Plato 9781472598127, 9781853996627

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Corrigenda p. 13, line 11 from foot: read ‘cygnet’ for ‘cynet’ p. 16, line 15: insert comma after closing bracket p. 30, line 5 from foot: read ‘such common characteristics as distinct or separate from’ p. 37, line 7: read ‘symposion’ for ‘symposium’ p. 42, line 6 from foot: delete dash at beginning of line p. 52, line 4 from foot: read ‘subjects’ for ‘subects’ p. 66, line 7 from foot: read ‘against [antilegei]’ for ‘[antilegei] against’ p. 67, line 5: read ‘Zeno’ for ‘he’ p. 116, line 7: insert comma after ‘temperance’ p. 128, lines 12-13 from foot: read ‘he hardly makes any reference to’ for ‘he never makes direct reference to’ p. 147, lines 7-8: read ‘a spoudaion thing’ for ‘a spoudaios thing’ p. 161 n. 12: insert ‘e.g.’ after ‘See’ p. 174, line 20 from foot: read ‘incorporeal’ for ‘immaterial’ p. 182, line 5 from foot: read ‘different’ for ‘diferent’ p. 183, line 8: read ‘and’ for ‘ane’

Preface to the First Edition This book attempts to provide a connected account of Plato’s main themes and arguments. Given the size and complexity of the Platonic corpus, and the weight of the scholarship which has been brought to bear on it, the task is a daunting one. I do not pretend, however, to have covered the whole of Plato; nor is the book offered as a survey of the current state of Platonic scholarship. It singles out for analysis just those ideas which Plato (as distinct from his commentators) seems to have thought most important, and is based directly on a reading of the dialogues themselves. The interpretations given of particular dialogues and of contexts within them have of course been shaped to a considerable degree by existing literature on Plato (a highly selective list of which I give in the Bibliography); but I have largely restricted my explicit references to it to those cases where I am aware of borrowing immediately from it. If the result is that I may sometimes appear to be claiming exclusive rights to the offspring of others, the alternative would have been a massive and unacceptable increase in the number of footnotes. I have also frequently been aware of the danger of seeming to ignore the careful work done by other scholars, especially recently, on specific passages or arguments. But a certain blurring of the parts is a necessary consequence of an attempt to see the whole; and no one could seriously deny that Plato’s thought is a whole, in the sense of being a broadly unified structure, although – as I shall repeatedly stress – the elements out of which it is composed are continually changing. I have tried to relate Plato’s ideas not only to each other, but to the society and the thought, both philosophical and non-philosophical, of his time. I have also paid some attention to the particular form in which he chose to write, looking at what he says, so far as possible, in connection with the context in which he says it, which is usually a necessary condition of a proper interpretation. What I have nowhere reproduced is the stylistic excellence of much of Plato’s writing; in the interests of accuracy I have stuck fairly closely in the many passages quoted from the text to the shape of the original Greek sentences, and a good Greek sentence often makes a very poor English one.

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Transliteration of isolated words and phrases indicates that the English rendering given is only approximate, or might be disputed. The form of such transliterations is fairly conventional; but the reader without Greek needs to be warned that the sounds which are suggested by the letters used sometimes bear little resemblance to the sounds of the original Greek. My debts are above all to H.D.S.; to Jeanine Erskine, for typing part of an abominably handwritten first draft, and to Eleanor Gibbins for her efficient production of the final typescript. 1984

C.J. Rowe

Preface to the Second Edition Short treatments of complex subjects are inevitably unsatisfactory: they oversimplify, cutting corners where a proper account would add precision. The present book is no exception. Plato is an extraordinarily complex, and difficult, author, and almost any statement about him immediately seems to call for clarification and/or modification. Some contemporary interpreters, fortified by one or another variety of hermeneutic theory, can even be found claiming that we search in vain in the dialogues for the authentic voice of their author, who hides permanently behind the multiple voices of his characters. My own view, confirmed by extended encounters with five particular dialogues over the twenty years or so that have elapsed since the first publication of the present book, is that such a view is obviously, indeed painfully, inadequate. If Plato is elusive, his elusiveness is primarily that of a philosopher who – out of regard for his trade, and for the limitations of a merely human rationality – prefers indirect suggestion to pronouncement. For any handbook-like treatment of him, however, that is just where the problems start. In the first place, there will always be a temptation to present those indirect, provisional suggestions as if they were, after all, pronouncements. Is that not what anyone expects to get first from any decent book on Plato – what the man said? I hope that I have, to a large extent at least, avoided this danger (which is one of the reasons why I think the book worth republishing). But there is an even worse

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problem. This is that Plato’s manner of expressing himself is so indirect that it is quite possible to miss altogether the point of what he is saying, or suggesting: another source of encouragement, perhaps, for those anxious to identify Platonic writing as an ideal example of lack of closure. I shall list below some aspects which, if I were now writing the book from scratch, I should have approached rather differently. But at the same time the very fact that the greater part of most Platonic texts demands so much from the reader constitutes a justification for the writing of handbooks. To start trying to read Plato without one would be like trying to find one’s way around a new city with no map – a typical European city, that is, where roads tend to go off at any angle, or a Japanese one, where the house numbers go in no apparent order, though to the residents everything is perfectly in place. So what is the advantage, one might reasonably ask, of this guide over others; and why re-publish something that I myself might have wanted to do differently in any case? To the first question, I respond that it is still, even now, remarkably difficult to find short, digestible books on Plato that will (a) introduce readers to Plato, (b) help them steer an initial course through some of his texts, and (c) give a reasonably reliable sense of the kind of writing they represent; and that over the years a number of people involved in teaching Plato to students have regretted the non-availability of this particular short book. (One unusually readable new introduction is Thomas Szlezák’s Reading Plato, Routledge 1999.) As for the second question, my response is that most of the things to which I committed myself in 1984 and to which I no longer feel committed in fact still form part of the standard picture of Plato, at least in the English-speaking world. So, first of all, the book from that point of view represents a relatively safe place to start. By that I mean that it is, I hope, a mostly intelligent statement of a kind of interpretation that will sound reasonably familiar, and – within limits – mostly defensible, to those who learned their Plato over the last few decades in an Anglophone context. (There will be hardly any parts that will not somehow jar with someone, somewhere; those who reject it on that basis will probably not be the sort to write a general account of anything, sometimes out of fear of exposing themselves to criticism. So much the worse for the world at large, who could do with a taste of their expertise.) In any case, an introductory book is not necessarily the right place to argue for a whole collection of novel, or controversial, views, which by their nature require lengthy justification. (But see my ‘Plato’,

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in David Sedley, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Philosophy, Cambridge 2003, 98-124.) What is presented in this book is, I claim, a possible and – in broad terms – plausible way in to Plato. I offer it as no more than that. Below, I list those aspects of the book to which I no longer, at least whole-heartedly, subscribe. As that already implies, the list is also a kind of summary of the developments since 1984 in my own understanding of Platonic texts and of the Platonic project as a whole; for the reader, it may serve as an indication of some of the points at which I believe a standard (Anglophone) interpretation of Plato may need to be amended and, especially, deepened. 1. As Charles Kahn has pointed out, the now traditional division of the dialogues into ‘early’, ‘middle’ and ‘late’ – see e.g. Chapter 3 below – is at odds with the conclusions of the ‘stylometrists’ and their measurements of the movements in Plato’s style: three of the ‘middle’ dialogues, namely Phaedo, Symposium, and Cratylus, belong to the first of three stylistic groups (Charles H. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, Cambridge University Press 1996; see also his chapter in Julia Annas and Christopher Rowe, eds, New Perspectives on Plato, Modern and Ancient, Harvard University Press 2002). So Plato was already writing ‘middle’ dialogues, or, more to the point, introducing ‘middle period’ Platonic ‘forms’, in his earliest period. 2. ‘Early’ dialogues are standardly treated, as I implicitly treat them in the present book, as ‘Socratic’. This may still be generally right, but I now think we need to reconsider what is properly to be identified as ‘Socratic’, i.e., perhaps, to be associated, in its basic form, with the historical Socrates (to that extent, then, the ‘Socratic problem’ might, after all, be ‘urgent’: p. 4), or at least as belonging to that period in his life when Plato was closest, in his thinking, to his teacher and master. The Socratic claim of ignorance is genuine, not ‘ironic’ (p. 3: see below for a good reason why it must be); wealth and other such things are not ‘goods’ for the Socrates of the first group of dialogues, but actually neither good nor bad (p. 6, I now accept, mistranslates Apology 30b, and p. 88 positively misrepresents the Lysis, which implicitly denies that ‘goods-as-means’ are goods); virtue, for Socrates, is identical with knowledge or wisdom (p. 7 and passim), and it is this relation of identity, not definition as such, that occupies him (so Aristotle got it wrong on this point: p. 10); further, a simple equation of this ‘virtue’

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with ‘moral virtue’, and of the relevant knowledge as ‘moral knowledge’ (p. 44 and passim), is of limited use, and positively misleading if it induces us to import e.g. the Christian virtues into the discussion, not least because the knowledge in question is specifically knowledge of what is good for the agent (on the same basic grounds, I now do prefer ‘excellence’ for the Greek arete, contrary to n. 32 on p. 121; cf. p. 158); but this does not lead either to a gross egoism, or to any ‘arid’ view of interpersonal relationships (p. 136); happiness is a matter of possessing goods, but it is a lifetime’s work, and longer, to establish what these goods are (so the claim that ‘[Plato] remains convinced that knowledge is possible’ needs to be heavily qualified: pp. 61-2). 3. The long list under 2. above emerges in particular from a thoroughgoing study I have undertaken of the Lysis, in collaboration with Terry Penner, the results of which will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2004. That list, however, still leaves unstated the central point about the ‘Socratic dialogues’ that the present book neglects or understates: their ‘intellectualism’, i.e. their tendency to try to explain the differences in quality between human actions, and indeed between human beings, solely in terms of belief (because we all, always, desire what is really good for us – if only we knew what that was: see e.g. Penner in Annas and Rowe, New Perspectives). On my present view, it is the definitive abandonment of this explanation of human behaviour, with the introduction of irrational parts of the soul in Republic IV (of which the ‘desires of the body’ in the Phaedo may perhaps be cousins: p. 166 below), that marks the real turning-point between ‘Socratic’ and other dialogues. This moment might also have figured prominently in my Epilogue, insofar as the Republic’s account of human behaviour is, in essence, the one which we moderns have come to take for granted. 4. I have also moved radically away from the standard picture of the development of Plato’s political theory. In common with many others, I now hold that Plato might, in principle, have written Republic, Statesman, and Laws at the same time (even if this would have been physically impossible). See especially Christopher Rowe and Malcolm Schofield, eds, The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Philosophy, Cambridge University Press 2000. A different interpretation of the Statesman myth from that suggested on p. 47, and a different interpretation of the key passage at Statesman 300bff.

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(following out the implications of the parenthesis to n. 48, to p. 138), will be found in Rowe, Plato: Statesman (Aris & Phillips 1998). 5. A few final points on which my own thinking has moved on: (i) if Plato never implies any claim to complete understanding, he is always way ahead of the reader (contrary to what p. 27 may suggest). (ii) The treatment of the genesis of the idea of ‘self-instantiation’ on p. 55 and elsewhere now looks to me too simplistic, even patronising (Plato surely manages better than this analysis); and the term ‘self-instantiation’, used here and later, is not superior to the more traditional ‘self-predication’, which I introduce further on – demonstrating, perhaps, a naïve kind of ‘developmentalism’ on my own part. (iii) The Timaeus surely is to be included among the later dialogues (no ‘if’ about it: pp. 81-2); and the story of the creation in the same dialogue is surely – so I now suppose – a fiction (my reasoning on pp. 189-93 I myself have ceased to find persuasive). (iv) On p. 114, I should not airily refer to ‘Book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics’, since I now think the book properly belongs, or originally belonged, to the Eudemian Ethics. To the list of commentaries in the Bibliography, as well as my Statesman (above) should be added C.J. Rowe, Plato: Phaedrus (Aris & Phillips 1986); Plato: Phaedo (Cambridge University Press 1993); and Plato: Symposium (Aris & Phillips 1998) – the first, third and fourth of which also contain translations. The Statesman translation has been adopted by Hackett; it appears both in the Hackett Plato: Complete Works, edited by John Cooper, 1997 (now the standard English translation of Plato), and, with a short new introduction, as a separate volume (1999). Four other items (chosen from an unending stream) that should without doubt be added to the Bibliography: Terry Penner, The Ascent from Nominalism (Reidel 1987); Terence Irwin, Plato’s Ethics (Oxford University Press 1995: more or less replacing his Plato’s Moral Theory of 1977); Gerasimos X. Santas, Goodness and Justice (Blackwell 2001); and the (fairly conservative, but handy) collection of articles edited by Gail Fine, Plato I and II (Oxford University Press 1999), especially for its bibliographies. Durham, March 2003

Christopher Rowe