and seer

becomes another example of the science of Erotics.

Thus the point of the speech is to insist on the cosmic signi-

ficance of Eros. The underlying thought is that nature is every-

where made up of " opposites," which need to be combined or

supplemented by one another ; they may be combined either in

proportions which make for stability, and then the result is tem-

perate climate, health, prosperity, tranquillity, or in proportions

which lead to instability, and the result is then cataclysms of nature,

disease, misfortune, violent and unwholesome excitement. The

business of science in all cases is to discover the proportions upon

which the " good " results depend. The sources of the doctrine

are easily indicated. We detect the influence of the Heraclitean

conception of the balance of " exchanges " as the explanation of

the seeming permanences of the world-order, the Pythagorean

doctrine that all things are combinations of " opposites," and of the

special biological working out of the thought which is characteristic

of the philosophy of Empedocles, the founder of Sicilian medicine.

The general point of view, as German scholars have pointed out,

is much like that of some of the treatises of the Hippocratean

corpus, notably the Trcpt SICU'TTJS a', in which the attempt is made to

find a speculative foundation for medicine in the Heraclitean

cosmology. The only inference we are entitled to draw is that the

main ideas of Sicilian medicine could be presumed to be generally

known to cultivated persons at Athens in the last third of the fifth

century, as is, in fact, shown abundantly by the use made of

analogies based upon them all through the ethical dialogues of

Plato For the argument of the Symposium itself the chief function

of the speech is to divert attention from the topic of sex, as must

be done if sex itself is to be treated with the necessary philosophic

detachment in the discourse of Socrates, and to call attention to

the universal cosmic significance of the conception of the recon-

ciliation of " opposites " in a higher " harmony." This preludes

to the discourse of Socrates, where we shall find that the principle

has actually a supra-cosmic significance. Meanwhile, the intro-

duction of this thought of Eros as a " world-building " principle

provides the starting-point for the brilliant and characteristic

burlesque cosmogony put into the mouth of Aristophanes.

THE SYMPOSIUM 219

Speech of Aristophanes (1890-1 93^ .^-To the general reader,

this is perhaps the best-known section of the whole dialogue, and

one of the best-known passages in the whole of Plato. It is the

more important to avoid misapprehending its purpose, which is

simply humorous and dramatic. We should note that the speech

itself is introduced by a thoroughly Aristophanic jest, and that the

poet tells us in so many words that he means to live up to his pro-

fession by being " funny." The speech itself may be very briefly

summarized. In the beginning man was a " round " creature

with four arms and four legs and two faces, looking different ways,

but joined at the top to make a single head. There were three

" sexes/' if we can call them so, of these creatures, the double-male,

double-female, and male-female, the first derived from the sun,

the second from the earth, the third from the moon, which is at once

a " luminary " and an "earth." But as yet there was no sexual

love and no sexual generation. The race procreated itself by a

literal fertilization of the soil. These creatures were as masterful

as they were strong and threatened to storm heaven or blockade

it, as we learn from the old traditions about the " giants." As a

measure of safety, Zeus split them longitudinally down the middle

and reconstructed them so that their method of propagation should

henceforth be sexual. Since then, man is only half a complete

creature, and each half goes about with a passionate longing to find

its complement and coalesce with it again. This longing for re-

union with the lost half of one's original self is what we call " love,"

and until it is satisfied, none of us can attain happiness. Ordinary

wedded love between man and woman is the reunion of two halves

of one of the originally double-sexed creatures ; passionate attach-

ment between two persons of the same sex is the reunion of the

halves of a double-male or a double-female, as the case may be. If

we continue in irreligion, it is to be feared that Zeus may split us

again, and leave us to hop on one leg with one arm and half a face.

As I have said, the brilliance of this fanciful speech must not

blind us to the fact that it is in the main comedy, and that the real

meaning of the dialogue must not be looked for in it. Plato is

careful to remind us that the speaker is a professional jester ; he is

too good an artist to have made the remark without a purpose,

or to have discounted the effect of the disccurse of his hero Socrates

by providing his dialogue with two centres of gravity. To be sure,

there are touches of earnest under the mirth of his Aristophanes,

as there always are under the wildest fun of the actual historical

Aristophanes. There is real tenderness in Aristophanes' descrip-

tion of the love-lorn condition of the creature looking for its lost

" half," and a real appreciation of unselfish devotion to the comrade

who is one's " second self." Aristophanes shows more real feeling

than any of the speakers who have been heard so far. It is also

true that he is making a distant approximation to the conception,

which Socrates will develop, of love as the longing of the soul for

union with its true good. But the distance is even more marked

220 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

than the approximation. The goal of love, as Socrates conceives

it, is not incorporation with a mate of flesh and blood, nor even

lifelong "marriage" with a "kindred mind/' but the Upos ya/xos

of the soul with the " eternal wisdom " in a region " all breathing

human passion far above." The passion Aristophanes describes

is that which finds its most lapidary, perhaps its most perfect

expression in Dante's canzone Cosl nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro,

not that which animates the Paradiso, the " female love " which

Blake would have us give up before we can see " eternity." It is

in keeping with this that Aristophanes, like Pausanias, relegates

the love of men for women to the lowest plane, on the ground that

the woman is the "weaker vessel," the "earthy" ingredient in our

original composition, thus denying the Socratic and Platonic tenet

that " the goodness of a man and of a woman are the same," and

proves his point by the allegation (192^) that those who are sensible

of female attractions show themselves inferior in " politics." (Like

Pausanias, he has no conception of any worthier life than that of the

" lover of honours.")

We may put the discourse in its true light by a consideration

of its obvious sources. In the first place, I think it is clear that in

composing the speech Plato had in view the brilliant burlesque of

an Orphic cosmogony in Aristophanes' own Birds (693-703), where

also Eros is the great primitive cosmic active force. From the Birds

comes again the suggestion of the danger that the gods might run

if the turbulent round-bodied creatures cut off the supply of sacri-

fices, the very method by which the birds of the play reduce

Olympus to unconditional surrender. As for the details of the

story, I think it is clear that they are a humorous parody of

Empedocles. Creatures in whom both sexes are united figure in

his cosmology (Fr. 61), along with the " men with the heads of

oxen " and similar monsters, as appearing in the early stages of the

evolutionary cycle to which we belong, the period of the world's

history in which " strife " is steadily disintegrating the " sphere " by

dissociating the complexes into their constituent " roots." This

is enough to provide a hint for the construction of the whole narra-

tive. We know that the theories of Empedocles became known at

Athens in the fifth century. The Phaedo represents Socrates and

his friends as well acquainted with them, and Aristotle tells us that

a certain Critias we may safely identify him with Plato's great-

grandfather, the Critias of the Timaeus and Critias had expressly

adopted one of them, the view that " we think with our blood." *

As the Clouds and Birds are enough to prove, Aristophanes was

fairly well at home in the doctrines of the men of science of whom

he made fun, and it is quite in keeping with Plato's dramatic

realism that he should be made to burlesque Empedocles, exactly

as he has burlesqued Diogenes and the Orphic cosmologists in his

extant comedies. It is from this humorous burlesque (carefully

" bowdlerized " to suit Christianized ethics, bien entendu), that the

l de Anima, 40566.

THE SYMPOSIUM 221

popular misconceptions about so-called " platonic love " seem to

have taken their origin.

There are now only two members of the party who have still

to speak, Agathon and Socrates. A little by-play passes (1930-1940),

which has no purpose beyond that of enhancing our anticipation

and making it clear that their speeches are to be the " event " of

the evening. It is worth noting that Plato is ready on occasion to

turn the humour against the foibles of his own hero. Socrates is

allowed, after his fashion, to put an apparently simple question,

simply that he may be called to order ; if he were not checked, the

programme would be ruined by the substitution of a dialectical

discussion for a eulogy. To be sure, when it comes to Socrates'

turn to speak, he gets his way after all and we are plunged into

dialectic whether we like it or not ; this is part of the fun.

The two speeches marked out as supremely important are

wrought with even more art than any of those which have preceded.

In form, as in matter, they exhibit the tension between opposites

which is the life of a drama at its acutest pitch. Agathon is morally

commonplace, cold in feeling, superficial in thought, for the lack of

which he compensates by a free employment of all the artificial

verbal patterns popularized by Gorgias; his encomium is a suc-

cession of frozen conceits with no real thought behind them

litter ature in the worst sense of the word. Socrates is, as usual,

simple and direct in manner ; he begins what he has to say in the

usual conversational tone of his " dialectic/' though, before he

has done, the elevation of his thought leads to a spontaneous eleva-

tion in style, and he ends on a note of genuine eloquence which

leaves all the " fine language " of Agathon hopelessly in the shade.

He is on fire with his subject, but with the clear, white-hot glow

of a man whose very passion is intellectual. He thinks intensely

where Agathon, and fine gentlemen like him, are content to talk

prettily. And we are not allowed to forget that Agathon 's pro-

fession is the " stage " ; he is the " actor/' impressing an audience

with emotions he simulates but does not feel ; Socrates is the

genuine man who " speaks from the heart " and to the heart.

(Note the adroit way in which this point is worked in at 1946.)

Speech of Agathon (1940-1970). The whole speech is a masterly

parody of the detestable " prose-poetry " of Gorgias, as will readily

be seen by comparing it with the specimens of the original article

which time has spared to us. It may be summarized, when divested

of its verbal extravagances, as follows. Previous speakers have

ignored the main point which a eulogy should make ; they have

talked about the gifts of Eros to men rather than about his intrinsic

qualities. It is these on which the eulogist should dwell, (i) Eros

is the most beautiful of all gods ; for (a) he is the youngest of all,

not the oldest as Phaedrus and his cosmologists pretend. The

" wars in heaven " would never have happened if Eros had held

sway then. Also he is eternally fair and young and consorts with

youth, not with " crabbed age/ 1 (b) He is " soft " (dTraXos) and

222 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

tender, and that is why he makes his dwelling in the tenderest

place he can find, the soul, and only in souls whose temper is yielding

(/xaXa/coV). (c) He is " pliant " (y/>6s TO cl^os), can wind his way

imperceptibly in and out of the inmost recesses of the soul.

(d) He is comely and lovely and bright of hue, and that is why he

will not settle and gather honey from a body or soul which is " past

its flower." (2) He has all the virtues : J (a) justice, for he neither

does nor suffers violence. He cannot suffer from it, for love is

unconstrained, and he never inflicts it, for all things are his willing

slaves and nemini volenti fit iniuria. (b) Temperance, for he

"masters all pleasures" (an idle verbal quibble), (c) Valour, for

he can master Ares, the "warrior famoused for fights." (d) Wis-

dom ; he is the author of mediciae, as Eryximachus had said ; he

inspires poetry in the most unpoetical and must therefore be himself

a supreme poet. He shows his wisdom, further, in being the con-

triver of all generation and the teacher of all crafts. It was love,

love of the beautiful, which inspired the various gods who were

their discoverers. In the beginning, when necessity held sway,

heaven itself was a place of horror ; the birth of Eros has thus been

the cause of all that is good in heaven and on earth. In short,

Eros is the giver of peace among men, calm in air and sea, tranquil

sleep which relieves our cares, mirth, jollity and here the speech

loses itself in a torrent of flowery phrases, which "bring down the

house," as they were meant to do.

We see, of course, as Plato means that we shall, the barrenness

of thought which all this euphuism cannot conceal. In a way, the

praise of Eros, in Agathon's mouth, has " lost all its grossness," by

transmutation into unmeaning prettiness, but it has incidentally

lost all its reality. The discourse has all the insincerity of the con-

ventional petrarchising sonneteer. Like the sonneteering tribe,

Agathon is so intoxicated by his own fine-filed phrases, that he is

evidently not at all clear which Eros he is belauding, the " heavenly "

or the " vulgar." For the euphuist's purpose, this really does not

matter much ; the theme of his discourse is to him no more than a

peg on which to hang his garlands of language. There had been real

feeling, under all the burlesque and the grossness, in the speech of

Aristophanes ; from Agathon we get only " words, words, words/'

Socrates indicates as much in the humorous observations which

introduce his own contribution to the entertainment. He really

began to be afraid, as Agathon grew more and more dithyrambic,

that he might be petrified and struck dumb by the " Gorgias' head/'

He bethought himself, now that it was too late, that he had been

rash in undertaking to deliver a eulogy at all. In the simplicity

of his heart, he had supposed that all he would have to do would

be to say the best which could be truthfully said of his subject. But

it now appears that the eulogist is expected to glorify his subject at

all " costs," regardless of truth. This is more than Socrates engaged

1 Note that the list of the " cardinal virtues " is taken for granted as

familiar. Thus it is no discovery of Plato or of Socrates.

THE SYMPOSIUM 228

to do, or can do. Like Hippolytus in the play, he is " unsworn in

soul," and must be allowed to deliver his speech in his own artless

fashion, telling the truth and leaving the style to take care of itself,

or the result may be a ridiculous collapse. And he must make one

more little stipulation. Perhaps Agathon would answer one or

two questions, so that Socrates may know where to make a be-

ginning. Thus, we see, the philosopher contrives to get his way

after all we are to have " dialectic/ 1 in other words, thinking,

as well as fine talking, as part of our programme (1986-1990).

Dialectical Interrogation of Agathon by Socrates (1990-2010).

The purpose of this little interlude, as Socrates had said, is to make

sure that his own encomium, which was to " tell the truth/ 1 shall

begin at the right starting-point. In other words, we are to be

brought back to reality, of which we have steadily been losing sight.

Eros, " love/' " craving/ 1 is a relative term ; all Eros is Eros of

something which is its correlate, and it is meant that this correlate is

a satisfaction. This would be clear at once in Greek, but is a little

obscured for us in English by the ambiguity of our word "love."

In English there are at least three quite distinct senses of the word

" love," and much loose sentimental half-thinking is due to con-

fusion between them. If we would be accurate, we must distin-

guish them precisely. There is (i) " love of complacency," the

emotion aroused by the simple contemplation of what we admire

and approve, the " love to the agent " of which the moral-sense

school speak in their accounts of moral approval. We may feel

this towards a person wholly incapable of being in any way affected

for good or bad by our acts or affecting us by his, as when we glow

with attachment to the great and good of whom we have read in

history. There is (2) " love of benevolence," which prompts us

to confer kindnesses on its object or to do him services. This love

we may feel to the good and the evil alike. It may show itself as

active gratitude to a benefactor, as pity for the unfortunate or the

sinful, and in many other guises. There is finally (3) " love of

concupiscence," desirous love, the eager appetition of what is

apprehended as our own " good." It is only this desirous love

which can be called Ipws in Greek. 1

Eros, then, is always a desirous love of its object, and that object

is always something not yet attained or possessed. Agathon had

said that " love of things fair " has created the happiness of the

gods themselves. But if Eros " wants " beauty, it must follow that

1 Hence when Euripides says fyare, TrcuSes, /-oyr/xJs, he means a great deal

more than we can express by saying " love your mother." He means that

the sons of such a mother as his heroine are to be " in love " with her ; she is

to be to them their true mistress and " dominant lady," as Hector in Homer

is " father and mother " to Andromache. One might illustrate by saying

that in Christianity God is thought of as loving all men with " love of ben-

evolence," and the righteous with an added " love of complacency/' but as

loving no creature with " love of concupiscence." The good man, on the other

hand, loves God with love of concupiscence, as the good for which his soul

longs, and with love of complacency, but could hardly, I suppose, be said to

love God with amor benevolentiae.smce we cannot do" good turns " to our Maker.

224 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

he does not yet possess it, and therefore is not himself " ever fair/

and in the same way, if he " wants " good, he cannot himself be

good.

At this point Socrates closes his conversation with Agathon and

enters on his " discourse/' having found the apxy for it. The

questioning of Agathon is no piece of mere verbal dexterity. It is

indispensable that we should understand that the only Eros de-

serving of our praises is an amor ascendens, a desirous going forth

of the soul in quest of a good which is above her. And this going

forth must begin with the knowledge that there is something we

want with all our hearts but have not yet got. As the old Evan-

gelicals said, the first step towards salvation is to feel your need of

a Saviour. " Blessed are they which hunger . . . for they shall be

filled/' The soul which is to be love's pilgrim must begin by feeling

this heart-hunger, or it will never adventure the journey. This is

the dpx>7 demanded by Socrates for any hohes Lied der Liebe which

is to " tell the truth."

Speech of Socrates (2oid-2i2c). Though Socrates had affected

to make his " dialectic " a mere preliminary to the " discourse " he

was contemplating, he actually contrives to turn the discourse itself

into " dialectic," genuine thinking, by putting it into the mouth of

one Diotima, a priestess and prophetess of Mantinea, and relating

the process of question and answer by which the prophetess had

opened his own eyes to understand the true mysteries of Eros.

The purpose is that his hearers shall not merely follow his words and

possibly be agreeably affected by them, but shall follow his thought.

They are to listen to the " conversation of his soul with itself."

At the same time, I cannot agree with many modern scholars in

regarding Diotima of Mantinea as a fictitious personage ; still less

in looking for fanciful reasons for giving the particular names Plato

does to the prophetess and her place of origin. The introduction of

purely fictitious named personages into a discourse seems to be a

literary device unknown to Plato, as has been said in an earlier

chapter, and I do not believe that if he had invented Diotima he

would have gone on to put into the mouth of Socrates the definite

statement that she had delayed the pestilence of the early years

of the Archidamian war for ten years by " offering sacrifice " at

Athens. As the Meno has told us, Socrates did derive hints for

his thought from the traditions of " priests of both sexes who have

been at pains to understand the rationale of what they do," and the

purpose of the reference to the presence of Diotima at Athens about

440 is manifestly not merely to account for Socrates' acquaintance

with her, but to make the point that the mystical doctrine of the

contemplative " ascent " of the soul, now to be set forth, was one

on which the philosopher's mind had been brooding ever since his

thirtieth year. This, if true, is very important for our understand-

ing of the man's personality, and I, for one, cannot believe that

Plato was guilty of wanton mystifications about such things. At

the same time, we may be sure that in reproducing a conversation

THE SYMPOSIUM 225

a quarter of a century old, Socrates is blending his recollections

of the past with his subsequent meditations upon it, as normally

happens in such cases. He sees an episode which had influenced

his life profoundly in the light of all that had come out of it, much

as St. Augustine in later life saw the facts of his conversion to

Christianity in a changed perspective, as we are able to prove by

contrasting the Confessions with the works composed just after the

conversion.

To all intents and purposes, we shall not go wrong by treating

the " speech of Diotima " as a speech of Socrates. We can best

describe the purpose of the speech in the language of religion by

saying that it is the narrative of the pilgrimage of a soul on the way

of salvation, from the initial moment at which it feels the need of

salvation to its final " consummation/' In spite of all differences

of precise outlook, the best comment on the whole narrative is

furnished by the great writers who, in verse or prose, have described

the stages of the " mystic way " by which the soul " goes out of

herself," to find herself again in finding God. In substance, what

Socrates is describing is the same spiritual voyage which St. John

of the Cross describes, for example, in the well-known song En una

noche oscura which opens his treatise on the Dark Night, and

Crashaw hints at more obscurely all through his lines on The Flaming

Heart, and Bonaventura charts for us with precision in the

Itinerarium Mentis in Deum. The Christian writers see by a

clearer light and they have an intensity which is all their own, but

the journey they describe is recognizably the same the travel of

the soul from temporality to eternity. In Greek literature, the

speech, I think we may fairly say, stands alone until we come to

Plotinus, with whom the same spiritual adventure is the main

theme of the Enneads. Unless we have so much of the mystic in

us as to understand the view that the " noughting " and remaking

of the soul is the great business of life, the discourse will have no

real meaning to us ; we shall take it for a mythological bellum

somnium. But if we do that, we shall never really understand the

Apology and the other dialogues which deal with the doctrine of

the " tendance of the soul/' a simple-sounding name which conceals

exactly the same conception of the attainment of " deiformity "

as the real " work of man." In the Phaedo we have had the picture

of a human soul on the very verge of attainment, at the moment

when it is about to " lose itself in light." In the Symposium we

are shown, more fully than anywhere else in Plato, the stages by

which that soul has come to be what it is in the Phaedo. We see

with Plato's eyes the interior life of the soul of Socrates.

The desirous soul, as was already said, is as yet not " fair " or

" good " ; that is what it would be and will be, but is not yet.

But this does not mean that it is " foul " and " wicked." There

is a state intermediate between these extremes, as there is a state

intermediate between sheer ignorance and completed knowledge

the state of having true beliefs without the power to give a iusti-

226 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

fication of them (avev TOV ?x tv ^-oyov Sowai). This may be ex-

pressed mythologically by saying that Eros is not a " god/' nor

yet a "mere mortal," but a 8cu/xa>v or " spirit/' and a mighty one

(202d-e). According to the received tradition, "spirits" stand

half-way between mortality and divinity ; they convey men's

prayers to the gods, and the commands, revelations, and gifts of

the gods to men ; intercourse between gods and men has them as

its intermediaries. Eros is one of these " spirits " (20 30). His

birth answers to his function. He is the child of Poros son of

Metis (Abundance, son of Good Counsel), by the beggar-maid Penia

(Need), conceived in heaven on the birthday of Aphrodite, and he

inherits characters from both his parents. He is, like his mother,

poor, uncomely, squalid, houseless, and homeless. But he has so

much of the father about him that he has high desires for all that is

" fair and good/' courage, persistence, endless resourcefulness, and

art in the pursuit of these desires. He is the greatest of " wizards

and wits " (Seivo? yo'r/s . . . KCU o-o<toT77s), he " pursues wisdom

all his life long " (^tXoo-o^oiv Sia Travros TOV (3iov). He is neither

god nor mortal, but lives a " dying life," starving and fed, and

starving for more again. 1 He is your one " philosopher " ; gods

do not aspire to " wisdom," for they already have it, nor yet " fools,"

for they do not so much as know their need and lack of it. " Philo-

sophers," aspirants after wisdom, of whom Eros is chief, are just

those who live between these two extremes. 2 They feel the hunger

for wisdom, the fairest of things, but they feel it precisely because

it remains unsatisfied. The conventional representation of Eros

as the " ever fair " is due to a simple confusion between the good

aspired to and the aspirant after it (2010-2046) .

When the thin veil of allegory is removed, we see that what is

described here is simply the experience of the division of the self

characteristic of man, when once he has become aware of his own

rationality. Rationality is not an endowment of which man finds

himself in possession ; it is an attainment incumbent on him to

achieves j Spiritual manhood and freedom are the good which he

must reach if he is to be happy, but they are a far-away good, and

his whole life is a struggle, and a struggle with many an alternation

of success and failure, to reach them. If he completely attained

them, his life would become that of a god ; he would have put off

temporality and put on an eternity secured against all mutability.

If he does not strive to attain, he falls back into the condition of the

mere animal, and becomes a thing of mere change and mutability.

Hence while he is what he is, he is never at peace with himself ;

that is the state into which he is trying to grow. It is true, in a

deeper sense than the author of the saying meant, that der Mensch

ist etwas das iiberwunden werden muss (we are only truly men in

so far as we are becoming something more). (That the " temporal "

1 The /3/of 0iX<J<ro0oy, we might say, has as its motto quasi morientes et ecce

vivimus ; tanquam nihil habentes et omnia possidentes.

1 Cf . the classification of rational beings ascribed to the Pythagoreans,

" gods/ 1 " men," " beings like Pythagoras " (0i\&ro0oi). Aristot. Fr. 192, Rose.

THE SYMPOSIUM 227

in us which has to be put off is always spoken of by Socrates as

" ignorance " or " error," not as " sin," has no special significance,

when we remember his conviction that the supreme function of

" knowledge " is to command and direct, to order the conduct of

life towards the attainment of our true good.)

It will be seen that Socrates is formally deferring to the dictum

of Agathon about the proper disposition of the parts of an encomium.

He has dealt with the question what the intrinsic character of

Eros is ; he now proceeds to the question of his services to us

(TWO. xpei'av lx t T k avflpwirois) . What is it that, in the end, is the

object of the heart's desirous longing ? Good, or in still plainer

words happiness (cu&u/Aoi/t'u) . All men wish happiness for its

own sake, and all wish their happiness to be " for ever." (Weh

spricht, Vergeh ! Dock alle Lust will Ewigkeit.) Why, then, do we

not call all men lovers, since all have this desirous longing ? For

the same reason that we do not call all craftsmen " makers," though

they all are makers of something. Linguistic use has restricted

the use of the word TTOIIJTI/S (" maker ") to one species of maker,

the man who fashions verse and song. So it is with the name

" lover " ; all desirous longing for good or happiness is love, but

in use the name " lover " is given to the person who longs earnestly

after one particular species of happiness TOKO? eV /caAcp (" pro-

creation in the beautiful ") whether this procreation is physical or

spiritual (/ecu Kara TO OXO/AO, KOU KCITO, TT/V t/^v^v, 206&).

To explain the point more fully, we must know that maturity

of either body or mind displays itself by the desire to procreate ;

beauty attracts us and awakens and fosters the procreative impulse,

ugliness inhibits it. And love, in the current restricted sense of the

word, is not, as might be thought, desire of the beautiful object,

but desire to impregnate it and have offspring by it (desire T>}S

ycvvrjo-ctog KCU TOU TOKOU lv /caXu>). (It is meant quite strictly that

physical desire for the " possession " of a beautiful woman is

really at bottom a "masked" desire for offspring by a physically

" fine " mother ; sexual appetite itself is not really craving for

" the pleasures of intercourse with the other sex " ; it is a passion

for parenthood.) And we readily understand why this desire for

procreation should be so universal and deep-seated. It is an

attempt to perpetuate one's own being " under a form of eternity,"

and we have just seen that the primary desire of all is desire to

possess one's " good " and to possess it for ever. The organism

cannot realize this desire in its own individuality, because it is in

its very nature subject to death. But it can achieve an approxi-

mation to eternity, if the succession of generations is kept up.

Hence the vehemence of the passion for procreation and the strength

of the instincts connected with mating and rearing a brood in all

animals. The only way in which a thing of time can approximate

to being eternal is to produce a new creature to take its place as it

passes away. Even within the limits of our individual existence,

the body " never continues in one stay " ; it is a scene of unending

228 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

waste made good by repair. Our thoughts and emotions too do

not remain selfsame through life. Even our knowledge does not

"abide " ; we are perpetually forgetting what we knew and having

to " recover " it again by /ucXeny ("study," "rehearsal"). It is

only by giving birth to a new individual to take the place of the old

that the mortal can " participate in deathlessness " (2086) .*

The passion for physical parenthood, however, is the most

rudimentary form in which the desirous longing for the fruition of

good eternal and immutable shows itself, and the form in which

Diotima is least interested. Her main purpose is to elucidate

the conception of spiritual parenthood. If we turn to the life of the

" love of honours " note that this reference (20 Sc) implies that in

what has been said about the physical instincts we have been con-

sidering the " body-loving " life the passion for " fame undying"

which has led Alcestis, Achilles, Codrus, and many another to

despise death and danger is just another, and more spiritualized,

form of the " desirous longing for the eternal." Thus, just as the

man who feels the craving for physical fatherhood is attracted by

womankind and becomes " exceeding amorous," so it is with those

whose souls are ripe for the procreation of spiritual issue, " wisdom

and goodness generally " ; the mentally, like the physically adult

looks for a " fair " partner to receive and bear his offspring (2090-6).

He feels the attraction of fair face and form, but what he is really

seeking is the " fair and noble and highly dowered " soul behind

them. If he finds what he is looking for, he freely pours forth

" discourse on goodness and what manner of man the good man

should be, and what conduct he should practise, and tries to

educate " the chosen soul he has found. The two friends are

associated in the " nurture " of the spiritual offspring to which their

converse has given birth, and the tie is still more enduring than that

of literal common parenthood, inasmuch as the offspring which

are the pledges of it are " fairer and more deathless." Examples

of such spiritual progeny are the poems of Homer and Hesiod, and

still more the salutary institutions and rules of life left to succeeding

ages by Lycurgus and Solon and many another statesman of Hellas

or " Barbary " ; some of these men have even been deified by the

gratitude of later generations (2095). a

1 This has absurdly been supposed to be inconsistent with the doctrines of

the Phaedo, and it has even been argued that the Symposium must have

been written before Plato discovered the doctrine of immortality expounded

there. In point of fact, there is no inconsistency. According to both dia-

logues the " body " belongs to the " mortal " element in us, and perishes

beyond recall. Hence man, according to the Phaedo, is strictly mortal ; what

is immortal is not the man, but the " divine " element in him, his ^vxt, as

has already been explained. There is not a word in the Symposium to suggest

that the $vxt is perishable. Hence no inference about the priority of the

one dialogue to the other can be based on comparison of their teaching.

*The allusion to "temples" erected to deified statesmen presumably

refers to Oriental communities in which the " laws " were traditionally ascribed

to remote " divine " rulers. The Greeks did not deify their legislators. At

Laws 624*1 the Cretan speaker, indeed, attempts to claim Zeus as the author

THE SYMPOSIUM 229

The desirous longing for an eternal good, however, has far

higher manifestations than these, and Diotima will not take it on

her to say whether Socrates is equal to making the ascent to them,

though she will describe them, and he must try to follow her. 1

(The meaning is that-, so far, we have been talking only about what

is possible within the limits of the two lower types of life : we have

now to deal with the more arduous path to be trodden by the

aspirant to the highest life of all, that of " philosophy. 1 ') He who

means to pursue the business in earnest must begin in early life

by being sensible to bodily beauty. If he is directed aright, he

will first try to " give birth to fair discourses " in company with

one comely person. But this is only the beginning. He must

next learn for himself 2 to recognize the kinship of all physical

beauty and become the lover of " all beautiful bodies.'' 3 Then

he must duly recognize the superiority of beauty of soul, even

where there is no outward comeliness to be an index to it. He

must be "in love " with young and beautiful souls and try to bring

to the birth with them " fair discourses." Next, he must learn to

see beauty and comeliness as they are displayed in ltririftvop,a.ra.

and vofuu, avocations and social institutions, and perceive the

community of principle which comely avocations and institutions

imply. Then he must turn to " science " and its intellectual

beauties, which will disclose themselves to him as a whole wide

ocean of delights. Here again, he will give birth to " many a

noble and imposing discourse and thought in the copious wealth of

philosophy " that is, he will enrich the " sciences " he studies with

high discoveries.

of the r6/*ot of Crete, but he knows, of course, that the traditional author

of them was Minos, who was not a god, and so says they may " in fairness "

be credited to Zeus (because, according to Homer, Minos " conversed " with

Zeus).

1 Much unfortunate nonsense has been written about the meaning of

Diotima's apparent doubt whether Socrates will be able to follow her as she

goes on to speak of the " full and perfect vision " (rd rAea *ai tiroTrrtKA, 2ioa i).

It has even been seriously argued that Plato is here guilty of the arrogance of

professing that he has reached philosophical heights to which the " historical "

Socrates could not ascend. Everything becomes simple if we remember

that the actual person speaking is Socrates, reporting the words of Diotima,

Socrates is as good as speaking of himself, and naturally, Diotima must not

say anything that would imply that he is already, at the age of thirty, assured

of " final perseverance." In the Phaedo, speaking on the last day of his life

to a group of fellow-followers of the way, Socrates can without impropriety

say that he has " lived as a philosopher to the best of his power."

* avrbv KaravoTjo-ai, 2ioa 8. The aMv seems to be emphatic. The neces-

sity for a " director " (6 fjyotiuvo*) is admitted for the first step of the progress

only. The rest of the way must be trodden at one's own peril, by the " inner

light." Yet there is a return to the conception of " combined effort " at

2100 6, M rds 4irLffT^fJi,a^ dyayeiv.

8 It is not meant that this widening of outlook must act unfavourably on

personal affection. The thought is that intelligent delight in the beauty of

one " fair body " will lead to a quickened perception of beauty in others,

just as genuine appreciation of your wife's goodness or your friend's wit

will make you more, and not less alive to the presence of the same qualities in

others.

280 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

Even so, we have not reached the goal so far ; we are only now

coming in sight of it. When a man has advanced so far on the

quest he will suddenly descry the supreme beauty of which he has

all along been in search a beauty eternal, selfsame, and perfect,

lifted above all mutability. It is no " body/' nor yet even a

" science- " or " discourse " of which beauty could be predicated,

but that very reality and substance of all beauty of which every-

thing else we call beauty is a passing " participant " ; the unchang-

ing light of which all the beauties hitherto discerned are shifting

reflections (2116). When this light rises above his horizon, the

pilgrim of Eros is at last " coming to port." The true " life for a

man " is to live in the contemplation of the " sole and absolute

Beauty " (0a>/*cVa> avro TO KaAoV), by comparison with which all

the " beauties " which kindle desire in mankind are so much dross.

Only in intercouse with It will the soul give birth to a spiritual

offspring which is no " shadow " but veritable " substance/ 1

because it is now at last " espoused " to very and substantial

reality. 1 This and only this is the true achieving of " immortality. 11

Such was the discourse of Diotima, and Socrates believes it himself

and would fain persuade others that Eros (" desirous longing") is

the truest helper we can have in this quest after immortality. This

is what he has to offer by way of a eulogy on the " might and

manhood" of Eros (2i2&-c). 2

The meaning of the discourse is clear enough. In the earlier

stages of the " ascent " which has just been described, we recognize

at once that " tendance of the soul " or care for one's " moral

being " which Plato regularly makes Socrates preach to his young

friends as the great business of life. That the work of " tendance

of the soul " must go further than the development of ordinary good

moral habits and rules, that it demands the training of the intellect

by familiarity with the highest " science," and that the task of the

true philosopher is, by his insight into principles, to unify the

" sciences," and to bring the results of ripe philosophical thinking

to bear on the whole conduct of life, is the same lesson which is

taught us in the Republic by the scheme propounded for the educa-

tion of the philosophic statesman. As in the Republic, the study

of the separate sciences leads up to the supreme science of " dial-

ectic " or metaphysics, in which we are. confronted with the prin-

ciples on which all other knowing depends, so here also Socrates

describes the man who is coming in sight of his goal as descrying

" one single science " of Beauty (210^ 7). And in both cases, in the

final moment of attainment, the soul is described as having got

beyond " science " itself. Science here passes in the end into

direct " contact," or, as the schoolmen say, " vision," an apprehen-

1 Symp. 2i2a 4. The allusion is to the tale of Ixion and the cloud which

was imposed on him in the place of Hera, and from which the Centaurs sprang.

All loves but the last are, in varying degrees, illusions.

1 2126, ^yKw/udfwv rV dfoa/jitv *al dvSpelav rov tpwot. The dvdpeta is specified

because the pilgrimage is so long and arduous that it is no easy thing to " play

the man " to the end of it. It is a warfare against '' flesh and blood."

THE SYMPOSIUM 231

sion of an object which is no longer " knowing about " it, knowing

propositions which can be predicated cf it, but an actual possession

of and being possessed by it. In the Republic, as in the Symposium,

the thought is conveyed by language borrowed from the " holy

marriage " of ancient popular religion and its survivals in mystery-

cults. Here it is " Beauty " to which the soul is mated ; in the

Republic it is that good which, though the cause of all being and all

goodness, is itself " on the other side of being." *

We must not, of course, especially in view of the convertibility

of the terms KaXov and ayaOov which is dwelt on more than once in

our dialogue, be misled into doubting the absolute identity of the

" form of good " of the Republic with the avro TO Ka\6v of the

Symposium. The place assigned to both in the ascent to " being

and reality " is identical, and in both cases the stress is laid on the

point that when the supreme " form " is descried, its apprehen-

sion comes as a sudden " revelation/ 1 though it is not to be had

without the long preliminary process of travail of thought, and

that it is apprehended by " direct acquaintance/' not by discursive

" knowledge about "it. It is just in this conviction that all " know-

ledge about " is only preparatory to a direct scientia visionis that

Socrates reveals the fundamental agreement of his conception with

that of the great mystics of all ages. The " good " or avro TO Ka\6v

is, in fact, the ens realissimum of Christian philosophers, in which

the very distinction between esse and essentia, Sein and So-sein

falls away. You cannot properly predicate anything of it, because

it does not " participate " in good or any other " form " ; it is

its own So-sein. Consequently, the apprehension of it is strictly

" incommunicable/' since all communication takes the form of

predication. Either a man possesses it and is himself possessed

by it, or he does not, and there is no more to be said. This does

not mean that the " most real being " is irrational, or that by

" thinking things out " we are getting further away from it, but it

does mean that we cannot " rationalize " it. We cannot give its

constituent " formula/' so to say, as we could that of an ellipse

or a cycloid. You might spend eternity in trying to describe it, and

all you found to say would be true and reasonable, so far as it

goes, but its full secret would still elude you ; it would still be

infinitely rich with undisclosed mystery. As the Christian mystics

say, God may be apprehended, but cannot be comprehended by any

of His creatures. That is why He is "on the other side of being."

The " deiform " do not " think about " God, they live Him. This

does not mean that " myth " is something in its own nature superior

to scientific truth, a misconception on which Professor Burnet has

said all that is necessary. Because " vision " is direct, the content

of a " tale " or " myth " cannot really convey it. A " tale " is as

much a mere form of " knowing about " as a scientific description,

and as a form of " knowing about " it is, of course, inferior. In

1 Rep. 5086 9. For the metaphor of the " holy marriage," cf. e.g. Rep.

4906, 496*.

232 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

fact, all the mystics insist on the point that the direct vision of

supreme reality is not only incommunicable, it cannot even be

recalled in memory when the moment of vision has passed. You

are sure that you " saw " ; you cannot tell what you saw even to

yourself. This is the real reason why, as Burnet says, Plato never

uses " mythical " language about the " forms," but only about

things like the soul, which he regards as half real, partly creatures

of temporality and change. We should note, however, that the

supreme reality which is apprehended in the culminating vision is

never said in Plato to be God, but always the supreme " form."

It is the good which is the Platonic and Socratic ens realissimum.

The position of God in the philosophy of both seems to me

ambiguous and not fully thought out. Formally, Plato's God is

described in the Laws as a perfectly good soul (dpumy i/^x 7 ?)- This

ought to mean, as Burnet clearly holds it to mean, that God too is

only half -real, and belongs on one side to the realm of the mutable.

I confess that I do not see how to reconcile such a position with the

religious insistence on the eternal and immutable character of God

which meets us everywhere in Plato. We could not meet the

difficulty by supposing that God is an imaginative symbol of the

" good," since the whole point of Plato's Theism is, as we shall see,

that it is by the agency of God that the " participation " of the

creatures in the good is made possible. Thus God is not identical

with the good, and it seems equally impossible to suppose that God

is simply a " creature " participating in good. I can only suppose

that there was a really unsolved conflict between the Platonic

metaphysics and the Platonic religion. In fact, the adjustment

of the two became a cardinal problem for Plotinus and the Neo-

platonic succession. 1 We shall not be in a position to deal with

the topic properly until we come to speak of Plato's latest written

works and the " unwritten doctrines " expounded in the Academy.

Plato clearly means, in spite of Diotima's words of caution, to

present Socrates in the Symposium as a man who has in his supreme

hours attained the " vision " for himself, and for that very reason

impresses his fellow-men by his whole bearing as being not of their

world though he is in it. We could have inferred at least that

he was steadily treading the road to " unification " with the supreme

reality from the close correspondence of the description of that

road by Diotima with what Plato elsewhere represents as his hero's

course of life. But naturally enough, Socrates cannot be made to

boast of the supreme achievement with his own lips, and this is

why Alcibiades, the most brilliant living specimen of the " ambitious

life," is introduced at this point. We are to gather from his famous

narrative of the impression Socrates made on him in their years of

close intercourse, and the hold the recollections of those years still

1 The Ncoplatonic way of dealing with the problem, by making " The

One " the source from which vow and its correlate T& voijrd directly emanate,

definitely subordinates the "forms" to God. Through Augustine this view

passed to St. Thomas and still remains part of Thomistic pnilosophy

THE SYMPOSIUM 283

have on his conscience and imagination, what could not well be said

in any other way, that Socrates has " seen/ 1 and that the vision

has left its stamp on his whole converse with the world. Perhaps

there is a further thought in Plato's mind. Socrates, we might

say, is the man who has renounced the world to find his own eternal

" life " ; Alcibiades, naturally endowed with all the gifts required

for " philosophy/' but a prey to the lusts of the flesh and the eye

and the pride of life, is the man who might have " seen " if he

would, the man who has made the " great refusal " of sacrificing

the reality for the shadow. He has chosen for the world and has

all the world can give. We are made to look on the two types

side by side, and to listen to the confession of the triumphant

worldling in the full flush of triumph,, that he has chosen the worser

part. On the panegyric of Socrates by Alcibiades (2150-2226} it

is not necessary to dwell here. Its importance is for the under-

standing of the characters of Socrates and of Alcibiades, not for

any contribution it makes to our comprehension of the Socratic or

the Platonic philosophy. It shows us Socrates in act following the

route of the pilgrimage already described by Diotima. One should,

of course, note, in order to avoid some strange misconceptions, that

the famous story told by Alcibiades of his own " temptation " of

Socrates (216^-219^) is meant to go back to a time when Alcibiades,

who fought in the cavalry before Potidaea in 431-30, was still a

mere boy, little more than a child (2176). We must date the events

somewhere between 440 and 435, when Socrates would be in the

earlier thirties. This being so, it is important to observe that even

then his fame for wisdom was such that Alcibiades could think no

price too high to pay for the benefit of " hearing all that he knew,"

We must also, of course, understand that Socrates is to be thought

of as a man still young enough to feel the charm of beauty in its

full force, and to feel it in the way characteristic of the society of

his age, but too full of high thoughts to be vanquished by " the

most opportune place, the strongest suggestion his worser genius

can. 11 He moves through a brilliant and loose-living society like a

Sir Galahad, not because he is not a man of genuine flesh and blood,

but because his heart is engaged elsewhere, and he has none to spare

for " light loves." This testimony, coming from Plato, is enough

to dispose once and for all of the later gossip of Aristoxenus and

the Alexandrians who collected such garbage. We must also, I

think, with Burnet, recognize that the prominence given to the

account of Socrates' "rapt " for four-and-twenty hours at Potidaea

(zzoc-d) is intended to suggest that this was the outstanding

" ecstasy " of his life, and left an ineffaceable mark on his whole

future. It can hardly be a coincidence that the earliest " mission-

ary " effort of Socrates related by Plato, his attempt to convert

Charmides, is dated immediately after his return from the campaign

of Potidaea. 1 For the rest, Socrates' remarkable power of adapting

1 Greek Philosophy, Part /., 130, 138-142 ; E.R.E. xi. 670, col. i. Professor

Burnet has fallen into an oversight in the first of these passages when he makes

284 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

himself in appearance to the tone and manner of the world, and

yet contriving without any visible effort to bring with him the

suggestion of being all the while in constant contact with the other

" unseen " world which is at once so near and so far is one of the

best-known characteristics of the greatest " contemplatives " ; the

stress laid on the point helps to strengthen our conviction that we

are presented with a realistic portrait of an actual man. (The same

" adaptability " is noted as eminently distinctive of Xavier by his bio-

graphers. Xavier recalls Socrates too by the " gaiety " of which the

biographers speak as the most striking feature of his conversation.)

On the description of the scene of revelry with which the

" banquet " ends, I need only make one remark. We are told

(22$d) that when the new morning broke, Socrates, Aristophanes,

and Agathon were the only persons in the party who were equal to

continuing the conversation, and that Socrates was left by Aris-

todenms trying to convince the two dramatists that the man who

can compose a tragedy rcxvy, " by his art," can also compose a

comedy. Much ingenuity has been wasted on the interpretation of

this remark, and it has even been supposed to be a kind of prophecy

of Shakespeare's " tragi-comedies," which are neither tragedies,

nor yet comedies in the sense in which we give that name to the

brilliant personal burlesques of the Attic " old comedians." The

real meaning lies on the surface. As we have seen, Socrates dis-

sented from the current view that poets are o-o^ot and their pro-

ductions works of conscious " art." He held that they depend on

" genius " or " inspiration," and cannot themselves explain their

own happiest inspirations. His point is thus that the inability of

Agathon to compose comedies and of Aristophanes to write tragedies,

is a proof that neither of them is a o-o^os, working with conscious

mastery of an " art." Both are the instruments of a " genius "

which masters them, not wielders of a tool of which they are masters.

The passage sho'uld really be quoted, not as an excuse for gush

about Shakespeare, but as an illustration of what Socrates says in

the Apology about his attempts to " refute the oracle " by finding

a 0-0^09 among the poets and their failure. In fact, he fails here.

His two auditors are half asleep after their night of merriment and

" do not quite take the point " (ou <r<j>6$pa. cirofuVovs vvoraciv f 223^ 6).

See further :

RITTER, C. Platon, i. 504-531.

RAEDER, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 158-168.

NATORP, P. Platons Ideenlehre, 163-174.

BURY, R. G. Symposium of Plato. (1909.)

ROBIN, L. Platon, Le Banquet. (Paris, 1929.)

LAGERBORG, R. Platonische Liebe. (Leipzig, 1926.)

STEWART, J. A. The Myths of Plato, 397-450 (The Two

Symposium Myths) ; Plato's Theory of Ideas, Pt. ii.

STENZEL, J. Platon der Erzieher, 209-241.

the " rapt " take place at a time of " hard frost." The time was high summer

(Symp. 22od i).

CHAPTER X

THE PROTAGORAS

IF there is any Platonic dialogue which can challenge the

claim of the Symposium to be its author's dramatic chef

d'ceuvre it is the Protagoras, with its brilliant full-length

portrait of the famous Protagoras and its mirthful sketches of the

two minor " sophists/' Prodicus and Hippias. The very life-like-

ness of the narrative has led to grave misunderstanding of the

philosophical significance of the dialogue. It has been assumed that

so lively a work must be a youthful composition, and this has led

to the further supposition that its teaching must be " undeveloped/'

as compared with that of e.g. the Gorgias. By way of providing

Plato with a crude " early ethical doctrine/' for the Gorgias to

correct, it has then been discovered that the Protagoras teaches the

Hedonism of Bentham, a misconception which makes the right

understanding of its purpose wholly impossible. We shall see,

as we proceed, that the dialogue does not teach Hedonism at all ;

what it does teach is something quite different, the Socratic thesis

that " all the virtues are one thing knowledge," and that its

philosophical purpose is simply to make it clear that this thesis is

the foundation of the whole Socratic criticism of life. The ab-

surdity of regarding the dialogue as a juvenile performance is

sufficiently shown by the perfect mastery of dramatic technique

which distinguishes it. No beginner, however endowed with genius,

produces such a masterpiece of elaborate art without earlier experi-

ences of trial and failure. He has first to learn the use of his tools.

And it is worth noting that Aristotle must have regarded the

dialogue as a particularly ripe and masterly exposition of the

Socratic moral theory, since he has taken directly from it his own

account in the Ethics of the characteristic doctrines of Socrates. 1

1 E.N. 11166 4, Socrates thought that courage is knowledge, a reference

to the lengthy treatment of this point at Protag. 349^ ff. (rather than, as

suggested by Burnet in his commentary on the Ethics, to the Laches) ; 1 1446 18,

Socrates held that all the " virtues " are (ppovfoas (an allusion probably to

the assertion of this in Protagoras and Phaedo) ; 11456 23 ft., Socrates denied

that there is such a state as &K pour la in which " passion " commits a " rape "

on judgment, dciv&v y&p ^TTKTT^AITJS tvofow, cl>s yero S., AXXo n Kpartlv Kal TrepiA/cetp

airrty d>$ avdpdirodov (a verbal allusion to Protag. 352c) ; 11476 15, otf5' ai/'rr? (sc. ^

Kvpla tviffr-fiw) wpl\KTat. &d Tb ir&Bos (another echo of the same passage) ;

11640 24, on Protagoras' method of charging for his services, looks like a loose

reminiscence of Protag. 3286 6-c 2 ; E.N. 11096 6 is a plain reminiscence of

Protag. 3250" 6 ; E.E. 12290 15 is a direct allusion to Protag. 360^ 4, as is also

12300 7 ff. ; 12466 34 echoes Protag. 352$. Though Aristotle never names the

dialogue, he evidently appreciated its importance.

*35

286 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

In form, the dialogue is once more a narrated drama, but, like

the Republic, with a slightly less complicated formula than the

Symposium. Socrates himself gives an unnamed friend, with

whom he meets in a public place in Athens, an account of a brilliant

company from whom he has only just parted. The method of

indirect narration is once more necessary, because Plato wishes to

impress it on us that the date of the gathering was before his own

time. From the jocular opening remarks we learn that Alcibiades

is only just becoming old enough to be spoken of as a " man."

Since Alcibiades served at Potidaea in 431, this will take us back

at least to the beginning of his " ephebate," which cannot be put

later than 433, and is more naturally put at least a year or two

earlier. (For it would be unreasonable to suppose that he must

have been called out for a hard and distant service as soon as he

had the minimum age qualification.) Thus we are at a period

before the opening of the Archidamian war. This accounts for the

presence, on the most friendly terms, of distinguished men belong-

ing to states shortly to be official enemies of Athens, and for the

complete absence of any hint that inter-state relations are in any

way disturbed. (Hippias of Elis could hardly be made to glorify

Athens as he does at 3360-338^, and to preach a homily on the

" internationalism " of Kultur if the war-clouds were already gather-

ing.) The time is thus the Periclean age ; Athens is at the very

height of her opulence and glory, and Socrates must be thought

of as a man of about thirty-five. Of the other figures in the drama,

the most important, Protagoras of Abdera, is an older man. He

says (317^) that he is advanced in years and might easily be the

father of any one present, and subsequently (320$) alleges his

superior age as a graceful excuse for conveying his views in a fable,

" as a man may in talking to his juniors. 1 ' Thus we are directed

to think of him as a generation or so older than Socrates, and there-

fore a man at any rate, approaching sixty-five. 1 Prodicus and

Hippias will be roughly men of Socrates' age. The scene is laid

in the house of the famous " millionaire " Callias, son of Hipponicus,

1 This would throw back the birth of Protagoras to some time not very

far from 500 B.C. and make him a contemporary of Anaxagoras. The Alex-

andrian chronologists made him some fifteen years younger, and they have

mostly been followed by modern writers. It seems to me, as to Professor

Burnet, that we must accept Plato's statement. He must have known

whether Protagoras really belonged to the generation before Socrates, and could

have no motive for misrepresentation on such a point. All through the

dialogue the advanced age of Protagoras is kept before the reader's mind,

so that Plato is not simply falling into an oversight. The Alexandrians

obviously depend on one of their usual arbitrary constructions. The founda-

tion of Thurii (444) was their regular " fixed era " for events of the Periclean

a^e, and as Protagoras was known to have had to do with legislating for

Thurii, they fixed his d*^ to the year of its foundation. The restoration

of Protagoras to his true date enables us finally to dispose of the fable of his

prosecution (in 415 or in 411) for " impiety," a story which bears the marks

of its futility on its face. From the references of the Meno we see that Pro-

tagoras must have died during the Archidamian war, and that he ended his

life in high general repute.

THE PROTAGORAS 287

of whom we read in the Apology that he had spent more money on

" sophists " than any living man. He must be supposed to be

quite young, since his activity as a man of affairs begins at a much

later date. Aristophanes makes a topical joke about his presence

at the battle of Arginusae and his renown as a lady-killer in the

Frogs 1 (405 B.C.). In the speech of Andocides on the Mysteries

he figures as the villain of the story, the party who, according to

Andocides, is instigating the prosecution in pursuance of a personal

grudge, and we hear endless scandal about his domestic affairs.

From Lysias xix. (delivered between 390 and 387) we learn that the

family capital, which had once been believed to amount to two

hundred talents, had now shrunk to two. (We must take into account

the economic revolution which followed on the collapse of Athens

in 404.) We hear of Callias from time to time in the Hellenica of

Xenophon. He was commanding the Athenian force at Corinth

on the famous occasion (390 B.C.) when Iphicrates cut up the Spartan

mora with his peltasts (op. cit. iv. 5, 13), and was one of the repre-

sentatives of Athens at the critical congress held at Sparta early

in 371, two or three months before the battle of Leuctra. Hence

the agreement then concluded between the Athenian and Pelo-

ponnesian confederacies has been generally known as the " Peace

of Callias." His important social position at Athens can be gauged

from the facts that he held by heredity the position of " Torch-

bearer " in the Eleusinian mysteries and proxenus, or, as we might

say, " Consul " for Sparta. For a proper historical appreciation

of Socrates it is important to note that Plato represents him, at

this early date, as associating with persons like Callias and Alci-

biadqs, both connected with the Periclean circle, on equal terms,

and being in high consideration with both them and the most

eminent of the foreign " wits. 11 2

We cannot rate too high the importance of the Protagoras

as the fullest and earliest exposition of the character and aims of the

sophistic " education in goodness." Nowhere else in Greek litera-

ture have we an account of the matter comparable for a moment

to that which Plato has put into the mouth of Protagoras himself.

There is really no reason why we should feel any distrust of the

strict " historicity " of the statements. Plato stood near enough

to the Periclean age to be excellently well informed of the facts.

He could form his conclusions not merely from what he might be

told by men of an elder generation who had known Protagoras, or

actually taken his course, but from the work or works of the dis-

tinguished sophist himself. (The silly tale of their destruction is

refuted not only by the way in which it is assumed in the Theae-

tetus that all the parties to that conversation are familiar with

1 Frogs, 432 . For an earlier Aristophanic allusion to Callias as a spendthrift

and coureur de femmes, cf. Birds, 284-6. He had already been attacked as a

" waster " and patron of sophists by Eupolis in his K<5Xa/fes (421 B.C.).

* See the compliment paid him by Protagoras at 3615, and observe that

It is assumed to be based on an acquaintance begun still earlier on a former

visit of Protagoras to Athens.

288 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

them, but by the express statement of Isocrates. 1 ) He stood far

enough away from it to have no personal motive for misrepresenta-

tion of any kind, and, in point of fact, the personality and the ideas

of Protagoras are treated all through the dialogue with respect and

understanding, though we are made to see what his limitations

are. His exposition of his programme is done with as much

" gusto " as anything in the whole of Plato's works ; so much so

that some worthy modern critics have even discovered that Prota-

goras is the real hero of the dialogue who is meant to be commended

at the expense of the doctrinaire Socrates. Preposterous as this

exegesis is, the fact that it has been given in good faith is the best

proof that the dialogue is no satirical caricature, so far as Prota-

goras is concerned. He is depicted as a man of high aims and

sincere belief in the value of the education he gives ; his one mani-

fest foible is that he is not conscious of his own limitations, and in

that respect, according to the Apology, he is only on a level with

all the other " celebrities " of the Periclean age.

If we discount the little exchange of pleasantries between

Socrates and his unnamed acquaintance (309^-3100), which merely

serves the purpose of dating the interview of Socrates and Prota-

goras by reference to the age of Alcibiades at the time, the dialogue

falls into the following main sections : (i) an introductory narrative,

preparatory to the appearance of Protagoras on the scene (3100-

3160) ; (2) a statement by Protagoras of the nature of the " good-

ness " he professes to be able to teach, followed by a series of

" sceptical doubts " urged by Socrates against the possibility of

such an education, which are, in their turn, replied to by Protagoras

at great length (3166-328^) ; (3) an argument between Socrates

and Protagoras leading up to the Socratic " paradox " of the unity

of the virtues, which threatens to end in an irreconcilable dis-

agreement (328^-3340) ; (4) a long interlude in which the con-

versation resolves itself for a time into the discussion of a moralizing

poem of Simonides (334^-3480) ; (5) resumption of the argument

begun in (3), with the further developments that the one thing

to which all forms of " goodness " reduce is seen to be " knowledge/'

and the consequence is drawn that " all wrong-doing is error "

(3480-3600) ; (6) a brief page of conclusion in which both parties

to the discussion admit the need of further inquiry and take leave

of one another with many courtesies (3600-3620). This general

analysis of itself shows that the central purpose of the dialogue is

to exhibit clearly the ultimate ethical presuppositions of the Socratic

morality and the " sophistic " morality at its best, and to show

exactly where they are in irreconcilable opposition. The one

serious exegetical problem we shall have to face is that of discovering

the connexion of the discussion of the poem of Simonides with what

precedes and follows.

1 Isoc. x. 2, vvv d r/s forty otfrws dif/tjJuiOfy, tforts OVK olde Hlpwraydpav ical robt

icar* tKflvov rbv xp6vov yevofilvovs <ro<picmis t 6n *ai roiaDra Kal iro\

T/xty/xarwSlarepa (fvyypdnfJLara jrar&troi' imtv J

THE PROTAGORAS 289

I. INTRODUCTORY NARRATIVE (3100-3160). The narrative is

giyen in a tone of humour marked by touches of satire, which is

directed not against Protagoras but against the excessive adulation

bestowed on him by his younger admirers, and to a less degree

against the self-importance of second-rate " professors " of the

type of Prodicus. Its main object, however, is to insist on the

great importance of education in " goodness," if such an education

is to be had, and thus to raise our interest to the appropriate pitch,

before Protagoras and his programme are actually put before us.

Socrates has been roused from sleep in the " small hours " by his

young friend Hippocrates, who has just heard of the arrival of

Protagoras, and is anxious not to lose a moment in getting an intro-

duction to him and putting himself under his tuition. As it is

still too early to think of disturbing the great man, Socrates and

the lad walk about for a time in the av\r) of Socrates 1 house, con-

versing to pass the time. The drift of the conversation is that by

profession Protagoras is a " sophist," but Hippocrates is not pro-

posing to study under him in order to enter the " profession "

itself ; he would be degrading himself by such a course. His

object is, like that of the pupil of an ordinary schoolmaster or

trainer, to get " culture " (TraiScta) as a free gentleman should.

That is to say, he is about to put his " soul " into the hands of a

professional " sophist " to be " tended." (The point intended is

that " culture " is a much more serious thing than is commonly

supposed. It really means the moulding of the " soul " for good or

ill.) Hence, before we take such a risk, we ought to be quite clear

on the point " what a sophist is," i.e. to what ends it is his profession

to shape us. He is a cro<os or " wit," as his name shows, 1 but we

might say as much of a painter. We want to know further on what

his " wit " is exercised, of what accomplishment he is master.

Hippocrates makes the obvious suggestion that the particular

accomplishment of the sophist is the skilful use of speech the

" art " which, in fact, the pupils of Protagoras were specially

anxious to learn from him. But any skilled professional can speak

well and to the point about his own technicality, and in teaching us

that technicality, he will make us also able to speak properly about

it. Thus the all-important question is, What is it of which a

" sophist " as such is by profession a teacher? and Hippocrates

cannot answer this question (3i2tf). 2

Clearly then, Hippocrates is taking a great risk and taking it

1 312^. It is assumed that the popular etymology of cro^tcmjy made it a

derivative from <ro06s and clStvat, <ro0icrTiJs = 6 T&V <ro<t>uv torij j.

8 Hippocrates makes the suggestion that the " sophist's " speciality is

to be Scivfa X^yeip, of course, because the special skill of which Protagoras

notoriously boasted was the power to " make the weaker argument the

stronger," by stating the case forcibly and plausibly. " Advocacy " is what

the young men of Athens pay Protagoras to teach them. Socrates' point is

that the worth of his teaching as a " culture for the soul " depends on what

he " advocates " and teaches others to advocate. Even from the most utili-

tarian point of view, to be a clever advocate is not the one and only requisite

for a statesman.

240 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

in the dark. He would be slow to trust the care of his body to a

particular adviser, and would do all he could to be sure of sucl) a

man's competence before he became his patient. How much more

foolish to put that much more precious thing, his soul, into the hands

of a recently arrived foreigner, without any consultation with older

and more responsible friends and relatives, and actually without

knowing the real character of the stranger's profession ! We might

suggest that the sophist is by profession a sort of importer and

retailer (Ip.irop6<> ns YJ Kamj\o?) of foreign articles of spiritual diet

(a suggestion taken up again with a good deal of humour in a much

later dialogue, the Sophistes). The " food of the spirit " is, of

course, " studies "or " sciences " (yu-a^/xara) , and we need to

guard against the risk that the purveyor of this sustenance may

deceive us, as other vendors often do, about the quality of his

merchandise. The ordinary vendor praises the wholesomeness of

his wares, but without really knowing anything about the matter.

You would do well to take the advice of a medical man before you

patronize him. So if one could find a " physician of souls," it

would be desirable to take his advice before patronizing the spiritual

wares vended by Protagoras. This is all the more important that

you cannot carry away samples of his wares, as you might of a

food for the body, and examine them at your leisure before con-

suming them. " Sciences " have to be taken direct from the

vendor into the soul itself, and if they are unsound articles the

mischief is thus done at the very time of purchase. You and I,

says Socrates, are still too young 1 to judge for ourselves what is

wholesome diet for the mind. But we can, at any rate, go and

hear what Protagoras has to say about his merchandise, and take

the advice of others accordingly, before we commit ourselves

(314*)-

We need not delay over the lively description of the scene in

the house of Callias, the crowd of visitors, and the figures of those

lesser lights Prodi cus and Hippias. Some of the party must

have been mere boys ; Socrates says this, in so many words, of

Agathon, and it must be as true of Charmides, who was still a mere

lad in the year of Potidaea. Plato has been reprimanded for

making fun of the invalidism of Prodicus, but for all we know,

Prodicus may really have been a malade imaginaire at whom it is

quite fair to laugh. It is interesting to note that all the speakers

of the Symposium are present except Aristophanes, who would

be little more than a child at the supposed date of our dialogue.

1 ^uets ybp trt. vtot. Note the repeated insistence on the comparative

youth of Socrates. Plato is determined that we shall not forget the date to

which he has assigned the conversation. I should suppose that his reason is

that he knew or believed that Socrates, as a fact, did meet Protagoras at this

date, and that this was the most important occasion on which the two met,

just as he mentions in the Phaedo that Socrates first learned Anaxagoras'

doctrine about vovs from hearing some one "read aloud," as he said, "from

a book of Anaxagoras," simply in order to make the historical point that the

two meu had not actually met.

THE PROTAGORAS 241

(I should have mentioned in speaking of the Symposium that Aris-

tophanes must be the youngest of the speakers in that dialogue, a

man of about twenty-eight.)

II. THE PROGRAMME OF PROTAGORAS (3i6&-328rf). As soon

as Protagoras makes his appearance, Socrates, who already knows

him personally, opens the business on which he has come. His

young, well-born, and wealthy friend Hippocrates has political

aspirations which he thinks might be furthered by studying under

Protagoras. But a preliminary interview is desirable. Protag-

oras is of the same opinion, and is glad of the chance of explaining

his aims as a teacher, since the profession is one in which a man

cannot be too careful of his own reputation. Men feel a natural

ill-will towards a brilliant stranger when they see the young men

of promise preferring his company and instructions to those of

their own most eminent countrymen. This is why all the most

influential " educators " have preferred to disguise their real

practice, from Homer's time on, and have professed to be poets,

physicians, musicians, anything but what they really are. Protag-

oras plumes himself on his own courage in taking the opposite

course and frankly avowing that his calling is to " educate men."

His boldness has proved the wiser course, for in a long professional

career he has escaped all serious consequences of the popular

prejudice. 1 So he has nothing to conceal and is ready to expound

his aims with complete frankness. The whole company thereupon

forms itself into an audience for the promised exposition.

Socrates now repeats the question he had already put to Hippo-

crates ; what precise benefit may be expected from study under

Protagoras ? The answer Protagoras gives is that a pupil who

comes to him will go away daily " better than he came," (3180.

This establishes the formal equivalence of the notions of " educat-

ing men " and " teaching goodness.") But this statement needs

to be made more precise. Any master of a speciality might say

as much. If you studied under Zeuxippus, you would improve

in drawing, if under Orthagoras in flute-playing. But in what

will you improve daily if you study under Protagoras ? The

question, says Protagoras, is rightly and fairly put, and the answer

is that his pupil will daily improve, not in knowledge of astronomy

or geometry (like the pupils of the polymath Hippias), but in what

is the great concern of life, " prudence in the management of one's

private affairs and capacity to speak and act in the affairs of the

city." That is, Protagoras undertakes to teach us not how to be

1 3166-31 yc. Protagoras is, of course, speaking playfully when he suggests

that Homer, Simonides, and others were really " sophists " who tried to

escape unpopularity by passing themselves off for something different.

But we may infer from his remarks (i) that the popular, and very natural,

feeling against the professional sophist really existed in Athens in the Periclean

age, and is not, as Grote supposed, an invention of Plato and the Socratic

men ; (2) that Protagoras was actually the first man avowedly to practise

the " educating of men " or " teaching of goodness " as a paid profession.

Unless these are facts, there is no point in what Plato makes him say.

242 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

good specialists, but how to be good men, and what, to a Periclean

Athenian, is the same thing, good active citizens. He is really

claiming to be able to teach " statesmanship " (3190). (This,

of course, was precisely what aspiring young Athenians paid him

to teach them.)

There can be no doubt that this is the most important thing a

man could teach, if it is really true that statesmanship can be

taught. But Socrates feels a perplexity on the question whether

statesmanship is teachable. It is hard to disbelieve in the claims

of a famous man like Protagoras who has been pursuing his pro-

fession for so many years ; on the other hand, there are considera-

tions which make the other way, and Socrates now proposes to

state them. We must observe that he does not undertake to prove

that statesmanship cannot be taught, nor does he commit himself

to any of the views he goes on to present. He merely urges that,

seeing the quarter from which they come, they cannot be simply

dismissed, but have to be met. The argument is one from what

Aristotle calls etVdra, the probabilities of the case.

The Athenians have a great name for being a " clever " people,

and it is not likely that an opinion held very strongly by such a

people should be a mere delusion. Now the Athenian public would

appear to hold that " goodness " cannot be taught. For it is singular

that though they will only accept public advice on what are

admittedly matters for expert knowledge from properly qualified

advisers, they listen to an opinion on the statesmanship of a pro-

posed course of action without any such regard for qualifications.

They will listen, on a point of naval construction, to no one

who is not known either to be an expert himself or to have

studied under experts. But when the issue is one of statesman-

ship that is, one of the goodness or badness, the rightfulness or

wrongfulness, of a proposed public act they treat any one man's

opinion as equally deserving of a hearing with another's ; they

make no demand here that a man shall be an approved " expert "

or have learned from one.

And this is not merely the attitude of the " general " ; the

individuals who are regarded as our wisest and best statesmen show

by their conduct that they hold the same view. They neither

teach their own " goodness " to their sons nor procure masters of

it for them, but leave it to chance whether the young men will pick

up this goodness for themselves. The example selected, in this

instance, is that of Pericles. Thus Socrates argues the case by

appealing, in Aristotelian fashion, first to the opinion of the " many "

and then to that of the " wise/' the acknowledged experts. It is

not likely that a very widespread conviction should be merely

baseless ; it is not likely that the convictions of " experts " should

be merely baseless ; it is still less likely that both parties should

be victims of the same delusion. The point is raised simply as a

difficulty ; Socrates is quite ready to listen to a proof from Protag-

oras that, after all, both parties are wrong. The question is thus

THE PROTAGORAS 248

not whether goodness can be taught or not, but whether Protagoras

can satisfy Socrates that it is teachable, in other words, whether

goodness can be taught on the principles and by the methods of

Protagoras.

In dealing with the reply of Protagoras, we must be careful

to remember that his case is not established by the mere fact that

there is a great deal of truth in what he says, so far as it goes.

What is required is that he should make out sufficient justification

for his claim to be able to teach statesmanship as a speciality,

exactly as another man might teach geometry or medicine. If

we keep this point carefully in view, it will be found that, though

what Protagoras says is true enough, as a vindication of his own

claim it is a complete ignoratio elenchi.

He begins by indicating his position by means of a fable about

the culture-hero Prometheus. At the making of living creatures,

Epimetheus was charged with the work of distributing the various

means of success in the " struggle for existence " among them ;

Prometheus was to act as supervisor and critic. Epimetheus

managed the distribution so badly that when he came to deal with

mankind, the various serviceable qualities had already been used

up on the lower animals ; none were left for man, who would thus

have been helpless and defenceless if Prometheus had not stolen

from heaven fire and the knowledge of industrial arts. (In plainer

words, man is not equipped for self-preservation by a system of

elaborate congenital instincts, and he is handicapped also by physical

inferiority : he has to depend for survival on intelligence.) In the

" state of nature," however, intelligence and the possession of fire

were not enough to secure men against their animal competitors ;

they had further to associate themselves in " cities," and this gave

occasion for all kinds of aggression on one another. (One may

compare Rousseau's speculations about the opportunity given by

the social impulses of mankind to the exploitation of the many by

the able and unscrupulous few.) Hence Zeus intervened to preserve

the human race by sending Hermes to bestow on them 81*17 and

cuSws, the sense of right and conscience. But Zeus expressly

commanded that these gifts were not to be confined, like e.g. skill

in medicine, to a few specialists ; they were to be distributed to

every one, since " political association " is impossible on any other

terms (322^)* Hence the behaviour of the Athenian ecclesia, which

has surprised Socrates, is reasonable and right. " Political good-

ness " is wholly a matter of justice and " temperance/' and no

member of the community is a layman or outsider where justice

and temperance are concerned ; every " citizen," in fact, is an

expert in the virtues. This is also why we expect a man who is a

layman in other accomplishments to confess the fact, and ridicule

him if he pretends to an accomplishment which he does not possess.

But when it comes to " justice," or " temperance," or any other

" goodness of a citizen," we expect a man to pretend to it, even if

he does not possess it ; hypocrisy is a tribute we expect vice to

244 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

pay to virtue (3230). Similarly we may easily satisfy ourselves

that the Athenian people really believe that " goodness " can and

must be taught, by reflecting that they never " admonish " or

" correct " those who suffer from defects which they cannot help.

A man is not reprimanded or corrected for being ugly or undersized

or sickly ; he is pitied. But men are properly reprimanded and

punished for moral delinquencies, and the whole object is that the

reprimand or punishment may be a " lesson " to the offender or to

others not to offend in the future. The very existence of criminal

justice is thus proof that " goodness " is held to be something

which can be taught (3230-324^). (This does not mean that either

Protagoras or Plato rejects the " retributive " theory of punish-

ment. The " retributive " theory means simply that before a

man can be held liable to punishment, he must by his acts have

given you the right to punish him. You are not entitled to inflict

a penalty simply because you think the suffering of it would

" do the man good " ; the penalty must be preceded by the

commission of an offence. No sane theory of the right to punish

can ignore this.)

The little fable about Prometheus has already revealed Protag-

oras to us as a strong believer in the view that morality is

dependent on vofto?, the system of conventions and traditions

embodied in the " usages " of a civilized community. As we follow

his explanation we shall find him laying still more stress on this

point. Like Hobbes, he holds that in a " state of nature/ 1 there

would be no morality to speak of, and the lack of it would make

human life " poor, nasty, brutish, and short/' He declares himself

strongly opposed to the view of some of his rivals, that " citizen

goodness " is a thing that comes by " nature/' in other words,

that men are born good or bad. He is wholly without any belief

in the moral goodness of the unspoiled " savage " and, in fact,

looks on morality as a product of civilization, a matter of imbibing

a sound social tradition. Such a view would seem to suggest that,

since, as we have just been told, every civilized man has to be a

" specialist " in justice and temperance, there is no room and no

need for the expert teacher of goodness, a conclusion which would

make Protagoras' own professional activities superfluous. Hence

he goes on, at once, to explain that he does not mean to deny that

goodness can be taught or that there are expert teachers of it.

You do not imbibe it unconsciously ; it is a thing which comes by

teaching and training (323^). His position is that, in a civilized

society, life is one long process of being taught goodness, and every

citizen is, in his degree, an expert teacher. But there are a few

exceptionally able teachers with a special vocation for their function,

who do what every good citizen is doing, but do it better, and Protag-

oras himself is simply one of these.

In support of this view he makes an eloquent and telling speech

on the educational process to which the civilized man is all through

life subjected, as a consequence of the very fact that he is a member

THE PROTAGORAS 245

of a society with social traditions. Even in infancy parents, nurses,

servants, are all busy teaching a child by precept and example that

" this is right " and " that is wrong." The elementary school-

master next takes up the same task. The boy's reading lessons are

passages from the poets, full of sound moral instruction, and the

preceptors from whom he learns to read and write and tune his

lyre pay more attention to his conduct than to anything else. So

the trainer in bodily exercises makes it his prime business to teach

hardihood and manliness of temper, the first requisites of a future

soldier. When " school days " are over, and the boy enters on

manhood, the city by its laws sets before him a rule for the whole

conduct of his life, and penalizes him if he does not learn from this

rule how " to govern and be governed." Thus the citizen's life

is one unbroken progressive process of learning goodness (325^3260).

It is this very universality of the teaching which explains the puzzle

about the sons of statesmen. If any of the " accomplishments "

of which Socrates had spoken, for example flute-playing, were held

by some community to be so important that every citizen must

acquire it, and every one was anxious to communicate his own

knowledge of it to others, what would happen ? The citizens of

such a community would not all be first-rate performers. Any one

of them would be a much better performer than an average member

of a community which did not insist on the accomplishment ; but

the very universality of the instruction would lead to differences

between the individual citizens, based on their more or less marked

natural aptitude. Where the means of instruction were open to all,

and their use compulsory for all, proficiency would be most mani-

festly in proportion to aptitude. If no one but the son of a musician

learned music, or no one but the son of an expert in " goodness "

learned goodness, we might reasonably expect that the sons of

musicians would always be our most successful musicians and the

sons of " good men " our best men. Just because every one

" learns," this does not occur in an actual society, and Socrates'

paradox is thus seen to be no paradox at all. If he would compare

the worst men in a civilized society, like that of Athens, not with

imaginary " noble savages," but with real savages, he would soon

discover on which side the superiority lies (326^-3275). And as for

his argument that there is no provision of a special class of expert

teachers of goodness, we may reply that neither are there special

experts to whom a child has to be sent to learn to speak its mother-

tongue, or to whom the son of an artisan must be apprenticed to

learn his father's business. In both cases, the child picks up the

knowledge from its " social environment." Besides, there are

some men, like Protagoras himself, who have a special and superior

gift for teaching goodness, and their pupils do make exceptional

progress (3270-328^).

The reply to Socrates' doubts looks plausible, and has apparently

traversed all the points of his case. But the plausibility is, after all,

only apparent. If we look more closely, we shall see that the

246 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

whole argument depends on simply identifying " goodness " with

the actual traditions of an existing civilized state. What you do

imbibe, as Protagoras has said, from parents, servants, school-

masters, daily intercourse with your fellow-Athenians, is nothing

but the vo/ios, the social tradition, of the group in which you live.

In a different social group, at Megara for example, the same in-

fluences of the social environment would be equally powerful, but

the type of character they would tend to produce would be in

many ways different. Thus the theory expounded by Protagoras

can only be accepted as satisfactory if one assumes, as he has tacitly

done, that morality is entirely " relative/' that is, that there is no

moral standard more ultimate than the standard of respectability

current in a given society. If this is conceded, Protagoras has

made out his main contention that " goodness " can be, and actually

is, learned as a consequence of birth into a society with a definite

tradition. But the whole point of the Socratic identification of

morality with " knowledge " is that morality is not any more

" relative " than geometry. The traditions of Athens are no more

an ultimate standard in matters of right and wrong than they are

in questions of mathematics. In other words, what Protagoras

really means by " goodness/' if his argument is to be conclusive,

is just the medley of uncriticized traditions which Socrates calls in

the Phaedo " popular goodness " and opposes to " philosophic

goodness/' as the imitation to the reality. Goodness, as Socrates

understands it, is a matter not of traditions but of insight into

principles. Now this, to be sure, is " knowledge/' and must there-

fore be capable of being taught. But the kind of goodness Protag-

oras must have in mind when he says that any Athenian citizen,

as such, is a teacher of it, is something which, as his own illustration

about the boy who picks up his father's trade rather naively in-

dicates, is not got by teaching of principles at all, but merely picked

up, in the main, automatically. Without knowing it, Protagoras

has really admitted that such goodness is what the Gorgias had

called a mere " knack."

Hence it follows that there is a certain inconsistency between

Protagoras' main position and the vindication of his profession with

which he concludes his speech. To make the whole speech con-

sistent, we should have to understand him to be claiming for him-

self a certain exceptional ability in catching the tone of the " social

tradition " of Athens, or any other community he visits, and

communicating that tone to his pupils. Now it would, in the

first place, be something of a paradox to maintain that a brilliant

foreigner from Abdera can so successfully take the print of the

social traditions of every community where he spends a few weeks,

that a lecture from him will impress that tone on a young man more

effectively than lifelong intercourse with a society in which it is

dominant. It would be bad manners, at least, for a brilliant

Frenchman or American to profess that a few weeks spent in this

country had enabled him to understand the " tone and temper of

THE PROTAGORAS 247

the British people " better than any of us understand it for our-

selves." l If " goodness " is knowledge, we can understand

that a Chinaman, knowing nothing of " British traditions/' may

have lessons of first-rate importance to impart to us in it ; the

claim becomes absurd if goodness means, in us, simply thorough

conformity to the traditions of British respectability. The claim

to be an expert teacher of goodness is only justifiable on the Socratic

view that goodness is something eternal and immutable. It is in

flat contradiction with the relativism professed by Protagoras.

The further development of the discussion will make it still clearer

that it is bound to end in an irreconcilable divergence because,

from the first, the parties to the conversation have meant different

things by " goodness/ 1

III. THE UNITY OF THE "VIRTUES" (328^-3340). There is

just one " little " point Socrates would like to have cleared up,

before he can profess himself completely satisfied. Protagoras

had specified two qualities as bestowed on mankind by Zeus the

sense of right (8007), and conscience (ai8u>?) ; he had gone on to

mention piety and sophrosyne also as constituents of " goodness."

Does he mean that " goodness " is an aggregate of which these

characters are distinct constituents (/xdpia), or are we to understand

that " conscience," " sense of right," " sophrosyne/ 9 " piety," are

synonymous ? He meant to be understood in the former sense.

But did he mean that the constituents are constituents in the way

in which eyes, nose, and ears are constituents of a face, or in the

sense in which the smaller volumes contained in a homogeneous

mass (like a lump of gold) are constituents ? i.e. have the different

" virtues " each its own constitutive formula, or is there only one

such formula ? The question is one on which a practical teacher

of goodness is bound to have a definite opinion, because it has a

very direct bearing on his educational methods. On the first

view, a man might " specialize " in one virtue (for example, courage),

while his neighbour might prefer to specialize in some other, just

as one man may specialize in diseases of the respiratory organs and

another in disorders of the digestive system, or as one man may

become a crack oarsman, another a fast bowler. (Or again, a man

might set himself to acquire " goodness " by specializing first in one

of its " parts " or " branches " and then in another, like Benjamin

Franklin.) But on the second view, the principle of goodness will

be exactly the same in whatever relation of life it is displayed. A

1 That Protagoras actually took the line here suggested seems to follow

from the well-known passage of the Theaetetus where the question is raised

how Protagoras could reconcile his doctrine of " Man the measure " with his

own claim to be able to teach " goodness." Socrates suggests that Protagoras

might have pleaded that what he does for his pupils is not to give them

" truer " views a thing impossible on the Homo men^ura theory but to give

them "more useful" views (Theaetetus, i66a~i6Sc). This amounts to the

suggestion of the text, that Protagoras believes himself to have a special

aptitude for appreciating the tone of the current tradition of a community

and impressing it on his hearers.

248 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

man who really acquires one " virtue " will have to acquire all

simultaneously (3290).

Protagoras at once adopts the first alternative, that which

recommends itself to average common sense. For he thinks it

obvious that there are many brave but licentious men, and many

" fair-dealing " men (SiWot), who are far from "wise." (Note the

way in which the " quadrilateral " of the four great virtues is

thus taken for granted by Protagoras, as by other speakers in

Plato, as something already traditional.) l

A view of this kind implies that each form of " goodness " has

a function (SiW/xts) of its own, distinctive of it, and radically

different from the function of any other form. (We have already

seen that this view, widely current in ordinary society, is in sharp

opposition to the Socratic theory, in which the great difficulty of

defining a given " virtue " is that we regularly find ourselves driven

to adopt a definition which is equally applicable to every other

virtue.) We proceed to treat this position in the recognized Socratic

fashion by examining its consequences. It will follow that

" justice," to take an example, has a definite function, " piety "

or " religion " another and a different function. Justice is not

piety, and religion is not justice. But we cannot adopt the

monstrous moral paradox that justice is impious, or that religion

is " unjust," or wrong, though this would seem to follow from the

complete disparity between the " functions " of the different

virtues just asserted by Protagoras. 2 Hence Protagoras himself

is driven to take back what he had just said about the radical

disparity of the different forms of goodness. The matter is, after

all, not so simple as all that ; there is some vague and unspecified

resemblance between such different " parts " of goodness as piety

and justice, though we cannot say exactly what or how close the

resemblance is (3310). The reference to the scale of colours or

hardnesses as illustrating the point (331^) shows that the meaning

is that one virtue somehow " shades off " into a different one, though

you cannot say exactly where the boundary-line should be drawn,

as white shades off into black through a series of intermediate

grays.

To expose the looseness of this way of thinking and speaking.

Socrates resorts to another simple argument. Wisdom has been

included by Protagoras in his list of forms of goodness, and the

contrary opposite of wisdom is a<t>po<rvvrj (" folly "). But sophrosyne

1 It seems to me that the same allusion must underlie the curious phrase

of the poem of Simonides for the Scopadae shortly to be discussed, where the

" complete " good man is called " four-cornered " (rerpd^wj/os &i>v \f/6yov rervy-

M^os). Presumably we are dealing with a Pythagorean rer/oaKrtfy. It

should be clear, at any rate, that the " quadrilateral " is no invention of Plato,

since he represents it as familiar to so many of his fifth-century characters.

1 The reasoning (33 la ff.) does not really commit the error of confounding

otherness with contrary opposition. The point of the passage is actually to

make the distinction, though in simple and non-technical language ; the sug-

gestion that not- just (/Jj dlicaiov) = unjust (&dtKov) is made only that it may

be at once rejected.

THE PROTAGORAS 249

is also* a virtue which we ascribe to men who act " rightly

and beneficially." Now sophrosyne means by derivation moral

" sanity/ 1 and its contrary opposite, the conduct of those who act

"wrongly and harmfully/' is consequently aphrosyne (" folly").

For it is a principle of logic, which we can illustrate by an abundance

of obvious examples, that cV cvl Ivavriov (every term has one and

only one definite contrary). Further, what is done " in contrary

senses" (evai/raos) must be done "by contraries," i.e. in virtue

of contrary characters in the agents. Thus if we can oppose what is

"foolishly" done to what is "sanely" or "temperately" done,

we may also oppose " folly " to sophrosyne, temperance, moral

sanity. But we have already opposed wisdom and folly as con-

traries. On the principle then that one term (here "folly") has

one and only one contrary opposite, wisdom and sophrosyne must

be identified. Thus either we must abandon a fundamental logical

principle, or we must give up the distinction between wisdom

and sophrosyne, as our former argument was meant to show

that we must give up the distinction between justice and piety

(or religion).

(The reasoning here appears at first sight to turn on a mere

" accident " of language, the fact that profligacy happens to be

spoken of in Greek as " folly." When we reflect on the familiarity

of the corresponding expressions in all languages which have an

ethical literature, we should rather infer that the fact is no accident,

but valuable evidence of the truth of the main tenet of Socratic

morality. The thought underlying the linguistic usage is clearly

that all morally wrong action is the pursuit of something which is

not what rightly informed intelligence would pronounce good, and

it is always wise to pursue what is truly good and foolish to prefer

anything else.)

The next step in the argument is this. We have seen ground

for identifying justice with piety and wisdom with temperance

or moral sanity. This leaves us, so far, with two great types of

" goodness," justice, regard for right, and moral sanity. But may

we not further identify these two ? Can we really say of any act

that it is " unjust," a violation of some one's rights, and yet that it is

" morally sane " (<rw<j>pov) or " temperate " ? As a man of high

character, Protagoras says that he personally would be ashamed to

make such an assertion, but he knows that the " many " would

make it. We may therefore examine the assertion simply as a

piece of the current ethics of respectability, to see what it is worth

(3336-0) - 1 We must be careful, then, to bear in mind that, from

1 Observe that the highly prized virtue, courage (avdpela), seems to have

fallen into the background. This is a piece of Plato's dramatic art. The

identification of the other commonly recognized virtues with one another is

comparatively easy. But to the popular mind there is something " irra-

tional " in high courage ; it " ignores " the risks which " rational calculation "

would take into account. The identification of courage with knowledge will

therefore be the great crux for a rationalist moralist. Hence the discussion

is deliberately reserved for the second half of Socrates' argument,

250 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

the present onwards, Protagoras is avowedly acting as the dia-

lectical advocate of a current morality which he personally regards

as defective. It is not Protagoras of Abdera but the current ethics

of respectability, for which he consents to appear as spokesman, that

is on its trial. The question is whether a man who is acting " un-

justly " can be acting with sophrosyne. In our time, as in that of

Pericles, the average man would say that this is quite possible.

A man may be " temperate " enough, he may be clear of all

" licentiousness," but he may be greedy or ambitious and quite

unscrupulous about infringing the " rights " of other men in pur-

suing his greed or ambition. (Macaulay's character of Sunderland

would be in point here as an illustration l ) In fact, it is proverbial

that profligacy is a vice of youth and hot blood, avarice and am-

bition vices of " cold " later age, and the " old young man " (like

Joseph Surface) has always been specially unpopular with the

ordinary satirist, who is commonly indulgent to the " rake," unless

he happens to be an elderly rake. Socrates' conviction, like that of

Dante, who punishes the prodigal and the miser in the same circle,

is that Charles Surface and Joseph are brothers in the spirit, no

less than in the flesh ; the antithesis of the Sheridans and Macaulays

between the " generous" and the " mean " vices, is a false one ;

there are no " generous vices," and no " milksop " virtues.

Formally, the argument is not allowed to reach a conclusion ;

Protagoras, finding his case hard to defend, tries to take refuge in

irrelevancy by diverting attention to the theory of the " relativity "

of good. Socrates has started with the linguistic identification of

" temperance " with moral sanity. The man who behaves with

moral sanity is the tv /SoiAcvo/Aci/os, the man who acts " with good

counsel." Hence if a man can in the same act be both temperate

and unjust, it must be possible to act with good counsel in violating

a " right." But a man only shows himself to be acting with good

counsel when he " succeeds " or " does well " by disregarding that

right. Socrates is thus taking advantage of the ambiguity of the

expression cu 7r/>aTTen>, which may either mean " to act well," or

simply to " succeed in doing what you are proposing to do." How

he would have continued the argument is indicated by his next

question, " Do you recognize the existence of goods ? " He means,

having got the admission that injustice is only "well-advised"

when it is successful injustice, to argue that no injustice really does

" succeed " in procuring the aggressor on another man's rights

what he is really aiming at getting, real good or well-being ; it is

always unsuccessful because it always involves sacrificing the good

of the soul to something inferior (the thesis of the Gorgias and of the

closing pages of Rep. i.). But the moment he shows his hand by

and we are prepared for it by the long half-comic interlude in which the poem

of Simonides is canvassed ; this is Plato's way of indicating that it is the

hardest and most important section of the dialogue.

* " He had no jovial generous vices. He cared little for wine or beauty ;

but he desired riches with an ungovernable and insatiable desire," etc. etc.

(History, c. 6).

THE PROTAGORAS 251

asking whether "good things" do not mean "what is beneficial

to man/' Protagoras tries to escape the development he foresees

by delivering a wholly irrelevant homily on the thesis that what is

good for one animal may be bad for another, and what is good for

man taken externally as a lotion, may be very bad if taken internally,

in short that nothing can be pronounced good absolutely and uncon-

ditionally. This is, of course, a direct and simple application of

Protagoras 1 own principle of " man the measure " to ethics, and

the facts to which Protagoras appeals are all real facts ; only they

have no bearing on the issue at stake. It is true that I may be

poisoned by drinking something which would have done me good

if I had used it as an embrocation, that I should damage my health

if I tried to live on the diet on which a horse thrives, and so forth.

It does not in the least follow that there are not "good activities

of the soul/' which are absolutely good in the sense that it is good

that any man should exhibit them at any and every time, and that

scrupulous respect for " rights " is not one of these goods, and

possibly the best of them. In common fairness, we may suppose

that Protagoras is alive to this, and that he is simply doing his best

for his client, the ethics of the average man, by diverting the atten-

tion of the audience from the weak point of his case. 1

IV. INTERLUDE. The Poem of Simonides (3340-3480). At

this point the conversation threatens to end in a general confusion,

and the interrupted argument is only resumed after a long and

apparently irrelevant episode. The main reason for the intro-

duction of the episode has already been explained. The argument

for the Socratic " paradoxes " makes a severe demand on the

reader's power of hard thinking, and the most difficult part of it

is yet to come. The strain of attention therefore requires to be

relaxed, if we are to follow Socrates to his conclusion with full

understanding. Plato also wants an opportunity to produce two

striking dramatic effects. He wishes to contrast the manner of

the " sophist," who is highly plausible so long as he has the argu-

ment to himself, but gets into difficulty the moment he is confronted

by close criticism with the manner of Socrates, who cares nothing

for eloquent plausibility and everything for careful and exact

thinking. And he wants to provide a part in the drama for the

secondary characters, Prodicus and Hippias ; they will get no

chance of a " speaking part " while Protagoras and Socrates occupy

the centre of the stage. Hence I think we should take the whole

of this long interlude as intended mainly to be humorous "relief,"

a gay picture of the manners of cultivated Athenian society in the

later years of the Periclean age, and not much more.

The fun opens with the humorous pretence of Socrates that, in

* To judge from the Theaetetus, Protagoras had actually made the obvious

application of the Homo mensura doctrine to ethics for himself (Burner.,

Greek Philosophy, Part I., 1167). It leads directly to that identification

of " virtue " with what a respectable society actually approves which is the

foundation of his explanation of his own educational theory and practice,

and is common ground to " subjectivists " in ethics.

252 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

kindness to his " shortness of memory," Protagoras should curb

his eloquence and make his answers to questions as brief as he can.

(The self-depreciation is, of course, fun. Socrates means that he

would like fewer words and more thought ; but the implied criticism

has to be made with due regard for " manners.") Protagoras is a

little huffed by the suggestion that the other party to the discussion

should prescribe the character of his responses ; Socrates politely

expresses his regret for the weakness to which he has referred, and

discovers that he has an engagement elsewhere, and the party

thus seems to be on the point of dissolution, when the auditors

intervene to prevent such a misfortune. The point of chief interest

in the general conversation thus caused is provided by the enter-

taining burlesque of Prodicus, the great authority on the right

use of words. All he really has to say is that the audience who

listen to a discussion should give a fair hearing, without fear or

favour, to both parties, and assign the victory to the party who

makes out the better case. But his remarks are so disfigured by

the mannerism of stopping to discriminate each of the terms he

uses from some other with which it might conceivably be confused,

that it takes him half one of Stephanus's pages to make his remark.

It is clear that the real Prodicus (who, as we must remember,

actually survived the execution of Socrates, and so must have

been a well-remembered figure to many of the first readers of our

dialogue) must have been very much of a formal pedant in manner,

or the stress laid on the point by Plato would be unintelligible.

No doubt we are also to understand that the defect is being ex-

aggerated for legitimate comic effect. But it is not likely that the

exaggeration is very gross. Prodicus was trying to make a be-

ginning with the foundations of an exact prose style, and it would

be quite natural that, once impressed with the importance of dis-

tinguishing between " synonyms," he should ride his hobby to

death. We know from the remains of Varro's de lingua Latina, from

Quintilian, Aulus Gellius, and others, to what lengths the men who

attempted to perform the same services for Latin were prepared to

go, and it is likely that if the writings of the " sophists " had been

preserved, we should have found that Prodicus was not outstripped

by his Roman imitators. There is no trace of any personal malice

or dislike in the entertaining sketch Plato has given us. Hippias

is allowed to make a speech of about the same length, his main

point being to mark his disagreement with the partisans of " con-

vention," and his conviction that the whole company, in spite of

the differences of " conventional " political allegiance, are all

" naturally " fellow-citizens. His tone is exactly that of a cosmo-

politan eighteenth-century philosophe. Since Xenophon (Mem.

iv. 4) pits Hippias and Socrates against one another as champions

of <uVis and i/o/xo? respectively, this cosmopolitanism is presumably

a real trait of Hippias, though we cannot be sure that Xenophon

is not simply developing a hint taken from the Protagoras itself.

But even so, his representation shows that he thought Plato's

THE PROTAGORAS 258

little picture true to life in its main point. None of the interveners

in the general conversation shows any sense of the real bearing

of the argument which has just broken down. All treat it as a

mere contest of verbal skill between two parties, each of whom is

" talking for victory/' In the end, a heated disagreement is only

avoided by the consent of Protagoras to submit to further cross-

questioning, if he may first be allowed to deliver another speech.

He absolutely declines Socrates' proposal to submit himself to

be questioned and to give an example of what he thinks the right

way to meet criticism (338^-0). The scene which ensues can

hardly be understood as anything but broad comedy. Protagoras,

having carried his point about the delivery of a set speech on a

theme of his own choosing, remarks that it is an important part

of " culture " to understand the poets and criticize their perform-

ances, and that he will accordingly now expound and criticize

a poem composed by Simonides for the Scopadae. This is a task

suggested naturally by the previous course of the conversation,

as the contents of the poem have to do with " goodness/'

Unfortunately the poem (Fr. 3 in the Anthology of Hiller-

Crusius, 12 of Schneidewin) has to be reconstructed from the

Protagoras itself, and the reconstruction can be neither complete

nor certain, so that we are not entitled to speak with too much

confidence about the precise drift of the poet. The general sense,

appropriate enough in an encomium of a half-barbaric Thessalian

chief, seems to be that it is idle to expect complete and all-round

" goodness " in any man ; there are difficult situations out of which

no human goodness comes with credit. We must be content to call

a man " good," if his general conduct shows regard for right (&'*ca),

if he never misbehaves without highly extenuating circumstances ;

absolute superiority to circumstance can only be expected in a god.

The impression one gets is that one is reading a paid panegyric

on a magnate against whom there is the memory of some shocking

deed or deeds which the eulogist wishes to excuse or palliate by the

" tyrant's plea, necessity." l

The point on which Protagoras fastens is this. Simonides takes

occasion to comment unfavourably on the saying commonly

ascribed to Pittacus that "it is hard to be good " (xaXcTrov foOXbv

C/A/ACVCU). But he has just said the very same thing himself in

almost the Same words (avSp* ayaObv p.V aA.a0co)S yevccr&u ^a\ir6v).

He has thus committed the absurdity of censuring Pittacus for

the very sentiment he has just uttered as his own (339^).

Socrates now seizes the opportunity to defend the poet by the

aid of Prodicus and his famous art of discriminating between words.

The point, he says, is that whereas Pittacus had said that it is hard

1 Simonides writes much as a poet would have to do if he were composing

an ode in praise of William III and felt that he could not be silent about the

murder of the De Witts and the Glencoe massacre. The apologetic tone

shows that his hero had done something which was regarded by most persons

as highly criminal.

254 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

to be (<f/x/Avcu) good, Simonides says that it is hard to become,

(yeve'cr&u) good ; " to be " is one thing, " to become " another,

and thus there is no formal contradiction between denying that it

is hard to be good and asserting that it is hard to become good.

But, objects Protagoras, this distinction only makes matters worse

for Simonides ; if he denies that it is hard to be good, he must mean

that it is easy to possess goodness, and the common sense of all

mankind is against him. Socrates is ready with a rejoinder.

Possibly Simonides, like his fellow-Cean Prodicus, was a votary of

precision of speech, and regarded the employment of x a ^ ir v m

the sense of " difficult " as a misuse of words, just as Prodicus

objects to the common colloquial use of the word " awful " (Sctvos)

in such phrases as " awful wealth " (detvo? Tdonto;), on the ground

that only bad things can properly be called " awful." Let Prodicus,

as a fellow-countryman, tell us what Simonides really meant by

XaAcTroi/. Prodicus at once says he meant KO.KOV ("bad"). 1 If

that is so, Pittacus was, from his Lesbian ignorance of the exact

meaning of a Greek word, unconsciously uttering the senseless

statement that " it is bad to be good/' and Simonides was right in

objecting this to him. Prodicus at once accepts this explanation,

but Protagoras naturally rejects it as ridiculous. " So it is," says

Socrates, " and you may be sure Prodicus is only making fun of

us" (341*). .

(So far, it is clear that the whole tone of the passage about

Simonides is playful. Plato is laughing, as he often does, at the

fifth-century fashion of trying to extract moral principles from the

remarks of poets, especially of poets with a reputation, like

Simonides, for worldly wisdom and a shrewd regard for the interests

of " number one." The mock- respectful discussion of another

dictum of the same poet in Republic i. is couched in exactly the

same tone. The solemn pedantry of Prodicus is a second subject

of mockery. But the main stroke is aimed at the superficiality

of Protagoras. With all his eloquence about the value of a critical

study of " literature," his ideal of criticism is to fasten on the first

and most obvious weak point, and make an end of the matter. He

has shown his cleverness by catching Simonides in a verbal contra-

diction ; he does not see the need of an attempt to understand the

drift of his poem as a whole, or to consider whether the apparent

contradiction will vanish when taken in the light of the general

context. We are all only too familiar with this sort of " criticism,"

which aims at nothing more than the commendation or censure of

individual phrases, while it lets " the whole " go unregarded.)

Socrates now undertakes to propound an interpretation which

will pay due regard to the meaning of the whole poem (3420). He

introduces it by some general observations, the tone of which ought

1 The suggestion is not quite so absurd as it looks, absurd as it is.

in the sense " a hard thing to bear," may often be paraphrased by

without injury to sense. Cf. Pindar's repirvQw xaXeirdr re Kpliris (" issues of weal

and woe " ), or Homer's xaXcirAv yijpa.s (//. 6 103) ( " grim old age ' ' ), and the like.

THE PROTAGORAS 255

to settle the question whether we a^e to take his exegesis in earnest

or not. Crete and Sparta are really the most philosophical com-

munities in the Greek world, and " sophists " abound there more

than anywhere else ; but they conceal the fact from mankind at

large by passing themselves off as rough fighting-men, and by

vigilantly discouraging intercourse with other cities, so that they

may keep their wisdom for their own exclusive benefit. This is

why the ordinary Spartan startles you from time to time by the

pungency and pertinence of his " dry " and brief apophthegms.

They are all the product of this unique " Spartan culture." The

famous " seven sages " the list of them given in this passage is the

earliest extant were all trained in this school, and Pittacus was

one of them. Hence his saying " it is hard to be good " was much

admired as a piece of this sententious " philosophy/' and Simonides,

being an ambitious man, wished to win a great reputation by refuting

it. This is the object of his whole poem (342^-3430) .

(It ought not to have to be said that this whole representation

of Sparta and Crete, the least " intellectual " communities of

Hellas, and the two which Socrates himself takes as his models in

Republic viii. in describing the State which has made the mistake

of " neglecting education," is furious fun. Socrates is diverting

himself by his whimsical suggestions that the " laconizing " fashion-

ables of other cities, who affect the dress and appearance of prize-

fighters, are all the while imitating the wrong thing, the pretence

under which the Spartans disguise their real interests, and that the

" superiority of Sparta " is really based not on military prowess

and success but on intellectual eminence. And if the explanation

which introduces the exposition of the poem of Simonides is thus

sheer fun, we are bound in common sense to expect that the exposi-

tion will turn out to be mainly fun too.)

We are now given the professed exegesis of the poem, which

is only arrived at by a series of violences done to its language.

Simonides must be understood as correcting the saying "it is

hard to be good " by saying " no, the truly hard thing is not to be,

but to become a thoroughly good man, though this is possible.

To be permanently good is not hard, but absolutely impossible

for a man ; it is only possible to a god." A man, as Simonides

goes on to say, cannot help proving " bad " when he is " struck

down " by irretrievable misfortunes. Now no one who is already

down can be struck down. Hence Simonides must mean by a

" man," an " expert," a wise and good man, and his meaning is

shown by the fact that he goes on to say that a man is " good "

as long as he " does Well " (7rpaas p\v yap ev ?ras avr/p dya0os). For

the man who " does well," or " succeeds " in anything is the man

who knows how the thing ought to be done, the man who " does

ill " is always the man whose knowledge fails him. Simonides is

thus made, by an arbitrary exegesis, to bear witness to the Socratic

doctrine that " goodness " and knowledge are the same (3456).

His meaning is that it is hard to become good but impossible for

256 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

man to be permanently good, because of the limitations and imper-

fections of all human knowledge.

The rest of the poem develops the same thought. In par-

ticular, when the poet says that he will " praise and love the man

who does no deed of shame willingly/' (CKWV oo-rts epfy /x-^v alvxpov,)

we are not to take his words in what seems their natural grammatical

sense. The " cultured " Simonides must be supposed to know

that it is a vulgar error to suppose that anyone would do evil

voluntarily. Hence the CKWV must be taken by an extravagant

hyperbaton with the words which precede it, so that the sense is,

11 1 readily praise and love the man who does no deeds of shame "

(though my profession sometimes unfortunately requires me to pay

constrained compliments to " tyrants " who have committed

crimes).

Though there have been commentators who have taken

Socrates' exposition of the poem as perfectly serious, the blunder

ought to be impossible to any man with a sense of humour or of the

necessity of maintaining a dramatic unity of spirit throughout a

scene. We have been prepared for the discussion of the verses by

an introductory homily on the devotion of Sparta to " culture/'

which is manifestly the merest playful humour ; we are fairly

entitled to suspect Socrates whenever we find him pretending to

discover deep philosophic truth in the compositions of any " poet,"

and particularly in those of the poet who had become a byword for

his adroit and profitable flatteries of " the great " ; his purpose

should be made unmistakable by the forced character of the verbal

constructions he is driven to advocate. Clearly we are dealing

with an amusing " skit " on the current methods of extracting

any doctrine one pleases from a poet by devices which can make

anything mean anything. Socrates is amusing himself by showing

that, if he chooses to play at the game, he can beat the recognized

champions, just as in the Parmenides Plato amuses himself by

showing that he can, if he likes, outdo the constructors of " antin-

omies " in the use of their own weapons. The one thing in the

whole of the " lecture " on the verses of Simonides which is not

playful is Socrates' insistence on the doctrine that wrongdoing is

error, and is therefore not " voluntary.'' Here he is in intense

earnest, but the device by which he extracts the doctrine from the

text of Simonides by an impossible " punctuation " is itself merely

playful, just as his suggestion that what he well knew to be the

" paradox " of his own theory is so universally admitted by all

thinking men that it is incredible Simonides should not accept it,

is equally playful. He knows that the very proposition he repre-

sents as too well known to be ignored by Simonides will be rejected

as an extravagance by his audience when he conies shortly to

defend it. His object in getting it into the otherwise whimsical

exposition of Simonides is simply to bring back the discussion to

the original issues from which it has been allowed to diverge, and

he has the natural delight of a humorist in clothing his thesis in

THE PROTAGORAS 257

the most provocative and arresting words he can find. How far

he is from expecting his excursus into literature to be taken seriously

is shown by his remark that he has now discharged his part of a

bargain by allowing Protagoras to deliver a second speech, and

would be glad if Protagoras would honour the agreement by return-

ing to the interrupted discussion. For his own part, he thinks it

unprofitable to spend our time debating the meaning of the poets,

whom we cannot call directly into court ; it is much better to let

them alone and try to get at truth by the direct interplay of our

own thoughts (3470-3480) .

V. THE MAIN ARGUMENT RESUMED. The Identity of Goodness

with Knowledge, and its Consequences (3480-360^).- Now that

Socrates has succeeded in bringing back the conversation to the

point where it had been broken off, he carefully restates the question,

with a polite assurance that he is not talking for victory but honestly

asking the help of Protagoras towards the clarification of his own

thought. The question is whether the names of the great virtues

are different names for one and the same thing (349^), or whether

to each of these names there answers " a peculiar reality or object

with its own Special function " (tStos ova'ia KOL Trpay/xa t\ov cavroi)

SvVa/uv, where note that the word ova-la, exactly as in the Euthyphro,

implies the whole of the " doctrine of forms/' expounded in the

Phaedo). Protagoras has been so far impressed by the former

arguments of Socrates that he now restates his original opinion

with a large modification. He admits that most of the " parts of

goodness " are " fairly like one another," but holds that di/fym'a,

valour, courage, has a distinct character of its own. This is a

matter of everyday observation, for it is a manifest fact that many

men are singularly brave, but have no other virtuous quality ; they

have no regard for rights, no religion, no command over their

passions, no prudence. (The view is a familiar one ; it is habitually

adopted, for example, in the character-sketches of a work like

Macaulay's History. It implies, of course, that its supporters

identify dvSpct'a with the " popular " courage which the Phaedo

pronounces to be a counterfeit of true valiancy, mere hardihood

in the face of perils.) The first point which has to be made against

this position is that it rests on the false conversion of a true pro-

position. It amounts to identifying " the valiant " with the

" confident " or " fearless " (flappaXcot). Now it is true that

all brave men are fearless, but it is not true that all the " confident "

or " fearless " are truly brave, and the two classes, therefore,

cannot be identified. In the absence of a logical terminology, this

point has to be made by examples. Men who have learned a

" d'angerous " accomplishment, such as diving, fighting in the

cavalry, or the like, will be " fearless " in facing the risks they have

learned to deal with, as we also call them " brave " divers or

fighters But persons who have never learned to dive or to manage

a horse will also sometimes be reckless in throwing themselves

into the water or plunging into a charge. But this, Protagoras

258 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

says, is not valour ; it is simply madness. (He means, of course,

that there is no valour in taking a risk simply because you are not

alive to its magnitude. True valour involves consciousness of

the risk you are facing.) Protagoras accordingly points out that

though he had admitted that the valiant are fearless, he had not

admitted the converse, and complains that Socrates is treating

him unfairly (of course, Socrates' real object was simply to lead up

to the making of the distinction). It is true that fearlessness may

be the effect of knowledge, but it may also be the effect of high

temper (0v/xos) or mere frenzy (/uum'a) ; hence the superior fear-

lessness of the man who has learned to swim or to use his weapons

is no proof that courage (as distinct from mere fearlessness) is the

same thing as "'wisdom " or knowledge (<ro<ia). In fact, Protag-

oras holds that the fearlessness which deserves to be called valour

is due not to knowledge but to something else, " nature " (<f>vo-L<s)

and a " thriving " or " well-fed " state of soul (curpo^ta TW \j/vxw,

3516), just as physical strength is not due to knowledge but to

bodily constitution and sound nourishment. 1

Thus the question whether valour can be shown, as Protagoras

now admits that the other leading forms of " goodness " can be, to

be knowledge, requires us to raise still more fundamental questions.

We admit that one may live well or live ill, and that the man who

lives a life of pain and misery is not living well, but the man who

lives a pleasant life is. May we say then that the pleasant life is

the good life, the unpleasant life the bad ? Protagoras wishes to

stipulate that the pleasure must be " pleasure in fine, or noble,

things" (TOIS KaAots, 35 ic), thus anticipating Mill's "distinction of

qualities " of pleasure. But might we not say that things are

good just in so far as they are pleasant, and bad in so far as they are

unpleasant, so that good and pleasant are synonyms ? Protagoras

thinks it due to his character to maintain that this is not true ;

there are bad pleasures and good pains, and there are both pleasures

and pains which are neither good nor bad. But he is willing to

treat the suggestion, in the Socratic manner, 2 as one for further

investigation. (It is very important, then, to remark that the

Hedonist identification of good with pleasant comes into the con-

versation, in the first instance, aj problematic ; it is to be adopted

or rejected according as its implications approve themselves or

do not.) And the question about the relation between pleasure

1 The precise position is, and is meant to be, vague. The champion of

?6/iOf is clearly conceding more importance to ^ifou (" original temperament ")

than we might have expected of him from his earlier utterances. This part

of the Protagoras has directly suggested Aristotle's observations about the

" fearlessness " produced by ^uret/>(a or by native Bvpfa (E.N. nibb 3 ff.).

a 35i &<rirfp <fb X^7s, $ty, /cd0rore, u> Su>v/>ar, <rKOirujj,0a aM, KT\. Thus

Protagoras knows all about the Socratic method of " hypothesis " expounded

in the Phaedo. We must suppose that he had learned of it on the earlier

occasion when he had met Socrates and formed a high opinion of his abilities.

Rightly read, the Protagoras confirms the Phaedo in a way which can hardly

be accounted for except by supposing that both are portraits of the same

original

THE PROTAGORAS 259

and good directly raises another fundamental issue. The popular

opinion is that " knowledge " has not much influence on conduct.

It is held that a man often knows quite well that something is good

or evil, but acts " against his better knowledge," which is mastered

by " temper/' or " pleasure," or " pain," or " lust," as the case

may be. But may it not be that the popular opinion is wrong,

and that if a man knows good and evil, nothing will ever prevail

on him to act contrary to his knowledge ? Protagoras thinks that

it would only be proper in a professional teacher of goodness, like

himself, to take this view, and Socrates expresses his firm con-

viction of its truth. 1 But, since most men think otherwise, we,

who dissent from them, must give a correct analysis of the facts

they have in mind when they talk of a man's judgment as " over-

come " by pleasure or pain, and satisfy them that the popular

analysis of these facts is inaccurate (3530). We might, in fact,

ask the mass of men, who profess to believe that a man can be

seduced by the prospect of pleasure or frightened by that of pain

into doing, against his better knowledge, what he recognizes to

be evil, the following questions : (a) When you talk of something

as pleasant but evil, do you not mean simply that the pleasant

thing in question leads to painful consequences, and when you call

some things good but unpleasant, do you not mean that, though

unpleasant for the time being, they lead to pleasurable conse-

quences ? " The many " would readily admit this, and thus

would (b) commit themselves to the view that good and evil are

identical with pleasant and painful. In fact (c) they would admit

that the end they always pursue is getting the " greatest possible

balance of pleasure over pain " (354c-e). It follows at once that,

on the showing of the " many " themselves, the experience which

they call " being overcome by pleasure or by pain " is really making

a false estimate of pleasures and pains. To be " overcome " means

" to take a greater amount of evil in exchange for a smaller amount

of good " (3560), and on the hypothesis we are examining, " good "

means " pleasure " and " evil " means " pain." Errors of conduct

are thus on the same level as false estimates of number, size, and

weight. Now we are preserved from mistakes about number, size,

weight, by the arts or sciences (TC'XVCU) of counting, measuring, and

weighing. In the same way we need to be preserved from false

estimates in moral choice by a similar art of estimating the relative

magnitudes of " lots " of prospective goods and evils, that is to

say, prospective pleasures and pains, in fact by an " hedonic

calculus," which will terminate disputes. And a " calculus," of

course, is " knowledge," or " science." An argument of this

kind ought to reconcile the " many " themselves to the view that

1 352*2 2-4. Note that Socrates definitely commits himself to one oi th

two premisses of the argument which is to follow, the proposition that no

one really acts against his own knowledge of good and evil. He never

commits himself to the other premiss, the Hedonistic doctrine that good is

pleasure. This remains a suggestion for examination.

260 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

wrong choice, the victory of passion over knowledge as they call

it, is really nothing but miscalculation, and therefore that wrong

action is due to error and is always involuntary (357-358).

It is on this section of the dialogue that the notion of a Platonic

" Hedonism " has been erected, with the consequence that one of

two equally impossible inferences has to be made, either that there

is no consistent ethical doctrine to be found in the dialogues

Plato allows himself at pleasure to argue for or against any view

which interests him for the moment (the theory of Grote) or that

the Protagoras expresses an "early theory" which is afterwards

abandoned when we come to the Gorgias and Phaedo. Careful

reading will show that neither of these conceptions is justified.

Neither Protagoras nor Socrates is represented as adopting the

Hedonist equation of good with pleasure. The thesis which Socrates

is committed to is simply that of the identity of goodness and know-

ledge. The further identification of good with pleasure is carefully

treated, as we have seen, as one neither to be affirmed nor denied.

We are concerned solely with investigating its consequences. One

of these consequences would be that what is commonly called

" yielding to passion against our better knowledge " is a form of

intellectual error and is involuntary, since it means choosing a

smaller " lot of pleasure " when you might choose a greater. (These

consequences are, in fact, habitually drawn by Hedonists.) Hedon-

ism thus is in accord with the doctrines of Socrates on one point,

its reduction of wrong choice to involuntary error, and for that

reason Socrates says that you can make the apparent paradoxes of

his ethics acceptable to mankind at large, if you also adopt the

Hedonist equation, good= pleasure. (The " many," in fact, do

in practice accept this equation, because they are votaries of some

form of the /Jt'os <iXoxp^aros.) It does not follow that because

Socrates agrees with vulgar Hedonism on the point that wrong

choice is involuntary error and arises from lack of knowledge of

good, that he identifies knowledge of good, as the Hedonist does,

with calculation of the sizes of " lots " of pleasure and pain.

All he wants to show is that even from the point of view of the

persons who mistake "popular goodness" for genuine goodness,

it is no paradox to say that goodness is knowledge of some sort ;

the Hedonist is a "rationalist " in his ethics, though his " rational-

ism " may not be of the right kind. That this is all that is meant is

clear from the way in which Socrates is careful to insist over and

over again that the appeal is being made to the standards of " the

mass of mankind." We must also not forget that the appeal to the

unconscious Hedonism of the average man is being made for a

further special purpose. The object of convincing the average man

that, on his own assumptions, goodness is a matter of right calcula-

tion, is to prepare the way for the further proof that, even on these

assumptions, courage can be brought under the same principle as

all the rest of " goodness." When we thus take the argument in

its proper context, we see that the Protagoras no more teaches

THE PROTAGORAS 261

Hedonism than the Phaedo, which also represents the morality of

average men as a business of estimating pleasures and pains against

one another. Rightly interpreted, Gorgias, Phaedo, Protagoras,

are all in accord on the one doctrine to which Socrates commits

himself in the present section of our dialogue, the doctrine that

" goodness " is knowledge. The confusion between " knowledge

of the good " and computation of pleasures and pains is given, in the

Protagoras as in the other dialogues, for what it is, a confusion of

the " average man/ 1 and for nothing more.

To come to the application to the problem about dvSpcfa. What

is it that the courageous face, but the cowardly refuse to face ?

The current answer is that it is " dangers " (ra 8va). But

" danger " means an anticipated evil, and we have just seen that even

the average man, when he comes to theorize about his own practice,

holds that no one " goes to face " what he believes to be evil for

him. The very fact that he chooses to face the situation shows that

he regards it as the "lesser evil " to do so. The real reason, then,

why some men face the risks of war but others run away, must be

that the former judge that more good, which to them means more

pleasure, is to be got by standing your ground than by running

away ; the latter think that they will get more good, and again they

mean more pleasure, by running. If we praise the one and

condemn the others, we are praising a true (and also condemning

a false) calculation about the " balance of pleasure over pain/'

The brave man of everyday life faces the present pain and peril

because he has correctly calculated that endurance of it will lead

to a greater balance of pleasure than flinching. Thus even the

unconscious theory of the average man at bottom implies the view

that courage is ^ matter of knowing what is and what is not for-

midable (<ro<ia TCOV Seivaiv KCU JJLIJ Seii/ah/, 36oc). This is, in fact,

exactly what Socrates says about " popular " courage in the Phaedo.

(That what the " many " suppose to be knowledge of the good

namely, knowledge of the hedonic consequences of your act is

something very different from what Socrates means by knowledge

of the good is true, but irrelevant to the present argument, which

only aims at showing that, even if you adopt the working morality

of the average man, courage stands on the same footing as the

other " virtues." From his standpoint, it resolves itself, like the

rest, into calculation of hedonic consequences ; from Socrates' stand-

point, it and all the rest issue from knowledge of the true and

eternal good.)

VI. EPILOGUE. Our discourse has, after all, only ended by

bringing us in face of the really fundamental problem, what true

" goodness " is (3600). (This remark, again, shows that Socrates

is not represented as accepting the Hedonism which he finds to be

the unconscious assumption of the average man. We have seen

clearly enough what " goodness " is, on that theory.) In fact, we

have ended by exchanging positions in a very entertaining fashion.

Protagoras, who began by being sure that goodness can be taught

262 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

and that he can teach it, seems now to be equally sure that, what-

ever goodness is, it is not the one thing which can be taught, know-

ledge ; Socrates, who began by raising the doubt whether it can be

taught, is now doing his best to prove that it must be knowledge

and nothing else. And here the party breaks up, with a last word

of graceful compliment on the part of Protagoras. He has often

testified to his admiration of Socrates' parts and rates him far above

all other persons of his years ; he would not be surprised if he

should yet become famous for his " wisdom."

Of course, the apparent paradox of which Socrates speaks can

be very simply explained. What he doubted was whether the

sort of " goodness " of which the public men of Athens are examples

can be taught. Since this " goodness " is just another name for

" tactful management " of affairs, it obviously cannot be " taught."

A man has to acquire tact by the handling of affairs and men for

himself ; you cannot teach the theory of it. But political tact is

something very different from anything Socrates understood by

goodness. There is thus no real confusion or shifting of ground,

so far as he is concerned. Protagoras is in a different position.

By his own showing, the " goodness " he aims at teaching is just

the secret of political success, and political success really does

depend on a " tact " which cannot be taught. Hence Protagoras

really does combine incompatible positions when he asserts both

that " goodness " is not knowledge, and also that it can be taught.

If by " goodness " we mean what Protagoras defined as " success

in managing the affairs of your household and city," he is right in

maintaining that goodness is not knowledge, but clearly wrong in

holding that it is an " art " which he can teach. 1

See further :

RITTER, C. Platon, i. 308-342.

RAEDER, H. Platans philosophische Entwickelung, 106-111.

NATORP, P. Platons Ideenlehre, 10-18.

GOMPERZ, TH. Griechische Denker, i. 250-264.

STEWART, J. A. The Myths of Plato, 212-258 (The Protagoras

Myth) .

DITTMAR, H. Aeschines von Sphettus, 186-212 (on Aeschines'

dialogue Callias, where, however, the author's chronology

of the life of Callias is wrong. Callias had two sons, both in

at least their later 'teens in 399. ApoL 2oa-c.)

1 Cf. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, Part /., 170-179.

CHAPTER XI

THE REPUBLIC

THE Republic is at once too long a work, and too well known

by numerous excellent summaries and commentaries, to

require or permit analysis on the scale we have found

necessary in dealing with the Phaedo or Protagoras. We must be

content to presume the student's acquaintance with its contents,

and to offer some general considerations of the relation of its main

theses to one another and to those of dialogues already examined.

To begin with, it is desirable to have a definite conception of

the assumed date of the conversation and the character of the

historical background presupposed. It should be clear that Athens

is supposed to be still, to all appearance at any rate, at the height

of her imperial splendour and strength. 1 Also, the time is appar-

ently one of profound peace. No reference is made to military

operations ; though the company consists mainly of young men of

military age, no explanation of their presence at home is offered.

Yet Plato's two elder brothers, Adimantus and Glaucon, who are

both young men, have already distinguished themselves in a battle

near Megara (3680), which can hardly be any other than that of the

year 424 (Thuc. iv. 72). We have to add that the sophist Thrasy-

machus is assumed to be at the height of his fame, and we know

that he was already prominent enough to be made the butt of a

jest in the first play of Aristophanes, produced in the year 427.2

Similarly, the tone of Socrates' initial remarks about old age as an

unknown road on which he will yet have to travel shows that we

are to think of him as still very far from the age (sixty) at which a

man officially became a ytpw at Athens. Damonides of Oea is

referred to at 400^ as still alive, and since we have the evidence of

Isocrates for the statement that he " educated " Pericles, we cannot

suppose him to have been born much, if at all, later than the year

500. All these considerations, taken together, suggest that the

supposed date of the conversation must be about the time of the

1 This is made especially clear by the tone of the satire on democracy viii.

557 fif., where it is unmistakably the powerful, opulent, and formidable democ-

racy of the Archidamian war that Socrates is depicting. The year 411, assumed

as the dramatic date by some commentators, is about the worst of all possible

choices. It is rendered impossible by the fact that in the Republic, Cephalus,

the father of Polemarchus and Lysias, is still alive, though an old man. The

date is thus before his death and the removal of his sons to Thurii, whence they

returned, after a good number of years, to Athens in 411 (Vit. Lysiae, c. i).

1 Aristoph., Fr. 198.

a6 3

264 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

peace of Nicias (421 B.C.) or the preceding truce of 422. It is im-

portant to remember that Athens came out of the Archidamian

war, though not quite on the terms she might have got, but for the

folly of the democratic leaders after Sphacteria (425), far and away

the richest and most powerful of the combatant states, with the

main of her empire intact. For purposes of illustration the student

should read by the side of the Republic, the Wasps and Peace of

Aristophanes, as illustrative of the conditions of the time. Socrates

must be thought of as being no more than middle-aged, somewhere

about fifty years old, and we must bear in mind that it was at

most a couple of years before that Aristophanes had brought him

on the stage in the Clouds. Plato himself would be a mere child

of some five to seven years.

There is nothing in the dialogue to support any of the fanciful

modern speculations about a possible " earlier edition " without

the central books which discuss the character and education of the

" philosopher-kings/' or the possible existence of the first book by

itself as a" dialogue of search." On the contrary, the appearances

are all in favour of regarding the whole as having been planned as

a whole. It is not until we come to the sixth book that we are

in sight of the " goodness " which is one and the same thing with

knowledge ; the goodness of the " guardians " of Republic ii.-iv.

has been carefully marked as remaining all along at the level of

" opinion. 1 ' It rises no higher than loyalty to a sound national

tradition taken on trust, and is thus so far on a level with the

" popular " goodness of the Phaedo, though the tradition in this

case is that of a morally sounder society than that of Athens, or

of any existing Greek TroXi?. 1 Hence it is inconceivable that Plato

should ever have composed a Republic which ignored the central

points of Socratic ethics. The first book, again, serves its present

purpose as an introduction to the whole work perfectly. In outline,

all the main ideas which underlie the description of the ideal man

and the ideal society are there, the conception of the life of measure

(in the argument about TrAcovcfta), the thought of happiness as

dependent on " function " or vocation, and the rest ; but all are

stated, as they should be in an Introduction, in their abstract form ;

their real significance only becomes apparent as they are clothed

with concrete detail in the full-length picture of the good man and

the good community. To me it is inconceivable that Republic i.

should ever have been planned except as the introduction to a work

covering the ground of the Republic as we have it. 2

1 This is why in Book IV. the virtues, as practised in the " reformed " city,

are still distinguishable, so that different virtues are most specially prominent

in different sections of society, and, again, why we are told at iv. 430^ 3 that

the account just given of courage is adequate only as a description of " citizen "

courage, and may have to be revised later on. The " unity of the virtues "

only emerges in Republic vi. when we come to discuss the character of the

" philosopher- king."

The only specious argument for an earlier Urstaat is that, at the

beginning of the Timaeus, where Socrates is made to recapitulate the contents

THE REPUBLIC 265

it has sometimes been asked whether the Republic is to be

regarded as a contribution to ethics or to politics. Is its subject

" righteousness/' or is it the "ideal* state >N j& The answer is that

from the point of view of Socrates and Plato there is no distinction,,

except one of convenience, between morals and politics. The laws

of right are the same for classes and cities as for individual men.

But one must add that these laws are primarily laws of personal '

morality ; politics is founded on ethics, not ethics on politics.]^ The

primary question raised in the Republic and finally answered at its

closers a strictly ethical one, What is the rule of right by which a

maiTbught to regulate his life ? And it should be noted that the

first simple answer offered to the question, that of Cephalus and

Polemarchus, makes no reference at all to the TroXts and its vo/xoi,

and this, no doubt, is why it is put into the mouths of speakers

who were not Athenian TroXirat but protected aliens. The political

reference is brought into the dialogue in the first instance by Thrasy-

machus, who insists on treating morality as a mere product and

reflex of the habit of obedience to a political XQWCOV or " sovereign."

Socrates finds it necessary to keep this political reference in view

throughout his own argument, but he is careful to explain that the

reason for studying the public life of classes and communities is

simply that we see the principles of right and wrong " writ large "

in them ; we study the " larger letters " in order to make out the

smaller by their aid. All through, the ultimate question is that

raised by Glaucon and Adimantus, what right and wrong are " in

the soul of the possessor/' This comes out most clearly of all in

the part of the work which is written with most palpable passion,

the accounts of the degenerate types of city and men. Each de-

fective constitution is studied and the tone of public life fostered by

it noted, in order that we may learn by this light to read the heart

of the individual man. We see the real moral flaw in the outwardly

decent man who regards becoming and remaining " well-off " as

the finest thing in life, by considering the quality of national life

in a merchant-city, like Carthage, where the " merchant-prince "

is dominant and gives the tone to the whole community, and

so on. The Republic, which opens with an old man's remarks about

approaching death and apprehension of what may come after death,

and ends with a myth of judgment, has all through for its central

theme a question more intimate than that of the best form of

government or tJMijapst eugenic system of propagation ; its question

is, How does a flBlttam or forfeit eternal salvation ? For good or

of the Republic (Twfjja-iga), nothing is said about the philosopher-kings

and their education^^H>thing, however, is said about the account of the

" imperfect " types ^^Kien and societies in Republic viii. ix. either. The

silence of the Tiwa^^Bbout everything which follows Republic v. can be

explained conjectun^^fc more ways than one. The simplest explanation is

that the real purpos^^Khe recapitulation is to serve as an introduction to

the projected but un^^Bd Critias. Any explanation of the facts must remain

conjectural, since Pl^^Brrote only the opening pages of the projected Critias,

and we do not know|^J he meant to develop the story.

266 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

bad, it is intensely " other-worldly/' Man has a soul which can

attain everlasting beatitude, and this beatitude it is the great

business of life to attain. The social institutions or the education

which fit him to attain it are the right institutions or education ;

ail others are wrong. The " philosopher " is the man who has

found the way which leads to this beatitude. At the same time,

no man lives to himself, and the man who is advancing to beatitude

himself is inevitably animated by the spirit of a missionary to the

community at large. Hence the philosopher cannot be true to

himself without being a philosopher-king ; he cannot win salvation

without bringing it down to his society. That is how the Republic

views the relation between ethics and statesmanship.

The fundamental issue is raised in the introductory book with

great artistic skill. From the simple observations of old Cephalus

about the tranquillity with which a man conscious of no undis-

charged obligations can look forward to whatever the unseen

world may have to bring, Socrates takes the opportunity to

raise the question what SIKOLIOO-VVVJ, taken in the sense of the

supreme rule of right " morality " as we might say is. What is

the rule by which a man should order the whole of his life ? Before

we can embark on the question seriously, we need to be satisfied

that it is not already answered for us by the ordinary current moral

maxims of the decent man ; that there really is a problem to be

solved. Next we have to see that the theories in vogue among

the superficially " enlightened," which pretend to answer the

question in a revolutionary way, are hopelessly incoherent. Only

when we have seen that neither current convention nor current anti-

conventionalism has any solution of the problem are we in a

position to raise it and answer it by the true method. Thus there

are three points of view to be considered: that of the unphilo-

sophical decent representative of current convention, sustained

by Cephalus and his son Polemarchus ; that of the " new morality,"

represented by Thrasymachus ; and that of sober philosophical

thinking, represented by Socrates.

As to the first point of view, that of decent acquiescence in a

respectable convention which has never been criticized, we note,

and this may serve as a corrective to exaggerations about the

extent to which " the Greeks " identified morality with the VO/KOS

of a " city," that Plato has deliberately chosen as the exponent

of moral convention a representative who, as a ^CTOIKOS, naturally

makes no appeal to the " city " and its usages ; the rule of Cephalus

is specially characteristic not of a wdAig but of a profession, and

a profession which in all ages has enjoyed the reputation of sound

and homely rectitude. The old man's morality is just that which

is characteristic of the honourable merchant of all places. " Right/]

according to him, means " giving to every man his own, and speaking

the truth," i.e. a man is to honour his business obligations and hii

word is to " be as good as his bond " ; the man who acts thus has

discharged the whole duty of man. The point of the conversation

THE REPUBLIC 267

begun between Socrates and Cephalus, and continued with Pole-

marchus as respondent, is merely that this simple rule for business

transactions cannot be regarded as a supreme principle of morality

for two reasons, (i) There are cases where to adhere to the letter

of it would be felt at once to be a violation of the spirit of right ;

(2) if you do try to put it into the form of a universal principle by

explaining that " giving a man his own " means " treating him as

he deserves/ 1 " giving him his due/ 1 however you understand the

words " a man's due," you get again a morally bad principle. 1

Against Polemarchus, who thinks that morality can be reduced to

" giving every one his due " in the sense of being a thoroughly

valuable friend to your friends and a dangerous enemy to your foes

(a working morality expressed in the " gnomic " verses of Solon

and Theognis), it has to be shown that to make such a principle

of conduct acceptable to a decent man's conscience, we must at

least take our " friends " and " foes " to mean " the good " and

" the bad " respectively, and that, even then, the principle is

condemned by the fact that it makes it one half of morality to

" do evil " to some one. The argument equally disposes incidentally

of the " sophistic " conception of " goodness " as a kind of special

accomplishment by showing : (i) that in any definite situation

in life, the " accomplishment " needed to confer the benefit de-

manded by that situation is some kind of skill other than " good-

ness " ; and (2) that all these accomplishments can be put to a

morally bad, as well as to a morally good, use. Virtue, for example,

will not make a man the best of all advisers about an investment,

and the knowledge which does make a man a good counsellor on

such a matter also makes him a very dangerous adviser, if he

chooses to use it for a fraudulent end. This prepares us to discover

later on that though " goodness " in the end is knowledge and

nothing but knowledge, it is something quite different from the

" arts " or " accomplishments " with which the professional

" teachers of goodness " confound it.

When we come to the anti-conventional " immoralism " of the

" enlightenment/' it is important to remark that Thrasymachus

is made to overstate the position ; as Glaucon says, at the opening

of the second book, he has bungled the case. (As we know of no

reason why Plato should misrepresent a prominent man of the

preceding generation, the violence and exaggeration is presumably

a genuine characteristic of the actual Thrasymachus, and it is used

1 The apparent triviality of the examples chosen by Socrates to illustrate

his point is only apparent. He takes simple illustrations, as Professor Burnet

has said, because the issue at stake is most readily seen in such cases. Thus,

e.g., the question whether one should return a weapon to a lunatic because it is

his raises the problem whether it is the duty of a banker to honour all the

cheques of a wealthy senile client, or of a solicitor to take his instructions for

a manifestly insane will without any warning to his family; and these are

questions of moment, not only for the casuist but for the legislator. Grotius

has to begin with precisely the same kind of elementary example when he

wants to discuss the problems connected with international good faith in the

De iure belli et pads.

268 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

mainly for humorous effect. Thrasymachus, like modern authors

whom one could name, must not be taken to mean all he says too

seriously. Bluster is a mannerism with him, as it is in fact with

some successful advocates. The serious statement of the im-

moralist case is reserved for Glaucon.) As Thrasymachus states the

case, there is really no such thing as moral obligation. What men

call " right " is " the interest of the superior/' (In this phrase, TO

KpeiTTov is to be taken as neuter, and what is meant is " the

sovereign " in a community.) The theory is that right or morality

is a synonym for conformity to vo/xos (the institutions and traditions

of the community). But these institutions have been originally

imposed on the community by the " sovereign " purely with a view

to his own benefit, and the only reason why they should be respected

is that the " sovereign " has the power to make you suffer if you

do not respect them. Hence, unlike Hobbes, Thrasymachus feels

no need to justify the absolutism of the " sovereign " by appeal to

the " social contract " by which he has been invested with his

sovereign powers ; since he does not regard " right " as having any

meaning, he has not to show that the sovereign has any right to

obedience ; it is sufficient to observe that his power to enforce

obedience is guaranteed by the simple fact that he is the sovereign.

Like the imaginary prehistoric kings and priests of Rousseau or

Shelley, he has succeeded in imposing his will on the community

and there is nothing more to be said. In practice this theory

would work out exactly like that of Callicles in the Gorgias, but

there is the important difference that, in theory, the two immor-

alists start from opposite assumptions. Callicles is a partisan of

<u'cns who honestly believes that in the " order of things " the

strong man has a genuine right to take full advantage of his strength ;

Thrasymachus is pushing the opposite view of all morality as mere

"convention" to an extreme. The evidence for his theory is,

in the first instance, simply the fact that all governments make

"high treason," the subversion of the sovereign, the gravest crime.

The first care of every government is to ensure the constitution,

whatever it is, against revolution. By pure confusion of thought

the safeguarding of the constitution is then identified with the

safeguarding of the private interests of the particular persons who

happen at any moment to be exercising the function of sovereignty.

Subsequently an appeal is made to the familiar facts about the

" seamy side " of political and private life, the unscrupulosity and

self-seeking of politicians, and the readiness of private men to cheat

one another and the community, to job for their families and the

like, when the chance offers. It would be easy to show that the

indictment is drawn up with careful reference to features of con-

temporary Athenian life, but the reasoning of Thrasymachus rests

on the further assumption that the seamy side of life is its only

side ; life is robbing and being robbed, cheating and being cheated,

and nothing else. This is, after all, not an impartial picture even of

a society groaning under the rule of a tyrant or a demagogue, and

THE REPUBLIC 269

when Socrates comes to reply, he also finds no difficulty in appealing

to equally " real " facts of a very different kind, e.g. the fact that

a politician expects to get some sort of remuneration for his work,

which shows that the work itself is not necessarily a " paying "

thing. Even in the world as it is, the "strong man's " life is not

all getting and no giving.

The fact is that Thrasymachus, like Mr. Shaw or Mr. Chesterton,

has the journalist's trick of facile exaggeration. He is too good a

journalist to be an esprit juste, and the consequence is that he lands

himself in a dilemma. If his " sovereign " who has a view only

to the interests of " number one " is meant to be an actual person

or body of persons, it is obvious, as Socrates says, that he is not

infallible. It is not true that the moral code and the institutions

of any society are simply adapted to gratify the personal desires of

the sovereign who, according to Thrasymachus, devises them, or

to further his interests ; judged by that standard, every existing

set of vofjioi is full of blunders. 1 But if you assume that the

sovereign is always alive to his own interests and always embodies

them in his regulations, your sovereign is a creature of theory, an

" ideal/ 1 and you lay yourself open at once to the line of argument

adopted by Socrates to show that his worth depends on fulfilling

a social function, independently of the question whether he gets

any private advantage from his position or not. The " new

morality " of Thrasymachus must therefore stand or fall on its

own merits as an ethical theory ; it derives no real support from

his speculations about the origin of government in the strong man's

" will to power."

On the argument by which Socrates meets the strictly ethical

assertion that " conventional " morality is a mere expression of

the low intelligence and weakness of the " herd," all I wish to

remark here is that he is guided throughout by the Pythagorean

analogy between tuned string, healthy body and healthy mind,

which is the key to half the best thought of the Greek moralists.

The immoralist's case is really disposed of in principle by the often

misunderstood argument about 7rA.oveia (Rep. i. 349&~35oc). The

reasoning already contains in germ the whole doctrine of the

" right mean " afterwards developed in the Philebus and the Ethics

of Aristotle. The point is that in all applications of intelligence

to the conduct of activity of any kind, the supreme wisdom is to

know just where to stop, and to stop just there and nowhere else.

1 For example, on Thrasymachus' theory, the Sfjfiot, which is the Kpeirrov

at Athens, must be supposed to have adopted the institution of ostracism in

the interests of the dij^os, as a safeguard against would-be " dictators." But

in actual working the institution favours the aspirant to a dictatorship by-

giving him a chance to remove the natural leaders of a " constitutional opposi-

tion." The selection of magistrates by lot, again, must be supposed to have

been adopted to equalize the chances of the citizens ; but, as its ancient critics

said, it may work the wrong way, since it gives the fuffddvjpos as good a chance

of office as anyone else, whereas he would be handicapped under an elective

system by his known or suspected hostility to the constitution.

270 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

The " wise man," like the musician or the physician, knows what

the fool or the quack never knows, " how much is enough." The

mistake common to the fool in the management of life and the

bungler tuning a musical instrument or treating a sick man, is

that they believe in the adage that you " can't have too much of a

good thing." On the strength of this misleading faith, one ruins

his instrument, another kills his patient, and the third spoils his

own life. There is a " just right " in all the affairs of life, and to

go beyond it is to spoil your performance, and consequently to

miss " happiness." Once grasped, this point leads on to the other

that the "just right " in any performance means the adequate

discharge of function, and that happiness, in turn, depends on

discharge of function. The introduction to the Republic thus leads

us up to precisely the telcological conception of the rule of conduct

from which Butler starts in the Preface to his Sermons. " Happi-

ness " depends on " conformity to our nature as active beings."

What " active principles " that nature comprises and how they

are organized into a " system " we learn in the immediately follow-

ing books.

With the opening of the second book, we are introduced to the

genuine version of the immoralist doctrine of which Thrasymachus

had given a mere exaggeration, the theory that regard for moral

rules is a pis alter, though one which is unfortunately unavoidable

by ordinary humanity. The theory is often referred to as that

of Glaucon and Adimantus, but it should be noted that Adimantus

takes no part in the statement of the theory and that Glaucon,

who does explain it fully, is careful to dissociate himself from it ;

it is given as a speculation widely current in educated circles of the

time of the Archidamian war and supported by specious though, as

Glaucon holds, unsound arguments. His own position is simply

that of an advocate speaking from his brief. He undertakes to

make an effective defence of the case which Thrasymachus had

mismanaged, in order that it may really be disproved, not merely

dismissed without thorough examination of its real merits. The

important feature of his argument is not so much the well-known

statement of the " social contract " theory of the origin of moral

codes as the analysis of existing morality to which the historical

speculation is meant to lead up. The point is that " men practise

the rules of right not because they choose, but because they cannot

help themselves." At heart every one is set simply on gratifying

his own passions, but you will best succeed in doing this by having

the fear of your fellow-men before your eyes and abstaining from

aggression on them. If you get the chance to gratify your passions

without moral scruples, and can be sure not to be found out and

made to suffer, you would be a fool not to benefit by your oppor-

tunity. This is the point of the imaginative fiction about the

" ring of Gyges." The real fact which gives the sting to the

fiction is simply that we all know that there is no human virtue

which would not be deteriorated by confidence of immunity from

THE REPUBLIC 271

detection. None of us could safely be trusted to come through the

ordeal with our characters undepraved. We are all prone to lower

our standard whenjwe believe that there is no eye, human or divine,

upon us. There <fc.n be little doubt that a theory of this kind,

which amounts to the view suggested as possible by Kant that

no single human act has ever been done simply " from duty/' was

a current one in the age of Socrates, and we can even name one of

the sources upon which Plato is presumably drawing. The theory

attempts to combine in one formula the two rival conceptions of

" nature " and " convention " as regulative of action. It amounts

to saying that there is a morality of unscrupulous egoism which is

that of " nature " and is practised by us all when we are safe from

detection, and another and very different " morality of convention,"

a morality of mutual respect for " claims and counter-claims "

which we are obliged to conform to, so far as our behaviour is

exposed to the inspection of our fellows. This doctrine is taught

in so many words in a long fragment, discovered at Oxyrhynchus,

of Socrates' contemporary and rival, Antiphon the " sophist." *

According to Antiphon, the " wise man/' who means to make a

success of life, will practise " conventional justice " when he believes

that his conduct will be observed by others, but will fall back on

" natural justice " whenever he can be sure of not being found out.

This is exactly the position Glaucon means to urge in his apologue.

What he wants Socrates to prove is that the conception of the two

rival moralities is a false one ; that mutual respect of rights is the

true morality of " nature/' as much as of " convention," the course

of conduct suitable to ' ' our nature as agents." The proof is supplied

in the end by the doctrine of the " parts of the soul " in Republic iv.,

exactly as Butler attempts to supply a similar proof of the same

thesis by his account of the hierarchy of the " active principles " in

his three Sermons on Human Nature.

The contribution of Adimantus to the discussion is that he

places the argument for regarding respect for the rights of one's

neighbour as a mere cover for self-seeking on a basis independent of

all speculations about moral origins. The tone of his speech is

carefully differentiated from that of Glaucon. Glaucon, as he

himself admits, is simply making the ablest forensic defence he

can of his case, and can jest about the gusto with which he has

thrown himself into the cause of a dubious client ; Adimantus

speaks from the heart in a vein of unmistakable moral indignation.

He complains not of the speculations of dashing advanced thinkers,

but of the low grounds on which the defence of morality is based by

the very parties who might be presumed to have it most at heart.

Parents who are sincerely anxious that their sons should grow up

to be honest and honourable men regularly recommend virtue

simply on the ground of its value as a means to worldly success

and enjoyment ; they never dwell on the intrinsic worth of virtue

1 Oxyrhynchus Papyri, XI, no. 1364.

*72 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

itself. On the contrary, their habitual insistence on the hardness

of the path of virtue and the pleasantness of vicious courses suggests

that they think virtue in itself no true good. And the poets all

speak the same language. When you come to the representatives

of religion, who might be expected to take the highest line, you

find that they are worst of all. They terrify the sinner by their

stories of judgment to come, but only as a preliminary step to

assuring him that they will, for a small consideration, make his

peace with Heaven by easy ritual performances and sacraments

which involve no change of heart. The whole influence of religion

and education seems to be thrown into the scale against a genuine

inward morality, and this is a much more serious matter than the

speculations of a few clever men about the " original contract "

and the motives which prompted it. We need a new religion and a

new educational system. (We must, of course, note that the

indictment of religion is throughout aimed not at the official cult us

of the city, but at the Orphic and similar sects ; the vehemence

with which Adimantus speaks seems to indicate an intense personal

hostility to these debased " Salvationists " which is presumably a

real trait of the man's character.)

The effect of the two speeches, taken in conjunction, is to im-

pose on Socrates the task of indicating, by a sound analysis of

human nature, the real foundations of morality in the very constitu-

tion of man, and of showing how education and religion can be,

and ought to be, made allies, not enemies, of a sound morality.

This, we may say, is the simple theme of the whole of the rest of the

dialogue. Some comments may be offered on the various stages

of the demonstration. The theme has already been propounded

in the demand of Glaucon that it shall be made clear how " justice "

and " injustice " respectively affect the inner life of their possessor,

independently of any sanctions, human or divine. It is to the

answer to this question that Socrates is really addressing himself

in the picture of an ideally good man living in an ideal relation to

society, which culminates in the description, given in Books VI .-VII.,

of the philosopher-king, his functions in society, and the discipline

by which he is fitted for their discharge, as well as by the briefer

studies, in Books VIII. and IX., of increasing degeneration from

the true type of manhood. The answer to Adimantus, so far as his

indictment of education is concerned, has to be found in the account

of the training of the young into worthy moral character by a right

appeal, through literature and art, to the imagination (BooksIII.-IV .) ;

his attack on immoral religion may be said to be the direct occasioin

both of the regulation of early " nursery tales " with which Socrates

opens his scheme of reform in Book II., and of the magnificent

myth of judgment with which the dialogue closes, itself a specimen

of the way in which the religious imagination may be made the most

potent reinforcement of a noble rule of life. In dealing with the

details of the positive contributions of the dialogue to both politics

and religion, it is necessary to observe some caution, if we are to

THE REPUBLIC 278

avoid specious misunderstandings. We must remember all through

that the political problem of the right organization of a state is

avowedly introduced not on its own account, but because we see

human virtue and vice " writ large " in the conduct of a state or a

political party, and may thus detect in the community the real

moral significance of much that would escape our notice if we only

studied humanity in the individual. 1 Hence we shall probably be

misunderstanding if we imagine, as has sometimes been imagined,

that either Socrates or Plato is seriously proposing a detailed new

constitution for Athens, and still more if we imagine that either

would have approved of the introduction of the new constitution

by revolution into a society wholly unprepared to receive it. The

most we are entitled to say about any of the detailed proposals

of the Republic is that Plato presents them as what, according to

Socrates, is most in accord with the moral nature of man, and may

therefore be expected to be approximately realized in a thoroughly

sound condition of society.

(i) In the impressive picture given in Books II.-IV. of the

working of the principle of specialization of function according

to vocation, which will ultimately turn out to be the foundation

of all " justice/' there are one or two points which have perhaps

not received sufficient attention, and may therefore be briefly noted.

I think it is clear that we must not take the description of

the three successive stages through which Socrates' community

passes as meant to convey any speculation about the beginnings

of civilization. The " first city " is already on the right side of

the line which separates civilization from barbarism. Its inhab-

itants are already agriculturists, permanently cultivating a fixed

territory ; they are at home in the working of metals, and in some

respects they exhibit an advance in economic organization on

the Athens of the Periclean age. (Thus they have their clothes

made by a distinct class of artisans, not woven in the house by the

women of the family, as was still largely the custom at Athens.)

The notion that we are reading a satire on Antisthenes and the

" return to nature " is merely ludicrous. What is really described

is, in the main, the condition of a normal 71-0X19 where the citizens

are farming-folk. To me it seems clear that, so far as Plato has

any particular historical development before his mind, he is think-

ing of what Athens itself had been before the period of victory and

expansion which made her an imperial city and the centre of a

world-wide sea-borne commerce. (This is suggested almost irre-

sistibly by the assumption that even the " first city/ 1 like Athens,

requires to import a good many of its necessaries from elsewhere,

1 For example, punctuality is what is commonly considered a " minor

social virtue." A man is not thought much the worse of, if he is always late

at an appointment. But when we see how the issue of a campaign or even

of a war may be affected, if expected reinforcements arrive just a little too

late, we are reminded that it is a dangerous thing to call any virtue a " minor "

one. The contemplation of the " large letters " teaches us not to despise

" minute particulars."

274 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

and consequently contains merchants and sailors, and is already

producing for the foreign market.) In the description of the

steps by which this little society expands and becomes a city with

a multitude of artificial wants, and trades which minister to them,

thus acquiring a " superfluous population " which must somehow

be provided for, we can hardly see anything but a conscious re-

flection of the actual expansion of Attica under Cimon and Pericles.

(2) We must, of course, note that not all the artificial wants

which arise in the city as it becomes " luxurious " are meant to be

condemned. Even the demand for delicacies for the table is an

indication that the standard of living is rising, and all social students

know that a rise in this standard is by no means an entirely unwhole-

some thing. It is more significant that one of the chief features

of the development is the growth of professions like those of the

actor and the impresario. People are beginning to feel the need of

amusement, and this means, of course, that they are becoming

conscious that they have minds, which need to be fed no less than

their bodies. Presumably the reason why Socrates could not look

for " justice " in the community of farmers, but has to wait for

the " luxurious city " to come into existence and be reformed,

is precisely that the members of the first society would hardly

be alive to the fact that they have souls at all ; they could not feel

the need for a daily supply of any bread but that which perishes ;

they have no " social problem."

(3) It has been asked why, when over-population leads to an

acute social problem, aggressive warfare rather than colonization

should be assumed as the only way out of the difficulty. The

answer, of course, is simple. In the first place, peaceful coloniza-

tion of derelict territories had never been a feasible procedure

for a Greek city. The founders of the ancient and famous cities

we call the " Greek colonies " had regularly had to wrest their sites

from previous occupants not much inferior to themselves in " cul-

ture/ 1 There was no America or Australia in the Mediterranean

basin. And in the second, Socrates knows his countrymen and

is well aware that a Greek " surplus population " would not be

likely to transport itself across the seas in quest of a new home so

long as there was a fair chance of a successful inroad on its neigh-

bours. He is, as he says, not discussing the morality of the pro-

ceeding ; he is merely noting that it is what the city would, in

fact, do. (In theory, to be sure, it was a commonplace that an

aggressive war of expansion is not a iustum bellum.) And the point

he wishes to insist on is the perfectly sound one, that the experience

of having to make common sacrifices and face common dangers in

war, just or unjust (but when did any nation throw its soul into

the prosecution of a war which it seriously believed to be unjust ?),

does more to generate self-devotion in citizens than any other. War

gives the social reformer his chance, for the double reason that

it produces the temper which is willing to live hard, make sacri-

fices, and submit to discipline, and, when it is hard contested and

THE REPUBLIC 275

the issue doubtful, it makes the necessity for sacrifice and submission

pressing and patent. We who have lived through the events of

1914-1918 should be able to understand this from our own experience.

(4) It is unhappily customary to make two bad mistakes about

the nature of the reconstituted social structure which, in Socrates'

narrative, emerges from the experience provided by a great war.

It is called a " system of caste," and the matter is then made worse

by calling the %Aiovpyot' who form the third of Socrates' social

classes, " the working class," or " the industrial class." The

immediate consequence is that the social and political theory of the

Republic suffers a complete travesty, due to the unconscious in-

fluence of ideas derived from our experience of modern " industrial-

ism." To guard against misconceptions of this kind, we must, in

the first place, be clear on the point that there is no system of

" caste " in the Republic. The characteristic of " caste " is that

one is born into it, and that once born into a caste it is impossible

to rise above it. You may forfeit your caste in various ways, as a

Brahmin does by crossing the seas, but no one can become a

Brahmin if he is not born one. Now Socrates believes, rightly or

wrongly, that heredity is a powerful force in the intellectual and

moral sphere ; as a general rule, a man will find his natural place

in the " class " to which his parents belong (all the more, no doubt,

as procreation is to be placed under careful " eugenic " regulations).

But the rule has its notable exceptions : there are those who prove

quite unfitted for the work of the class into which they are born,

and those who show themselves qualified to take their place in a

higher class. Hence it is part of Socrates' idea that the early life

of the individual shall be under close and constant surveillance,

and subjected to repeated tests of character and intelligence.

There is to be every opportunity for the discovery and degradation

of the unworthy and the promotion of the worthy; no one is to

be ensured by the accident of birth in a particular social status,

and no one is to be excluded by it from rising to the highest

eminence. This qualification of the principle of heredity by the

antithetic principle of the " open career " for ability and character

is absolutely destructive of "caste." The philosopher-kings or the

soldiers of the Socratic state are no more a " caste " than Napoleon's

marshals. And, in the second place, the 3i?/uovpyot do not corre-

spond to what we call the " artisan " or " working " class, i.e.

to wage-earners or persons who maintain themselves by selling their

labour. They include our wage-earners, but they also include the

great bulk of what we should call the civilian population, inde-

pendently of economic status. The thought underlying the dis-

tinction of the three classes has primarily nothing to do with

economic status. It is simply that in any full-grown society, you

may distinguish three types of social service. There is a small

section which serves the community directly by directing its public

life, making rules and regulations and controlling policy. These

are the " complete " or " full-grown " guardians. There is necessarily

276 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

an executive arm, whose business it is to support the directive

action of the first class by the necessary physical force against

enemies from without and malcontents and offenders from within,

the army and police. It is this body which Socrates calls by the

name cwiKovpoi, and it should be noted that he selects the word

not merely for the appropriateness of its literal sense ("helpers,"

" auxiliaries "), but because it was, as we can see e.g. from Herodotus,

the technical name for the trained professional body-guard of

monarchs, and therefore indicates the important point that the

" executive " of the Socratic State is a carefully trained professional

fighting force, not an amateur constabulary or militia. The

associations of the word are the same as those of such an English

expression as " the Guards/' and Socrates does not scruple to apply

to his 7riKov/3oi the opprobrious name by which such permanent

professional soldiers were called in Greek democracies, which

objected on principle to their existence. They are, like the Ionian

and Carian soldiers of an Amasis, /xto-floW (" mercenaries ")/

except for two considerations that they are citizens, not aliens,

and that the only /xto-flos they get is their " keep." These two

classes are distinguished by the fact that they are the only direct

" servants of the public." What remains is the whole bulk of the

"civilian population/' with the exception of the "guardians"

every one who does not directly serve the public either as a states-

man or as a soldier or policeman. Thus the 8^/xtovpyoi include

not only all the so-called "working class," but the whole body of

professional men, and the whole class of employers of laboto-. Since

the two superior classes are expressly forbidden to have a/y kind of

property, personally or as classes, it follows that the whole " capital "

of ^ the State is in the hands of the S^/uov/iyoi. A "merchant

prince," under such a classification, is just as much one of the

" industrials " as his clerks and office-boys. Much purely perverse

criticism of the scheme would have been obviated if this simple

consideration had been duly kept in mind.

(5) An immediate consequence is that, in spite of all that has

been said about the " socialism " or " communism " of the Republic,

there is really neither socialism nor communism to be found in

the work. The current confusions on the point are probably

due mainly to the mistaken notion that the emphatic demand of

Book IV. 2 for the banishment of " wealth " and " penury " from

society must be the proposal of a communist, or at least of a

socialist. This assumption is, on the face of it, absurd. The point

made in Book IV. is simply that a man's character and work in life

will be spoiled equally by the possession of irresponsible wealth,

with no adequate social duties attached to it, and by a penury which

breaks his spirit and forces him to do bad and scamped work in

order to keep himself alive. A man may be aware of these dangers

without adopting either the socialist or the communist theory of

the right economic organization of society. In point of fact,

1 Rep. iv. 4iga-42oa. Rep. iv. 421^ ff.

THE REPUBLIC 277

nothing much is said in the book about the economic organization of

the only class who have any economic function at all, the Sypiovpyot,

but the implication of what is said is that there are differences of

wealth among them, and that the " means of production and dis-

tribution " are individually owned and operated. In Book VIII.

it is carefully indicated that one of the first signs of the degeneration

of the ideal State into a " timocracy " is the acquisition of real and

personal property by the two superior classes (they " appropriate

lands and houses/' (viii. 5476) ), but nothing is said of the first

introduction of private property among the 8iy/*iovpyoi, who thus

must be presumed to have enjoyed it all along. There are other

more general considerations which point to the same conclusion.

For one thing, both pure communism and " State monopoly " of the

means of production are so alien to the system of a Greek Ti-oXts

the " State ownership " of the silver mines at Laurium was an

exception at Athens that Socrates could not be presumed to be

contemplating either, unless he expressly explained himself. For

another, it is clear that agriculture is the assumed economic founda-

tion of the life of his city, and agriculture is just the pursuit to

which a " socialistic " economic system is least easy of application.

Collectivism is historically an ideal of the " proletariat " of great

towns ; the farmer has always been tenacious of the very different

ideal of peasant ownership. And it is noticeable that in the Laws

Plato declares himself for peasant ownership in its extreme form.

The citizens there not merely own their " holdings " but own them

as their inalienable patrimonies, and " common cultivation " is

expressly forbidden (v. 7400-6). We may fairly take it that if he

had intended to represent his master as advocating views of a

radically different type, he would have made the point unmistakable.

Hence, it seems to me that we must recognize that the economic

organization of the ideal city of the Republic is definitely " indi-

vidualistic." Yet we must not suppose that Plato is in any sense

putting Socrates forward as a conscious " anti-socialist." The

real object of the one restriction of ownership on which the dialogue

insists as fundamental, the prohibition of all property to the direct

servants of the State, is not economic. The purpose is the same as

that of the still more emphatic prohibition of family life, the elimina-

tion of the conflict between public duty and personal interest.

What Socrates wants, as Bosanquet has said, is simply to divorce

political power from financial influence. Wealth is to have no

political influence in his society ; it is " plutocracy," not individual

ownership, which he is determined to suppress. His rulers are much

more in the position of a mediaeval military monastic order than in

that of a collectivist bureaucracy.

(6) It may not be unnecessary to remark that, as there is no

socialism, there is also no " community of women " in the Republic.

If the reader will take the trouble to work out the consequences of

the regulations prescribed for the mating of the guardians, he will

find that the impulses of sex and the family affections connected with

278 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

them are subjected to much severer restraint than any which has

ever been adopted by a Christian society. It is plain that the

governing classes, to whom the regulations are meant to apply,

are expected to find no gratification for the sexual impulses except

on the solemn occasions when they are called on to beget offspring

for the State. The extension of the duties of the " guardian "

to both sexes of itself carries the consequence that these occasions

arise only at long intervals ; and the self-denial implied in the

acceptance of such a rule of life might prove to be even severer

than that imposed on the monk by his vow of chastity, for the very

reason that the inhibition has to be broken through at the time

when the State so commands. Indeed, the overwhelming probability

is that if any society should attempt to enforce on any part of itself

regulations of the kind proposed in the Republic, the attempt would

faU just because of their intolerable severity. No actual ruling

class would be likely to consent to the absolute elimination of the

affections of the family circle from its own life, even if it were

prepared to reduce the gratification of the physical impulses of

sex to the contemplated minimum. The true criticism on the

whole treatment of sex in the Republic is that, like all non-Christian

moralists, rigourist or relaxed, Socrates very much wn^estimates

the significance of sex for the whole of the spiritual life. Whatever

we may think on this point, it is important to remember that at

any rate the general principles which underlie the treatment of

the position of women in Republic v. are no personal " development "

of Plato's ; they belong to the actual Socrates. Aeschines, in the

remains of his Aspasia, agrees with Plato in representing the philo-

sopher as insisting that " the goodness of a woman is the same as that

of a man," and illustrating the thesis by the political abilities of

Aspasia and the military achievements of the Persian " Amazon "

Rhodogyne. 1 Hence the thought that the duties of statesmanship

and warfare should be extended to women must be regarded as

strictly Socratic, and the rest of the proposals of Republic v. are no

more than necessary consequences of this position. If they are to be

rejected, we must refute the assumption on which they are based,

that the distinction of sex is one which only affects the individual in

respect to the part to be played in contributing to procreation and

the rearing of a new generation ; we must be prepared to hold that the

difference goes deeper and modifies the whole spiritual life profoundly.

(7) There arc one or two remarks which may be made about

the plan of moral and religious training laid down in Books II. and

III., as supplementary to the many excellent studies of this part

of the dialogue already in existence. We note that in the proposed

purification of the stories by which religious impressions are to be

communicated to the very young, it is not merely, nor even mainly,

the Homeric mythology to which exception is taken, ' The crowning

offenders are Hesiod and the other theogonists who have related

1 See the fragments of the Aspasia collated in H. Dittmar's Aeschinct

von Sphettos. 275-283.

THE REPUBLIC 279

stories of the violent subversion of older dynasties of gods by

younger. This would, of course, include the Orphicists ; Socrates

has not forgotten that it was they against whom the denunciation

of Adimantus had been more specially directed. It is even more

instructive to observe that the attack on tragedy as propagating

false religious conceptions is directly aimed at Aeschylus, who has

often been mistaken in modern times for an exponent of the religion

of simple-minded Athenians. This means two things. It means

that to the Periclean age, even as late as the time of the peace of

Nicias, Aeschylus was still the great representative of tragedy, in

spite of the popularity and renown of Sophocles, who was clearly

thought of, as he is thought of in Aristophanes' Frogs, as a follower,

though a worthy follower, of the great originator of tragedy. If

Sophocles had in his own day already been recognized as " the

mellow glory of the Attic stage," it would be a mystery why nothing

is said of the very unsatisfactory part played by the gods in such a

work as the King Oedipus. It also means that Socrates is alive

to the fact that Aeschylus is no old-fashioned, simple-minded

worshipper of Apollo of Delphi, or the Olympians generally. In

fact, a " blasphemy " against Apollo is precisely one of the counts

brought against him. If it is " atheism " to represent the Olympians

as practising a questionable morality, Aeschylus, in spite of Dr.

Verrall, is just as much an " atheist " as Euripides, and Socrates

rightly makes the point. 1

(8) Most of the specific criticisms contained in the discussion

of the educational employment of poetry and music are, naturally

enough, negative. Socrates clearly holds quite strongly that the

tendency of the art 61 his own time is to a love of a relaxed and

formless complexity and variety for its own sake, and he thinks

it necessary, in the interests of character, as well as of taste, to

revert to~austerer and more cr classical " standards. It is important

to remember that these strictures are put into tHe mouth of Socrates,

speaking not later than the peace of Nicias.

We must not, then, suppose that they are aimed at epigoni

of a later generation. It is not the floridity of Timotheus or

Agathon which is the object of attack, but the art of the Periclean

age. We are only throwing dust in our own eyes if we suppose

that Socrates wants merely to repress the cheap music-hall and the

garish melodrama, or the equivalents of freak movements like

Dada. He is seriously proposing to censure just what we consider

the imperishable contributions of Athens to the art and literature

of the world, because he holds that they have tendencies which are

1 It would be singularly unlikely that Aeschylus, who had fought at

Marathon, should feel any particular devotion to a god who had " medized "

all through the Persian wars. That he felt none is surely proved by the part

Apollo is made to play all through the Orestean trilogy. The so-called naivete

of Aeschylus, like that of Herodotus, is a product of consummate art. In

one important passage where the poet really is expressing personal religious

conviction he is at pains to tell us that " popular orthodoxy " is against him

(A gam. 757,

280 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

unfavourable to the highest development of moral personality.

The magnitude of the sacrifice is the true measure of the value

he ascribes to the end for which he purposes to make it. We shall

not appreciate his position^ unless we understand quite clearly

_that^ he is in downright earnest with. .the consideration that_the

connexion between aesthetic _ taste and morality is so close .th^t

whatever tends to > ennoble .our aesthetic taste directly tends .to

elevate our character^ and whatever tends to foster a " taste L " for

tKeHebasedln Tart fends equally to deprave a man's whole moral

DeifigT" Whether we share this conviction or not, the recognition

tharSocrates holds it with as little qualification as Ruskin is the

key to the understanding of the whole discussion of early education.

We are allowed also to see incidentally that the suggested reforms

in " musical " education are not meant to be limited to the censure

of what is debased. It is meant that the young " guardian " is to

be subjected from the first to the positive influences of lofty art of

every description. (Painting, embroidery, architecture, and certain

" minor arts " one naturally thinks of the characteristic Athenian

art of pottery as an example are expressly specified, Republic iii.

40 la ff.) The growing boy or girl is to live in an environment of

beauty, and the appreciation of the beauty of the environment

is expected to lead insensibly to appreciation of whatever is morally

lovely and of good report in conduct and character. To Socrates 1

mind the moral employment of such epithets as " fair/' " foul/'

" graceful," " graceless," is no mere metaphor, but a genuine

analogy based on the fact that all sensible beauty is itself the ex-

pression and shadow of an inward beauty of character. 1

(9) Since the whole of the early education contemplated in the

Republic is based on an appeal to taste and imagination, it follows

that, as Socrates is careful to insist, the " goodness " it produces,

though it will be quite sufficient for every class except the statesmen,

is not the true and philosophic goodness of which the Phaedo speaks.

As we are carefully reminded, the self-devotion of even the fighting

force of the reformed city is founded on " opinion," not on know-

ledge ; their virtue is absolute loyalty to a sound tradition which

they have imbibed from their " social environment," not loyalty to

the claims of a summum bonum grasped by personal insight. Thus

the virtue described and analysed in Book IV. is still " popular

virtue " ; its superiority over the goodness of the average Athenian,

the respectability we have heard Protagoras preaching, is due simply

to the superiority of the " social tradition " of the Socratic city

over that of Periclean democracy. There is thus a double reason

1 Besides painting, embroidery, and architecture, the Republic (I.e.) men-

tions weaving, the manufacture of all " vessels " or " furniture " ((r/cevwp), and

appears to allude to gardening. There would be plenty of room in Socrates'

city for the arts of design, if there is not much left for the poet and dramatist.

It is an interesting question whether Socrates may not be right in what is his

evident conviction that the greatest art does require a certain austerity and

severe restriction in the matter of its vehicles of expression. I suggest the

question without wishing to answer it.

THE REPUBLIC 281

why we are bound to regard the picture of philosophers and their

philosophic virtue drawn in the central books as an essential part of

the argument, and to reject any speculations which treat this part

of the Republic as an afterthought. The account of that supreme

goodness which is indistinguishable from knowledge is absolutely

necessary in any presentation of Socratic ethics. And again, since

the statesmen of the Republic have to control and conserve the

national traditions, they must have a goodness which is not simply

the product of those conditions themselves. There would be no

point in subjecting the good soldier to the control of a higher

authority if the loyalty to established tradition which is the

soldier's point of honour were the highest moral principle attainable.

In a Republic without the central books, Sparta would have to

figure not as an example of the second-best, but as the ideal com-

munity itself, whereas the whole point of the description of the

" timocracy " in Book VIII. is that a State like Sparta, where the

qualities of the mere soldier and sportsman are regarded as a moral

ideal, has taken the first fatal step towards complete moral anarchy

and, in the ordinary course of things, must be expected to take those

which follow in due succession.

Recognition that the whole account of the virtues given in Re-

public iv. is thus provisional should save us from attaching too much

importance to the famous doctrine of the " three parts " of the soul.

We must be careful to understand that this doctrine does not profess

to be original nor to be a piece of scientific psychology. We have

already found it presupposed as something known in educated

circles in the Gorgias and Phaedo, and have seen reason to think

that it is Pythagorean in origin, as Posidonius is known to have

maintained, 1 and directly connected with the theory of the " three

lives." This means that we are to take it primarily as a working

account of "active principles/' or " springs of action," which suffi-

ciently describes the leading types of " goodness/' as goodness can

be exhibited in any form short of the highest. The scheme will

thus be excellently applicable to the goodness of the eirucovpot,

for ^their life is still a form, though the worthiest form, of the

<iAoT(/zos /?t'os. Loyalty to " honour/' " chivalry," " ambition "

(though a wholly unselfish ambition), is the utmost we demand of

them ; the life of duty remains for the best of them a struggle

between a " higher " and a " lower," though a struggle in which

the " higher " regularly wins, and this justifies our recognition of a

plurality of " parts of the soul " in them. It will be characteristic

of their experience that there should be conflicts of " desire " with

the tradition of loyalty, and that chivalrous sentiment should be

required to act as the reinforcement of loyalty to tradition in the

conflict. But the familiar Socratic doctrine is that the " philo-

sopher " who has directly gazed for himself on that supreme good

of which the Symposium has told us, necessarily desires the good

he has beheld ; to him " disobedience to the heavenly vision "

1 Buruet, Early Greek Philosophy*, 296 n. 2,

282 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

would be impossible, exactly as in Christian theology sinful volition

is held to be impossible to the saints who actually enjoy the beatific

vision of God. Hence it must follow that, as a description of the

moral life of the philosopher, the doctrine of the distinct " parts "

of the soul becomes increasingly impossible as he makes progress

towards the goal at which his activity is consciously directed. This

is why the last word of Socrates on the doctrine is to remind us

that it may be necessary to revise it when we have grasped the

truth of the " divinity " of the soul (Rep. x. 6nb ff.), and why we

are told, when it is first introduced, that we must not expect to

arrive at exact and certain truth by the line of inquiry we are now

pursuing (iv. 435^). 1 I do not think it needful to say more about

the doctrine here, than to utter a word of warning against two

possible misunderstandings. We must avoid every temptation to

find a parallel between the " parts " or " figures " in the soul and

the modern doctrine of the " three aspects " of a complete " mental

process" (cognition, conation, feeling). Plato is not talking about

" aspects " of this kind, but about rival springs of action, and the

doctrine, as presented in the Republic, has no reference to anything

but action and " active principles/' or " determining motives."

Also we must not make the blunder of trying to identify the

0vju,oei8s with " will." From the Socratic point of view, will

cannot be distinguished from the judgment " this is good," and this

judgment is always, of course, a deliverance of the Xoyio-TLKov. But

the XayurriKov may pronounce a true judgment, or it may be led

into a false one under the influence of present appetite or of anger

or ambition, or again, it may only be saved from false judgment

because the " sense of honour " comes into collision with the

promptings of appetite. To look in the scheme of the Republic

for some facultas electiva, intervening between the formation of a

judgment of " practical thinking " and the ensuing action, would

be to misunderstand its whole character.

(10) We see then why there can never have been a " first

Republic/' including the " guardians " and the scheme for their

early education, but without the philosopher-king and his training

in hard scientific thinking. The philosopher-king is doubly de-

manded as the only adequate embodiment of the Socratic con-

ception of goodness, and also as the authority whose personal

insight into good creates the public tradition by which the rest of

society is to live. To do full justice to the conception we must

not forget that Socrates' statesmen are expected to combine two

1 The suggestion is that in the man who achieves his eternal salvation, the

elements of " mettle " and " concupiscence " are, BO to say, transubstan-

tiated, swallowed up in intellect. (Of course this " intellect " would not be

a " cold, neutral " apprehension of truth, but an intellect on fire with intel-

lectual " passion," a white-hot intelligence.) The same suggestion is made

more openly in the Timaeus (6gc ff.). Since we cannot suppose the Pythag-

orean Timaeus to have learned about the "tripartite soul " for the first time

from the conversation of Socrates two days before, the fact that he makes a

point of the doctrine indicates that Plato regards it as Pythagorean.

THE REPUBLIC 288

characters which are not often united. They are to be original

scientific thinkers of the first order, but equally, they are to be

" saints." In the account of the character which will be demanded

of them and the natural endowments it presupposes, we hear,

indeed, of the qualifications we also should demand of a scientific

genius intellectual quickness, retentive memory and the like but

we hear as much, if not more, of what we should regard as moral

qualifications for sainthood, which may be wanting to a man without

impairing his eminence in science. How serious Socrates is with

this side of the matter is shown by the fact that his philosophers

are to be selected exclusively from the best specimens of young

people who have come out pre-eminently successful from the hard

discipline by which the fighting-force is made. The " auxiliary "

himself, as described in the earlier books, is expected to have all the

moral elevation of Wordsworth's " Happy Warrior/' and the

" Happy Warrior " is, in turn, only the raw material out of which

years of hard intellectual labour will make the philosophic states-

man. If we lose sight of either half of this ideal we shall form a

sadly defective notion of what the Republic means by a " philo-

sopher." By thinking only of the sainthood, we might come to

imagine that the philosopher is a kind of Yogi, bent on a selfish

absorption into the divine calm of the Absolute ; it would then be a

mystery why he is to be trained for his vocation by years of severe

mathematical study, and again why, when he has at last descried

the vision of the good, he should at once be made to devote all his

powers, throughout the prime of his life, to the work of government.

If we think only of the science, and say merely that what is aimed

at is that the highest intellectual attainments shall be employed

in the business of governing the world, we shall be forgetting that

many of the most eminent men of science would have been dis-

qualified for the supreme position in Socrates' city by defects of

character. From the point of view of intellectual eminence we

could think, perhaps, of no names so illustrious as those of Galileo

and Newton. But it may be taken as certain that both would,

by the Socratic standard, be relegated to the class of Si?/uovpy<u.

The moral cheapne^ of the one man's character, the vein of small

egotism in the other's, would debar them from being so much as

ImKovpoi. What we need to understand clearly is that Socrates

holds firmly to two positions at once the position that only a moral

hero or saint is fit to be a supreme ruler of men, and the further

position that discipline in sheer hard thinking, which can only be

won by personal service of science, is the immediate and indis-

pensable path to the direct vision of good which makes the saint

or hero. We are clearly here on Pythagorean ground. The under-

lying thought is just that which seems to have been distinctive

of Pythagoras, the thought that " salvation " or " purification "

of the soul is to be achieved by science (paO-jnaTa), not by a

ritual of ceremonial holiness ; the philosopher-kings embody the

same ideal which had inspired the Pythagorean communities when

284 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

they set to work to capture the government of the cities of Magna

Graecia. There is no reason to doubt that the actual Socrates,

whose standing complaint against Athenian democracy in the

dialogues is that it has no respect, in matters of right and wrong,

for the authority of the " man who knows, 1 ' shared these ideas.

They are avowed by Plato himself in his correspondence, where

they figure as the true explanation of his apparently Quixotic

attempt to make Dionysius II into a possible constitutional

monarch by an education in mathematics. No doubt Plato and

his friends were expecting from science something more than it has

to give, but, as Professor Burnet has said, their proceedings are

unintelligible unless we understand that the expectation was

passionately sincere.

How preoccupation with science was expected to ennoble

character (provided that only the right type of person is allowed

to meddle with it), we see most readily by comparing the courage

pronounced in Book IV. to be all that is wanted of the IviKovpot

with the still higher type of courage declared in Book VI. to be

part of the character of the philosopher. The " courage " de-

manded of the good soldier, in whose make-up Ov^s plays the

leading part, was defined as steadfast loyalty in the face of perils

and seductions to the right opinions inculcated in him by education.

Its foundation is thus allegiance to a code of honour held with such

passion that no fear of pain or death and no bait that can be offered

to cupidity is able to overcome it. Clearly a courage like this

will carry a man " over the top/ 1 make him volunteer for a desperate

enterprise, or win him a V.C. But there are situations in life which

make a demand for a still higher degree of fortitude. It is matter

of experience that a V.C. may not be equal to the task of duty

imposed, for example, on a priest whose business it is to tend daily

the last hours of the victims of some foul pestilence in a plague-

smitten city. Or again a brave soldier, who will face deadly peril

when his " blood is up " and the eyes of his comrades and his

commander are on him, may not have the nerve of the scientific

man who will quietly inoculate himself with some loathsome dis-

order to study its symptoms, or try the effects of some new and

powerful anaesthetic upon himself, in order to decide on its possible

utility in medicine. This is the sort of courage of which Socrates

speaks as only possible to a man who " knows " the relative in-

significance of the duration of any individual personal life from his

habitual " contemplation of all time and all existence." We should,

probably, prefer, both in the case of the priest and in the case of

the man of science, to speak of " faith," but the point is that, in

both cases, the agent is inspired by an absolutely assured personal

conviction about the universal order and his own place in it. With-

out this absolute assurance of conviction, one is never wholly free

from liability to illusion about one's own personal importance,

and so never quite a free man. Because Socrates holds that the

sciences form a ladder which leads up in the end to the vision of the

THE REPUBLIC 285

" Good " as the clue to the whole scheme of existence, he looks to

science, as its supreme service, to make us thus at last completely

free men. From this point of view, clearly in the soul of the man

who " knows/' the " parts " (fwpia) or " figures " (ci&y) which

have been distinguishable at a lower level of moral development

will be finally fused. His life will have only one spring of action

or active principle, his vision of the supreme good itself. The forms

of virtue, at its highest level, will therefore lose their distinction.

It might be possible for the average good civilian, or even for the

good soldier of the State, to be characterized by one form of good-

ness more than by another. This is what is meant by the assign-

ment of different virtues as characteristic to different sections of the

community. It is not meant that so long as the shop-keeper or

the fanner is " temperate/' it does not matter whether he is a

coward. He could not be a good man at all, if he were that, and

a society in which no one had any courage except the members of

the army and police would be morally in a bad way. But fighting

is not the civilian's trade. He will be none the less a valuable

member of society as a shop-keeper or a farmer because he has not

been trained to show all the pluck and presence of mind which

would win a D.S.O. or a V.C., though the State would succumb

in the hour of peril if its fighting-arm had no more martial courage

than the average civilian. But if a man is inspired in all the acts

of his life by the vision of the supreme good, he will be equal to all

the emergencies of life alike ; in having one virtue, he will neces-

sarily have all. Substitute for " the good " God, and the principle

of the unity of the virtues takes on the familiar form Ama et fac

quod vis.

(n) The conception of science as the road to vision of the good

leads us at once to consideration of the central metaphysical doctrine

of the Republic, the doctrine of the " Form of Good " (tSc'a rayaOov).

As is usual when the forms are mentioned in a Platonic dialogue,

their reality is neither explained nor proved. It is taken for granted

that the company in the house of Polemarchus, or at least Glaucon

and Adimantus who conduct the discussion with Socrates, know

quite well what the theory means and will not dispute its truth.

It is assumed also as known to every one that the mathematical

sciences are concerned with forms ; forms are the objects which

we get to know from mathematics, though the mathematician

leads us up to acquaintance with them by starting from the sensible

" figures " which he employs as helps to our imagination. So far,

we are told nothing we have not learned from the Phaedo. But

there are two points of the first importance on which the Republic

adds to that dialogue, (a) We now hear of a certain supreme

" form," the " Good " or " Form of Good/' which is the supreme

object of the philosopher's study. We learn that, over and beyond

the recognized mathematical studies, there is a still more ultimate

discipline, "dialectic," and that it is the function of " dialectic "

to lead directly to this vision of the " good." Further, we are told

288 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

that this " good " is something Socrates cannot describe ; It is not

" reality or being/' but " on the other side " of both, though it is

the source of all the reality (aXrjOeia) and being (ouo-i'a) of every-

thing, (b) The procedure of the mathematical sciences is criticized

and contrasted with that of " dialectic/' with a view to explaining

just why the ideal of science is realized in dialectic and in dialectic

alone. Both points call for some special consideration.

(a) THE FORMS (IMai) IN THE REPUBLIC. From the Phaedo,

among other dialogues, we gather that there is a form corresponding

to each " universal " predicate which can be significantly affirmed

of a variety of logical subjects. The same thing is explicitly said

in the Republic (vi. 5076, x. 5960) ; in the latter place the " form

of bed (K\ivrj) or table " (rpaTrcfa) is given as an example. (This

seems at variance with the well-known statement of Aristotle

that " we "i.e. the Platonists deny that there are " forms " of

artificial things, 1 but we must remember that Aristotle is speaking

of the doctrine as elaborated in the Academy, not of the position

ascribed to Socrates in the dialogues.) But in the Republic we

learn that there is a " Form of Good " which is to the objects of

knowledge and to knowing itself what the sun is to visible objects

and to sight. This is then further explained by saying that the

sun both makes the colours we see and supplies the eye with the

source of all its seeing. In the same way, the " good " supplies

the objects of scientific knowledge with their being (ouo-t'a) and

renders them knowable. And as the sun is neither the colours

we see nor the eye which sees them, so the " good " is something

even more exalted than " being." 2 Later on, we find that the

sciences form a hierarchy which has its culmination in the actual

apprehension of this transcendent " good." 3 Now, since it is

assumed in the Republic that scientific knowledge is knowledge of

forms, the objects which are thus said to derive their being from

" the good " must clearly mean the whole body of the forms.

The " good " thus holds a pre-eminence among forms, and strictly

speaking, it might be doubtful whether we ought to call it a " form "

any more than we can call the sun a colour. At least, all the other

forms must be manifestations or expressions of it. In the Phaedo

nothing was said which would warrant this treatment of the forms

as a hierarchy or ordered series with a first member of such a unique

1 Metaphysics, A. 9916 6, M. io8oa 6.

2 Rep. vi. 5086-5096. For the full understanding of the analogy with the

sun it is necessary to understand the theory of colour-vision implied which is

fully expounded in the Timaeus. A colour is itself a kind of " flame "

(Timaeus, 670 ff.), and the immediate organ of the sight by which it is appre-

hended is also itself a fire, like that of the sun, which is contained in the eye

and issues forth from it in the act of vision (ibid. 456 ft.). Thus the sun, as the

source of light, actually is also the source both of colour and of colour- vision.

The well-known Neoplatonist formula that vovs and rA vorjrd taken together

as inseparable proceed immediately from the supreme reality " the One " is

a perfectly correct transcript of the doctrine of the Republic into the termin-

ology of technical metaphysics.

* Rep. vii.

THE REPUBLIC 287

character ; they appeared rather to be a vast plurality of which

all the members stand on the same footing. Hence it is intelligible

that the view should have been taken that the " good " of the Re~

public represents a Platonic development going far beyond anything

we can attribute to Socrates himself. I think, however, that we

must be careful not to exaggerate on this point. There can, at

least, be no doubt that the " form of good " is identical with the

supreme Beauty, the vision of which is represented in the Symposium

as the goal of the pilgrimage of the philosophic lover. Hence,

though it is true that the name " form of good " occurs nowhere

but in the central section of the Republic, it would not be true to

say that the object named does not appear in the Symposium with

much the same character. Again, though the Phaedo does not

name the " form of good," the phrase ctfios rayaOov is verbally no

more than a periphrase for TO ayaOov (" the good"), just as similar

periphrases occur constantly with the words <vVi9, Suva/us, in Plato. 1

And it is in the Phaedo itself that we are told of Socrates 1 conviction

that the ayaQov KCU Se'ov (the " good and the ought ") is the principle

which " holds everything together," and thus the cause of all order

in the universe. 2 The statements of the Republic merely make the

implications of this passage of the Phaedo a little more explicit.

If the good is the universal cause, it obviously must have just the

character the Republic ascribes to it. Hence Professor Burnet

seems to be right in holding that what is said of the " form of

good " is strictly within the limits of Socratism, and that this

explains the point of contact between Socrates and an Eleatic

like Euclides of Megara. 3 That Socrates finds himself unable to

speak of this form of good except negatively, and that he can only

characterize it positively by an imperfect analogy, is inevitable from

the nature of the case. The same thing may be seen in any philo-

sophy which does not simply deny or ignore the " Absolute " or

supreme source of all reality. Because this source is ex hypothesi

a source of all reality, you are bound to insist that it transcends,

and is thus " wholly other " than, every particular real thing ;

every predicate you affirm of it belongs properly to some of its

effects in contradistinction from others and can therefore only be

asserted of the supreme source " analogically " and with the

warning that the analogy is imperfect and would mislead if pressed

unduly. At the same time, because it is the source of all reality,

every predicate which expresses a " positive perfection " must, in

its degree, characterize the source of all " perfections " and must

be ascribed to it " analogically." All we gain by knowledge of the

" detail " of the universe must add to and enrich our conception

1 To take the first examples which come to hand : Phaedo, gSa 2, a/rJas AXXo

s = another cause ; Phaedrus, 246^ 6, ^ irrepov 5iW/us = " a wing " ; Timaeus,

8, rty rov tru^iaros 0i5a(v=sthe body.

8 The physicists are accused (Phaed. ggc 5) of falsely thinking that rb &ya,0bv

Koi Se'ov auvSei /cal otWx ouScV. As one might say, " they forget that obliga-

tion is the ligature " which connects all things.

* Greek Philosophy, Part I., 168-170.

288 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

of the source of reality, and yet we can never " comprehend " or

completely " rationalize " that source. It remains, when all is

said, an unexhausted and surprising " mystery." Hence the

necessity Christian theology has always felt itself under of incor-

porating the profound agnosticism of the "negative way/' or

" way of remotion," in itself and the grotesque aberrations into

which it has always fallen in the hands of second-rate theologians

who have attempted to know God as one may know the " general

conic." Hence also the tension between the affirmative and the

negative moments in a metaphysic like that of Mr. Bradley. Hence

equally the inevitable failure of " positive science " to complete

its task of explaining everything. To explain everything would

mean to get completely rid of all elements of " bare fact/' to deduce

the whole detail of existence from a body of " laws/' perhaps from

a single " law," in themselves (or itself) " evident to the intellect,"

as Descartes tried to deduce physics from geometry, because

geometry appeared to him to involve no postulates which are not

immediately " evident " as true. In fact, we only " rationalize "

nature, in the sense of eliminating " bare fact " for which no ex-

planation is forthcoming, at one point by reintroducing it somewhere

else, as M. Meyerson has insisted in his series of illuminating works

on the philosophy of the sciences. And it is just because science

is under this restriction that its interest is perennial ; if we could

ever expect to " complete " it, we should have to anticipate a

time when it would no longer interest us. Science is eternally

progressive just because it is always tentative. 1

The language used in the Republic of the " Form of Good," as

the last paragraph has suggested, at once raises the question whether

or not this form can be identified with God, of whom language of

the same kind is used by Christian theologians and philosophers.

We cannot answer this important question correctly except by

making a distinctio sometimes forgotten. If the question means

" is the Form of Good another name for the God recognized in the

Platonic philosophy ? " the answer must be definitely No, for the

reason given by Burnet, that the good is a form, whereas God is

not a form but a " soul," the supremely good soul. When we

come to deal with the Laws, we shall see the importance for Plato's

own thought of this distinction. It is just because his God is not

a form that God can play the part the Platonic philosophy assigns

to Him. But if we mean " is the Good spoken of in the Republic

identical with what Christian divines and philosophers have meant

1 The last word on the question whether the philosophy of the Republic

and the dialogues generally is " rationalism " or not is briefly this. If we

could fully comprehend " the good " we should see directly that it is through

and through intelligible, and the only object which is wholly and perfectly

intelligible ; as we never can comprehend it completely, there is, in fact,

always something mysterious, not yet understood, about it. It is free from

all self-contradiction, but it always contains " surprises " for us. We can

" see into it " to some extent, and it is the philosopher's duty to see further

and further into it ; but you will never " see through it."

THE REPUBLIC 289

by God ? " the answer must be modified. In one most important

respect it is. The distinguishing characteristic of the " Form of

Good " is that it is the transcendent source of all the reality and

intelligibility of everything other than itself. Thus it is exactly

what is meant in Christian philosophy by the ens realissimum, and

is rightly regarded as distinct from and transcendent of the whole

system of its effects or manifestations. And, as in the ens

realissimum of Christian philosophers, so in the " Form of Good "

the distinction, valid everywhere else, between essentia and esse,

So-Sein and Sein, falls away. In other language, it transcends

the distinction, too often treated as absolute, between value and

existence. It is the supreme value and the source of all other

value, and at the same time it is, though " beyond being," the

source of all existence. This explains why, when a man at last

comes in sight of it at the culmination of his studies in " dialectic,"

it is supposed to be grasped by direct vision, and for that reason is

strictly " ineffable." Neither Plato nor anyone else could tell

another man what the good is, because it can only be apprehended

by the most incommunicable and intimate personal insight. Thus,

as it seems to me, metaphysically the Form of Good is what Christian

philosophy has meant by God, and nothing else. From the Christian

standpoint, the one comment which would suggest itself is that

since, on Socrates 1 own showing, the distinction between essence

and existence falls away in the good, it should not properly be

called one of the forms at all, and hence Socrates and Plato are not

fully alive to the significance of their own thought when they speak

of a " God " who is a \l/vxy and thus on a lower level of " reality "

than the good. Their form of theism is only necessitated because,

in fact though not in words, they are still haunted by a feeling

that the good is, after all, a " value " or an essentia, and needs

some intermediate link to connect it up with the hierarchy of

" realities " or " existents." On this point the last word of Greek

constructive thought was said not by Plato but by Plotinus and

Proclus. (Of course, also, we must remember that a specifically

Christian philosophy is determined in its attitude towards the

theistic problem by the fact that Christianity is an historical re-

ligion. It starts with the fact of the " Word made flesh/ 1 itself a

coalescence of existence and value, and to preserve its Christian

character, it is bound to be true to that starting-point in its whole

metaphysical construction.)

(6) THE CRITICISM OF THE SCIENCES. In studying the criticism

Socrates passes upon the sciences and his theory about their limi-

tations, we must not be misled by t'he fact that he deals throughout

only with the various branches of mathematics as recognized in

the fifth century. This was inevitable because he had before him

no other examples of systematic and organized knowledge. In

principle what he has to say is readily applicable to the whole

great body of more " concrete " sciences which has grown up since

his own day. If we speak of his comments as a criticism on the

290 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

mathematical method, we must understand the phrase "mathematical

method " in the same wide sense in which it is to be understood

in reading Descartes, as meaning simply the method which aims

at knowing exactly what its initial assumptions mean, and at

deducing their implications exactly and in the right order. This

is the method of all genuine science whatsoever ; there is nothing

in it, as Descartes rightly insisted, which involves any restriction

to the special subject-matter, " number aitd quantity " (and, in

fact, pure mathematics themselves have long ago outgrown the

restriction). The point of the criticisms is that the p.aOr)p.ara

themselves do not and cannot succeed in being absolutely true to

the ideal of method they set before themselves. This is why we

find that if we are to pursue the path of science to the end, we are

driven to recognize the reality of " dialectic " as the crowning

science of all sciences, and to demand that the existing fj.aOrjp.ara

shall themselves be reconstituted on a more certain basis by the

light of the dialectician's results. The recognition of this necessity

may well belong to the actual Socrates, since the most sensational

thing in the whole history of fifth-century science had been the

demonstration by the dialectician Zeno that the postulates of

mathematics, as hitherto prosecuted by the Pythagoreans, contra-

dict one another. 1 To save mathematical science in the face of

Zeno's arguments it became necessary in the fourth century to

reconstruct the whole system, and the reconstruction is preserved

for us in the Elements of Euclid. The men by whom the actual re-

construction was done, Eudoxus, Theaetetus, and their companions,

so far as they are known to us, were all associates of Plato himself

in the Academy, and it is quite certain that this revision of the

accepted first principles of mathematics was one of the chief

problems to which the school devoted itself. In the Republic,

which is concerned with the fifth century, we naturally hear nothing

about the way in which the difficulty was subsequently met, but

we are allowed to hear of the imminent need that the work should

be done.

The main thought is quite simple. In all the sciences the objects

we are really studying are objects which we have to think but

cannot see or perceive by any of our senses. Yet the sciences

throughout direct attention to these objects, which are, in fact,

forms, by appealing in the first instance to sense. The geometer

draws a figure which he calls a " square " and a line which he calls

v

1 To take one of the simplest examples : you cannot advance a step in

elementary geometry without recognizing that any terminated straight line

can be bisected, and there is no doubt that the Pythagorean geometers

made the assumption. But it is also one of their assumptions that points are

" units having position." If this is so, since a " unit " cannot be split, when I

" bisect AB at C " ; C cannot be a " point of AB," and, in fact, cannot be a

" point " at all. Thus one at least of the assumptions, " a straight line can

be bisected at " a point," " a point is a unit having position," must be false.

But the Pythagorean geometer cannot see his way to do without either. A1J

Zeno's " antinomies " are of this type.

THE REPUBLIC 291

its " diagonal." But when he demonstrates a proposition about

the square and its diagonal, the objects of which he is speaking

are not this visible figure and this visible line but the square and the

diagonal, and these, of course, we do not see except "with the

mind's eye " (vi. 510^-0). (It would not even be true to say, like

Berkeley, that what he is talking about is this visible figure and

an indefinite plurality of others which are " like " it, for the simple

reason that we can construct no visible figure at all which exactly

answers to his definition of a "square.") Further, all through

his reasoning the geometer or arithmetician depends on certain

" postulates " (vwofoWs) of which he " gives no account "

(Ao'yoq), such as the " postulate " that every number is either odd

or even, or that there are just three kinds of angle. It is meant

that these postulates are neither immediately self-evident, nor is

any proof given of them. They are " synthetic " in Kant's sense

of the word, and they are assumed without proof (vi. $ioc-d).

Thus there are two initial restrictions on the thinking of the mathe-

maticians, as represented by the existing state of their science.

They depend upon sensible things like diagrams as sources of

suggestion, though not as the objects of their demonstrations.

What cannot be " illustrated " or " represented " to the eye falls

outside the scope of their science. And they make no attempt to

reach real self-evidence in their initial postulates. They show

that their theorems follow by logical necessity from a group of

unproved premisses, but they do not undertake to show that there

is any necessity to admit these premisses themselves. Thus the

whole body of conclusions is left, so to say, hanging in the air.

The geometer's " results " in the end rest on a tacit agreement

(6/AoAoyta) between himself and his pupil or reader that the question

whether his assumptions are justifiable shall not be asked. In

strictness we cannot call the results " knowledge " so long as the

assumptions from which they have been deduced are thus left

unexamined (vii. 533s). 1

This suggests to us at once the possibility and necessity of a

higher and more rigorous science, " dialectic." Such a science

would differ from the sciences in vogue in two ways : (i) it would

treat the initial postulates of the sciences as mere starting-points

to be used for the discovery of some more ultimate premisses which

are not " postulated," but strictly self-luminous and evident

a real " principle of everything," and when it had

1 We may readily supply further examples in illustration of the two points

on which Socrates dwells. Thus the notion that the visible diagram is either

the object about which the geometer reasons, or at any rate, a necessary

source of suggestion, is dispelled by the elementary consideration that e.g. a

work on Conies commonly begins with propositions about the properties of the

" general conic." But you cannot draw even a rough diagram of a " general

conic." So the other point is well illustrated by the labour spent for cen-

turies on trying to show that what we now know to be the arbitrary Euclidean

postulate of parallels (that non-intersecting straight lines in the same piano

are equidistant) is a necessity of thought.

292 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

discovered such a principle (or principles), it would then deduce

the consequences which follow ; (2) and in this movement no

appeal would be made to sensible aids to the imagination, the double

process of ascent to the " starting-point of everything " and descent

again from it would advance from " forms by means of forms to

forms and terminate upon them " (vi. 5ii6-c). In fact, we may

even say that " dialectic " would " destroy " (dvatpetv) the postu-

lates of the existing sciences (ras viroOta-us avaipovo-a, vii. 533c),

that is, it would deprive them of the character of ultimate postu-

lates by showing that so far as they are not actually false, as

they may turn out to be they are consequences of still more

ultimate truths.

In this account of the aims of dialectic we recognize at once the

method described in the Phaedo as that of tricei/us cv Xdyot? on

which Socrates had fallen back after his disillusionment about

Anaxagoras. Only here the special emphasis is thrown on just

that side of the dialectic method which the immediate purposes of

the Phaedo permitted us to dismiss in a single sentence. We are

contemplating the procedure there said to be necessary if anyone

disputes an initial " postulate." In that case, the Phaedo told us,

our " postulate " will require to be itself deduced as a consequence

from one more ultimate, and the process will have to be repeated

until we come to a postulate which all parties are content to accept.

In the last resort this would, of course, involve deduction from some

principle which can be seen to possess unquestionable internal

necessity. Thus, so far, the Republic agrees exactly with the

Phaedo about the task of " dialectic," except that it lays special

stress on just that part of it which had not to be taken into account

in the Phaedo because the company there were all willing to admit

the doctrine of forms as a " postulate " without demanding any

justification of it. It is clear from the Republic that if a disputant

should refuse to make this admission, the theory of forms itself

would require to be examined in the same way in which the postu-

lates of the mathematician von Fach are to be investigated. In

the one passage of the dialogues where any such examination is

made, it is not put into the mouth of Socrates but into that of the

Pythagorean Timaeus (Tim. 516 7 ff.).

Though Socrates naturally confines himself to criticisms of the

sciences which had attained some degree of organization in his

own day, it is obvious that they would apply with equal force to

any others. Physics, chemistry, biology, economics are all full of

undefined " primitive notions " and undemonstrated assumptions,

and it is part of the work of the students of these sciences themselves

to make a steady effort to ascertain just what their untested pre-

suppositions are, and to consider how far they are really required,

and how far they form a consistent system. The progress made

by pure mathematics in the last half -century has largely consisted

in a more accurate and complete statement of the " primitive

notions " and ** indemonstrable postulates " of the science and the

THE REPUBLIC 298

elimination of numerous conscious or tacit " postulates " as actually

false. Thus, for example, the process by which the Infinitesimal

Calculus has been purged of bad logic and false assumptions, or

the development of " non-Euclidean geometry,' 1 is an excellent

illustration of the self-criticism and self-correction of thought which

Socrates and Plato call " dialectic. " Socrates 1 complaint (vii.

5330) about the mathematician who gives the name of science to a

procedure in which the starting-point is something one does not

know, and the conclusion and the intermediate steps "combina-

tions of things one does not know," would be a perfectly correct

description of the contents of any average text-book of the Calculus

in vogue seventy years ago. And it is manifest that the same sort

of scrutiny is required by such notions as " force/ 1 " accelera-

tion/' "atomicity," "evolution," "price." They are all inevit-

ably in practical use long before the sciences which employ them

have formulated any very precise account of their meaning, ^nd

the progress of science as science (as distinct from its application

to " commerce ") consists very largely in the steady correction of

our first crude attempts to explain what we mean by them. The

physicist of to-day may, like Democritus, make the " atomic

structure of matter " a foundation-stone of his science, but he

means by his " atom " something Democritus would not have

recogriized as " atomic " at all. Similarly we all talk of the " evolu-

tion " of species, but the view that new species originate by sudden

and considerable " mutations," if established, would change the

whole character of the special " Darwinian " postulate about the

character of the process ; it would involve exactly what Socrates

means by a " destruction " of the postulate. Thus, so far, we may

say that what the Republic calls " dialectic " is, in principle, simply

the rigorous and unremitting task of steady scrutiny of the in-

definables and indemonstrables of the sciences, and that, in par-

ticular, his ideal, so far as the sciences with which he is directly

concerned goes, is just that reduction of mathematics to rigorous

deduction from expressly formulated logical premisses by exactly

specified logical methods of which the work of Peano, Frege, White-

head, and Russell has given us a magnificent example.

But the " reduction of all pure mathematics to logic " is only

a part, and not the most important part, of what the Republic

understands by " dialectic." Such a unification of the sciences

as the Republic contemplates would require a combination of the

reduction of mathematics to logic with the Cartesian reduction of

the natural sciences to geometry. When the task was finished, no

proposition asserting "matter of fact," devoid of internal necessity,

should appear anywhere among the premisses from which our con-

clusions are ultimately drawn. The first principles to which the

dialectician traces back all our knowledge ought to exhibit a self-

evident necessity, so that science would end by transforming all

" truths of fact " into what Leibniz called " truths of reason."

This involves a still more significant extension of the range of

294 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

"science." It implies that in a completed philosophy the dis-

tinctions between value and fact, essentia and esse, So-sein and Sein

are transcended. The man who has attained " wisdom " would see

that the reason why anything is, and the reason why it is what it is,

are both to be found in the character of an ens realissimum of which

it is self-evident that it is and that it is what it is, a self-explanatory

" supreme being/ 1 This is why dialectic is said to culminate in

direct apprehension of " the good " as the source of both existence

and character. The thought is that all science in the end can be

transformed into a sort of " algebra," but an algebra which is,

as Burnet says, teleological. The demand for such a science is, in

fact, already contained by implication in the remark of Socrates in

the Phaedo that he hoped to find in Anaxagoras a solution of the

problem of the shape and position of the earth based on proof that

" it is best " that it should have just that shape and position and

no^ other (Phaedo qjd-e). When a modern biologist explains the

structure of an organism by the notion of " adaptation " to its

environment he is thus using on a small scale the principle which the

Republic would make the supreme universal principle of all scientific

explanation whatsoever. Only, of course, the biological concep-

tion of " adaptation " stops short with a relative best ; the par-

ticular environment of a particular species is taken as (relatively)

constant and independent ; the " best " realized in the develop-

ment of the species is adequate adaptation to that given environ-

ment. When the principle is made universal, the " best " becomes

an ethical and absolute best, since no place is left for an " environ-

ment " of everything. The " goodness of God," or its equivalent,

takes the place of the fixed " environment " as that to which the

structure of things is conceived as " adapted."

We need not suppose that Plato imagined this programme

for the completion of science as capable of actual execution by

human beings. We have learned from the Symposium that " philo-

sophy " itself is a life of progress, it is not those who are already

in possession of "wisdom," but those who are endeavouring after

it, who philosophize. The Timaeus reminds us with almost weari-

some repetition that, in physical science in particular, all our

results are inevitably provisional, the best we can reach with our

present lights, and that we must be prepared to see them all super-

seded or modified. One of the standing contrasts between Plato

and his great disciple Aristotle is just that this sense of the pro-

visionality and progressiveness of science is so prominent in the

one and so absent from the other. Plato never assumes, as Aristotle

was so apt to assume, that he can do the world's scientific thinking

for it once for all. This apparent finality, which made Aristotle

so attractive to the thinkers of the thirteenth century, who were

just recovering the thought of " Nature " as a field for study on her

own account, makes the real value of Aristotle's science rather

difficult for us to appreciate to-day. Plato was far too true to the

Socratic conception of the insignificance of human knowledge by

THE REPUBLIC 295

comparison with the vastness of the scientific problem to fall into

the vein of cheap and easy dogmatism. But though the final

" rationalization " of things may be an unattainable goal, there is

no reason why we should not try to get as near to the goal as we

can. If we cannot expel the element of " brute fact " for which we

can see no reason from science, we may try, and we ought to try,

to reduce it to a minimum. We cannot completely " mathematize "

human knowledge, but the more we can mathematize it, the better.

We shall see, when we come to speak of Plato's oral teaching in the

Academy, how earnestly he set himself to carry out the programme

by getting behind the mere assumption of the forms as the last

word in philosophy, and deducing the forms themselves from the

" good/ 1

(c) It should be unnecessary to dwell on the point that, with all

his devotion to this demand for a critical metaphysic of the sciences,

Plato is no champion of a mere vita contemplativa divorced from

practical social activity. One could not even say that he, like

Kant, conceives of " speculative " and " practical " reason as

active in two distinct spheres of which one is subordinated to the

other. To his mind, the two spheres are inseparable. The uni-

fication of science is only possible to one who is illuminated by the

vision of the Good which is the principle of the unification, and the

Good is only seen by the man who lives it. Hence the demand that

the " philosopher " shall devote the best years of his working life

to the arduous practice of governing, in all its details great or small,

is only the other side of the conviction that without the " heroic "

character no one will ever rise to the supreme rank in science itself.

The " philosopher " is necessarily a missionary and a sort of lesser

Providence to mankind because, on Socratic principles, the " Good "

cannot be seen without drawing all who see it into its service. The

" philosophers' " social activity is all the more effective that it is

not pursued directly for its own sake, in the spirit of the well-

meaning but tiresome persons of our own day who take up " social

work " as they might take up typewriting or civil engineering, but

issues naturally and inevitably, as a sort of " by-product,' 1 from

their aspiration after something else, just as the " great inventions "

of modern times regularly issue from the discoveries of men who

were not thinking at all of the applications of science to convenience

and commerce, or as art, literature, social life have all owed an

incalculable debt to St. Francis and his " little brethren," who never

gave a thought to any of them.

(12) This desultory chapter may be brought to an end by a few

remarks on the impressive picture of Republic viii.-ix. about the

stages of progressive degeneration through which personal and

national character pass as the true ideal of life falls more completely

out of view. It should be obvious that the primary interest of these

sketches is throughout ethical, not political. The " imperfect "

constitutions are examined in order to throw light on the different

phases of personal human sinfulness, not in the interests of a theory

296 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

of political institutions. We see the sinfulness of even " honour-

able " ambition or " business principles," when they are made the

mainspring of a man's life, more clearly by considering the type

of national character exhibited by a community in which these

motives determine the character of national life. Socrates is still

adhering to his declared purpose of using the " larger letters "

to decipher the smaller. In the sketches themselves, Socrates is

all through " drawing with his eye on the object." We are told

in so many words that Sparta has furnished the model for the

picture of the second-best society, where education is neglected and

the highest moral ideal is to display the character of a good fighting-

man and sportsman, i.e. the society in which " honourable ambition/'

the pursuit of the cursus honor urn, is thought the supreme virtue.

As mankind go, a community of this kind is not a bad one ; it is

morally in a much healthier state than a society where every one

regards " getting rich " as the great aim in life, and the " merchant

prince " is the national hero. Rome, in its better days, would be

an example of the kind of society intended, no less than Sparta.

The point of Socrates' criticism is that when " ambition " becomes

master instead of servant, it is not likely to remain " honourable "

ambition, ambition to " serve." From the first, the ambition of

the " timocratic " State has not been aspiration to be pre-eminent

in the best things ; at their best, the Spartans made a very poor

contribution to the positive pursuit of the highest life. When

they were not at their best, their " ambition " took the form of

mere devotion to military success ; and at their worst, ihey were

mere aspirants to the exercise of power and the accumulation of

the wealth to be got by " empire," as the " timocratic man," in

his old age, degenerates into the kind of character who is greedy

of the power money will give him. It ought to have been im-

possible to find any idealization of Sparta in the picture. As I have

written elsewhere, it would be truer to say that in the Republic

we discern the shadows of the third-century ephors and of Nabis

behind the " respectable " figure of Agesilaus.

It is generally admitted that the picture of the " democratic "

city where every one does as he pleases, and the most typical of

citizens is the gifted amateur who plays, as the mood takes him,

at every kind of life from that of the voluptuary to that of the

ascetic a sort of Goethe, in fact is a humorous satire on Athenian

life and manners. Of course we should be alive to the further point

that the satire would be wholly beside the mark if directed against

the drab and decent bourgeois Athens of Plato's manhood. The

burlesque is aimed directly against the Imperial democracy of the

spacious days of Pericles when Athens was a busy home of world-

commerce and the " new learning." If we read the description

side by side with the famous Funeral Oration in Thucydides, we

shall see at once that the very notes of Athenian life which Pericles

there selects as evidence of its superiority are carefully dwelt upon

by Socrates for the opposite purpose of proving that, for all its

THE REPUBLIC 297

surface brilliancy, such a life is at bottom so diseased that society

is on the verge of complete collapse. I, at least, cannot avoid the

conviction that Socrates sees in just what must have been the great

charm of Athens for men like Sophocles, Protagoras, Herodotus its

apparently inexhaustible variety and freshness the unmistakable

" symptoms of the end/ 1 1 (Perhaps he was not very far wrong.

What would probably have been the issue of the Penclean age if

Alcibiades, the incarnation of its energy and versatility, had returned

triumphant from the subjugation of Sicily ? One may " hazard a

wide solution/')

We are given no hint of the source from which the picture of

the intermediate society, where wealth is the great title to admira-

tion and " merchant princes " control the national destiny, is

taken. But I do not doubt that we can name the State which

Plato has in mind. When we remember that, as we see from

allusions in the Laws and in Aristotle's Politics, 2 there were just

three cities whose constitutions impressed Greek thinkers by their

appearance of being framed on definite principles Sparta, Crete,

and Carthage. I think it may safely be assumed that Carthage

has supplied the hints for the Venice or Amsterdam of the Re-

public, just as we may presume that Socrates has the Carthaginians

more than anyone else in fnind in the earlier passage where he

remarks on the exceptional aptitude of " Phoenicians " for com-

merce. The subsequent history of Carthage during the first two

Punic wars affords an interesting commentary on what is said

about the internal dissensions which paralyse the " oligarchical

city/' On the concluding argument, by which the life of respect

for right is pronounced far superior in happiness to the life of sating

one's cupidities and ambitions, 3 there is no need to say much. The

reasoning is that we have already met in the Gorgias, and turns on

the application of the medical formula of " depletion and recovery

from depletion " to the moral life. The " passions," like the

physical appetites of hunger and thirst, are capable of no permanent

and progressive satisfaction. You feed full to-day, but to-morrow

finds you as hungry again as though to-day had never been. What

you mistake for happiness has been only the temporary arrest of

a " depletion/' On the other hand, what you gain in knowledge

1 Cf. V. Soloviev's saying that " visible and accelerated progress is a symp-

tom of the end/'

a Arist. Politics, B n (12726 24 ff. ; note that Aristotle too comments

on the "plutocracy " of the Carthaginian scheme, and plutocracy is what is

meant by " oligarchy " in the Republic). For a reference to Carthage in the

Laws, see Laws, 674*1, written, no doubt, after Plato's association with affairs

in Sicily had made Carthage very much of an actuality to him. Commerce

made Carthage an object of interest to Athens in the Periclean age (Aristoph.

Knights, 174), and it has been plausibly suggested that the great plague of

the third year of the Archidamian war was brought to Athens from Carthage

by infected merchandise.

8 Republic, ix. 5836 ff . Cf .

" ' Mete unto wombe and worn be eek unto mete,

Shall God destroyen bothe/ as Paulus seith."

298 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

and goodness is not won to-day to be " excreted " by the time to-

morrow is upon you. It is permanently acquired. It is not

with character and intellect as it is with bodily health, which is

a mere balance between antithetic processes of waste and repair ;

character and intellect are KT^ara cs aUi. This is the reason

for the distinction between the " false " pleasures of sensuality and

ambition and the "true" pleasures of the philosophic life.

The former are "false," not in the sense that they are not

really felt, but in the sense that they are not what they

promise to be. " Alle Lust will Ewigkeit," but no Ewigkeit is to be

got out of the jSibs <iA.ocra)ju,aTos or the /fc'os <iA(m/x.o9, a truth

which no special pleading for Hedonism can explain away. I wil ]

add one final caution against possible misinterpretation. Plato

credits the " three lives " with distinctive pleasures, much as Mill

talks of a distinction of " higher " and " lower " in pleasure. 1

But he gives a rational reason for his preference of the " philo-

sopher's " pleasure where Mill gives an absurd one. Mill tries to

persuade his readers that a jury of pleasure-tasters devoid of all

moral principle would be unanimous in preferring the philosopher's

pleasures, or, alternatively, that the dissentients may be disabled

as no genuine connoisseurs. 2 Plato gives the right reason for the

preference, that the issue is one which must be decided by " in-

telligence," and it is just intelligence which the philosopher has and

his rivals have not. This is what John Grote also meant when he

said that Mill's argument is based on a misconception of our reason

for attaching weight to the philosopher's verdict. We go to him

not as Mill assumes, for evidence, but for authority?

See further :

NETTLESHIP, R. L. " Lectures on the Republic of Plato "

(vol. ii. of Philosophical Remains) ; Plato's Conception oj

Goodness and the Good ; The Theory of Education in Plato's

Republic in Hellenica *, 61-165.

NATORP, P. Platons Ideenlehre, 175-215.

RITTER, C. Platon, ii. 3-39, 554-641 al. ; Platons Staat, Darstel-

lung des Inhalts. (Stuttgart, 1909.)

RAEDER, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 181-245.

BARKER, E. Greek Political Theory : Plato and his Predecessors,

145-268.

STEWART, J. A. Myths of Plato, 133-172 (Myth of Er), 471-474

(Myth of the Earth-born] ; Plato's Doctrine of Ideas, 47-62.

SHORE Y, P. Plato's Republic. (London and New York, Vol. I.

1930, Vol. II. I935-)

DIES, A. Introduction to the edition of the dialogue in the

Collection des Universite's de France. (Paris, 1932.)

1 Republic, 5820-0.

1 Mill's plea is a perfect example of the kind of argument the Greeks called

a Aoyos dvTiarp<f>a)v, i.e. one which makes for neither party, because it can

be equally well applied by the other. If the sage disables the judgment of

the profligate on the plea that he must have lost the taste for the " higher

pleasures " before he can prefer the lower, the profligate can equally retort on

the sage with the adage about sour grapes. " You have taken to philosophy,"

he may say, " because you are physically too old to enjoy debauchery."

* Examination of the Utilitarian Philosophy, p. 47.

CHAPTER XII

THE PHAEDRUS 1

THE Phaedrus presents a double difficulty to the student of

Plato's work as a whole. What is its proper place in the

series of the dialogues ? And what is its purpose ? Is it,

as it professes to be, a discussion of the principles upon which

" rhetoric" (prose style) may be made into a " science," or is its

real subject Eros ? Is Plato primarily concerned with the question

of the use and abuse of sexual passion, or are the speeches Socrates

delivers on this topic merely examples of the right and the wrong

use of persuasive eloquence ?

The first question, on examination, proves capable of being

narrowed down to one which we may regard as of minor importance.

No serious student of Platonic style now defends the singular theory

of some critics in classical antiquity that the prominence of Eros

in the dialogue and the loaded rhetoric of Socrates' encomium

on him prove the work to be a youthful writing, perhaps the earliest

of all the dialogues. 2 It is matter of common agreement that, on

stylistic grounds, the dialogue cannot be placed earlier than those

works of Plato's maturity as a writer with which we have been

dealing in the last four chapters ; it cannot be far removed from

the great quadrilateral in point of date. But there still remains

the question whether it may be earlier than some of these four, or

whether it is later than all of them. In particular, we have to ask

whether the Phaedrus is earlier or later than the Republic. Argu-

ments from stylometry cannot be wholly trusted in this case, since

it is manifest that many of the peculiarities of language are due to

deliberate imitation. On the whole, the stylometrists appear to be

satisfied that the Phaedrus is the later of the two works, and this

view is plausibly supported by the contention urged by H. Raeder,

that some of the details of the mythical part of the dialogue are

hardly intelligible except on the assumption that its readers would

be familiar with Republic v. and the concluding myth of Republic x.

I do not myself find the argument conclusive. 3 On the other hand,

1 On the problems connected with the dialogue, see inter cetera Thompson,

Phaedrus, Introduction; C. Ritter, Platon, i. 256; H. Raeder, Platons philoso-

phische Entwickelung, 245 ff.

1 Diogenes Laertius (iii, 25) mentions the theory ; Olympiodorus repeats

the story as a fact.

8 Raeder sees in the mention of the " journey of a thousand years " on

which the soul enters after each incarnation (Phaedrus, 2490) a reference to

the fuller explanation in the Republic (6i5a). This is inconclusive, since the

299

800 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

as we shall see in the next chapter, there is convincing reason for

thinking that the Theaetetus, which pretty certainly opens the group

of dialogues of Plato's later life, was not written until about twenty

years after the Republic and its immediate fellows, and it is perhaps

hard to believe that so great a writer as Plato was absolutely silent

through so long a period. Hence I have nothing to set against the

conclusions of recent eminent scholars on the point, and would

merely remark that the priority of the Republic is not absolutely

demonstrable, and also that, in view of the difference in spirit

between Republic and Theaetetus, we must fairly suppose the

Phaedrus, if the composition falls in the interval between those two

dialogues, to have been written early rather than late in the interval.

The other problem is more difficult, and I would recommend

the reader to suspend his judgment on it until he has followed our

analysis of the dialogue. My own opinion is on the side of those

who regard the right use of "rhetoric " as the main topic, for the

following simple reason. In Socrates, with whom the " tendance

of the soul " was the great business of life, it is quite intelligible

that a discussion of the use of rhetoric or anything else should be

found to lead up to the great issues of conduct. If the real subject

of the Phaedrus were sexual love, it is hard to see how its elaborate

discussion of the possibility of applying a scientific psychology

of the emotions to the creation of a genuine art of persuasion, or

its examination of the defects of Lysias as a writer, can be anything

but the purest irrelevance.

In structure the dialogue is of the simplest type. Socrates falls

in with Phaedrus who is, under medical advice, taking a consti-

tutional in the country outside the city walls, and, for the sake of

his company, joins him, departing for once from his preference for

the streets of the town. He soon persuades Phaedrus to sit down

by the bank of the Ilissus under the shade of a plane tree ; the

conversation which ensues takes place here and is strictly tete-a-tete.

As for the supposed date of the conversation, it can be approximately

fixed by the opening sentences. Lysias, who figures as a mere lad

in the Republic, is now at the height of his fame as a writer of Aoyot

(228a), and is living at Athens (2276). We may add the further

detail that Polemarchus is also alive and, according to Socrates,

" has betaken himself to philosophy " (2576), also that Isocrates,

though still young, is already rivalling Lysias in his profession ;

Socrates anticipates that he may either throw Lysias and all former

professors of it into the shade, or even aspire to a still higher calling,

period seems in both cases to be taken over from current Orphic mythology.

So the reference to the " lots " which play a part in assigning a new body to

the soul (Phaedrus ,2 496) need not be to Republic 6ijd, since the K\ijpoi appear to

be Orphic (Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy 3 , 190 n. 3). Still less convincing is

the argument that the Phaedrus tacitly presupposes the doctrine of the " parts

of the soul " expounded in Republic iv., since this is equally true of the Goreias,

as we have seen, and the doctrine appears to be a piece of fifth-century Pytnag-

oreanism. Raeder's other arguments are complicated by the assumption

that the dialogue contains a polemic against Isocrates. On this vide infra.

THE PHAEDRUS 801

for " there really is philosophy in him " (2790). The conversation

thus falls at some date between 411, when Polemarchus and Lysias

returned to Athens from Thurii, and the year of anarchy, 404-3,

when Polemarchus fell a victim to the " Thirty." The tradition

was that Isocrates was some seven years older than Plato, so that

his birth would fall about 435 B.C. ; as he survived the battle of

Chaeronea (338 B.C.), he cannot well have been born much if any

earlier; hence he would be about twenty-four in 411 and thirty-one

in the " year of anarchy/ 1 A date intermediate between 411 and

404 is thus required by the supposed facts. We note then that

Phaedrus must now be between five and twelve years older than

when we met him in the Symposium ; no lad (for he figured in the

Protagoras), but a man at least approaching forty 1 ; Socrates is a

ytpwv, a man of at least sixty^ and perhaps more.

When Socrates falls in with Phaedrus, the time of day is already

close on noon (this explains why the pair so soon take rest under the

plane-tree). Phaedrus has spent the early morning listening to a

brilliant and paradoxical Aoyos we should call it an essay by

Lysias in defence of the thesis that a lad should be kinder to a

wooer who is not " in love " than to one who is. He has the written

text with him, and Socrates professes to believe that he is taking

his solitary stroll for the express purpose of getting it by heart.

The main point of the short and playful conversation between

Socrates and Phaedrus as they make their way to the place they

have chosen for their siesta (227-230) is to pitch the ethical key

for what is to follow. Socrates is not interested in the " rationaliza-

tion of myths/' like that of Boreas and Orithyia, because he is pre-

occupied with a graver problem, that of learning to " know him-

self " ; he is indifferent to the charms of the country, because the

trees, unlike the men he meets in the streets, can " teach him

nothing " that bears on this supreme topic, the moral being of man.

These remarks prepare us for the moral earnestness with which the

merits of Lysias's essay and the possibilities of rhetoric are to be

treated in the body of the dialogue.

THE ESSAY OF LYSIAS (2300-2340). It has been disputed

whether the discourse Phaedrus proceeds to read is an authentic

composition of Lysias or a brilliant imitation of his style by Plato

himself. There is no evidence either way, but for my own part, I

feel that we must agree with those scholars, including Lysias'

latest editor, Hude, who regard the essay as genuine. No one

doubts Plato's ability to compose a Xoyos for Lysias with perfect

fidelity to the style of the supposed author. But, since the dialogue

ends with severe and formal censure of Lysias, founded on a search-

ing criticism of the Arfyog, I find it difficult to believe that the

document is an invention. It would be self-stultifying to publish

a severe criticism of a well-known author based on an imitation of

him which the critic had composed for his own purposes and could

1 The same point is taken by Parmentier, Bulletin de I' association Guillaunw

No. 10, p. 4.

302 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

not expect readers to take as authentic. One might as well suppose

that Berkeley could have made the point he wants to make in

Alciphron about the false glitter and shallowness of Shaftesbury

by composing an imitation of the Characteristics. Plato's purpose,

like Berkeley's, demands that the attack should be made on work

which is both genuine and admired by the circles whose literary

and moral false taste is to be exposed. Hude seems to me fully

justified in printing the discourse as part of his text of Lysias.

The thesis of Lysias, we must remember, would be an offensive

paradox even to the section of Athenian society which practised

" unnatural " aberrations. The fashionable theory was that the

relations in question are ennobled when they are inspired by genuine

" romantic " attachment, but not otherwise, as is taken for granted

by the encomiasts of them in the Symposium. To suffer the

advances of an cpacrn?? from calculations of advantage was regarded

as the basest thing a Greek lad could do. For a modern parallel

to the paradox we might imagine a clever essay written to show that

Tom Jones's conduct towards Lady Bellaston is morally more

innocent than his affair with Molly Seagrim. We must not suppose

that Lysias intends his argument to be taken seriously. He simply

means to exhibit his cleverness by showing how good a case he can

make out for the worst conduct, much as a clever writer to-day

might amuse himself and his readers by an essay on the moral

elevation of a bomb-throwing " Communist/' But there are theses

which cannot be defended and arguments which cannot be employed,

even in jest, without revealing deep-seated moral depravity or

insensibility ; the kind of cleverness which sustains such theses

by the use of such arguments is a real moral danger to the com-

munity and requires to be countered, as it is by Socrates, with better

morality and superior wit.

The discourse may be summarized very briefly ; it is throughout

an appeal to considerations of " utility " in the most sordid sense

of the word. One is likely to make one's price much more effectively

out of a suitor who is a cold sensualist. Romantic love has its

fits of repentance and its lovers' quarrels ; it changes its object,

and when it does so, it passes into hate and scorn. It imperils

reputation, since the romantic suitor " blabs " of his success, while

the business-like sensualist knows how to hold his tongue. The

" lover " is notoriously jealous and tries to monopolize his beloved ;

the cool sensualist does not object to going shares with rivals recom-

mended by their wealth or other qualities. 1 The " lover " is

attracted by physical charm before he has considered the suita-

bility of the connexion in other respects ; the man who is not " in

love " chooses carefully. The lover's judgment is blinded by his

passion, and this makes him the worst of confidants and advisers.

He flatters one's weaknesses and quarrels with one's better qualities.

On all these grounds it is absurd to expect solid and lasting advan-

tage irom one's complaisances towards him. (Manifestly such a

1 Like our own Charles II, to take an actual example.

THE PHAEDRUS 808

discourse, apart from the moral turpitude which pervades it, is

really a failure, considered merely as a defence of its thesis. Lysias

gives a number of excellent reasons for thinking that it is bad to

" grant favours to a lover " ; he has given no reason for thinking

that it may not be as bad, or worse, to grant them to a sensual

" man of the world." The speech is thus, judged by any reasonable

standard, bad rhetoric, as well as bad ethics, a point which Socrates

will not be slow to make.)

Socrates professes at first to have paid no attention to the

matter of the discourse. He was attending wholly to its stylistic

qualities, and these even Lysias himself could hardly approve,

since it was full of empty repetition and tautology. The mere

recollection of what poets like Sappho and Anacreon have said about

love would enable a man to make a much better speech on the same

theme. Lysias has in fact shown no " invention " in his essay ; he

has merely dwelt on one obvious point, the " blindness " and

irrationality of the lover's passion/' a point no one could miss. The

whole merit of his performance, if it has any, must be looked

for in the arrangement (8ia0e<ris) of this commonplace material.

Phaedrus himself admits this (236^-6), but challenges Socrates, if

he can, to treat the same theme (u7ro'0e<rts), the admitted " madness "

of the lover's passion, better than Lysias has done. Socrates

accepts the challenge, with a prayer to the Muses to make up for

his well-known ignorance by the aid of their " inspiration." With

this preface he makes a rival speech on the theme, only carefully

introducing one slight but significant modification. The supposed

speaker, in his discourse, is to be not a cold-blooded sensualist

making a disgraceful " business proposition," but a " lover " astute

enough to cloak his passion under an appearance of indifference.

(This gives Socrates a double advantage over Lysias. He safe-

guards his own character by abstaining from even a playful defence

of a morally disgraceful thesis, and he leaves himself free, if he

pleases, to urge subsequently that the apparent reasonability

of the speech is only the simulated rationality of a madman, since

the client into whose mouth it is put is really inspired all the time

by " romantic " unreason.)

FIRST SPEECH OF SOCRATES. Thesis : It is Bad to Listen to

the Blandishments of a "Lover" (2376-241^). The first requisite

for all sound deliberation is to know the real character of the object

about which we are deliberating. Since the question is whether

one should yield to a lover, we must start by understanding what

" love " is, and what it aims at, and whether it is for our good or

for our harm. " Love " is, of course, a desire or craving for some-

thing. Now there are two principal types of desire the " inborn "

craving for the pleasant, and the desire for the " best," which is not

inborn, but has to be acquired, and is based on judgment (So'a)

and there is often a clash between the two. The victory of judg-

ment (8o'a) in this conflict over appetitive craving is what we

call sophro$yne ; the victory of appetite over our judgment of good

804 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

we call "lust 11 or "passion" (vppis). "Love" (ipw, sexual

passion) is one special variety of vftpi* or " lust." It is the prev-

alence of violent desire for the pleasant uninformed by rational

judgment of good, when aroused by physical beauty (2380). The

question before us, then, is whether it is for the benefit or for the

hurt of the party who has aroused such a passion to gratify it.

And here, Socrates says, he will give the rein to an almost " poetical "

eloquence with which he feels himself inspired beyond his ordinary,

perhaps by the surroundings in which he is speaking. (The arti-

ficial graces of Lysias are to be met by the " unstudied eloquence "

of the " heart. 1 ')

The " lover," being a slave to his pleasures, will, of course,

desire his beloved to be the pliant minister to them, and will hate

everything which makes him less subservient, and gives him any

kind of personal independence. Now wisdom, valour, even ready

wit and eloquence themselves, tend to give one an independent

personality, and for that reason a " lover " will object to them in

the object of his passion. His jealousy will prompt him to exclude

the beloved from all intercourse which would " make a man " of

him, and above all from " divine philosophy." The last thing

he will desire is that his " minion's " charm for himself should be

endangered by the acquisition of intelligent and manly qualities of

soul. In the next place, he will resent the acquisition of hardy and

manly physical qualities such as make one of worth in " war and

other necessities " ; he will deliberately, for his own pleasure, try

to keep the cpo^eyos to a soft and effeminate course of life. Finally,

he will be anxious to isolate his victim from all the influences of

family affections ; he will object to his having any financial in-

dependence, or to his marrying and forming a family of his own,

since he resents whatever tends to emancipate the victim from the

position of mere minister to his own selfish pleasure. Thus the

" lover " is an enemy to the good alike of the victim's soul, of his

body, and of his estate. (We see that Socrates' pretence of being

carried out of himself on a flood of " inspired " eloquence must not

be taken too seriously. He is deliberately observing the rules of

arrangement which Lysias had neglected. His theme is nominally

that of Lysias, the jealous and petulant selfishness of the " lover."

But he has carefully articulated his argument and avoided vain

repetition by grouping the effects of the lover's jealousy on his

victim under the heads of mind, body, estate. This has given him

further the opening for lifting the whole argument to a worthier

moral level by insisting on the supreme importance of the moral

goods which are jeopardized by complaisance. Considered simply

as an example of effective pleading, Socrates' speech has thus

stylistic advantages over that of Lysias which far outweigh his

neglect of the verbal graces and prettinesses of the other.)

The speech ends with a further consideration. Connexion

with an tycumfc has been shown to be productive of evil to mind,

body, and fortune. We may add, as a minor point, that besides

THE PHAEDRUS 805

being " harmful," it is also not even pleasant. Association with a

flatterer or a kept mistress is also hurtful, but the palliative can

be urged that, at any rate, these are "pleasant vices." But in

the connexion of the ipa<mfc with his victim, the victim does not

even get the pleasure ; such as it is, it is all on the side of the other

party ; the victim's position is intolerable, and he only sustains

it on the strength of promises of solid advantages, which the " lover"

will not implement, when once he has had his wicked will and sated

himself. The " love " of the c/wwmys is thus the proverbial love of

the wolf for the lamb.

Even Phaedrus can see that this discourse, though it gives good

reasons against bestowing favours on a " lover/' does nothing to

advance the plea of the suitor who is not " in love." Socrates, who,

of course, did not mean to act as advocate for such a client, suggests

that it would be enough to add that such a person is in all respects

the very opposite of the lover whose faults we have exposed. He

is about to take his leave of Phaedrus with this remark, when " the

divine sign " checks him. He professes to understand this as a

warning that, since Eros is a god, he has committed an impiety

by denouncing him and must purge himself of his contempt by a

palinode, as Stesichorus did when he had blasphemed Helen. If

a real gentleman had overheard either the speech of Lysias or that

which Socrates has just delivered, he would have imagined that he

was listening to persons brought up among " common sailors," in-

capable of understanding what a free man means by " love."

Thus the point of the " palinode " is to be that it is a recanta-

tion of the identification of c/>o>s with a brutal physical appetite

(241^-2430) , l

SECOND SPEECH OF SOCRATES (2440-2560). The True Psychology

of Love. The ground on which we have so far maintained that

it is better to associate with one who is not in love than with a

" lover " is that the lover is " beside himself " (/xaiWcu), but the

man who is not in love retains his sanity, and sanity is better than

" madness." This is the proposition we are now to recant. It

would be true if there were only one kind of frenzy, common mad-

ness. But there is an inspired " frenzy " which is productive of

good we could not equally obtain in a state of sanity and control

of ourselves. One of its forms is prophecy ; the priestess of Delphi,

who predicts in a state of " exaltation," is far superior as a prophet

to diviners who predict the future by calculations based on the

flight of birds and similar omens ; a second form is the " exaltation "

of the authors of " purifications " and " initiations," " founders of

1 The definition of (pus from which the speech of Socrates started was

correct in the sense that it is a true definition of what Lysias had called fy<os

in formulating his thesis. Hence it was rightly adopted also by Socrates for

the immediate purpose of showing how the same thesis might have been

treated with less superficiality and without idle repetition. But, as we shall

see, it is not in fact an adequate account of even guilty and degraded human

" love," to call it a craving for a certain physical " exoneration." (Even an

unholy love if it is " love " at all is the pollution of a high sacrament.)

806 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

religions " as we should say ; a third is the inspiration of the poet.

No one who attempts to compose poetry in a state of " sanity "

by rules of art ever achieves anything great (2440-2452). The

madness of the lover, as we shall find, is a fourth form of this divine

" frenzy " which is so much wiser than the wisdom of the world. 1

We intend to show, that, if the lover is mad, his madness is an

inspiration from heaven and may be a great blessing. To prove

this we must lay down the principles of a sound psychology ; we

must see what is the nature, and what the actions and passions

of the soul.

In the first place, the soul is immortal (2450), a statement which

means to a Greek that it is divine. The proof of this is that what-

ever is always in motion is immortal, and the soul is always in

motion. The minor premiss of this syllogism is again proved thus.

The soul is the source and initiator of its own motions ; its motions

are not communicated from without, but spontaneously originated

from within. Thus they were never started by anything else, and,

as the soul itself is the first fountain of them, they can never come

to an end. If the soul could come to an end, there would be an

end of nature and becoming universally (2450) a statement which

implies that souls are the only things which can move from within,

and so the only possible sources of movement. The soul may thus

be rigorously defined as " that which moves itself " (2460). 2 But

1 To ^appreciate this doctrine aright, we must neither forget the habitual

" irony " of Socrates nor exaggerate it. The key to his meaning is given by

his well-known theory about the poets. He found the poets unable to explain

in bald prose what they meant by their finest passages, or how they came by

them. Hence he classes them among the persons who think they have a

knowledge which they really have not. They are not alive, whatever they

may suppose, to the full significance of their best work. He does not, of

course, mean to suggest either that the great things in Sophocles or Euripides

are not really great, or that great poetry may be nonsense. It means more

than the poet himself in his " uninspired " hours could tell you, and this shows

that some influence which the poet cannot wholly control has been speaking

through him. In the same way, though it is part of his irony to dwell on the

alleged benefits conferred on men by the trance-utterances of the Pythia or

the " purifications " devised by abnormal and eccentric " religious geniuses/'

it is quite consistent with his habitual attitude to " things divine " that he

should suppose a higher power to use such vehicles for revealing the future,

and admit the real healing effects of some " initiations " and " purifications "

on the body and mind. The great defect he finds in poetry as in /iam/oj is

just that the spirits of the prophets are not subject to the prophets. Hence

you cannot depend on the Pythia's predictions, and hence also the great poet

is apt to decline into bathos or nonsense as much as the Shadwell to deviate

(occasionally) into sense.

2 This argument, in an expanded form, is reproduced in the Laws, as we

shall see, and treated there as the sufficient proof both of the existence of

God and of the immortality of the soul. Unlike the arguments of the Phaedo

it has no special connexion with the theory of the forms. But it would be

rash to say that its introduction shows that we are dealing with a post-Socratic

development of Plato's own thought, since in principle the argument is that of

Alcmaeon of Crotona that the soul is immortal because it " is like immortal

things, and is like them in the point that it is always in motion " (Aristot.

de Anima, 40 $a 30). Hence the argument must have been well known to

THE PHAEDRUS 807

what is the character of this " self -moving " source of all move-

ment ? For our purposes, we may content ourselves with an

analogy. It is like a charioteer with a pair of winged steeds,

forming a single living whole. 1 In the case of the gods, driver and

horses are all as good as they can possibly be ; in the human soul,

the driver has to manage two horses of different strain, and this is

what makes his task so difficult. While the horses keep their wings,

they travel round the circuit of heaven and the soul " administers "

the Cosmos. But they may lose their wings and fall to earth ; the

soul then acquires an earthly body which seems to be able to move

itself (though it is really moved by the soul within it), and it is this

complex of body and soul which we call the mortal " animal."

By analogy we come commonly to think of God (falsely) as a being

with a soul and body which are never separated by death (246^).

(We see at once that we are dealing in a parable with the " three

parts " of the soul ; the driver is judgment, the two horses are

" honour " or " mettle " and " appetite." If we press the details,

they imply that all three " parts " are present not only in the soul

which has not yet put on the garment of the flesh, but in the gods,

who are never embodied at all. This would be quite at variance

with the hints of the Republic and the express teaching of the

Timaeus. But it is not really permissible to extract metaphysics

from mythical details which are necessitated by simple regard

for the coherency of the pictorial representation.)

The myth proceeds to describe the life of all souls under the

image of a great festal procession. The souls progress, under the

leadership of the gods, round the whole compass of the heavens,

maintaining the universal order of things. The goal of the whole

pilgrimage is reached by an ascent to a region outside the whole

heaven, " the plain of reality," where the procession pauses and

enjoys a Sabbath rest in the contemplation of " bodiless reality,

without figure, colour, or tangible quality " (in other words the

forms) ; this is the true home of souls, and the source of their

spiritual food. Thus the thought is that it is in the strength of this

pure contemplation that gods and men alike execute the practical

task of establishing and maintaining natural and moral order in the

realm of mutability and becoming. Like Moses they make every-

thing after the pattern they have seen " in the mount." The gods,

of course, achieve this " steep ascent of heaven " with complete

success ; they actually conduct their living chariots out of the

whole region of " nature " to the goal outside it. With men it is

otherwise. The best of them only succeed for a time in getting

their heads above the visible region, and attaining a glimpse of

Socrates, who alludes to the views of Alcmaeon about the brain as familiar to

himself in the autobiographical narrative of the Phaedo.

~ l Phaedrus 2460, ^OIK^TW Si) ffvpffrrtp dvvdjuLi viroirrtpov fcuyovs re KCLL ty^xov.

(rvjjLffxjTy here should mean, as the word regularly does in Plato, literally con-

cretae, " grown together into one." It is inserted in order to insist on the

unity of the individual mind. We are to think of the driver and his horses as

a single organism.

808 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

what lies wholly beyond it, and then redescend. The worse are

thrown into complete confusion by the restiveness of the horse of

inferior strain and the unskilfulness of the horseman. Their horses

lose their wings, and horses and horseman sink to earth, not to

regain their old place until the wings of the soul have grown afresh.

The magnitude of the fall is shown by the kind of life which the

now incarnate soul leads in the body. Those who have " seen

most " become philosophers, lovers of beauty, musical men or

lovers ; then follow in descending order, law-abiding kings and

soldiers, men of affairs and business, athletes and physicians,

prophets and " initiators," poets and artists, mechanics and

farmers, professional sophists and demagogues, tyrants. The rule

which applies to all is that after each life a man receives the rewards

of the deeds done in the body. None may recover his wings and

return to the place from which he fell until ten thousand years are

over, except one who chooses to live the life of the " philosopher or

philosophic lover " three times in succession. For such a man the

ten thousand years are reduced to three thousand. 1 For others

the scheme includes, like that of the Republic, reincarnations in

animal as well as in human bodies, but no soul can finally recover

its wings after such a degradation until it has once more been

reincarnated in human form, for the recovery of the soul's wings

is only effected by recollection of the things of which the soul

caught a glimpse when it was following the great procession of the

gods, and it is only man to whom the experiences of sense suggest

these recollections. A man in whom these recollections are Toeing

awakened is popularly thought " distracted/ 1 from his loss of

interest in the things other men take seriously, but he is really

" inspired " (frflovomfwv). 2

Now our sensible experiences only suggest few and faint images

of righteousness and temperance and the other forms, but beauty

is much more impressively adumbrated in sense-experience, and

the effect of the experience in awakening " recollection " is therefore

exceptionally startling. In the soul which has all but lost the

impression of heavenly beauty, the effect of its earthly adumbra-

tion is to provoke " brutal " appetite (rcTpaTroSos vo/xov, 2500) for

intercourse with the beautiful body. But in a soul fresh from deep

contemplation of spiritual beauty, the sight of earthly beauty

1 Thus the scheme is the same as that of the myth of Er in the Republic.

The assumption is that the normal extreme limit of human life is a hundred

years. Reincarnations take place once in a thousand years in order that the

rewards and punishments at the end of each incarnation may be on a tenfold

scale. The privilege of escape from the wheel after three incarnations and

the hope that in general it will be achieved after ten, are not mentioned in the

Republic, but I suspect Orphic origin for part at any rate of this. Empedocles

fixes the soul's period of exile from heaven at 30,000 "seasons " (Fr. 115,

R.P., 181), and we may suspect that he is reckoning three &pai to the year,

lap, 0fyo, xetiufr. On the details of the Phaedrus myth the student should

consult the full commentary in Stewart's Myths of Plato.

1 Cf. Browning's Epistle of Karshish with its treatment of Lazarus as " the

madman/' or St. Paul s language about the " foolishness " of the Cross.

THE PHAEDRUS 809

arouses religious awe and worship ; the soul's wings begin to sprout,

and this process, like the getting of teeth, is a mingled one of un-

easiness with intervals of relief, pain in the absence of the beloved,

rest and pleasure in his company. Hence the lover gladly forsakes

all other society, neglects his property, and throws convention to

the wind, so long as he can win the society in which he is getting his

heart's desire. Men call this " being in love " ; it is really growing

one's spiritual wings again (250^-252^). What sort of person will

provoke this passion is a matter of the lover's peculiar temperament.

In the best type of man the qualities which awaken it are " love of

wisdom " and a " commanding personality " (2520) ; others are

attracted by different gifts. In every case the " lover " aims at

moulding the being he " idolizes " into the more and more perfect

image of the " god " whom both serve, and the affection between

them grows with every fresh step of the process (2520-2530).

But we must remember what we said about the difference in

strain between the horses of the human soul. The better horse is

modest and chivalrous, a " thorough-bred " ; the worse horse is a

" bolter." So when the charioteer is wrapt in the contemplation

of the beloved, the better horse modestly holds himself in, but the

worse " bolts," in spite of rein and whip, from lust after carnal

delight. The worse horse may be often " pulled to his haunches,"

but he persists in his struggles, and the time of really fierce tempta-

tion comes when the passion which began on one side is reciprocated

on the other. If the temptation is successfully resisted, the pair

have won one out of the three " Olympic victories " necessary to

release them from incarnation in the flesh. Henceforward they have

mastered the evil in themselves and won their freedom. But if

their lives are directed only to the second-best, " honour," in the

place of the first-best, " wisdom," the evil horse may get his way in

an unguarded moment, and then there will be other such moments

in their lives, though not many, as their conduct has not commended

itself to their " whole souls." Their attachment will be real, but

not so real as that of the pair who have won the mastery over them-

selves. At death, they are still " wingless " though " desirous to

be winged," and even this is a gain. It is at least a beginning of

the journey heavenwords, and the rest will come (253^-256^) - 1

This, then, is what association with a true lover may bestow ;

intimate relations with the man who is " not in love " lead to a

meanness of soul, falsely taken for a virtue, and a nine-thousand-

years' period of " folly," spent on and under the earth. May

Eros accept this recantation, grant Socrates not to lose his " skill

in matters of love," and punish Lysias by converting him, as his

1 The power and insight with which this account of the conflict between

the spirit and the flesh is written should not mislead us into supposing that it

must be concealed autobiography. Comparison with what Alcibiades says

in the Symposium about the relations between himself as a boy and Socrates

suggests that the model for Plato's picture of the lover who has come through

the severest temptation unsmirched is to be found in Socrates and his behaviour

to ihe beautiful and petulant boy.

II

810 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

brother Polemarchus has already been converted, to philosophy l

(256^-2576).

Phaedrus is delighted with the fine speech to which he has just

listened. Lysias himself could hardly match it. Perhaps he would

not try ; he is a touchy man and was recently gravely offended by a

politician who had called him a mere " writer of speeches " in de-

preciation. But, says Socrates, politicians who affect to despise

" discourse- writing " are only disguising envy under the mask of

contempt. They are vain enough of the decrees they propose

and carry, and what is a decree but the record of a " discourse "

to which the author has prefixed the names of its admirers, " the

council " or " the people " ? And how much vainer a man is when

his " discourses " are preserved in perpetuity as the " laws " of

a State. Clearly, if there is any discredit it is not in composing

discourses, but in composing them ill. And this raises the whole

question, what is good writing ? (258^). This is the sort of problem

which it gives an educated man real pleasure to discuss. If we

neglect it and prefer to sleep out the warm noon-tide, the cicadae

over our heads may carry our bad report to their patrons the

Muses. 2 Accordingly, we now find ourselves launched on a serious

inquiry into the problem of style. What is a good style ?

THE PRINCIPLES OF STYLE (259^-278^). (Nominally the ques-

tion under discussion is that of the canons of a sound rhetoric,

but we shall see that it rapidly expands into a consideration of the

character of " style " in literature in general. A speaker or writer

has a case of which he wishes to convince his hearer or reader.

The question is what principles may be laid down for the presenta-

tion of this case in the way which will be most effective. Thus the

considerations urged by Socrates bear as much on the written ex-

position of a subject in an essay or a treatise as upon the spoken

presentation of it to an audience. The reason for approaching the

topic primarily from the side of spoken discourse is simply that,

in the age of Socrates, there was no serious prose literature in

existence. The one still extant prose work of importance of an

earlier date than the supposed conversation between Socrates and

Phaedrus was the book of Herodotus. The " pre-Socratic philo-

sophers " had, indeed, attempted to state their views about Averts in

a sort of prose ; the Periclean age saw the first written manuals

of " rhetoric " and medicine, and the first written discussions of

ethical and political problems. But the writers of rixyai made

no pretensions to style, and their compositions were not regarded

as " literature." Literary prose, as a vehicle for the artistic

expression of reflection upon life, was the creation of Isocrates,

1 The point of the remark about Polemarchus is unknown. Had he, as

would be quite possible, fallen in with some belated survivor of the downfall

of the Pythagoreans during his years in Italy ? E.g. with Philolaus ?

1 Note the allusion in 259^ to the saying familiar from the Phaedo that

philosophy is the pcytoni /Aowri/tiJ. It is assumed that the saying is ajready

current ; hence we cannot be far wrong in supposing that its origin was

Pythagorean

THE PHAEDRUS 811

and at the assumed date of the conversation, Isocrates is still

simply a composer of speeches to be delivered in the law-courts.)

It would seem obvious that the first prerequisite of a really

good " discourse " is that the deliverer of it should know the truth

about his subject. Yet the accepted view is that this is unnecessary.

To compose a telling speech you need not know what are the Strata,

the " rights and wrongs of the case " ; you need only know what

the audience who are to decide the issue think right and wrong.

You win your case by appeal to the " prejudices of your hearers."

But this view will not bear examination. It would be a comic

situation if Phaedrus, being under the impression that the word

" horse " means a donkey, should be persuaded by a discourse on

the usefulness of the horse in war to provide himself with a donkey l

against his next campaign. It would be worse than comical if

a public man with a persuasive tongue confused evil with good and

led the community to embark on a policy based on the confusion.

This would not be statesmanship, but the reverse of it. Possibly,

however, the professors of rhetoric might reply that they do not

claim for their art that it can teach us the principles of good and

evil, but simply that even if you know these principles, you will not

be able to turn your knowledge to account in practice unless you

also follow their precepts. 2 Thus sound knowledge of good and

evil would be an indispensable prerequisite for statesmanship, but

mastery of the technical rules of rhetoric would be necessary for

the statesman who needs to convince the public. So far as it

goes this is a fair defence of rhetoric, on one condition. The

condition is that the rules in question form a real TC^VT; or " art/'

the application of real scientific knowledge to practice. But there

is a view that they are nothing of the kind ; " persuasion " is a

mere empirical " knack " (rpi/Jij) for which no rules can be laid

down, and there is no " art of speaking " distinct from the know-

ledge of the true facts about the subject-matter of the discourses.

This view demands consideration (2590-2610).

May we not define rhetoric as verbal " sorcery " (i/^xaywyi'a) 3

whether practised in the courts, in other public gatherings, or in

private life, and whether the issues on which it is employed are

grave or trivial ? The writers on the subject, it is true, generally

confine the sphere of the art to public discourses before law-courts

and popular assemblies ; but they forget that such a restriction

would amount to excluding Zeno and his paradoxes from considera-

1 The implication is that Phaedrus is still a rich man ; he would have to

serve in the cavalry, if called out, and thus belongs to the class of irevTaKOffto-

pidinvoi or that of ITTTT^S.

1 This, we may remind ourselves, is actually the view taken by Gorgias

in the dialogue called after him. He disclaims any pretence to be able to

" teach goodness."

The word should be understood in its literal sense of " spirit-raising/'

The eloquent speaker deals with the \f/vx*l of the audience as the sorcerer

does with the ghosts he raises and lays ; he puts a " spell " on you. So we

hear in our modern slang of " wizards " and spell-binders " in public life.

812 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

tion. This would be a bad mistake. Zeno, like the speakers in the

courts or the ecclesia, is a controversialist. Just as a skilled

political or forensic pleader can make us think the same course or

the same case just or unjust at his pleasure, Zeno makes us accept

or deny the same proposition in the mathematics as he pleases.

Rhetoric is thus universally skill in controversy. Success in it

depends on ability to establish resemblances or similarities and to

expose resemblances which have been tacitly presupposed by the

antagonist * (2610). Now we are most readily led astray in cases

where the dissimilarity between two things is apparently slight,

and therefore a man who wants to confuse others but avoid being

misled himself, as the controversialist does, needs to know what are

the real similarities and dissimilarities between things, and this

makes it ridiculous to talk of an " art of discourse " which can be

divorced from " knowledge of the real " (2620). We may illustrate

the point from the discourse of Lysias with which we have been

concerned. Lysias is discussing the question whether a " lover "

is a blessing or a curse. Now " love " is not, like " iron " or

" silver/' a word with a definite and undisputed meaning. Different

persons understand very different things by the name. It is idle

to ask whether a " lover " is a blessing or not, unless we begin by

defining " love." Lysias never explains what he means ; in his

opening sentence he introduces the word " lover " without any

explanation. The ambiguity thus introduced into his speech is

definitely an offence against art, a violation of a law of good style.

He begins where he ought to have ended. 2 Socrates was better

inspired by the local deities, since he opened his speech by the

required definition.

A second grave fault in style is that there is no recognizable

order in the discourse of Lysias. It is not the consistent develop-

ment of a theme and has no organic structure. There is no dis-

coverable reason why the various points of the speech might not

have been made in a wholly different order. But a good discourse

ought to have a definite organic structure, just like a living creature.

There should be a definite plan underlying it which would be ruined

if you inverted the order of its paragraphs. 3 Here again the dis-

course with which the Nymphs inspired Socrates presents an in-

structive contrast. It began by saying what " love " is, a kind of

" madness " or " frenzy." Next it distinguished two main types of

1 Cf. the appeals to " precedents " which are so common a feature of both

forensic and political oratory. The irapd8ei7/ia which Aristotle calls a " rhetori-

cian's form of induction" (Analyt. Post. A, 7ia 9) is just the "appeal to

precedent."

1 The right order of thought would be to say first what the passion " love"

is, then to consider how it will affect the man who is dominated by it, and

last of all to ask whether these effects will make him a better influence in a

lad's life than the man who is not " in love." Lysias begins with this last

question, and never raises the others.

* Socrates puts his finger on the defect which, above all others, is the most

glaring fault of the bad stylist, neglect of the logical sequence of the parts of

his essay or the chapters of his book.

THE PHAEDRUS 813

madness, that due to human disease and that due to divinely

sent " exaltation " above everyday " conventionalities." Then

it went on to make a further subdivision of divine " exaltation "

itself, and so to distinguish the " exaltation " of the lover from that

of the " seer/' the " poet/' and the founder of a religion, and ended

with an imaginative hymn in praise of Eros (2646-2656). Much of

what we said was, perhaps, sportive, but there are two points about

the method we followed which are of serious importance. When

any subject is to be expounded, it is vitally important to define it,

and to define it one must be able to " collect " its disiecta membra

into a single " pattern " (iSc'a), as we did when we reduced all the

manifestations of " love " under the one head of " distraction "

(Trapai/oia). But it is no less important, when we have got our

single " pattern/ 1 to " divide " it again rightly into sub-patterns,

like a skilful carver who disjoints an animal at the proper articula-

tions. This was what we tried to do when we went on to distin-

guish a " sinister/' or left-hand and a " right-hand " distraction,

and then carefully subdivided both again along the proper lines,

so that we were left with a " sinister " love which we were entitled

to denounce and a clearly discriminated " right-hand " or " divine "

love which was eulogized as the source of the greatest blessings.

(It was just this process of first " collecting " the definition and then

making a scientific subdivision of .the definitum on a proper funda-

mentum divisionis which enabled us to give a rational justification

for our answer and our approbation.) Socrates is devoted to this

method of combined " composition " and " division," and is ready

to follow the steps of the " dialectician " who possesses it, as those of

a god. Thus we are brought to the conclusion that " dialectic is

philosophy " in the wide sense in which that word means the

capacity for seeing the real affinities in things, and so grouping

them in well-defined genera ; and detecting the differences which

mark off different species within the genus, is the first requisite

of a masterly style. To be a true stylist, you must have a clear

view of your subject as a whole, and be able to articulate it aright

(2650-266^).

Phaedrus agrees that this is a good account of " dialectic,"

and that Socrates has a correct conception of a " scientific style."

But Thrasymachus and the other teachers of prose style have not

the qualities we have described. What they mean by " rhetorical

style " is something different. They mean, in fact, the arrangement

of the parts of a " discourse " on a certain model which they pre-

scribe, but which has nothing to do with the kind of logical structure

just described. To use technical terms, they say, e.g., that a good

speech must have its exordium (TTPOOI'/AIOV) ; then you must go

on to the narration (Snjy^o-is), which relates what you allege to

be the facts of the case ; next to the production of the depositions

(fjiaprvptai) of witnesses ; then to a consideration of the presumptions

(rcK/xijpia) and plausibilities (etjco'ra) ; and there are many other

subdivisions. (The precise meaning of the technical terms is in

814 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

many cases uncertain, since some of them were not preserved in the

later manuals of the art, and even of those which are preserved, we

cannot be certain that they already had their later meanings as

early as the fifth century. The reader may consult the notes in

Thompson's edition of the dialogue.) Gorgias and his master

Tisias insist on the importance of a dexterous art of exaggeration

and extenuation; Polus and Protagoras before him on grace

and appropriateness of verbal phrasing. We need not follow them

into all these details, but we must test the worth of their theory of

style as a whole ; perhaps its texture will look very loose if we view

it in a clear light (2666-2680).

Suppose a man claimed to be a physician on the ground that he

knew recipes for raising and lowering the body's temperature,

producing a vomit and an evacuation and the like, would specialists

like our friend Eryximachus admit his claim ? If he did not know

also in what patients, when, and with what violence to produce

these effects, they would say at once that he did not know medicine.

So Sophocles or Euripides would say to anyone who knew how to

make single speeches effectively but not how to construct an

artistic whole out of them, " You may understand the preliminaries

to play-making, but you don't know how to make a play." So

Pericles, we may be sure, would have told us urbanely that a man who

has learned the devices of the textbooks has only learned the pre-

liminaries to " rhetoric. 11 The art consists in knowing how and

when to use the various devices to effect (mQavfa) and to make

your discourse into a real whole (2680-2690) - 1

Admittedly this cannot be learned from any of the law-books :

how then should a man set himself to acquire a really persuasive

style ? To begin with, he must have a natural gift of expression,

or he will be wasting time in trying to cultivate a barren soil.

If he has the natural gift, its cultivation demands both knowledge

and practice (/*e\en;), and is thus not wholly a matter of "art."

In so far as it does depend on knowledge and thus is an " art/ 1

Lysias and Thrasymachus have misconceived the kind of knowledge

required. What it is may be suggested to us by the facts about

Pericles, the most effective of all our great orators. Over and

above his natural gift of speech (irpbs ru> v<f>vrj<s eti/at, 2700),

Pericles had the advantage of early association with Anaxagoras.

This gave him a certain largeness of mental outlook which makes

itself felt in his political oratory. 2 The great stylist, in fact, needs

1 Note that Euripides is definitely associated here with Sophocles (268^).

Both are assumed to be living and accessible. Hence we should date the

conversation before the final departure of Euripides from Athens (408 or 407).

The reference to Eryximachus and his father (2680) shows that if they are the

persons of the same names who were implicated in the scandal of 415, it had

not such serious consequences for them as it had for some of their circle.

8 Of course, the allusion is half playful. The suggestion is that Pericles

turned to account in practical statesmanship the Anaxagorean physical

speculations about the sovereignty of vovt; he made mens agitat molem into

a political principle (2700, 5).

THE PHAEDRUS 815

to build on -the same foundations as the great physician. If a

man is to be more than a mere empiric in medicine, as we may see

from the teaching of Hippocrates, he needs a scientific knowledge

of the body, which can hardly be acquired without a knowledge of

" nature " as a whole. He must know whether the human body

is composed of one single ingredient or of many, and, in either case,

he must further know how the substance or substances composing

the human body are affected by each and all of the substances

which medicine employs in its pharmacopoeia. Without this

scientific basis, medicine would be a mere " fumbling in the dark." l

The same thing is true of the " orator.' 1 He is trying to produce

healthy convictions in the minds of his audience by discourses

exactly as the physician produces healthy conditions in their

bodies by his prescriptions. Hence anyone who undertakes to

teach the art of persuasion needs first of all to have a thoroughly

scientific knowledge of the mind. He must know what are its

components and exactly how each type of discourse will affect

them. In a word, he must have a sound psychology of human

nature. Thus he must understand what different temperaments

there are among his auditors, what different types of " discourses "

there are, and why such and such a type of " discourse " appeals to

such and such a temperament. And this is not all. The effective

speaker, like the successful physician, must have skill in diagnosis.

He must be able in practice to judge rapidly and surely of the

temperament of an actual audience and the type of appeal which

will go home to them. Only when he has thus diagnosed his

hearers' temperaments and decided on the right kind of appeal

to make will he be in a position to apply the rules given in the

hand-books for producing the kind of effect which will be oppor-

tune (269^-2726).

The road to oratorical success we have described is, no doubt,

a long and difficult one ; but can the writers of the handbooks

really show us an easier short cut ? We know that, as has been

already mentioned, they often say the " speaker " or " stylist "

need not concern himself with realities or " truths " ; he need only

aim at being plausible, and, indeed, should often prefer plausibility

to truth. Thus if he is employed in a case where a plucky little

man has beaten a stronger but cowardly man, he would, speaking

1 Plato is thinking mainly of the doctrine of the four fundamental

" humours " (blood, phlegm, red bile, black bile) on which the Coan school of

medicine built up its humoral pathology, and is arguing that the physician

must have a scientific knowledge of the action of each substance in the

pharmacopoeia on each of these " humours." The counterpart would be a

scientific knowledge of the " active principles," as Butler calls them, in the

human mind and the way in which each may be stimulated or inhibited by

the appropriate type of verbal appeal. The particular Hippocratean work

alluded to is, perhaps, the nepl </>vato$ avQpamov, where the humoral pathology

is expressly expounded. But see the discussion of Die's, Autour de Platon, 30 ff.

The sure and rapid gauging of the temper of the audience, on which he rightly

insists as all-important, is just the sort of thing of which there can be no

No rules can be given for it; it is a matter of aloBrjais (27 ic).

816 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

for the defence, dwell on the improbability that the small man should

have attacked a bigger man, or, if he spoke for the prosecution,

he would try to suggest that there had been a concerted assault

by several assailants. In either case, the real facts of the situa-

tion are just what the clever advocate would take care to keep dark.

But we must retort once more that one can only judge of the

" plausibilities " in proportion as one knows the real facts. (The

advocate may rely on distortion of the facts, but he must know

what they are if he is to distort them in a really plausible way.)

So we adhere to our view that it is a long and a hard task to acquire

the art of a persuasive style. The time and labour required would

be disproportionate if one's object were merely to make an im-

pression on one's fellow-mortals, and not, as it ought to be, to make

our words, like our deeds, acceptable to God. (That would, of

course, be the aim of a true statesman, who employs his knowledge

of human temperaments and the way in which they may be ap-

pealed to, to enlist his fellow-citizens in the prosecution of good and

the avoidance of evil.) This is, in substance, all we have to say

about the principles of an art of style. It must be based on a

masterly knowledge of the subject-matter dealt with and an equally

masterly knowledge of the psychology of the hearers (or readers)

addressed, combined wtih a natural gift of language (2720-2746).

We may now turn to the question, suggested by the sneer of

the unnamed politician about Lysias (257^, whether it is a proper

thing to perpetuate one's discourses in writing. Socrates professes

to have heard a story Phaedrus prefers to think that he is inventing

it that, in the old days when Egypt was governed by gods, the

god Thoth invented the art of writing and recommended it to

Amon, 1 who then ruled at Thebes, as a device which would

make the Egyptians wiser and improve their memories. Amon

reproved him, on the ground that written records tend to make us

neglect the cultivation of memory by making it unnecessary, and

to fill men with an empty conceit of their own wisdom. They think

they know a great deal which they have merely read without

understanding and without any abiding effect on their minds. The

art of writing does not act as a substitute for memory ; it merely

provides us with memoranda convenient means of refreshing our

memory from time to time. A book is like a picture. The figures

of the picture may actually " look alive," but they cannot speak.

So the words and sentences in a written book look full of wisdom, but

if you question the book about its meaning, you can get no reply.

A " discourse/' once written down, comes into the hands of the

unintelligent, as well as of the intelligent, and is exposed to mis-

interpretation. If it is to be rightly understood, it needs the living

voice of the author to explain and defend it. Thus the written

discourse is at best a lifeless image of the living thought which is

1 Plato calls him Thamus, but the mention of Thebes shows what Egyptian

god he has in mind. Is the name Thamus, which has perplexed the com-

mentators, due to a presumably wilful confusion with the Syrian Thammuz ?

THE PHAEDRUS 817

written " in the soul of him who understands it." A gardener may,

for amusement, force flowers in a " garden of Adonis, 1 ' l but he

takes care to sow the seeds of crops about which he is in earnest in

the appropriate soil and to wait months for their maturing. So the

man who is in earnest about raising the fruit of righteousness and

goodness will not trust to forcing it by writing his deepest convic-

tions in ink ; he will trust to the slow and steady cultivation of

them in his own soul, and in those of others with whom he is in

constant personal contact. When he commits his thoughts to

writing, it will be partly as a memorandum against the " forgetful-

ness of his old age," partly because such literature affords a worthy

form of entertainment in our hours of relaxation. So we may tell

Lysias and we might say the same thing to Homer and the poets,

or to Solon and the " composers " of laws that if any of them has

really understood what his " works " can effect and what they

cannot, and how secondary a place they hold by comparison with

his living thought such a man has a claim to a very different

name from that of Aoyoyp<<os ; he is a true " philosopher. " But

if he really has nothing better to give mankind than the painfully

elaborated phrases and clauses of his writings, he deserves to

be called a mere poet or speech-writer or " law- writer." a The

man ought always to be greater than his book or poem or code

(2746-2782).

This conviction that a man's personality ought to be greater

than his literary " work," and, in particular, that the true philo-

sopher is a great personality whose very deepest thoughts are those

which he cannot set down "in black and white," was one Plato

held strongly and retained to the end of his life. 3 It explains why

he never attempted to put in writing any of his own profoundest

metaphysical speculations. They were the fruit of a " way of life,"

and, to be understood, pre-supposed the living of the same life

on the part of the recipient. To record them for the world at

large would have been merely to court dangerous misunderstanding.

Even so, Carlyle, as the jest has it, wrote thirty-seven volumes to

persuade the world that silence is golden. Naturally he could not

tell us the secret of the " golden silence." That could only be told

to a man with the soul of a second Carlyle, and such a man would

discover the secret without needing to read the thirty-seven

volumes.

1 As we should say, " in a hot-house." The horti Adonidis were pots in

which flowers were rapidly forced, to die again equally rapidly.

* vofjLoypdfav (278^ 2) cannot mean " writer of music." The word appears

to be used nowhere else in literature. Here it obviously means a " code-

maker," and the point is that if a man like Solon really exhausted all his

wisdom in the mere excogitation of the clauses of a code of laws, so that in

personal intercourse he merely talked his own code, as some writers are said

to talk their own books, he deserves to be spoken of with disparage-

ment. The word is invented to convey the same sort of depreciation as

Compare the insistence on the point in Ep. vii. 3410-342(1, 3430-344**,

where the imagery and language seem directly reminiscent of our dialogue.

318 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

Epilogue (2780-2790). Has Socrates any message for his friend

Isocrates, the younger rival of Lysias ? He can only conjecture

what the young man's development will be, but he believes that

Isocrates has better natural endowments and a nobler temper of

soul than Lysias. Probably, if he continues in his present pro-

fession, he will out-distance all rivals and competitors, and it may

be that he will be led " by a diviner impulse " to still higher things,

for there really is a " strain of philosophy " in him.

Nothing remains now but that Socrates should take leave of

the spot where he has spent his hour of siesta with a brief prayer to

Pan and its other tutelary spirits. His prayer is that " he may

become fair in the inward man, and that the outer man may be

conformable to the inward ; that he may regard wisdom as the

true riches and that his wealth may be such as none but the tem-

perate can carry.' 1 Thus the prayer is for good of mind, body, and

fortune, and is worded in a way to remind us of the Socratic estimate

of the relative importance of the three.

There is no real need to enter into the idle questions which have

been raised about the significance of the allusions to Isocrates.

What is said is strictly true and appropriate to the assumed situa-

tion. Isocrates certainly had greater parts than Lysias and stood

on a higher intellectual and moral level. He showed his superiority

in parts by becoming the real creator of literary prose style, and his

superiority in character by deserting " speech- writing " for the

foundation of a school for the training of the young for public life.

However defective Plato may have thought the training he gave,

the simple fact that it was based on a generous Pan-Hellenism, and

that Isocrates was the recognized mouthpiece of this Pan-Hellenism

among the publicists of his age, fully explains Plato's ascribing to

Socrates the remark, quite likely enough to have been actually

made, that there was a strain of philosophy in the man. There

can be no doubt about the historical fact of the influence of Socrates

on Isocrates. 1 As to the alleged " feud " between Isocrates and

Plato, of which much has been made by some modern writers, there

is really no evidence for it. The frequent expressions in Isocrates'

writings depreciatory of " science " and " eristic " as a propaedeutic

for the statesman are, indeed, pretty clearly meant specially for the

Academy, but the attempts to find sarcastic rejoinders in Plato

to these little acerbities have not really been successful, and the

ingenuity devoted to these attempts seems to me to have been

simply wasted. After all, Plato and Isocrates had a good deal in

common in their .views on practical politics, and they were neither

Alexandrian literati nor German Professors. We in this country

can quite understand how two eminent men can differ in their

1 On this seeBurnet, Greek Philosophy, Parti., 215-219 ; " Socratic Doctrine

of the Soul," in Proceedings of the British Academy, 1915-16, p. 235 ff. So the

point of Isocrates' comments on the attack on Socrates by Polycrates is that

Socrates was as absurd a theme for invective as Busiris for eulogy. Polycrates

showed his silliness by denouncing a man of exemplary virtue no less than by

eulogizing a monster (Isocr. xi. 4).

THE PHAEDRUS 319

philosophical programmes without becoming personal enemies,

or how the bigger man of the two can afford to take an occasional

" rap over the knuckles " from the lesser in good part. (No one

supposes, for example, that Shakespeare's relations with Ben

Jonson were disturbed by Ben's occasional quips.) Hence I cannot

but agree with Professor Burnet in thinking that the tradition

followed by Cicero, which represents Plato and Isocrates as being

on personally friendly terms, is likely to be the true one. 1

In taking leave of the Phaedrus, we may note that while it

supplements the Gorgias in its conclusions about the value of

" style," it modifies nothing that was said in the earlier dialogue.

The moral condemnation pronounced on the use of eloquent speech

to pervert facts and produce false impressions remains the same.

So does the verdict that the sort of thing the professional teachers

from Tisias to Thrasymachus profess to expound is not a science but

a mere " trick " or " knack " (and therefore cannot be conveyed, as

they professed to convey it, by "lessons"). In adding that a

thorough knowledge of a subject-matter and a sound knowledge of

the ^ psychology of the public addressed furnish a really scientific

basis for a worthy and effective style, Plato is saying nothing incon-

sistent with the results of the Gorgias. There is thus no sufficient

ground for thinking that the teaching of the Phaedrus represents a

later " development " from the more " Socratic " position of the

Gorgias. Socrates cannot have lived in the Athens of the Archi-

damian war and the subsequent twenty years without having had

occasion to turn his thoughts to the problem of the value of ' ' rhe-

torical " style, and there is no reason why he should not actually

have reached the conclusions of the Phaedrus, though naturally we

cannot prove that he had.

See further :

THOMPSON, W. H. Plato's Phaedrus.

ROBIN, L. Phedre (Collection des Universitcs de France, Paris.

1933).

RITTER, C. Platon, ii. 39-62 ; Platons Dialog Phaidros *,

pp. 1-280.

RAEDER, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 245-279.

NATORP. Platons Ideenlehre, 52-87.

STEWART, J. A. Myths of Plato, 306-396 (Phaedrus Myth) ;

Plato's Doctrine of Ideas, 62-65 an d Part II.

DIES, A. Autour de Platon II, 400-449.

1 Cicero, Orator, xiii. 42, " me autem qui Isocratem non diligunt una cum

Socrate et Platone errare patiantur." Cf. Diogenes Laert. III., 8, where

we are told that the Peripatetic Praxiphanes wrote a dialogue in which

Isocratea figured as the guest of Plato. The theory of a rivalry has no ancient

tradition behind it. This is the more significant that the rivalry between

Aristotle and the school of Isocrates is quite well attested (Cicero, de Oratore,

iii. 35, 141, Orator, xix. 62). I should suppose that Plato's purpose in ending

the dialogue with a marked compliment to Isocrates is to show that it ia not

as a polemic against him.

CHAPTER XIII

THE THEAETETUS

IT seems possible to date the composition of the Theaetetus

more precisely than that of any other Platonic dialogue.

For the main discussion is introduced by a short preliminary

conversation between the Megarians, Euclides and Terpsion, whom

we met in the Phaedo as members of the inner Socratic circle.

Terpsion relates that he has just met Theaetetus of Athens, who

is being conveyed home from the Athenian camp at Corinth after a

battle, wounded and suffering severely from dysentery. The

thought of the loss such a man will be to the world reminds Euclides

that Socrates had once met Theaetetus, just before his own death,

and had prophesied a distinguished future for the lad. Euclides

professes to have heard all about this from Socrates himself ; he

was so struck that he at once wrote out memoranda of what Socrates

had told him, and afterwards corrected and enlarged them with the

help of Socrates himself.

Since much stress is laid on the point that Theaetetus, who is

called a distinguished " man " by Terpsion (1426) was a mere

" lad " in the year 399, it is clear that the battle from which

Theaetetus, as the whole tone of the Prologue implies, was carried

home to die, must fall a good while later. As Dr. Eva Sachs has

shown, 1 the known engagement which best satisfies the implied

conditions is that of the year 369, in which Epaminpndas broke

through the Athenian and Spartan lines on Mt. Oneion. 2 Mani-

festly the dialogue was written as a tribute to the memory of

Theaetetus, shortly after his death, which Euclides and Terpsion

regard as certainly impending. This brings us to 368 or the be-

ginning of 367 as the date of its completion. Thus, as Burnet

points out, it must have been finished on the very eve of Plato's

departure from Athens to throw himself into his great political adven-

ture at Syracuse, and probably with full consciousness that he was,

for the time, about to abandon the studious life for that of affairs.

Several points in the introduction call for remark, (i) When

Euclides explains that, to avoid tediousness, he has adopted the

1 In her dissertation de Theaeteto Atheniensi (Berlin, 1914), which finally

disposes of Natorp's singular theory that the dialogue is a juvenile work.

2 Xenophon, Hellenica, vii. i, 41 ; Bury, History of Greece, p. 608. The

engagement appears to have been a trivial one, but even trivial engagements

involve casualties. Theaetetus apparently owed his death more to dysentery

than to his wounds (1426)

3o

THE THEAETETUS 821

directly dramatic form of narration (1436-0), we must, of course,

understand that this is really Plato's explanation of his abandon-

ment of the method adopted in all the great dialogues of his literary

prime (except the Phaedrus). Henceforth, with a possible excep-

tion for the Parmenides, we shall find him returning to the simply

dramatic method of his earliest writings. 1 This is, no doubt,

because in these later works the old interest in reproducing a living

picture of Socrates and his contemporaries has at last yielded

pretty completely to the more philosophical interest of developing

the subject-matter. The Theaetetus is the latest dialogue in

which the personality of Socrates is made prominent. (2) The

stress laid on the prophetic insight shown by Socrates in his estimate

of the lad Theaetetus seems unintelligible, unless we are to take

the meeting of the lad and the old philosopher, and the forecast

made by the latter, as genuine historical facts. They are just the

sort of facts which might properly be made the most of in a work

meant as a " tribute " to the memory of Theaetetus. (3) Euclides'

account of the way in which he worked up his narrative, with the

help of Socrates himself, may be a fiction, but Plato evidently

thought it a natural fiction. We may fairly infer that admirers of

Socrates actually took down such notes of striking conversations,

and that Plato himself may have used such records, made by himself

or others, as material for his Socratic dialogues. In the present

case, by appealing to the record of Euclides he contrives to let

us know that he was not himself actually present when Socrates

met Theaetetus, though we might otherwise have expected him to

be there. Possibly this is explained by the illness which also kept

him away from the death-scene of the Master a few weeks later.

(4) The introduction of Euclides and Terpsion into the narrative,

like the preoccupation with the personality of Parmenides and Zeno

in the Parmenides, and the appearance of a " visitor from Elea " as

chief speaker in the two later dialogues, which are made to continue

the conversation of the Theaetetus, shows that we have reached a

period in Plato's life when his special interest is to define his atti-

tude towards the Megarian developments of Eleaticism. This is

a matter which will call for consideration more particularly when

we go on to deal with the Parmenides and Sophistes. We shall

find Plato in these dialogues taking up an attitude of decided

hostility to the one-sided intellectualism of the school as tending to

pervert philosophy into a mere barren sporting with " abstractions."

The same attitude is shown in our dialogue by the emphatic recog-

nition of the contribution of sensation to real knowledge. By

virtually dedicating the dialogue to his old friend Euclides, a

1 On the question whether the Parmenides is earlier or later than the

Theaetetus, see the next chapter. In any case, they must be nearly contem-

porary. Probably the difficulty of keeping up the indirect method in the

Parmenides was the immediate occasion for its abandonment.

1 Euclides can hardly be assumed to have died in the interval between 369

an 1 367. That would be too much of a coincidence.

822 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

Plato gives us to understand that his growing dissatisfaction with

the contemporary " Megarians " implies no change in his sentiments

towards the founder of the school, an old and faithful member of

the group who had been lifelong admirers of Socrates.

The main conversation is dated very shortly before the famous

trial of 399, as we see from the concluding sentence (2iod), where

Socrates explains that he has to attend at the offce of the " king/ 1

to put in his answer to the indictment of Meletus. The parties

present, besides Socrates, are the Pythagorean geometer Theodorus,

the lad Theaetetus, his companion the younger Socrates (147^),

who is a " mute personage," and possibly one or two other un-

named lads. The scene is an unnamed palaestra (1440), possibly

that in the Lyceum. We learn in the course of the dialogue that

Theodorus comes from Cyrene, and that he is a friend and admirer

of the now deceased Protagoras, though he professes to be strictly

a mathematician, wholly unversed in the methods and terminology

of contemporary Athenian " philosophy " (1466, 1650). That

he belonged to the Pythagorean order is indicated by the appear-

ance of his name in the list of Pythagoreans given by lamblichus

(Vit. Pythag. xxxvi. 267). A notice preserved by Proclus in his

commentary on the First Book of Euclid's Elements (Friedlein, p. 66)

shows that Eudemus in his History of Mathematics ranked Theo-

dorus with Hippocrates of Chios as one of the greatest of fifth-

century geometers. Xenophon (Mem. iv. 2, 10) mentions him in

a way which implies that Socrates knew him, though this may be

only Xenophon 's inference from our dialogue. Theaetetus, it is

important to remember, was a member of Plato's Academy and one

of the very first mathematicians of the fourth century. Eudemus,

as we see from Proclus (loc. cit.) t named him along with Archytas

and Leodamas as one of the three prominent geometers of the fourth

century. From notices in the Scholia to Euclid's Elements and

elsewhere, we gather that he was one of the first mathematicians

to begin the systematic study of the types of " quadratic surd "

worked out to its completion in Euclid's Tenth Book, and he is still

more often referred to as the geometer who completed the theory of

the " regular solids," by adding to the three known to the Pythag-

oreans (tetrahedron, cube, dodecahedron) the remaining two

(octahedron, icosahedron). 1

Though the dramatic power of the Theaetetus is still remarkable,

it has features which show that we are near the point at which

1 There is a little difficulty here. The meaning of the statement must be

that the fifth-century geometers already knew the constructions for the in-

scription of three of the figures in the sphere : Theaetetus added the construc-

tions for the remaining two and thus . completed the doctrine of Euclid,

Elements, xiii. But Plato definitely attributes to the Pythagorean Timaeus a

knowledge of all five regular solids (and this is why these solids were known

in antiquity as the " figures of Plato "). Careful reading, however, will

show that Timaeus is never allowed to mention the inscribing of the octa-

hedron and icosahedron in the sphere, as he does that of the tetrahedron and

dodecahedron. This seems to me confirmation of the tradition that these

construction were unknown in the fifth century.

THE THEAETETUS 823

dialogue will become a mere conventional form for what is in reality

an essay on a set theme. The theme is propounded at the beginning

of the discussion and is then pursued, except for one remarkable

digression, owned to be such by the author himself, with a system

and strictness we have not yet met in any of the major dialogues.

The Socratic cross-questioning is becoming a conscious pursuit

of the " critical " method, brought to bear on a single determinate

problem. This makes the analysis of the dialogue unusually easy

to follow.

INTRODUCTION (143^-1510)

The problem to be discussed is still made to arise, in the fashion

of the Protagoras or Republic, apparently almost by accident. In

the old way, Socrates is made to speak of his interest in the young

and to ask Theodorus whether any of the lads of Athens have

struck him as showing remarkable promise. Theodorus says that

there is one whose remarkable combination of quick intelligence,

perseverance, and modesty afford grounds for hoping very great

things of him, Theaetetus. It is curious that this remarkable

boy has a quaint physical resemblance to Socrates himself. This

gives Socrates his opening. He calls Theaetetus out of the group

of lads who are anointing themselves after their exercises and

begins a conversation with him. Theodorus, he says, has just made

a remark about our facial resemblance. As Theodorus is not a

portrait-painter, such a remark from him is not very important.

But as he is an eminent man of science, his opinion about our

mental endowments carries weight. Hence Socrates would be

glad to discover whether the lad's mental gifts really bear out the

very high commendation they have just received. He will put

this to the test by asking a question. Theaetetus is learning geo-

metry and other things from Theodorus. Now to learn means to

be acquiring knowledge. But what exactly is knowledge ? Can

Theaetetus offer any answer to this question, one which has often

perplexed Socrates himself ? The lad begins, as Plato so often

makes an interlocutor do, by an enumeration. Geometry and the

other things taught by Theodorus are knowledge ; so is shoe-

making or carpentry.

Of course, as Socrates points out, this is no answer to the

question. To answer the question what knowledge is by saying

that shoemaking is knowledge only amounts to saying that knowing

how to make shoes is knowledge. Knowing how to make furniture

is also knowledge. Our problem is to say what we mean by the

" knowing " which appears as a " determinable " in both these

statements. Theaetetus seizes the point at once, since it makes the

problem under consideration the same in type with a mathematical

one which he and the younger Socrates have just solved. That

problem was to find a common formula for what we call, in our

modern terminology, " quadratic surds/' or " irrational square

824 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

roots." As stated by Theaetetus, the question is treated, exactly

as it is in Euclid, as one about " lines " (yQd^al). You cannot

construct a straight line commensurable with your unit of length,

such that the square upon it is 3 or 5 or 7 or n or 13 or 17 times the

area of the square 09 the unit line. But you can devise a general

formula for all these cases as follows. We may divide the integers

into two classes : those which are the product of two equal factors

(4, 9, 16, etc.), and those which are not (e.g. 6, 8). We may then call

the first class " square " and the second " oblong " numbers. This

enables us to make a correlated division of all terminated straight

lines. If the area of the square described on such a straight line

can be represented, in terms of the area of the square on a unit

line by a number which is the product of two equal factors, we

call the line in question a " length " (/x^os) ; if this area is repre-

sented by a number which is not the product of two equal factors,

we call the corresponding line a " power." Lines of the first class

are all commensurable with one another, since they are all

" measured " by our standard unit of length ; lines of the second

class have no common measure, but the areas of the squares on

them have (e.g. ^3 and ^5 have no common measure, but an area

of 3 square feet and one of 5 square feet have one, namely, the

square on a line i foot long). This is why the lines of the second

class are called " powers " ; they are not themselves commensurable

with one another but their " second powers " are commensurable. 1

Thus, since every terminated straight line under consideration

belongs to one and only one of these two classes, Theaetetus has

succeeded, by the use of dichotomy, in strictly defining the class

which we should call " quadratic surds " (1486).

Socrates is delighted with this achievement, and only wishes

Theaetetus to apply the same ability to determining the class of

" sciences " or " knowledges," by bringing them all under one common

determinable (148^). Theaetetus is eager to solve the problem,

but does not feel equal to the task, though he cannot persuade

himself to let it drop from his mind. This shows that Theaetetus

is " pregnant " with a thought which he cannot successfully bring

to the birth. Now Socrates, like his mother, practises the obstetric

art, not, like her, on the bodies of women, but on the souls of men.

He has no spiritual offspring of his own to bear, as midwives are

no longer fruitful when they enter on their profession. 2 But he

has great skill in assisting at the birth of a younger man's thoughts,

and in discerning whether they are healthy and well formed or

1 The use of the word SiW/xts in this sense of " quadratic surd " was

presumably an experiment in language which did not perpetuate itself. The

name for the " quadratic surds " which became technical in the Academy and

has passed thence into Euclid and later mathematics generally, is eu#e?a<

dvv&fMi ffiiifjifjicTpoi, straight lines whose squares have a common measure (Eucl.

Elements, x. Def. 3).

* Note that it is implied in the comparison that Socrates had not always

been spiritually " past procreation," any more than his own mother had always

been barren.

THE THEAETETUS 825

sickly and misshapen. This discernment is the more necessary

that the offspring of the mind, unlike that of the body, are some-

times mere fantastic "ghosts" (ciSwXa) of thoughts. 1 Socrates

is like his mother in another respect. Midwives are excellent

match-makers, since their professional skill makes them good

judges of the physical suitability of a couple to one another. So

Socrates has often judged shrewdly that some of the young men

who have frequented his company are not really " pregnant "

with thoughts at present, and in such cases he has found mates for

them in whose society they have ceased to be barren, such as

Prodicus. 2 He has now an occasion for the practice of his gift.

He will help Theaetetus' spiritual first-born into the world, and

then we will try it, to see whether it is a genuine thought or a mere

" changeling " (1490-151^).

FIRST DEFINITION OF KNOWLEDGE (1510-1860)

KNOWLEDGE AND SENSATION : THE THEORY STATED (1510-

ifod). With this encouragement Theaetetus attempts a first

definition. A man who knows a thing " perceives " the thing he

knows (as our own proverb says, " seeing is believing "). So we

may say, as a first suggestion, that " knowledge (cVitm^) is just

perception " (cuo-flr/o-ts) . 3 This would seem to be only another

way of saying what Protagoras expressed by the formula that

" man is the measure/ 1 Theaetetus, who has often read Protagoras

(1520), agrees with Socrates that Protagoras meant by this that

" what appears to me, is to me ; what appears to you, is to you."

In fact, " I perceive this " =" this appears to me " =" this is so

to me " (1526). " Sense " (aurftpris) is thus always apprehension

1 The suggestion is that if as is not the case a woman sometimes gave

birth to a real child and sometimes to a " changeling," the midwife's task

would become even more responsible than it is. She would have to decide

in a given case whether the offspring should be cast away. The passage lends

no support to the erroneous popular theory of infanticide as a feature of

Athenian life.

1 The transparent irony of this passage has actually been missed by some

of the zealots for the " sophists." It is the minds which Socrates judges to

be barren, the persons on whom his own endeavours would be thrown away,

i.e. the second-rate, whom he hands over to Prodicus and his likes. That the

conception of the obstetrics of the soul is a genuine Socratic fancy is shown

by the allusion in Aristophanes' Clouds, 137 ft.

8 I render afoOijffit in this statement by "perception," rather than by

" qensation, " since it is not clear to me that Theaetetus is at first using the

word with the specific meaning of discernment by sense. Until Socrates leads

him to make his statement more precise, he seems to me to be employing

alffOdveoffai, in the fashion of the pre-Socratics, for direct apprehension of any

kind, whether sensuous or not. What a man is directly apprehending he is

sure of (Mffrarai). For this sense of {riffraff Oat cf. Heraclit. Fr. 35 (By-

water), TOVTOP brlffTavrai irXeicrra cldtvai, " they feel sure he sc. Hesiod

was so wise." That afoOijeis is meant at first to include all immediate

conviction is shown by the introduction of the argument about numerical

propositions, 1541 ff.

326 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

of something which is (TOV OVTOS), and is infallible, and therefore is

the same thing as certain knowledge (tirurrrjprj) (1520).

We should note very carefully exactly what is the theory here

ascribed to Protagoras. (That the interpretation of his dictum

is the correct interpretation, or at least that supposed by his readers

at large to be correct, is clear, since it is assumed that all the parties

to the conversation are quite familiar with the context of the saying,

and not one of them suggests that there can be any mistake about

its meaning.) The view Plato ascribes to Protagoras is not " sub-

jectivism.' 1 It is not suggested that " what appears to me " is a

" mental modification " of myself. The theory is strictly realistic ;

it is assumed that " what appears to me " is never a " mere appear-

ance/ 1 but always " that which is," " reality." But Protagoras

denies that there is a common real world which can be known by two

percipients. Reality itself is individual in the sense that I live in

a private world known only to me, you in another private world

known only to you. Thus if I say the wind is unpleasantly hot

and you that it is disagreeably chilly, we both speak the truth,

for each of us is speaking of a " real " wind, but of a " real " wind

which belongs to that private world to which he, and only he,

has access. No two of these private worlds have a single con-

stituent in common, and that is precisely why it can be held that

each of us is infallible about his own private world. Protagoras

is not denying the genuine " objectivity " of each man's private

world ; his equation of " appears to me " with " is, is real, to me "

is meant to insist on this objectivity. But he denies the reality

of the " common environment " presupposed by " intra-subjective

intercourse." His thesis is strictly metaphysical, not psychological.

But now, how if Protagoras really meant something more

elaborate than this, and explained his meaning more fully to his

intimates " in secret," though he gave the world at large only

this one hint of it ? There is a " far from contemptible " (ov <avAos)

view which we might regard as implied by the Protagorean dictum,

and it is as follows. 1 All truth is strictly relative. Nothing, e.g.,

is big or hot " absolutely," but only " big " or " hot " relatively

to some standard of comparison. If you selected your standard

differently, the same thing could truly be said to be " small " or

"cold," relatively to the new standard. This applies even to

existential propositions. You cannot say absolutely " this is,"

any more than you can say " this is so." You can only say " this

is, is real " relatively to something else. For the very word " is "

is a misnomer. The things we speak of as " existing " are really

events which " happen " as a consequence of movements ; move-

ment is the only thing which is ultimately real in the universe, as

1 Theaet. i$2c-d. Since Socrates suggests that this doctrine was only told

by Protagoras to his followers "in a mystery," sub stgillo (4v dirop/rtjrv),

clearly nothing of the kind can have been found in his book. The suggestion

is that if you think out all that is really implied in the Homo me*sura formula,

you will be led to the metaphysical theory now to be expounded.

THE THEAETETVS 82*

all the " wise," with the solitary exception of Parmenides, seem to

have held from time immemorial. All life, bodily or mental, is

movement and activity ; cessation of movement is lethargy,

stagnation, death (1520-153^). Now apply this to the case of

anything we perceive by sense, e.g. a white expanse. We must not

say that the white we see is " in " a body outside our own, nor yet

that it is " in " our own eye. It is not anywhere. The truth is

that what we call our " eye " and what we call the " outside world "

are simply two sets of motions. When they come into contact

and interfere with one another, something "happens" (yiyvtrat)

momentarily as a consequence of this interference, and this some-

thing is the colour, which is thus neither " within " us nor " with-

out " us, but is just the joint product of two factors, the system of

motions which are outside the organism and the system of motions

which are the eye l (1530). This explains at once why each of us

lives in a strictly private world. Any change in either of the causal

factors, the " motions " in the larger world and the " motions " in

the organism, may affect their joint product, and therefore a man

and a dog will not see the same colours, nor a man in health the

same colours as a man out of health. If the perceived quality,

" hot," "white," or what not, were simply an affection of " that

by which we measure or apprehend," i.e. of our own organism or

" sensibility," it ought not to be modified by changes in anything

else (as, in fact, it is by, e.g., variations in illumination) ; 2 if it were

simply a character of " that which is measured or apprehended "

(the external object), it should similarly be unaffected by changes

internal to the organism (but, in fact, it is affected by them).

The facts thus show that the perceived world is a function of two

variables, my special organism and its environment ; hence it is

necessarily a " private " world (154^).

Before we can judge such a theory on its merits we need a further

clarification of our thoughts. On the " private-world " theory,

six dice will not only " appear " but " be " at once " many " and

" few " : " many," if a group of four is my standard of comparison,

" few " if my standard is a dozen. Reflection on such cases leads

us irresistibly to make three affirmations which seem to be self-

evident and yet not all mutually compatible : (i) nothing can

become greater in bulk or number except by being augmented

1 We shall see later on that this is not a complete account of the matter.

The " product " of the two motions is itself a motion, and this motion has two

aspects. The " seeing eye " is as much a momentary event as the seen colour.

As to the terminology of 1530, the active motion (rb irpoffpd\\ov) must be

conceived as that of the eye's own "visual ray" issuing out of the eyeball;

the passive (rb irpoff^a\\6(jivov) is what we commonly call the " external " object

on which this supposed visual ray impinges. We should think more naturally

of reflected light striking on the retina as the rpo<rpd\\ov, but Plato always

presupposes the Empedoclean conception of seeing as effected by a " search-

light " thrown out by the eye into the world around us.

* In 1546, rb irapafj,cTpotifJLvov is simply a paraphrase for ofo-^<rts. Socrates

inserts the TapapeTpotnevov simply to echo the curious use of the word

in the formula of Protagoras.

828 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

; (2) that to which nothing has been added and from

which nothing has been subtracted has been neither augmented nor

diminished ; (3) what once was not but now is must have " come to

be " in the interval (i.e. there has been a transitional process of

" coming into being/ 1 1556) .*

Yet the case of the dice, or the case in which Socrates is one

year taller than Theaetetus but the next shorter, seems to create a

difficulty. In this last case, Theaetetus has grown, but Socrates

has neither grown nor shrunk. He is now, what he was not last

year, " shorter, 11 and yet there has been no process of " coming

to be shorter." How are we to explain the paradox ? We cannot

explain it at all to a corporealist who denies the reality of acts and

E recesses and the invisible generally. But it might be explained

y the theory of certain more refined (/co/^orepoi) persons, whose

secret Socrates offers to disclose (1560). Their theory is this.

As has been already suggested, the only reality is motion. There

are two types of motion, the active and the passive. The mutual

friction or interference (rptyi?) of an active and a passive motion

regularly gives rise to a twin product, " sense "+" sensible

quality/ 1 and neither of these is ever to be found without its " twin."

And this twin product is itself, again, a pair of movements, though

of movements more rapid than those which gave rise to it. Thus,

to apply the theory to the case of vision, you have first two " slower "

causative " movements " (the " active " movement here is supposed

to be the " event " which is the visual apparatus, the " passive "

is the event we call the environment) ; when there is an " inter-

ference " of these two motions, in that very process there emerge

two correlated " quicker " movements, neither of which ever exists

without the other, 2 " vision in act " and " seen colour." Thus the

couple " seeing eye " and " colour seen " are themselves a dual

more " rapid " event produced as an effect by the mutual inter-

ference of the two " slower " causal movements. It follows that

all predication is strictly relative. The " causal " motions them-

selves are strictly relative to one another, each is " active " or

" passive " only in relation to its correlate ; and similarly in the

" effect/' the seen colour is seen only by this " seeing eye," and this

" seeing eye " sees only this colour. " Being " is thus a strictly

relative term. To speak accurately, we ought never to say "# is,"

but " % is, relatively to y " ; if we omit the qualification, it is only

because of an inveterate linguistic bad habit. Socrates does not

1 Note that we have here in outline the fundamental thought of the

Aristotelian doctrine about " generation " and " corruption." The diroplai

connected with the problem are one of the topics of the Parmenides (1550-1576).

1 Thus the theory is closely analogous to Aristotle's doctrine that in actual

perception the afoOipu and the alcr0rjr6v are, while the perception lasts, one and

the same. ^ The important difference is that in the account given here, both

the al<r6riT6v and the al<r8w6/Mvot> only exist actually during the process of per-

ception ; apart from the process, <r eye " and " colour " only are " potenti-

ally." On Aristotle's theory, this is true of the " seeing eye," but not of the

seen colour.

THE THEAETETUS 829

commit himself to this theory of " absolute becoming," any more

than to any other, but he has stated it because we cannot dispose

of the assertion that " is " =" appears to me" without deciding

this still more fundamental question (i^Sd).

We note that the difference between the Protagorean formula

and the doctrine now given as that of certain unnamed " fine

wits " is that the first is a piece of " epistemology," the second is

ontology, and professes to give the grounds for the individualistic

or " solipsist ' epistemology. The proposition that my perceived

world only exists for me, and that it is meaningless to ask whether

your " world " and " mine " can contain one and the same object,

is only one special consequence of the much more far-reaching

doctrine that " is " itself has no meaning unless one adds the quali-

fication " relatively to." It is now being asserted not merely that

perceived qualities only exist " for " the percipient who is aware of

them, and he is only " percipient " of just these qualities, but that

the correlated active and passive " slower " movements, thing and

environment, only are relatively to one another. (Thus, e.g.,

the statement that a particle A exists would actually mean that A

interacts in a certain way with B and C, and so on for B and C

themselves.) This is why the doctrine described here cannot be

disposed of in the summary way in which Mr. Bradley has disposed

of the " phenomenalism " of many modern scientific men in

Appearance and Reality. The persons of whom Mr. Bradley is

thinking have really not got behind the restricted doctrine of the

" relativity " of perceived quality to percipient. At the back of

their minds there is still the notion that both percipient and per-

ceived quality are effects of something which, though not itself

perceived, is, or is real in an absolute sense, and thus they are

easily convicted of inconsistency with themselves. But the theory

we are now dealing with asserts that the " slower motions," assumed

by the victims of Mr. Bradley's dialectic to be simply " real," are

themselves purely relative, each such " active " motion being relative

to a specific " passive " motion and vice versa. It is thus not

open to the criticism that it regards anything whatever, per-

ceptible or imperceptible, as simply real ; " this is real " is, on this

view, always an incomplete statement which, as it stands, is strictly

devoid of significance.

It is not clear from what quarter Socrates is supposed to have

learned the theory. He is clearly not inventing it, since he repre-

sents it as the " secret " of certain refined wits. Nor do I think

it likely that Plato has devised the whole thing for himself simply

as a metaphysic which might be urged, and in fact would have to

be urged, by a far-seeing defender of the Protagorean formula.

The insistence on motion as the only reality at once suggests a

Heraclitean influence, and the elaborate kinematic working out of

the thought further suggests that the KO^OL of whom Socrates is

thinking are persons with a strong mathematical interest. If we

had more information than we have about the curious blend of

880 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

Heraditeanism and Pythagorean mathematics represented in our

tradition by the stories told of the mysterious Hippasus, we might

be able to say something more definite. From Plato's own point

of view, the theory would be perfectly acceptable as an account of

" pure " sensation ; but we must remember that, as it is part of the

object of the dialogue to show, no piece of knowledge, not even the

crudest statement about present fact, ever is a mere deliverance of

sensation.

With this general metaphysical theory as a presupposition, we

could now dispose of the superficial objection to Protagoras that

some " appearances " those of dreams, delirium, fever are

deceptive. The world of the sleeper or the fever-patient is as real

to him, while his dream or fever lasts, as the world of the man awake

and in health is to him. And it is not true to say that there is any

conflict between the way in which the world appears to one and the

same percipient, according as he is awake or asleep, ill or well.

On the theory, the " twin-product," sensation + sensed quality

is a function of the complex, organism + environment. But it is

an immediate consequence that, since a sleeping or delirious

organism is different from a waking or healthy organism, the result

of interaction with environment must be different. Socrates asleep

is different from Socrates awake in important organic respects, and,

on the theory we are considering there is no " self " or " percipient "

but the organism as it is at the moment. Thus the sensa of Socrates

asleep are real relatively to Socrates asleep, exactly as those of

Socrates awake are real relatively to Socrates awake, and it would

be abandoning the whole theory of the relativity of " being " to

judge of the reality of the sensa of Socrates asleep by reference to

those of Socrates awake (1570-1 6oc). The sensa of any percipient

organism at any moment are relative to the state of that organism

at that moment, and to nothing else, just as that organism at that

moment is relative to those sensa and to nothing else. (The esse

of the organism at the moment t, we may say, is to perceive the

sensa it perceives at that moment ; the esse of those sensa is to be

perceived by it at that moment ; neither organism nor sensa have

any further reality.) Consequently the " world " of any percipient

at any moment is private to that percipient and that moment.

" My perception is inerrant, for it is relative to my world (e/^ ouri'a)

at that moment." l Thus the theory we have stated justifies the

Heracliteans in saying that all is motion, Protagoras in saying that

" man " is the measure," and Theaetetus in saying that sense is

knowledge (i6od-e).

1 i6oc t dXijOfy Apa faol i) ^ af<707j<ns TT)J y&p ipy* ov<rtas def tonv, where note

(a) that dei means not " always " but " at each moment," " at a given moment,"

and (6) that ij ^ ovffta does not mean " my own being," as though the thought

were that what I perceive is a " subjective " irdflos or state of my own body

or mind, but " the reality which is mine," a real world of objects which is my

own private world. The crux of the whole theory is that it is an attempt to

insist at once on the objectivity of the world I perceive and on its purely private

character.

THE THEAETETUS 831

THE THEORY EXAMINED. First Criticism (1600-1 652). - The

thought of which Theaetetus was in labour has now been fairly

brought into the world, Our next task is to consider whether

it is a genuine piece of thinking or only a " changeling/ 1 To give

the lad breathing-time for recollection, Theodoras partially takes

his place as respondent while Socrates raises a number of critical

doubts, (a) How does Protagoras justify his selection of man in

particular as the " measure " ? The theory would equally warrant

the statement that any creature a pig, a baboon, or a tadpole is

the " measure/' provided only that it is sentient, (b) If each of

us is the " measure " of reality and unreality in his own world,

where has Protagoras any advantage over his pupils ? How can he

claim to correct a pupil's views about the reality of a world which,

on the theory, is private to the pupil and relative to the pupil as its

" measure " ? (The very attempt implies, contrary to the theory,

that there is a " world " of some kind common to Protagoras and

the pupil, and that Protagoras is a better " measure " of it than the

other.) Was the professional career of Protagoras a prolonged

practical joke ? Protagoras might, however, fairly say that this

sort of " criticism " is mere caricature. 1 We must examine the

proposed identification of sense-perception with knowledge in dead

earnest. So we go on to ask (c) whether when we hear foreigners

speaking their own language we also know " what they are saying,"

or whether when a person who cannot read sees a written page he

knows what is written on it. The only possible answer is that in

such a case one does know what one actually hears or sees, the

pitch of the syllables or the shape and colour of the letters, but one

does not know the meaning of the foreign vocables or the written

words. (Thus the formula knowing = perceiving by the senses

will not cover the case of knowing the meaning of such symbols ;

their meaning can neither be heard nor seen.) (d) Suppose a

man has seen something and then shuts his eyes, but still remembers

what he saw. He no longer sees it, but can we say that he does not

know what he has seen and still remembers ? There is real point

in these questions, but we must take care not to " crow " over

Protagoras and his theory prematurely. If he were alive, he would

probably have known how to make a telling rejoinder to such cavils.

As he is dead and has no one to represent him, we must try to act

as his advocates ourselves, and to plead the cause as effectively as

we can (1645-1 650). 2 If we are to press mere verbal points, any

1 Theaet. i62d-e. This might be, but need not be, a hint that there had been

attempts to discredit the formula of Protagoras by caricatures of this kind.

But I think it very rash to indulge in conjectures about Antisthenes to whom

I can discover no certain allusions in Plato as the author of the arguments.

The dvri\oyiKol were a fairly numerous class, and we may suppose that many of

them exercised their wit on so tempting a theme. Protagoras would have an

easy retort to the first of the four objections. A tadpole is quite a good

" measure " of the " world " with which the tadpole has to concern itself.

The personification of the " discourse " of Protagoras as an " orphan "

whose natural guardians are neglecting their duties lends no colour to the silly

882 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

could quite easily make many more formidable than

those we have made ourselves, without ever coming to close quarters

with Protagoras' real thought.

SOCRATES' PROPOSED DEFENCE OF PROTAGORAS (i66a-i68c).

Protagoras might fairly say that he would not have been affected

by the question about memory which puzzled a lad like Theaetetus.

He would have exposed the absurdity of talking about memory as

if it meant the " persistence " of the state of the organism in which

it was at the moment of stimulation. He would have insisted on

the point that, according to his theory, each of us is not one per-

cipient but a different percipient with every change in the state of

his organism. And he would have urged that it is for his opponent to

refute him directly by proving either that a man's " senses " (atV^o-ets)

are not private to himself, or, alternatively, that, granting this position,

the sense-object which " appears " or " is " need not be private. 1

Meanwhile, the thesis of Protagoras remains untouched. Each

percipient has his own strictly personal and private world ; it is

not merely his " apparent " world, but a real, though private,

world. And yet there is a difference between the wise man and his

neighbours, a practical difference. The wise man is one who

can influence another so that the other man's private world, which

appears and really is bad, is made to appear and be good (i66d).

Thus the abnormal perceptions of the diseased organism are as

much a disclosure of reality as the normal perceptions of the healthy.

The physician does not attempt to argue the patient into denying

their reality. He subjects the patient to a regimen which brings

his perceptions into accord with those of his fellow-men, and thus

makes them " wholesome " or " useful," whereas they were, before

treatment, dangerous and unwholesome. So the " sophist," who is

the physician of the soul, aims not at giving a pupil " truer views "

that would be impossible, if the pupil is the " measure " of his

own real world but at giving him " better " and more wholesome

views of life (i66d-i6yc). The defence made by Socrates for Protag-

oras thus amounts to crediting him with a " pragmatist " view.

Any one belief, actually held, is as " true " as any other, but some

sensations and some ways of thinking are " better/ 1 that is, " more

useful hi practice " than others. It is implied, though not actually

said, that the " useful " way of perceiving and thinking is that

legend about the prosecution of Protagoras and the destruction of his book.

Socrates is merely jesting over the reluctance of Theodorus to commit him-

self to a "non-professional" controversy. Theodorus is called the natural

guardian of the orphan simply because he professes to be an old friend and

admirer of its author. The image, of course, implies that the book of Protag-

oras had not been destroyed, but had survived its " father." Only, no one

will venture on an " official " defence of it.

1 Theaet. i66c. In this alternative, the first position, that each man's

af<r0ifarets are " private," cannot be contested. I see with my own eyes, and no

other man can see with them, any more than I can see with his eyes. Thus

the issue between realism and " absolute phenomenalism " is rightly made to

be just whether two men, each using his own private senses, can perceive an

object which is " common " to both of them.

THE THEAETETUS 888

which agrees with the perception and thought of your " social en-

vironment," since it is only such agreement which makes concerted

action possible. To be gravely " eccentric " in your perceptions or

your moral convictions puts you into the class of the insane and

makes practical co-operation with your neighbours impossible. The

root of the matter is that, though the notion of a " common " natural

or moral world is, strictly speaking, a fiction, it is a fiction which is

necessary to life. The practical urgencies of life require that my

private world and your private world should not be very dissimilar.

If they are sufficiently alike, by a useful fiction we can act " as if "

we had a common world ; where the divergence is too great to

admit of this fiction, when I call black what you call white, one of

us needs a physician for the body or the soul. By altering the

state of the percipient, the physician, according to the Protagorean

theory itself, necessarily also alters the character of his " world/'

Since Socrates offers this interpretation as a substitute for an

" official " exegesis, it is clear that it cannot have been given by

Protagoras himself ; since it is welcomed by Protagoras' old ad-

mirer Theodoras, we may infer that it is offered as a fair and honest

attempt to explain what Protagoras meant, on the assumption that

he was a man of intelligence and that his doctrine was intended to

be compatible with his claims for himself as a practical teacher.

So far as I can see, it is not only offered in good faith, but is about

the best defence which can be made for the view that the " common "

world is strictly the creation of the " intersubjective intercourse "

on which all practical co-operation depends. Against modern

statements of pragmatism it has the advantage that it does not

attempt the task of equating " true " with " practically useful " ;

it simply sets aside the distinction between " true " and " false "

as irrelevant to human life, and replaces it by the obviously relevant

distinction between " useful " and " harmful." Our attention

is thus concentrated on the fundamental question whether the

abolition of the distinction of true from false really leaves this all-

important practical distinction between useful and harmful stand-

ing or not. This ultimate issue is so serious that we cannot allow

the case for the pragmatist to be prejudiced by being left to the

championship of a boy, even if he is, like Theaetetus, a boy of

genius ; Theodoras must take the defence on himself (1680-1690) - 1

1 It may be advisable to warn some readers again against the really wanton

attempt to find a hidden attack on Antisthenes in the pleasantries interchanged

between Socrates and Theodorus at 1696. Theodorus compares Socrates with

Antaeus, who compelled every one to wrestle with him, merely because

Socrates is so insistent on dragging Theodorus himself into a philosophical

argument he would rather decline. This leads naturally to the mention of

Heracles as the person who finally vanquished Antaeus. It is needless to

look for any more recondite reason for the allusion. And it is still more

needless to suppose that when Socrates speaks of the numerous Heraclesea

with whom he has had stiff " bouts/' he is thinking of his own friend and

companion. It is to be hoped that we shall hear less in the future of the im-

aginary " feud " of Plato with Antisthenes since Wilamowitz has uttered his

timely protest against this Antisthenes- Legende.

884 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

SECOND EXAMINATION OF THE PROTAGOREAN THESIS (169^-

1720, 1760-1796). The task now before us is to examine the " prag-

matist " philosophy on its own merits. The examination falls

into two sections, between which the famous panegyric on the life

of devotion to " useless science " is inserted, admittedly as a

digression. It strikes us at once, as a common experience, that

every one knows there are soijie things about which he thinks him-

self wiser than others and other things about which he thinks

others wiser than himself (1700-6). Every one admits that there

are things about which he is ignorant and incompetent and needs to

be taught or directed. And by " wisdom " and " ignorance " men

suppose themselves to mean true and false belief (Sofa) respec-

tively. According to the thesis of Protagoras, this belief that some

of my beliefs are true and others false, being one of my beliefs,

must be true. It must be true, since it is a belief, that there are

things of which a given man is not the " measure." This is a direct

consequence of Protagoras' own principle, and yet it contradicts

that principle. And the worst of it is that if there is one point on

which every one, even those who would most readily concede that

any one man's sensations are just as veridical as any other's,

is agreed, it is that when you come to the question what is whole-

some or hurtful, each of us is not equally the " measure " for him-

self. That is just why we need the expert physician (1710) . So

in moral matters, even those who hold that there is no common

standard of right and wrong, but that " right " means simply for

any community what that community agrees in approving, never

think that " expediency " is a purely relative matter. No one

holds that the expedient is what a given community thinks ex-

pedient, though many persons hold that right is just whatever the

community happens to think right. Every one holds that there is

a common standard of expediency (1726). These considerations

are meant to lead up to the conclusion that the plausible " prag-

matist" substitution of the " useful " for the "true" as the

criterion of value in beliefs fails at its central point. It refutes

itself by presupposing that the value of the belief " this is useful "

itself must be estimated by reference to a standard of " truth."

" It is true that this practice is useful " cannot simply mean " it is

useful to believe that this practice is useful." The full develop-

ment of the thought is postponed for a moment by the introduction

of the eulogy of the contemplative life.

DIGRESSION. The Contemplative Life (1720-1760). How far

the pragmatist criterion is from being self-evident or universally

accepted we may see by contrasting the whole attitude towards

life of the philosopher or true man of science with that of the " man

of affairs," and the man of law. The former is free where the latter

is a slave, 1 as we can see by comparing the style of their " discourses."

1 Theaet. i y2d. The distinctive mark of the " free man " is that all his time

is <rxo\i), " leisure," " free time," " his own time." The " life of business " is

not " free " because in business a man's time is not " his own " ; it is engrossed

THE THEAETETUS 885

The one can follow up his thoughts wherever they lead ; time is no

object to him, and the length of an argument no obstacle, so long as

it leads him to the " reality. 11 The other has to plead with a time-

limit and under a double control. He must speak " to his brief "

his opponent will take care of that and he must ad ipt himself to

the prejudices of his "lord and master," the court, or he may have

to pay dear for it, and thus cannot afford to have a single-minded

eye to simple truth. The other is free, as we are at this moment,

to follow up any line of thought which seems promising ; he is the

master, not the slave, of his " case/' Hence the violent contrast

between the whole characters of the typical thinker and the typical

" practical man." The former, in an extreme case, barely knows

where the law-courts and places of public assembly are, or what is

being done in them; he belongs to no political "club/ 1 and cares

as little about the social as about the serious side of such institu-

tions. He knows nothing of the current political and social gossip,

and is not even alive to his own deficiency. You might say that,

while his body is here in Athens, his mind freely roams over the

universe as its domain. When he is dragged down into the world

of petty local affairs, proceeded against in the courts for example,

he is lost in such a strange situation, and the practical man sets

him down as an absent-minded fool. He cannot make a telling

invective because he is quite unaware of the personal scandals

which furnish the appropriate matter. He is equally ineffective

in eulogy, since the topics of the ordinary eulogy, the subject's

illustrious descent and splendid wealth, are unimpressive to him.

The biggest estate seems a little thing to one who is accustomed to

think in terms of the spaces of astronomy, and the finest pedigree

laughable to one who knows how many kings and how many beggars

there must be in every genealogy, if we could only trace it back

through unrecorded generations. Hence the popular contempt oi

him as a man who is so wrapt up in his star-gazing that he cannot

see what is under his nose.

But from the philosopher's point of view, the brilliant practical

man is equally absurd. Take him away from the field of small

personal concerns and set him to think about the ultimate issues of

life, what are right and wrong, what are human happiness and

misery, and how is the one to be found and the other shunned in a

word, take him out of the realm of the temporal into the eternal,

and he is helpless in " discourse," for all his forensic " acumen."

This conflict between opposing standards of valuation is inherent

in " mortality," and that is the very reason why the man who

means to be happy must make it his supreme aim to " escape "

from mortality. The only way of escape is " to become assimilated

by the demands of those whom he serves his customers, patrons, clients, " the

public/' The thought reappears in Aristotle's Ethics and Politics, where

the best life for man is identified with the " noble use of leisure," and the

standard in education is made fitness to prepare the recipient to make this

right use of his " leisure."

836 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

to God as wholly as may be," to exchange temporality for eternity.

And " assimilation " means becoming " righteous and pious and

wise." The difficulty is to convince men that the real reason for

this pursuit of goodness is not the advantage of a reputation for

goodness, but the fact that goodness and wisdom make us like God

and therefore constitute real " manhood," and confer the only real

happiness.

The whole passage recalls, and is obviously meant to recall, the

spiritual mood and even the phraseology of the Gorgias and Phaedo.

But its connexion with the present argument is loose, and hardly

amounts to more than this, that the worldly man's estimate of the

philosopher and the philosopher's estimate of him furnish the best

proof that there is no single accepted standard of valuation. The

most natural way of accounting for the presence of the digression is

that of Burnet, that it is an expression of the mood in which Plato

is contemplating his own coming absorption in the necessarily

largely uncongenial mundane life of the Syracusan court. The

ideal of the world-renouncing pure " scientist " had never been his

own ; his early ambitions had been definitely political, and his

mature conviction was that the gifts of the philosopher ought to be

consecrated to the work of practical administration, but we can

readily understand that he would have a keen sense of the sacrifice

he was making to public duty and the pettiness of the personalities

and problems with which he was now called to mix himself up. 1

It would be a bad mistake, though the mistake has been made, to

find in so splendid a passage a polemic against the aims of his older

rival Isocrates. Whatever the limitations of Isocrates were, Plato

must have sympathized with his attempt to give his pupils at

least a broader and nobler outlook on the problems of public life

than that of the mere party-man of a little Greek TroAts ; the whole

picture of the " man of affairs " who is pitted against the philosopher

suggests in its details an admirer of Antiphon or Thrasymachus

rather than a figure from the school of Isocrates, the last place

where the cult of " successful unrighteousness " would be likely

to be in favour.

Second Criticism of the Protagorean Thesis concluded (1760-

1796). To return. We had just said that though the thinkers who

identify reality with change and those who teach that " what

appears to anyone is for him the reality," are ready enough to

extend these formulae to right and wrong, no one seriously con-

tends that what a city agrees to regard as good or useful must really

be so, so long as the agreement continues. Every one recognizes

that what is really good or profitable is so independently of the

beliefs which may be entertained about it. Now this suggests a

generalization of the problem raised by the saying of Protagoras.

When a city makes regulations to ensure good or advantage, it is

acting with a view to the future. So we may ask, granting that the

Homo mensura formula is valid for convictions about the present,

1 Greek Philosophy, Part I. pp. 244-5.

THE THEAETETVS 837

is it also valid for convictions about the future ? If a man feels

hot, he is hot. Soit; but if a man believes that he is going to have

a fever with a " temperature," while his physician denies it, what

then ? In such a case the physician's forecast is certainly a better

" measure " of what is going to be the layman's " reality " than the

layman's opinion. So the best " measure " of the sweetness or

dryness of next autumn's vintage is the husbandman ; a skilled cook's

judgment about the enjoyment a company will receive from the

dishes he has prepared is sounder than their own. Protagoras

would be a better judge than one of us about the effect of a speech

one of us was going to deliver. Generally, whenever a future issue

is in question, the specialist will be the best " measure " of other

men's experiences as well as his own. The Homo mensnra formula

thus is invalid in all cases where there is a reference to future ex-

periences. And this rids us of the doctrine that any and every

belief is true, which is, moreover, self -refuting, since it implies its

own contradictory. But we have still to examine the metaphysical

theory which is the foundation of the dictum that actual present

sensation and the judgments (8oai) based on it are always true.

Final Refutation of the Identification of Knowledge with Sense-

perception (179^-186^). The complete examination of the theory

that actual present sense-perception is knowledge demands a

consideration of the already mentioned metaphysical theory that

nothing is real but movement. We cannot get any coherent state-

ment of the grounds for this theory from its official representatives,

the Heracliteans, who disdain connected exposition and affect to

speak in cryptic aphorisms ; we must try what we can make of the

doctrine for ourselves (179^-1800). We must remember, too, that

Melissus and Parmenides maintain the very opposite that what is

is one and unmoving. A complete examination would involve

studying the views both of the " men of flux " (the peovrcs) and of

the " faction of the one-and-all " (the rov o\ov orao-iamn) ; it might

end by carrying us over into one of the camps, or by leaving us in

the comically persumptuous position of standing alone against both

parties. Still we must make the venture, and we will begin by

considering the Heraclitean view (1800-1816).

Everything is always in motion : what is the precise sense of

this ? There are two easily distinguishable types of " motion " :

(a) one which includes translation and rotation, which we will call

locomotion (<f>opd) ; (b) another illustrated by the transition from

youth to age, from black to white, from hard to soft ; we will call it

alteration (dAAotWt?). Is it meant, then, that everything is at every

moment changing both its position and its quality, or only that

each thing is at every moment exhibiting one or other of these

changes ? If the statement that there is no rest or stability in

the world at all is meant strictly, we must take the former inter-

pretation. Nothing ever keeps the same quality for the tiniest

interval, any more than it retains the same position (1810). Other-

wise there would be some sort of stability about things.

888 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

Let us bear this in mind and remember also the further details,

which are part of this same theory, of the way in which the mutual

interference of two of the " slower " motions gives rise to the twin

effect sensation + sensible quality. The theory was that when

two such " slower " motions meet, the result is a definite process of

sensation + a definite sensible quality, e.g. a " seeing of white "+

" white seen." But if nothing has any permanency, there is no

such definite process of seeing white, and no such definite white

seen. The process of seeing white itself is at any moment turning

into some other process, and the white seen is turning into some

other quality. We must not even speak of " colour-vision " and

" colour/ 1 since both process and quality are always turning into

something else. It will be no more true to say at any moment that

a man is seeing or having sensation of some other kind than that he

is not having it, and therefore, if sensing is knowing, it will never

be more true to say that a man is knowing than to say that he is

not knowing. The safest answer to any question would be to say,

" It is so and it is not so," but even this is more than we should

be really warranted in saying, since the very word " so " implies

a determination which, on the theory, never exists (1836). These

considerations dispose finally of both statements: that every one

is the " measure," and that knowledge is sensation. Both must

be false, if the theory of absolute " fluidity " on which they them-

selves rest is to be upheld. Theaetetus would like to proceed now

to consider the rival Eleatic theory that " nothing happens,"

there is no " fluidity " at all. But his wishes must not be indulged.

Socrates met Parmenides, who was then an old man, in his own

youth and was powerfully impressed by his " noble depth." l If we

discussed his view, we should very likely misunderstand it, the

examination would have to be very long and searching, and we

should be diverted from our present task, which is to practise

" spiritual obstetrics " on Theaetetus (1846).

Socrates now enters on a line of thought which is by far the

most important contribution the dialogue has as yet made to the

solution of its problem. He calls attention to the, so far neglected,

distinction between sensation and thought, or judgment. We

can point out the bodily instruments which a man uses in seeing,

hearing, touching. He sees with his eyes, hears with his ears,

and so forth. Or to be still more accurate, since it is always the

man, that is his \[/v\r), which sees and hears, we should do well to

say rather that he sees and hears through his eyes and ears (184^). 2

1 Theaet. 1830. There is a similar reference to this encounter at Soph. 2 1 jc,

and the Parmenides professes to be a third-hand report of it. It seems to me

that the emphatic way in which the impression made on the youthful Socrates

is insisted on in both references shows us that Plato wishes us to regard the

meeting as a real fact, and there is no reason why it should not be one (see

Burnet, E.G.Ph*. p. 168, n. 3).

* The point of the distinction here made between that with which () and

that through which (fit o5) we see and hear can be better expressed in English

differently. It might be made by objecting to the accuracy of the expressions

THE THEAETETUS 889

Eyes, ears, and the rest of the body are not the agents in perception

but the implements (opyava) of it the first appearance of the word

" organ " in this sense. For each " implement " there is what

Aristotle was later to call its " proper " (iSiov) sensible. None

can do the work of another. Colour can only be taken in by the

channel of the eye, sound through the ear. But if a man is thinking

about two such sensibles of different senses, comparing and dis-

criminating them, or counting them as " two/ 1 pronouncing them

like or unlike, asserting that they are " really there," the soul is

considering the matter " by herself " (avrrj Si' ai-njs) without the

employment of a bodily " implement " (i&^d). 1 If we try to make

a list of the determinations of an object which are thus made

"without any bodily organ," we have to reckon among them not

only " reality " (ouon'a), number, sameness, difference, likeness and

unlikeness, but good and bad, right and wrong (i86a). Thus the

ultimate categories of value, like those of " fact," are apprehended

by thought, not by sense. In fact, they are asserted as the result

of reflection, comparison, and discrimination : this explains why

animals are as capable of sensation as men, and babies as adults

(i86c), but sound convictions about " reality and value " (ovo-ia

and a><e'\ia) are only attained by us with time and pains and educa-

tion. Now we cannot have knowledge without apprehension of a

" reality " (ova-Ca) which is known. Hence it follows that " know-

ledge " is not to be sought for in the affections of our sensibility (rols

7ra0T7/m<ri) but in the mind's reflection upon them (ev TU> TTpi cxctVuv

o-vAAoyioytw, 186^). And this finally proves that knowledge is not

the same thing as sensation (ibid. b).

SECOND DEFINITION. KNOWLEDGE is TRUE JUDGMENT

(1876-2000)

The common name for the process of reflection, comparison, and

discrimination to which the occurrence of our sensations gives rise

is " belief " or " judgment " (Sofa, TO Sofa^iv). The word Sofa

is being used here in a way characteristic of Plato's later dialogues.

In his earlier writing Sofa had commonly been thought of as con-

trasted with eTnoTi/fiij ; it had meant " belief," with the implica-

tion that the belief is a mistaken one, or at any rate a doubtful

one ; in our dialogue, and henceforward, the meaning is judgment,

intellectual conviction in general, without any suggestion of dis-

paragement. This is one of the many indications that a chief

" the eye sees," " the ear hears," and the like, on the ground that they

obscure the point that both seeing and hearing are functions of a unitary

central consciousness. This is what Socrates means by saying that there are

not a group of alffOfacis seated inside a man, like the warriors in the fabled

" vooden horse " of Troy.

1 It does not occur to Socrates to consider the view, afterwards taken by

Aristotle, that some at any rate of the functions enumerated here might be

discharged by a " common sensorium " (KOIV&V alffeifrfyiov), placed by Aristotle

in the heart.

340 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

difference between mature Platonism and the Socraticism out of

which it developed is that the former attributes a decidedly higher

value to beliefs which do not reach the level of demonstrated

" science," that is, to our " empirical knowledge " of the sensible

world. We must not suggest that judgment is knowledge, since

there are such things as false judgments. But we may take it as

an amended definition that knowledge is true judgment (1876).

If we are to examine the truth of this statement, we must begin

by considering the difficulty suggested by the old arguments which

have been used to show that a false judgment is impossible. The

old argument, which we have met in the Euthydemus, was that either

you know what you are judging about or you do not. If you do

know, you cannot judge falsely ; and if you do not, you cannot

make any judgment at all, because your mind is a mere blank

about that of which you " know nothing." The point has now

to be considered elaborately with a view to discovering the specific

character of true judgments. If a man knows both A and B, it

would seem that he cannot mistake one for the other ; if he knows

A but not B, how can he compare A with the merely unknown ?

If both A and B are unknown, is not the impossibility of a confusion

even greater (i880-c). Perhaps we may avoid these difficulties

if we say that a false judgment is a belief in " what is not " (i&8d),

thus avoiding all reference to " knowing " in our definition. 1 But

the "unreal " (TO prj w), it may be said, is just nothing at all, and

you can no more think and yet think nothing than you can see and

yet see nothing. To think or believe is always to think or believe

something ; to think nothing is all one with not thinking at all.

(Just as Parmenides had long ago declared that " what is not " can

neither be thought nor spoken of.) This consideration leads us

to try a third explanation of what we mean by a false judgment.

We mean thinking that one reality (one o^) is some other reality,

thinking that something is other than it is (dXAoSota) ; false

thinking is thus the mental confusion of one reality with another

(1890), e.g. thinking that " fair is foul and foul is fair." In the

Sophistes we shall find that this is the true account of the matter

and can be successfully defended against the Eleatic dialectic.

But the defence will depend on recognizing that the Eleatic meta-

physic itself requires a grave modification ; there is a sense in

which " the unreal " can be both thought and spoken of. In our

dialogue Socrates is not allowed to probe the question to the bottom ;

he has already explained that he is not prepared at present to

examine Eleaticism as a metaphysical theory. He contents him-

self therefore with raising the question within what limits the

" confusion " of one reality with another would seem to be possible.

1 The difficulty it is intended to avoid by the new formulation arises from

the ambiguity of the word e/dlrcu, which may mean cither " to be acquainted

with " or " to know about." It is suggested in effect that we may eliminate

the ambiguity by recourse to metaphysics; we will say that false belief is

belief in something " unreal " (in a p4 ty- But , as we shall see, this at

once raises the Eleatic problem how it is possible to think the " unreal " at all.

THE THEAETETUS 841

To understand the very possibility of such a confusion, we must

begin by recognizing that thinking is a kind of argument (Xoyos)

in which the mind carries on a debate within itself, asking itself

a question and answering its own query. The judgment, once

formulated, is the verdict or conclusion which puts an end to this

internal dispute (1900). In what conditions is it possible for this

verdict to involve " confusion " of one thing with another ? At

first sight, the old dilemma about the impossibility of confusing a

thing you " know " either with something else which you " know "

or with something you do not " know " appears equally formidable

when you substitute the word " believe " or " think " for " know "

(Kjob-igia). But we seem to have been wrong in admitting the

premisses of the dilemma. Clearly a man who " knows " Socrates

might mistake an " unknown " stranger for Socrates, if he saw the

stranger in the distance. The hard and fast distinction between

" what I know " and " what I do not know " is false to fact and

rests on the deliberate ignoring of the consideration that there is

such a thing as " learning," " getting to know " something one did

not know before (1910). Let us consider the nature of this process.

We may represent the process figuratively thus. There is

something in each of us like a wax block prepared to receive the

" impressions " of signets of all kinds ; the quality of the wax is

very different in different persons. We may regard sensation as a

process in which an object stamps an impression of itself on the

wax (the whole of the traditional language about " impressions "

and " ideas " is ultimately derived from this passage). 1 How

definite this impress is and how long it will remain undeformed

depends on the original quality of the wax. So long as the impress

remains, we may say that a man has memory and knowledge (igid).

Now consider the case of a man who " knows " the impresses left

on the block, and at the same time is attending to his present

sensations. We may say that the confusion with which we have

identified error can only arise in one specific way. If I " know

both Theodorus and Theaetetus and am simply thinking about

one of them, I cannot confuse him with the other. If I " know "

only one of them, I cannot confuse him in thought with the other,

who is wholly unknown to me. If I neither " know " nor am

1 In particular, the Aristotelian description of perception as a process in

which the soul " receives the forms of sensibilia without their matter, as the

wax receives the shape of the iron signet-ring without the metal," is seen at

once to be directly based on the simile of the wax block, which is consequently

the far-away source of the whole mediaeval doctrine of " sensible " and " in-

telligible " species. Note that the suggested theory is a psychologizing version

of the doctrine that " knowledge is recollection." The first stamping of the

wax with a wholly novel pattern gives " acquaintance " ; ^Trio-T^w arises when

the wax is stamped with the pattern a second time and the pattern is " recog-

nized " as already familiar. The whole argument would have been easier to

follow if Attic, like Ionic, had possessed the word elftijo-is, which might then

have been specialized to mean " acquaintance." Plato can discriminate olSa

from tirlffrafuu, but he has no verbal noun which stands to oTSa as ^TKTT^/ZTJ to

CLi

12

842 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

actually seeing either, confusion of thought is impossible. It can

only come in in one case ; when I " know " both parties, and so

have the " impressions " made by past perception of both still

remaining in the waxen block, but also am actually seeing both or

one of the two, I may try to " fit " the new " impression " or

" impressions " into the old " imprints/ 1 and may fit them into the

wrong ones. That is, I may make an error in recognition, like that

of the man who tries to put his foot into the wrong shoe. Thus

" false judgment " will depend on mistaken recognition, and conse-

quently will only be possible when there is a misinterpretation of an

actually present sensation. Such misinterpretation may be caused

by any 01 the defects of memory symbolized by the various defects

which make a given block of wax unsuitable to receive a clear-cut

impression, or to retain it permanently, or to receive many such

distinct impressions without crowding and superposition of one on

another. The result is that error cannot arise in sensation taken

by itself, nor in thought taken by itself, but only " in the con-

junction of sensation with thought " (195^). I-e. a false judgment

is always a misinterpretation of present sensation, from which it

would seem that true judgment, which the definition under con-

sideration identifies with knowledge, is always the correct inter-

pretation of present sensation by thought.

On reflection, however, this theory proves to be unsatisfactory

in spite of its attractiveness. For it is not the fact that all error is

misinterpretation of present sensation. A man may falsely think

that 7+5 =11, and most men do make arithmetical errors of this

kind in operating with big numbers. And they do not make such

mistakes only when they are counting things present to their senses,

but when they are simply thinking of numbers and numerical

relations. Thus error (and by consequence true judgment) cannot

be restricted to the interpretation of present sensations. There

may be false (and also true) judgments where the " sensible " does

not figure as a constituent of the judgment at all (195^-1966).

Thus our simile of the waxen block has not done what we hoped

it would for us. (It has the merit of taking into account the facts

of learning and forgetting, ignored in the crude old argument

against the possibility of " false beliefs," but it leaves the possi-

bility of sheer intellectual error where it found it. 1 )

To cover the case of purely intellectual error we must amend our

account of dXXoSofia, and this may be done if we borrow a hint

from a current statement about knowledge. (It is true that a mere

" disputant for victory " would deny our right to use any such

statement while we are still in quest of a definition of knowledge,

but the fault, if it is one, is inevitable, and we have committed

1 The one criticism I should feel inclined to pass on Burnet's analysis of the

dialogue (Greek Philosophy, Part /., 237-253) is that he seems to make Plato into

a Kantian by ascribing to him the view that all knowledge contains as a

constituent a factor supplied by the " manifold of sense.'* This seems to me

to miss the point of the illustration from false judgments in arithmetic.

THE THEAETETUS 848

it already every time we have used such phrases as " we know

that . . .," " we understand that . . .," and the like.) Knowing

is commonly said to be the " having " of knowledge (197^). But we

might improve on this statement by distinguishing " possession "

and " having/ 1 A man may " possess " or " own " a cloak without

actually " having it on." So possibly a man may " possess " know-

ledge without " having " it. In fact, we may distinguish "posses-

sion " from " having in use." A man who has caught and caged a

multitude of wild birds " possesses " them all, but may not actually

have any one of them in hand, though he can " put his hand " on

one when he wants it (1970). Let us then introduce a new simile.

The mind is like an aviary ; when we are babies the aviary is

empty (Locke's " empty cabinet ") ; each new piece of knowledge

we acquire is like a wild bird caught and caged. But actual

knowing is like putting our hand on the bird we want and taking

it out of the cage. Now a man may put his hand on the wrong

bird instead of the one he wants, since the captured birds are

alive and can fly about in the cage. So we may " possess " a

certain knowledge, and yet when we want to use it, we may not

be able to recapture it, we may capture the wrong piece of know-

ledge, and this will be the case of the man who makes a false

judgment (197^-1990).

Clearly the new suggestion has advanced the argument. As

Socrates says, the distinction between knowledge in possession and

knowledge in use has relieved us of the old difficulty that false

judgment seems to involve both knowing and not knowing the same

thing ; there is no difficulty in admitting that a man " possesses "

what he cannot lay his hand on. We may add (i) that a com-

parison of " beliefs " with living creatures is psychologically much

sounder than the old comparison with " impresses " made once for

all on a block of wax ; judgment is a living process, not the mere

retention of a stamp left on the mind once for all ; (2) that the

distinction made here is the starting-point for the more extended

antithesis of "potentiality" and " actuality " x in which Aristotle

was to find the universal explanation of movement and becoming ;

(3) that the formula no longer requires us to confine the possibility

of error to the interpretation of present sensation.

But there is still a grave unsolved difficulty. Error is now said

to be due to a wrong " use " of knowledge which we already have

in possession. If this is so, a man's knowledge is the direct source

of his false judgments ; he only confuses A with B because he

possesses " knowledge " of them both. At this rate, might we not

equally say that error may be the cause of knowledge, or blindness

of vision ? (This difficulty is perhaps not meant to be taken wholly

1 That the distinction between the actual and the potential is primarily

due to the Academy seems to be further indicated by its appearance as

something needing no explanation in Aristotle's Protrepticus (Fr. 52, Rose),

which is shown by the considerable remaining fragments of it to have been an

eloquent exposition of Platonism and was probably written during Plato's

lifetime (Jaeger, Aristoteles, c. 4).

844 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

seriously. It is true that the more you " know," in the sense of

" having the knowledge in possession," the graver are the errors

to which you are exposed. As Mr. Chesterton says somewhere,

" a man must know a great deal to be always wrong." Really

grave error is regularly due to the misuse of wide knowledge. But

the point is not really examined. Socrates' object is simply to

prelude to a much more real difficulty. )

Theaetetus suggests that we might elude this difficulty by

modifying our image. We might say that there are " ignorances "

as well as " pieces of knowledge " in the aviary, and that the man

who makes a false judgment is putting his hand on an " ignorance."

But if that is so, since he really believes his false judgment, he must

suppose the " ignorance " to be a piece of knowledge. And this

gives an opening to the eristic for raising the old problem once more.

Can a man who knows what knowledge and ignorance are confuse

one with the other ? And if he does not know what both are, how

can he confuse something he knows with something of which he is

quite unaware, or one thing of which he is unaware with another of

which he is equally unaware ? If we try to meet our opponent

by suggesting that there is a " knowledge of the difference between

knowledge and ignorance " which is a sort of knowledge of the

second order, and that false judgment arises from inability to

put one's hand on this knowledge, we shall clearly be involved in

an impossible " infinite regress " (aooc). Thus the point which

Socrates is labouring is the sound one that it is impossible to have a

psychological criterion of true and false beliefs.

Independently of this impossibility of a criterion, there is an

obvious objection to the identification of knowledge with a " true

belief." A man may be induced to hold a belief which in fact is

true not by proof but by persuasive dexterous special pleading. 1

Thus the court which is led by clever advocacy to find a man guilty

of an act of dishonesty cannot be said to know that he has com-

mitted the crime ; to know that, they would require to have seen

the act committed. But if the man had really committed the act,

the court has a " true belief " about him. This proves beyond all

dispute that there is true belief which is not knowledge. The im-

portance of the point may become plainer if we put it in a rather

more modern way, What the illustration shows is that there is

a real and significant difference between " historical " and " scien-

tific " truths. History is not, and never can be, a department of

" demonstrative science."

THIRD DEFINITION. KNOWLEDGE is "TRUE JUDGMENT

ACCOMPANIED BY DISCOURSE

Possibly the difficulty just raised may be turned. As Theaetetus

says, he had forgotten to specify that a true judgment, to be

*The same point reappears at Timaeus $ie, where it is put into the

mouth of Timaeus of Locri. Presumably it is not specially Socratic nor

Platonic.

THE THEAETETVS 845

knowledge, must be accompanied by " discourse " (Xoyos). If

there are any objects of which there is no " discourse," they

will not be objects of knowledge, though we may have true

judgment about them. At least, so Theaetetus has heard from

some one whom he does not name. The point of the correction

is to distinguish between " simple apprehension " and appre-

hension attended by " discourse," and to deny the name " know-

ledge " to simple apprehension. Thus the passage is the source

of the familiar Aristotelian and mediaeval doctrine that the

" complex enunciation/' or proposition, is the unit of know-

ledge, as well as of the notion of " thought " as " discursive."

We note also, at once, that the theory suggested has a remark-

able prima facie resemblance to that put forward by Socrates him-

self in the Meno, where it was said that " beliefs " are converted

into knowledge when they are " secured " curias A.oytoy/,<T, by a

" computation of the grounds " for them. In our dialogue, Socrates

says that he too has a dream to tell. He seems to have heard

" in a dream " that there are certain elementa (o-roixcio) which

are the ABC of nature, all other things being " syllables," complexes

of these "letters." The "letters " can be simply apprehended and

named, but we can say nothing about them, can predicate nothing

of them, since to attribute any predicate to them would be ad-

mitting complexity in them (contrary to the hypothesis). The

complexes composed of these letters have a Aoyos, since you can

analyse the complex back into its simple constituents, just as you

can spell a syllable. The complexes then are " knowable and

rational " (pjrd) f but their elements are not ; they have to be

seized by direct simple apprehension (are ol^Ovjra). Knowledge,

" grounded belief," is always of the complex. Probably this theory

is the same as that of which Theaetetus had heard (201^-2020). We

are not told anything of the authorship of this interesting theory,

which has its counterparts in our own day, though it is plain that

it is not being invented by Plato. Where it comes from we can

only guess. The atomists have been thought of, but without

much probability. The question which Socrates goes on to raise,

whether a " syllable " is nothing but its components or a new unity,

would have no significance for persons who disbelieved in the reality

of all " composition," and is not a natural criticism to address to

them. It would be more reasonable to think of the doctrine of

Empedocles, which admits of genuine " chemical " composition.

From his point of view, the " four roots " correspond exactly to

the ABC of the book of Nature, bone, flesh, and other tissues to

" syllables," and organisms composed of these tissues to complete

words. But the employment of the epithet foral (' ' expressible ' ') to

describe the " syllables " of Nature's language suggests also mathe-

matical connexions of some kind. Thus I should be inclined to

attribute the theory to some Pythagorean of the type who were

trying in the later part of the fifth century to find room within

their own doctrine for the " four roots " and the Empedoclean

846 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

biology. 1 But why is Socrates said only to have heard of the

theory " in a dream " ? Possibly because the person who is respon-

sible for it had only produced it after the death of Socrates, or be-

cause it only became known at Athens after that date, and therefore

some apology has to be offered for making Socrates speak of it.

Hence, when we remember the precisely parallel doctrine attri-

buted by Theophrastus to the Pythagorean Ecphantus of Syracuse,

it is natural to suspect with Burnet that the reference is to him.*

The analogy from letters and syllables is specious, but we must

examine it more closely. It is true that the first syllable of Socrates'

name, the syllable So, has a certain Xoyos. You can say that it is

S and o the letter S has no such Xoyos. You can make statements

about it, e.g. that it is a " hissing " sound, but you cannot explain

the sound by analysing it into components. But now arises a

difficult question. Is the syllable So simply the sounds or signs

5 and o, taken in that order, or is it a new unity of a type different

from that of its " component " sounds or symbols ? If you take

the first view, that So is just " S and o," then it seems ridiculous to

say that a man can "know" "5 and o," and yet neither knowS

nor know o. On the second view, So is itself a unity, and has not

really 5 and o as " constituent " parts. Hence the syllable should,

like the single letter, be an object of simple apprehension, and there-

fore, on the proposed definition, not an object of knowledge (202^-

2050). Besides, the experience of our own early schooldays seems

to show that we learned to recognize syllables simply by learn-

ing to recognize the letters of which they are composed ; this tells

forcibly against the view that " syllables " can be known when

their component " letters " are not known (2o6a-c).

Apart from the question of the soundness of this analogy from

letters and syllables, what may we suppose to be meant by Xoyos

(" discourse ") in the statement that knowledge is " a true judgment

accompanied by discourse " ? Three, and only three, possible

meanings occur to us. (a) " Discourse " may mean actual uttered

speech made up of nouns and verbs. This, however, cannot be the

meaning intended, for any true judgment can be expressed in

speech, even if it is not entitled to rank as knowledge (zo6d). (b) Or

the meaning might be a complete enumeration of the component

" parts " of the thing thought about. Hesiod says that a hundred

planks go to a waggon. You and I cannot name more than a few of

them : is it meant, then, that we have only a " true judgment "

about a waggon, but should know what a waggon is, if we could

name all the hundred ? The objection to this interpretation is

that we cannot say that a man really knows a complex unless he

can recognize its components not merely as components of that

1 Philolaus is now known to have been a Pythagorean of this type (Burnet,

E.G.Ph.*, 277 ff .), and it is just this combination of Pythagorean mathematics

with the biology and medicine of Empedocles which is expounded at length in

Plato's Timaeus.

* For the doctrine of Ecphantus see Diels, Fr. d. Vors. 9 , i. 340-341. The

historical reality of E. is, as Diels says, guaranteed by the fact that our notices

of him come from Theophrastus, who could not well have been mistaken on

the point. Whether he belongs to the fifth or the fourth century is not clear-

THE THEAETETUS 847

complex, but when they recur in another setting. E.g., we should

not say that a man " knew " how to spell the syllable The, if he

wrote it correctly in spelling the name of Theaetetus but wrongly

when he had to spell the name Theodoras. And a man might be

liable to make the same sort of blunder about each of the remaining

syllables, and yet might spell the one name Theaetetus right. Thus

he would have enumerated all its letters correctly and yet would

have mere " right judgment/' not knowledge (2086). (c) Or was it

meant that a true judgment about a thing becomes knowledge

when you add to it the discourse which indicates the character

which distinguishes that thing from every other thing ? Is know-

ledge a true judgment accompanied by a statement of the differentia

(8ia<opa, Sia^opor^?) of the subject of the judgment ? l This account

looks as though it ought to be true, but when you examine it

closely it is as perplexing as theatrical stage-paintings seen from close

quarters. How can I have a " true judgment " about Theaetetus at

all, if I am not alive to the distinctive individual characters which

mark off Theaetetus from every one else ? If I am unaware of them,

how can my judgment be said to be about Theaetetus rather than

about Theodoras or any man you please ? Thus it would seem that

to make a true judgment about Theaetetus, I must already have the

differentia of Theaetetus in mind. Then what is added when this

true judgment is converted into knowledge by the addition of the

" discourse " of the differentia ? It cannot be meant that we are to

add a " true judgment " of the differentia to our existing true judg-

ment, for we must clearly have possessed that in order to make a

true judgment about Theaetetus. And to say that what is meant

is that we reach knowledge when we not merely think but actually

know the differentia amounts to the circular definition that " know-

ledge is true judgment plus knowledge of the differentia " (2o8c-2io0).

Thus our dialogue of search ends formally with a negative con-

clusion. Three suggestions have been made and all found untenable.

Theaetetus has no further suggestion of which to be delivered. If

he should ever find himself pregnant with any further suggestions in

future, we must examine them in the same fashion. It is not the

function of Socrates to make any positive contribution to knowledge,

and besides it is time that he went to the " king's " office to make

his formal reply to the indictment preferred by Meletus (2106-^).

The Theaetetus has thus been true to type as a Socratic dialogue

in ending with no avowed results. But negatively we have

reached a series of results of the highest importance. We have

disposed of the identification of knowledge with sensation or any

form of simple apprehension. We have also seen that pure rela-

tivism is untenable alike in the theory of knowledge and in meta-

physics. It may be added that it has been at least forcibly sug-

gested by the tenour of the whole argument that all the proposed

definitions have failed precisely because each of them has attempted

to provide a psychological criterion of knowledge, and no such

psychological criterion is possible. The most important positive

1 The first occurrence of the word in the sense which Aristotle was to stereo-

type as a technicality of logic.

848 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

result of the discussion is probably the recognition that the dis-

covery of the great categories both of existence and value is the

work of thought, " the soul by herself without any instrument."

We may note also the appearance for the first time of a whole

series of technical terms of the first importance : " quality "

(noidrrjg), " organ " of perception (dgyavov), " criterion " (xQiTfaiav) ,

" differentia " (dKupagd, dia^ogdTrjg). Also we see the very funda-

mental problems connected with the notion of " simple appre-

hension " and the difference between " acquaintance " and " know-

ledge about " coming into prominence and receiving illustration,

though without the formulation of a definite result.

Possibly the most striking feature of the whole dialogue is its

silence on a matter about which we should have expected to hear

something. Plato has written a long and elaborate discussion of

knowledge without making a single reference to the doctrine of forms,

though we might have thought it almost impossible for him to keep it

out of the argument against relativism. A similar silence may be said

to occur in all the dialogues we still have to examine. The forms are

mentioned only in two of them : the Parmenides, where the doctrine

is said to be that of Socrates in his early years and is criticized by

Parmenides and Zeno, and the Timaeus, where it is put into the

mouth of a fifth-century Pythagorean. I do not see how to account

for these facts on the view that Plato had himself originated the

doctrine and regarded it as his special contribution to philosophy.

If we trust his own accounts of the matter, we shall find it most

natural to suppose that in the earlier dialogues, which speak of the

forms, Plato has not yet developed a doctrine which he feels to be

specifically his own ; he is reproducing the common inheritance of

Socratic men. If that is so, the silence about the forms in the

Theaetetus may mean either that when he wrote that dialogue he was

feeling the necessity for a " Platonic " doctrine which had not yet

been definitely worked out, or else that he had already arrived at

the results Aristotle always assumes to be the Platonic teaching, and

felt that they were so definitely his own that dramatic versimilitude

would be outraged by putting them into the mouth of Socrates.

See further :

BURNET. Greek Philosophy, Part /., 234-253.

CAMPBELL, 'L.The Theaetetus of Plato*. (Oxford, 1883.)

RITTER, C. Platon, ii. 96-120 ; Gedankengang und Grundan-

schauungen von Platos Thedtet in appendix to Untersuch-

ungen ueber Platon. (Stuttgart, 1888.)

RAEDER, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 279-297.

DIELS, H. Elementum. (Leipzig, 1899.)

DIES, A. Autour de Platon, 450-452.

STEWART, J. A. Plato's Doctrine of Ideas, 65-68.

NATORP, P. Platons Ideenlehre, 88-116.

SACHS, E. de Theaeteto Atheniensi (1914).

CHAPTER XIV

THE PARMENIDES

IT is most probable that the Parmenides and the Theaetetus

were composed almost simultaneously. The Parmenides

cannot well be a decidedly earlier work than the other, since

it exhibits the same interest in Eleaticism and its great founder

Parmenides ; it cannot well be later, since it is the best example

in Plato of that cumbrousness of the indirectly reported dialogue

form which is mentioned in the Theaetetus as the reason for return

to the simpler type of the earliest dialogues. Indeed, it may well

be that it was just the difficulty of keeping up in the Parmenides

the fiction that the whole is recited by a speaker to whom it had

been formerly recited by a second person, who in his turn had

heard it from a third, which led Plato to renounce this type of

composition for the future. It had been useful so long as his

purpose had been largely dramatic, but was found to be worse than

useless for works in which the main interest lies in the analysis and

criticism of ideas.

The dialogue has always been regarded as an exceptionally

puzzling one, and the most divergent views have been held about

its main purpose. Yet if we attend to certain plain hints, given

by Plato himself, we may find that his object is indicated with

unusual clearness. The general scheme of the dialogue is this.

It falls into two parts of unequal length. In the first and briefer

part (126^-1350) Socrates is represented as a very young man

expounding his nev r ly formulated theory of the " participation " of

sensible things in forms to the great Parmenides and his famous

scholar Zeno ; Parmenides subjects the theory to a series of

criticisms which look annihilating and to which Socrates offers no

reply. Still he maintains that philosophy cannot dispense with

the conception of the forms. The weakness of Socrates is that,

being very young, he is attempting to philosophize without a

sufficient logical discipline in considering all the consequences

which follow from the acceptance or denial of a fundamental

" hypothesis." In the second part of the dialogue (136^-1660),

Parmenides illustrates the kind of logical discipline he has in mind

by taking for examination his own thesis that " Reality is One "

or that " Things are a Unity." He apparently shows in a series of

antithetical " antinomies " that whether this thesis is affirmed or

denied, the consequence is that a host of pairs of contradictory

349

850 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

statements may either be simultaneously affirmed or simultaneously

denied. In either case, of course, the principle of Contradiction

has been violated. The dialogue ends without a word of comment

on this portentous result.

Now it is quite certain that Plato never dreamed of denying

the law of Contradiction ; Aristotle would certainly have said

something on the point if that had been so. 1 We get a clue to

Plato's real drift when he makes Parmenides say (135^) that the

method of which he is about to give an example is that of Zeno,

the inventor of " antinomies. 11 This remark is clearly meant to

send us back to the earlier sentences (128 c-d) in which Zeno has

been made to explain the real intention of his own famous puzzles.

His purpose, he says, was simply to retort on opponents who said

that the Parmenidean doctrine " reality is one " leads to para-

doxical conclusions by showing that their rival " hypothesis " that

" reality is many " leads to still worse paradoxes. If we interpret

the Parmenides, as we clearly ought to do, in the light of these

broad hints, we shall see that it is constructed on the same pattern

as the paradoxes of Zeno. A series of attempts to show that the

Socratic " hypothesis " of forms leads to impossible results is

retorted upon by an elaborate attempt to show that the Eleatic

hypothesis is in still worse case. It is not safe even to mention it,

for whether you assert it or deny it, in either case a clever formal

logician can compel you to admit either that all assertions whatso-

ever are true or alternatively that they are all false.

It follows then that the objections urged against the doctrine of

sensible things as " partaking of " forms are not Plato's own, and

are not meant as a serious criticism by himself either of Socrates

or of his own earlier theories. They correspond to the objections

against Parmenides which Zeno had in view in composing his own

work. In other words, we are directed to regard these criticisms

as coming from opponents of the theory of " participation." And

since Plato's imitation of the Zenonian method takes the form of

raising still worse puzzles about the consequences of the Eleatic

doctrine, it is clear who these opponents must be. We must look

for them among .the formal logicians of the school of Megara who

were the continuators of Eleaticism. It is hi strict keeping with this

interpretation that the main point of the objections made by

Parmenides to Socrates is not to raise difficulties about the reality

of the forms. That he seems to concede. What he criticizes is

1 Cf. Aristot. Met. 10056 25, where it is mentioned that " some persons "

suppose Heraclitus to deny the. principle of contradiction, " but it does not

follow necessarily that a man means what he says. ' ' Ibid. loojb 22, the ' ' argu-

ment of Protagoras " would lead to the denial of the principle, as is argued at

length at 10090 6 ff. Heraclitus and Protagoras are the only eminent men

named in the course of the argument, and of them Aristotle only says that by

pressing, in one case, the thinker's mere words and, in the other, the conse-

quence of his thesis, you could reach this result. He means that neither really

intended to reject this " most certain of all principles. 11 If he supposed the

antinomies of the Parmenides to be meant seriously, he would have been bound

to refer to the point in this context.

THE PARMENIDES 851

the view of Socrates that sensible things " partake " of the forms,

and so have a kind of secondary reality. This is exactly as it should

be if the critics Plato has in view are the Eleatics of Megara. From

their point of view, the great fault of the doctrine expounded in the

Phaedo, Republic, and other dialogues is that it allows any kind of

reality at all to the objects of sense. Plato does not, in the dialogue,

offer any answer to these extreme " idealists " ; he simply sets

himself to show that two can play at the game of abstract formal

logic, and that he can, if he pleases, play the game better than its

professed champions. Their own methods may be applied to their

own fundamental doctrine ; let them see how they will like the

result.

If this is the right way to understand the dialogue, and Plato

seems to tell us that it is, it follows that the Parmenides is, all

through, an elaborate jeu d' esprit, and that all interpretations based

on taking it for anything else (including an earlier one by the present

writer), are mistaken in principle. It equally follows that the

ironical spirit of the work must not be forgotten in dealing with

isolated passages. E.g., when Parmenides gravely censures Soc-

rates for refusing to believe in forms of mud and dirt, and says

that he will get the better of such a prejudice when he grows older

and more philosophical (1300), we must understand the remark to

be a piece of polite irony. In Parmenides' mouth, it can only

mean that a man who is going to admit any kind of reality in

sensible things ought to be prepared to "go the whole hog/' and

nothing more. Presumably the remark is a reproduction of actual

Megarian criticism. It tells us nothing of Plato's own thought.

More than any other Platonic work of any considerable compass,

the Parmenides bears throughout the stamp of being an " occasional'

composition. Its purpose is to " have some fun " with Monists

who regard the sensible as illusion, and very little more.

There are several interesting points to be noted in connexion

with the introductory narrative. The otherwise unknown speaker,

Cephalus, who recites the dialogue, is a citizen of Clazomenae, the

native town of Anaxagoras. It is not said where he is speaking or

to whom, but apparently the scene is in one of the Ionian cities.

The assumption is that he had gone to Athens expressly to learn

the true story of the meeting between Socrates and the great

Eleatics from the only surviving person who could relate it, Plato's

own half-brother Antiphon, son of Perictione by her second husband,

the well-known statesman Pyrilampes. Antiphon could tell the

tale accurately because he had often heard it when he was younger,

from Pythodorus. (The person meant is the well-known Pytno-

dorus, son of Isolochus, prominent in the Archidamian war, whom

the writer of the Alcibiades I names as an actual pupil of Zeno.)

Pythodorus had been the host of Parmenides and Zeno on their

visit to Athens at the time of the great Panathenaea in a year

when Socrates was still " very young." It follows from all this

that we are to suppose the meeting of Socrates with the Eleatic

852 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

philosophers to have taken place about 450 B.C., nearly a quarter

of a century before Plato's own birth. The visit of Cephalus and

his friends to Antiphon must be supposed, as Proclus said, to be

after the death of Socrates. The recital of Antiphon was needed

precisely because all the persons who had been present at the

original meeting were dead.

Why does Plato make this unparalleled assumption that a con-

versation of Socrates is being repeated outside Athens, after

Socrates' death and a good half-century after the holding of the

conversation ? Clearly, by insisting on the early date of the con-

versation, and the fact that no one is living who could check the

third-hand report of what passed, he frees himself from responsibility

for the strict accuracy of his narrative. If we find the conversa-

tion so d propos to present-day Megarianism, well, we only know

what Socrates and Parmenides said from a second-hand story told

by Antiphon, a younger man than Plato himself, and who will go

bail for Antiphon ? I think it ought also to be said that the tale

of the anxiety of the Ionian philosophers to hear Antiphon's story

justifies an inference. Why the lonians of Asia Minor should feel

this interest is obvious. They would be members of the school

founded in Ionia by Anaxagoras on his removal from Athens ;

Socrates, the favourite pupil of Anaxagoras' successor Archelaus,

would in any case be an object of interest to such a group. That

Plato thinks it a plausible fiction that their interest should lead

them to visit Athens in order to gather a true account of events

fifty years old seems only explicable on the supposition that the

encounter of Socrates with the great Eleatics was a real historical

fact and, for philosophical circles, a memorable one, as an encounter

between two great chess-players or gamblers is memorable for

persons interested in chess or gaming.

The situation at the opening of the conversation is this. Zeno

has just been reading aloud his famous work containing the anti-

nomies for which he is still remembered. Socrates fastens on one

of them, an argument which has not survived and of which the

precise sense is uncertain, to the effect that " if things are many, they

must be like and must also be unlike, but this is absurd," as an

example of the rest. He proposes to regard the whole work as

intended to establish the thesis of Parmenides by disproving its

contradictory. Parmenides says " reality is one," Zeno that

99 reality is not many." Zeno accepts the statement with the minor

correction that his object was not to prove the Parmenidean thesis,

but simply to silence its critics by showing that their own rival

" hypothesis " has even more impossible consequences than those

they urge against Parmenides (127^-1280). Socrates then suggests

that if we will only accept the doctrine of forms and the participa-

tion of things in forms, there is really no paradox in saying that

the same " things " may " partake " at once of the form of likeness

and of that of unlikeness, and so be at once like and unlike. But

it would be a real and intolerable paradox (re/oas) to hold that

THE PARMENIDES 858

unlikeness can be predicated of the form of likeness or likeness of

the form of unlike. So it is intelligible enough that a sensible

thing, my body, for example, should be one body out of the six or

seven human bodies present in this room and also have many

members. But it would be quite another thing to hold that Unity

is many or Plurality one (1290-1 300). Parmenides and Zeno are

both impressed by the ability of Socrates, and Parmenides at once

asks him whether the theory is original. " Did you make this

distinction between forms and things which partake of them

auTo's? " "for yourself, 1 ' "out of your own head" (1306) ? Par-

menides asks the question, as Proclus says, because it might be

that Socrates had " heard of " some such distinction from some

one else. The noticeable thing is that it is not the doctrine that

there are " intelligible " forms which strikes Parmenides as novel ;

the original point which impresses him is that Socrates holds that the

things we see and handle " participate in " the forms. None of

the difficulties he intends to raise arises from the belief that there

are forms ; the difficulties all concern the relation of " participa-

tion " by which the sensible thing is connected with a form. It is

the reality of the " phenomenal " world which he, as an Eleatic,

finds a stumbling-block. The conclusion to which his criticism

is meant to conduct us is the double one (a) that unless we admit

the reality of the forms, there is an end of all philosophy; if

we do admit it, the form cannot be " present in " sensible

things, and these must therefore be simply unreal (1350-c). 1

This is precisely the position of Euclides and his friends, who

taught that " reality is one ; the ' other ' is unreal " (Aristocles

ap. Euseb. P.E. xiv. 17, R.P. 289). Hence we shall expect to

find that the arguments urged against Socrates by Parmenides

are theirs also.

I may summarize these arguments the more briefly that they

are admirably dealt with by Professor Burnet in Greek Philosophy,

Part /., 253-264, and other writers on the philosophy of Plato.

I have attempted a complete discussion of their weight and deriva-

tion elsewhere in " Parmenides, Zeno, and Socrates, 1 ' Philosophical

Studies, pp. 28-90, whither I may refer a reader desirous of further

information.

Parmenides begins by raising the question what precisely is

the content of the world of forms. Socrates professes himself

certain that there are forms corresponding to the fundamental

notions of ethics Right (Sucatov), Good (ayaOov), Noble (KO\OV) ; he

is doubtful about forms of organisms and physical things (Man,

Fire, Water) ; in the case of such things as mud, dirt, hair i.e.

1 This is, in fact, the position of the historical Parmenides himself. His

" one " is, no doubt, corporeal ; it is a solid homogeneous sphere. But our

eyes and ears do not show us anything of the kind. Hence the apparent

" things " which they disclose to us must be pure illusion. Though the

" one " is corporeal, we only apprehend it by thinking. Its sole reality is

deduced by Parmenides from what he regards as the postulates of coherent

thought.

854 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

sensible things which do not appear to have a recognizable type

of structure he is inclined to think that there are no forms. In

these cases there is no reality beyond " what we see." But he is

not quite sure that consistency would not demand forms of these

too, though he is afraid the admission might lead him into " abysmal

nonsense " (130 b-d). What he means by this " nonsense " we

can see, as Burnet suggests, by the notices preserved to us of the

arbitrary fashion in which the Pythagorean Eurytus attempted to

assign " numbers " to man, horse, and other things. The main

point is, that though Socrates is not certain about the contents of

the system of forms, the forms of which he is most certain are

those which correspond to our ethical ideals. (Since we can define

these as the mathematician defines his " figures/' they must

have the same kind of reality as that the geometer ascribes to his

figures.)

The theory then is that all the " particulars " of which a common

predicate is affirmed owe their possession of that predicate to their

" participation " in the corresponding form, and Parmenides sets

himself to show that, however we understand this relation of

" participation," we are led to consequences which are logically

absurd. This is exactly the line of reasoning adopted by Zeno for

the confutation of the Pythagorean mathematicians who assume

that " reality is many." The argument may be analysed as follows :

(a) If a form is " in " each of a number of things, either the whole

of it is " in " each of them, or only part of it is " in " each. In the

first case the form itself being as a whole " in " each of several

separate things is " outside " itself (i.e. it is, after all, many and not

one, contrary to the Socratic thesis of its unity). In the second

case, the form is divisible (/xcptoroV), and thus becomes many by

division just as, on the alternative view, it becomes many by multi-

plication ; the whole form is thus " in " no one of the things called

after it, and thus they are not really entitled to the " common

name " (i^ia-e). Thus we have an apparent reductio ad absurdum

of the " hypothesis " of " participation " ; it permits of only two

alternative interpretations and you are led, by a slightly different

route, to the same denial of the hypothesis itself, whichever alter-

native you adopt. The hypothesis is thus " self -refuting." (The

precise meaning of the reasoning by which the second of the alter-

natives is refuted in the special case of the form " magnitude " is

obscure, but seems to be this. If you say that one thing is bigger

than another in virtue of the presence in it of a " part " of the form

of " magnitude," less than the whole of the form, you are main-

taining in effect that there is such a relation as " not quite bigger

than." Thus you are committed to holding that, e.g., if A and B

are segments of a straight line, the relation between them may be

that A is " not quite longer " than, or " nearly longer " than B,

and this is manifestly nonsense. So, in the case of the form of

" smallness," you are committed to the view that it would be

significant to say that " A is nearly smaller than B, but not quite

THE PARMENIDES 855

smaller." But this is senseless. Either A is quite smaller than B

or it is not smaller at all. If there is any departure from strict

equality, either A is definitely greater than B or it is definitely less

than B, a perfectly valid argument against the notion of strictly

" infinitesimal " differences, which is exactly on a par with the

argument of Zeno against the view of the point as a " vanishing "

magnitude.) We note, of course, that the reasoning is nci directed

against the reality of forms, but against the assumption that a

form can be " in " or " present to " something which is not

a form.

(b) The reason and the only reason for Socrates' doctrine is

the assumption that when several things have a common predicate,

it is assumed that there is a single determinate reality (the form)

denoted by this predicate. But it ought to follow that, since the

common predicate can be affirmed of the form itself, there must be

a second form " present " alike to the first form and the things

which " participate " in it, and similarly, by the same reason, a

third, and so on in indefinitum. Thus there must be no one single

form of, e.g., magnitude, but a simply infinite series of forms of

magnitude ; thus, once more, the Socratic theory is shown to be

self -refuting, and again it is the asserted " presence " of forms

to things which has created the difficulty (132^-6).

In strict logic this reasoning is not conclusive, since it turns on a

confusion between a predication and the assertion of an identity.

E.g. David and Jonathan are a pair of friends, Orestes and Pylades

are another pair. Both pairs have something in common, the

cardinal number 2, which is the number of the members of each.

But the number 2 is not itself a pair ; it is a number, and cannot be

said to have a number. Since Plato's object is merely to rehearse

the objections of Eleatics to the Socratic doctrine in order to over-

trump them by showing that their own methods can be turned

with even more effect against their own theories, we need not

suppose that he was unaware of this logical flaw, though he has no

occasion to expose it. He had already made Socrates himself in

the Republic (5970) remark in passing that if you once surrender the

absolute unity of the form by admitting that there can be two

forms of the same thing, you are committed to the " infinite

regress/ 1 We may reasonably infer that this kind of reasoning was

already current in Socrates' own lifetime, not invented for the first

time after his death by Eleatic critics of the positions ascribed to him

in the Platonic dialogues. Hence I think it unlikely that this

particular difficulty has anything to do with the difficulty urged,

as Alexander of Aphrodisias tells us, by Polyxenus the Megarian

against the doctrine of " participation." As I understand the state-

ments of Alexander, the point of Polyxenus was that on the Platonic

theory there ought to be not only visible men, like Socrates and

Plato, and a form of man, but also a " third " man, intermediate

between the two, exactly as, on the Platonic theory itself, there are

certain " mathematical objects " intermediate between the form of

856 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

circularity and the visible diagram drawn on a black-board. 1 I

think also that when Aristotle talks of the " third man " as a

difficulty to which the doctrine of forms leads us, 2 he is always

intending to refer to this last-mentioned argument and not, as is

commonly supposed, to the " indefinite regress." I have tried to

argue the point fully in the essay already referred to (Philosophical

Studies, pp. 52-69).

Zeno, and Socrates, pp. 255-270).

(c) At this point Socrates suggests a way of escape from the

difficulty about the unity of the form. How if a form is really a

" thought " (voTjfta) and therefore is not " in " things at all, but

" in our minds " (eV ^ux a ^) ? We could then maintain its unity

without exposing ourselves to either of the lines of argument (a)

and (b). Parmenides, however, has a reply based on the principle

which is employed in his own poem as the foundation of his criticism

of all his precursors. You cannot think without thinking of some-

thing that is, of something real (to think of nothing would be

equivalent to not thinking at all) ; this something is some one

determinate thing which " that thought thinks, as being there in

all the instances." In other words, what the thought thinks is

always a form. (E.g., when you think of Socrates, Plato, and

Aristotle, you think some definite predicate about them, such as,

e.g., that they are all men, and thus we are back at our old position.

You are thinking of man as a form " present " to the three.) What

then, on this view that a form is a thought, can the " presence "

of the form to the thing mean ? Does it mean that a thing is a

complex of thoughts and that everything thinks ? Or would you

admit that there are " thoughts which do not think " ? (1326-0).

Once more, the difficulty is one not about the reality of the

form but about the possibility of the " presence " of it to something

1 Thus we can distinguish (i) the circle of which we give the equation in

analytical geometry, (2) the terrestrial equator, (3) the black line on a terrestrial

globe which stands for the equator. (i) is the form, (2) is an invisible perfect

" instance " of the form, (3) a visible and imperfect embodiment of the form.

On Polyxenus see Early Greek Philosophy, Part I., pp. 254, 259-260. It has

been suggested that the difficulties urged by Parmenides were originally raised

against Plato himself by his pupil Aristotle, and that it is in acknowledgment

of this that the Aristotle who was afterwards one of the " Thirty " figures as a

character in the dialogue and is made the respondent throughout the second

part. The fancy must be rejected for the following reasons : (i) Aristotle only

entered the Academy in the year 367, the very year of Plato's departure for

Syracuse, as a mere lad. It may even be doubted whether he can have held

any personal intercourse with Plato until after the end of Plato's first visit to

Dionvsius II ; (2) the one real point of contact between the Aristotelian

criticism of Plato and the Parmenides is the supposed identity of the rptroi

dvQpuiros with the argument from the " regress." If the two are not identical,

this point of contact disappears. Even if they are, the very fact that Aristotle

refers to the argument by such a nickname indicates that it was something

already familiar. (3) As has been finally established by Jaeger in his Aris-

toteles, Aristotle's divergence from the Academy on the doctrine of forms

was first indicated in the work Trept <tXo<ro0faj shortly after Plato's death. His

earlier works, so far as we know them (Eudemus, Protrepticus), are wholly

Platonic in spirit.

1 Met. 9906 15 fi. = loyoa n ff., 1039*1 1 ff., 10596 8 ff. ; S.E. 1786 36.

THE PARMEN1DES 857

which is not a form. Socrates has just suggested that the form

or univeisal may be just a " thought in our minds," a way of

looking at things. The theory is, in fact, that historically known to

us as Nominalism, though Conceptualism would be a better name

for it. It treats a " significant universal " simply as a point of

view from which the mind contrives to look at a plurality of things

with a single glance. We find it convenient, as making for

" economy of mental effort," to look at Socrates, Plato, Aristotle,

all together as " instances of the universal man " ; according to the

theory, the employment of this common name " man " only ex-

presses the fact that we have effected this economy and nothing

more ; what is common to Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, is simply that

we have succeeded in viewing them together and have therefore

given them the common name. Parmenides' objection is, in

principle, that the name remains insignificant unless there really is

a " common nature " which justifies the common name. But if

the common " nature " is a " thought in our minds," then the

things which are said to have this common nature must be just

complexes of thoughts, and we shall have to say that everything

whatever thinks, or, alternatively, since in any case a thing is assumed

to be a complex of forms, and forms have been declared to be

thoughts, that there are " thoughts which do not think " (dvor/ra

/o7///,aTa). The suggested Conceptualism, it should be noted, would

be just as fatal to Aristotelianism as to Platonism. On the Aris-

totelian view, though there are no universals ante res, there are

universals in rebus, and it is only because there are universals in

rebus that there are also universals in the intellectus of the scientific

thinker. As against the Conceptualism which, like that of Mach

or Karl Pearson, denies that universals exist at all except in in-

tellectu, where they are merely labour-saving devices, " conceptual

shorthand," the rejoinder of Parmenides seems decisive. As to

the source of this Conceptualism, it is not easy to say anything

with confidence. The best suggestion known to me is that made

ad loc. by Grote, 1 who calls attention to a statement of Simplicius

(commenting on Arist. Cat. 86 25) that the " school of Eretria "

maintained that " qualities " are i/aAal Zwoiai, " mere thoughts,"

" mere notions." Since Menedemus of Eretria and his followers

were famous formal logicians and agreed with the Eleatics of

Megara in objecting to negative predication (Diog. Laert. ii. 135),

it seems to me that Grote is probably on the right track, and that

we are still dealing with a criticism on the theory of forms derived

from Eleatic sources.

(d) Socrates next falls back on what Aristotle regarded as the

Pythagorean formula for the relation between form and thing.

The form is an archetype or model (Tra/oa&ty/xa), the other things

called by its name are likenesses (6/xoiw/xara) of it, so that the

relation between sensible thing and form is that the " thing " is a

1 Grote, Plato and the other Companions of Socrates (ed. 1885), vol. iii.

74 n. 2.

858 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

" copy " of the form. (This would, apparently, save the unity oi

the form by suggesting that there may be many " imitations " of

one form just as there may be many copies of the same original.)

Parmenides again argues that the theory refutes itself. For

" resemblance ' is a symmetrical relation. If A is like B, B is also

like A. It follows that the form must be like the things which

" resemble it." And, since the theory itself explains the likeness

of one thing to another by the existence of a common archetype

of both, we must account for the likeness of form to " thing "

by postulating a more ultimate archetype of both, and so on in

indefinitum (132^-1330).

As before, the difficulty really arises from a fallacy. As Proclus

rightly says, the relation of copy to original is not simply one of

likeness. (It is in fact a relation of resemblance -{-derivation, and

this relation is not symmetrical. My reflection in the glass is a

reflection of my face, but my face is not a reflection of it.) It

should be specially remarked that the suggestion that the relation

between form and " thing " is one of " likeness " is not offered as

an alternative to the doctrine of " participation," but as a further

specification of its precise meaning (132^ 3, ^ ftefo&s avny . . . TO>V

ctSojv OVK aXXtj TIS ^ iKacr0>)v<u avrots), and that Parmenides meets

both formulae with precisely the same objection that they appear

to involve the " indefinite regress."

(e) The gravest difficulty of all has yet to be faced. It is that

the recognition of two " worlds," presupposed by Socrates, a world

of forms and an " other " world of " things " which somehow

" partake " of the forms, leads direct to complete scepticism (1330-

T 35 C )- For the world of which each of us is a member is ex hypothesi

not the world of forms, but the " other " world (since it had been

observed at the outset that each of us is a man, none of us is the

" form of man "). Consequently the relations between forms

will belong exclusively to the world or system of related forms ;

corresponding relations of which " we " are terms will belong to

" our world " and will have their correlates within " our world."

There will be a relation between " master " as such and " servant "

as such, and the terms of this will be the form of master and the

form of servant. But each of us will be master or servant to

another man, and the relation between this pair will fall outside

the world of forms ; it will connect one man with another man, not

with a form. So the correlate of the form of knowledge will be

Reality as such. But the correlate of our knowledge will be such

reality as the objects of our world possess. And it is admitted that

" our " knowledge is not the form of knowledge (that is, the know-

ledge we have is partial and imperfect). Its counterpart therefore

is not the completely real. We are precluded from knowing what

real good is, for the counterpart of a merely relative and partial

knowledge must be a relative and partial reality. And we may

invert the argument with even more startling results. God, at

any rate, might be supposed to possess " absolute " or " perfect "

THE PARMENIDES 859

nowledge. But, by our previous reasoning, it follows that God

nows nothing of our imperfectly real world. And in the same

ray, we may deny the rule of God over us, on the ground that the

orrelate of human subject is human superior. In a word, the

onsequence of a theory of two distinct " worlds " or " orders "

rill be that every relation falls wholly within one of the two ;

here can be no relation connecting a member of the one world with

member of the other. (In the mouth of an Eleatic, of course,

his means that one of the two " worlds " is an illusion, and that

ne is the supposed " sensible world." Parmenides, who wrote

he words ravro yap fan votlv re KCU ttvai (" it is the same thing

rhich can be thought of and can be ") , has no intention of surrender-

ig the " intelligible " world, and any interpretation of the Par-

lenides which assumes that its object is to discredit the reality of

he intelligible is necessarily false).

Yet to deny the reality of forms is destructive of thought itself,

Ince it amounts to a denial of the possibility of definite knowledge,

f Socrates has been badly perplexed by the discussion which has

ist been closed, it is because, in his zeal, he has attempted to

nunciate his doctrine about forms without a sufficient preparatory

iscipline in arid and apparently " useless " formal logic. The

ind of discipline required may be exemplified by Zeno's famous

ntinomies, but needs to go even beyond them. Zeno had

ttempted to prove the thesis that " reality is many " self-refuting

y showing that it can be made to lead to pairs of contradictory

onclusions. For a really searching investigation it is not enough

D ask what follows from the assertion of a thesis, but also what

allows from the denial of it. E.g. Zeno should have asked not

lerely, " If things are many, what can be asserted about the many

hings, and what about the unit, and about the relation of the two ? "

ut also, " If things are not many, what follows about plurality,

he unit, and their relations ? " (It was not enough to argue that the

onsequences of Pluralism are self-contradictory ; the same issue

hould have been raised about the consequences of denying

luralism.) Complete investigation of any proposed philosophical

rinciple demands this twofold consideration of the implications

ioth of its assertion and of its denial (1356-1 36$).

In these remarks, which effect a transition to the second half of

he dialogue, there are two interesting implications. If Parmenides

scribes the helplessness of the young Socrates in face of the diffi-

ulties just raised to want of training in formal logic, we may infer

hat the suggestion is that the apparently formidable arguments

re themselves fallacious and would be seen to be so by a more

practised logician. That is, the fault of Plato's Megarian critics

5 not that they are logicians, but that they are not logical enough.

f we are only thorough enough with our logic, the alleged logical

bjections to the metaphysic of forms will vanish of themselves,

t seems further to be meant that the particular fault of these

Dgicians is one-sidedness. They scrutinize the consequences of the

860 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

Socratic and Platonic assertion of the " participation " of sensible

things in forms, but they forget to consider whether the denial of

the assertion may not involve worse antinomies than those they

have detected in the Platonic dialogues. Plato is, in fact, suggest-

ing that he knows how to play the game of formal logic according

to the rules even better than the famous professionals themselves.

Beyond these significant hints that what we need is not less but

more logic, the dialogue provides no solution of the problem it has

raised.

In the second part of the dialogue Parmenides consents to give

an elaborate example of the kind of logical method he has been

recommending, choosing as the respondent to his questions the

youngest member of the party, Aristoteles, on the ground that his

very youth will be a guarantee that his answers will be given without

finesse of any kind. The thesis selected for examination is, natur-

ally enough, Parmenides 1 own principle that "reality is one."

(1366-1370. It is significant that he speaks of the whole proceeding

as an elaborate " game " (TratSta), a plain hint that the antinomies

now to follow are not to be taken quite seriously, and that we must

not be surprised if there is a touch of conscious " sophistry " about

some of them. In fact, it is incredible that Plato should not have

known that some of them are pure fallacies. But, as his purpose is

simply to show that the methods of his critics can be made to recoil

on themselves, it is strictly fair that he should play their game by

their own rules. Any kind of reasoning they permit themselves

is equally permissible in a " skit " upon them.)

According to the programme already laid down by Parmenides,

we should expect to find him raising four problems : (i) if the real

is one, what can be asserted about this one real ? (2) if the real is

one, what can* be said about " the many 11 ? (3) if the real is not

one, what can be said about the one ? (4) if the real is not one, what

can be said about the many ? But by a further refinement, each

of these questions is raised twice over, the purpose being to show

that on either assumption (that the real is one or that it is not one)

you can make it appear at pleasure either that contradictory

predicates can be both affirmed or both denied alike of the one

and of the many. Thus we get altogether eight arguments forming

four " antinomies " two in which the subject of both thesis and

antithesis is the one, and two in which it is the many. The issue is

that the apparent dilemma to which Socrates had been reduced

at the end of the first part of the dialogue, that knowledge of the

real is equally impossible with or without his theory about forms

and " participation/ 1 is more than matched by the dilemma offered

to the Eleatics, and maliciously offered through the mouth of

their own founder Parmenides professing to be applying their

own peculiar method, that, whether you accept or reject their

Monism, you must either simultaneously assert or simultaneously

deny both members of an indefinite series of contradictory pairs of

propositions.

THE PARMENIDES 861

The formal arrangement of the eight " hypotheses " is this :

(I. // the real is one, nothing whatever can be asserted of it

(1370-1420).

II. // the real is one, everything can be asserted of it (1426-

I57C). 1

!IIL If the real is one, everything can be asserted of " things

other than the one " (1576-1596).

IV. // the real is one nothing can be asserted of " things other

than the one " (1596-1606).

(V. If the one is unreal, everything can be asserted of it (1606-

1636).

VI // the one is unreal, nothing at all can be asserted of it

(1636-1646).

VIl. // the one is unreal, everything can be asserted about

" things other than the one " (1646-1650)-

VIII. // the one is unreal, nothing can be asserted about anything

It would be taking Plato's metaphysical jest too gravely to make

a minute examination oi all the details of these bewildering argu-

ments. It will be sufficient to point out the peculiar character of

the dialectical method employed and to summarize the results.

The peculiarities of the method are dictated by the consideration

that it is avowedly a parody of that of Zeno. Now Zeno's special

trick of fence, a perfectly legitimate one, was to turn one-half of the

assumed " postulates " of his opponents against the other half.

This is the secret, for example, of the famous " paradoxes " about

motion. The double assumption of the geometers whom Zeno is

criticizing is that (a) any finite segment of a straight line can be

bisected, (6) such a segment is a path between two end-points

which are finite minima of magnitude. The geometers cannot give

up (a) without ruining their whole scientific edifice*; they cannot

give up (6) without destroying the parallelism between geometry

and arithmetic which is part of their system. Zeno turns (a) against

(6). From (a) it follows at once that there must be an endless series

of points intermediate between any two given " end- points/ 1 and

this is fatal to the view that the point has a finite magnitude. His

reasoning silences his opponents because they are not prepared to

surrender (a) by admitting the existence of " indivisible lines/'

nor yet to give up (6) by regarding the point as a geometrical zero.

In exactly the same way, the " hypothesis " of the Eleatics " if

It is one " or " if there is One " as they understand it, really covers

two assumptions (a) unity is real, (b) reality is unity; Plato's

trick is to play off one of these assumptions against the other. This

will come out more clearly if we compare the main positions of the

antithetical members of each " antinomy."

A. I. " It is one ; " therefore, " it " is not many, and therefore

is not a whole and has no parts. Ergo it has neither beginning,

1 The main argument ends at 1550 3. What follows down to 1576 5 is an

appended special development which would, in a modern writing, be relegated

to a note.

a62 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

middle, nor last part. Ergo it is unbounded (&rpov) and has no

figure ((rxfifjia). " It " has no place, since it cannot be " in "

anything. Ergo " it " cannot change its place, nor can it change

its quality without ceasing to be one. Thus " it " cannot move.

Nor yet can it be " at rest/ 1 since we have seen that it cannot be

" in " any place at all, and therefore not " in the same place where

it was." It cannot be identical with or other than anything. For

it cannot be identical with anything but itself, nor yet different from

itself. Nor can it be different from something " other " than itself.

If it were, it would be different from the other in virtue of some

point of difference ; thus it would have two characters at once :

it would be one and also " different " from something in some specific

way. That is, it would " be " two things at once, whereas, by

hypothesis, it is one and only one. So again, it cannot be identical

with itself. For " to be one " and " to be identical with " are not

the same. Once more, if " it " were " identical with itself/ 1 it would

have two characters, unity and identity, and so would be two and

not one. For similar reasons, " it " can neither be like nor unlike

itself or anything else. Again, it can be neither equal nor unequal

to itself or to anything else. For terms are equal when they are

of "the same measures" (TWV avrwv pcrpuv, 1406). And "it,"

as we have seen, cannot be " the same " with anything in any

respect and yet remain one. Nor can it be unequal to anything.

That would mean that it has " more " or " fewer " measures than

something, and therefore that it has parts.

So it can have no temporal predicates. It cannot be contem-

porary with, nor more nor less ancient than itself or anything else

(the reasoning being exactly like that just used about equality and

inequality). It cannot, then, be in time at all. For we may say

of whatever occupies time, but of nothing else, that (a) it is at any

moment " becoming older " than itself and also " becoming

younger " than itself ; and (b) that its existence fills just the

duration it does, and neither more nor less, and so it is " simul-

taneous with, 11 " of the same age as " itself. Since neither state-

ment can be made about the one, it cannot be " in time." There-

fore, we must not say of it, " it was," " it became," " it will be,"

" it will come to be," since all these expressions involve reference

to past or future, that is, to time. But the very word " is " or

" comes to be " also involves a reference to time, to present time.

And therefore we may not say of " it " that " it is " or " it be-

comes," since " it " is not in time at all. But if we cannot say

" is " of the one, we cannot ascribe being to it. It must be non-

existent. And if it is non-existent, it cannot even be one, for to be

one, it would have to be. But what is nothing at all can neither

be named, spoken of, thought of, known, nor perceived by the

senses. Thus we actually deduce from the proposition " it is one "

the conclusion that nothing whatsoever can be thought or said

about- "it."

It has been asked what the " it " presupposed as the subject

THE PARMENIDES 868

of the thesis " it is one " is. The answer, as the character of the

reasoning shows, is " anything whatever which is conceived to be

a mere undifferentiated unity admitting no plurality whatsoever."

The argument is that all affirmation implies plurality of some kind,

possibility of distinguishing. If there is anything which is such a

mere undifferentiated unity that there are no distinctions within

it, you cannot even affirm of it that it is one. Tt is the " hypothesis "

of the Eleatics that their " One," which is the only thing there is,

is just such a bare unit, and this hypothesis is self-refuting. We

note then, that in I., in the hypothesis " if there is one," the emphasis

falls on the unity of reality, not on the reality of unity. The assump-

tion is that " what is is one," not that " something which is one is."

The work of turning that part of the Eleatic " hypothesis " against

the other is undertaken in II.

II. If the one is (lv d c<rr/), it "partakes of" being. It has

two distinct characters ; it is, and it is one. Thus it has " parts "

(or, as we should say, distinct " aspects "). Unity and existence

are parts, or constituents of " the existing one," which is therefore

a whole. And each of these " parts," on inspection, is found to

have itself the same two " parts." Each is a constituent of the

" existing one " and each is one such constituent. The " existing "

one " is thus an infinite manifold (aircipov 7rAi)0os). Again, unity

is different from existence, and difference is itself something

different from both existence and unity. Here then are several

terms unity, existence, difference which can be grouped into pairs.

Each pair has a number the number 2. We have thus established

the existence of the numbers I and 2, and the addition of i and 2

establishes the existence of 3. We can then go on, by addition

and multiplication, to establish the existence of the whole integer-

series as a direct consequence of the existence of " the one." Being

thus has an infinite plurality of parts, and each of these parts is one

part ; there are as many units as there are " parts " of being. Thus

not only " being " but " unity " itself turns out to be infinitely

many.

Since parts are parts of a whole, they are contained by the whole

and thus have a bound (Wpas). The "existing one," then, is not

only indefinitely many or boundless, but is also bounded, and there-

fore has first, last, and intermediate parts beginning, middle, and

a of some kind.

end. Thus it has a shape or form (o-^a) of some kind. It is " in "

itself, for all the parts are in the whole, and " the one " is at once

" all the parts " and " the whole." But equally the whole is not

in the parts, either singly or taken together. To be in them all, it

would have to be in each singly, and that is impossible. But it

must be somewhere, if it is anything, and, as it cannot be " in

itself," it must be " in " something else. Thus, considered as

" all the parts," it is in itself ; considered as " the whole," it is in

something not itself. Since it is " in itself " and so in one place

(cv ivt) it is at rest ; but since it is " always in something else," it

cannot be at rest, and so is moving. The one is neither a part of

864 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

itself nor related to itself as whole to part, nor different from itself ;

hence it is identical with itself. But, as we said, it is also outside

itself, and therefore different from itself. Of course, also it is

different from the things which are other than itself. But it is also

identical with these other things. For there can be no difference

in what is " the same." Hence " difference " can never be " in "

anything, for, if it were so for the smallest fraction of a moment, it

would be, for that time, " in the same thing." Hence the things

which are not the one are not different from the one. Nor do they

"partake " of it ; for then they would not be " not one/ 1 but,

" in a sense, one." So they are not a whole of which the one is a

part. And they are not parts of the one. The only possibility

left is that they are identical with the one.

The one is different from other things, and they are neither

more nor less different from it, but to a " like " degree. Thus

the one and other things are alike because different. But if differ-

ence implies likeness, identity will imply unlikeness, and the one

and other things have just been shown to be identical. Therefore,

because identical, they are unlike. And yet again, in so far as two

terms have the same predicate they are alike, and in so far as they

have different predicates they are unlike. So the one and other

things will be alike because identical, and unlike because different.

And since the one has been shown to be both identical with and

different from itself, it must be both like and unlike itself.

Since the one is both " in " itself and " in " other things, it

will have contact with itself and with them. But things which are

in contact must occupy adjoining regions (c^c^s fcctb-ftu), and

that which is one cannot occupy two adjoining regions. Hence the

one is not in contact with itself. But once more, nothing has

contact with itself, and if there are to be n contacts, there must be

n+i things in contact. Now the "things other than the one"

cannot have any number, since what has a number " partakes of

unity." There can therefore be no contact between the one and

other things, since contact implies number.

Again, the one is at once equal to and unequal to itself and to

" other things." (a) If a is > 6, this means that the form of /xe'yeflos

is in a relatively to b, and the form of cr/uKpon?? in b relatively to a ;

if a is to be absolutely small or large, this means that the form

cr/uKpon/s or /icycdo? is " in " a. But neither /xe'yeflos nor oyujc/xm/s can

be " in " the one as a whole or in any part of it. For if OTUK/DOTT/S is

in the one as a whole it is equal with the one, and if it " envelops "

it it is greater than the one ; in either case the form CT/HKPOTTJS

would be " doing the function " of the different form to-or^s or

/Ltyc0os. And the same reasoning applies if we suppose o-fjuKporrjs

to be in any one part of the one. We may argue in the same

way, mutatis mutandis, about /u,eyc0os. Thus oyuKpori?? and /xe'yeflos

cannot be " in " anything whatever, and it follows that nothing,

except the form of fivc0os, can be " greater than " anything, and

nothing except the form of oyuKpoT^s " less than anything.

THE PARMENIDES 865

Hence neither the one nor what is other than the one can be greater

or smaller than the other, and therefore they must be equal. For

the same reason, the one can be neither greater nor smaller than

itself, and is therefore equal to itself, (b) Since the one is " in "

itself, it contains and is contained by itself, and thus must be, as

container greater, as contained less than, itself. Further, there is

nothing outside the one and things other than the one. And what-

ever is must be somewhere, and consequently the one and " the

others " must be in each other reciprocally, and therefore each of

these terms is at once greater and less than the other. And there-

fore also the one will be metrically of " equal," " more numerous,"

" fewer " measures, and so numerically equal with, higher and

lower than, itself and " the others."

Once more, " if there is one," the one is. And is expresses

present participation of being. Hence the one is " in time." And

time " goes on " (TropcvcTcu). Hence the one is always getting

older than itself as time goes on, and therefore, since " older *'

always has " younger " as its correlate, it is always getting younger

than itself also. And at any moment in this process, it is both

older and younger than itself. And yet it fills the same duration

as itself, neither more nor less, and so neither is nor grows older

nor younger than itself. Again, before there can be several things,

there must be one to start with. Hence the " one " must have

come to be before " the others " ; it must be more ancient than

" the other things." Yet we proved that the one has " parts,"

beginning, middle, end. Its beginning must have come to be before

itself ; the one itself will not be there until its end also comes to be.

Thus the one is the last thing to come to be ; everything else is

more ancient than the one. But, after all, each " part " of the one

is one part, and thus whenever anything comes to be, the one comes

to be, and the one thus comes to be contemporaneously with

everything else. Next, if one thing is older or younger than

another, the interval in age between the two never grows greater or

less. So we may say that the one is more ancient or more recent

than other things, but never grows more ancient or more recent.

And yet, though the one has been " in being " (ycyoi/c) longer

than " the others," the difference between their respective ages is

steadily being relatively diminished as time goes on, and we may

therefore say that, in so far as the one is more ancient than " the

others," it steadily becomes less ancient relatively to them, and

they more ancient relatively to it. But, in so far as it is less ancient

than " the others," it is steadily growing, relatively to them, older,

and they, relatively to it, younger. And finally, in so far as a time-

interval remains the interval it is, the one is neither becoming more

nor becoming less ancient than anything else.

In conclusion, the one, " partaking of time," has past, present,

future. It was, is, will be, was becoming, is becoming, will become.

It stands, has stood, will stand, in various relations. There can be

knowledge of it, belief about it, perception of it, and therefore it

866 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

can be named, described, and, generally, everything which was

denied in I. must be affirmed.

Appendix (1550-1576). The one, then, both is and is not, and

its being is " in time." It is during some intervals, during others

it is not, since it cannot be said to be and not to be at once. It must

pass through transitions from being to not-being and from not-being

to being. It undergoes aggregation and disgregation, assimilation

and dissimilation, augmentation and diminution. It begins to move

and ceases to move. So these reversals of the sense of a process

must also be "in time. 1 ' And yet they cannot be " in time " ; the

reversal must be strictly instantaneous, occupying no time, however

paradoxical we may find the conception of an instant (TO c<u'<vi?s)

which is strictly without duration. At the instant of the reversal of

sense, both members of a pair of antithetic processes must be denied

of the one. At such an instant, it is not " coming to be " nor yet

" passing away," neither being aggregated nor being disgregated,

neither being assimilated nor dissimilated. As with states, so with

processes ; both members of an antithesis must be asserted of the

one and both must be denied.

Perhaps the most striking feature of this argument to our own

minds is this introduction at its close of the notion of an unextended

" instant/' Plato is plainly stating exactly the paradoxes which

beset the founders of the Calculus when they took the notion of the

" infinitesimal " seriously and mistakenly supposed that the Calculus

really deals either with infinitesimal increments or with ratios

between infinitesimals. But the subtlety of some parts of the long

development must not blind us to the fact that most of the reasoning

throughout II. is purely sophistical and much of it clearly con-

sciously sophistical, and that the fallacies committed are mostly of

a very obvious kind, such as equivocation between " each " and " all

collectively. 11 Plato can and does, in this very dialogue, when it

suits his purpose, expose the very confusions in question and there-

fore must not be supposed to be serious when he commits them. It

is enough for his purpose to perplex the " eristics " by availing

himself of fallacies of the kind which they habitually commit in

their own argumentation. His parody of their elenchus is also an

exposure of it. The one important point to keep in mind is that

the conclusions to which he is led by his application of the Eleatic

methods to the Eleatic " hypothesis " are not meant to be asserted

as his own. They are simply what happens to the " hypothesis "

if you make the Eleatic criticize himself by his own methods. If

we wish to know what Plato himself thought of the Eleatic thesis,

we must turn from the Parmenides to the Sophistes, where he is

really criticizing it by the rules of a logic which is his own. For

the present it is enough to remark that, just as in I., -the emphasis

was laid on the unity of " what is," with the consequence that being

itself has to be denied of it, so in II. the emphasis is laid on its

reality, with the consequence that the unity of the one has to be

simultaneously affirmed and denied. So far, and no further, the

THE PARMENIDES 867

aradoxes of the Parmenides prelude to the positive results of the

III. If the one is, what of " other things " ? Since they are

" other " things, they are not the one ; yet they must " partake

of " it. For they must have parts (if they had not, they would

be just " the one "), and therefore parts of one complete whole.

And each of these parts must again be itself one definite part of the

one whole. The " other things " are therefore a manifold or

aggregate (irAct'o>). They must be a numerically infinite manifold,

since each " part " participates in unity and therefore is not itself,

in its own nature, one. And yet, in the act of participating in unity,

each part is " bounded " or " limited " or " determinate " relatively

to the whole and to any other part ; " something arises in it "

which constitutes a bound (Wpas). The " other things " are thus

at once infinitely numerous and also bounded. In so far as all

are " unlimited," each is like every other, and again each is like

every other in exhibiting " limit." But in so far as each is at once

unlimited and limited, each is unlike itself and the rest, and by

similar reasoning we may show that all the antithetical pairs of

predicates canvassed in I. and II. may be both affirmed and denied

of the " other " things.

IV. But let us consider the same question once more. "The

one " and " the others " form a complete disjunction. Neither is

the other, and there is no tertium quid. They are thus completely

" separated " (x^pts). And what is strictly one can have no

" parts." From these two premisses it follows that neither the

one as a whole, nor a " part " of it, can be in " the others. 11 They

cannot participate in it in any sense. There is no unity in them,

and therefore they are not even a manifold (woAAa), and have no

number. They are, after all, not " both like and unlike " one an-

other; if they were, each of them would have in it two opposed

forms, and would thus " partake of two," whereas we have just

seen that none of them can even " partake of one," and therefore

we must also deny that either member of the alternative " like-

unlike " can be asserted of " the others." The same kind of

reasoning will show that no predicates at all can be asserted of

them.

III. and IV. thus answer in inverted order to I. and II. In III.,

as in II., the emphasis falls on the reality of the Eleatic ov Iv,

in IV. as in L, on its unity. III. proves for TO, 5AXa what IL had

proved for TO /. IV. undertakes to prove of them what I. had

established for TO Iv. The total result of I. -IV. is summed up for

us at 1606 2 : "If the one is, the one is everything and is nothing

at all, relatively alike to itself and to 'the others/ "

V. We come to the second half of the complete dialectical

investigation proposed at 1360-6. // the one is not, what follows ?

When a man says " if the one is not," or " if magnitude is not,"

or generally "if # is not," he is making an intelligible supposition.

Whether we say that " the one " is or that it is not, we mean the

868 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

same thing by " one " in both cases, and we mean something de-

finite. So we may put our question in the form, " If the one is not,

what must be true of it ? " (ri ypy cTwi). It must be knowable, or

the statement " there is no one," " the one does not exist," would

have no sense. " The others " must be different from it, and it

from them. Thus we must be able to call the one " that " or

" this " and to ascribe relations to it. We must not say that it is,

but we are bound to say that it " partakes of " many things (has

many predicates). It is unlike anything else, but like itself. It

is not equal to rot oXXa, for then it would be like them ; hence it is

unequal to them, and therefore has magnitude, is greater and less.

But whatever is greater than % and less than y is equal to something.

Thus the one must, after all, be equal to something. It must

also have being of some kind (/ACTC'XCIV 7177 owrtas), because we can

ascribe true predicates to it, just as " what is " must partake of not-

being, since it " is not " whatever can be truly denied of it, so

" what is not " must in a sense be, since " it is " whatever can be

significantly predicated of it. And since the " non-existent one "

thus both is and is not, it must pass from one of these conditions

to the other and so change. It must exhibit motion. But again,

it is nowhere, and thus cannot change its place, nor rotate, nor

suffer change in quality (for if it did, it could no longer be "the

one"). Thus it has no motion, and so is at rest. But it is also

moving and therefore does change in quality, for whatever has

moved " is no longer as it was but otherwise." The one, then,

alters and does not alter, and so at once " comes to be " and "passes

away " and does neither. Everything can be affirmed of it and

everything denied. (Thus V. corresponds to II. ; all that had been

proved of the one in II. on the assumption that the one is, is proved

of it in V. on the assumption that it is not.)

VI. And yet again, " if the one is not," that means that being

is wholly denied of it. The denial is absolute and must be under-

stood without qualification. If the one is not, it cannot come to

be, nor pass out of being, since it can neither get nor lose what is,

ex hypothesi, wholly foreign to it. Neither can it alter in any way,

for the same reason, and therefore it cannot move. Nor can it be

at rest, for to be at rest is to be " in the same place " at successive

times. It can have no predicates or relations, for if it had any, it

would be whatever you truly assert of it. Hence it cannot be

known, thought of, perceived, spoken of, or named. (Thus what

was proved about the one in I. on the assumption that it exists, is

now proved on the assumption that it does not exist. In either

case nothing can be affirmed or denied of it.)

VII. " // the one is not/' what must be said of " the others " f

They must be " other than " and therefore different (Ircpa) from

something or we could not call them " the others." As there is

no " one " from which they could differ, they must be different

from one another. They must also be different infinite assemblages

, not different units, since, ex hypothesi, there is no unit.

THE PARMENIDES 869

Each of them must be an infinite assemblage, different from the

rest of these assemblages, which falsely seems on a distant view to

be one single thing. Since each such assemblage seems to be one

thing, there will seem to be a definite number of them, and there

will seem to be a least among them, though this again will seem to

be many and numerous by comparison with its own components.

Each assemblage will be bounded by others (will have a Wpas),

but will have in itself neither first term, middle, nor last term (i.e.

each assemblage will be an infinite series without end-terms, and

every component of it will be another assemblage of the same type).

Thus each will seem to be both bounded and unbounded, to be like

or unlike any other, according as we take a distant or a near view

of it. (In general, all that III. had said of ra aXXa will appear to

be true of them.)

VIII. And yet, to go over the ground for a last time, " if there

is no one, 11 TO. oAAa obviously cannot be one. And they cannot

be many, for then each of the many would be one. They must be

zeros, and no multitude can be constructed out of zeros. And they

do not even seem to be one or to be many. By hypothesis, " the

unit " is just nothing at all, and hence nothing can even seem to be

a unit ; a fortiori nothing can seem to be many, a collection of units.

By carrying the thought out it would follow that ra aXXa have none

of the positive or negative determinations we have ascribed to

them, and do not even seem to have any. Nothing can be thought

or said of them, (a conclusion which answers to that drawn in IV.).

Thus we may summarize the result of our whole series of antinomies

by saying that " whether the one is or is not, it and ' the others '

alike, are and seem to be, and also are not and do not seem to be,

all sorts of things (Travra), relatively both to themselves and to one

another " (i66c 2).

In the four discussions which take for their point of departure

the non-existence of the " one " or " unit," even more obviously

than in those which have preceded, the ultimate source of our per-

plexities is the ambiguity of the word "is." We get contradictory

results according as " is " is taken to be the symbol of predication

(Peano's e), or that of existence (Peano's 3). 1 Many of the infer-

ences turn simply on this confusion of a predication with what we

now call an " existential proposition." It is legitimate parody

to employ this fallacy, because, as we can see from the remains of

the poem of Parmenides, the whole point of Eleaticism lies in

ignoring the distinction. To make it clear, and to show that

Eleaticism had ignored it, is, in fact, the main purpose of Plato's

Sophistes. So long as he is merely undertaking to show that the

Eleatic logic would be even more damaging to the Eleatic " postu-

late " than to the Socratic postulate of ftc'0cis, he is fully entitled

1 There is, of course, a further confusion of both with the symbol of

identity (). The poposition A is an a is treated on occasion as implying both

A exists and A is identical with o. (Not to mention the further refinement

that existence also appears to be itself a vox equivoca.)

370 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

to avail himself of the double-edged tools of his opponents. It does

not follow that Plato himself was not alive to the ambiguity when he

wrote the Parmenides and only discovered it in the interval between

the composition of that dialogue and of the Sophistes. The pre-

sumption from the skilful way in which he makes or ignores the

distinction in the Parmenides just as it suits his immediate purpose

is that his own logical doctrine is already complete in his own mind ;

the parody of Megarian dialectic probably serves a double purpose.

It provides a highly enjoyable philosophical jest, and also provokes

the thoughtful mind, by the manifest impossibility of the conclusions

reached, to reflections which may prompt the reader to discover the

sources of the trouble for himself, without waiting to have them

explained to him by Plato. More than any other dialogue the

Parmenides has the appearance of being written for a rather circum-

scribed group of readers ; it was presumably meant to amuse the

literary circles but to fructify in the students of the Academy.

See further :

BURNET. Greek Philosophy. Part /., 253-272.

RITTER, C. Platon, ii. 63-96 ; Platans Dialogs, 1-24. (Stutt-

gart, 1903.)

RAEDER, H. Platans philosophische Entwickelung, 297-317.

NATORP, P. Platans Ideenlehre, 215-217.

APELT, O. Beitrdge zur Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie,

3-66. (Leipzig, 1891.)

STEWART, J. A. Plato's Doctrine of Ideas, 68-84.

STALLBAUM, G. Platonis Parmenides. (Leipzig, 1848.)

WADDELL, W. The " Parmenides " of Plato. (Glasgow, 1894.)

WAHL, J. Etude sur le Parme'nide de Platon. (Paris 1926.)

DIES, A. Platon, Parmenide, vi. xix., 1-53. (Paris, 1923.)

ROBIN, L. Platon, 119-140.

HARDIE, W. F. R. A Study in Plato. (Oxford, 1936.)

TAYLOR, A. E. Parmenides Zeno and Socrates (Philosophical

Studies, London, 1934, PP- 28-90).

TAYLOR, A. E. Plato's Parmenides. (Oxford, 1934.)

LEE, H. P. D. Zeno of Elea. (Cambridge, 1936.)

TANNERY, P. Pour I'Histoire de la Science Hellene (ed. 2, by

A. Dids, Paris, 1930, c. x. Zlnon d'EUe}.

CHAPTER XV

SOPHISTES-POLITICUS

THE dialogues which we have still to consider all reveal

themselves, by steady approximation to the style character-

istic of the Laws, as belonging to the latest period of Plato's

activity as a writer. In particular they all agree linguistically in

the adoption of a number of the stylistic graces of Isocrates, par-

ticularly the artificial avoidance of hiatus, a thing quite new in the

prose of Plato. They also agree, as regards their form, in two

important respects. All of them are formal expositions of doctrine

by a leading character speaking with authority ; the part of the

other speakers is merely to assent, and there is no longer any

thoroughly dramatic eliciting of truth from the clash of mind with

mind ; in every case, except that of the Philebus where there is a

good reason for the exception, Socrates is allowed to fall into the

background, and in the Laws he is absent. To account for so

marked a change in manner even from the Theaetetus and Par-

menides, it seems necessary to suppose a reasonably long interval

of interruption in Plato's literary activity, and if, as we have seen

reason to think, the Theaetetus was composed just before Plato's

visit to Syracuse in the year 367, we can account for the interruption

by the known facts of his life. From 367 down to at least 361-360,

the year of Plato's second and longer sojourn with Dionysius II and

his final resolution to take no further direct part in the affairs of

Syracuse, he rnust have been too fully occupied in other ways to

have much time for composition. We must probably, therefore,

think of this whole group of latest dialogues as written in the thir-

teen last years of Plato's life, 360-348/7. Since the Sophistes and

Politicus attach themselves outwardly to the Theaetetus, and the

former, in fact, contains the critical examination of Eleatic prin-

ciples which that dialogue had half promised, it is reasonable to

hold, as most recent critics do, that the Sophistes opens the series.

The curious state of the text of the Laws it is not permissible to

account for it by the arbitrary assumption that our MSS. are less

trustworthy for the Laws than for other works seems to show

that the work had never received the author's final revision. Thus

Plato's activity as a writer has no assignable terminus ad quern earlier

than his death. Beyond this, we have no special evidence by which

to date the composition of the individual dialogues. The main thing

which is clear about the whole group is that Plato felt that the

371

872 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

logical, cosmological, and juristic matter with which they deal

could not be handled by Socrates without a gross violation of

historical truth ; hence the selection of other characters to play

the principal part, except in the Philebus, which deals with the

same ethical problems we have already met in the Gorgias and

Republic as the " speciality " of Socrates. 1

In a biography of Plato it would be necessary to dwell at some

length on the precise character of his experiences at Syracuse, as

illustrated by his extant correspondence with Dionysius and Dion.

I must be content to refer the reader for all details to the excellent

accounts of Grote 2 and E. Meyer, 8 and the shorter narrative of

Professor Burnet. 4 The chief points which have to be borne in

mind are these. Plato's interposition in Syracusan affairs had

from the first a very practical object. The immediate political

necessity was to secure the future of Greek civilization in Sicily

and the West against the double peril that the work of Dionysius I

might be undone by the aggressions of Carthage, or that, under a

successor unequal to the position, the Oscans or Samnites whom

that vigorous ruler had employed might usurp the sovereignty of

Syracuse for themselves. The project of Dion and Plato was

clearly that Dionysius II should first be educated into statesman-

ship himself, and should then use his position to convert the real

though informal " tyranny " at Syracuse into a constitutional

monarchy embracing the cities which Dionysius I had subdued, and

strong enough to hold both the Carthaginians and the Italians at

bay. The hope of making a scientific statesman out of Dionysius

II appears not to have survived Plato's experiences of 367/6, and,

indeed, had always, according to Epistle vii., been a very remote

hope ; the more modest anticipation that the personal feud between

Dionysius and Dion might be accommodated and that constitutional

monarchy might at least get its chance, though an imperfect chance,

took Plato back once more to Syracuse in 361. It even outlasted

his final disillusionment about Dionysius, as we see from the fact

that most of the correspondence with that monarch belongs to the

time after Plato's last departure from Syracuse. For the years

between 367/6 and 361/360 we have only one contemporary docu-

ment (Epistle xiii.). The suspicions which have been felt about the

letter have been based entirely on its contents ; linguistically it is

above suspicion. One or two of the objections commonly raised

are curiously captious. It is said, absurdly enough, that the refer-

ence to Plato's mother as still living, and to the existence of four

1 The Sophistes and Politicus would have to be dated earlier if E. Meyer

and others were justified in identifying them with the 8iatpt<reis spoken of in

Ep. xiii. as sent with that letter to Dionysius (i.e. in 366 or at latest 365). But

the way in which these flteupAreu are mentioned (op. cit. 3606) should show that

the reference is not to works of Plato, but to specimens or samples of " divi-

sions ' ' (IT^/XTTW trot. T&V diapeatw partitive genitive) .

1 History of Greece, chapters Ixxxiv.-lxxxv.

8 Geschichte des Altertums, v. 497-528.

4 Greek Philosophy, Part /., 294-3011

SOPHISTES-POLITICUS 878

great-nieces whom he, as their most well-to-do kinsman, may be

legally required to portion, are ludicrous. Yet it is a fact that old

ladies do sometimes live to be centenarians, especially when they

belong to families of marked longevity, and that elderly men some-

times have a number of young nieces. Plato has even been thought

incapable of estimaling the expense of his mother's anticipated death

and funeral at ten minae, on the ground that in the Laws he limits

such expenses to one mina ; as though Plato and his mother were

living in the Cretan colony for which the Laws professes to legislate.

Read without misconceptions of this kind, the document is a

natural one enough, and highly creditable to the writer. Apart

from references to certain small commissions undertaken by Plato

at the request of Dionysius, and from an introduction to him of

Helicon, who had studied under Eudoxus and Polyxenus as well

as in the school of Isocrates, as a man who could be serviceable to

him in his studies, 1 the writer is chiefly concerned with a friendly

settling of accounts, such as was inevitable in the situation. Plato

must have been put to considerable expense and inconvenience in

removing himself for months to Syracuse ; he is anxious to be as

little beholden to Dionysius in return as possible, but thinks it

reasonable that he should receive what assistance he may need in

meeting the impending expense of burying his mother and portioning

the eldest of his grand-nieces, who is on the point of marrying her

uncle Speusippus. 2 Dionysius had also undertaken to defray the

expenses of his voyage to Syracuse.

Apart from this settlement of accounts between the parties,

the letter deals with two other matters. Dionysius had employed

Plato's offices in attempting to obtain a credit on the Aeginetan

banker Andromedes, who declined to make any advance, on the

ground that he had found it difficult to recover advances made to

Dionysius I. Application in another quarter was more successful,

and Plato takes the opportunity to administer a courteous homily

to the young king on the importance of prompt discharge of money

obligations and attention to one's accounts. The details of the

transaction in question are only hinted at, but it can hardly have

been concerned simply with the personal settlement between

Dionysius and Plato. More probably Dionysius wanted a credit

for his own purposes, and found it difficult to obtain one from

bankers who had known his father as an unsatisfactory customer.

This would explain the emphasis laid in the letter on the necessity

to a monarch of a good financial reputation.

1 Helicon would thus represent at once the political ideas of Isocrates, the

mathematics of Eudoxus and the formal logic, of Megara.

* The request is not, as often supposed, for portions for all the nieces. Plato

asks to be helped, if necessary, to portion the eldest niece, now on the point of

marrying. He mentions the portioning of the others, one of whom is an infant,

simply as possible future contingencies. The dowry he thinks necessary,

thirty minae, is not, as some have supposed, a large one, but, as the letter says,

a " moderate " or " middle-class " portion, as will be seen by reference to

contemporary speeches for the courts which deal with these matters.

13

874 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

There is also a cryptic reference to the relations between

Dionysius and Dion, who was at the moment living in a sort of

real, but not technical, banishment at Athens. The writer says

that he has not actually approached Dion about a certain matter,

but his judgment is that he would take the business very ill, if it

were proposed ; in general, Dion's attitude to Dionysius is reason-

ably amicable. Probably the matter, about which Dionysius had

clearly asked for a confidential opinion, may be his own desire that

Dion should dissolve his marriage with Arete, aunt of Dionysius.

This would be a way of showing that he had no sinister designs on

the " tyranny " of Syracuse, and, in fact, when Dionysius became

more suspicious, the marriage was forcibly dissolved without

Dion's consent. We may fairly take it that Dionysius would have

preferred a " parting by mutual consent " and had asked Plato's

opinion on the matter. If so, Plato's reply amounts to a tactful

disapproval of the project. There is nothing discreditable to

him either in his being consulted or in the response that the sugges-

tion of such an arrangement would gravely embitter Dion's feelings. 1

SOPHISTES-POLITICUS

Though the main interest of the Sophist es is logical, that of the

Politicus political, outwardly the two form a single whole, and both

are externally linked more loosely with the Theaetetus. The

assumption is that we are still in the spring of the year 399. The

personages of the Theaetdus have reassembled, as had been suggested

in the last words of that dialogue (2iod 3), but Theodorus has

brought a friend with him, an Eleatic pupil of Parmenides and

Zeno, who is the words imply that one would not have expected it

a really profound " philosopher." After a brief initial conversa-

tion this Eleatic visitor takes the conduct of the conversation into

his own hands ; Socrates and Theodorus relapse into what is all

but unbroken silence. The Eleatic remains throughout anonymous,

and in this respect stands alone among the characters in Plato, but

for the other example of the Athenian who plays the leading part

in the Laws. We could hardly be told more plainly that these two

personages are purely fictitious ; the object of the fiction seems to

be that, as they have no historical character to sustain, they may

be used freely as simple mouthpieces for the views of their creator.

No one doubts that this is the case with the Athenian of the Laws.

We are not entitled to say that he is meant precisely as a portrait

of Plato by himself, but he is certainly meant to represent the

ethics and politics of the Academy. Our Eleatic, too, turns out

to be a respectful but exceedingly outspoken critic of the main

thesis of his nominal teacher, Parmenides. The suggestion plainly

1 There is no question of a private plot between Plato and Dionysius

against Dion's family happiness. The dissolution of a " royal " marriage, if

that is really the matter in question, is an " affair of state." and it would be

quite proper in a young monarch to ask confidential advice on such a point.

Plato's answer is plainly meant as a strong dissuasive.

SOPH1STES-POLITICUS 875

is that, in spite of all divergences, it is Plato, and not the professed

Eleatics of Megara, who is the true spiritual heir of Parmenides.

One of the objects of the Sophistes in particular is to justify this

claim.

Formally there is a further link between the Sophistes and the

Polilicus. The question propounded at the opening of the Sophistes

is whether sophist, statesman, philosopher, are three different

names for the same person, or three names for two types of person,

or names for three different types. 1 The answer of the " Eleatic "

is that the three characters are all distinct. The object of the two

dialogues is ostensibly to prove this by denning first the sophist

and then the statesman ; both definitions are obtained by elaborate

and repeated use of the characteristically Academic method of

subdivision of a genus (cTSos) into its constituent species. The

method itself has consequently to be explained and illustrated

by simple and half-playful examples. Incidentally this explains

what might at first seem a strange feature of the Politicus. We can

understand the silence of Socrates in the Sophistes, where the logical

matter of the discussion takes us far away from the circle of ideas

commonly represented by Plato as familiar to him. But the

problems of politics are precisely those in which the Socrates of the

Gorgias and Republic had been peculiarly interested, and we might

have expected that here he would be given his old part of chief

speaker. What makes this impossible is not so much the particular

character of the results arrived at, though they do depart to a marked

degree from the uncompromising " idealism " of the Republic, but

the necessity of employing the precisely formulated " method of

division/' The peculiarity of both dialogues is that each has thus

a double function. Each has certain definite results to be arrived

at ; each is meant, at the same time, independently of its special

conclusions, to be an elaborate exercise in the careful employment

of logical method. As far as " results " go, we might say that the

object of the one is to explain the true character of a significant

negative proposition, of the other to justify " constitutionalism "

in politics. But we must not allow ourselves to forget that both

have further the common purpose of presenting us with an " essay

in philosophical and scientific method." Hence the chief speaker

in both must be a logician ; it is because the speaker is a " formal

logician," with a sounder logic than that of the Eleatics of Megara,

that he is represented as the true continuator of Parmenides and

1 Thus the question arises, Did Plato intend to devote a further dialogue

to the character of the " philosopher," and if he did, must we suppose that

he abandoned his design, or are we to identify the Philosopher with some

existing dialogue ? In antiquity some persons thought of the Epinomis

(D.L. Vit. Plat. 60 ; so, doubtfully, Raeder, Platons philosophische Entwickelung,

354). Moderns have thought of the Parmenides (Stallbaum, at one time,

Zeller), Phaedo (Schleiermacher), Republic vi.-vh. (Spengel), Symposium

(Schleiermacher). Chronological reasons, even if there were no others, make

all these suggestions impossible except the first. This also seems excluded

by the impossibility of regarding the Epinomis as anything but a part of

the Laws.

876 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

Zeno. The true cure for the " antinomies " of the " eristic " is not

to desert logic for some method more " varied and flexible/' but

to be more in earnest with it.

i. THE SOPH/STES. The opening words of the dialogue show

us how keenly Plato feels that the Megarian formal logic is a de-

parture from the genuine Socratic spirit of pursuit of real truth.

He is greatly relieved to learn that the Eleatic friend of Theodorus

is a " truly philosophic soul " ; from his antecedents he had ex-

pected rather to find in him a foos cXcyKTiKos, a " fiend " in con-

structing dilemmas, (like those of the Parmenides). But the true

philosopher is not always easy to recognize ; he is taken sometimes

for a sophist, sometimes for a statesman, and sometimes for a

downright madman. Now this raises the question whether the

philosopher, the sophist, the statesman, are three distinct characters,

or two, or possibly are all the same. The genuine Eleatic tradition

is that they are three distinct types, though it is hard to define the

precise differences between them (2175). The Eleatic undertakes,

if Theaetetus will act as respondent, to attempt a precise delineation

of one of the three types, the sophist, though he warns his audience

that the discussion will be long and tedious, a distinct hint that the

name " sophist " will be found to stand for something less readily

recognizable than the familiar type of the fifth-century teacher of

" goodness/' We discover, as the dialogue proceeds, that the

persons meant are, in fact, the Megarian pedants of an uncritical

formal logic. They are "sophists/' not genuine philosophers,

precisely because they have never subjected the principles on which

their own logic rests to a thorough critical scrutiny. (In fact, they

are " dogmatists " in Kant's sense of the word.) This special use

of the word cro</>io-r??s is a real innovation in terminology, though its

adoption by Aristotle, who regarded his Megarian opponents as

conscious tricksters, has given rise to the modern conception of

sophistry as the deliberate abuse of logic. The length of the dis-

cussion is due to the difficulty of analysing so elusive a thing as the

spirit of uncritical logical formalism.

Illustration of Method (2i8d-22ic). Our problem, then, is to

frame a satisfactory definition, and it is to be solved by a method

characteristic of Plato and the Academy, the method of accurate

logical division of a genus into its constituent species. As this

method was definitely a creation of Plato and his immediate

followers, it is necessary to explain and illustrate it for the reader by

applying it to a simple and familiar case ; Plato chooses that of the

angler. Of course, as Burnet has said, the example is half-playful ;

the very baldness of the illustration chosen is an advantage since

the simplest and most obvious illustrations are the best for the

purpose of setting the principle of the procedure in the clearest

light. In practice the use of the method in the Academy led to

results of great importance. Thus the tenth book of Euclid's

Elements, that great repertory of demonstrated propositions about

"quadratic surds/' is at bottom concerned with the attempt to

SOPHISTES-POLITICUS 877

make a systematic classification of such expressions, The vast

zoological work of Aristotle, again, belongs mainly to the years

before he had finally separated himself from the Academy, and thus

has to be taken in connexion with the similar, though no doubt

inferior, work in the same field of Speusippus and other Academics,

and their starting-point, as we can see from the remaining fragments

of the book of Speusippus on Homologies, was the search for a

satisfactory classificatory system. The Laws again offers us

repeated examples of the importance of the same problem in the

field of jurisprudence and political theory. The services rendered

to science by Plato's elaboration of the method of division have to

be measured by results of this kind, not by the easy examples

furnished to the " general reader " in the Sophistes and Politicus.

In principle the procedure is this. If we wish to define a species

x, we begin by taking some wider and familiar class a of which x is

clearly one subdivision. We then devise a division of the whole

class a into two mutually exclusive sub-classes b and c, distin-

guished by the fact that b possesses, while c lacks, some character-

istic ft which we know to be found in x. We call b the right-hand,

c the left-hand, division of a. We now leave the left-hand division

c out of consideration, and proceed to subdivide the right-hand

division b on the same principle as before, and this process is re-

peated until we come to a right-hand " division " which we see on

inspection to coincide with x. If we now assign the original wider

class a and enumerate in order the successive characters by which

each of the successive right-hand divisions has been marked off,

we have a complete characterization of x ; x has been defined.

The Aristotelian rule of definition by " genus and difference, or

differences " is simply the condensation of this Academic method

into a formula ; a still more exact reproduction of it has been given

in our own times in W. E. Johnson's account of the progressive

determination of a " determinable " (Logic, i. xi). It is, of course,

presupposed that we are already adequately acquainted with the

" determinable " or " genus " a itself, and that, at each step in its

further determination, we have the " gumption " to select as the

character constitutive of the new " right-hand " division one which

is relevant to the specification of x and also itself admits of further

" division " ; finally that we recognize the point at which the process

can stop because % has now been sufficiently specified. The satis-

faction of these conditions depends on our native acumen and our

acquaintance with the subject-matter, and no rules can be given

for it, precisely as no rules can be given for the discovery of a prom-

ising explanatory hypothesis. The method, like all scientific

methods, will not work in vdcuo. This is what Aristotle seems to

ignore in his depreciatory remarks about the " method of divisions "

(Analyt. Prior. A 460 31 ff.). He complains that the method in-

volves a petitio principii. From man is an animal, an animal either

is mortal or is immortal, it does not follow that man is mortal, but

only that man either is mortal or is immortal ; and so with the other

878 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

v

successive steps of the division, so that nothing is really proved

when the division has reached its end. As a criticism of Plato, the

complaint misses its mark. When we are told in the Sophistes

that hunters capture their prey either by snaring or by wounding,

and that the angler is a hunter who makes his capture by wounding,

we are presumed to know from our acquaintance with the facts of

life that a rod and line are not a snare ; there is no intention to

prove the point by making the division. We are as much entitled

to draw on our general stock of information for guidance as we are

to go to the same source for our information that the Duke of

Wellington is a man when we infer his mortality from the admitted

mortality of men. Neither the syllogism nor any other formal

logical device can enable us to dispense with first-hand acquaintance

with facts. Possibly some members of the Academy may have

overlooked this limitation in their enthusiasm for their own method,

but Aristotle seems equally to be forgetting for the moment that his

own method of syllogism is subject to precisely the same conditions.

DEFINITION OF THE SOPHIST (2210-237^)

The actual " division " by which the definition of angling is

obtained need not detain us long. So far as it is anything more

than a simple illustration of the method to be adopted in char-

acterizing the sophist, its further point lies in the playful suggestion

of certain un pleasing features which we shall rediscover in the sophist

himself, who is also, among other things, a kind of " angler/ 1 The

division itself may be graphically represented by the following tree :

Arts

of making of acquiring

A

of acquiring of capture

by consent

A

of open of stealthy capture

capture = hunting

of lifeless of living

things things

of terrestrial of animals which

animals live in a fluid

of birds of fishes

A

fishing by nets fishing by striking

by night by daylight

A

by a stroke by a stroke

from above from below

** angling.

SOPHISTES-POLITICUS 879

By a summing up of the " differences " constitutive of the

successive " right-hand " divisions we get the definition that

angling is an art of acquiring by stealthy capture creatures which

inhabit the water, the capture being made by daylight, by a

stroke delivered from below. We might, of course, have carried

the division further, but our acquaintance with the facts makes

this superfluous. It is a linguistic fact that we give the name

angling to every procedure which has the characteristics enumerated

and to no other.

We now proceed to apply this method several times over to the

sophist. (Thus Plato is fully alive to the point that the same

species may be determined by the division of different genera,

the same term may have more than one adequate definition ;

relevancy to the purpose in hand will be the principle which guides

us in the selection of a genus to be divided. Each of the successive

divisions is meant to throw some one characteristic of the sophist

into strong relief.)

(a) We might follow the precise example we have just chosen

down to the point where we divided the art of hunting living things,

and then turn our attention to the left-hand division of this. For

the sophist is a hunter of " civilized living beings/' that is, of men.

He hunts them, not like kings, pirates, and kidnappers, by violence,

but by the arts of persuasion. Persuasion may be practised in

public, or, as the sophist practises it, on individuals. And the

persuading may be done by one who gives a present (the lover), or

by one who takes a fee. And the fee may be taken for making one's

self agreeable and amusing (as in the case of the *oAa or " parasite ")

or got by promising to impart " goodness." This gives us a possible

definition of the sophist as a professional of the art of hunting

rich young men individually for a cash payment, on the pretence

of educating them (2236). Thus the points brought out are the

sophist's commercialism, the unreality of his " wisdom," and his

suspicious family likeness to the " parasite."

(b) The sophist, however, has more guises than one. We might

detect him again if we started by dividing the left-hand branch

of the art of acquisition, namely, acquisition by exchange, and then

subdivided exchange into exchange of presents and exchange of

commodities (dAAcucriKi?). Exchange of commodities again includes

the transactions of the man who sells his own produce and those

of the middleman who sells that of others. And middlemen may

be engaged either in the home retail traffic (icam/Xt*)/) or in inter-

state trade (l^TroptK^) . One branch of such inter-state trade

is traffic in mental wares (\j/vxwiropiKrj) , serious or trifling. Under

this head falls inter-state traffic in sciences (^a^ara), and one

form of this traffic is the selling of scientific knowledge of " good-

ness." This enables us to define the sophist again as a retail ex-

porter of the knowledge of goodness (224*2), though we must add

that he sometimes retails his merchandise in the home market, and

occasionally even manufactures some of it himself. As before,

380 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

stress is laid on the commercialism of this peddling of spiritual

wares for a living, and a new point is introduced by the suggestion

that the " ideas " which the sophist sells ?.re usually not his own,

but come to him " second-hand."

(c) Yet again, we might diverge from our original division at a

different point. We spoke of an art of acquisition by open capture.

We may, if we please, divide this into two branches, competition

and combat. (Plato is thinking of competition for prizes in the

great games, at the Dionysia, and the like.) And combat may be

physical or mental ; the latter being contention, of which " dis-

courses " (Xoyot) are the weapons. When the " discourses "

employed are question and answer, we call this sort of contention

disputation, and disputation about right and wrong (ircpl SIKOLLWV

CLVTWV Kal dSi/ccoy) carried on under regular rules of the game is

what we call eristic. When eristic is practised for gain, it is

sophistry. Thus the sophist now appears as a man who makes

a paying business of contentious disputation about right and

wrong (2260). He invents insincere paradoxes about morality

for gain.

(d) We have not done with him even now. Making an entirely

new start, we observe that there are a host of familiar occupations

which are all alike in being ways of separating different materials

from one another. Now some of these separate like from like,

others aim at separating a better from a worse, and all these we may

group together under the common rubric of purifying or refining.

Purification or refining, again, may be either of the body or of the

soul. And purification of the soul itself may be of two kinds,

since there are two " vices " which affect the soul : spiritual disease

and spiritual deformity (ato-^o?), villainy, "wickedness" as it is

commonly called, and mere ignorance (ayvota). The soul is

purified from wickedness by justice, " the art of discipline " ; from

ignorance by teaching (fttSao-KaAuo?). But "there are different

kinds of ignorance and correspondingly different kinds of teaching.

The worst form of ignorance is the self-conceit which believes itself

to know what it does not know ; the teaching which purifies from

this is what we mean by iraiSeux, " education," " culture/' and all

other teaching is merely subservient to it (229*2). There are, again,

two forms of ira&ctn. There is the old-fashioned method of the

pire de famille who relies for success on rebuke, mingled with ex-

hortation ; this we may call admonition (I/OV&TT/TIK??) . But some

of us are convinced by reflection that all error is involuntary,

and that no one can be expected to " learn better " until he has

been convinced that as yet he does not know. They adopt the

milder method of trying to convince the man who has a false conceit

of his wisdom by asking questions which lead him to discover

his ignorance for himself and to feel the longing for knowledge

foob-e). We cannot well give the name sophist to those who

practise this kind of teaching (which is, in fact, the familiar " ob-

stetric " of Socrates) ; the title would perhaps be too high an

SOPHISTES-POLITICUS 881

honour for them. 1 There is a certain resemblance between the

eristic and these dialecticians, but it is such a resemblance as that

of the wolf to the high-bred dog. Still, for the sake of argument,

let us waive this scruple and define the sophist once more as a pro-

fessional of the art of purifying the soul from its false conceit of

wisdom (2316). (Here, of course, it at last becomes clear what

quarry Plato is hunting. The definitions already suggested would

cover Protagoras and his rivals ; the specialization of the sophists'

method to " contention by question and answer " definitely indi-

cates that the persons meant are inferior imitators of the Socratic

dialectic who abuse its resources for a purpose which Plato regards

as at bottom commercial.)

(e) We have still not gone quite to the root of the matter. The

sophist has exhibited the guises successively of : (i) a paid hunter

of rich youths ; (2) an exporter of spiritual lore ; (3) a retailer of

such lore in the home market ; (4) a small manufacturer of it ;

(5) an " athlete " of controversy ; (6) a " refiner " of convictions

which are hostile to knowledge (though his title to this last dis-

tinction is not uncontested). To penetrate deeper we must ask

what one calling there is which can masquerade in all these guises

(2330). The answer is suggested by the consideration that, as we

have seen, the sophist is, among other things, an avnXoyiKos, a

pitter of discourse against discourse, a contradiction-monger. He

undertakes to discover antinomies everywhere in divinity, in

nature, in morals and politics and writes books explaining how the

specialist in all these departments can be reduced to silence. Now

obviously one man cannot really be an " expert " in all knowledge.

The secret or miracle (Oavpa) of sophistry lies in contriving to appear

to be such a universal expert. A clever illusionist might delude

children into the belief that he can make anything and everything

by showing them pictures of all sorts of things at a sufficient dis-

tance. (If a child were young enough, it would, e.g., take the men

and horses in a cinema picture for real animals.) Why then should

there not be an analogous art of illusion by means of discourses

which imposes " imitations " of truth on the youthful mind ? May

we not say that at bottom the sophist is an " imitator " and

1 2 3 la 3, fj.rj nd$ov cu'rots vpoff&irruncv ytpas. Ostensibly the remark is

ironical. Socrates, for example, who made it a point in his defence that he

had never professed to be able to " educate men," would say that he had never

aspired to so fine a name as <ro0i<rr7js. But the suggestion is intended that the

practitioner of the Socratic method is the " philosopher " whom it is the

nominal purpose of the dialogue to distinguish from the sophist. 0i\<too0oy, as

we have learned from the Symposium, is a less assuming designation than <ro06s

(or its equivalent 0-o0i<rr?Js), but the character is the loftier. (Campbell's

interpretation in loc. cit. that " the sophist seems scarce worthy of so high a

dignity " seems to me to miss the irony and to be grammatically impossible.)

The connexion of 23 la with what follows in 2316 is simply that the speaker

proposes, for the time being, to disregard the scruple he has just raised and to

define the sophist in terms which are really applicable only to the true dialecti-

cian. This is, as we are to see, irony. He professes for the moment to take

the eristic at his own valuation. The expression ^ ytvci yewala <ro0i(rrun5 (23 16 7),

which has been oddly misunderstood, is meant merely to point the irony.

382 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

"illusionist 11 (yoV) or "wizard" (OavpaTowoios, 235^). This yields

us a new " division.' 1 The sophist's " illusionism " is clearly a

branch of ctSuAoTrouKTJ, the art of making images. But there are

two kinds of " images." Some are " likenesses " (CHCWCS), exact

reproductions of an original in all its proportions and colouring.

But in some cases, as in that of the makers of " colossal "

figures, the artist has to distort the real proportions to get a result

which will look right when seen from below ; 1 we may call his product

a " phantasm " (a deceptive reproduction), to distinguish it from

an exact likeness. The question then arises whether the sophist's

product is a " likeness " or a " phantasm " of truth. If we say

that it is a " phantasm," a distorted reproduction of a reality, we

commit ourselves to the view that there are such things as false

appearances, false discourses, false beliefs. We are assuming that

there can be an "unreal something," that "what is not" can be. a

This has always been felt to be a paradox, ever since Parmenides

called attention to the difficulty, and we must therefore examine

the question to the bottom (237^-6). This leads us straight up to

what, though formally a digression, is materially the main topic

of the dialogue.

Criticism of Eleaticism (2376-249^). The difficulty must first

be fairly stated. If we say seriously " x is not," it seems clear that

the subject of the statement x cannot be anything that is (an ov),

and therefore cannot be a " somewhat " (rt), since " somewha't "

always means a " being," an " existent." Hence he who speaks of

" what is not " seems to be speaking about " nothing." Yet can

we say that he is " saying nothing " (making an " unmeaning

noise," 2370) ? This is bad, but there is worse behind. If we are

to talk about " non-entity " at all, we must do so either in the

singular (py ov) or in the plural (^ oi/ra). But mere non-entity

can have no predicates, and so neither unity nor plurality can be

significantly asserted of it. Hence it seems we can neither think

nor speak of it at all (238^). Yet in the very act of saying that " it

is unthinkable," by using the word " it " we are talking of non-

entity as though it were one thing (2390). It seems then that we

must say nothing whatever about " what is not," and this ruins

our attempt to characterize the sophist as an artist in illusion.

He would argue that an illusion is " what is not," and therefore

that " maker of an illusion " is a meaningless sound. Unless the

sophist really " takes us in " by producing a false belief in us,

there is no illusion, and if he succeeds for a moment in producing

the illusion, a false belief must be something real ; but, as we have

just seen, that is what the sophist will not admit. He will say that

1 Plato's example (2355) is that in the case of the colossal work of art, the

upper parts (the head of the statue, the capital of the column, etc.) must be

made larger in proportion than it really should be if it is to look duly pro-

portioned when seen from the ground.

1 And if you try to get over the difficulty by saying that the illusion is really

something, it is a " real illusion/' he will merely reply that " real illusion" a*

" real unreality " (2406).

SOPHISTES-POLITICVS 883

in calling a belief " false " we are involving ourselves in the contra-

dictions we have just exposed. If we are to defend ourselves against

this attack, we shall have, with all respect, to correct the funda-

mental principle of the great Parmenides, to say that " what is

not in a way is, and what is, also, in a sense is not (241^." If

the Eleatic principle " what is is, what is not is not " is maintained

in all its rigour, there can be no such thing as a " likeness " or

" image/' and no " false beliefs."

We may say that Parmenides and all the early thinkers . have

dealt with the problem too light-heartedly, almost as though they

were merely " telling a fairy-tale " (^Wov, 2420). Some of them have

said that what is is three things (PPherecydes); another (PArchelaus), 1

that it is two, e.g. the hot and the cold, or the moist and the dry ;

Xenophanes, and our own school of Elea, that it is one. Heraclitus

and Empedocles say that it is both one and many : the " austerer "

Heraclitus that it is both at once, the "laxer " Empedocles that it

is each by turns. Every one of them is too anxious to get on with

his story to trouble himself about our ability to follow him

(2420-243^). But if we look into the matter, these different state-

ments about what is are just as puzzling as we have found the

current statements about what is not. We have to ask what these

thinkers really meant by being (243^). When a man says, e.g.,

that " the hot and the cold are " and are all that there is, he says

of each of them that it is, and thus he means by " being " something,

and one something, which is different both from " being hot "

and from " being cold " (243^-0) (he is making a " synthetic "

judgment). So the Eleatic who says that " there is just one thing,"

can hardly mean that " one " and " being " are just two equivalent

names for the same thing ; if he means what he says, he cannot well

admit that there are names, since no name is a name for itself

(2446-^). Parmenides complicates matters still more when he

talks of " what is " as a whole. He implies that it has parts, but

how can this be if it is " just one " ? If " wholeness " is a char-

acter of the one, then there are two significant terms, " one " and

" whole," and not merely one ; if " wholeness " is a significant term

but " what is " is not a whole, it is not something, and so there is some-

thing wanting in " what is." If " wholeness " means nothing at all,

there is the additional complication that " what is " cannot even

come to be, for " whatever has come to be in every case has come

to be as a whole." * Thus we see that the theory of those who

1 Or is the reference to some Pythagorean cosmology ? In any case,

the " opposites " are those which play the chief part in the various Ionian

cosmologies.

2 rb yci>6nvov del ytyovcv 6\ov, 245^ 4. The meaning is that a ytvccrts or process

of " being evolved " is, at any moment of its duration, unfinished, a process to

a goal not yet reached. So long as the process is still going on, that of which

it is the " evolution " is not yet there. When it is there, the process is over

and complete. That process is finished. This is the principle used by Aristotle

in N.E. x. to prove that a feeling of pleasure is not a ytvcw. Note the way

in which this short section of the Sophistes assumes and recapitulates the

difficulties already developed in the second part of the Parmenides.

384 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

draw this precise and fine line of distinction between " what is "

and " what is not " involves difficulties about being quite as serious

as any of those raised by the Eleatics about " what is not " (2450).

To complete our survey of the difficulties about being, let us

consider what " the other side " l have to say about it. This " other

side " falls into two main sections who are at loggerheads with one

another, like the giants with the gods in the old tale. The " giants "

insist that nothing is but what can be laid hold of and felt ; " being "

and " body " are the same thing. The other party maintain that

real being consists of " intelligible bodiless forms/' and that the

bodies which their opponents regard as the only being are " be-

coming/ 1 not " being." We need not say much about the thesis

of the " materialists/' but we may imagine them to be at any rate

so far better than they actually are as to deign to answer our ques-

tions civilly. We will then ask them whether there is not such a

thing as a soul ; whether some souls are not righteous and wise,

others wicked and foolish. If they say Yes, as they must, we shall

ask whether this does not imply that wisdom and the other " virtues "

are something, and whether they are anything that can be seen or

handled. Even if they try to save themselves by saying that the

soul is a kind of body, they will hardly venture to say that wisdom

is a body, nor yet to say that it is nothing at all, though a genuine

and persistent materialist would have to take this second alter-

native. We shall have gained our point with any of them who will

admit that anything whatever can be and yet not be a body. To

put it most simply, we shall ask them to admit no more than this,

that anything which has any " power/ 1 however slight, of acting

or being acted upon, certainly is in fact, that " what is " is SiW/xts

(" force "), active or passive (2450-2470).

It is not clear precisely what persons are meant by the " giants "

of materialism. They are certainly not atomists, as has sometimes

been fancied. The atomists who insisted on the reality of the

ai/a</>i/9 Averts (vacuum) cannot be classed among persons who say

that only what can be seen and felt is. Nor could Theaetetus

say, as he does (2466), that he has met " lots " of these men ; he

would not meet many disciples of Leucippus, to say nothing of

Democritus, in the Athens of 399 B.C. It seems to me most probable

that Plato has in view the crass unthinking corporealism of the

" average man/' rather than the doctrine of any particular " school."

We must also be careful not to make the mistake of taking the

proposed definition of " being " as " force " for one seriously in-

tended by Plato. It is given simply as one which the materialist

could be led to concede if he were willing to reflect, and we are

warned that, on further consideration, we might think better of it.

1 ro)s <SXXo>s X^yovras, 2450 8. Since they are opposed to the

6vros re irtoi Kal juij, i.e. the Eleatics, this "other side " must be pluralists of

various kinds ; the men of Megara cannot be included among them, as they

were always regarded in antiquity as Eleatics of a kind, and are, of course,

among the duucpipoXoyounevoi irepl 6?rof. This point is important.

SOPHISTES-POLITICUS 885

The point is simply that the " materialist " who uses the notion of a

" force " has already surrendered his materialism.

We have now to consider the view of the " friends of forms,"

the immaterialists already referred to. They hold that " becoming "

and " being " are sharply contra-distinguished. Our body is in

touch with " becoming " through sense-perception ; our mind in

touch with real and unchanging " being " through thought (2480).

We have to ask them what they mean by " being in touch with "

(TO Kou/cDvcti/) . Do they mean " acting or being acted on by a

force " ? Theaetetus may not be able to say, but the Eleatic

speaker is familiar with the persons who are being criticized, and

consequently knows that they would reject the statement. So far

from accepting the identification of being with " the power to act

or be acted on/ 1 they would say that both action and passion belong

to the realm of " becoming " ; " being " neither acts nor is acted

on. 1 But we shall then ask them whether they do not admit that

" being " is known by the mind, and whether " being known " is

not " being acted on " and knowing, acting. To be consistent,

they will have to deny both statements. If " being " is acted on in

being known, it Traced (" has something done to it "), and therefore

is " moved," and it is not true that being is simply "quiescent "

{fipefjiovVt 2480).

We cannot seriously think that " what utterly is," the perfectly

real, neither thinks nor lives, or that it thinks but does not live.

If it thinks and is alive, it must have a soul, and if it has a soul, it

cannot stand everlastingly still ; it must have movement. If mind

is to be real, there must be both motion and variety and also rest

and uniformity in things (2480-249^).

It has been a much-discussed question who are the thinkers

to whom the dialogue ascribes the doctrine just criticized. From

the statement of their theory, it is clear that they are extreme

dualists, who regard " being " and " becoming " as absolutely

sundered. They then identify " becoming " with the sensible

world, and consequently hold that the sensible world has no real

existence. To put the same thing from the epistemological stand-

point, they deny that sensation has any cognitive value, or plays

any part in the apprehension of truth. This shows that the refer-

ence cannot be to the type of theory ascribed to Socrates in the

Phaedo and Republic. The whole point of the doctrine of " partici-

pation " of sensible things in forms was just to break down the

absolute severance between a real world of " being " and an illusory

world of " becoming," by ascribing a partial and secondary reality

to the sensible. So the doctrine of " recollection " was intended to

assign sensation a genuine, if a humble, part in the process of

reaching truth ; sensation is, on that theory, just what " suggests "

or " calls into our minds " the thought of the forms. A fortiori,

1 248$ 7-9. The view suggested is that acting and being acted on, both

involve process and change : hence neither can be found in the realm of eternal

and changeless being.

886 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

if the criticism is not aimed at Socrates, it is not directed against

Plato's " earlier self " or disciples, if there were any, who retained

a doctrine which Plato had once held, but had outgrown. Nor,

again, can the persons meant be Euclides and his friends at Megara.

They were strict rationalistic monists who did not admit the exist-

ence of even an " illusory " world of " becoming," and regarded

themselves as Eleatics, whereas the " friends of forms " are one of

two groups who have both been carefully distinguished at 2450

from the Eleatic monists. The one hint of their identity is given

by the Eleatic visitor when he says (2486) that Theaetetus probably

will not know their views, but he is acquainted with them himself

Sta o-w7?0eiav, because he has lived with the men in question. As

the speaker is certainly an Italian Eleatic he refers to his own

personal recollections of Parmenides (2370) we must plainly look to

Italy for these rationalistic dualists. Hence Proclus is pretty likely

to be right when he says that the persons meant are " wise men in

Italy " whom he also calls Pythagoreans, especially, as Burnet

remarks, since he makes the statement without any discussion as

though it were the recognized traditional interpretation. 1 The

Pythagorean formula that " things are numbers " would readily

lend itself to development along these lines.

The Meaning of Significant Denial. The Platonic Categories

(2490-2590). So far we have reached the result that though move-

ment and rest are contraries, both of them certainly are. There is

movement and there is rest, and when I say " rest is," I do not

mean that rest is motion, nor when I say that " motion is" do I

mean that motion is rest. Motion, rest, being, are all distinct,

and being embraces both of the others ; though it is neither of

them. It thus seems as difficult to say what " being " is the name

for, as we found it to say what " what is not " is the name for. If

we can answer the one question we shall probably find that we have

learned how to answer the other 2 (2500-251^).

Every one knows that we are always making assertions about,

e.g., a man, in which we do not confine ourselves to the statement

that " a man is a man," but say something further about his com-

plexion, his shape, size, good or bad qualities, and the like, and in

all these cases we are saying that a man is not one thing only, but

at the same time many (not merely a man, but ruddy, tall, lanky,

patient, etc.). Raw lads and men who have begun their thinking

too late in life 8 fasten eagerly on such " synthetic " propositions,

1 Proclus in Pavmen., p. 562 Stallbaum (Cousin, iv. 149) ; Greek Philosophy,

Part I., 91 n. i, 280.

2 This means, to use language more familiar to ourselves, that if we can

solve the question, What is implied by an affirmative " synthetic " proposition ?

the answer will also solve the problem about significant denial. The upshot

of the whole discussion is to be a general theory of the conditions of significant

non-identical assertion.

1 1 can see no allusion to Antisthenes in the use of the adjective <J^ijLta^f

(2516 6). There is no reason why he should be dragged into the discussion,

and, as he had been a pupil of Gorgias (D. L. vi. i), the epithet tyi/ta^s is really

not quite applicable to him.

SOPHISTES-POLITICUS 887

and declare them to be absurd, on the ground that they all imply

that one can be many and many one. They plume themselves

on the discovery that only identical propositions can be true.

This is the thesis we have really to combat (2510-^).

If we consider the three concepts being, rest, motion, there are

just three logical possibilities : (a) that they all " partake in " one

another, i.e. any one can be predicated of any other ; (b) that

none of them can be conjoined with any other, i.e. none can be

predicated of another ; (c) that some of them can be predicated of

(" partake in ") others. We can reject (b) at once, since it would

forbid us to say both that there is motion and that there is rest.

This would make an end of the views alike of Heracliteans, Eleatics,

" friends of forms/' as well as of all the physicists who account for

things as due to the aggregation and disgregation of " elements,"

whether infinite in number (Anaxagoras) or finite (Empedocles) .

The theory is actually self-refuting, since you cannot state it with-

out using such words and phrases as " is," " apart from everything

else," " by itself," and the like (2520). You cannot even deny the

possibility of " synthetic judgments " except by making such a

judgment. The proposition " only identical propositions are true "

is not itself an identity ; (a) is an even more absurd theory, since

it would require us to affirm that rest is motion and motion rest

(252^). Thus the only possible alternative is (c) that some " con-

cepts " will " combine " and others will not (2520), just as some

letters can be combined to form syllables, others cannot.

This illustration suggests a further point of supreme importance.

Vowels hold a " favoured position " among the elementary sounds

of language. Every syllable must contain a vowel, and the vowels

are thus the " connecting links " which make syllabic composition

possible. There is a special art (TC'XVT?), that of the " teacher of

letters," which considers what combinations of consonants by the help

of a vowel are possible and what are not, just as another art, music,

considers what combinations of notes of different pitch will make

a tune and what will not. 1 So there clearly must be a science which

considers what " concepts " will " blend " so as to give rise to " dis-

courses " (Xoyot) and what will not, and again whether there is a class

of concepts which, like the vowels in spelling, make all combina-

tions possible, and another class which gives rise to distinctions (2530).

Thus logic is here, for the first time in literature, contemplated as

an autonomous science with the task of ascertaining the supreme

principles of affirmative and negative propositions (the combina-

tions and " separations "). , But this task of dividing things rightly

according to their " kinds," detecting one " form " (ISca) where it is

disguised by complication with others, and distinguishing several

which form a single complex, is precisely that of " dialectic."

Thus we have unexpectedly identified the true philosopher before

1 The reference is, of course, to permissible and un permitted melodic

intervals, not to the construction of ' chords." Thus the parallel between

and /iov<n*ij is kept exact.

888 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

we have come to an end with our identification of the sophist.

The philosopher is the dialectician who knows how to find the many

in the one and the one in the many (2530-6). We had already been

told much the same thing by Socrates in the Phaedrus, but there is

an important point in which the problem now under discussion

marks a great advance on the theories ascribed to Socrates in the

earlier dialogues. In them, the combinations or complications

considered seem always to be the " things " of the everyday world

of sense. The sensible " thing " had been treated in the Phaedo

and Republic as a sort of complex " partaking " at once in a plurality

of forms in fact, as a bundle of " universals." Each form had

been spoken of as something independent of every other, and the

only " combination " of several forms contemplated had been their

simultaneous " presence " in the same ai<rOrjr6v. Or, to put

the same thing from the opposite point of view, the question had

never been raised, what constitutes the particularity of the partic-

ular thing. Plato is now raising a different issue. We are to see

that forms as such can " combine,' 1 so that you can predicate one

" universal " of another, and it is the special function of the new

science Plato is contemplating to specify the lines on which such

combination is possible. The doctrine of forms as known to us

from the " Socratic " dialogues throws no light on this problem,

and this, no doubt, is why it is never referred to in our dialogue.

It is not that it is disavowed, or even called in question, but that it is

simply not relevant to the issues which Plato now finds himself

called on to face. We might, perhaps, say that the language of

the Phaedrus about the dialectician's task of seeing the one in the

many and the many in the one, if followed up, raises precisely

the same question. But the Phaedrus is, to all appearance, one of

the very latest " Socratic " dialogues, and Plato is probably there

on the verge of straining the limits of historical accuracy.

We cannot now work out the whole inquiry into the " com-

munion " between forms, but we may deal with it for the special

case of a few of the most important and all-pervading. As we have

said, " being," " motion/' " rest," are three of these universalissima

or /Acyio-Ta ytvy. Two of them rest and motion refuse to com-

bine. But the third will combine with both of the two, since both

motion and rest are. Moreover, each of the three is distinct or

different (crc/aov) from the other two, but identical with itself.

And difference and identity, again, are neither motion nor rest.

Nor is either of them the same as " being." We ascribe being alike

to motion and to rest, but this is not to assert that motion is identical

with rest. For " different from " is always a relative term, whereas

being has an absolute sense. 1 Thus we have five, not merely

1 255*2 3-7. The meaning is, that I cannot intelligibly say " x is different "

without specifying some y from which x differs. But I can intelligibly say

not only that " x is a z," but that " x is," " there is an x." To this absolute sense

of " is " there is no corresponding sense of " is different." See Campbell's

note, loc. cit.

SOPH1STES-POLIT1CV& 889

three, Forms (1817, yeVi/, both words are used interchangeably) to

consider being, motion, rest, identity, difference. Difference

manifestly pervades all the others, for each of them is different from

the rest, and so " partakes of the form of different " (2546-255^).

Let us now consider the relations between these five all-pervading

forms. (It is never said that the list of the universalia universalis-

sima is complete, though later Platonists, like Plotinus in Ennead

vi. 1-3, treat them as a complete list of Platonic " highest uni-

versals," or categories.) Motion is not rest, nor rest motion. But

both are and are identical with themselves, and thus " partake "

(|DiTx) of being and identity, and also, since each is different

from the other, of difference. Thus we can say, e.g., that motion is

it is motion] but also is not it is not rest. But in just the same

way we can say that motion " partakes of " being and so is

there is such a thing as motion ; but motion is not identical with

being, and in that sense we may say that it is not, i.e. it is not-

being. The same line of thought shows that " not-being " may be

asserted of all the five forms already enumerated, even of being

itself, since each of them is different from any of the others, and

thus is not any of the others (255^-257^).

Now these considerations enable us to dismiss the difficulties

which have been raised about " not-being.'* When we say that

something "is not so-and-so," by the not-being here asserted we

do not mean the " opposite " (Ivavrlov) of what is but only some-

thing different from what is. " A is not % " does not mean that A

is nothing at all, but only that it is something other than anything

which is x (257 b-c). Not-beautiful, for example, is the name not

of nothing but of all the things other than the things which are

beautiful. And the things which are not-beautiful are just as truly

as those which are beautiful. The " not-large " is, every whit as

much as the " large/ 1 the " not-right " as much as the " right. 11

In making a denial we are not asserting an antithesis between noth-

ing and something, but an opposition of something and something

else different from it (2586). We may say, then, that " not-being "

is as real and has as definite a character as being. This is our

answer to Parmenides. We have not merely succeeded in doing

what he forbade, asserting significantly that " what is not, is " ;

we have actually discovered what it is. It is " the different "

(TO OoiTcpov), and since everything is different from all other things,

we may say boldly that " not-being " is thoroughly real (OI/TWS 6v,

2576-2580). Henceforth we shall not give ourselves any further

concern about the alleged paradox that " what is not " is that

unthinkable thing " the absurd," the " opposite " of what is.

It is childishly easy to see that any thing is different from other

things and so may be said to be " what is not " ; the true difficulty

is to determine the precise limits of the identity and difference to

be found among things (259^).

Application of our Result to the Problem of " False Opinion " :

Final Definition of the Sophist (26oa-268c). Our identification of

890 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

" not-being " with difference shows that " not-being " itself is a

pervasive and categorial feature in things. We have now to

consider whether this pervasive characteristic can " combine "

with discourse and belief (Sofa). If it cannot, if we cannot say or

think " what is not/' falsehood of speech or thought will not be

possible, and consequently there will be no such thing as error or

illusory belief, and no " resemblances," " likenesses/ 1 or " phan-

tasms/' all of which seem to be what they are not. The sophist's

last retreat will be to the position that at any rate discourse and

belief will not " blend " with " what is not " : there is no such

" complex " as utterance of or belief in what is not, and therefore

no such art as the fabrication of " phantasms." This is the posi-

tion from which we have now to dislodge him (2610). Let us

begin by an analysis of discourse. Just as not all combinations

of letters yield a syllable, not all complexes of forms a concept,

so not all combinations of words yield a significant discourse. The

words of a language fall in the main into two great classes : nouns

(ovopaTa) and verbs (prj^ara). The verbs are vocal symbols of

actions (Trpafcis), the nouns are the names of the agents in these

actions. A string of verbs, e.g. " walks, runs, sleeps," is not a

Xoyos or significant statement, neither is a string of nouns, e.g.

11 lion, deer, horse." The simplest discourse, the unit in discourse,

is the complex of a noun and a verb, e.g. " a man learns." Here

not only is something named, but something is signified (2,620).

Further, a discourse or statement must be " of " or " about " some-

thing and it must have a certain " quality," must be TTOIO? TIS.

Thus, take the two statements, " Theaetetus is sitting down,"

" Theaetetus, to whom I am now speaking, is flying." The

" quality " of the first statement is that it is true, of the second

that it is false, for Theaetetus is not at this moment flying but

sitting 1 (2636). And both the statements are about Theaetetus,

the false statement no less than the true. A statement which was

not about (or "of ") some subject would not be a statement at all

(2630). Thus some complexes of nouns and verbs are false. Now

thinking is an internal conversation in which the mind asks itself

a question ; belief or judgment (Sofa) is the statement, affirmative

or negative, in which the mind answers its own question, without

audible words. Sometimes the internal conversation is accom-

panied by sensation, and then we call it " fantasy " (i.e. when the

debate of the mind is started by the attempt to interpret a present

sensation). Hence, from the possibility of false statement or

discourse follows the equal possibility of false belief or judgment

and false " phantasy " (erroneous interpretation of sensation,

1 1 cannot agree here with Burnet (Greek Philosophy, Part /., 287 n.) that

what is meant by the quality of propositions is tense. It is clear from 2636 2-3

that the speaker means " truth- value, " as has usually been supposed. His

point is that the two statements about Theaetetus have opposed "quality" ;

but both of them have the same tense. For a similar reference to " true "

and " false" as the " qualities " of propositions, which Burnet has overlooked,

see Philebus, 376 io-c2.

SOPHISTES-POLITICUS 891

a-b). A false belief that Theaetetus is now flying is not a belief

about nothing at all but a belief about Theaetetus which asserts

of him that he is performing a definite ?rpais different from that

which he is in fact performing. This disposes of the old objection

to our assumption that there are " images " and " phantasms/'

and so we may go back to our attempt to define sophistry as a branch

of the art of making images (2640). We now proceed to divide the

making of images more carefully.

We said that we could divide it into the making of accurate

likenesses (ei/coVcs) and the making of inaccurate images (<ai/Tao7xara),

both of which are forms of " imitation.'* Let us reconsider this

more in detail. The making of imitations is a branch of creative

art, as distinguished from the arts of acquisition, as we said long

ago. We may now divide creative art into divine creative art

and human creative art. The difference is that God (not, as the

thoughtless say, unintelligent " nature ") creates all real things

without any pre-existing material (rrporfpov OVK wra, 265^) * ;

man's " creating " only originates fresh combinations of materials

thus created by God. Next we may take a new principle of

division, and subdivide both divine and human creation into creation

of actualities and creation of images. 2 The images created by God

are such things as dreams, shadows thrown by a light, reflections

in a polished surface ; those created by man are pictures of things

made by man (houses, etc.), and the like. Here we bring in again

our former and now justified subdivision of images. Man-made

" images " are either accurate likenesses or phantasms. Phantasms

again are of two kinds : those produced by tools of some kind (like

the painter's brush), and those for which the producer acts as his

own tool, as when another man (e.g. an actor) imitates the physical

bearing or the tone of voice of Theaetetus by his own facial gestures

and his own voice, and this kind of imitation is what we call mimicry

(jjiinrjo-is). Mimicry, again, is twofold. A man may know what he

is mimicking or he may not know it. Many persons who have no

knowledge of the true figure (o-xv/* a ) of justice or goodness generally

try to make their speech and action exhibit the appearance of what

they fancy to be goodness and justice, and some of them succeed

in conveying the impression they are aiming at. This is a plain

case of mimicry by a man who does not know (267^). There is no

recognized name for this specific " mimicry by the man who does

not know," so we coin one for the moment and call it

1 The language, perhaps, must not be unduly pressed, but it proves at least

that the idea of " creation ex nihilo " was quite intelligible to Plato.

8 The language of 2660 i about the division in n-Xdros presupposes this

diagram :

Divine creation

of actualities.

Human creation

of actualities.

Divine creation

of images.

Human creation

of images.

892 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

("counterfeiting "). But there are also two varieties of the art of

counterfeiting. The maker of the sham may honestly believe that

he knows the reality which, in fact, he does not know. Or he

may have an uneasy suspicion all the time that he does not really

know what he poses as knowing (2680). In the second case he is

an " ironical imitator," a conscious " humbug/' as well as a mere

counterfeiter in fact, an impostor. The professional sophist has

had too much practice in " discourse " to be a mere honest pre-

tender ; he must have his suspicions of the unsoundness of his own

" discourse," and thus his "art " falls under the head of conscious

counterfeiting imposture or charlatanism. Only one further

distinction remains. The charlatan may practise his imposture

in lengthy discourses before a public audience, or he may employ

brief discourses with an individual in which he tries to make his

interlocutor contradict himself. The one type of impostor is the

(fy/xoAoyiKos, the dishonest " spell-binder " passing himself off for a

statesman ; the other is the sophist who counterfeits the " wise man,"

more than half knowing himself to be a fraud (268c).

One closing remark may be made on the main result of the

whole dialogue. Plato's solution of the old puzzle about " what is

not " and the later paradox, grafted on it, of the impossibility of

error, turns, as we see, on distinguishing what we should call the

use of " is " as the logical copula, or sign of assertion, from the

existential sense of "is." To us the distinction may seem almost

trivial, but it only seems so because the work of making it has been

done so thoroughly, once for all, in the Sophistes. Though Plato

lets us see that he thought the ordinary Megarian a good deal of a

conscious impostor, the difficulty about the possibility of error

and of significant denial was a perfectly serious one with its

originators and remained so until the ambiguity had been thoroughly

cleared up. It is impossible to overestimate the service to both

logic and metaphysics rendered by Plato's painstaking and searching

examination. We shall realize the magnitude of the issue better if

we are careful to remember that, as Plato himself knew, the problem

is at bottom one which affects all assertion. His point is that all

significant propositions are " synthetic," in the sense that they are

more than assertions of the equivalence of two sets of verbal symbols,

and that they are all " functions " of an " argument " which is

" not null." This would be a mere paradox if there were no other

sense of " is " than the existential. We can see that a completed

logic would have to carry the work of distinction further than it is

carried in the dialogue. Notably the " is " which asserts the identity

of the object denoted by two different descriptions (e.g. " the victor

at Pharsalia is the consul of the year 59 B.C.") needs to be distin-

guished both from the " copula " and the existential " is." But

the first step and the hardest to take is the recognition of the

" copula " and its functions for what they are. Since the Sophistes

takes this step for the first time, it is not too much to say that it

definitely originates scientific logic.

SOPHISTES-POLITICUS 893

2. THE POLITICUS. We must deal much more briefly with the

application of the method of division to the definition of the states-

man. We may be content, now that we have grasped the principle

of the method, to concentrate our attention in the main on the solid

result it is used to establish. Plato's real purpose in the dialogue

is much less merely to continue his lesson in logical method than

to deal with a fundamental problem in the theory of government

on which men's minds even now continue to be divided. The issue

is whether, as the actual world goes, " personal rule " or impersonal

" constitutionalism " is the better for mankind, and Plato means

to decide definitely for constitutionalism and, in particular, to

commend " limited monarchy." His reading of the facts of the

political situation is that monarchy has to be revived, as it was

in fact revived by Philip, Alexander, and their successors, but

that whether it is to be a great blessing or a great curse will

depend on the question whether it is revived as constitutional

monarchy or as irresponsible autocracy. Democracy, with all

the defects it has shown at Athens, is the most tolerable form

of government where there is no fixed "law of the constitu-

tion," autocracy the most intolerable ; where there is such a

fixed law, a monarch is a better head of the executive and

administrative than either a select " oligarchy " or a " town's

meeting."

In form, the dialogue is a continuation of the Sophistes, with one

change in personnel. Theaetetus is present as a silent character,

but, to save him from undue fatigue, his place as respondent is

taken by his companion, a lad named Socrates, who has been present

without speaking through the Theaetetus and Sophistes. (The great

Socrates, as in the Sophistes, is completely silent but for one or two

opening remarks.) The " younger " Socrates has been introduced

by one phrase in the Theaetetus (147^ i) as studying mathematics in

company with Theodorus and Theaetetus. He is known to have

been an original member of the Academy. There is one further

reference to him in a letter belonging to the later years of Plato's

life, usually condemned by the editors as spurious, though for

no obvious reasons (Ep. x. 3580). We learn there only that he is

in poor health at the time of writing. Aristotle mentions him once

(Met. B 10366 25) in a way which shows that he belonged to the

Academic group reproached elsewhere by Aristotle for their " pam-

mathematicism." l I think it all but certain that it is he, not the

1 The statement of Aristotle is that " the younger Socrates " used to regard

the " material " constituent in the human organism as falling completely

outside the definition of man, exactly as the bronze of which a disc is made

falls outside the definition of circle. Aristotle's own view is that there is a

difference in this respect between a " physical " and a mathematical definition.

It is indispensable to mention in the "physical" definition the fact that the

material constituents in which the formula is embodied are such-and-such.

(Just as it would be no adequate definition of water to say that it is " two

units of something with one of another " : you must specify that the twg

units are units of hydrogen, and the one a unit of oxygen.)

394 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

great philosopher, to whom Aristotle's practice has given a spurious

immortality as a " logical example." l

The dialogue begins (257^-267^) with an attempt to characterize

the science or art (TC'XI/TJ, ITTLCTTYJ^) of the king or statesman

(TToXirtKi;, /3a<Ti\LKr'i) by assigning it a place in the classification

of the sciences. Some " sciences " merely provide us with know-

ledge, others, including all the industrial arts, produce results em-

bodied in material objects (orw/iara). So we begin by dividing

sciences into the practical (irpaKTiKaC) and the purely cognitive

(yvcooriK(u). The science of the statesman involves little or nothing

in the way of manual activitjr ; it consists wholly or mainly in

mental insight. Thus we class it as cognitive (259^). But there

are two kinds of cognitive sciences. Some of them are concerned

merely with apprehending truths, and may be called critical

(arithmetic is an example) ; others issue directions or orders for the

right performance of actions, and may be called directive (cTrtraKTtAcat),

and the science of the statesman is of this kind (260^). Again, some

of the arts which direct merely pass on instructions which do not

originate with the practitioner (as a " herald " communicates the

directions of his commander), others give sovereign directions, are

sovereignly directive (avTcmTaKTiKai, z6oe). Among these we may

distinguish those which have the sovereign direction of the produc-

tion of living beings from those which are concerned with the pro-

duction of lifeless things (like the science of the master-builder).

This puts the king, or statesman, in the class of persons exercising

sovereign control over the production and nurture (rpo^rj) of

animals. Next, there is a distinction between the groom, who

exercises this calling on a single animal, and the herdsman who

practises it upon a whole herd or flock ; the statesman, like the

latter, has a flock or herd to deal with (261^.).

We are thus on the point of identifying the ruler with the shep-

herd of a human flock (a metaphor as familiar to the Greeks from

their recollections of Homer as it is to us from the language of Old

Testament prophecy). But it would be a violation of the rules of

method to divide " herds " at once into herds of men and herds of

other animals. We must observe the rule that a division must

proceed in regular order from the highest to the lowest classes, not

make sudden leaps. It is unscientific to single out mankind as one

class and to throw all the rest of the animal world, irrespective of all

differences of structure, into the one ill-constituted group " other

animals/' just as it would be unscientific to divide mankind into

Greeks and " barbarians " (262^) or integers into " the number

10,000 " and " all other numbers." A reflective crane might be

1 This seems to be proved by the illustration of Topics i6ob 28 ff., where it

is supposed that " if Socrates is sitting, he is writing." Obviously the allusion

is to a scene in the lecture-room ; Socrates is one of the audience and it is

wrongly inferred that he must be taking notes of the lecture. So the common

examples, S is \cv K 6s (pale)," " is pownick." are not naturally understood

of the famous Socrates. He is not likely to have been " pallid " ; it is impos

sible to see an allusion to the Phaedo in his " sitting " and his " music "

SOPHISTES-POLITICUS 895

supposed just as reasonably to divide animals into " cranes " and

" brutes " (263^). We must take care to avoid constituting

infimae species so long as our division permits of being continued.

Animals may be divided into the " wild " and the " domesticated "

(Titfaow, 2640), domesticated animals into the aquatic and the

terrestrial (the tame fishes of Egypt belong to the one class; our

familiar domestic quadrupeds, domesticated geese, and the like

to the other). The terrestrial, again, are either birds which fly

or beasts which walk. From this point we may proceed by either

of two alternative routes, a longer or a shorter, to the same result.

The longer route is to divide " gregarious domesticated beasts "

into the horned and the hornless, the hornless once more into

those which can be " crossed " and those which cannot, and the

last group into quadruped and biped (2666) (or, alternatively, we

might have divided the hornless class into those with undivided

and those with divided hoof). A division like this has a comic side

to it ; it ranks that most dignified of beings, a king, much on a

level with a swine-herd. But science has no concern with our

conventions about dignity, and is anxious only to get at the true

facts (266^). The shorter procedure would be to divide " gregarious

domestic animals " into quadrupeds and bipeds. Since observation

teaches us that man is the only wingless biped, we might then divide

the bipeds into winged and wingless, with the same result as before

(2660).

The effect of our division then is to define the statesman as a

kind of herdsman of gregarious animals, with a trade of the same

kind as the cow-keeper or the pig-drover, except that his herd

consists of unusually " kittle " beasts. But there is a difficulty

of which such a definition takes no account. In the case of the

statesman there are a goodly number of rivals who might challenge

this description. Farmers, corn-dealers, physicians, professors of

" gymnastic/' might all urge that the definition " raiser of the

human herd " applies to themselves as much as to the ruler. This

difficulty does not arise in the other analogous cases of the shepherd,

ox-herd, swine-herd, because every one of them is at once breeder,

feeder, and physician of his herd. As this is not the case with the

ruler of men, there must be something faulty about the classifica-

tion we have followed ; our business is next to see where the error

has come in. We may get a hint from a tale we all heard as children,

the story that the sun reversed his daily path in horror when

Thyestes started the series of crimes which disgraced the line of

Pelops by stealing the " golden lamb " (2680).

The imaginative myth which now follows (2680-2740) is built

up on the basis of ideas of which we may find traces in the early

cosmogonists, combined with fancies known to have been specially

affected by the Pythagoreans. From the cosmogonists we have

the notion of a past " golden age " before Zeus had dethroned

Cronus ; many of the details about this age of gold seem to be

" Hesiodic." The conception of the life of the universe as an

896 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

alternation of half-cycles with opposite senses is most familiar

to us from the fragments of Empedocles ; the thought of the world

as a ship sailing over the stormy waters of the airfipov is specifically

Pythagorean, 1 though, no doubt, both Empedocles and the Pytha-

goreans were availing themselves of the suggestions of pre-scientific

cosmologists. Thus dramatic propriety is observed by making

the Eleatic visitor utilize for his story precisely the materials which

would be specially familiar to a native of Magna Graecia. The

tale is told simply to make an immediate point. It is wrong on

principle to take any part of it as scientific cosmology meant

seriously by Plato, and to attempt, like Adam, the impossible task

of fitting the story into that of the Timaeus. In outline the story

runs as follows. The tale of the sun's return on his track, like

much ot the existing mythology, is a fragment of a very ancient

tradition about the transition from the age of Cronus to the age of

Zeus. The whole may be reconstructed thus. Only God has

complete immortality. The universe as a whole, being corporeal,

cannot be quite immutable, but makes the nearest approximation it

can to immutability by alternately revolving round the same axis

in opposite senses. There are periods when God himself is at the

helm of the world-ship with his hand on the rudder, and there are

alternate periods when he " retires " to his look-out (nspuonrj,

2720) and leaves the ship to follow its own course. The immediate

result is a complete reversal of sense of all biological as well as

cosmological processes. Life runs backward, in " looking-glass "

fashion. The reversal of sense is attended by gigantic cosmic

catastrophes, but when the first confusion is over, the ship settles

down once more to a uniform course, though with* a reversed

sense ; at first the regularity of its processes is almost as complete

as when God was steering. But as time goes on, the world " forgets

God its Maker/' and the irregularities due to the " lusts " inherent

in its bodily frame accumulate ; all regularity is on the point of

vanishing, the ship nearly founders in the " sea " of the " infinite,"

when God puts his hand to the tiller again, and once more reverses

the sense of the cosmic movements.

The stories of the golden age, when men lived peacefully, without

agriculture, clothes, or laws, are reminiscences of the condition of the

world " under Cronus," when God was actually steering the ship,

and acting literally as the " shepherd " of mankind, with depart-

mental gods under him as " deputy shepherds." Our own age,

that of Zeus, belongs to the period when the world is left to itself,

1 For the " world-ship " see E.G. Ph. 9 294, with notes in he. ctt. On the

whole "myth" cf. Stewart, The Myths of Plato, 173-211; Adam, Republic of

Plato, ii. 295 ff. As to the " sea," see Politicks, 273* T, where the true reading is

not rfaov, as given by MSS. and editors, but ir6rrov. This is not a conjecture

of Stallbaum, but the best authenticated text, as it is the only reading recog-

nized by Proclus, who frequently refers to the passage. The variant roirov is

senseless, but may be ancient, since it appears at Plotinus, Enn. i. 8, 13, lv r<J

-rift dvo/uotdrT/Tos TO Try- a passage where the metaphor of the ship is missing,

ynless, indeed, Plotinus also wrote irovTy, as is just possible.

SOPHISTES-POLITICUS 897

and is separated from the " golden age " by the catastrophic reversal

of all motions. At this reversal the gods withdrew from their

immediate direction of the human flock. Mankind were left

naked, needy, uncontrolled ; all our arts of industry and govern-

ment have been slowly acquired in the gradual conquest of nature.

(The " noble savage " is thus not a figure in our history ; he belongs

to a world where men are born as full-grown out of the earth and

" live backwards/') l

Were the men of the golden age really happier than ourselves

who belong to the " iron time " ? It depends on the use they

made of their immunity from the struggle with nature for physical

existence. If they used their freedom from the cares of life to

glean wisdom from the beasts and one another, no doubt they

were happier. If they used it merely to fill themselves with meat

and drink, and to tell idle stories to the beasts and one another, we

know what to think about that kind of life (2720).

The moral of the story is that our attempt to define the states-

man as the " shepherd of men " has involved two errors one

serious, the other comparatively light. The serious error is that we

have confused the work of a statesman in our historical world with

that of one of the gods of the "age of Cronus. 11 They actually

" fed " their flock ; the statesman of the historical world does not.

The minor fault was that we said truly that the statesman is a

ruler, but made no attempt to specify the kind of " rule " he exer-

cises. We ought to have reserved the work of " feeding and breed-

ing " the flock for a god ; of the statesman, who is a man among

men, we should have said more modestly that his business is the

"tendance*" (eVi//,e'Aeia, fcpaTrcta) of the flock (2756-276^). (The

object of the remark is to eliminate the " superman " from serious

political theory, and so to strike at the root of the worship of the

" man who can," the autocrat or dictator paternally managing

the rest of mankind without the need of direction or control by

law.) If we had made this clear, we should not have found the

provision-dealers and others claiming that our description was as

applicable to them as to the statesman. As to the other fault,

it arises from overlooking an important step in our division. We

forgot that the " feeding,' 1 or, as we now propose to say, the " tend-

ance," may be either forced on the flock (/?t'<uov) or freely accepted

by them (cKownov). This is what makes all the difference between

the true " king " and the " tyrant " or " usurper." The " tyrant "

1 The humorous zest of the description of life in the days when it began

with old age and ended with babyhood ought of itself to prevent us from taking

the story seriously. The cosmological story of Timaeus is given, not indeed

as science, but as a " likely story," and Plato is careful, for that reason, to

allow no such extravagances in it. We may reasonably infer that Plato

regards the whole conception of the happiness of the alleged " state of nature "

as a mere unhistorical fancy. In the real world to which we belong, man has

painfully fought his way up out of hunger, nakedness, and savagery. The

state of nature" dreamed of by sentimentalists belongs to the unhistorical

world where animals talk. Adam (loc. cit.) is an example of the danger of

reading Plato without a sense of humour.

398 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

forces his tendance on his subjects ; the " king " is the freely

accepted ruler of freemen, a " free tender of free bipeds " (2760).

Yet we must not be too much in a hurry to accept this as an

adequate account of statesmanship. We have, it may be, drawn

the outline of our portrait of the statesman correctly, but we still

have to get the colouring of the picture right (277^-0). To explain

what we mean by this, we shall do well to illustrate our point by a

familiar example. And before we do this, we may even illustrate

the use of examples by a preliminary example. This preliminary

example shall be taken from the way in which small children are

taught their letters. At first they may be given a set of very simple

syllables which they soon read off exactly. But they still make

mistakes in recognizing these very same combinations when they

meet with them elsewhere. We correct their mistakes by making

them compare the combinations they have misread with the stand-

ard alphabet or syllabary they have already mastered. This is

their exemplar ; the purpose of repeatedly referring them back to

it is to make them able to detect unerringly any combination given

them when they meet with it again in a new setting. This is the

function of every example (2770-278^).

Now for our example of the kind of discrimination which will be

necessary, if we are to distinguish the statesman's " tendance " of

the community from all cognate or analogous occupations. We

may take it from the humble industry of weaving woollen garments.

If we set to work to distinguish the weaver's industry from every

other, a series of obvious " divisions " we need not repeat them,

though Plato gives them soon leads us to the result that it is the

industry of fashioning defences against climate and weather by the

intertexture of wools (2796-280^). But this statement, though

true, is not sufficiently precise. If we described the weaver as

occupied with the " tendance " of clothes, wool-carders, fullers,

stitchers, and others, to say nothing of the makers of the imple-

ments they all use, might put in a claim to be called " weavers."

If we are to avoid this difficulty, we must, in the first place, distin-

guish carefully between the art which actually makes a thing, and

those which only contribute in a subsidiary way to its production

the principal and the subordinate arts (2&id-e). Next, among

principal " arts " concerned with clothes, we must set aside those

which have to do with cleansing, repairing, and adorning the

material ; this is " tendance of clothes/' but not the kind of tend-

ance exercised by the weaver (2820). Next, if we consider the work

of actually making the clothes, which we will call " working in

wool " (raXacrtovpyiJci?), we can divide it into two kinds, each of

which may be subdivided again. Part of the work consists in

separation of the composite (the carding of the wool is an illustra-

tion) ; part consists in combining the separate into one. And this

work of combining may take either of two forms, twisting or inter-

lacing (282*2). Both the warp and the woof of the intended web

are made by twisting (or spinning), the one being spun closer and

SOPHISTES-POLIT1CUS 899

the other less close ; the weaving is the subsequent interlacing of

the threads of warp and woof to make the web (2830). We might,

of course, have made so simple a statement without going through

the tedious series of divisions which have led up to it. They might

be thought superfluous and unduly prolix. This leads us into a

digression on the true standard of proportion in discourse generally

(2830).

We may distinguish two kinds of measurement (^rprjTiK^) and

two standards of measure one extrinsic and relative, the other

intrinsic and absolute (the actual names arc mine, not Plato's).

We may measure things as great and small simply by reference

to one another, or by reference to the standard of TO /xeVptov,

the right amount, or, as it is also expressed, in words meant to

SOUnd paradoxical, Kara TT/V rr/s yevcVcws avayKatav ovcn'ai/ (" by the

standard of the being which is indispensable to the production/ 1

283^). (The meaning is, to take a simple example, that a tea-

spoonful of a liquid may be " very little " by comparison with a

bucketful; but it is dreadfully "too much," a dreadful "over-

dose," if the liquid contains a concentrated poison, medicinal in

minute doses.) The arts and their products, for example both

statesmanship and the art of weaving, of which we have just spoken,

are constantly employing this standard of the " just proportionate "

in estimating excess and defect ; it is by adhering to it that " all

good things " are produced and preserved. To demonstrate the

reality of this intrinsic standard of measurement might prove as

long a business as we found it to demonstrate the reality of " what

is not," and, as we do not wish to be led too far away from our

immediate topic, it is sufficient for our purpose to point out that

unless we recognize it we shall have to deny the very possibility

of applying science to the regulation of action (2840-^. (This

thought of a " just right mean " and its significance for action will

meet us again still more prominently in the Philebus. From the

use made of it in the Ethics it has come to be spoken of familiarly as

the Aristotelian principle of the Mean. In justice to both Aristotle

and Plato it is necessary to point out that the whole doctrine is

Platonic, and that Aristotle never makes any claim to its author-

ship, though he is careful to call attention, throughout the Ethics,

to the points on which he believes himself to be correcting Plato

and the Academy.)

Thus the sciences generally fell into two classes those which

measure numbers, lengths, areas, velocities, etc., against one

another, and those which take as the standard of their measure-

ments the right mean (^rpiov), the appropriate (TrpeVov), the

seasonable (KCU/OO'S), the morally necessary (Se'oi/). The saving

that " all science is measurement " is only true on the condition

that we remember this distinction between two kinds of measure-

ment. (Thus Plato combines the view that " science is measure-

ment " with strict adherence to the principle of the absoluteness of

moral and aesthetic values.) As an illustration of the point, we

400 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

cannot answer the question whether the disquisitions of the present

conversation or of yesterday's are " excessively long " except by

considering that our primary object has not been to define the

weaver's work or even the statesman's, but to train our souls in the

accurate apprehension of the most important realities those which

are incorporeal and unseen. If this purpose could not have been

equally effected by a quicker method, our longest digressions cannot

be said to have been " too long " (2840-2876).

We now return to the main argument. The example has

impressed it on us that in defining a science it is indispensable to

discriminate it from others which are (a) subsidiary to it ; (b)

analogous, but not identical with it. We must try to make this

double discrimination for the case of the statesman (2876-305^).

Arts or callings subsidiary to a principal " art " will, with a

little forcing, come under one of the following heads :

1. Those which make the instruments used by the principal

art as its implements ;

2. Those which make vessels for the safe keeping of products

of all kinds ;

3. Those which make stands and vehicles (ox>?V ara )

4. Those which make coverings and defences of all kinds ;

5. Those which ornament and embellish a product, and make

it tasteful arts of " play " ;

6. Those which fabricate what the principal art uses as its

" raw material " ;

7. Those which provide nutriment of all kinds (287^-2890).

If we add one other branch of art, " the rearing of herds/ 1

already often mentioned, this classification will cover all our

" property " (/cr^/x-ara), except slaves and personal servants (i.e.

except those human " chattels " who directly assist a man, in a

subordinate way, in the actual living of his life). (The thought is

that the only piece of " property " which cannot be reckoned,

roughly speaking, under the head of " implements " or " provisions,"

is the " chattel " who is also your assistant in the work of living.

You could not well apply to the services of your confidential clerk

who at Athens would have been your " property " the formula

that his business is to make, or to take care of, that which you use.

He really is, in his degree, contributing to the actual " tendance "

of your soul.) Thus there is the same sort of analogy between the

work of the king and that of a personal servant or slave as between

the work of the weaver and that of the carder or spinner. The

person whom it would be most excusable to mistake for the king

the irony is characteristically Platonic is the " menial " (2890).

For all his pomp and circumstance, the king really is very much

like a " menial servant/'

We should expect, then, that the most plausible false pretender

to the functions of the king would be some class of menials. On

inspection we find, however, that most menials never dream of

advancing such pretensions. If we extend the range of the term

SOPHISTES-POLITICUS 401

to include all who render " personal services/' we may bring seers

(//aVrcts) and priests under it ; both seer and priest are " messen-

gers " or " errand-runners " of a sort (2900-0*). Now we are

getting on the track of the pretender we wish to detect. Seers

and priests are persons of self-importance and " prestige/' as we

see from many examples, particularly from that of Egypt, where it

is a rule that the king must be a priest. But the pretender whom

it is hardest to distinguish from the true statesman or king is a

rather different creature, who, like the sophist, has many disguises,

and may, in fact, be said to be the greatest " wizard " (yo^s) and

sophist of all (2910). What he really is we may discover from the

following considerations.

There are three well-known types of government: monarchy

(the rule of a single person), oligarchy (rule by a small select group),

democracy (rule by the general citizen body) . But we may add that

the first two have two forms, so that the whole number of types

should be reckoned as five. The single person may rule in accord

with law and with the consent of the ruled, 1 or he may rule by

mere force, without law ; in the first case we call him a monarch,

in the second a " tyrant " (dictator, usurper). So the rule of the

few, based on law, is aristocracy ; the lawless rule of the few by

mere force is oligarchy. Democracy commonly retains the name

whether it is based on law or on mere force (291^-2920). This is

the current popular classification of forms of government. (It is,

in fact, that regularly insisted on by Isocrates, a good representative

of " popular culture.") But is the classification really scientific ?

We have already seen that kingship or ruling is a directive science.

The one relevant distinction between claimants to be rulers is

therefore their possession or want of this science, not the distinctions

between rule by the rich and rule by the poor, rule by fewer or more

persons, on which the current classification is founded (2920).

Now real knowledge of the science of ruling men is a very rare thing

rarer even than first-rate knowledge of draughts, though even that

is rare enough. The number of genuine statesmen must be exceed-

ingly few (2930). Those few, because they have scientific knowledge

of principles, will be. true kings or statesmen, whether they exercise

their profession with the popular consent or not, with a written

law as a control or not, just as the man who knows the science of

medicine is the true physician whether his patients like his treat-

ment, whether he follows the prescriptions of a textbook, or not

(2930-6). In any case, he, and only he, does the work of the

physician, preserves the bodily health of the patients he " tends."

So the one ideally right form of statesmanship is rule by the man

who has true scientific knowledge about the " tendance of the soul,"

1 It is assumed that government resting on a law of the constitution Is the

same thing as government by consent of the governed. This is in accord with

the current view that vdfios is ffwOfaii WO\IT&V (" the convention of the citizens ").

It is not meant that anything like the original formal " social compact " has

ever passed.

402 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

and makes the souls of the citizens healthy, be his methods what

they may (2932).

Yet it is a hard saying that it is indifferent whether government

is carried on by law or without it, and our position requires further

examination. Legislation is, in a sense, part of the work of a states-

man, and yet the ideally best thing would be the supremacy not

of the laws but of the embodied wisdom of the true king. For

no law can be trusted to produce the best effects in every case ;

this is impossible, since the law cannot take account of the infinite

variations of individual character, situation, and circumstance.

Any law will give rise to " hard cases " (294^). Why, then,

is legislation indispensable ? Because it is impossible for the

ruler, who is a man with the limitations of humanity, to give in-

dividual direction in each of the countless cases which have to be

considered. He has to fall back on giving general directions which

will suit the " average " man and the " average " situation (2950).

Now suppose that, over and beyond this, any practitioner of a

directive science, e.g. a physician, were compelled to absent himself

from his patients for long and frequent intervals, how would he

meet the risk of their forgetting his directions ? He would provide

them with written memoranda of the regimen they were to follow

in his absence ; but if he came back sooner than he had expected,

he would have no scruple about changing these written regulations

if the case demanded it. So the true statesman, if he could return

after an absence, would have no scruple in modifying his institutions

and regulations for similar reasons, nor a second true statesman in

changing those of a first (2950). It is popularly said that an in-

novation in the laws is permissible if the proposer can persuade the

city to adopt it, but not otherwise. Yet we should not say that a

medical man who insisted on breaking through a written rule of

treatment when he thought it necessary to do so had committed a

fault in medical treatment because the patient had objected to the

departure from the " books " ; so if a statesman makes the citizens

better men by forcing them to innovate on their written and in-

herited laws, we must not say that he has committed a fault in his

science, a " crime " or a " wrong " (2960). Nor does a man's claim

to make such innovations depend on superior wealth ; the one and

only relevant qualification is his wisdom and goodness. If he has

these qualifications, he is entitled to save the " vessel of the State "

as his goodness and wisdom direct, just as an actual pilot shapes his

course by his living " art," not by a written rule. The wise ruler

has only one rule which is inviolable, the rule of doing what is wise

and right (TO /ACTU, vov KOL Ttxyrjs St/catorarov, 297^). The one

perfect " form of government " would be government by the living

insight of such an ideal ruler ; all others are mere imperfect

" imitations," of varying degrees of merit.

In the absence of such an ideal ruler, that is, in the actual

circumstances of human life, the best course is the very one we have

just pronounced absurd where the ideal ruler is presupposed. The

SOPHISTES-POLITICUS 403

laws ought to be absolutely sovereign, and violation of them should

be a capital crime in a public man (2970). We may illustrate the

point by recurring to the examples of the navigator and the

physician. It is quite true that the competent navigator or

physician frequently puts us to grave inconvenience anrl discomfort,

and actually expects to be paid for doing so. But if this led us to

make a rule that no one should practise these callings avTOKparup

(with full authority), but that anyone who pleased might follow them

on the condition of always adhering to regulations approved by a

public assembly of laymen, we should get very strange results,

and still stranger, if we further went on to appoint our practitioners

annually by lot or by a property qualification, and required them,

at the end of the year, under heavy penalties, to satisfy a court that

they had infringed none of the regulations (2<)Sa-2()gb) . If we

went the further length of enacting that anyone who made a new

discovery in these or any other of the practical sciences might be

prosecuted as a traitor and " corrupter of youth," and put to death

if convicted, there would soon be an end of science and of life itself

(2996-0). But the case would be even worse if the courts entrusted

with the enforcement of the supposed regulations were not expected

to follow any regulations themselves, but were free to give their

verdicts as personal considerations prompted (3000). After all,

there was some experience (Trctpa) which suggested these rules, and

some intelligence employed in getting them generally accepted ;

they were not the expression of mere individual greed or vanity

or caprice.

The laws are at least an approximate " imitation " of the

principles on which the living ideal " king " would act. As we

said, such a man would refuse to be bound by formulae when they

do not really apply. In this one respect of departing from formula

and precedent, the politicians who disregard the law are like the

true statesman. But, since they are by hypothesis ignorant of the

principles of statesmanship, they imitate his " innovations " badly

they depart from law and precedent in the wrong cases and for

wrong reasons. In any community where the ruler is not the ideal

scientific statesman, and that means in every society where the

" sovereign " is a body of several men, and most, if not all, when

he is one man, the law ought to be absolutely paramount (3010).

(This means that we must eliminate from " practical politics "

the " rule of the saints " at which the Pythagorean brotherhood

had aimed in the cities of Magna Graecia. The infallible ruler

would be a god or a superman. Supermen are not found in the

historical world ; there, the sovereignty of law is the succedaneum

for an actual theocracy, as is further explained in the fourth book

of the Laws.)

These considerations explain why in actual fact we find five,

not merely three, distinguishable forms of government. When the

" well-to-do " govern with strict regard for law we have aristoc-

racy ; when they disregard law, oligarchy. One person ruling with

404 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

reverence for law is so near an imitation of the ideal statesman that

we give him the same name of king. When he " pretends to act,

like the true statesman, always for the best, unhampered by regula-

tions," but is really inspired by ignorance and lust, we call him a

tyrant. Democracy receives one and the same name, whether it

rests on a fundamental law or not. Since the perfect scientific

statesman is not met in actual life, and his place has to be taken

by very imperfect laws which must not be contravened, it is not

surprising that the public life of states should be as unsatisfactory

as it is ; the real marvel is that some of them exhibit as much

vitality and prmanence as they do (3020).

It is an important, if not strictly relevant, question which of

these various constitutions is least unsatisfactory. We may say

at once that monarchy, the rule of a single person, is the best of all,

if it is strictly subject to good fundamental laws ; in the form of

sheer personal rule without laws, " tyranny," it is worst of all. As

for the " rule of a few," it is " middling " ; the rule of the multi-

tude, from the inevitable subdivision of the sovereign power, is

weakest of all for good or evil. Thus, where there is a fundamental

law, monarchy is the best constitution, aristocracy the second,

democracy the worst ; where caprice rules instead of law, democracy

is least bad, oligarchy worse, despotism worst of all. (There is likely

to be more " fundamental decency " in a big crowd than in a little

" ring," and least of all in an uncontrolled autocrat, 3026-3036.)

We can now at last say who are the serious pretenders to the

name of the statesman or king, from whom it is so important to

discriminate him. They are the men of affairs in the imperfect

constitutions, who delude themselves and their admirers into false

belief in their practical wisdom ; they call themselves TroAmKof

(statesmen), but are really o-Tao-iaon-iKoi (party politicians). These

are the supreme " wizards " and " sophists " of the world (3030).

We have now, so to say, purged away all the dross

from our concept of statesmanship ; only good ore is left. But

as " adamant," itself a precious thing, is separated from gold

in the last stages of the process of refining, so we have still to

distinguish statesmanship from the tasks of the soldier, the judge,

the preacher of righteousness who " persuades men " into goodness

by the noble use of eloquence. Reflection satisfies us that the

business of the statesman is not to persuade or to win battles, but

to decide whether persuasion or enforcement shall be adopted,

whether war shall be made or not. So his business is not to ad-

minister the laws but to make the laws which the courts then ad-

minister. Each of the callings just mentioned has charge of one

action, the proper performance of which is its contribution to the

" tendance " of the city ; the statesman's superior function is to

control and co-ordinate all these inferior activities (303^-3050). His

task is to weave together all classes in the State into the one fabric

of the life of the whole.

Just as a web is made by the intertexture of the stiffer threads

SOPHISTES-POLITICUS 405

of the warp and the softer of the woof, so the garment of national

life or character has corresponding components : there are the

harder and sturdier and the softer and gentler temperaments, as

material. Speaking generally, there are two main types of tem-

perament the adventurous, keen, and masculine, and the quiet

and gentle. The very " virtues " of the two are, in a way, opposed ;

that of the one is valour, that of the other modesty and orderliness

(crox^poo-wT?) . And either, carried to the extreme and untempered

by the other, degenerates, the one into harshness, violence, and fury,

the other into softness and sloth. If the life of a society permanently

takes its tone from the predominance of the softer type, it begins

by being unambitious, peaceful, and neighbourly, but there is the

risk that, for sheer want of grit and backbone, the city will end by

being enslaved ; where the adventurous, ambitious type prevail,

the same result is likely to follow from the hostilities in which such

a society is sure to be entangled by its aggressiveness (3080). The

task of true statesmanship is just to weave these two contrasted

strains well and deftly together. The true statesman would begin

by a careful testing of the temperaments in the State ; he would

then demand that the educator should train the characters of the

young, so as to make them into the right kind of material from

which to weave the fabric of a sound public life, as the weaver of

cloth looks to the carder and others to provide him with properly

prepared yarn (308^). Thoroughly intractable temperaments

would be excluded by death and banishment, or at least reduced

to the status of slavery (3090).

The statesman then proceeds to give instruction for the inter-

weaving of the threads he has selected, the characters who can be

trained into the combination of valour with sophrosyne. He will

regard as the threads of his warp the temperaments in which the

original bias is to action and adventure, as the threads of the woof

the tamer and quieter. The actual weaving of the two together

is a double process ; the " everlasting " in the souls of the citizens

will be knit by a " divine " bond, the merely " animal " by a

" human.' 1 The " divine " bond is constituted by " true and

assured beliefs " about good and right, bad and wrong. These

the statesman will look to the educator to provide. The effect of

such an education is to make the naturally daring soul gentler by

teaching it respect for the rights of others, and to develop the natural

orderliness of the quiet and unambitious into sophrosyne and wisdom.

This education, which corrects the bias of each type, is the " divine "

bond which most effectively produces unity of life and character,

but it will only produce its full effect in the finest souls. The

" human " and inferior way of producing unity in the society is to

take care that marriages are contracted on the right principles.

At present, to say nothing of marriages based on equality in

fortune or rank, the tendency is for persons of the same type of

temperament to mate with one another, the adventurous with the

adventurous, the quiet with the quiet. But this is a false principle,

406 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

and militates against real unity of spirit in the community. The

right principle would be that persons in whom either bias is present

should be mated with partners of the other bias. This would not

only prevent the society from falling outwardly into two groups

without close relations, but would lead to a cancelling out of one-

sided bias in the children of the marriage, and so make for the

permanent continuance of the type of citizen whom we must have

if the community is to endure. The main necessity is to provide

by the right kind of education that both " temperamental " types

shall have the same convictions about good and evil ; if this is once

attained, the further unification of the community by proper re-

gulations about marriage and the like is an easy task (3096-3110).

When the fabric has been thus duly woven, it only remains for the

statesman to constitute the officials necessary for the administra-

tion. Where a single official is required, he will take care to select

one who exhibits the union of the two strains of temperament of

which we have spoken. Where a board has to be constituted, he

will see that both types are properly represented, so that the energy

and vigour of one part of its members tempers and is tempered by

the gentleness and caution of the other part (3110-6). This is

how the science of the statesman directs and controls the con-

struction of the most glorious of all fabrics, the garment of a

righteous and happy national life.

It will be observed that the dialogue is peculiarly rich, apart

from its immediate political teaching, in ideas which have passed

over into the substance of Aristotelian ethics. Thus, in addition

to the conception of the " intrinsic " standard of the Right Mean,

we may mention the distinction between Cognitive and Practical

Science, which corresponds to Aristotle's fundamental distinction

between Theoretical and Practical Philosophy ; l the conception

of the relation of a " directive," or, as Aristotle says, " architec-

tonic " science to its subordinate disciplines, together with the

specification of the two marks of the " directive " science that it

uses what its subordinate disciplines make, and that it superintends

and regulates their practitioners ; the conception of the science of

the statesman Politics as being, in virtue of its concern with the

production of the good life for the community, the single supreme

directive practical science ; the insistence upon education, which

provides the statesman with his proximate raw material, men and

women with the right type of character, as the most important of

all the disciplines subservient to statesmanship. All these con-

ceptions happen to be more tamiliar to us from the Ethics and

Politics than from the Politicus, but it is from the Politicus that

1 There is the difference that Aristotle, unlike Plato, insists that Politics is a

practical science. This is a mere verbal difference. Plato's reason for calling

it cognitive is that, though it deals with *7>dei$, its work is not manipulative,

but the giving of directions, an intellectual task. Aristotle's real reason for

denying Politics the name of " theoretical" science is that he is preoccupied,

in a way in which Plato is not, by his distinction between necessary and

contingent subject-matter.

SOPHISTES-POLITICUS 407

Aristotle took them, as is shown by the frequency with which he

echoes his master's phraseology and repeats his illustrations.

See further :

BURNET. Greek Philosophy, Part /., 273-301 ; Platonism

(1928), c. 5 .

RITTER, C. Platon, ii. 120-165, 185-258, 642-657 ; Platons

Dialoge, 25-67 ; Neue Untersuchungen ueber Platon, 1-94.

RAEDER, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 317-354.

NATORP, P. Platons Ideenlehre, 271-296, 331-338.

APELT, O. Platonische Aufsdtze, 238-290. (1912.)

APELT, O. Platonis Sophista. (Leipzig, 1897.)

STEWART, J. A. Plato's Doctrine of Ideas, 84-91 ; Myths of

Plato, 173-211 (The Politicus Myth).

DIES, A. Antour de Platon, ii., 352-399, 450-522.

BARKER, E. Greek Political Theory : Plato and his Predecessors,

276-291.

CAMPBELL, L. Sophistes and Politicus of Plato. (Oxford,

1867.)

DIES, A. Platon, Le Sophiste (Paris, 1925) and Platon, Politique

(Paris, 1935)-

CORNFORD, F. H. Plato's Theory of Knowledge. (Translation

of Theactetus and Sophistes with Commentary, London,

I935-)

STENZEL, J. Zahl und Gestalt bei Platon und Aristoteles, 10-23,

126-133. (Leipzig, 1924.)

And for the history of Plato's relations with Dion and

Dionysius II, the full treatment in

MEYER, E. Geschichte des Altertums, v. 497-528.

CHAPTER XVI

THE PHILEBUS

IN the Philebus we are once more dealing with " practice,"

and more specifically with " individual ' morality. The

dialogue is a straightforward discussion of the question

whether the " good for man " can be identified either with pleasure

or with the life of thought. Socrates once more takes the part of

chief speaker, a place given him in no other dialogue later than the

Theaetetus. The explanation of this is no doubt, as Burnet has said,

that the subject-matter, the application of Pythagorean " cate-

gories " to problems of conduct, is precisely that which Plato

represents as having always been his chief interest. I think it

significant that, as we shah 1 see, all through the discussion the " cate-

gories " with which Socrates works are the Pythagorean concepts

of the Unbounded, the Limit, and their synthesis. We know from

Aristotle that one of the characteristic divergences of Plato from

the Pythagoreans was that he substituted for their antithesis of

the Boundless and the Limit that of the Boundless, conceived as

"unbounded in both directions" (the Great-and-Saiall), and the

One. l (On the Pythagorean view, the One, or Unit, was the simplest

synthesis of the Boundless with Limit.) It is clear, since Aristotle

never hints at any change in Plato's teaching, that the doctrine

he calls Platonic must have been taught in the Academy as early

as his own arrival there in 367 ; the Philebus is certainly one of the

latest works of Plato's life, and must have been written years after

367, but it still uses the Pythagorean, not the Platonic, antithesis.

I can see no explanation except the simple one that for the purposes

of the discussion the Pythagorean categories are satisfactory, and

that Plato is unwilling to make Socrates expound what he knows to

be a novelty of his own.

There are no data for determining the relative dates of composi-

tion of Philebus, Timaeus, Laws. Presumably the composition

of the Laws was going on when the other two were written. The

dramatic date of the conversation cannot be fixed, except that from

Philebus 580 7 we see that it is later than the first visit of Gorgias

to Athens ; the scene is also left unspecified, though it is, no doubt,

" somewhere in (or about) " Athens. The two young men who

figure as interlocutors, Protarchus and Philebus, are entirely

1 Met. A 9876 25, T& 5' tori roC direfpou ws Mt 5vdfla irot^aai *al rb Airapov

fji(yd\ov Kal /turpoG, TOUT* tdiov.

THE PHILEBUS 409

unknown to us. 1 Socrates addresses the former as " son of Callias,"

but the name Callias was a common one, and we cannot say what

Callias is meant, except that it cannot be Socrates' acquaintance

Callias the " millionaire/ 1 whose children were mere boys at the

time of Socrates 1 trial (ApoL 200).

If we know so little about the date of the dialogue, we seem

able to say much more definitely than for most of the dialogues

what were the circumstances which occasioned its composition.

The object of the discussion is to examine two rival theses about

the " good " : (a) that it is pleasure (17801/7?), (b) that it is " thinking "

TO (frpovw, TO vociv. The way in which the theses are formulated

at the outset (nb) suggests at once that we are dealing with a

quaestio disputata within a regular philosophical school. When we

find that the purpose of the dialogue is to criticize both, to dismiss

both as inadequate, and to suggest a via media, the impression

naturally arises that Plato, as head of the Academy, is acting as

" moderator " in a dispute within his own school. The evidence

of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics seems to convert the possibility

into a certainty. As is well known, Aristotle there deals twice over

with the problem of the relation between good and pleasure. In

the discussion of the seventh book, he starts with an anti-Hedonist

thesis that pleasure is not good at all, examines the arguments

adduced by its defenders, and urges that they are so inconclusive

that they do not even prove that pleasure is not the supreme good.

The arguments are all taken from Platonic dialogues, including the

Philebus itself, but employed to prove something different from the

conclusions drawn in Plato. Since one of these is that " pleasure

must be bad, because it hinders thought " a misrepresentation

of the argument of Phaedo 66a ff . the persons who advanced

them clearly held that the good is "thinking" (TO </>oi/tv), the

thesis pitted against the identification of good with pleasure at

the opening of our dialogue. Aristotle incidentally mentions

among their arguments the contention that pleasure cannot be the

good because pleasure and pain are both bad things which a wise

man avoids, and names the author of the doctrine, Speusippus. 2

In the second discussion of the subject, he also tells us who the person

who identified " the good " with pleasure was ; it was the famous

1 It is assumed that there is also a considerable number of young men who

form a silent audience (i6a 4). Socrates is even said to be granting the party a

ffwovvta (igc 5), a word which has the suggestion of a formal "lecture" or

conference. It is clear, in spite of the opposite view of some editors, that

Philebus, who is almost silent throughout the dialogue, is a mere lad, much

more immature in mind than Protarchus. This explains the touch of petul-

ance about his declaration (120) that nothing will ever persuade him out of his

Hedonism. His worship of ytiov-fi is just a boy's zest for the joie de vivre.

2 E.N. 115365. Speusippus argued that the badness of pain does not

prove the goodness of pleasure ; both are opposed to the " good," as " the

greater " and " the less " are both opposed to " the equal." I.e. the good

condition is absence of both pleasurable and painful excitement. Hence the

point that " the good man pursues not the pleasant but the painless " (E.N.

11526 15) will be part of his argument.

410 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

mathematician Eudoxus, and his argument was precisely that which

is hinted at in the opening words of the Philebus (n& 5) and alluded

to again at its close (676 i), that pleasure is the one end which

all living things instinctively and spontaneously pursue. 1 These

references seem to make it certain that the issue discussed in the

dialogue is one which had actually divided the members of the

Academy, the question what is really meant by the Platonic " Form

of Good."' One party thinks that it means pleasure, the other

that it means thought. 2 The attitude taken by Plato in the

dialogue to this discussion is, to all intents and purposes, precisely

that of the " moderator " in the schools of the Middle Ages " deter-

mining" a quaestio dispntata. The arguments produced by both

parties arc reviewed and weighed, and the balance is struck between

the disputants. It is decided that the issue shall be narrowed down

to a consideration of the " good for man " in particular. When the

question has thus been delimited, it is " determined " by the

answer that neither pleasure alone nor thought alone is the " good "

or best life for men ; the best life must include both thought and

grateful feeling ; bat of the two, thought is the " predominant

partner." This is, in fact, the conclusion to which the discussion

is made to lead ; it is also the verdict given on the same issue in

Aristotle's Ethics, which owe more of their inspiration to the Philebus

than to any other Platonic dialogue.

THE QUESTION PROPOUNDED (na-2ob). What is "the good"?

Philebus has an answer to this question: "pleasure, joy, delight,"

this is the good for all living creatures. Socrates disputes this :

" thought, intelligence, memory, true judgment," are better than

pleasure " for all who can share in them " (lib). Thus Philebus

originally makes an assertion not simply about the good for man

in particular, but about good universal, " the " good. Socrates

commits himself to no assertion about good universal, but asserts

that for an intelligent being, like man, there is something better

than pleasure, namely, the exercise of intelligence. If we are to

decide between those conflicting views, we must at least agree on

the sense to be put on the phrase, "the good for man." We may

take it that both of us mean by this phrase "a condition and state

(<;is KOI &d0e<ris) of soul which can make any man's life happy "

(n^). 3 The question is whether pleasure, or again, thought, or

possibly something better than either, is that " state and condition."

1 E.N. 11726 9-15.

1 Few scholars would now make the old mistake, which unfortunately

persists in some of the best expositions of the dialogue, of supposing the

Hedonists and anti-Hedonists aimed at to be Cyrenaics and Cynics respec-

tively.

3 This is the definition of Aristotle also, except that Aristotle holds that

the true genus of happiness is not is (state) but Mpyeia (activity). This is

a valuable correction of the language of the Academy, but no more than a

correction of their language. Aristotle never suggests that Plato, or any

member of the Academy, meant that the " good " is a mere passive state.

He blames their terminology for not marking the difference between such a

" state " and an " activity."

THE PHILEBUS 411

In this last case, we should have to say that neither pleasant feeling

nor thought is, by itself, the good for man, but we should still have

to say that whichever of the two is most akin to the complete good

for man is the better of them (lie). (These remarks foreshadow

the coming conclusion that the "good for man" includes both

components, but that thought is the more valuable of the two.)

Now " pleasure " is a word with many shades of meaning. A

" life of pleasure " often means a vicious life, yet we say that the

continent man finds his very continence pleasant ; we talk of the

" pleasures " of folly and extravagant day-dreams, but we also say

that the " thinking man " finds his thinking pleasant. Thus there

may be pleasures of many kinds, and we have no right to assume

that all must be good (i2d). You may say, as the Hedonist does,

that the difference of which Socrates speaks is a difference in the

sources from which pleasure is derived, not in the pleasure yielded,

but this would be evading the real issue. All pleasant experiences

agree in being pleasant, just as all coloured surfaces agree in being

coloured. But there are more or less marked colour-contrasts

also. Why then may there not be pleasure-contrasts within the

genus pleasure ? If there are, this will be a reason for hesitating to

ascribe the predicate good to all pleasures.

" Pleasure is good " is, in fact, a synthetic proposition (130),

and therefore we cannot assume the impossibility of regarding

some pleasures as good, but others as bad. They are all, of course,

pleasant, but pleasantness might be present both in good and in

bad experiences. Similarly, if we consider the rival thesis, that

thought is " the good/' we can see that it is one thing to make

the analytic propositions " science is science," " knowledge is

knowledge," another to say that " science (or knowledge) is good."

If there are a plurality of " sciences," or other activities of intellect,

some of them may conceivably be good, others bad (140). Thus

we see that our present discussion raises the old and eternally

recurring problem of the one and the many (140).

One form of this problem may now be regarded as long ago

disposed of, the ancient difficulty of the possession of many qualities

or parts by the same individual (i^d-e). This was the form in which

the problem had arisen, e.g. in the Phaedo ; presumably Plato

means that the solution given there is sufficient to dispose of the

question. The case which still needs investigation is that in which

the " one " is not a thing which comes into or passes out of being,

but belongs to the non-phenomenal order. This case gives rise

to three questions : (a) whether there really are such non-pheno-

menal " units " ; (b) how we are to reconcile their unity with their

reality or being ; l (c) how we can think of such units as being at

1 Phileb. i$b 2-4. The wording of this second question is a little obscure,

but the meaning seems to be made plain if we read the words in the light of the

" antinomies " of the Parmenides. When we try to think of an 6> tv, a real

unit, we seem driven either to deny its unity in order to maintain its reality,

or to deny its reality in order to save its unity. This is also how Burnet

takes the words (Greek Philosophy, Part /., 326, n. 2).

412 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

once one and many. (This last question is manifestly the same

which has met us in the Sophistes, the problem of the " communion "

of a form itself with other forms.) These are the problems which

still give rise to vehement discussion (i^a-c).

We certainly cannot evade these problems ; they are perpetually

turning up in all our " discourses/' and we must meet them as best

we can (15^-166). There is no better way of dealing with them

than that of which Socrates has always been a lover. (Compare

the way in which he speaks in the Phaedrus of his reverence for the

true dialectician who knows how to " divide " a subject rightly.)

There was long ago a Prometheus Pythagoras is the person meant

who revealed the art by which such problems may be treated.

His followers have handed down to us the tradition that " whatever

is at any time said to be " is composed of the constituents limit

and the unlimited. No matter what subject we study, we can find

these elements in it. We can always find a single form (the allusion

is to the Pythagorean doctrine that the " unit " is the first combina-

tion of limit and unlimited) and on inspection we shall, with

care, be able to discover two, or three, or some other number of

definite further forms included in 'it. We should next take each

of these forms and look for a definite number of forms included in

them, and continue this process as long as fresh forms are to be

found. It is only when we can no longer repeat the process that

we should let things "go to infinity." In this way, the only way

worthy of a dialectician, we shall discover not only that every form

is at once one and infinitely many, but also how many it is (i6c-ija).

(That is, we must not be content to say, for example, that animal,

or anything else, is one kind and also that there are an indefinite

number of animals ; we must attempt to make a logical division

which will show us exactly what and how many species of animals

we can distinguish. It is only when we have reached an infima

species incapable of further logical subdivision that we may consider

the indefinite multiplicity of individuals. So long as you can go

on with the logical division, each genus has not an indefinite

plurality but a determinate number of constituents.) Thus the

grammarian must not say that articulate sound is in a sense one,

and yet that there are " any number " of different articulate

sounds ; he must know how many distinct sounds his alphabet

has to represent. To do this he has to divide articulate sounds

into vowels and consonants, and the consonants again into " stops "

and " sonants/' It is only if he finds that these classes cannot

be subdivided into sub-classes that he may then enumerate the

individual vowels, stops, or sonants. Thus definite number (the

number of the constituent species and sub-species) is everywhere

the intermediate link between the one genus and its indefinitely

numerous members (176-18^).

We must apply this consideration of method to our special

moral problem. Before we can decide whether all pleasure or all

thinking is good or not, we must know not only that pleasure is one

THE PHILEBUS 413

and knowledge one, and again that there are " ever so many "

pleasures and forms of knowledge, but also how many there are.

The question is, in fact, whether we can discover distinct " forms "

or " kinds " (eufy) of pleasure or of thinking, and hew many (196).

But this is a long and perplexing inquiry, and Protarchus would

be glad if Socrates could find some way of deciding the immediate

question whether thinking is better than pleasure without raising

this more fundamental issue (zoa-b).

PRELIMINARY DELIMITATION OF THE PROBLEM. Neither

Pleasure nor Thought alone is the Good for Man (200-220). Socrates,

as we shall see, has no serious intention of allowing the question

whether there are " kinds " of pleasure to be shirked. But we can get

rid of one of the issues raised without going so deep into the matter.

He seems to remember hearing perhaps in a dream that " the

good " is neither pleasure nor thought, but something better than

both. If that should be true, we can, at any rate, dispose of the

doctrine that pleasure is the good, and we can deal with this point

without going into the question about " kinds " of pleasure (200),

if we can agree on certain " notes " l characteristic of the supreme

good and find that pleasures do not exhibit these notes. Obviously

it is a note of the good that it is something " finished " or " com-

plete " (TC'ACOV), and consequently that it is " sufficient " (iicavdv),

and finally, therefore, that it is the one thing and the whole of the

thing at which any creature which apprehends it ever aims, the

whole and complete fulfilment of desire (2pd). 2 We may thus make

it a criterion of the good for man that it is what any one of us who

knows what it is would choose in preference to anything else, and

would be completely satisfied by. Judged by this criterion, neither

pleasure nor " thought " can be that good. Even a professed

Hedonist would not choose by preference a life simply made up of

moments of intense pleasurable feeling and nothing else. He

would want to be aware that he is feeling pleasure in the present,

to remember that he has felt it in the past, and to anticipate that

he will feel it in the future. Thus he would demand intellectual

activity as well as feeling to make him happy ; a life all feeling would

be that of an oyster rather than of a man. The same thing is true

about a life which is all thinking and no feeling. No man would

choose a life of mere intellectual activity entirely neutral in feeling-

tone. Any man would prefer a " mixed " life, which contains both

" thought " and pleasant feeling. The " mixed life " is thus better

for man than the unmixed. A life of " unmixed " feeling would

only be " complete " and " sufficient " for a brute, or perhaps a

plant ; a life of " unmixed " intellect may perhaps be suitable to

1 1 use the word much as Newman uses it when he talks of the " notes "

of the true Church

2 These same notes are adopted by Aristotle from the dialogue as the

characters which must be exhibited by the " good for man " (N,E. 10970 25 ff.).

The X67os of which it is there said that it " comes to the same thing " as Aris-

totle's own is the Academic theory of the " good for man," as given in the

Philebits,

414, PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

God, but not to man. The good for man must exhibit both factors*

But the real problem of our dialogue still remains. Does the

" mixed life " owe its goodness primarily to the presence of thought

in it, or to the presence of pleasant feeling ? Which is preponder-

antly the cause of its goodness ? Socrates must not expect to be

" let off " this discussion, and to deal with it we shall require to

follow a long and difficult line of thought. This brings us to the

main argument of the dialogue.

THE RELATIVE SIGNIFICANCE AND PLACE OF PLEASURE AND

THOUGHT IN THE GOOD FOR MAN (230-66^). Formal Character oj

Each (230-300) . Anything which is actual can be placed in one of

four classes : (a) infinite or unbounded (TO aTmpov) ; (b) limit

(Trc'pas) ; (c) the " mixture " or combination of both these con-

stituents ; (d) the catise which brings them together (z^c-e). To

explain a little more precisely : " temperature/' or, in the Greek

phrase, " hotter and colder," is an example of what we mean by

(a). We can call it " infinite" or " boundless" because anything

can always be made hotter or colder than it is ; there is no tempera-

ture which is the maximum or minimum conceivable, and again,

if you have two different degrees of temperature, you can insert

between them an endless number of intermediate temperatures

different from both. Since temperature may be increased or

diminished, we may also call it a " great and small " or " a less and

more " (a ^e'ya *eu jjiiKpov), and this, as we know from Aristotle,

was Plato's own name for what the Pythagoreans, whose language

Socrates is using in our dialogue, called the airapov. And what we

can say about temperature, we can equally say about everything

which allows of indefinite variation in magnitude or in degree,

admits of "more and less," or such qualifications as "intense,"

" slight." We may thus class together all that admits of such var-

iation under one single head as the "infinite " (245). The " infin-

ite " is thus what we should call quality with a continuous range.

By the " limit," again, as a single " form " we mean whatever

does not admit " the more and the less," but admits such predicates

as " the equal," " the double," in a word, whatever is " as an in-

teger to an integer or a measure to a measure " (256). The limit

(Trc/oas) means thus precise mathematical determination, number,

ratio, measure. (The last is added to cover the case of " surd "

ratios, like that of i : ^'2 or side of square : diagonal.)

The "mixed " class, or " mixture of the two," means a precise

and definitely determined magnitude or intensity of any quality.

(Thus, e.g., temperature is an awtipov, 20 is a Tre/oas, a temperature

of 20 C. is an instance of the " mixture " ; rainfall is an airupov, 6 is

a 7TC/M19, but a rainfall of 6 inches is a /ACIKTOV, and so on,) The

introduction of determination into a " more and less " is precisely

what we call a ycWts, or process of becoming (250). (E.g., to raise

water to a temperature of 100 C. is the " process " of making it boil,

it is also the introduction of the " limit " 100 into the awipov,

temperature.)

THE PIIILEBUS 415

Now we note that health in the body, proper attunement in

music, beauty and proportion in a body or a face, good climate, and

the like, all depend on the production of definite " limit " or ratio

in an aTmpov of some kind ; departure from this proper ratio pro-

duces disease, false intervals in music, ugliness, bad climate. And

the same thing holds about goodness in the soul (266 6). The point

to be made is thus that the right or sound or good state of anything

is marked by definite proportion and " limit " ; there may be in-

finitely numerous divergences from this one right proportion or

equilibrium, but they are all in varying degrees bad. This is what

is meant by calling the development which leads up to and stops

at the production of the right proportion a yeVeo-ts ck ovo-iar, a

development leading to a stable being (26^). The point is that the

physician producing health in his patient, for example, may do so

by steadily increasing the proportion of the "dry," or again of the

" moist," in the invalid, but he does not aim at increasing this

beyond limits. There is a definite ratio of the " hot " to the

" cold," or of the " moist " to the " dry," which is characteristic

of health. When the ycVeo-is set up by the physician's treatment

has secured this ratio, he dismisses the patient. Health once

attained, you don't make the man healthier in indefinitum by passing

further and further beyond the " limit " ; you would only give him

a new disease instead of the old one. This explains why we shall

be told directly that all the good things in life belong to this class

of the " mixed."

As for the " cause," we mean by it the agent which sets up

such a process as we have described, TO TTOLOVV (26^). We have

therefore to distinguish it both from that which it produces, the

process or yeVeoris, and that which "subserves it for the process,"

the " matter " of the process. The process we have already

referred to our third class ; the " matter " of the process is just

the factors which are brought into combination, the unlimited and

limit. This is why we had to add the fourth class to the other three.

We note here that the account of the " mixed " class is the direct

source of the " right mean " in Aristotle's Ethics. " Moral "

goodness, according to Aristotle's familiar account in E.N. ii.,

is a fixed and habitual right " mean " or proportion in our appetitions

and tempers, and the process of becoming good is one of " qualifying "

them, i.e. training them to exhibit just the proportion demanded by

the "right rule" (opObs Xoyos). 1 Thus it is just such a process

of ycVco-ts ets ovcri'ai/ as has just been described, the aircipov in the

case being the indefinite degrees of frequency and intensity which

tempers and appetitions admit, and the W/oas the exact degree

demanded by the " right rule."

1 The 6pObs Xdyos itself is Platonic too, and appears to come from Laws, 659^,

where education is said to be the " drawing and attracting of children to the

right discourse (6p0bs \6yos) uttered by the law." That Aristotle was influenced

by this passage is shown by his allusion to it as excellently said by Plato at

E.N. 11046 12.

416 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

Now let us apply what we have just said to our particular

problem. We see that the " mixed life," including both intellectual

activity and agreeable feeling, on the face of it, falls in our third

class, because it has these two distinct factors. (It is intended to

hint at the result to be established later, that the two factors need

to be combined according to definite law and proportion.) But

what about the life of pleasure recommended by Philebus, which

consisted in having as much pleasure and as intense pleasure as

you can get ? Pleasure, and again pain, clearly belong to the class

of the " infinite," since neither, in its own nature, has a minimum

or a maximum (270). Philebus thinks that it is this impossibility

of ever exhausting the possibilities of pleasure which makes it so

good. But you might also say that it is the same impossibility

of exhausting those of pain which makes pain so bad (280). Hence

it is clear that the mere indefinite range of pleasure is no proof of its

goodness. What, again, about the " intelligence " (wCs), know-

ledge, wisdom, preferred by Socrates ? Into what class does this

fall? (2&a). We are agreed to reject the theory that the course of

the universe is random (ciKfJ, 28^), and to agree with the traditional

belief that it is directed by a supreme wisdom ((frpovya-is) and in-

telligence (vovs) in every particular. Now when we look at our

own constitution, we see that the materials of which our body is

made are only small parcels of the great cosmic masses of similar

materials, and that these constituents are found in a much higher

degree of purity from other ingredients elsewhere in the universe

than in our bodies. The " fire " in us l is small in bulk and " im-

pure " in substance by comparison with the fire in the sun. And

again the " fire " or " water " in us is fed and kept up by that in

the larger world (29^). And generally our little body is fed by the

mass of body without us (290). By analogy, we may infer that

since there is soul in us, it too comes from a greater and brighter

soul in the universe. Also, we see in our own case that when things

are amiss with the body, it is the intelligence, resident in the soul,

which re-establishes order by means of the medical art. So we

may reasonably hold that in the universe at large, the same holds

good. The order in it is due to intelligence (vovs), and intelligence

is only found in souls. So we may hold that there are superhuman

souls, and that it is their inteDigence which is the cause of cosmic

order (30^). And we may answer the question now before us by

saying that vovs (intelligence) belongs to the fourth of our classes,

the class of " the cause of the mixture " (300). a

1 Plato may be thinking, e,g. t of the " animal heat " of the organism and its

dependence on a proper supply of solar warmth, but more probably his

allusion is to the theory, adopted in the Republic and Timaeus, that the im-

mediate organ of vision is itself a ray of light issuing from the eye, and is

itself derived from the sun's light.

f I have given the general sense of the passage from 300 8 to 305 3 without

going into the question of precise reading and interpretation of particular

phrases. I think Plato clearly means to identify vovs with the " cause of the

mixture." This is not inconsistent with his view that the good for man is not

THE PHILEBUS 417

There has been a great deal of discussion on the point of the

place to be assigned to the forms, as we know them from earlier

dialogues, in the classification of the Philebus. 1 No one has imagined

that they could be reckoned as examples of the aTmoov, but different

scholars have placed them in each of the other three classes. I do

not propose to spend much time on the problem, since it seems plain

that the fourfold classification has been devised with a view to a

problem where the forms are not specially relevant, and the true

solution is thus that they find no place in this classification. We

must not look for them in the class of the "cause," since cause

has been explicitly equated with agent, and it is quite certain that

the forms of the Phaedo and Republic are not agents. (At least,

we could only ascribe agency to the " Form of Good," and that,

as Socrates' difficulty in speaking of it shows, holds a unique place

in the scheme.) Limit, again, has been defined in a way which

shows that it means specifically mathematical ratio. Hence,

though, in a way, the forms may be said, as defining and deter-

mining the character of the sensibles which "partake" them, to

function as " limits," they must not be identified with the Wpas of

this dialogue. Again, though this is a matter which must not be

discussed until we reach our final chapter, it is plain from Aristotle's

allusions 2 that, according to the doctrine taught in the Academy

as early as 367-6, the forms, " man," " animal," and the rest

actually contain two factors, a " great-and-small " and a limiting

factor, " the one " or " unit." So far they resemble the " mixed

class " of our dialogue, and Professor H. Jackson did right to call

attention to this. But all the examples of the " mixed " class in

the Philebus are taken from the world of " events," and the forms

clearly are not " mixtures " of that kind. Not to dwell on the

further point that the 7re/>as of the Philebus stands for any definite

ratio, whereas the Trc/oas element in the forms, according to

Aristotle, was the " one," and the " one " in the Philebus is only

spoken of as equivalent to any genus regarded as a single whole.

It is clear that the line of thought which leads to the classification

in the Philebus brings us nearer to what Aristotle knew as the central

doctrine of Platonism than anything else in Plato's writings. But

it seems equally clear that Plato's final thought is not disclosed

even here. From his own language in Epistle vii. we may infer

that he never intended the reading of a written work to do more

than supply hints which might put a really original mind in the

position to discover his thought after a great deal of hard personal

thinking, and that he did not expect even as much as this apart

i/ous. It is clear from the Republic (5066) that the general question whether the

good can be knowledge or pleasure is older than the speculations of Speusippus

and Eudoxus. What is distinctive in the Philebus is the appeal to psychology

as relevant to the issue.

1 See Burnet, Greek Philosophy, Part L, 332 ; R. G. Bury, Philebus, pp.

Ixiv-lxxiv ; H. Jackson, Journal of Philology, x. 253 ff. ; Raeder, Platons

philosophische Entwickelung, 370 ff.

Cl. e.g., Aristot. Met. 9876 18-27

418 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

from the actual daily contact of the student's living mind with his

own. 1 Hence I shall defer anything I have to say about the central

mystery of the Platonic philosophy for consideration in a final

chapter. Provisionally, I will merely say what is quite obvious,

that, viewed in their relation to the things which " partake " of

them, the forms, as we have so far met with them, act as an element

of " limit " and determination, but that, as the recognition in the

Sophistes of a " communion " of forms, as such, with one another

shows, this is quite consistent with the view that a form which

functions as a " limit " should itself also be analysable into a

combination of an " unlimited " and a " limit."

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PLEASURE AND PAIN (31^-530). We have

seen to what class pleasure and pain themselves belong ; they are

ttTretpa. We must next consider " that in which they arise " (the

subject of them), and the 7ra0os, or state of things, which gives

rise to them, in other words, the actual conditions of their occur-

rence. To begin with pleasure. "That in which pleasure (or pain)

arises " is always a living creature, the creature which feels the

pleasure (or pain), and as such it belongs to the " class of the mix-

ture," since its organism is a complex of a plurality of ingredients

(310). The way in which they arise, the irdOrj which occasion them,

are that " when the attunement (that is, the proper balance between

the ingredients of the organism) in an animal is disturbed, pain is

felt, and when it is restored after disturbance, pleasure is felt."

Disturbance of organic equilibrium is attended by pain, restoration

of the equilibrium by pleasure feid-e). Thu^ when the body is

unduly heated or chilled, we have a Xvo-is T>}S <vVeo>s or disturbance

of the normal organic equilibrium, and it is painful ; the anti-

thetic process of recovering the normal temperature, which is a

return to the ovo-ta (the " natural state "), is pleasant. This defines

for us one kind or form (cTSos) of pleasure, namely, the agreeable

processes of return to the normal condition of the organism after

disturbance, or, as the defenders of the same type of theory in

modern times usually say, the process of recovery from organic

waste (2za-b)* Next, there is a second "form" or "kind" of

pleasure which depends on processes purely mental, and is not

attended by either disturbance or recovery of the balance in the

organism. A simple example is that the mental anticipation of a

painful disturbance of the organic balance is itself painful, the

expectation of the agreeable antithetic recovery from disturbance

is itself pleasant, and in these cases there is no actual accompanying

organic process, the pleasure and pain belong in a special way to

" the soul by herself " (320). These are the two distinct 1877 of

pleasure and pain it is necessary to begin by discriminating, if

1 Ep. vii. 340c-<?, 3410-*, 343^-344^.

1 Like Aristotle, Plato confines the waste-and-repair, or depletion-repletion

theory of pain and pleasure to the case of pains and pleasures connected with

the body and its needs. He does not regard it as applicable to pain and

pleasure generally. For a criticism of this type of theory, when extended to

all pains and pleasures, see Stout's A nalytic Psychology, ii. c. 12.

THE PHILEBUS 419

we are to judge soundly on the question whether all pleasures are

good.

Next, if there are antithetic processes of disturbance and

recovery of the organic balance, and these are respectively painful

and pleasant, there must also be an intermediate case, that in

which the balance is maintained without deflection in either direction,

and this, on our theory, must be neutral in respect of feeling- tone,

neither pleasant nor painful (32^). This would be the condition,

so far as feeling-tone is concerned, of the life of thought unmixed

with pleasure or pain already spoken of, and there is no impossibility

in the notion that there might be such a life, a life of permanent

maintenance of equilibrium. Very possibly it is the life appropriate

to a god (33&) and so the best of all. But we are discussing a

different matter, the part which thought and pleasant feeling

should play in the life of men like ourselves (for whom such an

existence without any rhythmic alternation is out of the question).

For our purposes, we must pursue the psychology of the second class

of pleasures and pains further. They are all dependent on memory

(since, of course, without memory we could have no anticipations),

and this makes it necessary to explain briefly what memory is and

what sensation itself is. We may say that some bodily processes

die away before they can reach the soul, but others penetrate to the

soul : the first we may call unconscious ; the second are conscious.

This enables us to define sensation as a movement (KH/T/O-IS) which

affects the body and soul together (KOU/T?, 340). Memory (i.e.

primary memory) is the retention (o-wnjpia) of sensation as thus

defined (ibid.) ; and, finally, recollection (dva/xvT/o-is) is the recovery

(reproduction) by the soul " by herself " of a lost memory or

sensation (346-0). These considerations will make it clearer what

we mean by a " purely mental " pleasure, and also throw light on the

nature of desire (ImOvfila, 340). To understand what desire is,

we may consider it in its simplest form, such as hunger or thirst.

A thirsty man desires, or lusts after drink. To speak more pre-

cisely, the thirsty man is in a state of depletion, his organism has

been depleted of its normal supply of liquid, What he really

desires is not simply " drink," but to be " filled up " with the liquid

he will drink. (He desires not the water, but the drinking of it.)

Thus he actually is in one state (a state of depletion), but desires

the antithetic state (the corresponding repletion). To desire to

drink the thirsty man must " apprehend " (c<a7rre<r0cu) repletion.

He does not " apprehend " it with his body. That is just what is

undergoing the unnatural depletion, and it cannot be passing

through two antithetic processes at once. Thus it must be with

his soul that he " apprehends " the repletion he lusts after. The

importance of the example is that it shows that (in spite of popular

language), there is really no such state as a " bodily " desire or

lust. All desiring is a state of soul (35c), since desire is endeavour

towards the opposite of the present state of the organism, and it

is in virtue of memory that this " opposite " is apprehended,

420 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

These considerations show that all impulse and desire belong to the

soul.

They also suggest an important problem. When a man is

actually in a state of pain due to organic " depletion, 1 ' but re-

members and thinks of the pleasant experiences which would

remove the depletion, can we say that his condition is either purely

painful or wholly pleasant ? If he despaired of ever realizing the

anticipation of " filling up/' no doubt, he would be doubly wretched,

but suppose he is feeling the painful depletion but expecting the

repletion (like a really hungry man who expects to be fed) ? The

anticipation that his want will be removed is pleasant, but the felt

want must surely be painful, and thus it appears that we must say

that, in the case assumed, the experience is a mixed one, pleasurable

and painful at once (366).

(The conception of " mixed " states which are half pleasant,

half painful, is so characteristic of Plato and so important in itself

that it cannot be passed over without some comment. Hedonists

naturally refuse to accept it, since it is quite inconsistent with the

treatment of pain as equivalent to subtraction of pleasure which lies

at the root of the Hedonic calculus. They have, accordingly, to

explain the facts to which Plato appeals in one or other of two

ways. They have to hold that the total feeling-tone of any moment

of life is either simply pleasant or simply painful. It is then open

to them either to interpret the facts about still unsatisfied craving

by holding that the experience is one of rapid alternation between

pleasure and pain, or by holding that it is, according to circumstances,

one of a low degree of pleasure, or one of pain, though of a moderate

degree of pain. Neither view seems to me to be in accord with fact.

When I am genuinely and acutely thirsty, e.g. in the course of a

long tramp in hot weather, but confidently anticipating arrival at

a place of refreshment in an hour's time, it is not the fact that I

oscillate rapidly between pure misery and pure delight according

as my attention is directed to my present condition or to the con-

dition I anticipate ; nor yet is it true that I am continuously feeling

a qualified pleasure or a qualified pain. I certainly feel the tension

between the pleasant anticipation and the actual pang of thirst in

a single pulse of experience. And there is no real difficulty in

understanding why this is so, if we remember that the physical

correlate of my mental condition is made up of a great complex of

neural excitations. No one of the constituent neural excitations

can have two antithetic senses at once, but the complex may perfectly

well contain elements with opposite senses. Hence it seems to

me that Plato's doctrine of " mixed states," which coincides with

the standing thought of great poets about the " unrest which men

miscall delight," is strictly true to the facts of common experience,

and that the criticisms levelled against it are all based on false

simplification of the facts.)

TRUE AND FALSE PLEASURE (360-536). We have thus dis-

tinguished two " kinds " of pleasures : (a) those directly due to ao

THE PHILEBUS 421

actual organic process of recovery of equilibrium or repair of waste ;

(b) those dependent on mental anticipation, where no such actual

organic process is taking place. The recognition of this second

class at once suggests a further question of first-rate ethical im-

portance : Can we admit of a second and different distinction of

pleasures (and pains) as true and false, real and merely apparent ?

(360). In other words, when we come to the valuation of pleasures

as ingredients in the good for man, must we make any deduction

for the " illusoriness " of some of them ? This is the vital dis-

tinction for the Platonic ethics ; it is to lead up to and justify it

that the whole psychological discussion has been introduced.

Protarchus denies the validity of the distinction. Beliefs or judg-

ments can be true or false, but not feelings (36^). Hedonists, like

Grote, have naturally taken his side and argued that Socrates is

merely in the wrong in making the distinction. For, it is argued,

a pleasure or a pain is exactly what it is felt to be ; its esse is simply

the fact of its being felt. If I feel pleased or pained, I am having

pleasure or pain ; if I feel greatly pleased, I am having a great

pleasure ; the pleasure always exists when it is felt, and it is

always just as great as it is felt to be. This reasoning, however,

is irrelevant to Socrates' contention. He is not asking whether I

am pleased when I feel pleased, or greatly pleased when I feel greatly

pleased; he is asking whether I am always pleased when I think

I am pleased, or intensely pleased when I think I am intensely

pleased, and this is a perfectly reasonable question, and, as he

says, one which needs careful examination. To put it simply,

the issue is this : Is the excitement in an exciting experience a

true measure of its pleasantness ? l May not the excitingness of

an experience lead to an over-estimate of its pleasantness? To

answer this question, we need to make a considerable apparent

digression.

There is such a process as judging, and such a process as feeling

pleased. When we judge, we make a judgment about something,

and when we feel pleased, we are pleased with something.^ And a

judgment does not cease to be an actual judgment because it is

false ; similarly a false feeling of pleasure would still be an actual

feeling of pleasure (376). (This last remark, of itself, shows that

Plato has no intention of denying that a " false " pleasure is a

pleasure ; it is its worth, not its actuality, which is in question.)

The question is whether pleasure and pain, like judgment, permit

of the qualifications true and false. They certainly permit of some

qualifications, such as "great/ 1 "small/* "intense"; and Protarchus

1 The question is vital, since the " intensity " regarded by all Hedonists

as a dimension of pleasure or pain is primarily a character of the situation by

which we are pleased or pained. We can only measure the intensity of the

pleasantness or painfulness by measuring the intensity of an objective feature

of the situation, and this makes it all-important to know whether such

a measurement can be implicitly trusted. For example, the satisfaction of

the impulses of sex is normally an intense organic excitement, but is its

pleasantness equally intense ?

422 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

allows that they may permit of the further qualification " bad."

But he denies that a pleasure can be said, like a judgment, to be

" erroneous " or false (372) ; if, as often happens, a false belief

yields us pleasure, the falsity belongs to the belief, not to the

pleasure.

Let us look at the facts. Pleasure and pain sometimes accom-

pany true beliefs or judgments, sometimes false. Now these beliefs

may be regarded as answers given by the soul to questions which

she has put to herself ; sometimes the answer is right, sometimes

it is wrong. We have, so to say, a scribe and a painter within our

souls. The interpretation of present sensation by the aid of

memory involved in all perception is the work of the scribe writing

" discourses " in the soul ; the painter (imagination) designs

illustrations (el/coves) to the scribe's text (39#-c), and his pictures

may be called true or false " imaginings " according to the truth or

falsity of the " discourse " they illustrate. These discourses and

pictures concern the future as well as the present or the past ; we

are all through life full of " fancies " (e'XTrffie?) about the future, and

when we anticipate pleasure or pain to come, we take an " antici-

patory " pleasure or pain, which has already been classed as strictly

" mental " in entertaining such expectations (39^-0). This is

true of good and bad men alike, but, since the good are " dear to

God," their pleasant anticipations are commonly fulfilled, those of

the bad are not (400-6) . (The good man gets pleasure in anticipating

sequences which are in accord with the order God maintains in the

world ; the bad man gets his pleasure from day-dreams of sudden

enrichment and other events which do not come about in the

''world as God made it.") Thus the bad man's pleasure in his

anticipations is as actual as the good man's, but the good man, as a

rule, gets the pleasure which he anticipates, the bad man does not.

This affords one sense in which the bad man may be said to have

false, or unreal, pleasures ; he derives present pleasure from antici-

pations which will not be realized, and this pleasure may rightly be

said to be deceptive, a caricature of true pleasure, and the same

argument will apply to pains due to anticipation (4oc) as well as

to emotions fear, anger, and the like generally (400) . Like beliefs,

all these states may have a foundation in reality or may have none.

Now the goodness of a belief lies in its truth, and its badness in its

falsity ; only true beliefs are good, and only false beliefs are bad.

(For, of course, the raison d'etre of a belief is that it should be true ;

that is what every belief aims at being.) May we not say then

that the badness of bad pleasures Protarchus has allowed that

there are such states is simply falsity and nothing else? a bad

pleasure means a " false " or " deceptive " pleasure.

} Protarchus is unconvinced. There may be " wicked " (wovypaC)

pleasures or pains, but pleasures and pains are not made wicked

by being " false." We will, however, reserve the consideration

of wicked or sinful pleasures for a moment, and call attention to

a second sense in which it might be possible to speak of many

THE PHILEBUS 428

pleasures as " false " (410-6). Consider once more the case already

mentioned of unsatisfied appetite, where the soul is craving for

the removal of a state of painful organic want now present in the

body. In this case we simultaneously apprehend the present pain-

ful want and the pleasant anticipated reaction against it. " The

body supplies us with a certain feeling, and the soul desires the

opposite condition " (410). And both pleasure and pain admit of

" the more and the less." Hence the problem constantly arises

how to estimate the painfulness of the present state against the

pleasurableness of the desired " opposite condition " (or, again,

the pleasureableness of the present state against the painfulness of

the " opposite "). In making such estimates we are always liable

to errors of perspective ; the anticipated " opposite " is over-

estimated by contrast. We expect the coming pleasure to be

greater than it will really prove to be, by contrast with the

present pain, and an expected pain is over-estimated in the same

way by contrast with present pleasure (410-420). There is thus

an element of illusion in all such cases, which must be allowed for

before our estimate of anticipated pleasure or pain can be admitted

as correct.

The illusion is still more marked in other cases. As we said

before, disturbance of the organic balance is painful, restoration

of the balance is pleasant. But suppose the organism is undergoing

neither process. It is true that many of the wise deny that this

case actually occurs ; they say that " everything is always flowing

either up or down/ 1 or, in Leibniz's phrase, that the " pendulum

never is at rest." But they must concede at least that we are

not always conscious of its oscillations. Small oscillations either

way are ''infinitesimal." It is only considerable oscillations which

are attended by pleasure and pain (430). Thus we have to admit

the possibility of a life which is neither pleasant nor painful, but

just painless. There are persons who actually say that this painless

life is the " most pleasant " of all (440). But this statement cannot

be strictly true. To feel no pain is manifestly not the same thing

as to feel pleasure, though this is the thesis of the real " enemies of

Philebus," the downright anti-Hedonists. These anti-Hedonists

are eminent scientific persons, who maintain that there really is

no such thing as a pleasure and that the experience Philebus and

his friends call pleasure is merely " relief from pain " (440). l

Though we cannot accept this doctrine, which is really due to the

scorn of fastidious souls for vulgar pleasures, it will yield us a useful

hint towards the discovery of the kind of pleasures which deserve

to be called " true " (44^). Their thought is this. If we want to

1 Phileb, 446 9, /cai /tdXa Seipofo \eyontvovs ret Trepl <j>vffu>. The words are

enough to prove that neither Antisthenes nor Diogenes is meant. They could

not be called deivol wepl <j>ij<riv. But the phrase exactly fits the anti-Hedonists

of the Academy Speusippus, Xenocrates, and their followers. The reference

is probably rather to their views about forms and numbers, discussed in

Aristotle's Metaphysics, than to such things as the works of Speusippus on

zoological classification. It is meant that they are ftaXemirof.

424 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

understand any "form" or quality, we do well to study it in its

extreme and most marked manifestations. So, if we want to know

what pleasure really is, we ought to start by considering the most

vehement and violent pleasures. But these this is given as the

reasoning of the anti-Hedonists are the pleasures connected with

the body (450). Now such pleasures are found in their most

exciting degree not in health, but in disease. The delight of

refreshing thirst with a cool draught, for example, is much more

intense when one is suffering the heat of a raging fever than at

another time, because the preceding want (IvScta) or craving is so

much more violent. We are not arguing, of course, that pleasures

are more numerous in disease than in health ; our point is that they

are more violent and exciting (450). And so the life of " sin "

(u/fyts) is marked by violent and exciting pleasures which make a

man " beside himself " ; the life of virtue by moderate pleasures,

regulated by the rule of " nothing too much " (45^-0). The most

exciting and violent pleasures, as well as the most violent pains, are

to be found in the diseased or bad body or soul.

Now let us consider one or two examples of these exciting experi-

ences. A man who has an itching spot on his body gets great enjoy-

ment from scratching or chafing it ; but, of course, he is only stimu-

lated to do so by the irritation of the itching. This is typical of a

host of experiences which language calls " bitter-sweet." They

depend on a tension between antithetic processes ; these processes

may be both bodily, or one may be bodily and the other purely

mental, or both may be mental. In all cases the violently exciting

character of the experience depends on the tension. There must

be a highly painful factor in order that the rebound may be intensely

pleasant (466-0). (Thus the difference between this case and that

of the " illusions of perspective " already mentioned is that the

element of contrast and antithetical tension is now an ingredient

in the actual concrete single experience.) The point, then, is

that in such a " mixed " experience, there may be an exact balance

of pleasurable and painful ingredients, so that, exciting as it is,

its " net pleasure value " would be nil, of pleasure may predominate,

or pain may predominate. But in no case is the " pleasure value "

simply measured by the intensity of the excitement, and the

" ticklish " person, for example, who gets so excited when he is

tickled that he says he is " dying with pleasure/' is not really

getting anything like the " quantity of pleasure " he supposes.

For the intensity of the excitement is due to the simultaneous con-

trast between the fully stimulated region of the skin and a neigh-

bouring region which is uneasily aching for similar stimulation,

46^-47^). Here is a plain case where a man's own estimate of the

pleasure he is getting is erroneous. The cases of tension already

mentioned, where the antithesis is between the actual condition of

the body and a mentally anticipated " opposite " condition, may,

of course, give rise to the same " mixture " of pleasure with pain

and the same errors in estimation (470).

THE PHILEBUS 425

There is still a third case where both factors in the tension belong

to the soul. There are a whole range of painfully toned emotions-

anger, fear, malice, and others and we know, and the poets con-

stantly tell us that, though they are painfully toned, to give them

full expression may be pleasant. To let yourself go, when you

are angry, Homer says, is sweeter than honey (tfd-e), and it is

possible to revel in lamentation. So people in the theatre enjoy

a sensational tragedy which sets them crying for the distresses of

the hero (480). Our feelings, when we see a comedy, are a still

subtler example of a " mixed" state, half painful, half pleasant.

This leads Plato to indulge in an acute psychological analysis of

the emotion aroused by comedy. We have just spoken of <t>66vos

(malice) as an unpleasantly toned emotion, and yet by malice we

mean " being pleased by the misfortunes of our neighbour" (486).

Now ignorance and folly are certainly misfortunes. But what is it

which amuses us in a " comic situation " ? A certain kind of

badness (Trovrjpta) in the comic character, namely, want of " self-

knowledge." (It is the discrepancy between his real character or

situation and his own estimate of them which makes him " comic.")

" Ignorance of self " may be : (i) ignorance of one's financial

position, as when a man fancies himself richer than he is ; (2) ignor-

ance of one's physical defects, as when a man has an empty conceit

of his beauty or strength ; (3) ignorance of the state of one's soul,

especially a false conceit of one's own wisdom (490). All these

states are bad, but we may make a distinction. They may be

accompanied with feebleness or they may not. In the former case

a man's vain conceit of self does not lead to any serious harm to

anyone, and is merely " funny " ; in the latter it is not funny, but

dangerous. It is the " harmless self-conceit " of the hero which

we find comic and laugh at (49^-0).

Now to explain why the feeling this spectacle rouses in the

audience is "mixed." It might seem that it is wrong to enjoy

the misfortunes of our friends ; yet we do find self-conceit in per-

sons we like " funny," when, as has just been explained, it is quite

harmless. (The connexion with comedy, I take it, is that, if we

are to enjoy a comedy, we must feel that we " like " the person

who is being exposed, for all his failings. If we could not find him

likeable, the comedy would cease to be comic, as Tartuffe does,

for the simple reason that we detest Tartuffe seriously.) Thus

our sense of the " comic " is a kind of malice (<0oVos), and this is, in

its nature, a painful emotion ; yet our laughter shows that we are

enjoying the experience, which must therefore be a " mixed " one

(490-500). (The observation appears true and subtle ; when, for

example, we see Malvolio on the stage, there is an element of the

painful in our mirth. It is, in a way, humiliating to see another

man " make such a fool of himself." If the absurdity were carried

a little further, or the exhibition of it a little more prolonged, the

painful would distinctly predominate. Even as it is, we can detect

its presence by a careful examination of our feelings.) Now this

426 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

is true also of the " tragedy and comedy " of actual life ; the situa-

tions of real life are constantly provoking emotional reactions in

which the painful and the pleasing are blended, no less than the

situations in a stage-play. We may take it as certain then that the

fusing of the pleasant and the painful in a single experience occurs

where the sources of both factors lie in the soul, no less than where

the source of one or both is in the body ($ob-e).

We may now consider the question what experiences are purely

pleasant without any admixture of painfulness. On our general

theory of the connexion of feeling-tone with organic process, we can

see at once that in any case where a "subliminal " or unconscious

process of " depletion " is followed by a conscious process of " re-

pletion," there will be an experience which is wholly pleasant.

This may explain the case of the pure aesthetic pleasure we get

from the contemplation of pattern (^xn^ra) , colour (xpw/Aara), tone

(<0oyyot), and the great majority of odours (^la-b). 1 These

pleasures are not preceded by a painful sense of craving, like those

of the satisfaction of hunger or thirst, and do not owe any part of

their apparent intensity to contrast ; they are " pure/' in the sense

of being pleasant through and through, without any admixture of

painfulness. We may suppose that they correspond to processes

of organic repletion after depletion, but that the depletion has been

insensible. 2 We must note, however, that we are not referring

here to pleasure got by seeing " patterns " which are likenesses of

animals or the like, where the pleasure arises from our perception

of the resemblance of the copy to the original, but strictly to the

pleasure we take in geometrical form as such, and the same remark

applies to the pleasantness of colours and sounds, and still more to

odours (5ic-d). 3

Again the " intellectual pleasure " which we get from the

" sciences " (/xa^i//x,aTa) is of this " unmixed " kind. There is

no felt pain antecedent to it ; merely not to possess geometrical

knowledge, for example, is not painful as hunger is painful ; and

again, the process of forgetting something we have learned is not

attended by pain. Of course it may be disagreeable to find that we

have forgotten something which it would now be advantageous to

know, but the process of forgetting itself is not painful, as the

process of growing hungry again, after we have eaten, is (520-6) .

1 He says " most " odours, of course, to exclude the case of those, e.g., of

articles of food, or those which indicate to the male animal the proximity of

a female. The pleasantness of these would depend on a previous sense of un-

satisfied want.

2 Timaeus expressly teaches that this is the case (Tim. 640-656).

3 1 do not take this to mean that Plato regards the pleasure we get from

seeing the " faithfulness " of a picture to its original as aesthetically illegitimate.

His purpose is simply to exclude from the list of unmixed pleasures any which

depend on a previous sense of want for their existence or their intensity. Thus

the degree of pleasure got from contemplating a " nude " clearly may be

affected by unsatisfied sexual desire in the beholder ; the pleasure with which

we hear the sound of a beloved voice will often depend for its intensity on a pre-

existing longing to hear that voice again.

THE PHILEBUS 427

By comparison of these now discriminated types of pleasures,

we can see that the " mixed " type, which depend on antecedent

painful craving, are marked by violence and " want of measure,"

and exhibit the fluctuations of the " more and less " ; the " un-

mixed " type, on the other hand, exhibit " restriction by measure,"

are " moderate in intensity " (52^). But we may make a further

distinction between the two types. They differ in " truth " or

" genuineness " (dA.r;0ia). Just as a small expanse of white

colour, for example, if it is a pure white, with no admixture, is

more truly white than a vast expanse which is not equally pure, so

even a " small " pleasure which is pleasure through and through, is

more truly pleasure, deserves that name better, than a " big "

pleasure which is mixed throughout with its opposite, pain (52^-530).

I.e. the highly exciting experiences which are commonly reckoned

the " greatest pleasures/ 1 since their exciting character actually

depends on tension and contrast with a painful factor equally

indispensable to the effect, are not the " truest to type." It is

the " moderate " pleasures, preceded by no painful craving and

independent of internal tension, which are pleasant through and

through, and thus deserve the name of pleasures most completely.

It is in this sense that Plato speaks of this class as " true," of the

others as " false " or " deceptive " pleasures. The first are what

they are taken to be ; the others are, to a large extent, something

different from what men take them to be.

THE METAPHYSICS OF PLEASURE. Can it be an End ? (53^-550).

We may remind ourselves of a second doctrine of the " wits "

(KO/A^OI), which we shall find suggestive. They say that pleasure

is always a "process of becoming" (yeWts) ; that it has no stable

and determinate being (ovo-ta, 530). That is, the theory is that

pleasure is an accompaniment of transitions, incompleted develop-

ments. It is felt while the development is going on, but falls

away when the definite and permanent goal of the "evolution" is

reached. We must not be misled into identifying the " wits " of

this passage with the third-century Cyrenaics who called pleasure

a " gentle motion," nor have we any right to ascribe their doctrine

by anticipation to the elder Aristippus. We meet it again in

Aristotle's Ethics, where one of the string of arguments against the

goodness of pleasure, all taken from recognizable passages in Plato,

is said (11526 13) to be that "every pleasure is a sensible transition

(or development) into a natural condition " (yeWts cis <vW

ala-OrjTrj) , an obvious allusion to the section of the Philebus we are

now considering. We may take this as an indication that the

Kofj^l/oi to whom the doctrine is due are the anti-Hedonist party in

the Academy, a view which, as we shall see, is borne out by the

language of Aristotle in dismissing their doctrine. The thought

arises by a natural, though illegitimate, extension of the depletion-

repletion formula to cover all cases of pleasures. On this theory,

the good, healthy, or normal state is, of course, that of balance or

equilibrium ; pain and pleasure are both felt only when there is a

428 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

departure from this ideal condition pain while the process of

depletion is going on, pleasure while that of repletion, restoration

of the balance, is happening. The natural end or goal of this

" repletion " is the establishment of an equilibrium, and the best

that could befall a man is that the equilibrium, once restored, should

be permanent. But, on this theory, pleasure is only felt during the

" filling-up " by which we approach this best condition. When we

have reached it and are steadily persisting in it, there is no longer

any process of " filling-up/' and consequently no pleasure. Pleasure

attends our progress to the " good/' but not our fruition of it ;

that will be the " neutral condition," painless but not pleasurable.

This is what is meant by the view that pleasure is always " becom-

ing," never is " being."

We can now express this thought in a general formula. The

end or goal is always of more worth and dignity than the means or

road to it. The means is " for the sake of " the end, not the end

for the sake of the means. And a process which culminates in the

establishment of a permanent condition is to that condition as

means to end. Thus the processes of shipbuilding and all the

appliances and raw material they employ are " for the sake of "

what comes out of them, the vessel. (E.g. the naval architect's skill,

his implements, the timbers of which he makes the vessel, all of

them only have worth because the vessel itself has worth in this

case, an " economic " worth (540). x ) If pleasure is a " becoming,"

then it must be relative to an end in which it culminates, must be

the coming-to-be of something. That something will be in the

fjioipa. or category of the good, i.e. will have " intrinsic value."

But 'the end and the process by which it is reached are never in the

same category, and therefore, on the hypothesis, pleasure will not

be a good. The " wits " from whom we have borrowed this sug-

gestion will therefore think it ridiculous to say that life is not worth

having without pleasure. This would amount to saying that life

is worth having when it is an alternation of aspiring after a good we

have not yet attained and losing one we have attained, but not

when it is the fruition of present good (54^-55^).

We note that Socrates is not made to accept the doctrine that

pleasure is only felt in the transition from an " unnatural " to the

" normal state " as his own. He clearly does not accept it without

reserve (as Spinoza does in his definitions of laetitia and tristitia,

Ethics, iii. Appendix, def. 2, 3). He cannot do so because he holds,

as we shall see, that some pleasures, the " pure " or " unmixed "

class, are themselves good, whereas the theory under criticism, as he

is careful to point out, compels us to hold that no pleasure is good,

since no pleasure, according to it, can be an end. The criticism

of Aristotle on the theory is based on the same conviction of the

1 The (pdpimxa of 54^ i are, of course, the paints employed for coating the

sides of the vessel, etc. So the ti\r) mentioned along with the " tools " does

not mean " raw material " in general, but the " timber " from which the

planks gf the ship are made.

THE PHILEBUS 429

goodness of these unmixed pleasures, and is one of the most valuable

things in the Ethics. As he points out, even the pleasures of " re-

pletion " cannot be proved not to be good, or even the good, by

this line of reasoning. For what gives rise to the feeling of pleasure

which accompanies return to the " normal state " after disturb-

ance, is not the process of return itself, but the successful reassertion

of the activities of the organism which were not affected by the

disturbance. The " filling-up " only gives rise to the pleasure

accidentally because it is attended with removal of an inhibition.

The thought is that the feeling-tone of normal organic life is itself

pleasant. A disturbance of the " balance " partially inhibits

function. Recovery from the inhibition is pleasant because it is

the successful reassertion of a normal activity which has persisted,

though under inhibition, all through the antecedent " depletion."

Hence we need to correct the proposed definition of pleasure as

" sensible transition to a natural state " into " unimpeded exercise

of a natural activity." The pleasure-giving process is not a

" coming-to-be " (yc'vco-is) but the discharge in act (cpc/Dycta) of

an already developed function. 1 The insistence on the difference

between the two kinds of process, "coming-to-be " and " activity/'

is a correction of first-rate importance in the Academic terminology.

We need not suppose that Aristotle is correcting Plato's views

about the worth of pleasures, which, in fact, agree with his own.

It is Speusippus and Xenocrates, not Plato, whose anti-Hedonism

he is criticizing, though he rightly notes that the want of a word

like his own cvepyeia makes it easy for the Academic to employ this

unconvincing argument against the goodness of pleasures.

We may add the further consideration that it is a paradox to

hold that all goods are mental, that pleasant feeling is the only

mental good, and, by consequence, that, e.g., beauty and strength,

valour, temperance, intelligence, have no inherent value, and that a

man's intrinsic worth depends on the question how much pleasure

he is feeling (55&). This, we see, is a valid argument against the

Hedonist, independently of the worth of the contention that all

pleasure is a ycvco-i?.

THE INTELLECTUAL VALUES (55^-59^). We have seen that

there are two types of pleasures, the "pure" and the "mixed,"

and we shall expect to find that they have different values for

human life. We must now consider intellectual activities and their

worth in the same way. As with pleasures, so with forms of know-

ledge, we have to discover which are " truest to type," most fully

deserving to be called knowledge. We may begin by dividing

" knowledges " or " sciences " into those which have to do with

making things, the " industrial " arts (xctpoTc^viKat eVicrriJ/Luu), and

those which are wpl iratSctav KCU rpo^v, have to do with the cultiva-

tion of the soul itself, the " cultural " arts and sciences. (This

is, in effect, the Aristotelian distinction between " theory " and

"practice.") We may begin by considering the "industrial,"

1 E.N. 11531 7-14

430 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

manual, or operative arts themselves, and ask whether some of them

do not contain more, others less, of genuine knowledge, so that we

can introduce again the distinction between " purer " and " more

mixed " forms of knowledge. We see at once that if we eliminated

from the industrial arts all that they derive from the exact know-

ledge of number, measure, weight, very little which we can call

knowledge would be left. What these arts contain beyond the

application of number, weight, and measure is little more than

empirical guess-work. We see the presence of this empirical factor

in such callings as those of the musician (who has largely to depend

on his "ear"), the practising physician, the soldier; we might

fairly say that there is more genuine science in the builder's business

than in any of these professions, because he is so much more con-

cerned with the exact processes of measuring, so dependent at every

point on his implements of precision, plumb-line, compass, and the

rest. So we will divide these crafts into a more exact and scientific

class of which building is the type, and a less exact, of which music

is typical (55c~56c). (The notion of " exact " science seems to be

definitely formulated here for the first time in literature ; the

thought is that of Kant, that every branch of knowledge contains

just as much science as it contains mathematics.)

Again, if we consider the " exact " sciences themselves, we

have to make a similar distinction. There are two " arithmetics " :

that of the "many," and the much more scientific arithmetic of

the " philosopher." The former operates with " concrete " and

very unequal units, such as one man, one army, one ox, and dis-

regards the fact that the men, oxen, armies, counted may be un-

equal ; the other operates with units which are absolutely and

in every way equal in fact, with numbers, not with numbered

things. So there are two forms of " mensuration " : the loose

measurement of the architect or the retail trader, and the accurate

measurement of the geometer and calculator. 1 Thus one " know-

ledge," no less than one pleasure, may be " purer," truer to type,

than another. The " exact " forms of knowledge which are con-

cerned with number, measure, weight, are much more exact and

" truer " than all others, and the " philosopher's " or " theorist's "

arithmetic and geometry are much more exact and true than those

of the mechanician or engineer (56^-57^). And we cannot, without

blushing, deny that dialectic, whose business it is to study the

absolutely real and the eternal, must insist on a still more rigid

standard of exactness and truth than any other kind of knowledge.

It must be still more intolerant of mere approximation than any

other science. Gorgias, to be sure, used to claim the first place

among the sciences for rhetoric, on the ground that it can secure

1 The simple man who undertook to settle the value of T by fitting a

string round a disc, unrolling it, and measuring it with a measuring-stick was

confusing the " tradesman's " mensuration, which is always rough approxima-

tion, with the geometer's, which must be accurate within a known and very

precise " standard of approximation."

THE PHILEBUS 481

the voluntary services of the professionals of all the rest. We

need not quarrel with him about this. Our question is not what

" art " has the highest prestige or the greatest utility- value, but

simply which sets up the most severe standard of truth and

accuracy, and there can be no doubt about the claims of dialectic

in this particular. Most of the " arts " are content to build on

8oat, contested beliefs, and even the cosmologists confine their

attention to " actual fact/' what " happens " ; absolutely exact

knowledge of actual fact is never to be had ; there is always an

element of the incalculable and contingent about it. The know-

ledge which is through and through knowledge must therefore be

" abstract " ; that is the price it pays for its exactness. It must

be concerned with the non-temporal (57^-59^).

THE FORMAL STRUCTURE OF THE GOOD LIFE (590-66^). The

best life for men, we saw, must be a blend of two constituents

intelligent activity and pleasant feeling. We have now examined

each genus of the two apart, and distinguished in each a variety

which is truer, and one which is less true, to type. We have now

to consider on what principle the two ingredients should be blended.

What will be the formula which appears as the Trcpas in this

" mixture " ? Our task is like that of the man who mixes the

ingredients of a sweet drink ; pleasure is the honey for our mixture,

intelligent thought the water ; the problem is to mingle them in

just the right proportion (6ic). It would be rash to assume that

we shall succeed in doing this by simply blending every form of

pleasure with every form of " thought " ; we need to proceed more

cautiously. It will be prudent to begin by considering first those

pleasures and those forms of knowledge which we have found to be

most genuine, most true to type (aX-rjOia-rara) ; if we find that the

blend does not completely satisfy our original condition that the

11 good " must be " sufficient/' all a man's life requires, we can then

consider admitting the inferior pleasures and arts into the mixture

(610). There can be no dispute about stipulating that the good is

to include all knowledge of the " truer " type, the exact knowledge

of the timeless things ; we shall certainly require for the best life

a knowledge of " righteousness itself " and the intelligence to use

the knowledge, and the same considerations will apply to all such

knowledge of the " absolute/' But will this be enough for the

purposes of life ? If a man is to live a life among men, he must have

some at least of the inferior knowledge which is inexact. A man

who knew only the " absolute " and exact lines and circles of the

geometer, but knew nothing of the rough approximations to them

with which life presents us, would not even know how to find his

way home. (As we might say, a chemical balance is a beautiful

thing, but it won't do to weigh your butter and cheese in.) So the

intervals we make on our musical instruments are only approxima-

tions, they are not " true " ; but a man must be conversant with

them, as well as with the mathematical theory of harmonics, unless

he is to go through life with none but the " unheard " melodies for

432 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

his companions. In fact, we may reasonably let in the whole crowd

of second-class knowledges; some of them we really need if we

are to live as men among men, and none of them will do us any harm,

if we have the superior knowledge too, and so are not in danger

of mistaking the rough approximation for something better (62a-d).

Thus we have let all the " water " go into the bowl in which

the draught of " happiness " is to be brewed. We must now con-

sider what we are to do with the "honey." Here, again, it will be

safer to consider the ''unmixed " pleasures first and the " mixed,"

which, as we have seen, are not wholly true to type, afterwards.

It is clear that we shall not be able to let in all this second class

without reflection. If there are any of them which are " unavoid-

able " (dvayicauu, sc. such as arise directly from the functions of

sound and healthy life themselves), they must, of course, be ad-

mitted. But whether we can admit all the rest depends on the

question whether all pleasures, like all knowledges, are profitable,

or, at worst, harmless (630). To decide this question we may ask

the pleasures themselves whether they would prefer to keep house

with all wisdom and knowledge, or by themselves. We may be

sure (since we have seen that the best life is the " mixed " one) that

the pleasures would reply that it is not good to live alone, and that

the best companion with whom to keep house would be " knowledge

of all things and in especial of ourselves " (630).

Now we put the same question to the various knowledges.

" Do you need the company of pleasure ? " "In particular, do you

need, over and above our class of true pleasures, the company of

the intense and violent pleasures ? " Knowledge would say that,

so far from desiring these exciting pleasures, she finds them a

perpetual hindrance ; they vex the souls in which she has taken

up her abode with mad frenzies, and destroy her offspring by pro-

ducing forge tfulness and neglect. She would claim kinship with

Socrates' class of "true" and "unmixed" pleasures; of the rest

those which are "mixed" satisfactions she would accept such as

accompany health and a sober mind and any form of goodness,

but reject those of " folly and badness " in general, as obviously

unfit to find a place in such a " blend " as we are contemplating

(63^-640). x There is only one further ingredient for which we must

stipulate dA^eia, "truth," "reality," "genuineness." If this is

left out, the result of the blending itself wfll not be real or genuine.

(The bearing of this remark is a little obscure, but it is probably

meant to lead up to the next stage of the argument, the considera-

tion of the relative importance to be laid on the different constituents

cf the " mixed life " for man and the assigning of the first place in

it to its rational structure, the last, to the " harmless " pleasures.)

We have now tracked down the good, so to say, to its very

1 Thus a place would be found in the " good for man " for all the pleasure

which attends the healthy and morally virtuous satisfactions of bodily

appetite." It is not expected that the best man shall not enjoy his dinner

when he is hungry. But dinners are not things he cares supremely about.

THE PHILEBUS 483

doors. It only remains to discriminate the relative values of its

various ingredients and so to answer the question we have been

considering so long, whether intelligence or pleasure is more akin

to the principle or cause which makes the good life so satisfactory

to us all (640). We may say at once that what makes any mixture

or blend a good one is measure and proportion (pfrpov, y TOV

0-vp.fjitTpov <ixm). Neglect of the rule of due proportion makes a

" mixture " unstable and vitiates the components. Where the

rule is neglected, you get not a genuine " mixture " but a mere

" mess.' 1 The good is thus a form of the beautiful (icaXdV), for

measure and proportion are the secret of all beauty (6^c-e). We

may thus take measure or proportion (o-u/^cTpia), beauty, and truth

(or reality, dX??0ia) as three " forms" (iSeat) or "notes' 1 found in

the good and say that the goodness of our " mixture " is due to the

presence of this trinity in unity (650). Our business is now to

confront first intelligence and then pleasure successively with these

three distinguishable but inseparable notes of the good. Let us

begin with the note of dXr;0aa (truth, genuineness). Pleasure is the

"hollowest " (dXaon'oraToi/) of all things, i.e. it promises to be so

much more satisfactory than it proves to be ; the illusoriness of the

" pleasures of sex " is a notorious case in point. Intelligence (vovs) is

either the same thing as dX^eta, or, at any rate, it is the most "genuine "

thing in the world (the least illusory, 6^c-d). Next, as to the note of

" measure " : pleasure notoriously tends to wild excess ; there is

nothing more " measured " than intelligence and science (65^). And

finally, as to beauty. There is no uncomeliness (ovSw alcrxpov) in

wisdom and intelligence, but the intensest pleasures are so unseemly

that we think the spectacle of a man who is indulging in them is

either ridiculous or disgraceful. We are actually ashamed to see such

a sight, and think that it ought to be covered by darkness (66a).

We may now draw our conclusion. Pleasure is neither the best

nor the second-best thing. We must give the first place to " measure,

the measured, that which is 'in place 1 " (TO Kcupun/); 1 the second

to proportion, beauty, completeness (TO o-v/^cTpov KCU KaXov KCU

TO rc'Xcov /cat t/cavoV) ; the third to intelligence and wisdom (vovs

Kal ^povrjcris) ; the fourth to " sciences and arts and true convictions "

(7rTT>7/Acu Kal Te^vai Kal Soai opOat) \ the fifth to the class of

pleasures, whether involving actual sensation or not, which have no

pain mixed with them (the " pure " pleasures of the discussion) :

we stop short, like Orpheus, with the sixth " generation " (66a-d).*

1 The concluding words of 66a 8 are the worst textual crux in Plato.

The mischief is in the dldiov. Burnet's suggestion ryv a (irp^r^v) I8tav is

highly attractive, or conceivably we might read alrlav, rendering, "you

may say that . . . the cause has been hunted down in the region of pirpov,

M. Dies holds that W supports a variant birbvoL Tomura, xM vopl{eiv nvb %8tov

ijprjjffai. But is ijSiov quite in place here ?

2 This might mean that the moderate satisfactions of appetite, which we

expect to find in the sixth place, are excluded from the "good" (on the

484 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

(For the precise meaning of this enumeration I would refer the

reader to Appendix B in Mr. R. G. Bury's edition of the dialogue.

I understand the passage in a way which is, I suppose, much the

same as Mr. Bury's. Measure, proportion, rational structure are

mentioned first because they have a cosmic significance ; they are

found in the " great world " without, no less than in the lesser

world of man's soul, and they are the " notes " of good, wherever

found. Then 7ricnr?}/xai and " pure " pleasures are mentioned,

in that order, because they are the two aspects in which rational

structure and law show themselves in human mental life, and

ImarTrjfJLaL are put first, because we have just seen that intelligence

is " more akin to " rational structure, reveals it more manifestly

and clearly than feeling. There is no question of introducing into

the good for man any constituents beyond the two which have been

contemplated all along, intellectual activity and grateful feeling.)

FORMAL EPILOGUE TO THE DISCUSSION (66^-676). Philebus

had originally said that the good for us is the plenitude of pleasure

(r/Sovi;/ Traora *at TrarreA^s) , Socrates that "intelligence" (i/o9s) is at

any rate (ye) a far better thing for man's life than pleasure. We

long ago convinced ourselves that neither can be the whole of

human good, since neither would be " all-satisfying," apart from

the other. But our investigation has shown us that " intelligence "

is at any rate infinitely (pvplw) more closely related to the " victor "

(the " mixed life ' f which proved to be the best of all for a man) than

pleasure. (The point is that though the best life includes both

elements, it is the element of rationality which gives it its specific

character. A man is not a creature who uses an intellect to contrive

ingenious devices for getting pleasures, but a creature who finds it

pleasant to practise intellectual activities. Hume's view that in

action reason "is and ought to be the slave of the passions " just

inverts the true relation. Human " passions " should be the

servants of intelligence.) Pleasure is not the good, even though

all the horses and oxen of the world should say it is, with the assent

of the " many " who think the " lusts of beasts " better evidence

than the discourses of philosophers (676).

The last sentence obviously alludes, in its reference to the Ovjpiw

epwras, to the argument of Eudoxus, afterwards adopted by

Epicurus, that pleasure must be " the good " because it is that

which " all living creatures " pursue when left to themselves (E.N. x.

nj2b 9 ff.). The supposed unmannerly reference to Aristippus

in the remark about the " horses " (tWoi) is a mere unhistorical

fancy. Even if Aristippus had been aimed at in the criticism of

Hedonism, such an allusion would be impossible, for the simple

reason that the leading anti-Hedonist of the Academy, Speusippus,

ground that they are not actually good but merely harmless). As they were

admitted at 63*, however, the meaning may be that the " sixth degree " is

actually counted in as the lowest and last. This makes the allusion to

" Orpheus " (Fr. 14, Kern) more apt. The theogonic poet quoted must have

described his " sixth generation " of deities as well as the preceding five.

THE PH1LEBUS 485

whose views we have found Plato expressly reproducing in two

places, had a " horse " in his name too.

See further :

BURNET. Greek Philosophy, Part I., 324-332.

RITTER, C. Platon, ii. 165-258, 497-554; Platons Dialog*, 68-

97 ; Neue Untersuchungen ueber Platon, 95-173.

RAEDER, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 357-374.

NATORP, P. Platons Ideenlehre, 296-331.

NETTLESHIP, R. L. Plato's Conception of Goodness and the Good.

(Works, i. 307-336.)

BAEUMKER, C. Das Problem der Materie in der griechischen

Philosophie, 193-196. (1890.)

POSTE, E. The " Philebus " of Plato. (Oxford, 1860.)

BURY, R. G.The " Philebus " of Plato. (Cambridge, 1897.)

DIES, A. Autour de Platon, ii., 385-399.

STEWART, J. A. Plato's Doctrine of Ideas, 92-100.

ROBIN, L. Platon, c. iv.

CHAPTER XVII

TIMAEUS AND CRITIAS

THE Timaeus stands alone among the Platonic dialogues in

being devoted to cosmology and natural science. Owing to

the fact that the first two-thirds of it were continuously

preserved through the " dark ages " in the Latin version and with

the commentary of Chalcidius, it was the one Greek philosophical

work of the best age with which the west of Europe was well

acquainted before the recovery of Aristotle's metaphysical and

physical writings in the thirteenth century ; it thus furnished the

earlier Middle Ages with their standing general scheme of the

natural world. In the present volume it is impossible to deal with

the contents of the dialogue in any detail ; I have tried to perform

the task in my Commentary on Plato's Timaeus (Oxford, 1928),

with which the later commentary of Professor Cornford (Plato's

Cosmology, London, 1937) should be compared.

The date of composition cannot be precisely determined. There

is no external evidence, and the internal evidence of style only serves

to show that the dialogue belongs to the last period of Plato's

authorship ; thus we must place the composition at some time after

the Sophistes, i.e. within the years 360-347. It is quite uncertain,

so far as I can see, whether we should regard the Timaeus or the

Philebus as the later work. As to the date of the imagined con-

versation I think it is possible to be more precise. We have to

consider (a) the internal evidence of the Timaeus itself, (b) the

evidence supplied by the Republic, (a) The interlocutors in the

dialogue are Socrates, Timaeus, Critias, and Hermocrates. Of

Timaeus nothing is known except what we learn from Plato, that

he is a Locrian from South Italy, with a career of eminence in both

science and politics behind him (200). From the fact that the

doctrine he is made to expound is recognizably a version of Pytha-

goreanism in which the biology and medicine of Empedocles is

grafted on the original Pythagorean mathematics, we can really

have no doubt that he is meant to be a Pythagorean of the same

type as the more famous Philolaus. This suggests that he is at

least as old a man as Socrates, and that we may perhaps connect

what we are told of the magistracies he has filled with the facts

about Pythagorean political ascendancy in Magna Graecia in the

first half of the fifth century. 1 Hermocrates is plainly the famous

1 1 cannot agree with those who dispute Plato's intention to represent

Timaeus as a Pythagorean. Everything in his doctrine can be traced back

TIMAEUS AND CRITIAS 437

Syracusan best known by the prominent part he played in the

defence of Syracuse against the Athenian Armada of 415. Socrates

implies (200) that Hermocrates is still a man with his career before

him, and bases his estimate of him on the general report. This

shows that Hermocrates is a stranger at Athens and indicates that

the conversation is presumably to be dated not too long after the

" pan-Sicilian Congress " at Gela in 425, where Hermocrates seems

to have first made his reputation (Thuc. iv. 58). l Critias is certainly

not, as all writers before Professor Burnet have assumed, Critias

the so-called " oligarch " who figured in the usurping government

of 404-3. He has already distinguished himself in science and

politics (200), and he refers pointedly to his own extreme old age

and the way in which he remembers the distant events of his child-

hood, though he can hardly recollect what he has been told yester-

day (266). He also says that his great-grandfather was a friend

and connexion of Solon (20^), and that he himself, as a boy of

ten years old, used to sing the verses of Solon, which were then a

" novelty " (2i5). All this shows that the Critias meant is the

grandfather of the " oligarch/' Plato's own great-grandfather. Even

so we have to suppose him, at the date of the dialogue, to be ex-

tremely old. (b) The Timaeus unmistakably announces itself as in

a way a continuation of the Republic. Socrates opens the dialogue

by recalling the main heads of what he had said " yesterday " to

the present company (17^-19^), and the recapitulation coincides

exactly with the contents of Republic i.-v. Thus we seem directed

to date the discourse of Timaeus two days after the conversa-

tion in the house of Polemarchus. 2 If we were right in our view

of the dramatic date of the Republic, this brings us to the time

of the peace of Nicias or very shortly before it, the year 422 or 421.

Such a date fits all the indications of the Timaeus itself. It enables

to Pythagorean sources except the use of the four Empedoclean " roots " and

the equally Empedoclean sense-physiology and medicine, a point which I have

tried to establish in detail elsewhere. For the evidence that Philolaus simi-

larly combined Pythagorean mathematics with Empedoclean biology, see

Burnet, E.G. Ph.* 278-279, Greek Philosophy, Part I., 88-89. I have tried to

add something to the evidence elsewhere. The name is not given as that of a

Locrian by lamblichus in his catalogue, but he mentions a Timaeus among the

Crotoniates, and again (unless it is the same man) among the Parians, who

precede the Locrians immediately in his list. This looks as though the name

had been displaced by a copyist. Plato's avoidance of the name of Pythag-

oras is a standing habit ; it, no doubt, has to do with the disrepute into

which the word was brought by the more superstitious members of the order.

1 It is impossible to imagine the meeting as taking place after the dispatch of

the Athenian fleet to Syracuse. As we know from Xenophon and Diodorus,

Hermocrates was serving against Athens in the East from 413 until his

descent on Sicily in 409 or 408. We cannot suppose that he would be likely

to choose Athens as a place to visit in this interval, or that he could meet

Socrates there on friendly terms, still less that Socrates would contrast him,

at that date, as a man with a career to make, with Timaeus and Critias as

men whose distinction has been already achieved.

* It is, however, suggested that the present discourse is held during the

Panathenaea, which do not fall even within two months of the day mentioned

in the Republic (the feast of Bendis). This secures us against connecting

the two dialogues too closely.

15

438 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

us to understand that the boyhood of old Critias would fall immedi-

ately after the expulsion of the Pisistratidae from Athens, and we

can guess why the poems of Solon would be likeVy to be popular

and " novel " at that date. (Pisistratus and his sons are not likely

to have encouraged the singing of them.) It also gives us a reason

for the presence of a distinguished public man from Locri and another

from Syracuse. Only a year or two before the peace the Athenians

had sent envoys on a tour of the South Italian cities, including

Locri, for the express purpose of forming a league to keep the power

of Syracuse in check. A general pacification would, of course,

leave a good deal to be " redd up " in the western Mediterranean.

We may be sure that Timaeus did not come to Athens expressly

to talk to Socrates about the creation of the world. We see also

why Hermocrates is known to Socrates only by reports of his

abilities and education. And it is significant that, if we are right,

the date at which Socrates is represented as listening with keen

interest to a cosmological lecture is only a year or two after the

burlesque of him in the Clouds. This is a much more appropriate

dramatic date than one later in his life. Hence I feel little doubt

that it is right.

The dialogue falls into three distinct parts: (a) introductory

recapitulation of the contents of Republic i.-v. by Socrates (170-

196), with expression of a strong desire to see the doctrine there

laid down embodied in a dramatic story of concrete achievements

(196-200) ; (b) relation by Critias of the alleged heroic exploit of

Athens in resisting and defeating the kings of Atlantis (200-26^) ;

(c) the cosmological discourse of Timaeus, which extends unbroken,

but for an occasional word of assent from Socrates, to the end of

the dialogue (270-920). We may consider these divisions in their

order.

(a) Introduction (170-200). There is not much on which we

need make any comment. It is useless to speculate on the identity

of the unnamed person who has been kept away from the conversa-

tion by indisposition and whom Timaeus agrees to replace as speaker.

As Timaeus takes his place, we are no doubt to understand that he

belongs to the same group of " Italian " philosophers. Philolaus,

as Burnet suggests, would suit the part, or we might perhaps even

think of Empedocles. Plato is merely intending a graceful ex-

pression of the debt of his dialogue to fifth-century " Italians."

The most striking feature of the recapitulation of the Republic

is that it covers only the ground of Books I.-V. Nothing is said

of the philosopher-kings and their education in mathematics and

dialectic, of the Form of Good, or of the contents of Republic viii.-x.

I suggest that the most likely explanation of this silence is that which

is also the simplest. Just so much of the Republic, and no more, is

recalled as will be an appropriate basis for the story of the Athenian

victory over Atlantis. Plato is quite alive to the fact that the

philosopher-king is an "ideal" which has never been realized, and

therefore abstains from an attempt to exhibit a society of philo-

TIMAEVS AND CRITIAS 439

sopher-kings in action. It is more credible that there should be an

actual society at the level of that described in Republic i.-v., and

he feels himself equal to the vivid imaginative delineation of its

performances.

The remarks with which Socrates closes his recapitulation are

interesting as showing that Plato fully understood that his own hero

had his definite limitations. Socrates, as he says, can give us a

picture of the really healthy society, but he cannot " make the

figures move/ 1 He cannot tell an actual story of the behaviour of

such a society in a life-like way, and the reason is that he has not

enough personal experience of the work of the active statesman.

He remains, after all, something of the theorist and doctrinaire

(igb-e). This was, in fact, true of Socrates, and it helps to explain

the fact that his influence on many of his associates was not wholly

beneficial. Association with him in early life was not an unmixed

good for the average lad ; so far, there was just a slight basis of

foundation for the distrust with which practical workers of the

democratic constitution, like Anytus, regarded him.

(b) The Story of Atlantis (200-25^). The story told by Critias

is to the effect that nine thousand years before the time of Solon

Athens had enjoyed just such institutions as those described in

Republic i.-v. Her soil was then wonderfully rich and fertile, as

it had not suffered from the denudation which has since reduced

the district of Attica to a rocky skeleton. The prehistoric Athen-

ians, strong only in public spirit and sound moral, encountered and

defeated the federated kings of Atlantis, an island lying in the

Atlantic outside the Straits of Gibraltar, who had already success-

fully overrun all Europe as far as Italy, and all Africa as far as

the Egyptian border. Afterwards both the prehistoric Athenian

victors and the island Atlantis were overwhelmed in a single day

and night of earthquake and inundation. The story only survived

in the records of Egypt, where Solon heard it when on his travels.

It should be clear that this whole tale is Plato's own invention.

He could not tell us so much more plainly than he does in the

Critias (ii3&), when he makes Critias appeal to the testimony of

" family papers " as his sole evidence for the narrative. Not only

the existence of the island-kingdom, but the statement that Solon

had ever contemplated a poem on the subject is represented as a

" family tradition " ; in other words, nothing was ever really

known of any such intention. It is* not hard to see what the

materials for the tale are. The alleged shallowness of the sea

just outside the " pillars of Heracles/' and perhaps tales of Cartha-

ginian sailors about islands in the Atlantic, are the foundation for

the story of the lost island ; the account of its destruction is mani-

festly based on the facts of the great earthquake and tidal wave

of the year 373 which ravaged the Achaean coast. The main

conception of the successful conflict of a small and patriotic nation

in arms against an invader with vast material resources and im-

mense superiority in the art of military engineering a point on

440 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

which the Critias lays great stress is clearly suggested by the

actual facts of the Athenian resistance to Darius and Xerxes.

Plato has projected the events of the Persian wars backwards,

magnified their scale, and thus made the moral, that numbers,

wealth, and engineering skill are no match for the national spirit

of a free people, the more obvious to the dull. Strictly speaking,

the whole narrative has no logical connexion with the special theme

of the Timaeus. Its real function is to serve as a prelude to the

Critias, where the narrative now briefly summarized was to be told

with full detail. As Critias puts it, at the end of his story (2ja-b),

the division of labour between speakers is to be that Timaeus

shall now describe the formation of the world and of man, as its

closing " work/' Socrates is then to be understood to have ex-

plained how man is educated, and it is left for Critias to describe

the heroic achievements of the men whose production has been

dealt with by Timaeus and their education discussed by Socrates.

Thus the logical order of the three dialogues would have been

Timaeus, Republic, Critias. The express allusion in this passage

to the contribution of Socrates seems to show that this definitely

means the Republic, the only Platonic work where Socrates ex-

pressly discusses the question of educational method. From the

absence of any reference to a discourse of Hermocrates, and the

difficulty of seeing what has been left for him to discourse upon,

I should infer that it was never Plato's intention to carry the scheme

beyond the Critias. Hermocrates, the youngest member of the

group, was probably to be a listener, not a speaker.

(c) The Discourse of Timaeus (270-920). The lecture which

Timaeus now delivers covers the whole ground of natural knowledge

from astronomy to pathology and psychophysics. It will be

impossible to deal with more than its most outstanding features.

It starts with two fundamental positions : (a) that the sensible

world, being sensible, " becomes," or, as we might say, is a world

of " happenings " or " events " ; (b) that whatever " becomes " has

a cause, by which Timaeus means that it is the product of an agent

(280-c). The " artisan " or " craftsman " (%xtovpyo's) who makes the

world thus comes into the story, and it is assumed that this maker

is God. Now a craftsman always works with a model or archetype

before him, and so we must ask whether the model on which the

world has been made is itself something that has " become " or some-

thing eternal. Since the maker is the best of all causes and the

thing he makes the best of all effects, clearly the model of which

the sensible world is a " copy " or " likeness " (CIKWV) is eternal (290).

(In more modern language, it is meant that the natural world is not

constituted by " events " only, but by events and the objects (in

Professor Whitehead's sense) situated in the events, and this is

why it is intelligible and can be known.) This leads us to lay down

an important canon of the degree of truth to be expected in natural

science. Discourse about the fixed and unchanging archetype,

or model, can be exact and final ; it has the definitiveness of Us

TIMAEUS AND CRITIAS 441

object : discourse about its sensible copy, which is continually

varying and changing, can only be approximate. Hence in natural

science, we have no right to demand more than " likely stories/' i.e.

in metaphysics and mathematics there can be finality ; in the

natural sciences we have to be content with approximate and

tentative results, though our business is to make our approxima-

tions as accurate as we can (2gb-d). In other words, physical

science is progressive in a sense in which metaphysics and mathe-

matics are not. (Newton's gravitation formula may be a "first

approximation " on which later physicists can improve ; such

a formula as cos0 = (^ l +-* 1 ) is no "first approximation " and

there is no improving on it.) This principle, that a proposition

of physics is always " approximate/' and that none is therefore

beyond the possibility of correction, is one so important that Timaeus

is careful to call repeated attention to it in connexion with the

special scientific hypotheses he propounds to explain special groups

of facts. A simple modern illustration would be the consideration

that all actual measurements of physical magnitudes are approxi-

mate, and that no determination of such a magnitude by experi-

mental methods can be trusted, unless it is accompanied by a

statement of the " probable error." When we are told that all

our natural knowledge is only a " likely story," it is not meant that

we may substitute fairy tales for science ; what is meant is that while

we must make our results as precise as we can, we must remember

that they are all liable to improvement. Our best measurements

may be superseded ; our most satisfactory explanatory hypotheses

may always have to be modified in the light of overlooked or freshly

discovered facts. What Timaeus is really trying to formulate is

no fairy tale, but, as we shall see, a geometrical science of nature.

Next we may ask ourselves why the Maker produced a world at

all. He was perfectly good, and for that very reason did not want

to keep his goodness to himself, but to make something like himself.

So he took over the whole of the " visible/' which was in a condi-

tion of chaotic disorder, and made it into an ordered system, since

order is better than chaos. For the same reason, he put mind

(vovs) into it, and, as mind can only exist in a soul (1/0^77), he gave

it a soul, and thus the sensible world became " by the providence

of God, a living being with soul and mind " (306). The model in

the likeness of which he made it was, of course, a vor^rov or " in-

telligible," something complete and whole (rcAcov), and something

living. The sensible world, then, is the sensible embodiment of a

living creature or organism (o>ov) of which all other living creatures

are parts. And there is only one " world " of sense (as against

the Milesian tradition of the " innumerable " worlds). For the

model is one, and a perfect copy of it will reproduce its uniqueness

(300-316). <

Thus, in the scheme of Timaeus, we see that the "efficient

cause " of the world is thought of definitely as a " personal " God,

and this " creator " or " maker " is, strictly speaking, the only God,

442 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

in our sense of the word, the dialogue recognizes. Later on we shall

find the name Qtos given both to the world itself as a whole and to

certain parts or denizens of it, but this must not mislead us. These

Scot are all " created " ; their raison d'etre is the will of the Sry/xtovpyo?

(2ge, 416), who is thus distinguished from them as God is from

" creatures " in Christian theology. The formal cause of the world,

however, is not God but the " intelligible living creature," the

auro o co-rt <poi/, which God contemplates as the model for his work.

The language used about this model shows that we are to think of

it as a form, the " form " of an organism of which all other

organisms are parts. It thus has the peculiarity that there is only

one unique " sensible " which " partakes *' of it.

It may naturally be asked how much of this can be conceived

to be serious Platonic teaching and how much is mere imaginative

symbolism ? No one, of course, could answer the question pre-

cisely ; possibly Plato himself could not have made a hard-and-fast

distinction between philosophical content and mythical form. But

one or two points are important. It would stultify the whole story

to follow the example of some interpreters, who wish to find some-

thing like the philosophy of Spinoza in Plato, by making the

" artisan " a mythical symbol of his " model/' the vorjrov fu>ov.

This may or may not be good philosophy and theology, but it is

not the thought of Plato, as we shall see more clearly when we come

to deal with the doctrine of God in the Laws. God and the forms

have to be kept distinct in Plato for the reason that the activity of

God as producing a world " like " the forms is the one explanation

Plato ever offers of the way in which the " participation " of things

in forms is effected. If " God " simply meant the same thing as

the forms, or as a supreme form, it would remain a mystery why

there should be anything but the forms, why there should be any

" becoming " at all. How far the explanation that God " makes "

a world on the model of the forms was taken by Plato to be a literal

statement of truth is a question that may be left to anyone who is

bold enough to pronounce exactly how literally Leibniz intended his

similar language about God's " choice of the best " as the reason

why the actual world is actual. The one thing which is clear from

the Laws is that God, in Plato, is a " soul/ 1 not a form.

A more legitimate question is whether God in the Timaeus is

quite all we mean by a " creator." Are we to take seriously the

representation, which runs through the dialogue, of God's action

as the imposing of order on a pre-existing chaos ? Does Plato

mean that the world was formed out of pre-existing materials ?

On this point we find a discrepancy of interpretation springing up in

the first generation of the Academy itself. Aristotle, as is well

known, insists on finding in the Timaeus the doctrine that the world

is ytvi/r/ros (''had a beginning"), and is severely critical of this

error, as he regards it. On the other hand, the Platonists for the

most part the Neoplatonists unanimously adopt the view,

originally propounded by Xenocrates, that the representation of

TIMAEUS AND CRITIAS 443

the world as having a beginning is adopted simply " for convenience

of exposition " (StSao-KaXtas XO-PW), as a geometer talks of " drawing "

a line, when all that he does is to point out that the existence

of the line is already implied by our initial postulates. 1 Thus,

on their view, the account of the world, or rather its constit-

uents, as they were before God began his work, is merely a picture of

the sort of thing you would have left on your hands if you tried

to do what you never can do successfully, to think away all traces

of the order and structure in which God's authorship of things reveals

itself. The only two Platonists who are known to have taken

Aristotle's view on this question are Plutarch and Atticus, a writer

of the Antonine age. It is significant that their attempt to take

the words of Timaeus literally gets them into very grave difficulties.

Since the undoubted Platonic doctrine, expounded most fully in the

Laws, is that " soul " is the cause of all movements, Plutarch finds

himself bound to discover in the Laws the doctrine that there is an

" evil " world-soul, which he supposes to have animated the original

chaos. Though this discovery has been followed in modern times

by such scholars as Zeller, it is certainly a mere "mare's nest. 1 '

The words of the Laws say no more than that, since there is disorder

in the world as well as order, there must be some soul or souls other

than God to cause the disorder. 2 And we may be sure that Aristotle

would never have been silent about a doctrine which would be, to

him, sheer blasphemy, if he had known of it as a Platonic theory.

If we look at the text of the Timaeus, we shall see that at any

rate Plato does not mean to say that there ever was a time before

God constructed the world, since he tells us, as Aristotle allows, 3

that time and the world "began" together, God, in fact, making

both of them. Thus the language which seems to imply a primi-

tive state of pure chaos cannot be meant seriously, and so far

Xenocrates seems to be right in his interpretation. (This would

leave it a logical possibility that the series of events had a first

member, and that the interval between the first member and the

event which is my writing of these words, is a finite number of

years, but I do not think any scholar acquainted with Greek thought

is likely to suppose Plato to be contemplating this alternative.)

Again, as will be clearer from what we shall have to say later on

about the use of the notion of "necessity/ 1 it seems plain that the

*For Aristotle's interpretation, see Physics, 2516 17, de Caelo, 280030,

Metaph. 10720 i. Since he comments on the fact that the dialogue makes

time and the world begin together, he is presumably alive to the point that

limaeus does not ascribe a beginning to nature in the usual sense of that

phrase. For the explanation of Xenocrates, see Plutarch, de Animae Pro-

creatione in Timaeo, 10130-6, where it is admitted that on this point the

Academy in general followed Xenocrates.

1 Laws, x. Sg6e, where all that is said is that, since there is disorder and

" dysteleology " in the world, the perfectly good soul cannot be the only soul

there is ; there must be one or more faulty souls. Neither Plutarch nor Zeller

had any right to manufacture an " evil world-soul " out of this straightforward

rejection of Pantheism.

* Physics, 2516 17, Metaph. 10720 l.

444 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

Timaeus knows of no external limitation imposed on God's will by

conditions independent of God himself. The " maker's " goodness

is the whole and complete explanation of the very existence of

the natural world. This should justify us in saying that the

" Demiurge " really is thought of as a Creator in the full sense of the

word. Probably Xenocrates may also have been right in taking

the dialogue to imply the " eternity of the world " in the sense in

which that phrase is commonly, but inaccurately, used, that the order

of events never had a first member. It still remains true that, in

Plato's own more accurate terminology, the world is a yeyoi/o's,

"something that has become/' not dtStov, eternal. Even if there

never was a first event, everything sensible has " emerged " as the

result of a process ; in the Platonic conception the world is always

" in evolution," even if the evolution never began and will never

come to an end. This is why the world, unlike God, has a history.

It is always getting itself made ; there is never a point at which it is

full-made.

The story of the making we cannot here follow far into its

details. Since natural things can be seen and grasped, fire (light)

and earth must be among their constituents. To combine two

such terms in a stable way, there must be a " mean " between them.

But fire and earth are volumes and have three dimensions. Hence

you cannot insert a single mean proportional between them, but

need two. 1 This need is met by air and water. Fire is to air

what air is to water and water to earth. This playful application

of the doctrine of the geometrical mean effects a transition from

Pythagorean mathematics to the four " roots " of Empedocles.

We shall see shortly that for Timaeus they are not " elements "

(316-32^). God used up the whole of these materials in making

the world. It excretes nothing and assimilates nothing, and this

secures it against age or disease. Its form was appropriately made

spherical, since the sphere has the greatest volume of all bodies with

the same perimeter, and is therefore the right figure for that which

is to contain everything. It was given no sense-organs, since there

is nothing outside itself to be apprehended, no digestive organs,

as there is nothing it can take in as food, and no organs of loco-

motion, for it has nowhere to travel. It needed no hands, for

there is nothing for it to grasp or repel. Being alive, however,

it moves with the most uniform of all motions, uniform rotation

on its own axis. Finally, we must add that it was animated all

through with a \l/\)\r), and this was the generation of a " blessed

god " (320-346).

We have begun, however, at the wrong end. We should have

described first the fashioning of the world's soul, since soul takes

precedence of body in order of " production " as well as of worth

1 The allusion is to the famous problem of the " duplication of the cube,"

connected by later anecdote with Plato's own name. The meaning of Timaeus

is clearly that no one rational " mean " can be inserted between two integers,

when each is the product of three prime factors and no more.

TIMAEUS AND CRITIAS 445

(since, on Plato's view, soul initiates all movements). The world's

soul has three constituents : (a) a Being which is intermediate

between that which is always " self-same " and that which " be-

comes and is divisible " in bodies ; (b) a similarly " intermediate "

kind of Sameness, and (c) of Otherness. God thus makes the soul

as a tertium quid between the eternal and the temporal. 1 Next

he " divided " the result in accord with the intervals of a musical

scale which Timaeus describes. 2 (Apparently we are to imagine

a long ribbon with intervals marked on it at distances corre-

sponding to the numbers indicated by the directions for making

the notes of the scale.) Next, the ribbon was split longitudinally

into two halves, which were laid cross-wise, thus + . Then each

ribbon was bent into a circle so as to give two circles, in planes

at right angles to one another, with double contact, like the equator

and a meridian on a sphere. The outermost of these circles was

called that of the Same, the innermost that of the Other. The

circle of the Same was made to revolve " to the right," that of the

" Other " was subdivided into seven concentric circles at unequal

distances from one another, which were made to revolve with un-

equal velocities " to the left " (340-36^). We learn a little later

that the inclination of the two circles was made oblique (390),

so that they turn out in the end to stand for the sidereal equator

and the ecliptic, their revolutions being the (apparent) diurnal

revolution of the " starry heavens " and the orbits of the sun and

the planets in the Zodiac respectively. It must be carefully noted

that nothing is said of " spheres/' and, again, that as usual in the

classical period, the orbit of a heavenly body is thought of as itself

revolving, like a cart-wheel, and carrying round the body which is

set in it. We have heard now of the orbits of the whole and of the

seven planets, but so far nothing has been said about any bodies

which, as we should say, " revolve in " these orbits. We are now

at last (36^) told that the creator finally constructed the body of

the world " within " its soul and adapted the two ; this begins

the " unceasing and reasonable life " of the KOO-/AOS as an organism.

The circle of the Same and the Other, being circles primarily "in

the soul " of the world, have an epistemological as well as an

astronomical significance. Their absolutely uniform revolutions

symbolize perhaps Timaeus means that they actually embody

1 I have adopted the exegesis given by Mr. Cornford in Plato's Cosmology

as convincing, and modified these sentences accordingly.

* For the construction of this scale its compass is four octaves and a sixth

see Tim. 356-366. Modern editors and translators in general have, in my

opinion all been led into errors by exaggerated deference to Boeckh, who, in

his turn, has been misled by an erroneous statement in Timaeus Locrus about

the sum of the terms of the progression. That Boeckh and his followers,

at least, must be wrong seems to be shown by their twice introducing

into their scale the interval called the dTroro/ziJ or major semitone. As

Proclus says, the silence of Timaeus shows that he does not intend to admit

this interval, but only the minor semitone, or Xer/^ia, which he is careful to

describe.

446 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

in the one case, science of the eternal and unchanging, in the other

true conviction (8oa) about the temporal (37#-c). (We must

remember that the cosmic animal is a rational animal.)

The creator next proposed to make his work even more like

the model on which he had designed it. He could not make it,

like its model, eternal (<u8tos) (since nothing sensible can be so),

but he made it as nearly eternal as he could. He devised a " moving

image of eternity," which he called time. Time is to eternity as

number is to unity ; its absolutely uniform flow is an imperfect

mirroring of the self-sameness of eternity, and time is the character-

istic form of the sensible. We try to speak of the eternal as that

which " was and is and is to be." But strictly, what is eternal

simply " is " ; we must not say that it " was " or " will be/' for such

language can only be used properly of what " happens/ 1 So again

we say that the past is past, the future is to come, the non-existent

is non-existent. But all such language, which ascribes being

to what is mere " becoming " and even to " what is not/' is un-

scientific l (37^-386). The true state of the case is that the model

eternally is, its sensible embodiment has been going on and will be

going on all through time (380). If there is to be time, there must

be perceptible bodies with uniform movements to serve as measures

of it, and so God devised the sun and the other " planets " and put

them into the orbits provided for them by the splitting of the circle

of the Other. Their order, reckoning outwards from the earth,

is Moon, Sun, Hesperus, the " star of Hermes," then the three

" outer" planets, for which no names are given here. The sun,

Hesperus, and the "star of Hermes" have the same " period,"

but the two latter are in an unexplained way opposed to the sun,

so that they are always catching him up and being caught up by

him. The details about the apparent behaviour of the others would

require more time than we can spare for their description. The

important points to remember are that their velocities are different,

that each of them has two motions, one communicated to it by the

outermost circle, that of the Same (which revolves from E. to W.

with a period of twenty-four hours), another, oblique to this, and

with a longer period (the planet's " year "), from W. to E. The

result is that the actual visible movements are complicated " cork-

screws " (IXtKcs). Men ought to understand, as they do not,

that the components of the movements of all are perpetually

uniform and regular, and are " time " just as much as a lunar

month, or a solar year. There is a great period, the longest of all,

at the completion of which all the planets are once more, relatively

to the sidereal heavens and to one another, in the same positions.

" To enable them to see their way " round these circuits, a great

1 Timaeus, we see, is not allowed to show any consciousness of the important

logical results Plato had reached in the Sophistes. This is presumably because

his discourse must be kept within limits imposed by the assumption that he is a

fifth-century Pythagorean. All through the dialogue we need to remember

that the speaker is not Plato, and that Plato need not be supposed to regard

his utterances as a complete exposition of his qwn

TIMAEUS AND CRITIAS 447

light (the sun) was kindled in the circle next but one to the earth

God had now to make the various lesser animals which were to

inhabit the different regions of the universe. This was done by

reproducing the various forms of organism mind discovers in the

form of " living being." Of these there are four, each inhabiting

its own region : gods who live in the sky, winged creatures who

inhabit the air, aquatic creatures, and land-animals. The " gods "

were made approximately of pure fire, given spherical form, distri-

buted over the heaven which revolves with the circle of the Same,

and given a double movement motion with the circle of the Same

(i.e. a diurnal revolution), and an axial revolution of their own.

(Thus the " gods " of Timaeus are simply the stars. We gather that

they are self-luminous, since they are made of fire, and from com-

parison of the mention of their axial rotations, with the absence of

any corresponding statement about the planets, we may (perhaps ?)

infer that the planets are not supposed to have any such rotations.)

As for the earth, our mother, God made it for " a guardian and

artificer of night and day, swinging (tAXo/Ac'v^i/) on the path about

the axis of the universe " (TT/V Trepi rov Sta Travros TroXov TtTOLfjLcvov,

406). To describe the system further would be impossible without

an actual visible model, and is irrelevant (39^-40^).

Full discussion of this astronomical passage is impossible here,

but the following points should be noted, (a) There is no reference

to the famous theory devised by Eudoxus within the Academy

itself, which analyses the apparent movements of the heavenly

bodies into combinations of axial rotations of imaginary " spheres,"

with a common centre at the centre of the earth. Timaeus never

speaks of " spheres," but, in the language originated by Anaxi-

mander, of " circles," conceived to turn round like a wheel spun

about its centre. And though one of the motions of each true

" star " is said to be " controlled by " the circle of the Same (406),

this motion is expressly ascribed to the star itself, not to an outer-

most " sphere." Presumably the mere fact that Timaeus is a

fifth-century astronomer, speaking many years before the origina-

tion of Eudoxus' hypothesis, sufficiently explains this, (b) The

stars are not thought of, after Aristotle's fashion, as made of a

superior and " celestial " stuff. They are made of " fire," the

finest quality of fire, but still the same fire to be found in ourselves

and bodies round us. We cannot too carefully remember that the

fateful distinction between " celestial matter " and " elementary

matter " was unknown to Greek science until Aristotle introduced

it as a direct consequence of his hypostatization of the purely

mathematical spheres of Eudoxus into physical globes, (c) It

is worth while also to observe the complete freedom of the whole

theory from any traces of the planetary astrology which was, later

on. to infest the minds of the Hellenistic age. The position of

1 Le. t all the planets shine by reflected solar light, as Empedoctes had

taught for the case of the moon,

448 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

the planets in the theory is a very humble one. They are not called

" gods," as the stars are, and the natural interpretation of Timaeus'

language is that they are not supposed to have any " souls " of

their own, but merely to be directed by the soul of the KOO-/XOS.

They serve as timepieces, and that, so far, is all. The remark of

Timaeus (40^) that though their movements are all calculable,

their occultations, reappearances, and conjunctions frighten " those

who cannot do a sum," and are supposed to be portents, is probably

meant to deride the astrological superstitions of the East, and it is

amusing to note that the negative in the phrase " who cannot do a

sum," preserved in A, and guaranteed by the version of Cicero,

has been dropped in our other best MSS. and marked for deletion

by the diorthotes of A. In the age of our copyists, it was assumed

that it is just the astronomer, who can do the sum, who is frightened

by the appearances he foresees ! (d) As to the astronomical theory

itself, it agrees with that of Eudoxus in being one of a " double "

planetary motion. Each planet is assumed to have a " proper

motion " through the zodiac from W. to E., and, over and above

this, to be affected by the diurnal revolution from E. to W., with

the result that it is brought daily back almost, but not quite, to the

position it had twenty-four hours earlier. Thus, in this view, the

moon, which most successfully resists the " diurnal revolution,"

is the swiftest of the planets, Saturn the slowest, since the moon

succeeds in getting round the zodiac in a month, Saturn takes about

thirty years. Both theories thus contradict the older view, traceable

back to Anaximander, that all revolutions are in the same sense.

If this were so, we should have to say that the moon is left farthest

behind, Saturn lags least behind the diurnal revolution. 1 Since the

double revolution theory is expressly employed in the myth of Er

(Rep. 6170), it is pretty clearly of Pythagorean origin, and may be

as old as Pythagoras himself, though this is uncertain.

(e) A much more important question is suggested by the remarks

about the earth. Does Timaeus mean to ascribe a motion to the

earth, or does he not ? In the middle of the last century there was

a sharp controversy on the point between Grote, who found the

motion of the earth in the dialogue, and Boeckh, who denied it.

On one point Boeckh was clearly right. Timaeus cannot mean,

as Grote thought, to give the earth an axial rotation with a period

of twenty-four hours, since this would conflict with his own express

attribution of this period to the " circle of the Same " at 390.

If the stars were revolving round us once in twenty-four hours and

the earth rotating in the opposite sense with the same period, mani-

festly the interval between two successive transits of the same star

over the meridian would not be twenty-four hours but twelve, and

we cannot suppose, as Grote suggested, that Plato may have forgotten

so obvious a point. On the other hand, though nearly all later

.editors have followed Boeckh, it is equally plain that he must be

wrong in making the earth of Timaeus motionless. His inter-

1 On all this see Burnet, E.G. Ph. 9 iio-tu.

TIMAEUS AND CRITIAS 449

pretation is overthrown at once by restoration of the correct text of

the passage (rrjv negl r6v dia navio-, rA). The rrjv here can only

mean rty 6d6v or rfjv neolodov, and is an accusative of the path

traversed. Also the verb used, MfofUvrp, is notoriously a verb of

motion, and we have to add that Aristotle twice over, commenting

on the passage, expressly interprets it as asserting a movement of

some kind. He does not even produce any argument to show that

this is what is meant, but assumes that no one will dispute the

point. Hence I think we may feel fairly sure that it was the

accepted exegesis of the first generation of the Academy. 1 It

follows that Timaeus regards the centre of the universe as empty

and ascribes to the earth a " to-and-fro " movement about it.

This oscillatory motion we must pretty certainly take to be recti-

linear, not circular or cycloidal like the movement of a pendulum-

bob. This will explain why Aristotle, discussing the motion of the

earth in de Caelo, B 13, distinguishes the view of Pythagoreans and

certain unnamed other persons, that the earth revolves " round the

centre/' from that of the Timaeus, that it moves " at the centre. 1 '

The interpretation just given follows Professor Burnet, who is

at least certainly right in insisting that the word used by Timaeus

of the earth (IMoiilvrjv) must stand, as Aristotle said, for a notion

of some sort. Mr. Cornford has since developed a very different,

and attractive explanation, according to which the meaning is that

the earth, situated at the centre of the universe, has a diurnal

rotation in the opposite sense to that of the " circle of the same "

and thus exactly compensating it (op. cit., pp. 120-124). Attrac-

tive as this view is, I still doubt whether it could have been ex-

pected to be divined by a reader with nothing before him but the

bare statement that the earth ?AAerai, " winds " or " curls," and

have therefore hesitated to adapt my text to it, though I am not

confident that it may not be right after all. But it is conceivable

that Timaeus may be supposed to hold that some sort of " slide "

of the earth would explain one or both of two " appearances,"

(a) the inequality of the " seasons " into which the year is divided

by the equinoxes and solstices, (b) the notorious fact that though

the sun and moon are "in conjunction" every lunar month, a

solar eclipse is not regularly observed at each conjunction. But

I give this avowedly as a guess. 2

1 For Aristotle's interpretation, see de Caelo, B 2936 30 ff., and cf. ibid. 2960

26. The important point is that the grammar of the passage in the Timaeus

demands a verb of motion, and that Aristotle expressly explains the word by

adding /rai KivewOat* That he should be mistaken, or speaking with mala

fides, on such a point seems incredible. Cf. Burnet, Greek Philosophy, Part I.,

348 and notes. The summary to D.L. (iii., 75) also ascribes a motion to the

(Kivela

earth, though wrong about its nature (KivelaOai irepl rt>

a On the anomaly of the seasons, see Theo Smyrnaeus, p. 153 (Hiller),

and on the Metonic cycle the passages quoted in Diels, Fragmente det Vorsok-

ratiker*, i. 29, 9 (s.v. Oinopides). For the problem raised by the comparative

rarity of visible eclipses of the sun, see Placita, ii. 29 (the explanation ascribed

to the Pythagoreans and to Anaxagoras). I suspect that Timaeus may

intend his sliding motion to explain why we do not see an eclipse of the sun

450 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

It is, in any case, improbable that the vague expression put

into the mouth of Timaeus is meant to disclose Plato's full doctrine.

Theophrastus, as Plutarch has told us, related that " in his old

age " Plato repented of having placed the earth at the " centre,"

which should have been reserved for a " worthier body." l In the

chapter of the de Caelo already referred to, Aristotle, after mention-

ing that some of the Pythagoreans held that the earth is a planet

revolving round a central luminary, adds that " many others too

might accept the view that the centre should not be assigned to the

earth, for they think (oiowai) that the most honourable region

should belong to the most honourable body, and that fire is more

honourable than earth, and the boundary than the intermediate.

Now circumference and centre are boundaries ; so on the strength

of these considerations they think that not the earth, but rather fire,

is situated at the centre of the sphere " (op. cit. 2930, 27-35). Aristotle

does not say who these persons are, except that they are not the

Pythagoreans of whom he had begun by speaking. Yet he must

be speaking of actual persons, since he twice uses the phrase " they

think." From what Plutarch has told us on the authority of

Theophrastus, it seems to me certain that the unnamed " some "

mean here, as so often in Aristotle, Plato and his followers. In

that case, we have the evidence not only of Theophrastus, though

that would be sufficient, but of Aristotle, that Plato " in his old

age " regarded the earth as a planet revolving along with the rest

round a central luminary, a view quite unlike that expounded by

Timaeus. This is borne out by the evidence of an important

passage in the Laws (821^-8220) where the Athenian speaker speaks

of it as a truth which he has only recently learned that every planet

has one and only one path (ov TroXXas aXXa /uu'av act). This can

have only one meaning, that the speaker intends to deny the

doctrine of the double or composite motion on which Timaeus

insists. He must mean that the diurnal revolution is not communi-

cated to the planets, and so is not a component of their motions ;

each planet has only its " proper " movement through the Zodiac.

Since the appearances which prompted the double motion theory

still have to be accounted for, we are driven to suppose that the

" diurnal revolution " must be intended to be regarded as only

apparent, being really due to a motion of the earth. The implica-

tion is that the earth is a planet revolving round an invisible central

luminary in a period of twenty-four hours, as the moon is supposed

to revolve round the same body in a lunar month, or the sun in a

year. A little more light is thrown on the matter by a sentence of

the Epinomis, a dialogue which is generally " athetized " on

extremely inadequate grounds, but admitted to have been at any

at every new moon, nor an eclipse of the moon at every full moon, by sug-

gesting that on most of these occasions the earth happens to be a little " out

of the centre."

1 Plutarch, Quaesl. Platon. 1006$, Vit. Numae, c. 11. See on this evidence

Burnet, Greek Philosophy, Part /., 347.

TIMAEUS AND CRITIAS 451

rate composed immediately after Plato's death by a disciple for

circulation along with the Laws, and is therefore, in any case, likely

to be faithful to the master's teaching. We are there told (Epin.

9876) that the various planets revolve in one sense and with different

periods ; the outermost circle revolves we are not told with what

period in the opposite sense, " carrying the others with it, as it

might seem to men who know little of such things." 1 This is ;

of course, only an urbane way of saying that it does not " carry

the others " with it, another denial of the double motion theory of

Timaeus. Presumably the reason why the period of this re volu-

tion is not stated is that, now that the twenty-four hours' period has

been given to the earth, there is no reason to suppose that we know

what the period of revolution of the " outermost circle " is. It

must have a movement, because the world has a ^xn ," that Plato

supposes its revolution to explain any particular appearance is

very unlikely. We can only say that, since the periods of the

planets become steadily longer as we advance farther from the

" centre," the period of the outermost circle is presumably a very

long one. 8

Plato's own doctrine would seem, thus, to be neither that of the

motionless earth, nor that of Timaeus, nor the full-blown Coper-

nicanism which some modern admirers have read into him. He

appears to attribute one motion only to the earth, a motion of

revolution round an invisible centre (not round the sun), with a

period of twenty-four hours. The important point is not that he

has a well-worked-out hypothesis, but that his scientific instinct

has seized the fundamental point that a true mechanic of the

heavens must start with a revolving earth ; this, no doubt, is his

reason for dissatisfaction with the scheme of Eudoxus, beautiful

as it is. Another inference of first-rate importance is this. We

clearly have no right to assume that the view ascribed to Plato

by Theophrastus and apparently presupposed in the Laws was

arrived at after the completion of the Timaeus. We have seen that

the Timaeus and the Laws must have been in progress simultane-

ously. And it is hardly credible that if Plato had suddenly made so

1 Epin., I.e., &yuv roi>s AXXovs, #s 7^ AvOpd-rrois tpatvotr &v 6\Lya TOVTUV eldo<nv.

If it only " appears so " to the " beginner," of course it is not so. Burnet's

insertion of OUK before Aytov only makes the meaning needlessly plain

at the expense of Plato's little jest at the blunder of disciples like Aristotle,

who had committed themselves to the Eudoxian view. There seems to be a

deliberate rejoinder in Aristot. Met. 10736 8, 5 ntv otiv TrXetous rCiv (pepoptvwv

cti <f>opa.l (f>avep6v rols ical jjifTplus Tj/x/i^ois* irXe/ous y&p ^Kaarof faptrou /uas r&v

TrXavwjjLtvwv farpuv just what the Laws denies.

* This interpretation of the testimony of Theophrastus is that of Schia-

parelh, C. Ritter, and Burnet. However we understand his evidence, it is

far too weighty to be simply set aside, nor do I think Mr. Cornford's ingenious

attempt to minimize its significance (Plato's Cosmology, p. 128) happy. I

think it more likely that Plato has deliberately chosen for his fifth-century

astronomer phraseology which, except that it ascribes movement of some

kind to the earth, is left studiously vague.

452 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

startling a change in his doctrine during the time when Aristotle

was a member of the Academy, Aristotle should have told us nothing

about the fact. It would have been " grist to his mill " if he could

have urged against the doctrine of a moving earth that Plato had

been forced to hold two inconsistent theories about its motion

in the course of a few years. Presumably, then, Plato held astro-

nomical views more developed than those which he has ascribed

to Timaeus at the very time he was writing the dialogue. This

should help us to appreciate Plato's real regard for historical

verisimilitude and make us on our guard against over-readiness to

suppose that all the theories of his Pythagorean are such as he

would find himself satisfied with.

Timaeus next adds that the Creator further made a number of

created gods who, unlike the stars, only show themselves when

they choose, Oceanus, Tethys, Phorcys, Cronus, Rhea, and their

offspring. We have no evidence for the existence of these beings

except that of persons who claim to be their descendants, but we

may fairly suppose these persons to know their own pedigrees

(^od-e). This is, of course, satire, not, as has been sometimes sup-

posed, a concession for safety's sake to the religion of the State.

Most of the figures named belong to the cosmogonies of poets like

Orpheus and Hesiod, not to the Attic cultus, and the ironical

remark that a man must always be believed about his own family-

tree is aimed at poets like Orpheus and Musaeus. Timaeus, as a

scientific Pythagorean, has his own reasons for not wishing to be

confounded with the Orphics. The Creator now addresses the

created gods, explaining that whatever is his own immediate work

is imperishable. Hence for the making of creatures which are to

be perishable, he will employ these created gods as his intermediaries

(4ia-d). He then himself makes immortal souls, in the same

number as the stars, of the " seconds " and " thirds " of the mixture

from which he has made the souls of the world and the stars. Each

soul is conducted to its star and made to take a perspective view

of the universe and its structure. It is then explained to the souls

that in due process of time they are all to be born as men in the

various " instruments of time " (i.e. the planets). 1 If they live

well in the body, they will return to their native stars ; if less well,

they will have to be reincarnated in the bodies of women ; if that

lesson is insufficient, they will be reborn as various brutes, and

will never return to their " star " until they have first climbed up

the scale from brute to man again. 2 The souls are then sown, like

seeds, in the various planets, while the created gods fashion bodies

1 The souls sown in the planets are not, of course, to be future inhabitants

of the earth. They are to inhabit the planets where they are " sown."

Timaeus is alluding to the Pythagorean belief that there are men and animals

in the planets as well as on earth.

a The connexion of a soul with its " star " has nothing to do with either

planetary or zodiacal astrology. The thought is simply that there is a corre-

spondence one-to-one between the " gods " and the human denizens of the

universe.

TIMAEUS AND CRITIAS 458

for them and any additions to their souls which may be required for

their life in the body (410-42^).

We are next told something of the way in which this work was

done, but the story is only given in outline, with the necessary

warning that, since it has to do with the mutable, L can only be

tentative (420-470). In making the human body, the gods first

constructed the head as a suitable dwelling-place for the immortal

soul, which, of course, like the soul of the KOCT/XO?, contains the

two circles of the Same and the Other. (This means that Timaeus

rightly accepts the discovery of Alcmaeon of Crotona that the brain

is the central organ in the sensory-motor system.) The skull was

therefore made spherical, as the body of the /cooyxos is spherical.

The trunk and the limbs were added for the safety and convenience

of the head (440-456). The organ of sight was then constructed. It

is literally a ray of sunlight dwelling within the body and issuing

out through the pupil. We thus see by an actual long-distance

contact of this ray, which is a real, though temporary, member

of the body, with the visible object the theory explained by

Empedocles in verses cited by Aristotle. To this account of vision

Timaeus appends an explanation of sleep as produced by an equable

diffusion of this internal " fire " when darkness prevents its issuing

out to join its kindred fire outside us, and a brief account of mirror-

vision (456-460). His main points at present are, however, of a

different kind. He dwells on the thought that the effect of the

conjunction of the soul with a body which is always " flowing,"

giving off waste material and taking in fresh, is to throw the move-

ments of the " circles " in the soul into complete disorder. The

movement of the circle of the Same is temporarily arrested, and

that of the circle of the Other rendered irregular. Hence the

thoughtlessness and confused perception and fancy of our infancy

and childhood. It is only when the " flow " of the body becomes

less turbid, as waste and repair come to balance one another in

adult life, that the movements of the " circles " recover from the

init al disturbance of birth, and men come to discretion and intelli-

gence, and then only with the aid of " right education " (43^440).

Also, we must be careful to remember the distinction between

true causes and mere subsidiary causes (rwaCria). Any account

we give of the mechanism of vision, or any other function, is a mere

statement about the subsidiary or instrumental cause. The true

cause, in every case, is to be sought in the good or end a function

subserves. Thus the real end for which we have been given eyes,

is that the spectacle of .the heavenly motions may lead us to note

the uniformity and regularity of days, nights, months, and years,

and that reflection on this uniformity may lead us to science and

philosophy, and so make the revolutions of the " circles in the

head " themselves regular and uniform. And the same thing is

true of hearing ; its real purpose is not that we may learn to tune

the strings of a lyre, but that we may learn to make our own think-

ing and living a spiritual melody (460-470).

454 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

We next come to one of the most important and character-

istic sections of the discourse an outline of the principles of a

geometrical science of nature. So far we have been talking about

the work done by Intelligence in the construction of the sensible

world. But this world is a " mixed " product, born of Intelligence

(1/01)5) and Necessity (avdyKrj), and we must now describe the con-

tribution of Necessity to the whole. The relation between In-

telligence and Necessity, which is also called the " errant " or

" irregular " cause (TrXavw/xcVr; ama), is that " for the most part "

Intelligence is superior (apxw, 480), Necessity is servant, or slave,

but a willing slave ; Intelligence " persuades " (TTCI^CI) Necessity.

The special reason given for now studying the working of Necessity

is that, unless we do so, we can give no account of the origin of the

" four roots " of Empedocles, the " stuff " we have so far been

assuming as there for God to form a world of. Hitherto no one has

explained the structure of these bodies ; they have been treated as

the ABC (crroixcta, elementa, 486) of things, though, as we shall see,

they do not even deserve to be called syllables. We are now to

analyse them back into something very much more primitive, and

we are carefully reminded again that, from the nature of the case,

our analysis can at best be tentative and " likely."

The sections which are now to follow are marked by Timaeus

as the most original and important part of his whole cosmology.

We shall see that they serve to connect the two main currents of

scientific thought, the biological and the mathematical, by providing

a geometrical construction for the " corpuscles " of the four

" elements " which the biologist Empedocles had treated as the

" simples " of his system. The four types of body thus con-

structed are then, in the Empedoclean fashion, treated as the

immediate units from which the various tissues and secretions of

the living body are formed by chemical composition. The result

is thus that Timaeus, in the spirit of Descartes, offers us an anatomy

and physiology in which the organism appears as an elaborate

kinematical system ; natural science is thus reduced in principle,

as Descartes and Spinoza held it ought to be, to geometry. Plato is

not, of course, very strictly committed by the details of speculations

which he repeatedly says are provisional, but it is clear that he is in

sympathy with the general attitude known to-day in biology as

mechanistic. The human organism, as he conceives it, is a machine

directed and controlled by mind or intelligence, but the machine

itself is made of the same ultimate constituents as other machines

and the workings of it follow the same laws as those of the rest.

It is important, if we are to approach the exposition in the

right spirit, to understand what is meant by the initial distinction

between the part of Intelligence and that of Necessity in the cosmic

system. We must be careful not to confuse the " necessity " of

which Plato is speaking with the principle of order and law. Law

and order are precisely the features of the world which he assigns

to intelligence as their source ; we are carefully told that necessity

TIMAEUS AND CRITIAS 455

is something disorderly and irregular, the irXay^v^ atria, a

name probably derived, as Burnet has suggested, 1 from the use

of the disrespectful name TrXa^reu, " tramps/' " vagabonds/' for

the heavenly bodies which seem at first sight to roam about the

sky with no settled abode. Thus the Necessity of the Timaeus is

something quite different from the Necessity of the myth of Er,

or of the Stoics, which are personifications of the principle of rational

law and order. On the other hand, Necessity is plainly not meant

to be an independent, evil principle, for it is plastic to intelligence ;

mind " for the most part " is said to " persuade it " ; its function

is to be instrumental to the purposes of i/oGs. 2 The reason for

introducing it into the story seems to be simply that it is impossible

in science to resolve physical reality into a complex of rational laws

without remainder. In the real world there is always, over and

above " law/' a factor of the " simply given " or " brute fact," not

accounted for and to be accepted simply as given. It is the business

of science never to acquiesce in the merely given, to seek to " ex-

plain " it as the consequence, in virtue of rational law, of some

simpler initial " given." But, however far science may carry this

procedure, it is always forced to retain some element of brute fact,

the merely given, in its account of things. It is the presence in

nature of this element of the given, this surd or irrational as it

has sometimes been called, which Timaeus appears to be personi-

fying in his language about Necessity. That " mind persuades

necessity " is just an imaginative way of saying that by the analysis

of the given datum we always can rationalize it further ; we never

come to a point at which the possibility of " explanation " actually

ceases. But the " irrational " is always there, in the sense that

explanation always leaves behind it a remainder which is the " not

yet explained." When we have followed the exposition a little

further, we shall discover that in the last resort this element of the

irreducible and given turns out to be exactly what Professor Alex-

ander has called the " restlessness of space-time/' But, unlike

Professor Alexander, Plato does not believe that the restlessness of

space-time is enough to account for its elaboration into more and

more rationally articulated systems ; left to itself, it would be

1 Greek Philosophy, Part I., 341-346. The " necessity " of the Timaeus

is not " uniform sequence." So far as sequences are " uniform/' the uni-

formity is due to the " persuasion " of necessity by voOf ; that is, the uni-

formity is an effect and sign of the presence of rational purpose. It is the

exceptional departures, the " sports " in nature, which we are to account for

by the presence of a TrXavw/x^ry alrta. More generally, " necessity " explains

why the course of actual fact only conforms approximately to the formulae of

kinematics. The " necessity " of the dialogue is thus precisely what Aristotle

has taught us to call " contingency."

* This excludes the superficial identification of " necessity " with an evil

" material principle." The doctrine that " matter " is the source of evil is

wholly un-Platonic. Historically, of course, the AvdyKTj of Timaeus connects

directly with the facipov of early Pythagoreanism. It is the element of

indetermination in events, the element which a Spinozistic conception of the

universe persists in ignoring.

456 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

merely restless ; order and structure are the work of the mind of

God, in whose hands necessity is plastic.

We find, then, that we need to revise our first account of the

sensible world. We had already spoken of two things which need

to be carefully discriminated, the intelligible archetype and its

visible copy. We have now to take into account a third concept

which we shall find obscure enough, that of the " receptacle "

(vTroSo^) or "matrix" (eV^aycioi/) in which "becoming" goes on.

This receptacle or matrix of process cannot be fire or water

or any of the things which the earliest philosophers had selected

as the primary "boundless." Experience shows that these are

constantly passing into one another ; there is now fire where there

was water, or water where there was fire. The various bodies are

mutable and impermanent ; what remains permanent under all

the variations is the region or room or place where they arise and

vanish. This is there and self-same under all the processes of

change, and has no form or structure of its own, precisely because

it is its indifference to all which makes the appearance of all within

it possible. We find it hard to apprehend, because it cannot be

discerned by sense ; it must be thought of, but can only be thought

of by a sort of " bastard reflection " (Xoytor^w TU/I vd0u>, 526), i.e.

by systematic negation, the denying of one definite determination

after another. It is, in fact, " place " (x<*>P a )- We may, incident-

ally, remind ourselves that each of our three principles is appre-

hended in a special way. We can satisfy ourselves of the reality

of the forms by considering that if there were only sensible objects,

science and true belief would be the same ; whereas it is clear they

are not. Science can only be acquired by learning (didayrf) a

true belief may be produced by " persuasion/' appeal to our

emotions ; what we know can always be justified to the intellect

(r6 ph &et per' dAr?0oi7 Ao'yov), a true belief not always ; we cannot

be argued out of the one, we can be persuaded out of the other.

Since science and true belief thus differ, their objects must be

different. 1 (Thus Timaeus has nothing to say in the one passage

in which he discusses the forms which differs from the presentation

of them in the Phaedo.) Sensible things we apprehend, of course,

by sight and the rest of our senses ; " place," as we have just said,

by a curious kind of thinking (480-520).

If we try to picture the condition of things " before " the intro-

duction of ordered structure, we have to think of the " receptacle "

1 There is an almost absolute equivalence of Timaeus' analysis with that

of Whitehead in his Principles of Natural Knowledge, and Concept of Nature.

Whitehead's " objects " have exactly the formal character of the !5foi; his

account of the " ingredience of objects into events " corresponds almost ver-

bally with that given by Timaeus of the determination of the various regions

of the " receptacle " by the " ingress " and " egress " of the impresses of the

forms. The " receptacle " itself only differs from " passage " in being called

" space " and not " space-time." If we try to picture " passage " as it would

be if there were only " events " and no " objects " ingredient in them, we get

precisely the sort of account Timaeus gives of the condition of the ' ' receptacle ' *

before God introduced order and structure into it.

TIMAEUS AND CRITIAS 457

or matrix, just described as place as agitated everywhere by irre-

gular disturbances, random vibratory movements, and exhibiting

in various regions mere rude incipient " traces " (h vr i) of the

definite structure we know as characteristic of the various forms of

body. (Thus; its general character is exactly that of the " bound-

less " of Anaximander, agitated by the "eternal motion, 1 ' before

the " opposites " have been "sifted out" and a xfo/toi; formed.

This is, in fact, pretty clearly the historical starting-point

from which Pythagorean cosmology had taken its departure). 1

The first step God takes towards introducing determination and

order into this indeterminate " happening " is the construction

of bodies of definite geometrical structure. This brings us to

the doctrine of the geometrical structure of the " corpuscles "

of the " four roots " which Empedoclean biology wrongly treats

as simple ultimates. The construction is effected by making a

correspondence between the "four roots" and the originally

Pythagorean doctrine of the regular solids which can be inscribed

in the sphere (530-560). There are five and only five distinct types

of regular solid, and four of them can be built up geometrically

by starting with two ultimate simple types of triangle, which are

the most beautiful, and therefore the most appropriate, of all.

These two triangles are the ultimate " elements " of the Timaeus.

One of them is the isosceles right-angled triangle, called by the

Pythagoreans the " half-square " ; the other is the triangle which

can be obtained by dividing the equilateral triangle into six smaller

triangles by drawing the perpendiculars from the angular points

on the opposite sides, or less symmetrically, by dividing the equi-

lateral triangle into two by a single such perpendicular. (Hence

the Pythagorean name for it, the " half-triangle/') Timaeus does

not explain what the peculiar beauty of these triangles is, but we

know independently that it lies in the fact that the ratios of the angles

of the two triangles are the simplest possible. Those of the " half-

square " have the ratios i : i : 2, those of the " half-triangle " the

ratios 1:2:3. From the former, by a symmetrical arrangement

of four such triangles about a centre of position we get the square,

and from a proper arrangement of six square faces, the cube. A

similar symmetrical arrangement of six triangles of the second type

gives us the equilateral triangle, and there are three regular solids

which can be made with equilateral triangles as their faces the

tetrahedron, the octahedron, the icosahedron. For physical reasons,

we take the cube as the form appropriate to a corpuscle of earth,

the tetrahedron as that of a particle of fire, the other two as the

forms of the particles of air and water respectively. There is still a

fifth regular solid, the dodecahedron, which has twelve pentagons

as its faces ; but this can be constructed from neither of the ele-

mentary triangles, and has a different part to play. God employed

it (556) "for the whole, adorning it with constellations. " (This

1 For the historical connexion of Pythagorean cosmology with the scheme

of Anaximander see E.G.Ph.* 108 ff., Greek Philosophy, Part I., <x 2.

458 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

out the celestial sphere for purposes of astronomical description by

dividing it into twelve pentagonal regions, exactly as a leather ball

is made by stitching together twelve pentagonal pieces of leather. 1 )

It follows from the theory that a corpuscle of one of the " roots "

can only be broken up along the edges of the triangles from which

it has been built up. Hence, since earth is formed from a special

type of triangle, it cannot be " transmutable " with any of the other

three, but they are all transmutable with one another. Timaeus

then proceeds to give a number of equations which determine the

equivalences between the corpuscles of these "roots." Into the

physical difficulties created by this table of equivalences we cannot

enter here. It must be enough to have seen that the general pro-

gramme contemplated is precisely that reduction of all physics to

applied geometry and nothing else which is equally characteristic

of Descartes.

We next have an attempt to specify the most important

" varieties " of each of the four types of body and the " chemical

compounds " they form with one another, and to account for the

sensible qualities of all these bodies by reference to their geo-

metrical structure, which must be passed over here (580-68^). Its

most interesting feature is a long psycho-physical account of the

conditions of pleasure-pain (64^-^656), in terms of the depletion-

repletion formula. The " unmixed " pleasures of sense are brought

under the formula by the hypothesis that they are sudden and

appreciable " repletions " of a " depletion " which has been too

gentle and gradual to be propagated to the " seat of consciousness."

With the next section of the dialogue we pass definitely from

physics to anatomy, physiology, and medicine (690-876). Again,

it must be sufficient in this volume to pass over the details lightly.

The main point is that the organism has been constructed through-

out to minister to the soul. To fit the soul for its embodied life it

had to receive two temporary and inferior additions, the " spirited "

and " concupiscent " " parts " or " forms " already familiar to us

from the Republic. Each of these has a central " organ " or " seat,"

just as the " rational " part has its seat in the brain ; " spirit " is

lodged in the thorax, " appetite " in the lower region of the trunk,

beneath the diaphragm (690-700). In connexion with this least

orderly and disciplined element in the soul, the liver has a specially

important part to play. It is the source of visions and bad dreams

1 The whole of this construction is Pythagorean in origin, as we see by

comparison with the valuable fragment preserved at the end of the Theolo-

gumena Arithmetica from the work of Speusippus on Pythagorean Numbers

(Speusippus, Fr. 4; Diels, Fragmented. Vorsokr.*i. p. 303 ff.], where the relations

silently presupposed by Timaeus between the angles 01 the " half-square "

and " half- triangle " are explained in full. The one point where Timaeus may

be going beyond results reached by the Pythagoreans is in his tacit assumption

that all his five solids and no others can be inscribed in the sphere. Note

that he makes a point of it that Socrates and the others are mathematicians,

and so will follow him easily ($y i).

TIMAEUS AND CRITIAS 459

of all kinds, an& the utterances of the " possessed/ 1 " seers/' and

the like are really due to a disordered liver. They can be inter-

preted by spokesmen (irpo^rai), who are themselves not in the

state of " possession/ 1 and thus given a salutary moral influence

(710-726). The details of the anatomy and physiology have more

interest for the historian of these sciences than for the student of

philosophy, especially since they are all given as tentative and liable

to revision. The most prominent feature of the section is the

elaborate attempt (776-790, Sod-8ie) to account (of course in a

fanciful way) for respiration, the systole and diastole of the heart,

digestion, all together as one vast rhythmical mechanical process

with the double purpose of maintaining the vital heat of the

organism and distributing nourishment through the blood to the

various tissues.

The physiology is followed up by a section on pathology which

makes a curious attempt at a classification of the various known

diseases (82#-86a). The theory could only be properly discussed

in connexion with what we know of other fifth- and fourth-century

speculations on the same subject from the Hippocratean corpus

and other sources. Its most outstanding feature is that it departs

wholly from the lines of the Hippocratean " humoral pathology "

by treating " phlegm " and " bile " not as ingredients of the

organism in its normal state but as unwholesome morbid secretions.

I have tried elsewhere to show reasons for supposing that Plato is

deriving the doctrine from Philistion of Locri, with whom, as we

see from the Epistles, he had made acquaintance at Syracuse, and

that in its main outlines it is in general accord with what we know

to have been the medical theory of Philolaus, though there are

points of difference. If this is so, we can understand why this

particular medical theory should be expounded by the Locrian

Timaeus. In any case, we must not suppose that Plato has in-

vented an amateur pathology of his own and is teaching it dog-

matically. He will simply be following what he regards as respect-

able specialist authority.

The pathology of the body leads up to the pathology of the soul

(866-876), and this to some regulations of physical and mental

hygiene (870-90^). Undesirable moral propensities are due very

largely to physical constitutional defects ; e.g. undue propensity

to sexual irregularities is largely of physiological origin. The

other chief cause of " badness " is education in bad social traditions.

Hence Timaeus infers not quite consistently with his own earlier

insistence on personal responsibility that those who begot and

educated the transgressor are really more to blame than the trans-

gressor himself. We must remember that he is, among other things,

a medical man, and that " the profession " are prone to views of

this kind. Plato may well be treating his speaker with a certain

touch of irony when he makes the moral theory of Timaeus a little

inconsistent with his mental pathology.

In laying down rules of hygiene, the supreme object we should

460 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

aim at is the correction of any disproportion between the body and

the soul which animates it. This disproportion is dangerous to

both body and soul. The soul which is too big for its " pigmy

body " actually wears the body out, as we see in the case of so

many keen political and scientific controversialists ; when the body

is too robust for its soul, a man too often makes the soul dull and

slow by ministering to the body's clamant appetites. The rule

should be that neither body nor soul should be exercised exclusively.

The student must take care to attend to his physical condition, or

he will suffer for it in soul as well as body. The best kind of

" motion " by which to exercise the body is active muscular

exertion, and the next best easy rhythmical passive motion, like

swinging, riding in a carriage, being rowed on the water. The

worst kind, which may only be resorted to in case of absolute

necessity, is the violent production of intestinal motions by drugs

and purges (Syc-Sgd).

A still more important topic is the hygiene of the mind which is

to rule and direct the movements of the body. Timaeus cannot

relevantly enter on a systematic discussion of the principles of

education, but he lays down the general principle that our intelli-

gence is the divine thing in us, and the real " guardian spirit "

(8at/xo)v) of each of us. It has been truly said that man, whose

divine part resides in the head, is like a tree with its root not in the

earth, but in the sky (900). The rule of healthy living for the soul

is that this divine thing in us should " think thoughts immortal

and divine," and that the merely human " parts " of the soul should

" worship " and " tend " it. The true " tendance " of any creature

consists in providing it with its appropriate food and " exercise "

(iun?<ri9, QOC), and the " exercise " appropriate to the rational

soul is thus " the thoughts and revolutions of the whole." The

end of life is to correct the " revolutions in the head " and bring

them once more into correspondence with the " tunes and revolu-

tions " of the world-soul, in whose image they were made at first

(cpa-d).

The story closes with a development which should not be taken

as seriously as has been done by some interpreters. Timaeus, we

remember, had incorporated in his narrative the old fancy that the

first men were directly sprung from the soil. Hence his physiology

has taken no account of the reproductive system. This, we are

now told, was only wanted in the second generation, when the

second-best of the original " men " came to be reborn as women.

He gives an unmistakably playful account of the modifications

which had to be introduced into the physiological scheme to suit

the new situation (goe-gid), and then adds more briefly that the

lower animals in general were also derived by degeneration from

the original human pattern, the deformation being greater or less

as the souls which were to tenant the various bodies had fallen

more or less short of virtue and wisdom in their first life (91^-926).

Nothing is said here of the hell and purgatory of the eschatological

TIMAEUS AND CRITIAS 461

myths of the Gorgias, Phaedo, Republic. Presumably the scientific

Pythagoreans of the middle of the fifth century regarded them as

no more than edifying mythology, exactly as the author of the

so-called Timaeus Locrus regards Timaeus' own statements about

metamorphosis. We should pretty certainly be wrong if we took

this part of the discourse as a serious speculation on the part of

Plato about a possible evolution d rebours. Timaeus himself is

probably meant to be less than half in earnest ; as in the tale of

Aristophanes in the Symposium, we are really dealing with a playful

imitation of the speculation of Empedocles about the " whole-

natured " and double-sexed forms with which evolution in the

" period of strife " began. What Plato himself thinks of all this

is sufficiently indicated when we are told in the Politicus that the

" earth-born " men and the " age of Cronus " do not belong to our

" half of the cycle," i.e. they belong to fairy-tale, not to history.

Here our story comes at last to an end. We have now told

the whole tale of the birth of this sensible world, " a visible living

creature, modelled on that which is intelligible, a god displayed to

sense " (920). x

The Critias calls for no special consideration. Its declared

purpose is to relate in detail the story of the defeat of the Atlantid

kings, of which Critias had given the bare outline in the Timaeus.

It remains, however, a bare fragment. Critias describes the topog-

raphy of Attica and Athens as they were before the process of

denudation which has reduced the country to a mere rocky skeleton

(1096-111^), and the happy condition of the inhabitants (ine-ii2c).

He then gives a much longer account of the island of Atlantis and

its kings, the descendants of the god Posidon, their institutions,

and their wonderful engineering works (1180-120^), and is about

to relate how their hearts were lifted up with pride in their wealth

and power, and how Zeus resolved to bring them into judgment,

when the fragment breaks off, just as Zeus is about to declare his

purpose to the assembled gods. The chief things which call for

notice are the clear-headed way in which Plato has grasped the

effects of gradual geological denudation on Attica, 2 and the special

stress he lays on the marvellous skill of the Atlantids in naval

engineering. The description may have been inspired by a re-

collection of what had actually been effected at Syracuse, 3 but the

1 clK&v roG VOTJTOU, 0e6s alffQrjrfo. In this sentence J/OT/TOU must not be taken,

against all the rules of grammar, as masculine agreeing with an " understood "

0cov, since the word 0e6s has not yet occurred in the sentence. VOTJTOV is

neuter, and we must either understand ftioi/ from the preceding $ov t or pos-

sibly take rb vorjr6v substantially. The v.l. TTOITJTOV found in A is inferior to

the vulgate, which is also the better supported reading, as it occurs in both

F and Y.

2 But it is said (Rivaud, Timte, p. 239) that much of the denudation of

Attica ascribed by Plato to the natural cataclysm mentioned at Timaeus 2$d

and Critias H2a is actually the work of man.

8 Plato is thinking also, perhaps, of the conversion of the Piraeus into a

great naval harbour, but the immediate source of the description is probably

what he had seen himself at Syracuse.

462 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

works ascribed to the mythical kings more than sustain comparison

with the greatest achievements of Roman architects and engineers.

The whole account illustrates Plato's exceptional knowledge of the

technical arts and his high estimate of their possibilities. We may

be sure that, if the story had been completed, one of its main points

would have been the triumph of patriotism and sound moral over

technical skill.

The conception of the " purpose of Zeus " seems to be an echo

from epic poetry. It is hardly a mere accident that the last com-

plete sentence of the fragment recalls the version of the Trojan story

given in the Cypna, where the origin of the great war is traced to

the plan of Zeus for the prevention of over-population. There may

be some significance in the fact that Zeus is said to summon the

divine council to his " most honourable abode " in the centre of the

universe. 1 Since one of the names given by those Pythagoreans

who believed in a " central fire " to this luminary was Atos <uA.a*r;,

this looks as though Critias meant to hint at that astronomical

doctrine. Timaeus, as we have seen, makes the " centre " empty.

See further :

BURNKT. Greek Philosophy, Part J., 335-349 ; Platonism (1928),

c. 7 .

RITTKK, C. Platon, ii., 258-287 al. ; Platans Dialog?, 98-158 ;

Neue Untersuchungen uber Platon, 174182.

LEVI, A. // Concetto del Tempo nella Filosofia di Platone. (Turin,

N.D.)

STEWART, J. A. Plato's Doctrine of Ideas, 101-105 ; Myths of

Plato, 259-297 (The Timaeus), 457-469.

DIES, A. Autour de Platon, ii., 522-603.

TAYLOR, A. E. A Commentary on Plato's Timaeus. (Oxford,

1928) ; Plato, Timaeus and Critias (translated) (1929).

RIVAUD, A. Platon, Time'e, Critias. (Paris, 1925.)

FRIEDLANDER, P. Platon; Eidos, Paideia, Dialogos (1928).

Excursus II. (on the city of Atlantis).

RAEDER, H. Platons philosophische Entivichelung, 374-394.

NATORP, P. Platons Ideenlehre, 338-358.

BAEUMKER, C. Das Problem der Materie in dev griechischen

Philosophic, 115-188.

MARTIN, T. H. Etudes suv le Time'e de Platon. (Paris, 1841.)

ROBIN, L. Etudes sur la signification et la place de la physique

dans la philosophic de Platon. (Paris, 1919.)

ROBIN, L. Platon, c. v.

CORNFORD, F. M. Plato's Cosmology (Timaeus translated with

commentary, Cambridge, 1937).

1 Critias i2ic 2-4. The sentence adds to the case for my view that the

astronomy of Timaeus is not Plato's, own.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE LAWS AND EPINOMIS

THE Laws is not only the longest of all Plato's writings ;

it also contains his latest and ripest thought on the subjects

which he had all through his life most at heart ethics, educa-

tion, and jurisprudence. Plato's services to the theory of educa-

tion, in particular, have usually been grossly underrated, from an

inexcusable neglect of the very thorough treatment given to it in

what he probably himself regarded as his most important work.

His theology, again, has often been misconceived in modern times,

because the tenth book of the Laws is the only place in his works

where it is systematically expounded. This neglect of so noble a

work is perhaps to be explained by two considerations. In one

respect the Laws makes a greater demand on the reader than any

other Platonic writing. The dramatic element is reduced to a

minimum ; if one does not care for the subject-matter of the book,

there is little in its manner to attract. To all intents and purposes,

the work is a monologue, interrupted only by formulae of assent

or requests for further explanation. Further, the purpose of the

whole is severely practical, and will not appeal to a reader who cares

more for metaphysics and science than for morals and politics.

More than any other work of Plato, the Laws stands in direct rela-

tion to the political life of the age in which it was composed and is

meant to satisfy a pressing felt need.

In the last twenty years of Plato's life it was becoming more and

more obvious that the old city-states which had been the centres of

Hellenic spiritual life had had their day. Athens herself had be-

come a second-rate power ever since the collapse of the great Syra-

cusan expedition, as Plato knew only too well. Sparta, to whom

the hegemony had passed at the end of the Decelean war, had proved

wholly unfitted for such a post, and had been crushed, in a way

from which she never recovered, by the brilliant successes of

Epaminondas, which made Thebes for a few years a power of the

first order. Meanwhile the very existence of Hellenic civilization

was endangered by the encroachments of Persia in the East and

Carthage in the West. It was clear that if civilization of the Hellenic

type was to hold its own, none of the older city-states was in a condi-

tion to become its centre. We know now that the historical solu-

tion of the problem was to be provided by the rise of the Mace-

donian monarchy and the achievements of Philip and Alexander,

463

464 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

But the work of Philip was only in the beginning in Plato's last

years ; his appearance south of Thermopylae as the ally of Thebes

against Phocis, the first manifest sign that a new power had

succeeded to the hegemony of the Hellenic states, did not take place

until the year after Plato's death. In the meantime, the most

striking feature of the situation was the founding of new cities

or the revival of old ones. Epaminondas' foundation of Megalo-

polis as a centre for Arcadia is a good example of the one process,

his restoration of Messene an equally good example of the other ;

and it is pertinent to remember that, according to Greek ideas, the

first thing to be done in such a situation was to provide the new or

revived community with a complete constitution and fundamental

law. It was naturally the practice to call in the aid of experts in

" politics " as advisers in the task. In the fifth century, Pericles

had employed Protagoras in this way, to give advice on the laws

to be made for Thurii ; in the fourth, the Academy was constantly

being asked, as a recognized society of experts in jurisprudence, to

do the same sort of work. Plato himself is said to have been re-

quested to legislate for Megalopolis, and, though he declined, work

of the same kind was done by his associates for many foundations. 1

Hence it was eminently desirable that men contemplating the

probability of being called on to "legislate," should be provided

with an example of the way in which the work should be gone about,

and the Laws is meant to furnish just such an example. The

assumed situation is that a new city is to be founded, and that an

Athenian is invited to lend his assistance in the work. The partic-

ular situation assumed, of a city to be founded in Crete on the site

of a prehistoric town, is presumably fictitious, especially if, as

Wilamowitz has asserted, the topographical details show that Plato

was not really acquainted with actual Cretan conditions ; a

fictitious situation will serve as well as a real one to illustrate the

principles which have to be enforced.

The date of composition of the work cannot be very precisely

fixed. But we may readily fix a terminus a quo. One of the chief

principles on which Plato insists is that the legislator has not really

done his work when he has merely enunciated an enactment and

provided it with a " sanction " in the form of a penalty for non-

observance. This is like the method of an empiric " slave " doctor,

treating other slaves ; he merely orders a prescription to be followed

under the threat of consequences if it is neglected. A great physician

treating an intelligent freeman tries to enlist his patient in the

work of the cure by explaining to him the principles on which the

treatment rests. In the same way, a legislator should try to enlist

1 See the list of active " law-givers " among Plato's pupils in Plutarch

(Adv. Colotem, n?6c-d). " Plato sent Aristonymus to the Arcadians, Phormio

to Elis, Menedemus to Pyrrha. Eudoxus and Aristotle wrote laws for Cnidus

and Stagirus. Alexander asked Xenocrates for advice about kingship ; the

man who was sent to Alexander by the Greek inhabitants of Asia and did most

to incite him to undertake his war on the barbarians was Delius of Ephesus,

an associate of Plato." Cf. D.L. iii., 23, for the request from Megalopolis.

THE LAWS AND EPINOMIS 465

the sympathies of decent men on the side of the law by prefixing

to his whole legislation and to the several main divisions of it

" proems " or " preambles'* explaining the aims of the legislation

and the reasons why its enactments are what they are, and why the

penalties for transgression are what they are (Laws 719^-722^). Now

in Epistle iii. 316^, Plato refers to himself as having been occupied

with Dionysius at Syracuse upon " preludes " or " preambles " to

the laws to be given to the cities they were proposing to form into a

constitutional monarchy. Thus we may reasonably infer that the

conception of legislation characteristic of the Laws was suggested

by Plato's personal experience of the Syracusan situation. The

occasion to which Epistle iii. refers is probably that of Plato's last

visit to Syracuse in 361/60, though it may conceivably be that of

the visit of 367/6. In either case, it is unlikely that Plato would

have the leisure to plan a work of the scope of our Laws before 360,

when his direct connexion with the affairs of Syracuse was over.

Such a work would necessarily involve a great deal of thought and

time and may well have occupied Plato more or less continuously

for the remaining years of his life, though the one actual allusion to

a dateable event seems to be the mention (638^) of a victory of

Dionysius II over the Locrians, probably to be assigned to the

year 356.

The personnel of the dialogue, if we can call it one, is exceedingly

simple. There are three characters an Athenian, left anonymous,

who is the main speaker, and two minor characters, Megillus, u

Spartan, and Clinias, a Cretan. All of them are old men ; of the

Athenian we learn that he has astronomical and mathematical

knowledge, is regarded by the others as a highly suitable person

to give advice on matters of jurisprudence and political science, and

that he has had personal experience of association with a " tyrant "

(71 ia). Thus his intellectual qualifications are those of a member

of the Academy, and his personal experiences are modelled on

Plato's own, and to that extent we may fairly take him as standing

for Plato, though we have no reason to suppose that he is drawn

with any deliberate intention of self -portraiture. All we learn of

the others is that the Spartan belongs to a family in which the office

of proxenus of Athens is hereditary, and that the Cretan is connected

by blood with the famous medicine-man Epimenides (6426, d).

This is meant to account for the unusual readiness of both to learn

from an Athenian. When the work opens we find the three old

men engaged in a general conversation about the merits and purpose

of the institutions of the traditional legislators of Sparta and

Cnossus, Lycurgus and Minos. They propose to continue their

conversation as they walk to the cave of Dicte, the legendary birth-

place of Zeus. The full situation is only disclosed at the end of the

third book (jQ2b-d). It then appears that the Cretans have re'

solved to resettle the site of a decayed city ; the making of the

necessary arrangements has been left to the citizens of Cnossus,

who have devolved it upon a commission of ten. Clinias, the head

466 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

of this commission, proposes to take the Athenian and Spartan into

consultation as advisers about the legislation and the constitution

generally. We have already incidentally heard that the time of

the year is midsummer, so that the long day will suffice for a full

discussion.

The argument of the first three books may be regarded as

introductory. Plato winds his way very gradually into his subject,

advancing almost imperceptibly from a problem of ethics, through

educational theory, to the consideration of strictly political and

juristic matter, and does not reveal his full purpose until the pre-

paratory positions have been thoroughly secured. This method is

very characteristic, and it is unfortunate that some modern readers

should have appreciated it so little as to speculate about the possi-

bility that the whole arrangement is due to the piecing together of

disconnected papers by an editor. I trust that the brief analysis

which follows will reveal the real march of the argument as far too

carefully studied to be the result of a well-meant blunder.

(Book I.) What is the central purpose of the institutions of

Lycurgus and Minos ? The Spartan and Cretan agree that their

law-givers have discovered the fundamental truth that, under all

disguises, the brute hard fact about the life of a city is that it is a

" war to the knife " with all rivals ; almost in Hobbes's phrase,

independent cities are in a state of nature towards one another, and

the state of nature is a state of real but undeclared war (jro/U/iog

aKYjpvKTos). Hence the supreme good for a city is victory in this

unremitting warfare, and the business of a citizen is to be, before

everything, a combatant. All the institutions of Sparta and Crete

are therefore rightly directed towards producing the one great

virtue, efficiency in warfare, di/Speta, valour. The Athenian dissents

entirely from this ethic of warfare. The supreme victory for any

community or any man is not victory over the foe without, but

victory over self, that is, the conquest of the worser elements in

the community or the individual soul by the better. And this

victory is not complete when the better elements coerce or expel

the worse ; it is only complete when subjugation is followed by

reconciliation and harmony. Peace, not war, between the com-

ponents of community or individual soul is the best state; it is

with a view to peace that a good legislator must make his enact-

ments. From this point of view, wisdom, sophrosyne, justice, are

the supreme virtues ; mere martial valour will rank only fourth

(6310). Now when we consider the Spartan system of training we

see that all its peculiarities the common meals of coarse fare, the

bodily exercises and hunting, and the rough discipline in general

aim only at fostering the one virtue we have just ranked lowest

among the four of the familiar quadrilateral. And, what is more,

they aim at teaching only the easier and less valuable half of the

one virtue.

True "manliness" or valour does not consist simply in the

power to face danger, pain, and weariness ; it means also being able

THE LAWS AND EPINOMIS 467

to face the seductions of pleasure without giving in to them, and

this is the finer half of the virtue and the harder to learn. But

Megillus himself cannot point to any training provided by the

Spartan system in this part of valour (6346). The explanation is

that the only way to learn to get the better of temptation is to be

made to face it and overcome it. The Spartans act on this prin-

ciple when they teach the young to face peril and pain bravely by

exposing them to them. They avoid making them learn to face

and overcome the seductions of pleasure. Indeed, the perverse

sexual practices which are fostered by the " barrack-room " life

of Sparta have given her a universal bad name (6366) no less than

the relaxed manners of her women (6370).

A chance remark of Megillus in reply to these criticisms provides

the material for the rest of the discussion of Book I. He regards it

as highly creditable to Sparta that its pleasures are so few ; a wine-

party, for example, is an unheard-of thing (6370). This leads the

Athenian into a long discussion of the practice of /xe'tf??, the convivial

use of wine. (As a mere drink with meals wine was used sparingly

at Sparta, as everywhere else in Greece, for the simple reason that

the water is bad.) Some communities wholly prohibit the practice,

others allow anyone who pleases to indulge in it as much as he

pleases and whenever he likes. Both, the Athenian thinks, are

mistaken. A Spartan may urge that the Spartans beat the " wet "

forces in the field whenever they meet them, but we cannot generalize

by enumeration from a few instances. The issue of numberless

engagements goes unrecorded, and we can point to examples on

the other side, such as the victory of the toping Syracusans over

the abstemious Locrians. If we are to judge of wine-drinking or

any other practice we must see what can be made of it under proper

regulation. Now under two important conditions (a) that the

party is presided over by a sober man who is not himself giving way

to the merriment, and (b) that this president is a man of more years

and experience than the rest of the party such a gathering might

have valuable social uses. In vino veritas is true in the sense that

when a man is warmed with wine, he shows himself for what he is

. without disguise. He blurts out thoughts which he would normally

keep to himself, and exhibits tempers he would normally hide. If

there were a drug which would gradually produce groundless fear

and apprehension, as there is not, it would enable us to make a very

safe and easy test of a man's courage. We could make him take

deeper and deeper draughts of it, and watch his success in mastering

his pathological alarms. We should thus be able to do without

risk what, in fact, we can only do by exposing a man to actual risk,

distinguish the more from the less valiant. Wine does give us

such a test of a man's sophrosyne. We can see who forgets himself

least and keeps his modesty best under the artificial removal of

restraints produced by the wine-cup, and, if the party is rightly

conducted, there is no danger that the application of the test will

have serious consequences ; the subject will be a little noisy and

468 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

silly for the time, and that is all. It is much better to learn a man's

weakness from such a slight exposure than to have to discover it

from his exposure to a grave temptation to unlawful love or the like.

The practice might thus be of great value to the magistrate who

wants to know what citizens he can safely trust to come well out

of positions where there is opportunity for gratifying the desire for

unrighteous pleasures. And to the members of the party, of course, .

learning to " drink their wine like gentlemen " does afford a very

real drill in learning to say " no " at the right time. On these

grounds the Athenian advocates the strictly regulated permission

to drink wine convivially. If there is to be no regulation of such

parties, he would like to see wine absolutely prohibited to the young

of both sexes, soldiers in the field, servants, magistrates during

their tenure of office, sea-captains, jurymen and counsellors when

acting in that capacity, and " any person immediately contemplating

the procreation of children " (6740-6). No doubt the main reason

for the discussion is that it serves to illustrate the great principles

that the better half of valour is mastery over one's desires, and that

the true way to master temptation is to stand up to it, not to make

its occurrence artificially impossible.

(Book II.) The sentence just quoted does not occur until the

end of the second book, but before we reach it, Plato has ingeniously

made the problem of the right use of wine lead up to that of the use

of music and poetry as a vehicle of early moral education. There

is still a further valuable social service which may be derived from

a proper use of wine, but before we can say what this service is,

we must ask the question what right education is. To answer this,

we reflect that a child's first experience in life is acquaintance with

pleasure and pain (6530), and that an education in character begins

with learning to feel pleasure and pain about the right things

(ibid. b). To understand how this education is to be got, we consider

that a young creature cannot keep still ; it is always jumping and

shouting (ibid. d). In man, by the gift of God, these boundings and

shoutings can be transformed into tuneful and rhythmical singing

and dancing, and it is with this transformation that education

begins (6540). Thus, by a liberal interpretation, the whole of the

early moral training of the young, which is to begin as soon as they

are sensible to melody and rhythm, can be brought under the rubric

of education in the " choric " art, the art of song accompanied by

the lyre and by the movements of an appropriate ballet faction.

The connexion of the discussion with the previous problem of the

right use of wine is effected by a playful artifice very characteristic

of Plato. It is at first assumed that, since the community as a

whole must take its part in the worship of the Muses, there will be

three choirs at our musical festivals one of the boys and girls, a

second of the younger, and a third of the older, men. But old men

who ale "stiff in the joints" and past the feelings of frolic will

naturally not find it easy to recapture the youthful spirit of gaiety

which will make it natural for them to sing and dance before a

THE LAWS AND EPINOMIS 469

public audience. If they do not enter thoroughly into the spirit

of the thing, there will be an awkwardness and constraint about

their contribution which is specially out of place in a festival of

the deities of graceful achievement. The concession to them of a

proper use of wine would provide just the requisite means of recover-

ing for the time the abandon of youth, and would be appropriate,

when we remember that Dionysus, one of the gods who are patrons

of song and dance, is also the giver of wine. As the argument

develops, we discover that we are not to take the description of the

functions of this " choir of Dionysus " quite literally. What they

are really to do is to select the words and music for the songs of

younger persons. They are, in fact, to be compilers of the official

anthology, and the use of wine is to assist them in this task. The

besetting fault of compilers of anthologies for the young is that

they make their selections much too " grown-up." The middle-

aged compiler's taste is not a safe guide. Plato thinks that if he

came to his work warmed with a few glasses of a generous wine, he

would be more likely to escape this commonly recognized danger

and to make a wiser selection.

The details of the book cannot be discussed here, but it should

be noted that while the treatment proceeds on the same main

principles as those laid down for the employment of music in the

schoolroom in Republic iii., the whole discussion is much richer in

psychological insight ; no account of Plato's views about the moral

influence of music on character can possibly afford to neglect

Laws ii., though many professed accounts commit the fault. For

the general theory of moral education, the most significant utter-

ances are the declaration, emphatically commended by Aristotle,

that the whole problem is to teach the young to " feel pleasure and

pain " rightly (6536) and that " rightly " means " in accord with

the rightly uttered discourse of the law" (659^, Trpos TOV LTTO TOV

VO/AOV \6yov opOov ctpT/fuVov), 1 a sentence which seems to be the

source from which the expression 6p0os Aoyos has got into the

Ethics of Aristotle. We may also note the vigour of the protest

against the view that " the tastes of the audience " are the standard

of excellence in art (6580-6590), and the allusion to the example of

Egypt as proof that it is possible to establish permanent canons of

aesthetic taste (656^, e)*

With Book III., we enter on the main problem of political science,

what a " city " is, and how it arises. To illustrate the way in

1 The whole sentence should be familiar to every one who wants to appreci-

ate Plato's educational theory ; " education (waiSela) is the drawing and

guiding (O\K^ re ical dywyfy of children towards the discourse rightly uttered

by the law and assented to as truly right by the best and oldest men, on the

strength of their experience." The immediate point is that sound musical

education must accustom the young from the first to enjoy what is really

good, so that " young and old alike " have the same tastes in music.

s Note that Plato does not, as is often said, express any approval of the

actual " stereotyped " Egyptian art. He merely appeals to the fact that

Egyptian art has remained stationary as a proof that permanent standard?

are possible.

16

470 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

which historical development of institutions is conditioned, we

imagine what would happen if a natural cataclysm destroyed the

whole of a community with the exception of a few shepherds and

goat-herds who escaped by the very fact that they occupied a re-

mote and inaccessible position. They would be the rudest members

of their society, and thus all the arts of civilization would be

temporarily lost. It would be only very gradually that the chief

industrial arts and the arts of letters would be recovered The

survivors would at first live in isolated family groups in out-of-the-

way places, with little or no means of intercommunication, and

hardly any implements of industry. In the main, when they began

to recover communication with one another, they would live, after

the fashion of nomads, on the produce of their herds, without

accumulating " portable property," and hence without strife and

greed (6790-0). Their rule of life would be " patriarchal," each

head of a house making regulations for his own household, as

Homer has correctly assumed in his account of the pastoral Cyclopes

(6806).

In course of time, men would pass from this " nomad life " to

agriculture, and the inhabiting of some sort of " city/' These

settlements would naturally be made first of all in the uplands, and

agriculture would bring along with it the first rude attempts at

" enclosures " (68i#). For defence against dangers, families would

coalesce in large " houses " (like the " long houses " of the North

American Indians). This would, in time, lead to an Ausgleich

of rules of life. The " large house " would develop a rule of life

out of the various rules each family group brought with it into the

settlement, and we might call this the first rude beginning of legisla-

tion (ibid. b-c). So we should find the first beginnings of sovereignty

at the same stage in the appearance of a sort of " aristocracy " of

headmen, who see that the rule of life is duly observed (6Sid).

When the memory of the cataclysm had sufficiently died out, a

further step would be taken. Men would venture to come down

into the plains and build cities on a larger scale, like Homer's

Ilios (6820). With this development we find ourselves in an age of

rich and powerful monarchs who can engage in serious hostilities.

(It will be noted with how sure an eye Plato discerns the general

character of the Greek " Middle Ages," as they are depicted for us

in the Iliad, which he rightly regards as historical in its representa-

tion of the old days of " chivalry.")

The traditional story of the disasters of the return from Troy

and of the Dorian conquest of the Peloponnese also has a lesson

for us. The narrative of the conflicts between the returning warriors

and the new generation, and of the Dorian invasion, throw light

on the way in which a " world- war " changes the face of history

(682^ ff.). The main point, made at considerable length, is that

the Dorian invaders, if they had only been wise in their genera-

tion, had the opportunity of establishing a State which could have

held its own against all the Oriental monarchies, since they found

THE LAWS AND EPINOMIS 471

themselves in occupation of a new territory, had no ancient tradi-

tions or vested interests to hamper them, and so had a free hand for

legislation. They must have misused their opportunity, for, though

tradition says that they set up a federation of three States Sparta,

Argos, Messene pledged to mutual support, two of the three were in

course of time reduced to subjection or impotence by the third,

and it is only in part, and in the one city of Sparta, that the old

rule of life, which dates from the conquest and was, in fact, dictated

by the position of the Dorians as invaders in the midst of an alien

and hostile population, has lasted on. The great mistake made at

the conquest was that, though the three kingdoms tried to ensure

the permanency of their institutions by a compact that if any attempt

at innovation was made in any one of the three States, the other

two would help to suppress it, they did not understand the all-

important principle that (6gic-d) the permanent well-being of any

State demands the division of the sovereign power between several

parties. Concentration of the plenitude of sovereignty in the

same hands is fatal. If Sparta has retained much of the old in-

stitutions it is because the " division of power " has preserved her.

Providence gave an opening for this, when circumstances led to

the division of the kingship between two houses ; the wisdom of

an ancient statesman this certainly means Lycurgus carried the

principle further, by dividing sovereignty between the kings and

the yepnva-ta \ the process was afterwards completed by the in-

stitution of the ephors. Hence the Spartan constitution is, as

Plato holds that a stable constitution always ought to be, a mixed

one (69 1 -6920).

We learn the same lesson from the history of Persia and that of

Athens. The principle is that, in the last resort, there are two

" matrices " of constitutions personal rule (monarchy), and

democracy (popular rule, 693^). In a sound constitution both

need to be blended. This was the case with the Persians under

Cyrus, as well as with the Athenians of the same time. But in

Persia, the element of popular control has disappeared, and govern-

ment has become capricious autocracy, with the result that Persia

is now only formidable on " paper," since there is no real loyalty

in the subject. At Athens, respect for personal character and

authority has been lost in a complete reign of the mob. The cause,

in both cases, has been the same, ignorance of the true principles

of education. Since the great Darius, every Persian prince has

been " born in the purple " and brought up by women and eunuchs,

who ruin him by gratifying all his caprices. At Athens, the mis-

chief began when the uneducated learned to think their own opinion

about music and drama as good as that of the educated, and the

same delusion soon spread to political matters; the Athens of to-

day is not really a " democracy " but a " theatrocracy " of ignorant

sensation-lovers (6940-701^). In Persia, no one is taught how to

command, and in Athens no one learns how to obey. The lesson

of history for the intending legislator is thus that every wholesome

472 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

government must rest on a " division of sovereignty " ; it must

combine the " popular " element with " something of personal

authority, 11 or, as Plato puts it, must unite " monarchy " and " free-

dom." There must be somewhere a scat of authority, but authority

must not degenerate into regimentation ; there must be \cvOpa,

the freedom of the individual, but not a freedom which is anarchical.

It is a good corrective to some popular misconceptions of Plato,

to note the judicious way in which he employs poetry and tradition

as the basis for his tentative reconstruction of pre-history, and the

moderation and sobriety of the lessons he draws from history. In

the main, his conception of the stages by which men pass through

the nomad to the agricultural state, and from the life of the

family group to that of the "city/ 1 agrees with Aristotle's,

and I might suggest that the well-known account of the " house-

hold " and " village " as the precursors of the " city " in the Politics

is consciously inspired by the more detailed picture of Laws iii.

In one respect, Plato is more " modern " than Aristotle or any

other ancient ; he, like ourselves, has a vivid sense of the enormous

lapses of time and the numerous changes which must have gone to

the making of society before our records begin. Alone among the

Greeks, he has a genuine sense of the recency of the "historical"

period of human life, and the importance of pre-history. For the

theory of politics, the great feature of the book is the clear and

definite enunciation of the principle of the " division of sovereign

power." Lord Acton once wrote, improving on Dr. Johnson, that

the first Whig was not the devil, but St. Thomas. It might be

even truer to say, neither St. Thomas nor the devil, but Plato.

The third book of the Laws ends with the statement that Clinias

and his friend are actually engaged in a visit to the site of the

proposed new city, and an invitation to the Athenian to assist them

by continuing his discourse on legislation as they walk. In Book IV.

Plato proceeds at once to give us a lesson in practical constitution-

making. The very first requisite is to be well informed about the

topography, climate, economic resources of the State for which we

are to legislate, and the character of its inhabitants. The constitution

and legislation must, of course, be adapted to all these conditions ;

Plato is no builder of Utopias, but an extremely practical thinker.

In the present case, he assumes that the territory of the imagined

city is varied : it contains arable, pasture, woodland, and the like,

in reasonable quantity, but it is not extremely fertile. In situation,

the city is some miles from the sea, though there is a spot in its

territory which would make a good harbour. It has no very near

neighbours. These conditions are assumed, because without them

some of the features Plato regards as most desirable in national life

could not be secured. He wants his territory to be varied in order

that it may be as nearly as possible self-supporting and independent

of imports ; he wants it not to be over-fertile, mainly in order to

exclude the rise of production for the foreign market, and for much

the same reasons he is glad that it should not have easy access to

THE LAWS AND EPINOMIS 478

the sea, the great highway of commerce. His objection is to the

influx of large bodies of aliens engaged in trade, whose presence

would be a menace to the stability of national traditions of life.

(There is to be no Peiraeeus.) And he wants to exclude a big export

trade also, because he does not wish the spirit of the community to

be commercialized. A further danger is that, as in the case of

Athens herself, the development of a sea-borne commerce will lead

to the growth of a navy, and with it to the growth of aggressive

" imperialism." This explains the motive for the long passage in

which it is argued that, contrary to the general opinion, the rise

of Athens as a sea-power has been her chief misfortune (705^707^).

This was also the opinion of Isocrates, and seems to be true, in spite

of the customary glorification of Themistocles and Pericles, It was

the spirit of commercialistic imperialism which led directly to the

attempt of Alcibiades and his admirers to create an Athenian

empire in the western Mediterranean, and it was this adventure

which irretrievably ruined the Periclean democracy. 1 The history

of Athens explains why Plato wishes a morally healthy society to

be agrarian rather than industrial, just as Ruskin, Carlyle, and

Morris all wished the same thing for England. The composition

of the prospective inhabitants by invitation of settlers from all

over Crete and from the Peloponnese is intended to provide another

advantage. As the citizens come from different quarters, they

will have different original traditions, and this will mean that a

legislator will not have the same dead weight of unintelligent

conservatism to contend against (708^).

Now what would be the most favourable opportunity for the

creation of a thoroughly sound system of laws and institutions ?

Though the remark seems paradoxical, the best chance would be

offered by the co-operation of a thoroughly wise statesman with a

" tyrant/' but the tyrant would have to be young, intelligent, and

endowed with unusual moral nobility (709^). The thought is that

in this case the statesman would have the freest hand. He would

need only to convert the autocrat to his plans, and the rest of

society would follow suit, partly from loyalty, partly because the

autocrat has the requisite force to constrain the malcontent. He

must be young as well as intelligent, of course, if he is to be won to

such an undertaking : an older man would be less easily impressed.

He must have moral nobility, because he will be called on to sacri-

fice his own position as autocrat, if the combination of authority

with " freedom " is to be effected. It is improbable that there

should ever be such a conjuncture as the association in one age and

place of a supreme statesman with a young autocrat of such unusual

qualifications, but we cannot say that the thing is impossible (7iicf).

So we may imagine that the condition has been realized and proceed

1 Of course it was not the fault of the Athenians that they were a naval

power. They had to be one, just because, like ourselves, they needed to import

their wheat. But the necessity of possessing a powerful fleet inevitably led

to the temptation to use it for purposes of selfish aggrandizement.

474 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

to consider what institutions the statesman with such a force at

his disposal would be likely to recommend. 1

If a man with a genius for statesmanship ever got this favourable

opportunity of carrying his conceptions out in practice, he would,

in accord with the principles already laid down, take care not to

establish an " unmixed " constitution of any of the three types

familiar in the Greek world. That would be to create a sovereignty

of a favoured person or class over a subject class or classes. In a

true " constitution " the sovereign is not class-interest, but God,

and the voice by which God makes His commands known is the

law. Hence the fundamental principle of good government is

that the sovereign shall be not a person or a class, but impersonal

law (7130). In such a society the posts of authority will be awarded

for superiority not in birth, or wealth, or strength, but in whole-

hearted service to law. Its point of honour will be loyalty to the

laws. The Athenian accordingly imagines himself to be in the

position of a legislator speaking in the presence of the whole body

of intending citizens, and proceeds to begin an address to them on

the majesty of law (7150-7180) ; the opening words of this speech

are, perhaps, the one " text " quoted more frequently than any

other by the Platonists of later antiquity. God eternally pursues

the " even tenour of his way," and Justice attends Him ; he who

would be happy must follow in their train with a " humbled and

disciplined " spirit (raTrcivo? /cat jce/cofr/x^/Acvo?). To follow God

means to be like God, who is the true " measure of all things " (7i6c).

We" are like God so far as we follow the life of right measure.

In the life of measure reverence (nprj) must be meted out to its

various recipients in the right order, first to the gods of the upper

world and our city, next to those of the underworld, then to " spirits

and heroes," then to ancestors and dead parents, and last to our

living parents ; in honouring these last, we must remember that to

support them with our substance is the least office, to minister to

them with our bodies something more, to give them the affection

and devotion of the soul the great thing. We cannot do too much

for them while we have them with us ; when they die, the most

modest funeral is the most decent and honourable. At this point

the discourse on the duties of life breaks off, to be resumed again

in the following book. The reason for the interruption is that the

speaker recollects that there are two possible types of law, a brief

one and a longer. The brief type of law is that in common vogue.

It consists of a command or prohibition accompanied by a

" sanction " in the form of a penalty threatened for non-compliance.

1 Why dot#s not Plato suggest that the supremely wise statesman should

himself be born heir to the throne ? Presumably because wisdom in states-

manship only comes with years and experience. But an experienced monarch

oi advanced years would have neither the enthusiasm nor the entire freedom

from self-interest demanded of the autocrat who is to employ his position to

suppress himself. Hence the wisdom must be that of a man who has not to

struggle with the insidious temptations of self -interest, the enthusiasm that ol

a man who has not lost the first flush of youth.

THE LAWS AND EPINOMIS 475

The wise legislator will not, however, wish to overawe the subject

into obedience by mere threats. He would prefer to enlist the

feelings of the subjects in favour of his regulations as far as he can,

leaving only the worst kind of citizen to be merely coerced. If we

look at the practice of physicians of the body, we shall see that

there are two types among them. There are the mere empirics,

usually themselves slaves with slaves for their patients, who give a

prescription magisterially with a threat that things will go ill with

the patient if he disregards it. There are the eminent physicians,

educated men with educated men for their patients ; they explain

to the patient the nature of their treatment and the purpose of

their regulations and do all they can to get him to help in effecting

the cure. It is their method the legislator should adopt. He

should therefore prefix to his whole legislation and to the principal

sections of it " preambles " explaining the purpose of his regulations

and the reasons why such-and-such penalties are proper for neglect

of them, and so win the sympathies of the society for whom he

legislates (jigc-j2oe). Thus, in enacting that a man shall marry

before he reaches a given age or be subject to fine or loss of civil

rights (aTLfjiia), he would dwell on the reason for the law, namely,

that it aims at securing such immortality as is possible for the race, 1

and the reason for selecting just this " sanction," namely, that the

man who shirks the duty to save himself expense shall be visited

in his pocket, and that the man who has done nothing to leave a

younger generation behind him shall not share in the honours we

expect to be shown by the younger generation to their parents

(j2ia-d). We may therefore regard the interrupted discourse on

the beings entitled to reverence and the respective degrees in which

they are entitled to it, as the opening of a general preamble to our

whole legislation.

Book V. in its opening pages contains the continuation of the

great preamble (726-734^). From reverence to parents, we proceed

to the reverence or respect due to ourselves and our fellows. The

rule of self-reverence is that the soul is more than the body and the

body than possessions. A man must prize his soul more than his

body and his body more than his " goods." We dishonour our

own soul when we put bodily vigour and health or power or riches

before wisdom and virtue, or when we gratify unworthy caprice

or passion. We dishonour the body when we prefer wealth to

health. Plato's view is that extraordinary beauty or robustness

or wealth are bad for the soul, generally speaking, no less than

extraordinary ugliness, deformity, ill-health, penury. The first

breeds vanity, the second gross lusts, the third idleness and

luxury. In respect of advantages both of body and of fortune,

1 This thought, which had already appeared in the Symposium, has no

bearing on the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. It is the man the

complex of soul and body of whom Plato says that survival in his descend-

ants is the nearest approximation he can make to deathlessness. The

divorced from the body is not Mpwiros but just ^vxt, a " spirit."

476 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

the middle condition is preferable to an extreme. The main rules

for right relations with others are that (i) in our relations with

friends and fellow-citizens, we should rate the benefits we receive

from them at a higher rate than they themselves do, the services

we render them at a lower ; (2) in relations to the alien, especially

to the suppliant, we ought to be specially careful to be on our

best behaviour, for nothing is so odious to man and God as taking

advantage of those who are defenceless (726-7300).

Next follows an exhortation as to the spirit in which a man

should conduct himself in matters where the law can lay down

no specific commands or prohibitions. The supreme demand on a

man is for uArytfeia (" genuineness ") in all the relations of life in

fact, for " loyalty/ 1 A man who is not " true and loyal " is wholly

untrustworthy ; want of loyalty makes friendship and all the

happiness of life impossible. We must lay it down that in this,

and in all points of virtue, it is good to practise them yourself,

better to go further and to bring the misdeeds of others to the

knowledge of the authorities, best of all, actually to assist them in

chastising the misdoer. We must add that rivalry in goodness of

all kinds is the one form of emulation we should encourage in all

our citizens, as it is the one kind of rivalry which aims not at en-

grossing a good to one's self, but at communicating it as widely as

possible. To the faults of others a good man should be merciful,

whenever they are remediable, since he knows that " no one is bad

on purpose " ; he will only let his anger have its course with the

incorrigible. A man must beware, too, of the deadly fault of im-

proper partiality to one's self. And he must repress all tendency

to unrestrained emotionalism (7266-732^).

We must not forget that it is men, not gods, whom we are trying

to enlist on the side of virtue. We must therefore make allowance

for the universal human desire for a pleasant existence. We cannot

expect men regularly to choose the noble life unless they are per-

suaded that it is also the pleasant. Its nobility has already been

argued ; Plato now proceeds to contend that, even by the rules of a

Hedonic calculus, if you only state the rules correctly and work

the sum right, the morally best life will be found to be also the

pleasant est. The rules are that we wish to have pleasure, and

not to have pain ; we do not wish for a neutral condition, but we

prefer it to pain. We choose a pain attended by an overbalance of

pleasure, and refuse a pleasure attended by an overbalance of pain ;

to an exact balance of pleasure and pain we are indifferent. We

have to take into account as " dimensions " of pleasure and pain

" number " and " size " i.e. frequency and duration and intensity.

We wish to have a life in which, when attention has been given to all

these " dimensions/' the balance works out on the side of pleasure ;

not to have one in which the balance is on the side of pain. The

life in which the balance is zero is preferable to that in which there

is a balance of pain. If we consider four pairs of lives, correspond-

ing to the four currently recognized virtues and their contrary

THE LAWS AND EPINOMIS 477

vices the life of the temperate and that of the profligate, the life

of the wise man and that of the fool, the life of the brave man and

that of the coward, the morally " healthy " and the morally

" morbid " life we find that in the first member of each pair there

is less excitement than in the second ; the pleasures and pains are

both less intense, but at the same time these pleasures are more

frequent and more lasting than the pains, whereas, in the second

members of the pairs, the pains are more numerous and lasting

than the pleasures. Thus, in each case, the balance is on the side

of pleasure in the first member of the pair, on the side of pain in the

second. This is Plato's proof that, if the calculation is fairly

worked, the better life proves to be also the pleasanter. Its moral

superiority, we must remember, is not identified with nor inferred

from its greater pleasantness, but is taken to have been already

established independently (7320-734.0). This brings us to the end

of our general prelude to the legislation.

There is still one more matter to be dealt with before proceeding

to the legislation in detail the creation of the necessary magis-

tracies. The magistrates are, so to say, the warp, the rest of the

citizens the woof, of the fabric we have to weave. The warp must

have the stronger and tougher constitution, must be made of

those elements of the population who have most strength of char-

acter and are least pliable. We begin by laying it down (737c)

that the size of the community, the number of households, must be

kept permanent. (We want to exclude the social revolutions which

would be produced by either marked decline or marked increase

in population.) We require to have just such a population as

our territory will support in industry and sobriety, neither more

nor fewer. If the population grows beyond this limit, it will begin

to expand at the cost of wrong to its neighbours ; if it falls

below it, it will not be adequate to its own defence. The actual

number of households will depend on the size of the territory, but,

for purposes of illustration (7370), we may imagine it fixed at 5040,

a number which recommends itself by the fact that it is divisible

by all the integers up to 10. This is convenient, since there may

be practical reasons for wishing to divide the inhabitants into

administrative groups for various purposes. 1

We may say at once that the very best and happiest of all

societies would be one where there was no " private " interest,

where even wives and children were "common/' and the word

" my own " never heard (7390). What we are describing now is a

1 5040= 7 ! (the continued product of the integers from i to 7). Plato has

chosen it because, since 7 is the highest prime number less than 10, and the

numbers 8, 9, 10 are each products of a pair of factors of which each is less

than 7, 7 1 will obviously be divisible by every integer up to 10. It will also

be divisible by 12 (2 x 6) ; and this is a great convenience, since 12 is the number

of months in the year. Ritter's note on the passage rightly points out that

the reason for choosing such a number is strictly practical ; it prevents any

difficulty in determining the precise quota a particular subdivision of the

population ought to contribute to the revenue or the defences.

478 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

society which is to come nearest to this ideal, an ideal only possible

perhaps to beings who are more than men (Otol 17 -n-aiSes 0cu>v,

739^). * For this " second city " we must lay it down that the land

is not to be cultivated in common ; there are to be private estates

and houses, as a concession to human weakness, but the owner of a

patrimony must always regard it as belonging to the " city " as

much as to himself. It will be an obligation of religion that the

number of " hearths " is always to be the same. A patrimony is

always to descend undivided to one son, chosen by his father, who

will keep up the household worship. Daughters are to be provided

for by marriage, and, to ensure their marriage, there will be a law

against giving or receiving dowries (7420). A man's remaining

sons will be provided for by encouraging adoption on the part of the

childless or those who have been bereaved of their sons. Plato is

thus aware that his scheme demands that the normal family shall

be one of two children. Tendency to over-population will be

counteracted by " moral suasion " (740^), or, in the last resort,

by sending out colonies. (Apparently no " artificial " methods of

birth-control are contemplated.) Unavoidable depopulation by

epidemics and the like can be met, though reluctantly, by inviting

new settlors.

It will, unfortunately, be impossible to prevent economic

inequalities altogether, but they may be kept within bounds, and

both penury and irresponsible wealth excluded by the following

regulations. The patrimonies should be, as nearly as possible, of

equal value (7370) ; to secure that they remain inalienable in the

same family, a careful survey of the whole territory will be made

and preserved in the public archives (741^). To keep out the

taint of commercialism, the State will have its own currency, value-

less outside its own territory, and it will be a crime in a citizen to

own the coined money of a foreign city (7420) . 2 There shall be no

lending of money on interest, and no credit (742^). The reason for

this is simply that we do not wish to encourage a man to live on

the automatic return of investments ; we want him to be a farmer

living by the labour of his own hands. Accumulation will be

checked by the establishment of four economic classes, the poorest

possessing nothing beyond their patrimony, the richest being

allowed to possess no more than four times the yield of the patri-

mony. Any further increase of wealth will be escheated to the

State (744^-7450). Thus wealth will have some weight, as well as

character and birth, in the distribution of offices. This is re-

grettable, but it is a condition we cannot wholly exclude (7446).

1 Plato still adheres to the moral ideal of the Republic, though he seems

definitely to be saying that it cannot be actually embodied in flesh and blood.

It may be doubted whether he had ever thought otherwise. At any rate, he

now regards a system of peasant-proprietorship with inalienable patrimonies

as the society in which ordinary men and women will be likely to show most

of the spirit of devotion to the " common " good.

9 A regulation based on the Spartan practice, which is proposed also by

Fichte in his Geschlossener Handelsstaat.

THE LAWS AND EPINOMIS 479

The community will be divided into twelve " tribes," l care

being taken that the total property of the tribes is approximately

equal and that their holdings are equalized. Each patrimony

will be divided into a half situated nearer to and one situated farther

from the town, which must have a central position, and we should

be careful to see that this division is fairly made, so that, e.g.,

a man who has the advantage of having half his estate close to the

town shall have the other half on the outskirts of the State (7456-0).

In connexion with the topic of subdivisions and measurements,

Plato shows his practical interest in small matters by expressly

insisting on the importance of a rigid standardization of the currency

and of all weights and measures (7460) , 2 the object being, of course,

to suppress the possibility of small dishonest gains. It is an un-

philosophical prejudice to suppose that the eye of the law should

be blind to such things. Arithmetic is of the highest value, pro-

vided it is pursued in a spirit untainted by the commercialism of

Phoenicians and Egyptians (747^-^).

Book VI. brings us at last to the appointment of the various

magistrates and administrative boards. We must be content here

to describe the most important of these and the method by which

they are constituted, as illustrative of Plato's insight into the

practical business of " representation/' The most important

ordinary magistracy is that of the vo//.o<u'AaKes or guardians of

the constitution, a body of thirty-seven men of approved character

and intelligence, who must be at least 50 years old at appoint-

ment, and must retire at the age of 70. Their functions are to

watch over the interests of the laws in general and, in particular,

to take charge of the register of properties, and penalize and " black-

list " any citizen guilty of fraudulent concealment of income. They

figure also as the presiding magistrates in connexion with the

trial of grave offences of various kinds. They are to be elected by

votes given in writing and signed with the voter's name (as a pre-

caution against an irresponsible vote), and the election has several

stages, by which the three hundred names first selected are finally

reduced to thirty-seven (three for each " tribe " with an odd man to

prevent an equal division of opinions).

The ordinary great council, the " representative chamber " of

the society, is elected on a plan ingeniously contrived to eliminate

extreme " class-consciousness " and to make wire-pulling and cabal

impossible. It is ultimately to consist of 360 members, ninety from

each of the four property-classes, but the selection has several

stages and is spread over a week. In the first instance 360 repre-

sentatives of each class are chosen, the voting covering four days.

1 The number is selected for the practical convenience that it makes it

easy for an office or duty to rotate through all the tribes in the course of a year.

The official year is to have 365, not 360, days a reform never adopted by any

actual Greek " city " until a later date (8286).

2 Ritter, ad loc., rightly calls attention to the point that Plato is here, for

the first time, pointing out the necessity of regulations of this kind, which

were unknown in Hellenic practice.

480 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

Citizens of the two richest classes are obliged under a penalty to

vote for the representatives of all four classes. The citizens of the

third and fourth classes are compelled only to vote on the first two

days, and may or may not vote on the second two, as they please.

(The thought is that they would mostly abstain, since they have

already lost two days from their working week, and will not wish

to lose two more. Thus, as the poorer citizens will be the most

numerous, the representatives of the two richer classes will be

elected by a vote in which the poorer classes will have most influ-

ence ; those of the poorer classes will mainly be chosen by the votes

of the richer. This means that the names selected will be those of

moderate men from all classes ; neither a Coriolanus nor a Cade will

stand much chance of election. This secures that the whole body

shall be public-spirited, fair-minded, and likely to co-operate

harmoniously.) In the second stage of the process, the number of

names is reduced to one-half by a vote which must be compulsorily

exercised by all citizens. (An extremist who might slip through the

first election would thus very probably be eliminated at this stage,

and, as the voting is compulsory for every one, the danger that the

richer classes might make the representation of the poorer a farce

by inducing their poorer fellow-citizens to abstain from voting for

the members of their own class is also reduced to a minimum.)

Finally, the numbers are again reduced to one-half by the use of the

lot. (This would be a final precaution against electioneering

jobbery.) The council thus appointed holds office for the year,

one-twelfth of it forming a committee which exercises the main

functions of sovereignty for each month.

The chief criticism a modern thinker would be likely to pass on

the scheme would probably be that it runs the risk of making the

extremist all the more dangerous by leaving him no chance of

airing his grievances in the " council of the nation/' But it might

be said that we are learning by experience how hard it is for the

same body to combine the functions of a " safety-valve " and a

really effective national council.

The most important office in a Platonic community is, as we

should expect, that of the Minister of Education. The well-being

of the community depends directly on the character of the educa-

tion given to successive generations, and the overseer of education

should therefore be the best and most illustrious man in the com-

munity, as holding its most responsible post. He must be a man of

over fifty, with children of his own, and should be elected for a

period of five years out of the body of the vopo&XaKts by the

votes of the other magistrates (765^-7666). The " President of the

Board of Education " is thus the " premier " in Plato's common-

wealth.

If the life of the society is to be thoroughly sound from a moral

point of view, we must first ensure that the tone of family life

itself is sound. Marriage must be regarded as a solemn duty to

society ; selfish neglect to discharge that duty, as we have already

THE LAWS AND EP1NOM1S 481

learned, will be penalized. Extravagant expenditure on wedding

festivities must be discountenanced. The peace of the household also

demands that we lay down a right rule for the treatment of servants.

A master must, for his own sake as well as for his servant's, make it a

rule to be even more scrupulously fair in his treatment of his slaves

than he is in his behaviour to his equals (777^). But he should be

strictly just, without compromising his position as master by im-

proper familiarities. His word must be law to his slave, and he

must punish all disobedience. When our young people have been

married, we must see to it that they begin their married life on the

right lines. We must not let them think they can spend these early

days, before children have yet come, just as they please, as a sort

of honeymoon. The young husband must, for example, take his

place at the public table with his fellow-citizens, exactly as he has

been used to do (7806). And, though this is a thing which has not

been attempted even at Sparta, women, no less than men, must be

taught to live under the eye of the society to which they belong.

They are frailer than men, and need even more to be safeguarded by

the knowledge that their conduct is open to public censure. They,

too, must have their common table, and we should not listen to the

complaints always raised against the moral reformer who claims

the right to regulate " private affairs " (780^-78 id). The three

keenest of human appetites are those of hunger, thirst, sex, and the

rudiments of civilized existence are only made possible by the

proper regulation of all three (782^-7836). When man and woman

have been married, they must think it their bounden duty to

present the city with worthy offspring. There should be a board

of ladies, appointed by the authorities, to supervise the behaviour

of married couples in this respect and advise them. This com-

mittee will have a general control over married people for ten years

after marriage, and it will treat its duties from both a eugenic and

a moral point of view. If a marriage remains childless, they will

arrange for its dissolution on equitable terms after the ten years.

They and the vo/xo^vXaKcs will act as conciliators in conjugal

disputes, and there will be penalties for parties who are intractable

to their remonstrances. They will also see that violations of

conjugal fidelity are chastised, where they are too grave to be winked

at. It need not be said that a careful register of births and deaths

must be kept ; without it we could not secure observance of the

regulations about the proper age qualifications for marriage, public

office, or military service. Men must marry between 30 and 35,

girls between 16 and 20. l A man may not be appointed to an

office under 30, nor a woman under 40. The period of liability for

military service will be for a man from 20 to 60 (the Athenian rule) ;

if women are given any " war work/' it should be after they have

borne their children and before they have reached 50 (783^-785^)

1 Later on (833^ the minimum age of the girls at marriage is reckoned

at 18 ; we must remember that the Laws has not received its final revision

by the author.

482 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

The seventh book of the Laws contains Plato's most important

and detailed scheme for a universal education. The principles are

at bottom those already familiar to us from the Republic, but the

treatment is much more detailed, and in some respects the level

of the demands has risen. There must be systematic organization

from the first, since if we leave anything to the caprice of the in-

dividual householder, we shall not secure the community of spirit

and character we need in the State. And we cannot take the

matter in hand too early. It is just when the child's body and

mind are most plastic that most enduring harm can be done by

wrong treatment. We ought, therefore, to begin the task even

before a child's birth, An expectant mother must take such

exercise as is required in the interests of her unborn child (789^).

When the child is born, we must see that, even before it can walk,

its nurse gives it the exercise and air which is good for it, and parti-

cularly, that it is not allowed to injure itself by walking too early

(7890). A baby should live, as nearly as possible, as though it were

always at sea ; it should be dandled and danced about and sung

to (jgoc-e) to keep it from being frightened. This is a first pre-

paration for the development of a brave and steadfast character.

And care must be taken to keep the baby in a placid mood ; it is a

bad moral beginning for it to be allowed to become fretful or

passionate (791^-793^). When the child is 3 or older, we can

begin to correct it judiciously, and it will take to playing games.

It is best to leave children to invent their own games, but from the

age of 3 to 6 they should be brought together daily in the various

temples to play under the supervision of ladies appointed by the

authorities, who will thus have the opportunity of seeing that the

nurses really bring up their charges in the way the State expects

of them (793^-794^. At the age of 6, lessons will begin in earnest,

and with them the segregation of the girls from the boys. The

boys should be taught to ride and use bow, sling, and dart, and it

would be well for the girls to learn the same things, or at any rate,

the use of these weapons (jq^c-d). Care should be taken to train

the children to be ambidextrous. That this is possible we see from

the indifference with which the Scythians use either hand to hold

the bow, and it is of great practical importance to have two " right

hands" (794^-795^). Taking "gymnastic 1 ' and "music" as the

names for the training of body and mind respectively, we may

divide the former into two branches, dancing and wrestling. For

educational purposes, " trick " wrestling is useless ; only the

stand-up sort which is also good training for warfare is to be

practised (7960-6) 1 ; the dancing to be specially commended is

similarly the dance in armour, which affords a good preliminary

training against the years of military education (7966-^).

" Music " requires a fuller treatment. We must remind our-

1 Plato has no use for fancy wrestling and boxing, and would clearly have

thought ju-jitsu unseemly. He condemns in so many words the art oi

Antaeus, who was fabled to vanquish an opponent by sinking to the ground.

THE LAWS AND EPINOMIS 483

selves once more of the great practical importance of the subject.

It is important that there should be no needless innovations in the

" play " of a society, for innovations in play lead on to innovations

in what is supposed to be earnest, and all departure from an estab-

lished " regimen " is attended with risk to the health of a society,

just as it is dangerous for an organism (797^-798^). Music,

as we have so often said, " imitates " or " reproduces " types of

moods and characters, and, since we wish the national ideal of

character to be kept constant, we shall need to keep the standards

of this imitation constant too. The Egyptians set us an example

in this ; each type of permitted musical form is consecrated by them

to the cultus of a god, and innovation thus becomes sacrilege, and

we ought to require that the example shall be followed in our city,

singular as it seems to a Greek. To see that it is observed should

be one of the functions of our board of i/oyuo^vAa/cc? (7990-800 b).

They will not allow the festivals of the gods to be polluted by

choruses declaiming blasphemies and wailing in a way only seemly

for the performer of a dirge (Sooc-e). (This is meant to exclude

tragic " choruses " and tragedy itself along with them.) Our

poets must feel that their work is prayer, and that the first rule for

it is that of eu^/xta, reverent reticency ; the second that they do

not know themselves how to " ask aright " and must learn from the

law what are the true blessings for which men should pray (Soia-c).

The poets, then, must submit to a censure and circulate no com-

position which has not the imprimatur of the i/o/xo<v/W5 (Sold).

It will be the business of the State to compile a suitable anthology

of verse which meets our requirements ; the compilers, besides

being men of sound taste, must have reached the mature age of 50.

In this way we may hope to imbue our young people from the first

with the right taste for high austere art (8o2a-d). There should,

of course, be a distinction between the songs learned by boys and

by girls ; the tone of the former must be lofty and manly, of the

latter, sedate and pure (8020).

We proceed with the details of the education to be reared on this

basis of a sound taste which is at once aesthetic and moral. We

have, so to say, laid the keel of the vessel and have now to design

the ribs. We may feel, perhaps, that the voyage of life is not so

serious an affair as it seems. Perhaps we are only playthings for

God, but even if that is so, we must " play the game " well, not

in the inverted fashion of mankind at large, who fancy that war is

the business of life, peace only the play. The truth is that it is

peace which is " real " and " earnest," for it is only in peace that

we can pursue education, the most serious affair of life (8o3#-8o4c).

To return to our subject. We shall need schools for the teach-

ing of the things we have spoken of, with proper buildings and

grounds. And the teachers in these schools will have to receive

salaries, and therefore must be foreigners. All the children must

attend school (<oirav) daily ; this must not be left to parental

caprice. This applies to girls as well as to boys ; they must even

484 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

learn to ride and shoot, or the State will be deprived of the ser-

vices it has a right to expect at need from the one-half of its citizens

(8040-8056).

It is important to note the magnitude of the proposal made

here. As Professor Burnet points out, what is being conceived

for the first time is the " secondary school/ ' a permanent establish-

ment for the higher education of boys and girls by specially com-

petent teachers duly organized and paid. (The impossibility of

maintaining such an institution without salaries is the reason why,

in accord with Hellenic sentiment, it is assumed that they must

all be non-citizens.) The " grammar school " meets us as an actual

institution in the Macedonian age ; it is presumable that it owes

its existence to the influence exerted in that age by members of

the Academy as the recognized experts in education and juris-

prudence. The old practice of the Periclean age had been that

" higher education " of all kinds was got from attending the lectures

of sophists, each with his speciality. Plato's new idea is the

systematization of secondary education by co-ordinating the

specialists in single institutions.

We need not be afraid of the criticism that our views on the

education of women are paradoxical. We see that women can

share the labours of men by the example of Thrace and other

districts where they do agricultural work, though at Athens they

are expected to do nothing but sit indoors, mind the store-closet,

and spin and weave. At Sparta a middle course is followed ; the

girls learn to wrestle, and they do no house-work, but they are not

expected to be capable of doing anything for the national defence.

With all courtesy to a Spartan hearer, we must confess that we cannot

be satisfied with such a compromise ; the women should at least be

able, in case of need, to scare away raiders from the city (8o6b). 1

The scheme we have adopted for our community makes it

certain that our citizens will not have to labour long hours for the

means of existence ; they will have abundant leisure, and they

must not waste it in fattening themselves like cattle, but use it in

setting themselves to live the most strenuous of all lives, that which

aims at goodness of mind and body. They will have to be up

betimes, before all the servants, and to prevent waste of the precious

hours in sleep, it will be enjoined that public as well as household

business shall be transacted in the early morning. Sleeping long

and late is as bad for the body as for the mind (8o6d-8o8c). It

follows that the boys must be taken to school at daybreak, and both

the servants who conduct them there and the schoolmasters must

pay the closest attention to their moral, for a boy, just because he

has a " spring of intelligence " in him, which does not as yet run

clear, is the most unruly of all animals. As to the subjects of

1 There is a clear allusion to the fact dwelt on by Aristotle (Pol. B 12696 37),

that the panicky behaviour of the Spartan women when Epaminondas was

threatening an assault on the city proved that the famous training in rough

exercises had no efiect in making them braver than women anywhere else.

THE LAWS AND EPINOM1S 485

education at school, we have already spoken of the principles on

which songs and poems should be selected, but it will be more

difficult to select suitable prose. Of course enough arithmetic

must be learned for the purposes of daily life, enough elementary

astronomy to understand the Calendar (Sogc-d), and enough of

music to know how to tune one's lyre. This will suffice until a

boy is 16 years old, if we allow three years (from 10 to 13) for reading

and writing and three more for the study of the lyre, taking care

that the sharp boys are not permitted to push on too fast nor the

dull to lag behind (Sioa). The one serious problem at this stage is

the selection of prose reading. We may certainly let the boys read

sound works on morals and law (Suc-e), but there is a difficulty

about other kinds of prose, and too wide reading would not be good

for boys (Sn^). 1 The supervision of the whole system will be in the

hands of the Minister of Education, assisted by the advice of experts

chosen by himself (8130). It must be understood that there will be

paid expert teachers of all the exercises we have prescribed for the

training of the body ; there will be women as well as men among

these teachers, and girls as well as boys will receive the training, so

that they may be capable of defending themselves in necessity (8140).

There are still three " branches of knowledge " (/xa^/xara)

which any free man should possess arithmetic, geometry, astron-

omy (8170). Only a few young people are capable of high pro-

ficiency in them, but all must study them " so far as is truly neces-

sary " (8186). But how far is that ? At least as far as the

Egyptians succeed in carrying large classes of young people. They

have a method of teaching them to deal with fractions and to find

the divisors of numbers by means of games in which garlands and

other objects have to be divided among a given number of persons, 2

or boxers to be paired. The study of this sort of problem can

readily be made to lead up to the recognition that there are " in-

commensurable " lengths, areas, and volumes, a subject on which

Greeks, even Greeks who dabble in mathematics, are disgracefully

ignorant (8206), but we must not let our young people share such

ignorance. Similarly our secondary education in astronomy must

correct the really " impious " mistake of current Greek astronomy,

which ascribes irregular movements to the heavenly bodies, and

leads to calling the swiftest of them the slowest. We must make

it clear that every so-called " planet " has a strictly regular motion

and only one such motion (8220) . 8

1 The point of this is that what prose literature there was in Plato's time

consisted for the most part of the works of the Ionian men of science and of

technical works on medicine and rhetoric. For reasons which will become

apparent when we speak of Plato's theology, he regards books on science as

dangerous reading for the boys and girls.

2 Two problems seem to be contemplated, the discovery of the factors of

composite numbers and the handling of fractions. On the Egyptian problems

in question see Burnet, E.G. Ph. 9 18-19.

3 ri]v avrr)v 'yd/) ai/rcDf 65bv ^KOLGTOV ical ou TroXX&j f.tlav del KUK\( die^px^rai.

This clearly means not only that the real motion of a planet is regular, but that it

486 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

It might seem in place here to add something about the value oi

hunting as a pursuit for the young. But we must lay it down

once for all that we cannot be expected to deal with the whole of

such problems in a law. The details must be left to the really

competent Minister of Education to regulate by his personal judg-

ment (822^-823^). For us it is enough to say that we mean only

to encourage the sort of hunting which contributes to make good

men. We do not wish our citizens to take to the sea, so we shall

discourage sea-fishing ; for stronger reasons, we object to raiding

and capturing men, and to any kind of chase which depends on

mere cunning. Hence we should discourage the mere netting and

snaring of any kind of creature, retaining only " the hunting of

quadrupeds with horses and dogs and one's own body/' as a

training in endurance and courage (824^).

The contents of Books VIII. and IX. must be dealt with very

summarily. Provision is made, as would be the case in any actual

Greek " legislation," first of all for the cultus of the State, every

month of the year and every day of the month being provided with

its appropriate worship ; the object is simply to place the whole

daily life of the whole community under the " religious sanction "

(828). Since there will be " gymnastic " and musical " contests "

as part of this regular worship, Plato then goes on to lay down

regulations for the regular monthly exercises of the citizen militia,

as well as for the " contests " which will mark special festivals.

The latter are meant to correspond to the pan-Hellenic games of

actual life, but the programme of " events " is revised. Competition

is to be in exercises of strength and endurance which have a real

military value, particularly in rapid evolutions in complete accoutre-

ment, and the mimic warfare is to reproduce its model as closely as

possible ; there must be a spice of real danger about it. The girls

and women must share in all this, so far as their physique permits,

but we cannot make detailed regulations on this point in advance

(829-835^)-

This raises an important ethical question. Is there not a real

danger that the very free association of young people of both sexes

in pursuits of this kind, and their abundant leisure from "work,"

may lead to a relaxed sexual morality ? Plato thinks not, if we

can only establish the right social tradition in such matters, which

is that " homo-sexual " relations of all kinds must be reprobated

as unnatural and that the normal sexual appetite is to find no

gratification outside the bounds of lawful matrimony. This

demand may strike most persons as Utopian, and as an attempt to

suppress " love." But we must not be misled by equivocal terms.

" Love of good-will " is one thing, love of carnal appetite quite

another ; the suppression of the second in no way militates against

is not composite. The object is thus to deny all theories, like that of Eudoxus,

which ascribe to a planet a double motion in opposite senses. I still think

that this must be meant, in spite of the dissent of Professor Storey and Pro-

lessor Cornford.

THE LAWS AND EP1NOM1S 487

the cultivation of the first. 1 That the standard of continence

proposed can be attained is proved by the lifelong abstinence of

well-known athletes, and surely our citizens can do to obtain a

spiritual crown what boxers will do for an Olympic garland. 2 That

carnal appetite can be effectually restrained by moral and religious

sanctions we see from the complete suppression of incestuous desire

in the lives of civilized societies, which is effected simply by the

tradition that incest is shameful. So our standard will be found

practicable when once it has been consecrated by the sanctions of a

social tradition (835^-842^). If we should find it beyond our power

to secure absolute conformity to this rule, we shall at least demand

that " unnatural " passion shall be wholly suppressed and that

more normal irregularities shall be visited by disgrace if detected.

The speaker now turns to a consideration of regulations necessary

for the pursuit of agriculture, the economic foundation of his

contemplated society. Under this caption we have proposals for

dealing with such matters as encroachments on boundaries, diversion

of watercourses, ownership of stray animals, regulation of the

market, 8 and the like. In matters like these, there are many

already existing good rules which we shall do well to follow (8430),

a significant hint that many of the regulations proposed are simply

based on the actual code of Attica. The student of Plato's political

philosophy need not delay over such details, though they have a

double interest for the historian of law and custom. They throw

a great deal of light on questions of Attic law, and they provide the

starting-point for the casuistry by which Roman lawyers and, in

modern times, publicists like Grotius and Pufendorf have laboured

to arrive at the principles of a satisfactory law of property. It is

not surprising that Plato's actual examples recur, for example, in

the Institutes of Justinian and the de Jure Belli et Pads. The

discussion of the regulation of the market leads naturally to

consideration of the conditions on which aliens may be allowed

to enter the society and practise industry (S^ob-d). They are

to be subjected to no poll-tax, but they must have an industry

by which to support themselves, must conform to the rules of the

1 Loc. cit. 8376-^. This is a criticism of the current theory of many Greek

societies not of Athens according to which " unnatural " attachments are

of great value for military purposes because of the mutual devotion they

inspire, the theory presupposed by the institution, e.g., of the Theban Upbs \6\os.

The Phaedyus had already denied the fact of the " devotion " ; the Laws

exposes the verbal equivocation by which the practice is defended. (For such

a defence, cf. the speech of Phaedrus in the Symposium, 1780.)

2 Loc. cit. 839^-840^. The reasoning is familiar to us from the Pauline

parallel, i Cor. ix. 23-27. The standard here set up is no novelty of Plato's

last years ; the demands made on the guardians of the Republic would be even

more rigorous.

8 The important points in connexion with the market are that (i) all

transactions must be on the basis of immediate payment, (2) there is to be no

" higgling " about prices. The seller must have a fixed price and must take

neither more nor less. Like Ruskin, Plato is not so anxious to prevent a seller

from asking too much as to keep him from palming off bad wares at a

pretended " sacrifice " (loc. cit. 8490-8 500).

488 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

State, and should normally be expected to depart again after

twenty years' residence (i.e. they are not to acquire a " right of

settlement ").

We come now to criminal jurisprudence, with an apology for the

necessity of admitting that there will be any crime to be legislated

against in a rightly constituted society. The crimes first con-

sidered are, in the order of their gravity, sacrilege, treason, par-

ricide. These are " capital " crimes, and it is best for a citizen who

commits them that he should be allowed to live no longer, but we

must lay it down once for all that the capital sentence must not

include the penalizing of his innocent family by the confiscation of

property, and that they are not to be regarded as tainted in their

honour by his offence. Similar crimes in an alien or a slave will be

more mildly visited by whipping and expulsion from the country.

In general, Plato allows himself a freer use of corporeal chastise-

ments than modern legislators, since he does not accept the

" humanitarian " estimate of physical pain nor the view that its

infliction is peculiarly degrading. These capital crimes are to be

tried before a court composed of the vo/xo<vA.aKcs and a number of

the magistrates of the preceding year, 1 and the proceedings must

be spread over three days.

We must insist, however, that in our State criminal jurisprudence

takes a scientific account of the psychology of the offender (8$jc-d).

Current opinion on this matter, as shown by the practice of existing

societies, is in a state of confusion. Justice is held to be a " fine "

thing (*aAoV), but the just chastisement inflicted on a criminal is

regarded as a disgrace to him (859^-8606). Yet to be consistent,

we ought to hold that if it is " fine " to do what is just, it is also

" fine " to get what is just done to you. 2 The secret of the current

confusion is that actual jurisprudence assumes that men are bad

and do wrong " voluntarily," hence the one great distinction re-

cognized by actual law is the distinction between voluntary and

involuntary transgression. But we must adhere to the philosophi-

cal principle so familiar to us from earlier dialogues that " all wrong-

doing is involuntary " (S6od), and therefore we cannot make the

distinction between voluntary and involuntary the basis of our

penal code (86id). The distinction we really need is a different

one, that of pkafiri, the causing of hurt or loss, from dSwaa, the

violation of a right. In inflicting penalties, the proper question is

not whether the act committed was voluntary or not, but whether

the person on whom it was inflicted received mere loss or hurt, or

was further injured in his rights. The proper thing to say about

a man who has caused an unintended loss or hurt to another is not,

1 8556 ff . The constitution of the court is thus suggested by that of the

Attic Areopagus. Plato is careful to avoid the miscarriage of justice attending

on the Athenian practice of allowing a capital case to come before an irrespon-

sible body of ordinary citizens chosen by lot, from whom there was no appeal.

1 The thought is the old one of the Gorgias. It is good for the offender's

soul to receive the penalty, and since the suffering is good for him it cannot be

The " disgrace " lies not in the punishment but in the crime.

THE LAWS AND EPINOMIS 489

as current jurisprudence says, that he has done an " involuntary

wrong/' but that he has not committed a wrong at all, but

only caused a loss or hurt (8610-862^). It is this distinction

between causing loss and infringing a right which we really need

to make fundamental in assessing penalties. Thus the important

distinction between the causing of detriment and the infraction

of a right, with the consequent distinction between an action

for damages and a criminal prosecution, is introduced into legal

theory for the first time in Laws ix. The courts can make mere

damage good by the award of compensation for it, but contraven-

tion of a right must further be met by the imposition of a penalty

intended to make the offender's soul better (S62c-e). If we doubt

whether wrongdoing is really involuntary, we need only remember

what its causes are temper, (flip's), lust for pleasure, ignorance

(8630-8646).

Plato now applies these principles to the construction of a

penal code. We have to distinguish violation of rights from the

mere causation of damage, and in the case of the former, we must

distinguish between violence and craft. Regulations are then laid

down for the cases of homicide, suicide, maiming, wounding with

intent to kill, minor assaults, the object being to give a specimen of

a logically constructed criminal code. The penalties will depend

not only on the main distinction already laid down, but on the

status of the parties, whether citizens, aliens, or slaves. The

details must be passed over here. What inevitably impresses a

modern reader most unfavourably is the special severity with which

injuries committed by a slave on free persons are treated. This is,

however, a direct consequence of the recognition of the servile

status, which gives these crimes something of the character of

mutiny.

Book X. introduces us to one of the most important develop-

ments of Platonism, its theology. Plato appears as at once the

creator of natural theology and the first thinker to propose that

false theological belief as distinguished from insults to an estab-

lished worship should be treated as a crime against the State and

repressed by the civil magistrate. He is convinced that there are

certain truths about God which can be strictly demonstrated, and

that the denial of these leads directly to practical bad living.

Hence the denial of these truths is a grave offence against the

social order and must be punished as such, the principle upon which

the Roman Church still maintains that it is the duty of the magis-

trate to suppress heretical pravity. Historically we have here the

foundation of natural or philosophical theology, The name we

owe to the famous Roman antiquarian, M. Terentius Varro, who

distinguished three kinds of theology, or " discourses about gods/'

the poetical, consisting simply of the myths related by the poets ;

the civil, which means knowledge of the Calendar of the State's

cultus and is the creation of the " legislator " ; and the natural or

philosophic, the doctrine about things divine taught by philosophers

490 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

as an integral part of their account of <vVts, natura, reality. The

first, according to a view as old as Herodotus, is the mere inven-

tion of poets who aim only at interesting and amusing ; the

second has been manufactured by the authorities with a view to

social utility; the third, and only the third, claims to be part

of the truth about things, 1 We must, of course, be careful to

remember that the epithet " natural/' as originally applied to

this kind of theology, conveys no contrast with a " revealed "

or " historical " theology ; it means neither more nor less than

" scientific."

The three heresies Plato regards as morally pernicious are, in

the order of their moral turpitude : (a) atheism, the belief that there

are no gods at all, the least offensive of the three ; (b) Epicureanism,

as we may call it by a convenient anachronism, the doctrine that

God, or the gods, are indifferent to human conduct ; (c) worst of

all, the doctrine that an impenitent offender can escape God's

judgment by gifts and offerings. It is morally less harmful to

believe that there is no God than to believe in a careless God, and

it is better to believe in a careless God than in a venal one. Against

these three heresies Plato holds that he can prove the existence of a

God or gods, the reality of providential and moral government of

the world and man, and the impossibility of bribing the divine

justice.

(a) Atheism. Atheism is treated by Plato as identical with the

doctrine that the world and its contents, souls included, are the

product of unintelligent motions of corporeal elements. Against

this theory, he undertakes to demonstrate that all corporeal move-

ments are, in, the last resort, causally dependent on " motions " of

soul, wishes, plans, purposes, and that the world is therefore the

work of a soul or souls, and further that these souls are good, and

that there is one dpion? \frvxn, " perfectly good soul/' at their head.

Thus the demonstration of the being of God serves also, in principle,

as a proof of the indestructibility of the soul, a doctrine which

has to be introduced in refuting the two graver heresies. He

indicates that atheism as an opinion has two chief sources the

corporealism of the early Ionian men of science, who account for

the order of nature on purely " mechanical " principles without

ascribing anything to conscious plan or design (8890-^), and the

sophistic theory of the purely conventional and relative character

of moral distinctions (8890-8900). If these two doctrines are

combined, atheism is the result. It has to be shown, as against

this atheism, that the motions of body are actually all caused by

prior " movements " of soul, so that rtxyrj, conscious design, pur-

pose, is the parent of r\>xn, not TU^T? of r^vrj, as the proverb says

(8926). Or, more briefly, mind, not bodies, is "what is there to

begin with " (8g2c). 2

1 See for Varro's doctrine on this point Augustine, de Civitate Dei, vi. 5.

* 8Q2C, ytvCffUr T7)V TTCpl T& TTpUTa^TTJV T&V TTpUTWV yCvt<TI.V=zTb TtDl/ TTpUTW -y&Of

= r6 TP&TOV. That yfrcrtt here is equivalent to yfros is clear from the context,

THE LAWS AND EPINOMIS 491

The proof turns on an analysis of the notion of /aVr/o-is, motion or

process (Sg^b-Sg^e) . Ten senses of the word are enumerated. The

first five are different forms of actual physical motion : (i) revolu-

tion in a circular orbit, (2) rectilinear motion, (3) rolling, (4) aggre-

gation, (5) disgregation. Then follow three " ideal " motions :

(6) the " fluxion " of a point which " generates " a line, (7) the

fluxion of the line which generates a surface, (8) the fluxion of a

surface which generates a solid. These distinctions are merely

preliminary to that which is essential for the purposes of our proof.

All motions belong to one of two classes : (9) communicated motion,

" the movement which can only move other things," or (10) spon-

taneous motion, the " movement which can move itself " (8946).

And it is argued that causally communicated motion always pre-

supposes spontaneous motion as its source (8940-8956). Now when

we see anything which exhibits spontaneous, or internally initiated,

motion, we call it *alive, l^vxov ; we say that there is ^v\j] in the

thing, t/fvxv, m f ac t, is the name which language gives to " the

motion which can move itself." Thus, " soul " is the name, or

definiendum, of which the " discourse " (Aoyos), " movement which

can move itself/' is the definition. The name and the discourse

are therefore equivalent, and it follows that the movements of

soul, " tempers and wishes and calculations, true beliefs, interests

(cVt/xcXciat) , and memories/' are actually the source and cause of

all physical movement, since no physical movement is spontaneous

(896^). This constitutes the proof that soul or mind is the cause

of cosmic movement. So far the argument is an elaboration of

that which has been given more briefly in the Phaedrus for the

immortality of the soul.

Next, there must be more than one soul which is the cause of

cosmic movements (i.e. Plato's theology is theistic, not pantheistic).

There must be at least two such souls and there may be more. For

there is disorder and irregularity in nature as well as order and

regularity, hence the " best soul " clearly cannot be the only source

of motion in the universe ; since order has the upper hand, God,

the " best soul," is clearly the supreme cause, but there must be

other souls which are not wholly good (8960-898^). (It must be

carefully noted that there is no trace in the language of the doctrine

of a " bad world-soul " read into the Laws in ancient times by

Plutarch and Atticus, and in modern times by Zeller and others.

The point is not that there are two souls responsible for the universe,

but that there are at least two ; the " best soul " is not the only

soul there is, but we are at liberty to suppose as many inferior souls

as the appearances seem to require.)

If we are not to misunderstand Plato's whole conception we

must note the following points carefully, (i) Evil, no less than

since the criticism made on the old physicists is that they regard such things

as " fire " and " air," i.e. their primary bodies, as the yfrciris ire pi ret irp&ra.

For this use of ytvew see Ast, Lexicon Platonicum, s.v., who, however,

wrongly places the passage under a different heading.

492 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

good, is expressly said to be due to " soul/' being identified with

disorderly motion. Hence the doctrine of " matter " as intrinsically

evil, and the source of evil, which figures in the popular Platonism

of later times, is wholly un-Platonic. (2) God (or the gods) is quite

definitely declared to be a il/vxn, and we are told that this means

that the universe is a result of T^y, design, Plato thus definitely

believes in a divine purposive activity in other words, in what is

really meant by the " personality " of God. " Pantheism/ 1 which

repudiates the notion of conscious creative design, would be only

another form of the very doctrine Plato identifies with atheism.

(3) God is a soul, not a form. The movement which can move

itself is the highest type of agent known to Plato, and the funda-

mental difference in theology between Plato and Aristotle is just

that Aristotle insists on getting behind it to a still more divine source

of movement, an " unmoved " mover. We have to think of Plato's

God as contemplating the forms and reproducing them in the

order of the sensible world. Plato's last word on the old question

of the Phaedo, " what is the cause of the presence of a form to a

sensible thing ? " is that God is the cause. Being perfectly wise and

good, God makes the sensible order after the pattern of the forms

he contemplates. (4) The argument disregards the question,

never felt by a Greek to be very important, whether there is only

one God or many. But the very phrase " best soul " shows that

there is one such soul which is supreme. This, no doubt, is the soul

responsible for the one movement which, from the point of view of

Plato's astronomy, presents no irregularity or anomaly at all, the

movement of the " outermost heaven." This soul would be God

in a special sense. How it is related to that which it moves Plato

does not tell us, though he suggests alternative views (8990).

(5) What are the irregularities which, to his mind, prove that not

all cosmic motions are due to a single divine soul ? We may

reasonably conjecture that they are, in the first place, the various

apparent anomalies in the motions of the planets. These anomalies

are not ultimate, but they at least require us to analyse the appear-

ances into combinations of several movements, and this would

suggest, as it does to Aristotle, the plurality of " movers." But I

think something further is meant. The course of nature on the

whole, by its regular periodicities, favours the development of

intellectual and moral civilization. Yet there are natural " catas-

trophes " which are adverse to this development, inundations,

successions of barren or pestilential seasons, volcanic eruptions,

and the like, and these exceptions to the rule have to be referred to

the agency of souls of some kind ; clearly these souls must be thought

of as at least partly irrational and evil. Whatever we may think

of a Theism of this kind, it seems to me plain that we can find no

other doctrine in Plato without doing violence to his language, and

we should take note that, though religious faith in God was, of

course, no novelty, Theism as a doctrine professing to be capable

of scientific demonstration is introduced into philosophy for the

THE LAWS AND EPINOMIS 493

first time in this section of the Laws. Plato is the creator of " philo-

sophical Theism."

The refutation of the two other heresies now becomes a simple

matter.

(b) Epicureanism (Sggd-go^d). The belief that though there

are gods they are indifferent to our conduct is suggested by

the spectacle of successful lifelong iniquity, but it is really no

more than a nightmare or bad dream (9006). If the gods pay no

attention to our conduct, the reason must be either that they are

unable to regulate everything or that they regard man and man's

doings as trifles, and neglect the control of these small matters

either because they think them insignificant or because they are

" too fine " to attend to them. We may dismiss the suggestion

of lack of power at once ; it is easier in action to handle small

affairs than to handle great, though it is the minute things which it

is hardest to perceive accurately. As to the other suggestions,

all competent practitioners of medicine, engineering, and the other

arts, especially that of the statesman, know that no one ever

succeeds in the main of any enterprise if he neglects what appear

to be " small details," and we cannot suppose that the " best "

soul is more ignorant than a human practitioner, even if it were

certain, as it is not, that human conduct is a " trifle " from God's

point of view. To suppose that God neglects us because He is too

indolent or fastidious to attend to us, would amount to saying

that the " best soul " is cowardly or " work-shy," and this is

no better than blasphemy. Nor is it true that the regulation

of human destiny in accord with moral law would involve

eniless "interference" with the machinery of things. The

result is secured from the first by a law of singular simplicity,

the law that " like finds its like," souls, like liquids, " find

their level." A man " gravitates " towards the society of his

mental and moral likes, and thus, through the endless succes-

sion of lives, he always " does and has done to him " what it

is fitting that such a man should do or have done to him (90 40).

That is the " justice of God " from which no man can escape

in life or death.

We may dispose of (c) the doctrine that God can be bribed to

wink at sin even more summarily (905^-907^). For our argu-

ment has justified the old belief that we are the " chattels " or

" flock " (KTrjfjLdTa) of the gods. If they wink at the conduct

of human " beasts of prey," they are behaving like shepherds

or watch-dogs who allow the wolf to rend the flock on condi-

tion of sharing in the plunder. A blasphemy like this is more

fittingly met by honest indignation than by argument or gentle

remonstrance.

We now come to the penalties for the publication of these various

heresies. The overt maintenance of any of them ought to be brought

at once to the notice of the magistrates, who are to bring the case

before the proper court. If a magistrate neglects to act, he must

494 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

himself become liable to prosecution for " impiety." In the case

of each class of offenders we must distinguish between two degrees

of guilt that of the heretic who is otherwise morally blameless,

and that of the worse offender who adds practical evil-living to his

heresy. For the morally inoffensive heretic the penalty, on con-

viction, will in every case include at least five years of imprison-

ment in the " House of Correction/' where he will see no one but

members of the " nocturnal council/' who are to visit him from

time to time and to reason with him on the error of his ways (9090).

A second conviction is to be followed by death. 1 The worst

offenders are those who add to the speculative belief that the

gods are indifferent or venal the still graver crime of trading on

the superstition of their neighbours for their own profit or

aggrandisement, by founding immoral cults. They are to be

imprisoned for life in " penal servitude " in the most desolate region

of the country, visited by no citizen whatever, and cast out un-

buried at death, in fact, treated as " dead in law " from the

moment of conviction. But their innocent families must not suffer

for their offence, and should be treated as wards of the State 2

(9090).

Plato is so much in earnest with this horror of immoral super-

stition that he ends by proposing to suppress all shrines and

sacrifices except those belonging to the public worship of the city.

No one may be permitted to have a private " chapel " or " oratory "

or to sacrifice except at the public altars and with the established

ritual. His motive is not so much the economic one of preventing

the locking-up of wealth in the " dead hand," as the moral one of

protecting society against the insidious lowering of the ethical and

religious standard.

The discourse now proceeds to deal with legislation for the

security of private property and trade, particularly with the regula-

tions necessary to prevent dishonesty in buying and selling, and in

executing or paying for " piece-work." Then follow regulations

about wills, the guardianship of orphans, the conditions on which

a son may be disinherited, and the enforcement of the claims of

parents on their children. Penalties are enjoined for vendors of

philtres and sorcerers, with the remark that the last-named offence

1 We may suppose that the term of imprisonment would be longer for the

two graver heresies. The length of the term and the rule of seclusion are

meant, of course, to give full opportunity for a genuine conversion and to

prevent the contamination of the rest of the community. Death is the

penalty for a second conviction, because the offender is presumed to have

shown himself " incurable," and death is better for such a man. On the

composition of the " nocturnal council " see below.

2 The simple atheist apparently runs no risk of this severer penalty, since

his heresy is not one on which an hypocritical " priestcraft " can be grafted.

It may be remarked here that by demanding a grading of prisons into (i) a

house of detention for persons awaiting trial, (2) a house of correction for the

reclaimable, (3) a house of punishment for the irreclaimable, Plato has antici-

pated an important reform never fully carried out in our own administration

until quite recent times.

THE LAWS AND EPINOMIS 495

might be ignored in a society of perfectly rational persons, but must

be treated as serious in a community where the current belief in

the sorcerer's powers makes him mischievous (9336). We then

have a paragraph dealing with larceny and robbery and another

on the necessity of enforcing proper supervision of the insane and

mentally deficient. Begging must be strictly suppressed, but it

will be the duty of the State to see that no one, not even a slave,

who is unemployed through no fault of his own is allowed to starve

(936>). Rules are laid down about the admission of evidence in

courts of law and the penalties of perjury. Litigiousness, a common

Athenian failing, should be checked by penalizing the vexatious

prosecutor ; if his motive was gain, the penalty should be death. 1

The abuse of the profession of Xoyoypa^o? is to be met by making

the crtV&Kos in a vexatious suit liable to the same penalties as his

principal (938^-0).

These matters of private law must not detain us here, though

Plato's treatment of them has the double interest of being founded

largely on Attic practice, which he is trying to amend where it seems

defective, and of having exercised a considerable indirect influence

on the development of Roman law. 2 With Book XII. we return

to the sphere of public law and the law of the constitution. Pecula-

tion or embezzlement of the public funds, an offence regularly

charged on every Attic politician by his enemies, is unpardonable

and in a citizen must always be visited with death, irrespective of

the magnitude of his defalcation (9420). In military matters every-

thing depends on discipline and strict fidelity to orders ; this must

therefore be enforced in all the exercises which have been enjoined

as the standing military training. Cowardice in the face of the

enemy is to be punished by loss of all citizen-rights as well as by a

heavy fine (944^-945^).

To ensure that the magistrates do their duty, Plato adopts

the Attic practice of requiring every magistrate at the end of his

term of office to submit to a tvOwa or audit, and gives special care

to the appointment of the board of corregidors (tvOwoi) charged

with the holding of the audit. The members of the board must

be over 50 years old, and are to be chosen by the following

method. There is a vote by universal suffrage, each citizen voting

for only one candidate. This process is to be repeated until the

number of names not eliminated is reduced to three. Twelve such

officials are to be appointed in the first instance. As soon as

the three oldest members of the board reach the age of 75 they

retire, and in future there will be an annual election of three new

1 The severe penalty is due to the heinousness of the attempt to make the

court of justice itself accessory to the infliction of a wrong. The abuses

Plato has in view are specifically Athenian, and would not be likely to be

common in the sort of society for which he is ostensibly legislating.

2 See Burnet, Greek Philosophy, Part I., p. 304. The Academy was the

first permanent and organized school of law as well as of mathematics. The

two studies are really connected by the importance for both of " clear and

distinct ideas."

496 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

members (9460). 1 Arrangements are made, however, for an appeal

against the findings of the board, and any member whose action

is quashed is to lose his post (9480). This board of corregidors is

the highest ordinary court of justice, and it is interesting to see

that Plato provides for appeals from its verdicts.

It would be inconsistent with the whole spirit of the legislation

to permit citizens to withdraw themselves from the life of the State

at their choice. Travel abroad must therefore always receive

the sanction of the authorities, and this sanction will only be given

in the case of persons over 40 (950^). It is desirable that older

men of sound character should visit other States with a view to

learning how the customs of our own society may be improved by

judicious imitation of those of others. The traveller should, on his

return, make a report on his observations to the " nocturnal

council," a sort of extraordinary Committee of Public Safety, which

is to be in perpetual session and is charged with a general super-

vision over the public welfare. We have heard of this body before

in connexion with the proceedings against heresy, and are now told

how it is constituted. Its members are the evOwoi* the ten

senior vo/mo^vAaKcs, the minister and ex-ministers of Education,

and ten co-opted younger men between the ages of 30 and 40.

It gets its name from the regulation that its daily sessions are to be

held before daybreak. One of its chief functions is to foster sound

scientific research (952^). There will be a similar careful control

of the temporary admission of foreign visitors to our own community.

Special encouragement will be given to responsible persons from

abroad whose object is to impart or acquire lessons in true states-

manship. They will be honoured " guests of the nation " (953^).

It is not enough to have made a good constitution and code for

our society ; there is need for constant vigilance to preserve our

institutions from degeneration (960^). This vigilance will be

exercised by the " nocturnal council," which may fairly be called

the " brain " of our whole system (961^). To discharge its functions

it will need to have a thorough understanding of the end to which

social life is directed, the development of " goodness " in all its

four great forms. This means that its members will require very

much more in the way of education than anything we have yet

provided (9656). If they are really to understand what goodness is,

they must be able to " see the one in the many " (9650), to appreciate

and realize the great truth of the unity of all virtues (ibid. d-e). In

fact, they must have a genuine knowledge of God and the ways of

1 It is clear that the details of the plan would need more adjustment before

it would work in practice. Perhaps it is tacitly assumed that most of the

original twelve cMvvoi would be nearer 75 than 50, and that the three oldest

retire in each subsequent year.

8 The actual words are (95 id) r&v icptuv ruv rd dpioreta cl\i)<}>6Tuv ; that this

means the etfdwoi is shown by comparison with 94 ja. In the recapitulation at

96ia b the composition of the council is apparently slightly different. The

two passages would, no doubt, have been better adjusted on a final revision

ot the text.

THE LAWS AND EPINOM1S 497

God (g66c) ; they must not be content, as the average citizen may

be, with a mere faith based on the tradition of the society (ib.).

(In other words, they must thoioughly understand the natural

theology already laid down in Book X.). We have seen that

scientific astronomy, with its doctrine of the regularity and order

of the celestial motions, is a chief foundation of the whole Platonic

apologia for an ethical Theism. Hence a thorough knowledge of

astronomy will be indispensable for the men who are the intel-

lect of the State. It is a common, but wholly mistaken, opinion

that such science makes men " infidels." When astronomical

knowledge is combined with insight into the true nature of the soul

as the one source of movement, it leads direct to piety. Hence

no one will be qualified to serve on the nocturnal council unless

he is a trained mathematician and astronomer and has also

rightly grasped the principle of the causal priority of soul in

the scheme of things. There remains the task of determining

what other studies are implicitly demanded by our programme

(966^969^).

It is sometimes said that in the Laws astronomy has taken the

place formerly given to dialectic as the supreme science, and that

this indicates a growing uncertainty in Plato's own mind about the

possibility of metaphysics. This is a complete misinterpretation

of the concluding section of the Laws. The intellectual quality

demanded in the members of the supreme council, that they should

be able to see the " one in the many " is precisely the character

always ascribed in the dialogues to the dialectician. And we note

that astronomical science is only one-half of the qualification laid

down. It must be accompanied by a right understanding of the

doctrine of the place of i/^x*? m the universe, the doctrine which,

more than any other, lies at the root of Platonic metaphysics.

Though the name " dialectic " is not used, the demand for the thing

remains unabated. 1

THE EPINOMIS. There is no real division between the Epinomis

and the Laws, and the former is sometimes actually quoted by

later writers as the " thirteenth " book of the Laws, though the

Epinomis was already reckoned as a distinct work by Aristophanes

of Byzantium. 2 There is no real ancient evidence against the

authenticity of the dialogue. Diogenes Laertius (iii. I, 37) says

that " some " ascribed it to the Academic Philippus of Opus, but,

as he has just told the story that Philippus " transcribed " the Laws

"from the wax," he presumably only means that he was said to

have done the same for the Epinomis. Proclus, who disliked the

work, wished to reject it, but, as he merely offers two very bad

arguments for his view, he presumably knew of no Academic tradition

1 The name is avoided, presumably, as specially characteristic of Socrates,

who is absent from the dialogue. The word is carefully avoided also in the

Timaeus for the same reason.

1 He made the (spurious) Minos, the Laws, and the Epinomis one of his

" trilogies " (Diog. Laert. iii. i, 62).

498 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

in its favour. 1 I can detect no linguistic difference whatever

between the style of Epinomis and Laws, and the very fact that the

Laws have manifestly not received even the trifling editorial revision

which would have removed small verbal inaccuracies and contra-

dictions makes it incredible to me that Plato's immediate disciples

should have issued as his the work of one of themselves. Hence I

am confident that the current suspicion of the dialogue is no more

than a prejudice really due to the now exploded early nineteenth-

century attacks on the genuineness of the Laws themselves. 2 In

any case, we have to recognize that the work was known to Aristotle,

who has a curious allusion to it at Metaphysics 1073?; 9.* I feel

justified, therefore, in regarding the Epinomis as Plato's, and hold-

ing that it was intended as an integral part of the magnum opus of

his last years.

The immediate purpose of the dialogue is to discuss the question

left unanswered in Laws xii., of the complete scientific curriculum

necessary for the members of the " nocturnal council " : What

studies will lead to o-o^i'a (9736) ? We must recognize that o-o^ia,

in any case, is only attainable by a select few, and with difficulty

(9730 ff.), and that most of the so-called eVto-T^uuu do not help us to it

(974^). Thus we may exclude all the arts and sciences which simply

contribute to material civilization or to amusement (9740-975^), as

well as those of war, medicine, navigation, and rhetoric, and still

more unhesitatingly the mere art of acquiring and retaining

multifarious information, which many confuse with o-o^ta (975^-

9760). We ought to give the name o-o&a only to studies which

make a man a wise and good citizen, capable of exercising or obeying

righteous rule. Now there is a branch of science which, more than

any others, has this tendency and may be said to be a gift of a god

to man, being in fact the gift of Heaven (ovpavo's) itself. This gift

is the knowledge of number, which brings all other good things

1 His arguments are given in the Prolegomena to the Philosophy of Plato

apparently by Olympiodorus (Platonis Opera, C. F. Hermann, vi. 218). They

are (i) that Plato would not have gone on to write another dialogue, leaving

the Laws unrevised, (2) that motion from W to E. is called in the Epinomis " to

the right " (Epin. 9876), whereas in the dialogues (Timaeus, 36c) it is called

^ to the left." But (i) assumes that the Epinomis is really meant to be

another dialogue," and (2) overlooks the point that the Laws use the same

language as the Epinomis (760^ 2). The really significant thing is that Proclus

makes no appeal to testimony.

* See the good defence of the Epinomis in Raeder, Platons philosophische

Entwickelung, 413 ff. Stenzel (Zahl und Gestalt, 103 n. 4) rightly declines to

commit himself to rejection. The " demonstration " of the spuriousness of

the Epinomis by F. Miiller (Stilistische Untersuchung der Epinomis des Phihppos

von Opus, 1927) leaves me still unconvinced.

8 It is said there that it is obvious rots K ai/jiTplw rjwtvois, that the motions

of the planets are composite, a fairly clear retort to Epin. 9876 9, where the

theory that the " diurnal revolution " is a component of the planetary orbits

is said to be " what might seem true " dvOpu-rrois 6\iya TOVTUV ei'&W. Jaeger

(Aristoteles, 146, 153 ff.) has called attention to the connexion between the

Epinomis and Aristotle's Trepl </>iXo<ro^as, but regards the former as an

Academic rejoinder to the latter.

THE LAWS AND EPINOMIS 499

along with itself (977&)- 1 Without knowledge of number we should

be unintelligent and unmoral (qjjc-e). How divine a thing it is

we see from the consideration that where there is number there is

order ; where there is no number, there is nothing but confusion,

formlessness, disorder (977^-9786). To be able to count is the

prerogative which marks men off from the animals. We learn to

count up to fifteen by simply studying the daily changes in the face

of the moon as she rounds to the full ; a much bigger problem is set

us when we go on to compare the period of the moon with that of the'

sun, as the agriculturist must. In our own recent discussion it was

easy enough to see that a man ought to have goodness of soul, as

well as of body, and that to have this he must be " wise." The

difficult question was what kind of knowledge this all-important

" wisdom " is. What we have just said suggests the answer

Perhaps we may not discover a single " wisdom " which covers

the whole ground. In that case, we must try to enumerate the

various branches of wisdom and say what they are (9800). We may

go back to our thought that the best way a man can spend his life

is to spend it in praising and honouring God. Let us then, to the

praise of God, construct an improved " theogony," holding fast

to the natural theology we have laid down, and particularly to the

principle of the causal priority of soul over body (9806-981^). An

" animal/' we know, is a soul conjoined with a body. There are

five regular solids, and we may recognize five corresponding forms

of body earth, water, air, fire, and aether 2 and five corresponding

kinds of animal, each with its special habitat. The body of each

kind of animal is a compound in which the " element " that forms

its habitat is predominant. Hence the two most conspicuously

visible classes of living beings are those which live on the earth,

of whom man specially interests us, and those which have bodies

made chiefly of fire and are gods, the stars and planets. Their

bodies are more beautiful than ours, and more lasting, being either

deathless or of age-long vitality. A comparison of the restless and

disorderly movements of man with the majestically orderly move-

ments of the heavenly bodies is enough to show that their souls

equally surpass man's in intelligence. If they, unlike us, never

deviate from one path, it is because their motion exhibits the

necessity imposed by rational pursuit of the best (9826). Their

real bulk, as science can demonstrate, is enormous, and there is

' * Number is the gift of " Uranus," because, as Plato holds, the science of

it has been developed in the interest of learning to number and compute

days, months, and years. Cf. Timaeus, 380, 30/;.

2 The corpuscular theory of the Timaeus is here implied, with the addition

that, to get something to correspond with the dodecahedron, the alOr/p, the

clear blue of the upper air, is recognized as a fifth " body." This Tre/m-rdi/ cupa

(whence the name quinta essentia] is identical with Aristotle's irpurov crcDjua, or

" celestial matter." But, unUke Aristotle, Plato does not regard it as the

" matter" of the heavenly bodies; they are made mainly of fire, as Timaeus

had taught.

500 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

only one answer to the question how such masses can be made to

revolve endlessly in the same orbits ; it is that the masses are alive,

and that it is God who has conjoined their ^i/x at ' with these vast

bodies (983^-0) . Either they are themselves gods, or they are

images of gods wrought by the gods themselves (9840), and therefore

more to be held in honour than any images of man's making. We

may suppose that the intervening regions of aether, air, water, are

also inhabited by appropriate denizens. A man may give what

account he pleases of Zeus and Hera and the rest of the traditional

pantheon, but we must insist on the superior dignity of the visible

gods, the heavenly bodies. Air and aether will have denizens with

transparent bodies and therefore invisible to us ; we may suppose

that they are a hierarchy of " spirits " (Sai/xoves), who act as unseen

intermediaries between gods and men, favouring the good and

warring against the bad (984^-9856). There may be similar

semi-divine denizens of the water of whom men get occasional

glimpses. The current worships have been largely prompted by

real or imagined appearances of such beings, and a wise law-giver

will not wantonly interfere with them. Men cannot have real

knowledge about such things (985^). But the neglect of Greeks

to pay proper honour to the heavenly bodies, the gods whom we

all do see, is quite inexcusable. They should be honoured not

merely by feasts of the Calendar, but by setting ourselves to get a

scientific knowledge of their motions and periods (9850). 1

This means that we must master the science of the revolutions

of the stars and planets. At present we have not so much as names

for the planets, though they are called the stars of several gods, a

nomenclature which has come to us from Syria (9860-987^). 2 It is

the general rule that whatever Greeks borrow from barbarians

they improve upon (9870). Every man who is a Greek should

therefore recognize the duty of prosecuting astronomy in a scientific

spirit, and cast off the superstitious fear of prying into divine matters.

God knows our ignorance and desires to teach us (987^-9880).

The study we need to lead us to true piety, the greatest of the

virtues, is thus astronomy, knowledge of the true orbits and periods

of the heavenly bodies, pursued in the spirit of pure science, not in

that of Hcsiod's farmer's calendar (990*2). But since such a study

is concerned with the difficult task of the computation of the relative

periods of sun, moon, and planets (and thus has to reckon with

1 The irony of the whole passage about the supposed denizens of aether, air,

and water and the popular cults of such beings must not be overlooked. We

have been told (g8oc) that the whole account is a " theogony," though, as is

added at gSSc, a less objectionable one than those of the old poets, and that

knowledge on such matters is impossible. All that is really serious is the

insistence on the necessity of giving the first place in the popular cult to the

heavenly bodies and recognizing the study of astronomy as the right way to

worship them. The rest is a concession to the maxim that harmless popular

rites are not to be disturbed. Timaeus had taken the same line (supra, p. 452).

2 The names "star of Aphrodite," "of Ares," "of Zeus," "of Cronus,"

from which our designations are derived, appear for the first time in literature

in this passage. " Star of Hermes " is first found in Timaeus, $8d.

THE LAWS AND EPINOMIS 501

highly complicated arithmetical problems), it must have as its

foundation a thoroughly scientific theory of number. This includes

not only a scientific doctrine of whole numbers (" the odd and

even," ggoc), but two other studies, commonly called by the mis-

leading names geometry and stereometry. Geometry is really

arithmetic, a study of numbers " which are in themselves dissimilar,

but are assimilated by reference to surfaces," and stereometry is

similarly the study of another class of numbers which become

similar when raised to the third power. Also we need to study for

its physical importance the theory of progressions. The geo-

metrical series i, 2, 4, 8 reveals to us the principle on which the

magnitude of length, area, and volume arc interconnected ; in

the arithmetical progression 6, 9, 12 and the harmonic progression

6, 8, 12 we have the secret of music, since the two means 9 and 8

correspond to the two great intervals within the octave, the fifth

and the fourth. Thus we might say that consideration of the ratio

2 : I, its powers, and the means between its terms, discloses the

supreme secret of nature (9900-9916). And besides we must add

to this study of a scientific arithmetic which has been extended to

cover geometry plane and solid, as the completion of the whole

curriculum, insight into the absolute unity of principle which runs

through the whole of exact science and makes it one (99 ic-e). 1

(Thus once more dialectic, the synoptic apprehension of the prin-

ciples which pervade all science and the whole of the scibilc, reappears

as the foundation of statesmanship.)

Without this scientific knowledge, a city will never be governed

with true statesmanship, and human life will never be truly happy.

The wisest man is the man who has attained all this knowledge ; we

may feel confident that when death translates him from the sensible

region, he will finally achieve the complete unification of the self,

and his lot, wherever it may be cast, will be truly blessed. As we

said before, the attainment is only possible for the few, but we

must insist that our supreme governors at least shall devote them-

selves to it (992*2-^). Thus the Epinomis ends by the unqualified

reassertion of the old demand that statesmanship and science shall

be combined in the same persons.

1 The text of QQOC 5-9916 4, the most important mathematical passage

in the Platonic corpus, is unfortunately uncertain, in part probably corrupted,

in part also possibly never reduced to grammatical form by the writer, but

the sense is clear. The point of chief significance is the revolutionary demand

that quadratic and cubic " surds " shall be recognized as numbers in opposition

to the traditional view that there are " irrational " magnitudes (lengths,

areas, volumes), but no "irrational" numbers. The meaning of the rest is

that the succession of the " powers " 2 1 , 2 2 , 2 3 , is the most elementary example

of the principle that similar areas have the duplicate and similar volumes

the triplicate ratios of the corresponding " sides," and that the ratios corre-

sponding to the fourth and fifth in the scale respectively, the tirirpiros and

?7jLu6Xtos X6705, are also the harmonic and arithmetic means between i and 2.

(Plato selects 6 and 12 as surrogates for i and 2 in this illustration because

he wishes the two " means " to be whole numbers.) Stenzel comes near

explaining the passage correctly (Zahl u. Gestalt, 98 ff.).

502 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

See further :

BURNET. Greek Philosophy, Part /., 301-312 al.

RITTER, C. Platon, ii. 657-796 at. ; Platons Gesetze, Kommcntar

zum griechiscken Text (Leipzig, 1896) ; Platos Gesetze,

Darstellung des Inhalts (Leipzig, 1896).

A. E. TAYLOR. The Laws of Plato translated into English.

(London, 1934.)

RAEDER, H. Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 395-419.

NATORP, P. Platons Ideenlehre, 358-365.

BARKER, E. Greek Political Theory : Plato and his Predecessors,

292-380.

JAEGER, W. Aristoteles, 125-170.

MULLER, F. Statistische Untersuchung der Epinomis des Philip-

pos von Opus (1927).

HARWARD, J. The Epinomis of Plato. Translated with Intro-

duction and Notes. (Oxford, 1928.)

And for the problems presented by the Epistles :

FRIEDLANDER, P. Platon : Eidos, Paideia, Dialogos (1928).

EGERMANN, FR. Die platonischen Briefe VII und VIII,

(Vienna, 1928.)

SOUILHE, J. Platon, Lettres. (Paris, 1926.)

NOVOTNY, F.- Platonis Epistnlac. (Brno, 1930.)

HARWARD, J. The Platonic Epistles. (Cambridge, 1932.)

CHAPTER XIX

PLATO IN THE ACADEMY FORMS AND NUMBERS

TO us Plato is first and foremost a great writer, but from his

own point of view, books and the study of them are a

secondary interest with the " philosopher " ; what counts

as supreme is a life spent in the organized prosecution of discovery

(TO o-vtfv). There can be no doubt that Plato thought his work as

the organizer of the Academy much more important than the writing

of dialogues. Since Aristotle commonly refers to the teaching given

in the Academy as Plato's " unwritten doctrine " (aypa<j>a Sdy/xara),

we may be reasonably sure that Plato did not even prepare a MS.

of his discourses. This explains why there were several different

versions in the next generation of the famous lecture on " the

Good,' 1 which seems to have contained Plato's most explicit account

of his own philosophy. We are told that several of the hearers,

including Aristotle, Xenocrates, and Heraclides of Pontus, all

published their notes of it, and the obvious implication is that there

was no " author's MS." to publish. Consequently we have to

discover Plato's ultimate metaphysical positions indirectly from

references to them in Aristotle, supplemented by occasional brief

excerpts, preserved by later Aristotelian commentators, from the

statements of Academic contemporaries of Aristotle, like Xeno-

crates and Hermodorus. This creates a serious difficulty. When

it is a mere question of what Plato said, the testimony of Aristotle

is surely unimpeachable ; but when we go on to ask what Plato

meant, the case is different. Aristotle's references are all polemical,

and Aristotle is a controversialist who is not unduly anxious to

be " sympathetic." Unfortunately, too, mathematics, the science

specially important for its influence on Plato's thought, is the one

science where Aristotle shows himself least at home. Thus there is

always the possibility that his criticisms may rest on misunder-

standing. And the misunderstandings may not even originate

with him. The criticism of Plato all through the Metaphysics

seems to be subsidiary to Aristotle's standing polemic against

Xenocrates, the contemporary head of the Academy. Hence it is

possible that much of the criticism of Metaphysics M-N, the most

sustained anti-Academic polemic in Aristotle, may be directed

rather against Academic misinterpretation of Plato than against

Plato himself.

In a necessarily brief statement our safest couise is to deal

503

504 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

only with views expressly attributed by Aristotle to Plato, and

with them only so far as their meaning seems to be beyond reason-

able doubt. This is, at any rate, all I can attempt in the space at

my disposal. But we must carefully avoid the nineteenth-century

mistake of treating the statements described by Aristotle under

the name of the " doctrine " (rrpayfjiaTcia) of Plato as a sort of

senile dotage. Aristotle definitely identifies Platonism with these

doctrines and never even hints that he knew of any other Platonism,

though he does occasionally remark that the dialogues differ from

the " unwritten " discourses. It seems to follow that the theories

called Plato's by Aristotle must have been formulated as early as

367 B.C., the year of Aristotle's entry into the Academy, and, quite

possibly, even earlier.

When we turn to these Aristotelian statements we find that,

for the most part, they amount to a version of the theory of forms

with a very individual character, and of a much more developed

type than anything the dialogues have ascribed to Socrates. There

are also one or two other notices of specific peculiarities of Plato's

doctrines, all concerned with points of mathematics, and it is with

some of these I propose to begin, as they may help us to understand

the point of view from which the doctrine of forms as known to

Aristotle was formulated.

We must remember that though mathematics was by no means

the only science cultivated in the Academy, it was that which

appealed most to Plato himself, and that in which the Academy

exercised the most thoroughgoing influence on later developments.

All the chief writers of geometrical textbooks known to us between

the foundation of the Academy and the rise of the scientific schools

of Alexandria belong to the Academy. In Plato's own lifetime,

Theaetetus had completed the edifice of elementary solid geometry,

by discovering the inscription of the octahedron and icosahedron in

the sphere. He and Eudoxus and others had laid the foundations

of the doctrine of quadratic surds as worked out in the tenth book

of Euclid's Elements ; Eudoxus had invented the method of approxi-

mating to the lengths and areas of curves by exhaustion (the ancient

equivalent of the Integral Calculus), and had recast the whole

doctrine of ratio and proportion in the form in which we now have

it in Euclid's fifth book, for the purpose of making it applicable

to " incommensurables." We naturally expect to find traces in

Plato's doctrine of this special preoccupation with the philosophy

of mathematics which is characteristic of the work of the school. 1

To understand the motives which were prompting the Academy

to a reconstruction of the philosophy of mathematics, we must go

1 For an account of the Academic work in mathematics I may refer the

reader to any of the standard works on the history of mathematics, e.g. Zeuthen,

Histoire des mathematiques dans I'antiquite et le moyen dge (Fr. tr., Paris, 1902),

or, for a still briefer account, Heiberg, Mathematics in Classical Antiquity

(Eng. tr., Oxford, 1922). The ancient notices are chiefly preserved in the

second prologue to Proclus' Commentary on Euclid i, and in the scholia to

Euclid.

PLATO IN THE ACADEMY 505

back to the age of Zeno. In the Pythagorean mathematics of the

fifth century there were two serious logical flaws. One was that

in treating geometry as an application of arithmetic, the Pytha-

goreans had made the point correspond to the number i, as is

indicated in the traditional definition of the point often mentioned

by Aristotle, that it is /xovas ex ovcra # e '<riv, " a i with position/'

The identification implies the view that a point is a minimum

volume, and was ruined by Zeno's acute argumentation from the

possibility of unending bisection of the straight line and the im-

possibility of making a line longer or a volume bigger by adding a

point to it. There are just two ways of meeting the difficulty :

one is to evade it, by severing geometry from its dependence on

arithmetic, as Euclid does ; the other is that actually hinted at by

Zeno's own language and definitely adopted by modern philo-

sophical mathematicians, of making the point correspond to o

and regarding o, not i, as the first of the integers. 1 It was towards

this view that Plato was feeling his way, as we shall see immediately.

The other great trouble was the discovery that there are " incom-

mensurables " or " surds," e.g. that the ratio of the length of the

side of a square to its diagonal is not that of " integer to integer."

Here, again, two ways of meeting a difficulty fatal to the old philo-

sophy of mathematics as it stood are possible. One is again to

surrender the parallelism between geometry and arithmetic by

admitting the existence of surd geometrical magnitudes, but deny-

ing that there are " surd " numbers. This is the position taken by

Aristotle in express words and tacitly by later mathematicians like

Euclid, who always represents an " incommensurable " by a line

or an area. The other is that of modern rationalistic mathematics,

to revise the conception of number itself, so that it becomes

possible to define " irrational " numbers 01 various kinds and to

formulate laws for their addition and multiplication in terms of the

already known arithmetic of integers. The problem has only been

satisfactorily solved in the work of the last half -century, but, as we

saw in dealing with the Epinomis, this was the line which already

commended itself to Plato. Geometry and " stereometry " are,

according to him, really the arithmetic of the quadratic and cubic

" surds," as plane geometry has been said in our own time to

be simply the " algebra of complex numbers." In this way the

parallelism of geometry with arithmetic is preserved by a revised

and enlarged conception of arithmetic itself. 2

With these considerations in mind, we can readily understand

certain statements which Aristotle makes about mathematical

views of Plato. There are three such statements which we may

at once elucidate, (a) Plato stated that the " point " was a

1 Cf. the definition of the integer-series in Frege's Grundgesetze der Arith-

mctik which is, put into words, " the integers are the successors of o."

* For a real comprehension of Plato's thought it is indispensable to have a

grasp of the modem logic of arithmetic. I would recommend as sufficient

(but also necessary) such an exposition as that given in chap. i. (Real Variables)

of Professor G. H. Hardy's Pure Mathematics.

506 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

"fiction of the geometers," and spoke, instead, of the "starting-

point of the line " (Met. A 9920 20). This means, of course, that

Plato rejected the conception of a point as a minimum of volume,

or " unit. "<& It has no magnitude of its own but is " the beginning "

of the straight line which has such a magnitude (its length). In

other words, what corresponds in arithmetic to the point is not

i but o, if only Greek arithmeticians had possessed a word or

symbol for o. The underlying thought is that which reappears

in later Greek Platonists when they speak of a line as the " fluxion "

(/juo-is) of a point, in the very terminology Newton was later to

introduce into English. We are on the track of the ideas and

terminology of the inventors of what we call the Differential

Calculus. It is true, of course, that this notion of an " infinitesimal "

which is not quite nothing nor quite something, but a nothing in

the act of turning into something, involves a logical paradox and

that it has only been finally disposed of by the purification of

mathematical logic, which has eliminated " infinitesimals " from

the so-called Infinitesimal Calculus. But the Calculus had to be

there first before its purification from bad logic could be possible,

and it is hard to see how it could ever have been originated without

this defective but useful conception, (b) (Met. ibid. 22) Plato ' ' often

used to assume his indivisible lines " (jioAAdxtg rrtOei ia; d-c6/*ov<;

ypa^ds). Aristotle, who apparently distinguishes this point from

the one he has just mentioned, does not explain its meaning. In

the textually badly corrupt Peripatetic tract de Lineis insecabilibus,

which appears to be a polemic of an Aristotelian of the first genera-

tion against Xenocrates, the " indivisible line " is regarded as a

minimum length, and it is urged that there are insuperable geo-

metrical difficulties about such a conception, as, in fact, there are.

What Plato may have meant by the expression we can only con-

jecture. As a conjecture I offer the suggestion that his intention

is precisely to deny the conception attributed to some Academic,

apparently Xenocrates, by the Peripatetic tract. A line, however

short, is " indivisible " in the sense that you cannot divide it into

elements which are not themselves lines in other words, it is a

" continuum." The point makes a straight or curved line not by

addition or summation, but by " flowing " ; a straight or other

line is not made of points in the way in which a wall is made of

bricks laid end to end. 1 (c) Plato said that " there is a first 2

and a first 3, and the numbers are not addible to one another "

(Met. M 10830 32, the one statement about numbers which is

definitely attributed to Plato by name in the last two books of the

Metaphysics).^ A similar point is made about the Academy gener-

ally in the Ethics (E.N. 10960, 17 ff.), where we are told that they

held that there is no form (iSe'a) of number, because " in numbers

1 Cf. the observations of Stenzel, Zahl u. Gestalt, 89 ff. The technical

expressions bclv, /Mem, the source of Newton's language about " fluents "

and their " fluxions," come from the accounts of the doctrine in the Aristo-

telian commentators and were presumably coined by the Academy.

PLATO IN THE ACADEMY 507

there is a before and an after/' i.e. because numbers form a series.

The meaning of these statements seems not to have been clear to

Aristotle, but is manifest to anyone who has learned to think of

number en malhematicien. The sense is that the series of numbers is

not made by adding " units " together. E.g. we say that 3+1 =4,

but we do not mean that 3 is three " units " or that 4 is 3 and I ;

4 is not four i's, or a 3 and a i, it is one 4. What we, really add

together is not numbers but aggregates or collections. Thus it is

true that if you have a group of n things and another group of m

things, and form the two into one group, the new group contains

m+n things, but it is not true that the number m~\-n contains a

number m and a number n. The importance of this view is that it

leads to revision of the whole conception of number. The fifth-

century theory, still represented by Euclid's definition of apiOpos

(Elements vii. def. 2) is that a " number " is TrXyOos povaSw, a

" collection of i's." On the new view, the only really sound one,

no number is a " collection " ; the statement that 3=2+1, which

is the definition of 3, does not mean that 3 is " a 2 and a i," but that

3 is the term of the integer-series which comes " next after "2.

This explains why there is no form of number. The reason is

that each " number " is itself a form, as was really implied in the

Phaedo itself when Socrates spoke of " the number 2 " and " the

number 3 " as instances of what he meant by a form. Hence the

ordered series of integers is not a form, it is a series of forms.

The point may be grasped if we remember that in our own philo-

sophy of mathematics we do not find it possible to define " number "

or even " integer " ; all that we can do is to define the series of

integers or the series, e.g., of " real " numbers, and to define indi-

vidual numbers. I can define " the integer series " as a series of

a certain type with a certain first term, and I can define " the

integer " w+i by saying that it is the number of that series which

is next after n, but I cannot really define " integer." Aristotle

is never tired of arguing against Plato that there is no number

except what Aristotle calls '" mathematical " number, or alter-

natively "number made of I's " (/xoyaStKos apiO^os) ; but the

simple truth is that no " number " is " made of i's," and that it is

precisely what Aristotle calls " mathematical " number which has

no existence except in his imagination. Plato may well have

been led to this denial that numbers are " addible " by his recog-

nition that " surds " like N /2, \/2, must be admitted into arithmetic

as numbers, since it is evident that no process of " adding i to i "

could ever yield such numbers as these. 1 Thus this doctrine, also,

may well be connected with the fact that the " real " numbers form

a continuum. But it is important to be clear on the point that the

principle that number is not really generated by addition of i's

1 This is the consideration made prominent in the treatment of the doctrine

by M. Milhaucl in Les Philosophes-gtonidtres de la Gr&ce, a work really indis-

pensable to the student of Plato. But, as we shall see immediately, it is not

the whole, nor the most important part, of Plato's doctrine.

508 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

applies equally to the numbers of the integer-series, which is not a

continuum.

This brings us to the consideration of Aristotle's account of

Plato's theory of forms. According to the Metaphysics, 1 Plato

actually called the forms numbers, and maintained that each form

or number has two constituents, the One, which Aristotle regards as

the formal constituent, and something called the " great-and-small "

or " the indeterminate duality " (aopio-ros Suas), which Aristotle

treats as a material constituent. In other words, a number is

something which arises from the determination of a determinable,

(the grcat-and-small), by the One. Since the forms are the causes

of all other things, these constituents of the forms are the ultimate

constituents of everything, and this is what is meant by the state-

ment that other things " participate " in the forms. 2 Aristotle

remarks on the theory that it is of the same type as the Pythagorean

doctrine that " things are numbers/' or are " imitations of numbers,"

but differs from that view by substituting the " duality " of the

" great-and-small " for the " indefinite " (aTreipoy) as one constituent

of numbers, and also by maintaining that " mathematical " (TO,

paOrjfjiaTLKa.) are intermediate between numbers and sensible

things, whereas the Pythagoreans said that the numbers are the

things. 8 He seems also to connect this theory with the special

point in respect of which he holds Plato and the Pythagoreans

inferior to Socrates, namely, that they " separated " (f^/Hcrai/)

the " universals " or forms from " things " as Socrates had not

done. 4

It is plain from the explanations attempted by the later com-

mentators on Aristotle that the chief source from which the doctrine

alluded to in the Metaphysics was known in antiquity was the

reports of the auditors of Plato's famous lecture on "the Good."

As we do not possess these reports and cannot be sure how far the

statements of Peripatetic commentators on Aristotle about them

can be trusted, we need to be cautious in our interpretation. But

there are certain points on which we can be reasonably certain.

It is quite clear from the whole character of Aristotle's polemic

against " ideal numbers," that the numbers which Plato declared

1 Met. A 9876 18-25.

2 The simple meaning of this is that, as we have been told by Timacus,

all the characters of " things " depend on the geometrical structure of their

particles, and thus, in the end, on the structure of the " triangles " into which

the faces of these particles can be resolved. And a triangle is determined again

by three " numbers," those which give the lengths of its sides.

3 Met. A 9876 25-28. Oddly enough, he does not mention the much more

important point that the One is made by Plato the formal constituent in a

number, whereas the Pythagoreans taught that " the unit " is the first product

of the combination of their two constituent factors, Trtpas and Aircipov, though he

had correctly stated this doctrine just before, Met. A 9860, 19.

4 Met. M 10786 30. Plato is not named in this passage, but a comparison

of the criticism passed immediately below (10786 34 ff.) with that made on

Plato at A 9906 2 fi. t shows that Aristotle regards the charge of making the

" separation " as applicable to him.

PLATO IN THE ACADEMY 509

to be forms are just the integers and nothing else, and also that

the doctrine does not mean that it is denied that " man," " horse/'

and the like are forms, but that " the form of man " and the like

are now held to be themselves in some sense " numbers." Hence

Aristotle can raise the difficulty whether the " units " which make

up the number which is the form of man or horse are the same as

those which are found in the form of animal, or those of the form

of man the same as those of the form of horse (Met. 10810 9,

1082$ 18, 10840 I 3)- ^ also looks as though Aristotle meant to

ascribe to Plato, as well as to the Pythagoreans, the view that the

integer-series is a succession of repetitions of the numbers up to 10,

so that the Form-numbers would be, in a special sense, the first

ten natural numbers. (E.g. Met. 10840 I2 > though the allusion there

might be rather to a theory of the Pythagoreans and Speusippus

than to a personal view of Plato.) It seems clear, at any rate, that

the key to the doctrine, if we could recover it, would be found

in a theory of the character of the series of integers up to 10.

To some extent, at least, it seems possible to recover this key.

We have to begin by understanding what is meant by speaking of

one constituent of a number as the " grcat-and-small " and by

calling this an " indeterminate duality." Even without the help

of the commentators on Aristotle, the Philebus would enable us to

give a reasonable answer to this question. We saw there that

" that which admits of more and less indefinitely " was Plato's

description of what we call a " continuum," though the number-

series itself does not figure among the examples of coniinua given

in the dialogue. This enables us to see at once why Plato spoke

of what the Pythagoreans had called the " unlimited " (airtipov) as

a " great-and-small " or a " duality." It is a duality because it

can be varied indefinitely in either of two directions. Probably

the commentators arc right in connecting this with the more specific

view that you can equally reach plurality, starting from unity,

by multiplication or by division, e.g. when you divide a given class

regarded as a whole into sub-classes, you have two or more more

determinate forms within the original ycVos*. This indicates a direct

connexion between the theory of number ascribed to Plato by

Aristotle and the preoccupation with the problem of the subdivision

of forms in the later dialogues on which Stenzcl has done well to

insist, though he has allowed himself to negloct too much the speci-

fically mathematical problem. We can also see, I think, why the

other constituent of a number should be said to be " the one,"

and why the " unit " is no longer regarded, in Pythagorean fashion,

as a " blend " of " limit " with the " unlimited," but as itself

the " limit." Here, again, we have a point of contact with the theory

of logical " division."' As the Philebus had taught us, we may arrive

at a " form " in either of two ways ; we may start with several

different eiS?/ as many and seek to reduce them to unity by showing

that they are all special determinations of a more general " form,"

or again we may start with the more general " form " and discover

510 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

more specific " forms " within it ; whichever route we follow, we

presuppose as already familiar the notions of a form and of forms

in the plural. " A " and " some " will be ultimate indefinables. 1

In the case of numbers it is easy to see how the conception,

already implied in the Epinomis, of a " continuum " of " real "

numbers leads to the Platonic formulas. If we wish to discover a

number whose product by itself is 2, it is easy to show that we can

make steady approximation to such a number by constructing the

endless " continued fraction " :

2+1

2 + 1

2 + 1

2+ ...

By stopping off the fraction at successive stages, we get a number of

values i, i+i, i+i , etc., with the following peculiarities. The

2 2+1

2

values are alternatively less and greater than >/2, and each value

differs from N /2 less than the preceding value ; by carrying the

fraction far enough, we can get a fraction a/b such that a 2 /b 2 differs

from 2 by less than any magnitude we please to assign. This is

what we mean by saying that \/2 is the limiting value to which the

fraction " converges " when it is continued " to infinity." Now

in forming the successive approximate values, or " convergents,"

we are making closer and closer approximation to the precise

determination of an " infinite great-and-small." It is " infinite "

because however many steps you have taken, you never reach a

fraction which, when multiplied by itself, gives exactly 2 as the

product, though you are getting nearer to such a result at each

step. It is " great-and-small," because the successive approxi-

mations are alternatively too small and too large. \/2 is, so to say,

gradually pegged down between a " too much " and a " too little,"

which are coming closer together all the time. I choose this parti-

cular example because this method of finding the value of what we

call \/2 was pretty certainly known to Plato. 2

1 We must, of course, distinguish carefully between the notion of " a " and

that of " the integer i." The latter is definable exactly as any other integer

is. i is the number of any group x which satisfies the conditions that (a) there

is an a which is an x"\ (b) "b is an x" implies "b is identical with a." This

distinction is not yet clearly recognized in the Platonic formula.

2 The denominators and numerators of the successive " convergents " are

the series called in Greek respectively the irXcvpiKol and the Sia/uLerpiKol dpiOjuioL.

The rule for finding any number of them is given by Thcon of Smyrna (p. 43-44,

Hiller). The geometrical construction by which the rule was discovered is

given by Proclus (Comm. in Eempubl. ii. 24, 27-29, Kroll). The source of

both Theon and Proclus appears to be the Peripatetic Adrastus in his com-

mentary on the Timaeus (Kroll, op. cit. ii. 393 ff.). Plato himself alludes to

the irXeupt/cof and Sia^erpiKoJ dpifl/xof at Rep. 546$ 5.

PLATO IN THE ACADEMY 511

The same point might be similarly illustrated by the definitions

given by modern mathematicians of the " real numbers." The

definitions are to a certain point arbitrary, but they all turn on the

notion of a " section." E.g. we cannot find a rational fraction the

" square " of which is exactly 2. But we can divide all rational

fractions into two classes, those of which the " squares " are less

than 2 and those of which the " squares " are not less than 2. We

see at once that the first of these sets has no highest term, the second

no lowest, and that no fraction can belong either to both sets or

to neither set ; thus our " section " is unambiguous, i.e. every

fraction falls into one and only one of the two sets thus constituted.

We may then define the " square root of 2 " either as this " section "

itself, or, if we prefer it, as the set of " fractions whose squares are

less (or, if we like, greater) than 2." Here again, the notion of a

" section " of the rational fractions exhibits the Platonic characters.

It involves a " duality," or " great-and-small/' the two sets, one

of which has all its terms less than, the other all greater than, a

specified value, and the duality is " indefinite " because one of the

sets has no highest term, the other no lowest. The section is a

determination of the " great-and-small " of the fractions by the

" one " precisely because it makes an unambiguous " cut " just

where it does. Other cuts can be made at other places in the

series, and each will define a different " real number." l

It is clear, however, that we have not yet exhausted the meaning

of Plato's doctrine. From Aristotle's polemic we see that the

Platonic analysis was not meant to apply simply to the case of the

" irrationals " which Plato was the first to recognize as numbers.

The theory also involves a doctrine of the structure of the integer-

series itself, since it is clear that the numbers with which the forms

are identified are, as Aristotle always assumes, the integers. The

integers themselves, then, have the " great-and-small " and the

" one " as their constituents. How is this to be understood ?

1 Cf. G. H. Hardy, Pure Mathematics*, p. 14. The "rational fractions "

are, to be sure, not a continuum, but they satisfy the only condition for a

continuum known in Plato's time, that between any two a third can always be

inserted. Stcnzcl rightly dwells on the connexion of the "duality" with

being" of which we read in the Sophistes (Aristot. Physics, A 192^ 6 ft.).

The meaning of what is said about geometry, plane and solid, in the Epinomis

will thus be, that the real scientific problem is to obtain a series of " approxima-

tions," within a " standard " which we can make as narrow as we please, to

the various quadratic and cubic surds. In doing so, we are discovering the

ratios of the " sides " or " edges " of the various regular polygons and Solids

to one another. We discover, e.g., exactly how long within a known " stan-

dard " a line must be if the area of the square or volume of the cube on it is

to be 2, 3, 5 ... times a given area and volume ; and since all rectilinear areas

and volumes can be expressed as those of squares and cubes, this solves the

question of the surveyor and the " stereometer." It is precisely with such

metrical problems, relating to the " regular solids," that Euclid's Book XIU.

is concerned, a safe indication of its Academic provenance.

512 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

The difficulty is that the integers do not form a continuum, even

in the sense in which continuity means no more than infinite

divisibility, i.e. the possibility of inserting a third term between

any two given terms of the series. For each integer is " next

after " another.

How, then^ does Plato suppose the series of integers to be con-

structed ? I doubt if the notices preserved to us enable us to answer

the question finally. What is clear is that Plato rightly rejects

the view retained by Aristotle, that an integer is a collection of

" j's," and that the series is thus constructed by additions of i

to itself. 2 is not " i and i " but " the number next after i."

(This ought to be plain from the simple consideration of the way

in which we learn to count. We do not count, " one, one, one, one,

. . ." but " one, two, three . . .") But when we ask in what way

the " duality " comes in in constructing the series of integers, we

are puzzled by the confusion which seems to run through Aristotle

and his commentators between the " indeterminate duality " or

" great-and-small " and the number 2. If it were only in the

polemic of Aristotle that this confusion were found, we might

conceivably dismiss it as a mere misunderstanding, but it appears

to have occurred also in the Academic reports of Plato's doctrine.

The complete study of the problem would require a long discussion

of the mass of material collected and examined by M. Robin in his

volume La Theorie platonicienne. Here it must be enough to

remark that the following points seem to be quite certain, (i) The

" dyad " was called SVOTTOIO'S, because it " doubles " everything

it " lays hold of." There is no doubt that the " dyad " meant is

the " great-and-small,' 1 but " it also seems clear that there is a

confusion, perhaps from the very first, with the avrb o Iv-ri Sua's,

the number 2, and that the function of the " dyad " within the

integer-series is thought of as being to produce the series of

"powers of 2 by repeated multiplication, 1x2, 1x2x2,

1x2x2x2, and so forth (cf. Epinomis 9910 i~4). 1 (2) The " one,"

we are told, puts a stop to the " indeterminateness " of the " great-

and-small " by " equalizing " or " stabilizing " it (ro> icmei/). 2

This, I suggest, as my conjectural explanation of an obscure

expression, means that each odd number is the arithmetical mean

between the preceding and following even numbers, and so

"halves their difference." Each odd number will be got by

halving " the sum of two even " numbers. Thus the order of the

" decade " will be, i, 2, 4, 8 ; 3 (which equalizes 2 and 4) ;

6 (double of 3) ; 5, 7 (which "equalize" 4 and 6, and 6 and 8) ;

10 (double of 5); 9 (which equalizes 8 and io). 3 Cp. Aristotle's

J Cf. Aristot. Met. 10840, 5, 10910 12, 10820 14, 9876 33.

"Plutarch, de Anim. procreat. 10120*, reporting the explanation of Xeno-

crates, 6c 5 TOVTWV ytvfoOat rbv apiO^bv rov &>6s bpl$ovTos rb wXr/flos, Aristot.

Met. M. 10836 23, 29, where the " unit " is said to arise from the " equal-

izing " of the " dyad " of the great-and-small.

3 See Robin, La Thforie platonicienne , p. 449. The mathematical reader

will see at once a certain analogy between this procedure and the " quadri-

lateral construction " of von Staudt.

PLATO IN THE ACADEMY 513

use of the "arithmetical mean" as an "equalizer," E.N.

I ff. If this was the construction, it must be pronounced very

faulty. Not only does it involve the confusions of " a " with i

and of " plurality " with 2, but it involves obtaining the terms

of the series in an unnatural order and using more than

one principle of construction where one is sufficient. (The one

really satisfactory way of defining the integers is to proceed by

" mathematical induction," i.e. to define each in terms of its im-

mediate precursor. This is readily done in the following way.

When we have defined the integer n t we can go on to define n + 1 by

the statement that n + 1 is the number of members of a group

satisfying the conditions (a) that it contains a group with n mem-

bers, (b) that it contains a member a which is not a member

of this group ; (c) that it does not contain any member which

is neither a nor a member of the group of n members already

mentioned.) .

If, as seems probable, Plato's conception has these defects, we

must not be surprised. He probably started with the right con-

viction that what we should call the notion of a " section " is

necessary for the definition of the " irrationals," and went on to

extend the conception to cover the case of the integers. What

could not be expected of the first thinker who had formed the

notion of a " real " number is the recognition that integers, rational

fractions, real numbers, do not form a single scries, in other words

that the " integer," 2, the " rational number " 2/1, and the " real

number 2 " are all distinct. In the logical construction of the

types of number, we need three distinct steps : the rules for defining

the successive integers, the derivation of the rational numbers

from the integers, and the derivation of the " continuum " of the real

numbers from the series of rational numbers. These, however, are

matters on which mathematical philosophers have only reached

clear comprehension in very recent times. The important point is

that Flato should have grasped the necessity of enlarging the

traditional conception of number and of strictly defining numbers of

all kinds. 1

What are the " mathematical " which Plato distinguished from

his numbers or forms ? Aristotle tells us that they differ from

forms in the fact that they are many, whereas the form is one,

and from sensible things by being eternal (Met. A 9876 15). It is

to be noted that he does not call them " mathematical numbers/'

1 Stenzel, Zahl u. Gestalt, 31, gives a different construction, but without

justifying it. I venture to think he has been misled by an anxiety to discover

Plato's number theory directly in the Philebus, where it could not have been

introduced without the dramatic absurdity of putting it into the mouth of

Socrates. In the main, I hope I am in accord with Burnet, Greek Philosophy,

Part I., 320 ff. But I should say that I can make nothing of n. 2 to p. 320,

which manifestly is a non-sens. It appears to be a partially correct explanation

of something Aristotle tells us about the Pythagoreans, which has got into its

present place by some inadvertence. How can " the one " be the terms of the

series ^2, *J6, V 7?2 . . . ?

514 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

but ra p,aOrjfjLaTiKa t and that he never appears to ascribe to Plato

the recognition of " mathematical number" The meaning seems

to me to be best shown by two passages in the Aristotelian corpus.

At Metaphysics K 10596 2 ff., it is made an objection to the theory

of forms that just as the fia^cn-iKa are intermediate between the

form and sensible things, so there ought to be on the theory

something intermediate between such a form as man or horse and

visible men and horses (though we see that there is not). This

implies that the " mathematicals " are something quite familiar.

I would couple with this de Anima A 4046 19, where we are told that

in ra TTfpl <tAoo-oc/>ias Aeyo/xci/a Plato said that the form of animal

is composed of the one and " the first length, breadth, and depth."

The form of animal is, according to the Timaeus, the archetype

on which the sensible world is constructed, that is, it is the res

extensa, the subject-matter of geometry, and Aristotle's meaning

is thus that this res extensa is constituted by the three dimensions

of length, breadth, and depth. These correspond*, as the context

of the passage in the de Anima makes clear, to the numbers 2, 3, 4

(the line being determined by two points, the plane by three, three-

dimensional space by four). Thus Plato's construction recalls the

Pythagorean tetractys of the numbers I, 2, 3, 4. But he spoke

not of numbers, but of the first " length, breadth, depth/' This

seems to mean that though, as the Epinomis says, plane and solid

geometry may be identified with the study of certain kinds of

number, lengths, areas, volumes are not identical with numbers.

The study of number provides the key to all these relations, and

yet they are not themselves numbers, and the significance of

number is not exhausted by its geometrical applications.

So we, too, are familiar with analytical geometry in which we

study the properties of curves and surfaces by means of numerical

equations. All the properties of the curves and surfaces can be

discovered from these equations, but the application of equations

is not confined to geometry or geometrical physics ; the same

methods, for example, play a prominent part in the study of

economics, as when we plot out curves to show the effects of modi-

fications of duties on the " volume " of foreign trade. In a word,

I take it, the " mathematicals " are what the geometer studies.

We may now perhaps be in a position to see what is meant by the

statement that the constituents of the forms are the constituents of

everything. The things of the sensible world, as we have learned

from the Philebus, are one and all in " becoming " ; they are events

or processes tending to the realization of a definite law, and this

law, Plato thinks, can be expressed in numerical form. Because

these things are always " in the making/' they do not exhibit

permanent and absolute conformity to law of structure ; if once

they were " made " and finished, they would be the perfect embodi-

ment of law of structure. And because the stuff of things is

extension itself, the law thus realized would be geometrical and

therefore, as we should say, be expressible in the form of an equation

PLATO IN THE ACADEMY 515

or equations. This is what Plato means at bottom in his own

philosophy by the " participation " of the sensible in forms and

by the doctrine that the trroix^n of number are the crrotxcia of

everything. (I abstain from commenting on the further numerous

passages in Aristotle where the question of the relation of the dpx<u

of geometry to those of arithmetic is raised, since these seem to form

part of the polemic against Speusippus and Xenocrates, and it is

not clear to me how far any of the views canvassed are meant to be

directly ascribed to Plato.)

Aristotle seems, as I said, to connect his complaint about the

Academic " separation " (x^pio-fj.6^) between forms and sensible

things specially with the doctrine we have just been discussing. He

is commonly taken to mean no more than that the Platonic form

is a sort of " double " of the sensible thing, supposed to be in some

" intelligible world," wholly sundered from the real world of actual

life. It is hard to suppose that he could put such an interpretation

on a theory which according to himself makes the a-Toi^a of number

the a-Toix^a of everything. Hence I think Stenzcl l is on the right

track in looking for a more definite meaning in the Aristotelian

criticism, and that he has rightly indicated the direction in which

we should look. As he points out, one of Aristotle's chief difficulties

about the " numbers " is that he holds that if " animal " is one

number and " man " is another, we have to face the question

whether the " units " in " animal " are part of the " units " which

constitute " man " or not ; (e.g. if you said " animal " is 2, " man "

is 4, since 2 X2 =4, " man " would seem to be the same thing as

" animal " taken twice over). The complaint, as Stenzel says, is

not that an c?8os is treated as something distinct from a sensible

individual, but that the more universal cufy, the yiv-q as Aristotle

calls them, are thought of as though they had a being distinct from

that of the dro/xov t<5o? or infima species. Aristotle's point is that

" animal," for example, has no being except as " horse," " man,"

" dog," or one of the other species which can no longer be divided into

sub-species. This would be, in effect, a criticism on the method

of division as practised in the Sophistes, where it is made a rule

that in summing up the result of the division into a definition, all

the intermediate differentiae which have been employed must be

recapitulated. This is a procedure condemned by Aristotle's own

doctrine that a definition need only state genus and specific differ-

ence ; the specific difference includes in itself all the intermediate

differences. Hence, according to Stenzel, the x M P l(T l Ji <: f which

Aristotle complains is that the Platonic account of " division " as

1 See Stenzel, Zahl u. Gestalt, 133 ff., with the Aristotelian texts discussed

there. The all-important passage is Met. Z 10376 8-1038^ 35. Aristotle

urges that if, e.g., you first divide animals into footed animals and animals

without feet, and then divide the former into bipeds and others, the Platonic

rule would require you to say that man is a " two-footed footed animal." But

the determination " footed " only exists actually as contained in the more

specific determinations " two-footed," " four-footed." The same problem

recurs in Met. H 6, 10450 7 ff

516 PLATO : THE MAN AND HIS WORK

the instrument of definition is fatal to the unity of the definiendum, 1

and, since the process is a direct outcome of the doctrine of /xcfofis,

the defect is one which requires the doctrine of /xe'0eis itself to

be revised. (Thus Aristotle's rejection of the Platonic doctrine of

forms would at bottom be based on rejection of the logical tenet

that the relation of species to genus is identical with that of indi-

vidual to species.) Whether this interesting interpretation is

sound is, however, a question for the student of Aristotelianism

rather than for an expositor of Plato.*

See further :

BURNET. Greek Philosophy, Part /., 312-324 ; Platonism, c. 5,

2, 7-

NATORP, P. Platans Idcoilehre, 366-436.

BAKUMKKR, C.-Das Problem der Materie in der griechischen Philo-

sophic, 196-209.

STKNZEL, ].Zahl and Gestalt bei Platan und Aristoteles. (1924.)

ROBIN, L. La Thiorie platonicienne dcs ide'es ct des nombres

apr?s Aristote. (Paris, 1908.)

MILHAUD, G. Lcs Philosophes-gt?om*tres de la Gr^ce, Platon et

ses predeccsseurs. (Paris, 1900.)

TAYLOR, A. E. Philosophical Studies, pp. 91-150.

THOMPSON, D'AucY \V. " Excess and Defect " in MTND, N.S.,

149.

1 Zahl u. Gestalt, 126 ff.

1 It seems clear that a definitive interpretation of Plato's main thought

must start with a thorough study of the material collected in M. Robin's great

work La Thiorie platonicienne. It is time that we should make an end of the

pretence of understanding Plato by ignoring the evidence or by arbitrarily

reading into him the views of our own favourite modern metaphysicians. In

this brief chapter I have only been able to hint at the interpretation the

material suggests to myself. These hints I have tried to develop briefly in

a notice of Stenzcl's book in Gnomon, ii. 7 (July 1926), and more fully in an

essay in MIND, "Forms and Numbers," with reference to the Aristotelian

evidence. (See the reference given above.)

ADDENDA

P. 21, 1. 1 8 ff. It seems necessary, in view of some criticisms, to

say expressly that I regard the date 387 B.C. as a mere convenient

" approximation," not as the known precise date of the founding of the

Academy. And, of course, my language about the long interruption

in Plato's literary activity must be understood with the qualifications

(1) that I expressly decline to commit myself to an opinion about the

relative order of composition of Republic, Phaedo, Symposium, and

(2) that I never meant to exclude the possibility of a minor " occasional "

violation of silence. On my own view the Mene.\enus would have to

be dated c. 380-379. Understood in this "common-sense" way, the

view that " roughly speaking " the dialogues earlier than the Parmenides

and Theaetetus were written before the foundation of the Academy

still seems to me as probable as it did to Burnet.

P. 207, 1. 26 ff . The reality of Plato's own personal faith in immorta-

lity is surely put beyond doubt by the words of Kp. vii. 335^, "one must

put genuine faith in the ancient sacred sayings which indicate that our

soul is immortal, has to face a judge, and pays the gravest penalties

when one has left the body," etc. (neiOeaOm de orrax; del yQt] TO it; jrAao/"j

re Kdl iegoit; Ao'yotg, ol df] firjvvovaiv r;/i> dOdvmov yvyjiv elvai fiixacrrds re

laxeiv xai liveiv rag /leyfarag TijucoQtaq orav n<; dnaMa%Oij lov croj/mToc).

P. 263, par. 2. It should be noted that the Gkuicon of the Sympo-

sium is not Plato's brother, who figures in the Republic, since (Symp.

1730) he, like Plato himself, was a mere nmq at the date of Agathon's

party.

P. 263, par. 2. Professor Burnet, in the posthumous volume of

lectures on Platonism delivered at the University of California, expresses

the opinion that the Republic and consequently the Timaeus are to

be given a dramatic date anterior to the Archidamian War (Platonism,

PP- 2 5~ 2 6). This would, so far as I can see, be possible but for one con-

sideration. It would compel us to hold that Perictione, since she was

the mother of two sons who are young men before 431, was at the very

least over a hundred years old in 366, when Ep. xiii refers to her as

still living. This is just possible, but hardly likely, and since I am as

convinced as Burnet himself of the genuineness of Ep. xiii., I would

rather not follow him on this point.

P. 278, n. i . Xenophon also (Symp. ii. 9) ascribes to Socrates the thesis

that " woman's nature is not inferior to man's " (/} yvvmxela fvai<; ovdev

%eiQO)v ir]s rov dvdpog ofiaa tvyxdvei), though she is not his equal in

physical strength and intelligence (yrco/^^c re xai lo-/vo<; deirai). But

he may be dependent on Plato or Aeschines, or on both.

P. 309, n. i. Aeschines also in his Alcibiades ascribed the " erotic "

temperament to Socrates, with special reference to his affection for

Alcibiades. (eycu <5 did TOV egami ov ervy^avov egcav 'Akxipiddov ovdiv

617

518 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

&id<poQov row Bax%a>v inen6v6eiv. Fr. 1 1 , Dittmar. This evidence seems

to me to make nonsense of all the inferences about the personality of

Plato which have been drawn from the Phaedrus and Symposium.

P. 450. In Platonism (1928), p. 106, Burnet now says that " it

can be proved" that Plato "discovered the heliocentric system" in

astronomy. The evidence offered is simply the statement of Theo-

phrastus discussed in our text. I do not understand how Burnet

reconciles this view with his own defence of the Epinomis, in which

the sun is still expressly treated as a " planet" (9866-987^). I am

wholly in accord with Burnet about the genuineness of the Epinomis

and therefore am compelled to dissent from his attribution of " Coperni-

canism " to Plato.

P. 472, 1. 20. But it should be remembered, as Mr. Lorimer reminds

me, that Aristotle does once observe (Pol. 13296 25) that the various

arts of civilized life must have been discovered " often, or rather an

indefinite number of times in the course of ages," and " Ocellus Luca-

nus " (c. 3) that " Hellas has often been barbarian, and will often be

so again."

P. 516, 1. 4. That is, Aristotle's great difficulty with the theory of

" forms," as it seems to me, is not so much that there should be a

" form " of man, " besides " Socrates and Coriscus, as that there should

be a " form " of animal, " besides " horse, and dog and man. That is

what he is specially anxious to deny.

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE

B.C.

428-7. Plato born (Ol. 88, i). Fourth year of Archidamian War ;

year following death of Pericles. Revolt and subjuga-

tion of Mytilene. Capture of Plataea by Peloponnesians.

Hippolytus of Euripides.

427. Gorgias at Athens as envoy from Leontini. Aristophanes'

first comedy (AairaXrjq) produced.

425. Tribute of Athenian allies raised. Capture of Sphacteria.

Pan-Sicilian congress at Gela. Acharnians of Aristophanes

performed. (?) Hecuba of Euripides.

424. Athenian defeat at Delium (Pyrilampes wounded.) Brasidas

in the north. Loss of Amphipolis and banishment of

Thucydides. Battle outside Megara. Knights of Aristo-

phanes.

423. Year's truce with Sparta. Revolt of Scione. Clouds of

Aristophanes. Connus of Amipsias.

422. Death of Brasidas and Cleon before Amphipolis. (?) Socrates

serves in this campaign. Wasps of Aristophanes.

421. Peace of Nicias ; Scione captured and inhabitants massacred.

Peace of Aristophanes.

418. Battle of Mantinea ; Laches killed, dioixiaiids of Arca-

dians by Sparta.

416. Melos captured by Athenians and inhabitants massacred. Tragic

victory of Agathon.

415. Mutilation of Hermae and "profanation of mysteries." Des-

patch of Syracusan expedition under Alcibiades, Nicias and

Lamachus ; recall and disgrace of Alcibiades. Troades of

Euripides.

414. Birds of Aristophanes.

413. Final ruin of Syracusan expedition ; deaths of Nicias and

Demosthenes. Decelea occupied by Spartans. (?) Electra

of Euripides. (?) Iphigenia in Tanris.

411. Revolution of the " four hundred." Return of Polemarchus

and Lysias from Thurii. Thesmophoriazusae and Lysistrata

of Aristophanes.

410. Battle of Cyzicus. Philoctetes of Sophocles (410-9).

409. Carthaginian invasion of Sicily ; Selinus and Himera destroyed.

408. Hermocrates in Sicily. Orestes of Euripides.

407. Battle of Notium. Return of Alcibiades to Athens. Hermo-

crates killed in street-fighting at Syracuse.

406. Battle of Arginusae. Trial and condemnation of generals ;

protest of Socrates. Deaths of Euripides and Sophocles.

405. Battle of Aegospotami. Dionysius I becomes " tyrant " at

Syracuse.

519

520 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

404. End of Peloponnesian War ; Athens surrenders to Lysander.

Appointment of the " Thirty " ; murder of Polemarchus.

Affair of Leon of Salamis (404-3).

403. Fall of " Thirty " ; deaths of Critias and Charmides. Restora-

tion of democracy at Athens.

401. Expedition of Cyrus and battle of Cunaxa.

399. Trials of Andocides and Socrates for impiety and death of

Socrates in archonship of Laches.

395-87. Corinthian War. Rebuilding of Athenian Long Walls (395-

393). Pamphlet of Polycrates against Socrates (c. 392-390).

Ecclesiazusae of Aristophanes. Destruction of Spartan

mora by Iphicrates (?392 or 390).

c. 388. First visit of Plato to Sicily and Italy at age of 40. Tradi-

tional date of capture of Rome by Gauls.

387. Corinthian War ended by " King's Peace." Approximate date

of foundation of Academy.

385. Birth of Aristotle at Stagirus.

382 Spartan seizure of citadel of Thebes and political murder of

Ismenias.

380. Panegyricus of Isocrates.

379-8. Spartan garrison expelled at Thebes by Pelopidas and his

associates. Raid of Spartan Sphodrias on Piraeus.

378. Alliance of Athens and Thebes. Second Athenian League

founded.

373. Great tidal wave and earthquake on the Achaean coast.

371. " Peace of Callias " between Sparta and Athens. Spartan

power broken by Epaminondas at Leuctra. Liberation of

Messene and foundation of Megalopolis follow in the next

year or two.

369. Spartan lines on Ml. Oneion broken by Epaminondas. (Theae-

tctus probably wounded in this campaign.)

367. Death of Dionysius I. Plato summoned to Syracuse by Dion.

Aristotle enters Academy. Traditional date of " Licmian

rogations " and defeat of Gauls by Camillas at Alba.

362. Battle of Mantinea ; Epaminondas killed.

361-60. Third visit of Plato to Sicily. Traditional date of penetration

of Gauls into Campania.

357. Capture of Syracuse by Dion,

c. 356. Birth of Alexander the Great at Pella.

354. Murder of Dion by Callippus. Plato's VII Epistle. Earliest

extant speech of Demosthenes (on the Symmories.)

353- Overthrow of Callippus. Plato's VIII Epistle.

351. First Philippic of Demosthenes.

349-8. Olynthiacs of Demosthenes. Capture of Olynthus by Philip

(348).

347 Death of Plato.

346. Peace of Philocrates. Philip acts as general in the " Sacred

War " against the Phocians, becomes a member of the

Amphictionic Council and presides at the Pythian games.

Temporary restoration of Dionysius II at Syracuse.

344-3. Dionysius finally overthrown by Timoleon. Aristotle (343-2)

at Pella as tutor to Alexander.

APPENDIX

THE PLATONIC APOCRYPHA

In using the name Apocrypha as a convenient collective designa-

tion for those items contained in our Plato MSS. of which it is

reasonably certain that they have no real claim to Platonic author-

ship, I make no gratuitous assumption of fraudulence in their

writers or worthlessness in their contents. Apart from the collec-

tion of Definitions, which has its own special character, the Apocrypha

seem to be undiguised imitations of Platonic " discourses of Socrates/'

and most of them to be the work of the early Academy ; the attri-

bution to Plato has arisen naturally and by accident. The works

in question fall into three classes : (A) items actually included in

the canon of Thrasylus ; (B) the collection of 6001 or definitions,

which falls outside the division into "tetralogies"; (C) voOevo/uevoi,

dialogues recognized in antiquity as spurious.

A. Dialogues included in the " tetralogies," but certainly, or all

but certainly, spurious.

Of these there are seven : A Icibiades /, A Icibiades II, Hipparchus,

Amatores (the whole of the fourth " tetralogy "), Thcages (" tetra-

logy " V), Clitophon (" tetralogy" VIII), Minos (" tetralogy " IX).

All were clearly regarded as genuine by Dercylides and Thrasylus.

The only fact known about their earlier history is that Aristophanes

of Byzantium had included the Minos in one of his " trilogies "

along with the Laws and Epinomis (D.L. iii. 62). Since we never

hear of Dercylides or Thrasylus as introducing any items into the

Platonic canon, it seems reasonable to infer that the whole group

were already accepted by the Alexandrian scholars of the third

century B.C. and that the composition of all must therefore be dated

earlier still. None of the group is certainly quoted by Aristotle,

or even Cicero, 1 but this proves nothing since none contains any-

thing which makes any difference to the interpretation of Plato's

thought. As I shall try to show, the linguistic evidence is also

decidedly against a late date in almost every case ; the Greek

with which these dialogues present us is recognizably that of the

fourth century. 2 It follows that we should assign their composition,

1 The allusion of Cicero, Tusculans, iii. xxxiv. 77, is certainly, that of

de Oratore, ii. 8 almost certainly, not to Alcibiades i, but to the Alcibiades

of Acschines of Sphettus.

3 The statement perhaps needs a little qualification in the case of A lei-

biades II, as will be pointed out later.

521

522 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

speaking roughly, to the half-century between Plato's death and

the opening of the third century, while one or two may quite

possibly have been written even within Plato's lifetime. I shall

also try to show that the thought is quite Platonic, though the

way in which it is presented is not altogether that of the Master.

My own conclusion is that the whole group is the work of Platonists

of the first two or three generations, intending to expound Aca-

demic ideas by " discourses of Socrates/ 1 This thesis cannot be

formally demonstrated, but seems more probable than either the

extreme view of Grote, who accepted the whole group as Platonic,

or the rival extreme view which would bring some of the items well

within the Alexandrian period.

Alcibiades I. This is in compass and worth the most important

member of the group, as it contains an excellent general sum-

mary of the Socratic- PI atonic doctrines of the scale of goods and

the " tendance " of the soul. The Platonic authorship has been

defended by Grote, Stallbaum, C. F. Hermann, J. Adam and

recently M. Croiset and P. Friedlandcr ; Jowett included a version

in his English translation of Plato. For my own part I feel reluc-

tantly forced to decide for rejection on the following grounds,

(i) Close verbal study seems to show that in language the manner

is that of the later Plato, 1 whereas the thought is that of Plato's

earliest ethical dialogues, and the exposition, at points, so unskilled

that a resolute defender is almost bound to regard the dialogue as

one of the earliest of all. (2) It seems incredible that Plato, who has

given us such vivid portraits of Alcibiades in the Protagoras and

Symposium, should ever have treated his personality in the colourless

fashion of this dialogue. (3) It should be still more incredible

that Plato, with his known views on the worth 'of " text-books/ 1

should have composed what is, to all intents, a kind of hand-book

to ethics. The work has the qualities of an excellent manual,

and this is the strongest reason for denying its authenticity. I

agree, then, with those who hold that Alcibiades I is a careful

exposition of ethics by an early Academic, written well before

300 B.C., and possibly, though perhaps not very probably, even

before the death of Plato. I should say with Stallbaum that it

contains nothing actually unworthy of Plato, but I am equally

satisfied that it contains echoes of Plato which are not in the manner

1 On this question see C. Ritter, Untersuchungen iiber Plato, 89-90 ;

Raeder, Platans philosophische Entwickelung, 2425 ; Lutoslawski, Origin

and Growth of Plato's Logic, 197-198. I would add that comparison with

the remains of the Alcibiades of Aeschines and that of Antisthenes shows

that our dialogue is almost certainly dependent on the former, and possibly

also on the latter. Use of these sources in this way is barely credible in

Plato. Also, Socrates is represented (103^) as posing as the tongue-tied

" lover " of Alcibiades, whereas according to Plato in the Symposium it was

rather Alcibiades who posed as the " beloved " of Socrates. For further

discussion, and for evidence that Alcibiades I depends also on Xenophon,

*ee H. Dittmar, Aeschines von Sphettos, 163-177.

APPENDIX 523

of a writer who is echoing himself. In particular, the closing words

(*35e) l can hardly be anything but an allusion to Plato's description

(Rep. 491 ff.) of the corruption of the young man of genius by the

blandishments of that supreme sophist, the " public/ 1 a passage

itself perhaps inspired by the tragic career of Alcibiades. There

are other similar disguised quotations, as we shall see.

The writer's purpose is to expound the thoughts that the one

thing needful for true success in life is self-knowledge, that this

means knowledge of what is good and bad for our souls, and that

such knowledge is different in kind from all specialism. Alcibiades

is drawn as a young man of boundless ambition just about to enter

on public life. (The date assumed is the end of his " ephebate,"

before the outbreak of the Archidamian War. Pericles is at the

head of affairs, 1046.) Socrates, who has long admired the wonderful

boy from a distance, is now allowed by his " sign " to express his

admiration for the first time. 2 He knows that A. is ambitious to

become the first statesman of Europe and Asia, and can help him

to realize the dream if A. will only answer his questions (103^-1066). 3

To succeed as a statesman, A. must be a good adviser and so must

have knowledge which his neighbours have not, and this knowledge

must come to him either as a personal discovery or by learning

from others. But none of the things A. has " learned " are matters

considered by sovereign assemblies, and in the matters which such

an assembly does consider there are experts who would be much

better counsellors than A. His boasted " advantages " of person,

rank, wealth, are irrelevant. On what topics, then, would he be

a competent adviser of the public ? He says, " On the conduct

of their own affairs, e.g. the making of war and peace." Yet it

is the expert we need to advise us whether it is better to make war,

on whom, and for how long. Our standard of the " better " is

supplied by the expert's rtxvrj. Now, what rs^vr] is the relevant

one in these questions of state ? When we declare war, we always

do so on the plea that our rights have been infringed. Has A., then,

ever learned " justice," the knowledge of rights and wrongs ? He

has never received instruction in it, nor can he have discovered it

for himself. To do that he would need first to look for it, and to

look for it he must be first awake to his ignorance of it. But from

his childhood he has always been wrangling with his companions

W, otf rt r-j ay 0tVet d7ricrrwi> dXXA rty rrjs ir6\b)S opuv /W/tij*', /XT)

t/JLOU Te KO.I (TOV KpCLTr)O"Q.

* 1030. The representation that S. has not spoken a word to the lad for

years seems an un-Platonic exaggeration. Contrart the representation in

the Protagoras which depicts a scene from the same period of the philosopher's

lile.

* This self-confidence, again, is not in keeping with Plato's conception

of Socrates ; it looks to be borrowed from the Socrates of Xenophon. It is

definitely "un-Platonic" that Socrates boasts (124$) of having God for

his '^guardian," with reference, as we see by a comparison with 1030 5, to

the " divine sign." God and the " sign " are never confused in this way

in any certainly genuine work of Platp.

524 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

about his " rights/' as if he already knew what they are (io6c-

nod). And he certainly cannot have ''picked up" knowledge

of right and wrong from the " many " at large, as he has done the

use of his mother-tongue. 1 The " many " all agree about the

meaning of vernacular words, and this is why one can learn the

language from them. Where their views are at hopeless variance,

they cannot be our teachers, and there is nothing about which

they are more at variance than their "rights" and "wrongs."

A. then is proposing to teach others what it is not possible that he

knows himself (iioe-ii^a).

But, says A., the politician need not know what is right ; he

need only know what is expedient. Well, if A. thinks he knows

what the expedient is, let him answer one question : Is the

expedient always the same as the right or is it not ? A. thinks

not, but Socrates is confident that he can prove the contradictory

(114^). The proof turns on establishing the equations *cdoV =

dyaBov, ala^Qov = xaptiv (114^-1166). 2 He who acts " finely "

also " does well," i.e. is in possession of good* and the good for us

= the expedient for us. He then who advises as expedient what is

wrong is a bad adviser. If A. hesitates whether to admit or to

deny this, his very hesitation is a sign that he is becoming conscious

of his ignorance about the most important of all subjects (1170).

He is suffering from virulent dfiaOla, the common malady of

" public men " (n8b). Pericles, indeed, is said to have " learned "

wisdom from Anaxagoras and Damon. But since he never imparted

" wisdom " to anyone, we may fairly doubt whether he had it. 4

A. might reply that if all our public men are " laymen," he need

not be more than a layman himself to compete with them. But

the real antagonists for whom an Athenian statesman needs to be

more than a match are foreign powers, the Spartan and Persian

kings. Both have the advantage of A. alike in descent, in careful

preparatory training for their office, 6 in wealth and resources. 6

1 An echo of Protagoras, 3270 ?

2 Cf. Gorgias, 474 c.

3 Cf. Rep., 353* ff .

4 Cf. Protagoras, 3195, Meno, 9$ (both echoed by Ale. 7, 1180).

5 The starting-point for the long and over-coloured picture of the educa-

tion of a Persian king (which must be meant ironically) seems to be Aeschines,

Fr. 8 (Dittmar), where Socrates ironically argues that Themistocles must

have practised " tendance of himself " before venturing to match himself

with Xerxes. The development of this hint in our dialogue seems to reflect

Xenophon's romance of the Education of Cyrus (itself possibly influenced by

the Cyrus of Antisthenes). Plato's view (Laws, 684) is that no Persian prince

ever receives any " education " at all. So far I should accept the conclusions

of H. Dittmar, but I am wholly sceptical of his further theory that the

real object of Ale. I is to discountenance the preference of Eastern thcosophy,

represented by Zoroaster, to Hellenic philosophy.

8 Note that the statements of the dialogue about the wealth of Sparta

would only be true for the period between the surrender of Athens to Lysander

and the battle of Leuctra. They are not true for the supposed date of the

conversation.

APPENDIX 525

If one is to compete with such rivals, the first lesson to be learned

must be " knowledge of self " (the lesson of not underrating your

opponent.)

How, then, must we set to work on the " care " (empeheia) of

ourselves ? We wish to be as good as possible at the goodness of a

nates xdyaQog, that is, of a <j>o6ri/4os, a man of sound judgement in

all things. About what things do the KaAoi xdyadoi, the " virtuous ",

show this sound judgment ? A. says, in capacity to command

" men who associate with one another to transact the business of

civic life " (125^), or more briefly, "men sharing in the constitu-

tional rights and functions of citizenship " (125^). The statesman's

liyyv} is evfiovUa, "excellence in counsel respecting the conduct and

safety of the State." This safety depends on the existence of <f>dia,

or more precisely, 6p6voia, " oneness of mind "between the citizens;

not the " oneness of mind " secured by the arts of number, weight

and measure, but the kind of " oneness of mind " which makes men

agree " in a house " and is the basis of family affection. Such

agreement implies that both parties to it have a " mind of their

own," and so differs from any arrangement by which one party

leaves a matter of which he is himself wholly ignorant to the sole

discretion of the other. That is not what is meant when justice

is said to be " minding your own business and leaving others to

mind theirs " (127^). (The exposition at this point shows traces

of a confusion one would not expect in Plato.)

Again (the transition is oddly abrupt), what is "care for a

man's self " ? With some needless elaboration, we reach the result

that to care for a thing means to make it better, and that we cannot

tell what will make a thing better unless we know what the thing

is. So our question becomes "What is the self?" (1280). It is

argued at length that an agent is never identical with the tools he

uses. All of us are constantly using our hands, eyes, members

generally, as tools. The body is thus an instrument used, and

therefore cannot be the agent who uses the instrument. The real

self, the agent which " uses " and " commands " the body, must

be the VVM, and the true definition of man is that he is a " soul

using a body" 1 (1306.) " Know thyself," then, means " know thy

yv%rj " ; sophrosyne, the true self-knowledge, must be different

from any of the " arts " which " tend " our bodies or our posses-

sions. And to be in love with another's body is not to be in love

with him. (His body is not really his " person.")

The great business of life is "self-knowledge," the " care " of

ourselves (i32c). 2 Now the eye can see itself only by looking at

its reflection. So the soul can " see itself " only by either gazing

at another man's soul, particularly at " that region of it where the

1 In refutation of the allegation that this definition, always insisted on

by the Neo-Platonists, is " not platonic," Raeder properly refers to Phaedo,

n$c-d.

* Cf. the reference to ^irt/^Xeia of the self in Aeschines, Fr. 8.

526 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

goodness of a soul is to be found/' or contemplating God, a mirror

of perfection brighter than any human soul. 1 We get to know

ourselves truly by knowing God (133^). Until we know ourselves,

we cannot know what is good for ourselves, for other men, for the

State. Without such knowledge, a man's career will be disastrous

to himself and the public (134^). Thus, the true prosperity of a

city depends not on its navy, but on its virtue (1346). 2 The states-

man must impart goodness to his countrymen, and he cannot

impart what he has not. It must be his first concern to get good-

ness by "looking to God," Freedom, the power to make one's

will supreme, is a bad thing for the ignorant ; it leads them to

disease, shipwreck, moral ruin. Until one has acquired goodness,

servitude to a better, not being " one's own master/' is the condition

which befits one.

Alcibiades II. A poor production, stamped as not Plato's by

its style, by manifest imitations of Alcibiades I, and, as has generally

been admitted since Boeckh, by a definite allusion to one of the

Stoic " paradoxes/' 3

The subject is Prayer. The writer seems to take his cue either

from the passage of the Memorabilia where Xenophon, who may

himself be thinking of the closing words of the Phaedrus, says that

Socrates " used to ask the gods simply to give him good things,

since they know best what things are good/' and thought it perverse

to pray " for gold or silver, or a tyranny, and things of that kind," 4

or possibly from Laws, 68gc-e, where the speaker expresses the same

view. A. is about to pray. Now, some prayers are granted, others

are not. So a man should be careful not to ask what is bad for

him ; his god might happen to be in a giving mood and take him

at his word, as happened to Oedipus. 5 A. says, Oedipus was

notoriously " a mere lunatic." This raises a problem. " Lunatic "

is the contrary of " sane." But mankind may be divided into two

classes which allow of no tertiiwi quid, the faonpoi, men of sound

judgement, and the afaoves, men of unsound judgement. On the

1 The argument presupposes the doctrine of the Laws which identifies

God with the apiary ^vxy-

2 A plain allusion to the language of Gorgias, 5190, a passage which seems

to be in the writer's mind all through his own account of " sophrosyne and

justice."

3 On these points see Stallbaum's Introduction to his Commentary on the

dialogue, and for remarks on the language, C. Ritter (Untersuchungen, 88-89),

who accepts Stallbaum's objections to several words and phrases, but owns

that the dialogue would not be condemned by his own stylometric tests

a significant confession.

4 Xenophon, Mem. i. iii. 2, i^xero irp6s TOI)S 0eoi>s airXws rd^a^A dtdovai,

ws rot)? 0foi>s KdXXurra e/56ras biroid &yaOd tern. This perhaps explains why the

dialogue was attributed by some persons to Xenophon (Athenaeus, 5060),

with whose manner it has no affinity.

6 Who prayed that his sons might divide their inheritance by the sword.

The writer follows the version of the story which accounts for the imprecation

as due to mere insanity. Cf. Frs. 2 and 3 of the Thebais, often regarded

in antiquity as " Homeric."

APPENDIX 527

principle that "one term has one, and only one, opposite/' it looks

as though this means that all men, except the few fadvipot, are

lunatics. But this thesis can hardly be sound ; if all men were

lunatics, we could not mix with them, as we do, with safety to life

and limb. (Thus the writer knows, and goes out of his way to

attack, the Stoic tenet that na$ cifiQwv /-tmVercu, every one but the

ideal " sage " is out of his wits.) We may urge that there are many

bodily ailments, many trades ; but no invalid has all the diseases,

no tradesman follows all the trades, at once. So there are many

degrees of " want of sense/' from mere dullness to stark lunacy, and

so lack of judgement must not be equated with lunacy (138^-140^).

The ^QOVL^OI are those who know " what is proper to do and

say/' The ftfaoveg do not know this, and so unintentionally do

and say what they should not. Oedipus does not stand alone

in this. If a god appeared to Alcibiades himself and offered to make

him autocrat of Athens, or Hellas, or Europe, A. would probably

think he was offered a great boon. Yet the power and splendour

of the position would be no true boon to one who had not the

knowledge how to use it. A tyranny may prove fatal to the reci-

pient, as was the case with the murderer of Archelaus ; he was

himself murdered after a reign of three clays. 1 Many Athenian

citizens have been undone by attaining high office ; children may

prove a curse to those who have prayed for them. The poet who asks

Zeus simply to give him what is good and withhold what is bad,

even if he asks it, speaks like a wise man (1400-1430). What ignorance

is thus shown to be so bad for us ? Some ignorance may be better

for us than knowledge. If A. the example is un-Platonic in its

bad taste formed a murderous design on his guardian Pericles, it

would be better that he should lose the power of recognizing Pericles

when he meets him. Knowledge of other things, not accompanied

by knowledge of good, is most often harmful. It is better not to

know how to do a thing, unless you also know whether it is good

to do that thing. Mere professional skill does not make men ^QOVI^OI ;

the national life of a society of " professional experts " destitute

of the knowledge of good would not be admirable (1436-1466).

Most men have not the knowledge which would tell them whether

what they do " skilfully " (nQo X eiQ^) is really beneficial. So it

is better that the " many " should neither have nor fancy them-

selves to have a professional skill which they would be sure to

misuse. Hence the importance of knowledge of good in private

and public life. If it is wanting, the fresher the breezes of fortune

blow, the graver the peril. Horner hinted at this when he said of

Margites that he " knew a lot of things, but knew them all badly"

(1436-147*).*

1 This is a bad anachronism, since Archelaua was killed in 399, some

years after the death of Alcibiades, who is a mere boy in the dialogue.

2 TTuXV r)irlffTa.To (pya, Kaicd* 5* rjirlffraTo irdi'To.. The forced interpretation

of Kaffutt as " to his own hurt " looks like an imitation of the whimsicalities

of Socrates' exposition of Simonides in the Protagoras.

528 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

A. now thinks that he would not jump blindly at the offer of a

" tyranny," and approves the wisdom of the unnamed poet whom

Socrates had quoted. The Spartans, Socrates adds, show a like

wisdom. Their only public prayer is a brief petition for aA<i eV

dyafloig, the honestum et bonum. There is a tale that the Athenians

once asked the oracle of Ammon why Heaven favours the Spartans

who, in spite of their wealth, are niggardly with sacrifices, more

than the liberal Athenians. 1 The oracle answered that the Spartan

ev(f>r)[i(a by which it presumably meant the decency of the prayer

just mentioned is more pleasing than all burnt-offerings. In the

same spirit the gods rejected the costly offerings of Priam. They

are not to be bribed, and they look at our souls, not our gifts

(148^-1506).

A. would do well, then, to postpone his prayer until he has

learned to pray aright. But who will teach him ? " Your sincere

well-wisher/' says Socrates, " but there is a mist which must first

be removed from your soul/' A. rewards these words of encourage-

ment by " crowning " Socrates with the garland he had meant to

wear while praying, and Socrates fatuously accepts the compliment.

(A tasteless reminiscence of the Platonic playful " crowning " of

Socrates by the drunken Alcibiades, Sympos. 2i^d-e.}

The very poor dialogue is dependent on, and therefore later

than, Alcibiades I. Besides the echoes already mentioned, we

note that the juawo/tevov avd^wnov of 1380 6, said of Oedipus, is

a verbal imitation of the use of the same phrase, " a mere lunatic,"

with reference to Alcibiades' own brother at Ale. I, uSe 4. The

ill-managed fiction of the god who offers A. the " tyranny " of

Athens, Hellas, or Europe, is founded on what is said more naturally

of A/s own day-dreams at Ale. /, io$b-c.

It is still more significant that the discussion of the Stoic

" paradox " is forcibly dragged into the argument at its very open-

ing. Oedipus is mentioned merely to give an opening for the

remark that he was " crazy," and the nominal main argument

is kept standing still while Socrates goes off at a tangent to discuss

the irrelevant question whether all unwise persons are " crazy " too.

The writer thus betrays the fact that his real concern is to attack

the Stoics. This shows that he is not writing before some date

when Stoicism was already in existence, i.e. not before the early

decades of the third century. In the time of Arcesilaus, president

of the Academy from 276 to 241 B.C., anti-Stoic polemic became the

main business of the school. It does not necessarily follow that the

polemic may not have begun rather earlier.

Linguistic considerations do not take us far. Stallbaum pro-

duces a respectable " haul " of alleged non-Platonic words and

phrases, but forgets that many of these may only go to show that

the writer was a poor stylist, without throwing any light on his

1 The reference to Spartan wealth is another anachronism, taken pretty

obviously from Ale. /.

APPENDIX 529

date, while, in one or two cases, the text is not certainly sound.

No great weight can be attached to his point that the use of the

word neyaMyvxo; at 1400 for a " megalomaniac " is singular. This

might well be a polite euphemism it is given as one in any age.

It is urged that the plural ovdeves is found twice (1480, 0). But

the same form occurs also in Plato (Euthydemus, 305^, Timaeus,

2ob, Ep. vii. 3440) and in Isocrates, and I take its double appearance

in a single half-page of Ale. II to be due to conscious imitation.

The forms djioxQidfjvai (1490), oldapev (141 , 142^) are definitely not

clasvsical Attic, 1 but the majority of the Academy were never Athe-

nians. Aristotle, for example, was an Ionian and constantly

betrays the fact by his vocabulary. Too much has been made of

the employment (1400, 1500) of rv%6v in the adverbial sense of

" perhaps." This is not usual in good classical Attic, but there is

at least one example in Isocrates. 2 By comparison with such early

specimens of the xoivrj as the extant remains of Epicurus, Ale. II

might almost be called Attic. Hence I think it should not be

confidently dated too late in the third century. It may belong to

any time soon after the first rise of Stoicism.

Amatores (or Rivales. The title is 'EgaaTai in the famous MSS.

BT, 'AvTEQaaral in the margin of B).

The scena is the school of the reading-master Dionysius, said

by Diogenes and others (D.L. iii. 5) to have been Plato's own first

teacher. Two boys are disputing, apparently on a point of geo-

metry. Socrates is told by the " lover " of one of them that they

are " chattering philosophy " about "things on high " (rd jierecoQa).

The tone of the remark leads him to ask whether philosophy is a

thing to be ashamed of. The " lover's " rival is surprised that

Socrates should act so much out of character as to put this question

to a man who leads the life of a voracious and sleepy athlete. This

new speaker is a votary of " music/' as the other is of " gymnastic. 1 '

His opinion is that philosophy is so divine a thing that a man must

be less than human if he disprizes it. But what is this " philo-

sophy " ? " What Solon meant when he spoke of ' learning some-

thing fresh every day of one's life '." 3 Yet, is it so clear that

philosophy is simply identical with multifarious learning ? 4 We

are used to think that philosophy is for the soul what exercise is

for the body. If so, " polymathy " must be the mental counterpart

of noXvnovia, excessive exertion, and it may be doubted whether

this latter is a good thing. The cultivated " lover " feels bound,

1 The first may be a vulgarism, the second is Ionic. Yet before the time

of the New Comedy oI5as is found once in Euripides, once (probably) in

Xenophon ; oldaficv once in Antiphon (the orator), once (probably) in

Xenophon.

8 Isocr. iv. 171, rvxbv &v ykp Av n (rvvcirtpavav. Cf. Xenoph., Anab. vi. I,

2O, vofjil^wv . . . TVX&I' t> Kal dyaffov rii/os SLV atnosry arpari^yfv^affat.

3 Solon, Fr. 2, yrjpdffKa) d' alti TroXXd didavKb^vos.

* TroXvfjLaOia (133$). The allusion is to Heraclitus, Fr. 16 (By water), TTO\*

i v6ot>

680 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

as a fair-minded man, to allow that nolvnovta may be good, though

the admission goes against his personal bias. His " athletic "

rival takes a different view. As all experts know, it is " moderate "

exertion which keeps the body fit ; even a hog has the sense to

understand that. In that case, may we not argue by analogy that

it is not excessive but moderate " studies" (/^adij^ara) that are

good for the soul ? This question leads straight up to another :

Who is the expert who determines what is the right measure in the

matter of studies ?

Again, tohat studies would a true lover of wisdom regard as

most important ? The " musician " says, "Those which will win

you the highest reputation." A philosopher should be at home in

the " theorick " of all the professions, or at least, of those which

are in high consideration, though he should not stoop to meddle

with their manual part. He should know them as the " master-

builder " * knows his business (1356-^). But can a man be really

proficient in the theory of two professions at once ? Only if we

concede that the philosopher need not have the " finished " know-

ledge of a great specialist, but such an amateur's knowledge as will

enable him to follow the discourse of the specialist intelligently

and form a sound judgement on it. That means, says Socrates,

the philosopher is to the great specialist what a " pentathlist " is

to a first-rate boxer or wrestler. He is not supreme in any one

speciality, but a good second-rate man in several (1360). As he is

not subdued to any speciality, he is not circumscribed by any. 2

But what is the good of his philosophy ? We do not want to trust

a second-rate physician when we are ill, nor a second-rate navigator

when we are in danger on the sea. If the philosopher is first-rate

at nothing, life has no place for him ; this seems fatal to the con-

ception of him as an all-round " intelligent amateur " (1376).

Let us make a fresh start. In the case of our domestic animals,

there are two sides to the professions which " tend " them. The

expert knows a good horse or dog from a bad one better than other

men; he also " disciplines," or "corrects" (*cadfei), the animals

under his care. What " art " similarly " corrects " human beings ?

Justice, the " art " of the dicast ; hence we should presume that

the practitioners of this art also know a good man from a bad one.

The layman in the art is ignorant even of himself, does not know

the true state of his own soul. This is why we say that he has not

sophrosyne ; by consequence, to have sophrosyne will mean to be a

practitioner of the art we have just called justice, the art of true

self-knowledge. We call this art sophrosyne because it teaches us

to know ourselves, and also justice, because it teaches us to " cor-

rect " what we discover to be amiss (138^). Since the life of society

1 A tell-tale allusion to Politicus, 2590 ft. ?

a This reminds one of the unnamed person described at the end of the

kuthydemus as being on the border-line between politics and philosophy (see

supra, p. 101). I suspect the writer means to recall that passage.

APPENDIX 581

is kept sound by the employment of this " correction/' we may also

call this same self-knowledge " politics," the art of the statesman,

or, when it is practised by one man for the whole community, the

art of the king, or even of the autocrat (ctiQawog). It is the same

art which is exercised on a smaller scale in regulating a household.

So we may say that the " master," the householder, the statesman,

the king, the autocrat are all specialists in an " art " whose true

name is indifferently sophrosyne or justice. The expert in this art

is the person whose discourse a philosopher must be able to follow,

and on whose results he must be able to pass a sound judgement

(138^). What is more, the philosopher ought to be himself a

first-rate practitioner of it (ib. e), and this disposes of the attempt

to identify the philosopher with the all-round connoisseur.

The purpose of the little work is clearly to set the Platonic con-

ception of philosophy as the knowledge of the good, with its corol-

lary, the identification of the true philosopher and the true king,

in sharp contrast with the shallower conception of philosophy as

" general culture." The great representative of this view of philo-

sophy in Attic literature is Isocrates, 1 and I think the 'EQcundi may

fairly be described as a pleasing essay on the superiority of the

philosophy of the Academy to the thing called by the same name

in the school of Isocrates. This may have some bearing on the

date of the composition. The tension between Isocrates and the

Academy seems to have reached its maximum in the last years of

Plato's life, when Aristotle was coming into prominence as a rival

teacher of " rhetoric." It is natural to regard our dialogue as a

contribution to the Academic side of the controversy, a view borne

out by the complete absence of all linguistic traces of later date.

The explicit recognition of the " tyrant " as a practitioner of

" sophrosyne and justice " indicates a more favourable view of

" personal rule " than anything to be found in Plato. Unless it

is to be taken as mere irony, it seems to imply that the writer

regards an autocracy as a fait accompli of which he definitely

approves. He also retains the demand that the philosopher ought

to be himself a " ruler," disregarding the modified view of the Laws,

where the philosopher acts as the sovereign's adviser and coadjutor.

May we infer that he is unacquainted with the Laws and therefore

presumably writing before their circulation ? 2 The facts would,

1 Burnet, Greek Philosophy, Part /, 215.

1 See the remarks of Jaeger, Aristoteles, 53-60, on the relation between

Aristotle's Protrepticus and [Isocr.] I. The Panathenaicus of Isocrates is a

contribution to the controversy ; the " sophists " of whom he complains

there as rivals and critics are unmistakably the Academy. I suggest that

the 'E/jaorraf belongs somehow to the same " war of pamphlets." There ia

a remark ascribed (D.L. ix. 37) to Thrasylus that etircp oi'AvTepavTal nXdrw^6s

eiffi, the " lover " to whom Socrates makes the suggestion that the philo-

sopher is a kind of " pentathlist," must be Democritus. This, as it stands,

is nonsense. Perhaps Thrasylus really said, what is true, that Democritua

was the kind of " all- round man " whom Socrates has in view I think with

532 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

I think, fall into line if we supposed the writer to be connected

with the Academic group formed, at the end of Plato's life, at

Assos under the protection of the converted " tyrant " Hermias of

Atarneus. I offer this suggestion for whatever it may be worth.

Theages. The main object of the work seems to be to relate a

number of anecdotes about Socrates' " sign." Theages, son of

Demodocus (perhaps the general of the year 425-4 mentioned at

Thuc. iv. 75), is twice named in Plato (Apol. 33^, Rep. 4966).

From these references we learn that he suffered from delicate

health and was dead in 399. According to the Republic, he

might have been lost to philosophy but for the invalidism which

kept him out of public life. In the Theages he is a mere lad whose

future destination is giving his father some anxiety. There is

no indication of dramatic date except that in 1270, apparently

verbally echoed from Apol. ige. Prodicus, Polus and Gorgias are

all assumed to be present in Athens. The piece can hardly be

said to have an argument. Demodocus thinks that nothing would

prepare his son for a great career so well as association with Socrates.

But, says S., my young friends do not always benefit by my society ;

everything depends on the " divinity." My " sign " sometimes

interferes, and it is always lost labour to disregard it. Charmides

neglected my advice not to train for the foot-race at Nemea and

had reason to be sorry for it. Timarchus insisted on leaving a

dinner-party to keep an engagement in defiance of the " sign."

The "engagement" was, in fact, to assist in an assassination,

and Timarchus afterwards confessed, on the way to execution, that

he had done wrong to disregard my warnings. The " sign " also

predicted the great public disaster at Syracuse. Aristides, grandson

of the great Aristides, made famous progress while he was with

me, but, in a short absence, forgot all he had learned, though

Thucyclides (the grandson of Pericles' opponent) was associating

with me to his great advantage. Aristides explained that he had

never directly learned anything from me, but found his own intelli-

gence mysteriously aided by being in the same room with me.

All through this conversation there are recognizable borrowings

from the Platonic dialogues. The " sign " is described (i28d) in

+he actual words of Apol. $id ; the statement that it warned S.

that some lads would not benefit by his company is taken from

Theactet. 1510, and the anecdote about the boys Aristides and

Thucydides has been constructed by combining that passage with

the Laches, where these two lads are introduced to S. by their

fathers. There is an allusion to the usurpation of Archelaus (124^)

which verbally reproduces Gorg. 470^. Theages, like the young

Grote that the words e?7re/> KT\. need not indicate any doubt of the genuine-

ness of the dialogue. They may quite well mean, " Since, as every one

knows, the work is Plato's." The object may be to argue that Plato has

made Socrates allude to Democritus. This would be a retort to the charge

that Plato ignores Democritus out of envy (D.L. iii. 25).

APPENDIX 533

Alcibiades of Ale. I, would like to be a x^avroc, " and so, I am sure,"

he says, " would you, or any one else " (1250). All these passages

are ultimately borrowings from Gorg. 469^. There is one glaring

anachronism, a reference to the mission of Thrasylus to Ionia in

the year 409. x Since the Republic manifestly speaks of Theages

as a grown man, the reference to the Sicilian disaster is probably

a second. The curious theory of 1295 ff. that the " sign " could

infect the associates of S. with intelligence is unlike anything in

Plato, but we may take it as indicating Academic authorship that,

in spite of its wonderful stories, the Theages agrees with Plato against

Xenophon that the " sign " gave no positive recommendations

(128^).

Stallbaum 2 had a theory which would bring the Theages down

to a very late date. He argues that the opening for its composition

was provided by the words of Theaetet. 150^, where Socrates says

that those of his young friends " to whom God permits it " (oloneQ av 6

Oeos naQetxrj) make great progress. Our writer wrongly supposed

that " God " here means the " sign," which has nothing to do with

the matter. This shows that he was influenced by the Stoic faith

in prophecies, divination and omens. We know from Cicero 3 that

Antipater of Sidon, a Stoic of c. 150 B.C., related curious tales about

the " divination " of Socrates, and may infer that the stories of

the Theages come from him. Hence the work is not earlier than

150 B.C. Stallbaum reinforces this argument by producing a

longish list of suspicious words and phrases.

I see no force in this reasoning, which starts with a bad blunder.

Stallbaum has forgotten the statement of the Theaetetus (1510)

about the warnings of the " sign " which is our author's real starting-

point. There is no misunderstanding of the Theaetetus in the

Theages. Also it is antecedently just as likely that the Theages

is one of the sources from which Antipater " collected " his tales

as that it is drawing on him. In fact, a Stoic would not be likely

to be satisfied with Plato's account of the merely inhibitory

character of the "sign." Xenophon's version of the matter,

which makes the " sign " give positive guidance, is much more

in keeping with Stoic theories about " the divinity." Hence I

hold that the fidelity of the Theages to Plato on this point is definite

evidence against the presence of Stoic influence. The linguistic

arguments are also nugatory. Some of the expressions to which

Stallbaum took objection are actually Platonic, others are mere

examples of a slightly turgid diction. 4 On the evidence I think it

1 For this mission see Xenoph., Uellenica, i. 2, I.

* See his Introduction and Commentary.

8 Cicero, de Divinatione, I. liv. 123, permulta collecta sunt ab Antipatro

quae mirabiliter a Socrate divinata sunt.

* He objects to f3iu>vai, though Plato has tftlu<ya.v t pi$ y piyTj, and even /3tu><ras ;

to TCKfji.a{pe<r0at dw6 rifos eft rt (a phrase directly imitated from Theaetet. 2066 7) ;

to irotoDfjLai deivfa clvat, an odd expression but paralleled, perhaps, Rep. 58 id

10 (where the n ol&ntOa, of editors is a correction of the MSS.

534 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

most probable that the dialogue is the work of an Academic of the

last third of the fourth century, a man of the type of Xenocrates,

(president of the Academy 339-314 B.C.). Xenocrates was notori-

ously interested in " daemons " and seems to have been the original

authority, or one of them, for the later Platonist lore on the subject.

The Theages is the very sort of thing we might expect from his

circle. 1 Its chief interest for us lies in the probability that some

of its anecdotes may have come down from men who had actually

seen Socrates, and thus may reflect the impression his oddities

made on contemporaries. Perhaps it is un-Platonic that the

Theages represents the dcujuoviov aiyuelov as leading Socrates to check

the acts of other persons. There is no parallel for this in any

certainly genuine dialogue.

Hipparchus. By general admission the language and diction

of the dialogue are excellent fourth-century Attic, not to be really

discriminated from the authentic work of Plato. This should

put Stallbaum's view that it is a clever late imitation out of court.

That might have been possible after the rise of " Atticism," but not

earlier. I shall discuss Boeckh's unlucky speculation on the author-

ship later on.

Socrates and an unnamed friend a are considering the question

what avarice (or greed, TO fafoxeQdes) is and who is the avaricious

or greedy man (the </>doxg<%). The first and obvious answer is

" A greedy man is one who is not above making a profit from an

unworthy source " (nno r&v firjdfrog d$lcov). But a man who expects

to make a profit from what he knows to be worthless must surely

be silly, whereas we think of the greedy not as silly, but as " cunning

knaves/' "slaves of gain " who know the baseness of the source

and yet are not ashamed to make the profit. Here there is a diffi-

culty. He who knows when and where it is " worth while " to

plant a tree, or perform any other operation, is always some kind

of expert. And an expert would not expect to make a profit out

(And in the Theages it is quite possible that we ought to read irpo<r-

irotoD/Luu.) He objects to the use of Trpo<ra.yopevi.v in the sense of "to

name," which is justified by parallels at Sophist. 25 la, Polit. 2910, Phileb.

120, 54, and the phrase a/yiara Kvfiepvav, a mere piece of " Gorgianism "

with a close parallel in Laws, 641 a 2. The only really suspicious word in his

list is ISioXoye'iffOai, apparently used nowhere else before Philo Judaeus.

But as the noun idioXoyia occurs in Epicurus, three centuries before Philo,

the suspicion does not amount to much. Ritter (Untersuchungen, 94) finds

the mannerisms in agreement with Plato's earlier style, though inconceivable

in a dialogue later than the Theaetetus, on which the Theages is dependent.

1 See also H. Briinnecke, de Alcibiade II, quifertur Platonis (Gottingen,

1912), 113. H. Dittmar (Aeschines von Sphettos, 64) thinks of Heraclides

of Pontus and his friends, which comes to much the same thing.

1 This is not in Plato's manner. Apart from the purposely anonymous

chief speakers in the Sophistes-Politicus and Laws, he only introduces unnamed

tralpoi as persons to whom Socrates reports the conversation (e.g. in the

Protagoras), never as interlocutors in the dialogue proper. It is also not

his practice to name a dialogue after a character who is not an interlocutor,

though Aeschines seems to have done this in his Miltiades.

APPENDIX 535

of worthless material or by using worthless instruments, as we

may readily convince ourselves by taking simple examples. This

disposes of the suggestion that cleverness is part of the definition

of the <tAoxe<%. We try a second formula : the greedy are those

who are insatiably eager for petty profits. (The emphasis now

falls on the paltriness of the gain.) Still, they cannot be supposed

to know how petty the profit is. Also, ex hyp. they are eager for

the gain. Gain is the "opposite " of detriment, detriment is always

an evil and therefore men are made worse by it, therefore it is always

an evil (2270, a singular argument in a circle). Gain, then, being

the " opposite " of something which is always an evil, must always

be a good. A man who loves gain is one who loves " good," as we

all do. With the first definition it would seem that no one could

be greedy, with the second that everyone must be greedy. If we

try a third suggestion, that the greedy man is one who is not " above "

making gain from sources to which the respectable (of xQ^aroi, 22yd)

will not stoop, it may still be replied that if it is true (a) that to

make a gain is to be benefited (dxfreXeloOcu), and (b) that all men

desire good, it must follow that the " respectable " are as much

" fond of all gain " as others. And it would not help us to say

that they do not desire to gain by that which will do them harm,

or to make a " wicked " gain. For to be harmed = to suffer loss

of some kind, and it is meaningless to talk of losing by a gain ;

and if gain is always good, how can there be any " wicked " gain ?

Here the friend complains that Socrates is " gulling " him. But

that, says S., would be a shocking act and would violate the precept

of that good and wise man Hipparchus, the eldest of the Pisistra-

tids. He introduced Homer's poetry to Athens, regulated its

recitation, patronized Anacreon and Simonidcs, all out of zeal for

improving his fellow-citizens. For the country-folk he set up

Hermae by the roads engraved with maxims intended to surpass

the wisdom of the famous Delphian inscriptions. One of these

maxims was MH &IAON E3A HA TA, ' ' never gull a friend. ' ' After the

murder of this great and good man, his brother Hippias ruled like

a tyrant, but so long as he lived, Athens enjoyed a golden age.

The true story of his death is that Harmodius murdered him from

jealousy because Aristogiton preferred the wisdom of Hipparchus

to his own. 1

To return : we cannot give up any of our theses, but perhaps we

might qualify one of them, the thesis that gain is always good.

Perhaps some gain may be bad. But at least, gain is always gain,

as a man, good or bad, is always a man. In a definition we should

1 The story makes a deliberate point of contradicting the facts in every

possible detail. It is thus certainly not meant to be taken seriously, but

should be regarded as a not quite successful attempt to recapture the " irony "

of Plato's Socrates. Stallbaum's denunciation of the homuncio who could

make such a string of blunders is wasted. So is the labour of those who have

gone to the passage for light on the " Homeric problem." The dialogue

gets its name from this intercalated piece of awkward pleasantry.

536 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

indicate the common character of all gain, as we do that of all

" meats/' wholesome or not, when we call them " solid nutriment "

(fyQd TQofy). We might try, as a last attempt, the definition that

gain is " anything acquired at no outlay, or an outlay less than

what accrues from it." But we reflect that one might acquire

an illness, not only at no expense, but by being feasted at another's

expense, and yet this would not be a gain. If we add the qualifica-

tion that the thing acquired must be a good, we shall be thrown back

on a difficulty which has already given us trouble. And the words

" with no outlay, etc." also have their difficulties. 1 To make their

meaning clear, we need to introduce the notions of value (dfo 231^)

and a standard of value. The profitable = the valuable, and the

valuable = that of which the possession, or ownership, is valuable.

But this seems to mean just the " beneficial " or " good." We

have ended by equating " gain " with " good " a second time and

are thus baffled by the plain fact that there appear to be " wicked "

gains which good men do not desire, and by the notorious common

employment of (frdoxeQdrjs as a term of reproach.

The thoughts of the trifle are, all through, as Platonic as itf

language, and, apart from the one awkward " circle " in the reason-

ing, the main argument seems to me worthy of Plato in his more

youthful vein. The interest shown in economic facts is thoroughly

intelligent. The real evidence of non-Platonic authorship is, to

my mind, the anonymity of the interlocutor and the inferiority and

irrelevant length of what is meant to be the humorous interlude

about Hipparchus. The dialogue should be assigned to an Academic

of the earliest period with an excellent style and an intelligent

interest in economics. 2

Clitophon. The work is no more than a brief fragment, but

raises interesting questions. Clitophon, a minor character in the

Republic* is conversing with Socrates, who has been told that he is

a great admirer of Thrasymachus, but inclined to be critical of

Socrates himself. Clitophon explains his real position. He holds

that as long as S. confines himself to preaching the need for " learn-

ing justice " his discourse is most awakening. He is convincing,

1 The point is that you might, e.g., exchange gold for twice or four times

its weight in silver and yet lose by the transaction, though you acquire a

greater weight of metal (since the ratio of the value of gold to that of silver

is 12 : i).

It stands " stylometric " tests well. C. Ritter (Untersuchungen, 91)

thinks or thought its genuineness an open question. I agree with hirn

that the writer has " learned more than his style " from Plato, and am content

to believe that his work may actually have been read by Plato.

8 He is mentioned there at 3276 in a way which suggests that he has

come to the party in company with Thrasymachus. At 3400 b he says a

few words urging that Tbrasymachus shall be allowed " fair play." Pre-

sumably he is the Clitophon mentioned by Aristotle, 'AOvivai'wv HoXire/o, 34,

as one of the more moderate supporters of the establishment of the 400 in 411

B.C., whose object was to return to the institutions of Clisthenes. Aristotle

classes him with Theramenes, Archinus and Anytus.

APPENDIX 537

again, when he is exposing the error of the belief that injustice is

ever " voluntary," x and the folly of trying to use what you have

not yet learned how to use, or insisting that if a man does not

know how to " use " his ipvjtf, he would be better dead, or under the

control of another who has this knowledge, which is the " art of

the statesman." 2 (That is, Cl. accepts the whole of the theoretical

Socratic ethics.) But when one has been converted to the necessity

of " learning justice " and is anxious to set about the task, Socrates

fails one. We may illustrate the nature of the failure thus. A

medical man can do two things with his knowledge. He can make

another man a medical specialist by imparting it ; over and above

this, he can cure a patient. Socrates should not merely tell us

that by " learning justice " we shall become specialists in the

subject ; he should also explain what justice produces, as medicine

produces health in the patient (4096). We want to know what

" health of soul " is. Some say that the product of justice is the

expedient (avjtfieQov), some that it is the right (Mxaiov), some that

it is the profitable (hvoiTehovv), or the beneficial (dxpe^i^v). None

of these answers they are taken from Rep. 3360-^ where Thrasyma-

chus says he will not be fobbed off with any of them as a definition

are very enlightening. An associate of S. has said that justice

produces friendship (^iXia) in cities. But he went on to say that

some tyittai, those with boys or animals, are not good. True fyiMa

is 6n6voia, the concord of two minds, and 6p6voia is a science

(Imartifiirj). The argument went no further, because no one could

explain what it is about which all just men are " of one mind."

Clitophon referred the question to Socrates, who told him that

justice makes us able to "do good to our friends and harm to our

enemies." Yet, on being pressed, S. admitted that a " just " man

will do no harm to any one. 3 It looks, then, as though one of two

things must be true. Either Socrates has the same limitations as

a man who can speak eloquently in praise of a science in which he

is himself only a layman, or, more probably, Socrates did not

choose to explain himself fully. Clitophon is sure he needs a

physician of the soul, but, unless S. can do more for him than he

has so far done, he will be left to fall into the hands of Thrasy-

machus or another for practical treatment (^loa-e).

It is not quite clear to what conclusion the writer is leading up,

but it should be plain that the apparent commendation of Thrasyma-

chus at the expense of Socrates is ironical. Clitophon's point is

that unless Socrates can do more for him than simply preach on the

1 407^-0, where the allusion is to the treatment of this topic in the Prota-

goras.

a 4070 if. The allusions seem to be to the " protreptic " discourse of Socrates

in the Euthydemus ; 4086 3 seems to refer to the simile of the mutineers

in the Republic itself (4880 ff.).

8 The allusion is to Rep. 3320-^, but there it is Polemarchus who offers

the definition and Socrates who criticizes it on the very ground mentioned by

Clitophon.

538 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

necessity of " tending " the soul, he is in the position of a sick man

in danger of falling into the hands of a confident " quack/' I

suspect that if the writer had gone on with his argument, Socrates

would have been made to explain why the physician of the soul

cannot simply give his " patient " a set of rules for moral regimen,

why, in fact, morality is not a professional specialism. Such an

argument would furnish a sound Academic commentary on the

discourse between Socrates and Polemarchus in Rep. I. We might

understand the piece better and, perhaps, discover something about

its origin, if we could be sure how to interpret the reference to the

eraiQos of Socrates who maintained that " justice " produces 6^6voia

in cities and that 6p6voia is a science. 1 Since the passage cannot be

explained out of the Republic itself, we clearly have here an allusion

to some actual controversy 2 ; the very irrelevance of the thesis

to its immediate context shows that the point is one to which the

writer attaches importance. That this writer is not Plato seems

to be proved by his manifest dependence on Republic, Euthydemus,

Protagoras. There would, so far as I can see, be no linguistic diffi-

culty in admitting Plato's authorship. Hence I should ascribe

the piece to some fourth-century Academic. 8

Minos. Like the Hipparchus, this dialogue gets its name from the

introduction of an historical narrative ; the respondent is anonymous.

The question discussed is the nature of law, and the point is to be

made that it is not of the essentiaoi law to be a command. A law is

the discovery (efevQeau;] of a truth, the view common to all champions

of " eternal and immutable " morality. The piece opens, in an

un-Platonic way, by a direct question from Socrates, " What is

law ? " (The abruptness seems to be copied from the opening of

the Meno, but there the abrupt question is put into the mouth of

Meno and is dramatically appropriate.) The answer given is that

"the law" is a collective name for rd vo/*i6fteva, the aggregate of

" usages." But this is like saying that sight (dyiig) is the aggregate

of visibles (oQw/teva). The statement, that is, tells us nothing about

the formal character of the " legal " as such. A new definition is

1 That justice produces <f>i\la and 6jj.6voia is said at Rep. 351^ by Socrates

himself.

* The question in what " goodness " makes men of one mind is, as we

saw, raised in A Ic. /., but the allusion cannot well be to that dialogue as Adam

thought, since there is nothing there about the <fn\iat of " boys and animals."

H. Dittmar suggests Aristippus as the lra?/>os of S. intended. It seems

improbable, however, that he wrote any Zw/c/xm/coi Xoyot. I fancy the

guess is based on the fact that the iraipos is said to be KojuL\f/6s and the mis-

taken identification of the Ko/jL\j/oi of the Philebus with Cyrenaics. <pL\la was

a standing topic with writers from the Academy ; Speusippus, Xenocrates,

Aristotle all treated of it.

8 See C. Ritter, Untersuchungen, 93, who finds the language closely akin

to that of the latest Platonic dialogues. Perhaps there may be an allusion

to the view that 6/t6p ota is an ^inaT^^rj in Aristotle's remark that agreement

about astronomy is not o^ota since the sphere of " concord" is rd irpaKTd,

(of which there is no &ri<mj/i77, E.N. n6ja 25). E.E. 12366 2 ff., which has

some remarks about 0iX/cu with Gypta, may allude to the same discussion.

APPENDIX 539

offered : a law is ddypa n6Xe<o<; t a pronouncement of the community.

(I.e. it is the authority of the "sovereign " which gives to " use "

the formal character of law the view of Hobbes and Austin.)

S. treats this statement as equivalent to saying that a law is an

opinion (66a] of the community, and, in spite of the contemptuous

comments of Stallbaum, the equation is a sound one. On the

proposed definition, a law is an embodied "judgement " of society,

or its representative, the " sovereign." But we also hold that

ol voptfjioi, " respecters of law/' and they only, are dlxaioi and that

dixaioavvri, regard for right, is good and preserves society ; its

contrary, dvopfa, disregard for law, is bad, and destroys society.

Now a given enactment may be a " bad law." But how can a

bad Soy/to. ntiXsux; really be law, if law is what really exalts a nation ?

It is suggested that we should define law as a sound judgement

(%Qr]OTr) (5o'a) of society. But here sound is a mere synonym

for true, and truths are not manufactured but discovered. It seems,

then, that formally a law is e^evQeaiq rov dvro$, a discovery about

(moral) reality. This is the main point of the Minos, and it is a

perfectly just one. 1

What are we to say about the notorious divergences between

the laws of different communities or different generations ? One

thing is clear ; no society ever fancies that right can really be

wrong. A law not based on reality (c6 ov) is an error about 16

vo^ifjLov. (It may be accepted as law, but it ought not to be so

accepted.) And we see from the examples of medicine, agriculture

and other arts that the laws of an art are the regulations of the

lni<mjiLia)v, the man who has expert knowledge about some region

of TO ov. So the true " laws " of civic life are the directions given

by " kings " and good men (the experts in moral knowledge), and

therefore will not vary ; a mistaken direction has no right to be

called " law."

Now, who knows how to " distribute " (diaveipai) seeds to differ-

ent soils properly ? The farmer who knows his business. The

physician's " distributions " of food and exercise are the right

distributions for the body, the shepherd's distributions the right

ones for the flock. Whose distributions are the right ones for

men's souls? Those of the king who knows his business. 2 In

ancient days, there were such " divinely " wise experts in kingship,

of whom Minos of Crete was one. The current story is that he

1 Cf. Sir F. Pollock, Spinoza, 1 304, " Law is not law merely because the

State enforces it ; the State enforces it because it is law," and the definition

in the Institutes, iurisprudentia est divinarum et humanarum rerum notitia,

iusti atque iniusti scientia.

2 There is here a conflation of the language of the Politicus about the

king as tender of the human herd with that of Laws, 7130-7140, where vo^uos,

" law," is playfully derived from vtfittv in the sense to divide, distribute,

assign, and law is said to be the " assignment " (Sicti/o^) made by i'ous.

The allusion to this passage explains the awkward double use of vopeus in

the Minos as covering at once the meanings herdsman and dispenser.

540 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

was a savage tyrant, though his brother Rhadamanthys is pro-

verbial for righteousness. This is a mere calumny of Attic poets

on a successful antagonist of Athens. Homer and Hesiod speak

very differently. Homer says that Minos used to " converse "

with Zeus every ninth year. 1 Zeus was a superlative sophist and

Minos his pupil. Rhadamanthys was not taught by Minos the

whole art of royalty, but only how to do the " understrapper's "

share of the work. 2 He and Talus the iron man of the tale

policed Crete under Minos. Now what does the wise king " dis-

tribute " to souls as the wise trainer " distributes " food and

exercise to bodies ? If we find ourselves unable to say, we must

confess that this inability to say what is good or bad for our souls

is disgraceful. (Thus we end with the familiar point that a man's

first duty is to get knowledge of good, to " tend " his soul.)

The thought of the Minos is Platonic ; not so Platonic is the eulogy

of Minos, of whose institution the Laws speaks with some severity. 3

Since the use of the Laws is unmistakable, the date of composi-

tion must be after Plato's death. This disposes of the unhappy

suggestion of Boeckh that the Hipparchus and Minos, with two

of the voOevo/jievoi (de lusto, de Virtute), are the work of the cobbler

Simon, who was believed in later antiquity to have circulated

" notes " (vnofjtv^/jLara) of conversations held in his shop by Socrates

(D.L. ii, 128). The language is really open to no exceptions. 4

Stallbaum's theory that the work is an Alexandrian forgery is

excluded by the known fact that Aristophanes of Byzantium placed

it in one of his " trilogies." The right inference is not Stallbaum's,

that Aristophanes brought the work into the Platonic canon, but that

he found it there. The language points to a date after the death

of Plato, but still in the fourth century. Aristophanes and Thras-

ylus both evidently regarded the Minos as a kind of " introduction "

to the Laws. The discrepancy between its estimate of Minos and

Cretan institutions and that of Laws, I. shows that the piece can

hardly have been intended so.

I subjoin here some brief notes on the contents of those among

*An allusion to Laws, 62^a-b, where Homer's obscure phrase

6af)L<TTr)s is explained in the same way.

2 The distinction between the king and his " underling," as Boeckh and

Stallbaum saw, comes from the Politicus. The explanation given of the

bad repute of Minos is strictly true, in spite of Stallbaum's ridicule. The

venom of the A ttic versions of the legends about him and his family (Pasiphae,

Phaedra, the Minotaur) is accounted for by the hostile relations between

Attica and the prehistoric rulers of Cnossus. To the Athenian ear the name

Minos suggested " chains and slavery."

8 At Laws, 630^, the Cretan complains rbv vo^od^r-rjv ^wwj> an o/SdXXo/xev e/5

4 See C. Ritter, Uniersuchungen, 92-93, though he holds that the style is

more like that of the Gorgias than of any other dialogue. Stallbaum took

oftence at the use of a.i\uorrfiv = convenire, to be fitting, at 3140, as only

found elsewhere in Ep. viii. 356^. But the author of Ep. vhi. was Plato,

and our writer is imitating him.

APPENDIX 541

the Epistles of which I have given no account in the body of this

book.

I. By an unknown and turgid writer to an unknown recipient,

who seems to be, virtually at least, an autocrat. The writer has

long held the highest aQ%ai in " your city," and has had to shoulder

the odium of false steps taken against his advice. He has now

been dismissed with contumely, and so washes his hands of the

" city " and returns an insultingly small sum of money sent him

for his present expenses. The situation answers to none in the

life of Plato, nor, so far as one can see, in that of Dion, to whom

Ficinus wished to transfer the authorship. Yet the style seems

fourth-century, and its total unlikeness to that of all the other

Epistles shows that we can hardly be dealing with a deliberate

forgery meant to pass as Plato's. If the "city" is Syracuse, the

writer might be a Syracusan who has been sent into actual or

virtual banishment and therefore poses as no longer a citizen. But

why does he write in Attic ? Or is our text a transcription into

Attic ? (I have sometimes thought of the historian Philistus

who had been sent into virtual exile at Adria by Dionysius I but

returned at his death and was the chief opponent of Dion as a

possible author. 1 )

V. Plato to Perdiccas of Macedonia. A letter recommending

Euphraeus of Oreus as a political adviser. Constitutions, like

animals, have their distinctive " notes " ; Euphraeus is skilled in

the knowledge of these, and would not be likely to recommend

measures " out of tune " with monarchy. An unfriendly critic

might discount the recommendation by urging that its author has

not even caught the " note " of the democracy in which he lives.

But the truth is that " Plato was born too late in the day " for his

country to listen to advice which he would have rejoiced to give.

Objections to the letter will be found in the works of C. Ritter and

R. Hackforth, 2 but seem to me trivial. I cannot think Plato, who

wrote the Politicus and played the part he did at Syracuse, would

have thought it unreasonable to give advice to a Macedonian king,

and the influence of Euphraeus with Perdiccas is attested as a fact.

(Athenaeus 5060.) The attacks on the very intelligible language

about the "notes " of different constitutions seem to rest on the

arbitrary assumption that the writer must be recalling and mis-

understanding the words of Rep. 493^-6 about the cries of the demo-

cratic belua. Ritter can urge nothing against the language, which

he regards as very much like that of Ep. iv. ; he gives away his

whole case, to my mind, by suggesting that v. is a genuine letter

1 The same suggestion is thrown out by L. A. Post, Thirteen Epistles of

Plato, 130, but rejected on the ground that the writer appears not to be a

citizen of Syracuse. As explained above, I think this inconclusive. But

why should Philistus write in Attic ?

2 C. Ritter, Neue Untersuchungen, 327-398. R. Hackforth, Authorship of

the Platonic Epistles, 73-75.

542 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

of Speusippus. (I.e. his real reason for denying it to Plato is

that he cannot rid his mind of the notion that Plato must have

been " above " corresponding with a Macedonian king. I think

Plato understood the political situation better than this.) The

letter, if genuine, falls some time in the reign of Perdiccas (365-

360 B.C.).

VI. Plato to Hermias, Erastus and Coriscus. The two young

Academics (Coriscus is Aristotle's friend whose name figures so

often in his " logical examples ") are introduced to Hermias, who

had made himself " tyrant " of Atarneus and was soon to be the

patron of Aristotle, as well as the first martyr in the Hellenic

" forward movement " against Persia. He needs confidants of

high character ; the two young men have character and intelligence,

but need an dpwrudi ovva^iq, a " protector/' whom they can find

in him. The writer hopes that his letter will lay the foundation

for an intimate friendship. We are not likely to hear any more

of the " spuriousness " of vi. since the vigorous defence of it by

Wilamowitz in his Platon and the throwing of a flood of light on

the philosophical and political importance of the " Asiatic branch "

of the Academy at Assos by Jaeger. 1 The letter is valuable as

showing that the foundation of the " colony " at Assos was under-

taken in Plato's lifetime and on his initiative. The letter must

belong to the last years of his life.

IX. Plato to Archytas. Archytas has complained of the heavy

burdens and anxieties of public life. He should remember that our

country and our family have both as much claim on our thought

and our time as our personal concerns. 2 A promise is made to

care for a young man named Echecrates, from regard to Archytas

no less than on his own and his father's account. No one has

alleged anything suspicious in the language of ix. The difficulty

which has been made about the youth of Echecrates arises from the

assumption that he is the man of that name who appears in the

Phaedo. Archer-Hind rightly called attention in his edition of the

dialogue to the mention of an Echecrates of Tarentum, the city of

Archytas, in lamblichus's list of Pythagoreans. The date of the

letter cannot be fixed. Plato and Archytas were already friends

in 367 B.C. (Ep. vii. 338a) and we do not know how much earlier.

X. Plato to Aristodorus. A mere note commending the loyalty

of the recipient to Dion and expressing the conviction that " loyalty,

fidelity, honesty " (r6 ptfiaiav xal TO marov xai vyitq) are the true

" philosophy." There are no materials for judgement either way,

but, as Ritter says, the tone "seems genuine." And why should

one forge such a note ?

XL Plato to Leodamas. A meeting would be desirable, but

1 Jaeger, Aristoteles, 112-124, 303-305.

* Cicero quotes the sentiment with approval, de Finibus, II., xiv. 45 : ut

ad Archytam scripsit Plato, non sibi se soli natum meminerit, seel patriae, sed

suis, ut perexigua pars ipsi relinquatur.

APPENDIX 543

L. cannot contrive a visit to Athens and Plato is not equal to a

journey which would probably bear no fruit. He might have sent

Socrates, i.e. the Academic of that name who figures in the Politicus

but he is ill. One hint may be given to L. in connection with the

colony he is projecting. A sound public life requires an authority

which can exercise vigilant supervision of daily life. Such an

authority can only be created if there is an adequate supply of

persons fit to undertake the charge. It is useless to dream of

setting up such a body if its members would first have to be educated

for the position. The date of the letter, if genuine, is probably about

360 B.C. 1 That Leodamas, a mathematician and member of the

Academy, 2 as well as a statesman, should have consulted Plato

about the founding of a " city " and received an answer is in keeping

with all we know of the interests and position of the Academy in

Plato's advanced age. C. Ritter, who finds linguistic affinities

between xi.,ii. and xiii., has only rather pointless objections to urge.

He thinks that the precise character of the "illness " of Socrates

would not be given in a genuine letter. But surely we all, even

if we are philosophers, do give such information to friends at a

distance, and there is real point in making it plain that the ill-

ness is not "diplomatic/ 1 Ritter also thinks the reason given for

Plato's unwillingness to face the journey himself " unworthy/' (It

seems to be a polite way of saying that he is too old.) Finally,

it is " not Platonic " to say that when a situation is desperate,

one can only " pray " for better things. But why not ? Plato

says the very thing at Ep. vii. 331^. And the way in which the

younger Socrates is mentioned is far too natural for the Hellenistic

forger. 3

XII. Plato to Archytas. A note acknowledging the receipt of

certain " papers " (vnojuvij^ara) and expressing admiration of their

author as fully worthy of his legendary ancestors. The writer sends

certain unre vised " papers " of his own in return. Our chief MSS.

append a note that the authenticity of this letter was disputed,

when or why is not known. C. Ritter inclines to attribute it to the

author of ii., vi. and xiii. (that is, as I hold, to Plato). The strongest

argument on the other side is its apparent connection with the

pretended letter from Archytas to Plato prefixed to Ocellus (or

Occelus) the Lucanian on the Eternity of the Cosmos.* If this were

genuine, xii. would be Plato's reply to Archytas, and the " papers "

sent to Plato would have to be identified with " Ocellus." There

is no doubt that " Ocellus " is a fabrication of the first or second

century B.C. or that the " letter of Archytas " is part of the fabrica-

1 Post, op. cit., 37.

2 Proclus in Euclid. I. (Friedlein), 66, 212.

8 A forger, even if he knew of the younger Socrates, would have been

afraid to make his document look suspicious to the purchaser by a reference

which would seem like a bad chronological blunder about the great Socrates.

4 The fiction is that " Ocellus " is an ancient Pythagorean of the sixth

Century, whose work has just been unearthed after long concealment.

544 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

tion. Hence Zeller suggested the now widely accepted view that

Ep. xii.is also the work of the same hand. This plausible view has,

to my thinking, one fault. It assumes that the fabricator had the

wit and sense to avoid introducing into Plato's " reply " a single

word which would definitely identify the " papers " spoken of

with " Ocellus." Of course the introduction of such language is

just the way in which the ordinary fabricator " gives himself away/'

but the cleverness of avoiding the blunder seems to me a little too

clever for the sort of persons who " faked " Pythagorean remains.

I think it possible, then, that Ep. xii. may be a genuine note from

Plato to Archytas about matters otherwise unknown, and that

its existence may have suggested to the fabricator of " Ocellus "

the basis of his romance. 1 But appearances are certainly strongly

against xii. I take no account of the few additional " letters "

which figure in the Life of Plato in Diogenes. They were never

included in the " canon/' or in any known Platonic MS. It was a

mistake in principle on the part of C. F. Hermann to prejudice the

case for the collection of the " thirteen epistles " by printing these

items in his edition of Plato. 2

B. The "O0oi.

This is a collection of definitions of terms of natural and moral

science. The total number of terms defined is 184, but a good

number of them receive two or more alternative definitions. In

the " canon " the collection was definitely marked off from the

genuine work of Plato by exclusion from the "tetralogies." Since

our collection was thus known to Dcrcylides and Thrasylus, it must

be older than the Christian era. I do not know that there is any

further evidence to show when or where it was made. The genuine-

ness of the contents as old Academic work is fairly guaranteed

by two considerations. Many of the definitions are simply extracted

from the dialogues ; others are quoted and criticized by Aristotle,

whose Topics, in particular, are rich in allusions of this kind. I

think it will be found that there are no signs of Stoic influence,

and this suggests that the collection, or a larger one of which it

is what remains, goes back to a time before the rapprochement

between Academicism and Stoicism under Antiochus of Ascalon

in the second quarter of the first century B.C. There seems also

to be no serious trace of Aristotelian influence. No use is made

of the great Aristotelian passe-partout Ivigyeia ; the genus of evdaipovla

is actually given (412^) as dvvapig; the Aristotelian distinction

1 Since Zeller, the fabrication of " Ocellus " and the correspondence

connected with it has usually been assigned to the first century B.C. The

latest editor, R. Harder, argues strongly for an earlier date in the second

century (Harder, Ocellus Lucanus, 149 ff.).

* On the Epistles generally see also the Introduction to J. Souilhe's edition

of them in the Collection des University's de France. But the conclusions

reached there seem to me vitiated by a violent animus against admitting

authenticity.

APPENDIX 545

between aofoa and intorripri, the speculative, and <f>Qovr\au; t the

practical exercise of intelligence, has not affected the terminology.

On the other side, OQB^K;, Aristotle's technical word for " cona-

tion," unknown elsewhere in the Platonic corpus, occurs twice,

in the definitions of wish (4130) and of philosophy (414^). The

statement that vocals is GQXV iniair\^r\^ (4140) and the definition

of 6eiv6tr)t; (413^) also sound Aristotelian. But these are trifles

when set against the absence of the distinction between tmarrffii)

and <^q6vr]aiq. On the whole I believe we should be reasonably

safe in saying that the collection fairly represents Academic ter-

minology as it was in the time of Xenocrates and Aristotle. Since

we know that Speusippus was keenly interested in terminology, and

that a collection of OQOI was included among his works (D.L. iv. 5),

we may infer that he is likely to be the ultimate source of much

of our document. The Divisions of Xenocrates (D.L. iv. 13) are

also likely to have contributed. As Aristotle quotes and criticizes

Academic definitions not found in the collection, it is clear that

we possess only an extract from more copious materials.

C. voOevoftevoi.

de Justo. A conversation between Socrates and an unnamed

friend on the nature of r6 Mxmov. Justice, the art of the judge

(dixaarrjs), like counting, measuring, weighing, is an art of distin-

guishing. It distinguishes the rightful from the wrongful. A given

act, e.g. the utterance of a false statement, may be sometimes

right, sometimes wrong: right when it is done " in the appropriate

situation " (Iv dfovri), wrong in all other cases. It is knowledge

which enables a man to recognize the appropriate occasion. Wrong-

doing, then, is due to ignorance, and so is involuntary.

de Virtute. This conversation also is held by Socrates with a

friend who is anonymous in most of the MSS. In the Vatican

MS. called by Burnet O he has a name, Hippotrophus. The piece

is thus presumably that mentioned by Diogenes Laertius under

the alternative names Midon and Hippotrophus. It has the same

type as the last. The question is whether " goodness " can be

taught. In both pieces Socrates is made, as in the Minos, to

originate the problem. The example of the various " arts " is

used to show that if you would acquire special knowledge, you

must put yourself under a specialist's tuition. But " goodness "

apparently cannot be acquired thus, since Themistocles, Aristides,

Thucydides, Pericles were all unable to impart it to their sons.

Again " goodness " does not seem to come " by nature. 11 If it

did, we might have specialists in human nature, as we have fanciers

of dogs and horses, and they would be able to tell us which young

persons have the qualities that will repay careful training. " Good-

ness/' then, like prophecy, seems to depend on an incalculable

" divine " inspiration.

Bocckh, as we have said, regarded these trifles as the genuine

546 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

work of an acquaintance of Socrates, the cobbler Simon. 1 They

cannot be that for several reasons. For (i) they are slavishly

close imitations, often reproducing whole sentences of Plato's text.

Thus the argument about the parallel between " justice " and the

arts of number and measure in the de lusto has been directly copied,

as Stallbaum said, from Euthyphr. jb ft. The de Virtute is largely

made up of similar "liftings" from the Meno and Protagoras.

(2) The discourses ascribed to the cobbler Simon must have been

shorter even than our two voOsvojuevoi, for there were thirty-

three of them in a single roll (D.L. ii. 122). (3) The work ascribed

to Simon was almost certainly a forgery. (The learned Stoic

Panaetius said that the only certainly genuine dialogues by " Socra-

tic men " were those of Plato, Xenophon, Antisthenes, Aeschines ;

those ascribed to Euclides and Phaedo were doubtful, all others

spurious. D.L. ii. 64.) In fact, it is hard to doubt that we are

dealing with late exercises in imitation of Plato's style, " atticizing "

copies of a classic. The purity of the language is partly explained

by this, partly by the presence of verbatim extracts.

Demodocus. This hardly even pretends to be a dialogue. It

is a direct harangue of Socrates to an audience which includes

Demodocus (? the father of Theages). The style is halting to the

verge of inarticulateness. The drift, obscured by verbiage, is that

Socrates has been asked to advise the audience on some decision

they are about to take. The request implies that there is a " science

of giving advice." Either the present audience possess this science

or they do not. If they all possess it, there is nothing to discuss ;

if none of them possess it, discussion is waste of time. If one or

two possess it, why do not they advise the others ? Where is the

use of listening to rival counsellors, or of taking a vote when their

counsel has been heard ? How can persons who do not know for

themselves which is the advisable course vote to any purpose on

the advices of rival counsellors ? Socrates will certainly not advise

such a set of fools.

At this point the shambling speech ends. What follows seems

to be a detached set of anecdotes, having nothing in common with

what has gone before, except that Socrates is apparently the

narrator, and that each anecdote embodies a rather puerile dilemma.

(a) I once heard a man blame his friend for accepting the story

of the plaintiff in a suit without troubling to hear the other side.

This, he said, was unfair and a violation of the dicast's oath. The

friend retorted that if you cannot tell whether one man is speaking

the truth, you will be still more at a loss if there are two speakers

with different stories. If they should both tell the same story,

why need you listen to it twice ?

(b) A man is reproached by a friend to whom he has refused

1 For a statement of Boeckh's case see his essay In Platonis qui vulgo

ferlur Minoent (Halle, 1806). It is fairly met and disproved by Stallbaum

in the introduction to his own commentary on the Minos.

APPENDIX 547

a loan. A bystander comments, " Your rebuff is your own fault.

For a fault means a failure to effect one's purpose, and you have

failed to effect yours. Also, if your request was an improper one,

it is a fault to have made it ; if it was proper, it is a fault not to

have made it successfully. Also, you have not gone to work the

right way, or you would not have been refused ; ergo, you have

made a fault." A second bystander urged that any man may

fairly complain if one whom he has helped refuses to help him in

turn. But the first speaker said, " The man either is able to do

what you ask, or he is not. If he is not, you should not make so

unreasonable a request ; if he is, how is it you did not succeed

with him ? " " Well, a man at least expects better treatment

for the future if he remonstrates/' " Not if the remonstrance is

as groundless as it is in this case."

(c) A man is blamed for giving ready credence to the random

utterances of irresponsible persons. Why ? Because he believes

the tale of " anyone and everyone " without investigation. But

would it not be an equal fault to believe the tales of your most

particular intimates without examination ? If a speaker is an

intimate of A and a stranger to B, will A be right in believing his

tale and B equally right in disbelieving the same story ? If the

same tale is told you by an intimate and a stranger, must it not

be equally credible on the lips of both ?

The shambling and helpless style of these anecdotes shows

that they come from the same hand as the foolish harangue to

Demodocus. The writer must have been a person of low intelli-

gence, with no power of expression and a taste for futile "eristic."

I doubt whether his scraps were meant to form a connected whole.

Sisyphus. Socrates is in conversation with a Pharsalian of

the singular name of Sisyphus, 1 whom he expected to have seen

the day before among the audience at an epidexis or show-speech.

Sisyphus explains that he was kept away by " our rulers," who

commanded his presence at an important consultation. 2 But what

is consultation (r6 fiovheveoQcu) ? A process of inquiry (TO rpeiv).

Inquiring is trying to get fuller knowledge of something of which

we have some preliminary notion, but not full knowledge. It is

the presence in us of ignorance which makes this process difficult.

But men do not " consult " about what lies beyond the range of their

knowledge ; hence the business of yesterday should have been

called an inquiry into the interests of Pharsalus. Why did not

the inquirers take the course of " learning " the truth from some

1 Presumably the Sisyphus of Pharsalus mentioned also by Theopompus,

Fr. 19 (ap. Athenaeus, 252/). Sisyphus was perhaps a " nickname."

Xenophon (Hellenica, iii. i, 8) says that the Spartan commander Dercylidag

was called so for his " artfulness." Athenaeus (5006), quoting from Ephorus,

gives the sobriquet in his case as <rKu<f>os, an obvious corruption (CK for

CIC).

8 Then is Socrates supposed to be in Thessaly, or were the " government

offices " of Pharsalus at Athens ?

548 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

one who already knew it, rather than the inferior course of trying

to puzzle it out for themselves ? And can there really be a differ-

ence between better and worse advice ? Advice always has refer-

ence to the future, the future is what "has not happened " and

therefore has no determinate character (ovd <f>vaw e%ei ovdefilav).

One guess about it cannot well be better or worse than any other.

The writer is perhaps the same man as the author of the Demo-

docus ; he has the same foible for childish eristic, the same interest

in the alleged puzzle about " deliberation " and the same helpless-

ness of style, though the Sisyphus is not quite so helpless as the

Demodocus. He has read the Meno l and he has one real point,

though he does not know how to manage it. He is playing with

the conception of the future as something which is, as yet, nothing

at all, 2 and therefore not a subject for rational consideration.

Possibly he is thinking of the Cyrenaic doctrine that the future,

being unreal, is "nothing to us," 3 and trying to "expose " it ?

Eryxias. This is a much more serious production than any of

the four just examined. The writer has provided a definite audi-

ence, scene and date. Socrates is talking in the portico of Zeus

Eleutherius 4 with Critias (the " oligarch "), Eryxias and Erasis-

tratus, nephew of Phaeax (the contemporary and rival of Alci-

biades). The date is supposed to be between the Peace of Nicias

and the determination taken in 416 by Athens to attack Syracuse,

as we see from the opening remarks made by Erasistratus on the

necessity of taking a firm line with that " wasp's nest." The

subject of the discussion, which is made to arise quite naturally,

is the nature and worth of nAovros, "capital," as we should say.

Erasistratus holds that " the richest man is he who owns what is

worth most." If so, may not a poor man in lusty health be said

to be richer than an opulent invalid with whom he would never

dream of changing places ? And there may be things of higher

worth than health. It is evident, also, that the thing of highest

worth is happiness (evdcujuovla). It should follow that the richest

of men are the " wise and good," because they do not impair their

happiness by making false steps in life : " the man who knows

what is good is the only real capitalist," a clear allusion to the

Stoic paradox, solus sapiens dives. Eryxias objects that a man

might be as wise as Nestor and yet in want of the bare necessaries

of life. Still, says S. f such a man's wisdom might have a high

value in exchange in any district where it was esteemed. A man

1 As we see not only from his reference to the old eristic quibble about

rb p/reir, but from his allusion to " inquiring " into the ratio of " diagonal "

to "side," to which he adds the later problem of the " duplication of the

cube."

2 The view adopted by Dr. C. D. Broad, Scientific Thought, 66 ff.

1 Cf . the saying ascribed to Aristippus, fiovov ^repov elvai rb irapov, pyre 81

rb rpOdvov /x/^re rb TrpoffSoK&fJievov: rb f*,iv ybp aTroAwX^vcu, rb de AdrjXov clvat

OTCU, R.P. 267.

4 For which see Pausanlas, i. 3, 2. It is also the scene of the Theages.

APPENDIX 549

who understood the direction of life might make capital of his

knowledge, if he chose. Eryxias treats this as a verbal quibble,

and this leads to a dispute between him and Critias in which S.

acts as seconder to Eryxias. Leaving on one side the verbal paradox

that the wise man is the true capitalist, we may more profitably

ask what ways of acquiring wealth are honourable, and whether

wealth itself is or is not good. Eryxias thinks it is, Critias that

it is not, since for some persons, those whose wealth leads them

to perpetrate follies or crimes, wealth is so clearly not good ; but

what is not good for everyone is not properly called a good. That

argument, says S., is a mere borrowing from Prodicus, who had

publicly defended the thesis that everything is good for the man

who knows how to use it, bad for the man who does not, but had

been silenced and put to shame by a mere lad. The lad's counter-

argument was that only a fool expects to get as answers to prayer

things he might learn from a teacher, or find out for himself. Pro-

dicus, like other men, asks in his prayers that " his lot may be

good " : on his own theory this amounts to praying that he may

himself become good, and also, according to his own theories, good-

ness is something a man can learn from a teacher. Critias is

borrowing the argument of Prodicus, and if he is not hooted down,

that is only because reasoning which would be seen to be bad in

a "sophist " imposes on hearers who respect Critias as a gentleman

and man of the world.

Here S. directs attention to the original and still more funda-

mental question what wealth is. You may say, " abundance of

XQij/iriTa, means." But what are means ? It is argued, with a

little needless display of general information, that means are

" possessions which are of use to us." Hence a cartload of Car-

thaginian currency would not be "means' 1 at Athens, where it will

not exchange for anything. Coin is popularly confused with wealth

simply because it exchanges freely for clothes and all other com-

modities. Now a professional man can exchange his professional

services for commodities, and thus Kmarrjuai, knowledge of pro-

fessions, seems to be one form of capital. Again an article is only

capital to one who knows how to use it, and the xahol xdyaOol

are the persons who know how to make the right use of everything.

Thus there is a sense in which to make a man wiser is to make

him richer. Critias still protests that possessions are not wealth,

but the argument is continued. In any trade, a man's capital

clearly includes not only his materials but his implements, and

sometimes also appliances for making those implements. If a

man were once fully equipped with all that his body requires,

money and such things would be useless to him. Again, since to

learn you must be able to hear, the money a man pays his doctor

for taking care of his hearing is actually useful as a means to

"goodness." This money may have been made in a "base"

calling, and thus a " base " thing may be useful for good. We are

550 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

almost tempted to say that, since a man can only become wise,

healthy, good, if he has previously been ignorant, unwell, bad,

ignorance, disease, vice are conditions sine quibus non of their

opposites, and therefore useful, and ought, by consequence, to

be called wealth. But apart from this paradox, we may ask our-

selves one question, " When is a man happier and better, when he

has the most or when he has the least numerous and expensive

wants ? " Since this amounts to asking whether a man is happier

in disease or in health, the question answers itself. The rich, who

have many and expensive wants, are not the truly happy.

I think it clear that the purpose of the dialogue, which is very

interesting for its economic theses, is to canvass the Stoic doctrine

that wisdom, virtue, wealth are identical, and that the sage is

the only " capitalist." This is the thesis which Eryxias treats as

idle playing with words and Socrates " side-tracks," in order to

discuss the more than verbal question whether riches are good or

bad. It is part of the anti-Stoic polemic that S. supports Eryxias

against Critias who denies that " property " is wealth. The author

means to protest against " pulpit declamation " which amounts to

nothing but words and to replace it by the dispassionate Academic

view that wealth and wisdom are different things, the one at the

bottom, the other at the top of the scale of good. The Greek of

the dialogue is not the Attic of Plato, yet it is hardly the vulgar

MOW}. I should conjecture that the work belongs to the begin-

nings of the Academic polemic against Stoicism, in the early decades

of the third century. The writer seems to have drawn some of

his material from the Callias of Aeschines, 1 in which the wealth

of the famous " millionaire " family was a prominent topic and

Prodicus received some notice. Suidas ascribes an Eryxias to

Aeschines himself, but there seems to be no other evidence for

the existence of such a work. Presumably our Eryxias is meant,

and Suidas has made a mistake about its authorship.

Axiochus. In style this dialogue is far inferior to the Eryxias.

The language is a vulgar *ov?}, full of non-Attic words and phrases.

The mise-en-sc&ne shows complete ignorance of the personages of

Plato's dialogues. The principal figure, apart from Socrates, is

Axiochus of Scambonidae, the uncle of Alcibiades. The supposed

date is fixed by a reference to the trial of the generals after Ar-

ginusae (368^) as not earlier than 405, and Axiochus represents

himself as having supported the protest of Socrates against the

unconstitutionality of the proceedings. The writer has forgotten

that Axiochus was, next to Alcibiades, the chief victim of the

scandals of 415 and shared the capital sentence. 2 In the opening

1 See H. Dittmar, Aeschines von Sphettos, 198-199, who, however,

perhaps mistakes a probability for a demonstration.

8 Andocides, i. 16, Agariste, wife of Alcmeonides and widow of Damon,

gave information against Alcibiades, Axiochus and Adimantus, *al 0iryor

retire* M raury rjj nyvfoei. Alcibiades afterwards had his hour of

APPENDIX 551

scene (3640:) Damon is mentioned as the music-master of Axiochus'

son Clinias (the Clinias of the Euthydemus), and Socrates sees the

two " running towards him/' though Damon, a contemporary of

Anaxagoras, would have been almost a centenarian if he had been

living at the supposed date. The scheme of the dialogue is simple.

Axiochus has been seized by a severe " fit " and apprehends death ;

Socrates is called in to " console " him. He does this by the

arguments that (i) death is utter unconsciousness and after it

there are no more pains to fear ; (2) life in the body is one unbroken

scene of anxiety and suffering, so that it is a positive good to have

done with it. This second point, intended to rule out the possible

rejoinder to (i) that even if death brings no posthumous disagree-

ables with it, it is still dreadful because it puts an end to the joie

de vivre, is argued at length in a speech professedly taken from

the eminently wise Prodicus. (3) A further argument, also ascribed

to Prodicus, is the dilemma, " death matters neither to the living

nor to the dead ; while we live, death is not there, and when we

have died, we are not there." Axiochus rejects these " consola-

tions " scornfully. They are the " superficial twaddle " which is

coming into vogue just now with empty-headed lads. It all sounds

fine, but when one is face-to-face with death it proves idle bravado

(369^). In the remainder of the dialogue Socrates drops the pre-

tence of holding the views of Prodicus and discovers himself as

a convinced believer in the blessed immortality of the soul. This,

he says, is proved (i) by the achievements of man in his ascent

from barbarism to civilization, (2) and particularly by his great

intellectual triumph, his creation of astronomy, the science which

reveals to us the magnolia Dei. Man could not have done all

this, " were there not indeed the breath of God in his soul." This

message goes home to the heart of Axiochus, who feels himself

now delivered from his terrors. Socrates then completes his good

work by relating a myth, in the Orphic style, of the blessedness

of souls in the next life, professing to have learned it from a Persian

magus. The myth leaves Axiochus actually " in love " with death.

I feel personally convinced that Immisch is right in the view

taken of the purpose of the dialogue in his edition of it. 1 As he

points out, the third of the pretended " consolations " produced

by Socrates is the familiar Epicurean dilemma, " death is nothing

to us, for while we are, death is not, and when death is, we are

not." 2 This is the argument of which Axiochus speaks with

marked contempt as superficial " twaddle " momentarily fashion-

triumph and restoration, but he had been banished again before 405 and

all his connections were then in the worst odour. The alleged " support "

given to Socrates is unknown to the historians, and the reference to irpbedpot

in the ecclesia (3680) seems to show ignorance of the fifth-century method and

procedure.

1 O. Immlsch, Philologische Studien zu Plato. Erster Heft. Axiochus,

Leipzig, 1896.

Epicurus, Ep. iii. 125 (Bailey), Lucretius iii. 830.

552 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

able with mere boys. Immisch seems also to have shown that

there are numerous distinctively Epicurean turns of speech through-

out the so-called discourse of Prodicus on the misery of existence.

Hence I cannot reject his conclusion that the dialogue is a piece

of anti-Epicurean polemic, intended to contrast the Platonic

with the Epicurean answer to the perennial question What may I

hope for? and to insinuate that the "wisdom" of Epicurus is not

even original. It is a mere revival of the ideas of a second-rate

sophist, and a " doctrine of despair " into the bargain. It is

natural, though not absolutely necessary, to draw Immisch's

further conclusion that, in the writer's day, Epicureanism was

just beginning to be in vogue among fin-de-siecle youths. In that

case we must date the composition as early as somewhere c. 305-300

B.C., since Epicurus established himself at Athens in 307/6. Other

scholars, such as Wilamowitz and H. Dittmar, reject this date

as too early, but, though I do not want to be over-confident, I

suspect they may be ascribing to "lateness " faults of style and

vocabulary which may only mean that the writer is neither an

Athenian x nor a person with a literary sense. I see no need to

suppose a date later than the time of Epicurus, whose Greek is

much of the same stamp. There was an earlier Axiochus by Aes-

chines of Sphettus of which all that is known is that, as we learn

from Athenaeus, it painted an unfavourable picture of the debauched

life of Alcibiades, and presumably of his uncle also. It can hardly

have supplied our author with material. 2

It is hardly necessary to say anything of the little trifle, not

contained in our Plato MSS., called the Alcyon and attributed,

in MSS., variously to Plato or to Lucian. (It is commonly included

in printed texts of Lucian ; the only recent editor of Plato to print

it is C. F. Hermann.) This piece of silly prettiness is certainly

neither Plato's nor Lucian's ; since it was already known to Favori-

nus of Aries, 3 it must be the work of some Atticist earlier than

Lucian. It describes Socrates and Chaerephon as walking by the

Bay of Phalerum, where they hear the cry of the (mythical) halcyon.

Socrates relates the legend that the bird is a transformed woman,

argues that, since God's power is incomprehensibly great, we must

not be too ready to reject such " miracles," and commends the

story for its moral of wifely devotion.

Diogenes Laertius (iii. 62) gives the following list of vo6ev6fievoi :

Midon or Hippotrophus, Eryxias or Erasistratus, A Icy on, [a corrupt

1 The attempt to argue from 3650, 368^ that the writer must be an Athenian

because he makes his characters talk of their national heroes as they naturally

would, does not deeply impress me.

* On the Axiochus of Aeschines see H. Dittmar, Aeschines von Sphettos,

159-163.

Favorinus ascribed it to a certain Leon (D.L. iii. 62). Athenaeus (5i6c)

calls the author " Leon the Academic," on the authority of Nicias of Nicaea.

If this means the fourth-century mathematician Leon, the ascription is

most improbable.

APPENDIX 558

word], Sisyphus, Axiochus, Phaeaces, Demodocus, Chelidon, Heb-

dome, Epimenides. The only " work " we possess not included

in this list is the de lusto. This is absent, unless it is covered

by the corrupt entry dxefaAois or d^<cdoi or d*,v<aAo rj (Schanz,

tj), before the Sisyphus. As there was a dialogue Cephalus ascribed

to Speusippus (D L. iv. 4), the reference of Diogenes may be to

that, as the Basle editors of the Vita Platonis suggest. Athenaeus

(506^), apparently following Hegesander of Delphi, the author of

a foolish diatribe against Plato, refers to an otherwise unknown

Cimon, alleged to contain invectives against Themistocles, Myro-

nides, Alcibiades and Cimon himself. Some of the statements

made in this attack on Plato are so absurd that one may wonder

whether the Cimon ever existed, except in the imagination of a care-

less scribbler.

There still survives in Syriac a translation of a " Socratic "

dialogue, Herostrophos * dealing with the soul. The text was pub-

lished by Lagarde in his Analecta Syriaca (1858) ; there is a German

version with a discussion of provenance by V. Ryssel in Rheinisches

Museum, N.F. xlviii. 175-196, on which the following remarks are

based. The dialogue is shown by its vocabulary and other pecu-

liarities to be a genuine version of a Greek original ; the trans-

lator, according to Ryssel, was the priest and physician Sergius

of Rasain, a student of Aristotle who died at Constantinople soon

after 536 A.D. The name of the interlocutor Herostrophos appears

to be a miswriting of Aristippus. (He is represented as a stranger

attracted to Socrates by his reputation for wisdom, exactly as

Aeschines of Sphettus (D.L. ii. 65) related that Aristippus was

drawn to Athens xatd *A&> ZawQarovs. The two names, as

written in Syriac, only differ by a single letter.) The problem to

which he desires an answer is that of the fate of the soul at death.

Does it perish with the body, enter a new body, or die for a time

and revive again with the same body ? (The last alternative seems

to be suggested by the Christian dogma of the " resurrection of

the flesh/' but might allude only to the Pythagorean and Stoic con-

ception of " cyclical recurrence " ?) I do not myself understand

the confused reply of Socrates. He seems to be combining insis-

tence on the thought that the soul is imperishable and immutable

with the notion that it has fire as its chief component, and the

suggestion of an analogy between death and sunset. As the sun

rises again to-morrow, so the soul reappears again with a new body

after the death of the present body. It does not appear that the

lost Greek original was ever taken by anyone for a work of Plato,

and I find it hard to believe that it is not influenced by Stoicism.

This might account for the apparent materialism and also for the

suggestion of the reappearance of the same body, if this is not

actually a borrowing from Christianity.

My attention was first drawn to the point by Mr. W. L. Lorimer of

St. Andrews University.

554 PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

The Anthology contains a number of epigrams ascribed to Plato

(though, in one or two cases, to other authors also). The fact of

the ascription does not prove authenticity. On the other side,

the manner and diction of Greek epigram is so stereotyped that

it would probably be impossible to prove any of these compositions

spurious on linguistic grounds. The collection will be found most

conveniently in Hiller-Crusius, Anthologia Lyrica,* Pt. /. The

items which, if genuine, would throw some light on Plato's per-

sonality are i, the well-known couplet on Agathon, translated by

Shelley ; 8, the lines on Alexis and Phaedrus ; 14, 15, two famous

couplets on a beautiful boy, perhaps called Aster ; 7, a fine epigram

commemorative of Dion, i and 8, at any rate, if genuine, would

prove Plato to have had the " erotic " temperament. To my own

mind, the occurrence of the names Agathon and Phaedrus is proof

of spuriousness. The author clearly has in his mind the parts

taken by Agathon the poet and Phaedrus of Myrrhinus in Plato's

great IQIDTMOS Adyog the Symposium, and has forgotten that both

were grown men when Plato was under twelve. I see no reason

why most of the other epigrams should not be Plato's, except that

there is no particular reason why they must be. Even the lines

on Dion, though worthy of Plato, can hardly be said to contain

anything which might not be said by any other good epigrammatist.

And it is, perhaps, hardly likely that Plato, writing after he was

seventy about his devotion to a friend who had lived to be over

fifty, would use the word EQWS to describe the attachment. I

fear we must be content to say that though some of the verses

may be Plato's, none need be so.

A more interesting personal document is Plato's Will (D.L.

iii. 41-43). The probability is that this and the Wills of Aristotle

and Theophrastus are genuine. The Academy would have legal

reasons for safeguarding the document, just as a society to-day

preserves its charter of incorporation or its title-deeds. The Will

runs thus : " Plato leaves possessions and devises them as here-

uncler. The property at Iphistiadae bounded on the N. by the

road from the shrine at Cephisia, on the S. by the shrine of Heracles

at Iphistiadae, on the E. by the land of Archestratus of Phrearria,

on the W. by the land of Philippus of Chollidae, shall be neither

sold nor alienated, but secured in every way to the boy Adimantus. 1

The property at Iresidae purchased from Callimachus and bounded

on the N. by the land of Eurymedon of Myrrhinus, on the S. by

the land of Demostratus of Xypate, on the E. by the land of the

said Eurymedon, on the W. by the Cephisus. 2 . . . Item, three

minae of silver. Item, a silver goblet, weight 165 dr. Item, a

cup, weight 45 dr. Item, a gold finger-ring and earring, com-

1 Presumably a descendant (? grandson) of Plato's eldest brother.

2 There is no statement about the way in which this property is devised.

Either the text is defective or we must understand that this property also

is part of the settlement on Adimantus.

APPENDIX 555

bined weight 4^ dr. Euclides the stone-cutter owes me three

minae. I give Artemis her freedom. I leave the following house-

hold slaves, Tychon, Bictas, Apollonides, Dionysius. Also the

household furniture specified in the annexed schedule of which

Demetrius has the duplicate. I leave no unpaid debts. I appoint

as executors Leosthenes, Speusippus, Demetrius, Hegias, Eury-

medon, Callimachus, Theopompus."

By comparison with the similar wills of Aristotle and Theo-

phrastus we can see that Plato was by no means in affluent circum-

stances.

See further on the works dealt work above :

SHORE Y, P. What Plato Said (pp. 415-444, " Doubtful and

Spurious Dialogues ").

SOUILHE, J. Platon, Dialogues Suspects (Paris, 1930. The

author tends to accept the Clitophon, and Alcibiades I) :

Platon, Dialogues Apocryphes. (Paris, 1930.)

FRIEDLANDER, P. Die Platonischen Schriften (Berlin and

Leipzig, 1930), pp. 117-127 (on Hipparchus), 147-155 (on

Theages), 233-245 (on Alcibiades I). All these are accepted.

INDEXES

I. INDEX OF PROPER NAMES

(This index makes no pretensions to be exhaustive, but it is trusted that

it will be found sufficient)

Academy (the), 5-7, 21, 286, 290, 318,

343 n., 375. 37. 393, 49 -. 4*7.

464, 503 ff., 529, 53L 544

Acton, Lord, 472

Adam, ]., 396 n., 397 n., 522

Addison, J., 5

Adimantus, 2, 263, 271

Adrastus, 510 n.

Aeschines (orator), 156, 165 n., 212 n.

Aeschines (of Sphettus), 35 n., 132 n.,

133 n., 143, 147, 163 n.,278, 517 n.,

521 n., 522 n., 525 n., 534 n., 550,

553

Aeschylus, 147 n., 279

Agathon, 210 ff., 221, 240, 554

Alcibiades, 13, 44, 91 n., u6n., 127,

158, 161, 165 n., 210, 233, 236,

309 n., 473, 512-14, 550

Alcmaeon, 120, 184 n., 194, 306 n.,

453

Alexander (Aphrodisiensis), 355

Alexander, S., 455

Amipsias, 58, 91 n.

Anaxagoras, 83, 199, 201, 208, 212,

214, 294. 3H' 352, 387, 449 n., 524,

55i

Anaximander, 447-448, 457

Andocides, 158, 237, 550 n.

Antiochus (of Ascalon) , 544

Antipater (of Sidon), 533

Antiphon (orator), 101-102

Antiphon (son of Pyrilampes), 351

Antiphon (sophist), 101-102, 119 n.,

271, 336

Antisthenes, 35 n., 86 n., 89 n., 96 n.,

180 n., 273, 331 n., 333 n., 3860.,

423 n., 522 n.

Anytus, 117 n., 130, 140, 158, 167,

173 n.

Apollodorus (of Phalerum), 210

Arcesilaus, 12 n., 528

Archelaus (of Macedon), 105, 113, 527

Archelaus (philosopher), 199, 383

Archer-Hind, R. D., 542

Archytas, 6, 8, 322, 542, 543

Aristarchus (of Samos), 449

Aristides, 57, 128, 142 n.

Aristippus (of Cyrene), 427, 434,

548 n., 553

Aristocles (Peripatetic), 353

Ariston, i, 2

Aristophanes (Byz.), n, 497

Aristophanes (Com.), 2 n., 51 n., 58,

75, 85, 105, n6n., 125 n., 129 n.,

161, 163 n., 209, 210, 219, 220, 234,

240-241, 263 n., 264, 325 n., 461

Aristotle, 3, 6, 10, 13, 14, 17, 26, 32 n.,

35, 41, 61, 64, 76, 81 n., 82 n., 90,

105 n., 120, 148 n., 176, 185, 203,

235, 258 n., 269, 286, 297 n., 312 n.,

328 n., 334 n., 341 n., 345, 347 n.,

350 n., 356, 37 6 ~37 8 > 393. 46.

408 ff., 413 n., 415, 417, 423 n.,

427, 443, 447-449, 45 n., 469, 472,

484 n., 492, 503 ff., 536 n., 538 n.,

544. 555. al.

Aristoxenus, i n., 283

Aspasia, 13, 41, 42, 278

Athenaeus, 541, 547 n., 553

Atticus, 443

Augustine, St., 28 n., 225, 232 n., 263,

490 n.

Axiochus, 90, 550 ff.

Bentley, R., 16 n.

Berkeley, G., 152 n.

Bethe, E., 213 n.

Bevan, E., 211 n.

Bignone, E., 102 n,

Blake, W. f 119 n., 209, 220

Blass, F., 1 6 n.

Boeckh, A., 445 n., 448, 540, 545-546

Bois-Reymond, E. du, 57

Bonaventura,St., 225

557

558

PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

Bosanquet, B., 277

Bradley, F. H., 288, 329

Broad, C. D., 548 n.

Browning, R., 308 n.

Brunnecke, H., 534 n.

Buraet, J., 9, 19, 101 n., 102 n., 104,

120 n., 132 n., 137 n., 146 ff., 151,

153 n., 156 ff., 163 n., 175 ff., 178 if.,

199 ff., 207, 210, 231, 233, 287,

289, 294, 318 n., 320, 342 n., 346,

37 2 > 376, 383ff-> 390, 408, 41 i*

433 a., 437-438, 448-449, 4 8 4-

485 n., 495 n., 517. 51$, al.

Bury, J. B., 320 n.

Bury, R. G., 211 n., 214 n., 215-216,

41 7n., 434

Butler, J., 270, 271, 315 n.

Callias, 24, 75-76, 76 n., 237, 409

Callicles, 105, 115

Callippus, 8

Camillus, M. Furius, 9

Campbell, L., u, 18, 381 n.

Carlyle, T., 116, 317, 473

Carnot (Sadi), principle of, 195

Cephalus, 263 n., 266-267

Chaerephon, 105, 106 n., 161

Charmides, 2, 3, 49, 158, 162, 240,

532

Chesterton, G. K., 34 n., 162 n., 269,

290, 322, 344

Cicero, M. Tullius, 14, 1 6, 90, 319, 448,

533 n., 542

Cobet, G., 1 6 n.

Connus, 91 n.

Copernicus, N., Copernicanism, 449,

45i 518

Crashaw, R., 225

Cratylus, 3, 69 n., 76

Critias (elder), 2, 220, 437

Critias (" oligarch "), 2, 3, 49 ff ., 138,

162, 165 n., 548

Crito, 97 n., 167 n.

Croiset, M., 522

Cudworth, R., 151

Cyrenaics, 427, 548

Cyrus, 471

Cyrus (the younger), 129

Damon or Damonides of Oea, 58, 263,

524* 55i

Danaids, the, 120 n.

Dante, 121 n., 220, 250

Darius I, 117, 471

Darwin, C., 293

Democritus, 208, 293, 384, 531 n.

De Morgan, A., 88 n.

Demus (son of Pyrilampes), 105,

116 n.

Dercylides, 10-11, 521, 544

Descartes, 199, 200 n., 201, 290, 313,

454

Dickens, C., 63 n.

Diels, H., 5 n., 346 n., 449 n., 458 n.

Dies, A., 315 n., 423 n.

Diogenes (of Apollonia), 177, 199, 220

Diogenes (Cynic), 423 n.

Dion, 7, 8, 20, 372

Dionysius I, 5, 7, 372, 541

Dionysius II, 7-9, 22 n., 284, 356 n.,

371 ff., 465

Diotima (of Mantinea), 11411., 146-

147- 224

Dittenberger, W., 18

Dittmar, H., 41, 45, 75 n., 262, 278 n.,

522 n., 524 n., 534 n., 538 n., 550 n.,

552

Dropides, 2

Echecrates, 542

Ecphantus, 346

Empedocles, 69 n., 134, 177, 194, 207,

218, 308 n., 345, 383, 387, 396, 436,

454. 4^1

Epaminondas, 320, 463-464, 484 n.

Epicurus, 551

Epimemdes, 465

Eratosthenes, I

Eryximachus, 69 n., 210, 216-217, 314

Euclides (geometer), 290-293, 324,

377. 507

Euclides (of Megara), 4, 176, 184 n.,

287, 320 ff ., 353, 386

Eudemus, 322

Eudoxus, 7, 290, 322, 373, 410, 434,

447, 451, 485 n., 498, 499 n., 504 ff .

Euphraeus, 541

Euripides, 83 n., 85, 105, 118-119,

122 n., 162 n., 223 n., 306 n., 314

Eurytus, 354

Euthydemus, 77, 79 n., 91 ff.

Euthyphro, 77 n., 83, 146-147

Favorinus (of Aries), i n., 552

Fichte, J. G., 478 n.

Francis (of Assisi), St., 295

Franklin, B., 247

Frege, G., 293, 505 n.

Friedlander, P., 522

Galileo, G., 283

Glaucon, 2 n., 263, 271, 517

Goethe, J. W., 18, 296

Gomperz, Th., 142 n.

Gorgias, 29, 104-105, 108 n., 129 n.,

134, 221, 314, 408, 430

Grote, George, 16 n., 29, 97, 241 n.,

260, 357, 372, 421, 448, 522, 532 n.

Grote, John, 298

Grotius, Hugo, 267 n., 487

INDEXES

559

Hackforth, R., 541 n.

Harder, R., 544 n.

Hardy, G. H., 505 n., 511 n.

Heiberg, J., 504 n.

Helicon, 373

Heraclitus, Heracliteans, 69 n., 70,

85, 185, 195, 218, 325 n., 337 ff.,

350 n., 383, 387

Hermann, C. F., 522, 544

Hermias, 532, 542

Hermocrates, 437

Hermodorus, 4, 176

Hermogenes, 75-76

Herodotus, 85, 122 n., 276, 2790.,

297, 310

Hesiod, 52, 69, 150 n., 167, 228, 278,

346, 395. 452. 500

Hipparchus, 535

Hippasus, 195

Hippias, 29 ff., 241, 252

Hippocrates (geometer), 322

Hippocrates (med.), 218, 315, 459

Hobbes, T., 120 n., 151, 244, 268

Homer, 35, 38-40, 51, 52, 82, 223 n.,

228, 241, 278, 317, 394, 425, 470

Hume, D., 31, 48, 434

Hutcheson, F., 151

Huxley, T. H., 194:8.

lamblichus, 322, 436 n.

Immisch, O., 551

Isocrates, 3, 5, 19, 43, 44, 101, 147 n.,

165 n., 212, 238, 263 n., 301, 310,

318-319, 336, 373, 401, 473, 529,

Jackson, H., 417

Jaeger, W., 15, 343 n., 356 n., 489 n.,

53i n., 542

John of the Cross, St., 225

Johnson, Samuel, 472

Johnson, W. E., 377

Jowett, B., 522

Justinianus, Flavius (Emperor), 487

Kant, I., 16, 50-51, 55, 94, 124 n.,

140 n., 148, 189, 191-192, 195, 207,

271, 291, 376, 430

Laches, 58 ff.

Leibniz, G. W., 199, 293, 423, 442

Leodamas, 322, 543

Leon (of Salamis), 157, 165

Leon (Academic), ^52 n.

Leucippus, 384

Libanius, 117 n.

Locke, J., 151

Lorimer, W. L., 515, 553 n.

Luria, S., 102 n.

Lutoslawski, W., 18-19, 522 ri

Lycurgus, 466, 471

Lysias, 43, 157-158, 212, 263 n.,

300 ff., 310 ff., 318

Macaulay, T. B., 159, 250, 257

Meletus, 157 ff., 163, 170

Melissus, 357

Menedemus, 357

Meno, 129-130, 538

Meton, 449

Meyer, E., 14, 16 n., 372

Meyerson, ., 288

Milhaud, G., 507 n.

Mill, J. S., 122, 258, 298

Miltiades, 126

Morris, W., 473

Miiller, F., 498

Newman, J. H., 413 n.

Newton, Isaac, 283, 441, 506

Nicias, 58, 105 n.

Nietzsche, F., 116, 119

" Ocellus," 518, 543

Orpheus, Orphics, 128, 136, 147,

150 n., 162 n., 167, 175, 178, 186 n.,

272, 279, 299 n., 308 n., 433 n., 452

Panaetius, 546

Parmenides, 83, 85, 96 n., 327, 337-

338, 349 #.. 383, 387

Parmentier, L., 22 n.. 301 n.

Pausanias, 214, 548 n.

Peano, G., 293, 369

Perdiccas, 541

Pericles, 2, 41, 44, 74, 109, 123, 126.

242, 314, 523-524. al.

Perictione, I, 2, 351, 517

Phaedrus, 210, 212, 300, 311 n., 554

Pherecydes, 383

Philippus (of Opus), 14, 17, 497

Philistion, 459

Philistus, 541

Philolaus, I2on., 175, 194, 207,

346 n., 436 n., 459

Pindar, 38, 117

Pittacus, 253 ff.

Plotinus, 225, 232, 300, 389, 396 n.

Plutarch, 208, 443, 450, 464 n., 491,

512 n.

Polemarchus, 263 n., 266-271, 301,

310

Pollock, Sir F., 539 n.

Polycrates (sophist), 104 n., 1170,

165 n., 211 n., 318 n.

Polyxenus (sophist), 355 ff., 373

Posidonius, 120 n., 281

Post, L. A., 541 n., 543 n.

Potone, 2

Praxiphanes, 319 n.

560

PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

Pioclus, ii, 14, 17, 37, 299, 352-353

386, 396 n., 497, 498 n., 510 n.,

543 n.

Prodicus, 101, 240, 252, 254, 325, 549,

55i

Protagoras, 72, 79, 82, 91 n., 96 n.,

127 n., 141, 236, 247 n., 314, 325 ff.,

333 ff-. 35 n-. 381

Pufendorf, S., 487

Pyrilampes, 2, 105, 351

Pythagoras, Pythagoreans, 93, 120 n.,

124, 128, 132 n., 163 n., 175, 181 n.,

182-183, i86n., 194-195, 218, 269,

281-283, 330, 345-346, 357. 386,

396, 403, 408 ff., 412, 414, 426 n.,

448-450, 452 n., 457, 462, 508 ff.

Pythodorus (son of Isolochus), 351

Quiller-Couch, Sir A., 442

Quintilian, 134 n.

Rabelais, F., 216

Raeder, H., 14, 17, 29v. 375 n., 417 n.,

498 n., 522 n., 525 n.

Richards, H., 16 n.

Ritter, C., i6n., 18, 299 n., 479 n.,

522 n., 526 n., 534 n., 536 n., 538 n.,

540 n.

Rivaud, A., 437 n., 461 n.

Robin, L., 512 ff., 513 n., 516 n.

Rohde, E., 167

Rousseau, J. J., 243, 268

Ruskin, J., 280, 473, 487 n.

Russell, B., 293

Ryssel, V., 553

Schanz, M., 553

Schleiermacher, F., 375 n.

Scotus, Johanne Duns, 203

Shaw, G. B., 269

Shelley, P. B., 268

Simon, 540, 546

Simonides, 241 n., 248 n., 253 ff.

Socrates, 3-4, 24, 27-28, 41-42, 58,

75, 100 n., 104, ii2n., 129-130,

141, 156-157, 166-167, 173 n.,

175 ff., 199-200, 211, 233, 290,

309 n., 322, 324, 348, 352, 372, 375,

385-386, 439-440. 532

Socrates (the younger), 393, 394 n.,

543

Solon, 2, 317, 437, 439

Sophocles, 279, 297, 306 n., 314

Souilhe", J., 544 n.

Spengel, L., 375

Speusippus, n, 120, 148 n., 373, 377,

409, 416 n., 423 n., 429, 434, 458 n.,

509, 5i5 542, 545. 553

Spinoza, B., 192 n., 197, 428, 442,

454. 455 n.

Stallbaum, G., 375 n., 386 n., 396 n.,

522, 526 n., 533, 534, 535 n., 539,

540, 546 n.

Stenzel, J., 498 n., 501 n., 506 n., 509,

511 n., 513 n., 515-516

Stesichorus, 305

Stewart, J. A., 308 n., 396 n.

Stout, G. F., 418 n.

Thackeray, W. M., no n.

Theaetetus, 20, 290, 320 ff., 393,

504

Themis tocles, 109, 123, 142

Theodorus (geometer), 322, 393

Theon (of Smyrna), 449 n., 510 n.

Theophrastus, 346 n., 450, 555

Theopompus, 547 n.

Thomas Aquinas, St., 151 n., 232 n.,

472

Thompson, W. H., 299 n.

Thrasylus, 10, n, 41, 521, 531 n., 544

Thrasymachus, 263 ff., 267, 313, 536

Thucydides (historian), 296

Thucydides (son of Melesias), 57

Timaeus (historian), 5 n.

Timaeus of Locri, 120 n., 292, 322 n.,

436

Ueberweg, F., n

Varro, M. Terentius, n, 252, 489

Ward, James, 57 n., 199

Ward, W. G., 196

Whitehead, A. N., 190 n., 293, 440,

456 n.

Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, U. von, 15,

16, 103 n., 117 n., 333 n., 464, 542,

552

Wordsworth, W., 283

Xavier, St. Francis, 212, 234

Xenocrates, 10, n, 148 n., 416 n.,

423 n., 429, 442, 443 n., 464 n.,

503 ff., 515, 534, 545

Xenophanes, 383

Xenophon, 29, 49 n., 52 n., 101 n.,

129, 166, 209-210, 214, 322, 523 ti ,

524 n., 525, 529 n., 533 n., 547 n.

Zeller, E., 11, 373^, 443, 491, 544

Zeno (of Elea), 91-92, 98 n., 100 n.,

199, 203, 290, 311-312, 349 ff.

361 ff., 505

Zeuthen, H., 504 n.

Zoroaster, 524 n.

II. INDEX OF SUBJECTS

(The list is unavoidably far from exhaustive)

Analysis (logical). See Division

(logical)

Analysis (mathematical), 511 ff.

Arithmetic, 290 ff., 323-324, 342, 430,

485. 507-513

Art (fine), 279-280

Art (the statesman's), 97-98, 530-531,

539

Association (of ** Ideas "), 136, 186-

187

Astronomy (Platonic), 447, 452, 485,

498-500, 518

Beauty, 34, 113, 229-231, 280, 308

Being and Becoming, 95, 202 ff..

226 ff., 326 ff., 337, 383 ff., 414-

415, 427 ff., 440 ff.

Being and Not-Being, 85-86, 96,

388 392

Categories (Platonic), 386 ff.

Causality, 34, 202 ff ., 415, 441, 453, 491

Classes (in Republic), 275-276

Comic, the, analysis of, 425-426

Conceptualism, 357

Constitutionalism, 375, 393, 401-404,

470-474

Copula, the, 392

Courage, 57 ff., 248-249, 257 ff., 280-

282, 466-467

Creation, 391, 442-444

Definition, 47, 132, 149, 151, 248

Democracy, 126 ff., 140 ff., 157, 296,

401 ff., 471 ff.

Depletion and Repletion, 120, 217,

297. 4i8 ff., 453. 458

Dialectic, 82, 98, 224, 230, 291 ff.,

313. 387. 4 1 *, 430. 497

Division (logical), 153, 313, 375~395

passim, 398-400, 412

Drama, criticism of, 279-280

Dyad, the Platonic, 512-513

Earth, motion of, 448 ff., 485

Economics 273-275, 276, 478, 534 ff.,

54 8 a.

Education, 2375., 241 ff., 278 ff.,

480, 482-486

Eristic, 86 n., 89 ff., 380

Eros, Platonic conception of, 224-

231. 305-309

Evil, involuntariness of, 26-27, 37-

38, 112, 259, 459, 476; source of,

455. 476. 491-492

Family, the, in Republic, 277-278 ;

in Laws, 480 -482

Forms, in minor Socratic dialogues,

30 n. (Hippias I), 70-71 (Lysis),

8 1 (Cratylus) ; in Gorgias, 112 n.,

121 n. ; in Meno, 132 ; in Euthy-

phro, 149 ; in Phaedo, 181 n.,

190 n., 202-203, 204-206 ; in

Symposium, 230 ff. ; in Proiagoras,

257 ; in Republic, 286-289 ; in

Phaedrus, 308 ; why absent from

Theaetetus, 348 ; in Pavmenidcs,

349-359 ; in Sophistes, 384-386,

388-389 ; in Philebus, 417-418 ; in

Timaeus, 442, 456

Forms, Aristotelian criticism of,

508 ff., 518

Forms and numbers, 503 ff.

Forms and sensibilia, 188, 190, 202,

353-359, 4 11 . 442. 508, 514

Friendship, 64-74, 537

Geometry, 137-138, 186-188, 289-

291, 324. 36i. 485. 5i 54. 5*3-

5M

God, Platonic doctrine of, 442, 489-

494. See also s.v. Good, Form of

Good, Form of, 231-232, 285-289,

441-442

Good, Goods, nature of, 26-28, 227,

257 ff., 410 ff., 431 ff., 475 ff.

Goods, hierarchy of, 27-28, 73, 93, 99,

114-115, 144-145, 180 ff., 227 ff.,

295 ff-> 304. 43i ff-. 475 ff. 522 ff.

Goodness. See Virtue

Guardians (in Republic), 275-276.

280, 282-284, 295

" Gymnastic," in, 460, 482, 486

561

562

PLATO: THE MAN AND HIS WORK

Health, physical and moral, 49, 70,

120 n., 123, 132 n., 170, 194, 217-

218, 269-270, 315 n., 332, 402, 415,

459-460, 537, 548

Hedonism, 120, 258-261, 298, 420 ff.,

427-429,433-435. 4.7 6 ~477

Homo mensura doctrine, 79, 96 n.,

247 n., 251, 325-334 336-337* 474

" Hypothesis," nature of, 139, 201-

202, 258 n., 289 ff ., 359-364

Imitation (artistic), 86, 381-382, 391

Immoralism, 115 ff., 267 if.

Immortality, arguments for, 136,

138 n., 183-206, 306, 452, 491, 55i

Incommensurable, the, 137 n., 322,

324, 414, 444, 485, 501 n., 504 ff.

Inspiration (poetic), 38-41, 162 n.,

234, 256, 306

Justice, in, 114, 248, 249, 474, 488,

498, 530. 537

Knowledge, character of, 27, 54 ff.,

94, 97-98, 284-285, 320-348, 389-

392, 429-431, 440-441, 498 ff.

Knowledge and Opinion, 108, 125 ff.,

143, 246, 280, 339-348, 390-391,

440

Knowledge and Sensation, iSoff.,

187, 290 ff., 325-339, 384-385,

453 ff-

Language, functions of, 77-82, 84-89

Law, character of, 403 ff., 474 ff.,

538 .

Lives, the three, 125, 191, 213, 229,

260, 281, 298

Mean, doctrine of the, 269, 399, 406,

415

Music, 279 ff., 468, 482-483, 485

Mythology, current, 150 n., 271-272,

301, 452, 590 n.

Necessity, 454-456

N6/xos and Morality, no ff., 244 ff.,

266 ff., 334, 336, 490

Numbers. See Forms

Perception, theory of, 325-339, 453

Philosopher, character of, I79ff.,

282 ff., 334-335. 53i

Planets, 446 ff., 485, 499-500

Pleasure and Pain, psychology of,

120-122, 297, 418-427, 458, 476 ;

metaphysics of, 427-429

Prayer, 526 ff.

Predication, 151. 202-205, 287, 369,

386-392

Pre-existence, 136, 186, 188, 196, 307,

452, 460

Prophecy, 305, 458

Reincarnation, 128, 136, 184, 191,

307 ff., 460

Reminiscence, theory of, I35ff.,

i86ff.

Rhetoric, 107-112, 122 ff., 310-319

Sciences, hierarchy of, 289 ff., 399,

430, 508 ff.

Self, knowledge of, 28, 53 ff., 523 ff.

Sensation, function of, 156, 187, 338 -

339, 453

Sicily, Plato's projects in, 7-9, 284,

336, 37 I ~374 465

Socialism not Platonic, 276, 477 ff.

Society, stages of, in Republic, 273 ff. ;

in Laws, 470 ff.

Sophist, definition of, 379-381, 389-

392

Sophrosyne, nature of, 47 ff., 123,

248-250, 285, 405, 466 ff ., 530

Soul, definition of, 306, 491, 525

Soul, tendance of, 27-29, 52, 65, 128,

145, 154, 164, 180 ff., 401, 460, 525

Soul, tripartite, 120 n., 281, 307, 458

Statesman, character and function of,

in, 125, 281, 282-285, 397-399*

401-404, 474 ff., 525

Stoicism, 12 n., 526, 528, 533, 544,

550

Temperance. See Sophrosyne

Theology, the Platonic, 489-493

Tragedy, 162, 234, 279-280, 483

Veracity, 35 ff.

Virtue, " popular " and " philo-

sophic," 143-145, 183, 246, 257 ff.,

280 ff.

Virtue, unity of, 28, 57, 64, 94, 132-

133, 247-251, 257-261, 284-285

Virtue, whether identical with know-

ledge, 28, 56-57, 62-64, 93ff

143-145, 183, 259-261

Virtue, whether teachable, i3off.,

242-246, 262, 267

War, 274, 466, 483

Wine, uses and dangers of, 467-469

Woman, goodness of, 42, 132-133,

220, 278, 484

Women, status of, in Republic, 277-

278 ; in Laws, 481, 482, 484, 485