Couch City: Socrates against Simonides 9780823294251

Citation preview

Couch City

Couch City Socrates against Simonides

harry berger, jr. Edited by Ward Risvold and J. Benjamin Fuqua Introduction by Jill Frank

Fordham University Press new york

202 1

Copyright © 2021 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Control Number: 2021903961 Printed in the United States of America 23 22 21

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First edition

to Ward Risvold with deepest thanks for our many years of friendship

Contents

Introduction: Speech Bonds, by Jill Frank

1

Part I. The Republic 1

Couch City, or, The Discourse of the Couch

13

2

Simonides, Part 1

25

3

Simonides, Part 2

46

4

Simonides, Part 3

62

5

Simonides, Part 4

82

Part II. The Protagoras 6

Macrological Mystification: Protagoras’s Myth

109

7

The Ethics of Etceteration

123

8

The Parts of Gold and the Parts of Face

130

9

Sophistry as Safemindedness in the Protagoras

143

Notes

171

Index

177

Couch City

Introduction: Speech Bonds Jill Frank

I In the Perils of Uglytown (2015), Harry Berger, Jr., shows that the allegedly ideal city of Plato’s Republic, its kallipolis or beautiful city, is more truly an aischropolis, an Uglytown. Couch City: Socrates against Simonides opens with the prehistory of Uglytown in what Berger dubs Klinopolis or Couch City, introduced in Republic 2. In this luxurious, soft, and “feverish” city (372e), couches are associated with pleonexia, “having more, wanting to have more, wanting to be superior and get the better of others, to do unto them before they do unto you.”1 As Berger writes in Couch City, the idea of the couch, which appears in Republic 10, “transcendentalizes the culture of Klinopolis,” idealizing its way of life. Symbolizing the desire for more honor, money, power, and pleasure, as well as the arguments that rationalize these desires, the idea of the couch exemplifies and justifies Klinopolis’s pleonectic ethics, its instrumental rhetoric, and the power politics its morality and discourses underwrite and produce. A depiction of fifth-century BCE Athens—the Athens of the new agathoi—Klinopolis is the sociopolitical backdrop of the dialogue that is the focus of Couch City, Plato’s Protagoras. In this dialogue, Socrates tells the story of a gathering of famous sophists, at which he and Protagoras discuss a central topic of Athenian culture and Greek philosophy, namely, aretē, excellence or virtue. The stakes are high. The conversation takes place before an eager group of students and admirers, including Critias and Alcibiades, up-and-comers in Athens’s political scene, as well as the

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young and impressionable Hippocrates, a political hopeful, who, desiring to learn from the venerable Protagoras, brings Socrates to the gathering to hold the great sage to account. When asked by Socrates what he teaches, Protagoras answers: “how to make good decisions” about one’s own affairs and the affairs of one’s city so that “one can be the most powerful” in the city “in both acting and speaking.” With Protagoras’s assent, Socrates glosses this as teaching “the political art [technē]” of good citizenship, or the excellence or virtue of citizens (318e–319a). Having introduced virtue into the discussion, Socrates expresses skepticism about its teachability (319a–320c). Picking up Socrates’s thread, Protagoras explains why virtue is necessary in a long myth about the origins of human society (320c–328d). On Berger’s reading, Protagoras’s “great speech” brings to light that, for Protagoras, virtue is a matter of “forethought for appearances (selfpresentation),” a skill that involves “teaching oneself and others the art of adjusting one’s public image to conform to public expectations” so as to avoid being overthrown. Virtue so understood Berger calls “face” or “the aretē of public performance.” This is the virtue of Protagoras’s myth. It is the virtue Protagoras teaches and preaches. And it is also the virtue he practices. Adjusting his own image to conform to public expectations, Protagoras prefers holding his discussion with Socrates not in private but before the gathering as a whole (316b–317e) so that he can burnish his reputation at Athens. Protagorean virtue as face, Berger writes, is a “weapon . . . of defense and offense,” a “performative skill in eristics” or verbal warfare. In the terms of Protagoras’s myth about the origins of human society, virtue is Promethean aggression seeded by Epimethean fear, by which avoiding being overthrown also means overthrowing others. A technē of attaining power through discursive means, Protagorean virtue reflects and sets in motion the pleonectic ethics, rhetoric, and politics of Klinopolis. Protagorean virtue stands as a rival to the do-no-harm ethics generally associated with Plato’s Socrates. And, across divergent traditions of scholarship, the prevailing view is that the Protagoras sides with Socrates over its namesake, upholding, against Protagoras’s Klinopolitan morality, the ethics Socrates advocates in other dialogues, namely that, in Berger’s words, “one should always try to do good, to be and stay good, and should never harm anyone, no matter what the cost.” Socrates may engage with Protagoras in all sorts of sophistic ways: deploy argument by antilogy; switch tactics from questioning whether virtue can be taught to asking whether the so-called cardinal virtues—moderation, justice, wisdom, courage—are all one thing or different; defend a kind of hedonism when he maintains

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that “salvation in life” depends on an “art of measurement” that ensures right action by enabling the maximization of pleasure and minimization of pain (351b–358d). Still, in defending the unity of the virtues and insisting that acting against one’s own convictions—weakness of will—is impossible, Socrates, it is said, wins by beating Protagoras at his own game, no holds barred. Although not unscathed, Socrates emerges victorious. Berger sees things otherwise. Through close readings of the scenes of debate between Socrates and Protagoras about the unity of virtue, courage, weakness of will, measure, and pleasure, Couch City makes the case that, despite important appearances of Socratic ethics in the Protagoras, the dialogue privileges overall the ethics of its namesake. Taking his cue from Socrates’s words at the end of the dialogue, according to which neither he nor Protagoras wins and the two speakers have exchanged places (361a–d), Berger demonstrates that by beating Protagoras at his own game, which includes committing himself to Protagoras’s tactics, Socrates acts against his own convictions and defeats himself. As Berger puts it in an earlier essay on the Protagoras, by “[d]efacing Protagoras, [Socrates] effaces himself ” (“Facing Sophists,” 406). Maintaining that he finds “the Prometheus” in Protagoras’s great speech “more to [his] liking than the Epimetheus” (361d), Socrates indicates that he opts for aggression over fear. Siding with virtue as “the forethought that enables humans to protect themselves against pain, danger, defeat,” Socrates affirms the Promethean ethos that Protagoras lives by, thereby strengthening “the very interests he [Socrates] opposes” (FS, 405–6). Despite their competing ethics, then, Protagoras and Socrates, on Berger’s reading, collaborate “to produce an argument that binds each to the other and divides each from himself.” In their joined performative eristics, they jointly exercise Protagorean virtue in their agon over virtue. This inflects how they speak and the meaning of what they say. Thus, as per Protagoras’s initial account of what he teaches, namely “acting and speaking” as technai of power, the speeches of both Protagoras and Socrates produce Protagorean virtue as the virtue of the dialogue as a whole. Protagorean virtue reigns in the Protagoras because of what, in the Theaetetus (as modified by Berger), Socrates calls the “inevitable law of our [interlocutory] being” (160b), which is that the I [in speech] is always the I-that-I-am-in-relation-to-my-auditors. In a succinct encapsulation of this law, Socrates says (also in the Theaetetus): “The arguments never come from me; they always come from the person with whom I’m speaking” (161b). Interested in the question of when and how the unavoidable bond of speech gives rise to bondage, Berger is on the lookout, here in Couch City as in earlier work, for the “subversive dynamic” he sees across

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Plato’s dialogues and names “charismatic bondage.” Exemplified by “[t]he power by which the sophist masters the audience [hoi polloi] [that] derives from the power by which the audience masters him,” charismatic bondage circulates, too, between politicians and their demotic audiences (Republic 493a–d; Gorgias 481e). Charismatic bondage can also characterize the relation between interlocutors in Plato’s dialogues and their audiences, as well as relations between the interlocutors themselves. Calling the subversive dynamic of charismatic bondage “a contagion,” Berger describes it as something from which no one and nothing is immune. Not even Socrates. Symptoms of contagion spread in all directions in the Protagoras. They are manifest in the reversals that punctuate the “interlocutory warfare” between Socrates and Protagoras, in their joint performative eristics, in their shared ethics of apprehensive defensiveness, and in their weaponization of virtue. Protagoras may be the first to prefer that his discussion with Socrates take place in public, but it is Socrates who goes about gathering the scattered groupings together to assemble them in one place as an audience (317d). For Socrates, no less than for Protagoras, virtue is face. “Enchained” to Protagoras through charismatic bondage, Socrates, as Berger writes, “becomes his double.”

II Couch City generates its new reading of the Protagoras by shining an especially brilliant light on one particular scene of debate between Socrates and Protagoras, namely their competition over the meaning of a poem about virtue (338e–348c). A centerpiece of Berger’s interpretation, this poetic interlude is not always analyzed by commentators, and when it is, they tend to mention in passing but then ignore that the poem, which both Protagoras and Socrates attribute to Simonides, is not attested to outside the Protagoras. This feature is important to Berger, however, for, if the poem exists only in the Protagoras, then how can we be sure that Simonides rather than, say, Plato, is its author? Taking seriously the undecidability of the poem’s authorship, Berger refers to its appearances in the dialogue as “poetic speech” to reflect that it is sourced to the speeches of Protagoras and Socrates (338a–347a). Berger pays critical attention to the interpretative practices Protagoras and Socrates deploy as they compete by way of their poetic speeches over the meaning of the poem, for which he invents a playful vocabulary, which includes “snippetotomy,” that is, their interrupted, broken, and selective citation and, in Socrates’s case, “etymological synapses,” proof by

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“etceteration” (his practice of induction, epagōgē), and, especially, citational and paraphrastic mimicry. Intent on overthrowing Simonides by showing him to be inconsistent in his understanding of virtue, Protagoras’s poetic speech is an(other) occasion for the sophist to “reduce talk about virtue to a weapon in a political contest.” Although Socrates tees up to defend Simonides against Protagoras’s charge, Berger demonstrates that Socrates, too, “is intent on overthrowing poor Simonides by making him speak against himself, not logically or rhetorically, but ethically.” Through deceleration—a slowing down that makes visible small changes that substantially affect meaning, and are, in Socrates’s description in the Phaedrus, most apt to deceive (261e–262b)—Berger shows that considerable shifts in the meaning of key virtue terms take place over the course of Socrates’s poetic speech, including of “good” (from agathos to esthlos to eumēchanos) and “bad” (from kakos to aischros to amēchanos). This shiftiness, part of Socrates’s “mimicry of sophistical procedure,” changes what it means to be and/or become good and to do and/or suffer bad. It also, Berger shows, produces Simonidean virtue as Protagorean virtue, that is, as avoiding being overthrown through “the skill and good luck necessary to weather misfortune and successfully avoid injury and shameful behavior.” In making the meaning they claim to be merely interpreting, Protagoras and Socrates, Berger writes, become Simonides’s doubles. In the case of Protagoras, this is anticipated early in the dialogue when Protagoras claims poets as the disguised predecessors of sophists (316d) and narrates the great myth in their manner. Socrates, for his part, appears to dismiss the value of poetry and its interpretation for ethics and philosophy: Because poetic interpretation is indeterminate, he says, he and Protagoras should leave the poets to one side and refrain from imitating poets in their speeches (347a–348a). Socrates says this directly after the poetic interlude, so it could be that he is simply sharing the lesson he has just learned from his inconclusive competition with Protagoras over the meaning of Simonides’s poem. But Socrates doesn’t just say that the poets should be left to one side and leave it at that. He also insists that they should not be imitated and, in so saying, reminds his audience that imitating Simonides was exactly what he did in his poetic speeches, both in his initial citation of the poem against Protagoras’s attack and also when he played Simonides in the debate he staged between the poet and Pittacus. Why call attention to that? In imitating Simonides through impersonation and representation, Socrates does what he did (and will do again) with Protagoras: As Berger puts it, he “speaks through [the poet and sophist] and represents their

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motives, their anti-Socratic logoi. In return, they speak through his imitation and make him speak against himself.” Functioning “as a field of displacement for the continuation of the struggle in which Socrates gets the better of the sophist and thereby defeats himself,” Socrates’s poetic speeches bind him to Protagoras and also to Simonides. And, as with Protagoras, so too with Simonides: By defacing Simonides, Socrates effaces himself. Socrates’s poetic speeches make visible a further feature of Protagorean virtue that Berger takes to supervene upon its weaponization in the service of power, namely, its evasion of responsibility. By claiming to be merely interpreting Simonides, and by, moreover, making the sophist Prodicus responsible for his interpretation (340a–342a), Socrates disavows his complicity in the reproduction of Protagorean ethics.

III Berger’s provocative interpretation of the Protagoras is guided by his immensely capacious reading practice, which trains his inimitable historical, literary, and sensorial energies on the implicities and complicities of the dialogue’s language, on what he calls its “agonistic surfaces” and “mnemonic triggers.” Attending to the Protagoras’s preoccupation with face, Berger gives face to ainigma, allusion, ambivalence, ambiguity, amphiboly, and analogy (staying, in the interest of space, with the letter “a”), taking these sites of instability as prompts to shift from logic to ethics and rhetoric, and as occasions for heightened philosophic and dramatic scrutiny. Berger subjects to similar scrutiny the invalid arguments and rhetorical misfires that punctuate the Protagoras but that Socrates’s interlocutors often fail to mark. Berger scrutinizes by, among other things, redeeming the “startle-value” of features of the Protagoras that other scholars apologize for, dismiss, or explain away. Reading “with suspicion” and “wonder,” Berger refuses to allow claims about the chronology of the dialogues or their development, or disciplinary distinctions between philosophy and rhetoric, say, or philosophy and poetry, prejudge what he sees. Marking a distinction between reading a Platonic dialogue logocentrically (as conversation to be overheard) and reading grammatologically (as a written text), and insisting on both, Berger reads with and against both the propositional logics characteristic of Anglo-American approaches to ancient philosophy and the dramatics of ascriptive intention characteristic of Straussianisms. Zooming out to a broad range of Plato’s dialogues to round out his reading of the Protagoras, while opting at the same time for close surveillance of

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discursive complexities and rhetorical tropes specific to the dialogue, Berger gleefully brackets nothing. He thus avoids the misanthropy that can threaten propositional approaches when they neglect the ways in which the Protagoras mediates its characters’ speeches through the drama of the text or when they abstract moral statements from the text. He avoids, too, the misologic esotericism that can underwrite quests for veiled truths beneath or behind the text’s drama. Allying with and supplementing ongoing and emergent interdisciplinary political theoretical approaches to Plato, Berger implicates readers in the dynamics of the text, thus opening the question of when and how, between readers and texts, the bond of interlocution can become charismatic bondage.

IV The world of Berger’s Protagoras is dramatically and literarily capacious as well as charismatically bounded and contagious. With no possibility of immunity from its subversive speech dynamics, not even for Socrates, the dialogue appears to offer no way out. In the registers of sophistic, interlocutory, and poetic speech, as these are depicted in the dialogue, this is true. Socrates’s and Protagoras’s performances at the gathering of sophists charismatically bind them to each other and also to their audience. In the Protagoras, however, Socrates speaks not only as a participant at the gathering (interlocutor to Protagoras, performer for the audience, interpreter/producer of poetic speech). He is also the dialogue’s narrator. What happens, Berger asks, when we pay attention to narratorial speech? Socrates’s role as narrator is in evidence at the beginning of the Protagoras. Ahead of his account of the gathering, Socrates is depicted in an exchange with what most translators call a “friend” or “companion,” but, as hetairos, is probably better translated as “comrade” (309a–310a). When the comrade learns that Socrates has just been in a “long conversation” with Protagoras, he asks Socrates to recount it, if he is free. Socrates replies that he would “look on it as a favor [charis]” if the comrade would listen. The comrade answers that he would see it as an act of charis if Socrates spoke. Sealing and mutualizing their charis bond, Socrates calls it a “double favor [diplou charis].” With the exception of one comment that Socrates makes to the comrade at the end of his first description of the gathering (316a), the Protagoras never explicitly returns to its frame. But, as always, the frame is crucial. For Berger, Socrates’s framing narration enables him to appear as not only “trapped in the role of sophistical

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parodist and entertainer” but also as aware of his plight. Similarly, as Berger notes in “Facing Sophists,” Socrates’s statement—“The arguments never come from me; they always come from the person with whom I’m speaking”—may be read not only as “a disclaimer of responsibility” but also as “a rueful confession of failure” (381). Socrates’s awareness that the I, in speech, is inevitably an I-in-relation-to-my-audience does not break the bond of speech or undo the law of interlocution. But it does open the possibility that the charis bond of speech need not always and necessarily result in charismatic bondage. And this opens the possibility that the Protagoras is not only depicting, describing, and performing its charismatic bondages, but also targeting them. Consider again Socrates’s framing narration. When the comrade invites Socrates to “sit down here” and tell the story of the gathering, he directs Socrates to the place occupied by his “boy” or slave. Socrates complies, and, in taking the slave’s place, casts a shadow over his freedom. Socrates, in turn, tells the comrade to “Just listen” (310a) and the comrade does as he is told, speaking no more for the remainder of the dialogue. Charis bond or charismatic bondage? Socrates sets up the “double” and reversible bond of interlocution in a way that makes it hard to tell. The dialogue’s frame thereby puts us on the lookout for the proximities and differences between the charis bond of interlocution and charismatic bondage, which rematerialize just a few lines later when, in a mirror of the opening, Hippocrates sits down by Socrates’s feet (310c), as well as when Socrates and the sophists first make their own charis exchanges (328d–e, 335d). The dialogue’s frame also puts both of these speech bonds in their place. When Hippocrates sits by Socrates’s feet, the very first thing he tells Socrates is about his runaway slave, Satyrus, whom he has spent the last two days trying to recapture (310c). With Socrates’s displacement of the comrade’s slave and Satyrus, it is implied, still at large, Plato excludes slaves from the dialogue’s depictions of the transformations of the charis bond and its assumptions of reciprocity and reversibility—doubling and symmetry—into bondage. And this suggests that he may not have been blind to the significant and substantial differences between the bondages of enslavement and those of interlocution. Under what conditions might the charis bond of speech not become charismatic bondage? Perhaps if confessions of failure stop being, as they are in the Protagoras, occasions for weaponizing virtue or speaking in the name of another to evade responsibility, and become instead occasions for avowals of responsibility. Those avowals, which Berger calls assuming “the middle voice of shared responsibility,” depend first and foremost on

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acknowledging the power of words as deeds to affect the ethical capacities of speakers and auditors. The main characters of the Protagoras fail to assume that voice. But their failures, as these are explored in Couch City, may, in prompting readers of the dialogue to do otherwise, open a different ethics, rhetoric, and politics of responsibility.

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Couch City, or, The Discourse of the Couch

The discussion of the Form of the so-called bed in Book 10 of the Republic has exercised Plato’s commentators. It has raised their eyebrows and lowered their esteem for his logic. Many of the problems in the passage have been concisely summarized in Julia Annas’s excellent An Introduction to Plato’s Republic.1 Annas discusses not only the logical inadequacies of Plato’s conceptualization of the theory of Forms but also the flaws in his unsuccessful attempt to assimilate poetry to “a debased form of painting.”2 Her discussion makes it impossible not to wonder why Plato should have opened himself to such obvious criticism. Why pick an artifact to instantiate the function of Forms, and why this particular artifact? I think Annas and the tradition of commentary in which she writes give the wrong kind of answer. The focus on Plato’s logic is misplaced for three reasons. First, the bed is not a bed: It is a klinē—a couch, as Paul Shorey and Allan Bloom more accurately translate it. Second, when Socrates introduces this object, he associates it three times with another, trapeza, or table (596b), before singling it our for special attention. One meaning of klinē is a banqueting couch (a triclinium), and one meaning of trapeza is a dining table, and when the two appear together, this set of meanings tends to be privileged. Trapeza appears by itself three times, always in connection with gormandizing. Third, the couch and table have appeared together before, and it’s this prior incidence to which I now turn. About three-fifths of the way through the second book, Glaucon scornfully dismisses the idyllic peasant frugality Socrates has been depicting with Adeimantus’s approval. Calling this a city of Sows (huōn polin,

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372d), he demands instead a setting more appropriate to the tastes and desires of wealthier citizens like himself. The citizens of the city they are founding should be able to “recline on couches and eat from tables and have relishes and desserts just like men have nowadays” (372d–e). Socrates responds by expanding Sow City into a tryphōn city—luxurious, soft, and “feverish” (phlegmainousan)—and the first items he adds are “couches, tables, and other furniture,” followed by what goes on them and what goes on around them, “relishes, perfume, incense, courtesans and cakes” (373a). This city, Couch City or Klinopolis,3 is insatiable and ever-expanding, and must be “gorged with a bulky mass” of inessential things. First there will be “hunters and imitators,” then “poets and their helpers” who stage plays, then “craftsmen of all sorts of equipment, for feminine adornment as well as other things,” then those who replace and release parents busied by pleasure (“teachers, wet nurses, governesses”), then those who dress bodies and food (“beauticians, barbers, . . . relish-makers and cooks”). And there will be “swineherds” to tend an animal absent from the earlier city but deemed essential in Klinopolis. There will also be also be need “of very many other fatted beasts [allōn boskēmatōn pampollōn] if someone will eat them,” and therefore greater need of doctors, and of more land “for feeding the men,” and, finally, of an army to go to war over the defense or seizure of land (373b–e). This army becomes the nucleus of the guardian class, the phylakēs, in the new society that replaces Klinopolis and that Socrates will call Kallipolis (527c). It is to the founding of Kallipolis that Books 2 through 5 are devoted (374a–471c). Socrates’s rapid sketch of Couch City and its Atlantean growth is by no means an unprejudiced portrait of Athenian democracy. Rather it’s the Athens of the new agathoi—members of rich families but not of the Eupatridai (“well-fathered,” the older aristocratic lineages). The sketch is presented as if to roil up the cankered traditionalist who condemns and contemns it partly because it appeals to the very desire for unlimited gain that caused the downfall of his genos after the period of Solon’s reforms. Kallipolis is to be a purge for, an antidote to, Klinopolis, and it will turn out to be a pharmakon in the ambivalent sense developed by Marcel Mauss and Jacques Derrida. More specifically, it will be a remedy for the pleonexia driving Couch City toward endless expansion. Much later in the dialogue, at 586bl, the term klinē appears in conjunction with other terms that clearly echo phrases in the account of Couch City. Socrates is describing “those who have no experience of prudence and virtue but are always living with feasts and the like . . . after the fashion of cattle [boskēmatōn], always looking down and with their heads bent to

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earth and table [trapezas], they feed [boskontai], fattening themselves and copulating; and for the sake of getting more [pleonexias] of these things, they kick and butt with horns and hoofs of iron, killing each other because they are insatiable” (586a–b). They are always in danger of becoming what they eat. This brief reminder of Couch City is strategically placed: it prepares the way for the reintroduction of couches and tables. The symbolic importance of couches is certified ten Stephanus pages later when the major example Socrates uses to illustrate the metaphysics of mimēsis is one that darkens the very idea of mimēsis. He situates it in the penumbra of the long shadow thrown by the superficially rejected lifestyle and culture of Klinopolis when he mischievously picks the Form of the Couch (klinē) as if out of the air (596a–598b). It is partly as a remedy for the pleonexia of Couch City that Socrates guides the brothers through the construction of Kallipolis. In its quasiSpartan institutions he depicts a military aristocracy like that which dominated the age before the tyrants and the Solonic reforms—a society complete with the ideology necessary to naturalize aristocratic power and legitimize exploitation. The extremism of this solution measures the degree of self-distrust, of submission to the misanthrope’s paranoia, that had surfaced in the early speeches of Thrasymachus, Glaucon, and Adeimantus. The genealogical development of the three cities to some extent dramatizes the motivational dialectic leading to the solution. Sow City reflects and responds to Adeimantus’s pleonectic fears and Couch City to Glaucon’s pleonectic desires, while Kallipolis alternately exercises—and externalizes—both their dispositions. With the help of Adeimantus Socrates had first sketched an idyll of cooperative farmers and craftworkers happily putting their differences and specializations to common use. Sow City is economic pastoral. Its idealized division of labor excludes competitive and contentious impulses of self-interest. But they are conspicuously excluded, so that their marked absence troubles the placid surface. This is apparent, for example, in the introduction of the key formula, “doing one’s own,” at 370a. The formula is ambiguous because incomplete (doing one’s own what?). It first appears in an alternative that is rejected: the autarky that finds each farmer “not taking the trouble to share in common with others, but doing his own by himself [auton di’ auton ta autou prattein].” But almost immediately, it is reinstated in the “one man one art” formula explained by the idea that “each of us is naturally not

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quite like anyone else, but rather differs in his nature; different men are apt for the accomplishment of different jobs” (370a–b). The privileged sense imposed on “doing one’s own” by “one man one art” will be transformed into the guardian injunction, “doing what you’re told or programmed to do.” This closes off an obvious alternative whose sense is caught in an idiom from the 1960s, “doing your own thing.” The transformation from one version to the other dramatizes the process of conspicuous exclusion—offers a glimpse of the autarkic danger to be dispelled. In this passage Socrates is still describing the minimal “city of utmost necessity” (anankaiotatē) composed “of four or five men”—the farmer, housebuilder, weaver, and “shoemaker or some other man who cares for what has to do with the body” (369d). He goes on at 370b to transform “our little city . . . into a throng” by adding toolmakers and pastoralists, merchants and trading networks (which means other cities), a commercial fleet, money, local tradespeople, and manual laborers “called wage earners.” The minimal city is on the verge of becoming a second Athens, and Socrates describes its expansion in such a way as to stress the tyranny of economic need. His accent falls on the steady erosion of the craftworker’s self-sufficiency and the increasing necessity to depend on the skills and needs of others. He emphasizes the growing power over the kind and quantity of products exercised by the system of exchange, its agents, and its medium. The autarkic ideal of total independence excluded by the “one man one art” formula is again suggested and excluded at the civic level at 370e. Adeimantus agrees with Socrates’s statement that “to found the city itself in the sort of place where there will be no need of imports is pretty nearly impossible.” This breach in the city’s self-sufficiency entangles the citizens in a network of alien needs so that “they must produce at home not only enough for themselves but also the sort of thing and in the quantity needed by these others [in other cities] of whom they have need” (371a). The agent of exchange is called diakonos, which means “servant,” “messenger,” or “ministrant.” Socrates often uses this term in the vaguely pejorative sense of one who performs menial services and knows how to flatter those dependent on him. Adeimantus’s comment on such figures expresses his contempt while acknowledging their enterprise and necessary function: “There are men who see this situation and set themselves to this service; in rightly governed cities they are usually those whose bodies are weakest and are useless for doing any other job” (371c–d). When Socrates baptizes this class kapēlos (“tradesman” or “huckster”)

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and then calls “ ‘merchants’ [emporous] those who wander among the cities” (371d), the shadow of the sophist flits briefly across Sow City. In this manner Socrates manages both to sketch out the image of the cooperative city based on need and to insinuate into it some of the dangers that elicit anxiety about pleonexia and failing control. To his question whether the city has “already grown to completeness,” Adeimantus responds a little uncertainly: “Perhaps” (Isōs). And when Socrates asks where “Justice and injustice” would be—what things they came into being with—he replies, “I can’t think . . . unless it’s somewhere in some need these men have of one another” (37le–372a). This poses the interesting question about where—in what needs— injustice resides, but Socrates leaves it open when he flatters Adeimantus’s vague reply with “Perhaps what you say is fine,” and goes on, “It really must be considered and we mustn’t back away.” Having said that, he immediately backs away, closes the lid on the problems, and concludes with an idyllic—therefore evasive—picture of the community of happy peasants at work and play. Even here, however, excluded dangers hover over the end of the idyll: For food they will prepare barley meal and wheat flour; they will cook it and knead it. Setting out noble loaves of barley and wheat on some reeds or clean leaves, they will stretch out [kataklinentes] on rushes strewn with yew and myrtle and feast themselves and their children. Afterwards they will drink wine and, crowned with wreaths, sing of the gods. So they will have sweet intercourse with one another, and not produce children beyond their means, keeping an eye out against poverty and war. (372b) Julia Annas is right to be troubled by Socrates’s depiction of the city and equally right to insist that a positive reading of it is still plausible. She mentions “the allusions to the Golden Age” as a factor that makes it seem attractive.4 But she ignores the particular function of those allusions: they impose an unearned happy ending on an account that increasingly stresses destabilizing elements. Above all, she misses a set of odd textual echoes centered on words belonging to the couch family. In the passage I just quoted, Socrates says the workers “will stretch out”—kataklinentes, whose root is klinē. This is the second of three occurrences of the term kataklinentes. At 363c Adeimantus complains that the Orphic poets encourage the appearance of justice (rather than justice itself) with their speeches about the afterlife. “In their speech” they lead those reputed just “into Hades and lay them down on couches [kataklinantes]; crowning them, they prepare a

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symposium of the holy, and they make them go through the rest of time drunk, in the belief that the finest wage of virtue is an eternal drunk.” Socrates allusively laces words and details from Adeimantus’s complaint into his own picture of the peasant picnic. Later, he echoes both passages in illustrating his protest that Adeimantus has the wrong idea about how to make citizens of the guardian polis happy: We know how to clothe the farmers in fine robes and hang gold on them and bid them work the earth at their pleasure, and how to make the potters recline [kataklinantes] before the fire, [and drink and feast], and how to make all the others blessed in the same way. . . . But don’t give us this kind of advice, since, if we were persuaded by you, the farmer won’t be a farmer, nor the potter a potter, nor will anyone else assume any of those roles that go to make up a city. (420e–421a) This argument is critical for the guardians. They must be denied the wherewithal that will encourage them to live the life of “happy banqueters” who pursue the pleonectic pleasures of the couch. Such “happiness . . . will turn them into everything but guardians” and will lead them utterly “to destroy an entire city, just as they alone are masters of the occasion to govern it well and make it happy” (420d–e, 421a). These passages speak to the contradictions in Adeimantus’s desire for a fail-safe solution that will repress or eliminate the dangers of pleonexia without requiring the effort that might make the task too difficult, might render the outcome uncertain. In fact, the idyllic harmony Socrates describes is a damped-down version of precisely the seductive promises Adeimantus had condemned the poets for making—the promises not only of the Orphic poets but also of Hesiod, who said that vice was easy and virtue hard (364d), and other things to this effect. It isn’t only for Adeimantus’s benefit that Socrates abridges his account of Sow City’s growth and shifts into his idyllic happy ending. The picnic is described in a manner calculated to stir up Glaucon. Such details as mazas gennaias (“noble” or, more ridiculously, “well-born barley-cakes”), kataklinentes not on couches but on rushes (stibadōn), and estephanōmenoi (“crowned” as with a symbol of honor or victory), trigger his demands first for relishes and shortly after for couches. Socrates obligingly responds to the demand for relishes with a list of the homeliest rustic garnishes, and then offers to fade his feasters out in a Hesiodic haze that’s also a parody of Achilles’s rejected life: “They will live out their lives in peace with health, as is likely, and at last, dying as old men, they will hand down similar lives to their offspring” (372d). Glaucon

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is appalled. “If you were providing for a city of Sows, Socrates, on what else would you fatten them than this?” On the basis of the reference to swineherds at 373c Leo Strauss dismisses this remark (no doubt playfully) as a mistake because “the healthy city is literally without Sows.”5 Nevertheless, it deserves more attention. Apart from revealing the aristocrat’s sense of amenities and scorn of peasant customs—a sign of factional differences—it implies that Socrates is fattening up his city of docile vegetarians for slaughter by warlike outsiders who, like Glaucon, eat meat (cf. 404b–c, 411c). The sexual, dietary, and occupational restrictions required to keep Sow City internally peaceful make it all the more vulnerable to plunder. Glaucon’s mention in Book 10 of Homer’s companion, Creophylos (600b), supplies a deferred identification: Marauders of the Meat Tribe would descend on Sow City in search of a readymade lower class, a servile population of dēmiourgoi to satisfy their necessary as well as unnecessary desires, some of which call for swineherds and swine. Strauss’s commentary on this section is excellent. “Glaucon is characterized by the fact that he cannot distinguish between his desire for dinner and his desire for virtue.” His rebellion against Sow City “was prompted by his desire for luxury, for ‘having more,’ for the thrills of war and destruction (cf. 47lb6–cl).” With the onset of the guardian proposals he is “compelled by Socrates to accept the complete divorce of the profession of arms from all luxury and gain.”6 I connect these statements to Strauss’s observation that Sow City decays into Couch City: “Its decay is brought about by the emancipation of the desire for unnecessary things.”7 This implies the extent to which Sow City is the product of the subversive repressions and exclusions (mentioned above) that conform to Adeimantus’s fears but not to Glaucon’s desires. The impractical economic fantasy developed for Adeimantus measures the stringency with which features of an actual polis were purged to pacify his fears. This puckered utopian impulse is then shown to release the dystopian fantasy of Klinopolis like a coiled spring as a reaction to Sow City. All that was excluded or repressed pours back into the vision of a polis in which humans are slaves to their appetites and can’t be trusted to purge or order themselves. Anyone who looks to Sow City as the true or ideal form of polity is thus in spirit both a willing and unwilling citizen of Couch City, a participant in excesses that lead him to demand the harshest as well as the most devious reforms to bring it back into order. The dialectic of foundation unfolds in an oscillatory pattern of violent reversals. As Klinopolis is an extreme reaction to Sow City, so the

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guardian polis is an extreme reaction to Klinopolis. Kallipolis is an effort to reestablish at a higher level the primitive equilibrium of the “hidden hand.” Socrates’s brief account of Sow and Couch Cities leads to one of the most significant road-forks in the long roundabout path of the Republic. Though he lays out the guardian proposals with the bland idyllicism of someone conducting a seminar on urban planning, their relation to Couch City places them and all the other proposals that fill the Republic on the most dubious ethical basis. Consider the genetic argument implicit in that relation: Since the urge to consume more pleasure, property, and food leads either to faction or to war, the guardian class and polis must be brought into existence (if only in speech) in order to avoid the possibility of faction and implement that of war. This argument conspicuously excludes an alternative remedy: the elenctic method of self-examination and self-refutation practiced by Socrates. War and guardianship are mystified as honorable responses to the city’s decision to gratify rather than restrain pleonexia by expanding beyond its boundaries. Guardianship and war as a way of life constitute an escape from elenchus as a way of life. To move from Klinopolis to the purged guardian state is to institute Kallipolis as an ambiguous remedy for the ills of Couch City. It is ambiguous in being both a repressive defense against its excesses and a way to maintain them through war. In this context, the force and fear of an oriental pleonexia necessitates repressive measures parodically modeled on Spartan training. The motivational structure externalized in Couch City reappears periodically throughout the dialogue in different forms. Pleonectic desire for the All is shown to generate not only Klinopolis and its guardian antidote but also the philosopher king and his dark double, the tyrannic soul. Therefore when couches and tables are reintroduced in Book 10, the lengthening shadow of Klinopolis, the city of pleonexia, falls across the idea or eidos of the couch. Is the eidos of the couch the eidos of injustice? These implications emerge more clearly at 601c when Socrates floats the idea that it is the user rather than the maker of any object who knows what it is for, and therefore how it should be made. He illustrates this point with the example of the flute player who knows about the goodness and badness of flutes, and to whom the maker should be compelled to listen. Rosamond Kent Sprague finds this suggestion “somewhat startling” because, on the analogy of the bed, whose Form was said to be produced by a god, this makes “the flute player or his equivalent . . . a kind of god.”

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Sprague’s way of making this less startling is to argue that to be a god merely means to have the “knowledge of function that controls making.”8 But I think we redeem its startle-value when we realize that the various Greek terms translated into “goodness” and “badness,” and applied to flutes and other artifacts, have all been previously charged with ethical meaning. Then their restricted reference in this passage to technical standards becomes both noticeable and questionable. The technical orientation of the question, “Who uses the flute?” is thus misleading, and it clearly obscures other questions: Why use the flute? Not, what is the flute for, but what is flute-playing for? Who uses the fluteplayer? To whom is he compelled to listen? And the same questions can be asked of the couch. Who uses the couch, and why? Isn’t the couch-user the one who uses and compels not only the makers of couches but also those of flutes, flute music, and all other Klinopolitan objects and practices, as well as their imitations? The couch-user, then, is the one who best knows the idea of the couch. He knows what it is for—what its aretē or function is—and what kind of eidos will most effectively actualize its aretē. Since he is the god who created the eidos, he can both provide the craftsman with building instructions (along with a paradeigma or model) and command him to build. But this divine user and maker of couches is not an individual recumbent, not even a whole class or genos of aristocratic recumbents. As an idea, the couch is the goal and product of erōs in its hybristic form, which is pleonexia. It symbolizes desire for the honor, money, power, and pleasure that make it worth one’s while to neglect justice and the rest of virtue. And it symbolizes the arguments that rationalize the desire. The Form of the Couch thus transcendentalizes the culture of Klinopolis. It idealizes the way of life opposed to the striving for to agathos, the softer way identified with the symposial house of Agathon. Whoever denies responsibility for the difficult quest of what is good or just, and who knows how to rationalize that denial, is a user, worshiper, and creator of the “Form” of the Couch. This “whoever” is not limited to actual users. For there is a discourse of the Couch, a set of well-articulated logoi disseminated throughout the pleonectic society by poets, seers, sophists, natural philosophers, and nomothetes. All these voices are complicit with the users in composing the Form of the Couch, in prescribing its function, in preserving and enhancing its power. The discourse of the Couch is the one Glaucon and Adeimantus had objected to in Book 2 when they pleaded with Socrates to refute it and

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develop a persuasive alternative in defense of justice. But during the remainder of the dialogue Socrates as narrator registers their persistent acquiescence to that discourse, their positive responses to the series of pleonectic constructions he presents as solutions to their dilemma. The return of the couch in Book 10 is thus like the return of the repressed. It is the eidos of the Klinopolitan culture putatively left behind in the founding of Kallipolis. It is the “Being” instantiated or imitated in many instances of interlocutory Becoming. The Form of the Couch is imitated in the fear and difficulty of elenctic self-confrontation, in the evasion of responsibility, in the willingness to let Socrates do the hard work, and in the desire to displace the care of justice from the sphere of ethical consciousness to technical and institutional mechanisms. These manifestations of the reclining state infiltrate the attempts of Glaucon and Adeimantus to combat—with Socrates’s help—the discourse of the Couch they find inscribed in the world they live in and the traditions that dominate it. The final stages of discussion in the Republic return to and reanimate the terms of Kephalos’s Simonidean logos. At 608b, Socrates secures Glaucon’s assent to the proposition that justice is to be desired for its own sake. He goes on to describe the just and unjust conditions of the immortal soul (608d–612b). Then he asks Glaucon to give back what he and Adeimantus had borrowed from him in Book 2. They had borrowed—that is, he had conceded to them—“the just man’s seeming to be unjust and the unjust man just . . . so that justice itself could be judged as compared with injustice itself.” He now asks them to give back the argument that true justice pays. They wholeheartedly agree to what is conspicuously, suspiciously, an idyllic dream of the just soul’s rewards (612b–614a). The Simonidean metaphor of exchange in this passage is confusing. First, the brothers are to give back the cynical argument in the sense of cancelling it. Then they are to give back the idyllic argument in the sense of letting Socrates use it. The confusion vanishes as soon as we realize that both arguments reflect a single desire: the desire that justice be rewarded and that this desire originate with the brothers, not with Socrates. He is in effect saying that it was Glaucon and Adeimantus, not himself, who really want justice to pay. Their effort has been to persuade Socrates to prove to them, and for them, what they would like to believe but can’t prove for themselves—not because they are cynical but because they live in a climate in which easy pieties like those of Kephalos are targets of sophistical disenchantment.

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Socrates, then, pretends to take back from the brothers what they owe him: the argument that justice pays; the argument they didn’t let him use. But he actually gives back to them what they want to hear. The metaphor of repayment signifies his dissociation from the argument he makes in their behalf. Yet if it is always wrong to do harm, and if in giving or taking back what is owed Socrates does harm to the cause of justice, isn’t he participating in an unjust exchange? And doesn’t he do this by following the dictates of the discredited logos of Simonides and Kephalos? The facility with which he redistributes “prizes, wages, and gifts” from the unjust to the just man and sends pains and punishments in opposing directions (612e–613e) suggests that he isn’t so much participating in the exchange as dramatizing it. The bouquet of rewards he encourages the brothers to savor is so smoothly and extravagantly described as to prevent the reader from sharing their enthusiasm. Our skepticism about the results of the inquiry into justice is not diminished by the comment with which Socrates approaches the myth of Er. He says that the rewards for justice conferred during life “are nothing in multitude or magnitude [plēthei oude megethei] compared to those that await each when dead. And those things should be heard so that in the hearing each of these men will have gotten back the full measure of what the argument owed him” (614a). In Socratic procedure, the reference to quantity and size is always a signal that his argument responds to the inclination of his auditors to measure good and evil in terms of units of pleasure and pain. He promises to make magnified mythic restitution to “each of these men”—the just and the unjust—for the Thrasymachean slander he borrowed in the brothers’ name, but the terms of this payment tend to blend with those of the apodosis the brothers owe him: a fantasy of the perfect distribution of pleasure to the just and pain to the unjust. Despite this promise, the myth of Er does not give equal weight to the two destinies. Rather its emphasis echoes that of Kephalos’s remarks on the tales told about Hades. Socrates dwells longer on the details of punishment than on those of reward. Since the sufferings recounted by the unjust and the delights recounted by those returning from heaven would take a long time to tell, Socrates will restrict his account to “the sum” (615a). “Sum” translates kephalaion, which momentarily lights up the long-vanished ghost of Kephalos. The sum includes a brief undetailed reference to the rewards of the just and holy, much quantified information about the penalties for injustice, and a longer, more fully visualized, narrative about the tyrant and parricide, Ardiaeus. When Socrates later describes the choosing of

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life-patterns, the tyrant is conflated with a suspiciously Kephalean figure. The melodramatic references to the parricide Ardiaeus and to the eating of sons, with its Hesiodic overtones, suggest exaggerated mythic transcriptions of the subtler dangers of generational warfare most fully treated in Book 8 but introduced in the discourse of Kephalos. One way to approach this passage is to read it in light of Socrates’s remarks about the tyrannical soul. At the beginning of the ninth book, he comments on the “terrible, savage, and lawless form of desires . . . in every man, even in some of us who seem to be ever so measured [metriois]. And surely this becomes plain in dreams” (572b). Even the most epieikēs man has potentially tyrannical desires. The price of the virtue derived from conformity with nomos is the diminution of self-awareness. Socrates says that the man best able to discern and judge the tyrant adequately is the one “able with his thought to creep into a man’s disposition and see through it,” the man who “has lived together with the tyrant in the same place” (577a) and confronted the potential tyrant within himself. Glaucon and Adeimantus are brought closer to this self-perception than Kephalos. Kephalos distinguishes the unjust man who has bad dreams from the man conscious of no unjust deed. But in aligning himself with the latter he so much as acknowledges in the existence of the former those whose tyrannical impulses he has cause to fear: those who envy his wealth and those enslaved by the savage despoteia of desire. If his wealth has helped him control or escape safely from the mad masters within, he has still to defend against the pleonexia of the young and the many, of oikeioi as well as allotrioi. The burden of his logos is that he has tried to do this by paying back what he owes. He tries to do it now by means of the exemplary moral sentiments he addresses to Socrates in the hearing of “these young men,” who might well profit by being reminded of the pains of hellfire. His final long speech contains the seeds of the myth of Er. When Socrates tells the myth, he puts Kephalos in his place by revealing the contradictions and evasions in his epieikeis logoi. Nevertheless, the myth as a whole reflects those logoi. It is a Kephalean rather than Socratic fantasy. Socrates ironically reinstates Kephalos’s morality at the end of the dialogue as the goal toward which the commitments and desires of the two brothers tend.

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Simonides, Part 1

1 The Republic and the Protagoras both reserve a small but significant place for a poet who differs from Homer and Hesiod. In Book 2 of the Republic (362d–367e), Adeimantus plays the victim and blames the poets for the injustice and pleonexia of contemporary Athens. We are, he whines, only the puppets, rhapsodes, and creatures of the poets. Thinking their thoughts, commanded by their opinions, we are helpless to fight against the cynicism and injustice we see all around us and for which they, not we, are responsible. If Adeimantus’s were the first occurrence of the discourse against the poets in the Republic there might be less reason to question it. But Socrates had raised the issue earlier in his discussion with Polemarchus, and there we encounter the poet whose work gets star billing in the Protagoras: Simonides. When Polemarchus utters Simonides’s saying that “it is just to give to each what is owed” (331a), Socrates proceeds to remodel it by making Polemarchus assent to the following series of formulas: (1) “[J]ustice is doing good to friends and harm to enemies” (332d); (2) according to Homer, Simonides and Polemarchus, justice is “a certain art of stealing, for the benefit, to be sure, of friends and the harm of enemies” (334b); (3) justice is doing “good to the friend, if he is good, and harm to the enemy, if he is bad” (335a); (4) it is never just to injure anyone, for it is the work of an unjust man “to harm either a friend or anyone else” (335d). At the conclusion of this charade Socrates says, “[W]e’ll do battle then as

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partners, you and I, . . . if someone asserts that Simonides, or Bias, or Pittacus or any other wise and blessed man said” that it is just to help friends and hurt enemies, for “he wasn’t telling the truth” (335e). This is only one of several Socratic arguments about the inability of charismatic authority figures—poets, rhapsodes, seers, orators, lawgivers, and sophists—to defend against misinterpretation. Most familiar are the arguments about poets in the Ion, Protagoras (347e), Phaedrus (275e), Lesser Hippias (365c–d), and Apology (22b–c), and the demonstration aimed at Protagoras in the Theaetetus. But in many equally familiar passages Socrates also discusses or suggests their dangerous influence and their cultural or political power. Beneath these apparently inconsistent emphases is the more complex logos of the charismatic bond, the uneasy dialectic in which the authority figure—poet or sophist—is implicated with his validating audience. In the classic Weberian account, the essential features of charisma are (1) that it is recognized as a gift transcending human power and (2) that it is recognized in and as the embodiment of transcendent power in a personal presence. The charismatic relation grounded in this embodiment thus breaks down into three components: at the center stands the figure; “above” is the transcendent source of his gift and favor, the Power that he or she or it condenses and refracts; “around” are those who see in the figure the manifestation of the Power, those who constitute the validating audience that confers the status of charismatic embodiment.1 The problem of charisma turns on the extent to which the reality of the second component, the legitimizing source, is rendered believable by existing sociocultural constructions. This is interdependent with another variable: the extent to which both figure and audience can repress or ignore the disabling suspicion that charisma lies in the eye of the observer (or simply that charisma lies). By focusing on the weakness of the second component in Athenian culture, and by dramatizing the pervasive effects of the consequent suspicion, the Platonic dialogues articulate the subversive dynamic that transforms the charismatic bond to bondage. Again and again, for example, they suggest—either through dramatic interaction or through Socratic speech—that the audience’s self-induced passivity, its refusal to recognize the middle voice of shared responsibility, is the source of its power. The audience makes the charismatic figure at once its god and its slave, ventriloquating its own logoi through his voice. The power by which the sophist masters the audience (hoi polloi) derives from the power by which the audience masters him. The figure of the sophist as an omnicompetent outsider is a phantasm created and ventriloquated by those who welcome him in their midst and

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who are careful to keep behind him in the dance they let him lead. The sophist provides a visible and audible focus for the power of the manyheaded beast. His arts guarantee its sōtēria in a profound if familiar sense. It is not possible to confront the power of that Protean agora, the validating audience, unless it is countenanced—unless it commits itself to a visible place, shape, and personal presence. Otherwise it is invisible as the air that circulates throughout the community of the polis, the air everyone breathes in the metabolic interchanges that keep the system going. As the local embodiment of the power, the sophist is dispensable—or at least as dispensable as a dream, since he condenses, displaces, and manifests in his own person the latent power of the audience that is the father of the discourse he delivers. The sophist exists to be effaced if necessary. He’s the scapegoat as well as the master of the many—their pharmakos as well as their pharmakeus. Like the evil dragon or monster, he is the embodiment who offers the hero a chance to prove himself and set things right in a single dialogical encounter—an epic dream of justice and victory through battle. Structurally parallel to the relation between the sophist and his audience is that between dead poets and their living interpreters. The reason the poets are at once helpless figures, quasi-divine figures, and scapegoats, is that (1) the living reach back into the past and continually interpret it to make it conform to their needs and desires. But (2) they disown, bury, forget their creation so that they can blame others or legitimize their own desires by attributing them to voices of authority they could not have created, and to the presumptive spokespersons of the transcendent gods. The position Plato assigns Socrates seems to be that while the relation between past and present might be one of reciprocity, it is more often a conflict of ventriloquisms—a conflict that takes place between two extremes: something like symbolic filicide on the part of the voices of the past, and something like symbolic parricide on the part of the voices of the present. Because parents, poets, and lawmakers want to live forever any way they can, they try to stamp out generations of replicas. Their writing, if they left any, was meant to fix indelibly the mark, the voice, the presence of its father, which would be inscribed by paideia in succeeding generations, so that it could seize, infiltrate, utter, and perpetuate itself through their voices. But since the ancients wrote poems as extensions of voice, they suffered the fate of all logocentric transmission. However unwilling they were to die, their works by outliving them opened up space for new interpreters. The father’s name remained, but the actual father behind the name was mutilated so that the power of his poetry could be freed and disseminated in new forms.

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Creative parricide is always mystified as passive and obedient reception. We who live exalt the poets we have buried. We enthrone them as the gods who impose on us our standards of what is good or bad, the standards by which we validate their authority over us. This is what Adeimantus criticizes in Book 2 of the Republic. He holds the ancient poets and seers responsible for the present injustice of Athenian culture. He speaks as if he and his generation are the powerless victims of the tradition. Socrates targets such disclaimers of responsibility when he willfully– and sometimes hilariously—misreads poetry in order to demonstrate that the god or muse who inspires the ancient poets is the living community itself. His interpretive performances show how the living, by their creative labor, give form not only to the next generation but also to past generations. Nevertheless, this critique of the victim’s discourse is not mounted from the outside observer’s position. Plato portrays a Socrates deeply implicated, even trapped, in the charismatic dialectic that dominates the institutions of a predominantly oral culture. The Protagoras vividly brings alive not only the power and weakness of poetry, not only its bond with sophistry, but also the bonding of that bond to Socrates. I began this discussion with a glance at Socrates’s interrogation of the Simonidean logos in Republic 1. An apparently superficial connection joins the Republic to the Protagoras: Both dialogues reserve a small but significant place for a poet who differs from Homer and Hesiod. In the Protagoras Simonides gives, or is given, his major Platonic performance. The Simonides interlude begins with Protagoras’s introduction of the subject of poetry at 338e. It is decisively terminated at 348a when Socrates rejects that mode of discourse and then goes on to finish off Protagoras. In what follows, I explore the related themes of poetry, sophistry, and charismatic bondage through a close reading of the interlude.

2 After Protagoras concludes his Great Speech, Socrates tries to lower the sophist’s resistance to participating in question-and-answer sessions with an invidious comment on macrologic oratory: If one should be present when any of the public speakers were dealing with these same subjects, one could probably hear similar discourses from Pericles or some other able speaker: but suppose you put a question to one of them—they are just like books [biblia], incapable of

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either answering you or putting a question of their own; if you question even a small point of what has been said, just as brazen vessels ring a long time after they have been struck and prolong the note unless you put your hand on them, these orators too, on being asked a little question, extend their speech over a full-length course. But Protagoras here, while able to deliver a long and fine speech, as he has made clear, is also able when questioned to reply briefly, and after asking a question to await and accept the answer. (328e–329b)2 At 347e Socrates makes a similar comment about the poets: You can’t question them “on the sense of what they say” because some claim they mean this and others that, “and they go on arguing about something they are powerless to put to the test [exelenxai].” The implication that the poets could help us out if they were present is challenged in other passages that suggest the helplessness of the poets themselves to put their poems to the test either by interpretation or by refutation, for the poets are filled with the god, which is to say they are moved by the godlike power of whoever speaks through them. And this is charismatic bondage: submission to the power of whatever audience or community pipes the music of its desires through the allotriaphōnē (other or alien voice) of the poet (347c–e) and then receives it from him as the gift, injunction, or wisdom of the gods. Charismatic bondage binds together the poet, sophist, and orator, and makes them sites of inscription, like the writing tablets Protagoras mentions at 326d. Adam and Adam remark that “Plato’s objection to poetry in the Protagoras . . . reminds us of his condemnation in the Phaedrus of written books in general as a means of education.”3 But the objection is not to writing per se. It is to writing as a metaphor of inscription and moral indoctrination. If poetry and sophistical rhetoric can’t defend themselves or answer the questions put to them, it is not because they are written. Rather, it’s because (even if they happen to have been written) they are composed for the conditions of oral performance and aural reception. They are composed for the purposes of perpetuating a morality adapted to the media in which those conditions have been institutionalized. Socrates’s sequence of comparisons—the orator as book, as sounding hollow bronze, as long-distance runner—traces a pattern of reincorporation that interprets both the structure and the motive shared by sophist, orator, and poet. If oratory is like a book, it is the recitation of a preinscribed text. Its authority is that of the “good poets” of yore (325e–326a). Its inability to ask or answer projects the speaker’s defensive unwillingness to be interrupted or challenged. In the second comparison, silent meaning

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gives way to sound, and the orator’s defensiveness is more dynamically and aggressively depicted. Both the underresponsive book and the overresponsive bronze conspire to the same end: They protect against interrogation. These combined images recall Socrates’s earlier comment on the way Prodicus’s booming voice so filled the room in which he was holding forth that ta legomena were indistinct. The irony of the narrator’s statement that he earnestly longed to hear this passophos and theios man is sharpened by the implication that Prodicus’s wisdom and divinity derive from the charismatic resonance of his voice and the consequent difficulty in understanding his logoi (315e–316a). The less he has to say, the longer and louder he speaks; the sense is drowned and silenced by the sound. Finally, the apprehensive and competitive motive of oratory is focused in the embodiment of the long-distance runner. At the end of this sequence of figures, Socrates distinguishes Protagoras from the orators and proceeds to slow him down with questions about the unity of virtues. But when Protagoras tries to pull away by speeding through his oleaginous discourse on goods, Socrates compares him to “Criso the runner of Himera in his prime, or to . . . one of the long-distance racers or Marathon couriers [hemerodromōn].” He complains that he cannot “keep pace with such runners”: Protagoras will have to run more slowly and be willing “to hold a joint discussion [dialegomenous]” and not insist on making a harangue (dēmēgorein; 335e–336b). These comments occur during the four Stephanus pages of procedural maneuvering that lead to the Simonides interlude. Both the interlude and the three figures center on the dynamics of charismatic bondage, and on the logocentric constraints of poetry, oratory, and dialogue. Procedural maneuvering within the system of oral culture is in fact the primary subject of the parody of poetic interpretation focused on Simonides’s poem. Socrates’s representation of his own role as a competitor is a significant feature of the account. It is flagged, for example, in his complaint that he can’t keep up with Protagoras, since he characterizes himself as a participant in the running contest. But if he plays the part of a Zenonian tortoise in this exchange, he changes into a hare during the interlude, racing through a two-mile parody of Protagoras’s Great Speech. From 334c to 339a Socrates and Protagoras jockey for position while Callias, Alcibiades, and the other sophists offer opinions about how the debate should be conducted. Each of the two contestants wants to run the discussion in the manner most advantageous to himself. Socrates suddenly remembers that he is forgetful and can’t deal with long speeches.

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He commands Protagoras to “chop up [syntemne] the answers and make them shorter,” and notes that Protagoras, unlike himself, is known to be proficient in both macrological and brachylogical styles of argument (334d–335a). Protagoras has a marvelous moment during this exchange in which he devotes three short questions to asking whether Socrates means that he should make his answers (1) shorter than they should be, (2) as long as they should be, (3) as long as Protagoras thinks they should be, or (4) as long as Socrates thinks they should be. When Socrates repeats his demand for brevity, Protagoras reminds him that he is a veteran word warrior and sensibly objects that “if I were to . . . argue just the way that my opponent demanded, I should not be held superior to anyone nor would Protagoras have made a name among the Greeks” (335a). At this point Socrates precipitates a minor crisis and a major group strategy session. He threatens to terminate the debate by leaving. He explains to his auditor that he could see Protagoras was unhappy with his previous poor showing in the short-answer department. He knew Protagoras would not readily continue in the same mode. Callias then breaks in to protest that he doesn’t want to be deprived of more good entertainment. Socrates restates at greater length his preference for brevity, and Callias puts in a word for the fairness of Protagoras’s request to be allowed to do it his way. Alcibiades intercedes on behalf of Socrates, and Critias briefly urges his colleagues to rise above partisanship and persuade both contestants not to break off in the middle of the discussion. This produces a pair of portentous pronouncements from Prodicus and Hippias calling for what is nowadays referred to as constructive engagement, at the end of which Hippias suggests a procedural via media supervised by an umpire, and suggests it in a hyper-judicious manner that clearly constitutes an application for the position. Socrates demurs and comes back with a counter-offer. First he rejects the idea of a single umpire: If the umpire were equal to the combatants in wisdom, he would be superfluous, and if less than equal, that would do his betters the injustice of being supervised by an inferior. Since no one is Protagoras’s equal, much less his superior, it would be an insult to him to choose anyone as his supervisor. Then he proposes that if Protagoras is not inclined to be on the receiving end, he can begin as questioner so that Socrates can show him the right way to answer, and when I have answered all the questions he wishes to ask, let him in turn undertake to do the same for me. If he then doesn’t seem eager to answer the particular question put to him, you and I together

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will appeal to him, just as you did to me, not to spoil our discussion. And for this there is no need at all for any one person to become supervisor, but you will all supervise together. (338d–e) Since the others consented to this plan, “Protagoras, though very unwilling, was nevertheless compelled to agree to ask questions” and then to respond “with short replies” (338e). Protagoras’s unwillingness is predictable. Socrates had bullied them all with his threats to break off their fun. He had been by turns condescending and overbearing toward Protagoras, had played to the other sophists’ desire to see Protagoras discomfited, and had budged very little from his original demand in his counter-offer. At the end he not only got his way; he also shifted the onus of spoilsport from himself to Protagoras, shaming him into submission, and positioning himself as a de facto umpire who would join the others in presiding over Protagoras (“you and I together will appeal to him”). Thus he edges the role of local challenger and underdog with the aggressive modesty of the eirōn, and pushes the world-class visitor into a corner. The next round is the Simonides interlude. This will be fought according to rules of combat proposed by and favorable to Socrates, though rules that Socrates bumptiously honors more in the breach than in the observance when he unfurls the billowing sail of his own makrologia (342a–347a). Since the subject is a question involving aretē, paideia, and politikē, since it is therefore peri tōn megistōn, about the greatest things, as Socrates later puts it (347a), my description is itself sophistical. It begs the question under discussion by tacitly privileging a particular idea of aretē or excellence: aretē not as concern for an ethical good that may jeopardize the attainment of all other excellences but as performative skill in eristics. From the Socratic standpoint elsewhere inscribed in this and the other dialogues, such a reduction of ethics to technē reverses means and ends. What the disputants are talking about is subordinated to their way of talking about it, their way of using it to win victory and fame. We are reminded of this at every transition by one of the repeated motifs of the dialogue: When he had thus spoken, the company acclaimed it as an excellent answer . . . (334c) When Prodicus had thus spoken, quite a number of the company showed their approval . . . (337c)

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His proposal was approved by the company, and they all applauded it . . . (338b) This speech of his won a clamorous approval from many of his hearers . . . (339e) If the procedural maneuvers I’ve been describing serve to ratify the values of sophistical morality, how can Socrates be exculpated from complicity in this game? Gregory Vlastos argues that he “leaves Protagoras no alternative but to fight on Socrates’s terrain.” At the same time, Socrates goes on to beat the sophists at their own game by committing himself to their tactics. Vlastos doesn’t find Socrates “wholly attractive . . . in this dialogue. His irony . . . seems clumsy,” and his “fulsome compliments to Protagoras, continued after they have lost all semblance of plausibility, become a bore. In his exegesis of the poet he turns into a practical joker, almost a clown.”4 This criticism is misplaced. Rather, it was anticipated by Plato’s Socrates. Vlastos ignores the difference made by the fact that Socrates is the narrator of the dialogue. His portrayal of his role in the narrated event is itself critical. It dramatizes his ethical dilemma. Both as narrator and as interlocutor his goal is to maintain contact with the sophist on behalf of Hippocrates and other young men seeking instruction in aretē. He can only do this by marking out his “terrain” within a portion of the enemy’s. The dialogues represent the charismatic logocentrism of oral culture as imposing that constraint on any attempt to teach or demonstrate aretē.5 Demonstration and persuasion are necessarily ad hominem rather than ad principium. These are the conditions within which the Simonides interlude unfolds.

3 It is Protagoras, not Socrates, who proposes that they discuss a poem. From his first utterance, at 316c, his attention to the poets has been prominent. He claims them as his disguised predecessors, narrates a fable in their manner, and notes their importance in the study of letters. Now, at 338e–339e, having been dissatisfied with his showing and forced into the role of Socratic interrogator, he falls back again on the poets. Protagoras asserts that “the greatest part of a man’s education is to be skilled [deinon] in poetic speech [peri epōn].” In the utterances of the poets he should to be able to perceive what has been rightly composed and what wrongly, and to know how to make distinctions [dielein, also

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“define” or “interpret”] and also how, on being questioned, to give one’s reasons [te kai erōtōmenon logon dounai].” His question (erōtēma), he continues, “will be on the same subject that you and I are discussing, namely virtue, but transferred to the realm of poetry; that will be the only difference.” His stake in this move, and Socrates’s response to it, have been elucidated often and well. Here is a representative sampling: Now Poetry, in the days of Plato, was regarded as perhaps the most powerful means of teaching virtue, and Protagoras had already maintained its educative value in his speech. It was therefore necessary to inquire whether the claims of the Muses were well founded. It became all the more necessary when the Sophists—or some of them—in this as in many other respects went with the stream, and developed the practice of poetical criticism into an art.6 Texts from the poets passed . . . as the common coin of ethical wisdom. They summed up, in memorable language, an insight that was more ancient, more authoritative, and more penetrating than any judgment made ad hoc was likely to be. Professor Werner Jaeger has told how the sophists, and Socrates too, attacked the validity of the poets’ teachings, and sought to substitute for them a new learning founded on reason, variously conceived. A favorite method was to argue that a poet could be convicted of contradicting himself.7 In view of Protagoras’s general educational program, and in view of his comments on the poem, it seems likely that he saw the importance of literary criticism rather in developing the critical faculty and the exact use of language than in promoting the understanding and appreciation of poetry as an end in itself.8 Whatever their minor differences, these statements agree in placing emphasis on the cognitive function of literary criticism. But that is hardly Protagoras’s emphasis. The statements account only for the first skill he mentions, “to be able to perceive what has been rightly composed and what wrongly,” but the real purpose of poetic education for Protagoras is expressed in the next two clauses, especially the last one: knowing how to give reasons when questioned. Why should anyone learn to interpret and evaluate poems? Why pull them apart (another meaning of dielegein) and find contradictions or inconsistencies in them? In order to be deinos in verbal encounters, to defend oneself when challenged by other deinoi, and to become authoritative in the affairs of the polis. Poetic study is valued for its rhetorico-political

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usefulness in a speech culture. The meaning of poems is subordinated to— and may be determined by—their use. For Protagoras the “importance of literary criticism” is this: On the pretense of continuing the inquiry into an ethical problem, he can reduce talk about virtue to a weapon in a political contest. The contest will either accredit or discredit his claim to empower others (and thereby himself) by teaching them political aretē. This battle is fought simultaneously on three fronts. As Leonard Woodbury notes, Protagoras “had to demonstrate that he was better qualified than either the old and revered Simonides or the artless but troublesome Socrates to teach the art of good citizenship.”9 In the dialogue he also competes with the other sophists present. The poets are the most formidable enemy in the sense that their authority is oldest and most pervasive. As Protagoras puts it, the old poets and lawgivers were sophists in disguise (316d). This utterance is both an assertion of the continuity of his calling with ancient authority and an emulative challenge, a bid to appropriate the poet’s traditional power. That there is some truth to his characterization of the poets becomes evident if we look awry at the following statement by Woodbury: “They summed up, in memorable language, an insight that was more ancient, more authoritative, and more penetrating than any judgment made ad hoc was likely to be.” No one who has read Havelock’s Preface to Plato,10 published a decade later than Woodbury’s essay, would let this sentence stand as is. We would now prefer to say that it was the memorableness of the language, the style and medium of communication, that gave the insight its authority and made it seem penetrating—made it, indeed, penetrate. The sophist had to challenge and overthrow more than the poet’s “ethical wisdom.” He had also to pit his own rhetorical and epideictic skill against poetry’s “memorable language,” against the rhetorical and musical art whose deinos practice was the sophistry of poets. That is, he had to confront one kind of oral discourse with another. And if he did, then so also did Socrates. On this Havelockian point, both translations and commentaries tend to be vague. This is why I depart from the five English translations at my disposal in rendering epōn (339al) as “poetic speech” rather than “poetry” or “verses.” This is also why I question the strategic advisability of Woodbury’s unqualified reference to “[t]exts from the poets” and Taylor’s reference to “literary criticism.” I consider Havelock’s thesis in more detail later, but at the purely material and mechanical level one obvious remark can be made now: No writing by Simonides is mentioned in the Protagoras or elsewhere, and nobody is represented as happening to have a scroll

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at hand (as Phaedrus does in the Phaedrus) to keep the exegetes honest. In fact, the absence of a text fixed by inscription will have become conspicuous by the time Socrates finishes making free with the poem.

4 Simonides of Ceos is a strange presence in the dialogues, if he can be called a presence. He is more like a spirit or ghostly rumor who assumes body and form when called forth to serve as an authority (by Polemarchus) and as a target (by Protagoras). These are his two major resurrections. A statement that has been attributed to him is cited by Adeimantus at Republic 365c as a saying of the sophoi, and another is recognizable at 489b. Protagoras mentions him by name along with Homer and Hesiod as closet sophists of antiquity (316d). He appears briefly in Epistle 2 (310e–311a) and in the Hipparchus (228b–c): in the former as an example of the symbiotic attraction of the wise and the powerful; in the latter as testimony to Hipparchus’s wisdom in patronizing poets (which is also an allusion to Simonides’s notoriously healthy appetite for money). It is symptomatic of the problem I’m about to examine that Plato’s authorship of these two works has been seriously questioned. What is strange about the Platonic Simonides is that neither of the texts discussed in the Republic and Protagoras seems to have any other provenance. The statement Polemarchus attributes to Simonides (“it is just to give to each what is owed,” 331e) is not attested to by any of the ancient sources on the basis of which modern editors have assembled the Simonidean corpus. The poem interpreted in the Protagoras seems to be preserved only there. Of the Republic citation, Paul Friedlaender remarks that Simonides “serves as an ironic cover for the popular view, which is really Polemarchos’s own view.”11 He is also an appropriate cover. Whether or not he was the source of the statement, the doxographic emphasis on his avarice singularly qualifies his name to authorize a discussion that fixes on the relations of chrēmatistikē (money-making) to power and pleonexia, and on the management of an apprehensive conscience. But it is in the Protagoras, where Simonides emerges into fullest view, that the problem “he” poses becomes most acute: the problem of citational opportunism, with its attendant aporiai—the perplexes of presence and representation, of impersonation and resurrection, of the mutual haunting by which selves and others, the present and the past, invade each other. None of these perplexes is discernible in modern anthologies of ancient

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Greek lyric. There we find that a poem by Simonides, sometimes referred to as the Scopas-fragment, has materialized in a fairly solid shape. According to editorial conjectures based on metrical grounds, several lines of the poem are missing. Since scholars have questioned some readings and emended others, existing versions show slight variations, but the overall sense is not much affected. What follows is an eclectic rendering of the poem (adapted from different translations), followed by the Greek text as reconstructed by J. Aars in four seven-line stanzas and modified in a few places by J. and A. M. Adam to restore the putatively original phrasing: 1. Indeed, to become a truly good man is hard, in hands and feet and mind foursquare, fashioned without reproach. [five missing verses] 2. Nor does the saying of Pittacus ring true to me, though uttered by a wise mortal: It is hard to be [or to stay—emmenai] noble. A god alone can have that gift; a man cannot but stay [emmenai] bad whom irresistible circumstance casts down. When he fares well every man is good, bad if [he fares] badly. For the most part [or for the longest] they are best whom the gods love. 3. Therefore I will never throw away my share of time on an unprofitable hope, vainly searching for what cannot come to be, an allblameless mortal among us who take the fruit of the broad earth. Should I discover him, I will tell you about it. I praise and love all who don’t willingly do anything shameful; against necessity not even the gods contend. 4. . . . I indeed am content with whoever is not bad or not too helpless [or unmanageable, apalamnos]. He who knows the justice that profits the city is a sound man. I do not blame him. For the race of fools is infinite. Surely all things are fair with which shameful things are not mingled. STROPHE 1. 1. Andr’ agathon men alatheōs genesthai chalepon, 2. chersin te kai posi kai noōi tetragōnon, aneu psogou tetygmenon. Verses 3–7 are missing. STROPHE 2. 1. Oude moi emmeleōs to Pittakeion nemetai, 2. kaitoi sophou para phōtos eiremenon; chalepon phat’ esthlon emmenai.

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3. Theos an monos tout’ echoi geras; andra d’ ouk esti mē ou kakon emmenai, 4. hon amēchanos symphora kathelēi.12 5. Praxas men eu pas anēr agathos, 6. kakos d’ ei kakōs , 7. 13 STROPHE 3. 1. Touneken ou pot’ egō to mē genesthai dunaton 2. dizēmenos kenean es aprakton elpida moiran aiōnos baleō, 3. panamōmon anthrōpon euryedous hosoi karpon ainymetha chthonos; 4. epi d’ ummin heurōn apaggeleō. 5. Pantas d’ epainēmi kai phileō, 6. hekōn hostis herdēi 7. mēden aischron; anankēi d’ oude theoi machontai. STROPHE 4. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Missing. [ouk eim’ egō philomōmos;] exarkei g’emoi, hos an ēi kakos mēd’ agan apalamnos, eidōs g’onēsipolin dikan, hygiēs anēr, oude mē min egō mōmēsomai; tōn gar ēlithiōn apeirōn genethla; panta toi kala, toisi t’ aischra mē memiktai.

Before quoting the poem I casually noted that Adam and Adam restored the original phrasing of the text reconstructed by Aars. But where is the original phrasing, and on what did Aars base his reconstruction? The difficulties of this poem are well known, and have called forth many pages of comment. . . . It may be at once allowed that no restoration can claim to represent with certainty just what Simonides wrote in the order in which it was written. Plato is seldom careful to make his quotations accurate, and the perverse exposition of the meaning of this particular poem is hardly calculated to increase our confidence in his verbal accuracy here. Nevertheless, Plato is our sole authority for the poem in question, and consequently that restoration will be most probable which, while it satisfies every metrical requirement, involves the fewest changes in the text and sequence of the poem as it stands in Plato.14

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This is the principle in terms of which the editors preferred Aars’s reconstruction to the others available to them. Their interpretation of the principle, as we’ll see, has a kink in it. Commentators tend to focus on the problems this uncertain provenance raises, especially since they don’t find that of the remainder of Simonides’s oeuvre more uncontroversial: The poem is quoted at length only here in all the literature that is preserved from antiquity; and Wilamowitz, whose study is the foundation of all later criticism, has given reasons for supposing that partial quotations in later authors are, in fact, made from Plato’s account.15 The fragments present far more problems than can be solved, and even if they are the work of Simonides, they do not throw much light on his methods. . . . Hephaestion, who quotes the [one fragment], says that it came from Simonides’s èpigrámmaga, and the word indicates that it was not an elegiac skólion but an inscription. As such, its authenticity is open to doubts, since many such were attributed to Simonides in later days, and he does not seem to have made a collection of them himself.16 While the latter passage is part of an editorial commentary, the previous is a statement of challenge which the author tries to meet by the standard strategies of scholarly interpretation. Each frames his inquiry in cautionary obeisance to its uncertainty, but only as a prelude that enhances the subsequent unveiling of a “real” Simonides hidden behind Plato’s text—“real” in the sense that the authors claim to recover what Simonides “intended,” what he recognizes, and above all what distinguishes the poet’s intention and “the original significance of the poem” from later interpretations of this intention. These “later interpretations” include not only those inscribed in the Protagoras but also those developed by the scholarly precursors and competitors whose restorations or readings are to be contested. It would be challenge enough for Simonides scholars to cope with the lack of “overall context” or the snippetlike character of “historical and biographical evidence,” but their woes don’t end there. This extratextual problem of snippetology is as nothing compared to the diabolical intratextual snippetotomy that Socrates and Protagoras perform on the body of Simonides’s poem. They set modern scholarship the task of reassembling a poem diffracted by the dialogue’s interpretive bluster into disiecta membra strewn about and all but drowned in commentary that goes on, in some instances, for two or almost three Stephanus pages. Thus if it’s true that Plato “is our sole authority” for this poem, there must be a fundamental error in the aim and practice of Simonides

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scholarship. The error is well illustrated by the Adams’ reconstruction of the poem. There is a lack of fit between the editors’ principle that the best restoration “involves the fewest changes in the text and sequence of the poem as it stands,” and the consequences of the way they interpret the principle. As I see it, the proper way to implement their principle is to return the poem to its original condition in situ. The purpose of this exercise is not merely to show how much the poem’s text and sequence in the Protagoras differ from the reconstruction of Aars or any other editor. Rather, it is to argue that the poem’s brokenness, its interruptedness, is essential to its meaning—and that this meaning is determined by its use in situ. The poem functions as a field of displacement for the continuation of the struggle in which Socrates gets the better of the sophist and thereby defeats himself.

5 The organizing scheme of the following outline is arbitrary. I make no special claim for the way I have articulated the text, and I can imagine other schemes with equal heuristic value. It depends on what the schemer is looking for, and since I prefer to read, as they say, “with suspicion,” I have made divisions that chart the ironic progress of Socrates’s triumph and self-defeat. The Simonides interlude occupies about eight and a half Stephanus pages. Its most important feature, at least symptomatically, is that only four and a half lines of the poem are discussed in the first five-plus pages, and that the pace of citation picks up dramatically thereafter—eleven and a half lines in the next two-plus pages and less than a page for the last seven lines. This measures Socrates’s increasingly broad mimicry of emotional involvement with Simonides’s cause. He begins the episode “outside” the poem, enjoying five pages of parodic play with the “rationalist” methods of sophistical interpretation. But his performance shifts in the last three pages or so toward reenactment of the poetic situation, as he pretends to enter the poem and bring Simonides’s speaking presence back to life. Yet he doesn’t so much enter the poem as steal it, not only by uproarious misreading but also by obliterating any clear boundaries between Simonides’s words and his own. This effect may well have been more pronounced in ancient inscriptions of the Protagoras text, which (in addition to continuous script and capital letters) have no formatting devices to set off citations; these are marked either by metrical and grammatical means or, in performance, by the voice of the lector.

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I preface the more extensive analysis of the passage and its context with a schematic breakdown of its divisions in order to outline the changes of tempo in the relation between citation and interpretation. Here is the legend of the outline (and of the subsequent analysis): (1) “Page” and “column” refer to the Stephanus text. (2) Divisions are indicated by Roman numerals. (3) Stanza and line numbers (“1.3–4”) refer to those in Aars’s Greek text as printed by the Adams (see above). (4) Virgules after and before line numbers indicate the first and last parts respectively of incomplete lines (“2.3–4/,” “2./3–4”). (5) Angle brackets enclose passages whose status as citation or interpolation is unclear; some are in oratio recta, but editors have ruled them out or repositioned them on metrical grounds, and these seem more obviously to be Socratic interpolations; except for 2.7, they are additions to the Aars text. I.

338e–339e. Protagoras’s attack on Simonides and Socrates. He introduces the poem in two segments:

339bl 1.1–2 Indeed, to become a truly good man is hard, in hands and feet and mind foursquare, fashioned without reproach. (After about a column of discussion Protagoras goes on to the second segment, omitting some intervening verses:) 339c3 2.1–2 Nor does the saying of Pittacus ring true to me, though uttered by a wise mortal: It is hard to remain noble. (Protagoras uses up another column claiming that the two passages are in contradiction.) II. 339e–341e. Socrates mobilizes Prodicus’s wisdom to help him defend Simonides and himself against Protagoras, proposing a slightly mad justification of the above lines that takes about two pages and concludes with a quotation at 341e3 2.3/ A god alone can have that gift . . . / III. 342a–343c. Socrates begins a makrologia with about two pages that consist mainly of his more than slightly mad history of the origins of philosophy among the Spartans. This is offered to explain why Simonides wrote the poem and what he intended. During this time all forward progress is halted on the quotation of the poem. IV. 343c–344b. Digression on method. Socrates fills up three and a half columns of Stephanus’s text with a wonderfully unconvincing account of how, given Simonides’s intention, we should

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imagine and interpret his diatribe against Pittacus. Still no word from the rest of the poem. (So far, then, the exegetes have managed to get through four and a half lines of quotation in almost six pages.) V. 344b–345c. The attack on Pittacus: Socrates returns to the poem and as he begins to speak for and as Simonides, the citational pace quickens. 344c4 2./3–4 . . . a man cannot but stay bad, whom irresistible circumstances casts down. (A half page of commentary in explication of this difficult concept, followed by) 344e7 2.5–6 When he fares well every man is good, bad if badly. (A little more than a half page on this jewel.) 345c2 2.7 (one sentence, leading into) VI. 345c–346c. Simonides as Truth-sayer. 345c6 3.1–4 Therefore I will never throw away my share of time on an unprofitable hope, vainly searching for what cannot come to be, an all-blameless mortal among us who take the fruit of the broad earth. Should I discover him, I will tell you about it . . . (one sentence on Simonides’s vehement pursuit of Pittacus, leading to) 345d3 3.5–7 I praise and love all whoever willingly does nothing shameful; against necessity not even the gods contend. (A comment on the grammatical function of “willingly” kicks off almost a page of speculation about Simonides’s motives for praising.) VII. 346c–d. At this point boundaries begin to dissolve as Socrates again intrudes into the poem and impersonates Simonides: 346cl 4.1–7 + additions I am indeed content with whoever is not bad or not too helpless [or lawless]. He who knows the justice that profits the city is a sound man. I do not blame him. The race of fools is infinite. Surely all things are fair with which shameful things are not mingled. (Socrates glosses the final sentence and then adduces 3.1–4 and 3.5–7/ in support of the gloss; mixing direct quotation with interpolated paraphrase, he slips into oratio recta for a rousing exordium in Simonides’s name:) 346d7

6 Commentaries generally agree on two basic points, first, that the interlude is playful, and second, that Socrates uses Simonides’s poem to express one or two ethical beliefs of his own. Some, like those of Crombie and Guthrie, place the emphasis on the first point: The purpose of this passage (apart from comedy-value) is probably to show that, as Socrates says (347e5), you can make a poem mean anything you like, with the implication, perhaps, that reliance on poetry as a means of education is misguided.17 When . . . Protagoras turns the discussion to Simonides, Socrates . . . feels entitled to treat the subject with outrageous levity. Here at least there can be no doubt that Plato knew what he was doing, and it is splendid entertainment, but hardly philosophy.18 Others appreciate the levity but make more of the seriousness implicit in the second point: The one thing in the whole of the “lecture” on the verses of Simonides which is not playful is Socrates’s 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.19 Socrates can impress this meaning upon the poem only by doing violence to it. . . . The interpretation as a whole reflects features of Plato’s ontology and is a brief sketch of what is called the Socratic ethics of

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knowledge. The attentive reader realizes that he is introduced here to a doctrine of essential significance even though it is concealed by a sophistic method and by a capriciously deceptive interpretation. . . . In this epideictic-sophistic section, i.e., in a non-Socratic context, . . . Plato most amusingly makes us see the essential link between knowledge and the good.20 The chapters that follow will unpack these two opinions in a reading that doesn’t so much take issue with them as resituate them in a new context. The context may do violence to what the authors of the opinions intended. For they will be unpacked in a reading. Guthrie’s remark about the dialogue as a whole applies to the Simonides interlude: “It must be read.” There are many things one could say about the different aspects of the interlude to show that it is, in Socrates’s words, “well made” (eu pepoi ētai, 344b), but to give its details the attention they deserve demands a laborintensive job of interpretation. Few of the commentators whose work I have read take the passage seriously enough to do that. They focus on its general outline and intention, perhaps because they think that since it is “splendid entertainment, but hardly philosophy,” it won’t stand a close reading. But that assumes what has to be proved, and the question-begging may be connected to the arbitrary categorical distinction between “entertainment” and “philosophy.” The trouble with the first opinion as it stands is this: To use the phrase “splendid entertainment” merely to denote qualified praise for Plato’s performance is to occlude its problematical meaning as an aspect of Socrates’s performance. The narrator of the dialogue represents himself not only as trapped in the role of sophistical parodist and entertainer but also as showing his awareness of his plight. This problematical representation is as much part of Plato’s performance as is the “splendid entertainment” or the “gay picture of the manners of cultivated Athenian society in the later years of the Periclean age.”21 It would be easy enough to isolate the entertaining “picture” by reducing the written text to a play script, a reference machine, a transparent plane on which is projected the staged drama. But this reduction puts out of play text-functions that are specific to writing. These functions produce more than a picturable satire on “the manners . . . of the age.” They carry a running critique of the contradictions, paradoxes, and double binds inherent in its logocentric structure. To read the entertaining picture in this light is to see that the pictorial emphasis suppresses and thus enables the critique. The interlude is deeply “philosophical” but the “philosophy” is precisely the critical analysis of the entertainment and the picture.

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The failure of commentators to read the interlude’s “elegant and well thought out composition” (344b) as writing leads them to ratify rather than question Socrates’s entrapment. My comment on the second opinion is closely related to this: The one thing Socrates does not do is “argue for his two great beliefs.” If “a doctrine of essential significance” lurks in the interlude—and there is a question whether any doctrine, as such, can have essential significance for Socrates—the arguing that would make it significant is conspicuously excluded. To read the interlude seriously is to see that it is hilarious, and that it isn’t the “doctrine” but the hilarity, the entertainment value, that has “essential significance.” In fact, the moral doctrine aired in the interlude is not its least amusing feature. But the interlude’s major theme is the submission to charismatic bondage that unites Socrates with the poets and sophists. The submission renders them all equally unable to father their own speech. During the interlude each speaker becomes the site of the others’ utterance. In the exegesis of the exegesis of Simonides that follows, I hope to reflect some of the complex mirroring devices by which Socrates’s speech represents its speaker’s awareness of his entrapment in the poetico-sophistical mode he struggles against.

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Simonides, Part 2

The subject of this study is not Simonides’s poem per se but the structure and divisions of the Protagoras interlude. Carefully edited and somewhat polished versions of the poem appear in anthologies of Greek lyric, but they are constructions after the fact if it is true that the poem originates in broken form in the Protagoras. The fragments of the poem are embedded in and inseparable from the seven divisions of the interlude discussed in Chapter 2. Divisions I and II are analyzed in this chapter, Divisions III through V in Chapter 4, and the last two divisions in Chapter 5. Divisions I–II: The Opening Debate, 339b1–c3 In these divisions Socrates and Protagoras argue about the following two strophes of the poem: Strophe 1. 1. Andr’ agathon [men alatheōs] genesthai chalepon, 2. chersin te kai posi kai noōi tetragōnon, aneu psogou tetygmenon. ([Indeed,] to become a [truly] good man is hard, in hands and feet and mind foursquare, fashioned without reproach.) (missing verses) Strophe 2. 1. Oude moi emmeleōs to Pittakeion nemetai, 2. kaitoi sophou para phōtos eirēmenon; chalepon phat’ esthlon emmenai.

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3. Theos an monos tout’ echoi geras . . . (Nor does the saying of Pittacus ring true to me, [though uttered by a wise mortal]: it is hard to remain noble. A god alone can have that gift. . . .) The argument unfolds in six steps; division numbers are in parentheses at the left: (I) 1. Protagoras: Since Simonides asserts 1.1 and blames Pittacus for asserting 2./2, and since 1.1 and 2./2 are the same, the poet contradicts himself. (II) 2. Socrates: There is no contradiction because, according to Prodicus, the two verbs, genesthai (“become”) in 1.1 and emmenai (“remain”) in 2.2, differ, and the difference is that between “becoming” and “being” (einai). Simonides, who says it is hard to become good, blames Pittacus for saying it is hard to remain good whereas many people would say with Hesiod that once a person has become good, staying good is easy. 3. Protagoras: The poet is stupid; everyone agrees that staying good is the hardest thing of all. 4. Socrates: If Prodicus will confirm the hypothesis that chalepon, which means “difficult” in Attic Greek, means “bad” (kakon) in the dialect of his and Simonides’s native Ceos, then it can be asserted that Simonides blames Pittacus for saying what sounded to him like “it is bad to be good.” Prodicus confirms the hypothesis. 5. Protagoras: Prodicus is wrong. Simonides, he is certain, meant what everyone means by chalepon, i.e., anything that is not easy and requires great effort. 6. Socrates: Protagoras is right. The idea that chalepon means “bad” was a touch outré, and can’t be correct. But of course it was Prodicus’s idea, not Socrates’s, and Prodicus was only making a joke to keep Protagoras on his toes. That Simonides meant “hard” rather than “bad” is proved by his next phrase, “A god alone can have that gift,” since it would be unflattering (akolaston) of Simonides to predicate “bad” of a god. This concludes the first two divisions and their round of arguments. Since at step 3 Protagoras ignores Socrates’s attempt to counterattack along the “being versus becoming” front and at step 6 Socrates disavows his second

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attempt to defend Simonides, Protagoras’s accusation against the poet remains standing. And perhaps Simonides does contradict himself—or, to state it in an expression closer to the Greek, does “speak against himself ” and, in blaming Pittacus, blames himself (339c, d). After step 6, Socrates secures Protagoras’s permission to continue and proceeds to take over the interlude, the remainder of which is a monologue. This is a complex epideictic performance, mercurial in its shifting nuances of voice and viewpoint, and many of its effects are produced by the way Socrates unpacks implications contained in the material of the first six steps. I’ll devote the remainder of this chapter to a commentary on these six steps.

Division I: Protagoras’s Attack Argument 1: Sophistical Snippetotomy Protagoras produces his contradiction by strategic snippetotomy, or selective citation, that reduces the area of controversy to two three-word phrases, “hard to become good” and “hard to remain noble.” Ignoring lexical differences between the two predicates, he treats them as identical, and screens out function words and modifying phrases as if they are irrelevant to the propositional meaning. Socrates will defend Simonides by worrying just the elements Protagoras excises. After his preamble, Protagoras introduces the poem with “Simonides somewhere [pou] says to Scopas, the son of Creon of Thessaly.” He follows this by reciting 1.1–2, and then asks Socrates, “Do you know the ode, or shall I go through the whole thing in order?” Socrates hurriedly replies, “That isn’t at all necessary [ouden dei], for I know it and it happens that I have given that ode a lot of attention.” In further cat-and-mouse maneuvering, Protagoras secures from Socrates the admission that the poem is well composed, and the poet does not contradict himself. He tells Socrates to look more closely at it and receives a second demurral (“I have looked into it sufficiently”). Then he goes on to recite 2.1–2, which he introduces with another indefinite pou (“Are you aware . . . that as the ode proceeds he says at some point . . .”). Finally, after another exchange, Protagoras closes the trap by insisting in a little speech that Simonides’s two statements contradict each other. In 1.1–2 Simonides had laid it down that it is hard for a man to become truly good, “and then a little further on in his poem [2.1–2] he forgot, and he proceeds to blame Pittacus for saying the same thing he did—that it is hard to be good—and refuses to accept from him the same statement that

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he made himself. Yet as often as he blames the man for saying the same as himself, he obviously blames himself too, so that in either the former or the latter place his statement is wrong” (339d). In his imitation of the Socratic interrogator Protagoras takes three cues from his model, echoing specific earlier moments. (1) As if remembering Socrates’s command to “chop up [syntemne] the answers and make them shorter” (334d), here, after his offer of full recitation is rejected, he excises a number of lines and isolates the two snippets which alone are required for his thrust at Simonides and Socrates; the remainder of the poem is irrelevant. (2) The idea that Simonides “forgot” his previous statement seems to return the mockery of Socrates’s earlier claim of forgetfulness (334c–d), the teasing quality of which was noted by Alcibiades (336d), and thus to mark the association of Socrates with Simonides. (3) Protagoras’s final statement recalls at least the sense of an earlier remark by Socrates: “For although it is chiefly the argument I am examining, it may happen that both I, the one asking questions, and the one answering, will be examined in the same manner” (333c). Since up to that moment Socrates had badgered Protagoras with rhetorical questions less apt for pursuing wisdom than for bagging sophists, he is indeed being examined by the text of his sophistical procedure and equated with his opponent. Friedlaender exclaims at the obvious irony of Protagoras’s statement: “It is delightful how Protagoras describes his own behavior!” (2.24). But Protagoras is also describing Socrates’s behavior. His statement registers the first step of the progressive convergence, during the interlude, of the two ancient poets and their two exegetes. As Socrates moves from outside the poem to its interior, from interpretation to imitation of Simonides, he first becomes a diploos or twofold man, Socrates-Simonides, and then a pollaploos or manifold man, Socrates-Simonides-Pittacus-Protagoras (cf. 397d–e). Simonides’s reference to a tetragon in the second line of the ode prompts me to imagine that these four figures begin as the sides of a tetragon. Extracting the square root of four collapses Simonides into Socrates and Pittacus into Protagoras. Repeating the operation produces an irrational number, the square root of two, signified by the diagonal that joins Socrates-Simonides to Protagoras-Pittacus. The result of these computations is not a single figure, the unit Socrates or the unit Protagoras, but a diploos and pollaploos

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hybrid, an atopos and alogos quantity, a dynamis which is more than one but less than two, and in which each is bound by contradiction to the other—as Socrates so much as says in nonmathematical terms at 361a. By his two uses of the indefinite pou, Protagoras flags the arbitrariness of his surgical appropriation of the poem. Such a grammatical tactic implies that the poem’s detail, its exact sequence, and its “integrity,” are expendable. They can be discarded when the poem is being assimilated to an eristic occasion. Snippetotomy makes the poem user-friendly. If we apply the name “Simonides” not to a person but to a quantum of cultural energy, this surgical operation removes the boundaries that isolate it, and lets it bleed into the dynameis named “Protagoras” and “Socrates.” The same effect is produced by the statement that Simonides forgot and proceeded to blame Pittacus: Protagoras resurrects the poet in the act of speaking and depicts him in an eristic situation like his own. He begins to recast the ode as a conversation, Simonides’s verbal debate with Pittacus, which can be interrupted, continued, and refuted. That is, he approaches Simonides not as reader to writer but as auditor to debater. And there seems to be no written text, no graphic parallel, that can defend against this violence.

Division II: Socrates’s Response I don’t know what to make of the two statements in which Socrates claims to have mastered the ode and to have no need of another “look” at it. They have the effect of blocking full recitation by Protagoras, as if he suspects the sophist of winding up for another makrologia. I can imagine a Protagoras who anticipates that suspicion and threatens Socrates with an uncut version in order to draw the refusal that would let him quote selectively. I can also imagine a Socrates who anticipates that threat and perhaps acknowledges its ironic justice: Protagoras conforms with his wishes by chopping up the poem and making it smaller. Finally, I can imagine a Socrates who doesn’t think the poem is worth spending more time on. As he insists later, no poem is, since you can’t ask the poets “about what they say, but in most cases when people quote them, one says the poet means [oein] one thing and one another, and they argue over matters which they are powerless to put to the test of refutation [exelenxai]” (347e). The Simonides interlude shows that the power of (mis)interpretation may be closely allied to the power of (mis)quotation, an alliance easier to forge when the oral text has no graphic parallel. The meaning of a poem that consists of a string of unargued assertions is especially vulnerable to such abuse.

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Given our ignorance of what Protagoras omitted, we have no grounds for rejecting either the idea that Protagoras’s charge of self-contradiction is justified or the idea that Socrates recognizes this. But in view of this, and of Socrates’s expressed opinion of poetry, how do we evaluate his claim that, knowing the poem well, he deems it self-consistent? And how do we evaluate his two subsequent responses to Protagoras’s attack on its consistency? When Protagoras sets the trap by asking whether he thinks the poet’s two statements are in agreement, Socrates tells his auditor that he replied, “To me it seems so,” but he then confides that he feared Protagoras “may be right” (339c). And after Protagoras illustrates its inconsistency and closes the trap to loud applause, Socrates reports that “as though I had been struck by a skillful boxer, I was blinded and dizzied by his speech and the applause of the others” (339e). This comment is for the benefit of a nameless auditor characterized in the dialogue’s opening exchange as typical—“one of the boys.” He invites Socrates to take his slave’s place and tell him the latest gossip, and he is obviously impressed by Protagoras (309a–310a). Socrates will go on to show that Simonides’s poem is consistent in being dominated by, and in expressing, the traditional morality prevalent in Athenian culture. This is the morality promoted by Protagoras as the aim of his instruction: To become good (agathos) is to fare well (eu prattein)—to have the skill and good luck necessary to weather misfortune and successfully avoid injury and shameful behavior. In defending Simonides against Protagoras’s charge of contradiction, Socrates indicates by the carefree liberties he takes with the oral text that Protagoras may have a point. But his defense also shows that it is consistent with Simonides’s morality for him to contradict himself if that will help him defeat the logoi of another wise man—and if he can get away with it. This makes it hard, as Simonides might say, for a poem to be or remain the noble (esthlos) thing the poet intended it to be. It is always becoming something else, another poem, in the continuous string of reinterpretations that preserves its life and authority. Simonides could thus be excused for complaining that the arguments never come from him but always from the audience he is speaking to, the audience that utters its meanings through his words. This is partly why the poets don’t know and can’t explain what they mean. Protagoras’s critique provides, and Socrates will later develop, a way to rationalize this aporia: Simonides sacrificed consistency of meaning to his eagerness to reproach Pittacus; the poem was less a mere expression of moral sentiments than an epideictic and elenctic act.

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Such acts are to be judged by sophistical criteria in terms of their use, their rhetorical success or failure, rather than their ethical meaning. Since there is no way to determine what Simonides meant, and since Socrates knows what Protagoras is up to, he lets the sophist lead him toward one interpretation in order to put the ball in play. But he well knows that whether the poem proves to be self-consistent or self-contradictory depends not on the poet but on the outcome of the interpretive debate. Paul Friedlaender observes that when Socrates pretends to seek Prodicus’s help against Protagoras, he “beats one Sophist . . . with the weapons of the other, thus displaying his superiority even on sophistic grounds.” But Socrates’s performance as narrator indicates that he may not share Friedlaender’s sense of his superiority. His beating the sophist at his own game is at least superficially doing what he blames the sophist for doing, and—depending on the outcome and the audience response—the resemblance may turn out to be more than skin-deep.1 His attitude jumps out in the comment that he was blinded and dizzied as if by a skillful boxer, and the clue to its tonal nuance lies in the phrase that follows it: “Then—and to tell you the truth, it was to gain time to consider what the poet meant—I turned to Prodicus” and summoned him with a high Homeric appeal to help rescue his fellow Cean from Protagoras’s onslaught (339e–340a). The humor does not come across as benign or even self-deprecating irony. Since the outcome is never in doubt, since Socrates manhandles Protagoras throughout, the tone can only be contemptuous and sarcastic. But from what position and to what audience is this sarcasm directed? The comment is the narrator’s, and it’s phrased in a manner that picks out his Athenian auditor: “to tell you [se] the truth” (339e). To revive this dubious figure here and grace him with a true confession, a confession I’m hardly the first to find ridiculous, is to dissociate Plato’s reader from Socrates’s auditor. The auditor, an admirer of Protagoras, surfaces to remind us of the constraints under which the narrator operates. Given the opening portrayal, I can’t imagine this auditor not to take the offered confidence straight as a favoring wink of complicity. Socrates constructs the auditor less as a sharer than as one of the targets of a sarcasm meant for other ears or eyes. His comment plays up to, and thus characterizes, a conventional set of expectations of the way Socrates ought to feel and behave. It places the auditor among those who would applaud a well-delivered blow, and who are eager to hear how Socrates, hanging on the ropes, will fight his way out of the aporia Protagoras has cornered him in.

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The passage may entertain the reader as well as the auditor. But this is what explains the sarcasm. It communicates Socrates’s awareness, both as interlocutor and as narrator, that “to tell you the truth” is exactly what he can’t do so long as he engages the enemy on the latter’s terrain. On that terrain he’s valued chiefly as an entertainer, a pugilist, a public performer. Socrates’s comment to the auditor is among several that leave a bad taste in the reader’s mouth. They contribute to a diffuse suspicion that although he was the easy winner in the contest, something about the terms of his victory still troubles him and affects the voicing of his replay. Even the passages of high comedy are edged with a vague uneasiness. If we consider the auditor and the scene of narration as part of the problem, Socrates’s narrative creates another recipient and elicits a further range of interpretive response. It is as if he aims his story over the head, beyond the ears, beneath the threshold, of his marked audience, toward some unmarked and indefinite community of eavesdroppers trying to overhear dark secrets or read between the lines. But it is only as if. After confiding in his auditor that he needed time to examine the poet’s meaning, Socrates tells him that he appealed to Prodicus, as Simonides’s fellow Cean, to come to the poet’s rescue: Accordingly I am determined to call for your assistance, just as Scamander, in Homer, when besieged by Achilles, called Simois to his aid, saying, “Beloved brother, let even the two of us join to hold back the strength of a man.” In the same way I call upon you, lest Protagoras lay Simonides in ruins. For indeed the restoration [epanorthōma, “setting back upright”] of Simonides requires your art [mousikēs], by which you distinguish wishing and desiring as not the same and just a moment ago said many other fine things. (340a–b) The implied sense of the term mousikē is probably more specific than “art” or “skill” (the usual translation). Socrates could easily have said technē or epistēmē. But mousikē as an elementary art of grammatical analysis or musical “division” by which a compound is resolved into its elements appropriately describes Prodicus’s obsession. It is also the part of primary education devoted to the study of such Homeric loci as the Achilles/ Scamander crisis to which Socrates had just compared the present crisis. The passage from Iliad 21 itself conceals an ironic comment on the Simonides interlude. The words Socrates quotes and the riverine attack on Achilles that follows constitute the turning point in Scamander’s fortunes. Previously the river had the better of Achilles, but now the gods

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intervene to defeat Scamander with Hephaestian fire. It is as if Socrates, even in this high-spirited moment, is acknowledging his own eventual defeat. The omitted words that complete the second line of the quotation (21.309) are “since presently he [Achilles, therefore Protagoras] will storm the great city.” Simonides becomes a second Troy, and Guthrie emphasizes the allusion in his translation by augmenting the Greek text: “lest our Simonides be sacked by Protagoras like another Troy.” As Socrates will later show, Simonides deserves to be sacked, and the metaphor of rebuilding in epanorthōma is ambiguous: To rebuild, restore, set back upright, resurrect may be either to revive and repeat or revise and correct. If we let our sight line to Plato travel through the Aeneid the meanings attached to those alternatives become clarified. The road to epanorthōma as revision or correction lies through loss, displacement, dissemination. The Virgilian fate of Troy and the Platonic fate of Socrates stand in the penumbra of the wisdom of the ancient Near East that darkened over Israel: If the only escape from the charismatic bondage to the body (or to the land) lies in the charisma of the wandering text, whose condition is the death of the former body, the textual diaspora nevertheless becomes the permanent site of such cycles of corrective reincorporation as we find in Platonisms and Neoplatonisms, in imperial Rome and holy Rome. Socrates’s strategic quotation of Homer epitomizes his approach to Simonides and to poets generally. The Adams’ remark that “Plato is seldom careful to make his quotations accurate”2 should be corrected to accord with the findings of more recent studies of Platonic or Socratic quotation: Socrates often seems careful to make his quotations either ironically inaccurate or meaningfully inappropriate. With Homer as with Simonides, the poetry is not so much “sacked” as forcibly made to bear Socratic meanings and send Socratic messages, including the less obvious messages about his own need of epanorthōsis, which are seemingly not picked up by his auditors and therefore lie waiting in the limbo of Platonic writing for petitions and repetitions from the other world. And perhaps what I have just described is Plato’s sack of Socrates; or my sack of Plato. None of Socrates’s moves in this passage is gratuitous. All focus and explicate his view of the situation he finds himself in. By his appeal to Prodican and Homeric music, by such impertinences as “Prodicus’s wisdom is very probably a gift of long ago from the god, beginning perhaps with Simonides or going back even earlier” (340e–341a), he flags his judgment on the regressive level of the exposition taking place: the level not only of Prodican diairēsis and elementary instruction in traditional

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morality but also of the warrior’s aristeia resurrected in the form of sophistical eristeia. Resurrection, making the dead rise up by interpretation, is featured here in a perverse form—epanorthōma as recrudescence—and I think the particular Prodican distinction Socrates picks out is selected to emphasize that meaning. He lights with apparent arbitrariness on boulesthai (to wish) and epithymein (to desire), which Prodicus had not mentioned in the earlier speech Socrates alludes to at 340b. Though boulesthai is rendered as “to wish” or “wishing” in all the translations I have consulted, it also denotes “to will” and “to mean.” I note this because boulesthai and epithymein are intention terms, and the argument from now on will turn on what Simonides meant to say, what he wanted to mean. Simonides will thus be set back upright and brought to life as a speaking presence through the agency of a Socratic mimēsis. Socrates will reenact Simonides’s intention in an “ethological mime,” as Klein calls it, and such mimetic performances are essential features of the mousikē Protagoras discussed earlier (325c–326e) when he described the way boys were trained to imitate “good men of old” and to desire to become like them.

Argument 2: Socrates’s Correction There is no contradiction because, according to Prodicus, the two verbs, genesthai (“become”) in 1.1 and emmenai (“remain”) in 2.2 differ, and the difference is that between “becoming” and “being” (einai). Simonides, who says it is hard to become good, blames Pittacus for saying it is hard to remain good whereas many people would say with Hesiod that once a person has become good, staying good is easy. (a) Most translations render emmenai freely as “to be.” This is understandable in view of the shift whereby Socrates assimilates emmenai to einai (“to be”). But I think it is a mistake because it obscures his shiftiness and therefore diminishes an important effect: the playful violence he parades in forcing meanings and displacing responsibility to sophist and poet. The assimilation produces a feint toward the more familiar and thoroughgoing “Platonic” opposition between becoming and being. As H. S. Thayer observes, this is a distinction “that Protagoras himself did not recognize,” and it could therefore provide an opening for the sort of discussion of epistemological and ontological issues that takes place in other dialogues.3 Since the allusion to the theme is conspicuous, so also is its exclusion. The combination of these two effects makes us aware of the comic limits imposed on the debate by Protagoras’s move toward a question of poetry.

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But it also alerts us to more serious constraints the move imposes on Socrates. (Someone might well ask who “us” refers to, and the question would be appropriate.) (b) On his way toward the reference to Hesiod, Socrates plays some odd metalinguistic or citational games with the verbs genesthai, emmenai, and einai. Having introduced to einai (“the ‘to be’ ”) and then reiterated that what Pittacus said was to emmenai. (“the ‘to remain’ ”), he reminds Protagoras that, “as Prodicus says, the ‘to be’ and the ‘to become’ are not the same, and”—here he repeats the verbs—“if to einai and to genesthai are not the same, Simonides does not contradict himself.” After thus insisting on the difference, Socrates, in the next sentence, inserts into his paraphrase of Hesiod the copula which was understood (therefore omitted) in Simonides’s first line: genesthai men agathon chalepon einai, “to become good, indeed, is hard” (340d). The influence of the previous three citations of “the ‘to be’ ” makes this instance briefly pry loose from its subordinate function as a mere copula and claim a grammatical status equal to genesthai. It would then be open to some punctilious Prodican or antilogikos to argue that if Socrates were correct about the distinction, Hesiod contradicted himself in saying “becoming is.” “For how,” he could go on, “according to your own principles of Platonic ontology, can you allow the poet to debase being to a servile predicate of becoming when in your austere Eleatic pronouncements you equate becoming with nonbeing, and even in your more lenient utterances you consider becoming at best an imperfect state of being?” To this I can imagine Socrates making three objections. First, his view of the matter is not necessarily Plato’s, with which it has too often been confused. Second, although he has no opinion as to whether or not the Eleaticisms of Parmenides and the Eleatic Stranger represent Plato’s ontology, he is quite sure they don’t represent his, since he doesn’t have one. Third, and most important, Hesiod does not contradict himself since, far from equating becoming with being, what he asserts is that becoming good is to be subsumed under a permanent state of being difficult. My justification for reporting this imaginary, or nonexistent, debate is that under the pressure of the pale cast of interpretation the ghostly lineaments of a Socratic ethic can be made out in—or made out of—the paraphrase of Hesiod: Becoming good is always and everywhere, absolutely and unconditionally, difficult, irrespective of circumstance, irrespective of whether one fares well or badly, irrespective of the praise or blame one receives from others. This ethic is in direct conflict with the ethic of

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Hesiod, Simonides, and Protagoras which Socrates will extract from the poem in later divisions of the interlude. To occult its ghost into the paraphrase is to foreground its conspicuous exclusion from the interlude. Of course, the ghost no sooner appears than it vanishes. Protagoras and the many he speaks for have only to object that Socrates is putting too fine a point on so casual an utterance. And the fact that “putting too fine a point” is a graphic metaphor may serve as a reminder that if the ghostly Socratic ethic appears at all it does so only to us—to the privileged class of a voyeur elite that severs all interlocutory ties with Socrates in order to observe a vow of strict reading. The necessary condition for such a discipline and its fine points of analysis is that the text be moored to writing so that it can be graphically stilled and fixed in place. Otherwise we could not make our decelerated marches through its ever-widening territories or shrink small enough to slip down its rabbit holes and forage among the rhizomes, or fan out into its coverts. How else to listen seeingly among its silences for the traces of a Socratic “voice” effaced in face-to-face combat by the interlocutory presence of ear to mouth and mouth to ear? (c) Modern commentators on Simonides’s poems have debated among themselves not only over the genesthai-emmenai distinction but also over that between agathos and esthlos: Some argue that Simonides made no distinction between them; others that he used esthlos to characterize a more aristocratic and heroic ideal of nobility. Though the debate is inconclusive, it indicates another area of dispute Socrates could have seized on. On the one hand, his own hair-splitting in the case of the verbs renders his refusal of that possibility more conspicuous and sharpens our sense of the arbitrariness of his procedure. On the other hand, because the critical debate is inconclusive, it sharpens our sense of the poem’s obtuse way with concepts and terms. I note in passing that the modern debate features a persistent effort on the part of Simonides scholars to determine what the poet intended. I mentioned this earlier and will return to it later because of the odd consonance between this modern project and Socrates’s performance in the last three divisions.

Argument 3: Protagoras Protagoras: Hesiod is stupid; everyone agrees that staying good is the hardest thing of all. (a) Perhaps one reason Protagoras ignores the offered genesthai-einai opposition is suggested by his appeal to popular opinion (“as everyone agrees”). Avoiding fine-grained analysis of the Prodican variety, he abstracts

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from the details of expression and pitches his argument at the level of general sentiment most likely to secure the assent of the audience whose approval and patronage he solicits. (b) Protagoras, who has the initiative at this stage of the debate, plays on Socrates’s term, epanorthōma: “Your correction, Socrates, contains an error greater than the one you are correcting” (340d). Socrates responds with another of his medical analogies: “Then it is a bad piece of work I have done [Kakon ara moi eirgastai], it would seem, Protagoras, and I am an absurd sort of physician; my treatment increases the malady” (340d–e). Socrates congenially represents himself to Protagoras as a technician of the body, and his correction as an attempt to restore a sick passage of poetry to health—as if it had been healthy before Protagoras infected it with germs of contradiction. But the malpractice he (conditionally) acknowledges is a consequence of the Prodican medicine he adopts, and of his commitment to the technē of clever speech that doctors share with sophists and poets. The burden of the dialogue as a whole is that his treatment increases the malady.

Argument 4: Socrates Socrates: If Prodicus will confirm the hypothesis that chalepon, which means “difficult” in Attic Greek, means “bad” (kakon) in the dialect of his and Simonides’s native Ceos, then it can be asserted that Simonides blames Pittacus for saying what sounded to him like “it is bad to be good.” Prodicus confirms the hypothesis. (a) It’s during this argument that Socrates draws attention to the double meaning of deinos which I discuss above. He emphasizes the hapless Prodicus’s opposition to Protagoras, who uses deinos in conventionally positive terms. The word was introduced into the dialogue by Hippocrates in describing Protagoras as “a master of making one clever at speaking”—ē epistatēn tou poiēsai deinon legein (312d). Protagoras uses it in a negative construction at 326d to refer to pupils not yet clever at writing, and again at 339a when he initiates the poetry discussion by affirming that “the greatest part of a man’s education is to be deinon in poetic speech.” This is the usage Socrates lights on when he apparently digresses to the Prodican view of deinos. The point of the digression is to prove that Simonides blamed Pittacus for meaning “it is bad to be good” when he said “it is hard to be good.” From the Socratic standpoint it is bad to be good when “good” is contextualized according to the conventional morality espoused by Protagoras, for whom to be clever, skilled, powerful, and so on, is agathos or ethlos.

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Prodicus, who is batted back and forth in this passage like a ping-pong ball, would agree with Protagoras on meaning if not on usage. If “good” is taken in stricter Socratic terms, “it is bad to be good” shifts into the Thrasymachean opinion elaborated by Glaucon in his speech in Republic 2: Those who are truly good or just are sure to be rendered helpless by those who are deinos; such helplessness, amēchania, is one of the Simonidean themes Socrates will soon pick away at. Glaucon might reluctantly agree with Thrasymachus that the deos of this prospect makes it hard to be good and good to be bad. If Protagoras and Prodicus agreed, they—or at least Protagoras—would have more tact than to express it in quite those terms. But the deos of helplessness is a central concern in the Protagoras, much of which is devoted exclusively to the subject of courage and covertly to Socrates’s probing of the apprehensiveness that underlies Protagoras’s claims to courage and forethought. (b) When Socrates appeals to Prodicus, he puns on his name, as he does later at 358d (see above): “Let us therefore ask Prodicus [Prodikon]. For it is right [dikaion gar] to question him on the dialect of Simonides.” The justice of Prodicus—the justice he is for and represents—is doubly reductive: It reduces ethical and cognitive distinctions to linguistic distinctions, and it resolves equivocal terms into precise univocal senses. One looks to Prodicus for the skill that knows how to escape from the difficulty, to chalepon, of deep ethical conflicts by transferring them to the domain of technical solutions. Socrates’s own solution here is itself a bracingly ridiculous example of technical bravura, for he pretends to refute Protagoras’s charge that Simonides was in contradiction by having Simonides convert to Pittakaion into the contradiction, “it is bad to be good.” By this move he diminishes the Simonides he is defending because he projects his own arbitrary misconstrual onto the poet, who is given a share in the contagious sophistry of the interlude. (c) Sophists differ among themselves, but in general those who claim to teach are thought deinos because they promise to cure or prevent amēchania, while the antilogikoi are deinos because they promise or threaten to produce it. And since amēchania is a form of aporia, the deinotēs of Socrates is easily assimilable to that of the antilogikoi who know how to make the weaker argument defeat the stronger. (d) My colleague John Lynch has suggested to me that deos and deinos may be rooted in the Indo-European dwo, “two.” Various forms and compounds of this root appear in terms meaning “double,” “twofold” (diploos), etc. As in the Greek word endoiastos and its Latin equivalent, dubius, it means hesitating between alternatives.

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At the most general level, the deos Socrates worries, elicits, and exposes is the fear of falling or being pushed into the deep well of aporia; the fear of ambiguity and dilemma; the fear of being enfolded in perplexity or complexity by the diploos man; the fear of being undone by the deinos man. It is thus appropriate for Socrates to raise the question of deos in exchanges with Prodicus because his is, as I noted earlier, a comic example of one kind of response to the deos that makes one unwilling to live in and with complexity.

Argument 5: Protagoras Protagoras: Prodicus is wrong. Simonides, he is certain, meant what everyone means by chalepon, i.e., anything that is not easy and requires great effort. (a) As in 3a above, Protagoras again appeals to popular opinion (“what everyone means by chalepon”). Since, in his battle with Socrates, his comments recommend themselves to his audience by their cavalier disregard of the poem’s detail, Socrates counters by diving down into it. He presses hard, and with a self-delighting air of mock-earnestness, on his small distinctions. The effect is that the poem is vulnerable to his fine-toothed diairēsis because it is itself too coarse-grained to discriminate between genesthai and emmenai or agathos and esthlos. If different terms are used synonymously, it may be because the distinctions remain unexamined, and if the poem lends itself to selective citation it may be because the syntactical and rhetorical glue that holds its concepts together is easy to dissolve. This suggests that there is some truth to Protagoras’s opinion: The reason the poem can’t defend against— or, to put it more benignly, the reason it can tolerate misinterpretation— is that it only means what everyone means. The soft focus of its truisms produces a string of statements that reflect and accommodate themselves to the soft focus of popular opinion, or at least the opinion of those whose approval and patronage the poet’s utterance solicits.

Argument 6: Socrates Socrates: Protagoras is right. That Simonides meant “hard” rather than “bad” is proved by his next phrase, “A god alone can have that gift,” since it would be unflattering (akolaston) of Simonides to predicate “bad” of a god. (a) When Socrates concludes this division by quoting line 2.3/ of the ode, “A god alone can have that gift,” the effect is to forewarn us of the poem’s viewpoint toward its presumptive theme. The poet discusses what

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counts or is acceptable as agathos and what is kakos in a world where to be less than godlike is to be exposed to constant mischance. The poem’s attitude toward morality, like its attitude toward meaning, is tolerant and relaxed. Since mortal life is difficult, since it is hard to become good and harder to stay good, humans are not to be blamed for failing to live up to a rigorous ideal. Socrates has already dropped enough clues to make us suspicious of a poem so amiable in its approach to synonymy as well as to human fallibility. It may not be willing to look too hard at distinctions that are profoundly important in a different framework whose standard of good and bad is adjusted upwards. Consider, for example, “it is bad to be good.” Embedded in the ironies of its Socratic context, the phrase provides a glimpse of competing moral interpretations. It could be a Socratic judgment on what Protagoras and Simonides, among others, call good. Or it could be their judgment on what Socrates calls good. For Socrates, “bad” means “wicked,” and “good” is implicitly characterized by the inversion of the statement—that is, by “it is good to be bad.” “Bad” here takes the value implicitly made available to it in Socrates’s discussion with Prodicus, namely, deinos. For the sophists, “bad” takes the value explicitly assigned it in the same discussion—chalepon—and refers to the difficulty and futility of the Socratic ethic.

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Simonides, Part 3

At 341e–342a Socrates gives Protagoras his last chance to stem the tide of his makrologia on Simonides’s ode: “But I am willing to tell you what I think Simonides means in this ode, if you wish to test me in the matter of poetic speech, as you call it; though if you wish, I will listen to you.” Hearing this, Protagoras replied, “ ‘[A]s you wish, Socrates.’ Then Prodicus and also Hippias and the others as well urged me to go on.” Poor Protagoras is now alone in his corner as his two competitors and the other guests of Callias get behind Socrates and look forward to a new wave of hermeneutic pleasure. Socrates takes full advantage of his triumph in the art of sophistry. He steps into Protagoras’s shoes and proceeds to monopolize the conversation from Division III to the end of the interlude. Divisions III and IV do not put into play any new material from the poem. Division V does, however, and its relatively rich citational texture calls for closer surveillance. Where I–II represented the unmediated debate between Protagoras and Socrates, from IV on the text represents Simonides’s debate with Pittacus as mediated by Socrates, who uses this device to replay and parody much of what went on earlier. Division III provides the framework for this move by setting the Simonides/Pittacus debate within Socrates’s survey of Great Moments in the History of Laconic Philosophy.

Division III. Rhematic Warfare. 342a–343c Socrates pronounces himself ready to state his view of what Simonides intended in the poem and begins his explanation in a characteristic

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manner, that is, by deferring it and turning instead to fabricate the historical background of Simonides’s quarrel with Pittacus. This is the story he tells: In days of old, Crete and Sparta were the cradles of philosophy, and the Spartans’ wisdom was in fact the true source of their hegemony over the rest of the Hellenes, though they kept this a close secret and pretended to be uncultured thugs who “owe their superiority to fighting and valor.” But they proved their excellence in philosophy and logoi by their skill in verbal contests. They played dumb to put their interlocutors off guard and then thrust home with short pithy sayings—rhēmata—that rendered them helpless. Now the Seven Sages saw through the Spartans’ pretense and became devotees of their cult and practitioners of rhematic warfare. Their love of Spartan wisdom is attested to by the rhēmata each of them uttered. They assembled at Delphi to dedicate the first-fruits of their laconizing to Apollo. Some, like those famous maxims on everyone’s lips, “know thyself ” and “nothing too much,” were inscribed in the temple. Others, like Pittacus’s “it is hard to stay good,” were privately circulated and praised. Now Simonides was “ambitious to get a name for wisdom,” and he perceived “that if he could overthrow this saying, as one might some famous athlete, and become its conqueror, he would win fame himself among men of that day.” Hence “he composed the whole poem as a means of covertly assailing and abasing this maxim, as it seems to me” (343c).

Commentary (a) This parable of the two faces of apprehensiveness, deos and pleonexia, sends up Protagoras’s history of sophistry (316c–317c). Socrates tells of xenophobic “philosophers” fending off exposure or contamination in their effort to guard the secret of their political domination of Hellas. Their maxims are formally self-protective in their laconic compactness: short and memorable, therefore easy to retain and hard to argue with. The two examples Socrates cites—“know thyself ” and “nothing too much”— taken together suggest that self-protection is also their theme, and this suggestion is reinforced by a parallel passage assigned to Critias in the Charmides. Critias asserts that the god’s salutation to worshipers at Delphi is “Be temperate” (sōphronein) and that in saying this he speaks very darkly [ainigmatōdesteron], as a seer would do. That “know thyself ” and “be temperate” are the same, as the inscription

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claims, and so do I, might be doubted by some, and this I think to be the case with those who dedicated the later inscriptions “Nothing too much” and “Pledges lead to perdition.” Because these people thought that “Know thyself ” was a piece of advice and not the god’s greeting to those who enter, so, with the idea of dedicating some admonitions which were no less useful, they wrote these things and put them up. (164d–165c)1 The idea that these rhēmata are riddles accessible only to the initiated fits the secretiveness of Spartan philosophers. But Critias’s tiny attempt at critical epigraphy also illustrates other tendencies of Spartan warfare. Socrates had introduced the idea of speaking in riddles tendentiously at Charmides 162a–b after frustrating Charmides’s attempt to defend the definition of sōphrosynē as “doing one’s own.” It soon became clear that in the act of defending “doing one’s own,” Charmides was doing someone else’s: namely, Critias’s. Socrates has been keeping Charmides in play in order to smoke out his guardian, who was using and hiding behind the handsome young man he had begun to corrupt with his teaching. Socrates tells Charmides that the author of the formula was either a fool or a dark-sayer who may have offered his definition as an ainigma (162b). Critias now rejects the first possibility by choosing the second and applying it to the god through whom he speaks in this passage as through an agalma. This is a fine touch: not Critias the prophētēs of the god, but the god as the interpreter of Critian riddles. At 164d he says, “I agree [sympheromai], with the one who set up the inscription,” which is to say that whoever set it up meant what Critias declares him to mean. Critias censures the other sages on three counts: (1) for misunderstanding the meaning of gnōthi sauton (“know thyself ”) and substituting other formulas for the one he asserts is correct; (2) for misunderstanding the rhetorical mode of the inscription as advice rather than salutation; (3) for competing with the god in this wrong mode by trying to give equally profitable (chrēsimous) advice (164c–165b). This criticism boomerangs. There is little difference between the mode of advice he ascribes to the sages and his own earlier statement that worshipers should paraskeleuesthai—exhort, or encourage—each other to “be temperate” (164e). Each sage is merely doing what Critias is doing: competing with the others in converting the god’s words and meaning into his own. Above all, his conduct and arguments in the dialogue reveal that his own sense of gnōthi sauton and sōphronein is very precisely interpreted by “nothing too much” and “pledges lead to perdition.” Nothing too much:

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Avoid shameful behavior; do things quietly and moderately within the proper limits of “your own.” Give no pledges or promises: Don’t commit yourself; keep up your guard; beware of unprofitable risks. In short, “to thine own self be true.” The first proverb is chiefly for the benefit of Charmides and all those in whom Critias would like to inculcate the quiet “virtues” that will make them tractable and obedient to his will. The second proverb encodes the prudential forethought, the attention to the hedonist calculus, that will enable Critias to get the better of others before they get the better of him. Together, the proverbs define sōphrosynē as the quality of being safeminded, sōs-phronimos, possessing the self-knowledge and self-control we characterize by the idiom “keeping an eye on yourself.” (b) The central accents in Division III of the interlude fall on verbal competition and on brevity. “Spartan philosophy” names a particular form of aggressive/defensive speech act, the unassailable one-liner aimed at producing the wisdom effect. Whether or not these rhēmata are written down, they are composed to be cited and recited, to overthrow the rhēmata of others, to win praise and fame for their utterers. “The short memorable sayings” uttered by the seven sophoi appear to consist of little more than proverbial wisdom phrased in a manner that is hard to forget (or easy to memorize). Yet Socrates’s examples suggest that this isn’t all there is to it. Granted that jewels like “know thyself ” and “nothing too much” give off the right doctrinal sound and command assent. But assent to what, exactly? No doubt, it’s their Protean meaning that accommodates the rhēmata to the needs of the Delphic oracle, with its famous semantic pliability. But it is also their firmly contoured rhetoric. Their function resembles that of commemorative coins. “It is hard to stay good” bears the maker’s name into the future: to Pittakaion, the Pittacan thing. Like oral formulas, they are destined for the treasuries of subsequent rhapsodes or speakers: “As Pittacus said.” But the thing is a weapon as well as a coin. It aims to leave its mark on the ear, and not so much to impart wisdom as to display it. Several of the sophoi Socrates names (Thales, Pittacus, Solon, and Chilon) were reputed to be worldly and to possess political cachet. They could be expected to appreciate what they learned from the Spartan word warriors: how to protect their rhēmata with the kind of compression that made them not only memorable but also vague, truistic, and thus immensely versatile in their range of applications. From the Spartans they also learned the importance of kairos, or timing—knowing when and where to let fly so as to maximize the striking power of their sayings.

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The Spartan fantasy implies that traditional rhēmata derived force and authority not from their meaning but from their rhetorical form, the skill with which they were employed, and the eudoxia of the site of enunciation. As the Charmides passage suggests, it is by speaking through the god and his oracle that sages and others create the divine source which countenances their power and wisdom. Yet if the oracle encourages such openended phrases as “know thyself ” and “nothing too much,” its aristocratic and pro-Spartan sympathies impose a degree of closure: The sayings are likely to mean whatever those in power make them mean, and what they are usually made to mean is “be obedient; know your place; do only your own.” (c) Socrates’s emphasis on brevity is summed up in the short saying, “nothing too much,” which serves as an autological comment on its own genre. But apart from the fact that he delivers a makrologia on the subject of brachylogia, his treatment of the subject departs in a peculiar way from his earlier comments on brevity. During the procedural sparring that took place from 334c to the commencement of the interlude, the chief topic of debate was whether Protagoras could be persuaded to “cut up” his answers “into shorter pieces”—whether he would be willing to forgo the long speeches by which, among other benefits, he fends off Socratic questions. Hence brachylogia in that context refers to the brevity that facilitates Socrates’s favorite procedure of rapid question and answer. But in the Spartan parody, brachylogia refers to short sayings that have the same apodeictic force and aim at the same epideictic effect as Protagoras’s long speeches: to provide answers in forms of expression that close off questions, score points, overcome competitors, and enhance the speaker’s reputation or power. Socrates’s joke about this turns on the kind of reversal implicit in the following two statements: (1) The Spartans keep the secret of their domination so well that they deceive the Laconizers “in our cities, who get broken ears imitating them, bind their knuckles with thongs, go in for muscular exercises, and wear short [bracheias] cloaks.” (342b–c) (2) The evidence of their superb “education in philosophy and argument” is that although the meanest of Spartans at first makes “a poor show in the conversation . . . at some point or other . . . he gets home with a notable remark, short and compressed—a deinos shot that makes his interlocutor seem no better than a child.” (342e)

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Broken ears, boxing gloves, and short cloaks are caricatures of the objective, the weapons, and the style of “philosophical” or rhematic pugilism. The wisdom paraded in the rhetoric of sages, poets, and sophists is a type of combat displaced from physical to rhematic warfare. In this form, it is diffused like a miasma throughout a culture dominated by the “contest system” characteristic of oral institutions. And this is the type of warfare Socrates wages during the very act of mocking it. (d) The Spartan parody has three morals. The first is that the way to understand what Simonides intended is to determine the use to which his utterance is put, the motive it serves, and the historico-cultural context that produces its occasion. The second moral is that the first moral is nonsense, Protagorean nonsense, and that one “determines,” that is, invents, whatever use, motive, and context will serve one’s own interpretive cause. But what is Socrates’s or Protagoras’s “interpretive cause” if not the nexus of use, motive, and context that determines their inventive treatment of the poem? Therefore, the third moral is that the first moral is not wholly nonsensical, for the very arbitrariness of their interpretation of Simonides is shown either to reflect or to be reflected by Simonides’s arbitrary interpretation of Pittacus. They too demonstrate the principle that the contestatory circumstances of utterance dominate the utterer’s intention, which in turn dominates the meaning of the utterances he cites no less than those he claims as his own. Socrates’s Spartan genealogy is a parable of logocentric warfare in which his contest with Protagoras is projected back into the past. The conspicuous outrageousness of the parable flags it as a parodic reduction of the dialogue’s serious concern with the problems of courage, deos, and charismatic bondage—problems that make it hard to stay good. Like a contagion, this parodic force contaminates the “historical” sequence. It moves from the Spartan word warriors, to the sages who armed themselves with Laconic pellets, then to poets like Simonides who embedded the pellets in poems, then to sophists like Protagoras who embedded the poems in performances aimed at living rivals. Last of all—in this prePlatonic series—the force moves to Socrates. Or does Socrates come first? For the contagion also spreads in the other direction. The past serves as pharmakos to the present—if, that is, there is any past beyond the one fabricated, and continually refabricated, as the mirror of the present. What facilitates refabrication are the conventions of oral exegesis that expose the poem to arbitrary excision and expansion.

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Protagoras casually dispenses with all but two rhēmata in his effort to overthrow the poet, and Socrates pretends to rehabilitate poor Simonides by moving with equal freedom in the opposite direction. Since the text of Simonides does not seem to be inscribed in any medium other than those of memory and recitation, it cannot take a stand apart from, or over against, such treatment. Its vulnerability to misinterpretation is compounded by its vulnerability to misquotation. “The past” as such has a tenuous existence. Socrates’s epanorthōsis, more revision than resurrection, may only throw more dirt over the dead poet. The question is whether the soil of his achievement falls on his own head as well.

Division IV. The Epanorthōsis of Simonides. 343c–344b The brief fourth division is devoted to bringing the poet back to life and showing how to make his eristic purpose control the interpretation of his utterance. Since “Simonides is speaking polemically against the saying of Pittacus,” Socrates pretends that the poet is in Pittacus’s presence and has just heard him speak, and that some of what Simonides says contributes more to his rhetorical purpose than to the poem’s moral statement. This project is carried out with the help of two pleasantly farfetched moves. First, Socrates picks on the particle men in the opening line of the poem, andr’ agathon men alatheōs genesthai chalepon (“It is hard, rather, to become a truly good man”), and argues that there is no sense inserting the particle unless Simonides is replying to Pittacus. Second, he commits the first of his two egregious crimes of hyperbaton, the trope in which modifiers get shifted from the referents of an utterance to its speaker, thus redirecting attention to his self-presentation. He insists that the word “truly” (alatheōs) does not modify “good”—that would at any rate “seem silly” (or “simpleminded,” euēthes) of Simonides, for it would not be like him to say that some men are truly good while others are good but not truly so. Rather, “truly” should be transposed so that, together with men, it can be interpreted as a performative that adds emphasis to his rebuttal: “Truly, it is hard to become good.” He thus underlines the truth of the correction of Pittacus he is about to make. The effect of this hyperbaton is to focus attention on Simonides’s selfpresentation as a courageous truth-sayer striving to overthrow the false rhēma of the famous sage. But even as Socrates produces this effect, he allows a doubt to glide briefly across the asserted truth he ascribes to Simonides, for it would be like Socrates to say that some men are truly good while others are good but not truly so. The possibility of making

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that distinction is about to be canceled by the false notion of “good” Socrates will develop on Simonides’s behalf in the next division. Having completed this digression on method and dealt with only four and a half lines of the poem, he goes on to utter what appears to be an excuse that anticipates further selective citation: “Many things could be said about each phrase of the poem to show that it is well composed [eu pepoiētai]. For it is very pleasingly and carefully composed. But it would take too long to go through it all like that.” This suggests that however well composed the poem and its details are, Socrates will—like Protagoras before him (339c)—only abstract from it what suits his purpose: to go over the poem’s “general outline and intention [ton typon . . . kai tēn boulēsin], which is above all to criticize the saying of Pittacus.” “General outline,” the usual translation of typon, is far too bland. Influenced by the figure of wisdom and warfare and by the references to broken ears and the Spartans’ skillful verbal shots, typos here has the force so frequently activated by the verb form in the Gorgias, “to strike,” “to box the ear” (456d, 476b–c, 480d, 486c, 508d–e, 527a). The typos of Simonides’s poem is its striking power. The term connotes the aggressive agency of the peithō Gorgias identified with compulsion. In the next division Socrates will not in fact abstract from the poem’s detail to its typos and boulēsis but will dive more deeply into more details than he had before. How, then, can we explain the conspicuous feint toward the overview we don’t get? Here I only want to sketch in rough outline the general hypothesis to be developed during the remainder of the commentary and at its conclusion. As I’ve suggested, I have no trouble imagining that the author of the Protagoras invented Simonides’s poem exactly in the form that has come down to us in the dialogue—as a series of fragments embedded like so much rubble in the conglomerate of the interlude. But he represents the interlocutors as discussing a poem which, for them, already existed in a form different from their selectively cited and freely adorned version of it. And he emphasizes the violence inflicted on the original poem by their treatment. This effect is managed by representing the act of citation in such a way as to imply consensus about the exact text which is being remembered, since this is necessary to convey the impression that the text is being dismembered and re-membered. The point of this move is to dramatize the fate not simply of a poem but of an oral text that apparently exists only as remembered by interlocutors and auditors, and is deployed in conformity with their interests. The oral text is represented as a source of opportunity, an occasion for creative misinterpretation. The original text is shown to be unable to resist these

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performative circumstances; its form and meaning are easily overthrown. The interpreters are applauded for their skill in strategically selective quotation, transposition, and paraphrastic insertion. From this standpoint, it is hardly possible for the poem to remain what it was; it is always becoming. But is it becoming better or worse? Does it fare badly in being overthrown or does it fare well?

Division V. The Attack on Pittacus: Simonides Doctored. 344b–345c Socrates now manages to get through the rest of the second stanza and—with the help of some short bursts of epagoguery—to divulge his view of Simonides’s meaning. The poet believes that although it is indeed hard to become good, Pittacus is wrong to say that it is hard to be good because it is not merely hard but impossible to be and remain good. That privilege is reserved for the gods. In the face of irresistible circumstance, mortals who try to stand firm and stay good are inevitably knocked down, and to be overthrown is by definition to become bad. Continuing the practice begun in Division IV, Socrates presents the poem dramatically as if he and his auditors were reenacting the speech event in which Simonides makes his response to Pittacus: Simonides proceeds “just as though he were making a speech,” which is also what Socrates is doing. Socrates assumes his voice, twice addressing his remarks directly to Pittacus (344c, e). The project of resurrecting Simonides increases the proportion of citational fuel to interpretive air in this division. Socrates enriches the mixture with three well-seasoned pieces from the sage’s tinder pile: 2./3–4 . . . andra d’ouk esti mē ou kakon emmenai, hon amēchanos symphora kathelēi, 344c. ( . . . a man cannot but stay bad whom irresistible circumstance casts down.) 2.5–6 Praxas men eu pas anēr agathos, kakos d’ ei kakōs, 344e. (When he fares well every man is good, bad if badly.) 2.7 ()

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Dividing the passage into Laconic brachylogies—three quick jabs to the ear—emphasizes its gnomic and truistic character. But the rhetorical pyrotechnics of Socrates’s commentary smokes the edges of Simonides’s rhēmata. Each of the first two sayings touches off a small fire-burst of over-explanation. Their redundant and sententious rhetoric seems to belong to the speech Simonides now—in Socrates’s latest fantasy—directs at his opponent. He’s anxious to refute to Pittakaion and supply a gloss on his own lines. Socrates-Simonides begins each gloss with the figure of rogatio or antipophora in which one answers one’s own question in order to emphasize the obviousness of the matter under discussion and to close off further inquiry. After the first saying at 344c: Now who is it that an irresistible [amēchanos] circumstance overthrows in the command of a ship? Clearly not the ordinary man, for he may be overcome at any time; just as you cannot knock over one who is lying down, but one who is standing…. So it is a resourceful [eumēchanon] man that an irresistible circumstance would overthrow. A great storm breaking over a pilot will render him helpless, and a severe season will leave a farmer helpless, and a doctor will be in the same case. (344c–d) And after the second (344e): Now what is good faring in letters [grammata] and what makes a man good at them? Clearly the learning [mathēsis] of them. And what is the faring well that makes a good doctor? Clearly it is learning how to heal the sick. “Bad if [he fares] badly.” Who could become a bad doctor? Clearly he who is first a doctor and second a good doctor, for he could also become a bad doctor. (344e–345a) These exemplify the characteristic Socratic procedure called epagōgē, which is proof by inductive etceteration. The most obvious thing about the examples in the questions is that, as illustrations of the two rhēmata, they are far from obvious. Nor are the answers obvious or predictable. Socrates’s use of dēlon (“clearly,” “obviously”) is characteristic: The insistence on obviousness flags an attempt to prevent an arguable proposition from being argued. The effect of rogatio here is to dramatize the moves—or, since Socrates is playing Simonides, to cite or mimic the moves—by which the deinos orator employs the skills he has learned in order to fare well and keep from being overthrown. But overthrown by whom? Clearly, by some

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interlocutory opponent (Pittacus, for example) or other audience standing before him—standing, not lying down, therefore resourceful, therefore good, therefore capable of being knocked over and becoming bad. For this, the rogatio is a serviceable device. It is a Spartan weapon, a mēchanē, which can be used offensively as well as defensively. The unexpected example is abruptly introduced and voiced as a question. The orator, let us say, pauses; his audience totters in momentary perplexity; he savors the ignorance dawning in their furrowed silence and waits for it to brighten the aurora of his wisdom; and then he speaks. Beseeched, empowered, he stamps his mathēmata directly on their supine souls, cures their ignorance, becomes their kybernētēs, and all by the art of his masterful dēlon. Such contrivances threaten to overcome the simple force of the first saying at 2./3–4 (344c), which is to equate “bad” with “helpless” and to treat them as enduring effects of an external cause. On behalf of Simonides, Socrates glosses this by harping on the term amēchanos (literally, without mēchanē, lacking in means, art, contrivance, skill). He activates both of its complementary senses, “irresistible” and “helpless.” In the traditional view expressed by the poem, the cause-effect logic that couples these senses moves from the former (“irresistible”) to the latter (“helpless”). But the direction is reversible, since the irresistibility of the symphora—whether understood as an event or as a mishap—may be an effect of nonresistance. To represent the traditional view as a strategic mystification of its opposite is a fundamental motif in the dialogues. It’s implied here by the way Socrates combines the use of the second-person form with a physical metaphor whose sense is influenced by the previous reference to Spartan pugilism: “You cannot knock over one who is lying down, but one who is standing; you might knock over a standing man so as to make him lie down, not one who is lying down already.” The pedantically repetitive emphasis momentarily diverts us from the example of the pilot in a storm to a very different situation: an image of combat in which the source of irresistible circumstance is the opponent whose potential victim may choose to avoid the onslaught by throwing himself down. Let’s re-frame this rhēma in Socratic terms: The kakos man is one who continually overthrows or victimizes himself to avoid being overthrown or victimized by others. This is itself a mēchanē, an artful device. As to the rhēma at 2.5–6 (“When he fares well every man is good, bad if badly”), it aims to overthrow an obvious Socratic objection: To be good has nothing to do with faring well, everything to do with obeying the injunction that

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it is wrong to injure anyone and worse to inflict wrong than to suffer it. But the Socratic logos goes against the grain of the first gloss at 344c–d, which focuses on the overthrow of the eumēchanos man. Socrates continues to emphasize Simonides’s appeal to moral consensus by having him cite yet another nameless poet in support of the proposition that it is possible for the esthloi to become kakoi. This authority claims that “the good man is at one time bad, at another time noble [esthlos]” (344d). Here the Prodican dissociation of Pittacus’s term, esthlos, from Simonides’s agathos, momentarily muddies Simonides’s position, because it implies that it is possible for a man to remain agathos, but not esthlos, when he is kakos. In these moves, the various meanings conferred on the three terms shift uneasily about. Since kakos has just received the value of amēchanos from the first gloss, the ethical or Socratic sense of agathos briefly surfaces. This glimpse accentuates the contrast that immediately follows at 344e when sophos and agathos are gathered up into eumēchanos. Esthlos in its final two appearances (344e4–5) is used less as an alternate definition than as a performative signal: It identifies the Pittacan thing on the verge of being overthrown and losing its nobility (344e). From this point on, Socrates-Simonides securely tucks agathos into eumēchanos. But he does so against the background of conspicuously excluded articulations of the Socratic ethic. If the exclusion adumbrates the limits of the Simonidean logoi, its shadows also fall on Socrates’s own performance. To define agathos as eumēchanos is to subsume ethical aretē under technical aretē, to equate “being good” with “being good at something.” This becomes explicit in the second gloss. Socrates unexpectedly interprets Simonides’s “When he fares well” to mean “when he learns a skill” (344b–345c). “Becoming good” or “faring well” is now euphemistically equated with “learning to be deinos at something.” The equation is justified partly by Socrates-Simonides’s appeal to life’s difficulty and uncertainty, partly by “his” appeal to a morality that vilifies failure and impotence as kakos. Kakia here denotes the effect of receiving injuries, not the cause of inflicting them on others. As the pugilistic image in the first gloss indicates, amēchanos symphora can include the injuries inflicted by other persons. This pleonectic ability to get the better of others is agathos and is especially justified in view of the belief that since even good men must sooner or later become kakos, they have the right to take whatever steps they think necessary to defer that fate. As for those who can never become

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bad because they never bothered or were able to acquire aretē, they only provide the material of rhetorical contrast. They may be entitled to pity, but they are apparently not worth the labor of epanorthōsis. Does Socrates leave Simonides’s morality standing, or does he try to overthrow it? The answer is far from clear. Before trying to tackle it, let’s review what is at stake on the agonistic surface of the interlude. In defending Simonides from Protagoras’s charge that the poet speaks against himself, Socrates is also defending his own claim that the poem is consistent. Simonides, he argues, speaks not against himself but against the saying of Pittacus. Even as Protagoras prepares to knock down Socrates by knocking down Simonides, Socrates plans to keep Simonides and himself upright. He will resist the sophist’s attack by showing how Simonides tries to knock down Pittacus for saying it is hard rather than impossible to stay good. Yet Socrates’s effort to bring Simonides closer by citational and paraphrastic mimicry is tonally off-key. He’s having too good a time. The suspicion grows stronger that he, no less than Protagoras, is intent on overthrowing poor Simonides by making him speak against himself, not logically or rhetorically, but ethically. And this is connected to the most pervasive effect of Socrates’s performance since the beginning of the Spartan parody: He has been refashioning Simonides in Protagoras’s image. Simonides will get resurrected as Protagoras with the help of a varied set of devices that recall earlier moments of the dialogue. In this division, for example, the focus of the first gloss on human helplessness (344c–d) recalls the deos Protagoras played on in the fable of Epimetheus and Prometheus. It also recalls his subsequent discussion, at 323c–d, of the wretches one pities but doesn’t punish because they are not dangerous. The use of the eu prattein formula in 2.5–6 of the poem, and in the second gloss at 344e–345a, is affected by its previous appearance at 333d. There, Socrates drew from Protagoras the opinion that the test of whether people had planned well and are therefore sensible and temperate is whether they fare well by their injustice. These two glosses encapsulate and reenact Protagoras’s appeal to the apprehension, the apprehensiveness, that underlies the success ethic. They suggest a psychological or motivational profile of the deos and pleonexia to which Protagoras speaks: The fear of being overthrown leads to the anxious cultivation of skills and to the desire to fare well (keep from being overthrown) by overthrowing others. Yet since the agent is always dependent for moral definition on external sources—those that can empower or enfeeble, praise or blame, reward or punish—his aretē is

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never exclusively a matter of technical expertise and never securely in his own power. In this scheme the agathon is not an intrinsic principle of the agent’s action and behavior, for if it were it would be possible, though difficult, to stay good. Rather, the agathon is determined by what happens to him. Like timē, kleos, and eudoxia, the good that equals faring well is always finally in the gift of another who must be forced or persuaded to bestow it. The anxiety of defeat, the fear of becoming bad, is therefore permanent among the agathoi. It isn’t only that their fate is not in their own hands but also that their stature as agathoi, and the self-esteem they attach to it, is not in their own hands. Something else glimmers through the discussion. There are moments in which the Socratic ethic is glimpsed then conspicuously excluded, as the rhetoric of the glosses works too hard to lay doubts to rest and prevent an arguable proposition from being argued. Socrates’s voicing of Simonides’s position emphasizes the impossibility of staying good or (as he says later) blameless in a hard world. It also conveys the air of pleading the zero-sum take-or-be-taken ethic at the bar of a bad conscience. This theme will emerge more fully in the sixth and seventh divisions of the interlude, when Socrates suggests that Simonides may not be at ease with himself and may need the excuse his argument against Pittacus provides. The argument and attack will there appear to be a kind of soterial promēthē warding off awareness of a self-betrayal he can’t come to terms with. In this respect also, Simonides becomes the site of a Protagorean dilemma. The Protagorean ethos and ethic also infiltrate the examples of the epagōgē that spans the two glosses, and to which I now turn. These examples are piloting, farming, medicine, letters, and carpentry. Farming appears only in one clause of the first gloss, letters only in the rogatio of the second gloss, and carpentry receives mere mention in the second gloss at 345a. The pilot dominates the epagōgē in the first gloss and the doctor in the second. The references to grammata and doctors work as mnemonic triggers that recall earlier passages—the many medical references along with Protagoras’s account of the role of writing and the grammatistēs in paideia. The previous linkage of doctors and sophists and the ideological function of the study of letters return here to inject Protagorean elements into Socrates’s impersonation of Simonides. These elements are reinforced by references to the medical text attributed to the sage whose name is borne by Socrates’s companion in the dialogue.

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The Hippocratic treatise “On Ancient Medicine” (or “The Tradition of Medicine”), dated near the end of the fifth century, has often been discussed in connection with Plato and Protagoras because of its etiology of food cultivation in chapter 31, its skeptical view of the uses of hypotheses, and some terminology in chapter 15 that anticipates distinctions basic to the so-called theory of Forms.3 The ninth chapter contains a remarkable analogue to the first gloss. It occurs while the author is discussing the difficulties that confront doctors in the matter of prescribing diets for the sick: One aims at some criterion as to what constitutes a correct diet, but you will find neither number nor weight to determine what this is exactly, and no other criterion than bodily feeling. Thus exactness is difficult to achieve and small errors are bound to occur. I warmly commend the physician who makes small mistakes; infallibility is rarely to be seen. Most doctors seem to me to be in the position of poor pilots. In calm weather they can conceal their mistakes, but when overtaken by a mighty storm or a violent gale, it is evident to all that it is their ignorance and error which is the ruin of the ship. So it is with the sorry doctors who are the great majority. They cure men but slightly ill, in whose treatment even the biggest mistakes would have no serious consequences. . . . When doctors make mistakes over such cases, their errors are unperceived by the layman, but when they have to treat a serious and dangerous case, a mistake or lack of skill is obvious to all, and vengeance for either error is not long delayed.4 The italicized sentences contain the same image Socrates uses at 344d: megas cheimōn for “great storm” in the Protagoras, cheimon [te] megas in the treatise. They also suggest a Socratic rather than Simonidean assignment of responsibility. That is, the context encourages us to consider the amēchania of passengers and patients as well as that of the pilot and doctor responsible for it, whereas the Simonidean moral logic Socrates develops tends to discourage that consideration, since “the bad man can’t become bad but must ever be so” (344e). The example of farming in the first gloss would seem to dilute such implications, especially if the material content of the examples in the epagōgē is ignored and they are treated as indifferent x’s and y’s. When we read that the pilot, farmer, and doctor may be rendered helpless, or when we encounter the phrase “doctors or carpenters or anything else of that sort” in the second gloss (345a), we may be inclined to dismiss them all as “of the same sort.” They all seem to exemplify what R. K. Sprague defines as first-order technai and distinguishes from second-order arts (rhetoric,

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sophistry, statecraft) on the grounds that they have “readily specifiable products.”5 But although Sprague classifies farming, piloting, and medicine indifferently as first-order arts, there is a profound difference between farming and the other two. The difference is that between plants and people. Protagoras had previously employed the people-to-plants reduction and mentioned medicine and farming in the speech on relative goods. Their recurrence together in this gloss is another mnemonic trigger. Furthermore, the inclusion of farming with the arts of navigation and medicine reproduces the reduction: Compared to the plight of pilot, farmer, and doctor, the “overthrow” of defenseless passengers and patients is as insignificant as that of plants. Another reason piloting and medicine don’t fit comfortably in Sprague’s scheme is that they are often used to illustrate the problem of rulership. A particularly telling joint appearance, one that illuminates their appearance in the Protagoras, occurs in Republic 1 (341c–347d) when Socrates, pressing Thrasymachus, asks what any art rules and whose advantage it seeks. He goes on to distinguish the arts of piloting and medicine from first-order skills that produce goods. Not only do these arts deliver services. They also give their practitioners power over others. As his explanation moves from piloting to medicine it becomes more devious. Socrates explains that although the pilot “sails in the ship . . . it isn’t because of his sailing that he is called a pilot but because of his art and his rule over sailors” (341d). From this he generates the following skewed analogy: Just as the pilot in the correct sense is not a sailor but “a ruler of sailors” so the doctor in the correct sense is not a moneymaker but “a ruler of bodies” (342d). The proper version of this analogy is so conspicuously excluded that it demands to be teased out. The pilot is not a mere sailor but a ruler of sailors. Nevertheless, he knows how to sail. The doctor is not a mere moneymaker but a ruler of the bodies of moneymakers. Nevertheless, he knows how to make money. This sort of innuendo hums under the surface of many Socratic references to doctors throughout the dialogues, and it surfaces most obviously and conveniently in the Charmides. For example, at 164a, Socrates asks whether the doctor can benefit himself as well as his patient. At 170c, he asks whether temperance as science of itself can help us distinguish a genuine doctor from a quack. At 173c, he “dreams” that a despotic temperance could deter charlatans in medicine and other sciences. Medicine is the example Socrates most frequently uses to argue the uselessness of Critias’s beloved science of science: How can science of science be beneficial if it can’t give us health? Critias respects doctors. He

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believes medicine is not an unlikely candidate for the science that can produce happiness (174b). The doctor is a sōtēr to whom men look when their bodies fail them or they fail their bodies. His status and potential influence derive from an art that enables him to prevent loss of life. At 174c Socrates casually names this preventive ability as the essence of kybernētikē and stratēgikē: Navigation is the art that saves lives at sea, generalship at war. It does not belong to these arts to inquire which lives should be saved, or whether they should be saved, or why they should be saved, or why they should be risked in the first place. Those decisions fall within the purview of the science of good and evil, or, as Critias would prefer, within the purview of the master science of science (174d–e). Yet because people entrust their lives and bodies to the experts in navigation, war, and medicine, these sciences are sources of power and advantage. That the doctor is ignorant of the reflexive ethical effect of his practice does not keep him from successfully directing the lives of others. Critias admires this power and diligently practices it in his control of Charmides. The coupling of pilots with doctors in Republic 1 confirms and advances a twisted argument Socrates develops with, for, or against Thrasymachus. He feints toward a good Socratic position: because the art per se—piloting, medicine, horsemanship—is perfect and self-sufficient it never seeks either its own advantage or that of the practitioner but only the benefit of the weaker subject it rules (342e). But since such a pointed (akribē) statement of the ideal is uttered in the presence of Thrasymachus, it evokes its own Thrasymachean rejoinder: The practitioner (unlike the art) may seek to benefit from the subjects who are weaker than the art and dependent on the artist. They should be expected to reward his services with wages. In this the artist differs from the art. He may, however, choose to resemble it by seeking to rule the art’s subjects not in his capacity as a first-order technician but as a practitioner of the moneymaking art skilled in steering his practice toward the port of higher income. The deos this account solicits is exacerbated by the example of horsemanship, which assimilates sailors and patients to horses, and by Thrasymachus’s even more loaded example of shepherding, which assimilates them to sheep. In addition, horsemanship connotes obvious social and political power relationships just as, in a different manner, piloting a ship is a conventional figure for governing a polis. Socrates uses it that way at Republic 488a–489a, and the figurative sense is implied in this division of the Simonides interlude. When he asks who it is that amēchanos symphora overthrows in the command (archē) of a ship (344c), the pugilistic metaphor that follows

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suggests there may be human as well as natural threats to the archē. The pilot might remain a perfectly agathos navigator and still become kakos as a ruler, or ex-ruler, of his tempestuous crew. He may lack certain supplementary skills essential to his archē—rhetoric for example. These tendentious uses of first-order arts to symbolize second-order relationships and dangers connected with rhetoric, rulership, and the arts of face suggest the range of problems Sprague sometimes mentions but seldom develops. We’ve seen, for example, that if doctors, sculptors, and lyre players teach as well as practice, a second-order art of deinos speech must be part of their first-order arts. Their art extends its rule—and theirs—to archē over pupils. The doctor is especially problematic in this respect, since the medical rule over bodies implicates the doctor’s rule over patients. “Plato knows perfectly well,” Sprague astutely remarks, “that it is the doctor who could, if he were not acting in the ‘precise sense,’ most efficiently produce disease,”6 and presumably this is no secret to the doctor’s clientele, who would also be aware that he does not always succeed in producing health. The doctor’s appearance at the end of the first gloss and his feature billing in the second touch on anxieties that afflict both sides of the doctorpatient relationship. Socrates says that a storm will undo a pilot, a bad season a farmer, and “the very same for a doctor [iatron tauta tauta]” (344d). Exactly what is it that overthrows the doctor? Clearly, one thinks, only a plague could so overwhelm the doctor “who is eumēchanon and sophon and agathon” that “he cannot but stay bad [kakon emmenai].” Yet if he lives and retains his skill, why can’t he become good again? Because he will lose his good name and his patients? In the next gloss (344e–345a) Socrates first says that the mathēsis of the cure of the ailing makes a good doctor, and then that only one who is (a) a doctor and (b) a good doctor could by faring badly become a bad doctor. The second statement conflicts with the first: If faring well makes one good, and the eupragia of medical study makes one a good doctor, how does one become a mere doctor, who presumably knows medicine but doesn’t fare well enough to be capable of becoming amēchanos? The obvious answer is that the distinction is analytical. But this doesn’t seem quite right. It obscures an ethical and technical area of unclarity that lurks as a presupposition in Socrates’s reference to “the study of the cure of the ailing [hē tōn kamnontōn tēs therapeias mathēsis]” (345a). What does this study include? To ask it another way, is there any difference between mastering the knowledge of cures, surgery, and so on, and faring well as a doctor? For since the eupragia or advantage of the doctor

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differs from that of the art and may not chime—may indeed be out of tune—with that of the patient, and since by “good” Simonides means “successful,” the medical mathēsis that makes a good doctor must include the learning of skills that are supplementary to those involved in prognosis, prescriptions, and surgery—rhetoric, for example. In this division, the convergence of medicine and sophistry is recapitulated in a manner that extends their kinship to poetry. Socrates’s impersonation resurrects the poet in the form of a Protagorean debater whose project of overthrowing his opponent and winning fame (343c) is reflected and moralized in his logoi. We can scarcely read about faring well and ill, or about the overthrow of the eumēchanos man, without applying this moral first to Pittacus and then to Simonides. Socrates’s explanatory expansion of the poet’s argument dramatizes the moves by which the deinos orator defends against interrogation or challenge. Pretending to save Simonides from a Protagorean attack, he turns him into a parody of Protagoras as part of his own mimicry of sophistical procedure. Protagoras had included Simonides among the ancient sophists who disguised their vexatious practice behind the proschēma of poetry (316d). Socrates provides a skewed confirmation of this genealogy by pretending that what is now treated as a poem originated under Spartan conditions as a bid for preeminence in rhematic warfare: Simonides’s intention was to use the poem as a typos, and those conditions determine the meaning of the poem. There is a more immediate comment on the Protagorean ethic in the way Socrates represents Simonides’s performance. In the fourth division he explained that Simonides’s intention was to overthrow (katheloi, 343c) the rhēma of Pittacus—later he will accuse Pittacus of lying (347a)—and this incidence of the verb kathelein seems planted to anticipate its appearance in line 2.4 of the poem and in the first gloss. According to the criteria of the success ethic, the truth of an utterance resides not in its content but in its fortunes: Any rhēma remains true so long as it is not overthrown by another that successfully—that is, persuasively—convicts it of being false. This confronts Simonides with a dilemma like that of the liar’s paradox. The truth he utters is that it is not possible to keep from being overthrown. Hence, if that truth is overthrown, it is both true and false, and if it remains victorious, it is both true and false. Simonides therefore speaks against himself, and this is what Protagoras claimed after introducing the poem. But in bringing matters to this pass Socrates shows that for Protagoras to speak truly about Simonides is also to speak truly about himself—to accuse himself of speaking against himself (against

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Simonides-as-Protagoras) and therefore, since this clearly runs counter to his intention, to overthrow himself. Socrates gives the screw another turn when he hints that amēchanos symphora may not really be as amēchanos, irresistible, as the poem expanded by his glosses implies. This places Simonides’s accent on the victim’s disclaimer of responsibility. There is a similar critique in the Hippocratic “Sacred Disease”: Quack doctors striving for the wisdom effect employ many pretexts “so that, if the patient be cured, their reputation for cleverness is enhanced while, if he dies, they can excuse themselves by explaining that the gods are to blame while they themselves did nothing wrong.”7 In concluding the division, Socrates cites or paraphrases a different appeal to the gods. The message “this part of the poem aims at”—teinei, an archery metaphor (stretches the bow at)—“is that although it is impossible to be a good man, continuing to be good, it is possible to become good, and bad also, in the case of the same person. ” (345c). A deflationary note of resignation suggests a lysis or slackening of the bowstring. It may reflect Simonides’s acknowledgment of the deinos man’s inevitable downfall. But it may also reflect something else. As we have seen, Socrates’s pious claim that he only follows arguments in the pursuit of truth is run up like a flag over his obvious effort to score, and in his sendup of sophistical interpretation he is himself busily playing a sophist’s game. No doubt his playfulness partly decontaminates the performance—but not entirely. For the logoi do not come from him. They come from the person he ventriloquates, and ventriloquation is a two-way street. In impersonating the sophist and the poet, he interprets them, speaks through them, and represents their motives, their anti-Socratic logoi. In return, they speak through his imitation and make him speak against himself. Given the structural constraints of interlocutory warfare, it is hard indeed to stay good; it is possible to become good, and bad also, in the case of the same person. To some extent the conclusion of Division V takes on the aspect of a self-description.

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Simonides, Part 4

Socrates has now managed to work his way through the fragments of the second strophe. He has shown how the moral content of the ode articulates with its use as an attack on Pittacus. The third strophe will produce an interpretive reorientation that picks out and magnifies a change of emphasis in the ode itself. This change has been noted and variously described by commentators. Leonard Woodbury, for instance, approaches the change through a grammatical observation: “The use of the first-person singular half a dozen times in the last two stanzas betrays an unmistakable emphasis on the poet’s own judgment and suggests a comparison with the false opinions of others.”1 Simonides now “speaks with the authority of the poet, who has the power to allot praise and blame.” Walter Donlan detects “a tone of passionate personal involvement, and didactic intent.”2 A very different response to these features, registered by a third commentator, is the subject of the present chapter. The commentator is Socrates.

Division VI. Simonides Overthrown. 345c–346c If Socrates finds the third strophe a positive contribution uttered with poetic authority and didactic intent, he has a strange way of showing it. He disengages from impersonation and adopts the stance of an advocate who delivers an apologia on Simonides’s behalf. He too will acknowledge that the poet is passionately and personally involved. But he will place a

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less sanguine construction on it as he explores or creates the effect of the constraints of patronage on the poet’s meaning and self-representation. In this and the next division he gives the poem its head. He had devoted a Stephanus page to the last five lines of the second strophe in Division V, but VI and VII get through the remaining two strophes in about a page and a half. Division VI begins with a generous portion of four lines: Therefore, I will never throw away my share of time on an unprofitable hope, vainly searching for what cannot come to be, an allblameless mortal among us who take the fruit of the broad earth. Should I discover him, I will tell you about it. (345c) Socrates interrupts to remark on the vehement (sphodra) tone with which Simonides “pursues the rhēma of Pittacus throughout the whole ode.” He then concludes his quotation: “But I praise and love all, whoever willingly [hekōn] does nothing shameful; against necessity not even the gods contend” (345c–d). This is the longest passage cited so far, and the “Therefore” (touneken) marks it as the thematic consequence of the previous general reflections. Because it is so hard to stay good and keep from being overthrown, Simonides willingly relaxes his standards. But why? Is his assertion that he won’t waste time on a vain search for the ideal only an emphatic way of disagreeing with Pittacus? Something more specific is suggested to Socrates by aprakton elpida (“unprofitable, idle, or unsuccessful hope”), by apaggeleō (“I will tell, announce, report”), and by epainēmi kai phileō (“I praise and love”). Socrates will construct from these lines a fantasy of Simonides’s activity as an epideictic poet and of his search for a patron to praise and love, a search that will bring him no profit unless he is willing to serve a not-soblameless mortal. Socrates had first attributed his assault on the rhēma to Simonides’s ambition for fame and the name of wise man (343c). That account is about to be modified by considerations that are practical, but also compromising. The isolated conclusion cited above provides the opportunity for Socrates’s second hyperbaton: “But I praise and love all, whoever willingly [hekōn] does nothing shameful; against necessity not even the gods contend.” This is also spoken with the same intent. For Simonides was not so uneducated as to say that he praises these men, whoever willingly does nothing bad, as if there were some who willingly do bad things. I am fairly

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sure of this, that no one among the wise men considers that anyone among mortals willingly makes a mistake or willingly does both shameful and bad things, but they know well that all those doing the shameful and bad things do them unwillingly. And in this case Simonides does not say he is the praiser of whoever does not do bad things willingly, but he uses the word “willingly” of himself. (345d–e) That is, the adjective hekōn should qualify “I praise and love” rather than “all who do nothing shameful.” The length and assertiveness of the purported quotation of Simonides convey a fuller sense both of the poet’s opinion and of his “presence,” his “voice.” Transposing hekōn contributes to this effect, as Socrates activates the hyperbaton that redirects attention to his self-presentation. These modifiers now assume performative or epideictic functions: they represent the poet as a parrhesiastēs, a truth-sayer who freely or willingly speaks his mind. The effect of the hyperbaton is to displace the moral issue of the interlude from the “content” or message or doctrine of Simonides’s poem to his speech itself and to the parrhesiastic posture Socrates is about to destroy with his apologia. Simonides, he continues, considered that a respectable man [andra kalon kagathon] often compels himself to become the friend and praiser of someone, as often happens to a man with an estranged mother or father or native land or some other similar things. When this sort of thing befalls the wicked, they view as if with pleasure, and reproachfully point out and denounce, their parents’ or country’s wickedness, so that people might not censure them for neglecting those and might not upbraid them because they neglect; and so they complain still more and add voluntary to unavoidable feuds. But the good disguise their feelings [epikryptesthai] and constrain themselves to praise, and if they get angry at some wrong done by parents or country, they tell themselves soothing stories and make a truce with themselves [autous heautous paramytheisthai kai diallattesthai], compelling themselves to love and praise their own. And I think Simonides believed [or considered] that he had often praised and eulogized some tyrant or other such person, not willingly, but under compulsion. (345e–346c) When Socrates enrolls Simonides in the ranks of the “good” who are, by any other name, hypocritical timeservers, his sketch of the poet’s rationale for moral tolerance in a difficult world suddenly changes into the rationalization that betrays a bad conscience. At the very moment in

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which Socrates touts Simonides’s self-presentation as a worldly-wise truth-sayer, he undermines it with a wickedly laborious justification of the poet’s inability or unwillingness to speak the truth. The two alternatives considered by “Simonides”—peacemakers and faultfinders—conspicuously exclude the middle way of parrhesiastic speech: taking the risk and speaking out against injustice, but at the same time recognizing, acknowledging, both one’s complicity and the difficulty of avoiding it. “They tell themselves soothing stories and make a truce with themselves”: This translation is admittedly strained to privilege the etymologies of the verbs at the expense of their meanings in use. Paramythia, “consolation,” also denotes a set of literary topics that gained conventional and quasi-generic status in post-Homeric poetry. The consolandus in consolation literature is normally the addressee. But the verb paramytheisthai—the only appearance of the term in the dialogue—is predicated of the speaker. My translation is meant to emphasize Socrates’s suggestion that in fabricating praise or consolation for another the poet is simultaneously working on himself. It is also meant to bring out the play on two different meanings of the para- prefix Socrates often uses: “beside” and “amiss.” The positional sense denotes support and encouragement, while the directional sense denotes mis-saying or misleading. Socrates’s immortality myths, for example, perform both functions in a manner that raises doubts about his interlocutors’ desire to be consoled. Paramytheisthai kai diallattesthai in the above passage gives a compact profile of the condition Socrates depicts. In his account of the poet’s reasoning he makes him go to great lengths to justify his praise of a tyrant who may have done something wrong. This suggests that Simonides feared he did wrong in praising and made it worse by trying to explain it away. The poet emerges from the profile as someone who doesn’t fully succeed in his effort to lie to himself and forgive himself, someone unable to profit from the soothing tales he tells the “tyrant or other such person” (i.e., himself) to whom he reconciles himself. “I praise and love all, whoever willingly does nothing shameful.” “I praise and love” serves as an echo connecting this situation with an earlier one that provides a model for it. C. C. W. Taylor calls attention to the “preecho” of this phrase at 335e. There, when Callias uses force to prevent Socrates from walking out on the discussion and spoiling their fun, Socrates replies that he has always admired Callias’s philosophia, and “I especially praise and love it now.” He would gladly oblige his host if he could, but he can’t keep up with Protagoras. The entertainer’s response to the host’s imperious gesture is a courtly hyperbole. We assess the quality of

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Socrates’s philō (“I love”) by our sense of the irony apparent in his praise of the quality of Callias’s philosophia. Here Socrates as courtly entertainer is roughly in the position of Simonides, and Callias is the not-so-blameless patron whom Socrates— willingly? unwillingly?—praises. Thus, if we let the earlier incidence of “I praise and blame” pre-echo or pre-interpret the later one, our association of the Socratic with the Simonidean position throws light on the constraints of charismatic bondage implicit in the poet’s situation. Simonides’s “whoever willingly does nothing shameful” comes perilously close to anticipating Socrates’s “no one willingly does wrong.” Although Socrates pretends to revise it to secure agreement with his own logos, he subjects it to deformations that send it galloping off in another direction. This maneuver is framed in a ridiculously reasonable tone of patient explanation. With a poker face Socrates unsheathes “no one willingly does wrong” in unlikely circumstances that make it a twoedged sword. One edge is aimed at Socrates: The doctrine that no one sins willingly—a corollary of the view that vice is only ignorance—is characteristic of the ethical teaching both of Socrates and Plato . . . but not of all Greek sages, and it is only by the most perverse sophistry that Socrates here reads it into Simonides, ignoring entirely the words anankē d’ oude theoi machontai.3 But Socrates himself mordantly registers his own awareness of its implausibility in the bland confidence of “I am fairly sure [skedon] . . . [that none of the wise men considers that any mortal] willingly does both shameful and bad things” (345d–e). Skedon, which has the tonal value of the Briticism, “I dare say,” adds both emphasis and a slightly ironic shading to the assertion. R. E. Allen’s translation more accurately catches that shading: “For I hardly suppose any wise man believes that any human being errs voluntarily or willingly does things shameful and evil.”4 Those who do shameful and evil things do them involuntarily, or reluctantly. They can’t help themselves. It’s not their fault. We know who these sophōn andrōn are. They had been characterized at 343a, when Socrates named and described the self-protective wisdom warriors (including Pittacus), the admirers of Spartan culture who fire off such short memorable rhēmata as “Know thyself ” and “Nothing too much.” Here, Socrates lets them appropriate and abuse his own thesis. They concede that shameful and bad things get done; their emphasis is on

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absolving the doers of intentional malice. They deploy their faux Socratisms to authorize and justify acts of pleonexia. The other edge of the sword is aimed at Simonides and the wise men: “Socrates’s assimilation of the poet’s thought to one of his own theses involves a blatant perversion of the plain sense of the poem,” which is, in Taylor’s opinion, “the common-sense view that sometimes a man cannot help doing wrong, either because he is subject to irresistible temptation, or because he is forced to adopt dishonest means to keep alive.”5 But the passage focuses less on such a view or such a man than on the poet’s willingness to praise him. Apart from this, Taylor’s reading of the “plain sense” ignores the rhetorical effect of the “blatant perversion.” The allusion to Socratic ethics persists as an echo that gives the last three lines of the third strophe a false ring. The poet in search of praiseworthy subjects then appears to be increasing both the candidate pool and his own chances of employment by giving a brief sample of his skill as an apologist. He activates the victim’s or tyrant’s plea on behalf of those whom stricter moralists might blame for having reluctantly done something shameful. Taylor decides “it is simplest to credit” Simonides “with the commonsense view.”6 He reads the poem as a “view” rather than as a rhetorical maneuver, as a moral statement rather than as a speech act. In doing this, he performs a double, not a single, abstraction: He abstracts the message from Simonides’s speech act, and both from Socrates’s speech act. Ironically, Taylor does this at just the moment in the interlude during which Socrates embeds the poet’s utterance in a context of use that overthrows the abstract utterance meaning. Socrates makes that meaning subserve the specific utterer’s meaning—the practical intention—he imputes to Simonides. He also makes it subserve his own intention as the rhapsode who utters and interprets the poet’s utterance. The “plain sense” Taylor retrieves from the poem is thus at odds with the sense Socrates injects into it. In this case the familiarity of the message, “no one willingly does evil,” diverts attention all the more easily from the series of small lexical and syntactical changes Socrates makes as he repeats the formula. Yet these changes substantially affect its meaning. When we decelerate the passage, we discover that the remodeling of Simonides’s Socratic rhēma confirms the exclusion of the Socratic ethic and replaces it with its sophistical rival. Before beginning this exercise, I want to comment on the key word hekōn and its privative, akōn. The various senses of hekōn (willing, knowing, voluntary, and the corresponding adverbs) don’t significantly differ from each other. But the various senses

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of akōn do: “unwilling,” “unknowing,” “involuntary.” “Involuntary” can mean either “unwilling” or “unknowing,” and it also has a third meaning, “automatic,” as in “automatic reflex.” But “unwilling” (or “reluctant”) and “unknowing” are opposed as conscious to unconscious sources of action. I render hekōn unwillingly as “willingly.” It is not an adverb but an adjective, often used with participial force, and sometimes assuming adverbial functions in predicates. Given the issues central to Socratic discussions about ethics, it would be preferable to use conventional English markers to register the difference between the modifying of acts and of agents. But my attempts to substitute “willing” for “willingly” violated more than English grammatical feeling. In addition to sounding barbaric, they failed to capture the more positive sense promoted by many contexts—the sense of readiness, of volition freely rather than grudgingly expressed. The difference may be illustrated by comparing “whoever willing does nothing shameful” with “whoever willingly does nothing shameful.” The former syncopates “whoever is willing to act shamefully but [reluctantly?] does nothing shameful.” In the latter, “willingly” ranges from “unreluctantly” and “voluntarily” through “freely” to “eagerly.” Of the different terms opposed to “willingly” the one favored in the following account is “reluctantly.” Compulsion plays an important supporting role in the process of rationalization mimicked by Socrates. So also, at another level, does ignorance. But unwillingness as reluctance is featured because Socrates is moving his representation of Simonides toward an emphasis on the poet’s self-division and bad conscience, and on his bad-faith appeal to the victim’s discourse.

Microanalysis of 345d–e (1) The skewed echo of the Socratic paradox initially appears in verses 5–7/ of the third strophe, which I translate first in literal word order: pantas d’ epainēmi kai phileō all, however, I praise and love hekōn hostis herdēi willingly whoever does mēden aischron. nothing shameful. (But I praise and love all, whoever willingly does nothing shameful.)

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Does hekōn (“willingly”) characterize the attitude of the praiser or that of the doers? Translations vary on this point: Guthrie: “[A]ll who do no baseness willingly I praise and love.” Taylor: “But I praise and love all / Who do nothing shameful freely.” Jowett/Ostwald: “But him who does no evil, voluntarily I praise and love. . . .” Allen: “I praise and love all those willingly / who do nothing shameful.” Lamb: “I praise and love everyone willingly committing no baseness.” Guthrie’s “willingly” can modify either “all” or “I.” In Jowett/Ostwald it modifies “I.” In Taylor, Allen, and Lamb it modifies “all” (though Allen’s rendering is more ambiguous). These versions produce a meaning decidedly different from the one implicit in my rendering of the word order. Mine is (a) “all, whoever willingly does no aischron.” Theirs is (b) “all who, whatever aischron they do, they do unwillingly.” My version more accurately catches the meaning conveyed by the word order Socrates cites as Simonides’s. When the translators bypass (a) for (b) they do what Socrates is careful not to do: They obliterate the differences between the two versions and thus obscure the specific effect of the willing and willful violence he perpetrates on the verses. For (a), “all, whoever willingly does nothing shameful” is closer in spirit to the Socratic thesis (“no one willingly does evil”) than (b). But in what follows, Socrates will sharpen the Simonidean edge of (b) and push it in the direction of an apologetic rationalization. His changes will work to “de-Socratize” Simonides. (2) Socrates claims Simonides was not so uneducated as toutous phanai epainein, these men to say he praises, hos an hekōn mēden kakon poiēi whoever willingly nothing bad does. (345d) I’ll defer comment on Socrates’s replacement of aischron by kakon in order to focus here on the effect of the change in word order. At (1), in hekōn hostis herdēi, hekōn marches together with the subject (hostis) and the positive verb in an alliterating phalanx that controls the negative phrase, mēden aischron. The metrical scheme reinforces the attraction of

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the verb away from the predicate phrase and toward the subject. In (2) as the verb, poiēi, pulls away from the subject, hos an, kakon slips between them and snuggles up to poiēi. This gives the negated predicate more weight and independence than the overmatched aischron of (1). Unlike herdēi, the verb phrase kakon poiēi is now the target of the willing subject’s negation. But the power to negate is weakened by the verb’s removal so that the sense of (2) differs from that of (1). Simonides’s emphasis falls on praise for good intentions. Socrates’s falls on the exclusion of willing from bad doing: “[W]hoever is happy to do nothing bad” morphs too easily into “whoever doesn’t intend to do the bad things he does” (as in, “it’s not my fault”). The implications of this change appear as soon as Socrates completes his counterfactual protasis: (3) Simonides doesn’t say he praises these men, whoever willingly does nothing bad, as if ontōn tinōn hoi hekontes kaka poiousin. there were some who willingly bad things do. (345d) The change of emphasis is from whoever hekōn does nothing bad to those who, when they do bad things, do them reluctantly. Now the singular kakon gives way to the plural, and good intentions can no longer prevent to kakon from being actualized in an indefinite plurality of bad deeds (kaka). Parallel to this is the effect of the shift from distributive to collective enumeration. The passage moves from the indefinite singular (hostis and hos an) that denotes whoever does nothing bad to the plural denoting those who do bad things, as if the latter outnumber the former. I haven’t forgotten that the statement in question is counterfactual; the counterfactual sense, however, governs the willingness to do bad but not the baddoing itself. (4) Socrates is fairly sure that no one (oudeis) among the wise men considers that oudena anthrōpōn hekonta examartanein oude aischra te kai kaka hekonta ergazesthai (345d–e)—“anyone among mortals willingly makes a mistake or both shameful and bad things willingly does.” But wise men know well that pantes oi ta aischra kai ta kaka poiountes akontes poiousi (345e)—“all those the shameful and bad things doing unwillingly do [them].” The pan has now moved from the good intentions of “all men, whoever willingly does nothing shameful” to the failed intentions of

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“all those people already doing the specific shameful and bad things which they do reluctantly.” The repetition poiountes . . . poiousi (“doing . . . do”) constricts poor akontes in the second passage, while the emphatic repetition of hekonta in the first passage accentuates the haplessness that wise men attribute to their fellow mortals. Now we can appreciate the significance of Socrates’s move in substituting kakon for the poet’s aischron at 345d. Kakon poiein is influenced by Socrates’s identification of kakos with amēchanos in the previous division— kakos there becomes “helpless” or “overthrown”—so that “doing wrong” shares its horizon with “doing badly.” The shift from “wicked” to “unfortunate” is reinforced by the addition of examartanein (“makes a mistake”) at 345e. Examartanein and kaka flank aischra on its reentry into the text, and color its meaning. Although aischra doesn’t surrender its moral sense, that sense is momentarily subordinated to “faring badly.” If we take both the moral and circumstantial senses into account, we can say that Socrates imputes to the poet and wise men the following articulated set of opinions: No one willingly gets overthrown. All who get overthrown do so unwillingly. If those who take measures to resist this shameful fate find themselves unavoidably doing something morally shameful, they do so reluctantly and under compulsion. In a world where not even the gods contend against necessity, one can’t be blamed for overthrowing others or for reluctantly doing wrong in order to defer one’s own overthrow. As he continues to pummel his famous paradox, Socrates splices together two lines of attack. On the one hand, the sequence of changes from steps (1) through (4) charts a progressive failure of good intentions that leads to the imminent overthrow of the agathos man. By step (4) this is beginning to sound very much like a rationalization. On the other hand, step (4) more clearly directs attention to the source of the rationalization: The voice and opinion of Simonides are swelled by the chorus of sophoi, producing the impression of a traditional consensus. The juncture at which this occurs is the odd echo effect that links oudena anthrōpōn to oudeis tōn sophōn andrōn: No one among the wise men considers that anyone among mortals, etc. All the wise men know well that all those doing the shameful and bad things do them unwillingly. If at this point we’re tempted to ask how they know this, a reflexive dimension opens up. It may be that the sophoi deem themselves no different from other mortals in respect of the general curse of amēchania. They are quite sure that not one of them willingly does bad things. They are

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equally sure that they cannot help doing whatever shameful and bad things they do. In the next and final stage of the synopsis, Socrates directs this line of attack at Simonides. (5) Simonides does not say he is the praiser of hos an mē kaka poiēi hekōn whoever does not bad things do willingly (345e) but says to hekōn (the “willingly”) about himself (345e). This is a variant echo of the version at (2): hos an hekōn mēden kakon poiēi; “Whoever willingly nothing bad does.” When we compare them, we find that Socrates has shifted hekōn from the first to the last position, which makes it more emphatic—and therefore more ironic—as a qualifier. We also find that kakon gives way to the indefinite plural, and that mē, in replacing mēden, transfers negation from the doing of kaka to the laggard hekōn. The changes underscore the outcome implied but deferred in (2). Here, in spite of good intentions, and with considerable reluctance, bad things get done. And regardless of the reason Socrates gives for the transposition of hekōn, the foregoing account prepares the way for him to initiate another mean move: The interpretation foisted at 345d on a condescending Simonides—that he says he is a willing praiser of those who try not to do shameful things—will be maliciously overthrown in the sequel. At 346b–c Socrates makes him say of himself that he doesn’t do [the] bad things [he does] willingly but reluctantly and under compulsion. The upshot of these changes is that although Socrates frames them in terms of his familiar thesis, he makes them generate strikingly different alternatives that comment on their own deviations from the thesis. First, if Simonides doesn’t say what he seems to say—that he praises whoever mē kaka poiēi hekōn—it is not for the Socratic reason that no one willingly does bad things. Rather, it is for the reason suggested by the poet’s relinquishing the search for an all-blameless mortal: There is no one who doesn’t do bad things in either the practical or the moral sense. Therefore, second, the field of praise gets narrowed to those who, when they do things that are shameful and bad, do them (a) unwillingly and (b) successfully. Third, to insist that people can’t help the bad things they do— that whoever does shameful and bad things does them unwillingly—may under certain circumstances itself be a shameful speech act. What these circumstances are emerge when we look more closely at the rationalization Socrates attributes to Simonides at 345e–346c. Simonides “considered that a respectable man often compels himself to become

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the friend and praiser of someone, as often happens to a man with an estranged mother or father or native land or some other similar things [e allo ti tōn toioutōn, 346a].” The blank space produced by the italicized phrase is subsequently filled in by Socrates’s equally vague reference to “some tyrant or other” (346b). When these are connected with an earlier statement by Protagoras, the poet’s dilemma becomes clear: At 339a Protagoras had casually noted that “Simonides somewhere [pou] remarks to Scopas, son of Creon of Thessaly” (339a). According to modern scholars, the lyric poets of the sixth century found their most favorable reception in the courts of tyrants, and the poem is probably an encomium written to an aristocratic patron. This setting puts Simonides and his ode in an amusing light. For example: the Scopads were admired for their wealth by the reactionary sophist and future tyrant Critias (Plutarch, Cimon 10), and they were known for their extravagance and Medism. Simonides was famous for many things: his love of money, his praise of ancestral wealth, his victory-songs composed for pay, his willingness to commemorate not only Medists and antiMedists but also mules, and his zealous pursuit of patronage from tyrants, aristocrats, and democrats alike. This dim view of Simonides has been taken by many students of the poem, and in his useful survey of critical attitudes Hugh Parry notes that it is the older of two divergent opinions: “[T]he poem has been seen among other things as an epinician ode, a consolation for a heinous but unavoidable crime, an indication of the poet’s lack of moral sincerity, and a regrettable case of distortion for the sake of money. Such interpretations are a far cry from the later picture of Simonides as a seeker of truth, and of the poem in question as a landmark in the history of ideas.”7 Parry illustrates the earlier view with the argument of F. G. Schneidewin (1885) that the poem “was written to celebrate Scopas’s victory in a chariot-race, but [that] the poet was constrained to include a vindication of some crime committed by his patron and to console him for his alltoo-human weakness.”8 The shift to the more positive view owed chiefly to the scenario projected by Wilamowitz’s influential study. He supposed, in Parry’s words, that “Simonides was not a mere flatterer” but that he believed “in an inner ethic independent of birth.” He “had the courage of his convictions to the point of telling his patron the truth: that is, that aretē is a purely moral ideal.”9 The trend in more recent criticism has been to assume that the poem’s “philosophical implications are primary” and to try to justify it “solely on its intellectual merits.”10 Assessments differ chiefly over whether and to

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what extent the poem has anything new to say about morality. Parry notes (with disapproval) that some commentators go so far as to pronounce it “a landmark in the history of ideas.”11 Because older critics considered the poem in the light of historical and biographical evidence about Simonides, they take into account the effect of the poem’s use—that is, the effect of its occasion and motivation—on its meaning. In this, they resemble Socrates, who would appreciate their skepticism. If he were to be told that Simonides was no flatterer but “had the courage of his convictions to the point of telling his patron the truth,” his jaw would drop. And he would understand why Wilamowitz (like so many other devotees of Simonides) counseled against taking Plato’s analysis of the poem seriously. He would be more open to the Adams’ gloss on his comment that Simonides’s praise was compelled: “Plato deals a sly thrust at Simonides’s notorious avarice. . . . The words all’ anankazomenos [but under compulsion] contain the sting.”12 From 346b on Socrates makes the context of utterance the dominant interpretive factor. This encourages us to believe that the poem’s moral statement is contradicted by its use as a particular kind of epideictic speech act. It instantiates Simonides’s reluctant praise of tyrants who have done wrong. Therefore, it gives new meaning to the tolerant morality encoded in such sentiments as “no one is wholly blameless,” “it is impossible to stay good,” and “only the gods can stay good but even they cannot contend against necessity.” “I praise and love all who don’t willingly do anything shameful”: Simonides’s statement is now stretched to include those who unwillingly do something shameful. When Socrates notes that Simonides transposes tō hekōn, “the willingly,” from others to himself, he makes it clear that Simonides is soothing himself for being “compelled” unwillingly to excuse with faint praise a tyrant who was “compelled” unwillingly to do wrong. Socrates’s apologia pro sua culpa on behalf of Simonides has the effect of converting the poem to Simonides’s apologia pro sua culpa on behalf of both Scopas and himself. As Wilamowitz and others argue, the poem makes claims to moral authority by its cultivation of the wisdom effect. But those claims are disabled when Socrates overexplains Simonides’s submission to political “necessity.” And the signs of submission become more strident in the final division of the interlude.

Division VII. Socrates Overthrown. 346c–347a As he approaches the parrhesiastic climax of the ode, Socrates’s voicing becomes more complex. He continues the practice of embedding the ode

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in an oration against Pittacus. But instead of separating short passages between stretches of commentary, he reverses the procedure, firing off a complete strophe punctuated by short bursts of interpolation. The comments now penetrate the strophe and mingle with the verses. That move not only quickens the pace and raises the rhetorical temperature of the performance. It also further obscures the boundary between the words attributed to an actual poet and those Socrates places in the mouth or mind of a speaker he invents. Socrates prefaces his recital by refocusing the rhetorical situation: “So he proceeds to tell Pittacus” (346c). He then steps back into the role of Simonides aiming verses at Pittacus. But after the sixth division this move has a different resonance, for we’ve been reminded that the poem is (and therefore was) addressed to Scopas. In that context it seems more to extenuate than to praise. But it may merely reflect the poet’s unwilling response to the “necessity” of patronage. The approach to the final strophe is thus clouded by the possibly dubious circumstances and motives that occasion it. Given these shadows, how can the address to Pittacus be articulated with the address to Scopas? I am indeed content with whoever is not bad or not too apalamnos. He who knows the justice that profits the city is a sound man. I do not blame him. The race of fools is infinite. Surely all things are fair with which shameful things are not mingled. (346c) I leave apalamnos untranslated. It means both helpless and reckless or violent: literally, without hands, therefore unhandy, but also, hard to handle. After the sixth division it’s something of a treat to find Socrates setting up Simonides as an arbiter morum. And after the discourse on kakia and amēchania in the fifth division, the pragmatic tolerance Simonides proclaims is crossed by a disruptive current. “Not morally evil or not too violent” now shares the semantic space with “not overthrown or not too helpless.” Knowing from personal experience that it is difficult, no, impossible, to stay good, Simonides can sympathize with anyone who is not too unhandy. He understands that one may sometimes have to be a little violent to keep from being overthrown. The poet is more cautious, or tepid, in the fourth strophe than in the third. Instead of offering to praise and love he now resigns himself to being content and abjuring blame. He lowers his expectations as if Socrates’s intervention between the two strophes reminded him that he was not in

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the position to ask more of a patron or of himself. His antipathy to the Pittacan thing now takes on practical meaning. If Pittacus is right, it would be difficult but possible to stay morally good and the standard would be more austere: One could be expected to make the effort. Anyone fond of blaming would then have a field day. But presumably Scopas or some other patron would not find this to his taste. It would therefore be foolish not to slake one’s appetite on the glut of fools. Does praising now mean not blaming? Simonides will not blame the sound or healthy man who knows the justice that profits the city (onēsipolin dikan). But will he praise him? Will that man make a good patron? As Socrates pictures it, Simonides’s problem seems to be to find ways to praise those to whom traditional epideictic topics and criteria do not easily apply—those who may therefore need and reward the poet’s praise all the more. Some commentators have assumed that “he who knows the justice that profits the city” refers to the civic-minded ordinary citizen of the democratic polis. Parry, however, thinks the “words could refer just as easily to a tyrant who administers justice to his subjects.” I partly agree because several details suggest a better candidate for the role of the man who knows onēsipolin dikan than the ordinary good citizen, especially since onēsis means pleasure as well as profit. Consider, for example, the earlier sequence of Protagorean opinions on the subject of the justice that profits the city: Zeus directed Hermes to give all citizens a share of the aidōs and dikē without which cities cannot come to be or survive. Since there cannot be a city without aretē, it would be strange if the agathoi did not teach their children that virtue ignorance of which could bring death, exile, loss of property, and the overthrow of the household. The wealthiest and most powerful people are best able to do this, and after their sons have been released from paideia “the city” inscribes the nomoi by which they are to rule and be ruled. As to the most advanced instruction in this art and virtue of politikē, Protagoras excels all others in helping (onēsai) people become noble and good (to kalon kai agathon genesthai). The dikē, aretē, and archē of the city have thus become identified with hoi oligoi, the few who are well-born and -bred (and -heeled). This identification, along with the opposition between hoi oligoi and hoi polloi, vibrates in Simonides’s contrast between the hygiēs anēr, the sound or healthy man who knows onēsipolin dikan, and the tribe or generation (genethla) of fools beyond number (apeirōn). Rhetorically, the contrast evokes the social oppositions of number and birth (the one sound man, the many born fools) touched on in Hippias’s speech at 337d ff.

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This contrast highlights the distinction between Simonides’s moral preference for relaxed standards and his social preference for the wealthy and powerful, and it allows the two preferences to converge. The healthy man may not be all-blameless, but he doesn’t need a doctor if he knows how to prescribe the justice that profits and pleases his city, and therefore himself. Tyrants like Scopas fit this description and Socrates has been suggesting that Simonides would praise the tyrant if he could, even if unwillingly, but that in any event he would not willingly blame him. When Socrates-Simonides prefaces the strophe with “I do not reproach you, Pittacus, because I like reproaching,” it sets up the expectation that he will go on to say, “but because x, y, etc.” Yet Simonides’s attention to his own praiseworthy tolerance carries him through to the end of the strophe without any explicit reference to why he does reproach Pittacus. Socrates will correct that omission at the end of the interlude. There may be a very fine line between “hard to stay good” and “impossible to stay good,” but it is of such small things that Socrates’s ethical critique is made. The Simonides he impersonates isn’t aware of this line. In his effort to win glory and please a patron by overthrowing the Pittacan thing, he turns a molehill into a mountain. The quarrel he starts up has all the size and consequence of a Prodican nit. By this time in the interlude, his vehement pursuit of Pittacus’s bland rhēma is assuming bizarre proportions. Socrates’s two interpolations maintain this undertone of vehemence by creating tension between the asserted disinclination to blame, on the one hand, and, on the other, the denunciatory Spartan pellet, “The race of fools is infinite.” The invective force of this pellet shoots it into the implied reproach of those who delight in reproaching. If this sequence vividly illuminates Socrates’s earlier sketch of “good” men who disguise their feelings and tell themselves soothing stories, it also portrays a man whose truce with himself remains uneasy. The uneasiness extends to and ambiguates the final line of the poem proper: “Surely all things are fair with which shameful things are not mingled” (panta toi kala toisi t’ aischra mē memiktai). This seems appropriately assertive and generalizing at first. It is the new rhēma brandished victoriously by the wise man who has just overthrown the Pittacan thing. But after the ear recovers from the blow, its echoes are questions. Is the proposition “all things unadulterated by aischra are kala” equivalent to the more restrictive “only those things, etc.” (or “no things adulterated by aischra are kala”)? Are the opposed terms to be understood as mutually exclusive contradictories or as scalar contraries that can shade into each other?

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Given the preponderance of fools, the more restrictive construal of these options would soon put a high-minded encomiast out of work. The rhēma nevertheless gestures in that direction because its disjunctive energy conveys an effect of moral rigor which is intensified by redundancy—kala, one wants to say, are by definition free of aischra. But counteracting the effect of rigor, the expansive panta . . . kala exudes tolerance. It opens up the field by suggesting that many things, though not blameless, qualify to be kala on the grounds that they are good enough to praise because not bad enough to blame. The aischron continues to vibrate between these two contrary pressures on the statement: Are aischra failures (even if they fare well) because they are shameful and wrong, or are they shameful and bad because they are failures? In the sixth division Socrates depicts the uneasy conscience of one who reluctantly excuses moral failure and praises the tyrant in order to avoid the “necessity” of practical failure. Against this, the ringing toi of the final line (“surely,” “assuredly,” “true it is”) expresses a kind of last-ditch upsurge, an effort to reclaim the higher ground of moral rigor. The utterance combines the wisdom effect with the air of confidence by which the truth-sayer, summing up, tries for a rousing affirmation of the plenitude and purity of the kala he would willingly praise. On so fair and foul a note the poem concludes, which is to say that metrists, editors, and others who liberate it from Plato and lock it into print declare it officially over at this point. But Simonides has not yet finished speaking or being spoken to. His attack on Pittacus continues, as does Socrates’s attack on him. Reverting briefly to his role as Simonides’s explicator, Socrates takes such pains to clarify the utterance that he throws it into umbrage: “He does not say this in the sense in which it might be said that in truth all things are white which are unmixed with black—that would be ridiculous in many ways—but [he says] that he himself accepts the things in between [ta mesa] and so does not reproach them” (346c–d). Of course, Simonides does—or tries to—say what Socrates claims is ridiculous, but the poet’s accent on purity and distinction is contravened by Socrates’s gloss, which leaves standing only the shadier concession to frailty. In the terms of the color analogy, to meson is not a neutral space between opposites but the gray area produced by their blending. Since Simonides accepts as kala things mixed with aischra, his preferential category is not white but gray. The considerations behind his acceptance are practical rather than moral. That is, they are immoral.

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This is suggested by the Protagorean character of the move to the color analogy. In the passage the analogy recalls that Protagoras argued that Socrates’s identification of the just with the holy was unjust because “there is a way in which white resembles black, and hard soft, and so with all other things which are regarded as most opposed to each other,” and so also with such different (if not opposed) things as “the parts of the face.” One could therefore prove if one wanted that anything resembles anything else “even if the likeness is very small” (331d). The dialogue offers two ways to interpret to meson. As a mean, a principle of measure, it is associated with what Terence Irwin calls the “principle of hedonistic prudence,” and with some of the defensive axioms that express it, such as mēden agan, “nothing too much.”13 Hippias uses it in this manner at 338a when he asks Socrates and Protagoras to compromise between the extremes of makrologia and brachylogia so that everyone will be pleased and the entertainment can continue. The other sense of to meson is featured by the color analogy and cuts closer to the bone: to meson can denote the gray area in which the convergence of opposites signifies their complicity, their shared responsibility for the argument and its consequences: For although my first object is to test the argument, the result perhaps will be that both I, the questioner, and my respondent are brought to the test. (333c) Yet as often as he blames the man for saying the same as himself he obviously blames himself too. (339d) Hence . . . it is . . . possible to become good, and bad also, in the case of the same person. (345c) You [Socrates] . . . are now hot in opposition to yourself. . . . Protagoras . . . now seems as eager for the opposite. (36lb–c) To meson in this sense—which we may call its middle-voice sense— denotes a collision rather than a convergence: The participants, whose ethical positions are mutually exclusive, have collaborated to produce an argument that binds each to the other and divides each from himself. In both opponents the mixture of kala and aischra produces a gray meson that accords more with the color theory reported by Aristotle than with that (or those) exhibited in other dialogues: Gray is a variant of black. For Socrates any concession to the hedonistic meson involves submission to this middle-voice meson, and he will go on to show that Simonides’s

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attempt to purify his motives and performance of aischra only increases their aischron character. The effect of Socrates’s sophistical gloss is to target the sophistry of the final line, its hedonistic calculation, and its reliance on soterial arts of face to countenance the concession to frailty. Simonides’s apologia pro sua culpa increases in force through the ode, and the following outline traces a progressive lowering of standards: 1. Only the gods stay good; mortals can’t. 2. Good = faring well, bad = faring ill; those who fare well will sooner or later be overthrown; those who stay good longest are loved by the gods (and most like them). 3. Since no mortal is all-blameless, I (who am no god) praise and love those who willingly do nothing shameful. 4. Since not even the gods can fight against necessity (they are sometimes overthrown? sometimes forced to do something shameful?), I am content with whoever is not bad or too helpless (or too violent), hence I am not fond of blaming. (I have, indeed, unwillingly praised a tyrant who did wrong.) I am content, therefore, not to blame the sound man who knows onēsipolin dikan. 5. The world is full of blameworthy fools. But for someone not fond of blaming all things are kala that are not mixed with aischra. The distinction between kala and aischra is clear enough when illustrated by examples drawn from earlier discussions in the dialogue: faring well versus faring badly, the deinos versus the amēchanos, the safe-minded (sōphrōn) versus the foolish (aphrōn), the honorable versus the disgraceful, the fortunate few versus the hapless many, or the handsome, strong, swift, and deep-voiced versus the ugly, weak, slow, and shrill-voiced. By step 3 the distinction becomes less clear: The “all-blameless” (panamōmos) person is excluded from consideration, and Simonides resigns himself to praising those who are reluctant to do anything shameful or bad. They seem condemned by the logic driving steps 4 and 5 to become those who do shameful or bad things reluctantly. In Simonides’s moral scheme the acts of those who reluctantly do shameful or bad things may still qualify as kala if they meet two conditions: first, that they are reluctantly performed to protect against amēchania, and second, that they are successfully performed. Socrates’s “report” of Simonides’s rationalization thus makes the poet appear ashamed, not in the sense of having fared badly but in the sense of having done something

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morally shameful to avoid that fate. The Socratic defense of the poet’s praise of kala turns into an attack. Simonides is forced to speak against himself when the spin Socrates imparts to aischron makes it swerve toward the meanings of ponēron and adikon, and then sends the whole package sheering like an amēchanos symphora across the boundary into the category of kala, which it contaminates, redefines, and overthrows. As the interlude draws to a close Socrates continues to portray the poet’s uneasy self-division. First, he reassumes impersonation with a little assiduous backing and filling. Then he returns the poet to the third person for a brief philological aside. Finally, he brings Simonides back to confess in his own voice the compliance Socrates had ascribed to him at 346c, and to unleash a rousing peroration. The poet’s first attempt at closure has just been foiled by the color analogy that Socrates uses to explain that the poet means he accepts ta mesa and so does not reproach them. I do not seek, he said, “an all-blameless mortal among us who take the fruit of the broad earth. Should I discover him, I will tell you about it.” But then, as far as that is concerned, I would never [get the opportunity to] praise anybody, so it is enough for me if he is in between and does nothing bad, since I praise and love all—and here he uses the Mytilenaean dialect, for it is against Pittacus that he says “I praise and love all willingly”—here at “willingly” one has to make the pause in speaking—“who do nothing shameful,” though there are some I praise and love unwillingly. If, then, you had spoken what was even moderately reasonable and true, O Pittacus, I would never have reproached you. But as it is, since you give the appearance of speaking the truth while lying outrageously about the most important things, for that I reproach you. And this, Prodicus and Protagoras, I said, seems to me to be what Simonides had in mind in producing this ode. (346d–347a) “I do not seek, he said [ephē]”: The imperfect tense momentarily sets Simonides apart from Socrates, reminding us of their distinctness. Yet this only serves to accentuate the loss of distinctness that follows when Socrates continues the Simonidean voice beyond the end of the quotation from strophe 3. Both the quotation and the gloss by “Simonides” that follows are disturbed by the undertone of the apologia in Division VI. The pedantic quibble about dialect associates Pittacus with Mytilene, recalls the Cean-vs.-Lesbian episode at 341c, and is immediately followed by the arch allusion to the tyrant unwillingly praised. These details bring the political context of the ode more fully into view.

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Pittacus was not only a sage but also a Mytilenaean tyrant or aisymnētēs (elective tyrant) who became a democratic reformer like Solon, and whom the aristocratic partisan, Alcaeus, severely criticized. What seems more likely here, at 346d–e, is a correlation between the attack on a foe of aristocracy, voiced as direct address, and the actual address to Scopas noted by Protagoras. The attack on Pittacus then seems performed for the benefit of the Thessalian aristocrat, and the attack on Pittacus’s rhēma becomes part of the apology for Scopas’s failure to stay good. Another aspect of this correlation flares forth from Socrates’s fantasy of the poet’s bad conscience and self-division: The increasing vehemence of the attack on Pittacus, peaking sharply in the closing tirade invented by Socrates, takes on the expressive force of a displacement. I imagine either or both of two possibilities: The vehemence may be redirected from Scopas to Pittacus, or it may be redirected from Simonides himself to Pittacus. The second seems to me more likely, though if he is reproaching himself for unwillingly praising an unworthy patron, some of the animus could attach to the patron. But since he reproaches Pittacus for lying about the most important things while appearing to speak the truth, and since Socrates depicts Simonides as a self-proclaimed free speaker aware of being less than candid, it is easier to see the displacement as a projection of self-reproach. Pittacus has become Simonides’s pharmakos and— true to his name—has been smeared with pitch (pitta). As in his conduct of the hedonism argument, Socrates scatters enough clues to his ethical beliefs to generate the possibility of conflict between those principles and the morality he develops in the name of Simonides. One site of the conflict is Pittacus’s rhēma, “it is hard to stay good.” I noted earlier that under the pressure of Socrates’s treatment “good” could mean “ethically good” as well as “successful.” If that alternative is factored in, Socrates’s emphasis on the vehemence of Simonides’s response to Pittacus is less outlandish. The opposition he conjures up between Pittacus’s “hard” and Simonides’s “impossible” is essential to this effect. By itself, “it is hard to stay good” easily assumes the apologetic value of Simonides’s discourse. But when the issue is joined at the collision between “impossible, not merely hard” and “hard but not impossible,” the latter indicates a standard more austere than Simonides can tolerate. And it implies that one could be expected to make the effort. The complete Simonidean response to this revision of the Pittacan thing will then be “it is impossible to stay both successful and virtuous, impossible to stay ethically good and keep from being overthrown.” The familiar Socratic alternative to this is “one should always try to do good, to be and stay good, and should never harm anyone, no matter what the cost.”

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This is what Simonides is lying about. Socrates combines evasive rationalization with mounting invective to imitate a conflicted rhetorical sensibility. The tone of anger he pumps into the exordium takes form in a speaker whose efforts to soothe himself divide him more deeply against himself. He sharpens the tone in order to show that the anger is exacerbated precisely because Simonides is addressing these words to another rather than to himself: “Since you give the appearance of speaking the truth while lying about the most important things, for that I reproach you.” There is real bitterness in “the race of fools is infinite,” and although Simonides aims it at Pittacus, the attack boomerangs. It betrays his awareness that the more stringent ethical code may be the truth one should live by even as he is in the process of violating the code and trying to justify the violation. Socrates thus converts the poem into the the portrait of two of his favorite generic targets: the bad-faith discourse that circulates through the apprehensive or pleonectic society; the diploos speaker whose soterial skill of self-deception can never fully silence the better logos despite a rich fund of techniques invented by society for the preservation of amathia. But that isn’t all. Simonides is not the focus of the interlude. He lives only in Socrates’s mouth and his epanorthōsis is conspicuously inadequate to serve as the sole subject of this sort of analysis. In a poem that associates to kakon with amēchania he urges his addressee to avoid evil by remaining eumēchanos, therefore agathos. Protagoras, in attacking Socrates through his attack on Simonides, uses the poem for the same reason: The house of Callias is his Thessalian court. His concern for the meaning of the poem he cites is ancillary to his interest in the scene of citation: He tries to render Simonides’s argument amēchanos in order to reduce Socrates to amēchania. But as Socrates’s interlocutory and narrative conduct of the dialogue shows, Protagoras is also trying to avoid amēchania himself. The critique of Protagoras overtly sustained in the Theaetetus is implicit throughout the Protagoras. Here too the author of Truth makes parrhesiastic claims: He shuns disguise and candidly prefers himself as an unexcelled teacher and purveyor of political truths. And here too Socrates shows that in striving to outperform the other sophists in the production of the wisdom effect Protagoras is “playing to the crowd” (dēmoumenon, Tht. 161e). Like Simonides, he is an itinerant flatterer of wealth and power in whatever form he finds it. He can be leader of his audience only by learning to follow and serve them, and his diaphora is the mask of his likeness to those he serves.

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All this makes contact with Socrates’s argument at Theaetetus 161b ff. There he shows, in John McDowell’s paraphrase, “that Protagoras’s claim of superior wisdom for himself is incompatible with his own doctrine.”14 So it is not hard to believe that when Socrates stages Simonides’s attack on Pittacus he aims the poet’s harsh concluding words at Protagoras: “[S]ince you give the appearance of speaking the truth while lying about the most important things, for that I reproach you.” But that isn’t all. Though Socrates may begin his and Simonides’s defense as the latter’s advocate against Protagoras on one side and Pittacus on the other, he goes on to impersonate and overthrow a Protagorean Simonides. This move validates Protagoras’s original charge (that Simonides speaks against himself) in such a way as to make the charge rub off on Protagoras. In the Theaetetus Socrates resurrects Protagoras to complain that his views have been unfairly represented (166a ff.). I can imagine his projecting a similar scenario here. The speech he invents for Simonides could well express Protagoras’s irritation at the way Socrates had behaved in the earlier phases of discussion: “[S]ince you give the appearance of speaking the truth while lying about the most important things, for that I reproach you.” To imagine this on the model of Simonidean bad conscience generates another idea: Socrates makes Simonides/Protagoras reproach Pittacus/Socrates as a defense against the deos of self-recognition. The reproach displaces the more difficult alternative: “[S]ince I give the appearance of speaking the truth while lying about the most important things, for that I reproach myself.” But that isn’t all. Socrates’s statement at 344b that Simonides proceeds “as though he were making a speech” is self-descriptive. It draws attention to the parody of Protagorean epideixis he is at that moment engaged in. Such indicators of the polylogical voicing of the interlude bring home Socrates’s calculated production of the boomerang effect. The voicing destabilizes simple oppositions. It not only confirms Protagoras’s initial charge at 339d but ironically generalizes it: Simonides “proceeds to blame Pittacus for saying the same as he did—that it is hard to stay good—and refuses to accept from him the same statement that he made himself. Yet, as often as he blames the man for saying the same as himself he obviously blames himself too, so that in either the former or the latter place his statement is wrong.” By his conduct of the interlude Socrates brings this charge to bear not only against Simonides and Protagoras but also against himself. We saw how Socrates’s earlier claim to be a disinterested truth-seeker was contradicted by the way he subordinated the moral content of the

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argument to an eristic motive. In the interlude he shows himself conspicuously straining to appropriate Simonides’s words in the service of that motive. The arguments and motives he ascribes to Simonides clearly don’t come from Simonides; they come from Socrates, and Simonides proves amēchanos to defend against misinterpretation. Pretending to speak for the poet and know his intention, Socrates refashions the poem into the image and critique of the present interlocutory occasion. Thus he ridicules the practice of stealing poems while exposing his own complicity in the practice and in the eristic contest it serves. But when he stages the strained attempt to convert Simonides’s words into a vehicle for expressing his own belief, he also stages the failure of the attempt by driving the vehicle off in the wrong direction and letting himself be dragged along with it. Since ventriloquation is a two-way street, the statement I just made about the arguments coming from Socrates is reversible. For he makes himself the site of a Protagorean performance while affirming his singleminded commitment to the truth. This affirmation is now represented as a traditional maneuver employed by sophoi and poets striving for the wisdom effect. I note in passing that such an observation challenges the exclusive emphasis on the defenselessness of poetry. It indicates rather what I referred to in Chapter 2 as a conflict of ventriloquisms. When Socrates appropriates and reinterprets the ode, he shows how traditional rationalizations can be reactivated by any speaker who finds it useful to deploy them in his own interest. In the process of bringing Simonides back to life, he allows Socratic logoi to be mixed with and fade into those of the poet. While carrying out the de-Socratizing of Simonides he enacts the Simonidizing of Socrates. “I praise and love all willingly . . . who do nothing shameful, though there are some I praise and love unwillingly.” The apology he ascribes to Simonides is easily adaptable to his own entanglement in the sophistical atmosphere of Callias’s house. By letting himself be persuaded to remain and continue the entertainment for which he expresses contempt (347c–e), he effectively endorses what he had earlier dismissed in his sarcastic “praise and love” of Callias’s “philosophy” (335d–e). Thus, at least positionally, Socrates binds himself to the poet and sophist in the gray or mixed area between kala and aischra. “We are bound to one another by the inevitable law of our [interlocutory] being, but to nothing else, not even ourselves” (Tht. 160b). If the self-defeat described in the preceding paragraph epitomizes the fate of the Socratic project as a whole, his comment on the second strophe applies to him: “[A]lthough it

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is impossible to be a good man, continuing to be good, it is possible to become good, and bad also, in the case of the same person.” As he joins Simonides in denying any fondness for psogos or mōmos, the air of protesting too much suggests how unwillingly praise and love were proffered—but if unwillingly, not unknowingly, not involuntarily; an irony for someone’s ears or eyes if not Callias’s, therefore at once unwilling and hekōn. Socrates builds up the sense of a suppressed impulse to blame until the impulse discharges itself in the angry outburst that he and the other occupants of the first person direct not only at each other but also, finally, at themselves: “[S]ince you give the appearance of speaking the truth while lying about the most important things, for that I reproach you.”

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Macrological Mystification Protagoras’s Myth

Macrology In the dialogue to which he gives his name, Protagoras claims that his fellow sophists mistreat their pupils by throwing them back into the study of the special arts (arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, music) from which they fled. He would never do that: From him a young man like Hippocrates will learn (mathēsetai) only what he has come for. This mathēma consists in good judgment about ton oikeion and tēs poleōs, so that he will be able to manage his own oikia and also have political power (318d–e). Of this statement we should note two things. First, its intention is eristic: Protagoras is advertising against competitors like Prodicus and Hippias, who are present. Second, the statement displays the characteristic ambivalence of the sophist’s attitude toward his clients. In promising to give them what they already want—what they have come for—he induces them to “want” the good he has come to give them. The sophistical project has been beautifully characterized by Gregory Vlastos. Protagoras does not derive his superior “ability to resolve moral disagreement in his favor” from his adeptness “in rubbing his own appearances into the minds of other people.” Rather, it comes from his proficiency in persuading others that what he can best give them is what they themselves desire as good: “A man who bases his claim to wisdom on his mere ability to impose his thoughts on others is much less likely to succeed in this very object than one who bases it on his ability to change their views in such a way that the result will be for their own

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good—their good as judged by themselves and by whatever norms are acceptable to them.”1 This Protagorean method of “induction” is a low-risk procedure, since the sophist has presumably made his study of the demotic beast and knows how to master the many by “following the great animal’s opinions” and “making the many his masters” (Rep. 492b ff.). Both sides of this attitude—subservience and contempt—appear separately during the dialogue: the first in his praise of Athenian paideia and nomoi and the second in two casual comments: “[T]he mass of people notice nothing but simply echo what the leaders tell them” (317a), and “why must we look into the opinions of the common man, who says whatever comes into his head?” (353a). Leo Strauss separates these opinions by attributing to Protagoras a distinction between the laws, which “are, or should be, ‘the inventions of good and ancient lawgivers’ (326d 5–6),” and “the enactments of a chance multitude. . . . It is due to the merit of those inventors that present-day man is separated by a gulf from the original savages.”2 But this diverts attention from two of the main features of Plato’s portrait of Protagoras. First, his success owes partly to his sharing the hedonist assumptions of the many he contemns. Second, his appeal to ancient lawgivers (including the poets) allows him to validate his own teaching by ascribing it to the ancients, which is to say, by reading into the ancients whatever he wants to find there. Both these points are made later in the dialogue, and Protagoras himself makes the second point in his own way by his outlandish suggestion that the old poets and lawgivers were sophists in disguise (316c–317c). The suggestion is of course convertible: The new sophist is a poet in disguise. Though he pretends to a modern, skeptical, and toughminded superiority, he is in fact a purveyor of the ancient “wisdom” and values that appeal to, derive from, and dominate the traditional culture of the polis. He promotes the pursuit of wealth, power, and honor. He’s all for chasing pleasure and fleeing pain so long as it does no harm to health or reputation. He applauds the musical paideia that not only produces replicas “of the good men of old” but also imposes conformity by associating “bad” with punishment/pain and “good” with the pleasure and rewards of obedience. From an entirely different position the sophist comes to uphold the same belief as the poets: Though nomos may be reality for the rooted poet and fiction for the wandering sophist, it is for both the source of order, peace, and civilization. It may be all the more urgently so for the

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disenchanted sophist if he believes that the following statement expresses the state of nature for human perception: Each one of us is a measure of what is and of what is not. But there is all the difference in the world between one man and another just in the very fact that what is and appears to one is different from what is and appears to the other. And as for wisdom and the wise man, I am very far from saying they do not exist. By a wise man I mean precisely a man who can change any one of us, when what is bad appears and is to him, and make what is good appear and be to him. (Tht. 166d)3 This is the world of sophistical misanthropology in which the perceptual state of nature is all but anarchy, and wise sophists traveling from one fortified tree to the next, each tree a different universe, would scarcely constitute an institution sufficient to forestall the doom. Humans must not be encouraged to develop these subjectivist and relativist tendencies by improving their several minds and skills. That would lead to mass murder. Rather, some counterforce must be imposed on individuals from outside, synchronizing their diversities, pressing against the state of nature, integrating humans into groups under a rule. Art in the form of political virtue must intervene if poleis are to be created against the grain of nature so that humans may be made to agree on what is right or wrong. In Protagorean misanthropology the effect of art (political relativism) is to reduce if not eliminate the effect of nature and chance (perceptual relativism). “Whatever practices seem right and laudable to any particular state are so, for that state, so long as it holds by them” (Tht. 167c). This provides the criterion, for each community, in terms of which the wise man can “substitute sound for unsound views of what is right.” Neither the Protagorean theory nor the Athenian’s synoptic version of it in the Laws provides for a smooth transition from the natural “war of every man against every man” to the shared values of the polis. Whatever humans do on their own, whatever skills they develop, can only increase their natural discord. Thus the implied transition from nature to politics and war to peace must be preceded by failure that is desperate enough to make humans aware of their deep need of assistance from forces beyond them. Plato often mentions such cataclysmic moments. One is described by Socrates when he begins to answer the “true” Protagorean position: “[I]n moments of great danger and distress, whether in war or in sickness or at sea, men regard as a god anyone who can take control of the situation and

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look to him as a savior, when his only point of superiority is his knowledge. Indeed, the world is full of people looking for those who can instruct and govern men and animals and direct their doings, and there are also those who think themselves qualified to teach and qualified to rule” (Tht. 170a–b). While the first sentence refers to particular moments, the second expresses a generally applicable insight: Most people are always looking for leaders, masters, and gods to entrust their destinies to. At the same time the natural distrust and hostility born of perceptual relativism makes people suspicious of merely human superiors. They’re reluctant to place themselves in the power of others, especially if those others are outsiders—xenoi, tyrannoi, or sophoi. The ancient poet or seer grasped both sides of this attitude. He appreciated the need for common measure and understood the fear of superior individuals whose private measures might become law. His response was to make himself the spokesman of the gods. Of course, since these were the gods he had created, he could count on them to validate his legislative competence. Appealing to religion, prophecy, and the shared epic past, he institutionalized these appeals in the musical and gymnastic forms of paideia. In this way he persuaded humans that the order they invented was the product not merely of their art but of the gods and tradition—that is, “the nature of things.” This is what Protagoras means when he calls the ancients sophists who used these appeals and institutions “as a screen to escape malice” (Prot. 316e). The modern sophist compares his work to that of a doctor or husbandman. He presents himself as a technical expert who can cure souls as if they were bodies. The real significance of this claim surfaces in one of Protagoras’s more amusing juxtapositions: And as for the wise, my dear Socrates, . . . I call them, when they have to do with the body, physicians, and when they have to do with plants, husbandmen. For I assert that husbandmen too, when plants are sickly and have depraved sensations, substitute for these sensations that are sound and healthy, and moreover that wise and honest public speakers substitute in the community sound for unsound views of what is right. (Tht. 167b–c) The point is driven home by the incongruous sequence, “body, . . . plants”; we expect to hear “body” followed by “souls.” The sophistical cure by persuasion is ideological rather than ideational, and coercive rather than dialectical: It aims directly at the powers, sensations, and desires conditioned by body rather than by intelligence.

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This brainwashing is deceptively concealed by the self-presentation of sophists as “wise and honest public speakers.” As the sophist replaces the ancient poets, so he continues in his own way their work as teachers of paideia. He will encourage pupils to memorize “poems containing much admonition and many stories, eulogies, and panegyrics of the good men of old, so that the child may be inspired to imitate them and long to be like them” (Prot. 326a). Thus when serious debate is about to begin and Socrates challenges the sophist to demonstrate that virtue is teachable, Protagoras responds by maneuvering his audience into the position of children anxious to be told the truth in a story: “[S]hall I, as an old man speaking to his juniors, put my explanation in the form of a story, or give it as a reasoned argument?” The choice is predetermined toward the first alternative by the qualifying hōs presbyterōs neōterois. When he is told to do what he pleases, he replies that “it will be more pleasant [chariesteron] to tell you a story” (320c). His resort to myth is a strategy described by Percy Cohen as a device “for blocking off explanations.” Myths anchor “the present in the past” to ensure that the effect will seem determined by its causes: A narrative is an ordering of specific events. This activity requires the establishment or creation of a moment of origin, or a moment of transformation. . . . The advantage that myth has over cosmology is that the latter may merely provide a set of ideas which sets limits to conceptual exploration; while myth does provide a time reference, it does presuppose that circumstances can be traced to particular, if only imaginary, events. To locate things in time, even if the exact time is unspecified, creates a far more effective device for legitimation, for example, than simply creating a set of abstract ideas which are timeless.4 Plato’s varied mixtures of cosmology and myth illustrate equally varied ways of setting limits to further exploration for participants in the dialogues, while stimulating it in Plato’s readers. Both myth and cosmology may function as the kind of mathēsis—or better, mythēsis—setting the mind at rest. Cohen notes that he derives his idea from the Hebrew Midrash, in a commentary on the problem of creation. The question that is posed is as follows: Why is the world created with the letter “Beth”? (The Hebrew letter ‫ ב‬when used as a prefix is the preposition “in”; Genesis begins with the word “BeRashit,” or “In the

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beginning.”) The solution given to this puzzle is as follows: “Beth is blocked on three sides, and open only on one; therefore one has no right to demand knowledge of what is above, what is below, what is before, only of what comes after, from the day on which the world is created.”5 The gist of this is that myth, by establishing a narrative, locks a set of circumstances in an original set of events. Protagoras’s makrologia is not a myth in this primary sense but a disenchanted pseudo-myth, an allegory followed by a logos. But clearly the aura and effect of primary myth suit his rhetorical purposes: to induce in his listeners the mood of passive acceptance and conviction characteristic of childlike souls, and so to keep his listeners from asking more questions. His word, chariesteron, encourages them to relax and enjoy themselves, and to direct attention less toward his meaning than toward the grace and elegance of his narrative performance. This is wise if only because the myth seems gratuitous and its relation to the logos arbitrary. In the next section I first connect the myth to basic “Protagorean” doctrine and then identify its significant point of departure from the Platonic view it evokes and distorts.

The Myth After beginning, in illo tempore, when “there existed gods but no mortal creatures,” Protagoras goes on to describe how, in G. B. Kerferd’s summary, before the fated day on which mortal creatures were to come up to the light from inside the earth, Epimetheus distributed the various “powers” among the animals on an equalizing principle to secure them protection both against one another and against the elements (320d–321c). But human beings received none of these powers and so lacked protection. Accordingly, Prometheus stole for them skill in crafts together with fire, thus enabling them to live. Clearly all this takes place before men come up to the light of day for the first time. On reaching the earth’s surface, men develop religion, speech, and the material elements of civilization. For defense against wild animals they founded fortified posts (Poleis), but as they lacked the art of politics injustice prevented them from living together and they soon scattered again (322a–b). Accordingly, Zeus sent Hermes to give men Aidōs and Dikē to secure their protection. The crafts had been distributed among men in the same way as the powers among all the

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animals, namely different crafts to different people. But Aidōs and Dikē are to be given to all men, and all men are to share in them. Any man who is unable to share in them is to be killed, as being a plague to the city.6 A discussion of the three parts of the myth follows. 1. Epimetheus: His name and his method of working suggest an activity at once casual and ordered by a principle. Each gift of powers is followed by (and therefore determines) a gift of opposite characteristics. He embodies the “chance and nature” to which the Athenian Stranger’s anonymous theorists in Laws attribute the organization of the physical cosmos with its seasons, plants, and animals. Epimetheus organizes forms of existence that are determined from the outside and inexorably fixed—wound up, synchronized, and set moving— in patterns of cyclic recurrence and equilibrium. His chief concern is the preservation or “immortality” of the species by a structural mechanism that neither relies on nor considers the consciousness of individuals. The natural dikē and nemesis founded on this nemein are therefore simple and certain. In the terms of this theory (which has been called atheistic but is better called “matheistic”), the simpler the mode of existence, the more completely it is dominated by the binary logic of the table of opposites, the better it is. Moving away from the optimal order of the cosmos to animals and then to humans, life becomes increasingly uncertain, problematic, and complex. The matheistic way of dealing with this is to try to secure order by extending the systemic model to society and imposing it on conscious beings. 2. Prometheus: In Protagoras’s myth, the human creature is a mistake, a near-abortion of nature, which had not provided for him and within whose system of order he does not fit. The myth says that because he is an afterthought of nature and chance, he must take forethought for himself, and since this forethought cannot come from nature, it must be stolen from the gods. He has nothing that is properly his own except need. The invention mothered by anankē is a bastard, and Protagoras presents technical sophia and its fiery means as the product of eris and impiety. Prometheus’s aporia leads him to place godlike skills in human hands and minds. Human individuals are thus forced to do for themselves what nature does for animals as species and forced to do it in a way that is ab origine sacrilegious. As Hermes notes at 322c–d, the special technai are unevenly distributed. The distribution follows the division-of-labor principle enunciated

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elsewhere by Socrates: “[E]ach of us is naturally not quite like anyone else, but rather differs in his nature; different men are apt for the accomplishment of different jobs” (Rep. 370a–b). Protagoras later resorts to this principle in explaining why good men fail to teach their sons political virtue. A troublesome uniqueness sets humanity off from other species and is reflected in Protagoras’s theory of perceptual relativism. The human species tends to break up into competing individuals and interest groups. This tendency is encouraged by the acquisition of specialized technai and can be counteracted only by further artifices in the field of nomos and ideology. The more negative implications of the Promethean gift are supplied by Protagoras’s literary source. Because the myth is so expressly Hesiodic in its allusions, its displacements from Hesiod are conspicuous. In Theogony and Works and Days the chief gift of Athene and Hephaestus is woman, the bearer of evil. Beautiful, artfully adorned, “in the likeness of a modest maiden” but endowed by Hermes with “lies and crafty words and a deceitful nature,” she is the source of the countless plagues that wander among men (W. and D. 60ff.) and “the deadly race and tribe of women who live amongst mortal men to their great trouble” (Theog. 590ff.). Zeus sends her down in requital for the theft of fire (W. and D. 570– 589). The gods had hidden the means of life from humans to keep them from getting lazy—to encourage the useful eris that makes a man grow “eager for work when he considers” his neighbor’s diligence and wealth. But Zeus had also hidden fire because he was deceived by Prometheus in the sacrifice at Mecone. The subsequent theft leads him to curse man by making him share the work of perpetuating life with a partner who is also his competitor. Woman brings both erōs and the bad eris. Protagoras says that from the theft of Hephaestus’s fiery art and also of Athene’s, the resources of life were born: euporia . . . tou biou gignetai (322a). If the passage speaks partly in Hesiod’s voice, the presence of Pandora slinks behind the veil of Protagoras’s language, and the effect is to cast even more blame on Prometheus for his dubious if necessary gifts. Lacking the resources of instinctive and species-determined behavior, he gave creative capacities, conscious energies, and drives that had to be disciplined by training. Prometheus implants sexual and technical erōs together. Perhaps we’re to understand that he does this by extending technē even to the tiktein through which the species is propagated. In the Symposium, Diotima argues that the fiery erōs born from the consciousness of need and death is the source of all human accomplishments: philosophy and legislation as well as fame and children. But the emphasis given by the Hesiodic

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allusions in Protagoras’s myth places the accent on the more unsettling potentialities of the fusion between desire and craft (forethinking or cunning): Whereas in nature tiktein supplies all the equipment and instinctive skill demanded for survival, so that technē is unnecessary, in human society tiktein itself is beset with the uncertainties of technical erōs and erotic technē. Protagoras goes on to say that as a result of Prometheus’s stolen gifts man had a share in the divine portion, theias metesche moiras (322a), and that because he was akin (syggeneian) to deity he “was the only creature that worshipped gods, and set himself to establish altars and holy images [agalmata].” Superficially this statement is a tissue of commonplaces. Human piety consists in the awareness that we possess creative and transformational powers which must have come from the gods since our species has been endowed with such poor natural equipment. Religious consciousness is a complex mixture of anxiety and hybris—the fear born of weakness and the pride born of skill. But the reference to divine kinship and holy images suggests that hybris is uppermost: that the gods humans worship are simply more powerful versions of themselves. The myth divides human adaptation into two phases, both of which apparently derive from the consciously directed productive processes of technē. First, humans domesticate the cosmos by filling it with gods to whom they are oikeios. “Secondly, by the art which they possessed, men soon discovered articulate speech and names, and invented houses and clothes and shoes and bedding and got food from the earth” (322a). The sequence implies that humans first created religion (if not the gods) in order to meet needs which they later met through their own developing material culture and technology. This rationale does wonders for anyone seeking to explain the decline of religion. Since the first fruits of technical adaptation—religion and the gods—are the complement of poor subsistence technology, the practical value and therefore the legitimacy of the gods will decline as its successor improves. Humans may replace the gods as benefactors and thus render them obsolete. The same technē that gave the gods their authority takes it away. Furthermore, if humans came into the world with a primitive piety that initially kept their scattered communities in order, their evolving technē superseded the paradise of piety but could not save them from wild beasts and from each other. In fact, their technē must have made them more proficient at injuring each other. Therefore, their primitive communities of technicians had to be replaced by the polis and by the

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political skill that would enable them to live together and defend against outsiders. Behind Protagoras’s reference to humankind’s “share in the portion of the gods” (322a) lies Hesiod’s myth of the sacrifice at Mecone (Theog. 535ff.). Here Prometheus tries to match wits with Zeus by offering him the poorest parts of the ox enticingly packaged in fat, and the best parts wrapped in a less attractive parcel. Zeus chooses the wrong portion, apparently knowingly, the implication being that he wants an occasion to vent his anger on humankind. But ever since that time, men, who have been cursed in other ways, have offered the bones to the gods and kept the meat and fat for themselves. This “share in the divine portion” led to the other gifts and punishments. It led to the hiding and stealing of fire and the arts, and to the gift of Pandora. Protagoras’s account of religion is thus skewed by its Hesiodic allusion to suggest once again the human creature’s self-defeating Promethean impulse to equalize his relationship to the gods. To those of Protagoras’s listeners who honor the poets and their gods, it will seem that humans are asking for trouble in ritual no less than in practical skills by following the hybristic leadership of Prometheus and his successors. But it will seem otherwise to those who understand that the gods are human creations and that they are the means by which legislators and leaders validate their authority over the polloi. They will view the choice of Prometheus as a dangerously ineffective political stratagem. In slandering Prometheus, Protagoras not only plays on the misanthropic apprehensions of his audience. He also casts aspersions on the Promethean claims made by the fellow sophists with whom he competes. 3. Zeus: The aidōs and dikē Zeus instructs Hermes to distribute to all humans will impose conformity on them. It will counteract the individual self-assertion that was a function of Prometheus’s original gifts. What Protagoras advocates is a qualified version of the instinctive or automatic conformity imposed on animal species by Epimethean chance and nature. Protagoras describes the Epimethean distribution in anthropomorphic terms. He refers to the animals’ clothes, shoes, beds, and homes. This conspicuous inversion suggests that the determined state of animal nature is the model for the ideal human community, and that Epimetheus’s only oversight was his failure to extend this system to men. Prometheus’s deuteros plous was a poor substitute. Although his influence can’t be completely negated, the solution offered by Zeus will produce the closest possible return to the condition in which forethought is a function of anankē. Humans will require only the kind of afterthought characterized by trained reflexes (i.e., thought which comes after the event).

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In the third section of the myth, Prometheus is replaced by Hermes. Zeus tells Hermes at 322d that all men should receive aidōs and dikē, and that those who cannot share in it should be put to death. Since this is repeated in expanded form by Protagoras at 324e–325a, his rhetorical intention is clear. To traditional listeners he presents himself as the successor to Hermes and the emissary of Zeus. To more enlightened listeners Protagoras’s choice of Zeus as his mythic persona reinforces his traditional Olympian message: Humankind should not transgress the ancient nomoi and moirai handed down from gods and ancestors. The justice of Zeus is the political justice of Republic 4: Each individual is programmed to obey the internalized commands of the polis and to do only what he is “naturally” qualified and appointed to do. But the aidōs of Zeus is an even more questionable quality. Guthrie thinks it combines “roughly a sense of shame, modesty, and respect for others. It is not far from ‘conscience.’ ”7 I think the sense Protagoras gives it is very far from “conscience.” Protagoras offers the following proof to support his contention that all men believe that everyone shares in justice and the rest of politikē aretē: In specialized skills . . . if a man claims to be good at the flute or at some other art when he is not, people either laugh at him or are annoyed, and his family restrain him as if he were crazy. But when it comes to justice and civic virtue as a whole, even if someone is known to be wicked, yet if he publicly tells the truth about himself, his truthfulness, which in the other case was counted a virtue, is here considered madness. Everyone, it is said, ought to say he is good, whether he is or not, and whoever does not make such a claim is out of his mind, for a man cannot be without some share in justice, or he would not be human. (323a–c) Defenders of Protagoras’s virtue try without much success to explain away the cynical import of his argument, which is (a) that there is something everyone believes, and (b) this is that a person who is adikos is expected to lie in public about it. Protagoras feels called upon to demonstrate (a) because the first part of Socrates’s challenge was carefully phrased in terms of public opinion, which he knows is important to Protagoras. His stated reason for saying “I did not think this [political virtue] was something that could be taught” is that the Athenians, who, “like the rest of the Hellenes, are sensible people,” don’t think it can be taught (319b–d). Protagoras now answers, “All the Athenians do think it can be taught,” and in concentrating his counterattack on this point he unwittingly gives away his own real opinion.

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He says nothing about acting unjustly in any respect or on any occasion. The actual ethical quality of each person’s soul is a private matter on which the welfare of the polis should not—and cannot—depend. So long as what a person says or does to himself remains hidden or contained, it is less important than what he says or does to others. No one given the ring of Gyges would be expected to get high marks for justice, since what the world believes is not that people are just but that they should pretend to be just no matter what they are. Political skill involves teaching oneself and others the art of adjusting one’s public image to conform to public expectations. Political skill may thus be defined as forethought for appearances (self-presentation) measured by considerations of pleasure and pain. Protagorean aidōs cannot therefore be very much like “conscience,” or respect for other persons. Rather it is respect for—i.e., fear of—public opinion. It is learned through the mathēsis of a shame culture: As soon as a child can understand what is said to him, nurse, mother, tutor, and the father himself vie with each other to make him as good as possible, instructing him through everything he does or says, pointing out, “This is right and that is wrong, this honorable and that disgraceful, this holy, that impious; do this, don’t do that.” If he is obedient, well and good. If not, they straighten him with threats and beatings, like a warped and twisted plank. Later on when they send the children to school, their instruction to the masters lay much more emphasis on good behavior than on letters or music, and musical instruction aims at domesticating (oikeiousthai) young souls so that they may become hemeroteroi, which means more civilized, or tamer (like animals). This will make them more effective and useful—chresimoi—in speech and action. (325c–326b) The term translated as “good behavior” is eukosmia, which here retains its cosmetic double sense as arrangement and adornment—as an embellished order imposed from outside and significant chiefly for its visibility. The proposition that good behavior equals good appearances combines with Protagoras’s subsequent pandering to “the wealthy” (326c) to provide Socrates with cues to the reductive alternatives on which Protagoras will subsequently founder: Is virtue one as the parts of a face are one, or as the parts of a piece of gold are one? (329d). Protagoras has Zeus direct Hermes to bring aidōs and dikē to men so that there should be poleōn kosmoi and desmoi philias synagōgoi (322c). In view of the foregoing discussion the first phrase may indifferently be

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translated “civic order” or “orderly civic appearances.” The “conjunctive ties of friendship” (desmoi philias synagōgoi) euphemistically refers to the unconscious coercion of the shame culture needed to counteract the irreconcilable private measures of individuals. To collapse Protagoras’s argument into a single claim, he teaches that everyone believes that everyone teaches virtue. The conceptual redundancy of this statement exceeds its verbal redundancy. “Virtue” = “whatever everyone believes.” Therefore, everyone believes that everyone teaches whatever everyone believes (which is that everyone teaches, etc.). In short, by claiming to teach what everyone believes, Protagoras can claim to teach virtue without committing himself to a more substantive inquiry into its objective nature. In this project Protagoras may indeed be as sincere and well-meaning as many commentators have thought. He may not believe public opinion—he may even hold it in contempt as the opiate of the masses—but he certainly believes in it. He respects or fears it and keeps one eye respectfully or fearfully trained on the public opiners who watch him debate with Socrates. His elegantly measured words seem to have been thought out in advance to charm or persuade public belief in his favor. He has aidōs; he should be entitled to sell it. The burden of Socrates’s strategy in the contest is to bring out the true basis of Protagoras’s power in the harmony between his fear and weakness and those of his auditors. Though Protagoras assigns himself the role of Zeus, he remains in the grip of Promethean and Epimethean impulses. He is Promethean in his ability to stir up faction by his art. He encourages his disciples to leave their families, scorn their past and traditions, and compete with each other for power. He is also Promethean in persuading humans that since their art of forethought is born of eris and impiety, they must learn to fear and distrust each other (rather than themselves), construct defenses against each other, behave as if every person were allotrios to every other. The makrologia portrays a deprived and helpless Epimethean creature who begins existence with no inherent protective armor and is the potential victim of all species, including his own. This Epimethean basis produces the Promethean reaction. The stolen fire only increases the power to do harm, the desire to advance or protect one’s own interest against those of one’s fellows. Protagoras therefore singles out courage, the knowledge of what is to be feared, as a special virtue. He offers humans no more than Epimetheus offered the animals: problēmata. He demonstrates his own problēmata, courage and forethought, by marching fearlessly into town, proclaiming himself a great sophist and

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teacher. What he fears is to have this protective persona attacked or destroyed. In taking precautions to avoid being embarrassed or pained, he betrays the Epimethean fear at the basis of his Promethean aggression. All this adds up to a portrait of Protagoras as a man with a fairly high opinion of himself (which accounts for his complacent praise of Socrates at the end) and a fairly low opinion of human nature. Humans must be compelled or enchanted if they are to be weaned away from their private measures and brought together into cities. The course from savagery to civilization is not envisaged as a gradual development in ethical selfawareness. The Protagorean view is not melioristic. As he presents matters, only the sum total of political and rhetorical constraints separates civilized communities from the self-destroying life of hybristic savages in the state of nature. This is the obvious meaning of his move from Prometheus to Zeus. Such misanthropic beliefs compose into a structure of cynicism, if cynicism can be thought of as a behavioral set rather than a fully conscious attitude. Plato’s portrait of Protagoras depicts a man who thinks himself enlightened and sincerely believes he can teach valuable skills, skills that can keep the political order safe from the anarchy with which human nature threatens it. This misanthropology both validates and reflects Protagoras’s own submerged apprehensiveness, his competitiveness, his devious rhetorical strategies. Yet it doesn’t place the more positive features of the portrait in question. It only renders the portrait more complex. Protagoras comes across as a figure whose confidence and success are nourished by powerful reserves of self-deception that protect him from the disabling effects of a bad conscience. The mention of success in the preceding sentence may seem odd in view of the general agreement on the course and consequences of the debate between Protagoras and Socrates. Socrates pretty much has his way with Protagoras and is often on the verge of humiliating him with logical moves. The speciousness of some of these moves escapes Protagoras’s notice. There is nevertheless a standpoint from which Socrates’s victory is selfdefeating. The more resoundingly he wins, the more profoundly he loses. The extent of his victory is not perceived by those present; it registers fully only on Plato’s readers. But the subversive implications of the victory are realized by Socrates. We know this because Socrates’s realization is reflected in his narrative. It is from the narrator’s standpoint that the futility of his eristic triumph is most clearly outlined.

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The Ethics of Etceteration

In the last chapter I treated the portrait of Protagoras as if it were strictly Plato’s—strictly, that is, a product of my encounter with the text and its relations with other texts (Theaetetus, Symposium, Republic, Works and Days, and Theogony). In doing this I abstracted the events of the dialogue from the rhetorical medium through which we receive them: Socrates’s report to an anonymous interlocutor, made immediately after his visit to the house of Callias. My purpose was to isolate certain features of the reported occasion that communicate their meaning without being affected by narratorial intervention. The complex effects produced by the interplay between Protagoras’s myth and its Hesiodic subtext are equally available to us whether we take the narrator into account or ignore him. Therefore, the practice of intertextual comparison can divert us from the narratorial performance. It not only decelerates the tempo of our reading. It can temporarily shift our attention away from the syntagmatic relationships of narrative. The Hesiodic subtext of the myth casts a dark penumbra over the dialogue, a shadow of misanthropic apprehension intended to whet the audience’s appetite for the Protagorean pharmakon. We have no way of telling whether Protagoras “means” to produce this effect, or whether Socrates picks it up. The text doesn’t help us determine whether the expressed intentions of Protagoras conceal even from himself the more disturbing motives and forces that structure his performance. Protagoras may or may not be a hypocrite in making positive claims as an educator. It would of course be more interesting if he were not, if those

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motives and forces flowed through him without his knowledge, if he were represented as knowing how not to know. The text’s near-silence on this point generates debate between defenders and critics of Protagoras, but at the same time that silence marks an important vacuum, an insulating void, between intentions or purposes and their effects. The silence suggests that it may be immaterial whether or not the sophist knows and intends the effect he produces. A well-meaning fool is no less responsible than a cynical knave. The sophist may serve more effectively as a convector of cynical hot air if his ignorance enables him to preserve the self-esteem on which his confidence rests. The second clause in the preceding sentence is not exactly part of the message communicated by textual silence. But it is communicated by Socrates’s performance as participant (rather than as narrator)—not only by his ironic or sarcastic remarks to Protagoras but also by his very choice of topics, his strategies of argument. What are the ethical motives that generate apparently invalid arguments? I call the motives “ethical” because they concern questions of ethics, and because their objective is the portrayal of the Protagorean ethos. Platonic writing always works sub-textually to build up and interpret ethical profiles of the major interlocutors. The profiles emerge from the interaction between the discussions and the literary devices that frame or situate them in the field of textual play. When the ethical discussions are abstracted from the text, they lend themselves well to an Austinian mode of analysis.1 That is, they appear as a series of speech acts in which efforts to carry through constative discourse are continually being challenged or thwarted by explicit or implicit performative constraints. The primary conventions governing the Socratic use of performatives are (1) the agreement to disagree in order to explore the controversial implications of previously unexamined statements, (2) the agreement to consider agreement on any point as the criterion of its validity, and (3) the agreement to be bound by any such prior agreement. In Platonic terms, the first convention is encoded as dialegein, the others homolegein. At no point in the Socratic dialogues does the famous “What is X?” question exist in abstraction from the speech acts—elenchos, epagōgē, etc.—within which it is embedded. The force of these acts is to produce agreement, perplexity, or concessions. The drama of speech acts is mediated through the drama of textual acts. It is the text that presents itself to readers as representing an interlocutory

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drama that is otherwise absent. Viewed in these terms, the canonical form taken by logical analyses of arguments in the dialogues is the abstraction of logoi as reasons or reasoning from logoi as textualized speech acts. The interlocutory surface of the dialogue is abstracted from its textual ground and reduced to a series of syllogistic possibilities. Let’s call this the logocentric fallacy. Analysts who commit the logocentric fallacy often write as if they are listening to a discussion which they can interrupt in order to criticize or improve. I cite as a perhaps extreme version of this response Gregory Vlastos’s apology for one of Socrates’s “errors” of logic: This error is one that he could easily have detected when he got the the chance to think out his moves in a more leisurely moment. He would then have seen that he could have produced a valid deductive argument for his immediate objective, and did not have to revoke a single inference he has made. And although some Socratic arguments are worse than this one, most of them are a good deal better. . . . This is not to deny that he occasionally makes grave errors. . . . It is only to insist that as a practitioner of logical inference, and one who practices on his feet, in the stress of live debate, and with no calculus or any formal patterns of valid inference to guide him, Socrates is not a bungler, but a master.2 Other logical analysts may not go this far but they respond in roughly the same way: After they extricate the logical cross talk from the text, and the propositional content from the cross talk, they go to the blackboard and proceed to paraphrase, amplify, formalize, and diagram the content. This procedure raises the following question: Is the ethical “message” of the Protagoras deducible from a series of speech acts abstracted from the text and construed, therefore, as paraphrasable? Were the discussions Socrates reports in his sustained narrative speech act serious attempts to inquire into the meaning(s) of aretē? Could the value of these attempts be assessed apart from their eristic context and apart from the infelicity of many of the logical moves? Are we supposed to assume, for example, that either Socrates’s auditors or Plato’s readers are morally enlightened by being told that justice is just, that if justice differs from holiness it must be unholy, and that the identity of wisdom and temperance is logically secured by their having the same contrary? In these discussions the terms for virtues are neither ostensibly nor etymologically explored. The discussants are not really inquiring into the referents of virtue-terms. But the virtue-terms aren’t entirely drained of

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content. They retain enough demotic familiarity to enable them to serve as signifiers whose differences qualify them as candidates for certain logical or quasi-logical operations. Commentators often raise questions about the apparent differences and overlaps among virtue terms. For example, are “wisdom” and “justice” and “temperance” synonymous, antonymous, or heteronymous signifiers? If it’s frequently assumed that the terms have identical ranges of denotation or connotation, this is because they are sufficiently drained of content to enable them to do the work and suffer the consequences of logical symbols. They stand in for x and y (-x and -y, not-x and not-y) in discussions that produce puzzles about self-predication, invalid derivations, fallacious conversions, and confusions of contrariety with otherness or with contradictions. Whenever Socrates secures his interlocutor’s agreement to an obviously questionable proposition, readers are cued to wonder why his speech act didn’t misfire or—to borrow J. L. Austin’s terminology—prove “unhappy” or “infelicitous.” For such curiosity we owe the logical analysts a genuine debt of gratitude. Had they not attended so carefully to Socratic logic, we might not have felt so strongly compelled to inquire into Socrates’s questionable or clearly invalid moves. When, for example, his conduct of the argument that virtue entails wisdom is shown to be either dishonest or confused, readers are encouraged to shift their attention back from the logical to the ethical status of his verbal behavior. Two notorious and often criticized pieces of argumentation provide a case in point. From 330c to 331e Socrates leads Protagoras through a discussion of justice and holiness, and from 332a to 334a they discuss temperance and wisdom. The fallacies in these passages have raised commentators’ eyebrows and lowered their opinion of Socrates or Plato for decades. Yet the dramatic function of Socrates’s questionable logic seems perfectly clear, since both discussions work toward the same result. When Protagoras tries to sit the fence on the question whether the virtues are identical or different, one or many, Socrates nudges him toward a version of the plurality thesis. He subsequently modifies this thesis in order to put the sophist in an untenable position. Protagoras can either win each round with a morally unsavory assertion or preserve his odor of sanctity at the cost of conceding the round. For example, at 331a–b, after putting self-predication into play (justice is just, holiness holy), Socrates twists the thesis he has foisted on Protagoras from difference to opposition. From the proposition that justice is not-holy (i.e., different from the holy) he slithers into the proposition that

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justice is unholy and holiness unjust. Protagoras now finds himself defending impiety. At this point, Socrates mounts his white horse to assert the unity of the just and the holy. Magnanimously, he offers to share the saddle of virtue with Protagoras if the sophist will lay down his impious logical arms: “If you let me, I should give the same answer on your behalf too, that justice is either the same thing as holiness or very similar, and above all that justice is like holiness and holiness like justice. Is that your view too, or had you rather that I didn’t give that answer?” (331b). Protagoras tergiversates, Socrates scolds him, and Protagoras responds with another piece of in-asense evasion, at the end of which he accuses Socrates—with justification—of arguing unfairly. Socrates graciously changes the subject after commenting on his opponent’s discomposure (332a). The second discussion (332a–334b) follows pretty much the same general scenario, though the details differ. By a shifty use of inductive etceteration, and by equivocating on the term enantion, Socrates “proves”—gets Protagoras to agree to—three propositions. (1) One thing can have only one contrary. (2) What is done in a contrary or opposite manner is done by a contrary/opposite agency. Therefore, (3) since aphrosynē is the contrary of both sophia and sophrōsynē, the latter two terms must name the same thing. In the first logos at 330c–331e, Socrates had pushed quickly for a concession on moral grounds, seeming merely to assert rather than argue the likeness or unity of the holy and the just. But now he defers the moment of truth and diverts Protagoras with an epagōgē that seems to prove the unity of virtues on logical rather than moral grounds. Protagoras is forced to agree to a morally benign proposition at the risk of acknowledging that he has contradicted his stand on the difference of the virtues. At 333c Socrates returns to justice and holiness, and sharpens the dilemma by capitalizing on the sophist’s previous failure to distinguish otherness from opposition: “Do you think that a man who acts unjustly is sensible [sōphronein] in so acting?” Protagoras now openly admits that the option which might preserve him from defeat may be acceptable to the many but is unworthy of him: “I should be ashamed to assent to that . . . though many people say so,” he replies, and encourages Socrates to aim his argument at the many rather than at him. Socrates blandly denies being out to get Protagoras. He pledges his usual allegiance to the disinterested pursuit of truth, and then proceeds to push his opponent back into a corner. Protagoras tries to extricate himself

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by babbling about the relativity of the good (334a–c). His audience responds with shouts of approval. In this performance, questions of ethics are clearly not the real issue under debate. The ethical center of the discussion is displaced from its constative surface to the manner in which the illocutionary agon unfolds. We are made to feel that the speakers’ motivation and their actual sentiments are shielded from view, but we suspect that these differ from the concessions produced by the “formal” argument. The ethical center resides in whatever it is that makes it difficult for the interlocutors to carry on a genuine inquiry into ethics. A major obstacle is that both audience and participants treat the logoi as tactical maneuvers in an entertaining zero-sum contest. The ethical terms they put into play function as weapons rather than as concepts. If we want to find a more substantive account of the “meaning” of the just, the holy, the wise, and the temperate, we’d have to look elsewhere. Some of the terms are defined by the behavior of the contestants. If Socrates appears to be acting unfairly or unjustly when he discusses justice, is his behavior justified at a deeper level by the nature of the enemy he fights? Is Protagoras’s reluctance to be shamed by defeat sensible and wise? Or is it the foolish and shameful consequence of a settled disposition toward injustice and intemperance? From the standpoint of his own safety, are his apparently obtuse concessions to Socrates’s dubious tactics as foolish as they seem? Such questions naturally follow from those that logical analysts have put to the logoi. Many commentators have been troubled by Socrates’s behavior and have tried to clear him on ethical grounds by explaining away the fallacies with blackboard demonstrations, or by attributing them to Socratic irony, or simply by assuming that Socrates’s occasional errors may have derived from Plato’s confusion. They often excuse Plato’s errors as by-products of the undeveloped state of his art, and they try to help him as much as they can. They formalize and unpack propositions, fill in logical gaps, and ignore the material content of the illustrations, which they convert to indifferent x’s and y’s. This procedure has the effect of short-circuiting crucial questions about the dramatic significance of skewed or inappropriate analogies and polarities—the reductiveness, for example, of plants and gardens as analogues of humans and cities, of the body as an analogue of the psyche, and of technical problems as models of ethical problems. To glance in passing at an example from the second discussion, the items Socrates selects for his epagōgē at 332a–d compose into an interesting pattern when the opposites are tabulated as shown in the accompanying table.

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positive temperate or sensible strong swift beautiful good deep voice

negative foolish weak slow ugly evil shrill voice

These two series cumulatively define the reappearance of temperate (or sensible) versus foolish and the addition of wise versus foolish (332d–333b). The second and third pairs are borrowed from the Great Speech, specifically from the list of qualities Epimetheus distributed to produce equilibrium in nature. The fourth and sixth pairs skew the meaning of “good” and “evil” toward physical and rhetorical norms (remember the mention of Prodicus’s deep voice at 316a). Finally, while the foundational Socratic pair of good versus evil is discreetly, or indiscriminately, tucked among a set of physical attributes, the leading characteristics are sōphrosynē and sōphronein, which may be translated as “safe-mindedness” and “acting safe-mindedly.” As always with Socrates’s examples, the more specific terms condition the meanings of the more general. To be strong and swift and have a deep voice is to be (accounted) beautiful and good (kalokagathos). To be successful as a warrior, hunter, and speaker is to prove oneself wise and sensible. The criterion of aretē Socrates develops in this exchange is borrowed from Protagoras and Epimetheus. It is sōtēria, the self-preservation that keeps all species from destroying each other or themselves. Strength, swiftness, beauty, goodness, deep voice, temperance, and wisdom are the parts of the aretē of sōtēria.

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The Parts of Gold and the Parts of Face

1 At 329d, as Socrates prepares to take the initiative on the subject of aretē, he scratches his head over a “small thing” in the Great Speech: Is aretē unitary or is it divided into parts? Protagoras tries to evade the disjunction by answering that it is both.1 Socrates refuses to let him equivocate and pushes him toward a choice between two versions of the plurality-assumption. Are the parts (moria), he asks, related “in the sense of the parts of a face, as mouth, nose, eyes, and ears; or, as in the parts of gold, none of which differs from any other or from the whole except in greatness or smallness?” When Protagoras chooses the facial analogy, Socrates repeats the question with respect to the powers, dynameis, of the parts of virtue. This time he curtails and etceterates his enumeration of facial parts: “just as, in the parts of the face, the eye is not like the ear, nor is its function the same; nor is any of the other parts like another, in its power or in any other respect” (329d, 330a). He leaves out the nose and mouth. Would it have seemed incongruous to ask about the dynamis of the nose in this context? And what about the dynamis of the mouth? Would it have been meaningful to inquire into the dynamis of the parts of gold? The concentration on the powers of seeing and hearing is significant, but both analogies are strange. They seem not only arbitrary but out of place—in the Greek idiom, atopos, queer—precisely because they are placebound visual images.

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Of the fifteen occurrences of prosōpon, “face,” documented in Brandwood’s Index, eight occur in Protagoras, seven in connection with this analogy. Prosōpon denotes countenance, front, mask, dramatic character—literally, that which not only has eyes but is before the eyes. The concept as a whole is at least as interesting as its parts. In the soft focus of symbolic allusion, face and gold are as appropriate to the general method and aims of sophistry as they are inappropriate to this particular piece of sophistical argument. I’ll turn to the face first, mainly because it is the more manageable of the two analogies. The gold has perplexed commentators who deign to touch it, but the face offers them some obvious handles.

2 Although facial commentary has fixed its gaze on the nobler parts at the expense of the whole, its practitioners have nevertheless been helpful in suggesting how to relate the analogy to ethical themes that condition the logoi but are inadequately reflected by them. David Savan develops a comparison between the powers of eye and ear and those of virtue.2 C.  C.  W. Taylor revises Savan’s account of perceptual/ethical ratios to head it toward the following conclusion: A virtue is a “permanent state which is in a man as the eye is in a man; its power is the capacity to act well which it gives him, as the power of the eye is the capacity to see which the eye ‘gives.’ ”3 This conclusion enables Taylor to give a more economical and satisfactory account of the self-predication perplex than we find in Vlastos’s elaborate analyses. But as it stands, it raises problems that are inseparable from its strong points. The problems are important because they touch the core of the voluntaristic orientation of Socratic ethics, and they suggest important qualifications in the usual understanding of it. Taylor’s account of the eye/virtue analogy implies that virtue is as automatic as vision. Yet he nowhere sorts out the different ways in which this implied automatism may be construed. His discussion as a whole is valuable in distinguishing the objective structure and effects of an ethical act from the intention of the actor. Although he suspects Plato may have been confused about the distinction, he has no doubt that “Socrates is represented in this dialogue as thinking of the virtues as things (characters or perhaps forces) in people which account for their acting in certain ways.”4 On this basis, self-predication may simply mean that it is the objective structure of justice that makes an act just regardless of the actor’s

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intention. The analogy to parts of the face “which are presumably thought of primarily as sense-organs” suggests to Taylor that in the following discussion about justice and holiness Socrates’s position, if unpacked, would be “consistent with the analysis given in the Gorgias and Republic, where the virtues are permanent organizational states of the soul issuing in acts of the appropriate kinds.”5 But Taylor’s account is unsatisfactory for two reasons. (1) Socrates thinks of the virtues “as things (characters or perhaps forces) in people.” The italicized phrase indicates vagueness about the modality of what Taylor elsewhere calls “internal states”: Are these states present to their subject’s consciousness or are they not?6 Do they function automatically, on the model of sight and hearing? Are they affected by a motivational network, a kind of community syntaxis within which the subject is positioned? Are their functions always, intermittently, or never reflected in conscious purposes and guided by critical self-consciousness? Taylor’s terminology and deployment of the analogy allow the inference that what Socrates “is represented . . . as thinking” could easily be articulated with the attunement argument in the Phaedo (92a ff.): Since the soul is no more than an effect or condition of bodily krasis, virtue is reducible to a state of physical well-being comparable if not identical with health. Given this position, which Socrates refutes, the problematics of motive and intention, of consciousness and critical self-consciousness, would be supererogatory. Ethics would be a matter of instrumental technē directed toward improving the automatic body-based functions of the soul. (2) Taylor’s account fails to deal with the characteristically shifty manner in which Socrates varies the shading of the term aretē. The first book of the Republic contains an example that beautifully illuminates the treatment of aretē in the Protagoras. There Socrates equates it with justice to put Thrasymachus on the defensive but then proceeds to define it in Thrasymachean terms: The aretē of a soul—like that of a horse, eyes, ears, and a pruning knife—is its ability to do its ergon well, and its specific ergon includes managing, ruling, deliberating, and all such things. Virtue is therefore power and efficiency; vice is incapacity and inefficiency (352d–353c). The virtuous soul is the instrument of the man who is stronger at managing and ruling. The examples listed above suggest the automatism of a power that is determined by its constitution—by what it was “made” to do. Socrates forces Thrasymachus to concede defeat by using a Socratic-sounding argument about virtue even as he reinstates the Thrasymachean argument as the winner.

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That Thrasymachus won but thought he lost dramatizes the thesis he had reluctantly accepted just before this logos: The man who is just, wise, and good would try to pleonektein those who are not like him—the unjust—but not his own “kind” or himself; the unjust man would try to pleonektein not only the just but also the unjust. He would therefore be his own enemy (349b–352a) and, like Thrasymachus in this argument, would unknowingly defeat himself. That logos too was less Socratic than Thrasymachean. It was a version of the conventional wisdom Socrates had argued against earlier: Justice is helping friends and hurting enemies. Republic 1 shows this traditional favorite to be a well-mystified version of the Thrasymachean shocker, justice is the advantage of the stronger. Socrates demonstrates by argument what the brief portrait of Cephalus had already revealed, namely, that the “weak” virtues of respectability, piety, and moderation could be advantageous and strength-giving not so much in the crude form of a hypocritical cover but as genuinely esteemed values. The aretē modeled by the rich weapons-maker is a kind of moral efficiency, an economically supported habit of decency: Cephalus claims money is useful to keep one from having to lie or cheat or incur obligations, but his emphasis is less on the injustice of harming others than on the avoidance of harm to himself; harm that includes the pain of bad conscience and fear of retribution (330d–331b). Cephalus’s defensive aretē both gives the lie to the Thrasymachean formula and epitomizes it. He preserves both his commitment to an unjust way of life and his ignorance of its injustice by withdrawing from an argument before his skilled ignorance suffers the inconvenience of too many Socratic questions. His escape from the discussion to pious observance marks a victory over Socrates in that it enables him to remain “conscious in himself of no unjust deed” (330e). Thrasymachus, on the other hand, jumps intemperately into the argument, flaunts his impiety, and foolishly concedes to his opponent the victory Socrates hands him on a platter: “Feast yourself,” he grumbles (352b), and Socrates complies, though at the end he accurately observes that his feasting has been in the Thrasymachean style, “like the gluttons who grab at whatever is set before them” (354b). Plato’s portrayal of Cephalus magnifies the dramatic gesture of withdrawal to the hiera. The gesture of the moment comes to figure the gesture of his life when the ensuing discussion with his son makes it clear that Polemarchus “inherited” not only his father’s money but also the bad argument that relies on the money and is signified by it. Like the unjust man in the later argument, Cephalus involuntarily harmed his son and unknowingly, therefore, defeated himself.

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The apparently paradoxical notion of the involuntary lie ceases to be a paradox as soon as it is viewed under the aspect of the “well-born [gennaion] lie.” The well-born lie is to be imprinted like a typos on a whole community as a way of life and transmitted from one generation to another. Such institutionalized mystification accounts for the disparity between motive and intention, and between intention and action. The questionable aretē of Cephalus converges with that of Thrasymachus as the other face of the same “inherited” typos. This method of critical profiling informs the portrayal of Protagoras. It conditions not only Socrates’s general handling of the sophist but also the specific logical moves that trouble the dialogue’s commentators. The aretē of the Protagorean ethos, condensed in discrete parcels of discussion, emerges both as the inner division between what he appears to intend and what motivates him, and as the external division between his flawed eristic performance and the victory he ultimately wins. The situation in Protagoras is a more complex version of that in the Thrasymacheia where, since Socrates defeats Thrasymachus with a Thrasymachean argument, he is also a loser. If the unjust man is the one who unknowingly defeats himself, is the just man one who, like Socrates, knowingly defeats himself? And, therefore, knows he has defeated himself, in one way with Cephalus and Polemarchus in another way with Thrasymachus and Protagoras, in still other ways with other interlocutors? Does the text invite its readers to get inside that knowing, to discern what it means to Socrates, how he views the relation between his “internal state” and the effects of his speech acts? C. C. W. Taylor notes in his discussion of virtue that while Socrates distinguishes “between action and internal state,” the connection between them still “needs to be established,”7 that is, Plato has not yet established it in the Protagoras. As I remarked earlier, the distinction is—with qualifications—important, but the judgment may be premature. The link between action and internal state may be located in the values of the face, and in turning now to consider the parts of the face, I’ll reformulate Socrates’s question: not “how are the parts of virtue like those of the face?” but “how is aretē like the prosōpon?” or, “what kind of aretē is expressible under the aspect of prosōpon?” or again, “what is the aretē of the prosōpon?”

3 Face is a synecdoche not only of the body and its visibility but also of charismatic and logocentric power. To define the particular aretai and their dynameis in terms of the parts of the face and their functions is to

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define them as “parts” and powers of the visible, audible presence. Virtue as “face” is the aretē of public performance, of self-concealment and selfpresentation. The visible, speaking “face” is “the eloquent Gorgias’s head,” the locus of persuasion and domination, which, when unmediated, turns those who see and hear it into stone (Symposium 198c). But the watching, listening face is not only a probēma; it is also a problem. It is the “look” that the I must cede to the other’s gaze. The prosōpon submits to, is always threatened by, the basilisk eye of the beholder. Aretē as face is the art of saving face, of saving the face, in order to use its powers to save everything else. Thus apprehensively apprehended, aretē is prosōpopoiea while the sophia that supports the prosōpon is promētheia. When we trace this network of meanings along the pathways of the text, certain terms that are drained of energy by logical analysts revive and fire off if approached as etymological synapses. During his lengthy exposition of Socrates’s attempt to persuade Protagoras that sophia and sōphrosynē are identical (332a– 333b), Taylor speculates in passing that Plato may have been “attempting to give a rigorous demonstration of the synonymy between sophia and sōphrosynē which emerges (given the appropriate senses of the term) from ordinary usage.”8 Both terms have broad ranges of meaning, some of which overlap each other and also make contact with phronēsis and with a cognate of sōphrosynē, sophronein. The association of sophia with sophistes along with Protagoras’s uproarious history of the closet sophists who shaped Greek culture suggests the following definition: Sophia combines the technē and phronēsis (“good sense”) of the man who takes precautions by concealing his dangerous calling under the proschēma of a more respectable technē—that of poets, soothsayers, athletic trainers, and music teachers. Sophia, sophistikē, and phronēsis: Together, these constitute an art of self-preservation. Socrates’s Spartan burlesque of Protagoras’s history makes it clear that sōphrosynē is another name for this art, especially when he attributes the famous prudential maxims of the Delphic oracle to Laconic wisdom (343b). Here he seconds the account given in the Charmides by Critias, who asserts that “know thyself,” “be temperate,” “nothing too much,” and “pledges lead to perdition” all mean the same thing (164d– 165b). Such Polonian wisdom (“to thine own self be true”) is briefly but tellingly etymologized in the Cratylus (411e–412a): Sōphrosynē is sōtēria of phronēsis. Within this network, sophronein means “to be safeminded,” and sōphrosynē, “safe-mindedness.” Friedlaender both appreciates and misconstrues the importance of the soterial meaning when he claims that “the word ‘health’ should and must be understood in the first syllable of the word sō-phrosynē,” and adds that

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“in the Gorgias . . . we learn that health produces a state of order in the body as justice and sōphrosynē do in the soul.”9 But what we learn about the so- syllable in the Gorgias contradicts this. After surveying some of the arts, including rhetoric, “which preserve [soizousin] us from every danger,” Socrates concludes that “if ‘better’ has not the meaning I give it, but virtue means just saving oneself and one’s belongings, whatever one’s character may be, you are merely ridiculous in cavilling at the engineer and the doctor and every other art that has been produced for our safety” (511b–512d). Sōtēria and its cognates surface only eleven times in the Protagoras, but the appearances are significantly located: four times with reference to Epimethean and Promethean measures for securing life (320e, 321b, 321c, 322b) and seven times between 354b and 357b with reference to the protective benefits of the hedonist calculus. Sōtēria, self-preservation at all costs, skill in avoiding pain or injury to oneself, is the root meaning that joins sophia to sōphrosynē in the Protagoras. It provides the rationale behind Protagoras’s notion and behavioral exemplification of andreia. It motivates the aidōs kai dikē which Zeus imposed on cities to compensate for the soterial failures of Epimethean defenses and Promethean arts. The essence of political justice is not mere conformity but the soterial deployment of face: If an unjust person “confesses the truth about this before everyone, that truthfulness which in the other case [of special skills] they regard as sōphrosynē they here call madness, and they say that everyone must say he is just whether he is or not, and anyone who doesn’t pretend to be just [mē prospoioumenou dikaiosynēn] must be mad” (323b–c). Prospoiein, which has an appropriative sense (pretense as claim)—often negative (an unjust claim)—here has the same purpose as the proschēmata by which the closet sophists of antiquity disguised (prokalyptesthai, 316d) their practices (316d, e, 317a). Finally, the theopoetic achievements of these poets, seers, cult leaders, and legislators contribute to the soterial production of the holy—i.e., of the gods that inspire the eusebeia which reinforces aidōs kai dikē. As the self-proclaimed expert in these matters puts it, “[W]hen one knows how to say and do what is gratifying to the gods, in praying and sacrificing, that is holiness, and such things bring salvation [soizei] to individual families and cities” (Euthyphro, 14b). The Euthyphro clarifies the drift of Socrates’s coupling of justice with holiness at Protagoras 330c ff. Socrates persuades Euthyphro to distinguish the two aretai on the grounds that the just pertains to actions directed toward other human beings while the holy pertains to the gods. But before Euthyphro gave his formula Socrates

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had anticipated and demystified it in a series of moves that collapsed that distinction. 1. He suggested that stories about the gods were legitimizing projections of human interest, and that the paradeigma of the holy on which Euthyphro urged him to fix his eye (apoblepon, 6d) was literally constituted by visible images rather than by some transcendent eidos: “And so you believe that there was really war between the gods, and fearful enmities and battles and other things of the sort, such as are told of by the poets and represented in varied designs by the great artists in our sacred places and especially on the robe which is carried up to the Acropolis at the great Panathenaea? for this is covered with such representations [poikilmaton]” (6b–c). In this connection, the graphē entered against Socrates by Meletus charged him with a crime against the writings and pictures of the image-makers, and Euthyphro is already, therefore, identified as one of those whose interests Socrates threatens. His dikē against his father foreshadows the graph against Socrates. 2. He persuaded Euthyphro to agree that aidōs was a part or species of the genus fear, thus reducing all forms of reverence (for the gods, for public opinion, for the elders, etc.) to the basic apprehensiveness which Euthyphro can be seen to share with Cephalus and Protagoras, and which Protagoras plays upon in his Great Speech. 3. He implied that humans used and tended their gods in the same way and for the same reason that they used and tended domestic animals (13a ff.). 4. He grammatically skewed a set of examples (13d ff.) to leave the inference that the art by which humans serve the gods is part of the art by which they create the gods that serve them. Hence what Euthyphro calls just is identical with what he calls holy—the holy is the mystifying veil of the just—and the unity of virtues is a unity of vice. What is to be feared and revered, then, is not so much the gods as the men whose power they legitimize. Aidōs, to hosion, and dikē (including Euthyphro’s dikē against his father) are—like the graphē of the image-maker and the graphē against Socrates—the instruments of Sōtēria. We have seen them at work in the “decent” figure of Cephalus. They constitute the prosōpon and proschēma of injustice, most effectively, perhaps, in the man “conscious in himself of no unjust deed.”

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The Spartan maxims discussed by Socrates are products of the same apprehensiveness. They are, first of all, weapons like the blows of pugilists that batter the ears and aim to leave their mark, their typos, on the souls of auditors. When Socrates says, “Let’s examine the typon of . . . [Simonides’s poem] as a whole and its intention, which is above all to criticize the saying of Pittacus” (344b), the noun usually translated as “general outline” here carries as well the sense—i.e., “striking power”—so frequently activated by the verb form in Gorgias: “to strike,” “to box the ear” (456d, 476b–c, 480d, 486c, 508d–e, 527a). As an impressed form or image, a doctrine, a type, typos connotes the aggressive agency of that peitho which Gorgias identified with force, and which assaults the soul through the powers and apertures of the prosōpon in face-to-face combat. But Socrates’s Spartan parody suggests that the arts and aretē of face the sophist deploys against others serve him not merely as an attack weapon but also as a soterial defense. The Spartan maxims described by Socrates are, secondly, self-protective in the laconic compactness by which their xenophobic coiners fended off exposure or contamination. As memorable as they were obscure, the rhemata were at once easy to retain and hard to pin down to any specific commitments. Their secret was that they had no intrinsic meaning, and they concealed this secret by flexibly adapting themselves to the interpreters whose meanings they mirrored. “Know thyself ” and the other sayings meant whatever those in power made them mean, and what they usually meant was, “Be obedient; know your place; do only your own.” Finally, the Spartans illustrate the uses of holiness by dedicating their sophia “to Apollo in his Delphic temple”: Speaking through the god and his oracle, they create the divine logoi that validate their power, and use the god as their proschēma. In Socrates’s parody the Delphic oracle, with its famous semantic pliability and its conservative, aristocratic associations, is the face preserving Spartan “philosophy.” The Spartan maxims conceal the secret that they hide no kernel of wisdom, no teaching, within themselves. Their true interior is outside them in the public force field crossed by mirrored and mirroring interpretations. This may provide insight into Protagoras’s claim that he differs from his predecessors in hiding nothing. Disguised as a poet or trainer, the ancient sophist risked disclosure because his reality differed from his appearance. But Protagoras avoids this risk: “I admit that I am a sophist and that I educate men; and I consider this precaution [eulabeian], of admitting rather than denying, the better of the two” (317b). What kind of claim is this? Is there then no risk, nothing to expose, because nothing is concealed? Yet the phrase asserting his candor is itself

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an expression of watchful calculation, so it is easy to interpret—and has been interpreted—as another protective proschēma. Is his “true” face, his “natural” face, another mask? His claim to candor another pretense? If so, what lies “behind,” “within” the face? Another face, which is “truer,” more “natural”? And behind that face, what? Is there, like the infinite regress of the Third Man, no end of faces within faces? Protagoras’s claim is meant to accentuate his difference from other sophists. He aims to stand forth alone, unique, the heroic individual above the many, the leader of the assembly, as if fully to personify the common meaning of his name. He counts on the face as the locus of uniqueness, individuality, identity, the visible counterpart of the name. He knows we look (and listen) to the face as to the signifier of personal intentions. Even if we take it to be a mask, we try to imagine the intentions it conceals. He would agree with Socrates’s Locrian friend, Timaeus, that face adorns our best part and highest member. Face is the round cephalic center of presence and order most worthy to be self. The assistants of Timaeus’s craftsman bound the divine revolutions of the All within the spherical kephalos, “it being the most divine part and reigning [despotoun] over all parts within us.” The rest of the body that serves this despot is an unreliable instrument brought into existence to keep the head from rolling helplessly about the earth or from being rooted in place. The gods deposited or imprisoned the more alien, irrational, unselflike powers of the psyche within the subcapital corpus. They narrowed the isthmus of the neck to keep those powers from assaulting the head. The Timaean gods signified that the front of the head was more honorable than its back by setting “the face on this side.” There they “bound organs for the soul’s forethought [pronoia] and ordered this, which is the natural front, to be the leader.” They “caused the pure fire within it, which is akin to that of day, to flow through the [light-bearing] eyes in a smooth and dense stream,” and they fashioned the mouth not only for the reception of food but also for “the stream of speech which flows out and serves phronēsis and is of all streams the fairest and best” (Tim. 44d ff., 75e). This is an appropriate container for “the most lordly form of soul.” Nous dwells like a reigning Eupatrid “in the summit of our body and lifts us from earth toward our celestial affinity, like a plant whose roots are not in earth, but in the heavens. And this is most true, for it is to the heavens, whence the soul first came to birth, that the divine part attaches the head or root of us and keeps the whole body upright” (90a).

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There is at least a figural connection between this praise of the head and the return of Protagoras in the Theaetetus. When Socrates brings him back for his second defense, he imagines Protagoras emerging “from the ground, here at our feet, if only as far as the neck” (171d). Like Timaeus, Protagoras would leave his lowly body in the underworld. In a brilliant essay on Protagoras, Edward Lee notes that this image reverses Timaeus’s figure of the head rooted in heaven and that it symbolizes Protagoras’s ultimate helplessness: Protagoras is presented as responding to fairly flagrant injustices against himself, and his defense . . . abounds with first-person pronouns and possessives. . . . When “Protagoras” takes up the defense of his views, there is . . . a strongly proprietary, personal and selfcentered air to all that he says. Just as he makes himself the measure of Theaetetus’s performance . . . he goes on to insist that all discussion be directed scrupulously to what he himself maintains . . . : to the truth as he has written it . . . and, indeed, not just to the letter, but to the spirit of what he means to maintain. . . . The truth appears to be . . . that Protagoras would not balk at anything in his determined efforts to maintain that “the truth is just as he has written it to be.”10 This defensive saving of face is necessary because of the dilemma with which Socrates confronts him: Why “was Protagoras wise, so that he could rightly be thought worthy to be the teacher of other men and to be well paid, and why were we ignorant creatures . . . obliged to go to school to him, if each person is the measure of his own wisdom?” (161d–e). The only way out would be to follow the example of Timaeus, who made himself the world’s measure. Otherwise, as Lee astutely observes, Protagoras remains “deeply at odds with himself, almost the philosophical equivalent of an Oedipus: the very crimes with which he charges others are those he is guilty of, and the very virtues that he thinks he has are not his but those of the persons whom he most contemns. ‘He is what he thinks that he is not—all the more so because he thinks that he is not’ (176d5–6)” (pp. 237–38). Lee’s account frames the Protagorean arts of face in a new perspective. It depicts a form of sōtēria deeply at odds with the face Protagoras strives to present. The sophist offers the proprietary face, the natural front of the soul’s pronoia, as the mark of a unique and integral identity. His prosōpon signifies the purposive presence of the father of the logos. By his command of that face, he stands over against others, a separate individual, and above others, a superior individual.

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The trouble is that in the Theaetetus the self-assertive owner of Protagoras’s face, speech, and truth is not even present. He’s revived from the dead and ventriloquated by Socrates, just as Socrates is revived from the dead and ventriloquated by the boy who reads from Euclides’s text, just as Euclides and his text are ventriloquated by Plato, who is not present. Where, then, do we locate the boundaries of any individual presence, any natural face? The signifying power of face, the embodied visibility that localizes presence, the mouth from which phronēsis streams in speech: Aren’t these the misdirections and illusions of the logocentric fallacy? What if the face by its presence, its very existence, conceals the absence of what it pretends to conceal (or express)? And what if the organs of pronoia are not its own but are inscribed with patterns from elsewhere, are nourished through their roots from another source? On behalf of whom or what does it exercise its soterial power? To explore the powers of virtue or those of perception and thought under the aspect of the dynameis of face is to explore them under the constraints of logocentric conditions. That can make it harder to pry the logos of the discourse apart from the performative play of its rhetoric. The unity of face Protagoras prefers is not only the unity of the bounded and apparently autonomous individual. It’s also the unity of his teaching with his person. This is why, as Lee insightfully shows (p. 254), the Protagoras represented by Socrates is so possessive and fearful of misinterpretation that he has to rush back to defend his teaching in person. The unity of the teaching with the person is dramatized in the epistemological conflation of knowing with perceiving. Socrates shows that this conflation slanders both knowledge and perception, that it encourages—in addition to misology—misaisthēsis and misepistēmē. Plato demonstrates in the portrait of the Eleatic Stranger, that the dialectical consequence of such a conflation is a radical split between the two cognitive modes, a split that reintroduces the double slander at another level. The Eleatic philosopher is not merely a logician who flies above the paltry concerns of the polis. He is a logical imperialist, never more interested and political than when he claims to remove himself from personal engagement. He is clearly out to “get” Socrates and make converts, that is, followers, of Theaetetus and Young Socrates. His claim to Olympian disinterest is the rhetorical face by which he tries to render his pleonexia for power invisible. Protagorean conflation and Eleatic diacritics are the two faces of a single coin.

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Lee argues that the plant-like image of Protagoras’s head rooted in the ground signifies the ultimate futility of “his strong attachment to his ‘Truth’ ” and “enables Plato to pass, both on Protagoras’s doctrine and on his attachment to it, the most damning and dismissive judgment.”11 This reading closes down on the ironic dialectic implied by Lee’s statement that in his self-division Protagoras unknowingly converges with those he contemns. I’m not persuaded by Lee’s insistence on the vegetative character of the image, but if I were, I would want to explore the idea that the head, like those of the hydra, is not only expendable: Decapitation nourishes and activates the root structure that always sends up two shoots for every one lost. It is not so much the aretē or technē of the face, its parts, and its powers, but their fallibility, that saves the deep-rooted structure of fears and interests whose proschēma the sophist is. This is one reason why Socrates’s defeat and defacing of Protagoras may at best be a Pyrrhic victory. But there is another reason. It is too easy to forget that Protagoras never actually appears in his own person in Plato’s dialogues. Since the Protagoras is narrated by Socrates, Protagoras is only “Protagoras” there as well as in the Theaetetus—where, in fact, Socrates is only “Socrates.” In fact, the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues is always “Socrates” rather than Socrates. One of the canonical questions guiding the exploration of Plato’s fantasy of Socrates has been, where does Socrates begin and Plato end? It’s of equal interest to carry the question a step further: In “Socrates’s” fantasy of Protagoras, where does Protagoras begin and Socrates end? Are they not, like pleasure and pain, “joined together in one head,” as Socrates remarks in the Phaedo? Perhaps if Aesop had made a fable of Socrates and Protagoras he would have told “how they were at war and the god wished to reconcile them, and when he could not do that, he fastened their heads together, and for that reason, when one of them comes to anyone, the other follows after” (60b–c). How, then, could Socrates defeat and deface Protagoras without defeating and defacing himself?

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Sophistry as Safemindedness in the Protagoras

From the acropolis of his lordly Timaean face Protagoras looks down upon his audience as the one upon the many. The many includes not merely the poorer voting and rowing majority but also their political pilots and socioeconomic superiors. In what follows, we watch Socrates dislodge Protagoras from his high fastness and lead him down the steps of the old dance toward the pleasures of the agora. During the course of this descent the partners change places and the leader becomes the led.

1 The episode of Protagoras’s decline and fall occurs during the hedonism argument near the end of the dialogue. This episode can’t be explored in isolation because it is tightly sandwiched between two discussions of courage (andreia) that explain its presence. The first unfolds from 349a to 351b and the second from 358d to 360e. The sophist’s downfall is motivated by the first and conditions the second. Andreia poses special problems for Protagoras. Its traditional associations would not be palatable to his demotic audience. Its military bearing, its very name, place it among the “well-born” competitive aretai rather than among the cooperative or “quiet” aretai to which Protagoras had wisely, temperately, respectfully, and judiciously appealed by emphasizing aidōs and dikē in his makrologia. Andreia may also pose problems of another sort for Socrates, since the problems of apprehension and misanthropy are intimately connected to

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the nontraditional version of courage that underlies Socratic aretē. At 358d he asks the sophists whether there is something they call deos kai phobos. With its military associations of panic and flight, phobos is the coward’s fear (358d–e, 360b). Deos is the more general apprehensiveness of things that are fearful or terrible (deinos). At 360d he states that andreia is the sophia that knows what is and is not fearful (tōn deinōn mai mē deinōn). The discussion of andreia, like that of aretē generally, is introduced amid the conflicting crosscurrents of technical and ethical criteria. The question is whether the knowledge that supports any aretē is epistēmē or sophia. Epistēmē, “knowledge” (sometimes translated as “science”), is a knowing-how. Sophia, “wisdom,” is a knowing-why and knowingwhat—why or to what end a particular act should be performed. The difference between these two terms gets emphasized during the account of hedonism when the art of measurement, metrētikē technē, is installed as “our salvation in life” (356d) and redefined at 357b as technē kai epistēmē. Except for a brief reappearance at 360d, sophia vanishes from that discussion. During its absence, the stream of discourse continually veers toward the hedonistic ground cultivated by sophia’s evil twin, sophistikē. The knowledge and skill connected with the competitive aretai seem more distinct from the sphere of ethical judgments than those connected with the cooperative aretai. Cooperative aretai demand difficult “skills” of self-reflection and self-restraint, especially in actions that serve selfinterest—for example, in making and honoring contracts. When attempts to define justice, reverence, holiness, temperance, and wisdom arise in the context of cooperative aretai, it becomes harder to characterize them in terms merely of epistēmē, or technical competence. It’s also harder for Socrates to promote ethical accounts that conflict with those that seem reasonable to his interlocutors. He perversely demonstrates this at 349d–351b when he steers the first courage argument off track by reducing courage to daring before identifying it with sophia. The discussion is famous among logicians for the episode of the fallacious conversion of sophia to andreia (350c) that propels Protagoras into one of his several paragraphs of strategic bloviation (350c–351a).1 That discussion properly began at 349b–d when Socrates reminded him of the question he posed earlier (329d–330b) in response to the makrologia: Are the parts of virtue related to each other like the parts of gold or like those of the face? Protagoras had then selected the latter option. Now he replies that four of the referents of virtue-terms “resemble one another fairly closely, but courage is altogether different” (349d).

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Socrates picks away at this. He wonders whether tharraleos—boldness or daring or confidence—is a property of courage (349e), and he uses epistēmē to denote the specialized skills that underwrite the boldness of horsemen, peltasts, and those who dive into wells (350a–c). The leisureliness of this zany epagōgē seems calculated to get on Protagoras’s nerves. He testily agrees that those whose boldness is based on epistēmē—expertise, knowing-how—have a finer kind of courage than the fools who boldly take risks but have no epistēmē (350c–351b). During the interchange Socrates allays Protagoras’s fears by using epistēmē (and forms of epistamai) rather than sophia, but he shifts to sophia immediately after. At 350c he concludes that since, according to the argument, the wisest (hoi sophōtatoi) are the boldest and therefore the bravest, sophia must be andreia. If this conclusion bothers Protagoras, it may be because he finds it more manly—more andreios—to define courage as wisdom than to define wisdom as courage. He protests that Socrates has misrepresented his position: He may have admitted that all the brave are bold, but he never agreed that all the bold are brave (350c–351a). More specifically, he objects to the way Socrates infers the identity of sophia with andreia from the correlation of epistēmē with tharraleos (boldness). Socrates, he complains, tries too zealously to exercise the unifying power of sophia (“proceeding in this manner you might even take strength to be wisdom,” 350d). He then proceeds to roll out a mindboggling proportio: Strength is to power in the body as courage is to boldness in the soul (350e–351b). He associates the second term of each pair with epistēmē (or mania or thymos) and assimilates courage to strength as a product of conditioning (physis and eutrophia, a nonce-word). Sophia is thereby eliminated, and andreia returned to the sphere of the competitive aretai that can be instilled by sophistical paideia. The next appearance of sophia occurs after Socrates has asked Protagoras his opinion of the power of epistēmē. He replies that epistēmē kai sophia are the mightiest (kratiston) of all human things (352d). Here, clearly, epistēmē is the operative term under which sophia is subsumed as a reinforcing synonym. After this, sophia is mentioned only four times. At 358c Socrates uses it in the Protagorean sense to secure the sophists’ agreement to the hedonism thesis. Near the end of the second courage argument (360d) he twice bares its unifying edge in preparation for his final victory over Protagoras. Finally, in a gesture of good sportsmanship, Protagoras predicts on the basis of the performance just concluded that Socrates will become famous for sophia (361e), which in this context may be translated as “sophistry” (i.e., “if you keep it up, you may be able to fill my shoes some day”).

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Protagoras, then, seems interested in positioning sophia safely under the control of epistēmē or of the more general skill of sophistikē. His brand of sophia includes promētheia for what best brings sōtēria in the matters of life, pleasure, and the pursuit of power. He’s therefore rightly apprehensive when Socrates uses sophia, whatever its meaning, to drive home the unity-of-virtue thesis.

2 Well-divers, horsemen, and warriors: Socrates uses the same examples to run a similar epagōgē in the Laches, but one that supports the contrary thesis: Those who take risks without being skillful are braver than those who are skilled (193a–194b). In both passages, the well-diver protrudes like a sore thumb. Or as C. C. W. Taylor more coolly puts it, the purpose of this activity “is not totally clear; as the word translated ‘wells’ [phreata] also means ‘storage tanks’ it seems likely that the reference is to divers’ going down under water to clean the well or tank.”2 But whether it is a well or a storage tank it is something people not only dive into but also fall into. So Socrates reminds Theodorus in the Theaetetus that poor Thales (who boldly if foolishly said all things are water) fell into a phrear while “studying the stars and looking upward” (174a). Thales exemplifies the high-minded or misanthropic philosopher who scorns the affairs of the city and “pays no attention to his next-door neighbor.” He is the laughingstock of the mob he contemns because “he falls into wells and all sorts of perplexities [aporian]” and his lack of schēma is frightening (aschēmosyne deine; Theaetetus 174a–d). The diver’s function may be to pull fallen philosophers out of the well or tank. But what kind of expertise would that take if the well is an aporia? And if it is the kind of aporia Socrates has made his reputation on, don’t we need a third category? There are people who fall into a phrear, people who dive in and pull them out, and people who push them in. Thales’s well is not the first to be mentioned in the Theaetetus. At 165b, while Socrates is testing the orphaned Protagorean logos (knowledge is perception) that he claims to have extracted from Theaetetus, he pushes Theaetetus in “with a question from which there is no escape, by which you are, as they say, trapped in a well.” It is in fact a trick question, almost as deinos as the sort put by Euthydemus or Dionysidorus, but the point of the episode is to bring Protagoras to the rescue. Here, then, Socrates pushes people into wells and Protagoras is the expert who rushes in confidently and impetuously to fish out the orphan that the hydrated Theaetetus happens to be holding. By the end of the

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dialogue, however, he ends up in the same deep water as Theaetetus and Thales. The Thalean philosopher has often been taken to be a Socratic selfimage. This makes sense only as a mordant self-parody. Socrates presents the flying or falling philosopher as his antitype. But he suggests in several dialogues—especially in his autobiography at Phaedo 96a–99d—that his own desire to philosophize may be contaminated by the same misanthropic impulse. Thales, the philosopher king, Protagoras, Socrates: These are odd wellfellows, and their flowing together into watery coalescence raises the questions so conspicuously excluded from the Protagoras: For what reason should a man, whether courageous or foolhardy, expert or clumsy, dive into a well and risk his life? What kind of aporia is signified, what’s at stake, what is to be saved? Is it always wise or just to save a life, even if it is the life of your child or of your logos? Is it wise to know where wells are and keep clear of them? Or is it always noble and fine to be so disinterested, so antipolitical, so greedy to comprehend the All, that you lack the expertise required to avoid dropping into a well? Is there a right way—a technically competent way—to fall into a well? The point of the first courage argument has been well characterized by Taylor: The courageous man faces danger even to death because he knows that that is the best thing to do, whereas the expert faces it for as long as he can master it but runs away when he sees that he can no longer cope. This distinction provides the answer to Socrates’s dilemma in the Laches; while the courage of the non-expert is indeed unintelligent from the purely technical point of view of the expert who aims to come out unscathed as well as to do the job, it is not unintelligent from the point of view of the rational man who decides that e.g. his obligations to his country require him to hold out to the end against hopeless odds (for instance, the Spartans at Thermopylae).3 Taylor goes on to account for the structure of the courage-hedonismcourage sandwich on these grounds: “The present argument, which attempts to equate courage with expertise, is abandoned, to be succeeded by another argument in which courage is equated with an altogether different kind of knowledge, viz. knowledge of what is to be pursued and what is to be avoided in life as a whole.”4 Military experience provides the normal context for discussions of courage. But the well-diver image is anomalous—even comical—enough to arouse the suspicion that it may open up an aporia and invite us to dive

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into it. It both implies and sidesteps the more complicated questions about courage that occupy the center of the Socratic warfare. Taylor states that the shift from epistēmē to sophia at the end of the first courage argument (350c) is not an equivocation—“those terms are frequently interchangeable in Greek, and are clearly so used here.”5 But used by whom, or for whose benefit? And does “here” refer to the dialogue as a whole? And if there is “an altogether different kind of knowledge”—different, that is, from the expertise associated with epistēmē—what should it be called if not sophia? Do Socrates and Protagoras share a common understanding of the relation between epistēmē and sophia? If not, is either aware of the difference? The conclusion of the first courage argument shows that Protagoras suspects Socrates of promoting “an altogether different kind of knowledge.” Although its precise character may be unclear to him, it seems associated with the unity-of-virtue thesis the sophist is trying to block. Socrates shifts to sophia at precisely the moment he threatens to score a point for the unity thesis (“on this reasoning, wisdom will be courage,” 350c). “Knowledge of what is to be pursued and what is to be avoided in life as a whole”: Taylor judges this to be “an altogether different kind of knowledge” from the knowledge Protagoras values. It is sophia in the antihedonist sense normally identified with Socratic ethics. Yet if this is so, Taylor is wrong to identify it with epistēmē. But he remains consistent in arguing that Socrates himself embraces the hedonist position.

3 The question whether sophia and epistēmē are synonymous is a critical issue in the last section of the dialogue. It is symptomatic of the controversy over hedonism. For someone who claims that it’s always right to take precautions against pain or death, and that this justifies doing evil or injustice to others, there can be no substantial difference between the two terms. Sophia and epistēmē differ only when pain is distinguished from evil and pleasure from good. This is the question that the first courage argument (349d–351b) raises and begs, and it is what motivates Socrates’s apparently abrupt transition to the hedonism discussion at 351b. Terence Irwin has argued that Socrates resembles the hedonist in valuing the art of measurement, which allows him to advocate a craft of virtue superior to the vague and subjective notion of training in aretē offered by Protagoras. Since pleasure defined as the good is more measurable than the good distinguished from pleasure, Socrates—on those instrumental

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grounds—rejects the latter alternative and embraces the former.6 He affirms what Irwin calls “epistemological hedonism, taking judgments about pleasure to be epistemologically prior to judgments about goodness.”7 But this proves unsatisfactory. After Irwin identifies several problems in the position, he concludes that the hedonism developed in the Protagoras “is Socrates’s own doctrine.” Plato shows it has serious flaws that demand its rejection. In subsequent dialogues from the Gorgias to the Republic the commentator explores other answers leading to a radical revision of a Socratic theory forced, because of its “inadequate resources,” to rely on “the dubious support” of the hedonism argument.8 Irwin’s account centers on Plato’s perception of the dilemma. But it supplies all the materials for a study of Socrates’s perception of a different dilemma: the dilemma not merely of being misunderstood, but of finding himself unavoidably complicit in the production of misunderstanding. And this is the topic I explore in the following pages.

4 The most interesting feature of Irwin’s argument is the idea that if Socrates is to defeat Protagoras, he must do so by promising to apply Protagorean principles more systematically than Protagoras. In offering to save pleasure-seekers from their incontinence and teach them to become competent, Socrates offers to supply the means by which they can achieve the end Protagoras helps them envisage. If, then, he strips Protagoras of the face that distinguishes the sophist from the many, Socrates can’t avoid losing the face that distinguishes him from Protagoras. Irwin accepts this with equanimity. Does Socrates? The question is prompted by his repeated insistence that the arguments he produces come not from him but from his interlocutors. Is this disclaimer mistaken? Is it ironic? Does it express a programmatic intention that isn’t carried through in practice? To worry such questions is to join forces with all the commentators who discuss the passage. For the issue that divides them is whether Socrates and Protagoras join forces or remain divided. Are they speaking at variance or as one? To this common concern I append a small rider: Doesn’t Socrates appear to be worried by the same issue? My view of the hedonism argument accords with the view argued by Grube, Cornford, Guthrie, and Weingartner, among others, but it’s most heavily indebted to J. P. Sullivan’s

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short essay “The Hedonism in Plato’s Protagoras.”9 Sullivan concludes that Socrates does not embrace hedonism, and bases this conclusion on an analysis of his interlocutory strategies. His analysis is motivated by the conviction that although the sophists may think Socrates follows the argument “wherever it leads,” readers are “meant to . . . see” that he’s actually doing something else: “providing himself with another ad hominem premise to assimilate courage and knowledge in the final argument, and incidentally revealing the basic conceptions of the Sophists and the mass of mankind.” He forces Protagoras “to defend a thesis which he is ashamed to affirm—the common view that one may exercise self-control in injustice.” But the dialogue suggests “that it may be Socrates and Protagoras, not the thesis, who will be examined.”10 Critics on both sides of the issue agree that since the outcome of the discussion is to equate Protagoras’s opinion with that of the many, he has indeed been “examined.” But has Socrates been “examined”? The answer implicit in the approaches of Taylor and Irwin is that Protagoras can be made to change faces with the many only if Socrates changes faces with Protagoras. Socrates is aware of this condition. He knows in advance that the discussion will test him no less than Protagoras. He signals this with a Homeric allusion that marks the major transition from the Simonides debate to the courage and hedonism discussions. After the debate Socrates repetitively insists (347c–d and 348a) that he and Protagoras should put the poets aside and continue “by means of their own voices and discussions,” speaking “together in our own persons, making trial of the truth and ourselves.” But when a rebuke by Alcibiades appears to embarrass Protagoras (348b), Socrates reassures him with advice from the poets: “When two go together, one of them at least looks forward” (348d). The complete sentence, uttered by Diomedes as he initiates the Doloneia, is “When two go together, one of them at least looks forward / to see what is best; a man by himself, though he be careful, / still has less mind in him than two, and his wits have less weight” (Iliad 10.224–26).11 This line also appears early in the Symposium (174d) with loaded implications unpacked by Stanley Rosen in his great study of that dialogue.12 In the Protagoras, when Socrates/Diomedes chooses the sophist as his Odysseus, the irony of his subsequent praise stands out more sharply against the cautious chivvying of the two heroes in the parallel passage of the Iliad. Diomedes’s statement offers a dare no less than a share, and

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implies a pecking order: “One of them at least looks forward / to see what is best.” Where Protagoras/Odysseus looks remains to be seen. The allusion generates more profound uncertainties. Socrates as narrator had identified himself with Odysseus early in the dialogue (315c–d), and his manipulation of Protagoras even as he quotes Homer is characteristic of his crafty prototype. An instability of reference begins to move these figures about and perhaps even blend them. Does Protagoras have anything in common with Diomedes, the embodiment of tharraleos? And what about the possibilities inherent in the mirror-structure that makes the Doloneia so unusual in the Iliad? Ironic parallels between Achaian and Trojan actions in this episode have often been noted. Dolon (“Trickster”) combines the impetuous boldness of Diomedes and the craftiness of Odysseus in perverse or parodic form. The episode dramatizes the motif of the trickster tricked, the hunter hunted. This structure of shifting relationships is injected into the Protagoras on the point of Socrates’s allusion. It gradually spreads through the verbal warfare it introduces until its ambivalent strains permeate the night raid into the terrain of the many on which Socrates leads Protagoras. In the physical warfare of the Iliad, the doubling is a temporary effect, an archaic ghost, easily dissipated by the clear distinction between Trojans and Achaians. But when the Homeric figures are assimilated to Socrates, Protagoras, and the many, the archaic force of miasma is intensified by the receptivity of its new host. As the foray into courage and pleasure proceeds, the boundaries of identity begin to slacken and in the ensuing confusion it becomes harder to distinguish hero from coward and predator from prey. Socrates will find himself affected by the logic of the scapegoat as he leads Protagoras (or Protagoras leads him) toward the many. Casting himself out, making his “own voice” and his “own person” the site of the logos of the Other, he will succeed in reuniting a torn community; but not his community.

5 Socrates begins the hedonism interrogation at 351b by warming up with three innocuous one-liners about good and bad living. He uses the milder adverb eu instead of the adjectival red flag agathos to make it safe for Protagoras to agree that those who live pleasantly live well and those who don’t live badly. These casual inquiries are abruptly transformed to official premises by a fourth one-liner in which Socrates puts agathon

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into play and asks Protagoras whether he concludes that it is good to live pleasantly and bad to live unpleasantly. The hedonist definition is advanced in the form of an unqualified men . . . de polarity. Protagoras sidesteps this modest phrear with a carefully noncommittal qualification: “Yes, if indeed one lives in the enjoyment of things that are kaloi” (351c). Kalos is a diffuse term that already glances toward commitment to the values of kalokagathia. Socrates continues to press. He digs the well deeper by offering a pair of equally unpleasant alternatives. Protagoras must either “agree with hoi polloi who call some pleasant things bad and some painful ones good,” or agree with “what I say,” that is, that pleasant things are good and painful things bad without qualification (351c). Protagoras fends off this pressure with an expansive gesture of prudence and a fudge: It is “safer [asphalesteron] for me to reply, with a view not merely to my present answer but to all the rest of my life, that some pleasant things are not good, and also that some painful things are not bad, and some are, while a third class is neutral, neither good nor bad” (351d). This produces a brief tactical and procedural skirmish in which Protagoras (1) tries to slow Socrates down, and (2) cedes him the leadership in the discussion. At this point Socrates reintroduces the face. He asks Protagoras to imagine someone trying to judge a man’s health and bodily function by his appearance. [He] might look at his face and hands [or fingertips, cheiras akras] and say: “Come now, uncover [apokalypsas] your chest too and your back and show them, that I may examine you more thoroughly.” Something of the sort is what I want for our present inquiry. Observing that your attitude to the good and the pleasant is what you say, I want to go on something like this. “Come now, Protagoras, uncover this part of your thinking: how are you in regard to knowledge [epistēmēn]? Do you agree with the many there too, or do you think otherwise?” (352a–b) If we squeeze a kalos-pun out of apokalyptein and equate “uncover” with “unbeautify,” the drift of Socrates’s unmasking project will be clear. Initially, he helps Protagoras maintain the face that distinguishes him from the many by making it easy for him to reject their views as beneath him— incorrect (352e) and unconsidered (353a–b). Protagoras responds enthusiastically to the chance to join Socrates in the noble opinion that knowledge is noble (kalon) and can govern humankind: “My opinion is indeed as you say . . . and moreover it would be an

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especial disgrace to me above all men not to claim wisdom and knowledge to be the mightiest [kratiston] of human things” (352c–d). Socrates applauds: “Nobly [kalos] spoken, and true.” What is true is that Protagoras would consider it ignoble to be heard saying something ignoble, and this concern for his rhetorical prosōpon works a sea change on the opinion as it journeys from Socrates to Protagoras. In the medical analogy, the face and cheiras akras represent Protagoras’s safe reply, and especially his concern for safety. Cheiras akras, whatever its precise reference, suggests extremities and outer defenses. The chest and back, stethos and metaphrenon, are interesting choices: Both the chest and the phren were metonyms for seats of passion or affection, and the phren was a Homeric locus of mind. Seth Schein has suggested that in the neighborhood of a discussion of andreia those terms suggest the Homeric image of a warrior who either courageously presents his stethos to the enemy or else exposes his back like a coward.13 “Let’s strip off your proschēma and see what kind of courage and what kind of fear motivate your dianoia. And let’s see whether or not the sophistical front you so boldly present is backed by a cowardly opinion of what is to be feared—an opinion no different from that of the ignorant pleasure-seeking many you despise.” The discussion that follows contains brilliant passages of interlocutory drama. First Socrates leads Protagoras chest forward into the fray, then he spins him around and exposes his back to the Socratic spear. He puts his leading questions to Protagoras in such a way as to elicit affirmative responses to two different inquiries: (1) Does Protagoras agree that this is the opinion of the many? (2) Does his opinion agree with theirs? At 356c, 357a, and 357b, Protagoras affirms that Socrates has expressed the view of the many. At 356e and 357b, he states that he agrees with their view. The preceding set of six questions, from 353e to 354c, had lulled Protagoras by being exclusively of the first variety. In two of the six “Protagoras and I” are partners in explanation (353c, 354a). In five cases Socrates keeps the many clear of Protagoras: He fixes them safely in the “you” position created by direct address. Then in each case, as he turns to solicit Protagoras’s response to their opinions, he removes them from “you” to “they.” The penultimate instance, at 354b, is an especially interesting example of this tactic because the many’s opinion begins to breach the deictic insulation and creep closer to Protagoras: “[D]o you call them [painful things] good because they produce extreme pangs and anguish for the moment, or because later on they result in health and good bodily condition, the sōtēria of cities, dominion over others, and wealth? They would agree to this, I suppose.” Though this paraphrases the list of benefits

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Protagoras claimed to bestow at 318e, the shift to “they” prevents contamination and allows him to comment as a bystander. At 354c Socrates suddenly drops the third-person shield and trains his “you” directly on Protagoras. Protagoras carelessly shows his back: Then do you pursue pleasure as being a good thing, and shun pain as being a bad thing? [Oukoun tēn men hēdonēn diōkete hōs agathon on, tēn de lypēn pheugete hōs kakon;] He agreed [Synedokei]. So one thing you consider [ēgeisth’] to be bad—pain; and pleasure [you consider] to be good. . . . Now the verbs in the second-person plural (diōkete, pheugete, ēgeisth’) include Protagoras among the many. Socrates completes his statement by remarking that if “you” appeal to any other criterion “you might be able to tell it to us; but this you will be unable to do,” and Protagoras responds, “[I]t doesn’t seem so to me [Oud’ emoi dokousin]” (354d). Socrates then virtually repeats himself, as if to confirm Protagoras’s commitment to the opinion of the many: If “you” have any other criterion, “you can tell it to us; but you haven’t any other.” Protagoras’s reply, “Truly spoken” (354e), may refer ambiguously both to the opinion of the many and to the fact that this is their opinion. It may also register his own assent. After Socrates discusses the idea of a hedonist art of measurement (356a–357e), he alternately elicits type (1) and type (2) responses. The effect of the sequence is to change the implication of Protagoras’s type (1) responses from a detached “that’s what the foolish many would say” to “that’s what they would say and that’s the way it is.” Taylor’s rendering of 357a–e sensitively picks up this shift: He departs from other translators in treating Protagoras’s two responses at 357b as replies Socrates makes on behalf of the many. The upshot of the hedonism discussion is that when Socrates strips away the protective face and fingertips of Protagoras’s dianoia (352a), it appears already contaminated by the vulgar dianoia from which the sophist so strenuously dissociates himself. He emerges as the double of the many. His mouth, eyes, and ears are their creations, their instruments. They, and not he, are the father of his discourse. What he claims to teach them is what they have taught him to teach them. The pressure Socrates puts on Protagoras with his deployment of type (1) and (2) questions is part of a larger rhetorical drama centered on his Protean play with shifters. At the start of the discourse (a) Socrates and Protagoras together disagree with (b) the majority of humans (352d)

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about how to characterize the failure of (c) the many to do what they know is best. Initially at stake is not the behavior of the many per se but the opinion of the majority as to how to interpret it. The majority who explain the behavior as incontinent are not themselves the incontinent actors; they are distinguished as “you” from the pleasure-seeking “they.” At this point, neither Protagoras nor the majority is yet implicated in the behavior and values of the many. Protagoras is still safely positioned as a mere commentator, and one who sides with Socrates against the majority. These distinctions are threatened with instant collapse at 354c, when Socrates pops the trick question, “[D]o you pursue [diōkete] pleasure as good and avoid pain as bad?” The majority and the many now converge with Protagoras in the addressee’s position. In the next two utterances Protagoras agrees with Socrates against the majority: They call the behavior good in terms of pleasure rather than some other end (354c–e). But something else is also going on. The crucial moment at which Socrates first draws the type (2) response—the moment when Protagoras agrees with the opinion of the many (356e)—intersects another turning point. Earlier, within the space of a single Stephanus page (354b–55b), Socrates adverts five times to an alternative that the majority are unable to cite as the criterion governing the choices made, first by the many, and then also by themselves (and Protagoras). After the first of these, Protagoras steps into the “you” position. At 354e, following the third recurrence, the majority spokesman becomes more aggressive and voices an objection that echoes Socrates’s response to Protagoras’s Great Speech: “[B]ut why do you go on at such length about this, and in so many ways?” As Socrates plays the majority spokesman, he lets himself be elbowed into a Protagoras-position. He counters aggressively by firing his fourth and fifth recurrences in rapid succession, separated only by a single—but critical—question: [4] But even now it is possible to retract if you can say that the good is different from pleasure or the bad from pain. Or is it enough for you to live out your life pleasantly, without pain? [5] If it is, and you can’t call anything good or bad that doesn’t end in pleasure or pain, listen to what I have to say next. (354e–55a) The fourth recurrence is most explicit in pointing toward the familiar Socratic alternative, and in emphasizing by “even now [nun]” that although the moment of truth is close at hand “you” have a final chance to retract before it is too late.

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The chance is immediately withdrawn in the question, “[I]s it enough for you to live out your life pleasantly, without pain?” This echoes the question at 354c that drew Protagoras’s first type (2) response, merging him with the other addressees and collapsing them all into “you.” With the fifth recurrence Socrates foists their conclusion on them and sets out to perform the reductio ad absurdum on their claim that a man knowingly commits evil or refrains from doing good “because he is driven and dazed by his pleasures” (355a–b). These recurrences produce an odd rhetorical effect. On the one hand, they assume the character of a persistent leading question (“have you any other telos?” 354d) as if to give the interlocutors a chance to reconsider. On the other hand, his negative answers on their behalf make them appear to repudiate what may be a better if tougher alternative. More generally, the interlocutory strategies in this part of the discussion seem perverse. The reduction of good and evil to pleasure and pain injects the hedonist argument that incontinence is a mistake, a product of technical ignorance (amathia, 357d–e) that can be corrected by learning and applying the instrumental art of measurement (355d–358a). Readers who have a good idea of the excluded alternative are encouraged to register the predictable Socratic protest: The good differs from pleasure. It is not enough to live out our lives pleasantly. Once the many are made to acknowledge they are responsible hedonists rather than helpless incontinents, we can go on to show them that their incontinence results from more than ignorance of the hedonist calculus. It derives from their totalizing commitment to what Irwin has called the “principle of hedonistic prudence.”14 This is not a mere absence of the knowledge that the good differs from the pleasurable. Rather, it is a skilled ignorance based on the refusal to inspect one’s motives and on careful avoidance of the gadfly’s sting. It resembles the ignorance of Cephalus, Crito, and other decent human beings whom Socrates numbers among his so-called friends. The Socratic ethic pleads and presses to be let into the discussion, but he blocks it by performing the reduction of the good to the pleasurable. He argues that since “good” and “evil” have become synonymous with “pleasure” and “pain,” the absurdity of the hedonist claim can be shown by unmixing the two pairs and employing only the first: “[A] man does evil, knowing it to be evil, and not having to do it, because he is overcome by the good” (355d). Socrates doesn’t exactly “argue” this case. Instead, he impersonates a questioner, who seems only to be asking for information, but who turns out to be hybristēs (355c). He pushes Socrates toward the phrear with some

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interrogatory jabs and presses on to convert the reductio to the hedonist calculus. Or so it seems.15 The questioner suggests that Socrates has put the reduction in a tendentiously absurd form, and he offers to save it by shifting the notion of “being overcome” from affective to cognitive terms. He proceeds to do this by introducing the term axios. Its general sense, “worthy,” derives from contexts that involve weighing and exchange (“worth as much,” “equal in weight,” “counterbalancing”). The questioner forces Socrates to admit that the pejorative word “overcome” in the reduction means that “the good is not worthy of conquering the evil”—is not equal in weight or force—and then he mounts his attack. I have broken the block paragraph into sections and interposed numbers to indicate places where a change of interlocutor is definitely called for, or seems probable, or is questionable: But in what sense, he might ask us, is the good unworthy of the bad, or the bad of the good? [1] This can only be when the one is greater and the other smaller, or when there are more on the one side and fewer on the other. We shall not find any other reason to give. [2] So it is clear, he will say, that by “being overcome” you mean getting the greater evil in exchange for the lesser good. [3]

That must be agreed.

[4] Then let us apply the terms “pleasant” and “painful” to these things instead, and say that a man does what we previously called evil, but now call painful, knowing it to be painful, because he is overcome by the pleasant, which is obviously unworthy to conquer. [5] What unworthiness can there be in pleasure as against pain, save an excess or defect of one compared with the other? That is, when one becomes greater and the other smaller, or when there are more on one side and fewer on the other, or here a greater degree and there a less. [6] For if anyone should say: But, Socrates, the immediately pleasant differs widely from the subsequently pleasant or painful, I should reply: Do they differ in anything but pleasure and pain? [7] That is the only distinction. Like a practiced weigher, put pleasant things and painful in the scales, and with them the nearness and remoteness, and tell me which count for more. . . .

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[8] Isn’t that the way it is, my friends? I know they wouldn’t be able to deny this. (355d–356c) It isn’t at first necessary to assign (1) to Socrates. The questioner could be answering his own question. Since Socrates identifies the questioner as speaker in (2), it’s clear that Socrates responds at (3), but whether he stops or continues at (4) is less clear. Taylor’s looser translation of tauta men oun houto at (3), “so much for that,” makes it more conceivable that (4) marks a change of subject by the same speaker, but Taylor in fact argues against a reading “the main attraction” of which is “that the ‘ill-mannered questioner’ takes no further part in the discussion,” since it is the questioner’s thesis that is being developed.16 Whether there is a change of speakers at (5) is even less certain. Assuming that the questioner picks up at (4), it is possible to read the first question at (5) as Socrates’s response to the statement that the pleasant is unworthy to conquer. But until we get to (6) it is equally possible that the questioner continues his exposition. Section (6) marks a definite continuation, and since it introduces another new speaker, an objector who addresses Socrates by name, we conclude retroactively that Socrates has been speaking in his own voice at least since (5) and possibly since (3). After a moment of hesitation at (7)— the first sentence could be read as a restrictive response on the objector’s part—we also conclude that Socrates speaks in his own voice at the end of the passage. At (8) he completes the exposition addressed to the majority and the many, and presumably also to the questioner and the objector, after which he turns finally from “them” to Protagoras. When Socrates puts the new voice into play at 355c, he clearly marks it as distinct from his own, the intervention of an outside examiner. The effect of this tactic on the reduction of good/bad to pleasure/pain is striking. Socrates had five times suggested that if there were an alternative to hedonism, an ethical telos or teleutē, the many (now including the majority and Protagoras) would reject it.17 J. P. Sullivan has rightly stressed the importance of these repetitions.18 Since the reductio was going to be the consequence of that rejection, Plato’s more sanguine readers might expect that after Socrates had shown the absurdity of the hedonist claim he would go on to rehabilitate the alternative in its familiar Socratic form. This possibility had been prepared for at 345d–e when Socrates wrings one of his favorite formulas out of poor old Simonides, “no one willingly errs or does shameful and evil deeds.” The possibility fails to materialize, however, and the break-in by the questioner coincides with the failure. Socrates makes it appear that the questioner has his own agenda, and that

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it is he who effectively foils Socrates’s attempt at reductio by heading it in a different direction. The questioner shoots for a “scientific” or epistemic resolution to the problem of demystifying incontinence. His redirection at first imposes a strain on the reductio. While it remains focused on the term “good,” its absurdity extends to the questioner’s attempt to make sense of it, since it is ridiculous to say one is overcome by the good because it is less axios than the bad. Therefore, at step (4) the good is quickly discarded for its presumptive equivalent, pleasure, in terms of which it is reasonable to argue that what the majority really meant by “overcome” was a failure in logistical judgment, a defect of technē. This move is congenial to the claims of the Protagorean teacher. He can then go on to persuade the many that their incontinence is avoidable through instruction. I note in passing that if the shift from “good” back to “pleasure” converts an absurd proposition to a reasonable one, “good” cannot actually be synonymous with or reducible to “pleasure.” Step (4) is then the critical turning point: It launches the triumph of the hedonist calculus. At the same time, it is the most ambiguous interlocutory juncture, for we can’t decide whether Socrates or the questioner is speaking. And the moment at which their “voices” indistinguishably blend is also the moment that lays the basis for an argument favorable to Protagoras. As the majority position converges with that of Protagoras, the majority spokesman, initially introduced as a hybristēs opponent to Socrates, appropriates his voice. From that moment on, the ventriloquist becomes the ventriloquated. The spokesman borrows Socrates’s voice and transmits his argument through it. Socrates and his good have been rendered unworthy (ouk axios), overcome by the many, by the majority, by Protagoras, and by their pleasure. And now, accepting the spokesman’s argument as his own, he signifies this development by a change of shifters that occurs at 356d and is maintained through the conclusion of his speech: “[I]f our welfare consisted in doing and choosing things of large dimensions, and avoiding and not doing those of small, what would be our salvation in life?” Here, finally, “we” are all together, united in our commitment to and praise of the hedonist calculus. Just what they are praising is something Socrates leaves studiedly vague—“[T]he nature of this technē or epistēmē we shall consider some other time” (357b)—since his nominal purpose has been served. He has persuaded the majority to revise its explanation of the many’s incontinence. They will now agree that it is an art or science. And that’s all they know. What Socrates omits, and keeps from the many, is an account of precisely how they can save their lives.

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The omission may prompt us to wonder what the saving science may be. As for the many, it can only raise their anxiety to be told that there is a way to save their lives but be denied the knowledge of how to do so. Since someone else has the secret, the many must be more apprehensive than ever, more willing, perhaps, to deposit their lives and fees with the sophist for safekeeping. In proclaiming and celebrating the victory that “Protagoras and I” have won, Socrates allows the questioner within him a moment of hybristic crowing. If earlier we had said the experience of the many was not “being overcome by pleasure” but was “ ‘ignorance,’ you would have laughed us to scorn: but now if you laugh at us you will be laughing at yourselves as well” (357d). This is so not only because “you” have been defeated, but also because “you” and “we” have coalesced into one. At 357e–58a Socrates executes a transition that projects the unison beyond the dramatis personae of his exposition to his actual interlocutors. “To be overcome by pleasure means just this—ignorance in the highest degree, [an ill] for which Protagoras here claims to be the doctor, as do also Prodicus and Hippias. . . . That would have been our answer to the many. And now, with Protagoras, I ask you, Hippias and Prodicus— for you can both answer as one—whether you think that what I say is true or false.” Socrates has just advised the many that the pain of sacrificing money to the sophists will be outweighed by the pleasurable mastery their teaching guarantees. The doctors find his arguments charis. All of them euphorically agree six times with the conclusions he draws from the argument (358a–d). His fourth and fifth statements in this series—self-mastery is wisdom and ignorance is having a false opinion and being deceived about important matters—are recognizable Socratic opinions trapped in the hedonist logos. They lead to the final ringing Socratism: “[N]o one willingly goes after evil or what he thinks to be evil . . . in preference to the good” (358d). Earlier, Socrates had uttered it in his Simonidean voice, and here “evil” and “good” have been infiltrated by the ponderable values of pleasure and pain.

6 My argument so far has been that Socrates does not embrace the hedonist position. He uses sophistical methods to fight sophistry, and his ironic or parodic commitment to those methods is part of the devious strategy by which he defeats Protagoras at his own game. Socrates reduces

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him to the many and, in so doing, makes a convincing pretense of embracing hedonism. In this connection, the idea that Socrates is arguing ad hominem rather than stating his own view has proved ethically unpalatable to readers on both sides of the fence. Some would rather see him hedonistic than dishonest. Taylor, for example, finds it “implausible that Socrates should be represented as arguing with conscious dishonesty.”19 On the other side, Sullivan seems a little embarrassed by the evidence of “unsoundness or unfairness or insincerity” in Socrates’s performance: “This ad hominem technique may be repugnant to modern readers, just as the merciless Socratic elenchus of Protagoras may offend us,” but the end justifies the means.20 “The impression the reader is to get is not that Socrates is a fallacious and dishonest reasoner and Protagoras isn’t, but that Socrates may use such tactics against such confused and dangerous people as Protagoras.”21 Sullivan winds up his defense by arguing that however devious or slipshod Socrates’s dialectic may seem, it “is distinguished from eristic . . . by the purity of its motives . . . and the truth of its conclusions.”22 This whitewash fails to account for the mischief let loose by the performance of the hybristēs questioner. Socrates’s tricky conduct of the hedonism argument should discourage apologists like Sullivan more than it does. He succeeds in bringing all the sophists, who had been competing with each other before, into harmonious agreement. The great and telling irony of the dialogue is that by wresting agreement from his interlocutors and by winning the contest, Socrates constitutes the community of pleasure. He unites the sophists in affirming the ethos and practices they live by, and thus strengthens the very interests he opposes. Taylor concludes that Socrates shares the hedonist “assumptions . . . and . . . conclusions” of the many (“the common man”). He’s driven to this conclusion by the thought that it would be “dishonest” of Socrates to mislead his interlocutors while “arguing in his own person.”23 The emphasis of the hedonism passage is less on substance than on performance. Its “message” is not an argument about hedonism but an argument about the interlocutory constraints on the utterance of one’s “own” logos. The hedonism episode enacts the drama of the theft of voice and of the permeability of presence. If Socrates begins as Diomedes or Odysseus, he ends as Dolon, allowing himself not only to be captured by, but also transformed into, the imaginary opponent who speaks through his ventriloquist. The face he presents his interlocutors gradually changes into the face of the other.

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Thus to say that Protagoras has been reduced to the many he contemns is only to express the more superficial half of the drama. The interlocutory detail of the episode shows the cost of achieving that reduction. Allowing himself to be infiltrated by the combined voices of the majority, the many, and the sophists, Socrates fatefully enchains himself to Protagoras and becomes his double. To defeat Protagoras is to be defeated by him; to play him is to become him. Defacing Protagoras he effaces himself. Reducing him to silence, he silences himself.

7 Some disputes may be “objectively” resolved by measurement. That isn’t the case with disagreements about right and wrong, or good and bad. They make us quarrel and become enemies “because we differ about them and cannot reach any satisfactory agreement” (Euthyphro, 6d–7a). It is easy to imagine that a hedonist who found disagreements and quarrels painful unless they were capable of being resolved—and resolved in his favor—would try to reformulate them as problems that yield to the operations of the metrical art any diligent mathētēs of pleasure could acquire. Socrates thus brings in the questioner at 355c to demonstrate one way to sidestep the alternative, and to state what is essentially an improved version of the majority opinion. He has the questioner insist that the only way to make sense of the reductio is to quantify it. From that point on he accommodates himself to the questioner’s argument by converting Socratic terms (“good,” “bad,” “knowledge,” “wisdom,” “virtue”) to the metrical system of hedonism, urging the many to rationalize their procedures. At the same time, the restrictive effects of the questioner’s intervention are inscribed in his opening attack. For if the idea about being overcome by pleasure is made ridiculous by replacing “pleasant” with “good,” this can only be because the two sets of terms—good/evil and pleasure/pain— retain their different semantic ranges. If good does not make sense in this context, it is because it continues to carry the sense it bears in some other; it refuses to be fully assimilated to pleasant. Would it be ridiculous to say that a person voluntarily suffers pain because “overcome” by the good? Pain, for this person, would be dissociated from evil and the reductio could not be put into play. There may be very few such persons in any community. But if only one should exist, then both sets of terms, with their different ranges of meaning, would be necessary for adequate descriptions of ethical states and choices. Two conflicting yet intermingling ethics, along with their terminologies, would be required to reflect actual practices.

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Thus, the moves that put the hedonist calculus into play reveal the presence of the incompatible Socratic alternative in the very process of driving that alternative underground. Socrates introduces the questioner to block its emergence. In the questioner’s comically incontinent response, he mimes both the irritation the Socratic “method” of argument arouses and the self-interest that fuels the response. The questioner represents the faction-ridden community of pleasure now further jeopardized by the threat of a critique of its legitimating rhetoric. His apprehension is measured by the violence he commits against Socrates’s argument. This aggression, which leads to the reintegration of the community, prefigures the outrage to be perpetrated on the scapegoat who embodies that argument and is its sole locus of expression. And just as, in this passage, Socrates is complicit in bringing about his own downfall, so in the Apology his rhetoric constitutes and mimics the opposition and forces its hand. It becomes difficult to distinguish one violence from the other. There is, finally, one more feature of the hedonism argument that deserves comment. No explicit distinction is made as to whether the object of hedonist calculation is oneself or another. But the discussion of pleasure and pain makes sense only on the assumption that the object of concern is oneself. Consider, for example, whether the following situations are subject to the healing effects of that mysterious art, the hedonist calculus: (1) One inflicts pain on another because overcome by the desire of pleasure for oneself. (2) One inflicts pain on oneself because overcome by the desire of pleasure for another. (3) One inflicts pain on another because overcome by the desire to pleasure the other. (4) One inflicts pain on oneself because overcome by the desire to pleasure oneself. The operations of the calculus are reserved primarily for (4). They are applicable to (3), but the subject of the other’s pain or pleasure is never raised. (2) may of course come under the correction of the calculus, and the correction would modify it to the more favorable balance of (1). The objective of the calculus is sōtēria, safemindedness, not dikē. It offers no help in adjudicating between the claims of self and other. Its function is to assist and correct the unreliable powers of eye and ear in determining true size, dimension, and quantity with respect to pleasure and pain.

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Socrates’s first tentative formulation of this goal briefly glances at a possibility he subsequently ignores: “[I]f our welfare [eu prattein] lay in winning and taking great magnitudes [megala mēkē kai prattein kai lambanein], and in avoiding and not going after [pheugein kai me prattein] the small, what would be our sōtēria in life?” (356d). This differs slightly from later suggestions that the right choice of pleasure depends on knowing when to choose the small as well as the great. Here, the statement conditionally suggests that pleasure lies in getting more. The prehensive force of lambanein and the hyperbolic redundancy of megala mēkē resonate with pleonexia. To the idea that salvation consists in getting more pleasure than pain, this statement adds the idea that getting and keeping more things, bigger things, is itself pleasurable. If that were everyone’s goal, the community of pleasure could hardly avoid being perpetually faction-ridden (unless it were perpetually warring on its neighbors) and each pleonectic hedonist would be plagued by persistent apprehension, or deos, of the deina his clever fellow citizens might do to satisfy their own pleonexia. Though this possibility is ignored during the remainder of the hedonism discussion, it surfaces again at 358a–b. Socrates asks Prodicus to resist the temptation to exercise his discriminative art on the names for pleasure. He then goes on to win rapid assent to the five remaining conclusions he states at 358a–d. The request to Prodicus is a gratuitous interjection. Its effect is to increase our sense that Socrates wants to capitalize on the harmony he has achieved and hurry through his conclusions without any pause for closer scrutiny or second thoughts. This produces a momentary counterthrust of resistance in readers aware that the conclusions increasingly resemble Socratic formulas pressed into the service of hedonism. In the final conclusion, the Socratic ethic no sooner appears than it is jostled by a hedonist qualifier: “[N]o one willingly goes after evil or what he thinks to be evil” (358c–d). At 358d Socrates turns back to Prodicus and this time invites his participation with some jingling wordplay on his name: “Well, I said, is there something you call apprehension or fear [deos kai phobos]? And is it the same thing I mean—I speak to you Prodicus—by an expectation of evil, whether you call it fear or apprehension?” (358d). The jingle—pros se lego, Prodikē. prosdokian—produces a Cratylean pun, making the vocative Prodikē a condensation of prosdokian, “an expectation” (of evil). Prodicus completes the self-definition by responding that it is dread or apprehension (deos) not phobos.

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The community of sophists may appear to be bound together by a commitment to pleasure. But at bottom it is a community bound together by its surrender to deos. What unites the sophists is their persistent apprehension of failure in the common enterprise of pleonexia. This isn’t the first time Socrates has sought Prodicus’s help in connection with the little family of terms that articulate the features of apprehensiveness. Deos is intimately associated with deinos.24 At 341a–b, during the interpretation of Simonides, Socrates had appealed to the authority of Prodicus while arguing that deinos should not be used in its positive senses (marvelous, powerful, clever, skillful) but only in its negative senses (terrible, dreadful, dangerous): “[W]hen I say, for instance, that Protagoras is a terribly wise man, he [Prodicus] asks if I am not ashamed to call good things terrible. For terrible, he says, is bad; thus no one . . . speaks of ‘terrible wealth’ or ‘terrible peace’ or ‘terrible health,’ but we say ‘terrible disease,’ ‘terrible war,’ or ‘terrible poverty,’ taking ‘terrible’ to be ‘bad’ ” (341b). The ambiguity of deinos overcomes Prodicus, who is himself a comic example of the deos that makes a man unwilling to live in and with complexity: All ambiguous terms must be divided into their black and white faces. This is his technique not only for gratifying his eristic pleonexia but also for alleviating the expectation of evil that attends it. Though Socrates immediately dismisses Prodicus’s distinction between deos and phobos at 358d–e, his subsequent usage shows that he maintains it. In his next comment he continues to give his own logos a hedonist skew: No one willingly goes after what he dreads since, as “we have admitted . . . he regards what he dreads as evil” (358e)—not, let it be noted, he dreads what he regards as evil. The inversion makes deos the criterion of the kakos. One effect of the appeals to Prodicus is to focus our attention on the distinction between deos and phobos as Socrates moves into his final argument. In both the Laches and the Protagoras the distinction is consistently maintained. Phobos and the courage associated with it are connected to situations in which humans or animals confront an immediate threat to life, a perceived threat that causes fright or panic (cf. Laches 191a–b, 196e–97b). When Socrates begins a general discussion of bravery and cowardice, Protagoras diverts it by citing the specific example of war, and it is only in this traditional context that Socrates speaks of fear in terms of phobos (359e–360b). As we saw in the first courage argument at 349d–351b, where the well-divers provided the anomalous example, Socrates leaned on

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the remaining two instances, peltasts and horsemen in war. It was in those restrictive terms that he tested Protagoras’s assertion that since wicked men were courageous, courage was not a part of virtue. The more complex and diffuse implications of deos and Socratic andreia are clearly stated by Nicias in the Laches. He defends his definition of courage as “the knowledge of what is to be dreaded or dared, either in war or anything else” (194e–95a). Laches contentiously challenges the extension beyond war on the grounds that one does not call doctors or farmers courageous for knowing what is to be dreaded in disease or agriculture. Although doctors know what is to be feared in cases of illness that doesn’t make them courageous. Nicias denies that doctors know what is truly to be feared. Do they know in any particular case whether health itself is to be dreaded by anyone rather than sickness? . . . Don’t you think it better for many people that they should never arise from their bed of sickness? Tell me this, do you say that in every case it is better to live? Is it not often preferable to be dead? (195c–d) Despite the fact that Nicias’s extended definition of courage fails to stand up in the context of the Laches, its more profound meanings resonate as soon as the reader plays it off against the dilemma of Socrates in the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. There its nuances are ambiguous. On the one hand, Socrates chooses to accept death rather than yield to a desire for life that might jeopardize the nomoi he claimed to affirm against slanderous misuse by the demos. On the other hand, his performance in those discussions is driven by the misanthropic impulse that life as he has experienced and examined it—the unexamined life of others—is not worth living. Is the choice of death an expression of courage as “the knowledge of what is to be dreaded or dared”?

8 Such situations explicate the Socratic notion of andreia as the knowledge of what is to be dreaded. But this notion is conspicuously excluded from the text of the second courage argument at 358d–360e. The result is that when Socrates finally reintroduces sophia the reader is at a loss to know whether to embrace it or mistrust it. To follow the moves in this argument we have to recall that Protagoras did not at first swallow the full-strength version of the hedonist thesis. He defended himself against a possible phrear by agreeing that to live pleasantly is good only “if one lived in enjoyment of kalois” (351c). At 358b,

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however, he joins the other sophists in assenting to a proposition that sounds similar but is actually different: “All actions aimed at living painlessly and pleasantly are kalai.” This eliminates the qualifying “only if ” clause. Now the pleasant has become the criterion of the kalos. At 360a Socrates uses that formula to dig another aporia: Since going to war is kalon kai agathon, and therefore—by the previous admission—pleasant, and since cowards go for what is pleasant and avoid pain, they must go to war no less willingly than those who are courageous. This absurdity is once again produced by excluding the Socratic ethic with its dangerous principle that the quest of the good may threaten the actor with pain. Socrates could argue that those who risk injury and death do so because it brings honor and they judge it good to be thought noble. Measuring one pleasure or pain against another, they decide that it would give them greater pleasure to win fame by dying than to live in ignominy. Socrates doesn’t pursue this line, and the question of whether cowards actually would make such a choice is not raised. Instead, he revives the contrast between the courageous and cowardly: Unlike the latter, the phoboi and confidence of the former are not aischroi (360b). The mention of aischros flags another problem in the earlier statement about winning honor in war. Aischros belongs to a family of terms—aidōs, timē, kalon, kleos—that reflect the traditional values of the so-called “shame culture.” Its appearance returns us to a harder consideration of the motivation for going to war. Is any particular war justified? Do courageous men risk their lives in war because they judge the cause to be good or because they want honor and fame? Is it always right to help friends and hurt enemies? What the courageous find deinos is the phoberos response to warfare, whereas the cause of cowardice is “ignorance of what is dreadful” (360c). But as soon as the operational range of courage is extended beyond warfare, the kind of apprehensiveness with which andreia is concerned may well include the deos of going to war, even if that war is considered honorable by the many. The contributions of war to the hedonist economy are suggested by Socrates’s remarks at 354a–b. As examples of things that are good but painful he cites “physical training, military service, and medical treatment conducted by cautery, incision, drugs, or starvation.” They are good because their temporary painfulness can result “in health and good bodily condition, the deliverance of cities, dominion over others, and wealth.” Here, military training and the poleōn sōtēriai (“deliverance of cities”) get folded into the pleonectic motives of domination and wealth.25 Medical treatment may be as applicable to the violence and luxury connected

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with these motives as it is to military service. Those who flee the Socratic needle of self-examination have more need of medical and sophistical doctors. Overcoming self-division: The task Socrates continually enjoins on his interlocutors is a task they (explicitly or implicitly, in one manner or another) refuse. He enjoins it on Crito, who continues to agree and continues not to believe. He also enjoins it on Callicles: [Philosophy] speaks what you hear me saying now, and she is far less fickle to me than any other favorite: that son of Cleinias is ever changing his views, but philosophy always holds the same, and it is her speech that now surprises you, and she spoke it in your own presence. So you must either refute her . . . by proving that wrongdoing and impunity for wrong done is not the uttermost evil; or, if you leave that unproved . . . there will be no agreement between you, Callicles, and Callicles, but you will be in discord with him all your life. And yet I . . . would rather choose . . . to have any number of people disagreeing with me . . . than have internal discord and contradiction in my own single self. (Gorgias, 482a–c) Meno and Alcibiades respond with different kinds of perplexity to the painful witchcraft or narcosis of the elenchus. Nicias, in the Laches, blandly embraces it. Laches, who has had no experience of Socratic conversation, is willing to participate primarily because he has seen Socrates tested in warfare and “found him living up to any fine words however freely spoken” (189a). The Laches well illustrates the kind of problem Socrates confronts. Nicias can take pleasure in conversing with Socrates, can even spout Socratisms and give a Socratic definition of courage, without in any way being personally stung by the elenchus. The armor of his self-satisfaction remains undented to the end, penetrated only by Laches’s sarcasm. Laches, all the while, responds positively to the elenchus until his desire to understand what courage is (194a–b) changes into a desire for victory over Nicias. In what may be a parodic epitome of the problems underlying Athens’s failure in the Peloponnesian War, both generals evade selfconfrontation by redirecting their animus outward toward another. War as a way of life is thus an alternative to—or even an escape from— elenchus as a way of life. It is among the techniques of avoidance that sustain the hedonist’s particular brand of self-mastery: mastery over whatever might question the telos of pleasure and self-esteem. Such techniques reinforce self-division by externalizing it as competition. Those whose discourse of war and (military) courage remains stubbornly literal—Laches,

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for example, or Protagoras, or Homer, or Critias—therefore mystify its true function in the psychosocial economy. When Socrates metaphorizes war in the Apology and Phaedo, he reconnects it to its ethical source by claiming that his warfare in the service of the oracle consists in the elenchus, which exposes selfcontradiction. His enemy is embodied less in Athens as a political unit than in the cultural ethos of Hellas. That enemy is the system of fears and interests grounded not only in fear for oneself but also, and most deeply, in fear of oneself. The specter of this enmity lies behind the second courage argument (358d–360e) and accounts for its emergence from the discourse on hedonism. Just as the creation and confrontation of the other as enemy is a way of avoiding self-confrontation, so the acute threat of phobos may be a relief or escape from the chronic threat of deos. Measured by the hedonist yardstick, there is more honor and therefore pleasure in facing the dangers of war, more pain in the elenctic warfare that threatens the exposure of self-division. “If this [hedonist] proof was correct, no one goes to meet what he regards as deinon, since to be overcome by oneself was found to be ignorance” (359d). What you most deeply fear is the discovery that you have been overcome by yourself without knowing it. You then lose the confidence or boldness sustained by the ignorance that protects against the discovery. It may be preferable to avoid the danger by going to meet what is phobos. Such ignorance should itself be the primary source of deos. Socratic courage is both the awareness that this is so and the willingness to confront it. “Awareness,” not “knowledge”: sophia, not epistēmē. Socrates does not mention epistēmē in the second courage argument. But at 360d he finally reintroduces sophia and defines courage as wisdom about “what is and is not deinon.” He then bullies a reluctant Protagoras into the critical admission: Those who are ignorant of what is to be dreaded can’t possibly be courageous (360c–d). The question is whether at this point he secures Protagoras’s grudging agreement about the sophist’s sophia or about the sophia that knows the good differs from the pleasurable and is to be preferred at the expense of all pleasure and pain. If the second is the case, and Socrates is about to win what from his normative standpoint is a genuine victory, then Protagoras is not the only one to be unaware of it. If the first is the case, Socrates is ironically on the verge of beating Protagoras with a Protagorean logos and therefore of losing an implicit ethical debate by winning the logical debate.

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Protagoras is offered a chance to secure his own interest by agreeing to a newly reinforced version of the aretē he claims to teach. But in order to do so he would have to concede defeat in the contest that turns nominally on the question of the unity of virtue. On the brink of an aporia, and afraid of losing face, he saves himself by backing off, apparently unaware that his fear was misdirected. As Socrates suggests in his summing-up, they end in a stalemate in which neither wins, each has defeated himself, and the two speakers, exchanging places, become atopoi (361a). Atopos is a term with meanings that range from “unusual” through “out of place” or “displaced” to “improper” or “perverse.” Socrates explains this strange tangle as the logical if disorderly exodos of the argument they have worked together to produce: They themselves are the displaced creatures of the choric dance they jointly created. Socrates renders this judgment by personifying their logos and exodos: “[I]t seems to me to accuse and mock us like some human person; and if it could assume a voice [phonen laboi] it would say: ‘What atopoi you are, Socrates and Protagoras.’ ”

Notes

Introduction: Speech Bonds 1. “Facing Sophists: Socrates’ Charismatic Bondage in Protagoras,” in Situated Utterances: Texts, Bodies, and Cultural Representations, by Harry Berger, Jr., with introduction by Judith H. Anderson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 398.

1 / Couch City, or, The Discourse of the Couch 1. Julia Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). 2. Ibid., 340. 3. For additional discussion of Klinopolis and the pleonectic impulses found in this chapter, see my The Perils of Uglytown: Studies in Structural Misanthropology from Plato to Rembrandt (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). 4. Annas, Introduction to Plato’s Republic, 77. 5. Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 95. 6. Ibid., 95, 97. 7. Ibid., 96. 8. Rosamond Kent Sprague, Plato’s Philosopher-King: A Study of the Theoretical Background (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1976), 76.

2 / Simonides, Part 1 1. See Max Weber, On Charisma and Institution Building, trans. S. N. Eisenstadt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). 2. English translation by W. R. M. Lamb in the Loeb Classical Library series, Plato, volume 2, Laches, Protagoras, Meno, Euthydemus (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977). Translations, which will be from this edition unless otherwise noted, may be slightly modified from time to time. 3. J. Adam and A. M. Adam, eds., Platonis Protagoras (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), xxvi–xxvii; cf. 128 and 329a.

172 / notes to pages 33–70 4. See Vlastos’s preface to Plato’s Protagoras, trans. Benjamin Jowett and Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), xxiv. 5. Ibid. 6. Adam and Adam, Platonis Protagoras, xxvi. 7. Leonard Woodbury, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 84 (1953): 137. 8. C. C. W. Taylor, ed., Protagoras (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 83. 9. Woodbury, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 138. 10. Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963). 11. Paul Friedlaender, Platon, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1954), 56. 12. Strophe 2, line 4, hon an for hon. (Adam and Adam, Platonis Protagoras). 13. Aars’s reconstruction (in Das Gedicht Platons Protagoras, von J. Aars [Christiania, 1888]). The text reads epi pleiston de kai aristoi eisin ous an hoi theoi philōsin. Modern editors and translators take this as a free Platonic (Socratic) paraphrase and try various restorations. The Adams revise Aars’s conjecture to kapi pleiston aristoi. . . . More recently D. L. Page’s version has been accepted by some subsequent editors of Simonides: toupi pleiston aristoi tous ke theoi phileōsi (Poetae Melici Graeci [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962], 283). 14. Adam and Adam, Platonis Protagoras,194; my italics. 15. See Woodbury, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 138. 16. C. M. Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry from Alcman to Simonides, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 321. 17. I. M. Crombie, An Examination of Plato’s Doctrines: I. Plato on Man and Society, vol. 6 (London: Routledge, 2012), 234. 18. W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 4: Plato, The Man and His Dialogues, Earlier Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 227. 19. A. E. Taylor, Plato: The Man and His Work (London: Methuen, 1960), 256. 20. Friedlaender, Platon, 25. 21. A. E. Taylor, Plato: The Man and His Work, 251.

3 / Simonides, Part 2 1. Paul Friedlaender, Platon, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1954), 24. 2. J. Adam and A. M. Adam, eds., Platonis Protagoras (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 194. 3. See H. S. Thayer, “Plato’s Quarrel with Poetry: Simonides,” Journal of the History of Ideas 36, no. 1 (1975): 14.

4 / Simonides, Part 3 1. Rosamond Kent Sprague and Plato, Laches and Charmides, Library of Liberal Arts (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), 76. 2. This is the phrasing given in Adam and Adam’s Appendix (196), after Aars. The Adams’ text of Protagoras differs: epi pleiston de kai aristoi eisin ous an oi theoi philōsin. See J. Adam and A. M. Adam, eds., Platonis Protagoras (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962).

notes to pages 76–125 / 173 3. See Hippocratic Writings, trans. J. Chadwick (London: Penguin, 2005). 4. Ibid., chap. 9, “The Canon.” 5. See Rosamond Kent Sprague, Plato’s Philosopher-King: A Study of the Theoretical Background (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1976), 68–69. 6. Ibid., 68. 7. Chadwick, Hippocratic Writings, 238.

5 / Simonides, Part 4 1. See Leonard Woodbury, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 84 (1953): 148. 2. See Walter Donlan’s “Simonides, Fr. 4D and P. Oxy. 2432,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 100 (1969): 87. 3. J. Adam and A. M. Adam, eds., Platonis Protagoras (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 167. 4. The Dialogues of Plato: Ion, Hippias Minor, Laches, Protagoras, trans. R. E. Allen (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 205. 5. C. C. W. Taylor, Protagoras (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 146. 6. Ibid. 7. Hugh Parry, “An Interpretation of Simonides 4 (Diehl),” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 96 (1965): 297–320. 8. Ibid., 299–300. 9. Ibid., 300. 10. Ibid., 298, 301. 11. Ibid., 299. 12. Adam and Adam, Platonis Protagoras, 168. 13. Terence Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 105–6. 14. See John Henry McDowell, Theaetetus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973).

6 / Macrological Mystification: Protagoras’s Myth 1. Gregory Vlastos, preface to Plato’s Protagoras, trans. Benjamin Jowett and Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), xxii. 2. Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 56. 3. Theaetetus, trans. Francis M. Cornford (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959). 4. Percy Cohen, “Theories of Myth,” Man, new series, 4, no. 3 (1969): 337–53. 5. Ibid., 349. 6. See G. B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 133–34. 7. W. K. C. Guthrie, In the Beginning: Some Greek Views on the Origins of Life and the Early State of Man (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1957), 87.

7 / The Ethics of Etceteration 1. See J. L. Austin’s foundational work on speech act theory, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975). 2. Gregory Vlastos, ed., Plato’s Protagoras, Benjamin Jowett translation revised by Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), xxxv–xxxvi.

174 / notes to pages 130–5 7

8 / The Parts of Gold and the Parts of Face 1. See the excellent analysis of Protagoras’s self-protective and evasive maneuvers in A. W. H. Adkins, “Democracy and Sophists: Protagoras 316b–328d,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 93 (1973): 3–12. Adkins clearly lays out the sophist’s dilemma: While the plurality-assumption would suit Protagoras’s aim of presenting his wares under the aspect of teachable technai (“administrative and political skills,” 7), the unityassumption would suit his tactic of lumping them together with “an assemblage of co-operative moral excellences” (6) in the guise of a single comprehensive course in politike aretē. 2. David Savan, “Self-Predication in Protagoras 330–331,” Phronesis 9, no. 2 (1964): 131. 3. C. C. W. Taylor, ed., Protagoras (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 110. 4. Ibid., 127, 119; my italics 5. Ibid., 110. 6. Ibid., 126, 127. 7. Ibid., 127. 8. Ibid., 129; cf. also 122–124. 9. Paul Friedlaender, Platon, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1954), 70. 10. Edward N. Lee, “Hoist With His Own Petard: Ironic and Comic Elements in Plato’s Critique of Protagoras,” in Phronesis, ed. Gregory Vlastos, Edward N. Lee, Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, and Richard Rorty (Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1973): 233–34, 237. 11. Ibid., 254.

9 / Sophistry as Safemindedness in the Protagoras 1. For detailed discussions of this, see Gregory Vlastos, preface to Plato’s Protagoras, trans. Benjamin Jowett and Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), xxxi–xxxvi, and C. C. W. Taylor, ed., Protagoras (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 150–61. 2. C. C. W. Taylor, Protagoras, 152. 3. Ibid.,154. 4. Ibid., 152. 5. Ibid., 152. 6. Terence Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory: The Early and Middle Dialogues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 104–109. See also the further development of this thesis in Irwin’s Plato’s Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 78–94. 7. Irwin, Plato’s Ethics, 83. 8. Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 114, 131. 9. J. P. Sullivan, “The Hedonism in Plato’s Protagoras,” Phronesis 6 (1961): 10–28. 10. Ibid., 28, 16. 11. Richmond Lattimore, The Iliad of Homer, First Phoenix ed. A Phoenix Book; P63 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). 12. Stanley Rosen, Plato’s Symposium (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1999). 13. Personal communication. 14. Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 104. 15. It is not clear who this questioner is. C. C. W. Taylor (Protagoras, 183–84) identifies him with Plato (“Plato with his gloves off ”) and thinks his function is first to mock “the manifest absurdity of the thesis that one could do bad things through

notes to pages 15 7–67 / 175 being overcome by good things,” and then to demonstrate “the incoherence which underlies this prima facie absurdity.” 16. C. C. W. Taylor, Protagoras, 185. The whole of Taylor’s deeply considered critique of commentaries on this passage (180–186) is well worth reading. 17. See 353e, 354b, 354d, 354d–355a, 355e–356b. 18. Sullivan, “Hedonism,” 27. 19. C. C. W. Taylor, Protagoras, 209. 20. Sullivan, “Hedonism,” 15, 26. 21. Ibid., 18. 22. Ibid., 26. 23. Ibid., 209. 24. Liddell–Scott cites Laches 198b (“the deina are things that cause deos”), 383. 25. Poleōn sōtēriai (“deliverance of cities”): The phrase is studiedly vague. Deliverance of one’s own city as well as others? Deliverance from what?

Index

Aars, J., 37–41, 172n13 Achilles, 18, 53–54 Adam, A. M., 29, 37–38, 40–41, 54, 94, 172n13 Adam, J., 29, 37–38, 40–41, 54, 94, 172n13 Adeimantus, 13, 15–19, 21–22, 24–25, 28, 36 Adkins, A. W. H., 174n1 Aeneid (Virgil), 54 agathoi, 75, 96; new, Athens of, 1, 14 agathon, 75, 79, 151–52 agathos, esthlos and, 5, 57–58, 60, 73 agora, Protean, 27 aidōs, dikē and, 96, 114–15, 118–21, 136–37, 143 aischron (shameful), 88–92, 94, 97–101, 105 aischropolis (Uglytown), 1 akōn, hekōn and, 87–88 Alcaeus, 102 Alcibiades, 1–2, 30, 49, 150 Allen, R. E., 86, 89 amēchania (helplessness), 59, 76, 91, 95, 103 amēchanos, 5, 71–73, 79, 91, 100, 103, 105 amēchanos symphora, 73, 78–79, 81, 101 andreia (courage), 136, 143–45, 147, 151, 153, 166–69 Annas, Julia, 13, 17 antilogikoi, 56, 59 apodosis, 23 apologia, of Socrates, on Simonides, 82, 84, 94, 101 Apology (Plato), 163, 169

aporia, 36, 51–52, 59–60, 115, 146–48, 167, 170 apprehensiveness, 63, 74, 122–23, 137–38, 143–44, 163–65, 167 archē (command), 78–79, 96 archery, 81 Ardiaeus, 23–24 aretē. See virtue aristeia, eristeia and, 54–55 aristocracy: couches and, 21; as eupatridai, 14; hoi oligoi, 96; military, 15; Pittacus and, 102 aristocratic power, 15 Aristotle, 99 arts, first-order versus second-order, 76–80 Athenian democracy, 14 Athenian Stranger, 115 Athens, of new agathoi, 1, 14 audience (hoi polloi), 4, 26–27, 96, 152 Austin, J. L., 124, 126 avowals of responsibility, 8–9 bad (kakon), 47, 58, 89–92, 103 bad conscience, 75, 84, 88, 102, 104, 122, 133 banqueting couch (triclinium), 13 beautiful city (Kallipolis), 1, 14–15, 20, 22 become (genesthai), 47, 55–57, 60 becoming good, 5, 73; Simonides’s poem on difficulty of, 47–48, 51, 55–57, 61, 68, 70 being and becoming, 22, 47–48, 55–56; good, 70, 73 Berger, Harry, Jr., 1, 3, 8

178 / index biblia (books), 28–30 Bloom, Allan, 13 body, face and, 139 boldness (tharraleos), 145, 151 books (biblia), 28–30 boulēsis, typos and, 69 boulesthai (to wish), epithymein (to desire) and, 55 brachylogia, 66, 71, 99 Brandwood, Leonard, 131 Callias, 30–31, 62, 85–86, 103, 105–6 cardinal virtues, 2–3 Cephalus, 133–34, 137 chalepon, meaning of, 47, 58–61 charismatic and logocentric power, face and, 134 charismatic authority figures, 26 charismatic bondage, 3–4, 7–8, 26, 29, 45, 54 charismatic dialectic, in oral culture, 28 charismatic embodiment, 26 charismatic logocentrism, of oral culture, 33 Charmides (Plato), 63–66, 77–78, 135 Cohen, Percy, 113 color theory, of Aristotle, 99 command (archē), 78–79, 96 comrade (hetairos), 7 conscience, 36, 98, 119–20; bad, 75, 84, 88, 102, 104, 122, 133 cosmology, myth and, 113–14 cosmos, order of, 115, 117 couch (klinē), 1, 13–15, 17–18, 20–22 Couch, Form of, 15, 21–22 Couch City, 1–2; couches in, 21; Kallipolis and, 14–15, 20, 22; pleonexia and, 14–15, 20; Socrates on, Republic, 14–15, 19–20; Sow City versus, 19–20 courage (andreia), 136, 143–45, 147, 151, 153, 166–69 craftworkers, in Sow City, 15–16 Cratylus (Plato), 135 Creophylos, 19 Crete, Sparta and, 63 Critias, 1–2, 31, 63–65, 77–78, 93, 135 Crombie, I. M., 43 cynicism, 122, 124 deinos, 34–35, 58–61, 144, 146, 164–65; amēchanos versus, 100; deos and, 59–60, 134; downfall of man, 81; hedonist on, 169; orator, 71, 80; speech, 79 deliverance of cities (poleōn sōtēriai), 167 Delphi, 63–65

Delphic oracle, 135, 138 democracy, Athenian, 14 deos, 67, 78; andreia and, 166–67; deinos and, 59–60, 134; phobos and, 144, 165, 169; pleonexia and, 63, 74, 164–65; of selfrecognition, 104 Derrida, Jacques, 14 desire, 24, 55, 109–10 despoteia, of desire, 24 diakonos (servant), 16 dialegein, homolegein and, 124 dianoia, 153–54 dikē, aidōs and, 96, 114–15, 118–21, 136–37, 143, 163 Diomedes, 150–51 diploos (twofold man), pollaploos (manifold man) and, 49–50 doctors, medicine and, 71, 75–81, 112 Donlan, Walter, 82 do-no-harm ethics, of Socrates, 2 dynamis, 130, 134–35 education, poetry and, 33–35 eidos (idea), of couch, 20–22 Eleatic Stranger, 56, 141 emmenai (remain), genesthai (become) and, 47, 55–57, 60 emporous (merchants), 16–17 epagōgē, 4–5, 71, 75–76, 127–29, 145–46 epanorthōma (setting back upright), 53–55, 58, 68, 74 epanorthōsis, of Simonides, 68–70, 103 epieikeis logoi, of Kephalos, 24 Epimetheus, 3, 74, 114–15, 118, 121–22, 129, 136 epistēmē (knowledge), 144–48, 152–53, 159–60, 166, 169 Epistle 2 (Plato), 36 epithymein (to desire), boulesthai (to wish) and, 55 eris, 115–16 eristeia, aristeia and, 54–55 eristics, performative, 2–4, 32, 134 erōs, 21, 116–17 esthlos, agathos and, 5, 57–58, 60, 73 etceteration, 4–5, 71, 127 ethical act, intention of actor and, 131–32 ethics: of major interlocutors, in Platonic dialogues, 124; poetry, literary criticism and, 34–35; of Protagoras, 124–25, 128; Socratic, 2–3, 43–44, 56–57, 61, 73, 75, 87–88, 131, 148, 156, 164, 167; of speakers and auditors, 8–9; technē and, 32, 132

index / 179 Euclides, 141 eumēchanos, 5, 73, 80, 103 eupatridai (well-fathered), 14 eu prattein (to fare well), 51, 74 Euthyphro (Plato), 136–37, 162 evil, good and, 23, 78, 95, 129, 148, 156–57, 160, 162 excellence or virtue (aretē). See virtue exodos, 170 eyes, virtue and, 131 face (prosōpon), 137–38; as aretē, of public performance, 2, 135; intentions and, 139; Protagoras, Socrates and, 141–42, 152–53, 161; in Protagoras, 2, 6; Protagoras and, 2, 139–43; Timaeus on, 139; unity of, 141; virtue and, 120, 130–32, 134–35, 141–42 “Facing Sophists” (Berger), 3, 8 farmers, in Sow City, 15–16, 18 fear (phobos), 144, 164–67, 169 first-order versus second-order arts, 76–80 flutes, goodness and badness of, 20–21 forethought (pronoia), 139–41 Form: of bed, 20; of Couch, 15, 21–22; Hippocrates and, 76; in Republic, 13 Friedlaender, Paul, 36, 49, 52, 135–36 genesthai (become), emmenai (remain) and, 47, 55–57, 60 genos, 14, 21 Glaucon, 13–15, 18–19, 21–22, 24, 59 good: bad and, 5, 58–59, 61, 70–73, 100, 105– 6, 110, 151–52, 155–59, 165; becoming, 5, 47–48, 51, 55–57, 61, 68, 70, 73; being and becoming, 70, 73; desire and, 109–10; evil and, 23, 78, 95, 129, 148, 156–57, 160, 162; pleasure and, 148–49, 157–59, 162, 166–67; Protagoras, on wanting, 109; relativity of, 127–28; staying, difficulty of, 47, 57, 61, 63, 65, 67, 70, 74–75, 81, 83, 94–95, 97, 100, 102, 104 good behavior, 120 good citizenship, 2, 35 good doctors, 71, 79–80 goodness and badness, of flutes, 20–21 Gorgias (Plato), 69, 132, 135–36, 138, 149, 168 grammata, 71, 75 guardian class (phylakēs), 14 guardian polis, 18–20 guardians, Sow City and, 16, 18–20 guardianship, war and, 20 Guthrie, W. K. C., 43–44, 54, 89, 119

Hades, 17–18, 23 happiness, of citizens, of guardian polis, 18 Havelock, Eric A., 35–36 hedonism, 2–3, 99–100, 102, 143–45, 147–69 hedonist calculus, 65, 136, 156–57, 159, 163 hekōn (willingly), 83–84, 87–92, 94, 106 helplessness (amēchania), 59, 76, 91, 95, 103 Hermes, 96, 114–16, 118–20 Hesiod, 18, 24, 47, 55–56; Homer and, 25, 28, 36; Protagoras on, 57–58; Protagoras’s myth and, 116–18, 123 hetairos (comrade), 7 Hipparchus (Plato), 36 Hippias, 31, 62, 96, 99, 109, 160 Hippocrates, 1–2, 8, 33, 76, 81, 109 hoi oligoi, 96 hoi polloi (audience), 4, 26–27, 96, 152 holiness, justice and, 126–28, 136–37 Homer, 19, 153; Hesiod and, 25, 28, 36; Iliad by, 53–54, 150–51 homolegein, dialegein and, 124 horsemanship and horsemen, 78, 146, 165–66 huōn polin (Sow City), 13–20 hyperbaton, 68, 83–84 idea (eidos), of couch, 20–22 ideal city, of Republic, as Uglytown, 1 Iliad (Homer), 53–54, 150–51 impersonation and representation, of Simonides, by Socrates, 5–6 induction, 4–5, 110 inductive etceteration, 71, 127 injustice: of contemporary Athens, 25; eidos of, couch and, 20–22; harm and, 133; justice and, 17, 21–26, 133; poets and, 25; proschēma of, 137 interpretation, of poetry, 5, 30, 43–44, 50–51, 54–55, 67–70; sophistical, 40, 81 An Introduction to Plato’s Republic (Annas), 13 Irwin, Terence, 99, 148–50, 156 Jaeger, Werner, 34 Jowett, Benjamin, 89 justice: aretē and, 132–33; in cities, 96; holiness and, 126–28, 136–37; injustice and, 17, 21–26, 133; intention and, 131–32; political, 119, 136; of Prodicus, 59; Republic on, 132–33 kakia, 73, 95 kakon (bad), 47, 58, 89–92, 103

180 / index kakos, 5, 60–61, 70, 72–73, 79, 91, 165 kala, 97–101, 105 Kallipolis (beautiful city), 1, 14–15, 20, 22 kalon (noble), 152–53, 167 kapēlos (tradesman or huckster), 16–17 kataklinentes (will stretch out), 17–18 kephalaion (sum), 23 kephalos, 139 Kephalos, 22–24 Kerferd, G. B., 114–15 klinē (couch), 1, 13–15, 17–18, 20–22 Klinopolis. See Couch City knowledge (epistēmē), 144–48, 152–53, 159–60, 166, 169 “know thyself ” maxim, 63–66, 86, 135, 138 Laches (Plato), 146–47, 165–66, 168 Lamb, W. R. M., 89 Laws (Plato), 111, 115 laws and lawgivers, 110, 112 learning (mathēsis), 71, 79–80, 113, 120 Lee, Edward, 140–42 literary criticism, 34–35 logic: of Plato, 13; of Socrates, 125–28 logocentric fallacy, 125, 141 logos, 5–6, 21, 80; anti-Socratic, 81; of charismatic bond, 26; epieikeis, of Kephalos, 24; exodos and, 170; hedonist, 160, 165; myth and, 114; of Prodicus, 30; prosōpon and, 140; Protagorean, 146, 169; Simonidean, 22–23, 28; Socratic, 73, 86, 103, 105, 127–28, 133; of Spartans, 63; as textualized speech acts, 125; of Thrasymachus, 133; of tyrant, 24 Lynch, John, 59 makrologia, 99; of Protagoras, 50, 109–14, 121, 143–44; of Socrates, 32, 41, 62, 66 manifold man (pollaploos), 49–50 mathēsis (learning), 71, 79–80, 113, 120 Mauss, Marcel, 14 McDowell, John, 104 mēchanē, Spartan, 72 medicine, doctors and, 71, 75–81, 112 merchants, 16–17 military aristocracy, 15 mimēsis, 15, 55 misanthropology, 111, 122 mnemonic triggers, 6, 75, 77 moneymakers, 36, 77–78 morality: of Kephalos, 24; Protagoras and, 2, 109, 127; in Simonides’s poem, 51, 54–55,

58, 61, 73–75, 82, 84, 96–101; sophistical, 33; traditional Athenian, in Simonides’s poem, 51 mousikē, 53, 55 myth: cosmology and, 113–14; of Er, 23–24; of Protagoras, 114–23 new agathoi, Athens of, 1, 14 Nicias, 166, 168 noble (kalon), 152–53, 167 nomos, 24, 96, 110–11, 116, 166 “nothing too much” maxim, 63–66, 86, 99, 135 objects, users versus makers of, 20–21 Odysseus, 150–51, 161 “On Ancient Medicine” (Hippocrates), 76 “one man one art” formula, 15–16 ontology, Platonic, 56 oral culture, 28, 30, 33 orators, 28–30, 71–72, 80 Orphic poets, speeches of, 17–18 Ostwald, Martin, 89 paideia, 27, 32, 75, 96, 110, 112–13, 145 pain, pleasure and, 110, 155–58, 160, 163–64, 166–67 parrhesiastic speech, 84–85, 94, 103 parricide, 23–24, 27–28 Parry, Hugh, 93–94, 96 Peloponnesian War, 168 performative eristics, 2–4, 32, 134 Perils of Uglytown (Berger), 1 Phaedo (Plato), 132, 142, 147, 169 Phaedrus (Plato), 5, 29, 35–36 pharmakon, 14, 123 pharmakos, 27, 67, 102 philosopher king, 20, 147 philosophia, of Callias, 85–86, 105 phobos (fear), 144, 164–67, 169 phronēsis, 135, 139, 141 phylakēs (guardian class), 14 pilots, 71–72, 75–79 Pittacus: aristocracy and, 102; attack on, Division V of Simonides’s poem, 70–82; Protagoras on, 5, 37, 41–43, 47–50; sayings of, 65, 80, 83, 102, 138; Simonides’s poem on, 5, 37, 41–43, 47–51, 55, 58, 62–63, 68, 70–85, 94–98, 101–4 Plato: on Eleatic Stranger, 141; on hedonism, 149; logic of, 13; ontology of, 56;

index / 181 quotations by, 54; Socrates and, 27, 54, 56, 128, 142 Plato, dialogues of: charismatic bondage and, 3–4; cosmology and myth in, 113; ethical profiles of major interlocutors in, 124; logocentric and grammatologic readings of, 6; Simonides in, 36; speech acts in, 124–25. See also specific dialogues pleasure: courage and, 151, 153; good and, 148–49, 157–59, 162, 166–67; ignorance, as being overcome by, 160; pain and, 110, 155–58, 160, 163–64, 166–67 pleonexia, 24, 87, 141; on contemporary Athens, 25; Couch City and, 14–15, 20; couches and, 1, 14–15; deos and, 63, 74, 164–65; erōs, couch and, 21; power, money-making and, 36; of Sow City, 15, 17–18 poetic speech, 4–7, 17–18, 33–35, 58, 62 poetry: education and, 33–35; ethics, literary criticism and, 34–35; interpretation of, 5, 30, 40, 43–44, 50–51, 54–55, 67–70, 81; power of, sophistry and, 28; Protagoras and Socrates on, 33–34; by Simonides, 28, 30, 36–46; sophists on, 34–35, 80 poets: Adeimantus on, Republic, 28; charismatic bondage, sophists and, 29, 45; charismatic bond and, 26; injustice and, 25; lawgivers and, 110; lyric, tyrants and, 93; Orphic, 17–18; power of, 27, 35; Protagoras and Socrates on, 33–34; Republic and Protagoras on, 25; Socrates on, Protagoras, 28–29; Socrates’s arguments about, 26; sophistry of, 35; sophists, orators and, 28–30; sophists and, 58, 67, 105, 110, 113, 138; voices of, 27, 29 Polemarchus, 25, 36, 133–34 poleōn sōtēriai (deliverance of cities), 167, 175n25 political justice, 119, 136 political power, 26, 78, 109 politikē, 32, 96 politikē aretē, 35, 119, 174n1 pollaploos (manifold man), diploos (twofold man) and, 49–50 power, 15, 26–28, 35–36, 78, 109 Preface to Plato (Havelock), 35 Prodicus, 6, 32, 164; Hippias and, 31, 62, 109, 160; justice of, 59; in Simonides’s poem, 47, 52–61; voice of, 30 promēthē, 75 promētheia, 135, 146

Prometheus, 3, 74, 114–19, 121–22, 136 pronoia (forethought), 139–41 proschēma, 80, 135–39, 142, 153 prosōpon. See face Protagoras, 1; as educator, 34, 121, 123, 138, 141; ethos of, 124, 134; face and, 2, 139–43; Hippocrates and, 109; on history of sophistry, 63; on laws and lawgivers, 110, 112; Lee on, 140–42; on literary criticism, 34–35; logos of, 146, 169; makrologia of, 50, 109–14, 121, 143–44; method of induction, 110; misanthropology of, 111, 122; morality and, 2, 109, 127; myth of, 114–23; on poetic speech, 33–35; on sophists, 36, 109–13, 121–22, 135, 138; in Theaetetus, 26, 103–4, 110–12; virtue of, 2–3, 5–6, 119–21 Protagoras, Socrates and, 2–3, 122, 169–70; on andreia, 143–45; ethics and, 128; face and, 141–42, 152–53, 161; good behavior and, 120; Great Speech by Protagoras, 28–30, 130, 137; hedonism argument and, 148–62; on justice and holiness, 126–27; on long speeches and brevity, 30–32; makrologia of, 32, 41, 50, 62, 66, 114, 121, 143–44; on opinions of the many, 153–55, 158–60; on poem about virtue, 4–5; poetic speech and, 4–5; on poets and poetry, 33–34; on political virtue, 119; on Simonides, 4–6, 35; Simonides’s poem and, 41, 43, 46–52, 55–62, 67–69, 74–77, 80–81, 93, 103–5; Socrates’s logic, 126–28; Socrates’s strategy in debate, 121, 124, 160; on sophia and epistēmē, 144–46, 148; sophists and, 4–5, 7, 32–33, 52, 103, 113; in Theaetetus, 103–4; voices of, 159 Protagoras (Plato), 1–9; on deos and phobos, 165; ethics and ethical message of, 124–25, 128; facial analogy in, 130–31; framing narration of, 7–8; Great Speech by Protagoras in, 28–30, 130, 137; hedonism argument in, 143–45, 147–69; makrologia, 109–14; Phaedrus and, 29; Plato’s portrait of Protagoras in, 110, 122–23; Protagoras’s myth in, 114–23; Republic and, 25, 28, 132; Simonides in, 25–26, 32, 35–36; sōtēria in, 136; speech acts in, 125–26; virtue terms in, 125–26 Protagoras (Plato), Simonides’s poem in, 28, 30, 36–39; on becoming good, difficulty of, 47–48, 51, 55–57, 61, 68, 70; on brevity, 65–66; chalepon meaning in, 47, 58–61;

182 / index Protagoras (Plato) (continued) Charmides, Critias and, 63–66, 77–78; Division I, 41, 46–50; Division II, 41, 46–48, 50–61; Division III, 41, 62–68; Division IV, 41–42, 62, 68–70, 80; Division V, 42, 62, 70–82; Division VI, 42, 82–94; Division VI, microanalysis of 345d–e, 88–94; Division VII, 42–43, 94–106; epanorthōsis, of Simonides, 68–70, 103; on good and bad, 58–59, 61, 70–73, 100, 105–6; hyperbaton in, 68, 83–84; interpretation of, 67–70, 81; morality in, 51, 54–55, 58, 61, 73–75, 82, 84, 96–101; oral text of, 50–51, 69; original text of, 69–70; on Pittacus, 5, 37, 41–43, 47–51, 55, 58, 62–63, 68, 70–85, 94–98, 101–4; Prodicus and, 47, 52–61; Protagoras, on Hesiod and, 57–58; Protagoras, on Pittacus in, 5, 37, 41–43, 47–50; Protagoras on, sophistical snippetotomy argument, 48–50; rhematic warfare and, 62–68, 80; Scopas and, 37, 48, 93–97, 102; Simonides as truth-sayer, 42, 68, 84–85, 98; on staying good, difficulty of, 47, 57, 61, 63, 65, 67, 70, 74–75, 81, 83, 94–95, 97, 100, 102, 104; traditional Athenian morality in, 51; typos and boulēsis of, 69 Protagoras (Plato), Simonides’s poem in, Socrates on, 40–45; apologia, 82, 84, 94, 101; attack on Pittacus, 70–82; Charmides and, 64–66; Division II, 50–61; ethics and, 43–44; Protagoras and, 41, 43, 46–52, 55–62, 67–69, 74–77, 80–81, 93, 103–5; “sacking,” 54; Simonides overthrown, 82–94; Socrates overthrown, 94–106; Spartans and, 65–67 Protagoras (Plato), Socrates in, 1–6; on aretē and virtues, 32–33, 125, 129–32, 134; on Great Speech by Protagoras, 28–30, 130, 137; on justice and injustice, 25–26; as narrator, 7–8, 33, 44, 52–53, 142; on orators, poets, and sophists, 28–30; on poets, 28–29; on Prodicus, 30; on Simondes, Pittacus and, 5, 41–43; Simonides and, 25–26, 32, 36; on unity of virtues, 30 Protean agora, 27 public opinion, 119–21 public performance, aretē of, 2, 135 relativism, 111–12, 116 remain (emmenai), 47, 55–57, 60 Republic (Plato), 15; Adeimantus on poets in, 25, 28; Adeimantus on Simonides in,

36; on aretē and virtues, 132–33; Forms in, 13; Glaucon’s speech in, 59; ideal city as Uglytown, 1; on justice, 132–33; political justice in, 119; Protagoras and, 25, 28, 132 Republic (Plato), Socrates in, 149; on construction of Kallipolis, 15; on Couch City, 14–15, 19–20; on couches, 13–14, 21–22; on division of labor, 115–16; on governing as piloting, 78; on justice and injustice, 22–24; on Kallipolis, 14; on klinē, Form of, 15; on klinē, “kataklinantes” and, 17–18; on myth of Er, 23–24; on Simonidean logos, 28; on Sow City, 15–20; on tyrants, 23–24; on users versus makers of objects, flutes and, 20–21 responsibility, avowals of, 8–9 rhēmata (short pithy sayings), 68, 71–73, 98; of Pittacus, 65, 80, 83, 102, 138; of Spartans, 63–66, 80, 86, 97 rhematic warfare, 62–68, 80 rogatio, 71–72, 75 Rosen, Stanley, 150 Sacred Disease, Hippocratic, 81 salvation, 2–3, 136, 144, 159, 164 Savan, David, 131 Scamander, 53–54 Schein, Seth, 153 Schneidewin, F. G., 93 Scopas, 37, 48, 93–97, 102 self-protection, 63, 86, 138 servant (diakonos), 16 setting back upright (epanorthōma), 53–55, 58, 74 Seven Sages, Spartans and, 63 shame culture, 120–21, 167 shameful (aischron), 88–92, 94, 97–101 Shorey, Paul, 13 short pithy sayings. See rhēmata Simonides: logos of, 22–23, 28; in modern anthologies of ancient Greek lyric, 36–37, 46; in Platonic dialogues, 36; poetry by, 28, 30, 36–46; Prodicus and, 53; Protagoras and Socrates on, 4–6, 35; Socrates on Pittacus and, 5, 41–43; on virtue, 4–5. See also Protagoras (Plato), Simonides’s poem in snippetology, 39 snippetotomy, 4–5, 39, 48–50 Socrates: Eleatic Stranger and, 141; epagōgē of, 71; ethics of, 2–3, 43–44, 56–57, 61,

index / 183 73, 75, 87–88, 131, 148, 156, 164, 167; in Euthyphro, 136–37; Hippocrates and, 8; logic of, 125–28; logos of, 73, 86, 103, 105, 127–28, 133; Plato and, 27, 54, 56, 128, 142; on poets, 26, 28–29, 33–34; on Spartan maxims, 138; Thrasymachus and, 134; on virtue, 2–3, 143–44; on virtues, as characters in people, 131–32; voice of, 57. See also Protagoras, Socrates and; Protagoras (Plato), Simonides’s poem in, Socrates on; Protagoras (Plato), Socrates in; Republic (Plato), Socrates in Socratic method, 163 Socratic procedure, 23, 71 Socratic speech, 26 Solon, period of reforms by, 14–15, 102 sophia, 115, 127, 135, 138, 144–46, 148, 166, 169 sophistical disenchantment, 22 sophistical interpretation, 40, 81 sophistical morality, 33 sophistical snippetotomy, 48–50 sophistikē, 135, 144, 146 sophistry, 5, 7–8, 145; hedonism and, 160–61; medicine and, 80; poetry, power and, 28; of poets, 35; Protagoras’s history of, 63; speech and, 32–33 sophists, 3–6; audience of, 26–27; charismatic bondage, poets and, 29, 45; charismatic bond and, 26; on deinos, 59; hedonism argument, Socrates and, 150; orators, poets and, 28–30; pleasure and, 160; on poetry, 34–35, 80; poets and, 28–30, 58, 67, 105, 110, 113, 138; power of, 26–27; proschēma and, 80, 135–36, 142; Protagoras, Socrates and, 4–5, 7, 32–33, 52, 103, 113; Protagoras on, 36, 109–13, 121–22, 135, 138; sophia of, 169 sōphronein, 63–64, 127, 129, 135 sōphrosynē, 64–65, 127, 129, 135–36 sōtēria, 27, 129, 135–38, 140–41, 146, 153, 163–64 soul: face and, 139; just and unjust, 22; tyrannic, 20, 24 Sow City (huōn polin), 13–20 Spartans, 15, 20, 41; maxims of, 138; mēchanē of, 72; philosophy of, 65; proschēma and, 138; rhēmata of, 63–66, 80, 86, 97; Seven Sages and, 63; Socrates on, Simonides’s poem and, 65–67 speech: bond of, 3–4, 7–8; charis bond of, 7–8; deinos, 79; ethics of speakers and auditors, 8–9; “I” in, 8; parrhesiastic,

84–85, 94, 103; poetic, 4–7, 17–18, 33–35, 58, 62; Socratic, 26; sophistry and, 32–33 speech acts, 65, 84, 87, 92, 94, 124–26, 134 speech culture, 34–35 Sprague, Rosamond Kent, 20–21, 76–77, 79 startle-value, 6, 21 Strauss, Leo, 6, 19, 110 stretch out (kataklinentes), 17–18 Sullivan, J. P., 149–50, 158, 161 sum (kephalaion), 23 symphora, 72; amēchanos symphora, 73, 78–79, 81, 101 Symposium (Plato), 150 table (trapeza), 13, 20 Taylor, C. C. W., 35, 85, 87, 89, 131–32, 134, 174n15; on courage, 147; on epistēmē to sophia shift, 148; on hedonism argument, 150, 154, 158, 161; on well-divers, 146 technē, 2, 58, 115–17, 135, 142; epistēmē and, 159; ethics and, 32, 132 temperance, wisdom and, 126, 128 textual acts, 124–25 Thales, 146–47 tharraleos (boldness), 145, 151 Thayer, H. S., 55 Theaetetus (Plato), 3, 26, 103–4, 110–12, 141, 146 Theogony (Hesiod), 116 Thrasymachus, 15, 23, 59, 78, 132–34 tiktein, 116–17 Timaeus, 139–40 to desire (epithymein), 55 to fare well (eu prattein), 51, 74 to meson, 98–101 to wish (boulesthai), 55 tradesman or huckster (kapēlos), 16–17 trapeza (table), 13, 20 triclinium (banqueting couch), 13 truth, 103–5 truth-sayer, Simonides as, 42, 68, 84–85, 98 twofold man (diploos), 49–50 typos, 69, 80, 134, 138 tyrannic soul, 20, 24 tyrants, 23–24, 93, 96, 98 Uglytown (aischropolis), 1 users versus makers, of objects, 20–21 ventriloquation, 26–27, 81, 105, 141, 159, 161 vice, virtue and, 18 Virgil, 54

184 / index virtue, 1, 4–5, 21, 73–74, 93, 96, 170; andreia and, 143–44, 166; of Cephalus and Thrasymachus, 133–34; competitive versus cooperative, 143–44; from conformity with nomos, 24; eyes and, 131; facial analogy for, 120, 130–32, 134–35, 141–42; Glaucon on, 19; Hesiod on vice and, 18; justice and, 132–33; poetry, in teaching, 34; politikē, 35, 119, 174n1; Protagorean, 2–3, 5–6, 119–21; of Protagorean ethos, 134; of public performance, face as, 2, 135; Republic on, 132–33; Socrates on, 2–3, 131–32, 143–44; Socrates on, Protagoras, 32–33, 125, 129–32, 134; of sōtēria, 129; teaching, 121; terms, in Protagoras, 125–26; unity of, 2–3, 30, 120, 127, 137

Vlastos, Gregory, 33, 109, 125, 131 voice, 27, 29–30, 57, 159 war, 20, 165–69 Weber, Max, 26 well-divers, 146–47 well-fathered (eupatridai), 14 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Enno Friedrich Wichard Ulrich von, 39, 93–94 willingly (hekōn), 83–84, 87–92, 94, 106 will stretch out (kataklinentes), 17–18 wisdom, 110–11, 126, 128, 144 Woodbury, Leonard, 35, 82 Works and Days (Hesiod), 116 Zeus, 96, 114, 116, 118–22, 136

Harry Berger, Jr., is Professor Emeritus of Literature and Art History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His most recent books are Resisting Allegory: Interpretive Delirium in Spenser’s “Faerie Queene”; Harrying: Skills of Offense in Shakespeare’s Henriad; and The Perils of Uglytown: Studies in Structural Misanthropology from Plato to Rembrandt. Ward Risvold teaches writing in the Writing Center Program at Nazarbayev University. J. Benjamin Fuqua is Lecturer in English at Clemson University. Jill Frank is Professor of Government at Cornell University.